THE WORLD ECONOMIC-

POLITICAL CRISIS
AND THE DEATH AGONY
OF U.S. IMPERIALISM
Draft Resolution on the
Perspectives and Tasks
of the Workers League

Su bm itted b y th e Political C o m m itte e o f th e W orkers League .

N o ve m b e r 7 ,1 9 7 8 T ■
©Copyright November, 1978 by Labor Publications, Inc.
Amended in June, 1979

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

Published by Labor Publications, Inc.

P.O. Box 1876, New York, New York 10001

@ World Socialist Website: www.wsws.org

 Table of Contents
PART I
THE DEATH AGONY OF U.S. IMPERIALISM .......................................................................1
World Economic Crisis ..................................................................................................................... 6
Bretton Woods .................................................................................................................................... 6
The Monetary Crisis ........................................................................................................................... 8
U.S. Crisis ............................................................................................................................................9
The Banks ..........................................................................................................................................10
Europe and America ..........................................................................................................................12

The Rise and Fall of the Dollar Republic................................................................................... 14

The Development of U.S. Capitalism .............................................................................................15
The Emergence of the Working Class .............................................................................................17

Historical Background and Political Significance

of the Fight for the Labor Party ............................................................................................... 19
Trotsky’s Contribution ......................................................................................................................20
Cannon’s “American Theses” ........................................................................................................... 22
The Labor Party and the Strategy for Power ................................................................................23

The Combined Counter-Revolutionary Role

of Stalinism and Revisionism in the United States .............................................................25

PART II
THE INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE AND
THE STRUGGLE FOR TROTSKYISM ............................................................................... 30
The Fight Against Pabloism and the Founding of the
International Committee ............................................................................................................. 30

The Building of the Workers League ........................................................................................... 32

The Young Socialists ....................................................................................................................... 35
The Historical Continuity of Trotskyism as the Basis
of Cadre Training and the Struggle Against Pragmatism ................................................ 36

Security and the Fourth International ......................................................................................... 38

The Assassination of Tom Henehan ............................................................................................. 40

PART III
TASKS OF THE WORKERS LEAGUE ...................................................................................42

Program ............................................................................................................................................... 42

For the United Socialist States of

North, Central and South Am erica!......................................................................................... 44
Latin America ......................................................................................................................... . 45
Puerto Rico ........................................................................................................................................47
Canada ............................................................................................................................................... 47
Full Support to National Liberation Struggles! .......................................................................49

For the Unconditional Defense of the Soviet Union!

For the Political Revolution Against the Stalinist Bureaucracy! ........................................ 50

For the Rehabilitation of Trotsky and

All Victims of the Moscow Trials! ...............................................................................................53

The Struggle Against Imperialist W ar......................................................................................... 53

Against Individual Terrorism......................................................................................................... 54

For the United Socialist States of Europe!

Forward with the Euro Marches! ................................................................................................. 55

Study the Works of Marx, Engels, Lenin

and Trotsky!................................................................................................................................... 55

Forward to the Daily Revolutionary Newspaper! .....................................................................56

