Extracts from Trotskyism Betrayed: communication of the National Committee of the SLL to the SWP 21/7/62

[p016] Extracts from ‘Trotskyism Betrayed’—communication of the National Com- mittee of the Socialist Labour League to the Socialist Workers’ Party, 21/7/62 13. In our communications with the SWP we provoked a strong reaction by daring to suggest that talk about ‘con- firming the permanent revolution’ without the construc- tion of revolutionary parties was nonsense. In practice, however, both the Pabloites and the SWP find them- selves prostrate before the petty-bourgeois nationalist leaders in Cuba and Algeria, which they have chosen to regard as the touchstone of revolutionary politics. Our view of this question is not opposed to that of the SWP simply in terms of who can best explain a series of events. It is a question rather of the actual policy and programme of Trotskyist leadership in these backward countries. The theory of permanent revolu- tion is, like all Marxist theory, a guide to action; analysis becomes the pointer to the need to organise an inaependent and determined working class and its allies in the peasantry for their own soviet power. ‘Confirming the permanent revolution’ is not an accolade to be conferred by Marxists on approved nationalist leaders, but a task for which Marxists them- selves have the responsibility. We find it difficult to comment on the SWP’s complaint that we failed to recognise that any other line on Cuba would have made things more difficult for them in the American radical movement. We are less impressed by the fact that. the SWP ‘drew the favourable attention of a whole new layer attracted by the Cuban Revolution incituding such significant figures as C. Wright Mills’, than by the fact that their theoretical position is a revisionist one, and if adhered to will lead to the liquidation of the SWP as a Trotskyist party. The very fact that the SWP document resorts to such criteria should be a warning signal. 14. The failure of the SWP spokesmen to provide an objective analysis of the role of the nationalist leader- ships and their reliance on impressions of the strength and ‘progressiveness’ of the nationalist movements, a consequence of the theoretical stagnation of the SWP, have also led to a falsification of the historical truth about the relations between consciousness and the development of the revolutionary movement. Lenin’s implacable opposition to all opportunism and com- promise on principles, his insistence on analysing the economic roots of all political difference, his lifelong insistence on the primary importance of political clari- fication before organisational steps—all this is ignored, in order to justify the SWP’s present orientation. Their document says ‘Experience has shown conclu- sively that the way to bring together wider forces is through collaboration, fusions and unifications with leftward-moving currents freshly radicalised by the class struggle. ’ ‘Limiting our review to the twentieth century, the history of Lenin’s Bolshevik Party involved more than splits. It also involved unifications and attempted unifications with other tendencies in the Russian Social Democracy, including the Mensheviks. Five years after 1912 when the Bolsheviks first constituted themselves as an independent party and in the midst of the 1917 revolution they merged with Trotsky and his Inter-District group—a fateful decision which helped pave the way for the victory in October. Even after the conquest of power, the Bolsheviks held the door open for any signs of a revolutionary turn by the Left Mensheviks or the Communist Anarchists.’ In fact, Trotsky and his followers joined the Bol- sheviks and for the rest of his life Trotsky defined better than anyone else the great significance of Lenin’s work in preparing the Bolshevik party for 1917. The document devotes one paragraph to the foundation of the Communist International. It abstracts from the process a single feature which appears to support its case: ‘The Communist parties of Germany, England and the US were all formed after the First World War, not by molecular accretions to the single original nucleus, but by fusions of a number of groups, none of which had originally been Bolshevik.’ Nothing at all is said here about the strict conditions on programme and Bolshevik organisation, above ali on Soviet power, which the Communist International insisted upon for its affiliated bodies. Lenin’s contributions in this discussion, with the hard- hitting criticism of all those trends which wanted the same kind of affiliation to the Communist Inter- national as had been possible to the Second Inter- national, are completely ignored by the SWP document. Trotsky’s own words shed an interesting light on this part of the discussion. ‘It was not flexibility that served (nor should it serve today) as the basic trait of Bolshevism but rather granite hardness. It was precisely of this quality, for which its enemies and opponents reproached it, that Bolshevism was always justly proud. Not blissful ‘optimism’ but intransigence, ‘vigilance, revolutionary distrust, and the struggle for every hand’s breadth of independence—these are the essential traits of Bolshevism. This is what the communist parties of both the West and the East must begin with. They must first gain the right to carry out great manoeuvres by preparing the political and material possibility for realising them, that is, the strength, the solidity, the firmness of their own organisation.’ (Third International After Lenin, p. 141; obtainable from Pioneer Publishers, New York) The reason for this distortion is to be found not in the ignorance of those who wrote this document nor in the unavailability of the relevant documents but in the present political line of the SWP. This line is one which wants ‘unity’ of ail Trotskyist forces, but without clarification of differences or a thorough examination of the roots of revisionism, and which abandons revolutionary criticism of ‘left’ trends in the movement. This leads to a denial of the historical

