In Defence of Trotskyism

[p004] IN DEFENCE OF TROTSKYISM ECAUSE it firmly adheres to Marxism, and B because it is attracting militant workers to its . ranks, the Socialist Labour League has been under constant attack in the short period since its establishment. Its first major proposal on a vital social question—that the London Labour movement form united defence committees and defence squads to protect the citizens of north Kensington from fascist gangs——has had the compliment paid to it of systematic misrepresentation in practically every national news- paper. Transport House has passed a series of solemn decrees proscribing the League and banning its weekly paper, and has even succeeded in expelling ten very active members of the Labour Party. Dutt, the Stalinist leader—who generally manages to find his own level in controversy—has written about the ‘lavish American finance’! that is supposed to be sustaining the Marxist movement in its challenge to capitalism and to class collaboration! It is with a certain measure of pride that we face these attacks. They show the Socialist Labour League is on the right road. And now, over the noise of the heavy artillery of Fleet Street and Smith Square and the poisoned arrows of King Street, it is possible to hear the faintest ping of a peashooter, as a body with the high-sounding title of ‘The International Secretariat of the Fourth Inter- national’ joins in the attack. Anxious not to miss the chance of adding their mite, the international secretaries have the following to say about the Socialist Labour League: By inordinate attacks against the leaders of the L{abour] P[arty] and the trade unions, and by its ‘third period’ activity at the rank-and-file level, disregarding the most elementary discipline necessary towards the party in which supposedly the essential work was to be done, [the Socialist Labour League] is now destroying all the positions won inside the Lfabour] Pfarty] and the trade unions, in a struggle—ill-chosen both in terms of the correlation of forces and in terms of timing—with the reformist bureaucracy.? ‘Inordinate attacks.’ ‘ “Third period” activity at rank- and-file level.’ This is how this body describes the activity of The Newsletter and the Socialist Labour League, whose only aim is to- build an alternative working-class leadership to that of the Right wing and the Stalinists! 1 R.P.D., ‘Notes of the Month’, Labour Monthly, vol. xii, p. 155, April 1959. — . 2 ‘Open Letter to the Organizations of the International Committee’, Internal Bulletin of the International Secretariat of the Fourth International, April 1959. Serious workers will ask: how does it come about that a body professedly Marxist, professedly Trotskyist, can make such a farcical assessment of the recent developments in the Marxist movement in Britain? Who are these international secretaries and what do they stand for? And what is the road to the construction of an international revolutionary leader- ship that can restore the good name of the Fourth International—which the international secretaries tarnish with every breath they utter—re-establish the political and ideological authority of world Trotskyism, and construct a world communist party in the best traditions of working-class internationalism? OUR attempts have been made to organize working men on an international scale. The First International was founded in London on Septem- ber 28, 1864. The defeat of the Paris Commune of 1871 and the vast expansion of world capitalism checked the development of the revolutionary vanguard and prevented its becoming an international working-class party. The Second International collapsed ingloriously as an international force when the first imperialist world war broke out in 1914. The reformist leaders capitulated to ‘their’ imperialist governments, betraying the pledges they had made to wage an international struggle against war. The conquest of power by the Russian working class in 1917 set the stage for the creation of a new world party. Those socialists throughout the world who were faithful to Marxist principles came together to form the Third Inter- national—the Communist International. Unlike the loose association that was the Second International, in. which each national leadership put collaboration with ‘its’ own capitalist class above the interests of the working class throughout the world, the Third Inter- national was truly international; it was a disciplined, fighting organization; it was a world party, dedicated. to the cause of socialist revolution. But the degeneration of the Soviet Union led to the degeneration of the Communist International. The bureaucratic leaders of the Soviet Union usurped the authority of the Russian revolution and turned the Communist International from an instrument of world revolution into an organization for the defence of their own bureaucratic privileges. To. Stalinism ‘inter- 33

