Click on title to link to article by Alan Woods concerning the crisis of the world capitalism economic order. This article is presented for informational purposes, some of Woods' conclusions I agree with, some not. The main point, in any case, for our purposes today is to not only analyze what the particular breakdown of the international capitalist order is at the moment but how to overthrow that order and create a more rational socialist order. As we now know from painful experience there is no economic crisis that the capitalists can not "solve". Economic analysis helps but organizing the labor movement is critical.
Showing posts with label revisionism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label revisionism. Show all posts
Saturday, September 28, 2019
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Introduction to C.L.R. James' "World Revolution 1917-1936"
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
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Introduction to World Revolution 1917-1936
This Introduction for the new edition of World Revolution 1917-1936 by C.L.R. James was written by Al Richardson the editor of Revolutionary History. The new edition was published by Humanities Press in 1993.
Introduction to World Revolution
C.L.R. James’ World Revolution, here presented in a new edition, was one of the few attempts made at the time to synthesise the experience of the revolutionary movement following the First World War. In judging its significance, both in its own time and for ours, it is worth bearing in mind the circumstances that gave rise to it.
The sheer weight of the apparatus of the Soviet Union and of the Comintern had established a virtual monopoly over Marxist thought by the mid 1930s. Dissident currents, whether of ‘right’ (Bukharinist or Brandlerite) or of ‘left’ coloration (Bordigist, Korschite or Trotskyist) had been successfully marginalised and reduced to small group existence by massive propaganda, gangsterism or terror.
Early in 1934 a dozen or so members of the Communist League, the first British Trotskyist organisation, at the instigation of Denzil Harber and Stewart Kirby and with Trotsky’s support, had left the parent body to set up a faction, later called the Marxist Group, inside the Independent Labour Party, which had itself parted company with the Labour Party a couple of years earlier. By this time C.L.R. James had already arrived in Britain and had made contact with members of the Labour Party in Nelson in Lancashire, but when he came down to live in Boundary Road in north west London he was recruited into the Trotskyist movement and joined the Marxist Group working in the ILP.1
In both groups the British Trotskyists were very few in number at the time he encountered them, and whilst the main body had with difficulty been able to sustain a monthly printed paper from 1933 onwards, the entrist organisation in the ILP had only been able to issue a few duplicated pamphlets, and, to put over their viewpoint, had been obliged to sell the Militant, a journal published by their American co-thinkers.
Trotskyism was not a popular standpoint during the mid 1930s in Britain. The wider Labour movement was more defensive than ever and was still recovering painfully from the split in the Labour Party at the time of the formation of the National Government in 1931. At the same time the Communist party was itself just recuperating from its reduction to the rank of a tiny sect during the “Third Period” of the Comintern, and was enjoying a period of rapid growth. The increase in the power of Nazi Germany made the USSR seem an attractive ally, even in some establishment circles, and the adoption of the policy of the Popular Front enabled the party to make a far wider appeal than it had ever done before, setting the tone for the ideological life of the left for the next decade. The Communist Party was able to infiltrate or take over existing organisations, such as the Labour Party’s student and youth groups, and to form a number of satellite bodies catering for the different interest groups in society.
The most effective of these was the Left Book Club, which came to enjoy a circulation of 57,000 and which was founded in May 1936 in partnership with the publisher Gollancz. Many of its titles were pure Soviet propaganda at its most mendacious, and of a virulently anti-Trotskyist character into the bargain, such books as Dudley Collard’s Soviet Justice and the Trial of Radek and Others, the Webbs’ Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation, and J.R. Campbell’s Soviet Policy and Its Critics.
The Club’s major programmatic book justifying the foreign policy of the Soviet Union, World Politics, 1918-1936, written by the Communist Party’s most cynical theorist, R. Palme Dutt, appeared in 1936. Unable to match anything like these resources, the British Trotskyists felt very much on the defensive, so C.L.R. James decided to use his contacts with a rival publisher to try to mount a counter-operation. As he later described it,
“There were no books in English, only pamphlets, so after a time I said ‘Why haven’t we a book in English?’, and they said that it was about time they had one. I finally picked myself up and got hold of Frederick Warburg ... I told Warburg and he thought that there was scope for the publication of books that were Marxist but not C.P. So I went away to Brighton and wrote this book in three or four months”.2
Although oral tradition in South Wales in the 1960s still pointed to a house where allegedly James worked on the book while campaigning down there for the ILP at the time of the Abyssinian War, it was largely put together, as he says, on the south coast. The local Communist Party bookshop in Brighton served as the basis for some of his material, though for many of his earlier sources he had to rely upon French and American non-Stalinist Marxists, and particularly upon the rich collection brought back by Harry Wicks from his course at the Lenin School in Moscow, whose expertise he thanks in his preface.3
The book finally came out in early 19374 to a less than enthusiastic reception. In the press dominated by them the Communist Party refused even to allow advertisements for it5 and, where in the nature of the case they were obliged to recognise its existence, such as in Gollancz’s Left Book Club, they attacked it with great hostility.6 No less hostile was the reaction of the British colonial authorities, who forbade the export of copies to India.7 This did not prevent it from being smuggled in and exercising some influence. G Selvarajatnan, later leader of the great strike in the Madras textile mills was converted to Trotskyism upon reading it, and Leslie Goonewardene’s Rise and Fall of the Comintern published ten years afterwards in Bombay was largely based on it.8
It has continued to suffer from neglect, being the least disseminated and commented upon of all James’ full length works, and the residue of Stalinist hostility towards it remains, even in New Left circles who are otherwise inclined to idolise its author. For James’ biographer, Paul Buhl, it is “James’ least original major work”, its “dogmatic weakness” being that it makes Stalinism “the deus ex machina for the failure of world revolution”.9
Such criticisms are based upon the view that World Revolution is largely a summary of the world view of Trotsky and the movement that followed him, Buhl for example seeing only in James’ treatment of the German crisis any differences with Trotsky.10 As a matter of fact, the book is far more original than it is given credit for, and neither James nor Trotsky regarded themselves as being in agreement over the basic argument contained in it. As James himself recalled,
“When I began to attack the Trotskyist position, some people in the United States said, ‘when we read your book World Revolution we said that it won’t be long before James is attacking the Trotskyist movement’. In this book it was pointed out to me in a particular paragraph. I agreed with the interpretation. I was told, ‘James, when some of us read that quotation, we said that ultimately James will go’”.11
These doubts were also shared by Trotsky himself. Whilst calling World Revolution “a very good book”, he criticised it for “a lack of dialectical approach”, considering that James’ theory of the development of Soviet politics wanted “to begin with the degeneration complete”. Whilst James’ chapter on the German events of 1923 is entitled Stalin Kills the German Revolution, Trotsky argued to the contrary that “the German revolution had more influence on Stalin than Stalin on the German Revolution. In 1923 the whole party was in a fever over the coming revolution”. Whilst considering the incredible policy of the German Communist Party during the accession of Hitler to power ten years later, James asks himself “Why did Stalin persist in this policy? How could the Soviet bureaucracy possibly conceive that any useful purpose could be served by letting Hitler into Power?”. Trotsky on the other hand argued that in fact “Stalin hoped that the German Communist Party would win a victory, and to think that he had a ‘plan’ to allow Fascism to come to power is absurd”.12 This suggestion, that the blunders of the Comintern and the KPD during 1930-3 were part of a deliberate plan was to occasion considerable embarrassment to the British Trotskyists, for it was immediately seized upon by their Communist opponents to discredit the book.13 Trotsky thus considered that the weakness of James’ book consisted in its not allowing for the development of Soviet politics, of allowing no movement within them, and of telescoping effect and intention, a sort of historical post hoc propter hoc argument.
The reason for this difference becomes apparent when we examine the secondary sources used by James in the construction of the book, and the major models that influenced his thought world at the time. We can dismiss straight away the suggestion made in Paul Buhl’s book, that he was indebted in any way to the “proletarian science” developed in the British Communist Party.14 These were precisely the people against whom he was polemicising. His main historical models were the classical historians, and the great modern historians of the classical world, such as Grote, whose works remained upon his bookshelf up to his death. They also included the classic Marxist histories, particularly The Eighteenth Brumaire which James regarded as “an indispensable book for the student of any period of History” (p.32n.1 below), and Trotsky’s My Life and the History of the Russian Revolution. We know that at the same time he was reading the works of the great French radical historians about the revolution of 1789 as preliminary research for his own future book, Black Jacobins (cf. pp.22-5 below). He must also have been acquainted with the historical labours of FA Ridley, for whom he maintained an affection to the end of his life, since they were both being published by Secker and Warburg at about the same time.
But it is the literature of the French and American non-Stalinist and non-Trotskyist left that supplies the key to understanding the distinctive features of World Revolution in that it shares the common assumption that the degeneration of the Russian Revolution began much earlier and proceeded at a more rapid rate that Trotsky would allow. One reference shows that James was acquainted with the literature of the Que Faire15 group, and we may note that Souvarine’s book, which he often cites, supported the Kronstadt insurrection against Soviet power as early as 1921.16 We know from other indications that at this time James was already acquainted with the “State Capitalist” theories about the USSR held by the French Union Communiste group led by Henri Chazé,17 as well as being in touch with some of BJ Field’s supporters in Canada, and conversant with the material of Weisbord, Oehler, and Erwin Ackernecht.18 James was particularly open to theories of the sort dismissed at the time by Trotskyists as “ultra left”, for after a long and sterile experience with entry activity within the ILP he had come to reject the tactic of entry altogether, refused to join the group that was pursuing such a course in the Labour Party, and had entered into a dispute with the Trotskyist International Secretariat on this basis.19 After a fragile unity was forced upon the British groups in 1938 he was sent to the USA, partly to give a free run to his longstanding opponent Denzil Harber, and partly to “straighten him out”.20 The distinctive position of World Revolution thus lies in the fact that its author was already in the process of rejecting Trotskyism, and his ideas were about to evolve towards the position he assumed during the Cannon-Shachtman conflict of 1939-40, and later in his State Capitalism and World Revolution of 1950, a political stance described by Robin Blackburn as “Anarcho-Bolshevism” (whatever that means).21 During the period that James was writing this book, there was, in fact, in both the United States and France, an entire left-wing thought world of groups who vied with each other to place the degeneration of Bolshevism and Marxism as early in time as possible (Oehlerites, Stammites, Eiffelites, Marlenites, etc, in the USA and in France, Cahiers Spartacus, Que Faire and the Union Communiste). It was a natural result of the disillusion produced among the left at the time by the rise of both Stalinism and Nazism, a pessimistic feeling that there was something deeply wrong with Marxism as they had inherited it. Although World Revolution is still quite close to the more recognisably ‘Trotskyist’ approach to these questions, it shows significant influences from this spectrum of ideas, and in effect stands at the beginning of C.L.R. James’ own gradual evolution in this direction.
A proper assessment of the value of the book can only be made in the light of historical experience, both of that which took place at the time and of later developments, for this is the only valid test of any social theory. Like any other book it is by no means infallible and our increased understanding of some of these past events inevitably shows shortcomings. In spite of the views of some modern commentators22 the subsequent history of the German USPD shows that Rosa Luxemburg was not “mistaken” in arguing that the Spartakists should remain inside it.23 James’ description of the foundation of the Comintern (p.112-3) can no longer be accepted as it stands. Whilst admitting that “the delegates were dissatisfied”, and that it was formed “due primarily to Lenin”, he comes to the strange conclusion that, at the time, “Lenin had almost been betrayed against his better judgement into a weak and vacillating position”. In the light of evidence that has since emerged it now seems clear that the dramatic appearance and speech of Gruber (Steinhardt) had been arranged in order to stampede the delegates into reaching the required decision.24 James’ endorsement of the Comintern’s verdict upon Paul Levi, because the latter condemned the 1921 “March Action” as a putsch, does that revolutionary less than justice.25 James’ view that Stalin was responsible for holding back the German Communist Party no longer receives uncritical support from historians of the Comintern,26 and there is some evidence that Trotsky himself came to have doubts about fixing the blame for any national errors on Brandler for the failure of October 1923 (p.187).27 Another of the myths of vulgar Trotskyism repeated here is that it was the Troika who were responsible for sending the Chinese Communist Party into the Guomindang, that “had Lenin been sitting as Chairman such an entry would never have taken place”28, and that Trotsky had voted against it from the very first (pp.236-7, 248).29 Count Stenbock-Fermoy, (p.331) a great-nephew of Prince Kropotkin, wrote to Trotsky to deny that he had joined the working-class movement to promote revanchist ideas.30 James’ description of Nin, Maurin and Andrade as “prominent leaders of the Spanish Revolution” (p.308) would in retrospect appear over optimistic.31 His acceptance of the production figures of the first Five Year Plan (p.292) appears as naive in hindsight, while time has dealt rather harshly with his remark that “if ever the Soviet Union goes down, that is to say back to capitalism, collective ownership has demonstrated how much capitalism retards the possibility of production”. Here however he was in good company, for not merely most socialists thought this but even a conservative such as Harold Macmillan, as late as 1961, feared the dynamism of the Soviet economy.
Much more problematic remains James’ view that the leaders of the Soviet Union were, as already noted above, carrying through a conscious policy in encouraging the suicidal behaviour of the German Communist Party in 1930-3. James links the deliberate policy of undermining Social Democracy to the fact that its foreign policy orientation was favourable to the “western” powers (p.337), whereas, as is well known, traditionally it is the more right wing elements in German society who have favoured an alliance with Russia. This is the view still supported by some historians - admittedly a minority, today.32
On the other hand when we consider the knowledge available at the time, the basic thesis supported by the book stands up surprisingly well. Its opponents of the day, Dutt, Strachey and the Webbs, could not be reprinted today without courting immediate ridicule. Scarcely half a dozen of the huge output of the Left Book Club during the same period is worth the shelf space in any Socialist library, and generally they pile up in the dustier sections of second hand bookshops where they remain unsold. James’ careful handling of his documentation stands him in good stead. At one point he notes, “the writer has used an (sic) Mss translation. Many of the most important articles by Lenin, written after 1918, have to be tracked down in obscure publications or translated afresh. The present Soviet regime does not publish them, or, when it does so, truncates them” (p.132n.1). Since the revelations of Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” at the 20th Party Congress of the Soviet Union in 1956 we are much better informed about these documents.33 Yet a comparison of James’ account of Lenin’s last conflict with Stalin and any modern treatment of the same subject, such as those of Moshe Lewin or Marcel Liebman34 would not modify the picture presented by James (pp.134-140) in any substantial way. He perceptively defines Trotskyism as a creation of Stalinism (p.151), and marshals his facts carefully to establish the existence of the massive famine caused by forced collectivisation (p.303), denied by virtually the entire range of left wing thought at the time.
Even some of his short-term predictions are found to be surprisingly accurate. “The long cold vistas of Siberia opened before Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky” he notes in 1929 (p.296), and, a year before the Trial of the Twenty-One, he asks “what insurance company would risk a penny on Bukharin’s life?” (p.199) Only a month after the appearance of World Revolution the events of the first week of May 1937 in Barcelona bore out his contention that “the day is near when the Stalinists will join reactionary governments in shooting revolutionary workers. They cannot avoid it” (p.389). The first section of the introduction to the book bears the subtitle The Coming War,35 and he prophesies that Trotsky “may be murdered in Mexico” (p.407). Many of the main events that come later in the wartime and post-war periods are sketched out quite adequately, such as that “the victory of Fascism in Germany would mean inevitably war against the Soviet Union” (p.320) and that “British capitalism, may despite all its efforts, be drawn into a war against Germany side by side with the Soviet Union” (p.408). The end of the Comintern is accurately foreseen as
“Stalin may even liquidate it altogether to assure the bourgeoisie that he will leave them alone, if only they will leave him and his bureaucracy in peace. But he dare not do this while Trotsky guides the Fourth International” (p.403).
Looking beyond the end of the Second World War James notes wisely that “the last war brought the partial freedom of Ireland, a loosening of the chains of Egypt and an upheaval in India which has seriously crippled the merciless exploitation of centuries. How long could Britain’s grip on India survive another war?” (p.10) For a brief moment the veil of the future is even drawn aside for China, Korea and Indo-China: “in China and the Far East, where Britain has so much at stake, capitalism is more unstable than anywhere else in the world” (ibid.).
Finally James’ analysis of the Soviet Union bears an amazing freshness in view of the events of the last three years. Speaking of the Soviet economy, he comments, “the whole system would stand or fall by the increased productivity of labour ... if Lenin returned today, he would not waste a minute on Stalin’s propaganda, but would calculate the income and expenditure per head of population and from it grasp at once the social and political character of the regime” (p.122). Examining the presuppositions behind Lenin’s theory of imperialism, he goes on to say:
“If capitalism proved to be still progressive, then the Soviet Union was premature and would undoubtedly fail. It was simple Marxism that the new Society could not exist for any length of time unless the old had reached its limits. But the conflict was not a conflict of entities already fixed. Capitalism in decay might still be powerful enough to overthrow the first Socialist State, whence it would gain a longer lease of life” (pp.119-120).
We can only await the confirmation (or otherwise) of the grim prophecy that flows from this: “If the Soviet Union goes down, then Socialism receives a blow which will cripple it for a generation” (pp.418-19).
Thus it emerges that a book dismissed for its “dogmatic weakness”, despite being written fifty-five years ago, still has lessons to teach us today if we read it in a fresh and critical spirit, and we warmly recommend a careful study of it as we place it in the hands of a public that, we are sure, will give it a better reception than when it first appeared.
Al Richardson
Footnotes
1. C.L.R. James and British Trotskyism: An Interview, London, 1987, p.1. An amusing picture of James’ influence upon middle class opinion in the ILP at this time is to be found in Ethel Mannin, Comrade, O Comrade, ch.x, pp.133-5.
2. C.L.R. James and British Trotskyism, p.1. Among the non-Stalinist books that James was able to influence Warburg to publish at this time were, in addition to his own, his translation of Boris Souvarine’s Stalin (1939), Mary Low and Juan Brea’s Red Spanish Notebook, recently republished unfortunately without James’ original preface, Harold Isaacs’ Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution (1938) and Albert Weisbord’s Conquest of Power (1938). Warburg of course, far more than Gollancz, was open to texts which came from the general left or ILP milieu and among his list at this period were Brockway’s Workers Front and both Next Year’s War and the Papacy and Fascism by F.A. Ridley, as well as the first edition of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, which Gollancz had rejected as being too critical of the Communist Party’s line
3. Below, p.xii; cf. Harry Wicks, 1905-1989: A Memorial, London 1989, pp.3, 8, & 14. For examples of the sort of material provided, cf. below, p.132n.1 and 179n.1.
