The SWP(USA) rejects
DOCUMENT
In December 1981, Liu Shanqing, a supporter of the
USA
Beijing Spring
Democracy Movement from
Hong
Kong, went to the mainland to visit himse arrested activists, relatives of the organisational demands arrested himself and was sentenced to ten years imprisonment.
of the Twelfth World Congress
Spring
Beijing
Democracy
Movement was suppressed with naked force. Yet, it was a significant development of the movement for democracy in China. In 1957, during the
Hundred Flowers Bloom Campaign, THE following statement was adopted by the United Secretariat the one million critics of the CCP of the Fourth International, at its meeting on October 5, 1985. policy were largely intellectuals. The fervent red guards that radicalised in the later years of the Cultural Revolution (represented by the 17-year old red guard Yang Ziguang's manifesto "Whither goes China?") were mainly secondary school pupils. Li Yi Zhe Wall Poster (Wang Xizhe being one of its writers), a manifesto demanding democracy system, symbolised more independent thinking than the red guard generation but it still had illusions in Mao Zedong. The 1976 Tian An Men Square event was a prelude to the anti-bureaucratic political revolution, in which tens of thousands of people participated, yet it was unorganized. The Beijing Spring Democracy Movement represented a more profound development in programmatic positions and organisational practice. Just before it was repressed, it had arrived at the stage of drawing up a programme, developing into a political party, and the vanguards, mostly young workers, began to be conscious of the need to go into the masses. Participation in the election campaigns and conscious links with worker struggles (such as the strike of 3,000 Taiyuan steel workers) in late 1980 were the first steps. As for the political programme, the demand for socialist democracy and Paris-commune type workers control over production and distribution was the predominant trend. This socialist alternative is quite distinct from the dissident movements in the Soviet Union, for example.
With its outstanding activists still in jail, the democracy movement stays underground. Now, the consequences of Deng Xiaoping's reforms, especially the offensives on the living standard of the urban working class, are becoming clear. The objective conditions favour a revival of the democracy movement. It can be expected that the new stage of the democracy movement will see a more mature political consciousness and a closer link between the vanguards and the masses.
International Viewpoint 11 November 1985
- At the end of 1983 the leadership of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the United States expelled from the party the majority of the members who, within the National Committee and the party branches, opposed its political orientation and its challenges to the programmatic foundation of the Fourth International, particularly concerning the theory of permanent revolution for the countries dominated by imperialism and the necessity of anti-bureaucratic political revolution in the bureaucratised workers states.
out in a brutal and anti-democratic fashion, lost the SWP more than 150 members, including a number of former leaders of the fraternal section of the Fourth International in the United States. These comrades, organised in Socialist Action (SA) and the Fourth Internationalist Tendency (FIT), appealed against their expulsions to the SWP convention in convention rejected their appeal, and on the allow a delegation of the United Secretariat to participate deliberations.
In January 1985, the Twelfth World Congress of the Fourth International receiving a collective appeal from the expelled comrades, adopted by a majority of almost 90 percent the following motions:
The World Congress upholds the collective appeal of the expelled SWP members now regrouped in SA and FIT.
Whereas these expulsions were carried out in bare-faced violation of the statutes of the Fourth International -of which the SWP is the fraternal organization in the USA — and whereas this political purge made mockery of the rights of minorities inside the SWP,
World Congress demands the collective reintegration of all the members of SA and FIT who were expelled from the SWP, into membership?
Vote:
for against abstain not ting Delegates 97.5 Fraternal 3 9 0
"b) Whereas the new members of SA and FIT who are not expelled former members of the SWP or who resigned from it in relation with the expulsions or who resigned on the basis of the programme of the Fourth International and whereas they would have been members of the SWP if the latter had not carried out these unjust and undemocratic expulsions, the World Congress supports the SA and FIT request that all their members be collectively integrated into the SWP with all the rights and duties stemming from the organizational norms of democratic centralism.' Vote:
for against abstain not voting Delegates 97 1.5 the situation that has been created in the United States by the undemocratic expulsion from the SWP of those who opposed the orientation of its majority leadership, and noting that as a result Fourth International divided into three separate organiza,tions when they should all be members of the Fourth International in the
Congress rules that, as long as SA and FIT are not collectively reintegrated into the SWP. the entire organized membership of will be considered as full members of the Fourth International with all the rights and duties prescribed by its statutes, and within the limitations imposed by reactionary US legislation.' for against abstain not voting
Delegates 98 5.5
Fraternal
In August 1985 the delegates of the twenty-third convention of the
23
SWP, on the recommendation of the Political Committee, rejected all the demands formulated Congress and reiterated at the convention by the United Secretariat representative present.
- These decisions openly violate the overwhelming majority demands of the World Congress. If carried out by an affiliated section they would make a nonsense of the elementary norms of functioning for an international organisation. While the SWP is prevented by reactionary US legislation from being affiliated to Fourth International, it has the political and moral obligation to give the greatest weight to World Congress if it takes seriously fact of being the fraternal section in the United States.
The statutes of the International leave a broad area of sovereignty to the national sections in determination of their national political line and the choice of their leadership bodies, but they fix a minimum of obligations and norms of functioning that make it possible to have the broadest possible exchange of ideas and positions within a common programmatic organisational framework. The decisions of the SWP convention, if adopted by a section, would be a complete negation of even the simply moral and political authority of the sovereign body would be refusing to abide by the spirit of our statutes, and thus put itself outside the common frame-
The International has the duty to state clearly and publicly that the SWP, fraternal section of the Fourth International in the United States, is not, because of its own decisions, organisation identifying politically with the Fourth International in the United States.
In conformity with the resolutions the Twelfth Congress (and because of the division of Socialist Action into two distinct groups) there are now in the United States, four totally separate organisations of fraternal members with the same rights and duties: the Socialist Workers Party, the Fourth Action and Socialist Unity. Each of these organisations is sovereign decisions concerning its political line and composition of is leading bodies. While deploring their division, which is the outcome of the crisis in the SWP and the anti-democratic purge of opposition, the United Secretariat defends the right of each of these organisations to attempt to build the revolutionary party in the United States but does not support the orientation of any one group
- All the steps taken by the SWP the section's desire to deny in practice the minimal functioning of the International, at the same time as it is turning its own party into a monolithic faction, accomodating itself to the formal framework of the International only on condition that it does not
La single obligation and gradually emptying this framework of all programmatic content.
No revolutionary party, particularly in the bastion of imperialism, will be built by trampling on the democratic traditions of Bolshevism and the Communist International, which the Fourth International was formed to defend, with the valuable collaboration of the SWP, against Stalinism. Through its own the
States, the SWP is already paying the price of this orientation, in striking contradiction with its past and with the internal regime of the Fourth International and its sections.
In fighting for the World Congress demands to be respected, the United Secretariat is convinced that it is fighting for the defence of one of the basic principles of the revolutionary programme: of discussion within the revolutionary organisation, in the framework of the discipline and centralisation necessary for effective action in the class
The Fourth International stands adamant on this principle and this programme. D of
International:
World the its
Congress. In so doing, a section
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International Viewpoint 11 November 1985