[p005] LABOUR REVIEW nationalism’ stands for working-class collaboration with the Soviet bureaucracy. It means the subordination of working-class and colonial struggles to the diplomatic needs of the Soviet leaders. Stalinism transformed the communist parties into frontier guards for the Russian bureaucracy. By 1933 the inability of the Communist International to prevent the victory of German fascism showed that it had decayed as a world revolutionary party. It was a mere formality when ten years later, at the behest of Roosevelt and Churchill, Stalin finally buried the corpse. From 1933 onwards there could be no doubt of the urgent need for the revolutionary vanguard to build a new international. It was then that the world move- ment which had developed around the struggle of Trotsky and the Left Opposition inside the communist parties issued the call for a new communist inter- national, a fourth international. WENTY-ONE years ago, in September 1938, "TL airs delegates from eleven countries, representing the most advanced sections of the international working class, met and set up this new international. "These founders of the Fourth International were the true heirs of Marx, Engels and Lenin. They had carried forward the internationalist traditions of Bolshevism in a struggle against Stalin’s narrow, nationalistic doctrine of ‘socialism in one country’. They had pitted their strength against the policies of defeat and capitulation which the Communist Inter- national in its degeneration had imposed upon the ‘struggles of the German workers, the French workers, the Spanish workers. From the historical experience of the working class ‘and its revolutionary vanguard in the ninety years since Marx and Engels had written the Manifesto of the Communist Party, they drew conclusions about what ‘the workers of the world and the oppressed colonial peoples must do to overthrow decaying capitalism. Their conclusions were embodied in the ‘Transitional Programme’, written by Leon Trotsky and adopted at this. founding congress as the programme of the new international. .Ehe world was on the brink of a war which the policies: of the Right-wing and Stalinist reformists had helped:.to prepare,;. These mis-leaders had led the working class into a series of defeats. In Germany the ‘social.:democrats had refused to mobilize the working class for.social revolution—the only way Hitler’s road to power could have been barred. The German Communist Panty had pursued an ultra-Left policy and, 3. ‘The ‘ ‘Death - ‘Agony: of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Working Class... ‘The Transitional Programme of the Fourth "Wfemational (n.d.). Fy July-August 1959 with Stalin’s theory of ‘social-fascism’, had split the German working class. Both parties collapsed miser- ably with the victory of fascism. In 1935 the seventh and last congress of the Communist International had met, veering from the ultra-Left theory of ‘social- fascism’ to the Rightist, reformist theory of the people’s front, based on the Stalinist bureaucracy’s desire for an agreement with French and British capitalism. It was the application of this theory by the Spanish Com- munist Party which destroyed the revolutionary initiative of the workers and peasants; the party confined the struggle to a defence of the bourgeois republic when the only way Franco could have been destroyed was by carrying forward the socialist revolution. . In Russia, the progress of the working class towards socialism had been retarded and distorted by the political dictatorship of a privileged caste which could only betray revolutionary movements in the rest of the world. The Stalinist: rulers had lately carried through their abominable frame-ups, executing the Old Bol- sheviks almost to a man. The ‘Transitional Programme’ declared that objective conditions for socialist revolution on a world scale were ripe. Capitalism was in decay. Ever more destructive wars, fascism and unemployment were the marks of that decay. The working class had both the power and the numbers to destroy this outmoded system. But between the working class and socialism stood all the old working-class leaders. ‘The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by a historical crisis of the. leadership of the proletariat’, the programme began. But ‘the laws of history are stronger than the bureaucratic apparatus’.* By these words Marxists expressed their confidence that the working class would be able to break the stranglehold of Stalinist and Right- wing reformism, and fulfil its historical task: freeing humanity from capitalism. That task, however, could be fulfilled only under. the leadership,,of a Marxist vanguard, which would be built’-in the inevitable conflict between the workers and their traditional leaders. The ‘Transitional Programme’ was the found- ation for the new international which would eventually lead the working class to the overthrow of imperialism, and to political revolution in the Soviet Union—the overthrow of the bureaucracy and the restoration of soviet democracy—which would be spurred on by an extension of the socialist revolution in the west. Jn 1938 the Marxists who founded the Fourth International expected revolutionary explosions in the maior capitalist countries in the forthcoming imperialist war. They expected that these developments would hasten the disintegration of Stalinist and Right-wing reformism. * They predicted that the crisis caused by 4 Ybid. pp. 3, 5. crs

