Bombed to oblivion?

 

The increasingly bizarre Socialist Workers Party (US) attempts to support Israel ´s attack on the Iranian regime while opposing the United States when it did exactly the same thing a week later (to back its ally, obviously). That, and a few other contradictions. 

SWP National Committee statement  

Israel deals blow to Iran´s nuclear weapons threat

A new stage

 

SWP shaking hands with Trump capitalista?

I´m old enough to remember when the U.S. Socialist Workers Party *supported* the ANC and *opposed* the State of Israel. Look now...

I´m also old enough to remember (last year) how the SWP condemned the Biden administration when *it* tried to cajole Israel into a ceasefire agreement with Hamas. But now, they claim that the Trump-brokered ceasefire is "a new stage in the fight to defend Israel"?!

In plain English: the Communist (?) SWP tacitly supports Donald Trump!    

South African government condemns immigrant coal miners to die

Ceasefire is new stage in fight to defend Israel as refuge for Jews

Footnote for historians

 

The US Socialist Workers Party on the recent pro-abortion referendum in Ohio. Not sure if their weird and eclectic position is some kind of sectarianism-at-any-cost, or whether they are getting closer to actually opposing abortions...

What if the SWP becomes a right-wing group in all but name within ten years or so?

Pro-abortion referendum blow to the working class?

"Call for cease-fire is support for Hamas"

 

Front line report from the U.S. Socialist Workers Party. The SWP has become more "hard" in their Zionism than even the British AWL (which supports a cease-fire)!   

Call for cease-fire is support for Hamas

Our most recent ally

 

I suppose it´s official now. The US Socialist Workers Party supports Israel´s war against Hamas (or Gaza, if you wish). What I frankly can´t fathom is why people who must have opposed Israel most of their politically active lives can change their line of march so drastically. 

While the line change seems to have happened already in 2009, most current SWP-ers were presumably recruited circa 1968. 

I know from my own experience that the Israel-Palestine issue isn´t just *any* issue but *the* central one for many leftists, indeed, I sometimes get the impression that it´s more controversial to support the IDF in any context, than to support the US military! One reason is (surprise) that many leftist radicals in the US are Jewish, and supporting the PLO or Hamas as a Jew must be rather taxing, but Gentiles have the same Pavlovian reflexes towards this particular conflict, presumably because of the Holocaust. 

Ask any radical leftist why he can´t stand the British AWL and something tells me it won´t be their support for Peter Kilfoyle in the Walton by-elections or even their opposition to an immidiate British withdrawal from Northern Ireland. Nah, it´s their support for Israel, it´s always Israel.

So the idea of an entire political party (albeit a small one these days) on the left changing their line from anti-Zionism to Zionism is weird...and fascinating, after a fashion.

They are Commies, but they are now "our" Commies!  

Fight Jew-hatred! Support the right of Israel to exist!

Ghosts of the past

 

This recently came to my attention. It´s an article by a former Canadian supporter of the U.S. Socialist Workers Party, posted in 2014, arguing that the SWP changed its line on Israel (and de facto on Zionism) already in 2009. That is, before my heated argument with a SWP supporter on Amazon´s custom review pages circa 2012. Unless I´m completely confused over the exact date - could it have been in 2008 or early 2009? 

The Canadian writer, Art Young, correctly predicts that the SWP´s line on Israel will become central to the group´s "degeneration" (or fundamental shift), which he sees as - at bottom - an "adaptation to US imperialism". Indeed, it seems that the SWP just the other week came out in full support of Israel´s war against Gaza, with arguments even somewhat "to the right" of the US establishment, if you read their articles carefully!

Clearly, I missed something...  

The SWP-USA´s final embrace of Zionism

Home to Zion

 

About ten years ago, I was reamed out by a supporter of the U.S. Socialist Workers Party at one of Amazon´s review pages when I criticized the SWP´s anti-Zionism and support for the PLO. Sure wonder what happened to the old comrade, since the party´s current stance is...well, almost the exact opposite of what it was back in the days! 

