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.

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

[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

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.

[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.”

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

[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.

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

[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

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

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)

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

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

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Women Who Won The Right to Vote

The Suffragist Movement

by Joyce Cowley

Joyce Cowley was one of the original signers of the June 1962 “In Defence of the Revolutionary Program”, the founding statement of the Revolutionary Tendency within the US Socialist Workers Party.

From Fourth International, Vol.16 No.2, Spring 1955, pp.48-56. Copied from  http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/fi/vol16/no02/cowley.html ]

WOMEN got the vote in the United States in 1920. The amendment to the Constitution granting women that right was the climax of a struggle it hat began almost a hundred years earlier. Suffrage leaders were ridiculed and persecuted while they were alive. Today they are either forgotten or contemptuously referred to as disappointed old maids who hated men. This concept of the woman’s rights movement as a war against men by sexually frustrated women is even accepted by some modern psychiatrists. But it is historically inaccurate and a great injustice to a number of truly remarkable women.

The status of women in society began to change with the breakdown of feudalism and the rise of capitalism. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England, women first entered trades. They were frequently partners in the husband’s business; widows and daughters carried on the family business. There are records of women pawnbrokers, stationers, booksellers, contractors and even shipowners. In the seventeenth century there were three women to every man in the woolen industry and many women were employed in the silk industry. They also worked in the fields and the agricultural labor of women was an important factor in the new American colonies.

The “woman question” was discussed as early as the Elizabethan period but this talk did not develop into an organized movement. It was in 1792 that Mary Wollstonecroft wrote the Vindication of the Rights of Womanwhich, historically, marks the conscious beginning of the struggle for woman’s rights. This book was a direct reflection of Mary Wollstonecroft’s sympathies with the French and American revolutions, a demand that woman’s rights be included in the rights of man for which the revolutionists were fighting.

It was in America, not England, that the woman question first developed into an organized movement rather than a subject of discussion in literary circles. This reflects the more advanced position of women in the American colonies, which was strikingly different from that of women in Europe. The laws of the colonies, modeled on those of England, gave women few legal rights. But the realities of pioneer life, particularly the scarcity of women and the appreciation of their skills, meant that they actually had a great deal of responsibility, engaged in numerous occupations that were supposedly “masculine” and consequently enjoyed rights and privileges, and a degree of freedom, unknown to women in England.

The Puritan concept of work further influenced the general attitude towards women’s activities. In their moral code, work was something you could never get too much of and they did not disapprove of women working, on the contrary they encouraged it. It made no difference whether the woman was married or not; the more she worked the better, and the less likely she was to succumb to the temptations of the devil.

In the colonial period women could vote, and sometimes did vote, as the right to vote was based on ownership of property and not on sex. They were gradually disfranchised by laws prohibiting women from voting – in Virginia in 1699, New York 1777, Massachusetts 1780, New Hampshire 1784 and New Jersey 1807.

At that time men engaged in agriculture and women in home manufacture. Women made most of the products used by the colonists that were not imported. The preponderance of women in the earliest factories in the United States is due largely to the fact that their work was transferred from the home to the factory. This was particularly true of the first major industry, the spinning and weaving of cotton, and accounts for the prominent role of women in early labor struggles, especially the fight of cotton-mill workers for the ten-hour day.

The woman’s rights movement, however, did not grow out of the trade-union struggles of women. It was never closely associated with trade-union activities nor particularly interested in the problems of working women. This may seem contradictory unless you keep in mind that the woman’s movement was primarily a fight for legal, not economic rights. The legal battle of the suffragists has been won, but in the Twentieth century women still face severe discrimination in wages and job opportunities.

The woman’s rights movement did spring directly from the abolitionist movement. Every prominent fighter for woman’s rights was first an abolitionist; and the two movements were closely allied for fifty years, although the “woman question” frequently caused division in the abolitionist ranks, as the Negro cause became more respectable and more popular than that of women.

Just how did the anti-slavery movement give birth to the struggle for woman’s rights? There is a simple explanation for what may seem at first a surprising evolution. Women who started out to plead for the slave found they were not allowed to plead. They were ridiculed when they appeared on a speakers’ platform, they were not accepted as delegates when they attended anti-slavery conventions. Within a short time, most of the women prominent in abolitionist circles spoke up for their own rights, too, although a formal organization advocating complete legal equality and suffrage was not formed for another twenty years.

The Early Leaders

A number of misconceptions about the pioneers for woman’s rights are prevalent. In the first place, it is assumed that they were all women – women united in a war against men. The truth is men were in the forefront of the struggle for woman’s lights, notably such spokesmen as William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass and Wendell Phillips. They were attacked even more viciously than the women and labelled “hermaphrodites” and “Aunt Nancy men.”

Furthermore, none of the women in this movement were exclusively pre-occupied with sex equality and women’s problems. They were, as I said, invariably abolitionists and frequently advocated a great many other reforms – the Utopian variety of socialism, trade unions, atheism, temperance, free love, birth control and easier divorce. Many of these causes were not too popular in the early part of the last century and this accounts to some extent for the common opinion that these women were freaks and probably immoral.

It is not true that most of the feminist leaders were either libertines or embittered virgins. With the exception of Susan B. Anthony, the best known – Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, Carrie Chapman Catt – were happily married. Mrs. Mott and Mrs. Stanton, founders of the movement, were mothers of large families. They didnot marry weak husbands who were dominated by their crusading wives. The husbands were generally men of outstanding ability and achievement, enthusiastic supporters of the woman’s cause. The only reason they were to some extent overshadowed by their wives was that the unusual activities of the wives attracted a good deal of attention.

Frances Wright was probably the first woman to speak publicly in this country and to advocate woman’s rights. She was Scotch, coming to America in 1818. Brilliant and courageous, she was also one of the extremists, exactly the type who were slandered and laughed at but never ignored. Among numerous other activities, she founded a colony primarily intended to set an example of how to free slaves and give them economic independence. But she was an opponent of marriage and her colony became more famous for its open repudiation of this institution than for any service to the Negro cause.

Opposition to marriage was common among the early advocates of freedom for women. They saw in it – quite correctly, in my opinion – an institution designed for the subjugation of their sex. In those days a married woman had no right to own property, her wages belonged to her husband and so did her children. The simplest way to avoid these evils was to stay single.

In spite of their audacity, these women frequently surrendered to local pressure. Mary Wollstonecroft gave birth to one illegitimate child; but when she became pregnant a second time by another lover, she found the struggle too difficult and married him. Frances Wright and her sister both married for the same reason – they were pregnant.

The sex question explains a lot about the notoriety associated with the first feminist leaders. As the movement grew and became more respectable, it attempted to dissociate itself from advocacy of “free love,” but was never completely successful.

About the same time that Frances Wright founded her well-publicized colony, Lucretia Mott became a Quaker minister. She is one of the most striking personalities in the woman’s rights movement. Of unusual intellect and breadth of vision, she studied intensively and was an active lecturer and organizer for fifty years. She supported trade unions when they were almost unknown and generally illegal, which was rare among abolitionist leaders, who seemed to think there was some kind of conflict between the two movements. She also raised six children and apparently enjoyed domestic activities like cooking and sewing, although you wonder as you read her biography how she found time for them.

She was at the meeting held in Philadelphia in 1833 where the first anti-slavery group was organized and from which the American Anti-Slavery Society developed. Although she spoke several times during the convention and played an influential role, it did not occur to her to sign the Declaration that was adopted. Samuel May, in his reminiscences, wrote: “Men were so blind, so obtuse, they did not recognize the women guests as members of the convention.”

Lucretia’s next step was to form a Women’s Anti-Slavery Society, but the women were so ignorant of parliamentary procedure that they found it necessary to get a man to chair the meeting – James McCrummel, an educated Negro. The brazen conduct of women in forming this society was attacked by clergymen as an “act of flagrant sedition against God.” While women were clothing and feeding the Negro on his way to Canada, “clergymien huddled in churches and wrung their hands, forecasting the doom of the American home and the good old traditions.”

Five years after the Women’s Anti-Slavery Society was organized, it held a convention in Pennsylvania Hall, a public building recently dedicated to “liberty and the rights of man.” While the delegates conducted their business, a mob surrounded the hall. Stones were thrown at the windows, breaking pane after pane, and vitriol was hurled through the gaping holes, while a cry rose, “Burn the hall!” Two or three hours after the women vacated the hall, it went up in flames.

That night Philadelphia was in an uproar. The mayor wanted to stop abolitionist activities and police protection was non-existent. The mob headed for the home of James and Lucretia Mott. There was a period of tense waiting inside the house while the yells and turmoil in the street grew closer. But as the minutes passed, the noise seemed to recede and gradually fade into the distance. The next day they learned that a friend had joined the mob and when they were within a block of the house, he flourished a stick and cried: “On to the Motts!” then led them up a succession of wrong streets. This was one of many similar incidents for Lucretia Mott, and her calm composure in a riot became legendary.

Sarah and Angelina Grimke, aristocratic women from the South, were among the earliest speakers and organizers of the abolitionist movement. I came across an interesting quotation from a speech by Angelina Grimke delivered before a Massachusetts legislative committee in 1832:

“As a moral being I feel I owe it to the slave and the master, to my countrymen and to the world, to do all that I can to overturn a system of complicated crimes built upon the broken hearts and prostrate bodies of my countrymen in chains and cemented by the blood, sweat and tears of my sisters in bond.”

Evidently Churchill knew a good phrase when he saw it.

Begin Organizing

Factional struggles inside the abolitionist movement led Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to call a convention for woman’s rights in 1848.

Eight years earlier, a fight had taken place over the election of a woman to a business committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society. The vote was favorable to the candidate, Abby Kelly; and the anti-woman group seceded from the organization and formed their own anti-slavery society. A world-wide anti-slavery convention had been called in London. Purged of its reactionary elements, the American Anti-Slavery Society elected Lucretia and two other women to their executive committee and chose her and Charles Remond, a Negro, as delegates to the London convention. Lucretia also headed the delegation from the Women’s Anti-Slavery Society.

Another delegation – one hundred per cent male, of course – was sent by the newly formed organization. In London every effort was made to keep peace by persuading the women delegates to withhold their credentials, but Lucretia insisted that the responsibility for rejection must rest with the convention.

Wendell Phillips opened the fight on the convention floor by proposing that all persons with credentials be seated. He pointed out that the convention’s invitation had been addressed to all friends of the slave and Massachusetts had interpreted this to mean men and women. Clergymen at the convention were particularly eloquent in their opposition to seating women. “Learned Doctors of Divinity raced about the convention hall Bible in hand, quoting words of scripture and waving their fists beneath the noses of disputing, brethren who did not know woman’s place.”

The reactionaries won. Women were admitted as guests only and seated behind a curtain which screened them from public gaze. Garrison, the greatest figure in the abolitionist world, was scheduled to be the main speaker. On his arrival he climbed the stairs to the women’s balcony, sat beside Lucretia behind the curtain, and remained there until the close of the convention.

It was on this trip to England that Lucretia met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a young bride of one of the delegates. It was here that they decided to start a crusade for woman’s rights on their return to America, although eight years passed before they were able to carry out their plans and call the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848.

This Equal Rights Convention, the first ever held in any country, was the official beginning of the suffrage struggle. The first day of the convention had been advertised as open to women only. When the women arrived at the Unitarian church they found they were locked out. A young professor climbed through a window and opened the door for them. On the spot, they decided to admit men, which turned out to be a fortunate decision for the suffrage cause.

James Mott was chairman of the meeting, as the women were still timid and did not know too much about parliamentary procedure. The Declaration of Sentiments adopted by the convention was signed by 68 women and 32 men. The resolution called for complete equality in marriage, equal rights in property, wages and custody of children, the right to make contracts, to sue and be sued, to testify in court – and to vote.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton introduced the suffrage amendment. It was opposed by Lucretia Mott because she considered it too radical and thought it would arouse public antagonism and ridicule. Frederick Douglass seconded Mrs. Stanton’s motion and made one of the most eloquent speeches in history for woman’s equality and her right to vote. His speech inspired the women to overcome their hesitation and pass the suffrage resolution. Within a year a National Woman’s Rights Association was organized and state and national conventions were held regularly.

Persecution and Abuse

The woman’s movement was met with a storm of abuse, particularly from the clergy, although a great many men just considered it funny. Within a few years, as it gained momentum, it met more serious opposition. Opponents of suffrage were divided as to whether the population would decrease because women were unsexed or illegitimately increase because of the practice of free love.

A typical example of the anti-suffrage point of view appears in a book by Dr. L.P. Brockett, quoted at some length in Hare’s biography of Lucretia Mott. It gives a picture of just what would happen if women were allowed to vote and declares it will be a gala day for the prostitutes, as “modest refined Christian women” would refuse to go to the polls in such company. Hare paraphrases the book:

“What a lesson of evil would be taught children on that day. Imagine the innocent offspring, clutching its mother as it stands in the presence of poor wretches, bedizened in gaudy finery, with bold, brazen faces, many of them half or wholly drunk and uttering with loud laughter, horrible oaths and ribald and obscene jests! What an impression the child would receive! And if the mother attempted to tell her daughter that these were bad women, the child might query: ‘But mother, they are going to vote. If they were so very bad, would they have the same right to vote that you and other ladies have?’ Unable to answer so precocious a question, the ‘modest, refined Christian mother’ would scurry home, leaving the polls to her male representatives and the women of the underworld.”

“To drive home the lesson,” says Hare, “the book is illustrated with a picture showing the refined woman at the polls completely surrounded by a vicious group of derelicts of both sexes. The picture vividly warns any woman who is on the verge of becoming a follower of Lucretia Mott, the type of men and women with whom she must associate if she votes. It also discloses the unintentional fact that the voting male is the uncouth immigrant, the bowery heeler, and the pimp; the same male hailed by opponents of female rights as woman’s natural representative in affairs of government. One glance at the men in the picture convinces the reader that woman’s benign influence in the home had gone awry, despite this best chosen argument of the anti-suffragettes.”

Dr. Brockett also predicts that some disastrous changes will occur in the appearance of women:

“The blush of innocence, the timid, half-frightened expression which is, to all right-thinking men a higher charm than the most perfect self-conscious beauty, will disappear and in place of it we shall have hard, self-reliant bold faces, and in which all the loveliness will have faded, and naught remain save the look of power and talent.”

The suffrage workers encountered additional ridicule at this time due to the introduction of the Bloomer costume. It was rather strange in appearance, consisting of trousers partly concealed by a full skirt that fell six inches below the knees. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone and Susan B. Anthony probably suffered greater martyrdom, because of this costume than for any other phase of their crusade, and after a few years they discontinued wearing it, feeling that it did more harm than good. Nevertheless, the outfit did give much greater freedom of action and was adopted by many farm women of the period and recommended by doctors for use in sanitariums. It was the first step toward the freedom of the modern dress.

Mrs. Stanton became one of the most active suffrage leaders and it was in this period that her life-long collaboration with Susan B. Anthony began. She was the mother of five boys and two girls, and whenever her schedule of lectures, conventions and meetings became too heavy, she would threaten to interrupt it by having another baby. Lucy Stone, now best known as the woman who insisted on keeping her maiden name, also became prominent in the 1850s. Lucy’s use of her own name grew out of her original opposition to marriage. When she did marry, the unusual ceremony attracted considerable comment, none of it favorable. She and Henry Blackwell opened the wedding with a statement:

”While we acknowledge our mutual affection by publicly assuming the relation of man and wife, yet in justice to ourselves and a great principle, we deem it a duty to declare that this act on our part implies no sanction of, nor promise of voluntary obedience to, such of the present laws of marriage as refuse to recognize the wife as an independent, rational being while they confer upon the husband an injurious and unnatural superiority, investing him with legal powers which no honorable man would exercise and no man should possess. We protest especially against the laws which give the husband:

“1. The custody of the wife’s person.

“2. The exclusive control and guardianship of their children.

“3. The sole ownership of her personal property and use of her real estate, unless previously settled upon her, or placed in the hands of trustees as in the case of minors, lunatics and idiots.

“4. The absolute right to the product of her industry.”

They continued with the regular marriage ceremony, omitting the word “obey,” but there was a popular feeling, especially since Lucy kept her own name, that they were not really married.

Many Negro women like Harriet Tubman, the extraordinary leader of the underground railway, and Sojourner Truth, also played an active role in the woman’s rights movement. Tubman is reported to have been an amazingly eloquent speaker, but for reasons of personal safety the speeches were rarely recorded.

Not a Soft Occupation

Even a bare outline of the lives of these early women leaders arouses admiration. Lecturing for woman’s rights was not exactly a soft occupation. Travelling was pretty rough then and the reception was likely to be rough, too. These women kept going at a remarkable pace in spite of large families and heavy domestic responsibilities.

Mrs. Stanton wrote most of her speeches after midnight while the children were sleeping – I don’t know when she slept. Most of the women continued their work without let-up even when they were in their sixties and seventies. Lucretia Mott was 83 when she spoke at the 25th anniversary of the suffrage association. They were middle-class women but many of them faced economic hardships. Lucy Stone went to Oberlin College – the first to admit women – and worked her way through, sweeping and washing dishes at three cents an hour. Her life as an abolitionist and woman’s rights speaker was not exactly a cinch either. She lived in a garret in Boston, sleeping three in a bed with the landlady’s daughters for six and one-fourth cents a night. Constance Burnett in Five for Freedom describes a fairly typical meeting at which she spoke. (She was the outstanding orator of the woman’s movement, a real spellbinder.)

“Lucy posted her own meetings, hammering her signs on trees with tacks carried in her reticule and stones from the road. The first poster usually drew an army of young hoodlums who followed her up and down streets, taunting, flinging small missiles and pulling down her notices as soon as her back was turned …

“For her ability to remain unperturbed through hoots, jeers and murderous assault, she had few equals. It was a common thing for her to face a rain of spitballs as soon ae she stepped before an audience. Once a hymn book was flung at her head with such force it almost stunned her. On another night, in midwinter, icy water was trained on her from a hose thrust through a window. Lucy calmly reached for her shawl, wrapped it around her shoulders and went on talking.

“At an open air anti-slavery meeting on Cape Cod, the temper of the crowd seemed so dangerous that all the speakers, one after the other, vanished hastily from the platform. The only two left were Lucy and Abby Kelly’s husband, Stephen Foster, a firebrand abolitionist of the same mettle from New Hampshire.

“Before either of them could get to speak, Lucy saw the mob begin its advance. ‘They’re coming, Stephen. You’d better run for it,’ she warned him hurriedly.

“Stephen no more than Lucy ever ran from danger. ‘What about you?’ he protested, and with that the surging, yelling mass was upon them. Overpowered, Foster disappeared in the melée, and Lucy, suddenly deserted, looked up into the face of a towering ruffian with a club.

“‘This gentleman will take care of me,’ she suggested sweetly, taking his arm, and too astonished for words, he complied. Reasoning calmly with him as he steered her out of the violence, she won his reluctant admiration and his consent to let her finish her speech. The platform was demolished by then, but he conducted her to a tree stump, rounded up the rest of the ‘gentlemen’ and preserved order with raised club until she was through talking. Lucy gave the whole gang a piece of her mind, not neglecting to collect twenty dollars from them to replace Stephen Foster’s coat, which in their gentlemanly exuberance they had split in two.”

The Alliance Ends

During the Civil War there was little activity in the woman’s movement. All of the women were devoted to the abolitionist cause and enthusiastically entered into various types of war work. But the end of the war brought the end of the fifty-year alliance between the woman’s cause and the Negro movement.

The split took place when Negro men got the vote. The Republican Party and the Negro leaders were both pressing for passage of the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution to enfranchise Negro men. The Republicans were not particularly interested in Negro rights but they wanted votes. The Democrats, who opposed the Negro vote, now gave lip service to woman suffrage in order to annoy the Republicans and hypocritically charge them with hypocrisy.

Negro leaders argued that this was the “Negro’s hour” and it was a matter of practical politics to push through the vote for Negro men while it had a chance of ratification. Adding woman suffrage to the amendment would inevitably result in its defeat. Negro and abolitionist leaders insisted that they were devoted to the woman’s cause and would continue to fight for universal suffrage after Negro men got the vote.

Many of the women were embittered by what they considered a sell-out. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in an argument with Wendell Phillips, said: “May I ask just one question, based on the apparent opposition in which you place the Negro and woman? Do you believe the African race is composed entirely of males?”

For fifty years these women had fought for the abolitionist cause and they felt that they had won the right to be included in the suffrage amendment. They would not agree to being left out on grounds of political expediency. They got little support and the 15th amendment was passed, giving the vote to Negro men only.

At the American Equal Rights Association convention in 1869, a formal split occurred; with the majority, the more conservative grouping, supporting the Boston abolitionist wing. Among the majority were Julia Ward Howe and Lucy Stone, who formed the American Woman Suffrage Association. The radical minority, led by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, organized the National Woman Rights Association. For twenty years these two groups remained separate.

As I have indicated, the principal cause of the split was the division of opinion over supporting Negro suffrage while the question of woman suffrage was postponed. I’ve read some eloquent statements on both sides of this argument. Negro leaders like Frederick Douglass, the first man to speak up for woman suffrage in this country, felt that the Negro cause was jeopardized by the women who selfishly advanced their own demands instead of waiting until it was more “practtical” to advocate suffrage for women, too. Women felt this attitude was a great injustice on the part of the abolitionists, showing ingratitude to the women who had fought so long and so courageously for the Negro cause.

In Lucretia Mott’s biography there is a description of the Centennial Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence:

“The newly enfranchised citizens appreciated what had been done for them – by their sex. Women on the sidewalks watched them carry banner after banner emblazoned with the names of Garrison or Phillips or Douglass. They searched in vain for a tribute to Lucretia Mott, or the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or any other woman of the anti-slavery conflict.”

Both the Negro and the woman’s movement were greatly weakened by the split in their ranks and it was another fifty yeairsi before women got the vote. In several accounts of this split written by men in sympathy with the Negro side of the argument, the women were held responsible for the delay because extremists in their ranks insisted prematurely on suffrage.

Historically there is not much point in speculating about what would have happened if the Negroes and women had stuck together – how long this would have delayed Negro suffrage (if at all) – and whether or not woman suffrage would have been won at an earlier date. Most Negro men were enfranchised in name only, and even to this day millions have not been able to exercise their constitutional right to vote. Personally I can’t help sympathizing with the women who felt they had been deserted and betrayed. It’s unfortunate that the reform movement was split as a result but I’m not sure this was entirely the fault of a few women “radicals.” There were heterogeneous elements in the Equal Rights Association, many of whom felt that their cause, Negro emancipation and enfranchisement, had been won, and it is probable that this conservative element would have broken away in any case.

The history of the woman’s movement from, this point on, divorced from the other reform struggles for which the women originally fought, becomes a bit dull. It is more bourgeois in character, exclusively concerned as it is with the vote.

The Struggle for the Vote

Immediately after the passage of the 15th amendment, Susan B. Anthony decided to test the new law, which was worded in such a way that it might possibly be construed to include women. In Rochester, N.Y., she and twelve other women armed with a copy of the Constitution demanded the right to vote. The election inspectors were so startled by this move that the women were allowed to cast ballots. They were promptly arrested for voting illegally. Susan was fined $100. She refused to pay the fine, hoping that she would be imprisoned and the case could be carried to the Supreme Court. But the judge was a shrewd politician and did not order her arrest. The fine has not yet been paid.

In the twenty-five years following the Equal Rights Convention of 1848, women achieved many of their original demands. More and more states passed laws giving married women the right to custody of their children, to disposal of their wages and their property.

Curiously enough, the first and most successful advocates of these laws were men whose interests were threatened. In upstate New York wealthy Dutch fathers-in-law became indignant when their daughters’ property was squandered by spendthrift husbands. The Married Women’s Property Bill was passed largely through their influence. In one of the Southern states a similar bill was introduced by a man who wanted to marry a wealthy widow. Heavily in debt himself, he knew her property could be attached to pay his debts if they got married. When the bill passed she could keep her property and they could both live comfortably on her income.

The Territory of Wyoming was the first to give women the vote in 1869; Utah followed the next year; Colorado and Idaho a little later. Pioneers in the West, accustomed to women who could load a gun, ride a horse and run a homestead as competently as a man, were more easily persuaded than Eastern men that women are not frail or feeble-minded. Twenty years later when Wyoming applied for statehood, the fact that women voted there became a political issue. Wyoming declared: “We will remain out of the union 100 years rather than come in without woman suffrage.”

Susan B. Anthony continued to campaign for another thirty years. Her final speech to a Woman’s Rights Convention was made in 1904 when she was 86 years old. An incident reported in Five for Freedom gives some idea of her remarkable energy:

“During this year Susan delivered 171 lectures, besides hundreds of impromptu talks. She traveled ceaselessly. The journey home through the Rockies in January became rugged when her train ran into mountainous drifts. Tracks had been recently laid, breakdowns were frequent and waits interminable. Passengers had nothing to eat but the cold food they had the foresight to bring. Many nights were spent sitting bolt upright.

“Susan did get back finally, in time for the annual convention of her National Woman Suffrage Association in the capital.

“‘You must be tired,’ they greeted her in Washington.

“‘Why, what should make me tired?’ asked Susan. ‘I haven’t been doing anything for two weeks.’

“The restfulness of transcontinental rail trips in the 1870s was not apparent to others.”

By 1900 the suffrage movement had become more powerful, but so had the opposition. The liquor interests, afraid that women would vote for prohibition, poured millions of dollars into campaigns to defeat woman suffrage. In state after state women lost out when the suffrage question came to a popular vote. The following circular published in Portland, Ore., is an example of how the liquor crowd worked:

“It will take 50,000 votes to defeat woman suffrage. There are 2,000 retailers in Oregon. That means that every retailer must himself bring in twenty-five votes on election day.

“Every retailer can get twenty-five votes. Besides his employees, he has his grocer, his butcher, his landlord, his laundryman and every person he does business, with. If every man in the business will do this, we will win.

“We enclose twenty-five ballot tickets showing how to vote.

“We also enclose a postal card addressed to this Association. If you will personally take twenty-five friendly voters to the polls on election day and give each one a ticket showing how to vote, please mail the postal card back to us at once. You need not sign the card. Every card has a number and we will know who sent it in.

“Let us all pull together and let us all work. Let us each get twenty-five votes.”

This was signed by the Brewers and Wholesale Liquor Dealers Association. In this case the liquor interests were successful and woman suffrage was defeated. In spite of such defeats, the suffrage cause won more and more mass support. Jesse Lynch Williams gives a description of a suffrage parade which he watched from the window of a Fifth Avenue club:

“It was Saturday afternoon and the members had crowded behind the windows to witness the show. They were laughing and exchanging the kind of jokes you would expect. When the head of the procession came opposite them, they burst into laughing and as the procession swept past, laughed long and loud. But the women continued to pour by. The laughter began to weaken, became spasmodic. The parade went on and on. Finally there was only the occasional sound of the clink of ice in the glasses. Hours passed. Then someone broke the silence. ‘Well boys,’ he said, ‘I guess they mean it!’”

In Albany, a representative from New York City said that not five women in his district endorsed woman suffrage. He was handed a petition signed by 189 women in his own block.

Turn to Militant Tactics

The split following the Civil War lasted twenty years. In 1890 the two suffrage organizations united as the National American Woman Suffrage Association. But in 1913 the movement split again, this time over the question of militant tactics imported from Great Britain.

The British suffragists started later than the American but once they got going, they really went to town. The militant suffragist movement in England, organized by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters in 1905, battled cops and hounded public officials. They chained themselves to posts or iron grillwork of public buildings and went on talking while the police sawed them loose. They climbed on rafters above Parliament and lay there for hours so that they could speak out at any opportune moment. Hundreds were arrested. In jail they continued to battle prison officials, went on hunger strikes, were subjected to forcible feeding.

A book written by one of Mrs. Pankhurst’s daughters gives a colorful glimpse of the lively character of their protest. A poster, reproduced in the book, reads: “Votes for Women – Men and women, help the Suffragettes to rush the House of Commons, on Tuesday evening, the 13th of October.” (In the subsequent trial there was a good deal of debate as to just what the word “rush” meant.)

The title of Chapter 20, June and July 1909, is followed by a brief summary:

“Attempt to insist on the constitutional right of petition as secured by the Bill of Rights, arrest of Mrs. Pankhurst and the Hon. Mrs. Haverfield, Miss Wallace Dunlop and the hunger strike, 14 hunger strikers in punishment cells. Mr. Gladstone charges Miss Garnett with having bitten a wardress.”

Chapter 21, July to September 1909, gives this summary:

“Mr. Lloyd George at Lime House, 12 women sent to prison, another strike, hunger strikers at Exeter Gaol, Mrs, Leigh on the roof at Liverpool, Liverpool hunger strikers,” etc. Some of the pictures have captions like “Lady Constance Lytton before she threw the stone at New Castle.” “Jessie Kenny as she tried to gain admittance to Mr. Asquith’s meeting disguised as telegraph boy.”

Two American women, Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, took part in the English demonstrations, were imprisoned and went on hunger strikes. They returned to this country determined to introduce some new methods into the now rather conventional woman’s movement.

In 1913 Miss Paul organized a suffrage parade in Washington, D.C. Some 8,000 women marched down Pennsylvania Avenue. As the procession approached the White House, it was blocked by hostile crowds. “Women were spit upon, slapped in the face, tripped up, pelted with burning cigar stubs, insulted by jeers and obscene language.” Troops had to be brought from Fort Meyer. Afterwards the suffragists forced a Congressional inquiry and the chief of police lost his job.

Alice Paul concentrated on passing a federal amendment which the older suffragists had more or less shelved while they fought local battles from state to state. Miss Paul followed the political tactics of the English movement. This was to hold the party in power responsible for the delay in granting woman suffrage and to campaign against all candidates of that party regardless of whether or not they supported suffrage as individuals. By that time women had the vote in a number of states and Miss Paul systematically campaigned against all candidates of the Democratic Party, in power at the time.

Conservative elements in the suffrage movement did not accept this tactic and Miss Paul and others were expelled in 1913. They formed a new organization which took the name National Woman’s Party in 1916. This organization also followed the British policy of putting a lot of pressure on top officials. (It got so that the British Prime Minister and cabinet officials were afraid to speak in public and only appeared at bazaars and social affairs.) To get favorable action from Wilson, who saw numerous delegations but kept stalling, a picket line was thrown around the White House in January, 1917. It continued day after day. On Inauguration Day, in a heavy rain, 1,000 pickets circled the White House four times.

In April, war was declared but the picketing continued. In June patriotic mobs began to tear down their banners and maul the pickets. On June 22 police started arresting the women, who refused to pay their fines. Hundreds were sent to prison, including Lucy Burns and Alice Paul. A history of the National Woman’s Party gives some details as to how they were treated:

“Instantly the room was in havoc. The guards from the male prison fell upon us. I saw Miss Lincoln, a slight young; girl, thrown to the floor. Mrs. Nolan, a delicate old lady of seventy-three, was mastered by two men … Whittaker (the Superintendent) in the center of the room directed the whole attack, inciting the guards to every brutality. Two men brought in Dorothy Day, twisting her arms above her head. Suddenly they lifted her and brought her body down twice over the back of an iron bench … The bed broke Mrs. Nolan’s fall, but Mrs. Cosu hit the wall. They had been there a few minutes when Mrs, Lewis, all doubled over like a sack of flour, was thrown in. Her head struck the iron bed and she fell to the floor senseless.”

As for Lucy Burns, “They handcuffed her wrists and fastened the handcuffs over her head to the cell door.”

Alice Paul’s hunger strike lasted twenty-two days. The authorities insisted on an examination of her mental condition. The doctor reported: “This is a spirit like Joan of Arc and it’s useless to try to change it. She will die but she will never give up.”

In the meantime, speakers of the National Woman’s Party were arousing the whole country against the treatment of the prisoners. Suddenly, on March 3, they were released. They were promised action on the suffrage amendment; but the following June, when Congress continued to stall, they started picketing again. Soon they were back in jail and on their hunger strikes.

The Senate finally voted on the amendment. It lost by two votes. The women transferred their pickets to the Senate.

Alice Paul started a “watch fire” in an urn in front of the White House. Every time President Wilson made a speech abroad that referred to freedom even in a passing phrase, a copy of the speech was burned in the “watch fire.” Invariably, police arrested the women who burned the speech. Evidently reports reaching Europe of the “watch fire” embarrassed the President, for he cabled two Senators asking them to support the suffrage amendment.

In February, 1919, the Senate voted again and the amendment lost by one vote. In June it was finally passed. It still had to be ratified by the states and this meant a state-to-state struggle lasting another year. The women of the United States voted in the presidential elections of 1920.

I seem to have given most of the credit for final passage of this law to the National Woman’s Party. The older suffrage organization continued its work during these seven years. It had a membership of almost two million as compared with a top membership of fifty thousand in the National Woman’s Party. But it was this militant minority that gave the final push to the suffrage drive.

The Struggle Ahead

Since I have limited myself to the struggle of American women for legal equality, I have not attempted to describe their economic development in this hundred-year period, their entry into industries, office work, trades and professions, or their role in the trade-union movement. That story would require another article, but its close relationship to the growth of the woman’s movement is obvious. As women achieved economic independence, their demand for the vote was taken more seriously. Laws change slowly and are generally a reflection of changes that have already occurred on the economic and social level.

Almost thirty-five years have passed since women got the vote. We are in position now to appraise what women achieved when they won the suffrage and what they did not achieve.

Many people are disappointed over the results of woman suffrage – for example, all those who believed that politics would be “purified” by the participation of women. Reactionaries insist that suffrage and the entry of women into industry have actually achieved nothing, that modern women are miserably unhappy, frustrated and hysterical and go insane at a faster rate than ever before. (All this because women are allegedly emotionally passive and have been forced against their true nature into competition with men.) The solution, if we are to believe them, seems to be to hurry back to what’s left of the home, which is something like going all out for the horse as a means of modern transportation. Modern Woman – the Lost Sex by a woman psychiatrist, Marya Farnham, is a good example of this reactionary trend.

Even people who approve of modern woman are disappointed at the results of the woman’s rights struggle. Purdy in his biography of Mary Wollstonecroft says:

“All that has been done for women in the last century and a half has not saved them from the tragedies that afflicted Mary Wollstonecroft, Eliza Bishop and Fanny Blood. Inherited poverty, brutal or indifferent parents, disease following overwork and neglect, reluctant or faithless lovers, incompatible husbands, the struggle to wring a living from an apathetic world – has not been ended by female suffrage or any other abstract benefits women have recently achieved.”

I can’t help wondering just how many problems they thought woman suffrage could solve. The vote was, a simple question of democratic rights and not a magic formula that could dissolve all the bitterness and frustrations of women’s daily lives. Men have been voting a hundred years longer than women and they’ve still got problems. That doesn’t mean they should give up voting. If Negroes suddenly achieved complete equality with whites, they would still face unemployment, the threat of war, reaction and all the other difficulties that confront every worker, regardless of race or sex. That doesn’t mean they should give up the fight for full equality.

I don’t doubt that women are unhappy. The legal equality and other democratic rights for which they fought so heroically are meaningless as long as their position in economic and family life remains basically unaltered.

The economic status of women is undergoing change. This is bringing about the first fundamental difference in women’s lives. Women now constitute one-third of the labor force and 25% of all married women are working. This is a revolutionary development that in the long run will mean a great deal more than the vote.

But the majority of women still face discrimination in wages and jobs. The average income of women workers is less than half that of men. They are also doubly exploited, as wage earners and as wives. A survey by General Electric revealed that the average work week of employed wives is 79 hours – 40 on the job and 39 at home.

This explains why women are not too enthusiastic about their so-called “emancipation.” Women workers are obviously not emancipated, any more than male workers, Negro workers, or any other section of the working class.

The structure of the family is also undergoing change, partly as a result of women’s changing economic position. Women are not as restricted in their sex and family relationships as they were when Mary Wollstonecroft first rebelled against marriage.

I believe it is significant that the first women who fought for equality and woman’s rights directed a large part of their protest against bourgeois family relationships. Only at a later date did they center their attention on issues like the vote. It may be that in our re-examination of women’s problems we will return to their starting point. In the light of modern psychological and anthropological knowledge, we should study the relations of husbands and wives, parents and children, in a society that is founded upon the institution of private property and where marriage laws and customs reflect this basic concept of private ownership.

Both the economic and sex status of women is changing, but these changes are only the first steps toward a revolution in human relationships which will take place in the future. The fight for freedom is indivisible and no basic change can be achieved in a society where men, as well as women, are not free.

When women are really emancipated from the economic exploitation and emotional restrictions of our society, men too will be freed from the frustrations and unhappiness which the same system inflicts upon them. Bull this can onlybe achieved in the cooperative atmosphere of a socialist commonwealth where our personal relationships will not be an expression of the property forms of a competitive society.

Trade Unionists And Revolutionists

by James P. Cannon

Delivered: May 11, 1953 in New York. First printed in Fourth International, Vol.15 No.2, Spring 1954. Copied from http://www.marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/1953/unions.htm

For several months we have been discussing the contrasting proposals of the two sides in our internal party conflict. It is time now, I think, to go a step further; to advance the discussion to an examination of the basic causes of the fight. You will recall that Trotsky did this in the 1939-40 fight with Burnham and Shachtman. At a certain stage of that struggle, after the positions of both sides were made clear – not only what they had to say but what they didn’t say, how they acted, the atmosphere of the fight, and everything else – when it was fairly clear what was really involved Trotsky wrote his article “A Petty-Bourgeois Opposition in the Socialist Workers Party”.

That article summed up his judgment of the Burnham-Shachtman faction as it had revealed itself in the fire of the struggle – when it had become clear that we were not dealing, as sometimes happens, with a mere difference of opinion among cothinkers on a given point or two that might be settled by fraternal discussion and debate. Burnham and his supporters – and his dupes – were moved by a profound inner compulsion to break with the doctrine and tradition of the party. They carried their revolt against the party to the point of frenzy, as petty-bourgeois factionalists always do. They became impervious to any argument, and Trotsky undertook to explain the social basis of their faction and their factional frenzy. We must do the same now once again.

The social groupings in the present opposition are not quite the same as in 1940. In that fight it was a case of a few demoralised intellectuals based on a genuine petty-bourgeois social composition of a section of the party, especially in New York, but also in Chicago and some other parts of the country – a petty-bourgeois concentration revolting against the proletarian line of the party.

The social composition of the party today is far better and provides a much narrower base of support for an opportunist faction. As a result of the split with the Burnhamites and our deliberate concentration on trade union work, the party today is far more proletarian in its composition, especially outside New York. Despite all that, the real social composition of the party is by no means uniform; it reflects some of the changes which have taken place in the American working class. This has been strikingly demonstrated by the line-up of the party trade unionists in our factional struggle. The revolutionists among them – the big majority – on the one side, and the conservatised elements – a small minority – on the other, have chosen different sides instinctively and almost automatically.

Since the consolidation of the CIO unions and the 13-year period of war and postwar boom, a new stratification has taken place within the American working class, and particularly and conspicuously in the CIO unions. Our party, which is rooted in the unions, reflects that stratification too. The worker who has soaked up the general atmosphere of the long prosperity and begun to live and think like a petty bourgeois is a familiar figure in the country at large. He has even made his appearance in the Socialist Workers Party as a ready-made recruit for an opportunist faction.

In our 1952 convention resolution, we explained the situation in the American working class as a whole in the two sections “The Causes of Labour Conservatism and the Premises for a New Radicalisation” and “Perspectives of a New Radicalisation”. In my report at the national convention, I called those two sections “the heart of the resolution” and centred my report around them.

It appears to me now, in the light of the conflict in the party and its real causes, which are now manifest, that those sections of the convention resolution dealing with the class as a whole require further elaboration and amplification. We need a more precise examination of the stratifications within the working class, which are barely touched there, and of the projection of these stratifications in the composition of the unions, in the various inner-union tendencies, and even in our own party. This, I believe, is the key to the otherwise inexplicable riddle of why one proletarian section of the party, even though it is a small minority, supports a capitulatory opportunist faction against the proletarian-revolutionary line and leadership of the party.

Examples from history

This apparent contradiction – this division of working class forces – in party factional struggle is not new. In the classical faction struggles of our international movement since the time of Marx and Engels, there has always been a division, in the party itself, between the different strata of workers. The proletarian left wing by no means ever had all the workers, and the opportunist petty-bourgeois wing was never without some working-class support, that is, working class in the technical sense of wage workers. The revisionist intellectuals and the trade union opportunists always nestled together in the right wing of the party. In the SWP at the present time, we have a repetition of the classical line-up that characterised the struggle of left and right in the Second International before the First World War.

Trotsky told us on one of our visits with him – I think he also wrote it somewhere – that there was a real social division between the two factions of the original Social Democratic Party of Russia, which later became separate parties. The Mensheviks, he said, had nearly all the intellectuals. With a few exceptions, the only intellectuals Lenin had were those whom the party had trained, a good deal like our own worker-intellectuals for the greater part. The intellectual – I mean the professional intellectual of the Burnham type, the man from the professor’s chair, from the universities – was a rarity on Lenin’s side, whereas the Mensheviks had shoals of them.

In addition, the Mensheviks had most of the skilled workers, who are always the privileged workers. The printers union was Menshevik even through the revolution. The railroad workers’ bureaucracy tried to paralyse the revolution; it was only by military force and the aid of a minority that the Bolsheviks were able to prevent the Menshevik railroad workers’ officialdom from employing their strategic position against the revolution.

Trotsky said that the Mensheviks also had most of the older workers. Age, as you know, is associated with conservatism. (In general, that is, but not always; there are exceptions to the rule. There are two different ways of measuring age. In ordinary life you measure it by the calendar, but in revolutionary politics you measure it by the mind and the will and the spirit – and you don’t always get the same result.)

On the other hand, while the older workers, the skilled and the privileged, were with the Mensheviks, the unskilled workers and the youth were with the Bolsheviks; that is, those of them who were politicalised. That was the line of division between the factions. It was not merely a question of the arguments and the program; it was the social impulses, petty-bourgeois on one side, proletarian on the other, which determined their allegiance.

The same line-up took place in Germany. The prewar German Social Democracy in its heyday had a powerful bloc of opportunist parliamentarians, Marxologists who utilised their scholastic training and their ability to quote Marx by the yard to justify an opportunist policy. They were supported not merely by the petty shopkeepers, of whom there were many, and the trade union bureaucrats. They also had a solid base of support in the privileged stratum of the aristocracy of labour in Germany. The trade union opportunists in the German Social Democratic Party supported Bernstein’s revisionism without bothering to read his articles. They didn’t need to read them; they just felt that way. The most interesting facts on this point are cited by Peter Gay in his book on Bernstein and his revisionist movement, entitled The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism.

All through the prewar fight over revisionism, then through the war and postwar days, through 1923 and 1933, the skilled, privileged trade unionists were the solid base of support of the opportunist Social Democratic leaders – while the communist revolutionaries, from the time of Liebknecht and Luxemburg all the way down to the fascist catastrophe in 1933, were the youth, the unemployed, and the unskilled, less privileged workers.

If you will go back and read Lenin again, in case you’ve forgotten it, you will see how Lenin explained the degeneration of the Second International, and its eventual betrayal in the First World War, precisely by its opportunism based upon the adaptation of the party to the conservative impulses and demands of the bureaucracy and aristocracy of labour.

We had the same thing in the US, although we never had a Social Democracy in the European sense and the working class was never politically organised here as it was there. The organised labour movement, up to the ’30s, was largely restricted to a privileged aristocracy of labour – as Debs and De Leon used to call it – of skilled craftsmen, who got better wages and had preferred positions, “job trusts”, and so on. The chief representative of this conservative, privileged craft union stratum was Gompers.

On the other side, there was the great mass of the basic proletariat, the unskilled and semiskilled, the mass production workers, the foreign born, and the jobless youth. They were without benefit of organisation, without privileges, the outcasts of society. It was not without reason that they were more radical than the others. Nobody paid any attention to them except the revolutionists and radicals. Only the IWW of Haywood and St. John, Debs, and the left Socialists voiced their bitter grievances, did the organising work, and led the strikes of the mass production workers in those days. If the official labour bureaucracy intervened in the spontaneous strikes of the unorganised it was usually to break them up and sell them out.

The officials of the skilled unions did not welcome the great upsurge of the unorganised workers in the ’30s. But they could not prevent it. When the spontaneous strikes and drives for organisation could no longer be ignored, the AFL began to assign “organisers” to the various industries – steel, rubber, auto, etc. They were sent however, not to lead the workers in a struggle but to control them, to prevent the consolidation of self-acting industrial unions. They actually wouldn’t permit the auto workers in convention to elect their own officials, insisting that the AFL appoint them “provisionally”. The same with the rubber workers and other new industrial unions.

These new unions had to split with the conservative labour fakers of the AFL before they could consolidate unions of their own. The drives behind the 1934-37 upsurge were the bitter and irreconcilable grievances of the workers; their protest against mistreatment, speedup, insecurity; the revolt of the pariahs against the pariah status.

This revolt, which no bureaucracy could contain, was spearheaded by new people – the young mass production workers, the new, young militants whom nobody had ever heard of. They were the real creators of the CIO. This revolt of the “men from nowhere” reached its high tide in the sit-down strikes of 1937. The workers’ victory in these battles definitely established the CIO and secured stability of the new unions through the seniority clause.

Conservatising influences

It is now 16 years since the sit-down strikes made the new CIO unions secure by the seniority clause. These 16 years of union security, and 13 years of uninterrupted war and post-war prosperity, have wrought a great transformation in the unprivileged workers who made the CIO.

The seniority clause, like everything else in life, has revealed a contradictory quality. By regulating the right to employment through time of service on the job, it secures the union militant against arbitrary discrimination and layoffs. It is an absolute necessity for union security. That is the positive side of the seniority clause. But, at the same time, it also gradually creates a sort of special interest in the form of steadier employment for those unionists who have been longest in the shop. That is its negative side.

In time, with the stretching out of their seniority rights and their upgrading to better jobs, a process of transformation in the status of the original union militants has taken place. In the course of 16 years, they have secured more or less steady employment, even in times of slack work. They are, under the rules, the last to be laid off and the first to be rehired. And in most cases, they have better jobs than newcomers to the shop. All of this, combined with war and postwar prosperity, has changed their material position and, to a certain extent, their social status.

The pioneer militants of the CIO unions are 16 years older than they were in 1937. They are better off than the ragged and hungry sit-down strikers of 1937; and many of them are 16 times softer and more conservative. This privileged section of the unions, formerly the backbone of the left wing, is today the main social base of the conservative Reuther bureaucracy. They are convinced far less by Reuther’s clever demagogy than by the fact that he really articulates their own conservatised moods and patterns of thought.

But these conservatised ex-militants are only part of the membership of the CIO, and I don’t think that our resolution at the convention deals specifically and adequately with that fact. In these mass production industries, which are real slave pens and hell holes, there are many others. There is a mass of younger workers who have none of these benefits and privileges and no vested interest in the piled-up seniority rights. They are the human material for the new radicalisation. The revolutionary party, looking to the future, must turn its primary attention to them.

If we, counting on a new upsurge in the labour movement, look to those who led it 16 years ago, we could indeed draw a gloomy picture. Not only are they not in a radical mood now; they are not apt to become the spearhead of a new radicalisation. That will take youth, and hunger, and raggedness, and bitter discontent with all the conditions of life. We must look to the new people if, as I take it, we are thinking in terms of the coming American revolution and not limiting our vision to the prospect of a new shake-up in the bureaucracy and of caucus combinations with slick “progressive” fakers for little aims.

This new stratification in the new unions is a feature which the party can no longer ignore. All the more so, since we now see it directly reflected in our party. A number of party members in the auto union belong to this privileged upper stratum. That’s the first thing you have to recognise. Some of the best militants, the best stalwarts of the party in the old times, have been affected by the changed conditions of their own lives and by their new environment. They see the old militants in the unions, who formerly cooperated with them, growing slower, more satisfied, more conservative. They still mix with these ex-militants socially, and are infected by them. They develop a pessimistic outlook from the reactions they get on every side from these old-timers, and, unknown to themselves, acquire an element of that same conservatism.

That, in my opinion, is the reason why they support a crudely conservative, pessimistic, capitulatory tendency in our internal faction fight. This, I am afraid, is not a misunderstanding on their part. I wish it were, for in that case our task would be easy. The miserable arguments of the Cochranites cannot stand up against Marxist criticism – provided one accepts the criteria of revolutionary Marxism.

But that’s the rub. Our conservatised trade unionists no longer accept these criteria. Like many others, who “used to be radicals themselves”, they are beginning to talk about our “Theses on the American Revolution” as a “crackpot” idea. They don’t “feel” that way, and nobody can talk them out of the way they do feel.

That – and perhaps a guilty conscience – is the true explanation of their subjectivity, their rudeness and factional frenzy when one tries to argue with them from the principled standpoint of the “old Trotskyism”. They do not follow Cochran out of exceptional regard for him personally, because they know Cochran. They simply recognise in Cochran, with his capitulatory defeatism and his program of retreat from the fighting arena to a propaganda circle, the authentic spokesman of their own mood of retreat and withdrawal.

Just as the older, more skilled and privileged German trade unionists supported the right against the left, and as their Russian counterparts supported the Mensheviks against the Bolsheviks, the “professional trade unionists” in our party support Cochranism in our fight. And for the same basic reasons.

I, for my part, must frankly admit that I did not see this whole picture at the beginning of the fight. I anticipated that some tired and pessimistic people, who were looking for some sort of rationalisation to slow down or get out of the struggle, would support any kind of an opposition faction that would arise. That happens in every faction fight. But I didn’t anticipate the emergence of a conservatised workers’ stratum serving as an organised grouping and a social basis for an opportunist faction in the party.

Still less did I expect to see such a grouping strutting around in the party demanding special consideration because they are “trade unionists”. What’s exceptional about that? There are 15 million trade unionists in this country, but not quite so many revolutionists. But the revolutionists are the ones who count with us.

Losing faith in the party

The revolutionary movement, under the best conditions, is a hard fight, and it wears out a lot of human material. Not for nothing has it been said a thousand times in the past: “The revolution is a devourer of men.” The movement in this, the richest and most conservative country in the world, is perhaps the most voracious of all.

It is not easy to persist in the struggle, to hold on, to stay tough and fight it out year after year without victory; and even, in times such as the present, without tangible progress. That requires theoretical conviction and historical perspective as well as character. And, in addition to that, it requires association with others in a common party.

The surest way to lose one’s fighting faith is to succumb to one’s immediate environment; to see things only as they are and not as they are changing and must change; to see only what is before one’s eyes and imagine that it is permanent. That is the cursed fate of the trade unionist who separates himself from the revolutionary party. In normal times, the trade union, by its very nature, is a culture-broth of opportunism. No trade unionist, overwhelmed by the petty concerns and limited aims of the day, can retain his vision of the larger issues and the will to fight for them without the party.

The revolutionary party can make mistakes, and has made them, but it is never wrong in the fight against grievance-mongers who try to blame the party for their own weaknesses, for their tiredness, their lack of vision, their impulse to quit and to capitulate. The party is not wrong now when it calls this tendency by its right name.

People often act differently as individuals, and give different explanations for their actions, than when they act and speak as groups. When an individual gets tired and wants to quit, he usually says he is tired and he quits; or he just drops out without saying anything at all, and that’s all there is to it. That has been happening in our international movement for 100 years.

But when the same kind of people decide as a group to get out of the line of fire by getting out of the party, they need the cover of a faction and a “political” rationalisation. Any “political” explanation will do, and in any case it is pretty certain to be a phony explanation. That also has been going on for about 100 years.

The present case of the Cochranite trade unionists is no exception to this rule. Out of the clear sky we hear that some “professional trade unionists” are suddenly against us because we are “Stalinophobes”, and they are hell-bent for an orientation toward Stalinism. Why, that’s the damnedest nonsense I ever heard! They never had that idea in their heads until this fight started. And how could they? The Stalinists have gotten themselves isolated in the labour movement, and it’s poison to touch them. To go looking for the Stalinists is to cut yourself off from the labour movement, and these party “trade unionists” don’t want to do that.

The people in Michigan who are hollering for us to make an orientation toward the Stalinists have no such orientation on their own home grounds. And they’re perfectly right about that. I don’t deny that people like Clarke, Bartell, and Frankel have heard voices and seen visions of a gold mine hidden in the Stalinist hills – I will discuss this hallucination at another time – but the Cochranite trade unionists haven’t the slightest intention of going prospecting there. They are not even looking in that direction. What’s amazing is the insincerity of their support of the orientation toward the Stalinists. That’s completely artificial, for factional purposes. No, you have to say the orientation toward Stalinism, as far as the Michigan trade unionists are concerned, is a phony.

What is the next thing we hear? That they are full of “grievances” against the party “regime”. I always get suspicious when I hear of grievances, especially from people whom you didn’t hear it from before. When I see people revolting against the party on the ground that they’ve been badly treated by this terrible regime in our party – which is actually the fairest, most democratic and easy-going regime in the history of the human race – I always remind myself of the words of J. Pierpont Morgan. He said: “Everybody has at least two reasons for what he does – a good reason and the real reason.” They’ve given a good reason for their opposition. Now I want to know what the hell is the real reason.

It can’t be the party’s hostility to Stalinism, as they say – because the Cochranite trade unionists wouldn’t touch the Stalinists with a 10-foot pole, not even if you stood behind them with bayonets and lighted firecrackers under their coat-tails.

It can’t be the Third World Congress,35 concerning which they are suddenly working up a lather. These comrades in Michigan have many admirable qualities, as has been shown in the past, but they’re by no means the most internationalist-minded section of the party; not by far. They’re not that section of the party most interested in theoretical questions. The Detroit branch, sad to say, has been most remiss in the teaching and study of Marxist theory, and is now paying a terrible price for it. This branch hasn’t got a single class going; no class in Marxism, no class in party history, no class on the Third World Congress or anything else. So when they suddenly erupt with the demand that the Third World Congress be nailed to the party’s masthead, I say that’s another good reason, but it’s a phony too.

The real reason is that they are in revolt against the party without fully knowing why. For the young militant, the party is a necessity valued above everything else. The party was the very life of these militants when they were young and really militant. They didn’t care for jobs; they feared no hazards. Like any other first-class revolutionists, they would quit a job at the drop of a hat if the party wanted them to go to another town, wanted them to do this or that. It was always the party first.

