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Ernest Mandel, 1923-1995

A critical assessment of his role
in the history of the Fourth International

23 October 1995
By David North

Part 1.The importance of an objective consideration

Ernest Mandel, the longtime leader of the United Secretariat, died on July 20, 1995. His death removes from the scene a man who figured prominently in the history of the postwar Fourth International. It must be acknowledged that in any objective and credible history of the Fourth International, his life and work will be the object of serious study and critical evaluation.

A definite responsibility falls upon the International Committee to offer its assessment of Mandel's political conceptions and activities. Those who are at all familiar with the history of the Fourth International know that the International Committee has been for more than four decades the most consistent and irreconcilable of the political opponents of Ernest Mandel. The International Committee was founded 42 years ago in the midst of a bitter struggle against a political tendency of which Mandel was a principal leader.

The purpose of this review of Mandel's life is not merely to vindicate the arguments made and actions taken by those who founded the International Committee in 1953. History, of course, has its claims. But the study of the past yields its greatest riches to the extent that it provides us with lessons that we can make use of today. Therefore, our aim is not to score some final factional points against Ernest Mandel, let alone to call into question the sincerity of his socialist convictions. Rather, we seek to understand through an examination of his life the enduring political significance for the international working class of the struggles that have been waged inside the Fourth International.

This point should be expressed somewhat more emphatically. "Enduring political significance" does not adequately convey the urgent relevance of the political issues that have preoccupied the Fourth International. To the philistines, the struggles within the Fourth International have been nothing more than sectarian squabbles of no importance to anyone other than those few people directly involved in the disputes.

We are not in the least troubled by this dismissive attitude, which expresses the intellectual bankruptcy of those responsible for formulating bourgeois policy. One has only to note that the upheavals of the past decade came as a complete surprise to all the political leaders of the major capitalist states. Less than a decade ago not one of them anticipated the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe, let alone the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Every major event has taken the international bourgeoisie unawares. Even today, the bourgeoisie lacks any coherent and integrated conception of the historical processes underlying the political transformations of the past decade. Ignorance and stupidity play no small role in the day-to-day formulation of the class policy of the bourgeoisie.

From its inception the Fourth International has been preoccupied with the fundamental political problems of this entire historical epoch. Again, we can assume that the philistines would regard this claim as immodest and presumptuous, if not ridiculous. To begin with, the very conception that there exist "fundamental political problems" that are associated with an "entire historical epoch" is utterly alien to the pragmatically-oriented mind. The bourgeoisie thinks not in terms of "historical epochs," but of business cycles, of upturns and downturns and of trends.

But for Marxists, the historical epoch is that of world socialist revolution. Its objective preconditions are rooted in the intractable economic and social contradictions of the international capitalist system. The "fundamental political problems" of this epoch are those which relate to the resolution of the crisis of leadership within the working class and the development and implementation of its international socialist strategy. From this standpoint, and in direct opposition to the claims of the intellectual representatives of the bourgeoisie, especially those within the universities, the October Revolution of 1917 was not an aberration, a mere deflection from the "normal," i.e., capitalistic, course of social development, but a fundamental turning point in world history. Notwithstanding the fate of the state that issued from that revolution-- and it is a matter of historical record that the Trotskyist movement predicted long ago that Stalinism would lead the Soviet Union to disaster- -the essential character of the epoch in which we live is still defined by the conflict between two irreconcilably antagonistic international social classes, the bourgeoisie and proletariat.

No one would deny that a great deal has changed since 1917. But these changes do not include a fundamental alteration of the economic foundations and class structure of society. Rather, the most significant of the changes in the social structure of society--the massive growth of the urban population and the decline in the size and economic significance of the peasantry--have accentuated the class polarization of society. There is no question but that we continue to live within a capitalistic society based upon the private ownership of the means of production and the extraction of surplus value from wage laborers.

From all sides we hear of the downfall of Marxism, of which the collapse of the Soviet Union was supposedly the climactic event. Usually this assertion proceeds from the theoretically absurd and factually baseless identification of Stalinism with Marxism. We also hear of the failure of Marxism from those who know something about the difference between Stalinism and Marxism, but in the face of apparently triumphant reaction, have thrown up their hands in despair and decided, without attempting to think the matter over too carefully, that socialism is nothing more than an unrealizable utopia.

To be sure, the socialistic aspirations of the October Revolution were betrayed, the Bolshevik Party was destroyed, and, after a process of political and social degeneration that spanned decades, the Soviet Union was dissolved. The working class has suffered serious defeats. Capitalism has demonstrated an extraordinary resilience. But the fact remains that this century has witnessed, in the aftermath of 1917, revolutionary struggles of a monumental character. Not so long ago the survival of capitalism seemed problematic even to its most ardent bourgeois defenders. Nothing is added to an understanding of this century by asserting, whether with malice or resignation, that Marxism has failed. Rather, it is necessary to study, in detail, the history of the international workers movement in the twentieth century and uncover the real causes for the setbacks and defeats of the working class.

Such a study requires a serious examination of the history of the Fourth International. It is within this movement that the objective processes of the class struggle were reflected consciously and made the subject of theoretical analysis. The controversies and struggles within the Fourth International, provoked by the tragic and momentous events of this century, were the means by which specific historical episodes were raised to the level of strategic experiences.

The education of the working class is a protracted and difficult process. The progress of the working class must be measured not merely in terms of what it has gained materially, but what it has learned theoretically. Only to the extent that the working class assimilates the strategic experiences of the entire postwar era will it be able to meet the challenges of a new period of revolutionary struggle. It is for this reason that it is necessary to study the role of Ernest Mandel in the history of the Fourth International.

Ernest Mandel did not belong to the generation that participated directly in the political struggles that led to the formation of the Fourth International in 1938. Mandel's political activity began after the outbreak of World War II and the assassination of Leon Trotsky. However, in order to understand the controversies that were to play so large a role in Mandel's life, it is necessary to review the events which gave rise to the founding of the Fourth International.

The history of the Fourth International begins not with its founding congress in September 1938, but with the formation of the Left Opposition, under the leadership of Leon Trotsky, inside the Russian Communist Party in the autumn of 1923. The first documents of the Opposition protested the bureaucratization of the party and the growing suppression of internal democracy. The dispute was deepened and assumed international significance in 1924 when Stalin, rapidly emerging as the political leader of the Soviet bureaucracy, introduced his "theory" of "socialism in one country." This conception detached the progress of the Soviet Union toward socialism from the development of the revolutionary struggles of the international working class. It was to have tragic consequences for both the Soviet Union and the Communist International. The political disorientation that this theory produced inside the Communist International contributed to a series of devastating defeats of the working class, especially in China in 1927 and in Germany in 1933.

Within Soviet Russia the Left Opposition sought to reform the Communist Party. As an international tendency, the Left Opposition sought to reform the Communist International. The climactic stage of this struggle came in Germany, as the International Left Opposition fought to change the disastrous ultraleft policies that had been foisted upon the German Communist Party by the Moscow-controlled Comintern and which were clearing the path for Hitler's victory.

Writing from exile on the island of Prinkipo, off the coast of Turkey, Trotsky called upon the Comintern and the German Communist Party to establish a united front with the Social Democratic Party, for the purpose of unifying the strength of the working class in a common struggle against the fascist danger. He subjected to merciless criticism the Stalinist claim that there existed no difference between Social Democracy and fascism, and that the victory of Hitler would be followed soon after by the victory of the Communist Party. Trotsky denounced this as political madness, warning that Hitler's triumph would be the greatest catastrophe that could befall the German and European socialist movement. The warnings were ignored; indeed, Trotsky and his followers were denounced by the Comintern as "social fascists." In January 1933 the Nazis came to power without any organized resistance from the working class. Within weeks the Communist Party was declared illegal and its members and supporters were being shipped off to the new concentration camp in the village of Dachau that the Nazis had established for political opponents of their regime. And not long after, the Social Democratic Party was declared illegal and the massive trade unions dissolved.

The Communist International refused to subject the policies that had produced the German catastrophe to the slightest criticism. Meeting in its aftermath, the Comintern declared its policies had been correct and that it was in no way responsible for the defeat.

