http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/11/15/sepf-n15.html:

SEP France:

This set the stage for Mitterrand to come to power in 1981, with PCF support. Exploiting mass discontent with the impact of the 1970s economic crisis and the austerity policies of conservative President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Mitterrand promised to nationalize key firms and boost purchasing power. Once in power, however, he soon repudiated his program. Faced with a predictable flight of capital from France, he refused to impose capital controls, instead proclaiming an “austerity turn,” slashing social spending and jobs.

The OCI broke with the ICFI and adopted the perspective of the Union of the Left, seeking a political and electoral alliance with the PS and the PCF.

The ICFI was founded in 1953 in direct struggle against the Pabloite revisionist tendency in the Fourth International (FI) from which the LCR/NPA descends. This tendency emerged within the FI’s International Secretariat in Paris, led by Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel, who initially expelled the majority of the French section for opposing their political line. The ICFI intervened to defend Trotskyism against Pablo and Mandel, who insisted that the FI liquidate itself into the Stalinist and bourgeois nationalist parties that had emerged in the leadership of the mass labor movements and anti-colonial uprisings after World War II. The Pabloites predicted that “war-revolution,” fought between the Stalinist and imperialist regimes, would replace revolution through the independent mobilization of the working class, as in Russia in October 1917; victorious “war-revolutions” would produce dictatorships, like the Stalinist regimes in China and Eastern Europe, lasting for centuries, from which socialism would develop in the distant future.

At the 1966 Third Congress of the ICFI, it brought with it a delegation from Voix Ouvrière and began advocating “reconstructing” the Fourth International. The formulation “reconstructing” meant a centrist reorientation away from the intransigence that characterized the ICFI’s struggle against Pabloism…

from further up>This has included the Workers Struggle (LO) group, founded in 1956 as the syndicalist organization Voix Ouvrière, and renamed LO in 1968. It included members of a group active in the 1930s and 1940s led by David Barta. The Barta group claimed loyalty to Trotskyism, but refused to join the FI on the anti-Marxist grounds that the working class would struggle only on a national basis, and that the FI was therefore a petty-bourgeois organization.

In 1968, the OCI sought to orient student protests to the workers and called a key strike at the Sud Aviation plant in Nantes that helped trigger the general strike. However, it adopted a syndicalist line, calling only for the formation of a central strike committee, regrouping all trade unions and workers’ parties. The British SLL correctly criticized the OCI for not calling for the PCF and the Stalinist General Confederation of Labor (CGT) to take power, in order to raise the issue of state power with the workers, expose the PCF’s counterrevolutionary policy, and place itself in a position to fight for political leadership of the working class.

…The SLL failed to carry out the [1971] split with the necessary clarification of political issues. Nor did it seek to win forces from within the OCI or build a party in France. The premature split, which preempted a discussion of essential political issues, effectively liquidated Trotskyism in France as an organized political tendency over an entire historic epoch, and proved to have serious political consequences for the SLL, itself, in Britain.

The OCI sent its members into the PS, functioning as a faction of the PS and the union bureaucracies. It played this role not only in France, but also used its influence to set up anti-working class parties internationally, most egregiously in Latin America, where it helped establish the Workers Party (PT) in Brazil.

[A break with the Workers Party in Brazil, meant a break from the policies of the OCI, and a break from the PS, allowing for the rebuilding, resolidification of the ICFI in France.]

SLL, Great Britain: Renaming itself the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP), it grew on the basis of popular opposition to the Conservative government of Edward Heath, but began to downplay the ICFI’s struggle against Pabloism. When the Labour Party returned to power in 1974 and the WRP struggled to continue its growth among workers, it sought support elsewhere behind the backs of the rest of the ICFI—in ties with Third World nationalists and factions of the union bureaucracy and political establishment.

[Theory for change from League to Party lacks discussion of practical experience of membership. No new unions formed since 1979 in US, except one in 2004, not through organizing, but through merger of older unions.]

1995, SEP: “We cannot resolve the crisis of working class leadership by ‘demanding’ that others provide that leadership. If there is to be a new party, then we must build it.”

[Similar to “syndicalist line” of the OCI in 1968, for which there was a split without discussion in 1971. Allow expelled members to argue for members within the party to join them outside the party, or true revolutionary leadership must remain outside or partially outside the party.]

[A division in the SEP USA and/or Germany appears inevitable because of the history of splits in France and the UK. An important lesson that can be drawn from these experiences: a failure to respond critically and divide on theoritical grounds can lead to a total breakdown of party discussion and a divide along national lines. This could be far more destructive, as this divides the revolutionary party from the working class of the unorganized country. They would ask, why do you prepare their revolution but not ours?

It should be an organizational principle above political positions, that any national party dividing from the international or attempting to exlude some other party, must divide along theoritical lines to guarantee the continuity of Marxist leadership in all countries involved. The split in the SLL was a belated acceptance of this concept, but the delay led to great losses in terms of inroads to the masses and access to mass media. Creating this rule would have created a split in the SLL and a split in the OCI, allowing for both continuity and unity throughout all the sections or parties of the ICFI. The damage caused to the growth of the British movement and French movement would have then been contained.]

LCR, LO and OCI: “…supported capitalist restoration in the USSR, these parties developed closer ties with the desiccated Stalinist and social democratic parties in Europe, and integrated themselves more deeply into the media, academia, and trade union bureaucracies. While posing as “left,” they supported imperialist war, social austerity and attacks on democratic rights.”

“The ICFI has classified these forces as the “pseudo-left,” a tendency based in upper layers of the middle classes and rooted in the degeneration of the post-1968 student movement.”

