The Third World Congress of the Fourth International, held in Switzerland in August-September 1951, on the surface appeared to herald a new era of close international collaboration between the various sections. The major resolutions were passed virtually unanimously. The dispute over the class character of the East European regimes was resolved by an agreement among all the major sections and leading figures that these countries were indeed workers' states and not capitalist regimes on the "road to structural assimilation with the Soviet Union." The editorial on the congress in the November-December 1951 issue of Fourth International magazine, the predecessor of the International Socialist Review, hailed the gathering as "A Milestone in Internationalism."
Yet, two years later, before the next world congress, there would be a split in the International. It would last ten years. It would be a bitter fight. And the dispute would involve many of the fundamental programmatic and organizational principles of the world Trotskyist movement. It would be a dispute over the character of Stalinism. Over what real perspective there was for building an international party or sections of an international party in particular countries. Whether there really was a possibility for socialist revolution in our time. And the nature of democratic centralism inside an international Marxist party.
For a number of reasons that I will come to, the split took place without an international discussion and almost to the moment of the split the appearance of unanimity and agreement tended to prevail.
[p. 10]
What we were grappling with was the whole new situation which we had given a partial explanation of in the agreement on Eastern Europe. The Soviet bureaucracy had succeeded, by military bureaucratic means, in overturning capitalism in a whole series of East European countries. In the Chinese and Yugoslav revolutions this went a step further. Here the anticapitalist revolutions were not simple byproducts of the military defense of the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany. Stalinist parties had actually led armed struggles, had taken power. This raised some very serious questions as to the nature of Stalinism. Does it have a revolutionary perspective? Can it under the pressure of imperialism, in an act of self-defense, play a revolutionary role that we would not have granted to it in the 1930s after the Spanish Civil War?
In the areas where we were working, especially in Western Europe, the grip of the Stalinist parties on the working-class movement remained unshaken. They had near total control of the trade-union movement in Italy and France. It would be very difficult for us to build mass parties in these countries, to break the Stalinist domination of the mass movement. In some countries we had suffered heavy casualties under the Nazi occupation, in some instances with the collusion of the Stalinists. We had no mass parties. We had not taken state power anywhere.
At the same time, the Cold War was beginning. American imperialism was launching a diplomatic offensive against the Soviet bloc. It was calling for the "roll back" and the "containment" of the workers' states. There was the possible threat of a third world war, directed first against China, and then by obvious implication, against the Soviet Union itself. We had to answer the question: was another war really about to break out, and if so, what would be the perspective for the Fourth International in that kind of a struggle between international imperialism and the Soviet bloc?
The European leaders of the International, and particularly Michel Pablo, the secretary of the International, began to develop their own thesis on the world conjuncture. This took place in several stages. There were differences of opinion among the European leaders, and it was not clear in the initial phase of the discussion what final conclusions Pablo would draw.
The first distinctive theory he put forward appeared in a document entitled "On the Class Nature of Yugoslavia" written in September 1949 (International Information Bulletin, December 1949). The central point of the article, the one that drew most attention at the time, was that here Pablo became the first of the European leaders to advance the same position taken by Joseph Hansen, who then represented a minority viewpoint within the SWP, that Yugoslavia was already a workers' state. Thus it appeared that the thrust of Pablo's position was in the same direction that the SWP was going.
But in passing, in a small section of the document, he advanced a special theory of his own on the inevitability of bureaucratic deformations in all revolutions that take place prior to the overturn of capitalism in the majority of the advanced industrial countries.
Pablo expected that there would be socialist revolutions in isolated countries, where power would pass into the hands of working-class parties. "But," he wrote, "this power will inevitably and rapidly become bureaucratized, and lead to a complete political expropriation of the proletariat if the revolution remains isolated in a country encircled by imperialism. Thus, in the historic period of the transition from capitalism to socialism we shall witness the rise not of normal workers' states, but of more or less degenerated workers' states, that is, states with strong bureaucratic deformations which can reach the point of complete political expropriation of the proletariat."
Pablo also made a prognosis on how long it would take before we could expect to see the development of healthy revolutions led by revolutionary Marxist parties that would result in the creation of workers' democracy:
"... in the whole historic period of the transition from capitalism to socialism, a period which can extend for centuries, we shall encounter a much more tortuous and complicated development of the revolution than our teach-ers foresaw—and workers' states that are not normal but necessarily quite deformed."
It could be argued that Pablo was merely generalizing the Yugoslav and Chinese experience. That is what happened in those two countries, where isolated revolutions were led by Stalinist parties and from the very beginning the workers' states that emerged were deformed; there were no institutions of workers' democracy. But in making a universal generalization of these experiences Pablo implied two conceptions that ran counter to the basic analysis of Stalinism made by Trotsky. First is the idea that Stalinism is historically inevitable. That the material objective conditions of backwardness in any underdeveloped country automatically produce Stalinism or its equivalent no matter what the quality of the leadership of the revolutionary party, no matter what their program, no matter what kind of institutions are created in the course of the revolution. Trotsky had explained the objective causes of the rise of Stalinism from the poverty and isolation of the first workers' state, which provided a base for the emergence of a privileged bureaucracy. But he never said that such a development was inevitable; only that there were very strong pressures for the creation of such a privileged layer of society, and a drive for such a privileged layer to take over the reins of government.
There is no necessary reason why a healthy, Marxist revolutionary leadership could not stave off that process of bureaucratization for an indefinite period, if the general course of the world revolution were on the upswing; if the revolution could be extended to other countries; if the morale of the masses could be held intact. Under favorable conditions there was no reason why an isolated workers' state should be unable to evade the kind of degeneration that took place in the Soviet Union, even for a prolonged historical period of time.
Second, in projecting a lifespan of "centuries" for the existing Stalinist regimes, and for new ones that had not yet even come into existence, Pablo was accepting implicitly that there would be no political revolution against Stalinism until capitalism had been overthrown everywhere. The Soviet and Chinese workers would not challenge those bureaucratic regimes as long as the threat of imperialism remained in the world. The West European revolution and even the American revolution would have to take place before there was any hope of a political revolution in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
[p. 11]
That obviously raised a third question. If the political revolution is not going to take place until capitalism has been overthrown everywhere; if all the new regimes along the road to the overthrow of world capitalism are going to be deformed, Stalinist-type regimes, who then is going to make the revolution against imperialism and capitalism? Isn't it going to have to be the Stalinist parties? For whatever reason, because they have to defend themselves against reactionary attacks, because there is a clash between imperialism and the Soviet bloc, out of reflex self-defense despite their program and their efforts to try to find class peace, the Stalinist parties would become, even against their will, the agency of the spread of world revolution.
