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 than 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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When Polemic Ruled The Leftist Life- Trotskyism vs. Stalinism In It Maoism Phase, Circa 1973
Markin comment on this series:
No question today, 2011 today, Marxists in this wicked old world are as scarce as hen’s teeth. Leninists and Trotskyists even fewer. And to be sure there are so many open social and political wounds in the world from the struggle against imperialism in places like Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, just to name the obvious America imperial adventures that come quickly off the tip of the tongue, to the struggles in America just for working people to keep heads above water in the riptide of rightist reaction on the questions of unemployment, unionism, social services, racial inequality and the like that it is almost hard to know where to start. Nevertheless, however dismal the situation may seem, the need for political clarity, for polemic between leftist tendencies, is as pressing today as it was going back to Marx’s time. Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, after all, is nothing but a long polemic against all the various misguided notions of socialist reconstruction of society of their day. And Marxists were as scarce as hen’s teeth then, as well.
When I first came under the influence of Marx in the early 1970s, as I started my search for some kind of strategy for systemic social change after floundering around with liberalism, left-liberalism, and soft social-democracy, one of the things that impressed me while reading the classics was the hard polemical edge to the writings. That same thing impressed me with Lenin and Trotsky (although as the “prince of the pamphleteers” I found that Trotsky was the more fluent writer of the two). That edge, and the fact that they all spent more time, much more time, polemicizing against other leftists than with bourgeois democrats in order to clarify the tasks confronting revolutionaries. And, frankly, I miss that give and take that is noticeably absent from today’s leftist scene. Or is dismissed as so much ill-will, malice, or sectarian hair-splitting when what we need to do is “make nice” with each other. There actually is a time to make nice, in a way, it is called the united front in order for the many to fight on specific issues. Unless there is a basic for a revolutionary regroupment which, frankly, I do not see on the horizon then this is proper vehicle, and will achieve all our immediate aims in the process.
So call me sentimental but I am rather happy to post these entries that represent the old time (1973, now old time) polemics between the Spartacist brand of Trotskyism and the now defunct Guardian trend of Maoism that the now far less radical Carl Davidson was then defending. Many of the issues, political tendencies, and organizations mentioned may have passed from the political scene but the broader questions of revolutionary strategy, from the implications of Trotsky’ s theory of permanent revolution to the various guises of the popular front still haunt the leftist night. Argue on.
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The Stalin School of Falsification Revisited
These articles were originally serialized in Workers Vanguard, in 1973, starting in the 22 June issue [No.23] and concluding in the 10 October issue [No. 30]
Reply to the Guardian
THE STALIN SCHOOL OF FALSIFICATION REVISITED
8. TROTSKYISM vs. SWP REVISIONISM
T
The last four articles of the Guardian series on "Trotsky's Heritage" are devoted to demonstrating that Trotskyism is reformist and "counterrevolutionary" by discussing the current policies of the Socialist Workers Party and, to a lesser extent, of the Workers League (WL). Not once is the Spartacist League mentioned. This is no accident. The SWP, which was once the leading party of the Fourth International, has long since abandoned the path of revolutionary Trotskyism for the swamp of reformism. First adapting itself to Castroist in 1961-63 by foreseeing a "guerrilla road to power" and to black nationalism with the theory that "consistent nationalism" leads to socialism, the SWP made its dive into reformism in 1965, becoming the organizer of a popular-front antiwar movement dominated by bourgeois liberals. Since then it has extended this class collaborationism into new fields, organizing single-issue movements for the "democratic" demand of self-determination for just about everyone, from blacks (community control) and women to homosexuals and American Indians.
The political bandits of the WL, on the other hand, have made their mark in the U.S. socialist left by constantly shifting their political line in order to temporarily adapt to whatever is popular at the moment (Huey Newton, Red Guards, Ho Chi Minh. Arab nationalists, left-talking union bureaucrats) only to return to a more "orthodox" position soon after. Its constants are a belief that an all-encompassing final crisis of capitalism will eliminate the need to struggle for the Bolshevik politics of the Transitional Program and an abiding passion for tailing after labor fakers of any stripe, from pseudo-radicals to ultra conservatives.
Thus it is easy to "prove" that Trotskyism is reformist by citing the policies of the SWP and the WL. But this has about as much value as "proving" that Lenin was for a "peaceful road to socialism" by citing Khrushchev.
Feminism and Trotskyism
Because of the rotten betrayals of the SWP during the past decade, Trotskyism has become confused in the minds of many militants with the crassest reformist grovelling before the liberal bourgeoisie. It also gives Maoists like Davidson plenty of opportunity to make correct attacks:
"Their [SWP's] approach is to tail opportunistically each spontaneous development in the mass democratic movements. Each constituency, in succession, is then dubbed the 'vanguard' leading the proletariat to socialism, with the added provision that the 'vanguard of the vanguard' in each sector is presently made up of the student youth."
--Guardian, 13 June 1973
This theory, formerly called the "dialectic of the sectors of intervention" by the SWP's European friends, is a denial of the leading role of the proletariat and is expressed in their programmatic capitulation to feminism, nationalism, student power, etc. Elsewhere, Davidson criticized the SWP for tailing the nationalism of the black petty bourgeoisie and the WL for tailing the chauvinism of the labor aristocracy (Guardian, 30 May 1973). Again this is correct.
But such criticism is cheap--it represents not the slightest step toward a Marxist program of proletarian class struggle. Thus after criticizing the SWP for tailing petty-bourgeois feminists, Davidson counterposes the "mass democratic struggle for the emancipation of women." This is the tip of the iceberg, for behind the contention that the struggle for women's liberation is only "democratic" (and not socialist) lies a call for maintenance of the bourgeois family (simply "reforming" it by calling "for husbands to share equally in the responsibilities of the home") and for an alliance with "even the women of the exploiting classes."
SL Embodies Trotskyist Program
Instead of capitulating to bourgeois pacifism the SL called for class-struggle opposition to the Vietnam war: for labor strikes against the war, bourgeoisie out of the antiwar movement, military support to the NLF, all Indochina must go communist; instead of petty-bourgeois draft refusal the SL was unique in consistently advocating communist work in the army.
Rather than capitulating to bourgeois nationalism, the SL called for an end to all discrimination on the basis of race, opposition to community control and preferential hiring, for a transitional black organization on a program of united class struggle.
In the struggle for women's liberation, the SL opposed capitulation to bourgeois feminism and the equally reactionary abstentionism of various workerist groups: We called for women's liberation through socialist revolution, bourgeois politicians out of the women's movement, free abortion on demand and adopted the prospect of the eventual creation of a women's section of the SL, as envisioned by the early Communist International.
Alone of all the ostensibly Marxist organizations the SL has upheld the Leninist norms of youth-party relations, with the youth section (Revolutionary Communist Youth, RCY [now the Spartacus Youth League, SYL]) organizationally separate but politically subordinate to the party.
Nationalism vs. Class Struggle
On the question of black nationalism, Davidson criticizes the SWP for tailing petty-bourgeois nationalists...and then declares that U.S. blacks constitute a nation and should have the right to secede. The nationalist theory of a "black nation" in the U.S. ignores the fact that blacks (and the other racial ethnic minorities) are thoroughly integrated into the U.S. economy although overwhelmingly at the bottom levels, have no common territory, special language or culture. Garveyite "back to Africa movements, the theory of a black nation and all other forms of black separatism have the principal effect of dividing the proletariat and isolating the most exploited and potentially most revolutionary section in separate organizations fighting for separate goals. Both the SWP, with its enthusiasm for community control, and Maoists like Davidson's October League and the Communist League with their reactionary-utopian concepts of a black nation, serve to disunite the working class and tie it to the bourgeoisie. The SWP's enthusiasm for a black political party lead it to enthuse over clambakes of black Democrats (such as the 1971 Gary convention), while black-nation separatism aids bourgeois nationalist demagogues like Newark's Ford Foundation-backed Imamu Baraka (Leroi Jones).
In part the capitulation to black nationalism by wide sectors of the U.S. left is a distorted recognition that this most exploited sector of the working class will indeed play a key role in an American socialist revolution. Black workers are potentially the leading section of the proletariat. But this requires the integration of its most conscious elements into the single vanguard party and a relentless struggle for the program of united working-class struggle among black workers. Conscious of the need for special methods of work among doubly-oppressed sectors of the proletariat, the SL has called for a transitional black organization not as a concession to black separatism but precisely in order to better combat nationalism among the black masses. ("Black and Red--Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom," Spartacist, May-June 1967).
Leninism vs. Workerism
Since the demise of the Weatherman-RYM II section of SDS in late 1969, black nationalism and feminism have been joined by a crude workerism as the dominant forms of petty-bourgeois ideology in the socialist movement. Adapting to the present backward consciousness of the working class, workerists have sought to gain instant popularity and influence by organizing on the level of militant trade unionism. Failing to heed (and in some cases denying) Lenin's dictum that socialist consciousness must be brought to the working class from the outside, by the revolutionary party, the radical workerists today carry out trade-union work which is in no way distinguishable from that of the reformist Communist party in the 1930's and 1940's. Falling in behind every militant-talking out-bureaucrat, and not a few in-bureaucrats as well, they fail to wage a political struggle in the unions, saving their support for the NLF, Mao, etc., for the campuses.
Among ostensible Trotskyist groups, workerism has taken the form of denying the need to struggle for the whole of the Transitional Program in the trade unions. Some fake-Trotskyists argue that wage demands alone are revolutionary (Workers league), others that the Transitional Program must be served to the workers in bits and pieces, one course at a time (Class Struggle league); still others verbally proclaim the Transitional Program in their documents, but see the strategy for power as based on giving "critical support" to every available out-bureaucrat (Revolutionary Socialist League). The SWP, for its part, does almost no trade-union work at all and in its press gives uncritical support to liberal bureaucrats, both in power and out.
The Spartacist League, in contrast, calls for the formation of caucuses based on the Transitional Program to struggle for leadership of the unions. While willing to form united fronts in specific struggles, the SL sees the fundamental task as the creation of a communist opposition--not just militant trade unionism. Together with Trotsky we affirm that the Transitional Program is the program for struggle in the unions. This does not mean that every caucus program must be a carbon copy of the SL Declaration of Principles--it is necessary to choose those demands which best serve to raise socialist consciousness in the particular situation. What is essential is that the caucus program of transitional demands not be limited to militant reformism, but contain the political perspective of socialist revolution.
Davidson quotes from Trotsky's 1940 conversations with SWP leaders to claim that Trotskyist trade union work amounted to "anti-communism." We have recently published a series of articles on "Trotskyist Work in the Trade Unions" (WV No. 25-28) detailing our criticisms of the SWP's policy of one-sided emphasis on blocs with "progressive" bureaucrats and its failure to build a communist pole 'in the unions. However, it was perfectly correct during the late 1930's to concentrate the Trotskyists' trade-union work on opposition to the Stalinists: these were the agents of Roosevelt in the labor movement, the authors and enforcers of the no-strike pledge during World War II. Of course, no one can accuse Davidson's friends in the October League or Revolutionary Union of attacking the Communist Party (or for that matter any militant reformist bureaucrat) in their trade-union work. Rather they uniformly support left bureaucrats in office (such as Chavez of the Farmworkers) and form blocs with-out-bureaucrats when the incumbent leadership is too conservative to awaken any illusions at all among the workers.
Consistent with his pattern of distortion of Trotsky's positions in the earlier articles of the series, Davidson seeks to create the impression that Trotsky endorsed the SWP's practice of blocking with "progressive" bureaucrats against the Stalinists. Not so! In 1940 Trotsky explicitly criticized the SWP for softness toward pro-Roosevelt unionists and insisted on an orientation toward the ranks of the CP.
The Struggle for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International
The degeneration of the SWP from Bolshevism to centrism did not simply occur one day in 1961, but was the result of a process of programmatic (and ultimately organizational) degeneration of the Fourth International after World War It. The critical point came with the split of the FI in 1953 which signified the organizational demise of the unified world party of socialist revolution. At the heart of the split was the program put forward by Michel Pablo, head of the International Secretariat of the FI, of "deep entry" into the reformist Stalinist parties, redubbed centrist in order to justify the new line. Pablo, no longer saw the crisis of revolutionary leadership as the key roadblock to revolution and the construction of the Fourth International as the solution. Instead he adopted the objectivist theory that the overwhelming crisis of capitalism (his "war-revolution thesis") would force the Stalinists to undertake at least deformed revolutions. Thus Pablo's "Theses on International Perspectives" of the Third Congress of the FI (1951) state:
"The objective conditions determine in the long run the character and dynamic of the mass movement which, taken to a certain level, can overcome all the subjective obstacles in the path of the revolution."
--Quatrieme Internationale, August-September 1951
When it became clear that the implication of Pablo's line was the organizational liquidation of the FI into the dominant Stalinist and social-democratic parties, and when this was brought home by a liquidationist pro-Pablo faction (headed by Cochran and Clarke) in the SWP itself, the party majority reacted sharply. James Cannon wrote:
"The essence of Pabloist revisionism is the overthrow of that part of Trotskyism which is today its most vital part--the conception of the crisis of mankind as the crisis of the leadership of the labor movement summed up in the question of the party."
--"Factional Struggle and Party Leadership," November 1953
The organizational destruction of the FI by Pabloist revisionism in 1953 had come about as the result of a number of factors affecting the entire Trotskyist movement after World War II, but particularly the European sections. For one thing, virtually their entire pre-war leadership had been murdered either by the Nazi Gestapo or the Stalinist GPU. The living continuity with Trotsky had virtually been broken. Furthermore the sections had been decimated and largely isolated from the working class, while the Stalinists had been able to expand their influence through leadership of anti-Hitler partisan struggles. At the same time Stalinist regimes were set up under the protection of the Russian Army in Eastern Europe, and peasant-based insurrection in China led to the overthrow of capitalism and the creation of a deformed workers state. Faced with these unexpected developments the initial response of the Trotskyist movement was to maintain that the Eastern European Stalinist regimes were still capitalist. Not until 1955 did the SWP, for instance, decide that China had become a deformed workers state. Having unwittingly vulgarized Trotsky's dialectical understanding of Stalinism, the orthodox Trotskyists stressed Stalinism's counterrevolutionary side until their theories no longer squared with reality. This disorientation enabled the revisionist current around Pablo to justify its opportunist appetites by concluding from the limited social transformations in Eastern Europe that non-proletarian, non-Trotskyist forces can lead any form of social revolution.
The SWP had been least affected by this process, having emerged from the war with its leadership intact, its membership and ties to the working class increased and the Stalinists still relatively weak compared to Europe. It was natural that in 1953 the SWP should lead the fight for orthodox Trotskyism. But in fact the party waged only a half-struggle, virtually withdrawing from any international work until the late 1950's. The "International Committee" which it formed with the French and British majorities who opposed Pablo hardly functioned at all. As the party lost virtually its entire trade-union cadre in the Cochran-Clarke fight, and as the greater part of its entire membership left during the McCarthy years, the leadership began moving to the right in the late 1950's in search of some force or movement it, could latch onto in order to regain mass influence.
It found this in the Cuban revolution, which evoked a wave of sympathy throughout Latin America and in the U.S. The party leadership declared that Cuba was basically a healthy workers state, although not yet possessing the forms of workers democracy (!) and that Fidel Castro was a natural Marxist (i.e., he supposedly acted like a Trotskyist even though he talked first as a bourgeois nationalist and later as a Stalinist).
Not surprisingly, this was the same line taken by the Pabloists in Europe. If the petty-bourgeois Stalinist bureaucracies could carry out a social revolution in Eastern Europe, they reasoned, why not also a petty-bourgeois nationalist like Castro. Thus in practice the SWP was coming over to the Pabloist line. At the same time an opposition was formed inside the SWP (the Revolutionary Tendency, predecessor of the Spartacist League) which considered Cuba a deformed workers state and criticized the SWP leadership's capitulation to Castro and the European Pabloists. The RT in 1963 proposed a counter thesis ("Toward the Rebirth of the Fourth International") to the majority's document which was the basis for the SWP's reunification with the European Pabloists to form the "United Secretariat." While the party majority supported a peasant-based "guerrilla road to power" the RT upheld the orthodox Trotskyist position that only the proletariat could lead the struggle for agrarian revolution and national liberation.
The RT was expelled from the SWP in 1963 for its revolutionary opposition to the majority's Pabloist tailing after petty-bourgeois forces. Subsequently the gap between the SWP's policies and the Trotskyism of the Spartacist group continued to widen. The ex-Trotskyist SWP capitulated in turn to black nationalism, bourgeois pacifism and feminism, to the point where today it is a hardened reformist organization with appetites to become the dominant social democratic party of the U.S.
We must learn from this history of defeats that revisionism leads to the same consequences whether it comes from Stalinist origins or from erstwhile Trotskyists. The Maoist line defended by the Guardian in no way offers a proletarian alternative to the reformism of the SWP. Instead of the SWP's single issue reformist campaigns in alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie (NPAC, WONAAC), the Maoists propose multi-issue reformist campaigns in alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie (PCPJ). The only road to socialist revolution is to make a sharp break with Stalinist and Pabloist revisionism and return to the Marxist program of proletarian class independence, uniquely embodied in the U.S. by the Spartacist League. Internationally this means an unrelenting struggle for the creation of a democratic-centralist programmatically-united Trotskyist tendency to carry out the task of reconstruction of the FI.
Down with Pabloism!
For the Rebirth of the Fourth International!
Showing posts with label pabloism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pabloism. Show all posts
Friday, July 15, 2011
Monday, May 30, 2011
From The Archives Of The International Communist League- The Development of the Spartacist League by the Spartacist League of New Zealand, August 1972
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 than 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 entry:
This document is well worth reading, despite its age and the demise of some of the organizations and personalities mentioned, because in the report are distilled most of the great questions that confront small groups of revolutionaries (our status today) even at a time when there were somewhat greater possibilities for developing into a solid propaganda group during the late 1960s-early 1970s. That, unfortunately, whether we like it or not and whether political people act on that understanding or not, is where we are today-struggling to create stable revolutionary communist propaganda operations. There is no way around it. Those who deny that reality and assume the appearance of a "mass" organizational front are not in tune with current tasks. And we need to do this all without succumbing to an inward-looking "circle spirit" in these tough times or a notion of the "remnant" (the small, virtuous us against the ignorant mass "them")to justify passive political action. Communist propaganda is what we must produce, distribute, organize and recruit others to join us in creating before we "step-up" to crush the monster of American and world imperialism.
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The Development of the Spartacist League
by the Spartacist League of New Zealand, August 1972
Introductory Note
The New Zealand Spartacist League broke in March from a state of complete disorganisation, but until recently largely confined its activity to serious internal discussion. This document, "The Development of the Spartacist League", is a summary of the conclusions of this discussion completed in early June. In it the Spartacist League looks at its own development in the light of the experience of international Bolshevism and thereby reaches a qualitatively higher level of revolutionary politics. The Spartacist League does not worship orthodoxy, but it does seek to benefit from the experience of the revolutionary past (hence the extensive use of the words of past revolutionaries here). Only in this way can the revolutionary party be built.
Since the completion of the document Owen Gager (who has a significant place in the history of the Spartacist League) seems to have moved towards organised international Pabloism. Some recent developments in his position are looked at in an article in New Zealand Spartacist, number 7.
15 August 1972
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1. Development of the Fourth International
The Fourth International, led by Leon Trotsky and carrying on the struggle of Marx, Engels and Lenin for international socialist revolution, was founded in 1938. The loss of political leadership with Trotsky’s death in 1940, the organisational disruption of the Fourth International as a result of World War II, the failure of the war to lead directly into world proletarian revolution, and the expansion of the bloc of deformed workers’ states following the war brought about the profound disorientation of the Fourth International.
In this period the Socialist Workers Party of the United States of America (SWP), which was the strongest section and Trotsky’s closest political collaborator, abdicated its responsibility to play an international leadership role. This followed the advance of Pabloism, a revisionist current which renounces the need for a revolutionary party and adapts to reformist and Stalinist misleaderships. Pabloism denies that the proletariat is the only force capable of destroying capitalism internationally and the only force capable of laying the basis for socialism. A basic unhealthiness in the SWP is shown by the fact that only when its organisational autonomy was threatened in 1953 did it lead a fight against the growth of Pabloist leadership internationally.
Revisionism in the SWP came to a head in the early 1960s. In 1961 it publicly called Castro’s Cuba a healthy workers’ state and denied there was any need for a political revolution. And in 1963 it reunited with the mainstream Pabloites to form the "United Secretariat of the Fourth International".
The Spartacist grouping developed in the United States out of the fight against revisionism in the SWP. Although differences were clear from the first, Spartacist strongly orientated towards Gerry Healy’s "International Committee" as an instrument for the rebuilding of the Fourth International until being kicked out on a manufactured pretext. This was done to prevent Spartacist criticisms in the International Committee directed at its leaders for their Pabloist method (shown in their positions on such matters as the Cuban revolution). Although the International Committee’s defence of its Pabloism was at this stage fought by anti-political diversionary means, its subsequent further degeneration proves beyond all doubt that it is basically Pabloist. For example it gave political support to the "Arab revolution" and to the Mao wing of the Chinese bureaucracy in the "Cultural Revolution". This softness is "balanced" by an extreme sectarianism, use of physical violence against opponent groups inside the movement, threats to take opponent radical groups to the bourgeois courts, etc.
So, by its founding conference in late 1966, the Spartacist League of the United States (SLUS), having sharpened its position in struggle first within the SWP and then the International Committee, was internationally in isolation. The conference issued a brief and definitive "Declaration of Principles of the Spartacist League", which has become the basic document of our tendency internationally. This statement aroused great international interest in the months after the recent split in the International Committee.
2. Trotskyism in New Zealand
The Socialist Labour Movement, a small loose organisation of Pabloists and others influenced by Trotskyism, existed in New Zealand at the time of the founding conference of the SLUS and the "Declaration of Principles" had immediate and considerable impact on this grouping. Owen Gager, the editor of the left-wing journal Dispute and a member of the Socialist Labour Movement, wrote to the SLUS describing the "Declaration of Principles" as "a statement of Trotskyist principle which I myself have always believed in but despaired of ever seeing clearly and unadulteratedly stated by the revisionist Pabloite ‘Fourth International’."1 Gager tried to lead the Socialist Labour Movement to acceptance of the "Declaration of Principles" but was fought by Keith Locke, a member studying in Canada and under the influence of the League for Socialist Action (which is closely aligned to the SWP in the United States). The Gager-Locke polemic was associated with a de facto split in the Socialist Labour Movement and the emergence of the New Zealand Spartacist League in 1967, and the Pabloist Socialist Action League in late 1968. (The NZSL had close fraternal ties, though no organisational links, with the SLUS.)
Except for a few months at the end of 1970 and the beginning of 1971, the NZSL has never had any organisational definition, but has been a very small "diffuse group of co-thinkers".2 Discussion within the group was that of friends and without the dimension of political struggle or Bolshevik theoretical training. The NZSL was defined by its political basis, the "Declaration of Principles", on which it was founded, and which it republished in New Zealand in December 1970 as one of its basic documents.
The leadership of the comrades working together in solidarity with these politics was in the hands of Owen Gager. But unfortunately, his statements of political solidarity notwithstanding, Gager’s acceptance of the "Declaration of Principles" was never more than superficial. Weakness of method (specifically an inability to appreciate the contradictory nature of social phenomena) laid him open under conditions of virtual isolation to programmatic errors: at some times capitulation to right-wing pressure; at other times a tendency towards sectarianism.
3. Deformed Workers States
The "Declaration of Principles" holds that Russia, Eastern Europe, China, North Korea, North Vietnam and Cuba are deformed workers’ states which on the one hand have made advances based on the "nationalisation of the means of production, establishment of economic planning, and the state monopoly of foreign trade", and on the other hand have seen the "formation of bureaucratic ruling castes which exclude the working class from political power."3 A deformed workers’ state is a form of dictatorship of the proletariat parallel to a bonapartist military dictatorship as a form of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. In Russia it was formed by the degeneration of a state which had formerly been under the political control of the working class, whereas in the other countries political control was in the hands of a bureaucratic ruling caste from the very beginning.
"The Spartacist League stands for the unconditional defence of these countries against all attempts of imperialism to re-establish its control.
