Markin comment:
In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement that in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.
After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Debs' Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.
I am continuing today what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.
However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
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Markin comment on this article:
As has been detailed in other pieces in this space about the fate of the cadre of the Fourth International, including the leading figure, Leon Trotsky, assassinated by a Stalinist agent in Mexico in 1940, that organization was decimated by various forces by the end of World War II and left it without strong theoretical leadership the post-war period. Not strong enough at a time when the seemingly improbable situation developed where non-Leninist (in the early Bolshevik sense) parties were leading overturns of capitalist regimes from Eastern Europe to Asia. This inability to sift through the historic facts was most forcefully felt in the immediate case of Yugoslavia. But, frankly, the post- World War II methodological problems still haunt those of us who stand on the history of the Fourth International, mainly today around the question of whether China is capitalist or not. That makes this pamphlet worthwhile reading to order to try to sort that problem out.
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Appendix I
The British Revolutionary Communist Party
Written: 1993
Source: Prometheus Research Library, Prometheus Research Series No. 4, New York, 2000
Transcription/Markup/Proofing: John Heckman.
Public Domain: Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 2007/Prometheus Research Library. You can freely copy, display and otherwise distribute this work. Please credit the Marxists Internet Archive & Prometheus Research Library as your source, include the url to this work, and note the transcribers & editors above.
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In digging up the history of the discussion in the Fourth International about Yugoslavia and East Europe, we have discovered that the positions of the Haston/Grant RCP were not only ignored, they were systematically distorted. Thus Morris Stein claimed, during the continuation of the discussion on East Europe in the SWP leadership, that “To the RCP, Stalinist control of state power also amounts to an automatic social change but they term it a workers’ state.”[1] Ernest Germain (Mandel) likewise claimed that, for the RCP, “Since from all evidence the bourgeoisie of the buffer countries no longer controls the state apparatus which has now fallen into the hands of the Stalinists...it logically follows that the state has ceased being a bourgeois state.”[2]
Following this same characterization we have ourselves written that
...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.[3]
Yet the RCP's amendments at the FI's Second World Congress (which were never published by the SWP) did not say that the countries of East Europe became deformed workers states with the Red Army victory in 1945 (as Vern-Ryan did), but rather that this was a process still under way in 1948. As the basis for the overthrow of capitalist rule, the amendments listed not only the preponderance of Soviet military force, but also “the balance of forces between the workers and Stalinist forces and the residues of the ruling class.”[4] Moreover, Bill Hunter's May 1949 document, written for the RCP majority, noted that it was the change in the international situation—namely, the onset of the Cold War—that led Stalin to change his policy from coddling the East European bourgeoisies to expropriating them:
True, for a period there existed Stalinist coalitions with the bourgeoisie, or with the shadow of the bourgeoisie.... In the first period following the war, the shadow of the bourgeoisie could have gained and was gaining substance. Given a different relationship of forces internationally, developments could have been entirely different to those which actually took place. However, because it could not afford to share the power, and because of its struggle against world imperialism, the bureaucracy, calling on the pressure of the masses, shattered the bourgeoisie completely. [5]
It is indeed unfortunate that the RCP's writings on East Europe and Yugoslavia were ignored, dismissed and largely suppressed. The Haston/Grant grouping was characterized by impressionism, earlier supporting the rightist Goldman/Morrow opposition in 1945-46 and later liquidating into the Labour Party. Moreover, a political tendency is more than just its stated program—and there is much we don't know about the actual functioning of the Haston/Grant-led RCP. But the struggle in the Fourth International might have followed a different course had their voices been around in 1951-53 to add theoretical understanding to the fight against Pabloism—and Pablo's bureaucratic treatment of them certainly foreshadowed the organizational methods he was to use again on the French PCI, and attempt to use on the American SWP. It is suggestive that, explaining the “impasse” of the RCP in 1950, Ted Grant pointed first of all to the “capitulation to Tito-Stalinism internationally.” Among the factors which permitted the rise of Stalinist-ruled, bureaucratically deformed workers states in the postwar period, he listed:
The fact that the revolution in China and Yugoslavia could be developed in a distorted and debased character is due to the world factors of
(a) The crisis of world capitalism
(b) The existence of a strong, deformed workers state adjacent to these countries and powerfully influencing the workers' movement.
(c) The weakness of the Marxist current of the IVth International.
These factors have resulted in an unparalleled development which could not have been foreseen by any of the Marxist teachers: the extension of Stalinism as a social phenomenon over half Europe, over the Chinese sub-continent and with the possibility of spreading over the whole of Asia.
