The Fourth International was founded by Trotsky in 1938. By that point, the Second ‘Socialist’ International and the Third ‘Communist’ International had completely betrayed their historic missions and acted as traitorous obstacles in the way of the victory of the working class. A new revolutionary leadership was required worldwide, one founded upon the Marxist ideas long since abandoned by the other internationals.
Despite the historic task that faced the Fourth International, after Trotsky’s assassination, many of its ‘leaders’ played a lamentable role. Amidst a sea of confusion, Ted Grant – founder of the organisation that is now the Revolutionary Communist International (RCI) – stands out as the only consistent defender of the genuine, revolutionary method of Marxism.
After years of omissions and slanders that have obscured the truth, the document below brings out the real history of the Fourth International and the role of Ted Grant. Through this document, and at the first World Congress of the Revolutionary Communist International, we intend to reclaim the real ideas that Trotsky founded the Fourth International upon for a new generation of Revolutionary Communists.
To read more about the issues discussed in this document, including Ted Grant’s own writings from the time, visit our reading guide on the collapse of the Fourth International.
“Learning not to forget the past in order to foresee the future is our first, our most important task.” (A Wretched Document, 27 July 1929, Writings of Leon Trotsky, Vol 1, 1929, New York 1975, p. 198-212)
“One of the basic principles of dialectics is that there is no such thing as abstract truth, truth is always concrete.” (Lenin, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, May 1904)
This document is about the degeneration and collapse of the Fourth International, founded by Trotsky in 1938, and the defence of the genuine ideas and methods of Trotskyism. This subject may seem at first sight to be only of historical interest, but this is certainly not the case.
In fact, these developments hold enormous lessons for us today. In particular, they provide a deeper appreciation and explanation of who we are, and the key role played by comrade Ted Grant in defending these genuine traditions.
The question of the degeneration of the Fourth International has been dealt with at different times and different places, not least in the Programme of the International, written by Ted Grant in 1970. In the past, this history played a key role in the education of our cadres.
However, given the rapid growth of the International over recent times, it is important to remind our comrades, especially the new recruits, of our history and tradition.
Although the Fourth International was destroyed, the programme and methods of the International under Trotsky’s leadership are alive today and embodied in the work of our International, the RCI. This is not an idle boast. It can be demonstrated, as we will show, in the theoretical contribution and documents produced by our tendency over the last eighty years.
The need to defend our heritage – together with our historic responsibility to set the record straight – is clearly very important. This is especially the case given the numerous distortions and outright lies put in circulation by the sects, in order to cover up their own past crimes and mistakes.
Above all, this means a recognition of the indispensable role that Ted Grant played throughout this period in defending the genuine ideas and methods of Trotskyism.
He continued the work of Trotsky under the most difficult circumstances, and it is to this tireless work that we owe our existence. It is this, and this alone, that gives us a right to exist and a justifiable claim to represent the genuine traditions of revolutionary Trotskyism.
Our tendency was born in the struggle to defend the ideas of Marxism against the pernicious ideas of Stalinism and reformism, but also against the revisionist ideas of the so-called leaders of the Fourth International. These included people like Cannon, Pablo, Mandel, Frank, Healy, Maitan, Lambert, and their supporters, who at that time, and in the years that followed, made one ultra-left or opportunist blunder after another. These mistakes arose above all from a fundamentally false method.
In order to furnish unquestionable proof of this assertion, we have found it necessary to quote from documents of the past. This may give rise to some difficulties for the reader, but the requirements of historical accuracy must take precedence over literary style or ease of reading.
Difficult conditions
When Leon Trotsky was dying from the blow of a Stalinist assassin, his last words were, “tell the comrades, I am convinced of the victory of the Fourth International. Go forward!”
But in the years that followed, it became clear that the human material Trotsky was dealing with was not capable of rising to the great tasks posed by history.
Nevertheless, it is necessary to point to the reasons why from its inception the Trotskyist movement was plagued by constant internal upheavals, crises and splits.
From its inception, the Left Opposition found itself in a very difficult position, both in Russia and internationally. Numerically weak, its ranks were necessarily filled with all kinds of elements who were united by their opposition to Stalin and the bureaucracy, but not necessarily by anything else.
It is hard to find an example from history of any movement that suffered from such an extreme degree of persecution. The faction led by Zinoviev and Kamenev soon broke away and capitulated shamefully to Stalin. This action produced widespread confusion and demoralisation in the ranks of the Opposition.
Not a few supporters of the Left Opposition succumbed to unbearable pressure and followed the lead of Zinoviev, Kamenev and Radek, capitulating to Stalin. Most, if not all of them were later physically liquidated.
These difficulties were replicated in the small groups that adhered to the Opposition in foreign Communist Parties. Although many of Trotsky’s followers were courageous and honest revolutionaries, others were frankly not the best material.
They were negatively affected by years of defeats, particularly the victory of Stalinism in Russia. The result was a general feeling of depression and disorientation.
It took a superhuman effort on Trotsky’s part to establish a firm political foundation for the new organisation that emerged from the shipwreck of the Communist International.
Many elements that had nothing to do with Trotskyism gravitated towards the Opposition. There were Zinovievists, anarchists, ultraleftists, as well as some unprincipled adventurers like Raymond Molinier in France, not to mention a considerable number of assorted misfits and oddballs seeking a political home.
Naturally, we are dealing here with mainly young, inexperienced and politically naïve elements, many of them drawn from student and petty-bourgeois backgrounds. They brought with them many confused and alien ideas.
Even in the American SWP there were people like James Burnham, for example, who was never really a Trotskyist and arguably not even a Marxist, as his repudiation of dialectical materialism later demonstrated.
But Trotsky obviously could not always choose the human material he was obliged to work with. In 1935, Trotsky held a discussion with a left-wing member of the socialist youth in France called Fred Zeller, in the course of which Zeller made some serious criticisms of the French Trotskyists.
In reply, Trotsky did not attempt to defend the members of the French section, but merely replied laconically: “You have to work with the material that you have on hand.” These words clearly conveyed his attitude towards many of those who called themselves ‘Trotskyists’. They were a devastating comment on the leaders of the future Fourth International, about whom Trotsky had very few illusions from the start. (See “On Organizational Problems”, November 1935).
The same year, Trotsky would comment:
“It would be absurd to deny the presence of sectarian tendencies in our midst. They have been laid bare by an entire series of discussions and splits. Indeed, how could an element of sectarianism have failed to manifest itself in an ideological movement which stands irreconcilably opposed to all the dominant organisations in the working class, and which is subjected to monstrous, absolutely unprecedented persecutions all over the world?” (‘Sectarianism, Centrism and the Fourth International’)
Sorting out the resulting mess and purging undesirable and alien class elements proved to be a long and painful process. This was the reason for many splits and crises in the following years.
In the words of the German poet Heine, Trotsky had “sown dragon’s teeth and harvested fleas”.
The American SWP
The leading role in the early years was played by the American section, which later became the SWP, but events demonstrated that it suffered from serious political deficiencies.
James Cannon, the leading figure in the American group, was probably the most capable of the international leaders in the early years. He had a long history of work in the American labour movement going back to the days of the IWW – a fact that Trotsky greatly appreciated. He had many good qualities as an organiser, but he also had an extremely negative side.
Cannon started out as a follower of Zinoviev and never rid himself of his Zinovievist tendencies. This was the school, not of Bolshevism, but of manoeuvres, intrigues and the substitution of organisational methods for clean political debate.
Trotsky highly appreciated Cannon’s loyalty, but he never agreed with Cannon’s heavy-handed organisational methods. He knew very well that this was a finished recipe for crises and splits. Trotsky makes the interesting point in In Defence of Marxism:
“Our own sections inherited some Comintern venom in the sense that many comrades are inclined to the abuse of such measures as expulsion, splits or threats of expulsion and splits.” (in In Defence of Marxism, p.97)
It is clear that when he wrote these lines, Trotsky had Cannon in mind. He supported Cannon’s political stand against the petty-bourgeois opposition of Burnham and Shachtman, but he was deeply uneasy about the hasty and excessively administrative approach that he used against them.
In fact, while maintaining an intransigent political stance, he opposed a split in the American section, preferring, as always, the weapon of sound political argument and theoretical clarification, as opposed to the blunt weapon of bullying, threats and expulsions, which made a split inevitable.
As long as Trotsky was alive, he was able to keep his followers on a correct political line. But following his death in 1940, and faced with changing objective conditions, they proved incapable of rearming the movement.
The Fourth International
The founding of the Fourth International in September 1938 was without doubt a historic landmark. This marked an attempt to galvanise the cadres, politically and organisationally, for the historic tasks that lay ahead.
Trotsky predicted that the coming Second World War would give rise to a revolutionary wave that would put all parties and tendencies to the test. The old Internationals – the Second, the Third, and the so-called London Bureau – were rotten and had become a barrier to the success of the socialist revolution. Trotsky believed that on the basis of the coming world cataclysm and its aftermath, these organisations would be shattered.
In 1938, Trotsky made the bold prediction that within the next ten years “not one stone upon another” would be left of the old organisations, and the programme of the Fourth International would be the guide of millions. (‘On the Founding of the Fourth International’, Fourth International, Vol. 1 No. 5, October 1940)
But this was only a tentative prognosis. A perspective is not a crystal ball that permits us to predict the precise course of events, it is a conditional hypothesis, which must be corrected in line with actual developments. That is ABC for anyone remotely acquainted with the method of Marxism.
In relation to the war in Finland in November 1939, Trotsky explained:
“All those who seek exact predictions of concrete events should consult the astrologists. […] I made reservations several times as to the conditionality of my prognosis as one of several possible variants.” (‘Balance sheet of the Finnish Events’ in In Defence of Marxism, p.234)
These words are crystal-clear. But they remained a closed book for the so-called leaders of the Fourth, who proceeded on the basis that what Trotsky wrote in 1938 was written in stone and could not be changed, irrespective of changing conditions.
That is the opposite of Marxism and in flagrant contradiction to everything Trotsky wrote about it. This is not to say that Trotsky’s original predictions were entirely false. On the contrary, in his analysis of the world situation, he showed a far deeper understanding and ability to predict events than any other world leader.
Some of the more farsighted bourgeois politicians clearly understood the risk of revolutionary implications arising out of a war. Coulondre, the French ambassador to Germany, told Hitler on 25 August 1939: “I would also have the fear that as a result of the war, there would be only one real victor – Mr Trotsky.”
Of course, the words of Coulondre were simply personifying the revolution in the form of Trotsky. However, events turned out differently as a result of the outcome of the war.
The assassination of Trotsky
The assassination of Trotsky dealt a mortal blow to the young and inexperienced forces of the Fourth International. Without Trotsky’s guidance, the other leaders proved to be completely useless.
It is interesting to note that Stalin, whose experience of Bolshevism meant that he understood the danger posed to his regime by even a small international revolutionary movement, understood the vital role of Trotsky in the Fourth International.
When some of his agents complained that they were spending an excessive amount of time and money on the assassination of a single individual, Stalin answered that they were mistaken – that without Trotsky the Fourth International was nothing, because, as he said, “they do not have good leaders.” He was not wrong.
Faced with an entirely new situation, they were unable to make the necessary adjustments and completely lost their bearings. That had a fatal effect on the development of the new International.
The war developed in a way that could not have been foreseen by anyone, even by the greatest genius. And the outcome of the war, especially the strengthening of Stalinism, upended Trotsky’s 1938 perspective.
However, it was not only Trotsky’s perspective that was falsified, but also the perspectives of the imperialists – Roosevelt and Churchill – not to mention those of Hitler and Stalin, who made the biggest mistakes of all. The outcome of the war between the USSR and Nazi Germany was the most decisive event that determined the entire situation.
Stalin’s blunder
Stalin, the so-called ‘great military genius’, in reality, had placed the USSR in the gravest danger. The Soviet Union had been rendered largely defenceless by the mass purges of the Red Army in 1937-38 and later in 1941, just before the German invasion of the USSR.
When German generals objected to the idea of an attack on the Soviet Union, arguing that it was a fatal mistake to fight war on two fronts, Hitler replied that the Soviet Union was no longer a problem, since they have no good generals.
The notorious Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 was, in reality, a defensive move on the part of the Soviet Union. By signing a non-aggression pact with Hitler, Stalin believed that he had avoided the danger of a German invasion. He was mistaken.
Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941 took Stalin by surprise. The cost paid by the people of the Soviet Union was truly appalling.
The imperialists had hoped that the war between Germany and the Soviet Union would lead to their mutual exhaustion, allowing the Americans and British to step in and sweep up the spoils.
The Second World War in Europe was reduced essentially to a life-and-death struggle between Stalinist Russia and Hitler’s Germany, armed with the combined resources of Europe behind it.
Initially, the position of the USSR seemed to be hopeless.
Trotsky had warned that the chief danger to the Soviet Union in the event of war was that an imperialist army (for example, the Americans) would bring a mass of cheap commodities in their baggage train. But things turned out differently. The German invasion came in the form of mass murder, concentration camps and gas chambers. The Nazis regarded the Soviet people as a subhuman race and treated them as such.
As a result, in spite of the crimes of Stalin and bureaucracy, the Soviet masses rallied to defend the gains of the October Revolution and fought with the most astonishing bravery against Hitler to repel the invaders. Despite all the odds, the Red Army stopped the Nazi invasion in its tracks and then went on to inflict a crushing defeat on Hitler.
This played a decisive role and effectively transformed the entire situation. It gave the Soviet Union colossal prestige and this served to strengthen the Stalinist regime for a whole historical period, contrary to Trotsky’s expectations.
This fact enabled them to maintain firm control over the mass movements, which they used to betray the revolutionary wave following the war.
This historic betrayal provided the political premise for the economic recovery, which led to the post-war boom: an unprecedented upswing of capitalism. This, in turn, provided the capitalist system with a new lease of life.
Rather than Stalinism being overthrown, as Trotsky expected, it emerged greatly strengthened, with the Red Army crushing Hitler’s armies and occupying large parts of Eastern Europe.
Two great powers thus emerged on a world scale: on the one hand the Soviet Union, and on the other, the United States, which now became the dominant imperialist power.
The United States never suffered the horrific destruction experienced by Europe during the war. It emerged from the war with its industries intact and its treasuries full to overflowing.
It was in a position to underwrite European capitalism and provide the necessary economic assistance to launch a period of economic recovery that was in complete contrast to the situation that followed the First World War.
All this meant that Trotsky’s 1938 perspective had been falsified by history. If Trotsky had lived, he would certainly have revised the 1938 perspective and reorientated the movement in this manner.
However, the leaders of the Fourth International: Cannon, Hansen, Pablo, Mandel, Maitan and Pierre Frank – and their supporters – failed miserably. They were not up to the task. Incapable of understanding the method of Trotsky, namely the method of Marxism, they simply repeated the out-of-date perspective of 1938 of immediate war and revolution as if nothing had happened.
They merely repeated like mindless parrots what Trotsky had said before his death, as if the clock had stopped. They never understood Trotsky’s dialectical method and his approach to perspectives.
This refusal to recognise what was in front of them led to one mistake after another, which was to produce an almighty crisis within the International.
The importance of leadership
The Marxist method of historical materialism seeks the fundamental forces in history in objective factors – particularly the development of the productive forces. However, historical materialism has never denied the importance of the subjective factor or the role of individuals in history.