The party is the highest prize to the young trade unionist who becomes a revolutionist, the apple of his eye. But to the revolutionist who becomes transformed into a trade unionist – we have all seen this happen more than once – the party is no prize at all. The mere trade unionist, who thinks in terms of “union politics” and “power blocs” and little caucuses with little fakers to run for some little office, pushing one’s personal interest here and there – why should he belong to a revolutionary party? For such a person the party is a millstone around his neck, interfering with his success as a “practical” trade union politician. And in the present political situation in the country, it’s a danger – in the union, in the shop, and in life in general.

The great majority of the party trade unionists understand all this as well as we do. The vulgar “trade unionist” appeal of the Cochranites only repels them, for they consider themselves to be revolutionists first and trade unionists second. In other words, they are party people, as all revolutionists are.

I think it’s a great tribute to our tradition, to our cadres, to the leadership of our party, that we have succeeded in isolating Cochranism to a narrow section of the party membership. It’s a great satisfaction, in these troubled and heavy times, to see the great majority of the party standing firm against all pressures. In the further course of the discussion, we will strike still heavier blows and chip off a few more here and there. We don’t want to see anybody leave the party if we can help it.

But soul-saving is not our main occupation. We are determined to protect the party from demoralisation, and we will do that. We are concerned with individuals only within that framework. The rescue of political derelicts can be left to the Salvation Army. For us, the party comes first, and nobody will be allowed to disrupt it.

This fight is of the most decisive importance because the prospect before our party is the prospect of war and all that goes with it. We see the dangers and the difficulties – as well as the great opportunities – which lie ahead of us, and just because of that we want to get the party in shape before the worst blows fall upon us.

The party line and perspectives, and the party leadership, will be settled in this fight for a long time to come. When harder times come, and when new opportunities open up, we don’t want to leave any doubt in any comrade’s mind as to what the party line is and who the party leaders are. These questions will be settled in this fight.

The Socialist Workers Party has the right, by its program and its record, to aspire to a great future. That’s my opinion. That was the opinion of Trotsky. There is a line in the document of the Cochranites that sneers at the 1946 SWP convention and at the “Theses on the American Revolution” adopted there. It says: “We were children of destiny, at least in our own minds.” In that derision of the party’s aspiration, the whole pessimistic, capitulatory ideology of Cochranism is contained.

In 1929, when Trotsky was deported to Constantinople, the victory of Stalinism was complete, and he was isolated and almost alone. Outside the Soviet Union, there were only about 200 people supporting him in the whole world, and half of them were the forces we had organised in the US. Trotsky wrote us a letter at that time in which he hailed our movement in the United States. He said our work was of world historical significance because, in the last analysis, all of the problems of the epoch will be settled on American soil. He said that he didn’t know whether a revolution would come here sooner than in other places, but in any case it was necessary to prepare by organising the nucleus of the party of the future revolution.

That’s the line we have been working on. Our cadres have been raised on that doctrine. When I read in the Cochranite document that cynical dismissal of our revolutionary aspirations, I remembered a speech I made to our young comrades 13 years ago in Chicago. The occasion was our Active Workers Conference, held just a month or so after the death of the Old Man,36 when everybody felt bereft; when the question in the minds of all, here and all over the world, was whether the movement could survive without Trotsky.

At the end of the conference, I gave a speech and I said to the young activists there: “You are the real men of destiny, for you alone represent the future.” In the 1946 convention theses we put the same concept.

That has been the position of all our militants who are standing together through this long, hard battle. A young comrade in California, one of the leading party activists, pointed the Cochranite sneer out to me and said: “What about that? If I didn’t think our party has a great future, why should I be willing to devote my life and everything I have to the party?” Anyone who low-rates the party and crosses off its future ought to ask himself what he is doing in the party. Is he here on a visit?

The party demands a lot, and you can’t give a lot and risk everything unless you think the party is worth it. The party is worth it, for it is the party of the future. And this party of the future is now once again getting its share of historical luck. Once again, as in 1939-40, it has the opportunity to settle a fundamental conflict in open discussion before a war, on the eve of a war.

Before World War II the party was confronted with a faction which threatened its program and, thereby, its right to exist. We didn’t have to jump immediately into the war before the question was settled. We were working in the open while the rest of our comrades in Europe were underground or in concentration camps. We here in America were privileged to conduct a debate for the whole International over a period of seven months.

The same thing is happening again now. We ought to recognise this historical luck and take advantage of it. The best way to do this is to extend and amplify the discussion. I will repeat what Comrade Dobbs said, that our aim is not to split the party but to break up the split and save the party. We will try to prevent a split by a political fight which hits the opposition so hard that it can have no perspectives in a split. If we can’t prevent a split, we will reduce it to the smallest possible size.

Meantime, we will develop the party work on all fronts. No party work is going to be sabotaged. If the attempt is made, we will move our forces in everywhere and take over. We will not permit the party to be disrupted by sabotage or derailed by a split, any more than we did in 1940. We have made a good start, and we won’t stop until we have won another complete victory in the struggle for a revolutionary party.

The Problem of Leadership and Program

[by Vincent Grey (Vince Copeland)

[First printed in Fourth International, Summer (northern hemisphere) 1954. Copied from
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/fi/vol15/no03/grey.html ]

[Revolutionary Regroupment note: Many on the left would be suprised that the faction in the Socialist Workers Party associated with Sam Marcy (of which Vine Copeland was an important leader) initially sided with James P. Cannon against Michel Pablo’s tailing after the Stalinists. Important criticisms of Marcy’s factions earlier years (before the turn towards an almost uncritical adaptation towards the Stalinists) aside, this document, critiquing Pabloism and Maoism, stand in very stark contrast to the current politics of the Workers World Party and it’s split, the Party for Liberation and Socialism (both of which claim the heritage if Marcy’s Global Class War tendency.]

IF WE may regard the Chinese revolution as the deformed child of the 1917 Russian revolution, then we may also regard Pabloism, in the field of theory, as an even more deformed offshoot of the Chinese revolution. The fact that Pabloism can thus trace its lineage back to the great Russian revolution is not very important here, because Pabloism’s main proposition is that its classical grandparent has been superseded. By what? Pabloism itself does not clearly and distinctly say; but it senses with a somewhat legitimate filial instinct, and half-mumbles with a tongue-tied persistency, that the Chinese revolution – or at least its concept of the Chinese revolution – is to be the matrix and fountainhead of the future.

The task of answering this false theory is the more difficult because the Pabloites have not made a logical and consistent exposition of it. The reader will quickly see, however, that we are not imputing any ideas to the Pabloites that they do not possess. We are merely tracing the source of some of their newly discovered historical laws, and attempting to pose and, to some extent, answer certain questions raised by the Chinese revolution, questions which we would have to answer quite independently of Pabloism.

Consciously or not, Pabloism is superimposing the Chinese experience – and only half understood at that – on the whole world. With no special analysis of the history and development of China in the last few decades, either from a Marxist or a revisionist point of view, Pabloism has blithely concluded that there is a “new world reality.” Their “new world reality,” however, is to be found not nearly so much in the mighty dynamics of the Chinese revolution itself as in the policies of the Chinese Stalinists, and thence, by a kind of transubstantiation, in world Stalinism.

While it is true that Pablo himself (like Clarke) first began to discover the “new world reality” in the Titoist party of Yugoslavia, he did not announce it in its present more comprehensive revisionist form until some time later. Actually it was not Yugoslavia, but China, which had the greatest impact upon the Pabloites. Regardless of the date of Pablo’s own conversion, Pabloism itself could only gain a certain growth by virtue of the greater revolution in China which had more of a world effect.

Unlike the Russian revolution, which raised the theoretical level along with the fighting class-consciousness of the workers of nearly all countries of the world, the Chinese revolution has left its mark in a twisted, peculiar way. The Chinese was a truly great revolution. It really shook the world – but unfortunately it shook the Marxism out of some Marxists as well. It is the fate of all great revolutions to reveal the weak spots, the accumulated rust in theory, and consequently to increase the weaknesses of some of the theorists. But the Chinese revolution has had an effect more contradictory than usual in this respect.

As the Pabloists have so often informed us, they are not sectarians. By no means! They have been extremely sensitive to the developments in the real world, including the development of the Chinese revolution. Rut the trouble is that their sensitivity, like a harp that anyone can play upon, also responds sympathetically to false ideas. The brain, a most sensitive instrument, is often, by the same token, a weak instrument. How hard it is for a revolutionist con-slantlv to oppose the ruling ideas of the ruling class – no matter how banal or illogical these ideas are! How hard it is to resist the ideas of the ruling caste in the Soviet Union as well, especially at a time when Stalinism seems to have a new historic validity, when it is the ideology of the leadership of several large states, when it is the current ideological banner of millions of fighting class-conscious workers!

Naturally Pabloism is not a duplication of Stalinism. But it rationalizes the apparent validity of Stalinism, and projects a progressive historic evolution for it. How can such an inferior idea take possession of a superior mind, trained in Trotskyism? We have to look outside the realm of ideas to answer this question. Trotskyism, has the same validity today as it did formerly. Its logic is just as sound. Its critique of Stalinism is just as correct. But it is more isolated. It seems less important. History seems to threaten to pass it by! This can be very frightening to a revolutionist.

To stand up directly against the reaction, to fight capitalism and overthrow it, to make the revolution without complications, just the good against the bad – that is a very natural and understandable desire. But then to see a great revolution put into power those whom one did not expect to take power at all – that is hard, even on a mind trained in Marxism. But the mind is “resourceful.” It covers up its shaken confidence and resolution with new rationalizations and new “theory.” Thus a great revolution can have some reactionary results! And thus Pablo could find fertile ground for Pabloism.

New Role for Stalinism?

Now the leading party, which assumed state power in revolutionary China, was the Stalinist party. The question of the real dynamics of the revolution and the class nature of the new state did not trouble the Pabloites nearly ,so much as another intriguing, and in fact very important question: “Cannot the Stalinists then take power on a worldwide basis, lead the world revolution, be the ‘wave of the future,’ and eliminate the necessity for ourselves, the Trotskyists?” This is the way the Pabloite leaders, who were oh-so-objective in regard to their own revolutionary role, began to pose the question – at first to their most private looking-glasses, and later on to the party, in their mumbling ruminations and qualifications, sandwiched in the guise of confusion between points of their resolutions.

Had the leading Pabloites raised this question frankly and honestly from the beginning (as revisionists seldom do), it would have been much easier to answer them, and to answer on a thoroughly theoretical basis. They contented themselves, however, with half-raising the question of the historic role of the Trotskyist parties – as parties – while they reaffirmed their belief in the historic role of Trotskyism. This meant that the Stalinist parties (or Social Democratic parties, as the case might be) could eventually adopt the Trotskyist program without necessarily becoming Trotskyist parties – by a process of political osmosis, as it were, without sharp splits, fights, clashes between Stalinists and Trotskyists that would result in new Trotskyist parties combatting all other tendencies and contending for leadership of the workers of the world. Posing the question this way, without reviewing the relationship of Stalinism and Trotskyism to the world revolution, it appeared to the Pablo followers that it was a choice between trying to lead the revolution with a small “sectarian” party or with the much larger and “almost” revolutionary Stalinist party.

Considering the latter-day “objectivity” of those who have lost faith in their own program, and considering the necessity for a theoretical answer generally, we really ought to take up Pablo’s theory of Trotskyism without the Trotskyist party. This theory should not be considered by itself, “subjectively” (for we are surely too blinded by our own desire to lead the revolution to do this adequately!). It should be considered in the framework of the role and relationship of the party to the mass in general, of “spontaneity” in general, of revisionism in general, and of the Chinese revolution in particular.

What does the Chinese revolution, viewed through the lens of Marxism instead of the impressionist mirror of Pabloism, have to tell us about these things? Consider, for example, the newly discovered historical law that the proletarian masses “choose” their own instrument (party) and accomplish their revolution with it, more or less regardless of the content of the party’s program, even re-fashioning the program in the process and imposing a “revolutionary orientation” or the leading party. Is not China the source of this utterly false and fatally deceptive idea? It is not China, but its half-baked interpreters we have to blame! Actually, as we shall later demonstrate, the Stalinist program in China was not especially different in 1949 from what it was in 1929. The Chinese Revolution swept over its leadership and swept up its leadership far more than it shaped the leadership.

But this is only one of the subordinate parts of the revisionism the Pabloites have sucked out of their thumbs while staring at China. The question can be posed in a much more basic way. China, the Pabloites have finally concluded, however pragmatically, is a workers’ state. Now in the opinion of the present author, this is true. But if it is true, what then?

Why then, the Chinese masses’ quarter-century of struggle erupted into a workers’ state without the benefit of Trotskyist leadership! And if that is so, what then? “Why then,” formal logic triumphantly replies to the prostrate Pabloite, “either this is a pattern for world revolution or it is not. And since we are not Chinese exceptionalists, it is a pattern. This is the new world reality!”

True, the Pabloites do not put the matter so bluntly or so clearly as this. They only make the conclusions which flow from this.

Like Joseph with the forgetful Pharaoh’s dream, we are compelled to articulate their idea in clear daylight, as well as to show its meaning – and answer it. Such ruthless logic can’t be answered, of course, if we concern ourselves only with the rigid, formal premises of this kind of logic. The living logic of the revolution, however, has little trouble replying to such copybook sentences.

Must View in Context

To understand the Chinese revolution we not only have to acquaint ourselves thoroughly with the mighty upheaval of the Chinese millions, but we must view this upheaval in the context of the world revolution and the international situation, outside of which it is meaningless and, in fact, could not have taken place. More than that, the “workers’ state” is a more provisional, more transitional thing, in a smaller world, than it was in the 1917 period. In other words, China is, in my opinion, a workers’ state. But in the world of today, even such a great state as China cannot be regarded in as definitive a sense as the Soviet Union of 1917 – and of course not remotely as definitive as was the early American bourgeois republic among the world’s distant, almost unreachable feudal monarchies.

A workers’ state is a transitional regime – even a transitional society, if you will – between capitalism and socialism, a bridge from one to the other. (Needless to say, this regime is definitive enough for revolutionaries all over the world to defend intransigently.) Rut this transitional edifice, unlike a bridge between two solid shores, is a constantly changing, supremely sensitive, living thing, rooted in the past and only pointing to the future, subject to overthrow, degeneration and downfall, as well as to the fulfilment of its rational function. It is a provisional thing, even on the basis of its own national aims. On a world basis, this provisionalism is magnified and multiplied. The weight, the stability, the static importance, of any national revolution have decreased simultaneously with, and because of, the tremendously increased dynamism of the world revolution.

It is the worldwide class war, which Pablo thought he understood but will be compelled to reconsider if he continues to whitewash Moscow – it is this war which dictates that the inner Chinese struggle must become transformed and merged into the outer international struggle, and that state power can only be validated on a world basis. This cannot be done by simple “repetitions” of China, even if such repetitions were possible. The Pabloites generally say that the Kremlin’s worldwide dilemma forces it to keep encouraging the Stalinists to take power in each colonial revolution (and possibly the European too) in order to defend the Soviet Union – and itself – against imperialism. Pablo himself does not dare to say that this compulsion would finally drive Moscow into giving consistent leadership for world revolution itself. But since this is a logical outcome of his proposition, as well as a widely held belief of the bourgeoisie, we should take a good look at the proposition itself. It is necessary, among other things, to take a look at what the Stalinists are actually doing.

The Stalinists, as well as we, have noticed the imminence of the Third World War. And they justify their shameless betrayal in Iran, for example, which is admittedly a tinder-box, by the threat of the same world war whose logic is supposed to drive them to victory, not only in Iran, but in such countries as … France! Moscow and Peking are even now maneuvering Indo-China into a peace which, despite its immediate practical advantages, is a class peace, a restoration of some “stability” to the Far East, and to that extent to the world. This is an attempt to restore the status quo, an attempt which will not, of course, prevent the bigger war, but only prepare its outbreak under conditions more unfavorable for the workers. And in Italy and France, where the Stalinist policy alone prevents the drive to power and refuses to make even the most elementary military preparations, the threat of American intervention and atomic explosion is the chief rationalization the Stalinists give to themselves and their followers for their treacherous policies.

The Stalinists could not hold back the revolutionary tide in China. But they have proved again and again, and since China, that they are more than adequate in other places to turn victory into defeat. Pablo has failed to notice that – given the character of the Stalinists and the desperation of the Kremlin – the imminence of the war, class war though it is, also acts as a brake upon the revolution. Thus each succeeding “repetition” of China (if there are to be any at all) will not increase the contradictions of the ideology of Stalinism, as Pablo theorizes, but on the contrary will confront the various national Stalinist leaderships, each time the question of power is raised, with tasks which become more and more impossible without breaking with Stalinism – not obliquely or by implication, but openly and consciously breaking with the Kremlin (whose material assistance is fully as important to them as the bourgeoise say it is). This is not possible without ideological battles in the course of explaining the role of the Kremlin, even while the Kremlin is helping a given struggle, without splits, and the formation of Trotskvist parties. To any serious revolutionary, this means that trere must be a fighting organization of Trotskyism (the independent party).

The Real Question

Are we predicting that Indo-China, Burma, India or even, for that matter, France and Italy, could not possibly have revolutions under the leadership of the Stalinists? Some of the most important pre-conditions for the Stalinist success in China are missing in these countries, of course. But it is not necessarv to deal in absolute predictions of this sort. (If the possibility exists, it still does not relieve us from the duty of building a revolutionary party in those countries.) It is mere speculation whether the experience of China can somewhere, sometime, be “repeated.” The real question is: can it solve the world problem? Is the Chinese method sufficient for the success of the world revolution?

That is the way practical, professional revolutionaries who are serious about the world revolution must pose the question. “Revolutionary” pipe-dreamers and sideline “Marxist” commentators will not pose this question at all. They will accept the affirmative answer to the above question, partly because they don’t clearly formulate the question, partly because they are afraid to ask it, and partly because, after all, wouldn’t it be nice if it were true? But as long as this question is not clearly formulated, as long as wish-thinking and impressionism substitute for thinking on this question, then all their schoolboy-revolutionist talk about strategy and tactics with the Stalinists is only a discussion of the tempo of their own liquidation.

As we have already remarked, Pabloism was extremely impressed by China. But what impressed it most was the leadership. Pablo himself correctly claims the “credit” for having made new contributions on the nature of Stalinism. It is a common fault to be more impressed by the leadership than by the essence of historical movements. Pablo, with a tradition of Marxism, fairly well conceals this fault. But he has it. And he did not first display it in the recent struggle.

A few years ago, under the influence of the right turn of the Stalinists, a leading Pabloite wrote that it was false to say that the defense of the USSR was “dictated chiefly by its sociological and political characteristics: ‘workers’ state,’ ‘outpost of the revolution’ and the like.” He finished his article with the words:

“The Fourth International – already firm on many planks of its program – must bring up to date its position on the question of the USSR …”

(Fourth International, May 1945, pp.136, 138.)

Had the Stalinists not made their left turn in 1947, it is hard to say where this Pabloite would have wound up, with his quotation-marked “workers’ state” and his insistence on unity with the Shachtmanites at that time.

The point is this: With all his “contributions” on the bureaucracy and Stalinism, in general, what Pablo fails to concern himself with is the working class, the revolution, the revolutionary state. He cannot see this essence directly, dynamically, dialectically, but sees only a sort of romantic disfiguration through the gaudy prism of the actions of the leadership. And now he graduates from a more or less unnoticed failing to a theoretical elaboration of this fault. First, the state is nearly cursed because of its leadership (Soviet Union). Next, the leadership is glorified because of the revolution (China). And now, the revolutionary will of the masses becomes frozen into a revolutionary pattern in the brain-cells of the leaders.

This is not an isolated mistake, but a new world-theory. Now Bolshevism is no longer necessary! The independent party is passé. Pablo has made no guarantees, of course, that the leadership will keep this transmuted revolutionary program in their heads in the event that the masses go through a difficult period when conservatism and even reaction possess them. (However, he has somewhat provided for this by explaining that the “revolutionary wave is irreversible” … Can we then conclude that Stalinism’s regeneration is irreversible?)

Defense of China and USSR

We are the real defenders of China, as of the Soviet Union. And we do not  base ourselves on the actions of the leadership, but on the actions of the masses and the nature of their social conquests. Mao’s murder of Trotskyists, for example, in no way determines our attitude on the historic importance of the mass struggle which Mao happened to lead. It is instructive to note that the impressionistic Pablo suppressed information about these murders, thus proving not only that he apologizes for Chinese Stalinism, but also that an impressionist may become so fond of one impression that he can inoculate himself against a contrary one!

Pablo’s trouble is not merely a small theoretical mistake in analyzing the nature of the Chinese state, not merely that he skipped a page or two while reading State and Revolution, not merely his incorrect understanding of the role of leadership in general. His trouble stems from the stubborn fact that, regardless of the chain of events which caused it, the Stalinists did find themselves at the head of the revolution, and finally in the administration of the state. Bemused and bedazzled by this fact, Pablo reminded himself that Trotskyism had not provided a place for the victory of the Stalinists in China, and proceeded – somewhat carefully for one bedazzled – to project the theory of a revolutionary orientation for Stalinism.

Now it would be terribly wrong to gloss over the events in China, or to rationalize the revolution out of existence, merely in order to prove the inadequacies of Stalinism. But it would be even worse, it would be a disarming of the world vanguard to say, as Pablo says in effect, that the Chinese revolution cuts out a new pattern for the world revolution, with the implication that the Stalinists, with a few lectures from us, can guide the world revolution to victory. We must agree with Pablo, of course, that it has proved possible for a party to take state power against the logic of its own program. But that was also proved by the Paris Comune in 1870. And trade union bureaucrats lead strikes every day in spite of their program of class collaboration. This encourages pragmatists to sneer at the validity of theory and the necessity for program. But does it prove them correct? Are the Marxist theory and program sideline commentaries on the class struggle, or are they the indispensable instrument in the hands of living people (a party) to the socialist conclusion of that struggle? Can a working-class party take power in the United States by the Chinese Stalinist method – that is, without a thorough understanding of the nature of the state, the nature of the liberal capitalist politicians, the nature of fascism, etc., etc., even with the most heroic cadre and the best will in the world?

Leadership and Program

The Pabloites slur over this question, partly because they half-believe that the blind revolution in China does set a new world pattern, partly because they half-believe that the world revolution is already won, or will be won by the addition of one or two more states to the workers’ bloc. A pernicious and fatal delusion! That is, it would be fatal if Pablo were to play any real strategic role in guiding the destinies of the world working class This is excluded, however, by the very nature of his political position. He does not really even regard himself as a leader of the Fourth International, but only as a sort of armchair Clausewitz writing admonitions for the generals of the Third. These gentlemen would manage to lose and/or betray the world revolution with or without the sideline comments of Pablo.

According to Trotsky, the question of leadership and program is the most important in our epoch. According to Pablo, this is no longer true (were not the Stalinists the leadership in China?). Now the masses “choose” a party to be their instrument to power, reshaping the instrument during the actual course of the revolution, somewhat as constant usage reshapes a handle better to the hand. With a peculiar logic, Pablo theorizes that it is the increased revolutionary drive of the masses that makes this possible and changes Trotsky’s thesis. But it is precisely the epic forces now going into battle that need, more urgently than ever before, a conscious, revolutionary Marxist leadership.

Basing ourselves always on the revolution itself in China, on the actions of the millions, let us reverse the method of Pablo and look briefly at the Chinese Communist Party’s history in the framework of the revolution. How did this party get catapulted to power without “projecting any revolutionary orientation” beyond their general orientation in 1931 or even earlier?

Is there anything in the past history of the Chinese CP, even previous to the taking of power and even previous to the “new world reality.” which might indicate a different future for it than for most other CPs of the world? And if there were such differences, what were they, how deep were they, and what caused them? Above all, what differences were there in the general Chinese situation?

To begin with, there was a revolutionary situation in China from 1925 to 1927. If there is anything to the proposition that the revolutionary drive of the masses becomes a revolutionary program in the heads of inadequate leaders, this was the time for it to be demonstrated. But the revolutionary masses at that time could not succeed in imposing the correct position and the drive for power on the minds of the CP leaders. (The few leaders who did finally understand the correct position got it from Trotsky, who was not in the Chinese mass movement at all.)

But Chiang’s success in 1927, his doublecross and defeat of the Chinese CP, proved to be incomplete; and the surviving cadres had a more correct line imposed upon them, insofar as Chiang’s intransigence prevented collaboration, and insofar as the general revolutionary situation in the countryside continued. It was precisely the subordination of the CP to Chiang and to the bourgeois Kuomintang that was the basic Stalinist error of 1925-27. The growth of independent class armies under the leadership of the Stalinists was in itself an objective correction of this error.

The great difference between the Chinese CP and other CPs of the world, even at this early time, lay in the fact that it was an independent armed body leading a civil war, as an aftermath of a revolution.

Furthermore, a larger and larger section of the oppressed peasant population armed itself under their banner. Still further, actual sections of territory came under the Stalinists’ armed rule. They had, so to speak. achieved power on a territorial basis long ago. The objective requirements and responsibilities of power were always a great factor, if not always the deciding factor, in their decisions. Finally, both their promises and their performances among the peasantry, in the whole long period of the civil wars and colonial war, were such as had to be transferred to the national field as soon as they achieved power; and these promises and performances, their program, and actions, were of the character of the bourgeois-democratic revolution.

Torrential Movement

In 1949 they fought for the same bourgeois-democratic demands they fought for in 1925-27. But this time they had to fight against the bourgeoisie instead of subordinating themselves to it. Chiang Kai-shek took care of that. But over and above everything was the torrential movement of hundreds of millions of human beings breaking through the rotting dams of feudalism, pouring out of the reaches of the ancient past, raging without let or hindrance into the present, still trying to cut a channel to the future.

It was not only the cataclysmic pressure of the revolutionary peasant masses in the concrete, who catapulted the Stalinists to power in China in a physical, mechanical sense; it was also the general bourgeois-democratic revolution in the abstract, that had to hurl a workers’ party into the breach since no bourgeois party would carry out the democratic tasks. (This explains why large sections of the left bourgeoisie could share power with the Stalinists, and, regardless of the mutual illusions of both parties, fail to put their class stamp on the state.) As Owen Lattimore commented several years before the revolution, if Chiang Kai-shek did not lead the democratic revolution, the Stalinists would have to do so. Lattimore correctly sense irrepressible nature of the Chinese revolution, and correctly called the turn on the Stalinist assumption of power, even if he did not understand the class nature of this power. But then, neither did the Stalinists.

Pablo might agree with this proposition. But this is not the same as saying that mass pressure converts itself into a revolutionary theory, or makes Stalinists become non-Stalinists. Nor does it permit us to generalize on the experience of China, since few places in the world duplicate the long history of armed struggle and the shifting boundaries of territorial civil war in China. (Nor is it now possible for the Stalinists to take state power in any other colonial country without being fully aware of what they have on their hands!)

It is worth noting also that Trotsky, in the 13 years he lived subsequent to the 1927 defeat, keenly observing the world situation, did not consider this unquestionably different situation of the Chinese CP so different as to raise any question as to whether it was really Stalinist or not. The fact is that the Chinese CP, through all the ups and downs of the long civil war, through the colonial war against Japan, through all the heroic and even epochal struggles, and through certain oblique differences with Moscow, followed the general turns of Kremlin policy.

It is true, however, and very important, that its flips and flops were somewhat less extreme than in other countries. But this was not for lack of trying. It was because of the basically different situation of the Chinese CP, and because of the specific history of the Chinese revolution. A man walks differently in water than on dry land!

Consider the famous Sian incident of 1937. The left-bourgeois “Young Marshall” Chang had kidnapped Chiang Kai-shek and called upon the Stalinists to join him in giving Chiang the mass trial before the people that they, the Stalinists, had so long been calling for. But the Stalinists double-crossed the “Young Marshall,” helped Chiang send him to prison, agreed to end land expropriations, gave up the civil war itself – all for a joint pact with Chiang to fight Japan. Subjectively, this was as much of a flip-flop as you could ask for; but objectively, it amounted to a “united front” with the colonial bourgeoisie (rather than a “popular front”) against imperialism, which as Trotsky said at the time was essentially a principled thing.

It was a “united front,” a joint action of worker-peasant armies and colonial nationalist armies against imperialism. The same Moscow-directed flip-flops in Europe at this period were “popular fronts”; that is, a subordination of the interest and ranks Of the workers to the liberal bourgeoisie of the imperialist countries. If the Chinese CP is qualitatively different from the other CPs, it was certainly different at that time as well. But was it?

Trotskyists, in the same situation, would also have made a united front agreement with Chiang in 1937, on the basis of the colonial struggle against imperialism, and on the basis of their program, and understanding of the permanent revolution. Did the Stalinists proceed from such a programmatic basis? No. The Soviet Union was being ground between the twin jaws of German and Japanese imperialism, and the Kremlin was conducting a cold war of maneuver between them and the so-called “democracies.” The Kremlin wanted to unite any and all forces it could, regardless of class, against Germany in the west and Japan in the east. The Kremlin ordered the Stalinists in France, England, etc., to unite with the liberal bourgeoisie against fascism (which meant Germany, as far as the Kremlin was concerned). And with exactly the same intent, they wanted the CP in China to unite with the Chinese colonial bourgeoisie against Japan. Due to objective circumstances (which also included the independent class armies under the Stalinists), what they wanted in the second case had a far different effect, and far-reaching results. And long before this, the Chinese Stalinists were conducting the most intense, hard-fought civil war, against monumental odds, even setting up soviets in the countryside. During these epic struggles from 1929 to 1937 had they ceased to be Stalinist? Did they entertain the notion of taking back the Trotskyist Oppositionists whom they had expelled, fingered, and harassed? No, they followed the Kremlin’s line most faithfully on this crucial question, and they committed themselves deeply. This was not a mere ritual on their part, for then, as well as now, they were extremely intolerant of any leftist criticism of their line, Trotskyist or otherwise.

But they had done one thing, more or less independently of strictly Stalinist considerations, which affected them inexorably for 25 years. They themselves had unwittingly raised the question of power by forming independent class armies after the defeat of 1927. (The whole essence of the tragedy of 1927 was the failure to have an independent party. Now, with the party taking the shape of an army, it was independent with a vengeance.) But it was not the mass pressure as such which forced the CP to break with Chiang. It was Chiang’s break with them and his drive to exterminate them. Their armies could only exist on the basis of revolutionary support from still other civilian armies of the poor. They had committed themselves to a civil war, which dictated by its own dynamics that they would have to end in utter annihilation or by taking power altogether.

Even at that, they might have actually ended in utter annihilation but for three other important considerations:

1) the logic of the permanent revolution, which prevented Chiang Kai-shek from carrying out his bourgeois-democratic program, and which enmeshed the Stalinists in its drive precisely because they were armed and subject to the above pressures;

2) the fact that Moscow’s politics, translated into Chinese conditions after 1927, could not have, as we have shown, the same effects they had in Germany, Spain, France, etc.;

3) the pre-condition of everything – that after 25 years of revolution, counter-revolution, famine, war and pestilence, the great masses still pushed forward, carrying the Stalinists upon their shoulders.

Having taken state power on the unprecedented wave of peasant revolt, the Stalinists were compelled to call upon the working class, whom they at first hamstrung, in order to carry out the demands of their revolutionary peasant base. Or to put it theoretically: The democratic dictatorship of the peasantry could only exist as the dictatorship of the proletariat, no matter how deformed. The Stalinists, by their inevitable and predictable response to the revolutionary demands of their peasant base (once they had the full field and full responsibility, i.e., state power), made clearer to the world, if not to themselves, the real historical class basis of their dictatorship.

Why Program Is Needed

So much for the revolution without a program. But can anyone seriously believe that this blind struggle can repeat its “success” on a world basis? True, the Chinese leadership arms Korea and Indo-China. But this flows from even the most conservative concepts of national defense. Do they, however, call upon the workers and peasants of India, for example – to say nothing of the United States – to prepare the socialist revolution? Do they, above all, explain to the workers and peasants of China that it is not possible to build socialism there without the aid of the world revolution? Certainly the Pabloites must know the answers to these questions. Certainly they must understand it is not “merely” the murder of the Trotskyists that prevents the Chinese Stalinist leaders from being genuine revolutionaries – that is, the kind of revolutionaries that history now requires.

It is not only Stalinist theory, such as it is, and Stalinist tradition that pull ideally upon the minds of the Chinese party. It is the material pull of 450 million hungry mouths which, under present conditions, the Chinese revolution alone cannot feed, which imperialist intervention makes still harder to feed, and which a summons to the world revolution and its consequently still greater sacrifices may make quite impossible to feed. Even the fortuitous conjunction of all the conditions for “success” of the Chinese revolution of 1949 could not remotely solve these problems or provide leadership for the coming titanic struggle.

For this, a program of world revolution is needed, and before that, a fight for this program. Why a fight? Because there is already a new bureaucracy, which has an interest in maintaining the status quo. If all the ties with Moscow were to be cut off tomorrow, the Chinese CP would still retain its own conservative incubus on top. Not only the Stalinist tradition in the abstract, but the concrete hold of the leadership on the rank and file must be fought, as it would have to be fought even in the least bureaucratized party we were trying to influence.

And when we consider that the demands of the world revolution not only conflict with the material interests of the bureaucracy, but require still greater sacrifices from the already bleeding Chinese workers and peasants themselves; when we consider this, in addition to all the rest, we must conclude that it is impossible for the Chinese leadership to fall accidentally into either the theory or the practice of world revolution; and we must conclude that it is fantastic even to dream of “fructifying” Mao’s party, just as it was to have any illusions about Tito. Revolutionary work in the Chinese CP must be the secret, underground work of Trotskyists who are determined to build their own party out of the indubitably excellent material in the rank and file of the CP. The leisurely “propaganda group” approach of Pabloism to the CP is not only inadequate but fatuous and suicidal – that is, if a hypothetical Chinese Pabloism would have any Trotskyist criticism of Mao at all.

The Chinese revolution itself raises the alternatives point-blank. Either we live in the age of separate distinct national socialist revolutions, step-by-step conquests of power, each conquest conservatively defending itself without regard to the needs of the rest of the world proletariat; or we live in the age of interconnected and interdependent revolutions and revolutionary movements. Either the Russian degeneration and the non-Bolshevik leadership in China are patterns of the future development over a long historical period; or the one is “a horrible relapse,” and the other a temporary conjuncture. Either there will be “centuries of degenerated workers’ states,” or there will be a new birth of mankind on the basis of revolution in the advanced countries, particularly the United States. Pablo sees this in a way, but in a wishy-washy way. He fails to see that each of these alternatives excludes the other.

The colonial revolutions, including the great Chinese revolution, though indecisive on a world basis (and that is the only real basis today), are not any less important because of these considerations. The genuine socialization of China, or India and China combined, for that matter, cannot be accomplished apart from the socialization of the United States. But on the other hand, the impact of the colonial revolutions on the struggle in the “advanced” countries is incalculable.

Sharpen The Crisis

The colonial revolutions, in depriving modern imperialism of its indispensable supports at the very time of crisis, still further sharpen the crisis and bring on still bigger explosions. The subjective aims of the colonial struggle, however – peaceful enjoyment of the land and the free development of industry – are impossible without the destruction of world imperialism, that is, without the world revolution. And the parties of the colonial revolution must be educated in this spirit of world revolution or they will sink inevitably into narrow Stalinist nationalism! or some variety of it. It is not by making a “mystique” of the coming world war, or by viewing it as a magic talisman, that the laws and strategy of the world revolution are to be learned. Anyone who, like Pablo, understimates the initial power of the US counter-revolution or fails to understand the absolute necessity of the American socialist revolution to the world revolution, is only playing at revolution, is unfit to speak of world strategy, and is falsely, even demagogically, invoking the name of internationalism to win our comrades in the colonial countries.

Pablo’s false theory of the colonial revolution, and his false appeal to it, go hand-in-hand with his false theory of the long-drawn-out nature of the revolutionary epoch. The long-drawn-out transition from feudalism to capitalism, which began in the fifteenth century, and in most countries is not even now complete, cannot be repeated in modern times by a similarly lengthy change-over from capitalism to socialism. The imposition of enforced Wail Street unity upon the world, the effects of uneven development and combined development, the proletarianization of even the most backward people and the penetration of modern material needs and aspirations among them, have all invested the modern revolution – that is, the socialist revolution – with a historic simultaneity that it had only partially achieved in the post-1917 world.

The world now resembles one great factory, whose different departments, making different parts of the common product, are manned by people of different nationalities – some of the departments being of a super-exploited, subterranean nature and for that reason all the more explosive, all the more likely to push the “upper,” more “advanced” sections into action. But it is the objective, absolute interconnection of all the departments, their common role of producers and consumers of the same product, which in the approaching crisis make the international strike-call ever more insistent, ever more appealing, even while it dictates that success depends upon the integration of the whole.

A romantic or impressionist understanding of this fact, this interrelationship, this imminence of world revolution, can lead to self-effacement, to illusions about Stalinism – in a word, to Pabloism. But a serious, professional, revolutionary understanding can lead only to the conviction that a world leadership, that is, a Trotskyist leadership, is the indispensable need of the working class.

The Chinese revolution, far from disproving this need, far from relieving us of the necessity of fighting for the hegemony of the Fourth International, has imposed upon us, in our forging of the world leadership, the additional, irrevocable duty of vindicating the heroic struggles of the Chinese masses, which otherwise would have been in vain.

by Peng Shuzi

[This open letter to James P. Cannon by the veteran leader of Chinese Trotskyism followed the decision of the Chinese Trotskyist organization to adhere to the International Committee. Copied from http://www.marxists.org/archive/peng/1953/dec/30.htm ]   

December 30, 1953

Dear Comrade Cannon,

Quite early this year I intended to write to you about the events and things which I have experienced and observed in person since my participation in the IS, and about the serious bureaucratic organizational tendency and revisionist political tendency represented by Pablo which, I was afraid, would eventually bring a crisis in our International. But out of “prudence” (this was also what Manuel advised me at that time) this letter was continuously postponed. Now the crisis has actually exploded with ferocity. I am therefore obliged to write this already retarded letter.

The reason for my writing to you is not only because you are the founder and leader of the SWP, the leading section of the world Trotskyist movement, but also because you closely collaborated with Trotsky in completing the Transitional Program and in founding our International, and led several victorious struggles over a long period of time against opportunism, sectarianism and revisionism. No less important is the fact that you fought through the whole epoch of the Comintern, in its ascendancy under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky and in the subsequent period of initial degeneration under the control of Stalin, and have thus obtained rich and profound experiences, which have since become a part of the most precious lessons in safeguarding and advancing our movement. I believe that with your rich experience and the capacities of the SWP, and your collaboration with the genuine Trotskyists of other countries, it is possible to overcome the present crisis.

The “Letter to Trotskyists Throughout the World” recently published by the SWP, though quite exceptional and unprecedented, is nevertheless necessary for saving the International from the extremely grave immediate danger. This “exceptional action” can be proved necessary and justified here too by the painful experiences of my personal participation in the IS during these two years.

Despite the fact that I became responsible for activity in the Trotskyist movement in China more than twenty years ago, it was hardly possible to maintain an intimate relation with the International and to participate in its activities because of the particular conditions in which I was placed: constant oppression and extreme persecution by all kinds of reactionary forces, often resulting in a state of isolation. When Mao’s party came to power, I was obliged to leave China and come abroad. I then cherished great hopes that on the one hand, I could submit to the International a detailed report of the events which had occurred in China in recent years to facilitate a common discussion that would result in a correct resolution and general orientation for the Trotskyist movement in China and the other backward countries of the Orient. On the other hand, I was prepared to contribute within the limits of my capacity my own experiences to the leadership of the International to help it in advancing our movement. But the experiences of these two and a half years have shown that the reality is completely different from my original aspirations, for I saw with my own eyes a frightful crisis brewing, growing, spreading and penetrating more and more into the different sections of the International. This has greatly disturbed and pained me and made it difficult for me to remain silent.

Now let me relate in a chronological order what I witnessed and experienced in person during this whole period, as follows:

At the Third World Congress, a “Far East Commission” was set up with the aim of holding a more or less penetrating discussion of the Chinese question and proposing a resolution on this important question to the World Congress to proceed on a broader discussion and eventual adoption of a more fully and correctly elaborated resolution. I was then designated as the reporter on this question. But before my report had gone half way, the representative of the IS, Comrade A. of India, who was in charge of the Commission, suddenly made a motion interrupting my report on the pretext of “security,” and demanded that this Commission proceed to vote for the adoption of the two previous resolutions on the Chinese question, i.e., the two adopted by the 7th and 8th Plenums of the IEC. I was quite surprised and expressed my indignation and protest. I declared that the Far East Commission was created by the Congress which stood above all the other organisms, and therefore could not simply submit itself to any instructions to cease functioning that were issued by the IS which was itself to be reelected. If the Far East Commission had the task of merely proceeding to vote the previous resolutions, then it was completely superfluous. And I reminded them that it was constituted for the purpose of reaching a more correct decision after an all round discussion according to the development of the events and new realities. Atthe same time, I stated that since I was requested to make the report, I had the responsibility and right not only to complete my report but to listen furthermore to the opinions of the delegates present (whether or not they agreed with or were against my report) and thus to obtain a conclusion endorsed by the majority of the Commission to submit to the Congress. Thanks to my protest and the objection of the great majority of the Commission regarding A’s intervention, I was reluctantly allowed to finish my report. But without passing to any discussion, the Far East Commission was terminated; in reality, it was aborted.

The inconclusiveness of the Far East Commission was mainly due to the fact that the representative of the IS, hearing my report in the first session, feeling that my views did not conform to theirs, and being afraid that my views would influence the comrades present, did not hesitate to interrupt me in the midst of the report in a domineering manner. This was later revealed in the “explanation” of Livingstone who attended the second session in place of A. He said, “The IS had not expected such a development of the Commission.” In other words, they had not expected me to express in my report views different from theirs. To the representative of the IS, it seemed that the Commissions created by the Congress had the sole task of justifying or proving the correctness of the IS’s previous resolutions or views by employing new facts and arguments. Otherwise, they would not hesitate to hand down orders to stop Commission proceedings.

To adopt such an arbitrary attitude toward important political problems (since all the delegates of the Congress considered the Chinese question as the most important immediate problem) and to exercise such control over the Commissions created by the Congress are practices far removed from the tradition of Bolshevism. This was my first unpleasant impression after coming here.

My discontent about the Far East Commission was of course sensed by Pablo. His explanations were made through Burns and the responsibility was attributed to A. in the explanations. Besides, Burns said that Pablo was willing to accept the opinions of others and hoped that I would participate in the IS to collaborate with him, especially to undertake more responsibility on the colonial and semi colonial questions in the Orient. Although I was not quite satisfied with Burns’ explanations, I was still prepared in all sincerity to collaborate with Pablo and others in order to serve the development of our movement.

Immediately after the Congress there exploded once again the divergences and conflict between the majority and minority in the French party. The crisis involved in this conflict culminated at the beginning of 1952. During the two meetings of the IS when the French question was discussed, Pablo always stressed the incorrigibility of the bad tendency of the majority leaders and the necessity of adopting severe measures. The opinion I expressed invariably was that because the majority represented the overwhelming majority of the party, among whom there were a large number of industrial workers in important sectors, we should still do our best and utmost to convince the majority of the comrades, especially the worker comrades, even though certain leaders at the top had manifested bad tendencies. (At that time, I also had certain bad impressions about a few leaders of the majority. But I must admit now that my bad impressions were formulated chiefly as the result of my excessive confidence and trust in Pablo and the minority in their portrayal of the majority leaders.) For this purpose, I said, it was necessary to carry out a universal and thorough political discussion in the French party, and if necessary to extend this discussion to the other sections of the International. In this manner, it would not only be possible to find the demarcation of different political views of both sides, but also to exploit this occasion for elevating the political level of the members as a whole. This opinion did not meet with any objection. Pablo, however, proceeded entirely according to his own plan.

It then happened that Pablo attended the Plenum of the Executive Committee of the French party last January (1952) and announced on the spot the suspension of the 16 majority members of the EC from their function. The fact is that the IS had not made any decision of this kind. Among the five members of the IS, three were completely ignorant of this decision: Germain and Manuel were both outside of the country, and I was not informed beforehand, although I was in Paris. Besides, only the IEC is entitled to sanction or suspend the function of the members of the executive committee of a section formally elected, even if they had committed grave political errors, and even violated discipline in action, while the IS is not at all entitled to this right. Moreover the IS did not make such a decision! Pablo’s suspension of the 16 members of the EC of the French party from their function by borrowing the name and authority of the IS fully exposed his unrestrained personal dictatorial conduct in abusing authority and in violating our organizational tradition.

After Pablo’s suspension of the majority leaders, Germain returned to Paris; he came to see me and asked my opinions about this event. The gist of what I told him was about as follows: The political views of the majority of the French party were still limited to divergences on tactics, and had not yet passed over to a general discussion. To take an organizational measure at that moment was entirely inappropriate. Besides, the measure employed by Pablo had not been approved by all leading members of the International and was therefore nothing but an arbitrary action in violation of our organizational tradition. Expressing his complete agreement with my position, he told me in addition that the leaders of the majority were all very active, and Pablo, etc., had previously praised them highly; and now they were suddenly described as not worth a penny, and even threatened with being completely thrown out of the movement! In saying this, Germain was not able to restrain his indignation.

In order to discuss the aggravated situation produced by this act of suspension adopted by Pablo, the IS called an enlarged IS meeting (which could be considered as the preparatory conference of the January 1952 Plenum of the IEC). At this meeting, Germain, J. of the German section, L. of the Italian section and I were all against the measure taken by Pablo. But the latter still tried obstinately to defend himself, saying, “The previous session of the IS decided on the necessity of adopting a severe measure, and the members who were present at that session should all be responsible for it.” But what was the real content of this so called “severe measure”? Under what conditions should it be applied? About these Pablo had never said a word and of course we could not have made any formal decision on them, and in reality we had not at all made such a decision. But Pablo utilized the “severe measure” mentioned before as an “algebraic formula” and he pretended he had obtained everyone’s agreement to fill this formula himself with the “arithmetical figures,” that is, the suspension from their function of the 16 majority members of the EC of the French party. This further exposed Pablo as a deliberate and systematic intriguer.

This enlarged IS meeting should have seriously examined the mistake of Pablo’s act of suspending the EC members of the French party and should have challenged his authority to do so, in order to open the road for a reasonable solution of the question of the French majority. But Pablo exerted his strongest pressure by threatening and maneuvering to prevent any discussion of this problem, and turned round to propose negotiation with the French majority in another attempt for compromise. That was nothing else than to nullify in effect the suspension of the majority EC members, and to form a leading Committee containing both the factions, with Germain, representing the IS, as the arbitrator. This was the sole result of the February session of the IEC. Here, again, it was evident that Pablo was playing intrigues to cover up for the moment his absurd conduct toward the leadership of a section and to prepare the way for his revenge. Thus the question of the French majority became more and more involved in confusion and could not be solved correctly which is proved by the outcome later.

Having seen Pablo’s arbitrary action on the question of the majority in the French party and his intrigues, I strongly felt that frightful consequences would result if the IS were to submit completely to the handling and control of Pablo. With this apprehension, on a trip to the south of France I had a formal conversation with Manuel, who was already there. I pointed out to him that Pablo’s suspension of the 16 members of the EC of the French party from their function all by himself disclosed very serious weaknesses in the IS itself, which deserved our serious observation and attention; since we have lost Trotsky, only the formation of a collective leadership could avoid internal crises and confront external events. At that time, I still considered that Pablo was indispensable for the leadership but that he should not be permitted to act arbitrarily on his own will. Moreover, I believed that as far as important political and organizational questions were concerned, not only was the IS not competent to make certain decisions, but that even the JEC was also not adequate (since the members who could be present at IEC meetings were limited), and that the IS should seek the opinions of responsible and experienced leaders and co thinkers throughout the world.

After I had expressed these views as stated above, Manuel said that he agreed with the fundamental idea expressed by me on collective leadership and would reexamine the question of the French majority, and that he intended to have a sincere conversation with Pablo the next day. But before Manuel could talk to Pablo, the latter started a violent and brutal attack on me in Manuel’s presence. Perhaps this was why Manuel cancelled his intended talk with Pablo.

When I returned from the south to Paris (in the middle of May, 1952), Pablo had framed up two charges to launch a fierce attack on me ”attempting to injure the prestige of the International” and “liberal action” (which meant violation of discipline). The “facts” he enumerated were: we (my wife and I) had slandered the International in front of an Australian couple; after returning to Paris, we had again slandered the International before the Vietnamese comrades; and we had moved from one hotel to another lodging without giving him notice beforehand. When I first heard about these ungrounded charges, though extremely enraged, I still restrained myself and requested Pablo to meet me in order to clarify the misunderstandings. But he was so arbitrary as to refuse my request, and declared that the “stories mentioned by him were true and facts.” Hence I realized that Pablo was deliberately and systematically attempting to trap me by slanders in order to discredit me and further to exclude me from the IS. I was therefore obliged to request the IS to discuss the matter of all these calumnies against me by Pablo.

At the IS meeting I proved with indisputable facts that all the charges made by Pablo against me, such as hurting the prestige of the International, etc., were completely false, and could be disproved by the testimony of the Australian couple and the Vietnamese comrades. As to the charge on my “liberal action,” it was still more absurd. The explanation is very simple: as I was not able to pay high rent in the hotel, I was forced to seek help from the Vietnamese comrades to get a cheaper lodging, and it was not at all necessary to give a notice to Pablo beforehand. I asked him to make a reply and explain his calumnies against me with concrete facts. He was not only not able to explain but started to shout and declared, “I am the General Secretary, I have my rule about things!” I told him, “The General Secretary has no privileges, and our rule is democratic centralism. Nobody is entitled to be dictator, to slander and constrain others.” Finally a resolution was proposed by Germain on the dispute between Pablo and me, which was generally as follows: there were no facts to prove that I had attempted to discredit the International and to violate discipline, but also that Pablo had not slandered me. This was a clever resolution to please both sides without any justice done to the truth. My statement was: I would not accept such a kind of a resolution and I reserved my right to appeal to the conference of a higher body.

I consider that when the General Secretary of the IS slanders another secretary at his will with the charges of “discrediting the International’ and “violating discipline,” it is not at all an ordinary “personal dispute” nor “trivial” but a serious phenomenon within the leading apparatus concerning the question of organization and functioning of its component members. In other words, this is a most naked expression of base bureaucratic methods to exclude personal opponents. This kind of phenomenon was quite frequently seen in the Stalinist parties, but was unprecedented in our own movement.

Afterwards, Burns told our daughter that through the independent observation of the Australian couple he learned the details of how Pablo’s wife treated us, especially my wife, tyrannically, and that was not less than madness, and he was sympathetic with us. But he said that it was by mistake that Pablo accepted his wife’s account as the truth, and he urged us not to insist on an “appeal.” Meanwhile, Manuel also did his best to dissuade me from doing so, saying that if I made this matter public, Pablo would not be able to continue his function, but who then was to replace him? In short, he persuaded me to leave it alone. For the sake of “preserving the integrity of the movement in general” I refrained from making any further protest. Nevertheless, I have always thought that the calumnies made by Pablo are not only inexcusable but express a dangerous tendency considering the position he holds. If he were in power, he would very probably have committed all those persecutions Stalin had done in the past.

During a whole year, from my arrival in Europe until the 11th Plenum of the IEC in June 1952, I was allowed to make a report on the Chinese question only at the Third World Congress and the Far East Commission, and there was never any exchange of views or discussion of this question in the IS. Even when the draft resolution was submitted to discussion in the IS, I was not invited to express my views. Besides, I had not heard in person what position was adopted by Pablo before he expressed his views at the 11th Plenum. Only indirectly I learned that Pablo assumed that Mao Tse tung had completed all the fundamental theses of the Permanent Revolution, that the Chinese CP had already become a centrist party, and that Mao’s regime was a proletarian dictatorship. Frank’s position was entirely unknown to me then. Only Germain had exchanged some views with me, but he declared that on the Chinese question his position was the most moderate. Thus on a question as important as China, the IS leadership had not even exchanged views with me, or had deliberately avoided doing so beforehand. It was not at all intended to have a collective discussion in order to arrive at agreement on a correct position as the basis for the resolution to be submitted to the IEC for discussion and adoption. On the contrary the IS leadership launched a sudden attack at the IEC meeting against the views which they considered to be erroneous, with the sole aim of gaining a majority to adopt their own draft resolution, and hastily made an end to the whole discussion on this question. In this way I discovered that the leading members of the IS were not prepared for a sincere discussion and mutual consultation to facilitate collaboration, but deliberately struck blows by all means against divergent views. This was particularly noticeable in Pablo who openly stressed at the IEC session that there existed a sectarian faction in the Chinese section which must be got rid of. (These words were not included in the published remarks of Pablo in the special issue of the International Bulletin on “The Report and Discussion on the Third Chinese Revolution.”) The sectarian he referred to was obviously me, and the reference was a threat and prelude to pushing me out of the International. I was not overawed by his bureaucratic threat, but once more it was demonstrated that Pablo was prepared to deal with the Chinese comrades with the same methods that were employed against the majority of the French section.

I believe that you already know the content of the resolution of the Third Chinese Revolution; my criticisms of this resolution, e.g., “A Few Remarks to Serve as Amendments to the Draft Resolution on the Third Chinese Revolution,” were sent to you two months ago, so it is not necessary to repeat them here. I have only one more point to make on this. When this resolution arrived in China, it not only failed to clarify the original divided views but enhanced the confusion and bewilderment. Aside from the comrades who oppose the resolution with theoretical arguments and facts, even those who are in agreement with it have quite diverse interpretations among themselves. Consequently, it has not been possible for them to elaborate a program of action with majority agreement on the basis of this resolution. The worst thing is that nobody can find a perspective for the Chinese Trotskyists in this resolution. For instance, a responsible comrade, F., who is completely in agreement with this resolution said, “We must dissolve our organization in order to participate effectively in mass activities led by Mao’s party.” This is evidently a liquidationist attitude. Another comrade, Y., said more frankly, “The Resolution of the International is correct, but there is no perspective for us Trotskyists.” This is pessimism through and through. Thus, the whole organization was politically disarmed and disoriented, and hence involved in endless organizational disputes, and was more and more approaching the edge of disintegration.

