Manifesto of the International Committee of the Fourth International

[p037] The International Committee of the Fourth International gives complete support to the internationalist initiatives taken by the youth organisations, the Young Socialists and Révoles. The fight to rebuild the Fourth International is inseparable from the most active participation in the class struggle everywhere and in all conditions. THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL FIGHTS UNCONDITIONALLY FOR: THE VICTORY OF THE VIETNAMESE WORKERS AND PEASANTS FOR THE DEFEAT OF U.S. IMPERIALISM "THE heroic fight of the Vietnamese workers and peasants is part of the world proletarian revolution. Vietnam is at present a point of con- vergence of the world class struggle. The Fourth International does not pronounce hypocritical homilies whilst in practice leaving imperialism a free hand. It does not praise the heroism of the Vietnamese workers and peasants only to betray their fight in the name of ‘peace’. It does not rely on de Gaulle or any other bourgeois politician to re-establish ‘peace in Vietnam’. It stresses and denounces, on the contrary, the deep solidarity of the imperialists, whatever their different interests may be, with US imperialism, the policemen of world imperialism in Vietnam, as it is everywhere else in the world. It brings out the real significance of the positions of the partisans ‘of a negotiated and peaceful solution in Vietnam’ perfectly illustrated by the words of de Gaulle: ‘we must wait for things to ripen in Vietnam’, or in other words for hundreds of thousands of workers and peasants to be assassinated and burnt by napalm. Then perhaps these pacifists hope, imperialism will be able to impose its ‘peace’. The Fourth International takes the Vietnamese revolution, the heroic struggle of the workers and peasants, as a strengthening of the call for the struggle against imperialism, for the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisie in every country. At the same time as it initiates and supports on every occasion specific actions for the unconditional withdrawal of the troops of U.S. imperialism in Vietnam, and the right of the Vietnamese people to self-determination, it links the struggle for the victory of Vietnamese revolution, for the defeat of imperialism, to the extension of the proletarian re- volution throughout the world. It supports the Vietnamese revolution by calling

[p038] 132 the workers to revolutionary action in New York, Moscow, Paris, London and Peking. Every blow against its own imperialism, every blow landed FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, AUGUST 1966 by the proletariat against the Kremlin bureaucracy, is effective help for the Vietnamese workers and peasants. THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL FIGHTS FOR THE UNCONDITIONAL DEFENCE OF THE CONQUESTS OF THE CHINESE REVOLUTION "THE defence of the conquests of the Chinese revolution is an integral part of the struggle for the world proletarian revolution. In the present circumstances it has the same importance as the defence of the USSR had on the eve of and during the second imperialist world war. The con- quests of the Chinese revolution are threatened by the combined actions of imperialism and of the Kremlin bureaucracy. They are also threatened by the consequences of the policy of the Chinese bureaucracy and the Chinese Communist Party. By upholding the Indian bourgeoisie, and then the Pakistani bourgeoisie, by supporting the policy of the Indonesian Communist Party, which sub- ordinated itself to the Indonesian bourgeoisie before becoming its victim, by giving complete support to the Algerian, Ghanaian etc., bour- geoisies, the Chinese bureaucracy and Communist Party paralyse the worker and peasant masses and the development of the proletarian revolution in those countries. They prepare bloody defeats for the proletariat of those countries, like that of Indonesia. As in India, they reinforce the bourgeoisie of those countries, who inevitably will become the tools of imperialism against the conquests of the Chinese revolution. They isolate the Vietnamese worker and peasant masses from the world proletariat and reinforce in this way the aggression of US imperialism in Vietnam. The ‘theories’ of the ‘storm centre’ and of America as ‘the main imperialism’ cover up a policy which is no less ill-omened for the conquests of the Chinese revolution. The revolution in the colonial countries develops as part of the world revolution; the counter-revolutionary intervention of US imperialism is possible only in so far as imperialism can stabilise the class relations in the economically developed countries, including those where, as in France, the bourgeoisie has differences with US capital. The struggle of the American workers, their acquisition of political conscious- ness, is intimately linked to the struggles and consciousness of the proletariat of the economically developed countries. By supporting the Gaullist regime and its policies, on the pretext of differences and contradictions in imperialism, on the pretext that the main enemy is US imperialism, the Chinese Communist Party contributes to the strengthening of the bourgeoisie in Europe and by this facilitates the counter-revolutionary action of US imperialism, which is aimed against China. In the same way, the Chinese Communist Party weakens the defence of the conquests of the Chinese revolution by condemning the revolutionary acts of the proletarians of Eastern Europe against the Kremlin bureaucracy and the satellite bureau- cracies. The suppression of the revolutionary -movements of Eastern Europe—June 1953 in East Germany, October 1956, in Poland, the Hungarian revolution of November 1956—\this suppression is part of the chain of counter- revolutionary acts carried out by the Kremlin bureaucracy, which, in the last analysis, are all to the advantage of imperialism. The counter- revolutionary agreement between imperialism and the Kremlin bureaucracy against the conquests of the Chinese revolution, basically, has the same origins as the bloody repression of the revolu- tionary movement of Eastern Europe and of the Hungarian revolution by the Kremlin bureaucracy. The conquests of the Chinese revolution can only be safeguarded in the long run by their extension, in Asia and in the world. The transformation of the economic and social structure of the countries of Eastern Europe demands their integration in an economy planned on the basis of collective owner- ship of the means of production on a European scale, which is incompatible with the existence of the Kremlin bureaucracy. The Fourth International defends unconditionally the conquests of the Chinese revolution. That is, independent of the fact that they are under the control of the Chinese bureaucracy. It does not raise the overthrow of that bureaucracy as a con- dition of the defence of these conquests. But the Fourth International defends the con- quests of the Chinese revolution as a component part of the strategy of the world proletarian revolu- tion. The defence of the conquests of the Chinese revolution in no way implies alignment with the

[p039] MANIFESTO OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE policies of the leadership of the Chinese Com- munist Party. It is indissolubly linked to the building of the Chinese Party of the Fourth International. The defence of the Chinese revolu- 133 tion implies a merciless struggle against the policies of the Chinese Communist Party, policies which jeopardise these conquests because that Party is opposed to proletarian internationalism. THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL FIGHTS FOR THE INDEPENDENCE OF THE TRADE UNIONS FROM THE STATE "THE destruction of all the independent organisa- tions of the proletariat is a vital necessity for the bourgeoisie in crisis. The working class does not live on abstractions. Through the daily struggle which brings it into opposition with capitalism, it has built trade union organisations. The incorporation of the trade unions into the bourgeois state means the destruction of the class nature of the trade unions. It is only possible to the extent that the trade union organisations have developed within themselves petty bourgeois apparatuses, the mouthpieces of capitalist policies inside the working class, whose constant feature is adaptation to the needs of bourgeois society. The struggle against the incorporation of the trade unions into the state is inseparable from the struggle for the proletarian revolution, for the building of revolutionary workers’ parties. The founding programme of the Fourth International States : ‘The Bolshevik-Leninist stands in the front-line trenches of all kinds of struggles, even when they involve only the most modest material interests or democratic rights of the working class. He takes active part in mass trade unions for the purpose of strengthening them and raising their spirit of militancy. He fights uncompromisingly against any attempt to subordinate the unions to the bour- geois state and bind the proletariat to ‘‘ccompulsory arbitration” and every other form of police guardianship—not only fascist but also “demo- cratic”. Only on the basis of such work within the trade unions is successful struggle possible against the reformists, including those of the Stalinist bureaucracy.’ At present, the struggle against the incorpora- tion of the trade unions into the state takes on overwhelming importance. Through the attempt to incorporate the trade unions into the state pass all the attempts, and this on an international scale, to destroy the working class’s means of organisation and struggle. The class struggle is expressed inside the trade unions. It is only pos- sible to build the revolutionary party by fighting for the defence of the gains of the working class and in all fields of the class struggle. The partisans of the Fourth International do not desert any battlefield of the class struggle. The defence of the trade union organisations and their independence from the state is a fight against the bureaucracies of all kinds. It demands that this fight be integrated into the programme of the proletarian revolution, and that the partisans of the Fourth International organise inside the unions as the most conscious section of the working class, that they associate with their struggle all those who have decided, inside the unions to take steps to defend the class indepen- dence of the proletariat. The attempts to incorporate the trade unions into the state are expressions of the sharpening of class contradictions. The capitulation of the bureaucratic apparatuses has no other source than the impossibility of defending the most elementary interests of the workers without blowing up the framework of capitalist society, without raising the question of power. It has the same origins as the capitulation of the reformist apparatuses and of the Kremlin bureaucracy before imperialism in the world class struggle. In this sphere, as in all others, the question is that of the proletarian revo- lution and of revolutionary leadership. The struggle against the incorporation of the trade unions into the state is linked to, and must be understood as a political task inseparable from, the rebuilding the Fourth International. It is an international task. This is why the Fourth International re-affirms : ‘self-isolation of the capitulationist variety from mass trade unions, which is tantamount to a betrayal of the revolution, is incompatible with membership of the Fourth International.’ And that: ‘If it be criminal to turn one’s back on mass organisations for the sake of fostering sec- tarian factions, it is no less so passively to tolerate subordination of the revolutionary mass movement to the control of openly reactionary or disguised conservative “‘progressive’ bureaucratic cliques. Trade unions are not ends in themselves; they are but means along the road to proletarian revolution.’

[p040] 134 FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, AUGUST 1966 THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL FIGHTS FOR THE UNITED FRONT OF THE WORKING CLASS "THE present phase of the class struggle places the struggle of class against class more than ever on the agenda. The proletariat must present a united front to the bourgeoisie, its state and its governments. This is the lesson of more than a century of class struggle. The more class antago- nisms sharpen, the more the working class needs to fight as a whole. It is the bureaucratic appara- tuses that divide and fragment the proletarian front. The tactic of the United Front, as it was defined at the Third and Fourth Congresses of the Comintern, is more than ever valid. Con- fronted by the economic and political attacks of the bourgeoisie against the working class—the incomes policy, the attempts to incorporate the trade unions into the state—the working class must oppose the bourgeoisie as a class. The tactic of the United Front does not mean denying in practice that the vast majority of the militants of the working class are organised in the reformist and Stalinist parties. It means, starting at all times from the concrete situation in the class struggle and from the demands of the struggle, to propose policies which break from _ the bourgeoisie and draw up the working class and its organisations face to face with the bourgeoisie as a class. It implies the denunciation of policies of class collaboration either with a section of the capitalist class or with the bourgeoisie as a whole. The United Front necessarily comes into conflict with the policies of the bureaucracy. It cannot be ruled out that the bureaucrats of the traditional leaderships might be forced to take steps towards the United Front under pressure from the working class and their own members. In such cases, we support and take part in all activities that can be organised in this way. The struggle for the United Front implies the building of revolutionary workers’ parties. The accomplishment of the United Front cannot be left to spontaneity. It demands the political struggle of independent organisations translating into practice the Transitional Programme. The revolutionary party cannot be built inde- pendently from participation and intervention in the real class struggle as it takes place under our eyes, or just through commentaries on the class struggle. The policy of the United Front can take on its real significance only in the building of revolutionary parties. THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL FIGHTS FOR THE UNITED SOCIALIST STATES OF EUROPE "THE Europe which came out of the second imperialist war is even less viable than the Europe resulting from the first imperialist war. The mosaic of European states has not disappeared. In Western and in Eastern Europe it is maintained both by the bourgeoisie and by the Kremlin bureaucracy and the satellite bureaucracies. To this has been added the division of Germany into two, cutting into the living flesh of the German working class. This mosaic of states, and the division of Europe into two, is incompatible with the development of productive forces. The capitalist attempt to overcome the narrowness of the national frontiers by the setting up of the European Economic Community and by the establishment of the Euro- pean Free Trade Association are only agreements between groups of capitalists according to the relationship of forces. They are established at the expense of the working class. Each bourgeoisie puts more pressure on its working class to the extent that it ‘collaborates’ with other bourgeoisies on the European scale. At the slightest sign of economic tension, cracks and groans are heard from inside both the EEC and EFTA. Under the guidance of the Kremlin bureaucracy the bureaucracy of each national state of Eastern Europe, far from harmonising the economy of its country has, on the contrary, reinforced the national divisions, thus multiplying the contradic- tions. The bureaucracy has no answer to this problem. The division of Europe into two, and of Germany into two, can only be resolved on capitalism’s side by the destruction of the economic and social structure of Eastern Europe and Eastern Germany and the reintroduction of capitalism. It would mean the liquidation of whole sections of the economy, the control of the remainder by American and European capital, millions of proletarians re-