There are many parallels between the war between nations and the class struggle. In a war, the importance of good generals is clearly a key factor, and one which can be decisive. The importance of good generals when the army is advancing is self-evident. But the quality of leadership is even more important at times when the army is forced to retreat.
With good generals, a retreat can be carried out in good order, with a minimum of losses and preserving the bulk of one’s forces from destruction. But bad generals will turn a retreat into a rout.
This is precisely the case with the Fourth International, through their complete incapacity, the leadership turned a retreat, which was necessary, into a rout. With their methods, they ended up destroying the movement created with such great difficulties by Leon Trotsky.
The role of Ted Grant
The only tendency that emerges with any credit from this existential crisis of Trotskyism was the Workers’ International League (later, the Revolutionary Communist Party) in Britain.
They alone were able to make a correct appraisal of the new situation and draw the conclusions. And they alone have any right to be considered as the real defenders of Trotsky’s method and the sole legitimate continuers of his legacy.
Lenin was the real defender of Marxism after the death of Marx and Engels. And after Lenin’s death, that role fell to Leon Trotsky. In the same way, following Trotsky’s death, the genuine defender of his ideas and method was Ted Grant.
It is not possible here to provide a detailed account of Ted’s life and work. We limit ourselves to a very brief outline. For a fuller account, we refer the reader to the comprehensive biography written by Alan Woods: Ted Grant, The Permanent Revolutionary.
Ted joined the Trotskyist movement in Johannesburg in 1929. By 1934, he had emigrated from South Africa to Britain in search of wider horizons.
There, he joined the Trotskyists working in the Independent Labour Party (ILP), but with opportunities drying up in the ILP, on Trotsky’s advice, the young comrades turned to work in the Labour Party, especially its youth section.
In 1937, a further group of South African comrades, including Ralph Lee, arrived in London and joined Ted and Jock Haston in the Paddington branch of the Militant Group. They became by far the most active members in the organisation.
The method of the leadership reflected the largely petty-bourgeois nature of the Militant Group, typical of the small-circle mentality, with their petty intrigues, and little connection to the working class. This resulted in continuous splits from 1934 onwards.
At the end of 1937, eight comrades decided to establish a new organisation, the Workers’ International League (WIL).
The founding of the WIL marked a decisive break from the old ‘Trotskyist’ groups of the previous period and marked the real origins of our tendency, the beginning of genuine Trotskyism in Britain.
Ted quickly emerged as the group’s key theoretician, its political secretary, and the editor of its new paper, the Socialist Appeal.
Correspondence with Trotsky
Within six weeks of establishing the WIL, on 12 February 1938, they sent a letter to Trotsky in Mexico explaining that the group had established a printing press.
Trotsky was suitably impressed. On 15 April 1938, Trotsky wrote a letter to Charles Sumner in Britain, whom Trotsky had been in touch with since 1937, informing him of the intended trip to Britain of James Cannon to help establish a genuine section of the Fourth International.
Not long afterwards, in early June, the WIL had produced the new edition of his Lessons of Spain, with an introduction written by Ted Grant and Ralph Lee. They proudly sent a copy to Trotsky.
On 29 June 1938, Trotsky again wrote a letter to Charles Sumner, which was full of praise for the WIL’s initiative: “I received your edition of my Spain pamphlet with your excellent introduction”, he wrote.
Again, Trotsky goes on to congratulate the WIL comrades for establishing a print shop: “It was really a good revolutionary idea to create one’s own printing shop.” He ends his letter: “My warmest greetings to you and your friends.”
Trotsky’s letter is extremely significant as regards our history. Firstly, the letter does not appear anywhere in Trotsky’s writings, published by Pathfinder Press, the publishing arm of the American SWP. The letter was certainly in their possession.
The letter only surfaced in 2018, and came into our possession completely by accident. It was truly an extraordinary turn of fate for which we are eternally grateful. This suppressed letter, which praises the WIL, can be regarded as our long-lost birth certificate. It is the only letter in existence in which Trotsky himself refers to the WIL, and in such glowing colours.
It was deliberately suppressed by the leaders of the SWP (and Cannon in particular), in their attempts to shamefully belittle the WIL for reasons of personal prestige and spite, as we will see.
Cannon’s pernicious role
In August 1938, James Cannon visited Britain, with a view to fusing the different Trotskyist groups into a single organisation ahead of the founding conference of the Fourth International.
At this time, there were four groups in Britain: the Revolutionary Socialist League (led by CLR James, Wicks and Dewar); the Militant Group (led by Harber and Jackson); one group in Scotland, the Revolutionary Socialist Party (led by Maitland and Tait); and the WIL (led by Ralph Lee, Jock Haston, and Grant).
However, these groups had widely different approaches, from open work to the entrist tactic, and how this should be applied. These tactical disagreements posed insurmountable difficulties in the way of practical joint work.
To overcome this difficulty, it was first necessary to hold a thorough discussion on tactics, programme, and decide a common line of action. On that basis, there could be a fusion.
But Cannon ignored this and tried to unify these groups on a purely organisational basis. He saw the differences over orientation as being of little importance.
Cannon therefore called a Unity Conference of the different groups to push through a formal unification. While the WIL agreed to attend, they were opposed to a false unity without real discussion. Otherwise, such unity on this shallow basis was simply a recipe for future splits.
But Cannon wanted unity no matter what the cost. Therefore, there was no discussion about political perspectives or any tactical differences at the Unity Conference. Instead, all groups were instead merely asked to sign a ‘Peace and Unity Agreement’, drafted by Cannon, and given 20 minutes to make up their mind.
The WIL decided this approach was unprincipled and therefore remained outside of the ‘united’ organisation.
The following month, in early September 1938, the Founding Conference of the Fourth International took place in Paris.
Although outside of the ‘united’ organisation, the WIL expressed the wish to become, if not a full section, then a sympathetic section of the Fourth International. Cannon seemed to be in agreement with the idea of a sympathetic section, and the WIL was asked to send a delegate to the Founding Conference. Unfortunately, they did not have the funds to send anyone. Instead, they handed a statement about their position to a delegate, so as to be forwarded to the conference.
Cannon had clearly changed his mind by the conference. Offended by the WIL’s refusal to unite with the other groups, he took the opportunity to slander the WIL and block its efforts to become a sympathetic section of the International. WIL’s message to the congress was not distributed to the delegates. It was a spiteful gesture, which revealed Cannon’s method of doing things.
The Founding Conference went on to endorse the new unified section, which took the name of the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL), as the official British section.
Cannon, who now nurtured this resentment against the WIL, reported to Trotsky that the WIL’s “attitude was condemned by the international conference”. He argued for a “firm and resolute stand” against the WIL and “in no case to acknowledge its legitimacy”. But, he complained the RSL was “not accustomed to our ‘brutal’ (i.e. Bolshevik) treatment of groups who play with splits.” (James P. Cannon, ‘Impressions of the Founding Conference, 12 October 1938’, in Joseph Hansen, James P. Cannon – The Internationalist, July 1980)
This last comment tells us a great deal about Cannon’s methods. It was precisely the way in which Cannon operated against people who opposed him within the SWP. Such methods were to become the accepted methods of the bureaucratic regime in the so-called Fourth International.
We do not have Trotsky’s response to Cannon’s slanderous remarks. He seems to have ignored them. Having no other first-hand information, he clearly preferred to wait and see how things would develop. It was clear that Trotsky, who never formed a hasty opinion, was reserving judgment about the WIL, which, after all, he had earlier openly admired. Trotsky never attacked the WIL, as some sectarians claim. In fact, the only thing that exists on record is Trotsky’s praise regarding WIL’s initiatives.
“From that time onwards”, explained Ted Grant, “Cannon was to nurture a deeply held grudge against the WIL and its leadership, which was to have serious repercussions in the future.” (History of British Trotskyism, p.63)
This grudge, which turned into venomous hatred, can be seen from what Cannon himself stated later:
“All the crimes and mistakes of this rotten-to-the-core Haston faction are directly traceable to its origin as an unprincipled clique in 1938. When I was in England a little later that year, on the eve of the First World Congress, I denounced the Lee-Haston faction as tainted by unprincipledness at its birth. I never had a bit of confidence in them throughout all their subsequent development, regardless of what theses they wrote or voted for at the moment.” (Cannon, Speeches to the Party, pp. 296-297)
This summed up Cannon’s whole approach. As far as the ‘leaders’ of the Fourth were concerned, James Cannon was probably the best of them. However, after Trotsky’s death, he saw himself as the leader: the sole person entitled to represent Trotsky’s legacy.
But he was not up to it. Cannon was certainly no theoretician. Not only that – he was actually proud of this fact. “I brought down my heavy hand against anybody ever calling me a theoretician”, he once explained. (Cannon, Writings & Speeches 1940-43, p.360)
He was essentially an ‘organisation man’ – a narrow-minded ‘practico’, with only a very basic understanding of Marxism. Lacking a profound grasp of theory, he was incapable of providing serious answers to critics, preferring to denounce them in the harshest language and, if necessary, to resort to administrative measures to silence them. He went on to emphasise his role as the ‘hard man’:
“When I came out of the nine years of the CP. I was a first-class factional hoodlum. If not, how would I ever have survived? All I knew when somebody started a fight, let him have it. That existence was all I knew.”
This was clearly shown in the debates with Schachtman and the opposition in the SWP in 1939-40, which Trotsky severely criticised. Later, Cannon admitted that Trotsky was right and he was wrong:
“I think Trotsky is right when he says that in that long drawn-out fight between Cannon and Abern that historical right is on the side of Cannon. But that doesn’t mean I was right about everything. No, I was wrong about many things, including my methods and my impatience and rudeness with comrades and repulsing them.”
In other words, Cannon came straight out of the bad school of Zinovievism that habitually utilized unscrupulous organisational manoeuvres to silence opponents, denouncing and shouting them down, instead of patiently answering their arguments, as Lenin and Trotsky had always done.
The fact that the Founding Conference of the Fourth International endorsed the RSL and condemned the WIL was soon shown to have been a mistake.
Hardly had the ink dried on the ‘Peace and Unity Agreement’ when the cracks in the RSL – ‘unified’ organisation – began to appear. These widened into splits. The RSP had split away before the end of the year. The ‘lefts’ soon followed, setting up their own Revolutionary Workers League (RWL). A general disintegration followed.
The WIL wrote a statement, which explained:
“Once again the old situation existed, except that it was more chaotic than at any time in the past. Our movement continued to consist of ‘general staffs’ but without the armies.”
Cannon lamented this fact, but he was never prepared to admit it. The WIL, in contrast, went from strength to strength.
As a report from the WIL explains:
“During this period the WIL continued its work, convinced that the only way out of the impasse of British Trotskyism was to turn our backs on the old clique spirit and petty-bourgeois milieu and draw in fresh workers to reinforce the ranks of the movement. That we suffered from the denunciation of the IS is undoubted. But as we had the correct policy and the correct attitude, the general harmony within our ranks gave us a superiority in the orientation and organisation of our cadres. A new phase began in the development of our movement.”
The International moves to New York
When the war broke out in September 1939, it was decided to transfer the headquarters of the Fourth International to New York. This meant that the SWP in effect ran the organisation during the war, with Sam Gordon, Cannon’s obedient stooge, appointed as its Administrative Secretary.
With the war and Hitler’s occupation of Europe, the European sections were forced underground or ceased to function. Even where they managed to operate, they were plagued by political confusion and differences. In reality, the contact between New York and the remnants of the Trotskyist groups in Europe was almost non-existent.
There were differences especially over Trotsky’s Proletarian Military Policy, which was met with widespread opposition, with some sections even accusing Trotsky of ‘social-patriotism’.
This was no secondary difference. The Proletarian Military Policy was an especially important contribution that Trotsky made at the time of the outbreak of the Second World War. It was an extension of Lenin’s policy of ‘revolutionary defeatism’ during the First World War. But whereas Lenin’s policy had been directed at the cadres, Trotsky’s policy was aimed at the masses. Trotsky explained the revolutionaries would need to adapt their programme to the needs of the situation and take into consideration the defencist moods in the working class. While we opposed the imperialist war, we needed to connect with the workers who wanted to fight Hitler.
The working class could place no trust in the capitalists. They were not pacifists and needed their own revolutionary military programme, the idea of which was for the workers to take power and lead a revolutionary war against fascism.
But many sections of the Fourth International were infected with sectarianism, a leftover from the earlier period.
The British RSL – the official section, let us not forget, of the Fourth International – opposed the policy outright, while the Belgian section deleted all references to it in their version of the 1940 manifesto drafted by Trotsky. The French also had their “reservations”, as did the European Secretariat, led by Marcel Hic, and following his arrest, by Raptis (Michel Pablo). As can be seen, this opposition to this policy – reflecting sectarian tendencies – reached the very top of the Fourth International.
One contribution to the IS from “AM”, who was either French or Belgian, had the title, “On the Subject of the Proletarian Military Policy: Did the Old Man Kill Trotskyism?” It went on to accuse Trotsky of “pure and simple chauvinism”. It continued in a similar vein: “We must openly and frankly pose the question whether we can continue to bear the name ‘Trotskyist’, when the leader of the Fourth International has dragged it into the mire of social-chauvinism.”
This gives you some indication of the complete confusion that reigned in the ranks of the Fourth International at this time.
The demise of the RSL
By the time of Trotsky’s death in August 1940, the RSL was in a dismal state. In the same year, the Emergency Conference of the Fourth International deplored “the fact that no less than four groups claiming adherence to the Fourth International exist outside the ranks of our official section in Great Britain”. In a fit of optimism, the resolution stated that “the Emergency Conference of the Fourth International hails the coming unified British section”. (Documents of the Fourth International, p.359)
The problem was that the RSL was a sectarian grouping. It rejected Trotsky’s Proletarian Military Policy, and its entrist work in the Labour Party had become a complete fetish, when the internal life in the Labour Party had collapsed. The RSL’s activity was reduced to mainly discussing amongst themselves, an expression of their isolation. They had in effect ‘gone underground’ – although no one really noticed the fact.
By contrast, the comrades of the WIL threw themselves into the work as the war broke out in September 1939, adapting to the new situation. Throughout this period, the comrades conducted the most effective revolutionary work of any of the Fourth International groups during the war, enthusiastically applying the Proletarian Military Policy in the most skilful fashion. This was applied effectively in the factories and within the armed forces on a scale not seen anywhere else in the world.
The WIL was the most successful Trotskyist group at this time in applying Trotsky’s method, demonstrating a firm grasp of the ideas and a great flexibility of tactics. This approach was outlined in their document Preparing for Power, (Workers’ International News, Vol. 5, No. 6, 1942) written by Ted Grant, as well as his reply to the RSL, (in The Unbroken Thread, p.11).
As the war went on, the sectarianism of the RSL was increasingly becoming an embarrassment to the Americans, especially Cannon. Not only had they rejected the Proletarian Military Policy; they even made rejection of this policy a condition of membership! By the summer of 1943, the membership had shrunk to 23. It had effectively collapsed. Something had to be done, but as far as Cannon was concerned, this would have to be done without in any way admitting that the WIL had been correct from the very beginning. This was accomplished by a set of manoeuvres.
