Toward Rebirth of the Fourth International

Spartacist English edition No. 58	Spring 2004

Forty Years of Spartacist

"Toward Rebirth of the Fourth International"

The first issue of Spartacist, dated February-March 1964, appeared 40 years ago. At the time, Spartacist was the organ of the Revolutionary Tendency (RT), which in December 1963 had been expelled from the rapidly degenerating Socialist Workers Party (SWP) of the United States. Our name and purpose were explained in the initial editorial statement:

"We chose the title, Spartacist, after the name, Spartakusbund, taken by the German revolutionary left wing led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht during the First World War. The German Spartacists waged a brave struggle against their imperialist rulers in wartime and, moreover, had to fight every step of the way in opposition to the degenerate, patriotic Majority social democrats of their time.

"In the United States the Trotskyist youth in the early 1930's called their paper Young Spartacus. It was an outstanding journalistic fusion of an advocate of revolutionary ideas with a guide to action. We aspire to do no more today than serve as well in honor of the name we have chosen for our endeavor to express the viewpoint of consistent Trotskyism, the authentic revolutionary Marxism of our epoch."

Initially Spartacist supporters worked as an expelled public faction of the centrist SWP, seeking readmission to the party. The SWP's definitive leap from centrism to reformism occurred in late 1965, when it jettisoned any remnants of a proletarian class fight against the Vietnam War in favor of seeking a bloc with pacifists and Democratic Party liberals in a classless "peace" movement. The Spartacist League/U.S. was founded in 1966, with Spartacist as its journal. After we won some international cothinkers, breaking out of our keenly felt (and necessarily deforming) national isolation in the early 1970s, Spartacist became, with issue No. 23 (Spring 1977), the organ of the international Spartacist tendency, which changed its name to the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) in 1989. Spartacist is now published in four separate language editions (English, French, German and Spanish) by the International Executive Committee of the ICL.

To mark our fortieth anniversary, we reprint below "Toward Rebirth of the Fourth International," which appeared in Spartacist No. 1. This document was written by the RT and submitted to the 1963 SWP convention. As a statement of revolutionary Marxist principles and purpose against the Pabloite revisionism that had destroyed Trotsky's Fourth International in 1951-53, "Toward Rebirth of the Fourth International" has more than stood the test of time, despite enormous political changes in the world.

The post-World War II order was marked by the emergence of bureaucratically deformed workers states in most of the areas of East Europe under Soviet occupation and (as a result of Stalinist-led peasant-guerrilla insurgencies) in Yugoslavia, China, North Korea and North Vietnam. Independence struggles erupted in much of the colonial world. In January 1959, Fidel Castro and his petty-bourgeois guerrillaist July 26 Movement overthrew the U.S.-supported Batista dictatorship. In the face of mounting U.S. imperialist hostility, the Castro government allied itself with the Soviet Union and, beginning in August 1960, nationalized large sections of the Cuban economy, driving out the bourgeoisie and creating a deformed workers state. That a small country only 90 miles off the coast of Florida had succeeded in shaking its fist at the Yankee colossus and realizing a social transformation served as inspiration for a generation of radicalizing youth around the world.

Reacting impressionistically to the onset of the Cold War in 1947-48 and the expansion of Stalinism, Michel Pablo, then leader of the Fourth International, had given up on the struggle to build Trotskyist parties to lead the proletariat in the fight for socialist revolution internationally (see "Genesis of Pabloism," Spartacist No. 21, Fall 1972). Pablo abandoned the program of political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracies in the USSR and East Europe, insisting that a process of "self reform" would eventually eliminate the bureaucratic deformities in those states. Asserting that "the relation of forces" internationally was turning against imperialism, he claimed that "the objective process is in the final analysis the sole determining fact, overriding all obstacles of a subjective order"—i.e., overriding the need for a conscious, programmatic Leninist vanguard ("Where Are We Going?", January 1951). Pablo concluded that Stalinist and other reformist parties could approximate a revolutionary perspective and that the job of Trotskyists was to enter such parties and push them in a revolutionary direction. Pablo's perspective of "deep entry" effectively destroyed the Fourth International.