Trotsky replied to this shameless abdication of political and moral responsibility by proclaiming that the Third International was finished as a revolutionary organization. The victory of Hitler was to the Third International what the outbreak of World War I had been to the Second International. It was necessary to build a new world revolutionary organization, the Fourth International.

There was not a trace of political subjectivism in the decision to issue the call for the founding of the Fourth International. First of all, Trotsky had resisted for several years demands for a break from the Comintern. As long as the fate of the German working class hung in the balance, he considered it premature to abandon the struggle for the reform of the Communist International. Then, immediately after the Nazi victory, Trotsky delayed the call for a new International. He waited to see whether a single section of the Third International would demand a discussion of the German events or in any other way express a critical attitude toward the policies of the Kremlin. As he later explained, even the criticism of a single section would have indicated that the possibility for a renewal of Marxist policies had not been exhausted within the Comintern. But the absence of criticism left no alternative to the International Left Opposition. In objective political terms, the cynical endorsement by the Comintern of policies that had been responsible for a disaster of unprecedented magnitude meant that this organization did not consider itself in any sense answerable to the working class. Its policies reflected the needs and interests of another social force, the Soviet bureaucracy.

In the years that followed, Trotsky substantiated and deepened his analysis of the Soviet regime, demonstrating that the crimes and betrayals of Stalin were the necessary expression of the material interests of the bureaucracy that had usurped political power from the working class. The role of the Soviet bureaucracy, Trotsky insisted, was counterrevolutionary. Within the Soviet Union, its ruthless suppression of all elements of proletarian democracy and its fixation with the preservation and enhancement of its own privileges made the bureaucracy the greatest obstacle to the development of the nationalized productive forces on the basis of genuine economic planning. Internationally, the diplomacy of the Kremlin treated the interests of the working class as so much small change in its dealings with the imperialist powers. While Trotsky continued to define the Soviet Union as a workers state, albeit one that had undergone a far-reaching degeneration, he warned that its long-term survival, not to mention its development along genuinely socialist lines, depended upon the overthrow of the bureaucracy in a political revolution.

Trotsky rejected all claims that the Stalinist bureaucracy represented a new social class. It was, rather, a social caste, which upheld its material interests through a monopoly of political power. The bureaucracy exercised this power to maintain its parasitic enjoyment of privileges which were based on property forms created by a proletarian revolution. In a historic sense, the bureaucratic regime offered no independent path of development. The longer it maintained its political stranglehold, the more protracted the degeneration of Soviet society, the greater would be the danger of capitalist restoration. Although the bureaucracy was not a new social class, Trotsky explained that it contained within itself the very tendencies that would produce, over time, the necessary social foundations for the emergence of a new capitalist class. As he wrote in The Revolution Betrayed:

"The very fact of its appropriation of political power in a country where the most important means of production are concentrated in the hands of the state, creates a new and hitherto unknown relation between the bureaucracy and the riches of the nation. The means of production belong to the state. But the state, so to speak, 'belongs' to the bureaucracy. If these as yet wholly new relations should solidify, become the norm and be legalized, whether with or without the resistance of the workers, they would, in the long run, lead to the complete liquidation of the social conquests of the proletarian revolution" (Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed [Detroit: Labor Publications, 1991], p. 211).

Trotsky's analysis of the Soviet regime and of the political character of the bureaucracy was the scientific foundation upon which he based his fight for the Fourth International. Having established the irreconcilable opposition between the material interests defended by the Soviet bureaucracy and the objective interests of the international working class, Trotsky insisted that the call for a Fourth International had to be seen as the expression of historical necessity, not as a tactical maneuver.

It was precisely on this point that Trotsky came into sharp conflict with a large number of political groupings that were active on the European left in the mid-1930s. Many of these tendencies claimed that they were in general agreement with Trotsky's analysis of Stalinism. They were prepared to acknowledge that the Soviet bureaucracy ruled despotically within the USSR and betrayed the interests of the international working class. However, they pulled back from what they considered to be the extreme and unrealistic practical proposal for the establishment of a new International. Such tendencies, of which the British Independent Labour Party with its London Bureau was the principal representative, argued that it was premature to proclaim the Fourth International. They declared that a new International could not be established artificially; that the formation of a new International had to arise organically out of "great events," i.e., out of a successful revolution. They pointed to the precedent of the Third International, which, they maintained, arose on the basis of the Bolshevik victory in 1917.

A deep skepticism and pessimism underlay these arguments. Basically, the position of the ILP, the German-emigre SAP, the Spanish POUM, the group of Henricus Snievliet in Holland, to name only the best known, was that there did not exist sufficient political support among the masses to make a new International a politically-credible enterprise. The Third International, as well as the remnants of the Second, still commanded the allegiance of the broad masses of socialist workers. The adherents of the Fourth International were simply too few.

It must be understood that these arguments against the formation of the Fourth International had very direct practical implications. In general, the organizations that considered the formation of the Fourth International premature adopted, in practice, an equivocal and compromising attitude toward the Stalinists. It was with good reason that Trotsky used the term "centrist" in relation to such organizations. They sought to chart a middle course between Marxism and both Stalinism and Social Democratic reformism. The tragic consequences of such an attempt was demonstrated in the Spanish Revolution, where the equivocal policy pursued by the POUM, under the leadership of Andres Nin, led to its destruction by the Stalinists.

In the many articles written by Trotsky in reply to the centrists, he repeatedly stressed that the historical interests of the working class could be served only by a party that told the masses the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. To the extent that the working class remained under the influence of Stalinism and/or Social Democracy, it would be led to further defeats and catastrophes. To oppose the formation of the Fourth International because the Stalinists were still too strong was to contribute to the perpetuation of the political stranglehold which, according to the centrists, was the insurmountable obstacle to the building of the new International. In other words, the politics of the centrists left the working class in a political labyrinth from which there was no escape. The SAP summed up its position as follows: "The proclamation of the new International, despite the need for it objectively, is in the meantime rendered impossible by subjective causes" (Quoted in Writings of Leon Trotsky 1934-35 [New York: Pathfinder Press, 1974], p. 262).

These "subjective causes," which the centrists lamented, to be sure, as a "profound problem," were, of course, the lack of an understanding within the working class of the need for a new revolutionary leadership, the lingering of illusions in the existing mass parties of the working class.

Trotsky replied scathingly to this type of rationalization: "In simpler terms, without the new International the proletariat will be crushed, but the masses do not understand this as yet. And what else is the task of the Marxists if not to raise the subjective factor to the level of the objective and to bring the consciousness of the masses closer to the understanding of the historical necessity--in simpler terms, to explain to the masses their own interests, which they do not yet understand? The 'profound problem' of the centrists is profound cowardice in the face of a great and undeferrable task. The leaders of the SAP do not understand the importance of class-conscious revolutionary activity in history....

"The question lies not in what the masses think today but in what spirit and direction Messrs. Leaders are preparing to educate the masses" (ibid., pp. 262-63).

Trotsky also refuted the assertion that the founding of a new International was not possible without the support of a catalytic "great event," such as the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. First of all, while the Bolshevik Revolution certainly facilitated the rapid growth of the Third International, the centrists of the 1930s forgot rather conveniently that Lenin had issued the call for the new International three years before the October Revolution, that is, in the autumn of 1914, following the betrayal of the Second International at the outbreak of the First World War. At that time Lenin's faction constituted a small minority, not only among the adherents of the Second International as a whole, but even among the small number of revolutionary internationalists who opposed the war.

At any rate, the Fourth International had been founded on the basis of "great events," the greatest defeats in the history of the international workers movement--in Italy, China, Germany, Austria, Spain, Czechoslovakia and France. The demoralization of the working class and the victory of fascism in country after country, combined with the systematic physical extermination of socialists in the Soviet Union, had demonstrated the bankruptcy and even criminality of the old workers organizations and brought humanity to the edge of an abyss. If the working class was not to be the helpless victim of the historical process, it had to be armed with a new perspective and a new program.

Here we come to the most profound element in Trotsky's argument against the centrists, contained in his reference to "the importance of class-conscious revolutionary activity in history," that is, to the role of the revolutionary leadership. For Trotsky, the greatest falsification of Marxism was that which presented the "historical process" as if it unfolded independently of human thought and practice, and that political events were merely the inevitable and predetermined outcome of "objective conditions." What this passive fatalism ignored was the role of consciousness in history, which not only reflected the objective course of historical development, but also interpreted it and devised the means to influence and change it. "History," wrote Trotsky, "is not an automatic process." By way of example, Trotsky pointed to the role of Lenin in 1917. Without him there would have been no October Revolution.

