Trotskyism: What it Isn't and What it Is! Part 1 (1990)

Spartacist Pamphlet (1990)

Trotskyism, What It Isn’t and What It Is!

Transcription/Markup/Proofing: John Heckman, Encylopedia of Trotskyism On Line; full text: http://www.marx.org/history//etol/document/icl-spartacists/1990/trotskyism.html

[part 1]

This article was first published in Spartacist (German edition) No. 14, Winter 1989-90. There are two additions to the English text, one dealing with the “Trotskyist” revisionists as the political heirs of the London Bureau and the other with the role played by former American Healyite leader Tim Wohlforth against the struggle for authentic Trotskyism in the U.S. Other minor changes and corrections have also been made.

To the workers of Germany, East and West,
and to European and other militants

In East Germany, what had seemed to be the most entrenched Stalinist regime in Eastern Europe is crumbling under mass opposition to its rule. We Trotskyists of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) stand with all those in the DDR who are seeking to establish genuine socialist egalitarianism, through breaking the repressive political apparatus of the Stalinist bureaucracy.

We stand with those members and ex-members of the SED who defend the gains the working people achieved through the overthrow of capitalism. We stand for the communism of Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Party.

The “reformers” in the bureaucracy are promising “socialist renewal.” But Stalinism can’t deliver any kind of “renewal.” As an ideology Stalinism is simply an apology for the rule of the bureaucracy. Its slogans and “debates” are but arguments about how to put the best false face on the policies of betrayal. Without state power, Stalinist ideology is an empty shell, devoid of any relevance to the question of proletarian power.

The bureaucracy headed by J.V. Stalin arose from the devastation and atomization of the Russian working class in the Civil War and from the failure and defeat of the proletarian revolution internationally — particularly the 1923 German Revolution. Lenin’s program of proletarian internationalism — concretely embodied in the understanding that the survival of the October Revolution depended on its extension through working-class revolution, particularly in the advanced capitalist countries — was dumped and replaced by the Stalinist “theory” of “socialism in one country.”

To consolidate its rule the bureaucracy had to destroy the entire leadership of the Bolshevik Party that had made the 1917 Russian Revolution. Millions of Communists were murdered. During the Moscow Trials false “confessions” were extracted from Stalin’s victims — not simply through sheer police-state terror but through the belief of many of the victims that in going along with Stalin’s monstrous accusations they were “serving the Revolution.”

In his memoirs Leopold Trepper — the founder and leader of the Soviet “Red Orchestra” espionage network in Nazi-occupied Europe, whose heroism was “rewarded” with ten years in Lubianka — damned “all those who did not rise up against the Stalinist machine.” In answer to “who did protest at that time?” Trepper, who was not a Trotskyist but a Polish Jewish Communist, wrote:

“The Trotskyites can lay claim to this honor. Following the example of their leader, who was rewarded for his obstinacy with the end of an ice-axe, they fought Stalinism to the death, and they were the only ones who did....

“Today, the Trotskyites have a right to accuse those who once howled along with the wolves. Let them not forget, however, that they had the enormous advantage over us of having a coherent political system capable of replacing Stalinism. They had something to cling to in the midst of their profoundndistress at seeing the revolution betrayed. They did not ‘confess,’ for they knew that their confession would serve neither the party nor socialism.”
—The Great Game (1977)

The Trotskyists knew that Stalinism — the bureaucratic stranglehold over economic, political and cultural life in the Soviet Union, the betrayal of revolutionary struggle and appeasement of imperialism internationally—was not communism but its antithesis. And they knew that rather than “serving the Revolution” this parasitic bureaucratic caste endangered the very survival of the Russian Revolution.

Trotsky analyzed both the social conditions which led to the rise of Stalinism and the instabilities and contradictions inherent in the rule of this bureaucratic caste — which is simultaneously dependent on the collectivized property forms of the workers state and reflects and acts as the transmitting mechanism for the pressures of imperialism in undermining the workers state. Trotsky foresaw that this balancing act was inherently unstable; the contradiction must be resolved either in the direction of capitalist restoration, or by proletarian political revolution against the bureaucracy to restore state power to the working class, organized on the basis of internationalist soviet democracy. In his work (most systematically in The Revolution Betrayed, written in 1936) Trotsky analyzed the Stalinist deformation of Soviet society and proved scientifically that Russia was not “socialist” nor was it moving in that direction.

He demonstrated that wage differentials among the layers of the working people had sharply increased, and contrasted to the Marxist understanding of the gradual “withering away of the state” in the progress toward socialism the cancerous growth of Stalin’s monstrous apparatus of police-state repression. He castigated the social conservatism of the bureaucracy, documenting for example the reversal of Bolshevik policies aimed at securing for women equal participation in social and economic life. He analyzed the bureaucratic disorganization of economic life and the demoralizing effect on the working people of the display of the privileges of the bureaucratic elite and wrote:

“Under a nationalized economy, quality demands a democracy of producers and consumers, freedom of criticism and initiative — conditions incompatible with a totalitarian regime of fear, lies and flattery.”

And reasserting the once-common Leninist understanding that socialism is and must be an international system, Trotsky insisted that the looming Second World War and the prospect of social convulsions in the capitalist countries would also shake the brittle Stalinist regime to its foundations.

More than 50 years ago, Trotsky predicted the unraveling of Stalinist bureaucratic rule which is now being seen from Prague to Beijing. In Poland, decades of Stalinist economic mismanagement, corruption and stultifying bureaucratic repressiveness deprived the regime of any moral authority to combat the restorationist schemes of international finance capital and the Vatican; the bankruptcy of Stalinism in Poland has now resulted in the election of an openly counterrevolutionary Solidarność government. In East Germany, where a Tiananmen-style massacre was narrowly averted, members and former members of the SED have demonstrated in the streets under banners demanding “Return to Lenin,” but in other demonstrations ominous revanchist slogans have also made their appearance.

In the Soviet Union, where Gorbachev now faces opposition from miners and other workers resisting the effects of perestroika, the regime’s fostering of “market socialism” has unleashed deadly conflict between the republics, as the better-off areas seek to benefit at the expense of their neighbors; from the bloody conflicts in the Caucasus, to the Baltic nationalists who carry the flags of the “independent” imperialist-puppet interwar regimes, to the Great Russian chauvinists and anti-Semites of the sinister Pamyat, these forces threaten the dismemberment of the multinational USSR. In China, where “market socialism” has achieved its fullest expression accompanied by enormous social dislocation, the accumulation of vast private fortunes and a huge increase in the gap between rich and poor in the cities and countryside, it was the entry of discontented workers into the student-initiated pro-democracy protests that precipitated the government’s Tiananmen massacre.

Trotsky was a leader, together with Lenin, of the Bolshevik Revolution. He founded and led the Red Army that defeated the forces of counterrevolution during the Civil War. Decades of Stalinist lies and calumnies against Trotsky and the physical obliteration of his supporters in the Soviet Union ultimately did not succeed in burying this history. The Gorbachev bureaucracy of Stalin’s heirs today encompasses a substantial layer of “Western-oriented” intelligentsia, mainly the sons and daughters of the bureaucracy, which was getting pretty tired of sitting down to sip champagne with Western “academic Marxists” and U.S. State Department hacks only to be confronted with gibes about the yawning “blank spaces” of Soviet history. Thus glasnost—although intended centrally to facilitate perestroika against the resistance of bureaucratic conservatives as well as to rehabilitate Nikolai Bukharin, the leader of the Right Opposition whose policies in many ways prefigured “market socialism” — has also generated pressure toward removing the figure of Trotsky from the realm of demonology and restoring him to official Soviet history.

Of course it is a welcome turn of events if the heirs of Stalin are forced to try to rehabilitate themselves by acknowledging what “everybody knows” to be the truth. But Trotskyism isn’t just “history,” it is the program of struggle to preserve and carry forward the heritage of Leninism — the rule of the proletariat organized on the basis of Soviet democracy and the struggle for world socialist revolution—against the fierce resistance of the bourgeoisie and their social-democratic lackeys and against the perversion and betrayal of Leninism by the Stalinist usurpers.

While Stalinism was created as an ideology to justify the existence of a privileged bureaucratic caste and has survived solely on the material basis of holding state power, Trotskyism has a political vitality. As Trotsky wrote in the founding document of the Fourth International,

“its indestructible force stems from the fact that it expresses not only
revolutionary tradition but also today’s actual opposition of the Russian working class. The social hatred stored up by the workers against the bureaucracy—this is precisely what from the viewpoint of the Kremlin clique constitutes ‘Trotskyism’.”

With the 1945 victory of the Allied imperialists and Stalin’s Russia over Hitler, the postwar world took shape. The Communist parties in capitalist West Europe worked overtime to derail the possibility of socialist revolutions there, while in East Germany and throughout Eastern Europe capitalism was abolished by the Red Army from the top down. What was excluded in both cases was the revolutionary mobilization of the working people. Eastern Europe was freed from its pro-Nazi ruling classes and from capitalist exploitation, but the working class was politically padlocked and well aware that the Soviet military held the decisive levers of power. Today Gorbachev, impelled by his own internal problems, has turned the key and Eastern Europe is exploding with political ferment — from all quarters, in every conceivable direction from outright capitalist restorationists to anti-bureaucratic Communists.

Today, with everyone from Gorbachev on down willing to say bad things about “Stalinism,” there is a renewal of interest in Trotsky — although few really know what he stood for (since his life and work have been both hidden and lied about for decades in the “official” histories). Now seeking to intervene into the events in East Germany are numerous claimants to the mantle of Trotskyism hoping to trade on his revolutionary heritage. The question is: how are people who have been deprived of any knowledge of “Trotskyism” supposed to be able to tell the real thing as opposed to the fakers and pretenders? To assist we will offer a little history.

