The strategic orientation enunciated at a conference of the Fourth International around '52 that postulated that the mass Stalinist parties were, in that conjucture, the leading anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist forces and that Trotskyists should engage in entryist tactics (united front from below) like they did with the French and US Socialists around '37, in the, "French Turn." Such liquidationist tendencies have been the bane of more orthodox Trots, for ever more.
A hefty book, full of fascinating detail, by an ex-Lovestoneite, Robert J. Alexander, "International Trotskyism, " Duke Univ. Press, 1986 or so. Online at the marx2mao website see, the A. Belden Fields book on French and US Trotskyism and Maoism. And from the group that puts out the daily WSWS, this history of Trotskyism, <URL: http://web.mit.edu/fjk/Public/essays/heritage.html >
Also, the Encyclopedia of Trotskyism Online and Revolutionary History websites.
From the last URL>...Pabloism -- the disruption of the Fourth International In such conditions of the stabilization of capitalism and the apparent successes of Stalinism, there developed within the Fourth International an opportunist wing which took this temporary stabilization for a permanent and normal phenomenon. Trotsky defined Stalinism as a temporary reaction against socialism, and a counterrevolutionary agency of imperialism in the working class. In 1949 and again in 1951, the leader of the International Secretariat of the Fourth International Michel Pablo began to insist that Stalinism is a legitimate phase along the road to socialism, that the Stalinist states will spread and widen, that these vile anti-worker police states will last for centuries. Pablo even advanced a grotesque pessimist theory about a nuclear war-revolution between the systems of Stalinism and imperialism, using this perspective to justify his move to support Stalinism. Pablo and Ernest Mandel insisted that Stalin's death in 1953 opened a process of the "self-reform" of Stalinism to the left. The basic conception of Trotskyism was and continues to be -- the construction of a revolutionary party and its assumption of the leadership of the working class. As opposed to that, the conception of Pabloism stated that Stalinism and petty bourgeois nationalism can play a progressive role in the move from capitalism to socialism, that the role of Trotskyism under conditions of continuing isolation of the revolutionary elements lies in criticism, in pushing these "mass movements" to the left. During the early 1950's Pablo, Pierre Frank, Ernest Mandel and many other leaders gave in to the apparent omnipotence of Stalinism and led the 4th International into a series of self-liquidations. They used their own authority and the authority of the Fourth International, giving directions to the sections of the FI to liquidate themselves into the various Stalinist parties. The differences between the tactic of the "French turn" of the 1930's and the Pabloite strategy of "integration in mass movements" consists in the following. Firstly, in the 1930's some of the social-democratic and centrist mass parties were of an amorphous, indeterminate character, often lacking a defined program, traditions and coloration. The Stalinists of the 50's and 60's had a definite counterrevolutionary tradition. Secondly, following Hitler's victory, inside the French, American and some other socialist parties there developed a strong left wing which had to be wrested from the clutches of the social-democrats and the Stalinists and directed towards revolutionary Marxism. In the post-War period, under conditions of worldwide stabilization of capitalism and the growth of opportunism, the reformist tendencies of the Stalinists and social- democrats could successfully suppress and isolate any leftist criticism. The
third, and most important distinction was that the "French turn" was a temporary tactic, subordinated to the strategy of conquering the advanced masses to the banner of Trotskyism. Pabloite world view, on the other hand, assigned a progressive role to Stalinism or petty bourgeois nationalism. Trotskyism was seen only as a movement of pressure and left criticism. According to Pablo and his cohort Ernest Mandel, the Fourth International was bound to dissolve in the mass Stalinist parties or movements of national liberation.
On that renegade Ernest Mandel...<URL: http://web.mit.edu/fjk/Public/essays/mandel.html > "
From the BT, <URL: http://www.bolshevik.org/history/gop.html > Genesis of Pabloism
The following very important essay on the history of the Trotskyist movement after Trotsky appeared in SpartacistNo. 21 (Fall 1972). We have appended an article from 1917No. 8 (Summer 1990) entitled “Revolutionary Continuity & the Split in the Fourth International” which contains a few criticisms and some supplementary comments.
