Editorial

[p006] EDITORIAL failed to attach any significance to Castro’s ban on the visit by Canadian students to Cuba in 1965. There surely is now not the slightest doubt that that decision, taken in the knowledge that Cana- dian Trotskyists shared the organising of the trip, was a pre- lude to the Havana outburst of January 1966. And yet one of these Canadian students, writing on the basis of his 1964 visit, before the ban, committed himself to print in the Canadian ‘Young Socialist Forum’, identified with ‘Workers’ Vanguard’ and the American ‘Militant’, supporters of the poli- tics of the United Secretariat, in the following sickening terms about Cuba, as late as the January-February 1966 issue: ‘By channelling the best, the most idealistic, the most hard- working rank and filers into the party, a cadre will be built which, by pooling its experi- ences, and making its decisions democratically, can safeguard the forward movement of the revolution.’ Castro’s move against Escalante, an old-guard Stalinist, is written up thus: ‘The effect of Fidel’s speech rang through the island like thunder; it is said (!) that people came out in the streets and danced. Anibal Escalante, the party secretary, and several others were instantly dismissed, the party was thoroughly re- organised and new elections were held. ‘Fidel’s role in the battle against bureaucratisation has been a ruthless one.’ And finally: ‘One may best describe Fidel as the heartbeat of the revolu- tion. Fidel commands more popular affection and_ trust than any other political figure today.’ Thus did the spokesmen of revisionism, to the very last minute and even beyond, in Han- sen’s and Pierre Frank’s pleas to Castro to correct his error (Pablo himself makes a similar appeal), prepare their followers for Castro’s open counter-revolution- ary attacks on Trotskyism. Castro’s evolution is by no means finished. But time is running out for those in the ranks of the revisionists who do not learn quickly to reject the whole course of the United Secretariat. We are confident that many of them, especially in the ranks of the SWP, will take this oppor- tunity of returning to the genuinely revolutionary road of reconstruction of the Fourth International. The International Committee’s international conference this spring provides the focus for the reconstruction of the revolu- tionary Marxist forces in the Fourth International. In their attitude to Castro, the revisionists express the disastrous results of their abandonment of the Marxist method and the Tran- sitional Programme of the Fourth International. By 1952-53 Pablo and his followers had concluded that in the post-Second-World- War situation the struggle for socialism would be fought through without the construction of independent revolutionary parties of the Fourth Interna- tional. Their first capitulation was to world Stalinism: they asserted that ‘mass pressure’ would force the Stalinist parties to take state power. Through the ‘fifties the same role was attributed to the petty- bourgeois nationalist leaders in the colonies and semi-colonies. When Castro successfully led the revolt against the corrupt Batista regime in Cuba and was then forced to resist the US imperial- ists, the Socialist Workers’ Party of the USA, having broken with Pabloism in 1953, returned to support of the revisionists, giving their blessing to the establishment of the ‘United Secretariat’ in 1963. The characterisation of Cuba as a workers’ state, and the uncriti- cal acceptance of Castro as the successor of Lenin and Trotsky, was made the yardstick of this ‘reunification’. Of course, the dominance, for a period, of people like Nkrumah, Ben Bella, Sukarno, or Castro, was only a transitory expression of one phase of imperialism’s handling of the revolution of the colonial workers and peasants in the epoch of crisis of leadership. Instead of going to the deep and insoluble crisis of the imperialist system, and understanding from this the need to build a proletarian inter- national, the Pabloite revisionists and the SWP ‘united’ in their pro- stration before the Stalinists and the middle-class nationalists. The ‘unification’ was achieved only shortly after a split in the revisionist ranks. The followers of Juan Posadas, who controlled the Latin American Bureau of the Pabloite revisionists, had already, in the very course of the ‘unifica- tion’ approaches, broken away from the Pabloites and proclaimed themselves the ‘real’ Fourth Inter- national. They adopted a perspec- tive of revolution only in Latin America, with the advanced coun- tries being radicalised through 51 nuclear war. It. was only a few