[First published in Workers Vanguard #125, 17 September 1976]

The bloody clash last month at Panmunjom between North Korean border guards and U.S. imperialist “peace-keeping” occupation forces provoked images of the 1950-53 Korean War and called forth a post-Vietnam “not again” reaction from many bourgeois liberals.

Always sensitive to the shifting moods of the left-liberal political milieu, Workers’ Power, the phony “mass press” of the social-democratic International Socialists (I.S.), resorted to the most shameless pacifism as a cover for its refusal to draw the class line in Korea. In its article entitled “The Deadly Game in Korea” (Workers’ Power, 30 August 1976), the I.S. bemoans the Panmunjom border clash and the many other “incidents” as “games of ‘chicken'” played by U.S. imperialism and so-called “Stalinist imperialism”:

“This time. there were some soldiers killed. It will happen again … Those in the so-called ‘demilitarized zone’ know they are dead ducks if the shooting war explodes again …. They [the Korean people] were slaughtered by the millions [during the Korean War of 1950-53] …. “

Here the I.S. rivals the liberal pacifism of the People’s Party of Dr. Spock or the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, wringing its hands in horror over the fate of the soldiers (U .S. imperialist troops included) “if the shooting war explodes again.” With this claptrap the I.S. seeks to obscure the class issues posed in any Korean conflict, “forgetting” even to call for a social revolution in South Korea!

While the I.S. does demand the withdrawal of U.S. forces from South Korea, these inveterate social democrats fail to indicate on which side they stand in the clashes which threaten “a shooting war.” As a political tendency the I.S. is characterized by its refusal to defend the bureaucratically deformed/degenerated workers states from imperialist attack, rationalizing this objective capitUlation to U.S. imperialism with its “theory” of “Stalinist imperialism.” Thus, at the time of the Korean War, the “Third Camp” tendency led by Max Shachtman (which later spawned the I.S.) called for the defeat of both sides, but nevertheless asserted that Stalinism was more reactionary than “democratic” U.S. imperialism. Declared the Shachtmanites:

“The so-called Northern government is not a government of the Korean people and in no way represents its interests…   the victory of its arms would mean nothing but the extension of the slave power of Stalinism over the whole territory of Korea, and therefore a disastrous blow to the people of Korea and the cause of democracy and socialism everywhere.”

New International, July-August 1950

Adapting to the present climate of “detente” the I.S. “puts popularity in command” and often tones down its “Third Camp” Stalinophobia in order to tail “Third World” nationalists in vogue. (Aping the cheerleaders of the MPLA the I.S. “forgot” to condemn the “imperialist invasion” of Angola by the “imperialist” USSR and Cuba.)

Unlike the I.S., revolutionary Marxists unconditionally defend the revolutionary gains represented by the collectivized property relations in North Korea (and the other degenerated/deformed workers states), while calling for a social revolution in South Korea and a political revolution in North Korea to smash the Stalinist bureaucracy and establish soviet democracy. While today indulging in blubbering pacifism, the I.S. upholds a political line which has already taken one generation of “Third Camp socialists” into the bosom of State Department socialism as drummer boys for Wall Street.

From Trotskyism to Reformism

Origins of Canadian Pabloism

By Arnold Michaels and Murray Smith

[First printed in Spartacist Canada #4, February 1976]

Until recently, the reformist League for Socialist Action (LSA), the “official” section of the international rotten bloc known as the “United” Secretariat, was the only visible ostensibly Trotskyist organization in Canada. Today, there are at least six organizations in this country which claim continuity with the Trotskyist tradition. An understanding of the reasons for this proliferation of revisionist pseudo-Trotskyist tendencies must proceed from an historical analysis of the degeneration of Trotsky’s Fourth International (FI) in the post- WWIl period. The Spartacist League of the United States (SL/US) undertook such an analysis in “Genesis or Pabloism” (Spartacist, Fall 1972). The unique characteristics of Pabloist degeneration within the Canadian movement have yet to be fully explored. in particular its liquidationist orientation toward the social-democratic Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). This policy had its roots in the late 1930’s but did not become definitive until over a decade later.

The degeneration of the FI was politically codified in the documents of the Third World Congress in 1951 which carried the line of liquidationism propounded by Michel Pablo. Under the impact of extreme isolation and unexpected developments (in particlilar the’ post-war Stalinist expansion into Eastern Europe and the Chinese and Yugoslav Revolutions), the international leadership, headed by Pablo, developed an objectivist perspective on the development of world revolution, a perspective which effectively obviated the role of the Trotskyist vanguard and the class-conscious proletariat in the revolutionary process. Progralnrnatically, Pablo’s view took the form of a liquidationist or adaptationist “orientation” toward the existing reformist workers parties. the Communists and the social democrats. According to Pablo’s schema, these parties could, under the pressure of the masses and the impact or objective developments (such as a new world war), transform themselves into “adequate instruments” for the revolutionary seizure of power by the proletariat.

Believing that the Western Communist Parties (CP’s) and even centrist currents developing within the social-democratic parties could follow in the steps of the Yugoslav and Chinese CP’s in “roughly outlining a revolutionary orientation, ” the Pabloist current redefined the role of Trotskyists as one of pressuring the proletariat’s existing leaderships to the left. The Pabloists remained inattentive to the exceptional conditions under which the Yugoslav and Chinese Stalinists were able to lead essentially petty-bourgeois mass movements in the destruction of the bourgeois state (conditions including the extreme decay and decadence of the bourgeoisie in those countries, pressures from world imperialism and the absence or extreme weakness of a revolutionary vanguard) and failed to draw the necessary programmatic conclusion that the deformed workers states issuing from these revolutions required proletarian political revolutions under Trotskyist leadership to oust the ruling bureaucracies in order to set them on the road to socialism.

The liquidationist adaptation to Stalinism was thus accompanied by an increasingly soft line toward all of the bureaucratically-deformed workers states, with the Pabloists effectively abandoning the program of political revolution in any of these states. This is the meaning of Pablo’s hypothesis that the future promised “centuries of deformed workers states, ” a projection which revealed both a fundamental pessimism concerning the capacity of the working class as a revolutionary force and of the Trotskyist movement to resolve the crisis of revolutionary leadership, and a completely non-Marxist understanding of the unstable nature of the Stalinist bureaucracy.

WEAKNESSES OF THE ANTI-PABLO FACTION

While Pablo was successful in winning a few adherents in the Canadian section of the FI, the section’s

majority supported the American Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in its belated opposition to Pablo in 1953. The SWP, together with the Healy tendency of the British section and the LambertBleibtreu group of the French, formed the central core of the anti-Pablo opposition in the Fl. All of these organizations, however, evinced serious tendencies toward parochialism and their struggle against Pablo was consequently flawed by their failure to wage it on an international scale, and not merely against Pablo’s supporters in their own countries.

The struggle was also flawed theoretically inasmuch as their critique of the Pabloist line relied too heavily on a reassertion of Trotskyist orthodoxy on the question of Stalinism, overlooking for the most part the methodological. programmatic and strategic premises underlying the Pabloist perspective which were to survive even after the Pabloists had made a partial rectification of their “Stalinophile excesses. ” Thus the Pabloist perspective of “deep entry” (entrism “sui generis”-entry “of a unique type”) into the CP’s was denounced, but its application in relation to the social democracy was largely overlooked.

By fighting the Pabloists primarily on the terrain of anti-Stalinism, the SWP was able to win the support of groups which were in other respects politically closer to the Pabloists on the question of entrism. The Canadian section majority falls squarely into this category (as does the Moreno tendency in Argentina and the Healy tendency in Britain, at least in the early 1950′ s).

As late as 1954, SWP leader Murry Weiss could write of the Canadian section:

“I am convinced that Pabloism, that is real Pabloism, has taken a deep hold in the whole organization up there. They don’t fully realize it. They think they are all united in the work in the CCF. And they are, but on a Pabloite line I’m afraid. They have become infected with with this terrible disease of thinking that everything can be solved with fancy endless maneuver’s in the CCF, with ‘deep’ entry conceptions.”

– –International Cornmittee Documents, Vol. 3, Education for Socialists series

Despite this assessment, there is no evidence that the SWP attempted to wage a serious political struggle with the Canadians over the CCF line.

Canadian Pabloism, taking the form of a liquidationist deep-entry perspective toward the CCF, fully appeared only in 1951, but it had been nurtured by a series of previous errors in relation to the CCF, beginning in the late 1930’s. These earlier errors, which were understood as such by the International, can be attributed to the extreme historic weakness of the Canadian section’s leadership.

Despite the presence of some highly talented cadres like Maurice Spector and Jack Macdonald, both of whom had been central leaders of the Canadian CP, the Canadian Trotskyist movement (first as the Toronto branch of the Communist League of America and later as the Workers Party of Canada–WPC) was heavily reliant on the American section from its inception in 1928. An authentically revolutionary organization of great promise and with an impressive scope of activity in the 1930’s (though with only 250 members, the group was over-extended), the WPC was never able to congeal an authoritative leadership, due in part to the perennial instability of both Macdonald and Spector.

As part of the International Communist League’s (ICL) tactical orientation toward temporary shallow entry into the leftward-moving social democracies in order to win the left wings to Trotskyism, the WPC in 1936 began an entry into the CCF in British Columbia and in 1937 in Ontario.

The CCl was characterized later by the Canadian Trotskyists as “a petty-bourgeois Social Democratic party with some trade union support but deriving it’s main strength from the agrarian regions and from middle class elements in urban centers” (SWP International Information Bulletin, September 1946). While in terms of social base the early CCF resembled a two-class party like the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party (FLP), it differed in one important respect: program. While the FLP had a bourgeois-populist program, the CCF adopted a petty-bourgeois “socialist” rhetoric and program, and was correctly characterized as a social-demorcatic party. Thus it was principled to conceive of an entry into the CCF of the type carried out during the “French turn” period. (For a fuller social-historical analysis of the CCF, see “Canada’s New Democratic Party: Right- Wing Social Democracy” parts 1 and 2 Workers Vanguard, newspaper of the SL/US 15 and 29 March 1974.)

A heated dispute over the question of entry into the CCF split the WPC into pro- and anti-entry facations. The pro-entry faction won a small majority but cornprised little of the party’s central leadership. Spector, in fact, had made a bloc with A.J. Muste and Martin Abern in the Workers Party/U, S. to oppose entry into Norman Thomas’ Socialist Party (SP). Macdonald also faded from the leadership of the WPC following this tactical turn.

The entry tactic was seen by Trotsky and the international leadership as a short-term raiding operation on the social democracy in order to intersect developing left currents. The most spectacular success for the tactic was registered in the U.S, where the American Trotskyists were not only able to win over a large number of SP youth and trade unionists, but also to effectively destroy the social-democratic obstacle. The American Trotskyists were significantly strengthened following the split from the SP.

In Canada however, the entry was a failure. resulting in the ruination of the section. By late 1937, the ICL (forerunner of the FI) had to step in to re-establish the section after its partial disintegration. The reorganization of a much smaller group took pIace at a convention of the American Trotskyists in January 1938, although a split from the CCF was not carried out at this time.

Failure of this entry (which the section had attempted to carry out on a principled basis) can be traced to three main inter-related factors.

First, the organization had suffered a significant degree of decomposition even prior to the entry, namely, the splitting away of a large part of the organization, including key cadre, who had opposed the entry tactic. Secondly. the group’s leadership was, particularly following this split. extremely weak and inexperienced and was unable to give firm guidance in the execution of this intricate maneuver. And finally, the left wing of the CCF proved, following the onset of the entry, to be more ephemeral than it had appeared in 1936. In 1938 the FI instructed the Canadian comrades, organized by then as the Socialist Policy Group in the CCF, to carry out a “complete programmatic and political fight at or around the national fall convention of the CCF with a perspective of completing the experience within this declining reformist organization and re-establishing the Canadian section of the Fourth International” (Documents of the Fourth International). This directive was not followed; the British Columbia comrades remained in the CCF while the Ontario comrades were expelled (finding their way back in short order, however).

The subsequent formation of the Socialist Workers League (SWL)in 1938 did not signify a complete break with the entrist perspective. Despite the directives of the International, an important part of the SWL’s work was in or even on behalfof the CCF. For example, the SWL participated in the organization of factory clubs for the CCF during WWII.

The fact that the entry was continued past 1938, against the FI’ s directives and at a time when the CCF was in decline, reflected a shift in orientation. The tactic of entry with a short-term perspective was being displaced by a permanent “semi-entrist” policy with no clear-cut objectives, contravening the FI’s instruction to “create a thorough line of demarcation between the reformists, centrists and themselves” (Documents of theFourth International).

These tendencies were accentuated during the war years both in reaction to government repression of the left and also due in no small measure to the failure of the SWP to maintain close surveillance on the work in Canada. As a strong section of the Fourth International in geographic proximity, it had a special responsibility for the Canadian section. But the SWP was succumbing to isolationism: “The American Trotskyists retreated into an isolation only partially forced upon them by the disintegration of the European sections under conditions of fascist triumph and illegalization” (“Genesis of Pabloism”).

The growing adaptation to social democracy was clearly revealed in the first issue of Labour Challenge (1 June 1945) in an article entitled “VOTE CCF’ which inferred that the CCF in power would be a “labour government,” a necessary stage on the path to socialism. The demand for a CCF government was, in fact, the focus of the overall program presented by Labour Challenge.

The CCF in 1946 was still a petty-bourgeois social-democratic party (with a working-class base which had grown since the late thirties) and it would have been conceivable, from the standpoint of Marxist principle, to give it critical electoral support. However, in 1946 the CCF stood on a record of wartime social chauvinism, having made a turn away from an anti-conscription position early in the war toward a stance favoring conscription.

In addition to this, it was very federated on the provincial level with farmers (who had moved considerably rightward since the radical “socialist” rhetoric of the thirties) as its overwhelming mainstay in certain areas. Thus, while it might have been correct to give critical support to the CCF in certain areas at certain times, it was a political mistake to call for a CCF vote on the national level in this period.

THE “WORKERS GOVERNMENT” SLOGAN

But the Canadian group’s “mistake” went beyond this. To begin with, its support to the CCF was not critical from the Leninist standpoint, but tended toward a stages theory of the road to socialism. Rather than conceiving of putting the CCF in power so that it would expose the falsity of its promises to the working class, the Canadian group saw a CCF government as a progressive step toward socialism, not as an obstacle that would have to be removed before genuine workers power could be achieved.

Trotskyists understand the “workers government” slogan as an algebraic formulation for the dictatorship of the proletariat. In departing from this transitional conception of the slogan, the by then centrist SWL took a basically reformist position on the role of the CCF in the struggle for socialism. The SWL was not consistent in this attitude; in fact, it tended in the forties to move from right to left to right on the question, ending finally with a hardened rightist orientation toward the social democracy.

One example of the rightist, strategic-entry policy in 1945 was the work of one SWL member who was so successful in integrating himself into the CCF that he won election to Parliament as a CCF candidate. This having been accomplished, the SWP prepared to send one of its leaders, George Clarke, to Ottawa to write the man’s speeches. But this ill-conceived venture soon fell apart when the new Member of Parliament dropped out of the SWL.

THE RWP 1946 LEFT TURN

With the formation under Ross and Murray Dowson’s leadership of the Revolutionary Workers Party (RWP), the Canadian section made a brief left turn, empirically abandoning its tailing of the CCF. The impetus for the turn was the militant post-war strike wave of 1945-46.

In RWP propaganda. the slogan. “For a CCF Government,” was correctly replaced with “For a Workers and Farmers Government. ” The RWP boldly embarked on its own municipal election campaigns in 1947 and ’48, not as a milk-sop surrogate for the CCF’s failure to run. but in order to advance a revolutionary program. The 1948 RWP campaign for mayor in Toronto was endorsed by two important United Auto Workers locals and received 20 percent of the vote under the slogan, “Vote DOWSON. Vote for a Labour Mayor, Vote for the TROTSKYIST Candidate.” Eight years after the FI had urged a break from the CCF, it was finally made: “The hardened opportunist leadership of the CCF… excludes any possibility of converting the CCF into an instrument of social revolution” (Labour Challenge, mid-October, 1946).

But the old errors had never been analyzed from a Marxist standpoint and the RWP was not politically prepared for the growing anti-communism of the cold-war period which followed the ’45-46 strike wave. The old orientation began to creep back, with Dowson re-embracing the erroneous line he had put forward in 1942: “Political action of the Canadian workers has taken a reformist detour. Today’s expression of working-class independent political action is the CCF” (RWP Internal Bulletin, 1942).

PABLO ENCOURAGES PERMANENT ENTRY INTO CCF

The international leadership was no longer capable of correctipg the Canadian section’s errors, having undergone a serious disorientation and then degeneration following the war. In fact. Pablo’s new international line encouraged the exploration of the deepest depths of the “CCF orientation”. In a 1950 letter the International Secretariat advised the Canadian section that the CCF entry it was preparing would be “something of a long duration” (quoted in Ross Dowson, CCF: Our Tasks and Perspectives). This instruction anticipated the line that Pablo would advance at the Tenth Plenum of the International Executive Committee in 1952. In countries where the hegemonic political tendency in the workers movement was social democracy. Pablo declared that the task was to enter the social-democratic parties ” …in order to remain there for a long time banking on the great possibility which exists of seeing these parties, placed under new conditions, develop centrist tendencies which will lead a whole stage of the radicalization of the massses and of the objective revolutionary process in their respective countries” (International Secretariat Documents, Vol. I, Education for Socialists series).

The general guidelines for these political entries, as outlined at the Austrian Commission of the Third World Congress in 1951, were directly counterposed to the Leninist-Trotskyist position on the question: “A. Not to come forward as Trotskyists with our full program. B. Not to push forward programmatic and principled questions… ” (quoted in “Genesis of Pabloism “). In periods of both full and partial entry over the last 25 years, Dowson and his heirs have never deviated from these guidelines in their CCF /NDP work.

While a 1951 RWP document which effectively heralded the dissolution of the RWP into the CCF noted that the CCF had no left wing, was declining, had a defunct youth movement and was moving rapidly to the right, the entry was made nonetheless. By the time the former RWPers were expelled from the CCF in 1955 (with the British Columbia section remaining inside), the group had defined itself completely as a left appendage of the CCF.

PABLO’S UNRECONSTRUCTED OFFSPRING

Today Ross Dowson, having departed from the LSA in early 1974 to form the Socialist League, accuses his ex-comrades of abandoning the historical position of Canadian ostensible Trotskyists toward the CCF/NDP in favor of a species of “ultra-left sectarianism. ” But while Dowson (with his long-term deep entry into the social democracy with a non-split perspective) has merely carried the historical practice of the LSA and its predecessors further along toward its logical conclusion in outright programmatic and organizational liquidation, the LSA orientation remains fundamentally no different.

As they have for over 20 years, the LSA affirms that its attitude toward the NDP is one of “unconditional” fraternal support. Although for the past two-and-a-half years, less of the LSA’s actual practice has taken place within the NDP than has been the historical norm, this is for purely conjunctural reasons stemming from the split during 1973-74 of most of the organization’s entrist fraction to either Dowson’s outfit or the centrist Revolutionary Marxist Group (RMG). In fact, as it moves closer to achieving unity with the Canadian adherents of the so-called “Organizing Committee for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International” (an invitee to the LSA’ s last national convention, whose sole practice in English Canada is subterranean NDP work), the LSA is coming to place noticeably more emphasis on its work inside (and on behalf of) the social democracy.

For its part, the RMG (the central core of whose leadership came from an inchoate left-reformist caucus in the Ontario NDP known as the Red Circle) has not since the early days of its independent existence exhibited the classic orientation of Canadian Pabloism toward deep entry in the NDP. (The early days or the RMG were marked by NDP fraction work which did not differ qualitatively from that of the LSA).

Yet this fact does not reflect any break in the direction of Trotskyism. The RMG, in common with its European mentors in the “United” Secretariat majority of Ernest Mandel. Pierre Frank and Livio Maitan (all of whom trained under Pablo during the 1950’s and early 1960’s), has embraced the more “militant” orientation of mainstream international Pabloism today–adaptation toward the spontaneous movements of various socially peripheral sectors which comprise a so-called “broad vanguard” presumably able to politically lead struggles in its own name. Thus rather than programmatically liquidate into the social democracy, the Pabloists of the RMG prefer at this juncture to programmatically liquidate into various petty bourgeois/sectoralist/reformist “indepent mass movements” of women, blacks, gays, immigrants and natives.

What all Pablo’s latterday, unreconstructed offspring have in common is an explicit refusal to fight for the revolutionary Transitional Program in the course of their day-to-day work, and a rejection of the centrality of the class-conscious proletariat and its Leninist vanguard in the struggle for socialist revolution. The Spartacist tendency had its origins as a faction in the American Socialist Workers Party in the early 1960′ s which waged a struggle for these principles against the SWP’s rapid flight toward unprincipled reunification with the European Pabloists in 1963. Today the international Spartacist tendency, of which the Trotskyist League of Canada is a sympathizing section, carries forward this struggle to reforge the Fourth International on the program and principles of revolutionary Marxism.

A Talk on the Labor Party Question

by Jim Robertson

[Reprinted in Young Communist Bulletin #3 “On the United Front”, 1976]

Note: The following is a slightly edited version of com­rade Jim Robertson’s “Talk on the Labor Party Question,” delivered at an internal youth educational in Boston on 5 November 1972.

This report is intended to be a presentation of a series of interlocked home truths and a comment on the search for deviations, of which in a hardened way we seem to have discovered only two. Its origins are that in the West Coast Labor Day Pre-Conference Discussion the issue of the Labor Party quite thoroughly dominated the discussion. A great deal of uncertainty, confusion and a very considerable spread of opinion on the Labor Party question presented themselves there, and we had to thrash them out.

At this point the slogan which I have been defending and want to defend here is the slogan “Dump the bureaucrats! For a Workers Party based on the trade unions.” Another slogan which was debated and which presents an aspect of rank and file-ism, of syndicalism, would be the slogan “For a Labor Party without bureaucrats.” Now that slogan lacks the contradictory tension of a struggle and suggests simply rank and file-ism and possibly, by implication, the development of an organized mass workers party counterposed to the trade unions: perhaps the political equivalent of the red unions of the CP’s third period.

I gather that on the Coast there is perhaps a comrade who objects to the first part of the slogan, “Dump the bureau­crats,” and just wants to have a slogan “For a Labor Party based on the trade unions.” In New York there is a comrade who just wants to have the slogan “Dump the bureaucrats! For a Communist Party.”

There is a great deal of confusion. The confusion centers along two separate axes. and that’s why there’s a great deal of confusion, or rather, complicated confusion. Furthermore, in the last debate in New York, I spent all my time on the decisions of the Third and Fourth Congresses. I’m going to evade that this time and simply point out that the Labor Party slogan is the current American version of the issue of the united front. It’s posed in the absence of a massive political expression of reformism or Stalinism in the United States; rather, with the organization of industrial unions with a deeply committed pro-capitalist trade-union bureauc­racy, it is toward them that the issue of proletarian unity and the process of communist triumph in struggle is centered on the Labor Party question. The axes are twofold….

There are two axes of confusion over the Labor Party. One is the importance of realizing that this is a propagan­distic demand for us today which has no relationship to what will happen in the future. That is, today, the Workers League to the contrary notwithstanding, the idiots who think that Meany who does not like Negroes, homosexuals or abortion laws is therefore building a Labor Party in order to carry out these anti-capitalist demands—it’s nonsense. There has to be a sense of proportion, which the Communist Party originally lost in 1924.

In the first place, the Labor Party is not the issue for propaganda; the workers government is. Now, we stumbled into this. If you read the early issues of Workers’ Action, you will find out that the final, triumphant, ultimate statement of position in the Workers’ Action program was for a Labor Party. Uh-uh. We are for a workers government, in the unions, in the plants and in our general education and approaching students with the conception of proletarian power. The dic­tatorship of the proletariat is a formulation which suffers certain problems. A popular-understanding of the dictatorship of the proletariat is that the workers are going to be put into concentration camps, like in Russia. If you talk of some kind of socialism, you get an image of happy Sweden main­taining its high alcoholism and suicide rates through victo­riously staying out of two world wars. [Laughter] But what should be clear in every way, over every kind of issue, is that the working people need their own government.

But—how do you get a government? That implies a polit­ical party of the working people—a class party. And it is as a subordinate element of the achievement of a workers government, which is an algebraic expression, as the saying goes, for the concrete realization of the dictatorship of the proletariat, that they require a workers or a Labor Party, which in its concrete, arithmetical expression is a revolu­tionary Labor Party: a Bolshevik party.

That’s a propaganda presentation.

Now what’s really going to happen in this country? Who knows?… Only Lynn Marcus. [Laughter] I’ll give you some variants.

One is: We have an unpolitical, extremely combative working class, with a bureaucracy that at present and without the aid of a thousand YSAers, is incapable at any serious level of struggle of controlling this class. Part of the residue of the enormous class struggles in Europe is the presence of an extremely sophisticated, able, political bureaucracy in depth. Can you imagine the capacity of a George Meany to cope with an American general strike the way that the CP did in France in ’68? It’s impossible. Which is where Jack Barnes and his gang think they’ve got their opening.

So it’s entirely possible now—as indicated in the funda­mental premises of the Transformation Memo—now that American hegemony has been lost, reducing the United States to merely the most powerful (but very effective) of the capitalist/imperialists, and with the fundamental pre­conditions for severe social crisis laid down on the planet, that the American working class may be impelled into massive political actions without a party, without a revo­lutionary party, without any party at all, and overwhelm the bureaucracy. That will be in the best case a fruitful catastrophe, rather akin to the Paris Commune and the 1905 Revolution. It is not something, therefore, that we work for. But as a smaller propagandistic group, we’ll do our job. If it comes to that, if we are unable to have the capacity as revolutionists to place ourselves at the head of insurgent masses, we will fight anyhow, even if we have to go through an experience as the Spartakusbund did in 1918/1919. The next time around it will be different, then.

That’s a possibility—that’s if the motion at the base in the class accelerates.

It is possible to go to the other extreme –given an orderly, stretched-out intensification of social crisis, the capacity of the growing communist movement to keep ahead of devel­opments, a thing which had begun to suggest itself classically in 1934 in this country when three ostensibly communist organizations led three city-wide general strikes (in Toledo, San Francisco and in Minneapolis): the possibility that the communist party could simply grow in linear fashion.

The other possibility would be the realization of a Labor Party either of a revolutionary or of a reformist character. That is, under the accumulated mounting pressures of social struggle, the bureaucracy begins to be torn asunder through the pressure from below, from developing class antago­nisms, and it becomes stretched. With a successful commu­nist agitation at the same time, the Labor Party could be formed in what will be a very convulsive act.

What is behind so much of the conceptual garbage that the Workers League puts out is that the Labor Party is an easy thing. (By the way, there’s a book by Henry Pelling, Origins of the Labor Party, which is useful for guidelines.) If you study the history of the achievement of political class consciousness by any proletariat, you’ll see that it is a convulsive, historically monumental act—sometimes com­pressed, sometimes stretched out—but always enormous in character, even if the outcome after the dust begins to settle is the restabilization of a pro-capitalist bureaucracy. The impact of ripping the mass of the working people away from capitalism—so that the assertion is: we need a society in which the working people govern, the productive property is nationalized—is enormous, and on top of this is laid the reformist and Stalinist labor skates. That will be a convul­sive period in American history, substantially larger than that of the sit-down period from ’35 to ’37.

But what will happen bears no particular relationship to our present advocacy, which is a way to pose the question of working people becoming the government developing the political instrument to achieve this, to link up that objec­tive fundamental need with the present consciousness of the bulk of trade-union-conscious American workers. The attempts to telescope with “what ifs,” as though there is a particular relationship, a linear connection, between what we say today and what will happen in mass motion is the source of a great deal of confusion and error.

