On February 28, 1972, Comrade Ernest Mandel was forbidden by the West German immigration officials at Frankfort airport from entering West Germany, and was deported back to Belgium. Questioned by a left socialist MP in the Bonn parliament about the incident, the bourgeois minister of the interior, Mr. Genscher, stated that Mandel was forbidden to enter Germany for an unlimited period, "until he changes his revolutionary views."
Genscher tried to make the subtle distinction between the "Marxist economist," who was supposed to be welcome, and the "active revolutionist," leading member of the Fourth International, whose activities were directed at the overthrow of the state and the social order in West Germany and who should therefore be banned from that country.
Specifically Mr. Genscher referred to the Fourth International's programme of wanting to install a workers republic based upon workers councils in Germany, and declared this to be unconstitutional. Before him, the West Berlin Senate had argued along similar lines when it refused to nominate Ernest Mandel to the post of professor for political economy at the Free (!) University of West Berlin, for which he had been chosen by a nearly unanimous vote of students, assistant professors, and professors.
The repressive measures of Minister Genscher and of the West Berlin Senate have provoked a storm of protest in all left-wing circles of the German labor movement and of the German students and intellectuals. This protest is still going on and spreading internationally.
While we are writing this article, thousands of students strike against Mandel being banned at the West Berlin university itself; several faculties have been occupied for more than a week. The University of Heidelberg officially joined the protest of the Free University of West Berlin. Student government bodies are doing likewise in many other universities. Mass meetings have taken place on this subject in half a dozen towns. In Berlin itself a congress convened for the purpose of fighting against this and similar measures of repression assembled more than 3,000 students. Important trade-union officials, several local trade-union bodies, as well as numerous left socialists, the national leadership of the West German Young Socialists, and half a dozen Social-Democratic MPs have come out against the ban.
From the beginning, Comrade Mandel has based his principled fight against the ban on two key issues. First, he never denied holding the programme of replacing bourgeois parliamentary democracy by soviet democracy, by the democracy of workers councils, but strongly insisted on the basic political freedom for all working-class tendencies to defend their full programme in West Germany. Second, he warned the West German trade unionists, Social Democrats, socialists, students, and intellectuals that this ban was only a new stage in a campaign of increased repression not only against the left-wing tendencies in the labor movement, but against the labor movement as such and against the democratic rights of all workers, students, and intellectuals.
He warned that the exclusion of Marxists from professorships would lead to the exclusion of left socialists and members of the "ruling" SPD [Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands] itself, that the ban against free movement of cadres of revolutionary organizations would soon lead to a ban against movement of trade unionists too. Against all these repressive measures it was necessary to build a united front of all working-class tendencies, without any exclusion or divisive tactics, defending the democratic freedom of the whole movement. Otherwise, these freedoms would be chopped away bit by bit from everybody.
These warnings of Comrade Mandel soon became confirmed. The West German tory party of Barzel and Strauss -- the Christian Democrats -- has started a vicious pogrom campaign against the Young Socialists and left Social Democrats (accused, among other things, of having defended the dangerous revolutionary Ernest Mandel). The French Pompidou regime, which had banned Mandel from France too, thereupon banned a delegation of British Labour MPs and trade unionists from entering that country in order to consult with French trade unionists during the recent referendum campaign in France on the subject of Britain's joining the Common Market.
It is clear that the case of Ernest Mandel is rapidly becoming a symbol of the type of capitalist Europe Big Capital is trying to build at present -- a Europe where free circulation is guaranteed only to big entrepreneurs, bankers, capitalist riffraff and speculators, bourgeois politicians, NATO generals and admirals and other underworld characters, but where this freedom of movement is being limited or denied to revolutionists, to socialists, to trade unionists and to "foreign workers," who are not satisfied with being "freely" exploited abroad but also want to be free to defend themselves. If the labor movement allows this kind of discrimination to be generally accepted, this can only mean that its own position becomes further weakened in the Common Market and Capital's position strengthened. So this question of the right to circulate freely without political discrimination has become an issue in the international class struggle itself.