"At the same time we assert the necessity for the working class to take direct control and defence of these states into their own hands through political revolution and thus sweep away the internal barrier to the advance towards socialism. Only the spread of revolution internally and internationally can successfully maintain these partial conquests of the workers."4
This has always been the position of the Fourth International. To quote from the documents of the 1936 conference preparing for the Fourth International:
"The Soviet Union can be called a workers’ state in approximately the same sense—despite the vast difference in scale—in which a trade union, led and betrayed by opportunists, that is, agents of capital, can be called a workers’ organisation. Just as revolutionists defend every trade union, even the most thoroughly reformist, from the class enemy, combating intransigently the treacherous leaders at the same time, so the parties of the Fourth International defend the USSR against the blows of imperialism without for a single moment giving up the struggle against the reactionary Stalinist apparatus."5
And for the manifesto adopted by the Emergency Conference of the Fourth International in 1940:
"While waging tireless struggle against the Moscow oligarchy, the Fourth International decisively rejects any policy which would aid imperialism against the USSR."6
Gager departed from this principle when, under the pressures of the Ban-The-Bomb milieu in which he was working, he developed a position which would deprive the deformed workers’ states of nuclear weapons. Prior to the "Declaration of Principles" the November-December 1964 and March-April 1966 issues of Dispute editorialised against the testing or possession of nuclear weapons, specifically including the deformed workers’ states. After his "acceptance" of the "Declaration of Principles" these editorial statements were defended by Gager in his polemic with Keith Locke. His argument involves the view that "socialism" (!) cannot "be defended by the same means as capitalism"7 and that the only defence of the deformed workers’ states is to "organise political struggle against capitalism, organising for revolution."8 By so narrowly circumscribing the defence of the deformed workers states, by emphasising indeed, only the importance of the necessary struggle for world revolution, Gager manages to escape responsibility for any real measures in defending the existing gains of the working class against imperialism prior to world socialist revolution. As the Bolsheviks knew when they set Trotsky to organising the Red Army, and as is implicit in the "Declaration of Principles", brute military power is sometimes the only immediately available weapon to use in defence against imperialism. The Fourth Internationalist defence of the deformed workers’ states is unconditional, and while the working class internationally is led by various counter-revolutionaries the military power of the vacillating and anti-working class Stalinist bureaucracies is the only immediate available—if poor, unreliable, and ultimately wholly inadequate—defence. Those "Trotskyist" groupings internationally with positions similar to Gager’s justify them on the basis of un-Marxist theories which in the end all turn out to deny that the countries in question are any form of the dictatorship of the proletariat at all—theories such as Tony Cliff’s "state capitalism" and Max Shachtman’s "bureaucratic collectivism" which comrade Trotsky refuted in In Defence of Marxism. Gager denies his kinship with such theories. "There is no validity in your claim that we are drifting to a state-capitalist position on China etc—my view is that the dictatorship of the proletariat has never been achieved" but that it is "only half developed"9. A dictatorship of the proletariat grossly deformed by bourgeois pressures (that is, a deformed workers’ state) is quite clearly not perfectly developed—but this is secondary. The Chinese state protects nationalised property as the dominant form of ownership of the means of production and is thus, without qualification, a dictatorship of the proletariat. Gager’s undialectical Theory of Half a Workers’ State is clearly incompatible with the Trotskyist analysis of deformed workers’ states. The most charitable interpretation of Gager’s muddled discussion of his clearly un-Marxist position is that it is still incompletely formed.
4. The Labour Party
Another example of Gager’s deviation from the general line of the "Declaration of Principles" involves his sectarian attitude towards the Labour Party. He finds it impossible to understand that the Labour Party embodies a profound contradiction between a petty-bourgeois programme and leadership, and a working class following. The "Declaration" is fully aware of such contradictions:
"The ideas of the bourgeoisie penetrate into the very movements and organisation of the workers through the agency of the petty-bourgeois labour lieutenants—particularly the parasitic trade-union, social-democratic, and Stalinist bureaucracies which are based on the "aristocratic" upper strata of the working class. Enjoying privileges not accorded to the vast majority of workers, these misleaders betray the masses of working people through class-collaboration, social-patriotism, and chauvinist-racist policies which sabotage proletarian understanding and solidarity. If not replaced by revolutionary leaderships, they will allow the organisation of the workers to become impotent in the fight for the economic needs of the workers under conditions of bourgeois democracy or will allow these organisations to be destroyed by victorious fascism."10
The first issue of Dispute promised "a very definite commitment to work for a Labour Party victory in the 1966 election"11 and Gager was active in the Labour Party until 1968, but some time in that year he apparently changed his mind, adopting the position that revolutionaries should abstain entirely from struggle directed at the Labour Party. As Trotsky said of one sectarian group:
"From the initial thesis that the proletarian party must be independent at all costs our English comrades concluded that it would be impossible to go into the ILP12. Alas! They only forgot that they were far from being a party, but were only a propaganda circle, that a party does not fall from heaven, that a propaganda circle must pass through a period of embryonic existence before it can become a party."13
Gager believes that the NZLP is petty-bourgeois through and through. He recently wrote:
"Social democracy offers nothing political to the working class and excludes workers increasingly from party membership and counters working-class politics by bureaucratic, police and military repression; it meets as few of the economic trade-union demands of a portion, though a large portion, of the working class as almost direct bribery; faced with the growth of productive resources it makes every effort to hold back their development for ‘human’ and ‘social’ reasons; it gives economic gains to white workers only by denying them to two thirds of the world. It is a petty-bourgeois party in composition and programme with reactionary and utopian policies."14
But what Gager fails to recognise is that the NZLP at one time led the working class in struggles which brought real material gain to the class, despite the reformist limitations of these struggles within the structure of the bourgeois state. Despite its subsequent degeneration, recognition of the Labour Party as it political leadership remains one of the most ingrained and central aspects of working-class culture. The Labour Party thus is a major problem for a revolutionary grouping aspiring to lead the working class. Although the masses of the working class have been profoundly disillusioned (substantially as a result of the degeneration of social democracy) and although few workers are active in any political organisation, in a hopeless position they still retain a sort of religious faith in the party which their parents supported on the basis of their real (if reformist) interests. Peter Frazer and Michael Joseph Savage15 get far more votes for today’s Labour Party than Norman Kirk. Using its historically developed relationship with the working class the NZLP is an extremely effective propagator of counter-revolutionary ideology in the working class.
Gager’s sectarianism is linked to a misunderstanding of Marx and Engels’ Address to the Communist League (1850) on the experience of the revolutionary activity of 1848 and 1849. However, the Labour Party is not the same as the petty-bourgeois/democratic parties dealt with by Marx. The difference lies in the relationship of the party to the working class. In Marx’s time the various petty-bourgeois parties sought the support of the workers, and received it in some measure, but were not seen as the leadership of the working class by the working class.
"The chief obstacle in the path of transforming the prerevolutionary into a revolutionary state is the opportunist character of the proletarian leadership: its petty-bourgeois cowardice before the big bourgeoisie and its perfidious connection with it even in its own death agony."16
Thus the revolutionary nucleus must, if it is to become the vanguard of the working class, have a strategy of political struggle with the bureaucracy for the leadership of its working-class followers. It is a fundamental strategic necessity that the Labour Party be broken asunder. The New Zealand revolution cannot go around the New Zealand Labour Party. We must "set the base against the top".
One tactic which may at some time be demanded by the historic situation to this end is shallow entrism—always a dangerous tactic, but successfully practised by the early Third International, and by the Fourth Internationalists of the 1930s. The tactic requires first a tightly organised grouping of revolutionary cadres solidly based in the working class, who join for a limited period of time a non-revolutionary party to build an alternative and revolutionary leadership by fighting for principled politics within the arena looked to by the working class for leadership. When these cadres are the recognised leadership of the working-class base of the Labour Party, it will wrench itself apart from the reactionary leadership. This is not Socialist Action League’s policy of trying to pressure the Labour Party to the left, but a strategy for tearing it apart.
"But isn’t it a fact that a Marxist faction would not succeed in changing the structure and policy of the Labour Party? With this we are entirely in accord: the bureaucracy will not surrender. But the revolutionists functioning outside and inside can and must succeed in winning over tens and hundreds of thousands of workers."17
In Gager’s sectarian mind such a policy would not only suggest an understanding of the (for him non-existent) working-class side of the NZLP, but would also be proof of Pabloism, economism and all kinds of dire disease. To Trotsky "entry in itself proves nothing, the decisive thing is programme and action taken in the spirit of this programme after the entry."18
In the meantime we adopt a stance of critical support towards the Labour Party - intransigent criticism of its bureaucracy, and revolutionary support for its base, which will smash the bureaucracy. This has nothing in common with the Socialist Action League’s policy of "critical" support, which is in fact merely an attempt to "pressure" the Labour bureaucrats to the "left". We will fight for working-class control of the Labour Party, and while having no confidence in its programme or leadership, will campaign for its electoral victory as the party of the working class on the slogan: FOR LABOUR TO POWER - SMASH KIRK AND THE LABOUR BUREAUCRATS.
5. Organisational Primitiveness
Despite his weakness (which had ultimately to be resolved in either the direction of bourgeois ideology or in the acceptance of Marxism) Gager remained in the vicinity of revolutionary Trotskyism, maintaining a fairly uncompromising working class line. By the end of 1969 he had managed to attract only one other person who would have identified himself politically as a member of the NZSL (although a small number of supporters, mostly more interested in armchair discussion than political struggle, gave the NZSL a slightly greater impact than this would suggest). In 1970 the SL increased its publishing activities, made a concerted intervention in the Wellington Progressive Youth Movement and played a leading role in the campaign against a New Zealand rugby team going to play South African whites.
By the end of August Menshevik organisational principles had allowed the small old armchair periphery to see themselves as members, and we had recruited a number of new activists. We had a small but in respect of the activists fairly disciplined group in Wellington. There was also a group in Auckland of less satisfactory quality, who had only intermittent contact with the centre. The SL had become an organised group of revolutionaries struggling to build a vanguard party of the proletariat. The general thrust of activity and publications, despite errors, was good, and the development was generally in a favourable direction.
However, the later degeneration of the NZSL derived from its inability to train cadre capable of successfully resisting counter-revolutionary ideology (for example, Gager’s growing revisionist impulse). In the chapter of What Is To Be Done? entitled "The Primitiveness of the Economists and the Organisation of the Revolutionaries," Lenin characterises as "primitiveness" organisational practices similar to those of the NZSL in this period19. The newer recruits, who came from a background of "mindless activism", were kept in frantic public activity by the leadership, without any significant attempt to raise their level of political consciousness. The older members, interested in armchair discussion among themselves (though not in the theoretical arming of the newer membership, in organisational meetings, or in propagandistic activities) were benignly tolerated in their atrocious indiscipline and lazy inactivity. Thus, yielding to spontaneity in the field of organisation, the NZSL was left quite incapable of turning itself into a highly trained body of professional revolutionaries—a Bolshevik organisation. As Lenin remarked of the Russian movement at this stage:
"One cannot help comparing this kind of warfare with that conducted by a mass of peasants, armed with clubs, against modern troops. And one can only wonder at the vitality of the movement which expanded, grew, and scored victories despite the total lack of training on the part of the fighters ... but as soon as serious war operations began ... the defects of our fighting organisations made themselves felt to an ever-increasing degree."20
6. The need for a propaganda orientation
No particular area of work (the unions, the Labour Party, the universities) in itself constitutes capitulation to economism or the bourgeoisie. No particular area of work is in itself revolutionary. The question is: what is the political programme directing the work. True, we must make a revolutionary party able to lead the working class, but before we can get far with the problem of leading the working class, we must get together the nucleus of an organisation of revolutionaries. Quoting an opponent in What is To Be Done? Lenin says "A committee of students is no good, it is not stable." And then he replies to it: "Quite true. But the conclusion that should be reached is that we must have a committee of professional revolutionaries, and it does not matter whether a student or a worker is capable of qualifying himself as a professional revolutionary."21 And we must move towards the implantation of revolutionaries in the working class, and intervening in its day-to-day struggles.
As Lenin and Trotsky said repeatedly, every revolutionary party must pass through a period of cadre-training and recruitment, and of theoretical struggle - at first predominantly within the organisation but with growing emphasis on testing its programme in propaganda struggle against revisionist organisations. The development of a tough cadre organisation is a necessary embryonic stage in becoming the party of the proletariat.
"We must not only tell the Russian, but also the foreign comrades that the most important thing in the ensuing period is study. We are studying in the general sense. They, however, must study in the special sense in order that they may really understand the organisation, structure, method and content of revolutionary work. If they do that I am sure the prospects of the world revolution will not only be good but excellent."22
A propaganda group orientation implies recognition of the fact that a group’s capabilities for leadership of masses is roughly proportional to its hold over the most politically conscious, so:
"As long as the question was (and in so far as it still is) one of winning over the vanguard of the proletariat to communism, so long and to that extent, propaganda was at the forefront."23
The press of the Spartacist League must be geared to this task. The importance Gager places in the immediate production of a newspaper for mass distribution is entirely misplaced. Trotsky’s words to French comrades in his 1935-36 writings are sound. The task of building a mass newspaper is of great importance.
"This task cannot be effectively solved except as a function of the growth of the organisation and its cadres who must pave the way to the masses for the newspaper - since it is not enough, it is understood, to call a publication a ‘mass paper’ to have the masses accept it in reality."24
In the meantime ours must be a propaganda paper geared to building the nucleus of the cadre grouping.
7. The disorganisation of the Spartacist League
The NZSL’s premature indulgence in mass agitation as its main activity constituted a major deviation which, in keeping the group to a low theoretical level caused its degeneration and disintegration. In the absence of a hardness and homogeneity of politics, the organisation was unified by a leadership structure depending on close collaboration between Gager, who gave leadership in matters of theory, and Bill Logan whose work was mostly organisational. This leadership broke down with comrade Logan’s departure overseas in December 1970, and tensions developed between Gager (supposedly supported by some theoretical members who had ceased coming to meetings) and the newly recruited members. The newer members fought particularly against Gager’s tendency to sectarian abstention from political struggle against other ostensible revolutionary groupings. The ideological roots of sectarianism lie in an inability to understand the theory of revolutionary leadership. The sectarian sees leadership merely as a matter of having the correct theory—he who has the correct theory is thought thereby to be the leadership—but in fact leadership must be won by struggle in the working class movement for the correct politics.
At about this time Gager had to be prevented from holding a separate "revolutionary" anti-war demonstration at the same time (but on a different route) as the official one. For reasons associated with his fundamental methodological weakness he is incapable of appreciating the possibilities for political development in some subjective revolutionaries in and around the ostensible revolutionary groupings, and he seldom sees any reason to be fighting for revolutionary politics at meetings and demonstrations organised by revisionists. (Of course, at times he can be forced to fight for his views politically.)
The tensions between the membership of the Spartacist League and Gager culminated with his holding of a rock concert, against the decision of two Spartacist League meetings, in the name of the Spartacist League, at a time conflicting with a Committee on Vietnam atrocity film-showing. Besides displaying once again Gager’s sectarianism, the holding of this rock concert was a blatant disregard on the part of the leadership for the operation of democratic centralism, and this on merely a tactical question. This led to the final collapse of the rank and file’s trust in the leadership.
Gager did not like the decisions reached by meetings of the Spartacist League in this period and he says "...more basic decisions were being made by people who ... couldn’t attend meetings."25 The Spartacist League had ceased to be an organisation, as meetings are a necessary condition for revolutionary organisation. The only alternative is autocracy. The people he agreed with and in Menshevik fashion wished to call members were unorganisable. As Lenin says in One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, "the Party should admit to its ranks only such elements as allow of at least a minimum of organisation."26 Gager’s principle that those who work for the organisation but cannot attend meetings should make decisions, smells very much like the Menshevik principle which allows people who do not belong to any of the organisations of the Party, but only "help it in one way or another", to call themselves Party members. This, "is in reality an anarchist principle. To refute this, one would have to show that control, direction and discipline are possible outside an organisation" - or a meeting.
After the rock concert episode, the organisation disintegrated. Members were "expelled" or "resigned". According to Gager, it was "as it was in early 1970"27.
8. Gager’s "theoretical advances" and final betrayal
In a lengthy exchange of letters with comrades Logan and Hannah, Gager claimed great theoretical advances as compensation for this organisational catastrophe. But these "advances" were nothing more than a complete swing away from revolutionary Marxism, though not completely inconsistent with his past which is one of theoretical muddlement over the deformed workers’ states, and of an undialectical view of the Labour Party (constituting an unrounded form of inverted Pabloism similar to the Healyite position on Cuba that it is not a deformed workers’ state but a capitalist state). In this period he became more clearly Pabloist, going completely soft on Stalinism and forming an uncritical alliance with the Communist Party of New Zealand (CPNZ). Softness towards Stalinism has always been a characteristic of Pabloists. Jim Cannon was talking of Pabloism when he said:
"The simple truth, which we must now recognise and deal with, is that we have nothing less than a pronounced tendency towards Stalinist conciliationism in the Party."28
For Pabloists: "The working class is transformed into a pressure grouping, and the Trotskyists into a pressure grouping along with it ...."29 "The Pabloites tend to replace the role of the working class and its organised vanguard—that is, the world Trotskyist movement—with other forces which seem to offer greater chances of success.30" Thus the foundation of Pabloism is the denial of the proletariat as the world historic revolutionary force. The theoretical advance claimed by Gager at this time involved the view that action by revolutionaries in any milieu in which the working class was in any way organised was necessarily "economist" and therefore bad. Gager’s "anti-economism" is no more than an unsuccessful attempt to dress his denial of the proletariat’s role in orthodox clothing.
With the publication of the first issue of a newspaper entitled Red Gager showed that the final resolution of the contradiction between the subjective revolutionism and the un-Marxist method of his thinking is in a complete break from revolutionary working-class politics. In its statement of principle, "Where we Stand" he says:
"The Trad Left believes that the bigger and better the unions, the closer the people are to socialism. Red believes that unions exist to make agreements with bosses, not to make workers their own bosses. The unions in every big confrontation with the state in New Zealand have always been defeated. For victory what is needed is a political party standing for Power to People. Agreements between employers and unions end up as conspiracies to defraud the consumer. What is needed is an alliance of workers and consumers against employers. Red stands for voluntary unionism.
"... Red stands for full military training for the people."31
"Power to People"? Which people? Which class? What sort of power? Not state power of course? The state is nothing more than a class organised to oppress other classes. It is clearly impossible for the "people" to hold state power, for them to be organised as oppressors—who would they oppress? As Engels says of the revolutionary state (and this is repeated by Lenin in State and Revolution): "the state is only a transitional institution which is used in the struggle, in the revolution, to hold down one’s [class] adversaries by force ... so long as the proletariat still needs the state it does not need it in the interests of freedom [or of the ‘people’] but in order to hold down its adversaries"32. When things develop to the stage when there are no longer distinctions between classes, when all the people have the same interests, there will be no state, no power.
When pressured on this question Gager retreats, saying he means to call for a "people’s revolution". Trotsky answers this quite clearly:
"Thanks for the quotation about the ‘people’s’ revolution from Thaelmann’s speech, which I glanced through. A more ridiculous and maliciously confused manner of putting the question cannot be imagined! ‘The people’s revolution’ - as a slogan and even with a reference to Lenin .... It is understood that every great revolution is a people’s or national revolution, in the sense that it unites around the revolutionary class all the virile and creative forces of the nation around a new core. But this is not a slogan; it is a sociological description of the revolution, which requires, moreover, precise and concrete definition. As a slogan, it is inane and charlatanism, market competition with the fascists, paid for at the price of injecting confusion into the minds of the workers.
"... In order that the nation should indeed be able to reconstruct itself around a new class core, it must be reconstructed ideologically and this can be achieved only if the proletariat does not dissolve itself into the ‘people’, into the ‘nation’, but on the contrary develops a programme of its proletarian revolution and compels the petty bourgeoisie to choose between two regimes. The slogan of the people’s revolution lulls the petty-bourgeoisie as well as the broad masses of the workers, reconciles them to the bourgeois-hierarchial structure of the ‘people’ and retards their liberation."33
But it is clear from the passage quoted from "Where we stand" that Gager does not want merely to lull the "people". Remember: "Red believes that unions exist to make agreements with bosses .... Agreements between employers and unions end up as conspiracies to defraud the consumer. What is needed is an alliance of workers and consumers against employers. Red stands for voluntary unionism." Even without the last sentence it would be clear that Red wants to smash the unions. But the call for voluntary unionism in New Zealand is clearly a call to end the system under which all unions have won from the employers union membership as a condition of employment. Thus "voluntary unionism" would in itself smash all but the strongest unions. Gager without doubt wants to mobilise his "people" to smash the organisations of the working class. A more pernicious manifestation of bourgeois politics has seldom been presented in left-wing disguise. It is true that the bureaucratic leaders of the unions confine them to inadequate attempts to keep wages rising as fast as prices. It is true that they are at present merely instruments to keep the workers quiet. It is true that trade unions, without the leadership of a revolutionary party, will never rise above the level of tomorrow’s bread and butter. The point is not merely to understand this but to change it.
"The trade unions of our time can either serve as secondary instruments of imperialist capitalism for the subordination an disciplining of the workers, or, on the contrary, the trade unions can become the instruments of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat."34
We will build a revolutionary party, we will organise revolutionary caucuses among the union rank and file, we will lead the struggles of the workers from the partial and economist, from the level of bread and butter, to the level of revolutionary consciousness and revolutionary struggle. We will work around a transitional programme "stemming from today’s conditions and from today’s consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat."35 We will lead "the base against the top", smash the union bureaucrats, and turn the unions into instruments of the revolutionary working class. The unions have within them that potentiality, but Gager’s inability to see and exploit the contradiction between the bourgeois interests served by the union leaderships and their working-class membership have resulted in a sectarianism so extreme that it amounts to an attack on the working class.
Red was the dividing line. It marked Gager’s final break from revolutionary politics. In a situation of political isolation he used the disintegration of the NZSL in order to purport to make completely fundamental changes in its line. Without any proper decision-making process he presented some sort of new-left populism or worse, specifically counterposed to the working-class movement.
Gager had previously counterposed the propaganda orientation advocated by comrades Hannah and Logan with a plan for a popular paper. In style, content and programme Red, number 1, shows itself to be a truly "popular paper" - for the petty bourgeoisie. On the front page greatest prominence was given to an article on ecology signed by one Brian Longrigg - a man obviously more sympathetic to the ideology of the National Party lawyers in the Save the Manapouri Campaign than to any even ostensibly revolutionary group. On the back page in uncritical support of the bourgeois puppet Awami League, Red calls for "us" to "cease hiding behind legalisms and recognise the Provisional Government of Bangladesh." Inside the paper was a mish-mash of notes in gentle criticism of the Labour Party bureaucracy, left-liberal support for Vietnamese Stalinism, and rock-record reviews. Despite the paper’s great interest in international affairs, its statement of principle fails to call for an international revolutionary leadership. The paper makes it quite clear that Gager has completely deserted the struggle to rebuild the Fourth International.
"... the question of the International, as well as the question of national parties, cannot be deferred for a single hour: we have here in essence two sides of one and the same question. Without a Marxist International, national organisations, even the most advanced, are doomed to narrowness, vacillation and helplessness; the advanced workers are forced to feed upon surrogates for internationalism."36
But though Red marks Gager’s final break from the politics of the Spartacist League some organisational unclarity remained, and he participated in some of the meetings of members of the Spartacist League which rebuilt in March. He was too arrogant and unorganisable to subject himself to the discipline of any group, and despite the fact that he continues to respond to criticisms with smokescreens of faked orthodoxy he is too far from Marxism to stand by seeing it used to test his views. His walk-out was merely the organisational expression of his earlier desertion of Marxism-Leninism. He was finally formally expelled.
The Spartacist League’s immediate task is to sharpen itself into a fighting propaganda group, a nucleus of trained Marxists capable of intervening in every radical movement and in the trade unions with revolutionary politics. One of our first steps towards this has been the establishment of a regular propaganda press.
The Spartacist League, as a national section fighting for the rebuilding of the Fourth International, is in the vanguard of the struggle for a socialist revolution, which will prepare for the freeing of the energies of all mankind and the creation of a truly liberated society.
"Our day-to-day preparation of the working class and our intervention and leadership in the decisive moments of the class struggle will propel the struggle forward to the final victory."37
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Endnotes
8 January 1967
Letter from Gager to Logan, 3 January 1971.
"Declaration of Principles of the Spartacist League", Marxist Bulletin, n 9, p 10. The Marxist Bulletin series is published by the Spartacist League US. The "Declaration of Principles" was also published in Spartacist, n 8, November-December 1966 - PRG, January 1991.
"Declaration of Principles of the Spartacist League", p 10
"The Fourth International and the Soviet Union", Documents of the Fourth International, Pathfinder, New York, 1973, p 107
"Imperialist War and World Revolution", Documents of the Fourth International, p 327
Dispute, November-December 1964
Letter from Gager to Locke, undated, about September 1968
Letter from Gager to Logan, 28 November 1971
"Declaration of Principles", p 10
Dispute, September 1964
The Independent Labour Party of England was a left-social democratic, sometimes centrist, organisation. Originally formed in 1893, it helped found the Labour Party, left it in 1932, and then returned to it in 1939 - PRG, January 1991
"The League Faced with a Decisive Turn" (June 1934), Writings of Leon Trotsky [1934-35], Pathfinder, New York, 1974, p 42
"Reformism Now", an internal discussion document by Owen Gager, 26 September 1971
Peter Frazer: Labour Prime Minister 1940-49; Michael Joseph Savage: Labour Prime Minister 1935-40 - PRG footnote, January 1991
The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (The Transitional Programme) [1938], New Park, London, 1980, p 13
"The ILP and the Fourth International" (18 September 1935), Writings of Leon Trotsky [1935-36], Pathfinder, New York, 1977, p 142
"Centrist Combination and Marxist Tactics" (28 February 1935), Writings of Leon Trotsky [1934-35], p 203-4. (The original citation given by the NZSL was from an earlier edition of Trotsky's Writings which gave this article's title as "Centrist Combination and Marxist Faction" - PRG, January 1991.)
