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The Organisation Communiste Internationaliste Breaks with Trotskyism

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TROTSKYISM VERSUS REVISIONISM A DOCUMENTARY HISTORY VOLUME SIX The Organisation Communiste Internationaliste breaks with Trotskyism NEW PARK PUBLICATIONS TROTSKYISM VERSUS REVISIONISM TROTSKYISM VERSUS REVISIONISM A DOCUMENTARY HISTORY edited by C. Slaughter VOLUME SIX The Organisation Comtnuniste Internationaliste breaks with Trotskyism NEW PARK PUBLICATIONS Pubtiahcd by New Park PuWic«ioMLtd.. ItSTaStomHi* Stmt, London SW4 7UG 1975 Set up, Printed and Bound by Trade Union Labour Distributed in the United States by: Labor Publication! Inc., 13S West 14 Street, New York, New York 10011 ISBN 0 902030 73 6 Printed in Great Britain by New Press (T.U.) 186a Oapham High Street, London SW4 7UG Contents FOREWORD xli CHAPTER ONE: THE BOLIVIAN REVOLUTION AND REVISIONISM Document 1 BoMa: Biter Lessons of Defeat, by Tim WohBorth August 30,1971 2 Document 2 What Happened In BoMa? by QuWermo Lore September 1971 8 Document 3 Statement by the OCI Central Committee, September 19,1971 19 Document 4 Statement by the OCI, the POR and the Organizing Committee of Eastern Europe, October 12,1971 23 CHAPTER TWO: THE SPLIT Document S Statement by the International Committee (Majority), October 24,1971 28 Document 6 Declaration of the Central Committee of the OCI, November 24,1971 45 Document r Statement by the International Committee (Majority), March 1,1972 72 CHAPTER THREE: THE FOURTH WORLD CONFERENCE Document • Report of the Fourth Conference of the International Committee, April 10-15,1972 104 Document 9 Manifesto of the Fourth Conference of the International Committee, Apr! 14,1972 109 CHAPTER FOUR: LESSONS OF THE SPLIT Document 10 Statement by the Workers Vanguard of Greece, June 1972 128 Document 11 Reply from the Workers Intemationalst League, Greek Section of the International Committee, July 1972 151 Document 12 Statement by the Liga Communista of Peru on the POMR and the International, June 1972 169 CHAPTER FIVE: IN DEFENCE OF TROTSKYISM Document 13 In Defence of Trotskyism, by the International Committee of the Fourth International, January 1973 190 APPENDIX: THE OCI AFTER THE SPLIT Document 14a Leading article from Informations Ouvrieres, January 29, 1975 242 Document 14b Leading article from Informations Ouvrieres, February 5,1975 244 Document 15 Statement by the PoMical Bureau of the SWP, January 2,1975 247 GLOSSARY OF NAMES 250 INDEX 252 Note on sources The documents published in these volumes have been collected from the journals, internal bulletins and correspondence of the Trotskyist movement over the period since 1951. The series is designed to provide the basic documentation of the fight within the Fourth Inter­ national during that time. Editing of the text has been kept to a minimum: footnotes and bracketed explanatory notes have been added only for essential reference. In all other respects the documents have been reproduced as they appear in the sources indicated below. Each volume has a foreword introducing the reader to the main developments covered in it, with a glossary of names and an index provided as additional guides to the documents. The sources for the documents used in this volume are as follows: 1. Bulletin, August 30, 1971 2,3,4and5. Fourtklnternational, Vol.7,No. 2, Winter 1971-71,pp. 72-76 6,7,8,9 and 10. Fourth International, Vol. 7, No. 4, Summer 1972 11 and 12. Fourth International, Vol. 8, No. 1, Winter 1972-73 13. Socialist Labour League pamphlet, February 1973 14a. Informations Ouvrieres, January 29, 197S 14b. Injtmaium Owtuns, February 5,1975 IS. Intercontinental Press, January 13, 197S Foreword In this volume are contained the essential documents of the fight of the International Committee of the Fourth International to defend and develop Marxism in the face of the rapid degeneration of the French Organisation Communiste Internationaliste (OCI). 1971 finds the OCI leaders providing political support for Guillermo Lora and his Partido Obrero Revolucionario in Bolivia, even beyond the point of the counter-revolutionary coup of Banzer. Confronted with this coup, the Bolivian working class was left disarmed, physically and politically, because of the betrayal of those who claimed to be their Marxist leaders, Lora included. By early 197S, as this volume was being prepared for the press, it had been publicly revealed that the OCI leaders had entered friendly discussions with the revisionist S WP and the United Secretariat in Paris, thus coming full circle from their first break with Pabloism in 1953. The foreword to an earlier volume of documents (Volume Four) anticipated clearly this development: What is vital is that the OCI, rejecting dialectical materialism as the theory of knowledge of Marxism and as the foundation of the training of the revolutionary youth, arrived at essentially identical theoretical positions with those of the SWP. (p.xvi) It is now clear that as these words were being written, formal discussions with