Twenty-five years of centrism; The USFI 1963-88 - pt 1

Twenty-five years of centrism; The USFI 1963-88

Trotskyist International No. 02, Winter 1989

Part one; from unification to the Tenth World Congress, 1963-74
Introduction

Amidst the meetings and celebrations surrounding the 50th anniversary of the founding of Trotsky’s Fourth International (FI), little has been heard of another anniversary, that of the formation of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFI) in 1963. The USFI itself has been particularly reticent about this anniversary. Perhaps this has to do with the fact that it has very little to celebrate. Of the two major forces which “united” with the International Secretariat (IS) in 1963, one—the Moreno current—has already split, and the other—the Socialist Workers Party of the United States (SWP)—has organised a de facto split. It effectively runs its own separate “International”, with its own organisation and press. A quarter century after the “reunification of the world Trotskyist movement”, its component parts are largely back where they started.

In 1951 the SWP supported, wholeheartedly, the systematic centrism of the Third World Congress. Yet in 1953 Cannon and Hansen bounced the International into a split rather than confront the IS at a conference. The result was the International Committee (IC) which was set up with Healy in Britain, Lambert in France and, finally, Nahuel Moreno in Argentina. In 1963 the split was ostensibly healed when the majority of the IC, with the exception of the British, the French and a few hangers-on, returned to the fold, fusing with the IS to form the USFI. The USFI was therefore able to claim, not only that the vast majority of avowed Trotskyists were in its ranks, but also an organisational continuity through Mandel, Frank, Hansen Cannon and Pablo with the leadership of the pre-split International.

The USFI’s claim to be the Fourth International has increasingly come to the fore over recent years as its opponents’ “Fourth Internationals” have disintegrated. First the rump of the IC split in 1971, with Healy maintaining the IC and Lambert setting up the Organising Centre for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International. In 1980 Lambert and Moreno’s Fourth International (International Committee) fell apart after less then a year’s existence. Since then Lambert’s Fourth International (International Centre of Reconstruction) has undergone a damaging split with its Latin American affiliates (1987) and the Morenoite International Workers League (Fourth International) has been unable to break out of its Latin American heartlands. Meanwhile Healy’s IC degenerated into a tiny sect living off handouts from the Arab bourgeoisie, only to explode and disintegrate in 1985.

This debacle of “anti-Pabloism” appeared to confirm the USFI’s claim to be the living continuity of the revolutionary FI: the only significant, truly international “Trotskyist” tendency. Like many other centrist currents, the USFI grew rapidly in the new period of class struggle after 1968. The bulk of the new recruits were in Europe, but sections in North and Latin America also experienced substantial growth. By the end of the 1970s it could claim around 14,000 members in fifty countries.

Since this all-time high the USFI has declined and suffered splits, having fewer than 10,000 members at the end of the 1980s. But the losses suffered by the USFI have been less dramatic than those of their “Trotskyist” competitors or the various semi-Maoist and Guevarist centrist organisations. It is therefore little wonder that it remains a pole of attraction, “the mainstream of Trotskyism”, even to its supposed “left” critics.

However, neither the claims to organisational continuity nor the relative size and stability of the USFI settle the question of its claim to represent the revolutionary continuity of Trotsky’s FI. The key question is that of political, programmatic continuity with the revolutionary FI. It is here that the USFI’s claim to be the FI stands or falls.

It is currently fashionable within the USFI, when reflecting on its history, to admit that it made “mistakes” and “errors”.1 Of course even a revolutionary International will make mistakes and errors, even on occasion major ones, but what we see in the quarter century history of the USFI is something different. We do not see errors recognised, corrected and learnt from. Rather, we see systematic and grossly opportunist tactics and strategy: programmatic liquidation of the highest order. Errors covered over or only half-admitted many years later. Errors repeated at the first opportunity. This method has a name in the communist movement. It is called “centrism”.

