Appendix to 'Opportunism and Empiricism': a reply to Joseph Hansen from P. Rodriguez to the leadership of the SWP 14/2/63

[p036] APPENDIX TO ‘OPPORTUNISM AND EMPIRICISM’ A Reply to Joseph Hansen From: F. Rodriguez, Paris To: The Leadership of the SWP Dear Comrades, I have received, as have a certain number of other Frenchmen, Joe Hansen’s text ‘Cuba, An Acid Test’, which constitutes an answer to the positions main- tained on Cuba by the SLL and the French. I am glad that an international discussion should begin in this way, on a question of such importance. We shall discuss it again between ourselves, in order to answer some of Hansen’s objections in detail. However, I should like, straight away, in the name of my comrades, to make a few points which seem to preface any dialogue, as they deal with the conditions themselves of a discussion of an international scale, that is to say with workers’ democracy itself. 1. The international bulletin of the SWP published Joe Hansen’s text in reply to our text and to our theses. The comrades of the SWP who will read it will thus know the answer to texts which they have not seen. For our part, we have acted differently, and have published for our comrades, the texts of the SWP before ours. 2. This lapse in the understanding of what workers’ democracy should be, is even more deplorable as comrade Hansen has a very peculiar conception of the way in which an honest militant should put forward the ideas of his comrades, when he does not share them. I had a moment of anxiety, while reading his text, and wondered if our comparison with Spain had been so badly presented that Hansen could have criticised it as he did, in good faith. But this is not so: we mentioned Spain to show an example of a bourgeois state—the republican state~—broken by a revolution, and resuscitated by the alliance between the bourgeois and Stalinists. If Joe Hansen wants to discuss this point with us, he will have to revise the analyses which our movement made at that time, and he will have to tell us that Trotsky was wrong to speak of the ‘alliance with the shadow of the bour- geoisie’, ‘with political spectres’ (Works, Vol. 3, p. 536). It is without pleasure that we read Hansen’s jokes about ‘spectres’, for before writing our text, we re- read Trotsky’s lines in the History of the Russian Revolution on the ‘semi-spectral dualism of power’ (Vol. 1 of the Reider edition, p. 306). It seems to us that Comrade Hansen, if he has any consideration for the members of the SWP, should explain to them either that he is not very familiar with Trotsky’s thought, and that the comrades he mocks are more so than he is, or that he invites us all to condemn without remission, those of Trotsky’s writings which we have just mentioned. 3. We have not got the same conception as Joe Hansen has of what constitutes ‘consideration’ towards comrades: Hansen laughs at the ‘spectres’ which Trotsky taught us existed and that it was just as well Paris, February 14, 1963 to recognise, and refrains from saying, as he laughs at us, that we are following Trotsky in speaking of half- or quarter-spectres. On the other hand he reproaches us with not having told our comrades things that we do not know. If, in fact, we said that we would return to certain questions at a later date, it was because our work is not yet complete. We prefer work to gossip, and we think that we have shown more consideration for the comrades than if, like Hansen. we had spoken either of a text that they have not been able to read, or of things we did not know or of which we were not certain. The leaders of the SWP will soon receive our text on the USSR after Stalin, and we hope that, this time, the comrades of the SWP will have it too: we believe, in fact, that it will arm them better to under- stand and consequently to practise what constitutes the defence of the USSR, which the analyses of The Militant and the contributions of Murry Weiss in defence of the bureaucracy cannot do. 4. We congratulate comrade Hansen on seeing that we have differences with the comrades of the SLL on the question of Cuba. Our agreement with them on fundamental questions is, in fact, so profound that in reading superficially as he seems to do, he could have overlooked their existence. However, we are sorry that the arguments that Joe Hansen puts up to the comrades of the SLL are so feeble that they can hardly help to make them revise the points of their analysis that we consider debatable. In fact, how can Hansen be taken seriously when he invokes against the SLL the opinion of the ‘peoples’ of the USSR, Poland, Hungary, etc. ... as it is expressed in the columns of the press which is edited by the bureaucrats, or in the meetings where they alone speak? The same opinion of the ‘peoples’, as he says, called Trotsky a spy and a murderer, and called the Trotskyists ‘Hitler- ites’... And did not the Spanish ‘people’ in the social- democracy and Stalinist meetings and writings also condemn the ‘Trotskyists’, accusing them of calum- niating, even of assassinating their ‘revolution’? At that time, no serious militant in the Trotskyist move- ment thought of criticising Trotsky for his analysis, and of suggesting that in order to explain the contra- diction between the opinion of the ‘people’ and his own, resort must be made to a psychosis of mania, etc. . as comrade Hansen does today. If Hansen really wants to criticise our comrades of the SLL, who have turned to Lenin for the definition of a workers’ state —see the number of lines that Trotsky devotes to the definition of the USSR in The Revolution Betrayed-— he must first of all explain why the construction of a ‘pure’ workers’ state was possible in a backward country at that time, and why it no longer is in Cuba today, and why he is reduced, as he has been for the

