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The arbitrary suspension of the four opposition NC members (Bloom, Henderson, Weinstein, and Lovell) from the Socialist Workers Party at the party’s 1983 post-Oberlin NC meeting in August was politically motivated and in violation of the organizational principles of the SWP and the FI. The charges against the suspended comrades of constituting a faction in the National Committee and of violating party organizational norms are false and groundless. The reason for these suspensions is to prevent the membership of the SWP from learning fully about the anti-Trotskyist course of the present leadership.
The action taken against the four opposition leaders is another step in a series of moves by the SWP majority leadership to convert the SWP from a genuine Leninist-type party into what this leadership conceives to be a Castro-type party.
The SWP leaders seek to become part of a nonexistent “new (Castro/Leninist) international.” They are convinced that in order to consummate a bloc with the Castroist political current they must first repudiate their Trotskyist heritage. This is a challenge to the political program and the organizational existence of the FI.
The most urgent ideological task of all sections of the Fourth International, of all revolutionists, and all serious students of Marx throughout the world is to plumb the depths of this thoroughly anti-Marxist method and unrealistic political course of the SWP leadership. It is a necessary part of the education and rearming of the vanguard.
This is not an easy task. It can be organized and successfully completed only through the structure of the FI.
The theoretical and organizational implications of this ideological struggle to expose the schematic methodology and wistful politics of the SWP leaders are no less far reaching than was the challenge of the “new thinkers” Burnham and Shachtman in 1939. The struggle today to defend the Marxist method of analysis, the concept of permanent revolution, and the indispensability of the Leninist party is a no lesser task than the one Trotsky and Cannon undertook forty-four years ago to defend Marxism and build the proletarian party of world revolution.
This means that the particular issues must be clarified and the solution to some long-standing theoretical puzzles must be explained again in light of the history of revolutionary struggles in the post-World War n period. How were victorious proletarian revolutions possible in Yugoslavia, China, Algeria, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Grenada without benefit of a Leninist-type party in any of these countries? Is it possible for the vanguard party to be created in the heat of revolution? And how suitable is such an instrument for the organization and administration of a workers’ and farmers’ government? How else can the working class throughout the world be rallied to the defense of revolutionary struggles as they erupt at different times and places in this epoch of capitalism’s death agony except through the international vanguard party?
How is this party organized?
How does it relate to the revolutions of the post-World War II period?
Is the governing party in Cuba (or in any other country where a workers’ state exists) — the Cuban Communist Party — a Leninist-type party? Is this party part of the international working class vanguard?
How does the CCP relate to the program, aims, and present organizational structure of the FI?
Is the present CCP a model for future sections of a mass revolutionary international? In what way is the Castro leadership of the CCP promoting — or helping to establish — an international working class vanguard party?
These questions — and many more — are challenges to the leadership of the U.S. SWP and to all other sections of the FI.
The SWP leadership gives answers based on its assumptions that the Trotskyist FI is bankrupt and the Castro current is destined to create a new Leninist international that will organize and lead the world revolution.
Those who are convinced otherwise must explain the fallacies of this position and in the process prepare the ranks of the FT for new working class conquests.
The expulsions of SWP opposition leaders and threats of a membership purge are symptomatic of the ideological sterility and organizational cowardice of the SWP leadership. This can only be effectively exposed and combated within the framework of an ideological struggle such as is suggested above. The broad struggle should be organized and directed by the leaders of the FI. Each section will participate as conditions of the class struggle and the level of party development in different countries dictate.
In the U.S. section, opposition comrades must work under very difficult circumstances. They should strive to stay inside the SWP as long as possible, trying to win over rank-and-file members to a Trotskyist perspective and making it as hard as possible for the leadership to make them victims of the purge.
We can anticipate that as opposition comrades are victimized they will attract the sympathy and support of others who have previously supported the majority — providing oppositionists conduct themselves at all times as loyal SWP members and do not give the false impression that they are “enemies of the SWP.”
It is not easy to work effectively in this way. It requires skills that we are not accustomed to that must be learned, but that once acquired will be useful in other activities in the future.
Those comrades who have been expelled and are outside the SWP should organize to work for their reintegration into the party. We will use various means for this. However, we will at all times work in close collaboration with those comrades who remain inside the SWP — meeting contacts, distributing opposition literature, and conducting ourselves as supporters and builders of the SWP (that is, the real SWP of Cannon and Hansen) rather than builders of a new organization in counterposition to the SWP.
We will also utilize our ties with the Fourth International in this fight. We must see ourselves as part of the ideological struggle taking place within the International against the revisionism of the Barnes leadership.
August 10, 1983
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