Toward the Rebirth of the Fourth International!
Declaration for the Organizing of an International Trotskyist
Tendency (statement formally initiating the international Spartacist
tendency)
Adopted July 1974; published in Spartacist, No. 23, Spring
1977
1. The Spartacist League of Australia and New Zealand and the
Spartacist League of the United States declare themselves to be the nucleus for
the early crystallization of an international Trotskyist tendency based upon
the 1966 Declaration of Principles and dedicated to the rebirth of the Fourth
International.
2. In a half dozen other countries parties, groups and committees
have expressed their general or specific sympathy or support for the
international Spartacist tendency, as have scattered supporters or sympathizers
from a number of additional countries. Among these groups and individuals are
comrades, in both Europe and Asia, possessing many years or even decades of
experience as cadres of the Trotskyist movement.
3. The Revolutionary Internationalist Tendency, a small Marxist
wing of the "United Secretariat," centered on the United States and with
supporters in Australia and elsewhere, has seen its spokesmen expelled from
their national sections and parties for seeking to express their views within
the United Secretariat, that deeply factionally divided and unprincipled
conglomeration of reformists and revisionists, latter-day Kautskys, Bukharins
and Pablos. If the main contenders in the "United Secretariat" are united in
their common and not-so-veiled class collaborationist appetites, they are
deeply divided between the electoralism and placid neo-populism of, e.g., the
American Socialist Workers Party and the guerrilla-terrorist enthusing of,
e.g., the French ex-Ligue Communiste. These differences reflect far more the
differing national milieus and resulting opportunist appetites than they do any
questions of principle. The recently concluded "Tenth World Congress" of the
United Secretariat refused to hear or even acknowledge the appeal of RIT
comrades against their expulsion. The RIT forces are now making common cause
with the Spartacist tendency. They are but a vanguard of those who will
struggle out of the revisionist swamp and toward revolutionary Marxism. Already
in France an oppositional Central Committee member of the former Ligue
Communiste has broken from the Front Communiste Révolutionnaire
(recently formed by Rouge) in solidarity with the views of the RIT.
4. In Germany senior elements from the centrist and now fragmented
left split from the United Secretariat in 1969 are being won to the Spartacist
tendency. They are regrouping around the publication Kommunistische
Korrespondenz. In Germany three inextricable tasks are posed for Leninists:
to programmatically win over subjectively revolutionary elements from among the
thousands of young left social democrats, centrists, revisionists and Maoists;
to fuse together intellectual and proletarian elements, above all through the
development and struggle of communist industrial fractions; to inwardly
assimilate some thirty years of Marxist experience and analysis from which the
long break in continuity has left the new generation of German revolutionary
Marxists still partially isolated.
5. In Austria, Israel, Canada and elsewhere similar splits,
followed by revolutionary regroupment and growth, are occurring. In Austria the
initial nucleus came from youth of the United Secretariat section. The
"Vanguard" group of Israel is the last still united section of the old
"International Committee" which split in 1971 between the British Socialist
Labour Leagues wing led by Gerry Healy (with which the American Workers
League of Wohlforth is still united despite friction) and the French
Organisation Communiste Internationaliste led by Pierre Lambert which
subsequently lost most of its international support--i.e., with the Bolivian
Partido Obrero Revolucionario of G. Lora and the European groupings around the
Hungarian, Varga, both breaking away. If the "Vanguard" group amid this welter
of disintegration is still unable to choose between the counterposed claims of
Healy and Lambert, it did produce and promptly expel a principled and valiant
counter-tendency to both. In Canada youth from the Revolutionary Marxist
Groups Red Circles are being drawn to Trotskyism. Everywhere unprincipled
formations are subjected to the hammer blows of sharpened capitalist crisis and
upsurge in the class struggle.
6. In Ceylon where the historical consequences of Pabloist
revisionism have been most fully revealed, only the Revolutionary Workers
Party, led by the veteran Trotskyist, Edmund Samarakkody, has emerged with
integrity from the welter of betrayals perpetrated by the old LSSP and which
were aided and abetted by the United Secretariat, its unspeakable agent on the
island, Bala Tampoe, and the craven Healyite "International Committee." The RWP
has been compelled to seek to generalize the revolutionary Marxist program anew
from Marxist class-struggle principles.
7. The Spartacist tendency is now actively working for the
immediate convening of an international conference to politically and
geographically extend the tendency and to further formalize and consolidate it.
The tendency organizing nucleus will seek to work in the closest collaboration
with sympathizing groups, particularly in continuing and assuring a
broadly-based and full written and verbal discussion process leading to this
international conference.