I. Leon Trotsky and the Coming of World War II

The Foundation of Trotsky’s Fourth International

In 1938, on the eve of World War II, Trotsky proclaimed the founding of a new revolutionary International in the urgent attempt to resolve the “crisis of leadership” that had left the international proletariat defenseless before fascism and imperialist carnage. Hitler’s Nazis had come to power in Germany unopposed by the Stalinists or the Social Democrats who overwhelmingly commanded the allegiance of the powerful German workers movement. That this crime did not provoke fights and splits within the Communist parties internationally led the Trotskyists to conclude there was no place for revolutionaries in the Stalinized Third International. This conclusion was compounded by the CI’s policy of the “People’s Front,” of allying the workers movement with the parties of so-called “democratic” imperialism.

The Transitional Program, the founding document of Trotsky’s Fourth International, was the continuation and extension of the program that had led to the victory of the Bolshevik Revolution. It upheld Trotsky’s theory of “permanent revolution” which was confirmed in the course of the Russian Revolution — that in the epoch of imperialism in underdeveloped countries even the most elementary bourgeois-democratic tasks can only be accomplished by the working class taking power at the head of the oppressed masses.

Against the betrayal of proletarian struggle to the “People’s Front,” the Transitional Program reasserted the fundamental Marxist principle of the unconditional independence of the working class from its capitalist exploiters and oppressors. It was under this banner, embodied in the slogan “Down with the Ten Capitalist Ministers! All Power to the Soviets!”, that Lenin and Trotsky led the proletariat to power in 1917.

The Trotskyists steadfastly stood for the unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union against imperialist attack and internal counterrevolution, despite the Stalinist misrulers. At the same time the Fourth International understood that this defense also required a proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucrats who had robbed political power from the working masses and whose hideously repressive, nationalist rule threatened the conquests of the Russian Revolution. Trotsky called for the return to the working people of their state through restoring the rule of Soviets (councils of workers and soldiers) and sought to mobilize the Soviet working masses against the bureaucracy on the basis of the socialist egalitarianism and revolutionary internationalism that were the foundation of the Russian workers state.

For all their youth, inexperience and episodic disorientation, the small forces of Trotskyist cadre fought with courage and audacity during the war to carry out this program. American Trotskyists risked their lives to sail on the Murmansk run to get their propaganda into the hands of Russian workers and soldiers. The 1945 Saigon uprising was led by Vietnamese Trotskyists. In the far-flung colonial empires of the Allies, particularly Indochina and the Indian subcontinent, currents identified with Trotskyism had a strong appeal to advanced workers and independence fighters, as against the Stalinist parties — bound to the bloc on a world scale with the “anti-fascist” colonial imperialist camp — which had to rein in mass struggles against the imperialist masters.

The Dutch Trotskyists struggled, with great capacity and few cadre, in illegality during the Nazi occupation of Holland. As early as 1943, with Germany already decisively defeated but with no Allied imperialist landings having taken place yet, they saw that it was a race against the clock between European working-class revolutions and an Allied-led counterrevolution leading to the division of Europe between Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin which would work against the revival of the German workers movement at the war’s end.

There are more examples of the heroism of the forces of the Fourth International in the face of overwhelming odds. But by the end of the war, large numbers of Trotskyist cadre had been wiped out by war and repression. Many were murdered by the Stalinists.

The Defectors

The 4 August 1914 betrayal of the German Social Democrats, who in the face of war went over to the side of their “own” ruling class, has been repeated many times in the workers movement. In World War II. the Stalinist Communist parties allied with one gang of imperialist warmongers, opposing working-class struggle in the “Allied” countries as treason to the so-called “Great Patriotic War Against Fascism.”

The Trotskyists recognized that the war was not a struggle between “democratic” imperialism and fascism but an interimperialist conflict aimed at the redivision of the world. Toward the imperialist powers the Trotskyists were, as Lenin was in World War I, revolutionary defeatist. At the same time, they called on the international working class to militarily defend the Soviet Union.

Nonetheless, although on a smaller scale, the second imperialist war also produced deformations in and defections from the Trotskyist movement. In the U.S. party, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the signing of the Stalin-Hitler pact together with the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland and the invasion of Finland produced an opposition which renounced defense of the Soviet Union in adaptation to a frenzied outcry of petty-bourgeois public opinion over the supposed violation of “poor little Finland” and the identification of Stalinism with fascism.

Up until the outbreak of the war, the SWP opposition led by Max Shachtman and James Burnham had declared that they too stood for the unconditional defense of the Soviet Union against imperialist attack, despite the Stalinist bureaucracy. They did not shrink from this position when the Stalinists betrayed the workers by strangling the forces for proletarian revolution during the Spanish Civil War. But at that time the Kremlin’s participation in the Republican camp was supported by bourgeois democrats around the world. In 1939-40 when the question of the defense of the Soviet Union was posed in the concrete, the opposition “welched on their promise,” to use the words of SWP leader James P. Cannon.

Trotsky played a major role in the ensuing faction fight in the American party. The close collaboration of Trotsky, combined with the fact that the SWP, unlike other sections of the Fourth International, was not directly subjected to the ravages of the war, made the fight with the anti-Soviet opposition a surrogate for such a struggle throughout the international Trotskyist movement.

The Shachtman-led minority split from the organization. Over the years, and heightened under the pressures of the Cold War, they evolved into anti-Soviet “socialist” advisers to the State Department and the CIA. At the time of America’s 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, Shachtman gave a speech alibiing the counterrevolutionary invaders as including some “good stout working class fighters” who were fighting Stalinist “totalitarianism.”

When on 17 June 1953 the East German workers were the first to rise up against Stalinism, they immeasurably assisted authentic socialists in the West to reject the blandishments of “State Department socialism.” The monstrous crimes of Stalinism — the purge trials and labor camps – facilitated the fake-“democratic” pretensions of imperialism, and the onset of the Cold War unleashed a barrage of bourgeois “political theorists” (exemplified by Hannah Arendt) arguing that Stalinist totalitarianism had reduced the workers of the Soviet bloc to mindless, soulless slaves rendered now and forever incapable of struggle. Therefore, they argued, partisans of the workers’ struggle should be in the front ranks of the new imperialist crusade against Stalinism. The East German workers, by their revolutionary action, punctured this myth and made it possible for those Western radicals who wanted to do so to make an aggressive counterthrust against imperialist propaganda. But of course many “radicals” wanted only to continue their bloc with their own bourgeoisie.

The Sozialistische Arbeitergruppe (SAG) are the direct heirs of Max Shachtman. Their British leader Tony Cliff split from the Trotskyist movement in 1950, refusing to defend the North Korean deformed workers state against U.S. imperialism. Today, the SAG sees the mass protests in East Germany as an uprising against “capitalist” exploitation. For them, there are no social gains to be defended in the collectivized property forms that exist in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

Like Shachtman, this position has led the SAG not only into supporting some of the darkest forces of imperialist reaction but into offering them as a model for struggle against Stalinist “totalitarianism.” Following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Cliffites cheered on the CIA-funded mujahedin who were preparing to drown any and every element of social progress in blood, with declarations that a “Mojahedin victory will encourage the opponents of Russian rule everywhere in the USSR and Eastern Europe” (Socialist Worker, 4 February 1989)! It is small wonder that the SAG has attracted to its ranks many skinheads, among the most loathsome SA-type [Sturm-abteilung] expressions of resurgent German nationalism and imperialist revanchism.

The British Workers Power organization and its League for a Revolutionary Communist International (in West Germany the Gruppe Arbeitermacht and the Gruppe ArbeiterInnenstandpunkt in Austria) drifted left from its origins in the Cliff organization. Workers Power has done such things as supporting the Ayatollah Khomeini in his struggle for power and initially in his war with Iraq. They also “critically” championed Solidarność while admitting that if Lech Walesa & Co. should conquer it would mean capitalist restoration. Now that there is a Solidarność-led government, Workers Power pathetically opines, “Poland: No Return to Capitalism”!

Most recently this outfit tried out the nasty practice of calling upon capitalist governments to throw out the ambassadors from “bad” deformed workers states. As far as we know only one of the groups that adhere to the LRCI’s “democratic-centralist” international did this, the Irish Workers Group who called on the southern Irish Republic to throw out the Chinese ambassador as a statement of “solidarity” with those murdered by the Chinese Stalinists in Tiananmen Square. Of course if pushed by tens of thousands of students defending a woman’s right to abortion, the government of the Irish Republic would probably want to pull its own Tiananmen Square to stop the demon of dissolute youth desecrating the values, most sacred to the government forces, upon which this bourgeois-clericalist state was formed.

II. The Cold War and “Trotskyist” Revisionism

In Europe, the decimation of Trotskyist cadre during the war combined with events in the aftermath of the war led to the emergence of a revisionist current within the Fourth International. Trotsky had predicted that the war would provoke social convulsions throughout the capitalist world, as the First World War had done, which would necessarily have a profoundly destabilizing effect on the Stalinist bureaucracies.

Trotsky’s warning that Stalinism posed a deadly danger to the USSR’s very survival was borne out in the initial collapse of the Red Army, which had been decapitated by Stalin, in the face of Hitler’s invasion, before the Soviet masses rallied to the defense of their country (ultimately, 20 million Soviet citizens gave their lives in the smashing of Hitler’s armies on the Eastern Front). Trotsky’s predictions of renewed capitalist crisis were fully confirmed by the objective situation at the end of the war, as the old imperial powers of Europe were militarily devastated and politically tainted with fascism, the ties to their colonial empires disrupted or shattered. All that remained was to throw them out and the means were in the hands of the proletariat.

Instead Stalin propped up his “democratic” Western allies. In Italy and Greece, naked treachery was required to militarily and politically disarm the Resistance forces and hand power back to the capitalist class. In France, the Stalinists had to work overtime as proponents of capitalist “national reconstruction” in order to establish a stable bourgeois regime.

A postwar development unanticipated by Trotsky was the expansion of Stalinist-ruled states in Eastern Europe. With the military victory of the Red Army over the Nazis and their puppet regimes, the former rulers fled to the nearest American headquarters leaving behind a power vacuum which was filled by the Soviet army. Confronted with the onset of the Cold War, the Stalinists were forced to establish deformed workers states in these countries as a “buffer zone.”

