An Unprincipled Maneuver Against Trotskyist Unity

The document "Under a Stolen Flag", published in the *Internal Bulletin* under the signature of W. Sinclair [Hunter] is a disgrace to the movement.

We shall come back to this fundamental aspect of the document in the conclusion of our article. For the moment, we like to stress that "Under a Stolen Flag" is not only a disgraceful document; it is also a very curious one. It starts out to declare war "to the death" against a hideous enemy. In its second paragraph it accuses the IS of the Fourth International "to revise the basic principles (!)" of that organization. It pompously asserts that the IS theories "would lay the Fourth International prostrate in face of historic opportunities."

Yet the evidence mustered to prove these accusations is so scarce and contradictory—it just consists of a couple of sentences torn here and there out of their context, a childish attempt one can apply to any documents of Marxism, from the *Communist Manifesto* to the Transitional Program, with equally "revealing" results—that the authors themselves, embarrassed as they are, can only have one argument in the last resort: the "real poisonous content" of Pabloism is always "not outspoken," "hidden," "obviously implied." It is like declaring a war against a ghost nobody can put his hands on. You can't see it, hear it, feel it, touch it. You only know the existence of "Pabloism" by Sinclairite intuition. In fact it is not a "war" at all, but an exercise in exorcism. Comrade Sinclair must pardon us, but as we told some more intelligent people before, we refuse to have this kind of "intuition" take the place of Marxism as the basic method of analysis of our movement.

The Fourth International has been trained in Lenin's and Trotsky's style of polemics. Lenin and Trotsky were not only thinkers of gigantic stature; they were also fighters in every nerve of their bodies and brains. They put at the service of their brilliant Marxist thought an implacable style, which like acid separates truth from half-truths and quarter-truths. But people who think that it is just sufficient to show oneself "harsh" in polemics, in order to remain in the true Leninist tradition, commit a very sad mistake. They have not yet learned the dialectics of means and ends. Divorced from correct analysis and loyal research of scientific truth, "harsh" polemics become just a disgraceful—and slightly ridiculous—exercise in abuse and ignorance. "Under a Stolen Flag" is certainly a masterpiece of the kind.

Marx, Engels, and their great disciples had that rare gift of discerning in the first stages of a discussion the ultimate theoretical conclusions the opponents would come to draw from their initial positions, thereby arriving at the roots—the objective class nature—theoretical differences initially expressed. This is a very great and rare gift—but does not justify at all every attempt made by irresponsible people to "characterize" their opponents as almost anything from the start. Otherwise the Stalinists, who have been busy "exposing" the "bourgeois counterrevolutionary nature of Trotskyism" for over 30 years, would have accumulated great merits for the revolutionary cause. To show that you possess that gift, it is not sufficient that you call your opponent in a faction fight a "revisionist," a "petty-bourgeois," or a "capitulator befor Stalinism." It is also necessary—small and unimportant detail—that history bears out your analysis and prognosis.

[p. 48]

When revolutionary Marxists called Bernstein and his friends revisionists capitulating to capitalism, they hadn't to wait long to prove their point. Barely two years after the initial discussion, Millerand entered a bourgeois cabinet, and things thereupon went even further than the Marxists thought they would go. When Trotsky and his comrades called Stalin a revisionist, it didn't take long to prove the point either. From the Menshevik revision of Bolshevism, which manifested itself in the Chinese revolution, till the strangling of the party and Soviet democracy within four years time, the analysis and the prognosis it included were proved up to the hilt. When Shachtman was accused of revisionism by joining Burnham in a violent faction fight against the revolutionary-Marxist majority of the SWP, the FI did not need a couple of years to see Shachtman revise not only the Marxist analysis of the Soviet state but the whole conception of our epoch and its motive forces, up to the point where a little bit later he abandoned revolutionary defeatism in the very bastion of world imperialism, the USA.

But the strange "revisionism" of the IS and "its" sections Sinclair is out to "prove" did not materialize anywhere. The IS did not "capitulate" before capitalism or "dissolve" any section (like people irresponsibly said it intended to do) anywhere in the world. It "revised" neither the Trotskyist analysis of the Soviet bureaucracy as a parasitic caste, nor the Trotskyist principle of unconditional defense of the Soviet Union against imperialism. As a matter of fact so little "revisionism" is today visible in the "Pabloite IS" that Comrade Cannon himself, for whom Sinclair still retains a little respect as an authority on "orthodoxy" states in a letter to the secretary of our Ceylon section:

"It is true that . . . the political pronouncements of the two sides appeared to come closer together than was the case in the period prior to the formal split. More particularly in the past year, since the XXth Congress of the CP of the Soviet Union, *the positions taken on the most important questions of the day came even closer together.*"

Our "revisionism" has therefore materialized itself in the fact that it led us to . . . come to the same political conclusions as the "orthodox" Trotskyists! A very strange "revisionism" indeed.

The very case of the Lawrence-Mestre-Clarke groups Sinclair tried to embarrass us with furnishes additional evidence to the strict adherence of the FI and its leadership to Trotskyist principles. We are not intuitionists and crystal-ball gazers. We judge people and will continue to judge people by what they actually do, say, and write, and not by what they *intend* to do, say, and write in the future, as revealed by Divine Revelation. As long as Lawrence-Mestre-Clarke did not make any break with Trotskyist principles, we refused to have them condemned and expelled for "revisionist intentions," thereby defending the democratic structure of our movement. From the first day they opened their mouths to put a question mark above the necessity of the Trotskyist party and a Trotskyist International, we condemned their revisionism unconditionally and openly, at the Fourth World Congress. Sinclair knows this very well and his childish attempt to insinuate that we did "pass in silence" the evolution of these people is only one among innumerable lies, distortions, and slanders which abound in that masterpiece of bad faith, "Under a Stolen Flag".

### To Set the Record Straight

Sinclair's method is a very simple one of begging the question. "As everybody knows" that Pabloites really capitulate before Stalinism, they are "conscious agents of Stalinism" as the document which engineered the split of the FI said, it is not necessary to call attention to the innumerable articles, manifestos, theses, and practical actions by which the FI has demonstrated its unceasing fight against Stalinism and the Soviet bureaucracy. All that only proves its "ambiguity," you see, because behind these actions cover the "capitulationist intention." One is reminded of the classical Stalinist argument that all Trotskyist revolutionary activity in capitalist countries was just "camouflage" to hide its real purpose of aiding and abetting capitalist counterrevolution. As Comrade Trotsky aptly commented: the Pope, without doubt, is only Pope in order to hide his real "intentions" of furthering the struggle against religion.

A very typical example of this method is given in the two first pages of "Under a Stolen Flag." Sinclair, speculating upon the bad memory of his readers—or upon the fact that many of them are uninformed, not having read the said document—brazenly sets out to "define" the "infamous" thesis defended by a former IS document, adopted by the Fourth WC: "Rise and Decline of Stalinism." He uses the occasion to take exception to an "immodest" remark I made in a letter sent to Comrade Breitman. I stated that I—not as a person, but as a representative of the group of comrades who have led the International during that crucial period—was proud to have been a representative of the only political tendency in the world which *predicted the deadly crisis of Stalinism inside the Soviet Union and the "new phase in the Russian Revolution" as far back as 1952.*

In order to acquaint the British comrades with some of the material they obviously do not know, and in order to set, in passing, the record straight on the documents so brazenly distorted by Sinclair, I should like to recall a couple of quotations to Sinclair's failing memory:

1) On May Day 1952, I wrote an article in *Quatrième Internationale* entitled "The victory of Leon Trotsky" (article which was reproduced if I am not mistaken in the review *Fourth International*) in which I drew attention to the increasing boldness of the young skilled workers in challenging the Soviet bureaucracy. I said that revolutionary ideas were spreading quickly in Russia, among workers and students, and that in their logic they were going in the objective direction of Trotsky's ideas; and I predicted that, based upon the victories of world revolution in Yugoslavia, China, and other colonial countries, revolution would soon spread to the orbit of the Soviet bureaucracy.

2) In November 1952, at the end of an analysis of Stalin's last article—an analysis published in the pamphlet by the IS—I explained the reason for that article by the fact that for the first time in more than 20 years, Stalin's ideas had been openly challenged in the Soviet Union. "Behind the monotonous repetitions of the former seminary student, one hears in this article the rumblings of the coming storm," the rising of the Soviet masses, I wrote. The young generation of workers and intellectuals who have challenged the theories of the bureaucracy will soon challenge its power.