V I Lenin, What Is to Be Done? [1902], Collected Works, Progress, Moscow, 1961, v 5, p 440
As above, p 442-3
As above, p 462
V I Lenin, "Five Years of the Russian Revolution and the Prospects of World Revolution" (Report to the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, 13 November 1922). (A slightly different translation can be found in: Collected Works, 1965, v 33, p 431-2 - PRG, January 1991.)
V I Lenin, "Left-Wing" Communism - An Infantile Disorder (1920). (A slightly different translation can be found in: Collected Works, 1966, v 31, p 93-4 - PRG, January 1991.)
Leon Trotsky, "What Is a 'Mass Paper'?" (30 November 1935). (A slightly different translation can be found in: The Crisis of the French Section [1935-36], Pathfinder, New York, 1977, p 97 -PRG, January 1991.)
Letter from Gager to Logan, 28 November 1971
V I Lenin, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back [1904], Collected Works, 1965, v 7, p 256
Letter from Gager to Logan, 21 August 1971
James P Cannon, Letter to Dobbs (6 April 1953), Speeches to the Party, Pathfinder, New York, 1973
Socialist Workers Party, "Against Pabloist Revisionism" (1953), International Committee Documents 1951-54, Towards a History of the Fourth International, Part 4, Education for Socialists series, New York, 1974, p 152.
Revolutionary Tendency of the SWP, "In Defence of a Revol-utionary Perspective" (1962), Marxist Bulletin, n 1, p 3
Red, n 1, November 1972
V I Lenin, The State and Revolution [1917], Collected Works, 1964, v 25, p 445. (The additions in square brackets are those of the NZSL in 1972 - PRG, January 1991.)
Leon Trotsky, "Thaelmann and the 'Peoples Revolution'" (14 April 1931), The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, Pathfinder, New York, 1971, p 75-6
Leon Trotsky, "Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay" (1940), Leon Trotsky on the Trade Unions, New York, Pathfinder, 1975, p 71.
The Transitional Programme, p 14-5
Leon Trotsky, "The ILP and the Fourth International", p 147
"Declaration of Principles", p 11
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 than 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 entry:
This document is well worth reading, despite its age and the demise of some of the organizations and personalities mentioned, because in the report are distilled most of the great questions that confront small groups of revolutionaries (our status today) even at a time when there were somewhat greater possibilities for developing into a solid propaganda group during the late 1960s-early 1970s. That, unfortunately, whether we like it or not and whether political people act on that understanding or not, is where we are today-struggling to create stable revolutionary communist propaganda operations. There is no way around it. Those who deny that reality and assume the appearance of a "mass" organizational front are not in tune with current tasks. And we need to do this all without succumbing to an inward-looking "circle spirit" in these tough times or a notion of the "remnant" (the small, virtuous us against the ignorant mass "them")to justify passive political action. Communist propaganda is what we must produce, distribute, organize and recruit others to join us in creating before we "step-up" to crush the monster of American and world imperialism.
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The Development of the Spartacist League
by the Spartacist League of New Zealand, August 1972
Introductory Note
The New Zealand Spartacist League broke in March from a state of complete disorganisation, but until recently largely confined its activity to serious internal discussion. This document, "The Development of the Spartacist League", is a summary of the conclusions of this discussion completed in early June. In it the Spartacist League looks at its own development in the light of the experience of international Bolshevism and thereby reaches a qualitatively higher level of revolutionary politics. The Spartacist League does not worship orthodoxy, but it does seek to benefit from the experience of the revolutionary past (hence the extensive use of the words of past revolutionaries here). Only in this way can the revolutionary party be built.
Since the completion of the document Owen Gager (who has a significant place in the history of the Spartacist League) seems to have moved towards organised international Pabloism. Some recent developments in his position are looked at in an article in New Zealand Spartacist, number 7.
15 August 1972
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1. Development of the Fourth International
The Fourth International, led by Leon Trotsky and carrying on the struggle of Marx, Engels and Lenin for international socialist revolution, was founded in 1938. The loss of political leadership with Trotsky’s death in 1940, the organisational disruption of the Fourth International as a result of World War II, the failure of the war to lead directly into world proletarian revolution, and the expansion of the bloc of deformed workers’ states following the war brought about the profound disorientation of the Fourth International.
In this period the Socialist Workers Party of the United States of America (SWP), which was the strongest section and Trotsky’s closest political collaborator, abdicated its responsibility to play an international leadership role. This followed the advance of Pabloism, a revisionist current which renounces the need for a revolutionary party and adapts to reformist and Stalinist misleaderships. Pabloism denies that the proletariat is the only force capable of destroying capitalism internationally and the only force capable of laying the basis for socialism. A basic unhealthiness in the SWP is shown by the fact that only when its organisational autonomy was threatened in 1953 did it lead a fight against the growth of Pabloist leadership internationally.
Revisionism in the SWP came to a head in the early 1960s. In 1961 it publicly called Castro’s Cuba a healthy workers’ state and denied there was any need for a political revolution. And in 1963 it reunited with the mainstream Pabloites to form the "United Secretariat of the Fourth International".
The Spartacist grouping developed in the United States out of the fight against revisionism in the SWP. Although differences were clear from the first, Spartacist strongly orientated towards Gerry Healy’s "International Committee" as an instrument for the rebuilding of the Fourth International until being kicked out on a manufactured pretext. This was done to prevent Spartacist criticisms in the International Committee directed at its leaders for their Pabloist method (shown in their positions on such matters as the Cuban revolution). Although the International Committee’s defence of its Pabloism was at this stage fought by anti-political diversionary means, its subsequent further degeneration proves beyond all doubt that it is basically Pabloist. For example it gave political support to the "Arab revolution" and to the Mao wing of the Chinese bureaucracy in the "Cultural Revolution". This softness is "balanced" by an extreme sectarianism, use of physical violence against opponent groups inside the movement, threats to take opponent radical groups to the bourgeois courts, etc.
So, by its founding conference in late 1966, the Spartacist League of the United States (SLUS), having sharpened its position in struggle first within the SWP and then the International Committee, was internationally in isolation. The conference issued a brief and definitive "Declaration of Principles of the Spartacist League", which has become the basic document of our tendency internationally. This statement aroused great international interest in the months after the recent split in the International Committee.
2. Trotskyism in New Zealand
The Socialist Labour Movement, a small loose organisation of Pabloists and others influenced by Trotskyism, existed in New Zealand at the time of the founding conference of the SLUS and the "Declaration of Principles" had immediate and considerable impact on this grouping. Owen Gager, the editor of the left-wing journal Dispute and a member of the Socialist Labour Movement, wrote to the SLUS describing the "Declaration of Principles" as "a statement of Trotskyist principle which I myself have always believed in but despaired of ever seeing clearly and unadulteratedly stated by the revisionist Pabloite ‘Fourth International’."1 Gager tried to lead the Socialist Labour Movement to acceptance of the "Declaration of Principles" but was fought by Keith Locke, a member studying in Canada and under the influence of the League for Socialist Action (which is closely aligned to the SWP in the United States). The Gager-Locke polemic was associated with a de facto split in the Socialist Labour Movement and the emergence of the New Zealand Spartacist League in 1967, and the Pabloist Socialist Action League in late 1968. (The NZSL had close fraternal ties, though no organisational links, with the SLUS.)
Except for a few months at the end of 1970 and the beginning of 1971, the NZSL has never had any organisational definition, but has been a very small "diffuse group of co-thinkers".2 Discussion within the group was that of friends and without the dimension of political struggle or Bolshevik theoretical training. The NZSL was defined by its political basis, the "Declaration of Principles", on which it was founded, and which it republished in New Zealand in December 1970 as one of its basic documents.
The leadership of the comrades working together in solidarity with these politics was in the hands of Owen Gager. But unfortunately, his statements of political solidarity notwithstanding, Gager’s acceptance of the "Declaration of Principles" was never more than superficial. Weakness of method (specifically an inability to appreciate the contradictory nature of social phenomena) laid him open under conditions of virtual isolation to programmatic errors: at some times capitulation to right-wing pressure; at other times a tendency towards sectarianism.
3. Deformed Workers States
The "Declaration of Principles" holds that Russia, Eastern Europe, China, North Korea, North Vietnam and Cuba are deformed workers’ states which on the one hand have made advances based on the "nationalisation of the means of production, establishment of economic planning, and the state monopoly of foreign trade", and on the other hand have seen the "formation of bureaucratic ruling castes which exclude the working class from political power."3 A deformed workers’ state is a form of dictatorship of the proletariat parallel to a bonapartist military dictatorship as a form of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. In Russia it was formed by the degeneration of a state which had formerly been under the political control of the working class, whereas in the other countries political control was in the hands of a bureaucratic ruling caste from the very beginning.
"The Spartacist League stands for the unconditional defence of these countries against all attempts of imperialism to re-establish its control.
"At the same time we assert the necessity for the working class to take direct control and defence of these states into their own hands through political revolution and thus sweep away the internal barrier to the advance towards socialism. Only the spread of revolution internally and internationally can successfully maintain these partial conquests of the workers."4
This has always been the position of the Fourth International. To quote from the documents of the 1936 conference preparing for the Fourth International:
"The Soviet Union can be called a workers’ state in approximately the same sense—despite the vast difference in scale—in which a trade union, led and betrayed by opportunists, that is, agents of capital, can be called a workers’ organisation. Just as revolutionists defend every trade union, even the most thoroughly reformist, from the class enemy, combating intransigently the treacherous leaders at the same time, so the parties of the Fourth International defend the USSR against the blows of imperialism without for a single moment giving up the struggle against the reactionary Stalinist apparatus."5
And for the manifesto adopted by the Emergency Conference of the Fourth International in 1940:
"While waging tireless struggle against the Moscow oligarchy, the Fourth International decisively rejects any policy which would aid imperialism against the USSR."6
Gager departed from this principle when, under the pressures of the Ban-The-Bomb milieu in which he was working, he developed a position which would deprive the deformed workers’ states of nuclear weapons. Prior to the "Declaration of Principles" the November-December 1964 and March-April 1966 issues of Dispute editorialised against the testing or possession of nuclear weapons, specifically including the deformed workers’ states. After his "acceptance" of the "Declaration of Principles" these editorial statements were defended by Gager in his polemic with Keith Locke. His argument involves the view that "socialism" (!) cannot "be defended by the same means as capitalism"7 and that the only defence of the deformed workers’ states is to "organise political struggle against capitalism, organising for revolution."8 By so narrowly circumscribing the defence of the deformed workers states, by emphasising indeed, only the importance of the necessary struggle for world revolution, Gager manages to escape responsibility for any real measures in defending the existing gains of the working class against imperialism prior to world socialist revolution. As the Bolsheviks knew when they set Trotsky to organising the Red Army, and as is implicit in the "Declaration of Principles", brute military power is sometimes the only immediately available weapon to use in defence against imperialism. The Fourth Internationalist defence of the deformed workers’ states is unconditional, and while the working class internationally is led by various counter-revolutionaries the military power of the vacillating and anti-working class Stalinist bureaucracies is the only immediate available—if poor, unreliable, and ultimately wholly inadequate—defence. Those "Trotskyist" groupings internationally with positions similar to Gager’s justify them on the basis of un-Marxist theories which in the end all turn out to deny that the countries in question are any form of the dictatorship of the proletariat at all—theories such as Tony Cliff’s "state capitalism" and Max Shachtman’s "bureaucratic collectivism" which comrade Trotsky refuted in In Defence of Marxism. Gager denies his kinship with such theories. "There is no validity in your claim that we are drifting to a state-capitalist position on China etc—my view is that the dictatorship of the proletariat has never been achieved" but that it is "only half developed"9. A dictatorship of the proletariat grossly deformed by bourgeois pressures (that is, a deformed workers’ state) is quite clearly not perfectly developed—but this is secondary. The Chinese state protects nationalised property as the dominant form of ownership of the means of production and is thus, without qualification, a dictatorship of the proletariat. Gager’s undialectical Theory of Half a Workers’ State is clearly incompatible with the Trotskyist analysis of deformed workers’ states. The most charitable interpretation of Gager’s muddled discussion of his clearly un-Marxist position is that it is still incompletely formed.
4. The Labour Party
Another example of Gager’s deviation from the general line of the "Declaration of Principles" involves his sectarian attitude towards the Labour Party. He finds it impossible to understand that the Labour Party embodies a profound contradiction between a petty-bourgeois programme and leadership, and a working class following. The "Declaration" is fully aware of such contradictions:
"The ideas of the bourgeoisie penetrate into the very movements and organisation of the workers through the agency of the petty-bourgeois labour lieutenants—particularly the parasitic trade-union, social-democratic, and Stalinist bureaucracies which are based on the "aristocratic" upper strata of the working class. Enjoying privileges not accorded to the vast majority of workers, these misleaders betray the masses of working people through class-collaboration, social-patriotism, and chauvinist-racist policies which sabotage proletarian understanding and solidarity. If not replaced by revolutionary leaderships, they will allow the organisation of the workers to become impotent in the fight for the economic needs of the workers under conditions of bourgeois democracy or will allow these organisations to be destroyed by victorious fascism."10
The first issue of Dispute promised "a very definite commitment to work for a Labour Party victory in the 1966 election"11 and Gager was active in the Labour Party until 1968, but some time in that year he apparently changed his mind, adopting the position that revolutionaries should abstain entirely from struggle directed at the Labour Party. As Trotsky said of one sectarian group:
"From the initial thesis that the proletarian party must be independent at all costs our English comrades concluded that it would be impossible to go into the ILP12. Alas! They only forgot that they were far from being a party, but were only a propaganda circle, that a party does not fall from heaven, that a propaganda circle must pass through a period of embryonic existence before it can become a party."13
Gager believes that the NZLP is petty-bourgeois through and through. He recently wrote:
"Social democracy offers nothing political to the working class and excludes workers increasingly from party membership and counters working-class politics by bureaucratic, police and military repression; it meets as few of the economic trade-union demands of a portion, though a large portion, of the working class as almost direct bribery; faced with the growth of productive resources it makes every effort to hold back their development for ‘human’ and ‘social’ reasons; it gives economic gains to white workers only by denying them to two thirds of the world. It is a petty-bourgeois party in composition and programme with reactionary and utopian policies."14
But what Gager fails to recognise is that the NZLP at one time led the working class in struggles which brought real material gain to the class, despite the reformist limitations of these struggles within the structure of the bourgeois state. Despite its subsequent degeneration, recognition of the Labour Party as it political leadership remains one of the most ingrained and central aspects of working-class culture. The Labour Party thus is a major problem for a revolutionary grouping aspiring to lead the working class. Although the masses of the working class have been profoundly disillusioned (substantially as a result of the degeneration of social democracy) and although few workers are active in any political organisation, in a hopeless position they still retain a sort of religious faith in the party which their parents supported on the basis of their real (if reformist) interests. Peter Frazer and Michael Joseph Savage15 get far more votes for today’s Labour Party than Norman Kirk. Using its historically developed relationship with the working class the NZLP is an extremely effective propagator of counter-revolutionary ideology in the working class.
Gager’s sectarianism is linked to a misunderstanding of Marx and Engels’ Address to the Communist League (1850) on the experience of the revolutionary activity of 1848 and 1849. However, the Labour Party is not the same as the petty-bourgeois/democratic parties dealt with by Marx. The difference lies in the relationship of the party to the working class. In Marx’s time the various petty-bourgeois parties sought the support of the workers, and received it in some measure, but were not seen as the leadership of the working class by the working class.
"The chief obstacle in the path of transforming the prerevolutionary into a revolutionary state is the opportunist character of the proletarian leadership: its petty-bourgeois cowardice before the big bourgeoisie and its perfidious connection with it even in its own death agony."16
Thus the revolutionary nucleus must, if it is to become the vanguard of the working class, have a strategy of political struggle with the bureaucracy for the leadership of its working-class followers. It is a fundamental strategic necessity that the Labour Party be broken asunder. The New Zealand revolution cannot go around the New Zealand Labour Party. We must "set the base against the top".
One tactic which may at some time be demanded by the historic situation to this end is shallow entrism—always a dangerous tactic, but successfully practised by the early Third International, and by the Fourth Internationalists of the 1930s. The tactic requires first a tightly organised grouping of revolutionary cadres solidly based in the working class, who join for a limited period of time a non-revolutionary party to build an alternative and revolutionary leadership by fighting for principled politics within the arena looked to by the working class for leadership. When these cadres are the recognised leadership of the working-class base of the Labour Party, it will wrench itself apart from the reactionary leadership. This is not Socialist Action League’s policy of trying to pressure the Labour Party to the left, but a strategy for tearing it apart.
"But isn’t it a fact that a Marxist faction would not succeed in changing the structure and policy of the Labour Party? With this we are entirely in accord: the bureaucracy will not surrender. But the revolutionists functioning outside and inside can and must succeed in winning over tens and hundreds of thousands of workers."17
In Gager’s sectarian mind such a policy would not only suggest an understanding of the (for him non-existent) working-class side of the NZLP, but would also be proof of Pabloism, economism and all kinds of dire disease. To Trotsky "entry in itself proves nothing, the decisive thing is programme and action taken in the spirit of this programme after the entry."18
In the meantime we adopt a stance of critical support towards the Labour Party - intransigent criticism of its bureaucracy, and revolutionary support for its base, which will smash the bureaucracy. This has nothing in common with the Socialist Action League’s policy of "critical" support, which is in fact merely an attempt to "pressure" the Labour bureaucrats to the "left". We will fight for working-class control of the Labour Party, and while having no confidence in its programme or leadership, will campaign for its electoral victory as the party of the working class on the slogan: FOR LABOUR TO POWER - SMASH KIRK AND THE LABOUR BUREAUCRATS.
5. Organisational Primitiveness
Despite his weakness (which had ultimately to be resolved in either the direction of bourgeois ideology or in the acceptance of Marxism) Gager remained in the vicinity of revolutionary Trotskyism, maintaining a fairly uncompromising working class line. By the end of 1969 he had managed to attract only one other person who would have identified himself politically as a member of the NZSL (although a small number of supporters, mostly more interested in armchair discussion than political struggle, gave the NZSL a slightly greater impact than this would suggest). In 1970 the SL increased its publishing activities, made a concerted intervention in the Wellington Progressive Youth Movement and played a leading role in the campaign against a New Zealand rugby team going to play South African whites.
By the end of August Menshevik organisational principles had allowed the small old armchair periphery to see themselves as members, and we had recruited a number of new activists. We had a small but in respect of the activists fairly disciplined group in Wellington. There was also a group in Auckland of less satisfactory quality, who had only intermittent contact with the centre. The SL had become an organised group of revolutionaries struggling to build a vanguard party of the proletariat. The general thrust of activity and publications, despite errors, was good, and the development was generally in a favourable direction.
However, the later degeneration of the NZSL derived from its inability to train cadre capable of successfully resisting counter-revolutionary ideology (for example, Gager’s growing revisionist impulse). In the chapter of What Is To Be Done? entitled "The Primitiveness of the Economists and the Organisation of the Revolutionaries," Lenin characterises as "primitiveness" organisational practices similar to those of the NZSL in this period19. The newer recruits, who came from a background of "mindless activism", were kept in frantic public activity by the leadership, without any significant attempt to raise their level of political consciousness. The older members, interested in armchair discussion among themselves (though not in the theoretical arming of the newer membership, in organisational meetings, or in propagandistic activities) were benignly tolerated in their atrocious indiscipline and lazy inactivity. Thus, yielding to spontaneity in the field of organisation, the NZSL was left quite incapable of turning itself into a highly trained body of professional revolutionaries—a Bolshevik organisation. As Lenin remarked of the Russian movement at this stage:
"One cannot help comparing this kind of warfare with that conducted by a mass of peasants, armed with clubs, against modern troops. And one can only wonder at the vitality of the movement which expanded, grew, and scored victories despite the total lack of training on the part of the fighters ... but as soon as serious war operations began ... the defects of our fighting organisations made themselves felt to an ever-increasing degree."20
6. The need for a propaganda orientation
No particular area of work (the unions, the Labour Party, the universities) in itself constitutes capitulation to economism or the bourgeoisie. No particular area of work is in itself revolutionary. The question is: what is the political programme directing the work. True, we must make a revolutionary party able to lead the working class, but before we can get far with the problem of leading the working class, we must get together the nucleus of an organisation of revolutionaries. Quoting an opponent in What is To Be Done? Lenin says "A committee of students is no good, it is not stable." And then he replies to it: "Quite true. But the conclusion that should be reached is that we must have a committee of professional revolutionaries, and it does not matter whether a student or a worker is capable of qualifying himself as a professional revolutionary."21 And we must move towards the implantation of revolutionaries in the working class, and intervening in its day-to-day struggles.
As Lenin and Trotsky said repeatedly, every revolutionary party must pass through a period of cadre-training and recruitment, and of theoretical struggle - at first predominantly within the organisation but with growing emphasis on testing its programme in propaganda struggle against revisionist organisations. The development of a tough cadre organisation is a necessary embryonic stage in becoming the party of the proletariat.
"We must not only tell the Russian, but also the foreign comrades that the most important thing in the ensuing period is study. We are studying in the general sense. They, however, must study in the special sense in order that they may really understand the organisation, structure, method and content of revolutionary work. If they do that I am sure the prospects of the world revolution will not only be good but excellent."22
A propaganda group orientation implies recognition of the fact that a group’s capabilities for leadership of masses is roughly proportional to its hold over the most politically conscious, so:
"As long as the question was (and in so far as it still is) one of winning over the vanguard of the proletariat to communism, so long and to that extent, propaganda was at the forefront."23
The press of the Spartacist League must be geared to this task. The importance Gager places in the immediate production of a newspaper for mass distribution is entirely misplaced. Trotsky’s words to French comrades in his 1935-36 writings are sound. The task of building a mass newspaper is of great importance.
"This task cannot be effectively solved except as a function of the growth of the organisation and its cadres who must pave the way to the masses for the newspaper - since it is not enough, it is understood, to call a publication a ‘mass paper’ to have the masses accept it in reality."24
In the meantime ours must be a propaganda paper geared to building the nucleus of the cadre grouping.
7. The disorganisation of the Spartacist League
The NZSL’s premature indulgence in mass agitation as its main activity constituted a major deviation which, in keeping the group to a low theoretical level caused its degeneration and disintegration. In the absence of a hardness and homogeneity of politics, the organisation was unified by a leadership structure depending on close collaboration between Gager, who gave leadership in matters of theory, and Bill Logan whose work was mostly organisational. This leadership broke down with comrade Logan’s departure overseas in December 1970, and tensions developed between Gager (supposedly supported by some theoretical members who had ceased coming to meetings) and the newly recruited members. The newer members fought particularly against Gager’s tendency to sectarian abstention from political struggle against other ostensible revolutionary groupings. The ideological roots of sectarianism lie in an inability to understand the theory of revolutionary leadership. The sectarian sees leadership merely as a matter of having the correct theory—he who has the correct theory is thought thereby to be the leadership—but in fact leadership must be won by struggle in the working class movement for the correct politics.
At about this time Gager had to be prevented from holding a separate "revolutionary" anti-war demonstration at the same time (but on a different route) as the official one. For reasons associated with his fundamental methodological weakness he is incapable of appreciating the possibilities for political development in some subjective revolutionaries in and around the ostensible revolutionary groupings, and he seldom sees any reason to be fighting for revolutionary politics at meetings and demonstrations organised by revisionists. (Of course, at times he can be forced to fight for his views politically.)
The tensions between the membership of the Spartacist League and Gager culminated with his holding of a rock concert, against the decision of two Spartacist League meetings, in the name of the Spartacist League, at a time conflicting with a Committee on Vietnam atrocity film-showing. Besides displaying once again Gager’s sectarianism, the holding of this rock concert was a blatant disregard on the part of the leadership for the operation of democratic centralism, and this on merely a tactical question. This led to the final collapse of the rank and file’s trust in the leadership.
Gager did not like the decisions reached by meetings of the Spartacist League in this period and he says "...more basic decisions were being made by people who ... couldn’t attend meetings."25 The Spartacist League had ceased to be an organisation, as meetings are a necessary condition for revolutionary organisation. The only alternative is autocracy. The people he agreed with and in Menshevik fashion wished to call members were unorganisable. As Lenin says in One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, "the Party should admit to its ranks only such elements as allow of at least a minimum of organisation."26 Gager’s principle that those who work for the organisation but cannot attend meetings should make decisions, smells very much like the Menshevik principle which allows people who do not belong to any of the organisations of the Party, but only "help it in one way or another", to call themselves Party members. This, "is in reality an anarchist principle. To refute this, one would have to show that control, direction and discipline are possible outside an organisation" - or a meeting.