By 1960, Pablo's chief lieutenant, Ernest Mandel, was serving as a braintruster and apologist for a left-reformist union bureaucrat, André Renard, in Belgium. Pablo himself went on to become an adviser to the bourgeois-nationalist National Liberation Front (FLN) government in Algeria after it won independence from France in 1962. In that capacity, he helped write the "self-management" decrees that integrated the Algerian workers movement into the bourgeois state apparatus, defusing the mass occupations of factories and landed estates that swept post-independence Algeria.

The SWP leadership under James P. Cannon had opposed—if only partially and belatedly—Pablo's liquidationism. The SWP and the other Trotskyist forces that opposed Pablo—centrally Gerry Healy's group in Britain and the majority of the French Trotskyists, who formed the Organization Communiste Internationaliste (OCI)—regrouped into the "International Committee" (IC) based on the principles of "orthodox Trotskyism." From its inception the IC was only a paper international.

In 1960 the SWP embraced the same liquidationist methodology as Pablo in response to the Cuban Revolution. The SWP declared the Castro leadership to be the virtual equivalent of the revolutionary Bolsheviks of Lenin and Trotsky. In fact, the July 26 Movement had merged with the Cuban Stalinist party and established a bureaucratic regime of the same kind as those in the USSR, China and East Europe. Having earlier destroyed the type for a Cuban edition of Trotsky's Permanent Revolution, in 1963 the Castro regime arrested five Cuban Trotskyists associated with the Latin American-centered tendency of Juan Posadas (see "Freedom for Cuban Trotskyists!", Spartacist No. 3, January-February 1965). The SWP majority dropped the qualitative distinction between a deformed workers state and a proletarian state based on workers democracy as embodied in elected workers councils, declaring in a Political Committee (PC) resolution, "For Early Reunification of the World Trotskyist Movement," submitted to the 1963 convention:

"The appearance of a workers state in Cuba—the exact form of which is yet to be settled—is of special interest since the revolution there was carried out under a leadership completely independent from the school of Stalinism. In its evolution toward revolutionary Marxism, the July 26 Movement set a pattern that now stands as an example for a number of other countries....

"(13) Along the road of a revolution beginning with simple democratic demands and ending in the rupture of capitalist property relations, guerrilla warfare conducted by landless peasant and semiproletarian forces, under a leadership that becomes committed to carrying the revolution through to a conclusion, can play a decisive role in undermining and precipitating the downfall of a colonial or semicolonial power. This is one of the main lessons to be drawn from experience since the second world war. It must be consciously incorporated into the strategy of building revolutionary Marxist parties in colonial countries."

—SWP PC, "For Early Reunification of the World Trotskyist Movement," SWP Discussion Bulletin Vol. 24, No. 9 (April 1963)

Section 15 of our "Toward the Rebirth of the Fourth International" was written in explicit counterposition to section 13 of the Political Committee document.

Formed in opposition to the SWP's abandonment of the fight for a Trotskyist party in Cuba, the RT opposed the reunification with Pablo/Mandel's International Secretariat that was to result in the United Secretariat (USec). So did the British section of the IC, Gerry Healy's Socialist Labour League (SLL). Initially the RT stood in political solidarity with the SLL on the basis of its 1961 document, "World Prospect for Socialism," a powerful statement of the proletarian and internationalist Marxist purpose.

What the RT did not yet know was that Healy was an unprincipled political bandit. In 1962 Healy, thinking he still had a chance to keep the SWP in the IC, attempted to get the RT cadres to recant their view that the SWP had become centrist. The majority refused, but a minority under Tim Wohlforth split to found a pro-Healy "Reorganized Minority Tendency." This unprincipled split in the RT severely damaged the fight for authentic Trotskyism in the SWP. Unlike Healy, the RT made it clear that if reunification was supported by a majority of the SWP, it would function as a disciplined tendency within the new, unified international formation. But the SWP leadership moved to expel the RT as reunification was consummated in late 1963. Healy and the French OCI chose to maintain the paper International Committee instead of fighting revisionism from within the new USec.

The world movement paid dearly for the IC's failure to carry out a thoroughgoing and principled struggle against Pabloism. As the SWP spiraled into outright reformism, the centrist Mandelites pursued one after another substitute for a conscious Trotskyist vanguard. When the May 1968 general strike in France dramatically refuted the notion that the revolutionary capacity of the Western proletariat had been neutralized by an allegedly unprecedented postwar economic boom, the Mandelites shifted their affections from Third World Stalinism to a sequential and overlapping series of "new mass vanguards." At all times, the USec catered to rather than combatted prevailing petty-bourgeois consciousness, frittering away a generation of would-be Marxist revolutionaries and eventually embracing "human rights" anti-Sovietism. It was through swimming against the stream that we were able to cohere the cadre for the international extension of the Spartacist tendency in the 1970s.