[p041] MANIFESTO OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE duced to unemployment and poverty, and national oppressions of unheard-of brutality. The Kremlin bureaucracy has no solution. All that it can hope for is to prolong. indefinitely a status quo which is impossible in the long run. Revolution in a European country could not bring the working class to power without the whole of Europe being shaken. No working class in a single country could hold power in Europe without the extension of the revolution to the whole of Europe. The struggle for the proletarian revolu- tion in Europe cannot ignore the question of national frontiers, of the division of Europe in two, of the unification of Europe. In Europe the social revolution in the capitalist countries and the political revolution in Eastern Europe and the USSR come together. The programme of the proletarian revolution in any European country demands the struggle for the United Socialist States of Europe, established by the dictatorship THE FOURTH 135 of the proletariat. This slogan demands: the denunciation of the division of Europe in two brought about at Yalta and Potsdam; the struggle against all forms of national oppression whether it be by imperialism or by the Kremlin bureaucracy; the struggle for the unconditional reunification of Germany. It demands the denunciation of the adulterated internationalism, consisting of participation of the trade union organisations in the organisations of the Common Market, which is only one facet of the incorporation of the trade unions into the state. The slogan of the United Socialist States of Europe is a weapon in the building of revolutionary parties in each European country. It is the con- crete answer to the national division of the European proletariat and unifies the social revolu- tion and the political revolution in a single process. It demands that the working class take power in every country. INTERNATIONAL FIGHTS AGAINST SLANDER AND REPRESSION "THE joint crisis of imperialism and of the Kremlin bureaucracy is expressed in the search by thousands and thousands of militants for the programme of the proletarian revolution, by the search of millions of proletarians for the path of proletarian revolution. It confirms the total bankruptcy of the Stalinist, reformist and petty- bourgeois leaderships. The policy of capitulation before imperialism requires from these leaderships slander and repression against revolutionaries. To prevent the workers from finding the path of pro- letarian revolution necessitates for these leader- ships that all means be used to prevent a vanguard from forming and establishing links with the pro- gramme of proletarian revolution and the organisa- tion which expresses it, the Fourth International. To offset the bankruptcy of Castroism, Fidel Castro made a violent attack on the Fourth Inter- national and its programme. He thus acted not only on behalf of the petty-bourgeois Castroite leadership but also on behalf of the Stalinist apparatus. Against the revolutionary militants, the Fourth International and its programme, he uses the same methods and even the same words as the gravedigger of the revolution: Stalin. The Kremlin bureaucracy uses the _ revolutionary prestige which Castro has, and which it no longer can claim for itself. Castro’s attack on Trotskyism is part of an in- ternational wave of slanders and repressions by the Stalinist apparatus. In France, the revolutionary militants grouped around ‘Révoltes’ were the object of a campaign of slander during the presiden- tial election campaign, emanating from the French Communist Party, because they denounced the treachery of the support for the bourgeois Mitterand by the Socialist and Communist Parties. But the repressions also rage in the USSR, in Hungary and in Poland. The trial of Daniel and Sinyavsky was aimed to prevent any possibility of free expression. In Poland those arrested are militants known for their devotion to the pro- letariat, their roots in the labour movement of Eastern Europe and their sympathy for Trotskyism. In Hungary, more than 40 workers who took part in the revolution of November 1956 have again been convicted and thrown into gaol. The aim is to destroy everything which can make up the elements of the building of an inter- national revolutionary vanguard, on the only possible basis: that of the Fourth International. The struggle against this offensive of slander and repression has as much importance for the Fourth International as had the struggle against the Moscow trials in 1934-38.

[p042] 136 FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, AUGUST 1966 FOR THE REBUILDING OF THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL "THE struggle for the rebuilding of the Fourth International is linked to all the problems that confront humanity. Thus is expressed concre- tely the fact that the crisis of humanity is the crisis of revolutionary leadership. Particulary important in this struggle is actively to build a revolutionary workers’ party in the USA, the bastion of imperial- ism. The American Trotskyists have a particularly heavy task, complicated by the abandoning of the programme of the Fourth International by the Socialist Workers’ Party. The Trotskyists of the entire world must give their fraternal support to the American Trotskyists who fight alongside the Forward to the International Committee. No less important is the task of building revolutionary parties in the USSR and the countries that the Kremlin bureaucracy controls. The accomplishment of these tasks is essential for the rebuilding of the Fourth Inter- national and to open the perspective of the pro- letarian revolution and the world revolution. The International Committee continues the struggle to rebuild the Fourth International against revisionism, under whatever mask it conceals itself. It carries out this struggle in all fields, theoretically, politically and organisationally. victory of the Fourth International! THE AGE OF PERMANENT REVOLUTION A TROTSKY ANTHOLOGY Edited with an introduction by Isaac Deutscher (with the assistance of George Novak). Published by Dell Publish- ing Co. Inc. Distributed in Britain by New Park Publica- tions 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 I86A CLAPHAM HIGH ST., LONDON, S.W.4

[p043] 136 FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, AUGUST 1966 FOR THE REBUILDING OF THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL THE struggle for the rebuilding of the Fourth International is linked to all the problems that confront humanity. Thus is expressed, concre- tely the fact that the crisis of humanity is the crisis of revolutionary leadership. Particulary important in this struggle is actively to build a revolutionary workers’ party in the USA, the bastion of imperial- ism. The American Trotskyists have a particularly heavy task, complicated by the abandoning of the programme of the Fourth International by the Socialist Workers’ Party. The Trotskyists of the entire world must give their fraternal support to the American Trotskyists who fight alongside the International Committee. No less important is the task of building revolutionary parties in the USSR and the countries that the Kremlin bureaucracy controls. The accomplishment of these tasks is essential for the rebuilding of the Fourth Inter- national and to open the perspective of the pro- letarian revolution and the world revolution. The International Committee continues the struggle to rebuild the Fourth International against revisionism, under whatever mask it conceals itself, It carries out this struggle in all fields, theoretically, politically and organisationally. Forward to the victory of the Fourth International! THE AGE OF PERMANENT REVOLUTION A TROTSKY ANTHOLOGY A TROTSKY ANTHOLOGY Edited with an introduction by Isaac Deutscher (with the assistance of George Novak). Published by Dell Publish- ing Co. Inc. Distributed in Britain by New Park Publica- tions 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 ST., LONDON, S.W.4

[p044] 137 V) American Trotskyism s second great crisis The struggle Tor Marxism in the United States by Tim Wohtforth C. THE SECOND GREAT CRISIS —1951-1954 The 1950s was a very difficult period for the American Trotskyist movement, The post-war boom was in full swing and as a result struggles on the part of the working class were at a minimum. In addition a witch-hunt against radicals was in full swing. It was certainly a dark period for building a revolutionary party—a period which brings out every weakness and accentuates every contradiction within a party. Revolutionaries cannot control the objective situation they must work in. It is their task to further the development of the movement both in times of opportunity and in times of retrenchment. A healthy movement learns from both kinds of period. A period such as existed in the United States in the 1950s necessarily meant losses to the SWP. The task of the SWP’s leadership was to minimise those losses and to educate the re- maining cadre in the process. There is a tendency to look upon the relation- ship of a party to objective conditions as a sort of automatic process. Under favourable objective conditions a party bounds ahead and _ grows. Under unfavourable objective conditions a party begins to shrink and split up. In this way the con- scious role and responsibility of the party’s leader- ship is minimised in both favourable and unfavour- able objective situations, In truth a party can grow quantitatively under favourable objective conditions and not really advance qualitatively at all. The result can even be a qualitative loss as opportunist trends grow in the party. Conversely a party can shrink quantitatively under adverse objective conditions but grow qualitatively as it puts its cadre to severe tests and the cadre educates itself and prepares for future advances. Such a party may come out of a reactionary period considerably stronger than it went into it. Objec- tive conditions may be blamed for creating an environment which encourages internal crisis but it cannot be blamed for the way a leadership handles itself during such a crisis. The 1952-53 Cochranite struggle has many similarities to the 1939-40 struggle. It was with- out a doubt the most profound internal struggle the SWP experienced since the death of Trotsky.

[p045] 137 V) American Trotskyism s second great crisis The strugsle for Marxism in the United otates by Tim Wohlforth C. THE SECOND GREAT CRISIS —1951-1954 The 1950s was a very difficult period for the American Trotskyist movement. The post-war boom was in full swing and as a result struggles on the part of the working class were at a minimum. In addition a witch-hunt against radicals was in full swing. It was certainly a dark period for building a revolutionary party—a period which brings out every weakness and accentuates every contradiction within a party. Revolutionaries cannot control the objective situation they must work in. It is their task to further the development of the movement both in times of opportunity and in times of retrenchment. A healthy movement learns from both kinds of period. A period such as existed in the United States in the 1950s necessarily meant losses to the SWP. The task of the SWP’s leadership was to minimise those losses and to educate the re- maining cadre in the process. There is a tendency to look upon the relation- ship of a party to objective conditions as a sort of automatic process. Under favourable objective conditions a party bounds ahead and grows. Under unfavourable objective conditions a party begins to shrink and split up. In this way the con- scious role and responsibility of the party’s leader- ship is minimised in both favourable and unfavour- able objective situations. In truth a party can grow quantitatively under favourable objective conditions and not really advance qualitatively at all. The result can even be a qualitative loss as opportunist trends grow in the party. Conversely a party can shrink quantitatively under adverse objective conditions but grow qualitatively as it puts its cadre to severe tests and the cadre educates itself and prepares for future advances. Such a party may come out of a reactionary period considerably stronger than it went into it. Objec- tive conditions may be blamed for creating an environment which encourages internal crisis but it cannot be blamed for the way a leadership handles itself during such a crisis. The 1952-53 Cochranite struggle has many similarities to the 1939-40 struggle. It was with- out a doubt the most profound internal struggle the SWP experienced since the death of Trotsky.

