The Fourth International was founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938 in order to organize the Marxists in all countries as “the world party of socialist revolution,” which meant building revolutionary working-class parties, on this internationalist basis, in every country. Stalinism had gone over to the side of imperialism; the Third International had become the instrument of counterrevolution, less than a generation after its formation against the degenerated Second International; the fate of humanity depended on the solving of the crisis of revolutionary working-class leadership.
The International Committee of the Fourth International is today the continuation of Trotsky’s work. Its national sections, such as the Workers Revolutionary Party in Britain, are the product of the long struggle against Stalinism and reformism. The IC has based itself on the struggle to develop Marxist theory through confronting every stage of the development of the historical crisis of imperialism, as it is expressed in the struggle of the working class and in every political and ideological development.
Since the political explosion which marked the beginning of the breakup of Stalinism in 1956, the International Committee has been able to build effectively on these theoretical foundations because of the great change in the objective situation, and especially in the international workers’ movement, which 1956 signalled. Trotskyism, so long isolated from the mass movement because of the historic defeats of the 1920s and 1930s and the Stalinist repressions and falsifications, was able to begin the difficult but successful ascent to actually bidding for the leadership of the working class in its struggle for power. This, revolutionary leadership in the struggle to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, is the aim and distinguishing characteristic of Marxists, against all other political tendencies. It was this which marked Lenin and Trotsky as the great inheritors of the movement founded by Marx and Engels.
Within the Fourth International—and still claiming to be Trotskyists, Marxists, to this day—there has been a series of individuals and groups who at a certain point came to devote their political lives to a systematic attack on these basic principles. They became the bearers of the pressure built up by the overriding interest of capitalism itself: the necessity of destroying the only movement which had been built to replace the degenerated Second and Third Internationals. Joseph Hansen in particular, and the present leadership of the Socialist Workers Party as a whole, are the spearhead of this attack; an attack which has now reached an unequalled level of frenzy because the objective process which began in 1956 has ripened into an insoluble imperialist crisis, with inevitable revolutionary struggles in the advanced countries as well as the colonial and ex-colonial countries and the degenerated and deformed workers’ states. It has become a historical necessity to destroy the International Committee and especially its oldest section, the WRP.
Hansen’s rush to support Wohlforth, ignoring the profound security questions which are evident to anyone, has this political explanation. This support is no different from Hansen’s support and sympathy for the petty-bourgeois opportunist James Robertson, when the latter was rejected by the Third Conference of the International Committee in 1966. It is no different from all of Hansen’s politics since the International Committee’s split with Pablo in 1953, the only guiding thread of which has been to work systematically and ruthlessly against the building of the Fourth International as the world party of socialist revolution.
Before we trace this course, a recent political statement by Hansen himself points the way for us very clearly. It is well known that the last World Congress of the “United Secretariat,” (the creation of Hansen’s “unity” with the Pabloites in 1963) was split 53 percent to 47 percent on all the main political questions. Hansen wrote a document in July 1973, before the Congress, entitled “The Underlying Differences in Method.” It has two main elements. It presents a potted political history of the Fourth International which is extremely revealing. Hansen notes that the Fourth International has lasted longer than any of the first three Internationals, and adds that:
...it was not the intention of the founders of the F. I. to create an organization that would be founded for its longevity... in 1938 we thought it would only be a few years until powerful revolutions broke out... Instead of a few years, we have seen decades pass, and it is still hazardous to set any specific time bracket for the overturn of capitalism although we know that this is inevitable.
All this is nothing more than the stock-in-trade of every cynical revisionist opponent of the Fourth International. The difference here is that Hansen lays on this rotten middle-class cynicism, the product of the pressure of imperialism, as a self-professed political heir of Trotsky. He tries to give the whole thing a more “theoretical” twist. According to him, these long years of waiting, with the ultimate (“inevitable”) revolution fading into the future, has caused “certain problems we ran into over the years.” These “problems” he then reviews.
