The message of the World Congress of the Fourth International
Interview with Daniel Bensaid The Twelfth World Congress of the Fourth International took place in February, five years after the last. Daniel Bensaid, a leader of the Fourth International and of its French section, was interviewed about the significance of this world congress in the April issue of Critique world Communiste, the theoretical magazine of the French section of the Fourth International. Our translation of the text of this interview follows. Minor editorial changes have been made in the English version.
Question. The task of a World Congress is to determine the main features of the international situation now and in the period ahead. And the situation today is dominated by crisis in every part of the world.
Answer. The World Resolution adopted at the congress characterizes the crisis from the standpoint of its underlying mechanisms as the gravest ever experienced by capitalism on the international scale. This point is important in order to assess and put into perspective the situation in the European capitalist countries, in order to combat the notion that the crisis can be resolved by a new wave of technological innovations or simply through limited defeats of the working class. Whatever the timing, tempo, or obstacles, the crisis is going to persist and deepen.
The specific crisis of the Eastern bloc countries does not derive automatically from that of imperialism, although it is given impetus indirectly by some of the latter's effects. There are by now considerable indications that the mechanisms set in place when these states were established are losing their effectiveness, with major political consequences.
Q. When the effects of the economic crisis are becoming painful, we have not seen any more or less general challenge to a manifestly bankrupt capitalist system in the West European countries. The mood in the working class is not one of self-confidence. The social situation in France is eloquent in this regard. At the same time, the victorious Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua seems quite isolated, threatened by a US imperialism that has gone back to its old tricks.
A. You have to go back to the right turn that happened in 1970 between the end of the Carter administration and Reagan's entry into the White House. On the other hand, that was the year of the triumph of the Nicaraguan revolutionists. From Reagan's first actions as president, we began talking about an imperialist counteroffensive. 22
Such a counteroffensive has in fact developed on the general political level; on the military level, with the renewed arms drive; and on the social level with austerity offensives in the various capitalist countries.
However, we should try to assess how successful the imperialists have been in achieving their objectives. Their aim is to turn around the international situation that took form at the end of the 1970s and which was marked by the paralysis of the US after its defeat in Vietnam.
You refer to the devastating effect of the crisis on the European workers' movement. You should also include Japan. In these countries, the working class has experienced setbacks, defeats, although they remained limited in scope, for example the defeat at Fiat in 1981 or the recent outcome of the test of strength between Thatcher and the British miners. We will have to see now what effect this latter defeat is going to have on the social resistance of the workers' movement, since it's clear enough that the objective of the Conservative government is to undermine the organizational strength and even the democratic rights of the labor movement.
However, for the moment this imperialist counteroffensive has run up against working-class resistance whose potential is far from exhausted. If you just take the year 1984 in Europe, we saw the struggle by the factory councils in Italy in defense of the sliding scale of wages, the historically unprecedented strike of the British miners, the remobilization of the West German union movement in the campaign for the 35hour week, general strikes of public workers in Belgium and the Netherlands, and regional struggles in Asturias and Sagunto in the Spanish state. In the latter country, at the start of 1984 social struggles came up more or less to the level of 1975 in the aftermath of Franco's death. So, there have been big fightbacks, often ending in compromises, without a decisive victory on the one side or the other.
The view of the present situation that was developed in the precongress discussion and in the congress itself was one of a tug-of-war in which for the moment the two sides are more or less in balance without either one being able to gain a clear advantage. This is not because of the inherent strength of the opposing classes but because of the weaknesses from which each suffers.
The crisis of leadership in the working class movement has prevented it from winning victories. But this statement has to be qualified a bit in the light of the British miners' strike. It was not a lack of determination on the part of the miners leadership that explains the defeat but the attitude of the other trade unions and a real split in the working class, which existed also in some mining areas. The mechanisms of solidarity in the workers' movement did not operate effectively enough to overcome the resistance of the traitor union leader- miatonna f the traitor union leaderships.
At the same time, there is a parallel crisis of leadership on the bourgeois side. Thatcher has just won a victory on the front of social struggle, but she may face a defeat on the electoral and political front tomorrow. There is a general instability of the political setups. Whether it is the reformist left or bourgeois parties that take on the job of applying austerity, they very quickly have to pay the price for this on the electoral level.
