Full Correspondence: Samuel Tissot's Expulsion

Letter 1: National Committee to Samuel Tissot  March 5

Dear Comrade Tissot,

Last Wednesday, February 28, you told us that you had suddenly developed major political differences with the PES. In fact, you stated that you had not been aware of the differences as recently as one week earlier. After six years of membership in the ICFI, you realized, on the basis of a few days, or even only a few hours, of reflection, that you reject entirely the history and program of the International Committee and its section in France, the PES. The extent and speed of your renunciation of longstanding political convictions is of a character usually associated with the consequences of torture. But you have set a new speed record for political reversal without either external pressure or, for that matter, any discernable intellectual activity. As you told me, “I’ve really only thought about this in the last couple of days.”

You informed the PES that you had been convinced over the previous two days by the attacks on the ICFI made by Alex Steiner, Frank Brenner and Shuvu Batta. None of these three individuals are Trotskyists or active in any socialist organization. Both Steiner and Brenner abandoned personal participation in socialist politics 45 years ago.

Just to remind you, North’s polemics against Steiner and Brenner date back to 2007. The essays in which North’s comprehensive analysis of their theoretical conceptions and politics were published in 2015, several years before your entry into the SEP in the United States, in a volume titled, The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and the Politics of the Pseudo-Left. You have studied this work, are familiar with its contents, and have expressed agreement with its critique of pseudo-left politics and Steiner’s anti-Marxist philosophy many times. I should add that the documents by Steiner and Brenner analyzed by North have been posted on their web site for years. You would have had no problem validating the accuracy of North’s presentation of their positions.

However, you suddenly allege that their views on Syriza have been misrepresented by North. In making this accusation, you claim that North falsely accused Steiner and Brenner of supporting Syriza. Without actually citing any specific passage written by North, you declared, “I cannot believe the party misquoted them this way.” You stated that North’s method of quotation was “dishonest,” and “This is why I’ve had such a quick turnabout.”

I have carefully reviewed the analysis made by North and the WSWS of the response of Steiner and Brenner to the election of Syriza. There is not a single incorrect statement to be found in any of our articles. The WSWS identified Syriza as a political agency of the bourgeoisie, refused to join in the general celebration of its electoral victory, and warned that it would carry out a massive political betrayal.

In an article posted on February 2, 2015, Brenner cited the following passages from the WSWS:

The International Committee of the Fourth International rejects with contempt the political excuse offered by the petty-bourgeois pseudo-left to justify support for Syriza and its pro-capitalist agenda—that a Tsipras government is a necessary “experience” for the working class, from which it will somehow come to understand the necessity for genuinely socialist policies.

Such sophistries are advanced only to oppose the emergence of a revolutionary movement of the working class, a development possible only through a relentless political exposure of Syriza. This task is undertaken by the World Socialist Web Site in order to prepare workers and young people for the decisive struggles they face in Greece and internationally.

And:

Another of their [i.e., the pseudo-left tendencies’] arguments is that one must support Syriza, so that the working class can go through these experiences and learn from them. This is pure cynicism. Given the enormous dangers posed by a Syriza government, the task of a Marxist party is to expose the class interests represented by Syriza, to warn the working class against its consequences and provide it with a clear socialist orientation.

This is how the World Socialist Web Site and the International Committee of the Fourth International participate in the “experiences” in Greece. The numerous pseudo-left groups cling to Syriza because they represent the same class interests as this party. They speak for better-off layers of the middle class, who fear an independent movement of the working class, and who are concerned to ensure their own social elevation within the bourgeois order.

Brenner replied: “These quotes are both examples of what Marxists call sectarianism.” He continued:

What I find striking is how in both these quotes the word experience (or experiences) is in scare quotes. The ostensible target of this criticism is other “pseudo-left” groups, but the real target is the masses: it is their experience that is being denigrated (“rejects with contempt”) with these scare quotes. They voted in their millions for a party whose Greek acronym stands for Coalition of the Radical Left. Nothing like this has happened in Europe in more than half a century. The election has also aroused the hopes of millions of other victims of savage austerity in Spain, Portugal and Italy. It marks the upsurge of a mass movement seeking radical social change. If you don't find this important, then you aren't a revolutionary.

Sectarians see things differently. What they see is – to use a prefix much favored by WSWS writers – a 'pseudo' experience. Nothing significant happened in the Greek election. “Syriza’s election victory does not express a political development, a step forward, progress or anything of the kind by or for the working class.” For them political analysis is quite simple: what happened is not a revolution, hence it is reactionary. One bourgeois party replaced another bourgeois party in power: that is their reading of the election.

Brenner’s article was, from beginning to end, a miserable capitulation to the bourgeois politics of Syriza. In his preface to The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and the Politics of the Pseudo-Left, dated July 16, 2015, North subjected its arguments to a scathing and entirely accurate analysis. He wrote:

Steiner and Brenner take responsibility for nothing. In order to justify their support for a bourgeois political party and the government it leads, they invoke the “experience” of the working class as if it were an unfolding stream of purely psychic phenomena, unaffected by class forces, which one must observe passively, in respectful silence. Above all, they insist that the conscious activity of the revolutionary party – the critical element of negativity as the ”moving and generating principle” in the dialectic of the objective historical process – must be excluded from the unfolding social experience. Steiner and Brenner argue, in effect, that it is impermissible to intrude upon that blessed psychic state of virgin innocence with critical analysis and discordant exposures. Experience must not be “denigrated.” Rather, the “experience” must be allowed to take the workers wherever it will – that is, to defeat.

It should not be necessary to provide further citations from North’s preface. You have a copy of the volume. Unfortunately, however, you have made the allegation against North dishonestly, and are not particularly interested in the substance of his criticisms of Steiner and Brenner who, as you remarked indifferently, “may be wrong.”

During the discussion, you made clear again and again that you have thought nothing through. You proclaimed your ignorance of figures close to Steiner whose arguments you now find convincing. Referring to Savas Michael, the leader of the Greek pseudo-left party EEK, you told me:

I don’t know enough about who Savas is. I know what his role was in 1985-1986, he supported Healy and I read about his subsequent evolution in one article. They [Steiner and Brenner] had a webinar with Savas, whether it’s correct or not, maybe Savas is a total bastard, and it possibly is the case that he works with Stalinism, and that no one working for revolution should go close to them, and maybe they made a mistake.

As for the renegade Shuvu Batta, who, while still a member of the SEP, entered into a secret alliance with Steiner and soon repudiated Trotskyism, you stated:

Batta is working within a faction of the Democratic Party. But he would argue that he is there to try to win over the best layers, workers that are there by accident, youth that are there by accident but actually are looking for a revolutionary perspective. And he is in there, trying to win them to Trotskyism. I don’t actually know beyond his expulsion in 2021 how he politically evolved, I knew Shuvu personally and I haven’t spoken to him since then, I can imagine that it wasn’t in a politically healthy direction at all.

But that to suggest that anyone who suggests working in an organization, or in the trade unions, is suddenly an agent of the Democratic Party—it’s a different level of accusation. It’s one that we should make with a distinction.

Only last summer, you and comrade Peter Schwarz gave a lecture on the centrism that destroyed the OCI, the ICFI’s French section from 1953 to 1971. In that lecture, speaking of the French Stalinist PCF and CGT bureaucracies of the 1960s, you said: ‘the critical issue facing the OCI, as the French section of the IC, was an uncompromising political struggle to expose the reactionary role of these anti-working class forces and break the workers from Stalinist domination.’

By denouncing North and applauding Steiner and Savas, who in 2015 called for an alliance with Syriza and the Stalinist Greek Communist Party, you are repudiating these principles you supported only a few months ago. This emerges also in your extraordinary attack on the PES for not agreeing to a discussion of dissolving our party into the French Morenoite RP, or of Shuvu Batta’s perspective for entry into the DSA and the Democratic Party.

You ludicrously claimed your demand that the PES discuss perspectives for joining RP or the Democratic Party in the US are in the tradition of Trotsky’s proposal to his French supporters in 1934 to enter into the social-democratic SFIO. This is a staggering falsification.

Trotsky saw a political opportunity as workers and youth streamed into the SFIO, looking for a way forward to struggle for socialism against the threat from Hitler’s coming to power in Germany the year before, and from the February 6, 1934 far right putsch in Paris. He carried out extensive discussions with his supporters, working out a program and accord for their entry into the SFIO that did not subordinate them to the social-democratic SFIO bureaucracy. They were thus able to carry out work in a broader working class milieu, in a classic example of a principled decision for entry.

The SFIO had, moreover, an entirely different class character from today’s PS, founded in 1971 by the colonialist and former Nazi-collaborationist François Mitterrand in alliance with various Pabloite forces. The PS is a viciously right-wing bourgeois party that has for decades waged imperialist wars, social austerity against the workers, and attacks on democratic rights at home. Yet it is into the Pabloite periphery of this party that you propose that the PES should enter.

You argue that the PES has to discuss perspectives for joining other organizations in the abstract, refusing to clearly state where you want to go. When pressed on this issue, however, you cited the Morenoite RP group as an example of the type of organization the PES could supposedly join.

RP bases itself on the tradition of Nahuel Moreno, who split with the ICFI in 1963. Having initially opposed the Pabloites who in 1953 split with the ICFI and rejected Trotskyism to orient to Stalinism and bourgeois nationalism, Moreno suddenly capitulated a decade later, carrying out an unprincipled reunification with the Pabloites. He called to build “left centrist” parties across Latin America.

RP until recently was a faction of the Pabloite NPA. RP consists of a few hundred university youth attracted to Morenoism based on racial and gender politics. You wrote in December a polemic on its pro-imperialist positions on the NATO war with Russia in Ukraine and Syria. During the mass French pensions struggle last year, it claimed the situation was not revolutionary, issued empty appeals to the union bosses to pursue a militant line, and advanced the perspective of a “democratic” revolution within the confines of the French capitalist state.

Your claim that dissolving the PES into RP is up for discussion only confirms that the political content of your proposals is to liquidate the PES and the ICFI.

Indeed, you adopt a completely false and demoralized approach to the work the PES has done in France, exclaiming: “What are the political conceptions of our party? Why does it feel like nothing has changed for the four years I was in France and the two years I was in the United States?”

What are we to make of your statement that you do not notice that anything has changed in four years? You arrived in France towards the end of the “yellow vest” protests and saw the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and the historic crisis over Macron’s imposition of pension cuts without a parliamentary vote in defiance of public opinion. Since this struggle, workers widely feel and discuss that Macron rules against the people.

The pseudo-left emerged from last year’s pension struggle totally discredited. It went through this struggle, which even the bourgeois media admitted was the greatest political crisis in France since the 1968 general strike, on a pro-capitalist line, oriented to appeals to the union bureaucracy and its negotiations with Macron. You yourself remarked only a few weeks ago that you had found disillusionment and mistrust of Mélenchon among workers who voted for him, for want of a better candidate, in 2022.

The PES was the only party that, during the pensions struggle, connected the struggle against austerity and police-state rule in France with the international struggle against imperialist war on Russia, and advanced a revolutionary policy based on a struggle for socialism.

Amid explosive anger at Macron, after polls emerged showing that two-thirds of the French people wanted a general strike to stop the pension cuts, the PES called for a struggle to bring down his presidency. It advanced revolutionary positions in mass meetings of students and in workers strike committees against opposition from members of pseudo-left groups. It built a record showing that it is the nucleus of the revolutionary, Trotskyist leadership of the working class that must be built in France.

Your change of position comes at a particular time. Macron has announced that preparations are ongoing to deploy NATO troops to fight Russia in Ukraine, directly posing before masses of workers the prospect of World War III. At the same time, the SEP (US) is launching a presidential election campaign that the PES and the other sections of the ICFI will support, placing the struggle against imperialist war at the center of their work.

Such a campaign directly conflicts, however, with your new-found interest in discussing perspectives for possibly joining the Democratic Party, which is leading the NATO imperialist powers’ military escalation around the world. You expressed this interest during your defense of Shuvu Batta, an ex-member of the SEP (US) who was expelled after distributing documents advocating the liquidation of the party into the union bureaucracy.

You yourself objected at the time to Batta’s improper distribution of these materials outside the normal channels for internal discussion in our movement. Now that you have been won over by the orientation outlined in Batta’s documents, however, you are eager to find justifications for his decision to leave the SEP, join the Democratic Socialists of America, and become a minor trade union bureaucrat. This involves advancing the transparent lie that the Democratic Party and the Biden White House are the center of growing revolutionary movement of workers and youth.

To cover up the pro-imperialist perspective underlying your sudden discovery that you are open to supporting entry into the Democratic Party, you denounce the ICFI on the issue of the trade unions. You falsely claim that after the 1985 split with the WRP renegades, we supposedly rejected all work in the trade unions. On this basis, you denounce comrade Will Lehman’s campaign in the UAW union as an unprincipled maneuver: “It’s sophistry to claim that’s not a call for a reform of the unions, which we say is impossible, given our historic analysis of the last 40 years.”

This is another pack of lies. First of all, the ICFI never rejected work in the trade unions. It works in the unions to mobilize the rank-and-file against the bureaucracy, while the pseudo-left works in the bureaucracy. The ICFI explains to workers the necessity of building an international movement of rank-and-file organizations, breaking with the national union bureaucracies, as the only viable way to struggle—including on what you call ‘bread-and-butter issues’ of wages and conditions—in the era of globalization and transnational production.

Second of all, comrade Lehman never advocated a policy of reform of the UAW bureaucracy. He advocated the dismantling of the UAW bureaucracy and returning to the rank-and-file the billions it has taken from them in dues, so workers can wage the class struggle. This was not a call for a “reform of the unions,” as you now claim, but a revolutionary call to transfer power to the rank-and-file. Comrade Will ran openly, as you know, as a socialist and a member of the SEP (US).

This was undoubtedly the most significant intervention the Trotskyist movement had ever conducted in the UAW. All of the pseudo-left tendencies opposed the socialist candidate to instead back Shawn Fain, one of the candidates put forward by the UAW bureaucracy.

When comrades raise such points against you and indicate that your positions are incompatible with a Trotskyist program, you suddenly denounce the PES as an undemocratic, sectarian organization. While asserting that you “respect comrades personally, professionally and politically,” a few seconds later you denounce the “internal party regime” of the PES as “anti-democratic to the core.” This is because we explain that support for imperialism, Stalinism and Pabloism is incompatible with membership in our movement.

When you denounce our party and try to claim you are defending the traditions of “fierce debate in the Bolshevik Party,” you only reveal your ignorance. The ICFI and its sections are politically disciplined socialist organizations of the working class, not middle class talk shops. Moreover, membership is based on the acceptance of a political perspective and program, which are not perennially up for debate. An individual cannot join a section of the ICFI on Sunday, professing agreement with its program, and then demand on Monday that the legitimacy of that program be debated. In any case, when differences arise, their discussion must proceed in accordance with the principles of democratic centralism.

