* “Workers of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains”-The Struggle For Trotsky's Fourth (Communist) International-From The Archives

Markin comment:

Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward

The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.

With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.

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The SWP and the Fourth lnternational, 1946-54:

Genesis of Pabloism

The following article was published in Spartacist English edition No. 21, Fall 1972 (Journal Of The International Communist League).

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

World War II: U.S. and France

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

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

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

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

I. SWP ISOLATIONISM

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

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

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

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

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

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

Optimism and Orthodoxy

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

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

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

II. THE BREAK IN CONTINUITY IN EUROPE

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

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

Trotskyist Cadres Decimated

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

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

III. ORTHODOXY REASSERTED

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

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

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

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

(European Executive Committee, April 1946)

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

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

Stalinophobia

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

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

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

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

Within the SWP, the rumor circulated that Cannon was flirting with the characterization that the Soviet Union had become a totally degenerated workers state, i.e., a “state

capitalist” regime—a position which Natalia Trotsky shortly embraced.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fourth International Flirts with Tito

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

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

IV. PABLOISM CONQUERS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Germain Resists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The crux of Germain’s argument was:

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

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

Third World Congress

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘V. THE ANTI-PABLOISTS

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

PCI Fights Pablo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SWP Enters the Struggle

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Closing speech, 30 May)

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

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

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

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

(“Letter to Tom,” 4 June 1953)

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

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

IC Formed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Flirtation to Consummation

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

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

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

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

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

“Experience since the Second World War has demonstrated that peasant-based guerilla warfare under petit-bourgeois leadership can in itself lead to nothing more than an anti-working-class bureaucratic regime. The creation of such regimes has come about under the conditions of decay of imperialism, the demoralization and disorientation caused by Stalinist betrayals, and the absence of revolutionary Marxist leadership of the working class. Colonial revolution can have an unequivocally progressive revolutionary significance only under such leadership of the revolutionary proletariat. For Trotskyists to incorporate into their strategy revisionism on the proletarian leadership in the revolution is a profound negation of Marxism-Leninism no matter what pious wish may be concurrently expressed for ‘building revolutionary Marxist parties in colonial countries.’ Marxists must resolutely oppose any adventurist acceptance of the peasant-guerilla road to socialism--historically akin to the Social Revolutionary program on tactics that Lenin fought. This alternative would be a suicidal course for the socialist goals of the movement, and perhaps physically for the adventurers.” Ironically, the SWP’s further rightist evolution leads it to now repudiate the basic line of section 13, from the other side—the U.Sec.’s advocacy of petty-bourgeois armed struggle is far too adventurous for the legalistic SWP which aims to become the mass party of American reformism.

Spartacist and the Fourth International

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

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

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

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

FOR THE REBIRTH OF THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL!

*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-The Lessons Of Class Struggle- Hamburg: Women Spark Shipyard Occupation (1984)

Markin comment:

The following is an article from the Spring 1985 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.

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Markin comment:

With the desperate need to ramp up the class struggle today (from our side, the bosses have been on a seemingly eternal offensive) this is a good article not only about the vanguard role that women can, and have, played in important class struggles in the past but about the tactics and strategy necessary to win struggles, ifonditions make that possible.


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The Lessons Of Class Struggle- Hamburg: Women Spark Shipyard Occupation (1984)

Last fall in West Germany strikes and plant occupations broke out in the key Hamburg and Bremen shipyards against massive layoffs of the workforce. The nine-day Hamburg HDW [Howaldtswerke-Deutsche Werft] shipyard occupation in September was sparked in large part by the militant actions of a group of women, wives of shipyard workers. W&R, along with comrades of the Trotzkistische Liga Deutschlands (TLD), section of the international Spartacist tendency, recently spoke at length with Birgit Wojak, one of the main activists of the women's group; we are pleased to print below excerpts from this very exciting interview.

The TLD had raised key demands during the occupation, in leaflets and discussions with workers in Hamburg and nationally, to extend and win the workers' strikes. These included: "For factory occupations in all plants hit by mass layoffs and closings! For a joint national shipyard, steel and mine strike!" Layoffs were hitting the vital Ruhr steel and mining districts. At the same time the Board of Directors of HDW (which is owned by a state conglomerate) announced that in HDW's Hamburg branch one half of the 4,500 workers would be laid off and in HDW's Kiel branch one out of every three of the 9,000 workers. This "hot autumn" of workers' demonstrations, strikes and occupations
potentially posed the most important class battle for the German workers in 30 years.

The Hamburg and Bremen shipyard occupations took place as political ferment in West Germany is greater than at any time since the founding of the Federal Republic in 1948. The deployment in West Germany of the first-strike Pershing 2 missiles, under the command of the anti-Soviet fanatic Reagan, has deeply polarized West German society. The dramatic actions of the North Sea shipyard workers is a further sign that the West German capitalist order, long the relatively stable core of NATO Europe, is now beginning to break down under the combined impact of war mobilization and economic crisis.

