The December 1956 plenum voted to open a discussion on the situation in the World Trotskyist movement. Such a discussion has become necessary for the following reasons:
Four years have elapsed since the split in the international. These have been years of fast-moving historic events. We have analyzed these events and expressed our views on them in a series of documents. Our political positions have been made amply clear. But we have, as yet, failed to clarify an important aspect of the problem: a comprehensive review of the situation inside the world Trotskyist movement. Yet it too has altered considerably.
At the time of the split, Pablo's conciliationist line toward Stalinism constituted the most direct and immediate danger. The documents of the period consequently centered their main fire on this point.
Since then Stalinism has been unmasked more and more. The events of 1956 alone, from the 20th Congress in February up to the Hungarian uprising in October, have thoroughly exposed the criminal role of the Kremlin bureaucracy. These events precipitated a trend away from Stalinism which has been deserted by many of its adherents and supporters. Under these changed conditions the Pabloites sharply altered the course which had led to the split. In addition, they have advanced a new proposal for the reunification of the Fourth International (Unity Appeal, 18th Plenum IEC, November 1956).
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A fresh appraisal of the political possibilities for unity, therefore, becomes necessary. The political differences between the adherents of the IS and the IC have narrowed. The question then is naturally posed, why not a common organization?
We can gain most from the discussion if we start with the more general propositions flowing from the history, role, and functions of the Fourth International. Such an approach will help to determine our course on questions involving the future of the International.
The need for the Fourth International was posed in 1933 with the Stalinist capitulation to Hitler. This capitulation confronted the world working class with a second catastrophe within the span of one and the same generation—the bankruptcy of the Third International on top of the treachery of the Second International.
From then on these two traditional organizations loomed as the biggest internal obstacle to the solution of the crisis of proletarian leadership which they themselves had precipitated. They have since served to perpetuate and aggravate the crisis.
The conditions under which the struggle for the Fourth International unfolded precluded the rapid emergence of mass revolutionary parties. Nevertheless, it was possible and necessary to raise anew the banner of proletarian internationalism, to affirm the revolutionary program, and to begin assembling cadres.
These were the basic considerations behind the first call for the Fourth International, issued in 1934. But it was not until the end of 1938 that the founding congress was held. Thus the F.I. was no sooner formed than it had to face World War II.
No other movement was so carefully prepared ideologically and so far in advance, for the outbreak of war. Nevertheless, the outbreak of war in 1939 precipitated a crisis in the ranks of the F.I.
The Stalin-Hitler pact became the starting point for a revisionist current, led by Shachtman and Burnham, to discard the traditions and theoretical positions of the movement, beginning with the abandonment of the Trotskyist position on the class character of the Soviet Union and the nature and role of the Stalinist bureaucracy.
The Fourth International had to swim against the stream throughout the war. The bureaucratic machines, above all the Stalinists, exercised virtually unquestioned domination over the working class. This was equally true in the colonies and in the metropolitan centers.
The Trotskyist cadres suffered persecution unexampled in history. They were hounded by the fascists, the "democratic" imperialists, the native colonial bourgeoisie, and above all by the Stalinists.
Nowhere was it possible for the revolutionary vanguard to fuse with the mass. Nowhere was it possible for the revolutionists to break out of isolation.
With the end of the war, the Stalinists and Social Democrats experienced new gains: the installation of Stalinist puppet regimes in Eastern Europe and the rise of the Titoists in Yugoslavia; the emergence of the Stalinists as majority parties in Italy and France; the Social Democratic revival in West Germany, Belgium, Holland and the Scandinavian countries; the sweep of the British Laborites to power. This situation produced revisionist and opportunist tendencies throughout the Fourth International. (The Haston group in Britain, Morrow-Goldman in the U.S., the right-wing Geoffroi-Damazier in France, the pro-Stalinist tendency of Philip Goonewardena in Ceylon.)
Common to all these groupings was the abandonment of program, the scuttling of the struggle to build the revolutionary party, and capitulation to whatever power had the greatest attractive pull in the given country at the given time.
The wartime alliance of the imperialists, Stalinists, and the Social Democrats carried over into the most critical postwar period. The same forces that had straitjacketed the proletariat during the war continued their role in the initial postwar period. The policy of national unity for the preservation of capitalism was crowned with coalition cabinets and the disarming of the masses.