4. It is advertised in Fight, Vol.i, no.5 for April 1937.
5. Martin Secker and Warburg, “Letter to the Editor”, 30th April 1937, in Fight, Vol.i, no.7, June 1937.
6. R.F. Andrews (Andrew Rothstein), “Leninism Trotskified” in Left News, June 1937, pp.291-8. Gollancz’s own opinion was that “a Trotskyist book falls as obviously outside the scope of the Club’s publications as does a Nazi or Fascist book” (New Leader, vol.xxi, new series no.178, 11th June, 1937).
7. George Padmore, letter to Tribune, 10th September, 1937, p.13.
8. K. Tilak, Rise and Fall of the Comintern, Spark Syndicate, Bombay, December 1947.
9. Paul Buhl C.L.R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary, London 1988, pp.51-2. Contrast with this James comment on p.159, below: “There is a tendency among Trotskyists to exaggerate the economic and social influences at work in the Trotsky-Stalin struggle in 1923”. Other examples of Buhl’s anti-Trotskyist bias need not detain us here (“A paroxysm of rage at Stalin”, “overly subjective, obsessed with details at the expense of the larger picture”, “with minor possible exceptions such as Trotskyists in Ceylon, only the activity of James himself forcefully joined anti-imperialism with Trotskyism”, etc). They have been commented upon by Charles van Gelderen in C.L.R., Socialist Outlook, April 1989.
10. op. cit., Note 9 above, p.52.
11. op. cit., Note 1 above, p.9.
12. L.D. Trotsky “On the History of the Left Opposition”, April 1939 in Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1938-39, New York, 1974, pp.260-66. cf. C.L.R. James below, pp.164-201, 335.
13. JR Campbell, in Controversy, vol.i, no.8, May 1937, p.36.
14. Buhl, op. cit., Note 9 above, pp.45-47. Here, as is evident from his preface, he has been misled by his English informants, principally Robin Blackburn of New Left Review. Even less relevant are references (p.58) to Christopher Hill, who in spite of his expressed admiration for Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution today (Sunday Times, 18 August, 1985), was busy, at the time indicated, writing a book about Lenin and the Russian Revolution which effectively censored Trotsky out of it.
15. The Que Faire group was formed in France in 1934 from ex-Stalinists and ex-Trotskyists, such as Kurt Landau, and set out to trace back the degeneration of the Russian Revolution from its earliest stages. The group finally united with Social Democracy in 1939.
16. Souvarine talks about the “Kronstadt commune” and “the legitimate character of the rebels’ claims” on pp.276 and 279 of Stalin. Trotsky described Souvarine’s theory as a “search for an independent line running directly from Marx to himself, bypassing Lenin and Bolshevism” (letter to Victor Serge, 29th April, 1936, in Writings of Leon Trotsky: A Supplement, 1934-40, New York, 1979, p.659), and Souvarine himself as the archetype of a “gangrenous sceptic”. James himself notes Souvarine’s “anarchist bias against the dictatorship of the proletariat” (below p.140n.2; cf. also p.309).
17. Description of a meeting with C.L.R. James on 10th October, 1937 by Ernie Rogers, “Letter to Jimmy Allen” in The Trotskyist Movement and the Leninist League, London, 1986, p.7.
18. Op. cit., Note 17 above; Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson Against the Stream, London, 1986, pp.256, 287.
19. Op. cit., Note 17 above: “there would have to be a struggle in the International League; efforts would have to be made to alter the line of the I(nternational) S(ecretariat). I told him that this had already been attempted and had been met with Stalinist methods; suppression, hooliganism. He (James) interjected and said that there was nothing we could say against the I.S. with which he could not agree. He knew all about them ... He asked Frost (Max Basch), a member of the EC, to provide him with the documents published by Oehler on the question, also the internal bulletin published by the Sec. on the French turn”.
20. Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson War and the International, London, 1986, p.24.
21. Robin Blackburn, C.L.R. James (Obituary), in The Independent, 2nd June, 1989. Cf. the remark made by James about Trotsky’s rejection of democratic centralism in 1903 on p.49 below: “He has since admitted that he was wrong; too generously, for the question is not so simple”. In view of Trotsky’s stated opinion about this conflict, the whole discussion that follows this comment (p.49-53) shows how far James was, already by 1937, at variance with Trotsky.
22. Chris Harman, The Lost Revolution: Germany 1918 to 1923, London, 1982, pp.19-20, 88, 95.
23. Cf. Rob Sewell, Germany: From Revolution to Counter-Revolution, London 1988, pp.33-4; Mike Jones, The Decline, Disorientation and Decomposition of a Leadership: The German Communist Party; From Revolutionary Marxism to Centrism, in Revolutionary History, Vol.ii, no.3, p.2. Cf. below, p.95.
24. Referring to Angelica Balabanoff, Impressions of Lenin, Ann Arbour, 1968, pp.69-70, Walter Kendall comes to the conclusion that “the whole affair is so dramatic as to suggest stage management” (The Revolutionary Movement in Britain, 1900-1921, London, 1969, p.226). The case is established beyond all reasonable doubt in his as yet unpublished MSS, World Revolution: The Russian Revolution and the Communist International, 1898-1935, to which I am greatly indebted.
25. “Mere condemnation of thousands of proletarians who risk their lives against the bourgeoisie has never been tolerated by Marxists”, p.169 below. Cf. Mike Jones, op. cit., Note 23 above pp.5-7.
26. Pierre Broué, The Communist International and the German Crisis of 1923, address to the AGM of Revolutionary History, 20th May, 1989 (as yet unpublished); cf. LD Trotsky, op. cit., Note 12 above, p.260.
27. Cf Mike Jones, op. cit., Note 23, pp.8-9; He refers to Jacob Walcher’s Notes on Discussions with Trotsky, 17th-20th August 1933, published in the Oeuvres, vol.ii. This text recently came to light in the SAP archives in Sweden and only became known after the publication of the Pathfinder English edition of the works of Trotsky’s last exile. It is hoped to put an English translation into general circulation in the near future. For Trotsky’s later return to his original opinion, cf. On the History of the Left Opposition, April 1939, in Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1938-39, New York, 1974, p.261.
28. On the strategy as a whole cf. Michael Cox’s verdict: “The general strategy developed by the Comintern by 1923 and 1924 was unambiguously bourgeois democratic. I can find no suggestion of any serious attempt to pose or even discuss the possibility of proletarian dictatorship, as a solution to the tasks of the anti-imperialist struggle in the colonies. That is, a well developed stages conception of the colonial revolution preceded Stalinism”, See The National and Colonial Question - The First Five Years on the Comintern, 1919-22, in Searchlight South Africa, no.4, February 1990, p.38.
29. Trotsky himself put various dates upon his support for the withdrawal of the Chinese Communists from the Guomindang. In a letter written in December 1930 he claimed that he had done so “from the very beginning, that is, from 1923” (Letter to Max Shachtman, 10th December 1930 in Leon Trotsky on China, New York 1976, p.490), but in My Life written a year earlier he says that it was “since 1925” (Penguin edition, Harmondsworth, 1975, p.552). “As a matter of fact” notes Paolo Casciola, “despite these assertions, no documents preceding the spring of 1927 are available in which Trotsky called for a withdrawal of the Chinese Communist Party from the Kuomintang” Trotsky and the Struggles of the Colonial Peoples, Centro Pietro Tresso, Foligno, 1990, pp.11-12.
30. Cahiers Leon Trotsky, no.36, Dec 1968, pp.51-3.
31. Cf. The Spanish Civil War: The View from the Left, Socialist Platform, 1992, for rather damning counter evidence.
32. Thomas Wiengartner, Stalin und der Aufstieg Hitlers, Berlin 1970, cf. the references given in A. Westoby, Communism since World War II, Brighton 1981, p.410n.28, especially Robert Black, Fascism in Germany, London, 1975, vol.ii, pp.749-55, 858-60.
33. Mostly to be found in vol.xxxiii of the 1966 English edition of Lenin’s Collected Works, along with the material in L. Fotieva’s Pages from Lenin’s Life, Moscow, 1960.
34. Moshe Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, London, 1969; Marcel Liebman, Leninism under Lenin, London 1975, pp.417-25.
35. Obviously many of these forecasts derive from the common stock of analyses James had at his disposal in the Trotskyist movement. We should remind ourselves that Trotsky himself, two years before the Second World War broke out, prophesied its outbreak to within a month (Daniel Guérin, Trotsky and the Second World War part.ii, in Revolutionary History, vol.iii, no.4, p.13), and that other writers acquainted with Trotskyist ideas such as F.A. Ridley, had sketched out the main lines of the coming conflict in such books as Next Years’s War, which Secker and Warburg had published a year before James’ book appeared.
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
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Introduction to World Revolution 1917-1936
This Introduction for the new edition of World Revolution 1917-1936 by C.L.R. James was written by Al Richardson the editor of Revolutionary History. The new edition was published by Humanities Press in 1993.
Introduction to World Revolution
C.L.R. James’ World Revolution, here presented in a new edition, was one of the few attempts made at the time to synthesise the experience of the revolutionary movement following the First World War. In judging its significance, both in its own time and for ours, it is worth bearing in mind the circumstances that gave rise to it.
The sheer weight of the apparatus of the Soviet Union and of the Comintern had established a virtual monopoly over Marxist thought by the mid 1930s. Dissident currents, whether of ‘right’ (Bukharinist or Brandlerite) or of ‘left’ coloration (Bordigist, Korschite or Trotskyist) had been successfully marginalised and reduced to small group existence by massive propaganda, gangsterism or terror.
Early in 1934 a dozen or so members of the Communist League, the first British Trotskyist organisation, at the instigation of Denzil Harber and Stewart Kirby and with Trotsky’s support, had left the parent body to set up a faction, later called the Marxist Group, inside the Independent Labour Party, which had itself parted company with the Labour Party a couple of years earlier. By this time C.L.R. James had already arrived in Britain and had made contact with members of the Labour Party in Nelson in Lancashire, but when he came down to live in Boundary Road in north west London he was recruited into the Trotskyist movement and joined the Marxist Group working in the ILP.1
In both groups the British Trotskyists were very few in number at the time he encountered them, and whilst the main body had with difficulty been able to sustain a monthly printed paper from 1933 onwards, the entrist organisation in the ILP had only been able to issue a few duplicated pamphlets, and, to put over their viewpoint, had been obliged to sell the Militant, a journal published by their American co-thinkers.
Trotskyism was not a popular standpoint during the mid 1930s in Britain. The wider Labour movement was more defensive than ever and was still recovering painfully from the split in the Labour Party at the time of the formation of the National Government in 1931. At the same time the Communist party was itself just recuperating from its reduction to the rank of a tiny sect during the “Third Period” of the Comintern, and was enjoying a period of rapid growth. The increase in the power of Nazi Germany made the USSR seem an attractive ally, even in some establishment circles, and the adoption of the policy of the Popular Front enabled the party to make a far wider appeal than it had ever done before, setting the tone for the ideological life of the left for the next decade. The Communist Party was able to infiltrate or take over existing organisations, such as the Labour Party’s student and youth groups, and to form a number of satellite bodies catering for the different interest groups in society.
The most effective of these was the Left Book Club, which came to enjoy a circulation of 57,000 and which was founded in May 1936 in partnership with the publisher Gollancz. Many of its titles were pure Soviet propaganda at its most mendacious, and of a virulently anti-Trotskyist character into the bargain, such books as Dudley Collard’s Soviet Justice and the Trial of Radek and Others, the Webbs’ Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation, and J.R. Campbell’s Soviet Policy and Its Critics.
The Club’s major programmatic book justifying the foreign policy of the Soviet Union, World Politics, 1918-1936, written by the Communist Party’s most cynical theorist, R. Palme Dutt, appeared in 1936. Unable to match anything like these resources, the British Trotskyists felt very much on the defensive, so C.L.R. James decided to use his contacts with a rival publisher to try to mount a counter-operation. As he later described it,
“There were no books in English, only pamphlets, so after a time I said ‘Why haven’t we a book in English?’, and they said that it was about time they had one. I finally picked myself up and got hold of Frederick Warburg ... I told Warburg and he thought that there was scope for the publication of books that were Marxist but not C.P. So I went away to Brighton and wrote this book in three or four months”.2
Although oral tradition in South Wales in the 1960s still pointed to a house where allegedly James worked on the book while campaigning down there for the ILP at the time of the Abyssinian War, it was largely put together, as he says, on the south coast. The local Communist Party bookshop in Brighton served as the basis for some of his material, though for many of his earlier sources he had to rely upon French and American non-Stalinist Marxists, and particularly upon the rich collection brought back by Harry Wicks from his course at the Lenin School in Moscow, whose expertise he thanks in his preface.3
The book finally came out in early 19374 to a less than enthusiastic reception. In the press dominated by them the Communist Party refused even to allow advertisements for it5 and, where in the nature of the case they were obliged to recognise its existence, such as in Gollancz’s Left Book Club, they attacked it with great hostility.6 No less hostile was the reaction of the British colonial authorities, who forbade the export of copies to India.7 This did not prevent it from being smuggled in and exercising some influence. G Selvarajatnan, later leader of the great strike in the Madras textile mills was converted to Trotskyism upon reading it, and Leslie Goonewardene’s Rise and Fall of the Comintern published ten years afterwards in Bombay was largely based on it.8
It has continued to suffer from neglect, being the least disseminated and commented upon of all James’ full length works, and the residue of Stalinist hostility towards it remains, even in New Left circles who are otherwise inclined to idolise its author. For James’ biographer, Paul Buhl, it is “James’ least original major work”, its “dogmatic weakness” being that it makes Stalinism “the deus ex machina for the failure of world revolution”.9
Such criticisms are based upon the view that World Revolution is largely a summary of the world view of Trotsky and the movement that followed him, Buhl for example seeing only in James’ treatment of the German crisis any differences with Trotsky.10 As a matter of fact, the book is far more original than it is given credit for, and neither James nor Trotsky regarded themselves as being in agreement over the basic argument contained in it. As James himself recalled,
“When I began to attack the Trotskyist position, some people in the United States said, ‘when we read your book World Revolution we said that it won’t be long before James is attacking the Trotskyist movement’. In this book it was pointed out to me in a particular paragraph. I agreed with the interpretation. I was told, ‘James, when some of us read that quotation, we said that ultimately James will go’”.11
These doubts were also shared by Trotsky himself. Whilst calling World Revolution “a very good book”, he criticised it for “a lack of dialectical approach”, considering that James’ theory of the development of Soviet politics wanted “to begin with the degeneration complete”. Whilst James’ chapter on the German events of 1923 is entitled Stalin Kills the German Revolution, Trotsky argued to the contrary that “the German revolution had more influence on Stalin than Stalin on the German Revolution. In 1923 the whole party was in a fever over the coming revolution”. Whilst considering the incredible policy of the German Communist Party during the accession of Hitler to power ten years later, James asks himself “Why did Stalin persist in this policy? How could the Soviet bureaucracy possibly conceive that any useful purpose could be served by letting Hitler into Power?”. Trotsky on the other hand argued that in fact “Stalin hoped that the German Communist Party would win a victory, and to think that he had a ‘plan’ to allow Fascism to come to power is absurd”.12 This suggestion, that the blunders of the Comintern and the KPD during 1930-3 were part of a deliberate plan was to occasion considerable embarrassment to the British Trotskyists, for it was immediately seized upon by their Communist opponents to discredit the book.13 Trotsky thus considered that the weakness of James’ book consisted in its not allowing for the development of Soviet politics, of allowing no movement within them, and of telescoping effect and intention, a sort of historical post hoc propter hoc argument.
The reason for this difference becomes apparent when we examine the secondary sources used by James in the construction of the book, and the major models that influenced his thought world at the time. We can dismiss straight away the suggestion made in Paul Buhl’s book, that he was indebted in any way to the “proletarian science” developed in the British Communist Party.14 These were precisely the people against whom he was polemicising. His main historical models were the classical historians, and the great modern historians of the classical world, such as Grote, whose works remained upon his bookshelf up to his death. They also included the classic Marxist histories, particularly The Eighteenth Brumaire which James regarded as “an indispensable book for the student of any period of History” (p.32n.1 below), and Trotsky’s My Life and the History of the Russian Revolution. We know that at the same time he was reading the works of the great French radical historians about the revolution of 1789 as preliminary research for his own future book, Black Jacobins (cf. pp.22-5 below). He must also have been acquainted with the historical labours of FA Ridley, for whom he maintained an affection to the end of his life, since they were both being published by Secker and Warburg at about the same time.
But it is the literature of the French and American non-Stalinist and non-Trotskyist left that supplies the key to understanding the distinctive features of World Revolution in that it shares the common assumption that the degeneration of the Russian Revolution began much earlier and proceeded at a more rapid rate that Trotsky would allow. One reference shows that James was acquainted with the literature of the Que Faire15 group, and we may note that Souvarine’s book, which he often cites, supported the Kronstadt insurrection against Soviet power as early as 1921.16 We know from other indications that at this time James was already acquainted with the “State Capitalist” theories about the USSR held by the French Union Communiste group led by Henri Chazé,17 as well as being in touch with some of BJ Field’s supporters in Canada, and conversant with the material of Weisbord, Oehler, and Erwin Ackernecht.18 James was particularly open to theories of the sort dismissed at the time by Trotskyists as “ultra left”, for after a long and sterile experience with entry activity within the ILP he had come to reject the tactic of entry altogether, refused to join the group that was pursuing such a course in the Labour Party, and had entered into a dispute with the Trotskyist International Secretariat on this basis.19 After a fragile unity was forced upon the British groups in 1938 he was sent to the USA, partly to give a free run to his longstanding opponent Denzil Harber, and partly to “straighten him out”.20 The distinctive position of World Revolution thus lies in the fact that its author was already in the process of rejecting Trotskyism, and his ideas were about to evolve towards the position he assumed during the Cannon-Shachtman conflict of 1939-40, and later in his State Capitalism and World Revolution of 1950, a political stance described by Robin Blackburn as “Anarcho-Bolshevism” (whatever that means).21 During the period that James was writing this book, there was, in fact, in both the United States and France, an entire left-wing thought world of groups who vied with each other to place the degeneration of Bolshevism and Marxism as early in time as possible (Oehlerites, Stammites, Eiffelites, Marlenites, etc, in the USA and in France, Cahiers Spartacus, Que Faire and the Union Communiste). It was a natural result of the disillusion produced among the left at the time by the rise of both Stalinism and Nazism, a pessimistic feeling that there was something deeply wrong with Marxism as they had inherited it. Although World Revolution is still quite close to the more recognisably ‘Trotskyist’ approach to these questions, it shows significant influences from this spectrum of ideas, and in effect stands at the beginning of C.L.R. James’ own gradual evolution in this direction.
