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
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