https://icfi1953.blogspot.com/

First, let me state that this is a heroic effort by ICFI (1953) Supporters. This confirms the opinions and justifies the actions of the Fourth International’s international left faction, the Democratic Power Faction. Without an organized faction aiming to change the leadership and threatening the present leadership with a fair debate and a fair election by the membership, the Fourth International will float like a raft taken by capitalist currents in one or another direction. The working class’s motor power will not enter into the party machine through the proper channels, and all effort would be a waste. This new faction can only take shape through efforts like those of ICFI (1953) Supporters and the CAC/SEP-Left from Sri Lanka, whose documents we will attempt to present and discuss so as to develop them further. This theoretical work may seem one sided, but it will lay the groundwork for the next turn to the working class, the next emergency transfusion of socialist consciousness, which will coincide with the rising of the working class itself as the intelligentsia comes under its influence.

From article:

1. ICFI (1953) supporters are confident that the production of this document and its distribution to the best elements amongst the working class and international Trotskyist movement will re-arm the movement with a more fully internationalist outlook.

We cannot put all our hopes into one document, but we should instead try to create more and more documents regularly. This would also allow us to circulate regularly to the same group of interested people. This can then lead to the foundation of an official faction to challenge the legitimacy of the current SEP leadership. The Lehman campaign creates the perfect setting for exposing the anti-democratic practices of the SEP Nanobureaucracy.

2. “This document was originally planned for release after the campaign of Will Lehman for UAW President. We did not want to be seen as, in any sense, aiming for a disruption of this campaign.“

The Democratic Power Faction posted Tweets in reply to Lehman’s campaign to show our political involvement. This was not meant to disrupt the campaign but to reverse Lehman’s arguments against the union bureaucracy on to the Nanobureaucracy itself. The Nanobureaucracy only supported Lehman in words but not in deeds. We supported Lehman in deeds by taking a public stand in his favor and helping him fight his real enemies. Lehman may not be aware of the trajectory of the SEP or its history, so he does not understand why an SEP member would stab him in the back. It is our job to clarify that for him. He also cannot understand why they would underfund his campaign, as you said.

3. UK:

We need specific context to understand the dialectical relationship between Labor and Labor voters. More context would especially include Brexit, and the position of the party on Brexit. The party sided with the EU, the larger more powerful imperialist state, and they used the excuse that the right-wing calls for Brexit. A study of the Bolshevik policy on nationalism could easily show that Lenin and Trotsky would have supported Brexit, since the EU is a capitalist state, something which must turn into an empire. Not only does the SEP Nanobureaucracy argue for Russian capitalism but also Euro-capitalism in its support for the EU. Marxists do no believe they can simply change the leader of the state for a Marxist, enact Marxist policy, and move democracy along on a smooth road to progress. Marxism attempts to show the class character of the EU or of the Russian state (or of a particular party or organization) and oppose their expansion while breaking them up into smaller parts. This leads to weaker central governments and more of them, increasing the probability of a break-through by the international working class that leads to the establishment of a socialist workers’ state. This would lead to a series of revolutions as military power comes under the control of the world revolution, which could then use that military power to expand rather than contract the revolution as all capitalist armies do.

Also important to the UK situation is the rise of the Conservative Party and the failure of Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters to explain how Corbyn did anything but set limits on the socialist movement to prevent its rise to power. The Labor Party functioned like a well-refined tool of the ruling class to contain and weaken working class demands for a just economy. We need to show how Corbyn’s criticism of Israel, perhaps rightly conceived of as anti-semetic, coming as it did from the imperialists of the UK Labor Party who oversaw the world’s largest empire for a time and led the UK during the foundation of NATO, how his criticism is used by the UK in inter-imperialist conflict revolving around the US empire. The UK seeks the second position in the alliance, and it wants to undercut Israel with a hypocritical criticism of its imperialist policies. This is to show that brute force, the kind that can be marshalled by the EU, NATO, and the UK, is more important than open-mindedness in the application of different inhumane tactics to further territorial expansion. Furthermore, Corbyn’s economic policies, though never enacted, could clearly show that Labor does not offer a path to socialism, since they do not support nationalization of the banks and corporations, international unity of the working class, or even higher wages and reduced hours.