In the pre-conference interim the tendency organizing nucleus
assumes political and organizational responsibility for the prior international
resolutions, declarations, open letters and agreements for common work of its
present constituent groups. These documents notably include: "Toward Rebirth of the Fourth International," 14 June
1963; Statement to the 3rd Conference of the
International Committee, 6 April 1966;
Letter to the OCRFI and French
OCI, 15 January 1973; Letter to Samarakkody, 27 October 1973; the
historical analyses: "Genesis of Pabloism,"
"Development of the Spartacist League [of New Zealand]," and "The Struggle for
Trotskyism in Ceylon"; and the agreements endorsed at the interim international
conference held in Germany in January 1974, printed in Workers Vanguard
No. 39, 1 March 1974.
8. Both the present "United Secretariat" and the former
"International Committee" despite their respective pretensions "to be" the
Fourth International, as a necessary condition for their fake "unities," have
chronically mocked the principles of internationalism and of Bolshevik
democratic centralism as their different national groups or nationally-based
factions have gone their own way--ultimately in response to the pressures of
their own ruling classes. Thus until the English and French components of the
ex-"International Committee" blew apart, the International Committee operated
explicitly on the proposition that "the only method of arriving at decisions
that remains possible at present is the principle of unanimity" (decision at
the 1966 London International Committee Conference). Since then the Healyites
have substituted the naked Gauleiter/Führer principle as their mockery of
democratic centralism. The other, OCI-led wing of the ex-IC retained the
contradiction of launching the Organizing Committee for Reconstruction of the
Fourth International which was supposed to initiate political discussion on the
basis of the 1938 Transitional Program, while simultaneously seeking to build
new national sections. Both such hypothetical sections and the Organizing
Committee itself therefore labored under a basic ambiguity from the outset, but
the Organizing Committees disintegration into sharply counterposed
elements all of whom swear by the 1938 Program, has left its practice
stillborn. Today, following the just concluded "Tenth Congress" of the United
Secretariat, its American supporters, being themselves in the Minority
internationally, threaten their own national minority, the Internationalist
Tendency (which belongs to the international Majority), by declaring:
"The Socialist Workers Party proclaims its fraternal
solidarity with the Fourth International but is prevented by reactionary
legislation from affiliating to it. All political activities of members of the
SWP are decided upon by the democratically elected national leadership bodies
of the SWP and by the local and branch units of the party. Unconditional
acceptance of the authority of these SWP bodies is a prerequisite of
membership. There are no other bodies whose decisions are binding on the SWP
or its members." [our emphasis] SWP Internal Informational
Bulletin No. 4, April 1974, from Introductory Note, 17 April
1974
9. This apparently naked assertion of national independence by or
toward organizations in the United States is not unique and has a specific
history. Thus the American Healyite publicist, Wohlforth, declares in his
pamphlet, "Revisionism in Crisis":
"With the passing of the Voorhis Act in 1940 the SWP was
barred from membership in the Fourth International by law. Ever since that time
the SWP has not been able to be an affiliate of the Fourth International. So
today its relationship to the United Secretariat is one of political solidarity
just as the Workers League stands in political solidarity with the
International Committee."
The "Voorhis Act" passed by the American Congress in 1940 has been
used as a convenient excuse for revisionists to more openly display their
concrete anti-internationalism than is convenient for their co-thinkers
elsewhere.
This act, while ostensibly aimed centrally at domestic military
conspiracies directed by foreign powers, was actually intended, as was the
overlapping "Smith Act," to harass the American Communist Party, then
supporting the Hitler-Stalin Pact. A key provision states: "An organization is
subject to foreign control if... its policies or any of them are determined by
or at the suggestion of... an international political organization" (political
activity being defined as that aimed at the forcible control or overthrow of
the government). Such organizations were to be subject to such massive and
repetitive "registration" requirements as to paralyze them, quite aside from
the impermissible nature of many of the disclosures demanded. Thus it was
similar to the later "Communist Control Act" which was successfully fought by
the American CP. But the "Voorhis Act" with its patently unconstitutional and
contradictory provisions has never been used by the government--only the
revisionists.
10. Today the United Secretariat Majority makes loud cries in
favor of international unity and discipline i.e., against the SWPs
views and conduct, but it was not always so. When the forerunner of the
Spartacist League tried to appeal its expulsion from the SWP to the United
Secretariat, Pierre Frank wrote for the United Secretariat on 28 May 1965
that:
"In reply to your letter of May 18 we call your attention
first of all to the fact that the Fourth International has no organizational
connection with the Socialist Workers party and consequently has no
jurisdiction in a problem such as you raise: namely; the application of
democratic centralism as it affects the organization either as a whole or in
individual instances."
