Last Wednesday (15th Feb), the Editorial Board of Marxist World sent an email to the Opposition Platform within the Fourth International. We conveyed our solidarity and sent them a letter outlining our view of their public platform statement. We also hoped this would offer the possibility for future communication and collaboration in the future. We stated we would publish the letter publicly, but would seek an initial response before doing so, providing them with a window of one week to respond.
Unfortunately, it appears they have either chosen not to respond to our email or it was suppressed and never reached the opposition. We used the only email address that was published, [email protected], and it seemed reasonable to use this given Jeff Mackler, the National Secretary of Socialist Action, was a signatory to the platform statement.
If it transpires that our email was deliberately prevented from being seen by the Opposition Platform then we would be prepared to publish any response on our website at a later date. We publish the full email below:
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Dear Comrades of the Fourth International Opposition Platform,
I am writing to you in the tradition of revolutionary Marxism and on behalf of the Editorial Board of Marxist World (marxistworld.net). We extend our solidarity to you and your platform struggling to build the forces of genuine revolutionary Marxism, and we have republished your statement on our website.
I have appended an open letter that we have written for your consideration, with the intention that it becomes a basis for future communications.
We will be publishing the open letter on our website in a week’s time, but wanted to send you the letter directly in order to give you the chance to provide an initial response which we can then include at the bottom of the open letter when published.
Comradely,
Steve Dobbs,
on behalf of the Marxist World Editorial Board
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Greetings and solidarity to the Fourth International Opposition Platform (FIOP) from the Marxist World Editorial Board (MW)
Your public declaration, which offers a broad overview of your various criticisms of the current Fourth International (FI) leadership, was read with much interest by members of MW. Like FIOP, MW also originally emerged as an opposition tendency in one of the other large Trotskyist internationals, the Committee for a Workers International (CWI), and primarily its sections Socialist Party of England and Wales (SP) and Socialist Party Scotland. It is no exaggeration to say that many of the points you have raised in relation to the FI were raised by those members of MW who were in the former CWI opposition tendency.
After some discussion, it was agreed upon by MW to both publish and promote the FIOP though publishing your statement on our website (http://marxistworld.net/2017/02/fourth-international-opposition-platform-announced/) and social media presence, along with producing this open letter.
Before we elaborate our main points on your statement, we believe it is important to clarify our motives, especially given our own experiences when we were both an opposition tendency within the CWI and after consolidating ourselves as a new grouping outside where we were contacted by several different Marxist organisations. Without exception, the motives of these various groups were to try and covertly recruit individual MW supporters or pressure the editorial board into starting a formal process of merging. Various lengthy theoretical documents were sent to us that we were expected to read.
Obviously we do not make a virtue of the divided nature of the Marxist left and we do want to see a process of unification around core Marxist theoretical concepts and ideas. However, we also believe the best way to achieve such mergers is through open collaboration in the workers’ movement. During such a process, debates and polemics can be conducted openly before the eyes of the working class. This ensures that, not only both organisations benefit from the potentially valuable insights and experience each group has, but the most advanced layer of the working class currently residing outside both organisations but following these developments can benefit too. It is also our firm view that closed off organisations that wish to set up a Berlin Wall between their internal politics and the working class, presenting publicly only cult-like monolithic propaganda, are not attractive, especially to the younger generations of workers and youth who have grown accustomed to open public debate on social media.
Our motives for contacting you openly through this letter are twofold. First and foremost, we wish to show our support and solidarity to any Marxist organisation that, regardless of whatever minor secondary differences we may have, is standing on a firm foundation of revolutionary Marxism as your platform outlined. MW does not claim to have a monopoly on revolutionary politics. Looking beyond narrow sectarianism, we would see it as a net gain for the working class and the socialist movement for anyone to join a Marxist group that stands on such a principled program.
Secondly, we do not think it is a coincidence that in the last few years we have seen two separate ‘orthodox’ (for lack of a better word) Marxist opposition tendencies develop in the two largest Trotskyist internationals, but rather see it as a reflection of the overall crisis of the far-left and its inability to respond to the current period. From this we believe it is the duty of such Marxist forces, when they emerge out of this ongoing process of the realignment of the far-left, to establish formal contact with each other for the aforementioned joint collaboration, be it as joint signatories to important public political statements and documents where there is broad agreement, or principled united front activity at an activist level in the workers’ movement.
