The Future of the Fourth international
This article consists of the Report on the International Situation made to the International Conference of Trotskyists held in London in September 1963, and attended by national sections affiliated to the International Committee of the Fourth International
THE TASK OF THIS Conference is to mobilise the forces of the International Committee of the Fourth International for the great class struggles which lie immediately before us. Our unity is based on the fight for the Transitional Programme of the Fourth International, founded by Trotsky 25 years ago. This fight has drawn us together to struggle against those revisionists who take the name ‘Trotskyism’ but have abandoned its programme. We must analyse the way in which this revisionism, expressed particularly by the Socialist Workers’ Party of the United States of America and the ‘Pablo’ group, has developed, how it reflects the pressure upon the revolutionary vanguard of the forces of imperialism. Such an analysis is part of our struggle against the bourgeoisie, a necessary step in understanding the development of imperialism itself. The revisionists have retained the phrases and formulae of ‘Trotskyism’, duly to adapt them to the service of non-working-class forces: in particular, to the national bourgeoisie in the colonial and semi-colonial countries, and to the Stalinist and Social-Democratic bureaucracies in the workers’ states and the advanced capitalist countries.
The aim of Marxist theory is to reflect accurately the reality of the class struggle as a guide to leading the working class. This can only be done through participation in the class struggle itself, armed with Marxist theory. In the modern epoch of wars and revolutions, there is no road to this scientific understanding except in the revolutionary struggle to build Leninist parties. Struggling to find a road to the working class, the party has to fight its way through the resistance of agents of the class enemy, leaderships which dominate the working class and its organizations. These leaders, Social-Democrats and Stalinists alike, have betrayed the working class into the hands of monopoly capitalism. The development and the problems of these leaderships reflect the crisis of their social basis: the military, political and economic crisis of monopoly capitalism and the parallel crisis of the Stalinist bureaucracy. A revolutionary party based on the objective class struggles produced by these contradictions can be constructed to defeat the bureaucracy. This was the meaning of the Transitional Programme and of the First Four Congresses of the Communist International: the crisis of humanity was concentrated above all in the crisis of leadership of the working class. Many say they agree with that formulation, but in the real struggle they capitulate to the bureaucracy, so that their repetition of the Transitional Programme as a slogan loses any content, and becomes a deception. The struggle against this deception, against the revisionists, is a vitally necessary part of the rebuilding of the Fourth International. In the course of such a struggle we begin to probe the full extent of their departure from Marxism. This reflects and demonstrates to us the magnitude of the crisis confronting the working class, and it is only in such a struggle that we rediscover and begin to enrich the Marxist method. That method is not something that can be learned by heart by any intelligent Communist, then ‘applied’ to each and every situation. It is something which has to be fought for in the real struggle to build Marxist parties.
Revolutionary Leadership and Marxist Method
The fight against revisionism in the Trotskyist movement, particularly in the Socialist Workers’ Party, has revealed a basic difference in method. The Socialist Workers’ Party leaders have abandoned Marxism for empiricism, they have abandoned that method which starts from the point of view of changing the world, as against interpreting or contemplating it. The far-greater part of the work in the struggle against this revisionism remains still to be done on our part. It is not enough to be able to demonstrate the descent into empiricism by the revisionists—our problem is to build around this fight against revisionism, sections of the Fourth International able to lead the advance guard of the working class. Looking at the world from the point of view of changing it, means, today, starting from the point of view of the construction of disciplined revolutionary parties able to intervene in the struggles of the working class, able to build the Fourth International out of their interventions. These parties are proletarian parties, whose work and methods correspond to the general interests of the working class. In the advanced countries, such parties are only built in implacable opposition to the petty bourgeois circles who have dominated ‘official’ left politics during the comparative prosperity since 1945. Inside our movement this means a constant fight to build a cadre consciously opposed to the way of life of the centrist propaganda circles who provide a left cover for the bureaucracy. This is the direct opposite of the Pabloite theory and practice of support for the bureaucracy, which takes the form of supporting supposedly ‘left’ trends inside the Stalinist bureaucracy, believing even that they will be forced to take the power in the capitalist countries or to carry out the political revolution in the workers’ states. Alternatively it leads to ‘deep entry’ in the Social-Democracy, justified by the hoped-for emergence of mass ‘left centrist’ parties.
In the backward countries, fighting to resolve the crisis of leadership means fighting for the construction of proletarian parties, with the aim of proletarian dictatorship. It is especially necessary to stress the proletarian character of the leadership in countries with a large petty bourgeoisie or peasantry. On this question, the revisionists take the opposite road to Lenin and Trotsky, justifying their capitulation to petty-bourgeois, nationalist leaderships. by speculation about a new type of peasantry. In recent years, the Pabloites have declared that the character of the new states in Africa will be determined by the social character and decisions of the élite which occupies state power, rather than by the class struggle as we have understood it. More recently, Pablo and others have discovered ‘the revolutionary role of the peasantry’. These are only thin disguises for capitulation to the petty-bourgeois leadership of the FLN in Algeria and of Castro in Cuba. Above all, the ‘theory’ that the ‘epicentre of the world revolution’ has shifted to the colonial and semi colonial countries, for all its revolutionary appearance, is used to justify this capitulation.
In relation to the Stalinist bureaucracy and the political revolution, the case is even clearer. The pronounced right turn of Khrushchev comes only a few years after Pablo’s insistence that his section of the bureaucracy would lead the destruction of Stalinism. At the recent ‘reunification’ congress of the Pabloites, supported by the Socialist Workers’ Party, Pablo’s minority insisted that Khrushchev’s was the ‘left’ tendency in Stalinism. Even though this was rejected, we must remember that as recently as April 1962, Germain, in the majority at this same Congress, spoke of the Khrushchev faction as ‘the most flexible and the most intelligent wing of the bureaucracy’. What are the prospects of a revisionist tendency which thought the ‘objective forces’ for Socialism so strong that ‘Stalinism could no longer betray’, in the face of the recent understandings of Khrushchev with Kennedy and the Roman Catholic Church? Any strategy which proceeds from assumptions that sections of the Stalinist counterrevolutionary bureaucracy can ‘move left’ is a negation of Trotskyism. The construction of independent Marxist parties, the paramount need of the working class, will be absolutely opposed by the bureaucracy in the workers’ states, just as it is in the capitalist countries. Not to struggle against this bureaucracy is to abandon the construction of Marxist parties. The whole theory of ‘mass pressure’ forcing the bureaucracy to the left is nothing more than apologetics for this abandonment of the Fourth International and its programme. Marxist parties are the conscious expression of the decisive historical role of the working class. For the revisionists, the role of the working class is reduced to that of unconscious, spontaneous ‘pressure’, to which the existing leaderships respond. Thus Pablo maintains that, ‘although in a distorted way’, Khrushchev’s group in the bureaucracy represents the revolutionary strivings of the masses.
Our fight against revisionism is thus identical with the fight to build parties of the Fourth International. Without this fight the working class cannot defeat the bureaucracy. Pabloite revisionism arose specifically as an adaptation to the dominant bureaucracies in the labour movement. The failure to develop Marxist theory after Trotsky’s death exposed the cadres of the Fourth International to this bourgeois pressure through the bureaucracy. We can only overcome the split which this brought about by understanding this process in all its aspects. Such an understanding can only come from the actual struggle against revisionism in all its manifestations, theoretical, political and organizational. We shall see that the revisions are so deep that they affect the whole theory and method of Marxism.
Why an International Discussion?
The International Committee has insisted, in its relations with the Socialist Workers’ Party and other forces calling themselves Trotskyists, on an all-embracing discussion. Such a discussion must include all the tendencies and must deal with all disputed questions. Only in this way can we grasp consciously the present stage of development of the class struggle and of our own movement in relation to it. Our determination to get to grips in discussion with the revisionists is not at all the result of any principle of super-democracy or of a desire for ‘unity’ for its own sake. On the contrary, we see revisionism as the highest reflection of all the tendencies which we have to combat in the construction of parties, in the fight for the political independence of the working class. Only the sharpest fight against revisionism, therefore, can equip us politically for the class struggle. We know that inside our own movement such a fight must be carried on internally for correct methods of work against revisionist conceptions. Pabloite revisionism was a response in the Trotskyist movement to a definite stage of development of imperialism and its relation to the world revolution, reflected through the Stalinist bureaucracy. It was not just the aberration of a few individuals, but has found a response in many countries. Consequently its influence necessarily pervades the methods of our own sections until we have fought through to the end all the problems of the split with Pablo. The Socialist Workers’ Party leadership, for example, reacting empirically to the actions of Pablo in 1953, actually initiated the forrhal split in the International, yet within a few years find themselves ‘re-united’ with the Pabloites. The formal rejection of some of the consequences of Pablo’s revision of Marxist theory was not enough. Because Cannon and his group did not explore the roots of this revisionism (and this would have pinpointed the theoretical responsibility of the Socialist Workers’ Party itself), the same forces which produced Pablo eventually overtook the Socialist Workers’ Party.
