Issuing body: Third World Congress of the Fourth International, Paris Original source cited: Bulletin intérieur du SI, n° 3 [and n° 4], septembre 1951
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THREE YEARS OF THE NEW COURSE OF TROTSKYISM
Activity Report of the IEC and the IS, presented by Ernest Mandel
The Second World Congress of the Fourth International had inaugurated a new stage in the history of international Trotskyism. The period of elaborating the programme and defending it against revisionist tendencies had culminated in the selection of an international leadership, the direct expression of the experience of the main sections, invested with the confidence of the great majority of our movement. This leadership, issuing from the Second World Congress, had the task of carrying out the orientation prescribed by the documents adopted at that congress: to transform the Trotskyist organizations from propaganda circles into genuine revolutionary organizations, rooted in the mass movement of their respective countries.
In order for the movement to carry out this reorientation, the international leadership itself had to concentrate its activity in the following areas: to begin acting as the leadership of a world party, that is, to launch and direct international campaigns of propaganda and agitation; to help the national sections grasp the particular features of the labour movement in their countries so as to determine the concrete path by which the building of the revolutionary party must proceed under these particular conditions; to help the sections in turn select an adequate leadership, capable of stimulating and orienting the new course of Trotskyism — its integration into the mass movement — under the concrete conditions of their country.
The present activity report will seek to determine to what extent the leadership elected at the Second World Congress has succeeded in beginning to resolve these tasks, what the main successes and the main failures have been along this road, and what obstacles must be removed in order to generalize, throughout the whole international in the years ahead, the transformation of Trotskyism into a genuine revolutionary leadership of the international labour movement.
The new course of Trotskyism, as it has begun to be realized over the past three years, does not signify merely the liquidation of a whole series of defects, the inevitable products of our movement's past isolation: sectarianism, failure to understand the real mass movement, impatience and instability of leaderships, activity essentially turned inward, a mechanical opposition between cadre formation and mass work, academicism, the setting of tasks unrelated to the practical possibilities of carrying them out, etc. It signifies, for the first time, the establishment of an entirely new relationship in the history of the world labour movement between the international leadership and the main national sections.
For the abstract internationalism of the Second International — where the international appears merely as the sum of the national sections — and for the mechanical internationalism of the Third International in the Stalinist epoch — where the international functions in reality as the extended arm of a single section, that of the USSR — the Fourth International has substituted a genuinely dialectical conception of internationalism, an expression of the contemporary world reality of the class struggle: it is precisely the international leadership, striving to sum up within itself the whole experience of the world labour movement and to determine on this basis a world strategy proceeding from the world dynamic as a whole, that succeeds best in grasping the particularities and the specifically national tasks of the labour movement in the main countries. The national leaderships, genuinely integrated into the labour movement of their country, in turn make it possible to subject the international's orientation to the only decisive test, that of action. Thus international leadership and national leaderships shape and influence one another in an increasingly harmonious way, a real guarantee of our movement's future progress.
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The functioning of the international's leading centre
The international leadership, as it emerged from the Second World Congress in the International Executive Committee, underwent only a slight modification in the two years that have elapsed since then: the expulsion of Haston, a full member, and of Grant, an alternate member, both of them representing the former majority of the RCP and embodying the tendency of British Trotskyism that stubbornly refused to integrate into the international, to assimilate the new course of Trotskyism. The history of this tendency, which our English comrades have just written up, deserves to be known throughout the international. It also shows how theoretical eclecticism, together with a failure to understand the real conditions of the mass movement, rapidly leads to such political degeneration. Today Haston, who at the Second World Congress still claimed to represent "true" orthodox Trotskyism, has become the bitter enemy of our movement; having fought for years against entry into the Labour Party, he has become a direct agent of the reformist bureaucracy; having long defended a pro-Stalinist orientation, he now plays second fiddle in the great anti-communist orchestra. His expulsion from the IEC, which took place at the Eighth Plenum after he had left the organization and committed acts of open betrayal, brought to a close a long political struggle in which the international leadership displayed undeniable patience and flexibility, making every possible effort genuinely to integrate the Hastonite tendency into the international.
The IEC elected at the Second World Congress met four times over the thirty-eight months that have elapsed. Participation in these sessions was regular only on the part of most of the European members. Delegates from the New Zealand (American) section were unfortunately absent from the Sixth and Eighth Plenums. From the Far East we had direct representatives only at the Eighth Plenum, and from Latin America only at the Seventh Plenum. While this unstable participation of extra-European delegates in the IEC's sessions did not greatly harm the political elaboration — and while close contacts with the New Zealand section, which contains an important fraction of our world cadres, allowed for their indirect participation in this political elaboration — the concrete application of the IEC's decisions, especially in the Far East and partly also in Latin America, suffered greatly from the absence of delegates from the sections of this part of the world at IEC meetings. Nevertheless, if we examine the whole of the IEC's political and organizational work, as we shall do in a moment, we can conclude that this body has, on the whole, resolved the tasks it had to resolve, and that its functioning corresponded to what could be expected of it in the wake of the Second World Congress.