The implications of this prognosis are extraordinarily pessimistic. They put in question the function and the necessity of an independent revolutionary party for a whole historical period. What would be the function of the Fourth International? Wouldn't it be merely to preserve the historical program of revolutionary socialism and workers' democracy and someday, after a century or so has elapsed, to lead the political revolution against Stalinism, which by then would have consolidated a world-wide social system? There wouldn't be very much it could do in the interim except to preserve some Marxist theoreticians and isolated propaganda circles. Suggested in this is a very dangerous adaptation to the claims of Stalinism to represent the most that can be achieved by the working class in our time.
Of course, all these implications were not so clear in 1949. Pablo was trying to draw a pragmatic estimate of what was going to happen. He had not yet drawn any theoretical conclusions on the nature of Stalinism, nor had he projected a program of action for the Fourth International flowing from the ideas he was developing. These things would come later.
The leadership of the SWP disagreed with Pablo's formulations, which had not yet appeared in the formal documents of the International, but only in passing in signed articles by Pablo. At this point the prime concern of the party was the construction of a new international leadership, to rebuild the European sections which had been largely destroyed during the war. The discussion over embryonic differences was held within the leading bodies of the party and of the International. There was an attempt made to persuade Pablo to withdraw his formulations, and at least not to try to impose them on the world movement by incorporating them in the resolutions of the International.
With the opening of the Korean War in 1950, which gave weight to the thesis that American imperialism was preparing an imminent attack on China and the Soviet Union, Pablo began to reveal that these formulations had not been accidental. They were part of a developing theory on the nature of Stalinism and the role of the Fourth International. He began to spell out a coherent world view. This was most fully developed in a document entitled "Where Are We Going?" written in January 1951, some eight months before the Third World Congress. I want to summarize Pablo's thesis in some detail.
1. World War II and the colonial revolution, particularly in China, have shattered the prewar equilibrium of world capitalism. Therefore imperialism had no choice but to prepare a new world war to regain the territories it lost. This was no longer a speculative question or a hypothetical assumption. There was no point in debating whether or not there would be such a war but only how soon it would take place.
2. Imperialism was not yet ready for war. It hadn't completed its rearmament program. It hadn't yet whipped the American working class into line, which was the function of the McCarthyite witch-hunt. But it would only take a few years, two or three years at the most, before the war preparations were complete. Therefore there was not much time to prepare to meet the changed situation that the outbreak of war would create.
3. The failure of American imperialism to win an immediate victory in Korea showed that the world balance of forces had turned to the disadvantage of imperialism. This meant that in a global test of strength, imperialism was likely to emerge the loser.
4. When the war broke out it would inevitably become "an international civil war, especially in Europe and Asia. These continents would rapidly pass over under the control of the Soviet bureaucracy, of the Communist Parties, or of the revolutionary masses." (International Information Bulletin, March 1951, emphasis in original.)
5. Here Pablo brings in one of the catch phrases of the dispute that was to take place. He wrote: "War under these conditions, with the existing relationship of forces on the international arena, would essentially be Revolution." (Emphasis in original.) Pablo here coined the term "war-revolution." The next phase of the world revolution would be provoked by a counterrevolutionary war by American imperialism; and war and revolution "are approaching each other more closely and becoming so interlinked as to be almost indistinguishable." (Emphasis in original.)
6. Under the impact of war, the mass of the European and Asian workers would remain loyal to the organizations they already knew, that is, the Stalinist parties. Any possibility of breaking that tie and establishing a new mass workers' party would be undercut by the objectively revolutionary role played by the Stalinists in defending the Soviet Union from imperialist attack. This would guarantee that the workers would not break from the Stalinists at least for the duration of the war.
The thesis is at least consistent. The revolution will not be extended by the internal class struggle, the particular dynamics of radicalization in each country, and the fight for Marxist hegemony in the workers' movement to provide a revolutionary leadership. Instead revolution will be forced into existence by an external factor that will instantly radicalize workers who are not now in the process of radicalization. The victory of this revolution depended on a second external factor: Pablo's expectation that the Soviet bureaucracy, despite its peaceful coexistence policies, would have no choice but to seek to overthrow capitalism in Europe.
What was at issue here was a question of estimate of what was going to happen. If the United States declared war; if the Soviet bureaucracy reacted as it had in Eastern Europe; and if the masses did not break from the Communist parties in the process; and if all three of these variables fell into place in just that way, then there was reason to believe that this particular schema would in fact be realized. There could be no theoretical objection to it. It was a possibility.
[p. 12]
That was not the level on which disagreements developed with Pablo. We never said that this was a theoretical revision of Trotskyism, or that his projection was totally impossible. What we argued was that this schema was not the most likely one. Nor was it one on which the International should stake its whole political future. The very fact that the United States had been stalemated in Korea was a sign that American imperialism appeared to be ready to back off from the prospect of launching an imminent world war. The Kremlin was making every effort possible to try to find a modus vivendi with Washington.
We began to develop our differences with Pablo in preparation for the Third World Congress of August-September 1951. A discussion of Pablo's draft Theses for the congress began in the SWP Political Committee in February 1951 and was carried on until the end of March. This discussion was summarized in a Political Committee memorandum dated June 5, 1951, entitled "Contribution to the Discussion on International Perspectives." Following are some of the essential criticisms made of the world congress draft resolution:
"The direct counter-revolutionary role which Moscow has played and continues to play will not fade into the background in the event of war. On the contrary, it will come to the fore whenever and wherever independent mass movements threaten to pass beyond the control of the Kremlin or the parties it dominates. Regardless of the effects upon the defense of the Soviet Union, the Stalinist bureaucracy will not countenance independent mass movements, and, least of all, oppositional ones. If the Kremlin feels that such independent movements jeopardize its interests it will not hesitate to repress them.
