A First Step to an Overdue Discussion

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Last weekend saw the leaders of the International Marxist Group make a tentative, but possibly important, first step towards a long-postponed discussion with the Workers Socialist League on the political problems and historical divisions that have arisen within the post-war Trotskyist movement.

WSL representatives were invited to attend an IMG day school on the 1953 split and the 1963 "reunification" , in which the speaker was the leader of the "United" Secretariat of the Fourth International, Ernest Mandel.

And, in the discussion, WSL Executive Committee member John Lister was given a short time to put forward some of the positions of our movement.

Pointing out that the WSL discussion document on these historical questions, entitled The Pòisoned Well, had been submitted to both the IMG and the USFi for reply nearly a year ago, comrade Lister attempted to show the link connecting today's political and programmatic differences between the IMG/USFI and the WS to the historical problems that have faced post-war Trotskyism.

• "Internationalist"

Reminding the school that, unlike the WSL, the USFI to this day characterises Castro's regime in Cuba as an undeformed workers' state, surmounted by a "revolutionary"; "internationalist" leadership, comrade Lister drew attention to the fact that this position effectively lines up the USFI alongside the Cuban and Soviet-backed Ethiopian forces currently attempting to crush the Eritrean liberation struggle.

And, stressing that in 1953 the leadership of the Fourth International, headed by Michel Pablo, had failed to cal! for the withdrawal of the Soviet troops sent to suppress the uprising of workers in East Berlin, comrade Lister denounced the failure of Socialist Challenge to call for the withdrawal of Vietnamese troops from Kampuchea.

Even these two obvious examples, argued comrade Lister, are enough to show that the confusion of 1953 and the Cuban revolution are still a factor in the political line taken today by the USFI.

Unless these political problems were discussed objectively and openly and the necessary lessons drawn, there could be no consistent proletarian class line fought for by the USFI leadership or its sections. Trotsky USFi sections may well exist and even grov ', but they would not be up to the task of leading revolutions.

Challenging the repeated argument put forward by both Mandel and other IMG speakers that, whatever mistakes had been made by Pablo and others in 1953, there had been no actual crossing of class lines, comrade Lister alluded to Trotsky's writings On the Trade Unions, where he states clearly:

"Independence from the influence of the bourgeoisie cannot be a passive state. It can express itself only by political acts, that is, by the struggle against the bourgeoisie.

"This struggle must be inspired by a distinct programme which requires organisation and tactics for its application.

"It is the union of organisation and tactics that constitutes the "In this way, the real independence of the proletariat from the bourgeois government cannot be realised unless the proletariat conducts its struggle under the leadership of a revolutionary and not an opportunist (Pathfinder ed. p. 16)

What Trotsky says here of independence from the bourgeoisie is equally true in asserting the independence of the working class from the bourgeoisie's agents within the workers' movement itself-the parasitic Stalinist and reformist If the Trotskyist movement proves itself unable in the test of events to put forward a political line independent of the Stalinist or reformist bureaucracy, then it proves itself unequal to the task of revolutionary leadership-whether or not it actually goes over to the side of the bourgeoisie, argued comrade Lister.

We turn to the study, of the historical crisis points of the Trotskyist movement precisely in order to steel our forces and train our leadership to the point where we do not fail a Similar test.

Time limit

This point could not be amplified in the time limit imposed at the school, but is of considerable importance.

USFI leaders today claim that agreement on programme for the "big political questions" now arising is sufficient, and that there is nothing to be gained by looking back to the crises of 1953 and 1963.

The IMG has taken this one step further and declared it a "point of principle" that they will not, as they put it, "vote on But of course in upholding the USFI as the political and organisational continuity of Trotskyism they are-whether they like it or not-voting on historical questions.

They are in practice declar ing support for the positions adopted by Mandel and Michel Pablo against which, in 1953, the American Socialist Workers Party, followed by the British section and the French grouping around Pierre Lambert, issued the Open Letter proclaiming a public faction.

They still insist that it was the signatories of the Open Letter who were in the wrong; that they carried through what was an organisational and not a political split; and that the political questions raised of little or no substance.

The latest IMG booklet on the Fourth International actually claims that 'Pabloism' was no more than a myth.

This, for all its weaknesses and avoidance of politics is an established position on history which the USFI is forced to defend in order to argue that it is today the Fourth International. So the reluctance to discuss these questions is not because the USFI has no position on them.

Nor is it because Lenin and Trotsky brushed aside historical Lenin ordered copies of Left Wing Communism, conVietnamese invaders storm taining his historical balance sheet of the struggles of the Bolsheviks, to be distributed to every delegate at the Second Congress of the Comintern.

In doing so he set out to turn the attention of delegates to the method of Bolshevism, its absolute insistence on the political independence of the working class, the leading role that class has to play in the struggle for socialist revolution, and the variety of tactical means and manoeuvres whereby the working class can be freed from the influence of reactionary bourgeois, petty bourgeois or reformist leaders.

