DOCUMENT 17

Document of the French Trotskyists, October 1953

Documents 3 to 17 and 19 to 24 originally published in Internal Bulletins of the SWP and the International Bulletins of the International Committee


The successive stages of Pabloite revisionism 1. With the Third World Congress the Fourth International entered upon a crisis which has steadily worsened and today threatens its very existence. The root of this crisis is to be found in the inculcation within the leadership of the International of an ideology alien to Trotskyism: revisionist and liquidationist Pablism.

2. The principal theoretical ideas of Pablism were formulated by Pablo as a personal contribution during the course of the discussion on the buffer zone (1949-50). Dazzled by the transformation of the productive relations in the buffer zone countries, attributing in addition the victory of the revolution in Yugoslavia and China under the leadership of centrist parties of Stalinist origin to the resources of Stalinism itself, Pablo, using the sectarian errors of the Chinese Trotskyists as a pretext, began a fundamental revision of our historical perspectives. In place of the conception of proletarian revolution he substituted that of centuries of transition between capitalism and socialism under bureaucratic rule; he introduced military-bureaucratic action by the Stalinist bureaucracy as an independent historical force, capable of taking the place of action by the exploited masses in accomplishing their historical tasks, he declared that Stalinism was objectively struggling for the proletarian revolution in capitalist countries and that in the USSR and buffer zone countries, it could only be reproached for causing suffering for the masses which was historically unnecessary; whereas the historical necessity of the Fourth International lies in the fact that Stalinism has 'definitively passed over to the side of bourgeois order' in the capitalist countries (that is to say, the Stalinist bureaucracy fights neither consciously nor 'unconsciously' for the proletarian revolution but seeks primarily to maintain the status quo in all spheres), and will lead the workers' states to ruin in the USSR and in the buffer zone if it is not overthrown by the masses.

3. It is in 'Where Are We Going?' that Pablo develops these theoretical premises to their final conclusions and begins to draw the political and tactical conclusions from them. The revolutionary action of the exploited masses from here on are from him nothing more than a supplementary force to be added to the military and technical forces of the Stalinist bureaucracy whose nature and historical function have changed radically; history from him is no longer one of class struggle but that of the struggle of blocs, between the capitalist regime and the Stalinist world. He denies that the character of the period separating us from war (considered by him as imminent, anyway) is a distinct historical period involving specific tasks for Trotskyists, and under the designation 'war-revolution' proclaims the identity of a war conducted by the Kremlin bureaucracy with the proletarian revolution; he substitutes for the Trotskyist perspective of revolutionary overthrow of the bureaucracy that of an 'objective' leadership of the world revolution by the bureaucracy, and of a subsequent and gradual withering away of the bureaucracy with the development of the productive forces. Within such a perspective, the Fourth International loses all historical necessity, and even all meaning.

4. Thanks to his tactic of bureaucratic manipulation, accompanied by a clever camouflage, Pablo succeeded in introducing his basic ideas in a thinly veiled form into the theses of the Ninth Plenum of the International Executive Committee (subsequently adopted by the Third World Congress) and thus achieved this eclectic and contradictory mess. Strengthened by the majority he thus secured, he was able at the Tenth Plenum of the I.E.C. to develop the tactical conclusions of his liquidationist orientation. He predicted that the policy of the Kremlin bureaucracy and that of the Stalinist parties would increasingly develop leftward, while the masses would flock about them; from this he deduced an entrist tactic into the Stalinist parties with political capitulation by the Trotskyists, entrism 'sui generis': these ideas and this liquidationist tactic were subsequently extended to the reformist parties and to all mass organizations under petty-bourgeois leadership (the Bolivian MNR, the Peronist movement in Argentina, the Ibanist in Chile, etc...).

5. However, events brought refutation after refutation to the Pablist predictions. Following the 19th Congress of the C.P. of the USSR, the Stalinist parties throughout the world oriented their policies not toward the left as Pablo had predicted but toward the right. With policy of the United National Front, the present position of Stalinist Parties such as the French CP and the Italian CP is far more rightist than at any time in the past. The revolutionary upsurge of the masses, of which the general strike of August 1953 in France has been the most startling manifestation up to now, has under these conditions swept the crisis of Stalinism to a higher level, setting the communist militants in direct conflict with their leaders, while for the first time in history, the radicalization of the masses in France is not passing into the channels of Stalinist organizations, which are continuing to lose their members. The decisive role of the independent revolutionary party as a pole for attracting and organizing communist militants who are in conflict with the Stalinist leadership thus shows up in a striking fashion.

In an equally striking fashion does it appear that the revolutionary upsurge in the capitalist countries, far from provoking the outbreak of a 'suicide-war' by imperialism, serves to delay the effective unleashing of the war.