"Unfolding revolutionary movements may in certain circumstances sweep the agents of the Kremlin along and they will seek to head them in order to control them. It is necessary to warn that the more such movements tend to sweep over their heads, the more openly will the Stalinist bureaucracy tend to collide with them and seek to crush them.
"While the greatly aggravated and steadily worsening international situation considerably reduces the chances for a deal between the Kremlin and the imperialists, the possibility of such a deal still remains. ... Such moves as Togliatti's bid to the Italian bourgeoisie demonstrate that the Kremlin has far from lost hope for a deal. ...
"The analysis of how the Stalinist parties may conduct themselves during wartime in capitalist countries tends to be one-sided in the theses. It is stated that in certain circumstances such parties may be compelled to outline a revolutionary orientation. This is not excluded. But the contrary is likewise not excluded. In certain circumstances the Stalinists could and would even in the midst of war work to strangle revolutions. This variant ought to be emphasized no less than the other. ...
"In harmony with what has been said it is further necessary to emphasize that the tactical orientation does not imply any conciliation with Stalinism. ...
"While the immense revolutionary upheavals which the outbreak of global war would provoke in the imperialist sectors is correctly emphasized, it should be pointed out that such a war would likewise aggravate the latent conflicts and arouse independent mass movements against the Kremlin's dictatorship in the areas it dominates. ...
"The perspective of 'deformed workers' states' as the line of historical development for an indefinite period ahead should not be recognized in the theses implicitly or explicitly. ...
"The central political feature of the world situation today is the crisis of the proletarian leadership. It is imperative to reaffirm this proposition of our Foundation Theses. Everything hinges on the resolution of this historic task. The objective conditions for its fulfillment are now ripe but the task will not be resolved automatically or mechanically or independently of our intervention and policies."
Here in embryo are the SWP's positions on all the major issues of the fight with Pablo, although it was not at all clear at the time how hardened the differences expressed by Pablo were or what practical conclusions they would lead to. In general this discussion was pursued at the leadership level. In the summer of 1953, however, Joseph Hansen wrote a series of articles for The Militant explaining why the war plans of America's rulers had been set back and deferred to the indefinite future. Pablo objected. He argued that the democratic-centralist character of the International prohibited publication of articles in the press of sections or sympathizing groups contrary to the views of the International Secretariat, even on questions of con-junctural estimate which are not, properly speaking, "line" questions. In order not to exacerbate the internal situation in the world Trotskyist movement, the series in The Militant was halted.
At this point I want to say something about Pablo's political method. In some ways his methodology is more important than his particular conclusions, or his attitude toward Stalinism. At the root of Pablo's expectations, expressed in his schema for the political future, there are several assumptions that run counter to traditional Marxist method.
1. There is an overestimation of the degree to which objective conditions alone can substitute for a conscious political leadership and for a revolutionary party. Pablo saw conditions as so ripe for revolution that there was no way in which any of the multiplicity of forces in motion could deviate from the particular course of development that he foresaw. The United States would have to launch a war. The Stalinist parties would be forced against their program to carry out objectively revolutionary actions. In effect this downgraded the importance of a revolution ary leadership and of the revolutionary party. The revolu tion is to be made by a fatalistic objective process that moves the revolution forward despite the programs and intentions of all its participants.
We have always recognized that there are periodic spontaneous revolutionary outbreaks by the working class. We know that the workers, even without leadership, can make a bid for power. But without a revolutionary leadership they cannot consolidate that power and establish a workers' state. That was not where our differences with Pablo lay. We did not disagree that objective conditions can provoke revolutionary situations. Nor did we deny that Stalinist or other petty-bourgeois parties could, under exceptional circumstances, come to power in a revolutionary upsurge.
Pablo went further than this and assumed that objective conditions could force hardened organizations like the Stalinist parties to act against their own program and special interests; and that this would happen not only under exceptional circumstances as in China and Yugoslavia, but as a general rule.
[p. 13]
2. The other side of the coin is an underestimation of the actual role played by the revolutionary party. If, as Pablo assumed, 99 percent of the conditions for a successful revolution were provided by the unconscious machine of objective circumstances, then what role is left for the conscious revolutionary leadership? Obviously it is very small; to apply pressure at strategic points. It does not require a mass organization that directly leads the masses in struggle. Pablo was to propose that the way this was to be done was to enter the Communist parties. They were going to play an objectively revolutionary role even if no Trotskyists were on the scene. All that was required was that there be a few Trotsky-ist cadres in each of the Communist parties to give them a push to the left.
Pablo never said that the CP leaders would be transformed into Leninists. But he did argue they they could fulfill their revolutionary function if they went as far as becoming centrists and that the Fourth International should devote its major energies to the process of their conversion. The Cochranites, the American followers of Pablo, put forward this thesis more crudely than Pablo did. They advanced the slogan that Stalinism "could no longer betray."
In January of 1951, when Pablo wrote "Where Are We Going?", he had not yet worked out the practical consequences of his theory. He had not yet proposed a course of action to the International. The leadership of the SWP agreed up to a point that his view of the impending apocalypse was a possible variant in the world situation. It did not agree that it was a certainty. The*, SWP Political Committee submitted a series of critical amendments to the documents that were adopted by the Third World Congress in 1951. It is necessary to describe the situation inside of the SWP and in the United States in order to explain what happened to some of of those amendments.
A subterranean factional line-up was taking place within the Socialist Workers Party that included a grouping that was evolving in the same direction as Pablo. A significant layer of the young party leadership was beginning to react to the pressure on the party resulting from the McCarthyite witch-hunt and the isolation of the party from the mass movement. We were being witch-hunted out of the unions. Members were being fired from their jobs for their Trotskyist affiliations. The circulation of the Militant dropped sharply. The finances of the party were in decline. The party began to lose membership. It was a period of retrenchment. And, of course, there was deep disappointment on the part of people who had been leading big struggles in the postwar strike wave of 1945-46. A number of people in the party began to give up the perspective that it was possible to build a revolutionary party in the United States. They began to call, first privately and later openly, for abandoning the structure of a party, for cutting back and riding out the period of reaction by becoming a simple propaganda organization, not running candidates, not participating in election campaigns, not calling ourselves a party, publishing a magazine but not a newspaper. In effect they proposed to become a Marxist discussion circle.
