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THE CRISIS OF THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL AND THE TASKS OF CONSISTENT TROTSKYISTS Adopted by the Founding Conference of the
1. Orthodox Trotskyism rests on the firm foundations laid in the documents elaborated—following the line of the theses and resolutions of the first four congresses of the Communist International—by the first three international meetings of the Fourth International: the Conference of the Movement for the Fourth International (1936); the Founding Congress (1938); and the Emergency Conference (1940). In the documents of these international meetings, the general programmatic, strategic, and tactical lines are indicated which, as developed and brought up to date on the basis of the historical evolution of the subsequent decades, still constitute the political foundations of orthodox Trotskyism.
2. The death of Leon Trotsky and World War II struck hard blows at the International. Not only did the war mean the cessation of direct relations among the different sections, but a bloodbath wiped out many of the International's most important leaders, in particular in Europe. The International Secretariat, under the leadership of the Socialist Workers Party of the United States (SWP/US), was able only partially to fulfill its responsibilities of political and organizational leadership of the international Trotskyist movement. Nevertheless, the Fourth International met the test of the war, politically and organizationally, and, during the period of reorganization (1943-1946), corrected the opportunist deviations which had developed in some sections, for example, the French section.
3. In the period following World War II, notwithstanding a certain growth in membership and increase in the influence of almost all its sections, the International did not become a mass organizing center, as, before the war, Trotsky and the entire Trotskyist movement had erroneously predicted would happen. The International attempted to deal with this fact by substituting a voluntarist orthodoxy for dialectical method: under the leadership of Pablo, the International acted as if the crisis of proletarian leadership were approaching resolution and the development of the International as a mass organization could be easily realized. At the same time, the principal section of the International, the SWP/US—using as the reason the reactionary Voorhis Act, which prohibits any American organization from maintaining an international affiliation—came to isolate itself from the rest of the movement. In taking this stance, the SWP expressed what were actually federalist positions on questions of international organization and placed itself, in practice, on the right wing of the Fourth International. Nevertheless, despite all its mistakes, the International continued to base its politics on orthodox Trotskyism. The theses of the Reorganization Conference (1946) and the Second World Congress (1948), although containing errors, should be included as part of the historic legacy of our movement.
4. The first serious opportunist failure on the part of the International occurred in 1948 on the occasion of the break between Yugoslavia and the Kremlin. Instead of limiting itself to defending Yugoslavia against any possible military attack by the USSR, the International treated Tito's break with Stalin as an expression of the revolutionary potential of the Yugoslav Communist Party. The Yugoslav CP was characterized as "left-centrist" and was regarded as moving towards Trotskyism, while over and over attempts were made to reach agreement with either the Yugoslav CP or with pro-Tito forces in capitalist countries. With an ultimate perspective of the affiliation of the Yugoslav CP to the Fourth International, these policies were maintained until 1950. Clearly this involved a total misunderstanding of the nature of the Titoist bureaucracy, resulting from the desire to find, at any cost, a shortcut to reaching the masses. Still, the desire to win the Yugoslav CP to the Fourth International makes clear the difference between the policy of 1948-1950 and classical Pabloism from 1951 forward. The opportunism of 1948 opened the way to Pabloite revisionism but definitely did not reach the depth of the opportunism of actual Pabloism.
5. Pabloite revisionism, which emerged at the end of 1950 and triumphed at the Third World Congress in 1951, represented an opportunist deviation of a centrist type. Drawing a false lesson from the unexpected events of the postwar period (the consolidation and expansion of Stalinism with the creation of deformed workers' states through the social transformations in the countries occupied by the "Red" Army and in the victorious revolutions in Yugoslavia and China; the cold war, and the failure of development of the Fourth International), Pabloite positions went so far as to deny the necessity of the struggle to build mass Trotskyist parties in all the countries of the world. The role of the revolutionary instrument was, in effect, assigned to the ruling bureaucracy of the USSR and the Stalinist parties, driven to assume this role by the revolutionary pressure of the masses and confrontation with imperialism and the "inevitable" formation and possible triumph of internal centrist tendencies. The sections of the Fourth International, placed within the Communist parties according to the strategy of "entrism sui generis," had to limit themselves to functioning as small groups for discussion among cadres, in order to aid the objective development of the revolutionary process under the leadership of the Stalinists. In this way, disappointment over the lack of success in achieving transformation into a mass organization led to political liquidationism.
6. The counterposed theses presented at the Third World Congress (1951) by the majority of the French section, although containing some mistakes and lacking a balance sheet of the previous errors, constituted a defense of orthodox Trotskyism against Pabloite revisionism. The cost to the French section of the defense of its positions was its expulsion from the International in 1952.
7. Only the emergence of ultra-Pabloite internal tendencies, which carried liquidationism to its extreme, drove the British section and the SWP/US to launch, in 1953, the struggle against Pablo. Conducted on the basis of the SWP's federalist conceptions, and so on the basis of relations among the separate national leaderships, this struggle did not come near to achieving an the results which were possible. On 16 November 1953, using Pablo's bureaucratic methods as the reason, the SWP, with an open letter, broke with the Pabloite leadership on the eve of the fourth world congress, so refusing to wage a struggle to win the majority of the International to opposition to Pablo. One week later, on 23 November, the expelled majority of the Parti Communiste Internationaliste (PCI/France), the English section, the Swiss section, and the SWP founded the International Committee of the Fourth International (IC), which declared Pablo and his International Secretariat removed from power, proclaimed itself the new leadership of the movement, and invited Trotskyists all over the world to group themselves under its banner, This call received a positive response from a few sections of the International (China, Canada), from the faction led by Moreno (Argentina), and from small minorities in a few other sections. And so, because of the incorrect tactics of the anti-Pabloites at the moment of the split, two-thirds of the International remained with Pablo.