After the rock concert episode, the organisation disintegrated. Members were "expelled" or "resigned". According to Gager, it was "as it was in early 1970"27.
8. Gager’s "theoretical advances" and final betrayal
In a lengthy exchange of letters with comrades Logan and Hannah, Gager claimed great theoretical advances as compensation for this organisational catastrophe. But these "advances" were nothing more than a complete swing away from revolutionary Marxism, though not completely inconsistent with his past which is one of theoretical muddlement over the deformed workers’ states, and of an undialectical view of the Labour Party (constituting an unrounded form of inverted Pabloism similar to the Healyite position on Cuba that it is not a deformed workers’ state but a capitalist state). In this period he became more clearly Pabloist, going completely soft on Stalinism and forming an uncritical alliance with the Communist Party of New Zealand (CPNZ). Softness towards Stalinism has always been a characteristic of Pabloists. Jim Cannon was talking of Pabloism when he said:
"The simple truth, which we must now recognise and deal with, is that we have nothing less than a pronounced tendency towards Stalinist conciliationism in the Party."28
For Pabloists: "The working class is transformed into a pressure grouping, and the Trotskyists into a pressure grouping along with it ...."29 "The Pabloites tend to replace the role of the working class and its organised vanguard—that is, the world Trotskyist movement—with other forces which seem to offer greater chances of success.30" Thus the foundation of Pabloism is the denial of the proletariat as the world historic revolutionary force. The theoretical advance claimed by Gager at this time involved the view that action by revolutionaries in any milieu in which the working class was in any way organised was necessarily "economist" and therefore bad. Gager’s "anti-economism" is no more than an unsuccessful attempt to dress his denial of the proletariat’s role in orthodox clothing.
With the publication of the first issue of a newspaper entitled Red Gager showed that the final resolution of the contradiction between the subjective revolutionism and the un-Marxist method of his thinking is in a complete break from revolutionary working-class politics. In its statement of principle, "Where we Stand" he says:
"The Trad Left believes that the bigger and better the unions, the closer the people are to socialism. Red believes that unions exist to make agreements with bosses, not to make workers their own bosses. The unions in every big confrontation with the state in New Zealand have always been defeated. For victory what is needed is a political party standing for Power to People. Agreements between employers and unions end up as conspiracies to defraud the consumer. What is needed is an alliance of workers and consumers against employers. Red stands for voluntary unionism.
"... Red stands for full military training for the people."31
"Power to People"? Which people? Which class? What sort of power? Not state power of course? The state is nothing more than a class organised to oppress other classes. It is clearly impossible for the "people" to hold state power, for them to be organised as oppressors—who would they oppress? As Engels says of the revolutionary state (and this is repeated by Lenin in State and Revolution): "the state is only a transitional institution which is used in the struggle, in the revolution, to hold down one’s [class] adversaries by force ... so long as the proletariat still needs the state it does not need it in the interests of freedom [or of the ‘people’] but in order to hold down its adversaries"32. When things develop to the stage when there are no longer distinctions between classes, when all the people have the same interests, there will be no state, no power.
When pressured on this question Gager retreats, saying he means to call for a "people’s revolution". Trotsky answers this quite clearly:
"Thanks for the quotation about the ‘people’s’ revolution from Thaelmann’s speech, which I glanced through. A more ridiculous and maliciously confused manner of putting the question cannot be imagined! ‘The people’s revolution’ - as a slogan and even with a reference to Lenin .... It is understood that every great revolution is a people’s or national revolution, in the sense that it unites around the revolutionary class all the virile and creative forces of the nation around a new core. But this is not a slogan; it is a sociological description of the revolution, which requires, moreover, precise and concrete definition. As a slogan, it is inane and charlatanism, market competition with the fascists, paid for at the price of injecting confusion into the minds of the workers.
"... In order that the nation should indeed be able to reconstruct itself around a new class core, it must be reconstructed ideologically and this can be achieved only if the proletariat does not dissolve itself into the ‘people’, into the ‘nation’, but on the contrary develops a programme of its proletarian revolution and compels the petty bourgeoisie to choose between two regimes. The slogan of the people’s revolution lulls the petty-bourgeoisie as well as the broad masses of the workers, reconciles them to the bourgeois-hierarchial structure of the ‘people’ and retards their liberation."33
But it is clear from the passage quoted from "Where we stand" that Gager does not want merely to lull the "people". Remember: "Red believes that unions exist to make agreements with bosses .... Agreements between employers and unions end up as conspiracies to defraud the consumer. What is needed is an alliance of workers and consumers against employers. Red stands for voluntary unionism." Even without the last sentence it would be clear that Red wants to smash the unions. But the call for voluntary unionism in New Zealand is clearly a call to end the system under which all unions have won from the employers union membership as a condition of employment. Thus "voluntary unionism" would in itself smash all but the strongest unions. Gager without doubt wants to mobilise his "people" to smash the organisations of the working class. A more pernicious manifestation of bourgeois politics has seldom been presented in left-wing disguise. It is true that the bureaucratic leaders of the unions confine them to inadequate attempts to keep wages rising as fast as prices. It is true that they are at present merely instruments to keep the workers quiet. It is true that trade unions, without the leadership of a revolutionary party, will never rise above the level of tomorrow’s bread and butter. The point is not merely to understand this but to change it.
"The trade unions of our time can either serve as secondary instruments of imperialist capitalism for the subordination an disciplining of the workers, or, on the contrary, the trade unions can become the instruments of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat."34
We will build a revolutionary party, we will organise revolutionary caucuses among the union rank and file, we will lead the struggles of the workers from the partial and economist, from the level of bread and butter, to the level of revolutionary consciousness and revolutionary struggle. We will work around a transitional programme "stemming from today’s conditions and from today’s consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat."35 We will lead "the base against the top", smash the union bureaucrats, and turn the unions into instruments of the revolutionary working class. The unions have within them that potentiality, but Gager’s inability to see and exploit the contradiction between the bourgeois interests served by the union leaderships and their working-class membership have resulted in a sectarianism so extreme that it amounts to an attack on the working class.
Red was the dividing line. It marked Gager’s final break from revolutionary politics. In a situation of political isolation he used the disintegration of the NZSL in order to purport to make completely fundamental changes in its line. Without any proper decision-making process he presented some sort of new-left populism or worse, specifically counterposed to the working-class movement.
Gager had previously counterposed the propaganda orientation advocated by comrades Hannah and Logan with a plan for a popular paper. In style, content and programme Red, number 1, shows itself to be a truly "popular paper" - for the petty bourgeoisie. On the front page greatest prominence was given to an article on ecology signed by one Brian Longrigg - a man obviously more sympathetic to the ideology of the National Party lawyers in the Save the Manapouri Campaign than to any even ostensibly revolutionary group. On the back page in uncritical support of the bourgeois puppet Awami League, Red calls for "us" to "cease hiding behind legalisms and recognise the Provisional Government of Bangladesh." Inside the paper was a mish-mash of notes in gentle criticism of the Labour Party bureaucracy, left-liberal support for Vietnamese Stalinism, and rock-record reviews. Despite the paper’s great interest in international affairs, its statement of principle fails to call for an international revolutionary leadership. The paper makes it quite clear that Gager has completely deserted the struggle to rebuild the Fourth International.
"... the question of the International, as well as the question of national parties, cannot be deferred for a single hour: we have here in essence two sides of one and the same question. Without a Marxist International, national organisations, even the most advanced, are doomed to narrowness, vacillation and helplessness; the advanced workers are forced to feed upon surrogates for internationalism."36
But though Red marks Gager’s final break from the politics of the Spartacist League some organisational unclarity remained, and he participated in some of the meetings of members of the Spartacist League which rebuilt in March. He was too arrogant and unorganisable to subject himself to the discipline of any group, and despite the fact that he continues to respond to criticisms with smokescreens of faked orthodoxy he is too far from Marxism to stand by seeing it used to test his views. His walk-out was merely the organisational expression of his earlier desertion of Marxism-Leninism. He was finally formally expelled.
The Spartacist League’s immediate task is to sharpen itself into a fighting propaganda group, a nucleus of trained Marxists capable of intervening in every radical movement and in the trade unions with revolutionary politics. One of our first steps towards this has been the establishment of a regular propaganda press.
The Spartacist League, as a national section fighting for the rebuilding of the Fourth International, is in the vanguard of the struggle for a socialist revolution, which will prepare for the freeing of the energies of all mankind and the creation of a truly liberated society.
"Our day-to-day preparation of the working class and our intervention and leadership in the decisive moments of the class struggle will propel the struggle forward to the final victory."37
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Endnotes
8 January 1967
Letter from Gager to Logan, 3 January 1971.
"Declaration of Principles of the Spartacist League", Marxist Bulletin, n 9, p 10. The Marxist Bulletin series is published by the Spartacist League US. The "Declaration of Principles" was also published in Spartacist, n 8, November-December 1966 - PRG, January 1991.
"Declaration of Principles of the Spartacist League", p 10
"The Fourth International and the Soviet Union", Documents of the Fourth International, Pathfinder, New York, 1973, p 107
"Imperialist War and World Revolution", Documents of the Fourth International, p 327
Dispute, November-December 1964
Letter from Gager to Locke, undated, about September 1968
Letter from Gager to Logan, 28 November 1971
"Declaration of Principles", p 10
Dispute, September 1964
The Independent Labour Party of England was a left-social democratic, sometimes centrist, organisation. Originally formed in 1893, it helped found the Labour Party, left it in 1932, and then returned to it in 1939 - PRG, January 1991
"The League Faced with a Decisive Turn" (June 1934), Writings of Leon Trotsky [1934-35], Pathfinder, New York, 1974, p 42
"Reformism Now", an internal discussion document by Owen Gager, 26 September 1971
Peter Frazer: Labour Prime Minister 1940-49; Michael Joseph Savage: Labour Prime Minister 1935-40 - PRG footnote, January 1991
The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (The Transitional Programme) [1938], New Park, London, 1980, p 13
"The ILP and the Fourth International" (18 September 1935), Writings of Leon Trotsky [1935-36], Pathfinder, New York, 1977, p 142
"Centrist Combination and Marxist Tactics" (28 February 1935), Writings of Leon Trotsky [1934-35], p 203-4. (The original citation given by the NZSL was from an earlier edition of Trotsky's Writings which gave this article's title as "Centrist Combination and Marxist Faction" - PRG, January 1991.)
V I Lenin, What Is to Be Done? [1902], Collected Works, Progress, Moscow, 1961, v 5, p 440
As above, p 442-3
As above, p 462
V I Lenin, "Five Years of the Russian Revolution and the Prospects of World Revolution" (Report to the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, 13 November 1922). (A slightly different translation can be found in: Collected Works, 1965, v 33, p 431-2 - PRG, January 1991.)
V I Lenin, "Left-Wing" Communism - An Infantile Disorder (1920). (A slightly different translation can be found in: Collected Works, 1966, v 31, p 93-4 - PRG, January 1991.)
Leon Trotsky, "What Is a 'Mass Paper'?" (30 November 1935). (A slightly different translation can be found in: The Crisis of the French Section [1935-36], Pathfinder, New York, 1977, p 97 -PRG, January 1991.)
Letter from Gager to Logan, 28 November 1971
V I Lenin, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back [1904], Collected Works, 1965, v 7, p 256
Letter from Gager to Logan, 21 August 1971
James P Cannon, Letter to Dobbs (6 April 1953), Speeches to the Party, Pathfinder, New York, 1973
Socialist Workers Party, "Against Pabloist Revisionism" (1953), International Committee Documents 1951-54, Towards a History of the Fourth International, Part 4, Education for Socialists series, New York, 1974, p 152.
Revolutionary Tendency of the SWP, "In Defence of a Revol-utionary Perspective" (1962), Marxist Bulletin, n 1, p 3
Red, n 1, November 1972
V I Lenin, The State and Revolution [1917], Collected Works, 1964, v 25, p 445. (The additions in square brackets are those of the NZSL in 1972 - PRG, January 1991.)
Leon Trotsky, "Thaelmann and the 'Peoples Revolution'" (14 April 1931), The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, Pathfinder, New York, 1971, p 75-6
Leon Trotsky, "Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay" (1940), Leon Trotsky on the Trade Unions, New York, Pathfinder, 1975, p 71.
The Transitional Programme, p 14-5
Leon Trotsky, "The ILP and the Fourth International", p 147
"Declaration of Principles", p 11
Thursday, January 20, 2011
From The Archives Of The Spartacist League (U.S.)-Yugoslavia, East Europe and the Fourth International:The Evolution of Pabloist Liquidationism-Documents
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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Circular to the Leadership of All Sections
30 June 1948
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Written: 1948
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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The following unsigned circular was issued by the International Secretariat of the Fourth International. The original is in the archives of Natalia Sedova Trotsky at the Trotsky Museum in Coyoacán, Mexico; a photocopy is in the collection of the Prometheus Research Library.
June 30, 1948
Circular No. 16
To the Leadership of All Sections
Comrades,
The Tito affair has an exceptional importance from two points of view: externally for our attitude to Stalinist workers in particular and to revolutionary workers in general, and the conclusions that we can draw in regard to our appreciation of the USSR and Stalinism.
It goes without saying that the leaderships of all sections will have understood immediately the importance of the events and the necessity of taking the initiative in this respect. However, the I.S. thinks it necessary to make known its point of view in order to facilitate prompt and coordinated action of the whole International.
Significance of the Conflict
The resolution of the Cominform and the reply of the Central Committee of the Yugoslav Communist Party clearly show that the origin of the conflict lies in the attempt of the Kremlin to strangle completely the latter and the Tito government.
GPU agents endeavoured to create a tendency inside the Yugoslav CP to “Russify” it completely, to undermine the personal prestige of Tito and to get rid of him. The Kremlin, estimating that in Yugoslavia it did not possess an absolutely docile instrument, and fearing an independent role on the part of Tito, however limited, attacked him by mobilising at the same time its direct agents in Yugoslavia and the prestige of the Russian Communist Party and the Cominform against the Yugoslav Communists; it attempted to create a faction of its own in the Yugoslav CP capable of overthrowing them.
This is an example of the extreme rigidity of the Stalinist bureaucratic machine, incompatible with the least opposition and which, driven by its own internal logic, is forced to nip in the bud the slightest sign of independence, in order to safeguard its prestige as well as its apparent unity and stability. But the attempt of the Kremlin in Yugoslavia misfired for a whole series of reasons. Tito and the leadership of the CP were strongly entrenched in a movement and a party which they had led during the last few years of struggle under the occupation and immediately after, without the direct support of the Kremlin, and of which they have been considered as the natural leaders. They have constructed on the other hand a strong state apparatus, which inspires them with a different assurance from that which formerly characterised various attempts at opposition in the Communist parties of the capitalist countries in the face of the all-powerful Kremlin. Yugoslavia is the only country of the glacis where the government had not been imposed by the entry of the Red Army and the Soviet occupation, but which had been brought to power by the revolutionary movement of the masses.
Tito personally is a bureaucrat to the hilt; past master in the bureaucratic and GPU Kremlin machine he served for several years and which he has known how to stand up to energetically in his own country.
The resistance of Tito has probably surprised and exasperated Stalin. Before the failure of his attempt, Stalin could either try to secure the unconditional submission of Tito, or eliminate him through the action of his agents in Yugoslavia. Stalin has preferred the former course despite all the inconveniences of mobilising his international machine and openly excommunicating Tito.
We shall see in the days and weeks to come on what supplementary trump cards Stalin has in the long run based his decision, and what will be the breadth of Tito’s resistance.
The Cominform Resolution and the Yugoslav Reply
The charge sheet of the Cominform against Tito is a typical product of the Kremlin machine of lies, calumnies, and amalgams. Tito is accused at the same time of “nationalism,” “Trotskyism,” “Bukharinism,” of basing himself on the kulaks and wishing to destroy the kulaks, etc.... This document is conceived in order to drown the facts of the case in an ocean of assertions, in appearance “Marxist-Leninist,” contradictory and confused, which allows anyone in Stalinist world public opinion or in Yugoslavia to find reasons to criticise and condemn Tito. The reply of the Yugoslav party enables us, naturally without solidarising with it or with Tito, to attack the resolution of the Cominform and the attitude taken by the different Communist parties, who have rushed to align themselves completely with the resolution, without even knowing Tito’s reply and without even publishing in their press an objective résumé of that reply.
The reply of the Yugoslav party shows in effect that its case has been judged by the leaderships of the various Communist parties and the Cominform on the basis of unilateral accusations brought against it by the Russian Communist Party and without it even being able to make known its point of view. Our organisations, in their press, and by special leaflets addressed to the Stalinist workers and to revolutionary workers in general, should underline the enormous proof, afforded by this action of the Kremlin, of the monstrously bureaucratic character of Stalinism. Between one day and the next, a whole party, standing at the head of a country considered to be the vanguard of all glacis countries, was condemned solely on the basis of unilateral accusations, without the contrary point of view of the accused party ever having been discussed by the militants of the Stalinist organisations.
This enables us to make clear before the masses the whole nature of Stalinism and to recall examples from the past, the accusations brought against Trotskyism, the Moscow Trials, etc....
Activities Towards the Yugoslavs
The International Secretariat is preparing a document addressed to the Yugoslav Communist Party which it will try to send to Yugoslavia and circulate amongst the Communist workers of Yugoslavia. We ask all sections, when they receive the text, to transmit it by delegations to Yugoslav consulates and embassies asking them to forward it to the CC of the Yugoslav CP. On the other hand, we ask all sections to let us know immediately any contacts or any means which will permit an intervention on the part of the International in Yugoslavia, and to send by these means their own publications on this subject.
Conclusions on the USSR and Stalinism
The Tito affair permits us to draw important conclusions on the following points:
a) Concerning the stability of the Stalinist bureaucracy;
b) Concerning the question of the extension of Stalinism in the world without rifts, and the revisionist theory of “bureaucratic collectivism”;
c) Concerning the nature of the glacis countries.
The Tito affair shows that the extreme rigidity of the Stalinist bureaucratic machine will have considerable difficulty in incorporating in its complicated and contradictory movements, without cracks, fissures and grave crises, the glacis countries as a bloc, each component part of which has been submitted to a whole series of different economic, historical and political conditions.
Stalinism is not a product that is capable of universal export and in proportion to its expansion its internal contradictions, far from disappearing, become more violent and explosive. The attempted assimilation of the glacis by Stalinism can well produce centrifugal forces in the international Stalinist edifice and even in the USSR itself.
In the Stalin-Tito controversy the Stalinists themselves put their finger on the capitalist nature of the structure of these countries in alleging that the regime of private property in agricultural production, commerce and petty enterprises, that is to say in the essential domain of the whole economy in these countries, where petty individual exploitation constantly engenders capitalism.
Where Is Tito Going?
We should follow with great interest but also with caution the evolution of the Moscow-Belgrade conflict.
The reply of the Yugoslav party indicates that Tito is not ready to capitulate and his reconciliation with the Kremlin remains problematical, if not impossible, after such a passage at arms.
There remain consequently three possibilities:
a) That Tito will be overthrown by the revolt of the Stalinist wing of the Yugoslav party, which does not appear in any case to be very important.
b) That he will maintain his present like of independence, which poses necessarily a more radical rupture with the Kremlin and the Stalinists.
c) That he will go over to American imperialism and the bloc of western democracies. But this last eventuality seems in any case only capable of realisation after a long evolution, his present base having been established on socialist ideas and anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist struggles. Above all the most important point for us is not the personal case of Tito, a bureaucrat of the old stock with bonapartist ambitions and tendencies, but the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, the proletariat and poor peasantry placed by the conflict with Moscow in a favourable situation to advance in the path of a more radical rupture with Stalinism.
It is in this direction that the International should act.
The International Secretariat
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An Open Letter to the Communist Party of Yugoslavia
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Written: 1948
Source: Prometheus Research Library, Prometheus Research Series No. 4, New York, 1993
Transcription/Markup/Proofing: John Heckman.
Public Domain: Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 200/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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The following letter by the International Secretariat of the Fourth International was published in the newspaper of the American Socialist Workers Party, the Militant, 26 July 1948.
Paris,
July 1, 1948
To the Central Committee and to All Members of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia
Comrades,
We want to let you know that the attention of the entire international revolutionary workers’ movement is today centered on the conflict in which you have, for some time, been pitted against the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party and the Cominform.
The official press of the Communist parties is seeking to engulf you in a flood of slanders and insults. Their conduct is a good example of how proletarian democracy is dragged in the mud by these people who operate from Moscow the entire international machine which is at the service of the Soviet bureaucracy.
But we are not in the least duped by this system of slander campaigns which has in the past destroyed so many precious forces in the labor movement. Because under the worst difficulties, we have never ceased for one moment, ever since Lenin died, to continue his struggle in Russia and in the entire world for the world communist revolution, against capitalist and imperialist reaction, and against the Soviet bureaucracy which usurped Lenin’s party and the whole Communist International.
We know with what sinister inflexibility the bureaucratic machine in Moscow tries to nip in the bud every aspiration of independence or even a sign of a critical attitude toward itself. This Soviet bureaucracy has nothing in common with the Bolshevism of Lenin and the genuine defense of what still remains of the October conquests in the Soviet Union. The struggle—which has, since 1927, destroyed in Russia the entire Old Guard of the Bolshevik Party of the days of the October Revolution—was led by the Thermidorians of the Russian Revolution, who were able temporarily to triumph over the proletarian revolutionary wing of Russian Bolshevism.
Now you are in a position to understand, in the light of the infamous campaign of which you are the victims, the real meaning of the Moscow Trials and of the whole Stalinist struggle against Trotskyism.
You hold in your hands a mighty power if only you summon enough strength to persevere on the road of the socialist revolution and its program. This road is also the road of independence from the bureaucratic apparatus of Moscow. Looking for a way out are tremendous forces in the entire world labor movement—now caught in a vise between imperialism led from Washington on the one side, and on the other, the Soviet bureaucracy in the Kremlin, interested solely in keeping its own privileged caste interests in Russia.
Keep up your fight! Deepen the significance of your struggle with Moscow and its international machine! Do not yield to imperialist pressures! Establish a regime of genuine workers’ democracy in your party and in your country! Thereby you will contribute immensely to the rebirth of the international workers’ movement.
The International Secretariat of the Fourth International, the organization which unites around its program of Bolshevism and Leninism 35 sections on the five continents, wants to address itself in this our first message to you not concerning those things about which we must be critical of you with regards to your past and more recent course. We wish rather to take note of the promise in your resistance—the promise of victorious resistance by a revolutionary workers’ party against the most monstrous bureaucratic machine that has ever existed in the labor movement, the Kremlin machine.
We shall presently address to you and to your Congress and to all Yugoslav Communists an open letter in which we shall treat in detail our point of view on the historic meaning of your conflict with Moscow and its Cominform.
Long Live the Yugoslav Socialist Revolution! Long Live the Proletarian World Revolution!
International Secretariat of the Fourth International
*****
An Open Letter
To the Congress, Central Committee and Members of the
Yugoslav Communist Party
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Written: 1948
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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This text of the 13 July 1948 Open Letter from the International Secretariat to the Yugoslav Communist Party corresponds to the English version published in the American Socialist Workers Party’s Fourth International, August 1948. In addition to minor spelling revisions, the first of the two slogans which conclude the letter has been retranslated from the French original.[1] (The Fourth International version read: “Yugoslav Communists Unite for a New Leninist International!”)
Comrades,
At its last session the Cominform passed a resolution excommunicating your party and its leadership. This has deeply stirred the members of Communist parties and revolutionary workers throughout the world. How, indeed, could they fail to be stupefied by such an abrupt about-face by the Cominform leaders who suddenly compel them to disparage a country which only yesterday was proclaimed the best model of “People’s Democracy.” Only three months ago, l’Humanité, central organ of the French Communist Party, sang praises to the “land of Tito.” Today, l’Humanité cannot find a slander too vile with which to besmirch your party.
Only recently, Enver Hoxha, premier of Albania, declared at the fourth session of the Albanian People’s Assembly:
Our people could neither enjoy the fruits of their war victories nor be assured of reconstructing their country and progress toward a better life, if it were not for the powerful, fraternal assistance accorded us in all spheres of life by the new Yugoslavia.
Today, the same Enver Hoxha cynically says:
The Central Committee of the Yugoslav Communist Party and its chieftain Tito have disrupted all the economic and political relations with our country....They aim to transform it into a colony of Yugoslavia....They have tried to suppress its independence....
The servility with which most of the leadership of the Communist parties have carried out the orders handed down from above is surpassed only by their evident dishonesty. Your party is accused of “lack of democracy.” At the same time your accusers set up a hue and cry in which your party is condemned without the Communist party members having been informed objectively about the existing differences, without affording you an opportunity to defend yourselves, without letting the members of various Communist parties become acquainted with the text of your reply to the Cominform resolution.
The double-dealing of these “leaders” is shown even more clearly by their refusal to accept your invitation to attend your Congress. This refusal means nothing else but that the leaders of the Communist parties refuse to acquaint their members with the real situation in Yugoslavia. They prefer to despicably deceive the Communist workers throughout the world rather than “disobey” an order sent by Russia.
