Tribune Group welcome for Foot

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The defeat of the right wing in the main conference at Brighton did little or nothing to alter the mood of good fellowship which dominated the meeting organised by Tribune at the Brighton Dome on the evening of Wednesday 3 October.

Chairman of the meeting and Tribune • editor Richard Clements began characteristically by reminding the meeting how 'unsectarian' they were.

Just to show this he allowed a lengthy diatribe from Barbara Castle (of 'In Place of Strife' fame) about how she is now apparently working inside the EEC framework 'in order to destroy it"

There were clearly few in the hall who did not agree with the heckler who shouted Why don't you get out?'-meaning not only -out of the European Parliament but also of the meeting.

Another example of Mr. "Clements' lack of 'sectarianism' was the contribution he allowed from the most eloquent supporter of every betrayal of the last Labour government-Deputy Leader Michael Foot.

Foot, of course, did not embark on the hopeless task of defending the Callaghan gang, but confined himself to attacking the Tories and telling Wedgewood Benn, (who shared the platform with him) to "grow up"

Double think : No doubt he can have every confidence that Benn will, in good time, grow to his own stature of double think and Benn himself declared that the real division in the conference was not between left and right-but between the mass media and the delegates!

This allowed him to engage in a series of demagogic attacks on the press and on the BBC where he described, quite correctly, a hostility to the labour movement that is nothing short of a scandal" = The only vague commitment he made to action was a statement that he was less concerned about 'entrism' in the Labour Party than with 'exitism' by those who had long since ceased to support anything for which the labour movement has stood.

It remains to be seen whether this will mean that in the future Benn and his colleagues on the NEC will be held to granting appeals against the witch-hunting of left wingers by local right wing cliques, when their appeals come through.

Benn compared the 'constituțional wrangles' within the Labour Party somewhat improbably to great battles of the past like those of the Chartists and the Sufragettes.

Eric Heffer, at least, was much more honest.

Despite the conference victories of the week, he said, they were only at the beginning of a long, hard battle.

With leaders like those lassembled on the Tribune platistrated!

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Centrists marching behind the banner of the Uni untea workers ayamısı represen- Dut Iney came ciust lu it uy ar tatives of the bourgeoisie (such exaggeration of the extent of as the army) and against their dual power and through such own collaborationist leaders, the • idealistic statements as the SWP leader Barnes Our criticisms of the SWP's positions in Portugal in 1975 do not imply that we support the very different positions taken by the International Majority Tendency and summarised in the document 'In Defence of the Portuguese Revolution' by E. Mandel, P. Frank and L. Maitan.

This document, and the other positions of the IMT in Portugal, are as far away from the Transitional Programme as those of the SWP.

While the SWP saw the existing reformist leaders as the 'defenders of the rights of the masses' , the IMT sought and thought they had found acceptable 'leaders' within the officer's corps of the bourgeois army!

Carvalho

The IMT's position in relation to the 'left' talking COPCON chief Carvalho is one of the clearest instances of their failure to project a line for the independence of the working class and of their search for a spontaneously generated nonworking class and even anti-working class leadership for the What emerged from the Mandel, Frank, Maitan document, and appeared in its extreme form in the LCI's (International Communist League's) participation in the Popular United Front (FUP), is a clear and conscious support for the 'left' section of the bourgeois army officers, under Carvalho.

The IMT failed at every turn to analyse events in Portugal on the basis of the class forces involved. Thus the Armed Forces Movement (or rather, the Carvalho/Goncalves wing of it) was analysed subjectively as 'left' , and later alongside the CP and the left groups as opposed to the 'right'-which in mid1975 included the Socialist In the same way they refused to give a class definition to the state. The SWP's claim that it was a military dictatorship was rejected only on the superficial grounds that Portugal was 'the freest country in the world' Perspective missing With the class perspective missing from their analytical tool-box, it followed that Trotskyism was missing from their political line.

Instead of fighting for the independence of the working class through presenting demands which could have amninet ronranam sonęse IMT pursued a line which actually supported the collaboration of the CP and the left groups with the AFM.