But as Wojak graphically describes, not only the "IG Metall" union bureaucracy and the SPD [Social Democratic Party], but even the so-called "leftists" who had control of the Hamburg occupation itself, did everything in their power to undercut the struggle and prevent the workers from carrying it to victory. The main brake on the German working class is the Social Democrats. Though out of power when these shipyard layoffs were announced, they were the architects of the West German bourgeoisie's present austerity program which has meant massive attacks on the working class.

The dramatic Hamburg occupation—and its betrayal— showed above all the need to forge a revolutionary working-class party by splitting the working-class SPD ranks away from the pro-capitalist tops.

The TLD's aggressive propaganda campaign around the occupations presented a broad programmatic alternative for the workers. Its leaflet noted the importance of the foreign workers: "Yesterday and today these foreign brothers are in the front lines of the struggle.... Full citizenship rights for foreign workers and their families!" The TLD further noted: "While the IG Metall bureaucracy wants to stiffen the backbone of the German steel magnates in the protectionist Common Market cartel, the 'left' is mobilizing for a 'National Steel Company/ or a 'National Shipyards Company.' But if the capitalist economy is not done away with, these nationalized companies (like HDW) will serve the capitalists. As opposed to the Rostock Yards only a few miles away [in East Germany], whose order books are filled with contracts for icebreakers, passenger ships, etc., running for years thanks to the Soviet planned economy, the capitalist 'solution’ to the crisis in the shipyards is arms production: battleships and submarines for war against the Soviet Union."

Lenin said that the fate of the October Revolution was inseparable from the victory of the German October. The converse of that is that the failure of the German working class, the best organized working class in Europe, to live up to its revolutionary obligations has led to two world imperialist wars. The TLD's leaflet concluded: "A militant strike in steel, the shipyards and coal would show the workers the way to prevent stationing NATO first-strike weapons. By strikes—not 'minutes of warning' against the 'superpowers.' For the Breits and the Loderers the Bundes-wehr is a 'peace force. They hate the Soviet Union and fear a new Bremen Soviet Republic, a new Ruhr Red Army—a German October.

"For the revolutionary reunification of Germany by a social revolution in the West and proletarian political revolution in the East! Smash the anti-Soviet war drive! For unconditional military support of the DDR/Soviet Union! For a socialist planned economy! For the Socialist United States of Europe!"

W&R: Can you tell us something about your background that you feel contributed to your becoming an activist in this struggle and occupation? Wojak: The thing that made me just want to do something—I didn't know what I wanted to do—was that my mother died, basically because she worked herself to death. Normally she shouldn't have been allowed to work at the job she did because she had asthma. She worked as a presser in a knitting mill and couldn't handle the wool dust. My father had to retire early as a partial invalid. He lost a leg, also worked 25 years at HDW as a welder, and now he can hardly do anything. The only thing my father had was my mother. He's just vegetating. And that was the main thing that made me say, that's not going to happen to me, and I wasn't going to put up with it any longer. And they want to fire my husband from the HDW plant.

W&R: Plans were announced for massive layoffs in the shipbuilding industry in early spring and a "warning strike" was called, including demonstrations. How did you become involved in the struggle? Wojak: I was approached by my husband to get involved with this women's group—they were actually all wives of men who were already active in the HDW shipyard and who were also affiliated with one political current or another. I met the women's group myself at a forum and found out that they had gone into the Hamburg parliament, tried to storm the microphone to draw attention to the situation of workers in the entire shipbuilding industry. The mike was cut off immediately so that they couldn't say anything. And because they had counted on that they had written an "Open Letter" to the mayor of Hamburg, the Social Democrat von Dohnanyi, and rained these leaflets from the gallery down onto all the parliamentarians. And they unfurled a banner reading, "HDW and MAN wives fight together with their men." Two women were picked out and criminal charges were brought for disrupting a public parliamentary session.

I met these women at a forum on this HDW issue, and Klose, the former Social Democratic mayor of Hamburg, was present. What struck me about this forum in particular was the workers; there were a whole lot of workers from HDW there. They were absolutely furious and wanted a complete change. And this Klose, he just tried to channel it into orderly channels that he could keep in hand. In the beginning, when I heard about what they did, it seemed to be a little bit too radical to me. But that Klose wanted to steer the workers in a very definite direction that he could keep in hand seemed even more awful. So I decided then to go to this women's meeting and take a look for myself.

At this first women's meeting I went to, in April, one woman said right away, yeah, maybe we can still see to it that there are a couple of strikes at HDW, and if it all
doesn't do any good, then we have to occupy the plant. And I thought, sure, if they occupy the plant, that's a long way off, and you don't have to go along with them. But during the occupation, in September, it turned out that some of the workers— I count myself among them as well—that we were the ones who carried out the occupation, whereas the women who had been talking weren't at all the ones who did the occupying. These women as well as so-called "activists" in the plant saw the plant occupation as a means to put pressure on the government to save jobs. And then when I participated in this occupation and got angry every time I had to leave the occupied shipyard and had to sleep alone in my bed at home, I saw it as if I had seized a piece of this shipyard along with all those workers. W&R: The women's committee waged a hunger strike that led up to and in some sense precipitated the September shipyard occupation. What motivated it?