 PARTI
THE DEATH AGONY
OF U.S. IMPERIALISM
The world capitalist system stands on the
brink of the greatest economic and political
catastrophe in its history. During the seven
years since the collapse of the Bretton
Woods Agreements, the international bour­
geoisie has exhausted virtually all its finan­
cial resources as well as the credit mecha­
nisms upon which it has relied since August
15, 1971 to stave off economic disaster.
At the Bonn economic summit of July 1978, the
leaders of world capitalism made no pretense of being
able to offer a palliative, let alone a cure, for the rag­
ing economic crisis. Global slump, mass unemploy­
ment, uncontrolled inflation, deepening trade war­
fare and the breakdown of the international mone­
tary system were tacitly acknowledged as the un­
alterable facts of economic life.
The aftermath of the Bonn summit has provided its own
indisputable justification for the pessimism of the partici­
pants. In the three months since the July summit, the price
of gold climbed nearly 20 percent to beyond the $240 mark.
And the US dollar, the official symbol of value, has crashed
through one “psychological barrier” after another. The
world crisis proceeds in accordance with the laws dis­
covered by Marx, not Freud.
It is now clear that the product of the Bretton Woods
Agreements of 1944 was not the “planned,” “managed”
and “organized” capitalism as claimed ad nauseum by
Keynesian economists and revisionists, but rather a finan­
cial Frankenstein now totally out of control.
World capitalism, despite all the subjective wishes of the
ruling class, cannot be regulated. The objective laws of
capitalist development, which presently dictate the vio­
lent knd anarchic “leveling off’ of the productive forces,
override all the subjective intentions of the ruling class.
The essence of this crisis is the fundamental conflict be­
tween the productive forces and the social relations of capi­
talism, between the world market created through the
international division of labor and the confines of the bour­
geois nation state. The measure of this crisis cannot be
taken simply in terms of the daily changes in the economic
indicators. The highest expression of the working out of the
contradiction between the productive forces and social
relations is precisely the gigantic dimensions of the growth
of the world revolution.
When Jimmy Carter stated, just a few days after the con­
clusion of the Camp David summit on the Middle East that
“It would be nice for us if they (the Palestine Liberation
Organization) would just go away,” he let slip the secret of
the crisis of world, and, in particular, U.S. imperialism.
Standing in the way of all “solutions” proposed by the
ruling class to deal with the crisis is the strength of the
international working class and the oppressed masses. The
economic crisis is the essential driving force of the world
revolution. But in the interaction between economics and
politics, the struggles of the masses against imperialism
intensifies the economic crisis and is transformed into its
essential driving force.
Carter’s denunciation of the PLO is imperialism’s wail of
despair. It desperately wants what it cannot have: an
opportunity to work out its economic crisis without the
interference of politics, and, moreover, a chance to resolve
its political dilemmas without the intervention of the
masses. But, as we have already stated, the world crisis
proceeds through the interaction of the economic and the
political.*The political arises out of the economic, but the
economic foundation is itself interpenetrated by the politi­
cal events for which it originally provided the impulse.
Thus, in analyzing this world crisis we are continuously
examining a dialectical process arising from the interpene­
tration, causal connections and reciprocal interaction of
the economic and political.
The greatest historical product of the interaction of the
economic and the political in the development of the world
crisis of capitalism is the Iranian Revolution. U.S.
imperialism has, in the fall of the Shah, suffered a defeat of
incalculable dimensions. A key strategic base, which for
more than a quarter-century served as the linch-pin of
imperialist policy in the Middle East, has been liberated
through the armed insurrection of the masses led by the
Ayatollah Khomeini. The U.S. ruling class has not just
suffered a defeat in Iran. Its entire world position has been
shattered, and this has already produced a decisive change
in the class struggle within the United States. This must be
understood above all: the overthrow of the Shah —
consummated in the February 9-11 insurrection against the
puppet Bakhtiar — has irreversibly altered the entire face
of the globe. We salute with heartfelt joy and admiration
the mighty victory of the Iranian masses; but the real
significance of the Iranian Revolution will be missed unless
its essential historical impulse is traced all the way back
into the development of the world economic and political
crisis of capitalism. In studying the development of the
Iranian Revolution, we reveal the operation of the universal
laws of the world capitalist crisis within the particular.
The main component parts of the world socialist revolu­
tion are the powerful national revolutionary liberation
2
movements being waged throughout Africa, the Middle
East and Asia and the struggles of the working class in the
major capitalist countries. “In their successful inter­
action,” wrote Trotsky in 1940, “lies the key to the entire
strategy of the world socialist revolution.”
The imperialism which confronts this combined on­
slaught today has been desperately weakened by the his­
toric triumph of the 1917 October Revolution which esta­
blished the Soviet Union as the first workers’ state, the
overthrow of capitalism in China in 1949 and in the victory
of the national liberation struggles in Vietnam, Laos and
Cambodia in 1975. Despite the totally counter-revolu-
tionary policies of the Stalinist bureaucracy, the U.S.S.R.
remains a workers’ state and an immensely powerful
