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
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