As early as June 1942, the International leadership wrote to the RSL, urging them to discuss fusion with the WIL. While the RSL rejected fusion, they agreed to a series of political debates. But these debates only served to widen the differences.
The IS was keen to resolve the problem by organisational means. In this way, they began to collaborate with Gerry Healy, who had himself long nurtured a grudge against the WIL leadership of Grant and Haston.
Gerry Healy
Healy was one of the original members of the WIL. He had a certain organisational ability and energy, but was clearly an unstable element. He was prone to resigning from the organisation in a light-minded fashion as a means of blackmailing the leadership. Despite his ultimatums and clashes with comrades, each time he was brought back in the hope that his organisational talent could be used in some way.
Then, at a Central Committee meeting in February 1943, Healy resigned yet again, saying that he was joining the ILP as it was impossible to “continue further work with J. Haston, M. Lee and E. Grant”. Following this walkout, he was unanimously expelled by the Central Committee.
Once more he was later readmitted, but given his previous record he was not allowed to assume any positions of responsibility. This simply increased the grudge he held against the leadership. As a result, he set to work to build a faction within the WIL on behalf of the IS and Cannon, with whom he had made contact in 1943.
With the disintegration of the RSL, the IS was forced to step in and reconstitute the RSL through a farcical shotgun marriage between the different remnants. Following this, ‘negotiations’ with the WIL resulted in the agreement to establish the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) in March 1944.
In reality, given the state of the RSL, the merger represented a complete takeover by the WIL. This was reflected in the makeup of the delegates at the 1944 RCP Founding Congress: while the WIL had 52 delegates, the RSL had 17 delegates, made up of several elements.
Then within a few months of the fusion, a campaign was underway by the International leadership to discredit the new RCP leadership. A report of the RCP Founding Congress appeared in the international bulletin of the SWP (June 1944), which contained errors, distortions, slanders and baseless criticisms against the British leadership, accusing it of “a deviation of national colouration”.
“Naturally”, states the report, “the leadership carries over into the RCP all positive as well as the negative characteristics that attached to it in the WIL.”
The RCP leaders reacted swiftly to answer this hostile ‘report’. They sent the SWP leaders a stinging reply which demolished the slanders brick by brick.
The letter also attacked the underhand methods employed by the SWP leadership, which only served to sow distrust within the International.
The RCP reply ended:
“In concluding this letter, let us say that we have had no pleasure in penning it. It is with the greatest reluctance that we have taken time off from more pressing political tasks. If the tone appears sharper than some comrades might think necessary in the circumstances, let us say we have deliberately toned [it] down. We wish to minimise and not exaggerate the situation. The responsibility for the conflict rests entirely on the shoulders of Stuart [Sam Gordon] and his immediate friends. We want a loyal international collaboration with the SWP and its leadership with whom we have political agreement on all outstanding questions. We object, however, to the American leadership, or a faction of it, having [an] organisational faction or clique irons in the British fire. That is the international method of Zinoviev and not of Trotsky.” (Emphasis in original)
The letter was signed in the name of the Political Bureau of the RCP and dated January 1945.
Without doubt, the RCP letter was regarded as an affront by Cannon, who was now more determined than ever to crush the ‘disloyal’ British leadership, by whatever means.
Morrow and Goldman
Given the refusal of the International leadership, especially the leaders of the SWP, to recognise reality, an opposition began to form around Albert Goldman and Felix Morrow, two leading members of the SWP, towards the end of 1943.
Morrow and Goldman objected to the SWP leaders’ assertion that bourgeois democracy after the war was ruled out.
At the 1943 October plenum of the SWP, the majority resolution stated: “Europe, today enslaved by the Nazis, will tomorrow be overrun by equally predatory Anglo-American imperialism” as they impose “military monarchist-clerical dictatorships under the tutelage and hegemony of Anglo-American big business.”
It went on: “The choice, from the Roosevelt-Churchill point of view, is a Franco-type government or the spectre of socialist revolution.” (Fourth International, Vol.4 No.11, December 1943).
The later resolution adopted by the Sixth Convention of the SWP in November 1944 explained:
“Bourgeois democracy, which flowered with the rise and expansion of capitalism and with the moderation of class conflicts that furnished a basis for collaboration between the classes in the advanced capitalist countries, is outlived in Europe today. European capitalism, in death agony, is torn by irreconcilable and sanguinary class struggles. The Anglo-American imperialists understand that democracy is today incompatible with the continued existence of capitalist exploitation.” (Fourth International, Vol. 5 No. 11, December 1944).
In opposition to this, Morrow and Goldman argued that the bourgeoisie could use bourgeois-democratic methods to derail the European revolution. They also believed that, given the successes of the Red Army, Stalinism would be strengthened, and not weakened, as the SWP leaders maintained. Furthermore, they believed that the Fourth International should energetically fight for democratic and transitional demands.
Morrow and Goldman were correct both in demanding a change to the 1938 perspective and in their criticisms of the SWP leaders. Nevertheless, they were clearly feeling their way forward in attempting to present an alternative.
Given the weakness of the forces of Trotskyism, Morrow and Goldman eventually argued that the Trotskyist groups should enter the mass organisations. However, there was no ferment or the development of mass oppositional currents within these organisations, and so no basis for such an approach.
Whatever the shortcomings of the Morrow-Goldman position, they were nevertheless at least attempting to re-evaluate the situation, given the peculiar way the war had developed. Their position was certainly pointing in many respects in the right direction. The problem that Morrow and Goldman faced was that they were in a small minority within the SWP, a party dominated by the Cannon regime. If there had existed a healthy regime within the SWP, then their ideas could have been debated democratically, which would have provided the basis for coming to a more correct position.
What is certain is that their position was a thousand times more correct than the Cannon leadership.
The Cannon regime
But the Cannon leadership stuck to its guns and simply repeated Trotsky’s 1938 perspective. Despite the changed conditions, they denied reality and buried their heads in the sand. Cannon even went so far as to deny the Second World War had ended in 1945.
The British RCP came out against this nonsense. Cannon could not tolerate this, and condemned both Morrow/Goldman and the RCP.
At a meeting of the SWP National Committee on 6-7 October 1945, Cannon launched an all-out attack. Cannon ended his speech, which was vitriolic in content, with the following words:
“You are in a bloc and you are already ashamed of it openly, but we will expose that bloc and all the rest of it. And we will take the fight on the international field. You go ahead and line up your bloc. We will work with those people who believe in the same principles, the same programme and methods, that we do. And we will fight it out and see what happens in the International.” (Cannon, Writings & Speeches, 1945-47, pp.181-183)
In the end, faced with constant harassment and bullying, Goldman was driven out and Morrow was expelled from the SWP in 1946.
It was in this same meeting where he attacked the RCP that Cannon admitted that he had been a follower of Zinoviev for nine years when he was in the leadership of the American Communist Party. “I, like every other leader of the American party in those days, could be said to be a Zinovievist”, he admitted. That was a very bad school, and the lessons he learned there remained with him to the end.
The methods practiced within the SWP were in marked contrast to the democratic regime that operated within the British section. Within the RCP, those who were struggling to re-evaluate the situation in Britain were in a large majority. They belonged to a party that encouraged the development of such ideas, free from any bureaucratic obstacles and slanders of ‘scepticism’.
Ground-breaking analysis
The only section of the International that was able to correctly re-evaluate the changed situation was the RCP. Ted Grant explained that the situation was completely different to that outlined in 1940. The new situation had raised unforeseen and difficult theoretical problems, which needed to be answered. Ted’s ground-breaking analysis was contained in The Changed Relationship of Forces in Europe and the Role of the Fourth International, and endorsed by the RCP’s Central Committee in March 1945.
This perspective explained that the political premise for a relative stabilisation of the political situation was at that moment a possibility in Western Europe. The revolutionary wave, which Trotsky had correctly predicted, had been betrayed by the Stalinist and Social-Democratic leaders.
In Italy and France, they entered bourgeois governments to rescue capitalism. The forces of the Fourth International were unfortunately too weak to challenge this. This betrayal then formed the basis of what Ted Grant called “counter-revolution in a ‘democratic’ form”.
He wrote:
“Social democracy saved capitalism after the last war. Today there are two traitor ‘internationals’ at the service of capital – Stalinism and social democracy.
[…]
“The task of Anglo-American imperialism to restore ‘order’ to Europe, to establish the rule of capital, assumes the shape of complicated and dexterous manoeuvres. To bludgeon the masses will be difficult at this stage and it will be necessary to deceive them with the panaceas of ‘progress’, ‘reforms’, ‘democracy’, as against the horrors of totalitarian rule.”
On the question of the fate of the Soviet Union, he argued that given the war weariness, especially in Europe, the admiration and support for the Red Army, the sympathy and warm support for the Soviet Union taken together made it extremely difficult, if not entirely impossible for the Allies to launch an attack on the Soviet Union in the immediate post-war period.
Ted developed these ideas in The Character of the European Revolution, published in October 1945:
“A ‘democratic’ phase in Europe will not result from the objective need for a phase of democratic revolution but because of the sell-out of the old workers’ organisations… Only the weakness of the revolutionary party and the counter-revolutionary role of Stalinism has given capitalism a breathing-space. Seeing that it is virtually impossible to rule by the methods of fascist or military dictatorship, the bourgeoisie has prepared to switch, for the time being, to the bourgeois-democratic manipulation of their Stalino-reformist agents. This does not constitute a democratic revolution but, on the contrary, a preventative, democratic counter-revolution against the proletariat.”
This allowed them to recognise and understand the important changes that were being prepared. From the very beginning of 1945, the RCP had developed fundamental political differences with the international leadership, who proved incapable of understanding the new balance of forces and the need to rearm the movement with a new perspective.
Clinging to the old position
This claim that bourgeois democracy was impossible in Europe was not confined to the SWP. In February 1944, a European Conference, held in France and attended by groups active in France, Belgium, Greece and Spain, also passed a document that endorsed the SWP’s line regarding their perspectives for Europe.
Of course, one mistake, if corrected, is not a tragedy. However, a mistake, if not corrected, leads to another and another. Mistakes can then become a tendency.
And this is what happened. Cannon thus argued that it was only the first “stage” of the war that had ended, and that the second stage – A Third World War – was actively being prepared by the imperialists. He immediately began banging the drum about an imminent imperialist war against the Soviet Union.
This line of imminent war against the Soviet Union was then constantly repeated ever more loudly throughout this period.
This position also followed logically from their false view that the Soviet Union had emerged from the war weakened. In fact, Stalinism had emerged massively strengthened, both militarily and from the point of view of the authority of the Soviet Union over the broad masses across the world.
As Ted Grant wrote in March 1945: “By far the greatest event of world significance is the emergence of Russia, for the first time in history, as the greatest military power in Europe and Asia.”
But the SWP leaders went even further in their mistake. Given the so-called weakness of Stalinism, as they saw it, they argued that capitalism could be restored in the Soviet Union without even the need of military intervention, “simply through the combined economic, political and diplomatic pressure and the threats of American and British imperialism.” (Quoted in the RCP internal bulletin, 12 August 1946).
One ludicrous mistake simply led to another.
Economic perspectives
These ‘leaders’ then denied any possibility that there would be an economic recovery in Europe.
ER Frank (Bert Cochran) opened the November 1946 12th SWP National Convention with the words:
“Under the present conditions, revival and reconstruction in Europe will take place at a very slow tempo; it will be very feeble in its achievements; it will not attain even the pre-war levels; under American tutelage, the European economy is doomed to stagnation and decay.” (Fourth International, Vol. 8, No.1, January 1947)
In actual fact, an economic recovery was clearly beginning to take place.
In September 1947, Ernest Mandel, the International’s ‘chief economist’, argued in support of the Healy-led minority and against the RCP majority that “it is necessary to abandon right now any juggling with a boom that has not existed and that British capitalism will never experience again.”
Mandel then went on record:
“If the comrades of the RCP majority were to take their own definition seriously, they would logically conclude that we are confronting a ‘boom’ in ALL CAPITALIST EUROPE, because in all these countries production is ‘expanding’.” (E. Germain, From the ABC to Current Reading: Boom, Revival or Crisis? In the internal bulletin of the RCP, September 1947, emphasis in original.)
Such arguments were simply rehashing those of the Stalinists from the Third Period, who put forward the nonsense of ‘the final crisis of capitalism’.
An International Pre-Conference was organised in Paris in April 1946, where 15 groups were represented. This included Haston for the RCP majority, and Healy and Goffe for the minority.
The Draft IS resolution to the Pre-Conference, supported by the Healy Minority in Britain, stated:
“The revival of economic activity in capitalist countries weakened by the war, and in particular continental European countries will be characterised by an especially slow tempo which will keep their economy at levels bordering on stagnation and slump.”
In effect, their position was that there was a 1938 ceiling on production, but this was soon surpassed as production levels rose and rose.
The resolution repeated all the errors of its previous drafts and endorsed the position of the American SWP. It stressed that there would be no period of bourgeois democracy, only Bonapartism, a boom was ruled out, and that Russia in the near future could experience counter-revolution even by peaceful diplomatic means.
Only the RCP majority stood out against this nonsense. Rather than facing a crisis of overproduction, capitalism was in fact experiencing the opposite: a crisis of under-production. Therefore, a cyclical upswing was inevitable. In their amendment to the international Pre-Conference Resolution, the RCP explained:
“All the factors on a European and world scale indicate that the economic activity in Western Europe in the next period is not one of ‘stagnation and slump’ but one of revival and boom.”
All the RCP amendments on all these questions that attempted to correct the IS position were overwhelmingly rejected.
Military dictatorships
Inevitably, these false ideas and perspectives offered by the IS had a disorientating and damaging effect on the weak European sections of the International. The French section, for example, believing bourgeois democracy was untenable, refused to come out of illegality for a whole period following the arrival of Allied troops, fearing an exposure to repression. Pierre Frank, who had weedled himself back into the movement and became a leader of the Parti Communiste Internationaliste (PCI), was so taken by the theory that he claimed that not only France in 1946 was under Bonapartist military rule, but had been under such rule since 1934!
Frank, who also became a member of the IS, claimed that the idea of a “democratic counter-revolution” was an “expression devoid of content”.
In Democracy or Bonapartism in Europe – A Reply to Pierre Frank (August 1946) Ted Grant, answered him, stating that Frank “would then be hard put to explain what the Weimar Republic organised by the Social Democracy in Germany was.” He then went on to completely demolish Frank’s arguments point by point. “Events have demonstrated the correctness of this analysis. Instead of honestly facing up to an error in perspective, Frank flies in the face of reality and attempts to convert an error into virtue.”
Ted pointed out: “The statement of the IS made in 1940 was incorrect. We made the same mistake. Under the circumstances it was excusable. But to repeat in 1946 a mistake that was already clear by 1943 is inexcusable.” (Our emphasis).
This contribution of Ted Grant was one of the key works that drew a line between the method and approach of genuine Marxism and the petty-bourgeois eclectic outlook of the International Secretariat.
