Aspects of the History of the Fourth International

Last year the first-ever Summer School held by the Workers Socialist league heard a series of lectures on Marxist Philosophy, Internationalism, the History and Method of the Transitional Programme, Stalinism, and the History of the Fourth International. A series of articles in Socialist Press carried the main substance of the lecture on Stalinism, and a series to commence in April will deal with some basic questions of philosophy. The problems of the post-war International, however, are less easily tackled in the confines of serialised articles, and we are therefore reprinting a slightly edited transcript of the lecture on this topic in these pages. We invite readers to send us written responses and comments on this article in order to further develop the discussion on these questions so vital to the Trotskyist movement.

I am going to concentrate on aspects of the post-war history of the Fourth International centring on the two major splits of 1953 and 1963. To examine them, I will have to include in this report some examination of the processes whereby the buffer countries in Eastern Europe in the post-war period were transformed into workers' states. We have to do that in order to answer the kinds of questions that have come up in discussion on Stalinism. Questions have been asked for example about whether Stalinist parties were not in fact capable of carrying out centrist policies, and whether it would be correct to say that Stalinism in certain instances has played a revolutionary role in the extension of nationalised property relations into these countries.

The position I will be arguing is that it is not correct to say that Stalinism at any point in those processes played a revolutionary role. I will argue that the processes are entirely explainable from the standpoint that Stalinism remains the major counter-revolutionary force in the workers' movement on a world scale. I will try to show why the task of Trotskyists internationally and in every country –not simply in those countries which most obviously parade capitalism or bureaucratic deformation, but also those which might from time to time even put on a left face–is to build independent revolutionary parties to lead the struggle for the conscious establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This means both the overthrow of bureaucracy and the overthrow of capitalism internationally.

We must begin at the starting point of the fight for the Fourth International. That was the recognition by Trotsky in 1933 that it was now impossible to transform the Comintern from within and to turn that into a revolutionary force. The betrayals of Germany 1930-33 and the failure of any sections within the Comintern to take up any struggle whatsoever against the treacherous policies in Germany were indicators that the Comintern was now dead as a revolutionary force within the world proletariat.

It was clear from the very beginning that the Fourth International had to differentiate itself sharply from Stalinism. It had to take the line of establishing the absolute political independence of the working class from the Stalinist bureaucracy in every country. That was the reason, the necessity of the formation of a new International. Otherwise the struggle could have remained within the Comintern.

So when the Fourth International was formed, the Transitional Programme spelled out not simply those demands on which we tend to concentrate in our daily agitation and propaganda work within the working class – demands designed to relate the Trotskyist movement to the mass movement and to form a bridge to the working class. The Programme also contained fundamentally and centrally a series of principles which differentiated Trotskyism from Stalinism and drew the lines of political independence of the working classs. This political independence was of course not simply independence from Stalinism, but was also developed in the sections dealing with the colonial revolution and the under-developed countries and Fascism, as well as declaring opposition to all the various forms of popular frontism in which the working class could fall under the influence of petty bourgeois liberal leaderships. The Transitional Programme embodies these principles, and takes them forward in a new organised form in the fight for the Fourth International.

But almost immediately after the formation of the International in 1939 there began an extremely bitter factional struggle within one of its biggest sections, the SWP in the USA. This was one of the sections with the longest and most distinguished history within the Fourth International. But within that emerged a basically petit bourgeois opposition, led by Burnham and Schachtman.

They argued from the appearances of events, from appearances of developments and actions carried out by the Kremlin bureaucracy, that in fact the Soviet Union was no longer a degenerated workers' state but was now a state capitalist country. In other words they declared that there was now no longer a distinction between the property forms and the established regime of the Soviet Union and the capitalist states internationally. This of course threw immediately into question the necessity to defend those gains against imperialism in the case of war.

Of course war was an immediately impending aspect in the situation in 1939. It was necessary for Trotsky to take much of the responsibility for directing the SWP in the struggle against these tendencies and towards the Marxist method of dialactical materialism. Trotsky showed how the movement had to focus on the understanding of the Soviet Union, and that this could not be achieved simply by attaching a label to it as it seems to be today, saying that that answers the question. It is necessary to understand the emergence of the Soviet Union as it is today as a process of development, a historical development in which a whole number of forces have played a role. Seen in this light, Trotsky insisted, the most decisive material force which still remains predominant in the Soviet Union is the overthrow of capitalist social relations which took place in the social revolution in 1917. It was this overturn that still determined the fundamental essence of the Soviet Union, and that overturn had not been reversed by events.

Whereas of course the Stalinist dictatorship within Russia exercised police powers and methods as reactionary in many cases as those of Hitler, and attempted in many ways to carry out brutal and totalitarian methods within the Soviet Union, the fact remained that that bureaucracy rested on property relations fundamentally different and fundamentally opposed to those of Hitler.

It was absolutely necessary to take these material facts as a starting point in analysing the Soviet Union, and not the moral response or the indignation of people who responded in horror to surface appearances of the bureaucracy without going on to analyse the roots of that bureaucracy.

This understanding of the development of the Soviet Union in 1939 as a historical process had to be the key also to the Fourth International's attempts to understand post-war developments. The tragedy was that so few elements within the International grasped the importance of this method. Few were able in fact to apply the method of Marxism in the fight to understand the post-war period. Of course this was hampered vastly by the impact of the Second World War on the International.

As we have sketched in the international documents we have produced, the leading cadres and the most advanced sections in many cases in many countries of the world were slaughtered, persecuted, imprisoned. They were pressed by fascism on the one hand and the bureaucracy on the other, while their own bourgeoisies also attacked the small forces of Trotskyism. The movement suffered tremendously. From its very strength, from the very fact that the Fourth International alone carried the torch of proletarian internationalism through the second world war, precisely for that reason they suffered the brunt of the attacks of the anti-communists and the forces fundamentally opposed to revolutionary socialism during the war. That, of course, sharpened immeasurably the problems that were faced in the post-war period, because the small, weakened forces, with many of their most principled and dedicated fighters having been sacrificed in the struggles for principle during the war period, had to confront a post-war situation which was completely unexpected. The situation did not fit in with any of the schemas that had been drawn up in the pre-war period. It had to be tackled from that standpoint by a new, often unseasoned leadership, unaccustomed to leading a world movement.

What were the particular problems? Well, firstly, Stalinism had not been destroyed in the course of the war by capitalism, nor had it been overthrown in the course of the war by its working class. Both factors had been very real dangers during the war period, both had come to the surface and had to be contended with by the Stalinist bureaucracy, but neither had in fact taken place. The spontaneous resistance of workers within the Soviet Union to wage cuts and speed-up that had taken place during the war period had lacked conscious leadership and had not been able to remove that parasitic bureaucracy. But at the same time all the military might of imperialism had failed to defeat the workers' state, despite the criminally inadequate and wrong policies through which Stalin attempted bureaucratically to defend relations within the Soviet Union.

So Stalinism remained intact. The restorationist currents within the bureaucracy that had also emerged during the war had not found support within the Soviet Union. That question was one for Trotskyists to solve and it had not, as expected, been resolved during the second world war.

The second problem was that capitalism, which every Trotskyist wanted to believe in the post-war period was about to enter a further period of acute crisis and collapse, was in fact on the verge of entering a sustained period of feverish expansion based not on healthy expansion of the productive forces, but upon exploiting the wreckage, the destruction and the defeats inflicted upon the working class over the previous thirty years–defeats inflicted with the aid of the treacherous leaderships of the working class.

So there was a new situation, which did not immediately show its main features on the surface of events and could not immediately be grasped by the leadership of the Fourth International.

Thirdly, the weakened and isolated nature of the Trotskyist forces cut them off from an ability to intervene within the workers' movement of their own country, left them forced to speculate and to feel their way without the ability to test out and to develop their theories in the practice of the class struggle.

When we come on to examine the shortcomings and problems of the International in that period, we must not in any way underestimate the difficulties they confronted. It would be entirely unscientific simply to say here were these, these, and these wrong theories and wrong positions and therefore all we were dealing with in the post-war period was a bunch of revisionists. That leaves out completely the fact that in order to develop correct positions, in order to develop politically, a struggle had to take place. In that post war period a struggle had to be waged simply to exist as the Fourth International. Things seem much simpler to us today when we look back and see things with the benefit of hindsight.

That does not mean of course that we must pull back from analysing the errors that were made. These errors have affected the whole of the development of the post-war Trotskyist movement. If we look, for instance, at Cannon's Theses on the American Revolution, written in 1946, we can say that Cannon both overestimated the stage of acute capitalist crisis, failing completely to see any possibility of the reconstruction of capitalism in the post-war period and, more important still, minimised the crisis of leadership within the working class internationally looking to a whole series of growing revolutionary waves which would eventually bring Trotskyists to the leadership and enable the overthrow of capitalism in a comparatively short space of time.

Within those Theses, this position contained two opposites. On the one hand was the strength of Trotskyism, its complete faith and confidence in the ability and the determination of the working class to struggle against imperialism. But on the other hand, there was a dangerously wrong estimate of the way in which those struggles would take place and a failure to stress adequately the necessity for leadership within those struggles.

That failure was to characterise many of the problems that subsequently emerged within the International. Probably more imporant, from 1946/47 onwards, the Fourth International was forced to take a stand on the complex and very uneven evolution of the Buffer Zone countries in the post-war period. This was complicated by the fact that before a coherent theory was worked out on the Buffer Zone question, Tito split with Stalin. This brought a new complication. Yet before the Stalin/Tito split was properly and satisfactorily worked through, there came the decisions of the Third World Congress of the Fourth International in 1951. From then on there was a continuous failure to solve one problem before the next one arose. In 1953 while confusion reigned, there came the emergence of political revolution in East Germany. And the failure of the leadership to seriously attempt to go back to the beginning and to re-assess the way in which discussion and positions had emerged on these questions, created an accumulating theoretical problem for the Fourth International, which we are only now beginning consciously to grasp. I think we should emphasise this point. We are only now beginning consciously to grasp the problem of theoretical development within the International over the last thirty years, particularly in relation to the problem of Stalinism.