Indeed, it´s even implied in the articles below that the SWP supports the Israeli war effort and opposes a two-state solution (but you have to read them carefully to see this - or not so carefully in the third case linked below). It´s also interesting that they use the more in-your-face terms "Jew-hatred" and "Jew-hating" rather than the more usual "anti-Semitism" or "anti-Semitic".  

Now, I happen to think that the SWP is right to defend Israel´s right to exist, but I sure wonder how this squares with their "revolutionary Communist" stances on other issues, such as support for Cuba, North Korea and so on. And where is the never-ending resolution with the self-criticism of the past 50 years or so of staunch anti-Zionism? 

Next year in Jerusalem... 

Biggest massacre of Jews since the Nazi Holocaust 

SWP says Hamas pogrom in Israel is threat to all workers

Defend Israel´s right to exist!

Wtf! Whence and whither the SWP?

The U.S. Socialist Workers Party has moved very far "to the right" in recent years. They support Ukraine against Russia, defend Israel (including the US-brokered Israel-Arab peace agreements), oppose the "witchhunt" of Donald Trump and his supporters, and even seem to defend the Electoral College and the Senate! They have also come out in support of nuclear power, and in one of the articles linked below defend a private business against "woke" "anti-racist" protesters. 

The SWP are not necessarily wrong, but it *is* astonishing to see this hard Communist group (they still support Cuba!) take positions such as these. Some kind of ultra-popular frontism? One sure wonders how far they are willing to go. About seven years ago or so, a SWP supporter was shadowing me on Amazon´s American site, accusing me of being a nefarious Zionist when I supported the right of Israel to exist. Today, SWP seems to have adopted my old position (after a fashion)...

Some highlights from the articles: 

>>>The liberals’ anti-working class angst leads them to target any part of the Constitution that provides an avenue for workers to put their stamp on politics, however indirectly. This is what is behind their hysterical campaign to get rid of the Electoral College and change the number of senators allocated to each state to be proportionate to the population.>>>

>>>Another Hamas leader, Saleh Al-Arouri, called the attacks a response to the March 28 summit of top government officials from Israel, the U.S, Bahrain, Egypt, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates, held in the Negev desert, the first such meeting on Israeli soil. It was a direct outgrowth of agreements made in 2020 between the Israeli government and four Arab governments that ended decades of treating Israel as a pariah state. Advanced by the Donald Trump administration, the pacts were tied to building a common front against the expanding military influence of the regime in Iran, which opposes Sunni Arab governments and calls for the destruction of Israel. The pacts led to greater trade and other relations. They also opened the door to more travel and contact between Israeli and Arab workers, which can advance their unity and solidarity in defending working-class interests against attacks by bosses and their governments.>>>

>>>In a relatively rare statement, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas condemned the terror attacks, saying, “The killing of Israeli and Palestinian civilians will only lead to a deterioration of the situation ahead of Ramadan.” But if Abbas wanted to help put an end to these deadly assaults he could end the so-called Palestinian Authority Martyrs Fund, which makes monthly payments totaling millions of dollars to the families of residents of the West Bank who die in the course of carrying out exactly such killings.>>>

Islamist groups launch terror attacks against Jews in Israel

Amid scramble for oil, fight for nuclear power is the road to electrification

Defend independence of Ukraine! For defeat of Moscow´s invasion!

Capitalists attack political rights workers need

Court ruling for the Gibsons is a victory for working people

The times they are a´changing

About 10 years ago, a supporter of the SWP was almost stalking me at another forum, accusing me of being a brazen lier for defending Israel´s right to exist, etc etc. 

Look now...

"Israel is, will remain, a Jewish state" says Palestinian leader

Old news

A little reminder in case you missed it. Original link, though! 

Democrats´ claim Trump "a Russian puppet" exposed as big lie

Critical Race Theory: An attack on the working class?

A short leftist criticism of "Critical Race Theory". Note also the attack on Antifa! 