3) In the same pamphlet was reprinted an article I wrote a couple of days after Stalin's death. In that article I said that Stalin would have no heir, that there would never again be a new Stalin, that there would never again be in the Soviet Union a protracted period of terror like the one which lasted from 1934 till 1953, that the Soviet bureaucracy was entering the period of its death agony and the masses were preparing to rise against the bureaucratic dictatorship, because on a world scale and in the Soviet Union, the relationship of forces was developing favorably for the proletariat.

[p. 49]

4) On May 1, 1953, the IS of the FI published a May Day Manifesto which had as title and as central theme: "The revolutionary upsurge of the masses is passing into the orbit of the soviet bureaucracy." Comrade Pablo was the author of that manifesto which set out to prepare our movement and the international working class for the great events which were to come: Berlin, June 16-17, 1953; Vorkuta; Poznan; Polish October; Hungarian revolution.

Now this is no matter of "modesty" or "immodesty" of individuals. This is a matter of documentary and historical record. What other tendency in the international labor movement, nay in the whole international world of people busy in politics, did predict in 1952 or before and immediately after Stalin's death, mass uprisings in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union? The Stalinists? The reformists? But they were busy praising the "iron stability" of the dictatorship (which could only be kept in check by imperialist rearmament). The Shachtmanites? They were thinking in the same terms, as they prated about the "atomized workers," no longer even proletarians but "state slaves" etc. . . The various ultraleft sects? They only gave variations of the Shachtmanite version. Deutscher and his friends? They were predicting only changes at the top, no *actions* from below. The so-called "orthodox Trotskyists"? Please, Comrade Sinclair, show me one document, one resolution, one article calling attention upon *immediate* revolutionary perspectives in the USSR and Eastern Europe, earlier than June 17, 1953. The last time Comrade Burns [Healy] participated in an international discussion, he used his breath to warn us against "exaggerating" what was happening in Russia and Eastern Europe. We were "exaggerating" indeed. One month afterwards there came the momentous workers' uprising in Eastern Berlin and Germany!

Sinclair knowingly distorts the meaning of the document adopted at the 4th WC—"Rise and Decline of Stalinism"—by presenting its "major thesis" like this: The "Stalinist bureaucracy was trapped between the drive of imperialism to immediate war and the ever increasing mass pressure arising from the postwar revolutionary wave" and therefore the bureaucracy would liquidate itself in an evolutionary process. Nobody can find any evidence for this. The "basic thesis" of "Rise and Decline of Stalinism," as developed at great length in that document and again repeated at the outset of "Decline and Fall of Stalinism" is that the social relationship of forces has become irreversibly unfavorable, for a whole historical epoch, to the Soviet bureaucracy, and that therefore what we had to expect in the Soviet Union and its orbit was not a "bloody fight to determine who would inherit Stalin's mantle as a dictator" —but the preparation of the objective and subjective preconditions for the political revolution of the masses against the bureaucracy, for the rising of the masses like they rose in Berlin, Poznan, Budapest, and Warsaw. This is said over and over again in that document, and only people of bad faith can willfully distort truth to the point of pretending the opposite.

Just to give uninformed comrades a couple of samples, we quote at random:

Thesis 21: "Our sections must resolutely fight against any tendency of apologising for or justifying the present political regime in the USSR, tendencies which will appear in petty-bourgeois circles who like to come to peace with Malenkov. The Bonapartist dictatorship, by 'liberalising itself, remains nevertheless a dictatorship. The proletariat remains politically expropriated in the USSR. The new penal code, even a real *habeas corpus,* would defend before all the bureaucratic privileges in the same way as police arbitrariness defended them till now. The task of destroying the dictatorship and the privileges of the bureaucracy, the task of a new political revolution in the USSR, remains more urgent than ever. THE MEANING OF THE RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IS THE MATURING OF CONDITIONS WHICH PREPARE AND FACILITATE THAT REVOLUTION."

Thesis 18: "Historically, the Malenkov regime signals the beginning of the decline of the power of the Bonapartist dictatorship. The 'liberalisation' as well as the hardening of the regime are only alternative means of self-defence of the bureaucracy, which will in any case try to use all the resources at its disposal in order to protect itself against the rise of the Soviet masses. But history has shown that autocracies, when they are condemned to disappear, cannot save themselves by either of these methods, nor by a condemnation of both. The Bonapartist dictatorship in the USSR is already condemned by history. The masses will crush it and will, by their political revolution, sweep away the power and privileges of the bureaucracy."

It was around these theses and not on the question of "approaching war" that the discussion arose in 1953 (after the split and not before the split, because before the split there did not appear, either in Britain or the United States, a single line of criticism of the Thesis in an internal Bulletin of the national or international organization)! The only political document which criticises the thesis at length, the document entitled "Against Pabloite Revisionism" adopted by the November 1953 plenum of the SWP, takes exception with exactly those basic theses (it is the only honest, if hopelessly eclectic, political document the whole international faction fight produced, because it tried at least to formulate a rounded political position against ours). It says, among other things:

"A global study and a realistic summary of the net results of the forward march of the international revolution from 1943 to 1953 leads to this conclusion: notwithstanding its great results and even greater potentialities, the revolution has failed in the conquest of the great industrial countries, thereby preventing the revolutionary forces of the working class to overthrowing the Kremlin oligarchy and to give an irresistible impulse to the disintegration of Stalinism. There has not yet occurred a qualitative change in the world relationship of forces between the classes. . . ." (retranslated from French).

We said such a change has already occurred and would lead to a political revolution in the USSR and Eastern Europe. Sinclair's friends said such a change had not yet occurred and had not given an "irresistible impulse to the disintegration of Stalinism." Will Comrade Sinclair please tell us who has been shown right or wrong on this decisive matter? The document, "Rise and Decline of Stalinism," or the document, "Against Pabloite Revisionism"?

[p. 50]

We could go on quoting that last document, where it says (like Healy said in 1953), that we were exaggerating the events in Eastern Europe and the USSR, that the period of "collective leadership" would only be a transition period between the death of the old dictator and the rise of a new one, etc., etc. Happily the SWP comrades have revised their position on all these questions and say today the same things we have been saying since 1953. Today, they warn against an underestimation, not an overestimation of the events in the USSR. We dislike quoting these old documents, because we think it serves no purpose to return to differences which have been solved by history. But Sinclair's cynical affirmation that our theses have been "exposed" by events, forces us to set the record straight, even if this means having to go back to old (and overcome) differences and thereby creating an atmosphere which is not favorable for unity. But Sinclair's article is precisely a provocation with this purpose.

### Mass Pressure And Mass Action

But, Sinclair repeats over and over again, we know that the IS uses many "phrases" about "political revolution." But these phrases do not mean the same thing they mean to us. Because, you see, at the bottom of the "Pabloite theory" there is the idea of the "irresistible *evolution*" in Eastern Europe and the USSR. Mass pressure forces the bureaucracy to dismantle itself. The process of self-destruction of the bureaucracy, as a result of mass pressure, takes the place of the process of revolution. Only "a secondary place in the evolution is given to the masses. Their role is to be primarily one of pressure till, under the leadership of a section of the bureaucracy, they give the final spurt to the process towards socialist democracy by finishing off diehard factions among the bureaucrats."

Again, there is no shred of evidence to support this slanderous assertion. Again and again the stress in "Decline and Fall of Stalinism" is put, not on the role of a "section of the bureaucracy," but on the decisive role of mass action.

Thesis 2 ends with the following summary statement of the present evolution:

"Thus the continuance of the 'new course' is inexorably preparing the big showdown between the proletariat and the more privileged layers of the bureaucracy, a showdown which will have as its main stake the administration of the plants and which will inevitably raise all the questions of the structure and control of the economy and of the workers' state."

