Degeneration and splits in the Fourth International,1948-1953

The Yugoslavian events and the FI's capitulation to Tito
In 1948, ten years after its foundation, the FI held its Second Congress. The documents insisted that the 1938 perspectives upon which the International was founded retained all their validity and that the international collapse of capitalism was imminent.

This was not in fact the case. As we saw in the previous chapter the Communist and Social Democratic parties of Europe had during the last year of the war in Europe combined with the "victors", USSR and Anglo-Saxon imperialist powers, to abort the revolutionary upsurge.

Whilst the massive devastation caused by the war in Europe fuelled discontent in provided an opening for US capital—which had expanded massively in the course of the war.

The FI’s Second Congress further argued that no overturn of capitalism had taken place in Eastern Europe and that none could take place unless these states were "structurally assimilated" into the USSR, as had happened to eastern Poland in 1939.

Although this perspective was fundamentally flawed, it enabled the FI to argue for building independent revolutionary parties, to continue to characterise Stalinism as a counter-revolutionary force etc. However, as the FI leadership’s world-view became increasingly at variance with reality, so their "orthodoxy" became ever more fragile.

All that was needed to dislodge the FI from the correct programmatic positions it held until 1948 was a sharp twist in world events. This was not long in coming.

That twist came almost immediately after the Congress.

On the 28 June 1948, Rude Pravo, the leading Czech Stalinist newspaper, announced a split between the Cominform - the international organisation of CPs - and the Yugoslav Communist Party (YCP). The YCP was suddenly attacked as being "nationalist" and "adventurist". In subsequent documents, Moscow described the YCP as "Trotskyist" and finally as "criminal fascists".

The whole world – and not least the Fourth International - was completely taken by surprise. Up until then, nothing had suggested that Tito was anything other than a loyal pillar of world Stalinism. Nothing in the articles and documents of the FI claimed that Yugoslavia constituted in any way an exception to the other states of Eastern Europe.

These were known collectively as "the buffer zone"— a term which hid differences within the International. These centred on whether these states were being effectively absorbed ("structurally assimilated") into the USSR or whether they still constituted capitalist states—albeit ones under the political dominance of the Soviet forces and with a high degree of nationalised property.

The resolutions adopted by the International on the "buffer states" barely mentioned Yugoslavia. Like Tito himself, the International had not seen the split coming.

As soon as the news came through, the International Secretariat set to work to explain it. The analysis it cam up with was nothing short of a catastrophe for the FI. On 13 July, the IS published "an open letter to the Congress, to the Central Committee and to the members of the YCP"

Outlining the two main choices facing the YCP – to the Kremlin or ally itself with Washington — the IS tried to use the split with Moscow to push the YCP leftwards, towards "a return to the Leninist conception of the socialist revolution, a return to the global strategy of the socialist revolution"

The IS proposed that the YCP should base itself on the "revolutionary dynamism of the masses" by the transforming the "popular committees" set up by the YCP into "genuine state organs", by introducing freedom of political parties, nationalising the land and transforming the plan through the participation of the masses.

After having indicated that the International had "numerous and important differences with your past political positions", though it cited principally the post-war Stalinist conception of "peoples' democracy", the IS closed its letter thus:

"Yugoslav communists, let us unite our efforts to build a new Leninist International! For the world victory of communism!"

However, there was a massive gap between the desires of the IS and the reality of the YCP.

Scarcely two weeks later, at the YCP Congress, Tito still protested his loyalty to Moscow and "the whole of the audience rose to chant, according to tradition, Stalin - Tito, Stalin - Tito.". (Francois Fejto History of the People’s Democracies).

At the same congress, Milovan Djilas, the YCP Central Committee reporter savagely attacked "the Trotskyist provocateurs who spread bourgeois lies about the Soviet Union, about the supposed dictatorship of Stalin, about the supposed bureaucratic rule in the USSR, about the supposed falsification of the trials against the Trotskyist, Zinovievist and Bukharinist spies."

The IS misinterpreted the nature of the YCP’s split with Stalin. In fact, the split with Stalinism did not exist."

