Third Period Healyism (1971)

Workers Vanguard No. 3 (December 1971)

Third Period Healyism:

LEARN TO READ - LEARN TO THINK

The SLL-WL, seeking to make factional capital of the disastrous policy of the Bolivian POR, adopted a sectarian posture which only mud-the waters and sows confusion before serious is seeking to understand the crucial lesof the Bolivian defeat. Prominent among the Healyite charges of class treason heaped upon Guillermo Lora of the Bolivian POR was this from Wohlorth in his 30 August Bulletin:

"Together with the Stalinists the POR supported the position of threatening a general strike and military action in defense of Torres!" [emphasis in original]

Such is Wohlforth's conception of treachery against the working class. The most charitable interpretation is that Cde. Wohiforth was sorely pressed for time in grinding out turgid copy for the weekly Bulletin. More likely, Wohlforth didn't know that he had scrapped a basic Leninist tactic for defeating counterrevolution and making proletarian revolution. In his self-proclaimed fight for the continuity of the Fourth International, Wohlforth would do well to re-establish continuity with the views of Trotsky:

The party came to the October uprising.... through a series of stages. At the time of the April 1917 demonstration, a section of the Bolsheviks brought out the slogan: 'Down with the provisional government!' The Central Committee immediately straightened out the ultraleftists. Of course we should popularize the necessity of overthrowing the provisional government; but to call the workers into the streets under that slogan-this we cannot do, for we ourselves are a minority in the working class. If we overthrow the provisional government under these conditions, we will not be able to take its place, and consequently we will help the counterrevolution. We must patiently explain to the masses the antipopular character of this government, before the hour for its overthrow has struck, Such was the position of the party....

"Two months later, Kornilov rose against the provisional government. In the struggle against Kornilov, the Bolsheviks occupied the frontline positions. Lenin was then in hiding. Thousands of Bolsheviks were in the jails. The workers, soldiers, and sailors demanded the liberation of their leaders and of the Bolsheviks in general. The provisional government refused. Should not the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks have addressed an ultimatum to the government of Kerensky?-free the Bolsheviks immediately and withdraw the disgraceful accusation of service to the Hohenzollerns - and, in the event of Kerensky's refusal, have refused to fight against Kornilov? This is probably how the Central Committee of Thaelmann-Remmele-Neumann would have acted. But this is not how the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks acted. Lenin wrote at the time: 'It would have been the most profound error to think that the revolutionary proletariat is capable, so to speak, out of "revenge" upon the SRs and Mensheviks for their support of the crushing of the Bolsheviks, the assassinations on the front, and the disarming of the workers, of "refusing" to support them against the counterrevolution, Such a way of putting the question would have meant, first of all, the carrying over of petty-bourgeois conceptions of morality into the proletariat (because for the good of the cause the proletariat will always support not only the vacillating petty bourgeoisie but also the big bourgeoisie); in the second place, it would have been-and this is most important-a petty-bourgeois attempt to cast a shadow, by "moralizing," over the political essence of the matter....

"It is precisely this 'petty-bourgeois moralizing' which Thaelmann & Co. engage in when, in justification of their own turn, they begin to enumerate the countless infamies committed by the leaders of the Social Democracy."
("Against National Communism," reprinted in The Struggle Against Fascism in
Germany)

Wohlforth is counting - not for the first time - on the ignorance of his supporters. He hopes that his own "petty-bourgeois moralizing," cataloguing the horrors of bourgeois regimes and the crimes of the reformists who participate in them, will cover his inability to handle them. Trotsky's devastating critique of the policies of the Stalinists and ultra-lefts in pre-Hitler Germany, "conducting politics with blown-out lanterns," applies with equal precision to the "Trotskyist" Wohlforth. More from The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany:

“One might have said, 'For Bolsheviks, Kornilovism begins only with Kornilov. But isn't Kerensky a Kornilovite? Isn't he crushing the peasants by means of punitive expeditions? Doesn't he organize lockouts? Doesn't Lenin have to hide underground? And all this we must put up with?'

"... I can't think of a single Bolshevik rash enough to have advanced such arguments. But were he to be found, he would have been answered something after this fashion. We accuse Kerensky of preparing for and facilitating the coming of Kornilov to power. But does this relieve us of the duty of rushing to repeal Kornilov's attack? We accuse the gatekeeper of leaving the gates ajar for the bandit. But must we therefore shrug our shoulders and let the gates go hang?' Since, thanks to the toleration of the Social Democracy, Bruening's government has been able to push the proletariat up to its knees in capitulation to fascism, you arrive at the conclusion that up to the knees, up to the waist, or over the head-isn't it all one thing? No, there is some difference, Whoever is up to his knees in a quagmire can still drag himself out. Whoever is in over his head, for him there is no returning."

For the Smarter Ones

On "critical support" advocated by Lenin "as a rope supports a hanged man," Wohlforth says:

"Is it necessary to point out that Lenin was referring to support to social democratic parties and not to bourgeois governments and certainly not to military dictators?"