Finally, the Kremlin bureaucracy, caught in a vise between imperialism marching toward counter-revolutionary war and the pressure of the proletarian masses, which have been stimulated by the progress of soviet economy and the worldwide revolutionary upsurge, and seeing the class equilibrium on a world scale broken, the equilibrium from which it was born and upon which its power in the USSR was founded, has entered a stage of convulsive agony which is tearing it into opposing tendencies; for, contrary to the declarations of Pablo, it is incapable as a whole of basing itself on the masses as against imperialism and the potentially restorationist tendencies in the USSR (Beria's orientation); and it is no less incapable as a whole of basing itself on the potentially restorationist tendencies as against the masses (Malenkov-Khrushchev orientation). Finally, it is more ready than ever to sacrifice the interests of the masses in countries like France and Italy, for example, as a price for even limited concessions of the bourgeoisie in foreign policy.

6. In the face of such a complete failure of his perspectives, Pablo has begun a large-scale operation of camouflage and political swindling, abandoning some of his fundamental positions and deliberately back-tracking, in order the better to hold on to the basic element: liquidation of the political independence of Trotskyism vis a vis the Kremlin bureaucracy and bureaucratic apparatuses in general.

'Objective conditions' yesterday imposed deformed workers' states for centuries. Today Pablo declares that nothing must interfere in the near future with establishing the widest proletarian democracy. War was imminent at the Third World Congress and the revolutionary upsurge could only precipitate imperialism into a 'suicide-war.' Today Pablo has the audacity to write that war has become'possible at any time now' (so it wasn't yesterday?), either immediately or in 'several years'; that the revolutionary upsurge is delaying the war and may even prevent it! And he coldly concludes from this that 'our tactic' (outlined at the Third World Congress and at the Tenth Plenum of the I.E.C.) 'remains (!!!) valid.'

Whereas he refused, as the French majority especially demanded, to inscribe among the slogans of the Third World Congress the traditional Trotskyist slogan for the overthrow of Stalin, today he correctly declares that the struggle for the approaching overturn of the bureaucracy is one of the basic tasks of the International and speaks with tears in his voice of 'our Soviet brothers,' a subject which was taboo two years previously. Yesterday the victory of Mao Tse-Tung 'was not exactly a victory of Stalinism'; today Pablo correctly indicates what the majority of the ICP has stressed for three years, that it is only the break of the Chinese Communist Party with the Kremlin which permitted the victory of the Chinese revolution.

7. At the same time, Pablo is reaffirming and developing his liquidationist orientation: insistence upon an objective revolutionary process which is automatic and irresistible, and which subordinates the reformist and Stalinist bureaucratic apparatuses to itself, changes their nature and function before our eyes and is ever increasingly transforming them into instruments of the revolutionary will of the masses. The analysis of Pablo winds up by considering the problem of revolutionary leadership as 'objectively resolved,' and ignores the unequal development of the revolution in the backward countries and in the advanced countries, whereas it is precisely the delay of the proletarian revolution in the advanced countries which underscores the importance, historically more decisive today than ever before, of the conscious factor for the victory of the world revolution.

He ignores the pressure exerted by imperialism on the Kremlin bureaucracy, and above all, ignores the fact that the pressure exerted by the Soviet masses, far from transforming the role of the bureaucracy and compelling it to enter upon an irreversible course of ever increasing concessions to the masses, is, on the contrary, strengthening its counter-revolutionary vigilance in self-defense. He foresees, contrary to the factual evidence and counter to principles, a co-direction of the world revolutionary movement by the Kremlin and the masses during the entire transitional epoch. He does not understand that the policy of the Kremlin will continue to oscillate right up to the end, up to its disappearance, and pastes the same label on the Beria course, during which the leading oligarchy had attempted to find a support in the masses against the restorationist forces and imperialism, and upon the Khrushchev-Malenkov course, during which the leading oligarchy is searching for a support in the restorationist forces against the masses.

For Pablo the historical mission of the Fourth International has lost all meaning. The 'objective revolutionary process,' under the aegis of the Kremlin, allied with the-masses, is taking its place very well indeed. That is why he is mercilessly bent upon liquidating the Trotskyist forces, under the pretext of integrating them into the 'movement of the masses as it exists.'

The salvation of the Fourth International imperatively demands the immediate eviction of the liquidationist leadership. A democratic discussion must then be opened within the world-wide Trotskyist movement on all problems left suspended, befogged or falsified by the Pabloist leadership during three years. Within this framework, it will be indispensable for the health of the International that the greatest self-criticism be carried through on all phases and causes of the development of the Pabloist gangrene.


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Last updated 17.8.2003