months after the agreement of the SWP and the Pabloite secretariat (of course, the Voorhis Act in the USA pre- vented the SWP from = any organised affiliation with interna- tional movements) that yet another major split occurred. Pablo himself, together with followers in a number of sections, was first suspended, and then, in 1965, expelled from the Germain- Frank-Maitan-led ‘United Secre- tariat’. Then followed the un- mitigated disaster, for the revi- sionists, of N. M. Perera’s capi- tulation in Ceylon. We have pointed out above the deepening crisis of imperialism and of the Stalinist bureaucracy and its allies. All over the world the resurgence of working-class militancy raises the question of independent revolutionary leader- ship. This is what explodes the revisionists’ unity. It was on this question that they broke from Marxist programme and method. Their infatuation with Castro and his ilk has found them tailing along behind the forces which are used to crush the drive to an independent leadership, instead of being able to place Trotskyism at the head of the revolutionary pro- letarian forces. Part of Joseph Hansen’s ‘reply’ to Castro’s slanders was to refer to the record of his tendency in ‘defending’ Cuba and Castro. Hansen’s aim was to dissociate himself from the Posadas ten- dency explicitly quoted by Castro, and draw attention to others in Latin America who have followed his own line of prostration before Castro. He chose as ‘typical’ of the revisionists’ attitude to Castro one Manuel Moreno, who wrote in the Argentine magazine Estrategia concerning the Guevara disappearance: ‘First, against the campaign of the writers in the pay of imperialism and its exploiters, we reject any insinuation that Guevara was “purged” by the Cuban regime and its undis- puted leader, Fidel Castro. In our opinion as we characterise the regime and its leader, the persecution of revolutionary militants, or leaders, whether _Cuban or foreigners, is ex- ~ cluded,’ All this despite the purging of the Escalante group without dis- cussion of any sort, despite the suppression of the Posadas-led Trotskyist group in Cuba, despite the cloud of secrecy over Gue- vara’s removal after his speeches in North Africa in early 1965. This same Manuel Moreno is capable of preparing the same

[p007] 52 betrayals in his own country as his revisionist friends have pre- pared internationally. Moreno has for years acted as one of the leaders of the ‘left wing’ of the Peronist movement. Its paper, Paiabra Obrera, appears with front-page photographs side by side, of Fidel Castro and... Peron! The paper announces _itself as ‘organ of revolutionary workers’ Peronism’, published ‘under the discipline of General Peron and the Higher Peronist Council’! Peron, at present domiciled in Franco Spain, is a left-bourgeois nationalist of the classical Latin American type, held in the back- ground as potential head of a ‘radical’ national government able to mislead and contain the work- ing class, persuading them of the advantages of a front with the bourgeoisie, rather than a social- ist revolutionary struggle at the head of the peasantry, against the imperialists, landlords and capi- talists, all of whom are insepar- ably interlinked in Latin America. While Pablo, Frank and Hansen implore Castro to correct his errors and ‘return’ to- the re- volutionary path, the Inter- national Committee of the Fourth International goes from strength to strength. On the basis of its principled struggle against re- visionism, the International Com- mittee calls a conference this year which draws together forces from all over the world to Kammer out the prospects of the socialist revolution and the reconstruction of the International. While the revisionists were pre- paring to hail the Tricontinental Conference, their hero Castro was playing his part in the suppression of the revolutionary tendency in the Latin American movements. The Soviet bureaucracy had be- come extremely disturbed by the revolutionary challenge to their policy of peaceful co-existence and collaboration with the bour- geoisie in these countries. It was thus no accident that Castro chose to concentrate his attack on Guatemala. Castro told the Tricontinental Conference that the Guatemalan guerrillas, and especially their leader, Yon Sosa, had been misled by a ‘Trotskyist’ political agent, working for the Yankee imperial- ists; into an adventurist policy, isolating them from the masses. Another leader, Turcios, had suc- cessfully opposed this tendency and restored the movement to sensible paths. What are the facts? The most detailed information available in the English