PIERRE FRANK'S ADVENTURES WITH THE DIALECTIC

member. •Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary maramant) lania and afta- movement, Lenin, and aner him Trotsky, insisted upon this principle against every enemy, inside the revolutionary movement as well as outside.

In the Bolshevik Party, in the Communist. (Third)_ International and then in the Fourth International, the middle-class attack on correct revolutionary strategy always had to be answered by deepening the struggle for basic Marxist theory.

Recently, in the International Committee of the Fourth Internatinnal nolitical diffarences have PURERUS ME once again come to the point of ference by the AJS (youth organiquestioning the very foundation of zation of the OCI) last year. Marxism, dialectical materialism.

The Socialist Labour League and the majority of the Inter- The primary national Committee, basing them- task of selves on the theoretical gains of the revolutionary the struggle against the empiri- youth cism and pragmatism of the Socialist Workers Party and other Pabloites who split from This amendment placed the the Fourth International, have struggle to develop Marxist theory fought to consciously begin every as the primary task of revolutask from thẹ standpoint of tionary youth. developing Marxist theory. The Organization Communiste Inter- in his lengthy article, Frank nonationaliste (OCI) of France and where says whether he agrees a minority of the IC have rejected with this amendment or not! He this struggle.

They prefer to regard Marxist to speculate and manoeuvre. The theory as something embodied in education of his own movement the programme of the Fourth on the principled questions inInternational, in the direction of volved does not enter his head. which the experience of the We have noted the evidence for workers' struggle will tend.

The documents of this split are such fundamental questions now being published in Workers earlier, in exposing the explicitly Press. Meanwhile the enemies of idealist basis of Tariq Ali's book, Trotskyism in the self-professed 'The Coming British Revolution'. 'United Secretariat of the Fourth International' in Paris (Pabloites) sentence (... consciousness deare trying, with little success, to termines history . . .) was the WRINAM WAICHWORD xb AN: ' determines take some comfort for themselves, no doubt to help obscure the raging difference in their midst.

One of the Pabloite leaders, Pierre Frank, writes in the March 6 issue of 'Intercontinental Press' an article ' "Construct"

"Reconstruct" the Fourth International'. While consisting largely of stale and unfounded criticisms of the stand taken by the International Committee on the questions facing the Trotskyist movement since 1953, Frank's article is revealing, nevertheless, for what it reveals of his own theoretical (or rather anti-theoretical) starting-point.

Frank quotes in full the amendment proposed by the Young Socialists to the resolution presentea to ine Essen yourn conThe first point to note is that is interested in it only in order this absence of any attention to just as, in that book, one vital clue to all the positions of Tariq Ali and the International Marxist Group, the • Pabloite section in Britain, so, in Frank's article, his comments on the consequences of this amendment take us to the root of the whole Pabloite conception.

Frank says: 'Lambert's refusal to vote for this amendment provoked two remarks from Healy. In the hrst place, this response showed that Lambert was guilty of underestimating, or renouncing dialectical materialism. On this point, we are faced with one of Healy's customs. Every time he engages in a tendency or faction struggle he believes it is necessary to introduce the question ot dialectical materialism. Why? Well because Trotsky dealt with this question in the struggle against Burnham and Shachtman in 1939.

"Trotsky did this because the question was introduced by his opponents, one, totally denying dialectical materialism, the other declaring that it had no practical importance. Trotsky conducted many tendency struggles without introducing this question; but that matters little for Healy. For him, every internal struggle cannot help but pose the question of dialectical materialism. And if no one else is inclined to raise it, he will never hesitate to do so.