Naturally I do not intend to say that the resolution of the IS is entirely responsible for such a dangerous state into which the Chinese organization was led. I would say rather that this is the result mainly of the objective situation the victory of Mao’s party, its persecutions, and the incomparable pressure weighing down upon us. But it is an undeniable fact that the resolution of the International did not make a reasonable and correct analysis and explanation of this objective situation nor did it point out a convincing perspective and orientation for the Chinese organization.

First of all, this resolution is a mixture of Pablo’s revisionism and Germain’s conciliationism (i.e., conciliation with Pablo), filled with theoretical fallacies, factual errors and self contradictions. These together with its idealization of Mao’s regime and illusions on its perspective, make it a strong expression of the tendency of conciliation with Stalinism. The liquidationism and pessimism which prevailed among the Chinese comrades was originated from here. Therefore I can say that Pablo’s revisionism, that is, his conciliation towards Stalinism, has already caused frightful consequences in the Chinese organization. This deserves serious concern among all comrades.

At the 12th Plenum of the IEC, November 1952, the IS let me report on the organizational situation in the Chinese section for the first time. When I reported the news of the incessant and systematic persecution of Chinese Trotskyists by Mao’s regime during these recent years, the whole meeting was greatly shaken. The Italian, L., rose and questioned why the IS did not give the sections the information about the persecutions of the Chinese comrades. In the midst of this tense atmosphere, Pablo, evidently embarrassed, stood up to defend himself, saying that the massacre of Trotskyists by Mao’s regime was not a deliberate action but a mistake, that is, the Trotskyists had been mistaken as Kuomintang agents; and that even if Mao’s persecution of Trotskyists were a fact, this could only be considered as an exception. T hen Germain posed another question: under what conditions were the Trotskyists massacred? I cited all the facts and “conditions” to demonstrate that the persecution of Trotskyists by Mao’s regime originated from a deep rooted tradition of Stalinist hostility towards Trotskyists, and was a systematic and deliberate attempt to exterminate the Trotskyists. I also pointed out that this persecution was not at all an “exception.” Not long ago, Ho Chi Minh slaughtered the entire Trotskyist leadership in Vietnam, and in the Spanish Civil War the GPU of the Stalinist party brutally persecuted innumerable Trotskyists all these are iron proofs. But Pablo turned to inquire of me, “So you have annulled the tactic of entrism into the Stalinist party and the mass organizations under its control, which you approved?” I replied, “This tactic of entrism into the Stalinist party was started by us four years ago, that is, since 1949. But precisely because of the severe persecutions Mao inflicts on the Trotskyists, we have to be particularly cautious and serious in carrying out this tactic, and should not have the slightest illusion about the Stalinists.” I urged the French and Italian sections to examine the lessons of the Chinese section and to organize very seriously in applying this tactic. Otherwise, the danger of ruin would be incurred, and in this case the IEC would be responsible. In short, from this illustration of Pablo’s defense for Stalinist persecution of Chinese Trotskyists, you can see the extent of his idealization and illusions toward Mao’s regime.

In the meantime, I received the English version of the special issue of the International Bulletin containing the report and discussion on the Third Chinese Revolution, and I discovered that my document criticizing the draft resolution on the Third Chinese Revolution did not appear in it. I therefore pointed this out at the meeting of the enlarged IS and questioned Pablo about the reason for not publishing my document. The reply was that the document was published in another issue of the International Bulletin. But I later looked through all the International Bulletins and could not find my critique of the draft resolution. It was obvious that Pablo had deliberately suppressed this document, as my critique pointed out with irrefutable facts several fundamental errors in the draft resolution: the revision of the theory of the Permanent Revolution, distortion of the “Workers and Peasants Government,” the fiction of the alleged “violation of the intentions of the Kremlin by Mao’s party,” and the illusion of the “transformation of the entire party of Mao Tse tung into a centrist party.” None of these criticisms was refuted or rejected either by the reporter or the participants of the discussion with theoretical argumentation or facts. Precisely for that reason, Pablo was resolved to conceal my criticism of the draft resolution from the comrades by keeping it in the dark. This is a typical manifestation of the bureaucratic methods of Stalinism, and was precisely what we resolutely combatted within the Comintern in the initial stage of its degeneration 25 years ago, and one of the main causes for constituting the Left Opposition. But Pablo did not stop there. When I asked him why he had not published my document, he openly lied that it was published in another issue of the International Bulletin. This added lying and cheating, on top of arbitrary bureaucratic methods.

Here I must mention that particularly since the beginning of 1952 when I opposed Pablo’s arbitrary measure on the French question, Pablo, for the period of a whole year, not only employed various bureaucratic methods to attack me, but he also informally deprived me of the right to participate in all meetings of the IS; that is, during this whole year, Pablo never called on me to attend any meeting of the IS itself. The members of the IS were officially elected by the IEC. But without going through a formal discussion and decision in an IEC meeting, he privately deprived me the right to participate in the IS meetings. This is clearly another manifestation of the most arbitrary and insolent bureaucratism!

Around the same period, I found out that Manuel was excluded from the IS meetings by another method: he was sent to another country in the name of helping the work there, thus being in effect informally deprived of his right to attend and work in the IS. But everyone knew that Manuel came with the sole purpose of participating in the activities of the IS. This fully proves that in order to monopolize the IS, Pablo did not halt at any bureaucratic methods and intrigues to gradually exclude representatives of the Western Hemisphere and Asia from the is.

On the other hand, I became generally acquainted with the fact that Clarke had started a factional struggle in the SWP and launched attacks on the party leadership in an attempt to seize the leadership of the party. This was evidently instigated by Pablo behind the scenes. I heard very often from the entourage of Pablo that “Clarke is the best leader in the U.S.” which was tantamount to saying that the SWP should be led by him. At the same tiine, a Chinese comrade, H., who was studying here told me personally that since last spring (1952) Pablo had acted particularly friendly and confidential toward hiyn, and had offered several times to send him back to China to “reorganize the party.” This comrade replied, “I do not have authority and prestige in the Chinese organization.” Then Pablo encouraged him by saying, “Don’t be afraid, our International will support you. You have just to proceed boldly.” From these words uttered by Pablo, H. clearly understood that not only Pablo did not trust me at all but was hostile toward me, and therefore wanted to give him this special mission to start factional work in the Chinese organization. Naturally, he was not at all willing to engage in such an affair, and consequently frankly told us.

From the facts enumerated above, I deeply felt that Pablo had manifested a revisionist tendency, and especially that he was employing terrible bureaucratic methods to exercise control over the IS and had started to build up his own factions in different sections in an attempt to dominate the whole international movement. For this reason, when Manuel was leaving here and came to bid farewell to us, I enumerated a few of these facts and told him frankly that a serious danger was hidden in the leading apparatus of the International, and was developing at an accelerating speed. I expressed the hope that he would find a way to make this opinion known to the leadership of the SWP and especially to you, so that you would be alerted in time and try to mend the situation. Though Manuel did not express any reaction toward my words, he promised to forward my opinions to you and some other leaders of the party.

On the Plenum of the IEC in May 1953, there are two things worth mentioning:

1. In the discussion of the resolution on the problem of the USSR after Stalin’s death, a considerable dispute was aroused. In this dispute, Burns first pointed out the spirit of the resolution was too optimistic; he warned that from the failure to fully grasp the significance of the Yugoslav events, which resulted from a too optimistic appreciation, we should have learned certain lessons. He also stated that the Stalinist parties remained Stalinist parties, and we should not have too many illusions about them. But Pablo made a threatening attack against his remarks. The sum of his words was that as a responsible leader, Burns should refrain from expressing views in violation of the line of the International. According to him, all the resolutions drafted by the IS conform to the “line of the International” and no doubt or objection is allowed. Hence the members of the IEC have simply to raise their hands in adopting any resolution concerning any newly occurred events or any important problems. Any doubts or views opposing the draft resolution of the IS are considered to “violate the line of the International.” Is this different from the bureaucratic attitude in the CP’s regarding Stalin’s “general line” which it was forbidden to criticize?

2. At this Plenum, Pablo proposed the election of a new IS. The reason was that there were not enough efficient members to participate in the activities of the IS, so two members from the British and Italian sections were added as permanent members of the IS. In this manner, representatives from the Western Hemisphere and Asia were formally eliminated, and the IS has virtually become an ES (European Secretariat). Since then, Pablo has “legally” modified the composition of the IS to enable himself to freely control and manipulate it, and to proceed “legally” with his design of excluding and eliminating his opponents and his plot of usurping the International.

At the May Plenum of the IEC, I submitted two documents ”An Appeal for Aid from the Chinese Trotskyists” and my “Open Letter to the Leadership of the Chinese CP” protesting the persecution of Trotskyists, in the hope that the Plenum would discuss and comment on them and decide to publish them in the public organs of different sections, in order to carry on a broad campaign to aid the persecuted Trotskyists in China. But Pablo told me through Germain that these documents should be discussed and decided only in the IS. At the IS meeting (this time only Pablo and Frank were present), I stated that I hoped that both these documents would be transmitted to the sections for publication, and would be made the occasion for a campaign to rescue the persecuted comrades. Both Pablo and Frank agreed to publish the “Appeal from the Chinese Trotskyists,” but said that they could not agree on several points contained in my letter of protest, and would consult with me in order to make a final decision.

From May to September, four months had elapsed, but I still did not see the appearance of the “Appeal from Chinese Trotskyists.” Then I began to suspect that Pablo had again suppressed a document. At the beginning of September I sent a copy of this document to the United States, asking that it be sent to the Militant, and inquiring if it had already reached there from the IS. The reply I received was, “Not received at all.” Once again I discovered that Pablo was playing tricks to deceive me. On his motive for resorting to such tricks to suppress this document: Firstly, he always idealizes Mao’s regime. The publication of this appeal would have exposed the reality contradicting his illusions and idealization. Secondly, he had for a long time been propagating in different sections the notion that the Chinese Trotskyists were sectarians, fugitives from the revolution, etc. The publication of this document would have categorically unmasked his lies and calumnies. Thirdly, Pablo was afraid that the publication of this document would interfere with his most strongly advocated ideal of “entrism,” that is, he feared that on seeing the cruel persecution of Chinese comrades by Mao’s party, as revealed in this appeal, the French, Italian, and Vietnamese comrades would start to doubt about the idealized “entrist tactic,” and would demand a new discussion.

By suppressing this document, Pablo not only deliberately deceived me and the Chinese comrades, but also committed two inexcusable crimes: (1) Objectively he helped the Chinese CP to conceal before the masses the most concrete and horrible facts of its persecution of the Chinese Trotskyists. (2) He has made it impossible for the comrades of different countries, applying or about to apply the “entrist tactic,” to learn lessons from the brutal persecutions afflicted on the Chinese comrades. This is like putting them to work in a danger zone without letting them know about the danger. A veritable ostrich policy! Let me cite another incident to illustrate this attitude. When the Vietnamese comrades were ready to return to their country to apply the “entrist policy,” and called a meeting in which I was invited to make a speech, the chairman of this meeting made a request of me not to mention before the comrades the recent persecutions experienced by the Chinese comrades. I knew quite well that it was an instruction or suggestion from Pablo. Al though I observed the request of the chairman, I still warned him personally that the “ostrich policy” was the most dangerous.

My Open Letter was written as the result of a proposal by Manuel at the November Plenum of the IEC, 1952, which was then approved unanimously and decided by all the members. Its aim was to make public internationally the facts about the persecutions afflicted on the Chinese Trotskyists in order to arouse the sympathy of the world working class and progressive groups and to exercise pressure on Mao’s party to restrain it from continuing to persecute the Chinese Trotskyists arid other revolutionary elements. Because of a desire to collect the most reliable data, this letter was finished only in April. It was already somewhat late. But under the pretext of sending somebody to consult me about the content of this letter, Pablo again succeeded in holding it up for two months more (during these two months, Frank discussed with me twice, pointing out a few not very important places to argue about with me, and of course, there was no conclusion whatever). Finally, at the beginning of July, Germain came to talk with me about it. He started by criticizing the form of the letter as completely wrong, and asked that it be written over again. According to their ideas, I should have opened the letter by first expressing a total support for the movement under the leadership of Mao’s party, praising its revolutionary achievements, and then at last come to the point of enumerating the facts of their persecutions and made the protest. Secondly, Germain remarked that the views expressed in this letter diverged considerably from the line of the resolution of the International, and for this reason he denounced me as a “hopeless sectarian.” At last he said that the IS could not undertake the responsibility of sending this document to the different sections for publication. If I insisted on having it published, I myself was to be responsible for any step taken concerning it.

It was quite a surprise for me to see how greatly Germain’s attitude had changed from his previous “moderate” and conciliatory one toward me. This time it was Pabloite through and through. I already understood that Pablo was absolutely unwilling to have this letter published; the reasons were generally the same as those in regard to the “Appeal of the Chinese Trotskyists.” As to whether or not this letter was written “completely in the wrong way” in its “form” and is “hopeless sectarianism” in its content, since it is now published in the Militant, those who have read it can make an open judgment. It is least of all my intention to defend myself. Nevertheless, from the above views expressed by Germain as representative of the IS, one can see clearly that they expected me to submit a panegyric to Mao’s party in order to seek conciliation with it. The conciiationist tendency toward Stalinism is again indirectly reflected here.

At this point, I would like to make a brief comment on the modification of Germain’s attitude during these two years, which might be of some help to you in understanding his role in the IS and in the present struggle.

I can say that ever since my first contact with Germain after coming here, I have always had the warmest sympathy toward him. This feeling derived from my observation of his seriousness and devotion in his work, his sincerity and warmth toward comrades, his consider able political maturity and respect for our tradition in organizational matters, and I once deemed him to be one of the most promising new leaders of our movement. Although I had also noticed his lack of penetrating analysis in observing various problems, his impressionist temperament, wavering and conciliationist spirit manifested very often on important problems, and his facility in modifying his own positions, I still trusted that he would be able to overcome these weaknesses through the experiences in the movement as it develops. So when I heard among the entourage of Pablo all kinds of unfavorable propaganda about him over a long period, picturing him as lacking any independent views, or even as simply “a secretary with the function of collecting materials for Pablo” (in the words of A.), I felt quite indignant for the injustice done on his worth. When the crisis of the French party exploded anew, Germain openly opposed the arbitrary measure taken by Pablo. I saw myself how he was violently attacked by Pablo and the French minority, and often felt very bad for him. I had sent him sympathetic regard through my daughter, and he said that without the support of the German and Italian sections, he would have been beaten down long before. Precisely because he had this support, Pablo made special compromises toward him and promoted him as the representative of the IS to participate in the “coalition leadership” of the French majority and minority, and made him the “arbitrator.” Henceforth, Germain was placed in the forefront of direct conflict with the French majority, and executed for Pablo the preconceived design which he had once been violently against. Around the same time, Pablo assigned him the task of drafting the resolution on the Chinese question, to put him in opposition to me. Ever since then, under Pablo’s “compromises” and “promotions” (almost raised to the height only next to Pablo himself), Germain gradually abandoned his conciliationary position, and more and more involved himself in the trap of Pablo’s bureaucratism.

Today his taking a position completely on the side of Pabloism in opposition to the struggle led by the SWP against revisionism and bureaucratism indicates how unconsciously he has fallen into Pablo’s trap. I am still very sorrowful over his degeneration. If Pablo did not have Germain’s support this time, that is, the support through him of the German and Italian leaderships, he would not be able to continue along his path all by himself, and a split might be avoided. From this point of view, the criminal role Germain played in this struggle is of decisive nature. In sum, I have to make the following conclusion from my observations and experiences with Germain during these two years: In many respects, especially in his temperament, he resembles Bukharin. He often wavers between revolutionary conscience and the momentary consideration of power. When the latter is satisfied for a time, the former is cast aside. For him to return to orthodox Trotskyism will be possible only when his revolutionary conscience is awakened by discovering Pablo’s entire conspiracy, and when he realizes that he is already involved in a terrible trap.

I have learned that the conflict in your party between the majority and the minority had proceeded for more than a year and a half, was accentuated after the May Plenum and then came closer and closer to the brink of a split. If the secretary of the IS had really been con cerned with the interest of our movement, he would have called in time an extraordinary session of the IEC, to discuss and examine the divergences of both sides, and to adopt a correct position in order to help the victory of the correct side. Even if this could not have been the case, at least the IS should have sent to the members of the lEG and to the leaderships of the different sections the documents of dispute in your party to enable them to study, discuss and express their opinions and criticisms, to indirectly help the conflict in your party to proceed objectively. Yet the IS under Pablo’s control concealed completely the news of your struggle and all documents of discussion from the members of the IEC and the leaderships of different sections. For instance, in my case, it was only in the beginning of September that I learned vaguely about the principal arguments of both sides through a friend. Without this source I would have remained completely in the dark until the time when you published the Open Letter. The fact is simply that the responsible members of the IS had never informed me about the situation of the internal struggle in your party. Pablo & Co. adopted bureaucratic methods to keep the information from us because they had a design they wanted kept hidden. And now it is all quite clear: The minority in your party is not only the advocator, defender and elaborator of Pablo’s revisionism, but they were inspired and directed behind the scenes by Pablo in the struggle, as is fully revealed by the methods they adopted and their conduct of sabotage. In other words, the degree and the consequence of split attained by the conflict in your party is caused directly by Pablo’s conduct in the interest of his own faction.

From all these facts stated above, which I witnessed and personally experienced, a general conclusion can be drawn as follows: Politically Pablo’s revisionist tendency in conciliation with Stalinism is totally unveiled by his idealization of Mao’s party and its present regime and the illusions cherished toward it, and especially by his excusing and defending Mao’s party for its persecution of Trotskyists. This conciliationism has already involved the Chinese section in extreme confusion, and even brought it to the edge of disintegration through liquidationism and pessimism derived from Pablo’s theses. Organizationally, the astonishing and dangerqus point reached by Pablo’s bureaucratism has been demonstrated by these facts that he freely abused the name of the IS in privately suspending the majority members of the EC of the French party and in excluding his opponents at his will; that he monopolized the IS and controlled the IEC through the IS; that he attempted to and did create a personal clique, conspiring to seize the leadership of the sections, that he suppressed the documents which should have been published, and even those he promised to publish; and that he isolated and disrupted the normal relations among leading comrades, and he slanders, calumniates, lies about and deceives them. All these crimes that I personally saw and encountered 25 years ago in the degenerated Comintern under Stalin’s control I now saw performed once again in the leading organ of the International under Pablo’s control! The splitting of parties conducted by the minorities in America and Britain in the recent time, and Pablo’s accelerated conspiratory activities to split the whole International right now were the logical developments of his personal ambition to usurp the whole International and of his bureaucratism.

The facts enumerated above and their conclusions have sufficiently justified the exceptional action adopted by the SWP as necessary and correct.

Recently a responsible comrade of the Chinese section (who politically agrees with your position) wrote to me and asked, “Why didn’t the SWP proceed according to democratic centralism, trying through the international discussion to win the support of the majority, instead of issuing first of all an open letter (referring to the Letter to Trotskyists Throughout the World) appealing to all sections to throw Pablo out?” Comrades like him, who do not understand the true state of affairs and still cherish innocent legalistic conceptions, are not of very small number. It is precisely in an attempt to exploit this situation that Pablo and his supporters are making a great hue and cry, “The open letter published by Cannon is completely in violation of Trotskyist organizational tradition, and in violation of the discipline of democratic centralism “hoping thereby to confuse and deceive comrades, and to cover up Pablo’s own conspiracy to usurp the authority of the International by bureaucratic methods, of his own trampling on organizational tradition and of his own violations of the discipline of democratic centralism. Therefore, I made the following reply on the 8th of this month to the Chinese section on the question posed above:

“Although there are such serious divergences between the political views of both sides (referring to yours and those represented by Pablo) yet, if the IS could have maintained its normal and reasonable procedure, there might be and ought to be the possibility for a full internal discussion, and to arrive at a solution through democratic centralism. But the extremely unfortunate thing is that the IS has been entirely controlled and usurped by Pablo who utilizes this “legal apparatus” to arrogantly proceed with the organizing of his conspiracy by arbitrarily excluding his opponents from the IS and secretly setting up his own clique or faction with the aim of seizing the leadership of a section or splitting the organization. This has rendered impossible any normal discussion according to the principle of democratic centralism, and thus obliged the SWP, led by Cannon, to adopt this exceptional action of today, to publish the Open Letter demanding the expulsion of Pablo and his agents from the International’s leading organ. This is really unprecedented in the history of our international movement, and is an action of revolutionary nature. This action has become necessary not only to crush Pablo’s attempt at usurpation, but also to gain time in which to rescue the movement, and to reorganize and co ordinate it in time to confront the approaching new world war and revolution. If the mobilization of this struggle should be prolonged until the explosion of the Third World War, it would be too late.”

I also have to point out that Pablo’s conspiracy of usurping the leading organ of the International during these recent years, and all kinds of bureaucratic methods of extremely arbitrary and absurd nature, have more or less been revealed on many sides. The fact is that our International as a whole and the responsible leaders of the different sections have not been vigilant enough, and did not exercise early enough severe surveillance, criticism, intervention and restraint. The result this extremely dangerous and uncontrolled situation deserves our special examination and review. Every responsible member and every orthodox Trotskyist should derive a serious lesson from this Pablo affair. (About this, if you wish, I can offer some materials and views for discussion with you.)

As a last point, I want to tell you in passing that since the Chinese organization received the open letter of the SWP, its leading organ, the National Committee, immediately held a series of meetings devoted to a most serious discussion. As a result, almost all unanimously (with only one abstention) approved the views and positions contained in your Open Letter, and expressed a resolute will to participate in this struggle led by you against revisionism and bureaucratism. Having gone through this discussion, they have recovered their original confidence, and are beginning to disentangle themselves from the confusions, conflicts and bewilderment of recent years. They are now initiating a general discussion in the rank and file in the attempt to re examine all fundamental political questions according to the orthodox Trotskyist tradition, and to obtain unanimity and unity to march forward on a revolutionary party. I consider this as the first most optimistic sign in the process of the struggle against revisionism.

Fraternally yours, S. T. Peng

[The following letter was first published in the 16 November 1953 issue of The Militant.  

From the 25th Anniversary Plenum of the National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party. First posted at http://www.bolshevik.org/history/pabloism/Trpab-4.htm]   

  

To All Trotskyists:

 

Dear Comrades:

 

On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Trotskyist movement in the United States, the Plenum of the National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party sends its revolutionary socialist greetings to orthodox Trotskyists throughout the world.

 

Although the Socialist Workers Party, because of undemocratic laws passed by the Democrats and Republicans, is no longer affiliated to the Fourth International — the World Party of Socialist Revolution founded by Leon Trotsky to carry on and fulfill the program betrayed by the Second International of the Social Democrats and the Third International of the Stalinists — we take interest in the welfare of the world-wide organization created under the guidance of our martyred leader.

 

As is well know, the pioneer American Trotskyists 25 years ago brought the program of Trotsky, suppressed by the Kremlin, to the attention of world public opinion. This act proved decisive in breaching the isolation imposed by the Stalinist bureaucracy on Trotsky and in laying the foundation for the Fourth International. With his exile shortly thereafter, Trotsky began an intimate and trusted collaboration with the leadership of the SWP that lasted to the day of his death.

 

The collaboration included joint efforts to organize revolutionary socialist parties in a number of countries. This culminated, as you know, In the launching of the Fourth International in 1938. The Transitional Program, which remains the keystone of today’s program of the world Trotskyist movement, was written by Trotsky in collaboration with the leaders of the SWP and at his request was submitted by them for adoption at the founding Congress.

 

The intimacy and thoroughness of the collaboration between Trotsky and the leadership of the SWP can be judged from the record of struggle In defense of orthodox Trotskyist principles in 1939-40 against the Petty-Bourgeois Opposition headed by Burnham and Shachtman. That record has had profound influence in shaping the Fourth International in the past 13 years.

 

After the murder of Trotsky by an agent of Stalin’s secret police, the SWP took the lead in defending and advocating his teachings. We took the lead not from choice but from necessity — the second world war forced the orthodox Trotskyists underground in many countries, especially in Europe under the Nazis. Together with Trotskyists in Latin America, Canada, England, Ceylon, India, Australia and elsewhere we did what we could to uphold the banner of orthodox Trotskyism through the difficult war years.

 

With the end of the war, we were gratified at the appearance in Europe of Trotskyists from the underground who undertook the organizational reconstitution of the Fourth International. Since we were barred from belonging to the Fourth International by reactionary laws, we placed all the greater hope in the emergence of a leadership capable of continuing the great tradition bequeathed to our world movement by Trotsky. We felt that the young new leadership of the Fourth International in Europe must be given full confidence and support. When self-corrections of serious errors were made on the initiative of the comrades themselves, we felt that our course was proving justified.

 

However, we must now admit that the very freedom from sharp criticism which we together with others accorded this leadership helped open the way for the consolidation of an uncontrolled, secret personal faction in the administration of the Fourth International which has abandoned the basic program of Trotskyism.

 

This faction, centered around Pablo, is now working consciously and deliberately to disrupt, split, and break up the historically created cadres of Trotskyism in the various countries and to liquidate the Fourth International.

 

The Program of Trotskyism

 

To show precisely what is involved, let us restate the fundamental principles on which the world Trotskyist movement is built:

 

(1) The death agony of the capitalist system threatens the destruction of civilization through worsening depressions, world wars and barbaric manifestations like fascism. The development of atomic weapons today underlines the danger in the gravest possible way.

 

(2) The descent into the abyss can be avoided only by replacing capitalism with the planned economy of socialism on a world scale and thus resuming the spiral of progress opened up by capitalism In its early days.

 

(3) This can be accomplished only under the leadership of the working class as the only truly revolutionary class in society. But the working class itself faces a crisis of leadership although the world relationship of social forces was never so favorable as today for the workers to take the road to power.

 

(4) To organize itself for carrying out this world-historic aim the working class in each country must construct a revolutionary socialist party in the pattern developed by Lenin; that is, a combat party capable of dialectically combining democracy and centralism — democracy in arriving at decisions, centralism In carrying them out; a leadership controlled by the ranks, ranks able to carry forward under fire in disciplined fashion.

 

(5) The main obstacle to this is Stalinism, which attracts workers through exploiting the prestige of the October 1917 Revolution in Russia, only later, as it betrays their confidence, to hurl them either Into the arms of the Social Democracy, into apathy, or back to illusions in capitalism. The penalty for these betrayals is paid by the working people in the form of consolidation of fascist and monarchist forces, and new outbreaks of wars fostered and prepared by capitalism. From its inception, the Fourth International set as one of its major tasks the revolutionary overthrow of Stalinism inside and outside the USSR.

 

(6) The need for flexible tactics facing many sections of the Fourth International, and parties or groups sympathetic to its program, makes it all the more imperative that they know how to fight imperialism and all of its petty-bourgeois agencies (such as nationalist formations or trade-union bureaucracies) without capitulation to Stalinism; and, conversely, know how to fight Stalinism (which in the final analysis Is a petty-bourgeois agency of imperialism) without capitulating to imperialism.

 

These fundamental principles established by Leon Trotsky retain full validity in the increasingly complex and fluid politics of the world today. In fact the revolutionary situations opening up on every hand as Trotsky foresaw, have only now brought full concreteness to what at one time may have appeared to be somewhat remote abstractions not intimately bound up with the living reality of the time. The truth is that these principles now hold with increasing force both In political analysis and In the determination of the course of practical action.

 

Pablo’s Revisionism

 

These principles have been abandoned by Pablo. In place of emphasizing the danger of a new barbarism, he sees the drive toward socialism as “irreversible”; yet he does not see socialism coming within our generation or some generations to come. Instead he has advanced the concept of an “engulfing” wave of revolutions that give birth to nothing but “deformed,” that is, Stalin-type workers states which are to last for “centuries.”

 

This reveals the utmost pessimism about the capacities of the working class, which is wholly in keeping with the ridicule he has lately voiced of the struggle to build independent revolutionary socialist parties. In place of holding to the main course of building independent revolutionary socialist parties by all tactical means, he looks to the Stalinist bureaucracy, or a decisive section of it, to so change itself under mass pressure as to accept the “ideas” and “program” of Trotskyism. Under guise of the diplomacy required in tactical maneuvers needed to approach workers in the camp of Stalinism in such countries as France, he now covers up the betrayals of Stalinism.

 

This course has already led to serious defections from the ranks of Trotskyism to the camp of Stalinism. The pro-Stalinist split in the Ceylon party is a warning to all Trotskyists everywhere of the tragic consequences of the illusions about Stalinism which Pabloism fosters.

 

In another document, we are submitting a detailed analysis of Pablo’s revisionism. In this letter we will confine ourselves to some recent tests that show in the decisive field of action how far Pablo has gone in conciliationism to Stalinism and how grave the danger is to the existence of the Fourth International.

 

With the death of Stalin, the Kremlin announced a series of concessions in the USSR, none of them political in character. In place of characterizing these as nothing but part of a maneuver aimed at further entrenchment of the usurping bureaucracy and part of the preparation for a leading bureaucrat to assume the mantle of Stalin, the Pabloite faction took the concessions as good coin, painted them up as political concessions, and even projected the possibility of the “sharing of power” by the Stalinist bureaucracy with the workers. (Fourth International January-February, 1953, p. 13.)

 

The “sharing of power” concept, promulgated most bluntly by Clarke, a high priest of the Pablo cult, was indirectly sanctioned as dogma by Pablo himself in an unanswered but obviously leading question: Will the liquidation of the Stalinist regime take the form, Pablo asks, “of violent inter-bureaucratic struggles between elements who will fight for the status quo, if not for turning back, and the more and more numerous elements drawn by the powerful pressure of the masses?”

(Fourth International, March-April, 1953, p. 39.)

 

This line fills the orthodox Trotskyist program of political revolution against the Kremlin bureaucracy with a new content; namely, the revisionist position that the “ideas” and “program” of Trotskyism will filter into and permeate the bureaucracy, or a decisive section of it, thus “overthrowing” Stalinism in an unforeseen way.

 

In East Germany in June the workers rose against the Stalinist-dominated government in one of the greatest demonstrations in the history of Germany. This was the first proletarian mass uprising against Stalinism since it usurped and consolidated power in the Soviet Union. How did Pablo respond to this epochal event?

 

Instead of clearly voicing the revolutionary political aspirations of the insurgent East German workers, Pablo covered up the counter-revolutionary Stalinist satraps who mobilized Soviet troops to put down the uprising (“the Soviet leaders and those of the various ‘People’s Democracies’ and the Communist Parties could no longer falsify or ignore the profound meaning of these events. They have been obliged to continue along the road of still more ample and genuine concessions to avoid risking alienating themselves forever from support by the masses and from provoking still stronger explosions. From now on they will not be able to stop halfway. They will be obliged to dole out concessions to avoid more serious explosions in the immediate future and if possible to effect a transition ‘in a cold fashion’ from the present situation to a situation more tolerable for the masses.”) (Statement of the International Secretariat of the Fourth International published in The Militant July 6.)

 

Instead of demanding the withdrawal of Soviet troops — the sole force upholding the Stalinist government — Pablo fostered the illusion that “more ample and genuine concessions” would be forthcoming from the Kremlin’s gauleiters. Could Moscow have asked for better assistance as it proceeded to monstrously falsify the profound meaning of those events, branding the workers in revolt as “fascists” and “agents of American imperialism,” and opening a wave of savage repression against them?

 

The French General Strike

 

In France in August the greatest general strike in the history of the country broke out. Put in motion by the workers themselves against the will of their official leadership, it presented one of the most favorable openings in working-class history for the development of a real struggle for power. Besides the workers, the farmers of France followed with demonstrations, indicating their strong dissatisfaction with the capitalist government.

 

The official leadership, both Social Democrats and Stalinists, betrayed this movement, doing their utmost to restrain it and avert the danger to French capitalism. In the history of betrayals it would be difficult to find a more abominable one if it is measured against the opportunity that was present.

 

How did the Pablo faction respond to this colossal event?

 

They labeled the action of the Social Democrats a betrayal — but for the wrong reasons. The betrayal, they said, consisted of negotiating with the government behind the backs of the Stalinists. This betrayal, however, was a secondary one, deriving from their main crime, their refusal to set out on the road to taking power.

 

As for the Stalinists, the Pabloites covered up their betrayal By that action they shared in the Stalinist betrayal. The sharpest criticism they found themselves capable of uttering against the counter-revolutionary course of the Stalinists, was to accuse them of “lack” of policy.

 

This was a lie. The Stalinists had no “lack” of policy. Their policy was to maintain the status quo in the interests of Kremlin foreign policy and thereby to help bolster tottering French capitalism.

 

But this was not all. Even for the internal party education of the French Trotskyists Pablo refused to characterize the Stalinist role as a betrayal He noted “the role of brake played, to one degree or another, by the leadership of the traditional organizations” -— a betrayal is a mere “brake”! — “but also their capacity — especially of the Stalinist leadership — to yield to the pressure of the masses when this pressure becomes powerful as was the case during these strikes.” (“Political Note No. 1”)

 

One might expect this to be sufficient conciliation to Stalinism from a leader who has abandoned orthodox Trotskyism, but still seeks the cover of the Fourth International. However, Pablo went still further.

 

An Infamous Leaflet

 

A leaflet of his followers addressed to the workers at the Renault plant in Paris declared that in the general strike the Stalinist leadership of the CGT (main French trade-union federation) “was correct in not introducing demands other than those wanted by the workers.” This in face of the fact that workers by their actions were demanding a Workers and Farmers Government!

 

Arbitrarily separating the Stalinist-headed unions from the Communist Party — evidence of the most mechanical thinking or evidence of deliberate design in covering up the Stalinists? — the Pabloites declared in their leaflet that so far as the significance of the strike and its perspectives were concerned “this point only concerned the trade union secondarily. The criticism to make on this point does not apply to the CGT which is a trade union organization, which must first and foremost act as such, but to the parties whose role it was to point out the deep political significance of this movement and its consequences.” (Leaflet “To the Workers’ Organizations and to the Workers of Renault,” dated Sept. 3, 1953. Signed by Frank, Mestre, and Privas.)

 

In these statements we see the complete abandonment of everything Trotsky taught us about the role and the responsibilities of the trade unions in the epoch of the death agony of capitalism.

 

Then the Pabloite leaflet “criticizes” the French Communist Party for its “absence of line,” for simply placing itself “on the level of the trade union movement instead of explaining to the workers that this strike was an important stage (!) in the crisis of French society, the prelude (!) to a vast class struggle, where the problem of workers’ power would be posed in order to save the country from capitalist swindling and open the way to socialism.”

 

If the Renault workers were to believe the Pabloites, all that the perfidious French Stalinist bureaucrats were guilty of was a trace of syndicalism instead of a deliberate betrayal of the biggest general strike in the history of France.

 

Pablo’s approval of the policy of the CGT leadership seems scarcely credible, yet there is the inescapable fact staring one in the face. In the biggest general strike ever seen in France, Pablo blandly puts as “correct,” a French version of Gompers’ bourgeois policy of keeping the unions out of politics. And this in 1953!

 

If it is incorrect for the CGT leadership to advance political demands in consonance with objective needs, including formation of a Workers and Farmers Government, then why is the Socialist Workers Party demanding of the present-day Gompers’ of the American trade-union movement that they organize a Labor Party? A Labor Party that would aim at putting a Workers and Farmers Government in power in the United States?

 

Pablo’s rubber-stamp OK appears in a still stranger light when we remind ourselves that the CGT leadership happens to be highly political. At the slightest gesture from the Kremlin, it is prepared to call the workers out on no matter what wild political adventure. Recall, for instance, its role in the events initiated by the anti-Ridgway demonstrations last year. These Stalinist trade-union figures did not hesitate to call for strikes to protest the arrest of Duclos, a leader of the Communist Party.

 

The fact is that the CGT leadership revealed its highly political character once again in the general strikes. With all the skill of years of perfidy and double dealing, it deliberately tried to head off the workers, to stifle their initiative, to prevent the workers’ political demands from breaking through. The Stalinist trade-union leadership consciously betrayed. And it is this course of betrayal that Pablo calls “correct”!

 

But even this does not complete the account. One of the principal aims of the Pabloite leaflet is to denounce French Trotskyists who conducted themselves in the Renault plant during the strike as genuine revolutionists. It specifically names two comrades who have “been expelled from the Fourth International and its French Section for more than a year.” It states that this “group has been expelled for reasons of indiscipline; and the orientation which it has followed, especially in the course of the last strike movement, is opposed to that actually defended by the PCI (French Section of the Fourth International).” The reference to the “group” is actually to the majority of the French Section of the Fourth International which was arbitrarily and unjustly expelled by Pablo.

 

Has the world Trotskyist movement ever before heard of such a scandal as officially denouncing Trotskyist militants to Stalinists and providing rationalizations to the workers for an abominable Stalinist betrayal?

 

It should be noted that the Pabloite denunciation of these comrades before the Stalinists follows the verdict of a workers’ tribunal acquitting the Trotskyists in the Renault plant of slanders leveled at them by the Stalinists.

 

The American Pabloites

 

The test of these world events is sufficient, in our opinion, to indicate the depth of Pabloite conciliationism toward Stalinism. But we would like to submit for public inspection of the world Trotskyist movement some additional facts.

 

For over a year and a half the Socialist Workers Party has been engaged in a struggle against a revisionist tendency headed by Cochran and Clarke. The struggle with this tendency has been one of the most severe in the history of our party. At bottom it is over the same fundamental questions that divided us from the Burnham/Shachtman group and the Morrow-Goldman group at the beginning and end of World War IL It is another attempt to revise and abandon our basic program. It has Involved the perspective of the American revolution, the character and role of the revolutionary party and its method of organization, and the perspectives for the world Trotskyist movement.

 

During the post-war period a powerful bureaucracy consolidated itself in the American labor movement This bureaucracy rests on a large layer of privileged, conservative workers who have been “softened” by the conditions of war prosperity. This new privileged layer was recruited in large measure from the ranks of former militant sectors of the working class, from the same generation that founded the CIO.

 

The relative security and stability of their living conditions have temporarily paralyzed the initiative and fighting spirit of these workers who previously were in the forefront of all militant class actions.

 

Cochranism is the manifestation of the pressure of this new labor aristocracy, with its petty-bourgeois ideology, upon the proletarian vanguard. The moods and tendencies of the passive, relatively satisfied layer of workers act as a powerful mechanism transmitting alien pressures into our own movement. The slogan of the Cochranites, “Junk the Old Trotskyism,” expresses this mood.

 

The Cochranite tendency sees the powerful revolutionary potential of the American working class as some far-off prospect. They denounce as “sectarian” the Marxist analysis which reveals the molecular processes creating new fighting regiments in the American proletariat.

 

Insofar as there are any progressive tendencies within the working class of the United States they see them only in the ranks or periphery of Stalinism and among “sophisticated” union politicians — the rest of the class they consider so hopelessly dormant that they can be awakened only by the impact of atomic war.

 

Briefly, their position reveals: Loss of confidence in the perspective of the American revolution; loss of confidence in the role of the revolutionary party in general and the Socialist Workers Party in particular.

 

Features of Cochranism

 

As all the sections of the world movement well know from their own hard and difficult experiences, pressures exist far greater than prolonged war prosperity and the sweep of reaction such as has been bearing down upon us m the United States. But the factor that sustains cadres under the most difficult circumstances is the burning conviction of the theoretical correctness of our movement, the knowledge that they are the living means for advancing the historic mission of the working class, the understanding that to one degree or another the fate of humanity depends on what they do, the firm belief that whatever the momentary circumstances may be, the main line of historic development demands the creation of Leninist combat parties that will resolve the crisis of humanity through a victorious socialist revolution.

 

Cochranism is the substitution of skepticism and theoretical improvisations and journalistic speculation for this orthodox Trotskyist world outlook. It is this that has made the struggle in the SWP irreconcilable in the same sense that the struggle with the Petty-Bourgeois Opposition in 1939-40 was irreconcilable.

 

The Cochranites have manifested the following features in the course of the struggle:

 

(1) Disrespect for party tradition and the historic mission of the party. Hardly an opportunity is lost by the Cochranites to denigrate, ridicule and preach contempt for the 25-year tradition of American Trotskyism.

 

(2) A tendency to replace principled Marxist politics with unprincipled combinations against the party “regime.” Thus the Cochranite faction is composed of a bloc of contradictory elements. One group, centered mainly in New York, favors a kind of “entry” tactic in the American Stalinist movement.

 

Another group, composed of conservatized union elements, centered primarily in Detroit, sees little to be gained by turning to the Stalinists. It bases its revisionist outlook on an over-estimation of the stability and lasting power of the new labor bureaucracy.

 

Also attracted to Cochranism are individuals grown tired, who can no longer stand the pressures of the present adverse conditions and who are looking for a plausible rationalization with which to retire into inactivity.

 

The cement binding this unprincipled bloc is common hostility to orthodox Trotskyism.

 

(3) A tendency to shift the party away from what our main arena must be in America, the politically unawakened workers of the mass production industries. The Cochranites, in effect, dropped the program of transitional slogans and demands which the SWP has used as a bridge toward these workers and argued that the majority in continuing this course was adapting itself to the backwardness of the workers.

 

(4) A conviction that all possibility of the American working class coming forward in radical opposition to American imperialism before the Third World War is ruled out.

 

(5) Gross experimental theorizing with “left” Stalinism that boils down to the extravagant belief that the Stalinists “can no longer betray,” that Stalinism includes a revolutionary side which makes it possible for the Stalinists to lead a revolution in the United States, in the process of which they would absorb Trotskyist “ideas” so that the revolution would eventually “right itself.”

 

(6) Adaptation to Stalinism in the face of new events. They support and defend the conciliation to Stalinism found in Pablo’s interpretation of the downfall of Beria and the subsequent sweeping purges in the USSR. They repeat all the Pabloite arguments covering the counterrevolutionary role of Stalinism in the great uprising of the East German workers and the French general strike. They even interpret the turn of American Stalinism toward the Democratic Party a mere “right oscillation” within a “left turn.”

 

(7) Contempt for the traditions of Leninism in questions of organization. For a time they attempted to set up “dual power” in the party. When they were rebuffed by the overwhelming majority of the party at the May 1953 Plenum, they agreed in writing to abide by the rule of the majority and the political line as decided by the Plenum. Subsequently, they broke their agreement, renewing their factional sabotage of party activities on a more feverish and hysterical basis than ever.

 

Cochranism, whose main features we have indicated above, was never more than a weak minority in the party. It would never have amounted to more than the most feeble and sickly expression of pessimism had it not been for the aid and encouragement it received from Pablo behind the backs of the party leadership.

 

Pablo’s secret encouragement and support was exposed soon after our May Plenum, and since then Pablo has been openly collaborating with the revisionist faction in our party and inspiring them in their campaign of sabotage of party finances, disruption of party work and preparations for a split

 

The Pablo-Cochran faction finally culminated this disloyal course with an organized boycott in New York of the Twenty-fifth Anniversary Celebration of the party, which was combined with a wind-up rally in the New York municipal election campaign.

 

This treacherous, strikebreaking action constituted, in effect, an organized demonstration against the 25-year struggle of American Trotskyism, and, at the same time, an act of objective aid to the Stalinists who expelled the initiating nucleus of American Trotskyism in October 1928.

 

The organized boycott of this meeting was, in effect, a demonstration against the campaign of the Socialist Workers Party in the New York municipal election.

 

All who participated in this treacherous, anti-party action obviously consummated the split which they had long been preparing, and forfeited all right to membership in our party.

 

Formally recording this fact, the Twenty-fifth Anniversary Plenum of the SWP suspended the National Committee members who organized the boycott and declared that all members of the Pablo-Cochran faction who participated in this treacherous, strikebreaking action or who refuse to disavow it have by that fact placed themselves outside the ranks of the SWP.

 

Methods of the Comintern

 

Pablo’s duplicity in presenting one face to the leadership of the SWP while secretly collaborating with the revisionist Cochranite tendency is a method that is alien to the tradition of Trotskyism. But there is a tradition to which It does belong — Stalinism. Such devices, used by the Kremlin, were instrumental in corrupting the Communist International Many of us had personal experience with all this in the 1923-28 period.

 

The evidence is now decisive that this way of operating is not an isolated aberration on the part of Pablo. A consistent pattern is apparent

 

For instance, in one of the leading European sections of the Fourth International, an outstanding party leader recently received an order from Pablo, directing him to conduct himself as one “who defends until the Fourth World Congress the majority line and the discipline of the International.” Along with the ultimatum Pablo threatened reprisals if his orders were not obeyed.

 

The “majority” to which Pablo refers here is simply the modest label he places on himself and the small minority hypnotized by his revisionist novelties. Pablo’s new line is in violent contradiction to the basic program of Trotskyism. It is only beginning to be discussed in many parts of the world Trotskyist movement Not having been backed by a single Trotskyist organization, it does not constitute the approved official line of the Fourth International.

 

The first reports we have received indicate outrage at his high-handed attempt to foist his revisionist views on the worldwide organization without waiting for either discussion or a vote. We already have enough information to state that the Fourth International is certain to reject Pablo’s line by an overwhelming majority.

 

Pablo’s autocratic demand to a leader of a section of the Fourth International to refrain from criticizing Pablo’s revisionist political line is bad enough. But Pablo did not stop there. While trying to gag this leader and prevent him from participating in a free discussion in which the rank and file might benefit from his experience, knowledge and Insight, Pablo proceeded to intervene organizationally, attempting to crystallize a minority revisionist faction to conduct war on the leadership of the section.

 

This procedure is out of the foul tradition of the Comintern as It underwent degeneration under the influence of Stalinism. If there were no other issue than this, it would be necessary to fight Pabloism to a finish to save the Fourth International from internal corruption.

 

Such tactics have an obvious purpose. They are part of the preparation for a coup by the Pabloite minority. Utilizing Pablo’s administrative control, they hope to impose his revisionist line on the Fourth International and wherever it is resisted to reply by splits and expulsions.

 

This Stalinist organizational course began, as is now quite clear, with Pablo’s brutal abuse of administrative control in his disruptive campaign against the majority of the French section of the Fourth International more than a year and a half ago.

 

By fiat of the International Secretariat, the elected majority of the French section was forbidden to exercise its rights to lead the political and propaganda work of the party. Instead, the Political Bureau and the press were put under the control of a minority through the Cominternist device of a “parity commission.”

 

At the time, we deeply disapproved this arbitrary action by which a minority was used to arbitrarily overturn a majority. As soon as we heard about it, we communicated our protest to Pablo. However, we must admit that we made an error in not taking more vigorous action. This error was due to insufficient appreciation on our part of the real issues involved. We thought the differences between Pablo and the French section were tactical and this led us to side with Pablo, despite our misgivings about his organizational procedure, when, after months of disruptive factional struggle, the majority was expelled.

 

But at bottom the differences were programmatic in character. The fact is that the French comrades of the majority saw what was happening more clearly than we did. The Eighth Congress of their party declared that “a grave danger menaces the future and even the existence of the Fourth International…Revisionist conceptions, born of cowardice and petty-bourgeois impressionism have appeared within its leadership. The still great weakness of the International, cut off from the life of the sections, has momentarily facilitated the installation of a system of personal rule, basing itself and its anti-democratic methods on revisionism of the Trotskyist program and abandonment of the Marxist method.” (La Verite, Sept 18, 1952.)

 

The whole French situation must be re-examined in the light of subsequent developments. The role of the majority of the French section played in the recent general strike demonstrated in the most decisive way that they know how to uphold the fundamental principles of orthodox Trotskyism. The French section of the Fourth International was unjustly expelled. The French majority, grouped around the paper La Verite, are the real Trotskyists of France and are so openly recognized by the SWP.

 

Particularly revolting is the slanderous misrepresentation Pablo has fostered of the political position of the Chinese section of the Fourth International. They have been pictured by the Pablo faction as “sectarians,” as “fugitives from a revolution.”

 

Contrary to the impression deliberately created by the Pablo faction, the Chinese Trotskyists acted as genuine revolutionary representatives of the Chinese proletariat. Through no fault of theirs they have been singled out as victims by the Mao regime in the way that Stalin singled out for execution the entire generation of Lenin’s Bolsheviks in the USSR, emulating the Noskes and Scheidemanns of Germany who singled out the Luxemburgs and Liebknechts of the 1918 revolution for execution. But Pablo’s line of conciliationism toward Stalinism leads him inexorably to touch up to the Mao regime couleur de rose while putting gray tints on the firm, principled stand of our Chinese comrades.

 

What to Do

 

To sum up: The lines of cleavage between Pablo’s revisionism and orthodox Trotskyism are so deep that no compromise is possible either politically or organizationally. The Pablo faction has demonstrated that it will not permit democratic decisions truly reflecting majority opinion to be reached. They demand complete submission to their criminal policy. They are determined to drive all orthodox Trotskyists out of the Fourth International or to muzzle and handcuff them.

 

Their scheme has been to inject their Stalinist conciliationism piecemeal and likewise in piecemeal fashion, get rid of those who come to see what is happening and raise objections. That is the explanation for the strange ambiguity about many of the Pabloite formulations and diplomatic evasions.

 

Up to now the Pablo faction has had a certain success with this unprincipled and Machiavellian maneuverism. But the qualitative point of change has been reached. The political issues have broken through the maneuvers and the fight is now a showdown.

 

If we may offer advice to the sections of the Fourth International from our enforced position outside the ranks, we think the time has come to act and to act decisively. The time has come for the orthodox Trotskyist majority of the Fourth International to assert their will against Pablo’s usurpation of authority.

 

They should in addition safeguard the administration of the affairs of the Fourth International by removing Pablo and his agents from office and replacing them with cadres who have proved in action that they know how to uphold orthodox Trotskyism and keep the movement on a correct course both politically and organizationally.

 

With fraternal Trotskyist greetings,

National Committee of the SWP

by James P. Cannon

[First printed in the Militant, June 16 1952. Reprinted in Notebook of an Agitator.]

THE WHOLE story of Koje Island is not yet known, but from the few scraps of information which have been blown out of the prisoners’ compounds, like hot rocks from a heaving volcano, the world is becoming uneasily aware of awful and fateful events transpiring there, with the premonition of more to come.

Through a breach in the military censorship the world is catching glimpses of a conflict of gigantic proportions in which ordinary men, as often before in history, play big parts because of the things they represent. In the great crises of history some men always, rIse above themselves and attain the stature of heroes. That happened In our own history—in 1776 and again in 1861. In the men who made these two revolutions young America saw the magnified image, of itself.

The same thing appears to be happening now once again in a far-off land, and we are witness to it. The transcendant issues of our century are being dramatized on Koje Island in human terms, as in a heroic epic which has for its theme the death agony of an old social order and the birth pangs of a new one. Colonial oppression and struggle for national independence; western supremacy and Asian self-assertion; war and revolution — these are the colossal Involved in the confrontation of white and yellow men across a barbed-wire barricade.

Outwardly it would appear that the struggle Is unequal, outcome foreordained. The American army, which never lost a war goes into the battle of Koje Island with much better equipment than the “Ragged Continentals” of 1776, who defended their land and their homes with an odd assortment of old muskets and sticks and stones, and a more impetuous policy than the patient General Washington’s strategy of attack and retreat to wear out the enemy and keep his own army in being.

For the battle of Koje Island we needed a different kind of general and we found him. To the atta-boy applause of the editorial writers, who unfortunately can’t leave their desks to take part. General Boatner has proclaimed a crack-down and he has the stuff to make good with it. Press dispatches bristle with accounts of the formidable array of armament he has brought up for use against prisoners of war who persist in waving their own banners within the compounds. There are daily reports of prisoners being killed and wounded since Boatner took charge and announced a “get tough” policy.

Things are moving to some kind of a show-down in this battle of Koje Island; and the American people, with the historic memory of Bunker Hill not yet entirely obliterated, would do well to ask for a little more information about what we are fighting for there. We have heard the explanations of the brass hats. The captured “gooks,” it seems, are “surly” and “fanatical”. They “don’t know who’s boss” and they have to be shown. The compounds have to be split up into smaller units so that the prisoners can be “screened” more effectively. The improvised banners, waved from sticks, inside the compounds, must come down. These are our declared war aims at Koje.

The prisoners’ side of the story didn’t come through yet, although a UP dispatch of May 21 reports that they made a strenuous effort to tell correspondents what it is. “When the prisoners inside saw new.,, men arrive they set up a clamor to be allowed to talk to them,” says the report. “One shouted in English: ‘Let us talk to these war correspondents! ‘ Authorities refused.” Could this incident, buried in a long dispatch, have been a correspondent’s indirect way of telling the world that the whole truth is not coming out because he and his colleagues are not allowed to send it?

As the climax approaches, the papers are full of information about the battle plans of the forces outside the barbed wire. The New York Times, June 9, reports: “General Boatner has shaped lip a full-scale offensive with all the troops under his command. . . . The plans call for battalions of infantrymen with fixed bayonets to crash through the barbed-wire barricades into the compounds, supported by several Patton tanks and under the protective range of machine guns.”

That ought to do it. Military doctrine says that, other things being equal, superior fire-power prevails and decides. What chance then, remains for the Koje prisoners who have no fire-power whatever? They have no chance at all—if other things are equal. But could it be that the prisoners keep their morale unshaken in the face of superior force because they think that the other things are not equal? That they have on their side some intangibles not comprehended by the military mind—some secret weapon more powerful than a bomb, some moral force generated by the things their banners represent and symbolize to them?

If that is the case, history tells us that such men will not be easy to conquer. History also tells us that men so inspired can lose a battle and still win the war. The most dangerous animal on earth is the man who has nothing to lose and is convinced that he has everything to gain. That’s the trouble with the ill-starred American adventure in Korea — it is up against men like that, who are convinced that their historic hour has come; that they have great allies; that hundreds of millions of their kindred are behind them because they are in the same fix.

