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I would like to respond briefly to some of the assertions made by Luis Oviedo (see In Defence of Marxism No 2) in reply to my article "Characterising the USFI Today" (in In Defence of Marxism No 1).

Firstly, Luis seems to doubt that Trotsky continued to characterise the Comintern as "bureaucratic centrist" (and not as "counterrevolutionary" ) after the Nazi victory in 1933 until the Stalin-Laval pact in 1935 when he openly denounced it as "social-patriotic" (i.e. counterrevolutionary). This wrong assumption is one that has been consistently made by those factions of Trotskyism which came from the International Committee (Healyism and Lambertism). The British WRP for example has always made this erroneous assertion.

This error can be shown by an examination of Trotsky's writings in the period 1933-35. Hitler took power in March 1933. In an article published in May 1933 Trotsky, in talking about the crimes of Stalinism in the 1927 Chinese Revolution and the Nazi victory, still characterises the Stalin faction as "bureaucratic centrist":

"As Marxists we remain on the ground of revolutionary realism in the struggle against bureaucratic centrism." (1)

In a further document published in June 1933, he wrote:

"The centrism of the Stalinist faction is characterised by a policy of convulsive zigzags or standstill, and it is the most conservative of all the centrist formations that have ever existed in the workers movement. This is explained by the fact that this time centrism has found a powerful social support in the Soviet bureaucracy". (2)

Again in July 1933 he wrote: "Within the framework of the CPSU and outside of it takes place the grouping of the scattered elements of the two basic parties: the proletarian and the Thermiorean-Bonapartist. Rising above both of them, the centrist bureaucracy wages a war of annihilation against the Bolshevik-Leninists".

In the same article on the following page he also says: "The charlatan analogy is designed to cover up the fact that the Brandlerite opportunists are trying to curry favour with the Stalinist centrists..." (3)

In September 1933, six months after the Nazi victory, Trotsky writes:

"We call the Stalinist apparatus centrist precisely because it fulfils a dual role; today, when there is no longer a Marxist leadership, and none forthcoming as yet, it defends the proletarian dictatorship with its own methods, but these methods are such as to facilitate the victory of the enemy tomorrow." (4) (emphasis original).

In February 1934, almost a year after the Nazi victory, and six months after Trotsky announced that it was necessary to build a new International, he wrote:

"The defining of the policy of the Comintern as that of bureaucratic centrist retains its full force now too. As a matter of fact only centrism is capable of constant leaps from opportunist betrayals to ultraleft adventurism; only the powerful Soviet bureaucracy could for ten years assure a stable base for the ruinous policy of zigzags." (5)

In June 1934, almost a year after the announcement that the Comintern is "dead for the purposes of revolution" ,Trotsky writes: "Having abandoned a principled line on the war question, the Third International vacillates between defeatism and social patriotism", (6) i.e. in classic centrist fashion.

By the time of early 1935, the conception of "bureaucratic centrism" evolving into "Soviet Bonapartism" begins to surface in Trotsky's writings as Stalin concentrates more and more power in his hands. Trotsky also modifies his analogy with the French Revolution as he realises that the stage of Bonapartism is developing and that Thermidor is in the past rather in the future.

"Bureaucratic centrism, which has developed into the Soviet form of Bonapartism would not be what it is, if it could maintain itself in any other manner save by continual attacks on "two fronts", .i.e. in the last analysis, against proletarian internationalism and against the tendencies of capitalist restoration." (7)

And again, in January 1935:

"As the bureaucracy becomes more and more independent, as more and more power is concentrated in the hands of a single person, the more does bureaucratic centrism turn into Bonapartism." (8)

Finally, only in May 1935, over two years after the Nazi victory, does Trotsky come out openly and denounce the Stalinists as "social patriotic", "swine": "For the first time, Stalin has openly said what is, i.e. in full view of the entire world, he has repudiated revolutionary internationalism, and passed over to the platform of social patriotism." (9)

The support for the rearmament of the French military was a clear and unambiguous indication that Stalin would support the war effort of an imperialist power. The Spanish Civil War also provided confirmation of this as the Stalinists butchered the vanguard of the Spanish proletariat.

To respond briefly to other points made by Luis. Does a centrist characterisation mean that the USFI is recoverable? Not necessarily. As Trotsky said of the Comintern--"we never promised to cure the organism, we simply refused to bury the not yet dead" . As I said in my article: there is no guarantee of success, but we won't know if we don't try. As Trotsky also observed: those who are incapable of struggling to preserve past gains will not build anything new.

I am not sure what Luis means when he says that I "compare" the Cuban Revolution with the annexation of Eastern Poland and the Baltic states. I do not recall either saying that "the USFI limited itself to uncritically supporting the expropriation of capital by bureaucratic means (for this reason it was centrist)". Where did I say these things and what significance is supposed to be attributed to the fact that I (supposedly) said these things?