I left open the question of the outcome, of the character of the Labor Party in the third case. In the Bay Area somebody said, “Ah, but how can there be a revolutionary Labor Party? Obviously by definition it’s reformist.” And immediately there came to mind the examples of the transformations of the Italian and French mass Socialist Parties into Communist Parties and, more engagingly, because of the similarity in name and origins, the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (Majority) is commonly taken to be a revolutionary Labor Party. But that depends on the relationship of forces in the development between the revolutionists and the ref­ormists who associate themselves with such an insurgent move on the political plane—approximately the same way that John L. Lewis and a section of the AFL bureaucracy did with the CIO industrial organizing in 1935.

So that’s one kind of confusion.

The other axis of confusion is over the question of why advocate a Labor Party and what is the relationship between the advocacy of a Labor Party and its political character? Will it represent the general historic interests of the prole­tariat, i.e., be a revolutionary Labor Party, or will it represent special, partial, narrow, limited, aristocratic, chauvinist and nationalist appetites within the proletariat, i.e., be a reformist Labor Party? And therefore, why advocate a Labor Party at all since it seems to have a kaleidoscopic character?

There is, of course, a perfectly good circumstance in which our present propagandist and limitedly agitational advocacy of a Labor Party would be abandoned. And that is if we began to see that a communist party began to be recognized by advanced sections of the proletariat, not even very large ones but significant layers, and had the capacity to struggle in a linear way, by bootstrap operation, to be­come the authentic and literal vanguard of the class. At that juncture we would probably see a section of the bureaucracy form a Labor Party very fast in an attempt to head this off. The progressive wing of the bureaucracy would counterpose the development of a Labor Party. And necessarily, from its birth, its essential purpose would be that of an anti­communist Labor Party. We would fight such a thing in every way. We would try to united-front it to death, we would denounce it to death, we would raid it to death, we would do everything we could to smash it in the egg at every step.

But that is a far cry from the present situation. It is literally not possible by qualitative orders of magnitude—not just one, but qualitative orders of magnitude—to advance at this juncture the Spartacist League as the answer to the felt mass problems of the proletariat. But those felt mass problems exist. And what does exist in a mass way is the trade-union movement. Therefore one can point out (and should!) that the trade-union movement, the economic organ­ization of a section of the working class, has the responsi­bility to offer the political as well as the economic answers to the plight of the working people. And so it is an address made to that one institution that exists in the United States—the organized labor movement.

Now I’ve got a couple of other points to make in this connection. To go back to the workers government slogan, which is the purpose of the Labor Party agitation, we should be clear what is meant by a workers government. It is noth­ing other than the dictatorship of the proletariat. There have appeared some speculations or projections, either in a hypo­thetical way or at one point as an ephemeral possibility in history, that a workers government is not simply a synonym for the dictatorship of the proletariat. Interestingly enough, in the formulations of the Fourth Congress of the Commu­nist International, where there was a vagueness and an abstraction about the projection of the conditions under which a workers government would be achieved, both Hal Draper and Joe Hansen zeroed in on that material—as they did on a phrase in the Transitional Program—in order to “prove” that from the British Labour Party government of 1945 to Ben Bella in Algeria to Fidel Castro’s Cuban gov­ernment—all were workers governments.

The concrete possibilities that Trotsky posed in the Tran­sitional Program were roughly of the following formulation: It is conceivable that under mass revolutionary pressure reformist elements might go much further in the direction of a workers government than they ever conceived they would at the outset. That was a “what if” question, a generalization on the following condition that took place in the Russian Revolution between February and October: The slogan of the Bolsheviks addressed to the Provisional Gov­ernment—which was a coalition government of Social Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, the minuscule Trudoviks of Kerensky and the Cadet Party, that is, the Constitutional Democrats, the effective liberal bourgeois party—was the slogan “Down with the ten capitalist ministers, form a government purely of the workers parties,” coupled of course with the social and political and economic demands that the Bolsheviks were raising. Posed in a “what if” way, the question is, what if under mass pressure the Cadets had been thrown out of the government? You would have a murky period at that point, something not very stable, in the context of what already is inherently a historical episode of a dual power situation between a bourgeois govern­ment and the existence of organized nationwide soviets. What that would represent is not a workers government separate and apart from the dictatorship of the proletariat, but an episode immediately on the way. But of course the centrists make much out of non-viable episodes possible in the histories of revolutions in order to try to construct a sort of third camp between the dictatorship of the prole­tariat and the administration of a bourgeois state by the reformists.

Now another question’s been raised, just lately; a useful question has been posed by comrade Seymour’s article on the Labor Party, I think. because it’s not a clear-cut case and it shows some problems in actual application. And that’s the experience of the Communist Party in 1923-24 with the Farmer-Labor Party and the Federated Farmer-Labor Party and the general issue of the possibility of a bloc between the communists and. as Cannon put it, the progressive sec­tion of the labor movement. You know, apparently it is never too late to learn something, because after 25 years, while reading Seymour’s piece, it suddenly occurred to me, Farmer-Labor Party — wait a minute, that’s a two-class party, we’re opposed to a two class party, what the hell are we doing in a two class party situation? “One step forward….” Furthermore. the thing has got to be reformist because what kind of interests of both workers and farmers could be contained wiithin a common program? The farmers produce their commoditles, they sell them themselves, they’re inter­ested in high prices, squeezing out the middlemen, getting to the export market directly, all this kind of stuff is the economic program of the farmers. Sometimes of course farmers can be pretty restless and make a lot of trouble. But those interests of the workers that you could possibly put together could only be extremely narrow, the circum­scribed interest, of the American working class, even if you just sat down and aid. “Let’s cook up a Farmer-Labor Party.” Necessarily it would have to be episodic and limited in a reformist way because there are a lot of antagonisms between petty – and not so petty-bourgeois producers, which is what farmer are. and the proletariat.

And that’s the key to what was wrong in 1924 with the Communist bloc with the Chicago Federation of Labor. From the outset it was preordained that the struggle was going to be for a reformist Labor Party, i.e., throwing in the farmers to boot. And it was on that basis that a bloc was constructed then: that the Communists would simulate a reformist party hoping to maneuver on the inside, courtesy of brother Pepper. It’s on that basis and probably from that experience that Shachtman wrote his excellent article in 1935, where he asked. “Who needs a second-class, fake, reformist, hidden Communist Party?”

Now we, for our part, should have no reason to be opposed to a bloc with a section of the labor movement, including the labor officialdom, providing that bloc goes in the direc­tion we want it to go. But looking back to 1923, on what basis for heaven’s sake is this Chicago Federation of Labor going to give us what we want? That is, an agreement to struggle for a Labor Party together in the first place, and in the second place to struggle with each other over the character of its program and its cadres. On that basis we’ll make a bloc with people. If Meany says, “I’m for a Labor Party—you guys are for a Labor Party,” fine, we’ll all go and organize for a Labor Party and we’ll fight like hell to determine its program.

Yeah, we’d accept such a bloc and we’d fight—we’d seek such a bloc. The problem with a bloc is the nice old phrase of Bismarck that every alliance consists of two compo­nents—the horse and the rider. [Laughter] So that I do not know how we would realize the bloc because I’m afraid our projected horse would bolt. And the Communist Party clearly was doing the donkey work-or proposing simulat­ing doing the donkey work for the trade-union official­dom—except that they also wanted organizational control by the Communists plus a reformist program. This is not in aid of anything, and that’s the basic reason why they got such a mess out of it.

So that in reviewing the historical experience we ain’t ever for a Farmer-Labor Party—we oppose it. But a Farmer-Labor Party—it’s not going to happen in America. An inter­esting point that James Burnham made in 1938: He said, “Comrades, the Transitional Program says that we should be for a workers and farmers government in the United States.” But he observed already then, I believe, that there were more dentists than farmers in the United States, and therefore why not a workers and dentists government? [Laughter] Comrade Gordon waxes irate with me because I find the formula of a workers and “x” government very useful while on national tour. You know, there’s a workers and students government if you’re speaking on a carnpus, you go out to the military base, it’s a workers and soldiers government, you know. And you gradually move through all sections of the population. I suppose in Berkeley a few years ago it would have been a workers and women’s gov­ernment. The final achievement is one that boggled myown mind. The Argentine Pabloists came out a few years ago for a workers and peoples government. [Laughter[

Well, we’re for a workers and “x” government, all right; the problem with motley America is that “x” stands for a wide variety. But behind that is a truism: that the dictatorship of the proletariat will be centrally, but not simply or purely, proletarian. There is a wide layer of oppressed sections in American society—racially, ethnically, socially oppressed, ranging from old people to Latins, blacks, students, soldiers. This is quite real, it’s quite true, although a workers and peoples government is not exactly the formulation that one wants. But it senses something that’s particularly important: If one says a labor movement or a Labor Party right now, there is very good reason to see it right now in the most encrusted, aristocratic, racist, chauvinist, George Meany­like fashion. It’s extremely important and one of the reasons for the formulation “Dump the bureaucrats! For a Workers Party!” There’s no difference in conception between a “Workers Party based on the trade unions” and a “Labor-Party based on the trade unions,” except that the terminology projects a somewhat different conception.

Letter from the iSt to the WSL

international Spartacist tendency

BCM Box 4272

London WC1V 6XX

17 June 1976

Workers Socialist League London

Dear Comrades,

We have carefully studied your document “Fourth International Problems and Tasks”. Many of the particular and general points and conclusions in the document appear to parallel positions we have reached and fought for, in some cases as much as fifteen years ago during the period of our emergence as a distinct tendency within the Socialist Workers Party. Rather than reiterating these points; we would like to focus on a few matters dealt with in your document which in our opinion are both important and the focus of unclarities or possible differences.

The document correctly sees the evaluation of post-war Stalinism and the emergence of new states such as those in Eastern.Europe, China, and Cuba as a central axis of the disorientation and destruction of the Fourth International. Not only the political liquidationism of the Pabloites but also the initial shortcomings and eventual degeneration of the “anti-revisionists” of 1951-1953 was accompanied by an inability to correctly analyse these phenomena and a concomitant failure to uphold the revolutionary Trotskyist programme.

However, while the document shows a proper concern for the question of Stalinism, it does this to the exclusion of an analysis of social democracy. Thus while you refer to “the main counterrevolutionary force within the world workers movement — Stalinism” and state that the struggle for Trotskyism is “first and foremost, a struggle against Stalinism and its influence”, there is virtually no analysis of the role of social democracy. This weakness shows in several ways. In the treatment of the Chilean coup, for instance, the defeat is attributed simply to “the popular front demagogy of the Stalinists”. It is correct to denounce the Stalinist betrayals of the Chilean CP, but it is crucial as well to expose Allende and his social-democratic Socialist Party, which within the spectrum of the popular front generally stood to the left of the Communist Party. It was the prostration of the two mass reformist parties before the class enemy, expressed through the vehicle of the popular-front Unidad Popular government, which paved the way for the bloody coup.

Your document also discusses Pablo’s “attempt to liquidate the cadres of the FI into the Stalinist parties”. In fact, however, though the liquidationist theories of “entrism sui generis” were developed largely in relation to Pablo’s capitulationist analysis of Stalinism, the entries were often carried out as well into social-democratic parties (in Canada, Belgium, Chile, Australia) and radical nationalist parties (Indonesia, India and the classic example — Algeria, where Pablo personally played a direct role with the Algerian FLK in the destruction of nascent centres of independent proletarian power).  Presently the continuation of this method is shown in the USec majority’s tailing of the Vietnamese Stalinists, and guerrillaist groups like the Chilean MIR, nationalist formations like the Angolan MPLA, and left social democrats (the Labour “lefts” in Britain, the PSU in France). Particularly in Britain, which lacks a mass Stalinist party and where it is the social-democratic Labour Party and the pervasive traditions of parliamentary cretinism associated with it which stand as strategic obstacles to proletarian revolution, the omission of social democracy is glaring. Taken together with your slogan of “Make the Lefts Fight” and calls such as that “The Labour Party must be forced to return to its Manifesto” (leaflet distributed at the Conference on Women and the Cuts, 28 February 1976) this suggests an inability to pose a clear programmatic alternative to the Labour Party. What is indicated is a general softness towards social democracy, in particular in Britain an unwillingness to break from and confront the influence and strength of the Labour Party reformists.

A second aspect of your discussion of Stalinism is unclear to us; that is the question of political revolution in the deformed workers states.  You write of the “first forms of the political revolution” appearing in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and elsewhere of the political revolution in Berlin, Budapest, Prague and China.  We believe that it is essential to examine carefully any oppositional movements within the deformed workers states. Frequently ostensible Trotskyists have embraced any oppositional movement or individual.  A graphic example of this was the uncritical treatment of Solzhenitsyn in the Healyite press when he was first exiled; though he had not yet made his most overt anti -Soviet and anti-communist statements, it was already quite clear that he was the purveyor of the most reactionary ideas and an “anti-Stalinist” from a rightist direction.  The proletarian uprisings in Berlin and Budapest were certainly struggles that Trotskyists would seek to join and lead towards political revolution.  In the case of Czechoslovakia, we recognised that the “liberal” Dubcek wing of the Stalinist bureaucracy was in a number of respects to the right of the pro-Soviet elements, and more oriented to concessions to Western capitalism.  While condemning the Soviet invasion, we noted that the relaxation of political controls by Dubcek was a concession in order to “liberalise” the economy by increasing the product extracted from the Czech workers.  And in China, we analysed the Cultural Revolution as essentially an intra-bureaucratic struggle. To justify its disgusting tailism of the Mao wing, the Healy/Wohlforth tendency fulsomely applauded Mao’s mobilisation of Chinese youth, conveniently failing to notice that the Liu wing was able at times to mobilise significant sections of the industrial proletariat.  Obviously the tactics that a Trotskyist group would apply in such a situation would be varied and complex, but the essential point is that there was no justification for any form of political support to either side and our fundamental strategy would be to seek to mobilise the workers independently of either wing to oust the Chinese Stalinist bureaucracy as a whole.

The major point with regard to Stalinism in your document concerns the explanation of the emergence of deformed workers states in East Europe and China and the nature of the Cuban revolution.  The failure to understand this question is illustrated in the history of both the SWP and the SLL/WRP. Firstl the SWP opposed Pablo’s liquidationism in 1951-1953, later “reunifying” on the basis of its own adoption of the same Pabloite methodology with regard to Cuba. Then Healy attempted, to oppose the SWP’s liquidationism over Cuba, but was unable to come up with any analytical alternative except the absurd position that Cuba is capitalist, while at the same time pursuing a line of the most crass capitulation towards the Vietnamese Stalinists (a question ignored by your document) fully rivalling that of the USec.

Our tendency was first formed in a struggle against the SWP leadership’s turn to Castroism (as well as other questions). The position reached by the Revolutionary Tendency in its anti-Wohlforth/Healy majority and since further developed by the international Spartacist tendency surmounts the methodological difficulties of the “anti-revisionists”, difficulties flowing from premises shared with the Pabloites. In this struggle Wohlforth did make a contribution, as the documents written by him in our Marxist Bulletin Number 8 show. His preliminary Cuba documents constituted a useful literary undertaking, in sharp contrast to later attempts to make himself a reputation as a “theoretician” — most notably his pretentious updating of Mandel’s theory of “structural assimilation” which if it was inadequate when originally set forth becomes in the period of the Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions totally farcical.

As we note in the “Addition to the Preface of MB8”, Wohlforth’s theory of structural assimilation collapses with its inability to incorporate Cuba in its schema;

“Wohlforth’s ‘theory’ boils down to the following: first, absorption of adjacent states into the Russian degenerated workers state; second, social transformation of the newly acquired region; third and finally, its release as a separate deformed workers state — all because of a ‘defensive expansionist’ drive by the Russian Stalinist bureaucracy in response to the urgent threat from capitalist imperialism. Wohlforth explained North Vietnam’s becoming a deformed workers state by his own version of the ‘domino theory’; first China was absorbed by Russia and regurgitated, then North Vietnam likewise by China.

“But looking at his map Wohlforth noticed that Cuba is rather distant from Russia and an island to boot. Thus was Wohlforth left holding the position which the Workers League more or less shamefacedly advances today — that the Cuban state led by Fidel Castro is capitalist.”

While the WSL appears to recognise some of the limitations of Wohlforth’s document and to be particularly concerned with finding an explanation of the events in Cuba, hitherto you seem to have approached this as a matter of developing Wohlforth’s “theory. At a superficial level this theory may appear to fit the East European states, but it does not explain the victories by peasant guerrilla armies in China, Vietnam and Yugoslavia led by native Stalinists acting at crucial junctures against the orders of Stalin and the Soviet bureaucracy. The suggestion in your document that Wohlforth underestimates the extra-territorial power of the great powers seems to be an attempt to explain Cuba by reference to some sort of indirect influence or latent threat emanating from the USSR allowing the native Stalinists to carry out “structural assimilation”. But neither Mandel’s original theory nor this simplification can explain how and why deformed workers states were created, in particular the internal mechanisms of their creation.

We do not date the existence of deformed workers states in China and East Europe from the time of the actual expropriations per se. In East Europe the Red Army was the effective state power despite the existence of the trappings of bourgeois democracy and even monarchy. That army, the state power of the degenerated workers state, had ultimately either to defend proletarian property forms or (as it did in Austria and in Northern Iran) withdraw leaving capitalism intact. In China, the capitalist state power was overthrown in 1949, and though the Chinese Stalinists tried to have “New Democracy” they were compelled to complete the expropriation of the capitalists or face destruction at the hands of resurgent capitalism. The question of what property forms the victorious Castroist guerrillas in Cuba would defend was not resolved until late I960 with the expropriation of the major industries, and only after an internal struggle in the guerrilla force, under the pressure of the intransigent hostility of US imperialism to the new regime. The essential difference between our approach and that shared by the Pabloites and the SLL/WRP is that we recognise that what was created was a deformed workers state, in which there were never any genuine organs of proletarian democracy and in which a bureaucratic caste (in the case of Cuba initially enjoying immense popular support for its ouster of the hated Batista dictatorship) held political power. Thus from their inception these states were controlled by a bureaucratic caste which stands in the way of the advance to socialism, and must inevitably betray the international proletarian revolution. Within them, the task of Trotskyists is the same as for those in the Soviet Union; to prepare and lead the political revolution, to sweep away the bureaucracy and institute workers democracy based on Soviets.

The consideration that led us to characterise Healy as an “inverted Pabloite” is this: the Pabloites see the social transformation and draw the conclusion that there is no longer any need for the working class to be mobilised behind a revolutionary programme — either non-proletarian forces or non-revolutionary leaderships compelled by the objective “dynamic” can make proletarian revolution. On the other hand Healy and the like see the absence of a vanguard party and conscious mobilisation of the working class and refuse to acknowledge that there could have been a social revolution (not surprisingly, to our knowledge, the Healy tendency has never tried to explain how China became a deformed workers state). What “both conceptions share is the refusal to grasp the qualitative distinction — marked by the call for political revolution — between a workers state and a deformed workers state. Instead they see a kind of “sliding scale” of workers states ranging from very bad (Stalin’s Russia) through to those with a few “bureaucratic deformations” (at times China, Cuba and Vietnam).

History does not give any prizes for “definite attempts”. The inability to resolve this question, as the comrades of the WSL recognise, has had disastrous results. Inability to achieve Marxist clarity would pose for the WSL a path following that already taken by Healy. A useful illustration of the problem is your treatment (in Socialist Press number 19, 15 October, 1975) of the WRP’s series on Vietnam, You correctly denounce. the WRP’s capitulation to Stalinism, “but you cannot go beyond that.  A contrast with this is the article in Australasian Spartacist, number 24, (October 1975) dealing with the same Healyite series:

“John’s basic argument is simple — merely the ‘inverted Pabloism’ of Cuba turned right side up!  The social revolution in Indochina, occurred under the undoubted hegemony of the Stalinist Vietnamese Workers Party (VWP). Like the Pabloists on both Cuba and Vietnam, Healyism makes absolute the premise that a capitalist state can only be smashed by a revolutionary leadership, in order to draw from that Aristotelean premise the opportunist ‘only possible’ conclusion — the Vietnamese Stalinists cannot be Stalinists, they must be a revolutionary leadership!  But analysing and changing the real world requires the science of dialectical materialism, not a worship of the accomplished fact and the application of logical syllogisms.  In Indochina, as in Cuba, China, Yugoslavia, etc. the military victories of the guerrilla forces occurred in exceptional circumstances of the disintegration of the national bourgeoisie and its state apparatus and decisive limitations on the ability of imperialism to intervene at crucial moments.  But the crucial characteristic of all these revolutions was the absence of any intervention by the working class acting consciously in its own interests.  Such an intervention would have polarised the Stalinist and petty-bourgeois nationalist forces, driving their misleaders into the camp of the ruling class.  In Vietnam it was the political disintegration of the national bourgeoisie, the hostility of imperialism, the pressure from their peasant base and the need to consolidate their own rule that forced the Stalinists to collectivise the economy and join the “socialist” camp.  It was the absence of a conscious working class led by a Trotskyist party that allowed them the necessary independence to do so and that ensured that the resulting workers state would be burdened by a parasitic bureaucracy from birth.”

(“IC grovels before Vietnamese Stalinists — Healy’s Pabloism exposed”, Australasian Spartacist, number 24, October 1975)

These issues bear heavily on the general historical evaluation of Healy, the SLL/WRP and the International Committee.  In 1971, for example, we wrote:

“The Healy grouping, whose revolutionary competence was seriously called into question from the beginning by Healy’s own tarnished political history, represented politically a reflexive reaction against Pabloism which never broke from its essential theoretical method.  The Healy position accepts the revisionist analysis of the implications of the Cuban Revolution, concluding that the only way to avoid its abjectly liquidationist conclusions is to deny that any anti-capitalist social transformation took place in Cuba (a political absurdity which the USec constantly invokes to discredit all its opponents on its left). “Healy’s analysis of Stalinism follows the method which is the very crux of Pabloism: the choosing of one or another fundamentally defective nationalist or Stalinist current to ‘critically’support’ on the grounds of the implicit rejection as irrelevant of principled Trotskyist politics posing an independent proletarian line.  Thus the Healyites supported the Mao wing of the Chinese bureaucracy in the ‘Cultural Revolution’ intra-bureaucratic fight and purge, enthused ever the petty-bourgeois rationalists of the ‘Arab Revolution’ and abstained for years from the unpopular task of denouncing Ho Chi Minh and the NLF for their repeated Stalinist sellouts.” (“World Trotskyism Rearms,” Spartacist, April-May 1971)

From your document it is not clear how you view the history of the lnterniational Committee.  On one hand you have correctly noted Healy’s inability to deal with the Pabloite analysis of Stalinism, the shortcomings of the fight led by Cannon against Pablo, the absence of democratic centralism in the International Committee.  At the same time your analysis in other places appears to suggest that the SLL/WRP only degenerated around 1973. You yourselves remark on the way in which Healy has attempted to obscure the real history of his activity, and clearly any understanding of the IC’s history must involve a considerable and careful examination of documents that hitherto (and we would argue quite deliberately) were not made available to members of the IC, We view Healy’s degeneration as expressed in a series of programmatic positions that the IC developed in 1967 and subsequently.  Prior to this, despite a series of organisational atrocities perpetrated against us by Healy and important political differences (e.g. Cuba) there existed sufficient political agreement for the Healyite and Spartacist tendencies to have belonged to a common international tendency, had Healy’s cynical sectarianism not destroyed the chance of principled collaboration.

For our part, there were in the early 1960’s during the period of collaboration and discussion with the SLL (and still remain) areas of “Healy’s own tarnished political history” about which we lack detailed information (for example his conduct inside the Labour Party in the early 1950’s). Nevertheless in a number of respects your account of the history appears to fall within the framework of Healy’s interpretation of events. In particular this relates to the struggle of the Revolutionary Tendency within the SWP, and the dispute of its majority with Healy/Wohlforth.  This is apparent in your discussion of the Cuba question.  Your document claims that the SLL did not see their position as final, and you rebuke the IC for failure to discuss the issue.  Our experience, however, indicates that the failure to discuss the question goes far beyond simply underestimating its significance.  The IC has systematically avoided discussing the issue, but when forced to, at least in Australia and the USA, has strongly defended the line that Cuba is capitalist.  After Healy and Wohlforth contrived to split the Revolutionary Tendency in late 1962, Wohlforth replied to our proposal for reunification of the two groups, centring his objections on the differing analyses of the Cuban revolution, and strongly defending the position that Cuba remained capitalist.  This is hardly the posture of one who believes that the question was not resolved and ought to be one for discussion. (See Marxist Bulletin 8, “Cuba and Marxist Theory”)

We have extensively documented the history of the Revolutionary Tendency within the SWP, as well as the split in it and our subsequent relations with Wohlforth/Healy.  The WSL comrades should carefully study these disputes, the documents of which (like, we understand, the documents of your struggle in the WRP) were never made available to the IC membership in Britain, USA or elsewhere by the Healy leadership. In the second part of your document you refer to the period “After the pro-International Committee tendency in the SWP, headed by Wohlforth and Robertson, had been expelled, and was acting independently” . In fact the RT had previously been split in 1962 as a result of the bureaucratic manoeuvres of Healy and Wohlforth, and a Stalinist-type ultimatum by Healy himself. The majority of the RT was expelled, before the Wohlforth/Phillips group, purely on the basis of having opinions contrary to the SWP leadership. One pretense for the expulsions was extracts from internal RT documents, which Wohlforth had selectively leaked to the SWP leadership, purportedly showing that the RT majority had a split perspective. This early work in support of the no longer revolutionary SWP leadership against its Trotskyist opposition was just one of the many services Wohlforth provided. The SWP leadership has been able to use the Workers League’s opportunist flip-flops and capitulations as an example to harden their membership against left criticism, for example by pointing to Wohlforth/Healy’s gross insensitivity to women’s and black oppression in order to justify support to feminism and black nationalism. His well publicised return to the fold of the SWP, now a brazenly reformist organisation upholding “free speech for fascists”, demanding the US imperialist army be sent to Boston and defending the reactionary mobilisation headed by the Socialist Party in Portugal last year is only the latest example.

The details of the Healy/Wohlforth manoeuvres and gyrations at the time can be found in the documents contained in our Marxist Bulletin series. Two other examples will suffice here. First you refer to the IC’s struggle against the betrayal of the LSSP and Wohlforth’s insistence on a discussion of the question. For years the Healyites have used the LSSP’s betrayal to expose the USec which covered for the LSSP leadership right up to the last moment. However, Healy himself is tarred with the same brush. In August I960 James Robertson wrote to the SWP Political Committee criticising the failure to publicly condemn the LSSP over its entry into a Popular Front electoral pact. At that time Healy was urging “caution” and was against publishing any criticism (See Workers Vanguard number 3, December 1971). In the same issue of Workers Vanguard you can find evidence of Healy’s hypocrisy in another matter, the dispute with the OCI over the Lora FOR.

Your document expresses an inability to understand why Spartacist was at the 1966 conference. Now while Healy’s exact intentions may be obscure, our attitude has been publicly stated both at the time and since. The spokesman for the Spartacist delegation at the conference stated

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

“We are present at this Conference on the basis of our fundamenial agreement with the lnternational Resolution of the IC; moreover the report of Comrade Slaughter was for us solidly communist, unified throughout by revolutionary determination.”

(Spartacist Statement to International Conference, Spartacist,  June-July 1966)

We believed (arnd still do) that at that time on the basis of the published dcouments and  of discussions with Healy himself (in Montreal prior to the conference) there was a principled basis for our presence at the conference. After our unjustified and bureaucratic expulsion (in which the WSL comrades may see many parallels to their own expulsion from the WRP), we stated:

“The current wrecking campaign being pushed in the columns of the ACFI Bulletin and elsewhere represents a 180 degree turn away from the principled fusion line advanced by Healy at the October 1965 Montreal conference. Then Healy insisted, with our full concurrence, that the three-year-long unjustified (and unprincipled) division between Spartacist and ACFI must be brought promptly to an end; ACFI-Spartacist fusion, he then insisted, was an absolute pre-condition to building the Trotskyist movement in the U.S. “Now, in the wake of the April London I.C. Conference (reported in this issue) Healy, without offering any serious political pretext for his actions has diverted the energies of the I.C. away from building an international to conducting a campaign of petty internecine warfare against those with whon, up to April, he proposed to unify. By his own criteria of last October, Healy has set out to wreck the revolutionary movement in the United States…..