Pierre Frank
It is important to understand his political background and Trotsky’s attitude towards this individual. In late 1935, Molinier and Frank broke with the Trotskyist movement and established their so-called mass paper. In a letter of 3 December 1935, Trotsky wrote:
“There is no other political content in the attitude of Molinier and Frank. They are capitulating to the social-patriotic wave. All the rest is only phrases, worthless in the eyes of a serious Marxist…
“An open and honest break would be a hundred times better than ambiguous concessions to those who capitulate to the patriotic wave.” (The Crisis of the French Section, p.103)
Once again, in a letter dated 4 December 1935, Trotsky denounced Pierre Frank in no uncertain terms for an “abdication of principles”. He wrote:
“We have fought consistently against the Pierre Franks in Germany and in Spain, against the sceptics, and against the adventurers who wanted to perform miracles (and broke their necks in the process).” (The Crisis of the French Section, pp.106-7)
Trotsky insisted on the expulsion of Pierre Frank, warning that he should not be readmitted into the ranks of the Opposition. However, after the war, in Britain Frank supported Healy in the RCP, then returned to France. He rejoined his group, the PCI. He became a delegate to the 1946 conference and succeeded in being elected to the IS. In this way, he wormed his way back into the Fourth International, despite Trotsky’s serious objections.
Pablo’s diplomatic deal
The attitude of Cannon towards the newly-formed IS in Europe was to keep its nose out of American affairs. He wanted the Americans to be free to handle their own affairs without outside interference.
As Cannon himself explained later:
“Our relations with the leadership in Europe at that time were relations of closest collaboration and support. There was a general agreement between us. These were unknown men in our party. Nobody had ever heard of them. We helped to publicise the individual leaders, we commended them to our party members, and helped to build up their prestige. We did this, first because we had general agreement, and second because we realised they needed our support. They had yet to gain authority, not only here but throughout the world. And the fact that the SWP supported them up and down the line greatly reinforced their position and helped them to do their great work.”
He then added: “We went so far as to soft-peddle a lot of our differences with them…” (Cannon, Speeches to the Party, p.73)
It was therefore no accident that Cannon now praised the newly-elected secretary of the International, Michel Pablo, as embodying this spirit. “He is a prolific writer, I judge”, stated Cannon. “But we don’t get any personal directives from him. He doesn’t write any personal letters criticising the SWP or praising it or telling it what to do.”
Michel Pablo (Raptis) was elected secretary of the reconstituted IS at the 1946 World Pre-Conference, with the backing of the SWP. Following this, Pablo was to be Cannon’s man in Europe. This was cemented following a trip to New York by Pablo in early 1947.
Pablo was accompanied by Sam Gordon, the SWP’s agent in Europe. There is no doubt about it that the reason was ‘diplomacy’, and it is no wonder that Pablo was tight-lipped about the trip. It served to bond relations between the IS in Paris and Cannon in New York. They now marched in lockstep, along a road that was to lead to complete disaster for the Fourth International.
In early February 1947, Cannon wrote to the SWP National Committee that “the SWP will tolerate no more monkey business with discipline, and that unity manoeuvres [with the Workers Party of Shachtman] are firmly rejected and excluded for the future…” He then went on to describe the visit of Pablo:
“As you know, we have had a visit from Ted [Sam Gordon] and Gabe [Michel Pablo]. Together with them we have discussed and prepared some new moves designed to put an end to all ambiguity and bring all questions to a head and a definite settlement in connection with the world congress, now definitely scheduled for the fall…
“The information furnished us by Gabe [Pablo] and Ted [Gordon] made it clear that the genuine orthodox Marxist tendency is assured of a firm majority at the congress on all the disputed questions. Previous experience and discussion have prepared this victory of authentic Trotskyism in the world movement.”
Cannon then laid down the law in his usual terms:
“Those who accept the decisions of the Congress and oblige themselves to carry them out in practice, may remain in the organisation. Those who refuse to accept the decisions are to be automatically expelled. Any who may ‘accept’ the decisions with tongue in cheek and then proceed to violate them, shall be expelled.” (Cannon, Writings 1945-47, pp.323-324)
The “new moves” Cannon referred to were clearly measures to drive out any opposition (“monkey business”) and were part of the deal aimed internationally against the majority of the RCP. The tactic employed would be to split the RCP and recognise two sections in Britain, the majority led by Haston and Grant, and the minority led by Healy. The same methods were used against Demaziere and Craipeau, the opposition leaders in France.
The RCP leadership in Britain was shown to be correct on all the fundamental questions, which for the ‘leaders’ of the Fourth, steeped in prestige politics, proved intolerable. The British ‘problem’ needed to be urgently resolved. For this reason, from 1945 onwards, Cannon, Pablo, Mandel, Frank and their acolytes conspired to destroy the RCP, the most far-sighted by a long way of any of the sections of the Fourth International. It was a party whose political line could have successfully rearmed the movement and saved the Fourth International from destruction.
But this fact was precisely what the so-called leaders of the FI could not stomach. Cannon, in particular, hated to be proved wrong, which was the case on so many issues. In a letter to Healy, Cannon outlined his views:
“The whole Haston system had to be blown up before a genuine Trotskyist organisation could get started in England. The saddest part, which is to be regretted to this day, is that the recognition of this simple necessity was so long delayed.” (Cannon to Healy, 5 September 1953, ibid, p.262)
In his view, not only the RCP, but all opposition had to be “blown up”. This criminal plan to destroy the RCP now became even more pressing, given that the ‘leaders’ of the Fourth were making every mistake one could imagine – and a few more besides.
Entrism
Cannon was in regular contact with Healy in Britain. In Healy’s own words:
“The SWP members were especially helpful to us during the period between 1943 and 1949 in the struggle against the Haston clique. The group, which comprised a majority of the English Trotskyist organisation, was led essentially by Haston, his wife Mildred Haston and Ted Grant.” (Healy, ‘Problems of the Fourth International’, August 1966, in Trotskyism versus Revisionism, vol.4, p.298)
Gerry Healy was thus a creature of Cannon’s, who stepped up his manoeuvres to create an ‘anti-leadership’ faction within the RCP, based solely on manufactured differences. At the 1945 RCP conference, Healy proposed the idea of abandoning the open party and entering the ILP. This idea was planted in Healy’s head by Pierre Frank.
However, with the expulsion of Trotskyists from the ILP, this position gained no support and was quietly dropped by Healy. Soon afterwards, in a light-minded manner, he hit on another idea, namely entry into the Labour Party instead. But the conditions for entrism laid down by Trotsky were clearly absent. These were:
1. a pre-revolutionary or revolutionary crisis;
2. a ferment in one of the mass organisations;
3. the crystallisation of a left or centrist current within it; and
4. the possibility of a rapid crystallisation of a revolutionary tendency.
None of these conditions existed. But this didn’t deter Healy. He simply claimed that such conditions were about to quickly develop as Britain was facing an imminent cataclysmic slump. However, Healy’s perspectives, echoing the IS position, were completely false.
According to the RCP leaders, rather than a slump, there existed “a far more stable economic situation for British capitalism than the capitalists, reformists, or even the Trotskyists expected as the immediate outcome of the war…”
The Labour government, unlike that of 1929-31, was actually carrying out its reformist programme. This in turn strengthened the ideas of reformism, and as a result, meant there was no prospect of a mass left wing or ferment in the Labour Party for the foreseeable future. Following from this, the tactic to be pursued was not entrism in the Labour Party, but raising the banner of the open revolutionary party. Even Van Gelderen, the head of the RCP’s Labour Party fraction (a small group of RCP comrades doing fraction work in the Labour Party, keeping an eye on developments there), was opposed to entry.
Nevertheless, the leaders of the RCP understood the difficulties ahead. “The inevitable crisis, however, will not be immediate. It will be delayed for a time”, explained the editorial in the theoretical magazine. “The orientation and strategy of the Revolutionary Communist Party is firmly based on the long-term perspective of crisis and decline but its eyes are also wide open to the immediate conjunctural upswing.” (Editorial Notes, Workers’ International News, Sept.-Oct. 1946)
For Healy, any issue, no matter what, was useful to attack – and hopefully undermine – the RCP leadership. Of course, in this fight, the International leadership (and behind them Cannon) backed Healy to the hilt.
As a result, the June 1946 International Executive Committee (IEC) meeting passed a resolution urging “the concentration of the greatest part of the forces of the RCP within the Labour Party, with the object of patiently building up an organised left wing”, and that “the RCP should weigh the practical possibilities of entry into this party”. There was only one vote against, namely the delegate of the RCP.
As can be seen, the argument had changed from intervening in the left wing, to actually building up the left wing. This was precisely because of the absence of a left wing in the Labour Party. Thus, the false idea was born that it was the task of the Trotskyists to build the Left.
To add insult to injury, Healy began to repeat the old slanders of Cannon, that the old WIL leaders were guilty of “insular national deviations” when they refused to join the RSL in 1938. The task was therefore to remove this “anti-internationalist” RCP leadership and create a new one more loyal and in line with the views of the International.
In banging the drum about entrism, with the full backing of the International, Healy managed to gain the support of about 25 percent of the RCP membership. But the factional lines were sharply drawn and Healy could not progress any further. In 1946 and 1947 he could muster only seven delegates for total immediate entry against twenty-eight for the majority.
As a result, in the summer of 1947, Healy’s faction proposed splitting the party to allow the minority to conduct its own entrism. The issue was then raised at the IEC in September, which, with the full backing of the IS, endorsed Healy’s proposal.
Within a month, a special RCP conference accepted the decision under protest. Cannon’s ‘new moves’ had succeeded.
It would, however, take Healy more than a year – in December 1948 – to launch a paper, Socialist Outlook, which advocated mild left-reformist policies in an attempt to ‘build the left’, a policy that would become known as ‘deep entrism’.
The Second World Congress
The Second World Congress took place in Belgium in April 1948, with delegates from 19 countries. Once again, the leadership put forward a fundamentally false perspective of slump, fascism and world war. According to the main resolution:
“In the absence of a revolutionary situation, the sharpened crisis of capitalism threatens to lead once more to fascism and to war which, this time, would imperil the existence and future of all mankind.” (World Situation and the Tasks of the Fourth International, Resolution Adopted by the Second Congress of the Fourth International —Paris, April 1948)
This perspective of atomic war and fascism was typical of Cannon, Pablo, Mandel and Frank. The vision of 1938, but even more apocalyptic, had to be maintained at all costs. The experience of the world war and its outcome was a closed book to these people.
Another huge mess these so-called great ‘theoreticians’ were making was in relation to Eastern Europe and the processes unfolding there.
Following the victories of the Red Army, the Stalinists established friendly regimes, called ‘People’s Democracies’, in what became known as the ‘buffer states’. They installed their puppets in firm control of these governments. While the Fourth International still defended the Soviet Union as a deformed workers’ state, the question was raised: what was the class character of the buffer states?
As early as March 1945, Ted Grant explained that in these areas, Stalin had retained capitalism. But given the instability, another variant was possible. He put forward the perspective that as things unfolded either the retention of capitalism in Eastern Europe would lead to the restoration of capitalism in Russia, “or the bureaucracy will be forced, against its own wishes and at the risk of antagonising its present imperialist allies, to nationalise industry in the permanently occupied countries, acting from above and, if possible, without the participation of the masses.”
The RCP leaders had rediscussed the question of the class nature of Russia following the war. They even considered the theory of bureaucratic collectivism, which had been put forward by Shachtman, according to which, the bureaucracy had been transformed into a new ruling class. However, after careful consideration, this was rejected. The Soviet Union still remained a monstrously deformed workers’ state.
Naturally, the ‘leadership’ of the Fourth failed to understand what was happening in Eastern Europe. First, they simply labelled them capitalist states. The RCP’s prognosis that these states could become deformed workers’ states was ridiculed by the IS.
Cannon, for years later kept distorting what the RCP comrades were saying. In a letter to Farrel Dobbs in early 1953, Cannon writes:
“Early in the postwar period the Haston gang became captivated by the expansion of Stalinism and thought they saw in it ‘the wave of the future’.
They bestowed the honorific title of ‘workers’ states’ in every strip of territory the Red Army occupied, the moment this occupation took place.”
Cannon’s description of the RCP’s position was, as usual, a complete distortion. The RCP never argued that the entry of the Red Army into Eastern Europe transformed these occupied countries into workers’ states.
The RCP, on the contrary, argued that the ‘People’s Democracies’ still continued to be capitalist regimes. Stalin initially had no intention of expropriating the capitalists. He ordered the Communist Parties to enter coalition governments together with bourgeois parties. But in truth, these were coalitions not with the bourgeoisie, who had fled together with the Nazi occupiers. They were coalitions with the “shadows of the bourgeoisie”. Real power rested with the Stalinists and the Red Army. This uneasy alliance did not last long.
When the American imperialists started to introduce Marshall Aid to help establish the old order of things, and to give substance to the “shadows”, the Stalinists were forced to act. This meant leaning on the masses to carry through the expropriation of capitalism, but in a bureaucratic fashion and establishing regimes modelled on Moscow.
But the International poured cold water on such an occurrence. Instead, Mandel ironically asked Shachtman, “Does [he] really think that the Stalinist bureaucracy has succeeded in overthrowing capitalism in half of our continent?” (Fourth International, February 1947)
The ironical tone of the question presupposes the answer that Mandel and the other leaders of the Fourth had already decided: such a conclusion was absolutely ruled out. The draft theses of the IS for the Second World Congress in April 1948 continued to underline the capitalist nature of the ‘buffer states’:
“The capitalist nature of the production relations of the ‘buffer-zone’ countries and the fundamental differences between their economy and that of Russia, even at the time of the NEP, can be clearly seen.” (‘The Russian Question Today – Stalinism and the Fourth International’ – November-December 1947)
The theses then went on to box the International into a corner, ruling out any change in the class nature of these regimes:
“To deny the capitalist nature of these countries amounts to the acceptance, in no matter what form, of this Stalinist revisionist theory, it means seriously to consider the historic possibility of a destruction of capitalism by ‘terror from above’ without the revolutionary intervention of the masses.”
It went on:
“The fact that capitalism still exists in these countries side by side with exploitation by the Stalinist bureaucracy must fundamentally determine our strategy. The capitalist nature of these countries imposes the necessity of the strictest revolutionary defeatism in war time.”
The crudeness of these lines clearly indicates the barrenness of the schematic and abstract approach that seeks to impose preconceived notions on reality, without any reference to the real state of affairs.
This stands in glaring contradiction to the dialectical method used by Trotsky when he analysed the conduct of the Stalinists in Poland and concluded correctly that it was indeed possible for the Stalinists to introduce new property relations, in line with the nationalised economy of the Soviet Union, but without any democratic participation by the working class.
As usual, in this resolution Mandel and Pablo attempted to cover their backside by stating that “It is not excluded that a certain relation of forces may necessitate a real structural assimilation of one or another country in the ‘buffer zone’”– thus managing to face different directions at the same time.
But just to confuse things still further, it adds that the trend, however, was definitely not in that direction, and that the private sector was not “oriented” that way, and the Stalinist bureaucracy was introducing “new and powerful obstacles” to such a possibility.
In complete contrast to this confused model, the British comrades offered a model of clarity and political consistency. Haston presented the RCP amendments to the 1948 World Congress, which were combined to produce the following composite:
“… the economies of these countries [the buffer states] are being brought into line with that of the Soviet Union (a) The basic overturn of capitalist property relations has already been, or is in the process of being, completed (b) The capitalist control of the government and the apparatus of the state has been, or is in the process of being, destroyed (c) This process of assimilation is the necessary and inevitable product of the class character of the Russian economy, and the preponderance of the Russian state is the dominant military force in the existing relations…” (“RCP Amendments to the Thesis on Russia and Eastern Europe.”, which were never published by the SWP).
