Characterising the USFI Today

A Response to the

Declaration of the Fourth Internationalist Tendency (1979)

Chris Edwards

l8th October 1996

Note: the Fourth internationalist Tendency (FIT) is the former name of the international tendency

established by the POR of Bolivia (Lora) and the PO (Altamira) of Argentina in 1979

--not to be confused with the former US organisation of the same name.

This document will attempt to respond to a key issue in the Declaration of the Fourth Internationalist Tendency (1979), This is the question of the characterization of the USFI, an issue which is important in deciding how to respond to the crisis of the Fourth International.

The Declaration correctly criticises the USFI for its adaptation to Guevarist foquismo and its petit-bourgeois democratism in relation to the anti-imperialist struggle in Latin American and elsewhere in the Third World. It correctly criticises the USFI again for the inadequacy of its “self-criticism" on the question of foquismo at the l0th World Congress.

To this might be added the examples of the USFI's uncritical support to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and Lula in Brazil which have occurred since the Declaration was written in 1979. There is no shortage of examples of this kind of lack of political independence which, in my opinion is the hallmark of centrism. In this sense, it is necessary to disagree with the part of the declaration which characterises the USFI, on the basis of the guerrilla “turn”, as counter-revolutionary. The Declaration puts it this way:

"'Nobody is unaware that foquism and individual terrorism are totally foreign to Trotskyism. It is not a case of a secondary and temporary error, because it amounts to the abandonment of the Marxist conception of the revolution of our epoch and of the leading role which the proletariat must play in it. In other words the USec abandoned the Trotskyist programme in its entirety for foquism and adventurism. There are errors and errors. Some of them refer to tactical aspects and even secondary programmatic points. This type of deviation can be easily overcome by the route of self-criticism. But when it is a matter of abandoning programmatic principles, it means that an organisation has moved from the revolutionary camp to that of the counter-revolution. The organisation that takes such an enormous jump is lost for the revolutionary

process".(1)

The problem with this formulation, in my opinion, is that it is too wooden and formalistic. It fails to capture the living reality of the contradictions of post-war Stalinism, of which Guevarism is but one example, and therefore fails to correctly estimate the extent of the errors of the Mandelites. To say that the USec has abandoned, on occasions, the programme of the proletarian revolution is one thing. On that we can agree. To say, however, that it has embraced the programme of the class enemy is something else. This is not the case in my opinion. It has certainly lacked political independence from other non-proletarian leaderships and acted as left-cover for petit-bourgeois nationalism in Nicaragua. It has also acted as Lula's lieutenants in the PT of Brazil.

It has adopted, for a time, the petit-bourgeois adventurist programme of the Guevarists. However, the only time when a section of the USFI actually crossed class lines was in Sri Lanka in 1964 when it joined a bourgeois government. However, the rest of the USFI expelled this section from its ranks. If it had not done so, the FIT would have been justified in saying that the USFI had joined the ranks of counter-revolutionary reformists. But that was not the case.

Disorientation

To appreciate why the phenomenon of Guevarism created so much disorientation in the Trotskyist movement, we have to see it in the context of the contradictions of Stalinism as they have evolved since the degeneration of the Russian Revolution. Trotsky first characterised Stalinism as "bureaucratic-centrist" from the time of the mid-twenties and stuck with this analysis right up to the point where it supported the rearmament of French imperialism in 1935. At this point he changed his characterisation to one of "counter-revolutionary". This was despite the fact that the misdeeds of Stalinism in that period were very grave. The Stalinists gave left-cover to the trade union bureaucracy which betrayed the British General Strike. The lack of political independence of the Stalinists in China, in relation to the bourgeois nationalist Kuomintang, led to the massacre of Communists by this party. In Russia the Stalinists arrested Trotsky and exiled him. The criminal ultra-leftism of the Stalinists in Germany led to the defeat of the largest Communist Party in the world at the hands of Hitler. Even as Trotsky drew the conclusion that the Third International was "dead for the purposes of revolution" shortly after this, he still stuck to his characterisation of "bureaucratic centrism" for a further two years until 1935.