There were two wings in this grouping. They were moving in opposite directions, but they had agreement on this common estimate of the poor prospects for the SWP. There was a group in the Detroit area who were well-known union militants. Some held union posts, mainly in the United Auto Workers. They were led by Bert Cochran, who had risen to prominence in the early struggles of the UAW. As their ability to maneuver and operate inside of the unions became more and more constricted they began to make their peace with the Reuther bureaucracy in the UAW. The Reutherites were liberals, civil libertarians. The Cochran grouping began to evolve the theory that the Reutherites were more radical than the ranks of the workers, who were backward, racist, and indifferent to the class struggle. They began to look for a niche where they wouldn't be singled out in the witchhunt. It was embarrassing for them to run as candidates of the SWP. It called attention to their radical ties. It made it more difficult for Reuther to accept them in the apparatus. If they could just limit their public radical activity to contributing an occasional article to a socialist magazine it wouldn't create such difficulties for them. They were not interested in Stalinism. Stalinism was anathema to anybody involved in the union movement. They had no interests in finding a way to improve their relations with the American CP.
The other wing, which was led by George Clarke in New York, were people who sympathized with Pablo. It was a group of organizers, intellectuals, and writers. They began to orient strongly toward the Communist Party and circles close to the CP such as the National Guardian. George Clarke was then the editor of the Fourth International magazine and he was the party's representative in Europe. As the witch-hunt mounted still further, the government began denying passports to radicals. It became more and more difficult for people to travel to Europe, and finally Clarke was one of the very few lead-ers of the SWP who had still not been banned from traveling abroad. The party was dependent on his reports to interpret what was meant in practice by this or tha,t formulation included in documents and articles published in Europe.
Clarke reported very favorably on the progress being made by the European sections, on the ferment which was supposed to be taking place in the ranks of the Stalinist and Social Democratic parties, and on the gains our European comrades were making in work around these parties.
Clarke was the SWP's fraternal delegate to the Third World Congress in 1951. He was in Europe at the time the Political Committee was considering the resolutions. He passed a first set of amendments on to the authors of the main resolution. He decided against submitting a second set of amendments. He explained afterward that the SWP's amendments were so out of keeping with the new world reality that it would have been embarrassing to submit them and so he "burned" them.
It was extremely difficult under these circumstances to determine how many, how serious, and how hardened the emerging differences really were.
The key issue over which the split was to occur was the movement's practical orientation toward the Stalinist and Social Democratic parties. Pablo in his report to the Third World Congress adopted a cautious formulation on this. He proposed a combination of independent work and entry work aimed at reaching workers in Social Democratic and reformist trade unions, and "activity directed toward [the Stalinist] parties, organizations and the masses they influence, including work within these parties."
[p. 14]
There could be no objection in principle to doing work inside any mass organization, including inside a mass Stalinist party. Trotskyists work in labor parties, in Stalinist-controlled unions, and in mass reformist organizations of all kinds.
This cautious orientation was modified at the Tenth Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Fourth International in February 1952. Here for the first time the tactic of "deep" entry into the Stalinist parties was adopted or, as it was called by Pablo, entryism *sui generis-of a unique kind. What was unique about it was that unlike entry work done in the past in labor parties or Social Democratic parties, which were usually sufficiently loose so that we could maintain our own press, the Stalinist parties were so tightly disciplined and bureaucratically controlled that if all our members engaged in entryism we would have no way to maintain a Trotskyist newspaper. Hence, sui generis, a few comrades would remain outside to publish a Trotskyist newspaper or magazine directed at the members of the Communist party we were working with.
The motivation for this entry flowed from the whole thesis that Pablo had been developing up to this point. The war was imminent; the Stalinist parties were going to lead a revolution; and the Fourth International had to get rooted in the Stalinist parties in order to be able to influence the left currents that would automatically begin to arise in their ranks when this whole situation broke.
You can get a feel for the kind of frantic atmosphere that pervaded the International Secretariat from Pablo's report to the February 1952 plenum of the IEC. He said:
"The situation is prerevolutionary all over in various degrees and evolving toward the revolution in a relatively brief time. And this process from now on is in general irreversible."* ("The Building of the Revolutionary Party," excerpts from Michel Pablo's report to the Tenth Plenum of the Executive Committee of the FI, February 1952, International Information Bulletin, June 1952. Emphasis in original.)
He has staked almost everything on this one possible line of development. He proposed that we enter the Stalinist and Social Democratic parties; bury our entire membership there; and do this for an indefinite period. "We are entering them in order to remain there for a long time banking on the great possibility which exists of seeing these parties, placed under new conditions, develop centrist tendencies which will lead a whole stage of the radicalization of the masses and of the objectively revolutionary processes in their respective countries." (Ibid., emphasis in original.)
Presumably if these parties were on the road to taking power we would stay in them afterward in order to promote a left wing. It was from within the Stalinist parties, then, that the cadres would come for the anticapitalist revolution, and for the political revolution against Stalinism as well.
It was difficult to evaluate the entry maneuver from a distance. It was a tactical question and not a matter of principle. We had carried out entry work before. In the 1930s the American Trotskyists entered the Socialist Party. We spent more than a year in the SP and came out doubled in size. It was a very fruitful experience. In Europe at the same time a similar entry was carried out in the Socialist Party of France, and in other countries as well. There were precedents for this kind of tactic.
There were certain obvious risks in such a maneuver. A faction inside an opponent organization is subjected to great pressures. If the faction has a clear goal, trying to reach a specific group moving in their direction; if this goal is accomplished within a reasonably short time, and the entry is terminated; then the entry maneuver can be considered a success. If on the contrary entry is made into an opponent organization with unreasonable expectations as to how revolutionary its leaders are; if your own cadres are not solid; if there is a political adaptation to the program of the hostile organization; then the results can be the absorption of your members into the group you have entered.
There was a serious problem in what Pablo had proposed. The Fourth International had never before considered carrying out entry work for an indefinite period in a hostile organization, particularly in such tightly controlled organizations as the Communist parties. The only experiences the Trotskyist movement had had with the entry tactic prior to Pablo's proposal of "deep" entry were of relatively short duration. Pablo's proposal was qualitatively different. It was also different from long-term fraction work which we were familiar with in trade unions and in the Social Democratic British Labour Party. (or in Canada today, in relation to the Social Democratic New Democratic Party). The dangers of the assimilation of cadres in a hostile organization are substantially minimized in fraction work where the Trotskyists retain their independent organizational existence.
