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Continued from left column

Pseudo-Trotskyist Uses and Abuses of Yugoslavia

In later years, the Yugoslavia question has had a curious history among ostensibly Trotskyist currents. For the Healyites, claiming to be the direct continuity of the Fourth Inter­na­tional in an organ­i­za­tional battle with Mandel’s United Secretariat, the Yugoslav affair represented something of a problem. Since Healy was up to his neck in supporting Tito, organizing a “John MacLean Youth Work Brigade” from the Labour League of Youth to go to Yugoslavia,¹⁵⁶ it was imper­a­tive to assert that Pabloism only began with 1951, after the enthu­si­asm for Tito had passed. Healy solved this by hardly men­tioning Yugoslavia at all.

Healy’s one-​time flunky Tim Wohlforth, however, tried to make a virtue of the FI’s contortions over East Europe, providing a doctrinal precedent for the Healyite posi­tion that Castro’s Cuba remained a bourgeois state by resuscitating 1948-49 vintage Germain to proclaim the “theory of structural assi­mi­la­tion.” (Germain, at least, had had a sense of irony: he referred to the “metaphysics of structural assi­mi­la­tion.”)¹⁵⁷ If one had truly “assimilated” the Wohlforthian construct, then one could “explain” the formation of a Yugoslav deformed workers state and the Tito-​Stalin split by simply asserting that “Yugoslavia never fun­da­men­tally left the Soviet camp.”¹⁵⁸

David North, Wohlforth’s replacement as Healy’s American satrap, eventually turned on his master Healy and proclaimed himself heir to the mantle of the FI. He then published a giant tome, The Heri­tage We Defend, purporting to be “A Contribution to the History of the Fourth Inter­na­tional,” in which he takes as his own the multiple con­tra­dic­tory posi­tions of the Fourth Inter­na­tional on Yugoslavia from July 1948 on. To cover this up, he repeatedly lies about the content of the FI state­ments by leaving out their most embarrassing parts. Thus he extensively quotes (for several pages) the 13 July 1948 I.S. letter to the Yugoslav CP without men­tioning its call at the end for a common “Leninist Inter­na­tional” with Tito. He favorably cites the Seventh Plenum (April 1949) IEC docu­ment on East Europe without men­tioning that it described the “buffer zone” as still cap­italist! Healy/Wohlforth/North give new meaning to the word “charlatan.”¹⁵⁹

On the other hand, during the 1970s and early ’80s, a host of centrist groups split off from both the USec and the IC, as well as from the Shachtman currents. Among these split-​offs, quite a few suddenly “discovered” that the Fourth Inter­na­tional as a whole supposedly went revi­sionist over Yugoslavia in 1948, and therefore the 1951-53 split which destroyed the FI was not so important after all, since both Pabloites and anti-​Pabloites were supposedly rotten centrists. This list includes, at least:

—the Class Struggle League (CSL), U.S., of the professional ex- and anti-​Spartacist Harry Turner;

—the “Chartist” group, Britain;

—the Spartacus-BL, West Germany, split from the Inter­na­tionale Kommunisten Deutsch­lands, a split-​off from the German USec group;

—the Revo­lu­tionary Socialist League (RSL), U.S., split from the Shachtmanite Inter­na­tional Socialists;

—the Frazzione Marxista Rivoluzionaria (FMR), Italy, of Roberto Massari, a split from the Italian USec;

—the Workers Socialist League (WSL), Britain, led by Alan Thornett, which split from Healy’s SLL;

—the Gruppo Bolscevico-​Leninista (GBL), Italy, of Franco Grisolia, which split from the Italian Lambertistes;

—the Revo­lu­tionary Com­mu­nist League-​Inter­na­tionalist (RCLI), U.S., a New Haven-​based split from Sam Marcy’s Workers World Party;

—the Workers Inter­na­tional League (WIL), Britain, which split from the ex-Healyite Workers Revo­lu­tionary Party of Sheila Torrance; and

—Workers Power (WP), Britain, which split from Tony Cliff’s Socialist Workers Party.

In addition there are their various inter­na­tional lashups, such as the 1976-77 “Necessary Inter­na­tional Initiative” (FMR, Spartacus-BL), the “Trotskyist Inter­na­tional Liaison Com­mit­tee” (WSL, GBL, LOB), the “League for a Revo­lu­tionary Com­mu­nist Inter­na­tional” (WP) and the “Leninist-​Trotskyist Tendency” (WIL).

What’s noteworthy about this list, aside from the short lifespan of most of the groups, is their common hatred of the Spartacist League. This is not accidental. A main reason for their neutralist stance on the 1951-53 fight is to deny the rev­o­lu­tionary political continuity of Trotskyism represented by the Spartacist tendency. If the Fourth Inter­na­tional had already “degen­er­ated” (WP) over Yugoslavia, or if this was the starting point for the FI’s “complete aban­donment of Trotskyism” (CSL), they assert, then the fight against Pablo’s liqui­dationism in the ’50s did not defend Trotskyism. Hence the RT’s fight in the American SWP against the party’s Pabloist adaptation to Fidel Castro was of no particular consequence. What this disavowal of the importance of the 1953 split reveals is the utter lack of seriousness of these dilettantes, for whom the destruction of the Fourth Inter­na­tional as the centralized world party of socialist revo­lu­tion means nothing. Most of these self-​styled “theoreticians” fancy them­selves as the first Trotskyists since Trotsky (or, in the case of the RSL, the first Trotskyists ever). At least the CSL had the “consistency” to call for a “Fifth International.”

Typically, these groups explain the demise of the Fourth Inter­na­tional by a failure of analysis and creative thought, rather than seeing that there was a programmatic fight, and they offer a recipe reflecting their particular peculiar origins. Thus the ex-Healyite British WSL, in its docu­ment on the USec, declares Pabloism to be a “method” reflecting “the ideological approach of the petty bourgeoisie.” The political basis for the 1953 split, they write, “lay implicitly in the revi­sionist political line that had from early 1950 through to mid 1953 been commonly accepted by the FI leader­ship,” and which “was first formulated by Pablo at the end of 1949…based on the surface appear­ances of events in Yugoslavia since the Stalin-​Tito split of 1948.” The WSL’s diagnosis is that “The danger of such a method emerging remains acute wherever (for whatever reasons) Trotskyism becomes dependent for its existence upon middle class and intellectual forces.”¹⁶⁰

More recently, the WIL’s “Leninist-​Trotskyist Tendency” analyzed the demise of the Fourth Inter­na­tional as a straight line from Yugoslavia to the 1953 split, in which they take a “plague on both your centrist houses” line:

From denying the possibility of Stalinism overturning cap­italist property relations, the great majority of the FI’s leading cadre moved over to an accommodation and finally a capi­tu­lation to Stalinism, from the adulation of Tito in 1948 to the Third World Congress in 1951…. The outcome of the 1953 split between the IS of Pablo and Mandel and the IC of Cannon, Healy and Lambert was two centrist currents, neither of which was capable of honestly assessing—still less correcting—the post-​war crisis of the FI, the aban­donment of Trotsky’s programme and the failure to meet the political challenge of the world after 1945.¹⁶¹

By far the most elaborate of these schemas is that offered by Workers Power, which has published two books supposedly demonstrating the complete “degen­er­ation” of the FI by 1951. In The Death Agony of the Fourth Inter­na­tional and the Tasks of Trotskyists Today, Workers Power proclaimed that the Fourth Inter­na­tional’s post-WWII perspectives were “a combination of dogmatism and blind opti­mism” which spawned errors that “oscillated between sectarianism and oppor­tunism,” and that eventually “the political vibrations broke up the FI into two factions both equally tainted with these errors.” Issuing a death certificate, WP places the date of the FI’s demise at its 1951 Third World Congress: “The fact that no section voted against the Yugoslav res­olu­tion—the cornerstone of all the errors—is a fact of enormous significance. The FI as a whole had collapsed into centrism.” As for the Inter­na­tional Com­mit­tee, it “did not constitute a ‘left centrist’ alternative to the IS.”¹⁶² Workers Power denies that “the continuity of Trotskyism had been safe­guarded” by either side in the 1953 split, rejecting not only calls to “reconstruct” or “reunify” the FI, but any attempt to recreate Trotsky’s Fourth Inter­na­tional:

Even the apparently more far-​reaching call for “the rebirth of the FI” put forward by the Spartacist League (US), was an appeal for the reincarnation of an already degen­er­ate (post-1951) FI.¹⁶³

Workers Power’s method is profoundly idealist and anti-​Marxist. There were far-​reaching errors at the Second (1948) and Third (1951) Congresses of the Fourth Inter­na­tional, and an escalating political degen­er­ation as Pabloism took shape over the Yugoslav affair. Pablo certainly had a revi­sionist program by this time, but the liqui­dationist impli­ca­tions were in the process of being drawn out. It would be a mistake to equate the fully developed gangrene with the initial infection and its early stages. For one thing, the errors didn’t begin in 1948. The decimated European leader­ship of the Fourth Inter­na­tional was badly disoriented on the direc­tion of developments after 1945, continuing to insist on Trotsky’s perspective that the impe­ri­alist war would give rise to pro­le­tarian revo­lu­tions and bring about the demise of Stalinism. The defeat of the immediate postwar workers’ struggles, and the expansion of Stalin’s zone of domination as a result of the Red Army’s defeat of Hitler, confounded this prediction and confused the FI.

For that matter, we have long disagreed with the SWP’s usage of the slogan for a “Proletarian Military Policy” during World War II. And, of course, it was Trotsky himself who first raised the PMP, calling for trade-​union control of military training, although he seemed to be thinking more of a situation of dual power, as in the Spanish Civil War, than of a con­sol­i­dated bourgeois state.¹⁶⁴ The PMP was a serious devi­a­tion which undercut the SWP’s inter­na­tionalist opposi­tion to the impe­ri­alist war. Meanwhile, the French Trotskyists during World War II were split between two wings, one of which (the POI) subordinated its struggle to the Gaullist Resistance movement, while the other wing (the CCI) limited itself to factory work and largely ignored the struggle against the German occupier.

Does this mean that already by the end of the war the Fourth Inter­na­tional had “degen­er­ated”? Lutte Ouvrière would say so; we would not. For at the same time, 18 leaders of the American SWP and the Minneapolis Teamsters were jailed by Roosevelt for their opposi­tion to the impe­ri­alist war. And the very same wing of the French Trotskyists that capi­tu­lated to the bourgeois-​nationalist Resistance leader­ship also carried out the heroic inter­na­tionalist underground work that produced the Arbeiter und Soldat newspaper which circulated clan­des­tinely in German Wehrmacht units in France. Moreover, at the end of the war there was a political reckoning, in which the Fourth Inter­na­tional, in founding a fused organ­i­za­tion, the Parti Com­mu­niste Inter­na­tionaliste, criti­cized the weaknesses of both the POI and CCI.

