Leaders of the Workers Revolutionary Party in Britain who broke last October with longtime WRP cult figure Gerry Healy have opened a public discussion on the political and organizational degeneration of their party and on the history of the Fourth International and its place in the international workers movement today.
This public discussion was initiated with the publication of two articles in the February 7 and 15 issues of Workers Press, a weekly published in London by the wing of the WRP that broke with Healy. The February 7 article, by WRP National Secretary Michael Banda, was titled, "Twenty-seven reasons why the International Committee should be buried forthwith and the Fourth International built."
Bill Hunter, a veteran WRP leader, headlined his response in the following issue of Workers Press, "Mike Banda and the bad men theory of history." Both articles were reprinted in the March 24 issue of Intercontinental Press.
Banda's article appeared in the same issue of Workers Press that contained an explicit repudiation of the 10-year agent-baiting campaign conducted by the WRP and its U.S. satellite, the Workers League, against the U.S. Socialist Workers Party and the Fourth International. In this smear job, the WRP and WL had charged leaders of the SWP and the Fourth International with being agents of the FBI and CIA, as well as of the GPU, the Soviet Union's secret police.?
The wholesale denunciation of the Healyite slander campaign by the Workers Press wing of the WRP included a condemnation of a disruption effort against the SWP in the United States that has been relentlessly promoted by the Workers League and WRP since 1979. This involved a lawsuit against the SWP filed by Alan Gelfand, a lawyer for Los Angeles County in California. This court action remains a central part of the international harassment operation against the SWP and the Fourth International.
By renouncing the Healyite agent-baiting campaign, the WRP leaders who produce Workers Press have taken the first, necessary step toward having their views taken seriously as a legitimate part of the political debates that are occurring among revolutionists today.
The issues that Banda and Hunter address in relation to the history of the Fourth International are, in fact, part of a broader discussion taking place among those currently in the Fourth International, as well as those who were once part of it, consider it part of their continuity, and state that building it is part of their historic perspective. This discusion centers on the most fundamental questions about what the Fourth International is and what its relationship to other revolutionary currents should be.
'Proclaimed, but never built'
In his version of the history of the Fourth International, Banda does not just deal with the period since 1963 when the Healy-led Socialist Labour League (SLL), the WRP's predecessor, broke from the International. Following that break, the SLL/WRP functioned in a rump body called the International Committee of the Fourth International.
Banda's article goes back to the founding of the Fourth International in 1938 to relate what he calls a "sorry and lugubrious tale." "It must be stated emphatically, nay, categorically," he exclaims, "that the FI was proclaimed but never built. Not even in Trotsky's time was there a cadre capable of sustaining his monumental work
Since the assassination of Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky in 1940, Banda maintains, the leaders of the International have been a pack of "cowards," "capitulators, "charlatans," "petty-bourgeois dilettantes, and "fantasists." Moreover, he asserts, they were "confused."
Banda recounts one disastrous position after another allegedly taken by the leading bodies of the Fourth International, an organization "characterised by a total lack of strategy and perspective."
By the time the reader gets to the end of Banda's tortured discourse, it is far from clear why he still calls for building the Fourth International at all. He certainly doesn't seem to have his heart in it.
Banda also falsifies important chapters in the history of the SWP and the Fourth International. Although his stated goal is to refute the policies of the WRP under Healy's stewardship, he actually repeats much of the Healyite mythology about these two organizations. In order to get right into the most important political questions, however, let's set aside the correction of these distortions for a future article.
Hunter objects to Banda's "parade of despicable characters." He argues that "an immediate question must be asked: If Trotsky's programme could only attract this sorry band of adventurers, manoeuverers and repellent individuals, what is to be said for that programme?" Hunter urges that fundamental questions before the WRP be given "serious analysis and not the invective which so recently reigned in discussion in the Party."
With this suggestion on approach and tone in mind, let's enter the discussion.
To begin with, it is useful to summarize where the Fourth International came from. Neither Banda nor Hunter does this. Without taking up the International's origins, however, it is impossible to understand what it is, what its perspectives should be, and what its current challenges are.
Origins of the Fourth International
The Fourth International was founded in the 1930s by Marxist fighters from the Communist International who continued to carry out the revolutionary working-class activity that they had been engaged in since they became communists.
The Comintern had been founded in 1919 under the impetus of the October 1917 Russian revolution. It drew together the advanced detachments of the working class from many countries. Generalizing from the experiences of the Russian workers and peasants, as well as other revolutionary struggles of the time, the early congresses of the Comintern charted a course forward for working people.
After Lenin's death at the beginning of 1924, however, the Comintern increasingly came under the domination of a parasitic bureaucratic layer in the Soviet state and party apparatus, headed by Joseph Stalin. Its communist perspectives eroded throughout the rest of the decade, and by the 1930s this parasitic caste had destroyed the Comintern as an instrument of revolutionary struggle by the workers and peasants of the world.
This degeneration met stiff resistance from revolutionary fighters in the Soviet Union and many other countries. They insisted on continuing to carry out the program that had been developed in the first five years of the Comintern under Lenin's leadership. Soviet CP and Comintern leader Leon Trotsky emerged as a central figure in this fight to maintain a revolutionary internationalist course.