Correct, But Lenin was referring to political support, not military defense against counterrevolution – which is at issue in the "military action in defense of Torres" for which Wohlforth condemns Lora. Leninists defend the policy of fighting militarily alongside Stalinist, social-democratic, and even bourgeois forces against fascist or rightest military uprising, while maintaining the complete independence of the working-class movement. That is the whole lesson of the Kornilov affair, and of the policy Trotsky urged to save the German workers from Nazism. But Wohlforth apparently cannot understand the difference between a policy of unified military defense with political independence and military defense with political capitulation to alien classes and class collaborators.

Further, Wohlforth's acknowledgement of Lenin's policy of critical political support to reformist working-class parties-which is not the issue in the case of military defense of the bourgeois Torres regime against the right – is peculiar in its own way, since Wohlforth (in sharp contrast to his past positions) is recently on record as refusing to engage in united front political action with Stalinists, particularly Maoists. Are the Stalinists worse than the social democrats, Cde. Wohlforth? If you claim they are, you are in your haste to score cynical factional points embracing a "method" which Trotsky ceaselessly fought against: Stalinophobia. Wohlforth's position against any common action with Stalinists is blind sectarianism, the obverse of the U. Sec. capitulation to such currents, reminiscent of Stalin's own "Theory of Social Fascism" according to which the Communists were ordered to avoid any common action with the Social Democrats, who were held to be as bad as the Nazis. When will the Healyites openly label their current position the “Theory of Social Stalinism" or "Third Period Healyism"?

The POR must, through unsparing criticism of their own history and scrapping the centrist program leadership which led to the defeats in 1953 and 1971, discover the Leninist road to power (see article on page 3, "Centrist Debacle in Bolivia"), They can expect no help from the Healyites shouting their Leninist orthodoxy and "continuity" to cover their limitless opportunism, blind sectarianism and ignorance.

IC Fraud Explodes (1971)

Workers Vanguard No. 3 (December 1971)

RECONSTRUCT THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL!

The "International Committee," which for nearly two decades proclaimed itself the embodiment of authentic revolutionary Trotskyism opposed to the Pabloist revisionism of the "United Secretariat," has now crumbled under the weight of years of gross political deception perpetrated against the international Trotskyist movement. The IC combination sought to present itself as a political tendency but was in fact a rotten bloc between the political bandits of the Socialist Labour League of Britain and the left centrists of the Organisation Communiste Internationaliste of France. Years of jockeying for hegemony within the IC while seeking to preserve the criminal fiction of basic programmatic agreement came to ahead as the OCI increasingly gained the whip hand, especially by the affiliation to the IC of the Partido Obrero Revolucionario of Bolivia, which was lined up from the first with the OCI against the SLL. The IC has finally broken apart completely in open rupture, with the OCI-POR on one side and the SLL (and its U.S. sycophants, the Workers League) on the other. The split in the IC -- together with the increasingly strained relations within its major international competitor, the United Secretariat -- represents the fragmentation into chaotic chunks of the organizational configurations of ostensible Trotskyism which haveexisted essentially since 1953.

The SLL-OCI split is at once inevitable, unprincipled and opportune. Its inevitability was obvious to anyone familiar with the wide political distance separating Gerry Healy's SLL from the OCI of Pierre Lambert, joined in agreement not to disagree. The internationalist masquerade thinly concealed the reality of an unprincipled bloc between two power centers with keen competing appetites for satellites. The split, accomplished by a calculated SLL-WL provocation over the issue of the policies of Guillermo Lora's POR of Bolivia, is as unprincipled as was the erstwhile posture of unity. The split can be of great objective assistance in rebuilding the Fourth International of Leon Trotsky, by breaking unprincipled combinations as a prerequisite for political clarification and internal political struggle within national groupings previously insulated by the comforting assurance of "internationalism" (i. e. membership in one of the unprincipled international blocs).

But the rebuilding of the Fourth International does not proceed automatically from the collapse of the ersatz, revisionist and centrist conglomerations. The possibilities for revolutionary regroupment in authentic democratic centralist international tendencies defined by programmatic cohesion are sharply enhanced in the present period of heightened class struggle and growing instability in the imperialist world order; but the dangers of new unprincipled combinations built upon congruent appetite rather than principle likewise increase; only a vigorous fight by the revolutionary Trotskyists can prevent the creation ofsome new centrist swamp to trap and disillusion militants and breed revisionist confusion.

Healyite Provocation

The IC split Was precipitated by the British and U. S. Healyites' public attack on the policies pursued in Bolivia by the POR in the events which culminated in the August rightist military coup, The denunciation, appearing in the U.S. for the first time in the 30 August issue of the WL Bulletin, was a device for accomplishing quickly the desired break with the increasingly powerful OCI wing. By 8 November the Bulletin was able to print documents confirming the split, with the SLL-WL and smaller associates claiming to be the majority.

According to the Healyites, however, the "real" issue is not Bolivia. Bolivia's a "smokescreen''; the real issue is Essen, the youth conference called by the OCI in July 1971, during which the two centers of the same "international" voted against each other's motions. In a sense Healy is right -- for reasons which hardly, redound to his credit! Healy, accustomed to the organizational whip hand in the IC, was understandably chagrined to find himself opposed and outvoted by the OCI supporters; perhaps the unkindest cut of all was the presence (afterwards apologized for by the French) of a Spartacist League observer. Having lost organizational control, the Healyites determined upon a split, and chose to strike anorthodox Leninist pose over Bolivia as an excuse for a precipitous break. No, Bolivia was not the"real" issue, Comrade Healy; that it was not is shown by your own egregious opportunism over popular frontism in Ceylon and Chile, as documented below. It was only when the POR's policies came to their inevitably disastrous fruition in a rightist coup, and when the SLL-WL needed a factional stick to beat the OCI-POR, that the Healyite bandits rediscovered Trotskyism for Bolivia. In this they are strikingly reminiscentof their supposed polar opposites, the Hansen-SWP wing of the United Secretariat, which suddenly remembered Leninist orthodoxy in order to polemicize against the petty-bourgeois guerrillaist adventurism of Mandel-Maitan.

