Fourth International
International Secretariat
Pierre Frank,
Dear Comrades,
We have received two letters signed by your secretary, comrade Burns [Healy], dated respectively July 6th and 8th 1957. We should like to comment on them.
In that of July 6th you give the impression that Sinclair's [Hunter] article against our document "The Decline and Fall of Stalinism" represents only the opinion of a "leading member" of your organisation.
In that of July 8th you write, on the contrary, that your organisation is "opposed" to our 1953 "document 'The Rise and Decline of Stalinism' and opposed to (our 1957) document 'the Decline and Fall of Stalinism'".
Finally, in the letter of the International Committee in which your organisation participates, dated July 10th 1957, it is written that "the contribution of comrade Sinclair should be considered as discussion material." That is already in progress.
We have not failed to "speed up (our) reply to Sinclair" as comrade Burns asked us to do, and we hope that this reply will by now be known to all your members.
We further remind you that you considered the "repudiation" of our document "The Decline and Fall of Stalinism" as one of the two conditions for unification with the RSL, our sympathising organisation in Great Britain. The other was that they "dissolve the RSL as an open organisation and accept perspective of work in the LP."
After that, you are suprised that we characterised these conditions for unification as "ultimatistic".
In your present letters you refer to the condition of entry work, but you say nothing as to the other condition, to "repudiate the recent Pabloite document 'The Decline and Fall of Stalinism'" (According to the exact terms of your Conference Resolution).
We reject this affirmation that the RSL is supposedly for "open work" and is opposed to the entrist tactic. Nothing justifies this accusation. It is certainly not the International, that was the first to recommend this tactic in Britain, which would now be renouncing such a line.
But even supposing that the RSL were for the moment opposed to such a tactic, your way of posing the question of unification in Britain does not at all correspond at all to the liberal way that you state the question of unification on the international level, or to the indications given in this field by comrade Cannon in his letter to comrade P. O'D. [Mangan], with which you are familiar and which you say you now endorse. Re-read point 4 of this letter.
Must one proceed in Britain in another way than for example in France?
If one is ready to admit several organisations per country, each belonging with equal right to the International, and a flexible procedure later to bring them into cooperation and fusion, as comrade Cannon proposes, then naturally one must admit this everywhere without exception.
As for our position on this question, it was clearly expressed in our answer to the leadership of the SWP, dated May 7th 1957, with which you are familiar.
As for your general position on unification with the International, such as it emerges from your letters, we have the following remarks to make:
You keep stating, and emphasising, that "there are deepgoing political differences between the forces of the International Committee" and the International.
We must not, you say, forget this, and we must in a sense start out from it.
But if this were all, i.e., "deep going political differences", or as you wrote in the preface to Sinclair's articles "the gulf" between "the Pabloites" and yourselves "grows wider and wider", there would be nothing to be done, and it would be absolutely useless to speak of possible rapid unification, or to foresee any unification as possible on the basis of your propositions.
*It is only by starting out from the unquestionable drawing together of political positions that has been going on for a certain time between the positions of the Committee such as they have been shown in the line of the SWP, and those of the International, as the SWP leadership explicitly admitted, that the question of unification can be raised and solved.*
Reread in this connection the manner in which comrade Cannon poses the question in his letter of March 12th, 1957, to comrade Tilak [Goonewardene], a manner which we share. Above all, reread as attentively as we do The Militant and its line, and then compare it with the line of the International. Reread for example what was written in The Militant quite recently about the new crisis of the political leadership of the Soviet bureaucracy, and compare all this with, on the one hand, the line of the International, and on the other, with Sinclair's article.
Comrades, the question of unification is certainly above all political, and it is for this reason that we welcomed the drawing together closer of the political line observed in The Militant and ours.
[p. 67]
We unfortunately cannot say the same for your line, if it is that expressed by an article like that of Sinclair.
Under these conditions, we refer you to the reply that we are making to the July 10th letter of the International Committee, a copy of which we enclose.
With our internationalist communist greetings
The IS
[footnotes omitted]