“We firmly believe that real politics shapes the direction of organisations far more decisively than organisational and personal issues. At the same time the latter interact with and are therefore a part of real politics. It is from that that we draw the lessons of the April Conference and define our tasks flowing from it.

“We draw appropriate political conclusions from the organisational wrecking practices of Healy and Wohlforth. However, we do not close the door to them, much less to all those forces within the I.C. who are their victims. Yet, from Healy and Wohlforth, in particular, we will need evidence of an inner-revolution before collaboration would be possible. So long as they remain on their present bankrupt course, we are locked in an implacable struggle to cleanse the revolutionary movement of their poisonous influence.” (“Reunification Smashed”, Spartacist number 6, June-July 1966)

Several years later we wrote:

“We consider that organizational forms should correspond to political realities. We strongly opposed the break by the SLL, (“IC”) with us in 1962 because of its apparently mainly organizational character. Only after the very sharp rupture at the 1966 London Conference, and especially in the several years following when the SLL piled up a series of major political differences with us; were we able to appreciate that the SLL’s desire in 1962 to make a rapprochement to the SWP when (to which we were; willing to acquiesce but not agree with) was an expression  of a fundamental political difference.” (“Letter to the OCRIFI and the OCI” Spartacist number 2, Winter 1973-74)

Your analysis of the split in the WRP seems to be based on an overly simplified explanation of the WRP’ s difficulties and the present economic conjuncture, and of the relation between the correct programme and links to the working class. Thus your document contains passages like the following:

“It is not by chance that the nature and method of the Transitional Programme has been thrown into question within the International Committee. The forces driving or the discussion and factional struggle are material ones. They are those of the international working class and other oppressed classes on the offensive in Europe, in the Middle East, in Indochina, in the United States itself — in fact in every continent of the globe.”

“It is the world-wide offensive of the workers which forms the material basis of the discussion and splits.”

“The offensive of the working class is the essential and specific element for understanding the split in the WRP.”

“This struggle was only possible because the WRP opposition was based on experienced roots, narrow but none the less real and tempered, within the organised working class. And the WSL in breaking from the WRP, expresses the practical and theoretical offensive of the international working class.”

If the comrades are simply suggesting that the current economic crisis and destabilisation of the global imperialist order offers greater opportunities for revolutionary organisations to grow and affect events on an historic scale, and that the attempt to do real work in the class revealed the SLL/WRP’s inability to actually carry the revolutionary programme in struggle within the mass organisations of the working class, then we would not want to object. The evocation of the final “Crisis” of capitalism in which the working class is inexorably surging forward has been used by the IC to justify the most gross opportunism, even explicitly repudiating the necessity of the Transitional Programme on the grounds that today the simplest demand of the working class takes on an automatic revolutionary content. In fact, without the successful intervention of the Leninist vanguard there will be no “final” crisis of capitalism unless it is a barbaric nuclear holocaust. We would note as well that at least in Britain and the USA, the disarray of both the IC and other ostensibly revolutionary organisations can be more readily related to the present quiescence of the working class, and a concomitant “crisis of expectations” in many of these organisations. (For a fuller critique of Healy’s analysis of the “Crisis” see “Healy/Wohlforth and the Crisis”, Workers Vanguard number 26, 3 August 1973)

The other aspect of oversimplification is the way in which you link your opposition to your “experienced roots” in the working class, and see the WSL as expressing the “practical and theoretical offensive of the international working class”. Certainly an organisation which does not develop roots in the working class will inevitably degenerate, but to argue that an organisation can be protected from revisionism simply because it has roots in the working class is wrong. Thus at the 1966 IC Conference we stated our disagreement “with Voix Ouvriere’s view that Pabloism can be explained simply by reference to the petty-bourgeois composition of the F.I., any more than one could explain the specific nature of a disease by reference solely to the weakened body in which particular microbes had settled.” (”Spartacist Statement to International Conference”) As Trotsky noted in In Defence of Marxism the trade unions are the culture medium for every sort of opportunist deviation, and there are always enormous pressures on the trade-union members of a Bolshevik organisation. In developing our work within the organised working class we have struggled against the workerist conception that sees

‘”communist consciousness as a function of the social composition of the party. Workers are viewed as the proletarian conscience of the party. In reality the communist vanguard creates itself by breaking its recruits from the dominant social and political attitudes of whatever section of society they are part of, including the proletariat…. The communist vanguard maintains itself through constant struggle against the enormous social and ideological pressures that bourgeois society bears down on it in all areas of party work, particularly against the backward prejudices in the working class and particularly in periods of rising class militancy when the party is seeking to expand its influence in the unions„”(“Trade Union Memorandum”, adopted by the Third SL(US) National Conference, 25 November 1972, Marxist Bulletin number 9. part iii)

In the implementation of our perspective for work in the trade unions (in which we have had real, if still modest successes)

“The key organizational form for intervention in the unions is the caucus, the nucleus of an alternative, revolutionary union leadership, uniting members of the vanguard with those union activists who agree with that section of the party program for the labor movement. We strive to build our caucus in as political a way as possible. The growth of our caucus will not be primarily through the recruitment of politically backward militants drawn to us because of our leadership in local struggles. Rather, the caucus will grow through political struggle with other left and militant union formations leading to a process of splits and fusions. Thus we project our caucuses growing in a manner similar to, although not identical with, the party. However, the establishment of our cadre as recognized militants with real constituencies is the essential building block and core of our caucus. Without such a base of reputable militants, our caucus actions would be either empty rhetoric or tail-ending forces much stronger than ourselves. The caucus program is a program to lead mass struggles. In general, caucus recruits should be of a significantly higher political level than that defined simply by the caucus program.” (ibid)

In the context of these serious concerns and disagreements, we are in general agreement with the main thrust of the seven points which you lay out as forming the “basis for initial discussions between ourselves and other tendencies, especially those expelled from the IC”. As well we would generally agree with the additional four points made in the concluding section of the document. We would like however to clarify our view of the process through which the Fourth International can again exist. This is particularly necessary in the light of references in your document to the “world Trotskyist movement”, your statement that the “contlnuity of this struggle runs through the Trotskyist movement”, and your call for the “reconstruction” and “rebuilding” of the Fourth International. We are not clear exactly what you mean by these terms. Our slogan “For the Rebirth of the Fourth International” implies that a very fundamental process must be gone through, that it is not possible to fit together the existing rotted bits and pieces, perhaps with a little chipping here and there in order to put the edifice together again. [See “Letter to the OCRFI and the OCI” ). Your document correctly notes the practical meaning of the OCl’s call to “reconstruct” with regard to its dealings with the SWP.

In any discussion on the struggle for a reforged Fourth International, central attention must be focussed on the programmatic stance that revolutionists ought to adopt with respect to significant events in the recent international class struggle. Trotsky, in his struggle to build the International Left Opposition and later the Fourth International, sought to regroup revolutionists through political- struggle and clarification centred around the evaluation of certain events. Thus at various points the attitude that would-be revolutionaries adopted to the 1925-29 Chinese revolution, the struggle against fascism in Germany and the Spanish civil war were used as test cases for sorting out and regrouping the authentic Leninist cadre. Similarly today, we would seek such axes for discussion in issues such as Chile, the national question in the Middle East, the Vietnamese revolution, the tasks of revolutionists in Portugal, and such burning issues of the class struggle as arise in particular-countries.

In our opinion your evaluation of the roots of revisionism and of your own history as a tendency emerging from the Healy group must proceed to a consideration, barely undertaken in “Fourth International — Problems and Tasks”, of the main programmatic disputes involved in the fragmentation of the IC. In particular, we note that the present document undertakes no real assessment of some of the main questions which were disputed by the IC’s main components, the SLL and the OCI — for instance the role of the Bolivian POR and the question of the 1967 Near East war. With regard to the latter, it appears that the WSL may share the “Arab Revolution” line of the Healyites and Pabloites. In any case the crucial issues of popular frontism and the national question would be proper subjects for discussion between us.

We are sending copies of the articles and documents referred to in this reply. We look forward to receiving your answer to this letter and your suggestion as to what form further discussion might take.

Fraternally,

David Strachan

for the international Spartacist tendency

Soviet Women: A Stalinist Apology

[First Printed in Women & Revolution #10, Winter, 1975-76]

A careful look at the status of Soviet women sheds much light on the evolution of the Soviet state. The revolutionary Soviet government under Lenin took immediate steps to alleviate the oppression of women. Divorce was made free and easily accessible; discrimination agains, children born out of wedlock was eliminated; free communal daycare centers were established; equal pay for equal work was decreed; abortion was made legal, free and available, on demand; and thousands of schools were opened to women for the first time on the basis of preferential admissions.

One of the fundamental aims of the Bolsheviks was to increasingly supplant and transcend the nuclear family as an economic institution through the socialization of the housework traditionally done on a private basis by women. They understood that the family was a prison for women, condemning them to ignorance through isolation from society and limiting their horizons to endless years of housework drudgery. After the civil war, one of the very first major campaigns waged by the government was for the construction of adequate child care facilities.

After the consolidation of power by a bureaucratic caste headed by Stalin, women lost a great many of the advances which they had achieved through the Revolution. Stalin’s policies, aimed at extinguishing all traces of genuinely revolutionary sentiment which might pose a threat to the regime, decreed the restoration of a more traditional relationship between the sexes (i.e., women playing a subservient role), particularly within the family, which was then proclaimed to be the basic unit of Soviet society.

Soviet Women, a new book by William M. Mandel, is essentially an apology for these policies. While the existing sexual inequality in the USSR is admitted, it is ascribed to the legacy of tsarism or the inevitable errors of a peasant people. Mandel also subscribes to the official Stalinist line that the goal of communists is not to replace the oppressive nuclear family, as advocated by Marx and Lenin, but only to mitigate its worst abuses.

It is undeniable that Soviet women enjoy a great many opportunities and advantages unknown to women in other parts of the world. The USSR provides free child care facilities for 10,000,000, pre-school children and free medical care. Women are guaranteed 112 days pre- and post-natal maternity leave at.full pay and a year in which to return to their jobs without loss of seniority. Men and women are allowed sick leave to care for sick children. Women’s wages in the Soviet Union average 87 percent of men’s (as qpposed to 59 percent in the United States), and rent is set at five percent of a worker’s income. Nor are these advances limited to urban areas; among peasant women, where illiteracy was virtually universal until well after the Revolution, there are more college and high school educated women than men!

Moreover, Mandel demonstrates conclusively that Soviet women have been drawn out of the home and into productive work. They constitute 51 percent of the workforce, and, unlike their American counterparts, who are barred from a great many skilled and semi-skilled trades, Soviet women drive trains, fly planes; run massive hydroelectric power plants, plan the development of natural resources, unload ships, do theoretical work in mathematics and science and generally participate in every branch of industry and government. (“My pride in being an American was deeply hurt,” reports Mandel, “when I found that the share of U.S. women in the leading professions is just about the lowest in the entire world.”)

Those like the Maoists and “third-camp socialists”, who argue that the Soviet Union is a “social imperialist” or capitalist state would do well to reflect on these figures, for, while they certainly do not demonstrate full equality in the workforce, they do indicate advances which could only have been achieved in a society which has eliminated private, ownership of the means of production and instituted a planned economy. Full employment, the plowing back of social profits into the massive construction of day care and school facilities and the actual enforcement of equal pay for equal work cannot be achieved in a capitalist economy. Under capitalism surplus value is reinvested only where it returns a profit; a reserve army of the unemployed (historically composed largely of women) is required to drive down wages, and the cost of labor is minimized by shifting the entire burden of child rearing onto the worker’s family, specifically onto the mother. .

Latter-day Stalin devotees maintain that capitalism was restored in the Soviet Union after 1956 and that the gains of Soviet women pre-date this period. But it should be noted that there is a distinct upward curve in educational and occupational equality for Soviet women under 30 and that the greatest advances by women in the countryside haye been made in the past 10 years. (Mandel provides valuable, comparative statistics on Chinese development which debunk the Maoist myth that China has outstripped the Soviet Union in alleviating the oppression of women. While Chinese women are in a far better position than the women of capitalist countries of the region, such as India, China; lacking full employment, cannot begin to integrate women into the workforce on a level comparable to that of the USSR. Furthermore, maternity leaves are only half as long as in the Soviet Union when they are available at all, and abortions are not easily accessible.)

Stalin’s Legacy

Mandel admits to the relative absence of Soviet women in high decision making positions in government, management and the Communist Party. His explanation for this is that the progress of Soviet women has been obstructed.by the cultural heritage of tsarism. ln a shorter essay, “Soviet Women in the Work Force,” which contains the fundamental theses set forth in Soviet Women, he put it most succinctly; “…women have advanced in the Soviet labor force and professions in approximately direct proportion to the elimination of handicaps inherited by the Soviet regime and …a principal basis for residual differences in the status of men and women is the time lag in this regard.”

While Marxists recognize that a fledgling workers state is built on foundations heavily marked by the traditions of the bourgeois society from which it has just emerged, they also recognize that human consciousness can intervene to lessen the effect of those traditions. Mandel’s objectivist formulation serves to obscure the fact that sexual inequalities in the Soviet Union are as much a legacy of Stalin as of Nicholas. It was Stalin’s policies which for 20 years decreed that woman’s primary role was that of childbearer.

Mandel is too knowledgeable to simply omit all reference to Stalinist policy, and his personal repugnance for some of the worst atrocities of the regime leads him to voice occasional criticisms of it. Nonetheless, an ex-Stalinist himself, he has never broken from Stalinism’s fundamental premises. He believes that the bureaucracy’s policies were, in fact, justified:

“Because of the frank hostility of every other government to the USSR in the 1930’s, and Hitler’s publicly announced intention long before the war, to seize great parts of the Soviet Union and make it a colony, the Soviet Union became like a city under siege. Every individual’s life was subject to control in what was believed to be the interests of the survival of the whole.”

 Mandel’s real political sympathies come through most clearly in an earlier passage where he observes:

 “…there is a peculiar myth, political rather than scholarly in origin, that holds that Lenin’s brief lifetime after 1917 was a period of progress, followed by reactlon under Stalin. The fact is that Lenin died in 1924; and Trotsky, who had been second in prominence, was thereafter in a powerless minority. It was the first decade of Stalin’s Ieadership (1924-34) that witnessed both the flourishing of films and literature, and the kinds of legislation and experiments in living that many young Western radicals and cultural figures look upon with nostalgia.”

While Communist Party leader Gus Hall or the Maoists of the October League may look upon this period with nostalgia, 1929-36 was the period of the most brutal repression. Virtually every sector of Soviet society was devastated by purges in which some 500,000 people were killed (including virtually the entire original leadership of the Bolshevik party) and 5,000,000 were put into forced labor camps. Most of those who had participated in the brief flowering of Soviet art were put to death, Forced collectivization was so brutal and destructive that its effects are still felt in Soviet agriculture, contributing to the continually low levels of production. Mandel’s book, which is so chockfull of statistics, conveniently omits mention of any of these atrocities!

This period of Stalinist reaction marked a decisive step backward for women. As the revolutionary tide ebbed in Europe, the Soviet Union was left isolated and poverty stricken. This was fertile ground for the growth of a bureaucracy bolstered by its authority as the defender of Soviet borders and by its control of the scarce commodities available to the Soviet people. Anxlous to protect its privileged position, this bureaucracy set out to destroy all vestiges of Soviet power which could challenge its authority. It appealed for support to the most conservative prejudices of the urban and peasant masses. The family, that purveyor of the traditional ideas of subservience and respect for authority, was one of its central instruments.

An all out offensive was undertaken to reconstitute the family structure based on female subordination. In 1934 the Women’s Section of the party was abolished and all mass women’s organizations were dissolved. Mandel claims that these organizations disappeared because “at that time, women had gained the confidene to stand up for themselves in mixed organizations and to function in them, and had in practice attained essential equality in employment and education, that is, outside the home.” In his haste to justify Stalinist policy, he forgets the resolution passed in 1930 by the Central Committee of the CP which he had quoted earlier, noting ”’extreme indecisiveness by local party bodies regarding the promotion of women to leading posts involving independent authority, and in some cases absolutely open bigotry on the part of certain party organizations and members.”

Hard on the heels of the dissolution of the Women’s Section and mass organizations came the illegalization of abortion and the virtual impossibility of obtaining a divorce, combined with a propaganda offensive which Mandel admits “resulted in a sanctification of ’till death do us part’ that any church would envy.” In 1941 a law was passed relieving men of any responsibility for children born out of wedlock. In 1944, co-education was abolished, ensuring that women would get second best in terms of available schools, teachers and facilities. This decree was similar to the “separate but equal” decisions of the U.S. courts which followed the period of reaction in the South after abandonment of Reconstruction. Mandel’s response to these defeats is: ” … to me, the marvel of that period is that despite the steps backward the mass-scale advance of women was not fundamentally affected, as the subsequent years have shown.”

Nothing could be further from the truth! The inequality existing today can be traced directly to the policies of this period. Twenty years of illegalized abortion, the sanctification of marriage and motherhood and the abolition of co-education could not but reinforce the traditional attitude that women are indeed inferior. More important, while women were never driven from the workforce, the emphasis on child rearing and the limitations placed on women’s education robbed them of the skills which would facilitate genuine equality of opportunity. Rather than advancing as old handicaps were overcome, women, were forced to retreat as old prejudices were deliberately rehabilitated.

Soviet Women in the Post-Stalin Period

The question must be posed of why barriers to abortion, divorce and co-education were lowered in 1955. While Mandel never deals with the question directly, his answer can be found in another of his essays, “Soviet Marxism and Social Science”; “The USSR can today claim to be the first major socialist state to have emerged from the stage of internal terror (dictatorship of the proletariat, plus the unneeded massacres in its name).” Essentially he believes that the bureaucracy is self-reforming and that ‘socialism’ has been attained through simple economic growth. (He ignores Lenin’s dictum that even in the lower stage of communism the state will begin to wither away as the masses assume more and more of the simple administrative duties of government.).

The real explanation for the restitution of women’s civil rights in 1955 is bureaucratic self-preservation. By 1955 the Soviet bureaucray was faced with a serious problem. Its economy was still staggering from the impact of the war. Attempts to rebuild the economy by simply abusing Eastern European allies had already led to the German uprising in 1953 to be followed by uprisings in Hungary and Poland in 1956. To head off the rising tide of internal dissent which began to boil with Stalin’s death, the domestic economy had to be rationalized.

Women were the major untapped source of skilled labor power. Ever since the war mobilization they had constituted a near majority of the workforce. The most productive generations of men had been severely decimated during and immediately after the war. To provide women with the skills necessary for them to hold responsible positions in industry, they had to be admitted to institutes with high standards; i.e:, coeducation had to be restored. To encourage them to leave the household and devote the time and energy necessary to acquire these new skills, childbearing had to be de-emphasized. Since Soviet contraceptives at that time were still notoriously poor, abortion was a necessary back up for birth control. The assertion of women’s right to control their bodies led naturally to the belief that it was also their right to contract and dissolve marriages at will, and since a higher divorce rate led to greater mobility in the labor force, divorce became more acceptable. So when faced with the need to rationalize economic production, the bureaucracy was compelled to draw heavily upon women to provide the skilled labor necessary to advance national interests.

But the very limited reforms undertaken in the post-Stalin era were not accompanied by a return to the Marxist position on the necessity of replacing the nuclear family. Mandel readily admits that while over 85 percent of Soviet women are engaged in productive work outside the home, they are still basically bound by the family and, continue to be responsible for housework and childcare. The bureaucacy meanwhile cotinues to gorify motherhood by awarding medals to women bearing large numbers of children.

Current Soviet policy aims explicitly at reforming, not replacing, the family. The emphasis is on developing part-time jobs for women so that they will have time to do housework. Secondarily, there is some effort to prevail upon men to help out in the home and some effort to expand the distribution of consumer products and services.

Prospects for laying the economic basis for the socialization of housework — assuming that the bureaucracy would permit its implementation — are crippled by bureaucratic mismanagement of the economy. Despite the benefits of centralized planning, soviet economic growth has for years been under 7.5 percent annually. This slow growth combined with the devastation of Soviet productive capacity by World War II has meant, for instance, that it was only five years ago that every rural Soviet cottage finally received electricity. Mandel estimates that it will be another 10. years before refrigerators, washing machines and vacuums will be standard items in worker and peasant homes.

Meanwhile; even Soviet sources admit that among the peasantry “conditions of household culture similar to those of the past and the economic need to preserve the personial garden farm are the basis for preservation in the family of elements of the old social inequality of the sexes and the traditional division of everyday kinds of work into male and female.” (Mandel’s emphasis).

In a country where 43 percent of the population is still rural and many workers are only one generation removed from the land, the impact of this should not be underestimated. Mandel himself notes that the level of abortion is very high among peasant women because most of them are still ignorant of modern birth control techniques. The vast social pressure from the old peasant families against any form of birth control contributes directly to this ignorance.

The Soviet bureaucracy continues to be the major obstacle to the emancipation of the Soviet woman, as it is for the emancipation of the Soviet working masses as a whole. Soviet foreign policy, by guaranteeing capitalist rule in the West through a strategy of class collaboration (recently exemplified by the treacherous popular fronts advanced in Chile and Portugal), sabotages the international proletarian revolution and subsequently defers the day when the workers of the advanced countries can provide the products needed by the Soviet Union and more backward countries for the mechanization and socialization of housework.

Politically disfranchised as is the entire Soviet working class; Soviet women are particularly vulnerable to reversals in government policy, which may lead again to the abolition of legal abortion, co-education or easily accessible divorce. While the use of terror in the Soviet Union has become less blatant, it should be remembered that many of the reforms of the Khrushchev era disappeared entirely for several year after the invasion of Czechoslovakia. In fact, the Czech events demonstrate clearly the bureaucracy’s continued willingness to use armed force if necessary to preserve itself.

For Soviet women, the Trotskyist road of political revolution in the degenerated Soviet workers state is the only guarantor of their real liberation. Only through the direct democratic control of government by the working class can women be fully assured of their rights; .particularly control over their own bodies. Through the liberation of the productive forces which would occur with the destruction of the bureaucracy, together with advances in the world revolution aided by a policy of genuine, internationalism, major steps could be taken toward the socialization of housework which would free women once and for all from the grip of the nuclear family. Only when the nuclear family has been replaced will the basis be laid for socialist relations between the sexes, Then:

“In place of the indissoluble marriage based on the servitude of women, we shall see the rise of the free union fortified by the love and the mutual respect of the two members of the Workers State; equal in their rights and In their obligations. In place of the individual and egotistic family there will arise a great universal family of workers… Such will be the relation between men and women in the communist society of tomorrow,”

Alexandra Kollontay, “Communism and the Family”

The Private Life of Islam: A Review

[First printed in Women & Revolution #10, Winter 1975-76]

Young, Ian.
Private Life of Islam: A Young Doctor’s Harrowing Account of a Season in an Algerian Maternity Hospital.
New York: Liveright, 1974.

Algerian masses’ successful war of national liberation against French colonialism was for the early New Left a living symbol of the revolutionary potential of the “Third World.” Along with the overturn of capitalism in Cuba, the self-proclaimed construction of “socialism” in Ben Bella’s Algeria focused the vicarious “anti-imperialist” energies of the radicals of the 1960’s, as the Spanish Civil. War had embodied the “anti-fascist” anti-sentiments of an earlier generation.

Unlike the social revolutions which established deformed workers*states in Cuba and later in Indochi­na, the Algerian war for national independence stopped short of any fundamental transformation of the class nature of Algeria. At a tremendous human cost, the mainly peasant Algerian liberation fighters drove the French from their country but did not destroy capitalism, instead replacing the colonial rule of French capital by the domination of a native bourgeoisie which remains tied to imperialism through the world market.

American New Leftists uncritically solidarized with the struggle to build “socialism” in post-revolutionary Algeria. They viewed the Ben Bella regime as unequivo­clly progressive and considered it axiomatic that the defeat of imperialism would open the road to socia emancipation. Rejecting the Leninist view that only a socialist revolution under the leadership of a proletari­an revolutionary party can accomplish the liberation of all the oppressed, the New Leftists envisaged many “vanguard” layers—the colonial masses, American blacks, women, youth—each of whose struggles would automatically advance the aims of the other oppressed strata.

The reality of the grinding oppression of women in post-revolutionary Algeria explodes this myth. Neither the Ben Bella regime nor the less leftist Boumediene government which succeeded it significantly altered the subserviant position of women in Algerian society. “Socialist” Algeria has shown itself completely incapable of completing even elementary democratic tasks, instead finding itself compelled to buttress the Muslim religion and and the authoritarian family structure as essential props of bourgeois rule.

The Private Life of Islam demonstrates the reactionary role of religion and the family in perpetuat­ing the degraded condition of Algerian women. The book is a young British doctor’s account of his training in an Algerian maternity hospital, a place where women are mutilated and killed as often as helped. The hospital is run “like an obstetrics book turned upside down, every do a don’t, every never an always.” The incompetence of the hospital staff is matched only by its sadism.

The staff has no time for the fear, pain or even hygiene of its patients. Beds, sheets and patients are covered with food, blood, excrement. Those infants who survive delivery are wrapped in rags and left unchanged and unwashed until they leave. No medical histories are charted,.and examinations are cursory or skipped entirely. Curettage is routinely performed without anesthetic, although bottles of it sit unused on  shelves. If a slip of the hand punctures the womb, it is removed—with curses for the extra work.

The foreign doctors excuse their criminal neglect of medical standards and ordinary human decency by reference to the attitude ‘of Algerian men themselves toward the patients. In incident after incident, terrified and suffering women are mocked, insulted., struck and most often simply ignored by male relatives and the hospital staff. Ian Youing sums up one young husband’s attitude toward his wife’s confinement as “a trip to the vet.” Still filled with moralistic ideals, Young guiltily waits for one of the patients to reproach him with a look or a word for his complicity, bul the women submissively accept the pain and brutalization as their lot.

The deprecatory attitude toward women emerges clearly in one bit of dialogue between members of the hospital staff:

“‘It’ll be born dead at this rate.’ Fatma says to the girl: ‘if you don’t push harder next time, it’ll be a little girl.’ And to me, Djamila says: ‘A dead baby, or a little girl—it’s kif­kif, it’s the same thing’.”

In another incident, a young girl who has become pregnant after being raped faces a choice between returning to her village, where she will be killed by her father to avenge the family’s dishonor, or going to prison for the “crime” of bearing an illegitimate child. Occasionally a woman informed of her pregnancy timorously asks for an abortion, but most respond with despairing resignation.

Ian Young is indignant and ashamed. Blaming the foreign doctors, he seeks government aid to institute hospital reforms. He goes to see a bureaucrat described as a real “revolutionary.” He initially flatters and conciliates the English doctor but he reveals his true attitude by boasting of how he put a doctor’s wife who is a nurse, back in “her place” by telling her: “Medicine comes before women, Madame. Show some respect ­for your husband.” Young gradually comes to understand that the hospital is the product of the society which, supports it: “These men were the unhappy executors, working in blood, excrement and death, of the most respected attitudes in Algeria.”

“Muslim Socialism”

“We prefer the woman who gives birth to a pilot, to the woman who becomes a pilot herself.”

–Mouloud Kassim, Member of the Revolutionary Council

Algerian rhetoric concerning women’s liberation and socialism notwithstanding, the government upholds Islam. Some Muslim reformists, citing the Koran’s injunctions against burying female infants in the sand and noting the vagueness of the passages used to justify the enforced seclusion of women and the wearing of the veil, claim that true Islam provides equality between the sexes. But the Koran makes itself abundantly clear on its attitude toward women:

“Men are superior to women on account of the qualities which God hath fitted the one above the other and on account of the outlay they make from their substance for them. Virtuous women are obedient, careful during the husband’s absence, because. God hath of them been careful. But chide those for whose refractoriness ye have cause to fear; remove them into beds apart, and scourge them: but if they are obedient to you, then seek not occasion against them: verily, God is high, Great!”