These deformed workers states, which carried out the expropriation of these ruling classes whose power was broken when Hitler’s Nazis were smashed, were established without revolutions (with the exception of Yugoslavia, where Tito’s partisans prevailed in a peasant guerrilla war). These were cold social revolutions from the top down. The Soviet military forces were the state power; they established governments of the Walter Ulbrichts, the surviving Stalinist hacks who arrived back in Germany from Moscow and set up the SED in 1946 as the ruling party whose “leading role” was until just recently prescribed in the DDR constitution. The structures set up paralleled those which issued from the Stalinist degeneration of the USSR. Thus the expansion of “Soviet-bloc” states was at the same time a padlock and chain on the working class — a chain which despite episodic workers’ struggles was in place for four decades but has now been broken.

Just as the stabilization of capitalist imperialism with the containment of the “Russian menace” was at the root of Stalinism afer World War II the revisionist current which arose in the Trotskyist movement (under the leadership of the impressionist Michel Pablo) adapted to the apparent stability and geographical extension of Stalinism. The ascendancy of this revisionist current destroyed the Fourth International as the nucleus of a disciplined world party of socialist revolution (which has not prevented assorted pretenders to “Trotskyism” from claiming to be “the Fourth International” when it suits them).

Worshipping the accomplished fact of Stalinism’s survival, the Pabloists projected a “new world reality” of “centuries of deformed workers states” and opined that under mass pressure the Stalinist parties could be forced to play an “objectively revolutionary role.” The need for revolutionary Trotskyist parties to lead the struggle for socialist revolution in the West and for political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracies was thus obviated. Today the main continuators of this revisionist current are the “United Secretariat” (USec) led by Ernest Mandel.

At the time of the 17 June 1953 uprising in East Germany the Mandelites advocated the self-reform of the bureaucracy under the slogan for the “real democratization of the Communist Parties.” Three years later they backed away from the Hungarian workers who had risen up against the bureaucratic rulers and their hated secret police. At the time, they wrote that the absence of political leadership in Hungary provoked “exactly those shortcomings and dangers” which had been avoided in Poland “thanks to the leadership role” played by “the Gomulka tendency” (Quatrième Internationale, December 1956)!

In the 1960s the United Secretariat adapted to every petty-bourgeois radical craze. They wrote off the working class in the West as hopelessly bought off and counter-posed the idea that “red universities” would be oases of revolution in a supposed sea of stagnant proletarian reaction. They passed through a period of vicarious pick-up-the-gun guerrillaism. Junking Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, they postured as armchair Che Guevaras.

Enthusing over the Vietnamese NLF, in his book Le Parti Communiste Vietnamien (Paris 1973) French USec leader Pierre Rousset did not condemn the murder of the Vietnamese Trotskyists by the Vietnamese Stalinists but rather whitewashed these assassinations with the explanation that they showed “the width of the political gulf which then separated the Trotskyist groups from the Indochinese CP, the former probably underestimating the importance of the national question in the revolutionary mobilization of the masses, the latter profoundly underestimating the social question in the colonial revolution.”

Since Rousset also heralded the NLF leadership as having “assimilated the decisive implications of the permanent revolution,” their murder of the Vietnamese Trotskyists was alibied as simply an unfortunate mistake.

In the mid-1970s the USec refused to even recognize the existence of the surviving Vietnamese Trotskyists in exile, who had asked for recognition as the USec’s Vietnamese section.

In the name of “anti-imperialism,” the Mandelites and their cothinkers served as uncritical apologists for the bourgeois-nationalist FLN in Algeria, about whom they enthused for many years; Michel Pablo was a senior adviser to the head of state, while the American SWP’s Joseph Hansen touted the brutal Algerian regime as a “workers and peasants government.”

Like Max Shachtman, the USec was ever sensitive to petty-bourgeois public opinion. With the first hint of “Cold War II,” as imperialism went back on the offensive after its humiliating defeat in Vietnam, the Mandelites beat a retreat from former pro-Stalinist enthusiasm over to tailing “Eurocommunism,” voting for the installation of the most viciously anti-Communist popular-front governments like that of French “Socialist” François Mitterrand, and defending any and all manner of pro-Western Soviet “dissidents.”

In the early 1980s, they joined with the pro-NATO social democrats in going all out in support of Solidarność in Poland. From hailing Gomulka, whose policies began the process of mortgaging the Polish economy to West German bankers, decollectivization of agriculture and conciliation of the Catholic church, the USec went over to hailing a movement for capitalist restoration as a “political revolution” against the Stalinist bureaucracy.

Having championed any and every opposition to the Soviet government, the Mandelites have recently found occasion to embrace the fascistic fringe of Baltic nationalist movements which in the guise of “independence” are seeking a vicious capitalist restoration. This September, the USec’s journal International Viewpoint ran an article praising the Estonian Nazi “Forest Brothers” as “freedom fighters” in the “struggle against Stalinism.”

Now the USec counters the imperialists’ proclamations of the “death of Communism” by correctly pointing out that “what is dying is Stalinism.” But this rings pretty hollow coming from the mouths of people who three decades ago predicted that Stalinism would survive for “centuries” and adapted their politics accordingly. Now Mandel, who in the 1953 uprising of workers in East Germany saw a wing of the bureaucracy as a solution, trumpets the “upsurge of the mass movement rocking the GDR.” He talks of the need for a “politically capable vanguard” to “open the way for the victory and consolidation of the political revolution.” Don’t buy it. Mandel and his followers have heralded everything from university students in the West to the mullahs in Iran to Lech Walesa as the “vanguard.”

At a rally to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the founding of Trotsky’s Fourth International in New York City, Claudio Magnani representing the United Secretariat openly admitted: “We committed many mistakes, big mistakes, terrible mistakes” (printed in Bulletin in Defense of Marxism, December 1988). Mandel’s USec is shamelessly opportunist, wildly impressionistic and given to extreme vacillations in line — a chronic instability that reflects the lack of a programmatic anchor. What differentiates Bolshevism from these centrist impostors is the ability to “swim against the stream” when the masses are being misled against the historic interests of the proletariat. There would have been no October Revolution if Lenin’s party had submerged itself in the sea of social-chauvinism that inundated the Russian workers at the start of World War I. But Lenin persevered, and three years later the Bolsheviks achieved state power.

The various revisionists who claim the name of “Trotskyism” — like Mandel’s United Secretariat, Tony Cliff’s organization and Workers Power’s League for a Revolutionary Communist International — have followed the general political pattern established by Max Shachtman in both reflecting and capitulating to alien class pressures. In the postwar period they have come to occupy roughly the same political niche as that of the “London Bureau” in the 1930s.

The London Bureau (also known as the London-Amsterdam Bureau or the International Bureau for Revolutionary Socialist Unity) was a lash-up of centrist organizations including, at one time or another, the German Socialist Workers Party (SAP), the Dutch Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP, later the Revolutionary Socialist Workers Party, RSAP), the British Independent Labour Party and the Spanish POUM (Workers Party of Marxist Unification), who were driven by despair and distrust of the Second and Third Internationals following Hitler’s victory in Germany.

As Trotsky noted in his 1934 article “Centrism and the Fourth International,” the coming to power of the Nazis, followed by the bloody defeat of the 1934 general strike in Austria in which hundreds of workers were killed and thousands more imprisoned, “placed a final cross over ‘classic’ reformism,” i.e., the perspective of peaceful, parliamentary “evolution” to socialism. Open reformism was supplanted by various shadings of centrism. The Trotskyist Left Opposition energetically sought to intersect and win over elements from these centrist currents but for the most part was unable to overcome programmatically the congenital reformism of these organizations.

Writing of the irresolution and chronic vacillations of the organizations in the London Bureau, the refusal to draw revolutionary conclusions posed by the impending war and increasing political ferment among the working class, Trotsky predicted, “The failure of this group is absolutely inevitable.” The London Bureau collapsed on the eve of World War II. Many of its former leaders, such as Willy Brandt, Marcel Pivert and Fenner Brockway, returned to social democracy.

Conversations with Wohlforth - 5

Marxist Bulletin No. 3 (Part IV - 1965)

SPARTACIST-ACFI UNITY NEGOTIATIONS

Fifth Session 30 July 1965

Present: Spartacist: Robertson, Soute, Nelson (alt.), Harper, Secretary
ICFI: Wohlforth, Mazelis, Michael(alt.)

Meeting convened at 8:22 p.m. Chairman: Nelson

Agenda:

1. Minutes
2. Democratic Centralism
3. N.Y.C. Mass Election Leaflet
4. Epton Campaign Work
5. Discussion on SWP
6. IC correspondence
7. Time and Agenda of Next Meetings


1. Minutes:

Minutes of July 9 were approved as corrected (corrections incorporated).


2. Discussion on Democratic Centralism:

Robertson: The burden is on us to show how we think a group of our size ought to function, since in the event of unity the comrades from the Spartacist would initially be the majority. You have received our bulletin on the Smith case. Other documents explaining our position are "For the Right of Organized Tendencies to Exist Within the Party" and "Rescind the Suspensions:" We approach the question from the point of view of factional democracy. I was disturbed by comrade Wohlforth's remark last week that PL, the SWP, and Spartacist all claim to be democratic centralist organizations. But PL and the SWP seek to ban factions, while Spartacist defends the right of principled factions if properly regulated. Regulation is necessary to direct factionalism toward its legitimate end – arrival at a political line. The SWP used its regulatory powers for the purpose of suppressing the internal life of the party and reducing it to a mere safety valve every two years. There is also the question of the kind of balance that should be struck between the democratic and centralistic aspects. Daring the whole period of the American Trotskyist movement, the range of conditions under which Trotskyists have struggled has not been sufficiently great to justify any shift from the previous balance, i.e., the American party has never been either a mass party nor an illegal party; it has always been a propaganda group. In comparison with the total range in which democratic centralism was projected by the Bolsheviks to operate, we have experienced only a narrow range. We are a small propaganda group operating under conditions of legality. We don't deprecate the organizational question. It is one of the programmatic points defining a Trotskyist-Leninist organization, and the way an organization functions carries strong inferences about the role of that organization as a working class and revolutionary movement. The Russian movement split in 1903 over what was basically an organizational question: whether the majority will rule, what membership means. It would have been wrong for Lenin to have said these were "only organizational questions." While it would have been better to have had a clean, clear split (e.g., over an issue such as whether or not to have a bloc with Liberalism), nevertheless the issue was raised in this way, and it was important. Finally, if we try for a crystal clarity on organizational questions in these negotiating meetings, what the rights and obligations of membership are, there will be less grounds for anyone claiming to be "surprised" later.