In 1952 there was no evidence that any significant current in the Stalinist or Social Democratic parties was moving toward our program. There was no radicalization taking place; just the contrary. It was a period of reaction. Pablo's whole entry perspective was predicated on the expectation that World War III, which hadn't happened yet, was going to radicalize the ranks of the Stalinist movement, and then would come the recruitment and the setting of specific goals.
Even under unfavorable circumstances an entry might produce some gains if the cadres proved to be solid enough. Moreover, no one—including Pablo—visualized even a long-term entry as lasting more than several years. The time limit was set by the supposedly onrushing new war.
[p. 15]
While watching the evolution of this tactical turn in Europe in the spring and summer of 1952, the party got a glimpse of another side of Pablo's method: his conception of democratic centralism and the application of international discipline. This took place around a dispute in the French section, the largest and most important section in Europe. The majority of the ranks and of the leadership of the French party, the PCI (Internationalist Communist Party), rejected the turn toward deep entry in the Communist Party. They denounced it as a capitulation to Stalinism. Their principal leaders were Bleibtreu, Pierro Lambert, and Michel Lequenne. They argued that the tactic had been decided by a plenum of the International Executive Committee and not by a world congress and therefore was being imposed without any discussion in the ranks of the world movement. Because there had been no discussion around documents defending and opposing entryism they urged that the French party not be compelled to carry out the plenum decision until and unless it was approved by the upcoming Fourth World Congress in 1954. Pablo replied—and formally under the statutes of the International he was correct-that the plenum had the authority to act in the name of the International and that the French leadership were breaking discipline by not immediately implementing entryism.
At the plenum disciplinary measures were imposed on the French party. These guaranteed that a democratic congress of the French section would be held later in 1952. But in exchange they required that Bleibtreu, Lambert, and Lequenne pledge themselves to carry out the entryism line in some form. Then, in a sharp departure from the traditions of the Trotskyist movement, the IEC voted to reorganize the leadership of the French section. A parity commission was set up which appointed a new Political Bureau for France. The elected leadership was reduced to a minority, with a direct representative of the International Secretariat casting the deciding vote. Pierre Frank, who along with Mestre led the pro-Pablo minority in the French party, was appointed Political Secretary of the party. Then the representative of the International Secretariat, Albert, clarified the meaning of the democratic congress that had been promised. In a letter to the Bleibtreu-Lambert-Le-quenne tendency in the spring of 1952 he wrote: " "... the essential function of the 8th Congress of the [French] party is not to listen to the expression of agreement or disagreement with this line but to apply the line. That is the way democratic centralism is applied on an international scale. . . . Whatever the decision of the 8th Congress of the party, the line to be applied after the Congress will be that of 'entrism sui generis.'"
Albert further warned the French majority that if they dared to submit a political document to the French party congress disputing the entryist line, all of their representatives would be removed from the leadership even if they pledged to carry out the entry tactic when the congress was over.
At the end of June 1952 Pablo expelled the majority of the French section from the International.
Even at this point the issues remained unclear. The split Pablo had imposed on the French section had taken place apparently over a tactical question. We were troubled by Pablo's supercentralist conception of international procedure but there were reasons to give credence to the political charges he leveled at the Bleibtreu-Lambert-Lequenne grouping. Pablo replied to their charge that he was adapt-ing to Stalinism by claiming that they were Stalinophobes who had succumbed to bourgeois patriotism in the midst of an international offensive by imperialism against the Soviet Union. In similar periods in the past-the capitulation of the Social Democrats in World War I, the desertion of Marxism by Shachtman and Burnham on the eve of World War II-this had been the sharpest danger in the Marxist movement. Certainly in the United States, in the middle of the McCarthyite anti-Communist crusade, the party had far more reason to be on the lookout for Stalin-ophobia than its contrary. The bourgeois attacks on the Stalinists were going on throughout the world so it seemed reasonable to accept Pablo's claim that the French majority were moving to the right under this pressure. It was a difficult point to verify because we were in no position to talk to either side in the dispute directly and there had as yet been no test of events to verify the contending claims.
It was shortly after this that the fight with Cochran and Clarke broke out in the open in the SWP. This happened first in the New York branch at the beginning of 1953. Mike Bar tell, a staunch supporter of Pablo, was New York organizer and he had a majority of the executive committee behind him. He proposed to divert branch work into the Stalinist milieu. He privately explained to branch members that this proposal was motivated by the expectation that the American Communist Party and its periphery would stand in the forefront of the American revolution. The opposition to Bartell in New York City was led by Harry Ring and Dave Weiss.
A literary discussion was opened in the national party and documents started to pour into the party internal bulletin. The issues were fought out and the political direction of both the Cochran and Clarke wings of the minority faction were made clear and debated at length. In May a plenum of the National Committee was held where the views of the Cochranites were defeated. They received about 20 percent of the votes. A truce was declared at the plenum. The political differences remained sharp but an agreement was reached that the majority and the minority would work together to build the party in its present form and that the divergent estimates of Stalinism would be brought up again at the next party convention and discussed further.
In the course of the fight, Clarke claimed that his position on Stalinism—that it could no longer betray, that it was objectively the revolutionary wave of the future—represented the position of the international leaders, especially of Pablo. Pablo had never said many of the things that Clarke was saying: that the Soviet bureaucracy would reform itself, that a revolutionary international was unnecessary, and that the SWP shouldn't act like a party. Quite naturally the leaders of the SWP majority wanted to know if it was true that Pablo held the same views without as yet committing them to writing. Moreover, they wanted to know if Pablo was organizing the opposition in the SWP with the aim of provoking a split in the party. A letter was sent to Pablo inviting his comments on these questions. He declared himself neutral in the internal affairs of the SWP. As long as the SWP leadership adhered to international discipline, he said, he had no intention of fostering factional groupings inside the American party.
