An Analysis of SWP Leader Jack Barnes’ Speech of December 31, 1982 to the National Convention of the YSA

Statement of the Political Committee of the Workers League

On December 31, 1982, the national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, Jack Barnes, delivered a speech before the national convention of its youth movement, the Young Socialist Alliance. He spoke for nearly two hours, summing up the latest views of the SWP leadership on the role of Trotskyism and the Fourth International. For five months there has been no report on the content of this speech in any of the publications of the SWP, but portions of its transcript have now become available through independent sources. These excerpts show that the SWP leadership has repudiated both the history and principles upon which the party was founded in 1938. If the arguments advanced by Barnes are accepted, the only conclusion that can be drawn is that the SWP, and indeed, the Fourth International itself, should never have been brought into existence.

The essence of Barnes’s argument—insomuch as it is possible to identify a central theme amid the verbal debris of rambling anecdotes and non-sequiturs—was that the Trotskyist movement is a deviation from the historical line of development from Lenin and the Communist International. The origins of this divergence, Barnes maintained, lie in the defense of the theory of permanent revolution by Trotsky. “Well,” declared Barnes, “this considerably raised the question of continuity. We’ve now been shoved off the axis of the Comintern as such.”

Barnes continued:

“Permanent revolution is not a correct generalization, or an adequate one, or one that doesn’t open up more problems than it solves, as to what our program is.”

He advised:

“We will get much, much more by reducing the permanent revolution, by pointing out, in my opinion, that it is not correct and not useful as a general term for our program.”

Moreover, because of the theory of permanent revolution,

“Eighty percent of those on a world scale who call themselves Trotskyists, consider themselves Trotskyists, and I mean sincerely—that is, they believe they are Trotskyists—are hopeless, irreformable sectarians. What is being done in the name of Trotsky and Trotskyism is horrendous.”

In repudiating the theory of permanent revolution, the Socialist Workers Party is abandoning all pretenses of being a Trotskyist organization. Barnes explicitly rejected the historical role of the Fourth International as the World Party of Socialist Revolution. It is not out of the history, traditions and program of the Fourth International that the international revolutionary vanguard will emerge. Rather, Barnes proclaimed that this vanguard will be the product of an amalgam of Stalinist and bourgeois nationalist forces. He cited “the fusion of new forces” as advocated by the Cuban Castroites and the Salvadoran Stalinists as “the source, in our opinion, of a new world movement.”

Within the United States, Barnes asserted, the orientation of the SWP must be “toward a goal of fusion, discussion, collaboration” in order to “carry out parallel processes in the United States that are being raised by real revolutionaries in the center of the world revolution.”

Abandoned all pretenses of Trotskyism

Summing up the perspectives of the SWP leadership, Barnes declared:

“Trotskyism, that term itself, I predict, none of us will call ourselves before this decade’s out.”

The grammar may be confused but the message is clear: the Barnes leadership is officially renouncing all connections between the SWP and Trotskyism. The speech at the YSA convention reaffirmed a political line that was presented at a meeting of the SWP national committee in March 1982. He announced at the time:

“We consider ourselves part of a common world Marxist movement with the FSLN [of Nicaragua], with the New Jewel Movement
[of Grenada], with the Cuban Communist Party, with the vanguard proletarian leaderships of the revolutionary struggles in El Salvador and Guatemala. This is integrally tied to making the turn and building revolutionary, proletarian, Marxist parties in this country and around the world. We think that’s how the entire Fourth International should view itself.

“We’re part of a common Marxist movement with these revolutionists. We’re not part of a common movement with a lot of people and organizations that call themselves Trotskyists … No, we’re part of the world Marxist movement, an international working class movement, which includes, among others, the FSLN, the NJM, and the Cuban CP.”
(Internal Information Bulletin, September 1982, p. 3)

What is this so-called “world Marxist movement” of which the SWP now considers itself a part? If it includes all those organizations with which the Cuban CP enjoys fraternal relations and which Castro would define as “Marxist,” it means that the SWP now identifies itself politically with the Stalinist parties. Among the comrades of Mr. Barnes are General Jaruzelski and Yuri Andropov. Moreover, the inclusion of the FSLN and the New Jewel Movement means that the membership rolls of Barnes’ “world Marxist movement' include bourgeois nationalist regimes and organizations which call themselves “Marxist,” whatever their real class base.

An unbridgeable political chasm separates the present-day Socialist Workers Party from Trotskyism. Not a single programmatic conception upon which the founding of the Fourth International was based is still accepted by the SWP: not that of the permanent revolution, of the counterrevolutionary role of Stalinism and the necessity for the political revolution, of the decisive historical role of Trotskyism. In its present form, the Socialist Workers Party is the antithesis of the party that was founded 45 years ago by James P. Cannon in closest collaboration with Leon Trotsky. In 1940, in the midst of the great struggle inside the SWP against the petty-bourgeois minority that was passing over rapidly into the camp of US imperialism, Cannon defined the historical role of Trotskyism in a manner so clear that it can serve even today as a fitting reply to all the pygmy opponents of the Fourth International:

“The body of doctrine and methods known as ‘Trotskyism’ is indubitably the genuine Marxism of our time, the heir and continuator of the Bolshevism of Lenin and the Russian Revolution and the early Comintern. It is the movement known as Trotskyism and no other that has developed Bolshevism in analyzing and interpreting all the great events of the post-Lenin period and in formulating the program for the proletarian struggle and victory. There is no other school that is worthy of a moment’s consideration by the proletarian revolutionists. Trotskyism, embodied in the Fourth International, is the only revolutionary movement.”
(The Struggle for a Proletarian Party, Pathfinder, p. 3)

Nothing left of the SWP but the name

Nothing remains of the SWP as it was envisaged by its founders except the name. But the SWP’s transformation into an anti-Trotskyist party, lauding Stalinist assassins of the working class as its “comrades” in a “world Marxist movement,” is not the product of a bolt from the blue. Long before Barnes delivered his New Year’s Eve message to the YSA, the SWP had ceased to be a Trotskyist party. Politically and historically, the real death of the SWP as a Trotskyist party occurred 20 years ago, in June 1963, when it severed its political ties with the International Committee of the Fourth International. This split was engineered by SWP leader Joseph Hansen to clear the way for an unprincipled reunification with the anti-Trotskyist revisionist tendency led by Ernest Mandel and Michel Pablo.

Just 10 years earlier, in November 1953, the SWP vehemently denounced the revisionist theories of Pablo and his accomplice Mandel as a complete betrayal of Trotskyism. Under the leadership of Cannon, the SWP supported the expulsion of Pablo and Mandel from the Fourth International, and emphatically endorsed the formation of the International Committee of the Fourth International to lead an organized struggle against the Pabloite attempt to revise and overthrow the programmatic foundations of Trotskyism. In his historic Open Letter to the world Trotskyist movement, in which the split with the Pabloites was proclaimed, Cannon wrote:

“The lines of cleavage between Pablo’s revisionism and orthodox Trotskyism are so deep that no compromise is possible either politically or organizationally.”
(Trotskyism vs. Revisionism, Vol. 1, New Park, p. 312)

There was not the slightest exaggeration in this statement. Pabloism threatened the destruction of the entire theoretical and political heritage of the Trotskyist movement. The essence of Pabloite revisionism was the rejection of the revolutionary role of the working class as the creator and builder of socialist society. While still secretary of the Fourth International, Pablo argued that the Soviet bureaucracy, under conditions of inevitable world war with imperialism, would be compelled to wage a revolutionary struggle against capitalism, resulting ultimately in the establishment of deformed workers’ states. In this schema, the role of the working class was reduced to that of exerting mass pressure on the bureaucracy. Explicitly rejecting the perspective of the political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracies as a decisive component of the world socialist revolution, Pablo and his followers drew the conclusion that there existed no historical justification for the existence of the Fourth International. Instructions were sent to the supporters of Pablo to work secretly for the liquidation of the national sections of the Fourth International into the local Stalinist parties. Thus, Trotskyism was to be reduced to merely an auxiliary pressure group working inside the organizations controlled by the Stalinist bureaucracies. In short, what Pablo proposed was the destruction of Trotskyism.

The political roots of this revisionist cancer inside the Fourth International lay in the pressure of world imperialism upon the Trotskyist movement in the aftermath of World War II. Precisely because of the resurgence of the world proletariat and the colonial masses, revitalized by the crushing defeat of Hitlerite imperialism by the Soviet working class, world capitalism emerged desperately weakened from the war. Similarly, the heroic defense of the property relations established by the 1917 October Revolution enormously increased the self-confidence of the Soviet working class and undermined the Stalinist bureaucracy. Under these conditions, unable to rely exclusively on the Stalinist and Social Democratic bureaucracies to derail the world revolution, imperialism sought to develop a base of political support within the Trotskyist movement itself.