The “equality” of Islam is the equality of apartheid. That is how Algerian women lived before and during the French occupation and that is how they continue to live today—covered up, locked up, uneducated and sold in marriage to strangers, often as children. Seclusion may be vague in the letter of Koranic law, but, it is wholly in keeping with its spirit. The religious teachings of Islam, like the teachings of Judaism and Christianity, depict women as excessively sensual and morally inferior, needing the guidance of men to protect them from their own weaknesses.

The French made use of the Islamic degradation of women to justify denying democratic rights, particularly suffrage, to Muslims. The Algerian reacted with increased Muslim orthodoxy, praising their women as the perpetuators of their true culture against French influence. Due to their seclusion, Algerian women were indeed less affected by French influence than were Algerian men, although the French made a special effort to reach them. During the struggle for national liberation, the French initiated public pro-French unveilings of Muslim women and organized a Feminine Solidarity Movement which offe­red them medical care, legal aid, gifts and education, in an attempt to draw them out of their isolation and into the service of French imperialism.

The FLN (National Liberation Front) responded with the slogan “For a free Algeria, not a free French woman!” Rather than raising a genuinely socialist program for women, thus releasing them from the bondage of Islam as well as from French imperialism, the Algerian nationalists took the veil as their symbol! They placed the oppression of women on the pedestal of revolution.

The popular film “Battle of Algiers” dramatizes the heroic role of women in the struggle, but it was expediency not ideology which integrated the FLN, and this equality of the barricades was short-lived.,

On the eve of independence the Algerian masses had before them the possibility of sweeping away their own feudal elite along with French domination and of advancing their struggle past the attainment of bourgeois democracy and on to the construction of a socialist society. The petty-bourgeois leadership of the FLN, however, did everything in its power to avert such an outcome and ensure the future of Algerian capitalism  At Evian the FLN pledged economic cooperation with French imperialism  in exchange for technical and financial aid, a pledge which made the completion of even democratic tasks impossible. Respect for French landholdings meant that only deserted land could be distributed. The promised agrarian revolution necessary to feed the cities’. war-swollen population was put off year after year while French industrialists continued to suck oil out of the Sahara.

For women the mass unemployment and food shortage which followed the war meant starvation and mass prostitution. Even child prostitution was common.

The constitution proclaimed Islam the national religion and the family the basic unit of Algerian society. Men, since they were automatically considered the heads of households, were given preference in employment. Polygamy was only moderately restricted. Forced marriage was forbidden by law, but for most women, with no possibility of employment, the only practical alternative to marriage was suicide.

The Algerian revolution did achieve national liberation from the yoke of French imperialism, but it did not free the urban and peasant masses from poverty and exploitation, nor from the savage social oppression which is rooted in the fabric of capitalist class rule. In the era of imperialist decay, there is no room for independent capitalist development of the underdeveloped countries; the weak “national bourgeoisie” cannot break from even the most reactionary and feudalist elements of its class and is consequently propelled into the arms of foreign imperialism. Far from building “socialism,” countries such as Algeria cannot even address the democratic tasks formerly associated with bourgeois revolutions. It remains for the revolutionary proletarian party, which must also be a “tribune of the people,” to lift the veil of women’s oppression in Algeria.

Maoism and the Family

[First printed in Women & Revolution #7, Autumn 1974]

Although the “socialist”-feminists, who constitute most of what remains of the women’s liberation movement today, cannot bring themselves to support the elementary Leninist concept of a vanguard party to lead an international proletarian revolution, they have found less difficulty in flaunting their “socialism” by supporting Maoism — generally unserious or “marshmallow Maoism. But recently some of the “harder” Maoist groupings are finding it easier to make organizational gains among feminists as well. Most successful of all is the right-Maoist October League (OL), which has shown the greatest capacity for opportunist adaptation, a capacity which has assisted it in outstripping the equally right wing but somewhat less flexible Revolutionary Union (RU) in this arena.

What is the appeal of Maoism for feminists? Above all, it reflects the continuation of a current in the New Left from which the radical women’s liberation movement emerged, a current of liberalism and idealism which sought to effect social change not through class struggle but through moral persuasion. Thus, the RYM faction of SDS, from which both the OL and the’ RU are descended, appealed to whites to give up their “white skin privilege” and to men to give up male supremacy. Correct consciousness, according to this view, was sufficient to end the historic sexual and racial divisions fostered by capitalism within the working class.

New Left Maoism’ initially featured a “Third Worldist” outlook, which downplayed the role of the working class and looked instead to various oppressed groups such as the peasantry of underdeveloped countries as the key to revolutionary leadership. While Maoism continues to reject the centrality of the working class to this day, workerism — the glorification of existing working-class consciousness — is becoming increasingly popular, and the more farsighted of the Maoist organizations have been quick to discern this trend and adapt to it. Thus the “socialist”- feminists, who are only now turning to workerism in large numbers, can look for Ieadership to the OL and the RU which made this turn earlier.

Reinforcing the new popularity of Maoism among feminists is also the appeal of China itself, where women who were surely among the most oppressed on earth have been afforded many new opportunities as a result of scial revolution.

But despite this attempt at peaceful coexistence between Maoists and feminists, there are serious unresolved differences between them. That these differences have often remained suppressed is due largely to the dishonest approach of the Maoists, who take pains to conceal their politics. The most outstanding of these differences centers on the question of the family, a question on which Maoists hold a position which is at odds both with feminism and with socialism.

Maoists Defend the Family

While most feminists recognize that the family, which isolates women from society and confines them to a lifetime of what Lenin described as “the most stultifying, the most difficult work which women could do… utterly inconsequential, containing no .elements that can aid in women’s development” is the principal institution for the oppression of women, Maoists of all tendencies defend the family as “the fighting unit for socialism .. ” This reactionary position, which originated with Stalin, has nothing whatsoever in common with Marxism-Leninism, which seeks to free women from the endless drudgery and isolation imposed upon them by the family structure by creating alternative institutions which would perform collectively the work now performed privately by women in the family.

Despite their supposedly sharp differences on the woman question, both the OL and the RU engage the glorification of the bourgeois family unit. The OL asserts that “for the working class and other progressive forces in society today, children are not a ‘burden’… ” The RU concurs and adds that in spite of all its admittedly negative features, the nuclear family, should not be criticized because:

“ … for many working people, the family provides one of life’s few bright spots. Despite the many difficulties of raising children under capitalism, including financial hardships and real fears for their health and safety, the proletariat loves its children and does all it can to enable them to ‘have a better life than I did.’”

Revolution, March 1974

These sentimental portraits are clearly at variance with the reality of most family relationships in capitalist society where, as the Russian Bolshevik Party correctly pointed out, “it is the street which brings up the children of the proletariat.” Furthermore, the focus on, “‘my” children and “my” children’s future which the RU applauds, denotes not class consciousness but a proprietary relationship which is a barrier to class consciousness. It is precisely this exclusive concern with protecting the interests of one’s own immediate family which persuades workers to avoid the risks of class struggle and which makes housewives especially vulnerable to reactionary ideologies.

Marx and Engels had harsh words for those who peddled “bourgeois claptrap about the family, and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child”, and the ‘Soviet Republic under Lenin struggled to expand the very definition of the word “family” to embrace the whole of society so that one would speak ,no longer of “my” children” or “your” children, but only “our” children — all the children of the workers state. As Bolshevik Commisar Alexandra Kollontai wrote:

“The narrow and exclusive affection of the mother for her own children must expand until it embraces all the children of the great proletarian family. In place of the indissoluble marriage based on the servitude of women, we shall see the rise of the free union, fortified by the love and the mutual respect of the two members of the Workers’ State, equal in their rights and in their obligations. In place of the individual and egotistic family, there will arise a great universal family of workers, in which all the workers, men and women, will be above all workers, comrades. Such will be the relation between men and women in the communist society of tomorrow.”

Alexandra Kollontai, “Communism and the Family”

The Communist Manifesto makes it clear that the family must be replaced as the economic and legal unit of society if women are to be free to develop their full social potential, and this is as strikingly correct today as it was over a hundred years ago. Surely the OL and the RU are aware or the Marxist-Leninist position on this question. How then can these groups, which claim to be Marxist-Leninist, continue to peddle this “bourgeois claptrap”?

Why Maoists Must Deviate From Marxism

There are two fundamental reasons why Maoists must deviate from Marxism. First as Stalinists and in particular as defenders of the Chinese bureaucracy, they are forced to defend a society in which the family unit remains the basic economic unit. The Chinese Revolution was led not by a Leninist party at the head of the Chinese working class but by a Stalinist, petty bourgeois party at the head of a peasant based army. Because of exceptional historical circumstances, this petty-bourgeois leadership was able to overturn capitalism in China and to establish a deformed workers state, i.e. a state not qualitatively different from that which issued out of the Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet Union. Trotskyists therefore call for the unconditional military defense of the gains of the Chinese Revolution —  particularly nationalized property — against imperialist attack. At the same time, however, we call for a political revolution led by the Chinese working class to overthrow the ruling caste which undermines those gains and seeks to sell them out.

As in all degenerated and deformed workers states (including the Soviet Union, Cuba, North, Vietnam and Yugoslavia) women have been granted formal equality in many areas but have remained enslaved by domestic labor within the family. The key to any understanding of the interrelationship between the deformed workers state and the family lies precisely in the fact that the bourgeoisie has been smashed and the means of production nationalized, the working class has been politically expropriated.  The state is administered by a bureaucratic caste which, in order to maintain its undemocratic rule, must, among other things, rely upon and foster the nuclear family as one more, point for reinforcing respect for authority.

The maintenance of the family also represents a capitulation to the peasantry. Unlike the working class, for whom the family plays no necessary economic role, the class interests of the peasantry are essentially limited to consolidating the private ownership of small plots of land and this requires the maintenance of the family structure. It is precisely for this reason that the working class and only the working class will lead the struggle for women’s emancipation.

The second and equally significant reason why Maoists must deviate from Marxism on the question of the family is that Maoists, despite all their rhetoric about revolution being the main trend in the world today, the future being bright and so on, have absolutely no confidence in the revolutionary capacity of the working class. And lacking this confidence, they have no real interest in raising the consciousness of the working class, but only in tailing its existing backward consciousness. Why put forward revolutionary ideas such as the replacement of the family when such ideas may “turn people off”? Someday it may be possible to slowly introduce these ideas — but not now.

The Trotskyist alternative is not, of course, to raise the slogan “Smash the family!” This would be absurd for, as Trotsky, pointed out, “the family cannot be abolished, it has to be replaced” and there is nothing to replace it under capitalism. But without a correct analysis of the role of the family in class society, we cannot even begin to understand the dynamic of women’s oppression. It Is precisely this analysis, however, which Maoists cannot undertake, for its conclusions would expose their revolutionary pretensions as a sham.

The OL therefore avoids all discussion of the family as a source of women’s oppression and insists instead that it is “wage slavery’ which lies’ at the basis of women’s oppression,” but since women’s oppression predates capitalism by several thousand years, this cannot be a very convincing explanation, even to the members of the OL.

The RU is more orthodox in a way, first presenting its version of Engels analysis of the family as an oppressive institution which originated with class society, and only then going on to revise it on the grounds of the greater importance of the family unit to the working class today and the coziness, warmth and love, supposedly abounding in the contemporary proletarian home.

Even more orthodox in its approach is the Communist Labor Party (CLP), a Maoist organization which descends from the Provisional Organizing Committee to Reconstitute the Marxist- Leninist Vanguard Party in the USA (POC), the first pro-Stalin opposition within the Communist Party. The CLP presents Engels’ analysis in a more or less recognizable form, but draws from it no programmatic conclusions. While the CLP would like to avoid revising Engels, it cannot put forward the revolutionary implications of its book learning without threatening the very ground on which it stands. Thus in “Proletarian’ Morality” (Proletariat, Spring 1974) we find:

“The heart of the question that the comrades are asking is this. Is it anti-communist to have sexual relations with other than husband or wife, is it anticommunist to have sexual relations before marriage?”

To which CLP leader Nelson Perry discreetly replies “These questions are too personal for us to comment on.” The odor of puritanism, which Perry himself describes as “Catholic morality smeared over with Marxist phrases,” is very’ strong.

“Homosexual Relationships Require so Much Time”

As defenders of the bourgeois family, Stalinists generally feel called upon to denounce all those whose sexual preferences are other than monogamous and heterosexual. The OL tends to ignore the subject of sexual repression altogether. Michael Klonsky, leader of the OL, explained at a panel discussion in San Diego this summer why this question had not been taken up by his organization, saying that he didn’t see why so much fuss was being made about something that only took a few minutes a day.  The October League did not, however, draw back from assisting in the exclusion of a group of lesbian members of the Chicago Women’s Union from a trip to China.

The RU has been more outspoken in defense of “stable monogamous relationships between men and women.” A recent internal position paper on the subject, in which the RU attempts to soften its line, it is explained that while gays can be anti-imperialist (i.e. members of RU, front groups); ‘they cannot be communists’, (i.e., members of the RU):

“To be a Communist, we must accept and welcome struggle in all facets of our lives, personal as well as political. We cannot struggle with male supremacy in the factory and not struggle at home. We feel that the best way to struggle out such contradictions in our personal lives is in stable monogamous relationships between men and women based on mutual love and respect. Because homosexuals do not carry the struggle between men and women into their most intimate relationships they are not prepared, in principle, for the arduous task of class transformation. “

It would have been more honest (although equally disgusting) of the RU to simply admit, as the Workers League does, that it takes this reactionary position because, it conforms to backward attitudes prevalent in the working class. On the question of homosexuality as on the question of the family, the opportunist RU is guided above all by its determination not to “turn people off”.

Certainly there are reactionary currents in the “gay liberation movement,” but the RU’s condemnation of homosexuality as a disease to which people are driven by the “mire and muck of bourgeois decadence” (as if homosexuality had come into existence only with the decay of capitalism), is so backward and untenable that even the bourgeois American Psychiatric Association last year abandoned this position. The RU caps its garbled arguments by the assertion that homosexuality is incompatible with communism because “homosexual relationships require so much time.” One can only speculate upon the RU’s ideal of a meaningful heterosexual relationship. Presumably, as the OL’s Klonsky suggests, it should optimally take up “only a few minutes a day.”

This puritanical morality on the part of American Maoists is entirely consistent with the attitudes encouraged and even legislated by the Chinese bureaucracy. Visitors to China, who often differ on many questions of social life there, uniformly report that the Chinese suppress all premarital sex. Helen Snow, who as Nym Wales earned a reputation as an uncritical publicist for the Maoist regime, reports that:

“Any romantic attachment that goes the distance, outside the marriage bed, is actually a statutory offense, worth six months  in jail for the overeager young man…”

Helen Snow, Women in Modern China

This one report alone should stick in the throats of those American apologists for New China who never tire of crying: “Chinese Women Liberated!”

Chinese Women Unliberated!

The new opportunities afforded Chinese women are not insignificant. While we put forward our critical analysis of the Maoist regime, the Spartacist League firmly rejects the view advanced by some social democrats and feminists that the Chinese Revolution offered women little worth defending. The revolution has, among other things, given women legal equality, freedom of choice in marriage, greater access to contraception and abortion, a greater role in social production and political life and, for some, child care centers, dining halls and schools. It is indisputable that the lives of Chinese women, who in prerevolutionary were barely recognized as human beings,  have been radically transformed and that Chinese women are less oppressed in many ways than are women in bourgeois democracies.

But while we note such gains and therefore call for the unconditional military, defense of China against imperialist attack, we are also aware that China has not achieved socialism — a historical stage marked, among other things, by the withering away of the state — and that the Chinese bureaucracy sabotages those measures leading toward the emancipation of women which could be undertaken by the dictatorship of the proletariat in even a poor and underdeveloped healthy workers state. Chinese women, therefore, continue to be specially oppressed. Some indications of this oppression are the following:

1. The family continues to be the primary economic unit of society, and women continue to be primarily responsible for housework and child care. As the OL’s Eileen Klehr writes in “Women Hold Up Half the Sky”:

“I remember a woman factory worker who told me that all her housework was done by her children because both parents worked. This is good education for the future generation when household work will no longer be considered ‘women’s department’ but will be shared more equally between men and women.”

Instead of socializing the drudgery performed by women in the family, as the Bolsheviks attempted to do, the Chinese bureaucrats content themselves with appealing to the husbands of a future generation to share it “more equally.” (They are no doubt gratified to learn that President Ford makes his own breakfast.)

2. Swings in public policy since 1949 have resulted in sharp changes regarding contraception and abortion. Access to contraception and abortion is, not viewed as the right of all women, but as a privilege to be proffered or rescinded according to the political requirements of the bureaucracy at any given time.

3. Divorce may be granted only if both parties request it, and even then the court still attempts reconciliation and has the power to deny the divorce if it is deemed not to be in the best interests of the People’s Republic.

4. Puritanical attitudes toward sex prevail, and pre-marital sex is classified as a crime. There exists, as Trotsky put it when describing the Soviet Union under Stalin, “the philosophy of a priest endowed also with the powers of a gendarme.”

5. Jobs are still noticeably sex-typed; and there is unequal pay for equal work, especially in the rural communes. Also, the shortage of capital mean that there are not enough industrial jobs for all who would like them, and this especially affects women’s participation in’ production.

6. Women’s participation in politics is still limited to the lower echelons of the government and the Chinese Communist Party, with few exceptions. Women comprise about 10 percent of the party and about the same percentage of its Central Committee. In 1969  two women were named to the Political Bureau although not to the Standing Committee; which is the real power. The two women were Yeh Chun, wife of Liu Shao-Chi and Chiang Ching, wife of Mao. When Lin. Piao was disposed of in September 197;, Yeh Chun was removed.

7. The facilities to socialize housework are still lacking. Child care in the countryside is inadequate, communal dining facilities are unattractive and collectivization of household tasks is not encouraged. It is, of course, true that the productive forces in China are not adequate to accomplish all this even if it were governmental policy, but, as Trotsky noted about the Soviet Union:

“Instead of openly saying, ‘We have proven still too poor and ignorant for the creation of socialist relations among men, our children and grandchildren will realize this aim,’ the leaders are forcing people to glue together again the shell of the broken family, and not only that, but to consider it, under threat of extreme penalties, the sacred nucleus of triumphant socialism.”

Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed

Maoists are willing enough to acknowledge that Soviet women are not liberated, despite the enormous gains of the October Revolution, many of which were subsequently reversed. But because of the Maoist position that the Soviet Union became capitalist and “social imperialist” sometime after the death of Stalin in 1953, any Maoist account of how this reversal occurred must be a masterpiece of distortion and omission.

Thus the Revolutionary Union, in “Soviet Women–  Their Victory and Temporary Defeat” (Red Papers 3) explains that “a small band of traitors” managed to take over the Soviet Union within 10 years of the death of Joseph Stalin and at that point “the tremendous gains made by women, and by the whole working class, began to crumble.” Can the RU explain why, then, abortion, which was legalized under Lenin, was abolished in 1936, despite popular opinion to the contrary (and reinstituted after the death of Stalin)? Why co-education was abolished by the Stalinist bureaucracy? Why women’s section of the Communist Party was liquidated? Why divorces were made increasingly difficult and expensive throughout the 1930’s, until in July 1944, the fee for a divorce was set at a level which placed it out of the reach economically, of the average worker?

Of course, since these dates are embarrassing to Stalinists, they are often ignored. The entire Maoist/Stalinist worldview would be threatened by recognizing that the degeneration of the Russian Revolution began not in the 1950’s but in the 1920’s. Yet the facts are indisputable.

What Is the “Maoist” Position, Chairman Mao?

We have concerned ourselves so far with what the Maoists have in common, but it should not be assumed that there is general agreement among these groups on the Woman question. There is not. In fact, it was on the woman question that the Guardian’s unity–mongering forums of 1973 fell apart.

The OL, which has capitulated to petty-bourgeois feminism, insists that the RU does not see the radical women’s movement as a “positive progressive thing.” The RU denies this charge which is potentially devastating to the satisfaction of its opportunist appetites, and calls for a class analysis of the women’s movement. But despite the RU’s leftist rhetoric, its workerism and its refusal to fight for revolutionary leadership in the working class expose it as a liberal rather than a revolutionary organization.

A serious difference among Maoist groups centers on support for the Equal Rights AineildmEmt (ERA). (For a discussion of why the Spartacist League supports the ERA, see Women and Revolution No. 4, Fall 1973.)  The RU militantly opposes the ERA on the grounds that it would abolish protective legislation, but its arguments are contradictory. To be consistent, the RU would have to demand repeal of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 since this has been much more responsible for the repeal of protective legislation for women than the ERA would be. The point, of course, is to fight for the extension of protective legislation, not to seek defensively to maintain the status quo which is, in any event, under attack. The weakness of the RU on this question may have been behind its vicious physical attack on members, the Militant Action Caucus of the Communication Workers of America who were carrying signs in support of the ERA at a San Francisco demonstration this June. But while the RU does not hesitate to attack proponents of the ERA, it raised quite a hypocritical hue and cry about the refusal of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, including members of the OL, to allow the RU to criticize the ERA in a leaflet at an international Women’s Day march.

Like the RU, the Communist Labor Party initially opposed the ERA, declaring it to be a “fascist plot.” But recently the CLP has done “self-criticism” and following a short announcement of its “mistake, “an about-face of sorts was executed in the August issue of Peoples Tribune. In an exceptional display of political cowardice, the CLP refused to take a position for or against the ERA, stating only that it would engage in work “around the ERA”. But whether this work will support the ERA or attack it is anyone’s guess.

Regarding the question of orientation to the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW), differences similar to the ones above also emerge. The OL went whole-hog into CLUW, taking up many bureaucratic posts and submerging any independent presence. Their sharpest criticisms have been leveled at the Spartacist League for raising a class-struggle program in CLUW, with milder criticisms of the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party, which stand slightly to the right of the OL in this arena.

Having fought for the bureaucrats and against the communists in CLUW, the OL is now slowly “discovering” that CLUW is dominated by the trade-union bureaucracy, a fact pointed out by the Spartacist League more than six months ago. The recent disaffection of many of these bureaucrats has put the OL in a temporarily stronger position within CLUW, temporary because CLUW is not likely to be a viable organization. (See’ “CLUW: Dead End for Working Women”, W&R No. 6, Summer 1974.) .

The RU has for the most part ignored CLUW and criticized the OL for trying to push the unions to the left. The RU’s recent turn is away from trade unions altogether because while the RU is reluctant to capitulate to the trade-union bureaucrats, it is even more reluctant to fight them. However, when RU supporters came to the first Los Angeles CLUW meeting in July, they voted with the OL (and the SWP, IS and CP) to prevent political discussion ,by voting down a motion raised by a member of the Militant Caucus of AFSCME 2070 in favor of democratic debate and resolutions.

The OL, the RU and the CLP have all amply demonstrated their fundamental reformism. The polemics among them may be sharp, but none is fighting for revolutionary principles. All, too, would be quick to subordinate any struggle to the interests of the Chinese bureaucracy if it would gain them the coveted status of “official” Maoist party in the U.S. So while the Spartacist League carries forward the struggle for women’s liberation through socialist revolution, the Maoists persist in their attempts to make the family the fighting unit for reformism and puritanism.

Revolutionary Union On Homosexuals:

Malicious Maoist Bigotry

[First printed in Young Spartacus #26, November 1974. We are appending a 1992 IBT statement on the Revolutionary Communist Party, which the RU renamed itself.]

A scandalously revealing document entitled “Position Paper of the Revolutionary Union On Homosexuality and Gay Liberation” is presently circulating somewhat selectively within the left. Consistent with their trade-union economism and shameless adaptation to backwardness in the working class, the Revolutionary Union (RU) in this document follows through its capitulation on the struggle against the special oppression of women by embracing and promoting the most swinish prejudices against homosexuals as “Marxism-Leninism.” The document is to inform and assure pejudiced workers and lumpens that “homosexuals cannot be Comunists”, that is, belong to communist organizations, which of course means the RU. To the extent that the RU philistines provide some semblance of a political justification for this anticommunist position the document cannot be ignored.

Although the sexual phenomenon of homosexuality has existed in the most diverse cultures and social systems, the RU document begins by claiming homosexuality to be a response of alienated, anxiety-ridden escapist individuals, “particularly the petty bourgeoisie,” to “the pressures of capitalist society” and “the intensification of the contradictions brought about by decaying imperialism. ” Thus, it is the capitalist “system that drives them to homosexuality.” For these Maoists homosexuality is a disease of capitalist society, like “exotic religious sects, mysticism, drugs, pornography, promiscuity, sex orgies, trotskyism, etc.,” and those who choose homosexuality as a sexual preference are “like all people caught in the mire and muck of bourgeois decadence.” We have come to expect from an organization unable to politically defeat our program such unprincipled verbal violence as the defamatory association of Trotskyism with drugs, mysticism, and so on.We only demand that the RU come out and openly state what they so nauseatingly imply: that homosexuals are “perverts.”

In order to be “at one” with even the most backward workers, these “communists” willingly accept prevailing bourgeois morality and “deal concretely with homosexual relationships as they exist in our [!] society today.” From this perspective homosexuals “are in relationships which necessarily place them outside the mainstream of our society and thus puts enormous strains upon the relationships.” But, “concretely,” inter-racial relationships also are “outside the mainstream” of this racist society and certainly involve “enormous strains.” Will the RU dare to label these couples deviants? If homosexuals are anti-social deviants because they show an “unwillingness to struggle with the opposite sex in very important relationships,” then marriage between people of the same race surely must be an impermissable capitulation to racism.

From the social ostracism and persecution of homosexuals, the RU concludes that “therefore such relationships can be only individual solutions to the contradictions of imperialism.” Here is where these “dialectically” – endowed Mao-Thinkers clumsily attempt to attribute a class basis to an historically manifested expression of one form of human sexuality:

“In posing an individual solution to the contradictions of monopoly capitalism, homosexuality is an ideology of the petty bourgeoisie, and must be clearly distinguished from proletarian ideology.”

While certain petty-bourgeois radicals in the Gay Liberation movement may pose some utopian cultural-sexual “liberation,” homosexuality per se is objectively no more “individualist” than heterosexuality. The bourgeois state hounds homosexuals because their sexual choice rejects the sacred nuclear family upon which class societies have evolved and flaunts many of the ingrained norms of bourgeois propriety and morality which have been developed to justify it. While certainly not the threat to the existence of capitalist society claimed by some Gay Ltberation politicos, homosexuality, like many other expressions of non-conforming social behavior, is an irritant. Marx and Engels realized that the nuclear family constituted the primary unit of socialization in capitalist society and called for the socialization of child rearing and domestic work and the integration of women into the work force, so that the social and economic constraints on human relations might be removed.

Unlike Marx and Engels, the RU believes that the social unit corresponding to “proletarian ideology” is -the nuclear family! The document states:

“We feel that the best way to struggle out such contradictions in our personal lives is in stable monogamous relationships between men and women based on mutual love and respect… In reality, gay liberation is antiworking-class and counterrevolutionary. Its attacks on the family would rob poor and working class people of the most viable social unit for their revolutionary struggle against the imperialist system.”

Like the Communist Party and Progressive Labor, who long ago proclaimed the family to be “a fighting unit for socialism,” the RU excoriates homosexuals for the same reason the bourgeoisie treats them as pariahs.