Pablo’s response to the turn of world events after 1945 was to build a theory of ‘centuries of deformed workers’ states’. The Fourth International’s perspective of a revolutionary outcome of the world war, with the Trotskyist parties leading those revolutions, had been proven wrong, it was argued. Instead, the Stalinist parties, backed by the material strength of the Soviet state, had proven capable of overthrowing capitalist power and establishing deformed workers’ states. The strategy and tactics of the Marxists must be subordinated to this new reality.
In the first months of its reaction against Pablo in 1953, the SWP leadership rejected this perspective, condemning it as only the theoretical mask for capitulation to the Stalinist bureaucracy. Now the SWP leadership supports ‘reunification’ without a discussion of the political causes of the original split. In any case, it is said, the differences have narrowed to almost nothing. In a way, this is true. In the last few years, both the Pabloite and the SWP leaders have found other ‘new realities’ which point the way to a type of socialism replacing capitalism without the crisis of working-class leadership having been solved. This was the essence of the theory of ‘centuries of deformed workers’ states’.
Our impressionists have now imposed the same historical perspective upon the national liberation struggle in colonial and semi-colonial countries. Here, petty-bourgeois, nationalist leaderships will carry through the overthrow of capitalism; the leading role will not be played by the working class; there is no need for the construction of a Trotskyist party for workers’ states to te established; Trotskyists work with a perspective of ‘influencing’ the leadership of these revolutions, helping them along the road to training the masses in socialist construction, etc., etc.
This, then, is the meaning of the SWP leaders’ claims that the struggle in Cuba and Algeria has revealed the essential ‘unity’ between those who split in 1953. In essence, through the mechanism of the colonial struggle, the SWP has accepted the historical perspective of Pabloism: capitulation to petty-bourgeois leaderships in the struggle against imperialism.
Internationalism and Empiricism
The Socialist Workers’ Party leaders and the Pabloites have attacked the sections of the International Committee as sectarians who substitute their own limited experience, particularly in Britain and France, for the general picture of international objective forces working for Socialism. It is then argued that these ‘favourable objective circumstances on a world scale’ demand formal reunification of all tendencies, putting aside the discussion of differences. But the line of the International Committee does not at all flow from narrow or national considerations. Our type of activity, our method of party building, flows from a thoroughly international view of the class struggle. We have in the past three years begun an analysis of the bureaucratic agents of these class forces in the present stage of development of world capitalism, of the class forces which defend it, and of the mass movement.
The events of the last two years, since we tried to initiate political discussion with the Socialist Workers’ Party, have decisively confirmed our insistence on the basic Trotskyist position that the Stalinist bureaucracy is counter-revolutionary. In the Cuban missiles crisis and Sino-Indian border dispute of October-November 1962, the political consequences of our line and the line of revisionism in the Trotskyist movement were sharply contrasted. Cannon, in the Socialist Workers’ Party, hailed Khrushchev’s withdrawal of missiles as a contribution to peace, and in the course of it betrayed his whole descent into empiricism with the phrase: ‘What else could he (Khrushchev) have done in the given circumstances?’ In France, the Pablo group distributed a leaflet in the Renault factory calling on the workers to render assistance to Cuba ‘equally with the aid from the workers’ states’. The fact that Cannon found his way to Khrushchev via the uncritical support of the petty-bourgeois, nationalist leadership of Castro, whereas Pablo reflected the Stalinist pressure earlier and more directly, is only a matter of the particular historical situations of the two. Pablo reacted to the apparently overwhelming strength of the Stalinists in the ‘two camps’ period in postwar Europe, where there were mass Communist Parties. Cannon’s evolution in the United States, where Stalinism was feeble, took longer, and expressed itself through the relations of the Socialist Workers’ Party leaders, along with the whole ‘radical milieu’ in the United States of America, to the Cuban Revolution. The face of the Socialist Workers’ Party had become turned to this petty bourgeois milieu and away from the working class. Here we see clearly that Pablo’s original capitulation to Stalinism was only one variety of capitulation to the petty-bourgeois bureaucracies upon which modern imperialism depends.
In India the representatives of Pablo’s ‘International’ supported the bourgeois government of Nehru against the deformed workers’ state in China. This party issued a statement condemning the Chinese method of solving the border dispute. While the delegate. of the Indian section voted with Hansen and Germain for ‘reunification of the Fourth International’, hundreds of Indian Communist Party members were in Nehru’s prisons for opposing the Indian Communist Party leadership’s capitulation to Nehru. The latter was part of the Khrushchev bureaucracy’s deal with imperialism. Khrushchev supplied aircraft to Nehru, the United States supplied other weapons. Nehru’s troops are with the United Nations forces policing the Congo on behalf of United States imperialism. These decisive class questions have exposed the end-result of Pabloism: it is not a temporary weakening before a wing of the Stalinists, but a full-blown revision corresponding to the latest needs of imperialism, i.e., the development of powerful bureaucracies and state personnel able to control the masses of all countries. It is the presence of such basic class questions at the root of the division which explains the magnitude of the departure from even the most basic Marxist ideas among the revisionists.
What Cannon betrayed in a phrase about ‘the given circumstances’, Hansen has developed into a whole case, arguing that dialectical materialism is the same thing as ‘consistent empiricism’. What a contrast with Trotsky’s warning to the Socialist Workers’ Party! The ideas of pragmatism and empiricism have their direct and concrete expression in the domination of opportunism in the labour movement. The revisionists’ attempt to assimilate empiricism to Marxism is the natural accompaniment of the capitulation to the opportunist bureaucracies. In this way is justified the characterization of the July 26th Movement leaders in Cuba as ‘natural Marxists’, the Pabloite faith in the Soviet bureaucracy’s capacity for transforming itself, etc. In all this it is indicated that without conscious theory men will respond to ‘objective forces’ and arrive at the path of Marxism. This is a clear abandonment of the Transitional Programme, with its stress on the decisive question of resolving the subjective problems of the world revolution.
It is in this sense that the fight for dialectics is the fight to build the world party in every country. Neither can succeed without the other. Dialectical materialism will only be understood and developed in the struggle to build the party against all enemies. The party can be built only if there is a conscious fight for dialectical materialism against the ideas of other classes. It is on revolutionary theory that the ability of the party to win the political independence of the working class is based. Marxism is a developing theory; it develops in the practice of revolutionary parties who ‘discover’ reality by acting to change it. Trotsky’s warning about the fight against pragmatism was seen by the Socialist Workers’ Party leadership only as a suggestion that one or two comrades should interest themselves in questions of philosophy—the consequence is before us now. An explanation of the degeneration of Pablo, Cannon and the others will be incomplete if it ignores this side of the question: the neglect of theory since Trotsky’s death. It was this which halted Cannon’s rejection of Pablo in 1953 at the level of a few programmatic points, preventing the necessary deeper analysis.
We have a parallel for this development in the historical relationship between Marx and Lenin. Lenin made gigantic developments of Marxist theory after a historical gap during which expositions of Marxist ideas on various subjects went alongside the deepening degeneration of the Socialist movement in the Second International. The development of Marxism is not a purely theoretical development. It was the rise of imperialism, and the urgent tasks placed before the Russian working class, which laid the basis for Lenin’s contribution. But these new objective conditions did not automatically produce Leninism and the Third International, much less ‘transform’ the Second International into a revolutionary organisation! On the contrary, the epoch of wars and revolutions brought about by imperialism had to be analysed and grasped consciously by the Marxist method. Without a theoretical struggle to rework the dialectic in the context of the new situation, in conflict with all other trends, the concrete meaning of the new historical stage and of the tasks flowing from it could not have been burned into the consciousness of the Bolsheviks. When we say that Marxism is ‘the conscious reflection of an unconscious process’ this is what we mean. Reflection is an active, struggling, contradictory process, not a passive adaptation. Marxism is the organised, practical consciousness of the revolutionary working class, not a bible used to place blessings on the accomplished fact. Today, the Socialist Workers’ Party’s descent into empiricism is the result of this loss of the historical thread in the development of Marxism. Once this happens, the way is open for capitulation to other tendencies.
Crisis of the Revisionists
The ‘unification’ with the Pablo group, supported by the SWP, is founded not upon Marxist theory and the actual development of the movement, the conscious resolution of the contradictions in that development. Instead, it is a combination of centrist trends each of whose development is determined by empirical adaptation to circumstances. For such a ‘unified’ organisation there can be no unified development and no growth. Within it, some groups, such as Pablo and his immediate supporters, go to the right in complete capitulation to the national bourgeoisie in Algeria; others, held back by tradition and the force of inertia, resist this turn and look for face-saving formulae. Within the Socialist Workers’ Party itself a large minority adopts a position to the right of the leadership in relation to China.
