In Defence of Marxism

For the Reconstruction of the Fourth International!

An online bulletin of political news, views and comment in the tradition of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Liebknecht, Luxemburg and Trotsky

Some readers arriving at this page may not be familiar with the Marxist terminology used in many of the articles. This site has a Trotskyist Education page which contains an expanding glossary, and other explanatory material, precisely for such people..

News, Views and Comment

About world events and the tasks of consistent Trotskyists

July 2006. The SWP's Alex Callinicos writes in Socialist Worker (GB) about Italian troops being sent to Afghanistan: "Imagine, then, the disappointment that activists all over Europe felt when, a couple of weeks ago, Rifondazione deputies and senators voted to support the dispatch of Italian troops to join the Nato occupation of Afghanistan. Rifondazione is participating in the new centre left coalition government headed by Romano Prodi. It was especially sad to see a parliamentarian belonging to the Fourth International group in Rifondazione, Gigi Malabarba, vote with the government on this issue. At the same time, an article appears on the International Viewpoint web-site by Sinistra Critica, a grouping in Rifondazione that includes Bandiera Rossa--the Italian section of the "Fourth International" (ICFI/USFI), calling upon the Italian parliamentary left to vote against sending troops to Afghanistan! Looks like a replay of the fiasco in Brazil.

Spring 2006. Another excellent article in the IS Journal The Bolsheviks and Islam by Dave Crouch.

March 2006. Interesting article by Neil Davidson on Islam and the Enlightenment which sorts out the confusion of leftist Islamophobes.

10th March 2006. Brazilian Democracia Socialista member Miguel Rossetto, Lula's Minister for Agrarian Reform, "criticises" MST direct action. The reactionary logic of entering a bourgeois government is now being played out as Rossetto publicly attacks the landless rural workers' movement. All of this could have been avoided if the proposals of the ILT had been adopted by the last USFI World Congress.

February 2006. The International Committee (IC) of the USFI publishes a Resolution on Brazil--February 2006 which reports that a wing of its Brazilian section, Democracia Socialista (DS), still remains in Lula's Workers Party and one of its members, Miguel Rosetto, remains in his government, an administration that pursues a neo-liberal programmme. "The forces of the FI in Brazil are still, unfortunately, divided. The DS-PT continues to be active in the PT, confirming its participation in the government and reinforcing its integration in the party leadership; one DS leader occupies the post of PT general secretary." Making no comment about the seriousnesss of this continuing open betrayal of the political independence of the working class, the resolution ends with the words: "In order to foster a continuing discussion as well as maximize the chances of a convergence of all the anti-capitalist sectors, the IC reaffirms the maintenance of relationships with all components of the Fourth International in Brazil, with all these components continuing to be members of the International with full rights." The abandonment of any notion of international democratic centralism by the USFI at previous World Congresses is evident in this statement. The very idea of conducting a fair and transparent hearing or imposing discipline upon this tendency is apparently unthinkable.

19th August 2005. Karl Marx is voted "greatest philosopher" in BBC poll. It would seem that the rumours of the "death" of communism have been greatly exaggerated.

21st May 2005. Newly elected British Respect MP, George Galloway, uses US Senate witch-hunt as a platform to attack Anglo-American policy on Iraq.

7th May 2005. Respect makes breakthrough in the British general elections.

May 2005. New on the In Defence of Marxism Trotskyist Education web-page: a brief "Introduction" to Trotsky's "How Did Stalin Defeat the Opposition?".

May 2005. Voting Policy for the 2005 British General Elections

April 2005. Alliances and Coalitions in Britain: Stop the War and Respect - Jane Kelly and Karen O’Toole for the ISG Political Committee. An interesting article about Respect, secularism and the party's relationship to religious groups.

January 2005. USFI belatedly criticises the participation of its Brazilian Section in the Lula Government.

December 2003. Bolsheviks and Islam: Religious Rights . Feature article from the International Socialist Tendency's magazine Socialist Review by Dave Crouch. Well researched article about early Bolshevik policy towards Muslim Central Asia. Written during the emergence of the Respect party in Britain. It answers many of the red herrings raised by the sectarian Islamophobic British (and continental European) far left.

October 2004. International Left Tendency statement on the 2004 US Elections: Vote Nader for President!.

March 2003. International Left Tendency Statement on the Iraq War.

January 2003. USFI World Congress Documents of the International Left Tendency in the USFI.

Spring 2002. Excellent article in ISJ by Dave Crouch on Bolshevik nationalities policy--including towards muslim peoples in the Soviet Union The Seeds of National Liberation. Answers the likes of Pipes. Essential reading.

Polemics

Why the CRFI is not a way forward for the reconstruction of the Fourth International

Here (below) is an exchange of documents between the ex-Lambertist Partido Obrero (PO) of Argentina and Chris Edwards, a former member of the international secretariat of the International Trotskyist Opposition (ITO). They discuss some of the issues involved in the decision by the ITO to dissolve and politically collapse itself into the Co-ordinating Committee to Refound the Fourth International (CRFI)--dominated by Jorge Altamira's cultist PO. Despite this collapse, the original ITO conceptions, positions and methodology live on through the continuation of this web-site.

The central dispute with PO revolved around the question of how to go about reconstructing the Fourth International. More specifically, the dispute was about whether the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFI) should be included in an attempt to reconstruct the Fourth International. The PO said "no". The ITO said "yes". This, in turn was related to the differing political characterisations of the USFI--the largest remaining international tendency emerging from the crisis of Trotsky's Fourth International. By comparison with the USFI, the CRFI is tiny. Yet, there was always a school of thought within the ITO leadership, centred in the largest national section in Italy, which appeared to regard this as a secondary question and sought to paper over the cracks. This has now resulted in the political dissolution of the ITO.