These facts, coupled with the treatment you are receiving, illustrate the methods of “persuasion” used by the leaders of the Russian Communist Party. They intervene in the life of other Communist parties by means of brutal and ultimatistic ukases; they arbitrarily impose their rule on all parties, without the least consideration for the traditions, experiences or sentiments of the respective party members. At the same time, the leaders of the Russian Communist Party jealously guard their own privileges, regarding as treachery the slightest criticism of their own policies, and arrogating to themselves the right to excommunicate anyone who balks at following slavishly the countless zigzags of their tortuous party line.
The evil you have suddenly discovered, however, has existed for a long time. It existed during the final decade of the Communist International as well as during the five years since its dissolution. The grave sickness of the Communist parties and the main cause of the innumerable setbacks and bloody defeats they have suffered are to be found in the absolute control arrogated to themselves by the leaders of the Russian Communist Party. This control has led to a constant subordination of the interests of the socialist revolution, in one country after another, to the episodic needs confronting Russia.
Today the Kremlin is determined to force you to abandon your industrialization policy, just as in January 1945 it forced Thorez to disarm the French partisans for the benefit of de Gaulle. During the Spanish Civil War, when the workers seized the factories, the Kremlin forced the Spanish Communists to declare that this was “treason.” It instructed the German Communist Party to follow the suicidal course from 1930 to 1933 which permitted Hitler to seize power.
But events each time proved that far from rendering the Soviet Union stronger in the face of the imperialist forces, the weakening of the international proletariat isolated the Soviet Union still more and permitted the imperialists to deal terrible blows, such as that of 1941.
Once again today, in order to maintain their absolute sway over the Cominform, the leaders of the Russian Communist Party do not hesitate to employ against your party, policies which play into the hands of American imperialism and which can be utilized by all the enemies of the working class against the Soviet Union itself.
Comrades, you yourselves have already raised the question of the reason for this non-communist conduct of the Russian leadership toward the Communist parties of other countries. In this connection you might indeed have used the term “degeneration” in your reasoning. One should not fear this word, nor its real meaning and content. The outstanding trait of a Bolshevik is his courage in approaching reality and seeing it as it actually is, no matter how bitter the truth, no matter how painful the examination of this reality may be. It is a crime for a communist to deceive the workers or his own comrades—and this happens to be the real crime that the Communist Party leaders of many countries have just committed once again. But it is an even bigger crime to deceive oneself through fear of the sad reality which one does not wish to accept.
It would be the grossest self-deception to assume even for a moment that a country, governed by a party whose conduct toward its sister parties is so utterly non-communist, can nevertheless play the role of the vanguard of socialism. It would be self-deception to assume that policies which led to crises in so many Communist parties can still remain Leninist policies.
Yes, the Soviet Union and the leadership of the Russian Communist Party have degenerated. Yes, they have ceased to represent the vanguard of the world communist forces since the time they subordinated the interests of the world revolution to their own interests. We repeat: They act in their own interests and not those of the Russian proletariat. The interests of the workers and the oppressed of all countries are one and the same, and the interests of communism are indivisible the world over. That is why the abandonment by the Russian leaders of the cause of communism beyond the Soviet frontiers proves beyond doubt that they have abandoned this same cause inside the Soviet Union itself; that is to say, their degeneration is profound.
Causes of the Degeneration of the Soviet Union
However painful it may seem to you, it is now necessary to put your finger on the social origin of this degeneration. In Lenin’s time, and even after, Communist functionaries in both the party and the government strictly adhered to the rule that their salaries could not be higher than the average wage of a skilled worker. Non-Communist specialists and technicians, whom the young Soviet Republic sorely needed, were of necessity paid higher salaries, but they were placed under the strict control of the workers lest they should abuse those advantages which the state had been compelled to grant them. The workers remained the masters in the factories, in the soviets, in the party. Communist discipline was voluntary, arising from the enthusiasm for the class struggle and the victorious revolution. The party’s internal life, along with that of the Communist International at the time, was regulated by discussion, as impassioned as it was free. The most important decisions were reached on the basis of genuine conviction, that is to say, in accord with the experience and level of consciousness of the party members. The party was intimately tied to its class and through these ties brought the entire proletariat into participation in the running of the state and the economy.
Today all this is changed in the Soviet Union. The soviets are dissolved. The workers do not exercise the slightest control in the factories; instead they are completely at the mercy of the factory manager’s every whim. The discrepancies in basic earnings are even greater than in capitalist countries. Communist functionaries collect salaries as high as those of petty-bourgeois spetzes (specialists). An abyss separates the living conditions of the working masses from those of the bureaucracy which runs the economy and the state. This bureaucracy has completely wiped out inner-party democracy; it has eliminated and murdered the Old Guard Bolsheviks; it has converted the party into a vehicle for protecting its own privileges; it has destroyed the party as the instrument of international communism.
This bureaucracy has today become a closed caste which guards its positions as jealously against the workers at home as it is doing against you.
One of your most remarkable accomplishments in Yugoslavia, just as in the October Revolution in Russia, is the extension of free high school and college education to all children of workers and poor peasants. You must be aware of the fact that as far back as eight years ago the Russian government abolished this enormously progressive development and reintroduced the system of paying for high school and college education, thereby in practice restricting such education to the children of functionaries and well-to-do petty bourgeois, and sentencing the overwhelming majority of children to semi-ignorance. Is this not the best proof that the leaders of the Russian state and party have stopped the forward march toward socialism, and in fact have gone into reverse gear toward an ever increasing social inequality?
The existence of these bureaucratic privileges in Russia, far from being combatted by the leaders of the Communist Party of the USSR, is systematically protected; this also explains at the same time the ideological form assumed by the degeneration of this leadership. In Lenin’s time, the leadership of the Bolshevik Party and of the Communist International, even when directly engaged in negotiations with imperialist powers, openly declared to the world proletariat that capitalism and socialism are two incompatible regimes. Not for one minute did it suspend calling upon the workers of all the capitalist countries to overthrow the rule of their own exploiters, and actively preparing them for it. It always fitted the domestic and foreign policy of the USSR into the framework of the strategy of world socialist revolution, and considered its prime task to be that of giving maximum assistance to the Communist parties of other countries so that they could take advantage of every revolutionary situation which opened up before them for the overthrow of capitalism.
Of course Lenin and the leadership of the Bolshevik Party and the Communist International at that time, could not exclude the possibility, even the necessity, of temporary compromises with imperialism. Every sane revolutionist understands that every war, and certainly the social war of the working class against the capitalist class, is necessarily interrupted by periods of calm, of truces and of armistices. But as Lenin so lucidly explained in “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, such compromises in the class struggle are allowed solely on condition “of knowing how to apply these tactics in such a way as to raise and not lower the general level of proletarian class consciousness, revolutionary spirit, ability to fight and to conquer.”
This conception of Lenin flowed logically from the doctrine of the Bolshevik Party and of the Communist International, according to which the socialist revolution can be only the work of the conscious and sovereign working masses.
Results of Degeneration
The social degeneration of the USSR has brought it to a complete revision of these fundamental principles of Leninism. Today it proclaims and makes all the leaders of the parties which follow it also proclaim that capitalism and socialism are two systems which can live side by side in complete peace and harmony. It categorically forbids the leaders of the Communist parties in bourgeois countries to speak of “revolution” or of the overthrow of capitalism in their countries. On the contrary it orders them to restrict their propaganda to the “defense of the national independence” of their own capitalist countries! These same leaders who today accuse you of “misunderstanding the Marxist-Leninist conception of class and of the state” have themselves kept the communist workers of the capitalist countries in the darkest ignorance on these questions. They were not content only to enter the capitalist governments of France, Italy, Belgium, etc. from 1945 to 1947 and to forget everything that Lenin wrote against the reformist Social-Democracy on the impossibility of “conquering” the bourgeois state apparatus from within and on the necessity of destroying it and replacing it with a new workers’ Soviet state apparatus. They have gone so far during this period as to forbid the workers to make use of strikes for improving their miserable living conditions, and this in countries which are the bastions of European capitalism!
All these maneuvers have not in the least deceived the imperialist bourgeoisie, as the emissaries and foreign agents of the leaders of the Russian Communist Party would have us believe. The bourgeoisie has not for a moment given up its view that the Soviet Union is a mortal enemy. But they have confused, disoriented and deceived the workers of the capitalist countries. Only yesterday the workers saw the leaders of the Communist parties opposing their class movements, whereas today such movements are abruptly and bureaucratically launched. Thus the workers have the impression of being the dupes of a policy which is foreign to their own interests and of being utilized solely as a “maneuverable mass” by their leaders.
This policy broke the revolutionary fervor of the masses which, in France, Italy and elsewhere in 1944, equaled the fervor you experienced in your country. This is explained precisely by the fundamental revision of the very conception of socialism wrought by the leaders of the Russian Communist Party. Whereas Lenin and the Communist International in its initial period considered socialist revolution in the capitalist world the product of mass action, the present leadership of the Russian Communist Party is preoccupied exclusively with the military, economic and territorial expansion of the USSR. Whereas Lenin and the Communist International in its initial period considered it their most important task to assist the Communist parties of other countries onto the road of revolutionary mobilization of the masses in their own countries, the present leadership of the Russian Communist Party, contemptuous of foreign Communist parties and workers—as you know well from your own sad experience!—does not in the least hesitate to bar the revolutionary and socialist road to its fellow-parties when this is required by its own sordid considerations. This break with the Leninist conception of world revolution is the most conclusive ideological proof of the profound degeneration of the present leadership of the Russian Communist Party and of its complete rupture with the interests of the world proletariat.
Under these conditions, it seems particularly cynical for the present leaders of the Russian Communist Party and of the Cominform to accuse you of misunderstanding “proletarian internationalism” and of following a nationalist policy. This is said by those same Russian leaders whose chauvinistic propaganda during the war, in which they refused to draw a distinction between the German workers and their Nazi butchers, was chiefly responsible for the absence of a revolution in Germany, whereas in Yugoslavia the partisan movement was able to attract into its ranks thousands of worker-soldiers from the occupation armies. This is said by a Togliatti who did not hesitate to launch, along with the genuine fascists of the MSI (Movimento Sociale dell’Italia), a chauvinist campaign for the return of former colonies to his capitalist country. This is said by a Thorez whose nationalist hysteria on the question of reparations for imperialist France gives untold satisfaction to bourgeois politicians in the Poincaré tradition. Really, these people are certainly in a very poor position to give lessons on internationalism to anybody.
It is no less true, comrades, that the nationalism introduced into the Communist parties corresponds precisely with this same kind of degeneration which you now discern in Russia. No progress can be made toward socialism unless every trace of nationalism is extirpated from the thinking of communist militants. To fight for the right of self-determination of each nation, to struggle against national oppression, continually introduced and extended under imperialism in its decadent phase, is a primary task for the communist movement. And genuine communists are distinguished from petty-bourgeois nationalists precisely by the fact that they conduct this struggle in an internationalist spirit, always drawing a line between the bourgeoisie and proletariat of the imperialist country, carrying on the struggle within the framework of the revolutionary struggle for the overthrow of capitalism in their own country. It is particularly necessary to eliminate from propaganda all appeals to a national tradition which can injure the workers of other countries, all attacks against nations as such, all territorial demands based on chauvinist arguments. The Austrian and Italian bourgeoisies are today hoping that the Communist parties of their countries, under the directives from the Cominform, will line up in the capitalist camp to “solve” the problem of Carinthia and Trieste in the interests of imperialism. You must understand that there is only one way to foil the infamous maneuvers of the bourgeoisie and of the leaders of the Cominform against your party: that is to appeal boldly to the international solidarity of the workers, to proclaim aloud the right of peoples to self-determination, and to propose solutions of outstanding problems along this line.
You have settled the national question in your country with some degree of success. A truly communist and internationalist attitude toward international problems would not fail to strengthen immeasurably your position in the consciousness and feeling of millions of workers throughout the entire world.
What Road Will You Follow?
Comrades, your Congress which is about to meet, the delegates which will compose it, and the thousands of communist members whom they will represent, find themselves, on this day following the Cominform resolution against your party, confronting decisions of truly historical import. Three roads are open to you and you must choose one of them. Your choice will decide for years, if not for decades, the fate of your country and of its proletariat, and will exercise a profound influence on the evolution and future of the entire world communist movement.
The first road open to you would be to consider that despite the serious injuries dealt you by the leaders of the Russian Communist Party, it is above all necessary today, in the present world situation, to maintain a complete monolithic unity with the policies and ideology of the Russian Communist Party. There are certainly members in your midst who will propose such a course and will even suggest that it is preferable, under these conditions, to make a public apology and a declaration accepting the “criticism” of the Cominform, even to change your leadership, and wait for a “better occasion” to defend your particular conceptions within the “big communist family.”
Such a decision would be in our opinion an irreparable and tragic error and would do the greatest damage not only to your own party and your own working class but to the international proletariat and communist movement, above all to the workers in the USSR. You must by now know the methods and ideas of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party sufficiently well to understand that that body will never be satisfied by public declarations and political decisions. It will demand that all power in the party and the country should pass into the hands of its own “civil and military agents” and of those among you whom it believes it can manipulate like puppets. It will completely eliminate, along with your present leaders, all cadres which think independently, all members who dare raise their voices in protest. It will completely subordinate the interests of the workers and poor peasants of Yugoslavia to the needs of its own diplomatic maneuvers with imperialism. It will smash your party as an independent force and will deal a terrible blow to the socialist consciousness of the workers of your country. It will wind up by physically liquidating all those who dared resist for a moment. The tragic example of so many old Bolshevik leaders in Russia shows that it never pardons even a passing opposition, even when such pardon has been “bought” a thousand times by self-criticism and breast-beating of the most humiliating kind.
Such a decision would deal an even greater blow to the international communist movement. In all countries, the most courageous and independent Communist members, who are today stirred by your action, would be reduced to silence. The most servile elements would triumph everywhere. The pernicious principle that “whoever criticizes the Soviet government is an agent of imperialism,” which has already cost the international Communist movement so dearly, would be more firmly entrenched than ever. Thousands of sincere revolutionary workers, who have with good cause been revolted by the anti-Leninist policies pursued by the Cominform leaders, would fall back again into passivity and skepticism, thereby increasing the isolation everywhere of the communist forces and thereby strengthening the forces of reaction and imperialism. The road would be cleared for new defeats for the international proletariat.
A second road will certainly be suggested, consisting essentially of retiring into Yugoslavia, repelling the attacks and the eventual violence and provocations of the Cominform and its agents, and attempting to “build socialism” in your own country, while concluding trade relations with the powers of Eastern Europe as well as with those of the imperialist West. We will not conceal from you, comrades, that we consider this second road just as pernicious as the first.
It is completely utopian to think it possible to “maneuver” during a whole period between the USSR and the USA without being subject during this same period to a growing pressure from these two giants. The success of “maneuvers” depends in the final analysis on the relationship of forces, and, on the plane of economic, political and military power, the relationship of forces is obviously not in your favor. American imperialism will gladly make some advances to you for that would increase the weight of its arguments in its conversations with Moscow. But what it is looking for basically is not to support you against the USSR but to conclude a compromise with Russia, if necessary at your expense. Not only would the present leaders of the Russian Communist Party have no hesitation about accepting such a compromise, but they would even work furiously to create the greatest economic difficulties for you so as to force you to capitulate or to surrender completely to Yankee imperialism, in order thereby to “demonstrate” to world working-class opinion that every rupture with Moscow signifies going over to the “American camp.”
On the other hand, you must be aware that imperialism will rapidly become increasingly demanding toward you, especially if it is encouraged along this road by Moscow, as is to be feared. Its pressure will first be concentrated on your trade relations. Its first objective will be to include you in the Marshall Plan zone. In the course of putting this into effect, it will aim subsequently to destroy all the social reforms brought about in Yugoslavia in the past three years. To the extent that Russia will isolate you and that your economic difficulties will increase and imperialist pressure sharpen, reaction within your own country will lift its head. The kulak would attempt to make contact with the international market. American capital would penetrate through all the crevices in your mixed economy in order to help them achieve this. Your days would be numbered.
Every policy set up on the basis of ignoring the international contradictions, which are the all-embracing framework in which all problems of Yugoslav policy are posed; every policy which would pose questions of industrialization independently of the problem of securing equipment by means of international trade, and consequently, independently of the pressure of the capitalist world market; every policy of this kind must be rejected forthright. Otherwise the work undertaken by your party can only meet with complete ruin. In view of the slanderous accusations of the leaders of the Cominform, it is imperative to be sharply conscious of the lurking danger of imperialist pressure, so that you will take no step without carefully considering the consequences on that score. Therein lies the main guarantee of genuine revolutionary and socialist progress on your part.
Finally, there remains the third road, the most difficult, bristling with the most obstacles, the genuine communist road for the Yugoslav party and proletariat. This road is the road of return to the Leninist conception of socialist revolution, of return to a world strategy of class struggle. It must start, in our opinion, with a clear understanding of the fact that the Yugoslav revolutionary forces can only become stronger and consolidate their positions thanks to the conscious support of the working masses of their own country and of the entire world. It means above all to understand that the decisive force on the world arena is neither imperialism with its resources and arms, nor the Russian state with its formidable apparatus. The decisive force is the immense army of workers, of poor peasants and of colonial peoples, whose revolt against their exploiters is steadily rising, and who need only a conscious leadership, a suitable program of action and an effective organization in order to bring the enormous task of world socialist revolution to a successful conclusion.
We do not presume to offer you a blueprint. We understand the tremendous difficulties which you must contend with in a poorly equipped country which has been devastated by war. We desire only to point out to you what are, in our opinion, the main lines through which to concretize this international revolutionary policy—the only policy which will enable you to hold out while waiting for new struggles of the masses, to stimulate them and to conquer with them.
To commit oneself to this road means, especially in Yugoslavia itself, to base oneself openly and completely on the revolutionary dynamics of the masses. The Front committees must be organs which are genuinely elected by the workers of city and country, arising from a tightly knit system of workers and of poor farmers.
They must become genuine state organs and must take the place of the present hybrid organs which are relics of the bourgeois state apparatus. They must be the organs of Soviet democracy, in which all workers will have the right to express their opinions and their criticisms without reservation and without fear of reprisal. The right of workers to organize other workers’ parties must be laid down as a principle, subject only to the condition that they take their place within the framework of Soviet legality. The present hybrid constitution must be revised and a new one, taking its inspiration from the Leninist constitution of 1921, must be set up by an assembly of delegates from the workers’ and poor peasants’ committees.
These decisive political changes must be conceived as the end result of a real mass mobilization, to be brought about by your party through carrying these Leninist ideas into the most distant villages of your country, explaining the differences between the Soviet state and other state forms, and the superiority of the former type. That is the way Lenin did it in 1917, with the greatest simplicity. A vast campaign of re-education must be started, together with a period of discussion and of unhampered expression of opinion by the workers. The latter will express their criticisms of the present state of affairs in their assemblies. The party will finally know, directly, what the real aspirations of the masses are, and will obtain the constructive suggestions of the working-class masses, whose vast creative energy is the surest guarantee of socialism. Your party has nothing to fear from such a development. The confidence of the masses in it will grow enormously and it will become the effective collective expression of the interests and desires of the proletariat of its country.
It will not be enough, however, to reestablish the complete sovereignty of the committees, to change the standing army into a genuine workers’ and peasants’ militia, to replace appointed judges with those elected by the masses, to reestablish and firmly maintain the principle of payment of functionaries on the basis of the average wages of a skilled worker. The problem of the revolutionary transformation of your country is essentially an economic one, in which the question of the peasantry takes first place.
There is but one Leninist way to approach this problem: to seek support from the poor and exploited layers of the country and to be careful not to violate the laws whereby your economy functions, but on the contrary to utilize them in the interests of socialism. The land must be nationalized and a struggle waged against the concentration of income and property in the hands of the kulaks. But these measures cannot be made solely by administrative means, neither by decrees nor by force. What is necessary is that the immense majority of the peasants must view it as in their own interests. For this, a review of the Five Year Plan and the relations between agriculture and industry is necessary. The plan for industrialization must be able, above all things, to guarantee a growing quantity of consumer goods for the peasants. By means of stabilizing the dinar and a strict system of dividing industrial consumer goods, the state can offer more to the small and middle peasant than the kulak will be able to give him. It is necessary at the same time to give the utmost support to the freely formed cooperatives of the small peasants, to reserve all modern working equipment for them, grant them cheap credit, and to establish such conditions for them that they will live better and earn more than the middle peasants who continue to work their lands as individuals. This will prove to be the surest method of isolating the kulak in the village and of developing and accelerating voluntary cooperation locally.
Progress of this kind will be realizable only by changing the method of drawing up and verifying plans. No group of spetzes can ascertain mathematically the real equilibrium between the needs of the workers, those of the peasants, and the capital needs of the economy, upon which equilibrium depends the harmonious planning and development of the country. It is essential that the masses be induced to participate as actively as possible in the work of planning, that the greatest heed be paid to their complaints, and that the needs expressed by them be the primary factor in planning.
Complete sovereignty of the factory committees must be established in the plants, and genuine workers’ control of production must be instituted. The trade unions must be granted their real function, which is to defend the interests of the workers, even against the Soviet state if necessary, as Lenin repeatedly asserted. In a word it is necessary to give the workers and poor peasants the clear feeling that they are the masters in the country, and that the state and the progress of the economy are in direct correspondence with their own interests.
We do not at all conceal that such a policy will encounter very great obstacles in your country and even in your own ranks. A complete re-education of your cadres in the spirit of genuine Leninism would be necessary. Still less do we conceal that world imperialism and the present leadership of the Russian State would furiously attack your policy, for it would appear to them a mortal threat to their acquired positions. But if you will apply the same Leninist principles in your foreign policy, you can be sure of powerful support from the workers and the oppressed of the entire world, and your cause cannot lose.
You would have to make a sharp break with all the practices of traditional secret diplomacy and return to the revolutionary diplomacy practiced in the time of Lenin; you would have to become the champion and active supporter of all colonial peoples revolting against their imperialist masters; you would have to proclaim to the world the conditions for a just peace, without annexations or reparations; you would have to demand the immediate withdrawal of the occupation troops of all the great powers from all occupied countries, and strict application of the right of self-determination of peoples in all disputed questions. With one blow you will gain the sympathy of the Austrian and German masses who today feel themselves deceived and betrayed by all parties. You would have to develop and sharpen your propaganda in favor of the Danubian Federation by giving it its classical communist form and by launching the slogan for the Balkan Federation of Soviet Socialist Republics among the workers and poor peasants of neighboring countries, who would take it up with enthusiasm. And finally it would be necessary to incorporate this propaganda within the concrete framework of propaganda for the SOCIALIST SOVIET UNITED STATES OF EUROPE; to convoke a conference at Belgrade of the trade-union and workers’ representatives from all the countries of Europe, including Germany and Austria; to draw up with them a plan for the economic reconstruction of the continent on a socialist basis, in opposition to the Marshall Plan, and to make this socialist plan the central axis for revolutionary propaganda in Europe and in the world.
Your possibilities for action along the road of genuine Leninism disclose themselves to be enormous. But your historical responsibility far surpasses everything which has been outlined above. Millions of workers throughout the world are today profoundly disgusted with the policies and methods used by the present leaders of the Cominform. Unwilling to pass over into the imperialist camp in any guise whatever, they vainly seek a new pole of attraction, a new political leadership. Only the vanguard of this mass has at this time found the road toward our organization, the FOURTH INTERNATIONAL. You can become the mobilization point for this mass of revolutionary workers and thus, with a single blow, completely change the present condition of paralysis within the world working-class movement, the stranglehold of the agents of Washington and of the degenerated Russian bureaucracy. The social struggles which are developing and will develop within all countries will thereby be given the opportunity for a successful revolutionary conclusion. The Third World War, which threatens to throw the USSR and all of Europe into an abyss, can be prevented. The socialist future will unfold in all its glory before humanity.
Comrades, we address this letter to you because we are conscious of the terrible dilemma in which you find yourselves; because we understand exactly the tremendous responsibility weighing upon you, and because we consider it our communist duty to assist you in resolving the present crisis in communism along proletarian and Leninist lines.
We have many and important differences with your past and recent policies. We are in complete disagreement with the theory and practice of “People’s Democracy” for we do not believe in any other road from capitalism to socialism than the dictatorship of the proletariat. We believe that the use and propagation of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ways of living (servants, livery, titles, officers’ stripes, decorations) can only serve to demoralize real communists. But we are conscious of the enormous difficulties involved in a discussion between us, in view of the separation in activities which has existed between us for so many years. For this reason we consider it our duty to convey our ideas to you in a long and fruitful discussion, in the course of which we can each advise the other of our experiences in the revolutionary struggle and can clarify our differences in a spirit of genuine proletarian and communist fraternity.