8. In practice, the International Committee, based on organizational federalism, did not in any way represent a Bolshevik response to Pabloism. It proved incapable of drawing the slightest lesson from the crisis of the International. The successive policies of its different organizations (the entrism of Moreno's organization in the Peronist movement; the policy of the French PCI in relation to Algerian nationalism and, later, in relation to social democracy; the more and more marked adaptation of the SWP to petty-bourgeois intellectual circles in the US; the zigzags of the British section in its work within the British Labour Party; etc.) clearly demonstrated that the International Committee itself—even if obviously in a less serious form than the International Secretariat—suffered from opportunist deviations of a centrist type, which its federalist character could only exacerbate.
9. The reunification achieved in 1963 between the Pabloite International Secretariat and a wing of the International Committee led by the SWP/US, was the product of capitulation by the SWP to Pabloism, originating in the revisionist SWP's own ongoing shift to the right. A fundamental element in this shift had been the impact of the Cuban revolution, which the SWP understood in impressionistic rather than Marxist terms, going so far as denying, at least with regard to Latin America, the necessity of the struggle to build mass Trotskyist parties and openly abandoning the Leninist strategy of proletarian revolution. At the same time, the International Secretariat, which agreed with the SWP and its allies (Palabra Obrera/Argentina, Partido Obrero Revolucionario/Chile, etc.) on the analysis of the Cuban Revolution and Castroism (which was presented as a revolutionary-Marxist current, although with theoretical limitations), continued to be based essentially on the entire policy of liquidationist Pabloism. In fact the International Secretariat had discarded only a few elements of Pablo's analysis (for example, the imminence of a third world war) which had obviously been shown to be false, while its fundamental positions remained the same as in 1951, in fact with a more open capitulation to petty-bourgeois nationalism in the colonies and former colonies—positions which were connected to an impressionistic evaluation of the new period of capitalist development which followed the war. From 1964 on, this evaluation would lead to the theory of 'neocapitalism" with the consequent underestimation of the actuality of the socialist perspective and the revolutionary role of the proletariat in the imperialist countries. Despite such areas of political agreement, the 1963 reunification represented an unprincipled bloc, insofar as a number of fundamental political issues (such as entrism "sui generis" in Stalinist and social-democratic parties in Europe), on which profound differences persisted between the International Secretariat and the wing of the International Committee led by the SWP, were not confronted, in order to avoid disturbing the process of unification, while in essence an agreement was established which guaranteed the reciprocal independence of the original Pabloites with regard to Europe and the SWP with regard to the United States. Significantly, it was precisely in the period immediately preceding and following this reunification that important splits took place from the right wing of Pabloism: the split in 1962 of the Posadas faction of the International Secretariat, still attached suprahistorically to all the formal aspects of original Pabloism, including the imminence of a third world war, and evolving toward openly pro-Stalinist positions; the expulsion in 1964 of the Lanka Same Samaja Party (LSSP) of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), numerically, the most important section and the only section of the United Secretariat with a large mass base, which had gone over to counterrevolutionary reformism, entering the bourgeois government of Sirimavo Bandaranaike; and in 1965 the split of the Revolutionary Marxist Faction, led by Pablo himself, at the time an adviser to the Ben Bella government of Algeria, which carried to an extreme the position of the United Secretariat (USFI) on the priority of the colonial revolution over the proletarian revolution in the advanced capitalist countries and capitulated to Khrushchevism, among other things supporting the USSR in polemics with China, over against the rest of the USFI.
10. The struggle within the International Committee against the capitulation of the SWP was conducted primarily by the Socialist Labour League (SLL) of Britain and the Parti Communiste Intemationaliste (PCI/France; later [1963-1981] the Organisation Comnuniste Internationaliste [OCI/France]; since 1981, again the PCI). This struggle, however, was not based on a genuine balance sheet of the experience of the postwar Trotskyist movement or of the International Committee itself. In effect the SLL and OCI combined sectarian attitudes (on the unification itself—refusing to participate in the reunification in order to fight Pabloite revisionism within a united International, as would have been correct to do—as well as on the character of the Cuban state) with the maintenance of essentially left-centrist politics. The International Committee, maintained by the SLL and OCI with the support of a few other organizations (Greece, Hungary, and a left minority in the SWP), although attempting in its initial period (1963-1966) to draw certain lessons from its own past history, did not have a qualitatively different political character from the International Committee of 1953-1962.
11. The Third Conference of the International Committee (1966) decisively blocked any possibility of the leftward evolution of the International Committee. In fact, the Conference reaffirmed the federalist character of the organization (a rule requiring a unanimous vote for a proposal to be adopted) and signaled the suppression of serious political discussion with the exclusion of the Spartacist League of the United States for expressing generally correct positions on a number of fundamental questions, including the nature of Pabloism and the crisis of the Fourth International, the origin of the deformed workers' states and the character of the Cuban state, and the evaluation of international economic and political perspectives. The essentially bipolar condominium of the SLL and OCI established at the 1966 Conference contained in embryo the premises of the split of the International Committee into two counterposed blocs. The deepening of the differences between the two blocs' policies (the OCI's adaptation to international social democracy and its opportunist spontaneism; the SLL's national Trotskyism, verbal sectarianism—in particular regarding the Labour Party question—and idealist conception of the relationship between party and class) in fact provoked first political paralysis and then the definitive breakup of the International Committee in 1971.
