The 'United' Secretariat Indo-China war

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This is the first of a series of articles about the major tant Jan. 19 1979, reprinted in Intercontinental political and theoretical crisis in the USFI promoted by the Fred Feldman. "Socialist Revolution in Vietnam", national Socialist Review, April 1979, reprinted in continental Press/Inprecor, April 9, 1979:

Steve Clark, "Imperialism vs, Workers of the World" counterposed political resolutions which Militant March 23'1979, also reprinted in Intercontinental appeared in Intercontinental Press/Inprecor of June 4 1979: "The Sino-Indochinese crisis" (Statement of the Ernest Mandel, "Behind Differences on Military Conflicts in Fourth International) and "New Advances in the Indo- Southeast Asia" Intercontinental Press/ Inprecor, April 9 chinese revolution and Imperialism's Response" (United Steve Clark, Fred Feldman, Gus Horowitz and Mary-Alice Waters, 'War and Revolution in Indochina- What Policy for Revolutionists?". Intercontinental Press/Inprecor Khmer Rouge troops welcomed as liberators in Phnom Penh after defeat recent wars in South East Asia.

The main sources on the dispute, to in the articles are the following:

Secretariat Minority resolutions).

2. The main theoretical articles Fred Feldman. "Behind Fall Part One Last December's full-scale invasion of Kampuchea by Vietnam, and China's subsequent partial invasion of Vietnam, are events of profound significance for the working class of the world, and therefore for the Trotskyist movement.

Although bitter conflict between the leaders of states claiming to be communist is nothing new -and has led in isolated instances to moments of armed conflict-the new South East Asia conflicts are the first examples of all-out wars between such states.

"Freedom'

On many occasions workers of one country have been sent to kill and wound workers of another country, on both sides in the name of "freedom" and "democracy". • On a shamefully high number of occasions "socialist" leaders have echoed these calls or independently dispatched their followers to kill workers in the interests of "socialism" while their "comrades" in other countries did the same.

Now in South East Asia, for the first time on anything like this scalethough many times foreshadowed-the "communist" leaders of two states have called on their own workers to kill "enemy workers" in the name of "communism"

The wars therefore mark, if not a new state of the degeneration Stalinism, then a terrible new expression of that degeneration, and one which raises the appalling possibility of more destructive events of the same kind in the future.

Such prospects underline the fact that the building of an authentic revolutionary leadership in the working class is the the most vital task of our epoch. Trotsky and hiscomradesof the Left Oppposition founded the Fourth International to provide such a leadershipone which reflected the independence of the working class, both from the bourgeoisie and from the Stalinist bureaucracy, and which therefore also represented the objective unity of that class on which will be referred to date are: of Pol Pot Regime", Miliworld scale.

The Fourth International was in this way the continuation of the tradition of Bolshevism and the Third International in its early years, of the principled fight to create new workers states through socialist revolution, to lay the hasis for a world federation of those states based on a world planned economy and thus found a new historical epoch in which wars would be eliminated and class exploitation definitively ended.

Phyiscal As part of the fight for that objective Trotskyists, utterly hostile to pacifism, have supported the physical defence of even degenerated and deformed workers states, against imperialism.

But they have never believed that the struggle for new socialist property Inprecor, Jan. 22 1979.

Press/ Inprecor, April 9, 1979;

1979;

July 16 1979. forms would take the form of armed invasions of capitalist states by workers' states; such a perspective of building the revolution was explicitly repudiated by Lenin even in the case of a workers state that had not become bureaucratically degenerated. It applies with redoubled force to a Stalinist-ruled state.

We believe that it is also implicity in the tradition of the Bolshevik Party and the Left Opposition that, in a struggle between bureaucratic rules of two workers states, it is the task of the workers on each side not to kill each other in the name of "communism" and in the interest of two parasitic ruling castes, but rather to find the road to the unity of workers in both countries and the destruction of the bureaucracies.' This requires a policy analogous to the revolutionary defeatism Press/ InterInteradvocated by Lenin and Bolsheviks in relation to intercapitalist war 1914-18.