Under Lenin and Trotsky the Soviet Union annulled all laws discriminating against homosexuals and women and made real inroads into liberating women and children from the prison of the family. These gains were among the first to be wiped out by the emergence of the counterrevolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy, which based itself upon the political expropriation of the working class. The bureaucracy climbed to power in part by mobilizing the most backward masses, still under the influence of Great Russian chauvinism, antisemitism, male supremicism and anti-homosexual prejudice, against the remnants of the politically conscious vanguard. The Stalinist bureaucracy, having turned its back on proletarian internationalism, bent all social relations to building “socialism in one country.” The family was enshrined over the ashes of the important, liberating social measures of the October Revolution. The reactionary policy of the Stalinist regimes, from China to Cuba, on the homosexual question flows from the state maintenance of the family.

Based on its Stalinist “two-stage” theory of revolution (which means no revolution), the RU concedes that while homosexuals can never be communists, some may lift themselves far enough out of their “selfishness, self-indulgence and decadence” to be “anti-imperialist fighters.” Apparently homosexuals who wish to dedicate their lives to the struggle against capitalism should be grateful for being granted the same status as the Shah of Iran, Bandaranaike of Ceylon and NATO!

These “anti-imperialists” presumably would be permitted to join the RU’s “anti-imperialist” student front group, the Revolutionary Student Brigade (formerly the Attica Brigade) and function in the petty-bourgeois radical movement, where homosexuality is less covert and even somewhat fashionable. Clearly the viciously anti-homosexual position is for the workers, since the RU does “not feel that the Attica Brigade has to take a stand on this question.”

The program for socialist revolution does not take any position on the value of any particular sexual orientation. We are opposed to all forms of discrimination and persecution of homosexuals as well as all laws which curtail the democratic right of privacy and sexual freedom for consenting adults. We have only disgust for the position that homosexuals are incapable of coming to communist consciousness and functioning as cadres in a communist organization.

On this anti-homosexual bigotry and political sanctification of the family and monogamy the RU stands closer to Puritanism than Marxism.

---

Homophobia Aside:

Defend The RCP!

[First printed in 1917 West #1, Spring 1992]

July of 1991 the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) Demonstrations Committee decided it would no longer defend the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) because of that Maoist group’s reactionary position on homosexuality. The decision does not forbid individual NLG lawyers from defending RCP members nor will the NLG screen RCP members when they are involved in demonstrations in coalitions with other groups. However the NLG Demonstrations Committee as an organization will not provide lawyers or legal observers for events sponsored solely by the RCP.

The BT strongly condemns the homophobia of the RCP, which maintains that homosexuality is fostered and perpetuated by capitalist decay and that after the proletarian revolution a struggle would be waged to eliminate homosexuality. This position is inherited from that great butcher of revolutions, Josef Stalin, who termed homosexuality “bourgeois decadence” and whose consolidation of power in the Soviet Union in the 1920s laid the basis for the debacle which is now unfolding in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Homophobia is totally contrary to the spirit of Bolshevism, which stands for the broadest possible human liberation.

Nevertheless we disagree with the decision of the NLG Demonstrations Committee. The RCP is a part of the workers movement and therefore must be defended when necessary in spite of its bad position, for any refusal to defend any part of the workers movement against the bourgeois state eventually weakens everyone involved in the fight against oppression. We call for nonsectarian defense of left, workers and oppressed groups in the tradition of the International Labor Defense which was established by James Cannon and the then revolutionary Communist Party in the 1920s. An injury to one is an injury to all!

Toward a Communist Women’s Movement!

[First printed in Women and Revolution #4, Fall 1973]

It has been more than a year since the last issue of Women and Revolution was published. Beginning with this present issue, W&R resumes publication, at a projected initial frequency of three issues a year, under the direction of the Commission for Work Among Women of the Central Committee of the Spartacist League. This transformation ofW&R into an organ of the Spartacist League is the product of several factors: the consolidation of W&R supporters around the Trotskyist program of the SL, the stagnation of the, feminist-dominated petty-bourgeois women’s liberation milieu and the continuing transformation of the SL itself into the nucleus of the vanguard party.

Over the course of the past few years, the Spartacist League has been engaged in an internal discussion over the perspectives and scope of our intervention around the woman question, a discussion which culminated in the adoption of several documents at our Third National Conference held in November 1972. This discussion focussed on a reassment of the mechanisms for continued SL action on this question in the light of a critical review of the origins and evolution of our work.

The Fight Against Feminism

The radical women’s movement– as distinct from purely liberal, petty-bourgeois feminist organizations, such as the National Organization of Women (N.O. W.)– emerged as an outgrowth of 1960’s New Leftism. The reality of women’s oppression under capitalism predictably produced an elemental resentment and sporadic outbursts of resistance, but in the absence of a strong, proletarian pole of attraction and a principled revolutionary leadership, this partial consciousness could not generate a revolutionary program for women’s emancipation. Inevitably it was channelled by bourgeois ideology into utopian and reformist dead ends and made prey to isolation and demoralization.

As revolutionists, we were compelled to intervene in the women’s liberation movement both because we sought to honor our obligation to be what Lenin termed “a tribune of the people”– an organization responsive to the real needs of all the oppressed– and because this work was strategically important both in order to develop revolutionary class consciousness, among the mass of oppressed women and in order to raise the general level of consciousness in the class itself on this issue.

The SL’s earliest systematic involvement in this arena took place in the San Francisco Bay Area, where SL supporters along with others initiated the formation of the Socialist Workshop, a socialist women’s liberation group which intervened, in the amorphous women’s movement to struggle for explicitly political, anti-personalist perspective based on the recognition of the working class as the central force for socialist revolution. On the basis of this involvement, as well as other more fragmentary work taking place on the initiative of other SL branches, the 1969 Central Committee Plenum established work around the woman question as a real although subordinate priority for the organization as a whole.

Spartacist members and others drawn around SL program initiated local groups in several cities, and the first issue of the national newspaper Women and Revolution appeared in early 1971. Its “Manifesto” stated: “Our liberation and the liberation of the working class go hand in hand. We shall not separate ourselves from the mainstream of the revolutionary movement but shall make our struggle an integral part of it.” W&R activists intervened to fight for the transitional program in such organizations as Bread and Roses and Oakland Women’s Liberation. In New York, participation in the “Working Women’s Organizing Committee” (initiated by the International Socialists) was discontinued after the WWOC (which in its patronizing desire to avoid “alienating” anyone consistly shirked any discussion of program) codified its irrelevance to the struggles of working women by refusing to take any position on the union organizing taking place in the WWOC’s chosen target of activity, the telephone company.

W&R supporters also intervened in conferences and demonstrations of the SWP-initiated movement to legalize abortion; W&R demanded “Free Abortion on Demand,” an end to support for capitalist politicians like Chisholm and Abzug, a break from “single-issue” campaigns and the adoption of a full working-class program and an end to the exclusion of men from the movement.

W&R fully expected an “unsisterly” response to its explicit anti-feminism from the bulk of the petty bourgeois women’s movement. Yet at the same time we found that many of the more serious women’s liberation activists were drawn toward W&R on the basis of its uncompromising programmatic perspective. From out of the amorphous women’s movement came individual recruits and, in addition, W&R intersected several local study groups and feminist collectives which polarized and split along the lines of the fundamental political alternatives posed by W&R supporters. Through their study of the woman question, and often through reassessing their own experiences in attempting to organize working-class women, these groupings began to take sides on basic questions: feminism vs. Marxism, Maoism vs. Trotskyism, “serve-the-people” spontaneity vs. the vanguard party.

Comintern Positions Rediscovered

It was at this point that the Spartacist League found itself compelled to rediscover concretely the work of the Leninist Communist International on the woman question, which centered on the building of transitional organizations– women’s sections affiliated with the revolutionary proletarian parties.

The question of special communist work among women had been a controversial one in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) as early as 1896. Klara Zetkin’s position in favor of such work was adopted by the party, and a party section for work among women was established to direct it. Within the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) there was, beginning around 1905, a similar debate, in which Alexandra Kollontai was one of the leading proponents of special work among women on the German model. Special work among women was carried out by the Bolshevik party which published the journal Rabotnitsa (The Working Woman) under the direction of its Central Committee and which established Genotdel (The Department for Work Among Women) after the seizure of state power in 1917.

Within the Second International no special section responsible for directing work among women had ever been established. Lenin found the lack of such an international body intolerable:

“The first proletarian dictatorship is truly paving the way for the complete social equality of women. It eradicates more prejudice than volumes- of feminist literature. However, in spite of all this, we do not yet have an international Communist women’s movement and we must have one without fail. We must immediately set about starting it. Without such a movement, the work of our International and of its parties is incomplete and never will be complete….”

-Klara Zetkin, Recollections of Lenin, 1920

The Third International set itself the task of extending internationally and codifying the work begun by the German and Russian parties. On its initiative, the First Conference of Communist Women was held in 1920. This conference established an International Secretariat for Work Among Women with permanent representation on the Executive Committee of the International. The Comintern also made mandatory the establishment of special administrative and organizational bodies for work among women within all party committees. Thus, while decisively rejecting the notion of an autonomous women’s movement, the Comintern in its first four congresses specifically demanded a special division of labor within the communist parties for the direction of work among women.

Comintern work among women degenerated qualitatively as part of the general process of Stalinization, and the positions on the woman question which the first four congresses had clarified were virtually forgotten. Thus these crucial struggles became inaccessible to the working class for decades. It was only in the course of the SL’s extended internal discussion on work among women that we were compelled to rediscover many of these positions.

Women and Revolution Affiliates With the SL

While the first W&R groups which the Spartacist League initiated were based on the SL’s program for women’s emancipation as an integral part of the struggle of the working class for socialist revolution and were linked to the SL through their most conscious cadre, they were not yet functioning as a disciplined part of the common Spartacist tendency. Predictably, many of the militants they recruited recognized the need to become full communists and to become involved in the work of the Spartacist League as disciplined supporters. In the course of this common work the SL realized the need to make the W&R groups a part of the common Spartacist tendency and enable disciplined W&R supporters to participate in the work and internal life of the SL. It was proposed therefore that local W&R groups organizationally affiliate with the SL. The impetus for this step came from the SL, but mainly as the formalization of an accomplished fact.

By the time of the opening of the SL’s pre-conference discussion period in preparation, for the Third National Conference, the New York and Boston W&R groups had voted to become supporters of the SL on the local level and were participating in the discussion process. Elements from the Oakland and New Orleans women’s groups had already joined the SL or its youth group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY), and many had been implanted in industrial work, under the direction of the SL Trade Union Commission. The work around W&R, demonstrating the SL’s principled approach on the woman question, had been instrumental in the fusion between the RCY and the Buffalo Marxist Caucus, a component of which had been heavily involved in the women’s movement, Earlier, the woman question had been one of the focal points of the SL’s oppositional intervention into Progressive Labor-dominated SDS, which had won to the SL dozens of ex-New Lefters and individuals from PL’s periphery and had laid the basis for the formathe RCY.

The virtual disintegration of the petty-bourgeois women’s movement in the early 1970’s played a crucial role in convincing serious militant women that Trotskyism was the only way forward. It also precipitated a reassessment of perspectives for W&R. The women’s movement was virtually ceasing to exist as an arena for intervention, but a diffuse conscious of the reality of female oppression had trickled down to broad social layers, and its effects were becoming more apparent, especially within the labor movement itself.

In a document drafted for the SL Political Bureau and adopted by the Third National Conference, tactical guidelines for our work among women were set forth. While keeping in mind the current priorities and resources of the SL, we adopted as our goal a general strategy based on that of the Communist International in its revolutionary period, the creation of a transitional women’s organization affiliated with the proletarian vanguard party ;

“The organizational experience of the SL in this work has tended strongly toward the conclusion that the women’s’ circles must be brought under the discipline of the party so that the non-SL comrades involved can participate fully in the debates and decisions!of the movement and be represented on its leading bodies. In our experience in the women’s arena we were forced pragmatically to rediscover the position of the Communist International, which strongly opposed the initiation of women’s organizations not organizationally linked to the proletarian vanguard, not only when the revolutionary organization is a mass party in which case ‘independence’ would in fact constitute counterposition to the revolutionary party-but also when the vanguard is weak and struggling to increase its contact with and influence among the masses. Our strategic perspective should be the development of a women’s section of the SL….”

The National Conference decided to establish a Commission for Work Among Women responsible to the SL Central Committee. This commission will oversee SL work among women, centering on the regular publication of W&R. It will also work in close coordination with the other leading bodies of the SL, especially with the Trade Union Commission, since the struggle for the fullest possible integration of women into the organized labor force and against the divisive effects of male chauvinism in the working class occupies a central place in the work of both bodies.

W&R will feature articles on the women’s movement in the U.S. and abroad, the history of the communist women’s movement, the role of the family and women in the work force, as well as articles on topical issues and book reviews. The aim of the journal is the crystallization of a readership committed to the establishment of a communist women’s movement, looking toward the creation of a Spartacist League section for work among women dedicated to the struggle for the emancipation of women through international proletarian revolution.

Related Link
Dale Reissner: 1942-1994
International Bolshevik Tendency’s biographical obituary for the original editor of Women and Revolution.
http://www.bolshevik.org/1917/no14dale.pdf

Women and the Permanent Revolution

[First Printed in Workers Vanguard No. 17, March 1973]

For Marxists the emancipation of women from their special oppression is a precise gauge of the degree to which a society has been purged of social oppression as a whole. This interrelationship was first formulated by the utopian socialist Fourier:

“The change in a historical epoch can always be determined by the progress of women towards freedom, because in the relations of woman to man, of the weak to the strong, the victory of human nature over brutality is most evident. The degree of emancipation of women.is the natural measure of general emancipation.”

– Theorie des Quatre Mouvements

Fourier was paraphrased by Marx in The Holy Family (1845):

“The relation of man to woman, is the most natural relation of human being to human being. It indicates therefore, how far man’s natural behavior has become human, and how far his human essence has become a natural essence for him, how far his human nature has become nature for him.”

In a blunter and more succinct fashion, Marx repeated the same point 23 years later in a letter to Kugelmann: “social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, (the ugly ones included).”

Monogamous Family Emerges

One of the ironies of history is that the origin of the special oppression of women is rooted in one of the earliest social advances-the development of human technology beyond the day-to-day struggle for bare subsistence characteristic of hunting and gathering societies. With the introduction of cattle breeding, metal working, weaving and, lastly, agriculture, human labor power became capable of producing a substantial social surplus. Under the impact of these technological developments, the institution under which labor power is reproduced, the family, underwent a profound transformation. As Marx and Engels pointed out in The German Ideology, the propagation of the species engendered the first division of labor between man and woman. Because of women’s procreative functions, the lot of childbearing, child rearing and general domestic tasks fell to them. The household was the general sphere of woman’s activity. However, the development of technology, domestication of animals (including other humans, usually war prisoners or slaves) and the land, and the development of tools took place in the general sphere of man’s activity, and it was he that appropriated the concomitant expansion in social wealth. Thus, the advent of private property and the need to transfer this property through inheritance gave rise to the patriarchal law of inheritance and law of descent. The monogamous family was developed to ensure the paternity of the children, with the incumbent seclusion of the wife to ensure her fidelity. Seclusion meant an exclusion from public life and social production.

“Monogamous marriage was a great historical step forward; nevertheless, together with slavery and private wealth, it opens the period that has lasted until today in which every step forward is also relatively a step backward, in which prosperity and development for some is won through the misery and frustration of others.”

-Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State

Prior to the growth of private property and the monogamous family, arms, like tools and property, were held in common. However, with the development of private ownership in the means of production and procreation, and the polarization of society into economic classes, weapons became monopolized by bodies of men separated from the rest of society. These armed bodies of men constituted the essence of the state. While appearing to stand above classes, the state is in reality the instrument whereby the dominant economic class in each epoch maintains its hegemony. The ancient state was the state of the slaveowners for holding down the slaves, the feudal state was the organ of the nobility for holding down the peasant serfs and bondsmen, and the modern, “democratic” state is the instrument of the capitalist class to maintain its dominance and ability to exploit labor.

In each epoch the family, like the state, has been principally an institution for perpetuating the dominant property form and the dominant economic class. For the slave, serf and wage slave-i.e., for those social classes without property to inherit or defend-the social institutions of inheritance and defense, the family and the gendarme, are principally institutions of subjugation.

Limitations of Bourgeois Progressivism

With the advent of industrial capitalism, the family entered a state of relative dissolution. In order to drive down wages, capitalism sought to lower the cost of producing and reproducing labor power through drawing the entire family into the labor process. This meant breaking down the guild structure, at first through “piecing out” work to individual families, and then by concentrating them into industrial sites and company towns. In countries with belated capitalist development, such as tsarist Russia, guilds and the development of home industry were skipped, and serfs drawn directly into large, bleak company towns.

The return of women to social production provides the precondition to their social emancipation, but under capitalism it meant the further enslavement and degradation of women, as they were forced to take on wage slavery in addition to their domestic slavery. Unable and unwilling to provide social substitutes for the economic role of the family, however, the capitalists encouraged women to return to the domicile and kitchen with consciously generated propaganda in favor of the family and religion. Thus capitalism expanded the productive forces and laid the technological basis for the socialization of domestic work and the replacement of the family as an economic unit, but was and is unable to accomplish this replacement, just as it laid the basis for the international socialization of the means of production, but still cannot eliminate national boundaries.

Capitalism depends for its survival on the traditional, archaic social institutions of class rule: private property, the monogamous family and the nation-state. As the productive forces generated by capitalism increase, they strain against the bounds set up by the social institutions upon which the system depends, and the capitalist class becomes more vi rulent in trying to shore .up and reinforce institutions which become increasingly more reactionary. The capitalist- backed trend of women out of the plants and back to the domicile reached its zenith in the Nazi campaign for woman’s enslavement to “Kinder, Kuche, Kirche,”” children, kitchen, church.”

The bourgeois revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries, which cleared away feudal institutions from the path of capitalist development, replaced social relations based on obligations and privileges with those based on contractual equality, and thus had a profound effect on the family. Equality of rights between the sexes was given expression by the bourgeois revolution’s most radical ideological advocates, especially in regard to the ownership and inheritance of property. But even in the realm of formal legality, the bourgeoisie was frightened by the consequences of its own revolution and immediately dug into the medieval past for archaic institutions with which to stabilize its rule. Thus, the French Revolution was followed by a further political counterrevolution, a Thermidor in which the agents of the bourgeois revolution, the rural poor and the urban sans-culottes, were disinherited. Thermidor in terms of the family and the special oppression of women was provided by the Code Napoleon, which made women the property of their husbands, requiring a woman to obtain her husband’s permission in order, for example, to obtain a passport, make a will or sign a contract.

In a similar fashion the equality of nations proclaimed by the bourgeois revolution was subordinated to the drive of the industrially advanced nations to subjugate less developed nations in the struggle for markets and raw materials. The interrelationship between the subordination of the equality of the sexes and the equality of nations is graphically demonstrated by French imperialism. When Napoleon III thought that a higher birthrate was essential to provide workers and soldiers for expanding the French Empire, he appealed to Rome and won from the Pope a redefinition of when life begins from the traditional Catholic view that it begins when the fetus can survive outside of the womb, to the present immediatelyfollowing- conception view. This transformed abortion from a venial into a mortal sin, and on this basis Napoleon III drew up the restrictive abortion law which France has today.

Women Under Decaying Capitalism

Thus the bourgeoisie was never consistently democratic, even when the democratic tasks necessary to consolidating its class rule were on the agenda. In the epoch of imperialism, the imperialist countries have a further direct interest in suppressing the democratic and national aspirations of the colonial and semicolonial masses. Had the imperialist powers in China supported the T’ai-p’ing Rebellion (in which armed women’s brigades played an important part), a modern Protestant nation might have emerged there in the last century. Instead they backed the Manchus, upon whom they were already dependent to ensure stability. The road to imperialist subjection lay through bolstering the most reactionary and repressive aspects of semi-feudal society combined with the penetration of that society by the most advanced capitalist technique.

The inability of the “national bourgeoisies” of these colonial countries to shatter the feudal past and carry through a bourgeois-democratic revolution was conclusively demonstrated in the course of the last century. The national bourgeoisie, generally recruited straight from the old nobility, and dependent on relics of the feudal past for its survival (e.g., latifundia in South America), developed as the dependent broker for imperialism. The native bourgeois classes in the colonial world were unable to separate themselves from the entanglement with imperialist domination for fear of setting off forces-principally the anti-capitalist struggle of the workers, in alliance with the peasantry-which would sweep them from power as well.

Analyzing the tasks of a revolution in tsarist Russia and their means of accomplishment, Trotsky formulated the theory of the permanent revolution. He concluded not only that proletarian leadership would be required to accomplish the basic bourgeois-democratic goals of the revolution-since the bourgeoisie was unable to take a revolutionary path against the autocracy-but also that the proletariat would have to place its own, socialist goals immediately on the agenda if the revolution were to be successful. In order to uproot feudal autocracy and colonial domination, the working class would have to uproot the bourgeois order which had grown up within, and now propped up, these institutions.

The question of women’s emancipation in the Third World continues to demonstrate the truth of Trotsky’s conclusions and the lessons of the Russian Revolution which they anticipated. Equal rights for women is a basic democratic right, avowed by all democracies and accepted as a goal by all “national liberation” movements. Yet the special oppression of women is grounded in the very basis of the property system itself. Just as the anti-colonial struggle which limits its goals to the establishment of an independent state fails to provide real independence from imperialist domination, so the “revolution” which stops short of overturning capitalism has proven unable to uproot women’s oppression.

Bangladesh provides such shocking examples of inhuman imperialist behavior that the complete domination of the “national liberation” struggle against Pakistan by the equally reactionary, rival Indian imperialists is forgotten. Yet this fact absolutely precluded the accomplishment of any democratic tasks by that movement. Among the victims of the struggle over Bangladesh were 200,000 Bengali women who were systematically gang-raped by the West Pakistani army. Marshal Khan’s troops then had the heads of these women shorn, a mark of disgrace in Bengali society. The women were then turned loose, only to be rejected and massacred by their husbands, brothers and fathers as Sheik Rahman, former feminist Indira Gandhi’s faithful seneschal, came to power. The state that emerged behind the bayonets of the Indian army proved no more liberating for the women of Bangladesh than the regime which perpetrated bestial gang rape. The vengeful persecution of the Biharis under the new state is no consolation.

Algerian Independence Little Gain for Women

When “national liberation” does not simply replace one imperialist suzerain for another, as in Bangladesh, but results in a measure of real political independence within the context of continued imperialist economic domination-viz., lgeria-the unimproved condition of women reflects the continued failure to accomplish basic democratic tasks of the revolution for the masses. The Tripoli Program, basic manifesto of the Algerian Revolution, vaguely promised formal equality, but even the law of the new regime codifies sexual inequality for women, many of whom fought in the FLN as both auxiliaries and commandos. For example, the maximum punishment for adultery committed by men is one year-for women, two. And the reality is much worse than the letter of the law expresses-while forced marriage is now illegal, every year even the government is forced to admit that many suicides take place to avoid forced marriages. This could be attributed to the difficulty in overcomiflg tradition, yet the attitude of the Algerian regime is one that is hostile to overcoming tradition. Boumedienne, president of Algeria’s “Revolutionary” Council, said:

“We say ‘no’ to this [Western] type of evolution, for our society is an Islamic and a socialist society. A problem exists here. It involves respect for morality …. For we have seen among several peoples who have been recently liberated, that woman, once free, hastens to think of things which one need not cite here…. The evolution of Algerian woman and the enjoyment of her rights must be in the framework of the morality of our society.”

-8 March 1966

And this speech was given on International Women’s Day! The speech inspired the walkout of a number of women. In “socialist” Algeria, where every student receives religious education, women have been kept out of politics, generally out of higher education, and under the veil as well.

Algerian society has not been without some democratic reforms, even reforms which touch upon the family. But each reform is elaborately justified only after tortuous religious debate and tedious reinterpretation of the Koran.

Modern imperialism has not forgotten its Rudyard Kipling, has not forgotten how to wrap itself in the mantle of a “civilizing mission,” especially regarding the “weaker sex”-as it rapes both the women and the natural resources of the subjugated nations. French imperialists, whose Code Napoleon did not allow a woman to open a bank account or take a job without her husband’s permission until 1966, paraded themselves in Algeria as the defenders and liberators of Muslim womanhood. Perhaps the most ludicrous expression of this pious hypocrisy was the socalled “Battle of the Veils.” After 13 May 1958, when the French colons ransacked the Governor General’s headquarters, bringing down the Fourth Republic, a leading colon woman organized the Feminine Solidarity Movement, which paraded de-veiled Muslim women around to give eulogistic speeches on how good it was to be liberated by the society of liberte, egaIite, fraternite-the complete marriage of feminism and imperialism! In reaction, the veil became a symbol of the resistance to French imperialism, as did the Muslim family, the traditional customs, etc. Thus, not only were centuries-old customs of domestic slavery and oppression not abolished, but the symbols of these very customs were adopted by the “Revolution”! Thus Boumedienne says “no” not to French imperialist hypocrisy-his hatred of which is a sham-but to the basic achievements of the French Revolution.

The most articulate expression of Third World nationalism which, like the Russian Narodniks, reduces “socialism” and “revolution” to feudalistic revivalism, is ,to be found in that darling of the cafe revolutionaries, Frantz Fanon-the official ideologue of the Algerian FLN. While his L’An Cinq de la Revolution Algerienne (translated as A Dying Colonialism) is a testament to the courage and fortitude of the Algerian revolutionary woman-showing how involvement in the FLN revolutionized her social standing-Fanon finds her strength not in the liberating experience of equality imposed by commando life, but in patriarchal Muslim tradition:

“What is true is that under normal conditions, an interaction must exist between the family and society at large. The home is the basis of the truth of society, but society authenticates and legitimizes the family. The colonial structure is the very negation ofthis reciprocal justification. The Algerian woman, in imposing such a restriction on herself, in choosing a form of existence limited in scope, was deepening her consciousness of struggle and preparing for combat.”

Fanon is quite correct when he states that after participating in the national liberation struggle the Algerian woman “could not put herself back into her former state of mind and relive her behavior of the past.” But for Fanon, as for the Narodniks, the very cultural and social backwardness of the masses is itself a source of their revolutionary capacity. The Narodniks, the supreme petty-bourgeois radical democrats, denied the bourgeois character of the democratic revolution, i.e., agrarian revolution, national independence and democratic rights, which constituted the parameters of their program. For the Narodniks, for Fanon and for the official Algerian regime and its sundry Stalinist-Maoist-Pabloite apologists, such regimes are “socialist” despite their incapacity to carry through even the basic democratic tasks of bourgeois revolution. What emerges is a Third World nationalism, profoundly anti-democratic, feudalistic and in this case Muslim fundamentalist.

Women and the Russian Revolution

If the Algerian experience is the negative confirmation of the permanent revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was both positive and negative confirmation. The Russian Revolution emerged from the cataclysmic experience of world war in a country which, like the colonial countries, combined the latest in capitalist technology-industries that were totally merged with finance capital and as such ultimately controlled by the Bourses of Western Europe-with the most backward medieval institutions. At the same time Russia was the “chattel-house” of nations, itself an imperialist power with expansionist appetites in Asia Minor and the Balkans. Given Russia’s belated bourgeois development, it skipped over that stage which nurtures a strong urban petty bourgeoisie with strong democratic institutions and illusions. When the radicalized female of the intelligentsia entered politics, it was not as a feminist or suffragette, but as a terrorist. According to the reports of the tsarist Minister of Justice, Count Pahlen, of the 620 people summoned before the courts for revolutionary activities during the 1870s 158 were women. The 29-member Central Executive Committee of Narodnaya Volya (People’s Freedom) in 1879 had ten women. One of the members of this group, Sofya Perovskaya, directed the assassination of Alexander II.