The IMT leaders supported continued rule by a section of the bourgeois army in 1975, not only against an 'Portuquese Kornilov' but also against any demand for an SP/CP government.

They raised no demand for a break of workers' organisations with the AFM.

On the contrary, they saw thé AFM as being the midwife of soviet power, which the IMT appeared to regard as virtually an immediately realizable objective.

They did not explicitly make the immediate demand 'All power to the workers' commissions or peoples' assemblies' he thni, amma alano ta it his an Carvalho Part Three IMT leader Mandel following by G. Michaloux in Inprecor: • "In Portugal the governmental power is vacillating while the power of the rank and file is taking shape. It already has a name: the People's Assembries, which will elect a National Assembly of Workers and Soldiers. The National Assembly will form a Workers' and Peasants' Government ...

What need party?

If everything was so assured then what need could there possibly be for a Trotskyist revolutionary party? What need was there for the Transitional This inexorable advance towards soviet power was helped, according to the IMT, by the Guide Document passed on 8 July by the AFM assembly.

According to Michaloux:

"The 'guide document incorporates and thereby encourages the development of the self-organisation of the workers... (It is) a clear advance in relation to the Action Plan of the Revolutionary Council."

The IMT were, therefore, more than ready to accept an unelected bourgeois, military, popular front regime which, they said, had produced 'the freest country in the world today' as a stepping-stone towards 'soviet power' The LCI participated in the 10,000 strong demonstration of July 16 whose main slogans included 'Unity of Workers with the progressive wing of the AFM' and 'Dissolution of the Constituent Assembly!' (a purely sectarian anti-SP demand).

Infamous front

These positions taken by the IMT leadership led directly to the signing by the LC! of the infamous Popular Unity Front, The United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFI) is undoubtedly the largest and most widely known of the currents that have emerged from the postwar crisis of the Trotskyist movement.

With thousands of members and sections or sympathising sections in dozens of countries, it is viewed by many militants as "the" Trotskyist Fourth The Workers Socialist League does not share this view.

We see the USFI as a movement that has departed on numerous key questions from the positions and method put forward in the Transitional Programme on which the Fourth International was founded in 1938. in which the LCI joined various left groups and the Stalinists of the CP.

The accord they endorsed supported the anti-working class 5th Provisiónal Government under Goncalves, the Guide Document passed by the AFM assembly, and the concept of a military people's government.

The IMT attempted to deny parentage of this utterly unprincipled move; but the family resemblance is, unfortunately mistakeable.

The IMT defended the principle of this pact which was based on class-collaborationist obiectives. It questioned only the tactics:

«The LCI made a bloc with working class parties . ..there is no principled ground on which to object to that. It does not represent crossing clas ; lines.

•The important thing is whether the objective: i and platform of the bloc are correct or not.

"We believe they were not; the leadership of the LCI believed they were. This is a aitterence Tactics .1t._.. 1- - tics not principles." (RMP, p.26)

The policies which resulted in the signing of the FUP (which later became, with the departure of the CP, the "Revolutionary Unity Front" (FUR) are justified by the IMT as an example of the defence of the Portuguese Kerensky (Carvalho) against the Portuguese Kornilov (Spinola, etc).

SOCIALIST PRES We know, of course, that th two other main groupings tha lay claim to the title of "Fourt! International" are both nov substantially smaller than th USFI.

Both of them-the Healyit ''International Committee' (rui by the British WRP) and th "Organising Committee for th Reconstruction of the Fourt International' (run by th French OCI)-certainly hol political positions as bad or fa worse than the USFI on man questions and are themselve (like the USFI) wracked b internal crisis.

Disorientation

But the bankruptcy of thei rivals is in our view no arge ment for recognising in th USFI the exclusive continuit of the Trotskyist movemen 4y....

Of course, the fight against Spinolist reaction was part of the fight of the working class against the capitalist class.

Trotskyists naturally had to be in the vanguard of that fight, whose class character was not altered by the fact that the Portuguese Kerenskys' might opportunistically decide to take the side of the masses on particular occasions.

