The Fourth International loses its way after WWII

A new leadership came out of the 1946 conference of the Fourth International (FI), based in Europe rather than the USA. At the core of the new leadership was the International Secretariat (IS) of seven based in Paris which included Michel Pablo, the International Secretary, Pierre Frank, Ernest Mandel and US Trotskyist Sherry Mangan.

The IS faced immediate problems in two of its important European sections which had been formed from the post war unifications of former warring factions. In France the Parti Communiste Internationaliste (PCI) was deeply divided between its right and a minority, left wing. In Britain the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) was divided over an assessment of perspectives, especially on the question of entry into the Labour Party. In both cases the IS confronted majorities which disagreed with its own orientation.

The French PCI had grown considerably after the war; it had over a thousand members by 1948. It faced a powerful French Communist Party (PCF) which became the largest party in the Assembly after the 1945 elections and was part of the coalition government with the SFIO (the French socialists) and the MPR, a bourgeois republican party.

When this coalition government put forward a new Constitution to a referendum in 1946 the PCI leadership changed its line, moving from a position of boycott to one of voting yes. This was clearly an opportunist position. It involved a revolutionary organisation voting for a bourgeois constitution designed to swindle the masses. The PCI majority argued that, since the right wing opposed the Constitution because of its democratic elements, then the PCI should vote for it.

The IS rejected these arguments and opposed the PCI's call for a "yes" vote. But it did not overrule the leadership, fearing that such an intervention would have blown apart the fragile unity that existed in the PCI. It produced two internal bulletins especially devoted to the disputed questions.

Further friction arose around the PCI's intervention in the major 1947 Renault strike which was actively sabotaged by the PCP. The IS and the PCI left-wing criticised the PCI leadership for tailing the strikers' demands and failing to demand the spreading of the strike. This would have brought the PCI into direct conflict with the PCF and its union organisation the CGT.

The IS and IEC's attempts to preserve unity failed. Their arguments certainly helped to strengthen the left in the PCI which won a clear majority at the November 1947 conference. As a result the right wing split; it broke with the PCI and the International. Several hundred members left, dealing a severe blow to the French section.

In Britain an organisation unifying virtually all the British Trotskyists, the RCP, had been set up in March 1944, with about 300 members. It threw itself into a series of strikes and struggles which erupted at the end of the war. It played a leading role in organising and supporting an important apprentices strike in Tyne and Wear.             

For this activity it suffered government repression. Several of its leaders were arrested and put on trial for their activity in the strike. The government was aided and abetted by the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) who, as social patriots, saw every strike as sabotage of the war effort.

"Let the Government deal with these saboteurs with a strong hand", screamed one typical Daily Worker editorial during the trial. In May 1945 the RCP stood a candidate against Labour in the Neath by-election, a constituency in the heart of the South Wales coal field. Labour was standing as the wartime coalition candidate supported by the Tories, Liberals and of course by the CPGB. The RCP demanded Labour should break from the Tory led coalition and held large and successful election meetings of up to 1,500 to put across its arguments.

While the RCP only received 1,750 votes compared to the Labour/coalition's 30,847, the results of the by-election were good.

Over 30,000 leaflets had been given out and a special issue of Socialist Appeal had gone through 7,500 copies. The RCP's meetings and propaganda had resulted in several groups of workers joining the organisation.

But the initial success of the RCP was to be short lived. Only a week after the Neath election Churchill resigned and a general election was called for July 1945. Labour had already made clear that it would not remain in coalition. The RCP soon found itself facing a Labour government carrying out a radical reformist programme supported not only by the trade union bureaucracy but by millions of workers. As a result the RCP needed to adapt quickly to a situation that saw a dramatic decline in the levels of industrial struggle.

These developments deepened existing differences in the RCP. Its founding conference had recognised that a swing to the left in the Labour party could involve the RCP in a total entry tactic, but this was thought to be unlikely. The RCP leadership majority around Jock Haston and Ted Grant argued that total entry along the lines of the "French Turn" suggested by Trotsky in the 1930s should be based on evidence that significant forces in the LP were moving to the left. This was not the case in the post war Labour Party, they argued. They favoured instead fractional entry both into Labour and in the Independent Labour Party (lLP).

A minority around Gerry Healy and John Lawrence supported by members of the IS, favoured total entry first into the ILP and later into the Labour Party.

