December 3, 1953
Dear Ernest:
Thanks for your letter dated Nov. 15, the same date as the letter to the leaderships of all sections by the IS Bureau, to which you also signed your name. I answer your letter, and in part that of the Bureau, not only out of friendship's sake, but also because I have always felt closer to you politically and methodologically than any of the other European comrades and because I have always highly valued your contributions to the movement and want you to avoid making a terrible mistake. If this reply is poorly organized, it is because I have so much to say and so little time to say it in, and I hope you will make due allowances. If what I say is offensive to you, you will know that is not my intention. If you do not care to answer me, I still believe that you will ponder what I write here, and I hope that you will do so objectively.
The first differences we had with Clarke and the first signs we had of an unhealthy development in the IS, appeared at the beginning of 1951, at the start of the 3WC discussion, when Clarke wrote to us that it would be necessary to crush and maybe even expel the majority of the French party, Frank and you because of the incipient differences around the discussion. (You then were the "Stalinophobes.") Knowing Clarke, and knowing his close affinity with Pablo, we realized that he was not expressing a personal opinion. We were alarmed by the ultimatist, bureaucratic conception that it expressed about the international leadership, and Stein, on our behalf, wrote him a sharp letter, warning him that the view he expressed was ruinous and Would destroy all possibilities of collective leadership. This marked the beginning of Clarke's break with us, as he told us at our May plenum: our reproach to him was a "stab in the back." Evidently, however, it had a restraining as well as an embittering influence, because although he wrote us back a hot letter, he decided he had to be more careful. We were all happy to see a united IS leadership emerge from the discussion. But we could not help wondering what was going on in Pablo's mind that would enable him to even tolerate the course that Clarke had projected.
Then, after the 3WC, came the fight in the French party, ending in the intervention that removed the leadership from direction and the split. Before the split occurred, we heard a report from Warde. We were appalled by what the IS had done. No one denies the right, of the international leadership to suspend or even expel the leadership of a party, or even the party itself. But this is a power that must be used with the greatest care and discretion —when a leadership is betraying or muffing a revolutionary situation, for example, and not over tactical questions. Lightly used, or abused, as it seemed to us was done in this case, the movement can degenerate grotesquely. We told Warde of our view, and urged correction. We went along with the IS on the particular issue involved, because we agreed with it on that issue as we understood it But we were against the organizational measures that had been so lightmindedly applied, and disturbed by the split. We saw no evidence that the French majority was Stalino-phobic (and the year and a half since then, in which time and experience have had the opportunity to confirm or refute this charge, has certainly not demonstrated it to us; on the contrary): Pablo's periodic boasts about how the International is growing bigger and better all the time struck us as rather hollow after the loss of the majority of the French party and of the workers in the party.
[p. 199]
When Clarke returned, it was not to collaborate with us on the line of the 3WC, which we welcomed and accepted although the Congress had never acted on our amendments because Clarke, in consultation with Pablo, had burned them (hardly an act of the maturity and principled conduct that Pablo claims), but to fight us in the same way. that he had fought the French party. As you say, the Minority has for two years been trying to put itself in the position where it would appear to be the defender and representative of the International (rather the IS, and still more precisely, Pablo). (I don't claim to be the first to recognize what Clarke was up to; on the contrary, I was among the last.) He proceeded to form an unprincipled combination of those who blamed our difficult objective situation on the leadership, those who were looking for a bridge out of the party, and those who had become so disoriented by the new situation in the world that they took the 3WC line to mean that Stalinism is the wave of the future, everywhere, including countries like the US, Ceylon and Bolivia. Knowing Clarke, both his limits and his strong side, some of began to wonder about the source of his arrogance and assuredness as he set out to divide the party over a line that all of us had agreed on. And when he began to recruit people on the ground that he really "represented Pablo" and that the party leadership did not really accept or understand the line it had voted for, there was a growing uneasiness as to just where Pablo did stand. When a member of the Minority broke away from it and informed us of what basis he had been recruited on originally, we felt it necessary to let Pablo know about it, in order to clear the air. But Pablo refused to give us a clear answer. He refused to say that Clarke's claim was a lie. His reply was evasive and weasel-worded. To us this was not the behavior of a principled collaborator.
