The National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party [SWP] in Australia has publicly announced its decision to disaffiliate its organisation from the Fourth International, part of a process of a progressive abandonment of central conceptions and perspectives of revolutionary Marxism. At the last World Congress of the Fourth International the positions of the SWP were rejected by overwhelming majorities.
The public explanations (1) that the SWP leadership have given for their organisational break with the Fourth International include:
— its claim that the Fourth International suffers from 'an overestimation of the place... occupied by political revolution against the ruling castes in the bureaucratised workers states'; (2)
— their rejection of the theory and practice of permanent revolution and their assertion that the test of actual revolutions have repeatedly confirmed its incorrectness;
— that the Fourth International represents 'an obstacle to fully participating in the process of building new revolutionary parties and a new mass international revolutionary movement'; (3)
— a subordination of the aim of building a revolutionary international to the notion of 'international collaboration among revolutionaries'; (4)
1. According to the SWP leaders, the International has been unable to grasp the 'anti-imperialist axis' that, according to them, constitutes the unifying element of the world revolution.
This notion implies in fact that the main feature of the world revolution is the anti-imperialist struggles carried out in the dominated countries. The underlying idea is that the relationship of forces and, in the last analysis, the fate of the revolution on a world scale, will be fundamentally decided in these liberation struggles and that the proletariat in the industrial countries will be just a back up.
As against this idea the last World Congress emphasised the linking together of the socialist dynamic of the revolution in the dominated countries, the socialist tasks of the proletariat in the imperialist countries, and the tasks of political revolution against the bureaucracy in the USSR, China and Eastern Europe.
2. In the framework of their new conception of the world revolution — whose axis can be reduced to the anti-imperialist struggles — the SWP leaders blot out the perspective of the anti-bureaucratic political revolution and the revolutionary significance of the struggles waged by the working class in the bureaucratised workers states. The SWP leadership explains that the anti-bureaucratic struggle should be subordinated to the 'anti-imperialist axis'.
The SWP leaders are replacing the revolutionary Marxist conception of the three sectors of world revolution by a 'campist' conception which expresses the fundamental antagonism existing on a world scale in terms of the opposition between states or blocs of states instead of in terms of social classes.
Carried through to its practical conclusion this would mean that, in the interest of the fight against imperialism, the struggle against the bureaucratic castes should be given up. But these bureaucratic castes represent a major obstacle to aiding the proletariat of the dominated countries to wage a consistent struggle against imperialism and for the workers of the industrialised countries to challenge the domination of capital.
3. This is why the struggle to overthrow the bureaucracy is an integral part of the world revolution. Concerned to avoid the so-called 'sectarianism' of the Fourth International, the SWP leadership is for its part on the way to fabricating a theory of 'non-sectarianism' whose logic is to blot out the struggles led by one-third of the world working class!
In fact, the present position of the SWP reflects a more general opportunist attitude towards the bureaucracy. This is concretised in apologetic analyses of the bureaucratised societies which the SWP leaders persist in calling 'socialist states'. For the SWP leaders 'there is no economic crisis in the USSR' (5) despite the evidence provided by the Kremlin leadership itself in its calls for reforms of the economic system. For SWP members who were delegates to the recent Moscow Youth Festival all critical judgement was suppressed and instead a rosy view was adopted which proclaimed that 'the opportunities to meet and discuss with others were only limited by the hours in the day...And it seemed that the whole of Moscow wanted to be part of it...' Not a critical word was reserved for their hosts, a bureaucratic apparatus which under Stalin claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of class-conscious workers and continues to suppress independent organisation and discussion today.
The SWP's adaption has gone so far as to fail to disassociate themselves from such Stalinist crimes as the execution of the Vietnamese Trotskyists in 1945, instead providing a justification for these actions claiming that the Trotskyists and their nationalist allies had made a major contribution to the near-destruction of the revolution in the South. Preventing further damage, if necessary by physical repression, was imperative.' (6)
4. But the evolution of the SWP has been expressed above all by its leadership's rejection of our conceptions of socialist democracy, reaffirmed and made more precise in a specific resolution at the last World Congress. These conceptions — directly linked to our strategic perspective of political revolution — are an essential element in the identity of our movement.