[p006] - ad \ i] baw DEFENCE OF TROTSKYISM the war would enable the Fourth International to win the leadership of the masses of the people. , ET the Fourth International did not emerge as a mass force out of revolutionary developments. brought about by the war. The members of the Fourth International on the Continent were decimated by the war and by Nazi occupation. In the main it was a new, young generation of supporters of the Fourth International that emerged. By the end of the war the movement still consisted of groups in the major countries, for the most part carrying out only propaganda activity, still with much work in front of them if they were to show that their programme was correct and win support -for it. Discussing the defeat of the Spanish revolution, Trotsky had written: ‘Even in cases where the old leadership has revealed its internal corruption, the [working] class cannot improvise immediately a new leadership.> Trotskyism came out of the second world war still isolated from the mass movements, still weak in numbers. Despite Stalinist and Right-wing betrayals, it was unable to win mass support. Thanks to the treachery of Stalinism in western Europe the old capitalist politicians assumed leader- ship once again. Mass movements in France and Italy were diverted by their Stalinist leaders. In Britain the Right-wing Labour leaders came to power and successfully headed off the mass movement against Toryism. The Fourth International now faced a period of slow, painful, uphill work to build the Marxist movement in the various countries. Then in 1947-53 came the period of the Cold War. The question that presented itself to the Marxists was this: could revolutionary parties be built in time, before war began? - It was in this period, under the pressures of Stalin- ism and imperialism, that certain prominent individuals in the Fourth International, headed by Michel Pablo, secretary of the international executive committee, began to revise, and reject, the fundamental principles of the Marxist movement. It was these revisions which caused a split in the Fourth International in 1953. pessimistic prophecy of inevitable and immediate Pp ABLOISM had as its central thesis a deeply war. This forecast not only presumed the ~ _ organic incapacity of the American and European \ working class to prevent such a war—thereby dismiss- 5 Leon Trotsky, ‘The Class. the Party and the Leadership. Why Was the Spanish Proletariat Defeated? (Questions of Marxist Theory)’, Fourth International (New York), vol. i, no. 7, p. 193, December 1940. ing their revolutionary _potentialities—but also attributed to the imperialist rulers a power, homo- geneity and stability which they did not possess. Pablo made this forecast of inevitable, immediate war in a_ speech he delivered on July 12, 1952. He said: ‘The international situation is evolving irreversibly within a very brief period towards a world war of a giver character and within a given relationship of forces.” He went on‘to proclaim, modestly, that ‘this evaluation, which we were the first to make, not only within the ranks of the workers’ movement but even to a certain extent of all political movements, no one dares to attack any longer’. Referring to this ‘evaluation’ as ‘this inevitable evolution of the situation’, Pablo added: ‘Not wanting to lull ourselves with illusions, we attempt to act as of now in consequence of this position and in practice.6 Thus the ‘inevitable’ war and all that Pabloism saw as flowing from it in the policies and activities of working-class bureaucracy were to be the immediate axis of the Fourth International’s activity. Since the ‘inevitable’, ‘immediate’ war would be a war against the Soviet Union, Pablo declared that by its very nature it would be an international civil war, a ‘war-revolution’. The world was already being polarized between the forces of revolution and the forces of imperialism. Working-class bureaucracies, both Stalinist and Right-wing, were in a vice. On the one side was the irreversible march of imperialism to war—a war against the whole working class. On the other side was the irreversible revolutionary wave. ‘The situation is pre-revolutionary all over in various degrees,’ declared Pablo in February 1952, in a report to the executive committee of the Fourth International, ‘and evolving towards the revolution in a relatively brief period. And this process from now on is irreversible.” But these irreversible developments did not mear that the working class and the oppressed peoples in struggle would come into ever sharper conflict with their bureaucratic leaders; or that the latter would seek, as in the past, to head off and destroy revolution- ary development. On the contrary: according to Pablo: the conflict between the interests of the bureaucracy and those of the working class would be overcome.. The bureaucrats would be swept along by the revolu- tionary wave, which would end imperialism. 