Pabloism

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Pabloism (or Pabloism) is the name for a political movement within the Trotskyist Fourth International under the leadership of the then International Secretary Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel .

Origins

During the Second World War , the European Trotskyist movement experienced a considerable decimation under the influence of mass assassinations and persecutions by fascist regimes and Stalinist agents (these assassinations ultimately also led to Leon Trotsky being a victim in 1940). With this weakening of the European Trotskyists, the Fourth International was dominated almost exclusively by the American Trotskyists in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). After the war, the SWP promoted the development of a new leadership around Pablo and Ernest Mandel , who was then operating under the pseudonym Ernest Germain, in competition with the leadership of the British Revolutionary Communist Party, which was not under their influence. Pablo has been appointed Secretary of the International Secretariat of the Fourth International (ISVI).

There was great theoretical uncertainty in the Trotskyist movement of the time. The developments which Trotsky had anticipated in the transition program had only occurred in part or not in the final analysis. The program pointed out that the crisis of capitalism would inevitably lead to a world fire that would overshadow the First World War in horror and suffering. Likewise, the post-war forecast was:

"" Factory committees will surely come into being before the old bigwigs have left their offices to build trade unions; the councils will invade Germany before any corpse from Weimar has been brought back to life [...] The discontent of the masses and you The turmoil will grow by leaps and bounds. [...] The program of transitional demands will gain a burning topicality. The problem of the seizure of power by the proletariat will arise in all its gravity. ""

- Transitional program 1938

confirmed by the political developments after 1945. Antifa councils were the first political actors to become active and a rejection of capitalism was also a broad social consensus, as is evident in the Ahlen program . All over Europe, communist and socialist parties received an enormous boost, were included in the first transitional governments (France) or elected to the government (Great Britain). The Stalinist bureaucracy succeeded in bringing all other European communist parties to the line of Popular Front governments condemned by Trotsky and thus suppressing any initiative for a proletarian revolution. Moscow's counter-revolutionary role in Greece culminated with the Varkiza Agreement . Nowhere did the "Sections of the Fourth International succeed in placing themselves at the head of the revolutionary current". Trotsky and Co. underestimated the intensity of terror in fascism and Stalinism and thus the lack of prospects with which the workers were marked after the war and then quickly came under the influence of social democratic opportunism or Stalinist bureaucracy. Its main strength was "not in itself, but in the discouragement of the masses who lack a new perspective," as Trotsky noted. The problem, which was mentioned in the first sentence of the transitional program, remained:

"The global political situation as a whole is characterized above all by the historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat."

- Transitional program 1938

Trotsky had foreseen the extensive agreements at the conferences in Tehran , Casablanca , Yalta and Potsdam , which led to the division of the world into two large blocs, just as little as the Bretton Woods system or the Marshall Plan . Together with the lack of prospects for the masses, this significantly prevented similar political and economic crises and the unrest and revolutions that went with them as after the First World War.

A fierce debate also flared up about the class character of the new states in Eastern Europe dominated by the USSR. Trotsky had called Stalinism counter-revolutionary, but nevertheless insisted on defending the USSR as a degenerate workers state against all attacks by imperialism. Now new regimes emerged that were structurally almost identical to the Soviet Union. The question at issue was: Did Stalinism bring about progressive changes in Eastern Europe or just changed property relations? In a statement by the Fourth International from 1946, it was said:

“Their hideous betrayals, the suppression of mass uprisings, their counterrevolutionary terror, the devastation they wreaked and their looting - all of this discredits in the eyes of the workers the very word, the very idea of ​​communism. How serious are the nationalizations in Eastern Europe against Stalin's crimes against the working class? The Stalinist counterrevolutionary adventures in Eastern Europe by no means earned Stalinism a reputation for fulfilling a progressive historical mission; rather, they have increased the urgency to defeat this bloody demon and prevent it from doing more damage than it has already done to the world working class and its struggle for emancipation. The blindness of Stalinism, its indescribably reactionary character and its historical bankruptcy are particularly evident in Eastern Europe. In return for poor yields, for poor reparations payments that do not remedy the economic needs of the USSR in the least, the Kremlin has built a wall of hatred against itself throughout Eastern Europe and around the world. In return for military control over the poverty-stricken, bankrupt Balkan states, the Kremlin helped the Anglo-American imperialists suppress the revolution and revitalize declining capitalism. "

In 1948 the majority came to the conclusion that the Stalinist parties in Eastern Europe had created “deformed workers states”, pointing to both the similarities and the differences to the Soviet Union. This was created by the October Revolution , but the new regimes were reshaped from above by the Stalinist regimes without any influence from the workers. On the contrary, the new Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe suppressed any independent organization of the workers in councils, trade unions or parties from the start. This designation was also given to the new regimes in Asia that came into being under the leadership of communist parties. In April 1949, the International Executive Committee of the Fourth International declared on the role of Stalinism:

