Why Trotskyism Fractured

In 1933, after Hitler’s rise to power and the disastrous betrayal of the German working class by the Comintern, Trotsky declared the Third International dead for the proletarian revolution and called for the foundation of a new, Fourth International. Five years of struggle against incredible odds—from state repression to Stalinist betrayals and fascist victories—led to the founding congress of the Fourth International in 1938. The founding document, known as the Transitional Program, made a proud and defiant promise: to rally the internationalist forces behind a clear banner on the eve of the Second World War and cohere those cadres who, if small in numbers, nevertheless were the “pledges for the future.”

Tragically, the Fourth International would not live up to this promise. The war almost destroyed the organization. Countless among our best comrades, who fought heroically against terrible odds, were murdered at the hands of fascists or Stalinists—starting with Trotsky himself, in this very city. And emerging from the war, the Fourth International faced a world it could not understand, with most of its parties remaining small groups.

By 1953, the Fourth International had fractured in a fatal split. And those splinters would themselves split again, and again, most often in confused and obscure disputes. Fast forward to today, there have been at least 71 different rival international tendencies claiming the mantle of Trotskyism, with at least 35 still in existence (according to comrade Markov’s research). And each of these currents would proclaim themselves to be the real continuity of Trotskyism, against all other “revisionists.” These are the symptoms of a movement in crisis, which we must understand if we are to claim to unite revolutionary forces today.

Eighty-eight years have passed since the founding congress of the Fourth International. The world has changed greatly: from the rise of new workers states to the counterrevolutionary destruction of the USSR. Yet, the very same questions that broke the backs of far more experienced cadres are haunting us once again. U.S. hegemony, which was established as Trotskyists were emerging from the ruins of World War II, is now in decline, lashing out globally to maintain its position. Nationalist forces, pushed into conflict with U.S. imperialism, are exerting a powerful pull on oppressed peoples. The primary counterweight to the American empire is the Communist Party of China—the very same party whose rise to power in 1949 so deeply disoriented Fourth Internationalists. And the revolutionary movement is today in an even deeper state of weakness, disorientation and isolation from the working class. Either we learn from this history or we are condemned to repeat it.

History and Method

How can we learn from history when the Trotskyist movement is incapable of telling its own? For the anti-Pabloites, Michel Pablo, depicted as an almost cartoonish villain, single-handedly destroyed the International by suddenly embracing opportunism. For Pablo’s defenders, Cannon and Healy were mere sterile dogmatists, stuck in their ways. For the Workers Power tendency, the International was destroyed by “epigones” who abandoned Trotsky’s doctrine. The Revolutionary Communist International (RCI) preaches that Ted Grant alone understood dialectics, while everyone else was ignorant of it. And our own tendency’s “Genesis of Pabloism” (1972)—despite genuine insights—insisted that Cannon held the flame of “revolutionary continuity,” even though he clung to sterile orthodoxy.

For most young militants today, the history of the Fourth International feels like an incomprehensible web of obscure squabbles. And it feels incomprehensible because it is—at least with this method. History is reduced to personal betrayals and psychological defects, with tendencies arguing over who wrote what in some article or internal bulletin decades ago. This confusion is not an accident. It is a reflection of the crisis of our movement. Every tendency writes history from the standpoint of its own existence, forced to create an unbroken line of orthodoxy that conveniently ends with their own small group as the sole “true heirs” of Trotskyism. This is why you cannot make sense of anything. Yet, for those outside of the Trotskyist movement, what is patently obvious is that our entire movement has been in a crisis since 1945.

Who is right and how to determine it? The study of the Fourth International poses pointblank the question: what is revolutionary leadership? Organizations claiming to be revolutionary cannot be judged by programmatic purity on paper, by the personal qualities of leaders, or even by the accuracy of their prognoses. The true revolutionary mettle of a tendency is tested concretely in the course of great events: did it fight for a course of struggle which advanced the interests of the working class as a whole? Or did it become the tool of another class?