The primary theorist of the SWP's revisionist course, Joseph Hansen, labeled both the Cuban deformed workers state of Fidel Castro, and the neocolonial capitalist government of Ben Bella in Algeria, as "workers and farmers governments." As historical justification, Hansen cited the confused discussion on the workers government slogan at the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in 1922 (see "Rearming Bolshevism: A Trotskyist Critique of Germany 1923 and the Comintern," Spartacist No. 56, Spring 2001). Hansen's theoretical construct of a government of indeterminate class content, which would supposedly transform itself gradually into the dictatorship of the proletariat, obliterated the very purpose of a revolutionary Marxist party: the fight to make the working class conscious that it must fight to smash the capitalist state and create its own state.

In a prescient document written in 1961, James Robertson, one of the founding leaders of the RT and the Spartacist League, had asked the SWP majority:

"What do you want, comrades? Take the use of the transitional demand "the workers and peasants government." It is transitional right enough, that is it is a bridge, but bridges go two ways. Either the workers and peasants government is the central demand of the Trotskyists in urging the workers and peasants to take power into their own hands through their mass organizations—i.e., the struggle for soviet power (this is the use the Cuban Trotskyists put it to); or it is a label to apply from afar to the existing government and thus serve, not for the first time, as an orthodox sounding formula to side-step the consummation of proletarian revolution and to justify revolution 'from above' by leaders 'one of whose principal difficulties is imbuing the working people with a sense of revolutionary social responsibility.'

"In short, is the Cuban revolution to pass forward over that bridge to soviet power or is an American SWP majority to go backwards?"

—James Robertson, "A Note on the Current Discussion—Labels and Purposes," SWP Discussion Bulletin Vol. 22, No. 16 (June 1961)

For the SWP, the "workers and farmers government" construct was the bridge to reconciliation with the capitalist order. But out of the SWP's ranks came the forces for the regeneration of revolutionary Marxism. Spartacist continues to stand on the RT's heritage today.

Toward Rebirth of the Fourth International

DRAFT RESOLUTION ON THE WORLD MOVEMENT submitted to the 1963 SWP Convention by the Revolutionary Tendency.

INTRODUCTION

1. For the past fifteen years the movement founded by Leon Trotsky has been rent by a profound theoretical, political, and organizational crisis. The surface manifestation of this crisis has been the disappearance of the Fourth International as a meaningful structure. The movement has consequently been reduced to a large number of grouplets, nominally arrayed into three tendencies: the "International Committee," "International Secretariat (Pablo)," and "International Secretariat (Posadas)." Superficial politicians hope to conjure the crisis away through an organizational formula—"unity" of all those grouplets willing to unite around a common-denominator program. This proposal obscures, and indeed aggravates, the fundamental political and theoretical causes of the crisis.

2. The emergence of Pabloite revisionism pointed to the underlying root of the crisis of our movement: abandonment of a working-class revolutionary perspective. Under the influence of the relative stabilization of capitalism in the industrial states of the West and of the partial success of petit-bourgeois movements in overthrowing imperialist rule in some of the backward countries, the revisionist tendency within the Trotskyist movement developed an orientation away from the proletariat and toward the petit-bourgeois leaderships. The conversion of Trotskyism into a left satellite of the existing labor and colonial-revolutionary leaderships, combined with a classically centrist verbal orthodoxy, was typified by Pablo—but by no means was confined to him or his organizational faction. On the contrary, the Cuban and Algerian revolutions have constituted acid tests proving that the centrist tendency is also prevalent among certain groups which originally opposed the Pablo faction.

3. There is an obvious and forceful logic in the proposals for early reunification of the centrist groups within the Trotskyist movement. But "reunification" on the basis of centrist politics cannot signify reestablishment of the Fourth International. The struggle for the Fourth International is the struggle for a program embodying the working-class revolutionary perspective of Marxism. It is true that the basic doctrines of the movement, as abstractly formulated, have not been formally denied. But by their abandonment of a revolutionary perspective the revisionists concretely challenge the programmatic bases of our movement.