It is not a historical accident that the revisionists are driven together at this moment, nor is it simply a consequence of their subjective consideration of problems of their own internal development. The driving force here is the radicalization of the working class and the open manifestation of capitalist contradictions in the advanced countries in the last few years—in the US, Britain, Belgium, France, Germany, Spain—together with the accentuation of the crisis of Stalinism as the political revolution matures for the next blow after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Close to sections of the bureaucracy and the petty bourgeoisie instead of to the working class, in the years since the war, the revisionists proceeded from impressions of the comparative social peace in the advanced countries, as contrasted with the might of Stalinism on the one hand, and the upsurge of the national-liberation struggle in the colonies on the other. Thus they looked away from the decisive sector, the proletariat of the advanced countries, and conceived theories of left tendencies in the Stalinist bureaucracy, and of the epicentre of world revolution shifting to the colonial countries. In the advanced countries, they said, the class struggle took on a muted character, expressing itself only through the existing ‘mass organisations’, i.e., through the labour bureaucracy.
The revisionist forces based on this perspective are driven together now in order to resolve their own crisis, because the forces upon which they immediately depend, the bureaucratic and petty-bourgeois servants of imperialism, are in crisis, a crisis caused above all by the class struggle in Europe and the US. The mechanism of adaptation, for the revisionists, was through adaptation to bureaucracy. Since the death of Stalin the development of the political revolution in Eastern Europe and the radicalization in the advanced countries have brought crisis to the bureaucracies. Pablo’s organization first based itself on the perspective that the French Stalinists would even take state power. East Germany and Hungary in 1953 and 1956 exposed this perspective even more than the treacherous domestic policy of the French Stalinists. Pablo then turned certain of his sections into little more than errand-boys for the national bourgeois leadership of the Algerian FLN, turning away from the industrial working class itself in Western Europe. Now the crisis of the FLN deals a final blow and causes new crises and divisions within the Pablo camp. In the Socialist Workers’ Party, we have seen a similar turn to the radical, petty-bourgeois intelligentsia and away from the working class. While Hansen and Cannon concentrated on finding ‘radical’ allies for the ‘Fair Play for Cuba’ committees and made a great noise about recognising Cuba as ‘the first workers’ state in the Western Hemisphere’, the struggle of the working class in the US itself, particularly of the Negroes, came along and took them unawares. The same Kennedy against whom they defended Castro is called upon by the Socialist Workers’ Party organ The Militant to arm the Negroes of the South.
Crisis and Militancy
The resolution which formed the agreed basis of ‘reunification’ with the Pabloites, endorsed by the SWP, must be criticised in detail, in order to understand the full extent of the revisionists’ departure from Marxism, even though the document is intrinsically worthless from the point of view of a scientific view of the world revolution, its strategy and tactics, and the construction of the Fourth International.
In the introductory section, the main thesis is stated: ‘As a result of the successive failure of the two major revolutionary waves of 1919-1923 and 1943-1948—-and of the minor one of 1934- 1937—the main centre of world revolution shifted for a time to the colonial world. The victory of the Chinese Revolution in 1949, following the post-war revolutionary wave in Europe, opened an uninterrupted series of colonial revolutions’. In the following paragraph the Resolution formally accepts that the lag in the advanced countries is to be placed at the door of ‘the treacherous role of the official leadership’, in place of which the working class must have ‘a genuine Marxist revolutionary leadership’, The essence of the question is, of course, to build such a leadership to defeat the official bureaucracy. However, the Resolution concentrates upon another aspect entirely, with the ‘subjective factor’ entirely ignored. Thus, ‘the fact that the revolution won first in backward countries and not in the advanced is not proof that the workers in the advanced countries have shown insufficient revolutionary combativity. It is evidence of the fact that the opposition which they have to overcome in these countries is immeasurably stronger than in the colonial world’. (Our emphasis—Editors.)
In a single phrase, then, the Resolution indicates the responsibility of the traitorous leaderships for defeats in the advanced countries. Similarly, it contains a pious reference to the same problem in the backward countries: ‘The crisis of revolutionary leadership exists, of course, in the colonial and semi-colonial countries as well as in the advanced countries’. In both cases, however, this is only a question of repeating traditional formulae while rejecting their political meaning. For the advanced countries, the ‘unifiers’ have in fact gone over to the most reactionary revisionist viewpoint: it is the strength of the enemy, of the ruling class, which really appears to them the stumbling-block. For example, the Resolution refers to ‘a very astute and supple capitalist-class leadership which has learned to transform reforms into a powerful brake upon revolution’. Here Marxism is abandoned for impressions of the will and ability of the ruling class. The basis for reformism in these countries is a historical-economic one; the actual force which puts a ‘brake’ on revolution is the counter-revolutionary, bureaucratic leadership of the labour movement. What the resolution refers to as external, objective ‘facts’ are in fact the living force with which our movement is locked in struggle. We are based on the struggle of the working class as the contradictions of capitalism intensify; the bureaucrats rest on imperialism itself.
The Resolution continues: ‘The failure of a revolutionary wave in an imperialist country gives way eventually to some form of temporary relative economic stabilisation and even to fresh expansion. This inevitably postpones new revolutionary uprisings for a time, the combination of political setback (or even demoralisation) of the working class and a rising standard of living being unfavourable for any immediate revolutionary undertaking’. (our emphasis—Editors). In these sentences is expressed the essence of the revision of Marxist politics by the Pabloites. Their description of an ‘unfavourable combination of circumstances’ leaves entirely out of account the main question, i.e., the relation between the working class and its leadership, the role of consciousness in the revolutionary struggle. Because they do not start from this decisive consideration, the ‘unifiers’ inevitably dissolve the concrete into the abstract. In the sentences quoted, the words ‘working class’ are an abstraction. For political purposes we have to see the working class. with its internal divisions and contradictions, the developing relation between vanguard and mass, the changing relation to its traditional leaderships, etc. Contrast the glib ‘combination’ of the Resolution, for example, with Trotsky’s analysis of the European working class during the ebb of the revolutionary wave in the early 1920s (The First Five Years of the Comintern, Vol. I, pp. 74ff).
Trotsky shows that after 1914 there was a strong working-class upsurge, but that it was unorganised and poorly-led. Out of these struggles, the most dynamic sections were drawn into the new Communist Parties. Many more temporarily withdrew from the political struggle. This division in the class, resulting from a differentiation of consciousness in response to the first wave of struggle, was the basis upon which the labour bureaucracy restored its dominant position. When the crisis of 1920 broke over Europe, its effect was a series of bitter outbursts, but this was not sufficient to provoke the unity of the class necessary for revolutionary victory. For that to happen an economic revival was necessary. Here Trotsky concludes that an economic upswing is necessary for a new step forward in the class struggle. But it is not at all a question of formally opposite conclusions; under other circumstances an economic revival could, of course, have the opposite effect. But these ‘circumstances’ are the strategy and tactics of the leadership in relation to the economic and political struggle of the class. Because Trotsky examines the relation between leadership and class, examines the contradictions in the revolutionary camp, he is more concrete than our ‘unifiers’. At the centre of his ‘combination’ of factors is the strategy and tactics of the class and the leadership; the ‘combination’ is not a collection of impressions from which contemplatively to draw conclusions. The latter approach is well suited to the ‘deep entrism’ of the Pabloites in the official reformist parties in Western Europe, where everything is staked on the hope of mass centrist developments, and the construction of the revolutionary party in struggle against the bureaucracy abandoned.
Leadership in the Colonial Movement
On the other hand, the expression, ‘The crisis of revolutionary leadership exists, of course, in the colonial and semi-colonial countries as well as in the advanced countries’, is intended to put at their ease those who see that Pablo’s open capitulation to Ben Bella has gone too far. But a phrase is not enough! Those who have drafted the Resolution in fact conduct their ‘defence of the Algerian Revolution’ by subordinating themselves to Ben Bella, by saying and doing nothing about the construction of independent revolutionary parties in Algeria and the colonial countries. Indeed, the Resolution itself provides adequate ‘theoretical’ justification for this capitulation. This is summed up in the conclusion: ‘The weakness of the enemy in the backward countries has opened the possibility of coming to power even with a blunted instrument.’ In other words, workers’ power can now be achieved in these countries without Marxist parties. The double-edged formula is masterly—and meaningless. There is a crisis in the leadership, ‘of course’, in the backward countries, but there is no need for it to be resolved!