With all these difficulties was combined the problem of new forces that had some history in the Trotskyist movement, coming forward into leadership positions in the post-war period, and wanting simply to fit what was taking place in the very new post-war situation, into the established writings of Trotsky, Lenin and Marx. They wanted to find rigid schemas that they could bring forward from the pre-war period and just fit them round the new events. This would mean they would not have to apply the method and the content of the theories that were put forward in the earlier period, but that analysis of fresh events could be brought ready-made into the movement. This kind of approach resulted also in a distortion of theory and wrong positions emerging within the movement.

I want to go on to account for these problems of development by examining first what was happening in Eastern Europe as a whole between 1944 and 1950. I will then move on to examine what happened during a similar period in Yugoslavia and in China, before returning to examine the responses within the Fourth International to these events, and the way that these developed towards the crisis and the split in 1953.

When talking about the extension of nationalised property relations into Eastern Europe and the process that brought that about, the most decisive question is not whether this or that country became a bureaucratised workers' state. The most decisive question in the role of Stalinism internationally is that the Buffer Zone formed a part of an international deal between Stalinism and imperialism. While Stalin had the use and the control over the Buffer Zone countries in the immediate post-war period, this formed part of a scheme in which he cynically traded the selling-out and conscious betrayal of revolutionary struggles particularly in France, in Italy and in Greece, for "peaceful coexistence" with imperialism in the post-war period.

The moves by Stalinism that took place in the Buffer countries can thus only be seen as completely subsidiary to that overall goal and overall drive by Stalinism for the stabilisation of post-war capitalism, and the consolidation of the balance of power with a capitalist class which was racked by deep crisis and in an extreme state of nervousness and exhaustion after the war. This was exactly the time that, given an ounce of leadership and assistance from the Soviet Union, in Italy in particular, and in France and Greece, capitalism could have been overthrown by force of arms by the working class and genuine social revolutions could have taken place. That possibility was consciously sabotaged by the Soviet Union. As Tim Wohlforth says in The Theory of Structural Assimilation:

"The whole shape of the post-world-war world was determined not so much by the transformations in the buffer, but rather by restabilisation and the growth of capitalism over two thirds of the world's surface, something that could not have been achieved without the Kremlin's active cooperation."

The second point to stress is the way that the Kremlin approached the question of the Buffer Zone. Why a Buffer Zone? Firstly because the Soviet Union had very nearly been defeated at various points in the war. The basis of the bureaucracy had very nearly been taken away by the military intervention of imperialism. Quite clearly, Stalin as a representative of the bureaucracy was not about to stand back and allow that kind of situation to recur if it could be prevented, but neither was he prepared to utilise what we would see as the main asset of the first workers' state in the world, the international mobilisation of the working classes in their own countries against the bourgeoisie in order to defend the Soviet Union.

Stalin had categorically refused that course of action throughout the whole of the war, even in defence of the Soviet Union. In the post-war period he remained determined not to do so, so there was a situation where in order bureaucratically and militarily to defend the Soviet Union by the most conservative means, Stalin set out to create a 'buffer' of states round the borders of the Soviet Union to guard against the immediate threat of a military attack by imperialism. That was the situation at first. This objective was assisted by the fact that, in the process of the defeat of German imperialism, the Russian Red Army had marched into many of these countries in any case. The Red Army, that had actually driven out the Nazis, was present in force in those countries. The imperialists, however, mainly concerned with stabilising relations in the major capitalist countries, did not feel in too good a position to attempt to regain those 'buffer' states and were prepared grudgingly to concede them in a deal with Stalin in the post-war settlement.

Stalin also saw these states as a bargaining counter, to be held over in case of further diplomacy and exchanges taking place. By holding these states, Stalin could argue that if imperialism conceded this or that, the states might be ceded back; if no concessions were made, he could threaten that they be absorbed into the Soviet Union.

In addition, we should not forget the fears that Stalin had of revolution on the borders of the Soviet Union. In every area where the Red Army had gone into the buffer countries, they had been greeted by spontaneous revolutionary upsurges of the working class. Factory occupations, demonstrations and strikes were staged by workers throughout these countries, though the workers' movement in many of them had been laid waste for years by fascism and by oppression during the war period. The workers greeted the Red Army, seeing it as a force for revolution. Stalin was not at all confident that if he pulled the Red Army forces out of the Eastern European countries that the native capitalist class–which had been decimated during the war period in those in particular, either as active pro-Nazis, or as active collaborators, while others chiefly consisted of foreign capitalists not on the scene–could restore "order" in those countries.

Stalin saw the danger if the Red Army simply withdrew, that there could be actual revolutions on the very borders of the Soviet Union itself, at a time when Stalin was still contending with struggles of his own working class rebelling against further exploitation as a result of the war period.

So this calculation was also a very real factor. There was a need for the Kremlin to halt the movement of the working class before anything further could be done with these buffer countries.

The final factor which was also of importance again related to the internal situation within the Soviet Union, which had suffered massive industrial devastation during the war period. In order to find a rapid way to reestablish the industrial processes Stalin looked around for the most convenient bureaucratic solution.

The most obvious answer was to loot factories, plant and equipment wholesale from the Buffer Zone countries. From this respect also, these countries were of value to the bureaucracy. Whole sections of industry were shipped out by the Red Army for use within the Soviet Union itself.

Now all of these objectives could be satisfied just as well, or better, if these countries were formally speaking not workers' states. Certainly if you are going to plunder plant and equipment out of a country in the name of Socialism it is much better if the plundered nation is not regarded as a workers' state. And certainly if you are going to use a country as a bargaining counter with imperialism it is much better if you have not gone the whole hog and actually removed the capitalist class altogether before you offer to trade it back again. In this way many of these questions left a short-term option for Stalin to attempt to retain control over these countries without the complete transformation of them into bureaucratised workers' states.

So we find that while this post-war working-class upsurge was at its height; while the factories were being occupied; while the strikes and demonstrations were at their peak, Stalin set out with a policy of establishing a coalition government with the bourgeoisie in each of these countries. In many cases this meant he had to retrieve the bourgeoisie from imperialist countries where they had fled. As the Nazis had run, so had the native bourgeoisie, scared that they would suffer the same fate as the Nazis' leftover, discredited agents, getting short shrift from the working class.

So in many cases it was necessary for the Stalinists to go and find the bourgeoisie to form a 'popular front' coalition with. There is a definite comparison between these efforts and the move towards coalition governments to head off the mass movement in Italy and in France in the immediate post-war period. While Stalinists actually entered bourgeois governments in these countries, in the Eastern Bloc countries they set up bourgeois governments, to form a coalition. In many cases there are accounts of the way they even had to reconstruct the bourgeois parties themselves. You had the spectacle of soldiers driving round in Red Army vehicles setting up bourgeois and peasant parties in these countries in order to establish the basis of a coalition government.

These coalitions, once established, were the means to syphon away the power from the hands of the popular committees, local committees, occupation committees and peasants' committees that sprang up with the defeat of the Nazis. The objective was to remove local power from these popular organisations, and gather it into the hands of a state power over and above that of the working class. Where necessary, these governments nationalised factories in order to get the occupying workers to leave them, and put the control back into the hands of appointed state managers. This was one of the original causes of the nationalisations that took place in the Buffer Zone. In other cases, nationalisation took place for different reasons. In many cases it was made necessary because the factories had been owned by known pro-Nazi employers, who had skipped out of the country as rapidly as possible when they saw the Nazis were going. This left no other way of running the factories except through nationalisation, there was not even any bourgeoisie to take them over. In many cases foreign-owned plants were taken over where again the bourgeoisie failed to take them up and resume production.

After the working class upsurge had begun to die away, after these coalition governments had in most cases established themselves, came the emergence of the Cold War and serious attempts by the imperialists to isolate the Soviet Union and as far as possible weaken it.

Stalin became nervous of the bourgeois element within these coalition governments so close to the borders of the Soviet Union. In particular he began to question whether he could seriously control these areas and use them for their purpose as a military buffer against imperialism, if within the governments of those areas were actual bourgeois elements who could at any point form a rallying point for pro-capitalist elements to fight against the Soviet Union. This was a major turning point in the decision to go towards the all-out transformation of these countries.

It is interesting to see that included among the Buffer Zone countries in the early period were Austria and Finland. While the majority of the Buffer Zone countries were in fact transformed into workers' states, Austria and Finland stopped short at that point. They did not go through the final process of transformation and of course remain today within the orbit of capitalism though heavily influenced by their border relations with Russia and the deformed workers' states.

This process of transformation was not a preconceived plan. It was in each country within the Buffer Zone an uneven and empirical process, designed to exclude the independent mobilisation of the masses. It began in almost all cases with increased nationalisations of industry and of the land. It then developed in pace with Cold War pressure, moving on to the elimination and suppression of the bourgeois and peasant parties within the coalition governments within the buffer states.

This was linked to moves to destroy the social power of the petit bourgeoisie, in particular steps taken against retail and wholesale trade, on which the petit bourgeoisie largely functioned in those countries. In the countryside there was a push towards forced collectivisation. Affairs were directed in this way in each of these countries regardless of their national peculiarities. The object was to set up economic colonies functioning on the model of the Soviet Union.