Or let us go back further in history: the Fourth Congress of the Com­mu­nist Inter­na­tional in 1922 passed the famous “Theses on the Eastern Question” containing the call for an “anti-​impe­ri­alist united front.” These theses were revi­sionist, laying the basis for popular-​front politics in the colonial and back­ward cap­italist countries. This followed on the Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East in 1920, which praised Kemal Pasha (Atatürk), at a time when he was repressing the Turkish Com­mu­nists, and called for a “jihad” (Islamic holy war) against impe­ri­alism—also revi­sionist. The 1922 theses were a foretaste of advancing bureau­cra­tic conservatism in the Comintern. And it was no abstract question: this was the theoretical basis that Stalin used to justify ordering the Chinese Com­mu­nist Party to join and stay in the bourgeois-​nationalist Kuomintang. That led of course to the Shanghai massacre of 1927.

So…at what point do you say that the Comintern and the Bolshevik Party degen­er­ated? In 1922, or even in 1920, when there were revi­sionist responses on key questions? Or perhaps only in December 1924, when Stalin first formulated his revi­sionist “theory” of “socialism in one country”? No, it was in 1923-24, when there was a fight, and the Stalinist-​led bureauc­racy usurped power, defeating the Bolshevik inter­na­tionalists. Likewise, when do you declare the Third Inter­na­tional dead for the revo­lu­tion and call for a new Inter­na­tional? Trotsky insisted that only great events could decide such matters, and continued to fight as an expelled faction of the Comintern until 1933, when the CI let Hitler march unopposed to power (and then approved this criminal policy). Moreover, in the case of the Fourth Inter­na­tional, it is not just the question of a date. The FI was destroyed as a world party, but it did not betray the rev­o­lu­tionary pro­le­tariat; and its leading section, the SWP led by James P. Cannon, despite its many weaknesses, did not succumb to Pabloist liqui­dationism until some years later.

Serious com­mu­nists do not write off their inter­na­tional party until it has shown in deeds that it is dead for the revo­lu­tion, that it has betrayed the cause of the pro­le­tariat and gone over to the side of the bourgeoisie. Lenin continued to fight within the framework of the Second Inter­na­tional until the German Social Democrats’ vote for the Kaiser’s war credits on 4 August 1914.

The Fourth Inter­na­tional was destroyed as the result of the deep inroads of revi­sionism, but when and where did it betray the pro­le­tariat in world-​historic events like wars or revo­lu­tions? Over Yugoslavia? The FI indeed had faulty analyses of East Europe, and it took a capi­tu­latory line toward the Yugoslav leader­ship in the Stalin-​Tito split, yet later drew back empirically under the impact of Yugoslavia’s support for the impe­ri­alist “UN” intervention in the Korean War. But such an oppor­tunist political course should lead revo­lu­tionaries to wage a faction fight to save the world party of socialist revo­lu­tion or resuscitate it, rather than to write it off. In fighting to reforge the Fourth Inter­na­tional, we are continuing Trotsky’s pro­le­tarian stand of never aban­doning any posi­tion until it is defin­i­tively lost, just as we fought a last-​ditch fight for political revo­lu­tion against the capitalist-​restorationist onslaught in the former Soviet Union. It is not surprising that those who so lightly turn their backs on the Fourth Inter­na­tional end up on Yeltsin’s coun­ter­rev­o­lu­tionary barricades.

Workers Power’s most elaborate work arguing the bankruptcy of the Fourth Inter­na­tional is The Degen­er­ated Revo­lu­tion: The Origins and Nature of the Stalinist States. In this tome they ascribe the postwar “programmatic confusion amongst those claiming to uphold the banner of Trotskyism” to “an inability to creatively elaborate Trotsky’s own analysis of Stalinism.” More specifically, “no section of the Fourth Inter­na­tional (FI), nor any tendencies within the sections, developed a correct appraisal of the role of world Stalinism in East Europe.”¹⁶⁵ That’s not quite true—the Haston/​Grant RCP did pretty well, at least on paper. But what WP thinks is a correct analysis is revealed by their state­ment that they “stand by the programmatic declarations of the 1948 Congress”—including its res­olu­tion on world Stalinism proclaiming East European states to still be cap­italist!¹⁶⁶ But then we read WP’s supposedly creative and correct analysis which declares: “Wherever it occurs and whatever form it takes, Stalinist bureau­cra­tic social revo­lu­tions are coun­ter­rev­o­lu­tionary.”¹⁶⁷ So there you have it: “coun­ter­rev­o­lu­tionary revo­lu­tions”! This isn’t dia­lec­tics but Stalinophobic flimflammery.

On the empirical level, it is simply false that such bureau­cra­tic, top-​down social revo­lu­tions are “carried through against the prevailing level of consciousness of the forces necessary for the pro­le­tarian revo­lu­tion in the country—ie the working class,” as Workers Power asserts.¹⁶⁸ Look at Prague in 1948, which the bourgeoisie described as a “coup.” Here the workers responded enthusiastically when the Stalinist tops permitted a limited mobi­li­za­tion to sweep out the remaining bourgeois ministers: “On 21 February 1948 the Com­mu­nists called on the population to form Com­mit­tees of Revo­lu­tionary Action in the factories, in the local govern­ment offices, in towns and villages. Workers militias were quickly formed, to which arms were hastily distributed.”¹⁶⁹ These com­mit­tees and mobi­li­za­tions, used to carry out a rev­o­lu­tionary overturn of property forms, were bureau­cra­tically controlled and manipulated, not smashed, as any real coun­ter­rev­o­lu­tionary action would require. More generally, as we pointed out in an article on Workers Power:

What could a coun­ter­rev­o­lu­tionary overturn of cap­italism mean—except, perhaps, a return to feudalism? The closest thing to this in recent times was the “Islamic revo­lu­tion” in Iran. But there WP backed the mullah-​led “mass movement” uncon­di­tionally, just as they supported Polish Solidarność’ full-​blown attempt at coun­ter­rev­o­lution despite admitting the Solidarność leader­ship was committed to the restoration of cap­italism.¹⁷⁰

Behind this concoction of Stalinist-led “coun­ter­rev­o­lu­tionary revo­lu­tions” lies a fun­da­men­tal rejection of Trotsky’s analysis of Stalinism. While claiming to reject the char­ac­ter­i­zation that Stalinism is “coun­ter­rev­o­lu­tionary through and through,” WP declares that “Stalinism…is invariably a coun­ter­rev­o­lu­tionary force.”¹⁷¹ Moreover, Workers Power declares, “we reject the notion that Stalinism has a dual nature.”¹⁷² One could cite Trotsky’s numerous references to the “dual” role/​function/​position/​character of the Stalinist bureau­cracy, which are to be found in virtually every work where he analyzed the nature of this con­tra­dic­tory phenomenon. Trotsky emphasized that the bureau­cracy is not a stable social formation, such as a class, but an inter­me­diate layer, a parasitic out­growth of the workers state that arose under certain conditions. Its con­tra­dic­tory (zigzag) policy is a reflection of its con­tra­dic­tory posi­tion. You cannot under­stand the nature of the Stalinist bureau­cracy by abstracting it from its parasitical rela­tion­ship to the economic foundations of the workers state. In “The Class Nature of the Soviet State,” Trotsky wrote that the Stalinist apparatus “defends the pro­le­tarian dic­ta­torship with its own methods; but these methods are such as facilitate the victory of the enemy tomorrow. Whoever fails to under­stand this dual role of Stalinism in the USSR has under­stood nothing.”¹⁷³ This dia­lec­tical under­standing is basic to explaining how, under highly exceptional cir­cum­stances, the parasitic Stalinist caste could carry out bureau­cra­tically deformed social revo­lu­tions such as in East Europe after World War II.

WP rejects the term “deformed workers state,” saying Pablo used it to imply that “the bureau­cra­tic defor­ma­tion of the Yugoslav workers’ state was only quantitative” and Yugoslavia was “not in need of political revo­lu­tion.”¹⁷⁴ In any case Pablo’s use of the term doesn’t invalidate this scientific char­ac­ter­i­zation. In fact, at the Third World Congress Pablo and the rest of the FI termed the East European “buffer zone” deformed workers states and did call for political revo­lu­tion. “Bureaucratic defor­ma­tions,” such as Soviet Russia had even under Lenin and Trotsky, are a matter of degree; a bureau­cra­tically deformed workers state is something qualitatively different, separated from a rev­o­lu­tionary workers state by a political revo­lu­tion. Workers Power’s preferred term—WP called Yugoslavia a “degen­er­ate” workers state—is not a Marxist definition at all but a term of opprobrium. Tito’s Yugoslavia didn’t degen­er­ate, never having been a workers state based on soviet demo­cracy, guided by rev­o­lu­tionary inter­na­tionalism. So Workers Power can only mean that Yugoslavia was “degen­er­ate” in the sense of debased, decadent, depraved, dissolute.

The use of such Stalino­phobic verbiage by Workers Power, and their proclamation of the “degen­er­ation” of the Fourth Inter­na­tional over Yugoslavia, point straight back to their origins in Tony Cliff’s Inter­na­tional Socialists (now the British SWP). The Cliffites occasionally claim that they originated in a fight against “the shamelessly oppor­tunist support for Tito’s Yugoslavia by the rest of the Trotskyist movement.”¹⁷⁵ This is a patent falsi­fi­cation. Cliff did not write his docu­ment criti­cizing the FI’s line on Eastern Europe until July 1950,¹⁷⁶ just at the moment when the Cliffites got them­selves expelled from the Fourth Inter­na­tional for publicly repudiating defense of the North Korean deformed workers state in the war with U.S. impe­ri­alism. In 1948 Tony Cliff was arguing that the Soviet Union (and Yugoslavia and the rest of East Europe) were “state cap­italist”! For WP to locate the defin­i­tive “collapse” of the FI in 1948-51 is a way of alibiing their own past: it’s no big deal that Cliff was a “Third Campist” if Pablo and Cannon were both centrist revi­sionists as well. Workers Power’s line also facilitates inter­na­tional lashups: there being no rev­o­lu­tionary political continuity, everyone can wipe out their past and start with a clean slate. As we noted:

Seizing upon the disori­en­ta­tion that gripped the entire world Trotskyist movement in the face of the post-WWII Stalinist overturns of cap­italism in East Europe, Workers Power contemptuously dismisses the Trotskyists who fought the liqui­dationism of Michel Pablo, albeit belatedly, partially and prima­rily on their own national terrain, and who recon­sti­tuted them­selves as the IC. Cannon just isn’t up to snuff for Workers Power, because it took him a few years to catch on. But he led a fight to preserve Trotskyism against those who sought to destroy it.¹⁷⁷

Workers Power (like WIL and the rest of the lot) argues that the Fourth Inter­na­tional “degen­er­ated” and “collapsed” because theoretically it just wasn’t “creative” enough to under­stand the postwar reality. This is the reasoning of self-​satisfied petty-​bourgeois academics—or, as gadfly gossips of the British Trotskyoid left char­ac­terize WP, “1970’s students, becoming Polytechnic lecturers.”¹⁷⁸ Following Trotsky’s principle in the 1939-40 fight against the Shachtman-Burnham opposi­tion—“Any serious fac­tional fight in a party is always in the final analysis a reflection of the class struggle”¹⁷⁹—a Marxist would ask first what class forces were behind the split in 1953. WP portrays it more or less as Pablo’s Stalino­philia vs. SWP/PCI “Stalino­phobia,” responding to the pressures of social demo­cracy. But this ignores a key point: in 1948-51, both sides were complicit in tailing after the Stalinist Tito, and the supposed Stalino­phobes of the SWP supported Pablo in ordering the French PCI to enter the Stalinist party. In supporting Pablo, Cannon argued that he suspected the French majority (Bleibtreu/​Lambert) of…Stalino­phobia.