Will the Real IC Please Stand Up?

That the main impetus for the split was a power fight can be seen in the hilarious gyrations of Tim Wohlforth and his Workers League over the POR -- not over its politics, but over the question of its putative IC membership. In the 19 July Bulletin the POR, then riding high, was described simply as the "Bolivian section of the International Committee." By 30 August the connection between the POR and the IC had been disappeared:

"...Lora was carrying forward a political course begun over a decade ago, from which he has consistently refused to veer. At every point this course has received support within the Fourth International or forces claiming to represent the Fourth International.... "

If the reader knew who the suddenly organizationally anonymous Lora was -- well, okay. If not, Wohlforth wasn't telling.

The United Secretariat's Intercontinental Press was, of course, delighted to be able to point out that the man Wohlforth was denouncing was a member of Wohlforth's own IC. On 4 October the Bulletin attempted to reply to the charges of unprincipled combinationism and sectarianism, but did not deny the POR 's affiliation although such a denial would have been the most effective answer to the attack. But the 24 October SLL-WL statement declares that the POR "is not a section of the International Committee." The OCI has consistently claimed that it is. The treatment of this question -- at first boasting of the link with the influential POR, then ignoring the connection, then not denying it when asserted by the United Secretariat, then denying it later when a Healyite "majority" in the split is needed -- not only casts doubt on the present SLL-WL claim but, much more importantly, illustrates the utter hollowness of the IC pretense of Leninist internationalism. A prerequisite for any genuine organization, obviously, is knowing who is in it! Nothing illustrates more clearly the rottenness of the IC -- bordering on organizational non-existence, which claimed to be an international (and the Fourth International, at that) -- than its inability to agree on its own membership.

In fact, the IC never even managed to agree on its own name. According to the SLL, it was "the IC of the Fourth International"; the OCI has always called it "the IC for the reconstruction of the Fourth International." Two fundamentally different evaluations of the very nature of the IC were expressed in these difference over nomencllture: the British held the IC to be the simple, linear political and organizational continuity of the international founded by Trotsky; the French insisted that the international had been destroyed by Pabloist revisionism and the central international task of Trotskyists was to wage a struggle for its rebuilding. This difference was debated the 1966 London IC Conference and an internal exchange occurred between the SLL and OCI on this question in 1967; yet both wings continued insist that their adherence to "the IC" was a priori proof of their internationalism (one might paraphrase "the IC position" as: the Fourth international no longer exists and we are it!). The SL position is merely another example of its much vaunted "method" -- the creation of cynical, shabby Potemkin villages by which it seeks to dupe its followers -- in this case simply sidestepping the struggle to rebuild the Fourth International by a dogmatic and sectarian assertion that the task was completed in the form of the IC. And the French were content to coexist with the Healyites despite their numerous differences, the least of which was what their common organization was and who was in it!

The IC: Rotten Bloc

Healy and Wohlforth are now seeking to create an orthodox Leninist image for themselves against their picture of the OCI as unprincipled centrist maneuverers. But the mask keeps tearing, revealing the ugly features of an organization qualitatively worse than the grossly defective OCI/POR. For on every issue on which they indict the Lambertistes, the SLL-WL have in their readily verifiable history swung far to the right of their former bloc partners, in response to the most trivial appetites, ignoring even the limitations on opportunism observed by intelligent reformists in pursuit of the "main chance." The OCI is a serious political current with a persistently centrist thrust-i. e. an opportunist practice; the SLL-WL are both hilariously sectarian and egregiously opportunist.

The chief opportunist sin of the OCI is precisely the one with which the Healyites will never charge them: their service for years in shoring up Healy's claims to internationalism. The grave charges which both sides are now flinging at on another include not only sharp differences over current and recent issues, but positions of years' duration -- public positions of the competing wings when both sides claimed adherence to the same IC as proof of their internationalism! The main SLL-WL statement, dated 24 October, denounces the OCI for supporting a wing of the Algerian nationalist bourgeoisie, the MNA, in the 1950's; the 19 September OCI statement included a veiled attack on the Healyites ("those who attack the POR... are the same people who... ") for having "characterized Ho Chi Minh as a revolutionary" and having "subordinated the Palestinian resistance to Nasser, then to the petty-bourgeois leaders of the Palestine resistance."

