1948-1968: Results
and prospects of the
struggle to rebuild
the International The first phase of the history of the Fourth International ended at the founding conference in September 1938. One year later, World War Two broke out and the newly-founded International was caught up in the turmoil. In August 1940 Leon Trotsky, who until then had played the central role, was assassinated. On top of that, the core of the international leadership which had been set up in the United States fell apart when the majority of its members followed Schactman in his split with the SWP. Finally, the European sections lost many leaders and members in their fight against Nazi occupation and under the blows of Stalinist repression. This explains why it was necessary to start more or less rebuilding the International, often starting from scratch, at the start of the period covered by this article. The continuity of our movement was hanging by a thread.'
This rebuilding, which in Europe began in the summer of 1943 after the overthrow of the fascist regime in Italy, first demanded a programmatic redefinition as well as the elaboration of a strategic hypothesis for the workers' movement and our own intervention. The programmatic redefinition, all the more necessary as differentiations and major splits took place shortly after the 1938 congress and during the war, was to a large extent completed at the Second World Congress (April 1948).2
58 International Marxist Review
The essential contribution of this Congress was the text analysing the evolution of Soviet society. It refuted, among others, the principal theses which differed from ours, especially state capitalism and bureaucratic collectivism. It is undeniable that those debates and the conclusions reached at the Congress helped us greatly in the polemics that arose in the workers' movement a few months later following the Yugoslavian affair. They especially helped us understand the crisis of Stalinism and its dynamic. On the other hand we obviously did not yet have a clear understanding of what had happened, and of what was going to happen in Eastern Europe. It was the split between the Yugoslavian Communist Party and the Cominform in June 1948 that pushed us to re-examine our positions on this matter.
We began to outline the details of our strategic perspectives after 25 July 1943, the date of Mussolini's fall, which we hailed as the first day of the 1 uropean corerence rally under Nazi acception in brand oped by plained: "The depth, the multiplicity of imperialist contradictions, the major inability of the bourgeoise to overcome them, the decomposition and decay of leading capitalist centres on the one hand, the irresistably rising revolt in all layers of the toiling population on the other hand, are the symptoms of a tremendous revolutionary crisis which will shake the entire world imperialist system. '3
Germany was to be the epicentre of this crisis. Later on other texts drew attention to the factors that checked the revolutionary progress, especially in Germany. The perspective of revolutionary crisis was definded in a more general framework: "The present situation is not one of conjunctural crisis. It is not a question of an isolated uprising in a given country. It is a question of a total revolutionary period on a world scale. The capitalist world has no way out other than prolonged agony.' (Manifesto of the International Conference of April 1946).
From this analysis and from the analysis, vindicated by experience, of the nature and the orientation of the traditional workers' parties—social democratic as well as Stalinist—we drew the conclusion that very profound crises were inevitable in the relatively short term between these parties and the masses radicalised by the revolutionary or pre-revolutionary context. Great possibilities thus existed objectively for the construction of revolutionary parties, inspired by the Fourth International. To use our contemporary terminology, our hypothesis of party-building was centred on independent work. This was even more the case in regions of the world where the traditional parties did not have the influence and traditions that they had in Europe, primarily in the United States and Latin America.
This approach was fundamentally upheld at the Second World Congress. The revolution on the world situation and our tasks reaffirmed: 'The capitalist world as a whole is evolving under the sign of a fundamental growing imbalance, which limits the basis of possible periods of relative stability and increases in periods of convulsions and crises. The policy of
1948-1968: The struggle to rebuild the International 59 the Fourth International in the near future must start from these considerations and emphasise the necessary and possible mobilisation of the working and colonial masses for the revolutionary solution.'
As the International was to explain later—we will come back to that—we definitely tended to over-generalise revolutionary situations. We underestimated the possibilities of recuperation and revitalisation of the European bourgeoisies, and the fact that the American bourgeoisie had not only maintained, but considerably increased its economic potential and could thus contribute decisively to the capitalist reconstruction of the old continent. Moreover, we expected decisive sectors of the working class, especially in France and Italy, to come to a relatively rapid understanding of the role played by the Communist Parties and the Soviet bureaucracy itself, which enjoyed enormous prestige thanks to the heroic struggle of the Soviet people against Nazi imperialism. We also underestimated how difficult it would be for the masses to resist the illusions of bourgeois democracy, inevitable after the domination of fascism in Europe, and to make the necessary distinction between their struggle for the conquest or re-conquest of democratic rights, and the operations of capitalist restoration which the ruling classes covered up by the mystifying ideology of 'Liberation' and 'return to democracy'
The voluntarism that must nourish any revolutionary combat tended to make us forget that the reconstruction of our organisations started from nucleii too scanty to be a real pole of attraction at the level of the masses and to transform themselves in the short term into the true revolutionary parties indicated in our perspectives. This was the case in Germany, which for a period was considered the key to the European situation and where the work of reconstruction had only begun around the Second Congress. It was also the case in Italy, where we were too hasty in recognising the POC (Workers and Peasants Party) as a section. This organisation was closer in its conceptions to Bordigism than to revolutionary Marxism and, on top of that, had only a very peripheral regional base. It was only after the disaffiliation of the POC by the Second Congress that a core of comrades coming mainly from the Young Socialists began to construct the GCR (Revolutionary Communist Group. In Greece, Trotskyist forces had existed since the beginning of the 1930s, but during the fascist occupation and in the final years of the war our comrades had been severely hit by the repression, both bourgeois and Stalinist. In those circumstances they could not expect a change in the relationship of the forces in their favour for a long time. Even in France, our forces were very limited and the section was weakened greatly by departures and by a split that happened just before the Second World Congress. These retrospective reflections on our perspectives and hopes of the epoch do not at all imply a change in appreciation of the perspectives and the strategy of the traditional workers' parties. Their analysis of the situation and its dynamic was no more correct than ours. Beyond their differ-
60 International Marxist Review ences, social democrats and Stalinists— frequently allies in governments of national unity-both advanced the perspective of a new international order, founded on collaboration of the powers that had won the war, within the framework of new international organisations guaranteeing world peace and, internally, the perspective of a progressive democracy, within which all classes could collaborate indefinitely. But most importantly, the policy pursued systematically by all these organisations during the crucial phase of 1943-48 contributed decisively to the reconstruction or reorganisation of the bourgeois state apparatus, shaken up by the war, and to the capitalist economic revival. More often than not they even renounced the leadership of struggles for the political and social demands arising out of the capitalist system.