[p037] APPENDIX TO DOCUMENT No. 3 last two years, to awaiting a speech by Castro, announced but not in evidence, on the new institutions, in order to know what workers’ democracy is today. We fear that Hansen may have forgotten that a revolutionary Marxist must change the world, and not analyse the way in which it changes by itself under the influence of those unconscious and objective forces which he calls ‘the facts’. 5. Finally, if our text had been published for all the comrades of the SWP, we presume to think that there would have been at least one to understand that it was a typing error that substituted ‘cultural assimila- tion’—which is meaningless—for ‘structural assimila- tion’, which was a frequent expression of Trotsky’s pen during the polemic of 1939-40, as in our ranks just after the war. Hansen would thus have been spared 33 the ridicule of devoting so many lines to a copying mistake. However, despite bad procedures and futile lawyer’s manoeuvres, Joe Hansen’s text puts up some serious ob‘ections to our theses. We are getting down to work to answer them, and we shall try and publish all the texts again, his and ours, hoping that you will do as much. It is only in this way, in our opinion, that the leadership of the SWP will prove that it intends a discussion which can make the world movement progress, and that it is not one of those who, with the words of unity on their tongue, in reality are preparing a split in the obscurity of a dis- cussion in which the texts of each are not known to all. Yours fraternally, (Sgd.) FRANCISCO RODRIGUEZ ~ THE AGE OF PERMANENT REVOLUTION A TROTSKY ANTHOLOGY Edited with an introduction by Isaac Deutscher (with the assistance of George Novak). Published by Dell Pub.ishing Co. Inc. Distributed in Britain by New Park Publications Ltd. Price 9s. 6d. A concise and invaluable collection of Trotsky’s writings. The theoretical genius of one of the world’s great Marxists and co-leader of the first successful socialist revolution is brilliantly revealed in this book. It is an indispensable addition to the library of all communists who are serious about studying, understanding and grasping the method and programme of contemporary Marxism. Orders to: NEW PARK PUBLICATIONS LTD 186A CLAPHAM HIGH STREET, LONDON, S.W.4

[p038] APPENDIX TO DOCUMENT No. 3 last two years, to awaiting a speech by Castro, announced but not in evidence, on the new institutions, in order to know what workers’ democracy is today. We fear that Hansen may have forgotten that a revolutionary Marxist must change the world, and not analyse the way in which it changes by itself under the influence of those unconscious and objective forces which he calls ‘the facts’. 5. Finally, if our text had been published for all the comrades of the SWP, we presume to think that there would have been at least one to understand that it was a typing error that substituted ‘cultural assimila- tion’—which is meaningless—for ‘structural assimila- tion’, which was a frequent expression of Trotsky’s pen 33 the ridicule of devoting so many lines to a copying mistake. However, despite bad procedures and futile lawyer’s manoeuvres, Joe Hansen’s text puts up some serious ob’ections to our theses. We are getting down to work to answer them, and we shall try and publish all the texts again, his and ours, hoping that you will do as much. It is only in this way, in our opinion, that the leadership of the SWP will prove that it intends a discussion which can make the world movement progress, and that it is not one of those who, with the words of unity on their tongue, in reality are preparing a split in the obscurity of a dis- cussion in which the texts of each are not known to during the polemic of 1939-40, as in our ranks just all. after the war. Hansen would thus have been spared Yours fraternally, (Sgd.) FRANCISCO RODRIGUEZ THE AGE OF PERMANENT REVOLUTION A TROTSKY ANTHOLOGY Edited with an introduction by Isaac Deutscher (with the assistance of George Novak). Published by Dell Pubiishing Co. Inc. Distributed in Britain by New Park Publications Ltd. Price 9s. 6d. A TROTSKY ANTHOLOGY A concise and invaluable collection of Trotsky’s writings. The theoretical genius of one of the world’s great Marxists and co-leader of the first successful socialist revolution is brilliantly revealed in this book. It is an indispensable addition to the library of all communists who are serious about studying, understanding and_ grasping the method and programme of contemporary Marxism. Orders to: NEW PARK PUBLICATIONS LTD 186A CLAPHAM HIGH STREET, LONDON, S.W.4 .

[p039] 34 FourTH INTERNATIONAL, SUMMER 1965