Spartacist (English language edition) No. 66
 International Executive Committee of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist)
 2020-03

IEC Plenum: Fighting Centrist Bending to the European Union
Forward with the Banner of Leninism!
The International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) held a plenum of its International Executive Committee (IEC) in Germany last summer. This gathering of the IEC, the ICL’s highest decision-making body between conferences, came at an important time for our organization. The death in April 2019 of our central founder and longtime party leader, Jim Robertson, whose interventions had been crucial in maintaining our revolutionary compass, posed pointblank the question of continuity. Also, this was the first gathering of the leadership elected at the Seventh International Conference of the ICL in 2017, which was the culmination of a hard struggle to re-establish a Leninist framework on the national question and to rectify adaptations to Great Power chauvinism (see “The Fight for Leninism on the National Question,” Spartacist [English edition] No. 65, Summer 2017). The plenum and the memorandum adopted unanimously by the IEC, “Forward with the Banner of Leninism!”, were continuations of that struggle.
A key aim of the plenum was to reappropriate the clear programmatic framework of opposition to the European Union (EU) that we established in the 1970s. As part of our disorientation in the period marked by the 1991-92 counterrevolution that destroyed the Soviet Union, a degenerated workers state, the ICL has repeatedly capitulated to the EU, a consortium of unequal capitalist states dominated by German, and to a lesser extent French, imperialism. As comrade Jay, a member of the International Secretariat (I.S.), reported at the plenum:
“Our main opposition to the EU became liberal outrage over ‘racist fortress Europe,’ with the implication that the imperialists should stop being racist and defend immigrants. We raised the demand for a Socialist United States of Europe like it was some kind of extension of the EU. And by the time the economic crisis hit Europe in 2010, we were writing about the European Central Bank and the IMF ‘helping’ dependent countries with their debts.”
The last several years saw a series of struggles to sharply assert our opposition to the EU. Reprinted below is the section of the plenum memorandum, edited for publication, that codifies the results of the discussion and struggle on this question.
A central task since the International Conference has been the consolidation of a new international leadership collective capable of confronting the enormous challenges the ICL faces in a period defined mainly by a lack of social struggle and a retrogression of proletarian consciousness. The plenum memorandum noted, “Without comrade Robertson, our capacity to maintain our revolutionary continuity depends heavily on the capacity of the I.S., as the continuing executive arm of the IEC, to give the sharpest programmatic guidance possible. Our task remains to do what Lenin did and create a party composed of layer upon layer of thinking Bolsheviks.”
Since 2017, the I.S. has had an unconventional composition, with a number of its members not residing in the international center. The geographic spread brings challenges. At the same time, this configuration is vital because each comrade has more distance and plays the role of a programmatic corrective in the International and in the other comrades’ national sections. It also serves to counterbalance the pressures that come with having our center in the U.S., the most powerful imperialist country.
It is a deforming pressure on the ICL that most of our membership is concentrated in the imperialist centers. The predominant weight of the American section, and the pro-Democratic Party “fight the right” climate in the U.S. under the Trump presidency, continue to be challenges for us (see “In the Predominant Imperialist Power,” Workers Vanguard No. 1158, 26 July 2019). The plenum memo included a section on the Spartacist League/U.S. and one on the German section, the Spartakist-Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands (SpAD), which focused heavily on its struggles over the EU. It was in part to counter the pressures on the SpAD and further its integration into the International that the plenum was held in Germany.
Our commitment to internationalism was highlighted by the multilingual nature of the gathering, where simultaneous translations made the proceedings available in four languages, including for the first time German. Both the plenum and the memorandum strongly motivated the importance of rooting ourselves in communist programmatic continuity and in history.
The plenum began with an educational point on German unification under Bismarck and on Japan’s Meiji Restoration. The presentations explained how these bourgeois revolutions from above led to the rise of Germany and Japan as dominant imperialist powers. “The Meiji Restoration: A Bourgeois Non-Democratic Revolution” (Spartacist [English edition] No. 58, Spring 2004), a programmatic document fundamental to the work of the Spartacist Group of Japan, is both an analysis of the modern history of Japan and an indispensable weapon for political battle against the reformist left. For our German section, it is crucial to appreciate Bismarck’s significance in order to understand the formation of the German capitalist state and its position and role as an imperialist power in the middle of Europe.
Transatlantic Opportunism on the EU
While our problems in confronting the EU reflect pressures we are under in our European sections, much of our wrong approach came from the SL/U.S. There was an important fight leading up to the plenum, and which continued after, over appreciating the fact that the EU remains crucial to the strategic interests of U.S. imperialism, notwithstanding the competition between the American bourgeoisie and its German and other rivals. American capital is heavily invested in Europe, and the EU continues to function as an adjunct to the U.S.-dominated NATO military alliance.
Denying this relationship means capitulating to U.S. imperialist interests in Europe. But this understanding was initially resisted by IECers in the U.S. section, including in the I.S., who tended to reduce problems on this score to bad formulations in our press or analytical shortcomings. One sign of the problem, described in the memo excerpt, was that an initial draft IEC statement on the 2019 “Europarliament” elections written in the U.S. softened our principled opposition to running for seats on this body, which is essentially a diplomatic tool of the EU’s dominant imperialist states. (The IEC statement is printed on page 22 of this issue.) More generally, as the I.S. Secretary wrote in a document following the plenum, liberalism on the EU coming from the U.S. section “was a warmed-over version of our own imperialism’s approach to the EU, i.e., a kind of support to European ‘integration,’ which is the position of NATO, the IMF and the State Department.”
Our problems on the EU stemmed in part from prettifying the role of finance capital in oppressing the dependent countries of Europe. In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin exposed the Kautskyist lie that imperialism is just a policy of military aggression. Lenin explained that imperialism is a stage of capitalism in which monopolies and finance capital have become dominant and the world has been divided by a handful of rival capitalist powers. The imperialists, including the American bourgeoisie, have reaped huge benefits from the European single market and the euro.
There is nothing peaceful about the EU, a tool for imperialist plundering of the oppressed nations of Europe and exploitation of the working class. However, there are widespread illusions that there is “peace in Europe” because Germany is building the EU rather than invading other countries. Lenin’s Imperialism took direct aim at such notions:
“‘Inter-imperialist’ or ‘ultra-imperialist’ alliances, no matter what form they may assume, whether of one imperialist coalition against another, or of a general alliance embracing all the imperialist powers, are inevitably nothing more than a ‘truce’ in periods between wars. Peaceful alliances prepare the ground for wars, and in their turn grow out of wars; the one conditions the other, producing alternating forms of peaceful and non-peaceful struggle on one and the same basis of imperialist connections and relations within world economics and world politics.”
In the lead-up to the plenum, one IECer echoed the party’s past adaptations to the EU, treating it as a federation of equal states rather than a set of exploitative treaties imposed by imperialist powers on their victims. In the guise of being hard against Greek nationalism, the IECer argued that it was wrong to say that the EU was responsible for smashing the result of the 2015 Greek referendum on German imperialism’s bloodsucking EU “bailout” plan. After the vast majority of the population voted “No,” the imperialists insisted on an even more savage program of starvation and humiliation, which the Syriza government agreed to in a sellout of the Greek masses. In arguing that the Syriza government was mainly responsible, the IECer alibied the EU’s imperialist subjugation of Greece. Rejecting this chauvinist framework, the plenum memo reaffirmed: “While Greece is formally an independent country, it does not fundamentally control its own domestic and foreign policies.”
Continuing the Fight Against the Hydra
The Seventh International Conference was crucial for the ICL’s ability to take a strong stand on the side of oppressed nations and against Great Power chauvinism. The IEC Plenum furthered this struggle, making an important correction to the characterization of abuses by two now ex-members who had been involved in the work of the Trotskyist Group of Greece (TOE). The members of the Greek section were critical of the fact that the actions of these individuals were not recognized as racist at the time, when they were in Greece, and that at the International Conference their actions were instead treated as on a continuum with other piggish behavior that came to light in the course of the fight against Anglo-chauvinism. The TOE comrades questioned whether the two should remain members and asked for an International Control Commission investigation. As soon as the investigation was launched, one of the two quit the party.
The plenum passed a motion stating that the International Conference had failed to correctly characterize the conduct of the two as racist, that their behavior was qualitatively worse than other examples of abusive behavior in the ICL, and that they should have been expelled at the time the actions were committed. Following the plenum, the second of the two was expelled after she upheld her grotesque record in Greece and exposed herself as a self-serving liar.
As a small revolutionary Marxist tendency in a prolonged period of political reaction, we have had to struggle hard against the pressures of bourgeois society in order to uphold the banner of Leninism. But our numerous internal struggles over the past period have shown that there is a vibrant and interventionist IEC, with comrades throughout the International playing crucially important roles. The pre-plenum discussions and the proceedings themselves highlighted once more the necessity of international collaboration. The plenum was a strong statement of the ICL’s dedication to the perspective of reforging the Fourth International as the world party of socialist revolution, the essential tool for paving a way forward for the proletariat and opposing imperialist domination of the planet.
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IEC Plenum Memorandum (Excerpt)
The following is a selection from the memorandum adopted by the summer 2019 plenum of the ICL’s International Executive Committee.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the party has repeatedly adapted to the EU, treating this imperialist-dominated conglomerate as a supra-national state and bending to illusions in its “progressive” character. Comrade Robertson intervened repeatedly to correct these departures and insist that we uphold our historic opposition to the EU. As he insisted, “The EU is not a state. It is a treaty entered into by states.” Although there have been numerous correctives over the years, they have been partial and have never tackled the full extent of our capitulations on the question. This plenum seeks to critically review and correct our numerous past deviations on the EU, including in the recent period, in order to go forward on a strong programmatic basis.
We are opposed on principle to the EU and its instrument the euro. The EU is an unstable alliance dominated by German, and to a lesser extent French, imperialism. Its purpose is to increase the exploitation of the working class and the subjugation by the imperialists of dependent countries, and to increase the European imperialists’ competitiveness against their U.S. and Japanese rivals. At the same time, the EU was created with the backing of the U.S. and remains an integral part of the U.S.-dominated transatlantic alliance, a point that has been disputed in the lead-up to this plenum.
Revisionism on the EU is a capitulation to imperialism. For sections in Europe, it is obvious that capitulations on this question come from the pressure of their ruling classes. However, in a number of cases our problems on the EU have come from or were shared by comrades in the SL/U.S., reflecting the political pressure of U.S. imperialism.
The social democrats and the labor lieutenants of capital have played a key role in selling the myth of the EU as a permanent, peaceful, democratic supra-national entity. In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), Lenin polemicized against Karl Kautsky, who raised similar arguments, for his
“most reactionary method of consoling the masses with hopes of permanent peace being possible under capitalism, by distracting their attention from the sharp antagonisms and acute problems of the present times, and directing it towards illusory prospects of an imaginary ‘ultra-imperialism’ of the future.”
The problems the party has had in opposing the EU are part of our broader adaptations to Great Power chauvinism and imperialism. The current struggle over the EU is a continuation of the fight against the chauvinist hydra, codified in the 2017 International Conference document.
U.S. Imperialism, NATO and the EU
The EU is not a homogenous bloc united against the U.S., even though it functions as a bloc against the U.S. on particular political and economic issues. Its forerunner, the European Economic Community (EEC), was historically a Cold War instrument for the U.S. against the USSR, and the EU continues to act as an adjunct of NATO. The American ruling class uses the EU to maintain Germany within the U.S.’s orbit and to counter Russia. The U.S., Germany and France continue to collaborate in expanding the EU and NATO in tandem in East Europe and the Balkans. At the economic level, a large fraction of the surplus value extracted from the exploitation of workers in Europe is appropriated by American capitalists, directly and indirectly. The U.S. bourgeoisie has benefited politically and economically from the EU and overwhelmingly supports it.
In the period following capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union, our propaganda wrongly disappeared the role of the U.S. in the EU. By presenting the EU as if it were united against the U.S., we made the bloc appear more stable than it really is and minimized the differences among the European imperialists. When we began to correct our capitulations to the EU, they were viewed solely as a “European problem,” denying that the problems in the U.S. were an adaptation to the political pressure of U.S. imperialism. Recent examples of softness in the U.S. leadership on the EU included not addressing the intervention of the U.S. in the draft introduction to “Greece: Chauvinist Frenzy over Macedonia” (Workers Vanguard No. 1142, 19 October 2018), blunting our opposition to the EU “parliament” in the draft statement written in New York (“Down With the EU! No Participation in Its Pseudo-Parliament!”, WV No. 1154, 3 May 2019) and subsequently burying two documents about the problems with the draft.
[…]
Evolution of Our Propaganda on the EU
In the 1970s, our tendency opposed on principle the EEC (or Common Market), direct predecessor of the EU. Our articles at the time clearly identified the EEC as a reactionary agreement between capitalist states that was directed against the working class and the Soviet Union. This propaganda provides a model for our dealing with the EU. A document from an I.S. comrade detailing the evolution of our propaganda toward the EU explained that our early propaganda polemicized effectively against the opponents over their treatment of the EEC as a Kautskyite “superstate.” This later disappeared from our propaganda as we ourselves began treating the EU as a “superstate.”
The anti-Soviet nature of the EEC was correctly central to our principled opposition to this imperialist conglomerate. Once the Soviet Union was gone, as part of the general disorientation caused by this world-historic defeat, our opposition to the EU started to waver, though in an uneven manner. While some of the articles written in the early 1990s correctly upheld our political line, others buried our opposition to the EU behind impressionistic analysis and bombastic projections.
The statement we put out for the 1997 Amsterdam “Euromarch,” “For a Workers Europe—For Socialist Revolution!” (WV No. 670, 13 June 1997), is the last formally orthodox article that we wrote on the EU for a number of years, and it has often been quoted in our more recent propaganda. It reaffirmed our fundamental positions in general terms, but it already presented significant weaknesses. The “Euromarch” was an important turning point for the European left in openly mobilizing behind the EU. However, the article failed to sharply denounce this pro-EU rally, reflecting an opportunist softening of our opposition to the EU. The statement contains another serious political error, asserting that “with or without the Maastricht Treaty, the main enemy of the workers of each country is their ‘own’ bourgeoisie.” This misapplication of Karl Liebknecht’s slogan for an interimperialist war disappears the dominant role of foreign finance capital in dependent countries. It denies the point that a worker in an oppressed country has an enemy in the bourgeoisie of the imperialist oppressor country, e.g., Greek workers are viciously oppressed by German capital. The sentence also downplays our opposition to the Maastricht Treaty, which is oppressive for workers including in the imperialist centers.
A 1999 discussion on participating in the fake EU “parliament” marked the beginning of an overt assault on our principled opposition to the EU itself. In the years following this discussion, the EU was barely addressed in our propaganda, despite the fact that it had become a central question for all of our European sections. The introduction of the euro, which was forcibly imposed on oppressed countries in the EU, was a devastating blow to workers and the oppressed across Europe, but we did not mention it in our propaganda at the time. When the EU was mentioned, it was treated as a “superstate.” These articles threw away our previous understanding of the nature of the EU, and our opposition to it was generally limited to anti-racist liberalism often directed at the pro-EU social forum milieu. The article “Capitalist Europe’s War on Immigrants Is a War on All Workers” (WV No. 784, 12 July 2002) was written in the context of the EU summit at Seville but did not even say that we are opposed to the European Union. This article was totally liberal; a longtime European cadre remembers comrade Robertson hating it and saying that it could have been written by a Marxist social worker.
In 2004, two central IEC members in Europe launched a revisionist discussion seeking to explicitly repudiate our understanding of the EU as opposed to the centrist hypocrisy that had become our established practice. They argued that Germany and France had transcended their rivalries, accepting the EU and the euro as stable and presenting the EU as a superstate. However, this discussion did not lead the party to formally revise our program. An early review of our problems on the EU in the 2014 IEC Plenum Memo singled out the documents by these comrades as if they were the source of our deviations on the EU and the euro. In fact, there was general agreement with their arguments because they expressed the appetite to capitulate to the EU that was prevalent in the party at the time. The profoundly revisionist 2004 discussion did not qualitatively change our propaganda.
In the wake of the 2008 global economic crisis, while the imperialists imposed devastating austerity on the oppressed European countries, our propaganda presented the imperialists as “helping” dependent countries and put the whole blame for austerity on the bourgeoisies of the oppressed countries. When the question of siding with the oppressed against the oppressor was sharply posed, our opportunism on the EU became social chauvinism. As Lenin explained in “Opportunism, and the Collapse of the Second International” (1915), “Social-chauvinism is a consummated opportunism. That is beyond doubt. The alliance with the bourgeoisie used to be ideological and secret. It is now public and unseemly.”
Following a 2011 IEC plenum, a senior IEC cadre wrote a document relaying comrade Robertson’s concerns that “people thought our line in opposition to the EU was hypothetical and that in fact we should use our observations from the past to demonstrate that our line has been vindicated by what is happening today.” This was the beginning of correcting our longstanding opportunism on the EU. Struggles over the Greek referendum, Grexit and “open border” liberalism, as well as the fight on the national question, were all key to our programmatic rearming. These fights are codified in the 2017 conference document. Since 2017, our political understanding has gotten better through numerous struggles on the EU, which are still ongoing.
EU: Tool for Imperialist Plunder
An essential component of our opposition to the EU is that we are against the national oppression of dependent European countries by the imperialists. However, for years we approached the EU as though it were a union of equals. While we originally insisted that the EU was an instrument for domination by German imperialism and to a lesser extent French imperialism, this disappeared from our propaganda by the early 2000s. As an IEC member in Europe argued in a document written before the plenum, “Our articles are bad or weak because we thought that the EU is peaceful and progressive and we failed to recognize early on that Germany and to a lesser extent France tramples on the national sovereignty of the smaller capitalist countries.” Indicative of this, the 2004 Agreement for Common Work Between the ICL and the Trotskyist Group of Greece as well as the 2007 article announcing the refounding of the Spartacist Group Poland did not even mention the EU.
In 1999, while partially upholding our opposition to the EU, a senior cadre also wrongly argued that “Italy is not to Germany as Mexico is to the United States. The European Union is not the European equivalent of NAFTA. We are dealing with the relationships of stronger to weaker advanced capitalist imperialist states.” Italy aside, the notion that countries such as Ireland, Portugal or Greece are “imperialist” flies in the face of reality. While not semicolonies, these are dependent countries. As Lenin explained in Imperialism:
“It must be observed that finance capital and its foreign policy, which is the struggle of the great powers for the economic and political division of the world, give rise to a number of transitional forms of state dependence. Not only are the two main groups of countries, those owning colonies, and the colonies themselves, but also the diverse forms of dependent countries which, politically, are formally independent, but in fact, are enmeshed in the net of financial and diplomatic dependence, typical of this epoch.”
In fact, like NAFTA/USMCA, the EU is an agreement for the plunder of oppressed countries.
In the early 2000s, a number of articles, especially in Workers Hammer, commented on the EU’s expansion into East Europe and its possible expansion into Turkey without opposing it, and some articles appear positive about the expansion of the EU. However, the 2004 IEC Plenum did reaffirm that “we oppose the European Union and hence its extension to Eastern Europe. The same applies to Turkey.” Thus coming out of that plenum, in an article in Le Bolchévik No. 171 (March 2005), reprinted in WV No. 848 (13 May 2005), we opposed the expansion of the EU into East Europe (“No to Capitalist European Union and Its Constitution!”). In the case of WH, it was not until the summer of 2006 that it retrospectively claimed that we opposed the eastward expansion of the EU (“Full Citizenship Rights for All Immigrants!”, WH No. 195, Summer 2006).
Our articles on the economic crisis in Greece written in 2010-11 put all the responsibility for austerity on the Greek governments while presenting the EU and IMF as playing a progressive role. One example of this Great Power chauvinism is the article “Greece: Down With PASOK Government’s ‘Stability Program’!” (WV No. 959, 21 May 2010), which states that “as their part of the bailout deal, the EU and IMF committed an unprecedented sum—almost $1 trillion—for loans to Greece, and potentially other heavily indebted EU countries like Portugal and Spain, to help them cover their budget deficits and refinance their debt” [emphasis added].
As one IEC member laid out in a May 2019 document, the article titled “Greece: Mass Anger Over Savage Austerity” (WV No. 983, 8 July 2011) grotesquely accuses the Greek workers of nationalism for fighting against the EU, falsely counterposing this to fighting against the Greek bourgeoisie. The article stated: “As long as Greek workers are mobilized primarily against the foreign diktats of the IMF and EU, they will be unable to see that opposing the imperialists is intertwined with overthrowing the Greek bourgeoisie.”
A document by an IECer in Britain outlined that the same problems are present in our propaganda on Ireland. The Permanent Revolution pamphlet (2008) states: “For well over a century, Ireland has been integrated into the economy of the British Isles, with a large fraction of the Irish proletariat working in the factories and construction sites of London and other cities. And in recent decades, Ireland’s membership in the European Union has played a large part in the country’s further economic development.” The article never mentions the national oppression of Ireland and outrageously presents British imperialism and the EU as playing a progressive role in the development of the Irish economy. As is already apparent from the headline, “Dublin Government Launches Savage Attack on Working People,” the article in WV No. 970 (3 December 2010) written by the SL/B blames EU-imposed austerity measures solely on the Dublin government and presents the EU as promoting stability and “helping” Ireland by bailing out the banks. This article also effectively takes a side with the imperialists by denouncing the “nationalist hue and cry” over Irish sovereignty when the European Central Bank stationed “observers” in the Republic’s Finance Department.
Like the ECU (European Currency Unit), the euro is the “deutschmark in drag.” We did not write anything substantive about the euro until after the world financial crisis, much less oppose the devastating consequences of its introduction. The initial articles addressing this question, written while the Greek economy was being crushed by Germany, did not characterize the euro as the financial instrument of German imperialism or state its oppressive nature. For example, an article written by the SpAD and reprinted in part in WV as “Financial Crisis Rocks Imperialist EU” (WV No. 960, 4 June 2010) stated:
“The attitude of the German bourgeoisie toward the introduction of the euro was mixed to negative, since it saw the danger of ceding sovereignty rights while obtaining a currency that would tend to soften.”
While grotesquely presenting the German imperialists as victims, the article has nothing to say about how Greece is oppressed through the euro!
For the Socialist United States of Europe, United on a Voluntary Basis!
During the 2000s, our propaganda raised the call for a Socialist United States of Europe without making clear that opposing the EU is a precondition for this perspective. For example, the article “Mass Protests Shake France” (WV No. 867, 31 March 2006) stated: “Against the reformists’ appeal for a capitalist ‘social Europe,’ we call for proletarian revolutions to achieve a socialist united states of Europe.” Nowhere in the article did we say that we are against the European Union. This is similar to how the reformists use the slogan, to express their view that the EU is a step toward “socialism.”
In contrast, our articles in the 1970s polemicized with our opponents on this exact point. “Down With the Common Market of NATO Europe!” (WV No. 233, 8 June 1979) stated:
“The USec’s main slogan in the elections is, ‘For a Socialist United States of Europe!’ To raise this slogan in running for the Strasbourg parliament implies that the Common Market is in some way historically progressive, i.e., provides an objective basis for the socialist unification of Europe. But the Common Market is no more a progressive step toward the socialist unification of Europe than was Nazi Germany’s conquest of most of Europe in 1939-44. The USec electoral platform never clearly states that the EEC cannot be transformed into a Socialist Europe but must be destroyed.”
When calling for a Socialist United States of Europe, we should be explicit that it can be achieved only through a series of proletarian revolutions in the different European countries, and we must make clear our opposition to the EU.
Following discussion in the Lega trotskista d’Italia in 2017, it was proposed that our demand for a Socialist United States of Europe be changed by adding “united on a voluntary basis.” This is an important addition because it takes into account that Europe includes both oppressor and oppressed nations, some of which are fighting for independence. It highlights the fact that the national question will not immediately disappear after the revolution and that historically oppressed nations will not be forced into a union with their former oppressors.
Against the Kautskyite Notion of a “Superstate”!
An overarching problem in our propaganda is treating the EU like a “superstate.” The EU is not a state. It does not pass laws or have its own armed bodies of men. It is an alliance of capitalist countries whose bourgeoisies all have separate, conflicting interests. Many of our articles have used wrong formulations that imply the contrary: “EU capitalists,” “capitalist Europe,” “European military units,” “the rulers of the European Union,” “supranational police-state measures,” “EU citizens,” etc. We should not use such formulations.