During the debates of the period, the Stalinist leaders, obliged to respond to the concerns of important sectors of their base, defended their orientation with two arguments: first, there were American troops in Europe who would immediately crush any revolutionary attempt. Secondly, even from the point of view of the internal relationship of forces, it was impossible to put the conquest of power by the working class on the agenda in 1944-45. Victorious revolutionary struggles that arose in different regions of the world demonstrated sufficiently how false it was to attribute invincibility to any army of occupation. 4 But the issue was not whether to project insurrectional struggle for power in the immediate or short term. No one ever favoured that approach. As we have already mentioned, we were conscious of the obstacles standing in the way of a rapid revolutionary explosion, for example in Germany. The difficulty is to know whether within the context of revolutionary or pre-revolutionary crisis (or even a crisis which has not reached this level) the workers' organisations have the reformist perspective of propping up the system. Thus they either endeavour to channel social and political conflicts by defusing their explosive potential and re-establishing equilibrium in order to re-stabilise the situation, or they mobilise themselves in the opposite perspective, that is to say, with the aim of deepening the contradictions, widening the gaps and further stimulating a dynamic of offensive struggles, advancing transitional demands sensitive to raising the level of consciousness of the masses and making them understand that the question of power is posed more and more concretely. Social democratic and Stalinist leaderships opted for the first alternative, revolutionary Marxists put forward the second. Four decades later we have no reason to believe we were wrong.
Finally, it is true that the bureaucratic leaderships succeeded in maintaining control over the masses and, thanks to the radicalisation provoked by the social and political crisis, they were even able to maintain their influence, sometimes in spectacular proportions. But the differentiations and conflicts arose between 1944 and 1948. It is enough to remember the different phenomena, which in the final analysis corresponded to the same logic. Examples such as the conflicts within the French, Belgian and
1948-1968: The struggle to rebuild the International 61 Italian resistance when the partisans had to integrate into the 'regular' forces or dissolve, and to hand in their arms; the appearance of formations of partisans and resistance fighters outside of the political and military framework of national unity, such as in Rome; the struggles that broke out at the time of the liberation of Paris; the different political and social struggles that took place various times in various countries; and finally as the great workers' strike at Renault in April 1947 in France and at the massive overflowing of the masses, partially insurrectional, in July 1948 in Italy following the attempt against the leader of the Italian Communist Party, Palmiro Togliatti.
It was precisely by winning militants or groups that had participated in struggles outside the control of the bureaucratic leaderships and who were part of groups or left tendencies inside the traditional parties, that we could rebuild or start to build our sections and play a real role in significant moments of the class struggle and in the political confrontations within the workers' movement. We should add that, from the outbreak of conflict between the Kremlin and the Yugoslavian Communist Party, we intervened actively not only in the political and theoretical debate opened up by the first crisis of Stalinism, but also in the solidarity movement with Yugoslavia (we will return to this later), and in the attempts towards recomposition of the workers' movement that were being sketched out in certain countries. The most significant episode was undeniably the formation of the UAP (Independent Workers Party) in Germany, to which our comrades contributed in collaboration with Communist Party members who had broken with their party, left socialist militants, and unaffiliated workers and intellectuals. If the UAP had an ephemeral existence and experienced a wastage of considerable forces, the responsibility falls upon the elements directly tied to the Yugoslavian apparatus who wanted to impose orientations inspired by the political-diplomatic exigencies of Yugoslavia and to achieve this did not hesitate to use the worst bureaucratic methods against revolutionary Marxists. A new stage: the Third Congress and the Tenth Plenum The Third World Congress (August 1951) and the Tenth Plenum (February 1952) represent key moments in a new stage in the history of the International, after the completion of the post-war reconstruction.
The Third Congress reformulated our analysis of the world situation and its trends. It upheld the notion of a global crisis of capitalism with the relationship of forces evolving to its own detriment, especially after the victory of the Chinese revolution. But the fundamental perspective became imperialism's tendency to rush headlong into world war within the short term, before the relationship of forces could become even more unfavourable, and especially before a major crisis hit its own North
62 International Marxist Review American stronghold. This war would be characterised by its 'dominant general tendency' to transform itself into international civil war.®
This appreciation influenced our analysis and orientation for the next few years. For example, in the first edition of Quatrième Internationale in 1953, the editorial talks of 'an irresistable and irreversible world revolutionary process' • The editorial of the following edition which puts forwards a fundamentally correct analysis of the tendencies forming in the Soviet Union after the death of Stalin, specifies; 'the revolutionary perspectives are not only good, they are becoming excellent'. The Fourth Congress, June 1954, whose principal preoccupation was the struggle for the defence of the International after the severe split of 1953 and against opportunist tendencies which were expressed even at the congress, remains on the same wavelength.' A preparatory text explains that the logic of the international situation, of its evolution, we can say, is Trotskyist, Fourth Internationalist'. The political resolution synthesises the perspective as following:
We are entering a critical period from this point of view (of the preparations of war and rearmament) which, while in certain conditions, particularly in the case of a real danger of major economic crisis, precipitate into general armed struggle.
Concerning the situation in different countries, the texts see a 'a rapid political victory in the whole country' for Vietnamese revolutionaries and, still in Asia, they speak of approaching revolutionary crisis in India and Japan. As for Europe, a 'new revolutionary crisis' is foreseen in France and in Italy. 8 The analysis of the situation in the United States outlines— correctly—a radically different scenario, but it remains counter-balanced by the perspective of a major economic crisis.
Returning to the Third Congress, the text on the Yugoslav revolution and the evolution of the Eastern European countries represents an important contribution. They complete the line of thought started immediately after the preceding congress and constitute the necessary fruits of more systematic analysis of the crisis of Stalinism adopted by the Fourth and Fifth Congresses. In retrospect, we can grasp their weaknesses, the deficiencies and the characterisations which stimulated much debate afterwards. ° But it cannot be denied that these texts helped us a great deal to orient rapidly to the events following the death of Stalin; the revolt in East Germany in June 1953, the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU and the revolutionary rise in Poland and in Hungary in 1956.
The Third Congress marked considerable progress both in our analysis and our orientation in Latin America where we already had sometimes important influence, in the 1930s. The main acquisition of the congress was the understanding of populist phenomenon. The Western European and American workers' movements had until then been incapable of understanding either its nature or its dynamic of mass movement. Despite all its vicissitudes, contradictions and capitulations, populism maintains a considerable influence in several countries even today. This alone indi-
1948-1968: The struggle to rebuild the International 63 cates the importance of this contribution from the Third Congress which prevented us, sometimes unfortunately too late, from being cut off from the mass movements that marked workers' and popular generations of the continent.