As could have been expected, this was overwhelmingly rejected.
The Seventh Plenum of the IEC in April 1949, twelve months after the Prague coup, stubbornly refused to say capitalism had been abolished in Eastern Europe, but viewed the ‘buffer states’ as bourgeois states “of a special type”. In the inimitable words of Pierre Frank, “something like ‘degenerated bourgeois states’”.
Their hide-and-seek approach to the class nature of the buffer states was defined as “a unique type of hybrid transitional society in the process of transformation, with features that are as yet so fluid and lacking precision that it is extremely difficult to summarise its fundamental nature in a concise formula.” (Resolution to the 7th Plenum)
Max Stein, in his report to the Political Committee of the SWP in July 1949 dealing with the IEC resolution on Eastern Europe, having been forced to recognise the nationalisations that had taken place, still dismissed the RCP’s views, saying he was “not dealing with the position of the British RCP which represents no new factor in the discussion, since its point of view was already presented to the World Congress and overwhelmingly rejected by it.”
He concluded by revealing the majority’s theoretical bankruptcy:
“Rather than jumping at conclusions as to the social character of the states in Eastern Europe it is far better to await further development.” (SWP, internal bulletin, vol.xi, no.5, October 1949)
However, a turning point came with the startling news of a break between Tito and Stalin. True to form, Mandel attempted to enhance his ‘theoretical’ standing by writing a long document about the class nature of Yugoslavia and the ‘buffer states’. This was published in October 1949 in an International internal bulletin.
He started by saying we must look at the facts, and then proceeded to ignore all the known facts and to reiterate the false position that the ‘buffer states’ were capitalist states, but in “transition”. These endless qualifications on top of qualifications are typical of Mandel’s dishonest method, amounting to continuous double bookkeeping.
Mandel indirectly attacked the RCP, by putting words in their mouths, and without using a single direct quote. By 1948, the RCP had reached the conclusion that these regimes were Stalinist deformed workers’ states, where capitalism had been eliminated, but only to be replaced by the rule of a bureaucratic elite.
The Stalinist bureaucracy had leaned on the workers to expropriate capitalism, but in their own bureaucratic manner, carefully removing any possibility of the kind of democratic workers’ state that was established by the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917.
In his haste to deny any progressive credentials to Stalinism, Mandel insisted that Stalinism was always and invariably counter-revolutionary in character, and therefore organically incapable of moving in such a direction:
“Obviously the hypothesis of the destruction of capitalism, not in Estonia or in Romania or even Poland, but in all Europe and the greater part of Asia, would transform our attitude towards Stalinism from top to bottom…
“The comrades adhering to the theory of the proletarian character of the buffer countries are far from envisaging this eventually, but it would be the logical conclusion of the road on which they have embarked and would oblige us to revise from top to bottom our historical appraisal of Stalinism. We would then have to examine the reasons why the proletariat has been incapable of destroying capitalism on such extensive territories where the bureaucracy has successfully achieved this task.
“We would also have to specify, as certain comrades of the RCP have already done [?], that the historical mission of the proletariat will not be the destruction of capitalism but rather that of building socialism, a task which the bureaucracy by its very nature cannot solve. We would then have to repudiate the entire Trotskyist argument against Stalinism since 1924, a line of argument based on the inevitable destruction of the USSR by imperialism in the event of an extremely prolonged postponement of the world revolution.” (International Information Bulletin, January 1950)
The first word in the sentence – “obviously” – is intended to anticipate the final result in advance. If something is obvious, there is no need to furnish any justification for it. If we define Stalinism as counterrevolutionary in its very essence, how then can it be capable of overthrowing capitalist property relations in Eastern Europe?
Trotsky explained many times that there can be exceptional circumstances in which even reformist politicians can be forced to go further than what they intended.
Whereas Stalin initially probably had no intention to eliminate capitalism in Eastern Europe, his hand was forced by the aggressive actions of US imperialism, which was attempting to use Marshall Aid as a lever to strengthen the bourgeois elements in the coalition governments in countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia.
Stalin was forced to act in order to prevent this. It was not very difficult. As Trotsky said, in order to kill a tiger, a shotgun is necessary. But in order to kill a flea, one’s fingernails will suffice.
The weak and degenerate bourgeois of Eastern Europe was easily eliminated by a simple manoeuvre, carried out from the top, it is true, but with the active support of the workers, who were mobilized against the bourgeois parties and in support of the expropriation of capital.
Naturally, these methods have nothing in common with the classical model of proletarian revolution advocated by Marx, Lenin and Trotsky. That is based on the conscious movement of the working class itself from below.
What we have here is a Bonapartist caricature of a proletarian revolution that deliberately prevented the workers themselves from taking over the state and running it on democratic lines. Such a development would have been a mortal threat to Stalin and the Moscow bureaucracy. But the establishment of deformed workers’ states, established on the model of Russian Stalinism presented no threat at all. On the contrary, it served to strengthen Stalin and the bureaucracy.
The emergent regimes naturally had nothing in common with the democratic workers’ state established by Lenin and Trotsky in Russia in 1917. But it undoubtedly led to the abolition of capitalism and the establishment of a nationalised planned economy. In that sense – and only that sense – it represented the carrying out of one of the fundamental tasks of a proletarian revolution.
Despite Mandel’s distortions, what had taken place in Eastern Europe was completely explainable using the Marxist method, as Ted Grant had done.
Mandel could not face up to the facts, because they were in flagrant contradiction to his preconceived ideas. For him, to recognise that capitalism had been overthrown in Eastern Europe was equivalent to admitting the possibility that the Stalinist could play a ‘revolutionary’ role.
It is elementary for Marxists that genuine socialism can only be achieved through the conscious movement of the working class. But the revolutions that were carried out in Eastern Europe were not genuine proletarian revolutions, but bureaucratic caricatures, carried out from the top by the Stalinist bureaucracy, although with the support of millions of workers who enthusiastically greeted the expropriation of the bosses.
Such methods could never lead to a healthy workers’ state, and the RCP never claimed that they could. What emerged was a monstrous bureaucratic caricature of ‘socialism’ – in other words, precisely a deformed workers’ state, as in Stalinist Russia.
Trotsky’s dialectical method was a book sealed by seven seals, for Mandel and the other ‘leaders’ of the Fourth International. Proceeding from a series of abstract concepts, they were unable to understand the real concrete phenomena and processes that were unfolding before their very eyes.
Truth, as Lenin explained many times, is concrete. You have to start from the facts and not attempt to squeeze reality into a preconceived theory, as Trotsky pointed out:
“There is nothing more dangerous, however, than to throw out reality, for the sake of logical completeness, elements which today violate your scheme and tomorrow may wholly overturn it.” (The Revolution Betrayed, Chapter 9, Social Relations in the Soviet Union)
This was not a secondary matter, but dealt with the very touchstone of proletarian revolution and a fundamental question for Marxist theory, namely the class nature of the state. It was an acid test.
It is highly instructive to compare the International’s position to the one adopted by the RCP in 1948, at the time of the Second World Congress in April.
Ted Grant explained that in relation to Eastern Europe “we came to the conclusion that what we had there was a form of proletarian Bonapartism”. Events in Czechoslovakia in February 1948 had confirmed the processes taking place. In an article published in the April edition of Socialist Appeal, about the ‘Prague coup’, Ted explained that the Stalinist-dominated government, leaning on the working class through ‘action committees’, had carried through measures of sweeping nationalisation of key sectors of the economy and that “the economic basis for a workers’ state has been achieved”.
However, Ted explained that “for the state to act in the interests of the working class, the expropriation of the capitalists by itself is not enough. Democratic control of the state apparatus is an essential prerequisite for the march towards a communist society. All the great Marxists emphasised this.” He then went on to outline Lenin’s four points for a workers’ democracy, modelled on the Paris Commune and established by the Russian Revolution of 1917.
On this question, the ‘leaders’ of the Fourth were silent, refusing as usual to recognize what was taking place in front of their noses. For them, Czechoslovakia, and the rest of Eastern Europe, remained capitalist states.
Max Shachtman, who if nothing else clearly had a sense of humour, remarked:
“While the British hailed the (Prague) coup as a victory for the working class, the rest of the official Trotskyist press hailed it as a victory for the bourgeoisie which, with inexcusable perversity, was celebrating its triumph by jumping or being thrown out of high windows onto the pavement below.”
It would not be until July 1951, a full three years later, that Mandel and co. would come to reluctantly recognize that Eastern Europe had ceased to be capitalist.
Stalin-Tito clash
An even more astonishing example of this method was the scandalous position taken by these ‘leaders’ in regard to developments in Yugoslavia, which resulted in the Stalin-Tito clash in June 1948.
On 28 June 1948, a bombshell exploded with the publication of an extraordinary communiqué of the “Communist Information Bureau” (Cominform) – the organisation set up by Moscow to replace the Communist International, which had been officially dissolved in 1943.
The communiqué, issued on the initiative of the Russians, announced the expulsion of the Yugoslav Communist Party. This event rocked the entire world Stalinist movement.
The Stalinist bureaucracy in Moscow was soon to attack Tito as a counter-revolutionary “nationalist”, “imperialist lackey” and “Trotskyist”. In reality Tito was neither a “Trotskyist” nor a “fascist agent”, as the Stalinists claimed. He had emerged as the leader of the Yugoslav Communist Party in the 1930s, after the old leadership had been murdered in Stalin’s purges. Tito, in fact, was himself responsible for the physical annihilation of the “Trotskyists”.
While the Red Army swept through Europe, it was Tito’s peasant partisan forces that defeated the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia. This had brought them into conflict with the deal that Stalin had made with Churchill at the Moscow Conference in 1944, to divide Yugoslavia equally between them.
As part of the agreement, Stalin had backed the establishment of a royalist-bourgeois government in Yugoslavia, in an attempt to curb Tito. He even refused the Yugoslavs arms and munitions. But faced with the rapid advance of Tito’s partisan forces, the bourgeoisie, who had collaborated with the Nazi occupiers, had fled in terror together with the retreating German army. Having gained a victory through his own forces, Tito refused to submit to pressure from Stalin. He soon filled the vacuum left by the departure of the landlords and capitalists and, resting on the support of the workers and the peasants who formed the basis of his partisan army, eliminated capitalism and created a regime modelled on Stalinist Russia.
It was, in effect, a carbon copy of the process that occurred earlier in Poland and Czechoslovakia – but with a decisive difference. The liberation of Yugoslavia was not brought about by the Soviet Red Army, but by the Yugoslav Stalinists who commanded a powerful partisan army.
This gave Tito a firm base of national support, upon which he was able to carry on a policy independent from Moscow. However, the narrow national interests of the Russian and Yugoslav bureaucracies soon clashed. This came to a head when, in early 1948, the Yugoslav and Bulgarian governments proposed the formation of a Balkan Federation of ‘People’s Democracies’.
Stalin stamped on this proposal, but was now met with resistance. The Russian Stalinists sent GPU agents into the Yugoslav CP to bring it under control. But they were purged by Tito, who had a firm grip over the state apparatus, and a mass base, which he leaned upon. This was the basis for the Stalin-Tito split.
These events threw the leadership of the Fourth into complete confusion. Despite the decisions of the World Congress, Pablo, as the head of the IS, regarded the clash as a golden opportunity to win over the Titoists to Trotskyism.
Overnight they abandoned their previous idea that Yugoslavia was a capitalist state, held only two months earlier, and rushed to support Tito.
Two days after the Cominform statement announcing the break, the IS wrote to the national sections of the Fourth, drawing their attention to the Tito affair as of “exceptional importance”.
The following day, the IS issued a remarkable ‘Open Letter’ to the Yugoslav Communist Party. “Now you are in a position to understand, in the light of the infamous campaign of which you are the victims, the real meaning of the Moscow Trials and of the whole Stalinist struggle against Trotskyism”, explained the statement. (The fact that the Yugoslav leaders enthusiastically participated in this campaign was not mentioned.) “We wish rather to take note of the promise in your resistance – the promise of victorious resistance by a revolutionary workers’ party against the most monstrous bureaucratic machine that has ever existed in the labour movement, the Kremlin machine.”
It then went on to urge the Yugoslav party, “Establish a regime of genuine workers’ democracy in your party and in your country!”, and concluded with the words: “Long Live the Yugoslav Socialist Revolution!”
Some two weeks later, on 13 July, the IS issued a second Open Letter, much longer, but even more fawning, to “the Congress, Central Committee and Members of the Yugoslav Communist Party”.
This Open Letter urged the Yugoslav party to introduce workers’ democracy and return to Leninism at home and abroad. “We do not at all conceal that such a policy will encounter very great obstacles in your country and even in your own ranks. A complete re-education of your cadres in the spirit of genuine Leninism would be necessary”, stated the IS Letter. “We understand exactly the tremendous responsibility weighing upon you…”
The Open Letter ends with a request for a delegation of “our leadership to attend your Congress, in order to establish contact with the Yugoslav communist movement and to set up fraternal ties… Yugoslav Communists, Let Us Unite Our Efforts for a New Leninist International! For the world victory of Communism!” (Our emphasis)
Of course, this sycophantic appeal flew in the face of all their pronouncements about the class nature of ‘capitalist’ Eastern Europe. They had emphatically rejected the amendments of the RCP in April of that year, which recognised that the bourgeoisie in Eastern Europe had been or were being expropriated. The International ‘leadership’ maintained that counter-revolutionary Stalinism could not carry through a revolution, despite the fact that Trotsky had explained that under exceptional circumstances this was possible. Now, in a 180-degree turn, the IS had declared Yugoslavia under Tito a relatively healthy workers’ state, a state without the bureaucratic deformations present in Russia!
At first the SWP in the US took a ‘plague on both your houses’ approach. However, when the Open Letters appeared from the IS, the SWP raised no objections. In fact, they published them in their press without any reservation or criticism.
RCP response
The response of the British RCP to the Yugoslav crisis was completely different. First, they upheld the fundamental principles of Trotskyism, including the defence of the right of the Yugoslavs to self-determination, which the SWP refused to recognise.
“It is clear that any Leninist must support the right of any small country to national liberation and freedom if it so desires”, wrote Ted Grant and Jock Haston. They continued:
“All socialists will give critical support to the movement in Yugoslavia to federate with Bulgaria and to gain freedom from direct Moscow domination. At the same time, the workers in Yugoslavia and these countries will fight for the installation of genuine workers’ democracy, of the control of the administration of the state and of industry as in the days of Lenin and Trotsky in Russia. This is impossible under the present Tito regime.” (Socialist Appeal, July 1948)
Again, in their pamphlet Behind the Stalin-Tito Clash, Ted and Jock argued that the conflict “must be the means of educating the working class as to the fundamental differences in method between Stalinism and Leninism”. On this basis, they wrote:
“This crack in the international Stalinist front can mark a stage in the long struggle of Trotsky and the Fourth International to expose Stalinism […] It will mark a stage in the advance towards the building of a genuine Communist International, the Fourth International, which can lead to the establishment of a world system of freely federated Communist republics.”