Abe Lincoln was fond of the story about the backwoods men engaged in a struggle to the death with a bear, and the man's wife who watched the struggle and showed her "impartiality" by shouting, "Go it, husband! Go it!" b'ar!" In the American view, this is not real impartiality, considering the relation of the woman to the man. 'Throughout its history our party has been accustomed to getting the support of the International against all revisionist developments that arose in our ranks. We always got it from Trotsky, that is sure. But perhaps the IS, not as experienced as Trotsky and not as well acquainted with our Minority as we are, did not yet recognize its revisionist character? Good — or at any rate if not good, then at least understandable and permissible temporarily. But under the circumstances if the IS was not to help us against the revisionists for whom our party had become —yes — a prison, then the least that we could expect of its members was that they should not give backhanded help to the Minority —which was what Pablo was doing when he refused to disavow the Minority's claim of his support. Was this too much to expect from one with whom we had collaborated in the most loyal fashion? Against our wishes the conviction began to grow that apparently it was too much to expect. Try to put yourself in our position, Ernest—wouldn't you have been put on guard by all this?
At the May plenum we defeated the Minority, and extracted from them a pledge to abide by majority rule. Put on our guard by Pablo's evasions and feeling that the truce in the party could last only if the Minority did not see a chance for help from outside the party ranks, we decided to investigate Pablo's attitude. Read non-faction-ally, that was the purpose of the Tom letter: to discover the reason for Pablo's attitude in the past, to be alert to his moves in the future. I do not have the letter before me but it (or the speech on Internationalism and the SWP) explicitly stated that we had, no intention of making the first hostile move on the international field. How then was .this a declaration of war against Pablo or anyone else? No, it was a declaration that we were on our notice — and after what had happened, we would have been fools to. take any other attitude. Meanwhile, we intended to re main in a state of military discipline in our party just as the Minority was — until either the differences were resolved or the fight broke out anew. This is the simple truth. The Minority's different interpretation was factional from beginning to end, the pretext (not the reason) for breaking the truce and renewing a fight that could only end in split
I turn now to the charge that our course has been unprincipled in this fight (in contradiction, as you admit, to our entire past). "Their 100% about-face of today dates only a few months back. How then to explain it? When were they, sincere: when they affirmed their total solidarity with the line of the Third World Congress, or when they today affirm, with an unheard-of cynicism, that we are quite simply Stalinists and even agents of the GPU?" (IS Bureau letter, Nov. 15.) This is what we call a "have you stopped beating your wife?" question. Has it occurred to you that it is possible both that we were sincere then and are sincere today (I leave aside the tendentious way in which the quotation is phrased)? At any rate, please consider the possibility.
About our sincerity and the principled character of our support of the general line of the 3WC, there never was any doubt. I can assure you of that personally, Ernest, because I was among the last to understand and to come to agree with this line, and I was aided in this not only by the general correctness of the line but by the patient, persistent and helpful persuasion of most of the Majority leaders. What reason was there for them to do this if they secretly did not accept the line or had so many reservations about its 'correctness? It wouldn't make sense, and it flies in the face of our whole tradition. We were all sure that the 3WC line was not the real basis of our differences with our Minority, and that is not involved today 'either. No one will profit except factionally in trying to rewrite this section of our movement's history. As to our relative understanding of the line, we did not interpret it to mean a turn to the American CP, and could, not. The Minority did, despite .their, protestations to the contrary because it was so flagrantly in conflict with the text of the documents, and that will be proved now in action, and already has been proved by .their first independent activity — an influx into the ALP as their major point of concentration in New York.
