AMERICAN LEFT HISTORY

This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager

Showing posts with label pabloism. Show all posts

Saturday, January 15, 2011

From The Archives Of The Spartacist League (U.S.)-Yugoslavia, East Europe and the Fourth International:The Evolution of Pabloist Liquidationism-Appendix I &II-The British Revolutionary Communist Party

Monday, January 10, 2011

From The Archives Of The Spartacist League (U.S.)-Yugoslavia, East Europe and the Fourth International:The Evolution of Pabloist Liquidationism

Markin comment:

In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement that in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.

After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Debs' Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.

I am continuing today what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.

However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
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Markin comment on this article:

As has been detailed in other pieces in this space about the fate of the cadre of the Fourth International, including the leading figure, Leon Trotsky, assassinated by a Stalinist agent in Mexico in 1940, that organization was decimated by various forces by the end of World War II and left it without strong theoretical leadership the post-war period. Not strong enough at a time when the seemingly improbable situation developed where non-Leninist (in the early Bolshevik sense) parties were leading overturns of capitalist regimes from Eastern Europe to Asia. This inability to sift through the historic facts was most forcefully felt in the immediate case of Yugoslavia. But, frankly, the post- World War II methodological problems still haunt those of us who stand on the history of the Fourth International, mainly today around the question of whether China is capitalist or not. That makes this pamphlet worthwhile reading to order to try to sort that problem out.
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Yugoslavia, East Europe and the Fourth International:
The Evolution of Pabloist Liquidationism
by Jan Norden
August 1992 (revised March 1993)

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Written: 1993
Source: Prometheus Research Library, Prometheus Research Series No. 4, New York, 1993
Transcription/Markup/Proofing: John Heckman.
Public Domain: Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 2007/Prometheus Research Library. You can freely copy, display and otherwise distribute this work. Please credit the Marxists Internet Archive & Prometheus Research Library as your source, include the url to this work, and note the transcribers & editors above.

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(continued)

Discussion on Yugoslavia: Round One with Pablo
At its Seventh Plenum in April 1949, the IEC decided to open a discussion in the International on Yugoslavia. This discussion was marked by rampant confusion, as could be imagined from the FI’s shifting programmatic statements. Over the course of three years, a number of individuals changed position: Pablo was initially the most enthusiastically pro-Tito, but after the outbreak of the Korean War he most strongly emphasized the deformed character of the Yugoslav regime; in the French section, Lambert was initially critical of the I.S.’ capitulatory policy toward Tito, but by 1951 was criticizing Pablo for being too harsh on Yugoslavia; Bleibtreu was consistently soft on the Yugoslavs, first supporting Pablo, then Lambert; Mestre in turn was consistently harder on Yugoslavia, initially aligned with Lambert, later with Pablo; and Germain was consistently confusionist. Yet amid the confusion, one can discern the early stages of a battle which by 1951-53 was to put into question the very existence of the Fourth International.

At the heart of the internal struggle over Yugoslavia was a drive by Pablo to deny the need for an independent Trotskyist vanguard. He generalized his liquidationist program of chasing after Stalinist forces from initially tailing Tito to seeing revolutionary possibilities in the Kremlin itself and the European CPs which followed its orders. On the other hand, the response of those who opposed Pablo was marked by a formalistic pseudo-orthodoxy that was unable to explain events in East Europe when reality didn’t square with their undialectical categories. Reasoning that Stalinism, as a counterrevolutionary force, could never carry out a social revolution, however bureaucratically deformed, they first denied that Yugoslavia had overthrown capitalist rule, only to then claim that there had been an authentic proletarian revolution and Tito’s YCP had been able to establish a workers state because it was not Stalinist. The theoretical confusion that resulted from such contortions seriously undermined the struggle against Pabloist liquidationism, and eventually fed into the American SWP’s embrace of the same revisionist program a decade later over Cuba.

As head of the International Secretariat, Pablo was responsible for the initial “Open Letters” which embraced the Tito regime. In his first signed article on the Tito-Stalin split, “The Yugoslav Affair,” written in August 1948, Pablo argued that the Yugoslav CP during the war “led a real mass movement with distinct revolutionary tendencies which brought it to power.”[85] A year later, Pablo was already raising many of the themes which he later elaborated into a wholesale attack on Trotskyism. In September 1949 he wrote:

Thus, in the historic period of the transition from capitalism to socialism we shall witness the rise not of normal workers’ states, but of more or less degenerated workers’ states, that is, states with strong bureaucratic deformations which can reach the point of complete political expropriation of the proletariat.[86]

Asserting that “in our epoch, the proletarian power established in a single country will inevitably and rapidly become bureaucratized,” Pablo argued that “there is no other remedy than to bring to bear the weight of the world organization of the proletariat,” which “alone is capable of counterbalancing the corrupting influence of national isolation upon the party in power.”[87]

Thus Pablo declared that Stalinist degeneration was no longer an exceptional situation but rather constituted “modifications in the norm of proletarian power”! In asserting that bureaucratization was “inevitable,” he simply wrote off the Trotskyist program of proletarian political revolution to overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy. Moreover, these “modified norms” were destined to last for a considerable time:

...in the whole historic period of the transition from capitalism to socialism, a period which can extend for centuries, we shall encounter a much more tortuous and complicated development of the revolution than our teachers foresaw—and workers’ states that are not normal but necessarily quite deformed.[88]

This is the revisionist perspective that came to be characterized by Pablo’s opponents as “centuries of deformed workers states.” It liquidates the need for the Fourth International as an independent revolutionary leadership, at best reducing it to the role of opposition after the necessary/ inevitable bureaucratization of the revolution, or, more likely given Pablo’s later evolution, to the role of “Marxist” braintrusters to the Stalinist regimes—or even to left-talking rulers of capitalist states. (In the early 1960s Pablo (Raptis) acted as a government adviser to Ben Bella’s Algeria, and in the early 1970s to a lesser extent to Allende’s Chile, peddling “self-management” schemes borrowed from Tito’s Yugoslavia.)

Already in 1949, Pablo referred to Yugoslavia as “a workers’ state deformed from its birth,” which was “led and controlled by a caste forming into a bureaucracy.”[89] But he pointedly did not call for a workers political revolution to oust this bureaucracy. (Logical enough, since according to him bureaucratization was “inevitable.”) Unfortunately, however, the far-reaching liquidationist implications of his analysis were largely ignored at the time, since his opponents were arguing that Yugoslavia along with the rest of East Europe remained capitalist. Thus most of his initial document was taken up with long quotes from Yugoslav officials demonstrating that the bourgeoisie had indeed been liquidated. Pablo again took up this same theme in February 1950, arguing against Germain’s construct of the East European states as capitalist states on the road to structural assimilation into the USSR.[90]

The main response to Pablo was given by Germain.[91] In his opus, Germain adduced all manner of arguments to show that the states of the “buffer zone” remained capitalist. But how did he square this with the Marxist definition of the state, since the armed force was entirely in the hands of the Stalinists (local and Soviet), and the economies had by this time been essentially collectivized except for agriculture? Referring to Engels’ “jewel-like formula” of the state as a body of armed men, he waved this aside, averring that it “suffices to explain to novices the Marxist theory of the state and to find one’s way in cases which are comparatively simple,” but was of no use at all in this complicated situation. Likewise he rejected the criterion of what class interests the state serves and dismissed the evidence of the expropriation of the bourgeoisie throughout East Europe, claiming that Mussolini did the same in his 1943-44 “Salò Republic” (in German-occupied northern Italy)!

Instead the erudite Marxist savant discerned “an entirely special type of capitalism.” He discovered an entirely new category, a “bastard” bourgeois state, or, “if one wishes,” “a degenerated bourgeois state on the road to structural assimilation with the USSR”![92] It is easy to poke holes in this contorted concoction. Germain in fact threw the Marxist theory of the state out the window in his desperate attempt to maintain the classification of the East European states as capitalist. To get around the problem of defending Belgrade against Moscow while arguing that capitalism hadn’t yet been destroyed in Yugoslavia, he labeled it a “workers and peasants government”—essentially giving Tito & Co. a certificate of revolutionary good conduct. His invention of a “bastard/degenerated bourgeois state” was simply playing with words, allowing him to keep on calling the buffer zone capitalist while emptying this term of all verifiable content. But why did he go to such absurd lengths?

Following Trotsky’s observation that “every sociological definition is at bottom an historical prognosis,” Germain warned that those who defined East Europe as workers states were adopting “a perspective of the possibility of a growth and increasing development of Stalinism on an international scale in the years and decades to come!” That “would oblige us to revise from top to bottom our historical appraisal of Stalinism....We would then have to repudiate the entire Trotskyist argument against Stalinism since 1924, a line of argument based on the inevitable destruction of the USSR by imperialism in the event of an extremely prolonged postponement of the world revolution.”[93] Germain was quite wrong to insist that recognizing East Europe as deformed workers states would mean abandoning Trotsky’s analysis and revolutionary program against Stalinism. But he did accurately discern that this is what Pablo & Co. were driving at. The same concern was voiced by various leaders of the SWP who were clearly driven by fear of the potential implications of recognizing the East European regimes as deformed workers states. Morris Stein, in a February 1950 report to the SWP National Committee plenum, noted: “their ‘workers states’ have come into existence not by means of proletarian revolution but through bureaucratic counterrevolution. How square this with our Marxist concepts of the proletarian revolution?”[94] John G. Wright, who called Germain’s tortured document “brilliant,” wrote:

Finally, to call the regimes in Eastern Europe “workers states” is to say that the Stalinists have been and are carrying out revolutionary tasks there, in a bureaucratic way, in a “deformed” way, qualify it how you may, revolutionary nonetheless. We must challenge that. We must say that just the contrary is true. It is the counterrevolutionary essence of Stalinism that has come to the fore in Eastern Europe, and not the reverse.[95]

This wooden orthodoxy of the SWP was based not on a dialectical and materialist analysis of the situation, but on fear that if it were admitted that capitalist rule was destroyed in the states of the Soviet-dominated “buffer zone,” then all of Marxism would collapse along with the justification for the very existence of the revolutionary party. The bankruptcy of this “method” was shown by what happened when the fact of the expropriation of the bourgeoisie in East Europe could no longer be denied. Only five months after writing his treatise, Germain flipflopped and at the Eighth Plenum of the IEC (April 1950) suddenly declared that Yugoslavia was now “a non-degenerated workers’ state”![96] And when they had to face the truth on the buffer zone, Germain’s supporters simply pretended that his criteria for “structural assimilation” into the Soviet Union had been accomplished. Thus Murry Weiss, reporting for the National Committee to the SWP’s November 1950 convention, declared: “The salient characteristic of the whole process has been the destruction of these states as separate states, and their incorporation, in one form or another, into the USSR.”[97]

This is not successive approximations, but rather repeated obfuscation. In fact, Trotsky had laid the theoretical basis for recognizing that the Stalinists could, under unusual conditions, overthrow bourgeois rule. The Transitional Program states: “one cannot categorically deny in advance the theoretical possibility that, under the influence of completely exceptional circumstances (war, defeat, financial crash, mass revolutionary pressure, etc.), the petty-bourgeois parties, including the Stalinists, may go further than they themselves wish along the road to a break with the bourgeoisie.”[98] But where Trotsky wrote of this as a “highly improbable variant,” the Pabloist revisionists seized upon this phrase and turned it into the norm. The anti-Pablo forces denied reality as long as they could and then capitulated, rather than insisting that even in those exceptional conditions where revolutions led by Stalinist and other petty-bourgeois forces overthrow capitalism, this is accomplished against their own program, and the resulting bonapartist regimes remain a roadblock to international socialist revolution.

In the fight over Yugoslavia in the Fourth International, one can see the origins and early stages of Pabloism. Yet it was not yet the full-blown liquidationist program. One indication of this is that the lineup over Yugoslavia was not identical to that in 1953, when the battle came to a head. In the former case, not only those who later stood with Pablo, such as Bert Cochran (who used the name E.R. Frank) and Michèle Mestre, called for recognition that Yugoslavia and the rest of East Europe were workers states, but also Joseph Hansen, who was one of the leaders of the fight against the pro-Pablo Cochran-Clarke faction in the SWP. In a December 1949 document, Hansen noted: “Labelling such a country in Eastern Europe as Yugoslavia a ‘workers state’ concedes nothing to Stalinism and does not involve a revision of the Marxist theory of the state.” He stressed that events in Eastern Europe were merely “the positive side of a development that was a major blow to the socialist movement. While the borderlands experienced an upset in property relations, Stalin’s henchmen in France and Italy were knifing workers’ uprisings in the back. All Europe, including Germany, might have been socialist today were it not for the crimes of Stalinism at the close of the war.”[99]

Yet Hansen didn’t recognize that Tito, too, was a Stalinist, and the SWP went along with the FI’s capitulatory line on Yugoslavia. Once again, in this discussion the only treatment of Yugoslavia and East Europe that followed the lines of Trotsky’s own writings on Soviet Stalinism came from the British RCP. A May 1949 document by Bill Hunter, “The I.S. and Eastern Europe,” pointed out anew how events had confirmed the RCP’s amendments at the Second World Congress a year earlier. Hunter noted that the position that Yugoslavia was a workers state, but the rest of East Europe wasn’t, amounted to a “halfway house,” insisting that comrades who took that line couldn’t hold to it for long. Hunter went back to Trotsky’s 1940 work, In Defense of Marxism,[100] for some guidelines:

Trotsky said of Poland in 1939, “This overturn was forced upon the Kremlin oligarchy through its struggle for self preservation under specific conditions.”

It was that same struggle for self preservation which was the determining factor of the Kremlin’s post war policy in Eastern Europe....The fact [that] Stalinism under certain specific circumstances carries out revolutionary measures does not cancel out its past, its origins, its conservative and counter-revolutionary aspects, its bureaucratic base and the effect of its methods on the world working class movement. On the other hand we cannot be blinded to the particular progressive measures Stalinism is forced to carry out because of the viability of the property form on which it rests. The Fourth International is not to be justified by ignoring facts, or attempting to pour them into preconceived theoretical vessels. In that way lies a fog of mysticism.