The 1997 Euromarch article, “For a Workers Europe—For Socialist Revolution!”, has been repeatedly quoted in our propaganda and used as a point of reference on the question of the “superstate” and the euro. The article argued:
“Control over the quantity of money within its boundaries is a basic economic prerogative of a bourgeois state, one necessarily closely linked to other instruments of economic policy. A stable monetary system based on the ‘euro’ would require tight and permanent restrictions over taxation and government expenditure in all the EU member states. This is precisely what Kohl and the Bundesbank are now demanding. But since capitalism is organised on the basis of particular national states, itself the cause of repeated imperialist wars to redivide the world, it is impossible to cohere a stable pan-European bourgeois state. A European imperialist ‘superstate’ can be achieved only by the methods of Adolf Hitler, not those of Jacques Delors, the French social-democratic architect of Maastricht. Should the Maastricht project for a common European currency come into being, it would amount to only a brief, conflict-ridden episode.”
While this statement correctly emphasizes the inherent instability of the euro and links the control of currency to national sovereignty, it also has a number of weaknesses. The most significant of these is that by stating that it is impossible to have a “stable pan-European bourgeois state,” the article wrongly implies that there could be an unstable pan-European bourgeois state, and that this could be the case with the EU.
Another weakness in the article is the statement that a “‘superstate’ can be achieved only by the methods of Adolf Hitler.” While evocative, this assertion is imprecise. Hitler brought military occupation and quisling regimes, not a “superstate.”
Liberalism on “Fortress Europe”
We should not use the term “fortress Europe.” This purely liberal term, which began appearing in our articles in the 1990s, is simply a call to open the borders. As one comrade argued, it also accepts the false notion that the EU is a “superstate” with one common external border, a common immigration policy and “free movement” within the bloc.
We should not deal with anti-immigration repression as one common policy that is shared by every country within the EU. Our starting point should be to oppose the specific repressive measures taken by specific countries. This does not deny that capitalist states do carry out coordinated repression, including through the EU.
Our embrace of the slogan “Down with racist fortress Europe” went hand in hand with liberal demands effectively calling for open borders. Until the 2015 fight on this question, we often used formulations such as “full citizenship rights for all immigrants and asylum seekers” [emphasis added]. This implies that the working class should fight for full citizenship rights for anybody on earth who wants to come into a given country, i.e., “open the borders” liberalism.
The EU’s purported “free movement” of people is a fraud. A patchwork of restrictions governs who can live and work where. States regulate who can enter their borders, including through treaties, but this does not mean that borders “disappear,” something that can happen only with the withering away of the state. As Lenin explained:
“We maintain that the state is necessary, and a state presupposes frontiers. The state, of course, may hold a bourgeois government, but we need the Soviets. But even Soviets are confronted with the question of frontiers. What does ‘Down with frontiers’ mean? It is the beginning of anarchy…. Only when the socialist revolution has become a reality, and not a method, will the slogan ‘Down with frontiers’ be a correct slogan.”
—“Speech on the National Question” (April 1917)
As against “open the borders” liberalism, our line remains encapsulated in the call for “full citizenship rights for all immigrants” who made it into the country in question. We oppose deportations and fight for a class-struggle leadership of the trade unions against the anti-immigrant divide-and-rule of the bosses. It will require socialist revolutions internationally to put an end to the imperialist devastation that drives emigrants to leave their homes.
Tinkering with the EU Treaties
A 2018 I.S. meeting adopted the position that “we are against the Posted Workers Directive (PWD), one of many mechanisms of the European Union to attack the trade unions and lower the wages and benefits of all workers.” Although the motion stated that opposing the PWD “is part of our opposition to the EU itself,” in fact, the motion sanctioned a deviant method of singling out particular EU regulations for opposition, a method we had correctly rejected in the past.
In 2015, the I.S. had correctly opposed the comrades who argued to single out the Dublin III agreement for opposition out of all the EU treaties. That agreement states that the country where refugees first enter the EU will process their asylum requests. However, our wrong position on the Posted Workers Directive gave new impetus to the liberal appetite to single out the Dublin agreement, leading the I.S. to reopen that discussion.
In an 18 August 2018 letter to the I.S., a senior comrade in the Bay Area relayed how comrade Robertson convinced her
“that to oppose Dublin III, or for that matter any other particular regulation of the EU, is to accept that the EU is some kind of ‘superstate’ as opposed to an unstable conglomerate of imperialist nation states and weaker, dependent countries. As he pointed out regardless of the particular EU mechanisms controlling the flows of people and labor, the bourgeoisies of EU countries do assert their own rule (albeit in the case of the weaker countries this is highly curtailed by the predominant power of German imperialism, to the point that Greece has been reduced to a virtual neo-colony which in turn owes much to the servitude of the Syriza government). Moreover, to selectively oppose particular EU regulations buys into the notion that the EU can be reformed, i.e., partakes of the myth of a ‘social’ Europe. To be clear these arguments apply not simply to the question of Dublin III but also the Posted Workers Directive which we recently took a position in opposition to.”
A subsequent I.S. motion corrected these problems on the basis of this intervention.
No Participation in the Fake European “Parliament”!
One component of the recent struggles to reassert our opposition to the EU has been reclaiming our line that it is unprincipled to run for election to the EU “parliament” or give critical support to opponents running in it. As a 2019 I.S. motion stated:
“The European ‘parliament’ is used by the imperialists in the EU to falsely present their consortium as a ‘free’ and ‘democratic’ union of peoples that transcends the nation state. The EU parliament is nothing but a diplomatic forum for haggling over treaties to the benefit centrally of the Fourth Reich at the expense of the weaker European countries and the working class across Europe. The participation of leftists in European elections necessarily gives credence to this charade. To serve in the European parliament is to be a diplomatic representative for a capitalist state, which is a betrayal of the proletariat’s interests.”
In fact, the 1979 article “Down With the Common Market of NATO Europe!” had the correct position of opposing the European “parliament.” However, that position was wrongly expressed in the call for a boycott, an electoral tactic that contradicted the article’s correct principled opposition to the European parliament by implying that we might participate in these elections in other circumstances. Nevertheless, the article established the key understanding that running for the then EEC “parliament” was seeking representation in a reactionary imperialist alliance. It firmly asserted that revolutionary Marxists “would not participate in this Euro-imperialist charade.”
In 1999, there was an international discussion that criticized our 1979 article opposing participation in the EEC “parliament.” Although the I.S. motion voted at the time doesn’t explicitly repudiate our principled opposition to participating in the EU “parliament,” the whole thrust of the discussion opened the door to participation, presenting this as if it were a tactical question. Following this discussion, we no longer criticized our opponents for the very act of participating in EU elections. Rather, we engaged in polemics over the content of their electoral platforms. Most of our polemics over EU elections are against British groups that claim to be against the EU: [Arthur] Scargill’s SLP [Socialist Labour Party], No2EU. While we rightly criticize these formations for being nationalist, we downplay how the EU is used against British workers and our own opposition to it. The article “No vote to No2EU!” (WH No. 207, Summer 2009) argues against voting for No2EU in the European elections. However, its whole premise is that we could potentially vote in EU elections.
In the context of the 2019 European elections, it became necessary to clarify our position. The I.S. Secretary argued that we should uphold our 1979 article and not participate or give critical support to opponents running in EU elections. There were a lot of differences within the IEC over this question. One IECer gave the strongest expression of these differences in two documents arguing that participation in EU elections is a tactical question and treating the EU “parliament” as a real parliament.
The draft statement on the EU “parliament” that was sent for approval to the IEC indicated that there was ongoing softness on this question. It did not express the politics laid out in the initial I.S. motion and presented our opposition to participating in the EU “parliament” as a question of how much power this body has, not of the nature of the institution. Participating in the EU “parliament” means participating in the reactionary EU alliance. Arguing against participation on the basis that the “parliament” is “impotent” or that it “has no power” implies that we could participate if it had power! This methodology is similar to Workers Power’s call in 1997:
“Dissolve the powerless European parliament and convene a Europe-wide constituent assembly (organised and defended by the workers’ organisations) to tear up the Maastricht treaty and to draw up a new workers’ plan for economic and political convergence, designed to meet the needs of the workers, not the ruling class.”
—Workers Power, January 1997 (quoted in WV No. 670, 13 June 1997)
Furthermore, the draft did not make clear that participating in the EU’s so-called “parliament” inherently means serving as a diplomatic representative of a capitalist state. And it did not argue against opponents for the very act of campaigning for a seat in this body.
Down With the EU! No Participation in Its Pseudo-Parliament!
For a Socialist United States of Europe, United on a Voluntary Basis!
The following statement was issued on 21 April 2019 by the International Executive Committee of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist).
Social democrats and other reformists are beating the drums for the European Union (EU) in upcoming elections to the European Parliament. Typically, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) propounds that “Europe is the answer.” The very act of campaigning for and participating in the European Parliament betrays the interests of the working class. This “parliament” is not a parliament but a diplomatic forum. It is used by the imperialists to falsely present their consortium as a “free” and “democratic” union of peoples that transcends the nation-state.
Our international tendency has always opposed the EU and its predecessor organization, the European Economic Community (EEC), which were initially established as an economic appendage to the U.S.-led NATO military alliance against the Soviet degenerated workers state. The EU is today dominated by German imperialism, and secondarily by France. The EU is a consortium of capitalist states whose purpose is to maximize the exploitation of the working class in each of its countries and to enforce the economic domination and subjugation by the imperialist powers of poorer countries such as Greece, Ireland, Portugal and East European member states, including through its financial instrument, the euro. The EU is also designed to increase the European imperialists’ competitiveness against their rivals in the U.S. and Japan.
The EU is not a superstate but a series of treaties entered into by states. In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), V.I. Lenin exposed the Social Democrat Karl Kautsky’s reactionary-utopian notion of “ultra-imperialism,” in which the capitalist powers would supposedly overcome their mutual rivalries as they jointly exploited the world. Because capitalism is organized on the basis of particular national states, it is sheer Kautskyism to posit a pan-European bourgeois state, or a stable common currency. The EU is subject to continual tensions arising from the disparate national interests of the European imperialists, which constantly threaten to tear it apart, and can be broken up by class struggle.
It is unprincipled for Marxists to participate in the European Parliament. Prior to 1979, delegates were appointed by the governments of the EEC. The post-1979 direct election of delegates did not change its essentially diplomatic character. As we wrote in the newspaper of our U.S. section 40 years ago, in regard to participation by the pseudo-Trotskyist United Secretariat (USec) in the Europarliament elections, “What if NATO’s North Atlantic Council were constituted by direct elections, or the colonialist British Commonwealth set up a pseudo-parliamentary body: would the USec seek representation in these imperialist alliances? We can only assume that they would!” (Workers Vanguard No. 233, 8 June 1979).
The International Communist League does not seek to renegotiate the particular terms and provisions of the EU; to do so would reinforce illusions that the EU can be reformed in the interests of the working class. The misleaders of the working class propagate the lie of a “social Europe,” the false view that the EU can be an instrument for social progress for the workers and the oppressed. Our attitude toward the EU is intransigent opposition: we seek to shatter it through proletarian internationalist struggle. We fight for workers revolutions across the continent, leading to a Socialist United States of Europe, united on a voluntary basis.
The institutions of the EU, including its “parliament,” are nothing more than bodies that regulate the terms of exploitation and oppression of the capitalist order in Europe under the leadership of Germany. The treaties regulating the EU represent the balance of power between the imperialists themselves and between the imperialists and the oppressed dependent countries. The European Parliament is an impotent advisory body that tinkers with the treaties negotiated by the heads of EU member states. No matter what the platform on which a member of its “parliament” is elected, his role is that of a diplomatic representative of a capitalist state. Such service in negotiating reactionary treaties necessarily entails sharing responsibility for their outcome.
To participate in any way in the EU “parliament” would compromise the class independence of the proletariat. On that basis, the ICL on principle does not give critical electoral support to left opponent organizations running for this “parliament.” In “Left-Wing” Communism—An Infantile Disorder (1920), Lenin pointed out that the masses learn from experience and not simply from communist propaganda. At the time, he urged Communists in Britain to help put the Labour Party in government so that the masses could learn that the Labourites were class traitors. The ICL has used this tactic when appropriate. However, one cannot expose reformists by electing them to the European Parliament. The very act of running means accepting the framework of tinkering with the EU imperialist treaty.
Like the League of Nations of old (and the United Nations today), the EU is a den of imperialist thieves and their victims. Up until 1934, the Stalinist bureaucratic caste in Moscow and the Communist parties that supported it opposed participation in the League. When the Kremlin changed course in 1934 and joined it, this marked the onset of the popular-front policy, based on the invention of a “progressive” wing of imperialism. Pillorying Stalin’s betrayal, the Trotskyists quoted his own 1927 declaration regarding the League in an article in New International (July 1934):
“The Soviet Union is not prepared to become a part of that camouflage for imperialist machinations represented by the League of Nations. The League is the rendezvous of the imperialist leaders who settle their business there behind the scenes. The subjects about which the League speaks officially, are nothing but empty phrases intended to deceive the workers. The business carried on by the imperialist ring-leaders behind the scenes, that is the actual work of imperialism which the eloquent speakers of the League of Nations hypocritically cloak.”
The EU is an alliance of states that are unequal, with the dominant imperialist oppressor states lording it over the poorer, oppressed countries. It is held together through economic force and blackmail exerted by the more powerful imperialists. An example is the imposition of the euro, which devastated living standards of working people and benefited German capitalism. Control over currency is a key component of national sovereignty. Ordinarily, a debtor country can gain some relief and regain economic competitiveness by devaluation. But this is not possible within the eurozone.
How the imperialists oppress the dependent countries in the EU was described in a Financial Times (11 May 2014) article, “How the Euro Was Saved.” In 2011, when then Greek prime minister George Papandreou proposed a referendum on a bailout, the leading EU powers united to stop the referendum and organized a political coup to replace him. French president Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel of Germany, IMF director Christine Lagarde and the EU’s two presidents met to plot how to block the referendum. They proposed a “national unity government” to be headed by Lucas Papademos, a former vice president of the European Central Bank. Within a week, Papademos took over. No election was held.
In July 2015, Greece’s Syriza government called a referendum on accepting further austerity as the condition for another EU bailout deal. Some 60 percent of the population voted “no,” delivering a slap in the face to the EU. Prime Minister Tsipras then agreed to an even more savage program of starvation, misery and humiliation drawn up by the EU masters. In response, our comrades of the Trotskyist Group of Greece (TOE) called for forming workers action committees that would repudiate this sellout, and repudiate the EU and the euro. The TOE explained that these committees would fight for such demands as canceling the debt; workers defense guards against the fascists; expropriation of the banks, utilities and ports; jobs for all through a shorter workweek at no loss in pay. These demands were linked with the need to struggle toward “a government which will act in the interests of the working people and be subordinated to them” (“Repudiate Syriza’s Sellout to the EU! ENOUGH!” Workers Vanguard No. 1072, 7 August 2015).
The only mass workers party in the country, the Greek Communist Party (KKE), played a treacherous role in demobilizing struggle when it counted. The KKE refused to call for a “no” vote in the referendum. This proved the hollowness of the KKE’s claims to oppose the EU. The fact that the KKE runs for and participates in the European Parliament, for which the EU pays substantial subsidies, underscores its actual subordination to the EU and the European capitalist order.
The trade-union misleaders and reformist workers parties have played the key role in propping up the EU and the capitalist bosses, exemplified by the SPD’s “GroKo” (Grand Coalition) with Merkel. Germany’s predominance in the EU is due in no small part to the SPD. The last SPD-headed government introduced a series of anti-working-class “reforms,” including the Hartz IV laws and Agenda 2010, dismantling numerous welfare provisions. This directly led to the introduction of a huge low-wage sector in the country, greatly strengthening the competitive position of the German bourgeoisie.
The ICL’s British section supports Brexit and called for a vote to “leave” in the 2016 referendum. In contrast, Labour “left” leader Jeremy Corbyn betrayed his working-class supporters by campaigning against Brexit and more recently has come out for a second referendum, in defiance of the vote of the populace. With austerity continuing to stalk the workers of Europe, the reformists’ servile support for the EU has fueled the growth of the far right and fascists.
The ICL’s opposition to the EU and its “parliament” is proletarian, internationalist and revolutionary. To build a society free of hunger, want and oppression requires a series of socialist revolutions that will expropriate the capitalist rulers, especially in imperialist centers like Germany and the U.S., and establish an international planned economy based on workers rule. What is needed is the construction of revolutionary workers parties, sections of a reforged Fourth International, to lead the working class to power, sweeping away the rotten capitalist-imperialist system.
On the Genesis of Women’s Oppression
A Tribute to Lewis Henry Morgan
(Women and Revolution pages)
Pioneer American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881) was the author of Ancient Society (1877), the groundbreaking work that for the first time put the study of early history and culture on a scientific basis. As such it was the inspiration for Friedrich Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), the key Marxist work laying out the institution of the family as the main source of the oppression of women.
One of the more pernicious myths promulgated by bourgeois ideologists is that the family and the subordination of women are decreed by biology and have always existed. Morgan’s work proved that the “tribe” (clan), not the family, was “the primitive and spontaneously developed form of human association” in early society (Engels, footnote to Capital, Vol. 1, 1883). Morgan often used the Latin term “gens” or its plural “gentes,” now called clan or band. In the tribal organization, the original division of labor between the sexes was egalitarian and reciprocal, kinship was reckoned through the maternal line, and sexual relations were relatively free. There was no dependency of women and children upon the support of a man, and the care of the children was the work of the clan as a whole.
In Marxist terms, Morgan’s work showed that the family and the oppression of women arose out of the breaking up of the communal, egalitarian hunter-gatherer clan. The advance of productive technology (e.g., agriculture, domestication of animals, metallurgy, textiles) in the late Neolithic period allowed for the production of a social surplus for the first time and laid the basis for the emergence of a class-divided society based on the exploitation of labor by a ruling elite. The invention of private property brought with it the institutions of the state and the family to defend and differentiate the tiny group of exploiters from the masses of toilers. Thus the source of the subordination of women is neither biology (as reactionaries of all sorts claim) nor male-supremacist ideology (as feminists often claim). Women’s oppression is the product of a certain stage of historical development, and it inevitably is affected as the social and economic level of society changes.
Morgan saw his analysis of cultural history as “provisional” and “convenient and useful,” commenting that it “may require modification, and perhaps essential change in some of its members.” Indeed, since the publication of Ancient Society some of Morgan’s hypotheses have been shaken or even become untenable, but Morgan’s broader understanding of the evolution of early human society is confirmed by findings in anthropology, human evolution and archeology over the last 150 years.
The issue of updating Morgan’s data has often been used by anti-communists to attack Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. On the contrary, a dialectical materialist analysis of early history as presently understood deepens, confirms and reinforces the conception that the genesis of women’s oppression lies in private property and the family; it also confirms the Marxist perspective of women’s liberation through socialist revolution. Marxists see the emancipation of women as part of a worldwide socialist transformation that will include the full replacement of the family with socialized childcare and housework in a society of abundance created by a globally planned economy based on the most advanced technology.
Morgan and the Materialist Conception of History
In his preface to the first edition of Origin, Engels wrote:
“The following chapters constitute, in a sense, the fulfillment of a behest. It was no less a person than Karl Marx who had planned to present the results of Morgan’s researches in connection with the conclusions arrived at by his own—within certain limits, I might say our own—materialist investigation of history and only thus to make clear their whole significance. For Morgan rediscovered in America, in his own way, the materialist conception of history that had been discovered by Marx forty years ago, and in his comparison of barbarism and civilisation was led by this conception to the same conclusions, in the main points, as Marx.”
Origin, subtitled In the Light of the Researches by Lewis H. Morgan, was based on extensive extracts from and notes on Ancient Society that Marx made before he died in 1883. (For Marx’s actual notes, see The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx, Lawrence Krader, ed. [Amsterdam: International Institute of Social History, 1972].)
Morgan spent a lifetime in original research and fieldwork that was initially sparked by his discovery of a kinship system among the Iroquois in upper New York State that had been unknown to European science. This led to his discovery of the original egalitarian, clan-based organization of human society and of the fact that the family itself had evolved and changed, based on the underlying social and economic structure. Through subsequent worldwide research, Morgan hypothesized that human history as a whole could be defined in terms of successive stages. His starting point was the fact of the uneven development of the different peoples of the world, illustrating the sequence of social evolution.
The purpose of Ancient Society was stated in its subtitle, Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization. Morgan wrote:
“As it is undeniable that portions of the human family have existed in a state of savagery, other portions in a state of barbarism, and still other portions in a state of civilization, it seems equally so that these three distinct conditions are connected with each other in a natural as well as necessary sequence of progress.”
Bourgeois ideologues have slandered Morgan as a racist for using the terms “savagery” and “barbarism.” But as Rosa Luxemburg noted:
“By filling the descriptions ‘savagery,’ ‘barbarism’ and ‘civilization’ for the first time with a positive content, Morgan made them into precise scientific concepts and applied them as tools of scientific research. For Morgan, savagery, barbarism and civilization are three sections of cultural development, separated from each other by quite particular material characteristics.”
—“Introduction to Political Economy,” 1909-10
The stages that Morgan called savagery and barbarism are now called Old Stone Age (Paleolithic) and New Stone Age (Neolithic), while the story of the evolution from one to the other and further to class-divided society has been enriched and broadened.
Independently of Marx and Engels, Morgan pointed to the same force propelling social evolution, namely that of the development of the mode of production: “Mankind commenced their career at the bottom of the scale and worked their way up from savagery to civilization through the slow accumulations of experimental knowledge” by inventing more effective methods of producing the means of subsistence (food, clothing, tools, shelter). He postulated parallel sequences in the history of social, economic and political institutions: the evolution of the family, private property and the state.
While he began with a materialist framework, Morgan saw social evolution as springing from the development of a series of “original ideas” (the “idea” of government, of the family, of property). It fell to Engels in Origin to apply a fully historical-materialist understanding to Morgan’s findings and to sharply define their theoretical implications.
Morgan Founds Scientific Anthropology
Born into a prosperous farming family in upstate New York, Morgan was well educated and soon showed the scholarly dedication that led to his becoming one of the premier American scientists of his generation. He served as the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and founded its anthropology section, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and delivered innumerable papers to the prestigious New York Historical Society and others. He was part of the first generation that contributed to the newly founded Smithsonian Institution; he worked to build museum collections of Native American artifacts. He met with and corresponded with Charles Darwin and other prominent scientists of his day.
Morgan’s interest in ethnology began as a youthful romantic infatuation with Native Americans, specifically the Iroquois. His father’s farm was located within their historic territory; the federal government awarded the land to Morgan’s grandfather in recognition of his service in the Continental Army in the American Revolution. Morgan founded a fraternity with his friends modeled on Iroquois dress, language and customs. Soon he made the acquaintance of the 16-year-old Ely Parker, a Seneca Indian from the Iroquois tribe who later became famous in his own right as a Civil War brigadier general under U.S. Grant and as the author of the terms of the Confederate surrender at Appomattox. Parker introduced Morgan to his friends and family at the Tonawanda Reservation.
On one of these visits Morgan made the discovery that set the course of his life: he found that the Iroquois had a kinship system at odds with customary practice in the country. As an example, among the Iroquois one called one’s biological mother and her sisters by the same kinship term, and the children of one’s mother’s sisters were called “brother” and “sister.” A man called his brother’s children “son” and “daughter”; however, the children of his sister were “nephew” and “niece.” The Iroquois rule of exogamy (marriage outside the group) meant that mother and father were in different clans. This, not biological relationships, determined the concepts and terms of kinship. Morgan had discovered the kinship terminology of a clan based on matrilineal descent.
Morgan pursued his studies of Iroquois ethnology with Parker’s assistance, both at Tonawanda and at the Six Nations Reservation in Canada. In 1851, he published the first major scientific account of Native Americans, The League of the Iroquois, dedicated to Parker and considered to this day one of the finest studies of Iroquois culture. Morgan never lived among the Iroquois, as Engels claimed—this error was widely believed in Europe at the time. In fact, he was adopted into the Hawk clan of the Seneca tribe and tried to help the Native Americans in their struggle against attempts to defraud them of their land.