But the Third Congress represents a particular turn in relation to the party-building project drafted after 1943. The new orientation was determined to a very large extent by our perspective on the course of imperialism towards war and revolutionary war. Certain organisational decisions were especially dictated and justified at the time by the idea that the crunch was coming and that we could not lose time if we wanted to be integrated into the real process. '° Most important, however, is that we ultimately arrived at a more realistic appreciation of the relationship of forces in the workers' movement. We understood that for a long period the masses would tend to regroup themselves around their traditional organisations.
It has to be said that, even before the Second Congress, the international leadership and some British comrades had put forward the perspective of entryist work inside the Labour Party. But this perspective was based on the specificity of the organisational framework of the British workers' movement which had already suggested to Lenin and the Third International the idea of participation of Communists in the Labour Party. ' At the Third Congress an orientation of entry into social-democratic parties had been indicated for other countries as well (for example, Belgium, Austria and outside Europe, Japan). Moreover, the resolution of the international situation and our tasks advocated a battle for the formation of a 'Bolshevik tendency' inside the Yugoslav Communist Party and work in the mass organisations under the influence of Communist Parties in China and Vietnam. But it was the Tenth Plenum which drew most systematically and explicitly the conclusions from the analyses and from the methodological approach of the texts of the congress by drawing up a plan of projects of party-building in different regions of the world and in different sectors of the workers' movement.
The adoption of an entryist orientation in its diverse forms often provoked conflicts, indeed splits within our movement. We need not look any further than the decisions of 1951-52 which partly contributed to the split in 1953 and which have been the subject of innumerable polemics since then. We will limit ourselves here to some summary reflections: • if the perspective of a war in the short or medium term proved false and was subsequently rectified, it was essential, we repeat, to understand that the traditional organisations had very deep roots in the working class, especially in capitalist Europe, and it was impossible to go around them. Later we explained even better the phenomenon of the loyalty of workers to their organisations, despite all the vacillations, the retreats and the veritable capitulations, by the concept of the dialectic of partial, conquests. In any case our orientation in 1951-52 was fundamental in equip-
64 International Marxist Review ping us with an approach to construction which avoided sectarianism and sterile self-proclamations; • entryism in some cases led to opportunist backsliding, indeed to capitulations (as in Britain on several occasions). We must also recognise that in certain countries (for example Italy and Germany) we realised too late the need to turn towards and capitalise on the new wave of youth radicalisation in the late 1960s. It is true that the entryist practice carried on for 15 years. Because many militants and cadres were recruited by entryism they had no experience of independent revolutionary work. This often constituted a major obstacle to an understanding of the problems of organisation and of leadership. But this entryism which allowed our militants to participate directly in union struggles and in mass movements, to play a role in the important experiences, for example at the level of the work place and to acquire leadership capacity. All this constituted a fundamental element in their education. • the perspective of a split of 'whole layers' of the traditional organisations did not materialise as we had conceived. But it is difficult to dispute that many of those who played a leading role in the launch and the leadership of newly formed movements and organisations after 1966, had previously been militants and had been formed in traditional organisations. The example of France is the most significant for us, but similar phenomena also occured elsewhere.
We must not forget that the project of construction defined at the Tenth Plenum did not only involve entryism. The report itself starts with a chapter dedicated to 'essentially independent' work, which set out the following criteria: 'Our activity must essentially be considered as independent in all countries where the existence of another leadership, reformist or Stalinist, is not firmly established among the masses and, consequently, does not impose long-term entryism, as we envisage now in other cases. This essentially independent activity signifies, as we have said, acting from now like the revolutionary leadership of the masses' see Quatrième Internationale, February-April 1952).
It was not a question of a secondary option. This is proved by the fact that this orientation was foreseen for organisations who were—or appeared to be-the strongest in the International, such as the American SWP, the Bolivian POR, the Sri Lankan LSSP, as well as Latin American, Indian and Middle Eastern organisations. If, in fact, the weight of independent organisation was only very limited during a whole period, this was due to diverse factors (splits, organisational crisies, political difficulties, etc) and not to decisions taken at the Third Congress and the Tenth Plenum.
Almost 40 years later it may be tempting to make fun of the political perspective that most directly inspired entryism at the beginning of the 1950s. Any balanced judgement should consider the context in which we had formulated our prognosis. It was the epoch of the Korean war. The United States and China were face to face in the Asian peninsula. People
1948-1968: The struggle to rebuild the International 65 like MacArthur were proposing more resolute action with the utilisation of all the resources of imperialism. Later, imperialist leaders like Foster Dulles, partisan of a policy going as far as the "brink of the abyss', preached an internationalism of the Indochinese conflict (1954) without excluding use of atomic weapons. The potentially explosive character of the situation was confirmed once again by the Suez crisis in 1956 and later by the crises of the straits of Taiwan, Berlin and Cuba.'2 The crisis of Stalinism and the colonial revolution The phase that follows is marked by our efforts to put into practice the party-building lines mentioned above. Despite numerous difficulties and the weakness caused by damaging splits, it was precisely in this phase that the militants of the European sections succeeded in most cases in inserting themselves into the organised workers' movements of their countries. In Latin America our forces reorganised themselves by participating in mass movements, often registering considerable numerical growth, although inferior to that claimed by the leaders of the time influenced by the LatinAmerican Bureau controlled by J Posadas. In political and theoretical elaboration it was the phase when we arrived at an analysis of the situation in the industrialised capitalist countries and in particular of the prolonged economic boom. We developed a more systematic appreciation of the crisis of Stalinism. Finally, we stressed the paramount importance of the colonial revolution.