If we take the argument leading to this conclusion we find exactly the same method, the same impressionism, the same dissolving of the concrete into the abstract, the same neglect of the conscious role of the class and the leadership, as in the Resolution’s analysis of the advanced countries. For example:
In the colonial and semi-colonial countries, on the other hand, the very weakness of capitalism, the whole peculiar socio-economic structure produced by imperialism, the permanent misery of the great majority of the population in the absence of a radical agrarian revolution, the stagnation and even reduction of living standards while industrialization nevertheless proceeds relatively rapidly [?], create situations in which the failure of one revolutionary wave does not lead automatically to relative or even temporary social or economic stabilization. A seemingly inexhaustible succession of mass struggles continues, such as Bolivia has experienced for ten years. The weakness of the enemy offers the revolution fuller means of recovery from temporary defeats than is the case in imperialist countries.
Now, of course, it is true that the ‘specific weight’ of the national bourgeoisie in the economic and political life of a colonial country is small, since it is international finance-capital which dominates the social structure. But when Trotsky wrote of this phenomenon in Czarist Russia, developing the theory of permanent revolution, he was especially concerned to bring out, on the other hand, the increased significance of the role of the industrial proletariat, despite its small numbers. The greater concentration and militancy of this class, its birth at an already highly developed stage of the international movement, qualitatively decided its leading role in the struggle against Czarism, and determined the necessity of the transition from bourgeois to proletarian revolution. Trotsky eventually realised that only the type of party constructed by Lenin could carry out the strategy and tactics flowing from this perspective. Such a party was founded upon Marxist theory and was quite specifically proletarian in character. This proletarian character of the leadership does not stand in contradiction to the overwhelming preponderance of the peasantry in the population. In point of fact, where the working class is so outnumbered and even has close ties on many sides with the peasantry, there is need for special vigilance to assure that the Party is based on proletarian methods and Marxist theory.
The revisionists draw the opposite conclusion. A ‘blunted instrument’ will be sufficient, because of the weakness of the enemy. Defeats and lost opportunities are not so serious, because in any case the number of mass struggles is ‘seemingly inexhaustible’. This abstracted impression is substituted for any analysis of the experience of the proletariat, and of the revolutionary vanguard, in Bolivia, Algeria, Ceylon, South Africa. Of course, it appears as a ‘hard fact’ that ‘mass struggles’ continuously recur, but the actual course of these struggles and the experience of the classes in struggle is completely neglected. This is parallel to the actual politics of the revisionists, with their uncritical praise of Castro-ism, peasant guerrilla uprisings, and so on. Similarly with the phrase, ‘the weakness of the enemy offers the revolution fuller means of recovery from temporary defeats than is the case in imperialist countries.’ (our emphasis—Editors). Here the words ‘the revolution’ are an abstraction with no meaning, an abstraction at far too general a level for any political, class orientation: Like the phrase ‘colonial revolution’, it is however at a level of abstraction which is perfectly adapted to acceptance of the existing leadership of the national liberation struggles. Any more exact abstraction, based on the class content of the struggle and the contradictions within the fight for political independence, would be precisely against the interests of the petty-bourgeois leadership, who also prefer non-class formulations—the Algerian revolution, the Arab revolution, Arab Socialism, etc., etc.
The Resolution proceeds to discuss the various ‘sectors’-—colonial revolution, political revolution in the workers’ states, revolution in the advanced countries—considering each one with the same method we have outlined. As ‘Marxists’, of course, our ‘unifiers’ must insist that the struggles in these three spheres form a ‘dialectical unity’— ‘each force influences the other’. By this is meant something quite different from the actual struggle of the class forces on a world scale. The Resolution refers, for example, to the interrelation of the USSR and the absence of successful revolutions in advanced countries in this way: ‘This same delay [in the advanced countries] also retards the maturing of the political revolution in the USSR, especially inasmuch as it does not place before the Soviet workers a convincing example of an alternative way to build Socialism’ (our emphasis—Editors).
Now, of course, the propaganda effect in the USSR of such a revolution would be enormous. But to lay the major emphasis upon this ‘example’, or lack of it, in one’s analysis of the interrelations of the struggles of the international proletariat, is to assume that in the class struggle the mechanism is identical with that of the Pabloites’ own method —the response of individuals to impressions. What is above all important here is the single task of constructing fighting links between revolutionaries in all countries through the development of the Fourth International. Only a detailed historical treatment of the history of the sections of our own Marxist movement in relation to the experience of the working class in each country can give us the basis for such an analysis. Where events occur which pose real problems of the interrelated, international character of all revolutionary struggles, the Resolution is silent. In the Cuban crisis of October-November 1962 the fate of the present government and of the working class in Cuba was clearly posed as an international problem. Only a correct orientation towards Stalinism as a counter-revolutionary force, and towards the organization of revolutionary struggles led by Marxist parties against the rulers of the imperialist countries, could guide those who wished to defend Cuba against US imperialism. It was not just a question of the weakness of the national bourgeoisie, undoubtedly true for Cuba, but of the impossibility of fighting for the socialist revolution in Cuba outside of a struggle against the counterrevolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy, the specific stage of whose relations to imperialism must be grasped. What is more, Khrushchev’s latest approaches to the US ruling class and to the Roman Catholic Church are a defensive reaction of the Soviet bureaucracy to the mounting struggle of the working class in both Western and Eastern Europe and the USSR. Instead of this kind of class analysis of the ‘interrelation’ of the struggles in different parts of the world we actually found the revisionists welcoming Khrushchev’s ‘actions for peace’. Once again the connection between revisionist theory and opportunist practice is crystal-clear.
What is the Colonial Revolution?
In its consideration of ‘the Colonial Revolution’ the Resolution expresses most clearly the politics of revisionism. This ‘colonial revolution’ is described in the terms used by petty bourgeois and centrists everywhere:
As a development in world history, the colonial revolution signifies above all that two billion human beings—men, women and children in areas where the tradition for centuries has been to live as passive subjects, condemned to super-oppression and super-exploitation, utter humiliation and destruction of their national traditions, even their national] identity when they have not been made the target of mass slaughter and extermination— suddenly acquire a voice, a language and a personality of their own. Basically, the colonial revolution is the irrepressible tendency of these two billion human beings to become at last the masters and builders of their own destiny. The fact that this is socially possible only through a workers’ state provides the objective basis for the tendency of the colonial revolution to move into the tracks of the permanent revolution.
There follows a feeble attempt to answer the criticisms which have been made in recent years of the exclusive Pabloite stress on ‘objective forces’ making for this ‘permanent revolution’. But we are left with an absolutely worthless conclusion
…any ideas that this process will recur automatically or inevitably within a certain time limit [?] necessarily leads to a distorted estimate of the actual relationship of forces and replaces scientific analysis by illusions and wishful thinking. It presupposes that the objective process will solve by itself a task which can only be solved in struggle through the subjective effort of the vanguard; i.e., revolutionary socialist conquest of the leadership of the mass movement. That this is possible in the very process of the revolution and in a relatively short time, has been adequately demonstrated in the case of Cuba. That it is not inevitable, and that without it the revolution is certain to suffer serious defeats or be limited at best to inconclusive victories is demonstrated by much in the recent history of other Latin-American countries; for instance, Bolivia, Argentina and Guatemala.
It is difficult to see how this face-saving formula can be made consistent with the earlier conclusion that ‘a blunted instrument’ will suffice for victory of the socialist revolution in these countries. It might be argued that it is only a question of emphasis. But this is just the point: unless the whole concentration of Marxists is upon the construction of independent proletarian parties, then the masses will be betrayed. For the revisionists, it is quite a different matter; the existence or non-existence of such parties before a revolutionary situation may or may not be decisive! It is not possible to develop revolutionary strategy and tactics from such a perspective. All that follows is a passive acceptance of the existing leadership, covered up by a semblance of ‘left’ activity supposedly designed to encourage the likes of Ben Bella along ‘the tracks of the permanent revolution’.
Wisely, the Resolution neglects a detailed analysis of the experience of the class. struggle in particular countries: ‘A more precise perspective for each of the great ethno-geographic zones of the colonial revolution (Latin-America, The Arab World, Black Africa, the Indian subcontinent and South-east Asia) can only be worked out on the basis of a concrete analysis of the specific social and political forces at work and of their more exact economic conditions.’ The colonial revolution, already an ideological abstraction, is now subdivided into ‘ethno-geographic zones’. The significance of this division is not indicated, but its relation to historical materialism is obscure, to say the least. It conforms much more readily to the ideologies of the bourgeois-nationalist leaders.
In place of analysing the experience of the class struggle and of the revolutionary vanguard in particular countries, the Resolution enumerates ‘certain general social trends which apply to all or most of the colonial or semi-colonial countries’. It is almost sufficient to quote at length from this section of the Resolution to confirm the correctness of the criticisms which the sections of the International Committee have made of the Socialist Workers’ Party and the Pabloites in the last two years in relation to the struggle in the backward countries.