This is not an abstraction. The postwar period saw the birth of the American empire and the launch of the Cold War against the USSR. It saw the Red Army liquidate the capitalist classes in half of Europe. It saw mass social revolutions led by Stalinist forces in Yugoslavia, China and Korea. And it saw a titanic wave of colonial uprisings under nationalist leadership. These are the tests. The question to pose to evaluate revolutionaries is: were they able to stand on the right side of the barricades? And if so, did they put forward an independent strategy to genuinely advance these struggles—one capable of breaking the masses away from their non-revolutionary leaders?

Viewed from this standpoint, it becomes obvious that none of the tendencies of the Fourth International rose to this challenge. This does not mean that specific tendencies, at a specific juncture, were not able to carry out a revolutionary intervention. And it certainly does not negate the courage and determination of thousands of militants who sincerely fought for the Fourth International and sometimes paid for this with their lives. But to ensure their sacrifices were not in vain we must develop a coherent explanation for the collapse of our movement—one that rejects self-serving factional fables and goes directly to the root of the crisis of our movement.

Thesis

The central task posed in the postwar world was the struggle against the American empire. The task of Trotskyists was to put forward an internationalist and revolutionary strategy to defeat it, in opposition to the strategies of the Stalinists and nationalists, the main forces leading workers and the oppressed.

Neither the Pabloites nor the anti-Pabloites were able to do this. After the war, the movement retreated into rigid, pre-war dogmas. As I will explain, this sterile orthodoxy bred Stalinophobia, which, in the heat of the Cold War, generated a sharp reaction in the opposite direction: liquidation into Stalinism and nationalism—what will be called “Pabloism.” Ultimately, because both those trends failed the test, neither could justify the independent existence of Trotskyism as a living, necessary political force for the working class in the postwar era. This is the root cause of the 1953 split as well as the endless succession of splits into ever smaller groupings.

Thus, should we simply throw away this heritage? This would only guarantee the repeat of the same errors. Every tendency in the Fourth International reflected a piece of social reality, and held a grain of truth. The Pabloites understood that revolutionaries had to link themselves to the masses, particularly in the national liberation movements. As for the anti-Pabloites, they understood that the Marxist program had to be defended against the blind alley of nationalism and Stalinism. Both were right, yet both lacked a method capable of combining these elements—which is the essence of revolutionary leadership. Fractured into two broken halves, the movement was condemned to a false choice between opportunist liquidation and sectarian isolation.

I cannot tell the entire story of the Fourth International today. But what I can try to do is to rescue some vital political lessons necessary for our tasks.

The Postwar World

The end of World War II opened a new chapter in history. And it also tore up the playbook the Trotskyist movement had relied upon for over a decade. Trotskyist cadres entered 1945 armed with a prognosis derived from the pre-war era. The Fourth International predicted a deep economic crash, the collapse of the Soviet bureaucracy and the rapid discrediting of Stalinist and Social Democratic parties as they betrayed the postwar revolutionary wave. However, history took an unforeseen turn.

While the temporary diplomatic theatre of Yalta and Potsdam initially masked the new world order—with the USSR collaborating with its allies to carve up the world and crush revolutionary openings—a profound structural shift was happening. The dropping of the atomic bomb and the complete dominance of the U.S. over all other capitalist powers signaled the end of the multipolar, interimperialist rivalries. In their place now stood the American empire.

Through its financial, industrial and military dominance, the U.S. rebuilt the old imperial powers (Japan, Germany as well as France and Britain) and unified them under its leadership. Instead of sinking into economic crisis, the U.S. was able to marshal its enormous resources and global pillage to prop up the world capitalist economy and rebuild bourgeois democracy in Europe. All of this for a single purpose: to confront and destroy the Soviet Union.

On the other side, the Soviet bureaucracy emerged from the war massively strengthened. The Red Army occupied half of Europe, and Communist parties commanded the allegiance of millions of workers. While a revolutionary wave did erupt in Western Europe, it was swiftly quashed by the Stalinists. Instead, the center of gravity of revolutionary struggles shifted to the colonial world, where a decades-long wave of titanic uprisings unfolded, exploiting the vacuum left by the defeat of Japan and the decline of the old British and French empires. These millions in revolt looked for leadership not in the small groups of the Fourth International, but in powerful Stalinist and nationalist forces.