Worse the Open Letter was aimed first and foremost at the leadership of the Yugoslav party. There were no proposals aimed at the rank and file to force Tito and Co into a real "left turn"—i.e. the restoration of inner party democracy, the right of factions, of Trotskyists to organise etc.

And as for the creation of a section of the Fourth International in Yugoslavia, the IS did not breathe a word about it. Indeed the implication of the call for a "new Leninist International" was that the FI would not let the programme of Trotskyism stand in the way. It is clear that the leadership of the International was already beginning to place its hopes on the self-reform of the Titoite leadership.

The reform of the "liberation committees"—advocated by the Open Letter was presented as being a constitutional task for the party leadership rather than as a task for the Yugoslav workers. Completely absent was the perspective of the workers’ own seizure of political power from a usurping bureaucracy.

This alone indicated just how far the FI had departed from Trotsky’s conception of the political revolution and the role of. soviets as the organs of the proletarian struggle for power, as well as for its democratic exercise after this.

In August, Pablo wrote an article entitled "The Yugoslav Affair", in which he recognised that the YCP had "no fundamental difference with Moscow. But despite this tacit admission of the Stalinist nature of the YCP, Pablo suddenly discovered that "during the war the YCP led a genuine mass movement with clear revolutionary tendencies". (Fourth International December 1948, p.241),

This supposed fact made all the difference as far as the attitude of the FI to Tito went.

Certainly the YCP—because of its role in leading a guerrilla war against the Nazi occupation— had much greater independent prestige amongst the Yugoslav masses than other CPs of the "buffer states". These entered their countries as mere appendages of the Soviet Army.

It was this base which enabled the YCP to resist successfully the agreements signed between USA, Great Britain and USSR, which had initially assigned Yugoslavia to the western sphere of influence and to support. Likewise —for a period— Tito supported the Greek Communist partisans.

At this time the Cold War had broken out. Imperialism was increasing its economic and military pressure in order to force Stalin, if not to abandon his conquests, at least to prevent further advances by the Communist parties in Italy, France and Greece Moscow wanted to be certain of the loyalty and discipline of Tito’s party.

It regarded Tito’s negotiations with Dimitrov’s Bulgaria on a future Balkan Federation (a long standing pledge in both CP’s programmes with alarm. For one thing they had been undertaken without Stalin’s prior agreement. The paranoid but overconfident Soviet dictator decided it would be an easy matter to liquidate Tito and place a more pliable bureaucrat at the head of the YCP. A similar process took place in nearly all the Eastern European parties as the Cold War intensified.

Following on from the Fourth International’s profoundly opportunist response to the Tito-Stalin split, Michel Pablo the International Secretary took the initiative in developing an entire methodology based on an unfolding "new world reality" which, he claimed, was overcoming and transforming the nature of Stalinism.

He did not as his "anti-Pabloite detractors have repeatedly claimed hold that "Stalinism is becoming revolutionary" but rather that objective developments and their expression in mass movements were already and would increasingly, lead to the disappearance of Stalinism. This of course led to him characterising still Stalinist parties as no longer so.

Pablo took the lead in insisting that Yugoslavia was and had been a workers state for at least two years prior to the split with Moscow. The counterrevolutionary pressure of Moscow had been overcome by the supposed pressure of the masses, via the revolutionary committees the CPY had set up during the war and its immediate aftermath. In reality these committees were only a façade for bureaucratic dictatorship.

This process, according to Pablo, had resulted in the resulting Workers State not being "degenerate" (i.e. qualitatively the same as the USSR). Indeed this objective process had converted Tito and Co. from Stalinists into centrists, into subjective revolutionaries. Consequently there was no necessity for either a political revolution or a new revolutionary party to replace them.

This was a profound abandonment of everything that Trotskyism had hitherto stood for. It was accepted by nearly the whole of the FI, with the exception of the majority RCP (Britain).

In particular the later heroes of Anti-Pabloism; the SWP(US) leadership in its entirety, the French section (the PCI), and the minority of the British section led by Gerry Healy were enthusiastic supporters of the Yugoslav line. Joseph Hansen in particular supported Pablo’s efforts to bring the FI’s theory on Yugoslavia quickly into line with its practice..

There were opponents of this collapse. They included were the disillusioned Natalia Sedova—Trotsky’s companion and the ultra-left supporters of Grandizo Munis in Mexico.