First, then:
(a) The numerical and economic weakness of the national bourgeoisie. Despite the priority granted them by history, the national bourgeoisie has proved incapable of handling the capital made available under the rubric of ‘aid to the undeveloped countries’ in such a way as to achieve optimum results in industrialization. This is perhaps the biggest obstacle in the way of a ‘bourgeois solution’ of the problem of economic underdevelopment. Everywhere we find the same phenomena: Of available surplus capital, a major part is diverted from industrial uses to investment in land or usury, hoarding, import of luxury consumer goods, even outright flight abroad. This incapacity of the national bourgeoisie is not the result of mere reflection of its moral corruption but a normal operation of the capitalist drive for profits under the given economic and social conditions. Fear of permanent revolution is not the least of the motives involved.
We are dealing here with a tendency which capitulates to the petty-bourgeois nationalist leadership. Particularly in Algeria, this leadership has maintained relationships with French imperialism. Pablo has in the past ‘explained’ the necessity of such agreements, leaving intact as they do large French investments in Algeria. It is a matter, in fact, of managing better the resources made available by the imperialists; this will achieve ‘optimum results in industrialization’. This paragraph from the Resolution abandons the Marxist analysis of objective relations between world finance-capital and the exploited masses of the colonial countries, with the petty-bourgeois, nationalist leaderships playing a Bonapartist role in the ‘independent’ states. Such a clear political characterization of the role of the petty-bourgeois nationalists is avoided by the device of having separated off ‘the colonial revolution’ in each country for separate consideration, ignoring the international economic and class content of the actual social relations within the country.
The second ‘general social trend’ indicated is ‘the creation of the infrastructure of heavy industry through the state, taking the form of nationalized property’. Referring in particular to Egypt and India, the Resolution points out that these nationalizations do not in themselves alter the capitalist character of the state; they are carried out under the leadership of the ‘urban petty bourgeoisie, especially the intellectuals, the military and state functionaries’, and are indispensable for the foundation of a bourgeois state. What is not discussed in the Resolution is the actual relation of the practical politics of the revisionists to these petty-bourgeois governments. In Algeria, the revisionists, as we have seen, in fact give support to the petty-bourgeois, nationalist government. They express similar uncritical approval of Castro in Cuba. There was even published an article by one Sadi both in the Socialist Workers’ Party International Socialist Review and the Pabloite Fourth International advocating ‘entry’ into Nasser’s national movement, and specifically disavowing any organized independent political opposition. A class characterization of nationalization is incomplete, and turns into its opposite, if it does not sharply define the role of the proletariat in opposing the petty-bourgeois nationalists.
The Myth of the Revolutionary Peasantry
The remaining two ‘general social trends’ in the colonial revolution are of special interest, insofar as they represent crude attempts, once again, to accommodate Pablo’s extreme revisionist formulations while at the same time reassuring those who are not prepared to go as far as Pablo in drawing the logical conclusions from their revisionist method. It is a question here of ‘the strategic role of the colonial proletariat’ and ‘the radical role of peasantry’. The Resolution emphasises that factory workers are an insignificant minority in colonial countries; most important are ‘the miners, plantation. hands, agricultural workers and largely unemployed—typical for the colonial economy’. We have here a formula to satisfy Pablo, who recently wrote approvingly of Fanon’s thesis that the colonial proletariat is, in fact, a privileged stratum. From this flowed the conclusion that the rural masses, ‘the revolutionary peasantry’, would form the base of the socialist revolution. Many of Pablo’s followers naturally could not accept this clear contradiction of Marxist writings on the peasantry as a class with no independent political role: the peasantry rebels against oppression, but the political content of this rebellion depends on the leadership coming from the bourgeoisie or from the proletariat. The Resolution we are considering somehow finds a halfway formulation: ‘In the form of expanding guerrilla forces, the peasantry has undoubtedly played a much more radical and decisive role in the colonial revolution than was foreseen in Marxist theory. It has revealed a social nature somewhat different from that of the traditional peasantry of the advanced capitalist countries.’
But what is this ‘somewhat different social nature’? The Resolution itself finds it necessary to point out that ‘the existence of a large majority of small land-owning peasants has undoubtedly served as a momentary brake on the revolutionary process in several South-East Asian countries (Malaya, Thailand, even [?] Ceylon)’. For the rest, it is no revelation that the peasantry is not a homogeneous class specific to capitalism. In every country its composition is determined by a complex history of past economic systems and their degree of dissolution. In no case is the peasantry a homogeneous class in the same sense as the proletariat tend towards homogeneity through the laws of capitalism and the necessities of the class struggle. Like other petty-bourgeois strata, the peasantry under capitalism is constantly being differentiated by the penetration of big capital into the countryside. There is no doubt of the economic breakdown and utter impoverishment of the peasantry in colonial countries in the epoch of imperialist decay, and of the consequent mass forces of revolt who become potential allies of the proletariat against imperialism. But none of this alters the central importance of proletarian leadership. Here it is necessary constantly to reemphasise the elementary lessons of the experience of Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks, who had to fight against ideas of just this kind from Russian petty-bourgeois, radical intellectuals. This is particularly true in relation to the Resolution’s final point on the peasantry: as against ‘the ingrained individualism of the classical peasantry’, the Resolution contrasts ‘the predisposition towards collectivism among rural populations still living under conditions of total or partial tribal (communal) property. This class, in contrast to the traditional peasantry, is not per se opposed to the introduction of socialist property relations in the countryside. It therefore remains an ally of the proletariat throughout the whole process of permanent revolution’.
It is difficult to know where to begin, in criticising such patent nonsense. Where are the rural populations still living under partial or total tribal communism? Without a doubt, all known existing societies are class societies. The subsistence cultivators of Africa, Asia and South America have long ago seen their societies fragmented by the penetration first of commercial and then of industrial and finance capital. Whether the greater part of them were still tribal-communal is very doubtful in any case. But worse follows. If such societies did exist, how could we explain the term used in the second sentence of our quotation: ‘This class .. .’2?! If the people concerned are in a ‘totally tribal’ society, they are clearly not a class; if it is only a ‘partially tribal’ society, then its people are by definition differentiated, and share membership of the classes of that society into which they have been incorporated. It is thus impossible to attach any meaning whatever to this essay in a ‘peasantry of a new type’. It is about as new as the Russian village community so beloved of the Narodniks. It is not, of course, necessary to comment on the Resolution’s injunctions on future workers’ states to imbue these primitive communists with ‘the essential components of discipline, self-management and modern industrial rationality’ !
Pablo’s crowning formula, in his previous writings on the ‘revolutionary peasantry’, was the so-called ‘Jacobin leadership sui generis’, a conglomeration of petty-bourgeois intellectuals and other politically active people forced by repression to leave the urban centres and put themselves at the head of peasant uprisings. This is not even a sophisticated formula; it is only a very transparent justification of the existing domination of petty-bourgeois leaders over the mass movement in the backward countries. Those who have ‘unified’ on the basis of this Resolution cannot denounce and expose Pablo’s role, much less make a principled break from his course, which will inevitably compromise them all. Instead, they adopt once again a formula designed to obscure the differences: ‘It is an absolute necessity to educate revolutionary Marxist cadres and to build tendencies and independent parties wherever possible [?] in all colonial countries’. And finally, although it bears no relation and is emptied of all meaning by the earlier equivocations, doubleedged formulae, and outright revisions, we have the pious repetition of correct phrases: ‘The building of sections of the Fourth International capable of working out concrete analyses of their specific national situations and finding concrete solutions to the problems remains a central strategic task in all countries’. What will these ‘sections of the Fourth International’ do, since ‘blunted instruments’ are sufficient? What will be their role in relation to the existing parties and leaders? What will be their class basis? An answer to these questions is the absolute prerequisite of ‘finding concrete solutions’ to the problems of class struggle in the colonial countries.
