The Comintern was finally dissolved unilaterally on Stalin’s orders in 1943 in order to ease the USSR’s relations with the United States and Great Britain. But was the Fourth International able, after Trotsky’s brutal murder able to develop a genuine revolutionary International?
1933: Hitler came to power in Germany. Contrary to the generally accepted idea, the reasons for this victory lay less in the strength of Nazism than in the weaknesses of the leadership of the workers’ movement at the time. The policies of the leadership of the German Communist Party and of the Communist International, the Third International, had allowed Nazi barbarism to descend on the German proletariat without a fight.
For Trotsky, it was time to build a new international, founded in 1938.
Stalinism had irreparably reduced the Communist International, the tool of world revolution, to the status of a mere toy in the hands of the bureaucracy that had usurped power in the Soviet Union, the same bureaucracy that was using the purges and mass executions to draw a line of blood between its regime, and the rule of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Having betrayed the revolution, the Comintern was finally dissolved unilaterally on Stalin’s orders in 1943 in order to ease the USSR’s relations with the United States and Great Britain.
As a new world war loomed, Trotsky anticipated that it would precipitate a new revolutionary wave not only in the imperialist powers but also in the colonies. The creation of the Fourth International was urgently needed to meet these challenges. To those who pointed out the numerical weakness of this world party of revolution, Trotsky retorted that “The October Revolution, too, began to walk in children’s shoes”. For him, within 10 years there should be nothing left of the old organisations that had betrayed the world revolution, and the Fourth International should constitute the decisive revolutionary force on the planet.
However, for Marxists any outlook is conditional. Many economic, political and social factors arise and interact with each other. At any given time, it is crucial to evaluate and adapt the perspectives that have been mapped out, because it is these that provide the guide for revolutionary action. This is of course even more the case in the context of an event as powerful as a world war. A fundamentally different development from the one anticipated can occur, and clinging to dated perspectives is a mistake for which there is always a heavy price to pay. Unfortunately, this is what happened with the Fourth International.
The ravages of WWII on the Fourth International
The tasks the Fourth International had set itself were no small ones, and the obstacles it faced were immense. State repression was compounded by criminal attacks by Soviet agents. First Trotsky’s son, Lev Sedov was murdered by Stalinist agents in Paris, then one of his secretaries, Rudolf Klement, was kidnapped and cut into pieces on the eve of the creation of the Fourth International. Trotsky himself was assassinated in August 1940.
During the war, dozens of militants were shot or killed in Nazi concentration camps, including prominent leaders such as the Frenchman Marcel Hic and the Belgians Léon Lesoil and Abraham Léon, the author of the monumental “The Jewish Question- a Marxist interpretation“.
Not even war could stop the Stalinist killing machine. The Italian leader Pietro Tresso, having joined French and Belgian guerillas in the Maquis in the company of French comrades, was killed by Stalinist resistance fighters under orders from Moscow. During the civil wars that raged in China, Vietnam, Yugoslavia and Greece, Stalin’s supporters orchestrated a veritable campaign of mass murder to wipe out Trotskyist organisations. At the same time, in India, many Trotskyists were massacred while organising peasant struggles against famine and war.
This weakening of the framework of the Fourth International must be taken into account in the series of difficulties in grasping the new situation. Those who took over the leadership of the International interpreted the perspectives of 1938 not as a working hypothesis, but as a literally correct thesis, while the war had developed in a way that even the greatest of theoretical geniuses could not have anticipated.
Second Congress of the Fourth International
When the Second Congress of the International was held in April 1948, the discussion on the results of the first 10 years of the International’s existence and its policy during the war lasted barely half an hour! Yet there was much to debate, given the range of positions adopted on the eve of the war and during it, in a situation where communication between the various sections was virtually impossible.
In an unprecedented fashion, Michel Pablo, who had become the central figure of the Fourth International, explained that “everywhere the general tendency is towards the transformation of the organisations of the Fourth International into real mass parties. There is already a series of organisations which are fulfilling this task with growing success and through their experience are pointing the way to the masses for our whole international movement. (…) The objective conditions remain favourable for the strengthening of our organisations and their more or less rapid transformation into mass parties”.