Dealing in more detail with the political content of your platform declaration, We have some comments on what we see as some of the more important points you have raised:
- The tendency of the rate of profit to fall
It is our view that the abandonment of this key component of Marxist theory is the major root cause of the crisis of the far-left internationally. It was this issue that lead to the formation of the opposition within the CWI, before widening the critique to other issues as the internal struggle developed. While the other larger far-left international groupings obviously have their own histories, with some having broken with accepting the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (TRPF) in anything but the most abstract way earlier or later, in the case of the CWI this happened in the early/mid 1990s.
The consequences of this were an adaption to accepting a radical form of keynesianism in the sphere of economic theory. This was to play a factor, alongside the, in our view, correct explanations you have provided along the lines of a massive disillusionment and desperation among the leaderships of the FI that also pushed the CWI and other Marxist groups into a strategic orientation of trying to recreate social-democratic parties, or broad “new workers’ parties” to use a CWI phrase. This reflected their belief that some kind of idealised, chemically pure, left-reformist party could solve the ongoing economic crisis though keynesian measures by seizing the “cash hoards” of the banks, rather than be compelled to capitulate immediately to the ruling class and implement austerity, like Syriza in Greece as you mention.
- The centrality of the working class
Another major strength of your document is your affirmation of the central role of the organised working class in the socialist movement and revolution. It is our contention that, to a greater or lesser extent, every Marxist organisation today has come under the influence of various postmodernist, identity-politics, intersectionality trends. This was to be expected as, with the decline of even the bastardized Stalinist distortions of Marxism in the workers movement, it was inevitable that these ideas, which hold some weight among the petty-bourgeois layers, were going to filter into and penetrate the Marxist left.
MW is in no way immune to this. We have various ongoing debates take place among our supporters as we seek to overcome these alien class influences and arrive at proper Marxist critiques of these petit-bourgeois ideas. We do so without falling into the trap of some Stalinist groups, who disengage from the ideological struggle and fall back on to uncritical dogmatism. This approach, whilst undoubtedly appealing to a small layer of ethnically white radical workers and youth who have grown sick of being told that they are inherently reactionary and their only role in struggle is to support uncritically the views and actions of various oppressed minorities, cannot hope to break through and win mass support when it is unable to seriously challenge these ideas.
On a historical note, this is not the first time that the central role of the working class has been rejected by the Marxist movement. Even if we discard the third-worldism of the Maoists and other Stalinist tendencies that looked towards the peasantry in the neo-colonial world, the Trotskyists have been just as guilty at various periods. The United Secretariat of the Fourth International, of which the current FI originates, has a long and complex history of opportunist capitulation to all manner of anti-Marxist ideas, such as student vanguardism, black nationalism, guerrillaism and adapting to various national Stalinist leaders like Tito or Mao, hailing them as ‘unconscious Trotskyists’. We therefore believe we would be failing in our duty to the historical record of the Marxist and Trotskyist movement if we did not point out that, throughout the 20th century, even going as far back as the late 40’s, the Marxist tendency associated with the figure of Ted Grant of which the CWI was to emerge in 1974 did provide a consistent Marxist critique of these continual deviations from Marxism by the USFI across various documents produced over the decades.
We do not write this as some cheap attempt at point scoring or to belittle the undoubtedly courageous and selfless work of USFI and other Trotskyist tendencies that carried out great work in spite of the incorrect analysis and approach to these issues. On the contrary, while maintaining a correct orientation to the working class, we are well aware that the CWI and the original isolated British based organisations made mistakes on a number of issues. We do not wish to simply crudely hold up the CWI tendency as the ‘true’ Trotskyist path after Trotsky died, but rather that, in combating these various petty-bourgeois ideas today, members of MW have found the CWI’s critiques of these ideas and their past manifestations provides a suitable framework in which to maintain a correct orientation to the working class. These critiques are a Marxist resource that we want the entire Marxist left who are serious in challenging these ideas, rather than capitulating to them, to utilize and benefit from, just as MW have sorted out and embraced the writings of Marxists from other organisations and trends and will continue to do so.
- Revolutionary parties and democratic centralism
It appears to us that, for you, the liquidationism of the FI was the decisive factor that compelled you to unite as a layer of Marxists across the organisation and form the FIOP. Without question, liquidationism is the final nail in the coffin of any Marxist organisation. It’s such a serious issue that threatens the very existence of the Marxist organisation that it even briefly reunited Lenin and Plekhanov, the father of Russian Marxism, in a joint struggle against the Menshevik-liquidationist faction in the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party.