This meant each country was expected to develop as an industrial-based economy on the model of the Soviet Union. There was no attempt at a scientific division of labour on a planned footing. Instead relations stayed on a country-to-country basis between Buffer states and the USSR. Then came the emergence at various points within this development of five-year plans. Also key in the process were the purges to remove various elements from the Stalinist parties of these countries. These purges showed the way in which the process was headed. First out were many bourgeois elements who had recently joined and had been allowed into the Communist Parties as part of the coalition moves. They were now purged as part of the steps towards structurally transforming the countries, for which many bourgeois personnel were not sufficiently reliable. Secondly those within the CPs who might be more conservative on the pace of transformation were purged. Third, and most important, almost all those with some roots in the mass movement, or roots in the old CPs from before the war who might possibly seek to defend the national interests of those countries against the overall domination of the Soviet Union, were purged. Particularly feared were those who had the possibility of actually mobilising action against the direct exploitation of their countries by the Soviet Union. These purges were absolutely massive–for instance in the Polish party, 370,000 were purged, in the Czech party 550,000, in Hungary 200,000 and in East Germany 300,000.

All these moves were aimed at setting up an absolutely monolithic Communist Party absolutely subservient and dependable for the Soviet Union. At the same time came the decision to fuse the numerically depleted CPs with the national social democratic parties. The leaders of the social democratic parties had devoted their whole existence to subservience to their own national bourgeoisie. As a result they had become very much accustomed to the idea of simply administering whatever state regime happened to be around. They could therefore provide some safe but experienced personnel to step into leading positions in these monolithic parties.

At the same time there was the massive increase in the size of the state administration apparatus. In Poland for instance it increased to the point that the state bureaucracy virtually doubled while the population substantially fell as against the pre-war period. The increase in the state administrative bureaucracy was accompanied by a fusing of the party apparatus with the state bureaucracy, so that in a process directed from above the state machine and the state bureaucracy was taken over completely by a purged and a monolithised Communist Party.

All these changes in these countries were imposed from above, without the involvement and even in many cases despite the feelings of the masses. This period following 1946-47 was not a period of working class upsurge. There was no 'pressure from the masses' on these CPs to lead these actions. Instead it was a period in which the postwar upsurge which had flowed through these countries had been squashed or allowed to die away by the governments in those countries. All of these policies were imposed in a bureaucratic manner by a Stalinist leadership determined to avoid the mobilisation of the masses in the slightest independent action.

The only slight exception to that was in Czechoslovakia, where in order to remove a slightly more stubborn bourgeois element from the coalition, the Communist Party effectively mobilised mass demonstrations and in the end a coup against it. That was the only real exception in the main Eastern European countries to a process in which the masses were consciously excluded while piecemeal and empirical social changes were partly and unevenly taking place in each of these countries.

Tim Wohlforth in Structural Assimilation, spells out the impossibility of analysing such a complex process by taking single aspects of developments. He shows the way in which that process is a whole series of quantitative changes which at a certain point–extremely hard to define–finally produces a degenerated workers' state. He says,

'No single factor, such as nationalisations, or even the dominance of the CPs, should be viewed in isolation, but rather one must seek to understand the process as a whole. Essentially, structural assimilation is a combined process of the destruction of the political and social power of the bourgeoisie through administrative means, the consolidation of a monolithic party, which is essentially an extension of the soviet bureaucracy, the purging of the state apparatus of the bourgeois elements, and the fusion of the party and the state bureaucracy into a single ruling bureaucratic caste'.

Of course we must add that it all took place under the aegis of the Red Army, in many cases physically present in those countries, in other cases implicitly present in that the Buffer Zone had been ceded by imperialism to the 'sphere of influence' of the Soviet Union. The imperialists didn't feel able to combat that process or intervene in those countries in order to hold it back.

What took place there was the crumbling of bourgeois power cracked by its own self-created crisis, and the moving into that vacuum of new forms of government, under conditions where the masses were not mobilised and power was at all points kept out of the hands of the rank and file of the workers movement and of the peasantry.

This is the general pattern for Eastern Europe. But because of the importance of Yugoslavia in subsequent discussions, I'll go through Yugoslavia in a little more detail just to show the way that it fits and the way that it slightly differs from this pattern.

In Yugoslavia, the partisan struggles against the Nazis during the war period were led by the CP. The CP was under the leadership of Comintern agent Tito. It was a monolithic CP. Tito had been sent in with the specific command to construct a monolithic CP subservient to Moscow, and had done so. The national bourgeoisie, in many other countries had been prepared in one form or another of a popular front to struggle to a limited extent against the occupying Nazis.

But in Yugoslavia the bourgeoisie saw a threat in its programme that their Communist Party put forward for the partisan struggle.

This was because in order to win a sufficient force to actually challenge the Nazis in Yugoslavia, the Communist Party had to include demands for land reform and nationalisation. When attempts were made to remove that from the programme of the partisans, the peasant forces on which they were dependent threatened to depart. It was therefore impossible for Tito to actually remove those demands, although he would very much have liked to do so then in order to involve the bourgeoisie in the fight.

The call for land reform and nationalisation meant that the national bourgeoisie thought it much preferable to keep the Nazis than to fight with the partisans against them. Indeed they actually fought with the Nazis in many instances. The eventual liberation of Yugoslavia concluding the victory against the Nazis and their agents within Yugoslavia, was therefore carried through by the partisan forces under the leadership of the CP.

The coalition deal that was then done–as in every other Eastern European country–was extremely fragile because the vast majority of the Yugoslavian bourgeoisie either met grisly ends at the hands of the partisans or else had decided to avoid that by fleeing the country. So the deal was done by actually importing exiles from the United States who were to form part of this coalition, and the Tito/Subasich agreement was drawn up in 1944. It only lasted a few months, despite the efforts of the Stalinists because of the incredibly weak position of the Yugoslav bourgeoisie. The state apparatus, which had been riddled with people who had sided with the Nazis and which had been overthrown by the partisans, had also been completely destroyed in the process of the civil war. Virtually nothing in terms of existing repressive apparatus could hold back the working class in Yugoslavia.

But this did not mean that Tito, even given those conditions, was prepared to move in and legitimise the occupation of the factories that had taken place simultaneously with the victory of the partisans.

In fact the major nationalisations in Yugoslavia, despite this weakened position of the bourgeoisie, took place eighteen months after they did in Poland or in Czechoslovakia. In other words, simply because capitalism was weakened it did not mean that the Stalinists in any way whatsoever took advantage of that to develop the movement towards transformation. In fact the mass movement that Tito confronted was seen as a problem because of the rapid collapse of the coalition whereas in the other Buffer Zone countries such coalitions lasted for two or three years. It meant that the forward tide of working class struggles hadn't entirely subsided at that point.

It was therefore necessary for Tito to move much more rapidly towards the transformational process than in many other countries in order to head off that movement and control it, and to keep it within the national confines of Yugoslavia. Tito had an advantage in this task. He had a firm base of support within the Communist Party, which he had established and led through the partisan struggle. This CP had actually controlled distinct areas of the country prior to the complete partisan victory against the Nazis. Tito therefore felt a certain independence from the overall pattern of the Eastern European countries, and felt confident to proceed to the process of structural change within Yugoslavia.

The new constitution of Yugoslavia, which embodied most of the points which were to be commonly adopted by the Eastern European countries later, was actually adopted as early as in 1946. The beginnings of the process of removing the remaining bourgeois elements, nationalising property and so on, began fairly rapidly from that point onwards.

By the time of the 1948 break with Stalin–the break which was later heralded as Tito heading on an independent course in order to lead the victorious Yugoslav revolution–Yugoslavia had already virtually completed the transformation process which was to take the other Buffer countries several years more.

The process had simply begun earlier, with less resistance and complications. So when we look at the conflict between Stalin and Tito, we're not looking at a conflict between one man who wants to make a revolution against another who wants to stop him, we're looking at a disagreement over the pace and extent to which Soviet requirements could be imposed upon the economy and the new situation in Yugoslavia.

We're dealing with Tito's resentment of being ordered by Stalin not to give any support whatsoever to the Greek partisan forces with whom the Yugoslav forces on which Tito rested had formed a close fighting relationship. More important still was the question of the economic development within Yugoslavia, because Tito knew that to hold the masses within Yugoslavia within confines it was necessary to provide certain economic–not political–concessions. That would be impossible if the full-scale exploitation of the Yugoslav economy projected by Stalin was to be carried through. This was a basic element in the split between Stalin and Tito.

Stalin for his part of course couldn't allow Tito to stand up against his strategy under conditions where Stalin was still carrying out similar transformations to those in Yugoslavia, at uneven stages of development in the rest of the European Buffer Zone. If Tito could stand up and defy Stalin then Gomulka might also stand up in Poland and the various other leaders might also rebel in the other countries.

From both sides, then, the bureaucratic interests which led to the division between Stalin and Tito can be seen as flowing out of their national requirements and the contradictions they confront as bureaucracies attempting to balance between opposed social forces within their own countries and internationally–particularly in the case of Stalin. Tito was different from the other leaders in that he had a basis to resist Stalin. He had sufficient self-confidence and basis within Yugoslavia to resist Stalin's requirements.

But of course Yugoslavia didn't have the basis to proceed independently to the development of the economy on a national level. And instead of attempting any kind of a principled call within the international workers' movement, Tito preferred to put out an appeal to imperialism for economic assistance and in various ways to lean towards imperialism rather than mobilise the masses within Europe and internationally. In that, Tito showed that he retained to the full the Stalinist heritage, the bureaucratic method of approaching these questions, seeing it as necessary to hold back the working class at all costs, and seeking a way in which the various forces can be played off one against the other in order to preserve his own position.