In this article we demonstrate that the only continuity that exists in the 25 year history of the USFI is that of chronic and systematic centrist errors. The continuity of the USFI is with the centrism of the post-1951 “Fourth International”, not with Trotsky’s revolutionary organisation.

The seeds of re-unification

The IS leadership (Mandel/Frank/Pablo), together with Cannon, Hansen, Healy and Lambert, oversaw the political degeneration of the FI over the period 1948-51. The analysis of Stalinism they adopted, and of the bureaucratic social revolutions which took place in Eastern Europe and China, was a thoroughly opportunist one, involving a gross adaptation towards Stalinism.

By the 1951 Third Congress the whole of the FI including Cannon, Healy and the rest of the future IC, agreed that Tito had broken with the Kremlin, was no longer a Stalinist and that he had become some form of centrist. The same analysis was to be applied to Mao Tse Tung in the next few years. This position, as we have explained elsewhere2 was a revision of the revolutionary programme, and led directly both to Pablo’s project of deep entry into the Stalinist parties, and to the later enthusiasm of the IC for the Maoist led “cultural revolution”.

This opportunist method, which was common to all sections of the FI from the beginning of the 1950s, proved fatal to the preservation of the revolutionary programme in the post-war years. The fragile revolutionary continuity, preserved by Trotsky and then by the FI was broken, and the “Trotskyist” epigones of both the IC and the IS became cheerleaders for various Stalinist and petit bourgeois nationalist currents.

It was the Cuban Revolution of 1959, coupled with the increasing weakness of the SWP, which provided the basis for the 1963 “reunification”. The SWP, having split the International in 1953, showed little interest in building an alternative international tendency to the Europeans.3 However it took other, material, factors to convince the SWP that “reunification of the world Trotskyist movement” was necessary.

A key element was the SWP’s decline in size and influence. The impact of the cold war, McCarthyism and errors of perspective led to a serious weakening of the SWP, and its membership began to plummet. By 1959 all the SWP’s industrial fractions had been dissolved. The organisation which had led the 1934 Minneapolis teamsters’ strike no longer had any national intervention into the US labor movement. Opportunist electoral blocs brought them no success, either. The party was spiralling away. 4

In this context, the Cuban Revolution came as a godsend to the SWP. Through their participation in “Fair play for Cuba” committees they began to recruit again. Indeed this was the period in which a good part of the current SWP leadership were recruited. In addition it offered the beleaguered SWP a short cut to the revolution. Joe Hansen, later a self-proclaimed “orthodox” defender of “the Leninist strategy of party building”, argued at the time that Castro’s July 26 Movement—without the aid of any sort of “Leninist” party and despite the absence of any organs of working class power—had created a “pretty good looking” workers’ state. 5

The IS’s analysis was identical. Both interpretations were of a piece with the 1951 Third Congress’s position on Yugoslavia, which had junked the need for a revolutionary party in Yugoslavia, having found that a “blunt instrument”—the Yugoslav Communist Party—was able to do the job for them. If these analyses are correct Trotskyism and the FI are relegated to an auxiliary role.

The revolutionary position is somewhat different, of course. True, a workers’ state exists in Cuba. But the nature of this state is not qualitatively different from the USSR or the other degenerate workers’ states. The key task for the Cuban masses remains the construction of organs of workers’ and peasants’ power (soviets), and the building of a revolutionary party capable of leading the Cuban masses in a political revolution. The “Cuban road” is not one that the oppressed masses can follow if they wish to be truly liberated. It leads only to a Stalinist regime of the kind currently found in Havana, one which blocks that road to socialism.

The nature of the 1963 fusion

The 1963 fusion left all the disputed questions of the 1953 split unresolved. As the preamble to the re-unification resolution glibly stated:

“The area of disagreement appears of secondary importance in view of the common basic programme and common analysis of major current events in world developments which unite the two sides”.6

The fact that subsequently the USFI has spent most of its life riven by factions which basically repeat the pre-1963 line-up suggests that this was not the case!