Luis says that the "logic" of my argument is that Trotsky should have stayed in the Comintern up to 1935 and that perhaps he was wrong to found the Fourth International. No, this is not the "logic" at all. The criterion used by Trotsky was not simply the characterisation of the Comintern, but the response of the leadership and ranks (or rather the lack of it) to the Nazi victory. Of course, the two things are not unrelated. But characterisation alone cannot be the sole consideration. Other considerations come into our assessment of what is possible in terms of regeneration, partial regeneration or the winning of a significant minority. The failure of the Comintern leadership to acknowledge the enormity of the defeat, or even its own errors, was one factor in Trotsky's decision to break with the Third International. The other factor was the absence of any response, or discussion, in the ranks of the Comintern. There were no congresses convened to discuss the defeat, either national, or international; no iternal debate (which was prohibited by the bureaucracy in any case); and no debate in the Comintern press.

Can it be said that in the recent period, the USFI made no attempt to admit its errors or expel sections which openly betrayed the interests of the working class? That there was no internal discussion of these matters, no conferences, no debate in the press which discussed these questions? Inconsistently, inadequately, belatedly? Certainly. Not at all? It would be ludicrous to say this.

Luis picks up on the word "occasionally" and he says "no, all the time". If I had said that the USFI had been "opportunist 75 percent of the time", he would doubtless have said "150 percent". If I said "they are very bad", he would say "NO! They are TERRIBLE!" So I do not think I can win this argument, which, in any case, is a little sterile.

Luis says that it is also the logic of my argument that if an organisation has "size" we should remain in it. Clearly, the Comintern was more important in terms of size than USFI. It contained the majority of the international proletarian vanguard which the USFI or the CWI or Lutte Ouvriere, of course, do not. Even so, if the forces of consistent Trotskyism are very small (as they are), and those of centrist Trotskyism are much larger, and more geographically widespread (including important Third World countries like India, Sri Lanka, South Africa etc), this has to be a factor to be considered in deciding how best to reconstruct the Fourth International.

It does not necessarily follow that "eternal entrism" in a centrist Trotskyist organisation, is appropriate--as the recent experience of the ITO has shown. The Italian ITO comrades were obliged to operate independently of the USFI in order to pursue an appropriate policy in the PRC.

In the SLP, we work alongside a group of ex-USFI majority people where we can, but at the conferences we are on opposite sides of the debate on many questions. In other words, greater opportunities in the organisations of the broad workers vanguard may mean that we choose to work there rather than in the centrist Trotskyist organisations USFI or CWI etc. Careful assessment of the current conditions and tactical flexibility are the key here.

Where we are obliged to operate independently of the USFI, or other centrist Trotskyist organisations, the importnt thing for us is to keep open the channels of communication and dialogue so that we can exert whatever influence we can on them. We have always rejected the sterile, sectarian posturing of the International Committee tradition which succeeds only in self-isolation from other forces (i.e. the majority) identifying with Trotskyism.

Yes, I did know that there are other examples of the opportunism of the USFI, including in Europe. However, I was writing an article not a book. And I was polemicising against the FIT Declaration, which, if I recall correctly, had little to say in the way of examples of the European crimes of the USFI, but addressed itself mainly to Latin American examples of USFI opportunism. If Luis wants a more comprehensive account of my opinion of the shortcomings of the USFI, I can send him four years worth of polemics ad nauseum which I wrote in the British section of the USFI (ISG). This includes the materials from our World Congress intervention, which was so diplomatic and opportunist that they would not circulate it! But he will need to send a very large stamped, addressed envelope.

I disagree with Luis when he says that the (Stalinist) bureaucracy did not "adopt the programme of the class enemy". Is he serious? Was it only concerned with "peaceful coexistence" with imperialism? What happened to the idea that the bureaucracy was the agent of the bourgeoisie in the workers states? In the Third World? Did the Stalinists have the programme of the class enemy in the Spanish Civil War as they butchered the vanguard? What was the popular front with the so-called "liberal" bourgeois if it was not the adoption of the programme of the class enemy?

A counterrevolutionary characterisation implies either a direct physical confrontation with the working class (repression) or else political endorsement of such actions by bourgeois or Stalinist governments. That was certainly how Trotsky considered it in the long quotation on the Chinese peasant army in my last article. We have seen particular sections of the USFI degenerate to that point (e.g. Sri Lanka, Iran), but each time the USFI has expelled them. In other cases, the particular sections have come close to such a point, but they have come under pressure from other sections of the International and have pulled back at the last moment (e.g. Brazil where Mandel, at an IEC meeting, denounced what they were doing in the PT, literally, as "shit"!).