Such a conviction can make all things possible. From such a conviction comes the fanatical courage of the Koje prisoners — you can even call it heroism and you won’t go wrong — to face all the military power of America unarmed and defiant. Yesterday they knew nothing, with no rights that a white man was bound to respect. But a mighty revolution, coming up like thunder out of China and echoing throughout the entire Orient, has changed all that. Revolution has made new men out of them, lifted them to their feet and inspired them to sing and firmly believe: “We have been naught, we shallbe all!”

That may be the secret weapon of the prisoners of Koje Island.

[Originally published in Internal Bulletins of the SWP and the International Bulletins of the International Committee. Copied from http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/fi/1950-1953/ic-issplit/05.htm ]  

[Note: This correspondence is of more historic than programmtic significance, as it documents Cannon’s initial failure to support the French Trotskyist struggle against Pablo’s opportunism and bureaucratism]

Dear Comrade Cannon,

I am taking the liberty of writing you today because I think that you are one of the most qualified comrades in the Trotskyist movement for evaluating the situation in our section and the dispute which currently places the French party in opposition to the International Secretariat.

I have read In Defence of Marxism and The Struggle for the Proletarian Party; the exertions, struggles and experiences through which the American Trotskyists, and you especially, have passed, give you the necessary background for telling me what you think of what we are doing here.

All the leaderships of the Trotskyist sections are now in possession of a document from the International Secretariat dated January 21, 1952, concerning the French section.

However, this document in its five pages of text does not give an exact version of what is taking place. It does not present a political; view of the situation but strictly an administrative version of the dispute. From a reading of this document it could be concluded that the leading comrades of the French section are acting stubbornly and sulking at the decisions of the IS merely from whim.

The facts are really altogether different. Nobody in the International is unaware of the differences which have opposed the French majority to the IS up to the World Congress. These differences have been expressed in votes and in documents. The French majority has tried to clarify the nature of these differences, especially in the period 1 of preparation of the Seventh Congress of the French Party. But the differences which set the French Party in opposition to the IS were settled, if not solved, by the Third World Congress. And this found its expression in a resolution of the French Commission of the World Congress, a resolution which the Central Committee of our section unanimously approved, insofar as it is the line for applying the policies adopted by the Third World Congress. To say, as the IS does, that the French majority has ‘continued’ in practice to wish to apply the line of the Seventh Congress of the PCI is inaccurate and refuted by the entire attitude and policy as applied by the French leadership from the World Congress up to now.

Let me begin by stressing that Pablo, in opposing any vote at the World Congress on the documents which our delegates presented there (especially the 10 theses drawn up by Comrade Germain and adopted by our Seventh Congress), and this upon the contention that the International had not discussed them, was by this token unable to have our positions condemned by the Congress.

The truth is that whatever the spheres of activity of our party, nothing has given rise to the slightest criticism by any of the leading bodies of the International regarding remissness in applying the line laid down by the last World Congress.

In ‘youth’ work a draft resolution was presented to the Political Bureau. It gave rise to a certain amount of criticism, especially on the part of minority comrades. A parity commission of PB members was elected. This commission submitted a new, revised youth document, which was finally adopted. It is some four months since this resolution has been applied. Its application has called forth no important criticism, neither in the ranks of the minority nor from the IS.

If we take trade union work, up to and including the last meeting of the National Contact Commission of ‘Unite’, this work has gone ahead on the basis of complete agreement between the majority of the French Party and the IS. A document on directives was submitted unanimously by a commission of which Comrade Frank was a member. It was subsequently called into question anew by a totally different document with which I will deal presently.

Finally, the last sphere but not the least: our central organ, La Verité, has never been questioned in any fundamental way, by anyone whatever, for not having applied the line of the Third World Congress. What is more, Comrade Pablo stated to a meeting of the Paris Region that La Verité was showing ‘the obvious progress made by the French leadership in applying the political line laid down by the Third World Congress’. But if, as the IS letter declares, the French leadership’continues to wish to apply the line of the 7th PCI Congress’, where would this be more evident than in La Verité? Our paper, the principal external expression of our party, is best capable of reflecting in the light of events, the political positions of the leadership which publishes it.

Thus, since the Third World Congress, the French leadership has effectively endeavoured to apply the policies of our International ‘with understanding and discipline’. Further, it has maintained complete silence inside the party on the ever new demands imposed upon it by the IS. Inadequacies may have shown up here and there. They were inevitable. But this was in no sense wilful. If it were so, if the leadership had really desired to carry out a different line, this would have revealed itself not accidentally in episodic and piecemeal cases, but in the entire activity of the party, in all spheres, daily, and at every step. Examples of such an undisciplined attitude would be so numerous that there would be no difficulty in presenting a great many of them.

But the letter of the IS nowhere makes any precise, clearly formulated accusations.

In point of fact, there are two clearly distinct phases in the struggle between the IS and the French leadership. The first phase takes place after the Third World Congress, a period during which the party was orienting itself in its work on the basis of the French resolution. This application takes place with some necessary adjustments. Then there is a second phase whose date can be established precisely: it is December 6, 1951 when the IS issues a document entitled, ‘For the reorientation of our trade union work in France’.

This document, of which it was not known whether it was a mandatory resolution effective upon its appearance, or a contribution to the discussion of the trade union problem in France, called into question anew the decisions and documents of the Third World Congress. The stupefaction and indignation which such a document raised in the leadership of the French party were well founded. It was no longer a question of interpretation, of doing a job of exegesis on one sentence or another: this text was in fundamental and formal opposition with the text of the French commission of the World Congress.

For instance, in the French resolution, the following statement is made: ‘The necessary turn in the activity of the French party which results from the world turn in the situation does not in any case mean the abandonment of activities engaged in and of results achieved in such activities. On the contrary…,etc.

The text of the IS explains: ‘In order to realize these objectives which are possible right now, it is necessary not to attempt to set ourselves up as a distinct tendency (within the CGT), which is not objectively justified at the present stage — but to integrate ourselves there by promptly becoming the best workers for the unification of the trade union movement, by taking everywhere a clear unequivocal position for the unity proposals of the CGT, and by skilfully maneuvering as regards the Stalinist leaders so as to allay their suspicions about us and so as to let them consider us as useful instruments for the unity policy’. (Emphasis in the original).

About all this, the letter of the IS dated January 21 does not say a word; in this way it makes the dispute between the French party and the IS incomprehensible. The opposition which manifests itself on administrative and organizational questions can only find their explanation in the light of the political positions of each of the opponents. Every other way of trying to clarify the discussion can in fact only muddy it up.

This is all the more true when one considers the January 14 letter of the IS to the members of the Central Committee. There too, and anew, the CC found itself confronting totally new positions contrary to the letter and spirit of the Third World Congress. The question was that of envy into the CP but of a very special kind of envy, sui generis as the IS itself described it. Independent work was to be subordinated to this entry. (‘Independent work must be understood as having for its main ‘aim the aiding of “entrist” work and is itself to be directed primarily at the Stalinist workers’. —’Entrist work will develop in scope as we come closer to war’. Letter of the IS to the members of the CC).

But the World Congress stated precisely: ‘In the countries where the majority of the working class still follows the CP, our organizations, of necessity independent, must direct themselves toward more systematic work aimed at the ranks of these parties and of the masses which they influence’. (Theses on international Perspectives and the Orientation of the Fourth International).

This is so true that the Italian comrades, whose political situation is analagous to ours in many ways, have elaborated a resolution for work directed at the workers of the CP. The question of entry is envisaged and resolved in the following way: ‘This “entrist” tactic does not exclude but presupposes independent work …

‘Taking these requirements into account, we reach the conclusion that independent work must not be liquidated, but that on the contrary, it will be necessary to assign additional forces to this work’. The Italian comrades, in writing this, believe they are applying the line of the Third World Congress. But to say, as does the IS, that this Italian resolution ‘advocates a tactic identical to that proposed by the letter of the IS of January 14 to the CC of the French party’, constitutes a refusal to understand the obvious. The position of the IS in France makes independent work a supplement to entrist work; the Italian comrades are doing just the reverse. It is necessary to have a certain amount of political myopia to identify these two positions.

In my opinion the IS is seeking to mask the real reasons for the discussion by accusing the French majority of not wanting to apply the line of the Third World Congress and of wishing to substitute the line of the Seventh Congress of our party. Truthfully, the French leadership is not in opposition to the IS but to what we in France have labelled ‘Pabloism’. That is what is involved. And today, under the cover of our international leadership, Comrade Pablo is trying to have his own positions carried out. When the French majority says that the trade union resolution, as well as the letter of the IS to the members of the Central Committee of January 19 and 20, is not the honest expression of the World Congress, it is only expressing in another form that Pabloism did not win out at the Third World Congress. To convince oneself all one has to do is to return to the article, ‘Where Are We Going?’ and to the theses of the Third World Congress.

The struggle in which the French party has found itself engaged and in which I am taking part, has had for its setting the punitive action of the IS in suspending the majority of the Central Committee, a measure directed against all the living forces of the party, against everything which directly or indirectly touches working class and trade union work. This punitive measure is unjust and unjustifiable. It is a suppression of all genuine leadership in all spheres of work. And how does the IS explain this measure? By charging ‘political and organizational decomposition’. And upon what does it base this charge? Upon hearsay and gossip. But where the leadership of a party is decomposing politically and organizationally that ought to be confirmed by other means than by the charges of minority comrades. Decomposition, if it is political, must show itself in documents, and especially in the documents submitted precisely to the CC Plenum, where the majority was suspended. Political decomposition should also show itself in our central organ, La Verité, of which ten issues have appeared since the World Congress. This aspect of the question of political decomposition of our leadership is all the more important because allusion is made in this letter, to Shachtman, to the POUM, to the Yugoslavs. Those of our comrades who participated in the Second World Congress took a stand against the proposal to recognize the WP as a ‘sympathetic section’. Since that time we have neither said nor written a word which could justify an amalgam with Schachtman. No basis for comparison exists between our position and that of the POUM, to which Verité has replied in connection with its attacks against our Third World Congress. No position of ours is the same as the Yugoslavs against whom we have been conducting an offensive for over 18 months in all spheres where they have shown themselves (brigades, trade unions, youth). In what, directly or indirectly, does the argumentation employed by the French leadership resemble the positions taken by Schachtman, the POUM, the ‘Yugoslavs’? In nothing. And there you have an unprincipled amalgam which can only condemn those who make use of it.

As for the decomposition of the leadership of our party from an organizational standpoint, what are the symptoms which reveal this? Have members resigned? Has the paper failed to appear? Have directives not been issued in order to initiate this or that action at this or that moment? If the leadership is decomposing as the motor force of the party, what better test than the last strike movements of February 12 as a verification of this? But there again, as in the past, our leadership, conscious of its experience, of the situation in the party caused by the violent coup of the IS, proved itself equal to the greatness of its task.

Ah this tends to demonstrate that a bad cause has the need for bad methods in order to defend itself. And this likewise explains why for us the struggle against Pabloism is not a struggle of secondary importance. The French majority has acquired the conviction in the course of many months in which it has been opposed to Pabloism, that the latter means the destruction of Trotskyism, at least in Western Europe. The sharpness of the struggle, on both sides, can be explained or justified solely in this perspective.

If we return to the question of trade union work, we see in the French resolution of the World Congress, a resolution which our CC has adopted, the following perspective described in these words: ‘The agreements which have served as basis for ‘Unité’ (essential element of the trade union work of the French section) are taking place under the hallmark of free expression for the various currents gathered together around this paper. The general activity of the party in ‘Unité’ continues without any changes’. This is clear and without the slightest ambiguity. Four months after these lines were written, we can read the following sentences from the pen of the IS: ‘It is necessary not to attempt to set ourselves up as a distinct tendency’ as against the Stalinists. What is the meaning of such a sentence if not to deliver ourselves bound hand and foot over to the Stalinist bureaucrats. For us, however, the perspective is clear: the situation in the French trade union movement`is such that it imposes upon us the requirement not to surrender in any way the orientation laid down by the French resolution of the World Congress. That variations in Stalinist policy require of us this or that tactic is obvious. But it is a question of something quite different in the foregoing text of the IS.

If we return to the question of entry into the CP, our perspective is clear. We are not hostile to the examination of this possibility, and we had already formulated it well in advance of the letter of the IS of January 14 to the members of the CC. But for us it was above all a matter of fraction work which cannot change the work of the independent party and above all cannot in any way change the independent character of the Trotskyist programme with reference to Stalinism. Not only do we think that this fraction work in the CP is necessary and indispensable, but we say that this idea of entry in the CP must be considered by the whole party as the eventuality for which we must prepare ourselves in the perspective of great social upheavals and continued upheavals in the Stalinist apparatus. For Pablo it is quite another thing that is involved. It is a matter of pure and simple integration into Stalinism, ascribing to the latter the accomplishment of a certain number of historical tasks that Trotskyism is incapable of fulfilling.

Politics has its own logic, and particularly the politics of Pablo. Did not he state to the CC of the 19th and 20th of January that ‘the Transitional Programme’ was an inadequate instrument for effectively judging what Stalinism is at the present time? This may appear as a momentary error of Pablo, but since this statement, this idea has made its own way, and at the last meeting of the Parisian region, Comrade Frank, a member of the IS, stated that it is an incorrect idea of the Transitional Programme when it states that the ‘Third International had definitely passed over to the side of the bourgeois order’. And has not Comrade Corvin, member of the Central Committee, also said that to speak of the oscillations of the Stalinist bureaucracy means to put in question the workers’ character of the USSR, adding that we will no longer see oscillations, but hesitations by Stalinism in accomplishing the tasks of the revolution. Has not Comrade Mestre, member of the Political Bureau, stated that entry sui generis has become necessary because ‘Stalinism has changed’? All this is evidently not a product of chance. All this only expresses, in our ranks, the growing pressure of Stalinism upon the petty bourgeoisie of Western Europe which finds its echo in our organization.

This explains why I have personally stated that confronted by such positions the party must rise, unanimously, to condemn such crimes. I am not concerned with creating an atmosphere of hostility in the French section ‘against the International’ as the letter of the IS implies. I am concerned with defending the essential programmatic foundations of our movement, which is its wealth and which is its surest guarantee of victory.

The position which I have taken in this battle is the product of all the experience which I have accumulated during years of membership in the working class movement and particularly of my struggle for Trotskyism in the Renault plant. To create the notion that our opposition to the Pabloite line proceeds from an infantile anti-Stalinism is to conceal the real character of Pabloism, as it is revealing itself every day increasingly, every day more clearly. Today Pablo is compelled to call into question the fundamental ideas of the Transitional Programme in order to prop up his line. What will happen tomorrow?

The methods used by Pablo have caused me to reflect a great deal and I have in particular relived the struggle which Trotsky conducted against Schachtman, Burnham and Abern in 1939-40 in the American section. The methods used by the IS are absolutely the reverse of these. Trotsky, and all the American comrades at his side, fought politically and vied to convince the SWP comrades by the widest possible discussion and the most fundamental. In particular, Trotsky constantly turned towards the party’s working class base, addressed himself to it, used the best pedagogical forms so as to accomplish this, that the discussion would at least serve to educate the party. Here, we see the working class base of the party disdained, because it is the majority. We see fundamental questions evaded under false pretexts. To an entire leadership which is opposed to its line the IS replies: ‘Suspension’ and justified itself by insults.

From all this the party (and when I say party, I mean the whole International) can only lose. It is impossible to destroy a Trotskyist section under the pretext that it does not share the personal ideas of Pablo on the role of the Soviet bureaucracy and on ‘centuries of transition’. To destroy is not the role of a leader of the International: his role is not to destroy the human foundation of all politics, entrist or otherwise.

My letter has no other purpose than to warn you of this danger, to explain the situation and to ask your opinion. I hope I have accomplished my task.

With fraternal Bolshevik-Leninist best wishes, dear comrade, I am,

Daniel Renard

* * *

New York, N.Y.

May 29, 1952

Daniel Renard

Paris

Dear Comrade Renard:

I received your letter of February 16. Copies were also distributed to all the members of our National Committee, and in formulating the following reply I have had the benefit of discussion with them on the matter. If I have waited so long to answer, it is only because I am always reluctant to intervene in the affairs of another party without knowing all the pertinent facts and the people concerned. I make this explanation to assure you that I meant no disrespect to you by my delay in answering your letter. Just the contrary. My purpose was to give your communication the serious and deliberate answer it deserves.

In the meantime, the Tenth Plenum of the IEC has taken place, and its basic document on ‘The Tactical Application of the Third World Congress Line’, as well as its Organizational Resolution on the French situation, have been received here. We have also received a copy of the ‘Declaration by the Political Bureau Majority on the Agreements Concluded at the International Executive Committee’. These documents — the Tenth Plenum decisions and the Declaration of your Political Bureau Majority — seem to me to advance the dispute to another stage and to throw more light on it.

I have used the intervening time, since receiving your letter, for an attentive study of all the relevant documents, including those above mentioned. Naturally, from such a great distance I cannot feel qualified to pass judgment on the many secondary questions and personal antagonisms which are unfailingly involved in such a sharp dispute as your party is now experiencing. However, the general picture from a political point of view now seems clear enough to justify me in offering you and the other French comrades a frank opinion, as follows:

I think the Third World Congress made a correct analysis of the new post-war reality in the world and the unforeseen turns this reality has taken. Proceeding from this analysis, the Congress drew correct conclusions for the orientation of the national Trotskyist parties toward the living mass movement as it has evolved since the war. Further, the Tenth Plenum, in its basic document on the tactical application of the Third World Congress line, has faithfully interpreted, amplified and concretized the line of the Third World Congress as regards its tactical application under the different conditions in the different countries.

I note your statement that the majority are ‘not hostile’ to the ‘idea of entry into the CP’ as ‘the eventuality for which we must prepare ourselves’. That would seem to put the majority in basic agreement with the line of the IEC and clear the way for a jointly-elaborated programme of practical actions leading to an agreed-upon end. The ) differences seem to be reduced to questions of timing and pace. I should like to remind you, however, that in a fluid situation timing and pace can be decisive for the success or failure of an action. In such a situation, where an objective is agreed upon in principle, my own preference would be for decisiveness and speed.

I disagree in part with your formulation of the question of entry as ‘above all a matter of fraction work which cannot change the work of the independent party and above all cannot in any way change the independent character of the Trotskyist programme with reference to Stalinism’. Two different questions, which ought to be separated, are combined in this formula.

Of course, neither entry, nor any other policy or tactic which could be devised, can ‘in any way change the independent character of the Trotskyist programme with reference to Stalinism’. But ‘the work of the independent party’ in France, in the present historical conjuncture, can and must be radically changed, and that without unnecessary delay, for there is not much time left to seize the opportunity now open. We must get into the movement of Stalinist workers while there is yet time and by such means and methods as the situation permits, not those we might prefer to arbitrarily insist open.

A policy of maintaining the French party as an essentially independent party, with fraction work in Stalinist-controlled organizations as supplemental and secondary, would turn the necessities of the situation upside down. The situation in France now imperatively requires a policy of entry (of a special kind) into the Stalinist movement. The independent party and press should serve, stimulate and guide the entrist movement, not substitute for it or contradict it. It is true, as every Trotskyist knows, that the independence of the revolutionary vanguard party is a principle. Its creation is an unchanging aim of the revolutionary vanguard, always and everywhere and under all conditions. The function of the party, however, is not to exist for itself but to lead the workers in revolution. Further progress in the construction of a revolutionary party, capable of leading the revolutionary masses, requires now in France a wide and prolonged detour through the workers’ movement controlled by the Stalinists, and even eventually through a section of the Stalinist party itself.

The aim to build the Trotskyist party into a mass party remains fixed and unchanging, but the road toward it in France is by no means a straight one. If our French comrades should grow stubborn and formally insist on the functioning of the independent party as the primary and most essential work in the given situation, the living mass movement with its unbounded revolutionary potentialities would certainly pass it by and leave us with the form without the substance.

The breakup of the coalition on the trade union field around the paper, ‘L’Unité, was a progressive development for our party. Those reformist trade unionists who make a speciality of ‘anti-Stalinism’ in order to cover and justify their pro-imperialist policy are an international breed, and they are well known to us. They are not fit allies for Trotskyists in the United States, in France or anywhere else. The logic of their Stalinophobia inexorably impels them to the right, and no tactical diplomacy on our part can arrest the process. On the other hand, the French Stalinist workers, by the logic of the irreversible international trend of things, must be impelled more and more on a radical course. It is a matter of life and death for our comrades to establish connections with them and form an alliance with them against imperialism. The disruption of the ‘L’Unité’ coalition, provoked by the right wing, should be taken as a fortunate and most favourable springboard into this new and more fruitful arena.

As far as the anarchist phrasemongers are concerned — in the United States, in France, or anywhere else — time-wasting parleys and coalitions with them for the purpose of waging the class struggle against the imperialist bourgeoisie would make a mockery of things which ought to be taken seriously. This would not be revolutionary politics but a substitute for it.

Your letter, Comrade Renard, as well as the Declaration of the Majority of your Political Bureau on the Tenth Plenum, explains the political essence of your position in the conflict as opposition to ‘Pabloism’. You define this as a revisionist tendency, aiming at ‘pure and simple integration into Stalinism’ and thereby a capitulation to it. This question, as you may be aware, has a history in the Socialist Workers Party and is, consequently, familiar to us. As far back as 1950, when the new tactical turn was first indicated, the Johnsonites attempted to terrify the party with the scare of ‘Pabloism’. They sought to construe a struggle in the International Trotskyist movement of ‘Cannonism vs. Pabloism’. Since we were fully in favour of the new tactical turn from the start, we did not see any ground for such a contradistinction of tendencies, and said so when the question was first raised by the Johnsonites — an answer which no doubt hastened their departure from our ranks.

We, for our part, are orthodox Trotskyists since 1928 and thereby irreconcilable enemies of Stalinism or any conciliationism with it, not to speak of capitulation. I do not think I overstate the case if I say that should any kind of a pro-Stalinist tendency make its appearance in our international movement, we would probably be the first to notice it and to say: ‘This is an alien tendency with which we cannot compromise’. We do not see such a tendency in the International leadership of the Fourth International nor any sign nor symptom of it.

We judge the policy of the International leadership by the line it elaborates in official documents — in the recent period by the documents of the Third World Congress and the Tenth Plenum. We do not see any revisionism there. All we see is an elucidation of the post-war evolution of Stalinism and an outline of new tactics to fight it more effectively. We consider these documents to be completely Trotskyist. They are different from previous documents of our movement, not in principle or method, but only in the confrontation and analysis of the new reality and the tactical adjustment to it. It is the unanimous I opinion of the leading people of the SWP that the authors of these documents have rendered a great service to the movement for which they deserve appreciation and comradely support, not distrust and denigration.

I am sure that the International movement will not sanction or support a factional struggle based on suspicion of future intentions which cannot be demonstrated, or even deduced, from present proposals and positions formulated in documents. Nobody can learn anything from such fights, and the party is bound to be the loser. If you comrades of the majority should insist on a struggle against a ‘revisionism’ which is not evident to others, you could only disorient a number of worker comrades in the party ranks, isolate them from the other cadres of the International movement and lead them into a blind alley. Unfortunately, this has been done often enough in the past history of the French party by impulsive leaders who did not take thought of their course or heed the opinions of International comrades who sought to help them with friendly advice. I earnestly hope it will not happen this time.

It would be far better, in my opinion, to lay the suspicions aside or, in any event, not to make them the axis of discussion — and try to come to agreement with the IS on practical steps toward an effective penetration into the movement of Stalinist workers — leaving the different views as to the prospects to the test of experience. Political tendencies which are not clearly revealed cannot be fruitfully debated. If there is in fact any illusion about Stalinism on the one side, or a fetishism of formal independence on the other, the test of experience will mature and clarify such errors and make it possible to deal with them politically. Conversely, if there are no serious differences latent in the conflict, experience will eliminate any ground for suspicion in either respect.

An entry into the Stalinist workers’ movement and eventually into the Stalinist party itself, under the given conditions, with its rigid bureaucratic structure, is an extremely difficult and dangerous undertaking in the best case. It will be all the more difficult if there is no unity in the party leadership. The situation would be made many times worse if the French party has to be punished with one more unnecessary split. This possibility cannot be ignored.

Don’t deceive yourself, Comrade Renard. There is great danger of a split, even though both sides may have renounced any intention in this regard. A split is implicit in the situation as it has been developing in the recent period. In my opinion, the best way to avoid such a calamity — perhaps the only way — would be to shift the discussion for the time being to a concrete step-by-step programme, worked out jointly by the party leadership and the IS, to effectuate the imperatively-dictated entry into the Stalinist workers’ movement and eventually into a section of the Stalinist party itself.

Along that line — if our judgment is correct — the French party should soon get into a position to expand its influence and prepare for the great role which history has assigned to it in the approaching war and revolution. You can surely count on the sympathy and support of International comrades in this great endeavour.

Yours fraternally,

James P. Cannon

by Bleibtreu-Favre, June 1951

[First posted online at http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/fi/1950-1953/ic-issplit/04.htm ]  

[Revolutionary Regroupment note: While expressing confusion on Yugoslavia and China, the document’s more general critique of Pablo, who looked to the Stalinists to act as substitutes for the working class and it’s Trotskyist vanguard, was key in laying the groundwork for the 1953 split.]

……………………………………………………………………

Introduction by La Verite

The document we are serializing appeared at the beginning of June 1951 under the title ‘Where is Comrade Pablo Going?’ Its publication has been postponed for several months at the request of a member of the International Secretariat—Comrade Germain, the author of ‘Ten Theses’ (see issues 300-304 of La Verite)— who warned the leadership of the Parti Communiste Internationaliste (PCI) against ‘the trap Pablo has laid for destroying the French section.

When the author of the ‘Ten Theses’ opposed their adoption by the PCI Central Committee, he left no room for doubt that he had renounced defending his ideas. He had capitulated, like Zinoviev and others had done before him, like Calas did recently before the French CP’s Central Committee. Trotsky had learned from experience that the rarest and most necessary quality for a revolutionary leader is ‘that little thing called character’!

The Trotskyist critique of the revisionist notions expressed by Pablo in ‘Where Are We Going?’ began with ‘Where Is Comrade Pablo Going?’ The reader can refer to the former document, which appeared in the February 1951 issue of the magazine Quatrieme Internationale. It is interesting to note that neither ‘Where is Pablo Going?’ nor any other political documents of the PCI were published in the international bulletins preparing for the World Congress.

‘Where Are We Going?’ was the ideological proclamation of Pabloism. To date, the split in France has been the main practical result. May it be the last!

Where is Comrade Pablo Going?

Clarity in a discussion arises from the presentation of opposing theses on the one hand and from polemics on the other; the two methods do not contradict each other but are instead complementary, in the strictest sense of the word.

To refrain from stating your theses, to stage a sort of guerrilla warfare of partial amendments when principles are at stake or, even worse, to restrict yourself to polemicizing against the weak points of the contested thesis is the distinguishing characteristic of tendencies that have neither principles nor any consciousness of their duty to our World Party of the Revolution.

As for us, we think that the method that guided the international discussion on the problems posed by the people’s democracies is the correct method; each thesis was fully presented by various comrades (we are speaking of the comrades of the majority who at the Second World Congress came out against the revisionist tendencies, which dissolved after having fought us with a series of indirect attacks [Hasten is the prototype in this regard—F.B.]).

In particular, we believe that Germain’s ‘Ten Theses: What Should Be Modified and What Should Be Maintained in the Theses of the Second World Congress of the Fourth International on the Question of Stalinism!’—we emphasize that we mean the ‘Ten Theses’ and not their bizarre foreword—is a positive and extremely timely document in the discussion preparing for the World Congress. Its clarity fully exempts it from the obligation to engage in a polemic against the points of view expressed on several occasions by Pablo. This is the way a healthy discussion should start. But to remain healthy, it can’t stop there. The points on which there is disagreement must be brought before the full light of day, which is something that only a polemic can accomplish.

The goal of this document, which is addressed to our entire International, especially to all our leading comrades in the International, is to tell them fraternally and frankly of the danger that a whole series of new positions represents for the program, the activities, and the very existence of our International. We say: be careful; the scratch may become infected, and then gangrene can set in.

We don’t pretend to be infallible, we don’t think our theses are exempt from a number of insufficiencies, we don’t feel we have the right to give lessons to any of our comrades; but we say to them ‘Look out, our ship has lost its course; it’s urgent that we take our bearings and change our course.’

In his document ‘Where Are We Going!’ Comrade Pablo brings into full daylight the revisionist tendencies that were included in the International Secretariat’s draft thesis but were disguised in the Ninth Plenum’s [November 1950!] compromise resolution.

Beginning with its opening lines, the violent tone of this document is surprising, all the more so since we don’t know which members of the International Executive Committee and the International Secretariat were being taken to task in … January 1951. We will undoubtedly never know the names of the people in question, those ‘people who despair of the fate of humanity,’ nor those who have written that ‘the thinking of the international seems out of joint,’ nor those who ‘cry bitter tears’ (which Pablo wants to believe are genuine), nor those who ‘tailor history to their own measure,’ nor of those Trotskyist careerists who ‘desire that the entire process of the transformation of capitalist society into socialism would be accomplished within the span of their brief lives so that they can be rewarded for their efforts on behalf of the Revolution.’ [Emphasis added.]

I. The Theory of ‘Blocs’ and ‘Camps’ Makes in Appearance in the International.

‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles, one reads in that dustbin known as the Communist Manifesto.

But it’s necessary to keep abreast of the times and to admit without hesitation along with Pablo that:

‘For our movement objective social reality consists essentially of the capitalist regime and the Stalinist world. [International Information Bulletin, March 1951, ‘Where Are We Going?’ p.2. Emphasis added.]

Dry your tears and listen: the very essence of social reality is composed of the capitalist regime (!) and the Stalinist (!) world (?).

We thought that social reality consisted in the contradiction between the fundamental classes: the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Clearly an error, for from now on the capitalist regime, which encompasses precisely these two classes, becomes a totality that is counterposed …to the Stalinist world.

The term ‘world’ is quite obscure, you will say; but it offers some significant conveniences and permits classifying states and social groups according to the supreme criterion: their Stalinist or non-Stalinist ‘nature.’

Thus the state that arose from the Third Chinese Revolution (whose economy, let us recall, has retained a capitalist structure up to the present) is classified by Pablo as being in the Stalinist world. We will return to this question.

On the other hand,the Yugoslav workers state (where the economy is almost fully nationalized and planned) is expelled from the Stalinist world. And since it cannot remain outside the realm of objective social reality, it drifts objectively, though imperceptibly, into the enemy camp (along with its arms, bags and baggage, and dictatorship of the proletariat!).

In order to dispel any uncertainty as to his conception of contemporary history, Pablo continues:

‘Furthermore, whether we like it or not, these two elements (the capitalist regime and the Stalinist world) essentially constitute objective social reality, for the overwhelming majority of the forces opposing capitalism are tight now to be found under the leadership or influence of the Soviet bureaucracy.’ [‘Where Are We Going?,’ p.2. Emphasis added.]

Thus the sum total of Pablo’s ‘social’ criterion seems to be the political nature (Stalinist or non-Stalinist) of states and human groupings.

He gives us no details about the tiny remaining minority that is neither under the leadership nor influence of the bureaucracy. Let’s admit that it’s the exception that proves the rule. What then is this tiny minority of forces that are anticapitalist but non-Stalinist?

We don’t think it’s intended to include the millions of workers in the USA, England, Canada, Germany, etc., who are neither influenced nor led by Stalinism. We must then conclude that the proletariat in the most advanced countries of the world do not constitute ‘forces opposed to capitalism.’ They have been labelled and pigeonholed under the category ‘capitalist regime.’

It’s more difficult to pin this label on the massive liberation movements in North Africa, Black Africa, Madagascar, India, Ceylon, and Indonesia, a movement that cannot possibly be considered as either a tiny minority or belonging to the Stalinist world.

Thus, like it or not, classes, states, and nations must rush pell-mell into one camp or the other (capitalist regime or Stalinist world). Moreover, Pablo adds, the international relationship of social forces is, ‘to express it in a schematic way, the relationship of forces between the two blocs.’ [1] (p.5.)

What Pablo calls ‘expressing it in a schematic way’ in reality constitutes mixing and jumbling everything together, ending up with an incredible confusion. When analyzing situations it is impossible to abandon class lines even for an instant without ending up with such ‘schematic concepts’ and fruitless endeavors.

What? The international relationship of forces is the relationship of forces between the two blocs! Some progress.

Since contemporary social reality consists of the two blocs, the relationship of social forces is naturally .. .the relationship of forces between the two blocs! This logic is irreproachable, because it is a tautology.

We will be told that we have misinterpreted what Pablo is saying; he meant the international relationship of forces between the classes which, schematically, is the relationship between the blocs. But where is there any room here for the old-fashioned notion of classes? Where in Pablo’s document is there any serious analysis of the situation of the International proletariat? If he had tried to give any, he certainly wouldn’t have ended up with this astonishing notion of ‘blocs,’ nor would he have designated the international proletarian forces as the forces of this extraordinary ‘Stalinist world.

Furthermore, he explains what he means quite clearly when he talks about the respective roles of Stalin and the revolutionary proletariat within the very ‘Stalinist world.

According to him, ‘the revolutionary spirit of the masses directed against imperialism acts as an ADDITIONAL FORCE supplementing the material and technical forces raised against imperialism.’ (p.5 Emphasis added.)

In effect, he is making it quite clear that the revolutionary forces are the forces of the Stalinist world. But within this Stalinist world there are major forces: these are the material and technical forces—Soviet industry, the divisions of the Red Army; and there are supplementary forces, a sort of National Guard that is tacked on to these technical forces. The revolutionary spirit of 400 million Chinese workers, the Vietnamese, the Koreans, and all the working people in the ‘Stalinist world’ are the auxiliary forces of the socialist bastion led by Stalin.

Here you have the conclusion that necessarily emerges when the petty-bourgeois concept of a ‘bloc’ between states is substituted for a class analysis of world reality (an analysis of the contradiction between the international proletariat and the international imperialist bourgeoisie), that is, for the basic reality of the world we live in. Like it or not, on the basis of this concept the most one can do is provide more ammunition for Zhdanov, whose thesis rests on the following supreme postulate: the acid test for revolutionaries is their loyalty to the Soviet Union and to its leader Stalin. The petty-bourgeois concept of blocs necessarily leads to a choice between Stalin (with or without reservations) and Truman (with or without reservations).

The direction in which the choice is made depends solely on where the dominant pressure is coming from. In Central and Western Europe, the petty bourgeoisie tends to lean in a ‘neutralist’ direction, that is,to adapt to the Stalinist bureaucracy, which they see as having the prestige of power and of numerous ‘victories’ in Asia, in the buffer zone, etc.—and whose ‘material and technical forces’ are impressive by virtue of the fact that they are quite close at hand.

Marxists have been accustomed to starting out with the criterion of class. It was this class criterion that enabled Leon Trotsky and the Fourth International to take on the revisionists on the question of the USSR and to classify the degenerated workers state in the camp of the international proletariat. Today we are supposed to turn Marxism upside down, stand it on its Hegelian head, its legs waving toward the sky ‘of life’, of ‘objective social reality, in its essence’ (the worst of abstractions under the circumstances). And from this inconvenient position we are supposed to classify such-and-such section of a class, and such-and-such state, and such-and-such technical force in one or the other ‘bloc’, capitalist regime or Stalinist world.

II. The Beginning of a Revision on the Nature of the Bureaucracy

In Pablo’s article we discover the notion of a Soviet bureaucracy that will survive after the world revolution and then wither away by virtue of the development of productive forces. We read, in fact, that the Soviet bureaucracy will disappear in ‘two (contradictory) ways’:—’by the counterblows of the anti-capitalist victories in the world and even in the USSR, stimulating resistance of the masses to the bureaucracy’;

—’by elimination in the long run of the objective causes for the bureaucracy, for all bureaucracy, in direct proportion as the capitalist regime suffers setbacks and an ever increasing and economically more important sector escapes from capitalism and organizes itself on the basis of a state-ized and planned economy, thereby stimulating the growth of the productive forces.’ (p.5 Emphasis added.)

The second thesis, the idea that the bureaucracy will disappear through the development of the productive forces, contains as many errors as words:

(1) It establishes an amalgam between the Soviet bureaucracy and bureaucratism as it appeared in the USSR during Lenin’s lifetime.

(2) It begins with the notion of a slow and gradual decline (‘in direct proportion’) and of a slow accumulation of sectors in which a planned economy is installed. This is in flagrant contradiction with the perspective of a war that will be the final struggle between the classes, of a war that will determine the fate of world capitalism and that excludes capitalism’s being nibbled away over a lengthy period.

(3) Does Pablo—who believes, by the way, that a third world war is imminent—mean that in the very course of the war the development of the productive forces (which would be turned entirely toward the war effort at the expense of consumer goods for the masses) is capable of forcing a retreat in bourgeois norms of distribution? Or doesn’t he take seriously the notion that the third world war will be a final struggle, that is, does his perspective admit the possibility that the outcome of this war might be a new situation of equilibrium between the fundamental classes, with fewer bourgeois states coexisting with more numerous workers states?

Actually, the principal fault with the second thesis is the fact that it even exists, because it is equivalent to conceding that the Soviet bureaucracy can survive after the victory of the world revolution over imperialism. It is in direct contradiction with the first thesis (the traditional Trotskyist thesis), which is juxtaposed in an eclectic manner to the second thesis (Pablo’s thesis).

In the draft theses that Pablo presented to the Ninth Plenum of the IEC, whose relationship to his personal positions we have noted, the sole explanation given for the Soviet bureaucracy’s hostility to world revolution was the following vulgar economist explanation:

‘If (the bureaucracy) cannot capitulate to imperialism without undermining its existence as such in the USSR; on the other hand, it cannot base itself on the proletariat and the extension of the world revolution, which would remove, by organizing and developing the productive forces in the world, the objective reasons for its existence and above all(?) : for die omnipotence of any bureaucracy!’

The notion here is perfectly clear and is substituted for the Trotskyist notion of the bureaucracy’s incompatibility, not with planning and the development of productive forces, but with the revolutionary action of the masses, whose ‘first revolutionary victory in Europe,’ [2] Trotsky said, ‘will have the effect of an electric shock on the Soviet masses, awakening them, reviving the traditions of 1905 and 1917, weakening the position of the bureaucracy; it will have no less importance for the Fourth International than the victory of the October Revolution had for the Third International.’

The bureaucracy is not afraid of the development of productive forces. It is not holding back development in the USSR of its own will but rather through its incapacity. To the extent that its very character permits, it will try to increase development. Its slender results in relation to the great possibilities of planning both inside and outside the USSR don’t stem from a fear of disappearing following a growth in income sufficient to eradicate social inequality. [3] What the bureaucracy fears is not the growth of productive forces. What they fear is the awakening of the consciousness of the Soviet masses in contact with a revolution in another country.

The main danger in the explanation given by Pablo (even when juxtaposed with the discussion of another, correct explanation, the above one) is that it has the effect of masking the organically counterrevolutionary nature of the workers bureaucracy in the Soviet Union. This bureaucracy cannot be equated with the bureaucratism inherent in any society in which a scarcity in consumer goods exist. This bureaucracy is the result of nearly thirty years of the degeneration of a workers state. Politically, it has totally expropriated the Soviet proletariat. Contrary to what Pablo states, wherever it has been able to act bureaucratically or to maintain its bureaucratic control over the masses, the Soviet bureaucracy had tried to develop the productive forces (in the USSR and in the annexed or satellite territories) in order to strengthen the base of its own privileges and increase their extent. On the other hand, its liquidationist attitude toward the revolution that began in France in 1936; the way it brutally crushed the conscious cadres of the Spanish revolution; its complicity with Hitler in order to allow him to crush the Warsaw uprising; its Yalta policy against the interests of the revolution in Greece, Italy, Yugoslavia, and France; its blockade and military pressure against the Yugoslav workers state in the hope of delivering it bound hand and foot to imperialism (contrary to the interests of defending the USSR itself) unequivocally express the incompatibility between the Soviet bureaucracy and the development of the proletarian revolution. Such a revolution would represent a immediate and direct threat to the bureaucracy’s existence and it would do so even more sharply if it were to take place in an economically less backward country.

* * *

Leaving the door open, however timidly, to the hypothesis that the Thermidorian bureaucracy of the USSR could survive a third world war is to revise the Trotskyist analysis of the bureaucracy. First, as we have seen it calls into question the bureaucracy’s nature as a parasitic growth of the workers movement that lives off the advantage of the equilibrium between the fundamental classes. At the same time, this concept leaves the door open to the negation of its working-class nature. [4]

—Second, it overestimates the capacity of the USSR’s technical means when confronted with those of imperialism. —Third, it underestimates the breadth of the revolutionary movement in Asia and around the world. — Fourth, it accepts the notion that the Soviet bureaucracy can exist peacefully alongside a victorious revolution in the advanced countries.

— Above all, and here is where what Pablo really thinks comes in, it accepts the notion that the Soviet bureaucracy will not oppose the extension of the revolution but will even stimulate it.

In giving priority to ‘technical and material forces’ as opposed to the revolutionary struggle of the masses, however, Pablo does not go as far as the thesis of our comrades in Lyon. [5] This apparent superiority expresses a total incomprehension of the predominant role of the mass revolutionary struggle in the development and the outcome of a third world war.

The marked inferiority of the technical means at the disposal of the proletariat in the present world situation, a situation of ‘blocs,’ as Pablo puts it, becomes transformed into the proletariat’s superiority in direct proportion with its revolutionary mobilization, with an increase in its level of class consciousness and socialist consciousness, and with its revolutionary victories over imperialism. The military relationship of forces is politically determined. The Thermidorian bureaucracy in the USSR will play an even more emphatic counter-revolutionary role when it sees an upsurge in the revolution take shape, and when it sees mass socialist consciousness threatening its own domination in the USSR.

In its enormous struggle to smash the coalition of the imperialist bourgeoisie and its vast material means, the revolution will liquidate the Thermidorian bureaucracy in the USSR along the way. Otherwise the Thermidorian bureaucracy will impede, sabotage, and use military force against the revolutionary movement of the masses, paving the way for the victory of imperialist barbarism and for its own disappearance as a parasitic caste in the degenerated workers state.

All the experiences since 1933 have shown the role of the Soviet bureaucracy with increasing clarity and simply express its dual character—working-class and counter-revolutionary—its fundamentally contradictory nature, and its impasse. This bureaucracy will not survive a third world war, a war between the classes, a war whose outcome can only be world revolution or, failing that, a victory for imperialism that would liquidate all the conquests of the working class in both the USSR and the rest of the world.

III. From ‘Stalinist Ideology’ to the New ‘Bureaucratic Class’

Several times in the past the tendency to revise the Trotskyist concept of the Soviet bureaucracy has been expressed through the notion that Stalinism has its own ideology. Pablo seems to share this belief today when he speaks of the ‘co-leadership of the international Stalinist movement’ (our emphasis) by China and the Kremlin.

‘…China,’ he writes,’could not play the role of a mere satellite of the Kremlin but rather of a partner which henceforth imposes upon the Soviet bureaucracy a certain co-leadership of the international Stalinist movement. This co-leadership is, however, a disruptive element within Stalinism. …’ (‘Where Are We Going!’ p. 9. Emphasis added.)

What does this Russian-Chinese ‘co-leadership’ of the international Stalinist movement mean? Is there then a Chinese Stalinism alongside Russian Stalinism! What is the social base of this Chinese Stalinism? What then is its ideology? Is there really a Stalinist ideology?

We reply in the negative to all these questions.

The bureaucracy in the USSR has never even been capable of trying to define a new ideology, contrary to the way in which any historically necessary social formation, any class, operates. When you speak of the Stalinism of a Communist Party, you are nor speaking of a theory, of an overall programme, of definite and lasting concepts, but only of its leadership’s subordination to orders from the Kremlin bureaucracy. This is the Trotskyist conception. The ‘Stalinism’ of the international Stalinist movement is defined by this movement’s subordination to the bureaucracy of the USSR.

‘The Stalinist bureaucracy, however, not only has nothing in common with Marxism but is in general foreign to any doctrine or system whatsoever. Its ‘ideology’ is thoroughly permeated with police subjectivism, its practice is the empiricism of crude violence. In keeping with its essential interests the caste of usurpers is hostile to any theory: it can give an account of its social role neither to itself nor to anyone else. Stalin revises Marx and Lenin not with the theoretician’s pen but with the heel of the GPU.’ (Leon Trotsky: Stalinism and Bolshevism, New Park Publications, 1974, p.15.)

Would it be possible to have a Stalinist co-leadership, a dual subordination, one part of which would be .. .the Chinese revolution in full ascendancy? Is a modified version of Stalinist ideology supposed to have survived the victory of the revolutionary masses in China or is it supposed to have arisen in the course of the revolution?

But, Pablo adds, this co-leadership is a disruptive element for Stalinism. This clarification introduces a new confusion.

We are compelled on the contrary to state that the disruptive element in the ‘international Stalinist movement’ as such is the Chinese revolution and that this celebrated co-leadership, far from being a disruptive element, expresses an inherently temporary compromise between the counter-revolutionary bureaucracy of the USSR and its NEGATION, the Chinese revolution. This compromise reflects the lag between consciousness and reality, and more particularly the slowness with which China has begun to accomplish the tasks of the permanent revolution. We will return to this question.

The notion of co-leadership betrays a vast incomprehension of the irreducible character of the contradiction between the Soviet bureaucracy and a revolution in motion. Pablo has spoken several times of the victories ‘victories’ or ‘pseudo-victories’ of Stalinism when designating the development of the revolution in China, Asia, or elsewhere.

For Comrade Pablo, the most important lesson of the Yugoslav and Chinese revolutions is that it is important not to confuse them with ‘pure and simple victories (?) of the Soviet bureaucracy’!

For us, the lesson is that the development of the revolution is a defeat and a death threat for the bureaucracy, which does not evaluate the ‘revolution in all its forms’ from the same perspective as Comrade Pablo.

When this comrade adds that ‘the evolution of China can prove different from that of the Soviet bureaucracy,’ we have reached the height of confusion.(p.l2. Emphasis added.)

If someone can explain to us at what conjuncture, in what century, and on what planet the evolution of China could have even proved comparable to that of the Soviet bureaucracy—we’d like to hear about it.

This notion is only admissible if we accept beforehand Burnham’s thesis of the rapid formation (if not the pre-existence) of a bureaucracy of the Soviet type within the very course of a revolution.

In that case, this bureaucracy would not only have an ideology of international value, but we would have to accord it a historically progressive role. On the contrary, however, everything leads us to believe that the outcome of a revolution—even one that is isolated—will necessarily prove different and distinct from that of the USSR even if this revolution must degenerate because of its isolation and weakness. Trotsky has clearly demonstrated, in opposition to the revisionists, that the degeneration of the USSR has a specific historical character.

The Centuries of Transition

Are we compelled to revise Trotsky’s opinion on this point as well? Are the norms of the dictatorship of the proletariat, of the withering away of the state, outmoded and consigned to the rubbish bin by ‘life’ and by experience? Is the Soviet workers state really a degenerated workers state (a counter-revolutionary workers state, Trotsky said) [6] or, on the contrary, is it the prototype of what the transition between capitalism and socialism will be like after the victory of the world revolution? Although he doesn’t pronounce himself clearly in favour of one position over the other, and although his statements on this point are quite contradictory, Comrade Pablo does seem to lean toward the second response.

To those people-who-despair-of-die-fate-of-humanity, he replies that the transitional society between capitalism and socialism will last for several centuries (in oral discussion he has been more precise and has spoken of two or three centuries). [7] ‘… this transformation will probably take an entire historical period of several centuries and will in the meantime be filled with forms and regimes transitional between capitalism and socialism and necessarily deviating from ‘pure’ forms and norms.’ (‘Where Are We Going?’ p.13. Emphasis added.)

We are quite ready to engage in any struggle against purist utopians who subordinate reality to norms in order to reject reality. But we don’t see any sense in such a struggle at present, since we are unaware of any expression of this ‘purism’ within the international majority that emerged from the Second World Congress.

What we do see, on the other hand, is that the degenerated bureaucracy of the USSR has become the new norm, that Pablo is constructing a new utopia based on it, that the transitional society (‘several centuries …’) takes on a character of the sort that the Soviet-type bureaucracy (which is confused with all manifestations of bureaucratism that are inherent wherever you have a low level of the development of productive forces and a low level of culture) becomes a historically necessary evil, that is, a class.

What we see is that the bureaucratic caste of the USSR, which we consider to be the specific product of twenty-five years of degeneration of the first workers state, is supposed to be only the prefiguration of the ‘caste’ called on to lead the world for two or three centuries. So the notion of a ‘caste’ has been sent packing, and what’s really involved here is a class that was not foreseen by Marx, Engels, Lenin, or Trotsky.

As realists, we will have to revise Trotsky and his writings since the New Course because they are full of errors and misunderstandings on the historically progressive role of the bureaucracy. His explanation for the formation of the bureaucracy in the USSR is tainted from the start by its old-fashioned, utopian, and outmoded norms that have been contradicted by reality.

His attachment to these norms led him to consider the evolution of the USSR as a particular, exceptional, and specific violation of the norm.

‘In the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet state it is not the general laws of modern society from capitalism to socialism which finds expression but a special, exceptional, and temporary refraction of these laws under the conditions of a backward revolutionary country in a capitalist environment. (Leon Trotsky: ‘The USSR in ‘War’ in In Defence of Marxism, New Park Publications, 1971, p.8.)

What Trotsky calls degeneration is thus in reality the process that must begin after the victory of the world revolution and will last two or three centuries. And Trotsky put himself on the wrong side of the barricades when he wrote:

“The most honest or open-eyed of the ‘friends’ of the USSR console themselves with the thought that ‘a certain’ bureaucratic degeneration in the given conditions was historically inevitable. Even so! The resistance to this degeneration also has not fallen from the sky. A necessity has two ends: the reactionary and the progressive. History teaches us that persons and parties which drag at the opposite ends of a necessity turn out in the long run on opposite sides of the barricade.” (Leon Trotsky: ‘Socialism in One Country,’ in The Revolution Betrayed, New Park Publications, 1973, pp.307-8.)

He didn’t foresee that in the third world war the Soviet bureaucracy would be called on to carry out the function of gravedigger for world imperialism, to make an ‘international’ anti-capitalist revolution, or at least to co-operate with it. Neither Trotsky nor the Fourth International—a tragic misunderstanding—were aware of that up to this day.

Some Clarifications on an Incorrect Formulation

When we read in the Ninth Plenum resolution the following declaration on the defense of the Soviet Union: ‘The defence of the USSR constitutes the strategic line of the Fourth International, and its tactical application remains, as in the past, subordinated to unimpeded development of the mass movement in opposition to any attempt on the part of the Soviet bureaucracy, the Russian army, and the Stalinist leaderships to throttle and crush it. When we read this we are tempted to see no more than an incorrect formulation.

But we would be blind if we were to maintain this position after having studied the document in which the secretary of the International sets forth his perspective more fully, deriving it from the division of the world into the capitalist regime and the Stalinist world, a division considered as the essence of social reality in our epoch.

If we adopted this revisionist perspective it would seem to be necessary to go much further, to follow its logic to the end and to subordinate tactical application to the strategic line. It is precisely this principled attitude, this constant subordination of tactics to strategy, that distinguishes Marxism from opportunism of every stripe.

Pablo cannot remain there, straddling a fence. He must bring tactics into accord with not only strategy but also with a social analysis (his analysis) of the ‘present’ world.

If on the contrary we retain Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky’s analysis of society and their methodology, if we refuse to abandon the solid ground on which the foundations of our International rest, if we refuse to abandon this in favour of the quicksand of revisionism, our Third World Congress will of necessity return to the Trotskyist definition of the defence of the Soviet Union.

For Trotsky, the defence of the USSR did not constitute a ‘strategic line.’ The strategic line of the Fourth International is the world revolution.

Defence of the USSR against imperialism, like the defence of any workers state, is one of the tasks of this strategy, tasks that are entirely subordinated to the perspective of world revolution, to the strategy of the revolutionary mobilization of the masses.

Defence of the USSR cannot take the place of the strategic line of the World Party of Revolution—any more than the defence of the Yugoslav workers state or any other workers state could.

Therein lies the difference between Trotskyism and the Titoist and Stalinist varieties of centrism.

No unclarity can be allowed to remain in this discussion. Incorrect formulations on such questions are genuine errors of doctrine. No document of the International can today allow itself the slightest imprecision in defining the defence of the USSR and the place of this defence in our strategy. The defence of the USSR and of all the workers states constitutes a task of the Fourth International, a task that as such and in all its tactical applications must be entirely subordinated to the strategy of the struggle for the world revolution, to the unimpeded development of the masses, etc. [8]

Pablo Yields Ground to Martinet

This notion that the defense of the USSR (or of the ‘Stalinist world’) must be a strategic line has perhaps been most thoroughly developed by Gilles Martinet. Martinet is, in fact, the spokesman for the entire Stalinist intelligentsia in France. The Second World Congress correctly characterized his position as the Stalinist counterpart to Burnham’s revisionism.

The pro-Stalinist manifestation (a product of the Stalinist pressure in France) of this revisionism has been given its fullest form by Bettelheim, Martinet, & Co. in Revue Internationale. When they themselves apply the concepts mentioned above to the present world situation, they arrive at the following conclusions:

‘a) Owing to its lack of homogeneity and technical education, the working class will be obliged to pass through a stage of social differentiation and inequality after its conquest of power. Historic progress is assured by the privileged strata of the proletariat (the bureaucracy). It is the task of the state to defend these privileges.

‘b) During the epoch of decaying imperialism, the proletariat ceases to grow numerically and ideologically and instead retreats, witnessing the decline of its strength and the decay of its social structure. The failure of the ‘classic’ proletarian revolutions of 1918-23 is final. The Leninist strategy of the proletarian revolution is a thing of the past. In views of this incapacity of the proletariat to fulfill its historic mission, humanity has no other road to progress except to try to ‘participate’ in the stratification of the means of production by the Soviet bureaucracy on an ever larger scale,and to draw up a new minimum programme in order to attenuate the violent character of this process. …

‘There is no room for [these revisionist tendencies] in the revolutionary movement. But some of their features appear at the bottom of mistaken conceptions on the Russian question which have found expression in our own ranks. What is important is first of all to lay bare the inner logic of this incipient revisionism and make its proponents aware of its dangerous consequences to the whole of Marxism. [‘The USSR and Stalinism: Theses Adopted by the Second World Congress of the Fourth International, April 1948,’ in Fourth International, June 1948, p. 125.]