On the level of the basic relationship of forces among the classes, we say that nothing has yet been decided.
It is necessary to measure the points scored by the bourgeoisie against what they have to get, if not to resolve their crisis, at least to gain a serious respite and the time to carry through economic restructuration.
When the representatives of the bosses are saying openly that it is necessary to reduce the buying power of wages by
15%, the bourgeoisie is still far from having achieved that. Likewise, it is far from having dismantled past social gains, in particular the social security systems and unemployment insurance in the various countries. These battles have not yet been decided.
It is true, nonetheless, that there has been a real erosion of the strength of the trade unions, mainly in southern
Europe because this has occurred to a limited extent at most in the North.
The decline in trade-union membership has been spectacular in the Spanish state, and considerable in France. In response to the attacks the workers' movement has faced, one might have expected deeper going and more rapid processes of reorganization.
One of the reasons for the slowness of the processes of reorganization that are occurring (to some extent) in the unions but not yet very much on the political level is the fact that the inflow of youth into the centers of production has been slowed to a trickle. The statistics show this clearly in France and Spain.
On the other hand, one of the importInternational Viewpoint 17 June 1985
ant elements in the combativity of the British miners' strike was the role played by youth. With the swelling of youth unemployment, there has been little rejuvenation of the work force except in marginal or temporary jobs.
There are some striking indications of this exclusion of young people from the industrial workforce. For example at the last congress of the Workers Commissions in Spain, the average age of the delegates was around 37 or 38, which is very high. The youngest delegate was 29! The generation that represents the center of gravity in the working-class fightbacks has lived through the end of Francoism, May 1968 in France, and the 1969 upsurge in Italy.
Since 1976, the younger age groups have been coming on the scene at best in reduced numbers. This has a major negative effect. It weakens the workers' movement more than the working class as such.
The second element is that the extent of unemployment is not provoking the reactions of self-defense and solidarity that were in fact seen in the 1930s, although they should not be exaggerated. The means that exist now for administering the problem of unemployment create a situation where the predominant mood is still a confidence in, and a looking toward, the established institutions rather than the idea that the workers' movement itself should take the responsibility for solving them. This obviously can last only as long as the bourgeoisie is able to finance these systems. We are in an intermediary situation. If the working class is on the defensive, movements are nonetheless developing whose importance should be mass properly assessed. Some people are talking about a depoliticalization of the youth. But that is wrong. The political activity and mobilization of the youth extensive than they were in the 1960s at today are more powerful and • more the time of the anti-Vietnam war movement.
The great mobilizations of the youth in Europe today against the threat of war, against the missiles, the marches against
Belgium have been unemployment in Even in France, where such massive. mobilizations have been weaker, the antiracist demonstrations have affected far more youth than the anti-imperialist mobilizations twenty years ago.
However, and this is an important an important political consciousness has not developed in a way commensurate with the mobilizations. There is a general mistrust of political organizations and a doubt that makes it difficult for people to see the way forward. But this blockage should not lead us to underestimate the extent of mobilization and readiness for struggle among the youth.
counteroffensive has run up agains is obviously Central America. The US does want to intervene and the threat i
International Viewpoint 17 June 1985 real. But for the moment there is still a considerable gap between Reagan's statements and his actions. His line of rebuilding imperialist power has made a certain impact on publie opinion, the extent that he has gotten an opening for launching a new arms drive. But with respect to foreign interventions, the Vietnam syndrome continues to stand in the way. Direct intervention in the Middle East or El Salvador would still be difficult for the imperialists. That is why the central question in our congress was defense of Nicaragua, the only revolution in progress in the world today. It not only represents a national liberation struggle but a struggle for socialism, for the establishment of a workers state in the shadow of the United States.
Q. In the past in our movement, we have thought in terms of a dynamic, an interaction among what we called the three sectors of the world revolution -the revolution in the advanced capitalist countries, in the dependent and semi-colonial countries, and in the postcapitalist bureaucratic societies of the Eastern block. How does this dialectical interrelationship operate today?