This poses new theoretical problems to be worked out by the Marxist movement. Under conditions of isolation and of paucity of forces, new historical factors could not but result in a theoretical crisis of the movement, posing the problem of its very existence and survival.[6]
These comments could have been the beginning of wisdom, and they foreshadow in many respects the Spartacist analysis of the formation of a deformed workers state in Cuba a decade later. But by then the ravages of Pabloism had destroyed the Fourth International.
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NOTES
1 “Stenogram of Discussion in the Political Committee of the Socialist Workers Party on the Buffer Countries,“ SWP Internal Bulletin, Vol. XI, No. 5, October 1949, 23.
2 Ernest Germain (Mandel), “The Yugoslav Question, the Question of the Soviet Buffer Zone, and Their Implications for Marxist Theory,” SWP, International Information Bulletin, January 1950, 15.
3 “Genesis of Pabloism.”
4 “RCP Amendments to the Thesis on Russia and Eastern Europe.”
5 Bill Hunter, “The I.S. and Eastern Europe,” 8.
6 Unsigned (Ted Grant), “Statement to the BSFI [British Section of the Fourth International].”
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Appendix II
Workers Power:
New International, New Program, New World Reality
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Written: 1993
Source: Prometheus Research Library, Prometheus Research Series No. 4, New York, 1993
Transcription/Markup/Proofing: John Heckman.
Public Domain: Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 2007/Prometheus Research Library. You can freely copy, display and otherwise distribute this work. Please credit the Marxists Internet Archive & Prometheus Research Library as your source, include the url to this work, and note the transcribers & editors above.
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In The Death Agony of the Fourth International, Workers Power snootily remarks, “The fighting propaganda group is not, for the Spartacists, a vehicle for programmatic re-elaboration (they do not do any)....”[1] Workers Power’s own “creative re-elaboration” of Trotskyism leads them quite far afield. Having pronounced the death of the Fourth International due to political degeneration and calling for a new, undefined “revolutionary communist international,” Workers Power has also rejected the program of Trotsky’s FI. In a 1988 article WP honcho Mark Hoskisson called for “re-elaborating the Transitional Programme” on the grounds that since it was written “much has occurred that Trotsky’s programme neither foresaw nor prepared for.”[2]
But this is no mere “updating.” Hoskisson’s article rejects the key premise of Trotsky’s strategy of world socialist revolution, which was also that of the Communist International in the days of Lenin, to wit:
The economic prerequisite for the proletarian revolution has already in general achieved the highest point of fruition that can be reached under capitalism. Mankind’s productive forces stagnate.[3]
Yet, claims Hoskisson, “in the metropolitan countries the second imperialist war was followed by an unprecedented economic boom for almost twenty years.” Judging that Trotsky “and the FI as a whole” had “an inadequate understanding” of political economy, this arrogant twit proclaims: “Now, with the reality of the post-war boom behind us, only an idiot, or perhaps a charlatan like Gerry Healy, would describe Trotsky’s categorical declaration as correct.”[4]
We demonstrated two decades ago that the “long postwar boom,” with its periodic crises, is a revisionist myth.[5] But the statement that the productive forces had ceased to grow was not a conjunctural prognosis, it was a characterization of the entire imperialist epoch and the basis for the Fourth International’s program for world socialist revolution. Trade unions “can no longer be reformist,” wrote Trotsky, “because the objective conditions leave no room for any serious and lasting reforms.”[6] WP, in contrast, claims that the alleged “boom created the conditions for the resurgence of social-democratic reformism.”[7] Trotsky argued that “the independence of the trade unions in the class sense, in their relations to the bourgeois state, can, in the present conditions, be assured only by a completely revolutionary leadership, that is, the leadership of the Fourth International.”[8] Workers Power calls instead for “developing the tactic of the rank and file movement” as “the united front in the unions.”[9]
The Hoskisson article solidarizes with Felix Morrow, who led a rightist social-democratic opposition in the SWP after World War II. While Morrow’s immediate economic prognosis turned out to be more accurate than Cannon’s prediction of imminent economic crisis, he derived from this a program of democratic demands. Similarly Hoskisson calls for a “strategic retreat” in the postwar period:
The failure to carry out a “strategic retreat” for the imperialist countries by formulating a policy for the unions was mirrored by the failure to re-elaborate the programme to deal with the resurgence of reformism....In place of the Transitional Programme’s general denunciation of reformism a programme of action utilising the tactics of the united front was required.[10]
Hoskissen then claims that the absence of such a program for a “united front with reformism” was the problem in the Belgian general strike of 1961 and in France 1968. But contrary to the WP myth of a “long boom” filling the sails of reformism and requiring a “strategic retreat” into united-front tactics, what was lacking in Brussels in 1961 and in Paris in 1968 was precisely a revolutionary program for the struggle for power!