Our organization, the Fourth International, originated in the Left Opposition of the Bolshevik Party, which 25 years ago already saw the germs of the degeneration of the Russian Communist Party which you are discovering today. Hunted, persecuted, expelled, the Left Opposition fought nevertheless for ten years for reintegration into the official Communist movement. Only when the present leadership of the Russian Communist Party surrendered the German proletariat to the executioner Hitler without a struggle, and thereby opened a period of bloody defeats for the world working class, did our movement come to the conclusion that a new revolutionary International had to be built. Since then, the bureaucrats who now lead the Russian State have poured a ceaseless stream of vile slander over our International and no crime has been too sordid for them in their attempts to destroy us. Just as today they call you “agents of imperialism,” so they have labeled us “fascist spies,” when in reality hundreds of our best cadres and leaders gave their lives in the struggle against fascism. Just as today they are organizing the assassination of your leadership, so did they manage to assassinate Leon Trotsky, organizer of the October victory, creator of the Red Army, the greatest leader of the Communist movement since the death of Lenin—Trotsky, who just a few days before his death, expressed his unshakable devotion to communism and to the real Soviet Union of the workers and peasants in his moving “Letter to the Soldiers of the Red Army.”
But all these crimes did not succeed in smashing the FOURTH INTERNATIONAL because nothing can smash genuine Leninism! Today it has sections in 35 different countries on all continents, consisting of battle-tested and experienced revolutionary Communist members who stand for what is best in their class. Although weak in material resources, its Second World Congress, held last April in Paris, demonstrated that it was strong in political cohesion, in program, and in its clear understanding of present-day reality. Today it is launching in all countries a vast campaign protesting against the bureaucratic measures which the Cominform has taken against you. It appeals to communist workers of all countries to send their delegations to Yugoslavia, in order to make a spot check of the real policy followed by your party. Tomorrow it will make your documents known in 20 different languages—for workers’ democracy is not just an idle phrase to the Fourth International, and a communist cannot permit a member to be judged without a hearing. It asks that you allow a delegation from our leadership to attend your Congress, in order to establish contact with the Yugoslav communist movement and to set up fraternal ties which can serve only the interests of the world communist revolution.
Comrades, the cause of communism, of the revolutionary emancipation of the proletariat is invincible. No force in the world can prevent the genuine communists from ridding themselves of slanderers and would-be assassins so that they can go forward boldly toward their revolutionary goal. The quicker this task is done, the faster will the world revolution triumph.
Yugoslav Communists, Let Us Unite Our Efforts for a New Leninist International! For the World Victory of Communism!
The International Secretariat of the Fourth International
July 13, 1948
Notes
1 Les congrès de la IVe Internationale, Vol. 3, Bouleversements et crises de l’après-guerre (1946-1950) (Montreuil: Editions La Brèche-PEC, 1988), 394.
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Privas-Marin Resolution on the Yugoslav Crisis
PCI Resolution on the Yugoslavia Crisis
Written: 1948
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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The following resolution, submitted by Privas (Jacques Grimblatt) and Marcel Marin (Marcel Gibelin), was adopted by the Fifth Congress of the French Parti Communiste Internationaliste, held in July 1948. The French text appeared in the PCI’s internal bulletin, La vie du parti No. 1, August 1948. The translation is by the Prometheus Research Library.
The crisis which has broken out in the Cominform between Tito and the Kremlin should be considered from the standpoint:
1) of the underlying causes of this crisis;
2) of the prospects for development of this crisis;
3) of our intervention into these events.
A precise analysis is necessary exactly because of the importance of the repercussions this event is having and will have among the ranks of the Stalinist workers.
1) The Causes of the Crisis
The Stalinist policy has as its underlying line the exploitation of the workers movement for the needs and the defense of the interests exclusively of the privileged bureaucrats of the USSR.
In the countries of the buffer zone this policy takes the concrete form of exploiting these countries: economically, diplomatically and strategically (preferential treaties, privileged treatment of the ruble, exploitation of the economy to benefit the Red Army or the Soviet state).
This policy which preserves capitalist relations in the economy out of fear of the masses, which blocks the development of the buffer zone countries, necessarily creates a profound crisis in these countries. This crisis is expressed in the pressure of the bourgeois elements to re-establish ties with imperialism, and even in halfhearted notions of finding a solution on the part of indigenous Stalinist leaders (Dimitrov proposing a Balkan federation). Against these pressures and notions, in order to contain the crisis while maintaining its exploitation, the Kremlin is obliged increasingly to utilize methods of terror
a) against the bourgeois politicians
b) against the revolutionary elements
c) and even to replace the indigenous Stalinists with direct emissaries of the Kremlin (five “Russian” members on the seven-member Bulgarian PB).
This general situation, the necessary result of the application of the Stalinists’ policy, is governed by military and police measures, but this does not resolve the crisis. If in Yugoslavia the Stalinist CP has been led to resist this Russification, it is because, having assumed full responsibility for the state, it must respond to the needs of Yugoslav society and of each of its components: to assure a minimum of economic stability and to somewhat satisfy the needs of the different social classes. Complete control by the Kremlin absolutely prevents the fulfillment of this task.
If this situation—which is fundamentally that of all the countries of the buffer zone—has provoked active resistance first in Yugoslavia, this is due to its particular situation originating in the struggle of the Yugoslav masses during the occupation, which gave the Yugoslav CP a mass base and much more independence.
Stalin could not permit such independence in a party—especially of the buffer zone—without risking the breakup, not only of the system of exploitation of the buffer zone, but also of the whole hierarchical police state system of world Stalinism.
2) Prospects for the Crisis
One thing is certain: if it is impossible in general for a customary transitional situation to be maintained in the countries of the buffer zone, it is even more impossible in an isolated country.
The importance of the situation that has been created in Yugoslavia is that it objectively poses to the Yugoslav masses—not in general terms, but one could say immediately—the need to choose between socialism and capitalism.
The choice, even if it is still muddled, will necessarily lead to discussion and struggles between currents and classes in Yugoslavia.
The Yugoslav CP can only capitulate to the Kremlin, to the U.S., or embark on the path of revolution—although of course it is not possible to predict today which path will be taken or what the pace of development will be.
In any case, it is almost certain that without an intervention by the proletariat of the buffer zone and of the world, the path taken by the Yugoslav proletariat will not be that of revolution. Capitulation to the Kremlin or to the U.S. would be inevitable.
3) The Thrust of Our Intervention
The first major crack in the Stalinist apparatus is necessarily leading immense masses of Stalinist workers to fundamentally reconsider Stalinist politics. Obviously, we cannot remain indifferent to an event of this importance; rather we must intervene aggressively to help the proletariat as a whole to understand the Stalinist betrayal, and the Yugoslav proletarians to find the path of revolution.
In the Western countries, we must give an overall explanation of the causes of the Yugoslav crisis, demonstrating in particular the Stalinist conception of the defense of the USSR, the counterrevolutionary nature of the ties imposed by Moscow and of the theory and practice of “people’s democracy.”
To the Yugoslav proletarians we will demonstrate that the rupture with Moscow is the indispensable step for the struggle for socialism, and we will indicate the concrete and programmatic paths that make it possible (soviets, proletarian democracy, appeal to proletarians of other countries).
We do not at all reproach the I.S. for appealing to the Yugoslav CP and its CC. This step is appropriate given the relations between the masses and the CP. But we do object to these letters for idealizing Tito and the Yugoslav CP (revolutionary workers party—“continue your struggle for socialism”).*
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* This objection does not in any way signify a disagreement with the I.S. on the nature of the USSR, the buffer zone, and Stalinism.
On the other hand, the issue of La Vérité devoted to Yugoslavia, which defends the point of view of the I.S., provides no useful explanation when it gives the apparatus’ own laws as the cause of the crisis of the apparatus.
If this resolution is adopted, it does not mean that the PCI exempts itself from the discipline of the international leadership.
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Letter on Yugoslavia Sent to the IEC by the RCP (Britain)
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Written: 1948
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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The following letter to the International Executive Committee of the Fourth International by British Revolutionary Communist Party leader Jock Haston is undated, but apparently written in the summer of 1948 and was never published in the internal bulletins of the American Socialist Workers Party. The text is taken from a photocopy in the collection of the Prometheus Research Library. Excerpts from the Open Letters by the International Secretariat of the Fourth International cited in the text are from a different translation than the English versions reprinted in this bulletin.
To the IEC
Dear Comrades,
The Yugoslav-Cominform dispute offers the Fourth International great opportunities to expose to rank and file Stalinist militants the bureaucratic methods of Stalinism. It is possible to underline the way in which the Stalinist leaderships suppress any genuine discussion on the conflict by distorting the facts and withholding the replies of the YCP leadership from their rank and file. By stressing such aspects of the Yugoslav expulsion, we can have a profound effect on militants in the Communist Parties.
However, our approach to this major event must be a principled one. We cannot lend credence, by silence on aspects of YCP policy and regime, to any impression that Tito or the leaders of the YCP are Trotskyist, and that great obstacles do not separate them from Trotskyism. Our exposure of the bureaucratic manner of the expulsion of the YCP must not mean that we become lawyers for the YCP leadership, or create even the least illusion that they do not still remain, despite the break with Stalin, Stalinists in method and training.
In our opinion, the Open Letters of the IS to the YCP Congress failed to fulfil these absolutely essential conditions. They failed to pose directly and clearly what is wrong, not only with the CPSU, but with the YCP. The whole approach and the general tone of the letters are such as to create the illusion that the YCP leadership are communists, mistaken in the past, and discovering for the first time the evils of the bureaucratic methods of Moscow, instead of leaders who have actively participated in aiding the bureaucracy and acting as its agents in the past.
The letters appear to be based on the perspective that the leaders of the YCP can be won over to the Fourth International. Under the stress of events, strange transformations of individuals have taken place, but it is exceedingly unlikely, to say the least, that Tito and other leaders of the YCP can again become Bolshevik-Leninists. Tremendous obstacles stand in the way of that eventuality: past traditions and training in Stalinism, and the fact that they themselves rest on a Stalinist bureaucratic regime in Yugoslavia. The letters failed to point out the nature of these obstacles, fail to underline that for the leadership of the YCP to become communists, it is necessary for them not only to break with Stalinism, but to repudiate their own past, their present Stalinist methods, and to openly recognise that they themselves bear a responsibility for the building of the machine now being used to crush them. Here it is not a question of communists facing a “terrible dilemma,” with an “enormous responsibility” weighing on them, to whom we offer modest advice: it is a question of Stalinist bureaucrats becoming communists.
The aim of such Open Letters can only be limited. By placing on record a correct and principled analysis of the role of the Stalinist bureaucracy and that of the YCP leadership, by offering aid to the YCP in a clearly defined communist struggle, the Open Letters could be useful propaganda, aiding the approach to the rank and file seeking a communist lead.
As they stand, however, by their silence on fundamental aspects of the regime in Yugoslavia and YCP policy, the letter strike an opportunist note.
It is not our experience that the most courageous and most independent communist militants “are today stimulated by your [the YCP] action.” The Cominform crisis has rather sown confusion in the CP ranks and disorientated its supporters. That is to our advantage. But although it is a relatively easy task to expose the Cominform manoeuvres, there is sufficient truth in some of their accusations against Tito—particularly with regard to the internal regime, the National Front—to cause among Stalinist rank and filers an uneasiness with regard to the leaders of the YCP. That gives us an opportunity to win these militants not to the cause of Tito, but to Trotskyism.
Tito is attempting, and will attempt, to follow an independent course between Moscow and Washington, without altering the bureaucratic machine or turning to proletarian internationalism. A bureaucratic regime, resting as it does mainly on the peasantry, can have no independent perspective between the Soviet Union and American imperialism. The main emphasis of the letters should have been to show the necessity for a radical break with the present policy of the YCP, the introduction of soviet democracy within the party and the country, coupled with a policy of proletarian internationalism. The position must be posed to Yugoslav militants, not as a choice between three alternatives—the Russian bureaucracy, American imperialism, proletarian internationalism—but, first and foremost, as a choice between proletarian democracy within the regime and party, proletarian internationalism, and the present bureaucratic setup which must inevitably succumb before the Russian bureaucracy or American imperialism.
The IS letters analyse the dispute solely on the plane of the “interference” of the CPSU leaders, as if it were here solely a question of that leadership seeking to impose its will without consideration for the “traditions, the experience and the dealings” of militants. But the dispute is not simply one of a struggle of a Communist Party for independence from the decrees of Moscow. It is a struggle of a section of the bureaucratic apparatus for such independence. The stand of Tito represents, it is true, on the one hand the pressure of the masses against the exactions of the Russian bureaucracy, against the “organic unity” demanded by Moscow, discontent at the standards of the Russian specialists, pressure of the peasantry against too rapid collectivisation. But on the other hand, there is the desire of the Yugoslav leaders to maintain an independent bureaucratic position and further aspirations of their own.
It is not sufficient to lay the crimes of international Stalinism at the door of the leadership of the CPSU. Not only in respect to Yugoslavia, but also in respect to other countries, the Open Letter gives the entirely false impression that it is the Russian leadership which is solely responsible. To pose the relations in the international Stalinist movement in the manner of the IS letter—that the leadership of the CPSU “forced Thorez to disarm the French partisans,” “forced the Spanish communists to declare...that the seizure of the factories...was ‘a treason’,” “completely prohibits the leaderships of the Communist Parties in the capitalist countries from speaking of revolution”—can create illusions that the leaders of the national Stalinist parties could be good revolutionists, if only Moscow would let them. It is true that the degeneration of the CPs flowed basically from the degeneration in the Soviet Union. But the sickness of the Stalinist movement is also accountable by the utter corruption of the national leaderships who are bound up in the bureaucratic machine. These leaders actively participate in the preparation of the crimes. So also for Tito, it was not a matter of having been “forced” to carry out the wished of Moscow in the past.
It is impermissible to slur over the nature of the YCP, its identity on fundamental points with other Stalinist parties. Such a slurring over can only disorientate Stalinist workers. Yet every attempt is made by the IS to narrow the gulf that separates the policy of the YCP from Bolshevik-Leninism. What other conclusion can we draw from statements such as the following:
“...the Cominform accuse you of misunderstanding ‘proletarian internationalism’ and of following a nationalist policy. This is said by that same Russian leadership whose chauvinist propaganda during the war...is largely responsible for the absence of a revolution in Germany, whereas [our emphasis] in Yugoslavia the partisan movement was able to draw to its ranks thousands of proletarian soldiers from the armies of occupation. This is said by Togliatti, who has not hesitated to throw himself, alongside the real fascists of the Movimento Sociale el Italia (MSI), in a chauvinistic campaign for the return to the capitalist fatherland of its former colonies. This is said by Thorez, whose nationalist hysteria on the question of reparations for imperialist France delights the bourgeois heirs of Poincaré.”
It is true that the Yugoslav Stalinists settled, with some success, the national problem inside their own country. It was their programme with regard to this question that enabled them to win over members of the quisling armies. But the comrades must be aware that the propaganda of the YCP towards Germany was of the same chauvinistic character as that of the Russian and other Stalinist parties. The IS letter deals with the necessity for proletarian internationalism in the abstract, without taking up the concrete question of YCP policy today and in the past. It was surely necessary to point out concretely what this proletarian internationalism means, by dealing with the past and present policy of the YCP, which has been no whit less chauvinistic than that of other Stalinist parties. The IS mentions Togliatti’s chauvinism, and Thorez’ nationalist hysteria, and leaves the impression of a favourable comparison between the policy of other Stalinist parties and that of the YCP. We cannot be silent on the YCP’s chauvinistic campaign around Trieste, their attitude towards reparations, their uncritical support for the Russian bureaucracy’s demand for reparations from the German people. It is necessary to take up these questions so that it shall be clear precisely what the gulf is between a nationalist and an internationalist policy, and precisely what it is that Yugoslav militants must struggle against.
But there is another aspect of the IS letters which cannot pass by without the IEC adopting an attitude and expressing an opinion.
The World Congress majority adopted a position that the buffer countries, including Yugoslavia, were capitalist countries. It rejected the resolution of the RCP that these economies were being brought into line with that of the Soviet Union and could not be characterised as capitalist. The amendment of the British party to the section “The USSR and Stalinism” was defeated. But it is evident from these letters that the IS has been forced by events to proceed from the standpoint of the British party, that the productive and political relations in Yugoslavia are basically identical with those of the Soviet Union.
If indeed there exists in Yugoslavia a capitalist state, then the IS letters can only be characterised as outright opportunist. For the IS does not pose the tasks in Yugoslavia which would follow if bourgeois relations existed there as the dominant form. The letters are based on conclusions which can only flow from the premise that the basic overturn of capitalism and landlordism has taken place.
The second Open Letter gives several conditions necessary if Yugoslavia is to go forward with true revolutionary and communist progress. Yet nowhere does [it] call for the destruction of bourgeois relations in the economy and the overturn in the bourgeois system and regime. The tasks laid down in the latter are:
“The committees of the Front...must be organs of soviet democracy....
“To revise the present Constitution [based on that of the Soviet Union]....
“To admit in principle the right of the workers to organise other working class parties, on condition that these latter place themselves in the framework of soviet legality....
“To procure the broadest participate of the masses in the sphere of planning....
“To establish the full sovereignty of the factory committees...to set up a real workers’ control of production.”
And so on. Nowhere did the IS deem it necessary to call on the Yugoslav workers to overthrow capitalism. Had the IS been able to base itself on the World Congress document, that would have been their foremost, principled demand. The comrades will remember that the Congress document gives as its first reason why “the capitalist nature of the buffer zone is apparent,” that “Nowhere has the bourgeoisie as such been destroyed or expropriated.” Why no mention of this in the Open Letters? Of all the seven conditions given in the Congress document as making “apparent” the capitalist nature of Yugoslavia and other buffer countries, the IS letter mentions only one—the nationalisation of the land. But even here, the question of the failure to nationalise the land is raised not from the point of view of proving the capitalist nature of Yugoslavia. It is raised to point out, correctly, that the nationalisation of the land is necessary in order to combat the concentration of income and of land in the hands of the kulaks. The question is raised in the general context of the letter, as an aid to the socialist development of agriculture in a country where capitalism and landlordism have been overthrown, but the danger of a new exploitation is still present in the countryside.
Not only are the main tasks posed in the Open Letter identical to those to be carried out to cleanse a state similar in productive and political relations to the Soviet Union, but we must add that the impression given is that these relations are a great deal healthier than in Russia.
The articles appearing in our international press revealed one thing: the thesis adopted by the World Congress failed to provide a clear guide to the problems that arose from the Cominform-Yugoslav split and the tasks of the revolutionaries in connection with the regime and its economic base.
We appeal to the IEC to reject the orientation in the Open Letter, and to correct and repair the damage which has been done, by re-opening the discussion on the buffer zones and bringing our position into correspondence with the real economic and political developments of these countries.
With fraternal greetings,
Yours
J. Haston
on behalf of the Central Committee, RCP
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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Circular to the Leadership of All Sections
30 June 1948
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Written: 1948
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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The following unsigned circular was issued by the International Secretariat of the Fourth International. The original is in the archives of Natalia Sedova Trotsky at the Trotsky Museum in Coyoacán, Mexico; a photocopy is in the collection of the Prometheus Research Library.
June 30, 1948
Circular No. 16
To the Leadership of All Sections
Comrades,
The Tito affair has an exceptional importance from two points of view: externally for our attitude to Stalinist workers in particular and to revolutionary workers in general, and the conclusions that we can draw in regard to our appreciation of the USSR and Stalinism.
It goes without saying that the leaderships of all sections will have understood immediately the importance of the events and the necessity of taking the initiative in this respect. However, the I.S. thinks it necessary to make known its point of view in order to facilitate prompt and coordinated action of the whole International.
Significance of the Conflict
The resolution of the Cominform and the reply of the Central Committee of the Yugoslav Communist Party clearly show that the origin of the conflict lies in the attempt of the Kremlin to strangle completely the latter and the Tito government.
GPU agents endeavoured to create a tendency inside the Yugoslav CP to “Russify” it completely, to undermine the personal prestige of Tito and to get rid of him. The Kremlin, estimating that in Yugoslavia it did not possess an absolutely docile instrument, and fearing an independent role on the part of Tito, however limited, attacked him by mobilising at the same time its direct agents in Yugoslavia and the prestige of the Russian Communist Party and the Cominform against the Yugoslav Communists; it attempted to create a faction of its own in the Yugoslav CP capable of overthrowing them.
This is an example of the extreme rigidity of the Stalinist bureaucratic machine, incompatible with the least opposition and which, driven by its own internal logic, is forced to nip in the bud the slightest sign of independence, in order to safeguard its prestige as well as its apparent unity and stability. But the attempt of the Kremlin in Yugoslavia misfired for a whole series of reasons. Tito and the leadership of the CP were strongly entrenched in a movement and a party which they had led during the last few years of struggle under the occupation and immediately after, without the direct support of the Kremlin, and of which they have been considered as the natural leaders. They have constructed on the other hand a strong state apparatus, which inspires them with a different assurance from that which formerly characterised various attempts at opposition in the Communist parties of the capitalist countries in the face of the all-powerful Kremlin. Yugoslavia is the only country of the glacis where the government had not been imposed by the entry of the Red Army and the Soviet occupation, but which had been brought to power by the revolutionary movement of the masses.
Tito personally is a bureaucrat to the hilt; past master in the bureaucratic and GPU Kremlin machine he served for several years and which he has known how to stand up to energetically in his own country.
The resistance of Tito has probably surprised and exasperated Stalin. Before the failure of his attempt, Stalin could either try to secure the unconditional submission of Tito, or eliminate him through the action of his agents in Yugoslavia. Stalin has preferred the former course despite all the inconveniences of mobilising his international machine and openly excommunicating Tito.
We shall see in the days and weeks to come on what supplementary trump cards Stalin has in the long run based his decision, and what will be the breadth of Tito’s resistance.
The Cominform Resolution and the Yugoslav Reply
The charge sheet of the Cominform against Tito is a typical product of the Kremlin machine of lies, calumnies, and amalgams. Tito is accused at the same time of “nationalism,” “Trotskyism,” “Bukharinism,” of basing himself on the kulaks and wishing to destroy the kulaks, etc.... This document is conceived in order to drown the facts of the case in an ocean of assertions, in appearance “Marxist-Leninist,” contradictory and confused, which allows anyone in Stalinist world public opinion or in Yugoslavia to find reasons to criticise and condemn Tito. The reply of the Yugoslav party enables us, naturally without solidarising with it or with Tito, to attack the resolution of the Cominform and the attitude taken by the different Communist parties, who have rushed to align themselves completely with the resolution, without even knowing Tito’s reply and without even publishing in their press an objective résumé of that reply.
The reply of the Yugoslav party shows in effect that its case has been judged by the leaderships of the various Communist parties and the Cominform on the basis of unilateral accusations brought against it by the Russian Communist Party and without it even being able to make known its point of view. Our organisations, in their press, and by special leaflets addressed to the Stalinist workers and to revolutionary workers in general, should underline the enormous proof, afforded by this action of the Kremlin, of the monstrously bureaucratic character of Stalinism. Between one day and the next, a whole party, standing at the head of a country considered to be the vanguard of all glacis countries, was condemned solely on the basis of unilateral accusations, without the contrary point of view of the accused party ever having been discussed by the militants of the Stalinist organisations.
This enables us to make clear before the masses the whole nature of Stalinism and to recall examples from the past, the accusations brought against Trotskyism, the Moscow Trials, etc....
Activities Towards the Yugoslavs
The International Secretariat is preparing a document addressed to the Yugoslav Communist Party which it will try to send to Yugoslavia and circulate amongst the Communist workers of Yugoslavia. We ask all sections, when they receive the text, to transmit it by delegations to Yugoslav consulates and embassies asking them to forward it to the CC of the Yugoslav CP. On the other hand, we ask all sections to let us know immediately any contacts or any means which will permit an intervention on the part of the International in Yugoslavia, and to send by these means their own publications on this subject.
Conclusions on the USSR and Stalinism
The Tito affair permits us to draw important conclusions on the following points:
a) Concerning the stability of the Stalinist bureaucracy;
b) Concerning the question of the extension of Stalinism in the world without rifts, and the revisionist theory of “bureaucratic collectivism”;
c) Concerning the nature of the glacis countries.
The Tito affair shows that the extreme rigidity of the Stalinist bureaucratic machine will have considerable difficulty in incorporating in its complicated and contradictory movements, without cracks, fissures and grave crises, the glacis countries as a bloc, each component part of which has been submitted to a whole series of different economic, historical and political conditions.
Stalinism is not a product that is capable of universal export and in proportion to its expansion its internal contradictions, far from disappearing, become more violent and explosive. The attempted assimilation of the glacis by Stalinism can well produce centrifugal forces in the international Stalinist edifice and even in the USSR itself.
In the Stalin-Tito controversy the Stalinists themselves put their finger on the capitalist nature of the structure of these countries in alleging that the regime of private property in agricultural production, commerce and petty enterprises, that is to say in the essential domain of the whole economy in these countries, where petty individual exploitation constantly engenders capitalism.
Where Is Tito Going?
We should follow with great interest but also with caution the evolution of the Moscow-Belgrade conflict.