The SWP and the Fourth International, 1946-54: Genesis of Pabloism The American Socialist Workers Party and the European Pabloists travelled at different rates along different paths to revisionism, to converge in uneasy alliance in the early 1960's in an unprincipled "reunification," which has now broken down as the American SWP has completed the transition from Pabloist centrism to outright reformism. The "United Secretariat" which issued out of the 1963 "reunification" teeters on the edge of an open split; the "anti-revisionist" "International Committee" fractured last year. The collapse of the various competing pretenders to the mantle of the Fourth International provides a crucial opportunity for the reemergence of an authentic Trotskyist international tendency. Key to the task of reconstructing the Fourth International through a process of splits and fusions is an understanding of the characteristics and causes of Pabloist revisionism and the flawed response of the anti-Pabloists who fought, too little and too late, on national terrain while in practice abandoning the world movement. World War II: U.S. and France Before the onset of the war, Trotsky and the Fourth international had believed that decaying capitalism and the rise of fascism removed the possibility for reformism and therefore for bourgeois-democratic illusions among the masses. Yet they could not but become increasingly aware that the revulsion of the working class against fascism and the threat of fascist occupation gave rise to social chauvinism and a renewal of confidence in the "democratic" bourgeoisie permeating the proletarian masses throughout Europe and the U.S. Faced with such a contradiction, the powerful pressures for nationalist backwardness and democratic illusions in the working class tended to pull the sections of the Fourth International apart, some adopting a sectarian stance, others capitulating to the social patriotism which was rampant among the masses. The SWP briefly adopted the "Proletarian Military Policy" which called for military training under trade union control, implicitly posing the utopian idea that U.S. workers could fight German fascism without the existence of a workers state in the U.S., through "controlling'' U.S. imperialism's army. British Trotskyist Ted Grant went even further, in one speech referring to British imperialism's armed forces as "our Eighth Army." The German IKD returned to outright Menshevism with the theory that fascism had brought about the need for "an intermediate stage fundamentally equivalent to a democratic revolution." ("Three Theses," 19 October I941) The French Trotskyist movement, fragmented during the course of the war, was the best example of the contradiction. One of its fragments subordinated the mobilisation of the working class to the political appetites of the Gaullist wing of the imperialist bourgeoisie; another grouping renounced any struggle within the resistance movement in favor of work exclusively at the point of production and, not recognizing the existing level of reformist consciousness among the workers, adventurously attempted to seize the factories during the "liberation" of Paris while the working masses were out on the streets. The February 1944 European Conference document which was the basis for a fusion between two French groupings to form the Parti Communiste Internationaliste characterized the two groups: "Instead of distinguishing between the nationalism of the defeated bourgeoisie which remains an expression of its imperialist preoccupations, and the 'nationalism' of the masses which is only a reactionary expression of their resistance against exploitation by the occupying imperialism, the leadership of the POI considered as progressive the struggle of its own bourgeoisie...." "the CCI...under the pretext of guarding intact the heritage of Marxism-Leninism, refused obstinately to distinguish the nationalism of the bourgeoisie from the resistance movement of the masses."
I. SWP ISOLATIONISM European Trotskyism and American Trotskyism responded in initially different ways to different tasks and problems following World War II. The precarious internationalism of the American SWP, maintained through intimate collaboration with Trotsky during his exile in Mexico, did not survive the assassination of Trotsky in 1940 and the onset of world war. The American Trotskyists retreated into an isolation only partially forced upon them by the disintegration of the European sections under conditions of fascist triumph and illegalization. Anticipating the difficulties of international coordination during the war, a resident International Executive Committee had been set up in New York. Its only notable achievement, however, appears to have been the convening of an "Emergency Conference" of the International, held 19-26 May 1940 "somewhere in the Western Hemisphere," "on the initiative of its U.S., Mexican and Canadian sections." A rump conference attended by less than half of the sections, the "Emergency Conference" was called for the purpose of dealing with the international ramifications of the Shachtman split in the U.S. section, which had resulted in the defection of a majority of the resident IEC. The meeting solidarized with the SWP in the faction fight and reaffirmed its status as the one U.S. section of the Fourth International. The conference also adopted a "Manifesto of the Fourth International on the Imperialist War and the Proletariat World Revolution" written by Trotsky. Following Trotsky's death, however, the resident IEC lapsed into oblivion. At
least in hindsight, the American section of the Fourth International should have initiated a clandestine secretariat in a neutral country in Europe, staffed by qualified SWPers and emigres from other sections, to centralise and directly supervise the work of Trotskyists in fascist- occupied countries. But the SWP was content to limit its international activities during the war to the publication in its internal bulletins of letters and factional documents from European Trotskyists. The passage of the Voorhis Act in 1941 inhibiting U.S. groups from affiliation with international political organisations–a law which to this day has never been tested–also gave the SWP a rationalization for downplaying its international responsibilities. The SWP's work during the war did evidence an internationalist perspective. SWP longshoremen used the opportunity of ships from Vladivostok docking on the West Coast to clandestinely distribute Trotsky's "Letter to Russian Workers" in Russian to the Soviet seamen. The SWP concentrated its merchant marine comrades on the supply runs to Murmansk until the extremely heavy casualties compelled the party to discontinue the Murmansk concentration. (It was in response to such activities that the GPU was directed to activate the Soblen anti-Trotskyist espionage net. Testimony years afterward revealed that Cannon's telephone was tapped by the GPU and that the business manager of the SWP's Fourth Internationalmagazine, one "Michael Cort," was one of the GPU agents.) But the maintenance and direction of the Fourth International was part of the SWP's internationalist responsibility, and should have been a priority as urgent as the work which the SWP undertook on its own. The leadership of the SWP came through the war period essentially intact, but reinforced in its insularity and ill-equipped theoretically to deal with the post-war situation. During the later years of the war and the immediate post-war period, the SWP had registered some impressive successes in implanting its cadres in industry during the boom and in recruiting a new layer of proletarian militants drawn to the Trotskyists because of their opposition to the Communist Party's policies of social patriotism and class peace. <SNIP> -- Michael Pugliese