Editorial

[p003] EDITORIAL THIS SPECIAL issue of Fourth International consists largely of documents published in the discussion around the recent world conference of the self- styled ‘Unified Secretariat of the Fourth Inter- national’. The Unified Secretariat is based on a rejection of the essential Trotskyist programme and Marxist method, originating in the revisionist ideas of Michel Pablo, Secretary of the Fourth International in the period immediately before 1953. In that year, the Socialist Workers’ Party (USA) supported by the British Trotskyists now in the Socialist Labour League, the French Trot- skyists whose ‘Organisation Communiste Inter- nationaliste’ was banned by the French Govern- ment in 1968, and several others in Europe and America, broke decisively from Pablo and his supporters, Germain and Frank. The ‘Open Letter’ of James P. Cannon of the SWP (December 1953) denounced Pabloism as the negation of Trotskyism. Those parties opposed to Pablo formed the International Committee of the Fourth Inter- national, with Pablo’s followers retaining the title ‘International Secretariat’. By 1963, the SWP, together with small groups in Canada, Switzerland and Chile, returned to the fold of P&blo’s Secretariat. Thus was formed the ‘Unified Secretariat’, though it was almost perfectly coin- cident in time with considerable splits in the Pablo ranks: Juan Posadas led a walk-out of several Latin American sections, and soon Pablo himself was to lead a faction out of the newly formed ‘Unified Secretariat’. When we use the term ‘Pabloite’ it is to characterise this whole international tendency and not simply Pablo’s own line. Six years since 1963 permit a valuable test of the opposed perspectives of the day, and that is the purpose of publishing this lengthy selection of documents. In 1963 the International Committee (IC) refused to consider any proposal to unite with- out a preliminary discussion on all the problems be- Editorial fore the movement. The SWP—although of course forbidden by US law any international political _affiliation, supported the ‘reunification’. The principal argument used by them was that the Cuban Revolution was a_ socialist revolution, that the defence and extension of it was the primary task, that it proved socialist revolutions could be achieved without the creation of independent revolutionary parties, since leader- ship could emerge unconsciously from middle-class nationalist tendencies like Castro’s July 26 Move- ment. According to Joseph Hansen of the SWP and those who supported him, this agreement on Cuba, which involved compromise with all the revisionist theories of the ‘Third World’, and the abandonment of the revolutionary role of the working class, marked the latest stage in a process by which the Pabloite and the Trotskyist positions had come closer together on all vital questions. When the International Committee insisted on a full discussion, the SWP and the International Secretariat said in so many words that they would deliberately exclude discussion of the 1953 split, and encourage unity on the ‘concrete questions’ of the day. This whole method of effecting a unification, of course, was an abandonment of Marxism. It was precisely this method which united the various groups. What the SWP lacked was any analysis of the profound methodological revisions behind Pablo’s theses of 1952-1953. Cannon and the SWP did not carry further their characterisation of Pabloism, with its bureaucratic excesses and its capitulation to Stalinism, and because of this they were unable to profit from the 1953 split experience to put their own house in order. That was exactly what was required. Trotsky had warned the SWP in the course of his battle against Burnham, Shachtman and the petty- bourgeois opposition in 1940 that the fight for dialectical materialism against the pragmatism of American bourgeois ideology was a life-and-death 53