Most people on both sides of the barricades have understood this perfectly -- the capitalists by insisting upon their right to stop the activities of "foreign" revolutionists; wide circles of the international labor movement, including those that strongly disagree with Ernest Mandel's views, by insisting on the necessity of lifting the German ban. This has become a source of major embarrassment for the Stalinists, to begin with the Communist party in West Germany and West Berlin, and the ruling SED [Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands -- Socialist Unity party of Germany]. These organizations had stepped up their anti-Trotskyist campaign since the international conference of Communist parties convened a year ago in Moscow to discuss the specific question of how to fight Trotskyism. Comrade Mandel had been singled out by the CP publications the world over as "a professional anti-Soviet agitator" and a "ferocious anti-Communist." But now suddenly this notorious "anti-Communist" is expelled from West Germany because he is "guilty" of spreading Communist propaganda, and this "professional anti-Soviet agitator" is being accused by the imperialists of wanting to build a Soviet Republic in Germany! This type of propaganda -- as engaged in by Mandel before and after the ban -- in favor of soviet democracy, of a republic of workers councils, hadn't been heard in Germany for nearly forty years; and in addition he defends the CP victims of the bourgeois repression and discriminatory measures in West Germany, too ...
The embarrassment of the CP bureaucrats is all the greater as Comrade Mandel's statements were not only spread on millions of copies by popular weekly magazines like Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, Der Stern, Pardon, the organ of the West Berlin Social-Democratic party, the organ of the Young Socialists, etc.; they were also widely publicized on radio and television, which reach millions of workers, intellectuals, and students in East Germany. Most of these people got through these statements their first contact with Trotskyism -- and it wouldn't be an unsympathetic contact either. Here you had a revolutionist viciously attacked by the rulers of both West and East Germany -- and who stood for the democracy of workers councils.
The CP leaders tried to wriggle out of their plight by advancing a typically Stalinist line. The imperialists, they said, had deliberately selected Comrade Mandel as their main target in order to "force" the left to solidarize itself with a Trotskyist -- thereby strengthening this diversionist and "anti-Communist" tendency. In other words: oppression is really a conspiracy between the oppressors and the victim, in order to make the victim more sympathetic in the eyes of the masses!
With the same "logic" the French Stalinists had already "denounced" the "conspiracy" between the murdered Maoist worker Pierre Overney and the bourgeois private police at the Renault factory in Paris, the objective "proof" of the conspiracy consisting in the fact that the latter had killed the former.
One should add that the German CP has created strong dissension within its own ranks as a result of this unprincipled attitude on the question of solidarity with victims of imperialist repression. Many local youth and student groups have joined united-front actions in favor of lifting the ban against Ernest Mandel. We can only welcome this as a significant break with Stalinist opportunism.
But the Stalinists are not the only ones to cling to this type of "logic." Some sects are confronted with a difficulty similar to the one that faces the CP, be it on a much more modest and limited level, and they try to solve it by an analogous method.
The sectarian leaders of the Socialist Labour League, who refused to take part in the reunification of the Fourth International in 1963 and ever since then have hysterically tried to justify their existence separate and apart from the world Trotskyist movement by inventing all kinds of "accusations" against the Fourth International founded by Leon Trotsky, have for several years made of Comrade Ernest Mandel their target No. 1. He is the "arch-revisionist." He is the "darling of the middle classes," the "centrist par excellence," who "objectively" helps imperialism to disorient leftward moving workers. He is "moving rapidly towards bankrupt reformism."
One can only wonder why the imperialists don't share these estimates of Messrs. Healy, Slaughter, Banda, and Co., and put less obstacles on Mandel's activities around the world. On the contrary, these class-conscious and rather clever gentlemen totally disagree with the SLL's judgment of Comrade Mandel. They consider him not a "bankrupt reformist" (whom they would help) but a dangerous revolutionist whom they have to restrict in his activities. And their repression directed against him has been stepped up constantly for four years.
How does the SLL leadership react to this embarrassing situation? Cliff Slaughter, in Workers Press of April 12, 1972, engaged in a series of unprincipled manoeuvers which, basically, amount to scabbing on the struggle now being conducted on an international scale against restrictions of democratic freedom for all tendencies of the labor movement.
First he tries to minimize the repressive measures which Comrade Mandel has been subjected to by the bourgeois government of Western Germany. He writes:
"Further, they [the "Pabloites," whatever that may mean -- PJ & TA] are campaigning against the action of the W German authorities in refusing Mandel permission even to enter W Berlin when he recently tried to attend a 'teach-in' there."
