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Alan Thornett’s Denunciation of Trotskyism (Part 2)

Ellie Keen — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 22:00:55 +0000

Part 2 (See here for Part 1)

Alan Thornett’s diatribe against Trotskyism provides an occasion for a re-examination of his own political evolution. It is instructive in that it demonstrates how a false political conception regarding the development of socialism became the starting point for a pronounced shift to the right by a layer of workers and middle-class people who were once attracted to revolutionary politics. This political shift was bound up with profound experiences made by the working class with Labourism in Britain.

In his denunciation of “Trotskyist groups” in Britain for ultra-leftism, Thornett makes particular mention of the Socialist Labour League (SLL) and its successor organisation, the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP). The SLL/WRP was formerly the British section of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), which publishes the World Socialist Web Site. Thornett’s tendency originated from a split in the WRP in 1974.

Thornett was part of a substantial layer of militant workers won to the Socialist Labour League in the 1960s as a result of its political struggle against the Labour and trade union bureaucracy. A leading shop steward at the massive British Leyland car plant in Cowley, Thornett quit the Communist Party and joined the SLL. He led many struggles in the plant, becoming chairman of the Transport and General Workers’ Union 5/55 branch and of the Joint Shop Stewards’ Committee at Cowley. He was also the leader of the SLL’s industrial wing, the All Trades Union Alliance.

Thornett joined the SLL at a time when it was understood that the development of the revolutionary party would necessarily involve a substantial leftward movement developing within the Labour Party and the trade unions that had the allegiance of millions of workers, who believed these organisations to be socialist. The task was to carry out systematic work to expose the socialist pretensions of the Labour and trade union bureaucracy in order to win the most politically advanced workers to the revolutionary party by breaking them from illusions in Labour. In this struggle, the unions, which represented more than 10 million members and had a very active rank-and-file, were vital arenas of political struggle.

The tendency that Thornett came to lead emerged as an opportunist orientation towards the very bureaucratic leaderships and organisations the SLL had sought to oppose. In opposition to the waging of a political struggle to win workers away from the leadership of the Labour Party and the trade unions, he was to develop the conception that a left tendency would emerge from within the bureaucracy itself that would be won to socialism.

In a period of sharp political shifts in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which in Britain took the form of major struggles against the Conservative (Tory) Party government of Edward Heath, this became the starting point for Thornett’s organisational and political break with Trotskyism.

Thornett had remained very much a trade union militant in his outlook and came to view the struggle waged by the SLL as running contrary to his own work as a shop steward in Cowley, which focused on efforts to work with various left Labourites, Stalinists and left radicals in defence of jobs and working conditions. Thornett wrote later that “Trotskyism, for us—and being a Trotskyist then tended to mean being a member of the SLL because of its size and influence—provided an analysis not only of capitalism but also of the trade union leaders, their role in society and relationship to the employers.”

However, he continued, “The SLL took this to the sectarian extreme. It saw the role the officials played in general as applying equally to them all. It failed to see the different strands within them and that some could play progressive roles. It was, therefore, unable to construct alliances with those who did stand on principle” [Emphasis added].

Thornett’s adaptation to the Labour and trade union bureaucracy developed under conditions of a growing political disorientation within the central SLL leadership of Gerry Healy, Cliff Slaughter and Michael Banda.

As is explained in “How the Workers Revolutionary Party Betrayed Trotskyism,” the split with Thornett unfolded in the aftermath of the unclarified break with the French Organisation Communiste Internationaliste (Internationalist Communist Organisation—OCI) in 1971.

As early as 1966, the OCI had insisted that the Fourth International had been destroyed and had to be reconstructed. Denying that the ICFI represented the continuity of Trotskyism, it rejected the significance of the struggle that had been waged against the Pabloite movement’s political liquidationism and wholesale adaptation to the Stalinist, social democratic and bourgeois nationalist parties, which it proclaimed to be “blunt instruments” through which socialism would be achieved.

In the tumultuous social and political struggles that wracked Europe following the French General Strike of May 1968, the OCI began to build a substantial youth movement, but on the basis of adaptations to various centrist tendencies in France and internationally. It subsequently formed the Committee for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International and the Workers Party (PT) in France as centrist vehicles, through which it established a leading position within the Force Ouvriere trade union. The OCI was responsible for placing Lionel Jospin in the Socialist Party in 1971. Jospin went on to become a key ally of Socialist Party leader Francois Mitterand, who served as president of France from 1981 to 1995. Jospin later became prime minister of France.

The SLL failed to conduct a thorough-going political struggle against the OCI, declaring instead a public split on November 24, 1971, before any real attempt had been made to clarify the cadre of the then-French section of the ICFI and win them away from the centrist perspective of the party’s leadership. This meant that the SLL was politically disarmed and weakened when Thornett’s tendency emerged as a result of a similar centrist deviation and became a direct conduit for a political counterattack by the OCI.