A final point within this limited article would be the Ukraine war and the transfer of weapons by the UK, including depleted uranium, which releases radioactive dust into the air when it hits a target, and long-range missiles, giving the Ukraine the capability of attacking deep inside of Russian territory. The Corbyn left knows the Corbyn did not call for the banning of NATO. In a 2017 speech, he said: “It is vital that as Britain leaves the European Union, we maintain a close relationship with our European partners alongside NATO, to keep spending at 2 per cent.” (https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-corbyn-did-call-for-nato-to-disband-but-its-labour-policy-to-stay-in) The UK is one of only 7 countries in NATO, out of a membership of 31 member states, that lives up to the 1949 agreement to spend 2% of the government’s budget on the military. Former US President Donald Trump himself called for the end to NATO in order to pressure those other governments to increase their military budget.

4. Sri Lanka:

It does not make sense to put discussion of the SEP-Left and CAC anywhere but at the center. The entire revolution in South Asia depends on a clear success for democratic principles in the conflict between the Nanobureaucracy and the revolutionary class as it puts to work its political tool, the revolutionary party. The attempts to divide the socialist movement from the movement for democracy have taken an absurdist turn towards real-life caricature. We are supposed to suspend our disbelief that the struggle for socialism could be carried forward by bureaucrats whose main preoccupation is the sabotage of factional democracy through witch-hunts within the socialist movement. Hollywood could not devise a greater fiction.

5. Australia:

I also had a problem with this change of leadership. Not only was the process flawed, but I have also met the Beams’ successor, James Cogan, before he became the leader of the Australian party around 2016, three years after the sale of party assets to the Chicago Outfit mafia. I remember from a conversation a decade earlier in Detroit that he held deeply backwards views on the environment. Environmental and human concerns were counterposed mechanically, in the same way as defenders of capitalism falsely counterpose lower prices and higher wages. Both the environment and humanity can benefit from the elimination of the profit motive from the planning of the production process.

He also had a view of journalism that bellied his concealed support for military control over journalism. He seemed to think he was encouraging an unhealthy obsession with discussion of secret weapons, which would lead to a supposedly justified reaction by the military. In fact, respectable, independent journalism must confront, if necessary in an organized Christ-like fashion, not only secret weapons and torture programs but also the repressive apparatus that attempts to silence discussion of such programs. This does not mean leading journalists into a trap and a conflict with the military bureaucracy. It means protecting the rights of journalists until the end, using appeals to the courts and the popular will, to prevent the military from instituting things like slave-labor camps, unethical scientific experiments on human beings, forced displacement, and ecocide, among other atrocities that unchecked armies commit almost naturally.

6. France:

Primary to an understanding of the ICFI’s tasks in France is the admission of the flawed policy of the Healy leadership during the 1971 split between the British SLL and Lambert’s French OCI. Healy attempted to place the conflict within a theoretical context, emphasizing Dialectical Materialism above Trotsky’s Transitional Program. In practice, he approached the problem from the perspective of a nationalist bureaucracy, and the dialectical materialism could have been pinched from a Stalinist theoretician. In order to draw the lessons of that painful experience, which occurred during the early 70s, a very revolutionary period, we need to set forth an alternative policy to that proposed and executed by Healy. North and Steiner’s books What Makes Wohlforth Run and The Fourth International and the Renegade Wohlforth show that North and Steiner sought to eliminate all criticism of Healy as international chairman in exchange for his support for their joint assault on Wohlforth’s leadership in the US Party. Such petty concerns for position within the Nanobureaucracy should not decide the outcome of great Marxist debates.

7. US:

Excellent points and general agreement. We should point to a specific case, the Shuvu Battarai case, which I have analyzed at full length in this pamphlet: SEP Ejects Member, Terrifies Membership in an Act of Factional Dictatorship.