[p. 200]
At the same time, we could not help realizing that there were some important deficiencies in the 3WC documents when it could be interpreted so differently by groups which both claimed adherence to it. At best, therefore, it suffered from some ambiguity. This was not a mere suspicion: real life in our party demonstrated it. This was the first time in the history of our movement that such a thing had happened. It pointed to, the possibility that the documents straddled two different conceptions. In that case, two different views had converged around the line of the 3WC, and it was going to take time to determine how different they were.
Murry Weiss has recalled to us that in 1924 Trotsky and Stalin signed the same resolution on the need to promote democratic centralism in the party. Later Trotsky could be reproached for this, perhaps was, as insincere and unprincipled. That is an unhistorical view of political development. They signed the Same resolution, and then real life illuminated the fact that they had different conceptions. This should not surprise us. As you well know, all splits begin in identity at one point or another; in fact, split presupposes previous identity. That is the dialectical conception of development, isn't it (although of course not all identity leads to split in a given situation)? Why then should the fact that there was identity in the past and split now necessarily lead to the conclusion that there was something unprincipled about either the identity or the split? (Even in the case of Shachtman, we had unity of views on the defense of the Soviet Union at our July 1939 convention. Yet we had to break with him two or three months later and split with him the next April on that same question when certain events took place that showed he placed a different construction on our previously common position. Yet there is no doubt in my mind that he was sincere and principled' on this issue in July.)
As our fight here developed, it became evident that our common line meant different things to different people. Yet we were extremely careful not to leap to conclusions of a drastic character about the IS, and Pablo especially, because we know that not every difference becomes basic and develops all the way to the point of irreconcilability. This responsible approach guided us in our attitude to Pablo; we refused to declare differences that we were not sure existed in reality; we moved slowly, extremely slowly, not lightmindedly suspicious, but ready to give Pablo the benefit of every doubt, despite his peculiar attitude toward us. The fact that we now see vital differences is cited against us as a sign of lack of principle since "only a few months back" we didn't or weren't prepared to declare them. Does that really make sense, to you? Would we be, principled to suppress differences now because we did not see them, or because they did not exist, a few months back?
Great events took place in these few months, and they tested the differences and showed that they were not minor. (I refer to the events in East Germany, France and the conceptions about the political revolution in the SU) Could this have been foreseen a year or two ago? I don't think so. At any rate we didn't foresee. them. Ah, but it was fore! seen! So says Shachtman; So too now say the Cochranites. But Shachtman's premise was all wrong (the premise that defense of the SU leads to Stalinist conciliation) and the Cochranite premise was no; more correct (Anyhow, we know that even a correct conclusion or prediction is no proof that the reasoning employed to reach it was necessarily correct.) We still hold to the main line of the 3WC, but new events have shown that we have different conceptions of the analysis to be made today. To us the entrist conception of the 3WC is only that— a method for building our own movement. To the Minority and Pablo it is a bridge, to liquidationism (maybe that's what the 3WC was to them two years ago too —but that's not certain, maybe it wasn't that to them then; but anyhow it is a secondary question). And there is a third tendency, which I am not sure but I think you represent, which has failed to understand what the real issue in the International is today, and makes the mistake of accepting the Cochranite interpretation of the relation between the 3WC and the present struggle.
Try to get it clear, Ernest: this is not a fight over the 3WC. We have been angered by the devious and miseducational campaign of the Minority to make something sacrosanct of the 3WC. A WC is only a WC—it's not for all time. That's our attitude to all the congresses of our movement the first, the second, and the third. Time tests all the, predictions and prognoses they contain. We must retain what is still "useable," and replace what is not. We hold to what is good in it, but we're not bound by every word for "all time, any more than Lenin felt bound by last year's resolutions. Otherwise, we become truly sectarians and fossils. We must review everything in the 3WC documents, and we" will—the imminence of war, the effects of revolutionary upsurge in Europe on war, the possibilities of an American depression before a war, despite Washington's wish to have it otherwise, etc. We no longer will permit our movement to be frozen in its thinking by our Minority's campaign around the 3WC. To us the 3WC documents as written contain no support for liquidationism or conciliation — not when they were written, not now. And if it did (which I deny, although I admit it's a valid question for examination in view of certain ambiguities in the text) then it's our job to correct it now. What's unprincipled about that?
