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WSWS : News & Analysis : Europe : France

The politics of opportunism: the “radical left” in France

Part four: the roots of Pabloism—a historical review

By Peter Schwarz
22 May 2004

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The following is the fourth part of a seven-part series on the politics of the so-called “far left” parties in France. Part one was posted on May 15, part two on May 17, and part three on May 19.

If one compares the resolutions of the Fifteenth World Congress of the Pabloite International with the opportunist revisions introduced into the programme of the Fourth International by Michel Pablo more than fifty years ago, one sees striking similarities. It is remarkable how little has changed.

Pablo, the then-secretary of the Fourth International, and his supporters adapted to the political pressures resulting from the stabilisation of capitalism after the Second World War and the apparent strength of Stalinism. After the First World War, Europe had been wracked by years of violent class struggles, but after the Second World War it had been possible to pacify the situation in Europe and restore bourgeois rule in a relatively short period of time.

This was due, aside from the intervention of the US, to the Moscow-led Stalinist parties, which employed their authority to nip in the bud every revolutionary stirring. In countries such as Italy and France, where the Communist Parties exerted mass influence, they undertook to disarm the anti-fascist resistance and temporarily took up posts in bourgeois governments. They put into practice the agreements reached by Stalin and the leaders of the Allied powers in Yalta and Potsdam, whereby Western Europe was to remain under capitalist control, while the Soviet Union was allowed to exert its rule over a buffer region of Eastern European states bordering the USSR.

The Moscow bureaucracy had no interest in a revolutionary development either in the West or in the buffer states. Such a development would have inevitably undermined its own despotic rule. Therefore, it sought to exert decisive influence on the decisions made by Eastern European governments, without seriously challenging bourgeois property relations. To this end, it restored discredited bourgeois politicians to influential posts, so as to maintain control over the masses.

The situation changed with the onset of the Cold War in 1947 and 1948. Under growing pressure from the working class on one side and the increasingly hostile stance of the West on the other, the Stalinist bureaucracy tightened its grip. It disposed of its bourgeois partners and, in order to maintain its own status, proceeded to undertake a broad programme of nationalisation. At the same time, it increased its repressive measures against the working class—as seen in the bloody suppression of working class revolts in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), Hungary and Poland during the 1950s.

These events did not prevent Pablo from interpreting the nationalisations in Eastern Europe as proof that, under pressure, the Stalinist bureaucracy could play a revolutionary role. He was convinced that a Third World War between the United States and the Soviet Union was inevitable, and assumed that such a development would build into a world-wide civil war in which the Stalinist bureaucracy would be forced to carry out a social revolution.

Pablo summarized his standpoint most concisely in a 1951 document entitled “Where Are We Going?” It stated: “For our movement objective social reality consists essentially of the capitalist regime and the Stalinist world. Furthermore, whether we like it or not, these two elements by and large constitute objective social reality, for the overwhelming majority of the forces opposing capitalism are right now to be found under the leadership or influence of the Soviet bureaucracy.” (1)

As a leading member of the French section correctly explained at the time, this approach left no independent role for the working class. According to Marcel Bleibtreu: “We thought that social reality consisted in the contradiction between the fundamental classes: the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Clearly an error, for from now on the capitalist regime, which encompasses these two classes, becomes a totality that is counterposed... to the Stalinist world.” (2)

Pablo simply ignored the class struggle that was raging in the camps of both capitalism and Stalinism. His outlook was an echo of the theory of blocs propagated by the Stalinists themselves, and which formed the basis for the activities of the Cominform, which had been founded in 1947. According to this line, every socialist had to choose between the pro-imperialist and anti-imperialist camps by siding with the bureaucracy in the Kremlin. Every critique of Stalinism was branded as support for imperialism.

Pablo’s new position was not limited to an adaptation to Stalinism. It left no room for an independent role for the Fourth International and meant, in essence, its liquidation.