To declare that under every and all particular conditions the Stalinist bureaucracy must compromise with the bourgeoisie means never to understand the events in Eastern Europe....However, this does not mean that the bureaucracy has taken up the banner of world revolution. Its struggle still remains a defensive one within the framework of gaining the best possible compromise with world imperialism.[101]

Unfortunately, even though Hunter’s document was promised in the introduction to the first SWP International Information Bulletin announcing the start of discussion on Yugoslavia in the FI, it never appeared.[102] For that matter, as far as we could discover, none of the RCP’s letters and statements against the I.S./IEC line(s) on Yugoslavia and East Europe were ever widely circulated, or published in the SWP’s internal bulletins. Instead, Morris Stein, in opening the discussion on East Europe in the SWP Political Committee, simply dismissed them with a wave of the hand, remarking, “I am not dealing with the position of the British RCP,” since it “represents no new factor” and its views were already “overwhelmingly rejected” by the 1948 World Congress.[103]

Round Two: Pabloite Liquidationism Takes Shape
The discussion inside the Fourth International over Yugoslavia and the class character of the East European states was the first stage in the appearance of Pabloism as a full-fledged liquidationist current. But it was only the first stage. That it didn’t represent the “degeneration” of the FI is indicated by the fact that both sides pulled back. In fact, the earlier alignment over Yugoslavia had been largely reversed, with the initially strongly pro-Tito Pablo now attacking his detractors in the FI for capitulating to the Yugoslavs. Mainly the change of position over Yugoslavia was due to Belgrade’s capitulation before imperialism over the Korean War.

But by this point, the attack on Trotskyism had gone beyond the issue of Yugoslavia. As a result of the East Europe discussion, Pablo & Co. generalized an initial opportunist position into a full-blown revisionist program, while major sections of the Fourth International one by one drew back and went into opposition as the liquidationist implications of this program became clear to them, above all when it hit them on the national terrain. Pablo’s line on Yugoslavia certainly gave a foretaste of what was to come. Thus in his January 1951 revisionist manifesto “Where Are We Going?” Pablo points back to his December 1949 document “On the Class Nature of Yugoslavia”:

As for us, we reaffirm what we wrote in the first article devoted to the Yugoslav affair: this transformation will probably take an entire historical period of several centuries and will in the meantime be filled with forms and regimes transitional between capitalism and socialism and necessarily deviating from “pure” forms and norms.

We are aware that this statement has shocked certain comrades and served others as a springboard to attack our “revisionism.”

But we do not disarm.[104]

Taking Trotsky’s negative observation in the Transitional Program that “one cannot categorically deny” that under certain “completely exceptional” circumstances the petty-bourgeois parties “may go further than they themselves wish along the road to a break with the bourgeoisie,” Pablo turned this into a positive program, declaring: “The Yugoslav affair as well as the march and the victory of the Chinese revolution...have demonstrated that the Communist Parties retain the possibility, in certain circumstances, of roughly outlining a revolutionary orientation.”[105] When these statements provoked a storm of protest in the International, Pablo and his followers declared that “centuries” referred to the whole transitional period before full socialism and not just the degenerated/deformed workers states, and that “outlining a revolutionary orientation” only meant that the Stalinists could go so far as to take power. But this was only to throw sand in the eyes of those who didn’t want to see.

For Pablo went further. In the same article he declared that since World War II the world has entered “a period essentially different from everything we have known in the past.” And what was this “new reality”? “For our movement objective social reality consists essentially of the capitalist regime and the Stalinist world. Furthermore, whether we like it or not, these two elements by and large constitute objective social reality....” So where the “old reality” consisted of the two fundamental classes of capitalist society, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and intermediate forces such as the peasantry and more broadly the petty bourgeoisie, this new world reality consists of “the capitalist regime” and the “Stalinist world.” And where does the working class fit in this schema? According to Pablo, “the revolutionary spirit of the masses directed against imperialism acts as an additional force, supplementing the material and technical forces raised against imperialism.”[106] So in effect the world working class becomes an auxiliary to the Soviet Army, a kind of “National Guard,” as Bleibtreu put it.

What lay behind this “new reality” was the spectre of an impending third world war. Earlier Pablo had argued that this general war was “many years” away, but in “Where Are We Going?” he wrote that “capitalism is now rapidly heading toward war, for it has no other short or long-term way out.” “It is with the Korean war,” he added, “that our movement for the first time realized the important factor that the relationship of forces on the international chess-board is now evolving to the disadvantage of imperialism.” The coming war would “take on, from the very beginning, the character of an international civil war”; the continents of Europe and Asia “would rapidly pass over under the control of the Soviet bureaucracy, of the Communist Parties, or of the revolutionary masses.” In sum: “War under these conditions, with the existing relationship of forces on the international arena, would essentially be Revolution.” To the “new reality” corresponded a new programmatic conception, “the conception of Revolution-War, of War-Revolution which is emerging and upon which the perspectives and orientation of revolutionary Marxists in our epoch should rest.”[107]

In part, Pabloism consists of Cold War impressionism. Under the impact of imperialism’s “Cold War” against the Soviet Union, Stalin is obliged to expropriate the bourgeoisie in the “buffer zone” of East Europe; a maverick “national Stalinist” regime in Yugoslavia breaks with Stalin to seize power—and Pablo concludes that the CPs can sometimes “roughly outline a revolutionary orientation.” The North Koreans take Seoul, drive the puppet capitalist regime into the Pusan pocket; U.S. imperialism counterattacks with the Inchon landing, crosses the 38th parallel; China enters the war, Truman hints at using the A-bomb—and Pablo concludes that the third world war is around the corner, with imperialism holding the short end of the stick.

Pabloism is also characterized by objectivism. In language that would be echoed years later by the Argentine pseudo-Trotskyist adventurer Nahuel Moreno, Pablo declared in his report to the February 1952 Tenth Plenum of the IEC: “The situation is prerevolutionary all over in various degrees and evolving toward the revolution in a relatively brief period. And this process from now on is in general irreversible.”[108] Pabloism also incorporates themes raised by the Zhdanov line, the Kremlin’s quarter-turn to the left in response to the Cold War Marshall Plan. At the founding meeting of the Cominform in 1947, Andrei Zhdanov in his theses declared: “The struggle between these two camps, between the imperialist and anti-imperialist camp, unfolds under conditions of a continued deepening of the overall crisis of capitalism, of a weakening of the forces of capitalism, and of the strengthening of the forces of socialism and democracy.”[109] The struggle between “camps” instead of classes, the international balance of forces unfavorable to capitalism: these premises were shared by Pablo and Zhdanov.

But most fundamentally the “program” of Pabloism was the denial of the need for a Trotskyist vanguard. Under the impact of the unexpected postwar surge of Stalinism and the weakness of the Trotskyist forces, with new questions posed by events in East Europe and China, a whole section of the leadership of the Fourth International, particularly centered in Europe where the pressures were strongest, not only rejected Trotsky’s prognosis about the outcome of the imperialist war, but threw out the Trotskyist program as well. Instead of an independent proletarian leadership, they saw “new vanguards,” first Tito’s Yugoslavia and Mao’s China, and then the whole “Stalinist world.” Pablo and his acolytes were increasingly explicit in their revisionism. Pablo’s main report to the Third World Congress was published under the title, “World Trotskyism Rearms.”[110] The English version of the theses of the Third World Congress included a subhead on the “New Course of Trotskyism,” and Germain (Mandel), who by this time had capitulated to Pablo, gave a report to the congress on the activity of the I.S. and IEC under the title, “Three Years of the New Course of Trotskyism.”[111] The most blatant expression was from Pablo’s American follower George Clarke, who made his battle cry “Junk the Old Trotskyism”![112]

As the developing Pabloite revisionist current passed from particular positions to a general program, it also began to draw organizational consequences. Thus in his report to the Third World Congress, Pablo declared: “What we have understood for the first time in the history of our movement and of the workers’ movement in general...is that we must be capable of finding our place in the mass movement as it is.” This is specified as understanding “the necessity of subordinating all organizational considerations, of formal independence or otherwise, to real integration into the mass movement.”[113] A few months later, at the Tenth Plenum of the IEC (February 1952), Pablo spelled out what came to be known as “deep entrism.” He cited as a precedent the British section’s entry into the Labour Party (under massive pressure from the I.S.). This was “almost qualitatively different” from the “entrism” advocated by Trotsky during 1934-38, for this was intended to be “long-term” in nature. Of the reformist parties, he stated:

We are not entering these parties in order to come out of them soon. We are entering them 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 masses and of the objective revolutionary processes in their respective countries.[114]

In fact, he stressed, the aim was “to help in the development of their centrist tendencies”!

As for the official Communist parties, since the Stalinist tops would prevent any internal factions and likely prevent many known Trotskyists from entering, Pablo advocated “entrism of a special kind, sui generis,” arguing that the Stalinist movement will produce “much greater and more important centrist tendencies” than the social-democratic reformists. To accomplish this task, a member should “not hesitate” to “conceal his Trotskyism”:[115] “In order to remain there and work, it will be necessary for a whole period, at first, that our militants completely conceal their Trotskyist identity” and they must “not undertake any political work based on our own ideas.” “Ruses’ and ‘capitulations’ are not only admissible but necessary,” in order to carry out this “entrism sui generis.”[116] As for those on the outside, their chief aim was to assist the entry work. So when the anti-Pabloites wrote of the “liquidation” of the Trotskyist program and party, this was no projection or exaggeration, but the explicit, immediate program of Pablo and his associates.

What, then, of the opposition to Pablo? As we remarked at the outset, it was partial, belated, largely on the national terrain, and did not come to grips theoretically with the new questions which gave rise to Pabloism. But they did fight, and we take sides with those who sought, in however flawed a manner, to combat the forces that were liquidating Trotskyism!

First came the British RCP majority. In his report to the Third World Congress, Germain noted the expulsion of Haston and Grant from the International Executive Committee after its Eighth Plenum in April 1951, describing them as “embodying the tendency of British Trotskyism which obstinately refused to integrate itself into the International, to assimilate the new course of Trotskyism.”[117] Indeed the Haston/Grant majority derived from the old British Workers International League (WIL), which for purely cliquist reasons placed itself outside the British section of the Fourth International from 1938 to 1944. But in 1951 Pablo and Germain were far more concerned by the fact that the RCP majority had refused for more than three years to liquidate into the Labour Party, despite the insistent attempts by the I.S. to force them to do so. In the end, Pablo engineered by remote control a split led by Gerry Healy, who took about a third of the organization into the Labour Party. Haston/Grant didn’t go along with the I.S./IEC fiction that East Europe was still capitalist in 1948-49, and partly because their vision wasn’t distorted by these pseudo-orthodox blinders, they saw Tito clearly for what he was: a nationally based Stalinist who wanted to build socialism in his one country. In a 1950 statement written shortly before he was expelled, Grant rightly listed as the first of three reasons for the collapse of the FI in Britain “capitulation to Tito-Stalinism internationally.”[118]

In order to destroy Haston and Grant, Pablo’s I.S. destroyed the RCP in the process. To do so, they resorted to organizational methods reminiscent of Zinoviev’s Comintern regime. So when Healy split the British section in 1947, the IEC granted his entry group independent status, reporting directly to the I.S. Later, in late 1948-early 1949, when first Haston and then Grant capitulated and came out for entry into the Labour Party, the I.S. turned on them and denounced them for...liquidationism! “Their proposal of entry looks like a desperate man drowning himself in deep water,” commented the I.S. “Entry on such a pessimistic and liquidationist line...would only accelerate the process of political disintegration and destroy all perspective for the Fourth International.”[119] When Healy demanded and got from the I.S. control of the section now reunited in the Labour Party, even though he and his supporters were in a minority, with a year’s leeway until elections were to be held, he proceeded to drive out and expel his opponents, some legitimately (like the Cliff group, whose supporters publicly denounced “Russian imperialism” and refused to support the North in the Korean War), most not.

Healy, who had also been a leader of the old WIL, was implementing Pablo’s line in London. The “deep entrist” policy Healy carried out in Britain (which eventually resulted in the Socialist Labour League when he exited in the late ’50s) was certainly a precursor of the “entrism sui generis” which Pablo attempted to shove down the throats of the French PCI a few years later. The RCP had been set up only in 1944, as a forced (by the I.S.) fusion of the WIL and a disintegrated Revolutionary Socialist League (official FI section), and it was rent by inherited animosities at the top. Its principal leaders eventually abandoned Trotskyism, Haston openly, and Grant through carrying out an entry into the Labour Party so deep that his Militant group only exited in 1992 (and that over Grant’s opposition). But in the late ’40s the RCP, more than any other section of the International, tried rather successfully to grapple on the basis of Trotsky’s program with the issues that had been thrown up by history. And they were ground up by a leadership that subsequently sought to liquidate the Fourth International itself. In an interview on Healy’s history, Spartacist League Central Committee member James Robertson remarked:

Cannon and also Pablo were very much on the RCP’s case, and Healy was their local inside man. I don’t know all the rights and wrongs but I do believe that they did not try to reshape the RCP, but successfully destroyed it. And so far as I know that was the last Trotskyist organization in Britain, the SLL in the period from 1957-67 proving to be hollow.[120]

Pabloite Revisionism Ravages the Fourth International
The French PCI was the second section that Pablo targeted for destruction. As noted earlier, the then PCI majority opposed the I.S.’ 1948 letters to the Yugoslav CP for “idealizing Tito.” The PCI passed a motion demanding that the I.S. reject Pablo’s August 1948 article on “The Yugoslav Affair.” And while the composition of the PCI majority as well as its line on Yugoslavia changed, the French party was almost constantly in opposition to Pablo on East Europe and Stalinism. Working closely with the International Secretariat, which was then located in Paris, they smelled an anti-Trotskyist rat early on. The fight came to a head during 1950-52, in the period leading up to and following the Third World Congress. The first object of dispute was the “Theses on Perspectives and Orientation,” written by Pablo and submitted to the Ninth Plenum of the IEC at the end of November 1950, as part of the discussion for the upcoming Third World Congress.[121] The discussion was particularly colored by the appearance in January 1951 of Pablo’s revisionist treatise “Where Are We Going?” with its “new reality” and perspective of “centuries of deformed workers states.”

