https://iclfi.org/pubs/pamphlets/lfi-debate/4th-intl
Contents
- Presentation by G. Perrault for the ICL
- Presentation by Abram Negrete for the LFI
- Rebuttal by G. Perrault
- Rebuttal by Abram Negrete
- Select Floor Interventions
- Summary by Abram Negrete
- Summary by G. Perrault
Presentation by G. Perrault for the ICL
The world is entering a period of acute crisis. The working class confronts war and ruin on a scale unprecedented in decades. Despite bursts of resistance from the workers movement, it remains far behind in terms of political consciousness, weighed down by leaders who have spent decades preaching class peace. At this turning point in world history, the crisis of proletarian leadership is posed as sharply as ever. Which way forward? This is the theme of today’s debate.
Trotsky once wrote that “the essence of sectarianism consists in measuring historical processes at the scale of one’s own group.” We will get this from the LFI today. They will try to show that the ICL has done nothing but make mistakes, while the LFI has been correct all along. However, their account is totally divorced from the tasks posed in the broader world. They cannot put our disputes in the context of what needed to be done in the 1990s and what needs to be done today. For them, it is all about a word here or there or tertiary questions which in no way guide the working class forward. If you think Marxist politics means clinging to orthodox-sounding formulations, you may find their case convincing. But if you focus on the actual theme of this debate, “The Fight for the Fourth International Today,” you will see that they offer nothing different from what the entire left has been peddling for decades: opportunism and sterile dogmatism.
The ICL for its part does not claim to have the answer to every question, and we certainly do not pretend to be a pure and uncontradicted organization. What we can provide—and this will be the focus of my presentation—is precisely an answer to the problem of revolutionary leadership, which has been the source of the crisis for the entire Marxist movement in the last 30 years, including our two organizations.
In the Transitional Program, Trotsky wrote:
“The Fourth International does not search after and does not invent panaceas. It takes its stand completely on Marxism as the only revolutionary doctrine that enables one to understand reality, unearth the cause behind defeats and consciously prepare for victory” (emphasis added).
It is by these three points which I propose to measure the LFI and ICL: our ability to understand reality, to unearth the cause behind defeats and to consciously prepare for victory. Only from this standpoint can we go beyond the narrow disputes which have paralyzed our organizations and the entire left and advance the fight for the Fourth International.
1) Understanding Reality
Let’s start with reality. Marxism is revolutionary because it roots itself not in abstract ideals but in the material reality of class society. The basic point is simple: Without a correct materialist understanding of the world, it is impossible to guide the proletariat toward its liberation. To understand the current world, it is necessary to go back to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. This momentous event totally changed the balance of class forces internationally to the detriment of the working class. It is the failure of Marxists—including the ICL and LFI—to understand this new period which lies at the heart of our disputes and at the heart of the entire left’s disorientation.
The problem of the post-Soviet period from the Marxist point of view is the following: It was a period of defeat for workers while at the same time being a period of relative global stability and prosperity. The question is how to explain this without renouncing Marxism? It is in fact simple. With the destruction of the USSR, the U.S. emerged as the only superpower; and it was strong enough to force every other country, including its imperialist rivals, to comply with its system. The result was to suppress the national conflicts under capitalism—in a limited and temporary way. This explains why the post-Soviet period was relatively stable, why international trade developed to unprecedented levels and why productive forces grew in aggregate.
In many ways, the imperialist world system is not so different from organized crime. The bloodiest conflicts emerge when different gangs are fighting for the top spot. When one gang is much stronger, the criminals come out stronger—certainly bad news—but in the short term violence can go down and business goes up. It can form a cartel.
But in organized crime just as in capitalism, the balance of power is ever changing. Pax Americana was not only very profitable for the imperialists, but also created conditions for strong economic growth in China and other non-imperialist countries. This process has undermined the hegemony of the U.S., and today the world situation is defined by the accelerating breakdown of the post-Soviet world order. The U.S. must now increase the military and economic pressure on its rivals, but also on the countries it today considers allies. This dynamic is at the source of the growing instability in the world. The post-Soviet period was brutal, but it was nothing next to the economic chaos, social decay and wars that will come from its breakdown.
These basic Marxist points on the world situation are essential to understanding political developments nationally and internationally. Taken individually the points I just made are not ground breaking. I am sure you have heard most of them before from various commentators and others on the left. What is unique in the ICL’s understanding of the world is that we can explain the evolution of the world situation through the laws of class struggle. We can explain in Marxist terms, why the post-Soviet period was reactionary despite its stability, and we can explain how it is breaking down today. This is the starting point orienting our work. In other words, we use Marxism to understand reality and it is from this reality that we can put forward a revolutionary course for the working class.
In contrast to this, nothing is Marxist in the way the LFI approaches the world. Their view comes directly from documents written when its founding members were still in the ICL. The method of these documents, carried over to the LFI, is defined by doctrinairism and empirical impressionism. The documents explain the period as follows: the Soviet Union was a counterweight to imperialism, so its destruction will cause more reaction. From this it was predicted that there would be more interimperialist rivalries, that the U.S.-led alliance would collapse, that “free trade” would end and that all this was going to lead to immiseration, war and revolutionary upheavals. The problem is that nothing of the sort happened in the last 30 years.
Despite this, the LFI website’s welcome page (you can check on your phone), still dutifully asserts that what emerged after 1990 was not “a New World Order dominated by a single ‘superpower,’ but a mounting disorder of imperialist rivalries and nationalist bloodletting.” To this day, the LFI denies that the world situation since the ’90s is defined by U.S. hegemony. This is a problem, especially for a party centered in the United States!
So why cling to such an obviously wrong worldview? It is a question of method and purpose. For the LFI, just as for the ICL before, the task of Marxists is to uphold orthodox formulas. But if you understand Marxism as a guide to class struggle, then you cannot force reality into theory, you must seek to understand reality through Marxist theory. So, in part the LFI upholds its wrong view of the world out of doctrinairism—for them fighting revisionism means upholding words. But they also have the problem that this false view has guided their entire practice since their founding and is in every single one of their founding documents. To honestly confront these errors is to confront the very basis of their existence—a difficult but necessary thing to do.
Now, those who pay attention to detail will have noticed that in some of the LFI’s recent articles they tacitly admit that there is such a thing as a U.S.-dominated “World Order.” But this solves nothing. Their implicit change is simply a response to the reality in front of their nose and not a Marxist understanding of the laws of class struggle. This brings me to the LFI’s empirical impressionism, a method which consists in drawing sweeping conclusions from short-term trends.
The LFI looks at the news, sees the war in Ukraine, the increasing tensions with China and declares that World War III will occur as a direct outgrowth of current events. If you take the international situation, take a ruler, and draw a straight line, this makes sense. But once again, this is not Marxism; reality is more complicated. To be a Marxist is not simply to predict catastrophe—although catastrophe certainly is on the way. The task is to guide the proletariat based on understanding the laws of class struggle. The current situation is defined by the relative weakening of U.S. hegemony and the entire imperialist bloc. Not by the growth of two rival imperialist blocs vying to redivide the world. This is not just a detail but has important implications, on the tempo and nature of conflicts as well as on the tasks of the working class.
For example, if you think, like the LFI, that the current war in Ukraine will be escalated by the imperialists until they manage to break up Russia and destroy China, then it makes some kind of sense that the working class should support Russia. But if you understand that it is a regional war over who controls Ukraine that broke out because the imperialists overextended their hand in East Europe, then it becomes clear that the working class should oppose both sides, that Russia asserting its domination in Ukraine at the expense of the imperialists is not a positive development.
Ultimately, whether it is by denying reality or through empiricism, the LFI is navigating without a map, unable to understand the past or predict the future. For them, the world is black and white. There are the good guys and the bad guys, and history moves in neat little boxes along straight lines. This works if you think the job of Marxism is simply to raise immediate demands while proclaiming that socialist revolution is the solution. In that case, contradictions are irrelevant and those who so much as acknowledge their existence are rotten revisionists. But for those seeking to lead the working class, this will not do. To you comrades, I strongly encourage the careful study of our conference document “The Breakdown of U.S. Hegemony and the Struggle for Workers Power.” It does not have all the answers, but I do believe it represents a major step in providing a Marxist program for today’s world.
2) Why Does the Working Class Keep Losing?
Let’s move on to the second point, how our tendencies explain the defeats since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Of course, one can always say that the working class was defeated because of its pro-capitalist leadership. This is true, but perfectly useless in drawing any kind of lesson.
The starting point must be the concrete situation following the end of the Cold War. The wave of counterrevolutions came with a strong ideological offensive in the form of liberal triumphalism. The strength of this offensive was rooted in the material strength of U.S. imperialism. Everywhere it was proclaimed that the whole world needed to accept that there was no alternative to the American model. “Democracy,” “the rule of law,” “civil liberties,” “free movement,” “free trade,” these were all rallying cries used by U.S. imperialism to justify and extend its domination.
This ideology deeply permeated the workers movement, pushed by the likes of Tony Blair in Britain, John Sweeney in the U.S. and Gerhard Schröder in Germany. The strength of liberalism explains the weakness of Marxism in the post-Soviet period. It is a poison to the working class because it obscures the class nature of conflicts and makes everything about abstract moral principles.
Now, we often hear the argument that liberalism isn’t the problem, that the real danger is right-wing reaction, that to fight liberalism is to help the right. You can be sure that whoever makes this argument is himself a liberal. Here is the basic truth: so long as the working class is under the sway of leaders who look at the world through the lens of universal liberal principles instead of class struggle, the working class cannot defeat reaction.
Let’s take Trump for example. His strength comes from the discontent with neoliberal America. But the opposition to him has been under the leadership of the very people responsible for neoliberalism. Moreover, it has been organized around the liberal principles of “democracy” and “decency” not class struggle. Far from defeating Trump, the so-called resistance has only strengthened his appeal. The anti-Trump movement has failed because the workers movement and left have fought him wearing a liberal straitjacket. Defeating Trump requires breaking with liberalism, this is the central lesson.
What does the LFI say about defeats in the post-Soviet period? Its founding declaration correctly states that the “fight against revisionism has been a constant in the Marxist movement.” It points to Lenin’s fight against social democracy, Trotsky’s fight against Stalinism, Cannon’s and later the iSt’s fight against Pabloism. But what about today? What is the current form of revisionism today? No answer. In fact, liberalism—the dominant ideology in the workers movement—is not even mentioned in the LFI’s founding document. Why not? Because for the LFI and ICL liberal triumphalism was dead as early as 1992.
This has profound consequences. Think about it. For the last 30 years, movement after movement was paralyzed and led to defeat precisely because of its liberal program. From the anti-globalization movement to Occupy, to BLM to the union movement as a whole, all have in common the fact that they tried to fight the liberal order…with liberalism! And in turn, right-wing reaction has grown because it is the only force opposing liberalism. So, for Marxists, the main task—not done by anyone—was to build a revolutionary opposition to liberalism! To get into these various movements and fight like hell to put them on a different track, away from liberalism, toward Marxism! Any talk of “revolutionary leadership” without doing this is meaningless.
However, just like the ICL until recently, the LFI dismisses liberalism as a political force. This necessarily means capitulating to it. It means liquidating the role of the party, abandoning the oppressed to liberals and rejecting the central task of an entire epoch. And here we come once more to the question of purpose. If you understand revolutionary leadership in terms of guiding the class struggle, you must look at what is holding it back. But if, like the LFI, intervening in the class struggle means putting forward a series of abstract Marxist platitudes, then liberalism doesn’t matter, and the oppressed can stay on the road to disaster.
3) The Road to Victory
This brings me to the third point, the road to victory. How can tiny Marxist organizations provide a road to victory for the international working class? It is certainly not through the strength of our objective forces or the purity of our intentions. We can do so only to the extent that our program provides a course of action which corresponds to the historic interests of the proletariat.
Revolutionary leadership must be grounded in the two points we have already discussed—a correct understanding of the objective situation and a correct understanding of why the working class keeps losing. But as we have also seen, this analysis can only be Marxist if it is guided by a correct purpose: to provide a revolutionary path, counterposed to the reformist leaders.
Let me make this concrete with the best example of all, the Russian Revolution. The February Revolution created a situation where the working class had overthrown the tsar, but where its leaders had given the power to the liberal bourgeoisie. The role of the Bolshevik Party from February to October was not to create the forces behind the revolution, but to guide the working class. To show at every step how its interests were being betrayed by the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries. In other words, the revolution was victorious because the Bolsheviks succeeded in breaking the working class from its reformist leaders, opening the road to achieving its historic interests. This was not done through abstract preaching or proclaiming the need for a revolutionary party at the end of every article, but by adapting slogans and tactics to every twist and turn in the situation—always guided by a clear revolutionary goal.