Our positions on socialist democracy are based on the experience of mass movements in the bureaucratised workers states in which hundreds of thousands, indeed millions of workers from the East Berlin revolt in 1953 to the rise of the Polish revolution in 1980-1981 have put forward ideas, perspectives and demands that have enriched and confirmed an orientation developed since the emergence of the Left Opposition at the end of the 1920s. They forget that in the last analysis these movements confronted the bureaucratic regimes as such, going beyond a purely reformist perspective.
The logic of the SWP positions on the other hand comes down to now placing itself within such a perspective of reform. It is on this terrain in particular that the SWP is going in the direction of a break with revolutionary Marxism.
5. The revolution in the dominated countries is now presented by the SWP as a revolution by stages that implies a qualitative separation between the democratic revolution and the socialist revolution. Such a concept cannot be based on the history of any victorious revolution, starting from the Nicaraguan, Cuban or Vietnamese revolutions. All these revolutions confirm the basic idea of permanent revolution — that the democratic and national tasks of the revolution cannot be resolved without the workers taking power. The Sandinista leaders have explained that they made tactical alliances with bourgeois forces, without giving up their own leadership of the revolution. Furthermore in Cuba, following the installation of the workers state, the growing over into the socialist phase took place at a relatively rapid rate. The Vietnamese Communist Party waged a heroic struggle for over thirty years which resulted first in the formation of the North Vietnamese workers state and then its extension to the South after the 1975 victory. This is what we call the process of permanent revolution. Che Guevara was thinking in the same direction when he said that 'a socialist revolution or the caricature of the revolution' was the perspective in Latin America.
It is true that in a whole series of imperialist-dominated countries leaderships have been inspired by the schema of a revolution by stages and that they have banked on a strategic alliance with the bourgeoisie or important sectors of it. The practical consequences of such conceptions and orientations are tragically clear: the worker and peasant masses have suffered crushing, indeed historic, defeats. In the course of their polemic the SWP leaders pose the question of why the Vietnamese masses succeeded while the Indonesian masses were crushed. They correctly point to the differences between the strategies of the two Communist Parties as decisive. But they fail to stress that it was precisely because the VCP did not halt the struggle until the establishment of a workers state that US imperialism was struck its heaviest ever military and political blow and that it was because of the Indonesian CP's stagist view of the revolution that a million Indonesian workers went to their death.
The essential is, and remains, that the proletariat and its vanguard must from the outset seek to lead the revolutionary process, and that only the dictatorship of the proletariat can successfully accomplish the fulfilment of the democratic tasks.
6. The SWP leaders now claim that the majority of the International has also gone towards an — albeit timid — revision of the theory of permanent revolution without, for all that, drawing the conclusion, as the SWP has done, that Trotsky's theory was in fact, leftist, sectarian and consequently wrong.
In fact the text adopted at the last World Congress concerning the debate on permanent revolution said in particular:
'The difference between Lenin and Trotsky before 1917 can be discussed as much as one wants. This is a historical and theoretical question about which many viewpoints have already been expressed inside the Fourth International. However, the thesis of the sixth point of the Left Opposition is a dividing line between revolutionaries and reformists in the colonial revolution. It is consistent from its first to its last word since there cannot be "a peaceful growing over" of the Stalinist-style democratic dictatorship (as a regime separate and distinct from the dictatorship of the proletariat) into a socialist dictatorship; nor can the building of socialism be undertaken without a revolutionary conquest of power. On the other hand, there can and must be a growing over of the democratic and national tasks of the revolution into socialist tasks, in the framework of a dictatorship of the proletariat.