"Lenin represented one of the living elements of the historical process. He personified the experience and the perspicacity of the most active section of the proletariat. His timely appearance on the arena of the revolution was necessary in order to mobilize the vanguard and provide it with an opportunity to rally the working class and the peasant masses. Political leadership in the crucial moments of historical turns can become just as decisive a factor as is the role of the chief command during the critical moments of war" (Leon Trotsky, The Spanish Revolution 1931-39, [New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973], pp. 361-62).

Fundamental questions of the Marxist method were raised in this struggle against the centrists. The dialectic of the objective and subjective is among the most complex of all philosophical problems. It does not detract from materialism to acknowledge that the objective factor includes within it the operation of subjective forces. For the purpose of theoretical analysis, we can "abstract" the objective factor (i.e., the economic contradictions of the capitalist system) and consider it independently of all others. Such an abstraction is essential for the purpose of establishing at the most basic level the orientation of the party. But the development of a more profound analysis requires the examination of a complex array of "subjective factors," without which our understanding of the objective situation will remain abstract.

An analysis of the objective situation can attain the level of concreteness required by Marxism only to the extent that this analysis has "factored in" the potential impact upon it of subjective factors and forces, including, above all, the action of the working class and its revolutionary leadership.

Contrary to the claims of his many critics among the centrists, Trotsky was profoundly realistic in his assessment of political possibilities. He, better than anyone else at the time, understood the difficulty and complexity of the problems confronting the international working class and its most politically-advanced elements. He knew very well that these problems could not be surmounted merely with phrases and gestures. Trotsky certainly recognized that the formal establishment of the Fourth International could not, by itself, guarantee the victory of the socialist revolution. However, the possibility of exerting decisive influence within a given set of objective conditions required the existence of the party. Moreover, the ability of the party to win over the working class in the midst of a revolution depended upon what it had already achieved in the course of the preceding period. The elaboration of the party program, the development of political perspectives, the theoretical and practical education of its cadre, and the development of its authority among groups of class-conscious workers must not await, if at all possible, the outbreak of the revolution.

"To be sure," Trotsky wrote, "during a revolution, i.e., when events move quickly, a weak party can quickly grow into a mighty one provided it lucidly understands the course of the revolution and possesses staunch cadres that do not become intoxicated with phrases and are not terrorized by persecution. But such a party must be available prior to the revolution inasmuch as the process of educating the cadres requires time and the revolution does not afford this time" (ibid., p. 363).

Thus Trotsky considered a harmful distraction all discussion of the prospects for socialist revolution that did not proceed from the standpoint of elaborating the independent theoretical and political tasks of the Marxist party as the decisive conscious factor in the class struggle. Again and again Trotsky returned to this point: Objective conditions, even the most favorable, by themselves can provide the working class with nothing more than the possibility of conquering political power. There exists no cosmic historical dialectic that predetermines either the victory or defeat of the working class. Nineteen years after the October Revolution, Trotsky reminded his centrist critics:

"In the year 1917, Russia was passing through the greatest social crisis. One can say with certainty, however, on the basis of all the lessons of history, that had there been no Bolshevik Party, the immeasurable revolutionary energy of the masses would have been fruitlessly spent in sporadic explosions, and the great upheavals would have ended in the severest counterrevolutionary dictatorship. The class struggle is the prime mover of history. It needs a correct program, a firm party, a trustworthy and courageous leadership--not heroes of the drawing room and parliamentary phrases, but revolutionists, ready to go to the very end. This is the major lesson of the October Revolution" (Writings of Leon Trotsky 1935-36, [New York: Pathfinder Press, 1977], p. 166).

Part 2. The Fourth International after Trotsky

Leon Trotsky was assassinated in Coyoacan, on the outskirts of Mexico City, on August 20, 1940 by Ramon Mercader, an agent of the Stalinist GPU. As Trotsky had anticipated, Stalin chose for the assassination a time when the attention of the world would be distracted. In the preceding months Hitler's armies had swept successfully across Western Europe. France had surrendered. The Battle of Britain had just begun.

During the final months of his life, Trotsky produced political essays as brilliant as any he had ever written. His attention was concentrated on the great questions of historical perspective that were posed by the outbreak of World War II. He saw the war as the product of both the insoluble contradictions of the international capitalist system and the crisis of proletarian leadership. Only the successful development of the European socialist revolution could have prevented the war. But the Stalinist and Social Democratic bureaucracies had demoralized the working class and led it to defeat. The victory of Franco in Spain, for which the Stalinist regime was principally responsible, had removed the last possible obstacle to the outbreak of war. Mankind was about to pay a staggering price for the failure of the socialist revolution.

A generation earlier, World War I set into motion the chain of events that led to the Bolshevik Revolution. Trotsky was convinced that the Second World War would also produce revolutionary conditions. However, he warned his followers that the outcome depended upon the development of the political leadership of the working class. The outbreak of war had exposed the glaring contradiction between the very advanced stage of the objective crisis of capitalism and the unpreparedness of the subjective factors of working class consciousness and political leadership. This contradiction would not be overcome easily. There would be, in all likelihood, further defeats. But the cadre of the Fourth International, Trotsky advised, had to prepare for a struggle that was liable to span decades. Whatever the immediate outcome of this or that episode in the class struggle, the resolution of the "historical problem" depended upon the establishment of the political authority of the revolutionary party in the working class.

"The question of tempos and time intervals is of enormous importance; but it alters neither the general historical perspective nor the direction of our policy. The conclusion is a simple one: it is necessary to carry on the work of educating and organizing the proletarian vanguard with tenfold energy. Precisely herein lies the task of the Fourth International" (Writings of Leon Trotsky 1939-40 [New York: Pathfinder, 1973], p. 218).

Ernest Mandel was born in Germany in 1923, but moved as a child to Antwerp in Belgium. He was not part of the generation that joined the Trotskyist movement in the 1930s and was active in the struggles that led to the formation of the Fourth International. He was 12 years younger than Michel Pablo, with whom Mandel was to be so closely associated, and nearly a decade younger than Gerry Healy. But there is no question that he demonstrated his personal courage while still a very young man.

Mandel joined the Trotskyist movement during the early years of the war and became active in the anti-Nazi resistance movement. The European Trotskyist movement suffered heavily under the combined persecution of the fascists and the Stalinists. Many of its leading members, including the brilliant Abram Leon, who apparently played an important role in Mandel's political education, lost their lives. Mandel nearly lost his own, but fortunately survived his deportation to a death camp and returned to Belgium after the collapse of the Nazi regime.

The Fourth International was confronted with complex political problems at the end of the war. As Trotsky had anticipated, there occurred a tremendous political radicalization of broad layers of the European working class. However, despite the prewar betrayals, which had included Stalin's nonaggression pact with Hitler, the Soviet regime and the Stalinist parties emerged from the war with their political authority enhanced by the role played by the Red Army in the defeat of the Third Reich and by the participation of the Communist parties in the anti- Nazi resistance movements. The Stalinists utilized the influence they had acquired to restore the political authority of the desperately weakened Western European bourgeoisie. In France and Italy the Stalinists disarmed the partisan movements that were under their control and entered into coalition governments with the bourgeoisie.

The Fourth International lacked the necessary forces to overcome the influence of the Stalinist parties, whose membership grew into the millions at the end of World War II. In the face of these difficulties, the Trotskyist movement sought to analyze the complex problems raised by the end of the war and develop and defend a revolutionary perspective. Ernest Mandel became a prominent figure within the Fourth International at this time. Using the name Germain, which was to be for many years his political alias, he contributed numerous articles to the political journal Fourth International, in which he analyzed the counterrevolutionary role played by the Stalinists in the postwar restabilization of bourgeois rule in Europe.

"The first immediate goal of the bourgeoisie was to 'return to tranquility,'" Mandel wrote in April 1946. "To achieve this it was necessary that the masses leave the streets and return to their homes. The proclamation of a state of siege does not suffice by itself. It was also necessary that the leaders of the movement, primarily the Stalinist leaders, more and more call upon the masses to establish 'order.' The proofs of this have been complete. Without the leaders of the FTP in France, with the Front de L'Independence in Belgium, with the Force de L'Interieur in Holland, without the leaders of the Comite de Liberation Nationale in Italy, the bourgeoisie could not possibly have achieved a temporary stability but would have had to face civil war everywhere" (Fourth International, September 1946, p. 271).