Settling in Rochester, New York, in 1844, Morgan earned his living as a successful railroad lawyer and businessman, traveling widely throughout the Midwest in the process. On his journeys he always pursued opportunities to meet and interview members of different Native American tribes (including the Ojibwas, who belonged to a different language family from the Iroquois) and soon found evidence of similar kinship systems among them. After amassing comfortable wealth through stocks and investments, he retired from his Rochester law practice but continued to serve as an attorney for railroad and mining operations in Michigan. He undertook a series of field trips to the west—including the Kansas-Nebraska territory, the Missouri River region, Colorado and New Mexico—collecting artifacts and recording the details of kinship systems.
In 1871, Morgan published Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family based on the comprehensive collection of kinship terminology current among the peoples of the world. The data came from his own fieldwork among Native Americans as well as through a massive correspondence with missionaries, traders and government agents in Australia, India, Africa, the Pacific Islands and other places.
The analysis of his data led him to the observation that similar systems of naming kinsmen existed independently in different parts of the world. On this basis he postulated that kinship terminology has sociological significance, pointing to earlier stages of actual social relations. Drawing as well on his extensive knowledge of ancient Greek and Roman history, in 1877 Morgan published Ancient Society, in which he reconstructed the early foundation of written history.
Morgan hypothesized that when the technique of obtaining the means of subsistence reached the upper stage of barbarism (late Neolithic), conditions were created for a qualitative transformation of social organization based on the growing productivity of labor. In the original clan-based society, the labor of the entire community was required to maintain the minimum level of subsistence. Property was held in common and the relations of production were collective.
There was no distinction between a public world of men’s work and a private world of women’s household service. The division of labor between the sexes was reciprocal; both were necessary to the well-being of the group. All able individuals participated directly in the acquisition of necessities; both men and women had control over their production. Decisions were made by those who would carry them out. The marriage tie was loose and easily dissolved on either side. While all individuals maintained their autonomy, scarcity necessitated interpersonal dependence and mutual cooperation. The social cohesion of the band was a vital component of its survival kit.
With the development of techniques that increased the productivity of labor and the availability of goods, a process of exchange emerged at the periphery of the communal society. New relations arose outside of the band that gradually undermined its cohesion. Trade, in the form of barter of valued goods such as amber, shells and stone, had long existed in the Stone Age. The later production of goods exclusively for exchange, however, necessitated a new division of labor, with craft specialization and the demand for a surplus to support the craftsmen and traders. Men and women could no longer combine the tasks of obtaining food and making their own tools. As the intensification of production, long-distance trade and craft specialization took place, so too did the tendency for some individuals to accumulate wealth and authority.
Morgan named the governing system of the original clan organization societas, recognizing that no laws or special institutions were needed because the clan, based on communal property, would make decisions when conflicts or differences arose. The new social order he called civitas because a separate governing apparatus was necessary when the determining factor in social relations became private property. In Marxist terms, Morgan had discovered the origin of the state: the division of society into antagonistic classes. The conflict between the direct producers and those who expropriated their surplus product had brought about the need for a special institution to guard private property. Hence the advent of the state institution as special bodies of armed men that defend the ruling class against exploited labor. As V.I. Lenin wrote in The State and Revolution (1917), which quotes extensively from Engels’ Origin, the state is “the product of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms” and “a power standing above society and ‘alienating itself more and more from it’.”
Engels wrote in Origin that Morgan’s “rediscovery of the original mother-right gens as the stage preliminary to the father-right gens of the civilised peoples has the same significance for the history of primitive society as Darwin’s theory of evolution has for biology and Marx’s theory of surplus value for political economy.” At a time when 4004 B.C. was still considered by many to be the date of creation (based on the biblical calculations of a 17th-century Anglican Irish priest), Morgan unequivocally argued for a “hundred thousand or more years” for the age of man and immeasurably more for nonhuman species and for geologic time. He attacked the so-called theory of “human degradation” peddled by theologians of his day, which held that primitive peoples had been reduced to depravity according to the Christian concept of the fall of man.
Morgan repeatedly affirmed the common origin of the human species, writing, “The history of the human race is one in source, one in experience, and one in progress.” In the very last paragraph of Ancient Society, Morgan emphasized that “we owe our present condition, with its multiplied means of safety and of happiness, to the struggles, the sufferings, the heroic exertions and the patient toil of our barbarous, and more remotely, of our savage ancestors.”
Morgan’s Politics
In his own way, Morgan recognized the qualitative differences between the original equality of what Marxists call primitive communism and the oppression and exploitation of class-divided society. Thus he spoke of property becoming “on the part of the people an unmanageable power” and of the human mind standing “bewildered in the presence of its own creation.” He revealed an inspiring vision of the future when he wrote, “Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights and privileges, and universal education, foreshadow the next higher plane of society to which experience, intelligence and knowledge are steadily tending. It will be a revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes.”
But Morgan was no conscious revolutionary. For him, the march of humanity toward the equality of the future was a spontaneous process, a pious dream. He was a child of the optimistic period of ascendant American capitalism, when technological inventions and new methods of production were expanding at a rapid pace. He was a member of the Republican Party, which at its founding in 1854 represented the progressive, anti-slavery wing of the Northern bourgeoisie. He believed that the government could be a vehicle for achieving social equality, which he defined as the diffusion of prosperity among the masses of people, and served one term in both the New York State Assembly and the New York State Senate. Morgan, a bourgeois radical, saw European aristocracy and state-sponsored religious hierarchy as the main obstacles to equality, and these had been eliminated in the U.S. As he wrote toward the end of his European tour (1870-71):
“I shall be quite glad when I get there [New York], and am once more under the Stars and the Stripes. Our country is the favored and the blessed land. Our institutions are unrivalled, and our people the most advanced in intelligence, and in diffused prosperity upon the surface of the whole earth.”
—quoted in Introduction, Leslie White, ed., Ancient Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964)
The vehemently anti-clerical Morgan spoke of the dogma of Immaculate Conception as a “silly figment of degrading superstition.” In his European travel journals, as quoted in Leslie White’s Introduction to Ancient Society, Morgan lambasted the ruling classes and the church, writing, “It is singular as well as true that in all modern popular insurrections the populace strike simultaneously at the despot and the priest.” In Paris, which he visited soon after the defeat of the Commune in 1871, he wrote, “The Commune, the principles, objects and acts which made up its history, have been unjustly condemned, because not justly understood.” After listening to speakers addressing workers in London’s Hyde Park, Morgan commented, “When the time comes, if it ever does, the working men will have to rise upon the merchants and traders as well as the aristocrats and push them out of the way in one body.”
But his own class interests blinded him to the bitter class struggle in the United States, which had just emerged from four years of bloody war to destroy the Southern slavery system. In the 1870s, the United States witnessed an unprecedented wave of labor strikes, from the textile factories of New England to the coalfields of Pennsylvania. This culminated in the great rail strike of 1877, the year Ancient Society was published. Yet, as anthropologist Leslie White, the foremost scholar of Morgan’s work and editor of the definitive modern edition of Ancient Society, observed in the book’s Introduction, “In all of Morgan’s writings, published and unpublished, no recognition of this bitter class struggle in the United States can be found.”
Much of Morgan’s political activity focused on a lifelong defense of Native Americans. In 1876, when the U.S. erupted in a frenzy of genocidal hatred after the Sioux warriors’ annihilation of General Custer and his troops at Little Big Horn, Morgan defended the Native Americans in an eloquent letter to the Nation (20 July 1876). Recounting the history of the Sioux’s loss of their way of life to the advancing white population, land-grabbing “treaties” and forced resettlement, he wrote, “Who shall blame the Sioux for defending themselves, their wives and children, when attacked in their own encampment and threatened with destruction?” Nevertheless, while Morgan considered the federal authorities’ treatment of the American Indians “disgraceful,” he had illusions in the ability of the capitalist government to find a “remedy” for the Indians’ catastrophic situation. He sought, but did not get, appointment as the federal Commissioner of Indian Affairs.
Morgan was an advocate for women’s rights. While his project to establish a women’s college was not successful, he willed his entire estate to the University of Rochester to advance higher education for women. Speaking of the “great institution of the family, as it now exists,” he knew that the modern monogamous family was related to the subordination of women but felt that the institution could be perfected “until the equality of the sexes is attained.” Morgan recognized that the family must continue to change as society itself changes. He wrote, “Should the monogamian family in the distant future fail to answer the requirements of society, assuming the continuous progress of civilization, it is impossible to predict the nature of its successor.”
Marx and Engels, in sharp contrast, recognized the family as an institution that had to be thoroughly replaced to bring about the liberation of women. Decades before Ancient Society was published, they were deeply influenced by Charles Fourier, the early 19th-century utopian socialist, about whom Engels wrote: “He was the first to declare that in any given society the degree of woman’s emancipation is the natural measure of the general emancipation” (Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, 1880). Fourier understood the role of private property in the subjugation of women and advocated the replacement of the family by collective child-rearing and full sexual freedom. However, Fourier believed that such a society could be created by example alone and tried to set up various socialist communes, which inevitably collapsed under the pressure of the competitive capitalist economy.
Recognizing that the capitalist mode of industrial production constituted a qualitative leap forward, Marx and Engels were the first to put socialism on a scientific basis. They fought for a socialist revolution—the proletarian seizure of power as the first step toward building a worldwide planned economy that would make it possible to abolish private property and liberate women. They dedicated their lives to building a revolutionary organization to lead the workers to victory.
Morgan’s Impact on Marx and Engels
When Marx and Engels drafted the Communist Manifesto in 1848, their knowledge of pre-class primitive society was fragmentary; hence the opening statement in the Manifesto that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” After they became acquainted with Morgan’s work, they realized that this formulation was out of date. In 1872, Marx and Engels had recognized that “the Manifesto has become an historical document which we have no longer any right to alter.” Thus in the Manifesto’s 1888 edition Engels added a footnote:
“The inner organisation of this primitive Communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form, by Morgan’s crowning discovery of the true nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe. With the dissolution of these primeval communities, society begins to be differentiated into separate and finally antagonistic classes.”
This was more than a mere addition of some technical data. Morgan’s work showed that the primitive communist clan, far from having been a peculiar feature of some particular human groups, represented a stage in the natural social evolution of man.
In Anti-Dühring (1878), Engels wrote that for Marx to fully develop historical materialism, “an acquaintance with the capitalist form of production, exchange and distribution did not suffice. The forms which had preceded it or those which still exist alongside it in less developed countries, had also, at least in their main features, to be examined and compared.” Morgan’s researches and discoveries enabled Marx and Engels to more fully formulate the dialectics of social evolution. Morgan’s researches have, in an important sense, been incorporated into the fabric of Marxism.
Dialectical materialism—Marxism—is entirely counterposed to Morgan’s emphasis on ideas as the driving force in historical change. Marx succinctly explained in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859):
“In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or—this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms—with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.”
In opposition to the romantic idealizers of primitive man, such as the French Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Marx and Engels did not see the replacement of the egalitarian hunter-gatherer clans by class-divided societies as the secular equivalent of paradise lost. In Anti-Dühring, Engels described pre-class human society as “still half animal, brutal, still helpless in face of the forces of nature, still ignorant of their own strength; and consequently as poor as the animals and hardly more productive than they.”
Increasing human control over the forces of nature and transforming human culture itself required raising the productivity of labor through the progressive accumulation of scientific knowledge and ever more advanced technologies. Prior to the development of industrial capitalism, building the material, cultural and intellectual wealth of the human collective could not happen without the existence of a privileged class maintained by the labor of the mass of toilers. As Engels explained in Anti-Dühring:
“So long as the really working population were so much occupied with their necessary labour that they had no time left for looking after the common affairs of society—the direction of labour, affairs of state, legal matters, art, science, etc.—so long was it necessary that there should constantly exist a special class, freed from actual labour, to manage these affairs; and this class never failed, for its own advantage, to impose a greater and greater burden of labour on the working masses. Only the immense increase of the productive forces attained by modern industry has made it possible to distribute labour among all members of society without exception, and thereby to limit the labour-time of each individual member to such an extent that all have enough free time left to take part in the general—both theoretical and practical—affairs of society. It is only now, therefore, that every ruling and exploiting class has become superfluous and indeed a hindrance to social development.”
The Roots of Women’s Oppression
In Ancient Society Morgan wrote, “The family represents an active principle. It is never stationary, but advances from a lower to a higher form as society advances from a lower to a higher condition, and finally passes out of one form into another of higher grade.” Women maintained an egalitarian status until the advent of the patriarchal family: “The incorporation of numbers in servile and dependent relations, before that time unknown…stamped the patriarchal society with the attributes of an original institution.” Only the abundance generated by modern industrial production in a worldwide planned economy will make it possible to wholly replace the functions of the family with socialized childcare and housework, freeing women to become full participants in social and political life.
In developing a hypothetical history of the forms of the family, Morgan believed that kinship terminology directly reflected biological relationships of the recent past. Based on this framework and using the data he had collected from fieldwork and historical sources, he developed a theory of the stages of the family—from an original primitive promiscuity to group marriage, pairing marriage and eventually monogamy with the advent of private property. In his view, because of the impossibility of recognizing the male parent with certainty in conditions of group marriage, descent and blood relationships were thus determined through the female line (mother right).
With the advent of relatively settled agricultural societies, he posited, exclusive relationships between men and women began to emerge, pairing for a longer or shorter period. The man had a chief wife among his many wives, and for her he was the most important among her many husbands. But the marriage tie was still loose and could easily be dissolved. After such a separation, the children belonged to the mother’s clan. Morgan further hypothesized that the pairing marriage introduced a new element into the family: it provided the attested father with a warrant of paternity. The key factor of inheritance of private property through the male line, Morgan believed, was the root of the patriarchal family and monogamy (for women).
However, Morgan’s five stages of the family (Consanguine, Punaluan, Syndyasmian, Patriarchal and Monogamian) were based on an overly literal interpretation of the data. If a father and his brothers were called by the same kinship term, as were a mother and her sisters, Morgan believed that there must have been a time when groups of brothers married groups of sisters. Morgan’s theory—that mother right prevailed because no one knew who the fathers were—rested upon a faulty premise.
Modern anthropologists recognize that kinship terminologies represent social relationships and obligations rather than actual marriage and descent. In fact, flexibility in kinship systems and social systems is most beneficial to people living on the edge of survival, as primitive peoples often do and did. Both matrilineal and patrilineal systems can be found among primitive peoples. But Morgan’s key insight remained solid: the family and its accompanying codes of sexual conduct and morality changed according to social and economic conditions. Patriarchy and monogamy for women were inventions just as much as the stone ax or the spinning jenny.
Engels followed Morgan’s flawed hypothesis about the evolution of the family almost entirely in Origin. Much of the detail in the chapter dealing with early stages of the family has been superseded by a deeper and more complex knowledge that shows even more variety in the many forms of kinship, sexual relations and clan structure that human beings have created. Furthermore, the development of the production surplus and the organization necessary to support a class-divided society was far more complex and prolonged than either Morgan or Engels could possibly have known.
Relying on Morgan’s data, Engels emphasized that the advent of the patriarchal family was due almost entirely to the overthrow of mother right in favor of inheritance through the paternal line. He rightly identified the patriarchal family as “the first form of the family based not on natural but on economic conditions, namely, on the victory of private property over original, naturally developed, common ownership.” However, Engels also relied on Morgan’s data to explain how those economic conditions affected the family, leading to some conclusions that today we can see are problematic. He believed that the providing of food was the province of the “male sphere” in the primitive community. He did not know that women as the gatherers in the division of labor provided at least as much food for the clan as did men as hunters. He also followed Morgan’s hypothesis that agriculture was a late invention by male herders who needed a food source (grain) for their animals. But we know now that agriculture was a very early Neolithic invention, and anthropologists generally credit its invention to women as the plant gatherers.
Assuming, therefore, that the new surplus originated in the male sphere, Engels wrote:
“Thus, as wealth increased, it, on the one hand, gave the man a more important status in the family than the woman, and, on the other hand, created a stimulus to utilise this strengthened position in order to overthrow the traditional order of inheritance in favour of the children. But this was impossible as long as descent according to mother right prevailed. This had, therefore, to be overthrown, and it was overthrown.”
Engels continued in one of the most famous passages in Origin:
“The overthrow of mother right was the world-historical defeat of the female sex. The man seized the reins in the house too, the woman was degraded, enthralled, became the slave of the man’s lust, a mere instrument for breeding children.”
If the reason men became dominant was not because they controlled the surplus, why did it happen? Certainly a legitimate male line—assured by female monogamy enforced through custom, law and moral codes—was important for the orderly transfer of property and power to the next generation of the new ruling class. But after study and debate in our party, we have concluded that women’s childbearing role itself—in the conditions of the new class society—also played a major role in the development of their subordination in the family. This took place in a gradual, complex and dialectical process over a long period of time.
In the communal clan, the care of the children was the work of the whole group. Hunter-gatherers controlled their birth rate (spacing births and resorting to infanticide when necessary), since a balance of men, women and children was necessary for survival. With the advent of a farming economy, more labor was needed to work the fields and a new division of labor emerged. Seeking to increase their wealth and power, the new ruling class wanted yet more people as a labor force, as an army, as slaves to buy and sell. As the birth rate increased, women were ever more tied down in pregnancy and the care of babies and small children and were isolated in the household. Their household work was denigrated as it could not be a source of profit in the new economy of production for commodity exchange.
The transformation from egalitarian to class society and the foundation of the family cannot be attributed to a single historical development such as paternal inheritance, the rise of agriculture, the invention of the plow or the domestication of animals. Before this transformation occurred, the strong bonds that tied the kin collective together had to be gradually severed and the collective ownership of productive property had to be shattered.
The full story of what happened in the transition from the egalitarian clan-based societies to class society, which happened not once but many times and in many places, must rest on a certain amount of informed speculation. There were enormous variations in material conditions—such as climate and natural resources (plants, animals, minerals)—as well as history, culture, social customs and sexual practices according to time, place and circumstance. Future research may question some of the conclusions that scholars now draw.
Bruce D. Smith’s The Emergence of Agriculture (New York: Scientific American Library, 1995) usefully summarizes modern findings in archeology and genetics (tracing the changes in genes from wild to domesticated species of plants and animals) that show the protracted nature of the transition from a mode of existence based on food gathering to settled farming villages based on food production. The origins of agriculture in the Near East (one of seven known regions in the world where agriculture developed independently) reveal roots going back at least 12,500 years, with some 2,000 years of development before agriculture became dominant over hunting and gathering. Villages of thousands of people grew up in places like Jericho (on the West Bank) and Çatalhöyük (in Turkey). Ongoing excavations at Çatalhöyük reveal evidence of a culture in which relations between people, including those between the sexes, were still egalitarian. As Smith says, there may well have been “an increasingly important role for women as cultivators in early farming societies.”
In the Near East, fully developed class society came into existence only with the emergence of the Mesopotamian city-states of ancient Sumer. Ur, dating to at least 5,000 years ago, flourished as the hub of trade from the Persian Gulf to the rivers in the Mesopotamian heartland, becoming a city of fabulous wealth. Men may have ruled in the family, but the society as a whole was ruled by a new class of exploiters that usurped the products of the toilers.
Walled cities, magnificent palaces and temples, organized armies and territorial conquest, lavish tombs—all of these came about with extensive transfer of land and property to a new ruling elite. For example, in The Evolution of Urban Society: Early Mesopotamia and Prehispanic Mexico (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., 1966), anthropologist Robert McC. Adams addressed the impact of intensive agriculture based on irrigation systems. Communal systems of land tenure were disrupted by irrigation works that restricted access to often-scarce water, promoting the “concentration of hereditable, alienable wealth in productive resources, and hence also the emergence of a class society.” (Adams’ book originated as the 1965 presentation at the University of Rochester’s Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures.)
Even so, these early city-states were often fragile due to epidemic disease, ecological catastrophe or political unrest. A useful summary of the current state of knowledge about ancient Mesopotamia can be found in James C. Scott’s Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017). Scott wrote:
“If, however, the state often broke up, it was not for lack of exercising whatever coercive powers it could muster. Evidence for the extensive use of unfree labor—war captives, indentured servitude, temple slavery, slave markets, forced resettlements in labor colonies, convict labor, and communal slavery (for example, Sparta’s helots)—is overwhelming. Unfree labor was particularly important in building city walls and roads, digging canals, mining, quarrying, logging, monumental construction, wool textile weaving, and of course agricultural labor. The attention to ‘husbanding’ the subject population, including women, as a form of wealth, like livestock, in which fertility and high rates of reproduction were encouraged, is apparent.”
The family is one leg of a tripod of oppressive institutions (family, state and organized religion) propping up the system of exploitation—three key parts of the “legal and political superstructure” of class society, as Marx defined it. While for the ruling class the family is crucial as a means of defining the inheritance of property and power, it serves a different purpose among the toilers. The means for raising the new generation of labor to be exploited, the patriarchal family is the cradle for the indoctrination of obedience and deference to authority. As the basic economic unit of the new fractured society, the family emerged as the social replacement for the clan and instilled an ideology of subordination and rank into the previously egalitarian social order. Anthropologist Eleanor Burke Leacock wrote in her fine introduction to Origin (New York: International Publishers, 1972):
“These transitions occurred in the context of developing exploitative relations whereby communal ownership was being undermined, the communal kin group broken up, and the individual family separated out as an isolated and vulnerable unit, economically responsible for the maintenance of its members and for the rearing of the new generation. The subjugation of the female sex was based on the transformation of their socially necessary labor into a private service through the separation of the family from the clan.… The separation of the family from the clan and the institution of monogamous marriage were the social expressions of developing private property.”
It is notable that in Ancient Society, Morgan specifically put aside the subject of religion as “environed with such intrinsic difficulties that it may never receive a perfectly satisfactory exposition.” Perhaps not in the way that Morgan himself wished, but new findings shed light on this subject as well. Archeological digs at the sites of ancient Sumer indicate that the temples were the first depositories of the surplus as religious offerings, while studies of cuneiform tablets reveal that the first uses of writing were as inventories of goods in those temples.
Organized religion, with its harsh moral codes and rigid hierarchy, developed as an institutional bulwark of the exploitative order and a powerful partner of the new state. Laws regulating the family and morality are in the Code of Hammurabi, the earliest complete law code yet discovered. An earlier, less complete one, dating from around 4,450 years ago, criminalized the practice of polyandry (wives taking multiple husbands), institutionalized descent through the paternal line and imposed monogamy on women only (Ruby Rohrlich, “State Formation in Sumer and the Subjugation of Women,” Feminist Studies 6, No. 1, Spring 1980).
The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State was based on the best material available to Engels at the time. Even though some of this material is now obsolete, Engels recognized the heart of the matter:
“The old society, based on ties of kinship, bursts asunder with the collision of the newly developed social classes; in its place a new society appears, constituted in a state, the lower units of which are no longer groups based on ties of kinship but territorial groups, a society in which the family system is entirely dominated by the property system, and in which the class antagonisms and class struggle, which make up the content of all hitherto written history now freely unfold.”
The establishment of the patriarchal family was indeed the “world historical defeat of the female sex.” Women lost their early status of equality and became dependent on male support, while a new ideology of male superiority helped legitimize the inequality and oppression of the class-divided society.
For Women’s Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
The last words in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State are Morgan’s, projecting an end to the “mere property career” that has dominated existing civilization. While Morgan could only daydream of such a thing, Marx and Engels could project that with the advent of industrial production and the proletariat as the new prospective ruling class, it could actually become a reality.
While the advances in scholarly research throw light on the genesis of women’s oppression, it is the lessons of the October 1917 Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik work for the emancipation of women that illuminate the necessity of the full replacement of the family by collectivized childcare and housework. Insofar as they were able in the conditions of impoverished Russia, the early Bolsheviks sought to create job and educational opportunities for women and to establish collective childcare. But in the absence of adequate resources to fully replace the family, Russian working women often could not take advantage of the opportunities legally open to them. Replacing the family has to be a conscious act of building collective alternatives, organized from top to bottom by the workers state in control of abundant productive resources. (See “The Russian Revolution and the Emancipation of Women,” Spartacist [English edition] No. 59, Spring 2006.)