There is no question here about a showdown between the "liberal" wing of the bureaucracy and the "diehards"; no question of an automatic evolution. There is question of a showdown, a fight, an open struggle, a revolution of the masses against the more privileged layers of the bureaucracy (we shall take up further in this article the question of the other layers of the bureaucracy). Thesis 5 begins with the following description of the present situation:

"In this way the objective and subjective conditions of the revolution mature rapidly. After having lost the aureole of omniscience, the Kremlin has lost *this* of omnipotence. Having abandoned the mantle of autocracy, the bureaucracy loses the mantle of enlighted liberalism. With unheard-of speed, history obliges Stalin's heirs to throw down all their trumps and to face the assault of the masses nearly with bare hands."

There is no question here of "evolution" nor of the "decisive role of the liberal wing of the bureaucracy"; at the contrary, the "liberal mask" is exposed as a fake, and the thesis reminds the reader of the fact that, after the crushing of the Hungarian revolution, the Kremlin can no more efficiently use its "liberal" mask than it can use, with success, the weapon of omnipotent terror. This paragraph follows the end of thesis 4 which speaks about the repercussions the Hungarian revolution has had among the Russian soldiers:

"Through the Soviet soldiers in contact with this powerful revolutionary movement, the wave of political revolution will pass from the 'glacis' (Eastern Europe) back into the Soviet Union, where it will toll the bell for the desperate bureaucracy." Not an "evolution" but a "revolution," realized in the same way as it was in Hungary, which will "toll the bell for the bureaucracy" (not the diehard bureaucrats).

Again the end of thesis 5 gives a concrete prognosis on the way the political revolution will break out in the Soviet Union. It starts with a very clear statement:

"This growing tension between the masses and the bureaucracy, between the various currents inside the bureaucracy, between the desires of the soldiers and the function of repression which was given to them (Hungary!), approaches inexorably the point of violent explosion (some evolutionary process indeed—EG). Be it that a left faction inside the 'liberal' wing appeals to the masses; be it that these masses descend on the streets in order to settle an economic, social or political question which is dear to them; be it that vanguard currents in the youth, in the working class or even in the army start spontaneously to formulate a program of political demands; or be it that we assist at an interaction of all these different factors,—the logic of the political revolution prepares an OPEN COLLISION (will Sinclair "interpret" with his keen sense of "intuition" the term "collision" as expressing an "evolutionary process"?—E.G.) BETWEEN THE FORCES THAT DESIRE TO MAINTAIN THE FUNDAMENTAL INSTITUTIONS OF THE DICTATORSHIP . . . AND THE MASSES WHICH WANT TO TAKE INTO THEIR OWN HANDS THE DEMOCRATIC ADMINISTRATION OF THE STATE AND THE ECONOMY. Without a transformation of the *pressure* of the masses into their *direct action,* the political revolution could not win in the USSR."

Now, Sinclair gets a firm grip on this last sentence—torn out of context—and with a hopeful grin (we've gotten proof, at last!) he runs on (isolating of course the sentence from the whole preceding paragraph):

"Hence the confused formulations in the 'theses' dealing with the action of the masses in relation to the political revolution. Without a transformation of the pressure of the masses into direct action, we read on p. 7, the political revolution cannot succeed in the USSR. If we have the traditional conception of the political revolution which is precisely . . . direct action—the above statement is a tautology. Without a political revolution of the masses, the political revolution cannot succeed. But if the concessions of the bureaucracy, the 'battle for freedom of thought' at the Twentieth Congress, etc., are all part of the 'political revolution'; if we conceive of the 'political revolution' as being in fact an *evolution* towards democratization, then the statement means something."

[p. 51]

The brazenness of this interpretation is nearly incredible. Whereas a whole paragraph, as any reader can see, is used to give the various variants of mass actions; whereas the whole argument is turned against those who pretend that without mass action there can be a political revolution in the Soviet Union, distorter Sinclair tries to prove that words mean exactly the opposite of what they mean, and that when we write that only direct action of the proletariat can bring success to the political revolution, we really mean . . . that the political revolution is a peaceful evolution towards democratization from the top . . .

Let us however go a little bit further into Sinclair's distortions. We are in for a couple of surprises. It is "revisionism," we learn, to equate concessions from the top, "evolution towards democratization," with revolution. Very good. We know a document which could not have escaped Comrade Sinclair's attention. It is called "The New Stage in the Russian Revolution". It is a resolution adopted by a meeting of the National Committee of the SWP held April 13-15, 1956. Please, notice the exact date: April 13-15, 1956. There was not yet a Hungarian revolution (direct workers' action); there was not yet a Polish revolution, even Poznan; and in any case, the document speaks about the *Russian,* and not the world, the European, the Hungarian, or the Polish revolution. Could Comrade Sinclair tell us to what "direct action"—such a tautology!—this "new stage of the Russian revolution" refers? Perhaps to the Vorkuta strikes (which happened 2-1/2 years before, a long time to discover a revolution, don't you think so, Comrade Sinclair?) Not at all. The authors of the document leave no doubt about the events their definition refers to:

"A new stage has opened in the continuing development of the Russian revolution. The masses of the Soviet Union, who were politically expropriated by the bureaucracy under Stalin, and who suffered its brutal rule for nearly three decades, *are evidently once again in motion; they have already forced far-reaching concessions from the bureaucracy* and more can be expected to follow. The international repercussions, great as they are, have only begun. The correctness of Trotsky's struggle against Stalinism bids to rapidly become a key issue among the ranks of the Communist parties throughout the world. Stalinism, the main obstacle on the path of the world revolution, faces its death agony. Great new possibilities are now opening up for reassembling the world revolutionary socialist movement on a new plane and thus solving the crisis of leadership which has paralyzed the revolutionary proletariat. THIS IS THE MEANING IN BRIEF OF THE DEATH KNELL OF THE STALIN CULT SOUNDED AT THE TWENTIETH CONGRESS OF THE CP OF THE S.U."

Please don't rub your eyes, Comrade Sinclair, you are not confronted with typographical error. It is not the rotten through and through "revisionist Pabloite" IS who writes that the "death knell of the Stalin cult at the Twentieth Party Congress" is "a new stage of the Russian revolution". It is the National Committee of the SWP. We completely accept the analysis, but we would be a little more cautious about the definition. We would prefer to say that the Congress opens a prerevolutionary period of more rapid maturing of the objective and subjective conditions for the political revolution in the USSR. But surely, Comrade Sinclair will immediately and indignantly refute the SWP's "revisionist thesis" about "concessions" and "pressures" being a "stage of the revolution."

Of course the SWP document refers to the Eastern German and Vorkuta events as proofs of the fact that the masses are in motion. But at the time of the party Congress there were no great mass strikes or demonstrations to our knowledge in the USSR. The above named events exercised "pressure" on the bureaucracy which answered with "concessions." That "Pabloite-Deutscherite" thesis is defended by the SWP. We quote:

"The Congress (!) thus marks the beginning of a new, profoundly revolutionary (!) stage in the Soviet Union. The immediate reason for the concessions, as we have indicated, was the palpable pressure (!) of the masses which has grown so great that the bureaucracy calculates it cannot be suppressed simply by sweeping purges as in the days of Stalin—it is more expedient to bend with the pressure in hope of avoiding being broken by it."

Isn't it clear? The "pressures" as a stage in "revolution"? Horrible thought! Doesn't that mean that there is "no place left for the Fourth International"? That the masses will only come in "as a secondary factor" to finish off "the diehard bureaucrats"? No, it means nothing of the sort. If Sinclair and his friends would set aside stupid factional arguments, and sit and think about the history of *any* revolution past or present, social or political, they would come to the following simple conclusions:

A revolution occurs in a country when the given form of government (political revolution) or structure of society (social revolution) becomes unbearable to the great majority of the population, and when the ruling social forces can no more suppress this violent discontent. This is of course not an "event," but result of a more or less drawn out historical *process.* In *Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany,* Marx explains how the bourgeois revolutionary forces began to prepare by their "pressure" the events of 1848 as far back as 1840. In the first chapters of *The History of the Russian Revolution,* Trotsky explains at length how a chain of events, a "process" led from the Russian Revolution of 1905, the "liberal" half-reforms of Stolypin and their gradual suppression to the entry of Russia in the war, the disintegration of the leading classes and tsarist state, and the February 1917 days of Petrograd. Marx and Trotsky were not "revisionists." But they knew very well that a revolution, i.e., direct action of the masses, can never come about if it has not been prepared by a intermediary stage, during which state power begins to be weakened and to disintegrate, while the masses exercise "pressure" on it which does not, or only in very limited forms, appear as identical with "direct action." Only when this "pressure" becomes direct action, the preparatory "evolution" becomes a revolution.