A. You can describe the effects of the crisis that run through more or less all the sectors of the world revolution. But, and this is one of the features of the present situation, there is not any immediate unity of the world revolution.
That is the problem. We maintain our overall view. There is a unity in the long run. But today there is no direct interaction among the various sectors.
A convergence did appear in 1968, when the Tet offensive in Vietnam, the
Prague Spring, and May-June 1968 in
France all came together to give the impression that the three sectors of the world revolution were marching in step.
But that is no longer happening.
The Mexican PRT in conference (DR
It should not be thought that the convergence was an optical illusion, a subjective shorteut dreamed up in Rome or Paris. That was a time, for example, when the Latin American revolutionary organizations looked to Europe and believed in the possibility of a revolution on the old continent. They saw the European revolutionary organizations as sister organizations facing similar problems.
Today, the prevailing view among the Latin American revolutionary organizations is that Europe is a big backup area for solidarity. It is useful and nice that people are still revolutionary in Western Europe, but revolution is no longer on the agenda there.
The Polish developments have had a dual effect on Latin American revolutionists. For a major sector, they brought a revelation of the fragility, the possible crisis of the bureaucratic states.
In Brazil and even in Nicaragua, sectors linked to the Christian Base Communities and liberation theology have been particularly sensitive to Poland, and not only because of the religious question involved.
However, the conclusion drawn by other revolutionary sectors, including even the more lucid, was that Poland proved that "it can't be done," that you can't defy the USSR on its own doorstep and that Jaruzelski is the lesser evil. You hear this being said in currents that can be regarded as revolutionary, where it is seen as realism.
So, there is a desynchronization among the various sectors of the world revolution. Among revolutionists in the dependent countries, it is considered that the effects of the crisis in the developed capitalist countries still don't amount to anything European serious. There is unemployment, but there is still social welfare. The phenomena of economic collapse and social dislocation convulsing the dependent countries are unknown.
The unity of the revolutionary dynamic ) is hard to see, and this situation fosters a view that sees the international class struggle dominated by the relationships between the blocs, between the systems of alliances among states.
Q. You say that the Nicaraguan revolution was at the center of the congress. What tasks of solidarity with this revolution were adopted?
A. The Nicaraguan question was in fact central in the preparation for, and the only socialist revolution in progress, and it affects the political relationship of forces in the world for four reasons:
- It is taking place in the heart of the
US sphere of influence.
- It is taking place in Latin America while the Cuban revolution continues to have an impact, when Cuba has not yet suffered a bureaucratic counterrevoluton and still serves as a beacon or we continent.
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- It has already become a domestic a domestic political problem in the US because of the proportion of the American population today speaking. - It is a detonator for an explosive situation in Central and South America.
For all of Latin America, Nicaragua shows that Cuba is not an exception, that, in the context of the crisis, revolution is possible today.
So, solidarity with Central America is a long-term task for us in order to affect the international relationship of forces. It is also important for the new generations in Europe, which are active against nuclear weapons, racism, and famine. They are moved by a feeling of human solidarity but often also feel impotent. Solidarity with Nicaragua is one of the few activities where you can work directly for a revolutionary solution.
Q. In Europe, it has been hard to the impact of the Nicaraguan assess revolution on Latin America as a whole. Has this revolution really aroused the hopes of the entire continent? Is it helping to renew the strategic and political thinking of the vanguard in these countries?
A. After the trauma caused by the failure of the armed movements in the early 1960s, Nicaragua has demonstrated the possibility of a military victory.
That does not mean that you have to copy a Nicaraguan model. The Latin
American organizations are a lot more cautious today. They realize that what happened in Nicaragua was a combination of different sorts of struggles, selforganization of the masses, civil defense committees, guerrilla warfare, forms of insurrection. It is an example for study that is rich in lessons, if you are careful to keep in mind its specific features.