Exceptions to this were in Bolivia, Sri Lanka and Vietnam, where Trotskyists were able to win mass influence. But I will not be dealing with these particular cases as they require their own study.

The Great Disorientation

Most parties of the Fourth International found themselves isolated and profoundly disoriented. The leaders of the movement—from Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel, who emerged from the underground in Europe, to James P. Cannon in the U.S.—proved incapable of squaring this new reality with the literal text of the 1938 Transitional Program. Rather than responding to new problems with new answers, they clung to outdated predictions and retreated into a defensive, rigid orthodoxy. Year after year, official documents and resolutions stubbornly predicted an imminent economic meltdown, the rise of bonapartism in Europe and the coming World War III, completely blind to the capitalist stabilization occurring in Europe.

This disorientation paralyzed their strategy toward the masses. Fourth International leaders mechanically assumed that the betrayals of the Stalinists would automatically drive masses into the ranks of the Fourth International. All that was needed was to denounce Stalinist betrayals, past and present, and raise transitional demands—which were elevated in a formalistic manner as the solution to every problem—and voilà.

The 1946 theses of the Second International Conference proclaimed:

In the U.S., the Socialist Workers Party’s (SWP) 1946 central document “Theses on the American Revolution” projected an economic crash and working-class explosions, completely ignored the Communist Party and predicted uninterrupted successes for the SWP. The Bolshevik Leninist Party of India fought Gandhi’s Congress Party with the assumption that given its bourgeois character it would never be able to free India from British rule—a course which would soon face a rude awakening. In Palestine, the Fourth International failed to take the side of the Arab forces during the Nakba (see “Marxists & Palestine: 100 Years of Failure,” Spartacist No. 69, August 2024).

Stuck in sterile orthodoxy, the Fourth International was incapable of understanding how the Cold War was forcing Stalinist and nationalist leaders into confrontation with the American empire and its imperial partners. Because they could not grasp these living dynamics, they dismissed mass support for these leaderships as mere subjective and temporary confusion. Unable to engage the real contradictions within these movements, the International retreated into an abstract, Europe-centric framework—paying lip service to the colonial revolution while remaining politically blind to its true significance and specific tasks.

Dismissed Warnings: Morrow and Grant

There were multiple attempts by cadres to challenge this sterile framework, notably the Goldman-Morrow faction in the American SWP and the British Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP).

Against the SWP majority, Felix Morrow argued that U.S. imperialism was pouring massive resources into Europe, which was stabilizing capitalism, rendering the International’s catastrophist predictions completely moot. Dismissed as a “rightist” who wanted to liquidate the socialist program in favor of democratic demands, Morrow was in fact combating the movement’s maximalist outlook. Recognizing a real revival of democratic illusions among European workers, he insisted that democratic demands were vital to compete with mass Social-Democratic and Communist parties. As he wrote:

At least this had the merit of posing the tasks on the right terrain. But the International leaders responded mainly with rigidity—counterposing democratic demands to socialist ones. It is this sterility that drove Morrow toward Max Shachtman and led to his rejection of the defense of the USSR in 1946 and to his expulsion the same year. The point isn’t that Goldman and Morrow were right. They did bend toward bourgeois-democratic illusions. They also adopted a Zionist position regarding Palestine. But they did put their finger on real problems which, if properly debated and answered, could have reoriented the International.

Jock Haston and Ted Grant of the British RCP also fought the International’s wrong analysis. At the 1946 Conference and 1948 World Congress the RCP submitted extensive amendments correctly identifying the early stages of the postwar boom. Grant debunked the International’s apocalyptic perspectives, characterizing—correctly in my opinion—the situation in Europe as a counterrevolution in democratic form. For these insights, Grant and his cothinkers were marginalized by Healy’s maneuvers and eventually purged.