The question of entrism sui generis was swept under the table, as were the opportunist excesses of both sides. These were deemed to be historical questions which could be resolved at leisure, even though for the British, Italian, Austrian, Belgian and French sections, for example, opportunist entrism was still being carried out a decade after the SWP had found it necessary to split over the question! Further, there was no common analysis of the various Stalinist regimes and parties.

On the question of the nature of the Castro leadership in Cuba both sides were in agreement. They reached for the opportunist and centrist method used by the FI between 1948 and 1951 to analyse the Tito leadership of the Yugoslav Revolution. According to the USFI the Cuban Revolution was evolving towards revolutionary Marxism, and had “set a pattern that now stands as an example for a number of other countries”.7 On the question of Maoism, however there was little agreement. Fundamental differences between the two sides were skated over. For the ex-IS leadership, Mao was a “bureaucratic centrist” (implying that Maoism was qualitatively superior to counter-revolutionary Stalinism) and so there was no question of fighting for a political revolution in China.

The SWP held a different view, one based on its 1955 resolution that “the CCP is a Stalinist party and its regime is a bureaucratic dictatorship necessitating political revolution.”8

The difference was “overcome” by adopting an ambiguous centrist formulation in 1963 which called for “an anti-bureaucratic struggle on a scale massive enough to bring about a qualitative change in the political form of Government”.9

Each side was able to interpret this as it liked. The SWP interpreted it as meaning political revolution. For the old IS leadership it implied reforms necessary to overcome merely quantitative bureaucratic deformations.

The question of China was to haunt the USFI throughout the 1960s, especially after the Cultural Revolution of 1965-67. All the opportunist appetites of the Mandel/Frank/Maitan wing came to the fore, and their analysis of Maoism as “bureaucratic centrism” was adopted at the Ninth World Congress in 1969. This position, based on an impressionistic acceptance of Mao’s “left” rhetoric, and on the fact that he led a social revolution has never been rescinded. The fact that Mao, like Stalin before him, deprived the working class of political power from the outset never troubled the old IS leaders.

These differences over the analysis of Stalinism were to be repeated with respect to the Vietnamese CP where again there was no agreement between the two sides. The unprincipled fusion of 1963 and its method of covering over differences, relegating them to “historical questions”, guaranteed a faction ridden unity within the USFI.

This was necessarily reflected in an internal regime that bore no relation to that of a communist democratic centralist organisation. The SWP made sure there was no question of it being treated as a “branch office” of the International as Cannon had put it during the 1953 split. As a result the USFI developed a caricature of democratic centralism which meant that where differences existed a common majority line was never “imposed” on a national section. The USFI developed as a series of “non-aggression pacts”, where national leaders held sway in their own countries or continents without fear of “interference” from the International.

Ernest Mandel has recently re-affirmed this attitude in an article on the Fourth International.

“The functioning of such an International—as is already the case with the Fourth International today—must be founded on a two fold principle: total autonomy for national parties in the selection of their leaderships and national tactics, but international discipline based on the principle of majority rule . . . when it comes to international political policies.”10

The idea that it is possible to have “total autonomy” in national tactics as though they did not flow inseparably from the international programme and policies is a thoroughly centrist one. It is an excuse for federalism—made necessary by the real failure to have programmatic unity. Further the whole history of the USFI—especially in relation to key revolutionary situations in Argentina, Portugal, Iran and South Africa—shows that completely different “international political policies” were practiced and tolerated by the supposedly “Unified” Secretariat.

Another feature of the fusion resolutions is the emphasis on the “world revolutionary process” and the “three sectors of the world revolution”. These phrases could merely denote the fact that revolutionary situations develop and recede throughout the world over the years and that different tactics need to be applied in different situations (notably in the imperialist countries, the semi-colonies and in the workers’ states).

For the USFI, however, these oft-repeated phrases imply recognition of an inexorable logic to the spread of revolutions. This “process” is carried out by “blunted instruments” like the Yugoslav or Chinese CPs. According to this view, the role of revolutionaries is reduced to that of cheering on this inevitable sequence of events. The formation of separate Trotskyist parties would prove an embarrassment, indeed an obstruction, to the International’s role of friendly adviser to these unconscious Trotskyists or empirical practitioners of permanent revolution.