In a detailed examination of the roots of Pabloism, David North writes that Pablo had “lost confidence in the revolutionary capacity of the working class and in the ability of Trotskyism to defeat the powerful social democratic and Stalinist bureaucracies within the international workers’ movement or to overcome the influence of the bourgeois nationalists in the backward countries.” As a result, Pablo “subordinated all questions of program, perspective and principle to an unrestrained tactical opportunism. The practical activity of the Trotskyist movement was no longer to be centrally directed towards educating the proletariat, making it conscious of its historic tasks, and establishing its unconditional programmatic and organisational independence from all other class forces. [...] Instead, work was to be reduced to the small change of tactical expediency, in which principled positions established over decades of struggle were to be surrendered in the vain hope of influencing the leaders of the existing Stalinist, social democratic and bourgeois nationalist organisations and pushing them to the left.” (3)

Pablo described this as the “integration into the real movement of the masses.” In a speech before the Third World Congress of the Fourth International in the autumn of 1951, he called upon delegates to understand “the necessity of subordinating all organisational considerations, of formal independence or otherwise, to real integration into the mass movement wherever it expresses itself in each country.”

He explicitly called for the junking of any independent political program: “What distinguishes us still more from the past, what makes for the quality of our movement today and constitutes the surest gauge of our future victories, is our growing capacity to understand, to appreciate the mass movement as its exists—often confused, often under treacherous, opportunist, centrist, bureaucratic and even bourgeois and petty-bourgeois leaderships—and our endeavours to find our place in this movement with the aim of raising it from its present to higher levels.” (4)

It would seem as if François Vercammen had this very passage in front of him when 50 years later he wrote: “In such a formation, revolutionary Marxists do not practice ‘entryism’ with a secret or avowed goal of passing as quickly as possible to a vanguard ‘revolutionary party’ equipped with a revolutionary program. They are the co-initiators, co-organizers, co-leaders of this broad party in order to share the experiences of the current struggle and to progress together towards a mass anti-capitalist party capable of fighting for socialism.” (5)

As David North demonstrates in his analysis of Pabloism, this approach rejects a central lesson from over a century of class struggle. It denies the significance of conscious leadership in the struggle by the working class for political power.

The Pabloite approach is based on a theoretical method that is diametrically opposed to that of Marxism. North makes the following comment: “The standpoint of objectivism is contemplation rather than revolutionary practical activity, of observation rather than struggle; it justifies what is happening rather than explains what must be done. This method provided the theoretical underpinnings for a perspective in which Trotskyism was no longer seen as the doctrine guiding the practical activity of a party determined to conquer power and change the course of history, but rather as a general interpretation of a historical process in which socialism would ultimately be realized under the leadership of non-proletarian forces hostile to the Fourth International. Insofar as Trotskyism was to be credited with any direct role in the course of events, it was merely as a sort of subliminal mental process unconsciously guiding the activities of Stalinists, neo-Stalinists, semi-Stalinists and, of course, petty-bourgeois nationalists of one type or another.” (6)

Pablo’s theoretical innovations did not go unanswered. The first to object was the French section.

After the war, the Parti Communiste Internationaliste (PCI—International Communist Party) gained considerable influence. In 1946 the organisation had around 1,000 members and put up 11 candidates in parliamentary elections, who won between 2 and 5 percent of the votes. Its newspaper La Vérité was sold publicly in newspaper kiosks and had a wide readership. Its influence even extended to other organisations. The entire leadership of the Socialist youth organisation, with a total membership of 20,000, supported the Trotskyists.

Politically, however, the PCI was far from consolidated. In 1947 the social democratic SFIO shifted sharply to the right, dissolved its youth organisation and expelled its Trotskyist leadership. These events led to an intense crisis within the PCI.

The right wing reacted by writing off any sort of revolutionary perspective. In 1959, Yvan Craipeau, who in 1947 headed the PCI, wrote retrospectively: “It became clear that the revolutionary perspectives of the PCI did not measure up to reality... France was not Russia in 1917: the popular masses were not going onto the offensive against the regime; they regarded the strike not as a stage on the path to power, but rather as a means to secure their demands. The policies of the Communist and Socialist organisations had not been arbitrarily imposed on them; they reflected to some extent their state of mind. Once again, it seemed necessary to seriously revise the political estimation and orientation.” (7)

By making the “state of mind” of workers responsible for the policies of the Stalinists and Social Democrats, Craipeau was twisting reality. In 1947 the French working class rebelled against the dictates of the Stalinists, who sat in government together with the Socialists and bourgeois radicals and demanded severe sacrifices from workers in the name of national economic recovery. A wave of strikes, which began in the car industry, spiralled out of the control of the Stalinist-dominated trade union, CGT, and was for a time led by the Trotskyists. In order to head off the mounting anger, the Stalinists found themselves forced to withdraw their minister from the government.