Class nature

The problem which was posed for the world working class, and hence for Trotskyists, in the recent and perhaps continuing wars in South East Asisa were several: to understand how states claiming to be socialist in nature could go to war with each other; to understand the true class nature of thoses states; to understand the role and interests of the rulers of the states involved and the contradictions between these interests and those of the working class and oppressed masses; and to find a clear political road which expressed the independence and unity of the working class to make concrete the struggle against the the of Mandel both bureaucratic rule against imperialism.

In other words, the task is to apply to a new situation in the world the lessons obtained from the long theoretical struggle of Trotsky and the founders of the Fouth International about the counterrevolutionary historical role of the Stalinist bureaucracy, about the class nature of states ruled by that bureaucracy, and about the necessity for a strategy and tactics of political Since its foundation the Workers Socialist League has struggled to understand these lessons and apply them in today's conditions.

As part of that struggle we have examined the history of the Fourth International since Trotsky's death. World War Two, those who claim to be Trotskyists have had to face such questions over and over especially in the immediate post war period in relation to the development of Stalinist rule in Eastern Europe, and then again in relation to the Chinese revolution of 1949 and the Cuban revolution a decade later:

Significant All of these events provoked major discussions and disagreements in the Trotskyist movement and led to the most significant of the Trotskyist movement's many splits and fewer fusions.

We have been forced to conclude that the basic political problems to which these developments gave rise have remained unresolved in the Trotskyist movement.

And it is that fact which stands at the root of the disintegration of the Fourth International as an authoritative organisational centre of world revolution.

In the treatment of these major events by the leaders of movements claiming adherence to Trotskyism two characteristic tendencies have emerged: on the one hand a tendency to adapt to. and in some cases to give revolutionary credentials to, the Stalinist bureaucracy (and sometimes other non-proletarian forces as well); and on the other hand a tendency to adhere . rigid orthodoxy" which can see today's events only as repeats of yesterday's.

Adaptationist

There are occasions when we have argued (as in 1953 when Pablo threatened to liquidate the programme of the Trotskyist movement in entry into the Stalinist parties) that the organisational consequences of the adaptationist position were so serious in their implications that the resistance to them by the International Committee should be defended, even though the theoretical basis of that resistance was woefully inadequate and failed to be further developed.

And we have always seen as a landmark in a long process of theoretical disarmament of the Trotskyist movement the "reunification" document of 1963 on the basis of which the 'United' Secretariat of Fourth the International was established.

Liquidation

It is a document and an agreement which we regard as Pabloite, in the sense that it opens the way to the liquidation of the revolutionary programme by recognition of the petty-bourgeois Castro leadership in Cuba as an 'unconscious Trotskyist' leadership.

According to the USFI, the Cuban revolution unfolded the "logic" of permanent revolution, and the task of Trotskyists was not to carry through the fight for Trotskyist parties on the Marxist programme

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SOCIALIST PRESS. Wednesday 8 August 1979 Page 7 splits wide open over SOC 3. 09 2 08.: =1 48.0:42 12: 923•8 3 523. 0 10 5. # / 23% 234 but to "combine with" forces of Castroism.

This is one of many examples of how Trotskyists' , not only of the USFI, have under-estimated the historical role of the revolutionary role of the Stalinist bureaucracy, finding in the events of the world some spontaneous objective revolutionary "logic"

The 1963 agreement did not of course stop one of its main signatories, the American SWP (prevented by reationary US law from affiliating to the Fourth International), from waging a battle later in the decade against the most disastrous consequences of the proCastro orientation of the USFI-the guerrillaist turn of the USFI's 9th World Congress in 1969.

But, while the SWP insisted on the need for a revolutionary party to express the independent interests of the working class in Latin America. north of the Rio Grande it permitted itself full freedom in adapting to other petty bourgeois forces. The SWP's orthodoxy was selective, and seldom uncontaminated with Pabloite adaptationism In fact orthodoxy" itself-whether in the hands of the SWP or of Healyites or Lambertists -becomes, as the world changes around it, inevitably more and more theoretically reactionary, more and more an obstacle rather than an aid to the comprehension of the processes of evolutions and leaps in development of the objective political world.