In 1973, the SLL took the decision to launch a campaign to become the Workers Revolutionary Party. The founding documents of the new party represented a major shift away from the SLL’s Trotskyist moorings, under conditions in which a militant anti-Tory movement was at its height. The new party’s declared aim was to “undertake a specific political task: to unite the working class behind a socialist programme to throw out the Tory government and replace it with a Labour government.”

Thus the new party was largely defined in terms of an electoral, tactical policy, rather than as an instrument for achieving the strategic goal of mobilising the working class, on the basis of the historic legacy and international socialist programme of Trotskyism, of overthrowing capitalism, establishing workers’ power and constructing socialism in Britain and internationally.

The demand for the return of a Labour government pledged to socialist policies was, in itself, correct, and provided the possibility of taking workers through the experience of a political struggle against the Labour and trade union bureaucracy. The SLL/WRP anticipated that, with Labour having been brought to power due to an offensive by the working class against the Heath Tory government, millions of working people would expect Harold Wilson’s new Labour government to implement major social reforms. This, in turn, would bring them into conflict with Labour and create the best possible conditions for a political reckoning with social democracy and the building of the revolutionary party.

The WRP’s founding document stated that the subsequent struggle “for socialist policies under a Labour government” would enable the party to “win many thousands to Marxism and throw out the reformist leaders of the trade unions and labour movement.”

However, the SLL/WRP made impermissible adaptations to reformist illusions in the working class. The WRP advanced an essentially electoral programme that made the most minimal reference to the party’s Trotskyist character and the international perspective and political authority of the ICFI. The programme of demands it outlined were framed as a series of “basic rights”—for employment, a higher standard of living, social benefits and better housing, and to “change the system” in an unspecified way. The launching of a mass recruitment campaign requiring only agreement on this programme meant that workers who had not politically broken from reformism and begun their political education as Marxists could flood into the party.

Subsequent events were to develop in a more complex and protracted manner than was anticipated by the WRP. The party was not wrong to predict that the working class would come in to conflict with the Labour government. (Strike action throughout the public and private sector against Labour’s enforced wage restraint resulted in the loss of 30 million working days in the “Winter of Discontent” of 1978-1979.) But it was wrong to assume that a movement against Labour would develop as an uninterrupted extension of the militant movement against the Tories.

Heath had called a general election on May 3, 1974, under the slogan, “Who rules the country, the government or the unions?” Labour won power just four months after the founding of the WRP, but as a minority administration. Its victory had the initial effect of strengthening illusions in the Labour Party and in reformism, not weakening them, including amongst workers recruited to the WRP.

The working class was not politically prepared to immediately wage a struggle against the Wilson government, which it had placed in office, especially after Wilson made significant wage concessions to the coal miners. The reticence to challenge the government was compounded by Labour’s minority status and concerns that the Tories might return to power. Wilson was forced to call a second election on October 11 of that year, in which Labour’s vote actually increased and secured it a parliamentary majority.

The WRP had clearly underestimated the strength of the illusions in Labour in the working class. It was forced by these developments to place renewed emphasis on its Trotskyist identity and its historic opposition to the Labour and trade union bureaucracy. But this met with ferocious opposition from Thornett, who articulated a right-wing reaction to the WRP’s efforts to deepen its struggle against the Labour and trade union bureaucracy.

As the ICFI later explained, Thornett “had developed a close relation with sections of workers on the basis of the centrist basic rights deviations of the 1973-74 period” and “now resisted the return by the WRP leadership to sharp attacks on the Labour government, especially under conditions where it retained a precarious hold on power and was faced with the imminent necessity of calling new elections.”

An additional factor in shaping Thornett’s view that the WRP leadership was being “sectarian” towards Labour was the fact that British Leyland’s future was in jeopardy and depended on the support of the Wilson government. In 1974, British Leyland announced projected losses of £16.6 million. It sought an overdraft facility of £150 million and began talks with Labour’s Department of Trade and Industry. Labour’s Tony Benn spoke in Parliament in December to urge that, because British Leyland was a “leading exporter” and a huge employer, it was essential that government money be used to assist it. This was agreed.

The role of the OCI

Thornett’s general discontent with the party and hostility to its leftward turn made him receptive to political advances made by OCI supporters in Britain, organised in the Marxist Bulletin Group and led by two middle-class renegades from the SLL, Robin Blick and Mark Jenkins. The aim of the two, who were later to pass into the camp of open anti-communism, was to create a faction inside the WRP with the initial aim of removing Gerry Healy from leadership. This, in turn, was considered only a step towards shifting the WRP to the OCI’s position that the ICFI should be liquidated.