Wojak: In all our work between the warning strike in the spring and during the occupation in September, we tried to do all kinds of actions to mobilize the workers so that they would occupy or put up any line of resistance against the layoffs at all. Whenever there was any kind of plant assembly or when any new events in the shipyard came up we stood in front of the gates with our banner and passed out leaflets, calling on the men to defend themselves, to do something, offered them our help. The result was that the men laughed at us. Then this situation came up in a plant assembly where we said, either we're going to storm the microphone now, just like in parliament, or you guys read these things aloud. And the guys running the meeting were scared to death that we'd storm the mike, because they didn't expect the workers to do the same thing the parliamentarians did, namely nothing, when the mike was turned off, but that the workers would probably resist. So under this pressure, they read what we had written. And for the rest of the plant assembly we were surrounded by a ring of company cops. W&R: What were your demands? Wojak: Our demands were basically the men's demands. They were for the 35-hour week, statification of the shipyard under control of the workforce (we extended it to real control). Then there was the men's demand for "useful alternative production," and that filter systems be installed in power plants so they don't pollute the atmosphere so much. In fact, there was quite a hard discussion with one of the women in the women's group about this, with the result that the men raised "alternative production" as a very hard demand and we just raised it on the side.

W&R: Who were they, and what were the political currents in the women's group?

Wojak: The political people in the plant were primarily from the DKP [pro-Moscow Stalinists], people from the GIM [German section of the United Secretariat], people from the SPD, from the union—in fact all the political groupings were present. In the women's group there were the DKP, KPD [Maoists], GIM; there were people from Arbeiterpolitik [Brandlerites] who got in through women's groups in the union. It was the same with the Social Democrats who also had influence through the unions and some women's groups.
This discussion about "useful alternative production" that came up in the women's group was introduced by me, because I was the only really unpolitical woman there and saw immediately what this "useful alternative production" basically meant for jobs. I told them that it's baloney and meaningless for jobs, whereas all the others supported it at first. The minute I started this discussion I had the feeling that all these women had a narrow-minded view of the whole situation because of their political orientation. That led me to view everything essentially more critically than before.

Maybe one more reason why the hunger strike happened. We wanted to spur the men on to fight. And we had found out that at Hoesch, in the Ruhr, where layoffs in the steel industry are also an issue, there was also a women's group, and they had waged a hunger strike. We had exhausted all the possibilities—standing in front of the gates; in plant assemblies; we went into the union and meetings organized by the union, where we were regularly thrown out. But the men saw us, and you couldn't pretend we weren't there. The Hoesch women had videos of their hunger strike and of the men's strike, and they advised us, if you do a hunger strike, there's no way it can fall through—you definitely have to do it.

From the very beginning we said we don't want to starve ourselves to get sick or die or something, but we agreed from the first if we do a hunger strike to limit it to three days. Because we thought, three days: that's enough to get it in the public eye. And if the men haven't gotten it together after three days to pull off a decent action, then even a ten-day hunger strike won't do any good.

W&R: So how long did the hunger strike go on before the occupation began?

Wojak: We waged a three-day hunger strike right before the occupation. When it got under way there were five women who took part in it from the first to the last day. And there were nine on the last day. We didn't just want to wage a hunger strike without drawing in the men in the shipyard. Because we didn't know that they would publish the list with the mass layoffs at just the same time, we had convinced the men beforehand to carry out an action in the plant as well, if we did this hunger strike. We won them over to boycotting overtime at that point. And then-it became known in the yards—that was the afternoon before the hunger strike, right before quitting time—as people found out that 1,354 people were supposed to be laid off, there was a symbolic occupation of the plant gate for two hours, with only 1,200 people taking part.

The first day of our hunger strike, when nobody knew anything about it beforehand, even the men in the shipyard, about 80 percent of the workforce said completely spontaneously, if the women go on a hunger strike then we'll boycott the canteen for the day. That was a very important thing, because you could see that we women were recognized by the men in the shipyard for the first time. The canteen had been contracted out to a private company before the layoffs were announced, and some women who worked in the canteen were thrown out and rehired for considerably less pay—we wanted to boycott the canteen until the women got the same pay as before.

All the men who were at all political had laughed at us before for this demand, and said that no worker would follow this demand because their own stomachs are more important than other people's stomachs. And the fact that 80 percent carried out this canteen boycott— and they really went hungry, because they didn't know they were going to boycott the canteen and didn't bring sandwiches from home—that proves that they were simply wrong, that the workers forgot their own empty stomachs in their solidarity.
This whole hunger strike was received by all the workers in the shipyard extremely well anyway, although they hardly dared to approach us because of their preconceptions—these poor, weak women, they're standing there and what's more, going hungry for us, and what have we done? They could hardly look us in the eye. And after quitting time that evening, here came all the workers and they brought us flowers. Most of them just kind of shoved them in our hands and walked on by.

W&R: So how did the actual plant occupation begin?

Wojak: The first one to call for an occupation, or for a massive action, I believe, was me. After the three days of the hunger strike were over, there was a closing rally. We had gotten an enormous amount of solidarity and over DM 9,000 ($4,500) in contributions. Several plants declared their solidarity, and it was not only for the women but for solidarity against all layoffs.