This is the meaning of revolutionary leadership. Whether there is a revolutionary situation, a strike or a reactionary offensive, the task of communists is to show through the struggle itself that the working class needs a communist leadership. It is from this fundamental starting point that the ICL approaches all questions.
What is the LFI’s starting point? We have already seen how it has a totally wrong understanding of the world situation and how it denies liberalism is a central obstacle in holding back the workers movement. This clearly makes it impossible to guide the working class. But these failures could be corrected with a clear understanding of communist tasks. Unfortunately, it does not have this either. The LFI does not openly support the liberal bourgeoisie—as the Mensheviks after February—but neither does it work to break the working class from its misleaders, as the Bolsheviks did. The role it plays is more akin to the conciliators within the Bolshevik Party during the revolution, such as Zinoviev and Kamenev. They uphold a formally revolutionary program and criticize reformists, but the axis of their work is not to break the working class from these reformists. This is centrism, and it permeates everything the LFI does.
To make the difference between our two approaches concrete, I will go through some of the major political questions in the current period. In every case, you will see the same pattern. The ICL seeks to advance working-class struggle and break the influence of its reformist leaders. The LFI either seeks to advance struggle while accepting the leadership of the reformists or denounces the reformists while standing aside from struggle. Whether it is through opportunism or sectarianism, the LFI’s program always leaves the reformists in charge of the struggle.
The Black Question in the U.S.
Since we are in the U.S., let’s start with the black question in the United States.
Going all the way back to the Civil War era, reliance on the liberal wing of the American bourgeoisie has held back the struggle for black liberation. Ending black oppression requires radical revolutionary measures, which the capitalist class will never accept. The movement for black liberation cannot be victorious as long as it is tied in any way to this class. From this, it is obvious that the task of revolutionaries is to break the chains tying the black movement to the liberal bourgeoisie.
Now let’s see how this played out in the 2020 BLM movement provoked by the murder of George Floyd. The movement itself was dominated by liberal politics and was supported by some of the most reviled Democrats and Republicans. Most of the labor movement and left openly defended the coalition between black activists and capitalist politicians, using the movement to build Joe Biden’s election campaign. Here we have our Mensheviks. What about the LFI? It correctly recognized that the reformists crossed the class line, seeking a “political alliance with bourgeois liberal forces.” But if you look at their intervention, it is obvious that its purpose was not to break this political alliance between labor and the liberals! This is centrism: Seeing the problem but doing nothing to solve it.
Let me explain. One of the LFI’s main demands is for labor actions against police brutality. The working class does need to be brought into the fight, but the whole question is under which program? A liberal one—leading to the Democratic Party—or a Marxist one—leading to black liberation? The LFI is quite explicit that its model for working-class action in defense of black people is the liberal rally organized by the ILWU on Juneteenth of 2020. So, on one hand, they say “break with the Democrats,” but on the other they promote politics and leaders that bring workers straight into the Democratic Party. Instead of showing how a real working-class fight to defend black people requires a completely different leadership, it encourages the actions of the current leadership. It’s very simple: The leaders of the ILWU are an obstacle to black liberation, but the LFI nonetheless hails their liberal rallies as some kind of step in the right direction! The LFI is not missing a word here or there—it is building a labor wing of the BLM popular front. Its perspective guarantees disaster for black people.
Now, I am sure most of you know that the ICL imploded in 2020 and was utterly paralyzed during this historic movement. But unlike the LFI, the ICL drew lessons from this betrayal. Out of the struggles which emerged in our ranks, we have reasserted the fundamental task of Marxists toward the movement against police brutality: to advance the struggle while showing in practice that victory requires a totally different track, that is a revolutionary break with liberal politics.
Today, the movement against police brutality is utterly demoralized. The most atrocious crimes provoke only pitiful demonstrations. How to move forward? We propose to rebuild the movement by organizing it around the demand to “open all police archives.” It is a demand which is popular—it intersects the felt sentiment in the black population and beyond. But it is also a demand whose pursuit will directly clash with liberals. It gives a path out of demoralization, while at the same time helping to break the movement from liberalism.
The LFI has denounced our campaign as reformist. Our crime? We say that we want to pressure liberal politicians to support our demand. Of course we do! We want to break their influence. Have you ever tried breaking something without putting pressure on it? Try it! But once again you have the LFI missing the forest for the trees. It focuses on a word here or there and chooses to ignore the whole purpose of our call: to advance the fight against police brutality and break the influence of the liberals. The LFI for its part prefers marching in the galleries proclaiming, “Only socialist revolution will bring justice.” Very radical! But it does nothing to advance the movement and nothing to break it from its current leaders.
To sum up, for the ICL the central task is to break the struggle for black liberation from liberalism and win it to communism. For the LFI, on the one hand it is to push the pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy like the ILWU to lead the movement and on the other to proclaim radical-sounding abstractions. Our approach is revolutionary, that of the LFI is class-collaborationist and sectarian.
China
Without a doubt, the question of China is one of the most important questions of our epoch. We both agree that China is a deformed workers state, we both formally stand for its unconditional defense in the face of counterrevolution and imperialist aggression, and we both stand for political revolution. But as on everything else, our approach is radically different.
The ICL proceeds from the basic Trotskyist understanding that the Stalinist bureaucracy undermines the social gains of the 1949 Revolution on which it stands. For this reason, we never support policies of the Communist Party of China (CPC)—all rooted in the program of “socialism in one country.” Instead, on every question we put forward a revolutionary internationalist program which defends the workers states in opposition to the bureaucracy.
We are for defeating Covid in China, but we oppose the bureaucracy’s brutal response, which was premised on maintaining its privileges and that of the capitalists. We are for defending China against imperialism, but we oppose the CPC’s nationalist strategy, which alienates the international proletariat while conciliating imperialism. In every case, we want to show the Chinese working class that its interests are being held back and betrayed by the Stalinist bureaucracy.
Now as I said, the LFI claims to be for political revolution. But this is betrayed by its support to Stalinist policies—sometimes critically, mostly uncritically. For the LFI, the main task is to counter imperialist propaganda spouted in the West against China. However, it does this by covering up the crimes of the CPC and burying the Trotskyist program.
In the case of Covid, the LFI hails the CPC’s response and even promises an article showing that there were no failures or cover-ups at all by the bureaucracy. This is crass political support to Stalinism. Far from defending China, it encourages the very policies that undermine it. The CPC’s response to the pandemic caused massive discontent in the working class and among the petty bourgeoisie. If this anger is not directed toward political revolution, it will be used by the imperialists to foster counterrevolution. A working-class answer to Covid would have been redistribution of housing and resources, early mass vaccination and democratic control by the working class—not the totalitarian “dynamic zero Covid,” nor the 180-degree turn, ignoring the virus.
The LFI will no doubt argue that by denouncing the policies of the Chinese bureaucracy and being very harsh we betray the defense of China. This argument is just a pathetic echo of the Stalinist slanders against Trotsky. His response to this argument—and our response to the LFI today—is that the workers state can only be defended by fighting to overthrow Stalinism, that means exposing its crimes. Let’s take the gulags in the USSR for example. The imperialists used the crimes of Stalin to attack the Soviet Union, but the Trotskyist response was not to deny or minimize these crimes, but to undercut the counterrevolution by providing a proletarian opposition to Stalinism based on defending the USSR.
I challenge the LFI today to provide a single example where Trotsky hailed the policies of Stalin in the name of defending the Soviet Union. Never! Even when the defense of the Soviet Union was sharply posed as in the lead-up to World War II, his defensism was always paired with a devastating critique of the Stalinist strategy.
Again, we see the same pattern. For the ICL, advancing the interests of the Chinese working class requires a total break with the main political force holding it back, the Stalinist bureaucracy. For its part, the LFI critically supports Stalinism. On one side we have Trotskyism, on the other social-democratic cheerleaders akin to the 1930s “friends of the USSR.”
Ukraine War
Now let’s move on to another flashpoint, the Ukraine war. Here the LFI and ICL have fundamentally different understandings of the conflict. For the ICL, this is a proxy war between NATO and Russia over who will control Ukraine. Our central slogan is for Russians and Ukrainians to “turn the guns around.” For the LFI, the war is about the national survival of Russia! Accordingly, they support Russia.
I will not spend too much time refuting this absurd position, eviscerated in the yet unanswered polemic “IG Goes All In for Russia.” In any case, time is doing its work. With every passing day, the Ukrainian army gets weaker, and the predatory ambitions of Russia larger. Kremlin officials are more and more open about their designs on large parts of Ukraine well beyond clear pro-Russian areas. Meanwhile, the imperialists are reducing support to their proxy and will leave it out to dry sooner or later. This is the difference between a proxy war and an imperialist war. Let’s see if in a year or two the LFI still thinks that the war is about the dismemberment of Russia. Let’s see.
While the position on the war itself is of great importance, the decisive test for our tendencies is our struggle at home. In imperialist countries, the task is to break the working class from its leaders who actively support their government’s foreign policy. The main obstacles impeding this break are the various pacifists and reformists who preach opposition to NATO and even the boycott of arms shipments but stay loyal to the liberal wing of the imperialist bourgeoisie.
Exposing these pacifist conciliators and fighting to split workers from the pro-imperialist labor bureaucracy has been at the heart of the ICL’s entire intervention on Ukraine. We have pushed this intervention most forcefully in Germany by calling to throw the NATO supporters out of the social democracy and trade unions. Once again, our purpose with this call is on the one hand to advance the movement against the war—totally paralyzed by unity with the pro-NATO wing—and on the other to expose the pacifists who choose unity with war hawks over their supposed principles.
The LFI denounces this approach. For them, the task is twofold. On the one hand, it abstractly proclaims the need for a revolutionary party. On the other, it supports the symbolic boycott of arms shipments organized by left-wing trade unions in Italy and Greece. Of course, it is necessary to participate in and support such actions. But the LFI supports these actions uncritically, papering over the fact that they are organized under the pacifist program of Greek Stalinists and Italian syndicalists. It is precisely this program and leadership which stands as the main obstacle to organizing a real, generalized blockage of arms shipments. To sweep this fact under the rug is to prop up the very leaders who need to be removed. The LFI criticizes reformists in general, including those that organize these actions, but when it comes to their concrete actions it seems the revolutionary program is no longer necessary, and pacifism does just fine.
This is getting repetitive, but here we have it again. For the ICL, advancing the struggle against imperialism goes together with splitting the base of the labor movement from the top. Meanwhile, the LFI builds illusions in the left wing of the trade-union bureaucracy while at the same time crying revolution into the wind.
Gaza War
The most significant event in 2023 was the outbreak of the Gaza war. If you compare the initial statements by the ICL and LFI with a checklist, they seem identical. Revolutionary solution, check; unity of Jewish workers and Palestinians, check; criticisms of Hamas, check. So, what is the difference? Once more, it is not about the words but the purpose.
The ICL stands clearly for the liberation of the Palestinians; the entire axis of our intervention is to provide a program to defend Gaza, defeat the Zionist state and defeat imperialism. However, we recognize that the main obstacle holding back this struggle is the leadership of the clerical-nationalist Hamas. Their actions on October 7 directed at civilians were not only criminal but totally counterproductive to Palestinian liberation. To be victorious, the Palestinians need a different strategy, a communist one. But for this to happen, it is necessary to be open about the truth: There will be only death and defeat with Hamas. I dare anyone today to argue that this statement is false!
For the LFI, to state this truth is to capitulate to imperialism and Zionism. This only makes sense if your intervention is not aimed at providing actual leadership to the Palestinian struggle, but to simply be in liberal “solidarity.” For the LFI and most reformist groups, it is more important to be perceived as supportive of the Palestinian movement than to provide a road which will lead to liberation instead of disaster. This is not only cynical, but criminal.
In the imperialist countries, the movement in defense of Palestine refuses to confront Palestinian nationalism. But at the same time, it openly supports capitalist politicians like Rashida Tlaib and AOC, representatives of the very party enabling the genocide in Gaza.
The SL/U.S. has recently written an article seeking to polarize the DSA on this question. The article seeks to encourage left-wing pro-Palestinian elements in the DSA to fight for a split with the Democratic Party. We show how the defense of Palestine is directly undermined by unity with Democrats. The LFI has not yet commented on our article, but you don’t need to be a genius to know what they will say. They will no doubt denounce us as opportunists for seeking to intervene in the DSA at all. It may sound very radical to simply yell at DSA members that they are part of the Democratic Party, but it does nothing to exploit the very real contradiction which exists among its members—many of whom consider themselves communists.