The Nicaraguan revolution has revived debate on strategy, how to fight for power, including on the political-military level. It is also food for thought about the problem of tactical alliances in a revolutionary struggle. The Nicaraguan case is quite special, because here the revolution took the form of an anti- dictatorial struggle at the same time as it represented the fulfillment of a nation that had never really existed independent of imperialism. It is necessary to point out this specificity without obscuring the more general problem that arises today throughout Latin America:
that is, the costs of the crisis have been such that they have produced a breakup even in some sections of the bourgeoisie itself. It is inconceivable that in countries such as Mexico, Argentina, or Brazil the effects of the crisis will operate in such a way as to give rise to great mass proletarian currents overnight. We are going to see much more differentiated, complex, intermediate forms of reorganization and relignment.
We do not think that the structure of the bourgeoisies in the more industtrialized countries such as Brazil or
24 a new wave of nationalist bourgeois populism like Peronism. In the last analysis, even if they bridle at the reins they. are renegotiating their debts and at t debts and are highly dependent.
However, in these countries there there are sections of the petty bourgeoisie that are going to break with populism without necessarily going over to. hardand-fast working-class positions over night. How should this problem be dealt with? The working-class united front is not a sufficient answer.
In Brazil, the working-class united the front is represented by the PT (Workers Party), which got an average of 3% of the vote in the 1982 elections, plus the Communist Party and the pro-Albanian CP, which are very limited groups. What is needed is an answer for popular sectors that goes beyond the PT, that politically expresses the unity in action that is possible around social, democratic, and anti-imperialist demands.
A third very important thing think about is that in the vanguard, or at least in significant parts of it, the form of transition in Nicaragua after the overthrow of Somoza is being taken very seriously. It is not seen only as a way of maneuvering and gaining time in the face of imperialist threats.
What I am thinking of here essentially is democracy, pluralism, and elections.
The experience of five years of pluralism in Nicaragua is becoming seen as apprenticeship in politics, appreciated for the possibility it has offered for solving conflicts, for discussion, and regarded, moreover, as appropriate to the rate of social transformation.
While this phenomenon is still limited, an astonishing combination has developed between the trauma of ten or twelve years of dictatorship, in which tens of thousands of people were made
"missing" and tortured in many Latin
American countries, and the eruption of the Nicaraguan revolution. We have to try to imagine the extent of the trauma.
These extreme forms of repression were not the result of foreign occupation, as we saw in Europe, but a phenomenon produced by the societies involved themselves. This has produced a concern for democracy that is likely to be long lasting. It goes very deep.
Then, on top of this has come the experience of Nicaragua, which seems to offer an answer to the aspiration for liberation while maintaining democratic guarantees. Its impact is enormous.
This is contributed to in many countries by the role of the church and the effects, which may be indirect, of the Polish example, although this affects more limited sectors.
All this is helping to modify the behaviour and thinking in the vauguard. The revolutionary organizations of the 1970s were often militarized movements, with the discipline and absence of debate that this implies. Now you get the impression that a lot of these organizations are thinking that in order to achieve power you will have to unite different unite different come w different trains, drent traditions, that you have to learn to live with such lifferences. This idea of pluralism that is reing applied to social and political action as well as governmental organization is also influencing the way people see building organizations and their internal life. I don't say that this attitude is already an acquisition, far from it, but this concern is new.
Q. With regard to Nicaragua, you just mentioned Poland. The congress also rediscussed the portent and lessons of this temporarily defeated antibureaucratic revolution.
A. On Poland, there was a debate on two levels. The first was in response to a position held by a very small minority that tended to reduce the struggle against the bureaucracy to a fight for democratic reform of the institutions of the Polish state. Their view was that the task was not to overthrow these institutions, inasmuch as they were part of the defenses of the workers state against imperialism.
Our view, to the contrary was that one of the most interesting things about the experience of the Polish revolution was that it showed, or confirmed, the need to destroy the key elements of this state apparatus, its repressive supports, which serve to oppress the working class of these countries. This discussion, which I have simplified here, has other implications for understanding the tasks in a country like Poland.
The other discussion, which is far from being exhausted, was more of a thinking out of the terms of our strategy.
There was • common framework regarding the perspectives of the Polish revolution. That is, we agreed that the political revolution is a real revolution and not a pseudorevolution. But we had a strategic discussion about how to assess the real development and above all the level reached by the movement in 1980-1981: What was the real extent of self-organization? To what extent did this rapid process of selforganization of the masses through
Solidarnosc, the self-management councils in the factories pose consciously
- not objectively but consciously - the question of an alternative form of rule?