The terrorist activity of the radicalized middle-class women was the prelude to the militant class battles of Russia’s working women. Concentrated primarily in textile industries, they were in the vanguard of the strike struggles of the late 1890s. After the turn of the century bourgeois feminists organized “Women’s Political Clubs” in St. Petersburg. In the winter of 1907-08 the Russian Social Democrats organized the “Society for Mutual Help Among Working Women” and issued the publication The Working Woman. When the bourgeois feminists organized the first All-Russian Women’s Congress in 1908 the “social-democratic women were represented by their own separate class group, numbering 45 women. Having passed their own independent resolutions on all questions, the women workers finally walked out of this ‘ladies’ congress” (A. Kollontai, Women Workers Struggle for Their Rights, 1918).

One of the differences between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks was over whether to organize an independent proletarian women’s group or participate in the bourgeois feminist groups. After the final split between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in 1912 the Bolsheviks distinguished themselves by continuing to struggle to draw proletarian women into the revolutionary movement. The Bolsheviks resumed publication of The Working Woman in 1914 for International Women’s Day. This holiday, which had originated in 1908 in Manhattan’s Lower East Side (Rutgers Square) by women in the needle trades, was adopted by the Second International under the leadership of Clara Zetkin in 1911. It was first celebrated in Russia at the instigation of the St. Petersburg textile workers in 1913 and celebrated again in 1914 complete with processional, mass meeting and the first appearance of the red flag in St. Petersburg. The next celebration was in 1917 and marked the opening of the Russian Revolution.

The Stalinists who try to fit the Russian Revolution into their two-stage schema claim that the February Revolution was the bourgeois-democratic stage of the revolution. While the February Revolution was bourgeois in that it put the bourgeoisie into power, there was very little democracy about it, especially in relation to the emancipation of women. Taking the church and ecclesiastical courts out of the private affairs of marriage and divorce was achieved only later, by the dictatorship of the proletariat. Likewise, it was only after the Bolshevik Revolution that a real effort was made to alleviate the domestic slavery of women through the establishment of nurseries, creches, maternity care, public dining halls and laundries.

The Bolshevik Revolution established another basic tenet of the permanent revolution-the need for proletarian leadership over the peasant movement. While the agrarian revolution was spontaneous, the struggle to summon peasant women to a full public and political life was not. The political mobilization of the peasant women required the courageous and persistent efforts of the Bolshevik party women, many of whom were recruited from the St. Petersburg textile factories which had been in the vanguard of the Russian <;lass struggle for three decades prior to the revolution. Organized in the special Communist Party sections dedicated to drawing in the oppressed women masses behind the revolution, party cadre, often disguised in paranyas and eluchvons (the veiled clothing worn by the women in Muslim territories of the Soviet Union) would carry the message of the revolution to the most backward areas of Russia. In order to reach women in nomadic tribes the CP’s women’s sections would organize Red Yurtas, or large tents which dispensed medical as well as political propaganda. Their efforts culminated in the First All-Russian Conference of Proletarian and Peasant Women in November 1918, attended by 1,700 delegates. One of the participants described the conference as follows:

“In 1918, when the civil war was raging, when we still had to struggle against hunger, cold and unprecedented devastation, when it was still necessary to defeat the enemy on countless fronts, at th is juncture the conference of proletarian and peasant women was summoned. Hundreds of working women, from the remotest factories and villages, had come to Moscow with their complaints, grievances and doubts, with all their cares great and small.”

~F.W. Halle, Women in Soviet Russia (1933)

Thermidor Reverses Gains

But the Soviet Union, an economically backward country to begin with, ravaged by imperialist intervention and civil war, encircled and blockaded by hostile capitalist powers, was unable to provide the economic basis for the construction of socialism; it could only “generalize the want.” Lenin and Trotsky realized that just as the democratic revolution must grow into the socialist revolution if the democratic tasks of the revolution are to be solved, so must socialist revolution grow directly into world revolution. The failure of the revolution to spread led to the seizure of power by the conservative state bureaucracy under Stalin in 1923 which converted the Soviet Union’s isolation from a profound defeat into a rhetorical “victory” with the anti-Marxist, nationalist “socialism in one country” doctrine. As Stalin consolidated power, the new ruling elite also required the revival of the monogamous family as the bulwark of this national “socialism”-just as it was a bulwark of the fascist political counterrevolution in capitalist countries.

The Stalinist political counterrevolution simply ran the film of the revolution backward in the realm of women’s rights. The party women’s sections were liquidated in 1929; homosexuality was made a crime in 1934; abortion, which had been legalized in 1920, was illegalized in 1936; from 1935 through 1944 divorce was made increasingly expensive and complicated; and in 1944 even coeducation was abolished. To accomplish these measures, Stalin relied on the conservatizing influence of the peasantry, which generally was alone in welcoming them.

Of course, at each stage Stalinist apologists could find economic and social reasons for each of Stalin’s counterrevolutionary measures. As Trotsky said in The Revolution Betrayed, “You cannot ‘abolish’ the family; you have to replace it. The actual emancipation of women is unrealizable on the basis of ‘generalized want’!” Thus, even the revolutionary government of Lenin and Trotsky had to face horrendous problems, especially in terms of the family and women’s emancipation. For example, in 1922 Lenin’s wife Krupskaya estimated that there were seven million homeless children, while Lunacharsky, Commissar of Education, estimated nine million. Adoption had to be illegalized in 1926 to prevent the exploitation of child labor by the peasantry! The chief “accomplishment” of Stalin was to turn difficult conditions into a rationale for entrusting all power to a conservative, counterrevolutionary ruling clique which adapted to the backwardness in order to survive.

Women Under “Third World” Stalinism

In Yugoslavia, China, North Vietnam and Cuba, petty-bourgeois leaderships commanding peasant-based armies succeeded, because of exceptional historical circumstances, in overturning capitalism despite their completely pro-capitalist, “democratic” programs. This fact alone has enabled these countries to play a role free of direct economic and political subservience to imperialism; that is, enabled them to fulfill the basic task of the anti-colonial revolution. But these victories took place as military confrontations which were lost by the imperialist and allied native bourgeois forces despite the best efforts of the “revolutionary” leaderships to sell out the struggle in exchange for a “revolution” safely contained under capitalism (such as did happen in Algeria and most similar situations). The proletariat, a victim of earlier defeats, lacked leadership and failed to playa role as an active contender for power in these revolutions.

As a consequence, what emerged was not proletarian democracy, but regimes as bureaucratically deformed as that which emerged from the degeneration of the revolution in the Soviet Union-i.e., deformed workers states. Within these regimes, once again the emancipation of women is a most accurate gauge of the general emancipation. While women have been granted formal equality, no consistent, concerted effort has been made to liberate them from domestic slavery. While women have increased their access to socially productive roles, they are generally restricted to those areas which are a simple extension of domestic work, such as textiles and nursing. In North Vietnam, after 26 years of war, women are still not permitted to play a combat role in the regular army. And only the exigencies of war have forced the North Vietnamese bureaucracy to establish nurseries and creches. Birth control and abortion are legalized and illegalized at the whim of the bureaucracy.

Politically, women are no more or less disenfranchised than their husbands in the absence of proletarian democracy. In the absence of special party sections for women, there are no special vehicles to train and equip them to enter the party. The recruitment of women is generally done through moral exhortation. Most women are shunted off to the local Women’s Democratic Federation where they can circulate petitions for peace, justice and equality. In China, the Women’s Democratic Federation, which once claimed a membership of 70 million, was headed by Liu Shao-chi’s wife; it was therefore abolished by the Cultural Revolution!

In backward and colonial countries, petty-bourgeois classes oppressed by feudalism and imperialism, particularly the peasantry, are more numerous than the proletariat. In order to come to power, the proletariat must mobilize these classes behind it in the struggle against imperialism and for basic democratic rights. Yet the proletariat is the only consistently revolutionary, anti-capitalist force in these countries. In order to overthrow capitalism and begin an unobstructed path toward socialism, the revolution must be made on the proletariat’s terms and with its program. The family as an economic unit enslaving women could then be replaced through socialization of the means of production and reproduction of labor power. But the revolution which rests on the peasantry or on a specious amalgamation of the interests of peasants and workers (that is, on a modified program of a section of the petty bourgeoisie) finds that for the peasantry, the family is the existing economic unit of small-scale agriculture, as opposed to the factories and socialized industries of the workers. Unlike the workers, the class interests of the peasants are based on deepening private ownership of small plots, which means retaining the family structure. But the peasants are incapable of reorganizing society. Their conservatizing influence can only be overcome through the leadership of the workers.

Thus, the interrelationship between the land question and the family is a key to understanding the zigzags of the degenerated and deformed workers states. For industrialization requires a food surplus; a food surplus requires mechanization; mechanization requires industrialization, etc. How to break out of this vicious cycle? The New Economic Policy (NEP), primitive socialist accumulation (the tax in kind), persuasion and example were the methods of Lenin and Trotsky. Bureaucratic fiat, whose parameters are only the precipices of catastrophe, is the method of Stalinism, which veers from Stalin’s “Kulaks, enrich yourselves” and Mao’s New Democracy to forced collectivization and the Great Leap Forward. During the Great Leap Forward and Stalin’s forced collectivization, women were encouraged to participate in social production, and the family tended to be subordinated. But these measures did not correspond to the real tempo of economic development, and no substitutes for the family as an economic unit were developed. Stalinist regimes were thus forced to strengthen the family structure as the only non-revolutionary way out of the chaos they had created and to conciliate the enraged peasantry. The proletariat, precisely the class for whom the family plays no economic role, is destined by history to lead the struggle for women’s’ emancipation.

Women and Permanent Revolution

While class exploitation is the main axis of social struggle, it is not the only form of social oppression. Insensitivity to the special forms of oppression, national, racial and generational as well as sexual, is a form of opportunism. Economism, the ideology of trade-union bureaucrats and their hangers-on like the [then leftist] Labor Committee and the Workers League, thrives on such opportunism. However, refusal to see the interlocked nature of special oppression and the class struggle, to posit roads (e.g., bourgeois feminism) other than the class struggle for dealing with special oppression, is both reactionary and utopian. Because the question of women’s oppression and the family is fundamental to class society, the solution can only be a global uprooting of capitalist property and the preparation for a classless communist society. Only an international proletarian party, conscious of its tasks and mission, can provide the necessary leadership for such an upheaval.

Smash the Reactionary Junta

For Workers Revolution in Chile!

 

[First printed as a Workers Vanguard supplement dated Sept. 13 1973]

 

SEPTEMBER 12-Yesterday’s rightist coup in Chile put a bloody end to the three-year-old Popular Unity government headed by President Salvador Allende. This seizure of power by the military is a serious defeat for the international working class, leading to a naked assault against the workers’ organizations and to the massacre of possibly thousands of proletarian militants. It is not yet clear to what extent the Chilean workers and peasants will forcibly resist the putschists; their heroic will to defend their organizations is not in doubt, but the Allende government consistently refused to arm the workers. It is the duty of all U.S. working – ciass organizations, both trade unions and parties, to launch an immediate, united-front protest against the counterrevolutionary coup. Smash the reactionary junta- For workers revolution in Chile!

 

The events of the last two days tragically confirm the Spartacist League’s warnings that the Chilean working people would pay in blood for the treachery of their leaders. The triumph of bourgeois reaction after three years of the Allende government was no accident! It was prepared by the very nature of the Unidad Popular [UP-Popular Unity] coalition.

 

As the Spartacist League insisted in a leaflet issued on September 4:

 

“The government of the Unidad Popular is not a workers government. It is a coalition of workers and capitalist parties. The presence of the ‘radical’ bourgeoisie and the ‘democratic’ generals is a guarantee that the Allende government will not step beyond the bounds of capitalism. Their presence is a guarantee that the workers and peasants will be left disarmed and atomized in the face of the impending rightist coup. Rather than pressuring Allende… we must instead calI on the workers to break sharply with the bourgeois popular front and the government parties, to fight for a workers and peasants government based on a revolutionary program of expropriation of the agrarian and industrial bourgeoisie.”

 

The seductive claims of the dominant workers parties that socialism could be won through elections and parliamentary action and in collaboration with “progressive” sections of the bourgeoisie have again proven to be simply the formula for defeat. The so called “Chilean road to socialism” was lauded the world over by pro-Moscow Communist Parties as the model of revolution through peaceful coexistence; and the Chilean capitalists -touted as the most “democratic” bourgeoisie of Latin America, with the most “non-political” military- were supposed to passively acquiesce to the transition to socialism!

 

But only the independent class mobilization of the proletariat to seize state power in its own name can open the road to socialism. A popular front is by its very nature- its alliance with a section of the ruling class- confined within the bounds of capitalism. It can never prepare the way for workers power. It can succeed only in frightening the forces of bourgeois reaction to the point that they undertake a concerted and brutal assault on the workers. in alienating and driving into the arms of the reaction sections of the petty bourgeoisie which would have split if faced with a clear proletarian pole, and in disorienting the workers through class collaborationist illusions so that they cannot mobilize an organized and united self-defense against ‘the rightist reaction. The lesson of Chile today is the lesson of the Spanish Civil War of the 1930’s: if the workers do not learn in time that popular fronts, parliamentarism and peaceful coexistence lead to defeat, they will pay with their lives.

 

What Was the Popular Unity?

 

The Popular Unity coalition was made up of the dominant workers parties, the reformist Communists and Socialists, together with the Radical Party and left Christian Democrats. Since the 1970 elections both the Radicals and left Christian Democrats have had splits, with pro-UP sections moving leftward and even claiming to support socialism. But the essence of the Popular Unity as a bloc with a section of the bourgeoisie was not changed. The UP government from the beginning rested on a tacit agreement with the dominant bourgeois party, the Christian Democrats, without whose votes Allende could not get a single one of his reforms passed by Congress. More recently as the rightist attack on the government sharpened, the role of chief guarantor of the interests of the bourgeoisie within the government was taken over by the military ministers.

 

The government adopted a policy of appeasing the rightists and increasing repression of the workers. Thus after the “bosses’ work stoppage” by the truck owners and shopkeepers during November 1972. Allende invited the military leaders into the government and promulgated a law which permits unannounced raids by the military in search of arms. This law, though ostensibly directed against both right and left-wing extremists, has in fact been used exclusively against the unions, the occupied factories and the workers parties, while fascist groups such as Patria y Libertad built up sizeable arms stockpiles. Then during May and June the government provoked a copper miners’ strike at the El Teniente mine by attempting to do away with the sliding scale of wages (cost-of-living escalator), and turned machine guns on the workers during the course of the strike (see WV No. 23, 22 June 1973).

 

Popular Front and Parliamentary Cretinism

 

Although the reformists have constantly attempted to portray Chile as the most radical popular-front government in history (compared to Spain 1936-39, France 1934-36 or Chile at different times from 1936 to 1948), the myth is far from reality. Thus in Spain the industrial centers were entirely in the hands of workers militias for much of the period after July 1936 and most of the factories were operated under workers control. In Chile, Allende signed an agreement in 1970 not to permit the formation of workers militias nor to promote officers from outside the graduates of the military academies. thus guaranteeing that the army would remain firmly under the control of the professional military elite. The Spanish workers were armed; for the most part, Chilean workers are not.

 

But a popular front is a popular front. The Spanish workers were defeated by Franco because they did not have a revolutionary leadership which struggled to overthrow capitalism. Instead the workers and peasants were constrained by the Stalinist Communist Party and the Assault Guards to remain within the bounds of bourgeois democracy. In their more honest moments the Stalinists would justify this in terms of not “scaring the bourgeoisie,” but they also had a theory to justify it. While Lenin had made the slogan “All Power to the Soviets” world-famous as the call for a workers revolution, Stalin” discovered” in 1924 that before the stage of soviets there had to come an intermediate “democratic” stage. In essence this was identical to the position of the reformist social democrats, who called for winning power through parliamentary elections as a “step” in the gradual transformation of capitalism. Now in the 1970’s this theory was resurrected by Allende’s UP:

 

“Since the National Congress is based on the people’s vote, there is nothing in its nature which prevents it from changing itself in order to become, in fact, the Parliament of the People. The Chilean Armed Forces ‘and the Carabineros, faithful to their duty and to their tradition of non- intervention in the political process, will support a social organization which corresponds to the will of the people …. ”

-S. Allende, “First Message to Congress,” December 1970

 

Historical experience again disproved this reformist fairy tale yesterday for the nth time!

 

The Chilean CP has throughout lived up to its Stalinist mission of reformist betrayal. Thus, in line with the Stalinists’ call to broaden the Popular Unity to include the Christian Democrats, they also opposed an extensive program of nationalizations. In order to “regularize the economy” CP minister Orlando Mill introduced legislation which would restrict nationalizations to certain specific sectors and return factories occupied by the workers to their “legal” owners!

 

The CP not only oppose’d the formation of workers militias, but Luis Corvalan, secretary-general of the party, rejected any form of arming the workers since such proposals “are equivalent to showing distrust in the army.” (This is, of course, true. And the Stalinists, of course, never show distrust in the bourgeois army. Thus even after yesterday’s coup, the Daily World [12 September] claimed only “a section” of the armed forces were involved, particularly the “traditionally upper middle-class Air Force.” The army no doubt appreciated this “trust,” which facilitated the generals’ reactionary coup.)

 

Shortly before the coup, French CP leader Bernard Fajon returning from Chile held a press conference in order to denounce:

 

“… certain economic theories whichput the accent on the destruction of the old structures ….

 

“The occupation of the factories by the workers… transformed in certain cases into taking possession of companies

not included in the program of nationalizations….

 

” … irresponsible and adventurist positions, such as the leftist slogan of calling on the soldiers to disobey [orders], which facilitates the efforts of officers favorable to a coup d’etat: such as the leftist slogan of exclusive workers control in all factories, tending to line up the engineers and professionals against the working class….

 

“The Communist Party of Chile has led and leads the most consistent struggle against these absolutely crazy views…”

 

-Le Monde, 3 September

 

Meanwhile, as the CP was clamoring to unite with the Christian Democrats and disarm the “ultra-leftists,” calling on the workers to give up the factories to their legal owners, the Soviet Union gave practically nothing in the way of economic aid to Chile. The utter cynicism which lies behind the Stalinists’ calls for “unity of all democratic forces” (i.e., including the Christian Democrats in Chile who just helped prepare a counterrevolutionary coup, and such liberal U.S. Democrats as Lyndon Johnson) can be seen in Angela Davis’ foolish remark at a pro-Allende rally following the coup: “I don’t think it’s a defeat, it’s a setback of course” (New York Times, 12 September). With setbacks like this, what would a real defeat look like? .

 

But the class-collaborationist logic of Stalinism is not limited to the direct followers of Brezhnev and Kosygin. The erstwhile guerrilla warrior Fidel Castro made his support for the bourgeois UP government clear in all of its glory during his visit November 1971 when he called on copper workers at the Chuquicamata mine to moderate their wage demands and work harder. A few months later he again expressed his “antiimperialist” solidarity by inviting Chilean generals to visit Cuba.

 

Preparation of the Coup

 

In order to excuse their own betrayals in Chile the Stalinists are now claiming that the coup is the work of fascists and extreme reactionaries in league with the CIA. There is no doubt that the ultra-right provided leadership of the coup and was in contact with the U.S. government. ITT’s offer of $1 million in 1970 to dump Allende is certainly not unrelated to the “accidental” presence of American navy ships in Chilean waters on the day of the coup.

 

But to hold only the “ultras” and the CIA responsible for the coup is to ignore the bulk of the Chilean bourgeoisie. The CP wants us to believe that only American capitalists will protect their property! In reality, the Chilean capitalists saw the handwriting on the wall as workers committees took over hundreds of factories following the abortive coup on June 29; they were joined by the military general staff after the discovery of leftist cells in the navy in early August. The September 11 coup is their answer. This coup was no fascist plot or the work of a few military “ultras.” It represents the decision by the key sectors of the bourgeoisie to smash the increasingly militant workers movement. Every important section of the Chilean capitalist class, including the “moderate” Christian Democrats and the “constitutionalist” officers, is involved in one way or another.

 

That its real aim is to smash the workers movement was amply proven on the first day of military rule. The fall of the government itself was quickly, almost surgically, accomplished by a classic pronunciamento by the heads of the armed forces and a short bombardment of the presidential palace. The presidential guard surrendered, while Allende either committed suicide or was shot. But during the first day of military rule, more than 1,000 people were killed and more than 100 leaders of workers parties and unions arrested. The generals threatened to blow up any factory which resisted.

 

Their particular concern was the mushrooming workers committees (the “cordones industriales”) in the industrial belts around Santiago. The New York Times (12 September) reported: “In the proclamation by the junta that seized power today, the factory groups were cited as a reason for the revolt.” The day before, an air force commando, had attempted to raid the important Sumar textile factory, looking for arms. The workers, who have occupied the factory, successfully repulsed the soldiers with gunfire and the commando was eventually forced to retreat as reinforcements from surrounding plants arrived (Le Monde, 11 September). The air force had carried out similar raids twice during August, apparently trying to provoke a shootout with the workers. This time they lost and that was perhaps the last straw; it was hIgh time to get rid of Allende. Brought to power in order to control the labor movement, he lost his usefulness as he increasingly proved unable to discipline the workers. And with a flick of its finger, the bourgeoisie toppled him.

 

That the coup was not simply the work of the fascists and ultrareactionaries is shown by several facts. In addition to Admiral Jose Toribia Merino, a’ sympathizer of Patria y Libertad, the junta also includes Army commander General Augusto Pinochet, a leading “constitutionalist.” Moreover, the whole recent chain of events was triggered by the resignation of General Carlos Prats on August 23. General Prats, the leading “constitutionalist” and MInIster of Defense, stepped down In order, as he put It, to preserve the unity of the institution” (the military). He was followed by two other military ministers. These resignations represented a vote of no confidence in the government by all wings of the general staff of the armed forces. From that time on, the coup was simply a question of timing and personnel.

 

Nor was it simply a military matter. The atmosphere for the military takeover was provided by the economic chaos resulting from the truck owners’, shopkeepers’ and professionals’ work stoppage which had continued for more than a· month and a half. This was a clearly political effort designed to bring down the government, as was the similar work stoppage last year. The truck owners’ confederation is closely tied to the National Party, while most of the other professional associations are linked to the Christian Democrats. Both in November and August of this year the CDP, directly called on its professional associations to join the counterrevolutionary action. Thus while its leaders in parliament talked soothingly of waiting until the 1976 elections, the Christian Democratic Party was preparing the coup along with every other sector of the bourgeoisie.

 

The “Revolutionary” Left

 

As the masses of Chilean worker’s and peasants have become progressively disillusioned with the reformist CP and SP they have begun searching for an alternative leadership. Many have joined the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionario [MIR-Revolutionary Left Movement], the most important group to the left of the UP. The MIR is a New Left-Castroite group which until 1970 concentrated largely on organizing peasants for land takeovers and guerrilla warfare, After taking an ultra-left line by abstaining from the 1970 election on principle, the MIR suddenly flip-flopped and issued a statement immediately after the election giving Allende critical support. It continued to call for support to the UP in one form or another until the very end: “The Revolutionary Left Movement maintains that although we do not agree with every step of the Popular Unity, that although we have differences with aspects of its policies, this does not signify that we come to a definitive break with the Popular Unity” (Punto Final, 9 November 1971). But it precisely is a “definitive break” that is called for. Here we have a government tied to a section of the bourgeoisie, whose main task is to hold the workers back from revolution -and the MIR gives it critical support! By this act of class betrayal it must take a major responsibility for the coup.

 

Furthermore, the MIR failed to raise as a key demand throughout this period the arming of the workers and the formation of workers militias based on the unions (and cordones industriales). Instead MIR documents speak only in the most general terms of the limits of peaceful reforms and of the need to “accumulate power to crush any seditious attempt or the civil war which the exploiters will attempt” (El Rebelde, 23-30 May). The main activity of the organization has been land and factory takeovers which, however militant they may be, failed to take on the question of the Allende government.

 

ChiIe and the American Left

 

Thus among the major socialist organizations in Chile there is none that called for the replacement of the popular-front regime with a workers government, i.e., called for the working class to break from the bourgeoisie; they instead capitulated to the UP government’s (initial) tremendous popularity among the working masses. In the U.S., of all the ostensibly Trotskyist organizations the only one to take a clear stand against the popular-front UP government from the beginning was the Spartacist League. Immediately after the 1970 elections we wrote:

 

“It is the most elementary duty for revolutionary MarxIsts to irreconcliably oppose the Popular Front in the election and to place absolutely no confidence in it in power. Any ‘critical support’ to the Allende coalition is class treason, paving the way for a bloody defeat for the Chilean working people when domestic reaction, abetted by international imperialism, is ready.”

 

–Spartacist, NovemberDecember 1970

 

By way of contrast, the opportunist Workers League wrote that “the workers must hold Allende to his promises…”(Bulletin, 21 September 1970) while the ex-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party’s initial evaluation of the Allende election(Intercontinental Press, 5 October 1970) amounted to defacto critical support: “…failing to recognize the positive elements in it, condemning it in toto out of some sectarian dogmatism, would mean suicidal isolation.” It would certainly have meant isolation in the early months of the Popular Unity government. But the principled Trotskyist position of unswerving opposition to the popular front was in fact the only alternative to suicide. It was support for Allende that led to the present counterrevolutionaiy coup.

 

A slogan cannot be applied mechanically in all situations. Thus at the time of the June 29 coup and during late August the SL called for “a united front of all workers organizations to smash the rightist-militarist offensive in Chile, while continuing to struggle for the overthrow of the popular front government of ‘socialists’ and generals by proletarian revolution” (“Showdown in Chile,” 4 September). Today, Marxists must struggle to smash the junta by a workers’ uprising. To call for support to the UP is to reaffirm a policy whose suicidal nature is being demonstrated at this very moment: In a similar situation, when faced with the attempt in August 1917 by General Kornilov to overthrow the Kerensky government and crush the revolutionary workers of Petrograd, the Bolsheviks called for a united front of all workers organizations to smash the counterrevolutionary conspirators and even fought alongside the troops of the bourgeois Kerensky government. “Even now we must not support Kerensky’s government,” wrote Lenin:

 

“We shall fight, we are fighting against Kornilov, just as Kerensky’s troops do, but we do not support Kerensky. On the contrary we expose his weakness. There is the difference. It is rather a subtle difference, but it is highly essential and must not be forgotten.”

 

-·To the Central Committee of the R.S.D.L.P.,” 30 August 1917

 

But of course in the Chilean situation it would be manifestly absurd to call for even military support to the UP government, which has already been smashed.

 

Similarly to calIon all “democrats” to defend civil liberties is to fail to understand the nature of the present coup. The junta will undoubtedly suppress civil liberties, even for the bourgeois parties, for a certain time. But its fundamental job is to crush the workers movement and it, in turn, can only be destroyed by a proletarian offensive.

 

Never have the lines between revolutionary Marxism and opportunism been clearer. They are drawn in blood, the coin in which betrayals are paid.

SWP Uses Watergate Methods Against Trotskyists

[First printed in Workers Vanguard #29, 28 September 1973]

DETROIT~Taking time out from their international faction fight and legal suit against Nixon for his Watergate-type harassment of them, the leadership of the Socialist Workers Partj recently expelled three of its members using evidence gathered with its own (rather inept) brand of “dirty tricks.” Among other things, the SWP had four of its members hiding in the bushes around the Spartacist League summer camp in August and instructed a YSA member to act like a Spartacist sympathizer in the time-honored agent-provocateur manner, The victims, Irene Gorgosz and Michael Milin, both of the Detroit branch, and Gerald Clark of the Oakland-Berkeley branch, were the three signers of the “Declaration of Revolutionary Internationalist Tendency” submitted to the SWP preconvention discussion. The charges brought against these comrades were “collaboration with the Spartacist League” and double recruiting. At the three sham “trials,” the charges against these comrades were patently only pretexts for a political expulsion, exposing the hypocrisy and intriguing of the SWP majority.