Far from being “hard,” the LFI intervention on Palestine does absolutely nothing to break the movement from the clutches of either Hamas or the Democrats. The LFI sees that these two forces are obstacles to Palestinian liberation, they know that to be successful the movement needs to be broken from their leadership, but they refuse to direct their entire energy to fight for this break!
By this point, I hope I do not need to summarize the two different approaches, and that you can start seeing it for yourselves. It always comes down to the two interrelated questions “how to move the struggle forward?”, “how to forge a communist leadership?”
Conclusion
In conclusion, I would like to recall the following words from Trotsky:
“How the New International will take form, through what stages it will pass, what final shape it will assume—this no one can foretell today. And, indeed, there is no need to do so: historical events will show us. But it is necessary to begin by proclaiming a program that meets the tasks of our epoch. On the basis of this program it is necessary to mobilize the co-thinkers, the pioneers of the New International. No other road is possible.”
This is precisely what I have sought to put forward today, a program for reforging the Fourth International. My presentation was rooted in a Marxist understanding of the world, it identified the main reasons for the defeats suffered by the working class in the post-Soviet period, and most importantly it provided a road to victory which advances the interests of the working class right now, while also driving a wedge against liberalism, Stalinism and nationalism. It is around this basic approach that we seek to win co-thinkers and play a role in regrouping revolutionary forces internationally.
My presentation today showed that there are indeed fundamental differences between the LFI and ICL. At the same time—whether they like it or not—the LFI is not so different from the ICL three years ago. In this sense, we think that despite all the bad blood and bitterness between us it is entirely possible to move closer to each other through serious political discussion. We will continue to fight for this as we will also continue to seek joint action with the LFI whenever possible.
The task at hand is urgent—enough sectarian squabbling! Join us in the fight to reforge the Fourth International!
Presentation by Abram Negrete for the League for the Fourth International
I wanted to thank Bryan for chairing today’s debate and also all of the people from both organizations who worked really hard on the technical and other arrangements.
I also wanted to thank comrade Perrault for helping to make my job up here somewhat easier—actually, a lot easier.
So the title of today’s debate, as you’re aware, is “The Fight for the Fourth International Today,” in other words, the World Party of Socialist Revolution, which was founded by Leon Trotsky and his co-thinkers in 1938 and was destroyed in 1951-53 by the revisionist current within the Fourth International that came to be known as “Pabloism,” after the then-International Secretary of the Fourth International, Michel Pablo.
The central thesis of the founding program of the Fourth International, The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International, known as the Transitional Program, is that the crisis of humanity is reduced to the crisis of revolutionary leadership. Interestingly, that thesis, and defending it or attacking it—or dismissing it, saying it was obsolete—was one of the early political disputes between us and the old ICL. Well, let’s call it the “middle-old” ICL or something like that, before the current “born-again” ICL. After our expulsion in 1996, early on, we had to defend, against a revisionist attack by the ICL, that concept at the heart of the Transitional Program. You can read about it in The Internationalist No. 5, in an article called “In Defense of the Transitional Program.”
I think that if we look at the world today, we can certainly see that this thesis is as urgent as ever, and I would argue even more urgent. We have the war on Gaza, a genocidal war against the Palestinian people. And this is a U.S. war, a U.S./Israel genocidal war on Gaza, and it is proceeding every day. The fact that it is a U.S. war is of enormous importance and it’s something that the LFI emphasizes. The ICL? I’m not sure if they’ve ever even said that.
But in any case: our line is to defend Gaza and to defeat the U.S./Israel genocidal war and to bring out the power of the international working class. From here to Portland to Italy to Sydney and Melbourne and elsewhere, LFI comrades are part of the fight to defend the Palestinian people, to defeat the witch hunts against defenders of the Palestinian people and to stop the flow of arms to this genocidal war. We have been part of those mobilizations and out in the hallway, you can see a poster about the motions that our comrades in Portland, Oregon have initiated and that were passed for the stopping of arms shipments by construction workers unions on the basis of comrades’ struggle in the Painters union and elsewhere; for a break with the Democratic Party and the forging of a class-struggle workers party, a motion that was passed in the Painters union some years ago and has been the basis for much of their work.
On the Ukraine war, as explained in The Internationalist, this went from the original nationalist war between two non-imperialist, capitalist states to a full-on U.S./NATO proxy war against Russia, which is a way station—as the imperialist military and political chiefs say—towards war against China. That war is aimed in large part against China, something that we also rarely, if ever, hear from the ICL. And this is part of a drive by U.S. imperialism, heading towards World War III. Only socialist revolution can stop that world war.
Now, our position with regard to the Ukraine war: revolutionaries stand for the defeat of the imperialists and for the military defense of those targeted by them, Russia and the Chinese deformed workers state. You will have noticed that comrade Perrault said that the war in Ukraine is a proxy war between NATO and Russia. The ICL states correctly that Russia is not an imperialist country. It states correctly, obviously, that NATO is a military alliance of imperialist countries headed by the U.S. Not only that, it’s headed by a liberal party, the Democratic Party.
Despite this, the ICL refuses to defend the targets of that imperialist war. It takes a neutralist position, saying it’s a war between two “gangs of thugs.” A lot of liberals say that, in fact I think I hear that from liberals pretty much every day: just a gang of thugs on one side and just a gang of thugs on the other side. So apparently the defeat of Russia by the imperialists would be a matter of indifference.
Now we hear about this “unipolar world.” Well, in fact, after the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union there was considerable disunity amongst the imperialists. Perhaps not as much as foreseen in the prognosis of a memorandum from 1994 or a document from 1992, but there was something called the Yugoslavia War, you may have heard of it. There was the Iraq War—where there was not unity amongst the imperialists—and a whole bunch of other stuff.
But where you do get something approximating that picture is right now with the U.S./NATO imperialist war against Russia, in which the ICL refuses to defend the targets of the imperialist onslaught—and uses liberal verbiage to promote that position. All right, let’s move on, there’s a lot to say and not much time. We give no political support, obviously, to the bourgeois government of Putin, but we call for bringing out the power of the working class to stop the arms shipments to the imperialists’ proxies, the Ukraine government.
Now, on the basis of what program, based on historical experience, can the Fourth International be reforged? Comrade Perrault said, and I think correctly, that the question of which program is of great importance. So let me just say, and I said this at an SL forum: when I was recruited to the SL youth group in 1972-73, at that time the Socialist Workers Party claimed to be Trotskyist, and they called us—guess what? Three guesses, starts with an “s.” “Sectarians.” But they tooth and nail denied that they were abandoning Trotskyism. They had some very intelligent people, with writers—[SWP theorist] Joseph Hansen was very competent, and a bunch of others—who would contest it every time that we said, “You’re abandoning the Trotskyist program.”
Until in the early ’80s, after a study of the “revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” and after polemics on this by Doug Jenness and polemics on this by other leaders of the SWP, they came out in 1982 with a speech by Jack Barnes called “Their Trotsky and Ours,” where they said: You know what? We’re not Trotskyists. Trotskyism is ultra-left sectarianism. And that permanent revolution thing? No good. And guess what? We’ve discovered the importance of supporting the Freedom Charter in South Africa and the ANC. That was an important thing.
Now, with the Spartacist League and the ICL: we were expelled in 1996 on frame-up charges, right? [Turning to Perrault:] They were frame-up charges, right? Comrade Perrault says “Right, they were.” Thank you. Listen to that. In other words, what’s been said about us for 28 years was a lie. You understand that? But let’s move on from that. We said—year after year—and we documented the abandonment of one key position after another by the ICL. But they denied that they were abandoning the historic program of Spartacism.
Born-Again ICL vs. Historic Spartacist Program
But now we have a new revelation. Does everybody have their Spartacist 68? [Holds it up.] I very much agree with comrade Perrault that it should be studied carefully—actually, very carefully. And here, what it says is: You know what? The Spartacist tendency was deformed from birth; we were wrong on just about everything, they say. As for your paper, the paper of one section or another [of the ICL], we renounce that paper back to the beginning, they say. They have junked and they’re in the process of junking, in a kaleidoscopic, dizzying way, one part of that program after another.
It’s far from over. I said at one of the ICL’s forums, in May: the members of the Spartacist League and the ICL do not know what their politics will be next week or next month or next year, because they’re changing so rapidly.
But in any event, that debate is over. The historic program of Spartacism is ours. They have renounced it, they say that it was a betrayal, they say it was a betrayal on one thing after another, they throw it into the garbage. But we maintain that the historic program of Spartacism is crucial and vital to reforging the Fourth International.
So that’s what the debate is about. Is the historic program of Spartacism—which was not the invention of some person in a fever dream, it was the distillation of decades of bloody struggles of the oppressed and the lessons of the past history of the Fourth International and the communist movement. Is the historic program of Spartacism fundamental to reforging the Fourth International? We say yes—and they say no. They say no.
Well, at least that’s out of the way.
So, what was the foundation of the Spartacist tendency? It came out of the Socialist Workers Party and something called the Revolutionary Tendency (RT), as most of the people here know. It was a group of young revolutionaries; some had been Shachtmanites, but the experience of the Hungarian Revolution [of 1956] taught them a thing or two. For example, on the “Russian Question.” And they came over to the Socialist Workers Party. So when the challenge of the Cuban Revolution arose, they were pretty well armed to have a revolutionary Marxist position, of militant defense of Cuba, but understanding that it was in the process of consolidating as a deformed workers state. And that a political revolution by the proletariat was necessary to open the road to socialism, to establish workers democracy based on workers soviets and a policy of revolutionary internationalism to expand the revolution. They rejected the suicidal strategy of guerrilla warfare.
And the Russian Question became key for the Spartacist tendency throughout its history. The Russian Question in the Soviet Union, the Russian Question in Vietnam, the Russian Question in Cuba, the Russian Question in Poland—which the ICL is now renouncing, what the Spartacist tendency had to say about Poland at the crucial moment of 1981 [when the U.S.-backed clerical-nationalist Solidarność movement was making a bid for power]. Openly.
Two: the black question in the United States, key to proletarian revolution—the specific nature of U.S. society, a society in which black oppression lies at the root of the origins of this society and at the heart of almost every political question in this society, every social question. The program of revolutionary integrationism, in opposition to false roads like black nationalism or following the liberal leadership of the liberal pro-Democratic Party leaders of the official civil rights movement. The RT fought inside the Socialist Workers Party, to get the activists from the SWP down there [i.e., into the South] into the movement, to get them on the buses, get them into the streets with the program that we now synthesize as “black liberation through socialist revolution.”
This was enormously important for arming the Spartacist tendency in the future, not only on the black question and in the extremely important and historic mobilizations to stop the Ku Klux Klan, for example, in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere. But also on other questions of special oppression, like the woman question, the fight for women’s liberation through socialist revolution. And this led to one of the most important Marxist journals, in my opinion, of the postwar period, Women and Revolution. What’s your position on that journal? I’d like to hear. Do you renounce that as well? Somebody answer that question today, please. Because we consider W&R, until pretty close to the end of it, ours in the sense of part of our political legacy. What’s your line on that? It also was key to other questions of understanding the Leninist party as the “tribune of the people,” the tribune of the oppressed. This was key, for example, to the historic fusion with the former Lavender and Red Union, which changed its name to Red Flag Union, a gay revolutionary Marxist group.
And then the struggle against Pabloism was the third, if you like, “whale” of the RT; the struggle against Pabloism, the struggle against the liquidation of the independent revolutionary Marxist party as the essential instrument for leading the proletariat and the oppressed to victory, and [against] the tailism of the existing leaderships by the liquidationist leaders of the [post-WWII] Fourth International.
Can people get their reading for today out, please? Spartacist 68 and “The LFI Chooses Sectarianism” (Spartacist supplement, 3 November 2023). [Shows cover of Spartacist No. 68.] So we read here, “A Program for the Fourth International,” and I’m like, wow! I kind of thought there was one already, the Transitional Program, but this ought to be interesting. I’d like to see what it has to say about the black question in the United States, for example, the citadel of world imperialism; about the struggle in the United States for black liberation, which was one of the pillars of the RT. Guess how much it has to say about that? Nothing. Please explain why. Why does the “Program for the Fourth International,” according to you, not mention the struggle for black liberation in the United States one time? Not once. Please explain.