What actually happened was described by the Revo­lu­tionary Tendency, precursor of the Spartacist League:

The emergence of Pabloite revi­sionism pointed to the underlying root of the crisis of our movement: aban­donment of a working-​class rev­o­lu­tionary perspective. Under the influence of the relative stabilization of cap­italism in the industrial states of the West and of the partial success of petit-​bourgeois movements in over­throwing impe­ri­alist rule in some of the back­ward countries, the revi­sionist tendency within the Trotskyist movement developed an ori­en­ta­tion away from the pro­le­tariat and toward the petit-​bourgeois leader­ships.¹⁸⁰

It is not just a matter of individuals and their thought processes. The person and personality of Stalin were not decisive in explaining the rise of Stalinism, which was the result of the cohering of a conservative bureau­cra­tic layer in an isolated, beleaguered workers state in a back­ward country. So also, the key to Pabloism was not that individuals became wedded to their peculiar theories, but rather that a liqui­dationist program reflected the tremen­dous pressures bearing down on an Inter­na­tional consisting of tiny groups of cadres faced with the unexpected expansion of Stalinism and the relative restabilization of impe­ri­alism after the first postwar years. Among some of them, this led to doubt in the rev­o­lu­tionary capacity of the pro­le­tariat and in their own ability to lead it. And it produced a sharp conflict in the rev­o­lu­tionary party, in which it was necessary to take sides.

This points to a more general question: the rela­tion­ship of program to theory. Many leftists are wont to cite Lenin’s phrase, “Without rev­o­lu­tionary theory there can be no rev­o­lu­tionary movement.” Quite true. As he emphasized, “the role of vanguard fighter can be fulfilled only by a party that is guided by the most advanced theory.”¹⁸¹ But over Yugoslavia the FI was faced with a theoretical failure. How do Marxists evaluate this and rectify it? We have synthesized this question in the aphorism, “program generates theory.” This arose in dis­cus­sions with the Wohlforth group (predecessor of the Workers League) in the early 1960s, with particular reference to Pabloism. Wohlforth had split the Revo­lu­tionary Tendency on orders from Gerry Healy, and in acting as Healy’s man he also took on The Leader’s peculiar emphasis on disembodied “theory” as a club to beat opponents.

In dis­cus­sions with Wohlforth, the Spartacist spokesman made the following point about Lenin’s pre-April 1917 call for the “democratic dic­ta­torship of the pro­le­tariat and peasantry”: “The Bolsheviks and Lenin had an incorrect theory, a sufficient but not a correct theory, but up to the supreme moment they had the correct political conclusion of not making alliances with the liberals. In 1917 Lenin became a Trotskyist.”¹⁸² (Trotsky, of course, while he had early on worked out the theory of permanent revo­lu­tion, calling for the pro­le­tariat to take power at the head of the peasantry, was wrong on the fun­da­men­tal party question, and not until 1917 did he become a Leninist.)

This question derives from the basic Marxist under­standing of knowledge, namely that we know a thing by acting upon it. And program is the means by which the rev­o­lu­tionary party acts upon objective reality. Those who explain the “degen­er­ation” of the FI by its analytical failure on Yugoslavia, while dismissing the programmatic fight with Pabloism during 1951-53 over the need for an inde­pen­dent Trotskyist vanguard party, proceed in the opposite, idealist, manner, and produce some pretty vacuous theory as a result.

The inroads of Pabloist revi­sionism in the Fourth Inter­na­tional did not lead to a gradual collapse but came to a head in a hard political fight, just as is char­ac­teristic of the class struggle generally. In that fight, serious Marxists had to take sides against the liqui­dationists. Subsequently, under similar pressures in the United States, after a decade of McCarthyism, in the early 1960s the SWP’s central leader­ship belatedly went down the same path Pablo and Germain had followed a decade earlier. And once again that revisionist-​liqui­da­tionist turn was fought, by the RT which gave rise to the Spartacist tendency and the Inter­na­tional Com­mu­nist League. It is this political continuity of Trotskyism that the WP and other revi­sionists seek to deny.

For Workers Power, the destruction of the Fourth Inter­na­tional and the liqui­da­tion of inde­pen­dent Trotskyist parties was “the most striking yet super­fi­cial aspect of ‘Pabloism’.”¹⁸³ Since the FI had already “degen­er­ated” due to an “inability” to “creatively elaborate” Trotsky’s analysis of Stalinism, Workers Power reasons, so what if it was then killed. This petty-​bourgeois idealism and disdain for the centrality of the party question—that is, the crisis of rev­o­lu­tionary leader­ship—is typical for the British pseudo-Trotskyist left. Steeped in years of chummy hobnobbing in the Labour Party milieu—whether “deep entrism” like Grant’s Militant Tendency and a host of USec supporters over the years, or perpetual “critical support” to Labour in elections à la Workers Power—for them Trotskyism consists of erudite analyses rather than the fight to build an inde­pen­dent rev­o­lu­tionary vanguard. And as they belittle Pablo’s liqui­da­tion of the party, they liqui­date the Trotskyist program.

Thus Workers Power has not only called for a “new” (un-numbered) Inter­na­tional, it has also declared the Transitional Program superseded by events since World War II. The Trotskyist Manifesto, published by the WP’s League for a Revo­lu­tionary Com­mu­nist Inter­na­tional (LRCI) in 1989, dismisses Trotsky’s state­ment that the pro­duc­tive forces have ceased to grow in the period of cap­italism’s death agony, calling this a mere “conjunctural char­ac­terisation” which doesn’t take into account the postwar “long boom in the impe­ri­alist countries,” which laid the basis for a new surge of reformism. Consequently, rejecting Trotsky’s premise that the conditions for socialist revo­lu­tion are not only ripe but overripe, these “Trotskyists” reject his central conclusion: “Today it would be wrong,” they assert, “simply to repeat that all contemporary crises are ‘reduced to a crisis of leadership’”¹⁸⁴ (see Appendix II).

The pro­le­tariat worldwide does indeed face the stark alternative of either socialism or descent into barbarism. And it is precisely the question of leadership that is key. The task that the Inter­na­tional Com­mu­nist League sets itself, in fighting to reforge a Fourth Inter­na­tional that Trotsky would have recognized as his own, is to point the way and lead the fight to resolve that burning con­tra­dic­tion, so powerfully stated in the Transitional Program and no less valid today than when it was written: “The histor­i­cal crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the rev­o­lu­tionary leadership.” As Trotsky defined the central lesson in 1924: “Without a party, apart from a party, over the head of a party, or with a substitute for a party, the pro­le­tarian revo­lu­tion cannot conquer.”¹⁸⁵

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¹⁰⁴ Michel Pablo, “Where Are We Going?”, SWP Inter­na­tional Information Bulletin, March 1951, reprinted in SWP Education for Socialists, “Inter­na­tional Secretariat Documents 1951-1954” (March 1974) (hereafter referred to as I.S. Documents), Vol. 1, 10.  Back

¹⁰⁵ Ibid., 8.  Back

¹⁰⁶ Ibid., 4-6.  Back

¹⁰⁷ Ibid., 6-7 (emphasis in original).  Back

¹⁰⁸ Michel Pablo, “The Building of the Revo­lu­tionary Party” (excerpts of report to IEC Tenth Plenum), SWP Inter­na­tional Information Bulletin, June 1952, reprinted in I.S. Documents, Vol. 1, 34.  Back

¹⁰⁹ Quoted in Favre-Bleibtreu (Marcel Bleibtreu), “Where Is Comrade Pablo Going?”, reprinted in SWP Education for Socialists, “Inter­na­tional Com­mit­tee Documents, 1951-1954” (March 1974) (hereafter referred to as IC Documents), Vol. 1, 18.  Back

¹¹⁰ Michel Pablo, “World Trotskyism Rearms,” Fourth Inter­na­tional, November-​December 1951, 168-76.  Back

¹¹¹ The Third World Congress reso­lu­tion, “Theses on Perspectives and Orientation,” is available in English in I.S. Documents, Vol. 1, 25-30, and in French in R. Prager, ed., Les congrès de la IV^e Inter­na­tionale (hereafter referred to as LCQI), Vol. 4, 147-60. Germain/Mandel’s report, “Trois années de cours nouveau du trotskysme,” appears in LCQI, Vol. 4, 303-26.  Back

¹¹² Cited by James P. Cannon in a speech to the Los Angeles SWP branch, 5 December 1953, SWP Dis­cus­sion Bulletin A-13 (January 1954), reprinted in IC Documents, Vol. 3, 159.  Back

¹¹³ Michel Pablo, “World Trotskyism Rearms,” op. cit., 172.  Back

¹¹⁴ Michel Pablo, “The Building of the Revo­lu­tionary Party,” op. cit., 35.  Back

¹¹⁵ Ibid., 37-39.  Back

¹¹⁶ Michel Pablo, “Rapport sur les applications tactiques de la ligne du III^e Congrès mondial,” LCQI, Vol. 4, 355-56. These quoted passages were not included in the SWP’s “excerpted” version of Pablo’s report cited above, note 108. This appears to have been a political “edit” job in order to excise the most oppor­tunist aspects, since almost the entire rest of his report is printed. At the time the SWP leadership was still backing Pablo against the French PCI majority.  Back

