History of the Marxist Internationals (part 6, Trotskyist collapse)

As anybody familiar with the revolutionary left will know, the Fourth International is a brand name that has been adopted by many different retailers. From its very beginning, the movement tended to cultivate various leaders who adopted the style of Leon Trotsky, a brilliant thinker who was far better at exposing the crimes, sins and peccadilloes of his ideological adversaries than uniting diverse anti-capitalist individuals and groups into a cohesive movement.

By contrast, Lenin was much better at wielding together diverse elements into a fighting movement. Despite his reputation for being a go-for-the-jugular polemicist, Lenin was far less interested in drawing sharp ideological distinctions than Trotsky. Consider the role of Iskra, for example. Lenin proposed the need for a newspaper that could unite socialists across Russia at the “What is to be Done” conference. In other words, if you were for socialism, you belonged in the social democratic party that was still gestating. Once that party was formed, there were few expulsions—arguably only one: Bogdanov, whose philosophical peregrinations threatened to undermine the basic theoretical foundations of the Russian party. Furthermore, it is probably a mistake to view the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks as hardened opponents. Despite the frequent polemics against the Mensheviks, Lenin was always exploring ways to mend the rift between the two factions.

The ideological basis for the Fourth International, as I explained in my last post, was the platform of the Left Opposition. In my view, Leon Trotsky would have been far more successful if he had struggled to build a world movement on a much broader basis, namely for workers democracy in the USSR, political independence from the bourgeoisie, etc. This might have meant having a much more forgiving attitude toward the centrists, who were willing to go along with Trotsky on 80 percent of his program. Indeed, the history of the Bolshevik Party reveals a kind of ideological diversity that attempts to “improve” it both in the Comintern and the Fourth International proved futile. The reason for this is simple. Just as there are various levels of consciousness in the working class, there will also be various levels in its organized political expressions. That is the reality of politics. Attempts to circumvent this reality will always end up in sect formations, as Hal Draper so eloquently put it:

What characterizes the classic sect was best defined by Marx himself: it counterposes its sect criterion of programmatic points against the real movement of the workers in the class struggle, which may not measure up to its high demands. The touchstone of support (the “point d’honneur,” in Marx’s words) is conformity with the sect’s current shibboleths – whatever they may be, including programmatic points good in themselves. The approach pointed by Marx was different: without giving up or concealing one’s own programmatic politics in the slightest degree, the real Marxist looks to the lines of struggle calculated to move decisive sectors of the class into action – into movement against the established powers of the system (state and bourgeoisie and their agents, including their labor lieutenants inside the workers’ movement). And for Marx, it is this reality of social (class) collision which will work to elevate the class’s consciousness to the level of the socialist movement’s program.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to building an inclusive movement was the record of a struggle in the American section of the Fourth International that supposedly exhibited Leon Trotsky at his best, namely the faction fight with Max Shachtman, James Burnham and Martin Abern. With the notion that their “petty bourgeois” methodology was opposed to the “proletarian” Cannon faction, amounting to a scratch that could lead to gangrene, you get the debating style that has marked Trotskyism until the current day.

The first major episode of gangrene prevention took place in 1953 when the Fourth International split over the role of “Pabloism”. Greek Trotskyist and FI leader Michael Raptis, who used the party name Pablo, had decided that the Cold War would transform the CP’s into imperfect revolutionary instruments. And, as such, they would be the proper place for Trotskyists to operate in a “deep entry” mode. When the majority of the French section dug in its heels to oppose this tactic, the leadership was replaced by a minority that favored it.

This abuse as well as a certain amount of Stalinophobia from James P. Cannon, the American Trotskyist leader, and his allies led to a split. Cannon, Gerry Healy from the British section, and Pierre Lambert, the purged French majority leader, formed the International Committee while Ernest Mandel led a so-called International Secretariat committed to one degree or another to Pablo’s perspective.

Despite the IC’s characterization of Michael Raptis as some kind of Satan, he played an important role in solidarizing with the Algerian revolution as the wiki on Pablo notes:

He was personally closely involved in supporting the Algerian national liberation struggle against France, which led to imprisonment in Holland in connection with counterfeit money and gun-smuggling activities. A campaign for his release was launched by Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1961 Pablo was finally sentenced to 15 months imprisonment, and liberated at the end of his trial. He took refuge in Morocco. After the victory of the Algerian revolution, he became a minister in the FLN government.

To the credit of the American Trotskyists and the Ernest Mandel leadership, they realized that their shared support of Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution compelled them to reunite in 1963. Gerry Healy and Pierre Lambert would have no part of this, however. Healy regarded Fidel Castro as a bourgeois nationalist and denied that capitalism had ever been overturned. Lambert was more prone to analyze Cuba in terms of the workers having failed to take power but I admit to not remembering the fine points of such arcane disputations from my misspent youth.

When I joined the Trotskyist movement in 1967, a mere four years after the reunification, the “betrayal” was still fresh in the minds of two small groups led by American supporters of the IC. One group, called the Workers League, was led by Tim Wolforth and had won the approval of Gerry Healy as his official American satellite. The other, called the Spartacist League, was led by James Robertson, a bizarre cult figure who I have never had the pleasure of seeing in public. Both of these groups were obsessed with “Pabloite revisionism” and would show up at public meetings of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) or at antiwar conferences to harangue the apple-cheeked student activists about Pablo’s betrayals. Today, Tim Wolforth is something of a Eustonite liberal while Robertson remains as elusive as ever.