In the I.S. itself there was resistance to Pablo’s theses (from Germain, Frank and Privas). Immediately following the plenum, at the beginning of December 1950, the French CC met, criticizing revisionist elements in the Ninth Plenum theses and refusing to approve the document. It also approved a political report for the PCI’s upcoming Seventh Congress. There followed, in January and March 1951, CC meetings at which Pablo’s emissaries (initially Clarke from the U.S.) tried to browbeat the French majority into submission. Germain intimated to Bleibtreu his intention to write a document to counterbalance Pablo’s theses, and to submit it for a vote. Germain did eventually write his famous “Ten Theses” document, a veiled attack on Pablo’s “Where Are We Going?” But Pablo cracked the whip, ordering Germain to defend the Ninth Plenum theses or be expelled from the I.S., and sent a letter to the French CC demanding that they rewrite their perspectives document along the lines of his theses. At the March meeting Germain, Frank and Privas capitulated and spoke for Pablo’s theses. In April 1951, Pablo himself attended a French CC meeting to attack the leadership; the CC formally split into majority (anti-Pablo) and minority.[122]

Also in April the PCI’s principal leader, Marcel Bleibtreu, wrote a document “Where the Disagreements Lie,” which was later developed into his famous “Where Is Comrade Pablo Going?” (Neither of these, nor any of the other French documents, were ever translated and distributed internationally by the I.S.) When Germain’s “Ten Theses” was published in March (although dated 15 January 1951), the French PB adopted them as a resolution for the World Congress (minus the author’s preamble, which endorsed Pablo’s Ninth Plenum theses).[123] At the PCI’s Seventh Congress in July, there were counterposed majority and minority reports and resolutions on both international and national work, and the majority voted down the Ninth Plenum theses. At the World Congress of the FI in August 1951, Bleibtreu spoke against Pablo’s theses, and the PCI introduced a series of amendments. The French were isolated, a vote was not permitted on their amendments or on Germain’s “Ten Theses,” and the PCI delegates voted almost alone against the main resolution, which included Pablo’s “Theses on Perspectives and Orientation.” A French commission was set up to replace the PCI majority leadership. In the end Bleibtreu et al. were left in place, but with the proviso that if they didn’t carry out the line of the World Congress, “the IEC and I.S. will be charged with taking all organizational measures to rectify the situation in the PCI.”[124]

There was plenty of thunder and lightning. But did the French fight Pabloite liquidationism programmatically in all this, or was it simply an organizational power fight, as some (such as Workers Power) would have it? There were plenty of weaknesses and errors in the PCI majority’s documents. Bleibtreu declared that “the essential difference concerns the revisionist view of the nature of the bureaucracy of the USSR” in Pablo’s texts.[125] But Bleibtreu’s definition of Stalinism excluded any ideological/programmatic elements: “When you speak of the Stalinism of a Communist Party, you are not speaking of a theory, of an overall program, of definite and lasting concepts, but only of its leadership’s subordination to orders from the Kremlin bureaucracy.”[126] Bleibtreu mocked the very idea of “Stalinism without Stalin.” And the PCI did not object to the statement in the “Theses on Perspectives and Orientation” that under certain circumstances, “like those which occurred during the war in Yugoslavia, in China, and recently in Korea,” certain CPs “can project a revolutionary orientation,” and that “from that moment on, they would cease to be strictly Stalinist parties.”[127]

Bleibtreu did not give a Trotskyist definition of Stalinism, for he excluded the programmatic components of “socialism in one country” and “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism, and ignored Stalinism’s material base, a nationally limited bureaucracy—both of which were common to Yugoslavia and China as well as the USSR. Bleibtreu wanted to limit Stalinism to only those parties directly under the Kremlin’s thumb, in order to exclude the Chinese and Yugoslavs. If anything, his texts were even more favorable to the Mao and Tito regimes than were Pablo’s (e.g., declaring that “it is absurd to speak of a Stalinist party in China, and still more absurd to foster belief in even the resemblance of a ‘victory of Stalinism in China’”).[128] But this was an attempt, if flawed, to fight against Pablo’s program, which ascribed revolutionary potential to Stalinism itself; Bleibtreu’s answer to the question of how CPs could take power and still be counterrevolutionary was to define the problem away, describing them as non-Stalinist. In rejecting Pablo’s assertion that “defense of the USSR constitutes the strategic line of the Fourth International,” Bleibtreu correctly stated that the strategic line of Trotskyism is world socialist revolution. But he did not emphasize, as Trotsky did, that Soviet defensism was also a strategic task of the FI.

Despite these errors, the French did attempt to fight the Pabloites’ policies of tailing after Stalinism. And thus they were an obstacle in the way of Pabloism’s revisionist course. Round Two of the showdown came as Pablo returned to the offensive, demanding that the PCI liquidate into the Stalinist movement under the rubric of “entrism sui generis.” Following his usual “salami tactics” Pablo had not called at the World Congress for entrism into the Stalinist parties, and in fact he had referred to the “necessarily independent” character of the Trotskyist organizations, as he admitted in his report to the February 1952 Tenth Plenum of the IEC. The policy of “entrism sui generis” was first raised in a January 1952 I.S. letter to the French leadership accusing the PCI of refusing to follow the line of the Third World Congress: “Let us define this policy once again clearly: what’s involved in a country like France is carrying out, more and more, a sort of sui generis entrist policy toward the organizations and workers influenced by the Stalinists.”[129]

When the January CC meeting of the PCI refused Pablo’s ultimatum to hand over control of the party to the Pabloite minority (via a “parity” Political Bureau with a double vote for a representative of the I.S.), Pablo decreed on the spot the suspension of the 16 majority members of the Central Committee! This bureaucratic atrocity was subsequently ratified by the I.S., reportedly with the votes of the British (Gerry Healy) and American (George Novack) representatives. At the Tenth Plenum (February 1952), the IEC revoked the suspensions, but decreed that the PCI CC could not meet unless the minority Political Bureau judged it necessary.[130]

But even when, in order to buy time, the French majority submitted to this grotesque measure, it wasn’t enough for Pablo, who demanded that discussion at the upcoming congress of the PCI be limited to implementing the entrist line of the Tenth Plenum, and that the CC elected at the previous congress not be allowed to present its political report.[131] Seeing an impending split, in late June the Pabloites removed typewriters and mimeograph machines from the PCI office. Two months earlier they had secretly filed a statement with the police registering a “PCI” with a completely pro-Pablo leadership. So on 14 July 1952, two PCI congresses were held in Paris, on different floors of the same building. In November the anti-Pablo PCI was formally expelled, again with the votes of the British and Americans. But this only whetted Pablo’s appetite. With the French out of the way, he then went after the big one, the Socialist Workers Party, led by James P. Cannon and conserving the largest group of Trotskyist cadres dating back to the time of Trotsky.

As in the case of the PCI, and even more so, the struggle against Pabloism in the SWP was fought out over the party question. The question of Yugoslavia seemed more remote on the American terrain, and an orientation of entrism into the discredited and relatively small American Stalinist party—which had gone semi-clandestine due to McCarthyite repression—was not only liquidationist but downright absurd for anyone with the slightest pretense of revolutionary politics. Cannon was able to easily demonstrate that the pro-Pablo minority was a rotten bloc consisting of New York petty bourgeois (led by George Clarke) who were looking to the popular-front milieu, and a layer of older Detroit trade unionists (led by Bert Cochran) who were looking for a way out of organized left politics altogether. But as we noted in “Genesis of Pabloism”: “The SWP only joined the fight against revisionism when a pro-Pabloism tendency, the Clarke wing of the Cochran-Clarke faction, manifested itself within the American party.” Moreover, when Cannon did finally take up the battle he did so in a way that “deepened [the SWP’s] isolationism into virulent anti-internationalism,” counterposed to international democratic centralism. In a review of Cannon’s Speeches to the Party, which covers this fight, we wrote of:

...the major weakness revealed during the struggle—Cannon’s failure to carry out an international faction fight against Pabloism. To avoid having to implement Pabloist policies, Cannon posited a federated International. (This deviation came home to roost in the later formation of the “United Secretariat” in which differences over the 1953 split, China and other questions were papered over as each national organization went its merry way.) Cannon’s federalist concept of internationalism was reflected in a polemic against (of all things) “Cominternism”![132]

The SWP leadership claimed to have disagreed with Pablo earlier, both politically and over some of his more blatant organizational atrocities. Thus for the Third World Congress, the SWP Political Committee sent off a “Contribution to the Discussion on International Perspectives” to “balance” Pablo’s “Theses on Perspectives and Orientation.” In particular, in this memo the SWP argued that “it is imperative to reaffirm our previous characterization of Stalinism as a counter-revolutionary force”; they opposed any recognition (“implicitly or explicitly”) of “the perspective of ‘deformed workers’ states’ as the line of historical development for an indefinite period”; they opined that it was “one-sided” to say that the CPs “may be compelled to outline a revolutionary orientation,” since the Stalinists could also work to strangle revolutions; and they argued for reaffirming the central importance of the crisis of proletarian leadership.[133] But the SWP’s “fraternal” delegate, Clarke, who happened to be one of Pablo’s chief hatchetmen, didn’t present this “contribution.” In fact, he later said, he was so “ashamed” of it that he burned the document!

Be that as it may, none of the changes the SWP advocated on paper were made, except for a ritual mention (in the “Theses on Perspectives and Orientation”) of “the selection of a new revolutionary leadership.” Nonetheless the SWP supported the Third World Congress documents. They also supported the Tenth Plenum documents ordering entrism. Questioned on this in a letter by French PCI leader Daniel Renard, a trade unionist who had been expelled by the Stalinist-led CGT, Cannon replied: “We do not see any revisionism there....We consider these documents to be completely Trotskyist.”[134] Cannon later claimed that the SWP leadership “hit the ceiling” and was “flabbergasted” when they heard about the International Secretariat diktat removing the elected Political Bureau of the French party and replacing it with a “parity committee” with an I.S. representative as arbiter.[135] But not only did the SWP do nothing about this travesty, its representative on the I.S. voted for the suspension of the French PB and then later for the expulsion of the PCI from the Fourth International.

Cannon admitted that the SWP consciously soft-pedaled and papered over differences with Pablo in order to boost the latter’s “authority.” A fellow party leader dissuaded Cannon from writing against the conception of “centuries of deformed workers states,” arguing that this would damage Pablo’s “prestige” and that “If it appears in the International that Cannon is attacking Pablo, the whole alliance will appear to be broken.” Cannon related that there were repercussions inside the American party as well, quoting SWP leader Arne Swabeck, who at a plenum “told us that a girl comrade got up in the Chicago branch and asked: ‘What is this? If there are going to be centuries of Stalinism, what’s the sense of my going out and selling ten papers on the street corner?’” “A very good question,” commented Cannon, adding, “But we kept quiet about all this in the party.”[136] After consulting with Cannon, Murry Weiss answered the Johnsonites in Los Angeles (who in 1950 were calling for “Cannonism against Pabloism”), saying: “You don’t need to fear about us rushing into Pablo’s arms; we’re already in his arms.”[137]

This false diplomacy and “prestige” building prevented the necessary fight for political clarity that perhaps could have headed Pablo off at the pass and prevented the destruction of the Fourth International. We have repeatedly and sharply criticized Cannon and the SWP’s conduct during the 1950-53 fight along the lines given above. But it is also necessary to stress that when the decisive hour came, Cannon fought and fought hard. “We are at war with this new revisionism,” he declared in his speech to the November 1953 SWP National Committee plenum. And he hammered away on the key question that had been given only secondary attention in the earlier battles with Pablo— the question of leadership, the party question: “The essence of Pabloist revisionism is the overthrow of that part of Trotskyism which is today its most vital part— the conception of the crisis of mankind as the crisis of the leadership of the labor movement summed up in the question of the party.”[138]

This has been denigrated, in particular by the British Workers Power group. Thus they publish a snotty article by Emile Gallet, declaring:

The problem with the SWP majority’s line on “Pabloism” was that they failed to get the true measure of the beast. They actually held to the fundamental tenets of the Pablo-Mandel method. However, like Bleibtreu, they balked at the logical conclusion of the third Congress view of Stalinist parties becoming transformed into centrist ones (e.g. Yugoslavia, China), that is, entry into the CPs. They therefore concentrated their fire on the most striking yet superficial aspect of “Pabloism,” which for them “boils down to one point and is concentrated in one point...the question of the party” [our emphasis].[139]

Later on, the author argues that “the SWP, like the rest of the FI, was unable to measure up to the problem of re-applying Trotsky’s method to the post-war world,” and thus “there are major centrist flaws which must lead us to reject any view which sees the SWP or Cannon as revolutionary communists in the post-war period.”[140] This puerile polemic shows just the opposite, that while the SWP had major flaws in its analysis, when it came down to the question of questions, that of the revolutionary leadership, for all their faults they fought liquidationism. And the fact that the party question is “superficial” for the likes of Workers Power shows that they can never measure up to the little finger of a Cannon.

Continue on...

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Notes
85 Michel Pablo, “The Yugoslav Affair,” Fourth International, December 1948, 241.

86 Michel Pablo, “On the Class Nature of Yugoslavia,” SWP International Information Bulletin, December 1949, 2.

87 Ibid., 3.

88 Ibid., 3.

89 Ibid., 27.

90 Michel Pablo, “Yugoslavia and the Rest of the Buffer Zone,” SWP International Information Bulletin, May 1950.

91 Ernest Germain (Mandel), “The Yugoslav Question, the Question of the Soviet Buffer Zone, and Their Implications for Marxist Theory” (October 1949), SWP International Information Bulletin, January 1950.

92 Ibid., 32.

93 Ibid., 42.

94 Morris Stein, “The Class Nature of the Buffer Countries in Eastern Europe,” SWP Discussion Bulletin No. 3, June 1950, 8.

95 John G. Wright, “The Importance of Method in the Discussion on the Kremlin-Dominated Buffer Zone,” SWP Discussion Bulletin No. 2, April 1950, 5.

96 Ernest Germain (Mandel), “Draft Resolution on the Development of the Yugoslav Revolution,” SWP International Information Bulletin, September 1950, 12.