Many people, especially in the US, associate Leninism with counter-revolution under Stalin. Leninism leads to Stalinism. This is exactly the position of the Nanobureaucracy, which, giving in to caricature, justifies Stalinist methods because they are simply the extension of Lenin’s methods. Trotskyists have always argued in opposition to this view, defending the state acts of violence under Lenin’s leadership as necessary from the standpoint of keeping the workers’ state from falling and allowing for a return to Tsarism and World War. Lenin turned towards such policies and tactics out of necessity, and since the Fourth International does not find itself in similar circumstances, they cannot justify the same use of executive, emergency powers to fight the will of the people. Not only can they not justify the same use of executive power, they must also carry an extra responsibility to remember that Lenin did arrive at circumstances in which he was forced to use repression, and that repression led to the formation of the Stalinist dictatorship. The party must now also anticipate such circumstances in the future and prepare to meet those challenges while doing even more to defend democratic rights, to prevent bureaucracy, and to prevent misrule.

This new responsibility comes on top of political competition from the numerous members of the ruling class itself. The Jefferson and Lincoln Cults, which hold like Marxism that progress builds upon progress so that humanity can achieve new feats with every new generation. In contrast to Marxism, the Jefferson and Lincoln Cults do not see the capitalists as a ruling class and see the establishment of a republic on royal territory or the abolition of slavery as a complete break from the entire history of class oppression. Marxists argue that class distinctions continue to this day, and that the ruling class is the capitalist class, the owners of the means of production. That difference in theory is no small difference. It separates Marxism from all the ideologies of the ruling classes, which by one means or another, argue that class oppression is part of progress, that, as Plato and Aristotle argued, the oppression of a slave leads to the development of a higher form of man through the liberation from work of the master, and, they all argue, it does not continue or carry forward in new forms the same oppression of the old class divide. Bourgeois ideology, they believe, has death with those old views with finality, since capitalist rule is the highest form of democracy, republic, and the closest thing to utopia given the inherent flaws of mankind.

8. Germany:

Also, many good points. “It is difficult to know to what extent the failure of the SGP to carry out such a campaign allowed for the SPD, then resting on shaky foundations, to somewhat restabilize itself.”

We will sound crazy to some, especially those who consider the “Far Left” the greatest threat to their existence, but in order to re-center politics around moderate international socialism we cannot turn their insults inward. The newest craze slips away, loses the interest of the crowd, and moves on. However, when it is important for human society, what we believe matters not just how we believe it. The dialectical method perseveres through every storm due to its remarkably firm foundations in objective reality and in the history of human thought. The SPD, since 1914, has represented only imperialism. As imperialism fails to defend itself within the party, the imperialist classes, especially the petty-bourgeoisie, will feel the rug pulled out from under them as Marxism stages its return. This can only happen with the active participation of the working-class masses, who cannot move for the revolution until the giant political structures of capitalism come tumbling down and the fences of their pens no longer restrain them. At that point, the Nanobureaucracy will present itself as the far-right, having incorporated the far right, because the workers will have moved so far to the left of them. Those who criticize the SEP from the Left will appear as moderates, and abolition of the state itself will appear on the Left horizon and gradually approach. Predicting and calibrating and organizing for that new center will put us at the top of the bell curve, the golden mean, to lead the greatest amount of people with the greatest amount of authority and trust from the people.

9. Philosophy:

“Such subjectivism is a thoroughly individualist outlook that exalts the will of the leadership and the mere act of thinking, without the limitation of any external, material contingencies such as the failure to build parties internationally.”

Subjectivism does not actually remove any limits, it only adds more, since on top of the limitations themselves is added the failure to understand or care about those limitations. Subjectivism is not as individualistic as materialism. This almost needs no explanation, but the full development of the individual is a goal in Communist Theory. Their rejection of that theory causes them to put defense of capitalism first, above their individual needs, as capitalism is the only alternative. They ignore the best interests of the individual reading their work and the individual they claim to be. False claims cross the line from philosophy to fraud, bringing legitimate punishment on the writers of the publication. Even assuming they were honest about themselves (and their limitations), by resorting to “subjective idealism” or positivism, they cause serious damage to themselves and their own cause, (for this reason their cause must not be socialist revolution, from the materialist standpoint, but Nanobureaucracy) in the form of mistaken conclusions resulting from faulty assumptions. Whether you describe that new theory as subjective idealism or “positivism” as Bertrand Poster did, depends on generalizing from inevitably limited experience. In fact, Lenin pointed out the link between positivism and subjectivism:

“The phrase “agnostic positivism” is also absurd, for the adherents of Hume in fact call themselves positivists… Petzoldt definitely regards empirio-criticism as positivism. And finally, to drag in the names of Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer is again absurd, for Marxism rejects not what distinguishes one positivist from another, but what they have in common and what makes a philosopher a positivist instead of a materialist.”