4. The essence of the debate within the Trotskyist movement is the question of the perspective of the proletariat and its revolutionary vanguard elements toward the existing petit-bourgeois leaderships of the labor movement, the deformed workers states, and the colonial revolution. The heart of the revolutionary perspective of Marxism is in the struggle for the independence of the workers as a class from all non-proletarian forces; the guiding political issue and theoretical criterion is workers' democracy, of which the supreme expression is workers' power. This applies to all countries where the proletariat has become capable of carrying on independent politics—only the forms in which the issue is posed vary from country to country. These forms, of course, determine the practical intervention of the Marxists.

EUROPE

5. The recovery and prolonged prosperity of European capitalism has not, as revisionists of all stripes contend, produced a conservatized workers' movement. In reality, the strength, cohesion, cultural level, and potential combativity of the European proletariat are higher today than ever before. The defeat of DeGaulle by the French miners and the persistent, currently accelerating, electoral swing to the Left in the bourgeois-democratic countries of Europe (most notably Italy, Great Britain, Germany) illustrate this fact.

6. The European workers' attempts to go beyond partial economic struggles to the socialist transformation of society have been frustrated by the resistance and treason of the labor bureaucracy. The four years of reaction in France following the seizure of power by DeGaulle show the terrible price still exacted for tolerance of these misleaders. The Belgian general strike showed once again that "leftist" bureaucrats like Renard would also do all in their power to block or divert a movement capable of threatening capitalist rule. But the experiences of both France and Belgium prove a spontaneous desire of the workers to engage in struggle against the capitalist class—rising on occasion to an open confrontation with the system.

7. The task of the Trotskyists in the European workers' movement is the construction within the existing mass organizations (unions and, in certain instances, parties) of an alternative leadership. Marxists must at all times retain and exercise political and programmatic independence within the context of the organizational form involved. Support to tendencies within the labor bureaucracy, to the extent that they defend essential interests of the working class or reflect class-struggle desires within the labor movement, is correct and even obligatory; but this support is always only conditional and critical. When, as is inevitable, the class struggle reaches the stage at which the "leftist" bureaucrats play a reactionary role, the Marxists must oppose them immediately and openly. The behavior of the centrist tendency around the Belgian journal La Gauche in withdrawing during the general strike the correct slogan of a march on Brussels, in order to avoid a break with Renard, is the opposite of a Marxist attitude toward the labor bureaucracy.

8. The objective prospects for development of the Trotskyist movement in Europe are extremely bright. Large numbers of the best young militants in all countries, rejecting the cynical and careerist routinism of the Stalinist and Social-Democratic bureaucrats, are earnestly searching for a socialist perspective. They can be won to a movement capable of convincing them, practically and theoretically, that it offers such a perspective. The structural changes stemming from European integration pose the issues of workers' democracy and of the independence of the political and economic organs of the working class as the alternative to state control of the labor movement—and impel the working class into increasingly significant class battles. If, under these objective conditions, the West European Trotskyists fail to grow at a rapid rate it will be because they themselves have adopted the revisionist stance of a satellite of the labor leadership as opposed to a perspective of struggle around the program of workers' democracy.

SOVIET BLOC

9. Since the Second World War, the countries of Eastern Europe have been developing into modern industrial states. As the proletariat of the deformed workers' states increases in numbers and raises its living standards and cultural level, so grows the irrepressible conflict between the working class and the totalitarian Stalinist bureaucracy. Despite the defeat of the Hungarian workers' revolution, the Soviet-bloc proletariat has won significant reforms, substantially widening its latitude of thought and action. These reforms, however, do not signify a "process of reform" or "destalinization process": they were yielded only grudgingly by the unreformable bureaucracy, are under perpetual attack by the faction of "Stalin's heirs," and remain in jeopardy as long as Stalinist bureaucratic rule prevails. These concessions are historically significant only to the extent that they help the proletariat to prepare for the overthrow of the bureaucracy. Real destalinization can be accomplished only by the political revolution.