Rejecting the Transitional Program’s central premise and its central conclusion, Workers Power launches a frontal assault on the founding document of the Fourth International as a program preparing the revolutionary struggle for power. In its stead WP elaborates a “method of transitional demands” leading to a “system of workers control”—that is, dual power in the factories—while relegating socialist revolution to the sweet by-and-by. “Transitional demands...could introduce a reformist led proletariat to the very need for revolution,” writes Hoskisson, and at some later date, when “the working class, or its vanguard, are fighting in this manner, the transitional programme will be transformed into the programme of soviet power and the dictatorship of the proletariat.”[11] Wrong. The Transitional Program is the program for the dictatorship of the proletariat. As Trotsky wrote, transitional demands are to organize the struggle of the proletariat leading it to the conquest of power: “It is necessary to help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demands and the socialist program of revolution.”[12]
Hoskisson’s article was the lead-up; The Trotskyist Manifesto, published in 1989 by Workers Power’s “League for a Revolutionary Communist International,” is the result. Declaring that “the FI was politically destroyed” in 1951 as the result of “the adoption of a systematic centrist method” whose “first and most dramatic example was that of Yugoslavia,” the WP/LRCI’s new program declares:
Trotsky, in the Transitional Programme, remarked that “Mankind’s productive forces stagnate.” This statement was part of a correct perspectival analysis of the 1930s, culminating in the cataclysm of the Second World War. However, no conjunctural or periodic characterisation holds good for an indefinite period....
In a number of major and minor imperialist powers “economic miracles” marked the boom years of the 1950s and 1960s....
During the long boom in the imperialist countries, a prolonged period of relative social peace reigned. This was based on rising real wages, near full employment and, in Europe at least, an unprecedented social welfare system. The Labour and Social Democratic bureaucracies tied the mass workers’ organisations to imperialism.[13]
Here you have the old New Left view of the bought-off working class and the new rise of reformism producing a prolonged social peace. Just to take the one example of France, this ignores the mammoth 1953 general strike, the miners strike and possibility of a working-class uprising against De Gaulle’s coup in 1958, extensive workers’ unrest over the Algerian War in the early ’60s, and the prerevolutionary situation of May 1968.
Rejection of Trotsky’s premise is followed by rejection of Trotsky’s revolutionary conclusion as well, writing it off as peculiar to the pre-WWII period. The WP/LRCI program states:
Trotsky’s Transitional Programme, written in these years, pronounced that the crisis of humanity was reduced to the crisis of leadership. However, today it would be wrong simply to repeat that all contemporary crises are “reduced to a crisis of leadership.”
The proletariat worldwide does not yet face the stark alternative of either taking power or seeing the destruction of all its past gains.[14]
Try telling that brazen lie to American unionists who have seen a massive onslaught against the unions, whose real wages have fallen steadily for the last two decades; tell it to ghetto black youth, an entire generation that capitalism has thrown on the scrap heap with no hope of ever getting jobs; tell it to British, French and West German workers who have suffered almost a decade of double-digit unemployment; tell it to the working people of east Germany, fully half (and even more among women) of whom have been thrown out of work as a result of the counterrevolution of capitalist reunification; tell it to the immigrant workers, who are the target of racist terror and suffer the sharpest blows of capitalist austerity; tell it to the masses of East Europe, reduced to starvation wages and soup kitchens; tell it to the interpenetrated peoples of Yugoslavia being ripped apart in bloody nationalist war; tell it to the masses of the “Third World,” including tens of millions of industrial workers producing for the imperialist markets, who are sinking ever deeper into immiseration! What profound confidence in capitalism Workers Power has.
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Notes
1. Workers Power, Death Agony, 63-64.
2. Mark Hoskisson, “The Transitional Programme Fifty Years On,” Permanent Revolution No. 7, Spring 1988, 74.
3. Leon Trotsky, Transitional Program, 111.
4. Mark Hoskisson, op. cit., 74, 84.
5. See “Myth of Neo-Capitalism,” Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter No. 10, January-February 1972.
6. Leon Trotsky, “Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay” (August 1940), Leon Trotsky on the Trade Unions (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1969), 71.
7. Mark Hoskisson, op. cit., 74.
8. Leon Trotsky, “Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay,” 75.
9. Mark Hoskisson, op. cit., 97-98.
10. Ibid., 97.
11. Ibid., 90-91.
12. Leon Trotsky, Transitional Program, 114.
13. LRCI, The Trotskyist Manifesto, op. cit., 10-12.
14. Ibid., 19.
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