In France and Italy the workers were mobilized to rebuild capitalism. In both countries Stalinists took the lead as the majority working-class party.
In Britain the Laborites subjugated the workers to the capitalists, with the British Stalinists more pro-Tory than the Laborite right wing. In Germany, the workers were held prostrate under the combined occupation forces. In Eastern Europe, the Soviet armies and secret police destroyed the revolutionary initiative of the workers and subjected them to the rule of the native CPs.
After relative capitalist stability had been attained in the metropolitan centers, the West European workers were caught off guard by the threat of war, the program of militarism, the apparent polarization of society behind the two major world powers—the U.S.A. on the one side and the U.S.S.R. on the other. The choice appeared to be either the Stalinist bureaucracy or the imperialists. Both the imperialists and the Stalinists did their utmost to present matters as if this was the only real choice.
On the one side the imperialists and the Social Democracy demanded an alignment with "democracy." On the other, the Stalinists demanded an alignment with the bureaucracy, not on the basis of struggle for socialism, but for the coexistence, people's front policy of the Kremlin.
The Chinese revolution and the Korean war produced a double pressure on the Fourth International:
1. It appeared that the Korean war was the beginning of a world conflagration. This posed the question—do we have the time to build revolutionary vanguard parties when the definitive showdown is upon us?
2. The revolutionary victory in China, like in Yugoslavia, was achieved under the leadership of a Stalinist party. Does this mean that Stalinism, which had been responsible for a whole chain of revolutionary defeats over a long period, had changed its character? If this were so, then the crisis of proletarian leadership was being resolved in new ways—ways never envisaged at the founding of the Fourth International.
At this stage, the Pabloites began to subordinate the struggle for the Fourth International to the power struggle between Moscow and Washington, introducing a conciliatory policy toward Stalinism. They sought to justify their policy through the following schema:
1. World War III is about to begin.
2. The war will be merged with revolutions from the outset.
3. The Kremlin bureaucracy fighting for its life will no longer be able to betray but will be on the side of the revolutions.
[p. 19]
4. The Communist parties can henceforth go only to the left (theory of "gauchissement").
5. They can project a revolutionary perspective as did the Yugoslav and Chinese CP's.
6. There is a growing homogeneity within the two camps heading for a showdown.
This line was injected at the Third World Congress in 1951. The team of Pablo, Clarke, Mestre, and Lawrence then used the Congress documents as a club against the orthodox Trotskyists who resisted Stalinist conciliationism.
To this must be added Pablo's views which, although not included in the documents, served to animate his activities.
1. The theory of centuries of degenerated workers states.
2. The idea that the program of transitional demands—the founding program of the Fourth International—was no longer valid.
3. The notion that the Theses on the American Revolution had also been negated.
The French organization was the first to perceive and to offer resistance to Pablo's line. It was, therefore, the first party in which Pablo proceeded to expel the majority from the F.I. Pabloite factions were then organized in the other Trotskyist parties and groups.
We were first alerted to the menace of Pabloism through the activities of the Cochranite faction. There was no course open but to alert the world Trotskyist movement and to urge upon them an open struggle against Pablo. This was done through the November 1953, Open Letter which set the following process into motion:
The British and Canadian Trotskyists broke with Pablo, after which the Pabloite minorities in these organizations split away. The British and Canadian majorities were joined by the Swiss, the French PCI and various groups in Latin America to found the International Committee. Other anti-Pabloite minority groups emerged inside organizations controlled by adherents of the I.S.
But the impact of the struggle launched by the Open Letter went beyond the limits of the organizations belonging to the I.C. A parallel process to repudiate liquidationism started inside organizations which remained affiliated to the I.S. It produced a differentiation among these forces. Those who were most determined to follow a liquidationist course to the end, broke with Pablo and repudiated the F.I. altogether.
Pablo himself pulled back sharply from his own line. Liquidationism also became very unpopular in the organizations adhering to the I.S. Pablo's ability to maneuver and to manipulate was reduced.
The objective situation came powerfully to our assistance. The beginning of this development can be traced to the German workers uprising against the Stalinist bureaucracy in the summer of 1953. The uprising revealed the profound gulf between the working class and the Stalinist bureaucracy and the ripening conditions for the political revolution.