However, reading Grant’s critique today, one is struck by how it reflects the same academic method that plagues the RCI—the heirs of Ted Grant today. For Grant, just like the RCI, perspectives were everything. Politics was reduced to an intellectual exercise of analysis, with Grant’s perspectives almost never drawing concrete political tasks. Grant was right about the postwar economic boom—but what did that actually mean for the tasks of the party? It was never spelled out. Later, Grant described, in large part accurately, the processes that enabled the Yugoslav and Chinese Communist Parties to seize power. Yet his analysis never answered the most fundamental question: what should Trotskyists actually do?

The quashing of the Goldman-Morrow tendency and the British RCP only led to the doubling down on a sterile course. In the SWP, Cannon’s “Theses on the American Revolution” were adopted at the same convention that saw the final showdown with Morrow.

Stalinophobia and the “Third Camp”

In Lessons of October (1924), Trotsky warned: “The party which does not keep step with the historical tasks of its own class becomes, or runs the risk of becoming, the indirect tool of other classes.” This is precisely what happened to the Fourth International between 1945 and 1948. Incapable of understanding that the task of the epoch was the struggle against the American empire in the Cold War, and unable to comprehend the source of Stalinist influence, the Fourth International’s sterile method led it to frequently capitulate to the growing anti-Soviet offensive of the U.S.-led democratic-imperialist camp.

First, already in 1946, the Fourth International raised the slogan for the immediate withdrawal of Soviet troops from Eastern Europe. In the context of U.S. encirclement, this completely misread the main line of battle. Wherever the Red Army withdrew—as in Iran and Austria—U.S. imperialism immediately stepped in. What this slogan ignored was also the deeply contradictory character of the Red Army. It was certainly used by the Soviet bureaucracy to commit crimes against the working class, which had to be denounced. But as the armed fist of the Soviet Union, the Red Army also struck terror into the local capitalist classes. Demanding its unilateral withdrawal did not aid the development of revolutionary upheavals but would only have aided Western imperialism as well as local capitalists and reactionaries.

Second, in the trade unions, given the treachery and violence of Stalinists—which was very real—the interventions of Trotskyists often degenerated into opportunist blocs with “democratic,” pro-imperialist elements. In France, the Parti Communiste Internationaliste (PCI) maintained a bloc with the leadership of the Force Ouvrière union, an anti-communist split from the CP-led CGT union. In the U.S., the SWP repeatedly formed blocs with pro-Democratic Party bureaucrats against the CP during the Red Purges. This contributed to discrediting Trotskyists in the eyes of Communist workers, associating Trotskyists with anti-Soviet, pro-imperialist forces.

Third, the main manifesto of the 1948 Second World Congress was titled “Against Wall Street and the Kremlin.” In the midst of the Cold War, this was a thoroughly “Third Campist” position, drawing an equal sign between U.S. imperialism and the USSR. While documents from the Congress maintained the position of defense of the USSR in general, they spoke of the Cold War in the most neutral terms. Under immense pressure from the democratic bourgeoisie, prominent internal currents—like the Johnson-Forest faction, Tony Cliff and even Natalia Sedova (Trotsky’s widow)—were openly declaring that the USSR had now become “state capitalist” or “imperialist” and reneged on its defense.

Clinging to dogmas, the International spent the years leading up to 1948 claiming it was impossible for movements under Stalinist leadership to carry out any social overturn. In China, as Communist forces led by Mao were inflicting one defeat after another on the nationalist Guomindang, the Fourth International insisted that the CP was capable only of betrayal. Worse even, Chinese Trotskyists advocated a ceasefire in the civil war and actually opposed the victory of the Communist forces! In East Europe, as the ruling classes were systematically liquidated by the Red Army, the Fourth International doubled down on denying reality, insisting at the 1948 Congress that these states remained fully capitalist. The fear that accepting reality would lead to conciliating Stalinism was paralyzing the comrades.