The reply of the Yugoslav party indicates that Tito is not ready to capitulate and his reconciliation with the Kremlin remains problematical, if not impossible, after such a passage at arms.
There remain consequently three possibilities:
a) That Tito will be overthrown by the revolt of the Stalinist wing of the Yugoslav party, which does not appear in any case to be very important.
b) That he will maintain his present like of independence, which poses necessarily a more radical rupture with the Kremlin and the Stalinists.
c) That he will go over to American imperialism and the bloc of western democracies. But this last eventuality seems in any case only capable of realisation after a long evolution, his present base having been established on socialist ideas and anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist struggles. Above all the most important point for us is not the personal case of Tito, a bureaucrat of the old stock with bonapartist ambitions and tendencies, but the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, the proletariat and poor peasantry placed by the conflict with Moscow in a favourable situation to advance in the path of a more radical rupture with Stalinism.
It is in this direction that the International should act.
The International Secretariat
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An Open Letter to the Communist Party of Yugoslavia
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Written: 1948
Source: Prometheus Research Library, Prometheus Research Series No. 4, New York, 1993
Transcription/Markup/Proofing: John Heckman.
Public Domain: Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 200/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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The following letter by the International Secretariat of the Fourth International was published in the newspaper of the American Socialist Workers Party, the Militant, 26 July 1948.
Paris,
July 1, 1948
To the Central Committee and to All Members of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia
Comrades,
We want to let you know that the attention of the entire international revolutionary workers’ movement is today centered on the conflict in which you have, for some time, been pitted against the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party and the Cominform.
The official press of the Communist parties is seeking to engulf you in a flood of slanders and insults. Their conduct is a good example of how proletarian democracy is dragged in the mud by these people who operate from Moscow the entire international machine which is at the service of the Soviet bureaucracy.
But we are not in the least duped by this system of slander campaigns which has in the past destroyed so many precious forces in the labor movement. Because under the worst difficulties, we have never ceased for one moment, ever since Lenin died, to continue his struggle in Russia and in the entire world for the world communist revolution, against capitalist and imperialist reaction, and against the Soviet bureaucracy which usurped Lenin’s party and the whole Communist International.
We know with what sinister inflexibility the bureaucratic machine in Moscow tries to nip in the bud every aspiration of independence or even a sign of a critical attitude toward itself. This Soviet bureaucracy has nothing in common with the Bolshevism of Lenin and the genuine defense of what still remains of the October conquests in the Soviet Union. The struggle—which has, since 1927, destroyed in Russia the entire Old Guard of the Bolshevik Party of the days of the October Revolution—was led by the Thermidorians of the Russian Revolution, who were able temporarily to triumph over the proletarian revolutionary wing of Russian Bolshevism.
Now you are in a position to understand, in the light of the infamous campaign of which you are the victims, the real meaning of the Moscow Trials and of the whole Stalinist struggle against Trotskyism.
You hold in your hands a mighty power if only you summon enough strength to persevere on the road of the socialist revolution and its program. This road is also the road of independence from the bureaucratic apparatus of Moscow. Looking for a way out are tremendous forces in the entire world labor movement—now caught in a vise between imperialism led from Washington on the one side, and on the other, the Soviet bureaucracy in the Kremlin, interested solely in keeping its own privileged caste interests in Russia.
Keep up your fight! Deepen the significance of your struggle with Moscow and its international machine! Do not yield to imperialist pressures! Establish a regime of genuine workers’ democracy in your party and in your country! Thereby you will contribute immensely to the rebirth of the international workers’ movement.
The International Secretariat of the Fourth International, the organization which unites around its program of Bolshevism and Leninism 35 sections on the five continents, wants to address itself in this our first message to you not concerning those things about which we must be critical of you with regards to your past and more recent course. We wish rather to take note of the promise in your resistance—the promise of victorious resistance by a revolutionary workers’ party against the most monstrous bureaucratic machine that has ever existed in the labor movement, the Kremlin machine.
We shall presently address to you and to your Congress and to all Yugoslav Communists an open letter in which we shall treat in detail our point of view on the historic meaning of your conflict with Moscow and its Cominform.
Long Live the Yugoslav Socialist Revolution! Long Live the Proletarian World Revolution!
International Secretariat of the Fourth International
*****
An Open Letter
To the Congress, Central Committee and Members of the
Yugoslav Communist Party
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Written: 1948
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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This text of the 13 July 1948 Open Letter from the International Secretariat to the Yugoslav Communist Party corresponds to the English version published in the American Socialist Workers Party’s Fourth International, August 1948. In addition to minor spelling revisions, the first of the two slogans which conclude the letter has been retranslated from the French original.[1] (The Fourth International version read: “Yugoslav Communists Unite for a New Leninist International!”)
Comrades,
At its last session the Cominform passed a resolution excommunicating your party and its leadership. This has deeply stirred the members of Communist parties and revolutionary workers throughout the world. How, indeed, could they fail to be stupefied by such an abrupt about-face by the Cominform leaders who suddenly compel them to disparage a country which only yesterday was proclaimed the best model of “People’s Democracy.” Only three months ago, l’Humanité, central organ of the French Communist Party, sang praises to the “land of Tito.” Today, l’Humanité cannot find a slander too vile with which to besmirch your party.
Only recently, Enver Hoxha, premier of Albania, declared at the fourth session of the Albanian People’s Assembly:
Our people could neither enjoy the fruits of their war victories nor be assured of reconstructing their country and progress toward a better life, if it were not for the powerful, fraternal assistance accorded us in all spheres of life by the new Yugoslavia.
Today, the same Enver Hoxha cynically says:
The Central Committee of the Yugoslav Communist Party and its chieftain Tito have disrupted all the economic and political relations with our country....They aim to transform it into a colony of Yugoslavia....They have tried to suppress its independence....
The servility with which most of the leadership of the Communist parties have carried out the orders handed down from above is surpassed only by their evident dishonesty. Your party is accused of “lack of democracy.” At the same time your accusers set up a hue and cry in which your party is condemned without the Communist party members having been informed objectively about the existing differences, without affording you an opportunity to defend yourselves, without letting the members of various Communist parties become acquainted with the text of your reply to the Cominform resolution.
The double-dealing of these “leaders” is shown even more clearly by their refusal to accept your invitation to attend your Congress. This refusal means nothing else but that the leaders of the Communist parties refuse to acquaint their members with the real situation in Yugoslavia. They prefer to despicably deceive the Communist workers throughout the world rather than “disobey” an order sent by Russia.
These facts, coupled with the treatment you are receiving, illustrate the methods of “persuasion” used by the leaders of the Russian Communist Party. They intervene in the life of other Communist parties by means of brutal and ultimatistic ukases; they arbitrarily impose their rule on all parties, without the least consideration for the traditions, experiences or sentiments of the respective party members. At the same time, the leaders of the Russian Communist Party jealously guard their own privileges, regarding as treachery the slightest criticism of their own policies, and arrogating to themselves the right to excommunicate anyone who balks at following slavishly the countless zigzags of their tortuous party line.
The evil you have suddenly discovered, however, has existed for a long time. It existed during the final decade of the Communist International as well as during the five years since its dissolution. The grave sickness of the Communist parties and the main cause of the innumerable setbacks and bloody defeats they have suffered are to be found in the absolute control arrogated to themselves by the leaders of the Russian Communist Party. This control has led to a constant subordination of the interests of the socialist revolution, in one country after another, to the episodic needs confronting Russia.
Today the Kremlin is determined to force you to abandon your industrialization policy, just as in January 1945 it forced Thorez to disarm the French partisans for the benefit of de Gaulle. During the Spanish Civil War, when the workers seized the factories, the Kremlin forced the Spanish Communists to declare that this was “treason.” It instructed the German Communist Party to follow the suicidal course from 1930 to 1933 which permitted Hitler to seize power.
But events each time proved that far from rendering the Soviet Union stronger in the face of the imperialist forces, the weakening of the international proletariat isolated the Soviet Union still more and permitted the imperialists to deal terrible blows, such as that of 1941.
Once again today, in order to maintain their absolute sway over the Cominform, the leaders of the Russian Communist Party do not hesitate to employ against your party, policies which play into the hands of American imperialism and which can be utilized by all the enemies of the working class against the Soviet Union itself.
Comrades, you yourselves have already raised the question of the reason for this non-communist conduct of the Russian leadership toward the Communist parties of other countries. In this connection you might indeed have used the term “degeneration” in your reasoning. One should not fear this word, nor its real meaning and content. The outstanding trait of a Bolshevik is his courage in approaching reality and seeing it as it actually is, no matter how bitter the truth, no matter how painful the examination of this reality may be. It is a crime for a communist to deceive the workers or his own comrades—and this happens to be the real crime that the Communist Party leaders of many countries have just committed once again. But it is an even bigger crime to deceive oneself through fear of the sad reality which one does not wish to accept.
It would be the grossest self-deception to assume even for a moment that a country, governed by a party whose conduct toward its sister parties is so utterly non-communist, can nevertheless play the role of the vanguard of socialism. It would be self-deception to assume that policies which led to crises in so many Communist parties can still remain Leninist policies.
Yes, the Soviet Union and the leadership of the Russian Communist Party have degenerated. Yes, they have ceased to represent the vanguard of the world communist forces since the time they subordinated the interests of the world revolution to their own interests. We repeat: They act in their own interests and not those of the Russian proletariat. The interests of the workers and the oppressed of all countries are one and the same, and the interests of communism are indivisible the world over. That is why the abandonment by the Russian leaders of the cause of communism beyond the Soviet frontiers proves beyond doubt that they have abandoned this same cause inside the Soviet Union itself; that is to say, their degeneration is profound.
Causes of the Degeneration of the Soviet Union
However painful it may seem to you, it is now necessary to put your finger on the social origin of this degeneration. In Lenin’s time, and even after, Communist functionaries in both the party and the government strictly adhered to the rule that their salaries could not be higher than the average wage of a skilled worker. Non-Communist specialists and technicians, whom the young Soviet Republic sorely needed, were of necessity paid higher salaries, but they were placed under the strict control of the workers lest they should abuse those advantages which the state had been compelled to grant them. The workers remained the masters in the factories, in the soviets, in the party. Communist discipline was voluntary, arising from the enthusiasm for the class struggle and the victorious revolution. The party’s internal life, along with that of the Communist International at the time, was regulated by discussion, as impassioned as it was free. The most important decisions were reached on the basis of genuine conviction, that is to say, in accord with the experience and level of consciousness of the party members. The party was intimately tied to its class and through these ties brought the entire proletariat into participation in the running of the state and the economy.
Today all this is changed in the Soviet Union. The soviets are dissolved. The workers do not exercise the slightest control in the factories; instead they are completely at the mercy of the factory manager’s every whim. The discrepancies in basic earnings are even greater than in capitalist countries. Communist functionaries collect salaries as high as those of petty-bourgeois spetzes (specialists). An abyss separates the living conditions of the working masses from those of the bureaucracy which runs the economy and the state. This bureaucracy has completely wiped out inner-party democracy; it has eliminated and murdered the Old Guard Bolsheviks; it has converted the party into a vehicle for protecting its own privileges; it has destroyed the party as the instrument of international communism.
This bureaucracy has today become a closed caste which guards its positions as jealously against the workers at home as it is doing against you.
One of your most remarkable accomplishments in Yugoslavia, just as in the October Revolution in Russia, is the extension of free high school and college education to all children of workers and poor peasants. You must be aware of the fact that as far back as eight years ago the Russian government abolished this enormously progressive development and reintroduced the system of paying for high school and college education, thereby in practice restricting such education to the children of functionaries and well-to-do petty bourgeois, and sentencing the overwhelming majority of children to semi-ignorance. Is this not the best proof that the leaders of the Russian state and party have stopped the forward march toward socialism, and in fact have gone into reverse gear toward an ever increasing social inequality?
The existence of these bureaucratic privileges in Russia, far from being combatted by the leaders of the Communist Party of the USSR, is systematically protected; this also explains at the same time the ideological form assumed by the degeneration of this leadership. In Lenin’s time, the leadership of the Bolshevik Party and of the Communist International, even when directly engaged in negotiations with imperialist powers, openly declared to the world proletariat that capitalism and socialism are two incompatible regimes. Not for one minute did it suspend calling upon the workers of all the capitalist countries to overthrow the rule of their own exploiters, and actively preparing them for it. It always fitted the domestic and foreign policy of the USSR into the framework of the strategy of world socialist revolution, and considered its prime task to be that of giving maximum assistance to the Communist parties of other countries so that they could take advantage of every revolutionary situation which opened up before them for the overthrow of capitalism.
Of course Lenin and the leadership of the Bolshevik Party and the Communist International at that time, could not exclude the possibility, even the necessity, of temporary compromises with imperialism. Every sane revolutionist understands that every war, and certainly the social war of the working class against the capitalist class, is necessarily interrupted by periods of calm, of truces and of armistices. But as Lenin so lucidly explained in “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, such compromises in the class struggle are allowed solely on condition “of knowing how to apply these tactics in such a way as to raise and not lower the general level of proletarian class consciousness, revolutionary spirit, ability to fight and to conquer.”
This conception of Lenin flowed logically from the doctrine of the Bolshevik Party and of the Communist International, according to which the socialist revolution can be only the work of the conscious and sovereign working masses.
Results of Degeneration
The social degeneration of the USSR has brought it to a complete revision of these fundamental principles of Leninism. Today it proclaims and makes all the leaders of the parties which follow it also proclaim that capitalism and socialism are two systems which can live side by side in complete peace and harmony. It categorically forbids the leaders of the Communist parties in bourgeois countries to speak of “revolution” or of the overthrow of capitalism in their countries. On the contrary it orders them to restrict their propaganda to the “defense of the national independence” of their own capitalist countries! These same leaders who today accuse you of “misunderstanding the Marxist-Leninist conception of class and of the state” have themselves kept the communist workers of the capitalist countries in the darkest ignorance on these questions. They were not content only to enter the capitalist governments of France, Italy, Belgium, etc. from 1945 to 1947 and to forget everything that Lenin wrote against the reformist Social-Democracy on the impossibility of “conquering” the bourgeois state apparatus from within and on the necessity of destroying it and replacing it with a new workers’ Soviet state apparatus. They have gone so far during this period as to forbid the workers to make use of strikes for improving their miserable living conditions, and this in countries which are the bastions of European capitalism!
All these maneuvers have not in the least deceived the imperialist bourgeoisie, as the emissaries and foreign agents of the leaders of the Russian Communist Party would have us believe. The bourgeoisie has not for a moment given up its view that the Soviet Union is a mortal enemy. But they have confused, disoriented and deceived the workers of the capitalist countries. Only yesterday the workers saw the leaders of the Communist parties opposing their class movements, whereas today such movements are abruptly and bureaucratically launched. Thus the workers have the impression of being the dupes of a policy which is foreign to their own interests and of being utilized solely as a “maneuverable mass” by their leaders.
This policy broke the revolutionary fervor of the masses which, in France, Italy and elsewhere in 1944, equaled the fervor you experienced in your country. This is explained precisely by the fundamental revision of the very conception of socialism wrought by the leaders of the Russian Communist Party. Whereas Lenin and the Communist International in its initial period considered socialist revolution in the capitalist world the product of mass action, the present leadership of the Russian Communist Party is preoccupied exclusively with the military, economic and territorial expansion of the USSR. Whereas Lenin and the Communist International in its initial period considered it their most important task to assist the Communist parties of other countries onto the road of revolutionary mobilization of the masses in their own countries, the present leadership of the Russian Communist Party, contemptuous of foreign Communist parties and workers—as you know well from your own sad experience!—does not in the least hesitate to bar the revolutionary and socialist road to its fellow-parties when this is required by its own sordid considerations. This break with the Leninist conception of world revolution is the most conclusive ideological proof of the profound degeneration of the present leadership of the Russian Communist Party and of its complete rupture with the interests of the world proletariat.
Under these conditions, it seems particularly cynical for the present leaders of the Russian Communist Party and of the Cominform to accuse you of misunderstanding “proletarian internationalism” and of following a nationalist policy. This is said by those same Russian leaders whose chauvinistic propaganda during the war, in which they refused to draw a distinction between the German workers and their Nazi butchers, was chiefly responsible for the absence of a revolution in Germany, whereas in Yugoslavia the partisan movement was able to attract into its ranks thousands of worker-soldiers from the occupation armies. This is said by a Togliatti who did not hesitate to launch, along with the genuine fascists of the MSI (Movimento Sociale dell’Italia), a chauvinist campaign for the return of former colonies to his capitalist country. This is said by a Thorez whose nationalist hysteria on the question of reparations for imperialist France gives untold satisfaction to bourgeois politicians in the Poincaré tradition. Really, these people are certainly in a very poor position to give lessons on internationalism to anybody.
It is no less true, comrades, that the nationalism introduced into the Communist parties corresponds precisely with this same kind of degeneration which you now discern in Russia. No progress can be made toward socialism unless every trace of nationalism is extirpated from the thinking of communist militants. To fight for the right of self-determination of each nation, to struggle against national oppression, continually introduced and extended under imperialism in its decadent phase, is a primary task for the communist movement. And genuine communists are distinguished from petty-bourgeois nationalists precisely by the fact that they conduct this struggle in an internationalist spirit, always drawing a line between the bourgeoisie and proletariat of the imperialist country, carrying on the struggle within the framework of the revolutionary struggle for the overthrow of capitalism in their own country. It is particularly necessary to eliminate from propaganda all appeals to a national tradition which can injure the workers of other countries, all attacks against nations as such, all territorial demands based on chauvinist arguments. The Austrian and Italian bourgeoisies are today hoping that the Communist parties of their countries, under the directives from the Cominform, will line up in the capitalist camp to “solve” the problem of Carinthia and Trieste in the interests of imperialism. You must understand that there is only one way to foil the infamous maneuvers of the bourgeoisie and of the leaders of the Cominform against your party: that is to appeal boldly to the international solidarity of the workers, to proclaim aloud the right of peoples to self-determination, and to propose solutions of outstanding problems along this line.
You have settled the national question in your country with some degree of success. A truly communist and internationalist attitude toward international problems would not fail to strengthen immeasurably your position in the consciousness and feeling of millions of workers throughout the entire world.
What Road Will You Follow?
Comrades, your Congress which is about to meet, the delegates which will compose it, and the thousands of communist members whom they will represent, find themselves, on this day following the Cominform resolution against your party, confronting decisions of truly historical import. Three roads are open to you and you must choose one of them. Your choice will decide for years, if not for decades, the fate of your country and of its proletariat, and will exercise a profound influence on the evolution and future of the entire world communist movement.
The first road open to you would be to consider that despite the serious injuries dealt you by the leaders of the Russian Communist Party, it is above all necessary today, in the present world situation, to maintain a complete monolithic unity with the policies and ideology of the Russian Communist Party. There are certainly members in your midst who will propose such a course and will even suggest that it is preferable, under these conditions, to make a public apology and a declaration accepting the “criticism” of the Cominform, even to change your leadership, and wait for a “better occasion” to defend your particular conceptions within the “big communist family.”
Such a decision would be in our opinion an irreparable and tragic error and would do the greatest damage not only to your own party and your own working class but to the international proletariat and communist movement, above all to the workers in the USSR. You must by now know the methods and ideas of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party sufficiently well to understand that that body will never be satisfied by public declarations and political decisions. It will demand that all power in the party and the country should pass into the hands of its own “civil and military agents” and of those among you whom it believes it can manipulate like puppets. It will completely eliminate, along with your present leaders, all cadres which think independently, all members who dare raise their voices in protest. It will completely subordinate the interests of the workers and poor peasants of Yugoslavia to the needs of its own diplomatic maneuvers with imperialism. It will smash your party as an independent force and will deal a terrible blow to the socialist consciousness of the workers of your country. It will wind up by physically liquidating all those who dared resist for a moment. The tragic example of so many old Bolshevik leaders in Russia shows that it never pardons even a passing opposition, even when such pardon has been “bought” a thousand times by self-criticism and breast-beating of the most humiliating kind.
Such a decision would deal an even greater blow to the international communist movement. In all countries, the most courageous and independent Communist members, who are today stirred by your action, would be reduced to silence. The most servile elements would triumph everywhere. The pernicious principle that “whoever criticizes the Soviet government is an agent of imperialism,” which has already cost the international Communist movement so dearly, would be more firmly entrenched than ever. Thousands of sincere revolutionary workers, who have with good cause been revolted by the anti-Leninist policies pursued by the Cominform leaders, would fall back again into passivity and skepticism, thereby increasing the isolation everywhere of the communist forces and thereby strengthening the forces of reaction and imperialism. The road would be cleared for new defeats for the international proletariat.
A second road will certainly be suggested, consisting essentially of retiring into Yugoslavia, repelling the attacks and the eventual violence and provocations of the Cominform and its agents, and attempting to “build socialism” in your own country, while concluding trade relations with the powers of Eastern Europe as well as with those of the imperialist West. We will not conceal from you, comrades, that we consider this second road just as pernicious as the first.
It is completely utopian to think it possible to “maneuver” during a whole period between the USSR and the USA without being subject during this same period to a growing pressure from these two giants. The success of “maneuvers” depends in the final analysis on the relationship of forces, and, on the plane of economic, political and military power, the relationship of forces is obviously not in your favor. American imperialism will gladly make some advances to you for that would increase the weight of its arguments in its conversations with Moscow. But what it is looking for basically is not to support you against the USSR but to conclude a compromise with Russia, if necessary at your expense. Not only would the present leaders of the Russian Communist Party have no hesitation about accepting such a compromise, but they would even work furiously to create the greatest economic difficulties for you so as to force you to capitulate or to surrender completely to Yankee imperialism, in order thereby to “demonstrate” to world working-class opinion that every rupture with Moscow signifies going over to the “American camp.”
On the other hand, you must be aware that imperialism will rapidly become increasingly demanding toward you, especially if it is encouraged along this road by Moscow, as is to be feared. Its pressure will first be concentrated on your trade relations. Its first objective will be to include you in the Marshall Plan zone. In the course of putting this into effect, it will aim subsequently to destroy all the social reforms brought about in Yugoslavia in the past three years. To the extent that Russia will isolate you and that your economic difficulties will increase and imperialist pressure sharpen, reaction within your own country will lift its head. The kulak would attempt to make contact with the international market. American capital would penetrate through all the crevices in your mixed economy in order to help them achieve this. Your days would be numbered.
Every policy set up on the basis of ignoring the international contradictions, which are the all-embracing framework in which all problems of Yugoslav policy are posed; every policy which would pose questions of industrialization independently of the problem of securing equipment by means of international trade, and consequently, independently of the pressure of the capitalist world market; every policy of this kind must be rejected forthright. Otherwise the work undertaken by your party can only meet with complete ruin. In view of the slanderous accusations of the leaders of the Cominform, it is imperative to be sharply conscious of the lurking danger of imperialist pressure, so that you will take no step without carefully considering the consequences on that score. Therein lies the main guarantee of genuine revolutionary and socialist progress on your part.
Finally, there remains the third road, the most difficult, bristling with the most obstacles, the genuine communist road for the Yugoslav party and proletariat. This road is the road of return to the Leninist conception of socialist revolution, of return to a world strategy of class struggle. It must start, in our opinion, with a clear understanding of the fact that the Yugoslav revolutionary forces can only become stronger and consolidate their positions thanks to the conscious support of the working masses of their own country and of the entire world. It means above all to understand that the decisive force on the world arena is neither imperialism with its resources and arms, nor the Russian state with its formidable apparatus. The decisive force is the immense army of workers, of poor peasants and of colonial peoples, whose revolt against their exploiters is steadily rising, and who need only a conscious leadership, a suitable program of action and an effective organization in order to bring the enormous task of world socialist revolution to a successful conclusion.
We do not presume to offer you a blueprint. We understand the tremendous difficulties which you must contend with in a poorly equipped country which has been devastated by war. We desire only to point out to you what are, in our opinion, the main lines through which to concretize this international revolutionary policy—the only policy which will enable you to hold out while waiting for new struggles of the masses, to stimulate them and to conquer with them.
To commit oneself to this road means, especially in Yugoslavia itself, to base oneself openly and completely on the revolutionary dynamics of the masses. The Front committees must be organs which are genuinely elected by the workers of city and country, arising from a tightly knit system of workers and of poor farmers.
They must become genuine state organs and must take the place of the present hybrid organs which are relics of the bourgeois state apparatus. They must be the organs of Soviet democracy, in which all workers will have the right to express their opinions and their criticisms without reservation and without fear of reprisal. The right of workers to organize other workers’ parties must be laid down as a principle, subject only to the condition that they take their place within the framework of Soviet legality. The present hybrid constitution must be revised and a new one, taking its inspiration from the Leninist constitution of 1921, must be set up by an assembly of delegates from the workers’ and poor peasants’ committees.