But when the leaders of the RCP saw the Open Letters of the IS to the Yugoslavs, they were horrified. Unlike the American SWP, the RCP was not prepared to tolerate this capitulation to Stalinism and came out openly against it. On behalf of the Central Committee, Jock Haston wrote a letter of protest to the International, reiterating their criticisms and rejecting the orientation of the Open Letters:
“The Yugoslav-Cominform dispute offers the Fourth International great opportunities to expose to rank-and-file Stalinist militants the bureaucratic methods of Stalinism. However, our approach to this major event must be a principled one. We cannot lend credence, by silence on aspects of YCP [Yugoslav Communist Party] policy and regime, to any impression that Tito or the leaders of the YCP are Trotskyist, and that great obstacles do not separate them from Trotskyism. Our exposure of the bureaucratic manner of the expulsion of the YCP must not mean that we become lawyers for the YCP leadership, or create even the least illusion that they do not still remain, despite the break with Stalin, Stalinists in method and training.
[…]
The Letters appear to be based on the perspective that the leaders of the YCP can be won over to the Fourth International. Under the stress of events, strange transformations of individuals have taken place, but it is exceedingly unlikely, to say the least, that Tito and other leaders of the YCP can again become Bolshevik-Leninists. Tremendous obstacles stand in the way of that eventuality: past traditions and training in Stalinism, and the fact that they themselves rest on a Stalinist bureaucratic regime in Yugoslavia. The letters failed to point out the nature of these obstacles, fail to underline that for the leadership of the YCP to become communists, it is necessary for them not only to break with Stalinism, but to repudiate their own past, their present Stalinist methods, and to openly recognise that they themselves bear a responsibility for the building of the machine now being used to crush them. Here it is not a question of communists facing a ‘terrible dilemma’, with an ‘enormous responsibility’ weighing on them, to whom we offer modest advice: it is a question of Stalinist bureaucrats becoming communists.”
The RCP letter continued:
“As they stand, however, by their silence on fundamental aspects of the regime in Yugoslavia and YCP policy, the Letters strike an opportunist note.
[…]
The IS Letters analyse the dispute solely on the plane of the ‘interference’ of the CPSU leaders, as if it were here solely a question of that leadership seeking to impose its will without consideration for the ‘traditions, the experience and the feelings’ of militants. But the dispute is not simply one of a struggle of a Communist Party for independence from the decrees of Moscow. It is a struggle of a section of the bureaucratic apparatus for such independence. The stand of Tito represents, it is true, on the one hand the pressure of the masses against the exactions of the Russian bureaucracy, against the ‘organic unity’ demanded by Moscow, discontent at the standards of the Russian specialists, pressure of the peasantry against too rapid collectivisation. But on the other hand, there is the desire of the Yugoslav leaders to maintain an independent bureaucratic position and further aspirations of their own.
[…]
Not only in respect to Yugoslavia, but also in respect to other countries, the Open Letter gives the entirely false impression that it is the Russian leadership which is solely responsible… [This] can create illusions that the leaders of the national Stalinist parties could be good revolutionists, if only Moscow would let them… These leaders actively participate in the preparation of the crimes. So also for Tito, it was not a matter of having been ‘forced’ to carry out the wishes of Moscow in the past.
We cannot fail to comment here that your uncritical letter to the Yugoslav Communist Party precisely lends weight to the point of view that Tito is an ‘unconscious Trotskyist’.”
The RCP letter went on to highlight the apparent turn around over the class nature of the Yugoslav and ‘buffer’ countries that had been adopted by the World Congress in April 1948. It was clear that the position of the RCP, rejected in April, was now being confirmed as having been correct only a few months later.
“The World Congress majority adopted a position that the buffer countries, including Yugoslavia, were capitalist countries. It rejected the resolution of the RCP that these economies were being brought into line with that of the Soviet Union and could not be characterised as capitalist. The amendment of the British Party to the section ‘The USSR and Stalinism’ was defeated. But it is evident from these letters that the IS has been forced by events to proceed from the standpoint of the British party, that the productive and political relations in Yugoslavia are basically identical with those of the Soviet Union.
If indeed there exists in Yugoslavia a capitalist state, then the IS Letters can only be characterized as outright opportunist. For the IS does not pose the tasks in Yugoslavia which would follow if bourgeois relations existed there as the dominant form. The Letters are based on conclusions which can only flow from the premise that the basic overturn of capitalism and landlordism has taken place.” (Emphasis in original)
In his Reply to David James (Spring 1949), Ted went on to state:
“The only difference between the regimes of Stalin and Tito is that the latter is still in its early stages. There is a remarkable similarity in the first upsurge of enthusiasm in Russia, when the bureaucracy introduced the First Five-Year Plan, and the enthusiasm in Yugoslavia today.
[…]
Already the first ‘sabotage’ trials have taken place where Tito puts responsibility for any deficiencies in the plan, on the shoulders of his opponents. Similarly, we have the pattern of the Russian ‘confession’ trials on a smaller scale. The familiar outlines of the Stalinist police state are clear to see. The differences are superficial, the fundamental traits the same.”
However, such damning criticism was dismissed out of hand by the ‘leaders’ of the Fourth International. But by this time, they saw no reason to reply. By that point they had already criminally split the RCP and Healy’s minority were in practice being recognised as the official section in Britain.
The only other section of the International which raised any objections was the French section, but its criticism was very weak and timid: “We do not at all reproach the IS for appealing to the Yugoslav CP and its CC. This step is appropriate given the relations between the masses and the CP.” However, the French leadership was upset with its tone. “But we do object to these letters for idealising Tito and the Yugoslav CP”. They nevertheless fell quickly into line and made it clear that they were abiding by international discipline.
During 1949 and 1950, the IS became ever more infatuated with the idea that Tito’s Yugoslavia was a ‘relatively healthy’ workers’ state. An IEC resolution in that year went so far as to announce that “the dynamics of the Yugoslav revolution confirms the theory of the permanent revolution on all points”, and that “in Yugoslavia … Stalinism no longer exists today as an effective factor in the workers’ movement…”
As regards the rest of Eastern Europe, while maintaining they were capitalist, they developed a dishonest, muddled theory that these states were “on the road of structural assimilation with the USSR”. But added that they “constitute, today, the pattern of a hybrid and transitory society in full transformation, with outlines still unclear and imprecise, from which it is extremely difficult to summarise their fundamental character in a concise formula”. This extremely vague formulation simply allowed them to gloss over the reality, but gave them a convenient escape route for the future.
Needless to say, the RCP’s amendments at the Second World Congress were never published by the SWP, while their positions were attacked and distorted.
The fact remains that it was the RCP who held a clear position, which allowed Grant and Haston to predict that “far from attacking the real crimes of the Stalinist bureaucracy, it appears that Tito will try to arrive at some compromise”. This is exactly what happened.
Work brigades
In 1950, the International developed the idea of organising work brigades to go to Yugoslavia. The French section, the International Communist Party (PCI), which, as we have seen, originally had reservations about the tone adopted by the IS ‘Open Letter’, had now, under the Bleibtreu-Lambert leadership, become the greatest fan club for the Yugoslav Stalinists.
With Lambert’s enthusiastic support, the PCI sent youth and trade union brigades to help ‘build socialism’ in Yugoslavia. In January 1950, the report on the PCI’s Sixth Congress stated “that it is false to speak of a Yugoslav bureaucratic caste of the same nature as the Russian bureaucracy” and “that it false to accept the idea that the YCP has capitulated or is on the way towards capitulation to imperialism” (La Verité, 246, Jan 1950, Report on the defence of Yugoslavia)”.
The Congress resolution declared that the Yugoslav CP represented a “return to Leninism on a series of important strategic questions”. It defined the YCP as “left-centrism in the process of evolving”, with factors “which objectively push the YCP onto the road of the revolutionary programme” (Hands off the Yugoslav revolution, resolution of the VI congress of the PCI, La Verité No. 247, 1st half of February, 1950).
The PCI urged its supporters to tune into broadcasts of Radio Belgrade. Under the headline, ‘The Magnificent Election Campaign of the YCP’, Gerard Bloch declared:
“The YCP and the Fourth International are hated for the same reason: because they express the greatest force of our epoch, the force of the proletarian revolution, the invincible strength of the working people of all countries.” (‘La magnifique campagne électorale du PCY’, La Verite No.251, first half of April 1950)
On May Day 1950, a French delegation visited Belgrade, which included the PCI leader, Lambert, who exuded admiration for the Tito regime:
“I believe that I saw in Yugoslavia a dictatorship of the proletariat, led by a party which passionately seeks to combat bureaucracy and impose workers’ democracy.”
At the same time, he proudly reported on the slogans that were carried in the demonstration: “Tito, Central Committee, Party, Yugoslav Peoples”, and “Tito Is With Us, We Are with Tito”. (Pierre Lambert, ‘1er Mai a Belgrade’, La Verite No.254, second half of May 1950)
Lambert, as responsible for the trade union work commission of the PCI, established a trade union bulletin called L’Únité, together with trade unionists opposed to the French Communist Party, which received funding from the Yugoslav embassy.
They organised work brigades called ‘Jean Jaurès Brigades’. The PCI newspaper, La Vérité, headlined a report of one delegation:
“Those Who Have Seen the Truth in Yugoslavia Say It: YES, This Is a State Where Socialism Is Being Built, This Is the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.”
Rebutting Stalinist allegations about Yugoslavia being a ‘police state’, the article declared:
“Unlike what happens in the USSR, it is the working class itself which exercises power in Yugoslavia […] This state is a WORKERS’ STATE, resolutely engaged on the road of SOCIALIST DEMOCRACY.” (‘Ceux qui ont vu la vérité en Yugoslavie la dissent: OUI c’est un état où se construit le socialisme, c’est la dictature du proletariat’, La Verite No.258, first half of October 1950)
Healy was also busy supporting Tito, organising a “John MacLean Youth Work Brigade” from the Labour League of Youth to go to Yugoslavia.
Not to be outdone, Cannon waded in with his praise for the regime. He sent a telegram to the Central Committee of the Yugoslav CP hailing its May Day manifesto:
“Workers everywhere will acclaim your appeal to defend Yugoslavia and restore revolutionary movement to Leninism as opposed to Stalinism and Social Democracy.” (‘Yugoslav May Day Manifesto Hailed by SWP Leader’, The Militant, 8 May 1950)
Two months later, the SWP’s newspaper, The Militant, was glorifying Tito with its headline, “Tito Denounces Bureaucracy as Foe of Socialism”, and his attack on Stalin as “a great milestone in the development of the international working-class and socialist movement.” (‘Tito’s June 27 Speech’, The Militant, 10 July 1950)
In the Eighth Plenum of the IEC in April 1950, Mandel boldly declared that Yugoslavia is now “a non-degenerated workers’ state”.
When the Tito regime openly capitulated to imperialism, in July 1950, by abstaining on the UN military intervention against the North in the Korean War, the PCI paper in December 1950 expressed disappointment and disillusionment:
“All this is extremely painful for the revolutionary friends of Yugoslavia who have hoped that its leaders would really keep their promises to consistently defend Marxism-Leninism against Stalinist revisionism.” (‘La Yougoslavie sur la voie glissante’, La Vérité No. 263, second half of December 1950)
But all the ‘leaders’ of the Fourth, without exception, capitulated to Tito-Stalinism: Cannon, Mandel, Pablo, Frank, Maitan, Healy, etc. Their International had become, in the words of Ted Grant, “an exculpatory tourist agency for Yugoslavia”.
In 1953, when Cannon, Healy and Lambert accused Pablo of being pro-Stalinist, they tried to hide the fact they had been big fans of Stalinism in the years before. Healy’s seven-volume documentary history of the Fourth International only begins in 1952-3. The earlier period is simply swept under the carpet.
Chinese Revolution
A further mess was being made in relation to China and the Chinese Revolution of 1949.
Incapable of thinking independently, the IS stuck to the idea that Mao would inevitably capitulate to Chiang Kai-Shek. As a result, the Chinese Trotskyists were thoroughly confused when events turned out differently.
The Stalinist-led peasant armies crushed those of Chiang Kai-Shek and overthrew capitalism. Inspired by Stalinist Russia, they constructed a proletarian bonapartist regime. Ted Grant alone understood what was happening and predicted in advance what was to take place, even before Mao himself realised it.
The refusal of the IS to recognise reality had become so utterly ridiculous. There was one international meeting where Cannon and the others, including a Chinese comrade, were arguing that Mao’s armies would never cross the Yangtze river and defeat Chiang’s forces. However, by the end of the meeting, the Red Army had in fact crossed the Yangtze River and smashed Chiang Kai-Shek’s forces. Shachtman had his supporters helpless with laughter when he joked about Cannon’s perspectives for China. “Yes, Mao wants to capitulate to Chiang Kai-Shek”, he quipped. “The only problem is Mao can’t catch up with him!”
Chiang Kai-Shek’s armies simply melted away under the impact of Mao’s revolutionary agrarian programme and propaganda of ‘land to the tillers’. However, he ruthlessly suppressed any independent movement of the proletariat in the towns.
Ted Grant proclaimed in advance that the development of the Chinese Revolution was “the greatest event in human history”, after the Russian Revolution.
Ted’s prediction
When Mao came to power in October 1949, his perspective was that there would need to be 100 years of capitalism in China before the possibility of socialism was posed. However, Ted’s analysis was so advanced that he predicted what would happen before even Mao thought of it.
The events in China were a puzzle to the ‘leaders’ of the Fourth. They took Trotsky’s pre-war tentative view that if the Maoist armies were victorious against Chiang Kai-Shek, the tops of the Red Army would betray its peasant base. And in the cities, given the passivity of the workers, the Red Army tops would fuse with the bourgeoisie, leading to capitalism. This did not happen as the road to capitalist development in China was blocked. The bourgeoisie under the regime of Chiang Kai-Shek revealed its complete bankruptcy, incapable of solving the agrarian question or ridding the country of imperialist domination.
In 1950, Ted explained the processes taking place which led to the rise of bureaucratically deformed workers’ states:
“The fact that the revolution in China and Yugoslavia could be developed in a distorted and debased character is due to the world factors of:
(a) The crisis of world capitalism.
(b) The existence of a strong, deformed workers’ state adjacent to these countries and powerfully influencing the workers’ movement.
(c) The weakness of the Marxist current of the Fourth International.
These factors have resulted in an unparalleled development, which could not have been foreseen by any of the Marxist teachers: the extension of Stalinism as a social phenomenon over half [of] Europe, over the Chinese sub-continent and with the possibility of spreading over the whole of Asia.
This poses new theoretical problems to be worked out by the Marxist movement. Under conditions of isolation and paucity of forces, new historical factors could not but result in a theoretical crisis of the movement, posing the problem of its very existence and survival.” (Grant, ‘Open Letter to the BSFI’, Sept-Oct 1950)
The problem of “its very existence and survival” was certainly posed very sharply. Mistake after mistake, and their inability to learn from their mistakes, had utterly discredited the International.
As late as 1954, the SWP were still talking about China as capitalist. It was only the following year, in 1955, that they characterised China as a deformed workers’ state.
Ted draws all the threads together in his document “Stalinism in the Postwar World”, written in June 1951:
“For Marxism neither pessimism nor spurious optimism can play a role in determining the analysis of events. The first necessity is to understand the meaning of the conjuncture of historical forces leading to the present world situation.”