Communist society can develop only on the basis of the overcoming of economic scarcity through the progressive increase in the productivity of labor. The first step on this road must be a series of workers revolutions to take power from the capitalist class and forge workers states in which the means of production is in the hands of the toilers. Only then will it be possible to construct a new, socialist order based on a worldwide planned economy. A society would develop in which the state has withered away and the institution of the family has been replaced by collective means of caring for and socializing children and by the fullest freedom of sexual relations. As the Spartacist League/U.S. wrote in “Communism and the Family” (Workers Vanguard No. 1068, 15 May 2015):
“When the family has withered away along with classes and the state, the communal upbringing that replaces it will lead to a new psychology and culture among the people that grow up in those conditions. Patriarchal social values—‘my’ wife, ‘my’ children—will vanish along with the oppressive system that spawned them. The relationship of children to one another and to the persons who teach and guide them will be many-sided, complex and dynamic….
“Replacing the family with collective institutions is the most radical aspect of the communist program and will bring about the deepest, most sweeping changes in daily life, not least for children.”
It will be indeed Morgan’s vision of the future, as quoted by Engels in italics at the end of his book: “a revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes.”
James Robertson
1928-2019
This article first appeared in Workers Vanguard No. 1162 (4 October 2019), newspaper of the Spartacist League/U.S.
James Robertson, a founding leader of the Spartacist League/U.S. and its longtime National Chairman, died at his home in Northern California on April 7, at the age of 90. A member of the workers movement for more than 70 years, comrade Robertson remained an essential component of the leadership of the SL/U.S. and the International Communist League until the last weeks of his life. He leaves behind his wife and comrade, Martha; his two sons, Douglas and Kenneth; two stepdaughters, Rachel and Sarah; and his grandchildren.
Historically, revolutionary Marxist parties have not outlived their founding leaders with their program and purpose intact. Comrade Robertson’s aim was to do his level best to reverse that verdict. In the last major political struggle of his life, Jim was key to the fight to correct a longstanding perversion of Leninism on the national question in the ICL, particularly as it applied to relatively advanced multinational states. Out of this struggle emerged a new generation of leaders who have become a key component of the ICL’s International Executive Committee, along with senior cadre who are critical to preserving our slender threads of revolutionary continuity.
Speaking at a memorial gathering of comrades and sympathizers following Jim’s death, the current National Chairman of the SL/U.S. noted that revolutionary continuity “is primarily programmatic but is also personal because program is embodied in human beings.” In party educationals and countless informal discussions, Jim gave a living sense of his political history and the factional struggles that were key to finding his way to the program of Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Party. This history took him from the Communist Party (CP) to Max Shachtman’s Workers Party/Independent Socialist League (WP/ISL), to James P. Cannon’s Socialist Workers Party (SWP), and then to being a central leader of the Revolutionary Tendency (RT). Expelled from the SWP in 1963-64, RT cadre went on to found the Spartacist League/U.S.
Later in his life, Jim remarked that what he learned, and had to learn, in the course of the factional battles he waged was that the “Russian question” is the defining criterion of revolutionary Marxism in the imperialist epoch. This issue encompasses both an understanding of the Bolshevik Party that led the conquest of power by the working class in the 1917 Russian Revolution and the need to defend the gains of that revolution despite the Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet Union.
From the early days of the SL/U.S., this programmatic understanding was central to our intervention into the Vietnam antiwar movement. Against the social-patriotic call to “Bring Our Boys Home,” we fought for the defeat of U.S. imperialism and raised the call “All Indochina Must Go Communist!” In a 7 February 1965 cablegram to Ho Chi Minh, sent the day the U.S. began bombing North Vietnam, we declared: “Heroic struggle of Vietnamese working people furthers the American revolution” (printed in Spartacist No. 4, May-June 1965). In the 1980s, when the winds of the imperialists’ anti-Soviet Cold War II drive were blowing red-hot, we stood out for our sharp-edged Soviet defensism, calling to “Hail Red Army in Afghanistan! Extend social gains of the October Revolution to the Afghan peoples!” and demanding “Stop Solidarność Counterrevolution” in Poland.
Comrade Robertson initiated some of our most hard-hitting and angular slogans, propaganda and actions. He was a central architect of the largest and most significant mobilization of our international tendency, as we intervened into an incipient proletarian political revolution in the East German deformed workers state (DDR) in 1989. As masses of workers, soldiers, students and others marched under banners reading “For Communist Ideals” and “No Privileges,” we raised the call for a “Red Soviet Germany” through socialist revolution in West Germany and proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist misleaders of the DDR.
We were in a political battle, although one marked by a disproportion of forces, with the abdicating Stalinist regime over the future of the DDR. We were defeated when Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev gave the green light for the capitalist reunification of Germany. But we fought with everything we had! Jim would later draw an analogy to Lenin’s intervention at a session of the First All-Russia Congress of Soviets in June 1917. After a Menshevik leader declared that there was no party prepared to assume power, Lenin yelled out, “Yes, there is.” As comrade Robertson remarked: “That was us in the DDR in 1989-1990. I do not believe that we should diminish or deny this simply because we were defeated. We will be defeated a lot.”
In 1991-92, the counterrevolution that had engulfed the deformed workers states of East and Central Europe destroyed the Soviet Union. Recognizing the devastating impact of this defeat on the struggles and consciousness of the working class, Jim underlined:
“We’re in an unusually deep trough, and the experiences that are immediately available to us are not very good. So we had better make very heavy reference back to the experiences of the workers movement when it could see much further: 1918 through 1921.”
Our quadrilingual theoretical journal, Spartacist, has been a central vehicle for keeping those experiences, embodied in the first four Congresses of the Communist International, alive. Jim, who was the founding editor and a crucial component of the editorial board of the English-language edition until his death, always stressed that this was not a matter of passing on received wisdom but of critical evaluation. He took particular satisfaction in our articles “Down With Executive Offices of the Capitalist State!” (Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 61, Spring 2009) and “Why We Reject the ‘Constituent Assembly’ Demand” (Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 63, Winter 2012-13). Having played a key role in motivating both, Jim saw these articles as vital extensions of Lenin’s The State and Revolution and The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky.
California, Calvinism and Communism
Born in Berkeley in 1928, Jim was a child of the Great Depression and often recalled its utter destitution. He also remembered the impact of the 1936-37 West Coast maritime strike from the vantage point of a young boy seeing the detritus thrown from unworked ships floating in San Francisco Bay.
Some 80 years later, Jim was a key impetus for our “Then and Now” pamphlet contrasting the 1934 victories of three citywide strikes waged amid the Depression—San Francisco longshoremen, Minneapolis Teamsters and Toledo auto workers—with the ongoing devastation of organized labor today. Seeking to arm a new generation of working-class fighters, the pamphlet drives home that a crucial difference is that the 1934 strikes were led by “reds” committed to mobilizing the class power of the workers as opposed to the current labor misleaders, who are committed to the interests and profits of American imperialism. In fighting to implant a class-struggle perspective in the working class, Jim had a keen appreciation of the relationship of the Leninist party to the proletariat: Unions mean the unity of workers, while the party means split—i.e., the fight to forge the vanguard of the class by winning over the most class-conscious workers.
Jim’s family, on all sides, was staunchly Presbyterian. The lessons inculcated by his Calvinist upbringing would continue to define him, even after he became an atheist in his teens. He maintained a commitment to knowledge and probity, as well as a keen appreciation of monetary matters. The battle against the ignorance, superstition and all-sided reactionary character of the Catholic church would also inspire him as a youth to side with the loyalists in the Spanish Civil War against Franco’s fascist-aligned forces. A polymath with a wide range of interests, Jim was an avid scuba diver and acquired an impressive collection of British coins; he had a fervent interest in Roman and Mediterranean history, including the transition from antiquity to feudalism.
The American Civil War and the fight to abolish black chattel slavery was another living issue for Jim from a young age. While his mother’s side of the family had been slaveholders, his great-grandfather fought on the side of the Union in the Civil War. In 1984, Jim was the moving force behind our tearing down the Confederate flag in San Francisco’s Civic Center. As a tribute to the inspiration of his great-grandfather, a picture of his gravestone was printed in Workers Vanguard accompanying our article “We Tore Down the Flag of Slavery!” (WV No. 353, 27 April 1984).
Raised mostly in the Bay Area and the Central Valley, where his mother taught in a series of small-town grade schools, Jim remained a Californian throughout his life. His idea of a good American meal was beef enchiladas, rice and beans. He also had a keen appreciation of the brutal oppression and degradation of Mexicans who labored in the fields of the Central Valley. The incarceration of Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War II was also a living memory for him. When his mother taught in a small Mennonite community, his only friends were the Japanese American kids who shared many of his interests. The image of Japanese Americans being held in a pen in Merced, California, waiting to be shipped to the camps was indelibly imprinted on his consciousness.
In notes for memoirs taken by his wife Elizabeth Robertson, whose death from cancer in 2005 was a body blow to Jim, he spoke to the impact of these experiences in “incubating a communist conscience”:
“A pronounced revulsion to racism; the absurdly simple idea that the material requirements of life ought to be produced and distributed upon the basis of the need for them rather than according to profitability to the owners of industry; a hard-core atheism flowing fairly straightforwardly from immersing an unknowingly dedicated Calvinist into a year of Roman Catholic school where he got A’s in catechism and then back to a secular school; and with the sole exception of the beloved Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a thoroughgoing distrust of existing government and institutions.”
At 18 years of age, Jim joined the Communist Party in Richmond, California, in late 1946. At the time, he fully shared the Stalinists’ pro-FDR “anti-fascist popular front” politics.
Black and Red
Jim was assigned to work in the CP youth organization, which was overwhelmingly made up of young black workers, many of whom had come from the South to work in the Richmond shipyards during World War II and were now laid off. As Jim once remarked, the idea that the North was “promised land” had been dashed, and now these black workers looked to the Soviet Union. The stories of the daily racist humiliation and degradation his new comrades were subjected to deepened Jim’s awareness of the centrality of black oppression to both the foundation and maintenance of American capitalism.
Years later, in the late 1950s, veteran SWP leader Richard Fraser would win Jim to his program of revolutionary integrationism, which is counterposed to both liberal integration schemes and black nationalism. Rooted in a proletarian-centered perspective to fight against every manifestation of racial oppression under capitalism, revolutionary integrationism is based on the understanding that the only road to black freedom lies in shattering this racist capitalist order through proletarian revolution, and that black workers, as the most oppressed and also most conscious and combative layer of the working class, will play a leading role in that struggle.
Describing Fraser as his “last personal teacher” at a memorial meeting following his death in 1988, Jim described his impact: “I was really quite ready to run into comrade Fraser’s presentation and historical foundation, that one can achieve the abolition of racial division in this country only through a profound, pervasive, far-going social revolution in which the working class comes to power.” One of the founding documents of the SL/U.S., “Black and Red—Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom” (1966), elucidated Fraser’s program of revolutionary integrationism, incorporating lessons from our early intervention into the black freedom struggle. This perspective animated the SL-initiated labor/black mobilization to stop the Klan in Washington, D.C., on 27 November 1982 and our other anti-fascist actions. The sight of 5,000 black people, unionists and other intended victims of Klan terror victoriously marching the KKK’s planned route in D.C. was one of our proudest moments.
During his two years in the CP, Jim took the first steps in what would be a lifelong study of the lessons of the Russian Revolution. His branch leadership did not encourage reading Lenin, so Jim went out and bought a copy of The State and Revolution. He was struck by the flagrant contradiction between Lenin and the class-collaborationist politics of the CP. This would later be amplified by his awareness of growing income and other inequalities in the Soviet Union, belying the Stalinists’ claim that the Soviet Union was steadily marching toward socialism.
As a chemistry student at UC Berkeley, Jim was introduced to Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed and other works by a young couple who supported Max Shachtman’s Workers Party. He would later often recall that when he “confessed” to being a “Trotskyite” (an experience he described as akin to telling your parents you were gay in the 1950s), he was told that it wasn’t so easy. There were two Trotskyist parties: one was “for Russia and against Stalin” and the other was “against Russia and against Stalin.” Having expressed a preference for the former, Jim was told that was “old fashioned” and was directed instead to Shachtman’s party. He joined its youth organization in 1948.
From the CP to the “Third Camp”
One of the founding leaders of American Trotskyism, Shachtman had split from the SWP in 1940, having repudiated the party’s defense of the Soviet Union. It would take some years for the full pro-imperialist implications of this defection from Trotskyism to play out. The Shachtman organization’s plunge into increasingly overt support for U.S. imperialism began not long after Jim joined, and it would propel him into opposition. In 1951, Shachtman floated the idea of supporting an American-led war against the Soviet Union under the condition that it would have some kind of labor cover. Shortly thereafter, Jim debated Shachtman in front of the Bay Area branch.
This took some guts, and it was an early marker of Jim’s political intransigence and audacity. At the debate, he used Shachtman’s 1941 article “Working-Class Policy in War and Peace.” In that piece, Shachtman had correctly excoriated the SWP’s “Proletarian Military Policy”—which advocated trade-union control over military training during World War II—as a concession to social-patriotism. Opposition to this policy remains a hallmark of our international organization, codified in our Prometheus Research Series No. 2, “Documents on the ‘Proletarian Military Policy’” (February 1989).
Jim also got a good education in Marxist classics in Shachtman’s organization, which he would refer to as a model for the education of new comrades in the SL. Unfortunately for Al Garber, who ran this educational program, it armed the student to polemically excoriate the teacher’s abject revisionism. Garber had argued that Stalinism could have been avoided if the Bolsheviks had called for new elections in 1921, at the end of the devastating Civil War, and handed over power to whichever party won. In a 1954 document titled “Should the Bolsheviks Have Surrendered State Power?” Jim argued that this would have been “a betrayal of the first magnitude of socialism and would have assured the defeat” of the October Revolution. Garber snarled that Jim belonged in the SWP, to which Jim retorted that Garber belonged in the Socialist Party. A few years later, those organizations were exactly where each of them ended up.
The 1956 Hungarian Revolution had a tremendous impact in puncturing the Shachtmanites’ position that the Stalinist bureaucracy was a new “bureaucratic collectivist” ruling class. In the face of a working-class uprising, the Hungarian Communist Party bureaucracy polarized and split. A sizable minority, including a central military commander and the Budapest chief of police, went over to the side of the workers. This confirmed Trotsky’s understanding of the Stalinist bureaucracy as an unstable caste, a parasitic excrescence sitting on top of the workers state. As Jim would later remark in a presentation on the antecedents of the Spartacist League, “Imagine a proletarian revolution in a capitalist country where one-quarter of the Republican Party or the Tories goes over to the side of the workers. This is a fantasy! Everything Trotsky said was right.”
The same year as the events in Hungary, Khrushchev’s “secret” speech on the crimes of Stalin propelled hundreds of shocked and disaffected Stalinists out of the Communist Party, breaking the dominance of the CP on the left. For his part, Shachtman was preparing to totally liquidate into the “State Department socialists” of Norman Thomas’s decrepit Socialist Party. As one of the leaders of the Shachtman youth organization’s Left Wing Caucus, which opposed the liquidation, Jim once again debated Shachtman. In the aftermath of the debate, Shachtman wrote that it was pointless trying to save Jim from “something he badly wants and badly needs—experience with a sterile, intolerant revolutionary phrasemongering sect like the SWP.”
And that is where Jim went, joining the SWP in 1957. He always fondly recalled his collaboration with veteran SWPer Murry Weiss, who was central to the party’s regroupment with the Left Wing Caucus. This regroupment would lay the basis for the founding of the SWP’s youth group, the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA). Comrade Robertson and other former Caucus leaders Shane Mage and Tim Wohlforth became leaders of the YSA. Although Jim described their view of the SWP as some kind of Trotsky memorial society, he thought that he would “rather be in an honorable irrelevant memorial association to Trotsky” than stay with the Shachtmanites.
The SWP, the RT and the Cuban Revolution
The SWP was pretty hollowed out by the time Jim joined, most immediately reflecting the impact of the stagnation and repression of the 1950s Cold War witchhunt. With the SWP having spent some years making little to no impact on society, the Trotskyist program had increasingly become irrelevant for much of the party leadership. Looking for something else to latch on to, the SWP found it in the Cuban Revolution led by Fidel Castro, whose petty-bourgeois guerrilla forces took power in Havana in 1959 and whose government expropriated the Cuban bourgeoisie in 1960-61. Jim often recalled longtime SWP leader Morris Stein enthusing that the Cuban Revolution was the best one he was going to see in his lifetime.
In embracing Fidel Castro as an “unconscious Marxist,” the SWP leadership dumped both the centrality of the working class as well as the need for a Leninist vanguard party to lead the struggle for power by the proletariat. In 1960, Shane Mage wrote an oppositional document, “The Cuban Revolution and Marxist Theory,” which was co-signed by Robertson and Wohlforth. In a 2014 presentation on “The RT at Conception,” Jim commented that since they were all new boys in the SWP, he didn’t think the document would have much impact. But they were also leaders of the SWP’s youth organization, and in January 1961 the party leadership called a plenum on the Cuban question. As Jim recalled: “The point of it was to bring us to heel, to stop us. They hit us pretty hard. We didn’t recant. Instead we called a faction meeting” (Marxist Studies for Cadre Education No. 10, June 2018). That was the beginning of the Revolutionary Tendency in the SWP.
A finished understanding that Cuba had become a deformed workers state in 1960 with the pervasive nationalizations and the liquidation of the bourgeoisie as a class is presented in an additional preface to Marxist Bulletin No. 8, “Cuba and Marxist Theory.” Written by Jim in 1973, the preface spelled out the exceptional circumstances that had led to this outcome: the absence of the working class as a contender for power, the flight of the Cuban bourgeoisie, the intransigent opposition of the Eisenhower administration and the existence of the Soviet Union as a military and economic counterweight to U.S. imperialism.
This analysis of the Cuban Revolution unlocked the process through which revolutions of insurrectionary peasant forces led by Stalinists had succeeded in smashing capitalism and establishing deformed workers states after World War II. It was a vital contribution, reaffirming Trotskyism against the disorientation and impressionism of the postwar Fourth International. The majority of Trotskyists, relying on sterile “orthodoxy,” initially insisted that without proletarian revolution there could be no social overturn of capitalism. Then, following the Yugoslav peasant-based revolution and Tito’s subsequent break with Stalin, many Trotskyists hailed the Yugoslav Stalinists as “comrades” and “left centrists.” Michel Pablo, who had emerged as leader of the Fourth International after the decimation of its central cadre in Europe during the war, generalized the embrace of the Yugoslav Stalinists into a broad revisionist course. He argued that the establishment of deformed workers states in East and Central Europe, most of which were created from the top down by the forces of the Red Army, demonstrated that the Stalinist parties “retain the possibility in certain circumstances of roughly outlining a revolutionary orientation.” Thus the very need for a revolutionary Trotskyist international was liquidated.
Although in a partial and limited way, Cannon’s SWP had fought Pabloite revisionism and united in the International Committee (IC) with other organizations that claimed to defend Trotskyism. But the SWP’s embrace of Castro’s guerrillas paved the way to its reunification with the Pabloites in 1963. The RT opposed this course. Jim was particularly proud of writing the following section of the RT’s 1963 resolution, “Toward Rebirth of the Fourth International”:
“Experience since the Second World War has demonstrated that peasant-based guerilla warfare under petit-bourgeois leadership can in itself lead to nothing more than an anti-working-class bureaucratic regime. The creation of such regimes has come about under the conditions of decay of imperialism, the demoralization and disorientation caused by Stalinist betrayals, and the absence of revolutionary Marxist leadership of the working class. Colonial revolution can have an unequivocally progressive significance only under such leadership of the revolutionary proletariat. For Trotskyists to incorporate into their strategy revisionism on the proletarian leadership in the revolution is a profound negation of Marxism-Leninism no matter what pious wish may be concurrently expressed for ‘building revolutionary Marxist parties in colonial countries.’ Marxists must resolutely oppose any adventurist acceptance of the peasant-guerilla road to socialism—historically akin to the Social Revolutionary program on tactics that Lenin fought. This alternative would be a suicidal course for the socialist goals of the movement, and perhaps physically for the adventurers.”
—printed in Spartacist No. 1, February-March 1964
Domestically, the RT, seeking to win black militants to revolutionary Marxism, fought against the SWP’s criminal abstention from the growing left wing of the civil rights movement. A July 1963 document written by Robertson and Shirley Stoute titled “For Black Trotskyism” recalled Trotsky’s admonition that “if it happens that we in the SWP are not able to find the road to this strata, then we are not worthy at all.” In December 1963, the SWP leadership expelled Robertson and four other leaders of the RT in the first political expulsions in the history of the party.
The Obligation of Revolutionary Internationalism
Following Cannon’s death in August 1974, comrade Robertson memorialized him in a presentation to an SL/U.S. national gathering the same month. He spoke to Cannon’s unique capacity, evolved out of his times and his political struggles, “to be the successful strategist and leader of a proletarian revolution in North America.” Jim noted, however, that Cannon had ducked the international responsibility that he ought to have taken up after Trotsky’s murder:
“Cannon had an abiding failure. He became the principal individual authority responsible for the world Trotskyist movement in August 1940 and basically didn’t do anything about it (though the SWP was internationalist and willing to commit energy, lives). I think the reason was pretty simple: Cannon felt he was not good enough to be a world leader of the Marxist movement, and he was right….
“So Cannon backed off, and we’re stuck with the job. He stuck us with it doubly. Because he was a lot better than we are—and when I say ‘he’ I mean not only Cannon personally but the immediate working crew that made up the ‘Cannon regime.’...
“There was a Cannon regime, and they were doing the best they could. But they didn’t accept the international challenge, and yet it is an obligation. Yes, if you know that you don’t know anything, go patiently, quietly, perseveringly; struggle with the greatest patience and attention for international collaborators. We have to go that way, not back off and wait in national isolation for somebody else to come forward and say, ‘I can do it,’ and then we say, ‘all right; we’ll give you our authority.’ We have to persist; we have to intervene.”
—Spartacist (English-language edition) No. 38-39, Summer 1986
From the beginning, our founding cadre understood that we would never survive as a revolutionary organization in national isolation, not least under the pressures of operating in the most powerful imperialist country on earth. We considered ourselves to be in programmatic agreement with the International Committee (until our definitive break with them in 1967). In particular, Gerry Healy’s Socialist Labour League in Britain had published very impressive and orthodox-sounding documents in defense of authentic Trotskyism. At the same time, the RT had had its own bad experiences with Healy’s bureaucratic organizational practices, which were aimed at coercing compliance with his dictates. In 1962, Healy’s American toady, Wohlforth, had split the RT, and he would later serve as the fingerman for our expulsion by the SWP leadership.
We also had a major political difference with Healy over Cuba. In what we would describe as “inverted Pabloism,” the Healyites answered the SWP’s embrace of Castro’s petty-bourgeois guerrillas by denying that capitalism had been overthrown in Cuba. Nonetheless, from what we could tell from their written documents, we had significant programmatic agreement, and that was central.
A Spartacist delegation attended the 1966 IC Conference in London, where comrade Robertson spoke on our behalf. He addressed our differences over Cuba, noting: “If the Cuban bourgeoisie is indeed ‘weak’ as the I.C. affirms, one can only observe that it must be tired from its long swim to Miami, Florida.” He criticized the IC’s enormous overestimation of the imminence of the final “crisis of capitalism” and argued that the IC had “not done very well” in fighting Pabloist revisionism. Healy’s response was swift. Charging that Robertson’s supposed “unexcused” absence from a Conference session was an act of petty-bourgeois American-chauvinist contempt, he demanded that Jim apologize. Jim refused to bow to the demand that he falsely confess.
In the Spartacist delegation’s final statement to the conference, Jim argued:
“We believe it is a violation of Leninist practice to demand that a comrade affirm to his comrades what he does not believe…. The Spartacist organization has been subjected to a series of slanderous attacks, despite our basic political agreement on the necessity of the fight against revisionism. This is an attempt to substitute for international democratic centralism for the American section a mechanism not of consciousness and discipline but of fear and obedience.”
A year later, the contradiction between Healy’s organizational practices and the IC’s professed program was resolved with its embrace of Mao’s “Cultural Revolution” and of the so-called “Arab Revolution,” which was composed of despotic nationalist regimes in the Near East.