In the early summer of 1953 it became clear that the Cochran-Clarke group had no intention of honoring the truce it had agreed to at the May plenum. The supporters of the minority began to put their attitude toward the party into practice and to systematically withdraw from party work. They continued to proselytize for the liquidation of the SWP and suited their actions to their words by withholding their sustainers and dues from the party as a demonstration of no confidence in the organization. It became clear that this was a grouping that was determined to get out of the party and out of politics as rapidly as possible and that it would not wait for the next party convention to do so.
[p. 16]
Meanwhile some important events took place that gave the party a test of what Pablo's real attitude was toward Stalinism. In June the first workers' revolt took place in the Soviet bloc in East Germany. Soviet troops were sent in to crush the workers' uprising. Pablo failed to call for the removal of Soviet troops. He approved of the work-ers' actions, but put the great weight of his press coverage on the concessions the bureaucracy had granted under pressure, ignoring the suppression of the upsurge by the Kremlin's armed forces. The Clarke grouping took a similar position on this. At the same time a general strike erupted in France, and Pablo's line was to endorse the efforts of the Stalinist union leadership to limit the strike to economic demands and suppress the demand for a workers' government.
The Militant came out clearly on the side of the West German and French workers.
The Political Committee began to prepare for a fight in the International. Here the International Secretariat had crossed the line of principle. It was no longer simply a matter of differing estimates of the course of world politics. Pablo had sided with a section of the Stalinist bureaucracy against workers' upheavals in two concrete situations. The Political Committee's intention was to await the publication of the International Secretariat's draft resolution on Stalinism for the upcoming Fourth World Congress and to submit substantive amendments or to issue a counter-resolution as a basis for discussion. Pablo's document, released in August 1953, was entitled "The Rise and Decline of Stalinism." Here for the first time in an official draft of a congress resolution there appeared the whole Pabloite thesis, which had been restricted in the past to articles signed personally by Pablo. (Already under pressure from the SWP, the Pablo forces drew back from the most extreme formulations—the phrase "centuries of degenerated workers' states" does not appear in the document.)
Two things became quite clear in the course of the summer. Pablo was, despite his denials, maneuvering to build the Cochran-Clarke grouping; and the Cochranites were set on
an imminent split course in the SWP and were a liquidationist tendency that had no intention of even attempting to build a rival party once they got outside the SWP. When this picture became unmistakably clear, it produced a considerable shock in the leadership of the party. It put the whole impending discussion in the International in a different light.
The Political Committee majority had operated on the assumption that the emerging lines of difference with Pablo were differences within a world leadership committed to building a homogeneous International. And further that, when it became necessary to take the dispute to the ranks of the International for a discussion and a vote, that there would be a comradely discussion and a democratic world congress.
The realization that Pablo was attempting, before the first document had been submitted to the International discussion, to overturn the orthodox SWP leadership or even to split the party, called for a profound reevalua-tion of what the party was dealing with. The International Secretariat's resolution on Stalinism shed a new light on the split in the French section he year before. The French case was not an isolated example. Similar splits were taking place in other sections.
If Pablo was prepared to engineer a split in the SWP, which had the most experienced cadre and the most solid traditions of any party in the world Trotskyist movement, behind the backs of the party leadership; and if in doing so he was throwing the support of the International Secretariat behind a grouping that was deserting Trotskyism entirely; what must be happening in the weaker and more inexperienced sections that the SWP had little contact with? How could an international discussion be conducted if the world movement was being bureaucratically lined up and split before the precongress discussion had even opened? How could we reach the ranks of the European sections with our documents when these would never get past the little committee that Pablo controlled, which insisted on acting in the name of the International without any effective participation by the leaderships of the sections?
The SWP leadership decided that a purely routine discussion could not affect the process of splits that Pablo had set in motion in the International. A dramatic gesture was required to convey to the members of the whole world movement how seriously the SWP leadership took the dangerous liquidationist course Pablo had set out on. It was decided to form a faction in the International; to declare the faction publicly, not just in the internal bulletin; and to place the authority of the full National Committee of the SWP behind the call. A plenum of the NC was announced for November to discuss the situation in the world movement and to draft a resolution on the fight.
There was not enough time to organize a full convention of the party, but the plenum was thrown open to the entire membership. Coincident with the windup of an election campaign, a rally was called in New York a few days before the plenum to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of American Trotskyism. It was to show to the outside world and to the members of the party that the SWP remained convinced that it was possible to build a Leninist party in the United States and that it believed there was something to celebrate in the twenty-five years of party-building experience we had gone through since the expulsion of the Trotskyists from the Communist Party in 1928. The Cochranites boycotted the rally. Not one of their supporters attended.
The first item of business of the plenum was the boycott. The leaders of the Cochran-Clarke grouping were suspended. The second point on the agenda was to approve an open letter to the world Trotskyist movement, which was published in the November 16, 1953 issue of The Militant. The open letter did not propose a split in the International. It outlined the party's disagreements with Pablo, and then limited itself to two relatively restrained demands: it called for the formation of a public international faction to fight Pabloism within the International; and it called for Pablo's removal as secretary of the International. The public faction was named the International Committee of the Fourth International. Such a move stepped deliberately beyond the norms of an ordinary internal discussion. But it was not a declaration of a split in the International and was never regarded as such by the participants in the November plenum. The split would come later, at the initiative of Pablo, at the world congress of the Pablo faction in 1954.
[p. 17]
The Pablo faction, citing the formation of a public faction as grounds, expelled the supporters of the International Committee at its 1954 "World Congress." The SWP, however, did not view the situation in the same way. The International Committee of the Fourth International, which the SWP was instrumental in founding, was not a rival Fourth International. The party regarded the International Committee as an international faction and did not read the "Pabloites" out of the Trotskyist movement. There were, of course, very sharp polemics and no concessions were made on Pablo's revision of basic Marxist principles.
In practice there was little contact between the two wings of the International during the almost ten years of split. In large part this was due to the witch-hunt imposed by the American government. For a number of years it was impossible for party members to get passports to go anywhere outside the United States. The Political Committee assigned Joseph Hansen to attend the Fourth World Congress in 1954 to explain why the SWP had issued a public declaration against Pablo's line, but he was denied a passport and was unable to go. It was not until 1958 that Farrell Dobbs was able, for the first time since the split, to go to Europe and have discussions with both factions. Regular visits and discussions did not become possible until 1960.