On the first point, two fundamental axes combine. They grasp all of the factors that made the relaunch of the capitalist economy possible, roughly from 1948-49 onwards, by doing a thorough self-criticism of our former analysis. This self-criticism seems all the more necessary since, as we have already mentioned, it was precisely the notion of a major economic crisis, primarily in the United States, which was the basis of our perspective of imperialism heading towards war. Secondly, while not minimising the considerable margin of manoeuvre still available to capitalism, and by advancing the perspective of partially controlled recessions rather than real crises, we rejected the theories defended at the time by most economists, also predominant in the workers' movement. Basically this was the idea that economic growth would continue indefinitely, relegating the classic phenomena of the past such as unemployment, etc to the dustbin of history. 13 It goes without saying that this was not an academic debate. Those who shared the ideology of 'neo-capitalism', as well as certain Marxists demoralised by the relative stabilisation of capitalism, which they had not foreseen, drew the conclusion that the perspective of overturning capitalism was wishful thinking and that the Western European working class and even more so, the North American, had ceased to be a revolutionary force. Many arguments advanced today portraying the
66 International Marxist Review working class as a spent or even disappearing force were put forward in much the same way thirty years ago!'4
The text adopted at the Fourth Congress, which provoked lively reaction at the time of its publication, had already helped us grasp the potential and the dynamic of the crisis of Stalinism which would break out two years later with the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU and the events in Poland and Hungary. At the Fifth Congress, our reflections on these events helped us progress further including in relation to the 1938 Transitional Programme and to the text of the Second Congress, on the conception of socialist democracy in a transitional society. The programme for political revolution which was adopted represents an important acquisition of our movement. In its essential line it anticipates the more systematic resolution of the 1985 Congress. Our debates and analyses in the 1950s also equipped us to understand the significance of the Sino-Soviet conflict and to intervene into it politically. They helped us understand from the start the full significance and dynamic of a phenomenon like the Cultural Revolution in China which had so many repercussions in the workers' and international revolutionary movements by wreaking theoretical and political havoc.
Today we can examine the justice of some of the 1954 perspectives, such as that of short-term violent explosion in the Soviet Union or the appreciation of the situation in Hungary at the time of the Fifth Congress, October 1957. We can just as well ask ourselves if, while having explained since 1948 that the bureaucracy tends to become more and more of a brake on the development of productive forces, we have not ourselves sometimes overestimated the significance of economic progress in the USSR and in other transitional bureaucratic states. But these are secondary questions. Even in more conjunctural analysis, our judgement on the situation in the Soviet Union was exactly correct. For example, at the beginning of 1958 we put it in these terms:
The perspective in the workers' states and primarily in the USSR is not the return to
Stalin, but the 'de-Stalinisation', distorted through the Khruschev experience which combines concessions, promises and reforms, with the tendency to outlaw ideological and political expression, invariably questioning the bureaucracy. (Quatrième Internationale,
February 1959)
It was starting, on the one hand, from the difficulties experienced by the Western European workers's movements and especially considering the defeat suffered by the French working class with the coming to power of General de Gaulle, and the temporary halt to the anti-bureaucratic movement in the bureaucratised workers' states on the other, that we arrived at the idea of the centrality, during this period, of the colonial revolution. This is what an editorial in our review said:
The colonial revolution has a dynamism which cannot be exhausted by reaching any echelon of capitalist stabilisation, but which pushes it to grow over into socialist revolution. For this reason, the colonial revolution is effectively at the present time the vanguard of the socialist revolution and has supplanted the role hitherto played by the
1948-1968: The struggle to rebuild the International 67
European revolution. (February 1959)
It goes without saying that the heroic struggle of the Algerian people, the victorious development of the Cuban revolution and the ripening of a revolutionary crisis in countries of the importance of Indonesian pushed us further towards such a perspective. The 1963 re-unification The tendencies of the world situation as we have summarised, with a reminder of the positions taken by the International, provoked very different reactions and attitudes in our ranks, with counterposed organisational conclusions.
The analyses of the Fifth Congress and the programmatic definitions on political revolution has pushed the leadership of the SWP and one part of what was called the International Committee to map out a course of rapprochement. It was then absolutely clear that we had not capitulated in any way to Stalinism and that the analyses of both on the crisis of Stalinism were fundamentally the same. The rapid convergence in the appreciation and the practical attitude towards the Cuban revolution was an additional stimulant to this unification which took place at the 1963 congress.
But at the same time, from 1959 onwards, new splits were forming within the International and especially in the leadership. At the beginning there was a convergence between Michel Pablo and Juan Posadas, both adopting more and more critical attitudes towards the majority of the members of the International Secretariat, especially on the question of the relative importance of the colonial revolution and the revolutionary struggles in capitalist Europe. In fact there was substantial agreement on the primordial role of the colonial revolution in that phase. Pablo and Posadas wanted to introduce a unilateral interpretation of our common analysis by toning down the importance of the struggles that were possible to lead in capitalist Europe, even within the given context. They conveyed within our ranks and increasingly pessimistic attitude towards the revolutionary potential of the working class in most industrialised countries. This caused inevitable conflict with the vast majority of European militiants who, justifiably, expressed a completely different appreciation and sentiment based on their particular experience in the mass movements and the traditional parties.
The divergence became even more practical, to the point that Pablo, supported by Posadas, did his utmost to reverse the centre of gravity of the activity of the International centre itself. It was the case at the time of the campaign of solidarity with the Algerian revolution. It goes without saying that no one contested our right to get involved in this area. But Pablo took very risky and questionable organisational initiatives for which
68 International Marxist Review he personally had to pay dearly. This behaviour was largely inspired by a growing lack of confidence in the potential of the European workers' movement and in our own possibilities for construction. This distortion became even more flagrant and almost paradoxical when Pablo, coming out of prison, reckoned that his principal task was to influence Ben Bella and the most progressive group of the Algerian revolution and pushed for the International to do the same. He went from paradoxical to the absurd at the Reunification Congress when, starting from the premise that the most promising revolutionary dynamic was then developing in Algeria, he proposed to tranfer the International centre there. This, in fact, would have cut the centre off from real organisations which would assure its functioning, and would depend on the complicity of the Algerian government which was not at all guaranteed in advance. Posadas was even worse. By the Sixth Congress (January 1961) he had pushed his attacks to the brink of a split which he finally provoked a few months later. His main 'argument' was that the majority of the International did not understand the priority of the colonial revolution. Before leaving, he sent an ultimatum to Pierre Frank, Livio Maitan and Ernest Mandel summoning them to relocate to South America to form the International centre there. It was a hypocritical pretext. This was confirmed very rapidly. Immediately after the split he, along with other members of the Latin American Bureau (such as Adolfo Gilly and Albert Sendic), set themselves up in Europe, in cities like Rome, Paris and Brussels-—hardly the epi-centres of colonial revolution.
In this context, the Reunification Congress of June 1963 was as important for the reorganisation of the International centre and the recomposition of the leadership as it was for our political and programatic orientation. International collaboration with the SWP had already begun before the congress, thanks mainly to the presence in Europe of Joseph Hansen and to his lucid and efficient activity.