But because the break was not–as some subsequently claimed–on ideological grounds, when the reconciliation took place in 1956, and Tito came back into the Stalinist fold, welcomed by Kruschev, toasted in the blood of the Hungarian workers, it was without any internal ideological problems within the Yugoslavian CP.

The break with the Kremlin had not been carried through as an ideological break, but had been an empirical move based on bureaucratic interests. When bureaucratic interests dictated, Tito and Kruschev moved back together again.

We should look also at the events in China which to a certain extent show a parallel. One clear parallel is that as in the case of Yugoslavia, nobody in the Trotskyist movement between 1947 and 1949 interpreted the Chinese struggles in the way they described them after the event. Nobody claimed that the Chinese events were an initiative taken by Mao Tse Tung's party as they were to describe them afterwards. Everyone went back to reapproach these questions and substantially rewrite them in order to fit in with later impressions–as was the case with Yugoslavia.

In China as in almost every country there was a post-war upsurge of militancy within the working class movement. In Shanghai there were strikes and occupations with demands for a sliding scale of wages against the Chiang Kai Shek government. There were demonstrations, there was student unrest, and peasant struggles throughout China. This was part of the world wide movement of the working class in the immediate post-war period. But this was precisely the period in which the Chinese CP was most earnestly seeking a coalition with Chiang!

Far from mobilising, developing and strengthening these movements of the working class, Mao's party was hoping for a coalition with an increasingly bankrupt and discredited bourgeois nationalist government, and no lead was given to these struggles.

This is an exact parallel with the moves in Europe and in the Buffer Zone countries by the Stalinists in order to consolidate 'peaceful co-existence'. The problem that Mao faced was that Chiang did not want a coalition. He wanted Mao's head on a plate and the heads of the militants within the Chinese CP. Mao's eventual offensive which began in response to determined moves by Chiang to extinguish the CP once and for all, didn't begin until 1947, after the main post-war upsurge had again fallen away and Chiang had been able to impose massive repression. Chiang found however, as he began to confront the CP, that his administration completely lacked popular support, and was completely discredited in the eyes of the whole population of China.

As one defeat followed another, there were no forces remaining that Chiang could call on to stand up aginst the offensive of theChinese CP. It was precisely a sense of such weakness that had brought Chiang to refuse a coalition deal with Mao. Even though Stalin withheld open assistance to Mao, we should point out that in a number of ways the influence of the Soviet Union was of great importance in the eventual victory of the CP-led forces.

Firstly the Chinese CP had been armed by the Soviet Union with equipment that they had taken off the defeated Japanese forces during the war. In this way they were equipped with modern arms capable of setting them up as a full-scale army. Secondly, the industry within Manchuria that Stalin had ceded back to Chiang was destroyed. The means of production were put out of commission before they were handed back. In other words, a major economic base was not returned to Chiang, though of course the act of ceding the territory back could well be questioned.

Thirdly, and most importantly, the international balance of forces between imperialism and the USSR, combined with the internal problems of the imperialist countries led to the decision that they were unable to intervene at that point. It was ruled out under conditions where they estimated that by intervening they could well confront a decision by the USSR to intervene on behalf of the Chinese CP.

Even after the fall of Chiang after 1949, Mao's objective was not initially to construct a workers' state. He set out instead to try and create a new coalition. Only the private holdings that had been deserted by their owners were taken over. Other whole sections of substantial holdings and capitalist enterprise remained, and though the capitalist class was defeated, it was actually propped up and put in a position of influence by the Stalinists' continued craving for popular front regimes.

Mao in 1949 stated explicitly that 'Our policy is to restrict capitalism, not to eliminate it'. It was much more gradually and in a much less planned manner than in Eastern Europe that the social changes took place in China. The old state apparatus was retained for a long period, with many of the old bourgeois personnel still in their offices; and it was only gradually, and without at any point the real involvement of the masses, that the steps towards the structural transformation in China were taken.

Firstly, under the pressure of capitalism, steps were taken to suppress and then eliminate the bourgeois parties and cliques from the coalition and from high office within the administration. Secondly, steps were taken to purge and to change the composition of the CP. Thirdly, a process of nationalisation of bourgeois holdings took place from above and of course, moves to merge the party and the state apparatus in China. This process was not carried out under the instructions or direct control of the USSR, but there was no evidence at the time that Stalin disagreed with Mao's course of action.

Despite the fact that capitalism had to all intents and purposes been defeated and crushed in China in 1949, the dictatorship of the proletariat was not declared there until 1956. Throughout that period, the relationships with the Kremlin had been close.

We can say therefore that the CCP was a Stalinist party throughout that period of struggle and throughout the period of transformation. It never departed from Stalinism, and it was the most enthusiastic supporter of the Kremlin attack on the Hungarian workers in 1956.

It would be absolutely wrong to allow impressions of divisions that developed subsequently to make us attempt to backdate them. Undoubtedly differences did develop later. But it is essential in defending the basic method of Trotskyism to see the processes that brought these differences as processes, and not simply attempting to label or backdate the finished result. To start today, for instance, from the various positions being taken by Maoism and simply say that Maoism has always been this or that, going back to find instances that prove the case, would be obviously ridiculous. It was a similarly false and deceptive method applied by Pablo, which did great damage to the building of the Trotskyist movement.

What I'm going to do now in analysing the response of the Fourth International to these events, is to work through in a fairly chronological way, the way the struggle and the different positions developed.

And the aspect that we are going to centre on is summed up in Trotsky's In Defence of Marxism,

"The primary political criterion for us is not the transformation of property relations in this or another area, however important these may be in themselves, but rather the change in the consciousness and organisation of the world proletariat, the raising of their capacity for defending former conquests and accomplishing new ones.

From this one, and the only decisive standpoint, the politics of Moscow, taken as a whole, completely retains its reactionary character, and remains the chief obstacle on the road to the world revolution."

(In Defence of Marxism, p. 19)

We have to look at the way that the Fourth International approached the questions of Russia and Eastern Europe in the post-war period. Firstly, we should look at the initial approaches by Mandel (writing as Germain). Mandel looked at the way in which the Kremlin bureaucracy as the centrepiece in the Stalinist movement was now forced to balance between the classes in a new world situation in which it was no longer so simple, as pre-war, to attempt to play off one imperialist nation, or one bloc, against another. Instead, the socialised property relations in the USSR had to be defended against a world-wide bloc of imperialist countries which had all been shown in the course of the war to be implacably hostile to socialism and the social system within Russia.

But at the same time the bureacracy was completely unable to call in any way upon the international strength of the working class movement, because the mobilisation of the working class would question the bureaucracy's own role and would challenge the stability of Stalinism within the USSR itself. Mandel wrote a document in 1947 going into detail on these questions and showed how the bureaucratic answer to this was to establish the Buffer Zone. He pointed to Trotsky's In Defence of Marxism for a method to analyse the changes in the Buffer Zone. Comrades will recall that Trotsky in In Defence of Marxism sketches out the possible stages of development if the Kremlin bureaucrats should decide to asssimilate Finland or Poland in the USSR in the pre-war period. He sketches the way in which that could be done from above, in a bureaucratic manner, in a way similar to that we have sketched out in discussing Eastern Europe. Trotsky demonstrates theoretically how that process could be conducted in a counterrevolutionary way. But in his hypothetical account, Trotsky included one key factor which turned out in most cases not to be borne out by events–that is the partial and controlled involvement of the masses.

Mandel however picked on this aspect and made it his centrepiece in declaring that because the masses had not been mobilised in any way in Eastern Europe, therefore it was impossible to assimilate all the elements of bourgeois property into a workers' state formation. For that reason, Mandel argued, the Buffer had to be regarded as capitalist states. He said,

"But in order to completely assimilate a given territory, that is to say, in order to expropriate and destroy as a class the landed proprietors and capitalists, the bureaucracy is compelled–even if in a limited way and with the aim of always controlling it and crushing it where necessary–to call upon the autonomous action of the masses...because of this...because the bureaucracy fears the autonomous action of the masses like the plague, it will be unable to accomplish assimilation except on a relatively limited scale."

Mandel thus latched on to one part of In Defence of Marxism and attempted to apply it in a fixed way to the post-war period. This provided a wrong basis for estimating the process of change in Eastern Europe, because, as we have just seen, it was not so much a mobilisation of the masses that brought the transformations in Eastern Europe, as the state of collapse of domestic and of international capitalism in the face of the threat of action by the Soviet Union and the parties it had established in the Buffer Zone. That collapse was the decisive factor, and Mandel's search for instances of mobilisation of the working class became a dead end search leading to all kinds of wrong positions and impressionism. In 1947, however, Mandel's analysis of Yugoslavia was as follows:

"The beginning of structural assimilation corresponds to a very revolutionary pressure in Yugoslavia, but the nature of the economy and the state remains bourgeois. Nevertheless the relations of forces are such that the bourgeoisie finds itself for the moment at the mercy of an action by the proletariat. It is only the bureaucracy's fear both of the proletariat and of imperialism which restrains it from dealing the native capitalists a death blow."

In other words, Mandel in 1947 clearly sees the possibility of revolution should the bureaucracy have chosen to mobilise a mass struggle against imperialism. He clearly defines the Tito leadership as a bureaucracy, which holds back from that step because of its mortal fear both of the working class and of imperialism. And Mandel concludes his examination of the Buffer Zone:

"All these buffer countries, including Yugoslavia, will however be exposed to an especially powerful pressure from imperialism. It is not excluded that in this case the Communist Parties, basing themselves firmly on the revolutionary aspirations of the masses, will move forward and abolish the remnants of bourgeois power and property."