Blick wrote in 1980 of how the Bulletin Group contacted Thornett through the WRP’s Western Region Central Committee member Kate Blakeney, who was met in August. Blakeney had told them “there existed an unofficial and rather secret opposition” grouped around Thornett that “had no clear platform or understanding where the WRP had gone wrong, but was rather a coming together of people who for various reasons were dissatisfied with the national performance of the WRP” [Emphasis added].

Blick states that he wrote “substantial sections” of Alan Thornett’s first oppositional document, including “the section on the Transitional Programme, the section on workers’ control, the section on corporatism, the section on Social Democracy.” He also collaborated with Thornett on an almost daily basis, preparing his reports “up to and during the expulsion of the opposition.”

The sections cited focus in large measure on opposing the WRP for its position that “the entire leadership of the trade unions and the Labour Party have been designated as ‘corporatist.’ ” Thornett’s faction platform stated that this was tantamount to calling them social fascists, as the Stalinists had called the Social Democrats in the Third Period.

The WRP’s political critique of Thornett’s right-centrist positions was correct, but Healy repeated and thus compounded the mistake made with the OCI of moving to an organisational settlement before fully clarifying both the party and the working class as to the political issues at stake.

Thornett’s provocative and disloyal behaviour no doubt played a part in Healy’s decision to do so, and he was soon proved right in his supposition that Thornett was working with the OCI. But this well-founded suspicion did not obviate the need to probe the essential theoretical issues raised by Thornett’s platform, which would have meant revisiting the conflict with the OCI and thus taking to a higher level the ICFI’s struggle against revisionism.

As a result of the confusion the split engendered, Thornett was initially able to take several hundred members with him when he was expelled, and the party lost its most important industrial base.

The split with the WRP liberated Thornett and his supporters to pursue “entry work” within the Labour Party, while he continued his trade union career at branch and national level until the late 1980s. Now in his seventies, Thornett has spent more than three decades trading off of the political confusion created by the WRP, while establishing a niche for himself as an advisor to whichever reformist or Stalinist bureaucrat desires his services.

His group was particularly active in the Chesterfield Socialist Movement, grouped around Tony Benn. For several years, he specialised in seeking to regroup various dissidents and splinters from the International Committee. But this was only a step towards ditching his pretensions to Trotskyist orthodoxy and making his way into his natural political home in the Pabloite USec. His International Socialist Group was recognised as a sympathising section of the USec in 1991 and became its British section at the 1995 World Congress.

With his latest writings, Thornett makes clear that his joining the Pabloites was only a step towards the repudiation of Trotskyism that he has now carried out, a development echoed amongst a substantial number of former radicals who have traded in their tattered credentials for well-paid positions in the higher echelons of the Labour and trade union bureaucracy.

In an additional polemic with the British SWP, Thornett writes a political paean to Galloway, describing him as “still the only left Labour MP to make a break with Labour,” “the best public speaker on the left,” and a “central leader of the anti-war movement” with “the biggest electoral base of anyone on the left outside of the Labour Party.” He adds that Galloway is “left Labour in his politics…. But it was this which he brought into Respect from the outset—a genuine component of left-Labour politics.”

Ultimately, this is what Thornett is concerned with: Ensuring that any new party must be a vehicle for various dissident Labourites and Stalinists that is implacably opposed to genuine socialism. “The strength of Respect Renewal, “ he declares, “is that it is serious about approaching other sections of the left, such as the trade union left and the [Communist Party of Britain], about a wider regroupment of forces to tackle the crisis of working class representation.”

Concluded

Alan Thornett’s Denunciation of Trotskyism (Part1)

Ellie Keen — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 21:50:24 +0000

Part 1 (Part 2 can be found here)

The January edition of International Viewpoint publishes a statement by the Socialist Resistance steering committee entitled “Democratic Centralism and Broad Left Parties.” Also known as the International Socialist Group, the group is led by Alan Thornett.

Thornett has recently secured his position as chief advisor to Member of Parliament George Galloway in Respect Renewal, the organisation formed following Galloway’s split with the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP) last November.

The SWP was the motive force for the creation of Respect-The Unity Coalition, which was formed in the immediate aftermath of the Iraq war. The SWP conceived of Respect as a political extension of the alliance of antiwar Labour MPs, trade union bureaucrats, Stalinists, Greens, Liberal Democrats and Muslim groups that constituted the Stop the War Coalition.

The SWP calculated that such a coalition could successfully challenge the Labour Party in elections, provided only that it did not place any obstacles in the way of such a regroupment. The biggest obstacle would be to insist that the new party be explicitly socialist. The SWP therefore stated that Respect would be a “broad coalition” with socialists within it, but raising only those demands that were acceptable to all the antiwar forces that joined it.

The “socialist” component of Respect would be made up of the SWP itself, but more importantly, the left Labour MPs and trade union bureaucrats it anticipated would break from the Blair government as a result of the war in Iraq and in opposition to Blair’s pro-business policies. These dissident Labourites would provide the real leadership of Respect.