6 ‘For a Decisive Turn in France (Speech of Comrade M.. Pablo at the 8th Congress of the P[arti] C[ommuniste] I{nternationaliste]—French Section of the Fourth Inter- national), International Information Bulletin (Socialist Workers Party, New York), November 1952, p. 5. 7 ‘The Tactical Application of the Third World Congress. Line. Report by M. Pablo (Adopted by the Tenth Plenum of the I[nternational] Efxecutive] C[ommittee]) February 1952°, International Information Bulletin (Socialist. Workers. Party, New York), 1952, p. 8. as ~

[p007] LABOUR REVIEW In this way Pablo revised the conception of the bureaucracy as being by its very nature a barrier to working-class struggle. In its place he put the idea that the present leaders of Right-wing and Stalinist parties—or some of these leaders—would adjust them- selves to ‘mass pressure’ to the extent that they would be forced to carry through the final battle against capitalism. For example, speaking of ‘countries where the [Right-wing] reformist movements embrace the political majority of the [working] class . . . as in England, Austria, Belgium, Australia, Canada, Holland, the Scandinavian countries, Switzerland and, with certain reservations, India and Germany’, Pablo declared: ‘These organizations cannot be smashed and replaced by others in the relatively short time between now and the decisive conflict. All the more so since these organizations will be obliged, whether they wish it or not, to give a leftward turn to the policy of the whole or at least a part of their leadership.” The bureaucrats were trapped by the revolutionary wave and forced to act counter to their nature— ‘whether they wish it or not’. To use words properly, they were forced to change their nature; for if a counter- revolutionary no longer acts as a counter-revolutionary he ceases to be one. The Stalinist bureaucracy in particular was caught between the drive of imperialism to war on the one side and, on the other, the pressure of the masses of the people in a continuous, unfolding revolutionary wave. While this bureaucracy might wish to betray the revolution, imperialism could no longer offer it any compromise. So, in its own interests, it was forced to go forward in struggle against capitalism under mass pressure. Under this pressure communist parties could be forced to struggle for power, or, as Pablo delicately: put it, ‘project a revolutionary orientation’. “The communist parties of the capitalist countries . . . find themselves placed in conditions absolutely different from those of pre-war days’, declared a document called Rise and Decline of Stalinism, which embodied Pablo’s ideas, and around which the sharpest controversy developed in 1953. This document, adopted as a resolution by Pablo’s ‘Fourth World Congress’ in 1954, stated: In countries where the C[ommunist] P[artie]s are a majority in the working class, they can, under exceptional conditions {advanced disintegration of the possessing classes).and under the pressure of very powerful revolutionary uprisings of the masses, be led to project a revolutionary orientation counter to the Kremlin’s directives, without abandoning the political and theoretical baggage inherited from Stalinism . . Under these conditions the disintegration of Stalinism in these parties must not be understood in the next immediate Stage as an organizational disintegration of these parties or as a public break with the Kremlin but as a gradual internal transformation, accompanied by a political differentiation within their midst. It is even possible that such a process of 8 Ibid. p. 11. 36 July-August 1959 Stalinist disintegration may be accompanied in some com- munist mass parties by a certain consolidation or an organizational strengthening, to the extent that, under the pressure of circumstances, they modify their policies to conform closer to the interests of the masses.9 The ‘irresistible process’ was also at work on the Soviet bureaucracy itself. Pablo was one of those who after the death of Stalin predicted a liberalization of the Soviet bureaucracy when it was forced to grant certain concessions to the Soviet people in order to maintain its rule. Pablo wrote: The dynamic of their concessions is in reality liquidatory of the entire Stalinist heritage in the USSR itself, as well as in its relations with the satellite countries, with