Theresa Conway visited Charlie van Geldren at his home in Cambridge and spoke with him about his memories of the founding congress of the Fourth International Page 16
P CHARLIE missed the first day of the Congress, when the discus sion took place on the Transitional Programme, but was present on the second when the vote to found the Fourth International took place. Three people, including two Poland, out of 21 present voted against. They felt it was not an auspicious time to found a new international in a period of defeats for the class.The previous three internationals had been founded at times of great working class strug gle and upsurge, whereas in 1938 world war was looming, the Left Opposition was small and the task facing revolutionaries
Ta truly daunting one. Charlie's view was, and remains so today, that there was no alternative. The Second and Third Internationals were dead as far as the inrevolutionary socialism were concerned and it was therefore necessary to take this step.
He was was twenty-four, and enjoyed meeting all those people who had just been names to him, especially James P.Cannon.He had been initiated in the trotskyist movement through reading Trotsky's articles in the Militant at the time Cannon and Shackman were the editors. He recalls 'Shackman was a remarkable writer and personality, despite what happenned to him afterwards. He was fluent in French, although they told be his French grammer was atrocious, I didn't notice, he chaired the meeting translating from French to German, and so I was very impressed'.
Charlie attended the Congress at the request of the South African trotskyists with whom he had been
involved, although by this time he had moved to England. reported back to meetings when he returned to England and was
greeted enthusiastically.Then he
went on to spend six months working for the International in
France, turning duplicator handles,before spending the war in Italy
where he helped to found a sec-
LINE WEN 'I was there': an
Charlie is appalled when he looks back at the complete lack of gress.Everyone sat around in cafes talking, including with the man who eventually assassinated Trosky. Charlie took several snapshots of him, and was taken out for a meal at Maxims at his expense. This iooseness seemed doubly inapproprate when it was discovered that Clement, who had been the acting secreatry had been murdered. All the organisation went through his hands and he disappeared about a week before the conference. Eventually a letter turned up from him, saying that he was disillusioned with revolutionary politics, and was going off to Spain to fight in the civil war. Of course the letter was a forgery as Trotsky argued immediately: his headiess body was found floating
The fact that this was a period of abject defeats was the reason, he thinks, that so many people at that conference fell by the wayside. People who were at that conference, like Max Shachman, who was chairing most of the meetings, Pablo from Greece, and the others, and Pierre Rousset's father, David, who eventualiy be came a Gaullist MP, could not stand the periods of retreats, especially after the second worid war, when the stalinist emerged as a much more powerful and long
lasting force than had been an-
Stalinism was incapable of
developing marxist thought.
Everything was dictated by Mos
cow, had to be rubber stamped as
bearing the correct line.Millions
died in the Soviet Union without ever coming to trial, amongst them
Cof supporters of the
Fourth International. And it is the
case that all the innovative think-
ing, which has tried to use the Mar-
xist method to analyse contem-
porary reality, or to deal with
issues like feminism that have
been manifested in new ways, have
come from trotskyists or other non-
Charlie confesses that the question of women's role in revolutionary politics was not consciouly discussed or considered in those days. Despite the debates raised by Kollontai, and the massive fer ment around the German women's 1920's, Trotskyists in Britain and internationaliy did not seem con cerned to ensure that women were won to revolutionary politics, or played a key role when they were when the position of women in the workforce was changing dramatically and because of that women's position in the home, the significance of this did not occur to the trotskyists.Internally too, the situation was appaling, with very few wowmen involved in any of the leading bodies.
Perhaps the most exhillarating experience for Charlie came after the Congress itself. 'We were so optimistic about the future, that we founded a youth international, and we set up an international executive committee, to which 1 was "elected'. At that time we had youth sections in America, France, the Netherlands, Britain and Belgium.The French youth played the decisive role in this. There was a remarkable French comrade, Hicks, a school teacher, who eventually died in a German concentra tion camp, after organising marxist
There were a number of comrades from America, the Youth alliance, Maggie Gould and others. As there has never been another conference, Charlie, at 75, is still a member of this Youth executive.