The same criteria apply to leadership. The fact that we supported Pablo up to a certain point and don't after that point is no proof that we're unprincipled (unless it can be shown that he hasn't changed —and that can't be shown). We went along with him at the 3WC for one reason —we agreed, with him, or thought we did. We broke with him for one reason —we found ourselves in disagreement with him on basic issues. What's unprincipled about, that? We weren't liquidationist or conciliationist then, and as far as we could make out he wasn't either. We aren't liquidationist or conciliationist now, but the test of events shows that he is today. What could we do but break with him? Wouldn't it have been unprincipled if we hadn't? (I must add here that a genuine Pablo cult has been developed by the Minority in this country. The mere idea that we would dare to differ from Pablo on any question brought a scream of anguish and even astonishment from' the Minority— sincerely from the Clarke wing, and for factional purposes from the Cochran wing. We're not cultists, and I hope never will be. No one is immune from criticism in our movement, Pablo, or Cannon, or anyone else. Our attitude to leaders is based on what they are and do as well as what they were and did. The handraisers are not on our side, despite all the slander to the contrary, as you will find out yourself if you choose to associate with the Cochranites.)
[p. 201]
But I've been wandering a little, and I want to get back. As you state it, your view is that we launched a preventive faction fight' against the International" and are guilty of "a deliberate and cynical attempt to find some political justification for an organizational 'struggle of power.'" You evidently regard this not only as cynical but unprincipled.
We have different ideas over who launched the fight; you think we did, we think Pablo and Clarke did. But who launched it is really secondary if the issues are fundamental. Far more important and revealing is the relationship between politics and organization struggle, and I'd like to go into that a little in connection with this fight.
I think you're making a mistake in the way you view the relationship in this concrete case. Let me put it another way. Suppose yourself in our position. You "have just endorsed the 3WC line, and a most vicious campaign is opened up on you by a faction in which you recognize all the earmarks of revisionism and which attacks you as an opponent of the line you have voted for. This faction derives its strength not from its own views but from its claim that it represents the International leadership with which you have worked in honest collaboration. You present the claim to the IS secretary, and he refuses to disavow it. The party heads for a split. You prevent it for the time being and create conditions of truce in which the party work can go forward — a test for the minority. They accept, and then break the truce at the first pretext. You become convinced then that the minority no longer wants to be in the party, it feels stifled, it wants to break out. Then you begin to detect signs that the IS secretary is not only continuing, but deepening his collaboration with this minority —all the while (to use the phrase used against us) that there are no apparent political differences between you and him; for the truth is that he has never up to this point expressed a single difference with the policy you follow. What do you do then?
If you are a responsible leader, then you ask yourself: "Why is he behaving in this fashion? Why does he ally himself with a revisionist faction in our party, though he does not yet do so openly? Is it merely that he finds Clarke's character more charming than Cannon's?" And you are forced to a different conclusion: "No, it must be more fundamental than that, it must be that he has an affinity for Clarke's politics and a distaste for ours. If faction fights have any meaning—and they generally do — there must be a political basis for his behavior." And unless you are something other than a Bolshevik politician, you begin to search to find the answer to the puzzle. What's unprincipled about that? Isn't that what the Nov. 15 IS Bureau letter also purports to do?
Yes, faction fights, if they are deepgoing, have a political basis, even though it may not be fully clear to everyone involved at the start. And organizational practice has a meaning in such a context—a political meaning—and one can go very far astray if he overlooks this fact. When a faction begins by challenging organizational tradition, by departing from democratic centralism, by resorting to intrigue and deception, then you can be sure, if the history of the Bolshevik movement means anything at all, that behind it or at the bottom of it revisionist politics is also being hatched. The way the Minority faction was formed, the way it conducted itself, was even more revealing than the political arguments it found it expedient to put forward at the start—half-way arguments, half-presented arguments, the traditional method of revisionists, who naturally cannot begin by fully presenting their own real views at the beginning. What applied to the Minority also applies to its behind-the-scenes ally and protector, Pablo. There is, there must be, some political basis behind his role, we concluded.