12. From the standpoint of the intervention of consistent revolutionaries, the main forces which have presented themselves as Trotskyist in the historical period of the degeneration of the Fourth International must be politically differentiated among themselves as those—
a. Counterrevolutionary Forces Only a very few of the organizations which have presented themselves as Trotskyist in the period since World War II have gone beyond breaking their political links with the Trotskyist program to actually becoming a part of the counterrevolutionary camp. Principally there have been two. 1. The Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) The Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP; Lanka Equal Society [that is, Socialist] Party) of Sri Lanka was once the largest section of the Fourth International and the only one with a large mass base. After a period of increasing adaptation to the Sri Lankan national bourgeoisie and its party, the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), the LSSP went over decisively to counterrevolutionary reformism in 1964, when it joined a government together with the SLFP and the Stalinists. At present, shattered by the victory of the most reactionary political forces in Sri Lanka and the crisis of the SLFP, the LSSP has become a small reformist organization, receiving less than 1 percent of the vote in the last elections.
2. The "Fourth International" of Posadas The Posadasite "Fourth International' went over to Stalinist positions with its support to the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Throughout its history it has been characterized by the utter lunacy of its primary leader, Juan Posadas. Posadas died in 1981, leaving this grouping as is political ghost, with a few dozen members around the world.
b. Centrist Forces A number of tendencies, while not overall counterrevolutionary in their political character, have broken sufficient fundamental links with the Trotskyist program so as to render politically meaningless any attempt to present them as Trotskyist. In most instances, as well, their political degeneration has been accompanied by the evolution of their internal regimes and their actual relations with their own class struggles in ways which effectively close off the possibility of healthy political development in the future. For these reasons, while these groupings have degenerated historically from Trotskyism and are now, generally speaking, centrist in their political character, they are not major poles of attraction to the Trotskyist program for leftward-moving militants breaking from Stalinist, petty-bourgeois nationalist, or other centrist forces with no historical or political connection to Trotskyism. Nor, for the same reasons, are they likely sites for major internal struggles for the Trotskyist program. Five such tendencies have had some considerable historical significance. 1. The "Militant" Grouping The British Militant group, led by Ted Grant and best known for its policy of deep entry in the British Labour Party, heads an international current which has in reality adopted the conception of the peaceful road to socialism, rejecting the necessity of smashing the bourgeois state apparatus. This current adapts to imperialism—in particular, British imperialism—for example, in its positions on Ireland and the 1982 Malvinas War. 2. The Healyite "International Committee" After the split of the International Committee in 1971 between the Lambertist and Healyite forces, the forces headed by Gerry Healy's British Socialist Labour League (from 1973, the Workers Revolutionary Party) maintained their own "International Committee." This trend has traditionally been characterized by an idealist and ultimatist conception of the relations between the vanguard party and the working class, extreme national-Trotskyism, crisis-mongering in its economic and political perspectives, zigzagging with respect to Stalinist forces, and political gangsterism, both externally—especially directed against other organizations presenting themselves as Trotskyist—and internally. Since 1975, this Healyite "International Committee" has undergone extreme political degeneration. It has established shamefully friendly political relations—and accompanying financial relations—with the Libyan Republic ruled by Colonel Muammar Qaddafi. This in turn has led to complete adaptation by the Healyites to all sorts of nationalist movements and regimes. Not only has Healy's "International Committee" provided uncritical support for petty-bourgeois movements such as the Palestine Liberation Organization. It has become a virtual public relations agency for regimes ranging from the left-Bonapartist government of Iraq to the reactionary bourgeois Khomeini regime in Iran. Today the crisis-ridden Healyite "International Committee" is merely a sinister paranoid centrist sect and a constant source of violent provocations against other organizations presenting themselves as Trotskyist. 3. The International Spartacist Tendency (IST) The International Spartacist Tendency (IST) is no more than an international appendage of the Spartacist League/US (SL), headed by James Robertson. In its first years of existence (1963-1968), the Spartacist League/US put forward generally correct positions, despite certain serious contradictions and mistakes. For example, during its intervention at the Third Conference of the International Committee in 1966, the Spartacist League made a series of correct criticisms of the positions of the International Committee. However, from about 1968 forward, the Spartacist League went through a gradual and increasingly serious process of political degeneration. In the late 1960's, it began to elaborate sectarian attitudes in relation to work in the trade unions. By the early 1970's, the SL had crystallized utterly wrong, non-Leninist positions on the national question, denying the progressive character of the struggles of oppressed nations against imperialism. These positions came to involve both extreme sectarianism toward anti-imperialist struggles and extreme opportunism, including adaptation to bourgeois "public opinion" in the imperialist countries, reactionary positions regarding immigration, and adaptation to support for Zionism. Over the course of the 1970's, such adaptations to American imperialism took the form of an intense pride in the SL's own "Americanism" and its conversion into an essentially national- Trotskyist sect. Increasingly the SL and its International Spartacist Tendency (founded in 1974) adopted a sectarian, ultimatist attitude toward reformist-led mass movements. Its strategy and tactics consisted overwhelmingly of sheer parasitism toward other left organizations. From the late 1970's on, the degeneration of the SL and IST deepened very significantly. The IST adopted positions of open support for Stalinist bureaucracies during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 and the suppression of the Polish working class in December 1981, while elaborating a global political theory implying "critical support" to the bureaucracy of the Soviet Union. In this same period, the Spartacists have also exchanged the methods of scientific communism for methods resembling those of pre-Marxist petty-bourgeois socialism in a series of simply bizarre positions, such as the rejection of the demand for nationalization under workers' control of factories threatened with closure, in favor of the demand for a "workers' auction" of plants being closed. Throughout this process of political degeneration, the SL and IST have also experienced profound organizational degeneration. In practice, Leninist norms have virtually been eliminated, both in the increasingly and pervasively corrupt Robertson regime and in the Spartacists' relations with other left-wing organizations, which have taken a qualitative leap into a consistent pattern of political gangsterism involving slander, provocations, and acts of violence. 4. The International Revolutionary Marxist Faction (Pablo) The International Revolutionary Marxist Faction, led by Michel Pablo, has very clearly put forward a politics of support for nationalist forces—not only for radical petty-bourgeois nationalism but also for "left-wing" bourgeois Bonapartist nationalism in the form of open and practical support to the experience of the "progressive" Peruvian military from 1970 to 1978. This trend also holds a number of non-Marxist positions characteristic of the moderate petty-bourgeois European New Left, such as the program of "self-management" ("autogestion"). 5. The Minority in the USFI Led by the American SWP Within the United Secretariat, the minority tendency led by the American Socialist Workers Party (SWP), headed by Jack Barnes, has been decisively transformed into a sect. It has broken all meaningful links to the Trotskyist program. Over the last several years the SWP has identified itself with Castroite Stalinism, which it regards as "the new international revolutionary leadership" along with the Sandinista FSLN. On this basis this trend has in practice dropped the program of political revolution in the Stalinist countries—by, for example, adopting highly equivocal positions on the Polish revolution. And it has openly rejected the perspective of permanent revolution, even in its Pabloite version. The most flagrant expression of the politics of the Barnes minority in the USFI has been the counterrevolutionary support to Khomeinism offered by the HYE (Revolutionary Workers Party), the SWP's Iranian supporters. In their intervention in the workers' movement, this trend displays crass opportunism compounded with abstract sectarian propagandism of an essentially Castroite brand. The Barnes trend is of no practical interest to consistent Trotskyists, except insofar as it is a polluting factor in the USFI, far worse than Mandel's centrist majority.