Effects of the Colonial Revolution
We saw earlier how the ‘unifiers’ conceived of the interrelations of the revolution in the advanced countries and the struggle of the workets in the USSR and Eastern Europe. The ‘effects’ of the colonial revolution are considered in similar mechanical fashion, instead of through the struggle and consciousness of the vanguard and the working class. We are told that the French working class received a ‘breathing space’ after de Gaulle’s accession to power because of the struggle of the Algerian people. This is breathtaking! It was the failure of working-class leadership during the French political crisis provoked by the Algerian struggle in 1958 which brought the Bonaparte de Gaulle to power. Instead of proceeding from this real ‘relationship of power’, the Resolution proceeds from ‘de Gaulle’s power’, ‘the Algerian Revolution’, and so on, as settled ‘facts’ to be balanced one against another. We are treated to a similar piece of mechanistic speculation with regard to Angola: ‘In Portugal, the outbreak of revolution in Angola and other colonies proved decisive in undermining the stability of the Salazar dictatorship, creating the pre-revolutionary climate which has placed the overthrow of Portuguese fascism on the order of the day. The fall of Salazar would help accelerate the Spanish revolution, weaken the bonapartist regime in France and intensify the new wave of militancy in the West European labour movement’. ‘Here is illustrated the extent to which the politics of the revisionists have become only the verdict of outside commentators on some process in which they have no part. They make some perfunctory remarks about the effect of the colonial revolution in radicalising certain elements in the labour movement but without any indication of the real content or class significance of this ‘influence’. For example:
…it has affected vanguard elements in an immediate way, crystallising new revolts against the waiting, passive or treacherous attitude of the old leaderships towards the colonial revolution or fresh reactions against the generally low level of politics [?] in some imperialist countries. This has occurred not only in France where these new layers have been most vocal [?] but also in several other European countries, especially Spain, and in the US where the opportunity to solidarise with the Cuban Revolution has opened the door to radical politics {?] for a new generation of vanguard elements [?]. In the same way the influence of the colonial revolution, especially the African revolution, upon vanguard elements in the Negro movement has helped prepare the emergence of a new radical] left wing. In all these cases, it is the task of revolutionary Marxists to seek to win the best elements of this newly emerging vanguard to Trotskyism and to fuse them into the left wing of the mass movement.
In point of fact, the SWP’s method of ‘solidarising with the Cuban Revolution’ only served to take the Party closer to ‘radical’ petty-bourgeois circles. Similarly, the effects’ of the mass struggles in Africa on the Negro movement in the US are not at all straight-forward and homogenous. Insofar as they are seen simply as polical struggles for ‘independence’ within the framework of imperialism, adequately represented by the likes of Nkrumah, then they can strengthen middle-class leadership of the Negro struggle. Only if they are understood and explained in a Marxist way can they be fused with the real class needs of the Negro workers. But the Pabloites prefer to speculate, once more, on ‘general’ influences rather than subjecting these to class analysis: ‘In general the colonial revolution has helped to overcome lethargy and the feeling of political impotence.’
A final ‘influence’ of the colonial revolution considered by the Resolution is its effect on world Stalinism. Apart from the usual glorification of the existing character of the national liberation movement,* «the most emphatic point made by the Resolution is that, ‘The victory in Cuba marked the beginning of a new epoch in the history of the world revolution; for, aside from the Soviet Union, this is the first workers’ state established outside the bounds of the Stalinist apparatus.’ The essential consequence of this has been that, ‘In fact an international Castro-ist current has appeared inside the world Communist and revolutionary-socialist movement.’ If the influence of this current is still largely confined to the backward countries, ‘One of the reasons for this is that the Cuban leadership has not yet reached an understanding of how it can best facilitate revolutionary rebirth in these areas.’
Here we have reached a crucial point in the role of revisionism today. Everything is staked on the initiative and consciousness of ‘the Cuban leadership’. It is true that ‘Castro-ism’ has found much support among peasant leaders and radical intellectuals in backward countries, but this is precisely because of the failure of the working class to resolve its crisis of leadership. In such a situation, petty-bourgeois tendencies basing themselves on superficial theories about peasant rising and guerrilla warfare easily find a following. Indeed, the bitterness of exploitation and the apparent ease of early success against rotten ruling cliques encourages many revolutionaries to go through an experience with this kind of ideology, particularly when the Stalinists offer them only class-collaboration policies. To accept as a ‘fact’ or ‘new reality’ the rise of petty-bourgeois-dominated, national revolutionary movements, instead of seeing as an essential part of their origin the opportunist betrayals of working-class leadership, is another example of the method of empiricism, of what Trotsky called ‘worship of the accomplished fact’.
In case anyone should think that the revisionists have thereby abandoned the role of the Fourth International, we have what is really a very clear depiction of the perspectives of the Pabloites and SWP.
The appearance of more workers’ states through further development of the colonial revolution, particularly in countries like Algeria, could help Strengthen and enrich the international current of Castro-ism, give it longer-range perspectives and help bring it closer to understanding the necessity for a new revolutionary Marxist international of mass parties. Fulfilment of this historic possibility depends in part on the role which the FI plays in the colonial revolution and the capacity of the FI to help win fresh victories.
This paragraph does not need lengthy analysis. The role of the Fourth International, in fact absolutely necessary to lead the proletariat in every country, is here reduced to ‘helping’ in the winning of fresh victories. This ‘help’ will have a ‘part’ in determining whether or not the ‘Castro-ist currents’ come closer to understand the need for a Fourth International. By this subtle influence our ‘Trotskyists’ will also influence the revolution in Eastern Europe and Russia. Thus: ‘The infusion of Trotskyist concepts in this new Castro-ist current will also influence the development of a conscious revolutionary leadership particularly in the workers’ states, will help prevent “Titoist” deviations and better assure the evolution of mass pressure and direct action into the cleansing force of the political revolution. The development of the Portuguese and Spanish revolutions, historically possible in a short period [?], can also give rise to new tendencies of the Castro-ist type which could help the Cubans and related currents to achieve a fuller understanding of world revolution in its entirety.’ So much for the phrase, ‘The crisis of revolutionary leadership exists, of course, in the colonial and semi-colonial countries as well as in the advanced countries.’ For Trotsky and the founders of the Fourth International the content of the insistence on resolving the crisis of working-class leadership was the urgent task of constructing parties of the Fourth International. The ‘Reunification’ of the Pabloites, with SWP support, is based on the exact opposite, reducing the ‘International’ to the role of ideological apologists for the existing leaderships of the mass movement, with appropriate formulae to suit the particular conditions of each country.
Russia, Eastern Europe and China
In considering the workers’ states, the Resolution offers only a collection of impressions and speculations. There is no analysis of the contradictions within these countries and consequently no basis for any consideration of the tasks of building sections of the Fourth International against the counter-revolutionary bureaucracy. Phrases can be found which ‘accept’ the necessity of political revolution to overthrow the bureaucracy, but exactly opposite formulations represent accurately the actual method and theory of the Resolution. Pabloism’s first direct political expression was the theory that the Soviet bureaucracy, in the conditions following the establishment of workers’ states in Eastern Europe and China, would be forced to itself express the revolutionary pressure of the masses. Within the SWP leadership, which at first opposed this orientation, there soon appeared formulations which equated reforms and revolution in the USSR. The ‘reunification’ document preserves a solid base for this type of policy and leaves the way open for the most rightwing elements in their support of Khrushchev, e.g., ‘The evolution of the workers’ states as a whole since the victory of the Chinese Revolu- tion in 1949 and especially after Stalin’s death in 1953 has therefore steadily removed the causes that fostered political passivity among the masses and their vanguard’, and ‘Certain sectors of the bureaucracy have indicated awareness of the objective need to loosen the Stalinist stranglehold on the productive forces the better to meet the threatening military and technological advances of US imperialism.’ Once again we have a picture of ‘the evolution of the workers’ states as a whole’, objectively removing the basis of the bureaucracy’s role, together with the supposition that these objective trends will be expressed through the bureaucracy itself. The essence here is the same as it was in considering the backward countries: the working class must have a conscious leadership, forged in struggle against the class forces who cling to their power and domination in face of the changing objective situation. Starting from this point of view, the reactions of the bureaucracy or of factions within it will be seen as tactical defences of the reactionary forces, not as relatively progressive or ‘left’ tendencies.
For all the talk about political revolution, the consequence of the Pabloites’ method is to accept the perspective of Soviet technical progress and ‘peaceful coexistence’ upon which Khrushchev and the Soviet bureaucracy themselves insist. Thus:
However entrancing the picture of the worldwide consequences of an early victory of the political revolution in the Soviet Union may be, the process may prove to be longer drawn out than we desire. It would therefore be disastrous for Marxist revolutionary forces to stake everything on this one card, meantime overlooking the very real opportunities for breakthrough in the colonial and imperialist countries before the political revolution in the USSR succeeds. Consequently it is advisable to take into account the effect which continuous technological and economic progress of the USSR and the other workers’ states can have on the world revolutionary process in the absence of an early revolutionary victory.
True, the Resolution rejects ‘the view that the economic and technological advances of the workers’ states can in themselves decisively modify the relationship of forces between the classes in the imperialist countries, or contribute decisively to the overthrow of capitalism’, but its conclusion is finally:
The main contribution to the development of the proletarian revolution in the imperialist countries remains therefore the effect in the labour movement of the crisis of Stalinism and the technological and economic gains of the USSR.
The Advanced Countries—The Key
We have already indicated the basically false method and revisionist conclusion of the Pabloites and the SWP leaders on the class struggle in the advanced capitalist countries. In its final section the ‘reunification’ Resolution returns to the theme of the relation between militancy and changes in living standards.