We ask the OCI: If these things disturb you now, how is it that you remained in an international bloc -- which you foisted off on the word movement as a political tendency -- with Healy and Wohlforth who shouted from the housetops their capitulation to Vietnamese Stalinism and Arab nationalism? The Bulletin's laudatory obituary of Ho Chi Minh, which painted hint as a sincere revolutionary betrayed by Stalin, glossing over his own role in the repeated Stalinist sellouts and the murder of Trotskyists, was no more than a vulgar but consistent extension of the SLL-WL's years-long policy of critical (and sometimes not-so-critical) political support, rather than principled military support against imperialism, to the NLF. This position was of a piece with the Healyites' shameless enthusing over Mao's "Red Guards" in the 1968 "Cultural Revolution" intra-bureaucratic fight, treating Mao's mobilization of the student youth (and the army) as a surrogate political revolution in China. The SLL-WL's campaign of political support to the so-called "Arab Revolution" -- i.e., the Arab governments' move to deflect the aspirations of the Arab working masses for social revolution into wars against Zionist Israel -- was in flat contradiction to the OCI line of revolutionary defeatism for both sides; where was the OCI outcry then? It is not enough to have published your own positions while for years lending your weight to the cynical fiction at the IC was a disciplined international. Such unprincipled combinationism contradicts the OCI's pious assertions of its commitment to struggle "for the reconstruction of the Fourth International."

OCI and NSA

The conduct of the. OCI at their Essen youth conference on 3-4 July demonstrates that on the question of the relationship between the youth and the working class the Lambertistes' rightist course places them on common ground with the past and present practice of the Healyites. Under guidance of the OCI and its youth affiliate, the Alliance des Jeunes pour le Socialisme, the call was put forward for "the Revolutionary Youth International":

"Youth wants to live, in hope and freedom, and in order to live it must struggle. Youth aspires to life, youth needs exhilarating perspectives. Bureaucrats and bourgeois offer only a sordid life, unemployment, misery, failure, war and suffering. "

A main slogan of the conference was "Long live the struggle of the youth against the Stalinist bureauracy and imperialism!" The posing of the struggle against Stalinism and capitalism as equivalent reflects not only a persistent tendency the OCI's part to fail to distinguish political revolution in the Sino-Soviet states from social revolution in the capitalist states, but also a capitulation to current moods among petty-bourgeois radical youth, The conference and the propaganda surrounding it constituted an adaptation to youth vanguardism; the very concept of a "youth international," unless it is indissolubly linked with and politically subordinated to an international proletarian party, can only be at best an illusion, and at worst a capitulation to anti-Leninism. "The youth" are not a class: proletarian youth are generally one of the most militant sectors of their class; student youth are the most volatile sector of the petty-bourgeoisie, many of whom can be won over to a proletarian revolutionary perspective but only by becoming in effect traitors to their own future class interests. Thus the youth movement must be linked -- in conception, program and organization -- to the revolutionary party, which is firmly rooted in the working class and encompasses the historical and living experi ence of previous generations of proletarian militants. In short, a "revolutionary youth international" cannot be independent of the vanguard party and it cannot be anything less than Trotskyist. The OCl line over the Essen conference is an accommodation to youth vanguardist and spontaneist moods in the petty-bourgeois student milieu.

Moreover, at Essen the Lambertistes were openly courting the Spanish POUM and even the U.S. NSA. (The NSA was in the past disgraced by the receipt of CIA funds. In projecting the NSA as a likely seedbed for the U.S. revolution, the OCI has compounded its opportunist appetites by gross ignorance.) While chasing after rightist elements, the OCI committed a gross violation of workers' democracy by forcibly preventing an oppositional Trotskyist tendency, the International Communists of Germany (IKD), from distributing outside the hall a leaflet criticizing the OCI's refusal to base the "revolutionary youth international" on an explicitly Trotskyist program. Although it lacks the Healyites' world-wide reputation for thuggery, the OCI shares with the SLL-WL the reprehensible position that the use of force and recourse to the capitalist state are legitimate means for settling disputes within the workers' movement.

The Healyites in effect boycotted the Essen conference -- they sent a delegation of perhaps two dozen headed by Cliff Slaughter (by way of Contrast, the SLL-WL demands that virtually the entire WL membership turn out for yearly rallies in England) -- while bringing in an "orthodox" motion that the youth international must base itself on revolutionary theory, the Fourth International and the IC, which the Lambertistes voted down.

Healy and YSA

That the Healyite opposition to the OCI's pollcies at Essen was a provocation empty of principle is shown by the SLL-WL conduct of many years' standing. The abysmal political level of Healy's own model youth operation, the Young Socialists, is well known and exposes his new-found concern for the importance of Marxist theory among the youth as a fraud from start to finish. The WL's several ill-fated attempts to build a youth group in the U.S. have been notable for their singular absence of anything resembling Trotskyist politics; having once launched a short-lived youth group called "Revolt" whose program was determined by what the WL thought would be most attractive to Maoist street confrontationists, the Wohlforthites' most recent exploit is a call for "a Conference of Revolutionary Youth" based on an economist "Program for Youth to Fight Back" whose section on the Vietnam war does not even mention military support to the NLF against U. S. imperialism.

The Healyites now denounce the OCI for its appetites toward the NSA, but their own orientation for the U.S. is no better. An internal WL Political committee directive dated 15 March 1970 earnestly explained the need to tone. down criticisms of the SWP's Young Socialist Alliance because:

'The perspectives document agreed to in England' proposed that the road to the American working class is through the YSA and it meant just that."