But for them the degeneration of the FI was linked to its refusal to reject the characterisation of the USSR as any sort of workers state. They too were unable to develop Trotsky’s analysis —only to reject it, albeit in a Stalinophobic direction.

The majority of the British RCP led by Jock Haston, Ted Grant, Roy Tearse et al. did make sharp and correct criticisms of the Open Letter. But sadly the RCP was in rapid decline and Haston, deeply politically demoralised, was to abandon the struggle.

He ended up supporting the right wing of labourism and the trade union bureaucracy. The party finally dissolved itself in June 1949, and its members, still at this time a majority of the Trotskyists in Britain, joined the Healy grouping ("the Club") inside the Labour Party.

Subjected to the tender mercies of Healy’s leadership (a conference was not due for another year) the leading cadre of the old party was rapidly disposed of. Haston left the FI altogether in February 1950.

As an IEC member, was he was formally expelled by the succeeding plenum for desertion. Indeed all the prominent leaders of the RCP, including Ted Grant, Roy Tearse and Tony Cliff were expelled on one pretext or another by the summer of 1950.

For the next three years Pablo had no more loyal supporter than Gerry Healy, the man who was later to become the self-elected Pope of Anti-Pabloism.

Pablo and the FI’s revisionism was at first limited to Yugoslavia. It was "centrism applied to a single country". But the methodological virus developed there was to breed rapidly on the greater material of the Chinese revolution and the Korean War.

After the victory of Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist party in October 1949 and then under the impact of the war in Korea which broke out in June 1950, the FI, under Pablo’s leadership, through a general revision of perspectives, of the characterisation of Stalinism and the left wings of Social democracy and semi-colonial bourgeois nationalism, through the tactics and methods of party building.

This marked a qualitative and decisive break with "the Old Trotskyism" i.e. that of Trotsky and his co-thinkers in the years 1933-48. Pablo made the running within the international leadership in this development and Ernest Mandel (at least on the question of recognising the social overturns in eastern Europe) brought up the rear.

But the great majority of the IEC and the entirety of the IS, which included George Clarke of the SWP(US) and Gerry Healy of the British Section had no differences on the war-revolution perspective. Indeed they both expressed it in even more vulgar forms than its author.

The leading bodies of the International the IS and the IEC were the place where the development of this line took place. The Eighth Plenum held in April 1950 saw the final acceptance by the FI that Yugoslavia was a workers state. It stated:

"The VIII Plenum, despite the existence of differing appreciations of the stages of development of the Yugoslav revolution, considers that, following the victory of the proletarian revolution in Yugoslavia, there exists a workers state and a regime of proletarian dictatorship in that country; .It observes that in the particular conditions of the Yugoslav revolution, bureaucratic deformations remain in this state and registers that a serious struggle has been engaged by the Yugoslav Communists against these deformations." (Les Congres de la Quatrieme Internationale vol 3 p451)

The Third—Liquidation—Congress of the Fourth International.
The IX plenum of the IEC held in November 1950 saw the birth of Pablo’s "war-revolution" perspective.

Pablos’ draft perspectives for the Third Congress accentuated the catastrophist economic perspectives held to by the FI in 1948 and drew from this the conclusion that this was driving the USA towards a new world war in the short term.

It interpreted the Chinese revolution and the outbreak of the Korean war as indicating a swinging of the balance of forces against imperialism. It held out the prospect of US imperialism desperately plunging into war against the USSR and Eastern Europe, China and creating from the outset revolutionary outbreaks throughout Europe and the semi-colonial world.

Thus the Third world war would not end in "international civil war" but this time would begin with it! The two camps of this civil war were Stalinism and imperialism..

Looking back to the Yugoslav experience Pablo held that this war-revolution would probably work a wholesale transformation on Stalinism, The Stalinist parties, again under pressure from the masses, would cease to be Stalinist and evolve in a centrist direction, just as Tito himself had done.

Just as Mao appeared to be doing. From these facts he concluded that the FI must get as close to these parties and movements and avoid the slightest "sectarianism"—i.e. revolutionary criticism of them.

