Reformism, centrism and the Fourth International
The struggles waged by workers around the globe, which are aimed against the increasingly harsh austerity plans imposed by all the pro-imperialist governments everywhere, have all a common ground. The imperialist powers, with the United States at their head, count with a whole set of multilateral institutions, such as the G7, the United Nations or else the IMF, with decisive influence in every single country on earth. If need be, they do not flinch from resorting to brutal wars like that of Iraq. Apart from that, they also can rely on their lieutenants, the treacherous misleaderships within the working class organizations. Hence, the fight to take up the banner of militant internationalism and build, not only revolutionary parties on a national level, but a world party of socialist revolution as well, requires that clearly identify the enemies standing against it.
When we take a look at the history of the working class movement, we can see the action of reformist working class organizations or parties, which just seek to gain reforms within capitalism itself -all of them opposed to a revolutionary change. Thus, when faced with massive catastrophes such as revolutions or wars, they have betrayed their grassroots all along the way. The union bureaucracies all over the world, beyond their ideological or political allegiance, have all worked in the same way. In Argentina, the Peronist-minded union leaders have made all sort of promises and are also trying to negotiate some token concessions -in spite of the fact that they have sold out all labor conquest in the last few years. However, whenever the working class started to fight in a bold fashion, and class-minded and bureaucratic sections emerged, like in the 1970s, the bureaucrats lent their suport to the death squads sponsored by the Peronist administration of the time, going as far as murdering left militants and labor activists, in a move that anticipated the atrocities of the military dictatorship inaugurated in 1976.
Let us have a look at the turning points in the international working class movement. In 1914, the mass Social Democratic parties making up the Second International , which rallied the support of millions of workers, became the lieutenants of the bourgeoisie in each country, lending their support to the First World War in each of their countries. Furthermore, they did not flinch from murdering the radical socialist leaders of the time, like Luxemburg and Karl Liebkhnecht.
The mass Communist Parties that came to life as a result of the shock waves of the 1917 Russian Revolution went on to rally in the Third International, led by both Lenin and Trotsky. However, they ultimately degenerated when Stalinism took over them. The latter betrayed a key struggle: that against German fascism. The wretched Stalinist policies led to Hitler"s rise to power back in 1933. Meanwhile, the opposition inside Russia was viciously persecuted at the time of the farsical Moscow Trials, a trend that would later on culminate with Trotsky"s assassination in 1940. Leon Trotsky had founded the Fourth International two years before that, with the aim of bequeathing the revolutionary legacy that Stalinism had betrayed to the new generations. In Argentina, the Moscow-leaning Communist Party, supported also by Fidel Castro himself, went as far as proclaiming support for the murderous miltary junta presiding the country after the 1976 coup. The local strand Maoism goes even further, still claiming today allegiance to Joseph Stalin!
Since the 1980s, the European socialist parties have become fervent advocates of "neoliberalism" in France, Spain, Germany and elsewhere, with the big "communist" parties of yesterday -such as the Italian CP- following suit after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. They ditched their reformist profile and politics and adopted a thoroughly reactionary bourgeois perspective altogether.
To sum up, we can say that the reformist tendencies are those standing by a politics of reform in order to gain the support of labor and other popular sectors. Sometimes, they even put themselves at the head of major struggles. On a strategical level, however, they are counter-revolutionary because they defend the capitalist system. They are sold out to the bosses and their governments.
That is why the revolutionaries have to unmask the reformists in the face of the labor grassroots, denouncing their sell-outs and demanding they should fight to the end when they are heading any given struggle, or else when workers have expectations in them. They should do so with a clear-cut strategy: kicking the misleaders out of the working class organizations to prevent further defeats and frustrations.
Centrist organizations are those "wavering between reform and revolution", in the words of Leon Trotsky. They tend to accomodate themselves to the reformist leaders all the time, but they sometimes veer to the left when the latter reveal their reactionary nature (in token struggles) or else their counter-revolutionary politics in major events of the class struggles.
We, the Trotskyist groups affiliated to the Trotskyist Fraction, have taken up the concept of centrism to refer to those trends that emerged after the split of the Fourth International in the wake of the Second World War. Trotskyist currents such as Morenoism or else Lambertism always branded Pabloism , the current that went further down the road of adapting to reformism, as a revisionist trend, pointing out to the fact the it revised the programme of the Fourth International, but they refrained from using the category of centrism. The problem with this line of reasoning is that the revision of the revolutionary programme is the last thing centrist currents do. For many years, and sometimes decades, they adapt themselves to reformism and only at the end of a long career of tailism do they ditch, i.e. "revise", the tenets of programme, breaking away with the Theory-Programme of Permanent Revolution, the fundamentals of present-day revolutionary Marxism.
The fight to rebuild/refound the Fourth International should proceed along the lines of fighting centrism, because in this way we are in a better position to fight back all the capitulations of those trends that still speak in the name of and claim allegiance to Trotskyism, but accomodate themselves to reformism (thus indirectly adapting to the bourgeois state). If we do away with the concept of centrism, we will only be in a position to criticize them when they ultimately ditch the theory, the strategy and the programme of revolution. "Yalta Trotskyism" (Moreno, Lambert) is a clear example of centrism within the Trotskyist movement, since they accomodated themselves to one or another strand of reformism. At one and the same time, they had heated debates on tactics and occasionally came together to capitulate to some big reformist organization. Yet, all this was done claiming "allegiance to the Transitional Programme" in a loud voice. A most telling testimony of this practice was the unification carried out by the main Trotskyist groups claiming allegiance to the Fourth International back in 1963. All of them recognized Cuba was a workers" state, but all of them refrained from raising a transitional program in the perspective of political revolution to challenge the drift to tight Stalinist-styled control. Still worse, they went as far as turning a blind eye on the crackdown of Cuban Trotskyists (of the Posadas-led current), to whom Fidel Castro sent to jail under charges of planning an occupation of the US base in Guantánamo. Trotskyist historians have proven today that the accusation was a forgery, as true as Stalin"s charge claiming that Trotsky was Hitler"s agent.