[p046] 138 As in 1940 the constituent elements which made up the bloc that was the SWP came apart at the seams and turned on each other. This time, however, the elements combined in a very different manner and not one of these elements was capable of bringing real clarity to the dispute. We have previously described the political position which had been evolved by the International leadership. The International had broken com- pletely from the Marxist method and had come to deeply liquidationist political conclusions. This method and these conclusions were codified at the Third World Congress held in 1951. George Clarke returned from this Congress determined that the SWP should actually carry out this new line. In this effort he had the factional backing of Pablo. Clarke’s mission threatened to break down the basis for the long-standing bloc between the Cannon leadership and the Pablo international leadership. Now Pablo was insistent that the United States was also part of the world and was seeking to get the SWP to implement the liquidationist international line. Clarke’s return from Europe can be seen as the catalyst which started into motion the various forces that came into bitter conflict in a very short time. The orientation of Clarke, and his lieutenant in New York, Bartell, towards the Stalinists was in part based on the very real crisis then going on in Stalinist ranks. This was the period of the CP decision to dissolve the American Labour Party and the Progressive Party and to return to open support of the Democratic Party. It was certainly a situation in which the party should have pro- perly intervened. However, the crisis in the decimated Stalinist ranks of 1953 was nowhere near as important as that of the immediate post-war period when the organisation was much bigger and more proletarian elements were involved. The 1953 crisis largely affected the petty-bourgeois Stalinist periphery. Of course the Clarke-Bartell orientation was a liquidationist one, and the section they were most interested in consisted precisely of such petty- bourgeois dilettantes as Huberman and Sweezy. A second factor in the situation was Cochran and the forces which he stood for. Cochran’s base in the party was the party’s strong auto fractions in Detroit and Flint, Michigan. In addition old-time trade unionists in almost every branch throughout the party supported Cochran. Cochran’s base was thus a working-class base. It was, however, a working-class base of a very special kind—an aristocratic stratum in the work- ing class which Trotsky had warned about so where. FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, AUGUST 1966 clearly in 1940 and earlier. This is the way Cannon was to describe the Cochran formation: The old union militants who are still in the plant, after 13 years of war and post-war prosperity, are now 13 years older, and many of them are 13 times softer and more conservative. They have many years seniority, and that has become a sort of vested interest, a special privilege in steady employment, as against the younger, newly- recruited slaves of the assembly line who have no privileges whatever. ... And some of them—some of our own trade unionists—have become infected with this conservatism themselves. We have that infection right in our own party! We have that reflection of the combined pressures of 13 years of prosperity, and six years of witch- hunt, expressed in the conservatisation of a section of our own trade unionists! That is the bitter truth. And these conservatised trade union- ists are the real social basis of Cochranism in our party. They are the conservative right wing of the party.42 Thus we can begin to see the elements which came together as the Clarke-Cochran minority inside the SWP in late 1951. There was a small group of petty-bourgeois and worker elements who were seeking to jump over the extremely difficulty objective circumstances facing the party through a special capitulatory orientation towards the Stalinists who, according to the Pablo thesis, would be propelled along the revolutionary road every- This was the Clarke formation. Behind Clarke stood Pablo and the International leader- ship. Combined with Clarke-Pablo was a large section of the party’s trade unionists who were not that much concerned with the Stalinists. In fact Cochran himself denied the very existence of the ‘Stalinist milieu’ towards which Clarkeites wished to orientate the Party. This section of the party had been as Stalinophobe as any section of the party in the past. This was no small section of the party. It had support of the most important trade union fraction left in the party and many, many other important trade unionists throughout the country. Most of these Cochranites had been in the party since the late 1930s. These were the same people Trotsky had in mind in his 1940 discussion. What was the real programme of the Cochran section of this minority? Cannon describes it this way: Their conservativism, which clashes head-on with the revolutionary line of the party, expresses itself 42. Cannon, James P. ‘Some Facts . . p. 21. .,0p. cit.,

[p047] STRUGGLE FOR MARXISM IN THE U.S. in a revolt against the party. Under the inspiration of Cochran, this revolt sometimes even takes the character of hatred of the party; denigration of the party; and denial of its historic mission. They exaggerate and whimper about petty ‘grievances’ which are mostly imaginary, and not worth two cents anyway. They want to withdraw from the political struggle in the open arena. They want to retreat into a propaganda circle. They oppose any programme of rounded activities proper for a revolutionary party, which is not the same thing as a mere group of progressive trade unionists.43 The cement which held together the Pablo- Clarke pro-Stalinists with this section of the party’s trade unionists was obviously a common desire to liquidate the party. On the other side of the struggle was an equally heterogeneous combination. The first grouping in the party to tackle the Cochranites was the group around Murry Weiss. Weiss’s base in the party was an essentially petty-bourgeois one. Though this group included a number of older comrades, its vitality and dynamism came from petty-bourgeois youth who had joined the party in the late forties and who had grown impatient and disturbed by the party’s growing conservatism in this period. They wanted a more dynamic party. Little concerned with trade union work, their loyalty was to the party as a propagandistic instrument and apparatus. Weiss was rather ill-equipped for a struggle against a Pablo-inspired pro-Stalinist tendency, for he and his brother Dave has been among the most enthusiastic early sup- porters of Pablo, especially on Yugoslavia. The Weiss tendency wanted a party of propagandistic activity but not necessarily one of proletarian intervention. The ideal of a young Weiss sup- porter was full-time party work quite removed from the American working class. Combined with Weiss from the beginning was Cannon. Cannon, almost alone of the old party cadre, responded strongly to the Cochranite threat because Cannon, above all else, felt deeply about the necessity of a party. It was this deep con- viction of the need for a party more than anything else which led him into a head-on struggle with a section of the party’s old trade union cadre. The role of Dobbs and the whole older cadre of the party which did not go along with the Cochran- ites was, at the beginning, quite ambiguous. The Dobbs section of the party—the great majority of the party—feared a break with the Cochranites and did everything they could to compromise the struggle and to avoid a showdown with Cochran. They viewed Cochran and his supporters as one of 139 their own, as part of the same stratum of the party, and having pretty much the same outlook. In the early stages of the dispute Cannon accused Dobbs of actually maintaining neutrality in the struggle and there is no doubt but that for a while he actually did do this. Cannon describes his relation to Dobbs this way in a letter written to V. R. Dunne following Dobbs’ decision to go along with Cannon in the struggle: He thought, it seems, we were hellbent on organising a factional fight in the party without consulting him and before the party members, or even. a considerable section of the leading cadre, were convinced of the depth and seriousness of the conflict. He said he had not intended his memo- randum to the PC as a declaration of political neutrality—as we told him frankly we had inter- preted it—but only as a means of slowing down the organisational side of the internal conflict.44 As late as May 1953, just a few months before the final split, Cannon continued to express worry about ‘neutralist’ sentiments in his ranks: Revolutionary elements in the party—and those who want to be revolutionists—have got to quit fooling around with the irresponsible game of ‘neutrality’, and take sides in the fight to protect the party against this Cochranite attack on its right to live.45 The Dobbs section of the party had been affected by much the same pressures as the Cochran section. It, too, was demoralised by the prosperity. It, too, lacked any real theoretical development. It, too, was a bit tired and would prefer to ‘sit things out for a while’. But there was one main difference between the Dobbs and Cochran groups. Over the years the Dobbs people had either left industry in order to do party apparatus work; or had been screened out by the witch-hunt; or, while remaining in industry, re- mained there largely to earn a living while their real life was in the party branch. The Dobbs section of the party was that section of the pro- letarian kernel of the movement which had retreated into the party, while the Cochran section was that section of the proletarian kernel which had retreated into the trade unions and the trade 43. Ibid., p. 21. 44, Cannon, James P. ‘Background and Issues of the Party Crisis (Letters to Comrades)’, Internal Bulletin, Vol. 15, No. 12 (Socialist Workers Party, May 1953). The letter was originally written on October 7, 1952, 45. Cannon, James P. ‘Some Facts . . p. 22, bd ., Op. Cit.,

[p048] 140 union apparatus. Thus while conservatism com- pelled the Cochranites to break from the party it compelled the Dobbsites to defend the party which had become their home. From the begining they both felt quite unhappy about the whole squabble but were powerless to change it. There were three small groupings which lined up also with the Cannon-Weiss-Dobbs majority in the final break. These groupings had no theoretical agreement with the majority but they did agree on the need to preserve the party. Two of them—the Marcyites and the Vernites—were localised per- sonal groups with pro-Stalinist views. The third was the remnants of the Johnsonites which main- tained a ‘state capitalist’ position. These com- rades continued to bloc with Cannon for the same empirical reasons which had led Johnson to enter the SWP in 1948. The actual written programme of the Clarke- Cochran faction was really unbelievably bad, con- fusing, unpolitical, and totally inadequate for the kind of factional heat that lay behind it. Only Clarke wrote clearly and he clearly presented the liquidationist views of Pablo. Pablo stood in much the same position to the 1952-53 minority as did Burnham to the 1940 minority. It was Pablo who was able to give some kind of theoretical justification to the flight from the party of the minority. It was his liquidationist theories which had done so much to encourage this flight from the movement not only in the United States but in other Trotskyist groups throughout the world. As in 1940 a good section of the minority was not particularly interested in these theories—it was only interested in flight. But despite this, Trotsky tackled Burnham head-on, knowing that in this way he was getting at the methodological roots of the disease which infected even those who showed no interest in theory (especially those). _In 1952 Cannon and his collaborators could not do this. In fact they proceeded in an exactly opposite way. They solidarised themselves with Pablo and the Third World Congress decisions over and over again. Cannon urged Pablo to support him over Cochrane-Clarke, making it perfectly clear that if he would support him, Cannon would continue his loyal support of Pablo internation- ally.46 As if in order to prove this point in 1952 Cannon fully solidarised himself with Pablo’s ex- pulsion of the majority of the French section and supported Pablo against the political attacks of the French comrades.47 This approach of Cannon’s—for which he is solely responsible—completely castrated the FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, AUGUST 1966 majority politically. Unable to attack the source of the revisionism it could only attack Clarke and company for mis-applying an international line they admitted to be correct. Once again they took refuge in ‘American exceptionalism’. It was all right to liquidate the movement into the Stalinist parties in Europe but not here. Stalinists in the United States are different, etc., etc. As long as the argument remained on this level no one learned much and Clarke was on the offensive. As time passed in the struggle Cannon shifted his fire to the Cochran section of the opposition.’ Here he felt on stronger ground. He defended the need for a party and the party’s whole past against someone who wished to escape from the party. But he was unable to go much beyond a mere repetition of orthodoxy. The party has been created by 25 years of struggle. The party is needed. The party should act like a party. But exactly what the party concretely should do either in this country or internationally Cannon did not seem to know. Time would tell whether or not the simple assertion of the necessity of the party as an orthodox principle would be enough to maintain the party as a revolutionary instrument. Cannon’s struggle against the Cochran section of the minority was hampered in another way. He was incapable of looking back at the history of the party and explaining how a central section of the party’s cadre degenerated to the point where they could reject the revolutionary party as such, wanting only ‘a mere group of progressive trade unionists’, It was Clarke and not Cannon who republished the 1940 discussion with Trotsky, and Cannon’s comments on this discussion during the dispute completely evaded seeing in Trotsky’s scorching assessment of the party’s trade union cadre the origins of Cochranism. The reason for this failure is clearly that such an approach would soon make clear Cannon’s own responsibility for the failure of the SWP leadership to develop its trade union cadre as Bolsheviks. In 1940 Cannon fought a section of the party to which he had never been very close, and for which he could claim to have no real responsibility. In 1952 Cannon was fighting his own creation—it was Cannon’s battle against a section of Cannonites. He was forced to > 46. The Cochranites reported a letter of Cannon’s in March of 1952 which ‘was a quid pro quo offer to Pablo: support in return for non-interference in the drive for a split’. See: Andrew, J. et. al., op. cit., p. 3. 47. ‘Letter from Cannon to Daniel Renard’, Inter- national Information Bulletin (Socialist Workers Party, November 1952).