One wonders what the SWP oppositionists, rebuffed in their campaign to make the SWP adopt even the most rudimentary working-class orientation, would think of this apparent affirmation of the YSA's proletarian credentials!

the Healyites' chase after the Pabloists -- perhaps motivated by the awareness that their own international rotten bloc was coming unstuck --reached its high point in the summer of 1970 when, on Healy's ' initiative, they approached the United Secretariat leadership with a proposal for private discussions toward the aim of joint work and the holding of a joint international conference: The overture, which had the effect of shoring up the Pabloists' Trotskyist pretensions at precisely the time when they were experiencing significant left splits in several countries, was spurned by the United Secretariat as Joe Hansen, lavishly covering himself in orthodoxy, explained that such discussions without a firm basis in a deepening programmatic agreement would not be principled, The incident illustrated the symbiotic relationship between the IC and the Pabloists, each episodically making the other look good by comparison.

From Red Guards to Stalinophobia

At the national convention of the SW P's antiwar front group last July the Wohlforthites pledged their physical support to the group's sponsorship of bourgeois speakers in the anti-war movement and joined the SWP goon squad in beating and evicting the militants, including supporters of the Spartacist League, who were vociferously protesting the presence of a U. S. senator. The slogan under which they justified this capitulation to popular frontism to their membership was "Stalinism vs. Trotskyism" --which in this case meant excluding the (ex-Maoist, now theoretically state capitalist) Progressive Labor and the (Trotskyist) Spartacist League, in the service of the (ex-Trotskyist) SWP and the (pro-Moscow) Communist Party. (This convenient. Stalinophobic pose rests very uneasily on the WL, which enthused over the "Red Guards" maneuver and the Stalinist NLF and in its frenzy of appetite toward PL once went so far as to justify an incident of gross PL violence against SWPers.) Now Wohlforth -- who, at the time of the 24 April anti-war demonstration categorically ruled out seeking a united front, based on a class line against the war, with left-wing Stalinists ("In any event we will not have joint actions with Maoists") -- is castigating the OCI for... Stalinophobia!

Where will the components of the former IC go from here? The Healyites, endlessly veering from egregious sectarianism to blatant opportunism, have never shown themselves loath to abandon any and every one of the ostensible principles in pursuit of new allies, dupes or masters. The OCI, in the past more stable in maintaining connection with a fundamental class line, but now loosed from its IC moorings by a rotten split -- in which it cast itself as a left cover for the POR debacle -- and launched on a youth vanguardist capitulation, may find itself moving further to the right than most of its cadres ever dreamed. The only' perspective which can open the road to authentic Trotskyism for these militants is intransigent internal struggle. Only by a ruthless examination of the IC split and its roots in unprincipled combinationism can the struggle for the rebirth of the Fourth International go forward!

Centrist Debacle in Bolivia (1971)

Workers Vanguard No. 3 (December 1971)

Centrist Debacle in Bolivia

The issue of the role of the Partido Obrero Revolucionario in the recent Bolivian events has become inevitably a factional football in the power fight between the Healyite (SLL-WL) and Lambertiste (OCI) wings of the now split International Committee. But in addition to providing a test of, the revolutionary capacity of both wings of the IC, the lessons of Bolivia are important in their own right, as a verification, in the breech, of the lessons of the October Revolution of 1917. The POR is an avowedly Trotskyist organization under the leadership of Guillermo Lora, which since 1970 has claimed agreement with the anti-revisionist avowals of the IC. Despite its opportunist policy following the 1952 Bolivian uprising in Conciliating the left wing of the bourgeois nationalist MNR government of Paz Estenssoro, the POR is an organization which must be, treated seriously because of its considerable implantation in the most militant sector of the Bolivian proletariat, the tin miners.

People's Assembly

The POR played an active role in the People's Assembly which came into existence under the bonapartist regime of left militarist General Juan Jose Torres, which was overthrown by the rightist coup of General Hugo Banzer in August. The People's Assembly was composed of a majority of representatives from working-class organizations and included representatives of the significant left political organizations. The basis for adherence to the People's Assembly was defined as support to the Theses of the Fourth Congress of the Central Obrera Boliviana, the main trade union federation, which is heavily influenced by left nationalists and Stalinists. The People's Assembly pledged to lead the struggle against imperialism and for socialism:

"The People's Assembly is a revolutionary anti-imperialist front led by the proletariat, constituted by the Central Obrera Boliviana, the trade union confederations and federations of a national character, the people's organizations and the political parties of revolutionary orientation. It recognizes as its political
leadership the proletariat and declares that its program is the Political Theses
passed by the Fourth Congress of the COB, held in May 1970....
"The People's Assembly constitutes itself as the leadership and unifying center of
the anti-imperialist movement and its fundamental goal consists in attaining
national liberation and the establishment of socialism in Bolivia.
(from the statutes of the People's Assembly, reprinted in the POR organ Masas of 13 July 1971)

According to the POR, the People's Assembly was a body of the soviet type which had the potential to become an institution of dual power - i.e., that it was an embryonic workers government within and in contradiction to the bourgeois government under Torres. Masas engaged in occasional sharp criticism of the CP for pursuing a "rightist and pro-government line" in the Assembly but did not systematically expose the CP and the other reformist parties for their betrayal of the working class in attempting to subordinate the Assembly to Torres, devoting at least as much emphasis to praising the Assembly and defending it against "leftist" detractors.