"Revisionism," "reformism," "evolutionism" is not the *denial* of that phase of evolution preceding revolution; that is the ABC of Marxism. Revisionism, reformism, evolutionism is the denial of the thesis that this process of "pressure" and "concessions" needs to transform itself into a revolution, a direct action, a qualitative "leap" (as we say in the language of dialectics), in order to achieve history's goal. Deutscher was a revisionist as long as he thought that "liberal reforms" could achieve soviet democracy. We do not know if he still thinks so. If he does, he still is a revisionist. But those who understand the profound meaning of the "concessions" and the "pressure" (as the comrades of the SWP do) PRECISELY AS A STAGE—AND A NECESSARY ONE AFTER 25 YEARS OF WORKING-CLASS PASSIVITY—TOWARDS DIRECT ACTION AND REVOLUTION BY THE WORKERS, are only orthodox Marxists, not "revisionists".

[p. 52]

Sinclair and his friends are like the sectarians of which the Transitional Program says that they fear succumbing to temptation. In order not to "equate the process of pressure and concessions" to revolution, they deny the importance or the very existence of the concessions. *Significantly, there is not one word in their document on that world-shaking event of ending the Stalin cult,* which prodded the comrades of the SWP to announce that a new stage of the Russian revolution had begun. One should admit that closing one's eyes to reality in order not to succumb to temptation isn't altogether the method of "orthodox Trotskyism". . .

### The "Disembodied Political Revolution"

Of course, Sinclair comes back to his primitive falsifications when he quotes our final sentence on the Hungarian revolution:

"'Encouraged by fierce passive resistance and an unremitting mass pressure, the revolution will again take up its march forward.'" Obviously (!) 'the march forward' is the actions of the bureaucracy (!) on which mass pressure is exerted."

Obviously our distorter is here caught redhanded! For the sentences which precede say very clearly:

"The Soviet military interventions . . . were unable, however, to break the magnificent combativity of the Hungarian workers. They lost only the first round of the political revolution, WHICH WILL ARISE AGAIN, INVINCIBLE, FROM THE BLOOD-LETTING IMPOSED BY THE KREMLIN. Already the Kadar regime is forced to keep part of the conquests of 23rd October (the workers' councils in the factories—E.G.). Encouraged by passive resistance and an unremitting mass pressure, the revolution will again take up its march forward, and will reestablish, with full and complete proletarian democracy, the honor of communism in Hungary."

"Obviously" between the November defeat and the next victorious stage of the revolution there must be an intermediary phase. But because this phase is one, not of defeatism, passivity, and demoralization, but one of "fierce passive resistance and unremitting mass pressure," the Hungarian revolution will rise again, invincible, sooner than many think. And obviously this "revolution," as any honest reader of our above-quoted passage can see, is not identified with the "concessions granted by the liberal (?) wing of the bureaucracy," but is a "revolution" of the Hungarian workers, like the one we witnessed from October 23 till November 4 or, if one wishes, till the general strike of December. What remains of Sinclair's "accusation" is only the demonstration of his obvious bad faith and slanderous distortions.

Now we have already seen how foolish is Sinclair's accusation that "The IS uses the term 'political revolution' as an abstraction. What we have is a disembodied revolution separate from its content of mass action."

We have already seen that our Theses precisely insist on the fact that without mass action there is no revolution, but only the process which prepares that revolution ("pressure" and "concessions"), and that we go into great length to analyze the concrete conditions in which this mass action can come about. If Sinclair would really be interested in the political revolution, and not in a cliquish faction fight for "conserving control" of his organization, he would have noticed that the very passage he attacks, i.e., the end of our thesis 5, analyzes at some length the variants of a possible beginning of mass action: "Be it that a left faction . . . appeals to the masses; be it that these masses descend on the streets in order to settle a . . . question which is dear to them; be it that the vanguard currents in the youth, in the working class or even in the army start spontaneously to formulate a programme of political demands, or be it that we assist at an interaction of all these different factors".

But, as Sinclair is by no means interested in the political revolution for any other reason than finding ammunition for his faction fight, he rapidly glosses over that section (there's no proof there of "Pabloism"!) and doesn't notice that these variants and their combination are precisely the story of what happened in Eastern Berlin, in Poznan, in Budapest, and in Warsaw, i.e., are nothing else than the simple generalization of the experience we already can gather about revolutionary actions against the Soviet bureaucracy!

But Sinclair's shadow boxing against the "disembodied political revolution" reaches its climax in the following remarkable passage which has already gained a place for itself in the anthology of poison-pen products of factionalism. Here it is in all its glory, and nothing suppressed:

"The metaphysicians of the IS love to play with idealistic abstractions. Listen to these lines which are palmed off on us as 'Marxist analysis': *'the battle for freedom of thought in the USSR won at the 20th Congress, tremendous victories whose effects cannot be wiped out.* Filtering inexorably through all the cracks and crevices henceforth opened up in the shaking dictatorship, *the spirit of criticism, the spirit of rebellion,* will penetrate into the political field (the 20th Congress was nonpolitical!) and will strike the spark of the political revolution, P.5 (our emphasis). What lyrical poet was responsible for this piece of nonsense? Will someone please tell us what exactly is this "battle for freedom of thought"? Like the twin spirits of rebellion and criticism, it appears to be creating untold havoc in the bureaucratic structure entirely apart from human beings. We must admit that posing developments in this way relieves one of the necessity of discussing concretely the nature and strength of the real forces at work. And that is what Pabloism avoids. It must spread cloudy words to bolster up its conception of evolutionary progress and of the decisive role of liberal tendencies among the bureaucracy."

Of course, if Sinclair would have taken the trouble to read our Theses a little bit more carefully—but who wants to "read" Pabloite documents? One wants to "crush" them!—he would not have failed to notice that the passage he quotes comes from thesis 3 in the chapter "Decline and Fall of Stalinism in the USSR." He would have noticed that thesis 1 analyzes the *economic* development in the USSR since 1953; that thesis 2 analyzes *the social* development, analyzes the main antagonistic aspirations and demands of the *three social forces present* (proletariat, bureaucracy, and peasantry), and that it comes to the conclusion that a violent conflict between bureaucracy and proletariat is inevitable.

He would have noticed that *after* having so analyzed "concretely the nature and the strength of the real forces at work," the document passes on to the question of the attitude of the intellectuals, scientists, and artists in the Soviet Union. He would have noticed that the whole thesis he quotes from is concerned with the intellectuals. And he would not have distorted *the very sentence* he quotes by cutting off its first part: "DESPITE THE DESPERATE RESISTANCE OF THE BUREAUCRACY . . . THE STRUGGLE FOR THE FREEDOM OF THOUGHT IN THE USSR HAS WON TREMEMDOUS VICTORIES AT THE 20TH PARTY CONGRESS." He would also have noticed that the "twin spirits" of rebellion and criticism, far from being divorced from "human beings," are "embodied" in concretely enumerated men, i.e., intellectuals who are at the spearhead of that fight today in the Soviet Union. He would also have understood why, after having won "tremendous victories" only on the field of history, of literature, of art, and of science, the "spirit of rebellion" which had not yet penetrated the field of politics at the Twentieth Party Congress—or does Sinclair know of any orator at that congress who criticized the present party line of the Khrushchev regime?—would be brought by the intellectuals into the actual field of politics as well. A prediction which, we have learned in the meantime, has become true in the opposition platforms worked out by the Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev University students after the Hungarian revolution. When after having read all this, Sinclair still obstinately mumbles, "Pabloism avoids discussing concretely the nature and the strength of the real forces at work," one can only shrug one's shoulder and say that some cases of course are always hopeless.

[p. 53]

But there is more to this disgraceful method of polemics than meets the eye. It also happens to be an act of criminal irresponsibility. For as we all know, hundreds of gifted intellectuals have just left the Communist Party of Britain, precisely because they passionately revolted against the "suppression of freedom of thought," precisely because in them came again to life—thanks to the shattering events of the 20th Party Congress, of Poznan, of Poland, and of the Hungarian revolution, —that "spirit of criticism and of rebellion" without which Bolshevism is unthinkable. Leaving the Stalinist CP, these intellectuals, who don't throw Marxism overboard, are looking for a revolutionary alternative. They become interested in Trotskyism. They study the works of Trotsky. They try to get acquainted with the groups which call themselves Trotskyist. And what do they find? They find a pocket book of King Street, telling them to get off all that "nonsense" about "freedom of thought," and these "metaphysics" about the "twin spirits of rebellion and criticism." If ever they should take this brand of ignorant arrogance seriously, Trotskyism will lose the chance of winning many valuable new members and cadres in Britain!