2003: “The ICFI issued an open letter to the three parties…” and “These parties did not bother to respond, however, simply aligning themselves with the campaign of the PS for a vote for Chirac, supposedly to block neo-fascism from coming to power.”

2014: “In its 2014 resolution titled “Socialism and the Struggle against Imperialist War,” the ICFI wrote:…” that “The task of the ICFI now is to work for the development of sections in new countries and areas of the world.”

“Workers’ power cannot be established by electing socialists to the structures of the bourgeois state. New organs of participatory democracy, created in the course of mass revolutionary struggles, in order to genuinely represent the working-class majority of the population, must be developed as the foundations of the workers state.”

[Does this include #Hashtag_social_movements or groups/pages at facebook.com, disqus.com discussions? 4chan? Reddit? Are these structures of the bourgeois state? They seem to be new organs of participatory democracy. Each should have an SEP presence with an elected leader for every site, and they should have daily 1-hour online meetings to discuss main points to be discussed among internet-based groups. There should also be a focus on arranging monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, or annual meet-ups, depending on participation rates. ]

“create a world federation of workers[‘] states”

“Yet capitalist society cannot resolve any of its economic, social, ecological or cultural problems.”

“The SEP condemns the wars waged by France and all the other imperialist powers, and rejects the fraudulent pretexts, advanced by the imperialists and their pseudo-left apologists, that these interventions are struggles for human rights or against terrorism. It recognizes the basic right of people to defend themselves and their countries against neo-colonial invaders. This principled position does not lessen the SEP’s opposition to violent acts against innocent civilians in occupied countries or around the world.”

[With regard to Russia]

“The decay of democracy, in France and all the countries with bourgeois democratic traditions, can be fought only in opposition to the entire political establishment through an independent political mobilization of the working class on the basis of a socialist program.”

“The struggle for the political independence of the working class”

“Manifestations of opportunism, such as that of Stalin, which developed in the Bolshevik party in the 1920s, that of Pablo and Mandel, which developed inside the Fourth International in the 1950s, and the OCI’s adaptation to the PS in the 1970s, can be traced to the influence of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois forces on the working class.”

[Stalin’s opportunism was evident as he led the Bolsheviks through February 1917, siding with the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries in approving of the Provisional Goverment and in siding against the establishment of a workers’ state based on the approval of the workers’, peasants’, and soldiers’ committees.]

[Unions:]

” “Instead of the conservative motto ‘a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,’ they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: ‘Abolition of the wages system!’” Marx wrote. ”

“Nonetheless, despite the collapse of their dues base, social cuts, mass layoffs and plant closures, the revenues of the unions have continued to rise, thanks to billions of euros in legal or semi-legal funding from corporations and the state. They are no longer workers’ organizations, but empty shells funded by the ruling class, in which workers are trapped and controlled by petty-bourgeois functionaries tied to the police and intelligence agencies. They function today as an industrial police force directed against the working class.”

“Leninist Vanguard”

“It fundamentally opposes, however, syndicalist conceptions that the organization of militant struggles can replace a worked-out revolutionary strategy for the working class, led by a Marxist party.”
The SEP upholds the essential revolutionary socialist principle: tell the workers the truth. It bases its program and its political work on a scientific and objective assessment of political reality and fights to develop socialist consciousness in the masses by bringing its Marxist perspective to the most advanced layers of workers and youth. It rejects the insidious claim that Marxists must take the prevailing level of mass consciousness—or rather, what petty-bourgeois philistines imagine it to be—as their point of departure. The first responsibility of the party, Trotsky explained, is to give “a clear, honest picture of the objective situation, of the historic tasks which flow from this situation, irrespective of whether or not the workers are today ripe for this. Our tasks don’t depend on the mentality of the workers. The task is to develop the mentality of the workers. That is what the program should formulate and present before the advanced workers.”

“The discipline required for revolutionary struggle cannot be imposed from above, however; it must develop on the basis of an agreement, freely arrived at, on principles and program. This conception finds expression in the organizational structure of the SEP, which is based on the principles of democratic centralism. In the formulation of policy and tactics, the fullest democracy must prevail within the party. No restraints, other than those indicated in the party’s constitution, are placed on internal discussion of the SEP’s policies and activities. Leaders are democratically elected by the membership, and are subject to criticism and control.”

Special emphasis on this part: “In the formulation of policy and tactics, the fullest democracy must prevail within the party. No restraints, other than those indicated in the party’s constitution, are placed on internal discussion of the SEP’s policies and activities.”

[No restraints does not mean no restraints when it comes to any discussion begun in the comments section of the WSWS. Moderators block comments at will without any discussion, email, or any attempt at communication. One may argue I am no longer a member, so it is not a protected internal discussion, but why then ask me to volunteer as a translator? Shouldn’t membership be arrived at freely, “on the basis of an agreement… on principles and program?” Also, this is the first instance I have heard mentioned a party constitution. How may one obtain a copy of the document?

In order to prevent a situation similar to the split with the OCI- based on the cutting off of discussion on the part of the SLL or SEP amid accusations of anarchism, syndicalism, radicalism, and opposition to discipline- there should be an open discussion on said constitution, as well as financial professionalism, and educational professionalism. See these three proposals for a party congress: https://randomposter33.wordpress.com/2017/11/18/three-additions/ ]

Trotsky on French proletariat: “Many times has the bourgeoisie dazzled it with all the colors of republicanism, of radicalism, of socialism, so as always to fasten upon it the fetters of capitalism. By means of its agents, its lawyers and its journalists, the bourgeoisie has put forward a whole mass of democratic, parliamentary, autonomist formulae which are nothing but impediments on the feet of the proletariat, hampering its forward movement.”