97 Murry Weiss, “Report on Yugoslavia and Related Questions,” SWP Discussion Bulletin No. 6, January 1951, 2.

98 Leon Trotsky, Transitional Program, 135.

99 Joseph Hansen, “The Problem of Eastern Europe,” SWP Internal Bulletin Vol. XII, No. 2, February 1950, reprinted in CPSEER, 33.

100 Leon Trotsky, In Defense of Marxism (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1942).

101 Bill Hunter, “The I.S. and Eastern Europe.” A photocopy of an original from the archives of Sam Bornstein is in the holdings of the Prometheus Research Library.

102 International Secretariat, Introduction (October 1949), SWP International Information Bulletin, December 1949.

103 “Remarks by M. Stein Opening Political Committee Discussion on IEC Resolution on Eastern Europe” (12 July 1949), SWP Internal Bulletin, Vol. XI, No) 5, October 1949, reprinted in CPSEER, 17.

104 Michel Pablo, “Where Are We Going?”, SWP International Information Bulletin, March 1951, reprinted in SWP Education for Socialists, “International Secretariat Documents 1951-1954” (March 1974) (hereafter referred to as I.S. Documents), Vol. 1, 10.

105 Ibid., 8.

106 Ibid., 4-6.

107 Ibid., 6-7 (emphasis in original).

108 Michel Pablo, “The Building of the Revolutionary Party” (excerpts of report to IEC Tenth Plenum), SWP International Information Bulletin, June 1952, reprinted in I.S. Documents, Vol. 1, 34.

109 Quoted in Favre-Bleibtreu (Marcel Bleibtreu), “Where Is Comrade Pablo Going?”, IC Documents, Vol. 1, 18.

110 Michel Pablo, “World Trotskyism Rearms,” Fourth International, November-December 1951, 168-76.

111 The Third World Congress resolution, “Theses on Perspectives and Orientation,” is available in English in I.S. Documents, Vol. 1, 25-30, and in French in LCQI, Vol. 4, 147-60. Germain/Mandel’s report, “Trois années de cours nouveau du trotskysme,” appears in LCQI, Vol. 4, 303-26.

112 Cited by James P. Cannon in a speech to the Los Angeles SWP branch, 5 December 1953, SWP Discussion Bulletin A-13 (January 1954), reprinted in IC Documents, Vol. 3, 159.

113 Michel Pablo, “World Trotskyism Rearms,” op. cit., 172.

114 Michel Pablo, “The Building of the Revolutionary Party,” op. cit., 35.

115 Ibid., 37-39.

116 Michel Pablo, “Rapport sur les applications tactiques de la ligne du IIIe Congrès mondial,” LCQI, Vol. 4, 355-56. These quoted passages were not included in the SWP’s “excerpted” version of Pablo’s report cited above, note 108. This appears to have been a political “edit” job in order to excise the most opportunist aspects, since almost the entire rest of his report is printed. At the time the SWP leadership was still backing Pablo against the French PCI majority.

117 Ernest Mandel, “Trois années de cours nouveau du trotskysme,” op. cit., 305.

118 Unsigned (Ted Grant), “Statement to the BSFI [British Section of the Fourth International]” (n.d., ca. summer 1950). A photocopy of this document is in the collection of the Prometheus Research Library.

119 Cited in Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson, op. cit., 225-26.

120 “On the 1966 Split,” Spartacist (English edition) No. 36-37, Winter 1985-86 (a special issue titled “Healyism Implodes”).

121 Pablo’s draft “Theses on Perspectives and Orientation” were adopted by the Ninth Plenum and published as “Thèse sur les perspectives internationales et l’orientation de la IVe Internationale,” Quatrième Internationale, January 1951. They were also published in English in SWP International Information Bulletin, January 1951. They were subsequently adopted with minor amendments by the Third World Congress. See note 111 for publication information on the theses adopted by the congress.

122 “The Struggle of the French Trotskyists Against Pabloite Liquidationism,” SWP Discussion Bulletin A-17 (May 1954), reprinted in IC Documents, Vol. 1, 25-29.

123 Ernest Germain (Mandel), “What Should Be Modified and What Should Be Maintained in the Theses of the Second World Congress of the Fourth International on the Question of Stalinism? (Ten Theses),” SWP International Information Bulletin, April 1951, reprinted in I.S. Documents, Vol. 1, 16-24. According to the SWP IIB, the “Ten Theses” first appeared in the March 1951 Bulletin of the International Secretariat. “Genesis of Pabloism” contains a discussion of Germain’s theses.

124 “Résolution sur le PCI français,” LCQI, Vol. 4, 331.

125 Favre-Bleibtreu (Marcel Bleibtreu), “Où résident les divergences,” La Vérité, June 1951, 2-11.

126 Favre-Bleibtreu (Marcel Bleibtreu), “Where Is Comrade Pablo Going?”, IC Documents, Vol. 1, 12.

127 “Theses on Perspectives and Orientation,” op. cit., 27.

128 Favre-Bleibtreu (Marcel Bleibtreu), “Where Is Comrade Pablo Going?”, op. cit., 16.

129 “Lettre adressée par le secrétariat international au comité central du PCI” (14 January 1952), LCQI, Vol. 4, 401.

130 Rodolphe Prager, Introduction to “Dossier sur la crise et la scission du PCI,” LCQI, Vol. 4, 373.

131 “The Struggle of the French Trotskyists Against Pabloite Liquidationism,” op. cit., 29.

132 “Cannon Versus Pablo,” Workers Vanguard No. 28, 14 September 1973.

133 “Contribution to the Discussion on International Perspectives” (5 June 1951), IC Documents, Vol. 1, 4-6. The SWP apparently never published this document until the Education for Socialists series came out in 1974.

134 James P. Cannon, Letter to Daniel Renard (29 May 1952), reprinted in IC Documents, Vol. 1, 23-25.

135 James P. Cannon, “Internationalism and the SWP” (18 May 1953 speech to majority caucus of the SWP), Speeches to the Party (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973), 79; and letter to Sam Gordon (4 June 1953), IC Documents, Vol) 1, 54.

136 James P. Cannon, “Internationalism and the SWP,” op. cit., 80-81.

137 Cited by James P. Cannon, “Report to the May Plenum,” Speeches to the Party, 140.

138 James P. Cannon, “Factional Struggle and Party Leadership” (speech to the November 1953 plenum of the SWP), Speeches to the Party, 181.

139 Emile Gallet, “The SWP (US) in the ‘American Century’—A Case Study of ‘Orthodoxy’,” Permanent Revolution No. 7, Spring 1988, 120.

140 Ibid., 122.

Wednesday, January 05, 2011

From The Archives Of The Spartacist League (U.S.)- Yugoslavia, East Europe and the Fourth International:

Markin comment:
In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement that in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.

After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Debs' Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.

I am continuing today what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.

However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
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Markin comment on this article:

As has been detailed in other pieces in this space about the fate of the cadre of the Fourth International, including the leading figure, Leon Trotsky, assassinated by a Stalinist agent in Mexico in 1940, that organization was decimated by various forces by the end of World War II and left it without strong theoretical leadership the post-war period. Not strong enough at a time when the seemingly improbable situation developed where non-Leninist (in the early Bolshevik sense) parties were leading overturns of capitalist regimes from Eastern Europe to Asia. This inability to sift through the historic facts was most forcefully felt in the immediate case of Yugoslavia. But, frankly, the post- World War II methodological problems still haunt those of us who stand on the history of the Fourth International, mainly today around the question of whether China is capitalist or not. That makes this pamphlet worthwhile reading to order to try to sort that problem out.
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Yugoslavia, East Europe and the Fourth International:
The Evolution of Pabloist Liquidationism
Editorial Note
Written: 1993
Source: Prometheus Research Library, Prometheus Research Series No. 4, New York, 1993
Transcription/Markup/Proofing: John Heckman.
Public Domain: Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 2007/Prometheus Research Library. You can freely copy, display and otherwise distribute this work. Please credit the Marxists Internet Archive & Prometheus Research Library as your source, include the url to this work, and note the transcribers & editors above.

“Yugoslavia, East Europe and the Fourth International: The Evolution of Pabloist Liquidationism” was originally prepared as a contribution to discussions between the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) and the Partido Bolchevique por la Cuarta Internacional (PBCI) of Argentina. It was published in the ICL’s International Discussion Bulletin No. 30 (October 1992) as part of the discussion for the Second International Conference of the ICL, which was held in the late autumn of 1992.

At the ICL conference, a panel discussion on “The Fourth International and the Fight for the Continuity of Trotskyism” examined the rise of the revisionist current led by Michel Pablo which destroyed the Fourth International in the early 1950s. Comrade Jan Norden, a member of the Central Committee of the Spartacist League/U.S. and of the International Executive Committee of the ICL, traced the evolution of Pabloism in the flawed response of the Fourth International to the Yugoslav Revolution and the 1948 Tito-Stalin split, while other panelists examined the influence of the Algerian independence struggle on the development of Pabloism in France, and the history of liquidation of the German Pabloists into the Social Democracy in the 1950s. The conference mandated the early publication of Norden’s document, which represents a significant extension of our 1972 Spartacist article “Genesis of Pabloism.” “Yugoslavia, East Europe and the Fourth International: The Evolution of Pabloist Liquidationism” assumes a knowledge of “Genesis of Pabloism,” which is included in this bulletin.

Based on the discussion at the ICL conference and in preparation for its publication as Prometheus Research Series No. 4, “Yugoslavia, East Europe and the Fourth International: The Evolution of Pabloist Liquidationism” has been revised and portions of an 8 August 1992 letter to the PBCI incorporated into it. The notes have been expanded to reflect the extensive documentation assembled from French- and English-language publications of the Fourth International, as well as from archival sources. We are not able to reprint in this bulletin a representative selection of the documentary record cited. We have included a few items from the early period immediately following the June 1948 announcement of the Tito-Stalin split, because most of these are not readily available in existing document collections.

We publish the International Secretariat’s initial circular to all sections of the Fourth International on the “Tito affair,” as well as the two “Open Letters” which the International Secretariat addressed to the Yugoslav Communist Party in July 1948. The leaderships of both the French and British sections of the Fourth International opposed the accommodation to Tito reflected in these Open Letters. We publish one document from each of these oppositional currents: a resolution adopted by the Fifth Congress of the French Parti Communiste Internationaliste, held in July 1948, and a letter by British Revolutionary Communist Party leader Jock Haston to the International Executive Committee, undated but written some time in the late summer of 1948.

Those who wish to pursue further study of the documentary record are directed to the many sources cited in the text. In the 1970s the American Socialist Workers Party reproduced many of the most important documents from the history of the Fourth International in its Education for Socialists pamphlet series, which is still in print; many documents reprinted in the Education for Socialists series are cited in the notes. Much documentation is available in French in the four-volume series edited by Rodolphe Prager, Les congrès de la IVe Internationale (manifestes, thèses, résolutions), published in the 1980s by La Brèche-PEC. Where a French-language source is cited in this bulletin, the English translation was provided by the library staff.

Prometheus Research Library
March 1993
*********
Yugoslavia, East Europe and the Fourth International:
The Evolution of Pabloist Liquidationism
by Jan Norden
August 1992 (revised March 1993)

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Written: 1993
Source: Prometheus Research Library, Prometheus Research Series No. 4, New York, 1993
Transcription/Markup/Proofing: John Heckman.
Public Domain: Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 2007/Prometheus Research Library. You can freely copy, display and otherwise distribute this work. Please credit the Marxists Internet Archive & Prometheus Research Library as your source, include the url to this work, and note the transcribers & editors above.

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On the eve of the Second World War, Leon Trotsky wrote in the 1938 founding document of the Fourth International:

All talk to the effect that historical conditions have not yet “ripened” for socialism is the product of ignorance or conscious deception. The objective prerequisites for the proletarian revolution have not only “ripened”; they have begun to get somewhat rotten. Without a socialist revolution, in the next historical period at that, a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of mankind. It is now the turn of the proletariat, i.e., chiefly of its revolutionary vanguard. The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership.[1]

The second imperialist world conflagration was certainly such a catastrophe threatening to engulf all of mankind. The outcome of that war, centrally the defeat of Nazi Germany by the Soviet Red Army and the imperialist hegemony of the United States, set the international framework in which class struggles were waged for the next four and a half decades.

In the last several years, we have witnessed the spreading collapse of Stalinist regimes from East Europe to the Soviet Union. This, too, was long ago predicted by Trotsky, who insisted that in the absence of socialist revolution in the imperialist centers and proletarian political revolution in the USSR to oust the parasitic Stalinist bureaucracy, the Soviet workers state faced destruction at the hands of economically more powerful imperialism. But the effects on the workers and oppressed of the world of the destruction of these bureaucratically degenerated (in the case of the Soviet Union) and deformed workers states are no less devastating for having been foreseen long ago. Capitalism continues to decay, and the treacherous misleaders of the working class continue to betray, paralyzing the workers in the face of a worldwide counterrevolutionary offensive. Today, no less than when Trotsky wrote half a century ago, “the crisis of the proletarian leadership, having become the crisis in mankind’s culture, can be resolved only by the Fourth International.”[2]

Yet the Fourth International itself was destroyed as the world party of socialist revolution some 40 years ago, at the hands of a liquidationist current headed by Michel Pablo (Raptis). The Pabloists abandoned the fight for an independent Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard of the proletariat and instead chased after the Stalinists and a host of other petty-bourgeois and even bourgeois misleaders, justifying their capitulation by relying on the pressure of the supposed “objective revolutionary process.” The Spartacist tendency, now the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), has fought from its inception for the rebirth of the Fourth International through the political defeat of Pabloism by authentic Trotskyism. That requires a study of its origins and development, which we have addressed in numerous documents and in “Genesis of Pabloism.”[3] The first appearance of the Pabloist revisionist current (though elements of it can be found earlier) came over the Tito-Stalin split in 1948, when the leadership of the Fourth International embraced the dissident Stalinist regime in Tito’s Yugoslavia.

For many years, those who laid claim to the heritage of the anti-Pablo forces grouped in the International Committee (IC), notably Pierre Lambert in France and Gerry Healy in Britain, virtually ignored the Yugoslav affair because of their own complicity. Thus in his 1966 pamphlet dedicated to justifying the expulsion of Spartacist from the London “International Committee” conference, Healy introduces Pabloism with the laconic comment: “Then, in 1951, came Pablo, at that time Secretary of the International, with his theory that because of the imminence of the third world war, the Stalinist parties could, under the impact of this war, transform themselves into revolutionary parties.”[4] Pablo’s theory apparently dropped from the sky.