[p049] STRUGGLE FOR MARXISM IN THE U.S. muster what strengths he had to battle against the creature of his own weaknesses. At a Plenum held in May 1953 a truce was called in the factional struggle. No sooner was the truce called than the factional struggle erupted with renewed violence. In fact it was the post- plenum reports to the branches which touched things off again. So in the autumn of 1953 the entire Cochran faction, comprising perhaps a quarter of the party membership, was uncere- moniously expelled from the party because the New York section of the minority had boycotted the 25th Anniversary Banquet of the party. The split in the party was of such importance and the discussion was so confused that the majority was forced to re-register the entire party membership to be sure the split was completed. Soon thereafter the party held an emergency Plenum denouncing Pabloism as revisionism and issuing an ‘Open Letter’48 which split the Fourth International in two. The political break with Pablo was not at all prepared during the previous Clarke-Cochrane struggle, though a certain behind- the-scenes organisational struggle with Pablo had taken place. Furthermore it came as a thunder- bolt to the world movement, which also was not prepared for it. The international discussion had just opened in preparation for the Fourth World Congress. Cannon in effect split the world movement before he even attempted to politically clarify its ranks in this opening international struggle. Clearly the SWP had split the world movement down the middle because of Pablo’s support for the American minority—that is, for purely national reasons. The political motivation for the split was simply added later—almost as an afterthought. ‘Following the split the SWP began what was to be a short-lived political offensive against Pablo- ism. The emergency plenum in the autumn of 1953 issued a resolution entitled ‘Against Pabloite Revisionism’*? as well as the ‘Open Letter’. Cannon wrote a searching article ‘Trotsky or Deutscher’ which was an attack on Deutscher as the theore- tical inspirer of Pablo5° Breitman and Hansen wrote some material in the Militant and then the struggle petered out around the middle of 1954. It is important for us to understand the nature of this all-too-brief political polemic with the Pabloites. Faced with a revisionist threat Cannon and his supporters could rely on only one thing to combat it—orthodoxy. Unable to really come to grips with the new problems which Pablo used as touching-off points for his revisionism, Cannon had to simply counterpose the old Trotsky 141 to the new revisionism. Thus in a sense Cannon was continuing his old bloc with Trotsky—this time with Trotsky’s corpse and what he had pro- duced in his lifetime. Thus was born ‘orthodox Trotskyism’. Cannon explains this ‘orthodox’ outlook in a letter to Leslie Goonewardene of the LSSP (Ceylon) in January 1954: This extraordinary situation consists in the fact— and there is no getting away from it, for it strikes everyone in the eye—that the personally mono- polised International Secretariat of Pablo has attempted, and is attempting, to impose upon the Fourth International a line of policy and political action not sanctioned by our programme or by any congress, and against the will of the great majority of the strongest Trotskyist cadres. The attempt of Pablo and his personal circles to impose unauthorised policy, and to choke off a free dis- cussion, by means of threats, expulsions, ex- communications and other measures of Stalinist discipline, confronted the orthodox ‘old Trotskyists’ with the inescapable alternatives: to capitulate or to fight. But precisely because they are ‘old Trotskyists’, precisely because they learned in Trotsky’s school how to stand up for their ‘old programme’ under any and all circumstances, and to grant no one the right to proscribe it, they have decided to fight. The first concern of Trotskyists always has been, and should be now the defence of our doctrine. That is the first principle. The second principle, giving life to the first, is the protection of the historically created cadres against any attempt to disrupt or disperse them.>! We need add only one slight change to this exposition by Cannon of what he was fighting for. In the actual struggle it was the second principle, the ‘protection of the historically created cadres’, which came first with Cannon. Only when Pablo was clearly involved in disrupting the SWP did Cannon turn to the first principle—the orthodox defence of doctrine. The brief international struggle of 1953-54 with Pablo was carried out in dead earnest and as far as the SWP leadership was concerned at the time it was a definitive battle. Cannon stated: . . The split of 1940 was by no means as definitive and final as is the split today. We are 48. Militant (New York, November 16, 1953). 49, Fourth International (New York, Sept.-Oct. 1953). 50. Fourth International (New York, Winter, 1954), p. 9 ff. 51. ‘Letter by James P. Cannon, Feb. 23, 1954’, Discussion Bulletin A-16 (Socialist Workers Party, March 1954), pp. 6, 7, 16.

[p050] 142 finished and done with Pablo and Pabloism for ever, not only here but on the international field. And nobody is going to take up any of our time with any negotiations about compromise or any nonsense of that sort. We are at war with this _hew revisionism, which came to full flower in the reaction to the events after the death of Stalin in the Soviet Union, in East Germany, and in the French general strike.52 But the break in 1953 did not lead to a break with the method of Pabloism, and so the split could not be permanent. Orthodoxy is not enough. New events always disorient those who rely on orthodoxy alone. That was Germain’s great weakness. Only the ability to apply the Marxist method to a changing reality can ensure the permanence of a split with revisionism in all its forms. Before we leave this period it is important to note that the expulsion of the Cochranites did not immediately bring internal peace to the SWP. Quite the contrary; it led almost immediately to a new internal factional situation which almost produced a second split and which showed how unstable the majority forces were. Soon after the Cochranite split the Weiss group- ing rushed into action. Emboldened by the special role they had played in the forefront of the struggle against Cochran, they expected to FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, AUGUST 1966 receive a greater share in the party’s leadership. In addition they hoped to galvanise the party with the youthful energy of the young supporters of Weiss who were sent throughout the party to build up the weaker branches. Dobbs’ reaction was immediate. He felt that he was being pushed out of party leadership. Further the tired section of the cadre which he rested upon were highly suspicious of those who expected that after the Cochranite split the party would really do something. In addition many of these older workers felt correctly that these Weiss- ite youth had no solid working-class outlook—that they had all the characteristics of footloose adven- turers. Everyone in the party was extremely tense and it was expected. that a new factional struggle was soon to break out. This time Cannon intervened—to preserve the peace. While he could have made a good case against either side in the struggle he did not do so. As long as both sides favoured the continued existence of the party he was willing to let things be. Weiss was requested to formally dissolve a faction he claimed he never had and Dobbs was requested to give Weiss a real role in the central apparatus of the party. So unity was preserved on the surface while a subterranean war con- tinued intermittently in the party up to the present moment. D. THE SWP TURNS AGAINST TROTSKYISTS—1954-1963 (1) Stagnation A very sick party emerged from the Cochranite fight. The party had been saved from organisational liquidation but what little remained of it politically would soon become clear. The basic cadre of the party was tired, demoralised, devoted to leading only a routine organisational existence in the branches. The majority had fought for an orientation towards.the mass movement against the Cochranites, but little if anything was really done to implement such an orientation after the Cochranites left. Routinist, internalised existence was the rule everywhere. In 1954 and 1955 the SWP paid a good deal of attention to the American scene and most par- ticularly to the rise of McCarthyism. Its assess- ment of McCarthyism was another sign of the theoretical decay and disorientation of the SWP. This decay reflected itself not simply in the SWP’s misunderstanding of international matters. It also found expression whenever the SWP sought to come to grips with the reality of its own country —that field it felt it knew the best. This is the way the SWP assessed McCarthyism in September of 1954: As a product of the witch-hunt, McCarthyism continues to set the pace for the hysteria, but it is more than a witch-hunting excresence of the capitalist state apparatus. It is a native American fascist movement in the early stage of formation. Having stepped out on the political arena as the murderous foe of the working class, it will not be subdued or contained by the old capitalist parties, even though they take fright, or by the well-mean- ing liberals or by any other force except the work- ing class itself.53 This assessment of McCarthyism as a fascist move- ment which could not be contained by the capi- talists was made after the famous Army-McCarthy Hearings which in actual fact were precisely the containing of McCarthy by the capitalists. But 52. Cannon, James P. ‘Factional Struggle .. .’, op. cit., p. 116. 53. ‘Draft Resolution on the Political Situation in America’, Discussion Bulletin A-20 (Socialist Workers Party, September 1954), p. 9.