The FUP/FUR agreement, however, like the IMT policy which led to it, is based on a different position-it is an agreement in which working class organisations come to the defence of the Kerenskys.

Class collaborationist This is an entirely different matter from allowing the Kerenskys to fight alongside them.

That this class collaborationist position was not abandoned within the IMT despite criticism and self-criticism can be seen from the position taken in the Presidential elections in June 1976.

There leading members of the IMT publicly argued that it might or would be correct to vote for the 'left' bourgeois military candidate, Carvalho, as opposed to the CP candidate, Pato.

The differences between the two main USFI factions on the question of Portugal became at times so sharp that one SWP spokesman said that they came

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straddled by a leadership which switch position in respo -for all its weaknesses and the surface developments rivicions-is definitelv interna- clace strudale.

It was this new majority leaders in expelling members of leadership that drafted the five the Brigade from the country!

Congress. But their manifest used in these attacks is that Militant soldiers from the RAL 1 regiment marching through Lisbon in a mass demonstration Wednesday 10 October 1979 whose post-war period has been characterised by profound political disorientation and a continuing series of incomplete and opportunist splits and fusions.

The forthcoming Xith World Congress of the USFI is however an important event. It offers Marxists the opportunity of assessing in more detail the stage of development of the political crișis which has characterised the USFI's existence since its formation in 1963.

Such an assessment is no easy task. Unlike the IC and the OCRFI, the USFi is the very opposite of a politically monolithic grouping consisting of sattelite "sections" grouped round a national-based party.

•Rather the USFI is a deliberately heterogeneous body, a consciously created hodgepodge of widely varying positions, analysis and practice, Popular Front ir i support of close to finding themselves on opposite sides of the barricades.

We are more struck, how. ever, by the underlying similarities between their methods.

Both of them failed to put forward a programme to centralise and unify the independent struggles of the working class.

This was because both of them at crucial moments looked towards a section of the bourgeoisie or its agents in the workers' movement to lead the fight for socialism.

Their methods in each case reflected not the strength and upsurge of the working class, but the pressure of opportunistic sectors of the petty bourgeoisie.

Basing themselves not on the class independence of the proletariat but the cosmetic 'left' face of social democracy or a 'progressive' military junta, both factions became the most crass exponents of spontaneity.

For this reason they both failed to recognise the combined nature of the tasks which faced the working class-the defence of existing gains of the workers' movement, the extension of those gains, the resistance towards the old forms of bonapartism and the fight to destroy the new 'more beneficent' varieties and replace them with a workers' government.

This failure was clear from -10 U.... tionally based.

The USFI makes a virtue of the fact that within its ranks currents holding completely opposing politica views on issues of programme and practice can exist side-by-side.even when such differences on topics such as strategy and tactics in Portugal 1974 Gam The Vietnamese invasion of ! puchea and the analysis of the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua reach a level where rival USFI factions find themselves potentially or actually on opposite their own ''comrades"

The USFI therefore is no' fixed entity: it is a sum total of divergent factional currents which continually shift and the Fifth Provisional Government Fifth Provisional Go the governmental slogans adopted by the USFI factions in the crucial period of 1975.

The SWP usually called for an SP/CP government based on the so-called Constituent Assembly.

Reformist

This reformist position contained the idea that the working class's main task was to build bourgeois democracy. No mention at this stage was made of soviet-type bodies except scathingly to • dismiss the existing ones as pitifully weak.

There was even a moment when the SWP's adaptation reached its zenith when it called for an SP government alone, thus helping to foster divisions in the working class, and illusions in its reactionary social democratic leaders.

The IMT later argued that up to April 1975 the call for an SP/CP government was correct (though it conspicuously failed to make it at the time) but that after that date (when, incidentally, the workers had overwhelmingly voted for the CP and the SP in the constituent elections) it became 'suicidal' What was not suicidal it seemed, was to support for the time being a 'left' AFM government which would supposedly help tp build soviets which could in the immediate future be ready to take power.

