Los Angeles, Calif.
Dear Gerry:
For your confidential information you will find enclosed a draft of the resolution on the unity question which the Los Angeles NC group is proposing to the Political Committee, along with my covering letter. It can be assumed that the PC itself will shortly inform you of its decision in the matter. Meantime, the material should not be copied or circulated.
Our opinion out here is that you made a mistake in accepting the Germain thesis as the central point of discussion. We should discuss our own documents and stand on them. As far as we are concerned, the documents of the Pabloite IS have no more standing than the resolutions adopted by our Plenum on the Twentieth Congress and the Hungarian Revolution, and other documents of our recent convention, and the resolutions adopted by your own recent convention, and documents produced by any other section of the International Committee. We are governed by our own resolution on the crisis of Stalinism and the Hungarian Revolution and haven't the slightest intention of accepting the products of the Pabloites as the basis for our political line, or even as the basis for discussion. If, as now appears extremely unlikely, things should come to a discussion with the Pabloites in a joint committee to draw up a common platform, all the mentioned documents would be put on the table on an equal basis, and an entirely new statement of political points would have to be written.
Moreover, it is our opinion out here in Los Angeles that Sinclair [Hunter] made an extremely exaggerated criticism of the Germain document, misinterpreted it in some respects, and in other respects even appears to have misrepresented it, and thus laid himself open to a demagogic counterattack from Germain. Germain's answer, like all his polemics, is a lawyer's brief making a "case." We have not failed to notice that, under cover of a reply to Sinclair's exaggerations and misinterpretations, Germain attempts to defend the whole course of Pabloism against us, to pass us off as "Pabloites" who have finally seen the error of our ways, and even to introduce Trotsky as a "Pabloite". This reference to us is a frivolous insult, but in his reference to Trotsky he carries frivolity to the point of obscenity.
[p. 68]
Your problem in England, as we see it, is not to engage in daily or weekly exchanges with the Grant group or the IS in Paris, but to put your own ranks in order against the Pabloite gangster attack. Your best argument there is the record. Now that the Grant-group, and also Germain, have opened up the question of the responsibility for the split, you have no choice but to educate and reeducate your young cadres about what really happened in 1953, especially in England. All the truth and all the justice is on your side in such a discussion. I don't think you have much to worry about in regard to the international "unity" maneuver of the Pabloites. Once it becomes clear—as it will in the near future that the SWP is not going to be flattered into playing a divisive role, everything will fall into place.
Fraternally,
James P. Cannon
JPC: ra
Enc.