A proper assessment of the value of the book can only be made in the light of historical experience, both of that which took place at the time and of later developments, for this is the only valid test of any social theory. Like any other book it is by no means infallible and our increased understanding of some of these past events inevitably shows shortcomings. In spite of the views of some modern commentators22 the subsequent history of the German USPD shows that Rosa Luxemburg was not “mistaken” in arguing that the Spartakists should remain inside it.23 James’ description of the foundation of the Comintern (p.112-3) can no longer be accepted as it stands. Whilst admitting that “the delegates were dissatisfied”, and that it was formed “due primarily to Lenin”, he comes to the strange conclusion that, at the time, “Lenin had almost been betrayed against his better judgement into a weak and vacillating position”. In the light of evidence that has since emerged it now seems clear that the dramatic appearance and speech of Gruber (Steinhardt) had been arranged in order to stampede the delegates into reaching the required decision.24 James’ endorsement of the Comintern’s verdict upon Paul Levi, because the latter condemned the 1921 “March Action” as a putsch, does that revolutionary less than justice.25 James’ view that Stalin was responsible for holding back the German Communist Party no longer receives uncritical support from historians of the Comintern,26 and there is some evidence that Trotsky himself came to have doubts about fixing the blame for any national errors on Brandler for the failure of October 1923 (p.187).27 Another of the myths of vulgar Trotskyism repeated here is that it was the Troika who were responsible for sending the Chinese Communist Party into the Guomindang, that “had Lenin been sitting as Chairman such an entry would never have taken place”28, and that Trotsky had voted against it from the very first (pp.236-7, 248).29 Count Stenbock-Fermoy, (p.331) a great-nephew of Prince Kropotkin, wrote to Trotsky to deny that he had joined the working-class movement to promote revanchist ideas.30 James’ description of Nin, Maurin and Andrade as “prominent leaders of the Spanish Revolution” (p.308) would in retrospect appear over optimistic.31 His acceptance of the production figures of the first Five Year Plan (p.292) appears as naive in hindsight, while time has dealt rather harshly with his remark that “if ever the Soviet Union goes down, that is to say back to capitalism, collective ownership has demonstrated how much capitalism retards the possibility of production”. Here however he was in good company, for not merely most socialists thought this but even a conservative such as Harold Macmillan, as late as 1961, feared the dynamism of the Soviet economy.
Much more problematic remains James’ view that the leaders of the Soviet Union were, as already noted above, carrying through a conscious policy in encouraging the suicidal behaviour of the German Communist Party in 1930-3. James links the deliberate policy of undermining Social Democracy to the fact that its foreign policy orientation was favourable to the “western” powers (p.337), whereas, as is well known, traditionally it is the more right wing elements in German society who have favoured an alliance with Russia. This is the view still supported by some historians - admittedly a minority, today.32
On the other hand when we consider the knowledge available at the time, the basic thesis supported by the book stands up surprisingly well. Its opponents of the day, Dutt, Strachey and the Webbs, could not be reprinted today without courting immediate ridicule. Scarcely half a dozen of the huge output of the Left Book Club during the same period is worth the shelf space in any Socialist library, and generally they pile up in the dustier sections of second hand bookshops where they remain unsold. James’ careful handling of his documentation stands him in good stead. At one point he notes, “the writer has used an (sic) Mss translation. Many of the most important articles by Lenin, written after 1918, have to be tracked down in obscure publications or translated afresh. The present Soviet regime does not publish them, or, when it does so, truncates them” (p.132n.1). Since the revelations of Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” at the 20th Party Congress of the Soviet Union in 1956 we are much better informed about these documents.33 Yet a comparison of James’ account of Lenin’s last conflict with Stalin and any modern treatment of the same subject, such as those of Moshe Lewin or Marcel Liebman34 would not modify the picture presented by James (pp.134-140) in any substantial way. He perceptively defines Trotskyism as a creation of Stalinism (p.151), and marshals his facts carefully to establish the existence of the massive famine caused by forced collectivisation (p.303), denied by virtually the entire range of left wing thought at the time.
Even some of his short-term predictions are found to be surprisingly accurate. “The long cold vistas of Siberia opened before Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky” he notes in 1929 (p.296), and, a year before the Trial of the Twenty-One, he asks “what insurance company would risk a penny on Bukharin’s life?” (p.199) Only a month after the appearance of World Revolution the events of the first week of May 1937 in Barcelona bore out his contention that “the day is near when the Stalinists will join reactionary governments in shooting revolutionary workers. They cannot avoid it” (p.389). The first section of the introduction to the book bears the subtitle The Coming War,35 and he prophesies that Trotsky “may be murdered in Mexico” (p.407). Many of the main events that come later in the wartime and post-war periods are sketched out quite adequately, such as that “the victory of Fascism in Germany would mean inevitably war against the Soviet Union” (p.320) and that “British capitalism, may despite all its efforts, be drawn into a war against Germany side by side with the Soviet Union” (p.408). The end of the Comintern is accurately foreseen as
“Stalin may even liquidate it altogether to assure the bourgeoisie that he will leave them alone, if only they will leave him and his bureaucracy in peace. But he dare not do this while Trotsky guides the Fourth International” (p.403).
Looking beyond the end of the Second World War James notes wisely that “the last war brought the partial freedom of Ireland, a loosening of the chains of Egypt and an upheaval in India which has seriously crippled the merciless exploitation of centuries. How long could Britain’s grip on India survive another war?” (p.10) For a brief moment the veil of the future is even drawn aside for China, Korea and Indo-China: “in China and the Far East, where Britain has so much at stake, capitalism is more unstable than anywhere else in the world” (ibid.).
Finally James’ analysis of the Soviet Union bears an amazing freshness in view of the events of the last three years. Speaking of the Soviet economy, he comments, “the whole system would stand or fall by the increased productivity of labour ... if Lenin returned today, he would not waste a minute on Stalin’s propaganda, but would calculate the income and expenditure per head of population and from it grasp at once the social and political character of the regime” (p.122). Examining the presuppositions behind Lenin’s theory of imperialism, he goes on to say:
“If capitalism proved to be still progressive, then the Soviet Union was premature and would undoubtedly fail. It was simple Marxism that the new Society could not exist for any length of time unless the old had reached its limits. But the conflict was not a conflict of entities already fixed. Capitalism in decay might still be powerful enough to overthrow the first Socialist State, whence it would gain a longer lease of life” (pp.119-120).
We can only await the confirmation (or otherwise) of the grim prophecy that flows from this: “If the Soviet Union goes down, then Socialism receives a blow which will cripple it for a generation” (pp.418-19).
Thus it emerges that a book dismissed for its “dogmatic weakness”, despite being written fifty-five years ago, still has lessons to teach us today if we read it in a fresh and critical spirit, and we warmly recommend a careful study of it as we place it in the hands of a public that, we are sure, will give it a better reception than when it first appeared.
Al Richardson
Footnotes
1. C.L.R. James and British Trotskyism: An Interview, London, 1987, p.1. An amusing picture of James’ influence upon middle class opinion in the ILP at this time is to be found in Ethel Mannin, Comrade, O Comrade, ch.x, pp.133-5.
2. C.L.R. James and British Trotskyism, p.1. Among the non-Stalinist books that James was able to influence Warburg to publish at this time were, in addition to his own, his translation of Boris Souvarine’s Stalin (1939), Mary Low and Juan Brea’s Red Spanish Notebook, recently republished unfortunately without James’ original preface, Harold Isaacs’ Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution (1938) and Albert Weisbord’s Conquest of Power (1938). Warburg of course, far more than Gollancz, was open to texts which came from the general left or ILP milieu and among his list at this period were Brockway’s Workers Front and both Next Year’s War and the Papacy and Fascism by F.A. Ridley, as well as the first edition of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, which Gollancz had rejected as being too critical of the Communist Party’s line
3. Below, p.xii; cf. Harry Wicks, 1905-1989: A Memorial, London 1989, pp.3, 8, & 14. For examples of the sort of material provided, cf. below, p.132n.1 and 179n.1.
4. It is advertised in Fight, Vol.i, no.5 for April 1937.
5. Martin Secker and Warburg, “Letter to the Editor”, 30th April 1937, in Fight, Vol.i, no.7, June 1937.
6. R.F. Andrews (Andrew Rothstein), “Leninism Trotskified” in Left News, June 1937, pp.291-8. Gollancz’s own opinion was that “a Trotskyist book falls as obviously outside the scope of the Club’s publications as does a Nazi or Fascist book” (New Leader, vol.xxi, new series no.178, 11th June, 1937).
7. George Padmore, letter to Tribune, 10th September, 1937, p.13.
8. K. Tilak, Rise and Fall of the Comintern, Spark Syndicate, Bombay, December 1947.
9. Paul Buhl C.L.R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary, London 1988, pp.51-2. Contrast with this James comment on p.159, below: “There is a tendency among Trotskyists to exaggerate the economic and social influences at work in the Trotsky-Stalin struggle in 1923”. Other examples of Buhl’s anti-Trotskyist bias need not detain us here (“A paroxysm of rage at Stalin”, “overly subjective, obsessed with details at the expense of the larger picture”, “with minor possible exceptions such as Trotskyists in Ceylon, only the activity of James himself forcefully joined anti-imperialism with Trotskyism”, etc). They have been commented upon by Charles van Gelderen in C.L.R., Socialist Outlook, April 1989.
10. op. cit., Note 9 above, p.52.
11. op. cit., Note 1 above, p.9.
12. L.D. Trotsky “On the History of the Left Opposition”, April 1939 in Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1938-39, New York, 1974, pp.260-66. cf. C.L.R. James below, pp.164-201, 335.
13. JR Campbell, in Controversy, vol.i, no.8, May 1937, p.36.
14. Buhl, op. cit., Note 9 above, pp.45-47. Here, as is evident from his preface, he has been misled by his English informants, principally Robin Blackburn of New Left Review. Even less relevant are references (p.58) to Christopher Hill, who in spite of his expressed admiration for Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution today (Sunday Times, 18 August, 1985), was busy, at the time indicated, writing a book about Lenin and the Russian Revolution which effectively censored Trotsky out of it.
15. The Que Faire group was formed in France in 1934 from ex-Stalinists and ex-Trotskyists, such as Kurt Landau, and set out to trace back the degeneration of the Russian Revolution from its earliest stages. The group finally united with Social Democracy in 1939.
16. Souvarine talks about the “Kronstadt commune” and “the legitimate character of the rebels’ claims” on pp.276 and 279 of Stalin. Trotsky described Souvarine’s theory as a “search for an independent line running directly from Marx to himself, bypassing Lenin and Bolshevism” (letter to Victor Serge, 29th April, 1936, in Writings of Leon Trotsky: A Supplement, 1934-40, New York, 1979, p.659), and Souvarine himself as the archetype of a “gangrenous sceptic”. James himself notes Souvarine’s “anarchist bias against the dictatorship of the proletariat” (below p.140n.2; cf. also p.309).
17. Description of a meeting with C.L.R. James on 10th October, 1937 by Ernie Rogers, “Letter to Jimmy Allen” in The Trotskyist Movement and the Leninist League, London, 1986, p.7.
18. Op. cit., Note 17 above; Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson Against the Stream, London, 1986, pp.256, 287.
19. Op. cit., Note 17 above: “there would have to be a struggle in the International League; efforts would have to be made to alter the line of the I(nternational) S(ecretariat). I told him that this had already been attempted and had been met with Stalinist methods; suppression, hooliganism. He (James) interjected and said that there was nothing we could say against the I.S. with which he could not agree. He knew all about them ... He asked Frost (Max Basch), a member of the EC, to provide him with the documents published by Oehler on the question, also the internal bulletin published by the Sec. on the French turn”.
20. Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson War and the International, London, 1986, p.24.
21. Robin Blackburn, C.L.R. James (Obituary), in The Independent, 2nd June, 1989. Cf. the remark made by James about Trotsky’s rejection of democratic centralism in 1903 on p.49 below: “He has since admitted that he was wrong; too generously, for the question is not so simple”. In view of Trotsky’s stated opinion about this conflict, the whole discussion that follows this comment (p.49-53) shows how far James was, already by 1937, at variance with Trotsky.
22. Chris Harman, The Lost Revolution: Germany 1918 to 1923, London, 1982, pp.19-20, 88, 95.
23. Cf. Rob Sewell, Germany: From Revolution to Counter-Revolution, London 1988, pp.33-4; Mike Jones, The Decline, Disorientation and Decomposition of a Leadership: The German Communist Party; From Revolutionary Marxism to Centrism, in Revolutionary History, Vol.ii, no.3, p.2. Cf. below, p.95.
24. Referring to Angelica Balabanoff, Impressions of Lenin, Ann Arbour, 1968, pp.69-70, Walter Kendall comes to the conclusion that “the whole affair is so dramatic as to suggest stage management” (The Revolutionary Movement in Britain, 1900-1921, London, 1969, p.226). The case is established beyond all reasonable doubt in his as yet unpublished MSS, World Revolution: The Russian Revolution and the Communist International, 1898-1935, to which I am greatly indebted.
25. “Mere condemnation of thousands of proletarians who risk their lives against the bourgeoisie has never been tolerated by Marxists”, p.169 below. Cf. Mike Jones, op. cit., Note 23 above pp.5-7.
26. Pierre Broué, The Communist International and the German Crisis of 1923, address to the AGM of Revolutionary History, 20th May, 1989 (as yet unpublished); cf. LD Trotsky, op. cit., Note 12 above, p.260.
27. Cf Mike Jones, op. cit., Note 23, pp.8-9; He refers to Jacob Walcher’s Notes on Discussions with Trotsky, 17th-20th August 1933, published in the Oeuvres, vol.ii. This text recently came to light in the SAP archives in Sweden and only became known after the publication of the Pathfinder English edition of the works of Trotsky’s last exile. It is hoped to put an English translation into general circulation in the near future. For Trotsky’s later return to his original opinion, cf. On the History of the Left Opposition, April 1939, in Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1938-39, New York, 1974, p.261.
28. On the strategy as a whole cf. Michael Cox’s verdict: “The general strategy developed by the Comintern by 1923 and 1924 was unambiguously bourgeois democratic. I can find no suggestion of any serious attempt to pose or even discuss the possibility of proletarian dictatorship, as a solution to the tasks of the anti-imperialist struggle in the colonies. That is, a well developed stages conception of the colonial revolution preceded Stalinism”, See The National and Colonial Question - The First Five Years on the Comintern, 1919-22, in Searchlight South Africa, no.4, February 1990, p.38.
29. Trotsky himself put various dates upon his support for the withdrawal of the Chinese Communists from the Guomindang. In a letter written in December 1930 he claimed that he had done so “from the very beginning, that is, from 1923” (Letter to Max Shachtman, 10th December 1930 in Leon Trotsky on China, New York 1976, p.490), but in My Life written a year earlier he says that it was “since 1925” (Penguin edition, Harmondsworth, 1975, p.552). “As a matter of fact” notes Paolo Casciola, “despite these assertions, no documents preceding the spring of 1927 are available in which Trotsky called for a withdrawal of the Chinese Communist Party from the Kuomintang” Trotsky and the Struggles of the Colonial Peoples, Centro Pietro Tresso, Foligno, 1990, pp.11-12.
30. Cahiers Leon Trotsky, no.36, Dec 1968, pp.51-3.
31. Cf. The Spanish Civil War: The View from the Left, Socialist Platform, 1992, for rather damning counter evidence.
32. Thomas Wiengartner, Stalin und der Aufstieg Hitlers, Berlin 1970, cf. the references given in A. Westoby, Communism since World War II, Brighton 1981, p.410n.28, especially Robert Black, Fascism in Germany, London, 1975, vol.ii, pp.749-55, 858-60.
33. Mostly to be found in vol.xxxiii of the 1966 English edition of Lenin’s Collected Works, along with the material in L. Fotieva’s Pages from Lenin’s Life, Moscow, 1960.
34. Moshe Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, London, 1969; Marcel Liebman, Leninism under Lenin, London 1975, pp.417-25.
35. Obviously many of these forecasts derive from the common stock of analyses James had at his disposal in the Trotskyist movement. We should remind ourselves that Trotsky himself, two years before the Second World War broke out, prophesied its outbreak to within a month (Daniel Guérin, Trotsky and the Second World War part.ii, in Revolutionary History, vol.iii, no.4, p.13), and that other writers acquainted with Trotskyist ideas such as F.A. Ridley, had sketched out the main lines of the coming conflict in such books as Next Years’s War, which Secker and Warburg had published a year before James’ book appeared.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
From The Archives Of The Spartacist League (U.S.)- The SWP and the Fourth lnternational, 1946-54:Genesis of Pabloism
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. Deb’s 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.
Today I am starting 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.
Markin comment on this article:
At the most general level Marxism calls for the more equitable international division of labor, production for social use and for distribution. A shorthand description for the struggle for that goal is –“Workers Of The World Unite.” Of course that lofty goal requires organization, a higher and more rationale level of organization than even the most progressive aspects (well past now) of capitalist development could attain. It also requires a high level of international organization in the political struggle to attain that goal.
That is why, going back to the founders Marx and Engels, the notion of an international organization of revolutionary labor was central to their scheme. The First International, limited as it was by the immaturity of the labor movement of the day and internal political wrangling, represented the first halting steps in that direction. The later, more successful Second International was another example before it fell before the impact of world events. Needless to say for a partisan of the Russian Revolution the Communist International was, leaps and bounds, ahead of all previous efforts until it too fell to its international contradictions.
That brings us to the Leon Trotsky-inspired and led Fourth International, its fate and its lessons at a time when there is some talk of a non-Marxist Fifth International whose outlines seem akin to the First International, at best. However, before one moves on to the concept of a new International, of whatever number, and of whatever program, it is necessary to see where the old International, in this case the Forth International, went off the tracks. That is the importance of this article. The period under discussion from the death of Trotsky until the early 1950s is critical to understanding what amounted to the stillbirth of Fourth International as a revolutionary force. From there one can look, and look hard, at the myriad trends, tendencies, groups, leagues and so forth who claim be, or claim to stand in that tradition to see if there is a viable revolutionary continuity. Or whether we need to start over from scratch. Admittedly tough work to wade through, but for serious revolutionaries necessary work.
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The SWP and the Fourth lnternational, 1946-54:
Genesis of Pabloism
The following article was published in Spartacist English edition No. 21, Fall 1972.
The American Socialist Workers Party and the European Pabloists travelled at different rates along different paths to revisionism, to converge in uneasy alliance in the early 1960’s in an unprincipled “reunification,” which has now broken down as the American SWP has completed the transition from Pabloist centrism to outright reformism. The “United Secretariat” which issued out of the 1963 “reunification” teeters on the edge of an open split; the “anti-revisionist” “International Committee” fractured last year. The collapse of the various competing pretenders to the mantle of the Fourth International provides a crucial opportunity for the reemergence of an authentic Trotskyist international tendency. Key to the task of reconstructing the Fourth International through a process of splits and fusions is an understanding of the characteristics and causes of Pabloist revisionism and the flawed response of the anti-Pabloists who fought, too little and too late, on national terrain while in practice abandoning the world movement.