acquisition of the international working class in its struggle
against imperialism.
The historical implications of the national revolutionary
liberation struggles must be grasped. Imperialist domina­
tion over the working class in Europe and the United States
depended, in the final analysis, on the resources it drew
from the bestial exploitation of the masses subjected to
colonial rule. For the U.S., the ruthless economic subju­
gation of Latin America to the dictates of Wall Street pro­
vided the necessary foundation for the transformation of
the Yankee tycoons into the financial oligarchs of the
world.
The struggle against imperialist oppresssion has
acquired unprecedented dimensions. Throughout Southern
Africa, the liberation forces are building up for the final
assault on the fascist and racist regimes in Rhodesia and
South Africa. In the Middle East, despite the treachery of
the Egyptian leper Sadat, the Arab Revolution gains in
strength and threatens the precious oil reserves of
imperialism. The PLO, the sole legitimate representative
of the Palestinian people, has emerged strengthened from
the plot hatched by Carter, Sadat and Begin.
All these struggles have been given tremendous impetus
by the victory of the Iranian Revolution. We said before
that it has undermined the entire world postion of the
American ruling class. Since the end of World War II, Iran
was of immense strategic importance to the United States.
Shortly after the end of the war, President Truman applied
heavy pressure and the threat of a military conflict to force
the withdrawal of the Soviet army from northern Iran.
From the late 1940s on, particularly with the post-war
decline of British influence, the United States began to
groom the Shah as its principal Middle Eastern
representative. The role of the CIA in the overthrow of the
nationalist Mossadegh government in 1953 is well known.
The Shah personified the system of client states developed
by the United States in the post-war period to defend its
key military, political and economic interests in the face of
mass revolutionary hostility to imperialism. Iran belong to
this system of client states whose members included
Vietnam, Thailand, Pakistan, Israel, Saudi Arabia and
Turkey. Of these, considering the interconnection of
military, economic and political interests, the Shah’s Iran
was the most important.
Politically, Iran was a bastion of reaction fortifying
imperialism against the onslaught of the Arab revolution.
Not only was Iran considered indispensable to the survival
of Israel, it was counted upon to maintain a continuous
pressure against the anti-imperialist nationalist regime in
Iraq led by the Arab Ba’ath Socialist Party. Iran occupied a
position of supreme economic importance as the second
largest oil exporting nation in the world. This position was
further enhanced by the fact that Iran exerted military
control over the key shipping route through the Strait of
Hormuz, through which the vast bulk of Middle Eastern oil
passes once loaded on the super tankers. At the same time,
not only did the Shah assume responsibility for the policing
of the Persian Gulf region — explicitly defending the Saudi
Arabian royal family from revolutionary dangers — he also
supplied the Zionists with oil, their only source in the
Middle East. Of not inconsiderable importance was the
strategic position of Iran on the southern border of the
USSR. All this has been swept away by the Iranian
Revolution.
In turn, the victory of the Iranian masses strengthens the
African Revolution — and here the strategic interest of the
U.S. ruling class is no less threatened than in Iran. It is
from the region bordered by Zimbabwe, Zaire and Angola
that the United States imports four essential metals:
chromite, platinum, manganese and vanadium. It is in the
Shaba province — the scene of a recent insurrection
against the imperialist puppet Mobutu — that yet a fifth
strategic substance is mined, copper. And in all these
areas, revolution is pounding at imperialism’s back door.
For all its vast military power and the incalculable
wealth derived from the inexhaustible abundance of the
North American continent (not to speak of the riches it has
plundered from the rest of the world!), the U.S. ruling class
cannot escape the fact that its rise to power on a world scale
coincided with the descent of capitalism as a world system
into its death agony. The American bourgeoisie, in both its
domestic and international fields of operation, is paying
the price for its belated emergence as the number one
imperialist power. This, too, must be seen in its political
and economic aspects. Since World War II, the U.S. has
been compelled not only to assume the awesome financial
burden of maintaining the economic stability of the entire
capitalist world, but it has been compelled to serve as the
global policeman in the face of the onrushing world
revolution.
The defeat of America in Vietnam, followed by the rout
of imperialism in Angola, decisively fractured the whole
structure of class rule within the United States. The old
historic law — that a ruling class defeated in a foreign war
becomes vulnerable to revolution at home — holds true for
the United States. This is the significance of the 111-day
miners strike. The contemptuous defiance of Carter by the
miners, the inability of the administration to enforce the
Taft-Hartley injunction and the concessions forced upon
the coal operators and Carter exposed the desperate
weakness of the ruling class.
The miners strike objectively signified the linking up of
the American working class with the advance of the world
revolution. It laid bare the drastic weakening in the whole
world position of the American bourgeoisie since the end of
World War II. Even in the hey-day of the United Mine
Workers immediately after the war, the ruling class felt
sufficiently secure to enforce injunctions and fines against
the union and its president, John L. Lewis. But the para­
lysis and indecision which emanated from the White House
during the 111-day strike expressed a failure of nerve by the