From "The Militant", published by the US Socialist Workers Party.

Rulers use "racial sensitivity" programs to attack working class

Communists for Trump?

Not everyone agrees…

OK, not really, but here is a somewhat different tack on the Trump impeachment campaign, from the Socialist Workers´ Party (SWP).

Why working people shouldn´t join the liberals´ impeachment crusade

Different goals

“The Lesser Evil?” is a book published by the U.S. Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in 1977. At the time, the SWP was a Trotskyist organization and had fraternal relations with the Fourth International. The book features three debates on what strategy progressive activists should take towards the Democratic Party. The debates were held in 1976, 1965 and 1959, respectively. The SWP opposed all electoral support for candidates running on a Democratic ticket. This included participation in Democratic Party primaries. (This is still the SWP's position, even after ideological changes on other topics.) Their opponents in the various debates argued for some kind of intervention in the Democratic Party.

The main item in the book is the 1976 debate between SWP presidential candidate Peter Camejo and DSOC chairman Michael Harrington. At the time, both SWP and DSOC (the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee) were important forces on the American left. Both had opposed the U.S. war in Vietnam. DSOC subsequently became the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America). The 1976 presidential elections pitted incumbent Republican Gerald Ford against Democratic challenger Jimmy Carter. Camejo got 90,986 votes or 0.11% of the total. Harrington's Democratic Socialists voted for Carter. (As a side point, let me note that Camejo later left the SWP. He was independent candidate Ralph Nader's running mate in the 2004 elections. The Nader-Camejo ticket got 465,161 votes or 0.38%.)

The next item is a 1965 debate between Jack Barnes, who later became National Secretary of the SWP, and Stanley Aronowitz, whose strategy was similar to that pursued by many pro-Sanders leftists today, who want to combine running in Democratic primaries if possible with independent political action if necessary. The 1959 debate is between leading SWP cadre George Breitman and Carl Haessler, described as being “closer to the Communist Party”. Haessler supported labor (or was it Big Labor?) in Michigan, including Walter Reuther (who definitely wasn't close to the Communists), and argued that it effectively controlled the Democratic Party at state level.

Despite the debate format (which can be tricky), I think “The Lesser Evil?” does clarify the differences between the SWP (and similar hard left groups) and the broader or softer left, with its orientation towards the Democrats. The question is obviously still highly relevant! But who is right? In a sense, they both are.

The SWP is absolutely correct that the Democratic Party cannot be transformed into a radical workers' party. If it's revolutionary change along Leninist-Trotskyist lines you want, the Democrats are indeed a graveyard. But then, “liberals” don't want such a transformation of the United States to begin with. Harrington's arguments make perfect sense, if you drop the man's socialist pretenses: it's easier for left-liberals to pressure a Democratic administration than a Republican ditto. Radical leftists like Aronowitz or crypto-Communists like Haessler, who may think they are being smart and tactical donning Democratic hats, are simply the fifth wheel under reformist Harrington, who in his turn is the fifth wheel under, say, Eugene McCarthy or Teddy Kennedy. And while it's difficult for somebody like Sanders to capture the Democratic Party and its machine, it doesn't seem intrinsically impossible either. In that sense, Harrington is the “winner” of this debate. The Democratic Party really is the lesser evil…for a liberal!

As Rosa Luxemburg said: Revolution and reform aren't two paths to the same goal, but two paths to very different goals. If the SWP's revolutionary goal is desirable, is another question entirely…

The end of the Fourth International

This pamphlet reprints several documents from the so-called Vern-Ryan Tendency within the U.S. Socialist Workers Party (SWP). The documents were originally written in 1952-53. At the time, the SWP was a Trotskyist organization in political solidarity with the Fourth International. I know next to nothing about the dissidents Sam Ryan and Dennis Vern apart from this material. Their opposition group is often accused of being “pro-Stalinist” in its analysis of East Europe. However, the Vern-Ryan Tendency is most famous for its criticism of the Trotskyist party in Bolivia, the POR of Guillermo Lora. Most of the material reprinted here deals with this issue. 