In the initial period of the USFI, the “epicentre of the World Revolution” was deemed to be firmly in the semi-colonial world, the workers in the imperialist countries could be written off. As Pablo put it in 1962:

“The ideological neo-reformism of the European workers’ parties who have betrayed the European Revolution and the Colonial Revolution is thus combated conjointly by the action and by the revolutionary ideology of the forces exterior to the advanced capitalist nations, with whom and from whom will be constituted henceforth the new leadership of the World Socialist Revolution.”11

Thus imitating Castro in Cuba or Ben Bella in Algeria was the key programmatic question for the re-born “Fourth International”.

This adaptation to “Third Worldism” was in fact a confession of the USFI’s inability to find a path to the industrial working class in imperialist countries during a period of relative prosperity. The class struggle was not abolished in these years and moreover, as both the Belgian general strike of 1961 and the French miners’ strike of 1963 show, this struggle could reach a high degree of generalisation. However, for the USFI sections buried deep inside the mass reformist parties, the method of using the Transitional Programme to relate to workers in struggle had long since been forgotten.

The first crises: Sri Lanka and Algeria

No sooner had the USFI been formed than the problems inherent in the mistaken political method shared by all the participants began to be revealed. The first example was that of Sri Lanka, where the USFI section, the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), entered the popular front government of Mrs Bandaranaike in the spring of 1964 in order to help it control and terminate a strike wave. The leader of the LSSP, N M Perera, even became Finance Minister! The USFI, of course, were quick to condemn this action and even expelled all those who supported the LSSP leadership line (75% of the section).

But the opportunist policies and appetites of the LSSP were there for all to see long before spring 1964. Throughout the second half of the 1950s, the LSSP had repeatedly made overtures towards the bourgeoisie, including voting for the Bandaranaike government’s budget in 1960. The IS, supported by the 1961 Sixth World Congress, finally criticised the 1960 turn and the LSSP corrected its line, at least to the extent that the LSSP MPs did not vote for the bourgeois budget in 1961! However, the 1963 fusion conference made no mention of the LSSP’s rightist tendencies, in the hope of keeping the “world movement” “unified”. The message was clear: there was to be no “interference” in the national tactics of the national sections however opportunist they were.

In a recent article12 reviewing this “painful moment in our history”, USFI leader Livio Maitan finds a whole series of explanations for the LSSP’s chronic opportunism, including the fact that it was never a Leninist party (true, but this discovery came rather late!). The one possibility he will not countenance, however, is that the IS/USFI leadership bore a heavy responsibility for covering up the LSSP’s “social democratic” nature (the phrase is Ernest Mandel’s), for only intervening decisively once it was too late and then only to wash its hands of the whole affair. The real truth is that the whole FI, including the post-53 splitters, looked to the LSSP as the only mass Trotskyist party—one that might come to power and change the world wide balance of forces. If it was indeed rather a blunt instrument why should the Stalinists have all the blunt instruments? The fact that the LSSP’s practical politics were 90% electoralist and trade unionist was conveniently forgotten.

In Algeria, the USFI made a parallel series of mistakes which, once again, miraculously only became apparent to these “Trotskyists” long after the event. From 1959 onward, Pablo and his Latin American lieutenant, Posadas, had been arguing that the “focus of the World Revolution” had shifted to the imperialised world. For Posadas, this was basically an excuse for cutting all links with the IS and resulted in his 1961 split. Pablo’s position was somewhat different. His orientation to the Ben Bella government—which he described variously as an “anti-capitalist state” and a “semi-workers’ state”—was at one with that of the whole of the USFI.

Pablo’s difference was that he wanted to follow the logic of this political analysis through to the end. At the Unification Congress he proposed that the International’s centre should transfer itself to Algiers! He went on to take up a position in Algeria as economic adviser to the Ben Bella government and his faction broke with the USFI majority completely in 1964.

