MOST TROTSKYISTS recognised that the regimes taking shape across most of Easter Europe were the offspring of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Kremlin, hostile to the working class, and in a visible sense counter-revolutionary even while they nationalised property, industry But many, like Pablo, believed that Tito's Yugoslavia was an exceptional case.
The problem was compounded when Pablo from the International SecSubscribe!
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"Certain CPs in favourable conjuncture, when they are linked to the movement of the masses, can detach themselves from ine yoke of the remin and bezin i0 act on their own."
Of course history has consistently shown precisely the opposite: that Stalinist parties are at their most counter. revolutionary when the possibility of revolution is at its height. This is one of the bitter lessons of Spain and Ger. many in the 1930s, of France, Italy and Vietnam after the war, of Indonesia in the 1960s and Chile in the 1970s.
But Pablo wene further: he developed the view that the Third World War was imminent, and that this would be a war between two camps' - imperialism on the one side and the Soviet Union on the other.
This, argued Pablo, was a global 'exceptional circumstance. which could force Stalinist marties to drop their counter-revolutionary role every. where. It would be a "war- revolution'. in which:
"It is not excluded that certain Communist Parties with the bulk of their forces can be pushed out of the strict orbit of the Soviet bu. reaucracy and can project a revolutionary orientation. The developments in Yugoslavia and China are only a prefiguration of the events to come.
With all this excitement on offer, it made no sense for Trotskyists to be building small parties on their own programme and politics: they should be getting into the bigger. Stalinist parties - especially in France and Italy - and "remain there, in order to take advantage of the revolutionary possibilities which will develop."
Trotsky's call for political revolution to overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR and Eastern Europe was also lost in the wash At first, Pablo's highly factional organisational methods, which included expelling the majority of the French section for refusing to enter the French communist Party, ora more to sur 10* sistance than his politics. But matters came to a head in 1953, when a succession of events served to discredit his line on Stalinism.
In September 1953, on the eve of the Fourth FI Congress, the British. American and expelled French seccons, cling radio s porties and mean ods, together signed an Open Letter which effectively split the International.
Pablo never dropped his campist line on Stalinism: nor indeed did the residual IS call, as Trotsky had done so clearly on the USSR, for the building of Trotskyist parties to lead the fight for political revolution against the Stalinist In 1963, when the IS reunited with the American SWP, largely on the basis of agreement over Cuba and Algeria. Pablo tabled a document calling for an "Kruschevist" wing of the Soviet bu. reaucracy.
Politically tail-ending the left-talking Ben Bella, whose FLN won a famous victory in Algeria in 1962, Pablo declared in the same document that the "underway".
His influence, together with the American SWP, ensured that the Fl adopted a hopelessly over-optimistic assessment of the politics of the FLN ano ine Alachan Revoluton. sex years later, the 1969 World Congress was to make a major self-criticism, belatedly recognising that by refusing to build a Trotskyist party in Algeria the Fl's ef. Tors nao delverco absortery nothing Pablo's departure from the Fl in 1965 came in the same year that another populist leader, Boumedienne. ended the FLN's honeymoon period leftists and CP members.
It was errors like these which made Pablo's name almost a byword for political opportunism among supporters of other currents in the Trotskyist movement In the hands of sectarians like Britain's Gerry Healy and France's Pierre Lambert, the term 'Pabloism" became a little more than buzz-word to justify the permanent split in the Fl, while they in tum implemented policies towards social democracy and bourgeois nabonalism which were coustly - 11 no more - crass and opportunistic than Pablo himself.
In practice Pablo gave political expression to the opportunist pressures which constantly bear down on the Trotskyist movement - pressures lo downplay the programme and politics of the Fl in the hopes of making a quick breakthrough into growing mass He may have gone but the hostile pressures have not. The fight to develop and strengthen the marxist programme in the tough conditions of the 1990s also involves resisting 'Pablo. style opportunism.
Socialist Outlook 99 • March 16, 1996. Socialist Outlook welcomes readers' letters. Post them to
He argued that mass movements could press Communist Parties into revolutionary action:. history has shown precisely the opposite