The PO (like the Lambertists--its former co-thinkers) has always insisted that the USFI, along with just about every other Trotskyist organisation in the world, is "counterrevolutionary". That is, consistently reformist. Chris Edwards and the ITO disagreed with this one-sided characterisation and argued that it was not "counterrevolutionary", but centrist. In other words it was both inconsistently revolutionary and inconsistently reformist and it periodically vacillated between these two political poles. The USFI was not consistently reformist, but, in the word of Edwards, consistently inconsistent and had been so for an extended period of a half century. The ITO's approach was to politically intervene into the crisis of the USFI and try to make it more politically consistent. This was done by joining the USFI and establishing an oppositional tendency--putting forward an alternative political position. The PO in contrast spent its time shrilly denouncing the USFI from the sidelines. Meanwhile its own small international organisation, the Fourth International Tendency (TCI), quietly collapsed in the 1980s.

As Trotsky once said: those who do not struggle to defend former conquests will build nothing new. In the ITO's view it was possible and necessary to rescue the USFI by politically arguing its case as a tendency inside the USFI. However, some ex-ITO comrades have now apparently abandoned this project.

The participation of the USFI Brazilian section, Democracia Socialista (DS), in the bourgeois Lula government appeared at first to bear out the PO case. Miguel Rosetto, a leader of DS, became Minister of Agrarian Development in the Lula government. This was a clear breach of working class independence. The USFI refused to investigate the matter, or take action (expulsion) against DS, at its January 2003 World Congress--despite ILT calls for it do just that. This failure appeared for a time to vindicate the PO claims that the USFI had degenerated into a counterrevolutionary, reformist organisation.

Trotskyists do not, under any circumstances, join bourgeois governments. Period. All historical experience tells us that the bourgeoisie will only allow the participation of workers' parties in a joint government with its own parties on its own terms and never on any other terms. Workers parties that fall for this kind of ploy are cynically used as left cover to legitimise capitalist policies. That is, they become powerless hostages and have to accept responsibility for attacks on the working class. The mistake of the Spanish POUM lay precisely in the fact that it joined the bourgeois Catalan government and adopted a policy of trying to persuade and advise the Republican bourgeoisie, Stalinists, Socialists and anarchists about the virtues of taking the socialist road instead of mobilising the workers against them. They rejected the policy of overthrowing the government--the successful policy the Bolsheviks adopted towards the Kerensky government in October 1917. This is not the first time that the USFI has been guilty of this sort of serious error. Its policy towards the Titoists, Vietnamese Stalinists, Castroites, the Sandinistas, Salvadorean FMLN, Khomeniists and the Provisional Sinn Fein was also based on a similar policy. This was one of diplomatic attempts at persuasion, advice and exhortation instead of building USFI sections and mobilising the workers to challenge/overthrow these petty bourgeois nationalist/Stalinist movements. The result is that today in all these countries there is no USFI section of any political weight or substance. As a result of its cringing opportunist diplomacy towards the Sandinistas, the USFI lost the bulk of its Latin American sections (today regrouped as the LIT). In Ireland, a local section joined the USFI (People's Democracy now named Socialist Democracy). However, it was later effectively snubbed by the USFI leadership as part of a policy of encouraging its members to join Sinn Fein to try and win its leadership to socialism. That strategy looks pretty silly now yet the USFI continues to support the "peace process"--a reactionary, Thatcher-inspired pacification programme--during which Sinn Fein has implemented privatisation programmes while it was a coalition partner in the northern Ireland colonial government. And the Irish section has been reduced to a handful of comrades.

Recent events, however, have cast doubt on PO's viewpoint and reinforced the ITO view. The USFI Brazilian section recently split over the neo-liberal betrayals of the Lula government. One section headed by DS senator Heloisa Helena was expelled from Lula's Workers Party (PT) along with several other senators for opposing these betrayals. And the leadership of the USFI has now, at long last (January 2005), come out openly and declared that participation in the Lula government is not appropriate. This does not exonerate the USFI from blame (far from it), but it does cast serious doubt on PO's characterisation of this organisation--a characterisation that it has made for decades incidentally.

These subsequent events thus cast new light on the political exchange between PO and Edwards--which took place long before Lula came to power.

The exchange was first published in the columns of In Defence of Marxism the British ITO bulletin. It is replicated here in the exact chronological order so that the dialogue can be understood as it unfolded. It should be also pointed out that Edwards was the only member of the ITO leadership to publicly debate the PO in written form about the differences which so clearly existed. The British proto-ILT was expelled from the Workers' Socialist League as a result of its principled stand against the political failures of its own national leadership during the 1982 war between Britain and Argentina. It is thus more than a little ironic that it should later be derided, by an Argentinian Trotskyist, for the political marginalistion that resulted from that expulsion.

For the Reconstruction of the Fourth International (Part 1)
Osvaldo Coggiola (translated by Chris Edwards)

For the Reconstruction of the Fourth International (Part 2)
Osvaldo Coggiola (translated by Chris Edwards).

Characterising the USFI Today
Chris Edwards

A Reply to Chris Edwards
Luis Oviedo (translated by Chris Edwards)

On the Stages of the Degeneration of the Comintern and the USFI.
Chris Edwards

The LCR-LO electoral agreement
Jorge Altamira (translated by Chris Edwards)

Response to Partido Obrero.
Chris Edwards

Response to Chris Edwards on the Character of the Agreement between LO and the LCR/France
Jorge Altamira (translated by Chris Edwards

...And Pigs Fly!
Chris Edwards