The Reunification Congress adopted a text on the dynamic of world revolution whose fundamental axes stood up to the test of 25 years of international upheaval. The idea of three sectors of world revolution was nothing new for revolutionary Marxists; it is enough to re-read our old texts to realise that. But the text on the dialectic of the revolution and the other texts adopted by the congress represented both a necessary focus on the two post-war decades and a fundamental critique of the different theories of the epoch whose common trait was the negation, more or less explicitly, of the revolutionary potential of the working class in the industrialised countries. Their analyses and concepts, as well as our integration, however modest, into the workers' movement in the majority of countries where we had sections, were the necessary basis of our understanding of the main events which marked the second part of the decade: the new rise of workers' struggles which were to shake even the most stable countries, the explosion of the youth and primarily the students
1948-1968: The struggle to rebuild the International 69 movements, the Chinese crisis at the time of the Cultural Revolution, and the imperialist war in Indochina. What is more, this understanding allowed us to participate in the new mass movements and to play an undeniable role in May 1968 in France, thus creating the conditions for the breakthrough of the International at the beginning of the 1970s. Some significant campaigns The orientations and preoccupations of the International and its leadership were expressed almost symbolically in the main campaigns which we led in the international or continental initiatives in which we participated.
We have already alluded to our solidarity with Yugoslavia, threatened and almost besieged after the YCPO split with Moscow. When Yugoslavia's difficulties became even more alarming after an exceptional drought, the International Secretariat put out an appeal to workers' organisations and primarily to unions of all countries for organised material aid and committees were set up. We had effectively engaged our modest forces in this direction. We did it more effectively in the organisation of workers brigades which went to Yugoslavia in the summer of 1950. Sending brigades was not an absolute novelty; the Communist Parties had themselves taken the initiative when Tito still seemed to be the model disciple of the 'great' Stalin. After the split, not only did Communist Parties-with the French Communist Party in the vanguard-cancel any link with the 'traitors' but they did not hestitate to sabotage. This included intervention of gangsters into meetings of the campaign to send brigades. Thousands of youth from different European countries went to Yugoslavia anyway. Our role there was very important, especially concerning France, from which about 1500 youth came.
Our campaign of solidarity with the Algerian revolution had a greater and more lasting impact. Several European and Latin American sections participated in many initiatives, including the construction of an arms factory at the Algerian/Moroccan border. In France our stance attracted a number of repressive blows against us. In 1956, the 'socialist' governement of Guy Mollet, supported by the PCF, who was leading the war against the Algerian people, arrested Pierre Frank, Simone Minguet and Raymond Bouvet, members of the Parti Communiste Internationaliste. The following year, Pierre Frank went to prison again, this time with Jacques Privas. The two comrades were incriminated by articles supporting the Algerian revolution published by our French section in La Verite des Travailleurs. In October of the same year, the Fifth World Congress took place under the mark of the Algerian revolution. The most moving session was the one where the repesentative of the French federation of the FLN made his intervention. Finally in June 1960 Michel Pablo and Sal Santen were accused of having falsified papers and money for Algerian revol-
70 International Marxist Review tionaries and were arrested in Amsterdam, where the International centre had been transferred after de Gaulle came to power. This severe blow dealt to the International leadership did not stop our solidarity activity with the FLN. It was pursued vigorously and, combined with an international campaign for the release of our two imprisoned comrades. Their trial was exploited by the incriminated comrades as well as by the comrades of the International leadership who were witnesses, to relaunch our internationalist appeal of unconditional solidarity with the Algerian revolution'5
Another important initiative of the same period was the participation of comrades of the Latin American sections (Argentinian, Chilean, Mexican, Uruguayan, and Peruvian) in the Latin American youth congress in Havana (July 1960). The Stalinists who at the time still had their own organisation, the Popular Socialist Party, launched a vicious antiTrotskyist campaign aimed at excluding our delegation from the congress. Remember that the PSP rejected any perspective of the revolution growing over into a socialist revolution. They wanted to fit it into their schema of popular democratic revolution of an 'independent state of national democracy, which was defended at that time by Moscow and the Communist Parties which shared its views. The operation did not last long and our delegates made their positions known by a manifesto distributed at the congress which said among other things:
We support unconditionally the Cuban revolution, the Algerian revolution, the African revolution... We have made an appeal to resolve the problems with a view to a more decisive struggle against imperialism, to an economy in the hands of the workers, under the control of a government of the masses.
At the end of May 1963 comrade Hugo Blanco was arrested. He had played a leading role in peasant struggles of the Cuzco region. It was the Re-unification Congress which, learning the bad news the same day as its opening, decided to launch a campaign for Hugo's release. This was also to be a campaign of solidarity with the struggles of the the Peruvian masses hit by successive repressions. The campaign was effectively carried out for almost three years in about 50 countries, many members being political and union leaders, Members of Parliament, well-known intellectuals and defenders of democratic rights. In some countries demonstrations or meetings of thousands were organised. The most significant demonstration took place in Lima at the initiative of a number of left and far-left organisations; 30,000 people participated. Hugo's intransigent and courageous declarations, which were taken up by our press and the press of other organisations of the workers's movement, gave the campaign a clearly revolutionary tone. If at the end our comrade, who had been condemned to a heavy penalty of detention, was able to escape the death penalty, it was a result of the popular mobilisations in Peru as well as of an international campaign of solidarity of exceptional scope and duration. 16
Finally we must remember the very active and prolonged participation of our international movement in the campaign against the imperialist war
1948-1968: The struggle to rebuild the International 7l in Indochina and the solidarity with the Vietnamese revolutionaries. The most massive mobilisations took place in the United States as well as in numerous other Western European countries, at the beginning of the 1970s. But by March 1965 the United Secreariat had launched a call which denounced the imperialist attack, criticised the passive attitude of both China and the USSR, called for a united front of workers' states against imperialism and finished with the following:
It is urgent that, in all countires, the workers, the youth, the students, women, stand up by the thousands and the millions to demonstrate their concern in front of criminal aggression of American imperialism. Let them cry 'stop' to Johnson in the demonstrations of solidarity with the heroic Vietnamese people and their revolution.