Inside the PCI, the right wing around Craipeau soon lost the majority. He was expelled in 1948 after agitating for the dissolution of the party into the Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire (RDR), a coalition of left groupings founded by the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre’s RDR broke apart a few months later. A number of representatives of the right wing of the party later joined the United Socialist Party (Parti Socialiste Unifié) of Michel Rocard, which in the 1970s merged with François Mitterrand’s Socialist Party.

The conflict with Craipeau had prepared the PCI for the struggle with Pablo. Pablo reacted to the resistance to his political revisions inside the French section by bureaucratically expelling the majority of the party in 1952. He was able to rely on the support of a minority of the organisation led by Pierre Frank und Ernest Mandel. In the years to follow, both men would evolve into prominent spokesmen of French and international Pabloism.

Eventually, in 1953, a number of sections of the Fourth International came out openly in opposition to Pablo. On November 16, the American Socialist Workers Party (SWP), led by James P. Cannon, published an Open Letter to Trotskyists all over the world replying firmly and at length to the positions advanced by Pablo. In the final years of his life Trotsky had worked closely with leading members of the SWP, which possessed considerable authority in the international movement.

The Open Letter accused Pablo’s faction of “now working consciously and deliberately to disrupt, split, and break up the historically created cadres of Trotskyism in the various countries and to liquidate the Fourth International.” It concluded: “The lines of cleavage between Pablo’s revisionism and orthodox Trotskyism are so deep that no compromise is possible either politically or organizationally.” (8)

The Open Letter led to the unification of all orthodox Trotskyists in the International Committee of the Fourth International, including the expelled French majority and the British section.

It is not the task of this series to detail the history of Pabloism. (Following the 1953 split in the Fourth International, the followers of Pablo grouped themselves in the United Secretariat). Such a project would fill several volumes. There is not even sufficient space to list all of the political catastrophes for which the Pabloite International bears full, or at least partial, responsibility.

The leading Pabloites proved to be insatiable in their quest to detect political figures and organisations to which they could play court and depict as the revolutionary vanguard. In particular, Ernest Mandel stood out in this respect. At different times his list of political role models extended from Marshall Tito to Mao, the Polish Stalinist Vladislav Gomulka, Fidel Castro, the Sandinistas, the muddle-headed GDR dissident Rudolf Bahro, right up to Mikhail Gorbachev, whom he praised in one of his last books—a work he dedicated to Boris Yeltsin!

Not one of these organisations or figures lived up to the expectations of the Pabloites. They invariably shifted right-wards in their politics and, in most cases, left political devastation in their wake. This, however, did not deter the Pabloites. Like ducks emerging from the water, they shook their wings and plunged back in to prepare the next disaster. The denial of their own responsibility for the results of their political practice was, and remains, a characteristic feature of the objectivistic outlook by which they seek to explain every political event as the work of anonymous historical forces.

Things were not so simple, however, for all those who had followed the advice of the Pabloites and suffered the consequences. Generations of workers and youth, drawn towards Trotskyism, were led astray and demoralized. Some of them lost their lives, including young people in Latin America who followed Mandel’s advice and left the cities to fight a guerrilla war in the jungle. Isolated from the working class, they became easy prey for fascist paramilitaries.

After the split of 1953, Pablo himself and other leading French Pabloites placed themselves unconditionally at the service of the Algerian Liberation Front (FLN), and took over organisational responsibilities, such as the printing of illegal newspapers, fake banknotes and counterfeit passports. They even set up a weapons factory in Morocco. After the victory of the FLN over the French colonial regime, Pablo entered into the service of the Algerian government. As special advisor to the head of state, Ben Bella, Pablo was responsible for the introduction in Algerian factories of the forms of “workers’ self-management” first initiated in post-war Yugoslavia.

At the same time, he officially coordinated relations between the Algerian government and national movements across the globe. He developed close links to the MPLA in Angola, Frelimo in Mozambique, and Désiré Kabila in the Congo. The Pan-African movement, which has since demonstrated its utter inability to overcome the legacies of colonial oppression and economic backwardness, owed much to Pablo in the period of its formation.