Spanish Civil War

Although the Stalinists' support for French rearmament and, a year later, the repressive actions of the Stalinists in the Spanish Civil War, was the point at which Trotsky characterised Stalinism as counter-revolutionary, the contradictions within Stalinism were still evident. Two years later, In 1939, the "counter-revolutionary" Stalinists overturned capitalism in Eastern Poland after they annexed it as part of the Hitler-Stalin pact. This was evidence, according to Trotsky, that the Russian Revolution "had not been completely assassinated" by Stalin.(2) The Trotskyist movement was thrown into chaos by these events. The Shactmanites, with their formalistic methodology, could not accept Trotsky's analysis and took off with a significant proportion of the membership of the SWP/US and several other sections of the Fourth International as well.

Much the same process took place after the war when "counter-revolutionary" Stalinism overthrew capitalism in Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia and China, the largest nation on Earth. The fact that the Stalinists actually led a civil war against the Nazis and monarchist chetniks in Yugoslavia, and the Japanese imperialists and bourgeois nationalist forces in China, led to another one-sided reaction by the Trotskyists and created further turmoil in the ranks of the Fourth International. The pre-war Shactmanites had seized on one aspect of the contradictory nature of Stalinism--its reactionary military-bureaucratic methods and declared formalistically, and one-sidedly, that there was nothing left to defend in Russia. The post-war Pabloites, likewise seized on another, one-sided, aspect of the contradictory whole--the fact that the Stalinists had led the partisan struggle against the Nazis during the war and the civil wars in Yugoslavia and China immediately afterwards. They declared formalistically that the Stalinists were no longer counter-revolutionary, but centrist.

Neither of these viewpoints coincided with Trotsky's dialectical analysis which recognised that Stalinism could be both counter-revolutionary in nature and yet still overturn capitalist property in particular parts of the world. It remained counter-revolutionary because, while it overturned capitalist property in a part of the world for its own narrow reasons of bureaucratic self-preservation, it did so at the expense of sacrificing the prospects for completing the process of permanent revolution. It sacrificed revolution on a world scale, which alone could have consolidated the gains of the Russian Revolution and enabled it to break out of the imperialist encirclement. (3)

The Cuban Revolution

The Cuban Revolution was carried out not by the Cuban Communist Party, but the July 26th Movement, which was a petit-bourgeois nationalist movement. This movement later embraced Stalinism as the hostile actions of US imperialism drove it into an alliance with the Soviet Union. Guevara, an Argentinean doctor, took part in the Cuban Revolution and later attempted to replicate it in the Congo and in Bolivia. However, a recent report in the London Guardian revealed that at a meeting with a representative of the US Kennedy Government in Uruguay, shortly after the Cuban Revolution in August 1961, Guevara had privately proposed a deal in which Cuba would "forgo an alliance with the Soviet bloc, pay for confiscated American properties in trade and curb Cuban support for leftwing insurgents in other countries" if the hostile actions of the US would cease. This offer was never taken up by Kennedy. (4)

The key point about Guevarism, however, is that, once again, the actions of Stalinists (or, to be more precise, petit-bourgeois nationalists who embraced the ideology of Stalinism) in the Cuban Revolution, the Congo, Bolivia, and later also in Angola and Mozambique, seemed to contradict the idea that Stalinism was counter-revolutionary. The Cuban Stalinists were at the sharp end of bitter civil wars against imperialism and its domestic stooges. And in the Cuban Revolution, capitalism was overturned and the Stalinists once again nationalised the means of production. This also created turmoil in the ranks of the Fourth International as both factions claiming its mantle, the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and International Secretariat of the Fourth International (ISFI), repeated the earlier formalistic errors of the Shactmanites and Pabloites. The Healy/Lambert-led ICFI repeated the errors of the Shactmanites with the absurd idea that Cuba was state capitalist, while the Pabloites simply continued being Pabloites and declared that Cuba was a healthy workers' state without the need of political revolution. This led to a realignment of the factions as the SWP/US and the Morenist current broke from the ICFI and joined the newly-formed United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFI).