The Red Army’s victory in World War Two, the overturn of capitalist property in Eastern Europe and China, and the Cuban Revolution, were all great setbacks for imperialism, says Hansen, but they gave greater credibility to Stalinism, and, in the last case, to “guerrillaism.”
This “temporary strengthening of petty-bourgeois currents” and “partial advances of the world revolution,” “led to certain oscillations in the course followed by the Fourth International since the close of World War Two.” Hansen is referring to the capitulation to Stalinism by Pablo leading to the split of 1953, and the capitulation of the “United Secretariat” to “guerrillaism” since 1968.
The whole point of Hansen’s “history” is to create the conviction that the Fourth International had and has no theoretical and political independence, and is nothing more than a passive recipient of the impressions and moods of the petty-bourgeois, bureaucratic agents of imperialism within the working-class movement. The real history of the Fourth International is the history of the struggle against this tendency at every point. Hansen’s organizational methods, his character-assassination, his use of the dregs of bourgeois “psychologizing” and gutter journalism are the exact and appropriate expression of this political hatred of the Fourth International, this determination to condemn it to the role of a plaything of imperialism and the bureaucracy. Hansen’s politics are exactly those of a man who is at pains to prove in practice that the revolutionary leadership for the overthrow of capitalism cannot be built. This explains the vitriolic attack on the International Committee, the Workers Revolutionary Party, and its general secretary, Comrade Gerry Healy, who represents, as Hansen recognizes, the consistent and unwavering struggle to build this leadership.
The other remarkable aspect of Hansen’s 1973 document is its factually correct but utterly cynical portrayal of the bankruptcy of the majority tendency of the Pabloite United Secretariat (all the examples given below are repeated in greater detail in Hansen’s other contributions to the 1974 Pabloite Congress). What Hansen does not reveal, of course, is that he himself was the main architect of the 1963 “unification” which is the political basis of this bankruptcy!
Outlining the recent experience of the Pabloites in Peru, Hansen concludes:
The other line, represented by Daniel Peroura, tended to elevate guerrilla war into a strategy. The source of the deviation clearly emanated from the view that the pattern of the Cuban revolution could be duplicated. The needs of party-building were deprecated. Guerrilla actions were undertaken in isolation from the masses and as a substitute for mass action. The consequences were disastrous to the Peruvian section. (Emphasis added.)
Generalizing on Latin America, Hansen adds, later:
Despite a correct analysis of the main economic, social and political trends in Latin America, the Ninth World Congress (of the Pabloites), through incorrect methodology, projected a course of action that led the official sections of the Fourth International in Bolivia and Argentina into catastrophes. (Emphasis added.)
And finally:
After giving birth to four or five or more fragments, the PRT Combatiente (the Pabloites’ section in Argentina) disavowed Trotskyism, severed connections with its principal sponsor, the Ligue Communiste of France, and took its distance from the Fourth International. The negative experience with the PRT (Combatiente) ought henceforth to be included in a handbook on party building methods under the heading: “How to Ruin a Section from Afar.”
No one can quarrel with this verdict, but where did all this “disastrous,” “catastrophic,” “negative” experience originate? For the answer we must go back to the role of Joseph Hansen himself in leading the SWP back into the Pabloite fold in 1961-63. (And these Latin American experiences are by no means the only fruits of Hansen’s party-building, as we shall see.)
When Hansen was in Europe on February 3, 1962, he attended a meeting of the National Committee of the Socialist Labour League. He refused to say more than a few sentences, avoiding political questions, because he was maneuvering for unity with the Pabloites. But he did say that he thought Cuba, and not Pabloism, was the main difference emerging between the SWP and the SLL. The minutes read: “As far as Latin America was concerned, he was not trying to frighten the SLL but was simply telling them that their policy in Latin America was suicidal for the Fourth International.” (Emphasis added.) (Trotskyism versus Revisionism, Volume III, p. 182.)