The restabilization of capitalism that had been made possible by the Stalinists led to the emergence within the Fourth International of a tendency, led by Felix Morrow and cheered on from the sidelines by Max Shachtman, that argued it was pointless to advance a revolutionary socialist program in Europe. The Fourth International, Morrow insisted, should present itself as the greatest champion of bourgeois democracy. Only on this basis would it be possible to win a hearing among the masses of European workers who were under the sway of democratic illusions. Mandel vigorously opposed this attempt to liquidate the socialist program of the Fourth International. He wrote in July 1946:

"The Leninist, in approaching the question of the utilization of democratic slogans, proceeds from his general estimate of the epoch in which we live, and from the program of socialist revolution which flows from it. The tactical question involves solely the way in which the masses must be led to accept this program ... and not how to occupy them in another way as long as they do not 'understand' this program! For the Leninist, democratic slogans are viewed solely as instruments for the mobilization of the working masses" (Fourth International, November 1946, p. 346).

Replying to the argument that the European working class could not understand a socialist program (which was, by the way, a rather dubious proposition in 1946), Mandel wrote that it was false "to permit oneself to be hypnotized by a transitory state of mind of the masses (as the opportunists do), and to base a political line not on the task of helping the masses raise themselves to the height of their historic tasks, but on the necessity of descending with one's program to the level of the most backward layers of the masses" (ibid., p. 347).

But by far the most difficult question that confronted the Fourth International after the world war was the programmatic implications of the political, social and economic transformations produced by the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe. The Fourth International had insisted, since its inception, on the counterrevolutionary role of Stalinism. Yet the victory of the partisans in Yugoslavia under the leadership of the Communist Party and the occupation of Eastern Europe by the Soviet army had been followed by the widespread nationalization of the industries in the affected countries. Did the nationalization of broad sections of these economies mean that the countries occupied by the Soviet Army had been converted into workers states? And if such a transformation had been achieved under the aegis of the Soviet army and the local Communist parties, did that not call into question the unequivocal characterization of Stalinism as counterrevolutionary?

There were other crucial issues posed by the developments in Eastern Europe. If the class nature of the state could be changed in a given country merely through the intervention of the Soviet army, supplemented by economic policies introduced and implemented bureaucratically from the top by Stalinist officials, without any genuinely independent revolutionary mass movement of the working class led by its own political party, did this not call into question the historical necessity of the Fourth International? If a workers state could be established without either a mass workers revolution or identifiable organs of political power, such as the soviets that had emerged in Russia in 1917, through which the proletariat exercised its class rule, did this not challenge the basic Marxist conception of socialist revolution as the most advanced political expression of the self-liberating activity of the working class? Was the independent, class-conscious revolutionary activity of the working class really necessary for the achievement of socialism? In what other forms, and through the leadership and activity of what other social forces, might socialism be realized?

Of course, these questions were not raised all at once. The far- reaching programmatic implications of the events in Eastern Europe were to emerge in the course of several years, and how the Fourth International responded to them was to have a profoud effect on its development.

The postwar transformations in Eastern Europe had been anticipated in a remarkable article that Trotsky had written in 1939, shortly after the outbreak of World War II. The Soviet invasion of Poland, which was carried out in accordance with the secret protocols of the Stalin-Hitler pact of August 1939, had been followed by the expropriation of bourgeois property in the eastern portion of the country seized by the Kremlin. Considered apart from all other factors, these expropriations had a certain progressive character. However, these actions had to be examined within a broader, international, framework.

"In order to gain the possibility of occupying Poland through a military alliance with Hitler," Trotsky wrote, "the Kremlin for a long time deceived and continues to deceive the masses in the USSR and in the whole world, and has thereby brought about the complete disorganization of the ranks of its own Communist International. The primary political criteria for us is not the transformation of property relations in this or another area, however important these may be in themselves, but rather the change in the consciousness and organization of the world proletariat, the raising of their capacity for defending former conquests and accomplishing new ones. From this one, and the only decisive standpoint, the politics of Moscow, taken as a whole, completely retains its reactionary character and remains the chief obstacle on the road to world revolution" (In Defense of Marxism [London: New Park Publications, 1971], p. 23).

In the immediate aftermath of the war, the leadership of the Fourth International firmly opposed suggestions that the economic measures undertaken by the Stalinists in Eastern Europe called for a revision of the Trotskyist program. Far from encouraging the spread of socialist influence, the journal Fourth International warned in November 1946, the methods of the Stalinists had antagonized the masses of Eastern Europe.

"The unspeakable treacheries, their stamping out of mass uprisings, their counterrevolutionary terror, their depredations and plunderings-- these are discrediting in the eyes of the toilers the very word, they very idea of communism. How weighty are the East European nationalizations on the scales as against Stalin's crimes against the working class? The Stalinist counterrevolutionary adventures in Eastern Europe, rather than endowing it with the aura of a progressive mission in history, have made more urgent the necessity of crushing this bloody fiend, and preventing it from doing any more damage than it has already done to the world working class and its struggle for emancipation.

"The blindness of Stalinism, its unutterably reactionary character, its historical bankruptcy is exposed glaringly above all in Eastern Europe. For the sake of paltry loot, for the sake of the small change of reparations-- completely meaningless so far as solving the USSR's economic needs- -the Kremlin has raised against itself a wall of hatred throughout Eastern Europe and the world. For the sake of military control over the poverty- stricken, bankrupt Balkans, the Kremlin has helped the Anglo- American imperialists crush the revolution and prop up decaying capitalism" (Fourth International, November 1946, p. 345).

As one reads these lines, written nearly a half-century ago, one cannot help but be astonished by their extraordinary prescience. They are a testament to the analytic powers of Marxism in general and the farsightedness of the Trotskyist perspective in particular. Even when Stalinism stood at the height of its powers, the Trotskyist movement foresaw the disaster to which the policies of the Kremlin would lead.

Mandel, though still in his early twenties, contributed aggressively to the struggle against tendencies which attributed to Stalinism any sort of progressive historical mission. He warned against jumping prematurely to the conclusion that the nationalization of property signified that workers states had been established in Eastern Europe. The "entire Marxist methodology," wrote Mandel, was irreconcilable with the "absurd" theory "of a degenerated workers state being installed in a country where there has not previously been a proletarian revolution" (Fourth International, February 1947, p. 48).

It was wrong, he insisted, to base the definition of the class nature of a given state simply on the fact of nationalization. Examining in detail the events that had transpired in Poland, Mandel explained:

"A combination of historical conditions was such that the Stalinist bureaucracy, upon entering the country, no longer found any proprietors whatever for numerous industrial and commercial enterprises. The workers had already in fact expropriated many of these enterprises. The Polish bourgeoisie, which has always been extremely poor in capital, was unable, even in the past, to assemble sufficient capital on the basis of private accumulation to create large-scale industry. The problem of the annexed territories with their numerous mines and factories could not find a solution outside of state management--even without Soviet occupation and without the revolutionary upsurge, these industries would have been nationalized" (ibid., p. 49).

Opposing all suggestions that the outcome of the war had somehow demonstrated the progressive character of the Kremlin bureaucracy and called into question the perspective of the Trotskyist movement, the programmatic documents written by Mandel and others were infused with confidence in the capacity of the Fourth International to win the leadership of the working class. As the Manifesto of the Second Congress of the Fourth International declared:

"To wrest from Stalinism the leadership of the working class, it is necessary to begin where the Social Democracy and the Communist Party left off. It is necessary to educate a new generation of revolutionary worker cadres, who through numerous successive experiences in struggle, will succeed in rooting themselves in the working class and gaining its respect and confidence. It is necessary to build a genuine party which, through ever wider activities, will eventually appear in all mass movements as the real alternatives to the bankrupt leaderships" (The Militant, July 26, 1948).

Part 3. The emergence of Pabloism

The years that followed the publication of these documents were to witness a profound change in the positions of not only Ernest Mandel, but also a large section of the Fourth International. The very conceptions that Mandel had labelled as absurd in 1946-47 were to be adopted by him in the years that followed. The change in his political position reflected the crisis that overtook the Fourth International in the late 1940s.