In 1952, the nationalist MNR took power in Bolivia. What began as a classical coup soon turned into a virtual revolution, as the labor union federation COB mobilized thousands of armed workers in support of the MNR. The nationalist cabinet consisted of several different factions, its left wing represented by COB leader Juan Lechín. Eventually, the revolution entered a more moderate phase (or was “betrayed”) as the MNR center faction around Victor Paz Estenssoro got the upper hand.

What made the Bolivian situation almost unique was the important role played in the events by a Trotskyist party, the previously mentioned POR. While the POR was numerically weak, it did exercise a strong influence within the COB leadership and the MNR left wing. POR leader Lora was Lechín's secretary, Lechín's speeches were written by POR cadres and Lechín himself was briefly a member of the Trotskyist party. The mineworkers' union FSTMB (likewise headed by the ever-present Lechín) had adopted a Trotskyist-sounding program. The POR also had several parliamentary deputies, elected as part of a FSTMB-backed union ticket. When the MNR took power backed by COB, FSTMB and Lechín, POR naturally acted as a ginger group on the MNR left wing.

The Fourth International supported Lora's policy, while the Vern-Ryan Tendency accused the POR of selling out the revolution to the nationalists. Instead, Vern and Ryan argued, the POR should have mobilized the working masses against the “bourgeois” MNR government, like Lenin's Bolsheviks had mobilized the Russian masses against the provisional government of Kerensky. Lora's failure to do this was a “betrayal” of the Bolivian revolution. I admit that I find their analysis surreal, but that's another show. Part of the disconnect is that the Vern-Ryan Tendency assumed that the POR was a mass party with a strong working class base, and hence resembled the Bolsheviks in that respect. But as we have already seen, Lora's group was actually quite small. They were influential precisely because they *didn't* oppose the MNR lefts, but rather mingled with them. Mainly, however, we are dealing with a political problem, Vern-Ryan opposing all nationalism (including Third World nationalism) to begin with.

In 1953, the Fourth International split. Neither the “orthodox” International Committee (dominated by the SWP) nor the “revisionist” International Secretariat (led by Michel Pablo) criticized Lora's policies in Bolivia. This is what makes the Bolivian issue so contentious for Trotskyists. If the International Committee was the true embodiment of revolutionary Trotskyism, how could it fail to notice that one of its member parties (POR supported the Committee) had betrayed a working-class revolution? From this, some really hard line Trotskyist elements eventually drew the conclusion that Vern-Ryan had been right, and that the entire Fourth International ceased to be a revolutionary organization in 1952-53. The International died on the Altiplano. These groups either call for the creation of a Fifth International, or the recreation of the true revolutionary Fourth International. This pamphlet is published by such a group, the small League for the Revolutionary Party (LRP) in New York City.

This material clearly isn't for the general reader. However, if you are interested in Trotskyist splits and fusions, “Bolivia: The Revolution the `Fourth International' Betrayed” may be a useful addition to your collection.

Clubbering the fascists?

“Counter-mobilization: A Strategy to Fight Racist and Fascist Attacks” is a pamphlet published by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the United States. For some reason, Farrell Dobbs is credited as the author on the front page. Actually, the bulk of the pamphlet consists of a discussion between several SWP leaders and activists, Dobbs among them, about the best way to counter fascism.