Tens of thousands of communists in the Soviet Union were jailed, exiled, or murdered. Internationally thousands were purged from the Communist Parties and from the International.
Finding themselves outside the International against their will, these communists continued to struggle, organizing themselves to do so on a national and international level. For those who refused to abandon the international working-class struggle, there was no other choice.
At first the orientation of these communists was to reform the International, fighting to salvage it from the Stalinist bureaucrats who had usurped leadership of their organization.
When events in the early 1930s proved that the International could no longer be reformed and was dead as a revolutionary organization, these working-class fighters continued along a communist course.
They actively participated in the class struggle and strove to build revolutionary workers parties in their countries.
Fourth International 'exists and fights'
The revolutionists who fought for the continuity of Leninism had, in fact, become the Fourth International a good number of years before there was an organization with that name. Contrary to Banda's "emphatic" and "categorical" assertion, the Fourth International was not "proclaimed."
"The Fourth International ... has no need of being 'proclaimed.' It exists and fights." That was the judgment of the principal document adopted by the 1938 founding congress of the International, "The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International" (the "Transitional Program").3
The communist fighters expelled from the Comintern by Stalin and his supporters had not started out with the idea of forming a new International. Nor were they out to establish a "Trotskyist" current against the world Stalinist movement. The Fourth International was formed out of the struggle to continue communist practice and strategy. The "Trotskyist" label was placed on these communists by the Stalinists.
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Vhat. ten. ( tional were "capable of sustaining [Trotsky's] monumental work"?
Perhaps the members of the International at that time and in subsequent years don't measure up to Banda's lofty standards. The fact remains, however, that these were the vanguard workers who refused to abandon the Bolshevik-Leninist program and continued to chart a revolutionary course for the working class.
Their ranks were not numerous. But, as the "Transitional Program" put it, "these cadres are pledges for the future. Outside of these cadres there does not exist a single revolutionary current on this planet really meriting the name. "4 With the Stalinist degeneration of the Communist International, that was the accurate assessment of the world workers' movement in 1938.
Has the Fourth International since its origins continued to be true to the line of march of the working-class vanguard, which, as Marx and Engels explained in the Communist Manifesto, has "no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole"? That is the decisive test for judging any working-class political organization. The Fourth International has clearly passed this test.
It offered a class-struggle alternative to the disastrous course carried out by the Social Democrats and Stalinists - a course that demobilized the working class and led to the Nazi takeover in Germany; that was responsible for the defeat of the revolution in Spain; that blocked the emergence of an independent labor party in the United States; and that subordinated the struggles of the oppressed peoples in the colonial and semicolonial countries to maneuvers in the framework of capitalist politics. Turn to working men and women
After the Fourth International was established as an organization in 1938, it immediately faced the challenge of the second worldwide imperialist war. Both in word and deed, the Fourth Internationalists refused to subordinate the struggles of the working class and oppressed peoples to the war aims of the imperialist ruling classes.
In a manifesto issued in May 1940, the Fourth International declared that it "turns not to the governments who have dragooned the peoples into the slaughter, nor to the bourgeois politicians who bear the responsibility for these governments, nor to the labor bureaucracy which supports the warring bourgeoisie. The Fourth International turns to the working men and women, the soldiers and sailors, the ruined peasants and the enslaved colonial peoples. "S
This policy guided the activities of the Fourth International and its sections during the war. Banda charges that the members of the International were disoriented during the war, but he offers not a scrap of evidence to prove this contention.
The facts show that in Europe Fourth Internationalists actively participated in the resistance movement against Nazi occupation as proletarian internationalists. In occupied France, for example, Fourth Internationalists collaborated with fellow revolutionists from Germany to publish Worker and Soldier, a journal directed to German workers in uniform.
Many Fourth International militants in Europe were executed or imprisoned in concentration camps for their political activities during the war.
In the United States, working-class leaders of the SWP were jailed for refusing to abandon their class-struggle opposition to the war aims of Wall Street and Washington.
In the colonial world, most notably in Indochina and India, revolutionary Marxists refused to subordinate the struggle for independence to the war policies of their colonial masters, as the Stalinists and Social Democrats did.
Banda chose badly in selecting the Fourth
International's conduct during World War li to find fault with its record. This, in fact, was one of the proudest chapters in the International's history.
Hunter too recognizes that "any criticism of the Trotskyist movement during the war based on a serious objective survey must accept that, generally, the Trotskyist movement conducted a struggle against imperialist war and upheld the principles of the Fourth International."
Hunter poses an alternative explanation to Banda's of the historical development of the Fourth International. He argues that "the biggest weakness in the Fourth International was that it was not able to develop theory in relationship with a mass movement." This factor, he contends, helps explain the International's failure to win mass influence.
It is true that no section of the Fourth International has yet become a mass revolutionary workers' party or developed mass influence in the workers' movement in any country. It is inaccurate, however, to say that the political development of the International has therefore been divorced from a "relationship with the mass movement."