And it is not alone a question of intellectuals either. The workers in the CP have had their bellyfull of the lies and distortions and slanders with which the King Street bureaucracy has kept the joint going for many years. They have now got what Sinclair cannot get into his thick head: a real and passionate thirst for truth. Why, it was a worker, and a workers' leader at that, who spoke these historical words to Stalinist hack Andrew Rothstein: "You are the enemy, you bloody old *lying* swine." And bloody right he was!

An old Pabloite of the name of Leon Trotsky once also made a passionate speech about truth, absolute truth, and the fact that socialism and the labor movement were impossible without that love of truth. He was, of course, a metaphysician with slightly lyrical deviations. But hundreds of thousands of Polish and Hungarian workers happen to have the same kind of poetical interests in "freedom of thought" and "metaphysical truth" as did that incorrigible Pabloite.

As if it wanted to present a final blow to Sinclair's stupid concoctions, history had it happen that the first manifestation of the "process" which set in motion the political revolution in Poland, long before the Poznan workers rose, was precisely the poem of a man called Adam Warczik, and a poem about truth, lies, and freedom of thought at that! It so happened that that poem, as well as the many articles written by Polish intellectuals asking for freedom of thought, letting criticism, social criticism, invade all forbidden nooks and corners of bureaucratic mismanagement, were bought by the workers on the black market, in thousands and thousands of hand or mimeographed copies.

It so happens that the Hungarian revolution was prepared by the months-old political agitation which was unfurled at that intellectuals' wasps' nest, the Petofi club, called after a lyrical poet, and that the very October 23 demonstrations behind which the Budapest workers closed ranks and started the revolution was called by a student body with slogans asking above all for "freedom of thought" and transferring "the spirit of rebellion and of criticism" from the realm of literature into the realm of social sciences, of economy, and of politics. Of course, all these facts are of no interest to Wizard Sinclair who wants to know about the "real forces at work." But they happen to be the facts of the political revolution we witnessed till now, and there is a good chance they also will be the facts of the political revolution to come in the Soviet Union.

### The Differentiation Inside the Bureaucracy

It is not by accident that the intellectuals' struggle for freedom of thought and the penetration of their criticism into the realm of social structure was a necessary preparatory phase of the Polish and Hungarian revolutions. This is a general law of history and an inevitable phase of development. The reason for it is very simple. Under any autocratic regime, there is no public political activity of the masses. Because the regime is autocratic, mass political action is precisely—the revolution. But before the masses dare pass into action, after years if not decades of oppression and bloody terror, they must be convinced that their enemy has become decisively weakened. Of course, in many skirmishes, at the shop, in the factory, at the office, they feel that the enemy loosens its grip, they feel him weakening, hesitating, retreating. But these skirmishes are isolated. The newspapers don't report them. There is no national and not even a citywide organization which permits generalization of experience. Each section of the proletariat thinks that this is just a particular situation in its own plant, factory, or office.

It is at that moment of crisis that writers and artists, feeling the new forces at work and being by their very talent and nature called upon to express indirectly what social forces feel, start to speak out. First hesitatingly, fearfully, sometimes in panic. The bureaucracy, the autocracy knows very well what this means. It tries to nip these timid demonstrations of incipient rebellion in the bud. But now happens the unforeseen. The real relationship of forces begins to assert itself. The writers no more obey the crackings of the whip. Some of them, all of them, resist, continue, go over to open rebellion. Furious and panic-stricken at the same time, the autocracy takes stock of its weapons of repression. It can of course, put some writers in the Bastille or send some others to Siberia. It calls upon its agents. They inform their masters, truthfully, that it would be necessary to deport thousands of writers and to close three-quarters of the newspapers in order successfully to conclude this repression. The autocrats hesitate. Would they dare? Wouldn't they? In general they will take a middle course, after trying both medicines.

[p. 54]

But in the meantime, the people, the workers will have read the poems, articles, pamphlets, books, by the thousands. They will make a big discovery. "We are not alone. There are thousands of people who think like we do. Why, even the best paid writers of the regime say so. If they let these things be put into print, they must be much weaker than we thought they were." And the illegal circles will grow, and will regroup themselves around some semilegal, or suddenly legalized institution, like the Petofi club, or the Writers' Association.

That is how revolutions were prepared, yesterday, today, and tomorrow. That is how the French revolution was prepared—every child knows the role the fight of the Encyclopedians played in its preparation. That is how the Russian revolution was prepared—yes, comrade Sinclair, Arch-Pabloite Trotsky even wrote that in periods of autocracy, *literary criticism replaces politics,* and that Belinski, Chernyshevsky, and other great literary critics were indirectly the trailblazers of the Russian revolution. That is how the Polish and Hungarian revolutions were prepared. And that is how the political revolution is being prepared right now in the Soviet Union.

Why, the first public opposition meeting being held since 1927 in Moscow was just held at the *Literaturnaya Gazeta* offices, for discussion of Dudintsev's novel *Not By Bread Alone.* People were standing a mile deep in the street, waiting to be admitted, and the basic bureaucratic dogmas about the "socialist society in the Soviet Union" were publicly being torn to shreds. . . .

And because we have learned from history how revolution actually occurs, we know that it is of utmost importance to follow all the differences and differentiations inside the ruling group, in this case the Soviet bureaucracy. We said above that revolutions occur when the given state of things has become unbearable to the people and the ruling group cannot protect its power adequately any more. But we may add: the surest sign of such a state of things is precisely when the "monolithism" of the ruling group is shaken to its foundations; when the main symbols and myths of that group—the Stalin cult in the case of the Soviet bureaucracy—have to be hastily abandoned; when those who want to rely exclusively on terror fall out with those who want more subtle means of government. Actually in his last great political document and real testament, "The Imperialist War and the Proletarian Revolution," Trotsky puts at the very first of his four conditions for the victory of a revolution, "the bourgeois impasse and the resulting confusion of the ruling class." This rule completely applies to the ruling caste of the Soviet Union as well.

It applies to that caste all the more because, precisely, it is *not* a class, it is socially not homogeneous, it is a parasitic outgrowth of the proletariat and when a political revolution threatens, it finds itself suspended in midair, without social support whatsoever. Like Trotsky predicted in his Thesis "The Fourth International and the USSR," the bureaucracy would rapidly disintegrate under the hammer of the political revolution. The very thought of a "civil war" between the bureaucracy and proletariat is meaningless. This was exactly confirmed in the experiences of East Berlin, Hungary, and Poland. In all three instances, the only people which actively opposed the revolution, arms in hand, were the secret police stooges—and not all of them at that—which would find themselves in such a minority that no serious fight would be necessary to drive them from the streets. The only difference was that in East Berlin and Budapest, the Soviet army came to the help of the local bureaucrats and saved their skins, while in Poland there was no intervention and therefore no serious fighting whatsoever. And as in the Soviet Union there is no outside army ready to rush to the help of Khrushchev and Co., one might prepare oneself for a short and violent battle rather than for any long drawn-out military operations.

We just reminded our readers that the bureaucracy is not homogeneous. More than that. It is linked to the proletariat by a whole pyramid of intermediary strata. The petty trade-union and party bosses; the stakhanovites; the lesspaid technicians, the lower grade employees and bookkeepers; the sergeants and lieutenants of the regular army . . . these millions of people whose "privileges" are only of a salary double or triple that of a worker, will inevitably drift towards the proletariat the moment the workers will start to act. To think that these people would risk their lives for defending the big bureaucrats' dachas and limousines is fantastic; it has not been borne out by facts in either East Berlin, Hungary, or Poland.