Wohlforth: We don't see how we can comment on the case of Smith since in our opinion it's a messy business. In order to make a fair judgment one would have to have gone through this particular experience and know the person involved. It is difficult for us to come to any kind of conclusion about the extent of our agreement or disagreement since we don't have a Constitution or similar document in front of us. On what I said last week, I meant that merely saying that we are democratic centralist is not enough to indicate basic agreement in practice. The SWP, PL, Spartacist, and ACFI too, all claim to be democratic centralist. In the SWP content violates form, while PL lacks even the form. The SWP has a resolution before the coming Convention banning permanent factions, a departure from their previous formal position. On the content of democratic centralism in the history of the SWP, we may have a difference, for we don't look back on the SWP as a model on either organizational or political questions. Cannon was always an unprincipled factionalist, and Trotsky intervened against him. In Trotsky's opinion, Cannon was a Zinovievist. Trotsky was unhappy with the way in which Cannon handled the Shachtman struggle, and only a few days before his death he threatened to break with Cannon. Cannon always felt a common front of the leadership against the ranks had to be maintained, and this helped lead to the destruction of the central cadre. The artificial separation of the ranks from the leadership leads to clique relationships. (This of course does not mean certain types of problems, like personal problems, should not be taken up first by the leadership.) Organizational questions cannot be raised apart from programmatic or political questions. We should not take the 1903 experience as a model, because Lenin's own development was not complete at the time. Had he been what he was in 1917, it would have been different, not that he was wrong in 1903. This was the birth, not the full development, of the Bolsheviks, and we should not seek to repeat the whole history of the Bolsheviks in 1965. Trotsky always insisted on methodological struggle. We have no differences over formal formulations -- disciplined cadres, assignment to tasks, moving around, etc., but at the same time, in dealing with someone incapable of this type of functioning but who still maintains political agreement we should seek sympathizer status. We're not saying you were wrong on Smith, but we are certainly not saying this was a model. I'd like to see your Constitution when you get it worked out. We feel a certain attitude around Spartacist, a formalism on the organization question, a rigidity.

Nelson: There are two weaknesses in your statement on democratic centralism. First, your not knowing what our position really is without a Constitution. We are not brand new, and our attitude on democratic centralism is not at all new. Part of our thinking on this subject was involved in our choice of the two articles in our pamphlet, i.e., "Building the Bolshevik Party" and "What is Revolutionary Leadership?". Second, in part on the historical basis of the organizational question and the basis of this alone that we could come to agreement or disagreement. There is a relationship between the task of the vanguard party and its organizational forms. What you said last week about the SWP, PL, and Spartacist all claiming to be democratic centralist -- this is an agnostic position. You know we are not the same. You know our background, our stated positions, etc. Your weakness is that despite statements to the contrary you disconnect the political basis of organizational attitudes much too much. Your attitude toward Cannon is purely subjective, that Cannon is no more than an organizational front man for Trotsky, nothing more than an organizational judo expert, or in the words of Marcus just "a window breaker." In your own words, Cannon becomes Foster. Shows a weakness in your understanding of the role of the organizational question in the building of a revolutionary party. Cannon's tactics toward the Progressive Party are still considered a model. Individuals and groupings in the SWP complained that their intellectual capacities were being squashed by the bureaucratic Cannon. Trotsky didn't dismiss the question but saw that it was a smokesscreen for fundamental political differences. Trotsky insisted on discipline in building the F.I. The Smith case is a concrete example of the way we operate and how we view the obligations of members. It is not messy, as you claim, but clear-out. He committed a breach of discipline, and when he attempted to defend and justify it we brought charges; however, his final expulsion was not for the original breach but for his public attack on Spartacist. The Slaughter article, in the section "Lenin and Inter Party Struggle", does a nice job in condensing a formal statement on the role of the organizational question in the revolutionary party:

"Political and organizational questions therefore cannot be separated. In an epoch where the constructuon of a leadership of the working class is the most vital historical problem, it is exactly on the questions of concrete planning and discipline for revolutionary work that political differences become explicit. Some Marxists seem to conceive of the party as simply a contractual discipline to stop individuals from going off the rails as they react to class pressure. But it is more than that: it must become the vanguard of revolutionary action, the representative of the general interest of the working class.

"In the construction of a revolutionary party there is a constant need to strive to maintain a correct relationship between democracy and centralism. The balance of this relationship tends to change with the objective situation. During times when the revolutionary movement operates under legal conditions, as in Britain today, it is essential to have full democratic discussion on all questions concerning the working class and the party. This does not, however, mean that democracy is a free-for-all, with nothing being decided. To the Marxist democracy is a weapon in the struggle against capitalism. Discussion is necessary to arrive at decisions upon which the activity of the party can be based.

"The constant training of new leaders in the revolutionary party requires the greatest patience by the leadership. Local autonomy and initiative, allowing the leaders and the rank and file to learn from their mistakes, is essential for the branches of the revolutionary party. The more experience the revolutionary leadership has the more flexible it will be in assisting the ranks by theory and practice to understand the need for a democratic centralist party."

The main point of this is that democratic centralism is the form of the revolutionary party, and this form flows from its political tasks. Balance varies according to the objective situation. The general balance between democratic and centralist haven't changed that much in the history of the SWP. The British comrades during their early struggles didn't seem to be as horrified as much as you are in hindsight about Cannon. Healy in reply to our protest over our exclusion from the old minority tendency quoted as a model for the minority to follow the relationship of the SLL to Cannon and the SWP. You shouldn't try to read the Cannon of 1962 back into his earlier history. He maintained a revolutionary party in this country admirably under adverse conditions, and maintained it longer and better than any other national section. The SWP and YSA Constitutions are examples of our attitude toward democratic centralism.

Mazelis: You seem to want a vote of confidence on the question of Smith, and this would not be proper. The Smith case must be judged from an overall political standpoint. We need not only examples of Spartacist functioning but also a Constitution to discuss or a resolution. We feel there were serious differences between Cannon and Trotsky on the organizational question, and we agree with Trotsky. We are threshing out this question in the absence of written material, and while we can get somewhere we cannot get all the way. You misunderstand our position on Cannonism and the SWP, take it out of context when you refer only to "window breaking" or "Foster". This doesn't mean we equate Cannon with Foster or Debs, but it doesn't mean we view Cannon as a Marxist or Communist politician either. Our history project document deals with this in detail.

Stoute: We stand in the tradition of the SWP -- the old SWP stands for something we can say we are in agreement with now, that we can apply to our movement today. This of course doesn't mean we endorse everything Cannon ever did. Your attitude is that we must either wipe out everything the SWP has been or must embrace it totally. This is not the way it is. I would like Wohlforth to elaborate on his statement that Spartacist is a rigid, military, formation.

Robertson: Nelson made a valuable point that examples of our application of democratic centralism are of far more value than our Constitution for your information, since our Constitution will be absolutely standard. There is something that has not been taken up. "For the Right of Minority Tendencies to Exist" discussed at length and concretely the question Wohlforth said would be of greatest interest to him: relationship of a minority to the organization as a whole. We will have a Constitution, but you won't learn as much from it as you can from the material before you, and it is in that sense we introduced it. We don't care whether you think we are right or wrong, but want to show you how we proceed, the concrete application of a certain type of discipline. If you feel we are formalist, I will say we are an organization with several currents in it; this stems from your presently being small enough to have complete homogeneity -- therefore democratic centralism seems like sheer formalism to you. You should be thankful we are formalists. The SWP has learned to dispense with these formalities. Since we are a larger organization we must bring less personal and more impersonal forms into play. We have an internal life and this must be regulated. You are loading a lot on Cannon's shoulders. Shachtman always said Cannon was a Zinovievist, but where did Trotsky say this? To reduce the experiences of the SWP from 1928 to 1940 to Cannon is overstressing the central figure. You want to see documents? We have taken over the experiences and practices of the earlier Trotskyist movement. We use "Struggle for a Proletarian Party" to train our new members with (in it, by the way, Cannon says "pay attention to what I say here, not to anything I may have done"). It is not automatic by any means that we have as yet gone beyond the SWP. On the role of leadership, the leadership is elected to handle the infinity of day to day problems, reserving for the entire organization decision on fundamental differences. Cliquism was certainly rife in the SWP. One thing we have strived to do is shatter preferential access to information. Our comrades are heavily informed and this creates a much healthier organization.

Wohlforth: We have refracted differences on this question, derived from other differences, such as on the SWP, and our general approach to building a movement. I now agree with Robertson -- having a constitution here wouldn't prove anything. I am sure we would find any constitution you presented acceptable. The difference is in approach to politics and building a movement. On ACFI being a homogeneous group, we strive to create a homogeneous group (though we are opposed to monolithism). The way you strive to have a homogeneous group is the way you have democratic centralism. Discipline flaws from political cohesion. Any disciplinary problem is in essence a political problem, including the 1903 split. Cannon sought to create organizational, not political, homogeneity. We don't disagree with what Cannon says in his book but with the experience of the Cannon regime. However, Cannon wrote his own history. Trotsky intervened in the 1932 Cannon-Shachtman fight and used the term "Zinovievist" regarding Cannon. Trotsky intervened in the Field question and in 1940, urging political rather than organizational fight. Our difference on this question is similar to our differences on method, theory, and program. Our feeling is that you are formalistic about organizational questions. This will find greater reflection when we discuss tactical questions relating to our work in this country.