[p051] STRUGGLE FOR MARXISM IN THE U.S. this is the way the SWP assessed those hearings: All attempts of the Democrats and Republicans to curb, crush, outflank or brush aside McCarthy have ended in fiasco. The Army-McCarthy hear- ings, for instance, which resulted from the need of the Eisenhower administration to draw a line on the encreachments of McCarthy’s independent power, cost nothing to the fascist demogogue than the sacrifice of his Jewish Democratic attorney as a scapegoat.54 Of course, if McCarthy really represented a fascist formation then considering the strength he had mustered, it would be understandable for the SWP to not expect the capitalist politicians to be able to contain him. It could look only to the working class. But the working class was in a far from militant, let alone revolutionary mood in 1954. Thus such an assessment of McCarthyism could not but have a deeply pessimistic impact on the SWP. This is exactly how the similar theory of the CP affected its ranks. It led to a deep inward turning of the CP combined with the increasing flight of cadres from the party. However, McCarthy was very far from being a fascist, even a ‘nascent’ one. Fascist movements develop in a different kind of period, when there is a deep social crisis in a country and a massive working-class mpvement in motion. Only after the capitalists exhaust their reformist resources in trying to placate the masses do they resort to fascism to break up and smash workers’ organisa- tions. Fascism thus must-have a social programme of its own in order to win enough petty-bourgeois and lumpen support to counter the working-class movement. McCarthy had no social programme whatsoever. McCarthy rose during a period of considerable prosperity and during which the masses were relatively quiescent and reformist solutions had been far from exhausted. McCarthy was in fact a ‘witch-hunting excresence’ of a very particular kind. He reflected the deep international crisis facing American imperialism and the anti- bourgeois-democratic turn he did take was a sign of the underlying instability of American “‘demo- cracy’ in the present world situation. Yes, McCarthyism was an extremely virulent and reactionary development, but it was far from a fascism of a Hitler, a Mussolini, or even a Father Coughlin (properly designated a ‘nascent fascist’ by our movement in the 30s). Another sign of the deep sickness that had infected the SWP was the infamous ‘Cosmetics Controversy’. .In 1954 the party was suddenly seized by a large scale controversy as to whether 143 or not one of the side effects of the proletarian revolution would be to liberate women from the use of cosmetics so as to let their ‘natural beauty’ flower. This not particularly burning issue of the day was taken in dead earnest by many in the party and filled a whole 67 page mimeographed internal discussion bulletin.55 Who should be in the centre of this controversy but one ‘Jack Bustelo’, a nom de plume for Joseph Hansen, the most prominent theoretical spokesman for the party majority during the Cochran fight. The years 1954 and 1955 were also the period when the SWP finally came to a decision as to the class nature of the Chinese state. There continued to be considerable theoretical confusion on this question even after the Cochran split. One promi- nent party leader, Joseph Hansen again, in fact circulated a memorandum to the National Com- mittee suggesting a state capitalist theory of China. Because of interest in this theory the party opened the pages of its theoretical magazine to Dave Miller, a former Johnson supporter, to pre- sent the state capitalist theory of China. By 1955 the SWP had settled on an analysis of China as a deformed workers’ state. This is to be found in the resolution ‘The Third Chinese Re- volution and Its Aftermath’ passed by the 1955 SWP Convention.5¢ This resolution represented a very fine and orthodox descriptive statement as to the nature of the state in China, the existence of a bureaucratic caste, and the need for a political revolution. However, the resolution made no attempt to offer a theoretical explanation of the real challenge in the Chinese events—by what process was a workers’ state established? As an empirical description of China and as a political stand in relation to that empirical picture, the 1955 resolution is excellent and represents the last attempt of the party to put forward orthodox theory in resolution form. But as the SWP did not really come to grips with the question of the process which created this deformed workers’ state, it was to have more and more difficulty as the years passed in upholding its orthodox con- clusions about China. To understand this process the SWP needed an understanding of the Marxist method. This it lacked. In the latter part of this period one of the minor constituents which made up the majority 54. Ibid., p. 10. 55. Discussion Bulletin A-23 (Socialist Workers Party, October 1954). 56. Discussion Bulletin A-31 (Socialist Workers Party, October 1955).

[p052] 144 bloc against Cochran left the SWP—the Vernites. This small personal group in Los Angeles had maintained that wherever the Red Army went workers’ states automatically sprang up. Upon leaving the party it immediately entered the Shachtmanite movement! Such was the peculiar logic of the times! (2) Regroupment The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was the beginning of a process which was to shatter the isolation of the SWP, thrust it into the middle of important developments both internationally and within the country, and subject it to tests which simple orthodoxy would prove inadequate to cope with. As long as one remains in isolation the repetition of past positions may suffice, but when one breaks out of isolation all kinds of new developments and new pressures are brought to bear on an organisation. Then one must be able to master the Marxist method or be destroyed. The party which entered this new period was far from healthy. The break with the Cochranites combined with the generally unfavourable objective situation largely destroyed whatever trade union fractions the party had been able to maintain up to 1953. By 1956 there were no more than one or two small fractions left in the party which func- tioned on any kind of regular basis. Many indi- vidual trade union cadres remained in the party, but most of these comrades did little or nothing in the unions. Their real life was in the local branch. To the extent that they functioned at all in the unions this work was seen as quite separate from branch life and very infrequently was it even reported into the branch. Above all the party had no contact on any level with young workers, Negro or white. Some Negro work had been done in the past period but it tended to be of a sporadic campaign- type character, and in the period following 1956— during a period of increasing militancy of the Negroes—the trend was to pull more and more out of this work rather than to enter more deeply into it. A few youth recruited primarily by the Weissites were in the party, but by and large youth work as such had been neglected by the party since 1940. The first phase of the party’s reaction to the Hungarian and Polish events and the crisis these events produced in all sections of the radical movement was generally a positive one. Politically the Hungarian uprising was seen as a reaffirmation of the historic position of the Trotskyist movement on political revolution. These events gave the FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, AUGUST 1966 tired cadres of the SWP new hope, new faith in tne ability of the working class to struggle against oppression and to exert its own independent will.57 Domestically the party turned its attention to the Communist Party and sought to intervene there around the slogan ‘Back to Lenin’. Some very fruitful work was done with dissident CP forma- tions in both Los Angeles and Seattle which had formed around this battle cry. These groups - finally were expelled from the CP and joined the SWP, providing the SWP with its most sizeable recruitment from its work in and around the Stalinist movement. This period also brought forward a crisis within the Shachtmanite organisation. The Shachtmanites had been moving steadily to the right over the past decade. The only fruitful work they were able to do was to build up a small student youth formation. They were able to accomplish this because the SWP completely neglected any kind of work in this field. By 1957 Shachtman had come to the conclusion that independent existence was no longer meaningful and he proposed that his organisation enter the Socialist Party in essentially a capitulatory way. In fact his aim was not so much to enter the Socialist Party as to commit political suicide—to lose completely one’s indi- vidual political identity. The Socialist Party was ideally suited for such a purpose. About a quarter of the youth organisation of the Shachtmanites rebelled against this capitulation and conducted a struggle against Shachtman which ended up in a split and then fusion with the youth of the SWP. This fusion of the former Shachtman- ite youth with the SWP youth, largely Weissite, created the basic cadres for a new youth organisa- tion for the SWP, its first such national formation since 1940. Whatever growth the SWP was to experience in the next seven years, outside of the initial recruitment from the CP mentioned earlier, was to come from this youth work. This first stage of positive ‘regroupment’ work did not last long. Soon the party was to become deeply disoriented and to adapt to centrist trends within the general Stalinist movement. This first stage was expressed in an extremely soft adapta- tionist approach to one of the two factions which struggled against each other inside the CP in 1957- 58. On the one side was Foster, who maintained Stalinist orthodoxy but who also had the support of the bulk of the workers in the party and many militant youth. On the other side was Gates, who 57. See: The 20th Congress (C.P.S.U.) and World Trotskyism (New Park Publications, London, 1957).

[p053] STRUGGLE FOR MARXISM IN THE U.S. expressed various ‘democratic’ criticisms of Stalinism, but who had an extreme right-wing orientation on the American scene. Gates was obviously seeking to break out of the CP in order to get with the ‘mainstream’ of American petty- bourgeois liberalism. The party sided almost un- critically with Gates, hoping that the Gates group would move to the left.°8 The Gates group soon left the CP and left radical politics, entirely dis- solving into their personal lives and/or the Demo- cratic Party. Several left groups were to later break from the Fosterites, the most recent being the Progressive Labor group, showing that mili- tant forces did exist in the CP but that the SWP was unable to find a road to these forces. The flirtation with Gates prepared the party for its next operation—an orientation towards the ‘progressive’ periphery of the CP whose spokesman was the publication National Guardian. This Guardianite milieu was essentially petty-bourgeois —in fact it was the identical milieu Cannon had rejected as ‘second-rate’ in 1952. Essentially they were the same kind of people as the Gatesites except that entry into the Democratic Party was a bit too much for them—at least at the time. They wanted to maintain a certain independent existence. OO The SWP organised for them the Independent Socialist Party, which ran a slate of candidates in New York State in 1958, and similar formations elsewhere. The ISP’s programme was essentially a modified Stalinist one and its major candidate was none other than Corliss Lamont, a millionaire dabbler in ‘left’ causes who liked to see his name appear in the paper. His major contribution to the campaign was to urge Harold Stassen, a Republican, to run as a ‘peace candidate’ in the next election. This regroupment work with the ‘Progressives’ became a total preoccupation for the party. The 1958 election campaign was organised from be- ginning to end by party members, with the ‘Pro- gressives’ making barely a token participation. In the end the relationship between the SWP and the ‘Progressives’ blew up and most of the ‘Progres- sives’ found their way back to the Democratic Party. No more than a handful of them entered the party and most of these were far from re- volutionaries. Never in its history had the SWP exerted so much effort to woo a group of people with so little concrete result. This regroupment process had very serious effects on the political and theoretical development of the SWP. It was in this period that the old orthodoxy of the SWP broke down and a new 145 revisionism came to the fore. For weeks on end the Militant took on the colouration of the ‘Pro- gressives’ it was working with. The Trotskyist critique of Stalinism—that great weapon which could have won the best of the Stalinists over to Trotskyism—was blunted, and every effort was made to make the SWP seem to be nothing but a slightly more radical version of the Progressive Party. The clearest theoretical expression of this trend can be found in an article by Joseph Hansen written in 1958, ‘Proposed Roads to Soviet Demo- cracy’. This article dealt with the critical question of political revolution. In 1953 and 1954 this question had been central in the dispute with Pablo. In 1956 the SWP had been in the fore- front in seeing the Hungarian Revolution as a vindication of its orthodox position on political revolution. Now four years after the Pablo fight and only two years after Hungary, Hansen was to put forward an essentially reformist conception of political revolution almost identical with that held by Clarke in 1953: It is much closer to reality to view the pro- gramme of political revolution as the total series of reforms, gained through militant struggle, cul- minating in the transfer of power to the workers. No revolution comes in a single oversize dose like a horse pill. It develops in interlinked stages affecting interlinked fields. If any of the stages be viewed in isolation, or fixed as an end in itself rather than a means to a higher goal, it appears as a reform. If its connections to the demands of other stages be kept in mind, it ‘appears as a transitional step. It is only when the process is viewed as a whole—in its origins, its fundamental aims and final results—that it appears for what it really is, a revolution: an organic qualitative change in whatever structure is involved.59 All this sounds very dialectical. But far from being the revolutionary position of Marxism, it is in actuality the evolutionary position of Menshev- ism. It is important that Hansen here generalises his concept that revolution is nothing but a series of reforms to apply to all revolutions. To Hansen the October Insurrection must have been but one of a number of reforms the cumulative effect of which was a revolutionary change. In our book the destruction of the capitalist state and the 58. See: Harry Ring. ‘The Struggle in the Com- munist Party’, International Socialist Review (New York, Spring, 1958), p. 52 ff. 59. Hansen, Joseph. ‘Proposed Roads to Soviet Democracy’, International Socialist Review (New York, Spring, 1958), p. 50.