Democratic centralism is not a perpetually valid permission slip authorizing any member, at any time, to force the party to entertain proposals for the repudiation of its political program and historical perspective, and to reconsider whether it has a legitimate right to exist. James Cannon, then the leader of the US section of the Trotskyist movement, replied well to those who argued the party had to include forces bitterly hostile to its program. He wrote:

The revolutionary Marxian party rejects not only the arbitrariness and bureaucratism of the Communist Party, but also the spurious and deceptive “all-inclusiveness” of the Thomas-Tyler-Hoan Socialist Party, which is a sham and a fraud. Experience has proved conclusively that this “all-inclusiveness” paralyses the party in general and the revolutionary left wing in particular, suppressing and bureaucratically hounding the latter while giving free rein to the right wing to commit the greatest crimes in the name of socialism and the party. The SWP seeks to be inclusive only in this sense: that it accepts into its ranks those who accept its program and denies admission to those who reject its program.

The rights of each individual member, as set forth above, do not imply that the membership as a whole, namely, the party itself, does not possess rights of its own. The party as a whole has the right to demand that its work be not disrupted and disorganised, and has the right to take all the measures which it finds necessary to assure its regular and normal functioning. The rights of any individual member are distinctly secondary to the rights of the party membership as a whole. Party democracy means not only the most scrupulous protection of the rights of a given minority, but also the protection of the rule of the majority. The party is therefore entitled to organise the discussion and to determine its forms and limits.

All inner-party discussion must be organised from the point of view that the party is not a discussion club, which debates interminably on any and all questions at any and all times, without arriving at a binding decision that enables the organisation to act, but from the point of view that we are a disciplined party of revolutionary action. The party in general not only has the right, therefore, to organise the discussion in accordance with the requirements of the situation, but the lower units of the party must be given the right, in the interests of the struggle against the disruption and disorganisation of the party’s work, to call irresponsible individuals to order and, if need be, to eject them from the ranks.

You have been a member of the ICFI for six years, but you have become demoralized and frustrated. Since the beginning of this year, you have on several occasions spoken of your discouragement, your fear of police repression, and your doubts in your own abilities.

You have said you have no confidence that the working class will be moved to revolutionary struggle by world war and genocide. You dismiss those who say otherwise as “the boy who cried wolf”. You assert that workers who come around the ICFI will “turn away, thinking these guys have no relation to my day-to-day struggles.” In short, you are losing confidence that the international working class is a revolutionary force that can solve the problems of war, genocide, authoritarianism and social inequality posed by the mortal crisis of capitalism.

At the same time, you announce to the PES that you are proud of your political and theoretical instability. What are we to make of your statement, “I change from one week to the next because I’m capable of reading and thinking”? This raises the question: Do you have any idea what you will be thinking a week, a month or a year from now?

You yourself declared in our discussion, without any prompting, that I would probably say that your positions and those of Shuvu show that “a layer of middle class youth came around the party briefly but then capitulated to petty-bourgeois pressures.” That was the one statement that is, in fact, accurate.

You are painting a portrait of yourself that is quite devastating. Is this how you wish to be remembered?

In the hope that you can be persuaded to reconsider your position and deal with issues of history, theory, principles and program with the necessary seriousness, the National Committee requests that you attend an online meeting of the party to discuss the issues that have arisen. It will be held this Sunday, March 10, at 9 a.m.

 

Fraternally,

Alex Lantier, for the National Committee of the PES

Letter 2: Samuel Tissot to National Committee, March 6

Dear members of the National Committee (NC),

I am writing in response to the letter I received from Comrade Lantier on behalf of the NC on March 5. I appreciate the time taken by Comrade Lantier and the NC with the intention of working through the political differences that I have raised.

Unfortunately, the content of the letter is largely false. Its assertions regarding the circumstances surrounding my development of political differences and their presentation to the party leadership are inaccurate. The letter also attributes an array of historical and political positions to me that I did not defend in the meeting held on Wednesday, February 28.

The content of the letter is a continuation of the approach adopted by Comrade Lantier during the online discussion with comrades Gnana and Kumaran held on February 28, during which my arguments and positions were either systematically misrepresented or dismissed as false without further discussion, on the basis that they were views typically associated with Steiner and Brenner or other forces we label as pseudo-left.

Wednesday’s meeting was held on extremely short notice at the suggestion of Comrade Lantier and the leadership, which I accepted trusting that it would be conducted on a principled basis. This was, however, not the case. At the opening of the meeting, political concerns I had shared in a phone call with Comrade Lantier were listed off by said comrade without prior discussion, and I was immediately accused of being disingenuous (Comrade Lantier asked after listing my concerns “are you even serious?”).

The points introduced by Comrade Lantier were then selected for “discussion” seemingly at random. Most of the concerns I raised were misrepresented in order to slander me as a “Stalinist,” “Pabloite,” and even a supporter of the Democratic Party and its role in the genocide in Gaza! These false characterizations of my political positions were repeated in the letter of March 5. During the Wednesday meeting, which I had been told would be a “free and open” discussion of political issues, Comrade Lantier also made it clear that if I did not renounce my differences, I should leave the IC there and then.

A number of my political concerns introduced by Comrade Lantier at the beginning of the meeting weren’t even discussed, and just over an hour after our discussions started, he declared that comrades were “too busy” to continue the discussion before instructing me to “pull myself together, personally and politically,” and calling an end to the meeting.

This unserious approach and the lack of adequate preparation impeded the possibility of a precise formulation and explanation of my concerns, meaning the meeting was not conducive to any principled political discussion. Beyond the misrepresentation of my positions, the most striking aspect of the meeting was the lack of any substantive discussion of the political issues raised.

Before I received the letter of March 5, I met with Comrade C earlier that evening, who I have the impression was meeting me on behalf of the National Committee (although I may have misunderstood this). At this meeting, I agreed to write up my differences so that they could be reviewed by the NC and discussed.

Given the unproductive nature of the February 28 discussion and the inaccuracy of large sections of the March 5 letter, including the misrepresentation of my political positions, I request that, in line with what I had understood to be my agreement with Comrade C on Tuesday evening, the NC permits me to produce a more comprehensive response to the letter of March 5 which will detail my precise political differences with the PES and IC. I hope this document, presented to NC comrades alongside the letter of March 5, will facilitate the clarification of the political issues raised.

I had previously made a request to produce a document detailing my concerns regarding the political work of the PES on Saturday, February 24, but I was dissuaded from doing so by Comrade Lantier. At that time he stated any such document “wouldn’t be productive.” However, as a result of the February 28 meeting, it is now clear that a thorough and productive discussion of my political concerns cannot take place before I have produced a written response to the letter of March 5.

To allow the time necessary to produce this document, I request that the NC meeting scheduled for March 10 be delayed by two weeks until Sunday, March 24. With the permission of the NC, my response to Comrade Lantier’s letter of March 5 will be sent to NC comrades no later than midday on March 20.

Fraternally,

Samuel Tissot

 

Letter 3: National Committee to Samuel Tissot , March 7

Dear Comrade Tissot,

We received your letter of March 6. Regrettably, it does not address a single historical or political issue raised in my letter of March 5.

Instead, you claim that the content of my letter “is largely false.” In fact, my reply was based on a verbatim transcription of what you said during the discussion held on February 28. There were no “false characterizations” or “misrepresentation” of your arguments.

If you want to withdraw, correct or clarify your positions, you will be provided the opportunity to do so. But do not begin this discussion by claiming that what is cited in my previous letter is not what you said.

In response to your request for time to clarify your position, the National Committee will postpone for one week its scheduled meeting until Sunday, March 17. We request that you provide the NC with your written clarification by March 14. We believe this is sufficient time for you, as an individual member, to formulate your views in a politically coherent manner.

However, the non-negotiable condition for holding this discussion is that you provide, in writing, the following assurances and undertakings:

    1. You accept the Constitution and political discipline of the PES.

    2. You have not been, and will not be, in communication with political tendencies, organizations or individuals outside the PES.

    3. You have not distributed or made available in any way, and will not in the future, documents and information related to internal party matters (of either the PES or ICFI) with Steiner, Brenner, Batta, Ross and their various political allies and affiliates (Savas, Altamira, etc.) or with any other tendencies and individuals outside the ICFI.

We request that you affirm in writing your unequivocal acceptance of these conditions no later than tomorrow, March 8.

If you agree to this, we will give you political leave until March 14 to prepare your reply.

Fraternally,

Alex Lantier, for the National Committee of the PES

 

Letter 4: Samuel Tissot to National Committee, March 8

Dear Comrades of the National Committee,

I am now writing in response to your letter of March 7.

In responding to your conditions for a discussion on the revised date of March 17, I would like to start by stressing that I have been nothing but open and honest with every comrade I have spoken to about my political concerns. On three separate occasions since February 27, I have told party members verbally (including twice to Comrade Lantier) that I have not contacted anyone outside of the ICFI or in other sections of the party regarding my political differences.

I am happy to repeat this in writing here:

Throughout the nearly five years I have been a member of the ICFI and the three and a half years I have been an active member of the PES, I have not once contravened the party’s constitution nor violated its political discipline, including any discussion of its internal political matters with anyone outside of the ICFI. This extents to the entire course of this exchange regarding my political differences.

I believe this settles the first two conditions of the NC’s list to go forward with a discussion of my political differences.

The demand that I unconditionally assure the NC that I will not share any of my political differences or this correspondence with tendencies or individuals outside the IC at any point in the future, however, is unacceptable. If I were to accept this condition, then the leadership would be totally unaccountable for any action, principled or otherwise, that it took against me. As long as I am a member of the IC, I will abide by its constitution and the political principles of Democratic Centralism. However, if I cease to be a member of the IC I reserve the right to share this correspondence and my political positions as I see fit.

If I have understood the third condition correctly, then I am afraid I do not believe a principled political discussion of my differences before the NC can take place. I hope I have interpreted this condition incorrectly and that a productive discussion of political differences can in fact take place.

I must also protest against another interdiction asserted in the letter, although not listed in the three conditions for the March 17 NC meeting to go ahead. This is the command that I “do not begin this discussion by claiming that what is cited in my previous letter is not what you said.” I will not respond again to the assertion that everything written in the March 5 letter was accurate, as this has already been raised in my March 6 reply.

As comrades will recall, in my previous reply I described the March 5 letter as “largely false” and I still believe this to be the case. The verbatim quotes are of course true, and I find it bizarre that comrades interpreted my previous letter as disputing this1. Nevertheless, I reserve the right to correct the way in which these quotes have been misinterpreted and ripped from their context to attribute political positions to me that I do not hold as well as other assertions in the NC’s March 5 letter, made without quotations, that are false.

To be clear, I will not argue that those quotes are false, but I will demonstrate to comrades that they have been stitched together in a manner that removes or distorts the political content of the positions I raised and defended during the February 28 meeting.

I was told by Comrade Lantier during our February 27 phone call when I first raised these differences that the only way forward was a “free and open discussion on the NC.” My ability to speak freely to the NC and NC’s recognition that its authority over my public political actions will cease if I am no longer a member of the IC are critical preconditions for such a discussion to take place. I am raising this issue of an end to my membership of the IC explicitly as this was raised by the leadership in the first meeting concerning my political differences. I will again remind comrades that Comrade Lantier stated in the February 28 meeting that if I did not intend to withdraw my criticisms then I should leave the party.

If the preconditions stipulated above, which I believe to be in line with our party’s constitution and the principles of Democratic Centralism, are acceptable to the NC then we can proceed with the revised time schedule proposed by the NC.

I would also like to ask the NC to clarify two further points raised by its March 7 letter.

Firstly, the verbatim nature of the quotations from the February 28 discussion of more than an hour raises the question of whether it was recorded? If so, why was this done without my permission? If it was recorded, then the entire transcript should be released to the NC and myself. I would also like to remind members that this was not a meeting of the NC or any other political body of the PES or IC. The discussion was proposed by Comrade Lantier as a meeting between him, myself and Comrade Gnana. Comrade Kumaran also was present although I had not been made aware that this would be the case before.

The discussion was initially supposed to be in-person before it was changed to being online a couple of hours before it commenced. If the meeting was recorded, then this raises the question, does the leadership regularly record unofficial discussions with comrades without their permission? Did my raising of political differences with Comrade Lantier lead to the decision to move the meeting online so it could be covertly recorded?

Secondly, a number of phrases used in the discussion of February 28, the NC’s letter of March 5 and the reply of March 7 refer, implicitly or explicitly, to my wasting of the party’s time or an individualistic approach to this exchange. I will remind comrades of the NC that I raised these political differences discreetly with Comrade Lantier in the hope that these positions could be refuted in a comradely manner through precise political argumentation. It was only at the request of Comrade Lantier that I shared these views with a wider circle of comrades at the February 28 meeting, from which the current exchange of letters followed. 

My only request in my March 6 reply to the NC was to ask to be allowed time to prepare a political response to the NC’s March 5 letter. Please can the NC explain what aspects of my political conduct through this exchange have been individualistic and politically unprincipled? And why my compliance with the leadership’s requests as to the nature and extent of political discussions has been a waste of the party’s time?

One final note, as for the author of the March 7 letter’s statement that “Regrettably” my March 6 reply  “does not address a single historical or political issue raised in my letter of March 5,” I will remind comrades that my reply was sent to state I disagreed with many of the characterisations of the March 5 letter and to request time to prepare a written response as a foundation for a principled political discussion. I do not see any reason why the NC should find it regrettable that such a request was not yet a complete political response.

I hope that on the basis of the considerations above that the March 17 meeting can proceed in a manner which clarifies the political differences raised and strengthens the political understanding of the PES and the ICFI.

Fraternally,

Samuel Tissot

Letter 5: National Committee to Samuel Tissot , March 10

Dear Comrade Tissot,

We are in receipt of your letter of March 8.

In my letter of March 7, written on behalf of the PES, I stated the conditions necessary for the holding of a discussion of your differences with the party:

    1. You accept the Constitution and political discipline of the PES.

    2. You have not been, and will not be, in communication with political tendencies, organizations and individuals outside the PES.

    3. You have not distributed or made available in any way, and will not in the future, documents and information related to internal party matters (of either the PES or ICFI) with Steiner, Brenner, Batta, Ross and their various political allies and affiliates (Savas, Altamira, etc.) or with any other tendencies and individuals outside the ICFI.