World War II: U.S. and France
Before the onset of the war, Trotsky and the Fourth International had believed that decaying capitalism and the rise of fascism removed the possibility, for reformism and therefore for bourgeois-democratic illusions among the masses. Yet they could not but become increasingly aware that the revulsion of the working class against fascism and the threat of fascist occupation gave rise to social chauvinism and a renewal of confidence in the “democratic” bourgeoisie permeating the proletarian masses throughout Europe and the U.S. Faced with such a contradiction, the powerful pressures of nationalist backwardness and democratic illusions in the working class tended to pull the sections of the Fourth International apart, some adopting a sectarian stance, others capitulating to the social patriotism which was rampant among the masses. The SWP briefly adopted the “Proletarian Military Policy” which called for military training under, trade union control, implicitly posing the utopian idea that U.S. workers could fight German fascism without the existence of a workers state in the U.S., through “controlling” U.S. imperialism’s army. British Trotskyist Ted Grant went even further, in one speech referring to British imperialism’s armed forces as “our Eighth Army.” The German IKD returned to outright Menshevism with the theory that fascism had brought about the need for “an intermediate stage fundamentally equivalent to a democratic revolution.” (“Three Theses,” 19 October 1941)
The French Trotskyist movement, fragmented during the course of the war, was the best example of the contradiction. One of its fragments subordinated the mobilization of the working class to the political appetites of the Gaullist wing of the imperialist bourgeoisie; another grouping renounced any struggle within the resistance movement in favor of work exclusively at the point of production and, not recognizing the existing level of reformist consciousness among the workers, adventurously attempted to seize the factories during the “liberation” of Paris while the working masses were out on the streets. The February 1944 European Conference document which was the basis for a fusion between two French groupings to form the Parti Communiste Internationaliste characterized the two groups:
“Instead of distinguishing between the nationalism of the defeated bourgeoisie which remains an expression of its imperialist preoccupations, and the ‘nationalism’ of the masses which is only a reactionary expression of their resistance against exploitation by the occupying imperialism, the leadership of the POI considered as progressive the struggle of its own bourgeoisie....”
“the CCI...under the pretext of guarding intact the heritage of Marxism-Leninism, refused obstinately to distinguish the nationalism of the bourgeoisie from the resistance movement of the masses.”
I. SWP ISOLATIONISM
European Trotskyism and American Trotskyism responded in initially different ways to different tasks and problems following World War II. The precarious internationalism of the American SWP, maintained through intimate collaboration with Trotsky during his exile in Mexico, did not survive the assassination of Trotsky in 1940 and the onset of world war. The American Trotskyists retreated into an isolation only partially forced upon them by the disintegration of the European sections under conditions of fascist triumph and illegalization.
Anticipating the difficulties of international coordination during the war, a resident International Executive Committee had been set up in New York. Its only notable achievement, however, appears to have been the convening of an “Emergency Conference” of the International, held 19-26 May 1940 “somewhere in the Western Hemisphere,” “on the initiative of its U.S., Mexican and Canadian sections.” A rump conference attended by less than half of the sections, the “Emergency Conference” was called for the purpose of dealing with the international ramifications of the Shachtman split in the U.S. section, which had resulted in the defection of a majority of the resident IEC. The meeting solidarized with the SWP in the faction fight and reaffirmed its status as the one U.S. section of the Fourth International. The conference also adopted a “Manifesto of the Fourth International on the Imperialist War and the Proletarian World Revolution” written by Trotsky. Following Trotsky’s death, however, the resident IEC lapsed into oblivion.
At least in hindsight, the American section of the Fourth International should have initiated a clandestine secretariat in a neutral country in Europe, staffed by qualified SWPers and emigres from other sections, to centralize and directly supervise the work of Trotskyists in fascist-occupied countries. But the SWP was content to limit its international activities during the war to the publication in its internal bulletin’s of letters and factional documents from European Trotskyists. The passage of the Voorhis Act in 1941 inhibiting U.S. groups from affiliation with international political organizations—a law which to this day has never been tested—also gave the SWP a rationalization for down-playing its international responsibilities.
The SWP’s work during the war did evidence an internationalist perspective. SWP longshoremen used the opportunity of ships from Vladivostok docking on the West Coast to clandestinely distribute Trotsky’s “Letter to Russian Workers” in Russian to the Soviet seamen. The SWP concentrated its merchant marine comrades on the supply runs to Murmansk until the extremely heavy casualties compelled the party to discontinue the Murmansk concentration. (It was in response to such activities that the GPU was directed to activate the Soblen anti-Trotskyist espionage net. Testimony years afterward revealed that Cannon’s telephone was tapped by the GPU and that the business manager of the SWP’s Fourth International magazine, one “Michael Cort,” was one of the GPU agents.) But the maintenance and direction of the Fourth International was part of the SWP’s internationalist responsibility, and should have been a priority as urgent as the work which the SWP undertook on its own.
The leadership of the SWP came through the war period essentially intact, but reinforced in its insularity and ill-equipped theoretically to deal with the post-war situation.
During the later years of the war and the immediate post-war period, the SWP had registered some impressive successes in implanting its cadres in industry during the boom and in recruiting a new layer of proletarian militants drawn to the Trotskyists because of their opposition to the Communist Party’s policies of social patriotism and class peace.
Optimism and Orthodoxy
SWP entered the post-war period with buoyant optimism about the prospects for proletarian revolution. The 1946 SWP Convention and its resolution, “The Coming American Revolution,” projected the indefinite continuation of successes for the SWP. The isolationist perspective of the Party was in evidence at the Convention. The necessarily international character of crises and revolutions is recognized, but not the concomitant international character of the vanguard party. The resolution in effect makes excuses for the political backwardness of the U.S. working class while praising its militancy and presents the following syllogism: the decisive battles of the world revolution will be fought in the advanced countries where the means of production are highly developed and the proletariat powerful—above all in the U.S.; therefore all that is necessary is to build the American revolution and world capitalism will be overthrown. Profound impressionism led the SWP to see the world through the eyes of American capitalism which had emerged from the war as the unquestioned pre-eminent capitalist world power.
The post-war stabilization of European capitalism, the emergence of the Stalinist parties as the dominant reformist workers parties in Europe, the expansion of Stalinism in Eastern Europe (apparently flying in the face of the Trotskyist analysis that Stalinism could only betray), the destruction of capitalism by peasant-based nationalist-Stalinist formations in Yugoslavia and China—all these developments posed new theoretical problems for the Trotskyist movement which the SWP, stripped of a layer of talented intellectuals by the petty-bourgeois Shachtman split and shortly thereafter deprived of Trotsky’s guidance, could not handle. The SWP’s immediate response was to retreat into a sterile “orthodoxy” stripped of real theoretical content, thus rendering its isolation more complete.
The 1950’s brought a new wave of spontaneous working-class struggles in West and East Europe, but to the SWP they brought the onset of the Cold War witchhunt: the Smith Act prosecutions of CPers and former CPers; the deadening of every aspect of social and intellectual life; the ‘relentless purge of known “reds” and militants’ from the union movement, severing the SWP’s connection with the working-class movement which had taken years to build up; the dropping away of the whole layer of workers recruited to the SWP during the late 1940’s. The objective pressure to become a mere cheering section for European and colonial developments was strong but the SWP hung on to its verbal orthodox commitment to making the American revolution.
II. THE BREAK IN CONTINUITY IN EUROPE
The vulnerability of the European Trotskyist movement to revisionism hinged on the historic weaknesses of the European organizations combined with the thorough shattering of their continuity to the earlier period. When Trotsky in 1934 launched the struggle to found the Fourth International, the European working class, confronted with the decisive choice of socialism or barbarism, lacked a communist leadership. The task facing the Fourth Internationalists was clear: to mobilize the class against the threat of fascism and war, to amass the cadres for the world revolutionary party which would stand for proletarian internationalism in the face of the march toward imperialist war and the social chauvinist capitulation of the Second and Third Internationals. But Trotsky had noted the immense difficulty for the conscious vanguard to go forward in a period of crushing defeat for the class and the “terrible disproportion between the tasks and the means.” (“Fighting Against the Stream,” April 1939) The weakness of the European movement was exemplified by the French section, which was repeatedly criticized by Trotsky and whose petty-bourgeois “workerist” deviation and dilettantism were the subject of a special resolution at the founding conference of the Fourth International in 1938.
The Fourth International geared itself up for the decisive struggle against fascism and war—and lost. During the course of the war and the Nazi occupations the very rudiments of international, and even national, coordination were destroyed. The International disintegrated into small groups of militants pursuing improvised policies: some opportunist, some heroic. The 65 French and German comrades who were shot by the Gestapo in July 1943 because of their revolutionary defeatist fraternization and the building of a Trotskyist cell in the German armed forces are a monument to the internationalist courage of a weak revolutionary movement fighting against insurmountable odds.
Trotskyist Cadres Decimated
In August 1943 an attempt was made to reestablish the rudiments of organization in Europe. The European Secretariat set up at this meeting in Belgium included exactly one surviving member of the pre-war leadership and largely as a result of the nonexistence of tested cadres, Michel Pablo (Raptis), a skilled clandestine organizer not known for ability as a political leader or theoretician, emerged as the head of the International. When in June 1945 a European Executive Committee met to prepare for the holding of a World Congress, the experienced leading cadres and the most promising of the young Trotskyists (A. Leon, L. Lesoil, W. Held) had been killed at the hands of the Nazis or the GPU. The continuity of Trotskyism in Europe had been broken. This tragic process was duplicated elsewhere with the imprisonment and eventual execution of Ta Thu-tau and the Vietnamese Trotskyists, the virtual extinction of the Chinese Trotskyists and the liquidation of the remaining Russian Trotskyists (including, besides Trotsky, Ignace Reiss, Rudolf Klement and Leon Sedov). The Europeans were apparently so starved for experienced leading cadres that Pierre Frank (leading member of the Molinier group which Trotsky denounced as “demoralized centrists” in 1935 and expelled in 1938 for refusing to break with the French social-democracy after the “French Turn”) was enabled to become a leader of the post-war French section.
At this crucial juncture the intervention and leadership of a truly internationalist American Trotskyist party might have made a great difference. But the SWP, which should have assumed leadership in the International throughout the war years, was sunk in its own national preoccupations. Cannon noted later that the SWP leadership had deliberately built up Pablo’s authority, even going “so far as to soft-pedal a lot of our differences” (June 1953). The urgent responsibility of the SWP, which whatever its deficiencies was the strongest and most experienced Trotskyist organization, was precisely the opposite.
III. ORTHODOXY REASSERTED
The immediate task facing the Trotskyists after the war was to reorient its cadres and reassess the situation of the vanguard and the class in light of previous projections. The Trotskyists’ expectations of tottering West European capitalist regimes and the renewal of violent class struggle throughout Europe, and especially in Germany where the collapse of Nazi state power left a vacuum, had been confirmed. However the reformists, particularly the Stalinist parties, reasserted themselves to contain the spontaneous working-class upsurges. Control of the French working class through the CGT passed from the social democracy (SFIO) which had controlled the CGT before the war to the French Stalinists. Thus despite the manifest revolutionary spirit of the European working class and the great waves of general strikes, especially in France, Belgium, Greece and Italy, throughout West Europe, the proletariat did not take power and the Stalinist apparatus emerged with new strength and solidity.
The Fourth International responded by falling back on sterile orthodoxy and stubborn refusal to believe that these struggles had been defeated for the immediate period:
“Under these conditions partial defeats...temporary periods of retreat...do not demoralize the proletariat.... The repeated demonstration by the bourgeoisie of its inability to restabilize an economy and political regime of the slightest stability offers the workers new opportunities to go over to even higher stages of struggle.
“The swelling of the ranks of the traditional organizations in Europe, above all the Stalinist parties...has reached its peak almost everywhere. The phase of decline is beginning.”
(European Executive Committee, April 1946)
Right-opportunist critics in the Trotskyist movement (the German IKD, the SWP’s Goldman-Morrow faction) were correct in noting the over-optimism of such an analysis and in pointing out that the traditional reformist leaderships of the working class are always the first inheritors of a renewal of militancy and struggle. Their “solution,” however, was to argue for a limitation of the Trotskyist program to bourgeois-democratic demands, and such measures as critical support to the post-war French bourgeois Constitution. Their advocacy of an entrist policy toward the European reformist parties was dismissed out of hand by the majority, which expected the workers to more or less spontaneously regroup under the Trotskyist banner. This attitude prepared the way for a sharp reversal on the entrism question when the implicit position of ignoring the reformists’ influence could no longer be maintained.
The Fourth International’s immediate post-war perspective was summed up by Ernest Germain (Mandel) in an article called “The First Phase of the European Revolution” (Fourth International, August 1946). The title already implies the outlook: “the revolution” was implicitly redefined as a metaphysical process enduring continuously and progressing inevitably toward victory, rather than a sharp and necessarily time-limited confrontation over the question of state power, the outcome of which will shape the entire subsequent period.
Stalinophobia
The later, Pabloist, capitulation to Stalinism was prepared by impressionistic overstatement of its opposite: Stalinophobia. In November 1947 Pablo’s International Secretariat wrote that the Soviet Union had become:
“a workers state degenerated to the point where all progressive manifestations of the remains of the October conquest are more and more neutralized by the disastrous effects of the Stalinist dictatorship.”
“What remains of the conquests of October is more and more losing its historic value as a premise for socialist development.”
“...from the Russian occupation forces or from pro-Stalinist governments, which are completely reactionary, we do not demand the expropriation of the bourgeoisie....”
Within the SWP, the rumor circulated that Cannon was flirting with the characterization that the Soviet Union had become a totally degenerated workers state, i.e., a “state
capitalist” regime—a position which Natalia Trotsky shortly embraced.
On the question of the Stalinist expansion into East Europe, the Fourth International was united in simple-minded orthodoxy. An extensive discussion of “The Kremlin in Eastern Europe” (Fourth International, November 1946) by E. R. Frank (Bert Cochran) was shrill in anti-Stalinist tone and tended toward the view that the countries occupied by the Red Army would be deliberately maintained as capitalist states. A polemic against Shachtman by Germain dated 15 November 1946 was still more categorical: the theory of “a degenerated workers state being installed in a country where there has not yet previously been a proletarian revolution.” is dismissed, simply, as “absurd.” And Germain rhetorically queries, “Does [Shachtman] really think that the Stalinist bureaucracy has succeeded in overthrowing capitalism in half of our continent?” (Fourth International, February 1947)
The methodology here is the same as that pursued, more cynically, by the “International Committee” in later years over the question of Cuba (perplexed? then deny reality!) with the difference that the class character of East Europe, with capitalist economic institutions but the state power held by the occupying army of a degenerated workers state, was far more difficult to understand. Empiricists and renegades, of course, had no difficulty in characterizing the East European states:
“Everyone knows that in the countries where the Stalinists have taken power they have proceeded, at one or another rate of speed, to establish exactly the same economic, political, social regime as exists in Russia. Everyone knows that the bourgeoisie has been or is rapidly being expropriated, deprived of all its economic power, and in many cases deprived of mortal existence.... Everyone knows that what remnants of capitalism remain in those countries will not even be remnants tomorrow, that the whole tendency is to establish a social system identical with that of Stalinist Russia,”
(Max Shachtman, “The Congress of the Fourth International,” October 1948 New International)
Excruciating as this ridicule must have, been for them, however, the orthodox Trotskyists were trapped in their analysis because they could not construct a theory to explain the East Europe transformation without embracing non-revolutionary conclusions.
German, as was typical for him in those years, at least posed the theoretical dilemma clearly: is the Trotskyist understanding of Stalinism correct if Stalinism shows itself willing in some cases to accomplish any sort of anti-capitalist social transformation? Clinging to orthodoxy, the Trotskyists had lost a real grasp of theory and suppressed part of Trotsky’s dialectical understanding of Stalinism as a parasitic and counterrevolutionary caste sitting atop the gains of the October Revolution, a kind of treacherous middle-man poised between the victorious Russian proletariat and world imperialism. Having thus reduced dialectical materialism to static dogma, their disorientation was complete when it became necessary to answer Germain’s question in the affirmative, and the way was prepared for Pabloist revisionism to leap into the theoretical void.
Fourth International Flirts with Tito
Virtually without exception the Fourth International was disoriented by the Yugoslav revolution. After some twenty years of Stalinist monolithism, the Trotskyists were perhaps ill-disposed to scrutinize the anti-Stalin Yugoslav CP too carefully. The Yugoslav Titoists were described as “comrades” and “left centrists,” and Yugoslavia as “a workers state established by a proletarian revolution.” In one of several “Open Letters” to Tito, the SWP wrote: “The confidence of the masses in it [“your party”] will grow enormously and it will become the effective collective expression of the interests and desires of the proletariat of its country.” The Yugoslav revolution posed a new problem (later recapitulated by the Chinese, Cuban and Vietnamese experiences): unlike East Europe, where the social transformations were accomplished by the army of a foreign degenerated workers state, the Yugoslav revolution was clearly an indigenous social revolution which, without the intervention of the working class or the direction of a Trotskyist party,succeeded in establishing a (deformed) workers state. The Fourth International avoided the theoretical problem by dubbing the revolution “proletarian” and the Titoists “left centrists.” (The SWP avoided the question of China by refusing to unambiguously characterize the Maoist regime as a deformed workers state until 1955. As late as 1954 two articles by the Phillips tendency, characterizing China as state capitalist, were published in the SWP’s Fourth International.)
Again orthodoxy is maintained but robbed of its content. The impulse, resisted until Pablo was to give it consistent expression, was that the ability of non-proletarian, non-Trotskyist forces to accomplish any form of social overturn robbed the Fourth International of its reason for existence. The crucial qualitative distinction between a workers state and a deformed workers state—demarcated in blood in the need for political revolution to open the road to socialist development and the extension of the revolution abroad—had been lost.
IV. PABLOISM CONQUERS
The numerically weak, socially isolated, theoretically unarmed and inexperienced cadres of the post-war Fourth International were easy prey for disorientation and impatience in a situation of repeated pre-revolutionary upsurges whose course they could not influence. Beginning in early 1951 a new revisionism, Pabloism, began to assert itself, responding to the frustrating objective situation by posing an ersatz way out of the isolation of the Fourth International from the main motion of the working class. Pabloism was the generalization of this impulse in a revisionist body of theory offering impressionistic answers which were more consistent than the one-sided orthodoxy of the early post-war Fourth International.
It is crucial that the organizational weakness, lack of deep roots in the proletariat and theoretical incapacity and disorientation which were the precondition for the revisionist degeneration of the Fourth International not be simply equated with the consolidation and victory of that revisionism. Despite grave political errors, the Fourth International in the immediate post-war period was still revolutionary. The SWP and the International clung to sterile orthodoxy as a talisman to ward off non-revolutionary conclusions from world events which they could no longer comprehend. History had demonstrated that at crucial junctures revolutionary Marxists have been able to transcend an inadequate theory: Lenin before April 1917 was theoretically unequipped to project a proletarian revolution in a backward country like Russia; Trotsky until 1933 had equated the Russian Thermidor with a return to capitalism. Pabloism was more than a symmetrical false theory, more than simply an impressionistic over-reaction against orthodoxy; it was a theoretical justification for a non-revolutionary impulse based on giving up a perspective for the construction of a proletarian vanguard in the advanced or the colonial countries.
