Why the Australian SWP left the Fourth International ERNEST MANDEL
The decision of the Australian SWP to break with the Fourth International will not surprise the majority of the cadres of our movement. They had the opportunity of studying the writings and speeches of the delegates from this organisation during the international's
World Congress. They were able to see the extent to which the sensibility of delegates were far removed from those of revolutionary Marxist activists and up to what point their loyalty to the Fourth International had faded
The actual break had been carefully prepared for a long time including through the holding of an writings were subjected to systematic malicious criticism. The formal break declared by the SWP National is only the public recognition of this.
Besides, one just has to examine the reasons for the rift given in the report of Doug Lorimer to that National Committee (1) to see that it is a question of pure formality. Since if these reasons were valid - in particular the argument that the existence of the Fourth International is supposedly an obstacle to linking up with the new revolutionary leaderships' Nicaragua and the Philippines - then they should have been just as valid in 1982 as in 1985. The decision to break now with the Fourth International has nothing principled or programmatic about it. It is for purely tactical and organisational reasons.
In fact, as no 'link up' with the Cuban leadership is in sight whether the Australian SWP is inside or outthe Fourth International, the expression used in reality adds up to the much more modest hope of deepening collaboration with that leadership. Furthermore, in this respect the SWP's membership of the International, far from being an obstacle, has been a source for understandgetting practically involved in the vast movement of international solidarity with revolutions unfolding throughout the world. It is the Fourth
International Viewpoint 24 February 1986
International - more than any other current of the international workers' movement - which has animated huge, successive solidarity movements with the Algerian, Vietnamese and Cuban revolutions. Its role in international solidarity with the Central American revolution and the struggle of the Kanak people is just as active. We act - and will continue to act -in the same way in relation to the solidarity movement with the South African masses' freedom struggle - a solidarity movement that now needs to be developed.
The real causes of the Australian SWP's break with the Fourth Internot those claimed by the leadership of that organisation.
are essentially political. They flow from substituting, step-by-step, opportunist pragmatism tionary Marxist politics. It is useful to take apart the ideological mechanism of this shift and its political consequences - to the extent that this reveals the dangers threatening any revolutionary organisation being built in an unfavourable context and in a still very complicated if not downright difficult international context. This must give pause for reflection to any other group or faction tempted by the same demons that have inspired the Australian SWP's revisionism. Such groups will see in the appalling evolution of this organisation the mirror image of their own fate if they do not stop in time. A key which opens no doors
Doug Lorimer's report to the SWP National Committee situates the main difference with the Fourth International around the refusal of the majority to recognise the centrality of the "Third World countries' in the world revolutionary process, to accept what Lorimer calls the 'anti-imperialist not as a whole.
To justify what he calls the 'central anti-imperialist class struggle (the 'class struggle and not even the world revolution!),
Logimer tries hard to base himself on the theory of the labour aristocracy which, due to colonial super- profits, is said to have become the main factor 'holding back and postponing the socialist revolution the advanced capitalist
Straightaway he commits an initial error in substituting the term 'labour bureaucracy' for aristocracy' identification of the two terms leads into a dead end. 'Colonial superprofits' by definition can only corrupt some working-class layers of the imperialist countries. The labour bureaucracy is a universal phenomenon. The bureaucracies of the Argentinian or Mexican trade unions are much more powerful than those of Australia or Canada.
Argentina nor Mexico are imperialist countries benefiting superprofits. As for two richest ful labour bureaucracies in the world, those of the USSR and the People's Republic of China - they monopolise the exercise of power in these workers' appropriating for themselves enormous material privileges on this basis. But no linguistic trickery can and the social and political conservbased on them, out of any sort of 'colonial superprofits'. aristocracy' (2) and labour bureaucracy' is not accidental. The Australian SWP leadership is beginning to aban-
Doug Lorimer's report to the SWP National Committee is published under the title: The 12th World Congress of the Fourth International and the future of the SWP's international relations' in a pamphlet "The Socialist Workers Party and the Fourth (Australia), September 1985. International' Pathfinder Press
2. The term 'labour aristocracy" in the scientific sense, applies to any minority fraction of the proletariat which seeks to protect its wage differentials and advantageous working conditions using actions and measures directed against the majority of the working class: refusing access to the profession; xenophobic demagogy and racism; refusing access to the trade unions; opposition to trade union centralisation and solidarity strikes etc.
