[p. 55]
We were pleased to receive your letter clarifying your relationship to Socialist Fight. We hope that by publishing this and by clarifying the allusion in Comrade Weiss' article, to which you objected, we can make it clear that Socialist Fight is not at all linked with the Fourth International or with you personally.
I am sure that Comrade Weiss did not intend to imply the existence of organizational ties in the brief reference he made to Socialist Fight and to its association and the association of its supporters with Trotskyists internationally "who belong to a faction headed by Michel Pablo in the Fourth International."
What Comrade Weiss actually referred to, or meant to refer to, was the common political position held by you and the supporters of Socialist Fight in relation to the attack that has been mounted against the British Trotskyists by a wide range of foes.
We take it that you do not question the accuracy of the reference in that context, or the propriety of discussing it, since in your letter you solidarize politically with the supporters of Socialist Fight in this question and defend their position against the Socialist Labor League.
We note also that you indicate in your letter that your political sympathy for such opponents of the Socialist Labor League extends to Peter Fryer, whose rather wild charges, evidently colored by emotion, offer little of interest, in our opinion, except as symptoms of vacillations of a kind seen often enough among some intellectuals suffering from an ambivalent attitude toward the Marxist movement.
We regret that you would lend a sympathetic ear to complaints of that kind, particularly in view of the way reactionary forces are scavenging for such things for their own purposes.
Your charges regarding possible "indiscretions" which you interpret as "objectively equivalent" to denouncing comrades to right-wing bureaucrats and even semifascist authorities seem to us without factual foundation. It would be well to withdraw them, we think, in the interest of reducing the heated factional atmosphere and establishing more comradely relations.
We wish that all the factions, groupings, and tendencies that adhere to the Fourth International, or consider themselves cothinkers, would decide to close ranks in a situation like this and follow policies to facilitate this aim. Much of our criticism of your policy in Britain stems from this consideration.
In the latest issue of the magazine Fourth International, for instance we were struck by the fact that although you printed an article about the British Labor Party and the crisis it faces, you did not mention the witch-hunt against the Socialist Labor League. The issues raised by the Socialist Labor League are at the heart of the crisis in the British Labor Party. It would therefore seem essential, even from the limited aims of such an analytical article, to defend with the utmost vigor the Trotskyist tendency which has been proscribed by the right-wing bureaucrats.
Many of your readers, rightly or wrongly, will come to the conclusion that such an oversight is deliberate; this in turn is not conducive to narrowing the present unfortunate division in the Fourth International.
In your letter, too, you appear to blame the victims for the witch-hunting visited upon them, since you imply that they invited it by a self-immolating tactic, an "operation suicide." To give any comfort whatever to the witch-hunters because you have highly debatable tactical differences with the victims is a strange position for a Trotskyist leader. It is scarcely calculated to convince the victims or their supporters that you are interested in narrowing the political differences.
[p. 56]
We feel this all the more keenly because we have been keenly impressed with the argument—and you happen to be among those who have voiced it rather strongly—that the political differences among the various groupings in the world Trotskyist movement have narrowed to such manageable proportions that organizational unity is called for. If you really believe this, your failure to open a vigorous campaign in support of the British Trotskyists who are under concerted attack from centrists, right-wing bureaucrats, and professional red-baiters is quite difficult to understand.
Some comrades have come to the conclusion that in reality you are not interested in unity and that your main concern at the moment in Britain is to seek immediate gains for your faction by approaching those in the Socialist Labor League or its fringes who might buckle under the attack that has been launched by the foes of Trotskyism. Such a policy seems to us so shortsighted that we hesitate to subscribe to this ungenerous interpretation. It would seem much more to the interests of a faction that believes itself capable of loyally representing Trotskyism as a whole to deliberately demonstrate in this situation how it would act if the movement were united and its leaders were holding elected positions of authority. In other words to give the Trotskyist movement a sample of what could be expected from you in a united organization.
In our opinion the best course for every comrade to follow, no matter which faction he favors, is to seek to uphold the interests of the world revolutionary-socialist movement as a whole. Right now these are heavily involved in the historically important struggle in Britain. Every genuine socialist, we believe, should feel it his first duty to close ranks against the enemies who have set up a united front against the specter of Trotskyism. Let's unite in a counter campaign! We think this is the only principled course. We hope that responsible revolutionary-socialists in every part of the world will recognize this and act accordingly.
We trust that you will not feel offended by our frankness. Our intention is simply to suggest, from where we see the struggle, that the advantages to be gained from a change in your course in Britain would prove considerable to the world movement for revolutionary socialism.
Again we want to thank you for your letter.