In January 1951 Pablo ventured into the realm of theory with a document called “Where Are We Going?” Despite whole paragraphs of confused crackpotism and virtually meaningless bombast, the whole revisionist structure emerges:
“The relation of forces on the international chess-board is now evolving to the disadvantage of imperialism.
“An epoch of transition between capitalism and socialism, an epoch which has already begun and is quite advanced.... This transformation will probably take an entire period of several centuries and will in the meantime be filled with forms and regimes transitional between capitalism and socialism and necessarily deviating from ‘pure’ forms and norms.
“The objective process is in the final analysis the sole determining factor, overriding all obstacles of a subjective order.
“The Communist Parties retain the possibility in certain circumstances of roughly outlining a revolutionary orientation.”
Pablo’s elevation of the “objective process” to “the sole determining factor” reducing the subjective factor (the consciousness and organization of the vanguard party) to irrelevance, the discussion of “several centuries” of “transition” (later characterized by Pablo’s opponents as “centuries of deformed workers states”) and the suggestion that revolutionary leadership might be provided by the Stalinist parties rather than the Fourth International—the whole analytic structure of Pabloist revisionism emerged.
In another document, “The Coming War,” Pablo put forward his policy of “entrism sui generis” (entrism of its own kind):
“In order to integrate ourselves into the real mass movement, to work and to remain in the masses’ trade unions for example, ‘ruses’ and ‘capitulations’ are not only acceptable but necessary.”
In essence, the Trotskyists were to abandon the perspective of short-term entrism whose purpose had always been to split the working-class organizations on a hard programmatic basis as a tactic for building the Trotskyist party. The new entrist policy flowed directly from Pablo’s analysis. Since the asserted shift in the world relationship of forces in favor of the advance of the revolution would compel the Stalinist parties to play a revolutionary role, it was only logical that the Trotskyists should be a part of such parties pursuing essentially a policy of pressuring the Stalinist apparatus.
All this should have exploded a bomb in the heads of the international Trotskyist cadres. Pablo was after all the head of the International Secretariat, the resident political body of the Fourth International! But there is little evidence of even alarm, let alone the formation of the international anti-revisionist faction which was required. One long document by Ernest Germain (“Ten Theses”), and perhaps some subterranean rumbling, did force Pablo to produce an attempt at orthodoxy on the question of the “transitional period” but no other literary notice was taken of Pablo’s most overt assault against the program of Trotskyism.
Germain Resists
In March 1951 Germain produced “Ten Theses,” which was a veiled attack on “Where Are We Going?” but did not attack Pablo or the document by name. Germain restated the Marxist use of “transitional period” as the period between the victory of the revolution (the dictatorship of the proletariat) and the achievement of socialism (the classless society). Without any explicit reference to Pablo’s position, he wrote: “No more than the bourgeoisie will it [Stalinism] survive a war which will be transformed into a world upsurge of the revolution.” Germain insisted on the contradictory Bonapartist character of Stalinism, based on proletarian property forms while safeguarding the privileged position of the bureaucracy against the workers. He emphasized the dual nature of the mass CPs outside the USSR as determined by their proletarian base on the one hand and their subservience to the Stalinist bureaucracies in power on the other.
Germain attempted to present the orthodox response to the Pabloist impulse that the destruction of capitalism in Eastern Europe, China and Yugoslavia without a Trotskyist leadership made the Fourth International superfluous. Again, he did not refer to the positions he was attacking; one would have thought that the “Ten Theses” simply dropped from the sky as an interesting theoretical exercise, rather than in response to the emergence of a revisionist current completely counterposed to Germain’s thrust. Insisting that a new worldwide revolutionary upsurge would not stabilize Stalinism but rather was a mortal danger to it, he wrote:
“It is because the new revolutionary wave contains in embryo the destruction of the Stalinist parties as such that we ought to be much closer today to the Communist workers. This is only one phase of our fundamental task: to construct new revolutionary parties....” [our emphasis]
“To be ‘closer to the Stalinist workers’ then signifies at the same time to affirm more than ever our own program and our own Trotskyist policy.”
The “Ten Theses” showed that all wings of the Trotskyist movement were still incapable of grasping the nature of the social transformations which had occurred in Eastern Europe (although the analysis of the British Haston-Grant RCP majority, borrowed by the SWP’s Los Angeles Vern-Ryan grouping, achieved the beginning (but only the beginning) of wisdom in recognizing that in the immediate post-war period an examination of native property forms would hardly suffice since the state power in Eastern Europe was a foreign occupying army, the Red Army). In 1951 Germain still considered the process of “structural assimilation” uncompleted (!) and predicted the assimilation of the armies of the East European states into the Soviet army—i.e., that Eastern Europe would simply be incorporated into the Soviet Union. Germain did recognize that the transformation in Eastern Europe destroyed capitalism but contained within it, even in victory, a decisive bureaucratic obstacle to socialist development; he stressed that the expansion of the USSR’s non-capitalist mode of production “is infinitely less important than the destruction of the living workers’ movement which has preceded it.”
No such inbuilt obstacle was recognized with regard to China and, specially, Yugoslavia. The Trotskyists were unable to disassociate the phenomenon of Stalinism from the person of Stalin; the Titoists’ break from the Kremlin obscured any recognition that Yugoslavia would necessarily pursue qualitatively identical domestic and diplomatic policies in safeguarding the interest of its own national bureaucratic regime against the working class. Uneasy about admitting that Stalinist forces heading peasant masses could ever consummate an anti-capitalist revolution, Germain in “Ten Theses” termed both the Yugoslav and Chinese events proletarian revolutions and also argued that “under such conditions, these parties cease being Stalinist parties in the classical sense of the term.”
Whereas Pablo took these events as the new revolutionary model which invalidated “‘pure’ forms and norms” (i.e., the Russian Revolution) Germain—again without referring to Pablo—stressed that they were as a result of exceptional circumstances which in any case would not be relevant to advanced industrial countries. He contrasted “the de facto United Front which today exists between the colonial revolutions in Asia and the Soviet bureaucracy, which has its objective origin in their being both menaced by imperialism...” with the possibilities for Europe. He concurred in the prediction of an imminent World War III between “the united imperialist front on the one hand and the USSR, the buffer countries and the colonial revolutions on the other” but rather than hailing it, termed it a counterrevolutionary war.
The crux of Germain’s argument was:
“What matters above all in the present period is to give the proletariat an international leadership capable of coordinating its forces and proceeding to the world victory of communism. The Stalinist bureaucracy, forced to turn with a blind fury against the first victorious proletarian revolution outside the USSR [Yugoslavia!], is socially incapable of accomplishing any such task. Herein lies the historical mission of our movement.... The historical justification for our movement...resides in the incapacity of Stalinism to overturn world capitalism, an incapacity rooted in the social nature of the Soviet bureaucracy.”
With the advantage of hindsight and the experience of the past 20 years—the counterrevolutionary nature of Stalinism reaffirmed most clearly in Hungary in 1956; the 1960 Cuban revolution in which petty-bourgeois nationalism at the head of peasant guerillas uprooted capitalism only to merge with the Stalinist apparatus internally and internationally; the consistently nationalist and Stalinist policies of the Chinese CP in power—it is easy to recognize that “Ten Theses” is flawed in its analysis and predictions. What is much more important, however, is the document’s consistent and deliberate non-factional tone which presaged Germain’s refusal to place himself in the anti-Pabloist camp. Divorced from the determination to fight for a correct line in the Fourth International, Germain’s theoretical defense of the necessity of Trotskyism meant very little. This was Pabloism merely at one remove, the denial of the subjective factor in the revolutionary process.
Third World Congress
The Third World Congress of the Fourth International was held in August-September 1951. The main political report attempted to distinguish between the Communist Parties and “reformist parties” on the grounds that only the former were contradictory, and projected that under the pressure of a strong mass upsurge the CPs could become revolutionary parties. The opportunist nature of Pablo’s version of an entrism tactic was sharply revealed in the repudiation of the principled entrist goal of sharp polarization and split: “The possibilities of important splits in the CPs...are replaced by a leftward movement within the CPs among its rank and file.” There was no recognition of decisive deformations in the East European and Chinese workers states; thus implicitly the Congress posed only a quantitative difference between the Soviet Union of Lenin and the degenerated and deformed workers states. The report projected the possibility that Tito might “head a regroupment of revolutionary forces independent of capitalism and of the Kremlin...playing a major role in the formation of a new revolutionary leadership.” There was no mention of the perspective of permanent revolution for the colonial countries.
The application of Pablo’s policy of “entrism sui generis” was elaborated in the Austrian Commission:
“The activity of our members in the SP will be governed by the following directives: A. Not to come forward as Trotskyists with our full program. B. Not to push forward programmatic and principled questions....”
No quantity of verbal orthodoxy in resolutions could have any longer obscured the vision of those who wanted to see.
The Parti Communiste Internationaliste of France submitted Germain’s “Ten Theses” for a vote (after Germain himself had apparently backed out of doing so) and proposed amendments to the main document. No vote was taken on the “Ten Theses” or the French amendments. The PCI voted against adopting the thrust of the main document; it was the only section to do so.
In the months that followed, the Pabloist line was elaborated along the lines already made clear before and at the Third World Congress:
“We are entering [the Stalinist parties] in order to remain there for a long time banking on the great possibility of seeing these parties, placed under new conditions [“a generally irreversible pre-revolutionary period”], develop centrist tendencies which will lead a whole stage of the radicalization of the masses and of the objective revolutionary processes....”
(Pablo, Report to the 10th Plenum of the International Executive Committee, February 1952)
“Caught between the imperialist threat and the colonial revolution, the Soviet bureaucracy found itself obliged to ally with the second against the first.... The disintegration of Stalinism within these parties ought not to be understood...as an organizational disintegration...or a public break with the Kremlin but as a progressive internal transformation.”
(“The Rise and Decline of Stalinism,” International Secretariat, September 1953)
‘V. THE ANTI-PABLOISTS
With the capitulation of Germain, whose role in the preliminary conflicts over Pabloist policies is ambiguous but in whom the French appear to have placed some degree of confidence, the task of fighting Pabloism fell to the French PCI majority of Bleibtreu-Lambert and the American SWP. Despite a considerable body of mythology to the contrary, both the PCI and SWP vacillated when revisionism manifested itself at the head of the Fourth International, balking only at applying it to their own sections. Both groups compromised themselves by uneasy acquiescence (combined in the case of the PCI with sporadic resistance) to Pablo’s policies until the suicidal organizational consequences to their sections necessitated sharp fights. Both abdicated the responsibility to take the fight against revisionism into every body and every section of the Fourth International and both retreated from the struggle by the foundation of the “International Committee” on the basis of “the principles of orthodox Trotskyism.” The IC from its inception was only a paper international tendency consisting of those groups which had already had splits between pro-Pabloist and orthodox wings.
PCI Fights Pablo
The PCI majority, having had been placed in receivership by the International Secretariat (which had installed the Pablo-loyal minority led by Mestre and Frank as the leadership of the French section), continued to claim agreement with the line of the Third World Congress, arguing that Pablo and the IS and IEC were violating its decisions! According to the French, Pabloism “utilizes the confusions and contradictions of the World Congress—where it could not impose itself—in order to assert itself after the World Congress.” (undated “Declaration of the Bleibtreu-Lambert Tendency on the Agreements Concluded at the IEC,” March or April 1952)
An important letter dated 16 February 1952 from Renard on behalf of the PCI majority to Cannon appealed to the SWP. Renard’s letter claimed agreement with the Third World Congress, including its French Commission, and contrasted the supposedly non-Pabloist World Congress (citing vague platitudes to demonstrate its presumably orthodox thrust) with Pablo’s subsequent actions and line in the IEC and IS. Renard asserted that “Pabloism did not win out at the Third World Congress.” (He wisely did not attempt to explain why his organization voted against the main Congress documents!) The main argument of the letter is an appeal against the Pabloist international leadership’s intervention into the French national section.
Cannon’s reply of 29 May accused the PCI majority of Stalinophobic opportunism in the union movement (a bloc with progressive anti-communists against the CP) and denied the existence of any such thing as Pabloism.
The PCI majority evidenced a clear understanding of the implications of the Pabloist entrism. In a polemic against minority theoretician Mestre the majority had written:
“If these ideas are correct, stop chattering about the tactic of entrism, even entrism sui generis, and pose clearly our new tasks: that of a more consistent tendency, not even a left opposition...whose role is to aid Stalinism to overcome its hesitation and to pose under the best conditions the decisive clash with the bourgeoisie.... If Stalinism has changed...[it means that] it no longer reflects the particular interests of a bureaucratic caste whose very existence depends on the unstable equilibrium between classes, that it is no longer bonapartist, but that it reflects solely...the defense of the workers state. That such a transformation should be produced without the intervention of the Soviet proletariat...but on the contrary by an evolution of the bureaucracy itself...would lead us not merely to revise the Transitional Program [but] all the works of Leon Trotsky since 1923 and the foundation of the Fourth International.”
(“First Reflections of Zig Zag,” PCI Internal Bulletin No. 2, February 1952)
But the PCI majority, not unlike the SWP, demonstrated a failure of concrete internationalism when faced with the prospect of all alone carrying through the fight against Pabloism.
On 3 June 1952 the PCI majority asked for recognition of two French sections of the Fourth International, thus permitting the PCI majority to carry out its own policies in France. This was in clear violation of the founding statutes of the Fourth International and meant the liquidation of the International as a disciplined world body. What was required was an international faction fight over the political line of the Fourth International. But the PCI majority was unwilling to subordinate work in France to the crucial fight for the legitimacy and continuity of the Fourth International. Pablo’s refusal to accede to this demand led directly to the split of the PCI majority.
SWP Enters the Struggle
The SWP only joined the fight against revisionism when a pro-Pabloist tendency, the Clarke wing of the Cochran-Clarke faction, manifested itself within the American party. In his reply to Renard dated 29 May 1952 Cannon had said:
“We do not see [“any kind of pro-Stalinist tendency”] in the International leadership of the Fourth International nor any sign nor symptom of it. We do not see any revisionism [in the documents]...we consider these documents to be completely Trotskyist.... It is the unanimous opinion of the leading people in the SWP that the authors of these documents have rendered a great service to the movement.”
The story that the SWP had prepared some amendments to the Third World Congress documents which Clarke (SWP representative to the International) had burned instead of presenting is quite possibly true but not very significant, in view of Cannon’s declaration of political allegiance to Pablo when it counted, in refusing to solidarize with the anti-Pabloist PCI majority.
Against Cochran-Clarke’s advocacy of an orientation toward the CP fellow-travellers, the SWP majority affirmed support to the Pabloist CP entrism tactic in general but insisted on a kind of American exceptionalism, contrasting the mass European parties with the pathetic American CP milieu, lacking a working-class base and peopled with shoddy third-rate intellectuals.
In response to the Cochran-Clarke threat, Cannon set about forming a faction in the SWP aided by the Weiss leadership in Los Angeles. Cannon sought to line up the old party cadre around the question of conciliation to Stalinism and appealed to the party trade unionists like Dunne and Swabeck by drawing an analogy between the need for factional struggle within the party and the struggle within the class against the reformists and sellouts as parallel processes of factional struggle against alien ideology. He told the May 1953 SWP Plenum:
“During the course of the past year, I had serious doubts of the ability of the SWP to survive.... I thought that our 25 year effort...had ended in catastrophic failure, and that, once again, a small handful would have to pick up the pieces and start all over again to build the new cadre of another party on the old foundations.”
(Closing speech, 30 May)
But Cannon chose another road. Instead of pursuing the necessary struggle wherever it might lead, Cannon made a bloc with the Dobbs-Kerry-Hansen apparatus over the organizationally liquidationist implications of the Cochran-Clarke line. In return for their support Cannon promised the routinist, conservative Dobbs administration total control of the SWP with no further interference from him (“a new regime in the party”).
The SWP’s response to finding the dispute in the International reflecting itself inside the American section was to deepen its isolationism into virulent anti-internationalism. Cannon’s speech to the SWP majority caucus on 18 May 1953 stated, “We don’t consider ourselves an American branch office of an international business firm that receives orders from the boss” and extolled discussion in which “we work out, if possible [!], a common line.” Cannon denied the legitimacy of an international leadership and referred to “a few people in Paris.” He contrasted the Fourth International with Lenin’s Comintern, which had state power and a leadership whose authority was widely recognized, and thus denied that the contemporary Fourth International could be a democratic centralist body.
Cannon belatedly took exception to Pablo’s conduct against the French majority, but only over the organizational question in keeping with the proposition that the International leadership should not intervene in the affairs of national sections. He wrote:
“...we were flabbergasted at the tactics used in the recent French conflict and split, and at the inconceivable organizational precedent established there. That is why I delayed my answer to Renard so long. I wanted to help the IS politically, but I didn’t see how I could sanction the organizational steps taken against the majority of an elected leadership. I finally resolved the problem by just ignoring that part of Renard’s letter.”
(“Letter to Tom,” 4 June 1953)
The “Letter to Tom” also reiterated the position that the Third World Congress was not revisionist.
The crucial defects in the anti-Pabloist struggle of the PCI and SWP were duly utilized by the Pabloists. The 14th IEC Plenum took Cannon to task for his concept of the International as a “federative union.” It noted that the SWP had never opposed the Pabloist entrism policy in principle and accused the SWP-PCI of an unprincipled bloc on China. Seizing on the SWP’s one-sided orthodoxy (Hansen’s defense of an SWP majorityite’s formulation that Stalinism is “counterrevolutionary through and through”—a characterization which fits only the CIA!) the Pabloists were able to cloak their liquidation of an independent Trotskyist program with pious reaffirmations of the contradictions of Stalinism as a counterrevolutionary caste resting atop the property forms established by the October Revolution.
IC Formed
Following the Cochran-Clarke split, the SWP precipitously broke publicly with Pablo. On 16 November 1953 the Militant carried “A Letter to Trotskyists Throughout the World” which denounced Cochran-Clarke and Pablo and belatedly solidarized with the “unjustly expelled” PCI majority. The SWP’s previous characterizations of the Third World Congress as “completely Trotskyist” necessitated an attempt in this so-called “Open Letter” to locate the emergence of Pabloism after the Congress, which doomed the SWP to present a somewhat unconvincing case leaning heavily on a leaflet or two of the Pabloist French minority from 1952. At about the same time the SWP produced “Against Pabloite Revisionism” dated November 1953, which contained a more competent analysis of Pablo’s liquidationist accommodation to Stalinism:
“The conception that a mass Communist Party will take the road to power if only sufficient mass pressure is brought to bear is false. It shifts the responsibility for revolutionary setbacks from the leadership to the mass...