In ‘Where Are We Going?’ Pablo throws this analysis overboard, declaring:

‘Our fundamental (!) difference with certain neo-apologists for Stalinism, of the Gilles Martinet stripe in France, does not involve the fact that there are objective causes at work imposing transitional forms of the society and of the power succeeding capitalism, which are quite far from the ‘norms’ outlined by the classics of Marxism prior to the Russian Revolution. Our difference is over the fact that these neo-Stalinists present Stalinist policy as the expression of a consistent, realistic Marxism which, consciously and in full awareness of the goal, is marching toward socialism while taking into account the requirements of the situation.’ (p.8.)

Note first of all that contrary to the notion Pablo elaborated above, Martinet does not repudiate the Soviet bureaucracy; instead he considers it a necessary evil on which falls defacto the task of destroying imperialism, and which will be overturned historically by the development of productive forces. It is his servility when faced with an accomplished fact, his tendency to generalize on the basis of the degeneration of the first workers state in order to transform a specific historical fact into a general historical necessity, more than his evaluations of Stalin’s ‘Marxism’ that make Martinet the most agile theoretician of the Thermidorian counter-revolution. The definition Trotsky gave in ‘After Munich’ applies to him without qualification:

‘Only the overthrow of the Bonapartist Kremlin clique can make possible the regeneration of the military strength of the USSR. Only the liquidation of the ex-Comintern will clear the way for revolutionary internationalism. The struggle against war, imperialism, and fascism demands a ruthless struggle against Stalinism splotched with crimes. Whoever defends Stalinism directly or indirectly, whoever keeps silent about its betrayals or exaggerates its military strength is the worst enemy of the revolution, of socialism, and of the oppressed peoples. The sooner the Kremlin gang is overthrown by the armed offensive of the workers, the greater will be the chances for a socialist regeneration of the USSR, the closer and broader will be the perspectives of the international revolution.’ (Writings of Leon Trotsky: 1938-9, p.16.)

Such is the language we expected from the secretary of the International in regard to the wing of the petty bourgeoisie that has capitulated before Stalinism and its supposed ‘victories.’ In place of that we are supposed to accept an ambiguous definition (actually the absence of a definition) based on a stupid quarrel over Stalin’s merits as a theoretician.

The Chinese Comrades’ Error Corrected With Another Error

It would be useless to deny that the Chinese comrades’ error weighs very heavily on the present discussion. Not only does it explain in part the orientation presented by Pablo, but Comrade Pablo also uses it openly as an argument in defence of his thesis and in the hope of overwhelming his adversaries.

We are not overwhelmed and for a whole series of reasons, among them the following:

(1) In April 1950 one of us, Comrade Bleibtreu, spoke before a public meeting of the ‘Lenin Circle’ on the problems of the Chinese revolution. Vietnamese, Chinese, French, and Sinhalese comrades attended the meeting. It concluded with an analysis of the Chinese revolution and the Chinese Communist Party, and with the necessity for Trotskyists to enter the Chinese Communist Party and form its consistent Marxist wing, a wing capable of resolving in both theory and practice the tasks of the permanent revolution.

This led, among other things, to his being vigorously contradicted by a member of the International Secretariat.

(2) The Central Committee of the PCI [Parti Communiste Internationaliste—Internationalist Communist Party met December 2, 1950, and passed a resolution asking the International Secretariat to take a position on the Chinese events and on the errors of the Chinese comrades. To date we have had no response from the International Secretariat or the International Executive Committee. We hope that this document will see the light of day before the World Congress, because it would represent an essential element of clarification.

In the face of this persistent silence, we are compelled to take the initiative in a discussion that the international leadership should have begun.

What Was the Error in China?

According to Comrade Pablo, this error began ‘following the victory of Mao Tse-tung.’ (‘Where Are We Going?’ p. 17.) In our opinion, it predates this victory by quite a bit.

A revolution had been developing in China since 1946, a revolution in which the Trotskyists should have been an integral part. Abandoned by Stalin, whose advice aimed at forming a National Front government with Chiang Kai-shek they had rejected,and encircled by virtue of the fact that the Red Army had given up Manchuria to Chiang, the Chinese leaders had to confront the most powerful offensive the white troops ever launched against the Seventh Army. The only possibility that remained open to them (like the situation confronting the leaders of the Yugoslav Communist Party 1942-43) was the revolutionary mobilization of the masses. Rejecting their Stalinist course of the previous years, they adopted a limited programme of agrarian reform, which the masses greeted with immense enthusiasm. Mass peasant committees and resistance groups sprang up everywhere and organized themselves to defend and extend the agrarian reform and to crush Chiang, the representative of the landlords. The advances Mao’s army made were above all the product of the massive levy of the revolutionary peasantry, and of the parallel collapse of Chiang’s peasant army, which was contaminated by the revolution and the thirst for land. The Chinese CP itself underwent a change in its social composition. The literate sons of well-to-do peasants, who constituted the backbone of its cadres up to that time (and certain among whom tended to oppose the explosion of elementary violence set off by the turn their party had made), were submerged by an influx of new militants hardened on the forge of the revolution itself.

Thus:

(1) The birth of the Chinese revolution was the beginning of the end of the Chinese CP’s ‘Stalinism.’ [9]

(2) The Chinese CP stopped subordinating itself to directives from the Kremlin and became dependent on the masses and on their actions.

(3) Its social composition was actually modified.

(4) The Chinese CP stopped being a Stalinist party and became a centrist party advancing along with the revolution. This doesn’t mean that the Chinese CP became a revolutionary party ipso facto. It retained from its past a series of incorrect and bureaucratic concepts that came to be reflected in its actions:

—by the timid character of its agrarian reform;

—by its limiting itself to North China;

—by the Chinese CP’s conscious effort to keep the urban proletariat isolated from the revolution. [10] The dialectic of social reality has already partially withdrawn certain barriers, and there are reasons to hope that this course will continue.

In any event, it is absurd to speak of a Stalinist party in China, and still more absurd to foster belief in even the resemblance of a ‘victory of Stalinism in China.’

The Korean war temporarily presented Stalin with both the means to slow down the Chinese revolution’s progress toward the solution of the tasks of the permanent revolution and to re-establish partial control over the Chinese CP. This explains Stalin’s policy of ‘nonintervention’ at the time when the victorious march of the Korean armies could, with a minimum of support, have driven the imperialists into the sea. This also explains the scantiness of his present aid and his fear of a solution, especially of a solution in favour of the Korean revolution.

But when all is said and done, the reality of class struggle will prove more powerful than the Kremlin apparatus and its maneuvers.

The error of the two Chinese groups is precisely to have failed to grasp the social reality. They have identified the revolution with Stalinism, which means identifying Stalinism with its negation.

The Chinese comrades turned their backs on the revolutionary movement of the masses, fell back when confronted with its march forward, and finally ended up in Hong Kong. [11]

Their greatest error was not their failure to understand Stalinism; it was a different and much more serious lack of comprehension.

They didn’t recognize the very face of the revolution. They saw the advance of Mao’s revolutionary armies as a step forward for Stalinism. They failed to understand that it is the action of classes that is fundamental,that it is social classes and not the apparatuses that make history, and that once it gets going, the action of masses is more powerful than the strongest apparatus.

In many respects Comrade Pablo revives the analytical errors of the Chinese comrades, even if he draws conclusions that are contrary, though just as disastrous.

He makes the same error on the nature of the Chinese revolution, which he considers as a victory—not a ‘pure and simple victory’ but nevertheless a victory of Stalinism.

This error flows from the erroneous notion of the Stalinist world and is expressed in the notion of Russian-Chinese co-leadership of the international Stalinist movement.

He shares the same erroneous criteria concerning the ‘Stalinist’ nature of a Communist Party. The Stalinist nature of a CP is constituted by its direct and total dependence in respect to the interests and policy of the Kremlin. A refusal on the part of the Chinese CP to accept the legal existence of a Trotskyist tendency—either inside or outside its ranks—and even the repression against this tendency would in no way constitute a criterion that ‘demonstrates its bureaucratic and Stalinist character’ (Pablo), but solely its lack of understanding of the permanent revolution, a lack of understanding that is not specifically Stalinist. We have often been served up such absurdities to ‘prove’ the ‘Stalinist’ character of the Yugoslav CP, which petty-bourgeois idealists don’t hesitate to define as Stalinism without Stalin!

He shares the same lack of understanding of the relationships between the masses, the CP, and the Kremlin bureaucracy: Pablo places an equals-sign between the dual nature of the CPs and the dual nature of the Soviet bureaucracy.

Generally, we would not deny that 2=2. But combining two errors (for example, Comrade Pablo’s error and the Chinese comrades error) is not the equivalent of combining two correct statements(for example, the thesis of our Central Committee and Comrade Germain’s ‘Ten Theses’). Thus it’s not always true that 2=2.

The dual nature of the Soviet bureaucracy is both the reflection and the product of contradictions in Soviet society. It is expressed through the Bonapartism of Stalinism when it is confronted with social forces inside the Soviet Union and on a world scale. The policy of the bureaucracy is not dual but rather forms an integral whole throughout all its variations: it’s a policy of balancing between the basic classes.

The dual nature of the CP means something quite different and expresses a different contradiction because of the fact that a parasitic bureaucracy of the Soviet type doesn’t exist internationally. The duality, the contradiction of a CP stems from the fact that it is a workers party by virtue of its social base (a necessary base for the Kremlin’s balancing act) and a Stalinist party by virtue of its politics and its leadership (a leadership chosen from above on the basis of its total submission to the Kremlin’s orders).

The thing that defines a workers party as Stalinist.—as opposed to a revolutionary party or a social-democratic party (linked to the bourgeoisie) or any sort of a centrist party—is neither a Stalinist ideology (which doesn’t exist), nor bureaucratic methods (which exist in all kinds of parties), but rather its total and mechanical subordination to the Kremlin.

When for one reason or another this subordination ceases to exist, that party ceases to be Stalinist and expresses interests that are different from those of the bureaucratic caste in the USSR. This is what happened (because of the revolutionary action on the part of the masses) in Yugoslavia well before the break in relations; the break only made it official. This is what has already happened in China, and will inevitably be reflected by a break in relations no matter what course the Chinese revolution takes.

A break in relations or a gradual differentiation within the Chinese CP, an eventuality that flows first from the correct evaluation of the nature of the CPs (an evaluation we gave in some detail at the Fourth Congress of our party in 1947) that was developed by the Second World Congress, and then from the lessons of the Yugoslav experience, would have the effect of greatly stimulating the revolutionary struggle in Asia, Europe, and Africa. It would also facilitate revolutionary victories in a series of countries, diminish considerably imperialism’s capacity for resistance and counterattack, and increase the level of consciousness and the combativity of workers in the advanced industrial countries. At the same time, it would modify in a favourable way the relationship of forces within the workers movement, making it more receptive to the revolutionary programme and thus infinitely more effective in the class struggle. The Chinese CP’s declaration of its independence in regard to the Kremlin and its steps toward accomplishing the tasks of the permanent revolution both in China and internationally are events that will probably take place before imperialism can start a world war.

It is under this perspective—with the Chinese masses, with the Chinese CP, against Stalin—that the actions of our Chinese comrades must be corrected. In every country where a Stalinist party has an extensive working-class base, the International must work under this broader perspective of the independence of the workers movement and its communist vanguard with respect to the Kremlin’s policy.

Concerning our Tasks

Never before has the Fourth International had such possibilities for implanting itself as the leadership in a mass revolutionary struggle. Nor has it ever (and this is a corollary of the revolutionary upsurge around the world) had such possibilities for gaining the ear of Communist workers organized in the Stalinist parties. Never in the past (and this is a function of the very development of the worldwide revolutionary upsurge) have we witnessed so profound a worldwide crisis of Stalinism.

Despite the fact that they consider these things as Stalin’s ‘victories,’ as proof of ‘his revolutionary effectiveness,’ the most conscious Communist workers will not accept the notion advanced by their leaders that socialism will be installed by the Red Army. They are seeking the road of class action, of the emancipation of workers by the workers themselves. This concern of theirs actually touches upon a fundamental aspect of the proletarian revolution, an aspect that dominates the works of Marx and Lenin: that is, that the essence of a proletarian revolution is not this or that economic measure but rather the proletariat’s gaining of consciousness, its molecular mobilization, the formation of its consciousness as an active and dominant class. This notion of Marx and Lenin has been strikingly confirmed by the example of the buffer zone on the one hand and, inversely, by the Russian revolution [12] and partially by the revolution in Yugoslavia on the other. We are not talking about a priori norms but rather about the very essence of the proletarian revolution: the working class gaining a consciousness of itself and setting itself up as the ruling class,not only by taking power but also and above all by exercising the dictatorship of the proletariat and building socialism. And this latter task is not a mechanical phenomenon (the opposite of capitalist development) but requires the intervention of the proletariat as a conscious class. [13] This is the ABC. The experience of the USSR confirms it 100 per cent (relative stagnation domestically and a counter-revolutionary policy abroad), as does the Yugoslav experience, the Chinese experience and, in a negative way, the experience in the buffer zone.

No serious Communist worker criticizes Stalin for being afraid of world war, for refusing to declare the war-revolution or the revolution-war. On the contrary, what the best of them criticize him for is for subordinating the class struggle in other countries to the diplomatic and military needs of the USSR, subordinating the strategic line of the proletarian revolution to one of its tasks, the defence of one of the workers states.

In France the crisis of Stalinism, which has just manifested itself in the split among the mine workers, is fuelled continually by the ample proof that the French CP is an inadequate instrument for making a revolution:

— the ineffectiveness of its policy of supporting national fronts, of building ‘New Democracy’ (the politics of Yalta);

—the ineffectiveness of its policy of [parliamentary] opposition, of its leadership in the important class struggles since 1947 (the Zhdanov line);

—the incapacity of Stalinism to contribute toward uniting the proletarian forces.

All the strikes up to the present have reinforced the impression held by Communist workers that the French CP is not leading the proletariat toward revolution, but toward neutralization of the French bourgeoisie and a period of waiting for the war and the Red Army’s entry into it.

The Communist workers witnessed their struggle against the war in Vietnam—an undertaking the French CP had entered with a violence tainted with adventurism—subordinated to the campaign around the Stockholm appeal.

They witnessed their struggle against the eighteen months halted in mid-course and used as a springboard for the Sheffield-Warsaw appeal.

A great uneasiness spread among members of the French CP (and certainly among members of other CPs) in the fall of 1950, when the imperialist armies in Korea were within an inch of pulling out and a minimum of material support would have been sufficient to assure a success of immense scope for the entire Asian revolution. They saw that Stalin—applying the same policy of non-intervention he had used against the ascendant phase of the Spanish revolution—then allowed the imperialist armies to regain the offensive. This uneasiness was expressed so widely that the leadership of the French CP had to respond publicly—using Jeanette Vemersch as a mouthpiece—in the following way: Those who demand that the USSR intervene in Korea don’t understand what a world war would be like. This response disarmed the burgeoning opposition, because no Communist worker wanted a world war. What they were demanding wasn’t intervention but an end to the de facto embargo on arms that was strangling the Korean revolution.

It comes as no surprise that the Stalinist leaders are still inventive enough to pull the wool over the eyes of Communist workers. But what is surprising and inadmissible is that La Verite, through Comrade Pablo’s [14] articles, did nothing to take advantage of this crisis, although:

—it explained that it was difficult to make pronouncements about Stalin’s intentions;

— it remained silent about the meaning of his non-intervention;

—it did not wage a systematic and sustained campaign to publicize the demand the Communist workers were making on their leadership: Airplanes and artillery for Korea,

—worse yet, it adopted J. Vermersch’s evaluation of the situation as its own (aiding Korea means a world war), simply adding that if Stalin were a real revolutionary he wouldn’t be afraid of entering a world war (war-revolution, revolution-war).

Here we have a convincing application of the orientation Comrade Pablo refers to as ‘Closer to the Communist workers.’ It reminds us of the politics of the right-wing tendency that left our party. This tendenency also fought for the slogan ‘Closer to the Communist workers,’ which meant closer to Stalinist politics.

In the present case, La Verite was closer to Stalinist politics (it played the role of the MacArthur of the ‘Stalinist world’) but quite far removed from the concerns of the Communist workers; it didn’t help them find the correct response to their uneasiness.

By virtue of its methodology, perspectives, and application, this brand of politics is related to the most negative aspects of the history of our International. Through its impressionism and empiricism, its passive submission before accomplished facts and apparent ‘power,’ and through its abandonment of a class strategy, it revives all the errors of the right wing in the French party, of Hasten [15],” and of many other tendencies that followed a liquidationist course.

The Alarm Signal

We think that Comrade Pablo’s orientation is neither clear nor definitively set. We are convinced that he will correct his errors without too great a difficulty. But this isn’t the question. Comrade Pablo is also a leader of the International. This means that the positions he takes do not involve just him. His line has already been partially expressed in the Plenum resolution, which is a confused and contradictory document, the result of an unprincipled bloc between two lines, and the very model of an eclectic document.

But above all, a whole series of alarming signs have emerged as direct consequences of this theoretical hodgepodge.

On the one hand, a Stalinist tendency is rapidly developing in the International. Certainly Comrade Pablo can say, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, that this isn’t what he wanted. He can even apply a vigorous ‘self-criticism’ across the shoulders of politically weak comrades who tried to be more consistent than those who inspired them. But the remedy only disguises the disease and doesn’t heal it.

Similar destructive tendencies in the International have appeared on the editorial staff of our English comrades.

In France they cropped up among our comrades in Lyon, whose resolution we have cited.

They have appeared in our Central Committee, where Comrade Mestre stated her support for the Stalinist slogan of a struggle against German rearmament, manifestly subordinating the problem of the German and French proletariat’s gaining consciousness and taking up revolutionary struggle to the military defence of the USSR, seen in Stalinist terms as the number-one priority, the strategic line.

On the other hand, tendencies toward rejecting the defence of the USSR have already appeared and will inevitably develop. Some comrades who are troubled by the present tendency toward revisionism on the nature of the bureaucracy and on the Trotskyist concept of the defence of the USSR will inevitably break away from both Trotskyism and the defence of the USSR. We must seriously consider the defection of Natalia Trotsky, whose radically false concepts on the question of the USSR didn’t prevent the Second World Congress from placing her on its honorary presidium.

The orientation that has been outlined threatens to lead to the splintering of our International into a Stalinist tendency and a tendency that is defeatist toward the USSR.

We must react without delay and return to the Marxist method of analyzing society, return to the Leninist concept of the function of the working class, return to the Trotskyist analysis of the degeneration of the USSR and of the character of the bureaucracy, return to Trotsky’s fundamental statement that the crisis of humanity is and remains the crisis of revolutionary leadership, return to the revolutionary working-class line, that of the construction and the victory of the Fourth International, the World Party of the Socialist Revolution.

Footnotes

[1] Thus two camps have been formed in the world: on the one hand there is the imperialist and anti-democratic camp, whose basic goal is to establish American imperialism’s domination over the world and to crush democracy; on the other hand there is the anti-imperialist and democratic camp, whose basic goal consists in undermining imperialism, strengthening democracy, and liquidating the remnants of fascism.

‘The struggle between these two camps, between the imperialist and anti-imperialist camp, unfolds under conditions of a continued deepening of the overall crisis of capitalism, of a weakening of the forces of capitalism, and of the strengthening of the forces of socialism and democracy. (Zhdanov Theses, 1947, given to the first meeting of the Cominform in 1947.)

[2] So far as Europe is concerned, consider the bureaucracy’s policy in France (1936), Spain (1936-39), Poland (Warsaw uprising), Greece (1944-45), its efforts to prevent and overturn the Yugoslav revolution, its policy in France and Italy in the face of the revolutionary upsurge following the second world war.

[3] ‘…economic growth, while slowly bettering the situation of the toilers, promotes a swift formation of privileged strata,’ Trotsky said in the fundamental document defining the USSR (Revolution Betrayed, point D in the definition of the USSR, New Park Publications, 1973, p.255.)

[4] The draft theses presented by Pablo to the Ninth Plenum of the International Secretariat (point 2l, paragraph 3) spoke of the ‘conditions of economic exploitation’ of the Soviet proletariat by the bureaucracy. The idea of class exploitation no longer appears in the text adopted by the International Executive Committee, by the notion of historically necessary social layer (a class!) turns up again in Pablo’s document.

[5] “Once the war breaks out …the bureaucracy will no longer have any reason to oppose the development of mass revolutionary struggles in the imperialist camp. Quite the contrary the bureaucracy will have every interest in developing anything that will help undermine the military strength of the imperialist camp, including revolutionary movements of great scope. …’ (Thesis of the Lyons cell.)

The thesis as a whole comes down to this: up to the present the bureaucracy has been opposed to the revolution out of fear of military intervention by the imperialists. In the third world war the bureaucracy will no longer have this preoccupation and will become the leadership of the world revolution. This is much more consistent than Pablo’s thesis. The author of this resolution nevertheless was weak enough to renounce it in favour of Pablo’s position.

[6] Some voices cry out: “If we continue to recognize the USSR as a workers’ state, we will have to establish a new category: the counter-revolutionary workers’ state.” This argument attempts to shock our imagination by opposing a good programmatic norm to a miserable, mean, even repugnant reality. But haven’t we observed from day to day since 1923 how the Soviet state has played a more and more counter-revolutionary role on the international arena? Have we forgotten the experience of the Chinese Revolution, of the 1926 general strike in England and finally the very fresh experience of the Spanish Revolution? There are two completely counter-revolutionary workers’ internationals. These critics have apparently forgotten this “category.” The trade unions of France, Great Britain, the United States and other countries support completely the counter-revolutionary politics of the bourgeoisie. This does not prevent us from labelling them trade unions, from supporting their progressive steps and from defending them against the bourgeoisie. Why is it impossible to employ the same method with the counter-revolutionary workers’ state? In the last analysis a workers’ state is a trade union which has conquered power. The difference in attitude in these two cases is explainable by the simple fact that trade unions have a long history and we have been accustomed to consider them as realities and not simply as ‘categories’ in our programme. But, as regards the workers’ state there is being evinced an inability to learn to approach it as a real historical fact which has not subordinated itself to our programme. (Leon Trotsky:’Again and Once More Again on the Nature of the USSR,’ in In Defence of Marxism, New Park Publications 1971, pp.30-31)

[7] In 1651, three centuries ago, the bourgeoisie began to emerge in England.

In 1751, two centuries ago, it began to appear in France.

The two or three century transition period in which Pablo accords a necessary role to the bureaucracy would be longer than the period of bourgeois domination in the countries that developed the earliest, and three to six times longer than the worldwide domination of the capitalist bourgeoisie. It would therefore be difficult to find fault with applying the term class to the Soviet bureaucracy.

[8] In the Second World Congress theses there was already an unfortunate formulation, though it was appreciably different: ” ‘Defend what remains of the conquests of October’ is a (“a,” and not “the”) strategic line for the revolutionary party, and not alone a ‘slogan.’ ” [‘The USSR and Stalinism,’ Fourth International, June 1948, p. 114] It would have been more correct to say: ‘a strategic task’ or ‘a strategic orientation,’ formulations that are clearly opposed to the notion that the defense of the USSR is just a ‘slogan.’

‘The defence of the USSR coincides for us with the preparation of world revolution. Only those methods are permissible which do not conflict with the interests of the revolution. The defence of the USSR is related to the world socialist revolution as a tactical task is related to a strategic one. A tactic is subordinated to a strategic goal and in no case can be in contradiction to the latter.'(Leon Trotsky: ‘The USSR in War,’ in In Defence of Marxism, New Park Publications, 1971, p.ll.)

[9] A ‘Stalinism’ that was never very deeply entrenched at any given moment in the history of this party. Apart from the documents published by the Fourth International, a reading of the works of Mao Tse-tung (each page of which contains a more or less veiled attack on Stalin) is quite helpful in this regard.

[10] It is quite clear that the reasons for this stem from the difference between the proletariat’s aspirations and forms of action, and those of the peasantry. The peasantry desires bourgeois-democratic reforms and mobilizes spontaneously in the form of partisan armies. The proletariat has socialist aspirations and its revolutionary mobilization creates proletarian organs of power, both of which lead to a direct contradiction with the Stalinist bureaucracy right from the start.

[11] We request that the International Secretariat present its file of correspondence with the Chinese comrades to the World Congress,and in this way inform the congress of the directives that it had the right and the duty to give to the Chinese section.

[12] The Russian revolution unfolded in a way that was far removed from the ‘pure norms’; Lenin thought it was even further removed than any future revolution in an advanced country would be.

[13] ‘The primary political criterion for us is not the transformation of property relations in this or another area, however important these may be in themselves, but rather the change in the consciousness and organization of the world proletariat, the raising of their capacity for defending former conquests and accomplishing new ones. From this one, and the only decisive standpoint, the politics of Moscow taken as a whole, completely retains its reactionary character and remains the chief obstacle on the road to world revolution.'(Leon Trotsky: ‘The USSR in War,’ in In Defence of Marxism, p.23.)

[14] The Militant, the newspaper of the American Trotskyists, waged an excellent campaign around the revelations on this question. In France, where the basic cadres of the working class are organized in the CP, an extensive campaign should have been mounted around the theme: ‘Airplanes for Korea.’

[15] A reading of Hasten’s amendment to the World Congress is instructive: it is a timid outline of ‘Where Are We Going?

by Ted Grant

September/October 1950

First posted at http://www.tedgrant.org/archive/grant/1950/bsfi.htm

[Editor’s Note: ‘B.S.F.I.’ means the British section of the Fourth International. This open letter was written by Ted Grant after he was expelled from the section.]

Revolutionary Regroupment note: This letter was written after Ted Grant’s expulsion from the “the Club”. While correctly pointing to the developing revisionism within both the British section and the FI as a whole at a time of rampant confusion, Grants group was excluded from participation in the 1953 split with Pablo’s supporters due to Gerry Healy’s bureaucratic purge of his supporters. Tragically, in the aftermath, Grant’s isolation pushed him to ally with Pablo, in the process sealing his political fate as a revolutionary. In his “Go Forth and Multiply”, satirical British gadfly John Sullivan concluded.

“Grant’s historic meeting with Pablo can be seen as marking the death of British Trotskyism, once one of the Fourth International’s best sections. The meeting created British Pabloism, that strange mutation combining Trotskyist vocabulary with capitulation to whatever happens to be in fashion.”

http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/critiques/sullivan/fourth1.html#mil

………………………………………………………………………………………….

British Trotskyism has reached an impasse on the road which has been travelled by the official Trotskyist organisation; there is no way forward towards the development of a healthy revolutionary tendency rooted in the masses.

For three reasons, as a revolutionary tendency, the Fourth International in Britain has collapsed:

1) Capitulation to Tito-Stalinism internationally.

2) Policy and programme in Britain.

3) Lack of internal democracy.

Titoism

As a result of the development which followed World War Two an unforeseen relationship of forces has developed on a world scale between Stalinism, reformism and capitalism. The prognosis of the Fourth International before the war that the problem of Stalinism would be solved either during the war or immediately after has been falsified by events.

Owing to the viability of state ownership, the frightful decay and collapse of imperialism and capitalism, the revolutionary wave following World War Two and the weakness of the revolutionary internationalist tendency, Stalinism was enabled to take advantage of all these factors and emerged with the U.S.S.R. as second world power enormously strengthened throughout the globe. Stalinism has become the mass tendency in Europe and Asia.

The collapse of capitalism in Eastern Europe enabled Stalinism as a Bonapartist tendency to manipulate the workers and manoeuvre between the classes – establishing deformed workers’ states of a Bonapartist character with more or less mass support. Stalinism in the present peculiar relationship of class forces, basing itself in the last analysis on the proletariat – in the sense of standing for the defence of the new economic form of society – is Bonapartism of a new type manoeuvring between the classes in order to establish a regime on the pattern of Moscow.

In China and Yugoslavia, the Stalinist parties came to power on the basis of overwhelming mass support and established regimes relatively independent of the Moscow bureaucracy.

The fact that the revolution in China and Yugoslavia could he developed in a distorted and debased character is due to the world factors of:

(a) The crisis of world capitalism.

(b) The existence of a strong, deformed workers’ state adjacent to these countries and powerfully influencing the workers’ movement.

(c) The weakness of the Marxist current of the Fourth International.

These factors have resulted in an unparalleled development, which could not have been foreseen by any of the Marxist teachers: the extension of Stalinism as a social phenomenon over half Europe, over the Chinese sub-continent and with the possibility of spreading over the whole of Asia.

This poses new theoretical problems to be worked out by the Marxist movement. Under conditions of isolation and paucity of forces, new historical factors could not but result in a theoretical crisis of the movement, posing the problem of its very existence and survival.

After a period of extreme vacillation and confusion throughout the International, including all tendencies, three distinct tendencies have emerged:

(a) A movement of despair and revisionism, so-called state capitalism; organisational Menshevism of Haston and the ideological disintegration of Morrow, Goldman, Craipeau, etc.

(b) A tendency in the direction of neo-Stalinism (the I.S. and the British Section).

(c) The Marxist current striving to carry on the best traditions of Trotskyism.

Faced with formidable problems, the I.S. and the British leadership have revealed themselves theoretically bankrupt. Without any adequate theoretical explanation or conscientious analysis of their past position, they have changed 180 degrees in true Zinovievist fashion overnight, from one maintaining that Eastern Europe and China were capitalist regimes to one where Yugoslavia – since the break with Stalin – has mysteriously changed into a healthy workers’ state.

In Britain, echoing the I.S. and without the least attempt at theoretical understanding, the Healy leadership gives its crudest application. Their method of reasoning follows along these lines: (a) the Fourth International has predicted that Stalinism could not make the revolution (b) Stalinism has made the revolution, therefore… (c) it is not Stalinism! The second line of argument of which both the I.S. and the Healy leadership are guilty, is that there can only be one Stalin! Why? There can be more than one Fascist dictator because they have a class basis in the capitalist class, but Stalin, apparently, has no class basis.

Idealising and white-washing the Tito leadership because of their break with Moscow, the British leadership has suppressed all fundamental criticism of this tendency, and regards Yugoslavia in this light of a ‘normal’ proletarian dictatorship: i.e. a healthy workers’ state with this or that minor blemish of no real importance. Taking as a platform the fact that, since the break with Moscow, the Tito leadership has been compelled to borrow many of the arguments from the arsenal of Marxism in their criticism of the Moscow oligarchy, they do not see the conflict as a reflection of the national struggle against the oppression and the exploitation of the Moscow bureaucrats, and as one which was reflected throughout Eastern Europe, and even within the boundaries of the Soviet Union itself – the Ukraine, the Crimea Tartars, Volga German Republic, etc. The only important difference being the possibility of a successful resistance owing to the independent character of the state apparatus in Yugoslavia.

Despite zigzags to the left, partly demagogic partly sincere, the fundamental basis of the regime in Yugoslavia remains as before… socialism in one country (and tiny Yugoslavia at that), manoeuvring between world imperialism and the Russian bloc (only thanks to which Yugoslavia can maintain itself). The regime remains totalitarian – workers’ democracy does not exist.

The attempt to apologise for these ideas as a merely secondary hangover from Stalinism is criminal and false. Some correct criticisms of the Moscow regime do not transform Tito’s set­up any more than some of the correct criticisms of the Cominform change the nature of the regime in the countries where the Cominform holds power.

The crisis within Stalinism makes the problem of building the Fourth International more complex than before. The creation of new Stalinist states – independent, or semi-independent from Stalin – has added further confusion in the minds of the world working class. The Fourth International, while taking advantage of the rift within Stalinism in order to expose the real nature of this Bonapartist disease, must not make concessions to neo-Stalinism. While giving full support to the struggle for national self-determination on the part of the Yugoslav nation against the brutal attacks of Great Russian chauvinism, the Fourth International must not thereby underwrite the political position of Tito.

Whilst representing the national aspirations of the Yugoslav masses, the Tito leadership – on a Lilliputian scale – use the methods and fulfil a similar role as the Kremlin clique. It must not be forgotten that the break did not come from the Yugoslav side but was forced on the Yugoslav bureaucracy by the relentless and uncompromising attempt at Moscow domination. Since the break there has been no fundamental change in the principles and methods of the Yugoslavs… How could it be otherwise? Socialism in one country remains the axis around which the ideas of the Yugoslavs revolve. To them the degeneration of the Russian bureaucracy is purely an accidental phenomenon which they do not explain from the Marxist point of view that conditions determine consciousness. Nor could it be otherwise – on a smaller scale the conditions in Yugoslavia are similar to those in the Soviet Union (backward country, small minority proletariat, hostile environment, imperialism and Stalinism). Like causes produce like results. In foreign and in domestic policy the position of the Yugoslavs is not fundamentally different to that of Stalinism in its early phases. In the long run it will have the same consequences.

Instead of taking advantage of the conflict in order to demonstrate the real nature of Stalinism and the vitally necessary attributes which a healthy workers’ state, [they] have converted themselves into a replica of the Friends of the Soviet Union. The organisation has become the exculpatory tourist agency for Yugoslavia.

From the inception of the Socialist Fellowship by Ellis Smith, to the Korean Crisis, the organisation went through a period of collaboration and accommodation to various elements inside the Labour Party. These stretched from the social democratic left reformists such as Ellis Smith and Brockway to Stalinist fellow travellers, such as Tom Braddock and Jack Stanley. In the absence of a genuine left wing the Healy leadership helped to construct a shadow. In order to maintain this shadow they were forced to accommodate themselves to it. Thus when the Socialist Fellowship produced its policy, after the General Election, this leadership took a leading role in drafting a programme which was false and opportunistic.

At the same time, illusions were spread about the so-called working class leaders, Ellis Smith, Mrs. Braddock, etc.

At the first serious crisis when the Korea dispute arose, the inevitable splitting of this organisation took place, with Ellis Smith and Company departing. With the departure of the important left reformists, the group veered more openly in the direction of accommodating itself to the Stalinist fellow traveller wing. They remain in the rump of the Socialist Fellowship on a semi-Stalinist position.

In fact the Trotskyists form the backbone in membership, organisation and activity of the Socialist Fellowship.

The Trotskyists have expended their energy propagating an opportunist policy instead of building a revolutionary nucleus around themselves.

‘Socialist Outlook’

During the period of the development of the Socialist Fellowship, the Socialist Outlook carried out its stated task: “to reflect the confusion of the left wing.” (1949 Conference document). The political role of the Socialist Outlook was determined not by the anaemic editorials, but by the leading articles of those M.P.s, etc., whose policies were transparently one of sweetening the bitter pills of the right wing.

At the same time, the editorials were coloured by the need not to “offend” the Stalinist fellow travellers on the Editorial Board.

The editorial produced a line of “criticism” which is worthy of the notorious “Friends of the Soviet Union”. “The leadership…would like it to be.” “We are far from suggesting that the Russian Government at all times and under all conditions supports progressive movements.” “There is a distinct flavour of power politics about Moscow’s attempt to secure peace in Korea in return for an extra seat on the Security Council.” These are examples of “serious Trotskyist criticism”! Amongst such statements – which have a very distinct flavour – falls the following: “Russian foreign policy is determined by what the government of that country considers is in the interests of the Soviet Union, but that as India proved does not, by any means, always coincide with what is in the best interest of the international working class. Or even, in the long run, the best interest of the Soviet Union itself.”!

On this basis of political accommodation, the Healy tendency boasts in Britain and internationally of its numerical and organisational successes in the “building of the left wing” within the Labour Party. Claims which were largely without foundation in fact.

Even with their most strenuous efforts it remains an unimportant and semi-fictitious organisation. Without their propping up it would collapse immediately.

The Socialist Outlook is a “forum” with no revolutionary tendency reflected in it. Neither is revolutionary criticism allowed in the paper. For instance, S.L.’s [Sam Levy] attack on the April editorial and M.L.’s [Marion Lunt] attack on the position of Yugoslavia were not published, whilst quantities of out-and-out reformist and Stalinist material was published. In this respect they compare unfavourably even with the centrist Socialist Leader. The important point must be borne in mind that the dominating forces in the Socialist Outlook are the Trotskyists.

The Socialist Outlook being in reality the paper of the group, should be the organiser of the Group, instead it has become a channel for Stalinist influence in the Labour Party.

The whole line of the paper and the policy of this grouping has its crassest expression in the notorious Korea supplement. There was no criticism whatsoever of the role of the Stalinist bureaucracy. There was a white-washing of the role of the Yugoslavs at U.N.O. Whilst correctly supporting the struggle of the North there was not a syllable on the Stalinist set-up.

In the League of Youth [Labour Party youth wing], where there are the most favourable conditions for work, we see not a Trotskyist concept of spreading our ideas and gaining support for them, but the concept of controlling the whole L.O.Y. organisationally. In its struggle in the L.O.Y., while correctly fighting for democratic and organisational demands, it does so at the expense of a political position. The whole approach in the Labour Party is a Stalinist one of controlling machines, a Socialist Fellowship, a Socialist Outlook, an entire League of Youth, at the expense of political ideas and programme. However, it has not the saving grace that side by side with organisational appendages, the Stalinists simultaneously organise their own powerful independent party and press.

This liquidationist policy becomes the mixing of banners, policy and programme.

Lack of Internal Democracy

Without a proper sense of proportion and magnifying the dangers, the conference was held under most disadvantageous conditions. Delegates only, apart from the favoured few, were allowed to attend. Individual members, on the grounds of security, were refused the right to attend or even to know where the conference was being held.

The document of the State Capitalists was refused publication after the General Secretary had accepted it, on the grounds that its author was expelled (ex-poste facto). This constituted a provocation, which, of course, assisted the State Capitalists. They were a tendency represented at the conference and should have had the right to put forward a document to express their ideas even if the author was outside the organisation.

The Liverpool branch document was not published on the grounds that it was presented too late, although some of the ideas were incorporated in the last minute document, without acknowledgement.

The “amended” major document was, in fact, an entirely new document. By adding new ideas in an amalgam with the old, it could only succeed in disorientating and confusing the members. The leadership presented an entirely new document while at the same time claiming that they had only amended the old document. This is Zinovievist trickery.

At the conference the political discussion and voting took place in an atmosphere of disciplinary threats. On the resolution on reformism the delegates were told that anyone voting against its implementation would be expelled, notwithstanding the fact that some delegates disagreed with the document. In all Bolshevik organisations members have the right to vote against documents, although a majority decision determines policy, automatically. The resolution on implementation was put in order to force the minority to vote for a resolution to which they were opposed, on threat of expulsion. This ultimatistic attitude has more in common with Stalinist monolithism than Bolshevism.

They did not take the opportunity to allow the ventilation of the ideas of the State Capitalists by having a full discussion at the conference, despite the fact that growing numbers of the members were becoming sympathetic to state capitalism as a reaction to the semi-Stalinist line of the leadership.

Arbitrarily, and bureaucratically, the leadership dissolved and amalgamated branches, without taking into account the needs of the party, but only the needs of the clique. For example, the General Secretary went down to the Kilburn branch and declared the branch dissolved in order to “separate the branch from ‘malign’ influences”. This was not ratified by the Executive Committee (E.C.) until a week later.

In Liverpool, there was a deliberate attempt to split the branch in two for the purposes of dividing the “Deane family” from the rest of the comrades in Liverpool.

Branches were deliberately isolated from one another in order to facilitate control from the centre. There was no knowledge of what was taking place in the organisation as a whole, correspondence between branches was restricted and the statements which came through the E.C. had the specific purpose of rubber-stamping E.C. actions. Branches and individuals who disagreed were threatened with expulsion or attacked viciously as anti-party comrades.

As a consequence of this regime, political discontent was bound to reflect itself both in the infraction of discipline and dropping away of members.

The only reply to the infraction of discipline was instantaneous expulsion (Percy Downey in Birmingham). The decision to expel was taken to the branches for endorsement. Those who voted against the E.C.’s action on the grounds that a full discussion was necessary and that these violations were a result of the lack of political discussion and the lack of democracy inside the organisation, were themselves instantly expelled (Birmingham, West London). Thus, they insisted upon the monolithic principle of unanimity.

Leading opposition comrades such as J.D. [Jimmy Deane] and S.L. [Sam Levy] who were members of the National Committee were expelled on flimsy pretexts or on technical infractions of discipline.

By restricting the rights of members, by utilising technical points, by the dictatorial attitude of the leadership and the general intimidation of members, the group has shrunk. Due to the number of members resigning or the expulsions, it has been reduced to a shambles. In the provinces it has become a mere skeleton. In London members are losing confidence in such a leadership. These have been large losses.

Only the younger and inexperienced comrades and the hardened elements of the clique remain. The fact of an increasing number of members leaving the group, plus the fact of the expulsion of leading comrades, one a member of the National Committee and the only opposition representative on this important body, shows that it is both impossible and at the same time ceases to have any meaning, to fight for an alternative leadership in such a caricature of a Bolshevik organisation.

An Appeal

Comrades, these issues which we raise are not light ones. They are fundamental questions, which affect the fate of Trotskyism, nationally and internationally. We have not come lightly to the decision to break from this ideologically and organisationally disintegrating tendency. If the precious heritage of ideas left by Trotsky is to be preserved, expanded and developed it is necessary to break with those who trail in the wake of Stalinism. Today, groupings of the Fourth International, owing to various historical factors are small and weak. All the more necessary then, that the fundamental principles of Trotskyism should be retained intact. Today, the main task is one of ideological preparation for the development of a mass organisation at a later stage. On a programme of neo-Stalinism only disaster can be prepared. Only the training of developed revolutionary cadres can prepare the way for the future.

With the world situation and the conditions existing as they are, it is impossible to foresee the development of the mass Trotskyist movement in Britain very quickly. This will require years of patient work.

At this stage, the main activity of the group will have to lie inside the Labour movement and the mass organisations of the working class, as an entrist group. A left wing will inevitably develop in the Labour Party in the coming years. But the foolish endeavour to create a left wing out of nothing and declare that the left wing is already here has only demonstrated the impotence of the Healyites except in their own imaginings. In order to prepare for the left wing it is necessary now for serious and sober criticism of all tendencies in the Labour Party to be conducted in the press and in the Labour Party. At the same time a relentless exposure of Stalinism as well as of imperialism must be consistently carried on, in order to avert the possibility of sections in the Labour Party going over in despair to Stalinism.

For the conduct of the work scrupulous democracy and full freedom of discussion within the organisation must be maintained. Without this it will not be possible for a revolutionary grouping to be created and survive in the difficult period that lies ahead.

For all these reasons we appeal to all sincere comrades in the movement to join us in this task. Only in this way, will a fighting, living movement be created. Patient day to day work inside the Labour movement will achieve results if it is conducted on a correct basis. The years that lie ahead can be fruitful ones. The tasks are difficult, but the opportunities from a long term point of view [are] unbounded. Forward to the building of the revolutionary tendency in Britain.

September/October 1950

Against the Theory of State Capitalism

Reply to Comrade Cliff

By Ted Grant, 1949. Original source: The Unbroken Thread. The Development of Trotskyism over 40 Years. Edited by John Pickard. London: Fortress Books, 1989. Copied from https://www.marxists.org/archive/grant/1949/cliff.htm.

The document of Comrade Cliff entitled The Nature of Stalinist Russia^[source] at first sight gives the impression of erudition and scientific analysis. However, upon careful examination, it will be observed that not one of the chapters contains a worked-out thesis. The method is a series of parallels based on quotations, and its basic weakness is shown by the fact that conclusions are not rooted in the analysis. From his thesis it is not possible to conclude whether Stalinist Russia remains a progressive system (despite its deformations), or whether for Cliff it has now assumed the same reactionary role as ‘individual’ capitalism or fascism. The weakness is sharply brought out by the fact that no practical conclusions emerge. Is Russia to be defended, or is the revolutionary party to be defeatist? Instead of the answer being rooted in and flowing from the analysis, it has to be worked out a posteriori.

Despite the fact that Comrade Cliff asserts that the Stalinist bureaucracy is a new class, nowhere in his thesis is a real analysis made or evidence adduced as to why and how such a class constitutes a capitalist class and is not a new type of class.

And this is not accidental. It flows from the method. Starting off with the preconceived idea of state capitalism, everything is artificially fitted into that conception. Instead of applying the theoretical method of the Marxist teachers to Russian society in its process of motion and development, he has scoured the works to gather quotations and attempted to compress them into a theory.

Nowhere in the document does Cliff pose the main criterion for Marxists in analysing social systems: Does the new formation lead to the development of the productive forces? The theory of Marxism is based on the material development of the forces of production as the moving force of historical progress. The transition from one system to another is not decided subjectively, but is rooted in the needs of production itself. It is on this basis and this basis only that the superstructure is erected: of state, ideology, art, science. It is true that the superstructure has an important secondary effect on production and even within certain limits, as Engels explained, develops its own independent movement. But in the last analysis, the development of production is decisive.

Marx explained the historical justification for capitalism, depite the horrors of the industrial revolution, despite the slavery of the blacks in Africa, despite child labour in the factories, the wars of conquest throughout the globe – by the fact that it was a necessary stage in the development of the forces of production. Marx showed that without slavery, not only ancient slavery, but slavery in the epoch of the early development of capitalism, the modern development of production would have been impossible. Without that the material basis for communism could never have been prepared. In Poverty of Philosophy Marx wrote:

“Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that has given the colonies their value; it is the colonies that have created world trade, and it is world trade that is the precondition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance.

“Without slavery North America, the most progressive of countries, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe out North America from the map of the world, and you will have anarchy – the complete decay of modern commerce and civilisation.” [source]

Of course, the attitude of Marx towards the horrors of slavery and the industrial revolution is well known. It would be a gross distortion of Marx’s position to argue that because he wrote the above, therefore he was in favour of slavery and child labour. No more can it be argued against the Marxists of today that because they support state ownership in the USSR that they therefore justify the slave camps and other crimes of the Stalin regime.

Marx’s support of Bismarck⁽¹⁾ in the Franco-Prussian war was dictated by similar considerations. In spite of Bismarck’s ‘blood and iron’ policy and the reactionary nature of his regime, because the development of the productive forces would be facilitated by the national unification of Germany, Marx gave critical support for the war of Prussia against France. The basic criterion was the development of the productive forces. In the long run, all else flows from this.

Any analysis of Russian society must start from that basis. Once Cliff admits that while capitalism is declining and decaying on a world scale, yet preserving a progressive role in Russia in relation to the development of the productive forces, then logically he would have to say that state capitalism is the next stage forward for society, or at least for the backward countries. Contradictorily, he shows that the Russian bourgeoisie was not capable of carrying through the role which was fulfilled by the bourgeoisie in the West and consequently the proletarian revolution took place.

If we have state capitalism in Russia (ushered in by a proletarian revolution), then it is clear that the crisis of capitalism on which we have based ourselves for the past decades was not insoluble but purely the birth pangs of a new and higher stage of capitalism. The quotation he himself gives from Marx – that no society passes from the scene till all the possibilities in it have been exhausted would indicate that if his argument is correct, a new epoch, the epoch of state capitalism, opens up before us. This would shatter the entire theoretical basis of the Leninist-Trotskyist movement. Cliff says, without explaining why, that if we hold on to the theory of the degenerated revolution, we must abandon the theory of the permanent revolution. Yet he fails to see that to accept the theory of state capitalism, the theory of the permanent revolution, which is based on the idea that capitalism has so exhausted itself on a world scale that it is incapable of even carrying out the tasks of the bourgeois democratic revolution in backward countries, would have to be abandoned. For in Eastern Europe, the ‘state capitalists’ would have carried out the tasks of the bourgeois revolution on the land etc. Cliff skirts around this question of the agrarian revolution, which in the backward countries, Trotsky argued, only the proletariat could carry through. If the ‘state capitalist’ parties of the Stalinists can perform this task, not only is the theory of the permanent revolution thrown out of the window, but the viability of the new state capitalism in a historical sense must be clear to all.

If Comrade Cliff’s thesis is correct, that state capitalism exists in Russia today, then he cannot avoid the conclusion that state capitalism has been in existence since the Russian Revolution and the function of the revolution itself was to introduce this state capitalist system of society. For despite his tortuous efforts to draw a line between the economic basis of Russian society before the year 1928 and after, the economic basis of Russian society has in fact remained unchanged.

Incorrect Usage of Quotations

Comrade Cliff seeks to prove that Trotsky was moving to the position that the bureaucracy was a new ruling class. For this purpose he gives quotations from the book Stalin, and then from Living Thoughts of Karl Marx.

Cliff writes:

“A clear step in the direction of a new evaluation of the bureaucracy as a ruling class finds expression in Trotsky’s last book, Stalin. He writes:

“’The substance of Thermidor was, is and could not fail to be social in character. It stood for the crystallisation of a new privileged stratum, the creation of a new substratum for the economically dominant class. There were two pretenders to this role: the petty bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy itself. They fought shoulder to shoulder (in the battle to break) the resistance of the proletarian vanguard. When that task was accomplished a savage struggle broke out between them. The bureaucracy became frightened of its isolation, its divorce from the proletariat. Alone it could not crush the kulak ⁽²⁾ nor the petty bourgeoisie that had grown and continued to grow on the basis of the NEP; it had to have the aid of the proletariat. Hence its concerted effort to present its struggle against the petty bourgeoisie for the surplus products and for power as the struggle of the proletariat against attempts at capitalistic restoration’.” (The Nature of Stalinist Russia, Tony Cliff, June 1948, page 10) [source]

And Comrade Cliff comments:

“The bureaucracy, Trotsky says, while pretending to fight against the capitalistic restoration, in reality used the proletariat only to crush the kulaks for ‘the crystallisation of a new privileged stratum, the creation of a new substratum for the economically dominant class’. One of the pretenders to the role of the economically dominant class, he says, is the bureaucracy. Great emphasis is lent to this formulation when we connect this analysis with the fight between the bureaucracy and the kulaks with Trotsky’s definition of the class struggle. He says: ‘The class struggle is nothing else than the struggle for surplus produce. He who owns surplus-produce is master of the situation – owns wealth, owns the state, has the key to the Church, to the courts, to the sciences and to the arts’.” (Cliff, page 10)

And Cliff concludes:

“The fight between the bureaucracy and the kulaks was, according to Trotsky’s last conclusion, the ‘struggle…for the surplus products’.”

To illustrate the way in which Comrade Cliff has constructed his case, let us examine these quotations in context and we will see that the conclusion that flows is precisely the opposite to what he argues:

“The kulak, jointly with the petty industrialists, worked for the complete restoration of capitalism. Thus opened the irreconcilable struggle over the surplus product of national labour. Who will dispose of it in the nearest future – the new bourgeoisie or the Soviet bureaucracy? – that became the next issue. He who disposed of the surplus product has the power of the state at his disposal. It was all this that opened the struggle between the petty bourgeoisie, which had helped the bureaucracy to crush the resistance of the labouring masses and of their spokesmen the Left Opposition, and the Thermidorean bureaucracy itself, which had helped the petty bourgeoisie to lord it over the agrarian masses. It was a direct struggle for power and income.

“Obviously the bureaucracy did not rout the proletarian vanguard, pull from the complications of the international revolution, and legitimise the philosophy of inequality in order to capitulate before the bourgeoisie, become the latter’s servant, and be eventually itself pulled away from the state feed-bag.” (Stalin by Leon Trotsky, Harper, London 1941, page 397, our emphasis)

Cliff makes Trotsky look foolish by appearing to contradict himself by juxtaposing the two quotations and adducing therefrom that Trotsky was changing his position on the class character of the bureaucracy. A few pages further on, Trotsky explains his idea. he shows the organic tendency of the decay of capitalism everywhere. It is only on this basis that the nationalised productive forces have been maintained in Russia. The whole tendency of the economy in the last 50 years on a world scale has been towards the statification of the productive forces. The capitalists themselves have in part been compelled to ‘the recognition of the productive forces as social forces’ (Engels). In fact, this is the key to the explanation of why Russia survived the war. The disorientation of the movement which is expressed in Cliff’s document, is largely due to the failure to appreciate the implications of this tendency. In his book on Stalin, Trotsky raises the theoretical possibility of the bureaucracy continuing to rule for some decades.

A few pages after the quotations given by Cliff, Trotsky says:

“The counter-revolution sets in when the spool of progressive social conquests begins to unwind. There seems no end to this unwinding. Yet some portion of the conquests of the revolution is always preserved. Thus, in spite of monstrous bureaucratic distortions, the class basis of the USSR remains proletarian. But let us bear in mind that the unwinding process has not yet been completed, and the future of Europe and the world during the next few decades has not yet been decided. The Russian Thermidor would undoubtedly have opened a new era of bourgeois rule, if that rule had not proved obsolete throughout the world. At any rate the struggle against equality and the establishment of very deep social differentiation has so far been unable to eliminate the socialist consciousness of the masses or the nationalisation of the means of production and the land, which were the basic socialist conquests of the revolution…” (Stalin, page 405)

We believe this sufficiently demonstrates that Cliff has taken a quotation from Trotsky’s Stalin out of context and read something into it which is not there. In his last work, as in all others on the Russian question, Trotsky had a consistent theme in his characterisation of the Soviet Union. It is not possible to draw the conclusion from any of his writings that he was altering his fundamental position.

Can there be a Struggle between Two Sections of the Same Class? French Revolution – Russian Revolution

To understand the Russian Revolution we can take the analogy of the French Revolution which is striking in its similarity and course although obviously on a different economic basis. As is known, the rule of the bourgeoisie was ushered in in France in the revolution of 1789. Marx explains the progressive rule of the revolutionary Jacobins: this revolutionary dictatorship of the sans culottes went further than the bourgeois regime. Because of that they made a clean sweep of all feudal rubbish, and did in months what the bourgeoisie would have required decades to achieve. This was followed by the Thermidorian reaction and the Bonapartist counter-revolution.