Together with Che Guevara, Pablo participated in the construction of a new organisation spanning three continents that was to stand to the left of the non-aligned movement of Tito and Nehru. Ho Chi Minh showed interest in the new formation, along with Kim Il-Sung and Gamal Abdel-Nasser. In the name of Ben Bella, Pablo carried out negotiations with the embassies of these countries. He was also in close contact with the Soviet government.

In 1965, Pabloite activities in Algeria came to an abrupt end when the military overthrew Ben Bella in a violent coup and Houari Boumedienne took power. Pablo was able to flee the country with a passport obtained by the MPLA. Some of his friends, however, were captured and tortured. Under conditions where so-called Trotskyists had unconditionally subordinated themselves to the Algerian bourgeois nationalists, the Algerian working class was left completely politically unprepared for the inevitable shift to the right by the FLN.

The same year saw a break between the United Secretariat and Pablo. Points of difference between the two included the conflict between Moscow and Peking. During his period in the Algerian government, Pablo had formed close relations with the Kremlin, while, for its part, the United Secretariat supported Mao Tse-tung. Notwithstanding the parting of ways with Pablo, the United Secretariat failed to draw a balance sheet of the political foundations of Pabloism. It continued to glorify bourgeois nationalist movements. Amongst the heroes it celebrated was the so-called “natural Marxist” Fidel Castro.

The reactionary consequences of Pabloism were already visible a year before the departure of Pablo—in events in Ceylon. The Ceylonese section of the United Secretariat, the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), had entered into a bourgeois coalition government led by Sirimavo Bandaranaike—the mother of the current Sri Lankan president. The move triggered a political process that eventually plunged the country into a self-destructive civil war that continues to the present day.

The LSSP was the most important party in the Sri Lankan workers’ movement. It had mass influence amongst both Tamil and Sinhalese workers. Following the Second World War, it was the only party to oppose the new constitution for Ceylon—a constitution that had been worked out with the former British colonial power to secure the dominance of the Ceylonese bourgeoisie by playing off the two most important ethnic groups against one another.

In 1953, the LSSP did not support the Open Letter of the SWP, although it had reservations about Pablo. Instead, it sought to maintain relations with the Pabloite International. In the following years, with the encouragement of the Pabloites, opportunist tendencies developed in the LSSP that appealed for a direct political alliance with the national bourgeoisie.

This culminated in the events of 1964. For the first time in history, a party calling itself Trotskyist entered a bourgeois government. This served to discredit the Fourth International not just in Ceylon, but throughout the entire Indian subcontinent and all the countries of the so-called Third World.

The price paid by the LSSP for its participation in the government of Bandaranaike was its capitulation to Sinhala chauvinism. As part of the governing coalition, the LSSP supported measures (such as establishing Sinhala as the official national language) that discriminated against the Tamil minority.

As a result, the poor rural layers and, above all, the youth were prevented from uniting with the working class, and they consequently sought an alternative orientation. Separatist groups such as the Tamil Tigers (LTTE) were able to win support amongst the Tamils for an armed struggle for an independent Tamil state. In the poor rural regions of the south, the Janatha Vimukti Peramuna (JVP) was able to win influence. Originally basing itself on Maoism, the JVP rapidly embraced extreme forms of Sinhala chauvinism, including, for a time, elements of fascist politics.

The betrayal in Ceylon provided indisputable proof that Pabloism had gone over to the camp of the bourgeois counter-revolution. In the history of the Pabloite International, the betrayal of 1964 represents a break as decisive as August 4, 1914, for the German Social Democracy, which on that day voted to support the First World War.

After the split of 1953, the French Pabloites led a very miserable existence. The organisation had just a few dozen members, with barely any workers and virtually no representation in the trade unions. In the 1960s they were able to win support from the Communist Student Union at the Faculty for Literature at the Sorbonne University in Paris. This group was led by Alain Krivine, who had begun his political career as a Stalinist and had participated in a Youth Festival in Moscow in 1956.

Krivine was critical of the stance taken by the French Communist Party (PCF) in the Algerian war and came closer to the Pabloites. Two of his four brothers had, in fact, secretly been members of the Pabloite organisation for some time. In 1965 Krivine and the Communist Student union at the Sorbonne were expelled from the PCF. Several hundred members aligned themselves with Krivine and founded the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR). Many members, however, were unaware of Krivine’s collaboration with the Pabloites.