In your reply, you claim to accept the first two conditions, but explicitly reject the third, stating:

The demand that I unconditionally assure the NC that I will not share any of my political differences or this correspondence with tendencies or individuals outside the IC at any point in the future, however, is unacceptable. If I were to accept this condition, then the leadership would be totally unaccountable for any action, principled or otherwise, that it took against me. As long as I am a member of the IC, I will abide by its constitution and the political principles of Democratic Centralism. However, if I cease to be a member of the IC I reserve the right to share this correspondence and my political positions as I see fit.

We entirely reject this statement, which is, in effect, an open declaration of disloyalty to the PES and ICFI, and which renders your claim to accept the first two conditions meaningless. You are stating that you will respect the confidentiality of inner-party discussions only as long as you are a member; but once your membership has ended – an outcome that you seem to view as inevitable and unavoidable – you will distribute information to which you have had access while still in the party to whomever you please, or, as you write, “as I see fit.”

This means, in practice, that you will collaborate with organizations hostile to the ICFI. What makes this position all the more remarkable and repugnant is that you have not, as yet, even clearly formulated your differences with the party, let alone identified the individuals, tendencies, organizations or parties with which you have agreement and to which you wish to orient. The only thing of which you seem to be certain is that you are hostile to the PES and ICFI, even before you have clearly explained your differences, let alone presented an alternative.

Your write that that if you were to pledge to respect the confidentiality of inner-party discussion, “the leadership would be totally unaccountable for any action, principled or otherwise, that it took against me.” What, precisely, are you talking about? About what actions, “principled or otherwise,” are you speculating? Moreover, if the actions of the party are of a principled character – as you indicate may well be the case – then for what is it to be held “accountable”?

When you write of holding the PES leadership “accountable,” what you really mean is positioning yourself to take revenge against the movement.

 

As for the rule of confidentiality, this is by no means unique to the PES. The signing of a confidentiality agreement is often a condition of employment. It is a legally binding agreement which does not lapse when the employee changes jobs. You have informed me that you are subject to such a work agreement, and I have never asked that you impart to the PES information that would place you in violation of the terms of your confidentiality agreement.

It is impossible for the PES to hold a principled discussion with someone who has declared his intention to share information with its opponents. Under such conditions, your own conduct in the discussion would be of a dishonest character, aimed not at convincing the PES of the correctness of your views, but of preparing and instigating your political break in accordance with a pre-determined factional game plan.

I have, in a previous letter, referenced Cannon’s explanation of the principles of democratic centralism. Permit me to call your attention to another statement, in which Cannon described the psychology of political renegacy. Replying to the Cochranite tendency, which broke with the Socialist Workers Party in 1953, Cannon stated:

We have to remember that the Socialist Workers Party is a revolutionary party, and never pretended to be anything else, and never asked anybody to join it on any other basis. We tried to keep people in the party on that basis, and as long as they remain revolutionists, they love the party and stay in the party and never think of leaving the party. But when they cease to be revolutionists, as some have in the past, we noted invariably that their attitude undergoes a complete and profound change toward the party. They begin to hate the party, the party becomes a prison for them and they insist on breaking out.

Your declaration that you are open to sharing internal PES documents with the party’s opponents is a warning that you are considering taking such a path, breaking with revolutionary politics, and turning against the PES and the ICFI.

We again urge you to pull yourself together, rethink your positions, and provide us with the principled guarantees we have asked of you, so we can hold a discussion. Refusal to do so means that you demand the right to operate as a disloyal informer inside the PES and collaborator with the opponents of Trotskyism. This cannot be accepted by the PES.

If you cannot accept the conditions presented in our letter of March 7, the PES will be left with no choice but to end your membership in the party. We hope that you will act in a principled manner that will avoid this outcome.

Please let us know your decision no later than Wednesday, March 13.

Fraternally,

Alex Lantier, for the PES National Committee

 

Letter 6: Samuel Tissot to National Committee, March 13

Dear Comrades of the National Committee,

I have received your ultimatum of March 10, and I reject it. If this should lead to my expulsion from the movement without even a single discussion of my political differences in any official organ of the party, then this will expose that the principles of Bolshevism are a dead letter to the PES leadership.

You justify your unprecedented demand for an eternal non-disclosure agreement by accusing me of being disloyal and claim that I am already plotting my revenge against the party. In fact, I have no such desire. I have remained completely loyal to the ICFI and its principles throughout this exchange and my rejection of the third condition of your letter of March 7 does not change this fact. As I shall explain below, I have no choice but to reject this condition. Accepting it would, if I am expelled, leave me unable to defend myself against your attribution to me of political positions I do not hold, and other slanderous claims included in this correspondence.

Furthermore, through its campaign against me and efforts to block any discussion of my differences before the party, I charge that it is in fact the leadership of the PES that has violated the basic principles of democratic centralism throughout this exchange and that it has clearly been preparing to expel me for the sole reason that I dared to raise political differences loyally and privately within the party.

Ripping Cannon Out of Historical and Textual Context

In your March 10 letter, you quote Cannon to accuse me, like the SWP’s Pabloite minority in 1953 as it capitulated to Stalinism, of beginning “to hate the party.” In so far as the party defends the program and perspective of Trotskyism, fights for this in the working class and organises its internal conduct according to the principles of Democratic Centralism then this accusation is not true in the slightest. Indeed, it was out of my love for the party and desire to stay in the party that I raised my concerns loyally and discreetly to Comrade Lantier in the hope they could be discussed and clarified in a trusting and productive manner. I still hope that, perhaps somewhat foolishly at this point, this is a possible eventuality.

However, if it should become apparent that the party has given up its defence of this program, that it is not serious about building itself as a proletarian party, and runs roughshod over the principles of Democratic Centralism, then I would be obliged to loyally struggle to correct this degeneration, as the Cannon of 1953 would also have done. Unfortunately, the record of the leadership’s behaviour since I raised differences with Comrade Lantier indicates that this process may be too far gone to make such a struggle possible.

The leadership’s sole aim in using this quotation is to frame me as an enraged petit-bourgeois element who hates party discipline and has decided to leave the movement already as it is inconvenient for his personal life. This theme has run through the entire correspondence despite the fact I have not once violated party discipline. Firstly, if this was the case why would I bother raising differences at all? I could just leave quietly after all, as many ex-comrades have decided to do. Secondly, other than the leadership’s preconceived notion that everyone who disagrees with it is a petit-bourgeois renegade, does it actually have any proof for this charge in my case? If it is simply that I have a middle-class background or have a relatively well-paying job well, then you would have to condemn large sections of the leadership of IC on these bases as well!

You have repeatedly quoted excerpts from documents produced during Cannon’s struggles against the Shachtmanites and Pabloites to justify your unprincipled actions and demands in this exchange. Not only is a comparison to either of these struggles ahistorical and completely out of proportion with the current situation1, it is also clear that you are ripping these quotes out of their context to present them one-sidedly so that you can claim your unprincipled actions are in line with the traditions of Trotskyism. A closer reading of these texts undermines this approach.

Consider for example the preceding paragraph in the Internal Bulletin document of October 1953 (Vol 15, No. 19) from which you quote to claim I “hate the party”, it reads,

“Genuine revolutionists, hemmed in by a world of enemies, are privileged to differ and debate among themselves. They are not privileged to fight and split. The party has always permitted differences of opinion and has never expelled anybody – not one single person – because of his opinions.”

My contention is that the entire record of the leadership’s conduct shows that it is preparing to expel me for loyally expressing a difference of opinion within the party, an action explicitly defended by Cannon in this text and counterposed to Pabloite minority’s hatred of the party referred to in the preceding paragraph which is quoted in your previous letter. Furthermore, through the leadership’s efforts to intimidate me, slander me and its instructing me to leave the IC if I do not give up my differences of opinion, it is clear that it is you, not I, who are attempting to “fight and split”, a privilege Cannon denied for genuine revolutionists.

How Did We Get Here?

In responding to your ultimatum of March 10, I believe it is appropriate to review the conditions that have left me unable to sign away my right to defend myself in the future against the slanders of the party. This review will also review your conduct which suggests an intention to expel me since

I first raised political differences of opinion. This is exactly how James Cannon conceived of evaluating the validity of political conduct during a split. In another document previous cited by the leadership in this exchange, The Struggle for a Proletarian Party, Cannon writes,

“Proceeding from certain fundamental conceptions, the problem of applying the principle of democratic centralism differently under different conditions and stages of development of the struggle, can be solved only in relation to the concrete situation, in the course of the tests and experience through which the movement passes, and on the basis of the most fruitful and healthy interrelationship of the leading bodies of the party and its rank and file.”

The central political question throughout the most recent letters in this exchange has been whether the leadership or myself have been in violation of the principles of democratic centralism. So following from Cannon’s suggestion, let us draw up a brief account of the “concrete situation” that has led to the NC’s ultimatum.

The ICFI’s perspective is that we have entered into an objectively revolutionary situation amidst the “decade of socialist revolution.” This is substantiated by a rise in the extent and militancy of the class struggle internationally and the turn of the ruling classes toward war and genocide. In multiple countries, we have organised sections of the IC into parties to prepare for their transformation into mass revolutionary parties of the working class. We have also entered the “fifth phase” of the Trotskyist movement, which has been delineated according to the conception that “The objective processes of economic globalization, identified by the International Committee more than thirty years ago, have undergone a further colossal development” which portends the mass growth of the ICFI.

Given the revolutionary possibilities in such an explosive situation, the question of the party’s practice naturally arises. To say that the party’s growth in France and internationally has been slow, particularly in drawing in fresh proletarian elements (or anyone at all for that matter), would be an understatement.

 

I have witnessed first-hand the preference of the leadership both in France and internationally to sit in online meetings and repeat ad infinitum the conclusion of party declarations and hail their “historic character” over systematic contact work, work at factories and universities, organisation of meetings etc. One consequence of this policy is that the membership of local sections, or even national parties such as in France are mostly passive. They scarcely take part in the formulation, execution, and evaluation of political initiatives. At least in France, the leadership simultaneously cultivates this behaviour and then complains about its consequences, such as comrades being unwilling to perform work or feeling we are too weak to engage in the campaigns proposed. The situation is little improved in the working out of editorial work, with meetings organised without notice and in an inconsistent manner. Editorial feedback on articles can often take weeks. Rather than an active participation in working out of the party’s political tasks, comrades are handed down directives from the IC through Comrade Lantier and then the membership is expected to carry them out, often with little guidance or discussion of how best to apply these directives in the context of our work in France. I will remind comrades that the PES has not had a single party conference since its foundation in 2016. This top-down and dictatorial approach has not led to concrete political gains in several years.

When concerns about these practices are raised, the leadership retorts that we were the only party that emerged from recent struggles defending a revolutionary perspective and the Trotskyist program, and that therefore such concerns are just “demoralisation.” In other words, at a general level, things are going swimmingly. While weaknesses are entirely forgivable and a necessary part of the construction of any political party, a failure to acknowledge mistakes or bad practices isn’t.

But outside of our small ranks, who identifies us as the only revolutionary tendency worthy of the name? How do we plan to grow the website qualitatively and quantitatively? Even if we see an increase in the number of individuals reading the wsws.org/fr, how many of these are converted into contacts? To what extent is the content we produce for the site being assimilated by readers? Even when we perform interviews at mass protests, often including militant statements on behalf of workers and youth, this has not led to the development of further contacts. We talk about our increasing influence on the consciousness of the working class, but what evidence do we have of this? While these are concerns for the movement internationally, the intense isolation of our party in France brings them into intense focus.

When questions about the French section’s mostly journalistic existence are raised, Comrade Lantier describes how soon the working class “will be knocking down the door” to the party given our record published on the WSWS and the betrayals of other organisations. What our concrete conception is of how workers will make this leap to full agreement with the WSWS and why, even if they agree with our perspective, they should be convinced we are a real fighting working class party is left unanswered. This conception resembles millennialism more so than a concrete strategy to unite the working class in a revolutionary international struggle against capitalism. The leadership might as well say, “just a few more articles and judgement day will come!”

The party in France has been in a state of political inertia for some time and the only response of the leadership to this issue had been to try to motivate the cadre into frenzied and rushed work along six, seven or eight different avenues with the justification that “the revolution will likely be here in 6 to 12 months,” as Comrade Lantier has said to me on more than one occasion. An alternative is to blame other comrades for their laziness or personal animosity to the leadership. This is not just a national issue as this approach appears to be fully endorsed by the ICFI, and the flow of information between the ICFI and the PES is closely managed by the PES leadership.

For a long period, I felt these political difficulties and lack of motivation to perform political work were only the product of personal failings of myself and other comrades. However, as my day-to-day experience of our work became more and more divorced from our political analysis and triumphant declarations of the historical character of our interventions, successful or otherwise, I began to suspect the problem was in fact deeper. Of course, many of these difficulties in the work may be attributable to personal flaws on the part of the membership, including my own, but behind these flaws must lie deeper political issues.

It is in seeking political explanations for these issues that I began reading criticisms of the party’s political positions, including those of Steiner and Brenner and the ICFI 1953 webpage. I found many of these criticisms to be carefully argued and convincing. In the case of Steiner and Brenner, to whom the ICFI has of course responded to publicly, I continued to find their arguments convincing even after comparing them to the documents produced in response by the ICFI. This led me to inform comrade Lantier that I believed my feeling that our political work was ineffectual had a political basis and was not just a product of personal exasperation and demoralisation (as I had previously accepted, given I had been trained to consider the party’s political line and practice as practically infallible).

From Political Differences to Political Isolation and Intimidation

At the request of Comrade Lantier, I informed him of my political concerns on a phone call held on February 27. In this call, I briefly raised the question of the party’s ambiguous attitude toward the trade unions, that I had doubts over its expulsion of Shuvu Batta for raising the question of entryism, the vague and imprecise nature of our description of all forces claiming to be socialist outside of the IC as ‘pseudo-left’, and our sectarian “pre-conditions” for workers to form rank-and-file committees in order to struggle against the stranglehold of the pro-capitalist union bureaucracies on their struggles2. Concerning our day-to-day practice, I also raised questions about the political conceptions behind the PES’s subordination of all other forms of revolutionary work to the production of the French language WSWS and the way that political activity of the French section is often initiated through the dictate of the IC without internal political discussion, which I have spoken about in more detail above. Finally, I stated, which I still believe to be correct, that in the IC’s polemics with Steiner and Brenner, they had often been quoted in a dishonest way and their views misrepresented.

While the leadership has every right to argue that each of these concerns is incorrect or even a crude manifestation of petit-bourgeois pressure, it has not chosen to do this by reasoned political argument. Instead, it has resorted to slander and misrepresentation. Contrary to the slanders and name calling on the part of the leadership, anyone capable of thinking clearly can see that none of these concerns automatically render me a “Stalinist”, “Pabloite”, “supporter of the Democratic Party” nor does it indicate my desire to “dissolve the IC” as the leadership has asserted.