10. A new revolutionary leadership is emerging among the proletarian youth of the Soviet bloc. Inspired by twin sources—the inextinguishable Leninist tradition and the direct and tangible needs of their class—the new generation is formulating and implementing in struggle the program of workers' democracy. Notable in this regard is the point made recently by a long-time participant in Soviet student life. Regarding the fundamental character to much of the widespread opposition among Russian youth, it was stated, "Because he is a Marxist-Leninist, the Soviet student is much more radically dissatisfied than if he were an Anglo-Saxon pragmatist" (David Burg to The New York Times). The Trotskyists, lineal continuers of the earlier stage, have an indispensable contribution to make to this struggle: the concept of the international party and of a transitional program required to carry through the political revolution. Assistance to the development of a revolutionary leadership in the Soviet bloc through personal and ideological contact is a primary practical activity for any international leadership worthy of the name.

COLONIAL REVOLUTION

11. The programmatic significance of workers' democracy is greatest in the backward, formerly colonial, areas of the world: it is precisely in this sector that the program of workers' democracy provides the clearest possible line of demarcation between revolutionary and revisionist tendencies. In all of these countries the struggle for bourgeois democratic rights (freedom of speech, right to organize and strike, free elections) is of great importance to the working class because it lays the basis for the advanced struggle for proletarian democracy and workers' power (workers' control of production, state power based on workers' and peasants' councils).

12. The theory of the Permanent Revolution, which is basic to our movement, declares that in the modern world the bourgeois-democratic revolution cannot be completed except through the victory and extension of the proletarian revolution—the consummation of workers' democracy. The experience of all the colonial countries has vindicated this theory and laid bare the manifest inner contradictions which continually unsettle the present state of the colonial revolution against imperialism. Precisely in those states where the bourgeois aims of national independence and land reform have been most fully achieved, the democratic political rights of the workers and peasants have not been realized, whatever the social gains. This is particularly true of those countries where the colonial revolution led to the establishment of deformed workers' states: China, North Vietnam...and Cuba. The balance, to date, has been a thwarted success, either essentially empty, as in the neo-colonies of the African model, or profoundly deformed and limited, as in the Chinese example. This present outcome is a consequence of the predominance of specific class forces within the colonial upheavals, and of the class-related forms employed in the struggles. These forms imposed upon the struggle have been, for all their variety, exclusively "from above," i.e., parliamentary ranging through the bureaucratic-military. And the class forces involved have been, of course, bourgeois or petit-bourgeois. A class counterposition is developed out of the complex of antagonisms resulting from failure to fulfill the bourgeois-democratic revolution. The petit-bourgeois leaderships with their bureaucratic forms and empiricist methods are ranged against participation by the workers as a class in the struggle. The involvement of the working class is necessarily centered on winning workers' democracy and requires the leadership of the revolutionary proletarian vanguard with its programmatic consciousness of historic mission. As the working class gains ascendancy in the struggle and takes in tow the more oppressed strata of the petit-bourgeoisie, the Permanent Revolution will be driven forward.

13. The Cuban Revolution has exposed the vast inroads of revisionism upon our movement. On the pretext of defense of the Cuban Revolution, in itself an obligation for our movement, full unconditional and uncritical support has been given to the Castro government and leadership, despite its petit-bourgeois nature and bureaucratic behavior. Yet the record of the regime's opposition to the democratic rights of the Cuban workers and peasants is clear: bureaucratic ouster of the democratically-elected leaders of the labor movement and their replacement by Stalinist hacks; suppression of the Trotskyist press; proclamation of the single-party system; and much else. This record stands side by side with enormous initial social and economic accomplishments of the Cuban Revolution. Thus Trotskyists are at once the most militant and unconditional defenders against imperialism of both the Cuban Revolution and of the deformed workers' state which has issued therefrom. But Trotskyists cannot give confidence and political support, however critical, to a governing regime hostile to the most elementary principles and practices of workers' democracy, even if our tactical approach is not as toward a hardened bureaucratic caste.

14. What is true of the revisionists' approach toward the Castro regime is even more apparent in regard to the Ben Bella regime now governing Algeria on the program of a "socialist" revolution in cooperation with French imperialism. The anti-working-class nature of this petit-bourgeois group has been made clear to all but the willfully blind by its forcible seizure of control over the labor movement and its suppression of all opposition parties. Even widespread nationalization and development of management committees seen in the context of the political expropriation of the working class and the economic orientation towards collaboration with France cannot give Algeria the character of a workers' state, but leaves it, on the contrary, a backward capitalist society with a high degree of statification. As revolutionaries our intervention in both revolutions, as in every existing state, must be in accordance with the position of Trotsky: "We are not a government party; we are the party of irreconcilable opposition" (In Defense of Marxism). This can cease to apply only in relation to a government genuinely based on workers' democracy.

