Old Pals Together Again

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Part One of a review by Tony Richardson Cuban Revolution-the Trotskyist View"

published by Pathfinder Press in p The last couple of years have seen some internal changes within the "United' Secretariat of the Fourth The Leninist . Trotskyist Faction, which followed the political line of the US Socialist Workers Party (though the SWP is prevented by reactionary US laws from actual affiliation to international bodies) has merged with the former International Majority Tendency headed by Ernest Mandel:

In opposition to these moves, à newly-formed Bolshevik Tendency has emerged, led by Nahuel Moreno, comprising the vast majority of he. USFI sections in Latin imerica• and some forces in Europe, and declaring itself "a tendency more orthodox than ever"!

Both the documents dissolving the LTF and the declaration of the Bolshevik Tendency give rise to numerous questions about the history of the USFI and the Fourth International as a whole.

For SWP leader Joe Hansen to come out now with a book defending the SWP's positions on the Cuban revolution is thus linked to the moves within the USFI to consolidate a new 'united front' of SWP and Mandel supporters against the new challenge from the Bolshevik Tendency and elsewhere.

Mass pressure

The Fourth International split in 1953 as a result of the false positions argued by its leadership-Ernest Mandel and Michel Pablo.

They declared that the objective "revolutionary process" would pressure the mass Stalinist parties of Europe to the point where they would "project a revolutionary orientation"

And they proclaimed that Kruscher-used Cuban revolution for his own because in China and Yugoslavia the Communist Parties had become "centrist" parties under mass pressure, there was no need to build Trotskyist parties in those countries to carry through political The SWP, and the British and Frénch sections rejected this line in 1953. A public faction was declared against it.

The faction was subsequently "expelled" by Pablo and became the International Committee-which, in degenerate form, still exists today.

But, ten years later, in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, the SWP broke from its support for the IC and moved back towards the remaining International Secretariat, still led by Pablo and Mandel.

The earliest document in the book (which reprints material from 1960-70 with a 1978 introduction) confirms that, despite the hasty and unprincipled way in which the reunification took place in 1963 the political basis did exist for the SWP to accomodate to the empirical and • opportunist method of Pablo and Mandel.

Hansen throughout the articles argues shamelessiy that Castro political analysis must start not from the conflict of opposing class forces but "from the facts that everyone has to start with"

He even goes so far as to call the Marxist method of dialectical materialism "empiricism systematically: carried out"

Material process

But the empirical "facts" are not simply "given"-they arise from a material process of struggle in which the continuation of capitalism and athe treachery of reformist, nationalist and Stalinist leaders play key roles.

Thus, while Hansen in The Truth About Cuba can ape bourgeois historians by drawing together a strong potted history pointing to each major development in the revolution in relation to expropriation, this is little more than a catalogue of events rather than an analysis showing the connection between those events.

The reality is that Hansen starts and ends with the facts as they fit into his scheme.

Because capitalism in Cuba was overturned and this went against the previous position of the Cuban. CP, therefore, he argues, Castro must be an anti+ Stalinist, a "Marxist revolution. ary" or even a "socialist revolutionary"

Credentials

And since the Cuban CP declared support for Castro, Hansen. even awards revolutionary credentials to this, Stalinist "The fact is [!] that the Cuban : Communist Party supports the revolution. If a rift were to occur between Cuba and the Soviet Union it can be taken for certain that the loyalties of a decisive section of the Communist Party, if not the party as a whole, would remain with the Cuban revolution. The experience of Yugoslavia speaks eloquently ,for such an outcome.

"This party, like other Communist Parties, is favourably affected by the melting of the great iceberg of Stalinism, which began with the Soviet triumph in World War II...

"Viewed with cold objectivity, it is clear that the Cuban Communist Party is not a contestant for power but is instead one of the main components of a potential new political movement whose ultimate shape is yet to be determined."

pp .279-80 But these enthusiastic phrases are describing the same Stalinist party that had supported Batista in presidential elections in the 1930s!

Democratic conclusion It never seems to occur to Hansen to ask why a counterrevolutionary Stalinist party should suddenly declare itself apparently in favour of the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.

"That serious differences appeared in the world Communist [Stalinist] movement after the decades of Stalinist monolithism was in itself a progressive development.

"Arising fundamentally from the victory of the Soviet Union over German imperialism, the post-war advance of the colonial revolution and a balance of world forces favouring the socialist camp, these differences have helped pave the way for a resurgence of revolutionary Marxism.

"What is bad [!) is the absence of any provisions, customs and institutions to carry the discussion of the differences forward to a democratic conclusion."

So Hansen, once thought by USFI members to be a staunch. defender of Trotskyist "ortho: doxy" actually believes that the Stalinist movement • could: be won back to revolutionary Marxism, given only adequate 'provisions, customs and institutions"!

Open rejection

This position amounts to an open rejection of the very basis on which the fight for •the Fourth Internationa was : taken up by the International Left Opposition in 1933: the fact that . the Comintern was definitively "dead for the purposes of revolution"

The "serious differences" between Stalinist leaders, about which Hansen 'is so keen, amount in reality to no more than tactical disagreements on how best to control the working class.

For Trotskyists, the. only "democratic conclusion" to such a "discussion"' is the political overthrow of the parasitic bureaucracies in the degenerated workers states and the destruction of the mass Western CPs by the building of revolutionary parties.

The Cuban CP was actually driven into its initially uncomfortable alliance with Castro partly as a result of its determination not to allow any independent mobilisation of the Cuban masses, and to remain in contról of such movements that did take place, and partly as a result of the foreign and military policy requirements of the Kremlin bureaucracy.

Strategic outpost

The Moscow Stalinists saw Cuba as offering a cheap and convenient means of establishing a strategic outpost on the doorstep of US imperialism.

This opportunity arose at the point where the Ameriçans had taken a major stride ahead in the arms race, with the development of a highly expensive sophisticated network of Intercontinental Ballistic Refusing to mobilise the working class either int the USA or internationally in defence of the USSR, the Kremlin bureaucrats seized on the chance offered by the Cuban revolution.

As Castro's nationalist government lurched into crisis because the US retaliated against initial nationalisations by imposing a blockade, the Soviet leaders stepped in, bought up the crucial sugar with Castro. An obedient Cuban CP also complemented a parallel policy.

The Cuban Stalinists at. no point became revolutionaries, or broke from the Kremlin.

Wholesale adaptations For Hansen to suggest that they dia raises the whole question of whether in a revolutionary situation it is ever necessary to. build Trotskyist parties at all-since, inevitably, such situations always involve mass pressure on the Stalinist parties, and the "melting of the great iceberg of Stalinism" and the colonial revolution have both gone a lot further in 1978 than they had in the 1960s.

Hansen's arguement-now formally endorsed by the SWP in this reprinted edition of his writings Cuba-shows beyond doubt his failure and that of his Party to understand or complete the split with Pablo in 1953.

Both the SWP and the British Socialist Labour League (now the WRP) had in fact supported Pablo's positions at the 1951 Third World Congress of the Fourth International.

And even after the 1953 split there was no serious attempt to work back through these wrong positions and correct them.

The result was that. the SWP in only ten years drifted back to the politics it supposedly broke from in 1953.

But those politics had in fact grown even worse.

Pablo and Mandel's opportunist revisions of the Trotskyist Programme in relation to Stalinism in 1953 had been extended by 1963 to include wholesale adaptations to petty bourgeois nationalists such as Fidel Castro!

Next week:

Hansen on Cast Soviet freighter in Havana

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'Perks'-The 'Man Tuesday Novembe by John Lister December X120 live Report' BBC-2 30, Reviewed ges

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