In an attempt to justify their own concentration on work within the bureaucracy and inability to turn to the struggles of the most oppressed sections of the working class, the Pabloites have discovered that in fact the highly-paid workers, once their standards are disturbed, are most likely to set going the ‘revolutionary process’, e.g.:
What both theory and experience do prove is that the most revolutionary consequences follow not so much from the absolute level of real wage and living standard as from their relative short term fluctuations. Attempts to lower even slightly a hard-won high level, or the widespread fear that such an attempt is in preparation, can under certain conditions touch off great class actions that tend to pass rapidly from the defensive to the offensive stage and put on the agenda struggles of an objectively pre-revolutionary significance around transitional slogans. Such struggles may even lead to revolutionary situations. Recent strike waves in Belgium, Spain and Italy —spearheaded by the best-paid workers—again prove that it is quite false to hold that the highest-paid workers are automatically ‘corrupted’ by ‘capitalist prosperity’.
It is necessary to be very clear about the roie of this abstract speculating. The sharp swing to the right by Khrushchev is definitely a response to the revival of the class struggle in the advanced countries and in Eastern Europe. In the US and Europe the most oppressed sections of the working class, particularly the youth, are being drawn into the struggle. This is especially true in Britain and in the Negro struggle in America. Trotskyists will win the leadership of the working class only if they can build the revolutionary party out of these sections. At this point the struggle against the conservative organs of the labour bureaucracy becomes extremely sharp. In this sharp battle older workers and trade unionists who have gone through the prolonged ‘boom’ can be won from industrial ‘militancy’ to revolutionary politics. Because the Pabloite analysis, as we saw earlier, is an analysis by commentators and not participants, it neglects entirely the factor of consciousness and leadership. This is why it ends with grandiose and abstract conclusions with no import for the strategy and tactics of the revolutionary party. Thus:
If some of the obviously fine qualities of the undernourished proletariat of yesterday seem to have disappeared among Western workers, other good new qualities have appeared, precisely as a result of the higher standing of living and culture gained by the proletariat in the West. The gap between the knowledge of the skilled worker and the bourgeois technician has virtually disappeared or been greatly reduced. Technologically the Western worker is much more capable of socialist self-management today than was his father or grandfather; and he feels more strongly the need to play a conscious, leading role in the process of production.
It is also easier for today’s worker to grasp the overall economic interaction among all the factors, the intertwining of all economic problems and the needs and practical purposes of socialist planning. Increased leisure also means the increased possibility to participate on a mass scale in political administration [?], something that never existed in the past. It is not for Marxists to deny the basic Marxist truth that capitalism is the great educator of the workers for socialism, at least on the economic field.
All this ‘objective’ consideration of the working class as a collection of individuals sensitive to the economic climate, rather than as a fighting force, is a prelude to the Resolution’s justification of ‘deep entry’. After explaining the pressure of the falling rate of profit on the employers, which will lead to big wages struggles, the Resolution predicts even revolutionary situations:
…provided that the working class, or at least its broad vanguard [?], has sufficient self-confidence to advance the socialist alternative to the capitalist way of running the economy and the country. This in turn hinges essentially on the activity and influence of a broad left wing in the labour movement that educates the vanguard in the necessity of struggling for this socialist alternative and that builds up self-confidence and an apparatus capable of revolutionary struggles through a series of partial struggles,
and further:
The objective is to stimulate and broaden mass struggles to the utmost and to move as much as possible towards playing a leading role in such struggles, beginning with the most elementary demands and seeking to develop them in the direction of transitional slogans on the level of governmental power and the creation of bodies of dual power.
The advanced countries are the fundamental key to the world revolution. It is here above all that the resolution of the crisis of leadership of the working class, the constructing of Leninist parties, will strike at the heart of imperialism. But here, too, the revisionists have found a formula for trailing behind the official leadership.
At the centre of the actual reconstruction of the Fourth International will be the building of Trotskyist parties who make a relationship . with the strength of the working class in the advanced countries, a struggle which requires a bitter fight against the opportunists and centrists of all kinds. Those who excuse the betrayals of the bureaucracies, even dressing them up as reflections of mass pressure, stand in the way of this vital task.
The Fourth International
The revisionist ideas we have analysed here are the basis for the ‘reunified Fourth International’ of the Pabloites, supported by the Socialist Workers’ Party (USA). Denouncing the Trotskyists of the International Committee as ‘sectarians’ and ‘ultra-lefts’, deliberately confusing our position with that of an adventurist group (the ‘Posadas’ group) which split from their own ranks only two years ago, they unite on the basis of liquidating the independent Marxist party, which necessitates the abandonment of Marxism. Instead, all manner of demagogy and spurious nonsense talked by petty-bourgeois bureaucratic and nationalist leaders is welcomed by them as ap- proaching Marxism.
For example, in its section, ‘The Fourth International’, the Resolution says:
The validity of the Trotskyist explanation of the character of the bureaucracy as a social force has become accepted by all serious students of the Soviet Union. It is even reflected in the theoretical basis and justification offered by the Jugoslav government in its experimentation with workers’ councils and self-management.
Not only Tito, but also Castro is welcomed as a convert to Trotsky’s views on bureaucracy and the role of the working class, even to the extent of extravagant claims such as this:
The attack Fidel Castro launched against the Anibal-Escalante of Cuba sounded like a repetition of Leninist and Trotskyist speeches heard in the Soviet Union almost forty years ago.
In point of fact, Castro’s speech was a defence of the independence of the State official- dom, not only against one wing inside Cuban Stalinism, but also against any political control from outside the State apparatus itself. We thus have the spectacle of ‘Trotskyists’ not only justify- ing the manoeuvres of petty-bourgeois state bureaucracies, but even welcoming them as ex- pressions of the creeping victory of Trotskyism.
Theory is no longer seen by these ‘Trotskyists’ as a guide to action, but as a series of formal, abstract writings to be checked and ‘confirmed’ in the heads of their possessors. Our ‘theoreticians’ have the function only of casting around for ‘examples’ in the course of events or in the speeches and writings of politicians, examples which they then abstract from the context and list as ‘confirmations’. By contrast, Marxist theory is in fact confirmed and developed only by the active penetration of reality by the Marxists and the working class. The very expressions used in the document illustrate the difference: ‘In the same way the theory of permanent revolution, kept alive by the Fourth International as a precious heritage received from Trotsky .. .’ With this approach theory becomes an ikon with the possibility of perhaps a few quantitative additions, rather than a qualitative development through revolutionary practice. The Resolution indeed describes this explicitly:
The cadres of the Fourth International carried out their revolutionary duty in keeping alive the programme of Trotskyism and adding to it as world events dictated.
This part of the Resolution concerned with ‘The Fourth International’, which should be concerned with the struggle to establish and develop the theory and practice of independent revolutionary parties on the programme of the Fourth International, is in fact something quite different. After pointing out that small organizations are in greater danger from sectarianism than from opportunism, which is ‘generally easier to recognize’ (this passes for serious argument!), this section is devoted to a collection of formulae to excuse the virtual liquidation of independent revolutionary parties. ‘Entrism’ is necessary, says the Resolution, because the masses are still dominated by opportunist leaders: under these conditions, ‘the masses, when they display readiness to take the road of revolutionary action, do not begin with a fully developed Marxist consciousness but with an outlook which is closer to left centrism.
‘In addition to this, the bureaucratic leaderships do not facilitate bringing Marxist educational material to the ranks. They operate as ruthless permanent factions, completely hostile to the ideas of Trotskyism and prepared to engage in witch-hunting and the use of most undemocratic measures against those who advance fresh or challenging views.’
We have seen how, both in the advanced and the backward countries, the revisionists in fact capitulate to leaders of a petty-bourgeois type. The theoretical justification for this is that, through a tactic of ‘entrism’, the Fourth International encourages the rapid evolution of ‘left centrist’ mass movements: ‘The revolutionary nuclei actively participate in building left-wing tendencies capable of leading broader sections of the masses in action. Through the experiences built up in these actions, they assist in transforming the best forces of these centrist or left-centrist tendencies into genuine revolutionary Marxists.’ For all the disclaimers that entrism does not mean forming only ‘pressure groups’, this formulation makes it very clear that the leadership of the decisive mass struggles will be centrist in character, and that the ‘Fourth International’ will not organize for the political defeat of these leaders, preferring instead to ‘transform’ them into Trotskyists. All the talk about transitional demands resolves itself into the assumption of a purely educational role within the centrist apparatus rather than revolutionary leadership of the masses. The history of the Belgian General Strike and the Pabloite capitulation to the FLN are the most striking examples.