entire ruling class confronted with a rising tide of working
class militancy within the United States. Throughout the
strike, the ruling class remained utterly dependent upon
the union bureaucracy’s capacity to betray the miners. The
UMW strike was not exceptional — or, one might say that
it was in this “exceptional” struggle that the real state of
class relations within the United States was most clearly
revealed.
As all subsequent events have richly demonstrated —
most recently, the railroad workers walkout — the miners
strike represented the beginning of a period of mass
political struggles by the American working class against
the capitalist state. Inexorably, these struggles will raise
the fundamental question of power: which class shall rule?
This question shall be initially posed in the period imme­
diately before us in the form of a growing mass movement
for a break with the two capitalist parties and for the
construction of an independent labor party based on the
trade unions. The major struggles since the autumn of 1977
— the longshoremen’s strike, the UMW strike, the
nationwide wave of municipal workers strikes, the smaller
but no less bitterly contested strikes against companies
throughout the country (like the strikes against Duriron,
Hobart and Aeronca in Dayton, Ohio), and the growing
rank-and-file opposition to bureaucratically-imposed
contracts (as in the Postal Workers union, the New York
local of the Transport Workers Union) — foreshadow the
explosion of the independent mass political movement of
the working class. The latest turn by the Carter
administration in late October to recessionary policies in a
new “anti-inflation” program which combines “voluntary”
wage controls, brutal productivity schemes, and deli­
berate unemployment will in the coming months bring the
mass opposition of the working class to the Government
and the two-party system to the breaking point.
The Carter administration has decided to implement the
most brutal slump measures of any US administration
since the days of Herbert Hoover. The November 1st
announcement of a rise in the inter-bank lending
(discount) rate to an unprecedented nine-and-one-half per­
cent combined with other “tight-money” policies
guarantee a devastating fall-back in production and a
corresponding growth of unemployment in 1979.
While the rapidly rising rate of inflation will
dramatically intensify the militancy of the working class,
the growth of unemployment will inevitably produce
within a very short period of time a deep social crisis that
will produce an explosive politicalization of the rank and
file in the trade unions.
The mass labor party movement will not usher in a
new period of social-democratic “New Dealism” in the
United States, but rather a period of the struggle for
power.
The whole development of the capitalist crisis on a world
scale totally precludes any possibility of a rebirth of “New
Dealism” in the United States. The collapse of the world
credit system through which the long post-war boom was
financed represented precisely the death of “New Dealism”
internationally. Carter can only dream of the resources that
were mobilized by Roosevelt 40 years ago to prop up
American capitalism. What now looms before American
capitalism is the prospect of a collapse of catastrophic
proportions. Historically unprecedented conditions are
3
emerging for the political mobilization of the American
working class against the capitalist state. The formation of
a mass labor party, the task now posed directly to the
working class, will undoubtedly signal the beginning of the
social revolution in the United States. In the struggles of
the American working class, the whole development of the
world revolution will find its most concentrated expression.
Nevertheless, in advancing this perspective the Workers
League totally rejects any sort of contemplative objec­
tivism which sees the unfolding of the social revolution as
an automatic process whose triumph is guaranteed in
advance. The working class cannot take power in the
United States or in any other capitalist country without the
construction of a revolutionary, i.e., Trotskyist party.
History has provided sufficient examples of very favorable
objective conditions for the revolution being transformed
rapidly into their opposite because revolutionary leader­
ship was lacking. One-sided emphasis on “favorable objec­
tive conditions” which does not insist that the existence of
a revolutionary party capable of leading the working class
is, ultimately, the most decisive objective requirement of
the revolution plays directly into the hands of the counter­
revolution.
It is no accident that the old Stalinist liar, Victor Perlo,
should recently write:
“The central theme is what we call the general crisis of
capitalism: the decline, decay, and step-by-step replace­
ment of capitalism by socialism on a world scale.
“It involves the shifting balance of world forces, which
has made the forces of socialism, national liberation, and
the working people of the capitalist countries stronger than
the forces of capitalism, colonialism and war.”
This talk of “the shifting balance of world forces” and
the “step-by-step replacement of capitalism” is both a
cover for the counter-revolutionary role of Stalinism as well
as a foul attempt to sow complacency within the working
class as to the implications of the world capitalist crisis.
From the disintegration of world capitalism does not flow
its “step-by-step replacement,” but the alternative of
socialism or barbarism. Either the working class is
mobilized by the revolutionary party to overthrow capital­
ism and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat or the
ruling class, due to the betrayals of the existing bureauc­
ratic leaderships of the working class, shall alter “the
shifting balance of world forces” by inflicting a new round
of defeats on the working class and clear the way for the
launching of World War III.
It is the very weakness of the ruling class which compels
it to intensify its preparations for military-police dicta­
torship. The activities of the CIA and FBI are wider in
scope than ever before. After the initial shocks of the
Watergate crisis, the ruling class used the period after
Nixon’s resignation to undertake a complete overhauling of
the CIA. The removal of the CIA “old guard” — James
Jesus Angelton, William Colby, Richard Helms — was the
payoff for the Vietnam debacle. The ruling class now
requires a far more lethal agency of counter-revolution than
the old “Dirty Tricksters” could provide. The appoint­
ment of Admiral Stansfield Turner to head the CIA repre­
sents an attempt by the ruling class to more closely coor­
dinate and synchronize the activities of its military and
state intelligence agencies. The Pentagon, of course,