The SWP thus oriented itself not to the hundreds of thousands of workers and young people who mobilised against the war, but to the political forces that were able to dominate the anti-war movement and ensure that no political struggle was waged against the Blair government.

Such a party, based on widely disparate political tendencies rooted in opposing class forces, and with no agreement on programme other than being “deeply disappointed by the authoritarian social policies and profit-centred, neo-liberal economic strategy of the government,” could under no conditions be viable. But Respect’s fate was to be doubly disastrous, given that the break by a significant layer of Labourites from the party never materialised. The token opposition demonstrated by a handful of MPs to the war in Iraq evaporated once the war was underway. None of them were about to sacrifice their comfortable careers within Labour’s ranks.

Only Galloway found himself outside Labour’s ranks when he was expelled for his opposition to the war. For this reason, Respect became primarily a vehicle for Galloway to win back a seat in parliament.

Moreover, the reliance on Galloway helped to deepen the SWP’s own adaptation begun during the anti-war movement to Imams, Muslim businessmen, petty bourgeois leaders and groups such as the Muslim Association of Britain, as well as to the Middle Eastern regimes to which Galloway is oriented. The SWP did so, hoping to capitalise on Galloway’s connections in order to secure its own electoral advances.

The plan backfired badly for the SWP. Galloway eventually moved against his erstwhile allies when the Muslim politicians and business figures made clear their hostility to the alliance with the SWP—an opposition motivated to some degree by anti-communism, but mostly by petty organisational rivalries and a belief that the SWP exerted too much influence over who was in the leadership and who would stand as candidates.

Thornett, whose small group of supporters were the only other nominally left group in Respect, stepped in to paint Galloway’s Muslim-dominated faction as a great reforming movement against the undemocratic practices of the SWP. He jumped at the chance to “renew” Respect, even handing over his party’s press to it.

An attack on revolutionary socialism

The article by Thornett’s tendency’s in International Viewpoint is framed as a polemic against the SWP, claiming that it was responsible for the failure to secure the “broad alliance of progressive forces” that was originally envisioned as the basis for Respect. But in the process, Thornett delivers one of the most unalloyed presentations of the cynical, unprincipled and anti-socialist politics behind all such efforts to construct new parties from the decaying fragments and breakaways from the old social democratic and Stalinist organisations.

Thornett speaks as the leader of the British Section of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USec), whose affiliate parties—such as the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire in France—are engaged in similar political efforts throughout the world. He makes clear that the essential basis for all such projects is a deep political hostility to Trotskyism and a repudiation of the essential task of building an independent political leadership for the working class, guided by the socialist and internationalist perspective of Marxism.

The statement acknowledges that “there were no principled questions of politics involved” in the split in Respect, but insists that it is significant nevertheless. Respect failed, Thornett claims, because, unlike the International Socialism Group and the USec, the SWP maintains a commitment to “the models of political organisation and habits of engagement with the rest of the left adopted by some self-proclaimed Trotskyist organisations” that “were strongly pressurised by third period Stalinism and organisational methods and assumptions inherited from the Stalinised Comintern.” He adds that “no section of British Trotskyism was entirely unaffected by this pressure.” (1)

Thornett’s accusation that other left groups in Britain have historically suffered from an ultra-left attitude to the old mass workers’ parties and a Stalinist organisational approach sets the stage for his insistence that no one should make the same mistake regarding the new “broad left” parties formed since the late 1990s. He hails organisations such as Rifondazione Comunista in Italy and, more recently, the Left Party in Germany as a rebirth of the left that has rendered unnecessary and divisive efforts to build an independent Marxist party.

“It is absurd to imagine,” the statement declares, “that it is possible to take off the shelf wholesale texts written in Russia in 1902 or even 1917, and apply them in an unmediated way in 2007. Even less credible is the idea of taking the form of revolutionary organisation and politics appropriate for Minneapolis in 1934 (2) and simply attempting to extrapolate it in a situation where revolutionary politics has been transformed by central new issues (of gender and the environment in particular); where the working class itself has been transformed in terms of its cultural level, geographical distribution and political and trade union organisation; and where the experience of mass social movements and the balance sheet of Stalinism (and social democracy) has radically reaffirmed the centrality of self-organisation and democracy at the heart of the revolutionary project.”

Thornett is not arguing against an uncritical application of Lenin’s writings. He is rejecting any possibility of building a socialist party based on the working class. The future lies, rather, in liquidating into the new “broad left” formations.

He is forced to acknowledge that workers have already had bitter experiences with the very parties he champions, such as Rifondazione Comunista’s “support for Italian participation in the Afghanistan war” and the “neo-liberal domestic policies” of Lula’s Workers Party in Brazil. These, he states, were “of course massive defeats for the left.” But he reserves his venom for anyone opposing the betrayals of these parties.