To what extent was this question taken up if not by the movement as a whole at least by an important network of cadres.
Linked to this was a second question:
What were the real weight and roots in the working class of certain institutions, such as the Polish Communist
Party? It had lost a lot of its members.
Many of them had joined Solidarnosc, that's true. But could you expect this party to collapse, because it was built artificially by support from the state apparatus? Or did it have historic roots that meant that you had to have a policy for promoting differentiation within this party over a long term?
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The Fourth International stall at the 1985 LCR/Lutte Ouriere 'fete' in France (DR)
Society in such countries is not unorganized with only a bureaucratic lid on top. The tendrils of the CPs run through it, as well as the regime's transmission belts and the Church organization. How should you deal with these facts? Can a spontaneous mass antibureaucratic upsurge directly pose the quesiton of power?
Mass movements in such countries may roll a lot faster than in capitalist countries, consciousness can rise a lot more quickly. But the problem of finding a real political strategy cannot be solved spontaneously just by the momentum of the movement. A strategy means more than just a general strike and fight for power. It involves something else besides. The more you think about the need for a political strategy, the more the question of a revolutionary party is posed.
However, in the East bloc countries, people are obviously suspicious of the notion of a party, which they identify with the ruling party. Along with this, there is a hope that the mass movement will resolve all the problems in a short time. If you accept, on the other hand, that there are political and strategic problems that have to be solved, the question of a vanguard organization, of forming a militant current on a defined political basis, then arises.
Another problem that was discussed was how to respond strategically to the argument of the threat of Soviet tanks.
You can always criticize the positions that the KOR put forward in Solidarnose for being weak-kneed. But what produced the notion of the need for "self-limitation"
of the revolution was the search for some kind of standoff, at least a nonaggression pact, with the Soviet bureaucracy.
KOR's response to the problem, that is that social and economic questions should be left to the workers' movement and diplomatic and military ones to the bureaucracy in order to avoid a direct collision with the USSR, was an illusion.
The alternative that we put forward throughout the Polish events was that the more daring the movement was and the further that it went in the struggle for
International Viewpoint 17 June 1985 power, the higher would be the cost the Soviet bureaucracy would have to pay in order to intervene. This response is the starting point for combating any reformist policy in the East European countries. But it is only a starting point. You have to answer another question: what sort of solidarity should be appealed for and built in the other East European countries and in the USSR itself? What sort of language should you adopt toward them? What sort of dialogue should you develop, and with whom?
If you think in this context, it is clear that divisions in the bureaucracy itself are important. The division in the Polish Communist Party, the crisis it underwent in the summer of 1981, like the crisis of the Czechoslovak CP in 1968, represent problems that can counter-balance the threats intervention by Warsaw Pact tanks.
The document adopted at the congress offers an initial response to these questions. In it we stand on a strategic foundation - on a basis of experience in struggle, political lessons accumulated, orientations to be discussed to be in our ranks, as well as with the oppositionists in the East European countries who engage in dialogue with us.
Q. In accordance with the stalemated world situation that you have just described, it seems that the forces of our
International have not experienced any notable growth in the recent years. Five years after the last world congress, how strength of the Fourth
International look in those countries does the where it has organizations?
A. Except in Mexico and to a lesser extent in Brazil, the International has not grown numerically since the Eleventh
World Congress. Overall, we have maintained our forces. There have been gains in terms of new sections, mainly in Brazil, Uruguay, and Ecuador. Our first African section has been recognised in Senegal. The fact that we have maintained our strength might seem to represent a static situation. But in Latin America, where we were badly weakened by the split that followed the Eleventh World Congress, the International has been rebuilt, consolidated, or advanced in most countries of the continent, leaving aside Central America.
In Europe, our strength has remained the same or declined in some cases. But at the same time we have made progress in terms of our organizations putting down social roots, stabilizing their functioning, and building leadership teams. This is very important when you remember that after 1968 the organizational continuity of the sections emerging from entryism was precarious. In 15 years this capital has been rebuilt. In the last years it has been consolidated. Finally, the dominant note at our congress was a determination to go about political work differently.