Consequently the FI had to fundamentally alter its orientation and tactics. What this meant was not spelled out clearly until after the Third Congress. Instead all the documents contained strange polemical sallies against unnamed purveyors of "sectarianism", "dogmatism", "schematism". More ominously "the old Trotskyism" was contrasted with "the new".

This vulgar impressionistic response to the Korean War was expressed most boldly in a background document which Pablo published to accompany the Third Congress drafts Where are We Going?

In it Pablo claims that the swings between equilibrium and disequilibrium, which before the war Trotsky had seen as fundamental to the very nature of capitalism, even in its stagnation phase, had been now replaced by a chronic and constantly aggravating disequilibrium. Moreover he claimed that the strength of the anti-imperialist forces, had proved much stronger than the FI previously assumed.

"War under such conditions, in the relationship of forces such as exist internationally at present, would essentially be the revolution". (Les Congres de la Quatrieme Internationale vol 4 p34)

Pablo continues that the FI must replace the pre-war notion of imperialist war as the result of inter-imperialist rivalry and proletarian defeats in the class struggle, with revolution as the eventual outcome of the chaos and misery of such a war— with a different one.

In this new scenario war is the last desperate throw of a collapsing imperialism and this time the response of the masses to the launching of such a war will be immediate outbreaks of revolutionary struggle. Moreover this is to be the pattern of the rest of our epoch. Capitalism was in this sense in its final crisis.

" it is the concept of revolution-war, of war-revolution which is emerging and on which the perspectives of the revolutionary Marxists of our epoch must be founded".

The sheer vulgar nonsense of this perspective did arouse serious misgivings from sections of the International secretariat notably from Ernest Mandel and from the leadership of the SWP.

Mandel drafted a document, known only as "Ten Theses", as an addendum to the documents of the IX Plenum. The SWP(US) also drafted amendments to the Congress documents which added more orthodox formulations, on the counterrevolutionary character of Stalinism, without challenging or deleting Pablo’s main perspectives and formulations which contradicted them.

The French majority led by Marcel Bleibtreu (and initially Pierre Frank) did oppose the main line of Pablo’s theses vis-a-vis the "war-revolution" conflict between the two camps and the conclusions it drew on likely revolutionary projection of the European CPs.

Bleibtreu actually published a pugnacious reply to Pablo entitled "Where is Comrade Pablo going?". But Bleibtreu and Co. did not get to the roots of Pablo’s errors. Indeed on Yugoslavia and China they were actually more Pabloite than Pablo. They emphasised identified these as fundamental breaks with Stalinism because their seizures of power were , they claimed acts of insubordination to the Kremlin— which was an remained counterrevolutionary in the literal sense—against revolutions.

However once more the burgeoning opposition to Pablo rapidly melted away. Discussions took place between the French majority and Mandel for a block around his Ten Theses. But at some time in the spring Pablo was able to persuade, or pressurise, both Pierre Frank and Mandel to completely abandon their criticisms.

In another bizarre incident George Clarke, the SWP representative on the IS and IEC, burned the "orthodox" amendments of the SWP to the congress documents. What is even stranger the SWP leaders didn’t even complain about this until 1953!

By the time the Third World Congress of the FI assembled in Paris on August 16 1951 Pablo had silenced all serious opposition. The Congress lasted for eleven days and was composed of 76 delegates from 26 countries.

Many of the future leaders of the various strands of the "Trotskyism" of the second half of the century were present. Not only Pablo and Mandel but Nahuel Moreno, Juan Posadas, Peng Shu Tse. Gerry Healy, Livio Maitan, Pierre Frank, etc.

Pablo’s political report to the Congress entitled World Trotskyism Re-arms, systematically set out to replace the key positions of the Trotsky’s theoretical and programmatic legacy.

On the counterrevolutionary nature of Stalinism, whilst conceding that the Kremlin itself remained so, for the time being, Pablo went on to nuance even this by claiming that Stalinism because of its dual role was capable of transformation into centrism;

"We have made it clear that the CPs are not exactly reformist parties and that under certain exceptional circumstances they posses the possibility of projecting a revolutionary orientation, i.e. of seeing themselves obliged to undertake a struggle for power"(Fourth International vol XII no6 Nov-Dec 1951)

Pablo did not, as some of his over zealous detractors were later to claim say that Stalinism would evolve uninterruptedly into a revolutionary party. Indeed he explicitly warned against this.