Given the party’s analysis of the nature of the objective situation, and at a time where our party should be making significant political and organisational gains, it is imperative the leadership follow the principles of democratic centralism more closely than ever. Under such conditions, intensifying political pressures will lead internal divisions to arise more sharply than in previous periods. The question in this case then is, has the leadership followed these principles? It is my view that the following record shows that this has not been the case.

Since I raised political differences in the phone call of February 27, I have been treated with suspicion befitting of an individual suspected of being a police agent. In that call, I was immediately instructed that I should not contact anyone else in the IC about my differences and that any form of contact with Steiner and Brenner would be a major security threat to the IC.

What was meant to be an in-person initial discussion on Wednesday February 28 was moved online with a couple of hours’ notice, with the justification that Comrade Gnana suddenly could not make it to central Paris that day. Even if this was true, would it not have been possible to move an important discussion within a small party by a day or two to facilitate an in-person discussion?

At this unofficial meeting of four comrades, which is still the only meeting where I have had the chance to raise my political differences, the discussion was opened by Comrade Lantier laughing at me and asking, “are you even serious?” The positions I defended were then misrepresented in order to slander me and to accuse me of being in league with forces outside our party, which was false then and remains false today. I was told I was “wasting the party’s time” and that I should leave the party there and then if I wasn’t going to drop every one of my political concerns.

This was the first, but regrettably not the last time, the leadership’s new favorite refrain. namely “pull yourself together,” was levelled at me. Of course, how else could one disagree with the IC or PES on any point unless one was in the middle of an intense and overwhelming emotional crisis? Unfortunately for the leadership of the PES I am in no such condition.

After a week of no contact, on March 5 I was met by comrade C [name redacted] who on behalf of the NC asked me to write up my differences in a document to facilitate a discussion. In retrospect, it was clear that Comrade C was sent to “test the water” and ensure that I was not working with forces outside the party, despite the fact I had assured comrades repeatedly that I was not and would not be in contact with these forces while a member of the PES3. After this meeting I was sent a letter demanding a meeting with the NC on March 10 without the opportunity to prepare any document to be reviewed by the NC in advance, contrary to what I believed I had agreed with Comrade C just hours before. In response to this letter on March 6, I requested more time to produce the written document in line with what I had agreed with Comrade C.

In the March 5 letter, the leadership produced a handful of verbatim quotes from the February 28 meeting which it then falsely claimed I was disputing, as can be seen in the previous correspondence. Even though they did not have the NC’s intended impact, that these quotes were produced verbatim strongly suggests the leadership recorded the meeting without seeking my permission. I asked if this was the case in my March 8 letter, a request which the NC has completely ignored in its March 10 reply.

I repeat again the questions that were ignored in my last letter: Was the meeting of February 28 recorded secretly without my permission? Does the party leadership regularly record party meetings without the permission of the membership? If the meeting was recorded, the transcript should be shared with me and every member of the NC. I politely request the leadership does not continue to ignore these questions in its next response.

I should add that since I raised differences, I have not seen any member of the NC in-person, including Comrade Lantier despite our previously close working relationship. Even with the continued risk of Covid-19 infection, safe meetings with individual or a small group of comrades could have been organised outdoors. In any case, it was considered safe enough for Comrade C to come to meet me on behalf of the NC.

The Leadership’s Demand for an Indefinite Non-Disclosure Agreement

In the March 5 letter, a discussion of my differences was proposed for an NC meeting to be held on March 10. In my response of March 6, I accepted this suggestion and requested more time to respond in writing to the issues raised that letter. In the leadership’s March 7 reply to this request the NC laid down three conditions, without explaining why, for the meeting to go ahead at all. The first two were basic demands that I continue to respect the party constitution and its political discipline, which I happily agreed to. However, the third asked me to confirm in writing that,

“You have not distributed or made available in any way, and will not in the future [emphasis added], documents and information related to internal party matters (of either the PES or ICFI) with Steiner, Brenner, Batta, Ross and their various political allies and affiliates (Savas, Altamira, etc.) or with any other tendencies and individuals outside the ICFI.”

In the midst of its efforts to isolate me politically, dismiss my political differences, and push me out of the party, accepting this demand for an eternal non-disclosure agreement regarding the NC’s handling of my political differences would undermine my ability to respond to the slanders leveraged against me if I am to be expelled. Indeed, if “information” is read in the broadest sense of the term I would be pledging to refrain from discussing any aspect of my time in the PES or the nature of my now seemingly inevitable expulsion for all time!

What changed between March 5 and March 7? The original proposal for a March 10 NC meeting had been made after I had already made it clear on two separate occasions that my political discipline was contingent on my continued membership in the PES and ICFI – a very regular political conception of party loyalty. What changed in 48 hours to mean I had to agree to keep this correspondence and any “information” about this exchange to myself for all time in order to have a preliminary political discussion? Did my request for time to prepare a response supposedly show I was in league with hostile forces?

That the NC raised these conditions at all makes it clear the leadership suspected me of acting disloyally and believed that I had already contacted forces outside of the ICFI, despite my repeated assurances I had not. Not only is this belief false, but it is based on nothing other than my raising of political differences. I have no history of contact with these forces, I have no previous record of acting disloyally in the party, and all of my actions since raising political differences have been taken openly before the leadership and in complete loyalty to the ICFI, its constitution and revolutionary political discipline. This is in stark contrast to the paranoid, petty and potentially dishonest behaviour of the leadership.

As will be explained in more detail in the proceeding section, in my reply of March 8 I rejected this condition, stating that “if I cease to be a member of the IC I reserve the right to share this correspondence and my political positions as I see fit.” I also stated, again, that as long as I remain a member of the IC than I will not share the details of this correspondence or any aspect of the IC’s internal political life to anyone outside of the party and will respect its political discipline.

In response to this, in its March 10 letter the NC wrote that my rejection of this condition was “An open declaration of disloyalty to the PES and ICFI” and was evidence that I am “positioning myself to take revenge against the movement.” The letter concluded with a warning that “if you cannot accept the conditions presented in our letter of March 7, the PES will be left with no choice but to end your membership in the party.” This is effectively an ultimatum that I either resign my future right to defend myself against the leadership’s slanders in this correspondence or face expulsion.

The leadership’s conduct shows that it does not trust the party membership. In its eyes, to raise political differences is equivalent to “hating the party”, desiring “revenge” and renders an individual a security threat. The leadership will claim this approach just shows it takes security seriously, however, to any level-headed individual it is clear that this is not a reasonable security protocol but extreme paranoia toward anyone who disagrees with it, even if they are members of six years and have raised their concerns loyally.

This outlook has nothing to do with the construction of a revolutionary party in the Bolshevik tradition. As Trotsky explained in The New Course, “You cannot demand of the party confidence in the apparatus when you yourself have no confidence in the party. There is the whole question. Preconceived bureaucratic distrust of the party, of its consciousness and its spirit of discipline, is the principal cause of all the evils generated by the domination of the apparatus.”

On the basis of its record of distrust toward me and its instruction for me to give up my differences or leave the party, it is reasonable to suppose the leadership was already preparing my expulsion as soon as I raised political differences.

Why the Leadership’s Third Condition is Unacceptable

As explained in the previous section, by the time I was presented with these three conditions on March 7 it was reasonable to suspect the leadership was preparing to expel me on unprincipled grounds. The actions of the leadership since then, including deleting me from party group chats without explanation, has only provided further evidence that this was in fact what was being prepared.

Whether the unprincipled conduct of the leadership is a conscious ploy to intimidate me to withdraw my differences or a natural product of its sectarian view of politics is unknown to me. In an attempt to counter this, I continuously abided by every single demand placed on me by the leadership even in the face of indications it secretly recorded me. A consequence of this has been to leave me isolated and unable to raise my political concerns with other members of the PES or the IC. I will remind comrades that the last IC comrade who attempted to fight for their political positions outside of the “normal channels” of party organisation was expelled for doing so. As a result of my loyal conduct, the PES leadership completely controls the flow of information about my differences and this exchange not only to comrades in France but also internationally.

In this context, my rejection of the third condition is a necessary precaution to be able to defend myself against future internal and external documents that may be produced by the leadership which will likely attack my political positions and character in a false and politically unprincipled manner. As personal and political slander against members and non-members who have raised differences has been a recurrent practice in the IC’s responses to internal and external political criticisms internationally4, including the March 5 letter concerning my political concerns, this is a reasonable precaution.

If I were to agree to the NC’s third condition, this would mean the leadership could violate as many of my rights as party member as it wanted to and if it decided to expel me, I would only be able to defend myself by breaking my word. This, of course, would be very convenient for the leadership in the inevitable continuation of its campaign to paint me as a dishonest and “emotionally unstable” petit-bourgeois element, which seems to be its pre-determined response whenever it is confronted with political differences, regardless of whether they have been raised in accordance with the principles of democratic centralism or not. The convenient upshot of this is that it allows the discussion of the actual content of political differences to be evaded.

Alternatively, if I accepted his condition and I kept my word, then the leadership would have a free hand to present whatever version of this dispute it felt to be most beneficial to its reputation amongst comrades in the IC and the potentially the wider public. I will assume that the political benefit of my not being able to respond to all the charges of the leadership does not need explanation.

Contrary, to the “revenge” fantasy projected onto me by the leadership, these are the principled considerations based on the concrete situation in which we find ourselves that explain why I am unable to accept the third condition of the NC’s March 7 letter. Nevertheless, this does not change my desire for a principled discussion before the NC, as has been promised to me by Comrade Lantier on February 27 and was proposed without this unacceptable condition by the NC itself on March 5.

 

Have I Actually Made “an open declaration of my disloyalty to the PES and ICFI?”

As far as I understand, such an indefinite condition pertaining to the period after one’s membership in the movement has no basis in the party’s constitution nor as far as I am aware, any precedence in the history of Trotskyism5. Please can the NC point me to exactly where in the Constitution it states that the party’s authority over my political actions extends beyond the period of my membership?

In fact, it is publishing internal party documents to defend oneself against political slander that has a precedence in the Trotskyist movement. After Trotsky’s expulsion from the Russian Communist Party in 1927 he published internal party documents that exposed Stalinist slanders against his person6, and false claims propagated by the Stalinist press that his opposition to the Soviet Bureaucracy meant he considered the USSR had become a bourgeois state. Would the leadership of the PES object to Trotsky’s action on the basis that the leader of the Russian Revolution’s former membership in the Bolshevik entailed an unwritten eternal non-disclosure agreement?

I should also note that the ICFI has not hesitated to publish the private correspondence of ex-members in the past in order to answer criticisms levelled against it.  Of course, it will argue that in those particular circumstances this was actually a principled decision. Similarly, I contend now, in the conditions of this exchange described above, it would be principled to publish this correspondence in order to defend myself and my political reputation against the claims the leadership has already made and is liable to make in the future. This is what I am reserving the right to do with my rejection of the third condition. 

Even if we place these considerations to one side and supposed this condition was a completely legitimate demand but nonetheless one I disagreed with, was what I actually wrote in my letter of March 8 “an open declaration of my disloyalty to the PES and ICFI?” As the misreading of my wording has been a recurring theme throughout the NC’s responses to my letters, I would again encourage comrades in the NC to read what I actually wrote in that letter. I will repeat my own quote above with emphasis in the hope it makes its meaning clearer, “I reserve the right to share this correspondence and my political positions.”

My rejection of the third condition has absolutely nothing to do with a desire for “revenge” against the IC nor is it “an open declaration of disloyalty” toward the PES or ICFI but it is what I take to be a necessary measure to enable me to defend myself against the slanderous and false accusations levelled against me during this exchange. Despite what the leadership would have us believe, reserving the right to defend oneself against unprincipled manoeuvres is not the equivalent of political high treason!

In my previous letter, I stated explicitly that my right to share the details of this exchange was limited only to those documents (“this correspondence”) which include attacks against my personal character and the misrepresentation of my political positions. I made no threat to publish any other internal documents of the party nor other sensitive personal or political information.

To be clear, even should the IC expel me under the most unprincipled of circumstances, I will not share any personal information of comrades, nor any internal party documents beyond the scope of this exchange. If I do decide to share any part of this exchange, any information related to comrades’ true identities will be redacted. I hold no personal resentment against the members of the PES leadership or ICFI. My disagreement with their actions during this exchange and differences over their political conceptions of how to construct a revolutionary party does not mean I will resort to slander against them or that I desire to seek personal revenge against the IC. Despite what I believe to be unprincipled actions of its leadership, I believe the cadre of the PES is genuine in its struggle for socialism and I appreciate it is composed of well-intentioned, dedicated individuals who risk their own security by fighting for a revolutionary political perspective. No matter how bitter the resolution to my raising of political differences may be, I will never knowingly endanger any of the comrades I have worked with during my six years in the IC. This will hold whether my membership continues or not. 

Discussion or Expulsion?

The complete record of this exchange indicates, as I contended at the beginning of this letter, that the leadership seems intent on expelling me for a difference of opinion. In order to avoid admitting this directly, it seeks to justify my expulsion as a consequence of my supposed “disloyalty” to the party which it will allege has been proven by my refusal of its unprincipled ultimatum.

Should my rejection of this ultimatum lead to a vote to expel me from the PES then I believe the party will be making a mistake. The loss of an individual comrade will be nowhere near as significant as the further weakening of the claim of the PES and ICFI to the mantle of the World Party of Trotskyism as a result of this sordid episode, which has exposed the sorry fact that it is incapable of dealing with internal differences of opinion, even when raised in a loyal and deferential manner, in a politically healthy manner.

My expulsion from the IC on such an unprincipled basis can easily be avoided by the leadership respecting its previous agreement to an “open and free discussion” on the NC which was promised to me on February 27 in a phone call with Comrade Lantier and proposed without conditions in the March 5 letter. This means a comradely political discussion on the basis of my continued loyalty to the IC which does not require me to relinquish my right to defend my political positions and personal honesty for all-time.

If the leadership does expel me, I politely request it to provide an exact account of what actions I have taken in violation of the party’s constitution and discipline, including the precise references to the relevant passages of the constitution. The leadership should also explain precisely why its ultimatum is legitimate despite my continued loyalty to the political authority of the PES and IC. Even if what I have stated in these letters were to be indicative of a disloyal attitude toward the IC, has this manifested into concrete action in violation of its rules? Or am I just to be expelled on the basis of what I have said in this correspondence and what the leadership takes that to indicate about my “intentions”?