To analyse the world merely through the words that froze decades ago on the lips of Trotsky or Lenin is to make the ludicrous assumption that had these fountainheads of orthodoxy lived until today they would have continued to assess the world in the same terms they did when they were in fact part of it and fighting to change it.

In the USFI it was the disasters of experience, and :: 30 00409 the leaders' subjective need for unity, rather than any resolution of the theoretical argument over these questions, which allowed the SWP.s "orthodoxy" to triumph and the guerrillaist strategy to be abandoned in Latin America.

'Reunification'

new reunification' of the warring factions took place in the USFI in 1977 on the basis of very inadequate and partial self-criticism of their guerrillaist policy by the former International Majority Tendency. (We have analysed this in our document "The Poisoned Well"').

The leaders of the two factions seem also to have agreed not to go over again the issues which had SO sharply divided them in Portugal in 1975.

This agreement, under which the SWP and the International Majority dissolved their factions, was to be cemented together at the forthcoming 11th World Congress of the USFI. But, as the theoretical emptiness of the documents for that Congress demonstrate, the urge of leading groups of the world Trotskyist movement to establish organisational unity has been allowed to take precedence over the real need for continuous theoretical rearmament of the revolutionary movement.

Thus on two occasions, in 1963 and 1977, the two leading groups in the leadership of the USFI (the SWP on the one side and the section around Mandel, Frank and others on the other) have tried to get their marriage to coincide with a funeral, or perhaps a less ceremonious burial, of the profound theoretical issues which had previously divided them.

But whether these leaders face up to it or not, the fact is that the building of a Trotskyist leadership in the world today still depends on real steps being taken to resolve those theor8S :

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The Cuban revolution etical problems. The tragic events of South East Asia in recent months, where worker kills worker, under the leadership of "communists" , shows how urgent that need is.

The USFI today is by far the largest of the organisations in the world today claiming to be Trotskyist. The diametrically opposed positions emanating from various sections of that organisation on the South East Asian wars shows how far it is from having resolved any of the major theoretical problems facing Trotskyists, and therefore how far it is from being able to offer the revolutionary lead which could provide a way forward based on the independence and unity of the working class.

Castro The Indo-Chinese events have hit the USFI like a thunderboli, shattering the basis of 'unity' provided by the Latin American self-criticism and the agreement to forget about Portugal.

The Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia provoked a sharper counterposition between sections of the USFI leaders than ever before.

The SWP supports the Vietnamese invasion; the USFI majority around the European leadership oppose it, and call for the withdrawal of Vietnamese troops from Kampuchea.

The two sides in other words support opposite sides in a war.

In their latest article on the subject four leading SWP members acknowledged this fact:

"Two methods? Yes. Two underlying theoretical approaches? Yes. But, above all two political lines. Two lines of action counterposed in wartime.

«That was the difference that emerged in the world Trotskyist movement. It is the first time since the opening of World War II that differences of such magnitude in wartime have arisen in the Fourth International." (ICP, 16.7.79, It is impossible to escape from the conclusion that had the USFI had militants in Vietnam and Cambodia then the two main currents in its leadership would, on the basis of these two lines, have had to tell their followers to kill the followers of the other section in the name of "Trotskyism"!

A stark parallel exists between this situation and that of the "democrats" "socialists" and "communists" mentioned earlier who have promoted not the unity but the division of the world working class.

It is an awareness of the serious implications of this new split which has helped to force open • inside the USFI the most fundamental discussion of theoretical issues since its foundation.

The USFI is now publicly beginning to debate the question which the Workers Socialist League has been attempting to raise for the last four years and begin to answer as part of the theoretical rearmament necessary to the reconstruction of the Fourth International.

