Reply to Chris Edwards

Luis Oviedo

Autumn 1997

Comrade Chris Edwards argues that the Unified Secretariat (USFI) was not lost for the revolution: the adjective "centrist" is equal, therefore, to recoverable. He maintains that the founding declaration of the Fourth International Tendency (1979) was mistaken in giving as an example of the abandonment of the revolutionary program and of the shift towards the counter-revolution, the support of the USFI to Castroite foquism. He gives a position of Trotsky as example (1932) in the face of the Chinese peasant guerrillas led by the Chinese Communist Party, which only contained "tendentially" a confrontation with the proletarian vanguard (the same had happened to the Latin Americans guerrillas, supported by the USFI). He affirms that Trotsky had characterised Stalinism as "centrist" up to 1935 (Laval-Stalin pact) and only starting from there as "counter-revolutionary." He compares the Cuban revolution with the annexation of Eastern Poland and the Baltic countries by the USSR, as part of the Hitler-Stalin pact. He says that the USFI had limited itself to uncritically supporting the expropriation of capital carried out by bureaucratic methods (for this reason it was "centrist"). And he invites us to incorporate ourselves into the USFI. The errors of the text of Chris Edwards are political, historical and even logical. The worst, however, is that of method. We will see. Trotsky defined the Stalinist Communist International (CI) as "passing definitively to the bourgeois order" starting from 1933, when it capitulated without a struggle in the face of the ascent of Nazism, which imposed a great historical defeat on the proletariat of the world. He called, for this reason, to found the Fourth International. Trotsky understood that the politics of the Stalinist fraction were already counter-revolutionary well before this: it is to enough to read his criticism of the politics followed in the Chinese revolution or Anglo-Russian Committee (in The Great Organiser of Defeats), or the politics followed in Germany before 1933. What is proved in 1933 is that the Comintern, which had the support of hundreds of thousands of workers of all over the world, was completely destroyed as an organisation, by its null reaction in front of the Nazi victory. Trotsky did not have doubts on the politics of the Stalinist bureaucracy, but on the capacity of the Comintern to react to it. According to the logic of Chris (if an organisation is centrist and has "size" we should remain in it, Stalinism was centrist up to 1935), Trotsky should have continued in the Comintern, at least, up to 1935 (support for the rearmament of French imperialism). In fact, with this logic, he should even have continued much longer.

Chris confuses "bureaucratic centrism"--political oscillations characteristic of this social type, with its character intermediate between imperialism and the social conquests of the working class--with the historical nature of the Stalinist bureaucracy: an agent of the bourgeoisie in the Workers States, and counterrevolutionary on a world scale. Trotsky did not stop giving examples of "bureaucratic centrism" in 1935. In 1940 (In Defence of the Marxism) he characterised the annexation of Poland (and even the potential annexation of Finland!) as defensive measures of the bureaucracy in the face of imperialist oppression. This did not affect the counter-revolutionary character of the bureaucracy at all and of the state which it directed. It is not a matter of making a talmudic exposition of the texts of Trotsky, but, to speak frankly, of using one's head: the same Chris gives the example from Poland and, after the war, of the expropriation of capital in eastern Europe, Yugoslavia and China by "counter-revolutionary" Stalinism (the--ironical--quotation marks are Chris's). It is a step from saying that Trotsky should not have founded the Fourth International because Stalinism was not counter-revolutionary.

Chris does not understand the difference between a counterrevolutionary bureaucracy and the enemy of the class. The bureaucracy was not "the" bourgeoisie, but an agent of the same in the workers state, which used the social conquests of the revolution for its own benefit, which informs its contradictory nature. In the same way, social democracy was not "imperialism", but its agent in the workers organisations, when it capitulated to world imperialism in the face of the war. Chris insists that, "after 1935" (?) "when Trotsky characterised Stalinism as counter-revolutionary, the contradictions inside Stalinism were still evident." But if the contradictions typify "centrism" Trotsky was mistaken in characterising Stalinism as counter- revolutionary! In fact, these contradictions are evident even to this very day, which means that the social contradictory nature of the bureaucracy is not identical to its counterrevolutionary nature: with the method of Chris, Trotsky should not have founded the Fourth International, neither should Lenin have founded the Third International. As for the peasant guerrillas of the CCP, Chris did not specify exactly from a text of Trotsky of 1932: in the very Transitional Programme, Trotsky condemns "the liquidation of Red China, subordinating, not only the` rural Red Army, but also the very CCP itself to the Kuomintang, that is to say, to the bourgeoisie." What happened with the Fourth International after World War II was something different. It did not come to structure itself as an international organisation, when it was destroyed by a political crisis, the main manifestation of which was "Pabloite revisionism" (the definition of the bureaucracy as the agent of the world socialist revolution). It did not come to have the stature of an International, although it maintained the validity of its program: for this reason we called for the "reconstruction the Fourth International," and not to found the Fifth International (as Lenin called for the founding the Third International or Trotsky called for founding of the Fourth).