The political crisis within the Fourth International cannot be understood except in relation to the general development of the world situation. First and foremost, it had become apparent by the beginning of 1948 that the danger of socialist revolution in Western Europe that had loomed at the end of the war had been overcome. Under the aegis of American imperialism and its Marshall Plan, capitalism had achieved some sort of viable equilibrium. The movement of the working class receded, and the political initiative, with the assistance of the Stalinists and the Social Democrats, passed back into the hands of the bourgeoisie.

Notwithstanding its betrayals of the working class, the prestige and influence of the Soviet bureaucracy had been enormously increased as a result of its victory over Nazi Germany. In France and Italy, where they had been the preponderant force in the antifascist resistance, after the Nazi invasion of the USSR had rendered the nonaggression pact null and void, the Stalinists were the dominant political force in the working class. In Eastern Europe the statification of industry was accelerated in response to the implementation of the Marshall Plan. In Yugoslavia the regime led by Tito had already carried out the statification of industry. At the same time, the political influence of the Stalinist parties in Asia was growing rapidly, above all in China and French Indochina.

In a peculiar way, the eruption in 1948 of the conflict between the Tito regime in Yugoslavia and the Kremlin contributed to the political crisis inside the Fourth International. Initially, and quite correctly, the Fourth International critically defended Tito against the denunciations and provocations of the Kremlin. It warned, however, that it was not possible to fight Stalinism on the basis of a nationalist program, that is, by counterposing to the brutal dictates of the Kremlin a Yugoslav version of "socialism in one country." Nor, in the long run, would it be possible for the Yugoslav Communists to maneuver, on the basis of a program of national self-interest, between the Soviet Union and the imperialists. Without an international revolutionary perspective, efforts to defend the independence of the Yugoslav state against Soviet pressure and intrigue would lead eventually to an unprincipled and damaging compromise with the imperialist powers.

The intervention of the Fourth International in this momentous crisis, the first great split within the ranks of the Stalinists, was correct and principled. The crisis provided the Trotskyists with an unprecedented opportunity to explain before an international audience the issues that underlay the epochal struggle that their movement had waged against Stalinism since 1923. Moreover, the Fourth International could do what Tito could not and would not: explain that the Soviet attack on Yugoslavia arose out of the counterrevolutionary character of the Kremlin bureaucracy and Stalinism.

However, the developments in Yugoslavia encouraged opportunist tendencies that were beginning to take shape inside the Fourth International. Already, the nationalizations of industry in Eastern Europe had led to speculation about the ability of Stalinist parties to create workers states. Now, the defiance of the Kremlin by the Yugoslav Communist Party was seized on as an indication that Stalinist parties could undergo a process of self-reform. It was within this context that a discussion developed within the Fourth International on the nature of the states that had been set up by the Stalinists. After a lengthy debate, it was agreed that the regimes in Eastern Europe should be designated as deformed workers states.

What was the meaning of this new term? For many years the Soviet Union had been defined by the Fourth International as a degenerated workers state. Having been established on the basis of a successful proletarian revolution, the political structure and organs of the Soviet state had undergone a severe degeneration. The elements of proletarian democracy were suppressed by the bureaucratization of the state and ruling party. To the extent that the regime defended the new nationalized property forms that were created as a consequence of the October Revolution, the Soviet Union remained a workers state. However, the usurpation of political power by the bureaucracy, the renewed growth of social inequality, the contradiction between the ruling bureaucracy's defense of its own material interests and what the development of a scientifically planned economy required--all this expressed a process of degeneration that threatened the collapse of the Soviet Union and the restoration of capitalism.

The political task indicated by this definition of the Soviet state was the struggle to halt and reverse this degeneration; that is, to advocate and organize the overthrow of the regime of the Kremlin bureaucracy in a political revolution that would dismantle the structures of totalitarian repression, restore proletarian democracy and, on this basis, preserve and develop on a genuinely socialist and internationalist basis the nationalized property forms that arose after 1917.

The term deformed workers state contained an inherent ambiguity. Heretofore, the concept of a workers state had been exclusively associated with a state that, whatever its subsequent evolution, was the product of a proletarian socialist revolution. None of the states in Eastern Europe had been created through the conquest of political power by the working class. Even in Yugoslavia, the partisan movement was based on the rural petty-bourgeoisie.

James P. Cannon and other leaders of the Socialist Workers Party were concerned that the search for an appropriate definition of the regimes that had been established by the Stalinists in Eastern Europe and the Balkans not become the point of departure for the revision of basic Marxist theory and the historical perspectives of the Fourth International.

Eventually, it was agreed that the new regimes should be defined as deformed workers states. For Cannon and others who had insisted that the developments in Eastern Europe did not contradict the Trotskyist analysis of the counterrevolutionary role of Stalinism, the new definition was to be used in a precise and limited way. It acknowledged that the nationalizations undertaken by the state were, when viewed in purely economic terms, of a progressive character and should be defended against efforts to restore private ownership of the means of production. Moreover, the definition expressed the commitment of the Fourth International to the defense of these states against military attack by imperialism. This position directly opposed that of Shachtman, whose Workers Party had issued the call for a "national-democratic political revolution" under the slogan "Long live a free Poland!"

However, the use of the word deformed was meant to express the basic and essential difference between the Soviet Union and the new Eastern European regimes. The former was the product of a proletarian revolution; the latter were not. Deformed in the very process of their birth, by the bureaucratic strangulation of the Eastern European working class, these states were of dubious historical viability. As I sought to explain in The Heritage We Defend:

"Thus, far from associating such regimes with new historical vistas, the designation deformed underscores the historical bankruptcy of Stalinism and points imperiously to the necessity for the building of a genuine Marxist leadership, the mobilization of the working class against the ruling bureaucracy in a political revolution, the creation of genuine organs of workers' power, and the destruction of the countless surviving vestiges of the old capitalist relations within the state structure and economy" (The Heritage We Defend [Detroit: Labor Publications, 1988], p. 179).

The debate over a correct definition of the Eastern European states was more than a dispute over words. In politics, as Trotsky had once observed, behind every terminological definition lies a historical prognosis. Those who were most anxious that the Fourth International should recognize, as quickly as possible, that workers states of one sort or another had been established in Eastern Europe were in the process of developing an opportunist perspective and orientation for the Fourth International. The new definition of the Eastern European states became the starting point for a fundamental revision of the perspectives of the Trotskyist movement.

The outlines of this new perspective appeared in a document written by Michel Pablo, the secretary of the International Secretariat of the Fourth International, in September 1949. "Socialism," he wrote, "as the ideological and political movement of the proletariat as well as a social system, is by nature international and indivisible. This idea is at the foundation of our movement and the only one on which can be built the conscious mass movement which will assure the socialist development of humanity.

"But while bearing this in mind, it nevertheless remains true that in the whole historic period of the transition from capitalism to socialism, a period which can extend for centuries, we shall encounter a much more tortuous and complicated development of the revolution than our teachers foresaw--and workers' states that are not normal but necessarily quite deformed" (SWP International Information Bulletin, December 1949, p. 3).

This document marked the beginning of a new perspective of the historical transition from capitalism to socialism which assigned to the Stalinist bureaucracy an independent and, indeed, progressive historical role. In a somewhat different form, this conception had previously emerged within the Fourth International in the positions advanced by Shachtman and Burnham in 1939-40. They too had attributed to the bureaucracy a world-historic mission, as the protagonist of a new bureaucratic-collectivist society. Now, Pablo was suggesting that the deformed workers states that had been established in Eastern Europe represented the probable form that would be taken by a historic transition from capitalism to socialism which would span decades.

In his analysis of the Soviet regime, Trotsky had always insisted that the growth of the bureaucracy was the expression not of the organic tendencies at work in the transition from capitalism to socialism, but of the specific conditions that confronted the Soviet state following the October Revolution: (1) the extreme backwardness of the Russian economy; (2) the devastation produced by the Civil War of 1918-21; (3) the capitalist encirclement of the Soviet state, prolonged by the failure of the socialist revolution in Western Europe and China. Had the working class conquered power in an advanced capitalist country, it would not have confronted the combination of circumstances that produced the monstrosity of Stalinism. Pablo's new analysis suggested, instead, that Stalinism embodied universal tendencies in the historic transition to socialism.