Nelson: I see that "method" has raised its saintly head (it always does), unscathed and pure. I am listening to the words. You have profoundly oversimplified Cannon's role. As far as seeking to create homogeneous groups through organizational means, such a thing is not even possible. However, the main point I want to make is to question the "purity" (pardon a certain sarcasm) of your intentions. I dislike hearing pious words when dirty actions have preceded. Back to the "bookkeeping". You express a desire for avoiding "organizational excesses"...yet you played a key role in the organizational excesses of the SWP and YSA against us. Your words fall on slightly calloused ears. I happened to go through this (comrade Michael didn't--it might be good for him to hear this). You became the "theoretical arm" of the party in their desire to get rid of us. It was your document "Party and Class" that provided the Majority with the basis for our expulsion. This was not just naivete on your part. Then in 1964 in the YSA I and the comrades of our tendency were fighting the frame-up suspensions. We defended ourselves not primarily on technical grounds, but brought out the political reasons and context of the suspensions, the question of Party-Youth relations, etc. Comrade Mazelis played a despicable role that night. The Majority was unable to deal with our arguments and with the damaging evidence against them. Mazelis, as the most capable person in the room, took the floor as lawyer for the Majority, stating that with our line on Cuba we could not function as disciplined YSA members. When we tried to lean on the Constitutional technicality that YSA members can belong to any adult political organization, Mazelis claimed that the YSA in fighting us was fighting Menshevism in the YSA (I have the notes right here I took that night). This was your role in facilitating our expulsions from the SWP and YSA. You were able to do a better job than Jack Barnes, Peter Camejo, or Barry Sheppard were able to because they didn't have,your background and understanding. This is your past again. These past actions do not coincide with your words tonight.

Michael: I didn't live through all this. This is the second week you've brought up these old questions, and I don't see why you are doing this. I don't think this will help. You can put all this in a bulletin and I'll read it, but what are our tasks today? I am interested in what our differences are today. If we discuss this first, we can then have a clearer discussion on these old questions. I can't see that this sort of discussion helps us.

Mazelis: I agree strongly with Michael. I don't intend to take up the gauntlet. I do feel we made mistakes- but not the ones Nelson stated. This is the wrong way to discuss democratic centralism and the wrong way to go about the whole process of unification. Not because we are ashamed but these questions can only be clarified in light of our positions today. Nelson has given us a sarcastic and subjective outpouring of the way he feels his tendency was wronged by us. We have a completely different viewpoint. Later at the proper time we will sum up all these questions. It will be part of a summing up and not this kind of abstract bookkeeping, as he himself refers to it. I don't feel under any obligations to take up these points just because they have been raised here tonight. They will be taken up later, but in the right way. We want to relate them to developments up to the present.

Stoute: You said we seem to have a disagreement on whether or not a revolutionary movement should be made homogeneous on the basis of politics or organizational rules. We don't propose to bring about homogeneity on the basis of org. rules. However, one never has complete homogeneity and this is why we have org. forms. You said we can't settle this question tonight. How will we settle this question? You know what we are made of. You have a better knowledge than anyone else where we stand on all these questions.

Robertson: You may not like what Nelson said, but these things are vivid in the minds of our comrades. This is your past as well as ours. This is the single obstacle in our minds; repetition of this extremely bad conduct must be avoided. Wohlforth is standing the question of political homogeneity on its head. One struggles for political homogeneity not because it gives real democratic centralism bit because then you don't need recourse to the organizational rules. I deplore factions if by argument you can prevent their formation in advance. Most political leaders spend much of their energy on internal struggle. But whenever organizations meet new situations, differences develop. Wohlforth made a mistake - we are most interested in political homogeneity; but when you don’t have it you must function by rules. My reference to Comrade Cannon's "Struggle for a Proletarian Party" was answered by Wohlforth's counterposing Theory and Practice. But words are part of practice and can't be separated out. You have found comrade Cannon to be the source of the ills of the strongest national section of the Trotskyist movement bar none. Many Spartacists would call themselves Cannonites. We look upon the earlier period of the Trotskyist movement in America as our heritage, to be accepted, critically.

Wohlforth: On the question of past differences between our groups, we have not objected to their discussion and feel this is an important part of the unification process and have discussed them ourselves in our communications. However, we feel that at this and the last meeting such discussion has been broadened artifically. We didn't get much clarity at the last meeting, and tonight is another example. You feel that in order for us to understand what you mean by democratic centralism you have to discuss what Mazelis said on a particular night. Maybe Nelson was saying Mazelis knows what democratic centralism is because he correctly attacked you for Menshevism in the YSA. But I had a feeling Nelson was saying something else --"that whatever Mazelis says now doesn't make any difference because he finked". If you want to discuss this, you can put "finking" on the agenda. This has been brought in artifically and has not led to clarity. We must try to view this discussion process as aimed at its goal. It would seem proper to first probe the level of agreement and disagreement today. We can then make judgements on the past if one of us wants to keep a record. Our conclusion is that the split in 1962 was principled; you think it was unprincipled. We should put this on the agenda so that it can be discussed in a positive manner and not poison all our discussions. To the extent that we presently have differences on democratic centralism, these are not sufficient to bar unity. Since Spartacist feels such an identity with Cannon, I am worried as to whether or not Spartacist comrades proceed first from political to organizational questions or vice versa. Your failure to understand the real role of Cannon will lead you in one way or another to make errors on the organizational question. We have a feeling you may have made an error (on the Smith case), but we don't know enough. We might have a sharp difference with the way you handled the case. However, whatever differences we have on this question would be subordinate to differences on all other questions. We have a difference in emphasis on the org. question, but this is subordinate to the political questions. We should hold up on discussion till we see what is the level of current agreement. In that framework we can have a real discussion on past differences. Human beings have a correct desire to justify themselves. We will do our best not to discuss these differences now, as we were tempted to do at the last meeting.

Nelson: Politics determine – that is why we are here. The friction that exists between us is that our two groups are very similar politically yet continue to remain organizationally separate and competing. Continuing this separation on the basis that we have to examine further and still further the basis for unity is in the course of time becoming quite thin to anyone with eyes to see. It is not artifical to bring in "old" questions. We went through a common experience in the same party. Your role towards us in the YSA was not one of exposing Menshevism. Our record and our documents show the struggle of a Bolshevik minority to maintain itself in the face of bureaucratic suppression. Unfortunately for you, this can't be pushed under the rug. Because of your past role, we have to get understanding of what proper minority rights are. We have the scars to show your past attitude. Now the wheel has turned. The minority split originally was over whether or not you and your supporters were willing to accept a minority position in our common tendency. You denied our tendency had the right to democratic centralist organization. One instance of this was when our tendency selected a representative to go on the YSA local exec. You refused to support our candidate, running your own instead and letting the majority choose the weaker one. This was unprincipled. The differences we had could have been maintained within a common tendency. The question of discipline was the origin of our split. In your "history project" you analyzed Cannon's history, but when it comes to your own history then suddenly you aren't interested. You can't separate what we are now from where we came from.

Mazelis: We don't want to discuss it now, not because we are not interested but because it is a question of haw you deal with it and the framework in which it is raised. We will deal with it in the proper way. Your subjective interpretation can't lead us anywhere. The incident you mention has a certain importance, but you are exaggerating it. We did not vote for the representative not because we didn't accept democratic centralism but because of the situation. A trip to England by Philips was being made at the time. During a crisis in the organization we felt it was wrong for you to wield your majority as you did. Your way of interpreting these matters is not our way. Since this incident preceded our split by two weeks, we simply didn't wish to be bound by any decisions.

Wohlforth: I think we can show what we mean by the relation of organization to politics and why we feel it is necessary to discuss the split in the tendency as a separate point. We and the British came to a common judgment at the time of our split . We had no intention of carrying out your line. If we felt differences today were of the same depth we would not be interested in unity. We have no intention of playing games. We want to find out before we unite whether or not there is enough political agreement that we can maintain your line. A split is forced upon people when they can't carry out the line of the majority. We are not putting forward the position that our differences in 1962 were not important. We will have unity if there is enough political agreement that either side could abide by the majority. We should be discussing now only our present attitude toward the organizational question.

Stoute: The 1962 split was unprincipled and shouldn't have taken place. It was unjustified politically and was basically around organizational difference:; How you reacted organizationally at the time is where our disagreements came in. Do you think the concept of democratic centralism that we sought to put into practice in 1962 was wrong? What kind of minority rights would you expect?

Robertson: Your position on the 1962 split is now a serious political difference between us. You had a cavalier attitude toward democratic centralism within our tendency. You supported the SWP hatchet job on us on the basis that organizational questions are not important. You acted as the policeman of the majority over us when they desperately wanted to throw us out. Your actions show a difference in the revolutionary fiber of individuals. You lied to our Bay Area comrades. There must be some reflection on your part on what stood between us then now that the question of unity is raised. You have been wrong on every major question since then and don't show any reflection. It was a bad split and the proof is that we are still faced with it. I told you then that perhaps someday a split would be justified but it wasn't clear then, and it still isn't as long as we proceed along parallel political lines. What were the differences then? You wanted personal and political capitulation; you demanded we go before the party as liars. We were begging for democratic centralism. You took our money to send Philips to England while telling us it was for "consultation on the trade union question"; now you admit it was to work out the details of our split. Cannon never did the things you have done! We want unification because for us politics comes first. You must realize that you can't build a movement the way you acted. You casually say now "we had no intention of carrying out your line." Your actions drove a lot of people out of the minority, old party cadres, good people with maybe one more fight left in them. We blame you for blocing with Dobbs in order to get us. These are not "subjective questions". This what looms largest: Will you do it again?

Nelson: It would have saved a great deal of trouble if what you advance now as the real reason for your split with us in 1962 had been the reasons given your own supporters and to the SWP then. However, the comments you made then can still be read in documents. The comrades on the West Coast knew Philips was lying through his teeth when he gave his "reasons" -- that is why they voted him dawn 17-0. It was phony demogogery, designed to stampede political opinion. Because of this good comrades were lost. You drove out the people whom originally you had bragged of attracting? And there was no political basis for it. The people that left had a good history in the movement, but you wasted them, and people continue to be wasted. The existence of two separate groups with such similar lines has made us a laughing stock among serious people. Two groups cannot continue to exist in the same areas fighting for the same people. We will either unite or one will be removed from the scene. If you call this "military", go back to Lenin and look at the ruthless struggles he waged. This is the criminal side of dishonest and unpolitical approach. You want to fraternize with our rank and file? They have read the documents, and they feel that politics determine over organization.