[p017] DocuMENT No. 2 foundations of the communist movement. In their anxiety to present a unified and peaceful Trotskyist movement to ‘leftward-moving currents’, primarily from the ‘Stalinist monolith’, they are led to the dis- tortion of the very political foundation upon which the reconstruction of the international communist move- ment depends. When the SWP tries to justify its present line by saying that Trotsky made approaches to ‘Left-centrist elements’ it is once again selecting those ‘facts’ which suit its case and neglecting other vital aspects of the process. The document itself acknowledges that Trotsky initiated this discussion after the basic cadres of international Trotskyism had been consolidated. In fact this consolidation, like the great theoretical transformations forced through by Lenin between 1900 and 1917, was a process of political clarification which had to be carried through, before any question of numbers, or of organisational mergers, could be considered. The position of the Trotskyist movement today requires above all this theoretical ‘consolidation’. It is not possible to ‘forget’ the split of 1953, a split which the SWP itself described as a fundamental breach based upon the complete departure from Marxism of Pablo and his followers. 15. It is not surprising that the basic methodological differences should find expression in a sharp clash cn matters of urgent political importance. The SWP’s attitude towards the Algerian struggle, and particularly the condemnation of the SLL’s characterisation of the FLN leadership and its agreements with French im- perialism, will serve as the best example. On this question it has to be said that the SWP now finds itself at the end of a long historical line, beginning with the Mensheviks and continuing through the Chinese revolution to the post-war struggles of the Arab, African and South-East Asian peoples. It is no accident that the publications of the SWP have not contained a fundamental analysis of the Algerian revolution for some years. No article on Algeria has appeared in International Socialist Review. Little has appeared since 1958 in The Militant on the national movement in Algeria. From our side, over a number of years an attempt has been made to analyse the nature of the Algerian war and revolution and to specify the character of its leadership. In this process, mistakes have been made, but certainly we did not suddenly discover that the Evian agreement was a sell-out. We did not argue that the FLN had conducted the struggle against the French correctly up to a certain point and then blame it for making peace with French imperialism. The Algerian war did not end as it began; the men and movements involved were not the same at the beginning as at the end. We attempted to trace out the development of the elemental struggle of the Algerian peasantry and urban plebeians led, as it was, by a narrowly-based, petty-bourgeois leadership subject to all kinds of international pressures. We foresaw, while the peace negotiations were going on last year, what the likely, indeed, inevitable outcome would be. We were pre- 13 pared for the result and did not, therefore, have to exhaust our resources of vocabulary to turn the Evian agreement into a major defeat for French imperialism or to find excuses for the nationalists. We should, therefore, say that our criticism is not one merely of the Evian agreement, but extends to the conduct of the struggle by the FLN over the whole course of the war. It is, of course, not true that we overlooked the responsibility of the leaderships of the workers’ movement in France for the Algerian tragedy; that has constantly figured in the treatment of the French crisis in our press. The Evian agreement was not the result only of these, or only of the FLN. A different policy, that is a really revolutionary policy on the part of the French working class movement, could only have been waged under different leadership, but such a change in leadership in France would have profoundly affected the Algerian movement. It would have Swept the Ben Kheddas and Ben Bellas away like chaff in the wind. They have only survived because of the defeats of the French workers. The behaviour of the GPRA leaves little doubt that the talk of agrarian reform and even social revolution is no more than a blind. The Algerian petty-bourgeoisie seeks to fill the place vacated by French colonialism, while continuing to be a loyal guarantor of the fundamental interests of French capital in North Africa. We see the Evian agreements as the expression of this willingness, in