Centrist Vacillation

Even on the basis of insufficient documentation, what emerges clearly is a pattern of centrist vacillation on the part of the POR. For example, in an article written by Guillermo Lora after Banzer's coup is the admission:

"At this time [October 1970] everybody thought - including we Marxists -
that the arms would be given by the governing military team, which would
consider that only through resting on the masses and giving them adequate
firepower could they at least neutralize the gorila right.
This position was completely wrong...."
(Bulletin, 27 September 1971)

To have placed any confidence in Torres to arm the masses shows the most severe
disorientation on the part of the POR over the crucial question of the class
nature of the state. Torres was a bonapartist seeking to balance between the
working class, roused by a foretaste of power and eager to struggle for its own,
class rule, and the reactionary generals - at the head of a
bourgeois state. Although forced to grant concessions to the
masses, Torres, as Lora points out:

"...preferred to capitulate to his fellow generals before arming masses who showed signs of taking the road to socialism and whose mobilization put in serious danger the army as an institution."

The issue is clear, but the attitude and role of the POR is not. For in the 31 May 1971 issue of Masas we find a call for the formation of independent workers and peasants militias and the categorical assertion that: "General Torres Will never arm the workers and peasants militias. "

An article in the SLL's Workers Press of 24 August quotes POR leader Filemon Escobar:

"...we will work for political objectives that help radicalize the present process - for example, worker-participation in COMIBOL [Bolivian Mining Corporation]."

And Lora's Bulletin article speaks of "the danger to the state that majority working class participation in COMIBOL would mean." Yet a major article in the 31 May Masas exposes the plan for "worker-participation at COMIBOL as the point of departure for the bureaucratization and political control over the 'worker-managers' on the part of the state," counterposing to this the demand for "workers control - with veto rights" and pointing out that workers control does not obviate the class struggle.

A severe blunting of a hard Leninist edge is apparent in an article in the 9 May Masas which states:

"...the fundamental contradiction in Bolivia is nothing else than that which exists between the proletariat and imperialism."

Our question is simple: what role does the national bourgeoisie play in this schema? For the fatal illusion fostered by the nationalist-Stalinist cabal was precisely the conception of the "anti-imperialist" bourgeoisie as an ally. What was required of the POR was precisely to break the working class from subordination to the "revolutionary," "anti-imperialist" regime of Torres. To Marxists, the counterposed class forces are the working class supported by the peasantry on the one side and the bourgeoisie – both the puppets of imperialism and the "progressive" nationalist wing – on the other.

The OCI's response to the grave accusations levelled against the POR is an attempt to bluff it out. The 19 September statement declares:

“…the coup d'etat organized by the CIA and the military dictators of Brazil and Argentina and facilitated by the action of the Torres government is the proof that the policy carried by the POR was fundamentally based on the interests of the Bolivian proletariat...
“... All those who attack the POR through this, represent the enemies of the dictatorship of the proletariat. They take the sides of imperialism and Stalinism. They are agents of counterrevolution and are enemies, conscious or unconscious, of the Fourth International.”

This kind of argumentation can simply be dismissed out of hand. As Trotskyists, we have listened too many times to the hysterical accusations of Stalinists of all stripes along the same lines: the ferocity of U.S. imperialism's aggression against the NLF and the North Vietnamese regimes proves that their leaderships have not sold out; all those who attack Chairman Mao are taking the side of imperialism; Trotsky was a conscious or unconscious agent of fascism; those who stand in opposition to the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, ad nauseam. We only that this "defense" of the POR says nothing about the POR but a great deal to the discredit of the OCI.

The OCI asserts that the People's Assembly was "under the leadership of the Trotskyist party, the POR." This statement is open to question. In an interview in the 9 August Bulletin, POR leader Victor Sossa States that "the POR represented only around 20 per cent of the delegates, perhaps a little more." Yet he expected that the Assembly, still predominantly influenced by Stalinists, bourgeois nationalism and "ultra-left adventurist petty-bourgeois groups, " to do the following:

"In the case of a coup the People's Assembly will call a general strike, will assume the military and political command of the masses. The decision to go over to the systematic organization of militias is geared to this perspective and prepares the working class for the inevitable confrontation, the fight to fully install its own government, the workers and peasants government."

The question here is not whether the POR had already established its hegemony over the workers organizations, but whether it was struggling to do so - whether the POR's perspective was to expose the reformists' and nationalists' treachery before their supporters by demanding that the Assembly counterpose itself to the regime, breaking all ties with the regime and struggling to establish a workers and peasants government - i. e. the dictatorship of the proletariat. It would appear that the POR placed political confidence in the Assembly under its existing leadership.

Soviets: Form vs Content

What was the role of the POR within the People's Assembly? The OCI notes that:

"...the setting up of the People's Assembly expresses the fundamental trend of the period, the will of the proletarian and peasant masses to enter into the struggle for power."

But Allende's Popular Front government in Chile, for example, also without doubt represents "the will of the proletarian and peasant masses to enter into the struggle for power" – yet we know that the Chilean masses have been terribly deceived and they are likely to pay for their misleaders' promises in blood. The willingness of the working masses to struggle is not in dispute. In Bolivia, as in Chile, Spain, Vietnam and dozens of other instances, the question is whether their combative heroism has been betrayed.