Forging a Cadre Collective
Doubtless Healy thought that after our break with him, we would simply shrivel up and die. But we didn’t. From the first issue of Spartacist (February-March 1964), we had declared our intention to resolve the disparity between our size and our goal of forging a Leninist vanguard party through: revolutionary regroupment with leftward moving elements of other self-professed Marxist organizations and winning individual supporters from among radicalized youth and militants in the civil rights struggle, as well as seeking to intersect key sections of the working class.
It was a period of intense political ferment and tumultuous social struggle in the U.S. The civil rights struggles had shattered the reactionary 1950s Cold War consensus. Opposition to the pro-Democratic Party liberal pacifism of the Martin Luther King leadership had generated a left-wing split of young black militants. The impact of the Cuban Revolution was now combined with growing opposition to the Vietnam War. The New Left was growing by leaps and bounds.
Although our forces were small and in the early years somewhat amorphous, we fought to intervene to the best of our capacity. What comrade Robertson brought to bear were the lessons of Leninist party building, especially the training and development of cadre that he had learned in particular from the work and history of James P. Cannon. He understood that our recruitment would predominantly come from individuals and groups attracted to our program and analysis as expressed in our propaganda, not some phony pretense of “mass work.” At the same time, Jim looked for opportunities where we could, in an exemplary way, demonstrate our program in action.
In 1964, when black Harlem was under police siege following an upheaval of protest against the cop killing of a black teenager, the SL initiated the Harlem Solidarity Committee. Its purpose was to rally working-class support for the besieged black population. The response was a nearly 1,000-strong rally in New York’s garment district. Speaking to the crowd, Jim took on the cops’ campaign to charge communists with inflaming the upheaval in Harlem. As he defiantly declared, “Unfortunately there aren’t many Reds in Harlem now—but there will be!”
In 1968, in the course of an intense internal faction fight, Jim succeeded in forging a cadre collective of those comrades who had been won to the SL/U.S. in its early years. Then, after a series of regroupments and fusions, we were able to realize our perspective of being a fighting propaganda group with the establishment of Workers Vanguard as well as Women and Revolution. We founded a national youth organization, which in turn provided many of the young comrades who would go on to fight for a class-struggle perspective in key unions.
In notes for his own obituary written in 1990, Jim wrote: “He breached the gap from the old left under James P. Cannon and Max Shachtman to the New Left, bringing along several hundred at the time so they did not spend their lives in futile adventure or Yuppiedom.” And, by the time of our Third National Conference in 1972, we finally had the cadre, language skills and financial resources to systematically pursue our international extension.
Reforge the Fourth International!
The international Spartacist tendency was formally launched in 1974 with the “Declaration for the Organizing of an International Trotskyist Tendency” (DOITT). Adopted by the SL/U.S. and the Spartacist League of Australia and New Zealand, as well as supporters in Europe, the DOITT document stated:
“The international Spartacist tendency is just that, a tendency in the process of consolidation. But from its international outset it declares its continuing fidelity already tested for a decade in national confines to Marxist-Leninist principle and Trotskyist program—Revolutionary, Internationalist and Proletarian.
“The struggle for the rebirth of the Fourth International promises to be difficult, long, and, above all, uneven.”
From our first days, Jim was often part of international delegations that pursued opportunities for principled revolutionary regroupment. He personally focused particular effort on Britain, living in London in the mid 1970s. There he collaborated in the writing of our “Theses on Ireland,” a critical extension of a Leninist understanding of the national question especially in relation to geographically interpenetrated peoples. Jim was also central to winning an oppositional faction from Alan Thornett’s Workers Socialist League, which included several young Irish and Turkish members, laying the basis for founding the Spartacist League/Britain in 1978.
By the time of our first International Conference in 1979, we had sections in France, Germany, Australia, Canada, the U.S. and Britain. Of the nearly 300 delegates and observers in attendance who had been members of other organizations, the majority had been left splits from Ernest Mandel’s Pabloite United Secretariat. Others included former pro-Moscow and pro-Beijing Stalinists, anti-revisionist Trotskyists and former Third Campists, as well as ex-members of the Black Panthers and women’s and gay rights radical organizations.
Nonetheless, although we had won many youthful militants from self-proclaimed Trotskyist groups, we had failed to win veteran fighters whose experience would have helped shape a new generation. It wasn’t for lack of trying. Our most notable effort to find, in Cannon’s words, “the initiating cadres of the new organization in the old,” was a long fraternal experience with the comrades of Edmund Samarakkody’s Revolutionary Workers Party (RWP) in Sri Lanka. In 1960, Jim had written a letter to the SWP Political Committee protesting its public silence over the betrayals of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), which had signed on to a popular-front electoral pact with the bourgeois-nationalist, Sinhala-chauvinist Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP). [See Spartacist (English edition) No. 62, Spring 2011.] In 1964, the LSSP joined the SLFP government, leading Samarakkody to split from the LSSP. Later that year, he and his comrade Meryl Fernando, both Members of Parliament, cast their votes in favor of a motion of no confidence, a principled act that brought down the coalition government.
The DOITT document outlining the prospects for revolutionary regroupment took particular note of Samarakkody’s RWP as having “emerged with integrity from the welter of betrayals perpetrated by the old LSSP” and abetted by the United Secretariat (as well as Healy’s IC). In the course of written and other discussions with Samarakkody’s group beginning in 1971, it became clear that they had not broken from a parliamentary framework. Evidence of this included Samarakkody repudiating his 1964 vote against the popular front. Relations had seemingly reached an impasse when in 1979 we received a proposal for fusion.
Comrade Robertson headed a delegation to Lanka for discussions. As another comrade who was part of that delegation recently wrote: “These ten days of intense political combat were a display of Jim’s capacities as a clear-headed political leader, combining steely programmatic firmness with a masterful sense of diplomacy. The trip was conditioned by many factors, but chiefly Jim’s well-known commitment to extend our forces internationally.” Attending our 1979 International Conference, Samarakkody made clear that he intended to maintain his provincial operation on the left fringe of the Sri Lanka popular front and would not allow his organization to be subject to the correctives of international democratic-centralism. The fusion was off, as Samarakkody packed his bags and left before the conference ended.
Nonetheless, we learned that we had polarized the RWP, and several of its younger comrades were won to our tendency. They were animated by Jim’s insistence that the struggle against Sinhala chauvinism by the working class of Sri Lanka “can be no less a precondition for successful revolution than the struggle against Great Russian chauvinism was for the Bolsheviks.” As our Lankan section, they fought with great determination and courage against the government’s escalating war against the Tamil population. Internationally, our sections organized and participated in protests with Tamil exiles protesting the terror in Sri Lanka.
We lost these comrades largely due to our inability to communicate in each other’s languages. Despite concerted efforts by our Sri Lankan comrades and comrades in New York, we never succeeded in breaking the Sinhala-English barrier. In a later document titled “Internationalism Is a Dead Letter If…!” Jim wrote: “Without the language capacity to bridge the gulfs between the people of the world we are not merely lost, we are non-starters.” Referencing himself as “the pathetic walking example of this problem” despite several years of studying Spanish, some French and a prolonged attempt to learn German, Jim ended with the salutation “For a Welders’ and Bilinguals’ Government!”
Maintenance and the PRL
Jim’s reference to “welders” was not meant jocularly. Throughout his political life, he fought against bourgeois society’s veneration of “intellectual labor” and contempt for those who work with their hands. In part, this reflected his study of, and work in, chemistry. In remarks at the 1994 SL/U.S. National Conference, he counterposed “unifying communist values” that seek to overcome the division between mental and manual labor to “the bourgeois dichotomy between the doer and the thinker, the blue and the white collar, work and leisure, dirty and clean, menial and advantaged.”
Jim dedicated his presentation (printed as “Maintenance and the Communist Movement,” WV No. 605, 2 September 1994) to Nina Hartley. A porn star and fighter for sexual liberation, Hartley, in Jim’s words, “personifies the struggle against a parallel kind of invidiousness and hypocrisy, in her case sexual, inherent in the bourgeois order.” Jim was a key contributor to Women and Revolution, which was published from 1971 to 1996. Women and Revolution was not only a tool for intervention into the 1970s women’s liberation movement but also a means to illuminate social questions arising out of the fundamental character of women’s oppression, taking up subjects like human origins and early society as well as culture and art.
Inside the party, Jim encouraged women comrades to become leaders of the organization. In part, this came from his experience in the SWP, where male National Officers had female secretaries. While these extremely competent and devoted women cadre shared their opinions with the national leaders, they did not speak at Political Committee meetings. As one of our early leading women comrades wrote: “Jim said he didn’t want me to be like that; he wanted women in our party to seek authority in their own right.” The leaderships of the SL/U.S. and the ICL have always been distinguished by their many Marxist women cadre.
On the book-learning side of the equation, Jim pursued a lifelong dedication to building a Marxist library and collecting archival material documenting the history and experiences of the workers movement, both in the U.S. and internationally. This started during his years in Shachtman’s organization, and it wasn’t easy as an impoverished student in the midst of the McCarthyite witchhunt. Thus, Jim was understandably quite proud when Louis Sinclair, the bibliographer of Trotsky’s works, found items in Jim’s library that he wasn’t aware of during his visit to the Bay Area in 1958.
Noting Lenin’s admonition that “he who takes somebody’s word for it is a hopeless idiot,” the tasks and perspectives document adopted at the Fourth SL/U.S. Conference in 1974 spelled out the importance of archival work:
“One of the crucial tasks of the vanguard of the proletariat is the struggle to function as the memory of the working class. An important component of this struggle for continuity is the systematic assembling, propagation and critical assimilation of the primary documentary history of the workers movement. Given the passage of time and the accumulation of distortions and vulgarizations, only the precise, verified reconstruction of past realities can serve as a true compass.”
Jim’s personal collection became the basis for the Prometheus Research Library (PRL), a working facility for Marxist and related studies and also the library and reference archives of the SL/U.S. Central Committee. He remained PRL director until his death.
From the beginning of the PRL, Jim pushed an ambitious publishing program to make available rare and important documentation from the history of the communist movement. Our earliest Prometheus Research Series bulletin (August 1988) published the first complete and accurate translation of the “Guidelines on the Organizational Structure of Communist Parties, on the Methods and Content of Their Work.” Adopted by the Third Congress of the Communist International in 1921, the document stands as a codification of communist organizational practice as it was forged by the Bolsheviks and tested by the 1917 workers revolution.
Given the early PRL’s very limited editorial experience, Jim approached George Breitman, one of the principal editors of Pathfinder’s series of Trotsky’s works, who together with other old-time cadre had been drummed out of Jack Barnes’s SWP in 1984. With Breitman’s help, the PRL began to collect Cannon’s writings from the 1920s, work that eventually led to James P. Cannon and the Early Years of American Communism (1992), which Jim co-edited. A PRL memo based on Jim’s notes contrasted such collaboration with one’s opponents in the workers movement to the record of Stalinism:
“By all historical accounts Stalinism ended the moral and political framework of the old radical movement where anarchists, Marxists, syndicalists, co-operativists and even single-taxers worked together on issues of mutual interest. One of Stalinism’s more poisonous qualities, and it is quite total, is the conviction that if you have serious political disagreements with someone you can’t give them the time of day, let alone a reference to an old document.”
In this spirit, Jim was also personally involved in providing documentation and commentary to historian Bryan D. Palmer when he was working on James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928.
Most, but not all, of the Prometheus Research Series bulletins were conceived of (if not co-edited) by Jim, based on his years of research and reflection. This is also true of the PRL’s second book, Dog Days: James P. Cannon vs. Max Shachtman in the Communist League of America, 1931-1933 (2002). Jim had heard rumors of this factional battle from his early days in Shachtman’s organization, but it took him years to get his hands on the key documents. Jim realized that despite the absence of any principled programmatic difference, this early fight between Cannon and Shachtman presaged their 1939-40 battle over the Russian question. It was an early example of the petty-bourgeois impressionism that would lead to Shachtman’s break with Trotskyism. And it demonstrated Cannon’s commitment to programmatic integrity and proletarian centrality.
“We of the Older Generation…”
Dick Fraser once wrote that Robertson had appropriated the “worst aspects of Cannonism and Shachtmanism.” Jim hoped that Fraser meant Cannon’s political intransigence and Shachtman’s easy-going, democratic organizational practices. But he knew he didn’t. Despite political differences, Robertson and Fraser remained friends and political collaborators, particularly on the fight for black liberation, until Fraser’s death in 1988. Two years later, we produced a PRS bulletin containing a selection of his works as a tribute.
Other, unmitigatedly hostile opponents would present Jim as a raving megalomaniac surrounded by handraisers and hacks. These included Tim Wohlforth, who had contrasted his own putative status as a Marxist leader to Cannon, whom he called a vulgar “window-smasher.” The misnamed Bolshevik Tendency, an outfit started by embittered ex-members, joined this chorus. The subjective malice animating the BT was seen in its embrace of Bill Logan—a social and sexual psychopath who was expelled at our first International Conference—as its leader.
The truth of the matter is that Jim never aspired to be “the leader” and was keenly aware that he stood far in Cannon’s shadow. As he put it in his memorial to Cannon, Jim knew that he, and we, could not “wait in national isolation for somebody else to come forward and say, ‘I can do it’.” So he grasped the nettle. Not on his own, but through an ongoing struggle to forge a collective leadership.
Against those posturing as “100 percent” leaders, who were unable to tolerate any corrective or criticism, Jim argued that if you were right 70 percent of the time it was a pretty good track record. Jim often said that “the party flies on two wings,” underlining the value of comrades in the left and right wings of the party.
He also liked to quote Oliver Cromwell’s entreaty: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.” And when the party was wrong, Jim insisted that we publicly correct ourselves. Others, particularly of the líder máximo school, take this to be evidence of weakness and disarray. For our part, we recognize that frankly acknowledging our mistakes is, as Lenin put it, “the hallmark of a serious party” that seeks to both learn from its errors and impart these lessons to the proletariat.
Revolutionary politics is, as Cannon put it, “a devourer of men.” Against pretty big odds, comrade Robertson persisted in the struggle to forge a Leninist party. It took its toll. As part of coping with the stresses and to overcome a great personal shyness, he drank, a lot. By the late 1980s, he was also keenly aware of the impact of aging on his political capacities for central party leadership. He often spoke of the “Rickover Syndrome,” referring to U.S. Navy admiral Hyman Rickover, who was forced to retire at 82 after nearly sinking the nuclear submarine USS La Jolla during its 1981 sea trials.
In the early 1990s, Jim and his family moved to California, which he described as “semi-retirement.” Nonetheless, although removed from the administrative leadership of the party, he continued to be central to shaping our international line and to our propaganda, as well as to internal struggles in the ICL. With his health threatened by alcoholism, he stopped drinking and later also gave up smoking. This bought Jim, and us, some 25 more years of his life and political experience. In that time, he sought to pass on the lessons he had learned to newer party leaders.
In a 1977 internal educational on party history, Jim noted:
“The reason that we stress the continuity of international communism and Trotskyism is because we have so little…. It’s very thin, comrades, this continuity. And it seems to me and has always seemed to me that to be a good communist requires two components, each of which is necessary. One is akin to the university students, that is the mastery of the texts: to know, to read, to study, to be able to have the historic precedents through book learning at one’s fingers. And the other is analogous to the apprenticeship program where you learn by doing under the direction and supervision of those who know better than you. And without components of both I do not think it’s possible to build the Bolshevik party without having to start all over again which is unlikely.”
The founding leadership of the SL had the advantage of coming onto the scene at a time when society was erupting in the U.S. and internationally in social struggle. The current generation has to fight to persevere in a political climate that, since the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-92, has overwhelmingly been defined by a dearth of class and social struggle and a great retrogression of consciousness.
One of Jim’s favorite quotes was from a talk by Lenin in January 1917, when he said: “We of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battles of this coming revolution.” The following month, the February Revolution in Russia opened the way for Lenin and the Bolshevik Party to intervene in a political struggle that would culminate in the October Revolution. Advising our younger comrades to not be taken in by pretenders to Marxism who denounce us for lacking immediate perspectives, Jim underlined: “Don’t pay so much attention to your immediate perspective, because you don’t know what’s going to happen in February! What is your program? That is the decisive question.”
Edward Cliffel
1939-2017
Our comrade Ed Cliffel died in Orlando, Florida, on 23 September 2017, three weeks after a diagnosis of aggressive metastatic cancer. Ed was a leader of our tendency for nearly four and a half decades. At the time of his death at age 78, he was a full member of the Spartacist League/U.S. Central Committee and a consultative member of the ICL’s International Executive Committee.
Ed joined the party in 1973 as part of a fusion process between the Spartacist League and the Cleveland Marxist Caucus, a loose collective of friends and sometime cothinkers who were moving toward systematic study of Marxism. In 1974, he moved to New York City, where he played a leading role in the SL local, including as education director. Ed transferred to Chicago in 1979 and over time became that branch’s political leader.
A frequent and effective public spokesman, Ed was arguably Workers Vanguard’s best writer and drafted many of its front-page articles. His prose was always eloquent and persuasive, drawing on sources like Shakespeare, the King James Bible and popular movies. He presented complex issues concisely and often with mordant humor.
Ed was a presence, his booming laugh irresistible. He thought outside the box and was one of the most creative, independent and critical Marxist thinkers in our party. Ed always sought out political discussion and debate, usually over copious amounts of alcohol. His mind was brilliant and his spirit kindly belligerent; his gusto for life was Falstaffian. He had a deep sense of the human condition.
Ed’s death is a great loss to the ICL. He lived as he had wanted to and died with his boots on, in the trenches of the struggle for a communist future.
A fuller obituary for Ed was printed in Workers Vanguard No. 1119 (6 October 2017).
Victor Granovsky
1952-2019
Our comrade Victor Granovsky died on 15 May 2019, at age 66, in New York City after an eight-month struggle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). A veteran cadre, Victor was instrumental in the International Communist League’s Trotskyist intervention against the 1991-92 capitalist counterrevolution in the former Soviet Union.
Growing up in Los Angeles, Victor was radicalized by the Vietnam War and the state terror against the Black Panther Party. He and his cothinkers formed the Communist Working Collective, a Maoist group that, after being won to Trotskyism, fused with the Spartacist League in 1971. That fusion was crucial for the SL’s ability to launch Workers Vanguard. In the mid 1970s, Victor moved to our center in New York, where he joined WV’s Composition department. He was a graphic designer by profession.
Victor served as the ICL’s main public spokesman throughout the existence of our Moscow station, which lasted until the mid 1990s. At a gathering in December 2018 at the Prometheus Research Library in New York, Victor emphasized, “Comrades can be proud that we were the ones who planted the flag of Trotskyism, defended October to the very last.”
Victor’s astute political understanding and linguistic skills were exceptional assets that facilitated our publication of Russian-language propaganda over the years. As an editorial board member of the English edition of Spartacist, Victor made many and far-ranging contributions, from initiating and drafting the article on the counterrevolutionary 1921 Kronstadt uprising in issue No. 59 (Spring 2006) to conducting critical historical research and producing documentation for numerous other articles.
Victor was known as the party’s funniest and most dramatic storyteller, and we miss him deeply. We extend condolences to his sister and our comrade Irene, her husband Tom and Victor’s family, and to his many comrades and friends around the world.
A fuller obituary for Victor was printed in Workers Vanguard No. 1157 (21 June 2019).
République ouvrière and Workers Tribune: Raising the Banner of Leninism!
For Quebec Independence and Socialism!
We reprint below an article from Workers Tribune No. 1 (Summer/Fall 2018), English-language publication of the Trotskyist League in Quebec and Canada. It was translated from République ouvrière No. 2 (Spring/Summer 2018). For documents and motions related to the article, please see the issue of Workers Tribune.
After launching République ouvrière last summer, the Trotskyist League in Quebec and Canada is now launching a new English-language publication, Workers Tribune. These two papers are the direct outcome of our international fight against a longstanding perversion of Leninism on the national question, which had undermined certain aspects of the revolutionary program of the International Communist League (see Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 65, Summer 2017). This perversion was especially flagrant in Canada, a country defined by the oppression of one nation by another, where our section based in English Canada had long capitulated to the anti-Québécois chauvinism of its own bourgeoisie.
By decisively breaking from these politics, we have laid the basis for building an authentically Leninist party, which places the fight against national oppression at the heart of its program. Such a perspective has never been correctly implemented by any of the groups claiming to be Marxist in Canada. The history of the Canadian left is littered with the wreckage of organizations which crashed on the shoals of the national question. We seek to learn from the past and to correctly apply the lessons of the October 1917 Russian Revolution to the Québécois and Canadian context. Our two publications will be our tools for this, and it is through their pages that we will seek to apply our revolutionary program to reality. In this issue of WT, we are reprinting some key documents of our internal struggle, edited for publication, in order to show the process through which we came to reclaim our Marxist continuity on the national question.
The publication of two separate papers, one for English-speaking Canada and the other for Quebec, flows from our understanding that the Leninist vanguard has specific tasks in the oppressor nation and in the oppressed nation. Quebec was conquered by force and militarily occupied by the British Empire in 1759-60. The position of French Canadians as an oppressed national minority was later consolidated with the bloody repression of the democratic revolution of the Patriotes in 1837-38. The blood of the Patriotes and the oppression of francophones are the mortar with which the modern Canadian state was built. This understanding must be the foundation for any revolutionary perspective in this reactionary state, held together by the oppression of Quebec and by the British monarchy.
Our two papers represent our perspective of building two separate parties in two separate states. In the absence of an independent Quebec, our current task is to build a binational revolutionary party which fights for Quebec’s national liberation and for socialism. The building of such a party is an integral part of the ICL’s fight to reforge the Fourth International. The communist movement is by definition internationalist, and it is essential that the proletariat possess an international party that unifies the workers across national divisions and coordinates the interdependent struggles of the workers of all countries.
For a Workers Republic of Quebec!
Taking the same name as the paper of the celebrated Irish revolutionary James Connolly, République ouvrière (Workers Republic) seeks to be the voice of Leninism in Quebec. Quebec independence is a just cause which we defend without preconditions, whether under capitalism or in a workers state. As the left-nationalist intellectual Pierre Falardeau said in an interview:
“Freedom has value in itself, women’s liberation is not for something, it is positive in itself. So, the freedom of peoples is the same, we shouldn’t put…. For me, if you put conditions on this, you’re not progressive, you’re an asshole.”
Unlike the nationalists, we do not think that the proletariat and the bourgeoisie of a given nation share common interests, and we seek to channel the fight against national oppression along class lines. Since the 1970s, the hard fights waged by the Québécois proletariat have been endlessly deflected by the union bureaucracy into support for the Parti Québécois (PQ). The workers of Quebec have interests directly counterposed to those of the parties of the Quebec bourgeoisie, whether the PQ, the Liberal Party or the right-wing Coalition Avenir Québec. RO will wage a bitter struggle to break the chains that continue to tie the workers to the nationalist bourgeoisie, chains that have led them to countless defeats.
In contrast to most of the Quebec left, we know that nothing good can be expected from the populists of Québec Solidaire. QS is not a “lesser evil” compared to the parties of the bourgeoisie and it fundamentally shares the same program, seeking only to apply a few cosmetic measures to this rotting capitalist system. We must expose the dead end that is QS, along with its pseudo-Marxist waterboys. Québécois workers cannot be truly free in a “left” capitalist Quebec. What is necessary is a republic where the workers are in power. This perspective is expressed in our slogan: For independence and socialism!
Workers Tribune: Marxist, Anglophone, Defender of Quebec
Apart from Spartacist, our international journal, Spartacist Canada (SC) has been the main paper of our tendency in Canada since 1975. Thus it was an important link to revolutionary continuity on a series of key questions for the international proletariat. SC was unique in Canada in its fight against capitalist restoration in the USSR and for the defense of the gains of the remaining deformed workers states (China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam and Laos). SC fought against illusions in the social-democratic NDP [New Democratic Party], exposed the Canadian bourgeoisie’s racism and hypocrisy toward immigrants and denounced its military interventions abroad. We proudly defend this aspect of our heritage and lay claim to it. However, we cannot continue to publish a paper that throughout its existence was incapable of putting forward a consistent Leninist approach on the strategic question in Canada: the Quebec national question. Until 1995, its articles on Quebec openly capitulated to the chauvinism of the anglophone bourgeoisie and put forward an assimilationist position that defended the oppression of Quebec.