The Revolutionary Internationalist Tendency (RIT) had stood counterposed to both the International Majority Tendency (IMT) and the SWP majority-led Leninist~Trotskyist Tendency (see WV No. 28, 14 September). The “Declaration” wages a broad attack on the SWP’s deepening immersion in reformism and petty-bourgeois “movements” in the face of an intensifying capitalist crisis and working-class restlessness. At the same time its criticisms of the IMT are fundamental:

“The International Majority Tendency in standing for the petty-bourgeois guerrilla road in the colonial world which even if successful could at best lead to a deformed workers state, and at the expense of a working class centered revolution-has reaped with the PRT-ERP the inevitable consequences: that for such guerrillas, a Mao or a Castro, not a Trotsky, is their legitimate ideological hero and inspirer. In Europe, the IMT’s latest fad is the phrase “new mass vanguard” and the revolution guaranteed within five years. These quick remedies are not one bit superior to the concept of ‘red universities’ as the bastions of revolution, or ‘from the periphery to the center,’ since for many years they lamentably failed to turn Stalinist and reformist bureaucrats into involuntary revolutionaries through the tactic of ‘deep entryism.’ And for the United States, the IMT has been content to endorse the whole past work of the SWP, suggesting only that it might have been given a. somewhat more radical cover.”

–” Declaration of Revolutionary Internationalist Tendency,”

SWP Discussion Bulletin Vol. 31, No. 22, July 1973

In contrast the RIT stood on the general line of the two documents submitted by Gerald Clark: “The Only Road to Revolution is Through the Proletariat” (SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vo1.31, No. 1, April 1973) and “A Program for Building a Proletarian Party: In Opposition to the Centrism of the Party Majority” (SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 31, No. 14, June 1973). Starting with the premise that the “question of building a mass, proletarian World Party of Socialist Revolution” is the “central task facing revolutionaries throughout the world,” the first document traces the betrayals of both wing of the United Secretariat fight on the questions of Vietnam, Latin America, Cuba, the Middle East and strongly argues for the adoption of the Leninist conception of a democratic-centralist International.

The second document authored by Clark deals with the SWP’s policies regarding students and the “new radicalization, ” nationalism, community control, the chicano and women’s struggles, the antiwar movement and democratic centralism. In each case the document counterposes to the SWP’s abandonment of Trotskyism a revolutionary proletarian approach to these questions. It emphasizes the critical necessity of the application of the Transitional Program as opposed to adaptation to the present consciousness of the “masses” and demonstrates historically the importance of democratic-centralist functioning in regard to party-building and youth-party relations.

A third important document, “The Fight in the United Secretariat:Reformist Appetite Versus Guerrillaist Centrism” by Michael Milin (SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 31, No. 28) examines the legalistic, class-collaborationist approach of the SWP on the one hand and the capitulation of the IMT to insurrectionary nationalist Stalinism on the other hand. Each side, while seeking to establish for itself orthodox Leninist credentials in contrast with the other, at the same time shrinks from fundamental criticism of the other side for fear of exposing its own past opportunism:

“The central revision of revolutionary Marxism by the international majority is the separation of the class organization of an insurrection from the society emerging from it. A revolutionary workers state, in which the working class democratically governs on the basis of collectivized property, can only be established if the armed forces of the labor movement itself play the dominant role in overthrowing the capitalist state ••••

“For many years, the SWP leadership was not only an ardent advocate of guerrilla war, but engaged in idiot enthusing over the Castro regime and Fidelista movement. The SWP’s selfstyled orthodox turn against guerrillaism is part of its rightward motion in adopting a reformist program acceptable to sections of the liberal bourgeoisie. “

–“The Fight in the United Secretariat”

It was for these politics that the SWP expelled the three RIT comrades.

.

Snakes in the Grass with Binoculars

The trial of Milin and Gorgosz was highlighted by the revelation that the SWP was modelling its intelligence gathering methods on old cowboy-and Indian movies. The charge of “collaboration with an opponent organization” was proven on the basis of Milin’s and Gorgosz’s admitted attendance at certain sessions of last month’s SL summer camp. However their admission was not sufficient, for the Detroit executive committee took the trouble to plant four spies for direct observation on the camp grounds during the entire duration of the camp:

“The method used to “get” these two comrades was the method of Watergate. Surreptitiously sneaking into the woods surrounding the camp, the accusers spied on people whose only crime was that they were there and disagreed with the program of the party majority. Crawling on their bellies ‘for the party,’ comrades Kelly, Bechler, Fruit and Wallace, equipped, one assumes with binoculars and other assorted James Bond do-i t-yourself spying devices, scanned the campsite in the hope of recognizing the ‘disloyal’ elements in the act. I could just imagine the look on comrade Kelly’s face as he spotted not one, but two, three, many ex-SWPers in the crowd: comrades he once collaborated with when they were members of the party. But all that crawling around had its rewards: they spotted two faces they recognized, comrades Milin and Gorgosz. A job well done comrade Kelly! Maybe now they will give you a seat on the National Committee. “

–Clark to SWP Political Committee, 27 August 1973

As an additional reward the SWP might recommend its four intrepid woodsmen for an appropriate Boy Scout merit badge. The Detroit exec had also gone to great lengths to find the exact camp location. While the camp itself was widely publicized and open to a broad range of interested people, the location was given only to those serious about attending. Stating that “it was a source of information [it] might want to use in the future,” the exec refused to reveal how it discovered the location.

This unsavory activity was not the only devious tactic used by the SWP to “expose” the two “disloyal” elements. The two comrades were also charged with double recruiting on evidence provided by a majority agent, YSA member Steve Beumer. Professing to RIT supporters in July and August his intention to quit the YSA and his interest in the SL, this comrade miraculously abandoned his differences, went over to the majority and was accepted into party membership a mere two weeks after the Oberlin SWP convention in early August. In fact it was the party majority that engaged in double recruiting in order to procure an agent to work in its interests!

By the SWP’s bureaucratic anti-Leninist norms, members of the YSA must be treated as members of an opponent group. SWP members function under party discipline within the youth organization. Thus the youth are treated as political infants incapable of making intelligent decisions. While they are privy to internal party discussions (a good percentage of the Oberlin SWP Convention attendance was composed of non-party youth), they are expected to refrain from taking position on the party’s disputes! It was this paternalist, front-group attitude toward the YSA which impelled the party and youth leaderships to rid themselves of the troublemakers in the RIT before the youth preconvention discussion scheduled for this fall.

“Dirty Tricks” versus Principled Political Struggle

This was not the first time that agents provocateurs were used by the SWP /YSA majority in order to create charges sufficient (in their eyes) for the expulsion of a dissident minority. In July of this year three YSAers were expelled for “political solidarity with SL” (see RCY Newsletter Supplement, August 1973). In their case much of the prosecution’s evidence was supplied by a majority agent who, again professing interest in the politicS put forward by the three in branch meetings, encouraged their expressions of sympathy to SL/RCY politics. The method of entrapment, well known to the FBI and narcotics agencies, can do nothing but promote cynicism and suspicion among the SWP /YSA ranks. Apparently SL politics are so threatening to the SWP that it is willing to use all types of “dirty tricks” to root out a suspect.

These tactics, which are used in place of open political struggle, . have led to a fear of all political opposition and an atmosphere where intelligent discussion of opponent tendencies is necessarily reserved for guilty closet meetings. In fact the SWP ranks are treated to precious little “official” analysis of other organizations. Those rare references to other groups are usually superficial characterizations leading, for instance, to the lumping together of the SL and Workers League as “sectarian” or “ultra-left,” a gross distortion of these two groups, whose main similarity at this point is the fact that both were expelled from the SWP in the early sixties. SWP /YSA members find themselves disarmed, then, in the face of opponents; they have only cynicism or nervous half-serious repetitions of vague generalities at their disposal for polemics. It is not surprising, therefore, that exposure to the real politics of the SL or of groupings moving toward the SL, politics which represent the continuity of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, is a serious threat to the reformist leadership of the SWP.

Prosecution Lies Exposed, Defendent Proclaimed GuiIty Anyway

The Gerald Clark case was a manifest bureaucratic contrivance. Clark had been a member of the SWP for four years, a YSA member before that. As organizer of the Hayward, Cal. branch and a delegate to the 1971 SWP convention he was one of the few to vote against the “Youth Radicalization” document. His documents for the 1973 convention were deep-going criticisms of both the SWP majority and the IMT.

One of the SWP’s eagle~eyed spies reported that Clark had attended at least the first four days of the SL summer camp. Clark had little trouble proving to everyone at the trial that he had not attended the camp at all. Its first charge completely discredited, the SWP leadership fell back on its second line of defense-you guessed it, Steve Beumer. At the Oberlin SWP convention, Beumer had approached Clark and the other RITers telling them that he was dissatisfied with the YSA. He asserted that he was interested in knowing more about the SL, at which point Clark mentioned that the SL was holding a summer educatlonal camp. Beumer then tried to get Clark to attend the camp, but the latter wouldn’t consider it!

However, the trial body made it clear that the formal charges were irrelevant. Clark was really being charged withpolitical agreement with the SL and not organizational collaboration. Clark asserted that he was not an agent of the SL and, in fact, disagreed with it on important questions. The two major documents that he submitted to the pre-convention discussion should adequately answer any questions the SWP majority might have about his political beliefs.

These clearly political expulsions were motivated by the SWP’s almost pathological fear of Spartacist politics. They enabled the SWP to rid itself of a known dissident and an irritating left-wing tendency, lest an open political struggle expose the reformism of the SWP leadership

The SWP and the Fourth lnternational, 1946-54:

Genesis of Pabloism

[The following article was published in Spartacist English edition No. 21, Fall 1972. Copied from http://www.icl-fi.org/english/esp/archives/oldsite/GENESIS.HTM ]

The American Socialist Workers Party and the European Pabloists travelled at different rates along different paths to revisionism, to converge in uneasy alliance in the early 1960’s in an unprincipled “reunification,” which has now broken down as the American SWP has completed the transition from Pabloist centrism to outright reformism. The “United Secretariat” which issued out of the 1963 “reunification” teeters on the edge of an open split; the “anti-revisionist” “International Committee” fractured last year. The collapse of the various competing pretenders to the mantle of the Fourth International provides a crucial opportunity for the reemergence of an authentic Trotskyist international tendency. Key to the task of reconstructing the Fourth International through a process of splits and fusions is an understanding of the characteristics and causes of Pabloist revisionism and the flawed response of the anti-Pabloists who fought, too little and too late, on national terrain while in practice abandoning the world movement.

World War II: U.S. and France

Before the onset of the war, Trotsky and the Fourth International had believed that decaying capitalism and the rise of fascism removed the possibility, for reformism and therefore for bourgeois-democratic illusions among the masses. Yet they could not but become increasingly aware that the revulsion of the working class against fascism and the threat of fascist occupation gave rise to social chauvinism and a renewal of confidence in the “democratic” bourgeoisie permeating the proletarian masses throughout Europe and the U.S. Faced with such a contradiction, the powerful pressures of nationalist backwardness and democratic illusions in the working class tended to pull the sections of the Fourth International apart, some adopting a sectarian stance, others capitulating to the social patriotism which was rampant among the masses. The SWP briefly adopted the “Proletarian Military Policy” which called for military training under, trade union control, implicitly posing the utopian idea that U.S. workers could fight German fascism without the existence of a workers state in the U.S., through “controlling” U.S. imperialism’s army. British Trotskyist Ted Grant went even further, in one speech referring to British imperialism’s armed forces as “our Eighth Army.” The German IKD returned to outright Menshevism with the theory that fascism had brought about the need for “an intermediate stage fundamentally equivalent to a democratic revolution.” (“Three Theses,” 19 October 1941)

The French Trotskyist movement, fragmented during the course of the war, was the best example of the contradiction. One of its fragments subordinated the mobilization of the working class to the political appetites of the Gaullist wing of the imperialist bourgeoisie; another grouping renounced any struggle within the resistance movement in favor of work exclusively at the point of production and, not recognizing the existing level of reformist consciousness among the workers, adventurously attempted to seize the factories during the “liberation” of Paris while the working masses were out on the streets. The February 1944 European Conference document which was the basis for a fusion between two French groupings to form the Parti Communiste Internationaliste characterized the two groups:

“Instead of distinguishing between the nationalism of the defeated bourgeoisie which remains an expression of its imperialist preoccupations, and the ‘nationalism’ of the masses which is only a reactionary expression of their resistance against exploitation by the occupying imperialism, the leadership of the POI considered as progressive the struggle of its own bourgeoisie….”

“the CCI…under the pretext of guarding intact the heritage of Marxism-Leninism, refused obstinately to distinguish the nationalism of the bourgeoisie from the resistance movement of the masses.”

I. SWP ISOLATIONISM

European Trotskyism and American Trotskyism responded in initially different ways to different tasks and problems following World War II. The precarious internationalism of the American SWP, maintained through intimate collaboration with Trotsky during his exile in Mexico, did not survive the assassination of Trotsky in 1940 and the onset of world war. The American Trotskyists retreated into an isolation only partially forced upon them by the disintegration of the European sections under conditions of fascist triumph and illegalization.

Anticipating the difficulties of international coordination during the war, a resident International Executive Committee had been set up in New York. Its only notable achievement, however, appears to have been the convening of an “Emergency Conference” of the International, held 19-26 May 1940 “somewhere in the Western Hemisphere,” “on the initiative of its U.S., Mexican and Canadian sections.” A rump conference attended by less than half of the sections, the “Emergency Conference” was called for the purpose of dealing with the international ramifications of the Shachtman split in the U.S. section, which had resulted in the defection of a majority of the resident IEC. The meeting solidarized with the SWP in the faction fight and reaffirmed its status as the one U.S. section of the Fourth International. The conference also adopted a “Manifesto of the Fourth International on the Imperialist War and the Proletarian World Revolution” written by Trotsky. Following Trotsky’s death, however, the resident IEC lapsed into oblivion.

At least in hindsight, the American section of the Fourth International should have initiated a clandestine secretariat in a neutral country in Europe, staffed by qualified SWPers and emigres from other sections, to centralize and directly supervise the work of Trotskyists in fascist-occupied countries. But the SWP was content to limit its international activities during the war to the publication in its internal bulletin’s of letters and factional documents from European Trotskyists. The passage of the Voorhis Act in 1941 inhibiting U.S. groups from affiliation with international political organizations—a law which to this day has never been tested—also gave the SWP a rationalization for down-playing its international responsibilities.

The SWP’s work during the war did evidence an internationalist perspective. SWP longshoremen used the opportunity of ships from Vladivostok docking on the West Coast to clandestinely distribute Trotsky’s “Letter to Russian Workers” in Russian to the Soviet seamen. The SWP concentrated its merchant marine comrades on the supply runs to Murmansk until the extremely heavy casualties compelled the party to discontinue the Murmansk concentration. (It was in response to such activities that the GPU was directed to activate the Soblen anti-Trotskyist espionage net. Testimony years afterward revealed that Cannon’s telephone was tapped by the GPU and that the business manager of the SWP’s Fourth International magazine, one “Michael Cort,” was one of the GPU agents.) But the maintenance and direction of the Fourth International was part of the SWP’s internationalist responsibility, and should have been a priority as urgent as the work which the SWP undertook on its own.

The leadership of the SWP came through the war period essentially intact, but reinforced in its insularity and ill-equipped theoretically to deal with the post-war situation.

During the later years of the war and the immediate post-war period, the SWP had registered some impressive successes in implanting its cadres in industry during the boom and in recruiting a new layer of proletarian militants drawn to the Trotskyists because of their opposition to the Communist Party’s policies of social patriotism and class peace.

Optimism and Orthodoxy

SWP entered the post-war period with buoyant optimism about the prospects for proletarian revolution. The 1946 SWP Convention and its resolution, “The Coming American Revolution,” projected the indefinite continuation of successes for the SWP. The isolationist perspective of the Party was in evidence at the Convention. The necessarily international character of crises and revolutions is recognized, but not the concomitant international character of the vanguard party. The resolution in effect makes excuses for the political backwardness of the U.S. working class while praising its militancy and presents the following syllogism: the decisive battles of the world revolution will be fought in the advanced countries where the means of production are highly developed and the proletariat powerful—above all in the U.S.; therefore all that is necessary is to build the American revolution and world capitalism will be overthrown. Profound impressionism led the SWP to see the world through the eyes of American capitalism which had emerged from the war as the unquestioned pre-eminent capitalist world power.

The post-war stabilization of European capitalism, the emergence of the Stalinist parties as the dominant reformist workers parties in Europe, the expansion of Stalinism in Eastern Europe (apparently flying in the face of the Trotskyist analysis that Stalinism could only betray), the destruction of capitalism by peasant-based nationalist-Stalinist formations in Yugoslavia and China—all these developments posed new theoretical problems for the Trotskyist movement which the SWP, stripped of a layer of talented intellectuals by the petty-bourgeois Shachtman split and shortly thereafter deprived of Trotsky’s guidance, could not handle. The SWP’s immediate response was to retreat into a sterile “orthodoxy” stripped of real theoretical content, thus rendering its isolation more complete.

The 1950’s brought a new wave of spontaneous working-class struggles in West and East Europe, but to the SWP they brought the onset of the Cold War witchhunt: the Smith Act prosecutions of CPers and former CPers; the deadening of every aspect of social and intellectual life; the ‘relentless purge of known “reds” and militants’ from the union movement, severing the SWP’s connection with the working-class movement which had taken years to build up; the dropping away of the whole layer of workers recruited to the SWP during the late 1940’s. The objective pressure to become a mere cheering section for European and colonial developments was strong but the SWP hung on to its verbal orthodox commitment to making the American revolution.

II. THE BREAK IN CONTINUITY IN EUROPE

The vulnerability of the European Trotskyist movement to revisionism hinged on the historic weaknesses of the European organizations combined with the thorough shattering of their continuity to the earlier period. When Trotsky in 1934 launched the struggle to found the Fourth International, the European working class, confronted with the decisive choice of socialism or barbarism, lacked a communist leadership. The task facing the Fourth Internationalists was clear: to mobilize the class against the threat of fascism and war, to amass the cadres for the world revolutionary party which would stand for proletarian internationalism in the face of the march toward imperialist war and the social chauvinist capitulation of the Second and Third Internationals. But Trotsky had noted the immense difficulty for the conscious vanguard to go forward in a period of crushing defeat for the class and the “terrible disproportion between the tasks and the means.” (“Fighting Against the Stream,” April 1939) The weakness of the European movement was exemplified by the French section, which was repeatedly criticized by Trotsky and whose petty-bourgeois “workerist” deviation and dilettantism were the subject of a special resolution at the founding conference of the Fourth International in 1938.

The Fourth International geared itself up for the decisive struggle against fascism and war—and lost. During the course of the war and the Nazi occupations the very rudiments of international, and even national, coordination were destroyed. The International disintegrated into small groups of militants pursuing improvised policies: some opportunist, some heroic. The 65 French and German comrades who were shot by the Gestapo in July 1943 because of their revolutionary defeatist fraternization and the building of a Trotskyist cell in the German armed forces are a monument to the internationalist courage of a weak revolutionary movement fighting against insurmountable odds.

Trotskyist Cadres Decimated

In August 1943 an attempt was made to reestablish the rudiments of organization in Europe. The European Secretariat set up at this meeting in Belgium included exactly one surviving member of the pre-war leadership and largely as a result of the nonexistence of tested cadres, Michel Pablo (Raptis), a skilled clandestine organizer not known for ability as a political leader or theoretician, emerged as the head of the International. When in June 1945 a European Executive Committee met to prepare for the holding of a World Congress, the experienced leading cadres and the most promising of the young Trotskyists (A. Leon, L. Lesoil, W. Held) had been killed at the hands of the Nazis or the GPU. The continuity of Trotskyism in Europe had been broken. This tragic process was duplicated elsewhere with the imprisonment and eventual execution of Ta Thu-tau and the Vietnamese Trotskyists, the virtual extinction of the Chinese Trotskyists and the liquidation of the remaining Russian Trotskyists (including, besides Trotsky, Ignace Reiss, Rudolf Klement and Leon Sedov). The Europeans were apparently so starved for experienced leading cadres that Pierre Frank (leading member of the Molinier group which Trotsky denounced as “demoralized centrists” in 1935 and expelled in 1938 for refusing to break with the French social-democracy after the “French Turn”) was enabled to become a leader of the post-war French section.

At this crucial juncture the intervention and leadership of a truly internationalist American Trotskyist party might have made a great difference. But the SWP, which should have assumed leadership in the International throughout the war years, was sunk in its own national preoccupations. Cannon noted later that the SWP leadership had deliberately built up Pablo’s authority, even going “so far as to soft-pedal a lot of our differences” (June 1953). The urgent responsibility of the SWP, which whatever its deficiencies was the strongest and most experienced Trotskyist organization, was precisely the opposite.

III. ORTHODOXY REASSERTED

The immediate task facing the Trotskyists after the war was to reorient its cadres and reassess the situation of the vanguard and the class in light of previous projections. The Trotskyists’ expectations of tottering West European capitalist regimes and the renewal of violent class struggle throughout Europe, and especially in Germany where the collapse of Nazi state power left a vacuum, had been confirmed. However the reformists, particularly the Stalinist parties, reasserted themselves to contain the spontaneous working-class upsurges. Control of the French working class through the CGT passed from the social democracy (SFIO) which had controlled the CGT before the war to the French Stalinists. Thus despite the manifest revolutionary spirit of the European working class and the great waves of general strikes, especially in France, Belgium, Greece and Italy, throughout West Europe, the proletariat did not take power and the Stalinist apparatus emerged with new strength and solidity.

The Fourth International responded by falling back on sterile orthodoxy and stubborn refusal to believe that these struggles had been defeated for the immediate period:

“Under these conditions partial defeats…temporary periods of retreat…do not demoralize the proletariat…. The repeated demonstration by the bourgeoisie of its inability to restabilize an economy and political regime of the slightest stability offers the workers new opportunities to go over to even higher stages of struggle.

“The swelling of the ranks of the traditional organizations in Europe, above all the Stalinist parties…has reached its peak almost everywhere. The phase of decline is beginning.”

(European Executive Committee, April 1946)

Right-opportunist critics in the Trotskyist movement (the German IKD, the SWP’s Goldman-Morrow faction) were correct in noting the over-optimism of such an analysis and in pointing out that the traditional reformist leaderships of the working class are always the first inheritors of a renewal of militancy and struggle. Their “solution,” however, was to argue for a limitation of the Trotskyist program to bourgeois-democratic demands, and such measures as critical support to the post-war French bourgeois Constitution. Their advocacy of an entrist policy toward the European reformist parties was dismissed out of hand by the majority, which expected the workers to more or less spontaneously regroup under the Trotskyist banner. This attitude prepared the way for a sharp reversal on the entrism question when the implicit position of ignoring the reformists’ influence could no longer be maintained.

The Fourth International’s immediate post-war perspective was summed up by Ernest Germain (Mandel) in an article called “The First Phase of the European Revolution” (Fourth International, August 1946). The title already implies the outlook: “the revolution” was implicitly redefined as a metaphysical process enduring continuously and progressing inevitably toward victory, rather than a sharp and necessarily time-limited confrontation over the question of state power, the outcome of which will shape the entire subsequent period.

Stalinophobia

The later, Pabloist, capitulation to Stalinism was prepared by impressionistic overstatement of its opposite: Stalinophobia. In November 1947 Pablo’s International Secretariat wrote that the Soviet Union had become:

“a workers state degenerated to the point where all progressive manifestations of the remains of the October conquest are more and more neutralized by the disastrous effects of the Stalinist dictatorship.”

“What remains of the conquests of October is more and more losing its historic value as a premise for socialist development.”

“…from the Russian occupation forces or from pro-Stalinist governments, which are completely reactionary, we do not demand the expropriation of the bourgeoisie….”

Within the SWP, the rumor circulated that Cannon was flirting with the characterization that the Soviet Union had become a totally degenerated workers state, i.e., a “state capitalist” regime—a position which Natalia Trotsky shortly embraced.

On the question of the Stalinist expansion into East Europe, the Fourth International was united in simple-minded orthodoxy. An extensive discussion of “The Kremlin in Eastern Europe” (Fourth International, November 1946) by E. R. Frank (Bert Cochran) was shrill in anti-Stalinist tone and tended toward the view that the countries occupied by the Red Army would be deliberately maintained as capitalist states. A polemic against Shachtman by Germain dated 15 November 1946 was still more categorical: the theory of “a degenerated workers state being installed in a country where there has not yet previously been a proletarian revolution.” is dismissed, simply, as “absurd.” And Germain rhetorically queries, “Does [Shachtman] really think that the Stalinist bureaucracy has succeeded in overthrowing capitalism in half of our continent?” (Fourth International, February 1947)

The methodology here is the same as that pursued, more cynically, by the “International Committee” in later years over the question of Cuba (perplexed? then deny reality!) with the difference that the class character of East Europe, with capitalist economic institutions but the state power held by the occupying army of a degenerated workers state, was far more difficult to understand. Empiricists and renegades, of course, had no difficulty in characterizing the East European states:

“Everyone knows that in the countries where the Stalinists have taken power they have proceeded, at one or another rate of speed, to establish exactly the same economic, political, social regime as exists in Russia. Everyone knows that the bourgeoisie has been or is rapidly being expropriated, deprived of all its economic power, and in many cases deprived of mortal existence…. Everyone knows that what remnants of capitalism remain in those countries will not even be remnants tomorrow, that the whole tendency is to establish a social system identical with that of Stalinist Russia,”

(Max Shachtman, “The Congress of the Fourth International,” October 1948 New International)

Excruciating as this ridicule must have, been for them, however, the orthodox Trotskyists were trapped in their analysis because they could not construct a theory to explain the East Europe transformation without embracing non-revolutionary conclusions.

German, as was typical for him in those years, at least posed the theoretical dilemma clearly: is the Trotskyist understanding of Stalinism correct if Stalinism shows itself willing in some cases to accomplish any sort of anti-capitalist social transformation? Clinging to orthodoxy, the Trotskyists had lost a real grasp of theory and suppressed part of Trotsky’s dialectical understanding of Stalinism as a parasitic and counterrevolutionary caste sitting atop the gains of the October Revolution, a kind of treacherous middle-man poised between the victorious Russian proletariat and world imperialism. Having thus reduced dialectical materialism to static dogma, their disorientation was complete when it became necessary to answer Germain’s question in the affirmative, and the way was prepared for Pabloist revisionism to leap into the theoretical void.

Fourth International Flirts with Tito

Virtually without exception the Fourth International was disoriented by the Yugoslav revolution. After some twenty years of Stalinist monolithism, the Trotskyists were perhaps ill-disposed to scrutinize the anti-Stalin Yugoslav CP too carefully. The Yugoslav Titoists were described as “comrades” and “left centrists,” and Yugoslavia as “a workers state established by a proletarian revolution.” In one of several “Open Letters” to Tito, the SWP wrote: “The confidence of the masses in it [“your party”] will grow enormously and it will become the effective collective expression of the interests and desires of the proletariat of its country.” The Yugoslav revolution posed a new problem (later recapitulated by the Chinese, Cuban and Vietnamese experiences): unlike East Europe, where the social transformations were accomplished by the army of a foreign degenerated workers state, the Yugoslav revolution was clearly an indigenous social revolution which, without the intervention of the working class or the direction of a Trotskyist party,succeeded in establishing a (deformed) workers state. The Fourth International avoided the theoretical problem by dubbing the revolution “proletarian” and the Titoists “left centrists.” (The SWP avoided the question of China by refusing to unambiguously characterize the Maoist regime as a deformed workers state until 1955. As late as 1954 two articles by the Phillips tendency, characterizing China as state capitalist, were published in the SWP’s Fourth International.)

Again orthodoxy is maintained but robbed of its content. The impulse, resisted until Pablo was to give it consistent expression, was that the ability of non-proletarian, non-Trotskyist forces to accomplish any form of social overturn robbed the Fourth International of its reason for existence. The crucial qualitative distinction between a workers state and a deformed workers state—demarcated in blood in the need for political revolution to open the road to socialist development and the extension of the revolution abroad—had been lost.

