148. The 1968-75 period witnessed a revolutionary upsurge of the working class in many countries of the world, including Turkey. While a mass student movement against the Vietnam War emerged in the US, the 1968 general strike in France brought the question of power before the working class. It was the betrayal of the Stalinist French Communist Party (PCF) that saved the bourgeois state. In 1968 there was the “Prague Spring” in Czechoslovakia, and a wave of strikes in Italy in 1969, while in 1974 the miners’ strike in Britain brought down the government; the same year the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal and the colonels’ junta in Greece collapsed. In 1975, the forces of the National Liberation Front of Vietnam entered Saigon and defeated the US. These struggles were a product of the economic turmoil caused by the end of the post-war economic boom and the collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary system in August 1971.

149. Experiencing a superficial organizational growth in these conditions, the SLL and the OCI gradually began to adapt themselves to national political circles dominated by Social Democratic and Stalinist bureaucracies. At the Third Congress of the ICFI in 1966, the OCI began to deny the fundamental importance of the struggle against Pabloism by advocating the “reconstruction” of the Fourth International. This nationalist-centrist reorientation towards Social Democracy and Stalinism in France was accelerated by the rise of radicalism in 1968, with an uncontrolled influx of members into the organization. In November 1971 the SLL announced a split with the OCI. While the SLL was correct in many of its criticisms of the OCI, it had refrained from engaging in a debate on fundamental political issues, fearing the consequences for its own leadership. The SLL’s response did not focus on the lessons of previous political experiences and the intensification of the struggle against all the anti-Marxist tendencies of the period, because the SLL itself had begun to take a centrist path. Unlike the 1953 and 1961-63 splits, the SLL leadership did not clarify political differences and did not even try to build an ICFI section in France by winning over forces within the OCI. The devastating political consequences of this would not only lead to the political liquidation of Trotskyism in France for decades but would also accelerate the national-opportunist degeneration of the SLL.

150. The roots of the later opportunist degeneration of the SLL and the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP), which was to be formed as a tactical maneuver based on national considerations, lay in its retreat from the struggle against Pabloism. It began to put the building of a national party in Britain ahead of the building of the ICFI as the world party of socialist revolution. This was to manifest itself in a move away from the defense of the theory of permanent revolution. As David North later wrote in The Heritage We Defend:

In the late 1960s, [Mike] Banda’s writings on Vietnam, China and the revolutionary movements in the backward countries in general rejected two central tenets of the theory of permanent revolution: (1) that the democratic revolution in the backward countries can be completed only through the dictatorship of the proletariat, and (2) that the establishment of a socialist society is inconceivable without the worldwide overthrow of capitalism by the international proletariat. Banda’s writings assumed the character of an apology for the colonial bourgeoisie and an acceptance of the Stalinist two-stage theory of revolution.^[1]

151. During this period, Pabloite organizations sought to subordinate the anti-Vietnam war movement to the Democratic Party in the US, while in Europe they adapted to the Stalinists and petty bourgeois “New Left” tendencies, and in France they facilitated the betrayal of the working class by the Stalinist Communist Party. By glorifying Castroism and guerrillaism, the Pabloites, including Nahuel Moreno, were responsible for the political liquidation and physical annihilation of thousands of leftist workers and youth in Latin America in the 1970s. In an anti-Marxist resolution passed at its 1969 congress, the Pabloite United Secretariat stated:

Even in the case of countries where there may first occur great mobilizations of conflicts by the urban classes civil war will take varied forms, in which the principal axis for a whole period will be the rural guerrilla, a term whose principal meaning is military-geographic and which does not imply an exclusively (or even predominantly) peasant composition.

The only realistic perspective for Latin America is that of an armed struggle, which can last for many years. Technical preparation cannot be conceived of merely as an aspect of work, but rather as the fundamental aspect on an international scale and one of the fundamental aspects in those countries where even the minimum conditions don’t yet exist.[2]

The destructive political consequences of the rejection of the revolutionary potential of the working class, the Theory of Permanent Revolution and the role of the Fourth International, and the glorification of petty-bourgeois radicalism, would not be limited to Latin America, but would spread to many countries, including Turkey.