Documents 3 to 17 and 19 to 24 originally published in Internal Bulletins of the SWP and the International Bulletins of the International Committee
Comrades,
The most revolting operation has just been launched against the unity of the International. The majority of the American organization, cynically defying the most elementary rules of our international movement, and its traditions as well as its leadership, have just excluded by the decision of its Plenum of November 7-8 the minority which declares itself in agreement with the line of the International.
In England, the wing of the Central Committee of the organization led by Burns is preparing to perpetrate the same crime against the tendency defending the line of the International.
The international faction of Cannonites, announced in the letter of June 4 to Tom, is in the process of applying its premeditated plan to split our movement, in the midst of the discussion and preparation for the 4th World Congress of the International.
The IS, aware of this monstrous conspiracy which has already been going on for some months, as is proved by the attentive reading of the appended documents, has done everything to avoid such a development to which these bureaucratic and sectarian elements of our international movement were furiously pushing, not accepting either the discipline of the centralized world party which is the International, nor the political line of genuine fusion with the movement of the masses.
It is possible and even probable that certain comrades of the International will criticize our extreme prudence on this question and our deliberate and conscious refusal to bring it sooner to the knowledge of all members of the International.
We have nevertheless acted in this way, impelled by an acute sense of our responsibilities, because of a deep and sincere desire to exploit every chance of avoiding a split in our movement, because of supreme confidence in the sense of responsibility of elements like Cannon, Stein, Warde and other leaders of the American organization. We say and repeat forcefully, in order to avoid the worse, and likewise to act in a principled way.
For we do not believe that the Trotskyist movement can survive otherwise than as a strictly principled movement on the political and organizational plane.
Manoeuvres, duplicity, lies and slanders could never be the arms of a movement like ours. It will inevitably lead to its decay and its complete elimination as a factor of the historical future.
Those who use such weapons hereby give the proof of their degeneration consummated in conditions of their prolonged isolation.
Comrades of the International:
This unexpected crisis arising when our movement seemed to have attained a high level of political maturity and for the first time in its history effectively penetrated into the real movement of the masses, inevitably poses a series of agonizing questions to which it is necessary to give a clear and prompt reply. The attentive study of the appended documents, we are firmly convinced, will speak for themselves, will enlighten with a cruel light all the phases of this revolting affair. Nevertheless we believe it necessary to emphasize certain outstanding facts which will help your better orientation in this crisis, undeniably the gravest in our movement:
For a number of years our international movement has been led by an entire team of comrades who have found themselves, by the force of things and by unanimous and encouraging assent, at the centre of the theoretical and political elaboration of our movement, its reinforcement and its international extension. Their line was always that of the overwhelming majority of the International against the opportunists and sectarians. With ail their forces, they worked to apply the method of revolutionary Marxism to the burning problems of our explosive and turbulent time, to break through our isolation and bind us to the real movement of the masses.
The greatest progress in our history was incontestably realized during this period, and the success, almost unanimously recognized, of the Third World Congress marked the highest point in this evolution.
Cannon, Stein, Warde, Burns have up to a very recent date all left written testimony, praising and often exalting this very work and this line. We will not hesitate to publish them all very soon.
Their 100% about-face today dates only a few months back. How then to explain it?
When were they sincere: when they affirmed their total solidarity with the line of the Third World Congress, or when they today affirm, with an unheard-of cynicism, that we are quite simply Stalinists and even agents of the GPU?
If they now act in this way it is above all to safeguard the personal clique regime in the midst of their organizations that they consider threatened by the extension of the influence of the International as a centralized world party. Finally because at bottom they have submitted to, but not assimilated the line of the International toward a real fusion with the movement of the masses and its transformation into a centralized world party. Most often behindhand on the theoretical and ideological renovation of our thought and the tactical turns of our line, imposed by the sharp turns in the objective situation, they in effect represent in our movement the tendency which is showing itself inadaptable to the extraordinary new conditions of the extraordinary new period that the last war bequeathed to us.
Fixed on old ideas and schemas, educated in the old organizational atmosphere of our movement, they really represent politically and organizationally the sectarian tendency which recoils from the movement of the Social-Democratic or Stalinist masses or feels itself ill at ease within it. They further remain profoundly resistant to all real integration into a centralized world party.
The more they isolate themselves from the masses, the more they accentuate their verbiage on their so-called character as a Party and Leadership of the class, which they pretend to be, awaiting the direct influx of the masses toward them. The more they refuse international integration into a centralized world Party, the more they accentuate within their little groups a caricature of a so-called Bolshevik regime, transforming their leaderships into bureaucratic cliques gravitating around a capricious and uncontrollable chief.