Wohlforth: As I was impressed at the last meeting and more impressed this week, and as we suspected from the beginning you are opposed to unification. In fact, Robertson clearly states now that we have a real difference and unless it is resolved there can be no unification. We have not in the slightest changed our position on the origin of our split. If you feel this is the one difference, there will be no unity. This is not a parallel with 1902. The split was principled and later proven so. As far as the origin of the split, I tried to explain as clearly as I could and don't expect you to accept this, As we look back on our past there were questions on which we admitted errors, but we have no apologies on the split. It was correct, clear and proper. If you wanted to function as a tendency with us you could have signed our statement. Robertson gets all excitedaztt. I smile because I view it so differently,-l can't take it seriously. He views it differently because he has a different method. He ought to understand that we. YLWbat we sal.! This was not an incident of which we are ashamed. We felt the split was a good and necessary thing, and the French and British felt the same way. We had no intention of submitting to your discipline. We were not interested in that type of functioning and felt the work involved was too important. We are not going to get any further clarification than this. It was a very good and healthy split. The comrades in this room do not express seriousness. They thrust in questions in which they know we will get disagreement. The main difference is that Robertson feels we are a bunch of bastards. Instead of progress we are getting retrogression, and it is not the fault of ACFI. You have brought up questions to show we are rotten finks rather than seeking to find areas of agreement and proceeding from there. You tell us we are lucky to be dealing with you instead of with your snarling ranks. You should encourage them to read the Bulletin instead of factional stuff from the past. You are preparing your membership not for unification but for a deeper split, and as the responsible leadership you are responsible if that is the end result. Obviously the Spartacist group is hostile to unity because they take every matter and turn it into snarling dispute that would disrupt the final step -- concrete common work. More common work or no unity. We are going to work in common first or there is not going to be any unity. If you think we are going to waste our time in hostile confrontations, we are not, because we have more important things to do. I urge that we proceed first to make clear the principled basis. We should take up the important theoretical and methodological differences and only then proceed to past differences. We must proceed to fruitful common work. It is absolutely important to prepare unification but you. are preparing your comrades for a split. You should bombard us with fraternization.

Mazelis: The last session and especially tonight have in large measure reflected retrogression. Wohlforth's remarks were another last ditch effort to try to salvage whatever progress we have made, and go on to the final stage. You talk of immediate unity and then prematurely raise issues the way you do. We are more honest about unity, want to proceed in such a way that when the bitterness comes out it will be in a good context. That is why we propose to start working together. You simply call us finks again, and don't even begin to understand what our motivation was, you don't try to put yourselves in our place. We have tried not to take you up on this. I can't stress too strongly that this will get us no place. You are sabotaging unity. We plead for an end to this approach. You must have no political mind at all if you expect to raise questions in the way you have.

Nelson: You should be honest and not resort to debators language for the minutes. If you will examine the history of the attempt to unite our two groups, it is one year since we made the first proposal for unity, right after you were expelled. Retrogression? Do not complain of a process which you have set in motion. Any outsider can tell from seeing our positions which there is a basis for unity between us. We emerged from the SWP with greater differences than there are now, but there was still a basis then for unity. These differences could exist within a single organization with democratic centralism. This would be parallel with our relationship to the IC, i.e., we might have to carry out a line at variance with our own opinion, but as long as we had the right to participate in the arrival at the line we would do this. The issues you have reacted to our raising are live issues. The issue of 1962 is extremely pertinent. What would be our position in relation to the IC given this defense of your 1962 role? The IC nailed the French Pabloites to the wall for expelling the majority of the French section. Would you repeat the same action today were we in a common organization? The differences within our tendency then were far less than those separating us from the Pabloites, and we continue to maintain the split in 1962 was unprincipled. These issues must be discussed. It is clear that there has never been a political basis for the separation of our two groups. It is from this separation that factionalism comes.

Robertson: At the time of our split you said it was absolutely unprincipled to have any contact between our two groups. Now you say you have not changed your position on the split. Common work is not our problem. Michael has been drawn into common work... on our initiative. You were able to give an exact rundown on what the differences were between our groups but still you are not willing to admit that unity is possible. What are we preparing our ranks for? We frankly don't know what the outcome with you will be. We have told them everything we say here. On 1962, we are not proposing that you grovel. We are not asking you to sign a statement that you did wrong. But you will have to hear these words. We do not see any political good will on your part (by this I don't mean "friendliness", the fake seduction tactics you used on the SWP and PL). If the split in 1962 was such a good thing, why then are you in this room now? All you can come up with is the Pabloist theory of Spartacist getting better despite our own intentions.

Wohlforth: We feel the split was principled, justified, and necessary in 1962, but that the Spartacist group has evolved and that being in a different position outside the SWP and facing different problems, that unification today is .possible. So far in our discussions we see no barrier to unification. The most important differences have in fact been discussed already -- differences in method. We are willing to go back to ACFI and the IC and propose to them that we make a statement that unity is both principled and desirable despite differences in method. But I will also have to state that there is a grave danger that these methodological problems are so severe that they are forcing the Spartacist group into anattitude of hostility toward us and preventing the natural process of unity, and that while there seems to be a principled basis for unity, until we have worked together we cannot tell whether it would work out. If Spartacist is sincerely interested in unity they will go back to their organization and propose that in the negotiation sessions a serious effort be made toward seeking agreement on political questions and common collaboration. Common work wll help break the present stalemate and lead to fruitful discussion. Finally we must try to handle the question of past differences in this same spirit and seek to make the best of the current process. By common work and collaboration we should hold discussion on areas where both groups can become involved in and function as a common group and a common tendency, e.g., the comrades in SDS should seek to function as a common fraction.

Nelson: You arc now ready to go to ACFI and the IC and say that the political basis for unity exists. We came into these sessions with this position, and we said if you would agree to abide by the decisions of a joint conference that you could have full privileges. Without your agreement we would have a literary exchange but no organizational fusion.

Robertson: My own first reaction to your proposed agreement is a favorable one. We have already willingly drifted into common work, e.g., our involvement of You have one of your people in the Garment Center Anti-Viet Nam war committee. made a valuable statement, that unity between our groups is principled and desirable. In turn you state you want common work. You insist that we clarify issues that suggest agreement rather than discuss past differences. But fruitful discussions are not simply "positive" ones, not simply putting a good face on things. I would like to postpone decision until we have a chance to review the minutes of this and earlier sessions. It is a big step.

Wohlforth: I agree "fruitful" and "positive" are not necessarily the same. This agreement should be complemented with a clear statement that past differences are not on the agenda. We can discuss them later. Nothing is gained by discussing them week in and week out. Unity is not tied to resolution of past differences. One of the points of unification would be tabling any discussion of past differences for a year. They must be put aside. This is one of the proposals we would make. We are not going to unite with you in order to fight over who did what in 1962.

Robertson: Tell us one thing... where is the reevaluation that has led you to believe that unity is now permissible? You stated several times tonight that it was a great split in 1962. When did the change take place? The only explanation you have given is comrade Pablo's explanation. We have to discuss at one or another point our differences. There is a contradiction in comrade Wohlforth's remarks, that you did right in 1962 and now are interested in unity and preparing your ranks for it. How can you justify the split in 1962 while saying that we oppose unity? In the future should you change your conclusion on PL, for example, will we then face a new split? It is this quality which gives us the gravest apprehension. How can you square your affirmation of your past record with unity now? This contradiction which we see in you does not bode well. It seems to me from tonight's discussion that a split would be on the order of the day next time we have differences, and we will have differences. That is why we introduced a discussion of democratic centralism, so that we will have a way of dealing with those differences when they arise within a common organization, especially differences of a magnitude comparable with those in 1962, i.e., differences that weren't all that much.

Wohlforth: It is clear we haven't changed our minds. It is not clear whether you feel unification is possible. You must make up your mind whether you think unity is possible, or impossible on the basis of our position on 1962. We don't expect you to understand our motivation on this question, and must make it clear to you that we will not have an interminable number of discussions on past differences. That would be your way of stating that unless we capitulate you will not unify with us. If this is so, it will be an admission that you really feel the past break was principled. Wo have come to conclusion that the bar to unity is not principled political differences, but whether or not you really want unity. Spartacist must stick spoons in their mouth and hold back the outpouring of previous differences. We need experiences in common work.

Nelson: On the question of postponement of discussion of past differences, I don't know. Subordination and regulation, certainly, if subordinated to the whole of which they are a part. If your proposal is based on a genuine desire to go forward, then the movement forward would find translation into concrete organizational steps toward the unification process. Otherwise it is no more than your continually restating “we're here because we're here". That is the reason those discussions have grated so much. We have to go forward into positive organizational steps.

Robertson: We will take your proposals to our REB and consult. Obviously the rest of the agenda is tabled pending clarification of this.

Next meeting: Thursday, August 5.

Meeting adjourned at 12:30 a.m.