We finally adopted a line in favour of independence in 1995, following a fight led by comrade Robertson, the founder of our international tendency. Even though this change represented a qualitative improvement of our program, the conclusions of that fight had never really been implemented and the section had not broken definitively with its Anglo-chauvinist framework. Spartacist Canada is also not an adequate name for a paper that puts forward the perspective of dismantling the unity of Canada through Quebec independence. Thus we are launching Workers Tribune to reclaim Leninism and break decisively with this Anglo-chauvinist past. This paper is founded on the principle that “a nation cannot become free and at the same time continue to oppress other nations”—a quotation from a speech against the oppression of Poland given by Friedrich Engels in 1847 that we are proudly displaying on the WT masthead.
The Canadian bourgeoisie maintains its ideological hold on the workers of English Canada through sacrosanct Can-adian chauvinist unity. This poison is loyally transmitted into the working class through the NDP social democrats and the union bureaucracy. The English Canadian proletariat must at all costs defend the rights of Quebec, and champion Quebec independence if it wants to break politically from its own bourgeoisie and lead a successful fight for its own liberation. As Lenin said:
“The proletariat of the oppressor nations must not confine themselves to general, stereotyped phrases against annexation and in favour of the equality of nations in general, such as any pacifist bourgeois will repeat…. The proletariat must demand freedom of political separation for the colonies and nations oppressed by ‘their own’ nation. Otherwise, the internationalism of the proletariat would be nothing but empty words….”
—“The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination,” 1916
The question of Quebec’s national oppression goes hand-in-hand with the British monarchy: these are the two elements that make Canada what it is today and without which it would in fact have little reason to exist. That doesn’t prevent the reformist left from embracing the lie of a “progressive” Canada and burying the fact that the head of state is, to cite her official title, “Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom, Canada and Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith” (loyally represented by the governor general). WT has the duty to emphasize the reactionary role of the institutions of the monarchy and will work relentlessly to lead the working-class fight to abolish these relics of the Middle Ages. The power of the monarchy is far from being purely symbolic, and it has at its disposal an entire arsenal of anti-democratic measures. Notably, the governor general has the power to dismiss an elected government and dissolve parliament, as well as the power to decree emergency measures to suspend democratic freedoms. These powers were invoked during the 1970 October Crisis to repress the Québécois workers movement, supporters of independence and the courageous militants of the Front de Libération du Québec. Abolish the monarchy!
WT will also expose the Trudeauite lie of multiculturalism, which, under the cover of a great mosaic that is supposedly open and inclusive, in fact aims to assimilate Quebec, while burying the brutal oppression of immigrants in this country. The anglophone bourgeois media constantly tries to portray the movement for independence and Quebec’s national rights as fundamentally racist. Our newspapers will denounce this Quebec-bashing, while opposing the very real racist backwardness that exists in Quebec and in Canada, as in all capitalist societies. Our articles will be in the vanguard of the fight to mobilize the workers movement in defense of ethnic minorities. Full citizenship rights for all immigrants!
Workers Tribune and République ouvrière thus embody the conception that communists must fight as a tribune of the people. As Lenin said:
“The Social-Democrat’s ideal should not be the trade-union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects; who is able to generalise all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation; who is able to take advantage of every event, however small, in order to set forth before all his socialist convictions and his democratic demands, in order to clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat.”
—What Is To Be Done?, 1902
Canadian capitalism, based on the brutal oppression of the whole working class, is also marked by the special oppression of the Quebec nation, Indigenous peoples, immigrants and women. Thus the interim task of building a binational party goes hand-in-hand with that of constructing a leadership composed of 70 percent Québécois and oppressed minorities.
The Fight Against Anglo Chauvinism
The reason we now have the basis to construct a binational organization and have been able to correct our programmatic deficiencies is that for the first time we have a real existence in Quebec. Following the 2012 student strike, the Trotskyist League recruited a group of student activists to the revolutionary program of the ICL. Our Montreal comrades were recruited to our deficient program on the national question, but what the section had written about Quebec before our 1995 line change was hidden from them. In the summer and fall of 2016, the Canadian section was shaken by an important internal struggle. With international help, our Montreal comrades read for the first time certain pre-1995 articles, notably the article “Bilingual Air Traffic Control Dispute Rocks Canada” (SC No. 8, September 1976). This article was well known in the ICL and was considered for a long time as a model for its treatment of the Quebec national question.
In 1976, the English-speaking air traffic controllers and pilots of CATCA and CALPA (Canadian Air Traffic Control Association and Canadian Air Line Pilots Association) called a strike against the introduction of bilingualism in air communications. The French-speaking workers (organized in the Association des Gens de l’Air) refused to join the strike and fought for bilingualism in air traffic control. This issue raised two questions: the question of safety and the question of the linguistic oppression of French speakers. The fight for the right to speak French at work was one of the motor forces of the [1960s] Quiet Revolution, and the right of air traffic control workers to speak French among their colleagues (outside of air traffic communications) is elementary. But in this particular case, this legitimate struggle also confronted a question of safety, because it is in fact safer and more rational to have a single language for air traffic control. Rather than explaining this problem starting from opposition to national oppression, the article expresses complete contempt for the linguistic aspirations of the Québécois and capitulates to Anglo chauvinism:
“The Quebec nationalists’ demand for French unilingualism in Quebec demonstrates their willingness to sacrifice the fight against oppression of French-speakers throughout Canada in exchange for the ‘right’ to impose French in one province. This position has profoundly reactionary consequences, in effect linguistically ghettoizing Quebec and depriving French speakers in the province of any access to English, the dominant language of the North American political economy.”
On reading this article, the Québécois comrades were outraged and wrote a document denouncing its Anglo chauvinism, while also defending bilingualism in air traffic control. Though they were right about the central question, the utter insensitivity of the article, they did not distinguish the question of language from that of safety. Recognizing the chauvinism of the article, the international comrades Coelho and Robertson were able to convince the comrades of the need for one language for air traffic control. This convergence, as well as the support of some anglophone cadres, allowed us to lay the basis for reforging a genuinely binational section in Quebec and Canada. It was this principled fusion that was the lever for later extending the fight on the national question to the International.
A major bone of contention was that even if the ICL was not for independence prior to 1995, it had nevertheless always defended Quebec’s right to self-determination, an idea that was defended by many of the International’s historic cadres. In reality, at every key moment, we opposed the exercise of this right. Though comrade Robertson first raised in 1976 that it was necessary to stand for Quebec independence, this was unanimously rejected by the rest of the international leadership. In 1977, we published the conclusions of this discussion, reaffirming our line against independence. Then, when the question was posed concretely by the 1980 referendum, the Trotskyist League called for a boycott. For Marxists, a boycott is an active tactic which looks to invalidate the result of the vote. In 1907, Lenin explained that:
“boycott is the most decisive means of struggle, which rejects not the form of organisation of the given institution, but its very existence. Boycott is a declaration of open war against the old regime, a direct attack upon it.”
—“Against Boycott”
With this line, not only were we defending keeping Quebec within the oppressive framework of Canada, but we were also calling for mobilizing the Anglo-Canadian working class behind its own bourgeoisie to smash the Quebec referendum. The Trotskyist League did not defend self-determination any more than Trudeau did. From the time of the Conquest, the only principled position for revolutionaries was to call for independence for Quebec. In the 1980 referendum it was imperative to call for the victory of the “yes” vote.
This refusal to defend the Quebec nation’s right to exist was very clearly expressed in our earlier articles on the language question, where we vehemently opposed Law 101. In defending “bilingualism,” SC in fact defended the privileges of English and accepted the inevitability of forced assimilation of the Québécois. This political position remained intact despite our line change in favour of independence in 1995; it was only in the course of our international struggle that we broke decisively with this program.
French has always been a dirty language in the eyes of the anglophone ruling class. For a long time there was no question of speaking it in government and the business world: “Speak White!” The anglophone elite had an explicit assimilationist policy toward Quebec and sought to reduce the weight of French speakers through an influx of immigrants who would be integrated in English. With a minority of francophones, no risk of separation. Law 101, adopted by the Quebec government, allows for the maintenance of a francophone majority while remaining in the framework of the Canadian Confederation. As Leninists, we understand that the equality of languages requires a fight against privileges for the dominant language. To this day, English has never lost its status as the language of the oppressors in Quebec. Thus we defend Law 101 and support immigrants being integrated in Quebec by learning French, while raising the demand for free, quality language instruction. Law 101 is nonetheless only a partial expression of the right of self-determination. The only viable solution remains independence.
Reclaiming Our Leninist Continuity
Quebec is a drop of francophone water in an anglophone ocean. However, the Québécois proletariat is one of the most militant on the continent. While the unionization rate is about 10 percent in the U.S. and nearly 30 percent in English Canada, in Quebec it is nearly 40 percent. The history of class struggle shows that Quebec could well be the weak link of capitalism in North America. But unlocking the revolutionary potential of the working class cannot be accomplished without a vanguard party. The ICL’s struggle against the chauvinist Hydra and the publication of our new newspapers are laying the programmatic base for building such revolutionary parties in Quebec and Canada. The tasks that our modest nucleus confronts are enormous. We must undertake the work that should have been done from the beginning of our 40 years as a section, by studying and applying to Quebec the Marxist principles on essential questions such as a workers party, women’s oppression and the nature of the Canadian state.
The first issue of Iskra (1900) was a clear declaration of Lenin’s group’s reason for existing—of the need for a solid Marxist party composed of professional revolutionaries, defined in opposition to revisionist and reformist ideas, especially the widespread economism of that period. The Militant No. 1 (1928) put forward a sharp defense of the program of Trotsky’s Left Opposition, against opportunism and Stalinist bureaucratism and for a Leninist party. Practically all of the first issue of Spartacist (1964) was a defense of Marxism on Cuba, the black question and, fundamentally, the need for an authentic Trotskyist leadership against the rapidly degenerating U.S. Socialist Workers Party, whose leadership had just expelled us because of our principled struggle to uphold the Leninist program. Each of these newspapers was committed to defending the continuity of authentic Marxism.
RO and WT claim this heritage. However, in RO No. 1, the introduction of our new paper was subordinated to other articles—programmatically correct in themselves—which we thought were more relevant at the time. This decision showed a weakness in our understanding of the central importance of a Leninist vanguard party: for Marxists in Canada, nothing is more important than the publication of a francophone Trotskyist press that fights to make the struggle for Quebec national liberation a motor force for workers revolution. With the second issue of RO, and now the launch of WT, we have corrected that error. Like our predecessors, we set ourselves the task of cohering around our program a nucleus of cadres dedicated to national liberation, socialist revolution and the fight to reforge the Fourth International.
ICL Expels Members of Polish Section
The following statement was issued on 31 March 2019 by the International Executive Committee of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist).
Earlier this month, two members of the Spartakusowska Grupa Polski were expelled from the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) for violations of democratic-centralism. One member had raised internal political grievances with a non-member and both members subsequently defended this violation of basic Leninism. These acts were in direct violation of the ICL’s Organizational Rules and Guidelines, which specify that “political collaboration with non-members of the ICL must be formally authorized by the party organization having jurisdiction” (Spartacist [English edition] No. 54, Spring 1998). Our tiny Polish group, which had been a sympathizing section of the ICL, no longer exists.
The letter of expulsion by the ICL’s International Secretariat (I.S.) notes that the rejection of Leninist democratic-centralism was the culminating expression of these now ex-comrades’ opposition to our Trotskyist program:
“For a long time there have been political differences between the comrades in the SGP and the International leadership: you have consistently bent towards Stalinophobia, you have not defended our program on the woman question and the Jewish question, and more generally you have bent to the pressures of anti-Communist Polish nationalism. For the last few years, the International leadership has carried out a diligent struggle to win you over to the views of the ICL, but your recent acts in violation of democratic-centralism fully bring your political actions in line with your political consciousness.”
An I.S. motion expelling the SGPers was subsequently endorsed unanimously by the International Executive Committee (IEC).
Originating in 1990 as a fusion between the Young Left Movement of Poland and the ICL, the SGP was founded on hard opposition to Polish Catholic nationalist reaction spearheaded by counterrevolutionary Solidarność. The SGP was dissolved by the IEC in 2001 and then refounded as a sympathizing section at the ICL’s Fifth International Conference in 2007. The refounded SGP proved largely incapable of expressing Trotskyist politics and propaganda on its own. It thus remained a sympathizing section, requiring I.S. approval of its published material. The ICL had hoped that internal education and discussion would turn professed political agreement into real understanding and agreement. But the SGP’s differences sharpened qualitatively in the last few years under the social pressure of intensified political reaction in Poland under the overtly chauvinist and clericalist Law and Justice party (PiS), which took office in 2015.
The document adopted by our Seventh International Conference in 2017, “The Struggle Against the Chauvinist Hydra,” described the continuous fights being waged with the SGP against its accommodation to Polish nationalism. It listed several manifestations of this backwardness, including initially refusing to expel an individual when, in resigning from the organization, he announced that he was an anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim racist; the International had to insist that he be expelled. It also recounted a fight against one member who had not seen anything wrong with wearing a Polish flag patch on his shirt.
The conference document cited a 2015 motion passed at an SGP meeting attended by members of the IEC condemning the SGP’s trajectory of adaptation to anti-Communism:
“As reflected in several recent incidents, there has been an alarming political degeneration in the SGP in the direction of Stalinophobic Polish nationalism. This is expressed in the recent draft article titled ‘Imprint of Stalinism in Poland,’ whose lines on the 1940 Katyń massacre and the 1944 Warsaw Uprising run counter to the stated positions of the ICL.”
The SGP members were echoing the anti-Communist propaganda of the Polish nationalists against the Soviet Red Army that liberated Poland from the Nazis and their collaborators. It was in the aftermath of the Red Army’s victory that capitalism was overturned and a bureaucratically deformed workers state was created in Poland.
The SGPers had also repeatedly argued to drop expressions such as “capitalist class,” “great Bolshevik leader Lenin,” “deformed/degenerated workers state” and “bloody U.S. imperialism” from translations of ICL articles in their newspaper, Platforma Spartakusowców. They became openly hostile when ICL comrades argued against their wanting to drop Marxist terms and cater to anti-Communist sensibilities. They were likewise hostile when criticized for their dismissive attitude toward the October 2016 Black Monday demonstrations for abortion rights, an explosive issue in Catholic Poland.
During 2017 international pre-conference discussion, one of the now-expelled members, Wartecki, said that Hebrew is “the stupidest language ever.” After he was castigated for echoing the notorious anti-Jewish bigotry of Polish capitalist society, he tried to cover up the issue by claiming that this was all a misunderstanding. However, both SGP members went on to launch a barrage of slanders, perversely charging the ICL with anti-Polish bigotry for pointing out the prevalence of anti-Jewish poison in Poland!
Our international conference document concluded about the SGP: “This conduct and the accompanying politics are alien to the ICL. The continued existence of the SGP as a section of the ICL is in question.” The SGP delegate to the conference, Jedniak, voted in favor of the document. But this formal agreement did not result in any substantive change, a pattern all too familiar to comrades who had been fighting with the Polish section.
In early 2018, the PiS government enacted a law banning references to Polish complicity in the Holocaust. It was glaringly necessary for the ICL group in Poland—a country at the heart of the Holocaust—to produce a statement condemning the anti-Jewish law and telling the truth about the Polish rulers’ complicity with the massacres of Jews and others under Nazi occupation. A few months and three drafts later, the SGP continued to reduce opposition to the law to a defense of “historical debate,” cast Polish complicity in classless terms of collective guilt and minimized the role of the Polish nationalists and the bourgeoisie’s anti-Communist, anti-Jewish Home Army in aiding the Nazi extermination of the Jews.
Trotskyists worthy of the name proudly hail the Soviet Red Army’s liberation of East and Central Europe from the fascist scourge. But the SGP drafts all but buried the role of the Red Army and omitted our Trotskyist program of unconditional military defense of the then-existing Soviet degenerated workers state and the deformed workers states—including the Polish People’s Republic!—against imperialist attack and internal counterrevolution. The historic crime of Polish Stalinism was, over time, to drive the historically socialist Polish proletariat into the arms of Catholic reaction. Trotskyists called for political revolution to oust the parasitic Stalinist bureaucracy. It was indicative of the SGP’s Stalinophobia that one draft raised this call as a prelude to falsely implying that the Polish Stalinists were responsible for anti-Jewish pogroms in the immediate post-World War II period—pogroms that were in fact committed by anti-Communist Polish nationalist forces.
We were forced to rely on comrades outside Poland to finally write the article (“Poland: Capitalist Rulers Glorify Anti-Jewish Pogromists,” WV No. 1145, 30 November 2018). There we wrote: “The International Communist League is committed to the forging of a revolutionary internationalist party of the Polish proletariat. As a necessary task in this struggle, the SGP seeks to sear into the consciousness of the working class the record of the Polish bourgeoisie’s complicity in the Nazi extermination of the Jews.” The latter sentence was the one that the SGP most vehemently objected to, after the article was published with their agreement.
We had within the ICL an increasingly hardened Stalinophobic opposition that bowed to Polish nationalism and conciliated its corollaries—anti-Communist, anti-Jewish, anti-woman, anti-immigrant bigotry. We were prepared to continue to fight it out over their politics. But the former members rendered moot any continued struggle inside the ICL by taking internal political matters outside the ICL, and then defending that action.
We have a democratic-centralist international. One of the purposes of democratic-centralism is to protect the party as a whole from the influence of lower-consciousness elements outside of the party. International democratic-centralism also allows comrades outside a section, who are not under the same social pressures, to counter the parochialism of national sections and correct political adaptations. We reject a federated international, in which each section is allowed to capitulate to the pressures of its own society. We have lost a small window into an important country in Central Europe, which is unfortunate. But better that than conciliating the anti-Leninist program and practice of those who made up our former Polish section.
Correction: On the Spartacist League/Australia and the 1991 New South Wales General Strike
The main conference resolution adopted at the 1992 Second International Conference of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), reprinted in Spartacist (English edition) No. 47-48 (Winter 1992-93), stated the following about the intervention by our Australian section into the 1991 New South Wales general strike:
“Repeated and often hard-fought strikes throughout 1991 offered numerous opportunities for an aggressive class-struggle intervention by our party. These culminated in the powerful October 1991 24-hour general strike in New South Wales which, despite the treacherous union misleadership, united the state’s multiracial working class in opposition to draconian anti-union laws.
“In part due to its extreme isolation from the rest of the International, comrades of the Spartacist League of Australia (SL/A) were particularly vulnerable to the bourgeois lie that ‘communism is dead.’ This political demoralization led to an egregious betrayal of the elementary union principle of ‘One out, all out!’ during the October general strike and to tailing the most backward elements of the union bureaucracy.”
In 2015, the SL/A Central Committee (CC) organized a review and discussion of these events. It concluded, as codified in a September 2015 CC motion, that there was in fact no breach of principle by the section or by any disciplined supporter. While one supporter went to work during the strike, there was no union at the worksite and no picket line; our supporter did not replace the work of a striking worker. Thus, the assertion in the International Conference resolution that there was an “egregious betrayal” of union principle had no basis in material reality. The SL/A CC’s corrective motion was subsequently endorsed by the International Secretariat.
Correction (Hydra)
In “The Struggle Against the Chauvinist Hydra,” Spartacist (English edition) No. 65 (Summer 2017), we wrote: “The South Slavs played a reactionary role in the crushing of the revolutions of 1848-49 as foot soldiers for the reactionary great powers of that epoch (Prussia, the Russian Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire).”
In fact, the latter was at that time the Austrian Empire: the Austro-Hungarian Empire was established only in 1867.
May 1946 Constitution: Why the PCI Was Right to Vote Yes
A Trotskyist Program and Tactics in Postwar France
The following article is translated from Spartacist (French-language edition) No. 44, Spring 2019.
As the Nazi occupation of France was coming to an end in August through September 1944, the country entered a period of tumultuous class struggle. The French bourgeoisie was deeply discredited. The ruling class had overwhelmingly collaborated with the Nazis, just as the bourgeoisie had in Italy, Greece and other countries. The Stalinist Parti communiste français (PCF) was growing exponentially, capitalizing on its enormous weight in the Resistance movement and on the legacy of the 1917 Russian Revolution, which it falsely claimed to represent. The PCF’s ties to the Soviet Union enhanced the party’s prestige among workers who saw the Red Army triumph over the Nazi vermin and liberate the death camps in East and Central Europe.
The French capitalists clung to what remained of their colonial empire and sought to reclaim the place they deemed rightfully theirs among the victorious imperialist powers. But first they had to eliminate the threat of insurrection by an armed proletariat. When the German occupation ended, there were street battles in major cities as well as strikes and factory occupations, and even the emergence of embryonic organs of dual power. In Paris, workers took over the subway system. In Toulouse, they notably controlled the aircraft factories.
But the PCF leaders betrayed. Having collaborated with the Gaullist wing of the bourgeoisie in the Resistance, they then disarmed the proletariat and made every effort to restabilize the capitalist order in the name of the “battle of production.” After uprisings in Paris, Marseille and other cities in August 1944, the Trotskyist journal Fourth International (October 1944) wrote that if a party with the PCF’s influence had called for soviets (workers councils) and had fought for power, “the insurrection would have very quickly developed into a workers’ revolution. In fact, all the necessary conditions for a revolutionary situation existed, except for the presence of a sufficiently strong revolutionary party.”
Due to the Stalinists’ betrayal, working-class discontent was eventually diverted in a parliamentary direction, but struggles did not completely cease. The PCF received the largest number of votes in the October 1945 elections to the Constituent Assembly and formed a bourgeois coalition government with the Socialist Party (PS, also referred to as SFIO, “Section française de l’internationale ouvrière”) and a bourgeois party, the Mouvement républicain populaire (MRP). This was a classic popular front: the PCF subordinated the working class to the so-called “progressive” wing of the bourgeoisie, just as it had in 1936. The bourgeoisie, however, could not put up for long with a situation in which the PCF—a party allied with the Soviets, who occupied the eastern half of Europe—was the dominant party in parliament. Furthermore, early 1946 marked the official launching of the Cold War, an imperialist crusade whose ultimate aim was the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union.
At that same time, the PCF-SFIO majority in the Assembly adopted a new draft constitution, which was submitted to a referendum in May 1946. This draft constitution, which included a set of supportable democratic reforms (particularly the abolition of the Senate and more limited powers for the president of the Republic), deeply divided French society. All the bourgeois parties, including the MRP, called for a “no” vote, and the referendum became the focal point for a virulent anti-Communist campaign.
The Trotskyists of the Parti communiste internationaliste (PCI) were confronted with an unusual question: faced with the unanimous opposition of the bourgeoisie, should they vote “yes” in the referendum? By a narrow majority, the PCI leadership overturned its initial decision to boycott the referendum, and the party called for a “yes” vote two weeks before it took place. The call for a “yes” vote was opposed by a PCI minority as well as by the leadership of the Fourth International (FI) and its strongest section, the American Socialist Workers Party (SWP).
The International Communist League has re-examined the debates in the PCI and FI on the May 1946 referendum. We concluded that despite the PCI’s serious political problems, it was correct to call for a “yes” vote. The referendum occurred in a context where deep social divisions remained contained within a parliamentary framework. In other words, in the absence of a revolutionary situation, whether or not to call for a vote for a bourgeois constitution in a referendum was a tactical question, not a question of principle. In a motion adopted in December 2014, the International Executive Committee of the ICL stated:
“While we would not call or campaign for the establishment of a bourgeois constitution, when presented with a law or a constitutional amendment or even a new constitution, our duty is to look at whether or not its passage is in the interest of the working class, and then judge our tactics.
“In the case of the May 1946 referendum, it was not only consistent with our principles to vote for the constitution, but it was also tactically justified and intelligent. This constitution represented an amendment in a democratic direction of the previous constitution of the Third Republic; moreover, the unanimous anti-communist offensive of the bourgeois parties against the draft constitution, which was supported by the CP and by a majority of the SFIO, signified that in the event the constitution was rejected—reflecting a change, in favor of the bourgeoisie, in the relative strengths of the classes—the next constitution to be adopted was likely to be less democratic than in May (which was indeed the case).”
Today, this referendum is largely seen as a minor detail in history. But at the time, it divided French society and gave rise to serious differences within the Trotskyist movement. The questions in debate included: the relationship between democratic reforms and the proletarian class struggle; how to combat the raging anti-Communism of the day; and what governmental slogans to raise in a period of sharp class antagonisms when the Marxist vanguard led only a small minority of the working class. Re-examining these debates can provide rich lessons for future proletarian struggles. However, this requires an understanding of the historical context.