I would also like to point out the leadership’s hypocrisy when it criticises me for raising the possibility of the termination of my membership. I will repeat once more the essentials of the current situation. After being treated like a pariah, accused of being a Stalinist, supporting the Democratic party etc., potentially being covertly recorded and being directly told to leave if I didn’t withdraw my differences by the leadership, I am criticised for appearing to view the end of my membership as “inevitable and unavoidable!” While I hope this fear will not become reality, I sincerely encourage the NC to reflect on why it might appear this way. The irony that this statement occurs in a letter demanding I relinquish the right to defend myself indefinitely or be expelled from the party seems to be lost on the Party’s leadership!

Conclusion

In this lengthy response, I have outlined the basic course of my development of political differences with the PES leadership, my attempt to approach them in a comradely and deferential manner and the response of the leadership. To borrow Cannon’s phrase, this is the “concrete situation” in which both my own and the party’s invocation of the principles of democratic centralism must be judged.

On one side, I have been as deferential to the party’s requests as possible, followed the constitution of the party, its political discipline and have continued to trust the party leadership’s good faith in this exchange. My deference was only halted by the request I continue to respect party discipline even in the case of my expulsion on unprincipled grounds. On the other hand, the leadership’s initial response was to doubt my sincerity, point me to the door, assert baseless allegations about my sympathies for a wild assortment of political tendencies, distrust me without any evidence of my disloyalty, accuse me of wasting time, and, I might add for good measure, carry itself with an arrogance unbecoming of anyone, let alone a revolutionary leadership (that the leadership believes that the repeated invective to “pull yourself together” is a valid form of argumentation is an unfortunate indicator of the low level on which it approaches political issues). Its behaviour has been an example par excellence of the “pre-conceived bureaucratic distrust of the party” that Trotsky warned against over 100 years ago.

I believe that the record presented in this letter will leave no doubt that it is the leadership of the PES, and not myself, that has been in violation of the principles of democratic centralism in the course of this exchange.

Nevertheless, I sincerely hope that through reconsidering its conduct, the leadership will repeal its unprecedented demand laid down in its letter of March 10 and the ultimatum that followed from this. If it is able to do so, I look forward to a constructive discussion in which our political differences can be resolved in a comradely fashion. This will require the leadership to trust its party as much as the party is demanded to trust its leadership. If on the basis of such a discussion the NC feels I must still be expelled from the party, then so be it.

Finally, there are a number of political issues and slanders that have been raised in this exchange which I still wish to respond to in writing. Unfortunately, they are beyond the scope of what has already become an extremely lengthy response to the NC’s ultimatum of March 10 and explanation for why I have no choice but to reject it.

In the course of this discussion the NC has denounced my “repugnant” failing to respond to all of the political charges it raised against me in its March 5 letter. Frankly, I find it bizarre that the leadership objects so strongly to my exclusion of a thorough defence of my political positions in a series of letters concerning my right to even engage in such a defence in the first place!

Nevertheless, it is still true that my criticisms must be put into writing so that they can be judged on their merits and weaknesses. Whether the NC decides to expel me or not, I intend to respond to all the arguments, allegations and slanders against me. Whether this takes place within the confines of the ICFI or not is ultimately in the hands of the leadership. In either case, I hope this will be adequate to address the repugnance felt by the PES leadership.

Fraternally,

Samuel Tissot

 

Letter 7: National Committee to Samuel Tissot , March 23

Dear comrade Tissot,

We have received your letter, which reiterates your rejection of conditions for a discussion. You refuse to pledge that you will not distribute “in the future, documents and information related to internal party matters (of either the PES or ICFI)” to tendencies and individuals outside the ICFI. It is hardly necessary to state that your threat to reveal internal documents is a basic violation of political discipline and unacceptable to the party. Your rejection of the organizational norms of democratic centralism flows from your repudiation of the basic programmatic documents upon which membership in the International Committee and its section is based.

You initially established contact with and joined the Socialist Equality Party while a student in in the United States. As a condition of membership, you were required to study and declare in writing your agreement with two documents, The Historical and International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party and the Statement of Principles. Later, when you moved to France, you declared your acceptance of the statutes of the PES, which state:

The PES is in political solidarity with the International Committee of the Fourth International and accepts its political authority. Any person who accepts the principles of the SEP, the discipline of the party as defined in its statutes, who actively participates in its work and makes financial contributions is eligible to become a member of the PES.

It is now necessary to remind you that membership in a section of the ICFI is based on an agreement on essential issues of program and principles, which do not simply consist of a few random tactical points. The program of the International Committee is grounded in and articulates an appraisal of the historical epoch, the essential and enduring lessons of the great class battles of the last century and the strategic experiences of the Trotskyist movement, and, within this historic framework, the present tasks of the International Committee of the Fourth International as the World Party of Socialist Revolution. “The significance of the program,” wrote Trotsky, “is the significance of the party.”

Over the past month, you have demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of the nature of your criticisms of the ICFI and the PES. You claim that you are threatened with expulsion because the “leadership seems intent on expelling me for a difference of opinion.” You indicate your view that the party’s “unprincipled conduct” is “a natural product of its sectarian view of politics,” and that you now risk being forced to “leave the IC if I do not give up my differences of opinion.”

At issue here is not a mere “difference of opinion.” You are rejecting the programmatic foundations of our party, agreement with which is a precondition for membership. The program and principles of the ICFI are not subject to the vagaries of individual opinions. A Marxist-Trotskyist party is defined politically by its program, which is rooted in and represents the theoretically-guided summing up of the lessons derived from the struggles of the international working class and its Marxist vanguard over an entire historical epoch.

Trotsky himself explained the conception of international political discipline based on agreement with program, as follows:

We stand not for democracy in general but for centralist democracy. It is precisely for this reason that we place national leadership above local leadership and international leadership above national leadership. The revolutionary party has nothing in common with a discussion club, where everybody comes as to a café (this is Souvarine’s great idea). The party is an organization for action. The unity of party ideas is assured through democratic channels, but the ideological framework of the party must be rigidly delimited.

The “opinions” that you advance fall outside the ideological framework of the ICFI.

You have apparently forgotten that you joined our party based on the fundamental political conception that the ICFI alone continues Trotsky’s defense of Marxist internationalism against Stalinism. It was founded in 1953 in struggle against the Pabloite forces that broke with Trotskyism and sought to liquidate the movement via “deep entry” into Stalinist or bourgeois nationalist parties. It defended this continuity through a series of struggles against forces that sought an unprincipled reunification with Pabloism—in 1963, 1971, and 1985.

The first school of our movement that you attended, in 2019, consisted of a comprehensive review of the history of the Trotskyist movement over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries, establishing the ICFI’s role as the sole continuator of Trotsky’s struggle against Stalinism. At that time, you declared yourself in agreement with this conception.

Now, however, you make clear that you no longer support the fundamental programmatic conception that the ICFI alone continues Trotsky’s defense of Marxist internationalism against Stalinism. Referring to your announcement of your political differences with the PES, you state that you expect a further weakening of the claim of the PES and ICFI to the mantle of the World Party of Trotskyism as a result of this sordid episode, which has exposed the sorry fact that it is incapable of dealing with internal differences of opinion, even when raised in a loyal and deferential manner, in a politically healthy manner.

To drive home the point that you feel only contempt for the PES as a small, “sectarian” party, you write: “But outside our small ranks, who identifies us as the only revolutionary tendency worthy of the name?”

Since when has the historical role of the Trotskyist movement been dependent upon the approbation of its counter-revolutionary enemies? It was Trotsky who stated unequivocally that outside the sections of the Fourth International there did not exist a “revolutionary tendency worthy of the name.” This appraisal was not simply Trotsky’s “opinion”. It was substantiated by the historic events of the quarter century that preceded the founding of the Fourth International in 1938, which demonstrated the counter-revolutionary character of Social Democracy and Stalinism as well as the political bankruptcy of the myriad centrist and petty-bourgeois tendencies that opposed the “sectarian” Fourth International.

Moreover, the uniquely revolutionary character of the International Committee, basing itself on the entire legacy of Trotskyism, has been substantiated by the historic events of the last 71 years. All the enemies against which the Trotskyist movement fought – the mass parties of Stalinism and Social Democracies, the Maoist organizations that enjoyed immense prestige among petty-bourgeois radicals throughout the world, and the innumerable bourgeois national movements that once loomed so large – have all but collapsed. Events have discredited all those revisionist and opportunist tendencies, generally associated with Pabloism, that demanded that the Fourth International liquidate itself into the organizations led by the bureaucracies and bourgeois nationalists.

The historical role of the International Committee was defined clearly by James P. Cannon in the immediate aftermath of the split with the Pabloites:

We alone are unconditional adherents of the Lenin-Trotsky theory of the party of the conscious vanguard and its role as leader of the revolutionary struggle. This theory acquires burning actuality and dominates all others in the present epoch.

The problem of leadership now is not limited to spontaneous manifestations of the class struggle in a long drawn-out process, nor even to the conquest of power in this or that country where capitalism is especially weak. It is a question of the development of the international revolution and the socialist transformation of society. To admit that this can happen automatically is, in effect, to abandon Marxism altogether. No, it can only be a conscious operation, and it imperatively requires the leadership of the Marxist party which represents the conscious element in the historic process. No other party will do. No other tendency in the labor movement can be recognized as a satisfactory substitute. For that reason, our attitude towards all other parties and tendencies is irreconcilably hostile.

This is no longer a political conception that you share. Rather, you explain that, starting from your own lack of motivation to do political work, you have concluded the ICFI historic identification as the continuity of revolutionary Marxism has been refuted.

For a long period, I felt these political difficulties and lack of motivation to perform political work were only the product of personal failings of myself and other comrades. However, as my day-to-day experience of our work became more and more divorced from our political analysis and triumphant declarations of the historical character of our interventions, successful or otherwise, I began to suspect the problem was in fact deeper. …

It is in seeking political explanations for these issues that I began reading criticisms of the party’s political positions, including those of Steiner and Brenner and the ICFI 1953 webpage. I found many of these criticisms to be carefully argued and convincing. In the case of Steiner and Brenner, to whom the ICFI has of course responded to publicly, I continued to find their arguments convincing even after comparing them to the documents produced in response by the ICFI.

We will return later to your support for the attacks of Steiner, Brenner and their ally Shuvu Batta on the ICFI. However, what must be clear is that the criticisms that you raise of the PES and the ICFI on this basis are aimed at the world program and perspectives of our movement.

Differences of program, not differences of opinion

Your repudiation of the party’s program is explicitly stated in your denunciation of the ICFI’s so-called “dictate” over the French section and its production of the World Socialist Web Site. You write:

I also raised questions about the political conceptions behind the PES’s subordination of all other forms of revolutionary work to the production of the French language WSWS and the way that political activity of the French section is often initiated through the dictate of the IC without internal political discussion …

This attack on the ICFI’s “dictate” violates the PES’ acceptance of the authority of the ICFI, which is inscribed in our party’s statutes. The predominance of the world movement, which is not merely a conglomerate of national sections, is central to the politics and perspectives of the ICFI. It was reaffirmed in the course of the ICFI’s 1985-6 split with the nationalist renegades of the WRP, when the WRP was asked to re-register its members and specifically acknowledge the authority of the ICFI. Banda and Slaughter, after initially accepting reregistration on this basis, subsequently repudiated it. For Slaughter, the rejection of the agreement was necessary to affect a rapprochement with the Pabloites. For Banda, it cleared the path for the denunciation of Trotskyism and glorification of Stalin.

Your attack on the authority exercised by the ICFI is a bitter regurgitation of the anti-internationalism of the Workers Revolutionary Party. Answering Cliff Slaughter’s attack on the political authority of the ICFI, David North, writing on behalf of the Political Committee of the Workers League on December 11, 1985, stated:

The International Committee of the Fourth International is the historical embodiment of the “whole programmatic base of Trotskyism and the Marxism of Marx and Lenin.” The subordination of national sections to the IC is the organized expression of their agreement with and defense of that program. Those parties which uphold Trotskyism as the contemporary development of Marxist principles and program are organized in the Fourth International and accept the authority of the International Committee. To base one’s definition of internationalism on the separation of the program from its organizational expression is to adopt the standpoint of all those revisionist and centrist opponents of Trotskyism who deny the continuity of Marxism, embodied in the ICFI, in order to retain freedom of action within their national theater of operations. [https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/the-icfi-defends-trotskyism-1982-1986/21.html]

The fundamental documents of the ICFI stress the critical nature for its work of the production of the WSWS, which you complain takes up far too much of our time. Through the WSWS, the ICFI makes its positions known in multiple languages to its readers and supporters in every country. The Statement of Principles of the SEP (US), which you accepted when you joined our movement in the United States, explains:

The fight for socialism demands an enormous growth in the political, intellectual, and cultural stature of the workers’ movement … The SEP’s most important instrument for the development of socialist consciousness within the working class is the World Socialist Web Site [www.wsws.org]. With its daily analysis of world political and economic developments, exposure of the social realities of capitalism, coverage of workers’ struggles, commentary on vital questions of culture, discussion of historical and philosophical themes, and examination of critical issues of revolutionary strategy, tactics and practice, the WSWS plays a decisive role in forging the contemporary world Marxist movement.

Moreover, your allegation that the ICFI supposedly opposes work in the unions, and that this therefore requires the PES to discuss Batta’s attacks on the ICFI over the unions, is another lie. In fact, when you joined the SEP in the United States, you agreed to the following policy towards the trade unions, from the party’s Statement of Principles:

The Socialist Equality Party calls for a rebellion against and break with these corrupt organizations, which do not represent the working class. This does not mean that the SEP abstains from working inside such organizations, to the extent that such activity is required to gain access to and assist the workers jointly oppressed by their employers and the union functionaries. (emphasis added) But the SEP conducts such work on the basis of a revolutionary perspective, encouraging at every point the formation of new independent organizations—such as factory and workplace committees—that truly represent the interests of the rank-and-file workers and are subject to democratic control.

The ICFI works energetically inside the trade unions, but on the basis of a revolutionary perspective. We seek to organize a rebellion of the rank and file against the corporatist bureaucracy and transfer power to the rank and file. This is opposed by all the pseudo left groups and individuals that are allied with the bureaucracy and make careers within it.

The intervention of the SEP and the IWA-RFC in the UAW elections makes this clear. It found a response without precedent in the history of the Trotskyist movement. Our US comrades challenged the bureaucracy on a socialist program, publicly debated with Shawn Fain, and—despite the bureaucracy’s attempt to block worker participation in the election—won the votes of 5,000 auto workers. Fain ended up as a guest of honor of Biden’s State of the Union war speech against Russia.