Of course, this does not mean that the bureaucracy abandons its privileges and power without struggle. Not at all. It means that precisely by its very social nature, its main line of defense, confronted as it finds itself by a growing revolution, must be maneuvering before the actual outbreak of mass uprisings rather than trying to confront the masses in their final assault (this does apply to the USSR but not necessarily to Eastern Europe, where the presence of Soviet forces adds an additional element to the situation). This is precisely why the room for these maneuvers is very large—why we have witnessed not only the liberation of 3/4 of the concentration camp inmates, but also the liquidation of the Stalin cult and why we shall witness some more surprises soon. That is why Mao at least says he is granting the right to strike, and tomorrow opposition newspapers may appear in this or that country (like they do today in Poland).

Some supporters of Sinclair used to argue, a couple of years ago that all these discussions and fights were "only intra-bureaucratic strife." This was typical for a mechanical way of thinking, divorced from the real living process of history. Of course there were no "proletarians" at the 20th Party Congress, which was a congress of bureaucrats.[1] The discussions were "only among bureaucrats BUT PRECISELY REFLECTED—in a distorted and indirect way, of course—THE VARIOUS SOCIAL FORCES IN THE COUNTRY. Otherwise they become unintelligible and really open the road for capitulation to the bureaucracy. *If anybody can argue that out of its own will and sagacity, the bureaucracy suddenly decided to throw the Stalin cult overboard and started to restore historical truth, at least partially*—and that is obviously what happened at the 20th Party Congress—then one gives the bureaucrats a lot of praise which they do not merit and did not call for. But if one sees these steps only as inevitable concessions wrung by the pressure of the workers from a confused and divided ruling caste tottering towards its decline and fall, then the process becomes perfectly understandable and takes its place in a Trotskyist analysis of our epoch.

[p. 55]

Having once for all forgotten how to read, Sinclair hastily asks the comic question: "How could a proletarian tendency at the 20th Party Congress of bureaucrats take inspiration from Hungarian demands about trade unions which had not yet been formulated?" The very nerve of the man is in the end exasperating! If he would have read the very sentence he quoted less hastily, he would have noticed that we talked about the "preparation, the course AND THE AFTERMATH of the 20th Party Congress", i.e., the whole period from mid-1955 till the end of 1956. He would also have noticed we never said that the two main *social* tendencies were directly *represented* at the 20th Party Congress, but only that that Congress had to make concessions to them (i.e., felt their pressure). And he would have finally noticed that we nowhere identify these *antagonistic social tendencies* with the two colliding factions inside the Kremlin, but only say that one of these factions tends to make major concessions to the masses (the "liberal" faction), while the other tends to favor a stiffer policy.

If Sinclair still doubts that the "proletarian tendency" in the country received great concessions from the 20th Party Congress, we may quote to him two passages from the SWP resolution, "The New Stage in the Russian Revolution":

"That these pressures are proletarian in character is demonstrated by the simple fact that what the bureaucrats promise in breaking up the Stalin cult is a return to Lenin. This is the most popular promise they could make, the promise best calculated to appease the forces moving against the bureaucracy. A return to Lenin means keeping the planned economy but restoring the workers' democracy that existed in Lenin's time. The slogan 'Back to Lenin!' is thus a proletarian slogan which the masses will inevitably fill with their own revolutionary socialist content" (p. 25 of Pioneer Publishers pamphlet) and before that:

"The result was to give a really major concession—nothing less than Stalin himself. This was done at the Twentieth Congress, making it a landmark in Soviet history. In addition, other concessions—genuine concessions—were made. These included the promises of a shorter working day, an increase in social benefits, better housing, an end of lawless dictatorial rule, the rehabilitation of victims framed up by Stalin." (p. 23)

So you see, either you admit that there is a "proletarian tendency" in Russian society, which was very much "present"—by the pressure it exercised—at the 20th Congress, and things become understandable, or you see them just as a phase of "intrabureaucratic strife"—and then you are well on the road to ascribing to the bureaucracy the capacity of liberalizing itself without inverted commas!

And of course the proletarian tendency *in the country* has skillfully seized upon many slogans of Khrushchev, "filling them with their own content" like the SWP aptly says. It has filled the slogan of "collective leadership" with the revolutionary content of "fight against the one-man management" in the factories. It was "inspired" by the Polish and Hungarian examples to call for independence of the trade unions. It did all these things—the theses say—in actual life. That Sinclair did not happen to take notice is an argument against Sinclair—not against the thesis!

### The Leadership of the Political Revolution

But the question of the differentiations inside the bureaucracy has still another and more important aspect. *It is directly related to the reappearance of public, i.e., mass political activity.*

Seizing upon our statement that there are a proletarian and a consciously bureaucratic political tendency *in society,* and that these tendencies indirectly exercise pressure upon the warring factions inside the ruling clique, Sinclair inadvertently throws in a remark we made about a left faction appearing inside the "liberal" group, and then exclaims:

"What a welter of confusion is in these pages. What a terrible theoretical degeneration (sic). To what childish nonsense are those reduced who exchange eclecticism and impressionism for Marxist method. Pabloism however is something more than confusion. It theories would lay the Fourth International prostrate in face of historical opportunities, would drain away its firmness and confidence in a period when the forces are maturing which will destroy the Stalinist canker. It does this by creating illusions in a faceless 'liberal section' of the bureaucracy."

Why we "create illusions" in a "faceless liberal section of the bureaucracy" simply by stating the fact that it exists, we do not grasp. Perhaps because we say that this "faceless liberal section" can be forced to make concessions to the masses? But isn't that a historical fact, demonstrated, among other things, by the 20th Party Congress? What is so "eclectic" and "impressionistic" about it? Doesn't the orthodox SWP call this fact "worldshaking"? They must have got a dose of "eclecticism and impressionism" much bigger than ours!

For the use of our readers—hardly for the use of professional distorters and slanderers—we should repeat, in passing, that nowhere, at no place, did we say that the "liberal" wing of the bureaucracy could victoriously lead the political revolution. To the contrary, again and again we have stressed that it is *counterrevolutionary,* only using other means and methods than the stalinoid wing of the Kremlin. Any "intuitions" to the contrary which Sinclair impudently presents in that respect, must be exposed for what they are: pure and simple lies and slanders. But the fact that the "liberal" wing of the counterrevolution cannot possibly head the revolution does not mean that it plays no role in bringing that revolution about, much against its will and intentions. People who talk like that have never seriously studied the history of any revolution and certainly not the history of the Polish and Hungarian revolutions.

The cynicism of Sinclair is revealed when, a couple of pages later, trying to give his version of events in Poland, he calmly states himself that "a section of this native bureaucracy began to lean on the masses to counteract the demands of the Kremlin." Indeed it did. How would you call that "section"? A Stalinist one? Perhaps a "faceless liberal" one? But of course if *you* talk about such sections, your intentions are lily-white and pure, whereas when *we* talk about them our intentions are murderous and our theories "degenerate" . . .

[p. 56]

"The role of Gomulka and Nagy, in fact, only assumes importance—and then temporarily, from the point of view of this whole period of political revolutions—because of the weakness of the Fourth Internationalist leadership." There you have the whole method in a nutshell! Gomulka and Nagy are "only" important because there is no revolutionary mass party.

Of course, we never thought of that. Bevan also is "only" important for this very same reason[2]. For the very same reason all mass working-class tendencies in the world are "only" important because the Fourth International has not yet taken their place. But tell me, Comrade Sinclair, do you think that there will be a revolutionary mass party of the Fourth International in Eastern Germany, Czechoslovakia, or the USSR say in the two or three years? Will it fall from the sky, without cadres, without leadership, without a long period of preparation and experience! Whom are you deceiving, yourself or your comrades?

"Only" because there is no revolutionary leadership of the mass movement, there exists a crisis of mankind since 40 years! The fact came to our knowledge quite some time ago. Now we are interested in another fact: how are we going to overcome this crisis of leadership? Not in the abstract and the general, but under the concrete conditions of Eastern Europe and the USSR? Sinclair's hollow phrases and generalities do not help any Polish or Russian comrade one inch forward towards the goal of building Trotskyist organizations. That you must have a program and organize your own underground group, of course they know; they don't need Sinclair's advice for that: if they did not know these simple truths they would not be Trotskyists, as they happen to be.