Anyone who compared the Bonapartist counter-revolution with the revolution – at least in its superstructure – would have found as great a difference as between the regime of Lenin and Trotsky in Russia and that of Stalin in latter years. To superficial observers the difference between the two regimes was fundamental. In fact, insofar as the superstructure was concerned, the difference was glaring. Napoleon had reintroduced many of the orders, decorations and ranks similar to those of feudalism; he had restored the Church; he even had himself crowned Emperor. Yet despite this counter-revolution, it is clear that it had nothing in common with the old regime. It was counter-revolution on the basis of the new form of property introduced by the revolution itself. Bourgeois forms of property or property relations remained the basis of the economy.

When we study the further history of France, we see the variety of forms of government and of the superstructure which developed in the course of the class struggle. The restoration of the monarchy after the defeat of Napoleon, the revolutions of 1830 and of 1848 – what was the class struggle there? There was a different division of the income, but after all these revolutions the economy remained bourgeois.

The subsequent history of France saw the dictatorship of Louis Bonaparte, the restoration of bourgeois democracy and the Republic and, in recent days, the regime of Petain. Under all these regimes there were differences in the division of the national income between the classes and between different strata of the ruling class itself. Yet we call all these regimes bourgeois. Why? It can only be because of the form of property.

Given the backwardness of the Soviet Union, which is very well explained by Cliff, and the isolation of the revolution, why should not a similar process take place? In fact it did. Let us return to Trotsky’s book Stalin. The Old Man was clear. After the quotation where Trotsky shows that the substance of the Thermidor could not but be social in character and was the struggle for the surplus product, he went on to explain what was meant. Let us continue where Cliff stopped:

“Here the analogy with French Thermidor ceases. The new social basis of the Soviet Union became paramount. To guard the nationalisation of the means of production and of the land, is the bureaucracy’s law of life and death, for these are the social sources of its dominant position. That was the reason for its struggle against the kulak. The bureaucracy could wage this struggle, and wage it to the end, only with the support of the proletariat. The best proof of the fact that it had mustered this support was the avalanche of capitulations by representatives of the new Opposition.

“The fight against the kulak, the fight against the right wing, the fight against opportunism – the official slogans of that period – seemed to the workers and to many representatives of the Left Opposition like a renaissance of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the socialist revolution. We warned them at the time: it is not only a question of what is being done, but also of who does it. Under conditions of Soviet democracy, ie, self-rule of the toilers, the struggle against the kulaks might not have assumed such a convulsive, panicky and bestial form and might have led to a general rise of the economic and cultural level of the masses on the basis of industrialisation. But the bureaucracy’s fight against the kulak was single combat (fought) on the backs of the toilers; and since neither of the embattled gladiators trusted the masses, since both feared the masses, the struggle assumed an extremely convulsive and sanguinary character. Thanks to the support of the proletariat, it ended with victory for the bureaucracy. But it did not lead to a gain in the specific weight of the proletariat in the country’s political life.” (Stalin page 408, our emphasis)

When Trotsky speaks here of ‘the creation of a new substratum for the economically dominant class’ what is clearly meant is the proletariat, which dominates through the form of property. Cliff says: ‘One of the pretenders to the role of the economically dominant class, he says, is the bureaucracy. Great emphasis is lent to this formulation…’ Here we see the dangers in the method of working on the basis of preconceived ideas and the attempt to select quotations to fit into these ideas.

In this same chapter, Trotsky shows the similarity and the differences with the French revolution and why the reaction took a different form in France to that which it took in Russia:

“The privileges of the bureaucacy have a different source of origin. The bureaucracy took for itself that part of the national income which it could secure either by the exercise of force or of its authority or by direct intervention in economic relations. In the matter of the national surplus product the bureaucracy and the petty bourgeoisie quickly changed from alliance to enmity. The control of the surplus product opened the bureaucracy’s road to power.” (Stalin, page 40)

The theme of Trotsky is sufficiently clear. The struggle for the surplus product can be waged not only between different classes, but between different strata and different groupings representing the same class.

Does the law of Value Operate within the Russian Economy?

The whole of the section of Cliff’s document on the law of value is unsound from a Marxist point of view. In the most involved and peculiar manner he argues that the law of value does not apply within the Russian economy, but only in its relations to world capitalism. He finds the basis of the law of value, not in Russian society, but in the world capitalist environment.

“Let us now find out what importance the internal relations in Russia has when abstracted from the influence of world economy.

“The abstraction has solved one fundamental question: that the source of the activity of the law of value is not to be found in the internal relations of Russian economy itself. In other words it has brought us so far nearer solving the problem of whether the Russian economy is subordinated to the law of value by showing us where not to look for its source.” (Cliff, page 98. Emphasis in original)

According to the Marxist view, it is in exchange that the law of value manifests itself. And this holds true for all forms of society. For example, the way in which the break-up of primitive communism took place was through the exchange and barter between different primitive communities. This led to the development of private property. In slave society, in the same way, the products of the slave became commodities when they were exchanged. Through this development, the ‘commodity of commodities’ appeared: money. It was thus that the product enslaved the producer and in the end the contradiction caused by the money economy resulted in the destruction of the old slave society. Under feudalism, the exchange of the surplus produced by the self-sufficient lords and barons in their ‘natural economy’ became commodities, and in fact, was the starting point of capitalist development through the rise of merchant capital.

Therefore, if it was in exchange only between Russia and the outside world that the law of value manifested itself, all that this would mean is that the Russian surplus was exchanged on the basis of the law of value. What consequences that would have for the internal economy is a different question which would have to be worked out.

However, because of the small degree of participation of the Soviet Union on the world market, in comparison with the total production of Russia, Cliff unavoidably realises the weakness of this point. Thus, amazingly, Cliff finds the law of value manifesting itself not in exchange, but in competition. Even this would not be so bad if he argued that this was competition on the world market on classical capitalist lines for markets. But he cannot argue this because it is at variance with the facts. So he introduces a new conception. He finds his ‘competition’ and his ‘law of value’ in the production of armaments!

The pressure of world capitalism forces Russia to devote an enormous proportion of the national income on armaments production and defence on the one hand, and the greatest capital construction in history in proportion to the national income for the needs of defence, on the other. Here Cliff finds his law of value. The law of value manifests itself in the armaments competition between two social systems! This can only be described as a concession to Shachtman’s theory of bureaucratic collectivism. If this theory is correct, the theory of an entirely new economy, never before seen in history or foreseen by the Marxists, would apply.

Here again we would point out the dangers of indiscriminate use of quotations and amalgamations of ideas to form a ‘thesis’. In reality this document is not a state capitalist document; it is a hybrid in the union of bureaucratic collectivism and state capitalism. If this section of Cliff’s document means anything at all, it leads straight to the road of Schachtman’s bureaucratic collectivism.

This idea is partially borrowed from Hilferding⁽³⁾ who consistently argued that in Russia and in Nazi Germany the law of value did not apply and that these were entirely new social formations. It is also based on a misunderstanding of some passages in Bukharin’s Imperialism and the World Economy, where he argued on the basis of ‘state capitalism’ – the organic union of trusts with finance capital – and in which he, together with Lenin, brilliantly prophesied a form of dictatorship which was later realised in Italian fascism and nazism. Not state ownership of the means of production, but the fusion of finance capital with the state. In fact Bukharin chose as one of his classic examples of such a state…America.

The argument on armaments partakes of a mystical and not an economic category. At best, even if we accepted it as correct, it would only explain why Russian produces armaments, but not how or on what economic basis the armaments are produced. Even if Russia were a healthy workers’ state, in imperialist encirclement, there would be the absolute necessity to produce armaments and compete with the arms technique and production of the rival capitalist systems. But this argument about armaments is entirely false. The greater part of production in Russia is not armaments but means of production. Again, this would explain why the bureaucracy is attempting to accumulate the means of production at a frantic speed, but it explains nothing of the economic system of production itself. It is probably true that in a healthy workers’ state accumulation of arms would be smaller for social reasons (internationalist and revolutionary policy towards workers in other lands), but it would nevertheless take place under the pressure of world imperialism.

A quicker or slower tempo in the development of the means of production does not necessarily tell us the method by which these are produced. Cliff says that the bureaucracy is developing the means of production under the pressure of world imperialism. Good. But all this tells us again is why the pace is fast. From the point of view of even classical bourgeois political economy, Cliff’s argument is a pure evasion. It merely poses what has to be proved.

Not for nothing did Trotsky point out in Revolution Betrayed that the whole progressive content of the activity of the Stalinist bureaucracy and its preoccupation, was the raising of the productivity of labour and the defence of the country.

We have seen that if the law of value only applies because of the existence of capitalism in world economy, then it would only apply to those products exchanged on the world market. But Cliff argues two contradictory theses in relation to the Russian economy. On the one hand he says:

“This does not mean that the price system in Russia is arbitrary, dependent on the whim of the bureaucracy. The basis of price here too is the costs of production. If price is to be used as a transmission belt through which the bureaucracy directs production as a whole, it must fit its purpose, and as nearly as possible reflect the real costs, that is, the socially necessary Labour absorbed in the different products…” (Cliff, page 94, our emphasis)

Two pages later, Cliff describes as the central point he intends to prove:

“…that in the economic relations within Russia itself one cannot find the autonomy of economic activity, the source of the law of value, acting.” (Cliff, page 96, emphasis in original)

In the first quotation, Cliff shows precisely the way in which the law of value manifests itset internally in Russian society. Even if one abstracts from the world market, leaving aside the interacting effect which it undoubtedly has – when Cliff says that ‘the real costs, that is the socially necessary labour absorbed in the different products’ must reflect the real prices, he is saying that the same law applies in Russian society as in capitalist society. The difference is that whereas in capitalist society it manifests itself blindly by the laws of the markets, in Russia conscious activity plays an important role. In this connection the second quotation crushingly refutes Cliff’s argument that it is capitalism which exists in Russia under these given conditions because the law of value does not operate blindly, but is consciously harnessed. In capitalist society, the law of value, as he says, manifests itself through the ‘autonomy of economic activity’, ie, it is the market which dominates. The first quotation shows clearly that the market – and this is the point – is within given limits controlled consciously and therefore it is not capitalism as understood by Marxists.

Previously Cliff said that the law of value did not operate in Russia. Here he is showing precisely how it does operate: not on the lines of classical capitalism, but of a transitional society between capitalism and socialism.

We see therefore, that Cliff claims that Russia is a capitalist society – yet he finds the source of the basic law of capitalist production outside of Russia. Now, in any capitalist society in which the reserve fund is in the hands of the capitalist class, as Engels explained:

“… if this production and reserve fund does in fact exist in the hands of the capitalist class, if it has in fact arisen through the accumulation of profit…then it necessarily consists of the accumulated surplus of the product of labour handed over to the capitalist class by the working class, over and above the sum of wages paid to the working class by the capitalist class. In this case, however, it is not wages that determine value, but the quantity of labour; in this case the working class hands over to the capitalist class in the product of labour a greater quantity of value than it receives from it in the shape of wages; and then the profit on capital like all other forms of appropriation without payment of the labour product of others, is explained as a simple component part of the surplus value discovered by Marx.” (Anti-Dühring, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1969, page 233) [source]

This indicates that where there is wage labour, where there is the accumulation of capital, the law of value must apply, no matter in how complicated a form it may manifest itself. Further on Engels explains in answer to Dühring’s⁽⁴⁾ five kinds of value, and the ‘natural costs of production’, that in Capital Marx is dealing with the value of commodities and ‘in the whole section of Capital which deals with value there is not even the slightest indication of whether or to what extent Marx considers the theory of value of commodities applicable to other forms of society’. In this sense it is clear that in the transitional society also: ‘Value itself is nothing more than the expression of the socially necessary labour materialised in an object.’ Here it is only necessary to ask: what determines the value of machines, consumer goods, etc, produced in Russia? Is it arbitrary? What determines the calculations of the bureaucracy? What is it that they measure in price? What determines wages? Are wages payments for labour power? What determines ‘money’? What determines profits of enterprises? Is there capital? Is the division of labour abolished?

Cliff gives two contradictory answers to these questions. On the one hand he agrees that it is the law of value on which all calculations and the movement of Russian society develops. On the other, he finds the law of value only operating as the result of pressure from the outside world although how he does not explain in any serious way.

The Role of Money in Russia

The surprising thing is that Cliff himself points out that the bureaucracy does not and cannot determine prices arbitrarily. That it does not and cannot determine the amount of money in circulation arbitrarily either. And this has been so in every society where money (let us remember, the commodity of commodities) has played a role. Engels, dealing with this problem, pertinently asked Dühring:

“If the sword (no matter who wields it – bureaucrat, capitalist, or government – EG) has the magic economic power ascribed to it by Herr Dühring, why is it that no government has been able to succeed in permanently compelling bad money to have the ‘distribution value’ of good money, or assignats to have the ‘distribution value’ of gold? (Anti-Dühring, page 228) [source]

In Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky explains this problem very clearly. He shows that the economic categories peculiar to capitalism still remain in the transitional society between capitalism and communism, the dictatorship of the proletariat. Here is the key: the laws remain, but are modified. Some of the laws of capitalism apply and some are abrogated. For example, Trotsky argues:

“The role of money in Soviet economy is not only unfinished but, as we have said, still has a long growth ahead. The transitional epoch between capitalism and socialism taken as a whole does not mean a cutting down of trade but, on the contrary, its extraordinary extension. All branches of industry transform themselves and grow. New ones continually arise, and all are compelled to define their relations to one another both quantitatively and qualitatively. The liquidation of the consummatory peasant economy, and at the same time of the shut-in family life, means a transfer to the sphere of social interchange, and ipso facto money circulation, of all the labour energy which was formerly expended within the limits of the peasant’s yard, or within the walls of his private dwelling. All products and services begin for the first time in history to be exchanged for one another.” (Revolution Betrayed, NY, 1972, page 67, our emphasis) [source]

What is the key to this enigma? It can only be found in the fact that we have here a transitional society. The state can now regulate, but not arbitrarily, only within the confines of the law of value. Any attempt to violate and pass beyond the strict limits set by the development of the productive forces themselves, immediately results in the re-assertion of the domination of production over producer. This is what Stalin had to discover in relation to price and money when the Russian economy was inflicted with a crisis of inflation which completely distorted and disrupted the plan. The law of value is not abolished, but is modified. This is what Trotsky meant when he said:

“The nationalisation of the means of production and credit, the co-operativising or state-ising of internal trade, the monopoly of foreign trade, the collectivisation of agriculture, the law of inheritance – set strict limits upon the personal accumulation of money and hinder its conversion into private capital (usurious, commercial and industrial). These functions of money, however, bound up as they are with exploitation, are not liquidated at the beginning of a proletarian revolution, but in a modified form are transferred to the state, the universal merchant, creditor and industrialist. At the same time the more elementary functions of money as measure of value, means of exchange and medium of payment, are not only preserved, but acquire a broader field of action than they had under capitalism.” (Revolution Betrayed, page 66, emphasis in original)[source]

One has only to pose the problem in this way to see that an economic analysis must lead one to conclude that we have here a transitional society in which some of the laws peculiar to socialism apply and some peculiar to capitalism. That is after all, the meaning of transition.

Although Cliff does not recognise this, in fact he admits it, because when he says that the bureaucracy can consciously regulate (though within limits) the rate of investment, the proportions between means of production and means of consumption, the price of articles of consumption, etc, he is proving that certain of the basic laws of capitalism do not apply.

Is there a transformation of money into capital in Russia? In polemicising against Stalin, Trotsky answers this by showing that the investments are made on the basis of a plan, but nevertheless, what is invested is the surplus value produced by the workers. Here Trotsky shows the basic fallacy in Stalin’s idea that the state could decide and regulate without reference to the economy. We might add that Stalin never denied that there was commodity production in Russia.

In spite of the fact that there is only one ‘employer’ in Russia, nevertheless, the state buys labour power. It is true that because of the full employment which would normally place the seller of the commodity labour power in a strong position, the state has imposed various restrictions on the free sale of labour power, just as in a period of full employment under fascism. Or even in Labour Britain, where the same situation exists, by means of regulations and devices the employers have the state intervene to offset the advantages which accrue from this situation for the sale of labour power. But only one who argued in abstractions, could argue that this negated labour power.

It is true that in the classical capitalist economy there was free sale of labour power. However, in Marx’s Capital itself there was a whole section devoted to showing the ferocious laws which were introduced against the nascent proletariat after the Black Death in England had so reduced the population that the proletarians were in a favourable position to demand higher wages. Did this mean that the basic Marxian laws did not apply? On the contrary, Marx was dealing with a ‘pure’ capitalism which never did exist, from which he extracted the fundamental laws. The distortion of this or that element will not alter the basic laws. That is why in nazi Germany, despite many perversions, it remained fundamentally a system of capitalist economy, because the economy was dominated by production on the basis of private property.

One has only to compare the slave labourer in Siberia with the proletariat in the Russian cities to see the difference. The one is a slave based on slave labour, the other is a wage slave. The one sells his labour power, the other is purely an instrument of labour himself. There is the fundamental distinction.

It is not at all accidental that the ‘money’ used by the state must necessarily have the same basis as money in capitalist society. Not accidentally, as Trotsky explained, the only real money in Russia (or in any transitional economy – even an ideal workers’ state) must be based on gold. The recent rouble devaluation in Russia was in itself a striking confirmation of the fact that the law of money circulation, and thus of the circulation of commodities, maintains its validity in Russia. In a transitional economy the economic categories of money, value, surplus value, etc, must necessarily continue as elements of the old society within the new society.

Cliff argues that ‘the most important source of state income is the turn-over tax, which is an indirect tax.’ He introduced interesting material showing the tremendous burden which the turn-over tax imposes upon the masses.

However, the turn-over tax to which he refers in connection with the exploitation of the masses, in an indirect way, proves that the law of value applies in Russian society. Cliff shows how the turn-over tax applies in Russia. But he does not see that this tax must be based on something. No matter how much the state might add to the price by placing an additional tax, the price must be based on something: what else can this be but the value of the product, the socially necessary labour time contained in it?

Engels ridiculed Dühring’s tax by the sword, out of which the surplus is developed, when he said:

“Or, on the other hand, the alleged tax surcharges represent a real sum of value, namely that produced by the labouring, value-producing class but appropriated by the monopolist class, and then this sum of value consists merely of unpaid labour; in this event, in spite of the man with the sword in his hand, in spite of the alleged tax surcharges, we come once again to the Marxian theory of surplus value.” (Anti-Dühring, page 226) [source]

The turn-over tax in Russia and the other manipulations of the bureaucracy do not in any way invalidate the law of value. What is the essence of the law of value? That the value of the product is determined by the average amount of socially necessary labour time. That must be the point of departure. It necessarily manifests itself through exchange. Marx devoted a great part of his first volume of Capital to explaining the historical development of the commodity form from accidental exchange among savages through its transitions, till we arrive at commodity production par excellence, capitalist production.

Even in a classical capitalist economy the law of value does not reveal itself directly. As is known, commodities are sold above or below their value. Only accidentally would a commodity be sold at its actual value. In the third volume of Capital Marx explains the price of production of commodities. That is to say, that the capitalist only gets the cost of production of his commodity plus the average rate of profit. Thus some capitalists will be paid below the actual rate, others above. Because of the different organic composition of different capitals, only in this complicated fashion does the law of value reveal itself. This is effected, of course, through competition. Monopoly is merely a more complicated development of the law of value in society. Because of the controlling position held by some monopolies, they can extort a price above the value of the commodities, but only by other commodities being sold below their value. The total values produced by society would still amount to the same.

Was there Surplus Value before 1928? Cliff’s Arbitrary Division

In this connection, Cliff is not at all consistent. Shachtman, in his endeavour to deny that Russia is a transitional society in which capitalist laws continue to operate, as well as the laws of the future society, at least argues consistently. He says that the law of value does not operate, therefore all the laws flowing from it do not operate. It is not surplus value which is produced, but surplus product; it is not labour power that the workers sell, since they are slaves, etc, etc. Cliff, however, admits that commodity production continues, labour power and surplus value remain. But once these Marxian categories are accepted as valid for Russian society, then clearly the law of value must operate internally, or the whole position becomes nonsensical.

The whole contradiction, a contradiction within the society itself and not imposed abitrarily – is in the very concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat. If one considers the problem in the abstract, one can see that this is a contradictory phenomenon: the abolition of capitalism yet the continuation of classes. The proletariat does not disappear. It raises itself to the position of ruling class and abolishes the capitalist class. But in the intervening period it remains the working class. Therefore, surplus product in the form of surplus value is produced. It is the case today as it was under Lenin and Trotsky. We have only to pose the problem: what was the surplus value produced when Russia was still a workers’ state – though even then with bureaucratic deformations? What was the process by means of which surplus product before 1928 mysteriously became surplus value after 1928? What was this curious unexplained process? We would like to ask the question here: Did the existence of capitalism outside Russia before 1928 have a similar effect on Russia’s economy? Of course it did. In fact a far greater effect because of the weakness of the Russian economy. Why was there not capitalism in Russia then?

Or further: leave aside the period from 1917 to 1923 – what was the situation from 1923 to 1928 when the Stalinist bureaucracy was consolidating itself? There were far more actual individual capitalist elements in the economy of the country then than there are today. The pressure of world capitalism from an economic point of view was indisputably far greater. Merely to pose the problem is to show the arbitrary method.

The abuse of power and the legal and illegal consumption of surplus value by the bureaucracy, necessarily took place even in the early stages of bureaucratic control. Comrade Cliff has to construct a lifeless scheme which bears no relation to reality in order to create a distinction between the two periods: the period when the bureaucracy represented a degenerated workers’ state, and the period when the bureaucracy became a capitalist class. What, according to Cliff, is the difference? Incredible as it may seem, the bureaucracy really earned its income and only from 1928 onwards did they consume surplus value. Cliff writes:

“The statistics we have at our disposal conclusively show that although the bureaucracy had a privileged position in the period preceding the Five-Year Plan, it can on no account be said that it received surplus value from the labour of others. It can just as conclusively be said that with the introduction of the Five-Year Plans, the bureaucracy’s income consisted to a large extent of surplus value.” (page 45)

This is at variance with the analysis made not only by Trotsky but by the other Marxists of the time in relation to this problem. First of all, even in the most ideal workers’ state, in the transitional period there will unavoidably be a certain consumption of the surplus value by the specialists and bureaucrats. Otherwise, we would have the immediate introduction of communism, without any inequalities or the continuance of the division between mental and manual labour. It is only necessary to refer here to the Left Opposition on this very problem. As early as 1927, the Left Opposition commented on the enormous part of the surplus value being consumed by the bureaucratic apparatus. They protested that the ‘swollen and privileged administrative apparatus is devouring a very considerable part of the surplus value’. ^[source] (See Revolution Betrayed, page 141)

It is clear that from 1920 onwards, the bureaucracy consumed a great part of the surplus value, legitimately and illegitimately. As Marx explained in any case, in a workers’ state in the transitional period, the surplus value will be used for the speedy building up of industry and so prepare the way for the quickest possible transition to equality and then complete communism.

What else was Lenin speaking of in 1920 and 1921 when he stressed the step backward the Bolsheviks had been forced to make, when they paid the specialists according to bourgeois standards and in the old ‘bourgeois way’?

The Economics of the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism

The most significant thing about all tendencies who seek to revise Trotsky’s position on the Russian question is that they always deal with the problem in the abstract and never concretely explain the laws of the transitional society between capitalism and socialism and how such a society would operate. This is not accidental. A concrete consideration would impel them to the conclusion that the fundamental economy in Russia is the same as it was under Lenin and that it could not be otherwise.

The germ of the capitalist mode of production, which began under feudalism through the development of commodity production, lies in the function of the independent craftsmen and merchants. When it reaches a certain stage we have capitalist relations with a feudal superstructure. These are burst asunder by the revolution and the possibilities latent in capitalist production then have the free possibility of fruition unhampered by feudal restrictions.

The whole essence of the revolution (capitalist and proletarian) consists of the fact that the old relationships and the old forms do not correspond with the new ripened method or mode of production. In order to free itself from these restrictions, the productive forces have to be organised on a different basis and the whole of human history and movement of history consists in the development of this antagonism at its various stages in different societies.

However, the bourgeois revolution does not immediately destroy feudalism at one blow. Powerful feudal elements still remain, and to this day the remnants of feudalism exist even in the most highly developed capitalist countries.

One can speak of the feudal mode of production in the sense of the superstructure, despite the capitalist basis which has developed beneath. Or one can even speak of the feudal mode of production at its inception where the germs of capitalism and the possibility of the development of capitalism could be faintly discerned.

The fundamental error of this ‘state capitalist’ theory and its abstractions relating to the transitional period, lies in the failure to distinguish between the mode of production and the mode of appropriation. In every class society there is exploitation and a surplus which is utilised by the exploiting class. But in itself this tells us nothing about the mode of production.

For example, the mode of production under capitalism is social in contradiction to the individual form of appropriation. As Engels explained:

“The separation between the means of production concentrated in the hands of the capitalists on the one side, and the producers now possessing nothing but their labour power, on the other, was made complete. The contradiction between social production and capitalist [read individual or private, as Engels had already explained – EG] appropriation became manifest as the antagonism between proletariat and bourgeoisie.” (Anti-Dühring, page 321) [source]

The transitional economy which, as Lenin pointed out, can and will vary enormously in different countries at different times, and even in the same country at different times, also has a social mode of production, but with state appropriation, and not individual appropriation as under capitalism. This is a form which combines both socialist and capitalist features.

Under capitalism, the system of commodity production par excellence, the product completely dominates the producer. This flows from the form of appropriation, and the contradiction between the form of appropriation and the mode of production; both factors flow from the private ownership of the means of production. Once state ownership takes its place, whatever the resulting system may be, it cannot be capitalism because this basic contradiction will have been abolished. The anarchic character of social production with private appropriation disappears.

Under socialism also, there will be a social mode of production but there will also be a social mode of distribution. For the first time production and distribution will be in harmony.

Therefore, merely to point out the capitalist features in Russia today (wage labour, commodity production, that the bureaucracy consumes an enormous part of the surplus value) is not sufficient to tell us the nature of the social system. Here too, an all-sided view is necessary. One can only understand social relationships in the Soviet Union by taking the totality of the relationships. From the very beginning of the revolution various sectarian schools have produced the most untenable ideas as a result of their failure to make such an analysis. Lenin summed up the problem thus:

“But what does the word ‘transition’ mean? Does it mean, as applied to economics, that the present order contains elements, particles, pieces of both capitalism and socialism? Everyone will admit that it does. But not all who admit this take the trouble to consider the precise nature of the elements that constitute the various social-economic forms which exist in Russia at the present time. And this is the crux of the question.” (Left wing childishness and the petty-bourgeois mentality, Collected Works, Volume 27, page 335) ^[source]

To abstract one side must lead to error. What is puzzling about the Russian phenomenon is precisely the contradictory character of the economy. This has been further aggravated by the backwardness and isolation of the Soviet Union. This culminates in the totalitarian Stalinist regime and results in the worst features of capitalism coming to the fore – the relations between managers and men, piece-work, etc. Instead of analysing these contradictions Comrade Cliff endeavours as far as possible to try and fit them into the pattern of the ‘normal’ laws of capitalist production.

In addition, the tendency under capitalism for the productive forces not only to become centralised but even for measures of statification to be introduced can result in a wrong conclusion. To prove that ‘state capitalism’ in Russia is in the last analysis the same as individual capitalism with the same laws, Cliff cites the following passage from Anti-Dühring:

“The more productive forces it [the state – TC] takes over, the more it becomes the real collective body of all the capitalists, the more citizens it exploits. The workers remain wage-earners, proletarians. The capitalist relationship is not abolished; it is rather pushed to an extreme. But at this extreme it changes into its opposite. State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but it contains within itself the formal means, the key to the solution.” (Anti-Dühring, page 330) ^[source]

In point of fact, Engels is arguing precisely the opposite. Let us re-examine the passages and see how we draw different conclusions:

“If the crisis revealed the incapacity of the bourgeoisie any longer to control the modern productive forces, the conversion of the great organisations for production and communication into joint-stock companies and state property shows that for this purpose the bourgeoisie can he dispensed with. All the social functions of the capitalists are now carried out by salaried employees. The capitalist has no longer any social activity save the pocketing of revenues, the clippng of coupons and gambling on the stock exchange, where the different capitalists fleece each other of their capital. Just as at first the capitalist mode of production displaced the workers, so now it displaces the capitalists, relegating them, just as it did the workers, to the superfluous population, even if in the first instance not to the industrial reserve army.

“But neither the conversion into joint-stock companies nor into state property deprives the productive forces of their character as capital. In the case of joint-stock companies this is obvious. And the modern state, too, is only the organisation with which bourgeois society provides itself in order to maintain the general external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against encroachments either by the workers or by individual capitalists. The modern state, whatever its form, is an essentially capitalist machine; it is the state of the capitalists, the ideal collective body of all capitalists. The more productive forces it takes over as its property, the more it becomes the real collective body of all the capitalists, the more citizens it exploits. The workers remain wage earners, proletarians. The capitalist relationship is not abolished; it is rather pushed to an extreme. But at this extreme it is transformed into its opposite. State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but it contains within itself the formal means, the key to the solution.” (Anti-Dühring, page 330, our emphasis) ^[source]

Surely the idea in the foregoing is clear. Insofar as the forces of production have now developed beyond the framework of capitalist relations (that is, the germ of the contradiction has now grown into a malignant disease of the social system, reflecting itself through the crises) the capitalists are compelled to ‘socialise’ huge means of production – first, through joint-stock companies and then later, even to ‘statify’ sections of the productive forces. This particular idea was brought out sharply by Lenin in Imperialism, where he showed that the development of monopolies and socialisation of labour were in factelements of the new social system within the old.

Once the productive forces had reached this stage, capitalism had already accomplished its historic mission, and because of this the bourgeoisie becomes more and more superfluous. From being a necessity for the development of the forces of production, they now become ‘superfluous’, ‘parasites’, ‘coupon-clippers’. In this they are transformed into parasites in the same way and for the same reason as the feudal lords also became ‘parasites’ once their mission had been fulfilled.

This is merely an indication of the ripeness of capitalism for the social revolution. Writing in Capital Marx had shown that credit and joint-stock companies were already an indication that the productive forces had outgrown private ownership. Engels had shown that the social productive forces even compel the capitalists to recognise their character as social and not as individual productive forces.

Wherever the capitalist state is constrained to take over this or that sector of the economy, it is true the productive forces do not lose their character as capital. But the whole essence of the problem is that where we have complete statification, quantity changes into quality, capitalism changes into its opposite.

How otherwise explain the statement of Engels: ‘But at this extreme it [the capitalist relationship] is transformed into its opposite. State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but it contains within itself the formal means, the key to the solution’?

If one takes into account the fact that this follows the previously quoted passage in the same section where Engels defines capitalist mode of production (as social production, individual appropriation), we must conclude that Engels hopelessly contradicts himself, if we accept Cliff’s conclusions. But from the context, Engels’ meaning is clear. He explains that the solution to the contradictions of capitalism lies in the recognition of the social nature of the modern productive forces: ‘In bringing, therefore, the mode of production, appropriation and exchange into accord with the social character of the means of production. ‘But he shows that this ‘recognition’ precisely consists in asserting conscious organisation and planning, in place of the blind play of forces of the market on the basis of individual ownership. This, however, cannot be done at one stroke. Only ‘gradually’ can social control be fully asserted. The transitional form to this is state ownership. But complete state ownership does not abolish all the features of capitalism immediately, otherwise there would be social ownership, ie socialism would he introduced immediately.

But in the same way as we have the new within the old system in the development of society, so in the transitional society we still have the old within the new. Complete statification marks the extreme limit of capital. The capitalist relation is transformed into its opposite. The elements of the new society which were growing up within the old, now become dominant.

What causes the conflict within capitalism is the fact that the laws manifest themselves blindly. But once the whole of industry is nationalised, for the first time control and planning can be consciously asserted by the producers. Control and planning will, however, in the first stages, take place within given limits. These limits will be determined by the level of technique when the new social order takes over.

Society cannot step from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom overnight. Only on the basis of a limitless development of the productive forces will freedom, in its fullest sense, become a reality. The stage will be reached which will witness the ‘administration of things’.

Before such a stage is reached, society must pass through the transitional period. But in so far as immediately after private ownership has been abolished, control and planning become a possibility for the first time, then for the first time also the realm of necessity is left behind. But while it is now possible to speak of ‘freedom’, this is only so in the sense that necessity has become consciously recognised. At this stage (the transitional period), Engels pointed out:

“The social character of the means of production and of the products…is quite consciously asserted by the producers, and is transformed from a cause of disorder and periodic collapse into the most powerful level of production itself.

“The forces operating in society work exactly like the forces operating in nature; blindly, violently, destructively, so long as we do not understand them and fail to take them into account. But when once we have recognised them and understand how they work, their direction and their effects, the gradual subjection of them to our will and the use of them for the attainment of our aims depends entirely upon ourselves. And this is quite especially true of the mighty productive forces of the present day.” (Anti-Dühring, page 331, our emphasis) ^{[source (translation differs)]}

Engels, quoting Hegel, further summed up the relationships between freedom, necessity and the transitional period, thus:

“Freedom is the realisation of necessity. ‘Necessity is blind only insofar as it is not understood.” (Anti-Dühring, page 136) ^{[source (translation differs)]}

Marx and Engels only touched on the contradictory character of the transitional period. They left its elaboration to succeeding generations, laying down only the general laws. But clearly they showed the need for state ownership as the necessary transitional state for the development of the productive forces. Engels explained the need for the state during this stage for two reasons:

To take measures against the old ruling class. Because the transitional society cannot immediately guarantee enough for all.

The logic of Cliff’s thesis is that in the transitional society there are no vestiges of capitalism in the internal economy. While Comrade Cliff may argue vehemently that he agrees with the need for the state in the transitional period, it is evident that he has not thought out the economic reasons which make the state necessary and what character the economy assumes in this period. Before socialism can be introduced there must necessarily be a tremendous development of the forces of production, far beyond those reached under capitalism.

As Trotsky explained, even in America there is still not enough production to guarantee the immediate introduction of socialism. Therefore, there will still have to be an intervening period in which capitalist laws will operate in modified form. Of course, in America, this would be of short duration. But it will not be possible to skip this stage entirely. What are the capitalist laws which will remain? Comrade Cliff not only fails to answer this; he falls into the trap of bureaucratic collectivism by failing to recognise that money, labour power, the existence of the working class, surplus value, etc, are all survivals of the old capitalist system which were carried over even under the regime of Lenin. It is impossible to introduce immediately direct social production and distribution. Particularly was this the case in backward Russia.

Writing to Conrad Schmidt in 1890, Engels gave a magnificent example of the thoroughly materialist approach to the problem of the economics of the transition from capitalism to socialism. He wrote:

“There has been a discussion in the Volkstribune about the division of products in the future society, whether this will take place according to the amount of work done or otherwise. The question has been approached very ‘materialistically’, in opposition to certain idealistic forms of phraseology about justice. But strangely enough it has never struck anyone that, after all, the method of division essentially depends on how much there is to divide, and this must surely change with progress of production and social organisation, so that the method of division may also change. But to everyone who took part in the discussion ‘socialist society’ appeared not as involved in continuous change and progress but as a stable affair fixed once and for all which must, therefore, have its method of division fixed once and for all. All one can reasonably do, however, is (1) to try and discover the method of division to be used at the beginning, and (2) to try and find the general tendency in which the further development will proceed. But about this I do not find a single word in the whole debate.” (Marx, Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress, Moscow, 1975, page 393)^[source]

Writing in Anti-Dühring, Engels pointed out:

“Direct social production and direct distribution exclude all exchange of commodities, therefore also the transformation of the product into commodities (at any rate within the community) and consequently also their transformation into values.” (Anti-Dühring, page 366, our emphasis) ^[source]

But only socialism could realise this. In the transitional period, distribution still remains indirect – only gradually does society gain complete control over the product – and therefore the production of commodities and of exchange between the different sectors of production must necessarily take place. The law of value applies and must apply until there is direct access to the product by the producers. This can only take place on the basis of complete control of social production and thus direct social distribution, namely, each individual taking whatever he requires. Marx deals with this problem in passing in Volume III of Capital (Chapter 49), where he is discussing the problem of capitalist production as a whole:

“Accordingly a portion of the profit, of surplus value and of the surplus product, in which only newly added labour is represented, so far as its value is concerned, serves as an insurance fund…This is also the only portion of the surplus-value and surplus product and thus of surplus-labour, which would continue to exist, outside of that portion which serves for accumulation and for expansion of the process of reproduction, even after the abolition of the capitalist system…and the fact that all new capital arises out of profit, rent, or other forms of revenue, that is, out of surplus labour…” (Capital, Volume III, Progress, Moscow, 1971, page 847-8, our emphasis) ^[source]

In this chapter Marx is dealing, in an analysis of the process of production, in his own words, with ‘the value of the total annual product of labour (which) is under discussion, in other words, the value of the product of the total social capital.’

Repeating this in the same chapter, in answer to Storch, one of the bourgeois economists, he declared:

“In the first place, it is a false abstraction to regard a nation, whose mode of production is based upon value or otherwise capitalistically organised, as an aggregate body working merely for the satisfaction of the national wants.

“In the second place, after the abolition of the capitalist mode of production, but with social production still in vogue, the detemination of value continues to prevail in such a way that the regulation of the labour time and the distribution of the social labour among the various groups of production also the keeping of accounts in connection with this, becomes more essential than ever.” (Capital, Volume III, page 851, our emphasis) ^[source]

This is in line with the scattered remarks of Marx and Engels at various times in dealing with the transitional period: where Engels explains that under capitalism joint-stock companies and state ownership are beyond the framework, properly speaking, of capitalist production; where Marx already pointed out that credit also extended production beyond its framework even before the transition to the dictatorship of the proletariat. After that, as shown in the above passages and also in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx considered that bourgeois law, bourgeois distribution and in that sense a bourgeois state still remain.

Discussing the role of money and the state in the transitional period, Trotsky developed this idea even further:

“…These two problems, state and money, have a number of traits in common, for they both reduce themselves in the last analysis to the problem of problems: productivity of labour. State compulsion like money compulsion is an inheritance from the class society, which is incapable of defining the relations of man to man except in the form of fetishes, churchly or secular, after appointing to defend them the most alarming of all fetishes, the state, with a great knife between its teeth. In a communist society, the state and money will disappear. Their gradual dying away ought consequently to begin under socialism only at that historical moment when the state turns into a semi-state, and money begins to lose its magic power. This will mean that socialism, having freed itself from capitalist fetishes, is beginning to create a more lucid, free and worthy relation among men. Such characteristically anarchist demands as the ‘abolition’ of money, ‘abolition’ of wages, or ‘liquidation’ of the state and family possess interest merely as models of mechanical thinking. Money cannot be arbitrarily ‘abolished’, nor the state and the old family ‘liquidated’. They have to exhaust their historic mission, evaporate, and fall away. The death-blow to money fetishism will be struck only upon that stage when the steady growth of social wealth has made us bipeds forget our miserly attitude toward every excess minute of labour, and our humiliating fear about the size of our ration. Having lost its ability to bring happiness or trample men in the dust, money will turn into mere book-keeping receipts for the conveniences of statisticians and for planning purposes. In the still more distant future, probably these receipts will not be needed. But we can leave this question entirely to posterity, who will be more intelligent than we are.

“The nationalisation of the means of production and credit, the co-operativising or state-ising of internal trade, the monopoly of foreign trade, the collectivisation of agriculture, the law on inheritance – set strict limits upon the personal accumulation of money and hinder its conversion into private capital (usurious, commercial and industrial). These functions of money, however, bound up as they are with exploitation, are not liquidated at the beginning of a proletarian revolution, but in a modified form are transferred to the state, the universal merchant, creditor and industrialist. At the same time the more elementary functions of money, as measure of value, means of exchange and medium of payment, are not only preserved, but acquire a broader field of action than they had under capitalism.” (Revolution Betrayed, page 65-6, emphasis in original)^[source]

To sum up. Whereas before private ownership of the means of production is abolished, the market is dominant over man who is helpless before the laws of the economy he himself has created, after its abolition, he begins for the first time to consciously assert control. But consciousness here merely means the recognition of law, not the abolition of law. That is the peculiarity of the transitional period, that because man now understands the nature of the productive forces, to that extent he can exercise control over them. But he cannot transcend the limits of the given development of the productive forces. However, now that the productive forces have been released from the fetters of individual capitalist production, they can be developed at such a pace and with such expansion that very rapidly they can be transformed from state ownership as an intermediate form, into social ownership by society. Once this stage has been reached (socialism), there is real social production and distribution for the first time. Money withers away, the law of value withers away, the state withers away. In other words, all the forces of constraint which are a necessary reflection of the limits of technique and the development of production at any given stage, now disappear with the disappearance of the division of labour. Until such time, all the features referred to above, capitalist features carried over from the old capitalist society, will linger on in the transitional period.

The position of Comrade Cliff, as with Shachtman and all others who have revised Trotsky’s position on Russia, remains, on the transitional period, a blank. And for a very good reason. If one considers the theory of the transitional stage in the light of the Russian experience, there are only one of two conclusions: either Russia today is still in a transitional stage, which has taken on horrible distortions, or Russia was never a workers’ state from the very beginning. There are no other alternatives.

The Marxian Theory of the State. Two Classes One State – Cliff’s Contradiction

In the first chapter of his work, Comrade Cliff endeavours to prove that Trotsky’s analysis of the Russian state contradicts the theory of the state as developed by Marx and elaborated by Lenin.

The first chapter contains an elaborate scheme which sets out to prove that two classes cannot use one state machine. Here Cliff believes he has found a fundamental error in Trotsky. Taking the ideas developed by the Old Man at different times and in differing circumstances, he counterposes them to each other. He counterposes, for example, a quotation from Trotsky in the early stages of the degeneration of the bureaucracy and the expulsion of the Left Opposition, when he argued for the reform of the soviet state, and incidentally, also for the reform of the Bolshevik Party which controlled the state. (It was at this stage that Trotsky wrote the letter to the CC of the CPSU demanding that Stalin be removed.) Who can deny that had the international events developed differently it was theoretically possible that the Bolshevik Party could have spewed forth the bureaucracy and re-established a healthy workers’ state?

Cliff counterposes to this the quotation from Revolution Betrayed, in which Trotsky says that if the Russian workers come to power they will purge the state apparatus; and if the bourgeoisie come to power ‘a purgation of the state apparatus would, of course, be necessary in this case too. But a bourgeois restoration would probably have to clean fewer people than a revolutionary party’. Cliff’s answer to this is:

“Whether we assume that the proletariat must smash the existing state machine on coming to power while the bourgeoisie can use it, or whether we assume that neither the proletariat nor the bourgeoisie can use the existing state apparatus (the ‘purgation of the state apparatus’ necessarily involving such a deep change as would transform quantity into quality) – on both assumptions we must come to the conclusion that Russia is not a workers’ state. To assume that the proletariat and the bourgeoisie can use the same state machine as the instrument of their supremacy is tantamount to a vindication of the theoretical basis of social democracy and a repudiation of the revolutionary concept of the state expressed by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. To assume that different layers, groups or parties of one and the same class cannot base themselves on the same state machine is equally a repudiation of the Marxist concept of the state.” (Cliff, page 4)

This whole formalistic method is the fatal weakness of Cliff’s case. It would have been impossible for Trotsky in the early stages to deal with the problem in the abstract. He had to deal with the concrete situation and give a concrete answer. But the further degeneration posed the problem in an entirely different way. Once it had been established that it was impossible to reform the Stalinist party, that it was impossible to reform the Soviet state (we assume that Cliff also believes this was the task since up to 1928 since he says Russia was a degenerated workers’ state), then the question had to be viewed in a somewhat different light. It is foreign to the Marxist method to search for isolated contradictions, real or apparent. What is required is an examination of a theory in its broad general development, in its movement, and its contradictions.

But let us examine Cliff’s own thought processes on this subject. He too cannot avoid the very trap which he tries to lay for Trotsky. Chapter 1 (no less than eighteen pages) is devoted to proving the impossibility of two classes using the one state. But lo and behold, Chapter 4 accomplishes the miracle! The impossible gulf is bridged! Both the capitalist class and the proletariat of Russia have used precisely the same state machine. Why? Because more surplus value was produced! Realising this dilemma, Cliff is compelled to advance something truly new and unique in the movement: that the bureaucracy did not consume surplus value before 1928 but by the introduction of the Five Year Plan, the state was changed from a workers’ state into a capitalist state. (Any enemy of the Fourth International could immediately retort that the state of Stalin on this basis is purely an extension and deepening of the state of Lenin. For in the economic sense nothing fundamentally was changed. We have dealt with this in preceding chapters. Significantly it is only on the economic argument – and this is astonishing – that Cliff advances his theory. Despite the title of his first Chapter ‘An Examination of the Definition of Russia as a Degenerated Workers’ State’, he does not deal with the political question at all here or in any other chapter. Here is how Cliff sees the transformation from a workers’ state into a capitalist state:

“The statistics we have at our disposal conclusively show that although the bureaucracy had a privileged position in the period preceding the Five-Year Plan, it can on no account be said that it received surplus value from the labour of others. It can just as conclusively be said that with the introduction of the Five-Year Plans, the bureaucracy’s income consisted to a large extent of surplus value.” (Cliff, page 45)

In other words, Cliff sees the transition from one system to the other not by smashing of the state machine. How does this fit into his scheme in Chapter 1?

Cliff’s attempt to manufacture an artificial bridge between the workers’ state and the capitalist state, because he has not been able to find the smashing of the workers’ state machine, has led him to seek economic differences between the two periods – pre-1928 and post-1928. In this he falls into the most formalistic and abstract conceptions of the workers’ state prior to 1928. As we have shown in the previous chapters, even in the healthiest of workers’ states, according to Marx, surplus value must necessarily be produced in order to develop industry to the point where the state, money, and the proletariat itself and all the other survivals of capitalism will have disappeared. So long as the working class exists as a class, surplus value will be produced.

A statement of the Left Opposition in 1927 pointed out that the bureaucracy was consuming an enormous part of the surplus value. Cliff’s method of introducing this subject is totally incorrect. Instead of setting himself the task of proving a thesis, he blandly makes assertions and takes them as proven. That Chapter 4 contradicts everything in Chapter 1 is another matter! Just examine the way in which Comrade Cliff sums up this Chapter 4, in which he openly claims that a transition has been achieved without a revolution and without smashing the state machine.

He begins:

“In this chapter we shall describe the transformation of the class character of the Russian state from a workers’ to a capitalist state. We shall do this by dealing with the following points…” (Cliff, page 33)

He thereupon proceeds to detail a number of economic changes which have nothing to do with the structure of or the transformation of state power, and ends up with the subsection: ‘Why the Five Year Plan Signifies the Transformation of the Bureaucracy into a Ruling Class.’ All the economic arguments in this chapter have nothing to do with the state or its overthrow.

Cliff deals at length with the differentiation in the army, the introduction of privileges for the officers, military discipline, etc. He here merely repeats what Trotsky said a thousand times on the transformation of the bureaucracy into an uncontrolled caste. But let us see his conclusions. He writes:

“Again the Five-Year Plan marks the turning point. Then the organisation and the structure of the army began to change fundamentally. From a workers’army with bureaucratic deformations it became the armed body of the bureaucracy as the ruling class…” (page 59)

Let us see now whether what excludes a gradual social revolution excludes a gradual counter-revolution.

“If the soldiers in an hierarchically built army strive for decisive control over the army, they immediately meet with the opposition of the officer caste. There is no way of removing such a caste except by revolutionary violence. As against this, if the officers of a people’s militia become less and less dependent on the will of the soldiers, which they may do as they meet with no institutional bureaucracy, their transformation into an officers’ caste independent of the soldiers can be accomplished gradually. The transition from a standing army to a militia cannot but be accompanied by a tremendous outbreak of revolutionary violence: on the other hand, the transition from a militia to a standing army, to the extent that it is the result of the tendencies inside the militia itself, can and must be gradual. The opposition of the soldiers to the rising bureaucracy may lead the latter to use violence against the soldiers. But this does not exclude the possibility of a gradual transition from a militia to a standing army. What applies to the army applies equally to the state. A state without a bureaucracy, or with a weak bureaucracy dependent on the pressure of the masses may gradually be transformed into a state in which the bureaucracy is free of workers’ control.” (Cliff, page 82, our emphasis)

Cliff now sets out to prove that there can be a gradual transition from a workers’ state to a capitalist state, and clinches his chapter by producing a quotation from none other than Trotsky…whom he has so sternly discredited as an authority on this subject in his Chapter 1.

Cliff writes:

“The Moscow Trials⁽⁵⁾ were the civil war of the bureaucracy against the masses, a war in which only one side was armed and organised. They witnessed the consummation of the bureaucracy’s total liberation from popular control. Trotsky, who thought that the Moscow trials and the ‘Constitution’ were steps towards the restoration of individual capitalism by legal means, then withdrew the argument that a gradual change from a proletarian to a bourgeois state is ‘running backwards the film of reformism’. He wrote:

“’In reality, the new constitution…opens up for the bureaucracy “legal” roads for the economic counter-revolution, ie, the restoration of capitalism by means of a “Cold stroke”.’ (Fourth International and the Soviet Union, Thesis adopted by the First International Conference for the Fourth International, Geneva, July 1936.)” (Cliff, page 82)

Here we see the full light on Cliff’s thesis and his bad method. Starting off with the thesis that Trotsky is no Marxist because he says two classes can use one state machine, Cliff ends up saying precisely the same thing and using as his authority the same Trotsky.

Nationalisation and the Workers’ State

On page 2 of his work, Cliff gives a quotation from Revolution Betrayed:

“The nationalisation of the land, the means of industrial production, transport and exchange, together with the monopoly of foreign trade, constitutes the basis of the Soviet social structure. Through these relations, established by the proletarian revolution, the nature of the Soviet Union as a proletarian state is for us basically defined.” (Revolution Betrayed, page 248) ^[source]

One of Cliff’s conclusions is that, in this case, ‘neither the Paris Commune nor the Bolshevik dictatorship were workers’ states as the former did not statify the means of production at all, and the latter did not do so for some time.’ Here we see that Cliff bases his case on whether or not the working class has control over the state machine. We will deal with the question of workers’ control in a later chapter. But here let us examine Cliff’s method of separating the economic basis of a workers’ state from the question of workers’ control of the state machine. For a temporary period, for shorter or longer duration, it would be possible for the proletariat to take power politically while not proceeding economically to transform society. This was the position in Russia where the proletariat took power in October 1917, but did not undertake major nationalisation until it was forced upon them in 1918. But if the proletariat did not proceed to carry through the economic transformation, then inevitably the proletarian regime would be doomed to collapse. The laws of the economy will always break through in the end. Either the proletariat would proceed to nationalise the entire economy, or inevitably the capitalist system would emerge predominant. Cliff fails to show how the basic forms of Russian economy would differ under a healthy workers’ state. He has taken refuge in the surplus value consumed by the bureaucracy, but this evades the fundamental issue.

No better is Cliff’s case based upon the experience of the Paris Commune and the first stage of the Russian Revolution. The same would apply to them as aforementioned. These regimes were a transition to the complete economic rule of the proletariat. Such transitions are more or less inevitable in the change over from one society to another. Both in the case of the Commune and in the case of the Russian Revolution, they could not be long lasting if the proletariat did not proceed to nationalise industry. Has Cliff forgotten that one of the main lessons taught by Marx and assiduously learned by the Bolsheviks, was the failure of the French proletariat to nationalise the Bank of France? So we see a state can be a proletarian state on the basis of political power, or it can be a proletarian state on the basis of the economy; or it can be a transition to both of these as we will show.

The same laws would apply to the counter-revolution on the part of the bourgeoisie. The Old Man correctly argued that in the event of a bourgeois counter-revolution in Russia, the bourgeoisie might, for a time, even retain state ownership before breaking it up and handing it to private ownership. To a scholar it would appear then that you can have a workers’ state and a bourgeois state on the basis of state ownership, or you can have a workers’ state or a bourgeois state on the basis of private ownership.

However, it is obvious that one could only arrive at this mode of reasoning if one failed to take into consideration the movement of society in one direction or another.

Not only that, but all sorts of unforeseen relationships can develop because of the class structure of society and the state. To take the example of Russia. In 1917 up to the capture of control of the soviets by the Bolsheviks, we had the situation as sketched by Trotsky in the History of the Russian Revolution, where, because of the Menshevik majority, in a certain sense the bourgeoisie ruled through the soviets – the organs of workers’ rule par excellence! According to Cliff’s schema, how could this possibly happen? Of course, had the Bolsheviks not taken power, the bourgeoisie, having used the Mensheviks and through them, the soviets in the transitional period, would have abolished the soviets as they did in Germany after 1918.

In the transition from one society to another, it is clear that there is not an unbridgeable gulf. It is not a dialectical method to think in finished categories; workers’ state or capitalist state and the devil take any transition or motion between the two. It is clear that when Marx spoke of the smashing of the old state form in relation to the Commune, he took it for granted that the economy would be transformed at a greater or lesser pace and would come into consonance with the political forms. We will see later in relation to Eastern Europe that Cliff adopts the same formalistic method.

The Dialectical Conception of the State

It may be well to deal here with the nature of the state. According to Marxists, the state arises as the necessary instrument for the oppression of one class by another class. The state in the last analysis, as explained by Marx and Lenin, consists of armed bodies of men and their appendages. That is the essence of the Marxist definition. However, one must be careful in using their broad Marxist generalisations, which are undoubtedly correct, in an absolute sense. Truth is always concrete but if one does not analyse the particular ramifications and concrete circumstances, one must inevitably fall into abstractions and errors. Look at the cautious way in which Engels deals with the question, even when generalising. In Origins of the Family, Engels wrote:

“But in order that these antagonisms, classes with conflicting economic interests, shall not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, a power, apparently standing above society, has become necessary to moderate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of ‘order’, and this power, arisen out of society, but placing itself above it and increasingly alienating itself from it, is the state.” (The Origin of the Family, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1946, page 194) ^[source]

On the next page he goes on to show that:

“…it is enough to look at Europe today, where class struggle and rivalry in conquest have brought the public power to a pitch where it threatens to devour the whole of society and even the state itself.”