Those within the Trotskyist movement who proceeded with the method of empiricism and pragmatism were theoretically vulnerable to these imperialist pressures. The imperialist crisis assumed the contradictory form of an economic boom based on the unprecedented expansion of credit supplied by American imperialism and its various agencies. No less contradictory was the form assumed by the development of the crisis of Stalinism, where the apparent expansion of its influence expressed, in a distorted form, the revolutionary movement of the working class internationally against imperialism and its lackeys in the Kremlin bureaucracy. But the Pabloites proceeded as impressionists; in their analysis of economic and political phenomena, the given conditions were accepted uncritically, that is, the results at hand were examined independently of the historical processes out of which they emerged. Just as bourgeois economists who, examining merely the surface appearance of the process of exchange, see in a commodity merely a thing with value, and are oblivious to the social relations between worker and capitalist of which that value is an expression, the Pabloites, as they surveyed the post-war world, saw only the relations between imperialists and bureaucrats, and were blind to the titanic movement of the working class in its struggle against the international bourgeoisie.

The American Pabloites articulated this impressionist method in its most unvarnished form:

“Let us simply sum up some of the conclusions of the present reality: We see a world where our perspective of Stalinism being destroyed in the course of World War II has been proven wrong. We see a world where Stalinism is dominant over the eastern half of Europe, where the Communist parties are the leadership of the colonial revolution in Asia, where they constitute the strongest organizations of the working class in Italy and France. In the rest of the Western world, Social Democracy has been resuscitated, and in the United States, where labor has not yet advanced to an independent political existence, the reformist labor bureaucracy remains dominant.”
(Towards a History of the Fourth International, Part 4, Vol. 4, p.208)

The “Open Letter” of 1953

In opposition to the Pabloite’s prostration before the “accomplished fact,” Cannon, in the Open Letter, restated the fundamental conceptions upon which the founding of the Fourth International was based:

“1) The death agony of the capitalist system threatens the destruction of civilization through worsening depressions, world wars and barbaric manifestations like fascism. The development of atomic weapons underlines the dangers in the gravest possible way.

“2) The descent into the abyss can be avoided only by replacing capitalism with the planned economy of socialism on a world scale and thus resuming the spiral of progress opened up by capitalism in its early days.

“3) This development can be accomplished only under the leadership of the working class in society. But the working class itself faces a crisis of revolutionary leadership although the world relation of social forces was never so favorable as today for the workers to take the road to power.”

“4) To organize itself for carrying out this world-historic aim, the working class in each country must construct a revolutionary socialist party in the pattern developed by Lenin; that is, a combat party capable of dialectically combining democracy and centralism—democracy in arriving at decisions, centralism at carrying them out; a leadership controlled by the ranks, ranks able to carry forward under fire in disciplined fashion.

“5) The main obstacle to this is Stalinism, which attracts workers through exploiting the prestige of the October 1917 Revolution, only later, as it betrays their confidence, to hurl them back either into the arms of the Social Democracy, into apathy, or back into illusions in capitalism. The penalty for these betrayals is paid by the working class in the form of consolidations of fascist or monarchist forces, and new outbreaks of war fostered and prepared by capitalism. From its inception, the Fourth International set as one of its major tasks the revolutionary overthrow of Stalinism inside and outside the USSR.

“6) The need for flexible tactics facing many sections of the Fourth International, and parties or groups sympathetic to its program, makes it all the more imperative that they know how to fight imperialism and all its petty-bourgeois agencies (such as nationalist formations or trade-union bureaucracies) without capitulation to Stalinism; and, conversely, how to fight Stalinism (which in the final analysis is a petty-bourgeois agency of imperialism) without capitulating to imperialism.

“These fundamental principles established by Leon Trotsky retain full validity in the increasingly complex and fluid politics of the world today. In fact, the revolutionary situations opening up on every hand as Trotsky foresaw, have only now brought full concreteness to what at one time may have appeared to be somewhat remote abstractions not intimately bound up with the living reality of the time. The truth is that these principles now hold with increasing force both in political analysis and in the determination of the course of practical action.”
(Trotskyism vs. Revisionism, Vol. 1, pp. 300–301, emphasis added)

Just a more vulgar rendition of Pabloism

Were a member of the SWP today to submit a document to the membership arguing in support of any one of these six points, he would be promptly charged by the Barnes leadership with a violation of “party norms” and expelled without further ado.

The political roots of the present politics of the SWP are to be found not in the positions of Cannon but in those of the Pabloite faction within the SWP whose supporters were denounced by Cannon as renegades and expelled. Nothing in Barnes’ speech is original. It is simply a more vulgar rendition of the positions advanced by the American Pabloites within the SWP, led by Bert Cochran and George Clarke, whose program was summed up in the phrase: “Junk the Old Trotskyism!” The Cochranites declared that they had concluded

“that the revolutionary parties of tomorrow will not be Trotskyist, in the sense of necessarily accepting the tradition of our movement, our estimation of Trotsky’s place in the revolutionary hierarchy, or of Trotsky’s specific evaluations and slogans…

“The thought that in the coming period of our activity we have to go out of our way to mention the name and work of Leon Trotsky, and the name and existence of the Fourth International, shows how far all of us have become infused with narrow group thinking and organizational fetishism … Only by dropping all sectarian notions of imposing our specific traditions on the mass movement which developed in different circumstances and under different influences, can our approach register successes and guarantee the future of our precious cadre.”
(Towards a History of the Fourth International, Part 4, Vol. 4, p. 210)

These arguments find their virtual duplication in Barnes’ present-day lament that the SWP has “been too Trotskyist,” and the Cochranites’ demand for the SWP’s “integration into the real mass movement” by repudiating “sectarian” Trotskyist “fetishes” — finds its concrete realization in Barnes’ perspective of “fusion, discussion, collaboration” with the emerging “world Marxist movement.”

In 1953 the Socialist Workers Party opposed Pabloism and issued the Open Letter which led to the formation of the International Committee. But this struggle proved to be the swan song of the SWP as a revolutionary party. The decline, fall and degradation of the SWP is bound up with its retreat from and ultimately its betrayal of the principles and program for which it had fought in the struggle against Pabloism. Despite its defense of the program of “orthodox” Trotskyism in 1953, the SWP did not understand the methodological roots of Pabloite revisionism. It paid a heavy price for the failure to take to heart Trotsky’s insistence on the necessity of training the cadre of the SWP in the method of dialectical materialism. In 1940, in the course of the struggle against the petty-bourgeois opposition of James Burnham and Max Shachtman, Trotsky revealed the essential relation between the opposition’s rejection of the program of the Fourth International — most fundamentally, of the necessity of defending the Soviet Union unconditionally against imperialism — and its rejection of dialectical materialism.

In the aftermath of the 1953 split, however, the SWP leadership paid no attention to questions of philosophical method raised by the split, although the method of Cochran and Clarke, i.e., pragmatism, was fundamentally identical to that of Burnham and Shachtman. Though it rejected the political conclusion of the Pabloites in 1953, in the years that followed the split the SWP continued to pursue a method which was itself a variety of pragmatism. Under the difficult conditions of the post-war boom and the McCarthyite witchhunting, the SWP leadership reacted impressionistically to events that could have been comprehended through the development of the dialectical materialist method. Inevitably, there emerged within the SWP a mood of pessimism about the revolutionary potential of the working class and skepticism in the viability of the Fourth International.

Castroism substituted for revolutionary Marxism

Thus, without prior consultation with the International Committee, the SWP initiated contact in 1957 with the Pabloites in Ceylon and broached the question of reunification. By 1960–61, after having virtually ignored events in Cuba for the first year after the fall of Batista, the SWP suddenly began hailing the establishment of the first workers’ state in the western hemisphere. With Joseph Hansen now in the leadership of the SWP, Cuba was declared to be socialist even though there existed neither specific forms of workers’ power (i.e., soviets) nor a revolutionary working class party. Hansen cited the agreement of the Pabloites, now led by Mandel, on the designation of Cuba as a workers’ state as the basis of reunification — without prior discussion of the significance of the 1953 split to determine to what extent, if any, the issues which had provoked the split had been resolved.

Joseph Hansen claimed, however, that no such discussion was necessary because Pabloism was no longer an issue. In fact, the drive for reunification expressed the fact that the SWP had adopted the same liquidationist anti-Trotskyist outlook. The old Pabloite disease of rejecting the revolutionary role of the working class and of searching for substitutes was manifested in the SWP’s adaptation to Castroism. But where the Pabloites, in 1953, had made the Stalinist bureaucracy the historical medium through which socialism would be realized, in 1961–63 this historical role was bestowed on the Cuban petty-bourgeoisie, led by Castro’s guerrilla forces.

