US Socialist Workers
Party leaves Fourth
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL young militants, thus making it one of the most stable organizations of the US left as well as enabling it to play anew an important role in the construction of our international movement. For example, it participated very actively in the internal debates which took place between 1969 and 1976 on the orientation in Latin Amer-
International ica, the Portuguese revolution, the war in
Angola, and so on.
From the beginning of the 1980s the leadership of the SWP initiated a turn
THE LEADERSHIP of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) of the United States, together with the leaderships of other organizations belonging to its international current, have decided to end their fraternal links with the Fourth International'. In a letter sent to the International Executive Committee of the Fourth International, dated June 10, 1990, they put it in their own words: "For almost a decade now, an accelerating divergence has marked the course and character of our respective parties and the International Executive Committee [of the Fourth International]. These incompatible trajectories have been an unambiguous public fact for some which progressively distanced it from the general analyses and conceptions of the International. More precisely, it was at its 1981 national congress that it began to introduce new programmatic ideas. In November of the following year, Jack Barnes, the principal leader of the party, accentuated this line of march in a public speech in which he characterised the great majority of Trotskyists in the world as sectarians. Another landmark of the "new course" came at the time of the debates for the 12th World Congress. At this Congress the SWP emerged, with other organizations, as a minority current — around time". LIVIO MAITAN AND BRAULIO CHAVEZ
NDEED, for around ten years the majority of the SWP's leadership have followed a political and theoretical evolution which has led them further and further away from our conceptions, our orientations, our line of march and our organizational methods. This has gone hand in hand with a growing distance in relation to our international bodies and activities, in which the SWP has practically ceased to participate since the last World Congress (1985).
It was in 1928 that some leaders of the Communist Party of the United States, the foremost among them being James P. Cannon, rallied to the struggle of the Left Opposition against the bureaucratization of the USSR and the Communist International. Expelled from the party, they formed the Communist League of America (CLA). Ten years later, the Socialist Workers Party, which succeeded the CLA, was one of the principal organizations which participated in the founding of the Fourth International. Major contribution to work of
Fourth International
During and immediately after the Second World War, the SWP, and more directly some of its leaders, made a major contribution to the functioning and reconstruction of the International, which had suffered very considerable losses as a result of Stalinist and imperialist repression.
The Trotskyist organization in the United States played an important and sometimes decisive role in the class struggle of its country. Its militants led, for example, the truckdrivers' strike of the 1930s, which marked a turning point in the battle for the renewal of the trade union movement. Its internationalist battle against the participation of US imperialism in the Second World War, when other organizations of the left were swept along with the patriotic wave, led to repressive measures against it which went as far as the trial and imprisonment of its best known leaders. In the 1950s the SWP did not flinch before the reactionary rise of McCarthyism.
### Understanding black nationalism
At the beginning of the following decade, opposing itself to the dominant tendency of the time, including amongst the left currents, it grasped the revolutionary potential of Malcolm X and the black nationalist movement and took the initiative in solidarity actions on their behalf. The SWP also played a leading role in the movement of solidarity with the Cuban revolution, principal target of the reactionary policy of Washington in Latin America. Finally, during the war in Indochina the members of the SWP played a major role in the building and mobilization of an anti-war movement which, without doubt, contributed in an important way to the victory of the Indochinese peoples.
All this, moreover, allowed the SWP to overcome the setbacks of the previous decade and to considerably augment its forces, particularly through an influx of
10% of the forces represented - opposing itself to the rest of the international on all the most important questions?.
Jack Barnes on permanent revolution
It is in fact the fundamental theoretical and political conceptions of revolutionary Marxism that the SWP puts in question. On the subject of the theory of permanent revolution, Barnes said, amongst other things, in his above mentioned speech: "Permanent revolution does not contribute today to arming either ourselves or other revolutionists to lead the working class and its allies to take power and use that power to advance the world socialist revolution. As a special or unique frame of reference it is an obstacle to reknitting our political continuity with Marx, Engels, Lenin and the first four congresses of the Communist International. It has been an obstacle in our movement to an objective reading of the masters of Marxism, in particular the writings of Lenin".
As one of the resolutions of the 12th World Congress states, it is not an abstract doctrinaire fidelity which leads us to reject this speech — it is the experience of the victories and defeats of revolutions throughout these last fifty years which confirms the living actuality of a theory originally formulated, and then complet1. Since 1940, because of reactionary legislation adopted by the United States, the SWP has been formally unable to be a section of the Fourth International.This did not prevent it from participating for some decades in the activities and the debates of the International. 2. The other organizations which have, along with the SWP, severed their links with the Fourth International are the Communist Leagues of Great Britain, Sweden, Canada, Australia, Iceland and New Zealand. For the most part, these are small minorties which have at dif. ferent times split from sections of the Fourth Intera- : 25 tional. July 16, 1990 • #189 International Viewpoint
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL ed, on the basis of concrete revolutionary experiences, like the Russian revolution of 1905 and the Chinese revolution of 1927.
The questioning of this theory had implications not only for the historic analyses put forward by our movement on the Russian revolution or the views of Trotsky on the Chinese revolution, but above all for a series of concrete analyses and political attitudes related to current developments. For example, the leadership of the SWP has advanced the perspective of a bourgeois democratic revolution in South Africa and envisages a whole historic phase in which capitalism will develop itself, breaking "the reactionary obstacles and the limitations and prejudices of the feudal society". It also led them to take a non-critical attitude to the Khomeini leadership in Iran, even after it began to repress the organizations of the workers movement, including Trotskyist militants.