We held a rally at the end where each of the women who had taken part in the hunger strike was supposed to say something to the brothers in the shipyard. And I was the last one, and I had lost my notes. So I just called on the men to just do something, and if they didn't fight, that we women would think up something to do to them that would be pretty nasty. W&R: Lysistrata meets the class struggle. Wojak: But the effect of that was not that they all got terribly scared of me or the women, but they applauded it wildly, they cheered it, they picked it up like something they'd wanted to say themselves for a long time. And finally somebody said it. The hunger strike was over on Friday and then came the weekend. The gates were picketed from the outside so that no overtime could go on—organized by the men and some of the women picketed too.

There was a general plant assembly during the hunger strike where the men fought with the bosses and got us the right to speak. A plant assembly is where the whole plant comes together in one room, organized by the union—there's a minimum of four assemblies annually. And the Management Committee [the bosses] and the plant council are there and make reports. Every individual worker can speak.60 this plant assembly continued on Monday morning. It ended with a march of the workers through the inner city in a demonstration of 3,000. And after the demonstration all the workers went back into the plant and continued the plant assembly and then voted to occupy the plant. And that was adopted 100 percent.

W&R: And who was elected the leadership of the occupation?

Wojak: There was a prominent supporter of the DKP, who had worked out this occupation plan just in case. And they were essentially the people who had been working together beforehand—like the DKP, SPD, KPD, GIM, unionists.

W&R: What was the relationship of the official union leadership of the Metalworkers [IG Metall] to the occupation?

Wojak: Before the occupation the IG Metall didn't look upon it kindly and it didn't look on the women's activities kindly either. A week before the hunger strike somebody from the union put out the word that the HDW women are dead, they don't exist anymore. And then when this demonstration through the center of town took place and afterwards the occupation was voted, they were singing a different tune all of a sudden. Because they probably saw that the workers just couldn't be stopped. So they said, we'll support every action; go ahead, and we'll always be behind you. Only I'm talking about the local union organization in Hamburg—there wasn't so much as a letter of solidarity from the IG Metall from the rest of the country. During the occupation the union reps didn't behave worse than the "activists" in the plant, which were in all these parties, but they were awful enough themselves.

W&R: We haven't discussed the laws that come from the 1950s—the "Factory Regulation Law" (Betreefasver-rassungsgesetz). Can you explain why this law is followed so slavishly, and what it in fact means with regard to workers' struggles?

Wojak: The "Factory Regulation Law" is a law the government passed that means limitations on the workers, especially in strikes. It's a terribly thick book that's not easy to explain. But for example it says that in your plant you can't just support strikes in other plants or collect money for them. All the plant assemblies— how they are to be held, whether there are secret or open ballots, are governed by it. And a plant occupation is a violation of the "Factory Regulation Law" because a worker can't just seize the plant that belongs to someone else.

W&R: The fact that the members of the plant council are bound to silence is also laid down in the "Factory Regulation Law" as well, including about layoffs. Wojak: Yes. In the case of this list of 1,354 people to be laid off, for example, the members of the plant council were obligated not to make that public. This law basically just hinders the workers from using their power m any way whatsoever against the bosses. And the unions haven't done anything against it and are therefore complicit.

W&R: What was the role of the women's committee during the occupation?

Wojak: Pretty pathetic, because we had set as our goal calling on the men to wage a fight. And in fact we reached that goal with the hunger strike. So during the occupation we didn't want to stand on the sidelines; but we really didn't know at all what we ought to do
I myself concentrated on extending the strike together with two other women. We went to AC Weser, to a shipyard in Bremen where they had decided long before the HDW occupation to occupy\ this shipyard because there was no more putting the brakes on these workers or holding them back from doing an action like that. So we drove to Bremen and were totally depressed when we got there, because the conditions under which the shipyard was occupied were really awful for the workers. They had one last ship in Bremen which was up for repairs, and then the whole shipyard was supposed to be shut down, closed

We weren't allowed to speak to the workers there before the occupation was voted. And when they did vote to occupy, you could see that a crime was perpetrated against the workers, because the occupation was coupled with the condition that the necessary repairs for this one ship still had to go on during the occupation. Further, the occupation in Bremen was; an extremely late point in time—one day before the occupation in Hamburg was given up, and it w; planned that way.

During the HDW occupation a ship was literal kidnapped from the HDW workers. The cables were cut. One worker was injured, not very seriously, bi people could in fact have been killed. We took the brothers in Bremen a cable from this captured ship as warning that they should keep a close watch on the ship. The workers welcomed us with cheers. We g more applause for what we said there than ever before although it was just to give them a little courage at really nothing more. Afterwards we also discussed with a whole lot of workers, and a lot of them who h been for going on with these repairs changed this opinion within five minutes and didn't want to do it anymore.