¹¹⁷ Ernest Mandel, “Trois années de cours nouveau du trotskysme,” op. cit., 305.  Back

¹¹⁸ Unsigned (Ted Grant), “Statement to the BSFI [British Section of the Fourth Inter­na­tional]” (n.d., ca. summer 1950). A photocopy of this docu­ment is in the collection of the Prometheus Research Library.  Back

¹¹⁹ Cited in Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson, The War and the Inter­na­tional: A History of the Trotskyist Movement in Britain 1937-1949 (1986), 225-26.  Back

¹²⁰ “On the 1966 Split,” Spartacist (English edition) No. 36-37, Winter 1985-86 (a special issue titled “Healyism Implodes”).  Back

¹²¹ Pablo’s draft “Theses on Perspectives and Orientation” were adopted by the Ninth Plenum and published as “Thèse sur les perspectives inter­na­tionales et l’ori­en­ta­tion de la IV^e Inter­na­tionale,” Quatrième Inter­na­tionale, January 1951. They were also published in English in SWP Inter­na­tional Information Bulletin, January 1951. They were subsequently adopted with minor amend­ments by the Third World Congress. See note 111 for publication infor­ma­tion on the theses adopted by the congress.  Back

¹²² “The Struggle of the French Trotskyists Against Pabloite Liquidationism,” SWP Dis­cus­sion Bulletin A-17 (May 1954), reprinted in IC Documents, Vol. 1, 25-29.  Back

¹²³ Ernest Germain (Mandel), “What Should Be Modified and What Should Be Maintained in the Theses of the Second World Congress of the Fourth Inter­na­tional on the Question of Stalinism? (Ten Theses),” SWP Inter­na­tional Information Bulletin, April 1951, reprinted in I.S. Documents, Vol. 1, 16-24. According to the SWP IIB, the “Ten Theses” first appeared in the March 1951 Bulletin of the Inter­na­tional Secretariat. “Genesis of Pabloism” contains a dis­cus­sion of Germain’s theses. “Genesis of Pabloism” was originally published in Spartacist (English edition) No. 21, Fall 1972. It is included in this bulletin.   Back

¹²⁴ “Résolution sur le PCI français,” LCQI, Vol. 4, 331.  Back

¹²⁵ Favre-Bleibtreu (Marcel Bleibtreu), “Où résident les divergences,” La Vérité, June 1951, 2-11.  Back

¹²⁶ Favre-Bleibtreu (Marcel Bleibtreu), “Where Is Comrade Pablo Going?”, IC Documents, Vol. 1, 12.  Back

¹²⁷ “Theses on Perspectives and Orientation,” op. cit., 27.  Back

¹²⁸ Favre-Bleibtreu (Marcel Bleibtreu), “Where Is Comrade Pablo Going?”, op. cit., 16.  Back

¹²⁹ “Lettre adressée par le secrétariat inter­na­tional au comité central du PCI” (14 January 1952), LCQI, Vol. 4, 401.  Back

¹³⁰ Rodolphe Prager, Introduction to “Dossier sur la crise et la scission du PCI,” LCQI, Vol. 4, 373.  Back

¹³¹ “The Struggle of the French Trotskyists Against Pabloite Liquidationism,” op. cit., 29.  Back

¹³² “Cannon Versus Pablo,” Workers Vanguard No. 28, 14 September 1973.  Back

¹³³ “Contribution to the Dis­cus­sion on Inter­na­tional Perspectives” (5 June 1951), IC Documents, Vol. 1, 4-6. The SWP apparently never published this docu­ment until the Education for Socialists series came out in 1974.  Back

¹³⁴ James P. Cannon, Letter to Daniel Renard (29 May 1952), reprinted in IC Documents, Vol. 1, 23-25.  Back

¹³⁵ James P. Cannon, “Inter­na­tionalism and the SWP” (18 May 1953 speech to majority caucus of the SWP), Speeches to the Party (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973), 79; and letter to Sam Gordon (4 June 1953), IC Documents, Vol 1, 54.  Back

¹³⁶ James P. Cannon, “Inter­na­tionalism and the SWP,” op. cit., 80-81.  Back

¹³⁷ Cited by James P. Cannon, “Report to the May Plenum,” Speeches to the Party, 140.  Back

¹³⁸ James P. Cannon, “Factional Struggle and Party Leadership” (speech to the November 1953 plenum of the SWP), Speeches to the Party, 181.  Back

¹³⁹ Emile Gallet, “The SWP (US) in the ‘American Century’—A Case Study of ‘Orthodoxy’,” Permanent Revo­lu­tion No. 7, Spring 1988, 120.  Back

¹⁴⁰ Ibid., 122.  Back

¹⁴¹ James P. Cannon, “Factional Struggle and Party Leadership,” op. cit., 176.  Back

¹⁴² “Letter to Trotskyists Throughout the World,” Militant, 16 November 1953, reprinted in IC Documents, Vol. 3, 133, 137.  Back

¹⁴³ “Against Pabloist Revi­sion­ism,” Fourth Inter­na­tional, September-October 1953, reprinted in IC Documents, Vol. 3, 146, 152.  Back

¹⁴⁴ “The Successive Stages of Pabloite Revi­sion­ism” (October 1953), SWP Dis­cus­sion Bulletin A-17, May 1954, reprinted in IC Documents, Vol. 3, 153, 155.  Back

¹⁴⁵ “The Rise and Decline of Stalinism” (res­olu­tion adopted at the 1954 congress of the Inter­na­tional Secretariat), reprinted in SWP Education for Socialists, “Development and Disintegration of World Stalinism,” March 1970, 23, 25, 27.  Back

¹⁴⁶ “Inter­na­tional Secretariat Statement on East German Uprising” (June 1953), reprinted in I.S. Documents, Vol. 3, 124.  Back

¹⁴⁷ Peng Shu-tse, “The Chinese Experience with Pabloite Revi­sion­ism and Bureaucratism (A Letter to James P. Cannon)” (30 December 1953), SWP Dis­cus­sion Bulletin A-15, February 1954, reprinted in IC Documents, Vol. 3, 165.  Back

¹⁴⁸ “Genesis of Pabloism”  Back

¹⁴⁹ National Com­mit­tee of the Socialist Labour League, “Trotskyism Betrayed” (1962), reprinted in Trotskyism Versus Revi­sion­ism, Vol. 3 (London: New Park Publications, 1974), 258.  Back

¹⁵⁰ Ernest Germain (Mandel), “The Yugoslav Question, the Question of the Soviet Buffer Zone, and Their Implications for Marxist Theory,” (October 1949), SWP Inter­na­tional Information Bulletin, January 1950, 29.  Back

¹⁵¹ “Projet de rapport sur la révolution cubaine” (n.d., ca. December 1961). It was published in English as “Position of the French Section of the Inter­na­tional Com­mit­tee on the Cuban Question,” SWP Inter­na­tional Information Bulletin, April 1963, 10, where the translation reads, “a shoddy, decom­posed and unreal bourgeois state.”  Back

¹⁵² “For Early Reunification of the World Trotskyist Movement,” SWP Dis­cus­sion Bulletin, Vol. 24, No. 9, April 1963, 39.  Back

¹⁵³ “Toward Rebirth of the Fourth Inter­na­tional” (12 June 1963), reprinted in Marxist Bulletin No. 9, “Basic Documents of the Spartacist League,” 3.  Back

¹⁵⁴ See the Spartacist pamphlet, Stalinism and Trotskyism in Vietnam (1976).  Back

¹⁵⁵ “Déclaration de la minorité vietnamienne,” LCQI, Vol. 4, 215.  Back

¹⁵⁶ Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson, op. cit., 212.  Back

¹⁵⁷ Ernest Germain (Mandel), “The Yugoslav Question, the Question of the Soviet Buffer Zone, and Their Implications for Marxist Theory,” op. cit., 22.  Back

¹⁵⁸ Tim Wohlforth, “The Theory of Structural Assimilation” (1961-63), in “Com­mu­nists” Against Revo­lu­tion: Two Essays on Post-War Stalinism (London: Folrose Books, 1978), 62.  Back

¹⁵⁹ David North, The Heri­tage We Defend (Detroit: Labor Publications Inc., 1988), 147-59.  Back

¹⁶⁰ Workers Socialist League, The Poisoned Well (dis­cus­sion docu­ment for submission to Eleventh World Congress of United Secretariat) (Workers Socialist League, 1978), 3-4.  Back

¹⁶¹ “Rebuild the 4th Inter­na­tional!” (LTT/WIL fusion docu­ment), Workers News, April 1991.  Back

¹⁶² Workers Power, The Death Agony of the Fourth Inter­na­tional and the Tasks of Trotskyists Today (London: Workers Power and Irish Workers Group, 1983) (hereafter referred to as Death Agony), 26, 35-36.  Back

¹⁶³ Ibid., 60.  Back

¹⁶⁴ We have laid out our view on this in Prometheus Research Series No. 2, February 1989, “Documents on the ‘Proletarian Military Policy’,” where we polemicized with Pierre Broué.  Back

¹⁶⁵ Workers Power, The Degen­er­ated Revo­lu­tion: The Origins and Nature of the Stalinist States (London: Workers Power and Irish Workers Group, 1982) (hereafter referred to as Degen­er­ated Revo­lu­tion), 87.  Back

¹⁶⁶ Workers Power, Death Agony, 28.  Back

¹⁶⁷ Workers Power, Degen­er­ated Revo­lu­tion, 46.  Back

¹⁶⁸ Ibid., 46.  Back

¹⁶⁹ François Fejtö, Histoire des démocraties populaires, Vol I, L’ère de Staline, 1945-1952 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1952), 216.  Back

¹⁷⁰ “Workers Power: The Baggage of State Capi­talism,” Workers Vanguard No. 456, 1 July 1988.  Back

¹⁷¹ Workers Power, Death Agony, 29.  Back

¹⁷² Workers Power, Degen­er­ated Revo­lu­tion, 89.  Back

¹⁷³ Leon Trotsky, “The Class Nature of the Soviet State” (October 1933), Writings of Leon Trotsky (1933-34), 2nd ed. (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1975), 116.  Back

¹⁷⁴ Workers Power, Degen­er­ated Revo­lu­tion, 88.  Back

¹⁷⁵ Ian H. Birchall, “History of the Inter­na­tional Socialists, Part 1: From Theory into Practice,” Inter­na­tional Socialism No. 76, March 1975, 17.  Back

¹⁷⁶ Tony Cliff, “On the Class Nature of the ‘People’s Democracies’,” The Origins of the Inter­na­tional Socialists (London: Pluto Press, 1971), 14-64.  Back