And what was this policy, said by Hansen to be suicidal? It was our refusal to be stampeded into “unity” with the Pabloites who took Castro’s July 26 Movement as the model for revolution in Latin America! It was our unbending opposition to all those who, encouraged above all by Joseph Hansen, set out to liquidate the independent revolutionary party into the Castroite movement. It was our rejection of the line of Hansen’s mentor, James P. Cannon, who advised Cuban Trotskyists to join Castro’s party, then being set up on Stalinist lines.
The architect of the liquidation—politically and physically—of many, many cadres of the Fourth International in Latin America is the same Joseph Hansen who now seeks to appear as the main critic of “guerrillaism” in the United Secretariat. What are the real politics of a man who perpetrates this political “catastrophe” (to use his own term), accepts no responsibility for it, and then, summarizing for his SWP members the Pabloite Tenth Congress, blandly tells them: “The ultra-left course on which the international was placed at the Ninth World Congress will be continued until at least the next Congress (i.e., 1976).”
There was nothing exceptional or accidental about Hansen’s role in relation to Cuba and Latin America. The agreements of the SWP with the Pabloites that Cuba was a “workers’ state” was made the justification for “reunification” in 1963, and for the condemnation of the International Committee majority as “ultra-left” and “sectarian.” Yet the orientation began by Hansen himself at that time, having led to disaster, is now condemned by Hansen as itself “ultra-left!”
When Hansen came to the SLL Central Committee he had just returned from a long trip to all the main countries in Latin America. His purpose had been to prepare his unprincipled and completely calculated use of the Cuban issue to break the SWP and as many others as possible from the IC, to isolate the IC majority, to make definite links with the Pabloites.
While in Peru, he went out of his way to build up contacts which he kept completely apart from the IC, and at the same time he wrote articles designed to establish public political agreement with Frias, the Pabloite representative in that country. In Chile and Argentina, he arrives at agreement with the leaderships of the IC sections, Vitale and Moreno, taking advantage of their inclination towards liquidationist “anti-imperialist united fronts” (a line rejected at the IC Conference in 1958) to line them up on his policy of unification on the grounds of the “new reality” of the Cuban revolution. In the event, these sections, having agreed that no reunification could take place without an IC Conference, went into the reunification along with Hansen.
In fact, Hansen used the cover of the IC in Latin America to organize the disruption of the IC and to rebuild the failing Pabloite movement as best he could on the basis of “Castroism.” This was in fact Hansen’s role: to destroy any development of independent Trotskyist leadership and to reestablish Pabloism, which rejected this political independence, as the “official” Trotskyism.
In historical retrospect, the role of Joseph Hansen, the leading Pabloite revisionist, in sabotaging the building of independent Trotskyist leadership, shows through with great consistency.
In his latest contribution (“The logic of factional hooliganism: The Secret of Healy’s ‘Dialectics’,” Intercontinental Press, March 31, 1975), he refers to the struggle for dialectical materialism by the International Committee of the Fourth International, in the following terms:
Healy uses this logic to “expose” his political opponents on a “dialectical” level. For instance, George Novack, the world Trotskyist movement’s leading authority in the field of philosophy and a defender of dialectical materialism for almost half a century, has been “proved” by this odd logic to be an “idealist.” (p. 441.)
And in the same document, while criticizing Pablo’s organizational abuses and “short-cuts,” he says:
Pablo was not a subjective idealist. He was a materialist and remains one to this day. (p. 442.)
Actually, Hansen defends the idealism of Pablo and of Novack as part of the definite political task which he has undertaken for at least the last 22 years. His own criticism of the “methodology” of the United Secretariat today is calculated lying; that methodology is the same methodology which he defends in Novack and Pablo.
Novack was a supporter of Pablo in 1953, against the “Open Letter” of Cannon. His retention by the Cannon clique has never to this day been explained by the SWP. He bided his time because he sensed the same “methodology” would bring the SWP back to Pablo. When Hansen defends Novack he defends this.
