[p. 165]
A grave crisis has just broken out within the Trotskyist organization in the United States, the Socialist Workers Party. Hardly had the political discussion in the international Trotskyist movement opened up than the SWP leadership acted to expel more than a third of the members of its party, including all the principal working class sections. This bureaucratic expulsion is unprecedented in the history of the Trotskyist movement. The expelled comrades committed no public act of indiscipline. What they were condemned for is their defense of the political line of the Fourth International which the SWP leadership itself pretended to agree with up to a few months ago. They have been expelled for their ideas.
To divert the attention of the international Trotskyist movement from this act of bureaucratic expulsion, the SWP leaders have at the same time opened an unspeakable attack against the leadership and the political line of the International. Without setting forth their suddenly discovered divergences within the movement, without even previously calling them to the attention of the members of the Fourth International, they immediately publicly appealed to them to eliminate its present leadership.
[p. 166]
This appeal is backed up by ignoble calumnies collected from the dustbin of imperialist agents: the International has capitulated to Stalinism; it is opposed to the withdrawal of foreign troops from Germany; it has abandoned the perspective of a political revolution in the USSR to overthrow the Soviet bureaucracy, etc., etc.
Naturally there is not a word of truth in all that. The SWP leaders who express their approval and even enthusiasm for the work of political elaboration of the present leadership of the International, including the work of the Third World Congress of the Fourth International, are fabricating "political divergences" in a cynical manner to justify their attack against the existence of a world party of the socialist revolution.
For that is precisely what is involved.
The SWP leaders, themselves guilty of bureaucratic actions of unheard-of brutality, pretend to defend democracy in the International against the organizational interventions of its leadership in the national sections. In reality the leadership of the International has never expelled anyone for his political opinions. Ithas always safeguarded the functioning of the Trotskyist movement according to the healthy rules of democratic centralism. It has always defended both the right of the majority to apply its political line in public and the right of the minorities to defend their conceptions within the movement. But it defended these rules on the international scale and not only in the framework of a single section. It thus expressed the maturity of the revolutionary movement conscious of the impossibility of an adequate political elaboration in the framework of a national section. It is because the SWP leadership took account of the fact that the International would never accept the bureaucratic expulsion of the majority of the worker cadres of the Trotskyist party in the United States that it suddenly discovered the utilization of "Cominternist methods" in the International. As Trotsky so pertinently wrote: Sectarians who complain about the "methods" of the Fourth International as a rule maintain a despotic regime within their own groupings.
The SWP leaders are not embarrassed to heap up calumnies on lies, lies on calumnies. They speak of the International leadership as "usurpers, agents of Pablo." They take over from the little Bleibtreu-Lambert clique which deserted the Fourth International, the accusation that the International is oriented toward "Pabloism." In reality, the "usurpers" who direct the Fourth International, were elected at the Third World Congress by representatives of almost thirty sections, by unanimous vote (including those of the Bleibtreu-Lambert tendency which had not yet at that moment deserted the Fourth International.) These same "usurpers" have been confirmed in their function by each meeting of the International Executive Committee held since the Third World Congress. The SWP leaders are not embarrassed to accuse this collective leadership of the International of "supporting itself on the apparatus." A more ignoble lie cannot be imagined; the SWP leaders know better than anyone else that the international leadership has no "independent apparatus." It has no material force, no weight other than that of ideas, of the correct political line it is defending, confirmed many times by the facts. These so-called "capitulators to Stalinism" have been the only ones to predict the crisis now shaking the regime of the Soviet bureaucracy. They were the only ones to predict the rebirth of the movement of the masses against this bureaucracy as it has already been manifested at a future stage in the USSR itself. It is thanks to this political line that the international Trotskyist movement has succeeded in dealing with the world situation for three years without any disorientation, and with increasing confidence in its own future, confirmed for the first time by brilliant organizational successes in numerous countries. Therein is the origin of theunity of the present leadership of the International. But that remains un-understand-able to little apprentice-bureaucrats full of scorn for political ideas and having appreciation only for "the apparatus."
The irresponsible action of the SWP leadership, deliberately trying to split and disintegrate the Fourth International, incontestably delivers a harsh blow to the international Trotskyist movement. Above all it delivers a blow to the American Trotskyist organization, it destroys an important part of its achievement, of 25 years of patient efforts to construct a revolutionary cadre on a principled basis. It above all results from the stagnation and slow disintegration of this organization, derailed by a leadership which has lost its principles under the pressure of the reactionary atmosphere imperialism imposes in its country.
All the sections, all the members of the Fourth International will find in their political convictions and in their organizational loyalty the strength to repel scornfully the arguments of the splitters and calumniators. The International will continue on its road, the road of a compact political majority expressing itself in the Congress prepared under perfectly democratic conditions. The International will continue to build itself as a united world party regulated by a single discipline and not as a vague federation of national sects, each dominated by unprincipled "bosses." The International will continue to root itself in the real movement of the masses in each country, resolutely turning its back on all the adventurers and fantastic sectarians who think that repetitions replace the necessity for constant political elaboration, that invectives replace the necessity for a patient effort to convince the proletariat of the correctness of revolutionary ideas. Herein is the road of Trotskyism, of Trotskyism which is being verified and realized in the historical facts of our epoch. This is the road which will lead to the growing affirmation and final victory of the Fourth International.