The Second World War and the Soviet Union
The Second World War, like the first, was an interimperialist conflict. Marxists were for the defeat of both capitalist camps, the Allies as well as the Axis powers. Defeat in such a conflict weakens, demoralizes and discredits the bourgeoisie, which opens up the opportunity, as Bolshevik leader Lenin said, for the proletariat to “turn the imperialist war into a civil war”—in other words, into a fight for social revolution. The world proletariat had every reason to fear and hate Nazism. For the U.S. and Britain (and the Gaullists), however, the war was all about redividing the world—just as it was for their German and Japanese enemies (and the Vichy government). If the Allies succeeded in concealing this aim behind the sham of “democracy” and “anti-fascism,” it was not simply due to the barbarism of the Nazis but also because the PCF and other mass Stalinist parties politically supported the Western bourgeoisies.
The Soviet Union’s entry into the war on the Allied side after Hitler’s invasion of the USSR in June 1941 did not in any way change the Trotskyists’ position of revolutionary defeatism toward the imperialist powers. The Soviet Union was a bureaucratically degenerated workers state embodying the social conquests of the workers revolution of October 1917. Its planned, centralized economy was not driven by the capitalist profit motive. Trotskyists called for unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union, while remaining defeatist toward the imperialist Allies. In an August 1941 manifesto adopted by its Executive Committee, the FI declared: “The Fourth International has unceasingly proclaimed what the Soviet worker has grasped by his class instinct: unconditional defense of the Soviet Union! We defend the Soviet Union regardless of the betrayals by the bureaucracy and despite these betrayals” (Fourth International, October 1941).
At the same time, the FI called for a proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy and re-establish a regime of proletarian democracy and revolutionary internationalism. Internationalism permeated the Bolshevik Party that had led the October Revolution and forged the Communist International (Comintern, or CI) to lead the fight for world socialist revolution. But the revolutionary uprisings that shook Europe after 1917, especially the 1923 German Revolution, ended in defeat, primarily due to the betrayals of the Social Democrats and the absence of experienced and programmatically solid communist parties. The wave of demoralization that ensued among the Soviet working masses provided fertile ground for the emergence of a nationalist bureaucracy led by Joseph Stalin, which usurped political power beginning in 1923-24.
The Stalinist dogma of building “socialism in one country,” promulgated in late 1924, meant rejecting the Marxist conception that socialism—i.e., a classless society—can only be achieved through world revolution. Instead, the nascent bureaucracy began adapting to the imperialists and their lackeys. Leon Trotsky and other Bolshevik Party cadres formed the Left Opposition and continued the fight for authentic Marxism, while Stalin consolidated his power by condemning many of those who had led the October 1917 Revolution to exile, prison and subsequently to death. Trotsky himself was thus assassinated by a Stalinist agent in August 1940.
The rise to power of Hitler and the Nazis in early 1933, and the criminal passivity of the leadership of the powerful Socialist and Communist parties, were a shock for the international workers movement. The Stalinists had withdrawn into the sectarian adventurism of the “Third Period,” refusing to challenge the social-democratic leaders to join them in united-front actions to crush the fascist menace. When the debacle in Germany did not provoke the slightest revolt in the Comintern, Trotsky pronounced it dead for the revolutionary cause and called for building new Marxist parties to pick up the banner of Bolshevism. It was on this basis that the Fourth International was founded in 1938.
Panicked by the Nazis’ victory, Stalin sought an alliance with the imperialist “democracies” (Britain, France and the U.S.). To this end, in 1935 he proclaimed that the “popular front against fascism”—i.e., coalitions of workers parties with parties of the “democratic” bourgeoisie—was now the priority. This was a return to the politics of class collaboration that the Bolsheviks had rejected. It was in the name of the Popular Front that the PCF betrayed in June 1936, and then again in 1944-45.
The PCF’s Betrayals
World War II began barely three years after the June 1936 general strike in France, which had opened up a prerevolutionary situation. The strike was betrayed by the PCF in the name of supporting the Popular Front government elected in May and led by the Socialists. To justify his betrayal, PCF leader Maurice Thorez notoriously proclaimed: “You have to know how to end a strike.” But the bourgeoisie had taken fright and, for them, better Hitler than workers revolution. Except for a tiny minority around de Gaulle, who took refuge in England in June 1940, the bourgeoisie would go on to accept the Nazi occupation and avidly support the establishment of the Vichy regime, led by Marshal Philippe Pétain and allied with Germany. This is depicted in Marcel Ophüls’ 1969 film, The Sorrow and the Pity.
On 1 September 1939, the French bourgeoisie declared war. The Soviet Union had just signed a nonaggression pact with Germany. The PCF was banned and many of its leaders were thrown in jail. The PCF leadership, despite an initial patriotic impulse to rally behind the French government in the war, realigned itself with Moscow and began denouncing the government while minimizing the Nazis’ crimes.
When Germany prevailed in June 1940 after several weeks of blitzkrieg, the French bourgeoisie feared workers revolution more than ever. In his excellent book Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order 1940-1944 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), Robert Paxton explained: “As soon as the French government itself vacated Paris on June 10, rumors of a Paris Soviet began to spread.” The Commander-in-Chief, General Weygand, even told a June 13 cabinet meeting that the Communists had seized Paris. But taking Paris was the last thing the PCF had in mind. It continued to try to maintain the balance between its two sometimes contradictory loyalties: supporting the capitalist order in France on the one hand and the Moscow Stalinist bureaucracy on the other.
After France’s military defeat, the National Assembly voted by an overwhelming majority to grant full powers to Pétain, who then implemented his own “National Revolution.” Paxton refutes the myth that the Vichy regime was a mere puppet of the Nazis: “Neither diplomats nor soldiers at Berlin cared a fig for Vichy’s internal acts as long as order was maintained and French wealth poured into the German war machine.” Without prodding from the Nazis, the Vichy regime took the initiative to introduce its own anti-Jewish laws and then actively participated in the mass deportations of Jews to the death camps.
The occupation threw the workers and lower layers of the petty bourgeoisie into poverty, while speculators and industrialists producing goods for the German Reich made fortunes. Strikes and demonstrations were violently repressed and their leaders executed or thrown into camps. Hundreds of thousands of workers became prisoners of war or were sent as “volunteers” to do forced labor in Germany. The French cops played an indispensable role in the roundups of Jews, as well as Gypsies, homosexuals, leftists and others, for the death camps.
The decisive turning point in the PCF’s policy was the breakup of the Hitler-Stalin pact with Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany in June 1941. The PCF leadership then went back to seeking an alliance with a wing of the French bourgeoisie.
In spring 1943, the party leadership criminally joined the Conseil national de la résistance (CNR), the bourgeois political coalition just established by de Gaulle. The PCF assured de Gaulle that it had no intention of fighting for workers revolution. In January 1944, Thorez thus proclaimed: “My party would not dream of taking power, not now, nor during the Liberation, nor during the country’s period of convalescence and recovery” (quoted in Philippe Buton, Les lendemains qui déchantent: Le Parti communiste français à la Libération [Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 1993]).
With thousands of workers having joined the maquis [resistance] to evade forced labor in Germany, the PCF sought to take control of the heterogeneous guerrilla groups by forming the Francs-tireurs et partisans (FTP), which it subordinated to the CNR. The PCF also committed acts of sabotage and individual terrorism, including the assassination of rank-and-file German soldiers, thereby fueling vile anti-German chauvinism. Thousands of PCF partisans were killed by the Vichy police and the Gestapo. By the war’s end, the PCF had gained tremendous authority in the working class, in large part due to its self-styled image as the “Parti des fusillés” [party of the executed].
De Gaulle, who had bet on the Anglo-Saxon imperialists instead of the Germans, was initially completely isolated. However, public opinion in France was shifting as a result of the abuses of Vichy and the Gestapo, and with the Red Army gaining the upper hand on the Eastern Front beginning with the battle of Stalingrad. To buy the PCF’s allegiance, in April 1944 de Gaulle reluctantly proposed that its leaders join his government-in-exile. The PCF accepted and was still in de Gaulle’s provisional government when he was toted back to France a few months later by the U.S. and British armies.
In August 1944, de Gaulle arrived in Paris and proclaimed himself the “savior” of a devastated country. On paper, the provisional government gave him enormous powers. But “liberation committees” composed of forces allied with the PCF had seized control of many towns, killing or imprisoning numerous bourgeois officials who had collaborated with Germany. The only army de Gaulle could count on if confronted by the working class was the U.S. and British troops. In reality, he could do nothing without the PCF’s support, which Thorez & Co. loyally pledged. In November 1944, the PCF’s main newspaper, L’Humanité, published the decree announcing that those who did not turn in their arms risked being court-martialed. In January 1945, Thorez called for “one state, one army, one police force”: workers were to turn in their weapons. Finally, the PCF helped de Gaulle integrate the various Resistance militias into the capitalist state.
The PCF’s crucial role in coming to the aid of capitalism, including by defending France’s colonial possessions, was in keeping with Stalin’s policies. Stalin approved the postwar division of Europe at the February 1945 Yalta Conference with the U.S. and Britain and at Potsdam in July of the same year. Capitalist rule was to be maintained in West Europe in exchange for recognition of Soviet occupation in most Central and East European countries. Almost all of those countries later became deformed workers states.
The Stalinist leaders in Italy and France betrayed obvious opportunities for proletarian revolution. In Greece, it took a bloody civil war for the imperialists and their Greek monarchist/fascist underlings to succeed in crushing the proletariat (see “Greece 1940s: A Revolution Betrayed,” Spartacist [English edition] No. 64, Summer 2014).
From World War II to the Cold War
In June 1945, Benoît Frachon, a PCF leader and deputy secretary-general of the Confédération générale du travail (CGT, the PCF-affiliated trade-union federation), boasted to Richard Eldridge, an attaché of the U.S. Department of Labor, that if there was still discontent in the working class, the government or the Socialists were to blame. Speaking of the Communists, he said: “It is we who prevented a general strike” (quoted in Irwin M. Wall, The United States and the Making of Postwar France, 1945-1954 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991]). Frachon had good reason to boast. In France at that time, there were five million unionized workers—nearly half the working class—and 80 percent of them were in the CGT.
In the summer of 1945, although postwar unrest had ebbed, the bourgeoisie still truly feared a workers revolution. The Soviet Army that had crushed the Nazis was less than 400 kilometers from the French border, and revolutionary upheavals continued in Greece and Italy. Tensions arose between the U.S. and the French bourgeoisie, but when it came to anti-Communism they were entirely in agreement. The U.S. feared that the Red Army would drive deeper into Europe, while the French bourgeoisie had to fight social unrest and widespread support for the Communists in the proletariat. The U.S. occupation forces in West Europe, assisted by the British, provided the indispensable military might under cover of which the capitalists, with the aid of the Stalinists, could disarm the proletariat.
The U.S. ambassador to France alerted American authorities to the PCF’s popularity, and the director of the Central Intelligence Group (predecessor of the CIA) told President Truman that “the Communists now have sufficient strength to seize power in France whenever they may deem it desirable to do so” (quoted in Daniele Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe [New York: Frank Cass, 2005]). Washington already had a plan for an anti-Communist “Free Trade Union Committee,” which had been approved at an American Federation of Labor (AFL) congress in November 1944. In November 1945, Irving Brown, the AFL’s chief of European operations, arrived in Paris and immediately campaigned to discredit and split the CGT. Four months later, Winston Churchill, the man who had ruled Britain during the war, declared while visiting the U.S.: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”
When the war in Europe was drawing to an end and Hitler’s armies were disintegrating, prisoners and deportees began returning to France en masse. De Gaulle feared that this influx would lead to yet more instability, so he organized municipal elections in April-May 1945 to finally dismantle the “liberation committees,” the extraparliamentary organs that had emerged from the Resistance. Legislative elections were held in October, at a time when the PCF’s authority among workers, and even among peasants, was at its height. The PCF won 26 percent of the vote, becoming the largest party in the National Assembly. De Gaulle needed the PCF’s cooperation to pass the legislation he wanted. This included drawing up a new constitution for a Fourth Republic. A referendum held in conjunction with the legislative elections approved the transformation of parliament into a constituent assembly.
The PCF needed only the Socialists in order to have a majority in the Assembly. But the Stalinist leaders insisted that the MRP, the main bourgeois party, be included in the coalition. The fact that a popular front includes a bourgeois party (even a rump one) serves to guarantee that the coalition will not go beyond the framework of the bourgeois order. The reformist leaders are thus provided with an alibi to hide their own acceptance of anti-working-class measures, and of the capitalist order more broadly. And the PCF deputies joined with the MRP and the SFIO to elect de Gaulle head of the government.
The PCF used its enhanced authority to get the masses to accept the extreme hardships of postwar life. In 1944, gasoline consumption was one-tenth the prewar level, while that of coal was down to a third. Bread and other food staples continued to be rationed until 1949. A wage hike of 25 percent was granted in 1946, but food prices had increased by nearly 70 percent. Throughout this period, the PCF worked to prevent strikes. In July 1945, Thorez told miners: “Production, production, and more production, making coal—today, this is the highest form of your class duty and your duty as Frenchmen” (quoted in Philippe Buton, Les lendemains qui déchantent).
However, the workers still had illusions in the PCF, which notably took credit for the creation of the Social Security [national health care] system by its minister Ambroise Croizat. But the PCF played its full role in the bourgeois government to rebuild the French capitalist economy, spreading the illusion that this was about fighting for jobs and food. The PCF greatly expanded its base, which grew from 60,000 members in August 1944 to one million the following year. In 1946, PCF members held 80 percent of the leadership positions in the CGT.
The PCF was then the largest Stalinist party in the capitalist world, publishing 12 daily papers and 47 weeklies. L’Humanité was the country’s leading paper in terms of print run. De Gaulle was hesitant to do anything that might provoke the PCF to unleash the militancy of its working-class base. Meanwhile, the Socialists had lost a lot of influence, especially in their traditional industrial strongholds. Even the bourgeois parties were obliged to adopt leftist verbiage. The MRP presented itself as a progressive party, even though everyone knew that voting for the MRP meant voting for de Gaulle.
Problems of French Trotskyism
Thanks to the PCF’s betrayal, the bourgeoisie essentially managed to return things to normal and re-establish bourgeois parliamentarism. But the situation remained far from stable. What was missing to set the PCF’s working-class base against its leadership and open the road to revolutionary struggle was a politically solid Trotskyist party with sufficient roots in the working class.
French Trotskyism was handicapped from birth by the absence of a stable collective leadership. It had been formed out of successive and heterogeneous waves of PCF oppositionists who merged with much difficulty to become the Ligue communiste in 1930. This was in contrast to the nucleus of American Trotskyism, which came out of the faction led by James P. Cannon in the American Communist Party. About half of that faction was won over to Trotskyism en bloc in 1928, and Cannon succeeded in building a solid Trotskyist organization in the U.S., the strongest and best politically equipped section of the Fourth International from the 1930s on. For 35 years, this organization stood up to the pressures of conducting revolutionary work in that bastion of imperialism. The continuity of revolutionary Trotskyism runs through that party to the ICL today.
In contrast, French Trotskyism was marked by dilettantism and egotistical bickering, which prevented it from playing a significant role in the June 1936 general strike. At its founding congress in 1938, the Fourth International passed a resolution on the French section, the Parti ouvrier internationaliste (POI, Internationalist Workers Party), which stated:
“The inadequacies of the POI’s leadership are shown by an increasing organizational letdown, with, as sequel, the existence of a certain ‘revolutionary’ amateurism, the lack of a serious party administration, of a normally functioning national treasury, and of a [POI newspaper] Lutte Ouvrière editorship which is stable and full of the spirit of emulation.”
—“Resolution on the Tasks of the French Section,” printed in Documents of the Fourth International (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973)
Cannon was sent to France in early 1939 to remedy this situation and steer the POI toward bold, energetic Bolshevik work targeting the PSOP (Parti socialiste ouvrier et paysan [Workers and Peasants Socialist Party]), a left split from the SFIO. Cannon spent several weeks there to transmit his substantial experience in genuine Bolshevik mass work and to try to forge a Trotskyist leadership. But the French section completely ignored him and opposed, through every conceivable dilatory tactic, the urgent recommendations from Trotsky and the FI to enter the PSOP and fight there for the Fourth International (see the 1983 LTF pamphlet, “La question française”—Discours inédit (avril 1939) de James P. Cannon, fondateur du trotskysme américain [James P. Cannon, “The French question,” April 1939, printed in SWP Internal Bulletin Vol. I, No. 10, June 1939]).
The French Trotskyist movement was thus very weak and fragmented at the start of World War II. Some of its cadres, such as Jean Rous, openly abandoned Trotskyism at that time. Others such as Barta (from whose group the current organization Lutte ouvrière originated) founded a small semi-syndicalist organization. One of the main leaders of a group that originated in the POI was Yvan Craipeau, against whom Trotsky had written a fierce polemic condemning his refusal to defend the Soviet Union in the coming war (“Once Again: The USSR and Its Defense,” 4 November 1937). And then there was the group founded by Raymond Molinier, who was expelled in late 1935 for indiscipline resulting from his ultra-opportunist policy toward the SFIO. The founding congress of the FI called for Molinier’s “unconditional” expulsion as a precondition for any reunification with his group.
All these groups experienced serious political difficulties during the war. The POI’s initial policy was to subordinate the mobilization of the working class to the Gaullist wing of the imperialist bourgeoisie. For their part, the Molinierists denied that there was any element of national oppression in occupied France, and some of them reportedly even entered Vichyist organizations. The Barta group was similarly contemptuous of the national question, while using it as a pretext to renounce defense of the USSR as soon as the Red Army advanced beyond the borders of the Soviet Union in 1944.
Nonetheless, some Trotskyists fought to uphold a revolutionary internationalist proletarian perspective, in sharp contrast to the PCF’s chauvinism. They carried out particularly heroic internationalist work toward German soldiers stationed in France, publishing and distributing the German-language newspaper Arbeiter und Soldat (Worker and Soldier). This journal invited German soldiers—mostly workers in uniform—to fraternize and called on them to turn against their own imperialism. Many Trotskyist cadres paid with their lives for this work. (To learn more about French Trotskyism during this period, see the introduction to Prometheus Research Series No. 2, “Documents on the ‘Proletarian Military Policy’,” February 1989. See also “Trotskyists in World War Two,” Spartacist [English edition] No. 38-39, Summer 1986.)
By the end of the war, the Trotskyist movement had been badly weakened by the multifaceted repression of the French state, the Gestapo and Stalinist goons. The reunification of the former POI with the Molinierists to create the PCI took place without a thoroughgoing assessment of the problems experienced during the war. The scarcity of tested cadres allowed elements like Pierre Frank, one of Molinier’s former lieutenants, and Yvan Craipeau to gain top leadership positions in the organization. It also allowed the Greek adventurer Michel Pablo (Raptis) to take over the leadership of the FI’s European Secretariat and then the Paris-based International Secretariat. At bottom, in Europe the continuity of Trotskyism had been broken.
The American Trotskyist party, Cannon’s SWP, should have assumed much greater responsibility for the leadership of the Fourth International. Cannon was in fact the main leader of the FI after Trotsky’s assassination in 1940. Together with Trotsky, he had led a crucial fight in the SWP in 1939-40 against the Shachtman-Burnham faction for defense of the Soviet Union in the world war. The SWP leadership had emerged intact from the war years. But instead of demonstrating that it was up to the task of leading the International, it withdrew into an isolation that was not truly imposed on it.
The Trotskyists After the War
The French Trotskyists’ size and influence in the working class at the end of the war were minuscule compared to the PCF. The PCI was far from having a homogeneous program. A series of fights had essentially corrected the rightist deviations that bent in the direction of supporting the pro-Gaullist Resistance. But differences remained on questions as crucial as the class nature of the Soviet Union, which some leaders (including Craipeau) considered state capitalist or bureaucratic collectivist.
When the occupation ended, the PCI struggled to build factory committees that could become organs of dual power and fight for socialist revolution. The Trotskyists faced many political obstacles, particularly the pervasive idea that the imperialist Allies had waged a progressive, democratic war against fascism. Moreover, the reformists, and especially the Stalinists, came out of World War II with greatly enhanced authority. This situation was in contrast to World War I, which had utterly discredited the Social Democrats.
To combat the PCF’s attempts to channel the aspirations of the working class into parliamentarism, the PCI raised the call for a “PS-PC-CGT government.” This demand was a powerful tool to set the base of the workers movement, especially the base of the PCF, against its leadership by exacerbating the contradiction between the aspirations and objective interests of the working class, on the one hand, and the policies and actions of its sellout leadership on the other. The inclusion of the CGT—a mass trade union, not a parliamentary party—in the slogan reflected the extraparliamentary nature of this perspective; it evoked a regime based on workers councils or other mass organizations of the proletariat.
The call for a PS-PC-CGT government, linked with other transitional demands, was aimed at directing the proletariat’s struggle toward a workers government in opposition to the bourgeois popular front. An example of this approach is expressed in an article in La Vérité (25 December 1944) that presented the key demands of the PCI’s “action program”:
“A reconstruction plan drawn up by the CGT, implemented under the control of workers committees;
“Nationalization of the banks and trusts without compensation or buyouts;
“A government of the P.S., P.C., C.G.T.;
“Arm the people, workers militias;
“United international action by the proletariat.”
The “PS-PC-CGT government” slogan had a precedent: after the February 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks called for a government of the Social Revolutionaries (SRs) and Mensheviks that would be responsible to the soviets. Following the overthrow of the tsar by the February Revolution, a situation of dual power had been created: the soviets of workers and soldiers on one side and the bourgeois Provisional Government on the other. Under Lenin’s leadership, the Bolsheviks put forward the slogan “all power to the soviets,” while the SRs and Mensheviks, who had a majority in the soviets, supported the Provisional Government, which they entered in May. The demand for an SR-Menshevik government was therefore integrally linked to the call for power to the soviets. Trotsky explained in Lessons of October (1924) that the Bolsheviks’ tactic exposed the SRs and Mensheviks before the proletariat for wanting “to ‘exert pressure’ on the ruling bourgeoisie, a ‘pressure’ so calculated as to remain within the framework of the bourgeois democratic regime.” In The History of the Russian Revolution (1932), Trotsky noted that when the Bolsheviks had won a majority in the Petrograd soviet in September, and then in other places, the slogan “‘Power to the Soviets’...received a new meaning: All power to the Bolshevik soviets.”
The Question of the Constituent Assembly
Despite the correct “PS-PC-CGT government” slogan, the PCI’s action program adopted in November 1944 at the end of the Nazi occupation also called for a constituent assembly—in other words, for the election of a new bourgeois government. This call was presented in opposition to the unelected “Consultative Assembly” that was an integral part of de Gaulle’s provisional government.
Unlike truly democratic demands, such as abolition of the monarchy, the right of self-determination, etc., the call for a constituent assembly can only be a trap for the workers. As we explained in “Why We Reject the ‘Constituent Assembly’ Demand,” (Spartacist [English edition] No. 63, Winter 2012-13):
“While the Constituent Assembly played a progressive role in the great French bourgeois revolution of 1789, historical experience since has demonstrated that this ceased to be the case thereafter. Beginning with the Revolutions of 1848, in every situation where a constituent assembly or similar bourgeois legislative body was convened in the context of a proletarian insurgency its aim was to rally the forces of counterrevolution against the proletariat and to liquidate proletarian power. This was evident in the Paris Commune of 1871, the October Revolution of 1917 and the German Revolution of 1918-19. Though never subsequently codified by the CI as a general statement of principle, the thrust of the Bolsheviks under Lenin and Trotsky’s leadership following the October Revolution was to treat the constituent assembly as a counterrevolutionary agency.”
The Trotskyists’ agitation for a constituent assembly at the close of the war was wrong, and it exacerbated the political confusion inside the PCI. There was very strong opposition to this demand inside the PCI, particularly from former Molinierists.
The call for a constituent assembly was only one aspect of the PCI’s generally correct propaganda at that time. But this demand was put forward more and more prominently as the October 1945 legislative elections approached. These elections were accompanied by a referendum on whether to turn the new parliament into a constituent assembly. The PCI called for a “yes” vote, and for committees to defend the constituent assembly in the (imaginary) scenario of its convocation being threatened.