However, the thing that interests us here is the nature of the error of the Mandelites. Why did the ICFI lose a large percentage of its membership to the USFI over the question of the Cuban Revolution? Why did Guevara become a heroic legend to left-leaning youth throughout the world? Why did a whole network of Guevarist organisations, like the Chilean Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR), spring up throughout Latin America in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution? Why did the US establish the Alliance for Progress which provided a lot of money to finance the aid programmes of its right wing Latin American political allies? All of these things happened because the Cuban Revolution did shake the grip of the imperialists in the region, its own "backyard", and it did lead to a certain radicalisation of Latin American youth. Guevara's attempts to extend the Cuban Revolution to the African and the Latin American continents were opposed by the USSR and the continental Latin American Communist Parties. Consequently, Guevara's campaign in Africa and Bolivia seemed to many on the left like a break from the Stalinist policy of "peaceful coexistence" with imperialism. The persistence of formal logic in the thinking of the left led many to conclude that Guevarism was a kind of centrist break from counter-revolutionary Stalinism. The Mandelite notion that Castro was an "unconscious Trotskyist" was a particularly absurd example of this kind of thinking. The adoption of the guerrilla strategy by the 1969 World Congress of the USFI developed from this kind of erroneous thinking. If the Mandelites reacted formalistically to Guevarism, then it has to be said that the FIT Declaration reacted formalistically in its assessment of the Guevarist adventures of the Mandelites. The counter-revolutionary nature of Stalinism, as we have already noted above, flows from its military-bureaucratic and manoeuvrist method. The fact that Stalin did a secret deal with Hitler to annexe, by military force, Eastern Poland and the Baltic states may have overturned capitalism in one small part of the world; but it did so at the price of undermining the possibilities of revolution everywhere else in the world. The secret diplomatic and military manoeuvres with Hitler introduced confusion and disarray into the ranks of the vanguard internationally, and lowered class consciousness in the masses as a whole. If there was a parallel to this in the Cuban revolution it was the secret attempt to do a deal with US imperialism by Guevara mentioned above. The interests of the masses, in continental Latin America and internationally, were a bargaining chip in the diplomatic game being played out between the imperialists and the Cuban Stalinists.

But what significance should be attached to the USFI's adoption of guerrilla warfare as a strategy and the Declaration's assertion that this means that the USFI became a counter-revolutionary current? This approach contrasts with Trotsky's approach to a not wholly dissimilar situation faced by the Chinese Trotskyists in the early 1930s. After the defeat of the 1927 Chinese Revolution, the Chinese Communist Party, which Trotsky then characterised as "bureaucratic centrist", abandoned the workers' districts of the cities and went into the countryside where it began to organise guerrilla armies among the peasantry. Trotsky argued the following to his comrades which I will quote at some length:

"Bureaucratic centrism, as centrism, cannot have an independent class support. But in its struggle against the Bolshevik-Leninists it is compelled to seek support from the right, i.e. from the peasantry and the petit-bourgeoisie. counterposing them to the proletariat. The struggle between the two Communist factions, the Stalinists and the Bolshevik-Leninists, thus bears in itself an inner tendency towards transformation into a class struggle. The revolutionary development of events in China may draw this tendency to a conclusion, i.e. to a civil war between the peasant army led by the Stalinists and the proletarian vanguard led by the Leninists. Were such a tragic conflict to arise, due entirely to the Chinese Stalinists, it would signify that the Left Opposition and the Stalinists ceased to be Communist factions and had become hostile political parties, each having a different class base.