¹⁷⁷ “Workers Power: The Baggage of State Capi­talism,” op. cit.  Back

¹⁷⁸ Chus Aguirre and Mo Klonsky, As Soon as This Pub Closes…: The British Left Explained (1986), 23.  Back

¹⁷⁹ Leon Trotsky, “A Petty-Bourgeois Opposi­tion in the Socialist Workers Party,” In Defense of Marxism, (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1942), 60.  Back

¹⁸⁰ “Toward Rebirth of the Fourth Inter­na­tional,” op. cit., 1.  Back

¹⁸¹ V. I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done? (1902), Collected Works, Vol. 5 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961), 369-70.  Back

¹⁸² Remark by James Robertson in “Conversations with Wohlforth,” Marxist Bulletin No. 3, Part 4 (1965), 4.  Back

¹⁸³ Emile Gallet, op. cit., 120.  Back

¹⁸⁴ LRCI, The Trotskyist Manifesto (London: League for a Revo­lu­tionary Com­mu­nist Inter­na­tional, 1989), 19.  Back

¹⁸⁵ Leon Trotsky, “Lessons of October,” The Challenge of the Left Opposi­tion (1923-25) (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1975), 252.  Back

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 Back to Part 1

Round Two: Pabloite Liquidationism Takes Shape

The dis­cus­sion inside the Fourth Inter­na­tional over Yugoslavia and the class char­ac­ter of the East European states was the first stage in the appear­ance of Pabloism as a full-​fledged liqui­dationist current. But it was only the first stage. That it didn’t represent the “degen­er­ation” of the FI is indicated by the fact that both sides pulled back. In fact, the earlier alignment over Yugoslavia had been largely reversed, with the initially strongly pro-​Tito Pablo now attacking his detractors in the FI for capi­tu­lating to the Yugoslavs. Mainly the change of posi­tion over Yugoslavia was due to Belgrade’s capi­tu­lation before impe­ri­alism over the Korean War.

But by this point, the attack on Trotskyism had gone beyond the issue of Yugoslavia. As a result of the East Europe dis­cus­sion, Pablo & Co. generalized an initial oppor­tunist posi­tion into a full-​blown revi­sionist program, while major sections of the Fourth Inter­na­tional one by one drew back and went into opposi­tion as the liqui­dationist impli­ca­tions of this program became clear to them, above all when it hit them on the national terrain. Pablo’s line on Yugoslavia certainly gave a foretaste of what was to come. Thus in his January 1951 revi­sionist mani­festo “Where Are We Going?” Pablo points back to his December 1949 docu­ment “On the Class Nature of Yugoslavia”:

As for us, we reaffirm what we wrote in the first article devoted to the Yugoslav affair: this transformation will probably take an entire histor­i­cal period of several centuries and will in the mean­time be filled with forms and regimes tran­si­tional between cap­italism and socialism and necessarily deviating from “pure” forms and norms.

We are aware that this state­ment has shocked certain com­rades and served others as a springboard to attack our “revi­sionism.”

But we do not disarm.¹⁰⁴

Taking Trotsky’s negative observation in the Transitional Program that “one cannot categorically deny” that under certain “completely exceptional” cir­cum­stances the petty-​bourgeois parties “may go further than they them­selves wish along the road to a break with the bourgeoisie,” Pablo turned this into a positive program, declaring: “The Yugoslav affair as well as the march and the victory of the Chinese revo­lu­tion…have demonstrated that the Com­mu­nist Parties retain the possibility, in certain cir­cum­stances, of roughly outlining a rev­o­lu­tionary ori­en­ta­tion.”¹⁰⁵ When these state­ments provoked a storm of protest in the Inter­na­tional, Pablo and his followers declared that “centuries” referred to the whole tran­si­tional period before full socialism and not just the degenerated/​deformed workers states, and that “outlining a rev­o­lu­tionary ori­en­ta­tion” only meant that the Stalinists could go so far as to take power. But this was only to throw sand in the eyes of those who didn’t want to see.

For Pablo went further. In the same article he declared that since World War II the world has entered “a period essentially different from every­thing we have known in the past.” And what was this “new reality”? “For our movement objective social reality consists essentially of the cap­i­talist regime and the Stalinist world. Furthermore, whether we like it or not, these two elements by and large constitute objective social reality….” So where the “old reality” consisted of the two fun­da­men­tal classes of cap­i­talist society, the bourgeoisie and the pro­le­tariat, and inter­me­diate forces such as the peasantry and more broadly the petty bourgeoisie, this new world reality consists of “the cap­i­talist regime” and the “Stalinist world.” And where does the working class fit in this schema? According to Pablo, “the rev­o­lu­tionary spirit of the masses direc­ted against impe­ri­alism acts as an additional force, supplementing the material and technical forces raised against impe­ri­alism.”¹⁰⁶ So in effect the world working class becomes an auxiliary to the Soviet Army, a kind of “National Guard,” as Bleibtreu put it.

What lay behind this “new reality” was the spectre of an impending third world war. Earlier Pablo had argued that this general war was “many years” away, but in “Where Are We Going?” he wrote that “cap­italism is now rapidly heading toward war, for it has no other short or long-​term way out.” “It is with the Korean war,” he added, “that our movement for the first time realized the important factor that the rela­tion­ship of forces on the inter­na­tional chess-​board is now evolving to the disadvantage of impe­ri­alism.” The coming war would “take on, from the very beginning, the char­ac­ter of an inter­na­tional civil war”; the conti­nents of Europe and Asia “would rapidly pass over under the control of the Soviet bureau­cracy, of the Com­mu­nist Parties, or of the rev­o­lu­tionary masses.” In sum: “War under these conditions, with the existing rela­tion­ship of forces on the inter­na­tional arena, would essentially be Revo­lu­tion.” To the “new reality” corresponded a new programmatic con­cep­tion, “the con­cep­tion of Revo­lu­tion-War, of War-Revo­lu­tion which is emerging and upon which the perspectives and ori­en­ta­tion of rev­o­lu­tionary Marxists in our epoch should rest.”¹⁰⁷

In part, Pabloism consists of Cold War impres­sionism. Under the impact of imperialism’s “Cold War” against the Soviet Union, Stalin is obliged to expropriate the bourgeoisie in the “buffer zone” of East Europe; a maverick “national Stalinist” regime in Yugoslavia breaks with Stalin to seize power—and Pablo concludes that the CPs can sometimes “roughly outline a revo­lu­tionary orien­ta­tion.” The North Koreans take Seoul, drive the puppet capitalist regime into the Pusan pocket; U.S. imperialism counter­attacks with the Inchon landing, crosses the 38th parallel; China enters the war, Truman hints at using the A-bomb—and Pablo concludes that the third world war is around the corner, with imperialism holding the short end of the stick.

Pabloism is also char­ac­terized by objectivism. In language that would be echoed years later by the Argentine pseudo-​Trotskyist adventurer Nahuel Moreno, Pablo declared in his report to the February 1952 Tenth Plenum of the IEC: “The situation is prerevo­lu­tionary all over in various degrees and evolving toward the revo­lu­tion in a relatively brief period. And this process from now on is in general irreversible.”¹⁰⁸ Pabloism also incor­po­rates themes raised by the Zhdanov line, the Kremlin’s quarter-​turn to the left in response to the Cold War Marshall Plan. At the founding meeting of the Cominform in 1947, Andrei Zhdanov in his theses declared: “The struggle between these two camps, between the imperialist and anti-​imperialist camp, unfolds under conditions of a continued deepening of the overall crisis of capi­talism, of a weakening of the forces of capi­talism, and of the strengthening of the forces of socialism and democracy.”¹⁰⁹ The struggle between “camps” instead of classes, the inter­national balance of forces unfavorable to capi­talism: these premises were shared by Pablo and Zhdanov.

But most fun­da­men­tally the “program” of Pabloism was the denial of the need for a Trotskyist vanguard. Under the impact of the unexpected postwar surge of Stalinism and the weakness of the Trotskyist forces, with new questions posed by events in East Europe and China, a whole section of the leadership of the Fourth Inter­na­tional, par­tic­u­larly centered in Europe where the pressures were strongest, not only rejected Trotsky’s prognosis about the outcome of the impe­ri­alist war, but threw out the Trotskyist program as well. Instead of an inde­pen­dent pro­le­tarian leadership, they saw “new vanguards,” first Tito’s Yugoslavia and Mao’s China, and then the whole “Stalinist world.” Pablo and his acolytes were increasingly explicit in their revi­sionism. Pablo’s main report to the Third World Congress was published under the title, “World Trotskyism Rearms.”¹¹⁰ The English version of the theses of the Third World Congress included a subhead on the “New Course of Trotskyism,” and Germain (Mandel), who by this time had capi­tu­lated to Pablo, gave a report to the congress on the activity of the I.S. and IEC under the title, “Three Years of the New Course of Trotskyism.”¹¹¹ The most blatant expression was from Pablo’s American follower George Clarke, who made his battle cry “Junk the Old Trotskyism”!¹¹²

As the developing Pabloite revi­sionist current passed from particular posi­tions to a general program, it also began to draw organ­i­za­tional consequences. Thus in his report to the Third World Congress, Pablo declared: “What we have under­stood for the first time in the history of our movement and of the workers’ movement in general…is that we must be capable of finding our place in the mass movement as it is.” This is speci­fied as under­standing “the necessity of subordinating all organ­i­za­tional considerations, of formal inde­pen­dence or otherwise, to real inte­gra­tion into the mass movement.”¹¹³ A few months later, at the Tenth Plenum of the IEC (February 1952), Pablo spelled out what came to be known as “deep entrism.” He cited as a precedent the British section’s entry into the Labour Party (under massive pressure from the I.S.). This was “almost qualitatively different” from the “entrism” advocated by Trotsky during 1934-38, for this was intended to be “long-​term” in nature. Of the reformist parties, he stated:

We are not entering these parties in order to come out of them soon. We are entering them in order to remain there for a long time banking on the great possibility which exists of seeing these parties, placed under new conditions, develop centrist tendencies which will lead a whole stage of the radicalization of the masses and of the objective rev­o­lu­tionary processes in their respec­tive countries.¹¹⁴

In fact, he stressed, the aim was “to help in the development of their centrist tendencies”!