Charlie reminds us 'Trotsky his in diary in exile decided that he had no right to commit suicide because he was the living link between the
Leninist past and future. My view
then and now is that if we have ac-
complished nothing else in the in-
ternational, we have continued to
serve as a link between the revolu-
tionary policies of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, and the next
and present generations' SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 10 November 1988
Eileen Gersh & other students peel potatoes for hunger march
continued from page 15 programmes, however radical they may appear on the surface, which result in the working class looking to any sector of the ruling class for support in its historic struggle.
This central idea of class independence is based on, and subsequently confirmed by, the whole history of the twentieth century. It may seem elementary, but it lies at the heart of all the differences between revolutionary marxism and social democracy (whether left or right variants) and stalinism. Their practice and programmes are based on compromise, collaboration and integration with the bourgeoisie or sections of the bourgeoisie and its state institutions.
The issue of class independence is also one of the fundamental divides between revolutionary marxism and populist or national liberation movements in the dependent countries, whose programmes have been more or less influenced by their ideas about alliances with 'progressive', 'democratic' and "anti-imperialist" sectors of the local ruling class.
Since 1938 history has shown us that old-fashioned class col laboration and 'popular frontism' can take on many guises which may fool the unwary and lead the workers and oppressed into terrible defeats. In the post-war period Greece, Indonesia and Portugal spring to mind. In all these cases mass revolutionary movements went down to defeat due, in part, to the adoption of 'popular frontist' policies. And there are many other examples of class colSOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 10 November 1988
PI PILE MENT laboration which have resulted in demobilisation and defeat for the working class.
Some have challenged the marxist principle of class independence by pointing to the postwar revolutionary overturns of capitalism in the underdeveloped countries: revolutions which were not led by trotskyists. But whatever programme was formally adhered to, the leaderships of all these revolutions rejected in practice any intermediate 'stage' of alliance with the bourgeoisie, or a section of the bourgeoisie, and broke with the ruling class and its state.
In Yugoslavia, China, Cuba and Vietnam, very different kinds of leadership with inadequate programmes, sometimes derived from the stalinist movement of which, with the exception of the Castro leadership in Cuba, they were a part, were nonetheless able to break with the capitalists and the 'popular frontist' strategies pursued by the traditional parties.
These post-war revolutionary overturns were not only opposed by Moscow - even the revolutionary marxists were sometimes confused by political developments which did not seem to take a classical form. This resulted in opportunist or sectarian errors. Many trotskyists debated whether capitalism had in fact been overthrown in, for example, countries like Yugoslavia or Cuba.
This reflected the fact that in the post-war period the international class struggle developed in a quite different way to that which the trotskyists expected in the late 1930s. Despite this, the key to un-
derstanding the post-war overturns is to be found in the transitional programme. In the section entitled 'Workers and Farmers' Government', the transitional programme explains that revolutionary marxists must call on all those leaderships, old and new, who base themselves on the workers and peasants, and who claim to speak in their name, to: 'break politically from the bourOXFORD MAIL geoisie and enter upon the
Broad of struggle for the workers' and farmers' government. On this road we promise them full support against capitalist reaction. At the same time, we indefatigably develop agitation around those transitional demands which should in our opinion form the programme of the 'workers' and farmers' government'.
Although the exact wording of the slogan can vary (for example, a governmental slogan which rested on an alliance with the peasantry or farmers in Britain today would be anachronistic!), the method adopted here is applicable to both the imperialist countries and the semi-colonial
'Is the creation of such a government by the traditional workers' organisations possible?' asks Trotsky in the transitional programme. 'Past experience shows... that this isto say the least highly improbable. However, one cannot categorically deny in advance the theoretical possibility that, under the influence of completely exceptional circumstances (war, defeat, financial crash, mass revolutionary pressure, ete), the petty-bourgeois parties including the stalinists may go further than they wish along the road to break with the bourgeoisie.' "However,'
'there is no need to indulge in guesswork. The agitation around the slogan of a workers'-farmers' government preserves under all conditions a tremendous educational value'.