The fundamental Leninist proposition, that the dictatorship of the proletariat is the sole form of the transition to socialism, and that this dictatorship can only be established on the basis of a genuine mass movement of the working class, led by a Marxist party, in which millions of workers are drawn into the struggle to create a new state upon the ashes of the old bourgeois-type state, a state in which the tasks of administration are carried out by the workers themselves, was totally disregarded by the SWP. Flowing from this, the SWP, under the leadership of Hansen, arrived at the position that revolutionary leadership could arise outside of the Fourth International, and that “revolutionists of action” such as Castro could serve as a substitute for the building of a Marxist party.

The International Committee refused to be stampeded into a reunification based on this explicit rejection of the essential conceptions of the Transitional Program, which held that only the Fourth International could resolve the crisis of revolutionary leadership in the working class. For this principled stand it was denounced by Hansen as “sectarian” and “ultra-left.” However, the International Committee was simply defending the very principles upon which Cannon had insisted in his fight against the Pabloites. As he wrote to another leading member of the SWP, George Breitman, in 1954:

“We alone are unconditional adherents of the Lenin-Trotsky theory of the party of the conscious vanguard and its role as leader of the revolutionary struggle. This theory acquires burning actuality and dominates all others in the present epoch.

“The problem of leadership now is not limited to spontaneous manifestations of the class struggle in a long drawn-out process, nor even to the conquest of power in this or that country where capitalism is especially weak. It is a question of the development of the international revolution and the socialist transformation of society. To admit that this can happen automatically is, in effect, to abandon Marxism altogether. No, it can only be a conscious operation, and it imperatively requires the leadership of the Marxist party which represents the conscious element in the historic process. No other party will do. No other tendency in the labor movement can be recognized as a satisfactory substitute. For that reason, our attitude toward all other parties and tendencies is irreconcilably hostile.”

(Trotskyism vs. Revisionism, Vol. 2, p. 65)

We have been obliged to quote at length from the archives of the Fourth International to review what had been, not so long ago, the positions of the Socialist Workers Party. These documents may appear as ancient as the Rosetta Stone to SWP members who know virtually nothing of the history of the Fourth International since 1953, and who have been miseducated politically under conditions in which the SWP has displayed “irreconcilable hostility” only to those who have continued to fight for Trotskyist principles inside the international workers’ movement. We have presented, if only in outline form, the process of degeneration which has finally produced Barnes’ open denunciation of Trotskyism.

This speech is not an isolated development. For more than a year, the entire SWP leadership has been engaged in a frantic drive to rewrite the entire history of the Marxist movement in this century in order to provide a justification for its repudiation of Trotskyism. However, Barnes and his cohorts are unable to fashion an “original” form of anti-Trotskyism. They are obliged to fall back on the oldest lies that have been used by the Stalinists since the 1920s. An entire department has been set up by the SWP leadership to work through old texts of speeches by Stalinist hacks, and even by Stalin himself, to find ammunition for use against the Fourth International.

Attacks aimed at the theory of permanent revolution

The main target for these attacks, as in the past, is the theory of permanent revolution, and this is not a coincidence. This is the programmatic essence of Trotskyism as the Marxism of our time — the epoch of the death agony of capitalism, the world socialist revolution, and the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is the scientific substantiation of the revolutionary role of the working class, and it is as such, the most powerful refutation of all attempts to subordinate the working class to all petty-bourgeois and nationalist agencies of world imperialism. The theory of permanent revolution correctly interprets the 1917 October Revolution as a turning point in world history, i.e., the beginning, on a world-historical scale, of the transition from capitalism to socialism, and it reveals the interconnection between this world-historical development and the class struggle in each country. It thus proves that the fundamental historical task of the world proletariat since October 1917 has been to extend the socialist revolution beyond the borders of the first workers’ state, the Soviet Union, until the victory of the proletariat is secured throughout the planet.

The theory of permanent revolution became the program of Bolshevism in 1917 precisely because Lenin recognized, on the basis of his whole analysis of imperialism as the highest and last stage of capitalism, that the revolution in Russia, which began with the overthrow of the Tsar, could only develop as a socialist revolution based on the dictatorship of the proletariat. Despite his many years of uncompromising and correct struggle against Trotsky’s pre-1917 errors on organizational principles, Lenin, on the basis of his own theoretical work, arrived at the conclusions which had already been indicated by Trotsky in his earlier elaboration of the permanent revolution theory.

Barnes’ argument is not only with Trotskyism; it is with history itself. He performs on history the type of radical surgery that was previously to be found only in the various editions of the official Soviet encyclopedias. He proceeds exactly along the line of attack first opened up by the Stalinists, regurgitating the very slanders which first surfaced 60 years ago when the “original sin” of Trotskyism was declared to be its “underestimation of the peasantry.” The theory of Permanent Revolution was counterposed to the old, pre-1917, Leninist slogan of the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry” which Lenin discarded in April 1917 upon his return to Russia to lead the Bolshevik Party into action against the Provisional Government. In his April Theses Lenin called for the overthrow of the bourgeois-democratic regime and the seizure of power by the Soviets — the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Perspective advanced only by Trotsky before 1917

Until that time, the perspective of the socialist revolution in Russia as the logical culmination of the overthrow of Tsarism and the completion of the bourgeois democratic revolution had been advanced only by Trotsky. Insofar as anyone used the term “Trotskyism” before 1917, it was to describe that theory which maintained that Russia’s inevitable bourgeois democratic revolution could be consummated only under the leadership of the working class. Therefore, the right wing within the Bolshevik Party, as well as the Mensheviks, denounced Lenin’s April Theses as “Trotskyism.”

The entrance of Trotsky into the Bolshevik Party in 1917 was of a thoroughly principled character and ended all the old controversies between himself and Lenin. To be sure, there were occasions when disputes between the two flared up — as in 1920 in the famous controversy over the role of the trade unions in the Soviet Union. But never was there ever any reference to the old controversy on the nature of the Russian Revolution. That issue had been settled in 1917 by the objective course of the revolution, which completely confirmed Trotsky’s prognosis.

Barnes refurbishes Stalinist attacks on theory

However, now Barnes refurbishes the old Stalinist attacks on the theory of Permanent Revolution that were originally raised within the Soviet Union only after Lenin had been removed from the political scene by illness in 1923. The gist of Barnes’ argument is that Trotsky falsely asserted the existence of continuity between the theory of Permanent Revolution, which he had developed as early as 1906, and the strategy adopted by Lenin in his April Theses of 1917. “In defending himself” against the Stalinists, Barnes declared,

“Trotsky had to explain the revolutionary character of his ideas before 1917. In so doing a process begins of blurring what revolutionary continuity is …

“He also, as part of this counterattack, insisted on the weakness of Lenin’s basic idea on the working class and the peasantry vis-à-vis governmental power. He says that the weak point of Lenin’s conception was the internally contradictory idea of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, the political bloc of two classes whose interests only partially coincide …

“It may have been in Trotsky’s view Lenin’s weak point, but Lenin was completely aware of this point; he considered it exactly the transitional algebraic thing needed for this transition.”

In all essentials the position of Barnes is simply a restatement of the lies originally advanced by Stalin in 1924:

“It is not true that the theory of ‘permanent revolution,’ which was brushed aside by the Revolution of 1905, proved to be correct in the ‘second stage of the historical development,’ that is, during the October Revolution. The whole course of the October Revolution, its whole development, demonstrated and proved the utter bankruptcy of the theory of ‘permanent revolution’ and its absolute incompatibility with the foundations of Leninism.

“Honeyed speeches and rotten diplomacy cannot hide the yawning chasm which lies between the theory of ‘permanent revolution’ and Leninism.”
(Problems of Leninism, Foreign Languages Press, p.138)

Proceeding exactly along the line of the big lie pioneered by Stalin, Barnes goes so far as to claim that Trotsky misrepresented Lenin in claiming that the latter abandoned the theory of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry upon returning to Russia in 1917.

“It’s the only thing that I can remember Trotsky ever writing which I believe was factually false. I have yet to find anyone showing anywhere, anything Lenin ever wrote where he ever said this . . .

“Why Trotsky believed this to be the case I have no way of knowing.”

Well, Mr. Jack “Big Lie” Barnes, Trotsky said this and believed this because it was true. Anyone who has ever bothered to study the history of the Russian Revolution knows that Lenin repudiated his pre-1917 theory of the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry” upon his return to Russia following the overthrow of the Tsarist regime. As Lenin acknowledged, the weakness of this formula consisted in its failure to precisely establish the class character of the state that would emerge from the overthrow of the Tsar — and this weakness would have proved fatal to the revolution had not a correction been made.

Lenin had always insisted on the independent revolutionary role of the proletariat in the struggle against the Tsarist autocracy. He had implacably opposed any form of political or organizational subordination of the workers’ movement to the bourgeois democratic parties, and he continuously insisted that the working class, while striving for an alliance with the peasantry, should never mix its banners with those of the peasant movement. Therefore, the ambiguity of the “democratic dictatorship” slogan did not prevent the Bolsheviks from pursuing a correct political line in 1917.