Their detachment from the concrete revolutionary reality of our time is such that all their political constructions and all their organizational methods cry out with absurdity, mythology, the ossification of Marxist thought and arbitrariness.
We have not been deceived about the existence of such a tendency, such a current within our movement, and the difficulty of living together with it. But we thought that the force of events and the dynamic of our positive work toward the masses would pull this tendency further along and diminish its dead weight.
Since the Third World Congress this tendency appeared in manifest retreat, justifying the best hopes. But we have certainly underestimated the process of decline which for a series of years has already been effected within the American organization, more and more isolated from the movement of the masses, which has led, together with the steep drop in its effective forces, to a desolating conservatism of thought in contradiction with the ideological and practical progress accomplished by our movement everywhere else. Isolation from the masses and the drop in effective forces were and remain in a great measure the result of adverse objective conditions. A leadership at the height of its tasks should have combatted their affects by accentuating its advance on the ideological field and by fusing further with the rest of the international movement.
That has not been the case, especially with Cannon. Far from saluting the progress accomplished everywhere else and the affirmation of an international leadership of which his own organization and himself was a part, he began to see in it a rival capable of intervening in his own 'affairs' and disputing with him political influence over his 'own' organization. His struggle against the American minority for him evolved mainly around the motive of a struggle 'for power.' He subsequently rose up against the IS as is clearly proven by the appended documents, for this same reason. He sought to construct a platform of'fundamental political divergences' with the International only afterward, with difficulty and bit by bit.
To the degree that has fabricated certain political ideas, he has succeeded in manifesting all his political disorientation, the profound sectarianism of his thought, and the pressure to which he is submitted by the present reactionary environment prevailing in the citadel of imperialism. His methods of struggle equal his thought. Without even having formulated a clear political platform, he envisaged and built an 'international faction based on military discipline' with the most heterogeneous political elements and groups: Tom whom he knew to be a strong opponent of the Third World Congress, the Johnsonites in his own organization, Bleibtreu whom he fought with the rest of the International and his observers at the IS and at the IEC.
With a big and generous hand he now scrapes together all the 'orthodox,' all the politically compromised and bankrupt, discontented, sectarian, confusionist, anti-International elements and tendencies who are dying and agonizing under the blows they have received from events and from the line and achievements of the International, lifts them to their feet and launches them with all his force against the International.
The meaning of his so brutal and brusque undertaking is still better illuminated if we place it within the framework of the political conditions external to our movement, that of a new pre-war period, of the preparation of the decisive struggle between imperialism and the concrete forces of the revolution, and the extreme social pressures which result, brutally exercising themselves upon individuals and movements.
The crisis which Cannon has caused to break out has its epicentre in the United States in 1953, and that is not accidental. On the other hand, it is not the first in our movement. It suffices to establish the parallel with what happened on the threshold of the last war and the ensuing dislocation within our movement. It is sad to observe that Cannon, who was then with those defending Trotskyism against the defeatists on the question of the Soviet Union, now places himself at the head of the Stalinophobic sectarians within the setting of the regime of the witch hunt now raging in his country, the bastion of preparation for the counter-revolutionary war.
However, we will see to it that the blow of the desertion and the demolition of 1939-40 is not duplicated this time on a parallel scale. The International has likewise changed since 1939, it has been strengthened and has been hardened. It will not come out broken into pieces from this crisis, but more consolidated than ever. We are convinced of that.
Cannon is grossly deceived if he believes that he can thus destroy an achievement already inscribed in the ascending course of History. In the best of cases for him, he will re-establish only a constellation of vassal elements and groups gravitating around him, which are politically disparate and will lamentably disintegrate when the fever of their common struggle against the International will have subsided.
Comrades of the International:
The International was, remains and will remain a political movement and a principled organization. It will not compromise on its principles, it will never permit the expulsions effected by Cannon,nor those which Burns is preparing in England.
With all our forces we ask the IEC to stigmatize these measures, to enjoin those who have taken them to immediately withdraw them and to reintegrate forthwith the expelled members within their organizations.
Any other road followed by anyone whatsoever could only place them outside our movement. We are certain that the International, informed on the facts and the substance of this crisis, will firmly draw the same conclusions as ourselves and more solidified, more homogeneous, more confident than ever will resume its forward march. There is no force capable of extinguishing the spirit of living revolutionary Marxism or of halting the intimate fusion of the proletarian vanguard that is animated by it with the real movement of its class. There is no force capable in this sense of burying Trotskyism.
The IS Bureau
M. Pablo, P. Frank, E. Germain
The American organization mentioned in different texts, as is known, is not an organic part of the International and is not formally a section of it.
The IS Bureau
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Last updated 17.8.2003