Q. There, you have to make clear what you are talking about.
A. You have to remember that in the past the International, not exclusively but mainly, served as a point of reference for analysis and for defending our program in the most general terms. That was in part the inevitable result of isolation and having to struggle against the current, even though there was a constant striving to keep the connection with practical work and to do the utmost with our limited resources, as is shown by the help we gave to the Algerian revolution. For example, we defended the concept of permanent revolution against the Stalinist theory of revolution by stages, with a feeling that from that flowed quite naturally the answer to political situations.
For many sections there was no difference between putting forward their general ideas in propaganda and political activity in the form of initiatives, tactics, operations, answers to day-to-day political problems. This situation was particularly dangerous because every concrete political response to a given problem tended to appear either as a direct confirmation or betrayal of the program.
There was no flexibility, no room in between. This mechanism is no doubt behind a lot of the splits we have seen.
What is new is the idea that we are trying to respond to concrete political problems. We could for example discuss in general terms the permanent revolution, the worker-peasant alliance, determine whether in the context of the democratic tasks in antidictatorial struggles, we can make alliances with sections of the bourgeoisie. But for all the Latin American sections today these questions are no longer something to be discussed on the level of principles alone or general theory. Because every one of them faces a concrete problem that it has to solve. Should we be in the Izquierda Unida : in Peru? How should we fight against
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extending this coalition to the APRA, which is a full-fedged bourgeois party?
How should the electoral battle be waged from this stand point? In Brazil our comrades took part in the formation of a mass workers party, the PT. But this is neither the major nor the only party of the working class. How should we appeal to other sectors and continue to build the PT? This party exists as an independent working-class party. But independence in and of itself is not a complete class program.
In Uruguay, should we join the Frente
Amplio, a broad front which does include a bourgeois party but also embodies the united resistance to the dictatorship, which has been the political expression of the united reorganization of the trade- union movement, which gave rise to a thousand local and street committees, etc. in Montevideo? And if we should be in this front, what sort of fight should we wage in it? These are the problems that the sections want to discuss now.
Small organizations, once they have passed a certain threshold of development and begin to play a role in the crisis of the workers movement, assume responsibilities far exceeding their numerical numerical forces. For example, our
Bolivian comrades played an important role in the formation of the new majority that emerged at the last congress of the
COB, the Bolivian Confederation of
Labor. They can no longer just challenge the CP, as they could when it led the
COB, to launch a general strike or organize mass self-defense! Now it is their responsibility to do that, or in any case a responsibility they share. This is the reason for the need for concrete answers that was deeply felt at the world congress.
In the In the same way, the functioning same of the International must change. What the comrades expect is not to be offered programmatic orthodoxy in response to the concrete situations they face. Of course, this sort of answer remains important in polemies in polemies with other currents. But what our comrades need is a framework for discussion in which they can take up their problems of line in other terms than "censure" or "excommunication." Outside the International, the Moreno and Lambert currents offer a caricature of such practices.
Within the framework of our common programmatic orientations, there is a place for political dialogue that does not involve making judgements of people but rather an attempt, between sections or between sections and the International leadership, to deal with political problems, to utilize common experience.
Over and above whatever political differences there may be, there is a conviction that we are trying to solve the same problems. We may offer different answers, but they do not necessarily involve differences of program, historic breaks, or capitulation on anyone's part.
This feeling was very strong and very 26 evident at the congress. It proceeded without any break, although there were on its agenda debates over fundamental programmatic questions that involved some of the points on which the Fourth
International was founded. This was the fourth world congress that I have attended and by far the most tranquil because there was this broad majority for this conception of the International and a determination to transform it accordingly.
Fine. But there are still the basic problems thut arose in the International under the impact of the Polish and
Nicaraguan revolutions. What is more, our movement is absent as an active force from the Central American scene.
How did it respond to this situation?
A. In a way, the Nicaraguan revolution represents a challenge for us. It is a revolution made by others, and at the beginning we understood it badly.
This situation could produce two extreme reactions in our ranks. One is to reject a programmatic guide that they think kept us from recognizing the Sandinista revolution and linking ourselves to it.