When we were still an opposition tendency in the CWI, we argued that abandoning the TRPF opens the party up to the danger of liquidating into social-democracy at a later stage. In this respect we can certainly understand the extent of your alarm at these developments in the FI, and it was precisely to avoid them that we launched the opposition within the CWI for. While abandoning the TRPF itself certainly brings with it its own problems in terms of an inability to understand capitalist crisis and the false perspectives drawn from it, it was the long term political consequences of it, with liquidation being the end game, that motivated a layer of CWI members to form an opposition tendency.
We would argue though that, on the basis of further political reflection, debate and discussion, following the consolidation of MW as an independent grouping, there is another major factor that is responsible for pushing formally revolutionary Marxist parties towards liquidationism: The lack of genuine democratic centralism in these organisations.
To the extent that democratic centralism is understood by the majority of the far-left, it is presented as the maxim of: Unlimited democratic discussion ‘inside’ the Marxist party, total political and organisational unity once a democratic decision is taken, and presenting a united position ‘outside’ the party to the working class. This is also presented as how the Bolshevik faction and later party actually functioned.
Apart from being historically incorrect (as an increasing number of historians of Russian social-democracy have argued), this approach, which we call bureaucratic centralism, has produced nothing but a legacy of endless suppressions of minority groupings and splits that litter the far-left with endless tiny groupings like flies round a stagnant pond.
How can bureaucratic centralism lead to liquidationism? As the outdated and inefficient bureaucratic centralist method of organisation clashes increasingly with the basic level of acceptability of the younger generations of activists (who, as we’ve already alluded to, have developed politically across social media enjoying a level of open debate and discussion that was inconceivable to the older generations), the leaderships of these isolated revolutionary parties can look towards the formation of new board parties to compensate for their lack of democratic space. The idea is to form such a broad party covertly controlled by the revolutionary one using the manufactured structures of the broad party in order to give the illusion of democracy and use it to draw in new members. Such a situation though, where a single organisation and membership is effectively running two separate parties - both the internal ‘revolutionary’ faction and the ‘broad workers party’ - is inherently unstable, and over time one will eventually consume the other. Either the revolutionary party will liquidate into the broad party, or the broad party will be absorbed by the revolutionary one. When you then factor in the generalised crisis of the far-left internationally, with the wrecking of Marxist theory and the dead end of their bureaucratic-centralist organisational model, it seems to us far more likely that liquidationism is the outcome.
From the details in your public platform statement, we have read that members of FIOP have been the victim of Stalinist methods. Again, such methods are sadly nothing new in the Trotskyist movement. The original MW supporters were witch-hunted out of the CWI when they were an opposition tendency. One member was even given an ‘indefinite suspension’ - in order to avoid the limited constitutional right to appeal that expelled members are granted - for violating a disciplinary code that, when challenged to see it, was told flat out that it only existed in the heads of the leadership!
Going back further though, both the CWI and FI/USFI have, over the decades, treated opposition groups, factions and tendencies with the same Stalinist tactics. To name just one example, in 1964 the British section of the USFI drew up a number of discussion documents for the upcoming 8th World Congress of the USFI the following year. These various documents outlined a thorough and comprehensive critique of the main documents submitted by the USFI leadership over issues such as the colonial revolution, Marxist economic theory and so on. The British section were assured that their documents would be translated and sent to the various different sections that would be attending in order to lay the basis for an in-depth discussion of these issues.
Alas, when the British delegation arrived, consisting of Ted Grant and Peter Taaffe, they discovered that their documents had been deliberately suppressed, with no copies having been circulated and none of the delegates even aware that they existed! Peter Taaffe, representing the British section, was then given just 10 minutes to summarise all of the suppressed documents on the congress floor, but of course could not possibly hope to win support from delegates who had not even read them. At the end of the congress, a special form of expulsion of the British section took place. Another British Marxist organisation that would go on to form the International Marxist Group (IMG), had attended the congress as sympathisers and was in broad agreement with the USFI leadership. This sympathising group was elevated to be a ‘second’ official British section, unprecedented in the history of Marxist Internationals, with it being spelt out pretty clearly that this was really a bureaucratic manoeuvre to get rid of the British section led by Grant.
We felt we had to raise the issue of democratic vs bureaucratic centralism as, while you certainly make references to its operation in the FI in relation to the methods that have been deployed against the FIOP, you do not advance a detailed and comprehensive critique of it. Instead we gained the impression, from your lengthy quote of Lenin from Left-Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder, that you see the manifestation of such bureaucratic practices as a consequence of having an incorrect program. MW see this as only partially correct. On the one hand yes, of course, having an incorrect, non-Marxist program will inevitably lead to bureaucratic centralism as the leadership are unable to withstand Marxist criticism from an opposition within the organisation. They are compelled to resort to such methods to defend themselves or rather, what they perceive to be the revolutionary party itself, the majority of them sincerely believing that they are defending the continued existence of the party from its destruction by what they believe is an ultra-left, opportunist, dogmatic (the popular slur thrown at the MW opposition tendency was “dogmatists”) or any other description that fits their conception.