[p054] 146 transfer of power to the working class organised in Soviets was quite a reform, quite a reform! Need- less to say the concept of the political revolution as a series of reforms completely obliterates the division between the Trotskyist position and that of Deutscher and other revisionists who urge a reformist road in the Soviet countries. This, of course, was its purpose. Hansen’s theoretical role in the post-war history of the SWP was not a personal matter. He reflected —perhaps a bit more grotesquely than others—the empiricist method of the SWP. His theories were developed as impressionistic reactions to current development or to serve political and factional purposes. A theory once developed would be lightly discarded when either the objective situa- tion or the factional need changed. Thus in 1949 and 1950 Hansen, together with Cochran, reacted in the same impressionistic way as did Pablo to the expansion of Stalinism. Their views were if anything cruder, more vulgar than. Pablo’s. In 1952 and 1953 Hansen responded to the internal factional needs of the Cannon group in the SWP and became the foremost advocate of the view that Stalinism was ‘counter-revolutionary through and through’. In 1954 and 1955, in the climate of McCarthyism and reaction, Hansen experimented with state capitalism, a position about as far re- moved politically—if not methodologically—from his 1949 position as one could get. By 1958, when the party’s tactical needs required an adaptation to the Stalinists, Hansen was to return to his earlier Pabloite views. This was to prepare him for his future role as the foremost battler against ortho- doxy and for a return to the Pabloites. Only a party deeply sick with the disease of empiricism would let such a person occupy a leading position in its central leadership. There was, as would be expected, a minor orthodox resistance to the return to revisionist views fought against earlier and to the almost total absorption of the party in a ‘radical’ petty- bourgeois milieu. This resistance found expression in the Cowley tendency, which opposed the ex- tremes of regroupment and which urged a con- tinuation of an orientation towards the mass move- ment. It was, however, a very weak echo of orthodoxy and its base was in the same tired section of the party which was responsible for the disorientation of the party in the first place. Quite naturally a good section of these Cowley sup- porters, including Cowley herself, were to simply drift out of the party and out of politics in the next period. They were simply too tired to do FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, AUGUST 1966 much else than register their protest before they left. The Marcyites also strongly opposed regroup- ment. However, it would be difficult to charac- terise their opposition as really ‘orthodox’ as they combined their criticisms of regroupment with a position that the Hungarian Revolution was a fascist counter-revolution. This section was to split from the party before the 1959 convention and to drift more and more away from Trotskyism. In the meantime, the evolution of the Cochran- ites fully confirmed the deeply liquidationist nature of this formation. First of all in the early stages of the regroupment process the Bartell-Clarke wing of the formation split away and played a certain role for a while as ‘unity brokers’, The Cochran- ites proper were too involved in publishing their magazine, American Socialist, to bother with re- groupment. Soon after regroupment came to an end, the Cochranites simply ceased publication of their magazine and announced to all and sundry that they were going out of business for good. The Bartell-Clarke formation had disintegrated a little earlier once the ‘unity brokerage’ business had dried up. For the Weiss formation regroupment was a heaven-sent proposition. Murry Weiss came to the fore as the party’s leading negotiator and expert on adaptation to pro-Stalinist currents. All over the country these people were in the forefront of regroupment, its ceaseless advocates, its most dedicated exponents. Regroupment was more than a tactical manoeuvre to the Weissites—it was a whole approach to the building of the party. They saw the party being built through a process of ever b?sader fusions with petty-bourgeois radical forces on an ever more amorphous political programme. They developed a deeply liquidationist approach towards regroupment. More and more they began to espouse the formulations and outlook of the Cochranites—their enemies of only a few short years back. At the same time that the Cochran- ites outside the party were dissolving, the Weiss- ites were to evolve inside the party into essentially a Cochranite formation. As long as regroupment was the main orientation of the party as a whole the Weiss and Dobbs forces in the party worked reasonably well together with only occasional subterranean conflicts. Weiss also put forward no line independent of the majority line. In fact, as far as regroupment was con- 60 Cowley, Joyce. ‘Resolutions’, ‘Regroupment Policy’, Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Socialist Workers Party,Januaryl959), pp. 22 ff.

[p055] STRUGGLE FOR MARXISM IN THE U.S. cerned, he was the main formulator of the party line.6! At the 1959 party convention the SWP was to make a decisive turn away from this work in the Stalinist milieu. The impetus for the turn came from Cannon. Throughout the 1957 and 1958 period Cannon had been a firm defender of re- groupment. He not only defended some of its excesses—he committed some himself. But by 1959 it became clear to Cannon that the Stalinist milieu was moving away from the party and for the party to chase after the Stalinists could lead to liquidationism. So he suddenly discovered that some comrades were mistaking regroupment for ‘political togetherness’. On the eve of the 1959 Convention he sent a letter to Farrell Dobbs pro- posing that the political resolution already drafted for the Convention by Dobbs be redrafted to eliminate regroupment.®* Dobbs hurried to Los Angeles for consultation and out went regroup- ment. No real assessment was ever made of the party’s failings in this period. The party simply turned to other work. But regroupment was not over for Murry Weiss. On October 7, 1959, several months after the con- vention, Weiss issued to the National Committee a ‘Memorandum on Policy Towards the Rubinstein Group’ which in effect urged a continuation of the regroupment approach towards the very small remnants of petty-bourgeois ‘Progressives’ still willing to talk to the SWP. This was unceremoni- ously rejected. As late as April 26, 1961, Weiss once again urged a regroupment approach—this time towards the CP itself in the local New York elections—claiming that the Cuban Revolution was opening them up for this kind of proposal. This was also rejected. By this time Weiss liquidation- ism began to spread to the international question, and we will take it up in more detail later. (3) Back to Pablo As we have noted earlier, splits which do not lead to an understanding of the methodological causes of the split, cannot be permanent. No matter how much one may wish to turn one’s back on the split and get on with other business, the split keeps hitting at you until you are forced to face up to it again one way or another. So it was with the Pabloite split. This split had been brought about by a precipitous reaction to Pablo’s factional manoeuvres in various national sections— especially the SWP. Only a rudimentary opposition of orthodoxy was thrown up to counter Pablo’s revisionism. No one had come anywhere near to an investigation of the underlying methodological 147 causes of the split. Thus it was understandable that no sooner had this ‘definitive’ split taken place than unity nego- tiations got under way. In 1954 the International Committee, in a move hoping to win over the LSSP, initiated a unity move with a parity pro- posal. There was no response from the Pabloites. The whole matter was dropped at the time, in part at the urging of the SWP.® Then in 1957 the SWP itself proposed that unity with the Pabloites take place on the basis of parity between the International Committee and the International Secretariat. This time also the International Secretariat rejected the overture.® In neither 1954 nor in 1957 were the unity pro- posals seen as initiating a politica] discussion. Rather this stage was dispensed with and the negotiations dealt strictly with organisational pro- posals. More important, the SWP, which was the only party in a real position to do so, did not carry on a theoretical and political struggle after its brief flurry in early 1954. It simply dumped the new International Committee in the laps of the British and French and proceeded once again to devote its energies to its beloved American scene. It hoped that this time the International would just leave it alone. It got its wish for a while-—but not for long. Neither the French nor the British had the strength at the time to give much leadership to the International Committee, so without the SWP’s active role the International Committee fell into relative quiescence from 1954 until 1961. The period from 1957 to 1961 in the SWP was to be a period of political preparation for organi- sational fusion with the Pabloites. We have seen how the SWP began to develop a revisionist out- look very close to that of the Pabloites in the period of 1957-59. After the 1959 convention the party was supposed to turn once again to the party’s traditional major arena of work—the work- ing class. But the SWP was unable to make such a turn—the SWP of 1959 was organically incapable of making such a turn. It was a tired party, a party which had long since withdrawn from the working class. Such a formation could not simply re-enter that from which it had slowly withdrawn 61. See: Murry Weiss. ‘Regroupment and United Socialist Political Action (Majority Report to Plenum)’, Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Socialist Workers Party, January 1959). p. 1 ff. 62. ‘Letter to Farrell Dobbs’, June 11, 1959. 63. See: ‘A Reply to Comrade Peng from the Socialist Labour League’, International Bulletin No. 5 (International Committee, London, 1961), pp. 4, 5. 64. Ibid., p. 6.

[p056] 148 over the past decade. The SWP cadres could keep an organisation going, raise finances for the national office, modestly circulate the press, hold forums in the local areas and carry on other routine organisational and propaganda activities. It could keep an organisation as an organisation but by 1959 it no longer had an organisation which could be used as a revolutionary instrument. To turn the party towards effective intervention in the class would have required a complete shake-up of the party from top to bottom. Such a shake-up would have meant the loss of much of the tired cadre. This no one in the leadership for a moment considered. The organisational turn away from regroupment work did not signify a sharp break from the kind of revisionist political formulations which were being evolved in the 1957-1959 period. In fact two months after the 1959 convention the Militant ran an editorial on the then current international manoeuvres between the U.S. and USSR entitled ‘A Welcome Thaw’. The opening sentence of the editorial referred to this current ‘thaw’ as ‘...a victory for the forces of peace over the warmongers’ in the true non-class, pacifist spirit of the National Guardian. In the Autumn, 1960, International Socialist Review, dedicated to the twentieth anniver- sary of Trotsky’s death, Murry Weiss wrote an article called ‘Trotskyism Today’. This article expressed a completely Pabloite outlook in which Trotskyism was seen flowering all over the place in the triumph of the Yugoslavs, the triumph of Mao, etc. However, the development of Trotsky- ism as a movement in its own right was completely ignored. Weiss stated: ‘Trotskyists have never claimed a franchise on revolutionary theory and practice. On the contrary, all of our work is directed towards convincing the working class and its parties to take the revolutionary road.’ The Trotskyist movement is clearly seen as outside ‘the working class and its parties’ seeking to con- vince others to do what Weiss feels it is incapable of doing itself. Thus the 1959-1960 period was essentially a period of busy work and a propagandistic election campaign. The party turned away from the Stalinist milieu only because the Stalinist milieu turned away from it. But it turned in no other direction. It just waited for something to happen. Only in the youth movement did anything really happen. There the youth organisation experienced a period of relatively peaceful growth and deve- lopment, concentrating its work among the students where new radical trends were emerging. By the middle of 1960 something new did FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, AUGUST 1966 happen which finally gave the party something to do—the development of the Cuban Revolution, As American imperialism pushed the Cuban Revolution to the left the SWP began to pay more and more attention to Cuba. Finally the SWP declared that Cuba had become a workers’ state, and the Cuban leadership was seen as offering the way out for the Trotskyist movement. Objective pressures had forced Castro to the left. Now if only the little SWP could connect up with the Cuban leadership, much as Pablo a decade earlier sought to connect up with the Stalinists, it could become once again part of the revolutionary process. Cuba was seen as a substitute, a short-cut for the long, hard struggle to build a party in the United States—a struggle which the tired old SWP cadres could make only a half-hearted effort to carry out. The pro-Cuba forces in the United States (the Fair Play for Cuba Committee) were to become the new regroupment arena and the major area for party work. These pro-Cuban forces were essenti- ally the same petty-bourgeois radicals the SWP had sought to reach during regroupment. Once again the Militant took on the coloration of the Castroites and devoted much of its space to publishing Castro’s speeches. This chameleon-like ability of the Militant to absorb the coloration of others was an indication of its own lack of indigenous colour—that the SWP had no conscious direction in and for itself. As time passed the pro-Cuban forces began to drift away and those remaining grew increasingly hostile to the SWP and Cuba worked closer with the USSR. Finally the Fair Play group formally dissolved itself in the wake of the Kennedy assassination. But long before this it had lost its steam. Out of all this effort the SWP did not gain more than a handful of recruits. However, this new adaptation to Castro re- inforced the old adaptation to the ‘progressives’ and helped to prepare the SWP for a return inter- nationally to Pablo’s camp. Modest moves were made in this direction in late 1960 as the SWP leadership took note of the concurrence of agree- ment on important political questions such as the Cuban Revolution. The whole question, however, was brought to a head by the January 1961 letter of the SLL to the SWP stating that: It is time to draw to a close the period in which Pabloite revisionism was regarded as a trend within 65. F{ilitant (New York, August 10, 1959). 66. Weiss, Murry. ‘Trotskyism Today’, International Socialist Review (New York, Fall, 1960), p. 110.