The political and class orientation underlying your break with the program of our movement finds sharp expression in the way you approached your differences with the party. The ICFI is, of course, no stranger to internal debate and conflict. The ICFI documents on the WSWS how its program emerged from the support it gave to criticisms formulated by David North between 1982 and 1985 of the positions of Gerry Healy, Michael Banda and Cliff Slaughter in the leadership of the WRP.

Between the way North raised his differences and the way you raised yours, however, it is night and day.

As North became concerned with a drift in the WRP away from the principles and program of the ICFI, he turned to the Marxist classics. As the issues initially raised were philosophical, he began with an extensive reading of Marx’s writings on philosophy. His writings—Leon Trotsky and the Development of Marxism, Contribution to a Critique of G. Healy’s “Studies in Dialectical Materialism” in 1982, or his 1984 Political Report to the ICFI—refer to and base themselves on great works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky.

North presented these differences without any subjective hostility to the WRP. He engaged in a political struggle over several years, respecting party discipline, even when the WRP leadership blocked discussion of his criticisms. This made it possible for the ICFI to promptly support North’s criticisms, once they were presented, and to oppose the break of Healy, Banda and Slaughter with Trotskyism when the ICFI split with the nationalist renegades of the WRP in 1985.

To whom did you turn when, as you said, you felt a “lack of motivation” for political work? It was not to Marx, Engels, Lenin or Trotsky, but to Steiner and Brenner—two middle class nobodies. They left the movement in 1978-1979 and have not been active in socialist politics since then. Their blog has won a following among a small group of renegades, by denouncing North for having “gutter politics” and “crackpot philosophy.”

You behaved with utter political unseriousness and light-mindedness. You read this blog for a couple days, you told us, and suddenly decided to support it against the ICFI. You boasted that you can shift 180 degrees on fundamental political issues from week to week, and even from day to day, because you are “capable of reading and thinking.”

You raised Steiner’s attacks on the ICFI’s analysis of the election of the bourgeois Syriza (“Coalition of the Radical Left”) party in Greece in 2015, which Steiner developed with the EEK party of Savas Michael-Matsas. You said that “maybe Savas is a total bastard, and it is possibly the case that he works with Stalinism.” You indicated that you knew that Savas Michael supported Healy in the 1985 split, writing, “I know Savas has a particular history, I am going to have to go have a look at it.”

You should have had “a look at” the political history of Savas Michael before embracing him as a potential role model. In fact, his record constitutes a warning as to the implications of your rejection of the ICFI’s struggle against the nationalist degeneration of the WRP and the lessons of the 1985 split. Michael broke from the International Committee in October-November 1985 because its opposition to Healy cut across his plans to transform the Workers Internationalist League in Greece into the EEK [Workers Revolutionary Party] on the basis of a nationalistic opportunist strategy. In a letter to the Greek WIL, dated November 9, 1985, the ICFI warned:

The WIL is on the brink of announcing the “transformation of the League into the revolutionary party.” Comrade Savas and the CC know that there are gigantic destructive dangers in founding a party on the unprincipled foundation of a break with internationalism. The very best interpretation which can be placed on Comrade Savas and the Greek CC’s break from the IC is that they fear disruption of their work for the transformation into a party. Such a position, politically, means that internationalism, the foundation of our movement in every country, is rejected in favour of immediate national concerns as perceived by the WIL leadership.

A party formed on this basis could never be a section of the World Party of Socialist Revolution, the Fourth International. It would attract all those petty bourgeois elements who reject our internationalist foundations. We urge you with all the force at our command to turn back from the path upon which you have embarked, to return immediately to the IC, and to conduct the work of founding the revolutionary party in Greece on this, the only principled basis. [https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/the-icfi-defends-trotskyism-1982-1986/15.html]

This warning was confirmed by the entire subsequent history of Michael and the EEK. After the 1985 split, Savas, counselled by Healy, advocated a “United Front” with the Stalinist Greek Communist Party (KKE), as it supported the Soviet bureaucracy’s moves towards capitalist restoration and prepared its entry into capitalist government of Tzannis Tzannetakis in Greece in 1989, as part of the Synaspismos coalition with the right-wing New Democracy party.

This same pro-Stalinist perspective, decades later, underlay Savas Michael’s reactionary role at the time of the election of Syriza in 2015. Claiming that its election had “shaken the world,” he appealed to Syriza to form an alliance with his party and the KKE, publishing a statement to this effect in the pro-Syriza daily Efimerida ton Syntakton. While Michael worked to suppress opposition on its left, Syriza slashed workers’ living standards and set up EU detention camps for refugees on the Greek islands.

The extent of Michael’s break with the entire history of the ICFI is summed up in a newly published biography of Michel Pablo, which notes that the former had become a close friend of the founder of anti-Trotskyist revisionism. In his account of Pablo’s funeral, the author cites the response of Michael:

His [Pablo’s] funeral took place in Athens’ oldest cemetery on 21 February 1996, with hundreds of people lining up hours before to view the open coffin. ‘They came from all walks of life,’ recalled Savvas Michael, then a middle-aged doctor who for two decades had been a fierce factional critic but lately mellowed into a friend and comrade. ‘There were literary figures, workers, peasants, students, old people and young people. They may not have known all his ideas but they saw him as someone who stood for revolution and was always on the “right” side. Someone who had dedicated his life to human emancipation. He died as a hero of the people.’ [The well dressed revolutionary: The Odyssey of Michel Pablo in the age of uprisings by Hall Greenland]

This again makes clear that what is involved here are not matters of opinion, let alone the opinion of someone who adopts positions without the necessary study and flits from one ill-formed idea to another without concerning himself with their implications. But let us remind you: The International Committee’s defense of the continuity of Trotskyism and its hostility to all neo-Stalinist, Pabloite, and pseudo-left tendencies, not to mention pathetic petty-bourgeois renegades like Steiner, Brenner and Batta, are not mere “opinions” subject to re-evaluation whenever one or another demoralized individual decides that he wants to start a new life outside the Trotskyist movement.

The entirely subjective motivation of your attack on the ICFI and absence of any concern for the political implications of your position is exposed by the fact that you fail to reference

any contemporary events or issues of policy. You make no reference to the NATO-Russia war in Ukraine, the Gaza genocide, the COVID-19 pandemic, to Trump’s January 6 coup, or to police-state rule in America and Europe. You do not mention any events in the class struggle, or any statements of the ICFI. You do not attempt to demonstrate that the ICFI has adopted an incorrect political position on any major, or even minor, political event. You do not counterpose the analyses of another individual or organization to those presented by the WSWS. Of course, that would not be easy to do, as your new intellectual mentors, Steiner, Brenner and Batta, rarely take pen to paper. Steiner’s annual contributions to his own blog site are about as frequent as the changing of the seasons.

The one question that you raised, in a completely empty manner, was that we should enter into large organizations. This was, however, as everything else you have raised, not a serious proposal. When asked into which organization you wanted to enter, you said you did not know and raised as a possible example Shuvu Batta’s entry into the Democratic Socialists of America. You said:

Batta is working within a faction of the Democratic Party. But he would argue that he is there to try to win over the best layers, workers that are there by accident, youth that are there by accident but actually are looking for a revolutionary perspective.

We do not share the ludicrous view that the Democratic Party—the party of the Biden White House, the cockpit of world imperialism—are the center of a growing revolutionary movement. This view is however entirely bound up with your broader rejection of the ICFI’s defense of the revolutionary continuity of Trotskyism.

You announced your differences, significantly, just as the SEP (US) announced its presidential campaign, and Macron announced plans to send ground troops to Ukraine to wage war on Russia. It is significant that the concrete proposal that you made was to enter into the orbit of the Democratic Party, which is leading the war and against which our American comrades are running.

What you are proposing is not an entry tactic into “large organizations” to try to shift them – imagining hypothetically that these phantoms actually exist – to the left, or to bring the party closer to a layer of left-wing workers or youth. The basis on which you want to join these organizations is a repudiation of the ICFI’s defense of Trotskyism. That is to say that—in a latter-day version of “deep entry” by Pablo and Mandel into the Stalinist and bourgeois nationalist parties—you are proposing the liquidation of our party.

This is not a discussion that the PES is prepared to have with you, or with anyone else, because this is not a discussion that can be conducted within the framework of Trotskyism. Doctors in a hospital have a right to debate how to treat a patient, but they do not have a right to debate whether the Hippocratic oath is valid, or whether they should instead call in a witch doctor.

You are in effect separating yourself from the party by rejecting its program. Your sudden about face has the hallmarks of a justification for a shift in and retreat from your political activity, out of concern at the highly explosive political situation. Significantly, in a phrase identical to Batta’s declaration— “If this sows chaos in the ICFI, so be it!”—you close your letter, stating: “if I must  still be expelled from the party, then so be it.” Some might think that the reappearance of Batta’s winged phrase in your own document raises questions about the authorship of your letter. But I cannot possibly comment on this.

Despite your politically irresponsible conduct, the PES does not seek to exclude you from the party. The PES leadership is willing to give you an opportunity to reconsider your positions. We, therefore, make the following proposal, the terms of which are not up for negotiation.

We will extend you a period of political leave until July 1 to study the history of the ICFI and reevaluate your positions. You will not be required to participate in other political work during this time, but you will remain bound by the discipline of the party.

At the end of this period, we will ask you to reaffirm in writing your support for the programmatic documents, and the political positions stated therein, to which you agreed when you joined our movement: the Statement of Principles, the Historical and International Foundations of the SEP (US), and the founding statement of the PES (France). You will also be asked to reaffirm your acceptance of the party’s Constitution and the principles of democratic centralism.

If you refuse to do this, you clearly no longer support the program and perspectives of our party and cannot remain a member. You will have effectively expelled yourself by repudiating the history of the International Committee of the Fourth International.

Fraternally,

 Alex Lantier, for the CN of the PES

Letter 8: Samuel Tissot to National Committee, March 27

Dear Comrades of the National Committee,

Your most recent letter is a real mess. You quote a couple of words or phrases from our previously correspondence taken completely out of context but you ignore every argument made in my letters, attribute to me (again) a series of arguments I’ve never made, deride me for omissions that aren’t there, absurdly criticise me (again) for not raising fundamental political points in an exchange about organising an initial discussion! Large portions of the current letter consist of repetitions of earlier arguments, detailed arguments by association to evade answering the political points1 and ad hominem attacks which explain nothing.

The insinuation that I am already working with Batta, Steiner and Brenner because I used the phrase “so be it” is, to be frank, one of the stupidest comments I have ever come across in any exchange, let alone within the Trotskyist movement. Does the leadership of the Trotskyist movement in France really think that the repetition of one of the most common phrases in the English language is evidence that I am secretly working with Steiner and Brenner? It is equal proof that the hand of Wordsworth, Shakespeare or, believe it or not, Leon Trotsky himself (or at least the English translators of his works) is behind the letters under my name2!

The approach adopted across the entire exchange and the failure of the IC’s most recent response to respond to any of the substantive points I make raises the question: Have you carefully read any of my letters? Or do you just screen them for quotes that you can rip from their context and then twist them to justify your pre-determined conclusions?

For example, you have now twice criticized the fact my letters do not contain an in-depth political elaboration of my positions. I have already answered this once, but you completely ignore this and repeat the attack again. So, for a second time, this series of letters originally concerned an opportunity to prepare a document detailing my political positions so that they could be defended before the NC. This is an opportunity which you originally offered, and I accepted, but then you retracted and hid behind a condition unprecedented in the history of Trotskyism and now deny me with the consolation of three months to “reconsider” my positions. If anyone is to be blamed for the fact that my political positions have not been defended extensively in reference to party documents and the history of the IC it is the NC itself.

Call me “light-minded”, “subjective” and question my seriousness to your hearts’ content, but it is the NC that has denied me the opportunity to make my case in reference to the objective situation and the party’s major analyses by refusing even one single planned discussion of my positions!

This current letter could easily turn into another dozen page effort to answer every single false assertion made in your letter of March 23, but as I have already done this in previous letters and these efforts have almost entirely been ignored it does not seem worthwhile for you or I to waste any more ink than is necessary on such a fruitless task.

However, I would like to refer to one false and one true assertion made about me in the last letter, as they seem to concern the issues you find the most irksome in this entire exchange. Namely, that I support entry into the Democratic Party and that I dare have the gall to question Comrade North.

One of your main arguments that I no longer accept the program of Trotskyism is a verbatim quote in which I speculate over Shuvu Batta’s political justification for joining the DSA. Here is the quote from the February 28 call, “Batta is working within a faction of the Democratic Party. But he would argue that he is there to try to win over the best layers, workers that are there by accident, youth that are there by accident but actually are looking for a revolutionary perspective.”

Firstly, I have no idea if Batta remains a DSA member or whether he has a position within the RWDSU, but even supposing this is true, how does this mean I have the “ludicrous view that the Democratic Party—the party of the Biden White House, the cockpit of world imperialism—are [sic] the center of a growing revolutionary movement.” I never said the DSA was “the center of a growing revolutionary movement” nor did I advocate the IC joining it.

Does the NC seriously believe that contemplating someone’s reasons for taking an action is the same thing as endorsing that action? You’ve repeated this specific argument regarding my remarks on Batta across multiple letters and it remains as false and incoherent as the first time you asserted it.

I would also like to remind comrades that while it may be valid to criticise me for not having fully worked out proposals for alternative forms of political work at the time, it is worth noting I took part in this call a day after I raised my initial concerns with Comrade Lantier on February 27 at his insistence. Furthermore, my previous request for a week to prepare a document listing my concerns had been dismissed as a “waste of time.” Again, the leadership seeks to discredit me for shortcomings in this exchange which are primarily of its own creation.

Secondly, I would like to respond to the NC’s dismay that I should support the view of two “middle-class nobodies” who dared to describe David North as engaged in ‘crackpot philosophy’ and ‘gutter politics.’ Undoubtedly these are weighty words, but unlike the name-calling which the IC engages in against Steiner and Benner (as well as now against my own person), Steiner spells out convincing arguments to justify the use of these sharp terms.

Regarding ‘crackpot philosophy’ Steiner’s analysis in Downward Spiral3 of the history of philosophy expounded in Comrade North’s Marxism, History and Socialist Consciousness, and his drawing of a convincing parallel to the manner in which the followers of Ayn Rand blamed every wrong in the world on Immanuel Kant are substantial reasons to think that such a designation is fair.

As for ‘gutter politics’ the now over decade-long smear campaign against Steiner is proof enough of this charge. I have found out in the course of this exchange that this approach seems to be the bread and butter of political argument throughout the IC.