Again the notion that the masses have to be involved there somewhere, and that it is impossible to impose social change from above, in a bureaucratic fashion, creeps into even this detailed study by Mandel–a study which is about the nearest to a thorough and serious examination of the question in the immediate post-war period. The slogan that Mandel put forward as a result was "For the immediate withdrawal of all Red Army troops from the Buffer Zone countries", to focus on the need for the revolution to be carried through independently by workers themselves in the countries. That orientation formed the basis of a major resolution passed by the International leadership in 1947, which did not differentiate in any way between Yugoslavia and the rest of the Buffer Zone. It included Eastern Europe as a whole, with which Yugoslavia had simply gone further in the uneven process of transformation.

In general, however, Mandel upholds the view in 1947 that all of the Buffer Zone countries are still capitalist. He held on to that position until he collapsed in front of Pablo, and began putting a completely different position in 1951.

Of course Mandel never looked back after that and has remained collapsed before Pablo from that day to this.

In 1949 the International Executive passed a resolution which declared, "There is an undeniable existence of a police regime in Yugoslavia." That was in April 1949; but by December of that year, Pablo had begun to challenge this whole position and to question the analysis that had taken place. And in May 1950, Pablo developed the argument further to declare that:

"A revolution of a special development had taken place in Yugoslavia and it led up to a seizure of power, to a radical transformation of the capitalist property relations, and the destruction of the old capitalist state and the construction of a new state apparatus."

That was Pablo's opening shot in his offensive against the established position of the International on the role of the Stalinist party in the buffer states. And when Pablo had to confront the obvious gap in time between the CP-led partisans driving out the capitalists in 1944, and the structural transformation of Yugoslavia, which was still gradually taking place only from 1947 onwards, he did so by quoting the Titoites:

"They [the Titoites] insist that none of the political and social conquests of the struggle was endangered by the [Tito-Subasich] 1944/45 coalition with the bourgeoisie, for the simple reason that the reaction had no real base among the masses and that the coalition was realised at the top between representatives of the masses and impotent shadows of the bourgeoisie."

So if the Titoites say nothing wrong happened, then according to Pablo nothing wrong happened. Pablo set aside any idea that the revolutionary process might have actually been held back by the formation by the CP of a coalition with the remnants of the bourgeois class in Yugoslavia.

Pablo then proceeded to rewrite completely every account of Yugoslavia that had been put forward up to that point. He denied, for instance, the established Trotskyist view that the people's committees that were set up in the cities in Yugoslavia after 1944 were formed from above by the CP as bureaucratic organs specifically to control the working class and to limit its actions.

Pablo claimed instead that the workers were continuously active and mobilised from 1941 to 1948, and he quotes Tito's constitution to prove it. In fact Tito's constitution does of course say that they were active. Pablo goes on to claim–again completely in defiance of the positions that had been passed and adopted by the Fourth International–that the period of real ascendancy of the Yugoslavian revolution which resulted in a radical change of property relations, is situated precisely between 1945 and 1948–in other words, precisely the period in which the Yugoslavian CP actually did step in to stem the movement of the masses, and attempted in every way to shackle that movement. Pablo declared that this very period was the high point of the Yugoslavian revolution–the point recurs about five or six times in this 1950 document. Pablo went on to term the leadership of the Yugoslavian CP as 'partly bureaucratic', and says that the peoples' committees were 'led by a party which, for all its other merits, went through a Stalinist education and still maintained relations with Moscow'.

He is conspiciously silent as to what these 'other merits' are. Pablo added:

"Is it surprising that, freed from the yoke of Moscow (this is now alluding to the 1948 split between Tito and Stalin) the Yugoslavian revolution raises itself to new heights, becomes constantly more democratic, etc., etc.?"

Every one of these revisionist arguments starts from the appearances of events and the 'left' rhetoric being used by Tito to justify both his stand against the Soviet bureaucracy and his descent to unprincipled deals with imperialism.

Pablo uses surface appearance as a starting point and then attempts to explain surface appearances by rewriting history, actually retrospectively rationalising the positions held by the bureaucracy. From these positions Pablo draws the conclusion that:

"Certain CPs in a favourable conjuncture, when they are linked to the real revolutionary movement of the masses, can detach themselves from the yoke of the Kremlin and begin to act on their own. To regard every victory achieved by a CP as synonymous with a victory of Stalinism is an absurd generalisation and a mistake."

Here we have the emergence of the notion that by initiating a "revolutionary" process that Pablo has just retrospectively fabricated on the basis of impressions, the Yugoslav party broke from Stalinism and became–at least in a partial form–a revolutionary force. Such a revision does not jeopardise orthodox Trotskyism, according to Pablo, because the Yugoslav events were not really a product of Stalinism at all, since according to him the Yugoslav CP ceased to be Stalinist!

1950 was the start of the preparation of the Third World Congress of the Fourth International, and as part of the preparation Pablo wrote the now completely notorious document Where Are We Going? In this document, Pablo went much further than his document on Yugoslavia. He erected an entire theory on the observations of empirical phenomena, things on the surface.

Firstly, Pablo said that the apparently permanent consolidation and expansion of Stalinism after the war meant that the world could now not be seen in class terms any more. Instead he advised the terminology of "the two camps"–"imperialism" on one hand, "Stalinism" on the other.

Now this leads directly away from the independent role of the working class. If you say you have the "imperialist camp" over here which is hostile to the USSR, and the "Stalinist camp" over here which is generally in favour of it, then you eliminate completely the independence of the working class in fighting both capitalism in the imperialist countries, and fighting the Stalinist bureaucracy in the degenerate workers' states.

The position leads away from any independent role either in defending the workers' states, or in overthrowing capitalism. In the same way, by eliminating the independent role of the working class, the path was cleared for the other notorious Pabloite conception of an imminent Third World War. Of course there were Cold War conditions which we find it hard to imagine now; there were very real tensions; there was a situation of massive witch-hunt against Trotskyists and communists of all types in the post-war period. It is not entirely realistic for us to brush this aside and say in 1977 "How could anybody even dream of a Third World War straight after the Second?"

On the other hand, the way in which the Third World War was put forward as a concept ignored completely the role of the working class in the developed countries in fighting their own bourgeoisie during the course of such a war. No policy of any description was put forward for the independent struggle of workers to prevent such a War. Pablo made the War idea absolutely central:

"To understand that capitalism is now heading toward war, for it has no other short or long term way out, and that this process cannot be stopped short of the unavoidable destruction of the regime, is equivalent of describing a fundamental law in the evolution of the international situation."

So the War concept is a main axis, not simply an accidental trimming by Pablo. It is now simply a question, says Pablo, of how soon it all takes place, not whether or where, just how soon. Linked to this is then brought in the question of the defence of the USSR. It is this which leads in to the concept of "War-revolution"–the idea that because the USSR will have to defend itself against the whole of the imperialist world, therefore the Kremlin will be forced to call upon the CPs in every country to launch civil war against their own bourgeoisie.

Thus, claimed Pablo, by fighting for the defeat of capitalism in this new war, the Soviet bureaucracy will actually give the lead, wittingly or unwittingly, to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism internationally, and, of course, to itself, because once capitalism goes, then so does the base of the bureaucracy.

In this context, Pablo brings in the views that he began to develop on Yugoslavia, also now increasingly extended to include China. Pablo declared:

'the Communist Parties retain the possibility in certain circumstances of roughly outlining a revolutionary orientation, that is to say, of finding themselves compelled to engage in a struggle for power. . .

Under these exceptional conditions, the mass movement, which found only the Communist Parties available as a channel, compelled these parties to go further than their leaderships and above, all the Kremlin would have wished, and literally pushed them into power.'

The proposal for entry into the CPs is not actually included in Pablo's discussion document, or in the Third World Congress resolutions of 1951. Such calls were added later on by Pablo, after the Congress was complete. The Theses on Orientation and Perspectives which were adopted at the Congress (and remember this was voted for not just by Pablo, but by Pablo and the whole of the leadership of the Fourth International) said:

"It would be anti-Marxist not to recognise the possibility that CPs placed in favourable conditions may possibly see themselves obliged to undertake a struggle for power against the possessing classes and imperialism... this is proved by the experiences of the CPY and in part by the CP of China... To affirm that the weight of the bureaucratic apparatus will prove more decisive under all conditions than the weight of pressure of the masses would be anti-Marxist."

Now here you have a specific, deliberate reversal, a revision of the Transitional Programme. When the Programme states that the pressure of the movement of the masses is in the long term more powerful than the pressure of the bureaucratic apparatus, it is specifically in the context of building an independent Marxist leadership, in the context of the masses being headed by parties of the Fourth International. Not in any other context. It emerges in a whole section dealing with the crisis of leadership within the working class. To divorce it from that, and just say that the masses, irrespective of the bureaucratic weight of their leadership, can take the power, is to deny the purpose of any form of Marxist party whatever.

Such a view, however, was endorsed by the Third World Congress. This is the stage that capitulation to surface appearances had reached within the movement: people were almost universally accepting the positions that were being argued by Pablo, precisely because they corresponded to appearances. Pablo's ideas were not just snatched out of nowhere, they corresponded to the appearances of the situation. And unless his opponents went to a lot of trouble to dig beneath these appearances and probe to the processes that brought them about, you could only see through Pablo from an extremely limited standpoint.

Another section from the same resolution reads:

"In the long run, objective conditions determine the character and dynamics of the movement of the masses, which, raised to a certain level, can overcome all subjective obstacles on the road to revolution."

What need, then, for a Trotskyist party, what need of independent cadres to lead that struggle?

"It is not excluded that certain CPs, with the bulk of their forces, can be pushed out of the strict orbit of the Soviet bureaucracy and can project a revolutionary orientation."

All this was passed at the Congress.

"While the counterrevolutionary role of the Soviet bureaucracy remains unchanged, its possibility of successfully performing this role is determined not by its subjective desires, but by an objectively revolutionary situation.