"Can the communist parties transform themselves into revolutionary parties? The experience of the CPs does not permit such rash and dangerous assumptions. These parties can in certain exceptional circumstances (advanced decay of the bourgeois regime, a very powerful revolutionary movement) project a revolutionary orientation but their transformation into revolutionary parties, especially into Bolshevik parties has not been answered in the affirmative, not even in the most favourable cases known thus far (Yugoslavia and China). On the contrary."

But what he did say was bad enough; that the CPs could evolve into non-Stalinist parties, indeed were tending to do so already, and that the generalised war-revolution would make this a general tendency.

"They remain centrist parties subject to new retrogressions. However the fact that under exceptional circumstances these parties can project a revolutionary orientation retains all its importance and should act as a guide in our line towards them"

Thus Pablo and the FI abandoned the defence of the indispensability of a fully revolutionary party to make a proletarian revolution, defence of the necessity of soviets embodying proletarian democracy to any non-degenerate workers state.

Pablo’s positions, adopted by the FI at its Third World Congress in 1951, were subscribed to by all the major sections and leading figures of the FI.

here was no revolutionary opposition to Pablo’s centrist position that "In Yugoslavia, the first country where the proletariat took power since the degeneration of the USSR, Stalinism no longer exists today as an effective factor in the workers’ movement which, however, does not exclude its possible re-emergence under certain conditions"

Entryism "sui generis".
The leadership of the International, headed by Pablo, went on after the Congress to transform the tactic of entryism. In so doing they violated the key premises of the united front tactic (no confusion of programmes) turning it into a long term political capitulation. This was applied, variously, to Stalinism, to Social Democracy and to petty bourgeois and even bourgeois nationalism.

Using what he termed the "rearmament" Of the FI as his pretext, Pablo embarked upon a tactical course which involved the complete liquidation of the Trotskyist programme. This liquidation was necessitated by the organisational and political concessions that were involved in Pablo's "entryism sui generis" ("entryism of a special type", based on long-term entry and the hiding of the revolutionary programme).

Pablo argued that the imminent War-Revolution left no time to build Trotskyist parties, but that this was no longer a crucial problem because in the coming period a wide variety of political formations-not just the CPs-could embark on the struggle for power.

This thoroughgoing opportunism propelled the FI along a sharp, rightward-moving centrist course. In 1952, Pablo instructed the French section to make a deep entry into the PCF, to integrate itself into the working class movement "as it was".

Such were predicated on the abandonment (until circumstances made it possible) of any fight for principled politics against the leaderships of the parties or movements into which the Trotskyists entered.

In 1951 the centrist positions of the Third World Congress: on Stalinism, on Yugoslavia, and on general perspectives (the impending war-revolution) proved, beyond doubt, that a programmatic collapse of the Fourth International had taken place.

The fact that no section voted against the Yugoslav resolution - the cornerstone of all the errors - is a fact of enormous significance. The FI as a whole had collapsed into centrism.

From this point onward, the FI employed a consistently centrist method. All its sections had adopted a common false analysis and perspective. The criticisms which were raised later were partial and did not break with the common method.

The failure of the whole of the International to deal with the real political and programmatic challenges of the post-war world had borne bitter fruit. The revolutionary Fourth International had been destroyed by its own members.

The task of revolutionaries should have been to wage a relentless political struggle against the whole of the leadership and all the key positions adopted by this Congress. The splits and confusion of the next half century—not overcome to this day—are a direct result of the political destruction of the Fourth International.

The split in the French section
The thorough-going opportunism towards the Stalinist parties who "made revolutions" and towards "anti-imperialist" bourgeois nationalism propelled the FI rapidly along a right centrist course In 1951, Pablo characterised the Peronist movement in Argentina as "anti-capitalist".

Following hard on the heels of Bleibtreu, the IS soon claimed that the Chinese Communist Party, like the YCP, had become a revolutionary factor. In Britain, the left reformist Aneurin Bevan became a "left centrist".