“The working class is transformed [by Pablo’s theories] into a pressure group, and the Trotskyists into a pressure grouping along with it which pushes a section of the bureaucracy toward the revolution. In this way, the bureaucracy is transformed from a block and a betrayer of the revolution into an auxiliary motor force of it.”
In 1954 the “International Committee” was formed. It included the French PCI majority, the American SWP (fraternal) and the Healy (Burns) grouping in England. The latter did not play any significant or independent role in the fight against revisionism. The Healy-Lawrence split from the disintegrating Revolutionary Communist Party after the war, impelled by the Healy-Lawrence faction’s deep entrist perspective toward the British Labour Party, had been backed by Pablo’s International Secretariat, which recognized two sections in Britain and gave them equal representation on the IEC. Healy was Cannon’s “man” in England and had been consistently supported by the SWP in disputes within the RCP. When the SWP broke from Pablo, the Healy-Lawrence faction split, Healy aligning with the SWP and Lawrence with Pablo (Lawrence later went over to Stalinism as did the PCI minority’s Mestre). Despite being part of the new anti-Pabloist international bloc, the Healy group continued its arch-Pabloist Labour Party opportunism. It had no weight in the IC bloc until its recruitment of an impressive layer of CP intellectuals and trade unionists (most of whom it later lost) following the 1956 Hungarian Revolution made it considerably more substantial in the British left.
The IC also claimed the adherence of the Chinese (émigré) section, which had already undergone a split, and the small Swiss section.
The IC managed to produce a couple of internal bulletins in early 1954 but never met as a real international body, nor was a centralized leadership ever elected. The tactic adopted by the SWP was to boycott the Fourth World Congress, as merely a meeting of Pablo’s faction having no legitimacy as the Fourth International.
The world movement paid a high price for this evasion. To cite only one example: Ceylon. The Ceylonese LSSP took a non-factional position on Pabloism, appealing to the SWP not to split and to attend the Fourth Congress. A hard fight should have been aggressively pushed toward the passive Ceylonese doubtists, forcing a polarization and forging a hard cadre in the struggle. Instead the Ceylonese drifted along with Pablo. Some seven years later, the revolutionary reputation of Trotskyism was besmirched in the eyes of militants throughout the world by the LSSP’s entry into the bourgeois Ceylonese coalition government, precipitating a last-minute split by the international Pabloist leadership. Had a hard principled anti-revisionist fight been waged in the Ceylon section in 1953, a hard revolutionary organization with an independent claim to Trotskyist continuity might have been created then, preventing the association of the name of Trotskyism with the fundamental betrayal of the LSSP.
Thus the anti-revisionist fight was deliberately not carried to the world movement, the IC consisting mainly of those groups which had already had their splits over the application of Pabloist policies in their own countries, and the struggle to defeat revisionism and reconstruct the Fourth International on the basis of authentic Trotskyism was aborted.
From Flirtation to Consummation
In 1957 Pablo’s International Secretariat and the SWP flirted with possible reunification (the Hansen-Kolpe correspondence). The basis at that time was formal orthodoxy—the similarity of line between the IS and SWP in response to the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. The SWP, perhaps naively expecting a repetition of Clarke’s 1953 position on the possibility of self-liquidation of the Stalinist bureaucracies, tended to accept the IS’s formally Trotskyist conclusions over Hungary as good coin. These early reunification overtures came to naught because of the opposition of the British and French IC groups, as well as Cannon’s suspicions that Pablo was maneuvering. The issue was posed in a defective way—simply apparent empirical agreement without an examination of past differences and present motion.
When the question of reunification, consummated in 1963 with the formation of the United Secretariat, came up again, the entire political terrain had shifted. The IS and the SWP found themselves in agreement over Cuba. But the basis was no longer an apparent convergence on orthodoxy, but the SWP’s abandonment of Trotskyism to embrace Pabloist revisionism (which the SWP in its class-collaborationist line on the Vietnamese war has now transcended on the path to outright reformism).
The basis for the 1963 reunification was a document titled “For Early Reunification of the World Trotskyist Movement—Statement by the Political Committee of the SWP,” 1 March 1963. The key new line was section 13:
“Along the road of a revolution beginning with simple democratic demands and ending in the rupture of capitalist property relations, guerilla warfare conducted by landless peasant and semi-proletarian forces, under a leadership that becomes committed to carrying the revolution through to a conclusion, can play a decisive role in undermining and precipitating the downfall of a colonial and semi-colonial power. This is one of the main lessons to be drawn from experience since the Second World War. It must be consciously incorporated into the strategy of building revolutionary Marxist parties in colonial countries.”
In “Toward Rebirth of the Fourth International,” 12 June 1963, the Spartacist tendency counterposed:
“Experience since the Second World War has demonstrated that peasant-based guerilla warfare under petit-bourgeois leadership can in itself lead to nothing more than an anti-working-class bureaucratic regime. The creation of such regimes has come about under the conditions of decay of imperialism, the demoralization and disorientation caused by Stalinist betrayals, and the absence of revolutionary Marxist leadership of the working class. Colonial revolution can have an unequivocally progressive revolutionary significance only under such leadership of the revolutionary proletariat. For Trotskyists to incorporate into their strategy revisionism on the proletarian leadership in the revolution is a profound negation of Marxism-Leninism no matter what pious wish may be concurrently expressed for ‘building revolutionary Marxist parties in colonial countries.’ Marxists must resolutely oppose any adventurist acceptance of the peasant-guerilla road to socialism--historically akin to the Social Revolutionary program on tactics that Lenin fought. This alternative would be a suicidal course for the socialist goals of the movement, and perhaps physically for the adventurers.” Ironically, the SWP’s further rightist evolution leads it to now repudiate the basic line of section 13, from the other side—the U.Sec.’s advocacy of petty-bourgeois armed struggle is far too adventurous for the legalistic SWP which aims to become the mass party of American reformism.
Spartacist and the Fourth International
In his struggle to found the Fourth International, Trotsky repeatedly underscored the imperative need for revolutionary organization on an international basis. Prolonged national isolation within one country must ultimately disorient, deform and destroy any revolutionary grouping no matter how subjectively steadfast. Only a principled and disciplined international collaboration can provide a counterbalance to the fierce pressures toward insularity and social chauvinism generated by the bourgeoisie and its’ ideological agents within the working-class movement. As Trotsky recognized, those who deny the need for a programmatically founded democratic centralist world party deny the Leninist concept of the vanguard party itself. The destruction of the Fourth International by Pabloist revisionism, paralleled by organizational fracturing into numerous competing international blocs, necessitates unremitting struggle for its rebirth.
In our ten year history, the Spartacist tendency has faced and resisted powerful objective pressures toward abandonment of an internationalist perspective. Cut off from the possibility of disciplined international ties as a result of the organizational sectarianism and subsequent political degeneration of Gerry Healy’s International Committee, the Spartacist League has refused to passively acquiesce to the national isolation forced upon us. We have emphatically rejected the ersatz “internationalism” which achieves its international connections at the price of a federalist non-aggression pact thus renouncing in advance the struggle for disciplined international organization. We have sought to develop fraternal ties with groupings in other countries as part of a process of clarification and polarization. Our aim is the crystallization of a cohesive democratic centralist international tendency based on principled programmatic unity, the embryo of a reborn Fourth International.
The current cracking of the several international “Trotskyist” blocs now provides heightened opportunity for the Spartacist tendency to intervene in the world movement. Our history and program can serve as a guide for currents now in motion towards authentic Trotskyism, because despite involuntary national isolation for a time, we upheld our internationalist determination and continued to wage a principled fight against revisionism.
The shattering of the revisionists’ and centrists’ pretensions to international organization—the revelation that the United Secretariat, the International Committee, etc. have been nothing more than federated rotten blocs—combined with the worldwide renewal of proletarian combativeness in a context of sharpened inter-imperialist rivalry and intensified deep-seated capitalist crisis, provide an unprecedented objective opportunity for the crystallization and development of the Spartacist tendency internationally. As the political corpses of the revisionist blocs continue to decay, the Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution, must be reborn.
FOR THE REBIRTH OF THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL!
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. Deb’s 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.
Today I am starting 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.
Markin comment on this article:
At the most general level Marxism calls for the more equitable international division of labor, production for social use and for distribution. A shorthand description for the struggle for that goal is –“Workers Of The World Unite.” Of course that lofty goal requires organization, a higher and more rationale level of organization than even the most progressive aspects (well past now) of capitalist development could attain. It also requires a high level of international organization in the political struggle to attain that goal.
That is why, going back to the founders Marx and Engels, the notion of an international organization of revolutionary labor was central to their scheme. The First International, limited as it was by the immaturity of the labor movement of the day and internal political wrangling, represented the first halting steps in that direction. The later, more successful Second International was another example before it fell before the impact of world events. Needless to say for a partisan of the Russian Revolution the Communist International was, leaps and bounds, ahead of all previous efforts until it too fell to its international contradictions.
That brings us to the Leon Trotsky-inspired and led Fourth International, its fate and its lessons at a time when there is some talk of a non-Marxist Fifth International whose outlines seem akin to the First International, at best. However, before one moves on to the concept of a new International, of whatever number, and of whatever program, it is necessary to see where the old International, in this case the Forth International, went off the tracks. That is the importance of this article. The period under discussion from the death of Trotsky until the early 1950s is critical to understanding what amounted to the stillbirth of Fourth International as a revolutionary force. From there one can look, and look hard, at the myriad trends, tendencies, groups, leagues and so forth who claim be, or claim to stand in that tradition to see if there is a viable revolutionary continuity. Or whether we need to start over from scratch. Admittedly tough work to wade through, but for serious revolutionaries necessary work.
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The SWP and the Fourth lnternational, 1946-54:
Genesis of Pabloism
The following article was published in Spartacist English edition No. 21, Fall 1972.
The American Socialist Workers Party and the European Pabloists travelled at different rates along different paths to revisionism, to converge in uneasy alliance in the early 1960’s in an unprincipled “reunification,” which has now broken down as the American SWP has completed the transition from Pabloist centrism to outright reformism. The “United Secretariat” which issued out of the 1963 “reunification” teeters on the edge of an open split; the “anti-revisionist” “International Committee” fractured last year. The collapse of the various competing pretenders to the mantle of the Fourth International provides a crucial opportunity for the reemergence of an authentic Trotskyist international tendency. Key to the task of reconstructing the Fourth International through a process of splits and fusions is an understanding of the characteristics and causes of Pabloist revisionism and the flawed response of the anti-Pabloists who fought, too little and too late, on national terrain while in practice abandoning the world movement.
World War II: U.S. and France
Before the onset of the war, Trotsky and the Fourth International had believed that decaying capitalism and the rise of fascism removed the possibility, for reformism and therefore for bourgeois-democratic illusions among the masses. Yet they could not but become increasingly aware that the revulsion of the working class against fascism and the threat of fascist occupation gave rise to social chauvinism and a renewal of confidence in the “democratic” bourgeoisie permeating the proletarian masses throughout Europe and the U.S. Faced with such a contradiction, the powerful pressures of nationalist backwardness and democratic illusions in the working class tended to pull the sections of the Fourth International apart, some adopting a sectarian stance, others capitulating to the social patriotism which was rampant among the masses. The SWP briefly adopted the “Proletarian Military Policy” which called for military training under, trade union control, implicitly posing the utopian idea that U.S. workers could fight German fascism without the existence of a workers state in the U.S., through “controlling” U.S. imperialism’s army. British Trotskyist Ted Grant went even further, in one speech referring to British imperialism’s armed forces as “our Eighth Army.” The German IKD returned to outright Menshevism with the theory that fascism had brought about the need for “an intermediate stage fundamentally equivalent to a democratic revolution.” (“Three Theses,” 19 October 1941)
The French Trotskyist movement, fragmented during the course of the war, was the best example of the contradiction. One of its fragments subordinated the mobilization of the working class to the political appetites of the Gaullist wing of the imperialist bourgeoisie; another grouping renounced any struggle within the resistance movement in favor of work exclusively at the point of production and, not recognizing the existing level of reformist consciousness among the workers, adventurously attempted to seize the factories during the “liberation” of Paris while the working masses were out on the streets. The February 1944 European Conference document which was the basis for a fusion between two French groupings to form the Parti Communiste Internationaliste characterized the two groups:
“Instead of distinguishing between the nationalism of the defeated bourgeoisie which remains an expression of its imperialist preoccupations, and the ‘nationalism’ of the masses which is only a reactionary expression of their resistance against exploitation by the occupying imperialism, the leadership of the POI considered as progressive the struggle of its own bourgeoisie....”
“the CCI...under the pretext of guarding intact the heritage of Marxism-Leninism, refused obstinately to distinguish the nationalism of the bourgeoisie from the resistance movement of the masses.”
I. SWP ISOLATIONISM
European Trotskyism and American Trotskyism responded in initially different ways to different tasks and problems following World War II. The precarious internationalism of the American SWP, maintained through intimate collaboration with Trotsky during his exile in Mexico, did not survive the assassination of Trotsky in 1940 and the onset of world war. The American Trotskyists retreated into an isolation only partially forced upon them by the disintegration of the European sections under conditions of fascist triumph and illegalization.
Anticipating the difficulties of international coordination during the war, a resident International Executive Committee had been set up in New York. Its only notable achievement, however, appears to have been the convening of an “Emergency Conference” of the International, held 19-26 May 1940 “somewhere in the Western Hemisphere,” “on the initiative of its U.S., Mexican and Canadian sections.” A rump conference attended by less than half of the sections, the “Emergency Conference” was called for the purpose of dealing with the international ramifications of the Shachtman split in the U.S. section, which had resulted in the defection of a majority of the resident IEC. The meeting solidarized with the SWP in the faction fight and reaffirmed its status as the one U.S. section of the Fourth International. The conference also adopted a “Manifesto of the Fourth International on the Imperialist War and the Proletarian World Revolution” written by Trotsky. Following Trotsky’s death, however, the resident IEC lapsed into oblivion.
At least in hindsight, the American section of the Fourth International should have initiated a clandestine secretariat in a neutral country in Europe, staffed by qualified SWPers and emigres from other sections, to centralize and directly supervise the work of Trotskyists in fascist-occupied countries. But the SWP was content to limit its international activities during the war to the publication in its internal bulletin’s of letters and factional documents from European Trotskyists. The passage of the Voorhis Act in 1941 inhibiting U.S. groups from affiliation with international political organizations—a law which to this day has never been tested—also gave the SWP a rationalization for down-playing its international responsibilities.
The SWP’s work during the war did evidence an internationalist perspective. SWP longshoremen used the opportunity of ships from Vladivostok docking on the West Coast to clandestinely distribute Trotsky’s “Letter to Russian Workers” in Russian to the Soviet seamen. The SWP concentrated its merchant marine comrades on the supply runs to Murmansk until the extremely heavy casualties compelled the party to discontinue the Murmansk concentration. (It was in response to such activities that the GPU was directed to activate the Soblen anti-Trotskyist espionage net. Testimony years afterward revealed that Cannon’s telephone was tapped by the GPU and that the business manager of the SWP’s Fourth International magazine, one “Michael Cort,” was one of the GPU agents.) But the maintenance and direction of the Fourth International was part of the SWP’s internationalist responsibility, and should have been a priority as urgent as the work which the SWP undertook on its own.
The leadership of the SWP came through the war period essentially intact, but reinforced in its insularity and ill-equipped theoretically to deal with the post-war situation.
During the later years of the war and the immediate post-war period, the SWP had registered some impressive successes in implanting its cadres in industry during the boom and in recruiting a new layer of proletarian militants drawn to the Trotskyists because of their opposition to the Communist Party’s policies of social patriotism and class peace.
Optimism and Orthodoxy
SWP entered the post-war period with buoyant optimism about the prospects for proletarian revolution. The 1946 SWP Convention and its resolution, “The Coming American Revolution,” projected the indefinite continuation of successes for the SWP. The isolationist perspective of the Party was in evidence at the Convention. The necessarily international character of crises and revolutions is recognized, but not the concomitant international character of the vanguard party. The resolution in effect makes excuses for the political backwardness of the U.S. working class while praising its militancy and presents the following syllogism: the decisive battles of the world revolution will be fought in the advanced countries where the means of production are highly developed and the proletariat powerful—above all in the U.S.; therefore all that is necessary is to build the American revolution and world capitalism will be overthrown. Profound impressionism led the SWP to see the world through the eyes of American capitalism which had emerged from the war as the unquestioned pre-eminent capitalist world power.
The post-war stabilization of European capitalism, the emergence of the Stalinist parties as the dominant reformist workers parties in Europe, the expansion of Stalinism in Eastern Europe (apparently flying in the face of the Trotskyist analysis that Stalinism could only betray), the destruction of capitalism by peasant-based nationalist-Stalinist formations in Yugoslavia and China—all these developments posed new theoretical problems for the Trotskyist movement which the SWP, stripped of a layer of talented intellectuals by the petty-bourgeois Shachtman split and shortly thereafter deprived of Trotsky’s guidance, could not handle. The SWP’s immediate response was to retreat into a sterile “orthodoxy” stripped of real theoretical content, thus rendering its isolation more complete.
The 1950’s brought a new wave of spontaneous working-class struggles in West and East Europe, but to the SWP they brought the onset of the Cold War witchhunt: the Smith Act prosecutions of CPers and former CPers; the deadening of every aspect of social and intellectual life; the ‘relentless purge of known “reds” and militants’ from the union movement, severing the SWP’s connection with the working-class movement which had taken years to build up; the dropping away of the whole layer of workers recruited to the SWP during the late 1940’s. The objective pressure to become a mere cheering section for European and colonial developments was strong but the SWP hung on to its verbal orthodox commitment to making the American revolution.
II. THE BREAK IN CONTINUITY IN EUROPE
The vulnerability of the European Trotskyist movement to revisionism hinged on the historic weaknesses of the European organizations combined with the thorough shattering of their continuity to the earlier period. When Trotsky in 1934 launched the struggle to found the Fourth International, the European working class, confronted with the decisive choice of socialism or barbarism, lacked a communist leadership. The task facing the Fourth Internationalists was clear: to mobilize the class against the threat of fascism and war, to amass the cadres for the world revolutionary party which would stand for proletarian internationalism in the face of the march toward imperialist war and the social chauvinist capitulation of the Second and Third Internationals. But Trotsky had noted the immense difficulty for the conscious vanguard to go forward in a period of crushing defeat for the class and the “terrible disproportion between the tasks and the means.” (“Fighting Against the Stream,” April 1939) The weakness of the European movement was exemplified by the French section, which was repeatedly criticized by Trotsky and whose petty-bourgeois “workerist” deviation and dilettantism were the subject of a special resolution at the founding conference of the Fourth International in 1938.