The debate within the Fourth International took place, as I have pointed out, in the context of an enormous expansion of the authority and prestige of the Soviet Union. Within sections of the intelligentsia, especially in Europe, a new attitude began to emerge toward the Stalinist regime. Whatever the crimes it had committed, did not the immense successes of the Soviet Union suggest that Stalin was in some complex way the instrument of great historical ends? However terrible the brutality of Stalin's methods, had they not advanced the USSR toward socialism? Was it not the case that the purges, monstrous frame-ups to be sure, had consolidated the Soviet regime and made possible the united social will that produced the victory at Stalingrad? Is it not true that an omelet can't be made without breaking eggs? Perhaps the most sophisticated and influential example of this political and moral relativism was the biography of Stalin, written by Isaac Deutscher and published in 1949.

Deutscher had been associated with the Trotskyist movement in Poland during the 1930s. He had strenuously opposed the formation of the Fourth International, and had played a major role in formulating the arguments that were advanced by the Polish delegates who voted against the establishment of the Fourth International at its founding conference in September 1938. With the outbreak of the war, Deutscher escaped to London, immersed himself in the study of English and achieved a mastery of the language equal to that of his great compatriot, Joseph Conrad. He became a contributor to a number of leading British journals and newspapers. His Stalin was immediately hailed as an authoritative work.

Deutscher's Stalin was, in essence, a sophisticated political apology for its subject. He did not deny that Stalin had grossly falsified Marxism, betrayed the ideals of the October Revolution and murdered the leaders of the Bolshevik Party. But despite all this, Deutscher rejected Trotsky's characterization of Stalin as the gravedigger of the revolution. This was an exaggeration, claimed Deutscher. The career of Stalin was marked by a great paradox. However terrible the crimes he may have committed against Bolshevism, he had been compelled, by the sheer force of objective necessity, to carry out its historical legacy. He may have been a despot, but still a "revolutionary despot," in the tradition of Cromwell, Robespierre and Napoleon! Here is how Deutscher explained the policies pursued by Stalin at the end of World War II:

"We have seen that the two policies, the nationalist and the revolutionary, clashed on crucial points. Stalin did not, nevertheless, make a clear-cut choice between the two; he pursued both lines simultaneously; but whereas the nationalist one predominated during the war, the revolutionary one was to gain momentum after the war.

"This development constitutes by far the most striking paradox in Stalin's political evolution, so rich in paradox. For more than two decades he had preached the gospel of socialism in one country and violently asserted the self-sufficiency of Russian socialism. In practice, if not in precept, he had made Russia turn her back on world revolution--or was it Russia that had made him turn his back upon it? Now, in his supreme triumph, he disavowed, again in practice if not in precept, his own gospel; he discarded his own canon of Russia's self-sufficiency and revived her interest in international revolution. Bolshevism appeared to have run full circle and returned to it starting point. Such, indeed, was the strange dialectics of Stalin's victory that it seemed to turn that victory into Trotsky's posthumous triumph. It was as if Stalin himself had crowned all his toils and labours, all his controversies and purges, by an unexpected vindication of his dead opponent" (Stalin: A Political Biography [New York: Oxford University Press, 1966], p. 552).

The discovery and accentuation of such paradoxical twists often is taken, quite incorrectly, as dialectics. It is usually nothing more than a pretentious display of sophistry, consisting of a superficially skillful counterposing of "on the one hand" to "on the other hand." The portrayal of the policies pursued by Stalin at the end of the war as a peculiar variant of those espoused by Trotsky was a gross falsification not only of Marxism, but also of the facts. Stalin's postwar policies were aimed at suppressing the revolutionary movement of the working class within and outside the borders of the Soviet Union. Deutscher seems not to have noticed that even as he was writing his biography, Stalin was doing all that he could to ensure the defeat of the Greek Revolution. At any rate, the identification of the postwar policies of the Soviet Union, which were largely shaped by conventional "great power" and nationalist motivations, with the socialist internationalism of the Bolsheviks was utterly preposterous.

Nevertheless, Deutscher's work deeply influenced both Pablo and Mandel. It is impossible not to notice the similarities between conceptions advanced by Deutscher in his Stalin biography and those found in the documents written by Pablo and Mandel between 1949 and 1953. Consider, for example, the following passage from Deutscher's Stalin:

"In the Stalinist conception, insofar as this can be inferred from Stalin's policies, the process of world revolution is still a global one, for the antagonism between capitalism and socialism is, like the earlier one between capitalism and feudalism, inherent in all modern civilization. But their struggle is continuous only in the broadest historical and philosophical sense. It is likely to extend over the lifetime of many generations.... War-like collision between the opposed systems is, or may be, followed by a durable truce, lasting perhaps a few decades, in the course of which the antagonism of the two systems assumes the character of peaceful rivalry" (ibid., p. 553).

Pablo's prognosis of "centuries of deformed workers states" was a more flamboyant formulation of a perspective that found embryonic expression in the above-quoted passage. The transition from capitalism to socialism would, according to Deutscher, span generations. This transition would in all likelihood proceed largely in the form of a prolonged struggle between the Soviet Union and the imperialist powers. In the months that followed the publication of Deutscher's biography, Pablo and Mandel were to expand upon this conception and produce a truly bizarre revision of Trotskyism that they referred to as the theory of War- Revolution.

Part 4. The split in the Fourth International

Comparing what Mandel wrote during the first years after the war with what he produced after 1949, one is naturally struck by the obvious change in his political orientation. It will be the task of a skilled biographer to uncover the conditions and influences that produced this remarkable shift. Cannon himself was puzzled by Mandel's evolution, and, in the immediate aftermath of the split, thought that Mandel might separate himself from Pablo. I have heard from those who were active in the disputes of that time that Pablo's new formulations initially were opposed by Mandel, and that there were bitter clashes between the two men. I do not know if this was the case. But it is unlikely that Mandel revised his views simply under the pressure of a political associate.

One must assume that Mandel, despite his earlier defense of orthodox conceptions, was perplexed by the apparent strength of the Stalinist movement. Not only had the global position of the USSR been enhanced; but the Communist parties were at the head of powerful mass movements throughout the world. The victory of the Chinese Communist Party appeared to be yet another example of Stalinism possessing a revolutionary potential that the Fourth International had failed to appreciate.

Actually, the Transitional Program, the founding document of the Fourth International, had acknowledged that "one cannot categorically deny in advance the theoretical possibility that, under the influence of completely exceptional circumstances (war, defeat, financial crash, mass revolutionary pressure, etc.), the petty- bourgeois parties including the Stalinists may go further than they themselves wish along the road to a break with the bourgeoisie." But it warned that "even if this highly improbable variant somewhere at some time becomes a reality," it would not represent the establishment of a genuine proletarian dictatorship (Leon Trotsky, The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution [New York: Pathfinder Press, 1974], p. 95).

There is no doubt that Mandel, blessed with a photographic memory and an encyclopedic knowledge of Trotsky's published writings, was familiar with this passage. But political positions are not merely derived from books. Shachtman was no less familiar with the writings of Trotsky, with whom he had even enjoyed a close personal relationship. As a matter of fact, no one was as familiar with the subtle nuances of Trotsky's writings or, for that matter, admired him more than Max Eastman, his translator and biographer. But both Eastman and Shachtman, discouraged by the power and crimes of Stalinism, broke politically with Trotsky. The dominant position of Stalinism in the international labor movement had shattered whatever confidence they once had in the revolutionary role of the working class. In their minds it raised the Stalinist bureaucracy to the level of a great and independent historical force. Since they no longer considered the working class capable of overcoming the domination of the Stalinist bureaucracy, Eastman and, somewhat later, Shachtman entrusted that task to American imperialism.

Of course, Pablo and Mandel had very different political aims than Eastman and Shachtman. But the positions that they developed in the late 1940s and early 1950s also proceeded from a gross exaggeration of the strength and historical role of the bureaucracy and, inextricably linked with that error, an underestimation of the strength and revolutionary potential of the working class.