This is our basic approach to the postwar Trotskyist movement, at least from the year 1951 onwards. We claim that as a whole, it became an array of centrist tendencies bearing little continuity with Trotsky"s legacy.
That is why we, as Marxists, do not define those currents claiming allegiance to the Fourth International on the basis of their programme alone, but we also take into account their concrete political action, along the lines of their daily intervention in the class struggle.
Refounding the Fourth International today, at the onset of the 21st century, when the working class movement has just suffered harsh defeats (loss of conquests in the "West" up to include the restoration of capitalism in Russia, China and Eastern Europe) is a big challenge for revolutionaries. On the other hand, labor worldwide still has to settle accounts with the reformist leaderships, who caved in to the imperialist offensive and left their grassroots to their own devices. Hence, all Fourth International militants should endeavour to take up the best revolutionary traditions of the working class and make them relive in every single major struggle waged by the workers. We take issue against those who stand by the "internationalism of the social movements" of today, because they resort to it as a fig leaf to hide their skepticism of the working class and its ability to build powerful organizations and lead the forthcoming revolutions of the period ahead.
Every single struggle or fight, specially those waged by labor, puts us Trotskyists to the test, in the sense that we have to show that we stand for a superior programme and perspective, while exposing the mean and wretched agenda of those making peace with the reformists for the sake of conquering union or else parliamentary positions. This is not only about challenging gross adaptations such as that of the USec leader, Miguel Roseto, who holds a cabinet post as part of Lula"s bourgeois government in Brazil. We have to speak out against those actions by self-proclaimed Trotskyist that run against the most revolutionary tendencies at work in the youth and the working class. Let us bear in mind some examples of this: the Mexican POS (sister organization of the Argentine MAS) walked out of the struggle condemning the continuation of the massive students" strike at the UNAM and sided with the so-called "moderate" wing; the French LCR and Lutte Ouvriere for their part, made big election campaigns but refused to play a decisive role in the massive fights against cutbacks in social security; the British SWP accomodated itself to the pacifist leaders of the antiwar movement refraining from organizing at least a vanguard of the millions protesting on the streets with the aim of fighting to boycott the imperialist war machine.
That is why our policy to rebuild/refound the Fourth International goes beyond reaching programmatic agreement -let alone agreeing on a general platform consisting of four abstract slogans like the one the Argentine Partido Obrero and its co-thinkers in the MRCI have rallied themselves. Quite otherwise, we deem it necessary to draw common strategical conclusions out of the main developments in the class struggle of the last few years and also engage in a common intervention. We do not endeavour to make a critical appraisal of the record of each tendency in the last 50 years. We think that serious steps in the direction of refounding the Fourth International will be taken only if those currents committed to it either stand by independent policies or else adapt themselves to the state and the existing leaderships of labor and the mass movements.
It goes with a saying that we are open to a critical appraisal of our intervention in the past. If we compare it with the great revolutions of the 20th century, our practical intervention remains extremely modest. However, we do believe that it reflects a clear will to build our organizations and our international tendency along revolutionary lines. The Mexican LTS-ContraCorriente was born as a result of a bold revolutionary intervention in the harshly repressed students"s strike at the UNAM (Mexico"s biggest university). Not only our Mexican co-thinkers were active there, but also militants from the Trotskyist Fraction itself as well. Both Christian Castillo and Cecilia Feijoo, PTS leader and member respectively were jailed in Mexico due to their activities in support of the strike. In Argentina, ever since the revolutionary days of December 2001, the PTS focused its intervention in the occupied factories run by their workers, like Zanón and Brukman. Both of them have become labor banners worldwide, because they have shown the strategic potential dormant within the working class. In Bolivia, our co-thinkers have been able to draw upon the lessons of the capitulation and failure of Guillermo Lora"s POR, thus forging a militant group there which was very active and raised a revolutionary program in the uprising that rocked Bolivia last October.
We seek to make our programme match with our practical internvention in the class struggle, because by doing so we think we can prove that a revolutionary Marxist strategy is the only one that can endow the working class with the power to rebuild its revolutionary leadership and move on to victory. That is why we need a living Fourth International, the world party of socialist revolution.
If the Fourth International militants were able to use those first symptoms of international labor"s rejuvenation as a platform to promote a radicalization of the grassroots along the lines of the ceramic workers at the Argentine plant of Zanón, we should be able to challenge the discredited bureaucratic leaderships and prove the superiority of a revolutionary program and strategy in the face of both reformists and centrists, thus making a significant contribution by helping the working class regain confidence in its hegemonic role as a revolutionary subject. By the same token, we would be able to draw the more advanced sections of labor and the anticapitalist youth of the noglobal movement towards revolutionary Marxism. In this way, we would be much closer to effectively refounding the Fourth International.