the SWP were already in preparation, on the initia­ tive of the OCI (see Appendix to the present volume). It is worth recalling that when the International Committee in 1962 proposed a 'Parity Committee' to draw the Pabloites as well as the SWP into a comprehensive international discussion, in order to deepen the neces­ sary understanding of the theoretical problems involved in the split in the Fourth International, this was first opposed and eventually only xm XIV THE OCI BREAKS WITH TROTSKYISM reluctantly accepted by Lambert and the OCI leadership, who declared that they and their members did not require any further clarification on these questions. Similarly, they never tired of remind­ ing the IC that it was the French section which first clashed with Pablo, and that only later did they receive the support of the SWP and the British section. Again, in July 1970, the International Committee considered the situation favourable for engaging the Pabloites in a full discussion, particularly in view of the rapid development of the economic and political crisis as well as the divisions within the Pab- loite ranks. Yet, when Comrade Healy made approaches to this end, on the instructions of the IC (including the OCI), he was denounced by the OCI as making a concession to Pabloism! The decisive factor in the development of political tendencies is clearly not the demonstration of formal intransigence. On the con­ trary, the great lesson of the 19S3 split, learned in the subsequent years, was that only a conscious struggle to develop dialectical materialism on all fronts, but especially at the basic level of philosophy, could prepare the Trotskyist movement to defeat revisionism and grapple with the political tasks posed by the develop­ ing revolutionary crisis. Resistance to the 1962 and 1970 proposals for discussion by the OCI were more indicative of the complete under­ estimation of these theoretical problems than of revolutionary firm­ ness. Dominating the period since the Essen split and the Bolivian counter-revolutionary coup of 1971, has been the transformation of the world economic situation. Nixon's announcement in August 1971 that the post-war international economic agreements embodied in Bretton Woods were no longer in force was the sharp dividing-line. The dollar was finally cut adrift from gold convertibility, fixed parities were abolished, and US capitalism declared itself a bitter economic competitor rather than a collaborator and supporter of the other capitalist powers. Thus the stage was set for a development on a much higher level of the revolutionary clashes in France and Czechos­ lovakia in 1968 and Bolivia in 1971. Chile was soon to reveal even more starkly and tragically than Bolivia the consequences of aban­ donment of the permanent revolution. The collapse of Portuguese fascism and of the Greek junta in 1974 were to herald the decisive revolutionary effects of the inflationary crisis in Western Europe. And all this came before the plunge from uncontrolled inflation into actual slump, which took on real momentum in the winter of 1974-75. FOREWORD XV Such objective changes do not by any means automatically 'correct' the opportunist course of those who deviate from the construction of revolutionary parties. On the contrary, it is in such periods that the pressure of enemy class forces becomes much greater. As we have seen, only the conscious struggle to develop dialectical materialism in theory and practice can equip the revolutionary party and the Interna­ tional to defeat these pressures and develop on that basis. The growth of the forces of the International Committee on the one hand, and the degeneration of the OCI, on the other, are the living proof of that. The book In Defence of Trotskyism (1973), reprinted in this volume, pro­ vides the first balance-sheet of the theoretical lessons of the OCI split, placed in the historical context of the long struggle against the revisionism of the Socialist Workers Party. Chapter One The Bolivian revolution and revisionism Just as the entry into the Ceylon bourgeois government in 1964 of the renegades of the LSSP, formally a Trotskyist party, was a qualitative turning point in the struggle against revisionism in the Fourth Inter­ national (see Volume Four), so was the defeat of the Bolivian workers in 1971. The POR (Revolutionary Workers Party) of Lora was not a section of the IC of the Fourth International, but it had been pre­ sented as such by the OCI, one of the IC's sections. It was one of the organizations whose representatives voted with the OCI against the Socialist Labour League and the IC majority at the Essen youth conference. When Lora and the POR had collaborated in leading the workers into the trap of depending on the alliance with the 'left' bourgeois leadership of Torres, there was no escaping the most complete and ruthless exposure, which is begun in the first document in this chap­ ter. Lora's reply (Document 2) only serves to confirm the completely revisionist nature of his politics.
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