remains the backbone of all counter-revolutionary prepara­
4
tions against the American working class. The deepening
economic crisis and the aggravation of all social relations
leave the U.S. ruling class no choice but to jettison the
institutions of bourgeois democracy. As one banking
journal recently put it:
“More fundamentally, the gravity of the issues facing the
U.S. Administration, and the apparent impotence of the
Executive Branch, may increasingly imperil the security
and interests of the United States and its allies. When this
becomes evident the U.S. military may well find that it can
no longer stomach the present American system of govern­
ment — for which the horrific pressure of world political,
economic and financial events appears to be moving far too
swiftly and dangerously. Anyone who doubts this should
take note of remarks attributed recently to the Japanese
Prime Minister to the effect that international conditions
are ripening for a Third World War.”
The American ruling class is rapidly coming to the point
at which it cannot continue to “stomach the present
American system of government.” Though deeply divided
and lacking any real confidence in its ability to smash the
working class, it is driven by the crisis to take the most
desperate measures. Thus, the regime of capitalist democ­
racy — already in the United States the most police-in-
fested in the world — degenerates with each passing day
more openly into a facade behind which police-state
preparations are being made.
The sudden FBI raid on the offices of Teamster Local 70
in Oakland — carried out with neither a warrant nor an
explanation — underscores the real dangers to workers’
rights. The clear intention of the raid was to intimidate the
Teamsters union on the eve of the master-freight
negotiations in the spring of 1979. Significantly, only 36
hours before the raid Carter had unveiled his program for
“voluntary” wage controls. Administration spokesmen had
also stated on numerous occasions that the Teamsters were
going to be the major focus of Carter’s “anti-inflation”
program.
The fact that the depth of the objective crisis of U.S.
capitalism precludes any unfolding of a new period of
reformism does not at all mean that there will be no efforts
made to divert the political movement of the working class
along these historically bankrupt lines. Rather, it is pre­
cisely at the point of capitalism’s greatest crisis that
Stalinism, revisionism and the labor bureaucracy must
pool their resources to contain the working class within the
framework of bourgeois politics. In one form or another,
they gravitate toward the creation of “Popular Fronts” (the
“anti-monopoly coalition” of the American Stalinists) in
order to place a political strait-jacket over the working
class. While tailing behind the Stalinists and avidly parti­
cipating in their varied but uniformally reactionary coali­
tions, the revisionists of the Socialist Workers Party now
call for the formation of a labor party — as an avowedly
reformist organization whose goal would be the election of
“workers” to Congress in order to “administer the state.”
In other words, the revisionists raise the slogan of the labor
party only in order to politically castrate it — that is, to
detach the mass movement of the working class for a break
with the bourgeois parties from its revolutionary content
and then channel it back into a reformist framework accep­
table to the bourgeoisie.
The combined counter-revolutionary role of Stalin­
ism and revisionism represents the greatest danger to
the American working class. The decisive task remains
the building of the revolutionary party to resolve the
crisis of leadership within the working class through
the smashing of the counter-revolutionary Stalinist,
reformist and labor bureaucracies and their revisionist
and centrist allies.
This revolutionary leadership can be built only on the
basis of the principles of Trotskyism which are derived
from the historic experience of Bolshevism, the October
Revolution of 1917, the first four congresses of the Com­
munist International, the whole legacy of the struggle
against Stalinism and the 40-year struggle to construct the
Fourth International.
These principles are embodied today in the vast histori­
cal experience and practice of the International Com­
mittee of the Fourth International (which the Workers
League politically supports but to which it is unable to
affiliate because of the reactionary Voorhis Act). The
development of Trotskyism has proceeded entirely through
the 25-year struggle by the International Committee
against Pabloite revisionism and all forms of centrism.
This struggle has now reached its highest point with the
exposure of Joseph Hansen, the leader of the SWP and the
principal architect of its unprincipled reunification with
the Pabloites in 1963, as a double agent of the Soviet secret.
police and the FBI. The exposure of Hansen comes despite
the frantic efforts of the Carter administration to protect
him and other agents working inside the SWP from being
unmasked. By dragging the sinister counter-revolutionary
operations of Hansen within the Fourth International into
the light of day, the International Committee has rendered
an incomparable historical service to the development of
Trotskyism, the Marxism of our time. But the unmasking
of the network of agents which penetrated the Trotskyist
movement in the earlier period of the defeats of the working
class and the Second World War has only become possible
through the intransigent struggle against Stalinism and
revisionism waged by the International Committee since
its formation in 1953.
The development by the International Committee of its
historical investigation into the assassination of Trotsky
and the role of Stalinist agents within the Fourth Interna­
tional — the results of which have been published under
the title “Security and the Fourth International” — is the
outcome of the struggle by the International Committee
and the Workers League against the renegacy and revision­
ism of Tim Wohlforth.
It has been the struggle against this renegade and accom­
plice of police-agent Hansen that has established the indes­
tructible foundation for the construction of the revolu­
tionary party in the United States.
Wohlforth deserted the Workers League in September
1974 after having been removed as its national secretary
because he deliberately concealed the CIA family connec­
tions of his companion Nancy Fields. Wohlforth’s refusal to
accept the discipline of the Trotskyist movement — after
having voted in favor of the procedures recommended by
the Central Committee to deal with the security implica­
tions of the Fields affair — represented the anti-commun-
ist hatred of the petty-bourgeois for the fundamental
 5

