136. By the late 1950s, under the pressure of postwar growth, the SWP was adapting to middle-class movements and retreating from the struggle against Pabloism. The Cuban Revolution of 1959 further strengthened the opportunist faction within the SWP and brought it closer to the Pabloite “International Secretariat.”

137. The petty-bourgeois movement led by Fidel Castro came to power through a guerrilla war based on the peasantry, on the basis of a bourgeois nationalist program. When its partial nationalizations brought it into conflict with US imperialism, the Castro regime declared itself “communist” and sought the support of the Soviet Union.

138. By December 1960, the SWP declared that the nationalization of the largely agricultural economy made Cuba a “workers’ state,” ignoring the Castro regime’s open hostility to any independent action by the working class and the absence of any organ of workers’ power. Moreover, the SWP concluded that the nationalizations carried out by the Castro regime meant that a revolution could be made with “blunt weapons” under the leadership of “unconscious Marxists.” These “unconscious Marxists” would bring about socialism under the pressure of objective conditions and without the active participation of the working class. The SWP’s glorification of Castroism and guerrilla warfare in Latin America was accompanied by an adaptation to petty-bourgeois protest politics in the US and a rapprochement with the Pabloites.

139. The SWP’s revisions developed in relation to Castroism completely ignored Trotsky’s arguments in the fight against the Burnham-Shachtman minority in 1939-1940. As David North later explained in The Heritage We Defend:

In 1939–40, during the battle inside the SWP over the class nature of the Soviet state, Trotsky taunted the Burnham-Shachtman minority to explicitly state what strategic and programmatic conclusions were to be drawn from their proposed finding that the Soviet Union was no longer to be considered a workers’ state. In this way, he made clear that the struggle was not simply a dispute over terminology. The minority’s rejection of the Fourth International’s designation of the USSR as a workers’ state was inextricably connected to profound differences with Trotskyism on all fundamental questions.

Similarly, the question of Cuba was not merely a difference over terminology. Hansen sought to evade the formulation of a principled explanation of the implications, both for Marxist theory and the program of the Fourth International, of the definition of Cuba as a workers’ state. He refused to state precisely what conclusions the Trotskyist movement ought to draw from the alleged formation of a workers’ state under the petty-bourgeois non-Marxist leadership of Castro.^[1]

140. The SWP’s assessment of the Cuban revolution had far-reaching consequences, which in essence represented a denial of the foundations of Marxism. The declaration that a workers’ state could be built through non-Marxist petty-bourgeois leaderships was a clear denial of the decisive role of the international working class and the Fourth International in the world socialist revolution and of the Theory of Permanent Revolution.

141. In 1961-63 the British section of the ICFI, the Socialist Labor League (SLL), with the support of the French section, led the struggle for Trotskyist principles against the opportunism and Pabloite orientation of the SWP. In a January 2, 1961 letter to the SWP National Committee, the SLL National Committee, insisting on a political debate on the fundamental issues that led to the 1953 split, wrote:

The greatest danger confronting the revolutionary movement is liquidationism, flowing from a capitulation either to the strength of imperialism or of the bureaucratic apparatuses in the Labour movement, or both. Pabloism represents, even more clearly now than in 1953, this liquidationist tendency in the international Marxist movement...

Any retreat from the strategy of political independence of the working class and the construction of revolutionary parties will take on the significance of a world-historical blunder on the part of the Trotskyist movement...

It is because of the magnitude of the opportunities opening up before Trotskyism, and therefore the necessity for political and theoretical clarity, that we urgently require a drawing of the lines against revisionism in all its forms. It is time to draw to a close the period in which Pabloite revisionism was regarded as a trend within Trotskyism. Unless this is done we cannot prepare for the revolutionary struggles now beginning.[2]

142. The SLL’s May 1961 criticism of the adaptation of the SWP to the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalist leaderships in the underdeveloped countries was a powerful defense of the Theory of Permanent Revolution:

An essential of revolutionary Marxism in this epoch is the theory that the national bourgeoisie in under-developed countries is incapable of defeating imperialism and establishing an independent national state. This class has ties with imperialism and it is of course incapable of an independent capitalist development, for it is part of the capitalist world market and cannot compete with the products of the advanced countries...

While it is true that the stage of ‘independence’ reached by countries like Ghana, and the national independence movements led by men like Mboya of Kenya, acts as a stimulant to national liberation movements in other countries, the fact remains that Nkrumah, Mboya, Nasser, Kassem, Nehru, Soekarno, and their like, represent the national bourgeoisie of their own countries. The dominant imperialist policy-makers both in the USA and Britain recognize full well that only by handing over political ‘independence’ to leaders of this kind, or accepting their victory over feudal elements like Farouk and Nuries-Said, can the stakes of international capital and the strategic alliances be preserved in Asia, Africa, and Latin America...