The OCI declares:

"It is the unity in and around the People's Assembly, organ of dual power, which under the leadership of the Trotskyist party, the POR, dominated the whole revolutionary process before and after the confrontations of August 20-23."

What does it mean to acclaim the "unity in and around the People's Assembly"? If the People's Assembly was indeed an embryonic soviet form, how was the struggle for its leadership carried out? A soviet is a united front of the working class raised to the level of struggling for power. There is nothing sacred about the soviet or any other united front form. Soviets arise, even spontaneously, in revolutionary crises as the proletarian axis in the dual power situation, with the potential under revolutionary leadership to oust the bourgeois state power and become the agency of working-class rule – i.e. to consummate the revolution on the national plane. They are the best arena in which the Bolsheviks can demonstrate their superiority in carrying forward the tasks implicit in the soviet as an embryonic form of the state of a different class: the seizure of power and the dictatorship of the proletariat. A Menshevik-led soviet, for example, may indeed be an authentic soviet – but it will inevitably betray. Thus a Leninist call for the formation of soviets, for power to the soviets, must contain within it the perspective of struggle within the soviet: in order to demonstrate to the workers that it is they, unlike the revisionists and reformists, who have nothing to fear from soviet power and that only their policy can achieve and defend it. The existence of a soviet is in itself no guarantee of revolutionary principle. (Even the Stalinists have called – bureaucratically, to be sure – for the formation of soviets in their "left" zigzags, after having doomed the workers in advance by their policies – policies which guaranteed the ruin of the soviet.) Without the presence of revolutionaries intransigently struggling at every point to expose before the working class the traitorous misleaders within its ranks, the People's Assembly offered no more promise for the Bolivian proletarian revolution than George Meany's AFL-CIO raised to the political level. Does the OCI really want to boast that the POR expounded "unity in and around the People's Assembly"?

When questions of power politics between the wings of the IC were not so clearly and ultimatistically posed, the OCI was willing to take a more critical attitude toward the POR on precisely this question. A letter to the POR leadership dated 30 July 1970 and later published in the Lambertistes' public theoretical magazine discussed the COB Theses which the POR had helped prepare and voted for. The sections of the COB document singled out for sharp criticism by the OCI include the following:

"In order to attain socialism, it seems necessary first of all to make a unity of all the revolutionary and anti-imperialist forces. The people's anti-imperialist revolution is linked to the struggle for socialism. The people's front is an alliance of related classes, and the unitary instrument for making the revolution. The expulsion of imperialism and the realization of national and democratic tasks will render possible the socialist revolution." (La Verite, October 1970)

What this paragraph sets forward is the Menshevik theory of stages, pure and simple – first national liberation, then socialist revolution. It is the classic reformist rationale for class collaboration, which has led to the most bitter and bloody defeats for the working class. And yet the POR supported this resolution and continued to acclaim it in Masas. Instead of struggling around this question, the POR compromised around a contradictory hodge-podge document which contained affirmations of internationalism, condemnations of class collaboration alongside praise of the so-called "socialist" nations and clear popular frontism.

It speaks well of the Lambertistes that they were willing to raise to the POR and subsequently make public their criticisms of the POR's departure from principle. Now, however, the OCI's opportunism has gained the upper hand, and so all critics of the POR become "agents of counterrevolution"!

And what of the POR's conduct since the coup? The 6 December issue of the SWP's Intercontinental Press reprints a declaration signed by the POR – along with the Communist Party, the "POR" of the Moscoso Pabloists, left nationalist groups and General Torres himself! The document again pays lip service to "the leadership of the proletariat, the ruling class of the revolutionary process" but the tone of the document is nationalist-populist ("revolutionary priests," "revolutionary officers," "patriots," "the power is now in the hands of foreigners," etc.) and its core is the following:

“Therefore the need is undeniable to build a fighting unity of all the revolutionary democratic and progressive forces that the great battle can be begun in conditions offering a real perspective for a popular and national government....
"This is not a battle that concerns only one sector of the exploited people, or one class, institution or party. ... Any form of sectarianism is counterrevolutionary. Let us be worthy of the sacrifice of those who fell August 21 defending Bolivia." (our emphasis)

In fact, the declaration is a classic popular front which subordinates the working class to alien class forces and ideologies to which it is in fundamental and irreconcilable opposition.

Healyite Pop Frontism

For the political bandits of the Healyite SLL-WL, the OCI's decision to march in lockstep behind the POR is a godsend, a cheap way to assert their Leninist orthodoxy and cast themselves as the principled left wing in the IC split. But the real difference between the Healyites and the POR on proletarian policy toward a "leftist" bourgeois government is that the POR has had the opportunity to wreck a pre-revolutionary situation and the Healyites have not. Healy-Wohlforth have seized on Bolivia as a pretext for ridding themselves of the OCI, which was increasingly playing a dominant role in the IC -- and that's all. For although they would now prefer to bury it, the Healyites have a shining example of how they would deal with a Popular Front bourgeois government: Chile.