principles of Trotskyism and revolutionary interna­ The murder of Comrade Henehan, a member of the
tionalism. Represented in the degeneration and renegacy of Political Committee, is the response of imperialism to this
Wohlforth was a new m anifestation of Pabloite threat. The fact that both the Communist Party and the
revisionism, albeit in American clothing, emerging out of Socialist Workers Party have remained silent on the as­
the vast transformation of the world political-economic sassination, refusing to even report it in their press let alone
crisis after the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in condemn it, establishes yet again the counter-revolu­
1971. tionary roles of Stalinism and revisionism as agencies of
Therefore, the political preparation of the Workers imperialism.
League for this upsurge of the world revolution required not But the Workers League has not been and cannot be
only the defeat of the renegade Wohlforth, but also and intimidated. We recognize the assassination of Henehan as
above all the continuous struggle over the past four years to the expression of imperialism’s weakness and its hatred of
deepen the struggle against revisionism in the practice of the Workers League’s struggle for Trotskyist principles.
building the Workers League. Now, on the basis of these principles defended throughout
All the political work of the Workers League over the the 40 year history of the Fourth International and the 25
past four years has taken as its conscious starting point the years of struggle waged by the International Committee,
historic achievements of the International Committee the road forward today is to the working class.
derived from the struggle against revisionism. Within this The conscious preparation of the struggle for power in
political framework, the fight against opportunism, of the United States requires the transformation of the
which Wohlforth’s politics was just one manifestation, has Workers League into the revolutionary party in the period
been the relentless battle against all the reactionary mani­ immediately ahead. This must be carried out through a
festations of the pressures of American imperialism upon systematic struggle to develop Marxism in the fight to train
the working class and its revolutionary vanguard: theories cadre recruited from the industrial working class —
of American “exceptionalism,” anti-internationalism, particularly in steel, auto, rubber, the mines, transpor­
middle-class individualism and hostility to democratic- tation — and the entire trade union movement and the
centralist practice, pragmatism and the philistine’s youth.
contempt for the world scientific outlook of dialectical The central weapon in this fight must be a daily
materialism. newspaper that campaigns tirelessly for the building of a
Labor Party and for an understanding of the immediate
The lessons gained in this struggle are the absolutely revolutionary implications of this historic break with the
indispensable foundations for the training of the new forces two capitalist parties.
from among the working class, youth and students and The very essence of this fight now before the Workers
professional workers in the traditions and principles of League is the training of revolutionary cadre out of the
Trotskyism. mass struggles of the working class, unyielding in their
Thus, the struggle by the International Committee to hatred of the labor bureaucracy, Stalinist “Popular
build the Trotskyist movement in the United States, the Frontism,” and its revisionist accomplices.
center of world imperialism, has arrived at a qualitatively
new stage. The task now posed to the Workers League is to
consciously prepare the working class for the coming
struggle for power under the qualitatively new conditions in
which the multi-millioned American proletariat is being
drawn into mass political struggles against the capitalist
state.
In leading the fight for the historic break of the Ameri­
can working class from the grip of bourgeois politics, in
directing the struggle for the building of a labor party based
on socialist policies, the Workers League has the respon­
sibility to recruit and train thousands of the best fighters
who will now emerge out of the mass spontaneous struggles.
It was precisely to prevent this that U.S. imperialism
organized the murder of Comrade Tom Henehan on
October 16, 1977. The killing of Comrade Henehan came
just after the International Committee had succeeded in
exposing Hansen as an agent of the FBI.
Both imperialism and Stalinism have been and remain
united on one question: the necessity of preventing at all
costs the emergence of Trotskyist leadership in the working
class. This is why a special conference was called at Camp
David in June 1978 to instruct Attorney General Griffin
Bell to defy a court order and risk a possible jail term rather
than release the names of 18 out of at least 66 agents now
functioning within the SWP. This decision was dictated
not simply by the need to protect agents, but by the enor­
mous fear within the highest circles of American imper­