This statement, more incantation than analysis, perfectly illustrated the attitude of the official leaders of the Fourth International in the immediate post-war period. Faced with a situation that was unexpected and complex to grasp, they reacted with leftist simplifications.
Failing revolution, dictatorship or “reaction in democratic form”?
They had argued that only military dictatorships were possible in Europe once the Allied imperialist powers had won the war. It is true that in 1940, the International Secretariat had taken the view that if Britain installed de Gaulle in France, his regime would be no different from Pétain’s government. This error, like others, was understandable in the context of the time, but it had to be corrected and the outlook adapted.
The English Trotskyists around Ted Grant worked patiently on this as early as 1943, particularly in the light of the powerful strike movement in northern Italy that year: “In the absence of experienced Trotskyist parties with a tradition and rooted in the masses, the first stage of revolutionary struggles in Europe will probably be followed by a period of Kerenskyism or Popular Front. This can already be foreseen by the first struggles of the Italian workers and the repeated betrayals of social democracy and the Stalinists.”
In 1946, in “Democracy or Bonapartism in Europe”, Ted Grant tried to correct the theses defended by Pierre Frank for the International Secretariat: “Nothing saved the capitalist system in Western Europe other than the betrayal of social democracy and Stalinism. When the bourgeoisie relies on its social-democratic and Stalinist agents for counter-revolutionary purposes, what is the “content” of this counter-revolution? Bonapartist, fascist, authoritarian? Of course not! It is a ‘counter-revolution in democratic form’.”
Developments in the Stalinist bloc and proletarian Bonapartism
The official leaders of the Fourth International had also been taken by surprise by the social transformations at work in Central and Eastern Europe and by all the major developments in the Stalinist bloc. They reacted in a piecemeal, empirical fashion, capitulating to immediate reality without anticipating the developments of the groupings and tendencies. This attitude was aggravated by a desperate search for shortcuts and some kind of Messiah to break out of isolation and finally gain a mass base.
After dreaming of developing Trotskyist groups into mass parties, the International Secretariat went on to dream of developing the Yugoslav Communist Party into a Trotskyist party. As early as 1948, the French Trotskyist newspaper La Vérité asked the question: Is Tito a Trotskyist? Pierre Franck wrote in February 1949 that “a Stalinist party which breaks with Moscow ceases to be a Stalinist party even if it still retains Stalin’s internal regime, way of thinking and watchwords”.
In 1956, it was the Polish leader Gomulka’s turn to be seen as a representative of “democratic communism”, even though he represented a wing of the Polish bureaucracy that wanted to become relatively independent of the Russian bureaucracy. Like Khrushchev in the Soviet Union, these bureaucrats had no wish to return to the policies and programme of the October 1917 revolution.
The illusions in the “de-Stalinisation” of the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death were compounded by others following the Sino-Soviet break-up in the 1960s. After Tito, Mao became a new saviour and China a healthy workers’ state with minor defects. In Italy, the leaders of “Trotskyism” grouped around Livio Maitan helped to give Maoism a mass base by publishing and disseminating Maoist literature within the Italian Communist Party, the main effect of which was to sow theoretical confusion and demoralisation in their own ranks.
The approach of the leaders of the Fourth International was full of disillusionment and disappointment. They had lost faith in the ability of the working class to act in a revolutionary way, instead they sought a new revolutionary leadership amongst the ranks of the dissident Stalinists such as Tito and Mao, and propagated the methods of peasant/guerilla warfare rather than working class struggle in the urban centres. They found themselves completely disorientated and unable to intervene effectively in the tremendous events of 1968 in France, Italy and other countries.
The Colonial revolution
In colonial and ex-colonial countries, the post-war period was a time of unprecedented upheaval. Mass struggles brought together tens and hundreds of millions of people in Africa, Asia and Latin America. In China, Cuba, Burma, Syria, Cambodia, Vietnam, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia and elsewhere, regimes were established which, from the point of view of pre-war developments, were all new and special. Given the delay of the revolution in the advanced countries, the degeneration of the world Stalinist movement and the absence of mass revolutionary parties, all kinds of new social formations were possible.
For their part, the leaders of the Fourth International insisted that the colonial revolution could solve their organisation’s problems. Discouraged by their lack of success, they had come to blame the working class in Western countries, claiming that the workers had been corrupted by economic prosperity.
Ted Grant’s analysis though was a major contribution to the development of Marxism. In his theory of the colonial revolution he pointed out that in the absence of a working class based, revolutionary socialist leadership regimes would be, and were set up along the same lines as the existing model of totalitarian bureaucracy in Moscow, and later China: state ownership and planning of the economy, one-party rule and suppression of democratic rights. These “proletarian Bonapartist” regimes were established mainly on the basis of peasant wars, with a variety of petty-bourgeois or Stalinist rulers, with the working class playing a relatively minor role.
The economic situation
The betrayal of the reformist and Stalinist leaders had provided the political basis for economic recovery in Europe and the United States after the war. Michel Pablo, James Canon, Ernest Mandel and their supporters, however, clung to the idea that American imperialism would never come to the rescue of the Western European ruling classes because they were its rivals. But as Lenin had pointed out: until it is overthrown, capitalism will always find a way out of the worst of its crises. They were blind to the balance of power between classes and between nations that had resulted from the war, especially the balance of power between the Soviet Union and the United States.
In Britain, the leaders of the Fourth International pushed for entryism in the Labour Party in the immediate post-war period in the belief that a recession was imminent, and that this would lead to the development of a left wing in the party. This ‘deep’ entryism, in contrast to that practiced later by the Militant, was based on watering down the defence of Marxist ideas in order to move more easily in reformist circles and try to attract left-wing reformists. This had dramatic consequences, particularly during the 5-week general strike in the winter of 60-61 in Belgium, where the Belgian section followed in the footsteps of the reformist leader André Renard, to the point of not having a Trotskyist newspaper until after the strike!
After arguing that the economies of capitalist countries could not be rebuilt, they asserted that it would be impossible to exceed a certain ceiling, set at the highest level reached before the war. Then this ceiling was exceeded. Finally, since reality was stubbornly in the opposite direction, they went from one extreme to the other, explaining that capitalism had changed.
This was further illustrated in a document from the 1965 World Congress, when Ernest Mandel replaced Pablo as the undisputed leader of the International, “The Evolution of Capitalism in Western Europe and the Tasks of Revolutionary Marxists”. In this text, we read that the next recession, if there were to be one, “would not be a serious economic crisis of the type of those of 1929 or 1938. Indeed, as we have explained in detail in other documents of the International, imperialism has the possibility of cushioning a crisis by increasing public spending – at the expense of the purchasing power of money”. Then came the crisis of the 1970s and the rise of neo-liberalism.
They neither anticipated nor were able to properly explain and evaluate economic developments. As a result, like many left-wing currents of the time, they adapted to various aspects of social democracy, Stalinism or even various schools of the ruling class.
Firm on principle, flexible in approach
There was no shortage of difficulties throughout this period and even with the right approach, building revolutionary parties of the masses was no easy task. But the series of errors of outlook by the leaders of the International on all sorts of issues compounded the difficulties. As Ted Grant remarked, “The task of Marxists is to combine theoretical intransigence with the greatest tactical flexibility, so as to get closer to the working class. Mistakes can be serious; failure to correct them is fatal. (…) Theoretical questions were not taken seriously; they were subordinated to the arbitrary whims of the ruling clique. After 25 years of this regime, they are incapable of moving towards Marxism, politically and organisationally. It permeates everything: their methods of thought, their methods of work, their general outlook.” (“Programme of the International”)
Ted Grant and others engaged in these debates patiently and sought to develop a common understanding based on concrete experience. There were fundamental differences of opinion on China, the Sino-Soviet conflict, Cuba, guerrilla warfare and colonial revolution, the role of the working class, the role of students, etc.
But they stood out at the time by concentrating on politics and the search for theoretical depth despite the various manoeuvres of the official leaders of the Fourth International. In the end, it was during one of these manoeuvres at the 1965 World Congress that we were reduced to the rank of a sympathising rather than an official section of the International and, in effect, excluded from the International.
Going back to the texts and documents of the time, as well as to later ones, including the serious and critical political mistakes that Ted Grant himself made is necessary if we are to arm ourselves politically to meet the challenges of the “Era of Disorder” and the struggle for socialism in the 21st century.