Novack himself has recently confirmed this solidarity between the agents of Pabloite liquidationism. Writing in the International Discussion Bulletin of the United Secretariat, he says:
For almost a third of a century the learned John G. Wright, Joseph Hansen, and I among others, have done what we could to uphold and propagate the doctrines of materialist dialectics and ensure the continuity of Marxist thought and traditions in our ranks.
Note how Novack especially selects Hansen as his co-thinker for 30 years! This means Hansen, Novack and the Pabloites worked together from the beginning in complete agreement. Hansen’s articles against Pablo in 1954 stopped abruptly, as Cannon banned any attempt to deepen the discussion of the split. By 1955, Hansen was preparing the SWP cadres for the 1956 crisis of Stalinism by writing at length in the SWP Internal Bulletin on ... cosmetics!
Khrushchev’s speech, confirming in its own way the absolute correctness of Trotskyism against Stalinism, opened the door wide to a clear Marxist understanding of the objective meaning of the fight against Pablo.
The “confirmation” of Trotsky’s analysis and perspective meant that the Trotskyist movement was in fact now faced with the responsibility and the opportunity of destroying Stalinism and giving revolutionary leadership! Pabloite revisionism was the effect of imperialist pressure against this necessity and this possibility. The meaning of Marxism was now to take the fight against Pabloism to its deepest roots. This was the process Hansen and Novack opposed with everything they could summon.
When Khrushchev ordered the bloody suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in November 1956, the issue was put beyond all doubt. All those who compromised even one inch with Pabloism shared the responsibility for cultivating illusions in Stalinism and obstructing those who could be broken from it and won to Trotskyism.
Yet it was precisely on the basis of the Hungarian Revolution that the SWP, under the guidance of Cannon, Novack and Hansen, began fresh approaches to Pabloism! Joseph Hansen took the leading role in breaking the SWP from the International Committee. As we have seen, having failed immediately to utilize the Hungarian Revolution for this act, he found his instrument in the Cuban Revolution.
When Hansen today talks about the negative effects on the Fourth International of the Hungarian and Cuban Revolutions, he is in fact cynically referring to the role he himself played in using these events to derail the SWP.
From 1957 onwards, Hansen and the SWP reverted to the worst kind of American anti-internationalism and pragmatism. When Hansen refused to engage in political discussion at the SLL Central Committee on February 4, 1962, he was carrying out a deliberate line. In 1958, Farrell Dobbs, SWP secretary, attended the first IC World Conference, but refused to participate in the political discussion. (His only interest was to round up international support for bitter factional struggles in the leadership of the SWP at that time—see G. Healy, “Problems of the Fourth International,” in Trotskyism versus Revisionism, Volume IV.) When the SLL tried from 1960 onwards to engage the SWP National Committee in political discussion, we could not get a single reply (Ibid., Volume III).
Hansen and the SWP leaders were extremely disturbed when the Pabloites agreed to an international written discussion. (The IC made this proposal because it had proved impossible to get the SWP into a political discussion.) Hansen deliberately jumped the gun in the spring of 1963 and announced a forthcoming “reunification” of a rump of the IC supporting the SWP with the Pabloites. At this point, a leading spokesman of the revisionists, Mandel (Germain), visited England and proposed that the discussion should continue, regardless of unification, with those who opposed immediate unification. He engaged in such discussion, and repeated the proposal, at the SLL Summer Camp in August 1963.
At this point, Hansen came hot foot back to Europe and insisted on behalf of the SWP that the Pabloites break off all discussion with the International Committee. This proved beyond all doubt that for Hansen the purpose of the “unification” was to avoid the discussion at all costs, avoid clarification of the political questions.
Hansen’s line of covering up the political questions was applied within the ‘reunified’ Pabloite Secretariat. He knew very well that the Pabloites had declared that the SWP had returned to Pabloism (see Trotskyism versus Revisionism, Volume III), yet told the SWP members the very opposite, that the Pabloites had returned to Trotskyism. The only way to keep these two stories apart was to ban discussion, and this is exactly what was done. All questions related to the ten-year split in the International were barred from discussion!