1952 was to prove a watershed as in both theory and practice, the International was proving its centrism in Bolivia (see box) and in France. France was the key testing-ground for the new regime and political line confirmed at the Congress because the issues were more sharply posed in the Stalinist-dominated French labour movement and because the International Secretariat was located in Paris.

In the months after the Congress, the leadership of the French section expressed its willingness to apply the Congress decisions, unanimously adopting a perspective which argued for a priority orientation to the French CP (PCF). However differences soon arose with the IS over trade union work.

Most of the PCI’s trade unionists had been expelled from the Stalinist-led CGT union federation (many of them, like Pierre Lambert, for having applied the FI’s line on Yugoslavia) and had joined the right-wing split from the CGT, Force Ouvriere, publishing "l’Unité", a joint bulletin with other forces. Unable to come to an agreement over tactical differences, the PCI leadership asked the IS to adjudicate.

They did not like the answer they got: the IS argued that the PCI’s anti-communist bedfellows around l’Unité were preventing them from orienting correctly to the CGT’s recent "left" turn and that the PCI members should fight to support the action proposals of the CGT leadership.

However, whilst many of the IS’s criticisms were correct, in an accompanying letter they made clear what would happen if the PCI refused to apply the line. Under these circumstances "the IS would raise with the IEC the question of a definitive decision on the leadership of the French section."

By their heavyhanded impatience, the IS managed to consolidate the PCI leadership. Bleibtreu’s differences were re-raised whilst Lambert, who had previously played no part in the differences with Pablo but who led the trade union work and was thus pushed into an oppositional stance.
At the beginning of January 1952, the IS went further, instructing the PCI to carry out entry work in the PCF, whose internal regime was probably the hardest Stalinist tyranny outside a degenerate workers’ state. Again, bureaucraticism replaced politics as a way of convincing the majority of the organisation.

Thus the IS insisted that only they could interpret the 3rd Congress line and that discussion within the PCI could only take place around how to apply the line, not as to its correctness. Furthermore, only the IEC was allowed to criticise the IS!

In February 1952, the IEC supported the IS’s disciplinary actions against the PCI majority, called for a PCI conference and installed a new leadership, with Mandel having the decisive vote. Over the next few months the PCI majority campaigned against both the content of the IS’s proposals and the bureaucratic manner in which they were being imposed on the section. Their pleas fell on deaf ears.

In June 1952, when the majority of the PCI rejected the IS position, the Pablo-Mandel-Frank minority acted quickly: the PCI’s centre was rifled and all the equipment removed, whilst the IEC decided to expell those who voted against the IS line.

There was little response inside the International. When the French majority explained Pablo’s manoeuvres to Cannon in February 1952, he replied icily: "I think that the Third World Congress made a correct analysis of the new post-war reality in the world and the unforeseen turns this reality has taken. (....) It is the unanimous opinion of the leading people that the authors of these documents have rendered a great service to the movement for which they deserve appreciation and comradely support, not distrust and denigration. "

Healy, as a member of the IEC, had actually voted for the expulsion of the French majority! His views coincided entirely with those of Pablo, who at the beginning of 1952 had warned the French majority: "I have come to understand that some sections need to be given very, very firm leadership... In Britain we have made progress because comrade Healy has grouped around him a nucleus of comrades whom he leads very firmly."

On the key political issue - to enter or not to enter - the PCI could hardly expect much sympathy. This was exactly the same recipe they had insisted upon for the Chinese Trotskyists, who had also protested!

Cannon was not inclined to dispute the political questions, given his firm adherence to a "non-aggression pact" inside the International. As to Healy, he and John Lawrence had actually pioneered the "new" type of entrism in the Labour Party from 1947 onwards. Their strategy was based on a perspective of an economic crisis which would push the left reformist movement led by Bevan into centrism.

Despite the absence of a massive crisis, by 1950 both Healy and Pablo agreed that the Bevanites were centrists. Under Bevanite leadership a mass movement had to be encouraged into eventually forcing the removal of the right-reformist leaders. The task of Trotskyists was to fuse with this Bevanite left and assist in its development. To do this required the quiet shelving of the full programme of transitional demands or any mention of the need for a Leninist party It meant abandoning any public organ for revolutionary propaganda.