However, is such a perspective inevitable? No, I don't think so at all. Within the Stalinist faction (the Official Communist Party) there are not only peasant, i.e. petit-bourgeois tendencies, but also proletarian tendencies. It is extremely important for the Left Opposition to seek to establish connections with the proletarian wing of the Stalinists by presenting to them the Marxist evaluation of "Red Armies" and the inter-relations between the proletariat and peasantry in general.

While maintaining its political independence, the proletarian vanguard must be ready always to assure united action with revolutionary democracy. While we refuse to identify the armed peasant detachments with the Red Army as the armed power of the proletariat and have no inclination to shut our eyes to the fact that the Communist banner hides the petit-bourgeois content of the peasant movement, we, on the other hand, take an absolutely clear view of the tremendous revolutionary democratic significance of the peasant war. We teach the workers to appreciate its significance and we are ready to do all in our power to achieve the necessary military alliance with the peasant organisations.

Consequently, our task consists not only in preventing the political-military command over the proletariat by the armed peasant, but in preparing and ensuring the proletarian leadership of the peasant movement, its `Red armies' in particular" (5)

Clearly, there are some obvious differences between the situation in China in the early l93Os and the situation in Latin America in the 1960s and 70s. The Chinese Communist Party was a much more significant force than the USFI in Latin America, Hugo Blanco notwithstanding. Guevarist foquismo was not the approach of the Chinese CP although the intention of Guevara was to eventually create a mass Communist-led movement among the peasantry similar to the one in China in the 1940s.

Although we would characterise the Communist Parties today as counter-revolutionary rather than bureaucratic-centrist, the question is: does the adoption of guerrillism as a strategy imply that the USFI became a counter-revolutionary force similar to the Stalinists as the Declaration maintains? I think Trotsky's italicised word "tendency" in the above quotation may help in deciding this question. He says that the struggle between the Stalinist-led peasant armies and the Trotskyist forces in the workers movement had an inner "tendency towards transformation into class struggle", but that it was not inevitable and the question had not been decided. Only at the point where a civil war developed between these two forces would it be appropriate to say that the Stalinists and Trotskyists were no longer Communist factions, but "hostile political parties with a different class base". It is clear from Trotsky’s approach that the adoption of a rural guerrilla strategy does not necessarily imply that a counter-revolutionary degeneration has been completed. As we have seen, the Chinese Communist Party carried out such a strategy in the period 1928-35 while Trotsky characterised it as "bureaucratic-centrist".

If we apply the same methodology to the USFI guerrilla turn, I think we can say something very similar. There were all kinds of dangers in the guerrilla turn and it had the potential ("tendency") to lead to a counter-revolutionary degeneration if the logic of substitutionism had been followed to its conclusion. This did not happen, however, since the strategy failed to win mass support and it was abandoned. Internal opposition to the guerrilla "turn" developed inside the USFI and the "tendency" towards a possible counter-revolutionary degeneration was arrested.

While the "proletarian tendency" of the USFI (a propaganda organisation) was undoubtedly much less evident than that in the mass Chinese CP of the 1930s, the fact that an opposition did develop in response to the guerrilla "turn" was not without significance. Whatever inadequacies there were in the struggle of the Leninist Trotskyist Faction (LTF) led by the SWP/US and Moreno, it did struggle to defend the idea of a Leninist party (6). This does not mean that the LTF's political positions or practice were supportable on all questions, but on this question, opposing the guerrilla "turn", it did put up a limited struggle.

What conclusions should have been drawn by consistent Trotskyists in the period of the 1960s and 70s for deciding how to struggle to overcome the crisis of the Fourth International? Firstly, it has to be said that if the USFI majority, the International Majority Tendency (IMT), was not yet a counter-revolutionary tendency, but centrist, it was necessary to regard it as a faction of the Trotskyist movement, the Fourth International. Secondly, and flowing from this analysis, it was necessary for consistent Trotskyists to join, and struggle within, the USFI when it was established in 1963. The Healy/Lambert-led ICFI, Grant's Militant Tendency made a sectarian error in not doing so. The Spartacists, in contrast to their later, crazy, sectarian degeneration, had the correct approach in defending the idea of Cuba as a deformed workers state and In struggling within the USFI until their expulsion. There was no logical reason for maintaining a separate existence when the opportunity existed, as it did to struggle within the USFI.