As an aside, if Steiner and Brenner were “middle-class nobodies” then why would you, I direct this toward Comrade Lantier who I know wields the principal pen behind these arguments, the leader of the IC in France (a real somebody!) be moved to such anger by their arguments? If they really are so obviously wrong, why don’t you calmly address their political positions as they state them, correcting me convincingly and strengthening the IC in the process?

As I stated above, given that the points and questions raised in my previous letters have been ignored there doesn’t seem any good reason to drag a response to other specific charges in your last letter out any further. So, to the meat of the issue.

Your central point is that I have “concluded the ICFI historic identification as the continuity of revolutionary Marxism has been refuted [sic].”

Unfortunately, I have reached this conclusion, although I hope it can still be proven to me that I am incorrect. This is not because I support entry into the Democratic Party or that any of the other assertions you’ve woven out of whole cloth are true.

It is because I believe this “historic identification” is not akin to the Divine Right of Kings but something a political organisation earns through its continued defense of Trotskyism and its practice. It seems to me the IC has the former conception of the continuity of the Trotskyist movement, that it guarantees we aren’t capable of being incorrect about anything (even our own significant revisions to Trotsky’s program at the founding of the FI) and that when someone disagrees with us they are automatically anti-Trotskyist, petit-bourgeois, pseudo-left etc.

It now appears to me that in its practice, in the conduct of its leadership and in some of its political perspectives that the IC has departed from the principles of Trotskyism, if of course it can be proven otherwise through political discussion then I will happily admit my mistake in this case.

If you decide to expel me on this basis (or as you evasively claim that I will have “effectively expelled myself”) then I hope you are at least capable of reflecting on why it would seem to me, someone who has loyally fought for the IC’s perspective for six years, that this is the case.

This conclusion was one that I had no intention of reaching when I first raised differences with the leadership. At that time, I hoped- or even expected- these could be dealt with in a swift and comradely discussion with Comrade Lantier and others. As I detailed in my last letter, the response of the leadership has shown its conception of revolutionary Marxism is one that is very far away from the conceptions of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. At the core of this conclusion is the inability of the leadership to respond at all adequately to any of the points I raised.

I will remind Comrade Lantier and comrades of the NC who were not informed of my initial discussion with him, that I raised the following points in our initial private phone call on February 27 (these are based on the notes taken by Comrade Lantier himself):

• Concern that the party has a sectarian conception of political work: as long as we are correct on the WSWS, the objective situation will get bad enough that people will start to queue up to join.

    • Questions over the delineation of the fifth phase of the Trotskyist movement, the other phases were marked by major internal struggles of the Trotskyist movement whereas the fifth was just declared.

    • Uncertainty about the decade of socialist revolution. Our conception seems to be that if we can just raise the party’s work to a quantitatively higher level and raise the morale of the cadre, strategic and tactical questions about how to rise to the decade of socialist revolution don’t need to be discussed.

    • Confusion over our reasoning on the Will Lehman campaign. We don’t see the main arena for our work in the trade unions as was traditionally the case in the Trotskyist movement. We have to struggle against the bureaucrats, but it feels like we do this shouting from the sidelines.

    • Concern over founding of the IWA RFC. What is it, who leads it, how do workers elect delegates to it, how do you become a member? The same questions can be asked of the IYSSE.

    • Stated that the PES feels more Paris bureau of the WSWS in our day-to-day practice.

    • Raised questions over the term “pseudo-left”, even if we are irreconcilably opposed to these forces, pseudo-left is an epithet that often replaces a careful analysis of who these forces are, what they do.

    • Raised questions over our carpet ban on entry work in organizations (and I should add discussion of this as well)

    • Concern over the implications of the degeneration of trade unions after 1970s, did this mean we shouldn’t do work within them? Also trade unions have been highly degenerate at other periods of working class history but we worked within them then.

    • Concern as to why are we unable to win over students and workers.

    • I also stated that I find some of Steiner and Brenner’s arguments quite convincing, and I find some of the methodology use we use against them unconvincing.

Behind your quotes and accusations there has been almost nothing of political substance raised in response to these concrete points throughout this entire exchange. For the positions you have addressed your preferred techniques for political argument are strawman-ing, intimidation and name-calling.

While it can be said that the questions of the WSWS’s dominance in our work and our intervention in the unions has been answered more substantially, I am afraid these responses are still unconvincing. On the first, just quoting the US statement of principles is hardly an answer to the complex question of how best to develop the IC’s work in France. It can simultaneously be the case that the WSWS is the primary tool for our intervention in the class struggle in France and we develop other forms of work as well, my point was we never discuss this. On the second, saying we work energetically in the unions is one thing, doing it is another.

Finally, as I argued in my previous letter, you claim to embody the historic continuity of Trotskyism but you clearly have no trust in the membership of the Trotskyist party. This is a violation of the basic spirit of Bolshevism (although you accuse me of not referring to Trotsky at all, I quoted him to prove that this was a basic concept of the Bolshevik Party in my previous letter). The fact you didn’t respond to this charge shows you think this is either unimportant or that you are justified in treating an individual who has worked loyally for the party for six years as a pariah for internally raising political differences in a loyal and deferential manner. Either option is sufficient to show the IC leadership has drifted from the Trotskyist conception of building a vanguard party of the working class.

Across multiple letters you have refused to answer serious questions surrounding your attitude and conduct toward the membership. Unless the NC responds to the three following requests, I do not see any conditions in which a principled continuation of this exchange is possible:

1) Please point me to the place in the constitution of the PES or precedence in the history of the Trotskyist movement for your demand of an unlimited non-disclosure agreement, which was used to block a discussion of political issues and to issue an ultimatum with the threat to expel me from the party.

2) Regarding my “politically irresponsible conduct,” please concretely explain exactly what part of my conduct has been “politically irresponsible” and specify where it has violated the rules and regulations of the party.

3) Tell me directly whether or not you covertly recorded the online meeting of February 28. If you did, please provide me and every member of the NC with a copy of the unedited transcript.

If the NC is unable to response to these requests the only conclusion can be that it has no intention of any discussion whatsoever of my concerns, now or after July 1. 

As for the “non-negotiable” July 1 proposal for me to “reconsider my positions”- not the first non-negotiable in this exchange I might note- I do not accept it.

Presumably, even if I express agreement with the party’s program, constitution etc., on July 1, it  will only be found satisfying by the leadership if I undergo full political humiliation and admit I was wrong about everything, under the influence of petit-bourgeois forces, or that I was already planning to leave but used Steiner and Brenner’s arguments as convenient cover to save face. These allegations have all already been made- without any evidence presented of course- by the leadership during the course of this exchange.

Undoubtedly should I dare to refer to any part of the IC’s history that isn’t part of the leadership’s pre-approved reading list I, and whoever I cite, shall be denounced in similar terms to those thrown about by the leadership already.

This is not a proposal for political discussion, which now seems to have been completely tabled. In fact, it specifically precludes political discussion. It is nothing more than the proposal I spend three months in political isolation during which time I can “reconsider” why everything I’ve said was totally incorrect and the response of the leadership completely correct.

This is a total cop-out on the part of the leadership, either you are willing to have a planned and prepared initial discussion4 of political differences or you aren’t. If you aren’t that is enough proof for me that you do not represent the revolutionary continuity of Trotskyism and as stated above, I am happy to “effectively expel myself” on that basis.

I hope my impressions are incorrect and that the ultimate goal of the NC is to correct what it views to be my political misconceptions on the basis of valid political argumentation. This can easily be shown by responding in a principled and, I hope, cordial manner to the three requests that I have included above alongside an agreement to organise a preliminary discussion with prepared documents as was previously pledged by the NC.

Fraternally,

Samuel Tissot

 

Letter 9: National Committee to Samuel Tissot , March 31

Dear Comrade Tissot,

We have received your letter of March 27, which rejects the proposal of the National Committee of the PES that you take a leave of absence until July 1 to reconsider your repudiation of the history and program of the International Committee of the Fourth International. In making this proposal, it had been our hope that you would reexamine the process by which you, on the basis of little more than one week of reflection, denounced the program and principles which you claimed to support during the six years of your membership in the US and French sections of the ICFI. You have rejected this offer. Your reply, which employs the language of an embittered enemy of the Trotskyist movement, shows there is nothing left to discuss with you.

 

Your letter confirms the central point made by the PES in its responses to your attacks on the party: that you have “concluded the ICFI’s historic identification as the continuity of revolutionary Marxism has been refuted.” You admit this is assessment is correct, writing: “Unfortunately, I have reached this conclusion, although I hope it can still be proven to me that I am incorrect.”

 

What petty-bourgeois insolence! The International Committee, after 71 years of struggle in defense of the programmatic heritage of Trotskyism, has nothing at all to prove to you. As we previously noted, membership in the party is based on acceptance of program and principles, which are clearly elaborated in the founding documents of the ICFI and its sections. They are not up for discussion whenever one or another member gets cold feet worrying about the possibility of state repression – and, to be perfectly blunt, you fall into this pathetic category of deserters – and decides that the time has come to get out of revolutionary politics while the getting is good.

 

The repudiation of the historical continuity of the Fourth International has been a hallmark of individuals and tendencies in the process of breaking from Trotskyism. In March 1986, the Workers Revolutionary Party, led by Cliff Slaughter and Michael Banda, adopted a resolution titled “Dissolve the International Committee.” It stated: “The WRP rejects the traditions of the ICFI as anti-communist and considers its claim to be the World Party of Socialist Revolution as having no basis in reality.”

 

Within days of writing this resolution – which was based on the infamous document “27 Reasons Why the International Committee Should be Buried Forthwith” – Michael Banda issued a denunciation of Leon Trotsky and proclaimed himself an admirer of Joseph Stalin. Cliff Slaughter followed his own path to the political right, rejecting the Leninist concept of the revolutionary party, and embracing a variant of anarchism. Simon Pirani – who had voted with Slaughter in December 1985 against a resolution at a meeting of the International Committee that reaffirmed “the historical correctness of the struggle against Pabloite revisionism upon which the continuity of the Fourth International, preserved and embodied in the International Committee, is based” – evolved rapidly into an out-and-out anti-communist. By the early 1990s, the Workers Revolutionary Party, moving rapidly to its self-dissolution, offered its services to NATO during the Bosnian war.

 

Joining this sordid tradition of anti-Trotskyism, you attempt to cover your renegacy with denunciations. Drawing on the writings of the wretched Steiner and Hister-Brenner, you write that the work of the ICFI is “gutter politics” and based on “crackpot philosophy.” You state that there are “convincing arguments to justify the use of these sharp terms,” though you do not say what these convincing arguments are.

 

In the history of the Marxist movement, the collapse of an International has always been connected to a major political event. In the case of the Second International, it was the outbreak of World War I in 1914. The collapse of the Third International was determined by its betrayal of the German working class and complicity in Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. In your denunciations of the International and proclamation of its bankruptcy, there is not a single reference to be found to any significant objective political event. Nowhere do you attempt to demonstrate that the International Committee and its sections have incorrectly appraised events and betrayed the working class. There is no mention in your letters of the Gaza genocide, the US-NATO war against Russia, or the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

The only evidence that you present in support of the claim that the International Committee is bankrupt is its refusal to accept your demand for a discussion of the historic validity of its existence and its alleged misrepresentation of the writings of Steiner and Brenner.

 

The PES will not waste its time in discussions with someone who insists it is bankrupt or keep as a member someone who opposes its program. You are trying to compel the PES to repudiate its program and then, by entering into other parties, to complete its own liquidation.

 

You admit that “it may be valid to criticize me for not having fully worked out proposals.” In other words, we should entertain a discussion on the liquidation of the PES and ICFI and, moreover, with someone who does not even know into what organizations he wants to liquidate.

 

You denounce our refusal to enter into such a discussion as a “total cop-out on the part of the leadership, either you are willing to have a planned and prepared initial discussion of political differences, or you aren’t. If you aren’t that is enough proof for me that you do not represent the revolutionary continuity of Trotskyism and as stated above, I am happy to ‘effectively expel myself’ on that basis.”

 

The “cop-out,” comrade Tissot, came from you. In the month since you first told us of your differences, you have never given any historical argument to show how the ICFI failed to defend the continuity of Trotskyism over the last 70 years. Instead, after just two days of brooding on your own lack of motivation to do political work, as you told us in your last letter, you embraced attacks on the ICFI from Alex Steiner, Frank Brenner and Shuvu Batta. Whether you wrote the letters, or they dictated them to you is of little importance: you took all your arguments from them.

 

Steiner and Brenner have been demanding the liquidation of the ICFI for the last 15 years. In 2009, several years before their embrace of Syriza, they demanded that the German section of the ICFI enter into the Left Party. Two years later, Steiner and Brenner posted an article, written by one Daniel Müller, denouncing the German comrades for not embracing the “Pirate Party,” an ephemeral political stunt that expressed the aspirations of tech industry entrepreneurs. As this organization evolved rapidly to the right, Steiner and Brenner thought it advisable to delete the article from their blog (though it still dwells on the Internet as a monument to their opportunism and stupidity).

 

You now also admit that you are “happy” to be expelled. Indeed, this will allow you to shop around for different parties into which you could enter—all the while reserving the right, as you previously told us, to show these parties this correspondence in order to publicly denounce us. Your insistence on this “right” demonstrated that you were writing documents in bad faith, whose real pre-conceived and unstated purpose was to provide Steiner and Brenner with slanderous material for their blog.

 

As for your political orientation, you are moving to the right with breakneck speed. Socialist principles and the historical experiences of the Trotskyist movement count for nothing in your calculations. The real motto of your politics is “anything goes.”

While you protest that you do not support the Democratic Party, you demand that we discuss Batta’s decision to join the Democratic Socialists of America, arguing that we will find workers and youth in the Democratic Party hungry for socialist revolution. We reject the ludicrous claim that we can reach revolutionary workers and youth if only a path can be found into the party of the Biden White House, world war and genocide in Gaza.

 

The most remarkable feature of your conversion to Pabloite liquidationism is its speed. Only last August you co-authored and presented with ICFI Secretary Peter Schwarz a 90-minute lecture on the centrism of the OCI, the ICFI’s former French section, that led to its break with the ICFI and Trotskyism in 1971, and then its entry into Pabloite alliances with Stalinist and bourgeois parties. Here are a number of citations from that lecture, whose central theme was the International Committee’s defense of the continuity of Trotskyism:

 

Against this centrist drift of the OCI the SLL defended the continuity of the Trotskyist movement. Despite the SLL’s own significant political weaknesses at this time, and its failure to work through these issues with the French section in a principled way, it must be understood that the SLL still played the critical political role in defending the continuity of the Trotskyist movement. Without this struggle, the continuity of the Trotskyist movement embodied in the IC would have been lost. …

 

The Trotskyist movement is only able to struggle for a revolutionary perspective on the basis of the continuity of its program, which includes the defence of historical truth and materialist philosophy, and its insistence that the working class is the leading and decisive revolutionary class in the epoch of imperialism. …

 

The SLL’s defense of the continuity of the Trotskyist movement amidst the OCI’s degeneration into centrism is a critical episode in the history of our party. It provides crucial lessons for our political practice in the third decade of the 21st century, as we enter the Fifth Phase in the history of the FI. …

 

As is seen in the controversy over “reconstruction” in the mid-1960s, seemingly superficial differences over terminology, philosophy or history can have behind them anti-Marxist conceptions that are the expression of the pressure of alien class forces on the Trotskyist movement.

