DEFENSE OF THE AMERICAN TROTSKYISTS
By Pierre Frank
(The following article has been translated from the February issue of La Quatriéme Internationale, official organ of the Parti Communiste Internationaliste, French section of the Fourth International. The original title is "Une Campagne Perfide Contre les Trotskyistes Americains."]
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In the previous issue of our newspaper, we reported the World Congress of the Fourth International which was held in December 1965. Shortly after the present issue appears, a special issue of the magazine Quatriéme Internationale will be off the press containing the political documents adopted by the World Congress. Everybody will be able to. judge then, discuss them, even answer them, if he feels so inclined.
" Whatever the case may be, we are certain that no other organization in the world will be able, any more than in the past, to offer ‘the movements of the working class and the oppressed masses of the entire world such comprehensive theory and politics, constituting an answer to the imperious demand for an overall strategy in face of the world-wide counterrevolutionary strategy directed by American imperialism. Such an international revolutionary policy can be worked out only.-by an organization of militants linked. through daily activities with all the big mass struggles, those of the workers of the cities and fields of Latin America, the African revolutionists, the Asian masses, the Spanish proletariat, the vanguard of the workers, states, etc.; that is, by an International.
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The need for an international strategy against imperialism leads to the holding of conferences like the recent one in Havana; but these conferences are burdened by confusion from all kinds of © leaderships and the weight of the leaderships of states who give precedence to their national problems and to the interests of the bureaucracy over the general interests of socialism. The Fourth International is at present the only workers organization that is .~ not linked to any bureaucracy whatsoever and that does not depend on the ‘partial or passing interests of any privileged layer.
One of the outstanding features of the World Congress in December 1965 was the consolidation of the reunification carried out at. the preceding Congress in 1963, and this in spite of all kinds of efforts to break it up or reduce it to a minimum. Certain groups here in France, that claim to be Trotskyist, have kept this up since the reunification, without answering the question raised by us in our pamphlet on constructing a revolutionary party: How can you attempt to work out Trotskyist policies outside of an international organiza~ tion, outside the Fourth International?* ©
The struggle against the Fourth International has taken a new, indirect form in recent months. For years it appeared to some people to be sufficient to denounce "Pabloism"; but this theme now appears still more run down at the heels due to the fact that the Fourth International broke with Pablo because of his publicly advocating positions rejected by the preceding World Congress. At present the Socialist Workers party, the American Trotskyist organization, has been taken as the target of these organizations hostile to the Fourth International. The SWP does not formally belong .to -the.Fourth International because of laws in the United States forbidding workers organizations to belong to an International, but it warmly greeted the 1963 reunification and it has continued to express its political agreement with the International and its policies. The attacks against the SWP are all the sourer because the people now resorting to them formerly hailed the name of this organization.
: In a painful brochure written by Stephane Just, the few pages devoted to the SWP were among the most frenzied. The effect of this brochure as a whole was exactly the contrary of -that counted on; it. was thus necessary to undertake another attack in a more adequate. way. This has just been done by Pierre Broué in vicious fashion. In l'Ecole Emancipée, the bulletin of a tendency in a teachers union, he wrote an article on the appearance of a "new left" in the United States. This was the occasion which he utilized -- in an organ of this nature and in an article with pretensions at objectivity -- to devote. himself to a perfidious and lying attack | against the SWP.. He writes:
"The Trotskyists of the SWP were not capable ~~ in contrast to the English Trotskyists of the SLL [Socialist Labour League]. -+ of utilizing and exploiting the disintegration of the {Communist J *Construire le Parti Révolutionnaire, by Pierre Frank. 51, rue d'Aboukir, Paris. May 1965. 29 pp. 2 francs [#.40]. In French only.
movement following 1956. Led: by old, often demoralized cadres, they -seem to have settled on a main’ line of finding foreign substitutes ~ ‘for revolutionary action in the’ working. class: ultra-Castroists, they - followed up with black nationalism, making of Malcolm kK a new Castro and at the same time conducting a campaign to send federal troops into the South! Sclerotic and bureaucratized, the SWP expelled, in violation of its own statutes, the leaders and founders of its youth organization, Robertson and Tim Wohlforth, each of whom. has a. small circle..."
The overwhelming majority of the readers of 1! Ecole’ Emancipée are obviously unable to follow English-language publications; Similarly they are unable to follow the internal life of the SWP, its internal: bulletins, .so that they cotld not ascertain: whether Broué's two sources of information were expelled justly or unjustly. As in this ..case, we will not argue over the comparison with the English SLL which he uses. We could: say a lot about it, but if Broué believes he can still find in the SLL the Communists who broke with the British CP in 1956, he should provide himself with a lantern.