Still, this is not the full story. Even if we accept, for arguments sake, that the original manifestation of bureaucratic centralism in the Fourth International was along those lines, this does not help to explain why, every time a regrouping of Trotskyism has taken place on the basis of formally correct Marxist criticism of the then prevailing non-Marxist programme of the existing leadership, the same bureaucratic centralism persists, with this new formation later taking the same road to the right and the whole process starting yet again. It is our contention that bureaucratic centralism can be both a product of an incorrect programme and also contribute to the deviation of Marxism towards one.
To clarify, it is the view of MW that almost every time a realignment of the Marxist left takes place on the basis of a correct Marxist criticism of the programme of the then prevalent leadership, the organisational methods of bureaucratic centrism are not critiqued and end up being inherited by the new grouping.
These methods, which stifle debate and criticism, are often at first unnoticed, with the new formation united around a revolutionary Marxist programme with general agreement on all the major issues. Over time though, the new leadership, subjected to the various ideological influence of other class forces will, if left unchecked, inevitably begin to capitulate.
While it is true that there have been rare cases of exceptional individuals with a particularly strong character in leadership positions resistant to such pressures, this cannot be depended upon as a viable strategy to defend the organisation against opportunist political degeneration. Nor, we would add, is sealing oneself off from society like some of the more cultist revolutionary groups who, for maintaining Marxist purity, pay the price of stagnant, sectarian irrelevance from the working class.
The only solution is a decisive break from bureaucratic centralism with the acceptance of, not just the right, but the responsibility of the membership to continually hold the leadership to account, up to and including the public criticism of the leadership before the working class.
Democratic centralism, as it was understood and practiced by the Bolsheviks, was limited to unity in action around concrete party decisions. It was never conceived as a gagging order to prevent members from being able to publicly criticise the leadership. It is only with such processes firmly in place that we believe the rightward drift of a leadership can be help in check by a politically conscious membership who are deeply rooted in Marxist theory. While we recognise that even with such safeguards in place there is no 100% guarantee that it can ultimately prevent the degeneration of a political leadership and later revolutionary party, we would argue that, as history has shown, without it there is an absolute certainly it will happen sooner or later.
- Principled Opposition to the European Union
Although perhaps less fundamental than the other issues outlined above, one of the broadly correct positions we inherit from the SP/CWI traditional is opposition to the EU on a class basis. We say the SP were broadly correctly because they did tend to gravitate towards left-nationalism. For example, they uncritically formed a bloc with the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) as part of the ‘No 2 EU, Yes 2 Democracy’ front group for the 2009 European Parliament elections. The CPB often spoke about national (bourgeois) sovereignty and even immigration controls, which we would not support. This stems from their Stalinist position and the so-called “British Road to Socialism”.
We note our shared internationalist, class-based opposition to the imperialist EU, which is particularly important here in the UK given the confusion on the British Left with regards to Brexit. Admittedly there were differences of opinion on how to tactically vote in last year’s referendum, and the debate was openly played out in various articles on our website as per our understanding of genuine democratic centralism. Marxist World did not adopt a formal position as such, although it should be noted that the majority of active supporters and the Editorial Board supported a Leave vote.
We believe that much of the Left only give lip service to the concept of imperialism and have no real understanding of what imperialism is and therefore how institutions like the European Union facilitate the transfer of value from the poorer countries to the more developed ones. Again, this is related to the more general issue of a lack of clarity around Marxist economics including the TRPF which is the main driving force for imperialism.
Proposals
To draw this open letter to a close, Marxist World would like to put some concrete proposals to the FIOP:
- MW will publish on our website and social media the major public statements of the FIOP relating to your defence of a Marxist programme and your criticism of the FI, giving you our political support in the principled opposition struggle you are conducting.
- While our supporters are small in number, we will take seriously and fully discuss any more direct requests for support beyond basic solidarity, be this attending an event to speak alongside your comrades, producing joint political material or anything else.
- We will open a line of communication for future effective joint collaboration in struggles to more effectively serve the socialist movement, with each organisation being free to openly criticise the other during such joint work in the spirit of public debate before the working class.
- Future correspondence, excluding more mundane correspondence of a limited organisational manner, will be published publicly on our respective websites as part of a wider project of challenging bureaucratic centralism in the Marxist movement.
In Solidarity,
Marxist World Editorial Board
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