c. The "Trotskyist-Centrists" The great majority of the organizations which present themselves as Trotskyist have gone through a process of political degeneration which has led to their being centrist in their overall political character, but without having broken their fundamental links to the Trotskyist program. The consistently revolutionary, consistently Trotskyist forces, taken together with these "Trotskyist-centrist" organizations, form an international movement within which our organization today constitutes an organized, consistently revolutionary, consistently Trotskyist tendency. While there are many different national groupings with a wide variety of political positions with an overall "Trotskyist-centrist" character, including a few with a handful or so of co-thinkers in one or more other countries, there are six main international trends which contain the overwhelming majority of the "Trotskyist-centrist' forces in the world. 1. The USFI Majority (Mandelite) The United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFI) is the major "Trotskyist-centrist" organization in the world. More precisely, in the period since the supposed dissolution in 1977 of the Mandelite International Majority Tendency and the Lenin-Trotsky Faction led by the American SWP, two similarly aligned tendencies have reemerged, but much more sharply counterposed to each other than before. In reality, these two tendencies have functioned as two quite independent international organizations, pursuing their counterposed public policies while coexisting only formally within the fictitious unity of the United Secretariat. The majority tendency, whose chief spokesperson is Ernest Mandel and which is based on the major sections of the USFI in Europe and Latin America, remains the classic and most important international "Trotskyist-centrist" trend. The minority tendency headed by the American SWP has, as already described, broken its fundamental links to the Trotskyist program and now, quite correctly, refuses even to refer to itself as Trotskyist. This minority is clearly on the verge of ending its remaining formal ties with the USFI. The current USFI majority remains the major political heir of liquidationist Pabloism. It denies the necessity of building independent Trotskyist parties all over the world as indispensable instruments for the victory of socialist revolution. In the advanced capitalist countries the politics of the USFI majority features adaptation to the Stalinist and social-democratic leaderships of the mass organizations of the working class. Generally the USFI majority leadership sees its relationship to the class struggle as necessarily mediated through the leadership apparatuses of the established mass parties or trade unions or through particular sections of those apparatuses. This attitude is shown in the USFI majority's myth of "proletarian unity," meaning the unity of the established organizations; its initial failure clearly to oppose the Mitterrand government of France in 1981; and its adaptation to various reformist trade union "lefts" in many countries. Both in the relatively advanced and the oppressed capitalist countries, the USFI majority tends to seek "unity" with various centrist forces (although in different forms now than in 1968-1977). In particular, USFI majority organizations have formed electoral propaganda blocs with centrist forces in Portugal, Spain, Belgium, Italy, and other countries. This revisionist policy is, sometimes expressed in more general forms, reflecting the USFI's conception of "proletarian unity," by either establishing (as in Peru) or proposing (as in Mexico) electoral blocs with the established mass petty-bourgeois organizations and the organizations of the labor movement as a whole. In the oppressed countries, the USFI adapts to the ideology and politics of the radical petty-bourgeois nationalist movements, as expressed, for example, in its positions on the Salvadoran revolution or, worse, its uncritical support to the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, which it imagines to be a workers' and peasants' government. The USFI majority has also adapted deeply to Castroism and its counterrevolutionary world politics. In the degenerated and deformed workers' states, the USFI majority capitulates to reformist oppositional forces. Similarly, the USFI majority adapts to the petty-bourgeois ideologies prevailing in the women's, student, antiwar, and other mass movements not of a clearly proletarian character. Since the late 1970's, having abandoned its previous line of supporting "gauchisme" (petty-bourgeois leftism), the USFI majority has tended more and more to soft-pedal the position that the armed insurrection of the proletariat is essential in order to smash the bourgeois state. At the same time, under the pressure of Eurocommunism, the USFI majority has adopted democraticist notions with regard to the proletarian dictatorship—notions which must coexist in contradiction with its adaptation to Castroite Stalinism. Taken as a whole, the revisionist positions of the USFI majority can be traced to the objectivist conception of the revolutionary process which Pabloism developed at the point of its origin. This conception implies underestimating the critical role of the conscious, subjective factor: the Trotskyist party, and program and the necessity of a conscious, organized, and determined struggle to develop mass revolutionary socialist consciousness. This objectivism necessarily requires the misrepresentation of the entire active Trotskyist perspective of permanent revolution as some sort of objective and more or less automatic process. 2. The International Workers League (IWL; Morenist) The International Workers League (IWL or, by its initials in Spanish, LIT) exists primarily in Latin America and Spain. Its main leading figure is Nahuel Moreno, and its leading section is the PST of Argentina, which Moreno heads. The Morenist trend has been characterized by wide variations and contradictions in its political positions, both over the course of its history and in different countries at the same time. An amazingly broad range of perspectives has been put forward by the IWL and its forerunners, from extreme adaptation to trade union bureaucrats to anti-union attitudes; from open support to popular-frontist policies to rejection of any united-front tactics with reformist and petty-bourgeois nationalist organizations; from embellishment of Stalinist regimes to forms of Stalinophobia. What underlies these abrupt zigzags is a pronounced opportunist versatility—that is, the "ideology" of "Morenism," which is a chameleonic current incapable of carrying out the process of building revolutionary parties on sound Marxist foundations. The Argentine PST itself has a consistent record of right-centrist politics, including, despite some left turns and vacillations, deep adaptation to trade union bureaucrats, capitulation to bourgeois nationalism, popular frontism, and the constant misrepresentation of the revolutionary nature of its program. 