by DAVID NORTH
The following are the remarks delivered by David North, chairperson of the International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site, to a meeting at Birkbeck, University of London on Saturday as part of an international series of lectures on Leon Trotsky and the Struggle for Socialism in the Twenty-First Century.
1. Seventy years ago this week, on November 16, 1953, a “Letter to Trotskyists Throughout the World” was published in The Militant, newspaper of the Socialist Workers Party, which was then the Trotskyist organization in the United States. Issued in the name of the party’s national committee, its author was James P. Cannon, the SWP’s 63-year-old national chairman.
2. The Socialist Workers Party was not formally affiliated with the Fourth International due to anti-communist laws in the United States. Despite this technical limitation, Cannon’s political authority was based on the critical role he had played in the founding of the International Left Opposition in 1928, his subsequent close collaboration with Trotsky in the fight for the Fourth International and the preparation of its founding congress in September 1938, his central role in the struggle led by Trotsky against the petty-bourgeois revisionist tendency of Max Shachtman, James Burnham and Martin Abern in 1939-40, and, in the aftermath of Trotsky’s assassination in August 1940, his unyielding defense, in the reactionary environment of World War II and the initial years of the Cold War, of the programmatic heritage of the Fourth International.
3. But in 1953, Cannon confronted a powerful revisionist tendency in the International Secretariat of the Fourth International, represented by Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel, which proposed the repudiation of the essential programmatic foundations of the Trotskyist movement. The central elements of Pablo’s revisionism were the rejection of Trotsky’s insistence on the counter-revolutionary nature of Stalinism and the perspective of building the Fourth International as the World Party of Socialist Revolution. Pablo and his acolyte, Mandel, advocated the liquidation of the sections of the Fourth International into the mass Stalinist parties, or, depending on the balance of forces in a given country, into the social democratic, bourgeois nationalist and petty-bourgeois radical movements.
4. Within the United States, the followers of Pablo advanced this liquidationist program under the banner, “Junk the Old Trotskyism.” They derided Cannon and the veteran leadership of the SWP as “museum pieces” whose defense of “orthodox Trotskyism” was politically irrelevant. Pablo was not engaged merely in a war of words. He utilized his position in the International Secretariat to organize anti-Trotskyist factions in the Fourth International and to expel individuals and even entire sections that opposed his drive to liquidate the Fourth International as an independent revolutionary movement.
5. The political conception that underlay Pablo’s war against the Fourth International was his conception that Stalinism, contrary to the analysis of Trotsky, remained a powerful revolutionary force. Responding to the pressure of the masses, and under conditions of a global nuclear war, the Stalinists would be compelled to take power. The outcome of this process would be the creation of “degenerated workers’ states” that would, after a period of several centuries, somehow evolve into socialist societies.
6. That this bizarre perspective attracted a substantial following testified not only to the political disorientation that developed within the Fourth International in the aftermath of World War II, but also to the growing influence of an increasingly affluent and politically self-conscious petty bourgeoisie engaged in radical left politics.
7. Cannon’s issuing of what came to be known as the “Open Letter” was a critical political initiative in defense of the Fourth International. Drawing upon his immense political experience, Cannon concisely summarized the foundational principles of the Trotskyist movement. He wrote:
1. The death agony of the capitalist system threatens the destruction of civilization through worsening depressions, world wars and barbaric manifestations like fascism. The development of atomic weapons today underlines the danger in the gravest possible way.
2. The descent into the abyss can be avoided only by replacing capitalism with the planned economy of socialism on a world scale and thus resuming the spiral of progress opened up by capitalism in its early days.
3. This can be accomplished only under the leadership of the working class as the only truly revolutionary class in society. But the working class itself faces a crisis of leadership although the world relationship of social forces was never so favorable as today for the workers to take the road to power.
4. To organize itself for carrying out this world-historic aim the working class in each country must construct a revolutionary socialist party in the pattern developed by Lenin; that is, a combat party capable of dialectically combining democracy and centralism—democracy in arriving at decisions, centralism in carrying them out; a leadership controlled by the ranks, ranks able to carry forward under fire in disciplined fashion.
5. The main obstacle to this is Stalinism, which attracts workers through exploiting the prestige of the October 1917 Revolution in Russia, only later, as it betrays their confidence, to hurl them either into the arms of the Social Democracy, into apathy, or back into illusions in capitalism. The penalty for these betrayals is paid by the working people in the form of consolidation of fascist or monarchist forces, and new outbreaks of wars fostered and prepared by capitalism. From its inception, the Fourth International set as one of its major tasks the revolutionary overthrow of Stalinism inside and outside the USSR.
6. The need for flexible tactics facing many sections of the Fourth International, and parties or groups sympathetic to its program, makes it all the more imperative that they know how to fight imperialism and all of its petty-bourgeois agencies (such as nationalist formations or trade-union bureaucracies) without capitulation to Stalinism; and, conversely, know how to fight Stalinism (which in the final analysis is a petty-bourgeois agency of imperialism) without capitulating to imperialism.
These fundamental principles established by Leon Trotsky retain full validity in the increasingly complex and fluid politics of the world today. In fact the revolutionary situations opening up on every hand as Trotsky foresaw, have only now brought full concreteness to what at one time may have appeared to be somewhat remote abstractions not intimately bound up with the living reality of the time. The truth is that these principles now hold with increasing force both in political analysis and in the determination of the course of practical action.
8. Seventy years after its publication, the Open Letter retains undiminished relevance as a summation of the present political situation and the tasks of the Fourth International, led by the International Committee. Cannon’s warning of the use of nuclear weapons and the danger of fascist barbarism is even more timely today than it was in 1953.
9. The one major change that stands out is that the Soviet Union no longer exists, and the mass Stalinist parties have been swept away. Of course, to the extent that the reactionary class collaborationist, nationalist and anti-socialist politics of Stalinism persist in new political guises, the obstacle that it represented to the revolutionary movement of the working class has not disappeared.
10. The working class still confronts the systematic and organized treachery of the trade union bureaucracies, the reactionary organizations that still label themselves Labor, social democratic and “Green,” and the innumerable pseudo-left and bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalist parties and organizations—many of which trace their origins to the Pabloite repudiation of the program of the Fourth International. The crisis of revolutionary leadership remains to be resolved.
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