I happen to know that the SWP's line on fascism is very controversial among anti-fascist activists (the SWP has a small group of co-thinkers in Sweden, the Communist League). In Sweden, as in most nations, the goal of left-wing radicals is to “clubber” the fascists (to use Dobbs' expression), or at the very least to stop their meetings or to disturb them as much as possible if they can't be stopped outright. The Communist League argued against this strategy, and therefore left anti-fascist protests before the “clubbering” began. By contrast, the RS, the most active far left group in Sweden 20 years ago, adapted politically and sometimes physically, to the club-wielding brigade. In addition, most leftists (but perhaps not the RS) have traditionally demanded that the state bans fascist and racist organizations. The Communist League opposed this, too. Finally, the SWP's co-thinkers argued that the small fascist groups active during the 1980's and 1990's were really irrelevant, *real* fascism being something else. When it finally comes, it will be savvy, slick, were business suits and enjoy widespread support from the establishment. In Sweden, they argued, fascism could even come in a “socialist” form, perhaps through a future nationalist split from the governing Social Democratic Party. (While this idea sounds farfetched, I consider it a distinct possibility, albeit in the long term.)

All these ideas come from this particular pamphlet, first published by the SWP in 1976. It deals mostly with anti-racist/anti-fascist organizing on campus. Today, many students at American universities support the outright suppression of free speech, either by the administration or by the student activists themselves. During the 1970's, the general feeling of the student body was the exact opposite. Students, including radical students, were so supportive of free speech that even non-confrontational protests against racists were controversial. Of course, there was also a minority of activists who did try to stop certain speakers from appearing on campus, usually Arthur Jensen, William Shockley and Richard Herrnstein. The backdrop to the discussion in “Counter-mobilization” is an attempt by some leftist groups to stop an otherwise unknown neo-Nazi from appearing before a speech class at San Francisco State University. The SWP's campus organization refused to participate in the action.

Dobbs, Jack Barnes and the other SWP cadres argue that one should not attempt to stop fascists and racists from appearing on campus. They even argue that they, alongside everyone else, should have free speech. Every piece of repressive legislation against fascists will be used by the state to repress workers, radicals and anti-fascists even more. Indeed, such a general climate of repression will simply embolden the supposedly “illegal” fascists, who usually have the sympathies of the police and other establishment figures. However, it's not the primary task of the progressive movement to “defend” the “right” of fascists to free speech. (Here, the SWP parts company with ACLU and other “professional civil libertarians”, as Dobbs calls them.) Rather, the labor movement and other progressives should primarily defend their own democratic rights, against both the fascists and the state. To this end, the SWP calls for counter-demonstrations against fascist meetings or racist speakers, not to stop them, but to educate the public about the fascist menace (and, I presume, to show that the progressive movement is larger).

The SWP leaders further argue that the fascist groups active during the 1960's and 1970's were relatively unimportant to begin with. In the future, fascists won't be obvious kooks, and will neither wear swastikas nor don peculiar white gowns. They will come with an attractive program which seemingly offers solutions to the struggling middle class, build a mass movement, and avoid any explicit references to fascism. Above all, future fascism will come through a section of the establishment. SWP leader Jack Barnes proposes that the next fascist mass movement will have a program similar to that of Lyndon LaRouche's NCLC. This is not a bad guess: many classical fascists pretended to be “socialists”, “leftists” or pro-labor.

The weakest part of “Counter-Mobilization” is when the SWP attempts to prove that Leon Trotsky and the early Trotskyist movement had the same positions on fascism as the SWP leadership in 1976. The SWP is a direct continuation of the American Trotskyist movement of the 1930's, Farrell Dobbs being involved almost from the start. However, I think it's obvious from the material printed in this volume, and from Dobbs' own anecdotes, that the SWP originally *did* want to clubber the fascists and stop their meetings. True, they didn't always explicitly say so, but that seems to have been a mere tactical move, similar to the insistence of the Bolsheviks in November 1917 that they were merely defending the soviets against attack, when in reality Lenin was master-minding a coup to overthrow the government. By contrast, SWP's position in 1976 doesn't seems to be a mere tactical ploy, but their actual strategy. The new look SWP also called for the National Guard to protect Blacks against racist mobs in Boston and elsewhere, a position I'm sure Trotsky would have condemned as “reformist”! There's a certain tension in this material between attempts to sound reasonable, and other attempts to sound more revolutionary and hardboiled. I almost get the impression that Dobbs acts as “the left alibi” to Barnes during the discussion…

That being said, “Counter-mobilization” is nevertheless a relatively interesting Education for Socialists pamphlet, and I therefore give it four stars.