'On this essential point the Cuban, Vietnamese and Nicaraguan revolutions, and negatively the Indonesian disaster and the bourgeois normalisation currently underway in Iran, confirm the immediate relevance of the theses of the permanent revolution: "For countries with a belated bourgeois development, especially for the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the theory of the permanent revolution means that the genuine and complete solution of the democratic and national liberation tasks can only be the dictatorship of the proletariat standing at the head of the oppressed nation, above all the peasant masses." The truth is that just as those who stop making revolutions halfway are digging their own grave, those who in the epoch of the putrefaction of imperialism stop the revolution at its bourgeois democratic "stage" are handing the revolution over to its gravediggers. And now the course of the Nicaraguan revolution since Somoza's overthrow is also verifying this law of the growing over of the democratic revolution into a socialist revolution, a process which is necessary if the democratic conquests themselves are to be consolidated.' (7)
In reality, it was the SWP leaders who defended a sectarian and dogmatic conception of permanent revolution within the International for years. This position was neither in keeping with the positions of Trotsky, nor with those of the majority of the International. Thus, in the 1970s, the SWP for example attacked the Vietnamese leadership on the basis of an ultra-sectarian conception of the tactical and strategic questions that the Indochinese revolution was facing. For example, the diplomatic operation that the Vietnamese developed during the Paris Peace Accords in 1973 was considered as a capitulation of the Indochinese revolution. And even after the fall of Saigon they closed their eyes to the anti-capitalist dynamic of the revolution.
Today they are making the opposite mistake. And they want to make the balance sheet of their own previous positions the balance sheet of the whole International.
7. The SWP leadership throws overboard the main gains of revolutionary Marxism. The comrades claim that by doing this they will from now on be able to more easily establish relations with other movements and other revolutionary political currents outside the Fourth International. But the Fourth International has consistently fought to link up with new leaderships. It sought to do so with the leaderships which emerged in Yugoslavia, Cuba, Vietnam and Nicaragua not through merely explaining our support for the revolutions but through our active solidarity work. It is within that framework that we have both learnt from these revolutions and brought to bear a critical eye based on both the international and historical experiences of the workers movement.
8. In particular none of these leaderships has pursued the idea of a 'new international revolutionary movement'. The Cuban leadership, for example, does not advance this idea which is one of our differences with it. But the SWP leaders do not even offer the perspective of building an international today, instead denouncing it as a 'fetishisation of form'. They justify their position by saying 'the big parties do not have an international, they just have relations between parties.' (8) They assert 'the relations today between parties that stand at the head of state formations will not be the same as the relations between parties in the Third International'. They forget that the liquidation of the Third International flowed not from the founding of the Soviet workers state but from the Stalinist counter-revolution.
The lack of a mass revolutionary international remains the central weakness and is one of the agonising contradictions of the world workers movement. An international is necessary to defend consistently the interests of workers in the countries dominated by imperialism, in the industrialised capitalist countries, and in the bureaucratised workers states. The reality today, for example, is that the Cuban leaders support the struggles in Salvador and Guatemala, but in Poland or Czechoslovakia they line up with a bureaucracy that oppresses the workers. In the same way, movements like Solidarnosc fight against the bureaucracy but have illusions in the capitalist countries, and do not mobilise in solidarity with the peoples of Latin America.
It is absolutely necessary, and even vital for the future of the revolution and of socialism, to overcome these contradictions, to work for the unity of revolutionary forces in the three sectors of the world revolution and for the construction of a mass revolutionary international.
The Fourth International does not claim that it is this international. But it is an incontestable fact that it has carried out a fight for internationalism, theoretically and in practice, for fifty years, and that it is determined to continue this fight. The Fourth International is perfectly conscious of the limits of its organisational gains. However, it has been able to play an important role in campaigns and practical solidarity initiatives with revolutionary anti-imperialist struggles, including in the most difficult periods such as, for example, committing itself fully to solidarity with the Algerian revolution in the 1950s. In more recent times, it has mobilised in active solidarity with the Nicaraguan revolution and the Polish revolution. It has built active organisations in some fifty countries, active in the class struggle at every level, and often hard-hit by the repression of our enemies. These organisations are striving, in different situations and with different tactics, to build mass revolutionary parties. They are carrying out their tasks in the framework of an international organisation, which makes it more possible for them to resist any national or sectoral pressure.
