What a tedious chore it is to have to follow the "international life" of the Lambertists, their friends, and their ex-friends! You have to force yourself to read Correspondence Internationale, a "discussion bulletin" filled with virtually unreadable articles devoid of all interest. But nevertheless it must be done, in order to keep track of what is happening to those who, for a good twenty years, have claimed to be reconstructing the Fourth International.
It will be remembered that in 1971 there was a break between Lambert's OCI-AJS [Organisation Communiste Internationaliste-Alliance des Jeunes pour le Socialisme- Internationalist Communist Organization-Alliance of Youth for Socialism] and the British SLL [Socialist Labour League] led by Gerry Healy. The former wanted to "reconstruct" the Fourth International, while the latter wanted to "construct" it. Each side accused the other of "Pabloism."! The result is that there are now two rival "International Committees.
In July 1972 an "international preconference" was held by the committee set up by Lambert and those who lined up with him after the split with Healy. A general political resolution was voted on at this conference. The vote on this resolution was taken only after separating out certain sections of it, with the following result: The seetion on Latin America was not voted on by the Latin Americans, and the section on Palestine was not voted on by the Israelis.
From the first issue [of Correspondence Internationale] after the conference we learn that the members from the Eastern European countries had not wanted to press their differences on the political level. Further on we see that this committee (Lambert's "International Committee"] is bound only - still - by decisions that are arrived at unanimously.
In issue No. 6 of Correspondence Internationale, which reported the votes taken at this preconference, we find a particularly virulent article by Stephan Just [ a leading OCI member] against the Ligue des Révolutionnaires
Socialistes Hongrois
[LRSH - League of Hungarian Revolutionary Socialists] and the Comité d'Organisation des Communistes d'Europe de l'Est [CO— Committee for the Organization of East European Communists]. In issue No. 7 of this bulletin, which has just come out, we read:
"The political positions developed by Varga and the CO of East Europe, like their practice, represent an open capitulation to Stalinism, a complete break with the program and principles of the Fourth International. ... [The OCI] takes responsibility for breaking all political relations with the LRSH and the CO of East Europe" (page 2).
The issue contains two articles - one by Just, "A Political Passport," which vehemently denounces the aforementioned groups and especially their spokesman, Varga, who is also a member of the OCI's Central Committee and Political Bureau; another by Varga, entitled "For the Maintenance of the International Committee."3
Renaming a Phony Committee
The Healy-Lambert polemic dealt with certain political differences (over the workers' united front, electoral candidacies, Lora's policy in Bolivia), plus a little philosophical spice added in by Healy. On the other hand, in the Just-Varga polemic, it is literally impossible to find the slightest expression of differences, whether on the international political and economic situation as a whole, or on some particular aspect of it, or on the policy that either group recommends following.
The outside world does not exist for these people. These articles deal only with the mutual relations among members of the committee, with its functioning, and with the "Pabloist" disease allegedly ravaging it. (We shall speak about this further on.) The discussion turns on the fact that the preconference decided to replace the "International Committee," which had convoked it, with an "Organizing Committee for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International," composed of the same elements (minus Varga, after the split). Varga, on the other hand, declared for retaining the "International Committee." The many pages that the two sides devote to this point allow us to see, in an indistinct manner, that Varga advocates a smaller committee than does Just. But that's all.
In any case, yesterday Lambert and Healy broke over the question of whether the Fourth International had to be "constructed" or "reconstructed." Today, Just and Varga are breaking over the question of whether the "International Committee" must be preserved or renamed. Byzantine spats of sectarians coiling around each other! What is this "International Committee" that the fight is all about? Read what Just himself has to say:
"... it [the International Committee] never functioned as and never was organized as the Fourth International must be. ... At best it functioned as a federation; it had no congress, no executive, no budget. In principle, discipline was limited to the application of unanimous decisions, which were nevertheless not always respected. ... It must be told like it is: The IC was never a central leadership, a centralized and centralizing international leadership. ... After the SWP [the U.S. Socialist Workers party] joined the International Secretariat in 1963 and formed the United Seeretariat with it, the SLL progressively moved away; it hampered the IC's functioning and wound up by perpetrating a split, taking with it half the IC's organizations. ..." (page 21).
Who could better demonstrate than Just does in these lines that whatever its name or goal (construction, reconstruction, or re-reconstruction of the Fourth International), this committee was nothing but, and its successors will be nothing but, phony comittees?
