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
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