As for the official Com­mu­nist parties, since the Stalinist tops would prevent any internal factions and likely prevent many known Trotskyists from entering, Pablo advocated “entrism of a special kind, sui generis,” arguing that the Stalinist movement will produce “much greater and more important centrist tendencies” than the social-​democratic reformists. To accomplish this task, a member should “not hesitate” to “conceal his Trotskyism”:¹¹⁵ “In order to remain there and work, it will be necessary for a whole period, at first, that our militants completely conceal their Trotskyist identity” and they must “not undertake any political work based on our own ideas.” “‘Ruses’ and ‘capi­tu­lations’ are not only admissible but necessary,” in order to carry out this “entrism sui generis.”¹¹⁶ As for those on the outside, their chief aim was to assist the entry work. So when the anti-​Pabloites wrote of the “liqui­da­tion” of the Trotskyist program and party, this was no projection or exaggeration, but the explicit, immediate program of Pablo and his associates.

What, then, of the opposi­tion to Pablo? As we remarked at the outset, it was partial, belated, largely on the national terrain, and did not come to grips theoretically with the new questions which gave rise to Pabloism. But they did fight, and we take sides with those who sought, in however flawed a manner, to combat the forces that were liqui­dating Trotskyism!

First came the British RCP majority. In his report to the Third World Congress, Germain noted the expulsion of Haston and Grant from the Inter­na­tional Executive Com­mit­tee after its Eighth Plenum in April 1951, describing them as “embodying the tendency of British Trotskyism which obstinately refused to inte­grate itself into the Inter­na­tional, to assimilate the new course of Trotskyism.”¹¹⁷ Indeed the Haston/​Grant majority derived from the old British Workers Inter­na­tional League (WIL), which for purely cliquist reasons placed itself outside the British section of the Fourth Inter­na­tional from 1938 to 1944. But in 1951 Pablo and Germain were far more concerned by the fact that the RCP majority had refused for more than three years to liqui­date into the Labour Party, despite the insistent attempts by the I.S. to force them to do so. In the end, Pablo engineered by remote control a split led by Gerry Healy, who took about a third of the organ­i­za­tion into the Labour Party. Haston/​Grant didn’t go along with the I.S./IEC fiction that East Europe was still cap­i­talist in 1948-49, and partly because their vision wasn’t distorted by these pseudo-​orthodox blinders, they saw Tito clearly for what he was: a nationally based Stalinist who wanted to build socialism in his one country. In a 1950 state­ment written shortly before he was expelled, Grant rightly listed as the first of three reasons for the collapse of the FI in Britain “capi­tu­lation to Tito-​Stalinism inter­na­tionally.”¹¹⁸

In order to destroy Haston and Grant, Pablo’s I.S. destroyed the RCP in the process. To do so, they resorted to organ­i­za­tional methods reminiscent of Zinoviev’s Comintern regime. So when Healy split the British section in 1947, the IEC granted his entry group inde­pen­dent status, reporting directly to the I.S. Later, in late 1948-early 1949, when first Haston and then Grant capi­tu­lated and came out for entry into the Labour Party, the I.S. turned on them and denounced them for…liqui­dationism! “Their pro­posal of entry looks like a desperate man drowning himself in deep water,” commented the I.S. “Entry on such a pessimistic and liqui­dationist line…would only accelerate the process of political disinte­gra­tion and destroy all perspective for the Fourth Inter­na­tional.”¹¹⁹ When Healy demanded and got from the I.S. control of the section now reunited in the Labour Party, even though he and his supporters were in a minority, with a year’s leeway until elections were to be held, he proceeded to drive out and expel his opponents, some legi­ti­mately (like the Cliff group, whose supporters publicly denounced “Russian impe­ri­alism” and refused to support the North in the Korean War), most not.

Healy, who had also been a leader of the old WIL, was implementing Pablo’s line in London. The “deep entrist” policy Healy carried out in Britain (which eventually resulted in the Socialist Labour League when he exited in the late ’50s) was certainly a precursor of the “entrism sui generis” which Pablo attempted to shove down the throats of the French PCI a few years later. The RCP had been set up only in 1944, as a forced (by the I.S.) fusion of the WIL and a dis­in­te­grated Revo­lu­tionary Socialist League (official FI section), and it was rent by inherited animosities at the top. Its principal leaders eventually aban­doned Trotskyism, Haston openly, and Grant through carrying out an entry into the Labour Party so deep that his Militant group only exited in 1992 (and that over Grant’s opposi­tion). But in the late ’40s the RCP, more than any other section of the Inter­na­tional, tried rather successfully to grapple on the basis of Trotsky’s program with the issues that had been thrown up by history. And they were ground up by a leadership that subsequently sought to liqui­date the Fourth Inter­na­tional itself. In an interview on Healy’s history, Spartacist League Central Com­mit­tee member James Robertson remarked:

Cannon and also Pablo were very much on the RCP’s case, and Healy was their local inside man. I don’t know all the rights and wrongs but I do believe that they did not try to reshape the RCP, but successfully destroyed it. And so far as I know that was the last Trotskyist organ­i­za­tion in Britain, the SLL in the period from 1957-67 proving to be hollow.¹²⁰

Pabloite Revi­sion­ism Ravages the Fourth International

The French PCI was the second section that Pablo targeted for destruction. As noted earlier, the then PCI majority opposed the I.S.’ 1948 letters to the Yugoslav CP for “idealizing Tito.” The PCI passed a motion demanding that the I.S. reject Pablo’s August 1948 article on “The Yugoslav Affair.” And while the composi­tion of the PCI majority as well as its line on Yugoslavia changed, the French party was almost constantly in opposi­tion to Pablo on East Europe and Stalinism. Working closely with the Inter­na­tional Secretariat, which was then located in Paris, they smelled an anti-​Trotskyist rat early on. The fight came to a head during 1950-52, in the period leading up to and following the Third World Congress. The first object of dispute was the “Theses on Perspectives and Orientation,” written by Pablo and submitted to the Ninth Plenum of the IEC at the end of November 1950, as part of the dis­cus­sion for the upcoming Third World Congress.¹²¹ The dis­cus­sion was par­tic­u­larly colored by the appear­ance in January 1951 of Pablo’s revi­sionist treatise “Where Are We Going?” with its “new reality” and perspective of “centuries of deformed workers states.”

In the I.S. itself there was resistance to Pablo’s theses (from Germain, Frank and Privas). Immediately following the plenum, at the beginning of December 1950, the French CC met, criti­cizing revi­sionist elements in the Ninth Plenum theses and refusing to approve the docu­ment. It also approved a political report for the PCI’s upcoming Seventh Congress. There followed, in January and March 1951, CC meetings at which Pablo’s emissaries (initially Clarke from the U.S.) tried to browbeat the French majority into submission. Germain inti­mated to Bleibtreu his intention to write a docu­ment to coun­ter­bal­ance Pablo’s theses, and to submit it for a vote. Germain did eventually write his famous “Ten Theses” docu­ment, a veiled attack on Pablo’s “Where Are We Going?” But Pablo cracked the whip, ordering Germain to defend the Ninth Plenum theses or be expelled from the I.S., and sent a letter to the French CC demanding that they rewrite their perspectives docu­ment along the lines of his theses. At the March meeting Germain, Frank and Privas capi­tu­lated and spoke for Pablo’s theses. In April 1951, Pablo himself attended a French CC meeting to attack the leadership; the CC formally split into majority (anti-​Pablo) and minority.¹²²

Also in April the PCI’s principal leader, Marcel Bleibtreu, wrote a docu­ment “Where the Disagreements Lie,” which was later developed into his famous “Where Is Comrade Pablo Going?” (Neither of these, nor any of the other French docu­ments, were ever translated and distributed inter­na­tionally by the I.S.) When Germain’s “Ten Theses” was published in March (although dated 15 January 1951), the French PB adopted them as a Inter­na­tional for the World Congress (minus the author’s preamble, which endorsed Pablo’s Ninth Plenum theses).¹²³ At the PCI’s Seventh Congress in July, there were coun­ter­posed majority and minority reports and Inter­na­tionals on both inter­na­tional and national work, and the majority voted down the Ninth Plenum theses. At the World Congress of the FI in August 1951, Bleibtreu spoke against Pablo’s theses, and the PCI introduced a series of amend­ments. The French were isolated, a vote was not permitted on their amend­ments or on Germain’s “Ten Theses,” and the PCI delegates voted almost alone against the main Inter­na­tional, which included Pablo’s “Theses on Perspectives and Orientation.” A French commission was set up to replace the PCI majority leadership. In the end Bleibtreu et al. were left in place, but with the proviso that if they didn’t carry out the line of the World Congress, “the IEC and I.S. will be charged with taking all organ­i­za­tional measures to rectify the situation in the PCI.”¹²⁴

There was plenty of thunder and lightning. But did the French fight Pabloite liqui­dationism programmatically in all this, or was it simply an organ­i­za­tional power fight, as some (such as Workers Power) would have it? There were plenty of weaknesses and errors in the PCI majority’s docu­ments. Bleibtreu declared that “the essential difference concerns the revi­sionist view of the nature of the bureau­cracy of the USSR” in Pablo’s texts.¹²⁵ But Bleibtreu’s definition of Stalinism excluded any ideological/programmatic elements: “When you speak of the Stalinism of a Com­mu­nist Party, you are not speaking of a theory, of an overall program, of definite and lasting concepts, but only of its leadership’s subordination to orders from the Kremlin bureau­cracy.”¹²⁶ Bleibtreu mocked the very idea of “Stalinism without Stalin.” And the PCI did not object to the state­ment in the “Theses on Perspectives and Orientation” that under certain cir­cum­stances, “like those which occurred during the war in Yugoslavia, in China, and recently in Korea,” certain CPs “can project a rev­o­lu­tionary ori­en­ta­tion,” and that “from that moment on, they would cease to be strictly Stalinist parties.”¹²⁷

Bleibtreu did not give a Trotskyist definition of Stalinism, for he excluded the programmatic components of “socialism in one country” and “peaceful coexistence” with impe­ri­alism, and ignored Stalinism’s material base, a nationally limited bureau­cracy—both of which were common to Yugoslavia and China as well as the USSR. Bleibtreu wanted to limit Stalinism to only those parties directly under the Kremlin’s thumb, in order to exclude the Chinese and Yugoslavs. If anything, his texts were even more favorable to the Mao and Tito regimes than were Pablo’s (e.g., declaring that “it is absurd to speak of a Stalinist party in China, and still more absurd to foster belief in even the resemblance of a ‘victory of Stalinism in China’”).¹²⁸ But this was an attempt, if flawed, to fight against Pablo’s program, which ascribed rev­o­lu­tionary potential to Stalinism itself; Bleibtreu’s answer to the question of how CPs could take power and still be coun­ter­rev­o­lu­tionary was to define the problem away, describing them as non-​Stalinist. In rejecting Pablo’s assertion that “defense of the USSR constitutes the strategic line of the Fourth Inter­na­tional,” Bleibtreu correctly stated that the strategic line of Trotskyism is world socialist revo­lu­tion. But he did not emphasize, as Trotsky did, that Soviet defensism was also a strategic task of the FI.