Workers Among the issues which have already entered this dispute (though in some cases in an implicit or a distorted form) are: What is a workers' state? How is a workers state created? Is the creation of deformed workers' states fundamentally different from: the creation of healthy workers" states? Does the Stalinist bureaucracy play a partly progressive or totally reactionary historical role? What accounts for conflicts between the bureaucratic leaderships of workers' states? What are the consequences of these conflicts? Does the Stalinist bureaucracy preserve or endanger socialised property forms?

These are the same questions which arose in the theoretical and political debates in the Trotskyist movement after World War Il and in the lead-up to the 1953 split.

They are the same questions which were raised after the Cuban revolution in 1959 and which dominated the discussions in advance of the SWP's return to the Pabloite fold in 1963.

In the USFI they emerged again over Latin America, Portugal and more recently ism "

lo many leaders they are frightening questions.

The 1963 "reunification" of the USFI, for instance, involved an agreement not to open such issues to discussion until the dust could settle.

But they are, we have always maintained, fundamental questions for Trotskyists, questions which must be reopened and resolved time and time again in relation to changing historical events if the revolutionary socialist movement is to combat Stalinism at every new turn.

In the period since World War Il, the leaders of the organisations claiming to be Trotskyist have for the most part failed to give satisfactory answers to those questions.

And that, in the opinion of the WL, is one of the main reasons why they have contributed to the destruction of the Fourth International as an authoritative centre of world revolutionary leadership.

We must therefore accept it as in a certain sense positive that the discussion of these fundamental theoretical questions is being reopened within an organisation which since its formation has been more responsible for suppressing their discussion.

SWP leader Barnes But the USFI leaders have not been converted in a positive way to the virtues of this theoretical debate.

It has been forced upon them by the evident irreconcilability of the positions which have been taken up on the question of the Indo-Chinese wars.

In his main contribution to the discussion so far, Ernest Mandel uses a revealing word.

Referring to the disagreements in the USFI over the Vietnamese invasion of Kampuchea, he says that:

"their political implication with regard to further developments in relation to armed conflict between ruling bureaucracies in workers states are not clear. This is potentially dangerous especially because of the possibility of armed struggle between the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of China. Moreover, the underlying theoretical questions are of such importance (and, in one case, of such novelty) that a thorough discussion of them has become UNAVOIDABLE.

(ICP 9.4.79, p. 335, our emphasis)

But the theoretical discussion, which this jagged rip in the political fabric of the USFI has allowed to show through, demonstrates the vast distance between ceasing to avoid the questions and beginning to resolve them.

From the contributions so far it is clear that the long theoretical disarmament of the Trotskyist movement has left the USFI with no agreed positions on even the basic theoretical issues which have emerged in the period since World War II.

We can illustrate this point in concluding this initial article by summarising some of the present dispute, raising points, all of which we intend to discuss more systematically in the later articles in this series.

We find the two sections of the USFI leadership in total disagreement as what took place in Kampuchea after the defeat of the Lon Nol regime and the departure of the imperialists in 1975.

The discord is not so much about facts, as to how they are to be interpreted.

Ernest Mandel and the USFI majority says that a workers' state was established. The SWP leaders say that Pol Pot set up a reactionary capitalist state which came to act as an agency of imperialism.

So the difference between the interpretation of events in Kampuchea takes us at once to a more fundamental differenceabout what a workers' state is, and what is the nature of the process by which a workers state is established under Stalinist leadership.

Deficiency

A dispute exists between the two sides as to whether what defines a workers state is the overthrow of the previous state apparatus even in advance of any transformation taking place in property forms (Mandel's position), or whether a workers state is only established when the capitalist class has been expropriated (the SWP's position).

This dispute in itself is not the fundamental one; but it reveals a deficiency in the way both sides are attempting to resolve the question-through dictionary definitions rather than thorough attempt to understand complex dialectical processes.

Another question is raised by the discussion here: what is the significance of a deformed workers state? Or, to put it another way, is there a fundamental qualitative difference between the formation of a healthy workers state and the formation of a deformed workers state?

We argue emphatically that there is. But on this crucial question both sides in the USFI dispute seem to be saying or clearly implying that such a qualitative difference either doesn't exist, or else it is of incidental importance.

Continued next week