3. The International Center of Reconstruction (ICR; Lambertist) The International Center of Reconstruction (ICR) is the international extension of the French Parti Communiste Internationaliste (PCI; formerly [1963-1981] the Organisation Communiste Internationaliste [OCI]). The principal leader of the ICR and PCI is Pierre Lambert. In practice, all the sections of the ICR are subordinated to the PCI, which is deeply national-Trotskyist. The paramount features of the ICR's politics are capitulation to social democracy around the world, political adaptation to the trade union level of consciousness of the working class, transformation of the policy of employing the tactics of the proletarian united front (and the anti- imperialist united front in Latin America) into a perpetual strategy, Stalinophobia, and political and economic crisis-mongering (the theory of "imminent revolution"). The ICR obviously lacks any real internal democracy, especially in the French PCI. Its leadership has become notorious because of its slander campaigns and gangster attacks against political opponents, in particular on the occasions of the major international splits suffered by its organizational predecessors, the Organizing Committee for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International (OCRFI [1972-19801) and the short-lived bloc with the Morenist trend expressed in the Parity Committee (formed in October 1979) and the Fourth International (International Committee) (FIIC [December 1980-December 1981])—that is, the splits leading to the creation of the Vargaite organization in 1972-1973 and the Fourth Internationalist Tendency in 1979 and, in 1981, the breakdown of the bloc with the Morenists. 4. The Fourth Internationalist Tendency (FIT) The Fourth Internationalist Tendency (FIT) has substantial forces only in Latin America, with handfuls of supporters in Europe and the Middle East. Its major sections are Politica Obrera (Workers Politics; PO) in Argentina and the Partido Obrero Revolucionario (Revolutionary Workers Party; POR) in Bolivia. The FIT stands clearly on the left among the "Trotskyist-centrist" forces, but it holds revisionist positions on a number of fundamental questions, which have checked its leftward movement since its break from the Lambertist trend in 1979. In reality, the FIT is hardly an international organization at all. It lacks any real organizational internationalism. Although it claims to be democratic-centralist, the FIT is based not on international democratic centralism but on a federal bloc of the PO and the POR. The other sections and any international leading bodies have no practical significance. In practice, at least for the time being, the FIT is merely the international projection of the PO, on account of the extreme national-Trotskyism of the Bolivian POR and its principal leader, Guillermo Lora, and the PO's adaptation to Lora's national-Trotskyism. The political line put forward by the POR in its major interventions in the Bolivian class struggle, in particular at such crucial points as the Bolivian Revolution of 1952 and the events of 1970-1971 focusing on the experience of the Popular Assembly, has had, overall, a left-centrist rather than a Bolshevik character. The centrist tendencies of the POR have been revealed in these situations of mass upsurge and sharp class struggle by the tactical use of the demand for "a majority of workers' ministers" in left-wing bourgeois governments and by the POR's tendency to maneuver with Stalinist or petty-bourgeois nationalist leaderships rather than counterposing itself to such forces in the class struggle in a clear, revolutionary manner. Both the POR and the PO misrepresent the anti-imperialist united front, viewing this policy in a strategic manner, especially in periods of mass upsurge. Even worse, both the POR and the PO extend the policy of the anti-imperialist united front to include bourgeois nationalist forces, although each offers a somewhat different theoretical rationale. The FIT holds an ultra-sectarian position on the reconstruction of the Fourth International. It characterizes as "counterrevolutionary" most of the forces which present themselves as Trotskyist-specifically, the USFI. Although the split of the forces which formed the FIT in 1979 from the Lambertist trend (then the OCRFI, now the ICR) expressed the more progressive character of the FIT's forces in relation to the Lambertists and led to definite leftward development of these forces, the FIT has failed to draw a genuine balance sheet of its experience with Lambertism. In particular, the FIT has failed to provide a frank assessment of its current forces' support when in the OCRFI for even the most reactionary Lambertist positions—for example, hailing the "democratic" counterrevolution led by the Socialist Party in Portugal in 1975. The failure to draw this balance sheet flows from the fact that the FIT has yet to break its theoretical ties to the centrist revisionism of the main forces which have degenerated from the "anti-Pabloite" International Committee. 5. Lutte Ouvriere (LO) The French group, Lutte Ouvriere (Workers Struggle; LO), has allied organizations in the USA, the French Antilles, and among African emigres in France. The LO originated from a group formed in France during World War II on sectarian positions (the Groupe Communiste Lutte de Classes; after World War II, the Union Communiste). The main feature of the LO's politics is economist workerism, expressed in the virtual reduction of intervention in the class struggle with transitional demands to the demand for the sliding scale of hours and wages, combined with abstract, popularized propaganda for socialism. LO has a myth of building "a genuine workers' party," on the basis of which it has adopted non-Leninist methods of intervention and internal organizational structures and functioning. As a result, even though LO has been receiving relatively large votes—about half a million—in French elections since 1973, on the basis of populist propaganda, it has been unable to make use of these electoral gains for purposes of revolutionary party-building. LO holds to a semi-state-capitalist theory of the degenerated and deformed workers' states, recognizing the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers' state but regarding the deformed workers' states as state-capitalist. 6. The Vargaite "Fourth International" The Vargaite "Fourth International," formerly the International League for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International (ILRFI), is a trend formed from a split from the OCRFI in 1972-1973. Its principal leading figure has historically been Michel Varga (now withdrawn from political activity). Its politics is characterized by distinctly adventurist positions based on blatant crisis-mongering and a particularly extreme form of "imminent revolution" theory. The Vargaites are also characterized by prominent Stalinophobia, virtually equating imperialism and Stalinism, which are seen as allies in a "counterrevolutionary holy alliance."