IV. PABLOISM CONQUERS

The numerically weak, socially isolated, theoretically unarmed and inexperienced cadres of the post-war Fourth International were easy prey for disorientation and impatience in a situation of repeated pre-revolutionary upsurges whose course they could not influence. Beginning in early 1951 a new revisionism, Pabloism, began to assert itself, responding to the frustrating objective situation by posing an ersatz way out of the isolation of the Fourth International from the main motion of the working class. Pabloism was the generalization of this impulse in a revisionist body of theory offering impressionistic answers which were more consistent than the one-sided orthodoxy of the early post-war Fourth International.

It is crucial that the organizational weakness, lack of deep roots in the proletariat and theoretical incapacity and disorientation which were the precondition for the revisionist degeneration of the Fourth International not be simply equated with the consolidation and victory of that revisionism. Despite grave political errors, the Fourth International in the immediate post-war period was still revolutionary. The SWP and the International clung to sterile orthodoxy as a talisman to ward off non-revolutionary conclusions from world events which they could no longer comprehend. History had demonstrated that at crucial junctures revolutionary Marxists have been able to transcend an inadequate theory: Lenin before April 1917 was theoretically unequipped to project a proletarian revolution in a backward country like Russia; Trotsky until 1933 had equated the Russian Thermidor with a return to capitalism. Pabloism was more than a symmetrical false theory, more than simply an impressionistic over-reaction against orthodoxy; it was a theoretical justification for a non-revolutionary impulse based on giving up a perspective for the construction of a proletarian vanguard in the advanced or the colonial countries.

In January 1951 Pablo ventured into the realm of theory with a document called “Where Are We Going?” Despite whole paragraphs of confused crackpotism and virtually meaningless bombast, the whole revisionist structure emerges:

“The relation of forces on the international chess-board is now evolving to the disadvantage of imperialism.

“An epoch of transition between capitalism and socialism, an epoch which has already begun and is quite advanced…. This transformation will probably take an entire period of several centuries and will in the meantime be filled with forms and regimes transitional between capitalism and socialism and necessarily deviating from ‘pure’ forms and norms.

“The objective process is in the final analysis the sole determining factor, overriding all obstacles of a subjective order.

“The Communist Parties retain the possibility in certain circumstances of roughly outlining a revolutionary orientation.”

Pablo’s elevation of the “objective process” to “the sole determining factor” reducing the subjective factor (the consciousness and organization of the vanguard party) to irrelevance, the discussion of “several centuries” of “transition” (later characterized by Pablo’s opponents as “centuries of deformed workers states”) and the suggestion that revolutionary leadership might be provided by the Stalinist parties rather than the Fourth International—the whole analytic structure of Pabloist revisionism emerged.

In another document, “The Coming War,” Pablo put forward his policy of “entrism sui generis” (entrism of its own kind):

“In order to integrate ourselves into the real mass movement, to work and to remain in the masses’ trade unions for example, ‘ruses’ and ‘capitulations’ are not only acceptable but necessary.”

In essence, the Trotskyists were to abandon the perspective of short-term entrism whose purpose had always been to split the working-class organizations on a hard programmatic basis as a tactic for building the Trotskyist party. The new entrist policy flowed directly from Pablo’s analysis. Since the asserted shift in the world relationship of forces in favor of the advance of the revolution would compel the Stalinist parties to play a revolutionary role, it was only logical that the Trotskyists should be a part of such parties pursuing essentially a policy of pressuring the Stalinist apparatus.

All this should have exploded a bomb in the heads of the international Trotskyist cadres. Pablo was after all the head of the International Secretariat, the resident political body of the Fourth International! But there is little evidence of even alarm, let alone the formation of the international anti-revisionist faction which was required. One long document by Ernest Germain (“Ten Theses”), and perhaps some subterranean rumbling, did force Pablo to produce an attempt at orthodoxy on the question of the “transitional period” but no other literary notice was taken of Pablo’s most overt assault against the program of Trotskyism.

Germain Resists

In March 1951 Germain produced “Ten Theses,” which was a veiled attack on “Where Are We Going?” but did not attack Pablo or the document by name. Germain restated the Marxist use of “transitional period” as the period between the victory of the revolution (the dictatorship of the proletariat) and the achievement of socialism (the classless society). Without any explicit reference to Pablo’s position, he wrote: “No more than the bourgeoisie will it [Stalinism] survive a war which will be transformed into a world upsurge of the revolution.” Germain insisted on thecontradictory Bonapartist character of Stalinism, based on proletarian property forms while safeguarding the privileged position of the bureaucracy against the workers. He emphasized the dual nature of the mass CPs outside the USSR as determined by their proletarian base on the one hand and their subservience to the Stalinist bureaucracies in power on the other.

Germain attempted to present the orthodox response to the Pabloist impulse that the destruction of capitalism in Eastern Europe, China and Yugoslavia without a Trotskyist leadership made the Fourth International superfluous. Again, he did not refer to the positions he was attacking; one would have thought that the “Ten Theses” simply dropped from the sky as an interesting theoretical exercise, rather than in response to the emergence of a revisionist current completely counterposed to Germain’s thrust. Insisting that a new worldwide revolutionary upsurge would not stabilize Stalinism but rather was a mortal danger to it, he wrote:

“It is because the new revolutionary wave contains in embryo the destruction of the Stalinist parties as such that we ought to be much closer today to the Communist workers. This is only one phase of our fundamental task: to construct new revolutionary parties.…”[our emphasis]

“To be ‘closer to the Stalinist workers’ then signifies at the same time to affirm more than ever our own program and our own Trotskyist policy.”

The “Ten Theses” showed that all wings of the Trotskyist movement were still incapable of grasping the nature of the social transformations which had occurred in Eastern Europe (although the analysis of the British Haston-Grant RCP majority, borrowed by the SWP’s Los Angeles Vern-Ryan grouping, achieved the beginning (but only the beginning) of wisdom in recognizing that in the immediate post-war period an examination of native property forms would hardly suffice since the state power in Eastern Europe was a foreign occupying army, the Red Army). In 1951 Germain still considered the process of “structural assimilation” uncompleted (!) and predicted the assimilation of the armies of the East European states into the Soviet army—i.e., that Eastern Europe would simply be incorporated into the Soviet Union. Germain did recognize that the transformation in Eastern Europe destroyed capitalism but contained within it, even in victory, a decisive bureaucratic obstacle to socialist development; he stressed that the expansion of the USSR’s non-capitalist mode of production “is infinitely less important than the destruction of the living workers’ movement which has preceded it.”

No such inbuilt obstacle was recognized with regard to China and, specially, Yugoslavia. The Trotskyists were unable to disassociate the phenomenon of Stalinism from the person of Stalin; the Titoists’ break from the Kremlin obscured any recognition that Yugoslavia would necessarily pursue qualitatively identical domestic and diplomatic policies in safeguarding the interest of its own national bureaucratic regime against the working class. Uneasy about admitting that Stalinist forces heading peasant masses could ever consummate an anti-capitalist revolution, Germain in “Ten Theses” termed both the Yugoslav and Chinese events proletarian revolutions and also argued that “under such conditions, these parties cease being Stalinist parties in the classical sense of the term.”

Whereas Pablo took these events as the new revolutionary model which invalidated “‘pure’ forms and norms” (i.e., the Russian Revolution) Germain—again without referring to Pablo—stressed that they were as a result of exceptional circumstances which in any case would not be relevant to advanced industrial countries. He contrasted “the de facto United Front which today exists between the colonial revolutions in Asia and the Soviet bureaucracy, which has its objective origin in their being both menaced by imperialism…” with the possibilities for Europe. He concurred in the prediction of an imminent World War III between “the united imperialist front on the one hand and the USSR, the buffer countries and the colonial revolutions on the other” but rather than hailing it, termed it acounterrevolutionary war.

The crux of Germain’s argument was:

“What matters above all in the present period is to give the proletariat an international leadership capable of coordinating its forces and proceeding to the world victory of communism. The Stalinist bureaucracy, forced to turn with a blind fury against the first victorious proletarian revolution outside the USSR [Yugoslavia!], is socially incapable of accomplishing any such task. Herein lies the historical mission of our movement…. The historical justification for our movement…resides in the incapacity of Stalinism to overturn world capitalism, an incapacity rooted in the social nature of the Soviet bureaucracy.”

With the advantage of hindsight and the experience of the past 20 years—the counterrevolutionary nature of Stalinism reaffirmed most clearly in Hungary in 1956; the 1960 Cuban revolution in which petty-bourgeois nationalism at the head of peasant guerillas uprooted capitalism only to merge with the Stalinist apparatus internally and internationally; the consistently nationalist and Stalinist policies of the Chinese CP in power—it is easy to recognize that “Ten Theses” is flawed in its analysis and predictions. What is much more important, however, is the document’s consistent and deliberate non-factional tone which presaged Germain’s refusal to place himself in the anti-Pabloist camp. Divorced from the determination to fight for a correct line in the Fourth International, Germain’s theoretical defense of the necessity of Trotskyism meant very little. This was Pabloism merely at one remove, the denial of the subjective factor in the revolutionary process.

Third World Congress

The Third World Congress of the Fourth International was held in August-September 1951. The main political report attempted to distinguish between the Communist Parties and “reformist parties” on the grounds that only the former were contradictory, and projected that under the pressure of a strong mass upsurge the CPs could become revolutionary parties. The opportunist nature of Pablo’s version of an entrism tactic was sharply revealed in the repudiation of the principled entrist goal of sharp polarization and split: “The possibilities of important splits in the CPs…are replaced by a leftward movement within the CPs among its rank and file.” There was no recognition of decisive deformations in the East European and Chinese workers states; thus implicitly the Congress posed only a quantitative difference between the Soviet Union of Lenin and the degenerated and deformed workers states. The report projected the possibility that Tito might “head a regroupment of revolutionary forces independent of capitalism and of the Kremlin…playing a major role in the formation of a new revolutionary leadership.” There was no mention of the perspective of permanent revolution for the colonial countries.

The application of Pablo’s policy of “entrism sui generis” was elaborated in the Austrian Commission:

“The activity of our members in the SP will be governed by the following directives: A. Not to come forward as Trotskyists with our full program. B. Not to push forward programmatic and principled questions….”;

No quantity of verbal orthodoxy in resolutions could have any longer obscured the vision of those who wanted to see.

The Parti Communiste Internationaliste of France submitted Germain’s “Ten Theses” for a vote (after Germain himself had apparently backed out of doing so) and proposed amendments to the main document. No vote was taken on the “Ten Theses” or the French amendments. The PCI voted against adopting the thrust of the main document; it was the only section to do so.

In the months that followed, the Pabloist line was elaborated along the lines already made clear before and at the Third World Congress:

“We are entering [the Stalinist parties] in order to remain there for a long time banking on the great possibility of seeing these parties, placed under new conditions [“a generally irreversible pre-revolutionary period”], develop centrist tendencies which will lead a whole stage of the radicalization of the masses and of the objective revolutionary processes….”

(Pablo, Report to the 10th Plenum of the International Executive Committee, February 1952)

“Caught between the imperialist threat and the colonial revolution, the Soviet bureaucracy found itself obliged to ally with the second against the first…. The disintegration of Stalinism within these parties ought not to be understood…as an organizational disintegration…or a public break with the Kremlin but as a progressive internal transformation.”

(“The Rise and Decline of Stalinism,” International Secretariat, September 1953)

V. THE ANTI-PABLOISTS

With the capitulation of Germain, whose role in the preliminary conflicts over Pabloist policies is ambiguous but in whom the French appear to have placed some degree of confidence, the task of fighting Pabloism fell to the French PCI majority of Bleibtreu-Lambert and the American SWP. Despite a considerable body of mythology to the contrary, both the PCI and SWP vacillated when revisionism manifested itself at the head of the Fourth International, balking only at applying it to their own sections. Both groups compromised themselves by uneasy acquiescence (combined in the case of the PCI with sporadic resistance) to Pablo’s policies until the suicidal organizational consequences to their sections necessitated sharp fights. Both abdicated the responsibility to take the fight against revisionism into every body and every section of the Fourth International and both retreated from the struggle by the foundation of the “International Committee” on the basis of “the principles of orthodox Trotskyism.” The IC from its inception was only a paper international tendency consisting of those groups which had already had splits between pro-Pabloist and orthodox wings.

PCI Fights Pablo

The PCI majority, having had been placed in receivership by the International Secretariat (which had installed the Pablo-loyal minority led by Mestre and Frank as the leadership of the French section), continued to claim agreement with the line of the Third World Congress, arguing that Pablo and the IS and IEC were violating its decisions! According to the French, Pabloism “utilizes the confusions and contradictions of the World Congress—where it could not impose itself—in order to assert itself after the World Congress.” (undated “Declaration of the Bleibtreu-Lambert Tendency on the Agreements Concluded at the IEC,” March or April 1952)

An important letter dated 16 February 1952 from Renard on behalf of the PCI majority to Cannon appealed to the SWP. Renard’s letter claimed agreement with the Third World Congress, including its French Commission, and contrasted the supposedly non-Pabloist World Congress (citing vague platitudes to demonstrate its presumably orthodox thrust) with Pablo’s subsequent actions and line in the IEC and IS. Renard asserted that “Pabloism did not win out at the Third World Congress.” (He wisely did not attempt to explain why his organization voted against the main Congress documents!) The main argument of the letter is an appeal against the Pabloist international leadership’s intervention into the French national section.

Cannon’s reply of 29 May accused the PCI majority of Stalinophobic opportunism in the union movement (a bloc with progressive anti-communists against the CP) and denied the existence of any such thing as Pabloism.

The PCI majority evidenced a clear understanding of the implications of the Pabloist entrism. In a polemic against minority theoretician Mestre the majority had written:

“If these ideas are correct, stop chattering about the tactic of entrism, even entrism sui generis, and pose clearly our new tasks: that of a more consistent tendency, not even a left opposition…whose role is to aid Stalinism to overcome its hesitation and to pose under the best conditions the decisive clash with the bourgeoisie…. If Stalinism has changed…[it means that] it no longer reflects the particular interests of a bureaucratic caste whose very existence depends on the unstable equilibrium between classes, that it is no longer bonapartist, but that it reflects solely…the defense of the workers state. That such a transformation should be produced without the intervention of the Soviet proletariat…but on the contrary by an evolution of the bureaucracy itself...would lead us not merely to revise the Transitional Program [but] all the works of Leon Trotsky since 1923 and the foundation of the Fourth International.”

(“First Reflections of Zig Zag,” PCI Internal Bulletin No. 2, February 1952)

But the PCI majority, not unlike the SWP, demonstrated a failure of concrete internationalism when faced with the prospect of all alone carrying through the fight against Pabloism.

On 3 June 1952 the PCI majority asked for recognition of two French sections of the Fourth International, thus permitting the PCI majority to carry out its own policies in France. This was in clear violation of the founding statutes of the Fourth International and meant the liquidation of the International as a disciplined world body. What was required was an international faction fight over the political line of the Fourth International. But the PCI majority was unwilling to subordinate work in France to the crucial fight for the legitimacy and continuity of the Fourth International. Pablo’s refusal to accede to this demand led directly to the split of the PCI majority.

SWP Enters the Struggle

The SWP only joined the fight against revisionism when a pro-Pabloist tendency, the Clarke wing of the Cochran-Clarke faction, manifested itself within the American party. In his reply to Renard dated 29 May 1952 Cannon had said:

“We do not see [“any kind of pro-Stalinist tendency”] in the International leadership of the Fourth International nor any sign nor symptom of it. We do not see any revisionism [in the documents]…we consider these documents to be completely Trotskyist…. It is the unanimous opinion of the leading people in the SWP that the authors of these documents have rendered a great service to the movement.”

The story that the SWP had prepared some amendments to the Third World Congress documents which Clarke (SWP representative to the International) had burned instead of presenting is quite possibly true but not very significant, in view of Cannon’s declaration of political allegiance to Pablo when it counted, in refusing to solidarize with the anti-Pabloist PCI majority.

Against Cochran-Clarke’s advocacy of an orientation toward the CP fellow-travellers, the SWP majority affirmed support to the Pabloist CP entrism tactic in general but insisted on a kind of American exceptionalism, contrasting the mass European parties with the pathetic American CP milieu, lacking a working-class base and peopled with shoddy third-rate intellectuals.

In response to the Cochran-Clarke threat, Cannon set about forming a faction in the SWP aided by the Weiss leadership in Los Angeles. Cannon sought to line up the old party cadre around the question of conciliation to Stalinism and appealed to the party trade unionists like Dunne and Swabeck by drawing an analogy between the need for factional struggle within the party and the struggle within the class against the reformists and sellouts as parallel processes of factional struggle against alien ideology. He told the May 1953 SWP Plenum:

“During the course of the past year, I had serious doubts of the ability of the SWP to survive…. I thought that our 25 year effort…had ended in catastrophic failure, and that, once again, a small handful would have to pick up the pieces and start all over again to build the new cadre of another party on the old foundations.”

(Closing speech, 30 May)

But Cannon chose another road. Instead of pursuing the necessary struggle wherever it might lead, Cannon made a bloc with the Dobbs-Kerry-Hansen apparatus over the organizationally liquidationist implications of the Cochran-Clarke line. In return for their support Cannon promised the routinist, conservative Dobbs administration total control of the SWP with no further interference from him (“a new regime in the party”).

The SWP’s response to finding the dispute in the International reflecting itself inside the American section was to deepen its isolationism into virulent anti-internationalism. Cannon’s speech to the SWP majority caucus on 18 May 1953 stated, “We don’t consider ourselves an American branch office of an international business firm that receives orders from the boss” and extolled discussion in which “we work out, if possible [!], a common line.” Cannon denied the legitimacy of an international leadership and referred to “a few people in Paris.” He contrasted the Fourth International with Lenin’s Comintern, which had state power and a leadership whose authority was widely recognized, and thus denied that the contemporary Fourth International could be a democratic centralist body.

Cannon belatedly took exception to Pablo’s conduct against the French majority, but only over the organizational question in keeping with the proposition that the International leadership should not intervene in the affairs of national sections. He wrote:

“…we were flabbergasted at the tactics used in the recent French conflict and split, and at the inconceivable organizational precedent established there. That is why I delayed my answer to Renard so long. I wanted to help the IS politically, but I didn’t see how I could sanction the organizational steps taken against the majority of an elected leadership. I finally resolved the problem by just ignoring that part of Renard’s letter.”

(“Letter to Tom,” 4 June 1953)

The “Letter to Tom” also reiterated the position that the Third World Congress was not revisionist.

The crucial defects in the anti-Pabloist struggle of the PCI and SWP were duly utilized by the Pabloists. The 14th IEC Plenum took Cannon to task for his concept of the International as a “federative union.” It noted that the SWP had never opposed the Pabloist entrism policy in principle and accused the SWP-PCI of an unprincipled bloc on China. Seizing on the SWP’s one-sided orthodoxy (Hansen’s defense of an SWP majorityite’s formulation that Stalinism is “counterrevolutionary through and through”—a characterization which fits only the CIA!) the Pabloists were able to cloak their liquidation of an independent Trotskyist program with pious reaffirmations of the contradictions of Stalinism as a counterrevolutionary caste resting atop the property forms established by the October Revolution.

IC Formed

Following the Cochran-Clarke split, the SWP precipitously broke publicly with Pablo. On 16 November 1953 the Militant carried “A Letter to Trotskyists Throughout the World” which denounced Cochran-Clarke and Pablo and belatedly solidarized with the “unjustly expelled” PCI majority. The SWP’s previous characterizations of the Third World Congress as “completely Trotskyist” necessitated an attempt in this so-called “Open Letter” to locate the emergence of Pabloism after the Congress, which doomed the SWP to present a somewhat unconvincing case leaning heavily on a leaflet or two of the Pabloist French minority from 1952. At about the same time the SWP produced “Against Pabloite Revisionism” dated November 1953, which contained a more competent analysis of Pablo’s liquidationist accommodation to Stalinism:

“The conception that a mass Communist Party will take the road to power if only sufficient mass pressure is brought to bear is false. It shifts the responsibility for revolutionary setbacks from the leadership to the mass…

“The working class is transformed [by Pablo’s theories] into a pressure group, and the Trotskyists into a pressure grouping along with it which pushes a section of the bureaucracy toward the revolution. In this way, the bureaucracy is transformed from a block and a betrayer of the revolution into an auxiliary motor force of it.”

In 1954 the “International Committee” was formed. It included the French PCI majority, the American SWP (fraternal) and the Healy (Burns) grouping in England. The latter did not play any significant or independent role in the fight against revisionism. The Healy-Lawrence split from the disintegrating Revolutionary Communist Party after the war, impelled by the Healy-Lawrence faction’s deep entrist perspective toward the British Labour Party, had been backed by Pablo’s International Secretariat, which recognized two sections in Britain and gave them equal representation on the IEC. Healy was Cannon’s “man” in England and had been consistently supported by the SWP in disputes within the RCP. When the SWP broke from Pablo, the Healy-Lawrence faction split, Healy aligning with the SWP and Lawrence with Pablo (Lawrence later went over to Stalinism as did the PCI minority’s Mestre). Despite being part of the new anti-Pabloist international bloc, the Healy group continued its arch-Pabloist Labour Party opportunism. It had no weight in the IC bloc until its recruitment of an impressive layer of CP intellectuals and trade unionists (most of whom it later lost) following the 1956 Hungarian Revolution made it considerably more substantial in the British left.

The IC also claimed the adherence of the Chinese (émigré) section, which had already undergone a split, and the small Swiss section.

The IC managed to produce a couple of internal bulletins in early 1954 but never met as a real international body, nor was a centralized leadership ever elected. The tactic adopted by the SWP was to boycott the Fourth World Congress, as merely a meeting of Pablo’s faction having no legitimacy as the Fourth International.

The world movement paid a high price for this evasion. To cite only one example: Ceylon. The Ceylonese LSSP took a non-factional position on Pabloism, appealing to the SWP not to split and to attend the Fourth Congress. A hard fight should have been aggressively pushed toward the passive Ceylonese doubtists, forcing a polarization and forging a hard cadre in the struggle. Instead the Ceylonese drifted along with Pablo. Some seven years later, the revolutionary reputation of Trotskyism was besmirched in the eyes of militants throughout the world by the LSSP’s entry into the bourgeois Ceylonese coalition government, precipitating a last-minute split by the international Pabloist leadership. Had a hard principled anti-revisionist fight been waged in the Ceylon section in 1953, a hard revolutionary organization with an independent claim to Trotskyist continuity might have been created then, preventing the association of the name of Trotskyism with the fundamental betrayal of the LSSP.

Thus the anti-revisionist fight was deliberately not carried to the world movement, the IC consisting mainly of those groups which had already had their splits over the application of Pabloist policies in their own countries, and the struggle to defeat revisionism and reconstruct the Fourth International on the basis of authentic Trotskyism was aborted.

From Flirtation to Consummation

In 1957 Pablo’s International Secretariat and the SWP flirted with possible reunification (the Hansen-Kolpe correspondence). The basis at that time was formal orthodoxy—the similarity of line between the IS and SWP in response to the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. The SWP, perhaps naively expecting a repetition of Clarke’s 1953 position on the possibility of self-liquidation of the Stalinist bureaucracies, tended to accept the IS’s formally Trotskyist conclusions over Hungary as good coin. These early reunification overtures came to naught because of the opposition of the British and French IC groups, as well as Cannon’s suspicions that Pablo was maneuvering. The issue was posed in a defective way—simply apparent empirical agreement without an examination of past differences and present motion.

When the question of reunification, consummated in 1963 with the formation of the United Secretariat, came up again, the entire political terrain had shifted. The IS and the SWP found themselves in agreement over Cuba. But the basis was no longer an apparent convergence on orthodoxy, but the SWP’s abandonment of Trotskyism to embrace Pabloist revisionism (which the SWP in its class-collaborationist line on the Vietnamese war has now transcended on the path to outright reformism).

The basis for the 1963 reunification was a document titled “For Early Reunification of the World Trotskyist Movement—Statement by the Political Committee of the SWP,” 1 March 1963. The key new line was section 13:

“Along the road of a revolution beginning with simple democratic demands and ending in the rupture of capitalist property relations, guerilla warfare conducted by landless peasant and semi-proletarian forces, under a leadership that becomes committed to carrying the revolution through to a conclusion, can play a decisive role in undermining and precipitating the downfall of a colonial and semi-colonial power. This is one of the main lessons to be drawn from experience since the Second World War. It must be consciously incorporated into the strategy of building revolutionary Marxist parties in colonial countries.”

In “Toward Rebirth of the Fourth International,” 12 June 1963, the Spartacist tendency counterposed:

“Experience since the Second World War has demonstrated that peasant-based guerilla warfare under petit-bourgeois leadership can in itself lead to nothing more than an anti-working-class bureaucratic regime. The creation of such regimes has come about under the conditions of decay of imperialism, the demoralization and disorientation caused by Stalinist betrayals, and the absence of revolutionary Marxist leadership of the working class. Colonial revolution can have an unequivocally progressive revolutionary significance only under such leadership of the revolutionary proletariat. For Trotskyists to incorporate into their strategy revisionism on the proletarian leadership in the revolution is a profound negation of Marxism-Leninism no matter what pious wish may be concurrently expressed for ‘building revolutionary Marxist parties in colonial countries.’ Marxists must resolutely oppose any adventurist acceptance of the peasant-guerilla road to socialism–historically akin to the Social Revolutionary program on tactics that Lenin fought. This alternative would be a suicidal course for the socialist goals of the movement, and perhaps physically for the adventurers.”

Ironically, the SWP’s further rightist evolution leads it to now repudiate the basic line of section 13, from the other side—the U.Sec.’s advocacy of petty-bourgeois armed struggle is far too adventurous for the legalistic SWP which aims to become the mass party of American reformism.

Spartacist and the Fourth International

In his struggle to found the Fourth International, Trotsky repeatedly underscored the imperative need for revolutionary organization on an international basis. Prolonged national isolation within one country must ultimately disorient, deform and destroy any revolutionary grouping no matter how subjectively steadfast. Only a principled and disciplined international collaboration can provide a counterbalance to the fierce pressures toward insularity and social chauvinism generated by the bourgeoisie and its’ ideological agents within the working-class movement. As Trotsky recognized, those who deny the need for a programmatically founded democratic centralist world party deny the Leninist concept of the vanguard party itself. The destruction of the Fourth International by Pabloist revisionism, paralleled by organizational fracturing into numerous competing international blocs, necessitates unremitting struggle for its rebirth.

In our ten year history, the Spartacist tendency has faced and resisted powerful objective pressures toward abandonment of an internationalist perspective. Cut off from the possibility of disciplined international ties as a result of the organizational sectarianism and subsequent political degeneration of Gerry Healy’s International Committee, the Spartacist League has refused to passively acquiesce to the national isolation forced upon us. We have emphatically rejected the ersatz “internationalism” which achieves its international connections at the price of afederalist non-aggression pact thus renouncing in advance the struggle for disciplined international organization. We have sought to develop fraternal ties with groupings in other countries as part of a process of clarification and polarization. Our aim is the crystallization of a cohesive democratic centralist international tendency based on principled programmatic unity, the embryo of a reborn Fourth International.

The current cracking of the several international “Trotskyist” blocs now provides heightened opportunity for the Spartacist tendency to intervene in the world movement. Our history and program can serve as a guide for currents now in motion towards authentic Trotskyism, because despite involuntary national isolation for a time, we upheld our internationalist determination and continued to wage a principled fight against revisionism.

The shattering of the revisionists’ and centrists’ pretensions to international organization—the revelation that the United Secretariat, the International Committee, etc. have been nothing more than federated rotten blocs—combined with the worldwide renewal of proletarian combativeness in a context of sharpened inter-imperialist rivalry and intensified deep-seated capitalist crisis, provide an unprecedented objective opportunity for the crystallization and development of the Spartacist tendency internationally. As the political corpses of the revisionist blocs continue to decay, the Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution, must be reborn.

FOR THE REBIRTH OF THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL!