The Road from the SWP to Trotskyism . .. page 2 The Faces of Economism ... page 24 NUMBER 21 FALL 1972 25 CENTS I Tile SWP tint! tile Fourtll Interntltiontl/, 1946-54: Genesis of Pabloism The American Socialist Workers Party and the European Military Policy" which called for military training under, Pabloists travelled at different rates along different paths to trade union control, implicitly posing the utopian idea that revisionism, to converge in uneasy alliance in the early 1960's U.S. workers could fight German fascism without the in an unprincipled "reunification," which has now broken existence of a workers state in the U.S., through "control­ down as the American SWP has completed the transition ling" U.S. imperialism's army. British Trotskyist Ted Grant from Pabloist centrism to outright reformism. The "United went even further, in one speech referring to British Secretariat" which issued out of the 1963 "reunification" imperialism's armed forces as "our Eighth Army." The teeters on the edge of an open split; the "anti-revisionist" German IKD returned to outright Menshevism with the "International Committee" fractured last year. The collapse the'ory that fascism had brought about the need for "an of the various competing pretenders to the mantle of the intermediate stage fundamentally equivalent to a democratic Fourth International provides a crucial opportunity for the revolution." ("Three Theses;' 19 October 1941) reemergence of an authentic Trotskyist international tenden­ The French Trotskyist movement, fragmented during the cy. Key to the task of reconstructing the Fourth Internation­ course of the war, was the best example of the contradiction. al through a process of splits and fusions is an understanding One of its fragments subordinated the mobilization of the of the char'acteristics and causes of Pabloist revisionism and working class to the political appetites of the Gaullist wing of the flawed response of the anti-Pabloists who fought, too th~ imperialist bourgeoisie; another grouping'renounced any little and too late, on national terrain while in practice struggle within the resistance movement in favor of work abandoning the world movement. exclusively at the point of production and, not recognizing World War II: U.S. and France the existing level' of reformist consciousness among the workers, adventurously attempted to seize the factories Before the onset of the war, Trotsky and the Fourth during the "liberation" of Paris while the working masses International had believed that decaying capitalism and the were out on the streets. The February 1944 European rise of fascism removed the possibility, for reformism and Conference document which was the basis for a fusion therefore for bourgeois-democratic illusions among the between two French groupings to form the Parti Com­ masses. Yeti they could not but become Increasingly aware muniste Internationaliste characterized the two groups: that the revulsion of the working class against fascism and the threat of fascist occupation gave rise to social chauvinism "Instead of distinguishing between the natioO'alism of the defeated bourgeoisie which remains an expression of its and a renewal of confidence in the "democratic" bourgeoisie imperialist preoccupations, and the 'nationalism' of the permeating the proletarian masses throughout Europe and the masses which is only a reactionary expression of their U.S. Faced with such a contradiction, the powerful pressures resistance against exploitation by the occupying imperial­ of nationalist backwardness and democratic illusions in the ism, the leadership of the POI considered as progressive working class tended to pull the sections of the Fourth' the struggle of its own bourgeoisie ...." International apart, some adopting a sectarian stance, others "the CCI ... under the pretext of guarding intact the capitulating to the social patriotism which was rampant heritage of Marxism-Leninism, refused obstinately to among the masses. The SWP briefly adopted the "Proletarian (Continued on page 4) The Case of Bola Tampoe Suppressed Documents Expose United Secretariat PAGE 14 2 SPARTACIST .. The Road from the SWP to Trotskyism Resignations from 14 August 1972 Political Committee, Socialist Workers Party National Executive Committee, the SWP·YSA Young Socialist Alliance We, the undersigned, hereby reSign from the SWP The statement of resignation from the Socialist Workers and the YSA. We take this step as the culmination of Party in favor of a fusion perspective with the Spartacist our previous(v declared support within the SWP to the League, printed immediately below, is from comrades who Declaration of the Leninist Faction of 15 May 1972 have made the difficult transition from the reformism of the or, in the case of the YSA member, of our present solidarity with the politics of that Declaration. SWP to Trotskyism. They originated out of the complex pro­ 1n accordance with the programmatic parallelism cess around the last SWP Convention (August 1971). Two of our political position with that of the Spartacist left oppositions emerged in that Convention period: the LeagtJe of the U.s., and as principled and serious Communist Tendency' in Boston, a handful associated with revolutionists, we intend to seek fusion with the SL. one David Fender, and the much looser Proletarian Orienta­ We call upon all others in basic agreement with our tion tendency which amassed perhaps a hundred supporters views to adopt the same perspective. by Convention time. The CT took a more left-wing and multi­ faceted stance; the PO as its name implies centered upon in­ Fraternally, volving the SWP in the working-class movem~nt. After the Paul A., SWP (Washington D.C), Convention the PO formally dissolved and in fact began dis­ Jeff B., SWP (Oakland-Berkeley; integrating even before the post-Convention period. Of the Dave P., SWP (Washington, D.C) older more prominent individuals drawn to or associated Martha P., SWP (Washington, D.C) with the PO (Larry Turner, Hedda Garza, Harry DeBoer, Paul Ron P., YSA (New York City) Boutelle), most simply capitulated to the party majority. The surviving right PO elements headed by Ralph Lewis seem to place their future hopes on the centrist ~uropean United Sec­ elements who presumably think all the Chinese are simply retariat in the latter's incipient rupture with the reformist Stalinist totalitarians but that probably it is not very im­ American SWP. The more radical left PO elements around portant since it is not an American question. Just before Barbara Gregorich formally constituted a "Leninist Faction" picking up Fender who is some kind of extreme "socialist" within the SWP. militarist i.e. an enthusiast of his own version of an ultra Meanwhile Fender and the CT early got themselves Proletarian Military Policy, Turner had fortuitously broken, thrown out of the SWP, then split from each other. The CT, over questions of international maneuvering, with a "social­ after a weeks-long attempt to conquer the American prole­ ist" draft dodger, Bob Sherwood, resident in Canada. But tariat. independently as the "Committee for a Workers Gov­ Turner-Fender do have a principled basis of a sort for their ernment," liquidated into the third-camp International So­ amalgam: Turner's VNL had gone along with support to the cialists, though not without swearing to all and sundry that New York cops' strike (Turner was chasing the strongly pro­ they have not sold out but are rather on a vicious wrecking cop Workers League at the time) while most recently Fender Trotskyite entry. Fender has signed on as co-editor of Harry as a VNL representative precipitated the forcible opening by rumer's "Vanguard Newsletter" to produce one of the more campus cops of a WL "public" meeting in St: Louis where, as rotten little blocs of all time. The VNL is not only non­ usual, the WL was forcibly excluding known radical op­ democratic-centralist itself 'Iut projects and seeks to work ponents. through its "Committees for Rank and File Caucuses," a hy­ The record of the attempt of elements standing between pothetical united front in willful substitution for the aim of the reformism of the "Trotskyist" SWP and the revolutionary a Leninist party. The record of the combined VNL-CRFC Marxism of the Trotskyist Spartacist League to transcend crew to date, to take the China question for example, is the their centrist limitations ranges in the main from the pathetic "unity" of the pro-Maoist Turner and the pro-Liu Shao-chiist to the sordid. Fender, along with the sometime inclusion of the self-styled The most characteristic nostrum seen as an antidote to left pr.o-Lin Piaoist Bob Ross. In addition the CRFC swamp the SWP's revisionism is a particularly trivial species of work­ encompasses "Socialist Forum," some semi-ex-DeLeonist erism. Real revolutionary syndicalists, while they believe in FALL 1972 3 homogeneous Fourth International (World Party of Socialist Revolution), but five separate international groups all claiming to be either the Fourth International itself, or SPARTACJ5T separate "factions" of it. The shattering of the Fourth Inter­ (Fourth Internationalist) national originally constructed by Trotsky, Cannon, Sedov, Klement, and othe-rs had its basis in the isolation from the An Organ of Revolutionary Marxism working masses aftel World War II, and the methodology and EDITORS: Mallaging, Elizabeth Gordon; James Robertson; positions adopted at the Third World Congress in 1951. Joseph Seymour. At the Third World Congress, adaptation to non-revolu­ BUSINESS MANAGER: Anne Kelley. tionary currents took place, which resulted in the adoption Main address: Box 1377, G.P.O., New York, N. Y. 10001. Tele· of positions which negated the need for the Leninist vanguard phone: WA 5-2426. Western address: P.O. Box 852, Berkeley, party. These positions, based on impressionism and empiri­ Calif. 94701. Telephone: 848·3029. Southern address: Box 51634, Main P.O., New Orleans, La. 70151. Telephone: 866-8384.