Second question: the struggle against Pabloism. If you have to reforge the Fourth International, why is that? It took us a while to settle on that word, didn’t it, comrades who remember, and who want to remember. We had “rebirth of the Fourth International,” “reconstruct the Fourth International,” that didn’t work—I don’t have time to explain why—we came up with the somewhat exotic term “reforge.” But in any case, why? Not a word about it.
What about the Cuban Revolution and its lessons? Cuba is mentioned in a few lists of countries. The Cuban Revolution is mentioned in a photo caption, on page 42. Please open to page 42. You can do it too, you know, it’s yours. We’ve studied it. This is the only place that the Cuban Revolution is mentioned, in a photo caption, to make fun of the Spartacist tendency, [the photo and caption are placed next to the subhead] “Deformed at Birth.” Get it? You know, like a deformed workers state—isn’t that funny? That is the only time the Cuban Revolution is mentioned.
The Cuban Revolution is under threat right now. What’s your line? What is your line on the riots in Cuba in July 2021, in which counterrevolutionary instigators took advantage of economic crisis. Do you consider the question of defense of the Cuban Revolution in the here and now—not in “doctrinal abstractions” of orthodox “sectarians,” but now—do you consider it worthy of inclusion in what you call the “Program for the Fourth International”? If so, why is it not here? If not, please explain.
Bringing the Revolutionary Program into the Class Struggle
So I was having some trouble, quite a bit of trouble, actually, preparing for this debate for one reason, in one aspect. It was fun in a lot of ways. But how would one explain this to young people who want to figure out what is this all about?
When I was being recruited away from Guevarism, from Stalinism, in high school, me and my best friend, we used to get all the leftist papers and try to figure out what they were talking about—like, what the hell is this, I don’t understand this stuff. We had to read [Lenin’s] Two Tactics at an SL study group. The person who gave it might be here. There was a group in Two Tactics called Osvobozhdeniye—“what the hell is that?” What is the “revolutionary dictatorship,” etc. We read a little red [Spartacist] pamphlet called “Three Concepts of the Russian Revolution” by Leon Trotsky, which contrasts the “revolutionary democratic dictatorship [of the proletariat and peasantry]” formula of Lenin to the permanent revolution and to the Mensheviks. That was our main reading for one of the study groups of the SL/RCY study groups. [The Revolutionary Communist Youth was the Spartacist League’s youth section at that time.] But why, we wondered, were people arguing about such things? What did it mean in politics today? A lot of people probably wonder about that today.
So I was trying to think of some kind of analogy and I wasn’t doing so well. First I thought: this Spartacist 68, the new revelation and the new evangel, I guess, has a bunch of things to say, but they’re mainly about the ICL and how it screwed up in a whole lot of ways. And I was wondering, how would one explain this?
And a funny thing happened on the way to the forum—I mean, the debate. A guy came up to me, kind of a little guy, and he said, “Are you going to the debate?” I said, “I am.” And he said, “I don’t understand what is happening between your group and their group. Could you please explain?” And I thought I should try to boil it down somehow, so I came up with an analogy of a company that builds bridges and when asked, “Well, what’s your experience building bridges? Like, what’s your record, say for the past 30 years?” “Oh, all our bridges fell down, but now we’re very good at building bridges—we hope.” And I thought, no, that’s not such a good one, maybe you should use one with doctors, no, that’s not so good. So I thought: why not make it real?
Comrade Perrault is right and Bryan is right, they both said it or implied it: that this is going to be—it is already, but it will increasingly be—a turbulent period. There’s going to be a lot of struggles. So I thought: why not imagine that this audience consists of workers involved in a really hot struggle, who are getting fed up with their reformist leaders and looking for something like revolutionary leadership, and they are comparing the two organizations. And they say: Listen, we want some kind of radical leadership, but we want to know who is who and what is your experience, in the sense of not how old you are and how many years you’ve lived, but what is your record?
We would say: The LFI has fought seriously, consistently and systematically; we have written and we have fought in the class struggle to bring the revolutionary program of Trotskyism into the living class struggle.
They might say to us: Someone told us you lead some workers out in Portland. Is anybody from Portland here? Could you stand up? [A comrade from Portland stands up.] Thank you. You can talk to her and ask—we would say to these workers—she can tell you about the struggle to stop the fascists, Portland Labor Against the Fascists, and the role of class-struggle militants. [These workers might ask:] How was that connected to fighting against the union bureaucracy tying the Painters union and other unions to the bosses’ Democratic Party? What about the motions that were just passed in the Ironworkers and the Painters, not just saying that they stand for stopping the arms shipments, but calling on the labor movement to stop the arms shipments—how did that happen? What about the struggle to free Mumia Abu-Jamal, are there some lessons out there? Weren’t you guys (in the Painter’s union it’s mainly guys) in a pre-strike situation recently—what did you do about that? How is it connected to the struggle against the Democratic Party mayor? And what about when Portland was occupied by the feds, pretty much, and by “Teargas Ted” Wheeler, the Democratic Party mayor, during the mass upheaval against racist police terror after the racist murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and so many others?
There’s a poster display out there [in the hall], I invite you to see it.
How about in Mexico, like in the Oaxaca struggles, the struggles over Ayotzinapa, and there’s a strike right now in Mexico City. How about that huge UNAM [National Autonomous University of Mexico] strike in 1999 to 2000? Bringing the Trotskyist program, the Transitional Program, into the class struggle—did you from the LFI have anything like that, in that huge strike at the largest university in Latin America, when the World Bank, a pillar of the liberal order indeed, ordered the Mexican government to impose tuition?
Is anybody here from Mexico? Can you stand up, please? [ICL member in audience laughs.] It’s real funny—because bringing the Transitional Program into that struggle meant sparking workers defense guards. Look it up in your Transitional Program, that’s the old program for the Fourth International, not this one. They [our comrades in Mexico] sparked, they caused to be organized workers defense guards, which defended the strike 24 hours a day when the army, in July of 1999, threatened to invade the largest university in Latin America. And as a result of that, UNAM is still free…you know, a very “sectarian” action.
Speaking of university strikes, how about the one here in New York, there was a big university strike about two years ago. Was anybody here in that strike? Stand up if you were. I’m serious, let’s see the “sectarians.” [More than a dozen supporters of the IG and Revolutionary Internationalist Youth stand up.] What did you fight for? Picket lines mean don’t cross. Is that part of the program? It’s very “abstract,” it’s an “abstract orthodox dogma.” Fighting for that against the DSA, your [the ICL’s] new friends, or hoped-for friends. “Revolutionaries in the DSA”—give me a break. It’s a faction of the imperialist government party, the war criminal party. Don’t tell me about revolutionaries in the party of genocide, the party of the Vietnam War and napalm and Hiroshima. If they had an ounce of revolutionary in them, they would not be in that organization. Opportunism—yes, we call it that.
But fighting against the DSA and the Democratic Party in that strike, which led to “Shut It Down” on December 8 [2021], where the picket line—the SL was there, the only thing they were doing, even when people were crashing through the picket line, literally, was trying to get people to take their nutty (that’s a polite word for it) lockdown leaflet. That was the only thing they did there. But as a result of [the “Shut It Down” picket line] that strike won. This is connected to the program.
What about the McCarthyite witch hunts right now against defenders of the Palestinian people? Anybody here been involved in the struggle against that? I’m going to ask you to stand up again. [Again, more than a dozen supporters of the IG and RIY stand up.] What about organizing immigrant workers, one of the most exploited and oppressed sectors of the proletariat in this city? What about Hot and Crusty, is the former vice president of the union here? Would you stand up? [Comrade stands up.] He was fired and he’s been fired many times for organizing unions, and he was part of the struggle at the Hot and Crusty [bakery/restaurant] to put into effect the slogan “Full Citizenship Rights for All Immigrants,” and to fight against the union bureaucracy which turns its back on them. Hot and Crusty, Bröd Kitchen, B&H, Cabricanecos, Liberato restaurant: in each of these, the youth organization and the IG have brought the comrades into it, to fight for the revolutionary program.
ICL: Again and Again, We Betrayed—Now Follow Us!
By the way, when our comrades were arrested in Mexico [in February 2000] in the UNAM strike, there was only one organization that had no one arrested. Three guesses. Yes, the ICL. Why? Three guesses. When the cops arrived on the campus to arrest 1,000 students, the ICL wasn’t there. What a surprise. Isn’t that a big surprise?
So these workers then want to know: What about the mass upsurge against the racist police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor? Well, we collapsed, says the ICL. You mean you weren’t there at all? Did you publish something? No. Did you post something? No. Did you put out a leaflet? No. Why? Well, we’ll get to that in a second. One could go on. What about 9/11? We’ll talk about that later.
Then they say, well, what were you doing for the past 30 years? Well, it’s all in Spartacist: we were betraying. Wait a minute, you betrayed for 30 years? Yes, according to you. Seriously? What were you doing in your organization? Well, we were having a whole lot of turmoil and a lot of fights, lots and lots of fights, for 30 years, OK? What did those fights consist of? Oh, it doesn’t matter, it’s not very interesting. (I could go through them all, said comrade Perrault in a report which is published here, but they’re not very interesting.) They’re all basically meaningless. So what you’re talking about, you devoured yourselves for 30 years. Yes—now we’re back, OK?—they say. They were very busy.
After two years, they came out with Workers Vanguard. This is the first issue that came out, No. 1177 [17 March 2023]. And in that issue, what did they do? They were very productive. They listed their betrayals: eight betrayals. Eight. On what? According to them, on the black question; according to them, on the trade-union question; according to them, on six other questions. And then they came out with another issue, which listed more betrayals. On what questions? On the woman question, for example, and other questions.
So if these workers then asked: You’re saying that you betrayed over and over and over again. How about on Haiti, when you supported the U.S. imperialist occupation? Why did that happen? Oh, we don’t really want to talk about that very much. We were wrong, the IG was right. But why did it happen? Hmm, maybe because of a memorandum that people voted for 25 years before that, the memorandum made us do it. And the reason why you betrayed on these other questions? Well, we were really like the IG, you know; both of us supported the same memorandum and the same tasks and perspectives document.
Now sometimes, tasks and perspectives documents and memorandums can have some good aspects of their prognoses and some not so accurate aspects. But the argument that this is the essential question and if you get your prognoses wrong, everything is garbage and your program is garbage, this is the argument that was used after World War II when Trotsky’s prognoses of the post-World War II period were largely not confirmed. In reality it was used by whom? It was used by the Goldman-Morrow faction in the Socialist Workers Party. And what was their program? “Democracy.” They said: “The Trotskyists must be the best fighters for democracy”—democracy—oh!—in general. In Spanish, the expression is that democracy “tiene nombre y apellido,” it has a first and last name: there’s bourgeois democracy, there’s proletarian democracy. But the Goldman-Morrow faction said democracy in general. The Cochran-Clarke [faction in 1952-53], during the Pablo fight, they also said that the prognoses of the SWP and Trotsky did not come true in some considerable part and therefore the program was off. Where was the program, the fundamental programmatic questions, determined by this?
The Truth About the ICL’s Brazil Betrayal
But back to the workers asking these questions: Your organization, they would say [to the ICL], gave rise to another organization. How did that happen? Well, we expelled them back in 1996. Why did you do that? You also organized some trials and stuff? Yeah, we did that; we’re investigating that. Well, what do you think about it? Well, it was unprincipled. The fight against them was unprincipled. Really? Why? Oh, because both they and us voted for the same memorandum. The memorandum made you do it? Why did it happen? I don’t know—maybe you could ask some of the people in this room who did it. Because they’re here.
What about the stuff in Brazil: is it true that what you did in Brazil was unprincipled? Yeah, it’s true. It’s true, isn’t it? [Turning to Perrault:] Is it true? Comrade Perrault is saying “yes,” and he’s written it. Well, why did it happen? Why did that happen? We’re not sure yet, but it was unprincipled. Why? Because both sides voted for the same document. Oh, did the comrades in Brazil vote for that document? No, they weren’t around at that time. They were busy organizing illegal strikes—well, they weren’t illegal anymore, but against the military and [in the early ’90s] they were in a centrist organization called Causa Operária.
What was going on when that struggle [in 1996] happened? Oh, that’s the past. We don’t want to talk about the past. We’re all about the “now.” What did you do when those comrades were attacked by the bourgeois state, which put out an order for the “search and seizure” of their documents, of their bulletin, of their union leaflet? What did you do? Did you defend them, or did you side with the other side? There is an answer to that.