The confused arguments raised by the PCI are telling about the contradiction between calling for a constituent assembly and struggling for a workers revolution based on soviets. According to an October 1945 PCI pamphlet on the elections, the constituent assembly would have “two urgent tasks to fulfill: First, get the economy going to provide work and bread for everyone. Second, enact a democratic constitution, which would consecrate the sovereignty of the popular masses and ensure their direct and permanent control over the affairs of the state” (our translation). Implicitly, the working class could run the bourgeois state in its own interests.
In fact, the creation of a constituent assembly after the October 1945 referendum in France was one of the factors that contributed to deflecting potential revolutionary struggle into the dead end of parliamentarism. In the months leading up to the May 1946 referendum on the new constitution, strikes in France were rare and political life was confined to the parliamentary sphere.
Conflict over the Constitution
The ruling parties had opposing views about the new constitution. De Gaulle, who had the MRP under his thumb, wanted a bonapartist constitution tailor-made for him, which the PCF refused to go along with. The PCF and the MRP introduced their own proposals, with the Socialists serving as mediators. The PCF got enough support from the Socialists to block the MRP’s most reactionary and anti-Communist proposals. The SFIO helped block the MRP’s proposals for state funding of religious schools and other measures to bolster the church and the family. They also supported the PCF’s call for a unicameral legislature—i.e., without a senate—and weak presidential powers. The SFIO leaders had to accept some of the PCF’s demands because they needed the latter’s influence in the proletariat to get workers to accept plans for capitalist “reconstruction.” De Gaulle ended up resigning in January 1946, denouncing the “regime of the parties.”
Weakened by his resignation, the MRP wanted to leave the government. But the officer corps, following the “advice” of American military leaders working behind the scenes in France, forced the MRP to stay in office. The historian Georgette Elgey cites a letter from the head of the French general staff, General Billotte, to Maurice Schumann, leader of the MRP:
“This solution [a PCF-SFIO government], which would very quickly lead to the SFIO disappearing completely behind the PC, letting the latter take over the political leadership, has been objectively examined by the Anglo-Saxon military officers. They consider it a very grave threat to the rearguard of their occupation troops, and as likely to hasten a possible military conflict with the USSR.… I now think that the tripartite system under Socialist leadership is the lesser evil that will allow us to wait out the elections without too much damage being done. In the meantime, France can perhaps be stabilized.”
—Georgette Elgey, La république des illusions, 1945-1951 (Paris: Fayard, 1965)
This perfectly illustrates the role of bourgeois parties in a popular front: They serve to guarantee the maintenance of capitalism. Naturally, the MRP agreed to remain in the government.
The PCF hypocritically proposed a declaration on private property that left the door open for the expropriation of some private companies. Regarding the colonies, the PCF and SFIO timidly put forward the idea of some sort of federalism while speechifying about the “doctrine of assimilation.” What the PCF refused to do was call for unconditional liberation of the colonies—the only revolutionary Marxist position. In fact, the PCF was part of the government during the May 1945 Sétif and Guelma massacres in Algeria under French colonial rule. They remained in the government as French imperialism embarked on the war in Indochina against Ho Chi Minh’s forces, and while tens of thousands of people were massacred in Madagascar after the March 1947 uprising.
The Stalinists made concession after concession to the MRP. Yet the draft constitution did include substantial democratic reforms, certainly when compared with the reactionary constitutional laws of 1875 that established the Third Republic after the 1871 Paris Commune was crushed. The first 39 articles were largely devoted to democratic rights, and colonial subjects were to have the same economic and social rights and freedoms as French citizens (but the draft was in fact noncommittal regarding their political rights). It also made provision for a unicameral legislature and a weak presidential executive, despite the MRP’s objections.
On April 3, the MRP’s François de Menthon resigned from his post as rapporteur of the constitutional commission. On April 15, the MRP declared that it would refuse to vote for the draft, which was approved by the PCF-SFIO majority a few days later, shortly before the May 5 referendum. A raging anti-Communist campaign was launched against the PCF: “The Constitution that the SFIO and PCF wanted was solely identified with communism, dictatorship and fascism. The ‘no’ vote, on the other hand, was presented as a vote for freedom” (Pierre Letamendia, Le Mouvement républicain populaire: Le MRP, histoire d’un grand parti français [Paris: Beauchesne, 1995]).
In light of this right-wing offensive, the draft constitution was rejected by a narrow margin, with a turnout of almost 80 percent. According to one poll, at least 33 percent voted no “to oppose communism.” With anti-Communist hysteria at fever pitch, part of the SFIO backpedaled in the campaign for the constitution. Ten days before the vote, one of the party’s national leaders sent a telegram to every Socialist federation forbidding them to campaign jointly with the PCF for a “yes” vote. But in the end, only 18 percent of SFIO members voted “no.” And while the colonial lobbies denounced the constitution as a threat, the “yes” vote was overwhelming in the few colonies where the native population actually had the right to vote.
Jacques Fauvet, longtime editor of Le Monde and a prominent ideologue for French capitalism, commented in his book La IVe République (Paris: Fayard, 1959) that if the referendum had passed, “France would therefore have been governed by an Assembly at the only time in its pre- or postwar history when the Socialists and Communists had an absolute majority of elected representatives and close to a majority of the electorate.”
The working class had patiently accepted the massive increase in working hours and reduction of real wages imposed by the PCF and SFIO, which claimed that these measures would help rebuild industry and strengthen French imperialism relative to the U.S. and other countries. But the standard of living had fallen below prewar levels and the working masses were close to starvation. This was not the “liberation” they had fought for, and in 1946 they began to run out of patience. Adopting the constitution in the face of the bourgeoisie’s anti-Communist campaign could have rekindled class-struggle proletarian militancy. That is why it was so important for the bourgeoisie to defeat the draft constitution and thereby weaken the PCF.
The PCI and the Referendum
The PCI took up the question of the constitutional referendum at a March 1946 Central Committee (CC) meeting, which decided to call for a boycott (in fact, for abstention). In an article titled “Against the Tripartite Plebiscite: Boycott the Referendum” (La Vérité, 13 April 1946), the PCI declared: “Today, the leaders of the French Communist Party and the Socialist Party are asking workers not only to vote for a constitution that is bourgeois and anti-democratic but also to sanction the policy of three-party rule which, for the last ten months, has done nothing but worsen the condition of the working masses.”
Throughout the entire period of negotiations over the draft constitution, the PCI never considered voting “yes.” But events were rapidly changing the context, and therefore the corresponding tactical approach that Trotskyists needed to take. The PCI was divided into two main tendencies: one around Pierre Frank, Marcel Bleibtreu and Pierre Lambert, and the other—a rightist minority—mainly centered around Craipeau and Albert Demazière. Once the MRP withdrew its support to the draft constitution and the anti-Communist crusade began, the minority started to raise arguments for voting “yes.” As the polarization between the bourgeois parties and the PCF deepened, others in the PCI also began to reconsider their position.
On April 20, the day after the PCF and SFIO had voted in favor of the draft constitution in the National Assembly, Lambert gave a report to the PCI Political Bureau, the resident leadership in Paris. While he began by saying that the PCI should “wait to take a position” on the referendum, he ended up supporting a motion for a “yes” vote, which passed by five votes to four. At an April 23 emergency meeting, the CC narrowly approved this position. Much of Lambert’s report to that meeting was published in an article in La Vérité (26 April 1946). The article mentioned the capitulations of the PCF to the MRP and stated that the PCI “will vote YES in the May 5 referendum, not because we want to endorse the successive capitulations of the workers parties, not because we are supporters of the Constitution, that bastard child of tripartite politics, not because we accept the Union française [colonial French Union] and the enslavement of colonial peoples, but because what’s posed is a plebiscite for the parties of reaction or for the workers parties.”
To examine questions of constitutional reform, including by referenda, the starting point for Marxists is what can advance the proletarian class struggle. The May 1946 referendum in France was one of those situations where voting “yes” was both in accordance with Marxist principles and appropriate. From the standpoint of the workers and oppressed, the draft constitution was a positive change to the existing bourgeois order. And it was a lot better than the one that was finally adopted in October 1946, instituting the Fourth Republic.
The PCI’s decision to vote “yes” in the referendum was an application of Leninist tactics. In forging the Bolshevik Party as the essential instrument for socialist revolution, Lenin denounced the “constitutional illusions” fostered by the SRs and Mensheviks, who claimed that adopting a democratic constitution would stabilize Russia and make the state accountable to the people. Lenin explained that with or without a constitution, the bourgeois state would continue to attack the workers and the oppressed, but that “it would be the height of absurdity for revolutionary Social-Democrats to refrain from fighting for reforms in general, including ‘constitutional reform’” (“A Turn in World Politics,” 31 January 1917—before the outbreak of the revolution). For Lenin, “The Marxist solution of the problem of democracy is for the proletariat to utilise all democratic institutions and aspirations in its class struggle against the bourgeoisie in order to prepare for its overthrow and assure its own victory” (“Reply to P. Kievsky,” August-September 1916).
A Question of Tactics, Not Principles
On April 22, the International Secretariat (I.S.), the leading body of the Fourth International, then based in Paris, passed a motion denouncing the idea of voting “yes.” This was read into a meeting of the PCI Central Committee the next day. The main leaders of the postwar I.S. were Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel (Germain), leader of the Belgian section. Both continued to oppose the PCI’s position in the party discussions that went on for several months.
The I.S. motion argued that the PCI’s line was “a typical opportunist deviation” and that the only principled position was to oppose something that “sanctions the bourgeois character of the state.” According to this motion, “The rejection of the Constitution will not result in the passage of another and more reactionary Constitution nor in the handing of the power of the Communists and Socialists over to the bourgeoisie, but simply in an elaboration of a new Constitution by a new Constituent Assembly” (SWP Internal Bulletin Vol. VIII, No. 7, June 1946).
For starters, the FI leadership was wrong to say that the PCI was violating a principle. A Marxist principle is a distillation of the lessons of the class struggle: it is adopted because going against it would invariably mean acting against the interests of the working class. If France had been in the midst of a prerevolutionary or revolutionary situation, the question of fighting for soviets or other organs of insurrectionary struggle would have been posed. To call for adopting a bourgeois constitution in those circumstances would indeed have meant betraying the proletariat. But that was not the case in France in April-May 1946, unlike the first few months after the end of the Nazi occupation.
In its criticisms of the PCI’s position, the I.S. did not take into account that the French Trotskyists were trying to confront the political problems posed by the referendum. To vote “no” would have meant making a bloc with the right wing. To call for a boycott or abstention would have been sterile and abstract. The call for a “yes” vote was consistent with the call to break with the bourgeois MRP and form a PS-PC-CGT government. A breakup of the popular front would have exposed the reformist workers parties, which would have lost their main excuse for the betrayal of subordinating the working class to the bourgeoisie. This would thereby have advanced the class struggle. Moreover, the adoption of the PCF-SFIO draft constitution by the population would have struck a blow against the Cold War campaign in France.
The Debate in the IEC
The American SWP also opposed the PCI’s decision. In June 1946, its representatives on the International Executive Committee (IEC) voted for a resolution stating that the referendum was merely “an electoral manoeuver of the bourgeoisie” and that the PCI’s position “contributed to nurturing parliamentary illusions” (SWP Internal Bulletin Vol. VIII, No. 9, July 1946).
Faced with a new situation in the aftermath of the war, Cannon and his supporters were slow to recognize that the immediate revolutionary opportunities in France had passed. In the U.S., they had reaffirmed a proletarian, revolutionary stance, but they had grandiose perspectives for the SWP and expected an imminent increase in proletarian struggles. This was in spite of the fact that the American bourgeoisie had come out of the war in a greatly strengthened position, both domestically and on a world scale.
Within the SWP there was an opposition to Cannon, led by Albert Goldman and Felix Morrow, that was rapidly moving to the right. The opposition supported the PCI’s call for a “yes” vote in the constitutional referendum, which pushed Cannon to oppose the PCI. Cannon rigidly believed that Europe was heading either toward proletarian revolution or some variant of fascism or bonapartism. Goldman and Morrow, on the other hand, recognized that the capitalist class could maintain its rule through the sham of bourgeois democracy, and that this would reinforce democratic illusions in the working class. These empirical observations were correct. But Goldman and Morrow were on a political trajectory that liquidated the Trotskyist program of socialist revolution into a series of democratic demands. For example, in 1945 Morrow advised the French Trotskyists: “During the fight for legality, do not be afraid of making Vérité appear entirely as an organ fighting for nothing more than real democracy” (SWP Internal Bulletin Vol. VII, No. 12, November 1945).
Goldman and Morrow had proclaimed that a period of bourgeois-democratic rule was necessary in West Europe and had renounced unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union. These positions were closely linked: the European bourgeois democracies were the anti-Soviet allies of American imperialism. Morrow also called for the French Trotskyists to liquidate their forces into the SFIO, or even into a wing of the Mouvement de libération nationale, a bourgeois-nationalist movement. After exiting the SWP in 1946, Goldman and Morrow quickly abandoned Marxism and became pro-imperialist supporters of the Cold War.
While Goldman and Morrow embraced the postwar democratic order, Cannon and the SWP majority, despite some disorientation, remained committed to the program of proletarian revolution and to building a Leninist party in the U.S. to lead it. However, the SWP displayed a sterile orthodoxy, especially in regard to the renewed authority of the European Stalinists, and a certain parochialism. Like the FI’s new European leadership around Michel Pablo, the SWP impressionistically refused to recognize that proletarian struggles in West Europe had been defeated for the immediate period. In April 1946, just prior to the French referendum, the FI held its first postwar conference, which adopted a manifesto declaring that at that moment “the crisis of society has reached unprecedented depth and breadth.” The resolution added:
“In a situation which is undoubtedly as favourable for revolution as never before, both because of its profound crisis character as well as its universal extent, does the party exist which is necessary to lead the revolution successfully?...
“It is a matter of a whole revolutionary period taking place on a world-wide scale. The capitalist world has no other way out except its prolonged death agony.”
—Workers International News, April-May 1946
To say that the capitalists were incapable of re-establishing their order and that workers’ struggles were going ever forward was simply unrealistic. Moreover, the later decline of the Stalinist parties did not result from a massive leftward shift in the working class but from a bludgeoning by bourgeois reaction.
Discussion on the French referendum continued at a June 1946 IEC plenum. Jock Haston, leader of the British Revolutionary Communist Party, put forward a resolution in defense of a “yes” vote, placing the question back in its appropriate framework:
“At all stages of the class struggle it is our duty to develop and struggle for the proletarian form of state and to seek the overturn of the bourgeois parliamentary state. But soviets arise out of the class struggle at a given stage in history. While advocating and struggling for soviets and the dictatorship of the proletariat, revolutionaries have the duty to base their tactics upon the class struggle, not as we would like it to be, but as it really exists.”
The resolution concluded:
“The majority of the PCI correctly understood this problem and gave the correct directive to vote ‘Yes’ in the referendum. They did not create illusions in the bourgeois state thereby, but on the contrary, used this opportunity to expose the bourgeois character of the state. They did not create illusions in the mass workers’ parties, but on the contrary, used the opportunity to expose the capitulation of these parties to the MRP. At the same time they sought to use the conflict to drive a wedge between the workers’ parties and the MRP, and to create a bridge to the workers who support the mass parties. From the standpoint of principle, our French comrades of the majority were on solid ground. From the standpoint of tactics, their insight was superior to that of their critics.”
—SWP Internal Bulletin Vol. VIII, No. 9, July 1946
These arguments are sound. Although this resolution was defeated at the IEC plenum, it was later adopted by the PCI Central Committee.
Confusion on the “Workers Government” Slogan
Some of the arguments put forward by the supporters of a “yes” vote in the PCI leadership were far from being entirely correct. For example, in his report to the Political Bureau on 20 April 1946, Lambert raised the idea of an “anti-capitalist” constitution, an absurdity under bourgeois rule. It does not appear that the Trotskyists seriously examined to what extent the draft constitution represented a democratic reform in comparison with the Constitution of the Third Republic. Their argument was basically limited to taking the side of the workers parties (the “yes” camp) against the MRP and the bourgeoisie (the “no” camp).
In fact, both the “yes” supporters and their opponents displayed real confusion regarding governmental slogans. Sometimes they called for a “Socialist-Communist government,” thereby omitting the CGT, and sometimes for a “PS-PC government based on the CGT.” This disappeared the non-parliamentary, and therefore revolutionary, axis of the “PS-PC-CGT government” slogan.
We in the ICL recognize that there was a connection between voting “yes” in the referendum in the midst of a sharp class polarization and calling for an extraparliamentary PS-PC-CGT government: these linked positions would serve to advance class struggle against the bourgeoisie and its state. But the Craipeau-Demazière right wing coupled its support for a “yes” vote with governmental slogans formulated in a parliamentary framework. As long as the PCF and SFIO had a majority in the National Assembly, the PCI’s rightist elements called on them to “break with the bourgeoisie and form a government against the bourgeois parties.” But after the PCF and SFIO lost their majority in June 1946, Craipeau & Co. concluded that since the slogan of a PS-PC-CGT government could not be achieved by parliamentary means, it “must be abandoned” (PCI Internal Bulletin No. 30, undated [our translation]).
A set of draft theses written for the PCI’s Third Congress in September 1946 by Frank, Bleibtreu and Lambert correctly defended the extraparliamentary aspect of the slogan:
“To defend the slogan of a ‘PS-PC-CGT government’ by giving it a parliamentary content means defending a bourgeois government (British Labour government). It means abandoning our revolutionary position of irrevocable opposition to every government of the bourgeoisie.”
—PCI Internal Bulletin No. 28, undated (our translation)
For its part, the Mandel-Pablo FI leadership declared that “the slogan ‘For a Workers’ and Farmers’ Government’ is concretized in the formula systematically addressed to the old conservative leadership: ‘For a Socialist-Communist Government! Break with the Bourgeoisie! Take Power, All the Power!’” (Fourth International, June 1946). They argued that such a government could “in exceptional conditions” arise from a parliamentary combination of reformist workers parties. Indeed, Mandel claimed that one of the reasons it was necessary to reject the May 1946 constitution was that the latter would freeze the situation, whereas without it, the workers could pressure the PS-PC parliamentary government to take anti-capitalist measures:
“You must then compel the Socialists and the Communists to take full power. If they are to be able to move ahead and to attack the monopolies, they must not have their hands tied in advance by the adoption of a constitution which is designed solely to perpetuate, after the elections, the disastrous coalition with the MRP.”
—“The Position of the French Party on the Referendum,” SWP International Information Bulletin, Vol. I, No. 1, September 1946
And Pablo wrote:
“But can power be won through the parliamentary road? This hypothesis is not theoretically excluded in certain exceptional conditions. What is important is not how a ‘workers’ government is formed, but the kind of action (purely parliamentary or revolutionary) which it undertakes afterwards and the program it tries to carry out.”
—“On the Slogan of ‘Workers’ and Farmers’ Government’,” Fourth International, February 1947
These arguments have been utterly refuted by history. It has been shown time and again that the proletariat cannot come to power through the bourgeois parliament or any other institution of the capitalist state. Drawing the lessons of the 1848-51 revolution, Karl Marx explained in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) that up until then “all revolutions perfected this [repressive state] machine instead of breaking it.” The task of the proletariat is to overthrow the capitalist state through workers revolution and establish its own class power.
In putting forward their revisionist conclusions, Pablo and Mandel were able to draw on a confused discussion at the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in 1922. The “Theses on Tactics” from this Congress described various forms of “workers governments,” including parliamentary governments with a social-democratic majority and coalitions involving a Communist party, as well as a “genuine revolutionary proletarian workers government, which, in its pure form, can be embodied only through the Communist Party” (see “A Trotskyist Critique of Germany 1923 and the Comintern,” Spartacist [English edition] No. 56, Spring 2001). For revolutionary Marxists, the slogan of a workers government can be nothing other than a popular expression of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The Aftermath
The defeat of the “yes” vote in the May 1946 referendum was clearly a victory for the French capitalists. Anti-Communism was given a green light, fueling the Cold War. Emboldened, the bourgeoisie redoubled its brutality in the colonies. In Vietnam, French troops bombarded Haiphong in October 1946, leaving 20,000 dead. The massacre in Madagascar took place four months later.
In France, too, the defeat of the referendum had negative consequences for the working class. In the June 1946 legislative elections, the SFIO and PCF lost their majority in the new Constituent Assembly. (The PCF maintained its strength overall but lost votes in its proletarian strongholds in the North and in Paris.) The revised constitution that was approved by a new referendum in October was much more reactionary than the one that had been rejected. It included, among other things, a separate upper house (Senate) and greater presidential powers.
Proletarian struggles picked up again, beginning with the Renault strike in April-May 1947. The PCF-CGT leadership initially denounced the strike as the work of “anarcho-Hitlerite-Trotskyite saboteurs” but was ultimately forced to support it to avoid losing all credibility. Realizing that the PCF was no longer able to contain the working class and thereby keep down wages and living conditions, the MRP and its SFIO allies threw the PCF out of the government in May. That same year, the government brutally crushed a CGT-led strike wave, and in 1948, Socialist minister of the interior Jules Moch unleashed troops against the miners. Maneuvers by the U.S. rulers, their agents in the American Federation of Labor and by social democrats to split the CGT came to fruition with the formation of Force ouvrière, a CIA-funded anti-Communist union federation.
Lambert and the PCI right wing were clearly correct in calling for a “yes” vote in the May 1946 referendum, but rightists like Craipeau took advantage of that to take over the leadership of the PCI at its September 1946 congress. Scarcely a year later, Craipeau decamped with half the organization and joined the Rassemblement démocratique révolutionnaire, a short-lived petty-bourgeois grouping founded by Jean-Paul Sartre, among others.
The European-based FI leadership headed by Michel Pablo had not only been wrong about the French referendum but also resorted to arguments that were hardly any better than those of the rightists. The Fourth International grew increasingly disoriented as workers states were established in East Europe. These states came into being because real power was in the hands of the Red Army, the armed forces of a degenerated workers state, but for this very reason these new states were bureaucratically deformed from their inception.
The FI under Pablo was incapable of generating a theory that could explain these developments without drawing revisionist conclusions. First the FI denied that capitalism could be overthrown without a proletarian revolution, and even demanded the withdrawal of Soviet troops while U.S. imperialist troops were stationed a short distance to the west. Then it began flirting with the Yugoslav Stalinist leader Tito (who had just broken with Stalin) before capitulating to Stalin at the start of the Korean War. Reversing his own claim that the Stalinists would soon be in rapid decline, in 1950-51 Pablo called for “deep entry” into the Stalinist parties and even into some social-democratic parties.
What had been confused impressionism turned into a revisionist program: Pablo justified abandoning the building of an independent proletarian vanguard and liquidated the Fourth International. He wrote that “the objective process is in the final analysis the sole determining factor, overriding all obstacles of a subjective order,” and projected “several centuries” of “transitional” regimes between capitalism and socialism. He concluded that “the Communist Parties retain the possibility, in certain circumstances, of roughly outlining a revolutionary orientation” (“Where Are We Going?” SWP International Information Bulletin, March 1951).
At the time, Bleibtreu and Lambert were leaders of the PCI majority; they opposed Pablo’s liquidationist perspective, but they were bureaucratically expelled, and they failed in their duty to bring the fight into the international arena. In 1953, Cannon’s SWP belatedly took up the fight against Pablo’s liquidation of the party by reaffirming that it was vital to fight for a Leninist vanguard workers party. The SWP linked up with the PCI and Gerry Healy’s group in Britain to form the anti-revisionist International Committee (IC). But the IC never functioned in a centralized way, nor did it elect an international leadership with the political authority to intervene into the work of its sections and coordinate the international struggle against Pabloism. (On the Pabloite destruction of the FI in 1951-53, see “Genesis of Pabloism,” Spartacist No. 21, Fall 1972.)
The French Trotskyists had a correct tactic in the 1946 French referendum. But the SWP was able to maintain the principles of Trotskyism until our comrades took over the task 15 years later in a fight to reforge the Fourth International: When the SWP reconciled with Pabloism in the early 1960s, it expelled from its ranks the cadres who founded the Spartacist League/U.S. and our international tendency. It is through those cadres that the continuity of Trotskyism runs.