He also predicted that the creation of a deformed workers’ state in China would, as with Tito, lead to a serious clash with the Russian bureaucracy. In other words, he anticipated the future Sino-Soviet split.
All this was a closed book for Cannon, Mandel, Pablo, Frank, and Co., who completely failed to understand what was going on. According to them, there was a relatively healthy workers’ state in Yugoslavia, capitalist states in the rest of Europe, and a deformed workers’ state in Russia. As Ted explained, “This position was incoherent even from the standpoint of formal logic, let alone Marxism”.
RCP destroyed
The constant gyrations and blunders of the ‘leaders’ of the Fourth not only led to the destruction of the Fourth International, but also was instrumental in destroying the RCP, the most successful section of the International.
Although the movement faced objective difficulties, given the boom and the strengthening of Stalinism, a correct policy and perspective could have preserved the cadres. However, the manoeuvres and false policies of the ruling clique served to disorient and demoralise the cadres.
This demoralisation affected some of the leading comrades of the RCP, particularly Jock Haston. The leaders of the International proposed dissolving the RCP into the Labour Party – a policy of deep entrism. And although he knew very well that the conditions laid down for entrism by Trotsky were entirely absent, Haston, who was desperate to remain inside the ranks of the International, suggested that this proposal be accepted.
Ted and other party leaders were opposed to this, but in an attempt to keep the leadership together, they eventually went along with it. But when they tried to enter into discussions with the international leadership, they were abruptly told: don’t talk to us – talk to our representative in Britain – Gerry Healy. In fact, they were instructed to fuse with Healy’s group or find themselves outside of the International.
The conditions imposed by Healy were quite outrageous: there was to be no discussion of any differences for six months after which there would be a conference. This was supposedly to facilitate unification. In reality, it was a cynical manoeuvre on Healy’s part.
Healy was determined to guarantee himself a majority at the conference. Up to this point, he had never yet succeeded in winning a majority in the RCP. Now he had the means of solving this problem. Taking advantage of the situation and using the most arbitrary and bureaucratic methods, Healy immediately proceeded to expel opposition elements.
With Healy now in complete control of the organisation, no opposition was tolerated. This was the revenge he had been waiting for ten years to inflict.
When Haston saw what was happening, and by now completely demoralised, he resigned in disgust. Not satisfied with this, Healy demanded he be formally expelled.
He announced to the Political Bureau early in March 1950 that Haston should be expelled for his “renegacy”, arguing that “The man is an incorrigible opportunist.”
Haston’s resignation placed Ted in an impossible position. But he could see that the whole business was a disgusting farce, and so he abstained. Healy then went on to expel Tony Cliff, in reality due to his ideas and in order to prevent his document from being discussed at the conference. When Ted refused to endorse Cliff’s expulsion, he was also expelled.
On the basis of such blatant manoeuvres, and a systematic purge, Healy gained his ‘majority’.
These methods were completely alien to the Trotskyist movement. They were directly taken from the copybook of Zinovievism, which is only one step removed from Stalinism.
This had nothing in common with the traditions of Bolshevism, clean democratic traditions, which were always upheld by the RCP. This is how Trotsky explained that internal disputes should be handled:
“First of all, it is important to observe very strictly the statutes of the organisation – regular meetings of the rank and file, discussions before conventions, regular conventions and the right of the minority to express its opinion (there should be a comradely attitude and no threats of expulsion). You know that was never, never done in the old [Russian] party. Expulsion of a comrade was a tragic event, and was done only for moral reasons and not because of a critical attitude.” (From “Results of the Entry and Next Tasks”, 6 October 1937, in “Writings of Leon Trotsky [1936-37]”, page 486)
Ted and Jock Haston strongly disagreed with Tony Cliff’s revisionist theory of state capitalism, but they answered him politically, in a way that would raise the level of the cadres. It never occurred to them to expel him for his wrong views.
These rotten Zinovievist methods had now become the norm within the so-called Fourth International, whose leaders attempted to resolve political differences by administrative measures, pressure and bullying.
Following Ted’s expulsion from Healy’s organisation, the ‘Club’, as it was called, Ted was then formally expelled from the Fourth International at its Third Congress in August 1951 on a motion presented by Mandel.
According to the report in the International Information Bulletin (December 1951):
“The expulsion of Haston, regular member of the IEC and of Grant, alternate member, both representing the former majority of the RCP and embodying that tendency of British Trotskyism which obstinately refused to become integrated in the International and to assimilate the new course of Trotskyism.”
It continued: “it represents a typical example of the rapid degeneration of any tendency which seeks its salvation in a national particularism outside of the broad paths of development of the International…”
Its open display of cynicism went so far as to say:
“His [Haston’s] expulsion from the IEC at the eighth Plenum after he had left the organisation and committed acts of open treachery terminated a long political struggle in which no one can deny the patient and flexible attitude of the International leadership, which did everything possible to really integrate the Haston tendency in the International.”
Healy and Cannon, together with the rest of them, had finally got their way. In the end, the RCP, together with the whole of the Fourth International of Trotsky, was destroyed. This meant that genuine Trotskyism had been defeated and Zinovievism reigned victorious within the organisation.
An unprincipled split
Ted Grant pointed out many times that the only authority that a genuine Leninist leadership can claim is a moral and political authority. Take that away, and all that is left is a corrupt bureaucratic regime in which the leaders claim for themselves a spurious prestige.
Leaders who are equipped with the necessary ideological preparation and who are steeped in the methods of dialectical materialism are never afraid to answer any political differences or criticisms.
But leaders who do not have sufficient level to answer their critics in the language of facts, figures and arguments will always tend to rely on administrative measures to eliminate unwanted internal problems. Such methods are a sure path to the destruction of the organisation.
Lacking the necessary political and moral authority, the leaders of the Fourth used Zinovievite methods to impose their policy. Such methods inevitably only produce political demoralisation, crises and unprincipled splits.
This – together with a consistently incorrect political line – is what guaranteed the final destruction of the Fourth International.
The RCP was the only serious obstacle in the path of the complete degeneration of the Fourth International.
With the destruction of the RCP, the road was now open for Pablo, Mandel and Frank to ride roughshod over the sections of the International. What they lacked was political and moral authority, which was accurately reflected in their consistently incorrect perspective and policy.
In 1951, at the Third World Congress, Pablo and the IS swung over from their previous position of a Stalinism weakened from the war to one where the perspective was of an immediate atomic war waged by imperialism on the Soviet Union – a Third World War that would lead to revolution.
This war was regarded as part of the international class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, with the United States at the head of the bourgeois camp, and the Soviet Union, with its Stalinist leadership – however reluctantly – leading the camp of the international proletariat. This perspective, in the minds of these people, was made more real by the Korean War which was still going on. According to Pablo:
“The two conceptions of ‘Revolution’ and of ‘War’, far from being in opposition or being differentiated as two significantly different stages of development so interlinked as to be almost indistinguishable… In their stead it is the conception of ‘Revolution-War’ or ‘War-Revolution’ which is emerging, and upon which the perspectives and orientation of revolutionary Marxists in our epoch should rest.” (‘Where Are We Going?’, Michel Pablo, July 1951)
As regards a victorious outcome, this “transformation will probably take an entire historical period of several centuries and will in the meantime be filled with forms and regimes transitional between capitalism and socialism and necessarily deviating from ‘pure’ forms and norms”.
In other words, his perspective was one of “centuries of deformed workers’ states”, with the Trotskyists as a loyal opposition within these states.
Given the timescale and the ferment in the mass organisations provoked by this ‘War-Revolution’, the Trotskyists, according to Pablo, should now enter the mass organisations, Stalinist or Social-Democratic, to prevent their isolation. This was a policy of entrism sui generis – entrism “of a special kind”. This would be a policy of long-term ‘deep entrism’ until the “coming world showdown” had been resolved in the victories of deformed workers’ states.
Pablo declared that Stalinism and petty-bourgeois nationalism could play a progressive role in the transition from capitalism to socialism. This was precisely what the leaders of the Fourth had indignantly accused the RCP of arguing – although, in fact, the RCP never had such a position.
The Ninth Plenum of the IEC in November 1950, the Third World Congress in the summer of 1951, and then the IEC Plenum in February 1952, all endorsed Pablo’s analysis, including this new entrist strategy arising from the looming world war.
This led the POR, – the Bolivian section of the Fourth International – to support the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR), which led the proletariat to defeat in the 1952 Bolivian Revolution (see The 1952 Bolivian Revolution).
The Resolution on Bolivia for the 12th Plenum of the IEC (December 1952) stated that the POR had acted in a correct way and openly backed “the critical support granted to the MNR”. (International Information Bulletin, Jan 1953, p 24)
The majority of the French section came out in opposition to some aspects of Pablo’s new line and Bleitbreu-Favre wrote a document in opposition called ‘Where is Pablo going?’. While Pablo had adopted a line of adaptation to the Moscow Stalinist bureaucracy, Favre was still clinging to the previous position of illusions in the Stalinists in Yugoslavia and the Chinese Communist Party. His argument was:
“The thing that defines a workers’ party as Stalinist – as opposed to a revolutionary party or a social-democratic party (linked to the bourgeoisie) or any sort of a centrist party – is neither a Stalinist ideology (which doesn’t exist), nor bureaucratic methods (which exist in all kinds of parties), but rather its total and mechanical subordination to the Kremlin. When for one reason or another this subordination ceases to exist, that party ceases to be Stalinist and expresses interests that are different from those of the bureaucratic caste in the USSR. This is what happened (because of the revolutionary action on the part of the masses) in Yugoslavia well before the break in relations; the break only made it official. This is what has already happened in China, and will inevitably be reflected by a break in relations no matter what course the Chinese Revolution takes.”
This was the basis of the opposition to Pablo on the part of the PCI majority. Predictably, Pablo used bureaucratic means to overcome this opposition. First, he refused to put the French majority document to the vote at the 1951 World Congress. Then he strong-armed the French majority to agree to a commission to decide on the details of the tactics in France. This was an uneasy compromise.
In January 1952, the IS instructed the French section to implement entry into the French Communist Party. This meant abandoning the joint trade union work Lambert had been carrying in L’Unité with anti-communist elements (now part of the Force Ouvrière trade union federation), and joining the CGT. The majority of the CC voted against. Pablo then stepped in and bureaucratically suspended all 16 CC members who had voted against! This decision was reversed by the IEC a month later.
However, by mid-1952, with the national conference looming, the French section’s pro-Pablo minority raided the PCI headquarters and took equipment. They were promptly expelled by the majority, which resulted in two organisations with the same name and paper.
At the November 1952 IEC meeting the French majority, led by Lambert and Bleibtreu-Favre, were defeated and finally expelled from the International by the IS in January 1953. This action and the general political line were supported by an overwhelming majority, including by the American SWP and the Healy group, who were still arch-Pabloites.
Before this, Daniel Renard, a member of the French section, had written to Cannon for support against the pro-Stalinist line of Pablo. In May 1952, Cannon replied to Renard repudiating any suggestion of a pro-Stalinist tendency in the International:
“We do not see such a tendency in the International leadership of the Fourth International nor any sign nor symptom of it.
We judge the policy of the international leadership by the line it elaborates in official documents; in the recent period by the documents of the Third World Congress and the Tenth Plenum. We do not see any revisionism there. We consider these documents to be completely Trotskyist…
It is the unanimous opinion of the leading people of the SWP that the authors of these documents have rendered a great service to the movement for which they deserve appreciation and comradely support, not distrust and denigration.” (‘Letters exchanged between Daniel Renard and James P. Cannon’, February 16 and May 9, 1952)
The above statements, it is absolutely clear that all of them were ‘Pabloites’ at this time. They were all politically singing exactly the same song. It is sufficient to recall that the resolutions of the Third World Congress in 1951 were drafted by the Pabloite IS and agreed at that congress.
Cannon supported Pablo unconditionally. “The resolution as I understand it is an attempt to recognise and face the new reality in the world and to draw the necessary conclusions for our strategy and tactics. I agree with the conclusions which are drawn”, he stated. (Cannon, Speeches to the Party, p.141)
Cannon, in particular, saw these resolutions as endorsing his ‘American Theses’. He underlined this in a letter to Dan Roberts:
“In reality the events analysed in the Third Congress documents powerfully reinforce the American Theses, and give them more actuality. The world trend towards revolution is now irreversible, and America will not escape its pull.” (Cannon, Speeches to the Party, p.271)
When Cannon read Pablo’s pamphlet, The Coming World Showdown, with its perspective of world war developing into war-revolution, he stated: “I find myself in complete agreement with Pablo’s pamphlet.”
The 1952-3 split, when it came, was therefore nothing to do with political differences, as there was no disagreement. When Pablo presented a draft to the IS entitled The Rise and Fall of Stalinism as the basis for discussion at the forthcoming Fourth World Congress, Healy agreed that it be circulated to all sections in the name of the IS, with only a few minor criticisms.
For his part, Healy had been a close ally of Pablo over these years. “For the past few years I have been extremely close to him and have grown to like him considerably”, he wrote to Cannon in May 1953. “He has done a remarkable job and right now he needs our help.” (‘Letter from G. Healy to James P. Cannon, May 27 1953’, Trotskyism versus Revisionism, vol.1, pp.112 & 114)
The split instead had everything to do with the relations of Pablo and the SWP leaders, who now saw each other as rivals. While Cannon endorsed Pablo’s politics, he could never tolerate Pablo’s interference in the SWP. In particular, he accused Pablo of interfering in their ‘affairs’, with the emergence of a minority faction in opposition to the SWP leadership, led by Bert Cochran, which, according to them, was “instigated by Paris”.
As a result, Cannon launched an attack on ‘Paris’, a foreign body that was attempting to interfere in the American party and encourage its internal dissidents. Cannon was soon working to remove Pablo “and his spineless lackeys”. With his characteristic aggression, he wrote: “The revolutionary task is not to ‘live with’ this tendency… but to blow it up.”
He added:
“As I visualise the next stage of our strategy, it should proceed from the uncompromising determination to annihilate Pabloism politically and organisationally.”
So, there you have it: From total agreement and unconditional support for Pabloism in all its manifestations, to “the uncompromising determination” to annihilate it and drive it out of the organisation! And this 180° somersault was carried out effortlessly, without blinking an eyelid and without any explanation, in the space of just a few months.
When it came, the split was music to Healy’s ears. There would now be a new division of labour, where Healy would become Cannon’s man in Europe, allowed to get on with his own thing. He was also joined by the French PCI led by Bleibtreu-Favre and Lambert, who all came together in the formation of the so-called ‘International Committee’ of the Fourth International.
In the meantime, Healy was conducting a policy of deep entrism in Britain centred around Socialist Outlook, in collaboration with a number of left reformists. In 1954, the Labour NEC proscribed their paper. Without a paper, the Healyites began opportunistically to sell and contribute to the Tribune, a reformist journal edited by Michael Foot – an episode they would like everyone to forget.
From ultra-leftism to opportunism
For many years, Mandel, Pablo and Cannon stubbornly refused to recognise the reality of the changed situation following the end of the Second World War.
Then, without any explanation, and without making any criticism of past errors, they jumped from ultra-leftism to opportunism. Instead of the perspective of an immediate economic collapse, they began to flirt with revisionist ideas, including Keynesianism, which they borrowed from the decrepit arsenal of reformism, including bourgeois economics.