language is that pro- vided by Adolfo Gilly in the American Monthly Review of May-june 1965. Gilly showed that the Mi-15 guerrilla move- ment of ron Sosa was working out a aefinite une of proletarian ieadersnip in the revoiution, and a break irom the ovourgeoisie. iney were aiso explicit avout tne continental and international re- volutionary lmplications of a successtul struggie 1n Guatemala itseli. Armado Granados, in his inter- view with Gilly, delivered a criticism of the Guatemalan Communist Party in Marxist terms, opposing their policy of toe ‘bloc ot tne tour classes’ (anciuding the bourgeoisie) with the alternative of a socialist re- voilution under working-class leadership. However, Granados oitered to the Communist Party a policy of united front on the basis of their commitment to armed struggle. Said Granados: “What the CP of Guatemala proposes, with the aim of attracting the “non-imperialist bourgeoisie’ is a programme which accommodates itself to the framework of the capitalist system. We are against such a bloc: we are for the alliance of the working class and the peasantry behind a proletarian programme and proletarian leadership. . . . We do not reject all immediate democratic reforms. What we do reject is the conception of the conquest of democracy by the people within the capitalist system. We do not. separate our struggle for immediate reforms from the struggle for power— immediate demands for week- days, the socialist Revolution on Sundays. We consider them to be intimately linked to- gether. We do not have a minimum reformist programme for today and a maximum revolutionary programme for the future; we have a revolu- tionary transitional programme, in which all the immediate demands are inseparably linked to the struggle for the socialist revolution. On the basis of this programme we are working to establish, and we shall con- tinue to establish, a United Front with all organisations and parties whose struggle coincides on certain points with our own.’ The campaign against Yon Sosa and his followers became neces- sary for Castro and his Stalinist supporters because the MR-13 spearheaded most sharply the revolutionary tendency which opposes the rightward policies of the Stalinist parties in Latin America. Not only in Guatemala, FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, APRIL 1966 but also in Venezuela and Colom- bia, the Stalinist parties have recently reinforced their propa- ganda for a bloc with the ‘national bourgeoisie’ or ‘progres- sive’ capitalists in their respective countries. That is why the Tri- continental Conference was at- tended by the worst nationalist and liberal demagogues as well as by Stalinists and some leaders of the guerrilla struggles, and yet the revolutionary tendency, any- thing savouring of ‘Trotskyism’, had to be excluded and calum- niated in its absence. Michel Pablo, who noted these divisions between Stalinists and the revolutionary tendencies, in his journal ‘Under the Banner of Socialism’ for November-Decem- ber 1965, found himself just as badly caught out as the Frank- Germain-Hansen tendency. In his statement on the Tricontinental Conference two months later, he wrote: ‘The method of inadmissible amalgams employed by Stalin- ism to fight Lenin, Trotsky and the movement inspired by his fundamental ideas must never be that of a Fidel Castro (!) . .. As for the serious accusa- tions levelled against the heroic guerrillas in Guatemala led by Yon Sosa, we are astounded that the possible criticisms of this movement, which enjoys great prestige throughout Central America and in Latin America generally, could be made in such a summary, nega- tive, confusionist and partisan manner. ‘,.. The international Marxist- revolutionary tendency _[fi.e., Pablo’s tendency] . . . expresses the sincere desire to see the Cuban leadership return to the serious regard which it has held towards the authentic Marxist- revolutionary movement which is the true Trotskyism. ...’ Such is the impotence of the revisionists of all varieties. Their common method of tailing behind the petty-bourgeois nationalists and the bureaucracies leaves them without a single weapon. All these developments are a remarkable confirmation of the fight against revisionism in the Fourth International. The dis- integration of all the revisionist tendencies is only one necessary side of the process now under way all over the world: the resur- gence and radicalisation of the working class. In its conference this Spring, the International Committee finds in this radicalisation the objec- tive basis for a great step forward —the rebuilding of the Fourth International.