Developments in Yugoslavia and China are only a prefiguration of the events to come'.

Throughout that section on the Stalinist bureaucracy, there is no mention of the fight to build Trotskyist parties in those countries. It goes on to Tasks of the Fourth International.

'In countries where the majority of the working class still follows the CP, our organisation, necessarily independent, (this is before any call to liquidate the Stalinist parties) should orientate towards more systematic work among the ranks of these parties and the masses they influence. In the Peoples Democracies, our supporters who are not known should try to integrate themselves into the CPs'.

Those Communist Parties are ones which had had hundreds and thousands of people purged from them as dissident elements; they were CPs formed specifically from above as monolithic arms of Soviet policy within those countries; they had been fused with the state apparatus, and formed as the basis of a bureaucratic system of government.

Yet here Trotskyists are actually suggesting that Trotskyists who are not known should try and 'integrate' themselves into the CPs and remain there, 'in order to take advantage of the revolutionary possibilities that will develop'. That was passed at the Congress.

If the Congress was prepared to sanction this kind of policy and was in a state where no substantial opposition was put up to them, then quite obviously it was a fairly small extension from here when Pablo proceeded to claim liquidation into the European mass CPs was part of the policies endorsed by the conference. It was not actually written down, but this was the political conclusion that did indeed flow from the resolutions.

The same Congress actually passed two resolutions on the buffer countries–one on Yugoslavia, and one on all the rest. In this way Yugoslavia could be singled out as a special case and all of Pablo's conceptions embodied in the resolution which declared:

'Stalinism can be defined as the subordination of the interests of workers of every country to those of the Soviet bureaucracy. The CPY, beginning in 1941, outlined an orientation which was to lead to the break of 1948, and because of this fact ceased to be a stalinist party in the full meaning of the word. The difference in orientation between the CPY and that followed by the other CPs of Europe was affected in the first place by the pressure of the masses'.

There was no call in that resolution for the building of a Trotskyist party in Yugoslavia. Obviously if the pressure of the masses could in fact break the most monolithic CP in that part of the world from Stalinism, and force it to project a course towards the taking of a power, this quite obviously questions the necessity of a Trotskyist party anywhere. It goes on:

'Beginning with this time, the CPY has ceased to be a semi-Stalinist party and evolved as a centrist party carried to power by the revolutionary masses. In this connection the positions and the attitude of the CPY towards Trotskyism, either openly or by attempting to ignore it, acquires considerable political importance. What is involved is not merely a historic rectification of the past, it is the test of whether a workers' current which emerged from Stalinism has succeeded in linking itself with the traditional programme of Bolshevism, and thereby definitively and decisively surmounting capitalism'.

We can now see strong parallels between that method of approach and the various overtures being made and conciliatory articles and debates between the USFI and the Stalinists today. You now have Mandel urging Carrillo to 'complete his break' with Stalinism by actually calling for workers democracy and allowing the right to form tendencies within his own party and so on.

The Third Congress resolution explicitly rewrote and went back and 'corrected' the previous positions of the Fourth International. It was adopted with only a few people against it.

It would be nice if we could now line up all the forces that were fighting against this line for a correct line on Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe. But only a handful of individuals in the Fourth International took up a stand for the fight to build Trotskyist parties in Yugoslavia and China. The opposition was hamstrung by the same political weakness. On the one hand Mandel clung to the fact that since the masses hadn't been involved, Yugoslavia and all these other Eastern European countries theoretically ought to be still capitalist countries. When Mandel actually began to move from this position, he moved very dramatically and in such a way that while he toned down some of Pablo's more dramatic statements, he ended up drafting 'Ten Theses'. These were put forward at the Third Congress by the French section–against Mandel's own wishes. No vote was actually taken on the document. But the Ten Theses were only marginally better than the original account by Pablo, because they accept that the Yugoslavian and Chinese CPs are different and it actually says:

'In the coming revolutionary upsurge in Western Europe during the period of preparation and unleashing of war, the growing pressure of the masses is liable to force the French and Italian CPs to modify their pacifist course of 'neutralising' the bourgeoisie. These parties could then . . . project a revolutionary orientation and see themselves forced to undertake a struggle for power . . .'

The document goes on to draw conclusions for Western Europe as well:

'during the period of preparation and unleashing of war, the growing pressure of the masses is liable to force the French and Italian CPs to modify their pacifist course of neutralising the bourgeoisie. These parties could then project a revolutionary orientation and see themselves forced to undertake a revolutionary struggle for power'.

In other words a theory based on a misunderstanding of events in Eastern Europe is actually directed by Mandel into the class struggle in the whole of Europe. But Mandel attempts to get away from the worst excesses of Pablo's position, declaring that 'it is one thing to project a revolutionary orientation, another to accomplish a revolution, therefore its possible only that the Yuhoslavian or Chinese experience be repeated in the middle East maybe or Eastern Asia but not in Western Europe'.

He goes on to say that Stalinist parties are not reformist parties because 'they can conquer power in an independent fashion'. That's the difference that Mandel draws between them! In other words while opposing Pablo on a certain level particularly on the notion of imperialism and Stalinism as blocs and camps, at the same time Mandel wavers between Pabloism and orthodox positions. He was unable to fully develop a critique or present an independent position.

In 1951 the French section wrote an attack on Pablo's document 'Where Are We Going?' This was written by Bleibtreu, a leading member in 1951, but again started out from the conception that the Yugoslavian and Chinese CPs were centrist parties that broke from Stalinism and then led revolutions.

Within that framework Bliebtreu then criticises correctly many of the more appalling aspects of Pablo. This was one of the documents that we least understood when we carried through the struggle for a understanding of the Fourth International in the early period of the split from the WRP.

During the split we actually quoted chunks from Bliebtreu's document, little realising the importance of that weakness in his whole approach.

In America an individual called B. Lens and a comrade called Irving Steiner got together in 1950 to write a very sharp attack on the editorial line of the Militant, the SWP's paper, stressing the need for political independence of the working class.

'Fight with Yugoslavian workers against the possible Stalinist invasion? Fight with them against an actual ideological barrage? Absolutely. Support Tito in this fight? Not for an instant. But the most important thing is to build a party in Yugoslavia.'

These seem to be about the only people who ever raised that rather impolite question about building a Trotskyist party in Yugoslavia. Nobody else even thought it necessary to mention it. None of the main international documents actually put such a line forward. In England there was no opposition. Healy backed the position of Pablo.

He voted also for Pablo expelling the French majority in 1952. In taking this step Pablo had of course gone further than the Third Congress resolution. He had actually instructed the French section to do entry work within the French CP. Accourding to Pablo, this meant that the entire internal and external work of the Trotskyist organisation would thus have as its aim to speed up the radicalisation of the Stalinist workers and the development of a revolutionary leadership emerging basically from within that Stalinist movement.

The whole of the Trotskyist movement in Pablo's view had to be directed towards waiting for progressive leftwing currents to emerge out of Stalinism and the political independence of the movement was to be strictly subordinated to that. Now under those conditions it doesn't matter whether Pablo was proposing the whole of the movement going into the CP, or only half of it. In fact at that point he didn't advocate that everyone should go into the CP, he proposed an independent apparatus be retained to provide material aimed at their work within the CP. The political conditions within the CP and the perspective proposed by Pablo were so inadequate and so wrongly motivated that the turn could only end in the liquidation of the Trotskyist parties into Stalinism. Rather than draw Stalinist workers towards Trotskyism, the reverse process would be taking place with the loss of the precious cadres of the Fourth International. The French majority rejected this step, resisted it fiercely, and were expelled in 1952 by Pablo–with the full support of Healy and Cannon–for refusing to implement this policy.

To move on to the question of the 1953 split. Three events within the mass struggle of the working class internationally served as a motive force for the split with Pabloism in 1953.

Firstly the East German uprising, which was the first manifestation of the political revolution. Workers, arms in hands, were fighting to depose the Stalinist bureaucracy that had been imposed upon them by the development of the East German Buffer state into a workers state. By showing the independent movement of the working class, that uprising within what was supposedly a 'stalinist camp' showed the completely fraudulent nature of the blocs-and-camps theory, and showed the urgent need for an independent programme of Trotskyism to lead such movements in the workers' states.

All of a sudden it was realised that the Fourth International had no such programme developed in the postwar period. It didn't have any, and much of its publicity material, many of its publications, refused to put the call, for example, for the withdrawal of the Red Army from East Germany during those upheavals.

Secondly the French general strike was sold out by the Communist Party. This was the party which was supposedly going to be 'pressured' by the movement of the masses into projecting an orientation towards power. But instead it sold out the general strike, with the Pabloite forces failing to criticise it, saying that it wasn't really the job of a trade union to contend with political issues.

Thirdly of course the death of Stalin brought to a head the question of political revolution in Russia itself, and the question of what leadership was necessary to lead it. There was some juggling around by the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union with economic reforms and various so-called 'liberalisation' measures, which were taken as good coin by the Pabloites and being put out as indications that the masses were 'pressuring' the bureaucracy to the left.

It was under these conditions that the British and Americans saw the emergence within their own parties of Pablo-sponsored factions, actually advocating these positions within their own parties and trying to worm them into the Trotskyist press in their own countries. At the same time some of the illusions had been slightly dispelled in Yugoslavia. Healy for instance was able to write in May 1953 to Cannon:

'Take this talk about Stalinism: impatient comrades thinking in terms of China, Eastern Europe and now even the USSR, see the impact of the post-war revolutionary forces, but fail to recognise one vital thing; that as far as we know, we have not one single organised cadre group in these areas'.