Enthused by the victory of the FLN over French imperialism, and then by the massive nationalisations undertaken by Ben Bella in October 1963, the May 1964 International Executive Committee (IEC) of the USFI called for the construction of a “revolutionary socialist left”, “led by the FLN”.13 As was the case in Cuba, in Yugoslavia and in China, the Trotskyist party and programme were to be shelved in favour of tailing behind petit bourgeois nationalists who had no intention of giving the workers and poor peasants any say in events, beyond a few nods in the direction of “self-management”. Instead of genuine workers’ control of production these “self-management” schemes meant the involvement of workers in running the plants in the interests of the capitalist class!

The USFI, blinded as ever by words, enthused:

“The question that remains to be answered is whether this government can establish a workers’ state. The movement in this direction is evident and bears many resemblances to the Cuban pattern. ‘Self management’, with its already demonstrated importance for the development of workers’ and peasants’ democracy, offers the brightest opening for the establishment of the institutions of a workers’ state”.14

In June 1965, Ben Bella was overthrown by Boumedienne in a coup d’état. The USFI’s dream of a workers’ state on the southern shores of the Mediterranean faded away. And as the dream faded, the “orthodox” criticisms re-emerged. Four years too late, the USFI saw through Ben Bella and the FLN. It made Pablo the scapegoat for errors all its leaders had made together. The December 1969 Plenum of the IEC argued that the “Pablo tendency”:

“. . . assigned to mass mobilisations essentially the role of supporting the Ben Bella tendency and carrying out the programme of the FLN, failing to appreciate that it was crucial for the urban and rural proletariat and poor peasantry to set up independent organs of power, and clinging to the utopian and non-Marxist concept of the possibility of a gradual change in the nature of the state”.15

Whatever the IEC might wish us to think, this was the programme of the whole of the USFI during the first half of the 1960s, not just Pablo’s! The resolution also recognised—five years too late—that the USFI “did not correctly estimate the narrowness of the social base on which the Ben Bella team rested . . . did not sufficiently stress the imperious necessity of establishing independent organs of political power by the urban and rural proletariat” and should have stressed “the need to work amongst the ranks first to create a revolutionary Marxist organisation linked to the Algerian masses”.16 How seriously this “self-criticism” influenced their future conduct is demonstrated by the current USFI line on Nicaragua.

Leftish members of the USFI often defend their organisation’s record by pointing to this belated and half-hearted “self-criticism” and saying “better late than never”. But “late” is better than “never” only if the lessons of the error are learned, and if the same mistake is not repeated. Unfortunately, the history of the USFI is littered with such post mortem-style “corrections” of an opportunist line, none of which are used to change the organisation’s fundamental method. It is rather a way for an inveterate centrist leadership to cover its tracks.

“Structural reforms”

While the “epicentre” of the World Revolution was seen to lie outside of Europe and the main task in the imperialist countries was to aid it, the sections of the USFI were still involved in deep entry work in the Stalinist and social democratic parties of Europe. Within these parties the IS, and later USFI, sections made major accommodations to the reformist leaderships.

The USFI sections were advised to “concretise” the workers’ government slogan as “the expression of the political will of the working class, not as revolutionary Marxists would like it to be but as it really is at a given stage”.17 This simply means that a government of the existing reformist leaderships of the working class would be graced with the title “a workers’ government”. This idea, which conveniently leaves unspoken the class nature of such a government—the interests of which class will rule it?—returns again and again throughout the life of the USFI.

In connection with this the IS promoted the idea of the Transitional Programme as a series of “structural reforms” which gutted it of its revolutionary content, a method which was happily continued within the USFI. During the 1961 Belgian general strike, Ernest Mandel, as an editor of one of the Socialist Party’s papers, La Gauche, put forward a reformist programme which called for cuts in military expenditure, the nationalisation of the big holding companies and power industries, and for the “planning” of the economy through the establishment of a national investment fund. This left reformist programme of “structural reforms” was dressed up as a transitional programme adapted to the Belgian situation!