Furthermore, and most decisive, the Pabloite movement was facing an impending catastrophe in Ceylon. For years they had praised the LSSP as the greatest section of their “International.” N.M. Perera and the LSSP leaders were actually preparing to enter a bourgeois coalition government. Some comrades in the LSSP and even a small group in the Pabloite “International” were already warning of these dangers. They were silenced by the Hansen rule of “no discussion”! Hansen and the Pabloite Secretariat declared that any discussion of the problems in Ceylon would be “divisive.”
In the event, in July 1964, the LSSP leaders, still the official section of the “reunified” International of the Pabloites and Joseph Hansen, took office as ministers in the bourgeois coalition government of Mrs. Bandaranaike, and abandoned Trotskyism forever. The “catastrophes” Hansen talks about today in Argentina, Bolivia and Peru were anticipated by him ten years before, in Ceylon. The responsibility for the Ceylon betrayal rests securely on the shoulders of Hansen and the Pabloite international leaders, who banned the very political discussion that was necessary to defeat the LSSP leaders. This was the natural fruit of the politics of Hansen and the SWP, when they decided to call off the struggle to defeat Pabloism. Instead of Trotskyism taking its leadership responsibilities as Stalinism entered into crisis, it must be turned into an opportunist tendency which could play the role previously carried out by the Stalinists themselves. This is what the IC has been battling against since the struggle began against the SWP in the late 1950s!
A party in the USA brought up on these anti-internationalist lines can only develop into an opportunist party, and this is what Hansen has in fact achieved. When Hansen today makes criticisms, with formally correct quotations from Lenin and Trotsky, against the false theories of individual terrorism, “Minority violence” (the majority line of the Pabloites at their Tenth Congress) we must look to the SWP’s own policies to see what he actually means. Already in the 1960s the SWP National Committee was to be found sending a letter of condolence to the widow Jacqueline Kennedy on the occasion of her husband’s assassination! When the racists made their attacks on the Negroes of Mississippi, the same august body called for federal troops to defend them! Lest anyone think this was a temporary aberration, the same committee repeated this call in November 1974, demanding state troops be sent to Boston to enforce anti-racist legislation.
Hansen is the political leader responsible for these policies. It is because the International Committee, the Workers League of the US, and the Workers Revolutionary Party in Britain, systematically expose these policies and continue to show that Trotskyist parties can and must be built, that Hansen’s attack became so virulent. The removal of Wohlforth as Workers League Secretary represents for Hansen a defeat. It demonstrated that there has been built, against all his efforts, a serious Trotskyist movement equipping itself for revolutionary leadership, capable of defending itself. The very sight of such a thing is anathema to Hansen.
Let us return to Hansen’s role in the 1963 “reunification.” Not content with the disaster in Ceylon, he turned his attention immediately to Britain. Late in 1964 he brought together in Britain two thoroughly opportunist tendencies calling themselves “Trotskyist” and claiming the support of the Pabloite International.
These were the Grant group and another tendency led by one Ken Coates, around the publication The Week.
Grant was put out of the British Trotskyist movement as a renegade in 1951, after having abstained on the vote to expel Haston, who had deserted to the right wing of the Labor Party. He had been brought back in 1956 by Pablo solely to fight the tendency that was to become the Socialist Labor League. Grant’s supporters in the Labor Party, with Hansen’s backing, joined with the reformist bureaucracy in expelling the youth who supported the SLL. They formed a joint paper against the SLL-supported Keep Left, with the state capitalist Cliff group. When Keep Left was banned, their Young Guard proceeded uninhibited. When the Labor Party, in 1964, deprived the Young Socialists of all political rights and expelled the leadership, Grant’s group accepted these conditions and stayed in the Labor Party (as the Militant group).