In other words, Healy was now at last beginning to cotton on to the fact that something had been missing from all the discussion and the high-flown theories that had been put out by Pablo–and that is, any direction towards the building of parties. In this way the experience of these slightly older, more experienced forces with a base in their own working class, coming together with response to the struggles taking place, began to come into conflict with the theorising and web-spinning of Mandel and Pablo.

When these parties began to be threatened by Pabloite policies, the question became of immediate relevance. The British section between May and September completely reversed its position. In May Healy defended Pablo against Cannon; by September he was denouncing him as virtually a Stalinist and attempting in every way to compare the Pablo administration to the Comintern.

There was a similar rapid turn in the SWP. Until the middle of 1953 they were taking very little interest and not bothered at all about the line being taken by the International. This hardly affected their orientation within America. Suddenly the SWP swung from indifference to issuing the Open Letter in November, making a call to break with Pabloism, and all of a sudden dragging up a whole series of well-founded but newly-discovered political criticisms of Pabloism.

Such rapid turns can only be accounted for by both the response of those leaderships to the problems of their own parties, and the way that those problems reflected the developments and the new situation in the international class struggle. But they took place only on the most sketchy theoretical basis, in particular the SWP and the British both continued to defend the positions adopted at the Third Congress, positions which Healy was so embarrassed about that if you look through Trotskyism versus Revisionism you will see it begins immediately after the Third Congress, and does not reprint any of that material. Healy also abstains consciously from printing any Pabloite material at all, making it very difficult to judge what the British and the SWP were polemicising against. In fact the whole affair becomes detached from time once you take away the sequence of events and remove the statements and documents of Pablo. Healy makes it very difficult to understand the split and to reapproach it today.

The charges of revisionism against Pablo in the Open Letter were all taken from the period following the Third Congress, and none of them attempt to trace where those positions had come from. They take up four issues. Firstly, the failure to call for political revolution in the Soviet Union; secondly, the failure to present an independent programme in East Germany; thirdly, the betrayal by the Pabloites in the French General Strike; and fourthly, that Pablo secretly promoted factions and used Stalinist-type methods against the sections within the Fourth International.

All of these charges were absolutely well-founded. There is no reason to quibble about them being included. But none of them goes to the real problem of the disorientation of the Fourth International.

Those supporting the Open Letter were rapidly expelled by Pablo from the International before many people even realised what was going on. For that reason many sections, bemused by the lack of prior discussion, confused by the situation, unable at that point to chart an independent theoretical course of any description, failed to carry through the split with Pablo. The split was therefore confined largely to the British, French and American sections. In 1954, the inadequacy of the split was confirmed by the fact that the Pabloites went on to hold what they called the 'Fourth World Congress', in which the resolution, The Rise, Decline, and Perspectives for the Fall of Stalinism, managed scarcely to mention the East German uprising, but went on to say absurdly:

"The revolutionary tide which the Soviet bureaucracy is no longer capable of smashing and arresting is even being nourished by certain of its methods of self-defence applied by the bureaucracy."

In other words, the Pabloites ignored all of the lessons and questions that emerged from East Germany, turning even in 1954 to say that the bureaucracy was digging its own grave.

The resolution went on to specify the way that the Pabloite positions were an extension of the Third Congress positions, and in particular to spell out the logical conclusion of the Third Congress positions on Yugoslavia and China. It says that since the Chinese CP, and to a certain extent also the Yugoslav CP, are both in reality:

"bureaucratic centrist parties which however still find themselves under the pressure of the proletariat in these countries, we do not call upon the proletariat of these countries to constitute new revolutionary parties or to prepare political revolution in these countries."

That is the Rise and Decline of Stalinism, and it specifically states that it is an extension and not a reversal of the Third Congress. If you look at the points I have drawn out of the Congress decisions, you can see it was indeed simply spelling out the realities that had been included implicitly in the congress resolution.

Since the major questions of method had not been confronted in 1953, and the forces of the new International Committee concentrated merely on disgreement with Pabloism rather than establishing mutual agreement, there was very little in the way of an answer to the revisionist analysis put forward by Pablo from the forces that considered themselves 'orthodox Trotskyists'. This was the real weakness of the IC, despite its correct break in 1953.

But in the aftermath of the Hungarian events, the Pabloite faction held a Fifth World Congress in 1957, at which they adopted an even more appalling document, The Decline and Fall of Stalinism. This repeated all of the old eulogies of the Yugoslav CP–which had since joined hands with the Kremlin in the repression of Hungary - peddled illusions in the 'left' leadership of the Polish CP which had been installed by the Kremlin in order to head off similar movements in Poland as had taken place in Hungary, and uttered no call anywhere for the necessity of building Trotskyist parties in Eastern Europe.

Some of the worst aspects of that document are taken up very sharply in an article by Bill Hunter, of the British Section, entitled Under a Stolen Flag. But at the same time Cannon in the USA in 1957 was saying that 'The political pronouncements of the two sides appear to come closer together than in the period prior to the formal split. If the thinking of the two sides would continue to evolve in the same way, then they both would have to consider the question of unity'–this was Cannon's response to The Decline and Fall of Stalinism, and it gave a hint as to the dangers besetting the International Committee as a result of its lack of political agreement on method.

It was around the Cuban events that the weaknesses of the IC were most openly displayed. While the events in Cuba [as detailed in Trotskyism Today number 1] had many similarities to the processes outlined in post-war East Europe, there were, of course, particular problems to be tackled, and which proved too much for those who based themselves on impressions, and equally incomprehensible for those who merely clung to wooden "orthodoxy".

The right wing Batista dictatorship was overthrown in 1959 by petty bourgeois nationalist forces led by Fidel Castro. Initially the new regime looked to implement a fairly radical programme, aimed mainly at the big landowners and against foreign capitalist investment in Cuba. In particular they opposed the American sugar producers that imposed virtually colonial exploitation on the Cuban economy.

But the Castro government was not at first anti-capitalist. In the initial period after the downfall of Batista the first move was to set up a coalition government comprising both Castroites and representatives of the liberal bourgeoisie who also wanted to dismantle the most repressive aspects of Batista's regime and restrict US economic domination.

At first Castro was opposed to the Soviet Union from a nationalist standpoint. But as expropriation of US holdings in Cuba got underway, reprisals were taken which drove Castro towards the USSR. The US government broke off all purchases of sugar in a bid to sabotage the main bedrock of the Cuban economy and create a situation in which Castro could be overthrown by the right wing.

But the Soviet bureaucracy, for its own purposes, took over this trade, providing vital assistance to Castro. Why did they come to the direct aid of this particular petty-bourgeois nationalist regime on the very doorstep of the USA? The reason is to be found not in Cuba but in the problems confronted by the Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR itself.

Kruschev faced an extremely serious problem. The development of the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile had tipped the balance of forces in the arms build up in favour of the USA. But in the Soviet Union similar developments were being held back by an acute economic crisis, and problems in controlling the working class. The large sums of money necessary for such a programme were not available. But Kruschev, to preserve his prestige at home and abroad needed to find some way of redressing the balance. The Cuban situation seemed to offer an opening for this, with the chance of establishing a low-cost military threat to the USA.

If this were to proceed it would not be enough to have a nationalist regime in Havana–Castro had to be drawn more and more into a bloc with the Kremlin, to ensure that there was a firm basis of support.

So as Kennedy responded to Castro's further expropriations by escalating to a full-scale economic blockade on Cuba, the Castro regime found itself driven further into the open arms of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Under combined Soviet and US pressure, the bulk of private property in Cuba was taken over by the Castroite regime.

The Kremlin's part in these affairs paid no regard to the interests of Cuban workers. Stalinist involvement was based on a calculation of international diplomacy and the quest for global 'peaceful coexistence' with imperialism. The Missiles Crisis of 1962 came and went without reference to Havana. The whole affair was one conducted between Washington and Moscow.

The Cuban Communist Party also played its role in the Kremlin's efforts at sucking Castro into the Stalinist orbit. The CP had earlier supported the Batista dictatorship–even had a minister in his wartime government. CP leaders had attacked Castro. But under Moscow directives they began, shortly before the final fall of Batista, to move closer to Castro's movement.

Castro homself needed a means of controlling and intervening within the working class movement as a whole a task that his July 26 movement could not carry out. The CP had such an apparatus, it had a political organisation which could be used for such a purpose. The CP, which also sought to control the working class in the interests of Kremlin foreign policy, was able to see a common interest emerging after the overthrow of Battista and stepped up their moves towards the Castroites.

As the American blockade and economic pressures were intensified Castro needed to rally popular support within Cuba for the measures he was forced to take, while of course he had no intention of allowing things to overstep the mark and actually raise questions of workers' control. He wanted to keep the mobilisation very much within certain confines. This too lined up with what the CP wanted to take place in Cuba–the very last thing the Stalinists wanted to see was an independent mobilisation of the working class.

In 1961 there was an attempt to fuse the CP with the July 26 Movement. But in Cuba, unlike the East European Buffer Zone, the weight of influence was predominantly with the petty bourgeois Castroites, not with the Stalinists. There was no chance of Red Army intervention to pressure Castro into submission. The unification had to be on the Castroites' terms. Conflict arose over the high-handed moves of Stalinist Anibal Escalante. He was purged from the CP, and exiled to the USSR. The merger attempt failed.

In 1963–in a move welcomed by the Pabloites and the SWP alike–Castro set up the United Revolutionary Socialist Party, intended to fulfil the role of merging the CP with the July 26 Movement. This, too, collapsed.

Finally in 1965 the Castroites and the Stalinists finally jointly and from above set up the Cuban Communist Party. The process of fusing Castro with the Stalinist movement pressed ahead, and the Soviet outpost in the Caribbean was assured of a future.

These events provoked what appeared to be very different responses from the Trotskyist movement.

The SWP, at one on this with the Pabloites, blandly announced that Cuba had become a "workers' state". The only question in their minds was at what date this change had taken place.