Luis will no doubt respond to this by saying that this is further proof of my "Pabloite" tendencies and also that I have not mentioned the time when Mandel did this or that crime. In fact it would be easy for the ITO to agree with Luis, for the sake of a quiet life, that the Pabloites are simply all counterrevolutionary "swine" (to use Trotsky's term about the French Stalinists) and that is all there is to it. But we would not be honest with ourselves if we did that. The question which Luis and the PO have to answer is: where has a USFI section physically represssed the working class, or joined or, politically supported, a government which did so, but has not been subsequently expelled by the USFI? In Iran, a section of the the USFI supported the physical repression of their own comrades by the Khomeini regime--they really were counterrevolutionary "swine" in the fullest sense of the term, but they were expelled from the USFI. The USFI leadership did not want to face up to this acutely embarrassing issue, it is true, and they have still not published a full account of their own role in this affair. Pressure had to be exerted on the USFI leadership to achieve the expulsion by the Iranian comrades who were on the receiving end of the repression. It was a shameful episode which brought no credit on the USFI leadership.

But can we equate the actions of the Iranian perpetrators of repression with the rest of the USFI which expelled them? Is the whole of the USFI counterrevolutionary because one of its two Iranian sections betrayed the other Iranian section which, as far as we can tell, played a generally exemplary role in the Iranian revolution? It is simplistic nonesense to assert this.

When the Sri Lankan section joined a bourgeois government in 1964, they were expelled. True, this does not exonerate the USFI leadership from blame in this affair--far from it. It was very much a case of closing the stable door after the horse had bolted, as our 1995 USFI World Congress documents stated. But the argument is not about whether the USFI is a consistently Trotskyist organisation or not. We agree with Luis that it is nothing of the sort. The argument is about whether its practice up to now justifies the characterisation of "counterrevolutionary". Was the USFI leadership, which expelled its counterrevolutionary Sri Lankan section, itself counterrevolutionary? To ask the question in this way is to answer it--in the negative.

Luis will mention other examples such as the support of the Mexican section for the bourgeois nationalist party of Cardenas, or the similar errors of the Sri Lankan section. Our disagreements are not about the seriousness of these actions or that there is a danger (potential) for counterrevolutionary betrayal. At our international meeting in Genoa, comrade Rui Costa Pimenta spoke of other similar developments in Brazil about which we have asked him to publish further information.

But the key issue is to identify the point where centrist degeneration, with its characteristic inconsistency, its vaccilations and zigzags, its rightward lurches and pulling back from the brink at the last moment, turns into a policy of stable, consistent betrayal. When does quantity turn into quality? Demagogic polemics which put the worst possible gloss on our political rivals' actions may be permissible for casual exchanges in the everyday cut and thrust of political life. But they they can become a means of fostering sectarian prejudices in order to justify our own separate marginalised existence. And they are not sufficient for the more measured assessment necessary for formal characterisations.

On the question of ideology versus class analysis, as Luis acknowledges, Trotsky spent a good deal of time defending "dialectics" during the faction fight with the Shactmanites, so much so that in the New York branch of the SWP, any mention of the word would apparently bring forth howls of derisive laughter from the Shactmanite opposition. Trotsky was right in emphasising the fact that nearly all individuals rejecting dialectical materialism eventually ended up seriously politically disoriented, as proved to be the case with Burnham, who became an anti-communist. So it is wrong to in anyway belittle the importance of political method and "dialectics". The fact that the senile Healy used courses on dialectics to mystify the subject, does not invalidate the need for Marxist education--including on dialectics.

Yes, both the Shactmanites and the Pabloites were species of petite-bourgeois influences in the Fourth International, but the ideological form which they both took was that of a failure to utilise the Marxist method, dialectics, to analyse the events that were occurring around them.

It has always been my understanding that the Castroites attempted to set up a popular front with anti-Batista bourgeois remnants after defeating Batista'a army, in much the same way that the Eastern European Stalinists did with bourgeois elements immediately after defeating the Nazis. In an informal discussion with Rui Costa Pimenta in Italy, I gained the impression, at one point, that he was arguing that while the Pabloites were counterrevolutionary, the Castroites, at least prior to the present period of restorationist drift, were not. When questioned about this apparent reversal of reality, he denied that this is what he was arguing. He said that the Castroites were heading in the direction of counterrevolution, but had not arrived there (ironically the very thing I am arguing is the case with the USFI!). I do not wish to attribute too much importance to an informal political exchange, and I hope I have not misrepresented what Rui was saying, but I think it is possible to see the potential absurdity of combining a premature characterisation of the USFI as counterrevolutionary with a characterisation of Castroism as something less than counterrevolutionary.