This position is a good

Untenable

At its Tenth World Congress in 1974 the main factions were the Leninist Trotskyist Faction, politically supporting the formally "orthodox" • opportunist positions of the US Socialist Workers Party, and the International Majority Tendency, clinging on to the ultra-leftist and guerrillaist schemas of the USFI's European Secretariat.

But the untenable positions taken by both the LTF and the IMT during the Portuguese events of 1974-6 and the Angolan war led to a sharp realignment of forces which now shapes the coming XIth World The bulk of the USFI's example of that amalgam of ultra-leftism and adaptation to bureaucrats and bourgeois forces which has been the special hallmark of the IMT of the USFI.

It abandons all the lessons of the political struggle of the Bolsheviks and the left opposition.

In the first place, it confused soviets-the independent organs workers power, which existed only in embryo in Portugal in 1975—with 'workers' committees' established under the guidance of a reforming group of bourgeois military offiSecond, it abandoned the slogans of formal (bourgeois) democracy at a time when, far from having soviet rule, Portugal had a non-elected government answerable to no elected body, dominated by officers of a bourgeois army.

The slogans and demands of formal democracy at this point would have retained all their power as they did in Russia in 1917-not as an alternative to the building of soviets (as the IMT made it) but, on the contrary, closely linked to the building of soviets, whose demands at that stage should have included bourgeois democratic rights.

Lessons of October Reflecting on the experience of 1917 Trotsky says:

"The experience of Russia shows that during the progress of the revolution, the proletariat organised in soviets can, by correct policy, directed toward the conquest of power, draw behind it the peasantry, fling it against the front of formal democracy embodied in the Constituent Assembly, and switch it onto the rails of Soviet democracy. In any case, these results were not obtained by simply opposing the Soviets to the Constituent Assembly, but by drawing the masses towards the Soviets while maintaining the slogans of formal democracy up to the very moment of the conquest of power and even after it."(Problems of the Chinese Revolution, pp 187188)

Third, the IMT turns soviets into a fetish in exactly the way that Trotsky on many occasions Latin American member sections and sympathising sections broke with the line of the SWP and the LTf and, led by Nahuel Moreno's Argentinian PST, formed the Bolshevik Tendency' The growing challenge from these forces, combined with the complate collapse in the credibility of the IMT's guerrillaist perspectives of 1969 and 1974, pressured both the European and SWP leaders into e hasty dissolution of factions and the formation of a new, "united" leadership prior to the Xith Omissions main documents tabled for the warned against.

In the History of the Russian Revolution he writes:

"The soviet form does not contain any mystic power... Of all the forms of revolutionary representation, the soviet is the most flexible, immediate and transparent. But still it is only a form. It cannot give more than the masses are capable of putting into it at a given moment."

Fourth, it is not only soviets which were fetishized but, what was worse, fake "soviets' , which were planned to be dependent on the bourgeois military It was the task of Trotskyists to expose these 'soviets' as a manoeuvre by a section of the bourgeoisie. Trotsky again had warned of such a possibility:

"As if soviets cannot be a weapon for deceiving the workers and peasants! What else were the Menshevik Social Revolutionary soviets of 1917? Nothing but a weapon for support of the power of the bourgeoisie and the preparations of its dictatorship. What were the Social-Democratic soviets in Germany and Austria in 19181919? Organs for saving the bourgeoisie and deceiving the workers."! (The Revolution in India, Its Tasks and Its Dangers' Writings 1930, p151)

All in all, for the IMT the central task for revolutionary socialists was to encourage the construction of Soviets-even 'soviets' linked to a section of the bourgeois army! Everything had to be subordinated to this.

This contrasts sharply with the . real central task of Trotskyists, which was to construct a revolutionary party to lead the working masses to socialism.

Fi Extend gains Of course, such a party could be constructed only on the basis of a programme to defend and extend the gains made by workers and to expose their misleaders.

And the building of authentic soviets would be a major part of such a programme, but could not be a central objective.