Engels goes on to show that once having arisen, the state within certain limits, develops an independent movement of its own and must necessarily do so under given conditions: “In possession of the public power and the right of taxation, the officials now present themselves as organs of society standing above society.” (Emphasis in original) ^[source]

Contrary to Cliff’s conception that the state plays a direct role, one can see the meticulous care with which Engels treats the question of the independent role of the state, relative of course, to society. In the whole of Cliff’s material, the fact that the state under given conditions can and does play a relatively independent role in the struggle between the classes is forgotten. His is a ‘logical’ scheme: either it is a state of workers, directly controlled by the workers, or it must be a capitalist state. There is no room for the interplay of forces in Cliff’s method. Again, contrast this with Engels:

“As the state arose from the need to keep class antagonisms in check, but also arose in the thick of the fight between the classes, it is normally the state of the most powerful, economically ruling class, which by its means becomes also the political ruling class, and so acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class…Exceptional periods, however, occur when the warring classes are so nearly equal in forces that the state power, as apparent mediator, acquires for the moment a certain independence in relation to both…” (page 196, our emphasis) ^[source]

Again, on page 201, Engels wrote:

“The central link in civilised society is the state, which in all typical periods (our emphasis) is without exception the state of the ruling class, and in all cases continues to be essentially a machine for holding down the oppressed, exploited class…” ^[source]

Note the difference between Cliff’s black and white formulae and Engels’ careful formulations…’it is normally’, in ‘typical periods’, etc.

Why is it that the proletariat cannot take over the ready made state machine? Not for mystical reasons but because of certain very concrete facts. In the modern state all the key positions are in the hands of those people who are under the control of the ruling class: they have been specially selected by education, outlook, and conditions of life, to serve the interests of the bourgeoisie. The army officers, particularly the higher ranks, the civil servants, and in the nationalised industries today the key technicians, are moulded in their ideas and outlook to serve the interests of the capitalist class. All the commanding positions in society are placed in the hands of people whom the bourgeoisie can trust. That is the reason the state machine is a tool in the hands of the bourgeoisie which cannot be used by the proletariat and must be smashed by them. Now, what does the smashing of the state machine mean? To say the least, Cliff’s ideas on this question appear to be very nebulous.

It is possible that many, perhaps even the majority of the officials of the bourgeois state, will be used by the proletariat once they take power. But they will be subordinate to the workers’ committees and organisations. For example in the Soviet Union, in the early days after the Czarist army had been dissolved, the Red Army was led by ex-Czarist officers. Likewise in the state apparatus where a proportion of the officials were the same ex-Czarist officials. Because of unfavourable historical factors this was later to play an important role in the degeneration of the Russian regime. Not for nothing did Lenin say that the Soviet state is ‘a bourgeois Czarist machine…barely varnished with socialism’. (Incidentally this honest characterisation is very far from the idealised and false picture of the state under Lenin and Trotsky which is drawn by Cliff. How the process of degeneration could have taken place with the idyllic picture painted by Cliff would be difficult to understand. However, this will be dealt with in the later sections.)

The proletariat, according to the classical concept, smashes the old state machine and proceeds to create a semi-state. Nevertheless, it is forced to utilise the old technicians. But the state, even under the best conditions, say in an advanced country with an educated proletariat, remains a bourgeois instrument, and because of this the possibility of degeneration is implicit in it. For that reason Marxists insist on the control of the masses, to ensure that the state should not be allowed to develop into an independent force. As speedily as possible, it should be dissolved into society.

It is for the very reasons given above that, under certain conditions, the state gains a certain independence from the base which it originally represented. Engels explained that though the superstructure is dependent on the economic base, it nevertheless has an independent movement of its own. For quite a lengthy period, there can be a conflict between the state and the class which that state represents. That is why Engels speaks of the state ‘normally’ or in ‘typical periods’ directly representing the ruling class. The great Marxist teachers have analysed the phenomenon of Bonapartism to which Engels refers above. In the Eighteenth Brumaire Marx pointed out how the drunken soldiery of Louis Napoleon, in the name of ‘the law, order and the family’, shot down the bourgeoisie whom they presumably represented. ^[source]

Thus, one can only understand class society if one takes into account the many-sided dialectical inter-dependence and antagonisms of all the factors within it. Formalists usually get lost in one or other side of the problem. For example, Cliff can write:

“…It needs just as high a degree of mental acrobatics to think that Mikolajcik⁽⁶⁾ and his ilk who flee abroad or waste away in prisons are the rulers of Poland as to consider that the rulers of Russia are the slave labourers in Siberia.” (Cliff, page 13)

Were the bourgeoisie under Louis Napoleon the ruling class? It needs no high degree of mental acrobatics to answer this.

When considering the development of society, economics must be considered the dominant factor. The super-structure which develops on this economic base separates itself from the base and becomes antagonistic to it. After all, the essence of the Marxist theory of revolution is that with the gradual changes in production under the embryo of the old form, ie, super-structure in both property and state, a contradiction develops which can only be resolved by abolishing the super-structure and re-organising society on the base of the new mode of production which has developed within the old.

Economy in the long run is decisive. Because of this, as all the Marxist teachers were at pains to explain, in the long run the superstructure must come into correspondence with it. Once having abandoned the criterion of the basic economic structure of society, all sorts of superficial and arbitrary constructions are possible. One would inevitably be lost in the maze of history, like Perseus in the mythology of ancient Greece who was lost in the Palace of mines, but without a thread to lead one out. The thread of history is the basic economic structure of society, or the property form, its legal reflection.

Let us take as a case extremely rich in examples, the history of France. The bourgeois revolution took place in 1789. In 1793 the Jacobins⁽⁷⁾ seized complete power. As Marx and Engels pointed out, they went beyond the framework of bourgeois relations and performed a salutary historical task because of that, accomplishing in a few months what would have taken the bourgeoisie decades or generations to accomplish; the complete cleansing from France of all traces of feudalism. Yet this regime remained rooted in the basis of bourgeois forms of property. It was followed by the French Thermidor and the rule of the Directory, to be followed by the classic dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon re-introduced many feudal forms, had himself crowned Emperor and concentrated the supreme power in his hands. But we still call this regime bourgeois. With the restoration of Louis XVIII the regime still remained capitalist…and then we had not one but two revolutions – 1830 and 1848. These revolutions had important social consequences. They resulted in significant changes even in the personnel of the state itself. Yet we characterise them both as bourgeois revolutions in which there was no change in the class which held power.

Let us proceed further. After the Paris Commune of 1871 and the shake-up of the relations which this involved, we had the organisation of the Third Republic with bourgeois democracy which lasted for decades. This was followed by Petain, then the De Gaulle-Stalinist regime⁽⁸⁾, and now the Quielle Government. Examine for a moment the amazing diversity of these regimes. To a non-Marxist it would seem absurd to define in the same category, shall we say, the regime of Robespierre and that of Petain. Yet Marxists do define them as fundamentally the same – bourgeois regimes. What is the criterion? Only the one thing: the form of property, the private ownership of the means of production.

Take, similarly, the diversity of regimes in more modern times to see the extreme differences in super-structures which are on the same economic base. For instance, compare the regime of nazi Germany with that of British social democracy. They are so fundamentally different in super-structure that many theorists of the non-Marxist or ex-Marxist school have found new class structure and a new system of society entirely. Why do we say that they represent the same class and the same regime? Despite the difference in super-structure, the economic base of the given societies remained the same.

If we take the history of modern society, we get many examples where the bourgeoisie is expropriated politically and yet remains the ruling class. Trotsky describes the regime of Bonapartism, or as Marx calls it, ‘naked rule by the sword over society’.

Look what happened in China after Chiang Kai Shek had, with the dregs of the Shanghai gangs, crushed the Shanghai working class. The bankers wished to give him banquets and applaud him as the benefactor and saviour of civilisation.

But Chiang wanted something more material than the praise of his masters. Unceremoniously, he clapped all the rich industrialists and bankers of Shanghai in jail and extracted a ransom of millions before he would release them. He had done the job for them and now demanded the price. He had not crushed the Shanghai workers for the benefit of the capitalists, but for what it meant in power and income for him and his gang of thugs. Yet who will presume to say that the bankers who were in jail were not still the ruling class though they did not hold political power? The Chinese bourgeoisie (no Marxists!) must have reflected sadly on the complexity of society where a good portion of the loot in the surplus value extracted from the workers had to go to their own watchdogs, and where many of their class were languishing in jail.

The bourgeoisie is politically expropriated under such conditions; naked force dominates society. An enormous part of the surplus value is consumed by the top militarists and bureaucrats. But it is in the interests of these bureaucrats that the capitalist exploitation of the workers should continue, and therefore while they squeeze as much as they can out of the bourgeoisie, nevertheless, they defend private property. That is why the bourgeoisie continues to be the ruling class.

Here lies the anwer to those who assert that it is sheer sophistry to claim that a working class can be a ruling class when a great proportion of them are in jail in Siberia. Unless we are guided by the basic property forms of society we will lose the Marxist road. Many examples could be given in history of the way in which one section of the ruling class has attacked other sections. For example, in the Wars of the Roses in Britain the two factions of the ruling barons virtually exterminated one another. At one time or another in history big sections of the ruling class were either in jails or were executed. One has only to consider Hitler’s treatment of his bourgeois opponents. They lost not only their property but their lives as well.

In dealing with the role of the state, the most important question that must be answered and one which Cliff cannot answer is: the state must be an instrument of a class – which class does it represent in Russia and Eastern Europe? It cannot represent the capitalist class because they have been expropriated. It cannot be argued that it represents the interests of the peasant class, or the petty-owners in the cities. Under a fascist or Bonapartist regime, even though the gangsters might have the bourgeoisie by the throat, nevertheless there is a capitalist class in whose interests the economy operates as a whole, and on whom this parasitic excrescence clings. If they do not represent the proletariat, as Trotsky said, as a special form of Bonapartism in the sense that they defend the nationalisation of the means of production, planning and the monopoly of foreign trade, whom do the Stalinist bureaucrats represent? Cliff’s answer is that the bureaucracy constitutes the new ruling class, the capitalist class of Russia. But serious consideration of this would show that this cannot be the case. What he is saying is that the state is a class. The bureaucracy owns the state, the state owns the means of production, therefore the bureaucracy is a class. This is dodging the issue, he is saying in effect that the state owns the state.

According to Lenin, the state:

“…has always been a certain apparatus which separated out from society and consisted of a group of people engaged solely, or almost solely, or mainly, in ruling. People are divided into ruled and into specialists in ruling, those who rise above society and are called rulers, representatives of the state.

“This apparatus, this group of people who rule others, always takes command of a certain apparatus of coercion, of physical force, irrespective of whether this coercion of people is expressed in the primitive club or – in the epoch of slavery – in more perfected types of weapons, or in the firearms which appeared in the middle ages or, finally, in modern weapons which, in the twentieth century, are marvels of technique and are entirely based on the latest achievements of modern technology.

“The methods of coercion changed, but whenever there was a state there existed in every society a group of persons who ruled, who commanded, who dominated and who, in order to maintain their power, possessed an apparatus of physical coercion, an apparatus of violence, with those weapons which corresponded best to the technical level of the given epoch. And by examining these general phenomena, by asking ourselves why no state existed when there were no classes, when there were no exploiters and no exploited, and why it arose when classes arose – only in this way shall we find a definite answer to the question of the essence of the state and its significance.

“The state is a machine for maintaining the rule of one class over another.” (The State, Collected Works, Volume 29, page 477) ^[source]

The state by its very nature is composed of bureaucracy, officers, generals, heads of police etc. But these do not constitute a class; they are the instrument of a class even if they may be in antagonism to that class. They cannot themselves be a class.

We must ask Cliff: Which section of the bureaucracy owns the state? It cannot be all the bureaucrats, because they, the bureaucracy itself, are hierarchically divided. The little civil servant is part of the bureaucracy as much as the big bureaucrat. Is it then the commanding stratum in Soviet society? This is clearly unsound. In capitalist society, or in any class society, no matter how privileged the top, they wield the instrument to protect the ruling class which has a direct relationship to the means of production, ie, in the sense of their ownership. We know who Napoleon represented. We know who Louis Napoleon, Bismarck, Chiang Kai Shek, Hitler, Churchill and Attlee represented. But who do the bureaucrats represent: the bureaucrats? Clearly this is false. In another section we have shown that the relationship of the bureaucracy to the means of production is necessarily one of parasitism and partakes of the same parasitism as the nazi bureaucracy. They are not a necessary and inevitable category for the particular mode of production. At best they are entitled to wages of superintendence. If they take more, it is in the same way as the nazi bureaucracy consumed part of the surplus value produced by the workers. But they were not a class.

Innumerable references could be given to show that a capitalist state presupposes private property, individual ownership of the means of production. The state is the apparatus of rule: it cannot itself be the class which rules. The bureaucracy is merely part of the apparatus of the state. It may ‘own’ the state, in the sense that it lifts itself above society and becomes relatively independent of the economically dominant, ie, ruling class. That was the case in nazi Germany, where the bureaucracy dictated to the capitalists what they should produce, how they should produce it, etc, for the purposes of war. So in the war economy of Britain, USA and elsewhere, the state dictated to the capitalists what and how they should produce. This did not convert them into a ruling class. Why? Because it was in defence of private property.

Cliff argues that the bureaucracy manages and plans industry. True enough. Whose industry do they manage and plan? In capitalist society, the managers plan and manage industry in the individual enterprises and trusts. But it does not make them the owners of those enterprises and trusts. The bureaucracy manages the entire industry. In that sense it is true that it has more independence from its economic base than any other bureaucracy or state machine in the whole of human history. But as Engels emphasised and we must re-emphasise, in the final analysis the economic basis is decisive. If Cliff is going to argue that it is in their function as managers that the bureaucrats are the ruling class, then clearly he is not giving a Marxist definition of a capitalist class. He is calling the Russian bureaucracy a class, but he must work out a theory as to what class this is.

The state is the instrument of class rule, of coercion, a glorified policeman. But the policeman is not the ruling class. The police can become unbridled, can become bandits, but that does not convert them into a capitalist, feudal or slave-owning class.

What Happened in Eastern Europe

Events in Eastern Europe and the nature of the states which have arisen can only be explained by the Marxist-Leninist theory of the state, and only Trotsky’s conceptions can explain events in Eastern Europe from this point of view.

First it is necessary to understand what took place in Eastern Europe with the advance of the Red Army. No one can deny (leaving aside the question of Germany for a moment) that in all the Balkan and Eastern European countries the advance of the Red Army resulted in a revolutionary movement not only among the workers, but among the peasants as well. The reason for this lay in the whole background of these states, where, before the war, apart from Czechoslovakia, capitalism was very weak. We had here decaying feudal-military-capitalist dictatorships whose regimes were completely incapable of further developing the productive forces of the countries.

The general world crisis of capitalism was particularly exacerbated because of the backwardness and the artifical splitting up of the area which had followed the first world war. The very term Balkanisation comes from this part of Europe. Split up into small weak states, overwhelmingly agrarian in character, with a very shaky industry, these areas inevitably became almost semi-colonies of the great powers. France, Britain, and to a certain extent Italy, then Germany, became the dominant powers of this area. Through her trade relations, German industry dominated the backward economies of Eastern Europe in the Balkans. In all these countries foreign capital played an important role. In most of them, foreign investments were dominant in what little industry existed.

With the occupation of these countries by Hitler, not only was ‘non-Aryan’ capital expropriated, but also the native capitalists were to a large extent squeezed out and replaced by German banks and trusts. German capital seized the decisive place – all the key positions and sections of the economy. The capital that remained was owned by collaborators and Quislings largely, and remained subordinate to German capital.

The regime was made up of Quislings who relied on German bayonets for their support. What little popular support was possessed by the pre-war regimes – military police dictatorships had, in the course of the war, disappeared. With the collapse of the power of German imperialism and the victory of the Red Army, an undoubted impulse was given to the socialist revolution. In Bulgaria, for example, in 1944, the moment the Red Army had crossed the frontier, there was an uprising in Sofia and other big towns. The masses began the organisation of soviets or workers’ committees. Soldiers and peasants organised committees and workers seized the factories.

Similar movements took place in all the countries of Eastern Europe, apart from Germany. Let us examine what happened in Czechoslovakia. Here too, the advance of the Red Army was followed by insurrection in Prague, the seizure of factories by workers and land by peasants. Here too, there was fraternisation on the borders of Bohemia and Moravia between the Czech and Sudetan-German masses.

The elements of proletarian revolution were quickly followed by Stalinist counter-revolution. The trouble with Cliff is that he fails to separate out the elements of the proletarian revolution from the Stalinist counter-revolution which rapidly followed.

Let us take the two examples: Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia. In Bulgaria we had a situation which has developed over and over again throughout the tragic history of the working masses. The real power was in the hands of the working class. The bourgeois state was smashed. How? The Germans had gone; the officers no longer had control over the soldiers; the police had gone into hiding; the landlords and capitalists had no control. There was a vacuum; a classical period of dual power where the masses were not sufficiently conscious to organise their own power, and the bourgeoisie too weak to reassert their domination.

This is not a situation with which Marxists are unfamiliar: Germany 1918, Russia 1917, Spain 1936. Perhaps a comparison with Spain would be useful. Here too the masses seized the factories and the land in Catalonia and Aragon. The bourgeois ‘government’ was suspended in mid-air. The masses completely smashed the police and the army. There was only one armed force: the workers’ militias. All that was necessary was for the masses to organise sovicts or committees, brush aside the phantom government and take power.

It is well enough known what took place. The Stalinists proceeded to make a coalition not with the bourgeoisie – the factory owners and bourgeoisie had fled to the side of Franco as a consequence of the mass insurrection – but with the ‘shadow of the bourgeoisie’. The Stalinists did this in Spain with the express purpose of destroying the socialist revolution for fear of repercussions in Russia and, of course, because of the existing international line-up and their desire to demonstrate to the British and French imperialists that they had nothing to fear. In Spain, therefore, gradually, they helped the shadow to acquire substance.

Gradually they recreated a capitalist army and capitalist police force, under the control of the capitalist class. Once this had been accomplished, the land was returned to the landlords and the factories to their owners. The consequence of this was seen towards the end of the civil war when the bourgeois state – the bourgeois military machine which they bad helped to create, organised a coup d’etat which established a military dictatorship in Republican territory and promptly illegalised the Communist Party itself.

In Bulgaria, as in all other countries of Eastern Europe, the Stalinists proceeded to make an agreement with the shadow of the bourgeoisie. The socialist revolution had commenced and there was a danger that it might be carried through to a conclusion. This, of course, the Stalinists feared. But on the other hand, they also did not want the power to pass to the bourgeoisie. They derailed the socialist revolution by organising the so-called Fatherland Front in Bulgaria and headed off the movement of the masses round slogans of chauvinism and anti-Germanism. Fraternisation in Bulgaria was swiftly made punishable, the soviets formed in the army were dissolved, the worker and peasant committees emasculated. They formed a front of ‘National Unity’, the union of the entire nation. But the difference with Spain was that here the key positions in this so-called coalition, where the shadow of the bourgeoisie possessed no power, remained firmly in Stalinist hands. They took over the police and the army. They selected the key and commanding personnel. All important positions in the civil service were placed in the hands of obedient tools. Clearly, behind the screen of national unity, they concentrated real state power in their hands. They had created an instrument in their own image – a state machine on the model of Moscow.

The process was crystal clear in the case of Czechoslovakia. When the Stalinists entered the country there was no government. The Germans with their Quislings and collaborators had fled. The committees formed by the masses had control of the industrial enterprises and the land. The Stalinists brought in the government of Benes⁽⁹⁾ from Moscow. The real power, the key posts, were firmly in their hands; they retained the substance and gave the bourgeoisie the shadow.

Partly to destroy the socialist revolution, partly to arrive at a compromise with American imperialism, they allowed certain sectors of the economy to remain in the hands of private enterprise. But the decisive power, ie, armed bodies of men, were organised by them and under their control. This was not the same state machine as previously. It was an entirely new state machine of their own creation.

In order to derail the revolution the Stalinists played on chauvinism and dealt the country a terrible blow with the expulsion of the Sudetan Germans. The original instinct of the masses was on internationalist lines. Reports from Czechoslovakia show that in the beginning there was fraternisation between the Czechs and Sudetan Germans. We see how Cliff does not see the element of the counter-revolution, the activities of the bureaucracy to destroy the revolution and the revolution itself.

Of course, the attempt of the Stalinists to maintain a compromise with the bourgeoisie – let it not be forgotten with their control and their state power – could not continue indefinitely. Shadows can acquire substance. The attempt of the American bourgeoisie to base themselves on their points of support in Eastern Europe in the shape of the remnants of the bourgeoisie and those sectors of the economy which they controlled, with Marshall Aid as the wedge, was the danger signal. With precipitous speed the bureaucracy acted and ordered all Eastern European states to reject Marshall Aid. All history has shown the impossibility of maintaining two antagonistic forms of property. Although the bourgeoisie were very weak, they had begun to gain a base due to the fact that they retained a good proportion of light industry under their control. The mounting antagonism of America, the impossibility of relying on the bourgeoisie, their incompatibility with a proletarian state with power in the hands of the bureaucracy, forced the latter to take measures to complete the process. Here we might add that Trotsky saw in the extension of nationalised property in the areas under Stalinist domination, proof of the fact that Russia was a workers’ state. The February events on which world attention has been focused, highlighted in dramatic fashion, a process taking place in all Stalinist dominated areas. The factor which was decisive was that the Stalinists had the support of the workers and peasants in the nationalisations and the division of the land. All Cliff saw was that the state machine remained the same, presumably, as it was under the Germans. No doubt the bourgeoisie wished that it had!

According to all observers the Stalinists, because of their compromises and the disillusionment of the masses in the factories, would probably have lost votes in the forthcoming elections. The bourgeois elements were gathering strength, basing themselves on the petty bourgeoisie in the cities and among disillusioned workers and peasants. Gradually the bourgeoisie hoped to gain control of the state and organise a counter-revolution with the aid of Anglo-American imperialism. Although the bureaucracy had control of the state machine, this was precarious by virtue of the way in which it had been obtained.

In order to complete the process, as Trotsky had foreseen, however cautiously, the bureaucracy was compelled to call upon the masses. They issued the call for Action Committees which were bureaucratically controlled at the top, but were nevertheless relatively democratic at the bottom. The Stalinists armed the workers, ie, organised a workers’ militia. The enthusiasm of the masses under these conditions, naturally became apparent. Even the Social Democratic workers who hated and were distrustful of the Stalinists, enthusiastically participated in these measures against the bourgeoisie. Trotsky once said that as against a lion one used a gun, against a flea one’s fingernail. Faced with a Stalinist state apparatus, with the mass movement as a threat, the bourgeoisie was impotent.

However, the formation of the Action Committees, the arming of the workers, meant necessarily that an embryo new soviet regime was in the making. Of course, the bureaucracy speedily proceeded to crush the independence of the masses and totalitarianise the regime. New elections were rapidly organised on Moscow lines, with one list and strict supervision.

In the face of these events, Cliff asks:

“What then is the future of the Fourth International; what is its historical justification? The Stalinist parties have all the advantages over the Fourth International – a state apparatus, mass organisations, money, etc, etc. The only advantage they lack is the internationalist class ideology…

“If a social revolution took place in the Eastern European countries without a revolutionary proletarian leadership, we must conclude that in future social revolutions, as in the past, the masses will do the fighting but not the leading. In all the struggles of the bourgeoisie, it was not the bourgeoisie itself who did the fighting, but the masses who believed it was in their interests. The sans culottes of the French revolution fought for liberty, equality, fraternity, while the real aim of the movement was the establishment of the rule of the bourgeoisie. This was the case at a time when the bourgeoisie was progressive. In reactionary imperialist wars, the less the masses who are the cannon fodder know about the war aims, the better soldiers they are. To assume that the ‘new democracies’ are workers’ states, means to accept that in principle the proletarian revolution is, just as the bourgeois wars were, based on the deception of the people…

“If these countries are workers’ states, then why Marxism, why the Fourth International? We could only be looked upon by the masses as adventurists, or at best impatient revolutionaries whose differences with the Stalinists are merely tactical.” (Cliff, pages 14-15)

Cliff has addressed the questions to the wrong people. In reality, he should have posed these questions to himself and he should have given the answers. If his theory is correct, then the whole theory of Marx becomes a Utopia. Cliff thinks that if he sticks the label ‘state capitalism’ on to the phenomenon of Stalinism, he has salved his conscience and has restored the ‘lost’ role of the Fourth International to his own satisfaction. Here we see the fetishism of which Marx spoke and which even affects the revolutionary movement: change the name of a thing and you change its essence.

It is not possible to explain or trace the class historical threads of present day developments without the existence and degeneration of the workers’ state in Russia. One can only trace the events in Eastern Europe to the October Revolution of 1917. It is useless for Cliff to argue that the bureaucracy used the masses in Czechoslovakia, without posing to himself the question as to who was used in 1917. Was not the October Revolution followed by the victory of Stalinism? The good intentions, or the subjective wishes of the Bolshevik leadership or the working class, is beside the point. According to the theory of Marx, no society passes from the scene till it has exhausted all the potentialities within it. If a new period of state capitalism looms ahead – and this necessarily follows from Cliff’s theory because there can be no economic limit to the development of production under this so-called state capitalism then to talk of this being a period of the disintegration of world capitalism reduces itself to mere phrasemongering. We have the absurdity of a new revolution – a proletarian revolution in 1917, organically changing the economy into … state capitalism. We also have the no less absurd postulation of a revolution in Eastern Europe, where the entire capitalist class has been expropriated…to install what? Capitalism! A moment’s serious reflection would show that it is not possible for Cliff to maintain this position in relation to Eastern Europe without also transferring the same argument to Russia itself.

Cliff himself points to the fact that in the bourgeois revolution the masses did the fighting and the bourgeois got the fruits. The masses did not know what they were fighting for, but they fought in reality for the rule of the bourgeoisie. Take the French Revolution. It was prepared and had its ideology in the works of the philosophers of the enlightenment, Voltaire, Rousseau, etc. However, they really did believe in the idealisation of bourgeois society. They believed the codicils of liberty, equality and fraternity which they preached. As is well known, and as Cliff himself quotes Marx to prove, the French Revolution went beyond its social base. It resulted in the revolutionary dictatorship of the sans culottes which went beyond the bounds of bourgeois society. As Marx explained, this had the salutory effect of completing in a few months what would otherwise have taken the bourgeois decades to do. The leaders of the revolutionary wing of the petty bourgeoisie which wielded this dictatorship – Robespierre, Danton, etc, sincerely believed in the doctrines of the philosophers and attempted to put them into practice. They could not do so because it was impossible to go beyond the economic base of the given society. They inevitably had to lose power and merely paved the way for bourgeois society. If Cliff’s argument is correct, one could only conclude that the same thing happened with the Russian as with the French Revolution. Marx was the prophet of the new state capitalism. Lenin and Trotsky were the Robespierres and Carnots of the Russian Revolution. The fact that Lenin and Trotsky had good intentions is beside the point, as were the good intentions of the leaders of the bourgeois revolution. They merely paved the way for the rule of the new state capitalist class.

Thus, if the bureacracy used the masses of Czechoslovakia, and this constitutes the proof that it is state capitalism, no less did the Russian bureaucracy use the proletariat in the 1917 revolution. However, this theory can satisfy no one. The fact that the bureaucracy, because Russia is a workers’ state, with all its degeneration, has assimilated Eastern Europe into the economy, and instantaneously strangled the developing socialist revolution, means that simultaneously with the socialist revolution, they have consciously carried through a process which extended over many years in Russia. They have telescoped developments in the image of Russia. This much should be clear: that without the existence of a strong degenerated workers’ state, contiguous or near to these countries, these developments would have been impossible. Either the proletariat would have conquered with a healthy revolution on classical lines and spread the revolution, or imperialism would have crushed it.

Does this mean that the Stalinists have accomplished the revolution and therefore there is no need for the Fourth International? Many times in history we are confronted with a complicated situation. For instance, in the February revolution in Russia which overthrew Czarism, the masses then proceeded to come under the influence of the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries. This meant that the masses, having completed one task, the overthrow of Czarism – a political revolution – created new barriers in their path and had to pay for this by a second revolution – a social revolution in the form of October. The fact that the masses have accomplished the basic social revolution in Eastern Europe only to have this revolution immediately bureaucratised by the Thermidorian bureaucracy, means that they will now have to pay with a second revolution – a political revolution.

Cliff has only to pose the question: what are the tasks of the Fourth International in Russia? They are identical with those in Eastern Europe. In order to achieve socialism the masses must have control of administration and the state. This the Stalinists can never give. It can only be achieved by a new revolution. It can only be accomplished with the overthrow of the bureaucracy in Eastern Europe as in Russia. The tasks of the Fourth International are clear: to struggle for a political revolution to establish workers’ democracy – a semi-state and the speedy transition to socialism on the basis of equality.The form of property will not be changed. The fact that Cliff calls it a social revolution alters nothing.

Where Trotsky found proof of a workers’ state in the extension of the forms of property, Cliff finds proof of the reverse.

Cliff may argue, that unless the working class has direct control of the state, it cannot be a workers’ state. In that case, he will have to reject the idea that there was a workers’ state in Russia, except possibly in the first few months. Even here it is necessary to reiterate that the dictatorship of the proletariat is realised through the instrumentality of the vanguard of the class, ie the party, and in the party through the party leadership. Under the best conditions this will be effected with the utmost democracy within the state and within the party. But the very existence of the dictatorship, its necessity to achieve the change in the social system, is already proof of profound social contradictions which can, under unfavourable historical circumstances, find a reflection within the state and within the party. The party, no more than the state, can automatically and directly reflect the interests of the class. Not for nothing did Lenin think of the trade unions as a factor necessary for the defence of the workers against their state, as well as a bulwark for the defence of their state.

If it was possible for the party of the working class (the social democracy), especially through its leadership, to degenerate and fail directly to reflect the interests of the class before the overthrow of capitalism, why is it impossible for the state set up by the workers to follow a similar pattern? Why cannot the state gain independence from the class, and parasitically batten on it while at the same time (in its own interests) defend the new economic forms created by the revolution? As we have previously shown, Cliff tries to make a distinction by drawing a metaphysical line at 1928 between when he thinks surplus value was not consumed by the bureaucracy and when it was. Apart from being, factually inaccurate, it is a singularly lifeless way of examining the phenomena.

In reality, the transition from one society to another was found to have been far more complex than could have been foreseen by the founders of scientific socialism. No more than any other class or social formation has the proletariat been given the privilege of inevitably having a smooth passage in the transition to its domination, and thence to its painless and tranquil disappearance in society, ie, to socialism. That was a possible variant. But the degeneration of both social democracy and the soviet state under the given conditions was not at all accidental. It represented in a sense the complex relations between a class and its representatives and state, which, more than once in history the ruling class, bourgeois, feudal and slave-owning, had cause to rue. It mirrors in other words, the multiplicity of historical factors which are the background to the decisive factor: the economic.

Contrast the broad view of Lenin with the mechanistic view of Cliff. Lenin emphasised over and over the need to study the transition periods of past epochs especially from feudalism to capitalism, in order to understand the laws of transition in Russia. He would have rejected the conception that the state which issued from October would have to follow a preconceived norm, or thereby cease to be a workers’ state.

Lenin well knew that the proletariat and its party and leadership had no god-given power which would lead, without contradictions, smoothly to socialism once capitalism had been overthrown. That is necessarily the only conclusion which must follow from the Kantian norms categorically laid down by Cliff. That is why in advance Lenin emphasised that the dictatorship of the proletariat would vary tremendously in different countries and under different conditions.

However, Lenin hammered home the point that in the transition from feudalism to capitalism the dictatorship of the rising bourgeoisie was reflected in the dictatorship of one man. A class could rule through the personal rule of one man. Ex post facto Cliff is quite willing to accept this conception as it applies to the bourgeoisie. But one could only conclude from his arguments that such would be impossible in the case of the proletariat. For the rule of one man implies absolutism, arbitrary dictatorship vested in a single individual without political rights for the ruling class whose interests, in the last analysis, he represents. But Lenin only commented thus to show that under certain conditions the dictatorship of the proletariat could also be realised through the dictatorship of one man. Lenin did not develop this conception. But today in the light of the experience of Russia and Eastern Europe and with developments in China, we can deepen and understand not only the present but the past developments of society as well.

While the dictatorship of the proletariat can be realised through the dictatorship of one man, because this implies the separation of the state from the class it represents, it also means that the apparatus will almost inevitably tend to become independent of its base and thus acquire a vested interest of its own, even hostile and alien to the class it represents as in the case of Stalinist Russia. When we study the development of bourgeois society, we see that the autocracy of one individual, with the given social contradictions, served the needs of the development of that society. This is clearly shown by the rule of Cromwell and Napoleon. But although both stood on a bourgeois base, at a certain stage bourgeois autocracy becomes, from a favourable factor for the development of capitalist society, a hindrance to the full and free development of bourgeois production. However, the dictatorship of absolutism does not then painlessly wither away. In France and England it required supplementary political revolutions before bourgeois autocracy could be changed into bourgeois democracy. But without bourgeois democracy a free and full development of the productive forces to the limits under capitalism would have been impossible.

If this applies to the historical evolution of the bourgeoisie, how much more so to the proletariat in a backward and isolated country where the dictatorship of the proletariat has degenerated into the dictatorship of one man?

For the proletariat to take the path of socialism, a new revolution, a supplementary political revolution which will turn the Bonapartist proletarian state into a workers’ democracy is necessary. Such a conception fits in with the experience of the past. just as capitalism passed through many stormy contradictory phases (we are far from finished with them yet, as our epoch bears witness) so in the given historic conditions has the rule of the proletariat in Russia. So also by a mutual reaction, Eastern Europe and China are passing through this Bonapartist phase, resulting in the inevitability of new political revolutions in these countries in order to install workers’ democracy as the prerequisite for a transition to socialism.

It is in the inter-relation between the class and its state under given historical conditions that we find the explanation of Stalinist degerieration, not in the mystical idea that a workers’ state, under all conditions, must be a perfect workers’ democracy or the transformation of the state into a class. In the long run, the economic factor, as in bourgeois society, with many upheavals and catastrophes, will emerge triumphant. The working class, having been enriched by the historical experience and profiting from its lessons, will victoriously overthrow Stalinist absolutism and organise a healthy workers’ democracy on a higher level. Then the state will, more or less, correspond to the ideal norm worked out by Marx and Lenin.

Notes

⁽¹⁾ Otto von Bismarck, chancellor of the Prussian government from 1862, introduced the Anti-Socialist Law of 1878. He carried through the unification of Cermany, under Prussia, by successful wars against Denmark, Austria-Hungary and then France.

⁽²⁾ Russian term for rich peasant.

⁽³⁾ Rudolf Hilferding was a German Social Democratic leader.

⁽⁴⁾ Eugen Dühring was a prominent German social democrat. In 1874-5 he published works challenging the Marxist ideology of the German movement, to which Engels replied in Anti-Dühring.

⁽⁵⁾ The Moscow Trials of 1936 and 1938 were monstrous frame-ups resulting in a generation of revolutionaries and opponents of the bureaucracy being physically exterminated. In 1936 Stalin proposed a new constitution – it was abandoned on the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, as the bureaucracy was fearful of repercussions within the USSR.

⁽⁶⁾ Stanislaw Mikolafjcik, leader of the Polish Peasants Party, was the head of the Polish ‘government in exile’ based in London, from 1943. On liberation in 1945 he became the deputy prime minister in Poland, but real power lay with the Stalinists, supported by the Red army. By the time elections were held in 1947 many of his supporters were imprisoned and the party was later suppressed.

⁽⁷⁾ The Jacobins were the extreme radical wing of the French revolution. Their leader, Maximilien Robespierre (1758-94) wielded supreme power from 1793 until he was overthrown in 1794 and executed. The Directory was the government of the First French Republic from 1795-9.

⁽⁸⁾ From 1945-8 the French CP held various cabinet posts in the Government of National Union, headed by de Gaulle. The government of Henri Quielle, established in September 1948, was attacked by the CP for being ‘directed against the workers’.

⁽⁹⁾ Edvard Benes, a member of the Social Nationalist Party, was President of Czechoslovakia 1935-38, and from 1941 head of the Czech provisional government in London. In 1945 he became president of the provisional government in Czechoslovakia. He resigned in June 1948 in the aftermath of the ‘Prague Coup’.

Published by Ted Grant in January 1949

WITH THE spectacular advance of the Chinese Red Army, the diplomats of the State Department in America and the Foreign Office in Britain are seriously discussing the possibility of the complete collapse of the Chiang Kai Shek regime. The entire capitalist press writes gloomily of the prospect of North and Central China to the Yangtse coming under Stalinist sway.

Within three years of the collapse of Japanese imperialism, the Red Army has conquered Manchuria and most of North China. The Chinese capital Nanking, with the richest city of China, Shanghai, which has a population of five million, are rapidly coming within the grasp of the Red Army. The territory which the Stalinists already dominate has a population of more than 170 million.

The British capitalists, with investments in China amounting to £450 million, are dismayed at the prospect of the loss of this lucrative field of investment. American imperialism, within whose sphere of influence China fell with the weakening of the other imperialist powers during the war, has given the Kuomintang government aid to the extent of $3 billion, in a fruitless attempt to save China for imperialist exploitation.

But the American imperialists now realise that further aid is merely throwing away good money after bad. With all the military and technical advantages in its favour in the early stages of the civil war that followed the world war, the Kuomintang has suffered defeat after defeat. The Kuomintang regime, under the dictatorial rule of Chiang Kai Shek, represents the feudal landlords and capitalists. It is controlled by an utterly corrupt military clique which oppresses the workers and peasants and battens on their masters.

Chiang Kai Shek came to power after the defeat of the Chinese revolution of 1925-7 in which he played the role of chief butcher of the working class. He succeeded in this because of the policy of Stalin and Bukharin and the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. Their policy then was to form a bloc with the Chinese landlords, capitalists and feudal warlords, allegedly in the interests of the struggle against imperialism. In consequence, they sabotaged the attempts of the workers to take over the factories and the peasants to take the land. A ‘communist’ Minister of Labour sabotaged strikes and punished striking workers. A ‘communist’ Minister of Agriculture had peasants shot down when they attempted to seize the land.

The capitalist Kuomintang was taken into the Communist international as a sympathising section. In The Third International After Lenin by Trotsky, the Stalinists’ role is shown in an explanatory note:

“The Kuomintang was admitted to the Comintern as a sympathising party early in 1926, approved by the Politbureau of the CPSU, with the sole dissenting vote of Trotsky. Hu Han-min, right-wing Kuomintang leader, participated in the Sixth Plenum of the ECCI, February, 1926, as a fraternal delegate from the Kuomintang. Shao Ki-tze a henchman of Chiang Kai Shek, was fraternal delegate to the Seventh Plenum, ECCI, November, 1926 (Minutes German edition, pp. 403f)” (London edition, 1936)

On March 21 and 22, 1927, the workers of Shanghai captured the city. Chiang immediately began preparations to butcher them. He conspired with the imperialists to crush the workers.

Instead of preparing for the struggle the Stalinists gave full support to Chiang. The Comintern official journal International Press Correspondence, French edition, March 23, 1927, page 443, said: ‘Far from dividing, as the imperialists say, the Kuomintang has only steeled its ranks.’

On March 30 they wrote:

“A split in the Kuomintang and hostilities between the Shanghai proletariat and the revolutionary soldiers are absolutely excluded for the moment Chiang Kai Shek himself declared that he would submit to the decisions of the party…A revolutionist like Chiang Kai Shek will not go over, as the imperialists would like to have it believed, to Chang Tao-lin (the Northern militarist) to fight against the emancipation movement…”

Chiang proceeded to organise a coup, massacre the flower of the workers, illegalise the trade unions, the peasant organisations, the Communist Party, and deprive the masses of all rights.

The masses were utterly defeated and the remnants of the Chinese leadership of the Communist Party fled to the peasant areas – and there tried to organise a peasant war.

Peasant Army

The guerrilla struggle threw up leaders of remarkable military genius. Mao Tse Tung, Chu The[1] and others succeeded in evading the powerful military forces which the Kuomintang had arrayed against them. Despite the false political line which led to successive disasters, in one of the most remarkable military feats in world history, Mao was driven from Central and South China in a 6,000-mile retreat to the mountain fastnesses around Yenan, where a ‘soviet’ republic was set up. There, despite all the efforts of the Chiang regime to dislodge them, they succeeded in holding out against one attack after another. The secret of their success was that the land had been divided among the peasants in this small area, comprising, according to some estimates, about 10 million population.

In the intervening period between the wars, the Chiang regime piled up ever increasing burdens on the workers and peasants. In some areas the taxes were collected from the peasants by the corrupt local officials 80 years in advance.

There was an endless militaristic squandering of wealth, and the feeble Kuomintang regime showed itself incapable of waging a revolutionary struggle against the incursions of imperialistic Japan.

The Chiang regime resolved itself into one of bribery and police terror. In a period of two decades it became so completely degenerate from top to bottom that it had lost most of its support even among the middle class.

After the collapse of Japan, with a certain aid from the Red Army in Manchuria which helped the Stalinists to capture Japanese munitions, large parts of Manchuria and the North fell into the hands of the Stalinists. The Chinese Red Army had waged a guerrilla struggle against Japanese militarism throughout the war and were in a strategic position to seize certain areas with the Japanese collapse. Even throughout the war Chiang’s main preoccupation was the social danger at home, to deal with the Stalinists and workers, and had it not been clear that Japan was going to be defeated in the later stages, it is quite likely that he would have capitulated and made a compromise with Japanese imperialism.

A Dying Regime

American imperialism assisted Chiang by pouring in munitions and other supplies, and even direct military intervention in the transport of Kuomintang troops to Manchuria and North China by the US fleet and air force. Chiang had initial successes, but all in vain. He was leading a dying regime, more archaic than even the Czarist regime in Russia. So rotten was the regime that large parts of the supplies were sold by officials to the Stalinist armies for gold, and ministers and other officials in Chiang’s government pocketed a great part of the dollars supplied for the war by America. Only the lesser part of the supplies and munitions actually reached the Nationalist troops at the front.

The military commanders ceaselessly intrigued against one another, as in all doomed regimes. Chiang, for example, starved General Fu Tso Yi, the only outstanding general who showed any real capacity on the Nationalist side, of supplies, for fear he might seek to replace him. The generals were outclassed by the superior strategy and tactics of the Red Army command.

Social Questions Involved

However, the main reason for the victories of the Chinese Stalinists has been readily pointed out by Mao Tse Tung: the social questions involved. ‘Land to the peasants,’ as in the Russian revolution, sounded the death knell of feudal landowners and their corrupt regime. In large part, the Chinese Stalinists have carried out the agrarian revolution. That is the significant difference between the struggle in 1927 and now. It is this which has been responsible for the melting away of the armies which Chiang tried to use to crush the agrarian rebellion. Chiang’s armies are composed of peasants – the poorest peasants at that – who have not enough money to escape conscription by bribing the officials.

Even the News Chronicle (11 December 1948) admits:

“There is discontent among the rank and file of the Nationalist army.Chiang’s privates get about five pence a month.

“In some villages conscripts are roped together on the way to barracks, and when they travel by train carriage doors and wagons are locked so that they cannot escape.”

Naturally, they desert with their arms, even to the extent of whole divisions when confronted with the agrarian programme of the Stalinists.

The Stalinist Agrarian Programme

At the national agrarian conference of the Chinese Communist party held on September 13, 1947, it was proposed to carry through an agrarian law containing the following provisions:

“Article 1. The agrarian system of feudal and serni-feudal exploitation is abolished. The agrarian system of ‘land to the tiller’ is to he established.

“Article 2. The land ownership rights of all landlords are abolished.

“Article 3. The land ownership rights of all ancestral shrines, temples, monasteries, schools, institutions, and organisations, are abolished.

“Article 4. All debts incurred in the countryside prior to the reform of the agrarian system are cancelled.”

Article 10, aimed directly at the soldiers and even the officers of the Kuomintang reads, in part:

“Section c. All personnel of the People’s Liberation Armies, democratic governments, and all peoples’ organisations whose home is in the countryside shall be given land and properties equivalent to that of peasants for themselves and their families.

“Section d. Landlords and their families shall be given land and properties equivalent to that of the peasants.

“Section e. Families of Kuomintang officers and soldiers, Kuomintang Party members and other enemy personnel whose homes are in rural areas, shall he given land and properties equivalent to that of the peasants.”

One of the outstanding facts in the situation in China is the relative passivity of the working class. It is true that as a result of the collapse of the Chiang armies, there have been widespread strike struggles in the large cities, Shanghai, Canton, Hankow and Nanking, despite the repressive conditions. However, it is clear that as the Stalinists advance towards the big cities on the Yangtse, the workers, for lack of a mass alternative, can only rally to their banner. The workers never supported the Chiang Kai Shek regime.

Every socialist worker will wholeheartedly applaud the destruction of feudalism and of large-scale capitalism in this important section of Asia, even though it is carried out under the leadership of Stalinism. In its long-term implications it is as important as the October revolution itself. One could give no better Marxist analysis of the gloomy picture for the world capitalist class than that expressed in the editorial of The Times, 10 November 1948:

“At the best this spells only a single check (Hsuchow held by the Nationalists at the time and since fallen) after months of gains which have swung the balance of power – military, industrial, ideological to the communist side. Their widening hold on large areas of Northern and Central China has a much deeper meaning than the Japanese invasion of ten years ago, for the communists – decisively helped by Russia as they have been and Marxists as they remain – summon up and organise native revolutionary forces. In its vastness and in its all too likely consequences the present upheaval has rather to be compared with the Russian revolution of 1917 – from which it directly and obviously springs. Wider success for the Chinese communists would offer wider influence, and at the ripe moment wider success, for the power with which they ally themselves. Long-cherished Soviet plans for swinging the backward millions of Asia into the camp which already stretches from the Oder to Sakhalin would receive the greatest measure of reinforcement so far.

“…They can draw upon the peasantry for their divisions, and they have been able to win over the support of the peasantry by expropriating most of the landlords and redistributing the land. So far the agricultural reforms of the communists have prospered the more obviously because they have not had to feed many large towns; the food has mainly been kept in the country areas.

“In some regions a commander has ruthlessly shot or imprisoned those whom he has judged to be anti-communist; in others there has been a show of tolerance with few changes in the traditional way of life. Businessmen and others have even been given the choice of staying or leaving. This show of tolerance seems to be the policy of Mao Tse Tung, the highly astute communist leader. His writings and speeches show him to he an unshakeable Marxist, but one who recognises that Marx’s analysis of the opportunities for revolution in the industrial Europe of last century cannot be applied strictly to the mainly agricultural and primitive state of much of China. He seems to have decided to reach his communist goal by two stages. First, there is to be a system of relatively free trading, similar to the New Economic Policy which Lenin introduced after the initial failure of militant communism in Russia. It is this stage which he proclaims at present, hoping, not without success – not only to win the peasants but to assuage the fears of many townspeople. Secondly when the first stage has been accomplished, he plans to make the further step to Marxist socialism.”

The references to Marxism and the communist policy of Mao are of course false. The policy of Stalinism in Russia, in Eastern Europe and in China has been labelled Marxist by all present day capitalist journalists. It is a perversion of Marxism. Nevertheless The Times sees that the tactics of the Chinese Stalinists will be similar to those of the Stalinists in Eastern Europe.

Two Sides of The Coin

While supporting the destruction of feudalism in China, it must be emphasised that only a horrible caricature of the Marxist conception of the revolution will result because of the leadership of the Stalinists. Not a real democracy, but a totalitarian regime as brutal as that of Chiang Kai Shek will develop. Like the regimes in Eastern Europe, Mao will look to Russia as his model. Undoubtedly, tremendous economic progress will be achieved. But the masses, both workers and peasants, will find themselves enslaved by the bureaucracy.

The Stalinists are incorporating into their regime ex-feudal militarists, capitalist elements, and the bureaucratic officialdom in the towns who will occupy positions of privilege and power.

On the basis of such a backward economy, a large scale differentiation among the peasants (as after the Russian revolution during the period of the NEP) aided by the failure to nationalise the land: the capitalist elements in trade, and even in light industry, might provide a base for capitalist counter-revolution. It must be borne in mind that in China the proletariat is weaker in relation to the peasantry than was the case in Russia during the NEP owing to the more backward development of China. Even in Czechoslovakia and other Eastern European countries similarly, where the capitalist elements were relatively weaker, nevertheless the danger of a capitalist overturn existed for a time. The fact that the workers and peasants will not have any democratic control and that the totalitarian tyranny will have superimposed upon it the Asiatic barbarism and cruelties of the old regime, gives rise to this possibility. However, it seems likely that the capitalist elements will be defeated because of the historical tendency of the decay of capitalism on a world scale. The impotence of world imperialism is shown by the fact that whereas they intervened directly against the Chinese revolution in 1925-7, today they look on helplessly at the collapse of the Chiang regime.

However, it is quite likely that Stalin will have a new Tito on his hands. The shrewder capitalist commentators are already speculating on this although they derive cold comfort from it. Mao will have a powerful base in China with its 450-500 million population and its potential resources, and the undoubted mass support his regime will possess in the early stages. The conflicts which will thus open out should be further means of assisting the world working class to understand the real nature of Stalinism.

NOTES

[1] Chu Teh joined the Chinese CP (CCP) in 1922. His military forces joined with those led by Mao Tse Tung in 1928. Chu became the principal military leader of the CCP on the long March and in the civil war against Japan.

From the Archives of Trotskyism

Declaration of the International Communists of Buchenwald

[Printed in Spartacist #26, Winter 1979]

It is with great satisfaction that we publish for the first time in English this moving and historically important document. The “Declaration of the International Communists of Buchenwald” is a programmatic manifesto by cadres and sympathizers of the Trotskyist movement who survived the Nazi concentratIon camp. Neither fascist torture not Stalinist persecution broke these comrades political courage.

Originally written in German, the declaration was issued a little more than a week after Buchenwald was liberated in April 1945. Its third section was printed in a 1946 issue of Neuer Spartakus the first German language Trotskyist press published after the war. This part of the document was reprinted in October 1974 in Die Internationale, journal of the West German Pabloists. More recently, two different French translations of the full text have been published. One appeared in the Bulletin  (No. 10) of the Centre d’etudes et de Recherches sur les Mouvements Trotskyste et Revolutionnaires Internationaux (CFRMI RI): the second in Critique Communiste (No. 25, November 1978) journal of the French Pabloists. Our translation is from the original German text which was obtained from the CERMTRI archives in Paris. This introduction is largely based on the prefaces to the text which arreared in the CERMTRI Bulletin and Critique Communiste.

The “Declaration of the Internationalist Communists of Buchenwald” was the collaborative work of four comrades: the two Austrians Ernst Federn and Karl Fischer, Marcel Beaufrere and Florent Galloy, French and Belgian Trotskyists respectively. Like many other German and Austrian Trotskyists, Federn and Fischer were seized by the Nazis even before the outhreak of the second imperialist war. Both were first arrested for their revolutionary activities in Austria in 1935. Federn was released but Fischer and other Austrian Trotskyists were imprisoned and tried in Vienna in 1937. Sentenced to five years imprisonment, they were released in the amnesty decreed on the eve of the German annexation of Austria in February 1938 and escaped to Belgium and later to France. Federn was arrested again in 1939, sent to the Nazi camp at Dachau and later moved to Buchenwald.

Many of the Trotskyist cadres who were to join Federn at Buchenwald spent the first years of the war clandestinely organizing among German workers and soldiers under the Nazi occupation. Their internationalist struggle made the scattered Trotskyist cells the target of not only the Gestapo but also the Stalinists. Marcel Beaufrere was typical of those Trotskyist militants whose clandestine work was punished by the Nazis with imprisonment in the death camps. In and out of prison since 1939, when he had first been arrested for “provoking disobedience in the army,” Beaufrere worked closely with Marcel Hic, who had succeeded in regularly publishing La Verite right under the Nazis’ noses. In September 1943 Beaufrere was assigned to head up the Trotskyist cell in Brittany, where the underground paperArbeiter und Soldat was printed and distributed among the German armed forces. Despite fierce repression (in October 1943 the Gestapo caught and shot some 65 members of the cell, including 30 German soldiers and sailors), Trotskyist propaganda in German continued to be produced in great quantity (with press runs as high as 10,000 copies) and disseminated as late as August 1944. Beaufrere was finally arrested in October 1943, tortured and then sent to Buchenwald.

Many of the Trotskyist militants active in this work did not live to read the document produced by the Buchenwald comrades. Marcel Hic survived Buchenwald only to perish at Dora in 1944. Robert Cruau, the 23-year-old militant who headed the Trotskyist cell in the Wehrmacht at Brest, was arrested in 1943 and, according to the Critique Communiste introduction by Rodolphe Prager:

“A little after his arrest Rohert Cruau faked an escape in order to get himself killed. He wanted to be certain not to talk and he was the primary target of the interrogators.”

And Abram Leon, gifted author of the still definitive Marxist work on the Jewish question and leader of the Belgian Trotskyist cell in the Wehrmacht, was arrested in June 1944 when he arrived in the Charleroi region to assume control of the clandestine work among the miners, which covered some 15 mines and included publication of Le Reveil des Mineurs. Tortured by the Gestapo, Leon was exterminated in a gas chamber at Auschwitz at the age of 26.

Despite the Nazi terror, the Trotskyists in the concentration camps sought to continue fighting for their revolutionary program. Several accounts testify to the heroism and courage of the Trotskyist cell at Buchenwald. According to an interview which Beaufrere gave to an iSt representative in January 1979, when the Nazis were preparing to abandon Buchenwald to the approaching Allied forces, the camp commandants broadcast over the loudspeaker system an order for the prisoners to assemble. Recognizing that a final round-up and execution of the Jewish inmates were very likely in the offing. Beaufrere and his comrades immediately began to urge the inmates not to report for the assembly and to get the political prisoners to give their identifying red emblems to the Jews, who were forced to wear yellow stars on their uniforms. An almost certain mass slaughter of Jews (and perhaps communists as well) was thus partially averted .

