117. After World War II, the Fourth International faced a complex situation. Due to the betrayals of the Stalinist parties, by the end of the 1940s the bourgeoisie had managed to reassert its power and lay the foundations for the post-war economic boom. The political pressures of the new situation found expression in the emergence of a revisionist tendency within the Fourth International, led by Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel. The Pabloites abandoned Trotsky’s assessment of the counterrevolutionary character of Stalinism and ultimately rejected Trotskyism and the Theory of Permanent Revolution, attempting to revise the fundamental principles of Marxism. Instead of fighting for the construction of the Fourth International as the revolutionary leadership of the working class, they developed a policy which directed all Trotskyist organizations to liquidate themselves within the Stalinist, Social Democratic or bourgeois nationalist movements in their countries.

118. The revisionism led by Pablo and Mandel expressed a certain political continuity with the petty-bourgeois opposition that emerged within the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the US in 1939-40 under the leadership of Max Shachtman and James Burnham, the “Three Theses” group of the International Communists of Germany (Internationale Kommunisten Deutschlands, IKD) in 1941, also known as the “Retrogressionists,” and the Felix Morrow-Albert Goldman tendency that emerged in the SWP in 1944. The basic political conception that bound them all together was the denial of the revolutionary potential of the working class. However, as David North later analyzed in the Preface to the Turkish edition of The Heritage We Defend:

The precise forms taken by this rejection differed. Shachtman speculated that the Soviet Union represented a new form of ‘collectivist’ society, controlled by a bureaucratic elite that was in the process of becoming, or already was, a new ruling class. A variant of the Shachtmanite theory was that the Soviet Union was a form of ‘state capitalism.’ The ‘Three Theses’ group, followed by the Morrow-Goldman tendency, arrived at the conclusion that the socialist revolution was a historically lost cause.^[1]

In a demoralized reaction to the ostensible triumph of fascism, the “Retrogressionists” rejected Lenin and Trotsky’s conception of the epoch of imperialist war and world socialist revolution, concluding that the struggle for socialism had been replaced by a drive for “national independence” in a historical regression. In a document dated 1943, the IKD opposed the Fourth International’s call for a “United Socialist States of Europe,” arguing that

Before Europe can unite itself into “socialist states,” it must first separate itself again into independent and autonomous states. It is entirely a matter of the split-up, enslaved, hurled-back peoples and the proletariat constituting themselves again as a nation…

We can formulate the task in the following way: To reconstruct the whole screwed-back development, to regain all the achievements of the bourgeoisie (including the labor movement), to reach the highest accomplishments and excel them. …

However, the most pressing political problem is the century-old problem of the springtime of industrial capitalism and of scientific socialism—conquest of political freedom, establishment of democracy (also for Russia), as the indispensable precondition for national liberation and the founding of the labor movement.^[2]

119. IKD leader Josef Weber later claimed that “The Fourth International is dead, and, moreover, it has never existed,”[3] completely breaking with the Fourth International and Marxism and defending a semi-anarchist environmentalist utopianism. One of his main disciples, Murray Bookchin, would inspire Abdullah Öcalan, leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), to develop his ideas of “Democratic Confederalism” after his capture and imprisonment by the Turkish state in 1999. Öcalan would declare himself a “disciple” of Bookchin. As David North noted in the Preface to the Turkish edition of The Heritage We Defend, this was a perfect example of the logic of class interests dominating politics:

By the early 1950s, the retrogressionist conceptions had been recast within the framework of anarchist and ecological theory. Somewhat later, via the efforts of the anti-Marxist Bookchin, the conceptions of Josef Weber developed a broader social and political base within diverse sections of the petty-bourgeoisie, including Kurdish nationalists, whose political activities involve endless maneuvering and collaboration with the major imperialist powers.^[4]

120. Only after careful deliberation did the Fourth International characterise the Stalinist regimes in the so-called buffer states of Eastern Europe as “deformed workers’ states,” in response to their abrupt turn in 1947–1948 to the nationalisation of industry and commencement of bureaucratic state planning. Unlike the Soviet Union, which was the product of a proletarian revolution, these states were “deformed” from the outset. The changes to property relations did not issue from mass organs of proletarian power, Soviets, led by a Bolshevik-type party, but were imposed from above by Stalinist parties that suppressed any independent activity of the working class.

121. However, Pablo transformed what had been a provisional characterisation of regimes of a transitory character into a long-term perspective for “centuries” of “deformed workers’ states” that imbued Stalinism with a historically progressive role. Adapting to the framework of the Cold War, Pablo replaced the struggle of the international proletariat against capitalism with a new “objective reality” that “consists essentially of the capitalist regime and the Stalinist world.”