But even so, when the IS resolution on "The Rise and Decline of Stalinism" arrived, we did not leap to rash conclusions, and we weighed the matter carefully. I don't mind telling you my initial reaction: I thought it was on the whole an excellent document, despite some deficiencies and ambiguities I wanted to question you. about (as I said in my letter to you). There were others who shared this view. We began to discuss our attitude toward it. There were those who thought that we should prepare a number of questions to be submitted to the IS to clarify ambiguous or uncertain sections, with the thought that depending on the replies we would either vote for the document as it was, or propose amendments, or prepare a counter-document One thing we were sure of — we did not again want any document adopted unanimously, after which we would be confronted with the same situation that arose after the 3WC, when we were told we did not know what we had voted for, that we were not carrying out the line, etc.
We. had barely begun the discussion among ourselves when Clarke put out the FI, without showing it to the majority of the editorial staff, which contained his new thesis about the "sharing of power" between the bureaucracy and the workers as an alternative to the revolutionary upheaval of the masses against the bureaucracy. This revision he labeled as "political revolution" and, he assured us, it was in full accord with the resolution on Stalinism. Is it hard to understand that this decided to make us take a second, third and hundredth look at the resolution?
The text of resolutions is important but I need not tell you that we have learned that in the hands of unscrupulous people the text itself alone is not enough to indicate the real line intended. And it soon became clear to us that whatever you, the author of the resolution may have meant by it, and whatever we thought it meant, Clarke —
What had changed your status from Ceylon to here he did not explain. But it was plain enough that something had changed.
[p. 202]
All this, plus the political issues clarified by East Germany and France which I do not go into here, because they are in our Letter, which by this time you have seen, cleared away the last doubts. We were dealing with a revisionist opponent who did not scruple to use his post for the most devious maneuvers and deceptions. He was bent on splitting the British party because the majority there opposed him, just as he had done in France. Turning minorities into majorities, while the real majority is expelled, is his forte (also known as great advances on all fronts). He was bent on splitting our party too, and that was what his allies proceeded to try to do here.
Perhaps we were late in recognizing this reality. Perhaps we did not recognize it in the ideal order — from theory to politics to. organization—but in another order. But we have recognized it now, and we will fight it to the end. Lenin, you may recall, failed to recognize the revisionist ulcer in the Second International until the war showed him what Kautskyism was. This took bun a long time. But it did not take him long to recognize revisionism in his own party, and he fought it from the beginning. We too recognized Pabloism in our party fairly soon (although we did not know its full name at the start) and it was only as the fight developed that we recognized its kinship with the International revisionist leadership. But our slowness, if that's what it was, does not overshadow the fact that we did catch on before it was too late. We hope you'll do the same.
Your method of determining who is responsible for the split—find out "Cui prodest?"—is interesting, but rather limited. In some splits (politically unmotivated) it's in no one's interest. In others it can be shown (and I think this is the case most of the time) that it's in the interest of both sides.
You say, "Under such conditions (where the Minority appeared to be the defenders of the International politically and organizationally) the minority had every interest to stay in the party and to let a political discussion develop." That sounds reasonable, I admit. If I was in such a situation as you describe, that's probably what I would do: I'd not only want to remain in the party, but I'd fight to remain in, and I'd subordinate every other consideration of an organizational character to stay in just so long as I'd have the right to continue to present my political views. But the question then arises: Why didn't the Minority do that? Why, on the contrary, did it follow precisely the opposite course?