As for the IS, between the Second and Third World Congresses it did not achieve the stability of composition already attained by the world congress. In fact, only a nucleus of four comrades — comrades J. (Jérôme-Pablo), H. (Henry-Frank), B. (Bernard-Banerji), and W. (Walter-Mandel) — represented, during this period, the continuity of the day-to-day work of the international leadership. At three different periods — April-May 1948, from April to July 1949, and from October 1950 until now — the New Zealand (American) comrades M. (Morris Leavitt) and L. (Livingstone-Clarke) joined this daily nucleus, while from April 1948 to April 1949 comrade G. (Goff) also took part in the IS. From the summer of 1949, when the daily IS consisted of only four members, an enlarged IS was constituted by adding comrades C. (Maitan), B. (Burns-Healy), and B. (Bos-Santen) to the day-to-day bureau. This decision had been taken at the Eighth Plenum and provided for this enlarged IS to meet monthly.
Unfortunately, it proved impossible to maintain such a frequency, and the enlarged IS held only four meetings in all, the last of them in January of this year. The considerable difficulties we have encountered on the road to building a strengthened centre have two categories of causes: the still very great weakness of our movement in leading cadres, and the very great poverty of the international centre. Most of our sections have only a very limited number of front-rank leaders and hesitate to send them to the centre for any lengthy period; and since, with a few exceptions, they are moreover too poor to provide for the needs of their representatives at the centre, the burden falls entirely on the IS budget, which has had to cover the salaries of five full-time workers since October 1949. The IS's limited financial resources have meant that these salaries have been set below subsistence level, making any further reduction impossible. It was therefore enough for a section covering the salary of its representative on the IS to decide to withdraw that representative for a time for the number of members at the centre automatically to be reduced. However, the whole experience of recent years confirms how indispensable the existence of a strong centre is for the sound functioning and progress of the main sections, and how the broadening of horizon and experience that national cadres gain by taking part for a time in the work of the centre offsets the relative weakening that their temporary departure from their section may produce. It is to be hoped that, in the period ahead, a greater number of sections will decide to send a leading cadre to the centre for a time and to provide for the greater part of his upkeep at IS headquarters.
If we take all these difficulties into account, we can say that the IS has genuinely succeeded in carrying out considerable work in numerous fields. Despite the limited number of its participants, some of whom had to make numerous journeys, it held meetings with an almost weekly frequency, at which were debated both the administrative questions of the centre itself and a great many organizational and political questions concerning the international as a whole and particular sections or groups of sections. It saw to the publication of the resolutions and manifesto of the Second World Congress, together with a summary record (the political resolutions were moreover published, in whole or in part, by various sections in English, German, Spanish, Vietnamese, Dutch, Greek, Chinese, Italian, etc.). It saw to the publication of thirty-three issues of the IS's discussion "Internal Bulletin," nine of them preparatory to the Third World Congress. On each occasion it published, within a few weeks, the resolutions and minutes of the IEC plenums. It saw to the publication of fifteen issues of the review Fourth International as well as some twenty issues of the International Press Service. If the monthly frequency of the IPS, and the fortnightly frequency of the review, could not be maintained, this is essentially due to financial reasons. In addition, the IS published several public statements (on the false testament of Leon Trotsky, on the Tito affair, on the Korean war, on Natalia Trotsky's break with the Fourth International); it prepared the IEC's meetings through its resolutions and draft resolutions; it published four open letters to the PCY [Yugoslav CP], one open letter to the Chinese CP, and two May Day manifestos (1949 and 1951). To all this political activity must be added a more or less close participation in the leadership of several sections, to which we shall have to return.
The entire logic of the course our movement is now engaged upon requires the maintenance and expansion of all these activities. Responding, both theoretically and through agitational and propaganda actions, to the main turning-points of the international situation; taking part even more directly than in the past in the leadership of a whole series of sections or groups of sections; preparing and ensuring plenary meetings of the international leadership; feeding the various theoretical reviews now available to our international movement — all these tasks will pose themselves with increased urgency in the period of preparation and outbreak of the imperialist war that lies before us. Their solution requires the strengthening, in both cadres and finances, of the centre, for which we shall have to propose concrete measures.
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The elaboration of the international's political line
The principal task of the international leadership remains to elaborate, on the programmatic foundation reconfirmed and definitively assimilated since the Second World Congress, the international's political line in an epoch of sharp turns and tumultuous developments that put a heavy strain on the stability and class line of any revolutionary organization, especially one that is weak and relatively little integrated into the proletariat. In an eminently revolutionary epoch, the task of a genuine proletarian leadership is above all to preserve an orientation capable of enabling the movement to make full use of the revolutionary possibilities offered by the situation, and, to this end, to adapt the movement's line and language to the new needs produced by each new turn in the international situation. At the same time, this leadership must maintain the organization on the basis of its own programme and react with tact and energy against the petty-bourgeois pressures on the one hand, and Stalinist pressures on the other, which strive, on the occasion of each turn, to divert the international from its programmatic foundation.
The great international events that have followed one another since the Second World Congress have on several occasions required the leadership to re-examine the international situation as a whole. The fact that this re-examination has succeeded in arriving at an accurate interpretation of upheavals often of colossal dimensions, within the framework of our Trotskyist programme, confirms once again, if further confirmation were needed, the validity of this programme as the principal weapon for interpreting and changing the world of decadent capitalism.