His document insists: “For some on the revolutionary left, what we might call the ‘clean hands and spotless banner’ tendency, this shows that attempts at political recomposition are a waste of time. Far better to just build your organisation, sell your paper, hold your meetings, criticise everyone else and maintain your own spotless banner…. In our view this simplistic ‘build the party’ option is no longer operable.”

This cynical dismissal of the “clean hands and spotless banner” tendency is a reference to the closing paragraphs of the Transitional Programme of 1938, the founding document of the Fourth International (FI).

Trotsky’s formation of the FI was in political response to world historic defeats inflicted on the international working class as a result of the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet Union and the affiliated parties of the Communist (Third) International under the leadership of Joseph Stalin: the 1926 General Strike in Britain, the Chinese Revolution in 1927, and, above all, the victory of Hitler in Germany.

It was the failure of any party of the Third International to oppose this betrayal that led Trotsky to proclaim its death as a revolutionary organisation and to call for the founding of the Fourth International. He did so in political opposition to centrist parties, such as the POUM in Spain, which opposed building a new international and whose refusal to politically challenge Stalinism led to further bloody defeats. The Stalinist bureaucracy’s response to Trotsky’s challenge was to launch the political purges of the 1930s that culminated in the infamous Moscow Trials.

It was against this background, and on the eve of the Second World War, that the Fourth International was established. Drawing on these terrible experiences, Trotsky wrote: “The present crisis in human culture is the crisis in the proletarian leadership. The advanced workers, united in the Fourth International, show their class the way out of the crisis. They offer a programme based on international experience in the struggle of the proletariat and of all the oppressed of the world for liberation. They offer a spotless banner.”

Thornett rejects entirely Trotsky’s struggle to build the Fourth International, proclaiming it irrelevant in the modern period. He rails against “a false conception of the configuration of the workers’ movement and the left, a misreading of ideas from the 1930s, that is common in some sections of the Trotskyist movement. This ‘map’ sees basically the working class and its trade unions, the reformists (Stalinists), various forms of ‘centrism’ (tendencies which vacillate between reform and revolution) and the revolutionary Marxists—with maybe the anarchists as a complicating factor.”

“On the basis of this kind of map,” the statement continues, “Trotsky could say in 1938 ‘There is no revolutionary tendency worthy of the name on the face of the earth outside the Fourth International.’ If this idea was ever operable, it is certainly not today.”

“Today the ‘thin red line of Bolshevism’ conception of revolutionary politics doesn’t work,” the document insists. Why? Because “this idea often prioritises formal programmatic agreement, sometimes on arcane or secondary questions, above the realities of organisation and class struggle on the ground” [emphasis added] .

Pabloite liquidationism

For Thornett, it is not permissible to speak of Stalinism, reformism and centrism, because the parties he is seeking to construct can be formed and win influence only if the working class is kept ignorant of the political record of these discredited tendencies and is unaware that their remnants form the backbone of the new parties.

Anyone familiar with the history of Stalinism, for example, would not have been surprised by Rifondazione Comunista’s support for Italian participation in the Afghan war. It did so as a coalition partner of Romano Prodi’s government alongside the Left Democrats, which also emerged from the Italian Communist Party.

Various “left” groups had claimed that Rifondazione Comunista would function as a left alternative to the Left Democrats. But Rifondazione Comunista continued to support the government despite its role in Lebanon, is support for the expansion of a US military base in Northern Italy and its implementation of austerity measures that led to its fall from power in February.

The same can be said of the attacks on workers’ living standards by Lula’s so-called Workers Party and the record of any of the other formations held up by Thornett as having rendered Trotskyism obsolete. Thornett’s aim is to provide a political amnesty for organisations such as the German Left Party, set up by a section of social democratic functionaries led by Oskar Lafontaine and ex-Stalinists from East Germany, into which all manner of “left” groups have liquidated, including the sister party of the British SWP.

Thornett accompanies his denunciation of programmatic agreement with a list of “general guidelines” on how to operate in these “broad left” parties. The most significant of these is his insistence that “no revolutionary current can have the ‘disciplined Phalanx’ concept of operation…. [W]e are not doing entry work or fighting a bureaucratic leadership.”

What do Thornett’s prescriptions say of the type of parties he favours? No struggle for programmatic agreement means that there will be no challenge to the pro-capitalist programme of the leading figures in these parties. His tendency is “not fighting a bureaucratic leadership.”

The same is true of Thornett’s rejection of accountability within his own organisation or the broad party (Respect Renewal or some other formation) in which his co-thinkers operate. He does not speak for the rights of the rank and file, but for a leadership of which he is now a well-established representative. Everything can be discussed, any and all views held, only so long as nothing interferes with the right of the leaders to ignore the nominal programme of their party and the mandate of their members and do precisely what they want.

That is what has happened in the case of Rifondazione Comunista’s support for Italian participation in the Afghanistan war. And that is what will happen with Respect Renewal in Britain, should it ever win significant support.