It was especially strong in the nineteenth-century craft unions as well as in blatant cases like the white miners' unions today in South Africa. Sometimes it can be linked to the existence of colonial super-profits. But this is certainly not always the
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May 1, 1974, Lisbon (DR) don any analysis of the labour bureaucracy as a specific social layer having its own material interests - an analysis which really does not help when you want to "insert yourself" into the post-Stalinist current.
The resort to 'colonial superprofits' and the consequent 'labour aristocracy' thesis is a false key for interpreting the real course of the world revolution since the First World War. In no way does it help us explain either the defeats or the victories. First of all it dodges a fact of capital importance: Tsarist Russia, where after all, the first victory of the socialist revolution took place, was not a "Third World country' (if we take up Lorimer's terminology) at all. It would be difficult to contend that the Russian bourgeoisie in 1917 was weaker than the Chinese, Indian, Mexican or Turkish bourgeoisie. However, the Russian bourgeoisie was overtnrown first. The fundamental objective cause clearly lies in the more favourable correlation of social forces in Russia, that is, the relative strength of the proletariat in relation to the relative weakness of the bourgeoisie.
Second, we have to note that some of the most serious defeats of the world revolution have taken place in semi-colonial countries with much weaker ruling classes than in Russia or for that matter in China. Just to give two recent examples: the defeat of the Indonesian revolution in 1965, which resulted in the massacre of nearly a million communists, workers, peasants, and young people, and the defeat of Chile in 1973, at these two countries, Indonesia and
Chile, had among the strongest communist parties of the capitalist world.
Nobody can argue that these defeats are the result of the corruption of the Indonesian and Chilean 'labour
JULGAMENTO. PUBLIO,
RIMINOSOS • FASCISTAS DaS aristocracies' by 'colonial superprofits'. When one turns to look at the decisive defeats of the world revolution in the imperialist countries, explaining them by concepts of the 'labour aristocracy' and 'colonial superprofits' just as untenable in the light of even the most minimal concrete analysis.
greatest chance of tionary victory - the longest, most revolutionary which involved the greatest number of proletarians - in an advanced capitalist country was the 1931-1937 Spanish revolution. Was defeat in the Spanish Civil War caused by 'colonial superprofits'? Which part of the Spanish working class had been 'corrupted' by these famous 'superprofits'? of 1974-75. Was it defeated because of the "colonial 'corrupted' class? But the latter had miserable living standards, lower than those of an initially semi-colonial then semi-industrialised dependent country like Greece, to give just one example.
And the failure of the 1920 revolutionary upsurge in Italy, which could have changed the course of history, was this due to 'colonial superprofits'? Which ones? The defeat of the revolutionary crisis in Germany in 1923 took place at a time when the average wage in Germany was no longer enough for a worker to buy one suit a year. Did the revolution fail because of 'colonial superprofits'? Where from, in a Germany without colonies?
One might reply that the 'colonial superprofits explain these defeats not directly but at least indirectly. So following this line of argument these superprofits led internationally (for Germany in the past) to the emergence of the reformist current inside the socialist movement. This cu bent then maintained its paralysing political influence even when its material roots had been cut off. This was extended politically (by influence and imitation) to countries where these non-existent. But subtle line address the real question.
Clearly the appearance ism inside the international workers' movement analysis by a complex interplay of objective, subjective, economic, social, institutional, ideological and historical causes. But when it comes to the real life unfolding of the class struggle and the development of a revolutionary perspective, we have to know what is the decisive link in this chain. We have to know that despite the existence of the imperialist system, despite the colonial despite the existence of labour bureaucracles wage-earners of wage-earners) taken part in extra-parliamentary mass action in a whole series of imperialist countries. We should be aware that among these mass actions there were some of such scope as to create revolutionary crises that considerably paralysed the bourgeoisie's power and made the conquest of power by the proletariat objectively possible.
On these precise occasions what saved capitalism was certainly not its still great economic power or the presence of the labour aristocracy inside the proletariat, but the policy of the working class leaderships, that is the reformists' political refusal to overthrow the state apparatus, and the relative political and organisational weakness of revolutionary forces. The point is whether even in the given objective economic context the question could be resolved on the political level. In any case this was
Lenin's and the Communist International's opinion with regard to the revolutionary crises of the 1918-1923 period. This was the opinion of
Trotsky and the Fourth International concerning the revolutionary crises that have broken out since then.
The 'labour aristocracy' argument basically states the contrary - the cause was economic and not political.
Defeat was inevitable.
A relapse into economic fatalism
This response constitutes a relapse into the economist fatalism of which
Kautsky was the most eminent representative. The outcome of all International Viewpoint 24 February 1986