Again it was left to the logic of the struggle, “the revolutionary process”, rather than the conscious intervention of Marxist’s around a revolutionary programme to overthrow capitalism. As Mandel put it in 1967:

“Either one stands squarely inside the framework of the capitalist system . . . or one refuses, takes a socialist position, rejecting the road of increasing the rate of profit, and advocates the only alternative road, which is the development of a powerful public sector in industry, alongside the private sector. This is the road out of the capitalist framework and its logic, and passes over to the arena of what we call structural anti-capitalist reforms”. 18

Yet over the next few years, this right centrist orientation was to be replaced by a left, sometimes ultra-leftist, one. The impact of May 1968 and developments in Latin America were to blow the USFI off the course of “structural reforms” and into the arms of the petit bourgeois radicals who were incapable of addressing the question of reformism in the workers’ movement. However, despite the abrupt left turns, a zig zag symptomatic of centrism, the fundamentally opportunist method remained the same. The USFI could capitulate to reformism or try to kill it with curses but it could not fight it or overcome it.

The origins of the guerrilla turn

At the Ninth World Congress in 1969, the USFI adopted a resolution arguing that Latin America faced a “continent-wide structural instability [and] more precisely a pre-revolutionary situation”. The resolution continued:

“Latin America has entered a period of revolutionary explosions and conflict, of armed struggle on different levels against the native ruling class and imperialism and of prolonged civil war on a continental scale.”19

On this basis the USFI argued that guerrilla warfare should be the strategy for all the USFI sections in Latin America and that the USFI should work to integrate itself into the current around Castro. The American SWP reacted to this resolution with particular hostility, and launched a faction fight which effectively paralysed the USFI for much of the 1970s.

In their many polemics against the European leadership of the USFI, the SWP liked to present the 1969 conference decision as the beginning of the guerrillaist adaptation by USFI members Mandel, Maitan and Frank. This view is only partly true. Although 1969 certainly marked the codification of this line, from the late 1950s both the IS and the SWP had considered that guerrilla warfare—as practised by Mao and Castro—was a vital element of the “revolutionary programme for the imperialised world”.

The uncritical endorsement of the guerrilla strategy used by Castro and Mao to gain power was a complete departure from the Marxist approach to such tactics. The Marxist position on guerrilla warfare and “armed struggle” of all kinds is that whilst we do not rule out the use of any tactic in the class struggle, it is essential that the tactic be in complete accord with our strategy, which is the seizure of power by the working class.

The decisive forces of the working class, based in the factories, workshops and mines, develops the armed struggle against the bourgeoisie, led by a proletarian party, through armed workers’ militias. The road to these lies through the organisation of picket defence squads, armed defence of workers’ districts, of strike actions and of demonstrations. It is combined with revolutionary work amongst the rank and file soldiers aimed first at encouraging disaffection and, as the struggle develops, winning the troops over to the side of the workers. This amounts to breaking up the bourgeois army.

Certainly rural guerrilla warfare can be a subordinate tactic, especially where the peasant and small farming class is a significant, even predominant, portion of the population. But even here such a struggle must be intimately linked to the proletarian party and subordinated to the seizure of working class power. The guerrilla strategy of Castro and Mao was never based on such a concept. The real struggle was seen as one taking place in the countryside, based on the peasantry. The struggles of the workers in the cities were at best a useful adjunct. Indeed guerrillaism in Latin America has traditionally seen political action in the cities as a method of recruiting workers and students out of the cities and into the mountains.

Also the very nature of guerrilla struggle, be it rural or urban (as in the case of the Uruguayan Tupamaros or IRA), demands secrecy and the organisation of armed force in isolation from the masses, except perhaps in the final moments where the struggle takes on the proportions of civil war. Even here the fact that the struggle is left up to a minority of fighters, normally outside of the cities, breeds passivity amongst those very layers who should be struggling for their own liberation.