However, before Lenin’s arrival on the scene, the ambiguity of the formula did have an adverse effect upon those leaders, like Stalin, who were incapable of making an analysis of the class nature of the Provisional Government. Instead, they proceeded from the old slogan and denied the possibility of overthrowing the Provisional Government. Had Lenin not arrived, the leadership of the Bolshevik Party — despite considerable opposition from the rank and file — would have settled down to playing the role, alongside the Mensheviks, of an official socialist opposition within the bourgeois democratic republic.

Lenin did return to Russia; and the struggle he waged throughout the month of April against the Old Bolsheviks consisted precisely in overcoming their devotion to the old formula of the “democratic dictatorship.” Lenin’s rejection of the old formula and the identity of his new views with those of Trotsky can be easily established by quoting from his famous “Letters on Tactics,” written in April 1917:

“But at this point we hear a clamor of protest from people who readily call themselves ‘Old Bolsheviks.’ Didn’t we always maintain, they say, that the bourgeois-democratic revolution is completed only by the ‘revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’? Is the agrarian revolution, which is also a bourgeois-democratic revolution, completed? Is it not a fact, on the contrary, that it has not even started?

“My answer is: The Bolshevik slogans and ideas on the whole have been confirmed by history; but concretely things have worked out differently; they are more original, more peculiar, more variegated than anyone could have expected. To ignore or overlook this fact would mean taking after those ‘Old Bolsheviks’ who more than once already have played so regrettable a role in the history of our Party by reiterating formulas senselessly learned by rote instead of studying the specific features of the new and living reality …

“The person who now speaks only of a ‘revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’ is behind the times; consequently, he has in effect gone over to the petty bourgeois against the proletarian class struggle; that person should be consigned to the archive of ‘Bolshevik’ pre-revolutionary antiques (it may be called the archive of ‘old Bolsheviks’).”
(Collected Works, Vol. 24, pp. 44–45)

“The formula is obsolete”

Lenin expressed himself still more forcefully on the slogan of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry:

“The formula is obsolete. It is no good at all. It is dead. And it is no use trying to revive it.”
(Ibid., p. 50)

On April 14, 1917, ten days after his return to Russia, Lenin continued the offensive against the “old Bolsheviks” at the Petrograd City Conference of the Bolsheviks.

“Our political line, embodied in resolutions, was worked out in advance with far greater precision than that of any other party. Events, however, have created an entirely new situation. The chief mistake made by revolutionaries is that they look backward at the old revolutions, whereas life gives us too many new things that have to be fitted into the general pattern of events.”
(Collected Works, Vol. 24, p. 141)

Lenin carefully explained why the development of the revolution had rendered the old slogan of the “democratic dictatorship” obsolete:

“The Soviet is the implementation of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the soldiers; among the latter the majority are peasants. It is therefore a dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry. But this ‘dictatorship’ has entered into an agreement with the bourgeoisie. And this is where the ‘old’ Bolshevism needs revising. The situation that has arisen shows that the dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry is interlocked with the power of the bourgeoisie. An amazingly unique situation. The past contains no instances of a revolution where the representatives of the revolutionary proletariat and peasantry, though fully armed, concluded an alliance with the bourgeoisie, and though having the power, ceded it to the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie wields the power of capital and the power of organization. It is a wonder the workers have shown themselves to be as well organized as they are. The bourgeois revolution in Russia is completed insofar as power has come into the hands of the bourgeoisie. Here the ‘old Bolsheviks’ argue: ‘It is not concluded—for there is no dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.’ But the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies is that very dictatorship.

“The agrarian movement can go two ways. The peasants may take the land, but no struggle may develop between the rural proletariat and the prosperous peasants. This is unlikely, however, for the class struggle does not wait. To repeat now what we said in 1905, and omit mention of the class struggle in the countryside, is a betrayal of the proletarian cause.”
(Ibid., Vol. 24, pp. 142–143)

Barnes’s speech is a continuation of the open attack on Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution that was opened up by the SWP in November 1981, when one of Barnes’s associates, Douglas Jenness, also of Carleton College, attempted to prove that the “continuity” of the revolutionary movement should be traced from Lenin’s elaboration of the theory of the “democratic dictatorship.” To establish this continuity, both Jenness and Barnes had to distort the pre-1917 positions of both Lenin and Trotsky, deny the change made by Lenin in 1917 in the program of the Bolshevik Party, and rehabilitate the arguments against the theory of Permanent Revolution made by Stalin in the 1920s.

Barnes claims:

“We’ve now been shoved off the axis of the Comintern as such … [The theory of Permanent Revolution] broke the post-Russian-revolutionary unity between Lenin and Trotsky, in the political sense. It opened the door to sectarian, ultra-left interpretations and utilizations of the theory of permanent revolution …

“There’s another problem, of course, with the permanent revolution, and that is what it actually does mean.”

Historical Origins of Theory of Permanent Revolution

Barnes might just as well have asked: “What does ‘historical materialism’ actually mean?,” or even, “Who the hell knows what Marx and Engels meant by the dictatorship of the proletariat anyway?”

Barnes’ claim that the theory of permanent revolution represented a break with the continuity of Marxism simply exposes his pitiful ignorance of the history of Marxist theory. In his elaboration of the theory of permanent revolution, Trotsky displayed the intellectual characteristics of a truly great Marxist theoretician: sparkling originality and vigorous orthodoxy. Like Lenin, Trotsky was a historian of the Marxist movement — not in any pedantic and scholastic sense, but in accordance with his scientific conception of dialectical materialism as a theory of knowledge.

Therefore, in 1907, as Trotsky sought to comprehend the world-historical significance of the 1905 Revolution in Russia and to reveal the objective role of all classes within Russian society in the course of that revolution, the first great workers’ revolution of the twentieth century, he had to review the theoretical work of Marx and Engels in relation to the revolutionary struggles of 1848. Trotsky made no secret of the fact that his first major political and historical work, 1905, owed much to the revolutionary classics produced by Marx and Engels between 1848 and 1851.

The concept of “permanent revolution” was not a subjective invention of Trotsky’s mind. It was abstracted initially by Marx in 1850 from his analysis of the class relations in European society revealed during the course of the democratic revolutionary struggles of 1848. This concept was developed and enriched by Trotsky through his profound historical examination of the objective development of capitalist society, in which the transition from the era of democratic revolutions to social revolutions was carefully traced. Trotsky did not proceed from the concept to the external world. Rather, he explained how the concept reflected, at different stages in the development of the Marxist movement, the objective changes in the class struggle as a law-governed process.

Only an ignoramus or a liar — or, perhaps, an individual in whom both characteristics are embodied — would attempt to deny the continuity of the work of Trotsky with that of Marx and Engels.

As employed by Marx in his historic Address of the Central Authority to the League, the term “Revolution in Permanence” was the “battle cry” of the proletariat in its combined struggle against not only the remnants of the feudal aristocracy and the big bourgeoisie but also against the treacherous democratic petty bourgeoisie.

Marx’s “Revolution in Permanence”

The chief theoretical lessons drawn by Marx and Engels from the revolutions of 1848 was that in the struggle against feudal reaction, the bourgeoisie would betray its own democratic revolution out of fear of the rising proletariat. In this historically determined treachery, the democratic petty-bourgeoisie, for all its self-proclaimed devotion to democratic ideals and profession of “socialist” sympathies, would stand with the big bourgeoisie against the working class. As Marx warned:

“Far from desiring to transform the whole of society for the revolutionary proletarians, the democratic petty bourgeois strive for a change in social conditions by means of which the existing society will be made as tolerable and comfortable as possible for them. . . .”

“While the democratic petty bourgeois wish to bring the revolution to a conclusion as quickly as possible . . . it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent, until all more or less possessing classes have been forced out of their position of dominance, the proletariat has conquered state power, and the association of proletarians, not only in one country but in all the dominant countries of the world, has advanced so far that competition among the proletarians in these countries has ceased and that at least the decisive productive forces are concentrated in the hands of the proletarians. For us the issue cannot be the smoothing over of class antagonisms but the abolition of classes, not the improvement of the existing society but the foundation of a new one.”
(Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 10, International Publishers, pp. 280–81)

Marx and Engels insisted that the workers’ distrust had to be directed against the liberal democrats and that the independent interests of the proletariat be upheld against the democratic bourgeois in every political struggle.