Lenin p. 205. (https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/cw/pdf/lenin-cw-vol-14.pdf)

Another quote from Lenin in the preface to the same book reads:

“Engels’ dialectics is ‘mysticism’, says Berman. Engels’ views have become ‘antiquated’, remarks Bazarov casually, as though it were a self-evident fact. Materialism thus appears to be refuted by our bold warriors, who proudly allude to the ‘modern theory of knowledge’, ‘recent philosophy’ (or ‘recent positivism’), the ‘philosophy of modern natural science’, or even the ‘philosophy of natural science of the twentieth century’. Supported by all these supposedly recent doctrines, our destroyers of dialectical materialism proceed fearlessly to downright fideism (clearest of all in the case of Lunacharsky, but by no means in his case alone!). Yet when it comes to an explicit definition of their attitude towards Marx and Engels, all their courage and all their respect for their own convictions at once disappear. 

“In deed—a complete renunciation of dialectical materialism, i.e., of Marxism; in word—endless subterfuges, attempts to evade the essence of the question, to cover their retreat, to put some materialist or other in place of materialism in general, and a determined refusal to make a direct analysis, of the innumerable materialist declarations of Marx and Engels. This is truly ‘mutiny on one’s knees’, as it was justly characterised by one Marxist.” 

Lenin 19. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/mec/four2.htm

Indeed, it is as Lenin thought. They never openly break from Marxism except in deeds, they “cover their retreat…” They attempt to associate weakness with Marxism, a “mutiny on one’s knees” that has absolutely no chance of success. At the same time, it brings forces in the state who never tire of their “endless subterfuges,” the “service” they render the people, and who try to stamp and march over the real Marxists. Only standing up for every part of Marxism, even forgivable errors we find in hindsight, will remove from the party the internal political threats these philosophical problems reveal.

With regards to the final topic of the philosophical section, Rationalism seeks to inspire faith or awe in the followers of the Nanobureaucracy or any hierarchy, but this evasion of facts cannot go on forever. As revolutionaries in the past have always argued, facts are stubborn things. This will not go away despite a hundred irrelevant rationalizations or a hundred army invasions. Rationalism tells us the inevitability of the revolution brings us to the inevitability of a confrontation with Nanobureaucracy in the interests of the working class. With materialism we have proof of this in the many instances when potential members, parties, and even real members and parties were unjustly forced out of the movement. If we assume that only external forces are responsible, then rationalism tells us this leaves a scar. Materialism finds cases such as Shuvu Battarai, the SEP-Left, and ICFI Supporters, and uses them to remove the scar and restore the health and appearance of the movement. If we assume the forces were internal, the results would be quite the same, as excisions of an internal threat leave scars as well.

10. The class shift analysis is a very good analysis. We should add more details at a later stage. The rightward shift could not be more apparent, and that this rightward shift rested on the middle-class economic foundation becomes apparent through analysis.

11. The technical foundations section should include a mention of our conversation on Twitter and others you have had. As much as we have a technical foundation in social networks, let’s not forget that they are social networks. This means we must emphasize our ability to form connections and maintain connections as a political unit.

12. Conclusion:

I do not disagree with the goal of a party in every country, and that was not the approach of the Marxist movement under anyone from Marx to Trotsky. That goal can be achieved, but only after a revolution brings one or a few Fourth International governments into power. The extra resources released by the new government will break through many barriers for the Fourth International.

We need to set realistic goals, and based on my experience with Twitter, we will need 10,000 Tweets to reach one person with whom agreement is possible. To Tweet so many times would require countless hours. For that reason, I would say the organization of a coordinated international recruitment campaign, each member in their own community, would allow those of us who stand up for principles on our own to also stand together. This could lead into a local elections campaign, in which we could run for local offices on a socialist platform. This would bring socialist ideas to the people while giving us a chance to defend our name against our middle-class detractors.