[The following letter, dated March 26, 1977, is by the United Secretariat of the Fourth International. It was written in reply to a letter from C. Slaughter of the "International Committee of the Fourth International," the text of which appears on the opposite page.]
To: "International Committee of the Fourth International"
Dear Comrade Slaughter,
Your letter of February 7, 1977, to the United Secretariat of the Fourth International has puzzled us because of its contradictory nature.
First as to the facts. The purpose of the January 14 meeting, to which you refer, was to defend workers democracy against the use of frame-ups and slanders; and in particular to denounce the campaign being waged by leaders of the Workers Revolutionary Party charging Joseph Hansen and George Novack with being "accomplices of the GPU" and other leaders of the Socialist Workers Party and the Fourth International with helping them in "covering up for the GPU."
In face of the facts, you state: "On January 14 last you called a meeting in London with the declared purpose of answering the demand of the International Committee for a commission of inquiry into the security questions surrounding Trotsky's assassination and GPU penetration of the Trotskyist movement."
Your statement is obviously intended to help create the impression that by participating in the January 14 meeting we responded in some way to your demand to help set up a commission to "investigate" Hansen, Novack, and anyone else the central leadership of the WRP might decide to smear for factional reasons. That appears to be why you refer to previous letters you have written on this subject and why you leave out any reference to the public articles written during this same period by Hansen and Novack exposing the frame-up methods used against them.
Thus you pave the way for the assertion: "What took place at the London meeting has had the positive result of broadening considerably the interest in the workers' movement on these questions."
Does this praise from you for the results obtained by the protest meeting mark the beginning of a change in attitude toward us and our efforts to call to account the perpetrators of the frame-up campaign against Hansen and Novack? We would welcome such a change.
However, if a change in line is involved, your letter stands in glaring contradiction to the line being followed by the News Line, which in advance of the meeting condemned the participants and pictured the scheduled protest rally as a "Platform of Shame." After the event, the News Line escalated the epithet to "A Night of Slander."
In accordance with this way of picturing things, your cothinkers in the United States published an article in the February 25 Bulletin under the pen name "Frank Williams," describing the January 14 rally in defense of workers democracy and against the use of frame-ups and slanders as a meeting "in which revisionist leaders participated in a Platform of Shame to whitewash the GPU and its accomplices, Hansen and Novack."
It appears to us that you are caught in a considerable contradiction. The News Line and the Bulletin smear us with the false charge that we participated in a public meeting "to whitewash the GPU"; at the same time you send us a friendly letter commending our role at the meeting.
Perhaps you disagree with the News Line and the Bulletin. In that case, as a Trotskyist you are duty bound to open a vigorous struggle against the frame-up they use. But if you agree with the stance of the Bulletin and the News Line, you place yourself as a Trotskyist (which you claim to be) in the unprincipled position of addressing "accomplices of the GPU" and offering to join with them in setting up a parity committee to inquire into the crimes of the GPU. Did Trotsky address "dear comrades Yezhov and Vyshinsky" with the aim of peacefully discussing with them the crimes of the GPU that lay behind the Moscow Trials?
Whatever explanation may be offered for the contradictory nature of your letter, we want to stress our stand: We hold that the use of physical violence, of slanders and lies against opponents, has the effect of a deadly cancer in the labor movement which must [be] eradicated at all costs.
The Stalinists bear the prime responsibility for using such methods in the labor movement. But others share the guilt. Social Democrats, reformists, Peronists, and other trade-union bureaucrats and labor fakers have sinned in this respect again and again. Even petty sects have shown that they are not immune to committing such abominations.
We will fight against such methods mercilessly, wherever we encounter them. They are poison for the working class. They disrupt the normal functioning of workers democracy within working-class organizations. They block clarification of political issues for the working class. They stand in the way of development of class consciousness. They discredit the labor movement and give aid and comfort to the class enemy. They are obstacles to the proletarian class struggle, obstacles to unity of action of the proletariat against the class enemy, obstacles to building genuinely revolutionary parties, obstacles to the socialist revolution. That is how we see them. That is why we fight them.
They can serve no proletarian or revolutionary-socialist purpose, regardless of the justifications advanced by practitioners of such methods: "security," "the need for secrecy," "in the class war all means are justified," and similar threadbare bits of sophistry. Since its foundation, the Fourth International has waged war against these variations of the lie.
We shall win that war against the Stalinists as well as against the reformists and all their petty imitators.