As if anticipating the arguments made by the Stalinists during the period of the Popular Front betrayals 90 years later, Marx declared:

“At the present moment, when the democratic petty bourgeois are everywhere oppressed, they preach in general unity and reconciliation to the proletariat, they offer it their hand and strive for the establishment of a large opposition party which will embrace all shades of opinion in the democratic party, that is, they strive to entangle the workers in a party organization in which general social democratic phrases predominate, and serve to conceal their special interests, and in which the definite demands of the proletariat must not be brought forward for the sake of beloved peace. Such a union would turn out solely to their advantage and altogether to the disadvantage of the proletariat. The proletariat would lose its whole independent, laboriously achieved position and once more be reduced to an appendage of the official bourgeois democracy. This union must, therefore, be most decisively rejected.”
(Ibid., p. 281)

The exposure by Marx and Engels of the treacherous role of the bourgeois democrats, the latter’s cowardice before the openly reactionary parties and their hatred of the revolutionary proletariat, and their organic incapacity to complete in a clear and consistent fashion their “own” democratic revolution in those countries, as in Germany, where feudal political institutions had not been smashed as they had been in France during the 18th century, and the call by Marx and Engels for the “Revolution in Permanence,” was developed, under new historical conditions, by Trotsky as the theory of Permanent Revolution.

Barnes’ “problem” with the Permanent Revolution

Stalinists, centrists, and all petty-bourgeois radicals who hate the working class have always had a “problem” with the Permanent Revolution because it is the theoretical guide for the struggle against every form of class collaboration and subordination of the working class to the political agencies of the bourgeoisie. The “meaning” of the Permanent Revolution has been written about in countless books and documents produced by the Trotskyist movement — which once included the Socialist Workers Party — and its postulates have been illustrated and verified in the concrete experiences of revolutionary struggles throughout the globe.

In 1933, as part of the struggle to educate the ranks of the International Left Opposition on the necessity of founding the Fourth International — a political decision completely supported by the American Trotskyists — Trotsky restated the fundamental propositions of the theory of Permanent Revolution in a manner so simple that even Mr. Barnes could not fail to understand what it means.

“It follows then that in countries where, despite backwardness, the division into basic classes (the bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, the proletariat) cuts through the whole nation (China, India), the national-emancipation and bourgeois-democratic revolution cannot be brought to a conclusion without the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is precisely in this that the continuity (permanence) between the bourgeois and socialist revolution lies. The revolution in China passed through a number of stages; its road in India will be no less complicated and tortuous. We shall, of course, follow and analyze each stage. But the task of strategic prognosis is not to deduce the concrete stages and episodes but to formulate the basic tendency of revolutionary development. The basic tendency is indicated by the formula of permanent revolution, which is based on three concepts:

a. The national bourgeoisie, which during the initial stages seeks to utilize the revolution for itself (Kuomintang, Gandhi), invariably goes over to the other side of the barricades, to the feudal classes and the imperialist oppressors, in the course of the further development of the revolution.

b. The petty bourgeoisie (peasantry) can no longer play a leading role in the bourgeois revolution and, consequently, cannot take power. Hence flows the rejection of the bourgeois-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry.

c. Under the dictatorship of the proletariat, the bourgeois-democratic revolution passes over into the socialist revolution, which can triumph completely only as a link in the world revolution.

“The transgression of these principles has already resulted in great damage in China, India, Japan and other countries.”
(Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1932–33, Pathfinder, pp. 164–65)

This quote comes from a document published by the SWP’s own edition of Trotsky’s writings. It is a vital foundation of the theoretical and programmatic edifice of the Fourth International. Now, 50 years after the break with the Comintern by the Trotskyist movement, Barnes declares that the theory of Permanent Revolution represents a break with Leninism and that the Fourth International has 'been shoved off the axis of the Comintern as such...”

In other words, Stalin was right all along! The founding of the Fourth International was the act of renegades, wreckers and political saboteurs.

Deceitful doubletalk against Trotskyism

Of course, Barnes does not consider it politic to draw such explicit conclusions from the arguments he is presently advancing. Instead, he presents the following specimen of deceitful political double-talk:

“Yes, there’s a great thing that Trotsky has to give us that we haven’t gotten because we’ve been too Trotskyist [!] That’s right. That’s right. We were so Trotskyist that we didn’t read Lenin very much [!!] That is the truth. And that is not what Trotsky would have recommended. We were so Trotskyist that we didn’t read and study — not many people in this room have read and studied and absorbed — the unbelievable richness of the Communist International’s program, debates, reports and documents, that have become more and more important and are being applied in the world.”

It is hard to decide which of the two principal features of Barnes is more repulsive: his ignorance or his insolence? Where, but in the Trotskyist movement, did the study and development of Lenin’s work flourish during the decades when the counterrevolutionary apparatus of Stalinism dominated the international workers' movement? Had anyone, in those years when the Socialist Workers Party was the foremost Trotskyist party in the world, dared to make the remarks quoted above, he would have been denounced as an agent-provocateur and thrown out of the SWP. At its founding conference, in January 1938, the SWP adopted a Declaration of Principles and Constitution of the Socialist Workers Party which declared:

“The program of the revolutionary party rests upon the great principles of revolutionary Marxism expounded by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, and representing the summation of experience of the working class in its struggle for power. These principles have been verified in particular in the experiences of the last world war and by the victory of the Russian proletarian revolution. They have been concretized in the basic documents of the first four congresses of the Communist International and the fundamental programmatic documents put forward by the movement for the Fourth International in the past 14 years. The SWP stands upon the main line of principle developed in these documents.”
(The Founding of the Socialist Workers Party, Monad, p.189)

Now we have the ugly spectacle of the self-confessed ignoramus, Jack Barnes, who admits that he has failed to study Lenin, claiming that the SWP, in its present form, is not familiar with the documents of the Communist International because it’s been “too Trotskyist”! What Barnes is really saying is that the writings of Trotsky and the Fourth International represent not the continuity but a distortion of the Communist International.

“If we’re able to read Lenin, not through Trotsky’s eyes, but through Lenin’s eyes and the eyes of our work, we can read the Comintern documents not what we think is through permanent-revolution eyes, but through Comintern eyes and through our eyes and what’s happening, we’ll be able to go to Trotsky and read the richest political writings of any Marxist from 1923 to 1940, that are magnificent Marxist applications to the real revolutionary process around the world.

“We will get much, much more by reducing the permanent revolution, by pointing out, in my opinion, that it is not useful as a general term for our program.”

Little things like consistency are of no importance to Barnes. He does not take the trouble to explain how he reconciles, within just one sentence, his repudiation of the theory of Permanent Revolution with his declaration that “the richest political writings of any Marxist from 1923 to 1940” were written by Trotsky! Leaving aside this absurdity—which simply illustrates the totally deceitful character of Barnes’ speech—let us proceed to the more substantial claim: that the documents of the Comintern should be read through the “eyes of Lenin,” not those of Trotsky. In fact, what Barnes is really proposing is that history be revised in accordance with the politics of Stalin.

Barnes never states precisely to what Comintern documents he is referring. Rather, he deliberately leaves behind the impression that the Trotskyist movement has either misinterpreted or distorted the decisions of the Comintern. Permanent Revolution, he is claiming, is not part of the programmatic foundation of the Communist International. Therefore, the SWP must free itself of the harmful Trotskyist additives and reestablish the long-lost revolutionary continuity by going back to the real line of the Comintern before it was falsified by Trotsky in the course of his fight against Stalin.

The first four Congresses of the Communist International

If what Barnes says is true, then it would seem that a lot of people—especially the founders of the Trotskyist movement in the United States—have been living in a fool’s paradise. It was always the opinion of James P. Cannon that those who broke with Stalinism back in the 1920s and joined Trotsky’s struggle did so on the basis of a careful study of the Comintern documents which Barnes now suggests were never read. The position of the founders of the SWP had always been that they became Trotskyists to defend the programmatic heritage of the Communist International against the revisions of the Stalinist bureaucracy. At the meeting of the Political Committee of the Communist Party at which Cannon, Max Shachtman and Martin Abern were expelled, on October 27, 1928, they submitted a statement which declared:

“The attempts to revise the basic Marxist-Leninist doctrine with the spurious theory of socialism in one country have been rightly resisted by the Opposition led by Trotsky. A number of revisionist and opportunist errors in various fields of Comintern activity and its ideological life in general have proceeded from this false theory.”
(The Left Opposition in the U.S., 1928-31, Monad, p.32)

The Trotskyist movement has always traced its political continuity to the First Four Congresses of the Communist International, held between 1919 and 1922. These were held during Lenin’s lifetime, and the dominant theoretical and political role at these Congresses was played by Lenin and Trotsky. All the fundamental decisions of the first four congresses were incorporated by Trotsky into the programmatic foundations of the Fourth International. The specific contributions of Trotsky at these congresses, in the form of manifestos, documents, and speeches, were originally published by the Socialist Workers Party under the title, The First Five Years of the Communist International.