[p004] matter for the party and for the future of the American working class. The very impressionism and naive reliance on ‘experience’ which charac- terised pragmatism had won out in the SWP by 1963. When the International Committee and the Socialist Labour League took up the theoretical struggle with the SWP and Pabloism in 1961, it was precisely to these methodological questions that the whole discussion was forced to turn, as the documents show. Now, in 1969, the conference of the Unified Secretariat and the surrounding discussion show a sorry state. Everything said by the IC about the politics of the unification is proved to the hilt out of the very mouths of the ‘unifiers’. On almost every question, from Castro and Cuba, through China and the nature of Stalinism, to the revolutionary strategy for Europe and the US, there is wide disagreement. ‘Suddenly’ Hansen and the SWP find they have been giving ‘fraternal services’ to tendencies like that of Livio Maitan in Italy, who openly wants to liquidate every sem- blance of Trotskyism. It does not appear to strike Hansen that the essence of the SWP’s policy in the US is identical. After a lengthy report on the Conference (see below), Joseph Hansen expresses the opinion that perhaps a really thorough discussion on the international plane is in order. He does not explain to his listeners why the SWP opposed such a discussion in 1963. And yet every subject now up for discussion—the ‘guerrilla warfare’ strategy of Maitan and others, the role of leadership in the Cuban and Latin American revolutions, the nature of Stalinism and the struggle against it, the role of the Algerian nationalist FLN and the so-called Trotskyists who supported it—-was among those which the International Committee insisted be discussed in 1961-1963. 1968-1969 has proved a fateful year for the ‘Unified Secretariat’. Castro had already given a clear warning of his politics vis-a-vis Trotskyism at the Tricontinental conference in Havana in 1966. But now he went further: he refused solidarity to the French workers, was silent on the repres- sions in Mexico, and endorsed the Warsaw Pact suppression of political revolution in Czecho- slovakia. But much more basic: the working class of the advanced capitalist countries, beginning with France in May-June 1968, burst like a bomb- shell into the crises of imperialism and Stalinism, shattering all the revisionist theories of the third world ‘epicentre’ of revolution and of non- Trotskyist revolutionary leadership. 54 It is these great events which have forced a considerable minority of the Unified Secretariat (on most questions about one-third), and partic- ularly the SWP, to question the possibility of adhering to the old programme. This explains the series of critical documents here published from the Unified Secretariat and SWP_ discussion bulletins. But the SWP leadership is capable only of an empirical response to these events and their formal discrepancy with previous programmatic statements. It cannot draw the necessary conclu- sions about its own mistaken empiricist and pragmatist method, which led it to accept these wrong policies. The real lesson of 1968 and 1969 is that principles and history cannot be cheated. 1963 decided to leave aside 1953, but by 1969, 1953 is hacking away with great vigour! Formal criticism of the positions now taken up by Maitan, Germain, Frank and ‘others, even though expressed in the strongest terms (e.g. Peng calls for a ‘return to the road of Trotskyism’ and states that the Fourth International, i.e. the Unified Secretariat, must share the responsibility for the betrayal of the Algerian Revolution) will not answer these historical questions. Indeed it conceals them. The lessons for the Trotskyist movement of this experience are invaluable. In a number of countries the resources and cadres of the sections of the International Committee have undergone considerable growth. In Britain the SLL is now publishing a daily paper, the Workers’ Press, which marks a qualitative step forward after the years of isolation of Trotskyism since Trotsky’s death in 1940. But at the centre of all this is the development of Marxist theory. The Socialist Labour League based its struggle in Britain on the fight for Marxism against revisionism in the Fourth International. To check the political evolution of our opponents after six years is therefore invaluable. The documents here published comprise: 1. ‘The Future of the Fourth International’, report presented to the 1963 Conference of the International Committee (reprinted from Fourth International Vol. I, No. 1). This summarises the political differences with the ‘Unified Secretariat’ at the time of ‘re-unification’. 2. Report (1969) of Joseph Hansen to the New York local of the SWP giving his political impres- sions of the recently concluded world conference of the Pabloites. Fourth International, Winter 1969/70

[p005] 3. Joseph Hansen’s view of the majority line of the Unified Secretariat on Latin America and the strategy of guerrilla warfare. In this document Joseph Hansen takes up at considerable length the view of Maitan and the Secretariat majority, who subordinate the whole struggle in Latin America and internationally to guerrilla warfare. Hansen does not deal with Maitan’s outright liquidationism and abandonment of the revolutionary role of the working class in a Marxist way. He ignores the question of a proletarian party with a programme to unite the toilers in the countryside, instead turning essen- tially to the students in the urban centres. But it is the historical pay-off for the SWP’s own revisions which is instructive. Hansen may criticise Maitan’s capitulation to Castroism today (and may ridicule Maitan’s conclusion that the whole international struggle is posed on the actions of guerrilla activity in Bolivia!) but in 1963, in the SWP resolution upon which it based advocacy of reunification (“For Early Reunification of the World Trotskyist Movement’), Hansen him- self said: Along the road of a revolution beginning with simple democratic demands and ending in the rup- ture of capitalist property relations, guerrilla warfare conducted by landless peasants and semi- proletarian forces, under a leadership that becomes committed to carrying the revolution through to a conclusion, can play a decisive role in under- mining and precipitating the downfall of a colonial or semi-colonial power. This is one of the main lessons to be drawn from experience since the Second World War. It must be consciously incor- porated into the strategy of building revolutionary Marxist parties in colonial countries. and further: . . . We believe the Trotskyists of Cuba should seek to enter and take their place in the soon to be formed unified revolutionary party where they can work loyally, patiently and confidently for the implementation of the fully revolutionary socialist programme which they represent. In addition to mobilizing support for the Cuban cause, as they are doing, the Trotskyists throughout Latin America should try to bring together all those forces, regardless of their specific origins, which are ready to take the Cuban experience as the point of departure for the revolutionary struggle in their own countries. Given the fact that Peng Shu-tse collaborated 100 per cent with the SWP in 1963 in effecting ‘reunification’ his harsh words for the majority today have a hollow ring. Thus he now says: ‘The comrades have consciously or unconsciously Editorial discarded the Transitional Programme and have re- placed it with the strategy of guerrilla warfare’, and further, on Castro: Castroism has made no theoretical contribution to Marxism, Castro’s programme is merely one of action based upon his own experiences in the Cuban revolution, ie. guerrilla warfare. It is clear that Castro does not understand some of the basic tenets of Marxism or some of the most important lessons and experiences.of the world working class movement, such as the Bolshevik Revolution, the struggle between Trotsky and Stalin, etc. This lack of understanding is expressed practically in Castro’s politics by the lack of any democratic- centralist party in Cuba itself, by the lack of any democratic government in Cuba based upon the workers’ and peasants’ soviets, by the support of a guerrilla war strategy in Latin America, etc. 4. Documents of the Pabloite Conference and of Conference discussion on the question of Latin America. 5. Letter from a leader of the Chilean section (May 1969) in which the guerrilla warfare line of Maitan is endorsed against Hansen. This Chil- ean leader supported Hansen’s proposal for re- unification in 1963, primarily with the argument that to oppose Castroism was ‘sectarian’. 6. Documents of the Pabloite Conference discussion on China. Important here is that the China discussion raises revisions of the whole characterization of Stalinism in Trotskyist theory. In point of fact, the main resolution before the Conference, which received unanimous support, consistently uses the term ‘Stalinism’ to refer only to the past of the Stalinist movement, and only in a reference to France uses it for current parties and policies. Now in the discussion on China Hansen is forced to draw attention to the fact that Pierre Frank and the ‘majority’ are pro- ceeding to erase the whole decisive period of Trotsky’s work for the Fourth International. They do this by using the formulation ‘bureaucratic centrism’ to characterise Stalinism. This was Trotsky’s expression for the Stalinist bureaucratic line in the USSR and the Comintern in the period before the 1933 German defeat. It refers to a period when the perspective remained one of a struggle for reform within the Communist International and the Soviet state. After that, Trotsky characterised Stalinism as the principal counter-revolutionary force on the world arena; from this followed the: strategy of political revolution, not reform, in the USSR; and 55