The post-war revolutions have confirmed in real life that the stalinist and, in the case of the Cuban July 26th movement,
"the key to understanding the post-war overturns is to be found in the transitional programme." "post-war revolutionary overturns were opposed by Moscow... Page 17
"Trotsky did not expect Mao's Red Army to come to anything." "The tactic of the united front... was always a policy for defending and advancing the interests of the working class... Page 18
S UP P petty-bourgeois nationalist movements, can, in 'exceptional circumstances', go further than they intended along the road to break with the bourgeoisie. This confirms what was in Trotsky's day only 'theoretical possibility. force, the Mao leadership in China had its roots firmly in the stalinist tradition. In the 1930s Trotsky did not expect Mao's Red Army to come to anything. ditions - revolutionary war against the Japanese invasion and the nationalist Guomindang ar-
huge revolutionary pressures from the workers and
economic catastrophe, the inability of imperialism to intervene at the end of the world war and so on - allowed the Mao leadership to make a decisive break with the bourgeoisie. All the other openings (some of which were tried) were progressively closed off to it.
The Cuban leadership attempted to establish a national bourgeois-democratic regime after the revolutionary overthrow of the hated dictator Batista, but the sabotage and hostility of the national capitalists in alliance with US imperialism, which organised a blockade of Cuba, forced the Castro leadership to make a fundamental choice: to break with the bourgeois ministers in the government and embark on an anti-capitalist revolution, or to capitulate to imperialist pressure. The momentous choice they made marks one of the great moments in working class history.
Unlike the Chinese or Yugoslavian CPs, the Cuban July 26th movement did not have its roots in stalinism or social democracy. This is an important factor which, despite the subsequent development of the Cuban Communist Party under Castro and an increasing subordination to Moscow, has marked the political evolution of the Castro leadership till this day.
Other factors which led to a revolutionary outcome in Cuba, apart from the quality and in-
L E M LEIN However, momentous con- Mao: forced to break with the bourgeoise tegrity of the leadership, include the escalating mobilisations of the workers in Havana and on the plantations, the weakness and corruption of the national bourgeoisie and its subordination to US interests, the incredible blunders of American imperialism, and the willingness of Khrushchev's Kremlin leadership - for its own reasons - to lend economic and military support.
None of these individual elements in and of themselves could have made an anti-capitalist revolution possible, but they came together and pointed to the only way way forward. The Castro movement was not weighed down with stalinist or social democratic prejudices, but neither, as a pragmatic and empirical movement, was it a marxist party with a coherent programme of proletarian revolution and socialist democracy.
Such a leadership cannot provide a programme nor act as a model for revolutionaries in our epoch, although the experience of the Cuban revolution can clarify the marxist programme and deepen our understanding of the revolutionary process.
The question that some marxists have raised in relation to these post-war revolutionary breakthroughs is whether or not we can talk about exceptions' to a general rule. However distorted or bureaucratised these revolutions were - and they have all marked by a lack of institutionalised working class power-maybe we have been a lit-
tle sectarian towards them? Should we not reassess our attitude towards some political movements whose programme and origins lay within the stalinist or populist traditions?
This discourse has led to a variety of answers, and most of them end up challenging the validity of key aspects of the transitional programme - on questions of class independence, the popular front and the united front and on the theory of permanent revolution.
Another component of the transitional programme which is as fundamental as class independence from the bourgeoisie, is the equally strategic question of class unity. The united front which is proposed is counterposed to all kinds of "popular fronts' or "people's fronts" with bourgeois parties as advocated by stalinist parties.
The tactic of the united front as originally formulated by the early Comintern under Lenin and Trotsky, was much more than a political manoeuvre or a literary technique to 'expose' the refusal of reformist bureaucrats to fight. It was always a policy for defending and advancing the interests of the working class by seeking to unite its mass organisations and the non-aligned workers in a common struggle against the bourgeoisie. The two inseparable tenets of this tactic are united action for any genuine step forward and the organisational and political independence of the revolutionary party. SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 10 November 1988
Conditions do not exist in contemporary Britain for this "classical' form of the united front because of the existence of a mass unitary labour movement. It is nevertheless essential that the marxist left seeks, wherever possible, unity in action against the bosses. In other countries in Europe such as France, for example, where two mass workers' parties and trade union federations exist, the issue of class unity and the united front against the bourgeoisie retains its full force, including at the governmental level.
Translated into today's conditions in Britain, the workers' government slogan, an expression of a united front approach, would be: 'Fora Labour government that breaks with the bosses and defends the workers', or a variant of this (the content given to any slogan is the crucial thing). In France it could be: 'For a Communist Party-Socialist Party government which defends the workers'. In response to the present Rocard government which represents a coalition between the SP and a part of the right (and not the CP), marxists could call for: 'A government of the SP and CP without bourgeois ministers'
The united front tactic is necessary because of the divisions created within the working class. Unity in action is necessary not only within the walls of a single factory or industry, but also for such national political battles as the struggle against imperialist war, the fight against nuclear weapons and NATO.