d. The Consistent Trotskyists Finally, there is a tiny number of organizations based theoretically and in practice on Trotskyist programmatic and strategic positions, as consistently developed in the light of the current international class struggle. This orthodox tendency is, in the first place, represented by our own international organization. There also exist other small groupings, by and large nationally isolated, which maintain a consistently Trotskyist strategy and practical activity. But they are constantly threatened by two main dangers: a national-Trotskyist perspective and sectarianism toward the rest of the forces, centrist and consistently revolutionary, which meaningfully refer themselves to some degree or another to the Trotskyist program. Their fate will depend on whether our own organization will be able to present itself as a site for regroupment and whether they will succeed in overcoming the sectarian tendency to proclaim themselves the sole genuine Trotskyists in the world.
13. The Fourth International has suffered a grave process of political degeneration and organizational fragmentation. As an organized revolutionary political force, as the body of the international proletarian leadership, as the world organization of genuine revolutionary Marxism—it has obviously ceased to exist. This fact poses the fight for the international proletarian leadership in an extremely elemental form as the primary task facing proletarian revolutionaries today. The first question of international strategy which we as consistent, orthodox Trotskyists must, then, take up is the question of how actually to proceed in this elemental fight for the international proletarian leadership. While politically degenerated and organizationally fragmented, the Fourth International has not died politically. Despite its acuteness, the historical crisis of the Fourth International still differs qualitatively from the historical crises of the Second and Third Internationals. In August 1914 the betrayal of proletarian internationalism by almost all the national social-democratic parties at the outbreak of World War I, signaled the conversion of social democracy into a counterrevolutionary agent of the imperialists within the workers' movement, whose primary political function was to prevent the revolutionary unity of the proletarians of all countries and the revolutionary seizure of power by the working class of any country. The social-democratic program of reforms, real and illusory, became primarily a means of inhibiting the militant development of the proletarian class struggle and tying the workers of each nation to "their own" bourgeoisie and the economic development of "their own" national capitalism. The essentially counterrevolutionary role of the social democracies was confirmed by their responses to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the revolutionary situations which developed throughout the world in the aftermath of World War I. In 1933 the most important section of the Third International outside the Soviet Union, the German Communist Party, thanks to the grotesque "third period" line of the Stalinist Comintern, proved utterly incapable of mounting a serious struggle against Hitler's seizure of power. Instead of openly drawing the lessons of this catastrophic failure, the entire Third International pretended no serious political errors had been committed, while moving, initially behind closed doors, from the bureaucratic ultimatism and adventurism of the late 1920's and early 1930's to the crassly opportunist policies of popular frontism in 1934-1936. Popular frontism and global class-collaborationism became the fundamental strategy of the Third International, to which the actual organization of the Third International itself was sacrificed in 1943. The incapacity of the German Communist Party or the Comintern to respond in any sort of communist fashion to the victory of Hitler led Trotsky in 1933 to turn from the strategy of fighting to regenerate the bureaucratic-centrist Third International to the strategy of fighting to build a Fourth International, seeing the Comintern as still bureaucratic-centrist but no longer capable of regeneration. And with the adoption by the Stalinist government and Comintern of policies openly endorsing the "right to national self-defense" of "democratic" imperialists, the Comintern became itself, by the time of its seventh world congress in 1935, a counterrevolutionary force, in practice social-patriotic and committed to preventing world proletarian revolution. In the aftermath of World War II, Stalinist parties betrayed the working classes throughout Europe and Asia, preventing or aborting revolutionary struggles. The bureaucratic extension of collectivized property in Eastern Europe and, eventually, East Asia and Cuba, did not alter the essential character of Stalinism as an international counterrevolutionary force. The Fourth International has not gone through such a decisive transformation. Its degeneration and fragmentation have led to the development of a set of organizations which, with few exceptions—essentially a few particularly corrupt sects and the Lanka Same Samaja Party (Sri Lanka)—cannot be regarded as consolidated opportunist, counterrevolutionary organizations within the workers' movement. These international and national organizations differ qualitatively from the essentially counterrevolutionary social-democratic and Stalinist formations. First, a number of small orthodox, consistently Trotskyist organizations exist. And a few groupings historically originating from Trotskyism, while not counterrevolutionary, have broken with the Trotskyist program, openly rejecting the Transitional Program or fundamental elements of it (for example, Shachtmanite and semi-pro-Stalinist groupings such as the American Marcy group). But the great majority of the forces which have degenerated from Trotskyism without becoming counterrevolutionary maintain politics which are generally revisionist and centrist—or, in a few instances, ultraleft-revisionist—without openly breaking with or actually liquidating the Trotskyist program. The Pabloites have distorted the Trotskyist program and adapted it to various nonrevolutionary petty-bourgeois and bureaucratic currents. They have subordinated or denied the role of Trotskyist parties as the necessary expression of the political independence of the working class, in favor of adaptation to these nonproletarian and nonrevolutionary forces. The organizations of the International Committee of 1963-1971 tended to combine national-Trotskyist adaptationism with extreme forms of national-Trotskyist sectarianism (Lambert most clearly characterized by capitulation to social democracy, Healy by collapse into crazy sectarianism). But, from both sides of the 1953 split, organizations and tendencies survive whose opportunist and sectarian revisions of Trotskyism have not yet produced a complete and decisive break with the programmatic bases of revolutionary proletarian politics. These organizations continue to relate themselves positively, in various ways, to the Transitional Program of 1938. Programmatically they still stand on the perspective of the proletarian dictatorship based on soviet democracy, still formally reject popular frontism, still declare their