On 17 April of the same year our comrades of the SWP took part in the first major demonstration in the United States. Following that, the campaign against the war in Vietnam became one of the principle expressions of the youth radicalisation. In the period discussed in our article, the period before the explosion of 1968, we must remember especially the role played by the Jeune Garde Socialist of Belgium and the Jeunnesse Communiste Revolutionaire of Fance at the anti-imperialist demonstrations in Liege in October 1966 and our participation at the "Vietnam Congress' and at the massive demonstration in West Berlin in February 1968 which was one of the most significant and clear signs of what was to come in France, in other European countries and in the world a few months later.' Disappointed hopes and a shattering failure The aim of this article is not to analyse the activity of the different sections in the period under consideration. Nevertheless we think it necessary to refer to two national organisations, the Bolivian POR and the Sri Lankan - LSSP, who represented exceptional cases due to the mass influence which they had gained.
In Bolivia, the Trotskyist movement had been formed in the mid-1930s, and had progressed considerably ten years later. (In 1947 it had a senator and three deputies). It had reached its highest point of development after the 1952 revolution. Rooted in the working class and especially in the mines, it had succeeded in 1946 in winning the miners' congress to a programmatic text which followed the basic ideas of Trotskyism. One need only read the resolutions and appeals of the the International and the articles in our press during the 1950s to understand just how much we staked on the development of revolutionary struggle for proletarian power in Bolivia and the possibility that our section would play a major role. Unfortunately the revolution did not triumph and our organisation underwent many reversals, despite the mass influence that it enjoyed and the combative spirit of its militants.
The weaknesses of the POR, which were at the origin of its defeats,
72 International Marxist Review manifested themselves in many ways. In the first phase it had tendencies to adapt to the nationalist government of Colonel German Busch. The national populist regime of Villaroel also created difficulties for it. In fact, for a whole period the POR did not understand the full extent of the development of the nationalist populist movement expressed by the MR, and took a sectarian attitude towards it. At the time of the 1952 revolution this attitude had been corrected, which allowed our organisation to accumulate considerable forces and even to play a very important role in the union central (COB). But when the MNR, worried about our influence, unleased a counter-attack using all available means, the POR began to lose ground. An entire wing of the party (Moller, Lora) adopted an attitude of collaboration with the MR and afterwards, Moller and number of union leaders quit our ranks and joined the government party. Shorty after, Lora provoked a split.
It is obviously easier to say with hindsight that this indicated the POR had not effectively assimulated the conceptions and orientations of revolutionary Marxism. As well, the influence of its union cadres did not automatically imply a political influence on the party. Even the adoption of revolutionary theses at the miners' congress which we already mentioned, had been much more the result of personal prestige of several leaders than of a real assimilation by sectors of the masses. Moreover, the POR had not been able to introduce into its own organisation, or into mass organisations under its influence, elementary organisational norms which are indispensable for assuring both the democratic fuctioning and the necessary effectiveness in action and whose absence traditionally constituted one of the fundamental elements of weakness of the Bolivian workers' movement as a whole. 18
In 1966, under pressure from the international leadership, the POR forced itself to bring about unification with the organisation led by Guillermo Lora. They went as far as signing a public text of reunification and adopting a unitary leadership (see Quatrième Internationale, June 1966). But the agreement proved short-lived and Lora remained ouside the International. The following year, the beginning of Che Guevara's guerilla attack further deepened the divide. While Lora attacked Guevara harshly, the POR, which had already been hit by the repression two months earlier, launched an appeal of support in May for the guerillas. The action developed by our comrades concerns the period between 1968 and 1970 and is not analysed in our article. 19 We limit ourselves here to stating that the International experienced bitter disappointments in Bolivia. We paid dearly for serious delays in analysis, errors of political orientation and chronic organisational weaknesses, with negative consequences for the Bolivian workers' movement as a whole.
What happened in Sri Lanka is even more serious: the majority of the LSSP and its leadership simply capitulated. Let us remember that the LSSP had been the first workers party founded in the country, 20 that it
1948-1968: The struggle to rebuild the International 73 had suceeded in gaining a considerable influence, including at the electoral level, in playing a hegemonic role in the large mass movements. During those years it seemed to be the true anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist opposition. For example, it placed itself at the head of the hartal in August 1953,21 led the principle unions in Colombo, the transport unions, etc., played a very important role in the student movement and one of its leaders had been elected mayor of the capital. At the time of the outbreak of communalist unrest, it had taken principled positions, for example in the defense of the right of the Tamil minority to use its own language. The first serious difference with the International leadership took place in 1960 when the LSSP decided to support the government of Sirimavo Bandaranaike, leader of the bourgeois SLFP party. On 19 March the elections took place and the LSSP threw itself into the campaign with the perspective of gaining the majority. It won only 10 seats, against 50 for the UNP, the traditional bourgeois party, and the SLFP. This disappointment and the preoccupation with preventing the return to power of the UNP was at the root of an opportunist turn, the fruits of which were an electoral pact of reciprocal non-contestation with the SLFP.22 The United Secretariat deemed it necessary to criticise publicly the attitude of the LSSP by putting out a communique which explained, among other things, that the LSSP did not have to sign an electoral pact with the SLFP and even more so, did not have to vote for the Bandaranaike government. A few months later the Sixth World Congress ratified this position.
Following this the LSSP seemed to rectify its course. In 1961 it no longer voted for the governmental balance sheet and in March 1963 it launched a campaign for a united workers' front with the perspective of a workers' alternative to the Bandaranaike government. The Reunification congress noted this change. It did not however seem sufficiently clear, especially to the extent that it had not implied an explicit self-criticism of the 1960 orientation. This was not an unfounded concern. One year after the congress, the LSSP decided to enter the bourgeois government of the SLFP.