Faced with the outbreak of the PCY's [Yugoslav CP's] break with the Kominform; faced with the development of the third Chinese revolution; faced with the onset of the world economic depression; faced with the outbreak of the Korean war, the shift in the international relationship of forces, and the accelerating march of American imperialism towards the preparation and unleashing of the third world war; faced with all these events which shook to their foundations the already cracked theoretical constructions of all the other formations of the international labour movement, our international organization was able to react in good time and to base itself on a more accurate understanding of the objective situation in order to readjust or intensify its revolutionary activity in its main fields. The time of sterile discussions is now definitively closed within the Fourth International. And the important discussions that have taken place in our movement since the Second World Congress have been strongly marked by this understanding, henceforth assimilated by the great majority of our cadres: that for genuine revolutionaries the best theory has meaning only if it serves as the basis for real and effective activity in the class struggle.
The first great political problem the Fourth International had to face in the aftermath of the Second World Congress, and on which it was able clearly to demonstrate in practice the meaning of its new course of integration into the real mass movement, was the Yugoslav affair. As soon as Tito broke with the Kremlin, the IS set out its view of the matter and called on the whole international and the world revolutionary vanguard to come to the aid of Yugoslavia. At the same time, in the resolution submitted to and adopted by the Sixth Plenum, it set out the general origins and the possible lines of development of the Yugoslav revolution, an analysis that has entirely withstood the test of events. These problems were further clarified, after a lengthy international discussion running from the Seventh to the Ninth Plenum, in the resolution adopted by the Ninth Plenum and now submitted, with a few amendments, for adoption by the world congress.
There is no need to return here to the political substance of this discussion, which was largely exhausted during the debate on the Yugoslav resolution presented to this world congress. It will suffice, within the framework of the present report, to note that while the international leadership constantly sought to combine the progress of theoretical analysis with the requirements of practical action by our sections in the Yugoslav affair, it never at any moment allowed itself to be drawn into a pragmatic degradation of its overall conception of the Yugoslav affair, and the time it devoted to discussing the theoretical problems raised by this question, far from being wasted time, repeatedly proved to be the indispensable condition for readjusting the sections' practical activity in the face of the successive turns undergone by the development of the Yugoslav affair. We can affirm today that Trotskyism alone was able successively to demonstrate the importance, the promise, and the limits of this affair, and that only our theory of permanent revolution makes it possible to understand both the greatness and the wretchedness of the PCY.
Very early on, the discussion of the significance of the Yugoslav affair gave rise to a discussion of the problem of the evolution and nature of the "buffer zone" [glacis] countries. This discussion corresponded less to a need to re-examine what the Second World Congress had affirmed about these countries than to the necessity of taking account of the new developments that had occurred since the Second World Congress, and especially since the outbreak of the Yugoslav affair. The resolution adopted on this subject by the Seventh Plenum of the IEC marked a first important stage in the readjustment of our position. The discussion opened by that plenum, together with the events that have followed one another since then in the "buffer zone" countries, enabled the IS unanimously to present to the Third World Congress the draft resolution on the nature of the "buffer zone" countries which you discussed yesterday. The theses of the Ninth Plenum, together with discussion documents written by members of the IS — comrade Pablo's article "Where Are We Going?" and comrade Germain's "Ten Theses" — sought to place this reassessment of the nature of the "buffer zone" countries within the overall framework of our conception of Stalinism and the contemporary world, and demonstrated that it in no way destroys the cohesion and structural unity of our programme.
The discussion on the Yugoslav affair and the "buffer zone" countries was still under way when there occurred in the Far East an event whose historic importance is barely grasped even by us today: the victory of Mao Zedong's revolutionary armies over the power of the bourgeoisie and the landlords. This victory had not been foreseen, at least not within this time frame, by our movement; the Second World Congress had rather expected the civil war to be prolonged over a lengthy period. A rapid reassessment was needed here too, bound up with a re-examination of the nature and developmental tendencies of the Chinese CP — a task begun by the Seventh and Eighth Plenums' resolutions on the subject, by the theses of the Ninth Plenum, and by various articles by members of the international leadership. This analysis of the Chinese revolution enabled the international leadership to deepen its understanding — already expressed in the documents of the Second World Congress — of the exceptional importance, decisive for the present epoch, of all the revolutionary movements of the Far East. That is why the outbreak of the Korean war did not catch our movement unprepared but rather permitted a very rapid, unanimous alignment of the international behind the position taken by the IS in its resolution (declaration) of 1 July 1950, further elaborated in comrade Pablo's article on the Korean war and finally clarified in the theses of the Ninth Plenum. All the refinements we had brought, since the First World Congress, to our understanding of the international situation, of the importance of the Asian revolution, of the economic crisis threatening international capitalism, and of the crisis of Stalinism, represented the basis on which our world organization — once again, alone among all the formations of the international labour movement — defined a correct position on the Korean war. Bringing together all these refinements so as to give an overall analysis of the world situation, profoundly changed since the Second World Congress, determining on the basis of this analysis the prospects for development in the years ahead — revolutionary prospects above all! — and thereby fixing the broad lines of the international's political orientation: this task, felt to be necessary by the great majority of our movement's cadres, was successfully accomplished by the theses of the Ninth Plenum. Its result is tangible today. We can say without exaggeration that, for the first time in its history, our movement today presents itself as united not only in its programmatic conceptions but also in its assessment of the concrete political situation, in its assessment of political prospects, and of the orientation it will have to follow in the years ahead. This remarkable advance in political homogeneity will mark, in the history of the Fourth International, an important stage in its growth.