Conversations with Wohlforth - 3

Marxist Bulletin No. 3 (Part IV - 1965)

SPARTACIST-ACFI UNITY NEGOTIATIONS

Third Session 9 July 1965

Present: Spartacist: Robertson, Turner, Stoute (Harper, secretary)
ACFI: Wohlforth, Mazelis, Michael (alternate for van Ronk)

Meeting convened at 8:10 p.m. Chairman: Stoute

Agenda:

1. SWP: (a) historical; (b) current;
2. Minutes;
3. Election Statements;
4. Social; Topic and time of next meeting

1. SWP Discussion:

(a) historical

Wohlforth: The essential feature of the American Marxist movement has been its failure to really develop theory, and while certain progress has been made in some periods toward coming to basic working-class consciousness, and even going beyond that in adherence to the world movement and later the Trotskyist movement, through its entire history it has never mastered the Marxist method. Rather it sought to build a movement with theory inherited from past leaders like Marx or worked out elsewhere and imported. Americans learned lessons rather than the method leading to those lessons. Cannon came out of the midwest fusion of the Populist Wobbly movement, and the Cannon-Foster faction within the CP (while the healthiest of the factions) was representative of that empiricism. Cannon learned from Zinoviev, etc., a way of treating political questions in an organizational way. Trotsky warned him against this, but this tradition has remained to this day. SWP was a bloc between Cannon and Trotsky in which Cannon took the political line of Trotsky but developed the SWP in his own way organizationally. The struggle of the SWP with Shachtman showed the failure of the SWP to develop theoretically. It was Trotsky that insisted the struggle center around questions of dialectics and method. Discussions between Trotsky and the SWP leadership revealed that Trotsky was anything but an uncritical supporter of Cannon, was worried about Cannon's adaptation to the liberal-trade-union sections and the incapacity and unwillingness of the Cannon people to break from that sort of collaboration. Cannon's conduct during the Minneapolis trials has been used as a precedent for today. In the post-war period Cannon failed to understand the international conjunctural situation and came up with the theory of inverted American exceptionalism. But world capitalism was restabilizing itself and the American struggle would thus retreat. The International never understood this fundamental turning point in world history (1946-47), but instead the line of Pablo was that this was a period of ascending socialist revolution. Cannon never confronted the problem of Stalinism in the post-war period, but felt that the SWP would be thrown into leadership. Degeneration of the SWP during the '50s was then not merely a simple reflection of negative conditions, though these accentuated the sickness of the party. Internal problems forced Cannon into an international bloc he never wanted, explained this on the basis of 'orthodoxy'. This was short-lived and prepared ground for growth of revision. The crisis of the SWP has been brewing for 20-25 years. The central cadre of the party was fashioned in this sick situation. Understanding the history of the SWP is related to our tasks of building the movement today. Are we simply to be a more orthodox copy of the SWP. or recognize the necessity of theoretical development, of applying the Marxist method, of going beyond 'orthodoxy'? Our tasks are essentially Iskra tasks, bring theory and consciousness to an economist movement. Study of the history of the SWP is essential to our own development and tasks.

Robertson: Your document was a good and serious effort to understand the SWP, but was best in its particular analyses. However, it would seem that you have loaded too much on American empiricism. Actually it is American exceptionalism to single out what happened in the U.S. alone as reason for the decline of the Marxist movement (though it is undeniably true that the American movement had a theoretical incapacity). To counterpose the sickness of the U.S. to the world movement would be good if objective development confirms, but it doesn't. In the U.S., the most significant failure was that of the American working class to develop any political movement of its own. You often talk about 'theory' and 'method' but are weak in definition. In order to deal with Marxist method it is necessary to understand it, not merely to refer to it - 'theory' by itself is an empty word. Theory is a sufficient simplification of reality that it can be shoved into our heads and give us an active understanding as participants of what is going on – that is, what we hold in our heads is also a factor. Program generates theory. What are decisive are programmatic questions. The SWP in post-war years had a theory that was inadequate on Yugoslavia, China, etc. Pabloism was a revisionist attempt to fill that gap in a way that turned the movement toward programmatic shift and opened up the whole world movement for degeneration. Largely for objective reasons the SWP moved into the post-war period deproletarianized, isolated and with an aging cadre; a qualitative transformation took place. It is important to appreciate what the main driving forces were in the degeneration of the SWP, for no party has ever performed anywhere in the world longer better than the SWP has and that includes the Bolshevik Party – no party has ever outlived the aging of its cadre. The SWP managed to hold a revolutionary line for some decades – the 50s was the worst period any movement faced anywhere. The entire world Trotskyist movement had developed an estimation of Stalinism which was developed on the basis of a single kind of experience – the pre-war role of the Stalinist parties in the face of working class mobilization in struggle. In the post-war years the SWP line had a ritual character. Program is decisive. Wohlforth's analysis is fine, but has an idealist streak. His 'theory' and 'method' have a categorical quality. Though. I have come down hardest on the critical side, I thought "Marxism in the U.S." was a good statement.

Turner: Wohlforth's document will be helpful for those who have not gone through the struggle in the SWP, though there is a tendency to oversimplify in the document. The subjective aspect of Cannon has been elevated and made into a factor beyond the normal weight that should be assigned. After all, the entire international movement failed to deal with the new situation that had arisen – the failure was not merely Cannon's, but that of the whole movement. In raising questions about the application of Marxist method, it would have been useful to concretely show method in application in terms of dialectics rather than just repeating the word 'method.'

Wohlforth: We are not Cannonites. We do not want to return to Cannonism. We want the destruction of Cannonism.

Wohlforth: The points raised on the need for more concrete material on theory and method are quite welcome. As far as R.'s questioning my placing too much emphasis on American empiricism, failures of the whole international working class were obviously involved. I mentioned empiricism because this was the way the theoretical failure developed in the U.S., while in Europe, especially France, the failure was in the direction of formalism. As to the criticism that the document was weak in definition of theory and method, I wanted to show what they were through concrete analysis. The "Assimilation" document goes into it theoretically, and I consider it to be a complementary document, was how Marxist method should have been applied to the major problems of post-war period. Theory and method are not simple reflections of reality, but have an independent existence precisely because they are an abstraction from reality of the underlying process which may not be apparent through simple reflection. Theory seeks to reflect independent reality from beginning to end, not just present reality. The Pabloites had a theory that reflected a period of the expansion of Stalinism. Program does not generate theory; rather one comes to programmatic conclusions on the basis of theoretical understanding. There is an interaction between program and theory. Program in the concrete becomes part of the process and leads to theory; your mind is part of the reality. The weakness of the SWP would have failed in a good period in another way. It was headed for failure in 1946 by its false combination of sectarianism and opportunism, and would have led to the destruction of the SWP as a revolutionary party barring theoretical development. Can't say no party performed better than the SWP. It is to the Bolshevik panty we must return today, not to the SWP. Trotsky was the continuator of the Bolshevik party, but he was incapable given his time of creating a new formation that would be able to withstand his death. The Trotskyist movement was a failure but the Bolshevik movement was not. Bolshevism had within it greater revolutionary forces, more cadre who understood Marxist method, than any movement since. We will be playing only a transitional role. We don't come out of the old tradition; the SWP did not create a cadre capable of doing what Trotsky did in the world movement. It is not that the analysis of Stalinism developed in the 1930's is inadequate to explain current reality, but that they didn't understand the method by which that theory was arrived at. Stalinism is degenerative, not progressive. Cannon is a key person in the history of the SWP, and in essence Cannon is the SWP. The degeneration of the SWP is related to the degeneration of Cannon. We are not Cannonites. We do not want to return to Cannonism. We want the destruction of Cannonism. Cannon subordinated politics to organization. Organizational questions should not have a life in and of themselves. Our role is not simply to gather together workers where we can find them but to take to the working class the theoretical understanding without which the working class is incapable of organizing itself into a force to overthrow the bourgeoisie. Must have a conjunctural analysis of the development of capitalism as a world system in order to supplant the bourgeoisie.

Robertson: On theory being a reflection of reality -- you have defined this as current reality. But that is impressionism. The greatest reality is during crises when superficial reality is stripped away. 1923 was such a turning point – that is how I used the word 'reality'. I don't like the word 'process' because it has an objectivist tone. Slaughter is the most outstanding Marxist theorist today because of his denial of the autonomy of 'facts' and his insistence that what we think is part of the process and part of the social outcome. We differ on program generating theory. If you sought to adhere to program at the time of failure of theory, you would either have to freeze or else seek a stronger guide to action, examining full reality, not just present nor just past. Only Cuba allowed one to finally make sense of the entire postwar problem; the problem was not solved historically until the Cuban developments. But anticipations were possible. Regarding Cannon's worth as a Trotskyist political leader, as late as 1948 his writings on the Wallace campaign were a model. Trotsky was not part of the old Bolshevik cadre but issued out of Bolshevism partly in opposition to the Bolshevik party which fell apart. The SWP has produced us. We are a link, for bettor or worse, from the Bolsheviks to Trotsky to SWP to us. Cannon was the best Communist Politician produced in this country. It is not a question of copying the SWP, but of going beyond. Future Trotskyists will have to meet the measure of Cannon's strengths as well as his weaknesses. This is a real challenge. We have to learn from him positively as well as negatively. Phillips's criticisms of your history project, some were correct, but basically he was making a Philistine response.

Turner: On the subjective factor of Cannon vs. the whole objective situation in which Trotskyism found itself – even in its most positive periods, Trotskyism existed in a context in which Stalinism as a world system looked and was large. The Trotskyist movement, even while Trotsky was alive, was not able to make a dent in the European Stalinist movement. The failure was not basically that of the individual, Cannon. While the individual can play an important role in all the processes of history, you cannot eliminate the objective forces. For example, in the degeneration of the Bolsheviks, Trotsky never considered the subjective to be the main factor.

Mazelis: It is wrong to say Trotsky did not come out of the Bolshevik party. He joined in 1917. This was qualitatively different from us coming over to the SWP. We came over to Trotskyism, not Cannonism. Our development must be viewed separately from the SWP. Trotsky came over to Leninism. What we learned in the SWP was not of the order of what Trotsky learned from Leninism. The British movement is already on a higher level than the SWP ever was here. We feel Cannonism was unable to develop Marxism, but this is not saying we and the British have developed it, but we have scratched the surface. The 'Assimilation' document was an extremely important contribution, and the international conference will make other contributions.

Michael: Robertson gives the impression that program yields theory, that you have a program that draws you into contact with events taking place and then cast about for theory. This view doesn't take into account the things one uses to construct a theory.