The Yugoslav break with the Kremlin in 1948 appeared as a conflict of two rival bureaucracies. The German uprising, however, was a spontaneous action of the workers as a class, seeking to overthrow the bureaucracy as a caste.
The French General Strike of 1953 was also a spontaneous action of the working class which has been heavily dominated by the Stalinists. These two events exploded Pablo's schema that the working class would act only through the traditional parties.
It wasn't that the Pabloites were not aware of the crisis of Stalinism and the growing resistance of the masses to the tyrannical rule of the bureaucracy; they were aware of it and wrote at length about it. But they were mesmerized by their prediction of the imminence of war and the fear that the crisis of proletarian leadership could not be resolved in the short interval by way of building independent parties.
But the uprising of the East German workers and the French general strike emphasized once again the imperative need of a conscious leadership expressing the needs and interests of the working class through a revolutionary party.
The Pabloite statements dealing with these events, failed to stress this central lesson. Their analysis tended to obscure the Stalinist treachery.
The year 1956 provided a decisive test of political line. The 20th Congress of the CPSU was the high-water mark of concessions by which the bureaucracy sought to bridge the gulf separating it from the masses. The repudiation of Stalin was the first serious political concession designed to placate the masses.
Not long thereafter there followed the upsurge in Poland and the mass uprising in Hungary. As a result of these world shaking events the breach in the Fourth International was not widened but narrowed. The press of the two tendencies treated the events in essentially the same way.
There has been no specific repudiation of Pablo's past line. Nor has there been any specific Pabloite statement as to whether or not the Transitional Program, for example, remains a dead letter as he claimed in 1953. On the contrary, Pablo and his supporters claim they have been right all the time and have been vindicated by the events. They do this by conveniently forgetting their false prognostications and claiming credit for analyses and prognoses which derived not from Pablo's specific line but from that of Trotskyism.
Be that as it may, we cannot justify the continuation of a split because the Pabloites refuse to admit they were wrong in the past, unless the wrong line of the past continues to determine the course today. This does not seem to be the case. Pablo is moving away from the specific line which inspired a liquidationist wing in the F.I.
In the light of this, there would seem to be no serious obstacle to the unification of the Fourth International. Unification would demonstrate serious principled politics as against bitter-end factionalism, which has often plagued the movement in a number of countries. It would facilitate more effective intervention in the Stalinist crisis. It would be more than an arithmetical addition of forces—it would be a source of new inspiration to the young Trotskyist militants. It would signal a new period of consolidation of cadres for the great task for which the F.I. was founded.
The period of the death agony of Stalinism is the period of the vindication of Trotskyism. But to win a genuine and lasting victory, the Trotskyist program and organization must triumph. The conditions for this have never been more favorable. Unity on a principled basis could facilitate such a victory and is, therefore, progressive.
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What should be done to accomplish such a unity?
1. We could start with a common discussion of the past differences. Such a course would most likely lead not to unity, but on the contrary, to recriminations, bitterness and further split.
2. We could unify and follow up with a discussion of the past. This too could lead to a factional struggle, if not to another split.
3. The correct way would be to determine in advance of unity, not the respective positions in the old disputes, but the scope of present agreement on political line and organizational procedure.
From all indications, there should be no serious political obstacle to unity. The main difficulty may crop up on the organizational plane.
The split in France in 1951, Pablo's interventions in other parties and groups which led to the general split in 1953 brought to a head an unhealthy situation not only in the politics of the International, but also in its organizational functioning.
The organizational difficulties derive in large part from the numerical weakness of the International and its material poverty. The International is in no position to create executive bodies representing the most authoritative leaders of the sections. This situation existed in the International from the beginning. Its leader and inspirer, Leon Trotsky, lived in exile in Mexico while the executive center was in Europe. This in itself created a condition of duality in the leadership which sometimes led to friction. Such friction was minimized on the one hand by exercising prudence in organizational matters and by Trotsky's great authority and political wisdom.
During the war the ties between the sections were disrupted and the International bodies could function only loosely. Their main task was to maintain continuity of program and organization; to try and persuade but not to order. Under such conditions the International could set itself only modest goals.
When communications were reestablished after the war, the responsibility for reconstituting the world center was entrusted to the European Committee which had developed during the war under the conditions of Nazi occupation.