This policy was put into practice by Healy before and after the collapse of the British Revolutionary Communist Party in 1949. The British section was turned into a highly secret faction "The Club". The broader, public grouping within the Labour Party known as the Socialist Fellowship included Labour MPs and union bureaucrats, gathered around the newspaper "Socialist Outlook".

This organisation declared its strategic loyalty to the Labour Party with a sickening "improvement" on the famous quotation from the Communist Manifesto that they "had no interests apart from or separate to the Labour Party". Pablo warmly approved of this tactic and explicitly referred to it when advocating his generalisation of "entryism sui generis".

1953—the Anti Pabloite split
Given fundamental common ground, established by the Third Congress, between the IS and the British and American sections, how did the split come about? Quite simply because Pablo and the IS turned their attention to the tactics and leaderships of these sections, and began to work to orient them towards the Stalinist parties in their respective countries.

In fact, the split, announced in 1953, was not the work of the International Committee. It was declared by the SWP with its publication of "A Letter to Trotskyists Around the World", on the 25th anniversary of the foundation of the SWP.

And whatever the mythology that has sprung up around it, the true motivation of the split was clearly a response to the IS’s perceived "interference" in the internal life of the American section through the encouragement of the Cochran-Clarke faction, which wanted a preferential orientation to the American Stalinists.

Since Trotsky’s death the SWP would neither take its share of responsibility for leading the Fourth International nor submit to the leadership or discipline of those who did.

Prior to the emergence of the Cochran-Clarke faction in the SWP Cannon had believed that his long term support for Pablo ensured that the SWP would never be subjected to IS intervention. That intervention had been all right for the RCP in Britain or the PCI in France. In these cases Cannon had agreed to majority leaderships being deposed or expelled. But this was not how the veterans of the SWP expected to be treated.

Cannon regarded the Cochran-Clarke faction as being directed from Paris and aimed at imposing a Pablo-loyal leadership on the SWP. Possibly, Pablo intended to make the SWP carry out entry into the beleaguered American CP.

The SWP had always been somewhat Stalinophobic and preferred to orient to AFL-CIO trade unionists whose political sympathies were with the left wing of the Democratic Party. To identify any more closely with the CP at the height of the Macarthy witch-hunt would alienate their shrinking base of support in these unions.

As was his habit, Cannon criticised the faction and their degeneration from a largely sociological standpoint: the Clarke group were petit-bourgeois intellectuals; the Cochran group were older and tired trade unionists in retreat because of the Cold War offensive. They were united only in seeking to liquidate the party.

All of these features were had elements of truth to them and Cannon was right to point them out. But he was wrong to conclude that "liquidationism" in the organisational sense—especially the liquidation of the FI as an international organisation—was the key problem or the essence of "Pabloism". It meant that he failed to go to the heart of the methodological and programmatic errors of the IS and the Cochran-Clarke faction.

When it became clear within a year or two of the split that Pablo had not liquidated—that is, organisationally dissolved—the FI, the road back to the Pablo-led IS was again open.

Much the same process took place in Britain. By 1953 John Lawrence, supported by the majority of the IS, was pushing for a pro-Stalinist orientation. Healy's long term orientation to the anticommunist Bevanites conflicted with this turn.

In September 1953 the IS put Healy under a non-existent "IS discipline", forbidding him from opposing its line within the British section, whilst at the same time freeing the Lawrence minority from section discipline, enabling them to pursue the pro-Stalinist orientation.

Healy responded by agreeing to set up factional coordinating committee with the French and the Swiss, to prepare for the upcoming 4th Congress (1954). Like Cannon, Healy had the cheek to accuse the IS of "liquidationism"!

The SWP replied by announcing that they were going to publish an open letter and arguing that Healy should transform his committee into the new centre of the FI!

With the world Congress a few months away, the SWP were effectively running away from the fight. They explicitly ruled out the idea of a fight at the Congress, preferring to set up a new International.

The "Open Letter" certainly contains some correct criticisms of the IS leadership, but it was unable to break with the political method which lay at the heart of the centrism of the whole of the International (including of the sections of the International Committee) nor to provide a clear explanation of its political degeneration.

It also displayed a characteristic Stalinophobia and exaggerated the scale of the IS’s betrayals, especially in its treatment of the French trade union question.