And the same can be-said today. It is necessary to argue for the regroupment of Trotskyists into a reconstructed Fourth International in which. the issues can be debated and lessons learnt, not to paper over differences, but to struggle for political clarity. Today, the same "tendency" towards counter-revolutionary degeneration of USFI forces, this time in a reformist direction, can be seen in the Workers Party of Brazil. In the period before the elections, it looked possible for Lula to win. The question arose of the possibility of the USFI section giving political support to a reformist government. Other examples of lack of political independence exist in other sections of the USFI (for example, Mexico and Sri Lanka). It is obvious that such "tendencies" give cause for great concern, but we should not allow our characterisation to jump ahead of the actual developments. Trotsky was always extremely cautious in this regard and so should we. It would be far better to do something positive about it, as the International Trotskyist Opposition (ITO) has been doing in the past period, as an oppositional tendency inside the USFI. A successful outcome of this struggle cannot be guaranteed since we are small, but if there is no attempt to struggle, a negative outcome is certain. (7)

Today two of the largest international Trotskyist organisations, the USFI and the Militant-led Committee for Workers International (CWI), are in the process of having discussions with regard to possible fusion. Consistent Trotskyists should attempt to be a part of this process, and where excluded by bureaucratic obstruction, should attempt to maintain the closest possible external relation to it rather than "burning their boats" and marginalising themselves from it. This can be done by maintaining a political dialogue and collaboration where possible. While the political problems of both of these organisations continue to be evident, it is necessary to monitor developments in them and intervene in whatever way possible to bring about the political regeneration and organisational reconstruction of the Fourth International.

Notes

1) Declaration of the Fourth Internationalist Tendency, 1979. English Translation by Mike Jones.

2) Trotsky, L.D., In Defence of Marxism New Park. London 1971. p28

3) ibid. pp23-4

4) The London Guardian, 30 April 1996. The article reads: "JFK 'Snubbed Che Offer' (headline). Stung by the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, President Kennedy refused an offer from Che Guevara to broker a peace agreement between the United States and Cuba, according to newly released documents. The offer was detailed in a memorandum written by a top White House advisor who described a remarkable encounter with Ernesto Che Guevara, the Argentine-born insurgent who had become the second most powerful man in Cuba. The Miami Herald reported yesterday that Richard Goodwin, Kennedy's assistant special counsel, was approached by Guevara at a cocktail party in Uruguay on August 17 1961, four months after the failed US-backed invasion of Cuba. Guevara told Goodwin that the Castro government was prepared to forgo an alliance with the Soviet bloc, pay for confiscated American properties in trade and curb Cuban support for leftwing insurgents in other countries. In return, the US would cease hostile actions. Kennedy ignored Guevara's message, instead authorising Operation Mongoose, a secret plan to cause disruption in Cuba"--AP, M

5) Trotsky, L.D., Writings of Leon Trotsky 1932. Pathfinder. New York. 1973. p200.

6) Documents of the debate in the USFI on Guerrilla Warfare in Latin America in: Hansen, J., The Leninist Strategy of Party Building. Pathfinder. New York. 1979.

7) Positions of the ITO can be found in its founding document, the Declaration of Principles of the International Trotskvist Opposition (1992). This was a re-write of an earlier document of the Bolshevik Leninist Group (GBL/Italy) first written in the late 1970s. It was subsequently adopted by the Trotskyist International Liaison Committee (TILC) in 1979. the International Trotskyist Committee (ITC) in 1984, and later redrafted as the founding document of the Faction for the Trotskyist International (FTI) in December 1991. This version can be found in Bulletin of the Faction for a Trotskyist International No 1 (1992). The Faction for the Trotskyist International joined with other forces to form the ITO in 1992.