Another guy, the DGB [German trade-union federation] chairman in Bremen, spoke, and first express his solidarity and cozied up to them like mad and said you guys are in an unusual situation; so an unusual situation demands unusual means and you guys have
grasped them. And it's right that you have occupied your shipyard and you ought to occupy it a while longer—and then you ought to let the bosses and the politicians decide what ought to happen to the shipyard. And even then the workers applauded. And there was this worker sitting next to me during this speech, and it just slipped out of my mouth: how can this man be allowed to speak here? Why doesn't somebody throw him out? Then he really thought about it, at first he didn't say anything at all, then he said, yeah, that's outrageous, what he's saying here. He can't be allowed to do that. But then the guy up front was already gone. But before, this guy had clapped too.

We had these buttons with "Stop the death of HDW in installments—HDW must stand" on them, with the HDW insignia and over that "HDW Occupied" on a red background. And a worker in Bremen just had to have it, and he gave me his helmet. It has a sticker on one side, "AC Weser Occupied," and on the other "HDW Occupied."

When we women came back from this shipyard occupation, we didn't have the feeling that this occupation would be a support for the HDW workers, but that it was something designed to. go against workers' struggles. When we got back to HDW, we told the strike committee what was going on, that AC Weser wouldn't be a support for Hamburg and that they would have to extend the struggle in other ways. They said it wasn't right to tell the workers something like that. I did tell the workers that, and I know one other woman—from the GIM—also told it to the workers.

W&R: The TLD raised the demand to extend the strike to mining and steel, where there were also plans for substantial layoffs and firings. How do you feel about that demand, and given a revolutionary leadership, do you think it could have been an outgrowth of the shipyard occupation?

Wojak: It would have been possible, definitely. The question of extension was already very close, even without a revolutionary leadership, and only a spark would have been necessary to ignite it. But with a revolutionary leadership there would have been a guarantee for extending it.

W&R: How did the occupation end, and what did the workers win or lose?

Wojak: The HDW occupation lasted nine days. The mass of workers lost their jobs. The layoffs were carried out just like they had been planned. The layoffs are continuing today. The workers in the plant have worse working conditions than before, there's speedup. There have already been two deaths as a result.

The reason the occupation was broken off then was: yeah, they said we have the chance of getting a decent severance plan. They didn't even get the severance plan they had before the occupation but one significantly worse.

The foreign workers are in a very bad position. They are the ones primarily hit by the layoffs. About 50 percent of the foreign workers at HDW were fired. And they can be deported immediately if they don't get a new job, and they don't have a chance to get a new job either. So they won absolutely nothing, except when one or the other can draw the lessons—that you have to design an occupation differently, that is, not carry out an occupation under such conditions, but from the very beginning set the conditions yourself and not let them be dictated to you.

The occupation ended with a general plant assembly, which includes the lower- and middle-level management. Then the Management Committee has the right to take part; most of the time politicians are also invited—but not to this one. The Management Committee announced that if they didn't give up the occupation then they might fire the whole workforce— in one fell swoop. Without notice. People weren't quite convinced that that would in fact happen. But in the 70s that did happen once, when two shipyards, the Deutsche Werft and the Howaldtswerke fused. They fired the whole workforce because they were on strike, and afterwards they just hired back the part that they needed. So the threat of firings was in the air. Then there was the second thing. The Management Committee had announced that if Hamburg resisted and continued the occupation, the works would go deeper and deeper in the red, and then they wouldn't have any other choice but to split off Hamburg and Kiel from one another, as affiliates or even as two independent companies. But this plan has existed a long time, even without the occupation.

W&R: What was the role of the DKP and the KPD and the GIM during the occupation, and in the plant assembly meeting?

Wojak: From the first moment they set their stakes all on negotiations—negotiations with the politicians in Bonn and Schleswig-Holstein, since HDW is 100 percent state-owned. Those are both Christian Democratic governments. And their role was precisely to put pressure on these politicians, to say, "Do something about the shipyard please. Don't throw all these people out onto the street, after all." They all agreed completely on that. Those were always the things that kept coming up even before the occupation, in strikes or other actions—apply pressure. You can also see it in this program for "useful alternative production." That was drafted by people from the DKP, from the GIM— in effect a somewhat broader version of the strike committee together with people from the union and other activists. Then the union took it up and printed it as a program. For all practical purposes their aim is to give the capitalists a hand, how to make it, if you can just get a little bit more capital to boot, without having to fire guys.

W&R: I understand that in the course of the occupation a GIM supporter in the workforce put up a banner of Solidarnos'c'. How was this received?

Wojak: This Solidarnos'c' banner actually only had a slight meaning for the workforce. It was one banner among many. There were other banners from other plants, for example AEG Schiffbau brought over a huge banner. Such banners were received with more applause and many more workers also crowded around them. Solidarnos'c' itself was seen as the shipyard workers there going into the streets, and they stuck together and fought for their rights. Solidarnos'c'' real role wasn't seen; most of the workers don't know much about Solidarnos.