Why did it start sabotaging party work? Why did it insist that it was bureaucratic for the Majority to publish its Plenum resolutions in the magazine unless it also published the Minority resolutions? Why did it discontinue daily activity? Why did it withhold party funds? Why did it insist that there could no longer be educational discussions in the branches but only debates ("even on The Origin of the Family")? Why did it refuse to accept the offer to run Bartell for Mayor in New York? Why did it refuse to allow a debate on East Germany? (With regard to your explanation on the slogan of withdrawal of the troops in East Germany, I don't find it very strong. The fact is that in action the masses were demanding such a withdrawal, and Pablo — clearly meant something else. Such a resolution, whatever merits it may have, is inadequate under such circumstances.
Then came the IS letter of August 10, signed by you, Frank and Pablo. I don't have the documents before me, but I recall that you said you had seen Cannon's speech and letter and were distressed by their false implications, etc.; you also said twice that you did not intend to do anything about it. Because of the French strike, we did not receive the letter until Aug. 31. We began to compose a reply. Before we had finished, and without waiting for the reply, the IS three days later sent another letter. (This one was not signed; I assume and hope that you had left on your trip by then.) The tone of this was altogether different, although nothing new had happened in the meantime. Pablo denounced us for "the latest issue of the FI." What was this issue? It was the one in which, in the most guarded language, we let the readers know that we repudiated the conception on "sharing of power" that Clarke, in violation of his post, had smuggled into the previous issue of the FI. (In addition, we reprinted without comment Pablo's own article on the post-Stalin period, despite our strong opposition to much of it.)
What did this mean? One would have to be blind not to understand it Pablo, instead of congratulating us for repudiating a revisionist article, was condemning us for doing so. To us that spoke more clearly than a thousand resolutions as to where he stood in the fight against revisionism.
Furthermore, he demanded that we stop printing what we were saying about the Soviet Union, Germany, etc., because our articles were not in line with what he was saying. This —mind you —in the midst of a pre-world congress discussion, on new events on which the International had not yet adopted a position.
And to make his attitude clearer yet, he attacked us for distributing our bulletins directly to the sections, in.stead of through the IS.
In other words, he wanted us to publish Clarke's line and held over our head the threat that if we didn't we'd be acting in violation, of the 3WC, which never even took a line on these questions, and he threatened us because we were distributing bulletins in a way we have been doing ever since our movement was formed, with the knowledge and approval of the IS. To us, it was clearly an effort not to promote an international discussion on a correct and objective basis, but to strangle the discussion by creating an atmosphere of organizational threats which could only muddy up the political discussion,
This was followed by his organization of a faction in Britain, and an attempt to intimidate and throttle Burns and prevent him from participating in the international discussion on an equal basis.
And this was followed by what for me was the final straw. He had asked us to meet with either you or him. As soon as we heard that your trip, unlike his, was actually going through, we accepted. On the same day that we got your letter 'saying that for financial reasons you might not be able to complete the trip (to which we replied in a wire you may not have received that we would raise the money for the completion), we got a letter from Pablo informing us that it would not do for us to meet with you because you were not an "official" representative.
[p. 203]
whether or not they raised it vocally —and while I won't dispute that point, we have considerable evidence that they did — and it was our job not only to repeat what they were staying but to go beyond that and raise the slogans that were needed, even if the masses were not in position to voice them then. This whole business of East Germany, which I can't go into properly here, was most revealing to us. When the news came, we were happy, elated; the faces of the Cochranites became grim and moody; it was evident even physically that the news was not welcome to them: they no longer wanted to learn from events. And one of their top leaders (not a rank and filer) told us that it was correct not to demand the withdrawal of the Soviet troops because that would play into the hands of US imperialism! That was how the American Pabloites were educating their followers, not along the lines of your explanations.) And why did they impose faction discipline on all their members, subject to expulsion from the faction, not to attend the 25th Anniversary meeting in New York? Is that the behavior of people who think they have every interest in remaining in the party? Is that the kind of behavior that supports your theory?