On the other hand, a number of small centrist groups, which split off from the larger by-products of the explosion of the Fourth International, have declared that it was the FI’s capitulatory line on Tito that marked its definitive political degeneration. The result, and indeed the purpose, of this is to turn the 1951-53 fight against Pabloism into an aftereffect, in order to declare both sides bankrupt, the Fourth International politically degenerated, and the revolutionary continuity broken. This, in turn, frees the born-yesterday centrists to pursue their eclectic, anti-internationalist lashups with abandon, combining and recombining with other denizens of the pseudo-Trotskyist swamp, while conveniently amnestying their own revisionist history. Hence the British Workers Power group claims:

The historical continuity of Trotskyism was shattered....The opposition in America, Britain and France that did emerge in 1952-3 was subjectively committed to opposing Pablo. However, they have to be judged not by their impulse but by their politics. Their “orthodoxy” was both sterile and based on postwar revisionism, prompted by the Yugoslav events. It was not authentic Trotskyism. Thus we cannot view either component of the 1953 split as the “continuators” of Trotskyism. Both were centrist.[5]

In contrast, we have sharply criticized the errors and failures of those, particularly in the American Socialist Workers Party (SWP), who opposed Pabloism, as we take their side in this crucial fight for the survival of Trotskyism. Key to reforging the Fourth International, we wrote two decades ago, “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.”[6] But while recognizing the inroads of opportunism over the Yugoslav affair, we emphasized:

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....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.[7]

As we will show in what follows, based on an examination of the public and internal materials of the Fourth International, those who write off the FI over Yugoslavia are in fact renouncing the struggle for the Trotskyist world party and its program, the Bolshevism of today.

The “Tito Affair” Explodes
The Fourth International had indeed been confused by the fact that Stalinism emerged from World War II greatly strengthened, contrary to Trotsky’s prognosis. In Italy and Greece there were attempted revolutions, in France, Belgium and elsewhere there were great strike waves, but the Stalinists managed to douse these fires and thus save the bourgeoisie. Meanwhile, the Kremlin’s sway had been extended through the Red Army’s defeat of Hitler’s Germany. The resolution on “The USSR and Stalinism” at the Second World Congress of the Fourth International (1948) declared categorically about East Europe, “In the ‘buffer’ countries [‘glacis’ in French] the state remains bourgeois.” It listed seven factors determining the “capitalist nature of the economy” in East Europe, and ruled that “on so large a scale as half of Europe, structural assimilation [to the Soviet Union] of the ‘buffer’ countries was impossible,” in part because destruction of the bourgeois states “can take place only as a result of the revolutionary mobilization of the masses.”[8]

This was in April 1948, two months after the so-called “Prague coup” which was the benchmark for the Stalinist consolidation of power throughout East Europe. The revolutionary upsurge of the masses at the end of World War II had been suppressed in the interests of the pact with the “democratic” imperialists at Yalta and in agreement with the local bourgeoisies. But the American Marshall Plan in 1947 made it impossible for the “buffer zone” states in the Soviet sphere of influence to be maintained except by expropriating the bourgeoisie. In industrialized Czechoslovakia, with its traditionally strong Communist Party, this was accompanied by a bureaucratically controlled mobilization of the masses. In much of the rest of East Europe it was carried out in a completely “cold” manner by a police purge of the bourgeois parties (the Stalinists having everywhere controlled the political police since 1945). Within a year, the East European bourgeoisies had been liquidated economically and purged from the state apparatus except for purely symbolic tokens. At the time of the FI’s Second World Congress, the “people’s democracies” were bureaucratically deformed workers states in the process of consolidation.

With its disorienting position on the class nature of East Europe, the Fourth International was thrown into tremendous confusion by the bombshell of Stalin’s excommunication of Tito in the “Communist Information Bureau” (Cominform) communiqué of 28 June 1948. For the first time, an entire Communist party, and moreover one holding state power, was no longer under Kremlin control. The Cominform statement bandied about the spectre of Trotskyism, declaring that “slanderous propaganda about the ‘degeneration’ of the CPSU (B), about the ‘degeneration’ of the USSR, and so on, borrowed from the arsenal of counter-revolutionary Trotskyism, is current within the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia.”[9]

What did this signify? It is important to recall that this was the first time that a national Stalinist party had actually broken with the Kremlin, and thus a certain amount of disorientation was to be expected. For the Fourth International, this represented both a significant opportunity and a theoretical predicament. An opportunity, because many Communist Party members in East and West Europe would find it hard to swallow the overnight transformation of Tito from hero of the anti-Nazi Partisan struggle and shining star of the Cominform (whose HQ had been placed in Belgrade) to “Hitlero-Trotskyite” and even “fascist beast at bay.” A theoretical quandary, because Yugoslavia was supposed to be capitalist. Over the next three years, the International Secretariat (I.S.), the International Executive Committee (IEC) and the Third World Congress of the Fourth International declared that the Yugoslav Communist Party (YCP) had “ceased to be a Stalinist party,” but rather was centrist and indeed “left-centrist” evolving toward revolutionary.[10]

The leadership of the FI assumed that any split from Stalin had to be to the left. Yet, as Stalinism was based on the nationalist dogma of building “socialism in one country,” Trotsky had long foreseen the possibility of competing Stalinist nationalisms. Thus in his 1928 critique of the Stalin-Bukharin draft program of the Comintern, Trotsky wrote: “If it is at all possible to realize socialism in one country, then one can believe in that theory not only after but also before the conquest of power.”[11] And after the 1938 Munich pact, he added:

Ten years ago it was predicted that the theory of socialism in one country must inevitably lead to the growth of nationalist tendencies in the sections of the Comintern....Today, we can predict with assurance the inception of a new stage. The growth of imperialist antagonisms, the obvious proximity of the war danger, and the equally obvious isolation of the USSR must unavoidably strengthen the centrifugal nationalist tendencies within the Comintern....Henceforth the Communo-chauvinists will have to worry about their own hides, whose interests by no means always coincide with the “defense of the USSR.”[12]

The Fourth International’s line of tailing after Tito was certainly the starting point for Pabloism, which became a full-fledged revisionist program ultimately explicitly liquidating the raison d’être of the Fourth International as the indispensable independent proletarian vanguard of the working class. Already in the first of two open letters sent to the Yugoslav Communist Party in July 1948, the International Secretariat led by Michel Pablo referred to the YCP as a “revolutionary workers party.”[13] The second letter ended with the call: “Yugoslav Communists, let us unite our efforts for a new Leninist International!”[14]

There was turmoil and serious political disorientation over Yugoslavia throughout the Fourth International. But it would be a mistake to think that when the leaders and cadres of the FI picked up their morning papers on 29 June 1948, they were suddenly stricken with irremediable revisionism. In fact, the declarations of the FI are not at all uniformly opportunist. Thus a 30 June 1948 circular by the International Secretariat, “To the Leadership of All Sections,” notes:

Yugoslavia is the only country of the glacis where the government had not been imposed by the entry of the Red Army and the Soviet occupation, but which had been brought to power by the revolutionary movement of the masses.

Tito personally is a bureaucrat to the hilt, past master in the bureaucratic and GPU Kremlin machine....The reply of the Yugoslav party enables us, naturally without solidarising with it or Tito, to attack the resolution of the Cominform.[15]

The circular urged FI leaders to “follow with great interest but also with caution the evolution of the Moscow-Belgrade conflict.” Yet the initial “Open Letter to the Communist Party of Yugoslavia” issued the next day (1 July) did politically “solidarize” with the YCP leaders, calling on them to “Keep up your fight! Deepen the significance of your struggle with Moscow and its international machine!...Long Live the Yugoslav Socialist Revolution!” And by July 13, the I.S. had thrown caution to the wind in its second open letter, calling on the YCP to become the “mobilization point” for the “mass of revolutionary workers.”

The first two open letters on Yugoslavia by the International Secretariat could not have involved much consultation with the American SWP, which was initially a good deal less enthusiastic about Tito, as will be shown below. A third open letter from the I.S., dated September 1948, pulled back. In the meantime, the Yugoslav CP had held its Fifth Congress (July 1948), which took a purely defensive posture, and at the end of Tito’s report all those attending arose chanting, “Stalin-Tito!”[16] At the congress, in response to the Cominform charges, Tito boasted that he knew how to handle “Trotskyist-fascists.” The YCP’s paper Borba (4 July 1948) reported: “A handful of Trotskyists, who showed their true faces in the war as collaborators and agents of the invaders, ended shamefully before the People’s Courts.”[17] This may have given pause to those Trotskyists who were eagerly embracing the Yugoslav leader.

Thus the new I.S. letter to the YCP noted that “Your leaders and delegates at the Congress have reaffirmed the position, long held by your party, to the effect that Yugoslavia is already a country where socialism is being built and that it is possible to do this.” The letter polemicized against the Stalinist conceptions of “socialism in one country” and a “monolithic” party. It urged “Yugoslav Communists” to “institute a real regime of proletarian democracy in the party and in the country!” and to “call for the real proletarian revolution in other countries of Eastern Europe! And of all of Europe and the world!”[18]

After the initial rush of enthusiasm for Tito by the FI’s International Secretariat, there was nervousness over the implications. A resolution on Yugoslavia at the Sixth Plenum of the IEC, in October 1948, was relatively restrained. Yet it described “Tito and the leadership of the Yugoslav Communist Party” as representing, “thus far, the bureaucratic deformation of a plebeian, anti-capitalist revolutionary current,” and declared that “from the moment that there is a conflict and break between a Communist party and the Kremlin, this party ceases to be a Stalinist party like the rest.”[19] These conclusions opened a breach in the Trotskyist program through which opportunists could drive a truck, and they did.

For a time, the positions taken by the Fourth International were notable mainly for their rampant confusion. Thus the IEC resolution adopted at the Seventh Plenum (April 1949) goes through a tortuous argumentation, calling the East European states a “hybrid transitional society in the process of transformation, with features that are as yet so fluid and lacking precision that it is extremely difficult to summarize its fundamental nature in a concise formula.” Opting for a “definition by description,” the resolution details a long list of factors, finally declaring the buffer zone countries to be “capitalist countries on the road toward structural assimilation with the USSR.” But the resolution quickly adds that this “does not at all imply that the bourgeoisie is in power as the dominant class in these countries”; indeed, a “military-political overturn” had “eliminated the big bourgeoisie and the bulk of the middle bourgeoisie.”[20]

A capitalist country in which the bourgeoisie is not the ruling class, and indeed has been largely “eliminated” as a political and economic force! As Max Shachtman once wrote (speaking of the American CP’s talk of a “labor party” that would be neither reformist nor revolutionary), such a phenomenon “has never been and never will be seen by God or man or beast or the elfin folk who see pretty near everything.”[21]

Only the elimination of borders, literally incorporating East Europe into the Soviet Union and making planning possible, would be a sure sign marking a qualitative social transformation, according to the IEC’s Seventh Plenum. On the other hand, the plenum noted that in Yugoslavia, unlike in the rest of East Europe, the bourgeoisie had largely been liquidated and the bourgeois state apparatus destroyed as a result of the Partisan struggle. The IEC took note of the possibility of “a real differentiation in the workers’ movement following the Tito crisis, despite the undeniable existence of a police regime in this country.”[22] While the IEC hesitated to make the leap, Pablo insisted that the analysis presented “should logically lead to the conclusion that Yugoslavia has ceased to be a capitalist country.”[23] The plenum formally opened up a discussion in the International on the Yugoslav question.

But as Stalin’s anti-Yugoslav offensive mounted, particularly with the Rajk trial in Hungary and similar purges throughout East Europe, Tito and his associates, their backs to the wall, began talking of “bureaucratic degeneration” in the Soviet Union, founding Titoist parties in Germany and Italy and a pro-Tito trade-union current in France. YCP theoretician Moshe Piyade wrote in the Belgrade party daily Borba (6 October 1949), “Since that very day when they proclaimed that Trotskyism was no longer a tendency in the international workers movement and had become an agency of fascism,” henceforth “there remains only physical extermination and the burning of heretics, all discussion being excluded.”[24] The leaders of the FI jumped on these openings, producing paroxysms of praise, sending work brigades and trade-union delegations to Yugoslavia, publishing articles and interviews, and distributing books by YCP leaders.

At its Eighth Plenum (April 1950), the IEC fulsomely hailed “the progressive evolution of the Yugoslav CP,” which “surpasses the most optimistic forecasts,” and stressed “the depth of the revolutionary movement which bore this party to power and the remarkable qualities of its leading cadres”! This supposedly confirmed “the declaration made by our International upon the outbreak of the Yugoslav affair that the rupture of a Stalinist party with the Kremlin necessarily involves a differentiation from Stalinism, which under certain conditions can be highly progressive.”[25] A separate resolution declared that despite continuing differences over the stages of development of the Yugoslav Revolution, with “the victory of the proletarian revolution in Yugoslavia, a workers’ state and a regime of the proletarian dictatorship exists in this country.”[26] Yet what took place in Yugoslavia was not a proletarian revolution but a peasant-based revolution militarily organized by a Stalinist party, the majority of whose members were peasants, giving rise to a bureaucratically deformed workers state.