The thing is, they tried to block every political discussion in the union. There was a band in the yard one evening and they were singing some kind of political things, and a guy from the SPD took the mike away from them and said, look, leave politics out of this; the shipyard occupation isn't a political affair. The workers who got wind of it were pretty pissed off. And I noticed how they attacked the union bureaucrats pretty hard: what is this, and everybody can say what they want to here, and even if there's political stuff here—there's a highly political situation at HDW. He went away then, but the musicians didn't have the nerve to start again. But that was just the way discussions about Solidarnos'c' or issues in a larger context during the occupation were blocked, and the GIM supporters hung the sign up, intervened by doing that, but didn't tell the workers anything about it.

W&R: What role did these left groups play in the plant assembly discussion regarding the occupation in the face of the fact that the occupation had spread to Bremen, so that ending the occupation at that particular point in Hamburg was particularly criminal.

Wojak: It was criminal. The political groups were all straining to reach the same goal, told the workers, yes, under these conditions where we have to take into account that the whole workforce will be fired, where there's no sort of severance plan at all, and then the poor foreigners will be fired and won't even be able to take home any severance pay at all if they're deported—at such a point we can't call on you guys to continue the occupation, although we would have really liked to. That was what was said during the occupation, during the vote, by all the political groups. And Bremen. The workers in Bremen were of course terribly disappointed. They probably did see it as criminal, what happened in Hamburg. Only the strike committee (which was the same as the plant council in Bremen) said, what's so bad about that? Hamburg and Bremen don't have anything to do with each other.

W&R: Let's return to the question of the foreign workers. It's my understanding that the foreign worker also supported the end of the occupation even though they had the most to lose by the layoffs. Why was that?

Wojak: It was essentially Turkish workers who sup ported ending the occupation. Not because they were Turkish, but simply because the Turks speak the leas German, and because they were absolutely no properly provided with information. Hardly anything was translated. There was one Yugoslavian woman in our women's group and we were the first ones in the shipyard to have leaflets and placards in Turkish and Yugoslavian when we went into the plant assembly during the hunger strike, and a lot of foreign workers stood up. They applauded us and brought us chairs, because finally somebody in the shipyard was thinking of the foreign workers. I believe that without the women, the foreigners wouldn't even have known what was going on at the beginning of the occupation.

There was one Turkish guy in the yard who could speak good German. They told him, this is the way things are, and then it was up to him the extent to which he passed on the information to his brothers, or not. He handled it by saying, listen, the next vote is going to be about this or that, and if I raise my hand, that's correct, so you guys do the same. Of course, in this vote on the occupation that wasn't possible—it was secret, and nobody raised his hand. Most of the Turks had no idea what they should do and were totally unsure of themselves.

I heard that a couple of days beforehand there were also people in the yard who had threatened the Turkish workers. There was almost a physical fight. They threatened that if the Turks continued to participate actively in the occupation they would beat them up, or they threatened them in other ways. As far as I could find out these were people that came from the [Turkish fascist] Grey Wolves.

W&R: Did the workers in the shipyard occupation take any measures such as forming workers defense guards to defend against the fascistic Grey Wolves or other fascist groups that might attempt to break up the occupation?

Wojak: No, none at all. There was no defense, neither against the fascist groups, nor against the scabs, nor against the police attacks that had been threatened.
I have to add that there were a whole series of scabs during the occupation: almost all the white-collar workers worked during the occupation, and after a couple of days parts of the machine shop started working—in the end I believe it was half of the machine shop that worked, first secretly and then openly.

First the workers said, look, they're working. They can't do that. We're going to throw them out. And then there were discussions with the strike committee, and they said, no, that would disturb the "peace and quiet" in the yard, and peace and quiet and order [Ruhe und Ordnung], that's the one thing that you have to maintain in such a big occupation, and you ought to go to the people and talk to them and try to convince them not to work. When I came onto the yard the next day I asked, well, did you guys throw out the white-collar workers? And the workers said, no, we have to keep it quiet, and all that creates an uproar, and we can't do that either. That's the way they manipulated the workers' opinion in practice.

I ask myself how these people in the strike committee wanted to convince people to continue the occupation or not to work, when they themselves had made a deal with the management about painting the bottom of a ship and sent the workers off to work. The painting has to be done in two coats—if the second coat isn't done, then the first coat is ruined too. And for doing that they got from the management deliveries of food to the canteen for one more day.

A number of times in the Social Democratic daily paper there were two-page spreads: HDW will be cleared; police attack; police intervention threats—in order to confuse the workers about what they ought to do. When the first article came out I was in the yard too, and the workers said—a lot of them anyway—what do they think they want, the police? They won't even get in here; the gates are shut tight, and right behind the gates is the fire station. We have water cannons, we have helmets, we have clubs, we have everything here. They won't get in here at all; we'll know how to defend our shipyard for sure. And the next day I asked, what are you guys doing now, and they said, well, when the police come, then we'll let them carry us all away. We won't offer any resistance. And so that's another sign how the opinion was manipulated by the strike committee.

W&R: One of the points made in the TLD's leaflet directed at the HDW occupation was the comparison between the Rostock shipyards in East Germany, where the order books are full—a demonstration of the power of a planned economy—and HDW, which is even turning away work from the Soviet Union at the same time it's laying off thousands of workers. Did this contrast have any impact on the workers during the occupation?