In the interim, two international factions existed in the Fourth International: the International Secretariat led by Pablo, Ernest Germain, Pierre Frank, and Livio Maitan; and the International Committee of the Fourth International with which the SWP was in fraternal solidarity and which included the majority of the British and French Trotskyists led respectively by Gerry Healy and by Bleib-treu-Lambert-Lequenne.
The world movement was about evenly split. The majority of the European sections went with Pablo except for Britain, France, and Switzerland. The Latin American Trotskyists were divided. The majority in Argentina, Chile, and Peru supported the International Committee. The pro-Pablo forces, headed by Posadas, had groupings in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and a few other countries.
The Bolivian section, which at the time of the split was the largest Latin American Trotskyist party, remained neutral and did not take part in the debate. The Ceylon section, while formally adhering to the International Secretariat, in practice followed the same course as the Bolivians. Most of the English-speaking groups, including the Canadian section, joined the International Committee, as did the Chinese Trotskyists in exile led by Peng Shu-tse, and a scattering of small groups elsewhere.
The majority of the International Committee, particularly the Socialist Workers Party leadership, did not view the split as definitive, despite their strong opposition to the Pablo leadership, but saw it as a faction fight in progress and left open what the final resolution of the dispute might be.
Our experience with such fights in the past, particularly the examples of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks or the evolution of the Shachtmanites after they left the Socialist Workers Party in 1940, might have led some comrades to believe that the fundamental differences uncovered in the break with Pablo would prove unbridgeable and would grow deeper with time. In this case that was not so.
The party observed a political retreat by the International Secretariat from the most extreme positions of conciliation with Stalinism almost from the moment of the split, despite the organizational reprisals taken against the supporters of the International Committee. The depth of Pablo's adaptation to Stalinism was tested at the "Fourth World Congress" when the most extreme of the liquidation-ist tendencies fostered by Pablo tried to entice their mentor into abandoning the Fourth International. Mestre of France and Lawrence of England walked out of the congress to join their respective Communist parties. George Clarke, who had the "franchise" as the representative of the American supporters of the International Secretariat, put a motion on the floor to dissolve the Fourth International on the grounds that it served no useful function and that it was pretentious for such small forces to claim to be an international revolutionary party. When his motion was defeated, he too walked out of the congress. The Ceylonese delegates placed several amendments on the floor that embodied some of the criticisms of Pablo's line put forward by the SWP. These were passed.
Pablo himself made a noticeable retreat. But, even more important, the shock of the split combined with the unfolding of the political revolution in Eastern Europe and the ebbing of the threat of an imminent world war, was to lead figures such as Germain, Frank, and Maitan on the side of the International Secretariat to break with Pablo. They eventually formed a distinct tendency within the so-called Pabloite camp.
Further events resolved one central question that remained undecided at the time of the 1954 split: that was whether Pablo's political adaptation toward Stalinism was motivated by a fundamental revision of our characterization of Stalinism as a counterrevolutionary force in the workers' movement, or simply flowed from Pablo's conviction of the imminent inevitability of a third world war. By the end of 1955 when the war threat had clearly abated for the time being, the International Secretariat also drew back from its projections that revolutions would be led by Stalinist parties. By 1956 their public line had become very close to that of the International Committee, and the leadership of the SWP concluded that, on the political positions on which the two sides stood, continuation of the split could not be justified. It was time to consider reunification.
This estimate was confirmed by the reaction of the International Secretariat to the Hungarian Revolution of October 1956. Far from sidestepping the question of the Soviet invasion or hailing the "concessions" granted by the bureaucracy as Pablo had done after the German events of 1953, the International Secretariat gave its full support to the Hungarian workers' councils. The resolution adopted by the "Fifth World Congress" of the Fourth International—that is, of the Pablo faction - —in 1957 was unequivocal on this point. It declared that in Hungary there were assembled "all the objective elements for a rapid and brilliant revolutionary victory, capable of raising the whole world revolutionary movement to a higher level." Further, the resolution rejected the notion, previously advanced by Pablo, that the political revolution wouldbecarriedthrough by a new centrist tendency arising from within the bureaucracy. It said that what was lacking in Hungary was "a revolutionary leadership capable of quickly coordinating the proletarian forces and guiding them rapidly toward the constitution of a democratic and independent republic based on the (workers'| councils." ("The Decline and Fall of Stalinism" in the Education for Socialists bulletin, "The Development and Disintegration of World Stalinism.")
[p. 18]
It is true that the International Secretariat continued to pursue its policy of deep entry in the Communist and Social Democratic parties of Western Europe, long after the motivation for this tactic—the supposedly imminent war—had become outmoded. But the SWP did not view this as a sufficient reason to maintain the split when basic political agreement had been reached on the nature of Stalinism. Why, then, was reunification delayed for another seven years, until 1963?
In fact, the split had set in motion centrifugal tendencies
in both the International Secretariat and the International Committee that were moving away from the basic positions of Trotskyism, either in the direction of opportunist adaptation to reformist politics, or in the direction of sectarian abstention from real struggle. On the side of the International Secretariat, Pablo, although he retreated from his positions on the inevitability of Stalinist-led revolutions, adopted an attitude of political adaptation toward a whole series of forces, from the Kremlin bureaucracy to certain of the "radical" nationalist bourgeois regimes in the colonial world. By the mid-1950s Pablo represented only a minority tendency within the International Secretariat. He was opposed at all costs to reuniting with the forces of the International Committee and the SWP and did everything he could to sabotage efforts in that direction.
At the same time a symmetrical phenomenon was taking place. in the ranks of the International Committee. The split with Pablo had taken place over real questions of strategy and tactics for our epoch: the attitude the Fourth International should adopt toward mass movements led by reformist, Stalinist, or other non-Trotskyist forces; the possibility of building revolutionary Marxist parties to overturn capitalism; the kinds of demands that should be put forward to bridge the gap between our small revolutionary groups and the unorganized masses.