So whereas in April 1949 the IEC referred to “the undeniable existence of a police regime,” in April 1950 it saw in the evolution of the Yugoslav CP “an ever more clear and powerful affirmation (in the field of ideas and of the political and economic organization of the country) of the highly democratic essence of the dictatorship of the proletariat.”[27] Indeed, while the IEC admitted that “bureaucratic deformations continue” in Yugoslavia, it declared that “a serious struggle is being conducted by the Yugoslav Communists against these deformations.”[28] In addition to this remarkably clean bill of health for the Yugoslav workers state (in effect, no worse than the Soviet Union under Lenin ca. 1920-21), the Fourth International leadership saw a rosy future ahead for it:

To the degree that the Yugoslav CP persists along this road and, by ridding itself of the last ideological vestiges of Stalinism, it will renew the organic bonds between the unfolding Yugoslav and world revolutions, that will entail the regrouping of revolutionary forces on an international scale and it will become the most powerful springboard from which to launch the decisive assault against Stalinism in its crisis.[29]

The task the IEC laid out, therefore, was “to surround the Yugoslav revolution with a widespread and active sympathy by the international revolutionary vanguard and the conscious segment of the working class,” as well as to promote and regroup “the new Communist opposition” in the CPs “stimulated precisely by the Yugoslav example.”[30]

Belgrade’s “Right Turn” Over Korea
But at the same time that Tito & Co. were denouncing “bureaucracy” at home and in the Soviet Union, the imperialists were turning the screws on Yugoslavia. And then came the decisive event in the evolution of the Yugoslav affair: the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950. For a time, the YCP tops had sought to maneuver between the Kremlin and imperialism, but now that the issue of war was posed there was no escaping. Belgrade at first tried to take a waffling line of neutrality, speaking in the UN against labeling North Korea the aggressor and voting against the sanctions that gave a UN cover to the American expeditionary force in Korea.[31] But Yugoslavia eventually caved in to Washington, criminally abstaining on the resolution authorizing General MacArthur to cross the 38th parallel into North Korea, and then opposing the resulting Chinese intervention and voting against the Chinese resolution demanding U.S. withdrawal from Korea.

The Fourth International responded with articles such as “Yugoslav Foreign Policy Continues Drift to Right.”[32] A November 1950 appeal by the FI’s International Secretariat declared, “proletarian Yugoslavia appears to be abandoning its independent policy and seems to be lining up with the imperialist bloc led by Washington,” and called for an end to “the prostration of the Yugoslav Revolution before imperialism.”[33] A series of circulars by the I.S. noted “widespread illusions [among the Yugoslavs] concerning the role of the UN” (June 1950), then a “combination of a leftist course internally and a course which has shifted to the right internationally” (September 1950), and finally a series of positions “which can no longer be considered errors resulting from political confusion, but must be regarded as the expression of a new course taken by the leadership of the YCP which...is tending to associate it with the imperialist bloc” (November 1950). The final circular concluded that “we don’t call yet for the constitution of an opposition tendency,” but rather called on the YCP as a whole to renounce its policy toward Korea.[34]

At the end of November 1950, the FI International Executive Committee held its Ninth Plenum and passed a resolution which was then adopted, with very few modifications, by the Third World Congress of the Fourth International in August 1951. This was the last major statement by the FI on Yugoslavia. The IEC resolution declared that there was a “Yugoslav proletarian revolution” (whose conquests were “generalized and legally consolidated in 1945-46”), and held that with the break from Stalin the YCP “ceased to be a Stalinist party in the full meaning of the word.” The resolution claimed that in Yugoslavia “Stalinism no longer exists today as an effective factor in the workers’ movement,” and went even further to assert: “The dynamics of the Yugoslav revolution confirms the theory of the permanent revolution on all points.”[35]

What about Trotsky’s insistence that “the realization of the revolutionary alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry is conceivable only under the political leadership of the proletarian vanguard, organized in the Communist Party”?[36] The need for an independent, Bolshevik-internationalist vanguard party, the key to Trotsky’s program, was not mentioned, for the simple reason that this task had been ceded to the Stalinist YCP under Tito. The Workers Power obituary on the Fourth International claims that:

In 1951 the centrist positions of the Third World Congress on Stalinism, on Yugoslavia, and general perspectives (the impending “civil war” perspective) proved, beyond doubt, that a programmatic collapse of the Fourth International had taken place. The fact that no section voted against the Yugoslav resolution—the cornerstone of all the errors—is a fact of enormous significance. The FI as a whole had collapsed into centrism.[37]

In reality, while reflecting the deep inroads Pabloism had already made, the IEC resolution on Yugoslavia adopted by the Third World Congress was not quite so seamlessly opportunist as Workers Power would have it. Reflecting mounting disenchantment with the Tito regime, the resolution notes that the “right turn in Yugoslav foreign policy” over the Korean War had “in part vitiated the effects of the Yugoslav affair on the international crisis of Stalinism.” It also vowed to make “frank and uncompromising criticism of all the political errors and opportunist deviations on the part of the CPY.” In one of its few amendments to the IEC resolution, the Third World Congress insisted that these criticisms “should tend to impel the Yugoslav communists to replace their present opportunist leadership by a revolutionary leadership.”[38]

Moreover, the Third World Congress resolution on international perspectives declared that “we shall work for the creation of a Bolshevik tendency in the YCP, against the policy of surrender and capitulation of the leadership, and for its replacement.”[39] So by August 1951 the Fourth International was calling, softly, for the ouster of the Tito leadership. The report on Yugoslavia to the congress by Harold Livingstone (George Clarke) was harder. While saying that “the Yugoslav revolution is not dead,” it declared “its progressive influence on the world labor movement—in deepening the crisis of Stalinism and in giving new impetus to the forces of revolutionary Marxism—is now a thing of the past.”[40]

While Clarke said that “we do not put a cross on the Yugoslav revolution,” in fact Yugoslavia hardly appeared after that in the press or statements of the Fourth International up to the split in 1953. An article reporting on the Third World Congress wrote of Yugoslavia that “the events which have occurred since mid-1950 have demonstrated all the profound opportunism of a leadership nurtured within the Stalinist camp, and the extreme danger this opportunism constituted for the preservation of the revolutionary gains.”[41] And an article by Pablo summed up:

After a brief left-centrist period which followed their break with the Kremlin, the Yugoslav leadership in their attempt to safeguard the regime with the money, the military and diplomatic guarantees of Western “democratic imperialism,” has been liquidating the proletarian power in Yugoslavia bit by bit and preparing its total demise....It is now more necessary than ever that the revolutionary Marxists of the Yugoslav Communist Party organize into a Leninist tendency and align themselves against the treacherous policies of their leaders.[42]

For all of 1952 we found not one article on Yugoslavia in Quatrième Internationale, the press of the French Parti Communiste Internationaliste, or the press of the American SWP; for 1953 we found only one.[43] Having been burned by their handling of the Tito affair, the FI leaders dropped it like a hot potato. They backed away from the Belgrade regime, but there was no reckoning with the theoretical and programmatic questions Yugoslavia had posed for the Fourth International. In early 1953, SWP leader Joseph Hansen could say: “Our co-thinkers now call for a political revolution in Yugoslavia such as we advocate against the Kremlin. This means that the Tito regime is judged to be politically counter-revolutionary.”[44] But what happened to the earlier appraisal of the Tito regime as “left-centrist” and the “remarkable qualities of its leading cadres”? This was essentially swept under the rug.

At the time of the split with Pablo in November 1953, the document by the SWP plenum published under the title “Against Pabloist Revisionism” had only this to say:

Yugoslavia and China show that under certain exceptional conditions the leadership of a Stalinist party, caught between extermination by the counter-revolution and an extremely powerful revolutionary offensive of the masses, can push forward to power....But it would be unwarranted to generalize too broadly and hastily on this point. It should be remembered that while the Yugoslavs marched to power, the CP’s in other countries remained subordinate to the Kremlin and facilitated the work of the counter-revolution. Two Communist parties, the Yugoslav and Chinese, met the test in one way; the others in a directly opposite manner.

The specific conditions which forced the Yugoslav and Chinese CP’s onto the revolutionary road must be analyzed and understood.[45]

While the FI reaffirmed the need for a new revolutionary leadership of the proletariat, the study of the implications of the Yugoslav and Chinese revolutions did not take place. It took until 1955 for the SWP to characterize China as a deformed workers state, and even then it placed the qualitative transformation in 1951-53, when as a result of the Korean War (most of) the capitalists were expropriated, rather than in 1949 when the revolution took place.[46] This was continuing the same methodology which had led to enormous confusion over East Europe. Yet the May 1957 SWP convention declared that “the Titoites have demonstrated throughout that they are in no sense to the left of the Soviet bureaucracy.”[47] And an SWP resolution on the Hungarian Revolution said of Tito’s support for Moscow, “When the cards were down, the fact that Tito represents simply a variety of Stalinism proved decisive—despite his differences with Khrushchev & Co.”[48] The fact that these issues were dealt with only empirically and the theoretical questions raised by the deformed workers states after WWII were never fought out was a major failure of the anti-Pabloists. This was later to feed into the SWP’s capitulation to Pablo/Mandel over Algeria and Cuba, facilitating the formation of the Mandelite “United Secretariat” (USec) characterized by its perennial search for “new vanguards.”

Who Opposed FI Capitulation to Tito?
But to recognize and criticize these weaknesses and failures, as we more than any other tendency have done, is far from dismissing the struggle against Pabloism. Those who use the Yugoslav affair in order to equate pro-and anti-Pablo groupings in the Fourth International, who talk of the definitive degeneration and political collapse of the FI during 1948-51, are throwing up a smokescreen to obliterate what the fight during 1951-53 was all about: the continuity of Trotskyism. To accomplish this they simply disappear all opposition to the tailing after Tito pushed by Pablo and adopted by the I.S./IEC. Thus Workers Power writes:

As the FI leadership’s world view became increasingly at variance with reality, so their orthodoxy became ever more fragile. All that was needed to dislodge the FI from the orthodox positions it held until 1948 was a sharp twist in world events.

That twist in events came almost immediately after the 1948 Congress. In the summer of 1948 the Tito-Stalin split was made public....Out of the Yugoslav events the FI developed centrist conclusions and positions....Pablo’s positions on Yugoslavia were adopted by the FI at its Third World Congress in 1951. They were subscribed to by all the major sections and leading figures of the FI.[49]

This picture of a uniform capitulation to Pablo is utterly false. To understand the real development of Pabloism it’s necessary to look at the opposition that did arise over the Yugoslav affair, and its weaknesses.

Naturally, from outside the FI there was criticism from Max Shachtman’s Workers Party. Workers Party leader Hal Draper wrote of the “galloping political degeneration” of the FI, concluding: “The Stalinotropism of the Fourth International leadership is flowering.”[50] A similar tone was struck by the “Revolutionary Faction of the Mexican Section of the Fourth International.” Its “Critique of the ‘Open Letter’ of the I.S. to the Yugoslav CP” accuses the I.S. of “a grave opportunist deviation” as it “places Tito and the Yugoslav ‘Communist’ Party to the left of Stalin, thereby creating illusions about a future revolutionary role of a party that despite everything continues to be Stalinist.”[51] True enough, but in the very next sentence, it lets the cat out of the bag, declaring, “in the USSR there is no workers state, however degenerated they portray it to us, but rather state capitalism.”

Somewhat later, in May 1951, Natalia Sedova Trotsky wrote to the American SWP, breaking all ties with the Fourth International to protest its stands on Yugoslavia, East Europe and the Soviet Union. She declared that “your entire press is now devoted to an inexcusable idealization of the Titoist bureaucracy,” which “is only a replica, in a new form, of the old Stalinist bureaucracy.” She rightly noted that “It is absurd to believe or to teach that the revolutionary leadership of the Yugoslav people will develop out of this bureaucracy or in any way other than in the course of struggle against it.” Yet while she was able to take to task the SWP and the FI for their opportunist line on Yugoslavia, her starting point was the declaration that “Stalinism and the Stalinist state have nothing whatever in common with a workers’ state or with socialism.”[52] Natalia rejected Trotsky’s policy of unconditional defense of the Soviet Union, claiming it had become capitalist. Thus she refused to support the Soviet Union and North Korea (“the armies of Stalinism”) against U.S. imperialism in the Korean War.

So the purveyors of the thesis that the Soviet Union was a new exploitative class society, whether “bureaucratic collectivist” (Shachtman) or “state capitalist,” accused the I.S. of selling out to Stalinism. Of course, they wrote off the whole affair as a squabble between two bureaucrats. “Go to it, bandits! Deepen the rift between you!” wrote Shachtman,[53] while Draper declared that “the conflict between the Yugo and the Commissar is over who is to benefit from the exploitation of the masses.”[54] This is hardly surprising: their line was crystallized Stalinophobia. Thus Shachtman vituperated against “Stalinist imperialism,” while Draper opposed the Yugoslav call for a Balkan federation in denouncing “Yugoslav sub-imperialism.” Ultimately Shachtman’s line would take him from the mythical “Third Camp,” to pro-imperialist “neutrality” in the Korean War, to direct support for imperialism at the time of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and in the Vietnam War.

(Parenthetically, any honest believer in “state capitalism” should have realized the falsity of this construct by the time of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, when the Stalinist bureaucracy acted not as an exploiting class, which would have defended its property and class interests to the bloody end, but rather as a fragile, parasitic layer which quickly shattered, with whole sections going over to the insurrectionary workers. Today, as imperialist pimps, the “state caps” are enjoying the collapse of Stalinism. But if there were any shame among revisionists, by rights Tony Cliff et al. ought to be embarrassed into nonexistence by the stark revelation of the fallacy of their schema. If it’s only the change from one form of capitalism to another, then why the mass bloodletting in Yugoslavia, mass hunger in Poland, mass unemployment in East Germany, not to mention the emboldening of world imperialism for, e.g., the mass slaughter in Iraq?)

But there was plenty of unease over the Fourth International’s line on Yugoslavia from those who saw themselves as orthodox Trotskyists. The American SWP took a distinctly different tack at first from that of the I.S. An initial editorial in the Militant declared, “All that Tito and his clique are striving to defend are their own material interests, their power and privileges. All they ask is to be permitted to rule in Yugoslavia as Stalin rules in Russia.”[55] In the same issue John G. Wright, a leading SWP cadre, sounded almost like Shachtman: “The Dictator-in-Chief in the Kremlin has decided to veto the Little Dictator in Yugoslavia.”[56] This soon changed. Directly contradicting Wright’s rather Stalinophobic articles, Joseph Hansen declared: “Far more is involved than the fight between a big dictator and a little dictator. The struggle initiated by Tito...may well become the starting point for new, large-scale regroupments and developments in the international working class movement.”[57] That was quite true.