A Marxist look at the Congo crisis

“Revolution in the Congo” is a pamphlet by Dick Roberts published by the Young Socialist Alliance in 1965. The YSA was the youth arm of the U.S. Socialist Workers Party (SWP). The pamphlet consists of two articles previously published in the magazine Young Socialist. They give an overview of the Congo crisis from what I assume is the SWP's perspective.

The author supports Patrice Lumumba and the subsequent Lumumbist “Simba rebellion” against the pro-Western central government. Che Guevara was in the Congo as a military advisor to the Lumumbists, but this was unknown at the time, so Roberts naturally doesn't mention it (the SWP supports Cuba).

The second article deals extensively with the 1964 Western rescue mission of hostages in Stanleyville held by the Lumumbists. Roberts describes it as a campaign of racist terror against the African civilian population, unleashed by Western mercenaries. Other sources, of course, describe it otherwise. In an introduction, Roberts blames US president Lyndon B Johnson for the massacres and makes a connection to the escalating conflict in Vietnam.

This pamphlet was distributed by the SWP's Swedish co-thinkers still during the 1990's. Regardless of whether you agree with it or not, it does give a good introduction to the SWP's line on the Congo crisis.

SWP vs. SJW

This is the second part of a three-part series entitled “Communist Continuity and the Fight for Women's Liberation. Documents of the Socialist Workers Party 1971-86”. Part II is subtitled “Women, Leadership, and the Proletarian Norms of the Communist Movement”. The SWP is a Marxist organization in the United States. Judging by the contents, Part I and III are more interesting, as they deal more directly with SWP's analysis of women's oppression and the feminist movement. However, I don't have access to them at the present time. Part II is more tedious and feels extremely in-house. It does mention the peculiar “Bustelo affair” and the “Weiss clique”, but with little depth.

Still, it was interesting to learn that the SWP have very “old fashioned” norms of intra-party conduct. (I'm not surprised, though.) Race-baiting, including race-baiting of Whites, is prohibited. So are exclusive social affairs. One incident mentioned involved an event at a National Convention to which only “Third World comrades” were welcome. One of those excluded was the leader of the Mexican section of the Fourth International, since he happened to be a White Anglo-American! The SWP National Committee sharply criticized this practice and did away with it effective immediately. Children aren't allowed attending party branch meetings. Breast-feeding at party meetings is prohibited. SWP members can't date cops, foremen or virulent racists. Nor can they use illegal drugs (including marihuana). These, then, are the proletarian norms of the communist movement.

This sounds like common sense, but many American leftists have exactly the opposite policies. They practically revel in it. This pamphlet is dated July 1992. Since then, the number of absurd petty-bourgeois deviations (if you pardon me for using “Marxist” jargon) has multiplied almost endlessly, especially at US campuses. Somebody breast-feeding a baby at a party meeting would be the least of SWP's problems today. If the SWP ever decides to rework this pamphlet, they would be forced to double its size, at the very least! I'm not a supporter of this group, but if I would ever change my mind and become a firm adherent of communist continuity, I think I would feel more at home in the SWP than as an SJW…

The New World Reality

“Towards a History of the Fourth International” is a 16-volume series of Trotskyist documents, published by the National Education Department of the U.S. Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Most documents are of a decidedly in-house character. Four volumes deal with the so-called “International Secretariat” during 1951-54.

Unfortunately, the first volume of the IS material is unavailable from Amazon. I found that particular volume to be the most interesting one, since it contains several key texts by Michel Pablo (Michalis Raptis), the much maligned leader of the Fourth International after World War II. Pablo is often depicted as some kind of arch-traitor or wrecker, and plays a prominent role in the political demonology of some Trotskyist groups. The term “Pabloite” is used as an insult by these groups, and often directed at groups with which Pablo had nothing in common. (Compare “Trotskyite” as a term of opprobrium among Stalinists.) Pablo's political line, often described as pro-Stalinist, became so controversial that the Fourth International split in 1953, Pablo's opponents (among them the SWP) forming the “International Committee” in opposition to Pablo's “International Secretariat”. In 1963, the Fourth International was reunited, but for some reason Pablo left the “United Secretariat” two years later, forming his own independent tendency.