which the FLN leaders remain true to their nature. We cannot forget that the ‘centralist’ leadership have riever really desired more than this and that they have not stopped at assassination to strike down those proletarian elements in the nationalist movement who long ago pointed out where they were leading: The role of the revolutionaries is not to bow down before a leadership which has nothing to com- mend it except the ability to control, for the moment, the elemental forces of the Algerian revolution. We do not take seriously its professions of revolution. All nationalist petty-bourgeois groups today pose as socialists and Marxists. The FLN is actually a coalition of tendencies, but though some of them have potentiali- ties, we see no proletarian tendency. What we do see is a willingness for compromise, a fear of the masses, a desire to co-exist with imperialism, which may well make ‘independent’ Algeria no more socialist than Nasser and Bourguiba. Does the SWP wish to extend the accolade to these leaders as well? Considering the deep crisis of French imperialism in Algeria it had retreated in relatively good order, leaving its interests to custodians it has at length decided to trust. Some rightists think, of course, that Algeria will ‘go Communist’ and attack de Gaulle for making the agreement with the nationalists. We think those who see in an ‘independent’ Algeria under the FLN the jast hope of keeping that country within the circuit of the capitalist world market to be more in line with the existing facts. Of course, the situation in Algeria remains unstable. The survival of the FLN leadership is bound up, in fact, with its ability to carry out the terms of the

[p018] 14 Evian agreement. It is bound hand and foot by its relationship with world imperialism. This relationship prevents it from satisfying the social demands of the Algerian masses or from consolidating its power for a prolonged period. The need is for a proletarian movement against the FLN leaders, against the Evian agreement, to continue the struggle for independence: which means, for the masses, not only peace but also bread and land. We do not equate existing leaders with ‘the living movement’, least of ali in Algeria. Nor do we judge the movement from the existing leaders, which is what the SWP has more and more come to do. 16, It is necessary to clearly characterise the way in which this latest SWP document provides ‘theoretical’ cover for the betrayal of the Algerian revolution. The SLL, it appears, is wrong to call the Evian agreement a sell-out. We should have recog- nised, says the SWP document, that the ‘main thing’ is a victory for the independence struggle and a set- back for French imperialism. This type of formula- tion is, of course, not new: it is the classical Stalinist criticism of the Trotskyist programme in backward countries. We note that in Section II, the SWP document quotes with approval the following sentence from the pages of The Militant: ‘The first step in Algeria is the consolidation of independence, the second must be the socialist transformation of Algerian society.’ Is this different in any way from the Stalinist ‘two stage’ theory of the revolution in backward countries? Would it be possible to find a clearer example in practice of the abandonment of the Permanent Revolution, an abandonment which is not made any better by the fact that the theory is said to be ‘confirmed’? The sentence which follows the above quotation: ‘The Marxists there will strive to fight together with the worker-plebeians against the bourgeois elements in the nationalist camp in order to direct the revolution along the second course,’ amounts to nothing more than a habitual repetition of phrases which the SWP leadership do not as yet omit from their political statements. That this talk of ‘the fight against the bourgeois elements’ is nothing more than revolutionary phraseology is clear from the document itself. A Marxist, it says, ‘should participate in the forefront of the revolution at each stage—including its nationalist stage in colonial and semi-colonial lands.’ Such formulations can only disarm the most advanced workers. We are asked to ‘make alliances with the most combative elements among the leaders and the ranks while bringing forward their own program and proposals in contending for leadership.’ (Our emphasis) What this opposition amounts to is not an independent course towards working-class power, but a loyal oppo- sition within the nationalist camp. Lenin’s words on some of these questions, as set down in resolutions of the Communist International in 1920, need no commentary: ‘A resolute struggle must be waged against the attempt to clothe the revolutionary liberation move- ments in the backward countries which are not FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, SUMMER 1965 genuinely communist in communist colours. The Communist International has the duty of supporting the revolutionary movement in the colonies and backward countries only with the object of rallying the constituent elements of the future proletarian parties—~which will be truly communist and not only in name—in all the backward countries and educating them to a consciousness of their special task, namely, that of fighting against the bourgeois- democratic trend in their own nation.’ and ‘It is essential constantly to expose and explain to the widest masses of the working people every- where, and particularly in the backward countries, the deception practised by the imperialist powers with the help of the privileged classes in the oppressed countries in creating ostensibly politically independent States which are in reality completely dependent on them economically, financially and militarily.’ 17. It is all very well for the SWP document to say that ‘Between them Cuba and Algeria encompass most of the basic problems confronting the Marxists in the present stage of the colonial revolution’, but what is entirely lacking in the SWP presentation is any attempt at an overall analysis of the experiences of nationalist movements and revolutions in backward countries. What does the SWP document mean by the phrase ‘encompass most of the basic problems’? It is a matter here not of good and bad examples, but of a whole process in which the mass struggle in under- developed countries has been contained by petty- bourgeois leaderships. Besides Cuba and Algeria—and in order to understand both of these—the experience of Iraq, Iran, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Bolivia, Indo- China, and many other countries must be taken into account. What would emerge from such a historical analysis is the true role played by those leaders of the working class who have proceeded from the theory of ‘two stages’. Stalinism, far from being ‘forced to play a progressive role’, has in fact disarmed and betrayed the advanced workers in every one of these countries and has enabled a new bourgeois government to establish temporary stabilisation—which is all imperialism can hope for at the present stage. It is in this sense and this sense only that the ‘theory of Permanent Revolution has been confirmed’. The SWP document calls the Evian agreement ‘a major victory for the Algerian people, for the Arab and colonial revolution’, No attempt whatever is made at any general evaluation of this new animal, the ‘Arab revolution’. Instead of a concrete analysis of the Egyptian, Syrian and Iraqi experiences, we have acceptance at face value of the claims of the Arab leaders themselves. Meanwhile their jails remain full of communists and militant workers. The SWP by this position, falls along with the Pabloites into conniving at similar results in Algeria... . 20. ... The SWP document states that ‘a workers’ state has been established in Cuba, a consequence of the first victorious Socialist revolution in America’.

[p019] DOCUMENT No. 2 It is interesting to compare this evaluation with that of the Pabloites, who share the view of Cuba as a workers’ state. We have given our estimation of the Pabloite position in the Labour Review (Vol. 7, No. 1). The SWP political committee has now announced its determination to collaborate with the Pabloites, on the grounds that political differences are now minimal. Does the SWP see Pablo’s position on Cuba as part of this ‘coming closer together’? We see it, on the contrary, as the logical conclusion of the capitulation of the Pabloites to petty-bourgecis tendencies sub- jected to such strong criticism in the SWP’s Open Letter of 1953. Here again the SWP comrades have not considered Pablo’s line on Cuba in relation to his whole approach to the Permanent Revolution and the struggle in backward countries. As we have pointed out elsewhere, the Pabloites have abandoned Lenin and Trotsky’s positions on independent working-class action and organisation, subordinating themselves to ‘progressive’ nationalist leaders. 21. The determination of the SWP and the Pabloites to consider Cuba a workers’ state, or, to quote the SWP document, ‘an uncorrupted workers’ regime’, is another example of the departure from Marxist method. The SWP document tries to present the diflerences over Cuba in a false way, accusing the SLL of not recognising the workers’ state in Cuba only because the revolution there was not led by a Trotskyist party. The SWP, not misled by such ‘subjectivism’, bases itself on other ‘criteria’. The discussion in the 1930s on the class character of the USSR, and particularly the struggle against Burnham and Shachtman for the defence of the USSR as a workers’ state, are an essential background to the question of Cuba. But it is ridiculous to think that the question of the Cuban state can be resolved abstractly by ‘criteria’ from this earlier discussion, even at the end of which Trotsky was still saying that the last word had still to be said by history. Trotsky and the Fourth International adjudged Russia a workers’ state because in the October Revolution the armed workers, organised in Soviets, took the state power, which they then used to expropriate the capitalists and to defeat the counter-revolution. The peasant revolt was able to expropriate the landlords because the successful proletarian revolution guaranteed their initial conquests. (Incidentally, does anyone in the SWP leadership think that the proletariat would have been able to retain the state power without the leadership prepared in the Bolshevik Party? Who organised the Red Army and the great dynamic relationship of people to government which was preserved through the Civil War? Does the SWP think that a Marxist leadership to carry out these tasks would have been thrown up ‘in the process of the revolution itself’?) 