The tone of decades of polemic from the Healyites, the Lambertists and their bastard offspring was further given by the letter which sought to present the political line of the International as the result of one man and his personal clique.

This claim was laughable and discredited its authors. Pablo was the Secretary of the International; the Secretariat and the IEC were its legitimate leadership, elected with the full political support of the SWP and the British section. The demonising of Pablo was in fact a smokescreen for Cannon, Healy and Co’s past collusion with him as well as a way of leaving the path open for Mandel to break with Pablo.

The character of the International Committee
The opposition in America, Britain and France that emerged in 1952-53 was subjectively committed to opposing Pablo. However, they have to be judged not by their impulse but by their politics. Their "orthodoxy" was both sterile and based on the commonly-agreed post-war centrist revision of Trotskyism.

The IC groupings had no distinct and thoroughgoing political alternative to Pablo-Mandel and, therefore, they remained immobilised in a position where polemical heat was a poor substitute for political light. Of course, the IC was able, on occasion, to make isolated valid criticisms of the IS - e.g. on East Germany 1953, or on the limits of Kruschev’s "de-Stalinisation". However such criticisms virtually never went beyond a sterile defence of "orthodoxy".

Their strongest point was their defence of the independent party organisation against the "permeation" of alien class tendencies.

But in reality their much vaunted "orthodoxy" was a melange of economic catastrophism, Stalinophobia and an associated adaptation to social democracy—a mixture that Cannon, Bleibtreu, Lambert and Healy had all long been practising.

The IC refused to take the fight to the forthcoming World Congress, due to be held in 1954. On the other hand neither did they proclaimed themselves the legitimate leadership of the FI nor summoned a rival world congress. They failed to even attempt to restored and renewed the revolutionary programme and the democratic centralism of the FI.

They acted like guilty factionalists, uncertain whether to make a definitive split on principle or to seek regroupment and reform of the majority of the FI from outside. In some respects they acted like the Left Opposition towards the Comintern in the period 1926-33, i.e. as an expelled faction. There was one problem. They had not been expelled!

The IC also embodied the profound national isolationism of its three largest components, each of which only opposed Pablo’s bureaucratically centralised drive to implement the perspectives of the 1951 Congress when it affected them. In the IC itself they imposed no democratic centralism on themselves whatsoever.

Moreover, by not going beyond the framework of a public faction, they refused to wage an intransigent fight against the Pablo-Mandel leadership . Thus having denounced "Pabloite revisionism" in terms which seemed to preclude any possible reconciliation, within a year or two unity overtures were being made.

By 1963, 10 years after the split, reunification actually took place on the basis of a common adaptation to the Cuban revolution. Only the Healyites and the Lambertists refused to join the USFI, for different sectarian factional reasons.

We cannot view either component of the 1953 split as the "continuators" of Trotskyism. Both were centrist. The IC did not constitute a "left centrist" alternative to the IS. The IC, itself developing in a rightward direction (e.g. Healy's work in the Labour Party) was distinguished from the IS by the pace of its development. It recoiled from the most blatant expressions of liquidationism issuing from the IS, but not from the right centrist documents that underpinned that liquidationism.

The split of 1953 was thus both too late and too early. Politically it was too late because all the IC groups had already endorsed and re-endorsed the liquidation of the line in the period 1948-51.

The key political issues were thus obscured. It was too early in the sense that it came before any fight within the framework of the centrist FI to win a majority at the following congress. Indeed, the decision to move straight to a split aborted such a fight.

The lessons of the split and of the decades of political and organisational confusion which followed are clear. The inability to reelaborate the political programme and perspectives of the International led to confusion, sectarianism and isolation.

The political collapse of the International was masterminded by the whole of the FI’s leadership; the subsequent inability of the FI and its fragments to understand the true dynamics of Stalinism and petit-bourgeois nationalism, or to intersect with major sections of the working class or revolutionary youth in struggle were not due to "Pabloite revisionism" or to the split in 1953, but because of the centrist method adopted by the International in the post-war period.

Our challenge today is to overcome the revolutionary vacuum created by the centrist degeneration of the FI and to complete the work begun so long ago by building a new revolutionary International in the spirit of Lenin and Trotsky.

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