It is no surprise, therefore, that this elitist and individualist conception of struggle finds its most ardent proponents in the movements of petit bourgeois nationalists such as the July 26th Movement, the IRA, ETA or the PLO, and in the petit bourgeois intellectual circles in which the USFI swam in the late 1960s and 70s. Where the Stalinists have adopted such tactics, it has been on the basis of abandoning work in the proletarian urban areas, in favour of mobilising and basing themselves on the peasantry—a petit bourgeois strategy.

“Victories” for such movements, as a result, are never proletarian victories. They put into power either an alien class—popular fronts of bourgeois and petit bourgeois forces committed to preserving capitalism (July 26th Movement, FLN, FSLN)—or they can lead to Stalinist parties expropriating the bourgeoisie and excluding the working class from power, in the process creating degenerate workers’ states which block the road to socialism.

In painting up these petit bourgeois nationalist or Stalinist guerrilla movements as “socialist” and “revolutionary” the USFI was yet again abandoning the Marxist programme. This opportunist adaptation was reinforced in 1967 by two interconnected events: the attempt by the Cubans to open a guerrilla campaign in Bolivia and the foundation of the Organisation of Latin American Solidarity (OLAS).

In 1966, Che Guevara, romantic symbol of the revolution for many adolescent revolutionaries of all ages, left Cuba to launch a guerrilla war in Bolivia. Isolated from the masses, completely out of touch with the real focus of the Bolivian revolution—the Bolivian working class of the Altoplano—Guevara paid the price with his life in 1967. The “new left” had acquired its martyr, and Che’s poster flowered on the walls of a thousand student apartments. The USFI joined in the funeral orations, but failed to draw any critical political conclusions from this event. Quite the opposite.

Guevara’s intervention in Bolivia was not an individual initiative. He took with him 16 Cuban officers who included four members of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party. From early 1966 Castro had signalled to the Kremlin that he was discontented with their support for the isolated and threatened Cuba. At the Tricontinental Conference in January 1966, held in Havana, Castro invited, alongside the national Communist Parties, guerrillaist groups from Latin America, many of whom were hostile to their local Stalinist parties.

By July 1967 he had convened the first conference of the OLAS which brought together 160 delegates from “fidelista” organisations in Latin America. Earlier the same year the Cubans had openly backed the guerrillaist wing of the Venezuelan CP, led by Douglas Bravo, which had split from and denounced the pro-Moscow leadership.

Joe Hansen, sent to the conference by the SWP as an observer, declared that “a great advance has been registered” for the revolutionary vanguard. Hansen noted approvingly that OLAS saw launching a guerrilla war as the key tactic:

“The question of armed struggle was thus taken at the OLAS conference as the decisive dividing line separating the revolutionists from the reformists on a continental scale. In this respect it echoed the Bolshevik tradition”.20

Of course it echoed nothing of the sort. Guerrilla warfare, misnamed “the armed struggle” in and of itself is not a Bolshevik method. It is the method of the revolutionary bourgeoisie and petit bourgeoisie. OLAS itself met under the twin portraits of Guevara and Bolivar.

Castro’s Bolshevik position led Hansen to rave that:

“The OLAS conference thus represents an important ideological advance, offering the greatest encouragement to revolutionary Marxists throughout the world. One of its first consequences will be to facilitate a regroupment of revolutionary forces in Latin America . . . The turn marked at the OLAS conference conforms with the political realities of Latin America and the imperative need to build a revolutionary leadership capable of correctly absorbing and applying the lessons of the Cuban Revolution on a continental scale.”21

Moreno added his voice to the uncritical cheerleading of the OLAS declaring it the “only organisational vehicle for power” as did, of course, the Europeans.

Only two short years lay between this apparent unanimity in the wake of the OLAS conference and the faction fight, with Hansen and Moreno leading the opposition to the Ninth Congress’s support for “the strategy of guerrilla warfare”, and its avowed aim of “fusion with the current around OLAS”. What caused them to retreat from their previous positions?

Sun 06, August 2006 @ 18:06