For all these reasons, it is absurd to claim that the Fourth International was somehow “revolutionary” before the rise of “Pabloism” as we have argued in the past. And as Workers Power also argues, I should say. As the human material to build revolutionary parties was to be found inside the mass Stalinist and militant nationalist organizations, the Fourth International’s sterile and Stalinophobic course only guaranteed its disorientation and isolation.

1948: The Year Everything Changed

A few weeks after the Second World Congress in 1948, the geopolitical ground shattered: Stalin publicly denounced Tito, the leader of the Yugoslav Communist Party. Up until then, the Trotskyist movement knew Stalinism only as a monolithic bloc controlled entirely by Moscow. Now, however, a mass Stalinist party was suddenly denouncing Stalin, borrowing language from Trotskyism, and bringing Yugoslavia to the center of world politics. This was a profound shock.

Moreover, a closer look at what had happened in Yugoslavia during and after the war revealed something quite extraordinary. While the Red Army had bureaucratically expropriated capitalism from above in East Europe, Yugoslavia’s capitalism was smashed by a genuine mass uprising of workers and peasants—led by a Stalinist party, independently of Moscow. This was a second major shock, and one very difficult to understand or swallow for anyone clinging to sterile dogmas.

The shockwaves continued: a year later, in 1949, the Communist Party of China (CPC) marched into Beijing with Mao proclaiming the founding of the People’s Republic of China. A mainly peasant army overthrew capitalism and unified the country after a century of humiliation and imperialist pillage. This was without a doubt the most consequential revolution in history, after the Russian Revolution. Yet the Fourth International’s dogmatic predictions had been that the CPC could do nothing but betray, with our comrades on the ground left on the wrong side of history!

Soon after, in 1950, the Stalinist-led Korean People’s Army advanced into South Korea, launching the Korean War and posing the extension of social revolution on the entire peninsula. This led to a direct clash between U.S. imperialism and the People’s Republic of China. The American SWP flinched and failed to take the side of North Korea in the first few months of the war.

Despite being led by Stalinist forces, these transformations were monumental blows against imperialism and resounding victories for the oppressed. But they were also a theoretical catastrophe for the Fourth International. The movement found itself completely isolated from the revolutions of its era, unable to understand them. Worse still, these historic victories were being led by the very forces Trotskyists had written off for years as mere traitors. It was this acute crisis that drove Michel Pablo to push for a sharp turn in the International—that is, “Pabloism.”

What Is “Pabloism”?

In his famous 1951 document “Where Are We Going?”, Michel Pablo argued that a global war between the imperialist camp and the Soviet bloc would soon break out. In the early 1950s, with the Korean War raging, this was not so far-fetched. Pablo characterized this impending conflict as a “War-Revolution,” where the combined pressure of Western imperialism and the mobilization of the masses would force the Communist parties to fight for power—just as they had done in Yugoslavia or China. But this prediction itself was not what was really controversial in the International.

What ignited the explosive controversy were the conclusions Pablo drew. Believing the historical window was closing, he sought to sharply break from the previous course of Stalinophobia and pushed to get as close as possible to the mass Stalinist and nationalist parties, formalizing the tactic of entrism sui generis. This was entrism of a new kind: Trotskyists were to enter these mass organizations not for a swift, tactical maneuver to split them, but for a prolonged period, aiming to push forward the internal revolutionary development he believed was happening inside those parties.

Decades of factional mythology have totally confused this debate. To understand what happened next we have to pause, politically untangle this mess and ask honestly: what was right and what was wrong with Pablo’s turn?

Pablo’s Critics

I am going to do something quite dangerous and unprecedented here. I am going to defend Pablo on a number of points. It is essential to cut through the rigid dogmas of the traditional anti-Pablo camp, which our own tendency has, in some cases, repeated. Pablo was trying to grapple with real life; his fatal error was drawing non-revolutionary conclusions from it.