It is not the job of Trotskyists to boost the role of such nationalist leaders. They can command the support of the masses only because of the betrayal of leadership by Social-Democracy and particularly Stalinism, and in this way they become buffers between imperialism and the mass of workers and peasants. The possibility of economic aid from the Soviet Union often enables them to strike a harder bargain with the imperialists, even enables more radical elements among the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois leaders to attack imperialist holdings and gain further support from the masses. But, for us, in every case the vital question is one of the working class in these countries gaining political independence through a Marxist party, leading the poor peasantry to the building of Soviets, and recognizing the necessary connections with the international socialist revolution. In no case, in our opinion, should Trotskyists substitute for that the hope that the nationalist leadership should become socialists. The emancipation of the working class is the task of the workers themselves.^[3]

143. As the SWP increasingly rejected the necessity of building independent Trotskyist parties in the backward countries, it extended the Cuban analysis to the petty-bourgeois nationalist movement led by Ben Bella in Algeria. In a July 1962 statement, “Trotskyism Betrayed: The SWP accepts the political method of Pabloite revisionism,” the SLL National Committee stated:

In our communications with the SWP we provoked a strong reaction by daring to suggest that talk about “confirming the permanent revolution” without the revolutionary parties was nonsense. In practice, however, both the Pabloites and the SWP find themselves prostrate before the petty-bourgeois nationalist leaders in Cuba and Algeria. Our view of this question is not opposed to that of the SWP simply in terms of who can best explain a series of events. It is a question rather of the actual policy and program of Trotskyist leadership in these backward countries. The theory of permanent revolution is, like all Marxist theory, a guide to action; analysis becomes the pointer to the need to organise an independent and determined working class and its allies in the peasantry for their own soviet power. “Confirming the permanent revolution” is not an accolade to be conferred by Marxists on approved nationalist leaders but a task for which Marxists themselves have the responsibility.^[4]

144. The SLL placed these experiences in a broader international and historical context of the treacherous role of Stalinism:

Besides Cuba and Algeria—and in order to understand both of these—the experience of Iraq, Iran, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Bolivia, Indo-China, and many other countries must be taken into account. What would emerge from such a historical analysis is the true role played by those leaders of the working class who have proceeded from the theory of “two stages.” Stalinism, far from being “forced to play a progressive role,” has in fact disarmed and betrayed the advanced workers in every one of these countries and has enabled a bourgeois government to establish temporary stabilisation—which is all imperialism can hope for at the present stage. It is in this sense and this sense only that the “theory of Permanent Revolution has been confirmed.”^[5]

145. Without any discussion of the theoretical and political issues that had led to the 1953 split, the SWP, and groups in many Latin American countries that had hitherto been affiliated to the ICFI and traditionally looked to the US Trotskyists for leadership, formally reunified with the Pabloites at their Seventh Congress in Rome in June 1963 to form the “United Secretariat.” In what was a complete rejection of the Theory of Permanent Revolution, the main resolution of the Pabloite “World Congress” concluded from the Cuban revolution that “the weakness of the enemy in the backward countries has opened the possibility of coming to power with a blunted instrument.” With this, they openly denied the necessity of the working class and the Fourth International in the socialist revolution. While the Pabloites’ glorification of Castro, Che and the armed guerrilla struggle would directly contribute to the historic defeats in Latin America by serving to isolate revolutionary elements from the working class, it would also prevent the development of Trotskyism in countries like Turkey.

146. The importance of the struggle for the principles of Trotskyism against opportunism and revisionism was clearly demonstrated in the “Great Betrayal” that took place in Sri Lanka within a year. In June 1964, the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), then the Sri Lankan section of the Pabloite United Secretariat, joined the bourgeois government of Sirima Bandaranaike. For the first time in history, a party claiming to be Trotskyist had entered directly into the service of the bourgeoisie. As Gerry Healy, leader of the SLL in Britain, explained, the political responsibility for the LSSP’s betrayal lay with the Pabloite United Secretariat: “These people [Pablo, Mandel and Pierre Frank] must take responsibility, since they have been in constant communication with the LSSP in Ceylon, for the past 18 years. The answer [to the question of the LSSP’s degeneration] lies not in Ceylon, but in an international study of the struggle against Pabloite revisionism. The real architects of the coalition reside in Paris.”[6] Healy himself traveled to Sri Lanka to intervene in the LSSP congress, while the Pabloites everywhere refused the SLL’s demands to discuss this betrayal. The LSSP’s rejection of proletarian internationalism and its adoption of Sinhala chauvinism against the Tamil minority, in the service of the bourgeoisie, would pave the way for a bloody civil war that would lead to the loss of tens of thousands of lives and the division of the working class.

147. The SLL’s leadership in the fight against Pabloite revisionism in 1961-64 played a critical role in ensuring the continuity of the ICFI. A minority tendency within the SWP opposed the increasingly opportunist shift of the party since 1961. On the basis of principled opposition to unprincipled reunification and its destructive consequences, such as the betrayal in Sri Lanka, the pro-ICFI minority in the SWP founded the Workers League (WL) in 1966, while in Sri Lanka the Revolutionary Communist League (RCL) was formed in 1968. They were followed by the founding of the Bund Sozialistischer Arbeiter (BSA) as the German section of the ICFI in 1971 and the Socialist Labor League (SLL) as the Australian section in 1972. However, within the French section of the ICFI (the Organisation Communiste Internationaliste (OCI)), and within the SLL itself, there were signs of a move away from the principles for which they had fought in the earlier period.