Trotsky, too, set out in Lessons of October (1924) mercilessly to dissect the lessons of history in order to fight the ghastly errors being committed by Communist Party leaders, in particular in Germany.

This remained Trotsky's method in the fight for the continuity of Bolshevism.

Method

Refusing to accept the view that the Stalinist leaders were simply making a series of isolated "mistakes" , he insisted on probing the method behind these mistakes, and on fighting for the forces of the Left Opposition to take a clear position on them.

For instance in 1931 he wrote:

"Without a clear understanding of what happened in England in 1925-6, neither Communism as a whole nor the Left Opposition in particular will be able to make its way to a broad road". (Marxism and the Trade Unions The disastrous tactical manoeuvres carried out in 19256 by the Stalinised British Communist Party under the direction of the Kremlin bureaucracy led to the British CP virtually dissolving itself into the mass Minority Movement and tail ending the TUC General Council even as these traitors prepared to sell out the 1926 General Strike.

Trotsky insisted that behind this tactical blunder lay a fundamentally wrong method of approach to the building of revolutionary leadership in the working class.

Roots of opportunism Time and again in his writings Trotsky returns to this question, patiently explaining not simply that the Stalinists had adopted a false opportunist policy in relation to the trade union bureaucracy, but explaining also the roots of that policy:

"One of the psychological sources of opportunism is a superficial impatience, a lack of confidence in the gradual growth of the party's influence, the desire to win the masses by organisational manoeuvres or personal diplomacy.

"Out of this springs the policy of combinations behind the scenes, the policy of silence, of hushing up of self-renuncia tion, of adaptation to the ideas and slogans of others; and finally, the complete passage to the positions of opportunism.

"The subordination of the CP to the Kuomintang in China, the creation of workers' and peasants' parties in India, the subordination of the British party to the Minority Movement, etc. etc.-in all these phenomena we see the same method of bureaucratic combinationism which commences with a superficial revolutionary impatience and finishes with opportunist treason.* (p.37).

Others of Trotsky's writings trace through the material roots of this false, conservative approach within the still forming Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union.

He examined the process through which the Communist International, founded by Lenin in 1919 to provide leadership to the international workers' movement, had become simply a crude extension of the increasingly conservative foreign policy of the Stalinists.

And as a result of this consistent analysis of the historical degeneration of the Comintern Trotsky was able correctly in 1933 to point to the absence of even a ripple of concern within its ranks at Hitler's crushing of the powerful German workers' movement as unmistakeable evidence that the Comintern was now 'dead for the purposes of revolution' In setting about the task of constructing a new, Fourth International, Trotsky insisted that such an international must fight for absolute clarity:

"The chief historical instrument of our epoch is the party of the proletariat. This instrument must be forged of the best steel, well tempered and sharply ground. Only if such an instrument exists is it possible to work successfully upon the raw historic material"

We regard this as the correct approach to the fight for revolutionary leadership.

Absolute truth In demanding a reexamina tion of the issues involved in the 1953 split and the analysis made of the Cuban revolution, the WSL has no intention of attempting to trace some kind of "thin red line" of absolute truth reaching down to our tendency today.

On the contrary, East German workers fight Kremlin tanks in 1953 document The Poisoned Well makes abundantly clear, we are convinced that none of the parties to the 1953 split or the "Reunification" was wholly correct in its understanding of the contradictory role of Stalinism in the post war overturns of capitalism-though some drew less dangerous conclusions than others from their mistakes.

But nor are we neutral on the major political issues that arose in 1953, which in our view raised the whole question of how the programme of Trotskyism could be developed and defended in the light of the contradictory role of post-war . Adequate foundation Rather than awarding belated medals or slaps on the wrist, we are concerned today with the reconstruction of the Trotskyist Fourth International on a theoretical foundation firm enough to equip its sections to mobilise the working class independently of the various Stalinist, reformist and petty bourgeois nationalist leaderships.

That theoretical foundation was not laid down in 1953. Nor were any of the unresolved problems answered in the opportunist "agree to disagree" formulae of the 1963 reunification.

By refusing to make any serious critical reexamination of the false positions of the past, the USFI, whatever its facade of "orthodoxy" at the moment is building on sand.

Not circulated Last weekend's school enabled these problems to be broached for the first time with many of the IMG members present.

Many of them still have not been circulated with copies of The Poisoned Well The document was submitted last year by the WSL on the invitation of the USFI as part of the pre-conference discussion material prior to the USFI Xith World Congress.

But it now seems unlikely that any moves will be made by the USFI to circulate the document internationally.

Such is the reluctance of USFI leaders to discuss any aspect of their own history.

But hopefully last weekend's small beginning can at last mark the start of a serious discussion of the source of the obvious political differences between the IMG/USFI and the WSL.

Such clarification is essential if there is to be any hope of establishing a principled basis for the reconstruction of the Fourth International.

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*DUSTRIAL Striking journalists demonstrate through Nottingham Pat NELS the Nottingham strikers had known what would happen to them.

Although a speech from the General Secretary, Ken Ashton, was greeted with a PROFIT OFFER