On the eve of the founding of the Fourth International, Trotsky wrote:

“The International Left Opposition stands on the ground of the first four congresses of the Comintern. This does not mean that it bows before every letter of its decisions, many of which had a purely conjunctural character and have been contradicted by subsequent events. But all the essential principles (in relation to imperialism and the bourgeois state, to democracy and reformism; problems of insurrection; the dictatorship of the proletariat; on relations with the peasantry and the oppressed nations; soviets; work in the trade unions; parliamentarism; the policy of the united front) remain even today the highest expression of proletarian strategy in the epoch of the general crisis of capitalism.”
(Documents of the Fourth International, Pathfinder, p. 23)

The independence of the proletarian movement

Try as hard as he likes, Mr. Barnes will not find a word about the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry” in the documents of the first four congresses. In all the discussions dealing with the struggle of the working class in the colonial countries, the Communist International adhered to the perspective of the Permanent Revolution. In the Preliminary Draft Theses on the National and the Colonial Questions ratified by the Second Congress of the Communist International, Lenin insisted on

“the need for a determined struggle against attempts to give a communist coloring to bourgeois-democratic liberation trends in the backward countries; the Communist International should support bourgeois-democratic national movements in colonial and backward countries only on conditions that, in these countries, the elements of future parties, which will be communist not only in name, are brought together and trained to understand their special tasks, i.e., those of the struggle against the bourgeois-democratic movements within their own nations. The Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in the colonial and backward countries, but should not merge with it, and should under all circumstances uphold the independence of the proletarian movement even if it is in its most embryonic form.” (Theses, Resolutions & Manifestos of the First Four Congresses of the Communist International, Ink Links, p. 80, emphasis added)

At the Fourth Congress of the Comintern, Lenin’s theses were reaffirmed and developed in the Theses on the Eastern Question, which again placed great stress on the importance of the independent organization of the working class and the struggle against the bourgeois nationalists. The Fourth Congress considered it necessary to issue a salutary warning to communists fighting in the colonial countries:

“Often, as the Second Congress of the Communist International pointed out, the representatives of bourgeois nationalism, exploiting the political and moral authority of Soviet Russia and adapting to the class instincts of the workers give their bourgeois-democratic aspirations a ‘socialist’ or a ‘communist’ guise, in order — though they may not themselves be aware of it — to divert the first embryonic proletarian groups from the real tasks of a class organization.” (Ibid., p. 413)

The political content of these resolutions are identical to the essential components of the theory of Permanent Revolution as elaborated by Trotsky in 1928:

“No matter what the first episodic stages of the revolution may be in the individual countries, the realization of the revolutionary alliance of the proletariat and peasantry is conceivable only under the leadership of the proletarian vanguard, organized in the Communist Party. This in turn means that the victory of the democratic revolution is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat which bases itself upon the alliance with the peasantry and solves first of all the tasks of the democratic revolution.” (Permanent Revolution, New Park, p. 153)

From the standpoint of the political continuity of revolutionary Marxism, the Trotskyist movement has always insisted on the vital difference between the first four, Leninist, congresses of the Comintern, and those later congresses which bore the mark of Stalinist degeneration. The Fifth Congress, held in 1924, took place against the backdrop of an increasingly vicious campaign against Trotsky and the Left Opposition. At this Congress Trotsky did not speak and the international delegates were left in the dark about the significance of the struggle that was raging inside the Russian Communist Party. Held less than a year after the disastrous defeat of the German revolution in the fall of 1923, this Congress made no serious assessment of the reasons for this defeat, and this glaring omission and related errors paved the way for the further degeneration of the Communist International.

The degeneration of the Communist International

The Sixth Congress was delayed for four years. Between 1924 and 1928 the Communist International pursued a grossly opportunistic line that led to defeats in Britain and China. In 1927 Trotsky and the most important leaders of the Left Opposition were expelled from the Communist Party and from the Communist International. The leadership of the Comintern passed into the hands of functionaries selected by Stalin. The critique of the program of the Sixth Congress constitutes the foundation document of Trotskyism as an international revolutionary tendency. Following the Sixth Congress the Comintern swung to the left and instituted the sectarian and adventurist policies of the “Third Period” — in which social democracy was pronounced to be the twin of fascism. In Germany, the application of the Comintern line split the working class and enabled Hitler to come to power in January 1933. With this defeat, which marked the definitive transition of the Comintern into the camp of counter­revolution, the Stalinists adopted a policy which was based on the dedication of the Kremlin bureaucracy to international collaboration with imperialism. The Seventh and last Congress of the Comintern held in 1935 officially implemented this new policy of “Popular Frontism” which was implemented in France and Spain to destroy the prospects of socialist revolution and lead the working class to defeat.

As can be seen from the historical outline, it is not the first four congresses but the last three that Barnes has in mind in all his references to the Communist International. The documents with which he is concerned are drawn not from the Comintern in the period when the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky predominated, but from the period when it was being transformed into an agency of the Soviet bureaucracy.

It must be stressed that Barnes’ “theoretical” work is pure charlatanry. He rummages through the past, quotes out of context, regurgitates the oldest Stalinist lies and falsifies history in order to build a case against Trotskyism. All his pretentious and ludicrous “discoveries” in the fields of politics, sociology, history and theory serve merely as a smokescreen for the complete transformation of the SWP into a party committed to a program of class collaboration with imperialism, internationally and within the United States. This is the real political content of the now open anti-Trotskyism of the Socialist Workers Party.

The evolution of the Socialist Workers Party over the last 20 years, culminating in the New Year’s Eve speech of Barnes, is the greatest vindication of the entire struggle waged by the International Committee against Pabloite revisionism. Only completely unprincipled opportunists, whose politics are determined by the most petty factional considerations, can still deny the great historical significance of the International Committee’s struggle against the unprincipled reunification of the SWP with the Pabloites in 1963. The question of what political forces represented the historical struggle for Trotskyism — Hansen and his Pabloite allies or the International Committee and the Socialist Labour League led by Gerry Healy — has been answered decisively by Barnes himself in his New Year’s Eve speech:
“We are not Trotskyists.”

These were the only true words uttered by Barnes in his entire speech, and they confirm that the reunification of 1963 was, as the International Committee insisted at the time, a betrayal by the SWP of Trotsky’s struggle to resolve the crisis of revolutionary leadership in the working class. It is now clear that had the International Committee bowed to Hansen’s dictates and accepted the reunification without the necessary political clarification of the issues which underlay the 1953 split, it would have surrendered the banner of world Trotskyism to the most reactionary agencies of world imperialism.

The very nature of the present SWP leadership is an expression of this fact. Barnes and his clique which controls the SWP are the direct products of the SWP’s break with the International Committee. It is not a coincidence that the entry of Barnes into the SWP and his rapid elevation into the leadership of the party coincided exactly with the initiation of open warfare by Hansen against the Socialist Labour League and the International Committee. The full significance of this coincidence has now been established.

Security and the Fourth International

Over the last eight years, in the course of its investigation into the circumstances surrounding the 1940 assassination of Leon Trotsky and the history of state provocations against the Fourth International, the International Committee has obtained and published mountains of evidence documenting the takeover of the Socialist Workers Party by intelligence agencies of the US Government. The central figure in this process was Joseph Hansen, whose long-secret connections with the Soviet Stalinist police and his transformation into an agent of the US Government have now been exposed.

In March of this year, at the trial of a lawsuit brought by a former member of the SWP, Alan Gelfand, against the Government and the SWP leadership, evidence established that Hansen and Barnes collaborated to conceal from the Trotskyist movement evidence of Hansen’s ties with both the Stalinists and the American FBI. Documents admitted into evidence showed that Hansen’s connections with the Stalinist police, the GPU, pre-dated the assassination of Trotsky; and that the FBI — with whom Hansen established a confidential relationship immediately after the assassination — knew of his connections with the GPU. The evidence established that the FBI, through the testimony of Louis Budenz, the Stalinist ex-editor of the Daily Worker who became a government stool pigeon, learned the identities of two leading GPU agents inside the SWP. One was Sylvia Franklin, the personal secretary of James P. Cannon between 1938 and 1947. The second was Joseph Hansen, who had served as Trotsky’s secretary in Coyoacan, Mexico, from 1937 until the assassination in August 1940.

In secret testimony before a federal grand jury in 1958, Sylvia Franklin substantiated the allegations of Budenz, admitted her role as a Stalinist agent inside the Socialist Workers Party, and provided information that was used by the Government in its 1960–61 prosecution of Dr. Robert Soblen on charges of war-time espionage for the Soviet Union.

However, no public disclosure was ever made of Budenz’s identification of Hansen as a Stalinist agent. This was because the FBI preferred that Hansen remain inside the SWP in order to carry out the disruption of the Trotskyist movement as required by US imperialism.