'Must we add that when Healy induges in this bizarre idiosyncrasy, he succeeds most often in making himself look ridiculous?' Pierre Frank could do well to read over the very dispute with Burnham and Shachtman which he refers. Trotsky says:

"The opportunists, I am informed, greet with bursts of laughter the very mention of "dialectics". In vain. This unworthy method will not help. The dialectic of the historic process has more than once cruelly punished those who tried to jeer at it' Suited to the petty bourgeoisie, not to the proletarian revolution Pierre Frank, Joseph Hansen and Ernest Mandel have long ago substituted impressions for Marxist analysis. This method, suited to the petty bourgeoisie, but not to the proletarian revolution, led these gentlemen to agree on the fact that 'neo-capitalism' had so changed the proletariat that its revolutionary. role would pass over to-at different stages-the revolutionary peasantry, a left nationalist revolutionary leadership sui generis, the students.

Frank boasts about the 1963 'reunification' of his own forces with the American SWP on the basis of this agreement. He says:

... this period [of splits in the Fourth International] ended in 1963, when the principal Trotskyist organization in the world wound up advancing identical answers to those new problems and reuniting.' So desperate is Frank to avoid recognizing the dialectic of history which has made nonsense of the orientation to non-workingclass forces that he deliberately falsifies events. He knows that within months of the 'reunification', Pablo himself and his supporters split from the Unified Secretariat!

He knows also that the Lanka Sama Samaja Party of Ceylon, hailed by him as the first mass Trotskyist party, joined a • bourgeois coalition in 1964 and had to be expelled!

He knows that Castro, hallec is the epitome of a new 'natural' revolutionary Marxian as the basis of the 'reunification' went over immediately to the worst kind of Stalinist attack on If Frank continues shamelessly to sneer at dialectical materialism and to ignore the real history, it is because the dialectic has certainly found him out completely. Right at the time when the proletariat, written off by of tarxist theory, he laughs it demands the development off. That is to be expected.

His version of the 1939-1940 split in the SWP (Burnham and Shachtman) is, once again, dashed off in an irresponsible and carefully distorted fashion, very typical of the petty-bourgeois contempt for a truly theoretical revolutionary approach. Is it true that Trotsky only raised the question of dialectical materialism because his opponents did?

Let Trotsky speak for himself:

... My first conversation with comrades Shachtman and Warde, in the train immediately after my arrival in Mexico in January, 1937, was devoted to the necessity of persistently propagating dialectical materialism. After our American section split from the Socialist Party, I insisted most strongly on the earliest possible publication of a theoretical organ, bearing again in mind the need to educate the Party, first and foremost its new members, in the spirit of dialectical materialism. In the United States, I wrote at that time, where the bourgeoisie systematically: instils vulgar empiricism in the workers, more than anywhere else it is necessary to speed the elevation of the movement to a proper theoretical level...

'Let me also add that I feel somewhat abashed over the fact that it is almost necessary to justify coming out in defence of Marxism within one of the sections of the Fourth International!' (Trotsky. In • Defence of Marxism', pp. 142-143.)

A hundred other quotations from the same book could be cited to show just how far away from Marxism Pierre Frank has gone. In suggesting that dialectical materialism is some separate 'question' , which only comes up by chance in certain struggles, Frank engages in a complete renunciation of Marxism.

Once having thrown out dialectical materialism as theory of knowledge of development of consciousness, 'commonsense tall back on the method of a series of impressions. Each stage in the history of a party is then taken only on its own particular terms and concerns only the 'concrete questions which initially provoke a discussion.

In this way the unity of theory and practice, continuously negating and enriching each other is thrown away.

Dialectical materialism is challenged by all these revisionist forces, because it is precisely dialectical materialism which differentiates parties of the Bolshevik type from all bourgeois and reformist parties.

A clear far-sighted, completely thought out world outlook In order not to give way under the pressure of bourgeois public opinion and police repression, the proletarian revolutionist, a leader all the more, requires a clear, far-sighted, completely thoughtout, world outlook. Only upon the basis of a unified Marxist concepuon is it possible to correctly approach "concrete" questions.' ('In Defence of Marxism,' p.144.)

