Socialist Fight: Where We Stand

Thank you for your revealing portraits of Jim Robertson. People forget that David North and Jim Robertson joined Healy’s International together. North and Robertson, despite different styles, contained the workers’ uprising by covering up the anti-democratic methods prevailing in the supposedly “democratic” UK and US empires. Private ownership of the party limited debate to a few individuals, and this removed the Fourth International from the mass movement in time for the 1968 revolution.

Trotsky himself bears some of this responsibility, since he systematically erased Sylvia Pankhurst’s Fourth International while he allied himself with Stalin and the Comintern. This alliance brought the movement under control of the Soviet state as well as rich Western intellectuals who made it a priority to exploit workers’ leaders in inhumane ways. The SWP and Pablo’s IS did abandon the theory that the Fourth International and only the Fourth International could produce a revolutionary leadership at the head of a revolutionary party and mass movement. However, Trotsky’s war in alliance with Stalin against the Workers’ Opposition in Russia and their allies in Pankhurst’s Fourth International set back the revolutionary movement for almost two decades. A Fourth International within this context cannot hope to escape from the confines of bourgeois politics.

When Trotsky finally ended his war on Pankhurst and turned against Stalin, he had already surrounded himself with Stalin’s Comintern agents who simply eliminated him, since they had no further use for him. Had the Fourth International listened to criticism of the Bolshevik Revolution by leading Marxists of the day, especially women like Pankhurst, Kollontai, and Luxemburg, they could have organized in a secure environment. Robertson, North, and Healy all participated in the defense of a bourgeois dictatorship within the Fourth International as a means of covering up Trotsky’s own betrayal of the workers.

This did not occur from weakness of character, a lack of Neitzche, or even a lack of will for the revolution. It arose directly from the limited form of struggle imposed by the Bolsheviks and indirectly Tsarist Russia as a whole. (The Bolsheviks were an important part of the Tsarist government as a well-known party represented in the bourgeois Duma.) A Fourth International King like Robertson or North or Healy has an inherent flaw exacerbated to the extreme by conflict with Nazi, Stalinist, and Western Imperialist spies.

A proper correction can only occur if we take a direct approach to resolving the class struggle in favor of the workers and against the owners within the executive of the revolutionary party. The Robertson/North faction of the Fourth International argues in the same vein as Adam Smith, except arguing for the “Wealth of Factions.” We must break from bourgeois economics and finance by breaking with Adam Smith’s theory in favor of Karl Marx’s theory explained in his work “Capital,” in favor of democratic control by the working class of the material resources of the movement and society as a whole.