This tactic also flows out of the need for marxist currents, which are not recognised as the leadership of the workers' movement, to prove to the masses that they are ready to wage a common battle with anyone, so long as it is a step, however small, along the historic road of the proletariat towards its expropriation of capital.
Perhaps the best-known aspect of the transitional programme is its advocacy of a 'system of transitional demands, stemming from today's conditions and from today's consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 10 November 1988
S P - PLEM Spanish workers betrayed by Stalin conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat.'
Such an approach is counterposed to the traditional social democratic method of pursuing only a 'minimum' programme of reforms within capitalism, while leaving the 'maximum' programme of socialist transformation to May day speeches and the distant future. The reformist 'minimum' programme provides no bridge to the maximum socialist programme - the expropriation of the capitalist and so on. Reformist leaders are scared to death of such an idea.
Yet in a period of capitalist crisis like the one we face today, there can be no prospect of systematic social reforms, or the raising of the living standards of the broad masses of people; every serious demand - even 'minimum' demands - has a tendency to reach beyond the limits of capitalist property relations and the bourgeois state. Here lies the origins of the profound crisis of 'Labourism'. The British Labour Party cannot find a reformist policy which is acceptable to the ruling class, and as a consequence the bureaucracy, scared of socialist solutions, is being dragged to the right.
"The strategic task of the Fourth International lies not in reforming capitalism but in its overthrow... (but it) does not discard the programme of the old "minimal"
EIN demands.. it defends the democratic rights and social conquests of the workers. But it carries on this day-to-day work within the framework of the correct actual, that is, revolutionary perspective. Insofar as the old, partial, "minimal" demands of the masses clash with the destructive and degrading tendencies of capitalism - and this occurs at each step- the FI advances a system of transitional demands, the essence of which is contained in the fact that ever more openly and decisively they will be directed against the very basis of the bourgeois regime.'
The document adopted in 1938 discusses a whole array of such demands, from the sliding scale of wages (to protect the real value of wages against inflation through automatic increases), and the sliding scale of hours, to the expropriation of the monopolies and the banks and workers' control.
The transitional programme argues that revolutionaries must relate particularly to the most oppressed layers of the working class, especially women and youth. 'Opportunist organisations by their very nature concentrate their chief attention on the top layers of the working class and therefore ignore both the youth and the woman worker ' One could also add the black worker... 'The decay of capitalism, however, deals its heaviest blows
"Many trotskyists debated whether capitalism had in fact been thrown over in countries like Yugoslavia or Cuba" Page 19
Kinnock's Labour Party: loyal to the market "the transitional programme insists that revolutionaries should seek support 'among the most exploited layers of the working class; consequently among women workers"" Page 20
UPP to the woman as a wage-earner and as a houeswife.' It insists that revolutionaries 'should seek bases of support among the most exploited layers of the working class; consequently among the women workers.
Despite correct points in relation to social layers who experience a double oppression under capitalism, this section of the transitional programme appears to us today the most underdeveloped. The continued integration of women into the workforce during and after the second world war and therefore into society at large, created the conditions for the emergence of the modern women's liberation movement which has greatly enriched our understanding of women's oppression and an understanding of the centrality • of the liberation of women for working class politics.
The 1938 programme includes more sections than we have space to discuss here. There are sections, for example, on the struggle against imperialism and war, combined and uneven development in the backward countries, and permanent revolution.
It is a document which represents the distilled experience of a hundred years and more of the international class struggle. It is one of those texts which when reread always results in profitable new insights into the complex
E MEN T problems of socialist strategy. In particular, the opening section which focuses on the proletariat and its leadership, or more correctly the crisis of working class leadership, rings particularly true today.
In Britain the crisis of leadership could not be more clear. Virtually the whole Labour and trade union leadership has shifted its ground to the right and now subscribes to so-called 'new realism'
in reality, old-fashioned class collaboration under a new name. Even after the defeat of the miners' strike, the willingness of section after section of the class to move into struggle (albeit defensive struggle) is obvious. But on every occasion these