commitment to proletarian internationalism, and still—with some confusion and some significant exceptions—maintain the Trotskyist analysis of the Stalinist regimes and the necessity of defense of the collectivized property forms against imperialism—even while revising and distorting these principles and adapting to currents hostile to them. They are essentially centrist organizations, but centrist organizations of a special kind. In continuing to proclaim their adherence, even in a distorted fashion, to the revolutionary program of Trotskyism, these organizations continue to attract militants—in particular, advanced workers—breaking towards revolutionary politics from social democracy, Stalinism, and conventional forms of centrism. The actual and potential role of these "Trotskyist-centrist" organizations as apparently revolutionary-Marxist poles of attraction to advanced workers in the majority of the advanced capitalist, semicolonial, and Stalinist nations, creates a highly contradictory, complex, and historically unprecedented situation with fundamental implications for the strategic perspectives of orthodox Trotskyists fighting for the political regeneration and organizational reconstruction of the Fourth International. Not only do these organizations themselves vacillate between revolutionary and opportunist policies. In continuing to claim to base themselves on the Transitional Program, they retain the capacity to expose and, however inadvertently, train cadres in actual Trotskyist positions. Their constant vacillation between Trotskyist and revisionist policies tends to generate not only frequent splits but also frequent clashes of internal tendencies and factions, in which, over and again, some militants rise to the defense of at least some Trotskyist positions against revisionist pressures. All of this means that, even though, by and large, the leaderships of these organizations are hardened in their revisionist and adaptationist positions, these organizations, viewed as a whole on an international scale, tend to contain militants who are moving toward orthodox Trotskyist positions; to be subject to a constant process of limited struggles for Trotskyist positions; and to display a constant tendency to draw toward themselves advanced workers searching, in reality, for the revolutionary alternative of Trotskyism. The crisis of the Fourth International—in particular the failure of the anti-Pabloite forces to wage a correct and thoroughgoing international struggle—has led to a situation in which most of the orthodox Trotskyists in the world exist in small independent organizations. not inside the much larger "Trotskyist-centrist" organizations. But these two sets of organizations must be viewed together as historically and politically related focal points for the regeneration of the Fourth International. For the orthodox Trotskyists to turn their backs on the advanced workers being drawn toward Trotskyist positions by the "Trotskyist-centrist" organizations and the militants fighting for Trotskyist positions within them, would be an act of sectarianism of historically tragic proportions. Rather, the task of orthodox Trotskyists is to develop an international tendency oriented strategically toward reconstructing the Fourth International through linking up with, supporting, and organizing every struggle for Trotskyism, every genuinely Trotskyist development throughout the world, both within and outside the major "Trotskyist-centrist" organizations. In their own independent organizations, orthodox Trotskyists must develop exemplary work in the class struggle in ways which will make them genuine poles of attraction to advanced workers, both outside and within the "Trotskyist-centrist" groupings. Within the "Trotskyist-centrist" organizations, Trotskyist factions must fight for the political regeneration of these organizations, basing themselves in particular on struggles arising from the problems of revolutionary intervention in the ongoing proletarian class struggle. In the sense that within two sets of organizations, a few consistently revolutionary but many more centrist—both derived from the crisis of the Fourth International and both claiming to base themselves on the Transitional Program—a conscious struggle for the political regeneration of the Fourth International has taken place, is taking place, and must take place in the next period—in this sense, we must recognize and define the contours of a somewhat amorphous international movement in both parts of which we must fight to develop and reunify all the genuinely Trotskyist forces in the regenerated and reconstructed Fourth International. By this perspective we do not mean that orthodox Trotskyists in any way identify or confuse their program with the program of either Pabloite or anti-Pabloite revisionists. Nor do we mean that any form of centrism or revisionism, including Pabloism, can somehow in and of itself be treated as a genuine revolutionary-Marxist trend. Nor do we mean that these "Trotskyist-centrist" organizations derived from the crisis of the Fourth International should be the sole arena of the struggle to regenerate the Fourth International. Decisions on whether to work as independent organizations, within the "Trotskyist-centrist" organizations, or within other centrist or even Stalinist or social-democratic groupings, must be made concretely, country by country, situation by situation, always on the basis of how best to wage an intransigent struggle, over time, to win the advanced workers to the full revolutionary program of Trotskyism. An international Trotskyist faction could, then, decide to enter as a whole into one international "Trotskyist-revisionist" organization, to work primarily within a number of such organizations, to function primarily as a group of independent organizations, and so on—all depending on the concrete conditions best favoring the struggle to regenerate the Fourth International. What the recognition of the special character of these centrist groupings does mean is that orthodox Trotskyists must maintain a strategic orientation toward them. Further, their special character has a number of specific practical implications. Within the "Trotskyist-centrist" organizations, we must promote the formation of orthodox Trotskyist factions, united on an international basis with each other—independently of the various international or national organizations in which they may respectively be intervening—and with the independent orthodox Trotskyist organizations, both components together forming an international Trotskyist faction, organized on a democratic-centralist basis both internationally and in its national sections. The Trotskyist factions working within the "Trotskyist-centrist" organizations should, as a general rule, have neither an orientation committed in advance to short-run entries aimed at quickly splitting these organizations nor an orientation never under any circumstances to split these organizations. Rather, the main tactical orientation of such Trotskyist factions should be to fight in a disciplined way for their political ideas within the rules of these organizations and to make the centrist leaders clearly responsible for any administrative measures, such as expulsions. All the components of the international Trotskyist faction—the