Castro, in overthrowing Batista, they said, had gone on to lead the establishment of a workers' state. A social revolution had taken place led not by the Stalinists as in Eastern Europe, nor (obviously) by a Trotskyist party. This lent a new dimension to the problems of the 1950s.

If in Yugoslavia and China Stalinist parties had been seen as breaking from Stalinism and "projecting a revolutionary orientation", in Cuba a petty bourgeois nationalist grouping appeared to have set up what the Pabloites saw as only a mildly-blemished workers' state. In other words, petty-bourgeois forces had unconsciously and spontaneously moved to embrace Marxism.

To buttress this belief, as they had done previously with Yugoslavia, the Pabloites chose all of the most "left" appearances and statements of the Castro regime as their evidence. Every piece of Castro demagogy, every attempt to bolster his position with the Latin American CPs in case he should be abandoned by the Soviet bureaucracy was taken as good coin and retailed in the "Trotskyist" press of these sections. All other evidence was discarded, and Cuba was regarded not in an international context, but as a thing in itself.

But the other main position–that of Healy in Britain, and the French–was no more satisfactory. Starting from the notion that the capitalist state in Cuba could not have been overthrown since there had been no Trotskyist leadership, they ran into immediate problems in their analysis of the transformations in Eastern Europe and China. Just as Mandel had been crippled in fighting Pablo by his line that Yugoslavia was still a capitalist state in 1950, Healy was hamstrung on the Cuban question by his wooden "orthodox" view that Cuba remained a capitalist state. And while the Pabloites ignored the "bad" sides of the Castro regime, painting it as an almost undeformed workers' state, Healy brushed aside the progressive aspects of the changes that had taken place in his determination to prove it remained capitalist.

The Pabloites' joy was unlimited. At last they had "proof" of their belief that it was not necessary to build Trotskyist parties based on the working class in every country to lead a revolution:

"What is new for Revolutionary Marxism in relation to this experience is this: that we pass from the appreciation of the revolutionary role of the peasantry and the necessity of the workers and peasants alliance to the understanding of the possibility of beginning and carrying through for a whole period the Revolution in a number of colonial and semi-colonial countries by the armed struggle of the revolutionary peasantry".

(Quoted by Wohlforth in 'The Cuban Way–the Pattern for the Future?')

And as the Pabloites began to comb the world for future Cubas and budding Castros as an alternative to the building of Trotskyist parties, the SWP, having never grasped the real issues posed in 1953, began to belittle and depoliticise the differences that had led to the split, and to call for reunification:

"While substantial differences remain, especially over the causes of the 1954 split, the area of disagreement appears to be of secondary importance in view of the common basic programme and common analysis of major current events in world developments which unite the two sides".

(For Early Reunification of the World Trotskyist Movement, March 1963).

This attempt to dismiss the difference between the Pabloites and the IC forces in 1963 on the basis of "common analysis of major current events" recurs later in the same document:

" . . . it is self-evident that the continued division of the world Trotskyist movement in factions wrangling over obscure issues will vitiate its capacity to attract these new forces on a considerable scale".

While the SWP saw it as setting aside past differences, the Pabloites clearly recognised their change of position as an acceptance of this political method and analysis:

"The political basis of the 1953-4 split, as we saw it, was a lack of full understanding of the correctness of the International's turn in the estimate of the world situation made in 1950-51 . . . [but] starting from the XXth 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 evaluation 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 IVth International. From that time on, reunification became not only desirable but also possible".

(Quoted by Reorganised Minority Tendency in "The Rebuilding of the FI" May 1963).

So close had the SWP come to the positions of the Pabloites that the SWP in angling for unity themselves put forward the classic Pabloite formulation that:

"In its evolution towards revolutionary Marxism [!] the July 26 Movement set a pattern that now stands as an example for a number of other countries".

And the SWP bowed before the Pabloite notion of spontaneous revolutionary forces with whom Trotskyists could "fuse". These forces were variously termed a "newly emerging vanguard", "leftward moving currents", "a new generation of rebels" and even "mass revolutionary forces". The SWP saw the objective as "infusing" the ideas of Trotskyism into these petty bourgeois nationalist groupings:

"The infusion of Trotskyist concepts in this new Castroist current will also influence the development of a conscious revolutionary leadership, particularly in the workers' states, will help prevent "Titoist" deviations and better assure the evolution of mass pressure and direct action into the cleansing force of political revolution".

(Dynamics of World Revolution Today).

Alongside these liquidationist concepts, in which Trotskyists are reduced to the role of a left-wing ginger group within petty-bourgeois guerrilla bands, the SWP adopted the Pabloite position on political revolution–abandoning the call for the building of Trotskyist parties in the degenerated workers states and instead looking towards:

"The increased possibility of mergers between the revolutionary Marxist vanguard and the leftward-moving mass of militants in some of these [Stalinist] parties."

(Dynamics . . .)

The Castro leadership in Cuba was given credentials as "unconscious Trotskyists", and the reunification document voted for by SWP and Pabloite alike contained an implicit preference for opportunism as against the "danger" of sectarianism:

"A revolutionist isolated by circumstances over which he has no control can fall into sectarianism quite unconsciously. It is therefore a more insidious danger for a small organisation than opportunism, which is generally easier to recognise."

The SWP, however, refuted this by their very reunification with the Pabloites which confirmed beyond all doubt their inability to recognise opportunism.

A year later the leadership of the USFI's Ceylonese section had put this notion into practice, and had entered a bourgeois coalition government with Mrs Bandaranaike. The Pabloites were forced to expel those responsible for overstepping the unspoken limits of opportunism.

The inability of the remaining IC forces to take up the method of Pabloism in 1953 and in the Cuban events disarmed their opposition to the SWP's line. While it was in this period that the SLL made a turn to philosophy, and began to challenge Pabloism as an empirical method, the whole question was confined within certain bounds. The analysis of the Eastern European transformations was not reexamined, and SLL "analysis" of form and content in Cuba started from the premise of proving that Cuba remained capitalist.

This approach also hampered those forces that fought within the SWP against the turn to Pabloism. Tim Wohlforth, who was subsequently to make the biggest theoretical contribution to the understanding of the Eastern European transformations in his Theory of Structural Assimilation, caved in to pressure from Healy and adopted the position that Cuba remained a capitalist state–a straight reversal of his earlier position, when he had said to the SWP plenum in 1962:

"I think the comrades in Britain are wrong. I'll say it, I'll be very happy to say it. They're not all wrong. They're right in saying that in agriculture essentially capitalist relations remain except in a few state forms, the bulk of agriculture remains in private hands. They're right in saying the planned economy isn't really yet fully planned. They're wrong in saying Castro is a representative of capital. He's not. Cuba is well on its way to becoming precisely what Yugoslavia, China and Eastern Europe are. Yes. That is my opinion. But the comrades today are reacting to an impression of Cuban reality. The same way that Pablo reacted to Yugoslavia. In my opinion they are going to be proven wrong. Or, if you prefer, he was proven half right. He was right that it was a workers' state, wrong when he thought it wasn't going to be a deformed workers' state.

"I think, very well, comrades, you may be proven half right again. It may very well be a workers' state. If you want to call it a workers' state, all right. It's a matter of the designation of the point of qualitative change. But you're going to be very, very wrong if you try to maintain, as Pablo did then, that Cuba is going to evolve into a healthy workers' state with real proletarian rule, without the proletariat independently participating in that process".

(Report to the Plenum on Minority Resolution, 1962)

Wohlforth went on, in the same speech, to hit the main point that was subsequently to get lost in the argument on what kind of state Cuba was:

"The real thing is that we [the SWP] have a policy of just going along and describing reality in Cuba and not intervening in it. We do not feel that our intervention, the independent intervention of the working class itself in Cuba, will have a determining impact on events. We do not look to that force in Cuba today. We look to the government, we look to the state apparatus . . ."

Yet Wohlforth retreated from this line of analysis. And in blocking with Healy against the SWP leadership he retreated from his objective analysis of Cuba as a deformed workers' state. The Theory of Structural Assimilation, for all its strengths, was written by Wohlforth but then abandoned when Healy and the IC leadership refused to discuss it.

The basically correct though inadequate positions on Cuba that Wohlforth and his colleagues in the early Revolutionary Tendency developed, were, however, largely retained by the expelled Robertson group that is now the international Spartacist tendency. They formally upheld the view that Cuba was a deformed workers' state, and the need for the building of revolutionary parties, though their theoretical footing for this remains shaky to this day. But after their expulsion, the Robertson group decided that there was no chance of winning workers in the SWP to their positions–writing them off as too old, or careerist elements.

From this initial period of self-imposed isolation onwards the Spartacists have clung doggedly to a formal "orthodoxy" linked to a propagandist and increasingly sectarian practice, in which they state openly their refusal to recruit workers–whom they describe as "politically backward militants".

Thus no ready made or complete answer to the Cuban question emerged in 1963 any more than a full analysis of the East European events had emerged from the 1953 split.

This account of the two major splits in the post-war International is far from complete. But it attempts to bring together an examination of the problems of method in Eastern Europe and in Cuba with a historical view of the development of post-war Trotskyism.

In this way we can see that to provide a basis for the reconstruction of the Fourth International, it is not a question of simply marrying together the "correct" position of the Pabloites on Cuba as a workers' state with the "correct" insistence by Healy on the need for a revolutionary party. The post war history of the Fourth International must be reexamined as a whole and the method of Marxism reaffirmed both in theory and in the practice of national sections.

But in broaching these issues and focussing on them at a time when both IC and USFI forces are turned firmly away from their own history and towards opportunism, we can make a contribution to the fight for the reconstruction of the Fourth International.