The European Committee had become the leader and organizer of the European Trotskyists. It was both the political and administrative center for all the groups. This centralization suited the needs of strictly illegal functioning imposed by war. The young and inexperienced cadres looked to the European Committee for leadership. The authoritative prewar leaders of the sections had mostly perished.
Once the organizational relationship had again been extended beyond Europe, a new approach to the proper functions of the International center became necessary. The strongest Trotskyist organizations were located outside Europe. Their leaderships contained some of the most experienced cadres in the movement. These leading elements were least able to participate in the active leadership at the International center.
This situation required a clear understanding of the limitations imposed upon the International center. It required consultation with the most important sections in advance of important decisions and actions.
The elaborate statutes adopted at the Second Congress in 1948 were based on a high degree of centralism. They could probably pass scrutiny if conceived of as a model for an ideal international organization, having the power and resources to assemble in one place the most representative leading cadre.
For the first few years the International leadership tried to function within the framework, not of abstract statutes, but of the existing reality. When Pablo was struck with a new vision of the world and became obsessed with the immediate need of imposing his line on the world movement, he discovered the exaggerated powers vested in the I.S. by the 1948 statutes and proceeded to recklessly invoke them.
Placing the P.C.I. under receivership through the medium of a parity committee, with an I.S. representative as final arbiter, was an action without precedent in the Trotskyist movement. One has to go to the Comintern since its Stalinist degeneration to find such a precedent.
To prohibit Burns [Healy], a member of the I.S., from freely expressing his differences with that body's documents in a pre-congress discussion, represents a crude violation of his elementary rights under democratic centralism.
To give ardent support to a Lawrence in England as against the regularly constituted leadership, is to demonstrate a reckless disregard for the traditions of the movement. Such conduct undermines the painfully selected cadres, it does not build them.
To best appreciate the enormity of Pablo's recklessness one needs only to visualize what the world Trotskyist movement would have looked like had Cochran prevailed in the SWP, or Lawrence in England, or Mestre in France.
The question then arises: Is it possible to have unity with Pablo after such an experience with him? Wouldn't that mean returning to the same old shenanigans?
Unity is possible provided the lessons of the split become the property of the main cadres of the movement. We can be confident that they are. This does not mean that the cadres have all studied the voluminous documents of the period. But we can be sure that the overwhelming majority are aware of the following:
The world movement passed during 1951-53 through a revisionist crisis, which for its depth can be compared only with the crisis of 1939-40, when Shachtman and Burnham challenged the Trotskyist position on the defense of the Soviet Union and the nature of the Stalinist bureaucracy.
Even if one accepts Pablo's denial of complicity in the liquidationist splits, the question arises, where was he in the struggle against the liquidators? Did he fight to safeguard the Trotskyist program and organization?
To merely pose the question is to answer it.
Pablo claims we failed to make the issues clear so he could take sides. Let us grant for the sake of argument that we were inept in this respect. But if that were the case, what sort of leader is it who has to have all the t's crossed and all the i's dotted before he is able to recognize revisionism? If we failed to make Cochran's revisionism clear, why didn't he see it in Lawrence and Mestre with whom he was in intimate contact? If he couldn't join us in a fight, why didn't he carry on a parallel fight against the liquidators on his home grounds?
We can be confident that the international cadres will assess the split in this light and in no other. This itself—the consciousness of the cadres—is the best guarantee against a return to the status quo antebellum.
The consciousness of the cadres is the guarantee of vigilance in the future—the only real guarantee one can realistically expect.
[p. 21]
The Fourth International came into being under circumstances which did not permit the working class to emerge as an independent force. The selection of cadres proved extremely difficult under conditions of isolation from the mass movement. The cadres have included a disproportionate number of petty bourgeois elements, lacking experience and tradition in the workers' movement.
The polarization of the world between Stalinist-dominated workers' states and the imperialists has acted with powerful magnetic attraction upon such individuals.
The splits in the past have in the main been definitive. The political line of the splitters has generally tended to diverge more and more from the programmatic positions of the Fourth International.
Today we are witnessing a different process. The political lines following the split of 1953 have not been diverging; on the contrary they have been coalescing.
This is a verification of the improved objective situation. The working class is coming forward as an independent force. This is reason for optimism that a unification could prove viable.