[p057] STRUGGLE FOR MARXISM IN THE U.S, Trotskyism. Unless this is done we cannot pre- pare for the revolutionary struggle now beginning. We want the SWP to go forward with us in this spirit.67 The ability of the SLL to take the political initiative inside the ranks of the International Committee was a tribute to its development since the days of the original split with Pablo. The period since 1953 brought about not only a quanti- tative development of the British Trotskyist move- ment but also a qualitative development. Despite the surface changes in the line of the Pabloites it insisted that the Pabloites had not changed in their method. It took this stand in 1957 with Sinclair’s letter to Germain and again in an editorial in Labour Review in August of 1959. But it was not until 1961 that the SLL had developed to the point where it could struggle for this view despite the resistance of the SWP. There is another aspect to the SLL’s views as they unfolded in the Spring of 1961. The SLL, almost from the beginning, sought to turn the inter- national discussion around the question of method- ology. In this way the SLL began to raise the level of the discussion with the Pabloites beyond the level of the 1953 split—to go beyond orthodoxy. In this sense the SLL sought to raise the level of the international movement to the point Trotsky himself sought to bring it during his intervention in the 1940 struggle. In the 21 years since that struggle the Fourth International had slipped further and further back from the point Trotsky had developed it to in 1940. In 1961 the vast majority of Trotskyists were far below the theore- tical level of the 1940 struggle. This is the funda- mental meaning of the reaction on the part of the SWP and many others to the SLL’s efforts. Starting a little cautiously in early 1961, the SWP began a political process which was soon to bring it back into the Pabloite camp. Relations became tense between the SWP and the SLL. The SLL’s constant insistance on discussion rather than organisational manoeuvres was too much for the SWP. To the SWP leaders this meant the SLL was becoming its enemy. They feared discussion would destroy the internal regime of the SWP—would break the party up into its constituent parts, would lead to the wholesale flight of those in the party who were already dead politically. The SWP, and Cannon above all, sought to preserve the unity of the ‘cadre’ first even if it meant breaking with its closest international collaborators for a decade and abandoning principled politics altogether. By so acting the SWP showed how superficial its internationalism had been for the whole previous 149 decade. Just as quickly as Pablo had been trans- formed from friend to enemy in 1953 when Cannon felt his cadre threatened, so in 1961 with the SLL and the French. The real factional fever of the SWP leadership and Jim Cannon in particular can be seen in Cannon’s ‘Letters to the Party Center’ published on the very eve of the 1961 Convention.® These letters expressed a feeling of deep factional hostility towards those international sections which were the SWP’s closest collaborators only six months earlier. Politically the 1961 SWP discussion revealed that the party’s leadership had gone over completely to the very views it had struggled against in 1953. For instance, at the January 1961 Plenum, Comrade Morris Stein was to state the following about Stalinism, which was ‘counter-revolutionary through and through’ in 1953: ‘. . . The Soviet Union is compelled today, instead of playing a counter-revolutionary role—to place itself on the side of revolution.’6? Most significant is the fact that this statement was made by Stein, one of the most solid elements in the old Dobbs section of the party’s cadre—the man who held together the party during the war when the 18 were in jail; the man chosen to report for Germain’s position on Eastern Europe in February 1950; the man who played an important role in formulating the orthodox answer to Pablo in 1953; the man who was Dobbs’ spokesman in the showdown with Weiss. Stein’s degeneration was a sign of how deeply revisionist thinking had sunk into the most solid, orthodox sections of the party’s leading cadre and rank and file. The SWP’s international resolution passed at the 1961 convention represented a retreat to Pablo- ite positions on all major international questions. It stands in stark contrast to the position the SWP had drawn up in late 1953 in the resolution ‘Against Pabloite Revisionism’. For instance the 1961 resolution claimed that the victory of the Chinese Revolution ‘definitively altered the world relation of forces in favour of socialism’.70 How- ever, the 1953 resolution denied that such a qualitative alteration in the world relationship of 67. ‘Letter of January 2, 1961 from the NC of the Socialist Labour League to the NC of the Socialist Workers Party, February 1961), p. 21. 68. Cannon, James P. ‘Letters to the Party Center’, Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 22, No. 17 (Socialist Workers Party, New York, June 1961). 69. Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Socialist Workers Party, February 1961), p. 21. 70. ‘The Struggle for World Socialism’, International Socialist Review (New York, Summer, 1961), p. 90.

[p058] 150 class forces had taken place and this denial was central to its critique of the Pabloites. It declared: Up to date the counter-revolutionary interven- tion of the bureaucracy itself in world politics has forestalled the objective conditions for such a consummation. It caused the revolution to recede in Western Europe, weakened the working class in relation to the class enemy, and facilitated the mobilisation of the world counter-revolution. The struggle between the forces of revolution and counter-revolution is still inconclusive, and far from being settled. This very inconclusiveness, which it strives to maintain, at the present works to the advantage of the Kremlin.7! This was a central difference, for the Pabloite position has always been that, since the objective weight of world events is on the side of revolution, the subjective factor, the building of the party, tends to matter less. Almost any centrist forma- tion can be thrust forward by the objectively re- volutionary conditions and bring the working class to power. This was the conclusion the SWP also had drawn from the Cuban experience. The SWP’s organisational proposals for unity with the Pabloites were obviously predicated on a political movement in the direction of the Pabloite outlook. In this sense they were of the same character as the Goldman-Morrow proposals for unity with the Shachtmanites. The SLL’s insist- ence on a political discussion prior to unification was similar to the position the SWP took in 1946. However, as we have noted, the SLL went beyond the SWP of 1946 in probing the causes for the split. The Pabloites themselves clearly admitted that the reunification moves of the SWP were based on the SWP’s reversal of political position and not on any real change in the political outlook of the Pabloites. They state in their own resolution on reunification: The political basis for the 1953-54 split, as we saw it, was a lack of full understanding of the correctness of the International’s turn in the esti- mate of the world situation, made in 1950-51. ... Starting from the 20th Congress of the CPSU, some organisations affiliated with the International Committee or in sympathy with its political views as in the case of the SWP, corrected their evalution of the world situation and of the evolution within the Soviet Union, and arrived at an estimation of events very close to that of the Fourth Interna- tional. From that time on, reunification became not only desirable but also possible.72 The SWP quite naturally rejected every proposal of the SLL to discuss prior to unification and to discuss the origins of the split in 1953. Neither the SWP FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, AUGUST 1966 of 1961 nor the Shachtmanites of 1946 could affora to look back at their history and grapple with the causes of the original split. Any group incapable of studying its own history and of explaining its own evolution, has broken totally with the method of Marxism. All groups make mistakes—those groups which are incapable of learning from mis- takes or even acknowledging that they took place are making the biggest mistake of all, an irrepar- able mistake. After 1961 the evolution of the SWP back to Pablo was only a matter of time. Its decision to break from the International Committee and announce its political solidarity with the Pabloite International Secretariat came as no surprise to anyone. It had been prepared politically ever since the regroupment period. In fact it had been pre- pared earlier than that, in 1953, by the inability of the SWP to carry forward the struggle against Pabloism from the level of orthodoxy to a defence of the Marxist method and the application of that method to new events in the world. This failure in turn was prepared by the failure of the SWP after 1940 to really learn the lessons of the 1940 struggle and to definitively break with the method of empiricism. The SWP’s return to the Pabloite camp in no sense meant a revival of an international outlook on the part of the SWP. It was motivated solely by domestic needs, the need for protection against the political attack of the SLL, for protection of the cadre from politics. It was based on an understanding that once again the SWP would offer the international a little material assistance and support if only the international would leave the SWP alone. The international this time was in no position to do anything but leave the SWP alone. A decade of Pabloism had decimated its ranks, The move of the SWP back into the camp of Pabloism did not protect the party from disintegra- tion. Rather it created conditions which were to hasten the disintegrative process and to hinder any attempt to progressively resolve the party’s prob- lems. The evolution of the Weiss group is particu- larly instructive in this respect. Murry Weiss emerged as the most extreme advocate of reunifi- cation of the Fourth International, seeing this as but a small step in a much broader ‘revolutionary regroupment’ with Castro, Mao, etc. In fact, he 71. ‘Against Pabloite Revisionism’, op. cit., p. 100. 72. ‘Declaration of Reunification of the World Trotskyist Movement’ passed by the 23rd Plenum of the IEC, June 23, 24, 1962.

