DURING THE PAST thirty years world Trotskyism has been assailed by two basic trends of revisionism. Both of these concern the nature and role of the Soviet Bureaucracy, and in turn emerged during certain difficult periods of our movement's history.
The years of the middle and late thirties found our numerically weak international movement under constant pressure from the forces of imperialism then actively engaged in the preparation of war on the Soviet Union. Things came to a head in the autumn of 1939 when a large group headed by Professor Burnham and Max Schachtman opened an all-out attack inside the SWP of the United States, against the theory that the Soviet Union was a degenerated workers state, maintaining that it should not be defended in the event of imperialist attack. The bureaucracy, they claimed, was a new class—a bureaucratic collectivist class. This point of view was mercilessly opposed by Leon Trotsky and the record of that great struggle is to be found in the books, In Defence of Marxism, and The Struggle for a Proletarian Party.
Trotskyism emerged from the second World War still isolated from the mass Labour movements, and weak numerically. Thanks to the treachery of Stalinism in Western Europe, the old capitalist politicians assumed leadership once again, with the Stalinist parties retaining powerful support amongst the working masses, particularly in France and Italy. In Britain, the Labour Party came to power and successfully headed off the mass movement against Toryism. A period of slow, painful work in building up our sections began, under the most difficult material conditions. As in the years before the war, our movement had practically no financial resources, and a terrible shortage of cadres.
Then in 1947-53 came the period of the Cold War. The question was constantly posed: could we build revolutionary parties in time before war was upon us? During this period certain prominent individuals in the Trotskyist movement, headed by a man named Pablo—under combined pressures of European Stalinism and world imperialism—began to revise and reject the fundamental principles, criteria and method of analysis of the Trotskyist movement. The result of all this was a profoundly pessimistic world perspective and a false orientation based on a sceptical rationalization: the imminence and inevitability of the Third World War. This prognosis presumed not only the organic incapacity of the American and Western European working class to prevent such a war (and thereby dismissed its revolutionary potentialities) but conversely it also attributed to the imperialist bourgeois a power, homogeneity and stability which it did not possess. Trotsky's prognosis of Socialism or Barbarism was consequently replaced with the Pabloite schema of Barbarism first, Socialism afterwards.
Pablo developed the theory that since the next war would be against the Soviet Union, it would by its very nature be transformed almost immediately into an international civil war. Under these conditions, so the argument went, the Stalinist parties would move to the left and in certain circumstances could be expected to take the power as has happened in Eastern Europe and China. At first sight this looked reasonable enough, and it was not until Stalin died that the real face of the theory was revealed. In the summer of 1953 Pablo issued a draft document called 'The Rise and Decline of Stalinism'. In this he advanced the idea that sections of the bureaucracy in the USSR could unite with the Soviet masses and successfully re-introduce Soviet democracy.
When the East German uprising took place, Pablo opposed the withdrawal of the Red Army from Eastern Germany. It then became obvious that from the theory of 'international civil war' and the possibility of the Stalinist Parties taking power, Pablo, copying Isaac Deutscher, had now extended this theory into the USSR itself. For after all, if the bureaucracies of the CPs outside Russia could take power, why could not fundamental changes be introduced inside Russia by more 'left' or 'liberal' sections of the bureaucracy?
Like the theories of Burnham and Schachtman, Pablo revised the fundamental Trotskyist conception of the parasitic role of the Stalinist bureaucracy and by implication ascribed to it a conscious and progressive historical role. Whereas the orthodox Trotskyist movement from its inception maintained that the bureaucracy must be overthrown by the Soviet masses under the revolutionary leadership of a regenerated communist movement in the USSR, Pablo now placed a question mark over this basic proposition, and the result led to a series of splits in the world Trotskyist movement.
In France, Pablo placed the PB [Political Bureau] and the CC [Central Committee] of the French Section under the discipline of the IS, refused to allow the PCI to designate its own PB, forced a split in the party and bureaucratically expelled the orthodox, proletarian majority. Two months before the split which he consciously provoked, he registered the PCI with the Paris Police Department under the leadership of the minority nominated by him!
In Britain, Pablo assisted Lawrence to organize a secret faction behind the backs of the democratically-elected leadership of the section. When the overwhelming majority of this leadership rejected Pablo's policies, he utilized this faction in an attempt to blackmail the section into supporting his policy. He informed the majority that Lawrence was not subject to the discipline of the British section but to the discipline of the International, in other words, Lawrence could do whatever he pleased, provided it suited Pablo, who at that time was the only official of the International present in Paris. The first thing he did was to refuse to implement majority decisions regarding the policy of our weekly paper. This led to a split on November 24th 1953.
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Three weeks later, on December 15th 1953, Pablo constituted the Lawrence group as his official section and assisted them to re-organize their ranks in an all-out effort to capture control over our paper. The fight continued over six months, and at the end the policies of both Lawrence and Pablo were decisively rejected.
Several weeks after this, Lawrence took Pablo's policy seriously about the possibilities of the Communist Parties doing the job: he disbanded his group, stating that there was no need for an independent revolutionary party in Britain.
From that day to this, Pablo has never uttered one word of explanation of Lawrence's conduct. The fact that in 1954 his entire 'British Section' collapsed is kept well in the background.
Instead he set out to build another 'section' as if nothing had happened. Anxious to get some support, he obtained agreement with a small group of sectarians headed by G. [Grant]. Whilst, in true opportunist style, this group declare their opposition to Pablo in private conversation, they nevertheless manage to support him publicly in their journal 'Workers' International Review'.
This unprincipled alliance is directed mainly against the orthodox Trotskyists. It is designed to 'pressurize' us into an unprincipled unity by an all-out effort to confuse workers. In publishing the following document by Pablo with a reply, we urge our comrades to study both with great care.
The gulf between Pabloite revisionism and ourselves grows wider and wider. We feel sure that this bulletin will be of important educational value for all the members of our organization.