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The organization of international campaigns and actions
We have already indicated that one of the main characteristics of the new course of Trotskyism lies in the fact that the international leadership has striven to organize genuine international campaigns to achieve a series of objectives arising from the analysis of the world situation as a whole. As early as the aftermath of the Second World Congress, the outbreak of the Yugoslav affair made the organization of such a campaign necessary. Several circulars sent to the sections on this subject set out the aims of this campaign as follows:
a) By means of the press, leaflets, resolutions passed in mass workers' organizations, and public meetings and rallies, to draw the attention of the labour vanguard to the importance of the Yugoslav affair and to mobilize proletarian and liberal public opinion to help the FPRY [Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia], threatened by the Kremlin and by Wall Street. It was above all in France and Great Britain that this campaign was able to take on great scope. No fewer than five public meetings and rallies were organized in Paris around the Yugoslav affair. For the first time, our movement succeeded in becoming the centre of a united-front action with broad layers of youth, oppositional Communist intellectuals, centrist elements, etc., in France, thanks to a resolute defence of Yugoslavia. In Great Britain, the Trotskyists succeeded in mobilizing vanguard layers of the labour movement, the trade unions, and the youth in defence of Yugoslavia. The whole campaign reached its high point with the sending of youth brigades to Yugoslavia during the summer of 1950, for which our French comrades mobilized more than a thousand young people. The sending of these brigades was coordinated and directed on the spot by the international leadership itself. A substantial English brigade was present. The Belgian, Italian, Vietnamese, and Dutch sections also took part, and their action for Yugoslavia, while taking on a more propagandistic character, was not lacking in vigour. The Trotskyist organizations of the United States, Canada, Uruguay, Argentina, and Ceylon, though entering this campaign with inevitable delay, took part in it energetically throughout 1950. In several of these countries, as well as in India and Australia, it was thanks to the efforts of the Trotskyists that the Yugoslav affair was brought before working-class public opinion. In the USA, a broad relief action had been launched that was to result in the sending of a large youth brigade, an action that was sabotaged and broken through the fault of the Yugoslav leaders, as was also partly the case with similar possibilities and initiatives in Italy and Germany.
b) By means of contacts with the PCY's representatives abroad, by sending our comrades into Yugoslavia, by the penetration of our literature into Yugoslavia, to teach the Yugoslav Communist masses about the action undertaken in their defence, so as to facilitate their understanding of our criticism of their leaders' policy and to bring into their country the ideas of Trotskyism, unknown and slandered in the past. In a large number of countries (France, Germany, Italy, Great Britain, Austria, Belgium, Holland, Greece, USA, Canada, Argentina, etc.), such contacts were established and developed favourably at first, up to September 1950, before ending in a fairly abrupt break following the rightward turn in the PCY's foreign policy. Three trips by members of the international leadership were made to Yugoslavia. An international delegation, made up of leading French, Vietnamese, and Ceylonese militants, was sent to Belgrade for 1 May 1950. In Austria, some of our comrades collaborated, along our movement's line, on a newspaper published by the Yugoslavs. In Italy, the same kind of collaboration took place on Politica Nuova, inspired by the Yugoslavs. In France, our comrades gave political direction to the youth brigades' organ. Finally, it was in Germany that this action produced the most important effect, through our section's entry into the UAP.
After the abrupt rightward turn in PCY policy following the UN's action in Korea, a clear demarcation of our movement from the PCY became necessary, especially since certain sections had somewhat relaxed their criticism of PCY policy. The delay with which the international carried out this turn gave it a rather abrupt character, which caused hesitations, notably within the French section. Since then, despite the sending of the "IS's Open Letter to the Members of the PCY" of January 1951, the action in defence of Yugoslavia, especially in the face of imperialist blackmail and pressure, has been too limited on the part of many sections. Taking these negative aspects into account, it can nevertheless be said that, taken as a whole, the Yugoslav campaign represents the first successful undertaking of this kind by our movement since 1945.
The outbreak of the Korean war led the international leadership to launch a second international campaign in support of North Korea and revolutionary China, locked in struggle with imperialism. This campaign aimed to expose before the international labour vanguard the lies of the imperialists and their agents within the labour movement, as well as of all those who wished to remain "neutral" in the face of the just war waged by the Korean and Chinese masses. It was to lay bare the whole barbarity of the imperialist intervention, to extol the heroism of the colonial masses' struggle, and to denounce the criminal game played by the Kremlin, which exploited the struggle of the colonial masses to "neutralize" imperialist power while taking care not to give North Korea, and above all China, sufficient aid to enable their swift victory. In general, all our sections conducted a vigorous press campaign on this question, and in several countries — Germany, Switzerland, Holland, Australia — our voices were the only ones to reveal the true scale of the imperialist crimes committed in Korea. But it was above all the Trotskyist organizations of Great Britain and the USA that succeeded, on this occasion, in conducting a broad campaign of agitation and mass mobilization against imperialism. Our American friends, through a remarkable press campaign, through comrade Cannon's three open letters to President Truman, and through their electoral campaigns centred on the withdrawal of American troops from Korea, vigorously defended the revolutionary line amid the anti-communist war hysteria then reaching its peak. In Great Britain, the Trotskyists gave examples of what agitation by a vanguard organization can achieve in the present period. Through their paper, through leaflets, through the publication of a pamphlet, through numerous interventions in Labour Party and trade-union meetings, and above all through the organization of anti-war conferences in London, Birmingham, Manchester, etc., attended by hundreds of delegates officially representing sections of the mass movement, the British Trotskyists placed themselves at the head of the anti-imperialist movement and outstripped the Stalinists in their capacity for action.