Since the end of World War Il there have been titanic struggles of the working class and oppressed peoples that have weakened imperialism and resulted in historic new conquests for the world socialist revolution. The Fourth International has been challenged to learn from the unfolding struggles, to test previous theories against the living reality, and to draw new generalizations and lessons from the experience of workers and peasants around the world.
The Fourth International did not stand aside from these revolutionary battles. It actively followed and supported them, and its cadres participated in these battles where they could.
The communist fighters of the Fourth International should be judged on how well they have understood and advanced along the historic line of march of the working class in these struggles and further clarified its strategic course toward political power.
Let's take a brief look at the record.
Historic turning point
The Soviet victory at Stalingrad in 1943 marked a historic turning point for the working people of the world. It signified the beginning of a shift in the world relationship of class forces in favor of the exploited and oppressed against the capitalist rulers — an overall shift that has continued to this day.
The postwar overturn of capitalism in Eastern Europe was a direct consequence of the victory of the Soviet Union over German imperialism.
The Soviet victory was decisive in inspiring Yugoslav workers and peasants to carry their hard-fought struggle against German occupation and the profascist puppet regime in Croatia to a successful conclusion. They established their own government, which by 1947 had expropriated the capitalist class and established a workers' state. The Yugoslav revolution was the first successful workers' and peasants' revolution since the Russian revolution.
In other East European countries and in the northern part of the Korean Peninsula the advance of the Soviet army led to the collapse of capitalist governments and their replacement with Stalinist-led governments. By the end of 1948, the capitalist classes had been expropriated in these countries.
Contrary to Banda's assertion that the Fourth International failed to appreciate these developments, it considered them to be of the utmost importance. The International followed closely the unfolding experiences of working people in these countries.
This extension of the socialist revolution had not occurred in the manner anticipated by the International, and thus challenged its cadres to work their way through to a clear understanding of these events.
At first there were different evaluations of these changes and some false starts in explaining them. Through collective discussion, however, a generally common view was reached. Recognition of the facts prevailed over preconceptions and abstract schemas. The facts showed that workers' states, albeit bureaucratically deformed, had been established.
The revolutionary communists in the Fourth International recognized these as conquests of the international working class and have consistently defended these workers' states against imperialism, in the same way that they defend the Soviet Union.
Because of the leading role of the Soviet bureaucracy and Stalinist parties in these social overturns, however, none of them brought forward new forces for expanding the revolutionary vanguard internationally. In fact, these victories temporarily strengthened the Stalinist bureaucracy and the influence of Stalinism.
When the Yugoslav Communist Party, headed by Josip Broz Tito, broke with Moscow in 1948, the Fourth International responded on the basis that the Yugoslav party or a section of it might be headed on a revolutionary course away from Stalinism. The International recognized the great importance that such a development would have for the working-class vanguard internationally and defended the Tito current against Stalin. The Fourth International did not stand passively by, but actively attempted to influence Yugoslav communists toward revolutionary internationalism.
By 1950 the Titoists' refusal to clearly oppose U.S. military intervention in Korea, adopting instead a stand of "neutrality, showed that they were not headed in a progressive direction but remained mired in the nationalist, class-collaborationist outlook in which they had been trained in the Stalinist-led Comintern.
The break of the Yugoslav CP with Moscow, however, was a preview of the fissures in
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an Education for Socialists Publication available from Pathfinder Press. 220
Cuban troops in Angola. "The Cuban communists have shown in practice their commitment to proletarian internationalism."
the Stalinist monolith that would widen in the following decade, undermining its position. China and Indochina
Following World War Il there was also an unprecedented rise of the colonial masses against their imperialist masters. Colony after colony won its political independence. By the mid-1950s the workers and peasants in China and the northern part of Vietnam had not only thrown off imperialist domination, but swept away capitalist rule.
Here again Banda erroneously claims that the Fourth International "totally" failed to appreciate "the world-historic significance" of these revolutions.
A resolution adopted by the International Executive Committee of the Fourth International in 1952 — after the Chinese workers and peasants had taken political power but before they had expropriated the capitalist class - stated: "Having fully assimilated the decisive historical importance of the outbreak of the Third Chinese Revolution, the Fourth International defends it unconditionally against all its class enemies. It denounces the maneuvers and the economic, political and military pressures of imperialism aiming to prevent the stabilization of Mao's power and in fact preparing the counter-revolutionary war of intervention in
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China.
The resolution urged "the Chinese militants of the Fourth International [to] integrate themselves completely in the mass movement of their country...
Notes
1. For an account of this split, see "Shattering of a British sect: the politics behind the Workers Revolutionary Party's degeneration," by Doug Jenness, in Intercontinental Press, Dec. 2, 1985.
2. Articles and documents on this repudiation from Workers Press were reprinted in the March 10 issue of IP, along with an article, "Giant blow to agentbaiting campaign: Workers Press" repudiates Healy's big lie," by Doug Jenness.
3. Leon Trotsky, The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1977), p. 151.
4. Ibid, p. 152.
5. Writings of Leon Trotsky: 1939-40 (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973), p. 183.
6. For documents on this discussion, see "Class, Party, and State and Eastern European Revolution,