These decisive political changes must be conceived as the end result of a real mass mobilization, to be brought about by your party through carrying these Leninist ideas into the most distant villages of your country, explaining the differences between the Soviet state and other state forms, and the superiority of the former type. That is the way Lenin did it in 1917, with the greatest simplicity. A vast campaign of re-education must be started, together with a period of discussion and of unhampered expression of opinion by the workers. The latter will express their criticisms of the present state of affairs in their assemblies. The party will finally know, directly, what the real aspirations of the masses are, and will obtain the constructive suggestions of the working-class masses, whose vast creative energy is the surest guarantee of socialism. Your party has nothing to fear from such a development. The confidence of the masses in it will grow enormously and it will become the effective collective expression of the interests and desires of the proletariat of its country.
It will not be enough, however, to reestablish the complete sovereignty of the committees, to change the standing army into a genuine workers’ and peasants’ militia, to replace appointed judges with those elected by the masses, to reestablish and firmly maintain the principle of payment of functionaries on the basis of the average wages of a skilled worker. The problem of the revolutionary transformation of your country is essentially an economic one, in which the question of the peasantry takes first place.
There is but one Leninist way to approach this problem: to seek support from the poor and exploited layers of the country and to be careful not to violate the laws whereby your economy functions, but on the contrary to utilize them in the interests of socialism. The land must be nationalized and a struggle waged against the concentration of income and property in the hands of the kulaks. But these measures cannot be made solely by administrative means, neither by decrees nor by force. What is necessary is that the immense majority of the peasants must view it as in their own interests. For this, a review of the Five Year Plan and the relations between agriculture and industry is necessary. The plan for industrialization must be able, above all things, to guarantee a growing quantity of consumer goods for the peasants. By means of stabilizing the dinar and a strict system of dividing industrial consumer goods, the state can offer more to the small and middle peasant than the kulak will be able to give him. It is necessary at the same time to give the utmost support to the freely formed cooperatives of the small peasants, to reserve all modern working equipment for them, grant them cheap credit, and to establish such conditions for them that they will live better and earn more than the middle peasants who continue to work their lands as individuals. This will prove to be the surest method of isolating the kulak in the village and of developing and accelerating voluntary cooperation locally.
Progress of this kind will be realizable only by changing the method of drawing up and verifying plans. No group of spetzes can ascertain mathematically the real equilibrium between the needs of the workers, those of the peasants, and the capital needs of the economy, upon which equilibrium depends the harmonious planning and development of the country. It is essential that the masses be induced to participate as actively as possible in the work of planning, that the greatest heed be paid to their complaints, and that the needs expressed by them be the primary factor in planning.
Complete sovereignty of the factory committees must be established in the plants, and genuine workers’ control of production must be instituted. The trade unions must be granted their real function, which is to defend the interests of the workers, even against the Soviet state if necessary, as Lenin repeatedly asserted. In a word it is necessary to give the workers and poor peasants the clear feeling that they are the masters in the country, and that the state and the progress of the economy are in direct correspondence with their own interests.
We do not at all conceal that such a policy will encounter very great obstacles in your country and even in your own ranks. A complete re-education of your cadres in the spirit of genuine Leninism would be necessary. Still less do we conceal that world imperialism and the present leadership of the Russian State would furiously attack your policy, for it would appear to them a mortal threat to their acquired positions. But if you will apply the same Leninist principles in your foreign policy, you can be sure of powerful support from the workers and the oppressed of the entire world, and your cause cannot lose.
You would have to make a sharp break with all the practices of traditional secret diplomacy and return to the revolutionary diplomacy practiced in the time of Lenin; you would have to become the champion and active supporter of all colonial peoples revolting against their imperialist masters; you would have to proclaim to the world the conditions for a just peace, without annexations or reparations; you would have to demand the immediate withdrawal of the occupation troops of all the great powers from all occupied countries, and strict application of the right of self-determination of peoples in all disputed questions. With one blow you will gain the sympathy of the Austrian and German masses who today feel themselves deceived and betrayed by all parties. You would have to develop and sharpen your propaganda in favor of the Danubian Federation by giving it its classical communist form and by launching the slogan for the Balkan Federation of Soviet Socialist Republics among the workers and poor peasants of neighboring countries, who would take it up with enthusiasm. And finally it would be necessary to incorporate this propaganda within the concrete framework of propaganda for the SOCIALIST SOVIET UNITED STATES OF EUROPE; to convoke a conference at Belgrade of the trade-union and workers’ representatives from all the countries of Europe, including Germany and Austria; to draw up with them a plan for the economic reconstruction of the continent on a socialist basis, in opposition to the Marshall Plan, and to make this socialist plan the central axis for revolutionary propaganda in Europe and in the world.
Your possibilities for action along the road of genuine Leninism disclose themselves to be enormous. But your historical responsibility far surpasses everything which has been outlined above. Millions of workers throughout the world are today profoundly disgusted with the policies and methods used by the present leaders of the Cominform. Unwilling to pass over into the imperialist camp in any guise whatever, they vainly seek a new pole of attraction, a new political leadership. Only the vanguard of this mass has at this time found the road toward our organization, the FOURTH INTERNATIONAL. You can become the mobilization point for this mass of revolutionary workers and thus, with a single blow, completely change the present condition of paralysis within the world working-class movement, the stranglehold of the agents of Washington and of the degenerated Russian bureaucracy. The social struggles which are developing and will develop within all countries will thereby be given the opportunity for a successful revolutionary conclusion. The Third World War, which threatens to throw the USSR and all of Europe into an abyss, can be prevented. The socialist future will unfold in all its glory before humanity.
Comrades, we address this letter to you because we are conscious of the terrible dilemma in which you find yourselves; because we understand exactly the tremendous responsibility weighing upon you, and because we consider it our communist duty to assist you in resolving the present crisis in communism along proletarian and Leninist lines.
We have many and important differences with your past and recent policies. We are in complete disagreement with the theory and practice of “People’s Democracy” for we do not believe in any other road from capitalism to socialism than the dictatorship of the proletariat. We believe that the use and propagation of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ways of living (servants, livery, titles, officers’ stripes, decorations) can only serve to demoralize real communists. But we are conscious of the enormous difficulties involved in a discussion between us, in view of the separation in activities which has existed between us for so many years. For this reason we consider it our duty to convey our ideas to you in a long and fruitful discussion, in the course of which we can each advise the other of our experiences in the revolutionary struggle and can clarify our differences in a spirit of genuine proletarian and communist fraternity.
Our organization, the Fourth International, originated in the Left Opposition of the Bolshevik Party, which 25 years ago already saw the germs of the degeneration of the Russian Communist Party which you are discovering today. Hunted, persecuted, expelled, the Left Opposition fought nevertheless for ten years for reintegration into the official Communist movement. Only when the present leadership of the Russian Communist Party surrendered the German proletariat to the executioner Hitler without a struggle, and thereby opened a period of bloody defeats for the world working class, did our movement come to the conclusion that a new revolutionary International had to be built. Since then, the bureaucrats who now lead the Russian State have poured a ceaseless stream of vile slander over our International and no crime has been too sordid for them in their attempts to destroy us. Just as today they call you “agents of imperialism,” so they have labeled us “fascist spies,” when in reality hundreds of our best cadres and leaders gave their lives in the struggle against fascism. Just as today they are organizing the assassination of your leadership, so did they manage to assassinate Leon Trotsky, organizer of the October victory, creator of the Red Army, the greatest leader of the Communist movement since the death of Lenin—Trotsky, who just a few days before his death, expressed his unshakable devotion to communism and to the real Soviet Union of the workers and peasants in his moving “Letter to the Soldiers of the Red Army.”
But all these crimes did not succeed in smashing the FOURTH INTERNATIONAL because nothing can smash genuine Leninism! Today it has sections in 35 different countries on all continents, consisting of battle-tested and experienced revolutionary Communist members who stand for what is best in their class. Although weak in material resources, its Second World Congress, held last April in Paris, demonstrated that it was strong in political cohesion, in program, and in its clear understanding of present-day reality. Today it is launching in all countries a vast campaign protesting against the bureaucratic measures which the Cominform has taken against you. It appeals to communist workers of all countries to send their delegations to Yugoslavia, in order to make a spot check of the real policy followed by your party. Tomorrow it will make your documents known in 20 different languages—for workers’ democracy is not just an idle phrase to the Fourth International, and a communist cannot permit a member to be judged without a hearing. It asks that you allow a delegation from our leadership to attend your Congress, in order to establish contact with the Yugoslav communist movement and to set up fraternal ties which can serve only the interests of the world communist revolution.
Comrades, the cause of communism, of the revolutionary emancipation of the proletariat is invincible. No force in the world can prevent the genuine communists from ridding themselves of slanderers and would-be assassins so that they can go forward boldly toward their revolutionary goal. The quicker this task is done, the faster will the world revolution triumph.
Yugoslav Communists, Let Us Unite Our Efforts for a New Leninist International! For the World Victory of Communism!
The International Secretariat of the Fourth International
July 13, 1948
Notes
1 Les congrès de la IVe Internationale, Vol. 3, Bouleversements et crises de l’après-guerre (1946-1950) (Montreuil: Editions La Brèche-PEC, 1988), 394.
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Privas-Marin Resolution on the Yugoslav Crisis
PCI Resolution on the Yugoslavia Crisis
Written: 1948
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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The following resolution, submitted by Privas (Jacques Grimblatt) and Marcel Marin (Marcel Gibelin), was adopted by the Fifth Congress of the French Parti Communiste Internationaliste, held in July 1948. The French text appeared in the PCI’s internal bulletin, La vie du parti No. 1, August 1948. The translation is by the Prometheus Research Library.
The crisis which has broken out in the Cominform between Tito and the Kremlin should be considered from the standpoint:
1) of the underlying causes of this crisis;
2) of the prospects for development of this crisis;
3) of our intervention into these events.
A precise analysis is necessary exactly because of the importance of the repercussions this event is having and will have among the ranks of the Stalinist workers.
1) The Causes of the Crisis
The Stalinist policy has as its underlying line the exploitation of the workers movement for the needs and the defense of the interests exclusively of the privileged bureaucrats of the USSR.
In the countries of the buffer zone this policy takes the concrete form of exploiting these countries: economically, diplomatically and strategically (preferential treaties, privileged treatment of the ruble, exploitation of the economy to benefit the Red Army or the Soviet state).
This policy which preserves capitalist relations in the economy out of fear of the masses, which blocks the development of the buffer zone countries, necessarily creates a profound crisis in these countries. This crisis is expressed in the pressure of the bourgeois elements to re-establish ties with imperialism, and even in halfhearted notions of finding a solution on the part of indigenous Stalinist leaders (Dimitrov proposing a Balkan federation). Against these pressures and notions, in order to contain the crisis while maintaining its exploitation, the Kremlin is obliged increasingly to utilize methods of terror
a) against the bourgeois politicians
b) against the revolutionary elements
c) and even to replace the indigenous Stalinists with direct emissaries of the Kremlin (five “Russian” members on the seven-member Bulgarian PB).
This general situation, the necessary result of the application of the Stalinists’ policy, is governed by military and police measures, but this does not resolve the crisis. If in Yugoslavia the Stalinist CP has been led to resist this Russification, it is because, having assumed full responsibility for the state, it must respond to the needs of Yugoslav society and of each of its components: to assure a minimum of economic stability and to somewhat satisfy the needs of the different social classes. Complete control by the Kremlin absolutely prevents the fulfillment of this task.
If this situation—which is fundamentally that of all the countries of the buffer zone—has provoked active resistance first in Yugoslavia, this is due to its particular situation originating in the struggle of the Yugoslav masses during the occupation, which gave the Yugoslav CP a mass base and much more independence.
Stalin could not permit such independence in a party—especially of the buffer zone—without risking the breakup, not only of the system of exploitation of the buffer zone, but also of the whole hierarchical police state system of world Stalinism.
2) Prospects for the Crisis
One thing is certain: if it is impossible in general for a customary transitional situation to be maintained in the countries of the buffer zone, it is even more impossible in an isolated country.
The importance of the situation that has been created in Yugoslavia is that it objectively poses to the Yugoslav masses—not in general terms, but one could say immediately—the need to choose between socialism and capitalism.
The choice, even if it is still muddled, will necessarily lead to discussion and struggles between currents and classes in Yugoslavia.
The Yugoslav CP can only capitulate to the Kremlin, to the U.S., or embark on the path of revolution—although of course it is not possible to predict today which path will be taken or what the pace of development will be.
In any case, it is almost certain that without an intervention by the proletariat of the buffer zone and of the world, the path taken by the Yugoslav proletariat will not be that of revolution. Capitulation to the Kremlin or to the U.S. would be inevitable.
3) The Thrust of Our Intervention
The first major crack in the Stalinist apparatus is necessarily leading immense masses of Stalinist workers to fundamentally reconsider Stalinist politics. Obviously, we cannot remain indifferent to an event of this importance; rather we must intervene aggressively to help the proletariat as a whole to understand the Stalinist betrayal, and the Yugoslav proletarians to find the path of revolution.
In the Western countries, we must give an overall explanation of the causes of the Yugoslav crisis, demonstrating in particular the Stalinist conception of the defense of the USSR, the counterrevolutionary nature of the ties imposed by Moscow and of the theory and practice of “people’s democracy.”
To the Yugoslav proletarians we will demonstrate that the rupture with Moscow is the indispensable step for the struggle for socialism, and we will indicate the concrete and programmatic paths that make it possible (soviets, proletarian democracy, appeal to proletarians of other countries).
We do not at all reproach the I.S. for appealing to the Yugoslav CP and its CC. This step is appropriate given the relations between the masses and the CP. But we do object to these letters for idealizing Tito and the Yugoslav CP (revolutionary workers party—“continue your struggle for socialism”).*
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* This objection does not in any way signify a disagreement with the I.S. on the nature of the USSR, the buffer zone, and Stalinism.
On the other hand, the issue of La Vérité devoted to Yugoslavia, which defends the point of view of the I.S., provides no useful explanation when it gives the apparatus’ own laws as the cause of the crisis of the apparatus.
If this resolution is adopted, it does not mean that the PCI exempts itself from the discipline of the international leadership.
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Letter on Yugoslavia Sent to the IEC by the RCP (Britain)
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Written: 1948
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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The following letter to the International Executive Committee of the Fourth International by British Revolutionary Communist Party leader Jock Haston is undated, but apparently written in the summer of 1948 and was never published in the internal bulletins of the American Socialist Workers Party. The text is taken from a photocopy in the collection of the Prometheus Research Library. Excerpts from the Open Letters by the International Secretariat of the Fourth International cited in the text are from a different translation than the English versions reprinted in this bulletin.
To the IEC
Dear Comrades,
The Yugoslav-Cominform dispute offers the Fourth International great opportunities to expose to rank and file Stalinist militants the bureaucratic methods of Stalinism. It is possible to underline the way in which the Stalinist leaderships suppress any genuine discussion on the conflict by distorting the facts and withholding the replies of the YCP leadership from their rank and file. By stressing such aspects of the Yugoslav expulsion, we can have a profound effect on militants in the Communist Parties.
However, our approach to this major event must be a principled one. We cannot lend credence, by silence on aspects of YCP policy and regime, to any impression that Tito or the leaders of the YCP are Trotskyist, and that great obstacles do not separate them from Trotskyism. Our exposure of the bureaucratic manner of the expulsion of the YCP must not mean that we become lawyers for the YCP leadership, or create even the least illusion that they do not still remain, despite the break with Stalin, Stalinists in method and training.
In our opinion, the Open Letters of the IS to the YCP Congress failed to fulfil these absolutely essential conditions. They failed to pose directly and clearly what is wrong, not only with the CPSU, but with the YCP. The whole approach and the general tone of the letters are such as to create the illusion that the YCP leadership are communists, mistaken in the past, and discovering for the first time the evils of the bureaucratic methods of Moscow, instead of leaders who have actively participated in aiding the bureaucracy and acting as its agents in the past.
The letters appear to be based on the perspective that the leaders of the YCP can be won over to the Fourth International. Under the stress of events, strange transformations of individuals have taken place, but it is exceedingly unlikely, to say the least, that Tito and other leaders of the YCP can again become Bolshevik-Leninists. Tremendous obstacles stand in the way of that eventuality: past traditions and training in Stalinism, and the fact that they themselves rest on a Stalinist bureaucratic regime in Yugoslavia. The letters failed to point out the nature of these obstacles, fail to underline that for the leadership of the YCP to become communists, it is necessary for them not only to break with Stalinism, but to repudiate their own past, their present Stalinist methods, and to openly recognise that they themselves bear a responsibility for the building of the machine now being used to crush them. Here it is not a question of communists facing a “terrible dilemma,” with an “enormous responsibility” weighing on them, to whom we offer modest advice: it is a question of Stalinist bureaucrats becoming communists.
The aim of such Open Letters can only be limited. By placing on record a correct and principled analysis of the role of the Stalinist bureaucracy and that of the YCP leadership, by offering aid to the YCP in a clearly defined communist struggle, the Open Letters could be useful propaganda, aiding the approach to the rank and file seeking a communist lead.
As they stand, however, by their silence on fundamental aspects of the regime in Yugoslavia and YCP policy, the letter strike an opportunist note.
It is not our experience that the most courageous and most independent communist militants “are today stimulated by your [the YCP] action.” The Cominform crisis has rather sown confusion in the CP ranks and disorientated its supporters. That is to our advantage. But although it is a relatively easy task to expose the Cominform manoeuvres, there is sufficient truth in some of their accusations against Tito—particularly with regard to the internal regime, the National Front—to cause among Stalinist rank and filers an uneasiness with regard to the leaders of the YCP. That gives us an opportunity to win these militants not to the cause of Tito, but to Trotskyism.
Tito is attempting, and will attempt, to follow an independent course between Moscow and Washington, without altering the bureaucratic machine or turning to proletarian internationalism. A bureaucratic regime, resting as it does mainly on the peasantry, can have no independent perspective between the Soviet Union and American imperialism. The main emphasis of the letters should have been to show the necessity for a radical break with the present policy of the YCP, the introduction of soviet democracy within the party and the country, coupled with a policy of proletarian internationalism. The position must be posed to Yugoslav militants, not as a choice between three alternatives—the Russian bureaucracy, American imperialism, proletarian internationalism—but, first and foremost, as a choice between proletarian democracy within the regime and party, proletarian internationalism, and the present bureaucratic setup which must inevitably succumb before the Russian bureaucracy or American imperialism.
The IS letters analyse the dispute solely on the plane of the “interference” of the CPSU leaders, as if it were here solely a question of that leadership seeking to impose its will without consideration for the “traditions, the experience and the dealings” of militants. But the dispute is not simply one of a struggle of a Communist Party for independence from the decrees of Moscow. It is a struggle of a section of the bureaucratic apparatus for such independence. The stand of Tito represents, it is true, on the one hand the pressure of the masses against the exactions of the Russian bureaucracy, against the “organic unity” demanded by Moscow, discontent at the standards of the Russian specialists, pressure of the peasantry against too rapid collectivisation. But on the other hand, there is the desire of the Yugoslav leaders to maintain an independent bureaucratic position and further aspirations of their own.
It is not sufficient to lay the crimes of international Stalinism at the door of the leadership of the CPSU. Not only in respect to Yugoslavia, but also in respect to other countries, the Open Letter gives the entirely false impression that it is the Russian leadership which is solely responsible. To pose the relations in the international Stalinist movement in the manner of the IS letter—that the leadership of the CPSU “forced Thorez to disarm the French partisans,” “forced the Spanish communists to declare...that the seizure of the factories...was ‘a treason’,” “completely prohibits the leaderships of the Communist Parties in the capitalist countries from speaking of revolution”—can create illusions that the leaders of the national Stalinist parties could be good revolutionists, if only Moscow would let them. It is true that the degeneration of the CPs flowed basically from the degeneration in the Soviet Union. But the sickness of the Stalinist movement is also accountable by the utter corruption of the national leaderships who are bound up in the bureaucratic machine. These leaders actively participate in the preparation of the crimes. So also for Tito, it was not a matter of having been “forced” to carry out the wished of Moscow in the past.
It is impermissible to slur over the nature of the YCP, its identity on fundamental points with other Stalinist parties. Such a slurring over can only disorientate Stalinist workers. Yet every attempt is made by the IS to narrow the gulf that separates the policy of the YCP from Bolshevik-Leninism. What other conclusion can we draw from statements such as the following:
“...the Cominform accuse you of misunderstanding ‘proletarian internationalism’ and of following a nationalist policy. This is said by that same Russian leadership whose chauvinist propaganda during the war...is largely responsible for the absence of a revolution in Germany, whereas [our emphasis] in Yugoslavia the partisan movement was able to draw to its ranks thousands of proletarian soldiers from the armies of occupation. This is said by Togliatti, who has not hesitated to throw himself, alongside the real fascists of the Movimento Sociale el Italia (MSI), in a chauvinistic campaign for the return to the capitalist fatherland of its former colonies. This is said by Thorez, whose nationalist hysteria on the question of reparations for imperialist France delights the bourgeois heirs of Poincaré.”
It is true that the Yugoslav Stalinists settled, with some success, the national problem inside their own country. It was their programme with regard to this question that enabled them to win over members of the quisling armies. But the comrades must be aware that the propaganda of the YCP towards Germany was of the same chauvinistic character as that of the Russian and other Stalinist parties. The IS letter deals with the necessity for proletarian internationalism in the abstract, without taking up the concrete question of YCP policy today and in the past. It was surely necessary to point out concretely what this proletarian internationalism means, by dealing with the past and present policy of the YCP, which has been no whit less chauvinistic than that of other Stalinist parties. The IS mentions Togliatti’s chauvinism, and Thorez’ nationalist hysteria, and leaves the impression of a favourable comparison between the policy of other Stalinist parties and that of the YCP. We cannot be silent on the YCP’s chauvinistic campaign around Trieste, their attitude towards reparations, their uncritical support for the Russian bureaucracy’s demand for reparations from the German people. It is necessary to take up these questions so that it shall be clear precisely what the gulf is between a nationalist and an internationalist policy, and precisely what it is that Yugoslav militants must struggle against.
But there is another aspect of the IS letters which cannot pass by without the IEC adopting an attitude and expressing an opinion.
The World Congress majority adopted a position that the buffer countries, including Yugoslavia, were capitalist countries. It rejected the resolution of the RCP that these economies were being brought into line with that of the Soviet Union and could not be characterised as capitalist. The amendment of the British party to the section “The USSR and Stalinism” was defeated. But it is evident from these letters that the IS has been forced by events to proceed from the standpoint of the British party, that the productive and political relations in Yugoslavia are basically identical with those of the Soviet Union.
If indeed there exists in Yugoslavia a capitalist state, then the IS letters can only be characterised as outright opportunist. For the IS does not pose the tasks in Yugoslavia which would follow if bourgeois relations existed there as the dominant form. The letters are based on conclusions which can only flow from the premise that the basic overturn of capitalism and landlordism has taken place.
The second Open Letter gives several conditions necessary if Yugoslavia is to go forward with true revolutionary and communist progress. Yet nowhere does [it] call for the destruction of bourgeois relations in the economy and the overturn in the bourgeois system and regime. The tasks laid down in the latter are:
“The committees of the Front...must be organs of soviet democracy....
“To revise the present Constitution [based on that of the Soviet Union]....
“To admit in principle the right of the workers to organise other working class parties, on condition that these latter place themselves in the framework of soviet legality....
“To procure the broadest participate of the masses in the sphere of planning....
“To establish the full sovereignty of the factory committees...to set up a real workers’ control of production.”
And so on. Nowhere did the IS deem it necessary to call on the Yugoslav workers to overthrow capitalism. Had the IS been able to base itself on the World Congress document, that would have been their foremost, principled demand. The comrades will remember that the Congress document gives as its first reason why “the capitalist nature of the buffer zone is apparent,” that “Nowhere has the bourgeoisie as such been destroyed or expropriated.” Why no mention of this in the Open Letters? Of all the seven conditions given in the Congress document as making “apparent” the capitalist nature of Yugoslavia and other buffer countries, the IS letter mentions only one—the nationalisation of the land. But even here, the question of the failure to nationalise the land is raised not from the point of view of proving the capitalist nature of Yugoslavia. It is raised to point out, correctly, that the nationalisation of the land is necessary in order to combat the concentration of income and of land in the hands of the kulaks. The question is raised in the general context of the letter, as an aid to the socialist development of agriculture in a country where capitalism and landlordism have been overthrown, but the danger of a new exploitation is still present in the countryside.
Not only are the main tasks posed in the Open Letter identical to those to be carried out to cleanse a state similar in productive and political relations to the Soviet Union, but we must add that the impression given is that these relations are a great deal healthier than in Russia.
The articles appearing in our international press revealed one thing: the thesis adopted by the World Congress failed to provide a clear guide to the problems that arose from the Cominform-Yugoslav split and the tasks of the revolutionaries in connection with the regime and its economic base.
We appeal to the IEC to reject the orientation in the Open Letter, and to correct and repair the damage which has been done, by re-opening the discussion on the buffer zones and bringing our position into correspondence with the real economic and political developments of these countries.
With fraternal greetings,
Yours
J. Haston
on behalf of the Central Committee, RCP
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