The student movement of 1968 led to a swift growth of the LCR, which in a short period of time comprised several thousand members. Politically, the organisation adapted completely to the illusions of the students and played a very active role at the barricades. The Pabloites glorified the activism of the students and declared them to be the new vanguard of the revolution. In 1969, the PCI led by Pierre Frank and the LCR of Krivine united to form the Communist League (Ligue Communiste), which renamed itself the LCR in 1973.

Following its revolutionary posturing on the barricades of the Latin Quarter in 1968—excesses that had more to do with the emotional state of many youth at that time than any thought out political program—the LCR returned to the orbit of the Stalinists as the student revolt ran out of steam. Every time a crisis developed in the ranks of the PCF, the LCR rushed to embrace one of the competing factions and declare it to the basis for a new “left” organisation—only to note later that it had moved rapidly to the right.

Typical in this respect was the LCR’s support for the PCF dissident Pierre Juquin in the presidential elections of 1988. Since it is so illustrative of the politics of the LCR, this episode will be briefly dealt with here.

Basically, Juquin attacked the PCF from the right. He was close to the so-called “Euro-communism” expounded by the Italian and Spanish Communist Parties. These organisations sought to increase their independence from Moscow in order to work more closely with the ruling classes of their own countries.

The French CP under Georges Marchais was ambivalent towards Euro-communism. Since 1976, the PCF had propagated a program of “Socialism in French colours” and embraced a common program with the socialists and the left liberals, but it was wary of being out-manoeuvred by the Socialists. In 1977, Marchais ended the alliance with the socialists and intensified the party’s orientation towards Moscow. This did not prevent the PCF from entering into a coalition government with Socialist Party leader Mitterrand when he won the election in 1981.

Three years later, following a clear turn to the right by Mitterrand in economic policy, the PCF withdrew from the government. This resulted in the emergence of the so-called Rénovateurs (renewers) faction, under one-time party speaker Pierre Juquin, who criticized the “orthodox” course of Marchais and supported further collaboration with the Socialists.

Juquin was subsequently expelled from the PCF, and in 1988 stood as a candidate in the presidential elections against the official PCF candidate. Alain Krivine had already established close relations with the PCF historian Jean Elleinstein in the 1970s. Elleinstein was a spokesman for the French Euro-communists and a close friend of Juquin.

Following Juquin’s expulsion from the PCF, the LCR opened the pages of its newspaper to Juquin and organized his election campaign. The Pabloites hoped thereby to create a melting pot for dissatisfied Stalinists, ex-radicals and disenchanted students. Their efforts were in vain. Juquin won just two percent of the vote and rapidly disappeared from the political scene.

Although the policies of the Pabloite International regularly landed in a dead-end or a political catastrophe, this did not lead automatically to the disappearance of Pabloism as a political tendency. The International Committee itself witnessed the development of tendencies that held positions similar to those of the Pabloites, and once again the orthodox Trotskyists found themselves in a minority.

In 1963, ten years after publishing the Open Letter, which had ruled out any form of compromise with Pabloism, the American SWP joined the Pabloite International. A discussion over earlier differences did not take place. The political basis for the unification was common support for Fidel Castro.

In 1971, the French section of the International Committee, the Organisation Communiste Internationaliste (OCI), broke away. It kept its distance from the United Secretariat and its French section, the LCR, but adapted completely to the Socialist Party and the right-wing trade union, Force Ouvrière. At the same time, it established its own opportunist relations with the national bourgeoisie in the former colonies.

Finally, in the course of the 1970s the British section of the International Committee, the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP), increasingly adopted Pabloite positions—in its stance towards national liberation movements, the British trade union and Labour Party bureaucracy, and eventually towards the Stalinist bureaucracy in Moscow. This process led to a profound internal crisis in the section that culminated in the break-up of the party in 1985.

Today, the International Committee is based on those forces in the US, Sri Lanka and Great Britain that fought the capitulation to Pabloism, in addition to the new sections that joined on the basis of this struggle. The fight against the degeneration of the British WRP and the break with this organisation in the winter of 1985-86 represented a milestone in the development of the International Committee. The polemic and discussion of the roots of the degeneration of the WRP ushered in a renaissance of authentic Marxism, which is reflected today in the high level of political analysis found on the World Socialist Web Site. This struggle has established the political and theoretical basis for a revival of the international Marxist workers’ movement.