The “Theory of Blocs”: The anti-Pabloites raised a hue and cry, denouncing Pablo for viewing the world through the prism of two camps—the imperialist camp led by the U.S. on the one hand, and the camp of the USSR and the colonial revolution. The anti-Pabloites claimed Pablo was erasing the fundamental class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the working class. This was a rigid, undialectical critique. During the Cold War, the global class struggle was objectively refracted through the concrete antagonism between U.S. imperialism and the Soviet bloc—just as today, it is refracted through the antagonism between the U.S. and China. This does not mean class struggle ceases to exist within these blocs. Social reality is made of multiple layers. But to deny that the world consisted of a struggle between the imperialist and Soviet camps in the name of a “pure” bourgeois-versus-worker line of battle leads immediately to “Third Campism,” which always ends up capitulating to imperialism.

Centuries of Deformed Workers States: A lot of ink has been spilled about Pablo’s famous quote:

One can disagree with Pablo’s specific timeline. And in writing it, he did lend the Stalinist bureaucracy a historically progressive role—a point I will return to. But Pablo was mainly highlighting that the transition from capitalism to socialism was proving to be far more complex than expected, producing revolutionary processes that did not fit perfectly within the established norms of October 1917. This was, and is, true. Pablo also argued that the victories of anti-capitalist revolutions, even if led by Stalinist parties, were deepening the internal crisis of Stalinism—which is also true.

Entrism Sui Generis: This was branded as the ultimate proof of liquidationism. But it was entirely correct for small propaganda groups to seek entry into mass Stalinist or nationalist organizations, even with a long-term perspective. Whether this is possible or how to do it depends on the concrete. But Pablo pushed this explicitly against the Stalinophobic course of the previous period—and the accusations of “liquidation” were often a mere defense of this. If the raw material of the vanguard was to be found inside the CPs or colonial liberation movements, while the Fourth International had only small forces, then it was vital to have a perspective to enter. The problem was not the tactic; it was the political justification for it.

The Nature of Stalinism: Many accused Pablo of revising the nature of Stalinism. He definitely did—but not always in the way the anti-Pabloites claimed. The SWP majority’s main line of attack against Pabloites was the mantra: Stalinism is counterrevolutionary through and through. Workers Power, while claiming that both Pabloites and anti-Pabloites were wrong, also maintained that: “Wherever it occurs and whatever form it takes, Stalinist bureaucratic social revolutions are counterrevolutionary” (The Degenerated Revolution, 1982). Such formulations are not only disorienting. They are false.

The smashing of a capitalist state, the destruction of landlordism, the expulsion of imperialism—even if carried out under bureaucratic control—is the opposite of counterrevolutionary! It is highly progressive. Furthermore, in China, Yugoslavia, Vietnam and elsewhere, social revolutions were the product of powerful revolutionary upsurges of the masses, pushing Stalinist leaders to go way beyond what they wanted. While Pablo did prettify those forces, his opponents simply wrote off the deep, living contradictions within those movements. The labeling of social revolutions as “counterrevolutionary” was just a lazy way to sweep a problem away rather than solving it. It was also the surest way to guarantee the isolation and discrediting of Trotskyists.

Capitulating to Tito: Pablo certainly capitulated to Tito. So did Healy and Cannon. But critics who were quick to point this out, like Ted Grant (or our own later pamphlet on the question written by comrade Jan Norden), usually had no orientation to the Yugoslav revolution. Characterizing the Tito-Stalin split as a struggle between two bureaucracies—which it was—was often used as an excuse for abstention. Pablo was right to seek to influence the Yugoslav CP, including its upper layer, and send open letters. This was in the midst of a developing revolutionary situation, at a time when a bureaucracy was not totally consolidated. The issue was precisely what to say to the Yugoslav CP—which is what Pablo certainly got wrong.

More could be said. But the point I want to hammer is that Pablo wasn’t just a chemically pure opportunist consciously seeking to destroy Trotskyism. His critics were often revising basic tenets of Trotskyism just as much.

What Is Wrong with Pabloism

So, what exactly was wrong with Pabloism? Since our reorientation, we are often accused of being neo-Pabloites. But these accusations just show that the accusers do not understand what Pabloism actually is.