Despite these errors, the French did attempt to fight the Pabloites’ policies of tailing after Stalinism. And thus they were an obstacle in the way of Pabloism’s revi­sionist course. Round Two of the showdown came as Pablo returned to the offensive, demanding that the PCI liqui­date into the Stalinist movement under the rubric of “entrism sui generis.” Following his usual “salami tactics” Pablo had not called at the World Congress for entrism into the Stalinist parties, and in fact he had referred to the “necessarily inde­pen­dent” char­ac­ter of the Trotskyist organ­i­za­tions, as he admitted in his report to the February 1952 Tenth Plenum of the IEC. The policy of “entrism sui generis” was first raised in a January 1952 I.S. letter to the French leadership accusing the PCI of refusing to follow the line of the Third World Congress: “Let us define this policy once again clearly: what’s involved in a country like France is carrying out, more and more, a sort of sui generis entrist policy toward the organ­i­za­tions and workers influenced by the Stalinists.”¹²⁹

When the January CC meeting of the PCI refused Pablo’s ultimatum to hand over control of the party to the Pabloite minority (via a “parity” Political Bureau with a double vote for a representative of the I.S.), Pablo decreed on the spot the suspension of the 16 majority members of the Central Com­mit­tee! This bureau­cra­tic atrocity was subsequently rati­fied by the I.S., reportedly with the votes of the British (Gerry Healy) and American (George Novack) representatives. At the Tenth Plenum (February 1952), the IEC revoked the suspensions, but decreed that the PCI CC could not meet unless the minority Political Bureau judged it necessary.¹³⁰

But even when, in order to buy time, the French majority submitted to this grotesque measure, it wasn’t enough for Pablo, who demanded that dis­cus­sion at the upcoming congress of the PCI be limited to implementing the entrist line of the Tenth Plenum, and that the CC elected at the previous congress not be allowed to present its political report.¹³¹ Seeing an impending split, in late June the Pabloites removed typewriters and mimeograph machines from the PCI office. Two months earlier they had secretly filed a state­ment with the police registering a “PCI” with a completely pro-​Pablo leadership. So on 14 July 1952, two PCI congresses were held in Paris, on different floors of the same building. In November the anti-​Pablo PCI was formally expelled, again with the votes of the British and Americans. But this only whetted Pablo’s appe­tite. With the French out of the way, he then went after the big one, the Socialist Workers Party, led by James P. Cannon and conserving the largest group of Trotskyist cadres dating back to the time of Trotsky.

As in the case of the PCI, and even more so, the struggle against Pabloism in the SWP was fought out over the party question. The question of Yugoslavia seemed more remote on the American terrain, and an ori­en­ta­tion of entrism into the discredited and relatively small American Stalinist party—which had gone semi-​clan­des­tine due to McCarthyite repression—was not only liqui­dationist but downright absurd for anyone with the slightest pretense of rev­o­lu­tionary politics. Cannon was able to easily demonstrate that the pro-​Pablo minority was a rotten bloc consisting of New York petty bourgeois (led by George Clarke) who were looking to the popular-​front milieu, and a layer of older Detroit trade unionists (led by Bert Cochran) who were looking for a way out of organized left politics altogether. But as we noted in “Genesis of Pabloism”: “The SWP only joined the fight against revi­sionism when a pro-​Pabloism tendency, the Clarke wing of the Cochran-​Clarke faction, mani­fested itself within the American party.” Moreover, when Cannon did finally take up the battle he did so in a way that “deepened [the SWP’s] isolationism into virulent anti-​internationalism,” coun­ter­posed to inter­na­tional democratic cent­ralism. In a review of Cannon’s Speeches to the Party, which covers this fight, we wrote of:

…the major weakness revealed during the struggle—Cannon’s failure to carry out an inter­na­tional faction fight against Pabloism. To avoid having to implement Pabloist policies, Cannon posited a federated Inter­na­tional. (This devi­a­tion came home to roost in the later formation of the “United Secretariat” in which differences over the 1953 split, China and other questions were papered over as each national organ­i­za­tion went its merry way.) Cannon’s federalist concept of internationalism was reflected in a polemic against (of all things) “Cominternism”!¹³²

The SWP leadership claimed to have disagreed with Pablo earlier, both politically and over some of his more blatant organ­i­za­tional atrocities. Thus for the Third World Congress, the SWP Political Com­mit­tee sent off a “Contribution to the Dis­cus­sion on Inter­na­tional Perspectives” to “balance” Pablo’s “Theses on Perspectives and Orientation.” In particular, in this memo the SWP argued that “it is imper­a­tive to reaffirm our previous char­ac­ter­i­zation of Stalinism as a counter-revolutionary force”; they opposed any recog­ni­tion (“implicitly or explicitly”) of “the perspective of ‘deformed workers’ states’ as the line of histor­i­cal development for an indefinite period”; they opined that it was “one-​sided” to say that the CPs “may be compelled to outline a rev­o­lu­tionary ori­en­ta­tion,” since the Stalinists could also work to strangle revo­lu­tions; and they argued for reaffirming the central importance of the crisis of pro­le­tarian leadership.¹³³ But the SWP’s “fraternal” delegate, Clarke, who happened to be one of Pablo’s chief hatchetmen, didn’t present this “contribution.” In fact, he later said, he was so “ashamed” of it that he burned the docu­ment!

Be that as it may, none of the changes the SWP advocated on paper were made, except for a ritual mention (in the “Theses on Perspectives and Orientation”) of “the selection of a new rev­o­lu­tionary leadership.” Nonetheless the SWP supported the Third World Congress docu­ments. They also supported the Tenth Plenum docu­ments ordering entrism. Questioned on this in a letter by French PCI leader Daniel Renard, a trade unionist who had been expelled by the Stalinist-​led CGT, Cannon replied: “We do not see any revi­sionism there…. We consider these docu­ments to be completely Trotskyist.”¹³⁴ Cannon later claimed that the SWP leadership “hit the ceiling” and was “flabbergasted” when they heard about the Inter­na­tional Secretariat diktat removing the elected Political Bureau of the French party and replacing it with a “parity com­mit­tee” with an I.S. representative as arbiter.¹³⁵ But not only did the SWP do nothing about this travesty, its representative on the I.S. voted for the suspension of the French PB and then later for the expulsion of the PCI from the Fourth Inter­na­tional.

Cannon admitted that the SWP consciously soft-​pedaled and papered over differences with Pablo in order to boost the latter’s “authority.” A fellow party leader dissuaded Cannon from writing against the con­cep­tion of “centuries of deformed workers states,” arguing that this would damage Pablo’s “prestige” and that “If it appears in the Inter­na­tional that Cannon is attacking Pablo, the whole alliance will appear to be broken.” Cannon related that there were repercussions inside the American party as well, quoting SWP leader Arne Swabeck, who at a plenum “told us that a girl comrade got up in the Chicago branch and asked: ‘What is this? If there are going to be centuries of Stalinism, what’s the sense of my going out and selling ten papers on the street corner?’” “A very good question,” commented Cannon, adding, “But we kept quiet about all this in the party.”¹³⁶ After consulting with Cannon, Murry Weiss answered the Johnsonites in Los Angeles (who in 1950 were calling for “Cannonism against Pabloism”), saying: “You don’t need to fear about us rushing into Pablo’s arms; we’re already in his arms.”¹³⁷

This false diplomacy and “prestige” building prevented the necessary fight for political clarity that perhaps could have headed Pablo off at the pass and prevented the destruction of the Fourth Inter­na­tional. We have repeatedly and sharply criti­cized Cannon and the SWP’s conduct during the 1950-53 fight along the lines given above. But it is also necessary to stress that when the decisive hour came, Cannon fought and fought hard. “We are at war with this new revi­sionism,” he declared in his speech to the November 1953 SWP National Com­mit­tee plenum. And he hammered away on the key question that had been given only secondary attention in the earlier battles with Pablo—the question of leadership, the party question: “The essence of Pabloist revi­sionism is the over­throw of that part of Trotskyism which is today its most vital part— the con­cep­tion of the crisis of mankind as the crisis of the leadership of the labor movement summed up in the question of the party.”¹³⁸

This has been denigrated, in particular by the British Workers Power group. Thus they publish a snotty article by Emile Gallet, declaring:

The problem with the SWP majority’s line on “Pabloism” was that they failed to get the true measure of the beast. They actually held to the fun­da­men­tal tenets of the Pablo-​Mandel method. However, like Bleibtreu, they balked at the logical conclusion of the third Congress view of Stalinist parties becoming transformed into centrist ones (e.g. Yugoslavia, China), that is, entry into the CPs. They therefore concentrated their fire on the most striking yet super­fi­cial aspect of “Pabloism,” which for them “boils down to one point and is concentrated in one point…the question of the party” [our emphasis].¹³⁹

Later on, the author argues that “the SWP, like the rest of the FI, was unable to measure up to the problem of re-applying Trotsky’s method to the post-​war world,” and thus “there are major centrist flaws which must lead us to reject any view which sees the SWP or Cannon as rev­o­lu­tionary com­mu­nists in the post-​war period.”¹⁴⁰ This puerile polemic shows just the opposite, that while the SWP had major flaws in its analysis, when it came down to the question of questions, that of the rev­o­lu­tionary leadership, for all their faults they fought liqui­dationism. And the fact that the party question is “super­fi­cial” for the likes of Workers Power shows that they can never measure up to the little finger of a Cannon.

Cannon: “At War with Pabloism”

Having finally decided it was war, Cannon declared, “We are finished and done with Pablo and Pabloism forever, not only here but on the inter­na­tional field.”¹⁴¹ A “Letter to Trotskyists Throughout the World,” issued by the SWP’s November 1953 NC plenum, restated basic principles of Trotskyism, including that Stalinism was the main obstacle to resolving the crisis of pro­le­tarian leadership, and attacked Pablo’s revi­sionism as looking “to the Stalinist bureau­cracy, or a decisive section of it, to so change itself under mass pressure as to accept the ‘ideas’ and ‘program’ of Trotskyism.” The letter admitted that “the French com­rades of the majority saw what was happening more clearly than we did,” and declared: “The lines of cleavage between Pablo’s revi­sionism and orthodox Trotskyism are so deep that no compromise is possible either politically or organ­i­za­tionally.”¹⁴²

The lengthy docu­ment, “Against Pabloist Revi­sion­ism,” which accompanied the SWP letter noted:

By dumping the orthodox Trotskyist concept of the [Stalinist bureau­cra­tic] caste as in essence representative of the tendency toward cap­i­talist restoration…the Pabloites open the road to the completely revi­sionist concept that the bureau­cracy can right itself….