This second volume of the IS material covers a factional struggle within the French Trotskyist movement between Pablo's supporters and dissidents led by Pierre Lambert and Marcel Bleibtreu. It also includes material on Pablo's allies within the SWP, the so-called Cochranites. SWP's leadership around James P Cannon resolutely opposed both Pablo and Bert Cochran. Most of the documents and letters reprinted in this volume are of interest only to historians specializing in the Trotskyist movement. The only text of some interest to “general left-watchers” is Harry Frankel's “The New World Reality and the New Confusion”, a polemic against the SWP leadership from a Pabloite-Cochranite perspective.

Not sure how to rate this collection, but since most of it was frankly boring, I'm inclined to only give it two stars.

Pro-Stalinist orientation

This is a collection of mostly internal documents dealing with factional conflicts between different Trotskyist groups. It's part of a 16-volume series, published by the U.S. Socialist Workers' Party (SWP), and is mostly of interest to historians of the Trotskyist movement. This is the third volume of International Secretariat documents from the period 1951-54. The International Secretariat (IS) was a leadership body of the Fourth International, the Trotskyist world organization. However, the designation “IS” is also used to denote the majority faction within the International, a faction which claimed adherence to said leadership body. The IS faction was led by Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel. When the Fourth International split in 1953, the anti-IS faction called itself the International Committee (IC). The IC was dominated by the SWP. The Fourth International was reunited in 1963. The reunited organization is sometimes referred to as the United Secretariat.

Thrashing out the political differences between the IS and the IC is more difficult than many imagine, since both factions were fairly heterogeneous. The short story is that the SWP and its allies accused Pablo of having a pro-Stalinist orientation. Here, the term “Stalinist” is used in a broad sense, denoting not just Stalin's regime in the Kremlin, but the Soviet ruling bureaucracy in general. Thus, the Soviet Union remained “Stalinist” even after Stalin's death. China was also “Stalinist” in this sense. The SWP and the future IC further accused Pablo of wanting to “liquidate” the independence of the Trotskyist organizations by proposing strategic entryism into Stalinist, Social Democratic and Third World nationalist parties. Finally, the SWP attacked Pablo for supporting a minority faction within the SWP itself, the Cochran-Clarke-Bartell faction, hence disrupting the disciplined functioning of the SWP and its leadership. Pablo's International Secretariat hotly denied the charges of pro-Stalinism and liquidationism, but I think there was a large amount of truth in them. Indeed, Pablo counter-attacked by accusing the SWP of “Stalinophobia”, surely a curious slur when used by a Trotskyist.

This volume of IS material contains interesting articles by George Clarke, Michel Pablo and the IS on the post-Stalin thaw in the Soviet Union and the workers' uprising in East Germany. They were all written in 1953. While the Pabloites supported the East German workers, they nevertheless believed that the Soviet bureaucracy (and allied bureaucracies in Eastern Europe) had been forced by pressure from the masses to make real concessions after the death of Stalin. Both Pablo and Clarke imply that a faction of the Soviet bureaucracy could meet the masses half-way and reform the system. None of them calls for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from East Germany. Pablo clearly continues with his pro-Stalinist political orientation on the international scale, as if the cracks in the Soviet bloc proved *his* perspective rather than that of his opponents! He is also mesmerized by the Chinese revolution. How Pablo could simultaneously support the East German workers, Malenkov and Mao, is of course an interesting question… (But then, I've seen far worse eclecticism on the left. Trust me!)

This collection is very “in house”, but since I found it moderately interesting, I give it three stars. Of course, to get the full picture, the reader should get all four volumes of “International Secretariat Documents 1951-54”.