Chris says that the "USFI abandoned the program of the revolution occasionally.". He gives as an example its support for Castroism for Sandinoism, for the leadership of the Brazilian PT. We say that, in the measure that the USFI exists from 1963, and we can hardly finish with the examples of Chris (it would be necessary to add others, especially in Europe), these cover the whole history of the USFI, and not some "occasions." For Chris, the USFI "did not adopt the program of the class enemy"; very well, neither did the bureaucracy (the program of imperialism was the world victory of capital, that of the bureaucracy, "peaceful coexistence" of the workers states with world capitalism). Just as Trotsky did not wait for Yeltsin to declare "the death of the socialism" in order to proclaim the Fourth International (had he have lived more than 110 years), we are not waiting for the USFI to proclaim the world validity of capital (which would be irrelevant from the point of view of the world class struggle)--although at the moment it almost amounts to that, as we prove in diverse documents--in order to fight for the reconstruction of the international. For Chris, the problems of the present Fourth International had been ideological. Shactman, in 1938-40, had been "one-sidedly" antibureaucratic, and Pablo, in the decade of the 50s, "one-sidedly" pro-bureaucratic. Both are examples of "formal logic," and by this road we arrive at the senile conclusion of Healy: the solution for the Fourth International is to carry out courses on dialectics. Logically, Trotsky defended materialistic dialectics against the formalism of Shactman-Burnham, but he did not describe his opposition as "formal-logical," but as petit-bourgeois, and he called, against them, for the SWP to be built as a workers party. The problem with Pablo, in the post-war period, was not that of having been an opposition, but of being the leadership of what remained of the Fourth International Unlike Trotsky, who saw the ideological struggles framed in the struggle of classes, for Chris the "deviations" of the International Secretariat, and afterwards the United Secretariat, occurred in the limbo of the confrontation between "formalists" and "dialecticians," or between "formalists" of a contrary type. The problem is that Chris is also a great formalist, in fact a Pabloist. How to interpret, if this is not the case, his statement that Guevarism is an example "of the contradictions of post-war Stalinism." Or that the July 26th Movement was "petite-bourgeois nationalism influenced by Stalinism" (which only supported it when they had already entered Havana--Guevara was boycotted by Bolivian Stalinism before his death and with which they had conflicts later). Dear Chris: happily, in the post-war period (and in the pre-war period also) something more than imperialism and Stalinism exists, the revolution exists (for this reason Trotsky found the Fourth International!).

Chris should take distance from the Guardian, representative of imperialist "formal logic", and ask himself: 1) if it would not be necessary to verify the truthfulness of the news expounded there that Guevara had sought an agreement with imperialism at Punta del Este; 2) if he did, in what conditions did he do it, and if it was not a case of a manoeuvre in order to win time in the face of imperialist pressure against the Cuban revolution. Anyway, to compare this with the secret clauses of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, is a grotesque "formalism". It was the Cuban revolution, and not Stalinism, which propitiated a wide movement of radicalisation of young workers in Latin America in 1960-70. Since we are talking about formal logic, we say for the information of Chris (and of European Trotskyism in general) that the participation of the USFI in that movement was platonic (in the double sense: asexual and "ideal"). It was N Moreno, future "proletarian opponent" of the "guerrilla deviation," which threw up the watchword of "create the military arm of OLAS" (and who speculated openly about the substitution of the proletariat by the petite-bourgeoisie, and of Trotskyism by Mao-Guevarism. When Mario Santucho, came from the FRIP (Indoamerican Popular Revolutionary Front), wanting honestly to put this into practice, Moreno left, beginning the trajectory which would lead to a "centrist party of the legal left" (under the dictatorship). Santucho and the PRT-ERP, as is well known, went away quickly from the USFI, sticking without obstacles to Castroism, and characterising the USFI as "counter-revolutionary" (1972).

In Chile, the participation was nil: the USFI was rapidly expelled from the MIR. In Bolivia, it did not attack a gas station. These were all the "guerrillas" of the USFI (the guerrillas of Hugo Blanco was a case apart, because it was a movement of peasant self-defence in the valley of La Concepcion, when Hugo Blanco was in the framework of SLATO of the International Committee of the Fourth International, that is to say, not in the USFI, and he did not carry out a project when he assumed an openly foquist outlook). The "opposition" to the guerrilla course in the USFI, the Leninist Trotskyist Tendency/Faction (LTT/F), presented by Chris as a reaction "from the left," which proved the vitality of the USFI, was in fact from the right, because the support was based on the "centrism of the legal left" of Moreno (which took the successive forms of the PST and the BUT) and the "process of bourgeois-imperialist institutionalisation" openly supported by the PST. The only minimally redeeming aspect of this process, was exactly, the accusation which the International Majority Tendency (IMT) made of the participation of the PST in the framework of the "block of the 8" (carried out long before by PO) and in "defence of the institutionalisation" of the government of the Triple A (Isabel Perón), when the Morenists reached the extreme of defending the imprisonment of their former comrades of the PRT (!). It is an absurdity to say that the USFI abandoned guerrillaism by reason of the "struggle" of the LTF: it was made because the same Castro went over to agreement with bourgeois governments in Latin America (Allende, Perón, Velazco Alvarado). After this "adventure", conveniently distanced, the USFI went over to support for "Eurocommunism" and "socialist democracy," neither of which Chris mentions. The dictatorship of the proletariat ("cornerstone of the program", according to Marx) was explicitly and formally abandoned: the USFI conserves a formal reference to the Fourth International clarifying that it is not the "world party of the socialist revolution", but has become a variant of the left petite-bourgeoisie, in search of a place under the sun, in the face of the Stalinist and social democratic decomposition, and itself similarly in decomposition.

In terms of programmatic revisionism, the USFI is much more revisionist than was the Comintern in 1933 (its current positions, more than revisionist, are pro-bourgeois, with the disadvantage that the Comintern was a reference for the masses, which the USFI is very far from being. The document of Chris has an enormous merit: expounding openly, without leaving intermediates, the alternatives facing the ITO: "eternal entrism" in an "international" petite-bourgeois sect or the struggle for revolutionary parties and for an independent Trotskyist tendency which fights for the reconstruction of the international.