Pablo’s entire analysis was based on the notion that “Communist Parties retain the possibility, in certain circumstances, of roughly outlining a revolutionary orientation.” In those situations, he argued, those parties would “cease to be strictly Stalinist parties.” Here is the nub of revisionism that robbed Trotskyism of any raison d’être.

History has shown that, under certain specific conditions—a revolutionary uprising of the masses, huge pressure from imperialism, the weakness of the local bourgeoisie, etc.—Stalinist parties, and even petty-bourgeois nationalist organizations, can go way beyond the aims of their leadership, fight for power and even break with capitalism. This is without a doubt a revolutionary act. But it is not a “revolutionary orientation.” This is an ambiguous formulation that was used by Pablo and others to basically argue that those Communist parties had become revolutionary.

The problem is the following: the seizure of power in one country does not complete the revolution, but only initiates it. As long as imperialism remains, the conquests of a single country continue to be subject to imperialist asphyxiation and the threat of reversal. Therefore, a revolutionary orientation can be nothing but a conscious strategy for world revolution. This is what the early Comintern was built for.

And this is not the path the Chinese, Yugoslav or Korean Communist Parties were following. They did not “cease to be Stalinist Parties.” Pablo reduced Stalinism to the following of orders from Moscow. This is not what Stalinism is fundamentally. Stalinism is the subordination of the world revolution to the building of socialism in one country, which leads to seeking an illusory peaceful coexistence with imperialism. It arises from the interests of a privileged layer, separated from the masses and caught between them and world imperialism.

Tito leaned on U.S. imperialism against the USSR, leading to his total capitulation in the face of the Korean War. The CPC’s foreign policy was geared toward preserving the People’s Republic of China at the expense of the world revolution, as seen with the huge pressure it put on the Vietnamese CP to accept partition in 1954 or its later betrayal of the Indonesian CP.

Of course, Pablo was correct to argue to support these revolutions. He was correct to argue that Trotskyists had to link themselves to the masses under Stalinist leadership, including through entry tactics. What was fatal in his tactics was that they were all motivated not by the need to build a revolutionary current within them, but by the illusion that the “objective process” would push Communist parties to become revolutionary. This notion was then quickly extended to all sorts of forces, from the MNR in Bolivia, to Ben Bella in Algeria and even to the left wing of the Labour Party!

This raised the awkward question: what was the point of Trotskyism then? If Tito and Mao had basically projected a “revolutionary orientation,” if other CPs would do the same, or even nationalist formations, what would be our difference with them?

What the Fourth International often tried to raise was workers democracy and the legalization of Trotskyist parties. But the slogan for workers democracy alone is not a fundamental counterposition to Stalinism, nor is it a historical justification for a separate tendency of the communist movement. The same is true in the trade unions. The demand for workers democracy, while crucial, acquires a revolutionary significance only as part of a broader internationalist strategy. The fundamental reason a bureaucracy cannot tolerate the free expression of the working class is that it seeks to maintain its privileges, as well as to conciliate imperialism at the expense of the working class. Let me quote someone:

These words are from Ernest Mandel in his famous 1951 “Ten Theses.” They are absolutely correct! But they were used to defend Pablo’s course of support to Tito and Mao, who had “ceased to be Stalinists”!

The whole problem boils down to the fact that Trotskyism had no fundamental answer to Stalinism as it existed in the postwar period. Thus, it couldn’t make any decisive contributions to the revolutionary movement.

And, once again, we are back to the point I have been making throughout. The task of the era was to defeat the American empire. The only coherent way the Fourth International could challenge Tito, Mao, all the CPs and the nationalist leaders was on the terrain of the world revolution. This isn’t an abstraction. It meant developing a serious strategy that sought to defend the workers states based on the intensification of the class struggle abroad against imperialism. And from this standpoint denounce the CPs’ accommodation to imperialism as well as their narrow and nationalist strategies to defend the revolutions at the expense of workers, national minorities and the international proletariat.