China and the communist parties. It will no longer be easy to turn back .... Once the concessions are broadened, the march towards a real liquidation of the Stalinist régime threatens to become irresistible,10 The programme of the Fourth International had maintained that the Soviet bureaucracy must be over- thrown by the Soviet masses under the revolutionary leadership of a Marxist movement in the USSR: ‘Only the victorious revolutionary uprising of the Oppressed masses can revive the Soviet régime and guarantee its further development towards socialism. There is but one party capable of leading the Soviet masses to insurrection—the party of the Fourth International!!! Pablo placed a question mark over this basic proposition. Pablo’s theory of ‘mass pressure’ is set forth most clearly in a recent article where he states: ‘In the concrete currently existing conditions, particularly in the advanced capitalist countries, this transitional political power will be able to take on the form only of a government of the workers’ party or parties, sup- ported by the revolutionary organization of the masses 9 ‘Rise and Decline of Stalinism. Resolution Approved by the Fourth World Congress of 1954’, Fourth International (Paris), no. 1, pp. 52, 53, Winter 1958. The June 1957 . issue. of the French Pabloist journal La Vérité des Travailleurs summed up the conclusions of Pabloism, which it said had been ‘remarkably well confirmed’. Among these conclusions it gave the following : “The antagonism between capitalism and socialism cannot but lead to a war- revolution, i.e., an armed class struggle on the world scale .... In the course of the process leading to the war- revolution, and during the latter, the proletariat in the countries where the recognized leadership is Stalinist will tend to regroup itself around the C[ommunist] Pf[arty]. '-This leadership may put forward a revolutionary policy under pressure of the masses .. . The outcome of the war-revolution which is by far the most likely is the victory of socialism. The building of socialism will take place under the banner of the Fourth International’ (English translation in Against Pablo Revisionism. Bulletin no. 1, pp. 41-3, September 1957. Our emphasis). 10 Michel Pablo, ‘The Post-Stalin “New Course”’, Fourth _ International (New York), vol. xiv, no. 2, p. 39, March- April 1953. 11 The Death Agony of Capitalism, p. 39.

[p008] DEFENCE OF TROTSKYISM in committees.”!? In Britain this would mean a government of Labour Party and Communist Party MPs—which is precisely the present policy of the British Communist Party. Pablo goes on to outline his followers’ tasks: In reality the goal of the extra-parliamentary revolutionary action of the masses could not be to bring about a parlia- mentary government of a coalition between the workers’ parties and one wing of the bourgeoisie, but to impose a government of the workers’ parties, and to support it in the application of its transitional programme. By educating and mobilizing the masses for a whole period of years on the basis of a transitional programme oriented towards workers’ power of the workers’ parties in the advanced capitalist States, it would turn out to be possible to impose this political solution, either by winning the parliamentary majority or by forcing the bourgeoisie to accept the govern- ment of a coalition of workers’ parties .. . A consistent class policy on the basis of a concrete transit- ional programme adapted to the conditions in each country, and a united front of the parties claiming to be of the working class, would be able also in certain cases to win a parliamentary majority, and in others to impose a govern- ment of the workers’ parties even if it were minoritary [sic] from the viewpoint of parliamentary representation. Then, beginning with the formation (however it came about) of a workers’ government, mobilization and organization of the revolutionary masses, enabling the workers’ government to begin to act by going outside the bourgeois framework. The ‘new road’ to socialism in each advanced capitalist . country, i.e., the concrete transitional road to socialism, depends on three conditions: the working up of a transit- ional programme adapted to the peculiarities of the country; a systematic united front policy of the workers’ parties; the orientation of the programme and the front towards the government of the workers’ parties applying this programme and backed by the extra-parliamentary mobilization and organization of the masses.13 In an article on ‘The Arab Revolution’ Pablo calls for the formation, not of revolutionary parties, but of ‘transitional parties’. In Morocco and Tunisia he calls for the formation of a mass Labour Party based on the trade unions. ‘In the more special case of Algeria, it is obvious that both the revolutionary Marxist tendency and the essential forces of a mass Labour Party of tomorrow will emerge from the inevitable social and political differentiation within the present FLN.!