Very serious weaknesses had already been apparent before the crisis in the Sri Lankan section and the leadership of the International had discussed these several times with the leaders of the section. One can draw up a balance sheet on the following terms: • the core of the Trotskyist leadership which had formed the LSSP, was not able to educate the majority of cadres and even less the members of the organisations in revolutionary conceptions; • the electoral success had provoked an increasingly pronounced distortion in the activity of the party: winning seats in bourgeois institutions became, in fact, the main objective. Electoral needs determined to a large extent the daily activity of those elected and the leaders of the party (often the same people). Moreover, even before the opportunist turn, leaders such as N M Pereira had detended the idea that Sri Lanka was an excep-
74 International Marxist Review tional case and that several factors (weakness of the army, weakness of the police, traditions of the country, etc) permitted the possibility of the working class coming to power by the parliamentary road;23 • the LSSP had not overcome a chronic weakness of the Sri Lankan left, that is, the deficiency of its links with the plantation workers. More generally, it had not succeeded in gaining influence in the campaigns nor in elaborating an agrarian programme;24 • as in other countries, our organisation had not succeeded in transforming the recognised union leaders in their section into real political leaders of the mass movements, in other words, they did not transform their union capital into political capital; • the organisation did not function like a Leninist party (the congress was only general assemblies, the functioning was, more generally, very loose, the number of members organised was very limited in relation to the number of voters, etc), 25
The only positive note of this painful chapter of our history was the fact that if in Sri Lanka only a minority-at most 25% of memberscondemned the capitulation, at the level of the the International it was unanimous that the orientation of the LSSP had not only been rejected, but also considered incompatible with membership of the Fourth International. The expulsion of those who capitulated, an exceptional move by the United Secretariat, was approved by everyone-something very rare in our movement! The handicap of splits We have mentioned in passing the splits—of a very different bearingwhich took place during the 1950s and 1960s. The 1953 split did not hinder our ability to maintain the continuity of the International, its organisationsal cadre and even its leadership any more than the others. The split of the Posadist group, in particular did not have catastrophic consequences in Latin America either, even though Posadas had exercised a very strict control on the majority of the Latin American sections for a decade.
Nonetheless, we still paid a very high price. We are not dealing here with the problem from the angle of the national organisation which suffered grave consequences. It is enough to remember, for example, the ravages that the 1953 split provoked in Britain just at the time when our work in the Bevanist wing of the Labour Party had obtained spectacular results which were reflected in the distribution of the Socialist Outlook journal. The internal conflict and then the split provoked an extreme polarisation which opened the way for diametrically opposed positions, both equally wrong. What is more, Socialist Outlook became the battle ground of factional confrontation. All the militant energy and experience
1948-1968: The struggle to rebuild the International 75 was rapidly squandered and we had to start almost from scratch. In France also the 1952 split brought distressing losses and reduced dramatically our influence for a whole period.
But the consequences of the splits were even more negative from the point of view of the construction of the International and its leadership, , of our capacity to function and intervene.
The 1951 split broke the equilibrium which had existed previously and was based on collaborations between cadres expressed by the most solid European sections of a very long tradition, and the cadres which the SWP released to help the international leadership, while not being able to belong formally to the International because of reactionary legislation in the United States. Since the split and especially between the 1954 and 1960-61 Congresses, the axis moved in the direction of collaboration between the European cadres and the cadres of the Latin American sections under the influence of Posadas. Without the split, the integration of the latter would have represented a very important broadening out of the leadership in the International in a context that would have permitted greater homogenisation of our movement on the basis of a more direct global understanding of the process that was developing on a world scale. By contrast, the need to rebuild at whatever price and at the shortest notice an international centre that was at all effective after the split pushed us in the direction of putting together all those who rejected the split, leaving aside a series of political and organisational problems which were posed in several Latin American countries and in relations with the Latin American Bureau. Thus, Posadas could exploit the relationship of forces existing at the time by presenting himself as the spokesperson of the International in Latin America. In fact he most often followed a line determined only by himself and his closest collaborators. In particular, he used organisational methods which had not been part of our movement since its formation. 26
The weakening of the International leadership was also a serious handicap from the point of view of our relations with the Sri Lankan section. We were conscious for a long time before the outbreak of the crisis that the orientation and functioning of the LSSP posed problems. But we had neither the necessary politicial weight nor the material means to intervene effectively at the time. By the time the unification took place with the emergence of a broader leadership, it was unfortunately too late.
The Posadas split had less serious effects than we would have believed at first, even in Latin America. The consequence of the Posadist adventure was the distancing of the International and the progressive wearing out of devoted and capable cadres, of whom we only regained an insignificant number. What is more, were obliged to undertake painstaking and longterm work of reconstruction and re-organisation, even before being able to exploit the more favourable conditions created by reunification.
One sole example serves to illustrate the damage caused by these multiple splits. We have discussed the international campaign to save and free
Hugo Blanco. But in the period where, to please the head of a powerful peasant movement, the majority of Trotskyist members and organisations had not the slightest information in this regard, and even the organisation to which Hugo Blanco belonged was torn apart and paralysed by all sorts
The departure of the tendency organised by Michel Pablo had far fewer repercussions. But even in this case we lost, apart from Pablo himself, valauable cadres, mainly in France where at that time before the foundation of the JCR and the rise of 1968, our organisation was still very weak.
The question still remains whether during the two decades under discussion here, often characterised by the metaphor 'crossing through the desert' it was possible to build revolutionary parties and if it was fundamentally our political and organisational errors which prevented us from
Some may say yes in the very two specific cases of Bolivia and Sri
Lanka. But, more generally, we are convinced that the conditions, subjective as well as objective, for accomplishing such an undertaking did not come together and that, even if we had avoided the errors of analysis and orientation which we had committed and if we had not undergone splits, revolutionary Marxist parties with a broad mass influence would not have
Drawing a quick balance sheet, it is not triumphalism to say that we have assured against all odds the continuity of revolutionary Marxism and notably of internationalism. Further, we have been the only current of the workers' movement which has kept an international cadre, which the
Stalinist communist parties completely renounced after the lamentable failure of the Cominform. The social-democratic parties conceived of their
'international' even more than in the 1920s and 1930s as the place for diplomatic encounters, where the necessities of governments and states take precedence over the needs of the aspirations of the working class and the people oppressed by imperialism. As for other other organisations claiming to be Trotskyist, none, at any time, were able to create and maintain an international framework comparable to ours. Except for the International Committee for a very brief period, other "international centres' have been, at best, heteroclite and precarious constellations, dominated by
It was this international framework which allowed us not only to affirm the continuity of revolutionary Marxism, but also and especially to develop it in terms of the huge historic experiences of the post-war period.
The framework allowed us to integrate and develop cadres coming out of living political experience at the national level, to push forward the formaof manoeuvres. 27 succeeding.
been constructed a 'big' national party.
76 International Marxist Review
An elementary but essential lesson
1948-1968: The struggle to rebuild the International 77 tion and the development of sections, often numerically very weak, but almost always rooted in their own workers' movement and capable of actively participating, sometime in leadership roles, in mass movements. It is thanks to all this that we reached the turning point of 1968-69 with an accumulation of sufficient forces to be part of the new rise.