Under the influence of the political successes of the Stalinists and their continued domination of the international workers movement, Mandel and Pablo became increasingly convinced that the realization of socialism would depend, in the final analysis, on the actions of the Soviet Union and the Stalinist bureaucracies, not on the working class led by the Fourth International.

At the heart of the creative theoretical and political work of all the great Marxists was a scientifically grounded conviction in the historical role of the proletariat as the gravedigger of capitalism. Socialism ceased to be a utopia when it was demonstrated on the basis of the materialist conception of history that there existed within the capitalist mode of production an objective force that represented the negation of the existing forms of property and a more advanced principle of social organization. Whether or not one considered the perspective of social revolution viable depended upon one's assessment of the historical role and capacities of the working class.

Two diametrically opposite conclusions could be drawn from the events of the first half of the twentieth century. One conclusion was that the October Revolution of 1917 had demonstrated that the working class could overthrow capitalism and lay the foundations for the establishment of a socialist society. The other was that the degeneration of the Soviet state and the many defeats of the working class in the 1920s and 1930s had proven that the working class lacked the historical qualities which Marxism had attributed to it. The choices led to very different historical prognoses.

"If we grant as true," Trotsky wrote in 1939, "that the cause of the defeats is rooted in the social qualities of the proletariat itself then the position of modern society will have to be acknowledged as hopeless. Under conditions of decaying capitalism the proletariat grows neither numerically nor culturally. There are no grounds, therefore, for expecting that it will sometime rise to the level of the revolutionary tasks. Altogether differently does the case present itself to him who has clarified in his mind the profound antagonism between the organic, deep-going urge of the toiling masses to tear themselves free of the bloody capitalist chaos, and the conservative, patriotic, utterly bourgeois character of the outlived labor leadership. We must choose one of these two irreconcilable conceptions" (Leon Trotsky, In Defense of Marxism [London: New Park Publications, 1971], p.15).

But Pablo and Mandel sought to evade this choice by speculating about a third alternative: that even in the absence of a conscious and politically independent movement of the working class, the socialist revolution could be realized, in a manner not anticipated by Lenin and Trotsky, through the medium of a bureaucracy (or, as Pablo and Mandel were to suggest as their theory grew more elaborate, other nonproletarian forces). The most significant aspect of the revision of Marxism by Pablo and Mandel was their attempt to base the perspective of socialism on a political scenario in which the working class played a secondary, merely supportive, role.

The theoretical basis of this perspective found its essential expression in a document written by Pablo in 1951 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" (National Education Department, Socialist Workers Party, Towards a History of the Fourth International, part 4, 1974, p. 5).

Where, in fact, were Pablo and Mandel going? Certainly not in the direction outlined by Trotsky in the programmatic documents upon which the founding of the Fourth International was based. Indeed, the structure of social reality presented by Pablo had very little in common with the general conception of history outlined by Marx and Engels. If, as Pablo and Mandel claimed, "objective social reality" consisted of the "capitalist regime" and the "Stalinist world," what had become of the working class? In this new schema, the working class ceased to exist as the independent, let alone decisive, instrument of revolutionary change. Instead, it existed only as a subordinate element within a new reality defined by the struggle between the "capitalist regime" and the "Stalinist world." The fate of socialism depended upon the outcome of this struggle.

The consequences of this theoretical elimination of the working class as the basic revolutionary force found its clearest expression in the manner in which Pablo and Mandel depicted the development of the socialist revolution. It would, they hypothesized, proceed not through the development of the conflict of classes, but rather through the eruption of nuclear military conflict between the "capitalist regime," represented above all by the United States, and the "Stalinist world," whose axis was the Soviet Union. They called this scenario "war-revolution."

When one talks about it today, it sounds as bizarre as "Plan Nine From Outer Space." But, in fact, it was a peculiar reflection of the political conditions of the Cold War in the minds of disoriented radical theoreticians who no longer included in their calculations the possibility of revolutionary struggle by the working class and the impact of the political activity of the Fourth International.

Indeed, if one accepted their underlying premise--that the Soviet and Eastern European working class was mesmerized by Stalinism and the American working class was benumbed by McCarthyite anticommunism--their conclusions were not as weird as they at first appeared. There was, after all, a real conflict between the Soviet Union and American imperialism. There did exist the possibility of war between these two antagonistic powers, and their conflict was certainly rooted in the different social bases of the regimes. Pablo and Mandel thus derived from this conflict the essential impulse for socialist revolution.

In this scenario, the eruption of war between the Soviet Union and the United States would inevitably become transformed into a cataclysmic revolutionary conflict between two social systems. The Stalinist world, embodying, albeit in a degenerated form, the socialist principle, would be compelled, under the pressure of the masses it represented, to conduct the struggle against the "capitalist regime" on a revolutionary basis. Thus, according to Pablo, revolution and war were "approaching each other more closely and becoming so interlinked as to be almost indistinguishable under certain circumstances and at certain times." The outbreak of war, even if it were to assume nuclear dimensions, was to be eagerly awaited as the herald of socialism. War-revolution, proclaimed Pablo, was the conception "upon which the perspectives and orientation of revolutionary Marxists in our epoch should rest" (ibid., p. 7).

If the "Stalinist World" prevailed in this "war-revolution," out of its ashes would arise deformed workers states that would last for centuries. Pablo brushed aside the reservations of the squeamish. He acknowledged that the new perspective "will perhaps shock the lovers of Œpacifist' dreams and declamation, or those who already bemoan the apocalyptic end of the world which they foresee following upon an atomic war or a world-wide expansion of Stalinism. But these sensitive souls can find no place among the militants and least of all the revolutionary Marxist cadres of this terrible epoch where the sharpness of the class struggle is carried to the extreme. It is objective reality which thrusts this dialectic of Revolution-War to the forefront, which implacably destroys Œpacifist' dreams, and which permits no respite in the gigantic simultaneous deployment of the forces of Revolution and of War and in their struggle to the death" (ibid.).

It may come as a surprise to many of the later admirers of Ernest Mandel that he could have subscribed to such a preposterous, not to mention brutal, perspective. In fact, he did.

"It is not excluded," he wrote, "that the widespread devastation produced by an extended Third World War will provoke vast collapses in the machinery of production in great parts of the world which would thus facilitate initial bureaucratic deformations of new victorious revolutions.... [But] Our conviction in the victory of the American revolution, giving the socialist world a prodigious productive capacity even after a devastating war, allows us to envisage with confidence perspectives of proletarian democracy after a Third World War" (National Education Department Socialist Workers Party, Towards a History of the Fourth International, June 1973, part 4, vol. 1, p. 5).

Ernest Mandel had not gone mad, but he had adopted a mad perspective that expressed a political desperation produced by a complete loss of confidence in the revolutionary potential of the working class. Or, to express the same problem somewhat differently, he did not believe that it was possible for the Fourth International to win the working class to its revolutionary program. After all, the struggle against imperialist war had occupied a central place in the Marxian program throughout the twentieth century. The possibility of preventing war depended on the development of the revolutionary class consciousness of the international working class.

The perspective of Pablo and Mandel proceeded from the assumption that the working class, especially in the United States, could not be mobilized against its ruling class and that war was inevitable. They attempted to rationalize their pessimism by making the nuclear holocaust the prerequisite for socialism.

If the documents prepared by Pablo and Mandel between 1951 and 1953 had been merely a false and disoriented evaluation of the objective situation, one might conclude that they represented no more than an embarrassing lapse in judgment and a regrettable episode in their political lives. But this "episode" proved to be the defining experience in the lives of both men, as well as, and far more importantly, the beginning of a new and historically significant tendency within, or, more correctly, opposed to, the Fourth International.

This becomes clear when one reviews the practical conclusions that were drawn by Pablo and Mandel from their political analysis. Proceeding from the unstated but implicit premise that it was not possible to win the working class to the independent program of the Fourth International, Pablo and Mandel concluded that the only viable alternative left to the unfortunate Trotskyists was to enter and bury themselves in whatever mass organizations existed within the countries where they worked. This tactic was called "entryism sui generis." In those countries where the Stalinists reigned supreme, the Trotskyists had to join the Communist parties and work within them, with the aim of influencing these organizations and moving them to the left.

This tactic was justified on the grounds that Stalinist organizations could, under the pressure of events, "take," as Mandel said, "the first steps on the road toward a regeneration." The power of revolutionary developments would tend to drive Stalinist organizations to the left, and this process could be facilitated through the influence of Trotskyists engaged in "entryism sui generis."