This was the only path to undermine the bureaucracy, build a genuine communist current and prepare the political revolution. And it was the only path offering the Trotskyist movement a real coherence and historical role: by positioning it as the most consistent anti-imperialist faction of the communist movement, in the world struggle against the U.S. empire.

The 1953 Split

(click for detail)

Obviously, this is not what the anti-Pabloite forces argued. In France, the PCI majority under Marcel Bleibtreu was the first to fight Pablo. They attacked him on dozens of points yet on the core strategic error they agreed. The French majority explicitly argued that the Communist Party of China had ceased to be Stalinist and ridiculed the idea of “Stalinism without Stalin.” What they really opposed was the immediate, practical perspective of entry into the French Communist Party—an organizational diktat that Pablo did impose on them in a bureaucratic manner leading to the PCI majority’s exclusion.

In the U.S., the split in 1953 developed along different yet equally disoriented lines. The Cochran-Clarke minority fully embraced Pablo’s objectivist ideas, while at the same time opposing the Stalinophobia of Cannon’s leadership and trying to grapple with the real challenges posed by the McCarthyite period. In response, the SWP majority doubled down on a rigid orthodoxy. They defended Cannon’s 1946 “Theses on the American Revolution” as an almost mystical text, and, as I mentioned, waged an internal war under the banner that Stalinism is counterrevolutionary through and through. This fight only deepened the SWP’s disorientation. And right after the minority’s expulsion, the SWP quit the Fourth International without even bothering to fight within it!

The American, British and French sections would go on to form the International Committee. Our tendency has claimed that they represented the revolutionary continuity—albeit with a heavy dose of criticism, to be fair. But the truth is that the International Committee was equally incapable of offering a Marxist response to the fundamental questions of our movement.

While Pablo openly tailed Stalinist and nationalist movements, the International Committee retreated into a thoroughly sectarian, sterile, and reality-denying approach to those same movements. It later denied that a revolution had happened in Cuba! And one of the most damning indictments of this split was its geography. By 1953, the majority of the Fourth International’s membership was likely located in the colonial and semicolonial world—across Latin America and Asia. However, except for the Chinese exile group, no other sections outside the imperialist countries went with the International Committee at the time of the split.

And this is the tragedy of the 1953 fracture. The Trotskyist movement split into two broken halves, neither of which could offer a coherent, revolutionary answer to Stalinist and nationalist forces in the fight to defeat the American empire.

Conclusion

I will briefly conclude. Some comrades might wonder: yes, what you are saying seems correct, but would it have made a difference? Even with the best program, weren’t the Trotskyists facing an impossible situation, tiny in the face of huge Stalinist and nationalist forces?

A program isn’t a magic wand. That said, the easiest thing one can do in politics is to underestimate the power of a correct orientation, one which actually corresponds to the historical process. If the Fourth International had understood its task, it would at least have given it a political purpose and coherence. It would not have turned it immediately into a mass movement. But so many disorienting and destructive fights could have been avoided, and huge openings could have been exploited. And crucially, by the mid 1950s, when dissatisfaction with Stalinism was growing, thousands would have found a solid and coherent movement to rally to.

The ultimate lesson of this history is that a movement without a correct compass is doomed. Fundamentally, the Fourth International disintegrated because it failed to grasp that the central task of the era was the fight against the American empire. And today, the vast majority of the Trotskyist movement repeats the exact same error—labeling China as “imperialist” just as the American empire sows war and destruction to the four corners of the globe. And on the other side, many fighters in the Global South think that the Communist Party of China—which has only enabled the U.S. offensive and demoralized the working class—is genuinely revolutionary. These are the very questions which broke the Fourth International!

The task of revolutionaries today consists precisely in providing a revolutionary answer to this polarization, in forging the kind of revolutionary synthesis which our forebears didn’t. The task lies in building a revolutionary current which can say: With China against the U.S.! With the world proletariat against the CPC bureaucracy’s betrayals!

This is how we can give a renewed and deeper meaning to our slogan: Reforge the Fourth International, World Party of Socialist Revolution!