In a related document, David Packer of Thornett’s group makes this abundantly clear. He states clearly how “in the present context we should not, nor have we, been fighting for Respect to adopt a revolutionary programme or revolutionary forms of organisation.”

He goes on to give at least one example of how the “freedom” the Thornett group espouses works in practice. He writes, “I am sure we agree that our bottom line on abortion is a ‘woman’s right to choose,’ but this is not supported by our only MP [George Galloway], nor by some other forces in Respect…. Clearly, we would not expect [Galloway], an avowed Roman Catholic, to argue for a woman’s right to choose….”

Far from issuing forth some newfound wisdom prompted by developments unforseen by Trotsky, Thornett merely revives arguments previously marshalled in order to oppose a struggle against the old and now discredited reformist and Stalinist parties.

His is a warmed-over version of the politics long associated with the United Secretariat and its founding theoreticians, Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel. (3)

Throughout the post-war period, the Pabloite groups have insisted that Trotskyism has no independent role to play. The struggle for socialism would proceed by revolutionaries entering into the “mass workers’ parties” that dominated in any given country—Stalinist, reformist or nationalist—which they would steer in a socialist direction by building alliances and giving loyal advice in the hope of influencing their leaders.

In words foreshadowing Thornett’s document, Pablo called in 1951 for “the most effective possible regroupment of conscious revolutionary forces larger than our own” and, through a “fusion with them,” the eventual creation of “big Marxist revolutionary parties.”

Pablo, too, dismissed with contempt Trotsky’s insistence that outside the Fourth International “there does not exist a single revolutionary current on this planet really meriting the name.” He wrote in October 1953, “In the present concrete historical conditions the variant which is more and more the least probable is the one where the masses, disillusioned by the reformists and Stalinists, break with their traditional mass organisations to come to polarise themselves around our present nuclei, the latter acting exclusively and essentially in an independent manner, from without.”

It was in a struggle against this liquidationist tendency that the International Committee of the Fourth International was formed in 1953. Its founding statement, the “Open Letter to the World Trotskyist Movement,” issued by US Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon, declared: “The attempt to revise the accepted Trotskyist analysis of the nature of Stalinism and the Lenin-Trotsky theory of the party, and thereby in effect, to deprive the Trotskyist parties and the Fourth International as a whole of any historical justification for independent existence, is at the bottom of the present crisis in our international movement” (The Heritage We Defend, by David North, Chapter 18: “James P. Cannon’s ‘Open Letter’”).

Cannon could have been writing against Thornett’s document.

For decades, particularly during the revolutionary wave that swept Europe between 1968 and 1975, the Pabloite groups played a key role as apologists for the Stalinist, social democratic and bourgeois nationalist regimes and movements—employing Trotskyist phrases only to justify a policy of complete prostration before the labour bureaucracies.

This loyalty to the bureaucracy has an objective basis. The Pabloites articulated the interests of a layer of the petty bourgeoisie and better-off sections of workers whose social position depended on the welfare state mechanisms and other concessions the bourgeoisie was forced to grant in the post-war period.

The impulse for the ruling class doing so was a fear of a revolutionary development in the working class. However, the instruments through which these concessions were secured and administered were the social democratic and Stalinist parties, which constituted a substantial layer of privileged state apparatchiks in central and local government and the machinery of trade unions, as well as numerous left-leaning academics in the universities and colleges. It was this milieu that was the political tap-root of the various left radical groups, which specialised in demanding more energetic and greater reforms, from which they benefited, while opposing any development that would bite the bureaucratic hand that fed them.

These same considerations shaped the response of the USec’s affiliate organisations to the collapse of the Stalinist, social democratic and bourgeois nationalist parties in the 1990s. This was the decade in which the perspective historically upheld by Pabloism suffered its most crushing refutation.

The revolutionary “self-reform” of the Stalinist bureaucracy that Pabloism had predicted turned out to be its transformation into a capitalist oligarchy that oversaw the reintroduction of private property and market relations in the former Soviet Union. In the West, the reformist Labour parties and trade unions were refashioned as vehicles for implementing Thatcherite policies of privatisation and the destruction of essential services that has resulted in a historically unprecedented transfer of wealth from working people to the super-rich.

In every country, support for these old organisations has haemorrhaged, prompting efforts by sections of the bureaucracy to form new organisations—such as Lula’s Workers Party in Brazil and the Stalinist-led Rifondazione Comunista in Italy—in an attempt to maintain control over the working class. Every such effort was hailed by the Pabloites as a new political dawn.

Only after what remains of the social democratic and Stalinist left decided to make such an organisational break did the USec’s sections finally remove themselves from the decaying carcasses of the old parties. And they did so only to ensconce themselves as comfortably as possible in the new political creations of the self-same bureaucracy—redoubling their efforts to pour scorn on Trotskyism as a sign of their absolute loyalty.