After Frank gave the Spartacists his answer, Healy publicly
expressed sympathy for the Spartacists plight, charging in his
Newsletter of 16 June 1965 that Frank "ducks behind a legal formula for
cover." But when Healys own ox was gored by the SWPs publication of
the embarrassing pamphlet "Healy Reconstructs the Fourth
International," Healys SLL threatened violence and/or legal action
("Political Committee Statement," 20 August 1966 Newsletter)
against any who circulated the pamphlet in his England. Shortly he used
both--the Tate affair! Healy claimed as the basis for his threats the self-same
fear of the Voorhis Act on behalf of Wohlforth and the Spartacists. But the
Spartacists then replied:
"We for our part reject the SLLs solicitousness on
our behalf. The Voorhis Act is a paper tiger never used against
anyone and patently unconstitutional. For the Justice Department to start
proceedings against a small group like ours or the smaller and less threatening
[Wohlforthite] ACFI would make the government a laughing stock, and Healy knows
this. He is aware that for years the SWP has hidden behind this very act to
defend its own federalist idea of an International." Spartacist
No. 7, September-October 1966
11. More currently, however, as in the United Secretariat
Majoritys "Again and Always, the Question of the International" (by Alain
Krivine and the self-same Pierre Frank, 10 June 1971, SWP International
Information Bulletin No. 5, July 1971) they attack the public formulation
by Jack Barnes, SWP National Secretary, that "the principal condition for
international organization" is "collaboration between leaderships
in
every country." To this idea Krivine and Frank counterpose "the International,
a world party based on democratic centralism." And later the Majority Tendency
(in IIDB Volume X, No. 20, October 1973) notes that the Minority, in
flagrant contradiction to Barnes and Hansens previously expressed
views, declares, "we will do our utmost to construct a strong [international]
center," and the Majority concludes that "actual practice leaves no doubt: the
[Minority] faction would be for a strong center if it were able to
have a majority in it." And most recently the same United Secretariat Majority
asserts that behind the acts of the SWP-based Minority "lies a federalist
conception of the International which contradicts the statutes and the line
adopted by the [Tenth] World Congress" (17 March 1974, IIDB Volume XI,
No. 5, April 1974). The United Secretariat Majority ought to know. They made
this accusation in commenting on a Tenth Congress joint Minority-Majority
agreement so flagrant in mutually amnestying every sort of indiscipline, public
attack and disavowal, organizational chicanery, walkout and expulsion that the
Majority also had to offer the feeble disclaimer that these "compromises
adopted at this World Congress should in no way be taken as precedents" and
that "the exceptional character of these measures is demonstrated, moreover, by
the unanimous adoption of our new statutes" (which formally contradict the real
practice!). Yes indeed, for opportunists and revisionists basic organizational
principles are not of centralized, comradely, evenhanded and consistent
practice but just boil down to the simple matter of whose ox is gored. This is
the organizational aspect of Pabloism.
If today the United Secretariat promises to back up its own
friends in the SWP should action be taken against them, the point to be made is
not the United Secretariats dishonesty and hypocrisy per se, but rather
the shattering of the United Secretariats pretensions (like those of the
International Committee) to be the Fourth International. They both trim their
avowed organizational principles through expediency for petty advantage just as
and because they do the same with their political principles and
program.
12. The international Spartacist tendency is just that, a tendency
in the process of consolidation. But from its international outset it declares
its continuing fidelity already tested for a decade in national confines to
Marxist-Leninist principle and Trotskyist program--Revolutionary,
Internationalist and Proletarian.
The struggle for the rebirth of the Fourth International promises
to be difficult, long, and, above all, uneven. But it is an indispensable and
central task facing those who would win proletarian power and thus open the
road to the achievement of socialism for humanity. The struggle begun by L.D.
Trotsky in 1929 to constitute an International Left Opposition must be studied.
Both despite and because of the differing objective and subjective particulars
and with ultimately common basis then and now there is much to be learned
especially as to the testing and selection of cadres in the course of the
vicissitudes of social and internal struggles.
The giant figure of Trotsky attracted around itself all sorts of
personally and programmatically unstable elements repelled by the degenerating
Comintern. This led, together with demoralization from the succession of
working-class defeats culminating in the second World War, to a prolonged and
not always successful sorting out process. It is a small compensation for the
lack of a Trotsky that the Spartacist tendency has little extraneous, symbolic
drawing power at the outset. But a decade of largely localized experience shows
no lack of weak or accidental elements drawn temporarily to the tendency. The
only real test is in hard-driving, all-sided involvement in living class
struggle.
As L.D. Trotsky noted in "At the Fresh Grave of Kote Tsintsadze,"
7 January 1931:
"It took altogether extraordinary conditions like czarism,
illegality, prison, and deportation, many years of struggle against the
Mensheviks, and especially the experience of three revolutions to produce
fighters like Kote Tsintsadze....
"The Communist parties in the West have not yet brought up
fighters of Tsintsadzes type. This is their besetting weakness,
determined by historical reasons but nonetheless a weakness. The Left
Opposition in the Western countries is not an exception in this respect and it
must well take note of it."
Central Committee, SL/ANZ Central Committee, SL/U.S.
[This draft agreed to by the Political Bureau of the SL/ U.S.
and a representative of the Central Committee of the SL/ANZ, 22 May 1974;
accepted by the Central Committee, SL/ANZ, 7 June 1974; declared to be in
force, following concurrence with it at the European summer camp of the
international Spartacist tendency, 6 July 1974.] |