Coates was the political collaborator of Bertrand Russell and Ralph Schoenman. He quickly abandoned any claim to Trotskyism and founded the ultra-respectable Institute of Workers’ Control, a portable platform for treacherous bureaucrats like Scanlon and Jones to sound off on “industrial democracy.”
These were the forces brought together by Hansen to fight the Socialist Labor League. As they disintegrated, Hansen settled for Pennington, Tariq Ali and the group which became the IMG. We have seen the record of this tendency in the Lawless affair and the Red Lion Square events. This is Hansen’s politics in Britain. No wonder he must leap at every chance to try to discredit the Workers Revolutionary Party.
The highly dangerous adventures of the IMG in Britain are by no means exceptional in the Pabloite ‘Unified Secretariat.’ Their Red Lion Square episode was an exercise flowing from the main line of the Mandel-Frank majority, who have been built up by Hansen as the authentic leadership of the Fourth International. When the IMG’s Red Weekly, on January 11, 1974, reported in its main headline “Spanish Trotskyists (i.e., Pabloites) give total support to Carrero Blanco assassination” they were echoing the majority Pabloite line that “minority violence” and “exemplary action” are the road to leadership. For all Hansen’s formal criticism of this middle-class anarchism, he cannot avoid the fact that he and the SWP bear the main responsibility for its perpetrators having any credibility in the “Fourth International.”
Hansen himself is forced to the following conclusion about the French Pabloites’ own “Red Lion Square” of June 21, 1973. On that day the Pabloite Ligue Communiste walked into a police provocation by counterdemonstrating against the fascist “Ordre Nouveau.” Two Pabloite leaders, Krivine and Rousset, were jailed and the Ligue Communiste illegalized. Hansen himself concludes:
The reason for the course taken by the Ligue Communiste appears all the more obscure in view of the widespread opinion of the French far left, left, and even liberal circles, that the decision of the Pompidou government to permit the Ordre Nouveau to hold its meeting was a deliberate provocation. In other words, the Minister of the Interior, Raymond Marcellin set a trap for the Ligue Comuniste, his purpose being to inveigle the Ligue into engaging in a physical attack on the police that could then be used as an excuse for banning the Ligue.
But let Hansen answer these questions: how did the “Unified Secretariat” of his own creation produce a general line which permitted Krivine to say: “...We resort to violence on a minority basis when we are forced to and when it can be understood by the masses,” and, “We carried out the June 21 action as a test, a warning to the nation. We have shown the way.”?
More interesting still. How is it that the section scraped together by Hansen in Britain, the IMG of Pennington, repeated this action almost word for word in the following year in Red Lion Square? Hansen might well talk about “methodology.” But these are the results of his anti-Marxist methodology. His solidarity with the methodology of Novack is not misplaced. For did not Novack himself produce a joint book on Marx and alienation along with Mandel, the “methodological” inspiration of the majority now condemned by Hansen?
Hansen’s latest attack on the International Committee, necessitated above all by the transformation of the SLL into the Workers Revolutionary Party, has been accompanied by his rapprochement with the French liquidationist Organization Communiste Internationaliste (OCI). Searching for an independent basis against Frank and Mandel, in order to have as much control as possible for his own reactionary purposes, and looking for any stick to beat the IC, Hansen accepts the approaches of the OCI just at the point where the OCI has gone far to the right. Hansen’s call for US federal troops to Boston was matched to the full by the winter campaign of the OCI in France: to collect the signatures of workers calling upon the Stalinists and Social-Democrats to stop quarreling among themselves and make a reality of their “common front”!
All this is perfectly in order. The Fourth International, set up in the teeth of the Stalinist terror which was the real front of their “Popular Front” politics after 1935, can, so far as Hansen is concerned, be reduced to a cheerleader for the popular fronts of the Stalinism of the 1970s. This is certainly the real meaning of the whole course traversed by Hansen since the Pablo fight.
The International Committee is recommending to the Sixth World Congress that a special fund be started to provide resources for a thoroughgoing investigation into security in the Fourth International and the role of individuals such as Hansen.