[p006] the formation of a new International, not reform of the old, on the world scale. What the ‘Unified Secretariat’ discussion re- veals is that the majority tendency is fully com- mitted to the rejection of the theoretical and political grounds for the very existence of the Fourth International, and that this was the basis of their capitulation first to Stalinism and then to Castro. Hansen and the SWP have gone all along the line with this revisionism. Even their hesitation at the magnitude of the revisionism at this late stage is conditioned entirely by prag- matic requirements. Hansen wants some way of explaining and justifying his opposition to the Progressive Labour (PL) and other Maoist groups. It is this, and not a theoretical analysis and revaluation of the whole experience, which brings him into opposition to Frank. Just as in 1953 and 1963, Hansen’s start- ing-point is the pragmatic requirements of SWP policies, which are in fact opportunist in the extreme. This means that if principles are repeated and history is called in, it is purely to justify this opportunist course. 7. Draft Resolution for the Pabloite World Conference (1969) entitled ‘The Algerian Revolu- tion from 1962 to 1969’ together with an amend- ment proposed by Charlier and Germain. This resolution constitutes additional documentation of the catastrophic results of Pablo’s revisionism, leading to liquidationism. After bitterly opposing the International Committee’s insistence on the construction of independent revolutionary working- class leadership, and encouraging the idea that Ben Bella would be an African Castro (i.e., in their opinion ‘would go over from_ petty-bourgeois nationalism to Marxism), the revisionists now, after the Boumédienne coup d’état, the incarceration of Ben Bella and the purging of all socialists, in- cluding Pablo himself, from state offices, con- clude: In this context the fundamental strategic task re- mains the organization of a revolutionary Marxist vanguard and the subsequent (?) formation of a party of the urban and rural workers which would struggle for the overthrow of the Boumedienne regime and the establishment of a government of the worker and peasant masses. The collection of documents in this issue of Fourth International will enable everyone to contrast the theoretical and principled prepara- tion of the International Committee with the shameful revisions and betrayal of the Unified Secretariat. The International Committee considers that the study of these ducuments will prove a valu- able education for the young cadres of the Fourth International. ‘Without revolutionary theory, no revolutionary party’: the essential preparation for the great class struggles now enveloping Europe was a theoretical preparation; not just a defence of existing doctrine, but the development of theory in struggle against its enemies, the revisionists, and the building of independent revolutionary parties. If the young workers now coming to the Trotskyist movement are to understand their own movement, that necessitates a thorough study of the history of struggle for the theory upon which the Fourth International is based. In the Interests ot accuracy, we have not attempted to impose a consistent editorial style on the Pabloite documents, reproduced herein, which, but for neces- sary deletions, are presented in their original form. ( Editors.) Two pamphlets by Leon Trotsky Class & Art Problems of Culture under the Dictatorship of the Proletariat Speech by Trotsky during discussion, May 9, 1924, at a meeting called by the Press Depart- ment of the Central Committee of the RCP(B) on Party Policy in the Field of Imaginative Literature. Price: Two shillings The intelligentsia ‘and Socialism A review written for The the St. Petersburg review er , Sovremenny Mir in 1910, of intelligentsia Der Sozialismus und die and Intellektuellen, by Max Adler . published in Vienna in the same year. Price: One shilling Socialism: NEW PARK PUBLICATIONS LTD. 186a CLAPHAM HIGH STREET, LONDON SW4 a aes susecaccca cae sccccccccccc 56 Fourth International, Winter 1969/70

[p007] The future of tie = Fourth international This article consists of the Report on the International Situation made to the International Conference of Trotskyists held in London in September 1963, and attended by national sections affliated to the