[p. 25]
Dear Farrell:
Novack and I both received from Holland copies of the Pabloite Open Letter and had a little talk about it Saturday. The document is being passed around to the other NC members here. I haven't examined this document closely yet. But even a cursory reading clearly shows it to be an example of the insidious, cold-blooded treachery which we recognized in Pablo's operations in 1953. It is a declaration of war, designed to whip the Italians and Ceylonese into line; and, at the same time, to fish for suckers in our ranks who can be converted into agents and stool-pigeons for Pablo.
This new attack calls for cool deliberation and consultation before we decide on our own method of dealing with it and answering it. I will undertake to write an analysis of this latest and completely typical manifestation of Pabloism, but I can't do it right away. I am preparing a speech for Wednesday night's membership meeting on "Regroupment in Perspective"—to open the local discussion on the PC Draft Resolution—and have to concentrate on that right now. The speech will be tape recorded and I hope to work over the transcription after the meeting with a view to publishing the speech in the Internal Bulletin.
Meantime, as always when the party faces an attack, the first task is to put our own ranks in order. During the period when the possibility of international reunification was being considered, as also during the first period of regroupment in the youth field, a certain laxity and slackness in the matter of party loyalty and party discipline made itself evident. For a time, unfortunately, this deviation from our principle and tradition was tolerated and even condoned.
All that's out of date now. (It was out of date already when it happened.) Article VIII, Section 8, of the party constitution-Political collaboration with non-members of the party must be formally authorized by the Party Committee having jurisdiction"-must be strictly enforced without any exceptions whatever.
I mention this because, during the period when we were considering the Pabloite "unity" maneuvers, some young party members in New York and San Francisco were enlisted as distributers of the Pabloite press. They were also snared into correspondence by the Pabloite center with the object of turning them into agents in our ranks. This, as we have long known, is Pablo's invariable method of operation with national organizations, whether affiliated to his secretariat or not.
*
The worst way to meet this unscrupulous attack would be to rush out with a hasty and ill-considered answer which would appear to put us in the position of conducting a discussion with the Pabloites as a loyal tendency in our ranks. That is not the case at all. Pablo is an enemy. He is conducting a savage and unscrupulous war against the British Trotskyist organization—the most proletarian and most effectively active section of our international movement—at the moment when it is engaged in a life and death battle with the Labour Party and trade-union bureaucracy. The timing of the new attack is not accidental. Pablo is also appealing openly for dupes to promote a new split in the SWP-on the theory, presumably, that everybody has forgotten what happened to the dupes of 1953.
[p. 26]
The discussion we need in this situation is not a discussion with Pablo but a discussion among ourselves as to the best way of combatting this new attack, now that the "unity" mask has been taken off.
Fraternally,
James P. Cannon
JPC:jh
Copies to Burns [Healy] and Ross [Dowson]