The 21 September 1970 Bulletin advised the workers of Chile:

"There is only one road, and that is the revolutionary road of the October Revolution.... as a step in this understanding the workers must hold Allende to his promises...."<

Wohlforth's road is not that of the October Revolution, but of those Bolsheviks, Stalin prominent among them, who very nearly ruined the chances for October by their policy – denounced by Lenin and Trotsky – of support for the bourgeois Provisional Government "insofar as it struggles against reaction or counterrevolution." Wohlforth's statement parallels the notorious Pravda articles capitulating to Menshevism in February and March of 1917, filled with statements like the following:

"The way out is bringing pressure to bear on the Provisional Government with the demand that the government proclaim its readiness to. begin immediate negotiations for peace."

Against this policy Lenin declared: "To turn to this government with a proposal of concluding peace is equivalent to preaching morality to the keeper of a brothel," And Trotsky, in Lessons of October, said:

"The programme of exerting pressure on an imperialist government so as to 'induce' it to pursue a pious course was the programme of Kautsky and Ledebour in Germany, Jean Longuet in France, MacDonald in England, but never the programme of Bolshevism."

One must be sharply critical, as was Trotsky, of those Bolsheviks who would have let slip a revolutionary opportunity if it had not been for the sharp correction of Lenin. But more than criticism is merited by the Healyites, who claim to stand on the shoulders of the Bolsheviks, to have assimilated the "lessons of October."

Lenin expressed his policy in an uncompromising formula:

"Our tactic: absolute lack of confidence; no support to the new government; suspect Kerensky especially; arming of the proletariat the sole guarantee;. . . no rapprochement with other parties."

Against Lenin's policy stand both the centrism of the POR-OCI and the Healyite pseudo-Leninist posturing.

And now the Healyites sanctimoniously denounce the POR-OCI for the same kind of Pop Frontist capitulation which they themselves espoused for Chile!

Healy lawyers for the LSSP

But perhaps an even purer example of Healyite hypocrisy is the question of Ceylon. The 30 August Bulletin declares:

"...Though less known than the evolution of the LSSP in Ceylon, the role of Lora and the POR has been no less treacherous and important."

For years, in endless articles, the Healyites have used the betrayal of the Ceylonese masses by the LSSP – which tail-ended the bourgeois nationalist party of Mrs. Bandaranaike and when it came to power in 1964 entered the government – as an expose of the United Secretariat Pabloists, who covered for the LSSP until the last moment. (The Bulletin has just concluded yet another four-part series on the subject.) And rightly so, for their role over Ceylon was an important verification of the SWP-United Secretariat's departure from Trotskyism. But what the Healyites are unlikely to mention is that they themselves are tarred with the same brush!

In May 1960 the SWP, then affiliated with the IC as was Healy's SLL, began to get increasingly nervous about the line and conduct of the LSSP. On 17 May Tom Kerry addressed a letter on behalf of the SWP's Political Committee to the LSSP. It states:

"We are greatly disturbed by the parliamentary and electoral course now pursued by the leadership of the LSSP....
"Your policy of working for the creation of an SLFP government appears to us to be completely at variance with the course of independent working class political action which you have always promoted in the past as a matter of principle....
"Your new political course also appears to us to be a form of 'popular frontism' of the kind promoted in many countries by the Stalinists since 1935 – that is, class collaboration between the working-class parties and a section of the bourgeoisie...."

Despite their concern the SWP leadership hesitated to raise this betrayal in the public press.

On 8 August James Robertson, then a member of the SWP, wrote to the Political Committee:

"I am addressing you on the matter of our party's public silence concerning the recent and continuing betrayal of the Ceylonese working class and of the world Trotskyist movement by the, Lanka Sama Samaja Party. I refer, of course, to that party's entry into a 'Popular Front' electoral pact with the Stalinist party and with the left bourgeois nationalist party represented by the widow Bandaranaike.
"In raising this matter privately with several members of your body I was told that letters have been sent the Ceylonese and that your view is that for the present a greater advantage is to be gained by revolutionary Marxists in the LSSP through our remaining publicly silent, I must disagree and urge you to reconsider..."

The letter concludes:

"Comrades, that you condemn the Ceylonese ex-Trotskyist I have no doubt, but your failure to raise this publicly and with great seriousness does the movement internationally a disservice."

And what was the position of Gerry Healy, who now proclaims himself the world's only consistent anti-Pabloist After having written to the SWP that delicate maneuvers among the Pabloists were required in Ceylon, Healy on 14 August wrote to the SWP's Joe Hansen:

"We discussed at some length... the proposition concerning the situation in Ceylon. We think that it is necessary to write again asking for the fullest possible information concerning the present situation in the party in Ceylon.
"There is no doubt that they are in a severe crisis but if we take their situation and recent events in Europe it is not improbable that there will now be important developments inside the Pablo camp, This is all the more reason for us to proceed with caution – as you have in the past so rightly insisted.
"We are going to cable them tomorrow for information and we suggest you do likewise and hold up for the time being publication of anything in the Militant "

Rebuild the Fourth International!

It is their own sordid history which gives the lie to the Healyites' claims of internationalism and anti-revisionism. If the Lambertistes – who in 1952 launched the struggle against Pabloism never transcended centrism and have now hardened themselves in opportunism - their line on Bolivia and their conduct at Essen, the Healyites' pretensions of principle have always rested on sand.

Only the Fourth International – rebuilt in the process of struggle against all varieties of Pabloist revisionism, including the inverted Pabloism of the IC – can provide the way forward toward the decisive victory of the international working class.