ialism of the revolutionary threat posed by Trotskyism.
6
WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS
The collapse of the dollar signals a new
stage in the crisis of world capitalism. In the
last 18 months, the dollar has fallen by more
than 34 percent against the Japanese yen, 19
percent against the German mark and 41
percent against the Swiss franc. These
figures reveal the disintegration of the world
capitalist monetary system. This is shown
even more starkly by the huge increase in
the price of gold. Since the beginning of
1978, the price of an ounce has risen from
$165 to $240, a jump of 50 percent.
The dollar crisis has vastly accelerated the build­
up of slump in industry, double-digit inflation, mass
unemployment and trade warfare. This crisis is not
simply a “return to the 1930s.” The content of the
crisis is the accumulated contradictions of world
capitalism over the past 40 years, built up upon a
foundation so rotten that the epoch was already
characterized in 1938 as that of capitalism’s “death
agony.” Trotsky’s perspective was correct. This
death agony is now resolving itself into a situation
where capitalism will destroy the very foundations
for the existence of any economy at all. The economic
consequences of its crisis threaten to reduce econ­
omic relations to the level of primitive barter. The
political consequences of its crisis threaten the real
possibility that only the survivors of a nuclear holo­
caust will be left to engage in this form of economic
intercourse.
Only the smashing of capitalism by the working
class and the establishment of the dictatorship of the
proletariat can save mankind from this fate.
B re tto n W oods
The position of U.S. imperialism following World War II
was fundamentally different from that which it occupied
following World War I. It was supreme economically,
politically and militarily relative to its capitalist rivals.
But the very peak of its power coincided with the prostra­
tion of world capitalism. Germany, Japan, Italy and
France had been devastated by the war, and England was
little better than bankrupt. An insurgent working class in
Western Europe was moving toward insurrection against
the completely discredited bourgeois regimes. A rising tide
of national liberation struggles swept through Africa and
Asia. In the United States, the newly formed mass indus­
trial unions staged the biggest strike wave in history in
1945-47. A near rebellion broke out among GIs stationed in
Europe who demanded to return home.
U.S. imperialism had achieved supremacy among the
world’s imperialist powers only to come face to face with
the full blast of the world revolution. This left it no choice
but to retreat. It had to “save” Europe from revolution by
reviving postwar capitalism. To do otherwise meant imper­
illing its own existence. But it was only the open betrayal of
the Stalinists and their conscious aid that allowed the U.S.
and world bourgeoisie its chance to save capitalism. Stalin
used the Communist parties of western Europe to make
good on his promises to Roosevelt and Churchill at
Potsdam and Yalta: to prevent the spread of workers’
revolutions. The Kremlin bureaucracy subordinated the
interests of the international working class to its diploma­
tic deals with U.S. and British imperialism, carving up the
globe into “spheres of influence.”
In Italy, the Stalinists under Togliatti forced the workers
and peasants to hand over their weapons and accept the
return of a bourgeois government. In France, Thorez led the
Communist Party into a coalition cabinet under DeGaulle
and even backed the French military in their war to regain
control over Vietnam.
In Greece, though the Stalinists were unable to stop the
outbreak of civil war, they stabbed their own supporters in
the back on orders from Stalin who had promised Churchill
that Greece would remain in imperialist hands.
The framework for postwar capitalism was decided at the
Bretton Woods conference of 1944. The basis for those
decisions was a recognition by imperialism of its own
weakness and a deliberate retreat in the face of the interna­
tional working class.
World imperialism embarked on a policy of controlled
monetary and credit inflation centered on a convertible
dollar. The chief aim of this policy was to avoid a new
descent into depression, to rebuild Europe and Japan and
to reestablish a basis for class compromise with the working
class.
In effect, U.S. imperialism was extending on a global
scale the New Deal policies it had used to forestall revolu­
tion inside the U.S. during the 1930s.
The Bretton Woods conference established two organiza­
tions — the International Bank for Reconstruction and
Development (IBRD) and the International Monetary
Fund (IMF). The purpose of the first was to promote
private foreign investment. But it was the IMF which was
to play the far more crucial role in postwar capitalism. Its
job was to guarantee financial and commercial stability
between member-nations, prevent competitive depres­
sions in monetary circulation, and avoid any restrictions
which could hamper world trade. Specifically, those