Why did an organization like yours, which is of Trotskyist origin, and which in its first years was educated in a spirit of irreconcilable hostility to all methods that violate proletarian democracy, degenerate to such a point that it now employs the methods of bureaucratic gangsterism against its political opponents?
We believe that the origin of your course can be traced back to your refusal to participate in the principled reunification of 1963 which brought together the overwhelming majority of the world Trotskyist movement inside the Fourth International. You made a sectarian attempt to justify an isolationist course: first, by distorting the positions of the reunited movement; secondly, by exaggerating the real political differences that still separated your current from the bulk of the world Trotskyist movement.
Besides that you banked on organizational successes that would be achieved by your grouping and on organizational disasters that would shatter all others who proclaimed they stood for Trotskyism.
The reality turned out to be different from the schema you projected. Following 1968, the Fourth International expanded, so that despite some setbacks it now includes parties and groups in sixty countries. In contrast, the rump "International Committee," which you set up in 1963, ended in dismal failure and a series of irreparable splits.
In accordance with the dialectics of sectarian self-justification and dead-end factionalism, you escalated your efforts to seal off your members from the political influence of the Fourth International. The objective was to block any real political debate inside your own organization over your isolationist course, your factional reasons for remaining outside the mainstream world Trotskyism, your withdrawal into an insular shell, and your discreditment among the British workers.
It is the dialectic of dead-end factionalism, over which you seem to have lost all control, that brought you to include the use of physical violence against your opponents. We have repeatedly pointed to the case of Comrade Ernest Tate. He had to be punished for the "criminal provocation" of selling a pamphlet outside one of your public meetings in 1966.
A similar case occurred on October 17, 1976, in Sydney, Australia. David Deutschmann of the Socialist Workers Party and Keith Olerhead of the Spartacist League were badly beaten by your cothinkers of the Socialist Labour League. Deutschmann was guilty of the "criminal provocation" of distributing literature near the entrance of an SLL meeting. Olerhead was guilty of the "criminal provocation" of carrying a camera.
In the same pattern, you slandered Comrade Bala Tampoe, the respected revolutionary workers leader of Sri Lanka, as an "associate of the CIA."
Ernest Mandel, who has been banned from five imperialist countries for his revolutionary Marxist political views, is another of your targets. The latest slander is that he abandoned his responsibilities in the leadership of the Fourth International to become a "Cambridge professor." There is not a word of truth in these assertions.
In the case of Comrades Hansen and Novack, the very grossness of the slander directed at them-"accomplices of the GPU"-helps reveal its purpose. What means could more strongly prejudice members of the WRP from considering the of two internationally political views known Trotskyists who have spent a lifetime defending the program of Trotskyism and building the revolutionary movement in a principled struggle against imperialism and Stalinism?
All these slanders and lies have but one purpose; to prevent your members from asking a simple question: how is it possible that in the four imperialist countries where there is currently a revolutionary upsurge of the working class, which have witnessed years of rising, lively and sometimes explosive class struggle against capitalism, that is, France, Spain, Italy and Portugal, the self-styled "orthodox Trotskyists of the International Committee" have gained no organized force of any significance, have built no party worthy of the name, play no role in the class struggle, have no roots in the working class, are indeed ignored by the proletariat? Whereas the alleged "liquidators" and "revisionist" Trotskyists of the Fourth International, which you say refuse to build independent revolutionary parties, have won thousands of people to the Trotskyist program, have built strong Trotskyist organizations (including a daily paper in France, which has a bigger press run than News Line), have started to play a real role in the class struggle, and are beginning to successfully challenge the treacherous Stalinist and social-democratic misleaders of the proletariat?
You ought to take an objective view of the breakup of the "International Committee." It represented an insular concept— that through the success of a group of Trotskyists on a largely national scale an international can be constructed. But this concept is a political, theoretical and organizational absurdity. In the long run it leads to degeneration of the group adhering to it. A living example has been provided by the evolution of the WRP. It is high time to end the insular course you have been following and to reorient towards the Fourth International.
We will watch with interest for evidence that you have decided to give up your present campaign of slanders and lies against Comrades Hansen, Novack, and other leaders of the world Trotskyist movement, and to make public amends for vilifying them. Until we see such evidence, however, we have nothing further to discuss or to negotiate with you.
Comradely yours, for the United Secretariat of the Fourth International,
Charles Michaloux