*. We learn from him that Robertson and Wohlforth, who agree with each other only on fighting. the SWP (the question of their own dis-. pute is still a matter of argument between them), each have a small group. Yes, each one. a group not numbering more than a few dozen members. But he forgets to say -- he cannot be ignorant of it, since the American bourgeois press mentions it and his friend Healy of the -SLL is publicly disturbed about it -- that the SWP, this organization allegedly led by old, often demoralized cadres, has succeeded in winning to its own ranks and to the ranks of the Young Socialist Alliance, some hundreds of youth and that the Alliance is the strongest socialist youth organization in the American universities where it is conducting a courageous struggle against the war in Vietnam and for the freedom of the black people. Let us add, for Broué's information, that the age level of the SWP leadership has gone down considerably and that the “old, demoralized cadres" are the happiest about this.
: But Broué goes beyond all limits when he attacks the SWP politically. Take the way he simplifies the positions. of: the SWP. - According to him, the defense of the Cuban Revolution and the defense of the Negroes are "foreign substitutes for revolutionary action in >the working class." It is.unfortunate that in the United States the working class is ~- as was generally the case in. France in relation to Algeria’ at the time of the war there -- practically. indifferent to the question of Cuba, if not, alas, following behind the State Department: -~- and not much concerned about. the Negro struggle.
oe But. Broué's. attack has a political origin. te is necessary. to recall that the organization to which Broué belongs has shown that. - it never understood the Algerian question, nor the Cuban question, nor the colonial question in general. One remembers that for the hla Verité group, Messali Hadj was for a long time the quasi Bolshevik leader of the Algerian Revolution; and when it finally became conpletely clear that this champion was serving as a tool of de Gaulle, this group forgot that the Algerian people were continuing their
struggle against French imperialism without Messali Hadj. Broué and his friends probably saw support for the Algerians as a "foreign substitute for revolutionary action in the working class." It is likewise true that Broue's friends, for example the SLL, see Castro as another Batista.
As for the question of black nationalism, Broué's attack azainst the SWP testifies to ignorance in the problem of oppressed minorities; his implied policy would mean de facto subordination of the aspirations of the Negroes to tomorrow's revolutionary movement of the white proletariat; that is, stopping them sine die. Broué, for certain, is unaware that Trotsky, as early as the thirties, had a ‘presentiment of the importance of the black movement and that he foresaw it as highly probable that it would orient towards a nationalism which could possibly go as far as demanding secession. And Trotsky, far from condemning such an orientation of the Negro movement, thought that this nationalism would be very progressive. What Brové writes about sending federal troops to the South is a mutilation of the question, because the SWP is utilizing precisely the fact that the United States government is sending troops to Vietnam, to Santo Domingo, and not to the South, to explain to the Negroes that they have no other recourse but to undertake their own self-defense. In his article, Broué cites the pioneer: black in self-defense, Robert Williams, today a refugee in Cuba, forgetting to mention that he cooperated with the SWP in his actions.
Why, finally, did Broué forget in his picture of renewed political life in the United States, a phenomenon of great importance; namely, the circulation of tens of thousands of copies of Trotsky's works published in the form of pocketbooks? Why did he omit mentioning the appearance of.a notable Trotsky anthology, The Age of Permanent Revolution, edited by our comrade of the SWP, G. Novack, -and with a preface by I. ‘Deutscher?
| We coulda have understood a detailed political criticism of the SWP in the organ of the group to which Broué belongs. But to make a sneak attack in writing for an organ and a public that does not know what it is all about, while not so long ago a public debate on the tactical problems of the workers struggles was evaded, is not “very creditable and does not stand up any better than Just's brochure.
The Socialist Workers ‘party continues to carry high che panner of Trotskyism in the United States in the citadel of world capitalism. The Internationalist Communist party assures it of its complete solidarity in face of the attacks that are likewise aimed at the entire International and its sections. Attacks in the style of Just and Broué are only poor attempts to postpone the moment when their group will have to deal with genuine problems, those of velonging or not belonging to the Fourth International, those of the conditions and means of constructing mass revolutionary Marxist parties. Because the denunciation of "Pabloism" yesterday, of the SWP today, of traitors" or “worn-out" people, who are preventing the Robertsons, Justs, Broués and Healys from assembling the masses, 1s an” . Nergument™ that ‘becomes less and less impressive. - -
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