In addition to these two campaigns for the defence of Yugoslavia and Korea, the international leadership sought, with partial success, to coordinate two smaller-scale actions: that of the Peoples' Congress against Imperialism, and that for the defence of the Spanish proletariat. As early as the summer of 1948, the IS had drawn our sections' attention to the importance of the Peoples' Congress against Imperialism, which met at that time on the initiative of two centrist leaders, Jean Rous and Fenner Brockway, together with some of the important nationalist organizations of several colonial countries. Three members of the IS attended the first Congress, as did representatives of our Ceylonese, French, Vietnamese, English, and Palestinian sections. In the work of the executive committee that emerged from this congress, a representative of the IS, together with French, English, and Vietnamese comrades, took part regularly, with intermittent participation from a representative of the Ceylonese section. The possibilities for penetrating the nationalist organizations, especially in Africa, seemed considerable for our movement, particularly after the pro-imperialist turn of this congress's leaders at the time of the outbreak of the Korean war. But the fact that we found ourselves confronted only with the partly opportunist leaders of these movements within the congress, and that our sections — especially the French and English ones — failed to organize genuine grassroots work within the colonial nationalist organizations, limited the positive results of this action.
As soon as the Barcelona general strike broke out, the IS called on all our sections to undertake a broad campaign in favour of the Spanish proletariat and against the dealings of the Western governments with the hangman Franco. Unfortunately, in most cases this campaign did not go beyond the limits of a literary action. In the USA, the Trotskyists took part in a few protest demonstrations outside Spanish consulates. In Great Britain, they had resolutions passed in a few trade unions. Only in France and Switzerland did they take the initiative of a public demonstration against Franco — united-front demonstrations, of which the one carried out by our Swiss comrades can be considered a success (about five hundred participants).
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Towards the formation of adequate Trotskyist leaderships in the main countries
At the time the Second World Congress met, the situation of our movement in a number of important European countries was not brilliant: in France, our section was going through a major crisis following the desertion of its petty-bourgeois right wing, which had joined the RDR before disappearing altogether; in Great Britain, the movement was divided into two branches, one of which had just entered the Labour Party while the other was beginning to disintegrate; in Germany, the organization, made up of completely isolated militants, was itself disunited, without organizational structure or a political character of its own, and at odds with the international on important points of our programme, notably on the question of the USSR; in Italy, where the unhappy POC experience had just come to an end, there existed no more than half a dozen Trotskyists who had assimilated our programme; in Spain, the small Trotskyist group had just been thrown into disarray by the actions of Munis and was on the point of disintegrating.
For all these sections, a work of reorganization was begun under the direct responsibility of the IS, partly already before and partly since the Second World Congress — work that meant, first of all, forming a central nucleus of Trotskyist cadres firmly attached to our programme, capable of grasping the particular conditions of each country so as to integrate our organizations into the mass movement. After three years of effort, the balance sheet today looks entirely different, and it is only for Spain that we can say the foundations for building a genuine Trotskyist party have not yet been laid.
In Great Britain, our comrades' work has resulted in the unification of all the Trotskyist forces, those who had not assimilated the new course of Trotskyism having left, and then betrayed, our movement. Through the real ties most of their militants maintain with the mass movement, they are preparing a genuinely leading role for Trotskyism in the coming struggles of the British labour vanguard. This experience must be regarded as the most successful of all those undertaken since the Second World Congress.
In Italy, the majority of the leadership of the PSLI's Socialist Youth had already been won to our ideas before the Second World Congress. It was now a matter of winning this whole current over to our ideas and of selecting within it genuine Trotskyist cadres, capable of building a revolutionary organization that had abandoned every social-democratic method. Through the publication of the review IV Internazionale, through the organization of a cadre school, through the formation of the GCR [Revolutionary Communist Groups], through their reorientation towards the publication of a newspaper, Bandiera Rossa, through the shifting of the organization's centre of gravity towards the north, through the recruitment of militants coming from the CP, and through the holding of three national conferences since the First World Congress, this task is now well on the way to being resolved. The conference of the Italian Trotskyists, held at the end of July 1951 in Rome, showed the serious progress made by our cadres, not only along the road of political maturity but also in organizational seriousness and in understanding the specific paths for building the party.
In Germany, the IS first sought to foster political clarification within the section through the publication of the theoretical review Die Internationale, whose appearance could not be maintained because of financial and technical difficulties. It was above all from the time of our section's entry into the UAP — carried out in the summer of 1950 with the full approval and under the control of the IS — that the new course of Trotskyism began in Germany. This entry enabled our comrades to overcome their isolation and to rid themselves of their past life as a small circle. It also enabled us to win a number of highly valuable cadres, who for the first time in Germany are creating the elements for the constitution of a genuine Trotskyist leadership. But the most important result has been the achievement, through the organization of our tendency within the UAP, of a high degree of political homogeneity and assimilation of the international's political line, which will make it possible to resolve the tasks for the future building of the party, on which a special congress commission will report to you.
In France, the recovery of our movement, which had successively been abandoned by the right-wing and ultra-left tendencies, has been placed under the sign of building a Trotskyist workers' party. On this plane, serious progress has been made. For the first time, our movement today has a number of proletarian cadres rooted in their class, even if these are very young cadres. The successes achieved during the campaign in defence of Yugoslavia, and in the trade-union work of the l'Unité current, testify to the fact that in France too our movement has begun to realize its new course. However, the divergences that have arisen since the beginning of this year between the majority of the PCI's Central Committee and the international leadership show that this organization does not yet possess a mature and homogeneous leadership, capable of authoritatively carrying out the turns necessary to build the party within the specific framework of the French labour movement. It is to be hoped that, through the discussion now under way within the PCI and between the PCI and the international, this leadership will finally be forged.