From Pablo to the Socialist Union

This is the fourth volume of “Struggle in the Fourth International: International Secretariat Documents 1951-54”. The four volumes are part of a much larger series, apparently spanning 16 volumes in total, titled “Towards a History of the Fourth International”. Most of them are probably out of print. The series was published by the American Socialist Workers Party (SWP). All volumes are collections of documents, many of them internal, detailing various faction fights within the Trotskyist movement. They are primarily of interest to the few historians who specialize in such things. I suppose the odd Trotskyist might be interested, too!

The Fourth International (the Trotskyist world movement) split in 1953. The two competing factions are known as the International Secretariat or IS (also the name of a leadership body within the Fourth International) and the International Committee or IC. The SWP supported the IC. This volume of the series contain IS-related material from 1953-54. The Fourth International was reunited in 1963 (a few sectarian groups refused to participate). The reunited international is sometimes called the United Secretariat after its new leadership body.

The IC accused the IS of developing pro-Stalinist political positions, and of wanting to liquidate Trotskyist groups through a strategy of long term entryism into Stalinist organizations. The IC also accused the IS leader Michel Pablo (Raptis) of highhanded and undemocratic methods in dealing with opponents. Pablo openly supported a pro-IS minority faction within the SWP, something the pro-IC majority of the SWP regarded as a blatant attempt at disruption. Pablo, for his part, regarded the *SWP* as disrupters for refusing to follow majority decisions of the Fourth International as a whole (the IS faction had carried the day at a previous world congress). Pablo and his right hand man Ernest Germain (Mandel) also hotly denied the charges of pro-Stalinism and liquidationism. However, I think it's obvious from the documents reprinted in this volume that the Pabloites really were a kind of “soft core” pro-Stalinists.

Pablo strongly believed that the official Communist parties were already to the left of Social Democracy, and that they would be pushed even further left by the combined pressure of radicalized workers and an impending world war. The main axis of Pablo's thinking was the conflict between the United States and the Soviet bloc (which at this point still included China). The main danger was American imperialism, not “Stalinism”. He rejected the notion of a “third camp” or “third position”. At several points, Pablo and Mandel charged the SWP with “Stalinophobia”. The SWP had accused the IS of not demanding the immediate withdrawal of Soviet troops from East Germany during the 1953 workers' uprising. The IS countered by claiming that the SWP supported Eisenhower's food packages to East Germany!

Pablo and his followers strongly implied that a faction of the Soviet bureaucracy could meet the workers half-way and give them real concessions. This was supposedly proven by the thaw after Stalin's death. While the IS nominally still called for a political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy, their entire method pointed in the direction of “self-reform” of said bureaucracy. Mao's China and Kim Il Sung's North Korea hardly needed to be reformed at all, judging by the documents printed in this and other volumes of the series. (Left-watchers may want to make a comparative study of the Pabloite positions and those of Socialist Action in Britain or the Socialist Alliance in Australia. For a more “hard core” version, see the Workers World Party in the United States.)

The last document reprinted in this particular collection is a long declaration by the Socialist Union of America, the erstwhile pro-IS faction within the SWP. The SU was led by Bert Cochran and George Clarke. The SWP editors of the series have included the “Cochranite” declaration as a kind of epitaph, since it seems to prove the charge that the IS were liquidationists. The SU accepted Pablo's strategic entryism as its point of departure, but went even further. Essentially, the SU believed that specifically Trotskyist politics should be dispensed with entirely. Instead, the Socialist Union sought to integrate itself into the broad progressive movement. I've previously reviewed back issues of “The American Socialist”, the publication of the Cochranites. It sounds Trotskyist and Pabloite only if you know what to look for, and one of the last issues before SU's complete liquidation even criticize the Bolsheviks…

“International Secretariat documents 1951-54” (vol 4) is a very narrow work, but I admit that I found its long-winding documents relatively interesting, despite being neither a Trotskyist nor a historian specializing in such specialized things. Three stars.