9. This is the fight that the SWP is giving up today, without being able to give any realistic alternative, the "new world revolutionary movement" of which they talk not existing in reality. They can thus only put forward a practice consisting of episodic, diplomatic relations with different parties or national movements. This leads them, and will inevitably lead them, to adopt tail-endist attitudes towards other currents — opportunist, bureaucratic, including some of Stalinist formation — and they will in consequence be less and less able to resist national pressures. They have already moved in this direction.
For example in line with their tiny group of co-thinkers in the USA gathered around the North Star Network they have identified the Australian Labour Party as a party of the same basic type as the Democratic Party of the USA, justifying a simultaneously opportunist practice of supporting Democratic candidates electorally in the USA and an analysis of the Australian Labour Party which could lead to sectarian practice. Their regroupment discussions with the Stalinist Socialist Party of Australia have only hastened their abandonment of ideas of revolutionary Marxism as has their uncritical attitude towards the HDP, the movement organised around the reactionary ideal of Croatian nationalism in the Yugoslav state.
10. The SWP was formed as an organisation linked to the Fourth International and has been the official section since 1972. It has recruited its members as an integral part of the Fourth International. Its disaffiliation is not just a break of organisational relations with other sections and with the leadership of the International. It indicates a qualitative change in the very nature of the SWP, which now becomes a largely national organisation, subject to all the traditionally heavy pressures on the Australian left without an institutionalised framework for collaboration with revolutionary Marxists who can learn from their experience while subjecting it to friendly and critical discussion. Already there are worrying signs of these pressures. To take such an important decision as disaffiliation from the Fourth International without placing the matter for open discussion before the entire membership is reminiscent of the commandist style of leadership associated with sects. The most elementary duty was to submit the question to a national conference after an exhaustive discussion among all the members. It preferred to present everybody with an accomplished fact.
11. The SWP leaders declare that they would like to maintain a 'collaboration in practice' with us on questions on which they think there is agreement (struggle for Kanak independence, solidarity with Central America, etc.).
For years the International leadership and, at the last World Congress, the majority of the delegates, have polemicised against the positions of the Australian SWP leadership and denounced their liquidationist dynamic. We have however striven to avoid this organisational rupture that the SWP leaders have now chosen:
a) because we did not want to resolve a problem that was eminently political in organisational terms;
b) because the SWP leadership seemed to have the intention of remaining within the statutory framework of the International;
c) because we did not want to exclude the possibility that following a long discussion and on the basis of future experiences the Australian comrades would correct their course.
We still hope that they will do so, but there is now obviously a new situation resulting from the SWP leaders' break with the International. Our relations with them are put on a totally different plane.
It is however in our tradition and practice to strive to bring into being the workers united front and to collaborate with other parties or currents identifying with the workers movement in struggles, mobilisations and campaigns. We have never discriminated against other currents on this terrain, and we will not do so now with relation to the Australian SWP.
But that will not prevent us from continuing our struggle to build a revolutionary Marxist party, section of the Fourth International in Australia. We call on Australian revolutionary Marxists to join us in this.
1. 'The Socialist Workers Party and the Fourth International' by Jim Percy and Doug Lorimer. Published by Pathfinder Press (Australia). September 1985.
2. Ibid. p18
3. Ibid. p54
4. Ibid. p55
5. David Holmes in 'Direct Action' July 31 1985.
6. 'The Vietnamese Revolution and its Leadership' by Alan Myers, 1985, p. 48.
7. 'Resolutions of the Twelfth World Congress'. International Viewpoint. p. 33
8. 'The Socialist Workers Party and the Fourth International' p. 21.