One of the people involved in the ICL’s actions, that the ICL now says that we are correct to still be “outraged” about their actions in 1996—Let me repeat that: that we are correct to still be outraged by their actions in Brazil. In other words, what they were saying for 28 years was a lie, what we were saying was true. “Oh, but that’s old history and besides, you’re a bunch of hidebound doctrinaires.” Oh really? Were there no consequences?
I’m going to do this now. Can you please bring me that poster? [Holds up poster with headline “Brazil: ICL Seeks to Sabotage Defense of Trotskyist Workers,” with photos and documents on the campaign to remove police from the Volta Redonda Municipal Workers Union and quotations from Workers Vanguard (2 January 1998) denouncing the Brazilian comrades’ defense campaign.]
The bourgeois state, you’ve heard of it? It sent one of its agents to the offices of the comrades of the Liga Quarta-Internacionalista do Brasil, and they had a “search and seizure” order for every copy of their leaflet. This came from a suit which was demanding the names of all of the members of the trade-union committee, or caucus, and the order threatened, was associated with the threat to seize all of the belongings of the caucus and of the union president. And we organized an international defense campaign to try to get unions to support them. We’re talking about real people, we’re not talking about words on paper. Real people with names like Jorge Oliveira, the target of this suit, a black worker who worked 25 years as a railway man at the largest steel company in Latin America, which is not a doctrinal invention written on paper. It’s not about words on paper.
And what did the ICL say?
[This was an] “ação de busca e apreensão,” an “action for search and seizure,” right? Unions around the world were signing up to defend them [the Brazilian comrades], in South Africa, in El Salvador and elsewhere, on the basis of our work. The ICL tried to stop people from defending them. Is that statement true? Yes, it is true. They called the defense campaign a “cynical sham.” And they called the comrades—taking words virtually verbatim from the pro-cop grouping in Volta Redonda headed by Artur Fernandes—they called them “dangerous hustlers.” You want to defend a “dangerous hustler” in a campaign which is a “cynical sham”? What’s your line on this? [Turning to Perrault.] What’s your line on this? Please respond.
Now these workers in this room [in the scenario of a group of workers posing questions], when confronted by the ICL, might very well say: Well, what do you have to say about that? And the ICL would probably say: That was a long time ago, we’re all about the “now.” You ready to follow us now? We betrayed, we betrayed this way, and this way, and this way, and this way, and this way, and this way—now follow us! Because since the first of September 2023, when this [Spartacist No. 68] was published, now it’s all OK. You ready to follow us? I don’t think so. Well, we’re investigating it. One certainly hopes so; one looks forward to seeing the results of those investigations.
They’re going to say, “But what about the program?” We’ve been talking about program. Program is real—when you fight for it.
Pushing the “Anti-Imperialist United Front”
But what about the revelations in here [Spartacist No. 68]? Why, according to them, was the Spartacist tendency “deformed” since birth? Jim Robertson, they say, did not understand the permanent revolution or the national question, and the “revisionist” and reactionary positions, etcetera, meant that the Spartacist tendency was deformed from birth. So, a kind suggestion: why don’t you change the name of your journal? Change it.
How is that? We’re going to hear about some of this in the second part of the debate. What is this all about? What does it come down to, as a pompous SLer used to like to say to me, “when the rubber hits the road”? It comes down to the “anti-imperialist united front.”
They have resuscitated something which even most Trotskyists are not particularly aware of, or would-be Trotskyists: the “anti-imperialist united front” from the Fourth Congress of the Comintern. And they’re determined to “defend” the Fourth Congress of the Comintern. We always used to say that we stand on the first four Congresses of the Communist International, with reservations on the fourth. The discussion on the workers government [slogan] was very confused, Zinoviev was all over the map.
And what about the “Theses on the Eastern Question” [from the Comintern’s Fourth Congress]? I used to hear about that a lot, from Guillermo Lora, head of the Bolivian POR. Why? Because he’s got a pamphlet (I can give it to you as a present) called “The Anti-Imperialist Front”: because he dug those theses up to justify his class-collaborationist Frente Revolucionario Antiimperialista with the president—former president—of Bolivia.
Because in the Trotskyist movement, the “Theses on the Orient” or “Eastern Question” (originally it was called by that term, “Theses on the Orient”) had not been mentioned at the First Congress [1938] of the Fourth International nor in its documents nor at the Second Congress [1946] nor in the documents of the SWP. But they were mentioned at the Third Congress, by a man called Michel Pablo. Why? In order to justify a political bloc with the nationalist party [in Bolivia].
Well, we would never do something like that, might say the ICL, mightn’t they? Well, they might—but they don’t. To the contrary, they want an anti-imperialist front—and they say this, we asked it as a rhetorical question: Would the “anti-imperialist united front” include the president of Mexico? And they said: Why, yes, using a hypothetical—if in the future Mexico were attacked by the U.S., wouldn’t you be for a military bloc with AMLO [Mexico’s president Andrés Manuel López Obrador]?
We would defend Mexico militarily against U.S. imperialism—of course we would. But what’s happening right now is that he [AMLO] is serving as the border guard for Yankee imperialism. And they rush to his political defense. And one of their main arguments, I found it quite comical. They said, well, he had half a million people at this rally. When I moved to Mexico in the spring of 1988, the president of Mexico, Miguel de la Madrid from the government party, the PRI [Institutional Revolutionary Party], had 1.3 million people at his May Day rally. He must have been an “anti-imperialist”—let’s make an “anti-imperialist united front” with him, now.
How about, is there anywhere in the world where the ICL calls for an anti-imperialist united front now? It would be nice if comrade Perrault would answer that, but I can give you at least part of an answer. They say that it was necessary to form an anti-imperialist united front with the government of Greece in 2015. They say that voting for the maneuver by SYRIZA, the bourgeois populist-nationalist government party of Greece, was necessary. We said no, this is a maneuver, we’re not going to participate in tricking the workers. They [SYRIZA] are going to capitulate immediately to the bankers and this is preparation for that. They [the ICL] said no, you’ve got to vote for it. Now retroactively they say, yeah and guess what: that was an anti-imperialist united front. And it was necessary to make “a common front”—with the government. With the government. So, more will be coming on that.
But what if they say, “Wait a minute,” some not yet up-to-speed SLer or ICLer might get up and say, “No, we’re talking about the original discussion at the Fourth Congress [of the Comintern, 1922]. We’re not talking about now.” Really? Trotsky said the real historical process invests terms with meaning, historically.
But let’s look back at it. This was the Fourth Congress, comrade Perrault. Safarov, leader of Comintern work among the peoples of the East, said in the discussion on the Theses on the Eastern Question (you can find it in John Riddell’s very valuable collection): he said, since “the colonial and national revolution is a bourgeois-democratic revolution,” a “bourgeois-democratic government in the backward countries provides support and great reassurance for our proletarian movement.” Now is that Stalin? Is that Stalinism? No, the whole struggle in real life in the Second Chinese Revolution of 1925-27, in which the Stalinists used the formula of the anti-imperialist united front, yielded a bloody result through which, indeed, despite your [the present-day ICL’s] denials, Leon Trotsky extended the theory of permanent revolution internationally.
This is why they [the ICL today] are doing all this stuff about the “revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry.” All the theoretical revisionism and rewriting of the history of the Russian Revolution that they’re doing: it’s got a political purpose. Program does generate theory, you know. What you want guides what you do.
So how about the representative for Iran at the Fourth Congress discussion of those theses? He said—his name was Nikbin: “The Party,” in Iran, “is trying to create a general anti-imperialist alliance…. It has made an extensive proposal for a democratic”—that beloved word, democratic, the ICL is very much in love with that word democracy, democratic. And yes, we fight for democratic rights and in the countries of belated capitalist development, the bourgeois- democratic tasks can only be carried through by the dictatorship of the proletariat supported by and resting on the peasants. But he [Nikbin] says the party has a “proposal for a democratic bloc that is to include representatives of all the national and democratic groups…. [T]he bourgeois parties themselves are seeking a bloc with us,” said the representative for Iran.
But what about China? The representative of the Chinese CP—this is at the Fourth Congress, and I’ll finish up with this. “Starting from the principle that an anti-imperialist front should be established to drive imperialism out of China,” said the representative of the Chinese Communist Party at the Fourth Comintern Congress discussion on the Theses that they [the ICL] uphold, “our party decided to achieve a united front with the national-revolutionary Guomindang party. This united front took the form that we joined this party.” And we know, don’t we, where that led.
So let’s follow them! I don’t think so. Thank you.
Rebuttal by G. Perrault
I’ll start by saying that comrade Negrete certainly didn’t make my job easy. I’ll try to answer many of the questions, and I’ll try also to clarify the confusion because there’s a lot of themes and none of it makes sense. I personally feel much more confused after hearing this report about what the IG thinks about the world.
So, let’s start with the question that was hammered on. Why follow us? Well, I’ll answer. It’s because we’re using a dialectical and Marxist analysis to chart a path forward. I’ll start with a small example.
I made a prediction at the beginning of my report—that was the quote from Trotsky. That the “essence of sectarianism consists in measuring historical processes at the scale of one’s own group.” And this is exactly what we got from Negrete today. It seems like the whole world situation revolves around the disputes between the ICL and the LFI. And certainly, you know, we’ve admitted all these problems with our past and how we’ve done things.
But something that’s forgotten in Negrete’s presentation is that there was a crisis in the whole left. How did anybody else do in building bridges in this period? Open your eyes! You’ll see that the left is in an absolutely pathetic state. Why? There is not a single answer to this question. It’s all about these narrow little disputes that most people in the world have no idea about. And honestly, they’re not of interest for most people in the world. These little narrow disputes of 30 years ago.
The question of building a bridge. It’s true, you know. We said, oh, our bridges have broken and now what we did is we re-evaluated our engineering and now have a new plan on how to make a bridge. The problem is the whole rest of the left has failed to build a bridge, and they’re still trying to do the same thing. The LFI has been outside our organization for almost 30 years. Negrete was able to point to a number of actions that the LFI has done, which are certainly commendable. But in terms of providing revolutionary leadership on the key questions of the epoch, the LFI has utterly failed, and utterly fails today too.
Now, I think comrade Negrete forgot—although he named it—he forgot the theme of this debate, the fight for the Fourth International today. How are we going to move this fight forward? This is the question of today’s debate. And you had no answer for this from Negrete. Let’s start with the three points I outlined: reality, the reasons for defeats and the road for victory.
Think about Negrete’s presentation. How did he answer these three questions? First of all, reality. “Oh, so there was a memorandum, and there were a few bad formulations. We did some wrong predictions, but that’s okay. You know, that doesn’t really matter so much.”
But I’m sorry. To not understand that U.S. imperialism has been hegemonic for the last 30 years—actually, well before the last 30 years—is not a little analytical mistake. If you don’t understand that, you understand nothing about the world. And, you know, Negrete gave a number of examples of times that people used the world situation to justify being opportunist. Yeah, that’s certainly true.
But if you read Trotsky, it’s always so clear in all his polemics against Stalinism that his entire critique is rooted in a correct materialist understanding of the world situation. That’s not a secondary point. That’s absolutely fundamental. And it wasn’t just the 1992 conference document. Look at the LFI’s website today. Still, to this day, the LFI denies that the post-Soviet world order is defined by the hegemony of the United States.
This means it understands nothing. And now, right now, it’s so obvious that it’s breaking down, as Negrete himself said. But if you see it breaking down without understanding how you got there, then you’re totally blind. And then you think, “Oh, the Third World War is coming now.” Without understanding the actual laws behind it, the contradictions, how it’s evolving in a contradictory and dialectical way.
Now, the reasons for defeats. Have you heard a single explanation from Negrete of why the working class has suffered defeats for the last 30 years? Oh, we heard plenty about why the ICL was bad, that’s for sure. But why has the working class been defeated for the last 30 years? My presentation provided an explanation for this. It was rooted in the hegemony of the United States and the triumph of liberalism. If you look at the ideology in the workers movement for the last 30 years, everywhere in the world, it has been defined by the dominance of liberalism—the trade unions, BLM, all the movements.
Now, the reasons for defeat. Okay, Negrete pointed out that we didn’t write leaflets and that they wrote a lot of leaflets during BLM. True, correct. A lot of other groups wrote leaflets. But Negrete did not answer the question: Why was BLM defeated? And what are the lessons to be drawn for today? It’s not just a question of writing leaflets. All the left wrote leaflets. And the movement ended in a disaster. That’s obvious. Why? And what to do now about it? There’s no answer to this. This is a fundamental question.