As a result of the breakdown of our small Spanish group, the GCI, our Spanish work was for a long time limited to an effort at high-level contacts with the POUM. The prestige gained by the international thanks to its Yugoslav action has created, for the first time, a climate more favourable to the penetration of our ideas within this organization. The political differentiation that has begun to take place within the POUM, as a result of the revival of the Spanish masses' resistance movement and of the false position taken by this organization's leadership towards the revolutionary movement of the colonial masses, favours the building of a nucleus of a Bolshevik tendency.
On the positive side of the balance sheet of the international leadership's action within our European sections, mention must be made of the establishment of a contact that has developed favourably with the revolutionary wing of the underground Ukrainian movement, the formation of a revolutionary organization in Sweden, and the winning to our movement of a former founding leader of the Albanian Communist movement.
As for our other European organizations, our Dutch movement, which has solid cadres, has developed in close contact with the international, seeking above all to develop its already numerous roots within the labour movement, and striving, first among adults and then among the youth, to take advantage of the upheavals affecting left social-democratic, centrist, and oppositional Communist circles.
In Greece, our organization, working under very difficult conditions, has sought to regroup its forces after the end of the civil war, and the IS is trying to orient it towards entry into the mass organizations that offer possibilities for legal work.
Our Swiss organization has made an important turn towards mass work and towards building the revolutionary party in its country, in the course of which it has managed greatly to improve its relations with the IS and to work in greater harmony with it.
In Denmark, our small group has consolidated itself and achieved a greater degree of political homogeneity, working in closer contact with the international leadership.
Our organization in Austria, which has cadres some of whom are among the oldest in our European movement, went through, during the same period, a growth crisis largely determined by this section's leaders' search for the specific path for building the revolutionary party in Austria. The splitting of the section into two branches, carried out at the Eighth Plenum, and the experience gained through work within the Socialist Party by both the entrist branch and the majority of the section, will, we hope, before too long, allow for a regrouping of our forces for serious work in building the revolutionary left of the Austrian Socialist Party.
On the negative side of the balance sheet, on the other hand, mention must be made of the disappearance of the small Irish group, whose Shachtmanite representatives at the Second World Congress sank into bourgeois nationalism, while the sole survivor has gone over to the partisans of "state capitalism."
Mention must also be made of the crisis undergone by the Czech section after the days of April 1948, a crisis due in the first place to the Stalinist repression that came down upon it, but also to its own errors of orientation.
Mention must finally be made of the development of the Belgian section, marked by a chronic leadership crisis, with the result that entry into the PSB, desired and approved by the IS, did not, despite the serious possibilities this work opened up, result in a genuine organizational recovery.
Mention must finally be made of the split in our Cypriot section, driven underground by repression.
As for the extra-European sections, the intervention the international leadership was able to carry out there was much more limited and was not always able to accelerate, to the necessary degree, a series of processes of political clarification and organizational regroupment needed for renewed progress by our movement in these parts of the world.
The negative effects of this insufficient intervention by the international leadership have been most limited in the Anglo-Saxon countries, where our Trotskyist organizations generally have a leadership that has already, in past years, found the specific path for building the party.
The American Trotskyist organization, armed with the solidity and experience of its large cadre and with its theses on the American revolution — which assign to the American proletariat the leading place that is rightfully theirs in the world rise of the socialist revolution — has withstood, over the past years, the fierce anti-communist and anti-labour pressure to which all intermediate organizations have succumbed and continue to succumb. Despite temporary difficulties (financial difficulties, the expulsion of militants from certain trade unions in some corporations), they have on the whole maintained their many roots in the mass labour movement and are preparing to exploit the numerous opportunities that will be offered them by the masses' growing resistance to the preparation and outbreak of war. It should be mentioned that the Johnson-Forest tendency left the organization on the eve of this congress.
The integration of our Australian, Canadian, and South African organizations into the labour movement and the Negro nationalist movement of their respective countries represents, for these countries, the correct path for building the revolutionary leadership.
In Latin America, the IS strove, from the very aftermath of the Second World Congress, to promote the establishment of a Latin American sub-bureau and the preparation of a Latin American conference. These initiatives at first failed, for reasons that will be given to you during the discussion of the Latin American question before this congress. However, with the IS's help, the development of our Latin American sections has allowed for an important regroupment of the sections since last year. Special tribute must be paid to the effort made by the Argentine comrades of the GCI to ensure a Spanish-language edition of the review Fourth International, as well as to the comrades of most of the sections for setting up a bureau to aid the persecuted Bolivian comrades. The last congress of the Bolivian section also marked an important political advance. The lack of real ties with the international has proved to be one of the main factors provoking the present crisis being undergone by our sections in Chile and Brazil.
Mention must be made of the numerous efforts undertaken, between the Second and Third World Congresses, on the initiative of both the IS and the SWP, to improve our relations with comrade Natalia. These efforts were unfortunately not crowned with success, and despite four successive visits, together with lengthy discussions with leading cadres of our organization, comrade Natalia was led, by the logic of her revisionist positions on the question of the USSR, to a regrettable political break with the international.
