[p. 163]
"Another crisis among the Trotskyists," say our enemies, or those who follow our movement superficially, from the outside, as amateurs, and who are not very much stirred by the evolution of the workers movement in general, its setbacks, its defeats or its successes.
However, by its very nature, the revolutionary movement is a lengthy, convulsive process, enveloped and intersected as it is by the explosive and tumultuous struggle of the classes in our epoch. There has not been any rest or peace in its ranks, nor will there be up to the final victory and completion of socialism.
Struggles of tendencies, of factions, splits are part of the dialectical progression of the workers movement. Only an intimate and profound fusion of the revolutionary Marxist vanguard with the real movement of its class could attenuate the scope and frequency of the convulsions.
But the vanguard does not at all form itself apart from the class in order to ally itself and then become fused with it It emerges, it is formed from the struggles of the class, and is subjected to all the repercussions of the evolution of the class struggle. The more profound and extensive its bases in the class are, the more chances it has to evolve in a less convulsive manner.
For example, such could have been the case with the movement of the Third International if its Leninist line of the first four Congresses had been maintained and if the Soviet Union had not experienced the bureaucratic degeneration in which it is still involved.
Trotskyism has experienced many crises and will probably go through others for this principal reason: because it has not been able to secure up to now, broad and profound bases in the class because the historical conditions until the aftermath of the last war did not lend themselves to it. The other tendencies in the workers movement, reformism and Stalinism, are passing through an infinitely more profound and devastating chronic crisis than our relatively benign splits for a quite different reason: mainly because of the incompatibility of their line, reflecting the direct pressure of the bourgeoisie in the case of reformism or of the Soviet bureaucracy in the case of Stalinism, with the interests and aspirations of their mass base. Those who comment on the crisis of Trotskyism with complacence or skepticism would do well to look at what is happening around them in the other currents of the workers movement beginning with the crisis within the USSR.
[p. 164]
But let us examine more closely the present concrete crisis our movement is passing through.
Here is a tendency including among its cadres some of the "oldest Trotskyists" of our international movement, with Cannon and the other American leaders, some Englishmen, some others here and there, which is revolting against the organization and line of the International, is detaching itself and preaching a new "regroupment" of "orthodox" Trotskyists. The documents, both those published internally as well as those we make public today, demonstrate clearly that up to very recently this tendency solidarized with the rest of the International and loudly proclaimed its perfect agreement with the line of the Third World Congress and the subsequent Plenums.
This fact alone demonstrates that, independently of the personal and conjunctural causes which have naturally existed, especially in the cases of Cannon himself and Burns in England and have played a great role in the form and precipitation of the crisis, there was an objective basis for the crisis which must be understood.
What has been the orientation and immediate objectives of the International's policy in recent years? To integrate our nuclei of the Marxist revolutionary vanguard into the real mass movement in each country in order to create thereby the revolutionary mass parties of tomorrow and at the same time to fuse them all into a genuine world Marxist revolutionary party, the International.
In the framework of what political appraisal and perspectives? Of an international situation characterized by the energetic preparations of a united imperialism is devoting itself, for war against the Revolution in all its forms: anti-capitalist states, colonial Revolution, international workers movement, and of the extreme polarization of opposing social forces heading toward a decisive and final struggle.
In this order of ideas, the instance of our attitude toward the organizations and movements influenced by the Soviet bureaucracy has held our particular attention. For, if we were ready to accept more particularly any orientation of our work toward reformist, certain centrist or national-revolutionary organizations and movements, the resistances were far greater in regard to a correct and non-sectarian attitude toward the organizations and movements at present still influencing the majority of the most politically developed elements and forces which are in practice directed by the force of circumstances against capitalism and imperialism.
In 1938 at the time of the proclamation of the Fourth International, at the apogee of the counter-revolutionary course of Stalinism in the USSR and in the world at its lowest level of influence upon the international labor movement, our perspectives seemed to be those of a definitive defeat and destruction of Stalinism through the war which was rapidly approaching and through a direct rallying of the masses to our nuclei acting as independent poles of attraction from the outside.
This entire assemblage of predictions and of the correct tactic at the time was overturned from top to bottom by the different course taken by History. The Soviet Union came out victorious from the war and a whole constellation of other anti-capitalist states has arisen. Far from disappearing, the organizations and movements influenced by the Soviet bureaucracy or bound to it in one way or another, have acquired an importance unequalled in the past.
At the same time through the conjunction of the revolutionary forces outside and within the USSR, which have ripened meanwhile, Stalinism, that is to say the rule of the Soviet bureaucracy in the Soviet Union and its grip on the international workers movement, has entered into its phase of decline. Stalin's death precipitated the evolution.
Consequently the crisis of international Stalinism takes the aspect, not essentially of an organizational dislocation but of a fermentation and differentiation contained within it from which it is necessary to profit.
Far from losing their importance for us, the organizations and movements influenced by the Soviet bureaucracy have on the contrary acquired all the more importance in the present situation.