For the comrades who are developing this position in the International, the theory of permanent revolution is a sectarian theory that leads us away from understanding real processes. So, we have to get rid of it. What remains valid about
Trotsky, according to these comrades, is his defense of the traditions of the Third
International, of its first four congresses.
On the other hand, they think that what Trotsky added in the 1920s and
1930s handicaps us today.
This reaction could give rise to a debate counterposing revision and orthodoxy, which would have been disastrous. To the contrary, we tried through a concrete study of the Nicaraguan revolution to determine whether our programmatic guidelines were relevant and how they had to be updated.
Did the Sandinistas lead their revolution in spite of themselves, despite their policy of alliances with sections of we might make some criticisms of certain aspects, we recognise that the Sandinistas won thanks to their policy and not "in spite of it."
It is necessary to study this policy and to determine where it creates problems for us. We collectively reread Trotsky's eliminated some confusion. While the work on permanent revolution and bourgeois democratic and socialist tasks of the revolution are not separated in time by a Chinese wall, they are not totally telescoped either. The proletariat can have different allies at different times in the revolutionary process.
Unfortunately, some Trotskyists put forward a version of the theory of permanent permanent revolution in the dependent contes ta resembles tee bat resembles the one that the Stalinists criticize, that is, an ultraleftist one, the struggle for power right away and not as the result of a revolutionary process that may begin by struggles around democratic, antidictatorial, and national demands.
Another danger was to fall into a certain masochism and false humility.
Other people have made revolutions. We should learn from them. We reject this.
Of course, we always have to learn from experiences. But we are a historical current that preserves one little thing in particular, an international view of revolution, and which from its origins has represented an alternative to
Stalinism. Unfortunately, today even among revolutionists you don't find very many who share our position of supporting both Solidarnose in Poland and the revolution in El Salvador.
In the same way, we, who have maintained a programmatic tradition for decades, should not run away from it at the very time that other people in Latin America are discovering that the democratic and socialist phases of the revolution are part of the same process, when the Salvadorean CP, under the pressure of events, is rejecting the old Menshevik and Stalinist theory of "two revolutions," a democratic one and a socialist one separated in time. It is not for us to retreat at a time like that! There is no reason to hang your head or eat humble pie when history proves you right.
We can integrate ourselves completely into this rethinking and re-examination if we are involved in the work and an integral part of the process. The determination to do this was general in the world congress and there was a confidence in the role that the International can play if we are clear about what can be done and achieved today.
Q. Integrating ourselves fully in this discussion, working together with other revolutionary forces - that's fine. But what perspective for building International emerged from this congress? the
A. An old notion was thrown out at this congress, the idea that the International could suddenly transform itself into a mass organization by making a breakthrough around a key event in the world class struggle. The reorganization of the vanguard on the international scale will be a longer, more complex, and more uneven process. There is not going to be such a great leap forward, such a transformation, at least not in the foreseeable future.
The idea of a sudden transformation of the International could seem logical enough in 1938 when our movement was founded. There were then three currents in the workers' movement -the Stalinists, the Social Democrats, and a Fourth International that represented the direct and still fresh heritage of the Russian revolution. Moreover, there was still a strong hope that a mass Russian section could reemerge from the
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At a conference of the Japanese section... (DR) war, that the Moscow trials and deportations had not struck deep enough to destroy the revolutionary tradition.
The spectrum of political forces in the international workers' movement today is much more open ended. There are not only Stalinists, Social Democrats, and the Fourth International. There are intermediary positions that have many strong bases of support. The situation, therefore is much more complex. The question of forming new parties is being raised everywhere in Latin America. We must participate fully in these processes, while continuing to keep our sights set on the need for the Fourth International and defending its program. This goal requires different methods of work.
If the congress proceeded in this way, it was also because the process had been set in motion before, in particular through the transformation of the press of the International. Inprecor and International Viewpoint are now reportting extensively on the activities of the sections. It has become clear that the more we are led to collaborate with other currents, the more we have to do so on the basis of confidence in our own positions, and thus it is necessary to train and widen a layer of internatonal cadres. It is ironic that our international, which holds the record for longevity over the others, waited more than fifty years before setting up its own international cadre school. This school has been functioning now for three years.