The degeneration of the Socialist Workers Party is not simply the product of Hansen’s activities as a Government spy. However, under conditions of deepening political crisis within the SWP during the 1950s, with the theoretical issues arising from the 1953 split still unresolved, with leaders such as Cannon far past their physical and political prime, and with factional in-fighting rampant among the top leaders, the work of Hansen assumed enormously destructive proportions. In the late 1950s, the collaboration of the Socialist Labour League with the American Trotskyists could have provided great assistance in overcoming the internal crisis within the SWP. Together with the changes in the political situation in the United States — especially the growth of the mass movement among black workers for civil rights — the SWP could have once again made great strides forward as a Trotskyist movement.

The “Carleton Twelve” infiltrate the SWP

Instead, Hansen’s activities were entirely directed toward poisoning the political atmosphere within the SWP to block fraternal discussions with the Socialist Labour League. Blatant lies such as “Healy opposes the Cuban Revolution” were employed by Hansen to incite the SWP membership against the SLL and to destroy the possibilities for political clarification. Within the SWP, those who stood with the International Committee were driven from positions of responsibility. In fact, the origins of the Barnes leadership can be traced to the removal of International Committee supporters from the leadership of the, Young Socialist Alliance.

After a mysterious trip to Cuba which was funded by the Ford Foundation and a brief sojourn in the dubious Fair Play for Cuba Committee, ex-Republican Party supporter Jack Barnes, son of a businessman in Dayton, Ohio, suddenly became “radicalized” and joined the Young Socialist Alliance with his wife “Betsy” Stone. Both had attended Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota — a college for the sons and daughters of the affluent middle class at which, according to the Church Report of 1976, the CIA carried out a recruiting program. Although no branch of the SWP or YSA ever existed at Carleton College, Barnes and Stone became the first of 13 students from Carleton who, within a space of four years, joined the Socialist Workers Party. Of these individuals, 12 eventually became members of its national committee. At the present time, every leading position inside the SWP is held by ex-Carleton students.

These students — who include Mary Alice Waters, the SWP national chairman; Douglas Jenness and Cindy Jaquith, editors of The Militant; Larry Seigle, member of the SWP Political Committee — were all elevated into the leadership of the SWP under the supervision of Joseph Hansen.

In April 1982, in his testimony at a deposition taken by attorneys of Alan Gelfand to prepare for trial, Farrell Dobbs — national secretary of the SWP from 1954 to 1972 — stated that he knew nothing of Barnes’ personal background and that he knew of no particular qualifications which led to the selection of Barnes as SWP leader. Dobbs also admitted that he did not know of the common Carleton backgrounds of the principal SWP leaders. But while Dobbs was kept in the dark, Hansen was providing the necessary political training for the agents who had been infiltrated into the SWP leadership from Carleton.

Members devoted to Trotskyism are purged

All the political implications of this state takeover of the SWP are revealed in the present policies of the organization. The attack on Trotskyism is being accompanied by a vicious purge of all members suspected of the slightest political independence, or, what is still worse, devotion to Trotskyist principles.

The organizational methods of the Barnes leadership led to a protest by a veteran SWP member, who complained:

“National Committee elections are rigged. Opposition political tendencies are outlawed. Policy decisions are determined by the leadership in secret and not submitted to the members for approval. Critics of the leadership’s policies are driven out of the party, threatened or put on trial. All key local branch decisions are made by the national leadership rather than by the branches. The control commission, which is supposed to defend party democracy, is used by the leadership to terrorize or silence any opposition.”
(Internal Information Bulletin, September 1982, p. 80.)

Dozens expelled in the past 18 months

For issuing this letter, Harry De Boer, who joined the Trotskyist movement in 1933 and who played a leading role in the 1934 Minneapolis General Strike, was expelled from the SWP — along with Jake Cooper, also a founder member of the SWP who served Trotsky as a guard in Coyoacán. De Boer and Cooper are among dozens of SWP members who have been expelled on trumped-up charges during the past 18 months. At the most recent meeting of the SWP national committee — a rubber-stamp body controlled by Barnes — the appeals of more than 20 expelled members were rejected out of hand.

Another recent maneuver has been the cancellation of the SWP’s biennial convention that had been scheduled for this August. We can safely predict that before the curtain goes up on the next SWP convention — if one is held at all — the purge of Trotskyists from the SWP will have been completed.

The methods used to drive them out of the Party have been described graphically in an internal document recently written by Milt Alvin, a founding member of the SWP:

“Instead of acting like a Party Court of Justice, the control commission has recently taken on the characteristics of the Spanish Inquisition. Comrades live in fear of a knock on their doors that might bring a couple of representatives from the commission to ask all kinds of questions, deserved or undeserved. It is time to halt this kind of business that only creates an atmosphere in the party that demoralizes some members and drives them out.”
(International Internal Discussion Bulletin, May 1983, p. 30.)

Two recently expelled members of the SWP, Dianne F. and Carole S., wrote a letter dated July 11, 1983 to the party rank and file. The former joined the SWP in 1967 and the latter in 1965.

“In its entire history,” the letter states, “the SWP has never experienced so many individual trials and expulsions in any two-year period as it has had in the last eight months. Yet by a decision of the May plenum [of the National Committee] this information is being kept from the membership. That is, NC members and organizers are expressly forbidden to report on this plenum report. Why?”

The authors of the letter cite specific examples of arbitrary expulsions by the Barnes leadership. In the case of DH, a member of the San Francisco branch of the SWP for 11 years,

“D was charged with disrupting a branch meeting and heckling the chairperson in a threatening manner. The discussion was on the El Salvador initiative and a comrade who had requested the discussion had not been allowed to speak. D protested the undemocratic chairing of the meeting and without warning was expelled from the branch meeting and a few weeks later, from the party.”

In another case, AM of the San Francisco branch was expelled because

“She distributed copies of a poem she wrote. The poem celebrated the life and work of Anne Chester, and copies were given to friends, relatives and comrades at the party’s memorial meeting. Many knew A had written such a poem and had requested a copy. Never anticipating that anyone would perceive this as being in opposition to the organizational principles of the party, A told several people she’d be sure to bring enough copies so they could get them at the memorial meeting. And after 13 years in the party, A found herself expelled.”

In still another case, MS of the Manhattan branch, a member of the SWP for 15 years, was expelled for distributing unauthorized material. According to the letter,

“The ‘unauthorized material’ was a copy of remarks he had made in a branch meeting on party norms. These he sent with a letter to a long-time comrade and friend. In those remarks M stated that a party leader, Barry Sheppard [a long-time associate of Barnes], had taped a phone conversation with M without his knowledge or consent. At least one other person, RM, testified at M’s trial that he too had been taped by Sheppard without his knowledge. M was expelled for sending out his remarks to another comrade.”

Behind these organizational methods lie the objective interests of American imperialism, which are clearly expressed in Barnes’ speech and the entire political line of the SWP. The attack on the theory of permanent revolution, the revival of the Stalinist line on “two stage” revolutions and on “two class” worker and peasant parties have definite political significance. All these new formulations, borrowed from Stalinism, are directed toward the legitimizing of open class collaboration.

Even within the SWP, it is becoming increasingly clear to the membership that the Barnes leadership is orienting the practice of the party ever more openly toward joint work with the Stalinist Communist Party on the basis of direct collaboration with the capitalist Democratic Party. The now explicit abandonment by the SWP of even the pretense of a revolutionary line was made clear by Barnes when he told the YSA: “Even in the United States, even in North America, the expropriation of the capitalists will not be done all at once overnight. That stage will also take time.”

What is this if not a complete renunciation of the perspective of the socialist revolution? It parallels completely the political line upon which the Stalinists organize their interventions inside of and in support of the Democratic Party. Barnes’ political formulation opens the door for alliances with “left” Democrats who favor “socialism” but who insist that the nationalization of the means of production is a prospect for the distant future. In this epoch of the death agony of capitalism, this reformist program can mean only the defeat of the working class.

Political line confirms role as government agents

In the July 22, 1983 issue of The Militant, the SWP devoted an entire page to an enthusiastic report of the appearance of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a notorious political huckster for the Democratic Party, before the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). The SWP made no criticism of the perspective advanced by Jackson and LULAC President Tony Bonilla at this convention: to register millions of Black and Hispanic voters so that they can cast their ballots for the Democratic Party in the 1984 Presidential elections.

As The Militant reported, with no criticism, “Jackson and Bonilla hailed the election of (Democrat) Harold Washington as mayor of Chicago as the first big victory for the new Black-Latino coalition. ‘With the victory in Chicago we will begin to get the people from both communities to realize the significant impact we can have,’ Bonilla said.”

The Militant continued: “The recent election of Democrats Federico Pena as Mayor of Denver and Tony Anaya as governor of New Mexico were pointed to as examples of the power of a united effort.”