Mandel was mesmerised by state intervention, while Tony Cliff adopted the idea of the “permanent arms economy” to explain the post-war upswing. Only our tendency, in the person of Ted Grant, understood what was happening.
In a brilliant analysis written in 1960, ‘Will There be a Slump?’, Ted explained the nature of the upswing that was taking place:
“It is true that the rate of growth in the period 1870-1914 was at a higher tempo than in the period between the wars, but that reflected the fact that the relatively progressive nature of capitalism had changed. The world war of 1914-18 marked a definite stage in the development of capitalism. This was reflected in the impasse in which the private ownership of the means of production and the national state had landed society.
The economic upswing, following the second world war, is due to a whole series of factors. There is nothing ‘unique’ in such an upswing. The possibility of such an economic upturn of capitalist society was foreseen by Trotsky in his criticism of the blind mechanical conceptions of the Stalinists.”
He went on to explain the factors that had given rise to the upswing, including the unprecedented expansion of world trade.
“Since the Second World War, capitalism, in an uneven, contradictory fashion, has suffered such a period of ‘rebirth’. It is true that it is a temporary uplift of a rotten and diseased economy, reflecting the old age of capitalism rather than its resilient youth, that it shows all the feebleness of a decayed system. But even within the general decline of capitalism such periods are inevitable so long as the working class, through faulty leadership, fails to end the system. There is no such thing as a ‘last crisis’, a ‘last economic slump’ of capitalism, a ‘ceiling on production’ or any of the other primitive ideas put forward by the Stalinists during the great depression of 1929-1933. Nevertheless, the enfeeblement of capitalism is reflected in the revolutionary events following the Second World War.”
Pierre Lambert, the leader of the French section who was expelled from the Fourth International in 1952, also criticised the revisionism of the other leaders of the International, but his only alternative was to stubbornly stick to the false positions adopted by the International immediately after the Second World War.
Flying in the face of the facts, he continued to deny that there had been any development of the productive forces throughout the twentieth century, until the day of his death in 2008.
In reality, in the decades following the end of the Second World War, capitalism was experiencing its biggest economic upswing since the Industrial Revolution. Under these conditions, the Fourth International faced serious difficulties.
The upswing in the economy permitted capitalism to grant certain reforms and improvements in living standards. In Britain, the Labour government that was elected in a landslide victory in 1945 for the first time carried out its programme of reforms including nationalisation. This led to an enormous increase in illusions in reformism.
At the same time, the overthrow of capitalist regimes in Eastern Europe, followed by the great Chinese revolution of 1949 created new illusions in Stalinism among an important layer of the workers and youth.
The road of the Fourth International was therefore blocked by a series of objective obstacles that ruled out the possibility of a rapid development of its forces in most countries.
Even if Marx, Lenin and Trotsky had all been alive, the fundamental objective situation would have remained extremely difficult. However, as we have said, when an army is forced to retreat and is led by good generals it can retreat in good order, preserving the bulk of its forces in order to regroup and prepare for a new advance when the situation changes.
But bad generals will always turn retreat into a rout. That is precisely what happened to the Fourth International.
Ted, on the other hand, was able to develop a correct perspective, rearm the comrades and prepare the ground for the future:
“From the viewpoint of Marxism, this economic revival of capitalism is not a negative phenomenon only. It enormously strengthens the numbers and cohesion of the working class, and of the position of the working class within the nation. The next break in the economic conjuncture will pose even greater problems in front of capitalism than in the past.”
Ted concluded that the perspective of an inevitable slump was being prepared:
“Whatever the exact date, it is absolutely certain that the unprecedented post-war boom must be followed by a catastrophic downswing, which cannot but have a profound effect on the political thinking of the enormously strengthened ranks of the labour movement.”
It was this ability to analyse the concrete situation as it really was, and not as the sectarian muddleheads would have liked it to be, that allowed Ted to hold together the small forces we had back then. He was thus able to prepare them for the inevitable downturn in the economy that would come at a later stage, and with it, tumultuous class struggle.
Against the stream!
For a number of years after the destruction of the RCP, Ted Grant and the small group of supporters were compelled to struggle against the stream, under extremely difficult objective conditions.
Then in 1956, titanic events brought about a break in the situation. The Khrushchev revelations and then heroic uprising of the Hungarian workers that was brutally suppressed by Russian tanks, convulsed the Stalinist movement from top to bottom.
In Britain, the Communist Party suffered a serious split, in which it lost a large number of important cadres, including key trade union leaders. Unfortunately, the smallness of our forces made it virtually impossible to win over these elements, some of whom joined the Healy organisation, which they pushed in an ultra-left direction. Others went far to the right, and became agents of the ruling class.
The official Fourth International had lost its base in Britain when in 1953 Healy broke away to join the so-called International Committee. In an attempt to build a section from scratch, the International placed an advertisement in The Tribune newspaper, calling on all Trotskyists who were interested in the Fourth International to participate in a conference.
Although Ted and the other comrades had absolutely no illusions in this organisation, they considered that they would have nothing to lose by participating in it, which they did. Subsequently they agreed to unite with another small group to refound the British section of the Fourth. It should be made clear that this step was done without making any political concessions whatsoever, and certainly with no illusions. But it was seen as possibly a way to overcome our isolation and to enter into contact with co-thinkers in other countries.
For a while, the experiment brought some positive results. But very soon, the old differences would inevitably resurface – and the old manoeuvres and intrigues as well.
Ted became a member of the International Executive Committee, where he had occasion to notice all the problems caused by Pablo’s mistakes. Once again, Pablo was banging the war drum, pushing the theory of an imminent nuclear war, which, in some mysterious way, was supposed to lead to socialist revolution.
Ted was quite amused to see the effect of this stupid propaganda, even on leading cadres. He recalls an encounter with one female comrade who, on taking her leave of him with tears in her eyes, said: “Goodbye comrade, this may be the last time that we meet.”
To which Ted replied: “Don’t worry. Go to bed and sleep soundly. There will not be any war and we will meet again at the next session.” It is not recorded whether she was convinced.
He also noticed that there was a solid block of Argentinian comrades, led by a man called Posadas, who were always 1000% loyal to Pablo. In every vote, their hands would always shoot up without hesitation.
After one such vote, Ted took Pablo to one side and said: “You be careful with those people. Today they always vote with you. Tomorrow they will always vote against you.” This prediction proved to be correct.
The biggest section of the International was in Sri Lanka – which was then called Ceylon. But Ted noticed that in all the meetings of the IEC, the leading members from Sri Lanka showed quite a contemptuous attitude towards the international leadership.
The leader of the LSSP, NM Pereira was clearly showing opportunist tendencies. Ted said that “NM was never a Trotskyist.” But the international leadership made absolutely no attempt to correct him.
When Trotsky was alive, even as a single individual, he carried immense political and moral authority, which inspired respect in all the leading cadres of the International.
But these leaders could never enjoy such authority. Their innumerable mistakes and blunders undermined them, particularly in the eyes of the Sri Lankan comrades, who, after all, were leading a mass organisation.
Inevitably, the whole thing ended in tears. The LSSP joined a Popular Front government in Sri Lanka, causing consternation in the international leadership. But this was the inevitable result of years of failure to provide firm guidance to the comrades in Sri Lanka. In the panicked reaction, they expelled the entire LSSP, without even attempting to conduct a political struggle to win over the majority.
The differences between the British section and the international leadership became particularly glaring when Mandel, Pablo and co. entered into discussions in the early 1960s with the American SWP with a view to re-establishing “the unity of all Trotskyists.”
Nevertheless, Ted Grant predicted that, based on past experience, these people would only succeed in uniting two internationals into ten. This remark proved to be highly appropriate.
A heated row broke out among the tops of the International on several questions, particularly the nature of the Sino-Soviet split and the colonial revolution.
Pablo came out in favour of supporting the Russian bureaucracy against the Chinese, whereas the others supported the Chinese bureaucracy against Moscow. Ted insisted that this was a struggle between two rival bureaucracies, in which the Fourth International could not support either side.
On the question of the colonial revolution, the leaders of the International adopted the position of uncritical support for guerillaism, while the Americans had a position of uncritical support for Castro’s Cuba, which they characterised as a more or less healthy workers’ state.
This was a carbon copy repeat of the earlier mistake in relation to Tito’s Yugoslavia. In effect, these people are looking for shortcuts in the shape of “unconscious Trotskyists”. Having burnt their fingers with Tito, they now proceeded to lavish praise on Castro.
Later on, they were to present Mao Zedong in much the same light, even describing the so-called “Cultural Revolution” in China as a new version of the Paris Commune! All this amounted to an abandonment of the most basic ideas of Trotskyism, and pointed the way to the complete liquidation of the Fourth International, of which there were very clear indications that this was the case.
The small Irish group which stood for the Fourth International was in close contact with the British comrades. They were advised by the International to fuse with a small ultra-Stalinist Irish Maoist organisation led by a man called Clifford.
The condition imposed by Clifford was that there be no discussion on the difference between Stalinism and Trotskyism for the initial period. This they foolishly accepted. But immediately after fusion, Clifford launched a ferocious attack against ‘counterrevolutionary’ Trotskyism. Naturally, the Irish Trotskyists were unable to answer his document and urgently appealed to Ted Grant to write a reply for them. This was done (see A reply to comrade Clifford), but it did not prevent the utter shipwreck of the unity plan.
The most blatant case was in Italy, where no significant Maoist organisation existed – until it was launched, in effect, by the Fourth International! The leader of the Italian section, Livio Maitan, wanted to get copies of Mao’s Little Red Book in order to distribute it.
As there was no Chinese embassy in Italy, he travelled to Switzerland and obtained a large number of copies from that source. Thanks to his diligence, the Little Red Book was distributed all over Italy and had a big effect. Unfortunately, the Fourth International got nothing out of it. But they succeeded in spreading illusions in Maoism among wide layers of the radicalised youth at that time, presenting the ideas of Mao as a bridge from Stalinism to Trotskyism. It turned out to be a bridge the other way, with even a grouping within Maitan’s organisation splitting away, influenced by Maoism, and building what would become a sizeable ultra-left group in Italy.
New intrigues
All this time, Ted and the other comrades maintained a consistent opposition to the false line of the International. The leadership responded, as could be expected, not with arguments, but with manoeuvres and intrigues.
There was a small clique, based in Nottingham, of unprincipled individuals who were intriguing with Paris to undermine the leadership of the British section.
At that time, our organisation was weak, small and with very few financial resources. We had neither a centre nor full-timer. Ted Grant was working in the telephone exchange, devoting all his spare time to the organisation.
It was therefore welcome news that the International had decided to help us by sending us a full timer – a Canadian comrade, who would be paid by the International.
But from the very beginning, it was clear that the work of this individual was not the building of the British section, but to organise and intrigue against the leadership in collaboration with the group in Nottingham.
When these intrigues were exposed, there was a scandal, in which he walked off with all the books in the bookshop that he was supposed to be working for. That was a blatant act of sabotage, which indicated what these people were capable of. But that was just the start.
The ‘Unified Secretariat’
In 1963, the International finally united in a single organisation, known as the Unified Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFI), and immediately, it began to splinter.
Pablo split away, followed by Posadas, while Lambert and Healy remained outside. The unification of ‘all Trotskyists’ was therefore a dead letter from the start. This was an inevitable consequence of the fatal combination of wrong policies and a poisonous internal regime.
The British comrades from the beginning maintained a principled position. At the 1965 Congress, they submitted a document to the Congress outlining their differences. In the Sino-Soviet dispute, they stood for complete independence from Moscow and Beijing. They explained that the clash between the two was a reflection of conflicting interests between two rival bureaucracies – neither of which represented the interests of the working class or the world socialist revolution.
In relation to the colonial revolution, while standing firmly in support of the struggle of oppressed people against imperialism, the Fourth International must at all times maintain an independent class policy and not merely trail behind the petty bourgeois leaders.
We rejected the policy of individual terrorism and guerillaism, which played such a fatal role in Latin America at that time, while the leaders of the International adopted an attitude of uncritical support.
The document written by Ted Grant and presented by the British section, ‘The colonial revolution and the sino-soviet split’, represented the only one that stood firmly for a Trotskyist proletarian policy. Since we had no confidence that the international would reproduce it, we took the step of publishing it ourselves, although we suffered from an extreme lack of resources.
However, when the comrades arrived at the Congress, they discovered that our document had not been distributed, so nobody had the chance to read it. Ted Grant later commented ironically:
“Lenin contemptuously called the Second International a post office and not an International. This clique cannot even be dignified as a post office. Organisationally as well as politically, they are completely bankrupt.” (Grant, ‘Programme of the International’, May 1970)
In the debate at the Congress, Ted was given a grand total of fifteen minutes (that is, seven minutes, plus translation) to present the document, which naturally had no support. Then, the leaders of the International proceeded to pronounce what amounted to a dishonest expulsion of the British comrades.
Using the false argument that the British comrades were allegedly “incapable of building an organisation”, they proposed to demote them from a full section to a sympathising section, while granting the same status to a small clique that defended the official line of the International.
The comrades rightly denounced this as a dishonest expulsion. We would never return. The break with the so-called Fourth International was permanent and irreversible. Decades of experience serves to convince us that the Fourth International established by Leon Trotsky with such great hopes, finally ended in an abortion.
Conclusion
Today, as an organisation, the Fourth International no longer exists in terms of programme or organisation. The myriad of squabbling sects that lay claim to that once proud name has merely served to discredit it totally.
Not a single one of the different sects that emerged from the wreckage of the Fourth International has anything in common with the original ideas.
Though they invoke Trotsky’s name with tedious regularity, they have never understood his method. Between them, they all contributed fatally to the destruction of the Fourth.
None of them has anything in common with genuine Bolshevik-Leninism – that is to say, Trotskyism. Each one of them peddles a bizarre caricature that has discredited the very name of Trotskyism in the eyes of advanced workers and youth. That is a crime for which they can never be forgiven.
Consequently, we were a thousand times correct when decades ago we characterised them as utterly sterile and turned our backs on them for good.
Today the banner of Trotskyism is represented by only one organisation that can honestly claim to have defended it with obstinate determination for many decades – the Revolutionary Communist International.
A revolutionary party is, in the final analysis, programme, ideas, methods and traditions.
We have continuously emphasised the importance of revolutionary theory in the building of the International.
Lenin wrote: “without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement.” That statement is 100 percent correct. These words were a closed book for the so-called leaders of the Fourth International.
But while the Fourth International was destroyed, the ideas, programme, traditions and methods elaborated by Leon Trotsky are still alive and retain their full vitality and relevance.
We have inherited the greatest set of ideas of any political grouping in history. This is the heritage that we defend. It is our most powerful weapon and it enables us to say that never before has the revolutionary vanguard been so prepared theoretically for the tasks ahead as now.
We base ourselves on the greatest achievements of the First, Second, Third Internationals, and the founding congress of the Fourth.
Ted Grant rescued these ideas and developed and enriched them for over half a century. The publication of his collected works is a most important addition to our theoretical arsenal.
Our cause is a great one, because we stand on the shoulders of giants. Our task is to complete that monumental work, raising our modest forces to the level of the momentous tasks posed by history.