Our conception of the defence of the USSR and of the political revolution has also been, if not rejected, then palpably blurred. In fact, divergences have appeared on the necessity of destroying the existing bureaucratic apparatus, with the SWP leaders for a period sketching a fairly vague idea of gradual democratization. Moreover, they have rejected the programmatic text of the 12th World Congress on socialist democracy, opposing in particular the idea of the necessity of political pluralism in societies in transition to socialism.
In defence of the Cuban revolution
The divergences have crystallized around the question of Cuba. The Fourth International has always considered the defence of the Cuban revolution as an international task of the first order, and has never put the Castroist leadership on the same plane as the bureaucratic leaderships of the other workers" states. Today, it estimates it more than ever necessary to alert working class and anti-imperialist opinion to the dangers which weigh upon Cuba from US imperialism. On that question there are no differences.
However, for ten years now the SWP has adopted a totally uncritical attitude to the Castro leadership, seeking to downplay all the programmatic and political differences which separate the Castroist leadership from the Fourth International (notably the attitude towards the bureaucratic castes in power in the Soviet Union and in the other bureaucratized transitional societies, the conception of socialist democracy, the conception of the party and its functioning, the relationship between the party and the mass organizations, and so on). It has gone so far as to approve without reserve, as a step forward for the revolution, the execution of Ochoa 26 short, the Castroist conceptions and prac- and the other leaders in July 1989. In International Viewpoint #189 • July 16, 1990 tices have been indicated as a "model" which must inspire the proletarians of the whole world. In the current context of the United States, such an approach has contributed in great measure to pushing the SWP towards replacing active political and organizational construction in the mass movements with a fundamentally propagandist orientation.
The regression on the problems that we have evoked could only end up in a radically changed attitude to the problem of the Fourth International, and the project of constructing a mass revolutionary international. Behind the screen of the incantatory perspective of a "new international", this has led to a double result, or, to put it
La double illusion or selfmystification. On the one hand, the SWP sketches a project of convergence in a new international of the most disparate revolutionary forces, seeming to ignore the fact that these forces, to start with the Cuban leadership, have not the slightest intention of building in any form whatsoever an international communist workers movement.
On the other, in the effort to give a little content to the "new" world movement, it groups around it a kind of propagandist current, composed of little organizations and groups of whom it paints a picture which has no relation to their real stability, and still less with their integration in the workers' movement of their respective countries.
All these changes on the theoretical and political terrain have gone hand in hand with no less important changes in terms of the principles of organizational functioning. To impose these new conceptions and orientations, the SWP leadership has carried through a veritable purge of the party.
Purge of supporters of Trotskyist programme
Some hundreds of cadres, who were not ready to renounce the programme and methods of the Fourth International, have been first suspended and then expelled on the basis of grotesque accusations, without any respect for statutory norms or the most elementary principles of an organization based on democratic centralism (such as the right to express without limitation divergent opinions, criticize leaders, form tendencies, and so on). After having examined the appeal of the victims of the disciplinary measures, the 12th
World Congress condemned the behaviour of the SWP leadership and demanded
— unhappily without success — that all the expelled members be readmitted4.
Such procedures have also been applied on an international scale. Every national organization has the right to question the ideas and orientation of the International, at the level of all its bodies. Since 1985, however, nothing of that kind has really been done by the SWP leadership, who have even deliberately ignored the fact that a new World Congress has and a preparatory opened. Contrary to normal practice, they did not even invite the leadership of the International to the Convention held at the beginning of June, and have limited themselves to communicating to us their depar-
The evolution of the social and political situation in the United States has without doubt weighed on the regression of the SWP. In the context of the reactionary and conservative offensive of Reaganism, the spectacular retreat of the trade union movement, the prolonged decline of the struggles of an increasingly defensive working class and the weakening even of the anti-war movement and the movements of solidarity with the peoples in struggle against imperialism, it is incontestably difficult to build a revolutionary organization.
Uncritical exaltation and propagandism
This situation makes it tempting to counteract all the negative pressures by a propagandist reply, a tightening of the organizational framework, a continuing slide towards a sectarian practice and the uncritical exaltation of the revolutionary experiences of other countries. But, far from being a solution, such an approach can only increase the difficulties, and compromise, in the last analysis, the future of an organization by putting in question its reasons for existing, and isolating it from any real movement. The results are there - after a decade of the "new" course the SWP has lost the influence which it had in the left in the United States in the course of the 1970s, and registered a drastic reduction in membership as well as the successive resignation — or expulsion — of the majority of its leader-
The regression of the SWP and its split incontestably represents a defeat for the Fourth International. At the same time, there are in the United States some hundreds of cadres and sympathizers who defend the ideas of revolutionary Marxism and are linked to the Fourth International, whilst belonging at the moment to different organizations. Their task extremely hard. But they will continue to conduct their struggle for the reconstruction of our movement in that country. * 3. A report on Cuba was adopted by the Intemational Executive Committee of the Fourth International at the beginning of June of this year and will be published in a forthcoming issue of International Marxist Review. 4. The 12th World Congress also adopted a report on the construction of the Fourth Intemational which contained in part a critiques of the conceptions and orientations of the SWP. 5. According to the decisions of the last World Congress, the following organizations in the United States are linked to the Fourth International; Socialist Action, the Fourth Internationalist Tendency and the Trotskyist current of Solidarity.