Luis is quite right to warn about the dangers of relying on the Guardian for the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Personally, I would not even trust it to report the football results accurately. Unfortunately, there are not many Bolshevik daily newspapers in Britain, as yet (but we are working on it) from which to gain a reliable account of events, past and present. But neither is it good enough to assume that it must be lies.

Assuming it is true, I do not think that it is a "grotesque formalism" to compare promising to abandon the revolution in continental Latin America (i.e. sacrificing the interests of the working class outside Cuba) as part of a deal with imperialism, with the Hitler-Stalin pact. The Castroites' opposition to expropriation of all private property in Nicaragua was a major factor in the eventual collapse of the Sandinista revolution.

I have no reason to doubt the points which Luis makes about the "legal Marxism" of Moreno (we made a similar point in the ITO founding documents). Luis wrongly says that I presented the LTF/T as an "opposition from the left" using quotation marks which imply that I actually wrote this---I did not. I said that an internal opposition developed which carried out a limited struggle against gurrillerism and in defence of the Leninist Party. I deliberately understated the importance of the opposition ("the fact that an opposition did developed was not without significance") However, it is necessary to recognise that the resistance of the opposition, whatever its subjective political motivations) helped to arrest the lurch towards the maniacal ultra-leftism of the IMT. It is simply crass sectarian prejudice to refuse to acknowledge anything positive in this. I wonder if Luis has actually read the documents of the internal debates during that period? (10) This opposition included considerably more forces than he Morenists and the political errors of the latter cannot be attributed to all the forces involved in the LTF/T. The fact that the politics of the Morenist component of the opposition was suspect does not invalidate my point that an internal opposition developed against the crazy adventurist guerrillaism of Mandel-Maitan. We have to avoid cynicism as well as naiveté.

Luis's comment that the abandonment of guerrillaism was because the IMT tailed-ended the change of line of Castro ,and that the internal struggle played no role in this, is asserted, but not substantiated. Is this not another example of crass sectarian prejudice?

Once again it is alleged that I did not "mention" other crimes of the Mandelites (Eurocommunism, socialist democracy), as if this was motivated by a sinister desire to avoid these questions. Luis adopts the posture of the elevated left critic sniping from the sidelines at those who might run the risk of getting their hands dirty in the messy task of attempting to reconstruct the Fourth International, through internal intervention.

Luis's final counterposition of "eternal entrism" or "independent parties to reconstruct the Fourth International" has already been partly dealt with above.

We would simply add that this false counterposition indicates an inability to consider all the possible tactical orientations, a lack of tactical flexibility. It indicates a disposition to avoid the difficult internal struggle entailed in the task of reconstructing the Fourth International through confronting the centrists on their own ground, in their own organisations, as a minority. It indicates a preference for carping from the sidelines at those who are willing take up this struggle, making cheap attacks on the basis of guilt by association: you struggle in the Pabloite organisations because you are soft on Pabloism or are a "Pabloite" yourself. Such an approach will not help political clarification or succeed in reconstructing the Fourth International.

1) Trotsky, L., "On the Foreign Policy of the Stalinist Bureaucracy" in Writings of Leon Trotsky 1932-33 Pathfinder. New York 1972 p234.

2) Trotsky, L., "The Left Socialist Organisations and Our Tasks" in Writings of Leon Trotsky 1932-33. Pathfinder. New York. 1972. p277.

3) Trotsky, L., "It is Necessary to Build Communist Parties and an International Anew" in Writings of Leon Trotsky 1932-33. Pathfinder, New York. pp309-310.

4) Trotsky, L., "The Class Nature of the Soviet State" in Writings of Leon Trotsky 1933-34. Pathfinder, New York. 1972. p116.

5) Trotsky, L., "Centrism and the Fourth International" in Writings of Leon Trotsky 1933-34. Pathfinder, New York. 1972. p235.

6) Trotsky, L., "War and the Fourth International" in Writings of Leon Trotsky 1933-34, Pathfinder, New York, 1972. p317.

7) Trotsky, L., "Where is the Stalinist Bureaucracy Leading the USSR?" in Writings of Leon Trotsky 1934-35. Pathfinder, New York. 1972. p162.

8) Trotsky, L., "The Workers’ State, Thermidor and Bonapartism" in Writings of Leon Trotsky 1934-35, Pathfinder, New York. 1971. p180.

9) Trotsky, L., "Stalin has Signed the Death Certificate of the Third International" in Writings of Leon Trotsky 1934-35 Pathfinder, New York. 1971. p291.

10) Hansen, J., The Leninist Strategy of Party Building: the Debate on Guerrilla War in Latin America. Pathfinder, New York 1979.