The roots of the longevity of Pabloism and its temporary predominance over the forces of orthodox Marxism are to be found in the political and social relations prevailing in the post-war period. Pabloism nourished itself on the domination of Stalinism and social democracy over the working class and petty-bourgeois nationalism over the oppressed masses of the former colonies. It developed the political and theoretical formulae to justify such domination and provided it with a left cover. At the same time, it was able to recruit from amongst the social layers that had the most to benefit from class compromise—the trade union bureaucracy and sections of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia.

If one considers Pabloism as an objective social phenomenon, one understands that it is inseparably bound up with the existence of the Soviet Union under the domination of the Stalinist bureaucracy. The mere presence of the Soviet Union had forced the bourgeoisie in the West to cushion the class struggle through measures of class compromise and social concessions to the working class. This established a broad field of activity for reformist parties and the trade unions. The Cold War also created conditions whereby the national liberation movements could use the confrontation between the two opposing camps to establish a certain degree of independence to advance their own interests. At the same time, on a world scale, Stalinism remained the most important tool of counter-revolution and nipped in the bud every independent movement of the working class.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 plunged Pabloism into a profound crisis. The fact that the bureaucracy itself had taken the initiative to dissolve the Soviet Union only served to confirm the counter-revolutionary character of Stalinism—which Pabloism had continually denied. At the same time, it stripped away the basis for the political activities of social reformists and petty-bourgeois nationalists, leading to the decay and shift to the right on the part of these organisations.

The United Secretariat fell apart. Many of its sections collapsed or dissolved themselves into what was left of Stalinist parties. Others entered in united fashion into the successor organisations of the Stalinist parties and retained only the most informal links to the United Secretariat. The extent and drastic consequences of the crisis for the international Pabloite movement is dealt with in the report already cited on the Fifteenth Congress, where it states: “No revolutionary organisation has emerged unscathed from this neo-liberal, counter-revolutionary period. Everybody had to confront setbacks. All were forced to adapt.” Another passage refers to the period between 1985 and 1995 as a “descent into hell.”

The Pabloite International has re-emerged from this purgatory as the left wing of bourgeois politics, freed from any Marxist ballast. It has shifted markedly to the right and no longer plays the role of a left cover for the reformist props of bourgeois rule. Instead, it has itself assumed the role of a prop. What was the summit (and exception) of Pabloite betrayal in Ceylon in 1964—participation in a bourgeois government—has now become the rule.

Livio Maitan, a veteran of the Pabloite movement and for many years a leading member of Rifondazione Comunista in Italy, opened the Fifteenth Congress with greetings to a bourgeois minister from its own ranks—a novelty even for the Pabloites. Maitan also used the opportunity to refer to the events of 1964, which he cynically described as the “drifting in Sri Lanka.”

He declared: “In principle, we have never suffered from the fatal malady of the workers’ movement that is parliamentary cretinism, even if we have suffered some drifting at different times, from Sri Lanka to countries on other continents. Thus we are not afraid to stress, as a reflection of our growing influence, the fact that in the last decade we have had parliamentary representatives elected in a series of countries, from Brazil to the Philippines, Denmark to Portugal and to the European Parliament. In Brazil, a comrade like Miguel Rossetto, whose qualities and militant spirit are known, is today a member of the government emerging from the unprecedented popular success represented by the election of Lula. Miguel has assumed a crucial responsibility with the task of accomplishing a radical agrarian reform, capable of generating a more general dynamic of rupture with the system. We will follow and support his fight, supported by all the most advanced sectors of the PT and the MST [Landless Workers’ Movement] and, stifling an underlying anguish for the extreme difficulty of the enterprise, we express to him in this congress our warmest solidarity.”

In the next part we will examine how this “general dynamic of rupture with the system” worked out in practice in Brazil.

Notes:
1) Quoted from David North, The Heritage We Defend, Labor Publications, Detroit, 1988, p. 187
2) “Where is Pablo Going?” by Bleibtreu-Favre, June 1951, in Trotskyism Versus Revisionism vol. 1, New Park Publications, London, 1974, p. 54
3) David North, The Heritage We Defend, in particular, chapters 13-18. Here, p. 191
4) ibid, p. 194
5) See part three of this series
6) The Heritage We Defend, p. 188
7) La Vérité 583, p. 213
8) The Heritage We Defend, pp. 231, 240