To the IMT, soviets, even "soviets' established from above by a bourgeois military government with workers' parties exclWe build a even gi failure to reconcile past political disagreements is demonstrated by the pattern of conspicuous diplomatic omissions and evasions in: the documents.

The Bolshevik Tendency has in the meantime declared itself a Faction dedicated to the removal of what it calls a 'Castroist current' and an 'unprincipled bloc" at the head of the USFI and the restoration of "orthodox" Trotskyism.

The USFI leaders for their part have mounted vicious public attacks on the Simon Bolivar Brigade organised by parties от ine boisnevik raction dice el ale Dalahail lee for intervention in the Nicaraguan revolution.

These attacks go so far as to endorse the action of the FSLN Increasingly the language uded from them, became a magic formula.

There was no insistence on the independence of the soviets from the bourgeois state and no recognition that it was only under the leadership of a revolutionary party that soviets could become the instruments of socialist revolution.

In this way the IMT, too, in the programme compromised both the organisational. and programmatic independence of the working class.

In Socialist Press during this time we recognised the need to build and unify soviet-type com. mittees completely independent of the bourgeois AFM.

But we recognised also that these organs were not yet strong enough to form an adequate alternative source of power to the bourgeois state Given also that the great majority of the working class in most parts of the country remained loyal to the main workers' parties, we continued to call for an SP/CP government, but one which was answerable to the developing independent organs of workers' power rather than to a so-called Constituent Assembly which was compromised with the bourgeois AFM This policy was an application of the Transitional Programme.

It provided a concrete demand which recognised the objective and subjective reality. recognised the combined nature of the tasks facing the Portuguese working class in 1975, and upheld the unity and independence of the working class.

A party fighting in the mass movement for these demands, along with the other demands of the Transitional Programme, would have been seen to represent a clear alternative direction to that followed by the Stalinist and reformist leaders and adapted to by the parties of the left, including those claiming to be Trotskyist.

No easy task do not argue that to revolutionary leadership, ren the enormous opporappropriate to a split rather than an internal debate on A much lesser threat is seen in the statements produced by a new, 'Leninist Trotskyist Tendency" which has also emerged, with forces in a number of sections, pledged to "correct the errors" of the existing USFI The USFI in short is a movement wracked by the most profound internal crisis and contradictions.

In assessing its development and its problems we can, not only better grasp the political problems within it but also pinpoint central issues on which clarity is essential in the struggle to reconstruct the Fourth International as an authoritative international centre for the necessary Trotskyist world party of socialist revolution. tunities opened up by the fall of Caetano, was an easy task.

We do not argue that any group could have done it without in the process committin many errors-especially a young, inexperienced group of comrades.

But it is ciear to us that the much more experienced leaderships of what were then the main factions of the USFI made the task more difficult and not only committed errors but pursued lines which would inevitably be the source of continual errors.

Although the policies of the main factions appeared diametrically opposed to each otherbringing them almost to being on opposite sides of the barricades-they both, in our view, grow from a common root-the poison of Pabloism.

The Pabloite method brings brings a continuous tendency away from the independence of the working class at the head of all the oppressed masses, towards adaptation to non-proletarian forces-whether they be petty bourgeois forces (Castro, Carvalho and the AFM) or the bureaucratic castes which dominate the workers' states and the mass workers' parties.

Since 1976, the ex-IMT and the SWP have to all appearances united on the question of Portugal. The two USFI groups in Portugal have fused (though the PRT (Workers revolutionary Party) has since the split in the LTF supported not the SWP but the opposition Bolshevik Faction) on the basis of an agreement on today's tasks, and an accord not to discuss past differences.

But, unpleasant as it may be, such differences must be discussed as part of the process of learning the lessons of experience which can be the only way towards forging a revolutionary Continued

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• SOCIALIST PRESS, Wednesday 10 October 1979

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(form, the truth of this' state. ¡ment was inescapably demon-

two faces of opportunis adaptation

Plat POFL

sides of barricades, publicly denouncing the line adopted by