How to advance black liberation? How to defeat imperialism in Ukraine? Negrete didn’t actually answer this question. How do you actually defeat it? “We have the right position because of A, B plus C.” Okay, but if you look at the concretes: How do you advance the class struggle in Ukraine right now? The Ukraine army is being massacred. There’s discontent that’s brewing. There is talk of a possible coup in Ukraine. There will very likely be a revolt in the Ukraine army. The question: Which direction will it go? Will it be under the communist banner or will it be under the reactionary banner of fascism? You’ll never win the Ukrainian workers to welcome the Russian troops in taking over Kharkiv and Kiev. You’ll never win them to that. If you want a revolution in Ukraine, you must work toward the unity of Russian and Ukrainian workers. That is the only road.
A plus B—where does that logic get the LFI? They compare Russia’s position in the Ukraine war to Iraq [being invaded by the U.S.]. It’s not the same thing. A U.S. proxy war is also not the same thing as a direct war. And it’s kind of obvious. We would know if there was a war between U.S. imperialism and Russia. That’s not the same thing as what is happening now. To compare the Russian situation to the situation of China being invaded by Japan is absurd.
Now, the road to victory. How do we actually advance Palestinian liberation? No answer on this. How do we defend China today? No answer on this. On Palestine, Negrete asked everybody to stand up that had participated in actions to defend against the witchhunt.
In Germany, where the offensive has been the strongest, the LFI has refused to do a united front with us. Now, it’s not about “did you come to our demo?” That’s not the point. The point is that there is an urgent need in Germany for the left and workers movement that stand in support of Palestine to unite against social democracy and against the offensive.
So everybody, including the LFI, can go to the demos for Palestine, say they stand in solidarity, but when it comes to trying to build a united front against this offensive, they refuse. And okay, maybe they don’t want to come to our thing or follow our call, but at the last forum I challenged Negrete: Okay, put forward your own call for a united front. This question is crucial.
Rebuttal by Abram Negrete
On liberalism, I would like to ask comrade Perrault to please define what the ICL means by the word. Please, because it’s used many, many times in their analysis. They use the term liberalism 51 times in Spartacist [No. 68]. They use liberal 87 times. A very large part of their program consists, apparently, of saying “liberal,” of saying the word “liberalism” many times, and telling people to break from it. Liberalism has a very strong power, almost mystical magical power to make people do stuff, according to them. It’s liberal idealism.
The picture that they present of the world in the post-Soviet period is remarkably similar to that of the “death of communism” triumphalists. Supposedly, apparently, after the destruction of the Soviet Union there was considerable peace, prosperity and the growth of productive forces. Hmm, OK.
Now there’s a bunch of stuff to say about this, but I would like to talk a bit about what they’re doing now—because they say “we’re tired of talking about the past and the self-referential stuff,” which is pretty interesting for an organization whose Program for the Fourth International, quote unquote, consists overwhelmingly of denouncing itself. Vote for us, we were deformed since birth! Jim Robertson, revisionist shmuck, according to them; it actually pisses me off.
But what about what they’re doing now? What about Palestine? Compare their leaflet to ours—compare “Only Death and Defeat with Hamas: A Revolutionary Road”—quote unquote—“for Palestine Liberation”: that’s the headline. It genuflects to the bourgeoisie and what it demands. Right at the beginning and repeatedly, just like after 9/11. And what ours has to say: “Defend the Palestinians Against U.S./Israel Genocidal War on Gaza! Drive the Zionists Out of the West Bank and Gaza! For International Workers Action Against the Attack on Gaza!” So please tell me how, here in the United States or in Europe or in most places, the key task is to dispel illusions in—Hamas?
Now what about Palestine, where, as the pompous SLer (who’s in the room here) used to say all the time, “the rubber hits the road.” They’ve got a very interesting statement from [the ICL’s] British paper, Workers Hammer. It says: “Trade unions must take concrete action to stop arms shipments to Israel”—yeah. That was on October 20, 2023. The next day, Workers Vanguard has a supplement on the strike of the auto workers. I remember—some of you do too, I’m sure—that in 1973, 2,000 Arab American auto workers walked out in a protest against Zionism. Dearborn, Michigan is a largely Arab American city—auto. What [does the WV supplement] say?
It says:
“Lots of workers are watching the horrors in Gaza and wondering what they can do. The main thing that workers can do to fight for Palestinian liberation is to win this strike!”
—“UAW: Let’s Win This for Real!” (21 October 2023), emphasis in original
Nothing about stopping arms shipments, nothing about fighting to stop arms shipments, nothing about convincing others to fight to stop arms shipments, nothing about calling for it—but win your strike, don’t be distracted by the genocide in Gaza, pursue your strike. Yes, they should win their strike, but to separate this in this way, and to tell the workers to do nothing, nothing, nothing—this is worse than economism.
And lastly, what they’re doing now. A “revolutionary” program for black liberation, unlike BLM, which had liberal demands. True, and we exposed those demands systematically in our press, in our leaflets, in our speeches, in our signs, on the streets, in the meetings, in the unions. We did not collapse ignominiously, which is a capitulation to your own bourgeoisie. I don’t give a damn about how messed up you were in your organization, you couldn’t bring yourselves to put out one leaflet? Nobody should follow you. Your credit is zero.
But what do they call for in their campaign? “What’s necessary is a fight that will unite the broadest possible forces”—popular-front language. Take motions for opening the police archives, bring them “to your political officials who claim to represent you. We need to mobilize to bring pressure down on all the liberal and progressive politicians who claim to stand for workers and for black rights…. Opening the police archives is doable”—it’s a “doable” demand—“and, in fact, can be done by any politician in office that is really on the side of black people.”
Want some liberalism? It’s right here. And what would happen if those archives were opened? Who’s going to choose the “hundred most heinous cases”? The cops? And you believe what’s in the cops’ archives? Don’t you know anything about what cops put in archives?
That’s what you’re doing today. You’re trying to spread liberal illusions. And you say that it’s “exposing them.” I heard that from the SWP, pretty much every day of the year. And all the other opportunists.
Select Floor Interventions
ICL speaker
I am with the Spartacist League. So, the Internationalist Group and the LFI have been criticizing our statement on the Gaza war—which in the beginning, if you read it, very clearly puts forward a program for how to destroy the Zionist state and defeat imperialism—as a capitulation to Zionism and a “genuflection” to imperialism. Why do they say this? Because we have in our headline: “Hamas Only Means Death and Defeat”—which I will point out is in your statement, very far down, that there is only defeat with Hamas.
So, what is the beef here? That’s, on the one hand, what you say. On the other hand, you defend the historic Spartacist tendency’s line on Israel/Palestine which is in fact a capitulation to Zionism.
Let me explain. The LFI says in their statement that they “stand squarely on the side of the Palestinian people, which we have always defended against the Zionist oppressor state and its imperialist patrons who have further condemned them to a stateless, impoverished existence in exile.” Further, you say that Trotskyists opposed the founding of the Zionist state built on the dispossession and mass expulsion of the Arab majority of Palestine. Okay, sounds good. But that’s not actually true. The line of Spartacist in 1968 was not opposition to the founding of the Zionist state.
The SL took a side with Israel in the ’48 war in the Nakba and called for a “peace treaty” on the basis of the 1949 truce boundary lines. The boundary lines that took over 80 percent of Palestinian land. Even more than what was taken in the partition. The SL’s line put an equal sign between the Israeli Jewish nation, which has a right to exist, and the Zionist state, which was dispossessing the Palestinians.
While the SL did in 1974 change its line on that war, it was not on the basis of rejecting this line as an utterly reactionary position, but on the basis of supposedly new facts. So, the SL’s historic position is undeniably a capitulation to Zionism. The SL—and you guys uphold this—never approached these wars as national wars where we had a side with the Palestinian Arabs.
Do you really think this line doesn’t need to be looked at critically? Are you really defending this legacy? That’s a big contradiction for communists who say they are fighting for the national liberation of the Palestinians, which obviously you cannot do if you are betraying that struggle and capitulating to Zionism. So, yes, we are breaking with that, and it is necessary to do so, given the task of today, which is to raise the Leninist-Trotskyist banner in Palestine and Israel. That’s why we are revisiting and correcting this position.
LFI speaker
OK. Hello, everyone. I’m a member of the Revolutionary Internationalist Youth, the youth group of the Internationalist Group. It was founded in 2017, and it is a training ground for young revolutionaries. And it seeks to win young people from around the U.S., and around the world, to the program of Trotskyism. That is, to carry through to victory the genuine communist program of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky. All of it. Not just bits and pieces. Not just the quotes that we like. Not revised or redacted versions that make it more acceptable to “our” national bourgeoisie. But all of it.
Since 2017, we have recruited many young people to this program. I joined in 2018 for many reasons. But at first because of the internationalist and revolutionary Marxist position of independence for Puerto Rico, the oldest colony. And doing so—upholding that position—irrespective of what imperialist pressure and fear tactics have done to the Puerto Rican population. I am glad you finally re-adopted that position, after how many years?
In 2020 and 2021, we grew during our and the Internationalist Group’s intervention in some of the largest mass protests against racist police murder. We didn’t just write about it. We were there. You can see the photos outside. We defied the lockdowns, as did millions of other people. We were not paralyzed. We were ready.
On the question of how can we break something if we don’t put pressure on it. Good question. Well, how can you do that, or let alone be the revolutionary leadership of the working class, through abstention or through absence? You can’t.
Most recently, we organized a protest outside Hunter College against the McCarthyite witchhunts currently being waged against defenders of the Palestinians and those willing to mobilize against this U.S./Israel war. Sectarian us invited the SL to protest and to speak. And what did you do? Echoed imperialist propaganda. Again. And you accused the left of tailing Hamas. But you’re used to echoing imperialist talking points—you do that with China. So, you’ve seen the present-day ICL, multiple-time betrayers.
If you want to see what a real revolutionary organization looks like, come by our table. And lastly, you say that we will try to say that the ICL has made nothing but mistakes. You do that all on your own. Many times. And you’re right. You have, and not just with formulations, saying “a” instead of “an,” but on key questions, decisive questions, that will make or break a socialist revolution, here or anywhere. And our leaflets are important. What do those leaflets say? That’s it. Thank you.
ICL speaker
I’m from the SL. The speaker from the LFI challenged our assertion that liberalism became the predominant ideology in the post-Soviet period. Yes, it did, and there is a simple reason. Karl Marx said, “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.” The U.S. imperialists won the Cold War and proclaimed the triumph of liberal bourgeois democracy. Now, if you don’t recognize the primacy of liberalism in this period you end up tailing it as the LFI does today. You do it through opportunism. Examples are your tailing of the Neely protests, your solidarizing with the liberal pro-Palestinian solidarity milieu, your support to the bourgeoisie’s lockdowns and your tailing of BLM. You also do it through sectarian means and a very good example is your refusal to participate in our police archives campaign. Far from it being us pushing liberalism, what you are doing is protecting the liberals. Because we are making a demand that these politicians come out against the cops with whom they overwhelmingly work. And you don’t want to put them to the test. You’re protecting those people.
Now, finally, I want to say something about your disgraceful disfigurement of the history of the RT [Revolutionary Tendency] and the founding of the Spartacist League. You talked about our struggle against the SWP on Cuba. What was it about? What the SWP was doing was becoming a cheerleader for Castro and Cuban Stalinism. That is exactly what you people are doing in China with your completely uncritical support to the policies of the Chinese Stalinist bureaucracy. And on the black question, what the RT fought for was an independent, communist leadership for black liberation, not to be cheerleaders for liberal black movements or the civil rights movement. That is exactly the opposite of what you do when you tail BLM.
LFI speaker
I’m with the IG. In your March [2023] article “For Black Trotskyism,” you write that the SL rejected the need to fight for leadership of the struggle for black liberation, that you refused to fight for the Trotskyist program for revolutionary integrationism, and that this amounted to a betrayal. Your paper is littered with all sorts of betrayals, okay, that you’ve committed. Some concocted for internal purposes, but this betrayal is true. The SL collapsed and put forward absolutely no program responding to the racist police murder of George Floyd. This amounted to a capitulation, okay, to the bourgeoisie. Because betrayals are not mistakes. It’s class treason. Understand? No amount of public self-flagellation in your paper will exonerate you from your political bankruptcy on the black question in the United States.