The 'Pabloism' Psychosis
We will not go into the mutual organizational accusations, which cannot be verified from the outside. And we will pass over the extremely numerous insults exchanged. One central thread runs through the whole discussion: once again, "Pabloism." As Lambert and Healy did less than a year ago, Just and Varga accuse each other of "Pabloism."
"... the forming of an East European superparty of political revolution. This is nothing but throwing up Pablo's vomit under another form" (Just, Correspondence Internationale, No. 7, p. 10).
"... the OCI remains contaminated by this Pabloite past of the Fourth
" (Varga, Corre-
International. ...
spondence Internationale, No. 7, p. 54).
Each describes a "Pabloism" (without Pablo, who has become a phantom) that supposedly first destroyed the Fourth International as a united, centralized organization in 1952, and then allegedly continued its foul deeds obsessively within the International Committee that was created to combat it and continue the existence and the work of the Fourth International. "Pabloism" is said to have led first to the departure of the SWP, then to Healy's break, and finally to Varga's. Will this "Pabloism" never stop?
To these people Pabloism is a perseveration, an obsession. Their discussions - and this is what makes their articles unreadable — are nothing but a sort of perpetual effort to define it:
"Reformism, Stalinism, Pabloism are only particularized forms of the 'pres- April 9, 1973
sure of imperialism (of the bourgeoisie) on the proletariat... • The Kremlin bureaucracy is a special social layer, but it is organically tied to the world bourgeoisie... it embodies the unfinished bourgeois conterrevolution inside the workers state. ... The epicenter theory of revolution so dear to the Pabloites. ..." (Just, p. 11-12).
"We cannot accept that the roots of Pabloism are a 'conception,' a subtoward jectivist-objectivist attitude history..• • Pabloism is conceivable only in relation to the historic and worldwide battle between Bolshevism and Stalinism. ... It is thus the agent of Stalinism, since it is the natural product of Stalinism's destructive work against Bolshevism..• The OCT's saying that document winds up 'Pabloism is not worth very much as a political force.' This is false, for it is the agent of Stalinism, to which its life is tied, and Stalinism is not yet dead" (Varga, pp. 41 and 43).
And so it goes for whole pages. For them, Pabloism is a demon. Reality has been lost sight of, and their detached "thought" revolves around itself. The Justs and the Vargas who want to reconstruct the "Fourth International" have become prisoners of a mythical "Pabloism" that they use to continually discover in each other's ponderous pronouncements a means by which they can split apart every time disagreement appears in their ranks. Is this still politics? Are we not entitled to view it as a manifestation of a paranoid psychosis?
Each to His Place in History
The disease-for a disease it is — also shows itself in each one's tendency to believe himself the center of the universe. For Varga, the "International Committee" did not begin to become really Trotskyist until the SWP left it and the Varga group joined up:
"This period was concluded by a qualitative change in the IC between 1962 and 1963. It was marked by two important events. The first was the break of the SWP, which in 1962 rejoined the Pabloites to form the 'United Secretariat' after a 'reunification' congress. On the other side, parallel with this clarification and its conclusion, in 1963 the LRSH joined the IC. The change was very important. There was a deeper understanding of Pabloism and, on this basis, an alteration in the international struggle. ... A qualitative change occurred" (Varga, p. 48).
For Just, the truth can only be otherwise:
"History has given the OCI a special place in the reconstruction of the Fourth International" (p. 29).
Still worse, Varga was supposedly never a Trotskyist; he supposedly only "camped. inside the OCI," where he never worked openly.
"The OCI and the IC had to be used; they had to be placed at the service of this elite that came from 'the coun tries that have expropriated capital.' As hard as it may be, we have to look reality in the face: For them at bottom, the OCI was a chicken to be plucked. It was natural that one day or another they would break with the OCI, which now becomes their declared enemy after having been the milk cow they utilized" (pp. 28-29).
The chicken for the plucking was a milk cow! Thus we end with the only moment of joy Just has provided us in all his work to "reconstruct the Fourth International."
Notes
1. See Quatrieme Internationale, No. 2, April 1972, "La scission entre Lambert et Healy." [Available in English in Intercontinental Press, March 6, 1972, p. 242, "'Construct' or 'Reconstruct' the Fourth International?"]
2. See Correspondence Internationale, No.
6 (October 1972).
3. For the sake of simplicity, we will refer from now on to Varga when talking about the CO of East Europe and the LRSH.