The answers given to these questions by Pablo were wrong, but they were not the only possible wrong answers. Pablo sought a shortcut to the revolution through political adaptation to larger forces with nonrevolutionary programs. Within the International Committee in the years of split there arose tendencies that sought to insure themselves against such contamination through sectarian denunciation of every movement that was not explicitly Trotskyist. These currents were led by Pierre Lambert in France and the Socialist Labour League of Gerry Healy in England, whose American supporters are now organized in the Workers League of Tim Wohlforth. During the years when leaders of the SWP were unable to travel abroad, Healy and Lambert controlled direct dealings with the members of the International Secretariat. They sought by every means possible to obstruct and sabotage efforts at reunification. Healy in particular set a tone of virulent denunciation of the "Pabloites" in his press that made discussions of unification highly difficult, if not impossible.
The SWP began to have differences with Healy and Lambert over the character of the colonial revolution. They were disposed to denounce as betrayers the leaders of any anti-imperialist struggle who were not dyed-in-the-wool Marxists. Trotskyists, of course, are always opposed to any reformist or procapitalist tendency even when it. is engaged in a progressive struggle, but in the opinion of the SWP the weight of the party's intervention should be aimed at opposing imperialism and defending the right of self-determination of people who are struggling despite the inadequacy of their leadership. Healy and Lambert tended on the contrary to dismiss the importance of the whole postwar colonial revolution because it did not result in the creation of new workers states outside of China, North Vietnam, and North Korea. The decisive test of the depth of these differences came with the Cuban revolution of 1959. Although the Castroist July 26 Movement had petty-bourgeois origins and a program limited to bourgeois-democratic reforms, under the pressure of imperialism and because of the extraordinary honesty and intransigence of the Cuban leadership, the revolution moved to the expropriation of capitalist property in the summer and fall of 1960.
Both the SWP and the International Secretariat hailed the creation of a new workers state in Cuba. Healy and Lambert rejected this view, characterizing Cuba as a "state capitalist" regime and denouncing Castro as just another Batista or Chiang Kai-shek.
For the SWP this was the "acid test," as Joseph Han-sen called it in a document at the time. It was the measure of whether a self-proclaimed Trotskyist party could recognize a revolutionary reality or not. The victory of the Cuban revolution and the common recognition of its nature and its importance provided a further common basis for a principled reunification of the two factions of the Fourth International.
Healy, thinking to find fresh obstacles to reunification, actually facilitated the process. He proposed that the International Committee and the International Secretariat set up a parity committee to arrange discussions and decide on common projects. This was welcomed by both sides. The parity committee was set up and its existence of approximately one year paved the way for a principled reunification.
However the success of the work of the parity committee was not welcomed by Healy and Lambert. Healy, in particular, sought to slow down the process. But the lack of political justification for maintaining the split was becoming more and more glaring.
The Political Committee of the SWP issued a statement on March 1, 1963, entitled "For Early Reunification of the World Trotskyist Movement." This document outlined the areas of principled political agreement between the majorities of the International Secretariat and of the International Committee. It was officially adopted as the basis for unity at the Reunification Congress held in Italy in June 1963. Inasmuch as Healy and Wohlforth have endlessly repeated since then that the reunification was carried out without a discussion and was an unprincipled capitulation to the "Pabloites" by the SWP, it is worth summarizing this document which Healy has never published or answered.
"While substantial differences still remain," the statement said, "especially over the causes of the 1954 split, the area of disagreement appears of secondary importance in view of the common basic program and common analysis of major current events in world developments which unite the two sides." There followed a specific list, of which these were the main items:
1. The present world crisis is at bottom a crisis of revolutionary leadership, which must be resolved if capitalism is to be overthrown and world socialist planning instituted.
2. The delay in the world socialist revolution is due basically to the incapacity and betrayals of the Social Democratic and Stalinist leaderships of the working-class movement.
[p. 19]
3. The aim and purpose of the world Trotskyist movement is to build new mass revolutionary Marxist parties around a program of transitional demands and employing Leninist organizational methods to recruit and train a cadre. When an "entry" tactic is employed, "it should be the norm for those engaging in it to maintain a sector of open public work, including their own Trotskyist publication."
4. "The bureaucratic reformist and Stalinist machines do not use the organized strength of the working class to overthrow capitalism where this is possible."
5. In the bureaucratized workers states, "The Leninist forces are... faced with the need to organize revolutionary Marxist parties to provide leadership for the working class in exercising its right to overthrow the dictatorial rule of the bureaucratic caste and to replace it with forms of proletarian democracy. This signifies a political revolution."
6. The recognition of Cuba as a workers' state.
7. On de-Stalinization: "The Khrushchev regime has no intention of dismantling the bureaucratic dictatorship a piece at a time; its aim is not 'self-reform' but maintenance of the rule of the caste in face of mounting popular pressures."
8. The colonial revolution "is now playing a key role in the world revolutionary process." Further, "It is impossible in these countries to solve the historic problems of social, economic, and cultural liberation and development without overthrowing capitalism as well as breaking the grip of imperialism."
9. "Guerrilla warfare conducted by landless peasant and semiproletarian forces, under a leadership that becomes committed to carrying the revolution through to a conclusion, can play a decisive role in undermining and precipitating the downfall of a colonial or semicolonial power."
10. "Since the close of World War II, imperialism has methodically prepared for another conflict, one in which the capitalist world as a whole would be mobilized against the workers states, with the Soviet Union as the main target." This can ultimately be prevented only by the American socialist revolution.
On the basis of this document, the majority of the International Committee decided to go ahead with the reunification.
The Reunification Congress in 1963 set up a new leading body of the International, the United Secretariat, to supersede both the IS and the IC. Healy and Lambert were invited to participate in the united International without giving up their differences. They rejected the offer, refusing even to send observers to the congress. For a lengthy period they maintained the fiction that they still represented the International Committee. This rump organization, dedicated to the task of "reconstructing" the Fourth International, went through a split of its own in the fall of 1971, when Lambert and Healy parted company over their respective estimates of the conduct of their ally in Bolivia, Guillermo Lora, in the events preceding the Banzer coup in August of that year.
On the other side, Posadas left the International Secretariat in 1962, prior to the reunification, and set up his own "Fourth International," mainly confined to a few small groups in Latin America. These have been on the decline in recent years.
Pablo participated in the Reunification Congress, but took his leave of the International in 1964. Today he heads a group called the Revolutionary Marxist Tendency, which has declared that it has no ties with the Fourth International and does not claim to be a Trotskyist organization.
Thus the great majority of those in the world who call themselves Trotskyist have been represented by the reunified Fourth International since 1963.