But these forces were still too limited to influence decisively the recomposition of the workers' movement during the course of new struggles that developed and thus make possible a revolutionary outcome. It is precisely here that we register the negative side of our balance sheet. We could have come out of the 1960s with more forces than we actually had. It was objectively possible and it was our mistakes, our delays, our splits that hindered us from achieving this. This is the elementary but essential lesson that we must learn. It is during the preparatory phase, before the outbreak of the great social and political crisis, before pre-revolutionary and revolutionary crises, that substantial forces must be accumulated. Afterwards, it is too
The hope of the generation of militants to which I belong is that the militants of the new generation of the International will succeed in accomplishing in time this task which we were not able to accomplish.
Remember that of the 20 or comrades who had participated in the 1938 congress as delegates, reporters, members of the outgoing leadership, etc, only two-James Cannon and Michel Raptis-maintained a leading role after the war. Some died in battle, others quit the movement a few years later for different reasons. We must add that already in the period of preparation of the founding congress we had undergone severe blows with the assassination by the GPU of Erwin Wolf and Rudolf Klement and the death of Leon Sedov.
The texts of the Second World Congress were published in the course of the years by Editions la Breche. Remember that two volumes on the congress of the Fourth International—-the first on the 1939-1940 period and the second on the 1940-46 period—have already been published by the same house, in 1978 and 1981 respectively. Readers who may be interested will be able to find important texts and information on the events to which we are alluding in our
The texts which we quote were published in Quatrième Internationale and
4. A whole series of sources, even official ones, have confirmed that the morale of the American troops in 1945-46 both in Europe and in Asia was such that the leaders in Washington would have had difficulty in mobilising them to crush massive popular movements or insurrections. Moreover, the argument of the morale of the troops and more generally the feeling of the American
1.
2.
article.
3.
Notes reprinted in the above mentioned volumes (see note 2).
people opposed to new wars, was advanced by those tho rejected the perspective of a military engagement in 1946-47 in China to avoid the collapse of the
In August 1951 the Secretary of the UAP, after having excluded comrade
Georg Jungclass who was part of it, declared that the position of the Fourth
International on the defence of the USSR 'was incompatible with a platform
, even though the organisation had never taken a position on this question. At that time the Yugoslavian leadership had made a right turn in its foreign policy by voting at the UN in favour of intervention in Korea.
6. See the theses published in Quatrième Internationale, August-October 1951.
7. See Quatrième Internationale, January-February and June-August 1954.
8. In August 1953 there were massive strikes in France mobilising millions of workers. According to the editorial of Quatrième Internationale it could have been called a "pre-revolutionary situation'. We note that in an article on
France in the same edition this characterisation was not explicitly repeated by
Pierre Frank who spoke of 'the most important movement of workers since
9. Concerning, for example, the use of the concept of the workers' and peasants' government, see our article in Quatrième International, March 1985.
10. Such an argument has been used notably by Michel Pablo to justify the organisational measures adopted, with a procedure which the majority of the members of the USec at the time condemned, against the majority of the
11. See the report of the activity of the Second World Congress.
12. As the texts which were published in the above-mentioned volumes on the International congress clearly indicate, the perspective of war was accepted even by those who participated in the split in 1953 (majority of the French
13. For example, in his report to the Fifth Congress, Pablo polemicised against the theses advanced by the British Labour theoretician Strachey in a book
14. See, for example, Quatrième Internationale, February 1959, editorial and the
15. See especially the speech made in his defense by Michel Raptis and the evidence by Livio Maitan in Quatrième Internationale, n. 13 July 1961.
Michel Raptis and Sal Senten were sentenced to 15 months imprisonment and
78 International Marxist Review
Chiang-kai-shek regime.
of the UAP'
June 1936'.
leadership of the French section.
section and the SWP).
were freed in August 1961.
which was a great sucess, Contemporary Capitalism.
plan published in the same magazine (January 1960).
1948-1968: The struggle to rebuild the International 79
16. Hugo Blanco had written, among other things, in a letter to the Peruvian people: 'This trial is not opening against my person, but against the Peruvian revolution. The reaction claims to lead it to the dock; and we do not have to allow this; the oligarchy ought to be sitting in the dock.' The trial finally took place from 30 August to 8 September 1966 and our comrade was sentenced to 25 years in prison. He was freed under the regime of Velasco Alvarado.
17. At the meeting of 18 February, those who spoke alongside Rudi Deutschke
18. For other information and analyses on our Bolivian organisation, see our pamphlet Apuntes sobre una historia del trotskismo en America Latina,
19. See the resolution on Latin America of the Ninth World Congress 1969, the resolutions of the Tenth World Congress 1974, the resolution on Latin
America of the Eleventh World Congress 1979, all published by Pathfinder
Press, New York. See also our article Amérique Latine: de la guerilla á la
20. The Communist Party was born out of split from the LSSP which refused to adopt a line of collaboration with British imperialism during the Second
21. The hartal is a form of general strike, non-violent in principle.
22. The elections to which we have alluded had given birth to an ungovernable parliament. New elections were organised in July. On that occasion the LSSP signed an agreement according to which it would not stand candidates in the constituencies where the SLFP were standing, and the SLFP would do the
23. During a trip to Sri Lanka in August 1959, my hair stood on end when I heard
N M Pereira defend the possibility of peaceful road to socialism with arguments simular to those put forward by opportunist leaders of the Italian
24. The problem of relations with plantation workers was even more serious as they were almost totally from the Tamil minority. An indication of the backsliding of the LSSP was the absence of integration of these workers into the united front of the left in 1963 and even their exclsuion from the May plat-
25. On the attempts to partially rectify this state of things, see the article by E
Germaine, Quatrième International, November 1964. See also the article by
26. Serious differences were apparent with Posadas, for example at the time of
Sal Santen and Pierre Frank's trips to Latin America (1952-53), who had perpublished in 1978 in Columbia.
World War.
same.
Communist Party.
form of the same year.
Pierre Frank, Quatrième International, July 1964.
were, among others, Ernest Mandel and Janette Habel.
guerre du peuple? (Quatrième Internationale, spring 1975).
80 International Marxist Review ceived that their organisational methods were barely democratic. After 1953
Posadas did all he could to avoid other trips to Latin America by leaders of the International, including Michel Pablo. In fact, it was not until 1962 that another trip was organised, after the Posadist split. I was assigned to it. 27. Hugo Blanco was a member of the Peruvian organisation which declared itself for the International Committee and, in Latin America, was part of SLATO
(Latin-American Secretariat of Orthodox Trotskyism).