Slaughter knows very well that Mandel, as a Belgian citizen, needs no "permission" to enter West Berlin. He knows very well that what occurred was not a one-time action of the Bonn regime to prevent Mandel from being present at a West Berlin teach-in (this is, in fact, the excuse dished out by the advocates of the bourgeois repressive measures), but a general ban from entering West Germany. And he also knows that this ban has been justified by the government with reference to Mandel's revolutionary activities as one of the leaders of the Fourth International. It therefore constitutes an attempt to illegalize not only the visits of other members of the Fourth International into West Germany, but of all revolutionists as well.
All this Slaughter hides from his readers, thereby helping to whitewash the imperialist repression. The whitewashing job is further amplified by nasty innuendos of this kind:
"He [Mandel] appears at innumerable international seminars and colloquia ...
"Indeed, Mandel's political identity is nowadays entirely a matter of his impact as some sort of celebrity descending on various capital cities and university campuses."
Just imagine how shameless this revisionist Mandel has become. He has the nerve to "descend on various capital cities," whereas, as everybody knows, the real duty of a real internationalist is to stick to one's own cozy little island and let world revolution elsewhere take care of itself. Isn't such "revisionism" justly punished after all by the bourgeoisie?
Thirdly, Slaughter makes a clumsy attempt to deny that this whole matter of Mandel's being banned from West Germany and four other imperialist countries has anything to do with the interests of the international labor movement as a whole; for him it is only a small matter of the Fourth International itself: "Pabloites everywhere are campaigning against a decision by the W Berlin Senate ..." This again amounts to an attempt at whitewashing the imperialist culprits.
No, the ban is not a matter of interest to the "Pabloites" only. It is the whole left wing of the international labor movement that has started to "campaign" on this issue. And only blind factionalists can close their eyes to the obvious matter of common interest to all socialists and revolutionists which is involved here.
But then comes the explanation we have been waiting for, of why the imperialists should really have any interest at all to stop the activities of an "arch-revisionist" and of a "bankrupt reformist" (generally, as is well known, such persons are not stopped by imperialist governments under conditions of decaying bourgeois democracy, but rather rewarded with cabinet minister jobs):
"As imperialism ... moves rapidly into its worst-ever economic and political crisis, it must desperately suck away these middle-class elements to some centrist political force to deal with that phase of the crisis when new masses are thrown into political struggle.
"Such centrist forces cannot be sucked out of nothing as it were. Mandel is hatching out the kind of politics to fit the bill. Of course, imperialism uses the centrists in this way only as a short step on the road to the eventual fascist and dictatorial repression." [Emphasis in original.]
Here we have Slaughter swallowing the Stalinist position hook, line, and sinker! If there is international repression against Ernest Mandel and the Fourth International, this is not, as naive persons might think, because the increasing strength and influence of the Fourth International in organizing a revolutionary vanguard on a worldwide scale increasingly becomes a threat to the capitalist regime. Not at all. If the German capitalists and their right-wing Social-Democratic stooges treat Mandel not like "some sort of a celebrity descending" on their cities, but as a revolutionist who wants to overthrow capitalism and establish a soviet republic of workers councils; if they express the fear that he might strengthen a revolutionary organization of students and workers -- especially of workers, that's what they are really afraid of! -- this is all only make-belief to disorient the gullible, lead them to centrism, and prevent millions from rallying around the shining beacons of revolutionary thought and action ablaze on Clapham High Street.
No, if there is stepped-up repression against Ernest Mandel and the Fourth International, this is because the imperialists want to . . . use them against Cliff Slaughter! The victim is in a conspiracy with the victimizers, against the pure defenders of the faith, who are ignored precisely because they are the really dangerous people. It is difficult to find a more nauseating imitation of the Stalinist logic, produced by a sect which, out of habit, still calls itself Trotskyist, one wonders why.
But Slaughter has some principles left. Don't think he is in active support of imperialist repression. Perish the thought! To prove the contrary, we are treated to the following weighty piece of cant:
"Now, of course, [of course! -- PJ & TA] the Socialist Labour League is for the defence of the rights of all persons to travel without restriction, and against all arbitrary actions by the authorities in excluding individuals from universities. But we attack these infringements of elementary democratic rights by mobilizing the working class, behind whom the support of other elements can be rallied."