Wojak: This discussion definitely existed in the shipyard, this comparison between the DDR yards in general and shipyards in the Soviet Union, and here in West Germany—simply because these orders to build ships were refused. The workers said, sure, build ships—if it was a question of what kind of ships we need, we could be booked up too. The thing is whether we want to build them—or whether our bosses want to build them. And they just don't want to. And that's whose fault it is that we aren't getting any more work in the harbor.

W&R: After the occupation you put out a leaflet in which you call for a study of the lessons of the occupation. What do you think those lessons are?

Wojak: The lessons of the occupation are that the workers' interests were not represented during the occupation at all, otherwise they would have had something to take home with them from such a large-scale occupation. The people who are responsible for this are the strike committee, who belonged to all the political parties. It would have definitely been possible to extend a strike to all the shipyards, to the mines and to the steel industry, like it says in the TLD's leaflet. That was the least that could have happened. Such an extension into broad areas would have paralyzed a large part of the West German economy. At that point the HDW occupation would have been just one point of a massive campaign.

But of course you can't carry out such an extension if you basically don't want to win but only want a couple of concessions from the capitalists. If you lay the basis for things like this, then the consequence is that the workers take the power. And you have to want that.

There was criticism of a lack of solidarity from other plants. Well, if you don't offer me something to fight for, then what am I supposed to go running off and fight for?
During the occupation I saw what would have been possible, and I saw what all the parties and political groupings did. I saw what the social democrats of the SPD did. They said to the workers, we are the party; we'll do everything for you; we'll save your jobs, but we're going to do it together with the capitalists. And together with the capitalists means against the workers. That's not a party that can be the leadership of an occupation or of strikes, or of the workers' interests.

The DKP did nothing different from the SPD. Maybe there was a little bit more leftist touch in their speeches, but looking at what they did, they are indistinguishable. The GIM was in the shipyard, and they hardly opened their mouth. But the one guy from the GIM that was in the strike committee was also indistinguishable. It's exactly the same with the KPD, and the people from Arbeiterpolitik didn't have any different program either.

The first thing the workers have to have, that's a decent party that represents their interests. When you read the TLD's leaflet, you saw that they did represent the workers. The other political groups, parties—they wanted to keep the TLD out of the shipyard as far as possible. And discussions they had with individual workers were also not looked on kindly.

All the political groups except the TLD said, the workers—they're not that advanced; they can't do all that yet; and they don't understand all that yet. But I'm a worker myself. If somebody asks me, do you want to determine what's produced in your plant, I'll say of course I want that. And if he asked me, do you also want to determine how much you earn, then I'll say, of course I want to determine that. And do you also want to determine your hours and your working conditions? Then of course I say I want to determine that too. I don't have to be so all-fired advanced for that; every worker understands that. And that's what the TLD said. And it's simply necessary to have a party, one you can really turn to with your interests and doesn't turn right around and betray the workers again.

Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By- Tupac Shakur’s "Rebel Of The Underground"

In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.

*******

Markin comment:

Sometimes the truth comes out a little raggedy and not in our Marxist high-flown style but it is the truth, or a close approximation of it nevertheless.

********

Rebel Of The Underground lyrics-Tupac Shakur

Rebel.. rebel.. REBEL
Rebel.. rebel..

[2Pac]
They just can't stand the reign, or the occasional pain
from a man like me, who goes against the grain
Sometimes I do it in vain, so with a little bass and treble
Hey Mister! It's time for me to explain that I'm the rebel
Cold as the devil
Straight from the underground, the rebel, a lower level
They came to see the maniac psychopath
The critics heard of me, and the aftermath
I don't give a damn and it shows
And when I do a stage show I wear street clothes
So they all know me
The lyrical lunatic, the maniac emcee
I give a shout out to your homies
And maybe then, the critics'll leave your boy alone, G
On the streets or on TV
It just don't pay to be, a truth tellin MC
They won't be happy till I'm banned
The most dangerous weapon: an educated black man
So point blank in your face, pump up the bass
and join the human race
I throw peace to the Bay
Cause from the Jungle to Oaktown, they backin me up all the way
You know you gotta love the sound
It's from the rebel -- the rebel of the underground

Rebel he's a rebel, rebel of the underground [4X]

[2Pac]
Now I'm face to face with the devils
Cause they breedin more rebels than the whole damn ghetto
And police brutality
shit it put you in the nip and call it technicality
So you reap what you sow
So reap the wrath of the rebel, jackin em up once mo'
Now the fox is in the henhouse, creepin up on your daughter
While you sleep I got her sneakin out
Tupac ain't nuttin nice
I'll be nuttin how I wanna, and doin what I'm gonna
Now I'm up to no good
The mastermind of mischief movin more than most could
So sit and slip into the sound
Peep the rebel -- the rebel of the underground

Rebel he's a rebel, rebel of the underground [4X]