The task of the Fourth International, Pablo and Mandel insisted, was to accept "the necessity of subordinating all organizational considerations, of formal independence or otherwise, to real integration into the mass movement wherever it expresses itself in each country, or to integration in an important current of this movement which can be influenced" (Michel Pablo, "Main Report to the Congress: World Trotskyism Rearms," Fourth International, vol. 12, no. 6, November-December 1951, p. 172).

The essential content of the tactical innovations being proposed by Pablo and Mandel was that the central strategic task that had been posed by Trotsky--the resolution of the crisis of revolutionary leadership through the construction of the Fourth International--was no longer viable. Indeed, the perspective of winning the working class to a new revolutionary party was futile. As Pablo was to write in 1953:

"In the present concrete historical conditions, the variant which is more and more the least probable is the one in which the masses, disillusioned by the reformists and Stalinists, break with their traditional mass organizations to come to polarize themselves around our present nuclei, the latter acting exclusively and essentially, in an independent manner, from without" (Socialist Workers Party, Towards a History of the Fourth International, part 4, vol. 3, March 1974, p. 141).

By the autumn of 1953 it had become clear that the perspective of Pablo and Mandel called into question the very raison d'etre of the Fourth International. Acting on his perspective, Pablo, with the support of Mandel, sought to exploit his position as International Secretary to compel entire national sections to liquidate themselves as independent organizations and enter the ranks of the Stalinist parties. When the French section resisted, it was arbitrarily expelled.

The Trotskyists in China received similar instructions: "In order to realize the orientation of unconditional defense of the Chinese People's Republic, and critical support to the Mao government, the Chinese militants of the Fourth International should integrate themselves completely in the mass movement of their country, as has been decided by the Third World Congress of the Fourth International" (Fourth International, July-August 1952, p. 118).

The Chinese Trotskyists, working under extraordinarily difficult conditions, had sought to defend the independent interests of the working class and uphold the perspective of the hegemony of the working class in the socialist revolution. They had for decades refused to follow the petty-bourgeois orientation of the Maoists, who had essentially abandoned the working class and based their movement on the peasantry. Now they were being derided by Pablo and Mandel as "refugees" from the Chinese Revolution and told to integrate themselves into Mao's organization. Before the Chinese Trotskyists could work through the political implications of this brilliant advice, their organization was shattered by a series of arrests. Many of the Trotskyist leaders seized in late 1952 remained in prison for the next 20 to 30 years.

Eventually, the political resistance to the perspectives of Mandel and Pablo led to a split in the Fourth International. The International Committee of the Fourth International was formed in November 1953 to oppose the revisions of Pablo and Mandel. This is not the place to recount in detail the events leading up to the split. However, it should be stressed, in all fairness to Mandel as well as Pablo, that the split was not, in the final analysis, simply the product of their machinations. The very fact that their perspective found wide support within the Fourth International reflected the political conditions and social relations of the postwar period. Pablo and Mandel articulated the political skepticism that had been produced by the ability of the Stalinist and social democratic bureaucracies to maintain their control over the working class following World War II and prevent the eruption of socialist revolution.

Both Pablo and Mandel furiously denied that their positions represented a break with Trotskyism, or that they were calling into question the need for the Fourth International. But the real content of their revisions was expressed most clearly, if somewhat crudely, in the position of their American supporters, Cochran and Clarke:

"Let us simply sum up some of the conclusions of the present reality: We see a world where our perspective of Stalinism being destroyed in the course of World War II has been proven wrong. We see a world where Stalinism is dominant over the eastern half of Europe, where the Communist parties are the leadership of the colonial revolution in Asia, where they constitute the strongest organizations of the working class in Italy and France. In the rest of the Western world, Social Democracy has been resuscitated, and in the United States, where labor has not yet advanced to an independent political existence, the reformist labor bureaucracy remains dominant....

"The Cannonites still retain the outlived perspective, however, that the small nuclei will tomorrow become the revolutionary parties challenging all contenders and destroying them in battle....

"The fact that no one can realistically envisage a breakup of the old workers movements prior to the next revolutionary development is the clear sign that the old Trotskyist perspective has become outmoded. As before the war, the vanguard seeks to realize its revolutionary aspirations within the old parties, leaving no room for a new revolutionary mass organization....

"The very formulations of the International Resolution must lead us to the conclusion that the revolutionary parties of tomorrow will not be Trotskyist, in the sense of necessarily accepting the tradition of our movement, our estimation of Trotsky's place in the revolutionary hierarchy, or all of Trotsky's specific evaluations and slogans....

"But the last thing in the world we should attempt is to inculcate the ranks with the necessity of adopting our specific tradition, and impressing upon them the truth of all our specific evaluations broached by Trotsky from 1923 on....

"We said before that only by integrating ourselves within the existing movements could our cadres survive and fulfill their mission. We will now add to that proposition this corollary: Only by dropping all sectarian notions of imposing our specific tradition upon the mass movements which developed in different circumstances and under different influences, can our approach register successes and guarantee the future of our precious cadre....

"Although in the United States the situation is unique as the working class is still not organized into its own political party, the orientation here discussed operates with full force. One has to dwell in the never-never land of a Cannon to seriously promulgate the theory that the American working class, which has not yet attained labor party consciousness, will pass, with the next struggle, to the banner of Cannonite revolutionism, or what amounts to approximately the same thing, will in rapid fire fashion, plunge in and out of a labor party to join up with Cannon and his lieutenants to storm the barricades....

"Basing ourselves on this analysis, we have oriented ourselves towards the organized labor movement, especially the mass production unions of the CIO.... That does not mean that we are absolutely certain that a labor party will be formed. What the perspective does base itself on with certainty is that the inevitable political regroupment will pass through the existing channels of the organized labor movement and have a political character capable of uniting masses on a minimal level."

The theories of Pablo and Mandel expressed an adaptation to the dominant position of the bureaucracy, and, finally, an apology for it. In the years to come, the work of Mandel was concentrated on interpreting, in the most favorable light, the activities of the bureaucracies. Their actions as well as the conflicts within their ranks were invariably to be interpreted by Mandel as the manifestation of broad objective forces, within which revolutionary processes were mysteriously at work.

After the split, Mandel was pained by the accusation that he had become a revisionist. How could such a charge be hurled against him, Ernest Germaine, the writer of so many clever articles? As he wrote to George Breitman: "Do you really believe that we are Œcapitulating before Stalinism,' we who have been busy building the Trotskyist movement, not without success, all over the world?"

An answer to Germaine-Mandel was provided by James P. Cannon in a perceptive analysis written in 1954:

"Our objective is fundamentally different from Germaine's. In the last resort, it traces back to a different theory of the role of the revolutionary vanguard, and its relation to other tendencies in the labor movement. Germaine thinks he is orthodox on this question--he even wrote an article about it in Quatrième Internationale--but in practice he compromises the theory. We alone are unconditional adherents of the Lenin-Trotsky theory of the party of the conscious vanguard and its role as leader of the revolutionary struggle. The theory acquires burning actuality and dominates all others in the present epoch.

"The problem of leadership now is not limited to spontaneous manifestations of the class struggle in a long drawn-out process, nor even to the conquest of power in this or that country where capitalism is especially weak. It is a question of the development of the international revolution and the socialist transformation of society. To admit that this can happen automatically is, in effect, to abandon Marxism altogether. No, it can only be a conscious operation, and it imperatively requires the leadership of the Marxist party which represents the conscious element in the historical process. No other party will do. No other tendency in the labor movement can be recognized as a satisfactory substitute. For that reason, our attitude towards all other parties and tendencies is irreconcilably hostile.

"If the relation of forces requires the adaptation of cadres of the vanguard to organizations dominated at the moment by such hostile tendencies--Stalinist, Social Democratic, centrist--then such adaptation must be regarded at all times as a tactical adaptation, to facilitate the struggle against them; never to effect a reconciliation with them; never to ascribe to them the decisive historical role, with the Marxists assigned to the minor chore of giving friendly advice and 'loyal' criticism, in the manner of the Pabloite comments on the French General Strike" (Trotskyism Versus Revisionism, vol. 2 [London: New Park, 1974], p. 65).