22. For reasons which have been well analysed in our movement, these victories of the proletariat degene- rated. Trotsky fought a long battle against those essentially petty-bourgeois trends in the movement who used this degeneration to absolve them from the 15 defence of the workers’ state. In defending the USSR as a workers’ state, Trotsky himself considered that the social and economic conquests of October were still intact. The bureaucracy which usurped the government power in the social economy of Russia was a parasitic group and not a necessary fundamental class. Its power was unstable, based on a temporary relation between the proletarian revolution in back- ward countries and the continuing existence of im- perialism in the advanced countries. Trotsky’s basic definition still holds: the conquests of October are still intact. The power of the bureaucracy remains unstable and parasitic. It is clearer now than it was then that the Stalinist regime was not a new type of society but was a workers’ state which must be defined in a makeshift way, taking into account the special historical problems of the isolation of the revolution in a backward country. The states established in Eastern Europe in 1945 were extensions of the Russian revolution by the military and bureau- cratic methods of the Stalinist leadership. They were possible under the circumstances of special difficulty for imperialism and the chaos in Europe consequent on the defeat of German capitalism. In fact the betrayals of international Social-Democracy and Stalinism restricted the advance of the revolution to Eastern Europe (and later China). This perpetuates the essential conditions of the survival of the bureau- cracy in the workers’ states. There was by no means the same dynamic in the foundations of the deformed ‘workers states’ as there had been in Russia in October 1917. Our movement’s characterisation of all these states was not simply a question of applying ‘criteria’ like nationalization to the finished product. 23. These historical considerations are not irrelevant to the dispute over Cuba. Trotsky insisted that his discussion and definition of the USSR were to be taken historically, and in relation to the world struggle between the working class and the capitalist class. At every stage of his eleven-years-long work towards a ‘definition’ of the USSR, Trotsky insisted on a rounded, critical perspective and not simply on the ‘normative’ method of applying definitional criteria. The SWP method is the opposite, taking certain ‘criteria’ from the discussion of one particular mani- festation of the revolutionary struggle in one part of the world at a unique stage in the development of the world revolution. They apply these criteria to another part of the world a generation later, to a particular sector at a particular stage of the struggle. Thus nationalization and the existence of workers’ militias are sufficient to make Cuba a ‘workers state’ and to make the Cuban revolution a socialist revolu- tion. This ‘normative’ method is the theoretical cover for the practice of prostrating themselves before the present unstable and transitory stage of the struggle—the victory of the petty-bourgeois revolu- tionary nationalists—instead of starting from the per- spective and tasks of the working class. The objective basis for such a perspective would have to be an analysis of the present relation of classes and parties

[p020] 16 in Cuba and Latin America, in relation to the struggle against American imperialism. Our essential differences with the SWP on this question are, therefore, not over the ‘criteria’ of workers’ states. We do not accept such a framework for the discussion; if, in fact, we had defined a workers’ state by the existence or non- existence of Trotskyist parties then this would be a lapse into ‘subjectivism’, but we have not done this. We have tried to understand and discuss the Cuban question in terms of our own analysis of the economic position of Cuba and the evaluation of the present struggle in Cuba and the rest of America. We are in no circumstances prepared to join in the adulation of the ‘superb’ leadership of the Cuban revolution. We are in no circumstances prepared to liquidate the Trotskyist leadership in organisations like the IRO of Castro and the Stalinists in Cuba. The only possi- bility of holding on to the gains so far made in the struggle against imperialism is through the building of workers’ councils and the extension of the revolu- tion into Latin America. Only a Marxist leadership can orientate the Cuban masses for those two aims. Neither the July 26th movement nor the Stalinists will take up either of these slogans. 24. What does a ‘workers’ state’ mean in concrete terms? It means the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in one form or another. ‘It is only the domination of a class that determines property relations .. .’ (Lenin: Report to the Ninth Congress of RCP (B)). Does the dictatorship of the proletariat exist in Cuba? We reply categorically NO! The absence of a party squarely based on the workers and poor peasants makes it impossible to set up and maintain such a dictatorship. But what is even more significant is the absence of what the SWP euphemistically terms ‘the institutions of proletarian democracy’ or what we prefer to call soviets or organs of workers’ power. This is the paradox which lies behind all the so-called ‘democratic and socialist tendencies of the Cuban revolution’, To substitute a workers’ militia for soviets does not help. Workers’ militias without soviets are no better, no worse than soviets without workers’ militias. We would refer the SWP comrades to Lenin on this subject. Referring to the dictatorship of the pro- letariat, this is what he wrote: ‘Only he is a Marxist who extends the acceptance of the class struggle to the acceptance of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is where the profound differences lie between a Marxist and an ordinary petty (and even big) bourgeois. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and acceptance of Marxism should be tested.’ and on the question of Soviets: ‘The . . . revolution is one continuous and desperate struggle, and the proletariat is the vanguard class of all the oppressed, the focus and centre of all the aspirations of all the oppressed for their emancipation! Naturally, therefore, the soviets as the organs of struggle of the oppressed masses reflected and expressed the moods and changes of opinions of these masses ever so much more FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, ISSUE 1, 1965 quickly, fully and faithfully than any other institu- tions (that incidentally, is one of the reasons why Soviet democracy is the highest type of democracy)’. Lenin in The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky. The SWP comrades have discovered a new type of democracy—different from Soviet democracy— symbolised by Castro and typified by the Havana declaration. What is the class content of this demo- cracy? And in what way does it substitute for soviets? In our opinion, the Castro regime is and remains a bonapartist regime resting on capitalist state foun- dations. Its bonapartist nature is determined by the fact that the working class, because of the Stalinist misleadership, is unable to take and wield state power —-while on the other hand the big comprador-bour- geoisie which supported Batista is too weak and decimated to retake the power in the present period. Castro continues to lean upon the working class and peasantry in the struggle against the latifundists and their agents in and around Cuba. He is helped in this task by the economic concessions made to the workers and peasants. But it is the peasantry who have benefited most from the Castro regime. It is to this group and the urban petty-bourgeoisie that Castro turns and will turn for aid whenever there is a threat from the Left. Castro balances between contradictory and antagonistic class forces. This is what explains the smallness of the ruling clique, the absence of democratic discussion, the instability of the regime marked by recurrent splits and purges and the mystique of the Castro cult. The regime, however, is a variety of capitalist state power. The Castro regime did not create a qualita- tively new and different type of state from the Batista regime. What it did do was to clear out the old judges, administrators, bureaucrats, diplomats and policemen and replace them with people who sup- ported Castro. The old institutions were filled with new personnel, His present honeymoon with the Stalinists is dictated by the expediency of creating a staff of reliable administrators and functionaries. The attack against Escalante was motivated by a desire to keep power centralised in his own hands and not by hostility to bureaucracy or any other such things. The ‘militia’ is subordinate to Castro’s state—not to soviets, not even to a constituent assembly. In this sense they do not constitute workers’ power or even dual power. The nationalisations carried out by Castro do nothing to alter the capitalist character of the state. In this case there is a close analogy with Nasser’s Egypt. Faced with intense competition in the struggle for the Middle Eastern and African markets, the Egyptian bourgeoisie—-the most rapacious of the Arab bourgeoisies—has been forced to undertake a series of nationalizations of a state capitalist variety. In the summer of 1961, Nasser nationalized by decree the entire banking and insurance business, the shipping lines, the cotton processing industry, 96 big commercial and industrial firms and the entire press. He estab-

[p021] DOocuUMENT No. 2 lished state control of the buying and selling of all cotton. He set up a monopoly of the entire import trade and reduced the maximum land holdings by half. There is not a single industrial, financial or commercial firm which is not owned, directed or partly owned by the state. Yet Egypt remains an integral part of the capitalist world and is no more a workers’ state than imperialist Britain. It remains an extreme example of state intervention in a capitalist economy. A basic criterion for a workers’ state in the economic sphere in an under-developed country is the nationalization of the land and thorough political measures by the ruling power to prevent the growth of the kulaks. Neither in Egypt nor in Cuba has this been done. On the contrary, in Cuba Castro has recently promised (under the impact of the food crisis) to give the land back to peasants. So long as land remains alienable, so long will petty commodity