 

All sorts of tendencies develop in the midst of revolutionary situations, even amongst the leadership of the revolutionary party. We must understand that these can only be combated on the basis of an untiring campaign for the assimilation of the lessons of the movement’s history.

 

This means above all else the defence of the Trotskyist program, through which our movement has fought to liberate the working class from the influence of bourgeois forces for a century. Only on this basis can the revolutionary party, our party, rise to the historic tasks laid before it in the 21st century and lead the international working class in a socialist revolution. …

 

Permit us to point out that your lecture cited extensively from the writings of David North, whom you now denounce as a practitioner of “gutter politics” and exponent of “crackpot philosophy.”

 

In our discussion of February 28, you proposed the Morenoite Révolution Permanente as a tendency into which the PES should consider entry. But only four months earlier, on October 29, 2023, you authored a scathing denunciation of this tendency in an article titled “French Morenoites cover up US-NATO escalation against Gaza, Iran”. Analyzing the RP’s response to an issue of the greatest political significance, you wrote:

 

RP’s pro-imperialist lies reflect the material interests of layers of the affluent middle class and of student youth who work in the milieu of the union bureaucracy and its academic periphery. Until 2021, it functioned as a faction of the petty-bourgeois Pabloite New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA). It is oriented in particular to the Stalinist bureaucracy of the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) union, which it claimed could adopt a “revolutionary” orientation as France’s union bureaucracies strangled the mass strike movement against Macron’s pension cuts this spring.

 

In the period since the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the unbridgeable class gulf separating RP from the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), the leadership of the world Trotskyist movement, has become evident. At the outset of this period, CGT bureaucrats closely allied to the counterrevolutionary Soviet bureaucracy in the Cold War era declined to openly endorse imperialism. They postured as friends of the Soviet Union, who had played the central role in World War II in the defeat of Nazism. …

 

Building an international anti-war movement among the mass protests erupting in America, Europe and the Middle East requires consciously opposing the pro-imperialist complacency of RP. Its name cynically refers to Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, but RP works with French national union bureaucracies not to build, but to block an international socialist revolution by the working class against capitalism and imperialist war. The Trotskyist opposition in France that must be built against the type of pseudo-left politics represented by the NPA and RP is the PES.

 

One month later, you posted an article on the WSWS titled “French unions and pseudo-left parties march alongside Zionist group in government sponsored feminist march.” This article denounced the reactionary alliance of the pseudo-left and the #MeToo movement. You wrote:

 

After more than 20,000 Palestinian deaths and as Israeli leaders openly prepare to escalate their genocide against Palestine after fraudulent “humanitarian pauses,” French pseudo-left groups and the trade union bureaucracies expressed their indifference to the ongoing massacre in the Gaza strip by dissolving this weekend’s anti-genocide protest into a Macron government-sponsored feminist rally on Saturday. …

 

The protest received support from French President Emmanuel Macron, who tweeted a video underlining his support for #MeToo and for the campaign to put an end to gendered violence. All the major French trade unions and the pseudo-left parties including the New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA), the Morenoite group Révolution Permanente (RP), Unsubmissive France, the French Communist Party and the Greens sent large delegations.

 

The national union bureaucracies, the Macron government and pseudo-left parties are not concerned with alleviating dire social conditions in France or putting an end to imperialist slaughter. Instead, they consciously promote middle-class identity politics to whip up support for imperialist war and attacks on democratic rights.

 

The demonstration exposed the far-right and pro-imperialist character of the #MeToo movement, which has been backed by every pseudo-left group since its inception. #MeToo’s method of using unproven allegations of sexual crimes to intimidate political opposition was this time practiced by Zionist-feminists who came to the protest to rally support for Israel’s genocide against Gaza as part of a recently formed Zionist feminist organisation called “7 Octobre.”

 

Indicting the reactionary character of the demonstration, you wrote:

 

The 7 Octobre group is an unholy marriage of the pseudo-left promoters of identity politics and the far right. According to Le Point, the Israeli organisers included members of SOS Racism, a group with ties to the leadership of the Black Lives Matter movement in the US, which is a consistent supporter of American imperialism and embroiled in a corruption scandal involving hundreds of millions of dollars of money donated to fight against police violence. Multiple notorious members of the far-right Jewish Defense League were also identified among the 7 Octobre group by eyewitnesses at the rally.

 

You returned to the subject of #MeToo, in an article posted on the WSWS on January 21, 2024, defending Gérard Depardieu against a witch hunt aimed at discrediting the renowned French actor as a sexual predator. You wrote:

 

The anti-Depardieu hysteria seizing the political establishment, major media and #MeToo circles reflects the pro-imperialist, essentially right-wing character of this brand of gender identity politics. …

 

A recent Le Monde editorial denouncing Depardieu reflects this intersection of French imperialism’s geostrategic agenda and its gender identity politics agenda targeting the film industry. It denounces Depardieu’s “detestable and unworthy behavior” for being comforting to “the most reactionary part of public opinion, particularly to men who consider women's speech as an intolerable challenge to their domination.”

 

The vehemence of your denunciations of the reactionary character of the #MeToo movement assumes particular significance in light of your embrace of Steiner and Brenner. You have chosen to overlook their numerous denunciations of the SEP’s opposition to #MeToo’s assault on basic democratic rights. In a filthy diatribe in which he referred to the SEP as the “Sexual Inequality Party,” posted on the Steiner-Brenner blog site on June 18, 2018, Brenner wrote:

 

The SEP are sectarians, it’s a disease that’s taken hold in the very marrow of their politics. And the one thing sectarians hate (even more than having their sectarianism exposed) is any spontaneous upsurge of the masses. They react to it with instinctive hostility. #MeToo is such an upsurge.

 

The defense of democratic rights and opposition to political witch-hunting is, according to Brenner, sectarian. Moreover, his identification of #MeToo – a reactionary media-sponsored initiative serving the career interests of a segment of upper-middle class feminists – as a “spontaneous upsurge of the masses” is emblematic of Steiner-Brenner’s rejection of a class-based analysis of political tendencies. 

 

But the class character of Steiner-Brenner’s politics and record of gross political opportunism is of no interest to you. The glaring contradictions in your political positions, the ease with which you glide from one position to another, and forget today what you wrote yesterday exposes your intellectual superficiality and political instability. You are not a politically serious person. But your personal traits are rooted in a class position.

 

In the course of the seminal political struggle in 1939-40 against the Shachtman-Burnham-Abern opposition within the Socialist Workers Party, Trotsky provided the most succinct description of the characteristics that typify members of a petty-bourgeois tendency:

 

a disdainful attitude toward theory and an inclination toward eclecticism; disrespect for the tradition of their own organization; anxiety for personal “independence” at the expense of anxiety for objective truth; nervousness instead of consistency; readiness to jump from one position to another; lack of understanding of revolutionary centralism and hostility toward it; and finally, inclination to substitute clique ties and personal relationships for party discipline.

 

There is little to add to what Trotsky said. You are only the latest in a long line of petty-bourgeois students and recent graduates who dabbled for several years in socialist politics and then abandoned it. In the context of contemporary politics, the former Pabloite and now British Labour Party leader Keir Starmer comes to mind.

 

Since you have rejected the political program that is the basis for membership in our party, a motion has been presented to the National Committee of the PES for your expulsion, on grounds of your explicit rejection of the program of the party. It will be discussed and acted upon on April 1, at 9 pm. In accordance with the statutes of the PES, you will be afforded the opportunity to be present and respond to the motion.

 

Fraternally,

 

Alex Lantier, for the National Committee of the PES

 

Samuel Tissot Appeal Letter to Peter Schwarz, May 7, 2024

 

Dear Comrade Schwarz,

 

I am writing to you in your capacity as Secretary of the ICFI to appeal my expulsion from the Parti de l’égalité Socialiste (PES). I am appealing my expulsion as I believe the only reason I was expelled was that I expressed political differences with the leadership.

 

From the date that I expressed these differences until I was expelled, I acted as a loyal party member. I did not discuss my differences with anyone outside of the party, I did not contact IC members outside of the French section, and I stated my loyalty to the party multiple times in writing.

 

The only request I made to the leadership was for a single discussion before the National Committee. This discussion never took place. After six years of loyal membership in the ICFI and nearly four years in the French section, I was expelled without any discussion or any opportunity to defend myself before the party membership.

 

I strongly suspect that the PES leadership had decided to either expel me or intimidate me into submission as soon as I raised differences. The French leadership’s unprecedented demand for an NDA, which may have made me liable to legal proceedings after I had been expelled from the party, and its covert recording of my remarks in an informal online discussion support this suspicion.

 

Nevertheless, the leadership was forced to find a legalistic justification for my expulsion to maintain the mirage of inner-party democracy. The official justification for my expulsion was that I had questioned the leadership’s claim to “the historical continuity of Trotskyism.” The assertion that the ICFI embodies the historical continuity of Trotskyism cannot be reconciled with its national sections refusing to recognize the rights of members to discuss political differences within the organization, attempting to force a member to sign an NDA or engaging in political slander against a member. Either the ICFI and its sections represent the historical continuity of Trotskyism or it is an organization based on centralism without democracy in which the leadership has no accountability. Both cannot be true at the same time.

As a result of the leadership’s refusal to respect my democratic rights as a party member I was forced to conclude that as long as there is no room for discussion of political differences in the PES and this is unopposed internationally, it is inconceivable that the ICFI represents the historical continuity of Trotskyism. I was hoping to be proven wrong and I still hold out that hope, which is why you are receiving this appeal.

The meeting in which I was expelled by the National Committee had all of the trappings of a show trial. After an introduction in which Alex Lantier in his capacity as Secretary of the PES repeated various slanders against me, it was then demanded I retract my remarks on the ICFI’s claim to the historical continuity of the Trotskyist movement. After I refused to do so I was not permitted to explain why I had said this, defend myself or protest my expulsion.

 

Does the ICFI believe that its members have the right to express political disagreement with its leadership? Do they also have the right to ask for a discussion of pressing political concerns? If the answer is yes to either of these questions then I believe I have been expelled from the ICFI on illegitimate grounds.

 

Furthermore, does the ICFI endorse the PES leadership’s view that its embodiment of the “historical continuity of Trotskyism” is eternally valid regardless of the principles and practice of the party? If it does not, then the fact I questioned whether the leadership’s actions violate this heritage is a completely bogus basis for expulsion and my membership should be reinstated immediately. Upon reinstatement the PES should be instructed by the ICFI to organise a series of discussions of the political differences I previously raised.

Given that this situation has dragged on for several months now and throughout this time I was not given the opportunity to have a substantive discussion of my political differences in the PES or IC, I ask that you provide a timely response to my questions.

Fraternally,

Samuel Tissot

 

 

ICFI response to appeal, June 19

 Dear Samuel Tissot,

The International Committee of the Fourth International has reviewed your appeal of your expulsion from the Parti de l’égalité socialiste and your correspondence with the French section. It has concluded that the actions of the PES were politically justified and constitutionally correct. We therefore reject your appeal.

 

The one question that your appeal never addresses, let alone answers, is why you want to be a member of the PES. To the extent that an answer to this question can be inferred, it is that you seek membership only for the purpose of campaigning inside the party for the dissolution of the ICFI and the French section.

 

You have advanced the proposition “the ICFI’s historic identification as the continuity of revolutionary Marxism has been refuted,” and demand that it enter into a discussion whose only purpose is to convince the party to dissolve itself. This means that you believe the ICFI should not exist.

 

In your appeal you demand a discussion on this very question. But the ICFI will never agree to a discussion about whether or not it should exist.

 

The constitution of the SEP and of the PES make agreement with the “Statement of Principles” the prerequisite for membership. You agreed to this when you joined the SEP. You have, of course, the right to change your mind, but then you can no longer be a member of our party.

 

The historical identification of the ICFI as the continuity of revolutionary Marxism has nothing to do with “the Divine Right of the Kings”, as you cynically remark in one of your letters. By continuity of Trotskyism we do not mean apostolic succession, but the defence and development of the political principles and perspectives historically fought for by the Trotskyist movement. If you claim that the ICFI does not embody the continuity of Trotskyism, you are obligated to demonstrate how our politics deviate from these fundamental programmatic positions.

 

Remarkably, your attack on the ICFI does not reference any political events, nor do you demonstrate how the political line of the International Committee contradicts programmatic principles and policies historically associated with the Fourth International. All but ignoring contemporary political events, you do not even attempt to demonstrate that the ICFI has advanced an incorrect analysis and false political line.

 

This absence of a critique of the ICFI’s program and policies stands in sharp contrast to the traditions of the Trotskyist movement, dating back to Trotsky’s Critique of the Draft Program of the Communist International in 1928. More recently, the documents written by the Workers League and International Committee between 1982 and 1986, exhaustively documented the Workers Revolutionary Party’s descent into opportunism.

 

The sole basis for your claim that the ICFI has broken with Trotskyism is organizational: that is, that the PES and ICFI is violating your democratic right to argue for the dissolution of the ICFI. In fact, no such right exists.

 

The ICFI took note of the fact that you rejected out of hand the PES’s offer of a leave of absence to consider your position more carefully.

 

It also found your insistence on your “right” to publish internal documents to be clear evidence of a rejection of democratic centralism and an unprincipled attitude to political discussion within the movement. It is evident that your documents would be written in bad faith, i.e., not for the clarification of the party membership but for future use by the opponents of the ICFI and PES.

Finally, one cannot avoid being struck by the objective context of your sudden shift in political orientation. Against the backdrop of the Gaza genocide, the escalation the US-NATO war against Russia, and, now, the call for new elections in France, you raise the demand for the dissolution of the PES and ICFI. What are the implications of your repudiation of the ICFI and PES at the very point when Melénchon – trained in the reactionary centrist politics of Lambert – is calling for the resurrection of a Popular Front, which can be nothing but a death trap for the working class?

 

If you fail to reevaluate your position and find your way back to Trotskyism, you will inevitably drift ever further into the camp of the enemies of socialism and the working class.

 

Fraternally,

Peter Schwarz

International Committee

Secretary