The truth is that there was nothing in the world that could keep them in our party any longer — at least not on a basis acceptable to the practices of democratic centralism. They were eager to go, they were wild to go, not even a brick wall would have kept them from going, and as they left they heaved a sign of relief. (Only five of them were suspended by the plenum; the others could have remained by simply repudiating the anti-party boycott, and without giving up any of their rights as a minority, including the right to differ on the suspensions of the five. But they didn't even respond to this possibility; they fled.) This is the only revolutionary party in this country; the only one that has a generally correct position on all the basic questions, but they were acting under pressures that made it impossible for them to remain any longer as a minority within it. There was also another reason, to which I will return.
As for us, we had no intention of trying to do the impossible Moreover, we had no intention of destroying the party in the process. What kind of party would it be if we surrendered to such a boycott without any disciplinary measures? If they could get away with that, what couldn't they get away with? It would mean the end of the party as a disciplined organization. That price would be too high to pay under any circumstances, and we certainly would not pay it under these.
There was another reason why they wanted to leave now, and I will tell it to you in case you do not know it. Shortly after Clarke left, the Minority began to take stock of the International situation and, under pressure of questioning of its members, began to tell them that although it had Pablo, that is, "a majority of the ideological leadership in the International," it unfortunately did not have the support of the majority of the International itself, which tended to give the Majority tendency a "mechanical majority" in the International. Simultaneously Bartell and the others began to denigrate the size and influence of the International just as he did that of the SWP after it became clear that they had the support of no more than one-fifth of our members. We took stock too, and came to the conclusion that in an honest 4WC our view would be able to win the support of a decisive majority of the International. Note, I said "honest" —that is, unrigged, on the basis of the real relationship of forces in the International. But that was just the rub. Neither Pablo nor the Cochranites wanted an honest congress to settle all questions. That was the reason for their raising organizational questions to embitter and confuse the atmosphere. That was the reason for their wanting and organizing a split in our party and in the British party. With such splits, Pablo would use his position to recognize the minority in each case, and thus turn up with a "majority" at the WC —as he showed he knows how to do by the French split. And that, Ernest, is another reason why there was nothing we could do to prevent the split of the minorities either here or in Britain— or elsewhere if necessary.
You refer to Cannon's remark about the party suddenly becoming a prison for those under pressure of alien forces. You don't try to explain why that happened to our Minority, or maybe you haven't yet figured it out. But you turn it around and ask why has the world movement become such a prison to us? The answer is that it hasn't. This is our ideological movement and we have no reason or wish to break out of it. On the contrary, we intend to live in and build it, and we are quite confident that we will succeed. But Pablo's regime has become a prison to genuine Trotskyists — for the reasons given above. We do not trust it any longer, we have no confidence in it politically or any other way. We see an irreconcilable conflict, and we propose the genuine Trotskyists replace the Pablo regime by a Trotskyist regime, free of all trickery and manipulation and guided by a line that will be both orthodox and alert to all the revolutionary opportunities for building the party of world revolution. We hope that you will join in this work. I know that such a step will not be easy for you, but I hope that you too can reconsider and review the past and not hesitate, out of such subjective factors as the fact that you wrote the resolution which means one thing to you and another to the Pabloites who will have the power to enforce it, to take this course if it seems the correct one to you on further reflection.
I haven't touched on everything I'd liked to, but my time is running out, and I want to finish by posing a few questions to you:
Why should the SWP leadership, which you acknowledge has always practiced principled politics in the past, suddenly change so radically? (The "explanation" in the IS Bureau letter is hardly worth discussion and I cannot be lieve you take it very seriously. Why should it be assumed that the SWP Majority rather than the Minority has succumbed to the difficult objective conditions here? One must do more than make arbitrary statements.)
Sweeping aside the Pabloite bombast, why is it that the International has suffered so many losses and splits since the 3WC? Is "Cannonism" to carry the brunt for this too, and is Pabloism free of the responsibility?
Why is it in your letter to me you say you have always considered us to be principled up to now, while on the same date you allow your name to be signed to an IS Bureau letter which repeats every calumny that has ever been directed against us, and applies them not only to the present but to the past?
With warmest greetings, George Breitman