It is in the Far East that the absence of direct IS intervention in the life of our sections has had the most regrettable effects. It must be said that at no time has the international had more than fleeting contact with the leadership of our Chinese, Indian, Ceylonese, and Vietnamese sections, not to mention the small Trotskyist group in Japan, with which only three or four letters have been exchanged over the past two years. It is only since the last LSSP congress, which itself noted the loosening of relations with the international centre, that contacts with one of our most important sections have become somewhat more regular. Only the establishment of a Far Eastern sub-bureau could allow for more active intervention in the life of these sections. Unfortunately, numerous financial, technical, and human difficulties have up to now hindered the setting-up of this sub-bureau.
This does not mean that the development of our movement in the Far East has been negative since the Second World Congress. On the credit side of the balance sheet, mention must be made of the formation of the first Trotskyist group in Japan, and the establishment of a first contact — both epistolary and through the visits of comrade X and Colvin — with the revolutionary movement in Ceylon, which is preparing a great expansion for our movement in that country. It nonetheless remains true that the negative side of the balance sheet is heavy. It consists in the chronic disorganization in which our movement in Vietnam finds itself, disorganization temporarily overcome by the arrival of our Chinese leaders in that country, but since then further aggravated by the arrest of the principal Trotskyist leaders — disorganization that can only be eliminated by sending the principal cadres of the Vietnamese group in France, which has significant experience of struggle at the head of the masses.
A serious crisis, both political and organizational, has been created within our Chinese section since Mao Zedong's victory. This crisis, which has left surviving Trotskyist nuclei in several parts of the country as well as a serious organization in Hong Kong, should be able to be overcome quickly through an assimilation of the main lessons of recent events.
The entry of our Indian section into the PS[P], a step approved politically by the IS but about whose organizational modalities the IS had strong misgivings from the outset, has doubtless resulted in disorganization within our movement, despite the positive results achieved in several areas by this entrist work. It can be said without exaggeration that the international leadership's principal responsibility, in the period following the Third World Congress, consists in vigorously rectifying the situation in India, where our movement still has a chance of becoming the revolutionary leadership of the masses, but where this chance may be lost in the years ahead to the benefit of the Stalinists.
Let us mention, finally, the poor situation of our sections in Egypt and Israel, victims of repression and isolation.
In Pakistan, our young organization has wrested from the Stalinists the leadership of a legal youth organization and is making inroads into the trade unions.
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The main tasks of the leadership emerging from the Third World Congress
If the retrospective part of this report has been placed under the sign of our international's positive achievements, it is logical that, in establishing the tasks of the leadership issuing from the world congress, we should start first of all from the serious gaps that remain in our work, and that we should fix our essential tasks in relation to these gaps. It is clear that if we ourselves wish seriously to carry out what we have affirmed throughout this congress's political discussions, it will be a matter of life or death for our movement to know how to integrate into the real mass movement of the world's main countries, which will be progressively drawn into the revolutionary upsurge. Stimulating this integration on an international scale, helping our national sections carry it out under the specific conditions of the labour movement in their country, accelerating the transformation of our organizations, at least in some countries, into the genuine revolutionary leadership of the masses — these are the tasks that follow from our conception of the present world situation and its tendencies of development. This task can be summed up in a single watchword: to deepen, intensify, and generalize throughout the whole world the new course of Trotskyism.
As for the IEC, no significant change in its composition or in its functioning can realistically be envisaged for the period ahead. It is possible that international events will make even more difficult, if not for a time impossible, the twice-yearly meeting of the plenum bringing together representatives of our movement from several continents. All the more necessary, then, will it be to strengthen the day-to-day international centre. An IS made up of four members and concentrated in a single European or extra-European country will be incapable, in the months and years ahead, of carrying out the heavy tasks mentioned in the political resolution voted by this congress. A twofold change is required here: on the one hand, the number of IS members must be enlarged so as to allow for the permanent participation of representatives of the United States and of the Far Eastern sections, at the expense of these sections, without which the IS does not truly represent the accumulated experience of our whole world movement and cannot adequately work out a strategic line for all our sections. On the other hand, this numerical strengthening is necessary so that the IS can delegate its representatives to Latin America and the Far East for longer periods, without which no real intervention with these sections is possible. A stronger centralization of our leading cadres and a greater decentralization of our action thus mutually determine one another and represent the only basis on which the IS can extend its action. As already stated, this requires certain sections to sacrifice leaders sent to the centre, as well as an increased financial effort. The IS's regular monthly budget must be increased so as to carry out these tasks.
The countries in which our movement currently faces tasks analogous to those it has successfully resolved in Great Britain since the Second World Congress are, first and foremost, India, Argentina, and Germany. For a set of objective reasons arising from the particular character of the labour movement in these countries, our movement has, in these countries, a real chance of becoming, in the years ahead, the effective revolutionary leadership of the proletarian vanguard. Given the key position occupied by these countries in Asia, Latin America, and Western Europe, these possibilities impose on the international leadership a particular responsibility to help the sections build an adequate national leadership and find the path proper to building the revolutionary party. For this reason, the sending of IS representatives to these countries for a lengthy period must be envisaged. Particular attention must be drawn to the very great responsibility resting on the Ceylonese section in developing the Indian work. Unfortunately, certain possibilities that existed in Indonesia have already been lost owing to the lateness of our intervention. Under no circumstances should such a situation be repeated in India.