A 3 August 1948 statement by the Political Committee of the SWP was not nearly so effusively capitulatory as the I.S. Open Letter of July 13. Nevertheless, the SWP statement was marked by the objectivism which was characteristic of much of the FI’s writings on Yugoslavia:

The course of events will work in favor of the revolutionists....The logic of the Stalin-Tito struggle is such that it is bound to impel the militants in Yugoslavia and elsewhere—not to the right but to the left. This will happen independently of whether Tito himself moves to the right, or whether he seeks to straddle the fence somewhere between the Kremlin and imperialism.[58]

Over the next year and a half, the SWP continued to keep some distance from the Tito regime. Thus in November 1948 Joseph Hansen wrote an article, “Tito Flounders with Stalin’s ‘Theory’ of Building ‘Socialism’ in One Country.”[59] Nine months later a Militant editorial commented: “Thus far Tito has been fighting the Kremlin with measures and weapons borrowed almost exclusively from the arsenal of Stalinism,” to wit, the false claim of “building socialism” in one country, making deals with imperialism and “bureaucratic police measures” internally.[60] However, in late 1949 the SWP began to shift when a National Committee statement declared: “Stalinist in origin and ideology, the Tito leadership has nevertheless been compelled by the logic of the struggle to question some of the fundamental premises on which Stalinism rests....The Yugoslav struggle has given rise to a new form of centrism, a tendency between Stalinist reformism and revolutionary Marxism.”[61]

By the spring of 1950, the SWP had become positively euphoric over Tito. James P. Cannon sent a telegram to the YCP Central Committee hailing the latter’s May Day manifesto: “workers everywhere will acclaim your appeal to defend Yugoslavia and restore revolutionary movement to Leninism as opposed to Stalinism and Social Democracy.”[62] An article in the same Militant proclaimed, “Above all, the Yugoslav manifesto indicates that the final crisis of world Stalinism is at hand.”[63] (This paean was occasioned by a single reference in the YCP manifesto to “the struggle against the revision of Marxism and Leninism.”) Two months later, the Militant headlined “Tito Denounces Bureaucracy as Foe of Socialism,” and editorialized that Tito’s June 27 speech denouncing the “huge, bureaucratic, centralistic apparatus” in the USSR and attacking Stalin by name was “a great mile stone in the development of the international working class and socialist movement.”[64]

But as Belgrade lined up with imperialism over the Korean War, the SWP’s enthusiasm quickly cooled. From November 1950 to January 1951 the Militant published an eleven-part cautionary series by Ernest Mandel, who at the time wrote under the name Ernest Germain, titled “Yugoslavia Seen with Open Eyes.” This was followed by another four-part series by John G. Wright on “Yugoslavia’s Foreign Policy.” Wright accused the Yugoslav leaders of “more and more tending” to “trade away their democratic and socialist principles in exchange for material and military aid” from the imperialist West.[65] “What blinds the Yugoslav Communists is that their own leaders themselves still cling to the illusory reactionary goal of building socialism within the confines of Yugoslavia, just as they keep clinging to the Stalinist conception of a ‘monolithic’ party,” Wright concluded.[66]

The policy of the French Parti Communiste Internationaliste (PCI) on Yugoslavia was broadly similar to that of the American SWP, although the swings were more pronounced since the issue was much more immediate in Europe. At the Fifth Congress of the PCI in July 1948, the majority led by Jacques Privas (Jacques Grimblatt), Michèle Mestre, Pierre Lambert, and Marcel Marin (Marcel Gibelin) passed a motion directly opposing the I.S. Open Letter of July 13 “for idealizing Tito and the Yugoslav CP,” while making clear their intention to abide by international discipline.[67] The PCI motion insisted that the Tito-Stalin split was part of the general crisis of Stalinism in the buffer zone, which it attributed to “exploitation” of these countries by the Kremlin. The I.S. was supported by a minority led by Pierre Frank and Marcel Favre-Bleibtreu. At a PCI Central Committee meeting in late 1948, Bleibtreu and Frank fulsomely supported the Yugoslavia motion adopted by the October 1948 IEC plenum, insisting in particular that the YCP had ceased to be “a Stalinist party like the rest.” The majority of the PCI Central Committee, while viewing the relatively restrained IEC motion as a step in the right direction, still insisted that the IEC disavow Pablo’s August 1948 article, “The Yugoslav Affair,” as well as the Open Letter formulations which idealized Tito.[68]

On the other hand, during 1950, the French PCI practically became a publicity agency for the Yugoslavs. A January report on the PCI’s Sixth Congress declared that “above all the defense of Yugoslavia is the defense of a proletarian revolution”:

The reporter [Bleibtreu] fought the doubts and hesitations which threaten to weaken the intervention of the party. He showed:

—that it is wrong to speak of a Yugoslav bureaucratic caste of the same nature as the Russian bureaucracy;

—that it is wrong to accept the idea that the YCP has capitulated or is in the process of capitulating to imperialism. No vote of Yugoslavia in the UN, no trade agreement can justify such a claim.[69]

The resolution “Hands Off the Yugoslav Revolution” voted by the congress declared that the Yugoslav CP had “return[ed] to Leninism on a series of important strategic questions.” It characterized the YCP as representing “left-centrism in the process of evolving,” citing factors “which objectively push the YCP onto the road of the revolutionary program.”[70]

The PCI regularly advertised works by Yugoslav leaders such as Milovan Djilas and Edvard Kardelj (People’s Democracy in Yugoslavia) and urged readers to tune in to the broadcasts of Radio Belgrade. A headline proclaimed “The Magnificent Election Campaign of the YCP,” while the article declared: “The YCP and the Fourth International are hated for the same reason: because they express the greatest force of our epoch, the force of the proletarian revolution, the invincible strength of the working people of all countries.”[71] On May Day 1950 a French delegation visited Belgrade; PCI leader Pierre Lambert reported, “I believe that I saw in Yugoslavia a dictatorship of the proletariat, led by a party which passionately seeks to combat bureaucracy and impose workers democracy”! (At the same time he reported that typical slogans carried in the demonstration were “Tito, Central Committee, Party, Yugoslav Peoples,” and “Tito Is with Us, We Are with Tito.”)[72]

The PCI held meetings in defense of Yugoslavia which had to be physically defended against Stalinist attacks. It also took the lead in sending youth work brigades (called the Jean Jaurès Brigades after the French Socialist leader) and trade-union delegations to Yugoslavia, which eventually totaled some 2,000 young workers. La Vérité bombastically headlined the report of one delegation, “Those Who Have Seen the Truth in Yugoslavia Say It: YES, This Is a State Where Socialism Is Being Built, This Is the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” Denouncing reactionary and Stalinist accounts of a “police state” in Yugoslavia, the article declared, “This state is a WORKERS STATE, resolutely engaged on the road of SOCIALIST DEMOCRACY.” However, elsewhere in the reportage, La Vérité admitted that “the French delegation was struck by...a certain bureaucratic plethora,” and “a certain insufficiency of political life and discussion” in the ranks of the Yugoslav party and trade unions.[73]

Eventually, the Tito regime’s capitulation to imperialism over the Korean War could no longer be ignored. In December 1950 La Vérité candidly expressed the sense of disillusionment among the PCI ranks, particularly the youth who had enthusiastically joined the work brigades: “All this is extremely painful for the revolutionary friends of Yugoslavia who have hoped that its leaders would really keep their promises to consistently defend Marxism-Leninism against Stalinist revisionism.”[74] The trade-union grouping led by Lambert around the journal L’Unité, in which PCI militants cooperated with pro-Tito elements and which was reputedly financed by the Yugoslav government,[75] eventually fell apart.

In “Genesis of Pabloism,” we wrote that “Virtually without exception the Fourth International was disoriented by the Yugoslav revolution.”[76] With the documentation now available to us, we can say that this is not entirely true. The British Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) at least understood that capitalism had been abolished, not only in Yugoslavia but in the other countries of East Europe as well, and opposed the capitulation to Tito. Yet the RCP’s line was dismissed out of hand, not only by Pablo but also by the SWP, and, most importantly, almost none of its documents were widely disseminated in the FI. At the April 1948 Second World Congress, the RCP submitted amendments to the resolution on the USSR and Stalinism in which they opposed the description of the East European states as capitalist, noting instead:

a) The basic overturn of capitalist property relations has already been, or is in the process of being completed. b) The capitalist control of the government and the apparatus of the state has been, or is in the process of being destroyed. c) This process of assimilation is the necessary and inevitable product of the class character of the Russian economy, and of the preponderance of the Russian state as the dominant military and political force in the existing relations of world powers on the one hand, and the balance of power between the Stalinist and working class organisations and the remnants of the ruling class, on the other.[77]

At the same time, the RCP was careful to underline that “the destruction of capitalism in these countries must not be taken as a model for the general overthrow of capitalism, nor does it prove that capitalism can be destroyed in Western Europe coldly, by terror from above.”[78]

So unlike the rest of the International, the British RCP did not face a theoretical quandary in dealing with the Tito-Stalin split. RCP leaders Jock Haston and Ted Grant, in a July 1948 article, noted that this “marks a new stage in the development of international Stalinism which must be closely followed by revolutionary and militant workers,” but they cautioned: “One thing we know, Tito is no Trotskyist. Organisationally and ideologically he is the enemy of Trotskyism.” Their article concluded:

All socialists will give critical support to the movement in Yugoslavia to federate with Bulgaria and to gain freedom from direct Moscow domination. At the same time, the workers in Yugoslavia and these countries will fight for the installation of genuine workers’ democracy....This is impossible under the present Tito regime. For an Independent Socialist Soviet Yugoslavia within an Independent Socialist Soviet Balkans. This can only be part of the struggle for the overthrow of the Capitalist Governments in Europe and the installation of Workers’ Democracy in Russia.[79]

A powerful letter to the International Executive Committee by Jock Haston, “on behalf of the Central Committee, RCP,” undated but probably written in late summer 1948, criticized the Open Letters of the I.S., noting that while they exposed the bureaucratic expulsion of the YCP from the Cominform, this “must not mean that we become lawyers for the YCP leadership, or create even the least illusion that they do not still remain, despite the break with Stalin, Stalinists in method and training.” Haston criticized the Open Letters for failing to fulfill these conditions and appearing to be “based on the perspective that the leaders of the YCP can be won over to the Fourth International.” While individuals may change, Tito et al. “themselves rest on a Stalinist bureaucratic regime in Yugoslavia.” Thus, “by their silence on fundamental aspects of the regime in Yugoslavia and YCP policy, the letters strike an opportunist note.” Haston’s letter contained the essentials of a Trotskyist position on Yugoslavia:

Tito is attempting, and will attempt, to follow an independent course between Moscow and Washington, without altering the bureaucratic machine or turning to proletarian internationalism. A bureaucratic regime, resting as it does mainly on the peasantry, can have no independent perspective between the Soviet Union and American imperialism. The main emphasis of the [I.S.] letters should have been to show the necessity for a radical break with the present policy of the YCP, the introduction of soviet democracy within the party and the country, coupled with a policy of proletarian internationalism....

It is impermissible to slur over the nature of the YCP, its identity on fundamental points with other Stalinist parties. Such a slurring over can only disorientate Stalinist workers. Yet every attempt is made by the I.S. to narrow the gulf that separates the policy of the YCP from Bolshevik-Leninism....

It is true that the Yugoslav Stalinists settled, with some success, the national problem inside their own country. It was their programme with regard to this question that enabled them to win over members of the quisling armies. But the comrades must be aware that the propaganda of the YCP towards Germany was of the same chauvinistic character as that of the Russian and other Stalinist parties....The I.S. mentions Togliatti’s chauvinism, and Thorez’ nationalist hysteria, and leaves the impression of a favourable comparison between the policy of other Stalinist parties and that of the YCP. We cannot be silent on the YCP’s chauvinistic campaign around Trieste, their attitude towards reparations, their uncritical support for the Russian bureaucracy’s demand for reparations from the German people. It is necessary to take up these questions so that it shall be clear precisely what the gulf is between a nationalist and an internationalist policy, and precisely what it is that Yugoslav militants must struggle against.[80]

Haston also nailed the I.S. on the glaring contradiction between the latter’s defense of Yugoslavia, which the FI’s Second World Congress two months earlier labeled a capitalist state, against the Soviet degenerated workers state led by Stalin:

The World Congress majority adopted a position that the buffer countries, including Yugoslavia, were capitalist countries. It rejected the resolution of the RCP that these economies were being brought into line with that of the Soviet Union and could not be characterised as capitalist. The amendment of the British party to the section “The USSR and Stalinism” was defeated. But it is evident from these letters that the I.S. has been forced by events to proceed from the standpoint of the British party, that the productive and political relations in Yugoslavia are basically identical with those of the Soviet Union.[81]

Haston appealed to the International Executive Committee to “reject the orientation in the Open Letter” and, in order to correct the damage done, to reopen the discussion on the buffer zone. At the IEC’s Seventh Plenum in April 1949 (which voted the “definition-description” of the buffer zone as still capitalist), the representatives of the RCP introduced the substance of their Second World Congress amendments as a countermotion.[82] It was not until the IEC’s Eighth Plenum in April 1950 that the Fourth International characterized Yugoslavia as a workers state, and only at the Ninth Plenum in December of that year did it finally declare that capitalism had been overthrown in the “buffer zone countries.”

If, as we have written, the American SWP leadership’s approach to East Europe amounted to a “wooden orthodoxy,” insistently ignoring reality until finally forced by events to recognize it (but failing to draw the theoretical lessons), the Haston/Grant leadership of the British RCP tended toward empiricism. They recognized that events in Europe had not conformed to Trotsky’s prognosis, particularly following the defeat of the Italian workers uprising in 1944-45; but on this basis they declared a phase of “bourgeois ‘democratic’ counter-revolution.” Haston/Grant had supported the rightist Goldman-Morrow tendency in the SWP, which put forward a “democratic” minimum program for constituent assemblies as opposed to a fight for soviets. Seeing the British Labour government elected in 1945 carrying out more extensive nationalizations than had been expected, Haston speculated in 1946 about a worldwide trend to “state capitalism” and began questioning the character of the Soviet state. But in a sign of political vitality, the discussion which followed in the RCP produced a corrective and a switching of positions.