* The Marxists in these Arab countries must first work to form the Labour Parties so that they can work inside them in accordance with the theory of ‘mass pressure’. All this rigmarole shows Pablo not only turning his back on Marxist principles, as embodied in the “Transitional Programme’; it also shows him arrogantly refusing to take into account the rich experience of the Marxist movement in Ceylon, where the Lanka Sama Samaja Party has established itself as a mass party. What is the essence of Pablo’s theories? They are a 12 Michel Pablo, ‘Democracy, Socialism, and Transitional Programme’, Fourth International (Amsterdam), no. 6, p. 34, Spring 1959. 13 Jbid. p. 35. 14‘The Arab Revolution’, Ibid. pp. 56, 57. complete negation of the Marxist conception of the conscious intervention of the Fourth International. If one accepis the Pabloite dogma of irresistible processes, then the entire struggle for correct working-class leadership, and therefore for the building of the Fourth International, becomes completely redundant. If ‘objective conditions’, the ‘new reality’, as Pablo called it, can make bureaucracy act as a revolutionary force, then what earthly purpose does the Marxist movement serve? Why should Marxists put forward their own policies against those of the present leaders of the working class? Why should the Marxist move- ment fight to build itself as a realistic alternative before the working class, if ‘mass pressure’ can cut revolution- ary channels along which the present leaders, or at least sections of them, will have no option but to travel? But it is not simply a question of running away from the difficulties of building a revolutionary movement, and covering one’s retreat by an artificial and mechanical scheme of ‘irreversible processes” which will bring the victory of socialism. Those who declare that irresistible, irreversible mass pressure can prevent bureaucrats from carrying through counter-revolution- ary acts as in the past are in practice helping those bureaucrats. They are blunting the fight for correct policies and providing excuses for the bureaucracy. 15 When the east Berlin rising took place in 1953 the main lesson the Pabloists drew was that the bureaucracy was no longer able to repress in the same way. They sharply attacked articles in the Militant, the weekly paper of the U.S. Socialist Workers Party, declaring that these articles were contrary to the ‘line’ of the International and ‘devised from old schemas and reminiscences and not from a correct analysis of the present reality, of the relationship of present forces, from present dynamics’. A correct analysis of what happened in east Berlin should have been based, according to them, on ‘international revolutionary dynamics and the new relationship of forces between the masses and the bureaucracy, obliging it to make real concessions and limiting its possibilities of repressions and purges’. Again, according to the Pabloists the events in east Germany ‘did not primarily demonstrate the reactionary and repressive role of the bureaucracy (which we know very well) but its weakness in relation to the masses and its dislocation under the pressure and influence of the masses. The native and Soviet Stalinists in east Germany did not respond primarily by mass repressions, shootings etc. to the workers’ revolt. but much more by a series of concessions. Elsewhere, in Hungary. Rumania, Poland, Bulgaria, Albania, they proceeded by the granting of concessions even before the: pressure of the masses erupted, precisely in order to avoid’ it.... On the other hand, the events in eastern Germany have given rise to a highly significant and precious. phenomenon for the understanding of the real and not the bookish course of the political revolution in these countries, namely a split from top to bottom of the Stalinist party, an entire wing of the bureaucracy capitulating before the workers and taking their side at the time of the workers’ uprising’ (Letter of the International Secretariat of the Fourth International to the Socialist Workers Party, September 3, 1953). Three years later the bureaucracy, which was no longer ‘responding primarily by mass repres- sions, shootings etc.’, brutally crushed the uprising of the Hungarian workers. 37