sections functioning as independent organizations, the sections working within "Trotskyist-revisionist" organizations, as well as any sections doing work in other types of organizations—must put forward positions and engage in practical activity completely consistent with the Trotskyist program, respectively within the workers' movement as a whole, within the "Trotskyist-revisionist" organizations, and within any other organizations in which they are doing entry work. In this regard, the publication by the international Trotskyist faction of an international theoretical bulletin which is aimed particularly at the defense of revolutionary Trotskyism against all distortions and revisions, is an especially urgent task. Such tactical considerations do not imply that there is a clearly established, guaranteed course of action which necessarily leads to the revolutionary regeneration and reorganization of the Fourth International. Nor do such considerations imply that it is inevitable or even probable that we will actually succeed in regenerating any one or more of the extant "Trotskyist-revisionist" formations. However, only the flexible, dialectical strategy of such a struggle for political regeneration, combining independent work in the proletarian class struggle with factional intervention within the "Trotskyist-revisionist" organizations, will allow us to complete the actual complex process, however it may develop concretely, which—through splits, fusions, partial regenerations, and growth of independent work—will enable the international Trotskyist faction to win the political majority of the militants orienting to Trotskyism throughout the world and be transformed into the regenerated Fourth International. Of course a whole series of practical alternatives for the development of the activity of orthodox Trotskyists will present themselves. Trotskyists must be prepared to adjust their tactics to the concrete development of the struggle to regenerate the Fourth International and the concrete development of the international struggle of the working class—on the sole condition that they maintain the absolute political independence of the international orthodox Trotskyist faction.
14. The basic objective of the International Trotskyist Committee (ITC) is to unite all the consistent, orthodox Trotskyists, in the world in a determined struggle for the political regeneration and organizational reconstruction of the Fourth International. Functioning on the basis of international democratic centralism, the International Trotskyist Committee seeks to provide international political leadership and organizational and tactical coordination for the wide variety of struggles for Trotskyism developing, in many arenas, throughout the world. Where its sections function as publicly independent organizations, the International Trotskyist Committee builds work in the proletarian class struggle aimed at winning the advanced workers to the Trotskyist program, while also directing its message to militants in the "Trotskyist-revisionist" and other organizations in which the vanguard leadership of the working class may also be in process of formation. Within the "Trotskyist-revisionist" organizations, it wages a fight for the full program of revolutionary Marxism in a Bolshevik manner, building these organizations while fighting to regenerate them politically through relentless exposure of all forms of revisionism and through a struggle to win the political majority of their militants for consistent Trotskyism and, on this basis, form a new, consistently Trotskyist leadership. In any other organizations, the ITC seeks to win advanced workers moving toward revolutionary positions to the revolutionary program of Trotskyism, fighting intransigently for a break with reformist and centrist politics. Recognizing the fundamental, qualitative programmatic leap which must be made for any social-democratic, Stalinist, non-Trotskyist centrist, or petty-bourgeois nationalist organization either to be won as a whole to Trotskyism or be the site of a long-range struggle for Trotskyism, the forces of the ITC intervening in such an organization can normally expect to remain only for the relatively limited period of time in which a given struggle for this programmatic leap can be waged effectively. The tactics of the International Trotskyist Committee must be extremely flexible and fully dialectical, taking into account the concrete character of the struggle for the Fourth International in every country and uniting all the various struggles into a single, complex process of political development and regroupment. The ITC must recognize that its tasks are extremely difficult and will subject it constantly to intense opportunist and sectarian pressures—some taking quite unprecedented forms—both of which it must learn to identify and struggle against with utter consistency and clarity. It must never turn aside either from the revolutionary program itself or from the militants in any arena who are fighting for it or being drawn toward it. Whether its work takes the form of publicly independent organizations or activity within other organizations, the minimal conditions for the principled struggle of the International Trotskyist Committee will be the maintenance of its own political and organizational independence as a tendency, its international democratic-centralist functioning, and its absolute honesty, in small things as in large and, above all, in the defense and concrete development of the Trotskyist program. The specific orientation of the ITC must always be determined by concrete developments in the ongoing evolution of the forces most pertinent to the struggle for the Fourth International. Its overall and strategic orientation, however, is always toward the working class and, in particular, toward the most politically advanced workers and toward the most militant layers of the working class. The ITC must also orient strategically toward the most oppressed and exploited layers among the nonproletarian masses, especially in the economically backward countries. It must fight to unite within itself consistently revolutionary leaderships and cadres from the imperialist, semicolonial, and Stalinist countries, as a necessary initial step in the reconstruction of the Fourth International as the genuinely international leadership of the working class. The ITC's necessary orientation toward the "Trotskyist-revisionist" and other political organizations of the workers' movement must be linked with and shaped by its overall orientation toward the most politically advanced representatives of the workers and oppressed of the world, both in terms of the regroupment on a Bolshevik basis of Trotskyist cadres and through the development of work for the Trotskyist program in the ongoing struggles of the workers and oppressed. However limited our initial resources and however difficult the initial challenges we face, only a struggle actually developed along these lines can win the first decisive battles for the resolution of the historic crisis of proletarian leadership: the actual political regeneration and organizational reconstruction of the Fourth International. To this struggle the International Trotskyist Committee dedicates itself. ·
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