Tony Cliff, who had arrived in Britain from Palestine in late 1946, was assigned by the I.S. to argue against Haston in favor of the Trotskyist characterization of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers state. But Cliff then went over to “state capitalism” and in 1948 published his book, Russia: A Marxist Analysis. In contrast, in the course of restudying the question, going back to Capital and the works of Lenin and Trotsky, the Haston/Grant leadership came back to the original Trotskyist position. As a result of this study and under the impact of events in East Europe, the RCP leaders were able to adopt a coherent position on the “buffer zone” and Yugoslavia which, at least on paper, neither denied reality nor gave up the struggle for the Trotskyist program. And they were able to do so with a trenchant analysis that could have armed the International for future events. Thus a 25 June 1949 letter of the RCP to the I.S. stated: “We cannot fail to comment here that your uncritical letter to the Yugoslav Communist Party precisely lends weight to the point of view that Tito is an ‘unconscious Trotskyist’.”[83] A decade and a half later, the founding document of the United Secretariat, which brought the SWP together with the main forces of the European Pabloists, approvingly cited radical journalist I.F. Stone’s observation of the Fidelistas in Cuba: “the revolutionists there are ‘unconscious’ Trotskyists.”[84]

But at the same time, Haston and Grant were under constant attack by the I.S., which was supporting the RCP minority led by Gerry Healy. Cannon supported Pablo in Paris, and Healy was Cannon and Pablo’s man in London. As early as August 1945, Healy, instigated by Pierre Frank, was calling for the British section to enter the Labour Party. In June 1946, the IEC was pushing the RCP to put most of its forces into the Labour Party “with the object of patiently building up an organised Left Wing”—a foretaste of Pablo’s later call for “entrism sui generis” (of a distinct type), whose purpose was not to polarize an existing left wing but to bury the Trotskyists in this reformist party “for a long time.” The RCP majority opposed this liquidationist line. In September 1946 the IEC supported Healy when he threatened to split the RCP in order to enter the Labour Party, and they recognized two British organizations, the Haston/Grant RCP and Healy’s entrist group.

This heavy-handed treatment was repeated again in 1949, when Haston/Grant finally capitulated to the pressure and agreed to enter the Labour Party. To get around the fact that Haston/Grant still had the larger forces, Healy demanded (and the I.S. backed him) that he have a majority on the leading bodies of the fused group until an election the next year! As occurred with the French in 1951-52, liquidationist politics went hand in hand with a bureaucratic internal regime. In the end, the result was the destruction of the RCP, in which the FI’s wrong position on Yugoslavia was an important element.

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Notes
1 Leon Trotsky, The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (the Transitional Program), reprinted in The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution, 3rd ed. (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1977), 112.

2 Ibid., 113.

3 “Genesis of Pabloism” was originally published in Spartacist (English edition) No. 21, Fall 1972.

4 Gerry Healy, Problems of the Fourth International (1966), 274.

5 Workers Power, The Death Agony of the Fourth International and the Tasks of Trotskyists Today (London: Workers Power and Irish Workers Group, 1983) (hereafter referred to as Death Agony), 36.

6 “Genesis of Pabloism.”

7 “Genesis of Pabloism.” At the time we wrote “Genesis of Pabloism,” our documentation consisted largely of the internal bulletins of the American Socialist Workers Party. The present article draws as well on materials from the holdings of the Prometheus Research Library (New York), and from CERMTRI, the Centre d’Etudes et de Récherches sur les Mouvements Trotskyste et Révolutionnaires Internationaux (Paris).

8 “The USSR and Stalinism,” Fourth International, June 1948, 118-19. The theses are also available in French as “L’URSS et le stalinisme (thèses),” in R. Prager, ed., Les congrès de la IVe Internationale (hereafter referred to as LCQI), Vol. 3, Bouleversements et crises de l’après-guerre (1946-1950) (Montreuil: Editions La Brèche-PEC, 1988), 155-201.

9 The Soviet-Yugoslav Dispute (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1948), 62.

10 “Resolution on the Yugoslav Revolution and the Fourth International,” SWP International Information Bulletin, January 1951, 16-18. This resolution is also available in French as “Résolution sur la révolution yougoslave et la IVe Internationale,” LCQI, Vol. 4, Menace de la troisième guerre mondiale et tournant politique (1950-1952) (Montreuil: Editions La Brèche-PEC, 1989), 249-60.

11 Leon Trotsky, The Third International After Lenin (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1936), 72.

12 Leon Trotsky, “A Fresh Lesson,” Writings of Leon Trotsky (1938-39), 2nd ed. (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1974), 71.

13 “An Open Letter to the Communist Party of Yugoslavia” (1 July 1948), Militant, 26 July 1948.

14 “An Open Letter to the Congress, Central Committee and Members of the Yugoslav Communist Party” (13 July 1948), Fourth International, August 1948. This letter is also available in French as “Lettre ouverte au congrès, au comité central et aux members du Parti communiste yougoslave,” LCQI, Vol. 3, 394. The English translation significantly distorted the last quote to read, “Yugoslav Communists Unite for a New Leninist International!”

15 This circular exists in the archives of Natalia Sedova Trotsky at the Leon Trotsky Museum in Coyoacán, Mexico; a photocopy is in the holdings of the Prometheus Research Library.

16 Josip Broz Tito, Rapport politique du Comité Central presenté au Cinquième Congrès du Parti Communiste de Yougoslavie (Le Livre Yougoslave, 1948), 156.

17 Cited in Tony Cliff, “On the Class Nature of the ‘People’s Democracies’,” The Origins of the International Socialists (London: Pluto Press, 1971), 44.

18 This third open letter, dated September 1948, was published in the Militant, 20 September 1948.

19 “Résolution sur la Yougoslavie et la crise du stalinisme,” LCQI, Vol. 3, 421-22.

20 “Evolution of the Buffer Countries,” SWP International Information Bulletin, June 1949, reprinted in SWP Education for Socialists, “Class, Party and State and the Eastern European Revolution” (November 1969) (hereafter referred to as CPSEER). The material quoted appears on pages 13-14 of CPSEER.

21 Max Shachtman, “The Problem of the Labor Party,” New International, March 1935, 37.

22 “Evolution of the Buffer Countries,” op. cit., 15.

23 “Déclaration du camarade Jérôme [Pablo]” on “Résolution sur l’évolution des pays du ‘glacis’,” LCQI, Vol. 3, 439.

24 Quoted in Michel Pablo, “Evolution of Yugoslav Centrism,” Fourth International, November 1949, 296.

25 “Resolution on the Crisis of Stalinism and the Developments of the Yugoslav Revolution,” SWP International Information Bulletin, September 1950, 5.

26 “Resolutions on the Class Nature of Yugoslavia,” SWP International Information Bulletin, September 1950, 8.

27 “Resolution on the Crisis of Stalinism and the Developments of the Yugoslav Revolution,” op. cit., 5.

28 “Resolutions on the Class Nature of Yugoslavia,” op. cit., 8.

29 “Resolution on the Crisis of Stalinism and the Developments of the Yugoslav Revolution,” op. cit., 5-6.

30 Ibid., 6-7.

31 I.F. Stone, The Hidden History of the Korean War (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1988 [1952]).

32 Militant, 13 November 1950.

33 “Assiégée par le Kremlin, la Yougoslavie est sous le chantage de l’impérialisme,” La Vérité No. 261, second half of November 1950.

34 All these circulars were quoted in “Circulaire du S.I.: à toutes les sections de la IVe Internationale,” 15 November 1950, Supplement No. 158 to La Vérité No. 260, second half of November 1950.

35 “Resolution on the Yugoslav Revolution and the Fourth International,” op. cit., 13-14, 16.

36 Leon Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution (1929), reprinted in The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects, 3rd ed. (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1969), 277.

37 Workers Power, Death Agony, 35.

38 “The Yugoslav Revolution,” Fourth International, November-December 1951, reprinted in CPSEER, 59-60.

39 “La lutte contre la guerre impérialiste et pour la victoire de la révolution socialiste mondiale (résolution sur la situation et les tâches),” LCQI, Vol. 4, 183.

40 Harold Livingstone (George Clarke), “Report to the Congress—Yugoslavia: Review and Outlook,” Fourth International, November-December 1951, 177-83.

41 “Les transformations sociales en Europe orientale,” La Vérité No. 283, 25 October-7 November 1951.

42 “Tito Regime Adjusts Its Policies to Suit Aims of U.S. Imperialism,” Militant, 12 November 1951.

43 Gérard Bloch, “Contre-réforme agraire en Yougoslavie,” La Vérité No. 316, 12-15 June 1953.

44 Joseph Hansen, “What the New York Discussion Has Revealed,” SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vol. XV, No. 4, February 1953, reprinted in SWP Education for Socialists, “International Committee Documents, 1951-1954” (March 1974) (hereafter referred to as IC Documents), Vol. 1, 38.

45 “Against Pabloist Revisionism,” Fourth International, September-October 1953, reprinted in IC Documents, Vol. 3, 147.

46 “The Third Chinese Revolution and Its Aftermath” (resolution adopted by the 1955 SWP convention), SWP Discussion Bulletin A-31, October 1955, reprinted in SWP Education for Socialists, “The Chinese Revolution and Its Development” (November 1969), 3-10.

47 “The Soviet Union Today,” SWP Discussion Bulletin A-33, December 1955, reprinted in SWP Education for Socialists, “‘De-Stalinization,’ the Hungarian Revolution and World Trotskyism” (February 1978) (hereafter referred to as De-Stalinization), 21.

48 “The Hungarian Revolution and the Crisis of Stalinism” (January 1957), reprinted in De-Stalinization, 38.

49 Workers Power, Death Agony, 28-29.

50 Hal Draper, “‘Comrade’ Tito and the 4th International: Left-Wing Stalinism—A Senile Disorder,” New International, September 1948, 208, 212.

51 Fracción Revolucionaria de la Sección Mexicana de la IV Internacional, “Crítica a la ‘Carta Abierta’ del Secretariado Internacional al PC Yugoeslavo,” Boletín Interno, September 1948, 17-18.

52 “Text of Letter to SWP from Natalia Trotsky,” Militant, 4 June 1951.

53 Max Shachtman, “Tito Versus Stalin,” New International, August 1948, 178.

54 Hal Draper, “The Economic Drive Behind Tito,” New International, October 1948, 230-31.

55 “Meaning of the Yugoslav Crisis,” Militant, 5 July 1948.

56 John G. Wright, “Public Break with Tito Highlights Kremlin Crisis,” Militant, 5 July 1948.

57 Joseph Hansen, “Tito-Stalin Conflict,” Militant, 6 September 1948.

58 SWP Political Committee, “Yugoslav Events and the World Crisis of Stalinism,” Fourth International, August 1948, 175.

59 Joseph Hansen, “Tito Flounders with Stalin’s ‘Theory’ of Building ‘Socialism’ in One Country,” Militant, 29 November 1948.

60 “Yugoslavia and the Kremlin,” Militant, 15 August 1949.

61 “The Tito-Stalin Conflict,” Fourth International, October 1949, 262-63.

62 “Yugoslav May Day Manifesto Hailed by SWP Leader,” Militant, 8 May 1950.

63 “Yugoslavs Issue Appeal for Return to Leninist Principles,” Militant, 8 May 1950.

64 “Tito’s June 27 Speech,” Militant, 10 July 1950.

65 John G. Wright, “Yugoslavia’s Foreign Policy,” Militant, 5 March 1951.

66 John G. Wright, “Stalin’s ‘Socialism in One Country’,” Militant, 26 March 1951.

67 Jacques Privas and Marcel Marin, “Résolution Privas-Marin sur la crise yougoslave,” La vie du parti No. 1 (PCI internal bulletin), August 1948.

68 Partial minutes of this Central Committee meeting were published in La vie du parti No. 5 (supplement to La Vérité No. 229), February 1949. Pablo’s article, written in August 1948 and published in Fourth International, December 1948, described the YCP as leading a mass movement with “distinct revolutionary tendencies.”

69 “Le rapport sur la défense de la Yougoslavie,” La Vérité No. 246, second half of January 1950.

70 “Bas les pattes devant la révolution yougoslave, résolution du VIe congrès du PCI,” La Vérité No. 247, first half of February 1950.

71 “La magnifique campagne électorale du PCY,” La Vérité No. 251, first half of April 1950.

72 Pierre Lambert, “1er Mai à Belgrade,” La Vérité No. 254, second half of May 1950.

73 “Ceux qui ont vu la vérité en Yougoslavie la disent: OUI c’est un état où se construit le socialisme, c’est la dictature du prolétariat,” La Vérité No. 258, first half of October 1950.

74 “La Yougoslavie sur la voie glissante,” La Vérité No. 263, second half of December 1950.

75 Michel Lequenne, “A propos de la crise et de la scission de la section française (1951-1952),” LCQI, Vol. 4, 487, reports of L’Unité that “its material existence largely depended on Yugoslav financial support.”

76 “Genesis of Pabloism.”

77 “RCP Amendments to the Thesis on Russia and Eastern Europe,” Spring 1948. A photocopy of this document, from the archives of Sam Bornstein, is in the collection of the Prometheus Research Library. The French version was published as “Amendements soumis par le RCP de Grande-Bretagne,” LCQI, Vol. 3, 204-5. These amendments were not printed in the SWP internal bulletins.

78 Ibid.

79 Ted Grant and Jock Haston, “Yugoslavs Too Independent: Campaign Commences to Liquidate Tito,” Socialist Appeal, July 1948, reprinted in Behind the Stalin-Tito Clash: Trotskyist Analysis (Revolutionary Communist Party, 1948), 5-11.

80 Jock Haston (on behalf of the Central Committee, RCP), “Letter on Yugoslavia Sent to the IEC by the RCP (Britain)” (n.d., late summer 1948). The material quoted appears on pages 64-65. This letter was not printed in the SWP internal bulletins; it was published in a 1991 special supplement of Workers News, “The Fourth International and Yugoslavia (1948-50),” by the British Workers International League.

81 Ibid.

82 “Contre-résolution présentée par les 2 cam. représentants du RCP (anglais),” La vie du parti, special issue (supplement to La Vérité No. 236), second half of June 1949, 15-16. Again, this countermotion was not published in the SWP internal bulletins, although other dissident motions at the Seventh Plenum were.

83 Cited in Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson, The War and the International: A History of the Trotskyist Movement in Britain 1937-1949 (1986), 219.

84 “Dynamics of World Revolution Today” (June 1963), International Socialist Review, Fall 1963, 129.