Robertson: The best way to look at these questions is in situo – truth is always concrete. In the first workers' movement in Russia a new problem was broached. The Bolsheviks and Lenin had an incorrect theory, a sufficient but not a correct theory, but up to the supreme moment they had the correct political conclusion of not making alliances with the liberals. In 1917 Lenin became a Trotskyist. In the alliance of the proletariat and the peasants, the proletariat must take the lead – there was something new in the Russian situation which cleared this up; the old experience was not enough. Trotsky made these predictions in 1905 without there yet being a party to carry out the program's content. The Bolsheviks remained steadfast to their program. None of the individuals or groups at the time had the whole truth.

Turner: The basis of Marxism is materialism. In the beginning was the deed. History, life, pose certain tasks which men must solve, so they project a construction. To the extent the construction is related to the reality, men solve the tasks. This is fundamental to Marxism. There can be no disagreement on this.

Wohlforth: You are mistaken. Theory is more than a reflection of reality, it is an active part of reality. We must get out of a mechanism which has almost destroyed the Marxist movement. Theory is an interacting part of reality itself. Cannon was not a communist politician because he was never a communist in that he never mastered the fundamental of communism which was necessary to combine theory with the building of the party. Cannon was the world's best factionalist. He kept control over the party but he destroyed the party – a criminal act. The best communist politician in the history of the SWP was Wright – he almost understood. There is a basic difference between us: The Spartacist group has yet to complete the theoretical break with the SWP and Cannonism while we have taken this step and have done it in large part under the urging of the SLL. It was they who urged us to take on the history project. They had already come to the understanding of the need to break with Cannon. On program begetting theory – this is completely wrong. We are fundamentally counterposed to that position. That is not Marxism. You must begin with reality not with program. Lenin was in no sense an empiricist. He sought to implement a theory which wasn't totally wrong. His program was an adequate reflection of his theory. Trotsky didn't develop the theory of the Permanent Revolution out of program. He started with the reality of the 1905 revolution which led to theoretical understanding which led to program. "Working out theory to explain program"... "In the beginning was the deed"... I'm not interested in this, this is nothing. In this discussion we are concretizing what we mean by theory and method. Read Lenin's Notebooks – he uses the word 'process' 500 times. Process is essential to dialectics. If Robertson rejects the concept of process, he rejects the dialectic. To ignore or refuse to accept process loses that which is central to the dialectic, the internal process of life and matter. Everything is always in process. We continue to have important theoretical and methodological differences. This, rather than barring unification and discussion, necessitates discussion, makes this dialogue and process between us more urgent.

Robertson: The question has been raised as to what is the program of a party. This is a class question, anticipation of the limits of what that class or section of the class can hope to achieve for itself, the codification of the possibilities of a class, for the workers a question of the victory of the socialist revolution--that is what program is. What is it that shapes theory? The appetites of men shape out their intervention. The SWP was not a bloc with Cannon -- that implies they had different programs which they did not. The SWP was the American branch of the world Trotskyist movement, it was not the SWP vs. the Trotskyist movement. Theory does not always grow and develop. We know less about the world now than was known at the time of the Bolshevik revolution. We know less of the world at present because we have less means to change the world. I did not say Lenin was an empiricist, but that there was a certain theoretical weakness in the program of the Bolsheviks which was shared by Lenin, a slight empiricism. Trotsky did not start with the Revolution of 1905 for the theory of the Permanent Revolution, but had seen the need 18 months before that for a labor dictatorship. Because of this Trotsky seized on the Soviets more quickly than the Bolsheviks. Internal contradiction is the heart of dialectics. The word 'process' grates on me, invoking an image of "process industries" such as the automated American oil refineries; hence I object ... because we (or our absence!) are part of the 'process'.

Turner: Wohlforth should avoid trying to score debating points, but consider what is being said, not take words out of context and try to give it some implied meaning. That is not a dialectical approach. Generally we have very unimportant and minor differences, as far as the discussion here reveals.

Robertson: We don't propose to take a vote on your document, on views on these historical questions and on methodology. We ourselves have a running internal discussion on method.

Mazelis: I disagree strongly with Comrade Turner, with his entire approach. We have very serious differences, as the discussion shows. But we shouldn't be afraid of differences, they should be thoroughly explored, and not avoided. As W. said, they are anything but a bar to unity. It's perfectly understandable that you wouldn't have a position on a particular document. It's another thing that it should be stated the way you stated it – you don't anticipate taking a position. There are important differences between us.

Wohlforth: You will take a position on method at your coming conference whether you want to or not. Marxist method will or will not be reflected in your documents. Spartacist will not be able to avoid taking a position on method.

(b) SWP – Current

Robertson: We are bringing out a series of Marxist Bulletins going into the history of our quarrels, so we will not bring it up now. We must have clarification on our own split, but will wait till the documents are fully at hand. A rotten bloc is in the making in the SWP. We are in favor of a bloc for party democracy, nothing else. Party democracy should be foremost the leadership's responsibility, not that of various minorities. Most of the present SWP minorities are to the right of the SWP leadership. Some, under pressure of events, have been hopping around. Miller has denied democratic centralism for a decade. To develop a bloc with a right-wing minority against the center is unprincipled. Unification must be on the basis of political program. We above all cannot cross class lines on domestic politics. The opposition to Black Nationalism on the West Coast is from the right -- the “jobs or income now” approach is to the right of a program of Black Nationalism which is fantasy of the SWP. There has been a recrudescence of Weissism, pro Maoism. However, we want to encourage all tendencies to demand the readmission of the expelled, and would repudiate that support only if it were put forward in a context that was a repudiation of democratic centralism.

Wohlforth: Our views are not the same. As we gather from SWP internal bulletins that have cane into our possession, within the various tendencies there is at least a small, conscious Trotskyist force which is around Lynn Marcus. We have 99% political and theoretical agreement with Marcus on all questions. He has submitted to the SWP convention a document that is a complete break with Cannonism – a more complete break than Spartacist has yet made. He and a group of some half-dozen represent a clear Trotskyist position. Within the mess of the SWP there are elements moving to the left and right. Kirk’s current document is better than his previous position; has an understanding that his previous documents never had of the coming conjunctural crisis of American capitalism. He is making a complete attack on and break with the party leadership. We see Kirk as evolving to the left, but highly confused. As far as Miller and Philips are concerned, they are evolving as one would expect -- they are empiricists. A bloc with them would be in principle, however, on the American question. The American class struggle is the key for blocs in the party. We can bloc on a class line in this country against the majority, while being split on international questions. Swabeck is finished.. Seattle finished. The SWP is going through acute throes. Our task is to bring theoretical clarity into this despite difficulties.

Turner: From what I saw of Marcus while in the SWP, he seemed to take a number of positions of the Weiss group and to be to the right of the SWP leadership.

Wohlforth: The Weissites were Pabloites.

Mazelis: Spartacist is not fully aware of Marcus's development, but we assure you it is no exaggeration to say we are in 99% agreement. We feel that his development has taken place under the influence of the Bulletin at least in part which is directed at people like him. Our constant hammering has paid off. Marcus seems to be taking a strong stand on all questions.

Wohlforth: On the St. Paul and Madison people, here we have the evolution of a group of old party members, some out of the party and others not too active. The Brusts who are with ACFI were on leaves of absence from the party for a year or two and have since resigned. Around them are other party comrades, some out, some in, and they have connections with some YSAers. There is the probability of building a Trotskyist group in Minneapolis, largely of workers.

Robertson: There must be a genuine political basis for the alliance of any two groups, not a left and right bloc against the center. Almost all minorities in the SWP at present are to the right. We would be willing to have a bloc with Philips on the basis of your last documents. For every bloc it is necessary to have documents, written evidence. We have friends still in the SWP. But they have been sealed off in good part. Some have been squeezed out. But some have been in the party a long time, are well known comrades. Our line on the current SWP oppositionists is to pick and choose allies on the basis of political questions, not "we'll get all comrades together against the party leadership."

Wohlforth: Spartacist friends in the SWP should consider supporting Marcus's documents if they find them politically acceptable.

2. Minutes:

The minutes of 27 June were accepted as corrected.

3. Election Statement:

Michael: The revised draft brought in by Henry hasn't incorporated the changes I suggested.

Disc: Robertson, Wohlforth, Robertson, Turner, Stoute

Michael will write up amendments and bring them back for approval. ACFI has not yet prepared the draft for the popular leaflet.

4. Party:

People should be appointed by each side to help clean up afterwards. ACFI is handling liquor, Spartacist is handling food.

5. Time and Topic of Next Meeting:

2 weeks from tonight, on the IC resolution.

6. Miscellaneous:

Turner: On your forum on Algeria. The fact that we have been meeting regularly and frequently makes it inexplicable that we were not notified you were having this forum. Our members received a mailing, but Robertson did not receive a copy. Smacks of united front from below tactics, a provocation.

Wohlforth: The decision to have a forum was made last Wednesday, didn't know we mailed to your membership. The mailing went to the Bulletin mailing list. No one in Spartacist who doesn't receive the Bulletin would have received a mailing. Spartacist can have their literature on our lit table should they wish.

Turner: Having been creating a unity atmosphere, this last minute approach smacks of a desire to by-pass the Spartacist leadership, and I felt it should be discussed.

Wohlforth: The idea came up at the last minute; we felt we should have a forum because of the Algerian discussion. We have in no way communicated with your rank and file.

Robertson: Here is the chronology from our end. I subscribe to the Bulletin but did not receive a mailing. This is the first public forum you have had. We were planning a joint activity where our contacts and periphery are being brought in by our mailing list and invitations. Then unannounced you set up your very first forum which to us looks as if designed to pull our ranks to your group's activities.

Mazelis: We are operating independently. It is you who have been reluctant to proceed jointly. We had hoped a number of Spartacist comrades would come to the forum and take the floor. I personally organized the mailing, which included Comrade Robertson. I can definitely assure everyone that this was sent, and any mixup was not our doing.

Wohlforth: If the Spartacist comrades would like to announce their class they may do so at the forum.

Turner: That was the way it looked to us. We should try to make every effort to proceed in a non-provocative manner.

Meeting adjourned at 11:35 p.m.

(Minutes of this session approved at the fifth session, 30 July, 1965.)