pro- duction continue and so long will Cuba remain a capitalist nation. Despite or rather because of all the economic and social changes that have taken place in the last two- three years, Cuba has witnessed, not a social revolu- tion which has transferred state power irrevocably from the hands of one class to another, but a political revolution which has transferred power from the hands of one class to another section of that same class. In the course of such a transfer, substantial concessions have been made to the working masses, but these concessions do not transcend the limits of capitalist rule and exploitation. In this context it is childish nonsense for the SWP leaders to declare that Cuba affords ‘fresh confirmation of the correctness of the theory of the Permanent Revolution’. Here is what Trotsky says on this subject: ‘No matter what the first episodic stages of the revolution may be in the individual countries, the realisation of the revolutionary alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry is conceivable only under the political leadership of the proletarian vanguard, organised in the Communist Party. This in turn means that the victory of the democratic revolution is conceivable only through the dictator- ship of the proletariat which bases itself upon the alliance with the peasantry and solves first of all the tasks of the democratic revolution.’ (Our emphasis) (The Permanent Revolution, p. 153, 1962 edition.) Thus Cuba constitutes, in fact, a negative confirma- tion of the permanent revolution. Where the working class is unable to lead the peasant masses and smash capitalist state power, the bourgeoisie steps in and solves the problems of the ‘democratic revolution’ in its own fashion and to its own satisfaction. Hence we have Kemal Ataturk, Chiang Kai-shek, Nasser, Nehru, Cardenas, Peron, Ben Bella—and Castro (to mention a few). That is why the Socialist Labour League fights for the construction of a Marxist party based on the working class and armed with the finest and latest weapons from the arsenal of Marxism. The first task of such a party would be to establish the political and theoretical independence of the working class 17 from the capitalist class, its state and its ideological servitors. This implies complete organisational and political independence from that bureaucratic fusion of Stalinism and Castroism which is the Unified Revolutionary Party (IRO). Only on such a basis can a really revolutionary struggle for working-class power be waged. In conclusion we state that such a policy does not inhibit the struggle for the defence of Cuba against imperialist attack, nor does it prevent episodic alliances with the Castroite forces in the struggle against the latifundists. On the contrary, it would immensely facilitate the tasks of defending Cuba and defeating landlordism. The defence of Cuba and Castro against imperialism is a tactic. Our strategy remains the overthrow of capitalism and the setting up of a real workers’ state with real workers’ power. This task remains to be done in Cuba. 25. One final word on the section of the SWP document concerned with Cuba. The SWP political committee circulates among its members and pre- sumably throughout the world movement the following criticism of the SLL: ‘On the other hand, the fallacious theoretical approach of the SLL to the Cuban Revolu- tion has impeded practical activities. The SLL lost the initiative in Cuban defense efforts to centrist forces in England. The rejection of an Embassy invitation to celebrate the Cuban Revolution on January 1, 1962 needlessly widened the gulf between the British Trot- skyists and the Cuban Revolutionists. Recently the SLL has started promoting a “Food for Cuba” cam- paign. This kind of solidarity action is sure to be appreciated by the hard-pressed Cubans. We hope this improvement in their practical work will be followed by reconsideration of their theoretical views on the Cuban Revolution.’ We cannot understand this pro- nouncement. No evidence is given for it, and we would like to know which ‘centrist elements’ have gained the initiative in Cuban defence efforts. There have, in fact, been no such initiatives or efforts in Britain by anyone else except the SLL. Furthermore, in our efforts we have found the Cuban Embassy and their supporters in the Communist Party to be a major stumbling-block to any organised aid for the Cuban people. We hope that this section of the SWP state- ment will be withdrawn. We will not dwell here on the questions which we have previously taken up with the SWP leadership concerning the supposed attitude of Castro towards revolutionary Marxism. It is enough to note that this repeats a fundamentally mistaken notion of the nature and role of consciousness which is at the root of the SWP revisionism. The SWP document looks at Cuba in isolation, despite its claims to see Cuba as a focus of all the important problems in the colonial revolu- tion. The actual relations between the Cuban revolu- tion and the world situation of imperialism and the world revolution are not examined. Cuba is taken in isolation and formal ‘criteria’ of workers’ states then applied. The necessary result is ‘the worship of the accomplished fact’.

[p022] 18 DOCUMENT No. 3 FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, SUMMER 1995