Two Types of Leadership
The decisive test of a Marxist party’s orientation towards the mass movement is the degree of success in building a revolutionary cadre, whose links with the working class are forged in struggle against the opportunists and bureaucrats. In their concern over the past ten or 15 years to ‘get closer to the new reality’, the revisionists have produced a circle of ‘leaders’ and a method of work diametrically opposed to this revolutionary preparation. For the colonial and semi-colonial countries, it is clear that the so-called ‘sections’ of the Fourth International which follow Pablo have become mere apologists for the national leaderships. Their abandonment of an independent orientation to the working class is explicit. Such a method produces only a soft group of professional advisers who are not averse to becoming petty functionaries, as we see in Algeria. From these positions of ‘influence’ they help along the ‘objective’ process whereby the petty-bourgeois leaders are pushed towards Marxism.
In the advanced countries, these errors take similar form, The grandiose ‘World Congresses’ of Pablo’s International, with their claims of innumerable represented sections, discuss everything under the sun except the actual construction of the revolutionary leadership. What is the balance sheet of ‘entrism sui generis’? The tactic of entry into the mass labour organizations must build up a body of experience about trade union work and the methods of politically preparing an alternative leadership in battle against the opportunists and centrists; that is the purpose of entry. But at no Pabloite Congresses is there any discussion of this experience. Marxism develops as a science, by consciously working over the experience of the movement in struggle. But for the Pabloites such questions do not arise: ‘entry’ work consists of steadily entrenching themselves in positions within the apparatus, from which they will ‘help’ or ‘encourage’ the ‘left centrist’ tendencies who are in any case historically next in line for the mantle of leadership.
Such orientation produces a particular type of national section and a particular type of leadership within the Pabloite International. Around the publications of this group there gather numbers of petty-bourgeois intellectuals who very easily accept a standpoint of ‘principled’ but quite abstract avowals of Marxism, divorced from any struggle to construct a leadership against the enemies of Marxism and of the working class. Such groups seek constantly for ‘alliances’ with all kinds of centrist trends, cultivating the most naive illusions about the ‘leftward’ tendencies of these ‘allies’ in parliamentary and trade union circles, as in Britain and Belgium. The real task of Marxists, to ‘go deeper and deeper into the working class’ to build a power which will smash the bureaucracy, is anathema to these circles. To such a political way of life, the message that it is most important to encourage the ‘left centrists’ is a gift from heaven. The leaders of this International are, more and more, men of ‘influence’, men with ‘reputations’ in petty-bourgeois circles, and not working-class leaders, not leaders familiar with the intimate and detailed problems of the working class and the revolutionary party.
The sections of the ‘International’ led by this type of ‘leader’ are surrounded not by the most militant sections of the working class (in particular, today, the youth), but by their flimsy and deliberately unclarified relationships with the centrist and bureaucratic tendencies. In this environment, all the tendencies towards extreme revisionism which we have indicated are assured of a rapid growth; and are now strangling to death whatever remains of the cadres of the Pabloite International. In the United States, as we have pointed out in an earlier section of this report, the same result has been achieved by the SWP without benefit of the ‘entrism’ tactic. The well-known theories of ‘regroupment’ of the Left after the Stalinist crisis of 1956 and of joint electoral activity independent of the Democrats and Republicans, both of which are part of a general orientation of the Party’s work towards the ‘radical’ milieu in the United States, were the substitute for ‘entrism’, which was not a possibility. There is consequently a situation in the SWP where Trade Union work is at its lowest ebb and has produced no new cadres. The old leadership survives at the core of the Party, more and more concerned with creating a good impression in petty-bourgeois circles, from Castro to the National Guardian. - While this orientation has matured over the period since the war, a profound process of radicalization has surged through the most oppressed sections of the working class. In the struggles now taking place in the USA, part of the overall radicalization in the advanced capitalist countries, the SWP is utterly incapable of leadership. It tails along behind the pettybourgeois leaders of the Negro struggle, rejecting them only when their sway over the masses is coming to an end. The type of party into which the SWP has been turning is like the Pabloite sections, adapted to radical circles of petty-bourgeois, powerless to intervene in the real struggle of the class.
Leaders of this type are, not unnaturally, hostile to the International Committee, and particularly to the Socialist Labour League. Hansen advises the SLL to stop criticizing the centrists and instead, ‘advance to meet the leftward-moving stream’ in Britain. He is really advising an abandonment of the SLL’s orientation towards the working class in struggle against the bureaucracy. But it is the work of the SLL and the other sections of the IC which is the real guarantee of the defeat of the revisionists in the international movement. In contrast to the Pabloites and the SWP, it has been possible to develop the basis of a new working-class leadership, to train in struggle a force which knows how to lead workers and to fight the opportunists. On this fundamental, principled basis, the SLL in fact has a tactical relationship on limited issues with centrist tendencies in the trade unions which is far more stable and successful than that of any of the revisionists, who merely submit themselves as errand-boys to the centrists.
The Resolution eventually tries to justify liquidationism by accepting a formulation which the SWP leadership has been toying with for the last two-and-a-half years:
An acute problem in relation to the construction of revolutionary-socialist parties in many countries is lack of time to organize and to gain adequate experience before the revolution breaks out. In previous decades this would signify certain defeat for the revolution. Because of a series of new factors, however, this is no longer necessarily the case. The example of the Soviet Union, the existence of workers’ states from whom material aid can be obtained, and the relative weakening of world capitalism, have made it possible for revolutions in some instances to achieve partial successes, to reach certain plateaux (where they may rest in unstable equilibrium as in the case of Bolivia) and even to go as far as the establishment of a workers’ state. Revolutionary Marxists in such countries face extremely difficult questions, from an inadequate level of socialist consciousness among the masses to a dearth of seasoned or experienced cadres to carry out a myriad pressing tasks. No choice is open to them in such situations but to participate completely and wholeheartedly in the revolution and to build the party in the very process of the revolution itself.
This passage is a fitting end to our long series of quotations. It contains the conclusion which excuses everything: because of ‘new factors’ working-class power can be obtained without there having been constructed Marxist parties. In practice, this means that the primary emphasis in the work of the Pabloite national sections will be to encourage the ‘left centrist’ leaderships, for this will be seen as the quickest way of making sure the working class is not ‘overtaken’ by revolution. In reality the crisis of leadership has passed; new factors mean that humanity can emerge from capitalism without the formation of conscious leaderships based on Marxism.
When these revolutions occur, Marxists have no alternative but to participate in them ‘wholeheartedly’, i.e., they must not appear as opponents of the petty-bourgeois leaderships, In Cuba, for example, they must enter Castro’s party and work loyally within it. In Algeria, they must work for Ben Bella, and join with him in denouncing and imprisoning any opposition movements, Right or Left. The ‘dearth of seasoned or experienced cadres to carry out a myriad pressing tasks’ is a direct reference to the Pabloites’ role with regard to Algeria, where they have made themselves recruiting sergeants for technicians to strengthen the Ben Bella government. As for ‘building revolutionary parties in the process of the revolution itself’, this is only the most extreme of the hypocritical formulae in which the Resolution abounds. It is precisely in the revolutionary situations of Algeria and Cuba that the building of the independent party has been most blatantly abandoned, on the assumption that the petty-bourgeois leaders themselves will become revolutionary Marxists. Even if the formulation were taken seriously as a contribution to theory, it would have to be immediately rejected as false. The task of revolutionaries is never to speculate about whether there is ‘time’ for the party to be constructed, but to work in all the stages of development of the class struggle, guided by the long-term, revolutionary interests of the working class, to steel the revolutionary party in struggle against every arm of the capitalist class and its state, to develop a Bolshevik cadre with bonds of steel uniting it with every section of the proletariat. This constant struggle, through periods of black reaction as well as in times of revolutionary upsurge, is the only guarantee of preparedness in the struggle for power. Even such a party, when the revolution occurs, will find it necessary to overcome internal conflict, hesitations, even desertions, as Lenin found in 1917. Such a perspective is absolutely alien to the facile notion ‘of ‘building parties in the process of revolution itself’.
Such are the political bases of the ‘reunification’ of revisionists which took place in Rome in 1963. The sections of our International Committee in Europe, in Latin America, in Africa, in Japan, and in the deformed workers’ states of Eastern Europe, are united in their complete opposition to the revisionists. We are confident that in the course of action and of discussion, many of the followers of Pablo and Cannon will be compelled to change their views, and to recognize the need to return to the founding Programme of the Fourth International. Above all, the resurgence of the working class of the USA and of Western and Eastern Europe is the foundation for the great leap forward which is now possible in the Fourth International. This rising militancy of the revolutionary class is the ground of all our activity, and it is also the ground upon which the opportunists and centrists of all kinds will be defeated, because their room for manoeuvre with the imperialists grows smaller and smaller. The great international crisis of Stalinism is the most important proof of this process. Our fight against revisionism in the Fourth International is a vitally necessary part of our revolutionary political work in the working class. It is the revolutionary practice which will surely enable the Fourth International to provide the leadership of all those communists who come to take their place in the coming final battles of the working class to overthrow the power of world capital.
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