We, the IG, have consistently fought for black liberation through socialist revolution. We say that only revolution can bring justice because there is no justice in capitalist America. You sneer at this slogan, writing that it is as true as it is sterile. But you kept your hands clean by, in your own words, capitulating to the lockdowns and racist curfews imposed by the Democrats while we marched and mobilized labor against racist police and fascist terror.
Now you seek to create fanciful illusions in the bourgeoisie to then expose those very illusions, like calling to “unite the broadest possible forces”…“to bring pressure down on all the liberal and progressive politicians who claim to stand for workers and for black rights” and open all the police archives. Why? Because “opening the police archives is doable and in fact can be done by any politician in office who is really on the side of black people.” Do you really think that opening the police archives will bring some kind of justice? We’re for the right of armed black self-defense, for the militant organized power of the working class and for the formation of a revolutionary working-class party to fight for the liberation of the oppressed through socialist revolution. You are for a liberal pressure campaign. That’s what fake leftists do.
You were silent as a grave in 2020, and now you want to create your own fake movement, a popular front, with capitalist politicians to open the police archives. Your actual betrayals keep multiplying day by day. And you want to trivialize that. To you, “everyone betrays.” Don’t insult our intelligence as if we can’t read or trust what we see with our own eyes. The SL and IG are nothing alike, and people see that immediately.
ICL speaker
I’m from the Spartacist League. I want to touch on comrade Negrete accusing our interventions in the UAW strike of being economist. Our whole intervention, from the very beginning—when we put forth the program of no tiers, reindustrialization and black liberation for the UAW strike—was to actually fight against the economism of Shawn Fain, who was putting forward the notion that you could turn the tide for the working class and advance the interests of the working class by economic struggle alone. Well, no. Fighting for black liberation means you have to go right up against the interests of the capitalists. You have to show that the workers struggle and the black struggle need to be fused together in order to actually advance the struggle and go against capitalist interests.
So, when we say in that leaflet that you waved around that the best thing UAW workers can do right now for Palestinian liberation is to win this strike, what we are saying is that you need to deal a blow against imperialism, against capitalist interests. That is the best thing they can do for the Palestinians right now. I don’t think you can conceive of that because the only way you can conceive of this class battle is on the terms of the bureaucracy, what Shawn Fain was putting forward. The whole thing we were putting forward was to smash his narrow economism, that the strike needs to be waged like an actual battle of class interests. That is what we meant in that statement.
Another thing I want to touch on is what the comrade over there said about our police archives campaign. Because I think we need to go back to what the theme of this debate is, whether it be the UAW or the police archives: how do you guide the day-to-day struggles of the working class? How do you actually drive a wedge between the leadership, the dominant ideology and the base? Because the whole purpose of our campaign is to expose to the black masses and to the working class that these liberal politicians and everyone else are not on their side. Yes, we want the police archives to be open. Are these liberal politicians going to do it? No! We know that. And we are trying to expose to the black masses and the working class that these people are their enemy.
I’d like to raise the question again: What do you guys put forward, offer, for the UAW strike, for the black struggle? Because, really, it just seems to be a lot of abstract formulas. But how do you actually guide the struggle today? How do you actually put a wedge between the masses and the leadership? Because right now, you’re really just offering socialist revolution. Okay, yes, that’s obviously how you emancipate people. But what should people be doing today?
LFI supported speaker
Hi, I’m a supporter of Class Struggle Workers-Portland. And I want to talk about fighting for a class-struggle program and what that looks like in practice now, because that’s what we’re doing in Portland.
First, I just want to say that, as we speak, the Port of Oakland has been shut down by 3,000 pickets in protest against the war on Gaza. All cargo has been stopped, and the workers are preparing for a possible showdown later today. And I just want to take a minute to salute those pickets, because that’s what we mean when we talk about class struggle, by the way.
You might have seen the poster outside featuring a resolution that was proposed by members of the Class Struggle Workers-Portland. And it passed both in the Ironworkers Local 29 and Painters Local 10 in Portland. It calls for labor to refuse to handle war goods in solidarity with the Palestinian trade unions’ call for labor to stop shipments of arms to the U.S.-Israel war on Gaza. That’s what we mean when we talk about class struggle. We’re talking about getting workers actively involved where their power lies in their workplaces, organizing together to stop the shipment of war goods. That’s what we’re doing.
But I want to dial back to where all of this stuff came from, because these resolutions didn’t just come out of nowhere. To understand where they actually came from, it’s important to look back to August of 2016, when the Painters union in Portland, Local 10, at the behest of Class Struggle Workers supporters, passed a resolution to break with the Democrats and all parties of the bosses.
And this is important because labor’s allegiance to the Democrats in the U.S. is a major impediment to class struggle here, right? Like the leadership’s actual ties to the Democratic Party are what often forces the unions to capitulate to the demands of the Democratic Party, a ruling-class party.
After that resolution, there were several other actions that took place in Portland. So, on June 4th of 2017, when the Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys staged a provocation in Portland, they were met with hundreds of workers from at least 14 area unions, who effectively stopped them from marching. They boxed them in.
In 2020, when mass protests erupted following the murder of George Floyd, Class Struggle Workers-Portland organized several contingents of workers to intervene in the class struggle. Not to tail it, but to actually go out into the streets and have those political arguments inside of our union halls and in the streets. Instead of staying on the sidelines and calling the protesters liberals like the ICL would have us do.
As Democratic mayor “Teargas Ted” Wheeler gassed protesters every single day, federal, state, county and local police snatched protesters from the streets. Class Struggle Workers-Portland and the IG stood on the side of class struggle against racist police murder and in solidarity with the protesters being beaten.
ICL speaker
Hello. Comrade Negrete in his speech said: Imagine we’re a group of workers, and we want a leadership and we’re pretty radical. And he made his case in terms of we’ll judge between the ICL and the LFI. And he said the ICL cannot be trusted because look at all the bad things they did in the 1990s and the 2000s. They have written this or that.
Well, comrade Negrete, two things. First of all, I think workers quite like that the ICL is actually honest about its past. It looks at its mistakes head on, doesn’t polish them and is straightforward about what we missed. And, you know what? The problems and the mistakes of the ICL are also the problems and mistakes of the entire left. Why is the left so small? So tiny? So sclerotic? Explain that to me. That’s the problem of this epoch and we actually tried to respond to it. Workers might think these people have an explanation to something. But the LFI just ignores the problems and will only talk about the tertiary events that happened between our two tiny organizations.
Second, Negrete has forgotten that what matters for radical workers who are engaged in a struggle is what to do. What to do today. How to move the struggle forward. And I think the presentations were quite different on that matter. On the one side, you had a regurgitation about all sorts of tertiary problems that are completely divorced from the last 30 years and the great questions of the revolutionary movement today. And on the other, you had a presentation that actually shows on Palestine, on the black liberation struggle, on Ukraine what the key tasks are for revolutionaries to move forward today.
And so, a lot of speakers are coming up from the LFI, saying: “BLM, oh yeah, we were there, we put out leaflets.” One of your speakers said, maybe you should check out what the leaflets say. Yeah. They say what the ILWU did was great. And another speaker just got up saying that there is an action [of the ILWU] going on right now. Who leads ILWU Local 10? A bunch of pro-Democratic Party social democrats who need to be overthrown. And your leaflet says it’s great what they’re doing. Yeah, they’re reformist, but it’s great. That’s not fighting for revolutionary leadership.
So here’s the thing, comrades in the LFI. This debate is called “The Fight for the Fourth International Today.” And we provided a response. You looked at the past. We have a program for the present and the future. And we use our mistakes of the past—we’re very honest about them—to push that forward. Because—and in response to Platypus—that’s what orthodox Marxism is today.
LFI speaker
(The following is based on a translation by the LFI delivered initially in Portuguese.)
I would like to talk a little about a historic struggle here in Brazil and what the ICL did in 1996 and subsequently. A campaign to expel the municipal guardas from the SFPMVR (the Volta Redonda municipal workers union) was connected to the struggle against the PT (Workers Party) and racial oppression. For example, we brought the campaign to mobilize workers power to free Mumia Abu-Jamal to Brazil.
The struggle to remove the police was carried out on the basis of our experience in the huge strikes of the metal workers—many of them under the military dictatorship. The one in 1988 we, the workers, won despite the repression unleashed by the army, which culminated in its murdering three workers. We were the first, and up to now the only ones, to have put into practice the Trotskyist slogan: police of all kinds are not part of the working class and must be expelled from the unions. Through systemic mobilization of the workers, we carried out this campaign, which is now part of the history of the fight for the Fourth International.
What is ironic is that the ICL, which had encouraged us at first, wound up demanding that the comrades stop the campaign, abandon the union and, furthermore, leave the city of Volta Redonda. Since obviously we did not accept this shameful position, the ICL broke fraternal relations with us exactly one day before the union assembly we had mobilized for the workers to vote to carry out the expulsion of the police. That assembly was repressed. But despite this and the ICL’s abandonment of the struggle, we continued the campaign and the police were expelled by the workers’ vote.
The ICL tried to cover up its betrayal, launching one assorted slander after another, many of them taken from the pro-police, anti-communist grouping in Volta Redonda that tried to crush the campaign. The ICL even went so far as to try to stop unions in Brazil and other countries from defending us. Using the experience we have gained—the struggle to expel the police, the struggle against imperialist wars, the struggle against racism and racial oppression and women’s oppression and all the crimes of the Brazilian bourgeoisie—we created the Liga Quarta-Internacionalista do Brasil (Fourth Internationalist League of Brazil), one of the founding sections of the LFI. This is part of the fight that we, together with the other sections in the LFI, are carrying out to reforge Trotsky’s world party of socialist revolution.
ICL speaker
All right. This is how we demonstrated revolutionary leadership. It was with our Neely/Penny statement, which some of your members called racist. But what happens when you call our statement racist and give no answer to the issue of crime or to working-class self-defense? You fuel the destructive racial polarizations in society.
What was happening in this city at that moment? The anti-racist liberals were dividing the class along racial lines by saying Neely’s death was a racist attack. They told the working class that if they express any concern on crime or even defend themselves from an attack by a mentally ill person, they are either uncompassionate or racist. Ignoring the issue of crime will only push the working class, both black and white, into the arms of reaction.
You can see the beginnings of it now. It’s why many of the workers, seeing no revolutionary alternative, voted for Eric Adams in the first place, because he campaigned on a platform of “law and order,” especially in the subways.
Every day, the working masses are crushed by the bosses. Then they go home to dilapidated apartments if they haven’t caught on fire or collapsed yet. And in between, they have to take public transit, where they have to fight off attackers who either want to rob them or push them on the tracks. And in between, they have to worry if the train car will derail. Seriously, have you not taken the train to see what goes on down there? Have you not spoken to the working masses who take the trains and who are forced to face the rot created by the capitalists?
Because, let me tell you, working-class sentiment was: finally, someone got involved. Especially transit workers who deal with these hazards every day. But, no, that didn’t go along with the anti-racist liberal narrative. So, they made it seem as if Neely was performing; Penny went up behind him and killed him because of the color of his skin. When that’s not the case at all. Ask anyone who was on the train that day.
And here’s the thing, though. Neely did not deserve to die. But Penny had the right to self-defense and to defend the people on the train. And by placing the blame on them, you alibi those who are actually responsible for the Neelys and Pennys out there. That’s the bourgeoisie. This is how the issue of crime was taken up. On the one hand, you have the liberals, who tell the workers to ignore crime, turn the other cheek, eat the abuse. And then you have the right-wingers, who acknowledge crime, but their answer is vigilantism. Both of which only fuel racial polarizations.
It was the task of communists to cut through this racial division, expose how both these programs have no answer for the working class, both black and white. We needed to expose the right, but also to show that it wasn’t liberal compassion Neely needed. He needed housing, employment, healthcare. None of which you could get from the capitalist system because it’s in repeated economic and social decay. And these aren’t gains you can win with the program of the anti-racist liberals because they only try to curb the worst excesses of capitalism while trying to beg the bosses to be nice to the people who they oppress.
And I want to add that the scaffolding for our statement was the Bernard Goetz articles written by Jan Norden. Weird that you don’t even make a peep on that. Is it because you’ve fallen into the trap of liberal hysteria that has gripped this city? Or because you want to tail and not alienate the liberals?
Summary by Abram Negrete
First of all, I wanted to just mention that among the things that the ICL says that it’s going to investigate, and that we are waiting to hear the results of, are the [1996] trials; the trial of comrade Socorro, and the trial that was going to be held of comrades Jan and Marjorie.