15. 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.

16. In all backward countries where the proletariat exists as a class, the fundamental principle of Trotskyism is the independence of the working class, its unions, and its parties, in intransigent opposition to imperialism, to any national liberal bourgeoisie, and to petit-bourgeois governments and parties of all sorts, including those professing "socialism" and even "Marxism-Leninism." Only in this way can the ground be laid for working-class hegemony in the revolutionary alliance with the oppressed petit-bourgeois strata, particularly the peasantry. Similarly, for a working-class party in an advanced country to violate class solidarity with the workers of a backward country by politically endorsing a petit-bourgeois colonial-revolutionary government is a sure sign of centrist opportunism, just as refusal to defend a colonial revolution because of the non-proletarian character of its leadership is a sign of sectarianism or worse.

17. The inter-relationship between bourgeois-democratic and proletarian-democratic struggles in the colonial revolution remains as formulated in the founding program of the Fourth International, a formulation which today retains complete validity:

"It is impossible merely to reject the democratic program; it is imperative that in the struggle the masses outgrow it. The slogan for a National (or Constituent) Assembly preserves its full force for such countries as China or India. This slogan must be indissolubly tied up with the problem of national liberation and agrarian reform. As a primary step, the workers must be armed with this democratic program. Only they will be able to summon and unite the farmers. On the basis of the revolutionary democratic program, it is necessary to oppose the workers to the 'national' bourgeoisie. Then, at a certain stage in the mobilization of the masses under the slogans of revolutionary democracy, soviets can and should arise. Their historical role in each given period, particularly their relation to the National Assembly, will be determined by the political level of the proletariat, the bond between them and the peasantry, and the character of the proletarian party policies. Sooner or later, the soviets should overthrow bourgeois democracy. Only they are capable of bringing the democratic revolution to a conclusion and likewise opening an era of socialist revolution.

"The relative weight of the individual democratic and transitional demands in the proletariat's struggle, their mutual ties and their order of presentation, is determined by the peculiarities and specific conditions of each backward country and to a considerable extent by the degree of its backwardness. Nevertheless, the general trend of revolutionary development in all backward countries can be determined by the formula of the permanent revolution in the sense definitely imparted to it by the three revolutions in Russia (1905, February 1917, October 1917)." (The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International.)

CONCLUSIONS:

18. The task of the international revolutionary-Marxist movement today is to re-establish its own real existence. To speak of the "conquest of the masses" as a general guideline internationally is a qualitative overstatement. The tasks before most Trotskyist sections and groups today flow from the need for political clarification in the struggle against revisionism, in the context of a level of work of a generally propagandistic and preparatory nature. An indispensable part of our preparation is the development and strengthening of roots within the broader working-class movement without which the Trotskyists would be condemned to sterile isolation or to political degeneration in the periods of rising class struggle and in either case unable to go forward in our historic task of leading the working class to power. Above all what can and must be done is the building of a world party firmly based on strong national sections, the assembling of a cadre of working-class militants won and tested in the process of the class struggle and on the firm basis of the revolutionary perspective of the Fourth International, the program to realize workers' democracy—culminating in workers' power. A fundamental statement expanding on this perspective, its opposition to Pabloism, and its relevance in the United States is contained in the Minority's "In Defense of a Revolutionary Perspective" (in SWP Discussion Bulletin Vol. 23, No. 4, July 1962).

19. "Reunification" of the Trotskyist movement on the centrist basis of Pabloism in any of its variants would be a step away from, not toward, the genuine rebirth of the Fourth International. If, however, the majority of the presently existing Trotskyist groups insists on going through with such "reunification," the revolutionary tendency of the world movement should not turn its back on these cadres. On the contrary: it would be vitally necessary to go through this experience with them. The revolutionary tendency would enter a "reunified" movement as a minority faction, with a perspective of winning a majority to the program of workers' democracy. The Fourth International will not be reborn through adaptation to Pabloite revisionism: only by political and theoretical struggle against all forms of centrism can the world party of socialist revolution finally be established.

June 14, 1963