[p009] LABOUR REVIEW No revolutionary organization, no combat organization, will ever be built on the basis of theories such as these. That is why Marxists must oppose them. S the proverb says, ‘Tell me who your friends are, and I will tell you who you are’. Is it accidental that the ideas of Pablo were first taken up in this country by one John Lawrence and a small group around him in St Pancras? Lawrence has now developed Pablo’s ideas to their logical conclusion by joining the Communist Party. A small monthly paper, Socialist Fight, carries the torch for Pablo in Britain. It is a flickering torch; but the British Pabloites have bravely tried to keep its feeble flame alight by joining in the attacks on The Newsletter and the Socialist Labour League. Its February issue denounces as ‘irresponsible adventurism’ The Newsletter’s call for the rank and file of the trade unions to organize around militant policies. To Socialist Fight it is no less im- portant to warn against this ‘folly’ than to criticize the policies of the Right-wing Labour and trade union leaders. To The Newsletter the main task is to build an alternative leadership with a socialist policy in the factories and trade unions. To Socialist Fight the main task is this: ‘Above all pressure must be mobilized at branch and district level.” (The emphasis is in the original.) By distorting the position of the Socialist Labour League, by declaring that the aim of the League is to get together a tiny handful of militants and artificially call them a rank-and-file movement, the British Pabloites seek to cover up their own avoidance of the task of building an alternative leader- ship. The prospect that Pabloism holds out is that one sits tight contemplating one’s navel until the ‘process’ within the Right-wing and Stalinist parties pushes the bureaucracy in a revolutionary direction. The Socialist Labour League has not come into being by accident, but out of the struggles of the past year, which showed that such an organization was needed by the British working class. It has come into being to intervene in the experience of the working class, to organize, educate and prepare the vanguard which is drawing fundamental lessons from the employers’ offensive, from rank-and-file resistance and from Right- wing betrayals. It has come into being at a time when the growing militancy in industry is not yet being carried into the Labour Party. It has come into being to fight for class struggle policies inside the Labour Party and trade unions, so continuing and carrying forward in present-day conditions the best traditions of Trotskyist. work within the mass organizations of the working class. - Pablo and his band of international secretaries have 38 he te Sok July-August 1959 made not the slightest attempt to analyse or assess the present situation in Britain, the objective class re- lations, the industrial struggle, the political struggle, the problems and tasks of Marxists that flow therefrom. This is not their method. For one thing, such an analysis and assessment could be fruitful only if it drew on the experience of practical activity by the Marxist movement in Britain. But the international secretaries do not need to draw on anyone’s living experience. They have their ready-made scheme. And that means subordinating one’s own intervention in the class struggle until mass pressure forces the bureaucracy or sections of it into the leadership of a revolution. The anti-Marxist idea that ‘mass pressure’ could change the essential nature of the bureaucracy; the anti-Marxist idea that ‘mass pressure” could force the bureaucracy to go along with the world revolution: the assumption that—again under ‘mass pressure’—the communist parties could lead the working class to the conquest of power: it was against these Pabloite theories (which are indeed the ‘crude revision of the Marxist conception of the bureaucracy’!6 which Lazour REVIEW branded them almost two years ago) that Marxists defending the principles of the Fourth International gave battle. There could be no com- promise, for what was at stake was the International itself as a revolutionary force. For while Pablo and his supporters might repeat, side by side with their revisionist ideas, formal phrases about the necessity for the Fourth International, their revisionist ideas in practice steadily undermined its very foundations. Formal adherence to the International while destroy- ing its content, its programme: that sums up Pabloism. Those who put forward Pabloite ideas in the proud name of the Fourth International are impostors. Trotskyists in various countries who opposed this revision of Marxism therefore set up an International Committee to defend the programme and principles of the Fourth International against these people who posture as Marxists. The supreme task for Marxists today, as the Inter- national Committee sees it, is to establish the political independence of the working class through the con- struction of powerful revolutionary parties in every country, parties which will provide the solid foun- dations for the Fourth International. If this task is to be achieved there can be no compromise with Pablo’s theories. Between Pabloism and the Marxist ideas which guide the practical activity of the Socialist Labour League there lies an unbridgeable gulf. The Marxist cadre of the future cannot emerge without a consistent struggle against Pabloism. 16 ‘Soviet Reality’, Labour Review, vol. ii, no. 5, p. 130, September-October 1957.