In the face of the approaching revolutionary mass movement in Spain, the IS will also have the task of helping and stimulating, more than in the past, the formation of a solid Spanish Trotskyist nucleus. For Italy, France, and Great Britain, the IS will follow closely, as in the past, these sections' efforts to integrate into the mass movement of their country. The IS must also strive to promote the penetration of our ideas into North Africa and Black Africa, and to rebuild our organizations in the Middle East.
The period of revolutionary upheavals that lies before us demands, even more than in the past, the theoretical training of our cadres at a very high level. The regular publication of our review Fourth International, the essential weapon of political orientation for the entire world movement, is an indispensable necessity to this end. Its Spanish-language edition must be maintained and amplified by the publication of a Latin American theoretical review. The development of the German theoretical review, the publication of a theoretical review in Great Britain and the Far East, as well as the resumption of an Italian theoretical review — even if only mimeographed — will be indispensable for continuing the training of our leading cadres.
During the period between the Second and Third World Congresses, the IS had considered the possibility of publishing a series of educational pamphlets giving broad popularization of the essential positions of our programme. Lack of time and money prevented us from carrying out this project. It will nonetheless be appropriate, during the period ahead, to achieve a set of minimum objectives for the training of our militants:
a) To draft a basic course for the militant schools of our German, Italian, Latin American, etc. sections, a task already partly accomplished at this congress.
b) To publish, in the German language, at least a few key works of our movement hitherto unknown to the broad German public.
c) To undertake the publication of Trotskyist works in Spanish in Latin America, works that could also serve in the training of our Spanish militants.
d) To systematize the publication of Trotskyist pamphlets in the English language in Ceylon, especially for the use of our Far Eastern sections.
Thus takes shape a task of the international leadership that increasingly assumes the character of the political and organizational leadership of a single world party. The progress made along the road of understanding and practically realizing this conception of the world party by our most important sections will at the same time mark the road of their own transformation into the effective leadership of the labour vanguard of their country. We can promise no one quick or easy victories, and long gone is the time when one joined our movement in the hope of such a rapid victory. It is precisely by combining our revolutionary optimism, based on our political perspectives, with a more realistic assessment of the pace required for building a revolutionary party, that we shall form Trotskyist leaderships that are patient, tenacious, stable, and at the same time capable of seizing every opportunity offered for their own growth. This congress has shown that our movement already possesses homogeneous cadres in the world's main countries. Therein lies the guarantee of our future victory.
Reply of the rapporteur
The discussion faithfully reflected the extent to which all our sections, including the youngest, that of Sweden, are striving to grasp the particular features of the labour movement and the mass movement in their country. I shall therefore confine myself to dealing with a few particular problems raised in the course of the discussion.
The expansion of our movement into colonial countries where we do not yet have sections, but where a situation already exists that is favourable to the formation of Trotskyist nuclei (Indonesia, Burma, Malaya, Iran, Black Africa, etc.), must be carried out by coordinating the following activities:
a) Contacts with students and émigrés in the metropolitan countries, and the organization of political work and study circles among them by the metropolitan sections.
b) The organization, by the IS or the sub-bureaus, of information work, following the political life of these countries, taking advantage of upheavals in the labour movement (the recent split in the Burmese Socialist Party; the development of an opposition tendency within the Tudeh Party in Iran, etc.) and sending representatives on the spot wherever possible. Failing this, excellent opportunities may be missed.
In our conception of educational work, we should also draw inspiration, to a greater extent than in the past, from the need to put down roots in the mass movement. This in no way means abandoning traditional educational work, but, on the one hand, it must be given a less formalistic character, and, on the other, we must strive to add, in each country, to the cadre courses a special chapter on the history of the labour movement of that country and the history of our own movement. The specific efforts made in this direction by the American, English, and French Trotskyist organizations deserve to be taken up everywhere.
The request of the Danish Trotskyist group to be recognized as a section of the international will be examined at the next IEC plenum, once we have studied more precisely the situation of the movement in that country. It is furthermore necessary to follow the advice of the Swedish delegate and to strive to coordinate our Scandinavian work, especially so as to penetrate into Finland, where the Communist movement and the Stalinist party are much stronger than in the other Scandinavian countries.
The situation in Germany must be assessed realistically, starting from the actual state of our own forces and the objective possibilities that really exist in that country. We entered the UAP without any illusions about the political character of the Titoist elements, but understanding that, through this work, we could lay the foundation for the building of our movement. This has been entirely borne out. An ultimatistic attitude on our part towards this or that individual would have resulted in the UAP breaking apart before it had even been constituted, and would have harmed us more than the Titoists. It was in our interest to allow a political discussion to develop, to politicize the debates, and not to concentrate our fire on the past of this or that individual.
In conclusion, it is necessary to insist once again on the need to strengthen the movement's international centre. Our movement is a movement of a quite particular type in the history of labour organizations. The First International was based on the British trade unions; the Second on the apparatus of the social-democratic mass organizations; the Third on the apparatus of the Russian workers' state. Our international, for many long years, was based only on the community of ideas of its militants, without any apparatus or material base whatsoever. We are proud of the political homogeneity we have achieved. But at the same time, as Bolsheviks, we understand that, beyond a certain stage of development, ideas can develop effectively only if they are embodied in a serious organization, only if they possess a material base of their own. It is by building a stronger international centre, one that will allow the ideas emerging from this world congress to be better disseminated, that we can best contribute to the triumph of these ideas.
Report adopted unanimously
Internal Bulletin of the IS, No. 3, September 1951.