But what should they do in the meantime, before the revolution breaks out? Just make illegal progaganda? This is of course necessary, but if they limited themselves to that, they would be hopeless sectarians and hopelessly isolated when the revolution occurs. Contrary to Sinclair we have some experience of young illegal groups under severe dictatorship, and anybody who tells us that you can through them "organize masses" in "spontaneous organizations" *underground* only deserves to be called a fool, and a dangerous one at that! So either you remain inactive with regard to *mass work,* patiently waiting till the revolution occurs and in the meanwhile building your cadre and doing some individual propaganda and recruitment—a course completely justified in periods of reaction, but suicidal on the eve of the revolution—or you try to go where some beginnings of semilegal or legal activity of the workers is possible.

Now where is that place in Eastern Europe, e.g., in Hungary and Poland before the revolution, Comrade Sinclair? The "struggles" in Eastern Germany, Poznan, and Hungary were not expressed in the trade unions, says Ignoramus Sinclair. What a nerve! Why, the very delegation who called the meeting at which the Poznan workers decided their strike action, was the *officially elected trade-union branch of that factory.* The same thing happened in hundreds and hundreds of Polish and Hungarian factories. It also happened that way in Eastern Berlin. Of course, once the revolution has broken out, these organizations were quickly bypassed by the workers' councils. But just now there is no revolution going on in the Soviet Union. We have to prepare it by learning from the way the Polish and Hungarian workers prepared theirs. Only a fool, let me repeat, does not understand that the legal (or semilegal) transformation of the existing trade unions played a central role in that process.

But the Hungarian example is even more revealing. Except the Stalinists who, for their own reasons, spread fairy tales about the role of "underground organizations" in preparing the revolution, all witnesses are unanimous in saying that no organizations of that sort played any role whatsoever in the October 23 demonstration. But there was one organization which played such a role. It was not illegal but legal. It was the Petofi club, which actually organized, through its student faction in the official student organization, the October 23 demonstration in Budapest. *And this Petofi club was essentially nothing else than the loosely organized Nagy tendency of the Hungarian CP!*

Isn't it clear then what we mean when we say that people like Nagy in Hungary, Gomulka in Poland, or anybody of the same kind in any other Eastern European country, by trying to express for their own purposes and in their own interests at least partially the discontent of the masses—"leaning on the masses to counteract the demands of the Kremlin" like Sinclair puts it—create in reality a *semilegal political mass current* in which framework a real left faction, i.e., left-centrists and revolutionary Marxists, might operate in order not to cut themselves off from the existing chances of mass actions? How can anybody doubt this after the Polish and Hungarian examples? Not only did things happen this way in these countries, but even after the great revolutionary struggles of October 23-November 4, the new leadership of the Hungarian working class, the Central Workers Council of Budapest, put at the top of its demands the reinstatement of Nagy as prime minister and the rights of discussion between him and that body, so much had the man remained a symbol of working-class opposition to the regime!

It is tedious but we have to repeat it again: We did not and will not think that Gomulka, Nagy, or any people like that will ever successfully lead the revolution. Its final leadership will be revolutionary Marxists elected in the workers councils. But what *we* think is not as important, when we look for a way to build the party, *as what the masses think.* We must start from their own consciousness in order to bring them to our conclusions. And how can we do this by deliberately turning our backs on the only real mass groupings they take seriously, the "trade unions" and the "liberal" tendencies of the bureaucracy?

"Nowhere, in this document, is there a mention of the necessity of building sections of the IVth International, in Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union," says Sinclair, winking at his readers ("Didn't I tell you?"). Of course there isn't. It is stated at great length in that "infamous" bible of Pabloism, "Rise and Decline of Stalinism," and as our theses explicitly say at the outset, we do not think it necessary to repeat what is said there, as we incorporate every line of it, wholesale and retail, in our present document.

Let me give you a sample of Sinclair's method, applied to Sinclair: "Nowhere in Sinclair's document is there a mention of the necessity of defending the Soviet Union against imperialism. It follows that Sinclair has abandoned this defense." Do you hear the answering howl reverberating against St. Paul's? So please apply some "Kantian morals" to your polemical methods and don't make slanderous assertions. What *is* mentioned throughout in our theses is the *concrete road to build* sections of the Fourth International in these countries. Sinclair perhaps does not like that road (although it starts from the very same principles he tried to apply to his own country), but it happens to be the only correct and possible one.

[p. 57]

By criticizing our program for the political revolution in the USSR and Eastern Europe, Sinclair lets a very revealing sentence escape his pen: "A programme for the political revolution must begin (!) from the necessity of organising the masses independently of the bureaucracy . . . (it) must have as its central (!) aim the building of a conscious leadership."

Here we have a voice coming from the bottom of the heart: you must "start" from the organization; the organization is the "central aim" of the program. Isn't this a pretty—although rather outspoken and naive—definition of cliquism? Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky always taught us differently. The program of the *Communist Manifesto* did not start from the organization, nor did the program of Bolshevism, nor that of the Third International. And even the Transitional Program does not (although people who read it superficially think it does). Any Marxist program always *starts* from expressing general social needs, presented as such by millions of workers. It enumerates them, analyzes them in great detail, and then finally comes to the conclusion that in order to achieve these goals, you have to organize a revolutionary vanguard. To present this logic upside down is to make a caricature of Marxism, transforming the organization from a means into an end in itself. It is the expression of cliquism.

Sinclair has not yet learned to understand the difference between two things: the program of immediate and transitional demands with which you try to arouse the masses and prepare a revolution, and the demands you present to the masses once the revolution has broken out and you want to prepare for power, you want to assure its victory. The first kind of program, which must be specifically different from country to country, we cannot yet work out in detail on the basis of the limited experience of the movement. But the second one it is possible to formulate after the Polish and Hungarian events. And instead of cracking bad jokes about the "healthy workers' state," Sinclair should just throw a glance at the kind of questions which were—and are—passionately discussed by the Hungarian and Polish workers (and the communist workers all over the world are more and more discussing the same questions) and he would suddenly understand "the use of it" . . .

### The "Irreversible" Process

But why should Pabloites bother about "revolutionary leadership?" Sinclair insidiously begs the question. They are anyway convinced that the revolution is an "irreversible process." This is the Original Sin of Pabloism. It is a thousand times worse than our "belief" in the "evolutionary process" and than our "illusions" in the "faceless liberal wing" of the bureaucracy. It is Sin itself. Listen to the Grand Inquisitor:

"We are back to the essence of Pabloism. Teleology replaces Marxism. History grinds onwards, irresistibly, to its predestined goal. And the role of the advance guard, the conscious revolutionary force? Can there be any place for it when the march of progress is *irreversible?* But wait! There *is* a task for it to perform—to persuade the Soviet bureaucracy not to resist the laws of history."[3]

Once again we cannot resist the temptation—begging their pardon—to quote our co-sinners in teleology, the members of the National Committee of the SWP. They write in "The New Stage in the Russian Revolution":

"The slogan 'back to Lenin!' is thus a proletarian slogan which the masses will inevitably fill with their own revolutionary socialist content. Naturally, this will not occur in a day. The workers are yet unorganized. The bureaucracy will fight desperately as it nears its doom. The entire process (listen to them, kneedeep in Pabloite sin!) will have its ups and downs and even reversals. The IMPORTANT THING IS THAT THE PROCESS HAS BEGUN AND IN THE FINAL ANALYSIS IT WILL PROVE TO BE IRREVERSIBLE."

Unrepentant sinners as we are, and confronted with a form of cynicism in distortion which has patently childish aspects, we shall now very patiently and in the simplest possible words explain the mystery, so that even a Sinclair could understand what it is all about.

Once upon a time there was a country ruled by a very bad man called Joseph Stalin. That country had witnessed three revolutions within 12 years but the people, far from witnessing the triumph of equality and soviet democracy they had dreamed of, were confronted with ever sharpening forms of inequality, privilege, and dictatorship. But a very wise man with a black beard called Karl Marx had taught us a long time ago that no dictator could rest his power only on terror. For some reason people did not think it possible to revolt: That was the only explanation for the lasting dictatorship. So an equally wise disciple of old Marx set out to find the reasons why the Russian workers passively tolerated Stalinist dictatorship for so long. And in the most important book he wrote on the question, called *The Revolution Betrayed,* he said:

"If in contrast to the peasants the workers have almost never come out on the road of open struggle, thus condemning the protesting villages to confusion and impotence, this is not only because of the repressions. The workers fear lest, in throwing out the bureaucracy, they will open the way for a capitalist restoration" (p. 285).