A bit dour, perhaps, but in essence, excellent! But then, why aren't you busy "mobilizing the working class" in defence of Comrade Mandel, Comrade Slaughter? After all, the very terms which the West German government has used to ban Mandel could be used to ban Slaughter, Healy, and all their followers from entering Germany, too. So it is not only a matter of the elementary principle of international working-class solidarity. It is even a simple matter of self-defence. But instead of lifting one little finger to "mobilize" his own members and sympathizers -- let's not speak about the working class, among whom the SLL's influence is negligible if not nil -- to defend Comrade Mandel's democratic rights, Slaughter only attacks Mandel, not the West German government and its right-wing Social-Democratic props. Slaughter is so blinded by sectarian factionalism that he cannot understand any more such elementary questions as the need for class solidarity against imperialist repression.
When Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested, the Communist International started a defence campaign for the two anarchist martyrs, not a campaign of denouncing the sins of anarchism. When repression hits a leading member of the Fourth International, and through him threatens to hit anybody calling himself a Trotskyist, Slaughter is only eager to step up his campaign of "denouncing Pabloism." The need for a defence campaign against imperialist repression doesn't reach his cold shoulder ...
The political content of his denunciation is of the same caliber and the same origin as his political method of approach. It has nothing to do with a principled discussion of the real political and organizational differences between the SLL and the Fourth International -- which are plentiful. It is just an attempt to slander and falsify an opponent's position.
The fact that Slaughter uses these tools of slander and distortion in a brazen and cynical way, by printing side by side with his own comments the very text that he tries to falsify, only shows the typical bureaucrat's contempt of his own followers and readers. He believes them to be so stupid or so fanatical that they become unable to distinguish black from white.
One example will be sufficient to illustrate the Slaughter school of systematic slander. Answering the question of a journalist from the magazine Der Spiegel as to what kind of activities revolutionists undertake to bring down the bourgeois order in an imperialist country, Mandel answers that revolutions cannot be fabricated out of the blue sky by a small band of conspirators, but that they are the result of a deep-going social crisis in existing society, which pushes millions of people onto the road of revolutionary actions. He then adds ironically: "Unless neo-capitalist society is crisis-free." But in that case why worry about revolutionary propaganda? Instead of answering this question, the journalist of Der Spiegel sidesteps towards another track and asks: But in that case (when no great revolutionary upheavals can take place because society is crisis-free) there would be no difference between a revolutionary and a reformist. Mandel answers: Even in that case, revolutionists would still keep up the struggle for a fundamental change of society, in the far future.
Now Slaughter isolates this last sentence from the whole context, in order to have his readers believe that Mandel really thinks neo-capitalist society to be crisis-free. This is, of course, a shameless lie. In the very next sentence to the one Slaughter quotes, Mandel refers to revolutionary crises with revolutionary working-class actions, occurring not in a far future, but here and now: in May 1968 in France; in autumn 1969 in Italy. He explains that under such conditions, revolutionists try to bring workers to elect soviets and to fight for a conquest of power. But Cliff Slaughter, who limits his political propaganda day-in day-out to calling for new elections for a bourgeois parliament "in order to kick out the Tories"; who doesn't say a word in this propaganda about soviets or workers councils or the overthrow of the parliamentary system; who never makes propaganda for the dictatorship of the proletariat in his proud daily paper -- except when polemicizing against the "Pabloites" -- has the nerve to add:
"Here we have the true content of the Pabloite attack on Trotskyism. General lip-service is paid to the idea of a workers' revolution and socialist solutions, but there can be no question [!] of the working class today having any revolutionary significance."
Slaughter's thought and method; his refusal to campaign for the democratic rights of political opponents in the labor movement victimized by imperialism; his systematic use of slander and falsification to replace real political debate and struggle, do not stem from the school of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky. They had nothing to do with such methods and rejected them out of hand. These methods were concocted by the famous alchemists called Stalin, Vyshinsky, and Beria. We doubt whether they become palatable by adding a sniff of English insularity and cant.
May 5, 1972