When Pierre Frank describes the SLL's concentration on dialectical materialism as la bizarre idiosyncrasy' on the part of its national secretary, comrade Healy, and characterizes the result as ridiculous, Frank is repeating virtually word-for-word the behaviour of the Burnham-Shachtman opposition in 1939, who went into fits of laughter at the mention of dialectics.

What is at stake is not simply formal education in philosophical texts, but the whole method of building revolutionary parties and developing revolutionary perspectives in the struggle for power. Dialectical materialism is not an abstract philosophy, separate from the sciences which deal with nature and society, but is the theory of knowledge based on the development of these sciences. Without a continuous struggle for dialectical materialism, revolutionaries cannot understand the relation between their own activity and consciousness, on the one hand, and the objectively changing class relations of which they are part.

The rejection of dialectical materialism, as surely in the case of Pierre Frank as of Burnham and Shachtman, is the surest sign of having abandoned this revolutionary practice in favour of political representation of the petty bourgeoisie, a class whose very position in society inclines it to consider its consciousness to be independent of and higher than the objective necessity of social development.

Finally, let us see how the crude empiricism which Pabloism substitutes for dialectics works Far left: Lenin. Left: Trotaky;

revolutionary theory there can Castro; attacked Trotskyism. A for Marxist analysis. out today. Look at Frank's ow version of the possible source of the split in the Internation: Committee (as we have seen, h dismisses without even considera tion the possibility that a differ ence over dialectical materialist could produce a split!). We hav underlined certain expressions t emphasize the type of argumen Frank uses:

• a certain rigidity o Healy's part and Lambert's un bridled opportunism appear t clash. It would not be surpri ing if the source of this clas lies in the international situatio in the two organizations and i the relation of forces betwee them.

'At one time Healy carrie more weight than Lambert in th "International Committee". Not it seems to be the other wa around. Also, Healy's organiza tion may be losing some of it steam. In that case, his rigidit could be explained as a mean of halting this developmen Lambert's document alludes t this fact.

In the history of the Marxis movement, surely no one ha ever ventured into the explana tion of political differences an flimsier basis than this!

Lenin, for example, insisted i World War I that, in understand ing the split in Social Democrac it was necessary to explain th ceralise nor the tendencies n economic roots (in im Deranso or tne tendencies Social Democracy, to trace th history of the differences, so a to produce a systematic analysi of the relation betwen revision ism, reformism, social patriotisn and the struggle for a new Inter national. Prose, Salurday April 1, 1972 PAGE 6 both Inalsted on the principle without be no revolutionary movement'. Fop: bove: Mandel; substituted impressions Trotsky similarly always probed to the class roots of tendency differences and traced out their origins. Without this dialectical method there is no Marxist approach to the question.

But Frank very deliberately simply compiles a list of impressions from the surface, together with his own hopes: the SLL 'may be losing steam,' 'it seems to be the other way around', it would not be surprising'! Then what seems to be' becomes 'a fact'!

As we saw in the first part of this article, Frank is equally cavalier in his attitude to the history of his own movement. Even to open up the question of the real history of the issues on which the Pabloites 're-united' in 1963 would blow them wide apart and would show that the struggle conducted by the International Committee at that time for dialectical materialism, against pragmatism and empiricism, was the only basis for a truly proleraria i precisely because taran onentation. petty-bourgeois infection of the movement, via Pabloite revisionism, was so virulent, that all the basic questions of the Marxist method were raised.

What Frank may not recognize today is that the more he dabbles in the differences in the International Committee, the more he will expose his own role.

This is because the development of the working class now demands from the revolutionary vanguard a struggle to deepen and develop dialectical materialism as the method of the proletarian revolution.

the best way proper rights or more than two years-and of ene Yusy 1970 of the Inter- une ore connerenc 'The three delegations, meeting in Paris, believe i that the discussion is legitimate one between the sections of the IC as well as within each of these which signed the October 24 text.

Moreover, and on the question of 'reconstruction of the Fourth International' since the October 24 document alludes to the