The Fourth International geared itself up for the decisive struggle against fascism and war—and lost. During the course of the war and the Nazi occupations the very rudiments of international, and even national, coordination were destroyed. The International disintegrated into small groups of militants pursuing improvised policies: some opportunist, some heroic. The 65 French and German comrades who were shot by the Gestapo in July 1943 because of their revolutionary defeatist fraternization and the building of a Trotskyist cell in the German armed forces are a monument to the internationalist courage of a weak revolutionary movement fighting against insurmountable odds.
Trotskyist Cadres Decimated
In August 1943 an attempt was made to reestablish the rudiments of organization in Europe. The European Secretariat set up at this meeting in Belgium included exactly one surviving member of the pre-war leadership and largely as a result of the nonexistence of tested cadres, Michel Pablo (Raptis), a skilled clandestine organizer not known for ability as a political leader or theoretician, emerged as the head of the International. When in June 1945 a European Executive Committee met to prepare for the holding of a World Congress, the experienced leading cadres and the most promising of the young Trotskyists (A. Leon, L. Lesoil, W. Held) had been killed at the hands of the Nazis or the GPU. The continuity of Trotskyism in Europe had been broken. This tragic process was duplicated elsewhere with the imprisonment and eventual execution of Ta Thu-tau and the Vietnamese Trotskyists, the virtual extinction of the Chinese Trotskyists and the liquidation of the remaining Russian Trotskyists (including, besides Trotsky, Ignace Reiss, Rudolf Klement and Leon Sedov). The Europeans were apparently so starved for experienced leading cadres that Pierre Frank (leading member of the Molinier group which Trotsky denounced as “demoralized centrists” in 1935 and expelled in 1938 for refusing to break with the French social-democracy after the “French Turn”) was enabled to become a leader of the post-war French section.
At this crucial juncture the intervention and leadership of a truly internationalist American Trotskyist party might have made a great difference. But the SWP, which should have assumed leadership in the International throughout the war years, was sunk in its own national preoccupations. Cannon noted later that the SWP leadership had deliberately built up Pablo’s authority, even going “so far as to soft-pedal a lot of our differences” (June 1953). The urgent responsibility of the SWP, which whatever its deficiencies was the strongest and most experienced Trotskyist organization, was precisely the opposite.
III. ORTHODOXY REASSERTED
The immediate task facing the Trotskyists after the war was to reorient its cadres and reassess the situation of the vanguard and the class in light of previous projections. The Trotskyists’ expectations of tottering West European capitalist regimes and the renewal of violent class struggle throughout Europe, and especially in Germany where the collapse of Nazi state power left a vacuum, had been confirmed. However the reformists, particularly the Stalinist parties, reasserted themselves to contain the spontaneous working-class upsurges. Control of the French working class through the CGT passed from the social democracy (SFIO) which had controlled the CGT before the war to the French Stalinists. Thus despite the manifest revolutionary spirit of the European working class and the great waves of general strikes, especially in France, Belgium, Greece and Italy, throughout West Europe, the proletariat did not take power and the Stalinist apparatus emerged with new strength and solidity.
The Fourth International responded by falling back on sterile orthodoxy and stubborn refusal to believe that these struggles had been defeated for the immediate period:
“Under these conditions partial defeats...temporary periods of retreat...do not demoralize the proletariat.... The repeated demonstration by the bourgeoisie of its inability to restabilize an economy and political regime of the slightest stability offers the workers new opportunities to go over to even higher stages of struggle.
“The swelling of the ranks of the traditional organizations in Europe, above all the Stalinist parties...has reached its peak almost everywhere. The phase of decline is beginning.”
(European Executive Committee, April 1946)
Right-opportunist critics in the Trotskyist movement (the German IKD, the SWP’s Goldman-Morrow faction) were correct in noting the over-optimism of such an analysis and in pointing out that the traditional reformist leaderships of the working class are always the first inheritors of a renewal of militancy and struggle. Their “solution,” however, was to argue for a limitation of the Trotskyist program to bourgeois-democratic demands, and such measures as critical support to the post-war French bourgeois Constitution. Their advocacy of an entrist policy toward the European reformist parties was dismissed out of hand by the majority, which expected the workers to more or less spontaneously regroup under the Trotskyist banner. This attitude prepared the way for a sharp reversal on the entrism question when the implicit position of ignoring the reformists’ influence could no longer be maintained.
The Fourth International’s immediate post-war perspective was summed up by Ernest Germain (Mandel) in an article called “The First Phase of the European Revolution” (Fourth International, August 1946). The title already implies the outlook: “the revolution” was implicitly redefined as a metaphysical process enduring continuously and progressing inevitably toward victory, rather than a sharp and necessarily time-limited confrontation over the question of state power, the outcome of which will shape the entire subsequent period.
Stalinophobia
The later, Pabloist, capitulation to Stalinism was prepared by impressionistic overstatement of its opposite: Stalinophobia. In November 1947 Pablo’s International Secretariat wrote that the Soviet Union had become:
“a workers state degenerated to the point where all progressive manifestations of the remains of the October conquest are more and more neutralized by the disastrous effects of the Stalinist dictatorship.”
“What remains of the conquests of October is more and more losing its historic value as a premise for socialist development.”
“...from the Russian occupation forces or from pro-Stalinist governments, which are completely reactionary, we do not demand the expropriation of the bourgeoisie....”
Within the SWP, the rumor circulated that Cannon was flirting with the characterization that the Soviet Union had become a totally degenerated workers state, i.e., a “state
capitalist” regime—a position which Natalia Trotsky shortly embraced.
On the question of the Stalinist expansion into East Europe, the Fourth International was united in simple-minded orthodoxy. An extensive discussion of “The Kremlin in Eastern Europe” (Fourth International, November 1946) by E. R. Frank (Bert Cochran) was shrill in anti-Stalinist tone and tended toward the view that the countries occupied by the Red Army would be deliberately maintained as capitalist states. A polemic against Shachtman by Germain dated 15 November 1946 was still more categorical: the theory of “a degenerated workers state being installed in a country where there has not yet previously been a proletarian revolution.” is dismissed, simply, as “absurd.” And Germain rhetorically queries, “Does [Shachtman] really think that the Stalinist bureaucracy has succeeded in overthrowing capitalism in half of our continent?” (Fourth International, February 1947)
The methodology here is the same as that pursued, more cynically, by the “International Committee” in later years over the question of Cuba (perplexed? then deny reality!) with the difference that the class character of East Europe, with capitalist economic institutions but the state power held by the occupying army of a degenerated workers state, was far more difficult to understand. Empiricists and renegades, of course, had no difficulty in characterizing the East European states:
“Everyone knows that in the countries where the Stalinists have taken power they have proceeded, at one or another rate of speed, to establish exactly the same economic, political, social regime as exists in Russia. Everyone knows that the bourgeoisie has been or is rapidly being expropriated, deprived of all its economic power, and in many cases deprived of mortal existence.... Everyone knows that what remnants of capitalism remain in those countries will not even be remnants tomorrow, that the whole tendency is to establish a social system identical with that of Stalinist Russia,”
(Max Shachtman, “The Congress of the Fourth International,” October 1948 New International)
Excruciating as this ridicule must have, been for them, however, the orthodox Trotskyists were trapped in their analysis because they could not construct a theory to explain the East Europe transformation without embracing non-revolutionary conclusions.
German, as was typical for him in those years, at least posed the theoretical dilemma clearly: is the Trotskyist understanding of Stalinism correct if Stalinism shows itself willing in some cases to accomplish any sort of anti-capitalist social transformation? Clinging to orthodoxy, the Trotskyists had lost a real grasp of theory and suppressed part of Trotsky’s dialectical understanding of Stalinism as a parasitic and counterrevolutionary caste sitting atop the gains of the October Revolution, a kind of treacherous middle-man poised between the victorious Russian proletariat and world imperialism. Having thus reduced dialectical materialism to static dogma, their disorientation was complete when it became necessary to answer Germain’s question in the affirmative, and the way was prepared for Pabloist revisionism to leap into the theoretical void.
Fourth International Flirts with Tito
Virtually without exception the Fourth International was disoriented by the Yugoslav revolution. After some twenty years of Stalinist monolithism, the Trotskyists were perhaps ill-disposed to scrutinize the anti-Stalin Yugoslav CP too carefully. The Yugoslav Titoists were described as “comrades” and “left centrists,” and Yugoslavia as “a workers state established by a proletarian revolution.” In one of several “Open Letters” to Tito, the SWP wrote: “The confidence of the masses in it [“your party”] will grow enormously and it will become the effective collective expression of the interests and desires of the proletariat of its country.” The Yugoslav revolution posed a new problem (later recapitulated by the Chinese, Cuban and Vietnamese experiences): unlike East Europe, where the social transformations were accomplished by the army of a foreign degenerated workers state, the Yugoslav revolution was clearly an indigenous social revolution which, without the intervention of the working class or the direction of a Trotskyist party,succeeded in establishing a (deformed) workers state. The Fourth International avoided the theoretical problem by dubbing the revolution “proletarian” and the Titoists “left centrists.” (The SWP avoided the question of China by refusing to unambiguously characterize the Maoist regime as a deformed workers state until 1955. As late as 1954 two articles by the Phillips tendency, characterizing China as state capitalist, were published in the SWP’s Fourth International.)
Again orthodoxy is maintained but robbed of its content. The impulse, resisted until Pablo was to give it consistent expression, was that the ability of non-proletarian, non-Trotskyist forces to accomplish any form of social overturn robbed the Fourth International of its reason for existence. The crucial qualitative distinction between a workers state and a deformed workers state—demarcated in blood in the need for political revolution to open the road to socialist development and the extension of the revolution abroad—had been lost.
IV. PABLOISM CONQUERS
The numerically weak, socially isolated, theoretically unarmed and inexperienced cadres of the post-war Fourth International were easy prey for disorientation and impatience in a situation of repeated pre-revolutionary upsurges whose course they could not influence. Beginning in early 1951 a new revisionism, Pabloism, began to assert itself, responding to the frustrating objective situation by posing an ersatz way out of the isolation of the Fourth International from the main motion of the working class. Pabloism was the generalization of this impulse in a revisionist body of theory offering impressionistic answers which were more consistent than the one-sided orthodoxy of the early post-war Fourth International.
It is crucial that the organizational weakness, lack of deep roots in the proletariat and theoretical incapacity and disorientation which were the precondition for the revisionist degeneration of the Fourth International not be simply equated with the consolidation and victory of that revisionism. Despite grave political errors, the Fourth International in the immediate post-war period was still revolutionary. The SWP and the International clung to sterile orthodoxy as a talisman to ward off non-revolutionary conclusions from world events which they could no longer comprehend. History had demonstrated that at crucial junctures revolutionary Marxists have been able to transcend an inadequate theory: Lenin before April 1917 was theoretically unequipped to project a proletarian revolution in a backward country like Russia; Trotsky until 1933 had equated the Russian Thermidor with a return to capitalism. Pabloism was more than a symmetrical false theory, more than simply an impressionistic over-reaction against orthodoxy; it was a theoretical justification for a non-revolutionary impulse based on giving up a perspective for the construction of a proletarian vanguard in the advanced or the colonial countries.
In January 1951 Pablo ventured into the realm of theory with a document called “Where Are We Going?” Despite whole paragraphs of confused crackpotism and virtually meaningless bombast, the whole revisionist structure emerges:
“The relation of forces on the international chess-board is now evolving to the disadvantage of imperialism.
“An epoch of transition between capitalism and socialism, an epoch which has already begun and is quite advanced.... This transformation will probably take an entire period of several centuries and will in the meantime be filled with forms and regimes transitional between capitalism and socialism and necessarily deviating from ‘pure’ forms and norms.
“The objective process is in the final analysis the sole determining factor, overriding all obstacles of a subjective order.
“The Communist Parties retain the possibility in certain circumstances of roughly outlining a revolutionary orientation.”
Pablo’s elevation of the “objective process” to “the sole determining factor” reducing the subjective factor (the consciousness and organization of the vanguard party) to irrelevance, the discussion of “several centuries” of “transition” (later characterized by Pablo’s opponents as “centuries of deformed workers states”) and the suggestion that revolutionary leadership might be provided by the Stalinist parties rather than the Fourth International—the whole analytic structure of Pabloist revisionism emerged.
In another document, “The Coming War,” Pablo put forward his policy of “entrism sui generis” (entrism of its own kind):
“In order to integrate ourselves into the real mass movement, to work and to remain in the masses’ trade unions for example, ‘ruses’ and ‘capitulations’ are not only acceptable but necessary.”
In essence, the Trotskyists were to abandon the perspective of short-term entrism whose purpose had always been to split the working-class organizations on a hard programmatic basis as a tactic for building the Trotskyist party. The new entrist policy flowed directly from Pablo’s analysis. Since the asserted shift in the world relationship of forces in favor of the advance of the revolution would compel the Stalinist parties to play a revolutionary role, it was only logical that the Trotskyists should be a part of such parties pursuing essentially a policy of pressuring the Stalinist apparatus.
All this should have exploded a bomb in the heads of the international Trotskyist cadres. Pablo was after all the head of the International Secretariat, the resident political body of the Fourth International! But there is little evidence of even alarm, let alone the formation of the international anti-revisionist faction which was required. One long document by Ernest Germain (“Ten Theses”), and perhaps some subterranean rumbling, did force Pablo to produce an attempt at orthodoxy on the question of the “transitional period” but no other literary notice was taken of Pablo’s most overt assault against the program of Trotskyism.
Germain Resists
In March 1951 Germain produced “Ten Theses,” which was a veiled attack on “Where Are We Going?” but did not attack Pablo or the document by name. Germain restated the Marxist use of “transitional period” as the period between the victory of the revolution (the dictatorship of the proletariat) and the achievement of socialism (the classless society). Without any explicit reference to Pablo’s position, he wrote: “No more than the bourgeoisie will it [Stalinism] survive a war which will be transformed into a world upsurge of the revolution.” Germain insisted on the contradictory Bonapartist character of Stalinism, based on proletarian property forms while safeguarding the privileged position of the bureaucracy against the workers. He emphasized the dual nature of the mass CPs outside the USSR as determined by their proletarian base on the one hand and their subservience to the Stalinist bureaucracies in power on the other.
Germain attempted to present the orthodox response to the Pabloist impulse that the destruction of capitalism in Eastern Europe, China and Yugoslavia without a Trotskyist leadership made the Fourth International superfluous. Again, he did not refer to the positions he was attacking; one would have thought that the “Ten Theses” simply dropped from the sky as an interesting theoretical exercise, rather than in response to the emergence of a revisionist current completely counterposed to Germain’s thrust. Insisting that a new worldwide revolutionary upsurge would not stabilize Stalinism but rather was a mortal danger to it, he wrote:
“It is because the new revolutionary wave contains in embryo the destruction of the Stalinist parties as such that we ought to be much closer today to the Communist workers. This is only one phase of our fundamental task: to construct new revolutionary parties....” [our emphasis]
“To be ‘closer to the Stalinist workers’ then signifies at the same time to affirm more than ever our own program and our own Trotskyist policy.”
The “Ten Theses” showed that all wings of the Trotskyist movement were still incapable of grasping the nature of the social transformations which had occurred in Eastern Europe (although the analysis of the British Haston-Grant RCP majority, borrowed by the SWP’s Los Angeles Vern-Ryan grouping, achieved the beginning (but only the beginning) of wisdom in recognizing that in the immediate post-war period an examination of native property forms would hardly suffice since the state power in Eastern Europe was a foreign occupying army, the Red Army). In 1951 Germain still considered the process of “structural assimilation” uncompleted (!) and predicted the assimilation of the armies of the East European states into the Soviet army—i.e., that Eastern Europe would simply be incorporated into the Soviet Union. Germain did recognize that the transformation in Eastern Europe destroyed capitalism but contained within it, even in victory, a decisive bureaucratic obstacle to socialist development; he stressed that the expansion of the USSR’s non-capitalist mode of production “is infinitely less important than the destruction of the living workers’ movement which has preceded it.”
No such inbuilt obstacle was recognized with regard to China and, specially, Yugoslavia. The Trotskyists were unable to disassociate the phenomenon of Stalinism from the person of Stalin; the Titoists’ break from the Kremlin obscured any recognition that Yugoslavia would necessarily pursue qualitatively identical domestic and diplomatic policies in safeguarding the interest of its own national bureaucratic regime against the working class. Uneasy about admitting that Stalinist forces heading peasant masses could ever consummate an anti-capitalist revolution, Germain in “Ten Theses” termed both the Yugoslav and Chinese events proletarian revolutions and also argued that “under such conditions, these parties cease being Stalinist parties in the classical sense of the term.”
Whereas Pablo took these events as the new revolutionary model which invalidated “‘pure’ forms and norms” (i.e., the Russian Revolution) Germain—again without referring to Pablo—stressed that they were as a result of exceptional circumstances which in any case would not be relevant to advanced industrial countries. He contrasted “the de facto United Front which today exists between the colonial revolutions in Asia and the Soviet bureaucracy, which has its objective origin in their being both menaced by imperialism...” with the possibilities for Europe. He concurred in the prediction of an imminent World War III between “the united imperialist front on the one hand and the USSR, the buffer countries and the colonial revolutions on the other” but rather than hailing it, termed it a counterrevolutionary war.
The crux of Germain’s argument was:
“What matters above all in the present period is to give the proletariat an international leadership capable of coordinating its forces and proceeding to the world victory of communism. The Stalinist bureaucracy, forced to turn with a blind fury against the first victorious proletarian revolution outside the USSR [Yugoslavia!], is socially incapable of accomplishing any such task. Herein lies the historical mission of our movement.... The historical justification for our movement...resides in the incapacity of Stalinism to overturn world capitalism, an incapacity rooted in the social nature of the Soviet bureaucracy.”
With the advantage of hindsight and the experience of the past 20 years—the counterrevolutionary nature of Stalinism reaffirmed most clearly in Hungary in 1956; the 1960 Cuban revolution in which petty-bourgeois nationalism at the head of peasant guerillas uprooted capitalism only to merge with the Stalinist apparatus internally and internationally; the consistently nationalist and Stalinist policies of the Chinese CP in power—it is easy to recognize that “Ten Theses” is flawed in its analysis and predictions. What is much more important, however, is the document’s consistent and deliberate non-factional tone which presaged Germain’s refusal to place himself in the anti-Pabloist camp. Divorced from the determination to fight for a correct line in the Fourth International, Germain’s theoretical defense of the necessity of Trotskyism meant very little. This was Pabloism merely at one remove, the denial of the subjective factor in the revolutionary process.