Thus the USec insisted in 2003 that the great danger was that “sections of the revolutionary Marxist movement” had “fetishised their programmatic inheritance into a reified object to be defended against all comers.” What was necessary was “a rejection of the conception of an enlightened, arrogant vanguard that parasites on or subjugates the movement.”

Read Part 2.

Notes:

(1) During the “Third Period,” beginning in 1928, the Communist International declared that social revolution was imminent. In Germany, the Communist Party took an ultra-left line, denouncing the Social Democrats as “social fascists” and opposing Trotsky’s call for a United Front against Hitler as a means of defeating fascism by exposing the Social Democratic leaders and winning the allegiance to communism of the millions of workers who were supportive of the reformists. The Communist Party’s policies were instrumental in ensuring Hitler’s victory.
(2) The Minneapolis general strike of 1934 was led by Trotskyists and resulted in a substantial growth in support for socialism amongst American workers.
(3) The United Secretariat emerged as a political tendency in the years immediately following World War II. Under the leadership of Michel Pablo, the secretary of the Fourth International at the time, it represented an opportunist adaptation to the stabilisation of capitalism. The stabilisation was based on the political betrayal carried out by Stalinism of incipient revolutionary movements in Europe and elsewhere, and the role played by the United States in resuscitating European and Japanese capitalism.

The division of Europe agreed at Yalta and Potsdam and the subsequent onset of the Cold War obliged the Stalinist bureaucracy to reluctantly carry out a programme of nationalisations in the East European buffer states. Pablo responded to this by rejecting the struggle to build independent Marxist parties, based on the central understanding that the instrument for the realisation of socialism was the working class itself. Instead, he argued that the conflict between imperialism and the Stalinist regimes had forced the Stalinist bureaucracy to project a revolutionary orientation and would force it to do so again in future.

This capitulation to Stalinism developed into a comprehensive perspective both justifying and actively seeking the liquidation of the Fourth International. Pablo’s initial prognosis of “centuries of deformed workers’ states” gave way to more modest claims that a process of gradual “self-reform” of the bureaucracy was under way.

The Stalinists were, moreover, only one of a number of “blunt instruments” that could substitute for the revolutionary role previously assigned to the Fourth International. In countries where the social democratic bureaucracies dominated the workers movement, they would be the vehicle for socialist transformation, provided only that enough militant pressure was brought to bear on them by the working class. In the semi-colonial countries, various bourgeois nationalist regimes and parties—from Peronism in Latin America to, later, Castroism in Cuba—would play the same role.

UK and US Culture

Ellie Keen — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 21:49:33 +0000

Can I claim that my age [78], my life’s experience [WWII Nazi occupation, two dictatorships plus a revolutionary civil war], my birthplace [Athens, Greece], my profession [civil engineering], and my strict adherence to rationality and honesty, as an atheist, give me the right to address [mostly] young Britons and young Americans and “lecture” them on the subject presented below? The answer is: No! I do not have the right. I have the duty to address them. Here is the subject:

The German weekly magazine “Der Spiegel” [“The Mirror”] is one of the most important mainstream magazines of Europe and arguably of the world. “Der Spiegel” is definitely not a radical leftist publication. In its latest issue, that of February 25, 2008, on page 56 we read: “A clean ‘surgical coup’ would have been ‘attractive in many respects’, noted on May 6, 1976 the Planning Staff of the British Foreign Ministry”.

Now, what is a “clean surgical blow”? It is a method of killing women and children by using technology developed in institutions of higher learning, also known as “universities” or “institutes of technology”. The greatest experts in the world in this kind of “surgery” are Bush father and son, husband and son, respectively, of Barbara [of New Orleans fame]. This technology involves bombs, rockets, etc. By extension a “surgical coup” is an occupation of a country without the use of bombs, etc, but through torture and intimidation.

What was the target of this “surgical coup”? Rome! The cradle of Christianity [or something of the sort]. Note the date: it is 1976! Why would rational people want to do a thing like that? The [rational] people we are talking about are: US President Gerald Ford [plus “Kissy” of Harvard, aka Henry Kissinger], James Callaghan [British Prime Minister], Valery Giscard d’Estaing [President of France], Helmut Schmidt [Chancellor of Germany], et al. The reason for the coup: a “horror picture” [Horrorvorstellung] of the Italian Communist Party winning the elections.

[Note: That the Italian Eurocommunists (a term coined by the CIA!) were very “soft” communists, almost social democrats of the German kind, and most importantly note that they were completely independent from the Soviets and therefore they did not constitute a “threat” to the West, that was known to the Americans, the British, and the rest of the “civilized” West.]

The “Der Spiegel” article goes on: “Since the end of the Second World War again and again the USA has paid millions to [foreign] politicians and parties. One part of the money landed at Secret Service officers who cooperated with extreme rightist terrorists, whose bomb attacks with dozens of dead were then charged to radical leftists.” Beautiful and Christian world!