I want to send greetings to comrade Socorro of the Internationalist Group, a founder of our organization, and to protest here yet again against the filthy trial which you staged against her. Some of you are here in this room. We want to know what was unprincipled about that trial. And if you say “everything,” that’s true, but you don’t get away with just that. And if it’s maybe ancient history to you, and not so important, perhaps that’s because you were on the dishing out end and not the receiving end.
Similarly, when comrade Vincent [an ICL leader who spoke during the discussion period] says that the ICL at least admits its mistakes. I call this the Boy Scout defense: Hey, everybody makes mistakes, but we admit it. You get merit badges for it. No. What I will say about that is, you’ve had a lot of practice, haven’t you? In terms of your so-called “mistakes.” But there’s one little problem. According to us, and according to you, they were not mistakes, they were betrayals. They were betrayals. Have you ever been on the receiving end of a betrayal—I mean, a political, social one in the class struggle. The comrade from Brazil just talked about what that was about. That was a real struggle. It was a struggle to bring the program of Trotskyism into practice.
Now, unbelievably, we heard here today that the so-called “real crime” was not that sort of thing, but failing to understand the documents—the power of the documents from 1992 and so on and so forth. This is the memorandum theory of history yet again. Well, the very powerful documents magically made you do one thing—and us do the other. You say, well they both voted for the documents and they’re both the same, the [ICL] and the IG/LFI are both the same. The IG fought and the LQB fought to throw the police out of the union—and you fought to stop it. You told them to stop. Why? “The memo made us do it.” Funny that this powerful memo made us do the opposite.
How about 9/11? [“How about it?” yells an ICL member from the audience.] We called to defeat U.S. imperialism. We marched in the streets with that slogan. We called for workers strikes against the war. Was that an abstract slogan? According to you it had no “resonance.” We took it onto the docks. We took it onto the docks as the Iraq War was ramping up. This is not an abstract, hidebound, theoretical orthodoxy. This is called the class struggle—and you said that our call for hot-cargoing was wrong. Yes, you did, look it up. And we’ve documented it. You want to talk about the bureaucracy? That was the line of Jim Spinosa, [who was] the head of the ILWU: Don’t stop the war matériel, it might cause problems for the union.
And we called for workers strikes against the war, and you and the rest of the opportunist left said that would never happen. But guess what? It did. On May Day 2008, all 29 ports were shut down on the West Coast. And you sneered at it, and, talk about “deformed,” you deformed and you fabricated, same damn thing that you did about the Mumia shutdown [of the ports] in 1999—then you had to apologize and retract it, kind of, sort of.
But what about the one in Brazil that started it? The first workers action for Mumia’s freedom, the first labor shutdown for Mumia’s freedom. It’s not a page of paper, it’s a real action in the class struggle and it’s part of the program of revolutionary Marxism. That happened in Brazil. You have not written a single word about it since that time. Not one time, why do you think that is? Oh, because the “sectarians” carried it out. And the “anti-sectarians,” anti-sectarianly, don’t mention it. Because those are unmentionable, disposable people—disposable people on the receiving end, not of your “mistakes.” Everyone makes mistakes—trivial Boy Scout talking, I don’t mean the person, I mean the phrase. It was not a “mistake,” it was a betrayal.
And yes, when we called to defeat U.S. imperialism and we criticized you for dropping it, what did you say? A comrade referred to this. [Shows poster with quotations from Workers Vanguard, 26 October 2001.] No, we’re not going to let you forget it. You want to talk about “now”? Now is a product of history. You are a product of that history. You said that we were “playing the counterfeit card of anti-Americanism.” You said this in the weeks after 9/11, when “anti-Americanism” could land [someone] in prison. And there were roundups of immigrants all over the place and we went to the demonstrations to free them, which you did not, of course. (Well, you did go there, to denounce us, one time.)
And you said something else: “But the IG’s purpose is otherwise; it is playing to a different audience, one of ‘Third World’ nationalists for whom the ‘only good American is a dead American’.” That’s what you wrote about us. So you can say, well, we all make mistakes. This was not a “mistake,” and you’re doing the same kind of obeisance and genuflection to your own ruling class today, including over your leaflet on Palestine.
Why did this powerful memo make the two sides do opposite things? Because you ceased to be revolutionaries, through a process of degeneration, which has now culminated in you openly saying that the founding program of the tendency you still pretend to have some continuity with, somehow, was what? The old-timers are supposed to chew this up and swallow it. “The historic position of Spartacism turned the world upside down.” Interesting. Look at your Spartacist 68. The hammer’s upside down and backwards—they get a lot of things upside down and backwards—in their new logo. “Shaped by the delusion that the historic leader of our tendency, Jim Robertson, had a correct approach,” blah blah, “therefore it upheld many positions counterposed to permanent revolution.” It’s a “perversion of permanent revolution,” they say.
The old-timers are supposed to eat it, swallow it and regurgitate it. You have sold your birthright for a mess of pottage. The revisions are far from finished. The reason for this stuff about the “anti-imperialist united front” and supporting the language laws in Quebec and Catalonia and embracing the Freedom Charter and the rest of it is to take what remains of this organization very, very far, qualitatively far—who knows how far?—but it will be enormously far from what it set out to do.
And I’m very glad, let me just say, that the [SL’s] grotesque Neely leaflet was attacked [in the discussion], and quite horrified by the [SL supporter’s] response.
Forward to a real Fourth International—not a collection of rotten opportunist gimmicks.
Summary by G. Perrault
Okay. So, I think I don’t need to explain once more that I actually provided a perspective for the fight for the Fourth International today, and there was absolutely nothing on this from the speakers of the LFI. So, I won’t insist too much on this point. I will actually respond to as many of the questions as I can. By the way, about the old-timers, you should talk to them, see what they think. I’ll tell you, they’re not kept hostage.
Let’s start with the crisis in the left. You cannot ignore this question. The entire left has been in crisis for the last, well, more than 30 years. But it’s been particularly acute in the last 30 years. You have to deal with this question if you are serious about reforging the Fourth International. You have to try to provide an answer and explain: What is the reason for this crisis? You have no answer.
Liberalism, we were asked to define it. I’m not going to do a whole history of liberalism, which you can read somewhere else, but I’m going to try to pose it concretely because liberalism changes in different times and space. So, we did not invent the task to fight liberalism. Actually, most of Lenin’s career was spent fighting bourgeois liberalism in Russia, fighting the influence of the Cadets and against the Cadet opposition to tsarism. So, we’re not inventing the fight against liberalism. What we’re doing is we’re putting it in the concrete, the concrete of the epochs in the 1990s and today.
In the 1990s, as our comrade explained, liberalism was the ideology of U.S. imperialism. Its strength was a reflection of the strength of U.S. imperialism. It was pushed everywhere and that’s why you see the shift toward liberalism in the workers movement all around the world. Today, the character of liberalism is changing because U.S. imperialism is in decline. It’s no longer a confident liberalism, asserting and pushing. It’s a reactive, hysterical liberalism that cannot deal with any challenge, any criticism and that reacts frantically. Liberalism is the cover under which U.S. imperialism and its allies have committed all their crimes around the world. This has fueled massive discontent. Yet the problem with the left is they’re still trying to fight reaction today holding on to the coattails of this liberalism. It’s not just some academic abstract question, it’s rooted in the task. What is the task today? The task is to break the left from liberalism. That’s the task.
Now let’s get to some of the concrete questions. Palestine, what to do now? What is the obstacle to actually defending Palestine in the workers movement? It’s the Democratic Party in the United States. We need to fight to break the influence of the Democratic Party on the movement. That means the DSAers who are now leading this movement. There’s a gigantic popular front that goes from Joe Biden to the left-wing DSAers in Congress to the other DSAers who claim to be communists. You need to break this chain. If you cannot break this chain, you cannot defend Palestine because that’s how the whole movement is being organized.
You want to talk about legacy. Answer this question about the legacy of the Spartacist League on the question of the Nakba. Our initial position, read it, it’s a defense of the Nakba. That’s a criminal position and then we covered it up by saying that it was a factual mistake. Answer this question!
Now the black question. BLM, what were the tasks? Why did the left betray? What was the task? The task was to break the black movement from liberalism and put it on a communist path. How to do that? Not just by saying “break with the Democrats” and not by just saying “we need socialist revolution.” You need to exploit the contradictions of the movement, and that’s exactly what we’re trying to do with our “open the archives” campaign. And you know what again? It’s not totally our invention. We are inspired by the call of the Bolsheviks to open the archives of tsarist secret diplomacy. You know how they achieved that? They did it. It was possible. You know how they did it. They made a revolution. That’s how you do it. And you know what you’re disparaging about our demand: “Oh, will that bring justice?” Actually, you know, there’s hundreds of thousands of people whose families have been murdered by the cops who do want to know what happened and what’s in these archives. It’s not just some puff!
[Interjection from the LFI.] My turn! Mexico. Okay, you guys organized workers defense guards. All to your honor. But you know what? UNAM, it was a gigantic movement. How did revolutionaries intervene in this movement to break it from populism? Why wasn’t there a revolutionary pole built out of this movement? Why? It’s because all the so-called communists think that fighting against imperialism is a capitulation to the bourgeoisie. But the only way to defeat populism is to push forward the struggle against imperialism.
Portland. Your speaker said about the shutdown on the West Coast, “That’s what we mean by class struggle.” The ILWU supports Joe Biden. So, you can do one day of action, that’s to let the steam out. Communist workers need to go to that. They need to support this. But they need to do this while at the same time denouncing the ILWU bureaucracy. And that’s the element that’s missing, and that’s the centrism. The ILWU bureaucracy will never stop arms shipments to Ukraine or to Palestine. There needs to be a fight against them, and that’s exactly what you’re not doing.
DSA, okay. How are you going to build a revolutionary party in the United States? It’s by splitting social democracy, it’s by splitting the DSA. You can go to them and be like, “Oh yes, you supported Vietnam, you supported all the crimes of U.S. imperialism,” which is true, by the way, which is true, and you know what? The SPD, they supported all the crimes of German imperialism, and so on. But if you want a revolutionary party in Germany, you need to split the SPD. If you want a revolutionary party in the United States, you need to split social democracy, and you don’t do that just by throwing rocks at people.
Actions, you want to talk about some of the actions we did. Look at our intervention in last year’s strikes in Britain. Every step of the way, we told workers what needed to be done. We put forward a campaign for picket lines, and it became a polarizing question in the left because the whole left refused to say, “Never cross a picket line.”
UAW strike, same thing. Here again, we showed step by step. How dare you say it’s economist. Our main slogan was to tie this strike to black liberation. And if you think that a devastating blow to GM and Ford would not have helped the Palestinians, you are so wrong. That would have totally undermined the position of the U.S. right now and made it much more difficult to commit their crimes in Palestine.
Brazil, you know what? What we did was despicable. I’m ashamed of it. But you know what? How are we going to advance the revolution in Brazil? We’re gonna advance it by combining the struggle against imperialism and the fight against black oppression and showing how the popular front betrays this. And that’s what you guys have not done. And that’s what none of our discussions with Luta Metalúrgica ever touched on. [Interjection by the LFI.] It’s my turn.
Robertson, a lot was said about Robertson. I want to defend him a little bit here. We do not throw away our whole legacy. Actually, what do we stand on? We stand on the proudest moment of the ICL. We stand on the Russian question, on the defense of the Soviet Union, on the defense of the DDR. Nobody said anything about this, but that’s what we defend of Spartacism. So, no, we will not get rid of our paper. We will keep being proud to be Spartacists.
Reading these documents by the LFI, actually, I got a fair amount of respect for the comrades who at the time refused to capitulate under this bureaucratic witchhunt. Honestly. But just because you were the victims of a bureaucratic purge doesn’t mean that you had the answers to the historic tasks of the working class in that epoch. So, you speak about the tasks and perspectives. But, you know what? If you don’t have the correct tasks and perspectives, then you’re not rooting your program in a Marxist materialist base. So, you’re left just going around, floating around. And what happened? The truth is that the ICL and LFI were both circling around the pole of liberalism. Sometimes sectarian, sometimes opportunist. Both sides.
You can say: Oh yes, the SWP called us sectarian 30 years ago. But you know what? People are sectarian. Sectarianism is a problem in the left, just as opportunism is. And Trotsky and Lenin fought both tendencies.
So, I want to conclude by urging comrades to study these presentations. Study the content of the documents. And ask yourself, who actually has a perspective to go forward? Who can actually say what the task of revolutionary leadership is today?
And I think the answer to this question is very obvious. Thanks.