That is the main reason why that dictatorship lasted a long time, more than 25 years. Of course, these fears, historically correct to a great extent, were not completely objective. They also reflected the workers' demoralization, confusion, and hopelessness after the terrible defeats of the world revolution and the crushing blows they suffered from the bureaucracy in their own country. But these sentiments became thereby in themselves important objective factors, one of the main bases of support for the bureaucratic dictatorship.

Now these general conditions—called by a very difficult and scientific term, relationship of forces—started to change at the end of the second world war. The retreat of world revolution was finished. An advance set in, first in a contradictory way, with a single clear-cut victory in Yugoslavia, then in a tremendous way, after its victory in the most populated country of the world, China. At the same time, the workers became more confident because of what happened in the world, they also felt more confident because of what they were witnessing in their own country. They had been quietly learning a lot. They now know their skills very well. They were working at huge machines, of which they felt the tremendous productive power. They saw great achievements, power dams, airplanes, factories, of which they were proud but which they compared to their own miserable standard of living. They saw capitalism weakening all over the world. And now they felt there would be no more danger of capitalist restoration if they struck out against the bureaucracy. So they started some skirmishes. They had astonishing success. They asked for more. They received more. Appetite grows with eating, French proverb says. So their pressure increases all the time. AND AS LONG AS THIS RELATIONSHIP OF FORCES IS NOT BASICALLY CHANGED—i.e., as long as the international working class has not suffered a crushing defeat which is absolutely improbable in the next decade—THIS PROCESS IS IRREVERSIBLE, because outside of that change in world relations, there is no reason whatsoever why the Soviet workers would suddenly stop hating the bureaucrats and wanting to get rid of them!

[p. 58]

Does that mean that "there is no place for the advance guard"? Of course it does not mean that. But only people who have forgotten most of what they knew can ignorantly proclaim that it is the task of the vanguard [missing words] to see about the—yes, we remain sinners!—*irreversible objective process* which makes victorious revolutions *possible.* We always thought that the role of the vanguard only consists in transforming this possibility into a reality, i.e., in seizing the favorable opportunities in order to achieve revolutionary victory.

Let me quote a very timely example. Would anybody in his senses deny that in the present stage of imperialist decay the colonial revolution has become an irreversible process? Can anybody visualize, say, in the next ten years, the return of the British *Raj* to India, or the retransformation of North Vietnam into a French colony? Always conceding no fundamental change in the relationship of forces in the world (and there is no objective reason to predict such a change in the near future), one cannot but answer: No, Indian and Vietnamese political independence seem irreversible. But does that mean that "there is no more place for a revolutionary vanguard"? Of course it does not mean that. One thing is the return to full and complete imperialist domination, another thing is the final revolutionary anti-imperialist and anticapitalist victory. As long as there is no final revolutionary victory, many partial defeats (Guatemala, Iran) are inevitable, unnecessary retreats and sacrifices will occur, many occasions will be lost for achieving final victory, most countries—though not all—will pass through many intermediary stages, in which they will have their own and painful experiences with inadequate bourgeois, petty-bourgeois, or Stalinist leaderships. *It is precisely such a period which is ideal for the building of a mass revolutionary party.* Were the process quickly reversible, and had we to witness rapid successions of counterrevolutionary coups and counterrevolutionary crushing victories of the type of Hitler's, the successful building of a mass revolutionary party would be nearly impossible. As history has given us an "irreversible process" towards revolution—with many *partial* defeats, but no final and crushing ones—we stand at the contrary a fairly good chance of achieving our goal.

Having read all this, any objective reader will readily absolve us and our co-sinners from the alleged Sin of TELEOLOGY. Sinclair could not say anything different on the subject than what we have just said. But of course, his intentions are honorable, whereas ours . . .

### The Purpose of "Under a Stolen Flag"

We can now draw up our balance sheet. "Under a Stolen Flag" is a disgraceful document, we said. We have found out why. It substitutes abuse for argument, slander for analysis, distortion for polemics, and arrogant ignorance for Marxist inquiry. The dish strongly smells of King Street, with a flavor of Transport House and a tiny bit of hysteria added for spicing. There is not a single assumption on which it is based which is not a denial of what we really say and write. It is a completely artificial attempt of creating a panic about the nonexisting ghost called Pabloism which has to be exorcised at all cost.

The purpose of this unprincipled attempt is openly stated by Sinclair in the introduction of the internal bulletin. It is a "defense" against the attempt of some British comrades to "pressurize" Burns' [Healy] group into "unprinciled unity." Therefore Sinclair must prove, by all means, that there are big principled differences between the Fourth International and his group. He goes to great lengths to "demonstrate" this. But we have demonstrated that his "evidence" is a tissue of lies and distortions. The "principled" differences dissolve in smoke. Like J. P. Cannon wrote to Goonewardene: positions are coming closer and closer. Sinclair instead states that "the gulf grows wider and wider." The reason for such obviously false statements is very clear. It is of purely organizational nature. He fears that "someone" wants "to take away the leadership of the group." For that he is prepared to fight tooth and nail, principles or no principles. As a matter of fact it seems to be the only principle he honestly follows all through his activity. This is cliquism in its purest form.

We have conducted our relations with the Burns group, as well as with all the groups who are members of the International Committee, in an entirely different manner. We have started from principled basis. We have followed the political lines and documents very carefully. We have seen that these lines come closer and closer together. We therefore have concluded: It is a crime to the movement to reduce the tremendous opportunities opened up to us by the death agony of Stalinism by remaining split in several countries. We therefore issued a call for unity to all these organizations. We were ready and are ready to make the greatest organizational concessions which facilitate such unity with the one exception of dissolving the International as an organized body. We have no cliquish, no maneuverist purposes whatsoever. We only want to strengthen the international movement. Only irresponsible people can take another stand, given the development of the crisis of Stalinism, e.g., in Britain.

Some comrades may ask: you say you want to unite with Burns yet you call him a cliquist and you condemn his methods in the strongest possible terms. We answer: Unity can never be the result of self-effacement or capitulation of any part of the movement. The provocative nature of the Sinclair article precisely lies herein, that the author knew very well a sharp answer was inevitable. But we are confident that all Trotskyists who mean well for Trotskyism will not be taken in by that provocation. We explicitly restate that we want and desire unity with all groups who stand on the basis of the Fourth International program. We don't pose any specific organizational conditions; nobody is going to be excluded. We do not propose to "take away" the British Section from Burns or any section from anyone. Our movement is a healthy growing movement. Our cadres have withstood the test of the split splendidly in almost every country of the world. New and important sections have in the meantime joined the old ones. Under these conditions of general growth we do not need to fear anybody's "maneuvers." The Trotskyist cadres in any country will know how to straighten out any "wild man" if the necessity therefor arises. They will not need "international intervention" in organizational matters, except when it is necessary to protect minorities against wanton repression. We can safely leave the future of the British Section to the united efforts of the British comrades. That section will grow and draw to it a strong part of oppositional Communists—provided we relentlessly continue the fight for unity and bring it to a good end.

[p. 59]

E. Germain.

June 20, 1957

### Footnotes:

(1) Sinclair sees a "contradiction" and "confusion" in the fact that we state, on the one hand, that the Eastern European CPs have still a majority of advanced workers in their ranks, and on the other hand, that its apparatus is completely isolated from society. But the CPs are "part(!) of the apparatus," Sinclair exclaims! Indeed? Would you say that the British Labour Party is "part" of Transport House? Can't you visualize a revolutionary situation in Britain in which Transport House becomes "completely isolated from society" without the Labour Party stopping to group a majority of advanced workers?

(2) For English comrades interested in the subject, we draw attention upon the article we wrote after the Fourth World Congress, and which was republished in No. 2 of the British review *Fourth International,* article in which we analyzed the *centrist* nature of mass currents moving to the left and the inadequacy of that leadership which has to be replaced by a revolutionary Marxist, i.e., Trotskyist one.

(3) As we do not want Sinclair to get away with anything, may we just remind him that we could not "attach importance" in our document to the Chinese CP's statement "More on the Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat," for the simple reason that our document was finished before that statement was published? We have of course not waited for Sinclair's advice to become interested in that statement and published a long polemic against it in the April 1957 issue of the review *Quatrième Internationale.*