Thus, declassified documents in the UK, the US, and Germany “show that the British above all [the others] were thinking about a radical solution… a coup d’etat through rightist military in Rome”, by means of the above mentioned civilized “surgery”!

Now, addressing the ordinary Britons, especially the young Britons, one could ask why the British insisted in sowing murderous violence (that is what a coup means) in the lives of a peaceful people? The answer is not very difficult. The British elites are the poodle of the American elites. To secure the favor of the “owner” they, the British elite, have to be arse-lickers. The expressions: “The British are the lieutenants of the Americans” or “there is a special relationship” between them, are rather hypocritical.

How about the ordinary Britons? On the basis of my personal experience I have concluded that, in very general terms, in any given population the “distribution” of socio-political ideology is approximately as follows: about 30%, for a strange biological [?] reason, are rightists (that is crypto-fascists or even crypto-Nazis, but are called, simply, “conservatives”), about 40% consider themselves “moderate” or even “progressive” (but in reality they are scared people striving to make a living), about 15% are politically indifferent to the point of cynicism, about 10% are leftists (honest people with integrity and dignity), and finally there is the 5% of economic elite with their servant personnel ( the latter are called, also, politicians, military, etc).

Therefore, it is a considerable part of the ordinary Britons that allows the British elites to be the “poodle” of the US elites. That part could be the 30% of the “conservatives” reinforced by part of the cynics or it could be the 40% of the “moderates” aided again by the cynics. The nomenclature in Britain is Conservatives vs. Laborites, in the US it is Republicans vs. Democrats, and so on for other countries.

Let us go back to the case of Italy. Notice that the date for the discussion about a coup in Italy is May 1976. Only 20 months before that date, in July of 1974, the same coup scenario ended in Greece after a seven-years-long dictatorship instigated by the US elites through the rightist military in Greece. No need to elaborate on the brutality of the 1967-1974 military dictatorship in Greece. However, there is an interesting lesson to be learned: today in the central prison of Athens there are two members of the military dictatorship, Ioannidis [the master torturer and dictator for the last lap of the scenario] and colonel Dertilis [a sheer murderous person]. They have been in prison for 33 years. The only protection their US mentors could offer them was a modicum of luxury in their cells. It would be equally interesting to follow the fate of Musharraf of Pakistan, when the people tortured by his goons demand justice.

The “Der Spiegel” article closes with the following paragraph: “Luckily for Italy things turned differently. In the June 1976 election it was surprisingly the DC [Christian Democracy] that won 38.7 percent. The PCI [Italian Communist Party] stayed at the opposition with 34.4 percent.” Does the word “luckily” show how “mainstream” is the position of the German magazine or does it mean that the Italian people avoided “surgery”? Let us hope it is the latter. As for the 34.4 per cent of the 1976 Italian communists, in no way all of them can be considered leftists of the above mentioned 10%. Most were of the “moderate” variety.

What would have happened if the Italian communists had won? Not much. The state would have been a copy of the Christian Democrats with a more humane face this time and possibly with some benefits for the working people. However, the climate could have been favorable to plant the seeds for a pareconish kind of society!

So, finally, we arrive at the crucial question. Why is it that the British and the American elites, products of Oxford and of Cambridge or of Harvard and of Yale, respectively, do not give a damn about human life and act in an immoral and even in a rather “psychotic” way?

Let us try to see who these elites are. They are white, they profess to be Christians, they are very rich, they have the arrogance of the highly “educated” [education supposedly based on the classical Greek ideas], they are deeply racist, they carry the complex of the awareness of being untalented [so, they buy Rembrandts!], they grow in families of cruelty and hypocrisy, they are cowardly [so, they build armies and brutal police forces to dominate the ordinary people and thus feel secure], their women are equally brutal [in some cases even worse, e.g. Thatcher]. No need to go on, there is enough accumulated evil up to this point to last for the next dozens of Vietnams and Iraqs, not to mention “surgical” interventions in Italy, Greece, etc.

But, as the [Chomskyan] argument goes: it is the institutions that use the individuals to carry out the brutality. If the present “batch” of elites goes, then there would be another one to replace them, say a “batch” of Soviet communist elites. However, could it be that the institutions are products of the culture of the particular societies, the UK and the US ones, for the case we are talking about? But the culture of a population is the sum of the beliefs and acts of the individuals that constitute that specific population.

Therefore, the only way to stop the brutality by the UK and the US elites is for the ordinary people of these countries to start thinking about changing their culture.

[Note: Of course I did not mean to “lecture” anybody. All I tried to do is furnish some bits of information about the Italian case which might be unknown to young Britons and to young Americans. Information, that helps one to understand the human pain of the Iraqis, the Afghans, and the Palestinians.]