For the first five years or so I was in the SWP, everything seemed to be going swimmingly well in our world movement although from time to time I got the sense that the Mandel wing of the movement was just a bit off. I remember when the SWP organized a class on party history back in 1968, with all the big guns like Farrell Dobbs lecturing us on how wonderful we were. During a break, I was chatting with Judy White, a party functionary, about this and that and she volunteered that the party was anxious to train new members like me or else we might end up like the Europeans. It all sounded like a parent advising a child on the need to brush one’s teeth three times a day.

Despite this, the major emphasis was on the importance of unity especially in light of the prominent role of the French Trotskyists in the May-June events of 1968. The LCR, which would eventually fold itself into the NPA, seemed to be everywhere on the barricades and Alain Krivine emerged as a key student leader. Within the year, the SWP would be on the barricades in Berkeley during the People’s Park struggle. Peter Camejo, who played a key role in the struggle, gave talks around the country making an explicit link between Berkeley and France. Revolution, as Max Elbaum would put it, was in the air.

Not only was revolution in the air, there was a lot of ultraleftism as well. From making barricades, the next step for many leftists was picking up the gun. Urban guerrilla warfare became an epidemic worldwide, including Argentina where two factions of the Trotskyist movement emerged. One was led by Nahuel Moreno, a veteran of the Trotskyist movement who had opposed Pablo. It was oriented to trade union struggles and the mass movement. The other faction was involved with armed actions, particularly hijacking of trucks whose goods were dispensed in poor and working-class neighborhoods a la Robin Hood. Moreno eventually broke completely with the guerrillas and formed a new group called the SWP. At the time we were convinced that Moreno was “one of us” in the spirit of Judy White’s warnings.

Joseph Hansen, a veteran of the SWP who was Trotsky’s bodyguard and generally very astute, wrote a defense of our mass movement orientation titled In Defense of the Leninist Strategy Of Party Building in 1971 that became our main rallying cry against the urban guerrilla warfare orientation of Ernest Mandel and his supporters. It is very much worth reading, even if the “party building” amounts to the kind of clumsy “vanguard” approach I now reject. Joe Hansen was a terrific writer who taught me a lot. He is especially good on the virus of ultraleftism that had infected the left, including Robin Blackburn who at the time was a member of the British section along with Tariq Ali and the late Peter Gowans. Hansen refers to Blackburn in his customarily dry but devastating fashion:

Blackburn mentions specific cases of bombings ascribable to those who have presumably opted for outright civil war. He includes in his survey the following: “At the end of last year Hoover of the F.B.I. announced that he had discovered a collective, comprising almost entirely of priests and nuns, with a plan to kidnap a White House official to be exchanged for a bombing halt in IndoChina.”

(Blackburn is referring to the Daniel and Philip Berrigan frame-up case. He fails to mention that the two pacifist priests, speaking from their prison cells in Danbury, Connecticut, where they were alleged to have masterminded the plot, branded the charges as fabrications.)

Not long after Hansen had written this article, the honeymoon between Moreno and the Americans would be over. Despite some initial confusion over the Sandinistas, the SWP would decide that it was a movement worth supporting. Moreno, on the other hand, regarded them as bourgeois nationalists in the manner in which Healy and Lambert regarded Castro. So deep was his hostility that the Sandinistas decided to expel Moreno’s supporters from Nicaragua after refusing to accept the government as legitimate. Old habits die hard apparently.

Within a year or so, Moreno had set up his own Fourth International. Now there were three contestants vying for the right to be regarded as the authentic heir of Leon Trotsky.

Just around the time that Moreno was launching out on his own, the leader of the SWP, a character named Jack Barnes, decided that a kind of Fifth International was taking shape, although he never referred to it as such. Enamored of the FSLN, the FMLN in El Salvador, the New Jewel Movement in Grenada and the African National Congress, Barnes decided that the traditional Trotskyist project was defunct.

Oddly enough, this bid to connect with living and dynamic movements (at least in this period in history) was at odds with the SWP’s rapid transformation into a sect-cult. The new orientation to groups outside the Trotskyist movement was accompanied by the party’s self-isolation from arguably the counterparts of such groups inside the United States, as well as the mass movement in general. As part of the “turn toward industry”, the SWP decided that all of the movements it had once participated in could only be found within the trade unions. So, for example, the principal agency of opposition to Reagan’s wars in Central America would be the AFL-CIO, even if there was no evidence that the unions were ready to move. So the end result was abstention from the real movement that included Catholic nuns and computer programmers in its ranks rather than steelworkers or truck drivers.

For obvious reasons, the SWP could not sustain the illusion that a new international could be made up of itself and groups like the FSLN, which had imploded under the impact of US war and economic blockade. The SWP itself would begin to implode under the impact of the helmsman’s bizarre workerist schemas. It has set up its own international movement in recent years consisting of itself and tiny satellite groups in places like New Zealand that sell the SWP’s newspaper. On his worst days, I doubt that Pablo could have come up with something more grotesque.

Except for the Peter Taaffe, Alan Woods and Alex Callinicos led formations out of Britain, there are few claimants to the crown of Leon Trotsky’s successor. While Callinicos never would have staked out such a claim in ideological terms, there is clear evidence that the kinds of heavy-handed democratic centralism that proved to be the undoing of so many Fourth International groupings hampers the influence of his own state capitalist movement. When the American ISO developed fairly minor differences with Callinicos, they were expelled from the world organization. With respect to Taaffe and Woods, rival claimants to the Militant Tendency’s ideological legacy, there are few signs that they are ready to break with the Fourth International model.

That will have to be left up to new forces, particularly those responding to Hugo Chavez’s call for a Fifth International, the subject of my final post in this series.