[p059] STRUGGLE FOR MARXISM IN THE U.S. announced on the Political Committee in 1961 that the SWP’s international resolution did not go far enough in its liquidationism: ‘Murry said that this draft as it stands is inadequate and therefore erroneous on a couple of points. Although it made a flying start, it stopped on the subject of what he would term revolutionary regroupment in the revolutionary world process.’73 Weiss’s closest political collaborators saw workers’ states popping up all over the place. Bert Deck emerged with a ‘special position’ on Cuba, seeing it transformed into a workers’ state some six months earlier than the rest of the majority because of the presence of an armed militia.” Frances James, another Weiss supporter, supported the Deck line and further suggested that Guinea also was fast becoming a workers’ state.?> Weiss’s youth supporters suddenly saw thousands of young people radicalised by Cuba with whom we could fuse if only we would get out of our own way. In the 1961-1963 period the Weiss supporters deepened their liquidationist methods though they conducted no open struggle for their views. One by one the leading figures of the Weiss formation in the SWP left the party. Bert Deck with his ‘special position’, Nora Roberts and James Lam- brecht with their feverish images of thousands of revolutionary youth, more recently Frances James with her workers’ state in Guinea. Murry Weiss himself left the party in spirit if not formally. He simply pulled out of all party work and informed anyone who bothered to ask that he now had come to the conclusion that the Cochranites in 1953 had been basically right and that the SWP would play no special role in the great regroupment that was to come. Some of the Weiss supporters remained in the party to fight the ‘Dobbs regime’ and to urge that the party intervene in petty- bourgeois movements rather than the working class. The 1961-1963 period was the period of the serious growth of an openly Maoist group in the SWP. The Swabeck tendency had evolved to a point where they repudiated the whole history of the Trotskyist movement in China and sided with Mao from 1927 on. They, of course, completely abandoned the political revolution in China and didn’t even seem much interested in reform. They became an almost crystal-pure Stalinist formation within the SWP with support of perhaps as much as 15 per cent of the party. A minority opposition in support of the SLL position also rose up in the party. This opposi- tion’s main base was among the younger comrades relatively new to the movement. Significantly the few older Dobbs cadres who joined this opposition 151 on the same general grounds that they had fought Cochran and Pablo soon deserted it and the party. They were too tired to do more than register a protest before they retired from active political struggle. The Dobbs section of the party has always prided itself on its proletarian composition and its concrete orientation towards the American working class. Whatever theoretical weaknesses it had, it felt its concrete working-class work helped to compensate for these weaknesses. In this period the Dobbs section of the party emerged as the central element in the resistance to a turn by the party towards work in the mass movement. Its approach to the developing Negro struggle and the beginning of restiveness in the class as a whole has been one of abstentionism. At the 1963 Convention Dobbs took the lead in rejecting minority proposals to turn the party to- wards the working class and the Negro movement. As a cover for their very real abstentionism in the class the SWP majority leadership as a whole projected a deeply adaptationist line toward the petty-bourgeois leadership of the black nationalist section of the Negro movement. The chameleon- like Militant took on the coloration of the Black Muslims and Malcolm X’s speeches replaced those of Castro. But concrete work in the Negro move- ment on the basis of a class line was rejected. The one great virtue of the Dobbs group it no longer possessed. The evolution of the Dobbs forces in the SWP shows concretely that a perspective of struggle in the mass movement cannot be maintained for long without a theoretical understanding. In 1961-63 the Dobbs forces com- pletely capitulated to the Pabloites on every theore- tical issue and at the same time turned their backs on the concrete struggle of the working people in the United States. The Dobbs group, like the Cochran group, always was a more aristocratic section of the working class and never did reach the young workers and Negroes. Now this aristo- cratic section had receded into the party itself, thus isolating itself further from the class. The role of Cannon in this whole process must be mentioned. In 1953 it was Cannon who threw himself into the struggle against a liquidationist trend in the organisation. Later, though reluc- 73. Minutes of Political Committee, No. 12, May 10, 1961 (Socialist Workers Party), p. 4. 74. Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Socialist Workers Party, February 1961), pp. 4-6. P. 1. 75. James, Frances. ‘The Question of Criteria and the Cuban Revolution’, Discussion Bulletin (Socialist Workers Party, May 1961), pp. 4-6.

[p060] 152 tantly, he tackled the Pabloite revisionists. Today Cannon’s role was very, very different. Right through this whole period Cannon, above all, pursued a policy of compromise with the liquida- tionist Weiss section of the party—the current Cochranites. As late as the 1963 Convention Cannon intervened strongly in defence of the Weiss group. Thus the Cannon of 1961-63 played the role of the Dobbs of 1952-53. Cannon played the same role on the international arena. This great ‘protector of the historically constituted cadres’ did not blink an eye in writing off the entire British and French sections early in 1961 and throwing his weight on the side of the Pabloite destroyers FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, AUGUST 1966 and liquidators of the cadres. Cannon’s political role was of the same character, In December 1962 it was Cannon who jumped to the defence of the Kremlin in the Cuban Missiles Crisis and criticised the Militant for being a bit too critical of Khrushchev. After all, what else could Khrushchev do in the interests of ‘world peace’? He actually commended the positions of Bertrand Russell and Nehru on the question.76 In this respect he did not differ from Dobbs, who a year later was to send his condolences to Mrs. Kennedy after the Kennedy assassination and to lecture the American workers on the importance of ‘orderly processes’. E. FORTY YEARS OF AMERICAN MARXISM In the late 1950s Jim Cannon was to devote a good deal of his time to compiling his recollections of his past history as a participant in the American radical movement since the days of Debs and the © IWW. Summarising his whole history as an American revolutionist Cannon had this to say: My decision to support Trotsky and the Left Opposition in 1928, and to break with all the factions in the Communist Party over that issue, was not a sudden ‘conversion’ on my part; and neither was my earlier decision in 1917 to support the Russian Revolution and the Bolsheviks and to leave the IWW behind. Each time I remained what I had started out to be in my youth—a revolutionist against capitalism. The Russian Revolution and the Bolsheviks in the first instance, and the heroic struggle of the Left Opposition in the second, taught me some things I hadn’t known before and hadn’t been able to figure out for myself. They made me a better and more effective fighter for my own cause. But they did not basically change me into something I hadn’t been before. They did not ‘convert’ me to the revolution; I was a revolutionist to start with.77 Precisely because neither the Communist Inter- national nor Trotsky and the Fourth International changed Cannon ‘into something I hadn’t been before’, Jim Cannon, the American revolutionist personified, was by 1963 no longer a ‘revolutionist against capitalism’. This was not a matter of the evolution of an individual—Cannon’s evolution was the evolution of a whole trend of American Marx- ism, the only Marxist trend to emerge from the American Communist Party. American radicalism did not really survive World War I. The elementary syndicalism of the IWW was totally inadequate in the United States which emerged from World War I. The United States was not only a part of the world; it emerged in the pre-eminent position in the ranks of world imperialism. An American radical trend which could not even try to cope with this new world situation could not survive in the United States. So following the war the IWW disappeared from the scene as an effective radical force. Populism failed to survive the war as a serious national movement. The petty-bourgeoisie of the countryside and small towns—the real base of populist strength—were by the 1920s a relatively minor factor in American society. The new out- bursts of populism during the thirties were re- stricted to such backwater areas as the Dakotas. The real questions facing the United States were not to be solved on the wheat farms of the Dakotas. The Socialist Party never recovered its pre-war strength. This cannot be blamed simply on the split of the left wing and the formation of the CP, for the CP took only a small fraction of the Engish-speaking membership of the SP. The pre- dominantly English-speaking American-through- and-through Socialist Party of the 1920s was reduced to only a minor role in American radical politics while the ‘Russian’ CP remained the major factor in American radicalism until the post-World War II period. In order for any kind of socialist working-class movement to survive in the United States it was forced to go to the Russians for a programme—for a programme which would enable it to deal with the United States, which was now playing a central 76. ‘Letter from J. Cannon to New York, October 1962’, International Information Bulletin (Socialist ' Workers Party, July 1963). 77. Cannon, James P. ‘First Ten Years . . .’, op. cit., p. 28.

[p061] STRUGGLE FOR MARXISM IN THE U.S. role in the whole world situation. Thus the very growth of the Communist Party itself showed the deep need for American workers to go beyond their own narrow provincial experience and their own narrow empirical method. The basic programme of the early American Communist Party was not ‘made in America’, nor was it the product of the American empirical method. It had been deve- loped on an international scale through the use of the dialectical method. The early American Communist Party sought to empirically apply a pro- gramme that was developed dialectically. Jim Cannon in particular personified this process. His mind was compartmentalised. One part of his mind held a programme developed elsewhere by a method which remained a mystery to Cannon, the dialectical method. In another part of his mind Cannon had his impressions of the United States, his famous ‘feel’ for American workers in their revolutionary potential. This ‘feel’ was arrived at empirically and thus vulnerable to change depend- ing on changing conditions in the United States. The Jim Cannon of the 1930s approached politics in the same way as the Jim Cannon of the 1920s. The American Trotskyists had a programme deeply relevant to world-wide developments of capitalism, the degeneration of the workers’ state, and the deep ramifications of these related processes for the American scene. But this programme also was not made in America by the American method. It was developed by Trotsky, the the continuator of the Marxist traditions of the Russian Revolution. It was produced by the dialectical method, a method deeply alien to American empiricism. Cannon carried with him from the CP his neatly compart- mentalised mind, deftly filed the new programme in the place where the old programme had been, and devoted himself once again to his ‘feel’ of the American scene and to building an organisation. The net result was a deep crisis in the move- ment which almost destroyed it. Trotsky was forced to come to the rescue, for only someone who understood the Marxist method was capable of combating the revisionist threat of Burnham- Shachtman-Abern. During his last days Trotsky sought to bring about a further development of the Cannon section of the movement. He warned them of the deep danger of adapting to their situation in the American trade union movement unless they began to function as Bolsheviks first and American syndicalists second. With Trotsky dead, Cannon was suddenly left with a void in that compartment of his mind reserved for programme. He filled it as best he 153 could with the programme Trotsky had producea in the past period and turned his attention once again to the American scene. This time his ‘feel’ for the American workers weakened —he saw largely their conservative surface appearance rather than their deeper revolutionary potential. Left to his own resources and with an American work- ing class of which he was somewhat sceptical, he retreated into the refuge of broad socialist pro- paganda rather than asserting his rightful position as the leading spokesman of the international movement which represented the working class as it would become rather than simply as it was at the moment. Past positions, only empirically understood, are not enough to fill the programme section of even a compartmentalised mind. A new programme, developed this time with an empirical method, was furnished to Cannon by his international colla- borators. There is no doubt Cannon did not feel overly comfortable with this new programme. He could empirically feel it was different from the old one. But into his mind it went, for without a development on his part theoretically he could put nothing else there to cope with new inter- national developments. More and more Cannon had difficulties keeping the compartments of his mind separated. Comrades in the party with greater concern for theoretical consistency began insisting that the new programme actually be applied to the American scene. Faced with the very liquidation of the movement he had devoted such effort to constructing, Cannon broke empirically with the new programme, coun- tering it only with the old orthodoxy. But this did not work. Events kept banging and banging away at Cannon and his supporters. Finally, the new revisionist programme began creeping back into the cosy compartment, this time to settle down to stay. By this time the other compartment was not faring so well either. Despite all the rhetoric about the American Revolution, the Cannon of the late 50s and early ’60s began to see the American working class like the Cannon of 1941, but now multiplied many times over. This Cannon began to look elsewhere for a revolutionary force. First it was adaptationist, get-rich-quick schemes with petty-bourgeois Stalinists. Then it was Cuba— Castro’s empiricism seemed heaven-sent to the empirical SWP. Someone with their method had come to power. Never mind that the Castro formation was not a working-class formation. Never mind its lack of theory—this was seen in fact as its appeal. So what if the workers had no say in anything and Trotskyists were suppressed,

[p062] 154 Castro had power and he got it empirically—that was enough. Cannon’s whole history is the story of American Marxists facing a new situation which made it impossible for them to simply maintain a revolu- tionary perspective on American soil. They were forced to turn elsewhere for their programme. But they took over this programme without under- standing the method which produced it and sought to survive by simply applying it to the American scene empirically—with a method hostile to the method which produced the programme. Trotsky’s role and Trotsky’s intervention made it possible for the SWP to survive as long as it did. All other tendencies had long since broken from the revolu- tionary road. But in the end the SWP turned on Trotskyism itself and repudiated a revolutionary FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, AUGUST 1966 perspective in the United States. The American Marxists of the future must begin their work with an understanding of the history