[p010] DEFENCE OF TROTSKYISM STRONG guiding centre for the revolutionary workers’ movement in all countries must be built. An international cannot be a simple sum of parties; it must be a unified organization undertaking revolutionary tasks and able to help the workers’ struggles throughout the world. But how is such a powerful world party to be built? The crisis of the proletarian leadership cannot be overcome by means of an abstract formula.. It is a question of an extremely humdrum process. But not of a purely ‘historical’ process, that is, of the objective premises of conscious activity, but of an uninterrupted chain of ideological, political and organizational measures for the purpose of fusing together the best, the most conscious elements of the world proletariat beneath a spotless banner.17 The International will not be built by a group of impressionistic ‘world strategists’ handing down the tactical line to each country; nor by commentators charting the ‘irreversible processes’. An international movement will be built by helping national movements to reach a thorough understanding of the realities of struggle in their own countries, and of their tasks. The richest and most important lessons for the development of the revolutionary movement will be drawn from its practical struggle to win leadership, from the struggle for its programme, from its intervention in the battles of the working class and the oppressed peoples. The building of a world party is in many ways more complicated than the building of a national party. But nationally and internationally alike the authority of leaders can only be based on confidence, born out of experience, in their ability and the correctness of the practical and theoretical help they give to revolution- aries participating in the class struggle. N association with the International Committee of I the Fourth International, the Socialist Labour League is proposing to call an international confer- ence open to all revolutionary parties and groupings that are seeking to build Marxist movements in their 47 Leon Trotsky, ‘Luxemburg and the Fourth International. - Cursory Remarks on an Important Question’, New Inter- national (New York), vol. ii, no. 5, p. 169, August 1935. countries. It is planned to hold this conference in the autumn of 1960. To this conference there will be in- vited: all who stand for the building of Marxist - working-class parties in the capitalist countries, in the colonial and semi-colonial countries and in the countries under the rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy; all parties and trends which stand for the defence of the Soviet Union, China and the countries of eastern Europe; all those directing their efforts to the construction of a revolutionary leadership capable of organizing the working class for the socialist revolution; all those who, seeking to be in the forefront of the national liberation struggle in the colonial and semi-colonial countries, base their activity on the need to build independent working-class revolutionary movements as the only leadership able to carry through the struggle for national independence to the end by fusing the national revolution with the socialist revolution; all those who oppose the idea that Stalinism and social democracy can be transformed into revolutionary forces and who consciously intervene in mass movements for the pur- pose of winning leadership and smashing the bureaucrats’ hold over the working class. This conference will have the purpose of assessing the present state of the Marxist forces throughout the world, and of elaborating ways and means whereby the common experience of these forces can help each national movement to develop as a revolutionary force. The conference will be a step towards the eventual unification of the international revolutionary forces into a world party on a realistic basis, with a centre whose functions can develop as the growth of the movement permits the rise of representative executive bodies with an authority that has been earned by work. The time has come to reorganize the Fourth Inter- national and build it as a powerful international party linking the vanguard of the working class throughout: the world. We are confident that the proposed inter- national conference will be a milestone along this road.

[p011] LABOUR REVIEW July-August 1959