The fact that this is not simply an isolated article but rather the expression of a definite orientation to the Democratic Party was made absolutely clear in the very next issue of The Militant (July 29, 1983), in which the first part of Barnes’ speech to the notorious May plenum was reprinted. As the Carleton agents prepared to do a hatchet job on loyal SWP members, Barnes lauded Jackson:

“Jackson and others are presenting a social program that is to the left of anything any of the other Democratic candidates for president are saying. And they present a picture of the depth of the crisis of capitalism that is a little closer to being accurate than what the ‘major’ Democratic Party candidates are saying. You see interviews on television with working people coming out of these meetings in churches and town halls in New Hampshire saying things like, ‘That man has more to say than any other candidate.’”

Declaring that “the nationwide discussion sparked by Jackson’s initiative is such an important one for us to be part of,” Barnes insisted that the SWP

“should take as our starting point for participating in the discussion that is opening up the same starting point that the major figures in the labor movement and in the organizations of the oppressed nationalities who are involved in this claim to take. I stress, what they claim to take. Let’s take their words at face value for starters. The starting point is that the alliance of labor, Blacks, and Latinos; the working class and the oppressed nationalities—however it gets formulated—must be formed.”

It is not possible within the confines of this statement to reply in depth to Barnes’ characterization of blacks and latinos as “oppressed nationalities.” Let us merely note at this point that this characterization is totally anti-Marxist, ignores all that Lenin wrote on the question of oppressed nations, and undermines the struggle to unite all sections of the working class, regardless of skin color and national ancestry, against the capitalist class.

Nationalism and the Democratic Party

Neither blacks or hispanics within the United States constitute a separate nation. The overwhelming majority of American blacks and hispanics are part of the working class. Those who refer to them as “oppressed nationalities” are doing so only to avoid acknowledging the class differentiations which exist among blacks and other oppressed minorities within the United States.

Barnes is, in reality, pandering to the petty-bourgeois elements among blacks and hispanics, and cynically working with them in order to build a bridge to the Democratic Party. Thus, Barnes’ so-called “alliance of labor, Blacks and Latinos” is what every Democratic Party politician, from Mondale to Jackson, calls the “New Deal coalition.” Barnes’ enthusiastic response to the media hype around Jesse Jackson, a petty-bourgeois con­man if there ever was one, establishes a de facto political alliance between the SWP and the Democratic Party.

Here we come to what is, in political terms, the bottom line of the SWP’s denunciation of Trotskyism: the complete rejection of the struggle for the political independence of the working class from the capitalist parties and their toadies.

The political line of the SWP leaders does not contradict their role as government agents but confirms it. The collaboration of imperialism and Stalinism against the world socialist revolution is a political fact of life. This material relation has found its expression within the Trotskyist movement in the form of Pabloite revisionism, a political tendency whose capitulation to imperialism has as­sumed the historically determined form of adaptation to the counter­revolutionary program of Stalinism, which includes covering-up for the political and even physical crimes of the bureaucracy against the working class and its revolutionary vanguard.

It is by no means accidental that the Pabloites throughout Europe and Latin America have continued to defend Hansen and Barnes despite all the evidence that they are agents. No matter how provocative the attacks by Barnes on the Fourth International, Mandel and the rest of the Pabloites continue to treat their political differences with the SWP as a dispute within the “family.” The counter­revolutionary logic of Pabloism binds them to Barnes and the SWP just as the counter-revolutionary state interests represented by Barnes could find a cover and appropriate political expression in the logic of Pabloism.

The revisionists invariably justify their silence on the evidence exposing Barnes as an agent by claiming that they are only interested in “political questions.” As if the infiltration of the SWP’s central leadership by imperialist agents were not a “political question”! Despite their supposedly single-minded concentration on politics, they are unable to explain the political evolution of the SWP. Far from detracting from the vital political struggle against Pabloism, the exposure of the imperialist conspiracy personified by Barnes and the entire SWP leadership poses the theoretical and political implications of the struggle against Pabloite revisionism in all their historical acuteness. The International Committee’s exposure of the Government takeover of the SWP leadership is as central to its struggle against revisionism as Trotsky’s exposure of the GPU was to the struggle of the Fourth International against Stalinism. The International Committee does not view the Barnes clique as a political tendency that is to be rebutted and corrected, but as an excrescence of imperialist reaction that is to be exposed, politically smashed, and driven out of the workers’ movement.

Significance of the founding of the International Committee

Thirty years have passed since the Socialist Workers Party issued the call for the expulsion of the Pabloites and for the formation of the International Committee. As he prepared the publication of the Open Letter, Cannon explained to the SWP National Committee the significance of the break with Pabloism:

“Leadership is the one unsolved problem of the working class of the entire world. The only barrier between the working class of the world and socialism is the unsolved problem of leadership. That is what is meant by ‘the question of the party.’ That is what the ‘Transitional Program’ means when it states that the crisis of the labor movement is the crisis of leadership. That means until the working class solves the problem of creating the revolutionary party, the conscious expression of the historic process, which can lead the masses in struggle, the issue remains undecided. It is the most important of all questions—the question of the Party.

“And if our break with Pabloism — as we see it now clearly — if it boils down to one point and is concentrated in one point, that is it: the question of the party. That seems clear to us now, as we have seen the development of Pabloism in action. The essence of Pabloist revisionism is the overthrow of that part of Trotskyism which is today its most vital part — the conception of the crisis of mankind as the crisis of leadership of the labor movement summed up in the question of the party.” (Speeches to the Party, Pathfinder, p.182 )

But within just 10 years, the Socialist Workers Party, including Cannon himself, had abandoned this perspective, reunified with the Pabloites, and the process of degeneration became irreversible. The sharpest expression of this political degeneration was the prostration of the SWP before the capitalist state, the infiltration of hundreds of informers into the SWP ranks, and the insertion of the Carleton agents — under the supervision of Hansen — into the party leadership.

Under the leadership of Hansen and Barnes, the SWP was transformed into a staging ground for imperialist provocations against the international workers’ movement and the Fourth International. Now the last pretenses of any connection to Trotskyism are being abandoned. This development is an expression of the qualitative deepening of the world capitalist crisis, concentrated in the global debt crisis, whose revolutionary implications are clear to the American and European bourgeoisie. The emergence of Solidarity in Poland and the inability of the bureaucracy to crush this movement, despite the imposition of martial law and the papal blessing bestowed upon Jaruzelski, proves that the political revolution against Stalinism is at hand. Thus imperialism faces an unprecedented wave of revolutionary struggles on a world scale — both in the former colonial countries and in the advanced imperialist centers, above all in the United States — without being able to rely on the ability of Stalinism to destroy these revolutions. It is under these conditions, when the historical conditions are most favorable for Trotskyists to resolve the crisis of leadership and take the power, that imperialism requires its agents in the Socialist Workers Party to join openly in the counterrevolutionary alliance of imperialism and Stalinism against the Fourth International.

The Workers League

All these conspiracies, however, will fail miserably. For the past 20 years the International Committee has waged an implacable struggle against the betrayal of Trotskyism by the Socialist Workers Party. The Workers League is, in fact, the direct product of the International Committee’s defense of Trotskyist principles in the United States. Those leaders of the Young Socialist Alliance who were expelled from the youth organization and then from the SWP itself to make room for Barnes and the other Carleton policemen (and police women) were to become the founders of the Workers League. Even after the SWP broke politically with the International Committee and had removed the supporters of the IC from all positions of leadership inside the SWP and YSA, the latter continued to fight for Trotskyist principles.

In 1964, the Pabloite allies of the SWP in Ceylon joined the bourgeois coalition government of Madame Bandaranaike. For the first time in history, a party claiming to be Trotskyist, the Pabloite LSSP, openly passed over to the other side of the class barricades. The full historical significance of Pabloite revisionism as an agency of imperialism was now made clear for all to see. When the supporters of the International Committee inside the SWP demanded a discussion on the meaning of the Pabloite betrayal in Ceylon, Hansen had them expelled from the SWP. These nine expelled members formed the American Committee for the Fourth International and two years later, in 1966, founded the Workers League.

It was on the basis of this politically honorable stand that the founders of the Workers League carried forward the traditions of the struggle for Trotskyism in the United States that James P. Cannon had begun in 1928.

It must be added that in 1971, the Ceylonese Pabloites remained members of and supported the Bandaranaike regime as it crushed an insurrection of peasant youth and ordered the execution of thousands. Throughout the spring of 1971, the rivers of Ceylon were clogged with the bodies of murdered youth.

The struggle of the International Committee did not begin with the aim of exposing agents but with the determination to defend Marxist principles. The foundation of this long struggle has been an unshakeable belief in the revolutionary role of the working class, a profound scientific conviction in the correctness of Trotsky’s characterization of the epoch as that of capitalism’s death agony, and complete confidence in the historic mission of the Fourth International — whose traditions and principles are embodied in the Workers League and the International Committee.

July 25, 1983