However that is not the opinion of Cannon and his international tendency. In reality they remain genuinely "orthodox," faithful to the schemas and tactic of 1938. They proclaim themselves revolutionary parties of the class and its leadership, acting independently from the outside, expecting the masses taught by Stalinist and reformist treachery to leave them and rally directly around themselves.
They have the same attitude as in 1938 toward the Stalinist organizations and movements as well as what concerns the USSR. Regardless of the colossal facts and events which have since happened.
For them these organizations and movements are quite simply reformist and counter-revolutionary "through and through." When these are small they have to be ignored completely, or when they are relatively important they have to be demolished from the outside.
In the USSR, on the other hand, they see no notable change. Everything continues essentially as before. Malenkov is a second Stalin and makes concessions only to the bureaucrats and restorationist elements. For example, Bleibtreu, their new-found ally, writes on this subject without laughing, that the whole new agricultural policy undertaken in the Soviet Union is designed to block the numerical progress of the proletariat which threatens the bureaucracy, by the compulsory reconversion of a part of its forces into peasants through a return to the land.
The greatest pedantries, the most desolating ossification of thought, are spread through the columns of The Militant and the Bleibtreu organ presented as the quintessence of "orthodox" Trotskyism, 1953.
However, in Cannon's case the matter is not limited to a crying tactical sectarianism, sterility and a tragic-comic dogmatism of thought. Cannon and his tendency function in the United States in 1953, the citadel of imperialism, the advance-post of the counter-revolutionary war, saturated with Stalinophobia, McCarthyism, the "witchhunt" and "spy scares."
[p. 165]
An organization and policy like those of the International today demands political intelligence, courage and sacrifice from American Trotskyists. They are like blazing garments on the bodies of the militants who bear them in this country. More than hollow phrases on "orthodox Trotskyism," the "program" and "principles" are needed to carry them.
Cannon, who so hastily casts off these garments and furiously breaks the walls of the prison which our international movement has become for him with its conception of centralized world organization and its policy of genuine fusion with the real forces of the revolution; Cannon, who recaptures his "liberty" just now on the eve of the new war and rises up as the champion of the "anti-Stalinist" struggle in the United States in 1953, demonstrates this by all that: that he is not only the representative of the sectarian and ossified tendency produced by the isolation of our movement, but of that part which is buckling before the reactionary pressure now prevailing in the United States, indirectly promoted in a deformed manner through a series of ideas and methods of struggle of the Cannonite faction.
Herein is the basic explanation of the so-sudden and brusque coup d'etat of this faction, of its shameless lies and calumnies launched against the International.
Cannon, who praised us up to May, 1953 and counted on our support to conduct his unprincipled struggle against the proletarian minority of his organization, discovered our "capitulation before Stalinism" practically only in July-August, 1953.
When, so to speak, we "betrayed" the revolt of the German workers in East Germany and the "Revolution" of the French workers during the August strikes. In effect Cannon needed a "proof" of our "treachery," located precisely after May, 1953, a sort of duplication by us of the sudden Social Democratic treachery of August 4, 1914, belated, but "decisive."
However, an enormous dose of cynicism and effrontery proper to people caught red-handed in betraying under hostile social pressures the policy and organization to which they had declared themselves attached for years was required to distort facts and texts to such a point, to dare to drape themselves in all their dignity as "old and orthodox Trotskyists" and to give themselves over to such grotesque exhibitions of confusionism, sectarianism, political adventurism and to such revolting factional operations in the name of "program, principles, tradition."
The truth is that the Cannonites precipitately deserted our international movement without daring to face it in its democratic organisms, before any political discussion, while the Fourth World Congress was being thoroughly prepared, having already unmasked and exposed themselves through the unprincipled struggle they have sought to conduct against the International and the confusionist, pessimistic and sectarian platform they were forced to begin to fabricate the better to embroider this unprincipled struggle.
Naturally no one in the International who knows its democratic functioning, the almost unanimous votes and decisions of its Congresses and Plenums in the recent years as well as the documents and true political positions taken by all concerned, could swallow the far-too-great lies to which the Cannonites now have recourse. Their hypocritical idignation against our "uncontrolled, secret and personal regime," our "methods," is aimed only to camouflage their own sordid operations in this domain and to facilitate the unprincipled combination which this faction is now practicing on the international plane. Its methods and morals equal its consummated degeneration. Can they really think they can deceive History in this way and mark out even a small road in it and build any future in that way? Cannon cries out "stop thief hoping to catch some ignorant or simple-minded people in his net.
However, one would indeed have to be naive to believe that our time is propitious for such operations. The faction of Cannonites, by the methods it uses and the ideas it strives to express, is a group condemned by history. It represents the current of our movement which went through the events of the war and the post-war period without understanding them, without having been able to find the capacity of readjusting itself to new conditions, and thus blazing a salutary trail into the heart of the real mass movement With the approach of the new war it is now decomposing ideologically and morally.
As for us, we will so act that its desertion, as lamentable and distressing as it is, instead of weakening us still further clarifies our ideas and our perspectives, better specifies our way of constructing revolutionary mass parties, binds us more closely to the real movement in each country and forges the International.
November 22, 1953