[2Pac]
They say they hate me, they wanna hold me down
I guess they scared of the rebel -- the rebel of the underground
But I never let it get me
I just make another record bout the punks tryin to sweat me
In fact, they tryin to keep me out
Try to censor what I say
cause they don't like what I'm talkin bout
So what's wrong with the media today?
Got brothers sellin out cause they greedy to get paid
But me, I'm comin from the soul
And if it don't go gold, my story still gettin told
And that way they can't stop me
And if it sells a couple of copies, the punks'll try to copy
It's sloppy, don't even try to
I'm a slave to the rhythm, and I'm about to fly through
So yo to the people in the ghetto
When ya hear the bass flow, go ahead and let go
Now everybody wanna gangbang
They talkin street slang, but the punks still can't hang
They makin records bout violence
But when it comes to the real, some brothers go silent
It kinda make you wanna think about
that ya gotta do some sellin out, just to get your record out
But 2Pacalpyse is straight down
So feel the wrath of the rebel -- the rebel of the underground

Tupac is a rebel, rebel of the underground [8X]

Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By- Tupac Shakur’s "Papa'z Song"

In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.

*******

Markin comment:

Sometimes the truth comes out a little raggedy and not in our Marxist high-flown style but it is the truth, or a close approximation of it nevertheless.

*********

Papa'z Song lyrics-Tupac Shakur

(feat. Wycked)

Daddy's home...

[2Pac]
Heh, so?
You say that like that means somethin to me
You've been gone a mighty long motherfuckin time
for you to be comin home talkin that "daddy's home" shit (nigga)
We been gettin along fine just without you
Me, my brother, and my mother
So if you don't mind, you can step the FUCK off, POPS.. fuck you!

[2Pac]
Had to play catch by myself, what a sorry sight
A pitiful plight, so I pray for a starry night
Please send me a pops before puberty
the things I wouldn't do to see a piece of family unity
Moms always work, I barely see her
I'm startin to get worried without a pops I'll grow to be her
It's a wonder they don't understand kids today
so when I pray, I pray I'll never grow to be that way
And I hope that he answers me
I heard God don't like ugly well take a look at my family
A different father every weekend
Before we get to meet him they break up before the week ends
I'm gettin sick of all the friendships
As soon as we kick it he done split and the whole shit ends quick
How can I be a man if there's no role model?
Strivin to save my soul I stay cold drinkin a forty bottle
I'm so sorry...

[Chorus]
I'm so sorry
for all this time (I'm so sorry)
for all this time
for all this time (don't lie)
I'm so sorry
for all this time (so, sorry)
for all this time
for all this time, so sorry baby!

[Wycked]
Moms had to entertain many men
Didn't wanna do it but it's time to pay the rent again
I'm gettin a bit older and I'm startin to be a bother
Moms can't stand me cause I'm lookin like my father
Should I stay or run away, tell me the answer
Moms ignores me and avoids me like cancer
Grow up rough and it's hard to understand stuff
Moms was tough cause his poppa wasn't man enough
Couldn't stand up to his own responsibilities
Instead of takin care of me, he'd rather live lavishly
That's why I'll never be a father;
unless you got the time it's a crime don't even bother
(That's when I started hatin the phony smiles
Said I was an only child)
Look at mama's lonely smile
It's hard for a son to see his mother cry
She only loves you, but has to fuck with these other guys
I'm so sorry...

[Chorus]
I'm so sorry
for all this time
for all this time
for all this time
I'm so sorry
for all this time
for all this time (so sorry)
for all this time, so sorry baby!

[2Pac]
Man child in the promised land couldn't afford many heroes
Moms was the only one there my pops was a no-show
And ohh -I guess ya didn't know
that I would grow to be so strong
Lookin kinda pale, was it the ale oh pops was wrong
Where was the money that you said, you would send me
talked on the phone and you sounded so friendly
Ask about school and my welfare
but it's clear, you ain't sincere hey who the hell cares
You think I'm blind but this time I see you comin, Jack
You grabbed your coat, left us broke, now ain't no runnin back
Ask about my moms like you loved her from the start
Left her in the dark, she fell apart from a broken heart
So don't even start with that "wanna be your father" shit
Don't even bother with your dollars I don't need it
I'll bury moms like you left me all alone G
Now that that I finally found you, stay the Fuck away from me
You're so sorry..

[Chorus]
I'm so sorry (so sorry)
for all this time (so, so sorry)
for all this time (I'm so so sorry)
for all this time (fuck that!)
I'm so sorry
for all this time (no)
for all this time (so sorry)
for all this time, so sorry baby!

[Tupac - impersonating his father]
I never meant to leave but I was wanted
Crossed too many people every house I'd touch was haunted
Had to watch the strangers every brother was in danger
If I was to keep you breathin, had to be out of range-a
Had to move, one to lost my name and pick the number
Made me watch my back I had no happy home to run to
Maybe it's my fault for being a father livin fast
But livin slow, mean half the dough, and you won't get no ass
Hindsight shows me it was wrong all along
I wanted to make some dough so you would grow to be so strong
It took a little longer than I thought
I slipped, got caught, and sent to jail by the courts
Now I'm doin time and I wish you'd understand
all I ever wanted was for you to be a man
and grow to be the type you was meant to be
Keep the war fightin by the writings that you sent to me
I'm so sorry...

[Chorus w/ variations til end]