The political authority which the Internationalist Communists earned within the camp played no small role in their survival. As was the case at other Nazi camps, at Buchenwald the Trotskyists lived under the constant threat of assassination by the Stalinists, who in most cases controlled the clandestine military apparatuses formed in some camps. According to the interview with Beaufrere, the French Stalinist cell at Buchenwald recognized him as a Trotskyist upon his arrival in January 1944 and vowed to kill him. Elsewhere, Trotskyists were indeed murdered by the Stalinists– for example, Pietro Tresso (Blasco), a leader of the clandestine Trotskyist organization (the PCI), “disappeared” after a Stalinist-organized raid freed some 80 resistance fighters from Puy, a Nazi camp in France. At Buchenwald the French Stalinists used their administrative positions as trustees to assign Beaufrere to a task that would almost certainly lead to his death. Beaufrere was saved from this “death warrant” by the active solidarity of the German and Czech Stalinist cells, eventually also gaining the support of the other cells (which were organized along national lines), including the Russian group.

What enabled Beaufrere to gain the sympathy and respect of these Stalinist cadres was in no small measure the anti-chauvinist stand of the Trotskyists. Evidently many of the German and Austrian Stalinists were repelled by the anti-German chauvinism of their French CP “comrades.” (At the time of the Allied “liberation” of France L’Humaniteran headlines such as “Everybody Get a Kraut!”) After his arrival in Paris in 1945, Beaufrere recounted for the French Trotskyist press the impact of the Buchenwald declaration on the German Stalinists:

“Some old German Communists came to find our Trotskyist comrades [in Buchenwald], Beaufrere recounted on his return to Paris, and said to them, the hour has come, you must publicly show yourselves, and they asked for a preliminary political discussion. A text of our German comrades which declared us in favor of a soviet German republic had a profound impact on the German Communist comrades, who asked to keep in touch with the Trotskyists.”

La Verite, 11, May 1945, quoted in Critique Communiste, November 1978

The Buchenwald declaration is not without its weaknesses. From the standpoint of Trotskyism the manifesto contains formulations on the questions of the USSR and the Fourth International that are fuzzy if not simply ambiguous, Thus, while, the Soviet bureaucracy is referred to as a caste, the declaration avoids characterizing the USSR as a degenerated workers state. It quite explicitly puts a question mark over the future evolution of the regime and nowhere calls for the unconditional military defense of the USSR.

Likewise, while “IV International” appears at the end of the document in parentheses, the Fourth International and Trotskyism are not mentioned in the text. Rather, the declaration states that “a new world revolutionary party” remains to be created.

These were not hasty formulations but the result of much discussion, Beaufrere and Fischer held widely divergent positions on the class character of the USSR and on the Fourth International. Even before the war, Fischer had adopted a “state capitalism” analysis of the USSR and his group had grown increasingly aloof from the Fourth International.

The Buchenwald declaration represented a compromise. Karl Fisher explained in a 29 May 1946 letter to his comrades in Paris.

“It was composed jointly by Federn, Marcel Beaufrere, Florent Galloy and me. In regard to Russia and the Trotskyists I had to enter into a compromise, otherwise nothing at all would have come out.”

Quoted in Bulletin of the CERMTRI, No. 10

It should aIso be noted that the Declaration rather categorically predicts the imminent eruption of major inter-imperialist rivalrv between the U.S. and Britain, Such a projection, of course. was very soon revealed to be false. However. the issues involved were not new; in the mid-1920’s Trotsky already analyzed the bases for future Anglo-American interimperialist rivalries. But at the close of World War II the U.S, was clearly emerging as the hegemonic imperialist power.

Even with these weaknesses, the Buchenwald declaration on balance is a principled and powerful statement of revolutionary internationalism, an affirmation of revolutionary optimism in the capacity of the communist vanguard to lead the resurgent proletariat out of its crisis of Ieadership and toward the conquest of power.

* * * * * *

I. The International Conjuncture of Capitalism

In the wake of the second imperialist war Italy, Germany and Japan have lost their stature as great imperialist powers, while that of France has heen severely undermined.

The imperialist antagonisms and conflicts between the USA and Great Britain dominate the conjuncture of world imperialist politics.

At the heginning of this world war R lIssia emerged from its isolation and today confronts the task of politically and economically consolidating its military successes in opposition to the appetites of the victorious imperialist powers.

Despite its enormous efforts China remains a pawn of the great imperialist powers, an inevitable consequence of the victory of the Chinese bourgeoisie over the Chinese proletariat.

The unanimity so ostentatiously displayed at the international imperialist peace conferences is intended to lure the masses by concealing the antagonisms inherent among the capitalist powers. However, coinciding military interests vis-a-vis Germany cannot prevent the explosion of the antagonisms in the Allied camp. To these antagonisms must be added the inevitable crises and the social tumult of the decaying capitalist mode of production.

A precise analysis of the international situation using the methods of Marxism-Leninism is the indispensable precondition for a successful revolutionary line.

II. The International Situation of the Working Class

This development renders it possible for the German proletariat to rapidly recover from its profound defeat and to again place itself at the head of the European working class in the battle for the overthrow of capitalism. Isolated by the failure of the revolution in Europe, the Russian revolution has taken a course which has led it further and further away from the interests of the European and international proletariat. The policy of “socialism in one country,” at first just a defense of the interests of the ruling bureaucratic clique, today leads the Russian state to carry out a nationalistic policy shoulder to shoulder with the imperialist powers. Whatever the course of events in Russia may be, the international proletariat must cast off all illusions regarding this state and with the aid of a clear Marxist analysis realize that the presently ruling bureaucratic and military caste defends exclusively its own interests and that the international revolution cannot count on any support from this government.

The total military, political and economic collapse of the German bourgeoisie opens the road to liberation for the German proletariat. To prevent the restabilization of the German bourgeoisie, facilitated by imperialist antagonisms, and to establish workers power, the revolutionary struggle of the working class of each country against its own bourgeoisie is necessary. The working class was deprived of its revolutionary leadership by the politics of the two international workers organizations, which actively fought and sabotaged the proletarian revolution that alone could have prevented this war. The Second International is a tool of the bourgeoisie. Since the death of Lenin the Third International has been transformed into an agency of the foreign policy of the Russian bureaucracy. Both Internationals actively participated in the preparation and prosecution of this imperialist war and therefore share responsibility for it. To attribute responsibility, or partial responsibility, for this war to the German and international working class is only another way of continuing to serve the bourgeoisie.

The proletariat can fulfill its historic task only under the leadership of a new world revolutionary party. The creation of this party is the most pressing task of the most advanced sections of the working class. International revolutionary cadres have already come together to construct this world party in the struggle against capitalism and its reformist and Stalinist agents. In order to carry out this difficult task there must be no avoiding the issue through the more conciliatory slogan of a new 2-1/2 International. Such an intermediary formation would prevent the necessary ideological clarification and would sap revolutionary will.

III. Never Again a 9 November 1918!

In the imminent pre-revolutionary period what is necessary is to mobilize the working masses in the struggle against the bourgeoisie and to prepare the construction of a new revolutionary International that will forge the unity of the working class in revolutionary action.

All theories and illusions about a “peoples state” or a “peoples democracy” have led the working class to the bloodiest defeats in the course of class struggle in capitalist society. Only irreconcilable struggle against the capitalist state-up to and including its destruction and the construction of the state of workers and peasants councils– can prevent similar new defeats. The bourgeoisie and the uprooted petty bourgeoisie brought fascism to power. Fascism is the creation of capitalism. Only the successful, independent action of the working class against capitalism is capable of eradicating the evil of fascism, along with its root causes. In this struggle the hesitant petty bourgeoisie will join forces with the revolutionary proletariat on the offensive, as the history of the great revolutions demonstrates.

In order to emerge vietoriolls from the class battles to come the German working class must struggle for the implementation of the following demands:

-Freedom of organization, assembly and the press!
-Freedom of collective action and the immediate restoration of all the pre-1933 social gains!
-Confiscation of their property for the benefit of the victims of fascism!
-Conviction of all representatives of the fascist state by freely elected peoples courts!
-Dissolution of the Wehrmacht and its replacement by workers militias!
-Immediate free election of workers and peasants councils throughout all of Germany and a convocation of a general congress of these councils!
-Preservation and extension of these councils, while utilizing all the parliamentary institutions of the bourgeoisie for revolutionary propaganda!
-Expropriation of the banks, heavy industry and the large estates!
-Control of production by the unions and the workers councils!
-Not one man, not one penny for the war debts and the war reparations of the bourgeoisie!
-The bourgeoisie must pay!
-For pan-German socialist revolution! Against a dismemberment of Germany!
-Revolutionary fraternization with the proletarians of the occupying armies!
-For a Germany of workers councils in a Europe of workers councils!
-For world proletarian revolution!

The Internationalist Communists of Buchenwald
(IV International) – 20 April 1945

Testament of Leon Trotsky

My high (and still rising) blood pressure is deceiving those near me about my actual condition. I am active and able to work but the outcome is evidently near. These lines will be made public after my death.

I have no need to refute here once again the stupid and vile slander of Stalin and his agents: there is not a single spot on my revolutionary honour. I have never entered, either directly or indirectly, into any behind-the-scenes agreements or even negotiations with the enemies of the working class. Thousands of Stalin’s opponents have fallen, victims of similar false accusations. The new revolutionary generations will rehabilitate their political honour and deal with the Kremlin executioners according to their deserts.

I thank warmly the friends who remained loyal to me through the most difficult hours of my life. I do not name anyone in particular because I cannot name them all.

However, I consider myself justified in making an exception in the case of my companion, Natalia Ivanovna Sedova. In addition to the happiness of being a fighter for the cause of socialism, fate has given me the happiness of being her husband. During the almost forty years of our life together she remained an inexhaustible source of love, magnanimity, and tenderness. She underwent great suffering, especially in the last period of our lives. But I find some comfort in the fact that she also knew days of happiness.

For forty-three years of my conscious life I have remained a revolutionist; for forty-two of them I have fought under the banner of Marxism. If I had to begin all over again I would of course try and avoid this or that mistake, but the main course of my life would remain unchanged. I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist, and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist. My faith in the communist future of mankind is not less ardent, indeed it is firmer today, than it was in the days of my youth.

Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression, and violence and enjoy it to the full.

Leon Trotsky.

Mexico
February 27th 1940

A coda was added later dated March 3rd 1940. Mainly dealing with what should happen should he be involved in a serious drawn out illness, it ends with the following words:

“… But whatever may be the circumstances of my death I shall die with unshaken faith in the communist future. This faith in man and in his future gives me even now such power of resistance as cannot be given by any religion.”

Copied from http://www.marxist.com/testament-of-leon-trotsky.htm

Milwaukee’s Brand of Socialism

Socialism in One City

by James Boulton

First printed in Fourth International, Vol.I No.7, December 1940. Copied from http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/fi/vol01/no07/boulton.htm

We particularly recommend this 1940 Trotskyist polemic with US social democracy to supporters of groups historically associated with the late Ted Grant. To those familiar, the parallels in the politics critiqued are quite striking.

  

1. A Tenor Sings Socialism Away

The morning of April 3, 1940, broke dismally in the city of Milwaukee, heralding the defeat of Mayor Daniel W. Hoan and the return to capitalism. Dan, the Socialist mayor toward whom Norman Thomas could point with pride in every speech, the mayor whose treatise on City Government has now become a classic, who as City Attorney after the election of 1912 indicted and convicted hundreds of corrupt politicians and thereby ushered into office for over two decades the Milwaukee Socialist Party, its elected and appointed officials, and made the name of Milwaukee a star in international encyclopedias, the mayor, however, whose twenty-four years in office failed to produce any change in the life of Milwaukee’s proletariat.

When the final count came in, the beer parties in the wards were already ebbing and the golden haired thrush, Mayor-elect Carl Zeidler, had decreed the abolition of socialism. The major setback was not felt among the more “stupid” proletariat, but it did forebode ill among the many party Gifte Shoppe, butcher, book, and barber shop, tavern keeper, insurance salesman, and law suite members. Panic reigned in the City Hall and other municipal buildings; and in the offices of the stunned comrades of Norman Thomas there swelled a wave of defeatism that rolled right through the heart of the party convention which took place right afterward.

“What happened in Milwaukee?” was the paramount question put to delegates from the Cream City. Why had the workers cast their ballots for a tenor instead of for Dan?

When the initial delirium subsided, there still lingered a feeling of strength: Police Chief Kluchesky and “the Force” remained firmly entrenched in municipal power. All is not lost so long as comrade Police Chief Kluchesky remains at the head of the Force.

“Klooch,” as his comrades of the Socialist Party fondly call him, is expected to persist in waging the fight to liquidate the six mounted policemen, introduced by reactionaries to break the monotony of socialist civic life. Whole elections have been fought on this issue. The mounty funds, contend the Hoan men, could best be used in solving the problem of unemployment. Milwaukee Joe, when he is not busy “settling” strikes, will undoubtedly have something to say on this issue.

2. History and Achievements of Milwaukee Socialism

Pulling through the World War with very little to mar their record except the ride of Dan Hoan at the head of a Preparedness Day parade, the Milwaukee socialists continued on their march toward clean and efficient city government and a bigger and better convention city.

The first political boss of the Milwaukee local of the Socialist Party was Congressman Berger, who shared the job with Hoan until his death. Hoan now shares it with Andy Biemiller, Progressive caucus chairman in the assembly and author of the famous plea: “We must give aid to the Allies, our comrades!” Otto Hauser, ex-preacher and Hoan’s secretary to the Mayor, helps manage the dwindling machine, although he is mainly preoccupied with selling real estate.

“Old Vic” Berger merely bossed the party. Joe Kluchesky extended the practice of democracy against the general populace.

Frank Zeidler, State Secretary of the Socialist Party and a Sunday school teacher, readily concedes that nothing much was done in socializing the means of production. Nevertheless by the time Hoan retired to law practice in 1940, Milwaukee was the proud possessor of a socialized sewage disposal plant and many publicly owned streets.

Under the influence of comrade C.B. Whitnall, first elected in 1910 as City Treasurer, great strides were made in expanding the county parks; and today the Socialist county towers above the nation in quantity and quality of sweetheart’s rests.

In the course of this development Ernest Unterman, who reminds everyone that he is the Editor of the Fourth German Edition of Capital, was appointed Director of the Washington Park Zoo. Besides painting murals and collecting ostrich eggs, Unterman has also produced a work called Lenin’s Maggot.

In 1935, in a convention with eight other organizations, Milwaukee’s socialists gave birth to the Farmer-Labor Progressive Federation. The name was changed to Progressive Party Federation at the last convention when Comrade Hoan suggested that they should not give the impression of existing for farmers and workers alone. As a mass party the FLPF disappointed many. Some found it difficult to draw the line between the SP and the FLPF, the former usually meeting after the latter, often in the same hall or tavern as the case may be. A late comer was often heard questioning: “Is this the meeting of the SP or the FLPF?”

In all fairness to the party it must be added that much has been accomplished in placing 500 salaried election booth clerks, winning aldermanic, supervisory, and assemblymanic seats, appointing many tried and true men to various civic committees, administrative boards, and executive offices.

The achievements of the party culminated in the appointment of Joe Kluchesky and the completion of a really efficient police force, as the workers well may testify.

3. A Socialist Police Chief

Comrade Kluchesky is notable for his unique construing of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and for his view that transients do not vote and consequently are of no value to a crime-free socialist city.

The Socialist Party spent $10,000 for Norman Thomas’ New Jersey fight in which he contended handbill ordinances were undemocratic. But in the stronghold of Norman Thomas socialism, not a cent was spent to fight against such a handbill ordinance. As a matter of fact the Milwaukee comrades appreciated the ordinance’s value in keeping socialist streets litter-free and were inclined to favor it; so that, when the US Supreme Court invalidated that type of ordinance, comrade Kluchesky dissented and proposed an alternative ordinance to prevent the littering of public streets. The Milwaukee Young People’s Socialist League, at the instigation of a group who subsequently became Trotskyists, issued a statement to the press, repudiating the Police Chief’s action. The culprits were admonished before the SP’s Executive Board by Ed Knappe, who stated plainly: “The point is you cannot attack public officials.”

Klooch demonstrated his socialist efficiency during the Allen-Bradley strike. A trade union leader and member of the Socialist Party testified before the Party’s County Central that, in a conference with himself, Klooch, and President Bradley of the struck corporation, Klooch said:

“If law and order are not preserved I will have to put the police at the disposal of Mr. Bradley.”

Another act for which Hoan’s appointee has been criticized by some people was, in reality, not as arbitrary as it may seem, but logically arose from the Kluchesky theory that people ought to at least vote if they would breath Cream City rarefied air. This act took place at the Catholic Worker Family House, a haven for underprivileged transients. On March 23, 1940, a police detail under orders from the Chief raided the house without warrant and arrested seventeen inmates, on charges, substantially, that they were non-voters, unemployed, transient, loiterers, and defiled by their presence the grand beauty of a fair city. During the raid some people were mishandled, insulted, questioned and searched in violation of constitutional rights which apply to transients as well as voters.

When this act was brought (by those who later became Trotskyites) to the attention of the Party County Central with the pointer that under capitalism there is a fundamental antagonism between police and workers, and when the naively. indignant complainant vainly pressed for action, an Executive Board member objected to the use of Marxist formulas and windbagging, suggesting ejection of the disrupter.

At present Comrade Kluchesky’s force is cooperating with the FBI in cataloguing Socialist Workers Party street corner speakers and Socialist Appeal salesmen, no doubt crushing Trotskyism before it breeds Stalinism.

Recently there was a solemn ceremony, when 260 party members received “diplomas” for membership in the party of twenty-five years or more. One of those, grown gray in the service, was Comrade Police Chief Joe Kluchesky.

Believe it or not, some of those old boys who hold those diplomas aren’t able to figure out why the party didn’t once more this year win the election!

Milwaukee’s Brand of Socialism

Socialism in One City

by James Boulton

First printed in Fourth International, Vol.I No.7, December 1940. Copied from http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/fi/vol01/no07/boulton.htm

We particularly recommend this 1940 Trotskyist polemic with US social democracy to supporters of groups historically associated with the late Ted Grant. To those familiar, the parallels in the politics critiqued are quite striking.

  

1. A Tenor Sings Socialism Away

The morning of April 3, 1940, broke dismally in the city of Milwaukee, heralding the defeat of Mayor Daniel W. Hoan and the return to capitalism. Dan, the Socialist mayor toward whom Norman Thomas could point with pride in every speech, the mayor whose treatise on City Government has now become a classic, who as City Attorney after the election of 1912 indicted and convicted hundreds of corrupt politicians and thereby ushered into office for over two decades the Milwaukee Socialist Party, its elected and appointed officials, and made the name of Milwaukee a star in international encyclopedias, the mayor, however, whose twenty-four years in office failed to produce any change in the life of Milwaukee’s proletariat.

When the final count came in, the beer parties in the wards were already ebbing and the golden haired thrush, Mayor-elect Carl Zeidler, had decreed the abolition of socialism. The major setback was not felt among the more “stupid” proletariat, but it did forebode ill among the many party Gifte Shoppe, butcher, book, and barber shop, tavern keeper, insurance salesman, and law suite members. Panic reigned in the City Hall and other municipal buildings; and in the offices of the stunned comrades of Norman Thomas there swelled a wave of defeatism that rolled right through the heart of the party convention which took place right afterward.

“What happened in Milwaukee?” was the paramount question put to delegates from the Cream City. Why had the workers cast their ballots for a tenor instead of for Dan?

When the initial delirium subsided, there still lingered a feeling of strength: Police Chief Kluchesky and “the Force” remained firmly entrenched in municipal power. All is not lost so long as comrade Police Chief Kluchesky remains at the head of the Force.

“Klooch,” as his comrades of the Socialist Party fondly call him, is expected to persist in waging the fight to liquidate the six mounted policemen, introduced by reactionaries to break the monotony of socialist civic life. Whole elections have been fought on this issue. The mounty funds, contend the Hoan men, could best be used in solving the problem of unemployment. Milwaukee Joe, when he is not busy “settling” strikes, will undoubtedly have something to say on this issue.

2. History and Achievements of Milwaukee Socialism

Pulling through the World War with very little to mar their record except the ride of Dan Hoan at the head of a Preparedness Day parade, the Milwaukee socialists continued on their march toward clean and efficient city government and a bigger and better convention city.

The first political boss of the Milwaukee local of the Socialist Party was Congressman Berger, who shared the job with Hoan until his death. Hoan now shares it with Andy Biemiller, Progressive caucus chairman in the assembly and author of the famous plea: “We must give aid to the Allies, our comrades!” Otto Hauser, ex-preacher and Hoan’s secretary to the Mayor, helps manage the dwindling machine, although he is mainly preoccupied with selling real estate.

“Old Vic” Berger merely bossed the party. Joe Kluchesky extended the practice of democracy against the general populace.

Frank Zeidler, State Secretary of the Socialist Party and a Sunday school teacher, readily concedes that nothing much was done in socializing the means of production. Nevertheless by the time Hoan retired to law practice in 1940, Milwaukee was the proud possessor of a socialized sewage disposal plant and many publicly owned streets.

Under the influence of comrade C.B. Whitnall, first elected in 1910 as City Treasurer, great strides were made in expanding the county parks; and today the Socialist county towers above the nation in quantity and quality of sweetheart’s rests.

In the course of this development Ernest Unterman, who reminds everyone that he is the Editor of the Fourth German Edition of Capital, was appointed Director of the Washington Park Zoo. Besides painting murals and collecting ostrich eggs, Unterman has also produced a work called Lenin’s Maggot.

In 1935, in a convention with eight other organizations, Milwaukee’s socialists gave birth to the Farmer-Labor Progressive Federation. The name was changed to Progressive Party Federation at the last convention when Comrade Hoan suggested that they should not give the impression of existing for farmers and workers alone. As a mass party the FLPF disappointed many. Some found it difficult to draw the line between the SP and the FLPF, the former usually meeting after the latter, often in the same hall or tavern as the case may be. A late comer was often heard questioning: “Is this the meeting of the SP or the FLPF?”

In all fairness to the party it must be added that much has been accomplished in placing 500 salaried election booth clerks, winning aldermanic, supervisory, and assemblymanic seats, appointing many tried and true men to various civic committees, administrative boards, and executive offices.

The achievements of the party culminated in the appointment of Joe Kluchesky and the completion of a really efficient police force, as the workers well may testify.

3. A Socialist Police Chief

Comrade Kluchesky is notable for his unique construing of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and for his view that transients do not vote and consequently are of no value to a crime-free socialist city.

The Socialist Party spent $10,000 for Norman Thomas’ New Jersey fight in which he contended handbill ordinances were undemocratic. But in the stronghold of Norman Thomas socialism, not a cent was spent to fight against such a handbill ordinance. As a matter of fact the Milwaukee comrades appreciated the ordinance’s value in keeping socialist streets litter-free and were inclined to favor it; so that, when the US Supreme Court invalidated that type of ordinance, comrade Kluchesky dissented and proposed an alternative ordinance to prevent the littering of public streets. The Milwaukee Young People’s Socialist League, at the instigation of a group who subsequently became Trotskyists, issued a statement to the press, repudiating the Police Chief’s action. The culprits were admonished before the SP’s Executive Board by Ed Knappe, who stated plainly: “The point is you cannot attack public officials.”

Klooch demonstrated his socialist efficiency during the Allen-Bradley strike. A trade union leader and member of the Socialist Party testified before the Party’s County Central that, in a conference with himself, Klooch, and President Bradley of the struck corporation, Klooch said:

“If law and order are not preserved I will have to put the police at the disposal of Mr. Bradley.”

Another act for which Hoan’s appointee has been criticized by some people was, in reality, not as arbitrary as it may seem, but logically arose from the Kluchesky theory that people ought to at least vote if they would breath Cream City rarefied air. This act took place at the Catholic Worker Family House, a haven for underprivileged transients. On March 23, 1940, a police detail under orders from the Chief raided the house without warrant and arrested seventeen inmates, on charges, substantially, that they were non-voters, unemployed, transient, loiterers, and defiled by their presence the grand beauty of a fair city. During the raid some people were mishandled, insulted, questioned and searched in violation of constitutional rights which apply to transients as well as voters.

When this act was brought (by those who later became Trotskyites) to the attention of the Party County Central with the pointer that under capitalism there is a fundamental antagonism between police and workers, and when the naively. indignant complainant vainly pressed for action, an Executive Board member objected to the use of Marxist formulas and windbagging, suggesting ejection of the disrupter.

At present Comrade Kluchesky’s force is cooperating with the FBI in cataloguing Socialist Workers Party street corner speakers and Socialist Appeal salesmen, no doubt crushing Trotskyism before it breeds Stalinism.

Recently there was a solemn ceremony, when 260 party members received “diplomas” for membership in the party of twenty-five years or more. One of those, grown gray in the service, was Comrade Police Chief Joe Kluchesky.

Believe it or not, some of those old boys who hold those diplomas aren’t able to figure out why the party didn’t once more this year win the election!

A Letter to Trotsky

copied from
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backiss/vol3/no2/trotsky.html

The following letter of greeting was sent to Trotsky after the victory of the three Trotskyists in the elections to the Saigon colonial council, and appeared in the Socialist Appeal (USA), Volume 3 No.58, 11 August 1939.

Trotsky was much encouraged by this, and quoted from the issue of La Lutte that announced this in The Kremlin in World Politics, 1 July 1939 (Writings of Leon Trotsky 1938-39, New York, 1974, p.368) and India Faced with Imperialist War, 25 July 1939 (Writings of Leon Trotsky 1939-40, New York, 1973, pp.33-4). These texts can otherwise be found conveniently collected in S. Pirani (ed.), Vietnam and Trotskyism, Australia 1987, pp.110-3.

Dear Comrade Trotsky,

You must be acquainted with the results of the colonial elections of last 30 April in Cochin China. Despite the shameful coalition of the bourgeois of all types and the Stalinists, we have won a shining victory …

We went to battle, the flag of the Fourth International widely unfurled. Our victory is one of all the Fourth over the bourgeoisie, naturally, but above all, over their Social-Democratic and Stalinist agents. We have faith in the final victory of the Fourth International.

This faith you have imparted to us. Today, more than ever, we understand the importance not only of the programme of the Fourth International, but also of your struggle of 1925-28 against the theory and practice of Socialism in One Country, of your struggle against the Peasants’ International, the Anti-Imperialist League and other show committees, Amsterdam-Pleyel and others.

In these days of hope engendered by our recent victory, we think of you, of the moral and physical sufferings that you and your comrade have endured. We want to say to you that even in this remote corner of the Far East, in this backward country, you have friends who agree with you, comrades who struggle for that to which you have devoted your life, for socialism, for communism!

Our affectionate Bolshevik-Leninist salutations.  

Phan Van Hum
Tran Van Thach
Ta Thu Thau
and the group La Lutte
18 May, 1939

Fighting Against the Stream

by Leon Trotsky

April 1939.

[First printed in Fourth International [New York], Vol. 2 No. 4, May 1941. Copied from http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/04/stream.htm ]

NOTE: The following is a rough uncorrected transcript of of a discussion held in April 1939, between Trotsky and an English Fourth Internationalist, who had raised a number of questions concerning the development of the Fourth International in France, Spain, Great Britain and the United States. In his reply, Trotsky sketched the main reasons for the isolation and slow progress of the Fourth International in the first stages of its development and pointed out how a new turn in the world situation, like the present war, would inevitably lead to a radical change in the tempo of development, social composition and mass connections of the Fourth International.

TROTSKY: Yes, the question is why we are not progressing in correspondence with the value of our conceptions which are not so meaningless as some friends believe. We are not progressing politically. Yes, it is a fact which is an expression of a general decay of the workers’ movements in the last fifteen years. It is the more general cause. When the revolutionary movement in general is declining, when one defeat follows another, when Fascism is spreading over the world, when the official “Marxism” is the most powerful organization of deception of the workers, and so on, it is an inevitable situation that the revolutionary elements must work against the general historic current, even if our ideas, our explanations, are as exact and wise as one can demand.

But the masses are not educated by prognostic theoretical conception, but by the general experiences of their lives. It is the most general explanationthe whole situation is against us. There must be a turn in the class realization, in the sentiments, in the feelings of the masses; a turn which will give us the possibility of a large political success.

I remember some discussions in 1927 in Moscow after Chiang Kaishek stilled the Chinese workers. We predicted

this ten days before and Stalin opposed us with the argument that Borodin was vigilant, that Chiang Kaishek would not have the possibility to betray us, etc. I believe that it was eight or ten days later that the tragedy occurred and our comrades expressed optimism because our analysis was so clear that everyone would see it and we would be sure to win the party. I answered that the strangulation of the Chinese revolution is a thousand times more important for the masses than our predictions. Our predictions can win some few intellectuals who take an interest in such things, but not the masses. The military victory of Chiang Kaishek will inevitably provoke a depression and this is not conducive to the growth of a revolutionary fraction.

Since 1927 we have had a long series of defeats. We are similar to a group who attempt to climb a mountain and who must suffer again and again a downfall of stone, snow, etc. In Asia and Europe is created a new desperate mood of the masses. They heard something analogous to what we say ten or fifteen years ago from the Communist Party and they are pessimistic. That is the general mood of the workers. It is the most general reason. We cannot withdraw from the general historic currentfrom the general constellation of the forces. The current is against us, that is clear. I remember the period between 1908 and 1913 in Russia. There was also a reaction. In 1905 we had the workers with usin 1908 and even in 1907 began the great reaction.

Everybody invented slogans and methods to win the masses and nobody won themthey were desperate. In this time the only thing we could do was to educate the cadres and they were melting away. There was a series of splits to the right or to the left or to syndicalism and so on. Lenin remained with a small group, a sect, in Paris, but with confidence that there would be new possibilities of arising. It came in 1913. We had a new tide, but then came the war to interrupt this development. During the war there was a silence as of death among the workers. The Zimmerwald conference was a conference of very confused elements in its majority. In the deep recesses of the masses, in the trenches and so on there was a new mood, but it was so deep and terrorized that we could not reach it and give it an expression. That is why the movement seemed to itself to be very poor and even this element that met in Zimmerwald, in its majority, moved to the right in the next year, in the next month. I will not liberate them from their personal responsibility, but still the general explanation is that the movement had to swim against the current.

Our situation now is incomparably more difficult than that of any other organization in any other time, because we have the terrible betrayal of the Communist International which arose from the betrayal of the Second International. The degeneration of the Third International developed so quickly and so unexpectedly that the same generation which heard its formation now hears us, and they say, “But we have already heard this once!”

Then there is the defeat of the Left Opposition in Russia. The Fourth International is connected genetically to the Left Opposition; the masses call us Trotskyists. “Trotsky wishes to conquer the power, but why did he lose power?” It is an elementary question. We must begin to explain this by the dialectic of history, by the conflict of classes, that even a revolution produces a reaction.

Max Eastman wrote that Trotsky places too much value on doctrine and if he had more common sense he would not have lost power. Nothing in the world is so convincing as success and nothing so repelling as defeat for the large masses.

You have also the degeneration of the Third International on the one side and the terrible defeat of the Left Opposition with the extermination of the whole group. These facts are a thousand times more convincing for the working class than our poor paper with even the tremendous circulation of 5000 like the Socialist Appeal.

Against the Stream

We are in a small boat in a tremendous current. There are five or ten boats and one goes down and we stay it was due to bad helmsmanship. But that was not the reasonit was because the current was too strong. It is the most general explanation and we should never forget this explanation in order not to become pessimisticwe, the vanguard of the vanguard. There are courageous elements who do not like to swim with the currentit is their character. Then there are intelligent elements of bad character who were never disciplined, who always looked for a more radical or more independent tendency and found our tendency, but all of them are more or less outsiders from the general current of the workers’ movement. Their value inevitably has its negative side. He who swims against the current is not connected with the masses. Also, the social composition of every revolutionary movement in the beginning is not of workers. It is the intellectuals, semiintellectuals or workers connected with the intellectuals who are dissatisfied with the existing organizations. You find in every country a lot of foreigners who are not so easily involved in the labor movement of the country. A Czech in America or in Mexico would more easily become a member of the Fourth than in Czechoslovakia. The same for a Frenchman in the U.S. The national atmosphere has a tremendous power over individuals.

The Jews in many countries represent the semiforeigners, not totally assimilated, and they adhere to any new critical, revolutionary or semirevolutionary tendency in politics, in art, literature and so on. A new radical tendency directed against the general current of history in this period crystallizes around the elements more or less separated from the national life of any country and for them it is more difficult to penetrate into the masses. We are all very critical toward the social composition of our organization and we must change, but we must understand that this social composition did not fall from heaven, but was determined by the objective situation and by our historic mission in this period.

It does not signify that we must be satisfied with the situation. Insofar as it concerns France it is a long tradition of the French movement connected with the social composition of the country. Especially in the past the petty bourgeois mentalityindividualism on the one side, and on the other an clan, a tremendous capacity for improvising.

If you compare in the classic time of the Second International you will find that the French Socialist Party and the German Social Democratic Party had the same number of representatives in parliament. But if you compare the organizations, you will find they are incomparable. The French could only collect 25,000 francs with the greatest difficulty but in Germany to send half a million was nothing. The Germans had in the trade unions some millions of workers and the French had some millions who did not pay their dues. Engels once wrote a letter in which he characterized the French organization and finished with “And as always, the dues do not arrive.”

Our organization suffers from the same illness, the traditional French sickness. This incapacity to organization and at the same time lack of conditions for improvisation. Even so far as we now had a tide in France, it was connected with the Popular Front. In this situation the defeat of the People’s Front was the proof of the correctness of our conceptions just as was the extermination of the Chinese workers. But the defeat was a defeat and it is directed against revolutionary tendencies until a new tide on a higher level will appear in the new time. We must wait and preparea new element, a new factor, in this constellation.

We have comrades who came to us, as Naville and others, 15 or 16 or more years ago when they were young boys. Now they are mature people and their whole conscious life they have had only blows, defeats and terrible defeats on an international scale and they are more or less acquainted with this situation. They appreciate very highly the correctness of their conceptions and they can analyze, but they never had the capacity to penetrate, to work with the masses and they have not acquired it. There is a tremendous necessity to look at what the masses are doing. We have such people in France. I know much less about the British situation, but I believe that we have such people there also.

Why have we lost people? After terrible international defeats we had in France a tide on a very primitive and a very low political level under the leadership of the People’s Front. The People’s Front1 think this whole periodis a kind of caricature of our February Revolution. It is shameful that in a country like Prance, which 150 years ago passed through the greatest bourgeois revolution in the world, that the workers’ movement should pass through a caricature of the Russian Revolution.

JOHNSON: You would not throw the whole responsibility on the Communist Party?

TROTSKY: It is a tremendous factor in producing the mentality of the masses.

The active factor was the degeneration of the Communist Party.

From Isolation to Reintegration With the Masses

In 1914 the Bolsheviks were absolutely dominating the workers’ movement. It was on the threshold of the war. The most exact statistics show that the Bolsheviks represented not less than threefourths of the proletarian vanguard. But beginning with the February Revolution, the most backward people, peasants, soldiers, even the former Bolshevik workers, were attracted toward this Popular Front current and the Bolshevik Party became isolated and very weak. The general current was on a very low level, but powerful, and moved toward the October Revolution. It is a question of tempo. In France, after all the defeats, the People’s Front attracted elements that sympathized with us theoretically, but were involved with the movement of the masses and we became for some time more isolated than before. You can combine all these elements. I can even affirm that many (but not all) of our leading comrades, especially in old sections, by a new turn of situation would be rejected by the revolutionary mass movement and new leaders, fresh leadership will arise in the revolutionary current.

In France the regeneration began with the entry into the Socialist Party. The Policy of the Socialist Party was not clear, but it won many new members. These new members were accustomed to a large milieu. After the split they became a little discouraged. They were not so steeled. Then they lost their notsosteeled interest and were regained by the current of the People’s Front. It is regrettable, but it is explainable.

In Spain the same reasons played the same role with the supplementary factor of the deplorable conduct of the Nm group. He was in Spain as representative of the Russian Left Opposition and during the first year we did not try to mobilize, to organize our independent elements. We hoped that we would win Nm for the correct conception and so on. Publicly the Left Opposition gave him its support. In private correspondence we tried to win him and push him forward, but without success. We lost time. Was it correct? It is difficult to say. If in Spain we had an experienced comrade our situation would be incomparably more favorable, but we did not have one. We put all our hopes on Nm and his policy consisted of personal maneuvers in order to avoid responsibility. He played with the revolution. He was sincere, but his whole mentality was that of a Menshevik. It was a tremendous handicap, and to fight against this handicap only with correct formulas falsified by our own representatives in the first period, the Nins, made it very difficult.

Do not forget that we lost the first revolution in 1905. Before our first revolution we had the tradition of high courage, selfsacrifice, etc. Then we were pushed back to a position of a miserable minority of thirty, or forty men. Then came the war.

JOHNSON: How many were there in the Bolshevik Party?

TROTSKY: In 1910 in the whole country there were a few dozen people. Some were in Siberia. But they were not organized. The people whom Lenin could reach by correspondence or by an agent numbered about 30 or 40 at most. However, the tradition and the ideas among the more advanced workers was a tremendous capital which was used later during the revolution, but practically, at this time we were absolutely isolated.

Yes, history has its own laws which are very powerfulmore powerful than our theoretical conceptions of history. Now you have in Europe a catastrophethe decline of Europe, the extermination of countries. It has a tremendous influence on the workers when they observe these movements of the diplomacy, of the armies and so on, and on the other side a small group with a small paper which makes explanations. But it is a question of his being mobilized tomorrow and of his children being killed. There is a terrible disproportion between the task and the means.

If the war begins now, and it seems that it will begin, then in the first month we will lose twothii’ds of what we now have in France. They will be dispersed. They are young and will be mobilized. Subjectively many will remain true to our movement. Those who will not be arrested and who will remainthere may be three or five1 do not know how many, but they will be absolutely isolated.

Only after some months will the criticism and the disgust begin to show on a large scale and everywhere our isolated comrades, in a hospital, in a trench, a woman in a village, will find a changed atmosphere and will say a courageous word. And the same comrade who was unknown in some section of Paris will become a leader of a regiment, of a division, and will feel himself to be a powerful revolutionary leader. This change is in the character of our period.

I do not wish to say that we must reconcile ourselves with the impotence of our French organization. I believe that with the help of the American comrades we can win the PSOP and make a great leap forward. The situation is ripening and it says to us, “You must utilize this opportunity.” And if our comrades turn their backs the situation will change. It is absolutely necessary that your American comrades go to Europe again and that they do not simply give advice, but together with the International Secretariat decide that our section should enter the PSOP. It has some thousands. From the point of view of a revolution it is not a big difference, but from the point of view of working it is a tremendous difference. With fresh elements we can make a tremendous leap forward.

Now in the United States we have a new character of work and I believe we can be very optimistic without illusions and exaggerations. In the United States we have a larger credit of time. The situation is not so immediate, so acute. That is important.

Then I agree with Comrade Stanley who writes that we can now have very important successes in the colonal and semicolonial countries. We have a very important movement in IndoChina. I agree absolutely with Comrade Johnson that we can have a very important Negro movement, because these people have not passed through the history of the last two decades so intimately. As a mass they did not know about the Russian Revolution and the Third International. They can begin the history as from the beginning. It is absolutely necessary for us to have fresh blood. That is why we have more success among the youth in so far as we are capable of approaching them. In so far as we have been capable of approching them, we have had good results. They are very attentive to a clear and honest revolutionary program.

Fighting Against the Stream

by Leon Trotsky

April 1939.

[First printed in Fourth International [New York], Vol. 2 No. 4, May 1941. Copied fromhttp://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/04/stream.htm ]

NOTE: The following is a rough uncorrected transcript of of a discussion held in April 1939, between Trotsky and an English Fourth Internationalist, who had raised a number of questions concerning the development of the Fourth International in France, Spain, Great Britain and the United States. In his reply, Trotsky sketched the main reasons for the isolation and slow progress of the Fourth International in the first stages of its development and pointed out how a new turn in the world situation, like the present war, would inevitably lead to a radical change in the tempo of development, social composition and mass connections of the Fourth International.

TROTSKY: Yes, the question is why we are not progressing in correspondence with the value of our conceptions which are not so meaningless as some friends believe. We are not progressing politically. Yes, it is a fact which is an expression of a general decay of the workers’ movements in the last fifteen years. It is the more general cause. When the revolutionary movement in general is declining, when one defeat follows another, when Fascism is spreading over the world, when the official “Marxism” is the most powerful organization of deception of the workers, and so on, it is an inevitable situation that the revolutionary elements must work against the general historic current, even if our ideas, our explanations, are as exact and wise as one can demand.

But the masses are not educated by prognostic theoretical conception, but by the general experiences of their lives. It is the most general explanationthe whole situation is against us. There must be a turn in the class realization, in the sentiments, in the feelings of the masses; a turn which will give us the possibility of a large political success.

I remember some discussions in 1927 in Moscow after Chiang Kaishek stilled the Chinese workers. We predicted

this ten days before and Stalin opposed us with the argument that Borodin was vigilant, that Chiang Kaishek would not have the possibility to betray us, etc. I believe that it was eight or ten days later that the tragedy occurred and our comrades expressed optimism because our analysis was so clear that everyone would see it and we would be sure to win the party. I answered that the strangulation of the Chinese revolution is a thousand times more important for the masses than our predictions. Our predictions can win some few intellectuals who take an interest in such things, but not the masses. The military victory of Chiang Kaishek will inevitably provoke a depression and this is not conducive to the growth of a revolutionary fraction.

Since 1927 we have had a long series of defeats. We are similar to a group who attempt to climb a mountain and who must suffer again and again a downfall of stone, snow, etc. In Asia and Europe is created a new desperate mood of the masses. They heard something analogous to what we say ten or fifteen years ago from the Communist Party and they are pessimistic. That is the general mood of the workers. It is the most general reason. We cannot withdraw from the general historic currentfrom the general constellation of the forces. The current is against us, that is clear. I remember the period between 1908 and 1913 in Russia. There was also a reaction. In 1905 we had the workers with usin 1908 and even in 1907 began the great reaction.

Everybody invented slogans and methods to win the masses and nobody won themthey were desperate. In this time the only thing we could do was to educate the cadres and they were melting away. There was a series of splits to the right or to the left or to syndicalism and so on. Lenin remained with a small group, a sect, in Paris, but with confidence that there would be new possibilities of arising. It came in 1913. We had a new tide, but then came the war to interrupt this development. During the war there was a silence as of death among the workers. The Zimmerwald conference was a conference of very confused elements in its majority. In the deep recesses of the masses, in the trenches and so on there was a new mood, but it was so deep and terrorized that we could not reach it and give it an expression. That is why the movement seemed to itself to be very poor and even this element that met in Zimmerwald, in its majority, moved to the right in the next year, in the next month. I will not liberate them from their personal responsibility, but still the general explanation is that the movement had to swim against the current.

Our situation now is incomparably more difficult than that of any other organization in any other time, because we have the terrible betrayal of the Communist International which arose from the betrayal of the Second International. The degeneration of the Third International developed so quickly and so unexpectedly that the same generation which heard its formation now hears us, and they say, “But we have already heard this once!”

Then there is the defeat of the Left Opposition in Russia. The Fourth International is connected genetically to the Left Opposition; the masses call us Trotskyists. “Trotsky wishes to conquer the power, but why did he lose power?” It is an elementary question. We must begin to explain this by the dialectic of history, by the conflict of classes, that even a revolution produces a reaction.

Max Eastman wrote that Trotsky places too much value on doctrine and if he had more common sense he would not have lost power. Nothing in the world is so convincing as success and nothing so repelling as defeat for the large masses.

You have also the degeneration of the Third International on the one side and the terrible defeat of the Left Opposition with the extermination of the whole group. These facts are a thousand times more convincing for the working class than our poor paper with even the tremendous circulation of 5000 like the Socialist Appeal.

Against the Stream

We are in a small boat in a tremendous current. There are five or ten boats and one goes down and we stay it was due to bad helmsmanship. But that was not the reasonit was because the current was too strong. It is the most general explanation and we should never forget this explanation in order not to become pessimisticwe, the vanguard of the vanguard. There are courageous elements who do not like to swim with the currentit is their character. Then there are intelligent elements of bad character who were never disciplined, who always looked for a more radical or more independent tendency and found our tendency, but all of them are more or less outsiders from the general current of the workers’ movement. Their value inevitably has its negative side. He who swims against the current is not connected with the masses. Also, the social composition of every revolutionary movement in the beginning is not of workers. It is the intellectuals, semiintellectuals or workers connected with the intellectuals who are dissatisfied with the existing organizations. You find in every country a lot of foreigners who are not so easily involved in the labor movement of the country. A Czech in America or in Mexico would more easily become a member of the Fourth than in Czechoslovakia. The same for a Frenchman in the U.S. The national atmosphere has a tremendous power over individuals.

The Jews in many countries represent the semiforeigners, not totally assimilated, and they adhere to any new critical, revolutionary or semirevolutionary tendency in politics, in art, literature and so on. A new radical tendency directed against the general current of history in this period crystallizes around the elements more or less separated from the national life of any country and for them it is more difficult to penetrate into the masses. We are all very critical toward the social composition of our organization and we must change, but we must understand that this social composition did not fall from heaven, but was determined by the objective situation and by our historic mission in this period.

It does not signify that we must be satisfied with the situation. Insofar as it concerns France it is a long tradition of the French movement connected with the social composition of the country. Especially in the past the petty bourgeois mentalityindividualism on the one side, and on the other an clan, a tremendous capacity for improvising.

If you compare in the classic time of the Second International you will find that the French Socialist Party and the German Social Democratic Party had the same number of representatives in parliament. But if you compare the organizations, you will find they are incomparable. The French could only collect 25,000 francs with the greatest difficulty but in Germany to send half a million was nothing. The Germans had in the trade unions some millions of workers and the French had some millions who did not pay their dues. Engels once wrote a letter in which he characterized the French organization and finished with “And as always, the dues do not arrive.”

Our organization suffers from the same illness, the traditional French sickness. This incapacity to organization and at the same time lack of conditions for improvisation. Even so far as we now had a tide in France, it was connected with the Popular Front. In this situation the defeat of the People’s Front was the proof of the correctness of our conceptions just as was the extermination of the Chinese workers. But the defeat was a defeat and it is directed against revolutionary tendencies until a new tide on a higher level will appear in the new time. We must wait and preparea new element, a new factor, in this constellation.

We have comrades who came to us, as Naville and others, 15 or 16 or more years ago when they were young boys. Now they are mature people and their whole conscious life they have had only blows, defeats and terrible defeats on an international scale and they are more or less acquainted with this situation. They appreciate very highly the correctness of their conceptions and they can analyze, but they never had the capacity to penetrate, to work with the masses and they have not acquired it. There is a tremendous necessity to look at what the masses are doing. We have such people in France. I know much less about the British situation, but I believe that we have such people there also.

Why have we lost people? After terrible international defeats we had in France a tide on a very primitive and a very low political level under the leadership of the People’s Front. The People’s Front1 think this whole periodis a kind of caricature of our February Revolution. It is shameful that in a country like Prance, which 150 years ago passed through the greatest bourgeois revolution in the world, that the workers’ movement should pass through a caricature of the Russian Revolution.

JOHNSON: You would not throw the whole responsibility on the Communist Party?

TROTSKY: It is a tremendous factor in producing the mentality of the masses.

The active factor was the degeneration of the Communist Party.

From Isolation to Reintegration With the Masses

In 1914 the Bolsheviks were absolutely dominating the workers’ movement. It was on the threshold of the war. The most exact statistics show that the Bolsheviks represented not less than threefourths of the proletarian vanguard. But beginning with the February Revolution, the most backward people, peasants, soldiers, even the former Bolshevik workers, were attracted toward this Popular Front current and the Bolshevik Party became isolated and very weak. The general current was on a very low level, but powerful, and moved toward the October Revolution. It is a question of tempo. In France, after all the defeats, the People’s Front attracted elements that sympathized with us theoretically, but were involved with the movement of the masses and we became for some time more isolated than before. You can combine all these elements. I can even affirm that many (but not all) of our leading comrades, especially in old sections, by a new turn of situation would be rejected by the revolutionary mass movement and new leaders, fresh leadership will arise in the revolutionary current.

In France the regeneration began with the entry into the Socialist Party. The Policy of the Socialist Party was not clear, but it won many new members. These new members were accustomed to a large milieu. After the split they became a little discouraged. They were not so steeled. Then they lost their notsosteeled interest and were regained by the current of the People’s Front. It is regrettable, but it is explainable.

In Spain the same reasons played the same role with the supplementary factor of the deplorable conduct of the Nm group. He was in Spain as representative of the Russian Left Opposition and during the first year we did not try to mobilize, to organize our independent elements. We hoped that we would win Nm for the correct conception and so on. Publicly the Left Opposition gave him its support. In private correspondence we tried to win him and push him forward, but without success. We lost time. Was it correct? It is difficult to say. If in Spain we had an experienced comrade our situation would be incomparably more favorable, but we did not have one. We put all our hopes on Nm and his policy consisted of personal maneuvers in order to avoid responsibility. He played with the revolution. He was sincere, but his whole mentality was that of a Menshevik. It was a tremendous handicap, and to fight against this handicap only with correct formulas falsified by our own representatives in the first period, the Nins, made it very difficult.

Do not forget that we lost the first revolution in 1905. Before our first revolution we had the tradition of high courage, selfsacrifice, etc. Then we were pushed back to a position of a miserable minority of thirty, or forty men. Then came the war.

JOHNSON: How many were there in the Bolshevik Party?

TROTSKY: In 1910 in the whole country there were a few dozen people. Some were in Siberia. But they were not organized. The people whom Lenin could reach by correspondence or by an agent numbered about 30 or 40 at most. However, the tradition and the ideas among the more advanced workers was a tremendous capital which was used later during the revolution, but practically, at this time we were absolutely isolated.

Yes, history has its own laws which are very powerfulmore powerful than our theoretical conceptions of history. Now you have in Europe a catastrophethe decline of Europe, the extermination of countries. It has a tremendous influence on the workers when they observe these movements of the diplomacy, of the armies and so on, and on the other side a small group with a small paper which makes explanations. But it is a question of his being mobilized tomorrow and of his children being killed. There is a terrible disproportion between the task and the means.

If the war begins now, and it seems that it will begin, then in the first month we will lose twothii’ds of what we now have in France. They will be dispersed. They are young and will be mobilized. Subjectively many will remain true to our movement. Those who will not be arrested and who will remainthere may be three or five1 do not know how many, but they will be absolutely isolated.

Only after some months will the criticism and the disgust begin to show on a large scale and everywhere our isolated comrades, in a hospital, in a trench, a woman in a village, will find a changed atmosphere and will say a courageous word. And the same comrade who was unknown in some section of Paris will become a leader of a regiment, of a division, and will feel himself to be a powerful revolutionary leader. This change is in the character of our period.

I do not wish to say that we must reconcile ourselves with the impotence of our French organization. I believe that with the help of the American comrades we can win the PSOP and make a great leap forward. The situation is ripening and it says to us, “You must utilize this opportunity.” And if our comrades turn their backs the situation will change. It is absolutely necessary that your American comrades go to Europe again and that they do not simply give advice, but together with the International Secretariat decide that our section should enter the PSOP. It has some thousands. From the point of view of a revolution it is not a big difference, but from the point of view of working it is a tremendous difference. With fresh elements we can make a tremendous leap forward.

Now in the United States we have a new character of work and I believe we can be very optimistic without illusions and exaggerations. In the United States we have a larger credit of time. The situation is not so immediate, so acute. That is important.

Then I agree with Comrade Stanley who writes that we can now have very important successes in the colonal and semicolonial countries. We have a very important movement in IndoChina. I agree absolutely with Comrade Johnson that we can have a very important Negro movement, because these people have not passed through the history of the last two decades so intimately. As a mass they did not know about the Russian Revolution and the Third International. They can begin the history as from the beginning. It is absolutely necessary for us to have fresh blood. That is why we have more success among the youth in so far as we are capable of approaching them. In so far as we have been capable of approching them, we have had good results. They are very attentive to a clear and honest revolutionary program.

Open the Road to the Woman Worker! Open the Road to the Youth!

by Leon Trotsky

[Excerpted from the Transitional Program – 1938. Copied from http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/tp-text2.htm#wy ]

The defeat of the Spanish Revolution engineered by its “leaders,” the shameful bankruptcy of the People’s Front in France, and the exposure of the Moscow juridical swindles – these three facts in their aggregate deal an irreparable blow to the Comintern and, incidentally, grave wounds to its allies: the Social Democrats and Anarcho-syndicalists. This does not mean, of course, that the members of these organizations will immediately turn to the Fourth International. The older generation, having suffered terrible defeats, will leave the movement in significant numbers. In addition, the Fourth International is certainly not striving to become an asylum for revolutionary invalids, disillusioned bureaucrats and careerists. On the contrary, against a possible influx into our party of petty bourgeois elements, now reigning in the apparatus of the old organizations, strict preventive measures are necessary: a prolonged probationary period for those candidates who are not workers, especially former party bureaucrats: prevention from holding any responsible post for the first three years, etc. There is not and there will not be any place for careerism, the ulcer of the old internationals, in the Fourth International. Only those who wish to live for the movement, and not at the expense of the movement, will find access to us. The revolutionary workers should feel themselves to be the masters. The doors of our organization are wide open to them.

Of course, even among the workers who had at one time risen to the first ranks, there are not a few tired and disillusioned ones. They will remain, at least for the next period as bystanders. When a program or an organization wears out the generation which carried it on its shoulders wears out with it. The movement is revitalized by the youth who are free of responsibility for the past. The Fourth International pays particular attention to the young generation of the proletariat. All of its policies strive to inspire the youth with belief in its own strength and in the future. Only the fresh enthusiasm and aggressive spirit of the youth can guarantee the preliminary successes in the struggle; only these successes can return the best elements of the older generation to the road of revolution. Thus it was thus it will be.

Opportunist organizations by their very nature concentrate their chief attention on the top layers of the working class and therefore ignore both the youth and the women workers. The decay of capitalism, however, deals its heaviest blows to the woman as a wage earner and as a housewife. The sections of the Fourth International should seek bases of support among the most exploited layers of the working class; consequently, among the women workers. Here they will find inexhaustible stores of devotion, selflessness and readiness to sacrifice.

Down with the bureaucracy and careerism!
Open the road to the youth!
Turn to the woman worker!