Third World Congress
The Third World Congress of the Fourth International was held in August-September 1951. The main political report attempted to distinguish between the Communist Parties and “reformist parties” on the grounds that only the former were contradictory, and projected that under the pressure of a strong mass upsurge the CPs could become revolutionary parties. The opportunist nature of Pablo’s version of an entrism tactic was sharply revealed in the repudiation of the principled entrist goal of sharp polarization and split: “The possibilities of important splits in the CPs...are replaced by a leftward movement within the CPs among its rank and file.” There was no recognition of decisive deformations in the East European and Chinese workers states; thus implicitly the Congress posed only a quantitative difference between the Soviet Union of Lenin and the degenerated and deformed workers states. The report projected the possibility that Tito might “head a regroupment of revolutionary forces independent of capitalism and of the Kremlin...playing a major role in the formation of a new revolutionary leadership.” There was no mention of the perspective of permanent revolution for the colonial countries.
The application of Pablo’s policy of “entrism sui generis” was elaborated in the Austrian Commission:
“The activity of our members in the SP will be governed by the following directives: A. Not to come forward as Trotskyists with our full program. B. Not to push forward programmatic and principled questions....”
No quantity of verbal orthodoxy in resolutions could have any longer obscured the vision of those who wanted to see.
The Parti Communiste Internationaliste of France submitted Germain’s “Ten Theses” for a vote (after Germain himself had apparently backed out of doing so) and proposed amendments to the main document. No vote was taken on the “Ten Theses” or the French amendments. The PCI voted against adopting the thrust of the main document; it was the only section to do so.
In the months that followed, the Pabloist line was elaborated along the lines already made clear before and at the Third World Congress:
“We are entering [the Stalinist parties] in order to remain there for a long time banking on the great possibility of seeing these parties, placed under new conditions [“a generally irreversible pre-revolutionary period”], develop centrist tendencies which will lead a whole stage of the radicalization of the masses and of the objective revolutionary processes....”
(Pablo, Report to the 10th Plenum of the International Executive Committee, February 1952)
“Caught between the imperialist threat and the colonial revolution, the Soviet bureaucracy found itself obliged to ally with the second against the first.... The disintegration of Stalinism within these parties ought not to be understood...as an organizational disintegration...or a public break with the Kremlin but as a progressive internal transformation.”
(“The Rise and Decline of Stalinism,” International Secretariat, September 1953)
‘V. THE ANTI-PABLOISTS
With the capitulation of Germain, whose role in the preliminary conflicts over Pabloist policies is ambiguous but in whom the French appear to have placed some degree of confidence, the task of fighting Pabloism fell to the French PCI majority of Bleibtreu-Lambert and the American SWP. Despite a considerable body of mythology to the contrary, both the PCI and SWP vacillated when revisionism manifested itself at the head of the Fourth International, balking only at applying it to their own sections. Both groups compromised themselves by uneasy acquiescence (combined in the case of the PCI with sporadic resistance) to Pablo’s policies until the suicidal organizational consequences to their sections necessitated sharp fights. Both abdicated the responsibility to take the fight against revisionism into every body and every section of the Fourth International and both retreated from the struggle by the foundation of the “International Committee” on the basis of “the principles of orthodox Trotskyism.” The IC from its inception was only a paper international tendency consisting of those groups which had already had splits between pro-Pabloist and orthodox wings.
PCI Fights Pablo
The PCI majority, having had been placed in receivership by the International Secretariat (which had installed the Pablo-loyal minority led by Mestre and Frank as the leadership of the French section), continued to claim agreement with the line of the Third World Congress, arguing that Pablo and the IS and IEC were violating its decisions! According to the French, Pabloism “utilizes the confusions and contradictions of the World Congress—where it could not impose itself—in order to assert itself after the World Congress.” (undated “Declaration of the Bleibtreu-Lambert Tendency on the Agreements Concluded at the IEC,” March or April 1952)
An important letter dated 16 February 1952 from Renard on behalf of the PCI majority to Cannon appealed to the SWP. Renard’s letter claimed agreement with the Third World Congress, including its French Commission, and contrasted the supposedly non-Pabloist World Congress (citing vague platitudes to demonstrate its presumably orthodox thrust) with Pablo’s subsequent actions and line in the IEC and IS. Renard asserted that “Pabloism did not win out at the Third World Congress.” (He wisely did not attempt to explain why his organization voted against the main Congress documents!) The main argument of the letter is an appeal against the Pabloist international leadership’s intervention into the French national section.
Cannon’s reply of 29 May accused the PCI majority of Stalinophobic opportunism in the union movement (a bloc with progressive anti-communists against the CP) and denied the existence of any such thing as Pabloism.
The PCI majority evidenced a clear understanding of the implications of the Pabloist entrism. In a polemic against minority theoretician Mestre the majority had written:
“If these ideas are correct, stop chattering about the tactic of entrism, even entrism sui generis, and pose clearly our new tasks: that of a more consistent tendency, not even a left opposition...whose role is to aid Stalinism to overcome its hesitation and to pose under the best conditions the decisive clash with the bourgeoisie.... If Stalinism has changed...[it means that] it no longer reflects the particular interests of a bureaucratic caste whose very existence depends on the unstable equilibrium between classes, that it is no longer bonapartist, but that it reflects solely...the defense of the workers state. That such a transformation should be produced without the intervention of the Soviet proletariat...but on the contrary by an evolution of the bureaucracy itself...would lead us not merely to revise the Transitional Program [but] all the works of Leon Trotsky since 1923 and the foundation of the Fourth International.”
(“First Reflections of Zig Zag,” PCI Internal Bulletin No. 2, February 1952)
But the PCI majority, not unlike the SWP, demonstrated a failure of concrete internationalism when faced with the prospect of all alone carrying through the fight against Pabloism.
On 3 June 1952 the PCI majority asked for recognition of two French sections of the Fourth International, thus permitting the PCI majority to carry out its own policies in France. This was in clear violation of the founding statutes of the Fourth International and meant the liquidation of the International as a disciplined world body. What was required was an international faction fight over the political line of the Fourth International. But the PCI majority was unwilling to subordinate work in France to the crucial fight for the legitimacy and continuity of the Fourth International. Pablo’s refusal to accede to this demand led directly to the split of the PCI majority.
SWP Enters the Struggle
The SWP only joined the fight against revisionism when a pro-Pabloist tendency, the Clarke wing of the Cochran-Clarke faction, manifested itself within the American party. In his reply to Renard dated 29 May 1952 Cannon had said:
“We do not see [“any kind of pro-Stalinist tendency”] in the International leadership of the Fourth International nor any sign nor symptom of it. We do not see any revisionism [in the documents]...we consider these documents to be completely Trotskyist.... It is the unanimous opinion of the leading people in the SWP that the authors of these documents have rendered a great service to the movement.”
The story that the SWP had prepared some amendments to the Third World Congress documents which Clarke (SWP representative to the International) had burned instead of presenting is quite possibly true but not very significant, in view of Cannon’s declaration of political allegiance to Pablo when it counted, in refusing to solidarize with the anti-Pabloist PCI majority.
Against Cochran-Clarke’s advocacy of an orientation toward the CP fellow-travellers, the SWP majority affirmed support to the Pabloist CP entrism tactic in general but insisted on a kind of American exceptionalism, contrasting the mass European parties with the pathetic American CP milieu, lacking a working-class base and peopled with shoddy third-rate intellectuals.
In response to the Cochran-Clarke threat, Cannon set about forming a faction in the SWP aided by the Weiss leadership in Los Angeles. Cannon sought to line up the old party cadre around the question of conciliation to Stalinism and appealed to the party trade unionists like Dunne and Swabeck by drawing an analogy between the need for factional struggle within the party and the struggle within the class against the reformists and sellouts as parallel processes of factional struggle against alien ideology. He told the May 1953 SWP Plenum:
“During the course of the past year, I had serious doubts of the ability of the SWP to survive.... I thought that our 25 year effort...had ended in catastrophic failure, and that, once again, a small handful would have to pick up the pieces and start all over again to build the new cadre of another party on the old foundations.”
(Closing speech, 30 May)
But Cannon chose another road. Instead of pursuing the necessary struggle wherever it might lead, Cannon made a bloc with the Dobbs-Kerry-Hansen apparatus over the organizationally liquidationist implications of the Cochran-Clarke line. In return for their support Cannon promised the routinist, conservative Dobbs administration total control of the SWP with no further interference from him (“a new regime in the party”).
The SWP’s response to finding the dispute in the International reflecting itself inside the American section was to deepen its isolationism into virulent anti-internationalism. Cannon’s speech to the SWP majority caucus on 18 May 1953 stated, “We don’t consider ourselves an American branch office of an international business firm that receives orders from the boss” and extolled discussion in which “we work out, if possible [!], a common line.” Cannon denied the legitimacy of an international leadership and referred to “a few people in Paris.” He contrasted the Fourth International with Lenin’s Comintern, which had state power and a leadership whose authority was widely recognized, and thus denied that the contemporary Fourth International could be a democratic centralist body.
Cannon belatedly took exception to Pablo’s conduct against the French majority, but only over the organizational question in keeping with the proposition that the International leadership should not intervene in the affairs of national sections. He wrote:
“...we were flabbergasted at the tactics used in the recent French conflict and split, and at the inconceivable organizational precedent established there. That is why I delayed my answer to Renard so long. I wanted to help the IS politically, but I didn’t see how I could sanction the organizational steps taken against the majority of an elected leadership. I finally resolved the problem by just ignoring that part of Renard’s letter.”
(“Letter to Tom,” 4 June 1953)
The “Letter to Tom” also reiterated the position that the Third World Congress was not revisionist.
The crucial defects in the anti-Pabloist struggle of the PCI and SWP were duly utilized by the Pabloists. The 14th IEC Plenum took Cannon to task for his concept of the International as a “federative union.” It noted that the SWP had never opposed the Pabloist entrism policy in principle and accused the SWP-PCI of an unprincipled bloc on China. Seizing on the SWP’s one-sided orthodoxy (Hansen’s defense of an SWP majorityite’s formulation that Stalinism is “counterrevolutionary through and through”—a characterization which fits only the CIA!) the Pabloists were able to cloak their liquidation of an independent Trotskyist program with pious reaffirmations of the contradictions of Stalinism as a counterrevolutionary caste resting atop the property forms established by the October Revolution.
IC Formed
Following the Cochran-Clarke split, the SWP precipitously broke publicly with Pablo. On 16 November 1953 the Militant carried “A Letter to Trotskyists Throughout the World” which denounced Cochran-Clarke and Pablo and belatedly solidarized with the “unjustly expelled” PCI majority. The SWP’s previous characterizations of the Third World Congress as “completely Trotskyist” necessitated an attempt in this so-called “Open Letter” to locate the emergence of Pabloism after the Congress, which doomed the SWP to present a somewhat unconvincing case leaning heavily on a leaflet or two of the Pabloist French minority from 1952. At about the same time the SWP produced “Against Pabloite Revisionism” dated November 1953, which contained a more competent analysis of Pablo’s liquidationist accommodation to Stalinism:
“The conception that a mass Communist Party will take the road to power if only sufficient mass pressure is brought to bear is false. It shifts the responsibility for revolutionary setbacks from the leadership to the mass...
“The working class is transformed [by Pablo’s theories] into a pressure group, and the Trotskyists into a pressure grouping along with it which pushes a section of the bureaucracy toward the revolution. In this way, the bureaucracy is transformed from a block and a betrayer of the revolution into an auxiliary motor force of it.”
In 1954 the “International Committee” was formed. It included the French PCI majority, the American SWP (fraternal) and the Healy (Burns) grouping in England. The latter did not play any significant or independent role in the fight against revisionism. The Healy-Lawrence split from the disintegrating Revolutionary Communist Party after the war, impelled by the Healy-Lawrence faction’s deep entrist perspective toward the British Labour Party, had been backed by Pablo’s International Secretariat, which recognized two sections in Britain and gave them equal representation on the IEC. Healy was Cannon’s “man” in England and had been consistently supported by the SWP in disputes within the RCP. When the SWP broke from Pablo, the Healy-Lawrence faction split, Healy aligning with the SWP and Lawrence with Pablo (Lawrence later went over to Stalinism as did the PCI minority’s Mestre). Despite being part of the new anti-Pabloist international bloc, the Healy group continued its arch-Pabloist Labour Party opportunism. It had no weight in the IC bloc until its recruitment of an impressive layer of CP intellectuals and trade unionists (most of whom it later lost) following the 1956 Hungarian Revolution made it considerably more substantial in the British left.
The IC also claimed the adherence of the Chinese (émigré) section, which had already undergone a split, and the small Swiss section.
The IC managed to produce a couple of internal bulletins in early 1954 but never met as a real international body, nor was a centralized leadership ever elected. The tactic adopted by the SWP was to boycott the Fourth World Congress, as merely a meeting of Pablo’s faction having no legitimacy as the Fourth International.
The world movement paid a high price for this evasion. To cite only one example: Ceylon. The Ceylonese LSSP took a non-factional position on Pabloism, appealing to the SWP not to split and to attend the Fourth Congress. A hard fight should have been aggressively pushed toward the passive Ceylonese doubtists, forcing a polarization and forging a hard cadre in the struggle. Instead the Ceylonese drifted along with Pablo. Some seven years later, the revolutionary reputation of Trotskyism was besmirched in the eyes of militants throughout the world by the LSSP’s entry into the bourgeois Ceylonese coalition government, precipitating a last-minute split by the international Pabloist leadership. Had a hard principled anti-revisionist fight been waged in the Ceylon section in 1953, a hard revolutionary organization with an independent claim to Trotskyist continuity might have been created then, preventing the association of the name of Trotskyism with the fundamental betrayal of the LSSP.
Thus the anti-revisionist fight was deliberately not carried to the world movement, the IC consisting mainly of those groups which had already had their splits over the application of Pabloist policies in their own countries, and the struggle to defeat revisionism and reconstruct the Fourth International on the basis of authentic Trotskyism was aborted.
From Flirtation to Consummation
In 1957 Pablo’s International Secretariat and the SWP flirted with possible reunification (the Hansen-Kolpe correspondence). The basis at that time was formal orthodoxy—the similarity of line between the IS and SWP in response to the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. The SWP, perhaps naively expecting a repetition of Clarke’s 1953 position on the possibility of self-liquidation of the Stalinist bureaucracies, tended to accept the IS’s formally Trotskyist conclusions over Hungary as good coin. These early reunification overtures came to naught because of the opposition of the British and French IC groups, as well as Cannon’s suspicions that Pablo was maneuvering. The issue was posed in a defective way—simply apparent empirical agreement without an examination of past differences and present motion.
When the question of reunification, consummated in 1963 with the formation of the United Secretariat, came up again, the entire political terrain had shifted. The IS and the SWP found themselves in agreement over Cuba. But the basis was no longer an apparent convergence on orthodoxy, but the SWP’s abandonment of Trotskyism to embrace Pabloist revisionism (which the SWP in its class-collaborationist line on the Vietnamese war has now transcended on the path to outright reformism).
The basis for the 1963 reunification was a document titled “For Early Reunification of the World Trotskyist Movement—Statement by the Political Committee of the SWP,” 1 March 1963. The key new line was section 13:
“Along the road of a revolution beginning with simple democratic demands and ending in the rupture of capitalist property relations, guerilla warfare conducted by landless peasant and semi-proletarian forces, under a leadership that becomes committed to carrying the revolution through to a conclusion, can play a decisive role in undermining and precipitating the downfall of a colonial and semi-colonial power. This is one of the main lessons to be drawn from experience since the Second World War. It must be consciously incorporated into the strategy of building revolutionary Marxist parties in colonial countries.”
In “Toward Rebirth of the Fourth International,” 12 June 1963, the Spartacist tendency counterposed:
“Experience since the Second World War has demonstrated that peasant-based guerilla warfare under petit-bourgeois leadership can in itself lead to nothing more than an anti-working-class bureaucratic regime. The creation of such regimes has come about under the conditions of decay of imperialism, the demoralization and disorientation caused by Stalinist betrayals, and the absence of revolutionary Marxist leadership of the working class. Colonial revolution can have an unequivocally progressive revolutionary significance only under such leadership of the revolutionary proletariat. For Trotskyists to incorporate into their strategy revisionism on the proletarian leadership in the revolution is a profound negation of Marxism-Leninism no matter what pious wish may be concurrently expressed for ‘building revolutionary Marxist parties in colonial countries.’ Marxists must resolutely oppose any adventurist acceptance of the peasant-guerilla road to socialism--historically akin to the Social Revolutionary program on tactics that Lenin fought. This alternative would be a suicidal course for the socialist goals of the movement, and perhaps physically for the adventurers.” Ironically, the SWP’s further rightist evolution leads it to now repudiate the basic line of section 13, from the other side—the U.Sec.’s advocacy of petty-bourgeois armed struggle is far too adventurous for the legalistic SWP which aims to become the mass party of American reformism.
Spartacist and the Fourth International
In his struggle to found the Fourth International, Trotsky repeatedly underscored the imperative need for revolutionary organization on an international basis. Prolonged national isolation within one country must ultimately disorient, deform and destroy any revolutionary grouping no matter how subjectively steadfast. Only a principled and disciplined international collaboration can provide a counterbalance to the fierce pressures toward insularity and social chauvinism generated by the bourgeoisie and its’ ideological agents within the working-class movement. As Trotsky recognized, those who deny the need for a programmatically founded democratic centralist world party deny the Leninist concept of the vanguard party itself. The destruction of the Fourth International by Pabloist revisionism, paralleled by organizational fracturing into numerous competing international blocs, necessitates unremitting struggle for its rebirth.
In our ten year history, the Spartacist tendency has faced and resisted powerful objective pressures toward abandonment of an internationalist perspective. Cut off from the possibility of disciplined international ties as a result of the organizational sectarianism and subsequent political degeneration of Gerry Healy’s International Committee, the Spartacist League has refused to passively acquiesce to the national isolation forced upon us. We have emphatically rejected the ersatz “internationalism” which achieves its international connections at the price of a federalist non-aggression pact thus renouncing in advance the struggle for disciplined international organization. We have sought to develop fraternal ties with groupings in other countries as part of a process of clarification and polarization. Our aim is the crystallization of a cohesive democratic centralist international tendency based on principled programmatic unity, the embryo of a reborn Fourth International.
The current cracking of the several international “Trotskyist” blocs now provides heightened opportunity for the Spartacist tendency to intervene in the world movement. Our history and program can serve as a guide for currents now in motion towards authentic Trotskyism, because despite involuntary national isolation for a time, we upheld our internationalist determination and continued to wage a principled fight against revisionism.
The shattering of the revisionists’ and centrists’ pretensions to international organization—the revelation that the United Secretariat, the International Committee, etc. have been nothing more than federated rotten blocs—combined with the worldwide renewal of proletarian combativeness in a context of sharpened inter-imperialist rivalry and intensified deep-seated capitalist crisis, provide an unprecedented objective opportunity for the crystallization and development of the Spartacist tendency internationally. As the political corpses of the revisionist blocs continue to decay, the Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution, must be reborn.
FOR THE REBIRTH OF THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL!
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