This shifts the axis of the development of the political revo­lu­tion away from the self-​action of the masses and focuses it upon the rifts inside the bureau­cracy….

The working class is transformed into a pressure group, and the Trotskyists into a pressure grouping along with it which pushes a section of the bureau­cracy leftward toward the revo­lu­tion. In this way, the bureau­cracy is transformed from a block and a betrayer of the revo­lu­tion into an auxiliary motor force of it.¹⁴³

At the same time, the French PCI prepared a docu­ment which noted that “The principal theoretical ideas of Pabloism were formulated by Pablo as a personal contribution during the course of the dis­cus­sion on the buffer zone (1949-50).” Declaring that “with the Third World Congress the Fourth Inter­na­tional entered upon a crisis which has steadily worsened and today threatens its very existence,” it concluded:

For Pablo the histor­i­cal mission of the Fourth Inter­na­tional has lost all meaning. The “objective rev­o­lu­tionary process,” under the aegis of the Kremlin, allied with the masses, is taking its place very well indeed. That is why he is mercilessly bent upon liqui­dating the Trotskyist forces, under the pretext of integrating them into the “movement of the masses as it exists.”

The salvation of the Fourth Inter­na­tional imper­a­tively demands the immediate eviction of the liqui­dationist leadership.¹⁴⁴

With all the weaknesses of the anti-​Pabloites’ fight, this stand constituted a fun­da­men­tal platform for struggle for the Trotskyist program and party that must be defended. Those who turn their backs on this, refusing to take sides in the 1953 fight, are liqui­dators no less than Pablo. At stake was the very existence of our world party!

In the aftermath, the Pabloites generalized their liqui­dationist program, codifying it at their 1954 “Fourth World Congress,” in a res­olu­tion on “The Rise and Decline of Stalinism”—a draft of which had already been circulated before the split and was the object of the SWP’s critique published as “Against Pabloist Revi­sion­ism.” The Pabloists’ res­olu­tion included a “programme of political revo­lu­tion” that did not call for the over­throw of the Stalinist bureau­cracy or for the formation and leadership of a Trotskyist party, but again spoke rather of the “democratization of the workers’ parties.” Referring to “the impossibility for the Fourth Inter­na­tional to become a leading force of this upsurge” after WWII, it now claimed openly that the CPs could “be led to project a rev­o­lu­tionary ori­en­ta­tion…without aban­doning the political and theoretical baggage inherited from Stalinism.” And therefore the Pabloites sought not the “organ­i­za­tional disinte­gra­tion” of Stalinism but rather its “gradual internal transformation.”¹⁴⁵

This was also expressed in practice. Thus when the East German workers uprising occurred in 1953, the I.S. issued a state­ment calling for “real democratization of the Com­mu­nist parties”—but not for a Trotskyist party—and asserting of the Stalinists: “They have been obliged to continue along the road of still more ample and genuine concessions to avoid risking alienating them­selves forever from support by the masses and from provoking still stronger explosions. From now on they will not be able to stop halfway”!¹⁴⁶ The extreme Pabloites, like Michèle Mestre in France and George Clarke in the U.S., carried out the entrist program and did indeed liqui­date into the respec­tive CPs. (The Cochranite trade unionists in the U.S., as Cannon predicted, disappeared from the left scene.) Pablo himself pulled back when it became clear that there was no mileage in CP entrism, since Khrushchevite “peaceful coexistence” soon sup­planted the immediate threat of World War III.

A week after the SWP’s “Letter to Trotskyists Throughout the World” was published, and based on it, representatives of the American, British, French and Swiss sections formed the “Inter­na­tional Com­mit­tee of the Fourth Inter­na­tional.” The SWP was recognized as “the leading section of the world Trotskyist movement” by the Chinese Trotskyists, who also adhered to the IC, which consisted of the largest sections of the FI.¹⁴⁷ We have elsewhere dealt with the fate of the IC, which existed mostly as a paper organ­i­za­tion:

It never met as a real inter­na­tional body, nor was a centralized leadership ever elected…. Thus the anti-​revisionist fight was deliberately not carried to the world movement, the IC consisting mainly of those groups which had already had their splits over the application of Pabloist policies in their own countries, and the struggle to defeat revi­sionism and reconstruct the Fourth Inter­na­tional on the basis of authentic Trotskyism was aborted.¹⁴⁸

Nor did the IC come to grips with the theoretical issues which gave rise to Pabloism. So when the SWP, its rev­o­lu­tionary fiber weakened by years of McCarthyite repression and national isolation, finally succumbed and joined with the I.S. to found the “United” Secretariat in 1963, their arguments for political support of Castro’s Cuba could have been lifted word for word from Pablo’s writings on Yugoslavia over a decade earlier.

It is out of the fight against a new edition of Pabloism in the early 1960s that our Spartacist tendency took form. At that time, the French section of the Inter­na­tional Com­mit­tee under Pierre Lambert and the British Socialist Labour League under Gerry Healy simply repeated the errors of Pablo’s opponents over Yugoslavia and East Europe. Thus Healy declared that “the Castro regime is and remains a bonapartist regime resting on cap­i­talist state foundations.”¹⁴⁹ This could have been lifted straight from Germain’s analysis ca. 1949 of East Europe (which he described as “an entirely special type of cap­italism” ruled by “Bonapartist govern­ments of a new type”).¹⁵⁰ In turn, the Lambertistes’ description of Cuba as a “workers and peasants govern­ment” of a “broken-​down, decom­posed, phan­tom bourgeois state”¹⁵¹ could have been Germain on Yugoslavia 1944-48.

In contrast, the Revo­lu­tionary Tendency (RT) of the SWP analyzed the birth of a bureau­cra­tically deformed workers state in Cuba, while pointing out that the petty-​bourgeois Castro regime was not and could not become a rev­o­lu­tionary leadership (as the SWP and I.S. and subsequently the USec claimed). We warned that peasant-​based guerrillaism was no road forward to socialist revo­lu­tion. Looking back­ward, the RT’s analysis of Cuba also provides the key to under­standing Yugoslavia and China, and to under­standing what was wrong with the Fourth Inter­na­tional’s analysis at the time. The issue was summed up in two coun­ter­posed docu­ments at the time of the formation of the United Secretariat. The SWP Political Com­mit­tee wrote in its March 1963 statement:

Along the road of a revo­lu­tion beginning with simple democratic demands and ending in the rupture of cap­i­talist property relations, guerilla warfare conducted by landless peasant and semi-proletarian forces, under a leadership that becomes committed to carrying the revo­lu­tion through to a conclusion, can play a decisive role in undermining and precipitating the downfall of a colonial and semi-​colonial power. This is one of the main lessons to be drawn from experience since the Second World War. It must be consciously incor­po­rated into the strategy of building rev­o­lu­tionary Marxist parties in colonial countries.¹⁵²

In direct opposi­tion to this, the res­olu­tion submitted by the RT to the 1963 SWP convention, which became one of the basic docu­ments of the Spartacist tendency, stated:

Experience since the Second World War has demonstrated that peasant-​based guerilla warfare under petit-​bourgeois leadership can in itself lead to nothing more than an anti-​working-​class bureau­cra­tic regime. The creation of such regimes has come about under the conditions of decay of impe­ri­alism, the demoralization and disori­en­ta­tion caused by Stalinist betrayals, and the absence of rev­o­lu­tionary Marxist leadership of the working class. Colonial revo­lu­tion can have an unequiv­o­cally progressive rev­o­lu­tionary significance only under such leadership of the rev­o­lu­tionary pro­le­tariat. For Trotskyists to incor­po­rate into their strategy revi­sionism on the pro­le­tarian leadership in the revo­lu­tion is a profound negation of Marxism-​Leninism no matter what pious wish may be concurrently expressed for “building rev­o­lu­tionary Marxist parties in colonial countries.”¹⁵³

The under­standing of the postwar formation of the deformed workers states achieved by the RT over Cuba was very late. And the situation of the Trotskyist forces was very different: where in the late 1940s there was a seemingly united Fourth Inter­na­tional, in the early ’60s the RT confronted a visibly fragmented Trotskyist movement. One can only speculate what it would have meant if Marxist clarity had been achieved on East Europe and Yugoslavia almost a decade and a half earlier. In addition to countering Pablo’s destructive work, there were the situations where sections of the Fourth Inter­na­tional were locked in battle with Stalinism in the heat of revo­lu­tions: China and Vietnam. The Chinese com­rades, faced with Pablo’s enthusing for Mao while they were being jailed and murdered by the Maoist regime, clung to the false orthodoxy of continuing to label China a cap­i­talist country. At a time of great turmoil, in the midst of the Korean War and the nation­al­i­za­tion campaigns in China, this was politically disorienting to the point of absolute paralysis. (Meanwhile, Pablo and Germain were viciously slandering the Chinese Trotskyists as “refugees from a revo­lu­tion” and refusing to publicize their imprisoned com­rades’ appeals for support.)

The situation of the Vietnamese Trotskyists was no less excruciating. After playing a leading role in the 1945 Saigon insurrection against the returning French impe­ri­alist troops, they were subjected to murderous repression at the hands of the Stalinist party led by Ho Chi Minh.¹⁵⁴ Although many of them were forced into exile, they sought to fight for orthodox Trotskyism. At the Third World Congress of the Fourth Inter­na­tional in 1951, a Vietnamese anti-​Pablo delegate declared dramatically:

The minority of the Vietnamese group is voting against all the political res­olu­tions of the I.S. due to their confused and con­tra­dic­tory char­ac­ter and their tendency to subordinate Trotskyism to Stalinism.¹⁵⁵

In Latin America, the damage wrought by Pabloism was enormous. Pablo advocated, and the Third World Congress endorsed, entrism in bourgeois nationalist movements like Argentine Peronism and the Bolivian Movi­miento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR). This laid the basis for the capi­tu­lation by Guillermo Lora’s Partido Obrero Revolucionario (POR) in 1952, when the MNR staged an insurrection and the POR gave it “critical” support; a section of the POR eventually entered the MNR. In Argentina, because of the lack of a real inter­na­tional fight by the Inter­na­tional Com­mit­tee, the “anti-​Pablo” forces led by Nahuel Moreno carried out a classic Pabloite “deep entry” into the Peronist movement.

Throughout the world, the ravages caused by Pabloism are still being felt. It is to overcome this crisis of rev­o­lu­tionary leadership that the ICL fights to reforge an authentically Trotskyist Fourth International.

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