Devid Fernbach's contribution is to be welcomed because the subject is a very important one for the youth vanguard now coming forward that needs to find organisational forms appropriate to the tasks facing us. Pending a fuller consideration I make the following random comments.
1. The idea of the Fourth International. "We live in one world with one history" my be a truism, but it is a very important one, as Marx recognised. He drew out some of the implications in 'The German Ideology'. I merely attempted to take this a stage further,
I would remind Devid thet though we think this is a truism, our opponents deny it. Polycentrism, peaceful co-existance, national roads, the demand for autonomy of the C.P's, are all predicated on this denial,
However I think it is perfectly proper to argue that the conclusions of the very general analysis I sketched can be undercut by moving to a more concrete level and showing thet there are countervailing features in~ validating them. This is really what David is trying to do.
2. Re. D.F.'s point 2. This could be just the usual reference to democratic centralism. However it could also be read in a Stalinist way. To read, not that a central leadership is necessary but that one particular man or group has a God-given right to impose themselves. Lenin certainly never asserted the latter. As against the looseness of the Menshevik organisational forms he asserted the need for unity in action and an euthoritive centre. That this meant Lenin's personal dictatorship was the Menshevik slanderous interpretation of this, It is totally unMorxist for any individuel to identify the party with himself. To do so results in crass errors due to the resulting 'subjectivism' (to use the C.P.S.U. euphemism). 3. Re, D.F.ts point 3. I agree - but it is inconsistent to then charge under 8c that the Fourth International has suffered splits. Given the fun» damental questions posed to revolutionists in the last two decades it would be a miracle if there had not been splits. I think David would agree that the major formation, under the leadership of the U.S.F.I., is the most rational, and the minor tendencies the more dogmatic.
4. Re. D.P.'s point 8b. The counter-revolutionary record of the Third International in its later years is enormous: France in '36, Spain, the advice to Mao to submit to the Kuomintang, France and Italy in '45 etc. etc. (I am not saying that these, any more than France '68 would have
been successful even with correct C.P. policies. I am saying that the C.P.'s did their level best to deliver the masses into the arms of the bourgeoisie, so that the question was never put to the test).
5. Re. D.F.'s point 8c. Further to my previous remarks (3) it is important to point out that Britain has a peculierly bad experience of Trotskyism, which may colour the question for comrades like David. In no other country has the movement been afflicted with such a collection of deadheads and megalomaniacs. (Whether this was just bad luck or has deeper roots in the structures I leave aside). It is therefore no accident that at the present time there is no official section of the Pourth International in Britain, only more or lesssectarian groupings, some posing as the Fourth International and others favourable to the U.S.F.I. Nevertheless in many countries the movement has held together and is the dcminant tendency among the revolutionary youth. I think the influence of the Fourth International gan both, assist in the emergence of a genuine Marxist praxis in this country, and also produce a solid section here out of this.
6. Cuba and China. Perhaps the most extraordinary statement that David makes is that "Cuba and China both have influential strategies for world revolution". I would say that is just what these leaderships have failed to provide. (And even if they tried to they could not do it adequately on the basis of their own experience), It is precisely because of this that so many of those who rally to them provide the most absurd examples of a literal translation of programmes from the Cuban or Asian situation to quite different situations in Europe.
It is true that 0,L.A.5. raised itself to the level of envisaging a continental strategy, but this is still only partial. As for the.Chinese they don't rise much above the level of slogans. Where and when did either of these leaderships call together a world-wide tendency to integrate the experience of revolutionaries working in different sections and issue a document that can stand comparison with the Fourth International's Dynamics of World Revolution Today and meny other World Congress analyses?
And if we move from theory to practice ~ who organised the world movement of solidarity with heroic Vietnam? Was it the pro-Moscow C.P.'s with their enormous material resources? No. Was it the Maoists with their revolutionary phraseology? No~ almost everywhere they exhibited a sectarian refusal to work with other people until the movement got so big they had to join in - if only to disrupt it. ‘Was it the Fidelistas? No - of course people wear Che badges - but where are thé leaders that think of themselves as Fidelistas first and foremost? (The fact is that, in defeult of the C.P. the Trotskyists have done the mejor work in making proaganda for Cuba).
So whet about the Vietnam mvoement? The sober truth is that in so far as the movement did not generate spontaneously an ad hoc leadership, the people who worked day and night on it ( following a world congress resolus tion}, who raised the level from pacifiosism to anti-imperialism, who took the initiative in forging the necessary unity with other people, in country after country were the Trotskyist. Tiny in numbers and resources as they were, they fulfilled their revolutionary duty in a way that can stand come
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“parison with anybody. Of course the objective circumstances were very favourable, but someone had to come forward to forge an actual movement, to have the political guts and insight to wrest hegemony from the C.P./ pacifist line up. Of course the movement is far too big for any one tendency to control but I would argue that Pourth International militants made a significant contribution in providing key activists, particularly in the early stages, and especially considered internationally.
It is elementary that if a revolutionary internationalist current were to emerge in either Cuba or China that was interested, the Fourth International would gladly merege with it.
(One can only regret the loss of Che here. After his bad experiences with both wings of the Bolivian C.P. he would probably have turned to the Trotskyists in the tin mines for reinforcements and he, at least, had no prejudice against Trotskyists. We discover from his diary that among the very few books he humped around on his back were Debray and .... "one of Trotsky.") ;
7. Whe final section. Here D.F. poses a whole number of false antitheses. It needs to be emphasised that the Fourth International has only been engaged ain a holding operation - during the gradual revolutionary renewal on a world scale. It does not consider itself the world party - only a grouping of nuclei for such.
incidentally why on earth should revolutionaries sharing much of the Fourth International's analysis, reject its relevance? As for the counterposing of ideolgical and organisational hegemony, it was the whole point of my article to argue that in the long run these cannot be separated.
In the last analysis, the perspective for the Fourth International turns on its capacity to contribute to the theory and practice of revolution. If it degenerates into a band of dogmatic, sectarian fetishists, then it will become an irrelevance, and all the dilemas posed by David Fernbach will obtain. If, on the other hand, it does retain its life and its revolutionary outlook then it will have justified its existence, and even if it does not itself become the new international, it will be able to participate in the process of re-groupment as a respected contributor, and I forecast its main contribution will be to convince the comrades of the importance of building a world party}!