“ One cannot assess Stalinism on the basis of isolated results of its policies, but rather must start from the entirety of its activities at world level . If we look at the concrete situation from 1943-45, there is no question that at the world level Stalinism was the decisive factor that prevented the sudden and simultaneous collapse of the capitalist order in Europe and Asia. In this sense, the "achievements" of the bureaucracy in the buffer zone are at most the price that imperialism paid for services rendered to it on a world level - and this price is now also constantly being called into question. From an international point of view, the reforms of the Soviet bureaucracy [...] are far less severe than the blows that the Soviet bureaucracy has inflicted on the consciousness of the world proletariat through its actions in the buffer zone, which it demoralizes, confuses, misdirects and paralyzes with its policies so that it becomes partially receptive to the imperialist campaigns in preparation for a new war. Even from the standpoint of the USSR, they endanger the defeats and demoralization of the world proletariat caused by Stalinism far more than they strengthen the consolidation of the buffer states. "

With the further development of the bloc confrontation and the Cold War , which also flared up hotly in Korea in the early 1950s, Pablo came to the conclusion that a Third World War was imminent, which would take the form of a global civil war in which the Soviet Union would create further deformed workers' states and which would ultimately lead to the worldwide social revolution via the centuries-long detour (theory of the “war revolution”). In 1951, a majority of the International Executive Committee passed a corresponding revisionism resolution. In view of this impending World War III, Pablo saw an increase in the power of the Stalinist regime as the lesser evil. The role of the Trotskyists would be to integrate into the mass parties of the working class, especially the communist parties . Instead of overthrowing them with a political revolution, as has been the case up to now, one must fight for leadership there. He then extended this thesis to the mass movements of the bourgeois national liberation movements in the semi-colonial and underdeveloped countries. He demanded that the individual sections give up their organizational independence, and thus revised the decisive role that the revolutionary party played as a subjective factor in the history of class struggles up to now.

A factional struggle developed within the Fourth International, which culminated in November 1953. The leader of the SWP, James P. Canon, published an open letter accusing the Pablo faction of "disbanding, dividing and breaking up the cadres of Trotskyism in various countries in order to destroy the Fourth International." He criticized a number of decisions, resolutions and publications of the ruling Pablo faction, e.g. For example, on the uprising of June 17 in the GDR or the general strike in France in 1953. Using the dispute with the former SWP faction around Bert Cochrane , he also showed where Pabloism is going in practice. It ends with the verdict:

“The rift between Pablo's revisionism and orthodox Trotskyism is so deep that neither a political nor an organizational compromise is possible. The Pablo Group has shown that it will not allow democratic decisions to be made that truly reflect the opinion of the majority. They demand complete submission to their criminal policies. They are determined to expel all Orthodox Trotskyists from the Fourth International or to muzzle and handcuff them [...] If we can give advice to the sections of the Fourth International from [...] our position, we believe that it is time to act. It is time for the Orthodox Trotskyist majority of the Fourth International to get their way against Pablo's presumption of power. "

Pabloism nevertheless led to the dissolution of many sections and discredited Trotskyism worldwide. For example, German Trotskyists co-founded the Titoist UAPD and made themselves unattractive to left-wing critics of Stalinism, such as the later historian Hermann Weber .

Split in the Fourth International

Together with Gerry Healy's organization in Great Britain and a faction in the French Trotskyist organization that opposed Pablo, the SWP broke with the ISFI and founded the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). After the split, the majority of the Fourth International remained under the leadership of Pablo and his allies.

Based on the assessment of the Cuban revolution , however, from 1960 the leadership of the SWP and other parts of the ICFI moved closer to the positions of the Pabloites. Another was the evaluation of the colonial revolutions in the “ Third World ”. Just like Josip Tito or Mao Zedong and other left nationalist or "left Stalinist" regimes, the new systems of Fidel Castro in Cuba, the FLN in Algeria (for which Michel Pablo even became a minister for a short time) or the Sandinista in Nicaragua. This line mostly continues to this day, for example in support for the Bolivarian Revolution .

At the partial reunification to the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (VSVI) in 1963 Pablo was seen as an obstacle; he was transferred from the leadership and eventually founded his own current Tendance marxiste révolutionnaire internationale (International Marxist-Revolutionary Tendency) outside the Fourth International. But parts of the groups associated with the ICFI did not become part of the VSVI either. The British section headed by Gerry Healy and initially also the French section headed by Pierre Lambert and several small groups around the world oppose this course, which for them, as in 1953, was a betrayal of the fundamental Trotskyist principles. Today's ICFI was formed from these

Despite the separation between the VSVI and Pablo in the mid-1960s, many critics of the VSVI still refer to the organization as "Pabloite". The Pabloites of the "reunited" Fourth International with an "Executive Office" (formerly "United Secretariat") as a governing body are represented in Germany by RSB and ISL , in Austria by SOAL . Although these have little or no reference to their Trotskyist past. The "orthodox" Trotskyists of the International Committee of the Fourth International are represented in Germany by the Socialist Equality Party .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.db-thueringen.de/servlets/DerivateServlet/Derivate-1151/Dissertation.pdf
  2. ↑ http://www.wsws.org/de/articles/2008/12/sep6-d27.html quoted according to the historical and international foundations of the Socialist Equality Party.
  3. ↑ WSWS interview with Hermann Weber 2011