122. Pablo’s analysis wrote off the class conflict, the independent interests of the working class, and, therefore, the historical necessity of the Fourth International. For him, the task of the Fourth International was to function as a pressure group within the existing Stalinist organizations. Pabloism extended the false claims made on behalf of the Stalinist bureaucracy to the bourgeois nationalist movements in the semi-colonial and underdeveloped countries. In place of a class analysis, Pablo spoke of “integration into the real mass movement.” In a report delivered to the Third World Congress of the Fourth International in August-September 1951, he drew the conclusions of this perspective by declaring:

There is not now a single Trotskyist organization, which, either as a whole or in part, does not seriously, profoundly, concretely understand the necessity of subordinating all organizational considerations, of formal independence or otherwise, to real integration into the mass movement wherever it expresses itself in each country, or to integration in an important current of this movement which can be influenced.^[5]

123. This re-orientation represented a complete rejection of the Theory of Permanent Revolution and the struggle for the political independence of the working class from the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois leaderships in the backward capitalist countries. In Latin America, this liquidationism

called for ‘participation and activity, free from all sectarianism, in all mass movements and all organizations which express, even in an indirect and confused fashion, the aspirations of the masses which may, for example, take the channel of the Peronist trade unions or the Bolivian MNR movement, or the APRA in Peru, the ‘laborite’ movement of Vargas, or Democratic Action in Venezuela.^[6]

It also declared:

Elsewhere, as in South Africa, Egypt, the North African colonies, in the Near East, we understand that the eventual formation of a revolutionary party now takes the road of unconditional support of the national, anti-imperialist mass movement and of integration into this movement.^[7]

124. The November 1953 Open Letter to Trotskyists around the world by James P. Cannon, leader of the SWP in the United States, represented a historic step in ensuring the continuity of the Fourth International against Pabloite opportunism and liquidationism. The Open Letter became a rallying point for orthodox Trotskyists and led to the creation of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) with the support of the British and French sections. The letter summarized the essential principles of Trotskyism as follows:

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 today underlines the danger 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 can be accomplished only under the leadership of the working class in society. But the working class itself faces a crisis in leadership although the world relationship 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 in 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 in Russia, only later, as it betrays their confidence, to hurl them back into the arms of Social Democracy, into apathy, or back into illusions in capitalism. The penalty for these betrayals is paid for by the working people in the form of consolidation of fascist or monarchist forces, and new outbreaks of wars 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, know how to fight Stalinism (which in the final analysis is a petty-bourgeois agency of imperialism) without capitulating to imperialism.[8]

125. The Open Letter strongly opposed Pablo’s slanders against Chinese Trotskyists as “sectarians” and “fugitives from a revolution,” stating:

Contrary to the impression deliberately created by the Pablo faction, the Chinese Trotskyists acted as genuine revolutionary representatives of the Chinese proletariat. Through no fault of theirs they have been singled out as victims by the Mao regime in the way that Stalin singled out for execution the entire generation of Lenin’s Bolsheviks in the USSR, emulating the Noskes and Scheidemanns of Germany who singled out the Luxemburgs and Liebknechts of the 1918 revolution for execution. But Pablo’s line of conciliationism toward Stalinism leads him inexorably to touch up to the Mao regime couleur de rose while putting gray tints on the firm, principled stand of our Chinese comrades.^[9]

126. After a thorough consideration of the evolution of the Maoist regime, the Socialist Workers Party in the US and the ICFI designated China as a deformed workers’ state. In a resolution adopted at its 1955 national convention, the SWP provided a detailed analysis of the Chinese revolution, its impact on world politics and the transformation of class relations within China as well as of the Stalinist CCP and its policies. Summing up the process, the document concluded that after the 1949 revolution,

The objective dynamics, the inner logic of the struggle against imperialist intervention forced the bureaucracy to break with capitalism, nationalise the decisive means of production, impose the monopoly of foreign trade, institute planning, and in this way clear the road for the introduction of production relations and institutions that constitute the foundation of a workers’ state, which China is today, even though a Stalinist caricature thereof. China is a deformed workers’ state because of the Stalinist deformation of the Third Chinese Revolution.^[10]

127. The subsequent evolution of the Chinese regime, which restored capitalist property relations in the 1980s and transformed the country into the world’s premier cheap labour platform, has fully vindicated the International Committee’s principled position. In opposition to the Pabloites, the ICFI insisted that, without the overthrow of the CCP regime through a political revolution led by the working class, the Maoists, guided by the nationalist perspective of “Socialism in One Country,” would inevitably become the agents of capitalist restoration as was foreseen by Trotsky in The Revolution Betrayed. At the same time, the ICFI opposed various “state capitalist” tendencies that dismissed the enormous sweep of the Chinese Revolution, the subsequent nationalisation of private enterprises and the institution of economic planning, and in doing so, sided openly or tacitly with imperialism against the deformed workers’ state.