Regional meetings of political bureaus (in Europe, Latin America, and soon in other parts of the world) have created channels through which people can discuss politics, which offer a framework for exchanging experience regarding similar problems.
When we talk about centralizing the International, people tend immediately to think about the application of the decisions of a central committee. On the international level, things are much more :omplicated. There can be centralization n the form of making a decision. You ›ass a resolution on an important world question and apply it. But there are other inds of centralization, and political ialogue is one of them. The machinery hat has been set up, the dynamic that as been set in motion, and the congress emonstrate the common resolve that is to persevere in is direction. ‹ists to persevere in this direction.
ernational Viewpoint 17 June 1985
Q. From this new standpoint, what role is the leadership of the International called upon to play, and what sort of relations does it propose to build up with the sections?
A. The method that I have just spoken of has proved necessary and useful not only for dealing with proposals for programmatic revision. But let's take these as a starting point. They reflect within the International centrifugal tendencies that exist outside it. Because the Nicaraguan revolution exists, because the unity of the world revolution, while it exists as an underlying tendency, is not immediately apparent or visible to the untrained eye.
When you face real demands, you cannot respond to such pressures only by a reaffirmation of principle. That would be fatal. You could get a confrontation between sections facing more and more concrete problems and an International that would serve just to warn them against mis-steps and programmatic deviations - a sort of permanent red light!
The centrifugal tendencies can be controlled within the International only by facing up to the difficulties, not by taking refuge in abstractions. We do not have an international leadership based on the experience of a revolution, endowed with a great authority won in the test of the class struggle. This means that we have to find mechanisms of leadership that can build political dialogue by concentrating what is best in the accumulated experience of the International in order to make it easier to find answers to the problems as they arise. The result can only be an enrichment of the understanding and heritage of the International.
In discussing in this way, the International becomes interesting and useful for currents that don't necessarily have any intention of joining soon. Some organizations in Asian or Latin American countries are asking to participate in the schools of the International because they find in them a historical clarification they often lack.
In Asia, for example, the ChinaVietnam-Cambodia conflict has made it necessary to rethink the entire history of the workers' movement in the region. In the International's schools, such organizations outside our movement also find elements for comparing political experiences, so long as these experiences are dealt with in their own terms and not dissolved into programmatic generalities, which are important but do not in themselves solve the problems.
Obviously this change and this resolve at the same time create expectations. This resolve has to be matched by answers to these expectations. So, the congress posed a challenge. We have to prove able to carry forward, taking the time necessary, this transformation in the functioning of the International, its approach to political problems and its relations with the sections.
In accordance with this logic, it will be necessary to rethink the conception of future world congresses. The Twelfth World Congress was a typically transitional one. Some 80% of the time was devoted to discussing general programmatic questions and the remaining 20% to the conception and functioning of the International. The concerns were expressed, but little time was left for taking them up thoroughly. This, moreover, raises a problem in itself. How can a world congress discuss concretely the line in Bolivia? Either the discussion would be for the information of the delegates, or we would risk making decisions about questions with which people have only a superficial familiarity.
It has to be possible to discuss and adopt broad resolutions on key points, such as the problems of the imperialist military drive on Nicaragua, and reserve a considerable part of the time at the congresses for work in commissions. This, moreover, was roughly how the Third International functioned in its first congresses.
As for the specific role of the leadership bodies of the International, they should be left the responsibility for defining the position of our movement as a whole toward big events in the class struggle but also for dialogue with the sections about their problems of line, for preparing regional meetings, for publishing and setting the line of the international press, for adjusting the system of international education to the needs of the sections, and for coordinating and centralizing what can be centralized of the experiences of building the sections.
This objective is modest and ambitious at the same time. It can be accomplished only by relying more and more on the leaderships of the sections themselves; by internationalizing their work; by widening, on the basis of concrete tasks, the network of cadres involved not only in the discussion but in the activity of the International; and by assuring that the leadership bodies can reflect the living experience of the sections and their cadres.
We have to seek a real synthesis and not simply confirm a division of labor, which in the long term would be fatal, between the daily political work in which only the sections are involved and international leaderships devoted to theoretical and programmatic questions.
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