Healy moved his proposals for entry at the August 1945 RCP conference where they were rejected by a majority. The discussion was also linked to differences over the characterisation of the class struggle situation in Europe after the war.

The RCP was the only section at the 1946 conference to challenge the Fourth International's dogmatic defence of Trotsky's perspectives developed in the pre-war period. This perspective was embodied in the resolution The New Imperialist Peace which declared that the war had "destroyed the last possibilities of a relatively stable (capitalist) equilibrium".

Healy linked his proposals for total entry to this analysis declaring, "Our perspectives must be based upon the developing crisis which will exceed in magnitude the depression that set in during the winter of 1920".

The British capitalist recession of 1920 was the most severe of the century, so this was indeed a dramatic prediction, one to be repeated many times throughout Healy's decades of centrist misleadership. A far more accurate estimation of the period was argued by the RCP majority at the 1946 conference in an amendment: "All the factors on a European and world scale indicate that the economic activity in Western Europe in the next period is not one of stagnation and slump but one of revival and boom".

This analysis was rejected by the international but remained the view of the British majority.

The RCP continued a policy of fractional entry into both the ILP and the Labour Party. It had something like 60 members involved in this work, from both the majority and the minority, with its own entrist paper The Militant.

This was not sufficient for the IS. In a series of letters in 1946 and 1947 the IS attempted to convince the majority of the need for long-term entry into the Labour Party. What was new in these proposals, compared to what was argued by Trotsky in the 1930s, was both the long term perspective and suggestions that the development of a revolutionary working class party would take place exclusively through work inside the Labour Party.

Thus an IS letter in January 1947 declared: "The present situation sets new objectives for entry: the setting into motion of the entire awakened British working class along the path of revolutionary action, this time within the framework of the Labour Party itself."

This perspective opened the way to Healy and Lawrence to pioneer what was to become a generalised tactic for the FI "entryism sui generis". That is, entryism of a special type, which involved deep entry into the Labour Party adapting revolutionary politics to varieties of left reformism. But this was some way ahead. In 1947 the IS, whatever its mistakes, was still trying to convince the majority, not impose a centrist perspective.

As divisions hardened, the minority led by Healy moved towards a split. In June 1947 they held a meeting before the RCP conference, declared themselves a faction and declared that if they lost their position at conference they would appeal to the IEC to allow them to enter the LP "under their own control".

The RCP conference rejected their perspective and proposal but a commission set up by the IEC, which included Jock Haston, agreed to split the section. From October 1947 there were effectively two sections of the FI in Britain working under the direction of the IS. One, under the Healy/Lawrence leadership, was only doing work in the LP. The principle of only recognising one section in each country-adopted at the foundation of the FI-had been abandoned.

Despite these problems the Second World Congress of the FI which took place in Paris from 2 to 21 April 1948 marked a further step forward in the organisational strengthening of the world party. Fifty delegates attended, representing 22 organisations from 19 different countries. The Congress discussed four key documents: a manifesto, a perspectives document and a set of theses on the colonial revolution and on Stalinism.

While clinging to the main outlines of the now outmoded pre-war perspectives the Congress began to recognise the role of the USA in helping to stabilise Europe. But it still declared:

"The polarisation of social forces is accentuated under the pressure of US Soviet antagonism and the persistent crisis in most capitalist and colonial countries. This crisis, which the traditional parties show themselves incapable of solving, leads to ever greater class struggles. The outcome of these struggles in a number of key countries in the present international situation will determine the possibility of the relative stability of capitalism, or will accelerate revolutionary developments".

Thus, in 1948 the International did not rule out the possibility, under certain circumstances, of a new period of relative stability for imperialism. But this aspect of the agreed perspectives was quickly forgotten after 1948. Rather it was the emphasis on the possibility of an outbreak of war between the west and the Soviet Union, and of this being turned into an "international civil war" between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie---certainly present in the 1948 documents-which came to dominate the international's analysis after 1948.

This, as we shall see, was a wrong perspective. It increasingly disoriented the International and its sections. Combined with a sudden and unexpected division in international Stalinism, the Tito-Stalin split of 1948; it was to throw the international leadership into centrist confusion within months of this Congress.

Sat 15, November 2008 @ 16:07