countries facing severe balance-of-payments deficits could
turn to the IMF, with its pool of paper currency and gold
contributed by member-nations, for assistance.
The composition of the IMF reflected the domination of
U.S. imperialism. Its subscription to the IMF pool was the
largest (presently over $4.1 billion), giving it the largest
block of votes (nearly 27 percent) of any single country. The
Fund was, for all intents and purposes, an international
arm of U.S. capital. In later years, other organizations
(World Bank, Bank of International Settlements, General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development) were
established, all with the same basic purpose — to preserve
economic stability within world capitalism.
The linchpin of the entire system was the U.S. dollar,
which was accorded the position of “world money.” This
meant that the national U.S. currency simultaneously
became a world currency, substituting for gold in terms of
the conduct of international trade and the holding of
reserves.
A system of fixed exchange rates was erected with all cur­
rencies pegged to the dollar and allowed to fluctuate only
within narrow limits. In this way, the form of economic
stability was created and the basis laid for the expansion of
world trade.
However, gold remained the foundation of the postwar
monetary system, albeit through the medium of the U.S.
dollar. The functioning of Bretton Woods depended, above
all, on one thing — the guarantee by the U.S. government
to exchange dollars for gold at the rate of $35 per fine
ounce.
The role of gold in the capitalist world economy had not
diminished, despite numerous attempts by bourgeois
economists and revisionist “theoreticians” like Ernest
Mandel to make it appear so in later years. As in the
prewar period, it was gold, not dollars, which embodied the
absolute social materialization of wealth.
Dollars, in the form of bank notes, bills of exchange and
so on, are no more than liquid liabilities of the United
States to other countries which keep them in their reserves.
Marx wrote: “Paper money is a token representing gold or
money... Only in so far as paper currency represents gold,
which like all other commodities has value, is it a symbol of
value.”
The unique position of the dollar in the Bretton Woods
Agreements was based on the unmatched economic and
military superiority of U.S. imperialism in the postwar
period. In 1949, it held nearly 70 percent of the world’s gold
stocks (worth $24.6 billion). By comparison, all other
capitalist countries held a total of $9.04 billion in gold and
another $1.45 billion was held by private institutions.
Moreover, the U.S. was running huge balance-of-pay-
ments and balance-of-trade surpluses.
This enabled it to finance the Marshall Plan and rebuild
Europe and Japan economically and militarily. The role of
the dollar within Bretton Woods provided U.S. finance
capital with a weapon for gaining domination in interna­
tional monetary and financial relations. The key was that
the issue of dollars, which became a legal international
medium of exchange, was in the hands of the U.S. ruling
class. U.S. investors were spurred on by a declining rate of
profit at home to seek new outlets abroad. As the export of
private capital mushroomed, the issuing of dollars also
mushroomed. From 1949 to 1960, direct private U.S.
investment abroad jumped from $10.7 billion to $32.7
billion — a growth of over 300 percent. Investment in
7
Europe became a huge source of profits. By the late 1940s
and early 1950s, the postwar boom was in full swing and
imperialisTi on a world scale never seemed so powerful.
But the boom was itself the highest expression, though in
a contradictory form, of the weakness of world imper­
ialism.
This became apparent even during the heyday of capital­
ist prosperity. In 1949, the Chinese Revolution broke
through the counter-revolutionary logjam erected by the
Kremlin bureaucracy and dealt a staggering blow to world
imperialism.
In reaction, U.S. imperialism launched its invasion of
Korea in 1950. The banker of the world also had to become
its policeman. Korea was a hammerblow to the much-
vaunted U.S. military might. At the same time, to cover its
military expenditures abroad, U.S. imperialism resorted to
dollars and other liquid liabilities rather than gold. The
volume of dollars grew enormously as U.S. imperialism
built up a vast nuclear arsenal, set up NATO, NORAD,
SEATO and all the other military alliances required to
protect the outposts of a faltering world imperialist order.
Even before the end of the Korean war, the impact of
these measures were taking their toll on the U.S. financial
position. Whereas, in 1938, the liquid liabilities of U.S.
imperialism amounted to only 15 percent of its gold stock,
in 1949, they amounted to 33 percent, and by 1952, they
amounted to over 50 percent.
Bretton Woods did not at all represent the overcoming by
world capitalism of its contradictions, but rather their
movement to a new and higher stage. The monetary
arrangements, which provided the appearance of econ­
omic and political equilibrium, were the forms through
which these contradictions were building up. The develop­
ment of the capitalist monetary crisis made this clear.
By the late 1950s, as a consequence of its military
expenses and the growing volume of capital exports to
Europe, the U.S. began to run up a balance-of-payments
deficit. At first, European capitalists welcomed this
development. The U.S. payments deficits were the source
of much sought after dollars abroad. But in 1958, central
bankers began converting dollars into gold. For the first
time since the end of the war, the quantity of paper dollars
abroad exceeded the U.S. gold stocks in Fort Knox. By
1960, the amount of paper dollars and the other liquid
liabilities of the U.S. outside the country exceeded the U.S.
gold stock in Fort Knox by $800 million. The dollar was no
longer as “good as gold.”
That quantitative change beneath the surface appear­
ance of the boom had enormous significance. In effect, U.S.
imperialism had come to the point where its awesome
reserves of wealth were exhausted. It could not eliminate
its payments deficits because to do so would have meant
plunging Europe into economic crisis and destroying vast
sections of U.S. capital.
There was only one way out — to resort to the printing
press for more dollars to paper over the rising deficits. Only
U.S. imperialism could do this because of the dollar’s
unique position as “world money,” that is, legal tender for
repayment of debts throughout the world.
But this only aggravated the situation. Every new dollar
represented a liability which diminishing gold reserves
could not cover. In effect, U.S. imperialism was now living
off credit, cashing in on its good name and previous reputa­
tion to maintain economic stability and political
tranquility. It was borrowing from the future to pay for the
present.
 8
Such a policy could not last. By the mid-1960s, the
cracks began to emerge. The first was the 1967 rush on the
British pound, which had supplemented the dollar as a
reserve currency. In 1968, the attack on the dollar began in
earnest with the French government’s conversion of their
dollar holdings into gold. This led to the creation of the
make-shift two-tier gold pricing system. This established a
dual price system: one price remaining at the official $35
per ounce for the sale of gold between countries; the second
was unofficial prices on the open market.
The breakdown of Bretton Woods inaugurated an unpre­
cedented crisis in the top circles of the U.S* ruling class.
Lyndon Johnson’s policy of “guns and butter” — massive
military expenditures in Vietnam and massive outlays on
social programs at home — was the last gasp of New
Dealism. Both the economic and political framework began
to collapse simultaneously.
The Vietnamese handed U.S. imperialism a decisive
setback in the Tet offensive in 1968, and two months later,
in March 1968, the bottom fell out of the dollar market.
Johnson was forced to announce that he would not run for
re-election.
By the time the Nixon administration took office in 1969,
the United States owned less than 25 percent of the world’s
gold reserves. The dollar came under unbearable pressure
as capital exports accelerated, gigantic sums were
consumed by the Vietnam War and Nixon was unable to
impose any significant cut in the living standards of U.S.
workers. On August 15, 1971, Nixon broke the link between
dollars and gold.
The M o n e ta ry Crisis
That decision fundamentally altered the position of
world capitalism. The policy of controlled inflation gave
way to uncontrolled inflation. The system of fixed
exchange rates broke down, despite one attempt after
another, beginning with the Smithsonian Agreements of
December 1971, to patch it together again. The breakdown
of the monetary system ushered in a period of the irresis-
table buildup of competitive currency devaluations (the
dollar was itself devalued twice from 1971 to 1973) and
trade warfare.
The Arab-Israeli War of 1973 led to the oil embargo and
the decision by OPEC nations to quadruple the price of oil.
The decision, the direct outcome of the uncontrolled infla­
tion unleashed by the August 15, 1971 measures, threw the
entire capitalist world into recession, drove up the ex­
ternal debts of countries to astronomical levels and
signalled an irreversible descent into slump.
The bedrock of world capitalism has now become the
greatest force for its destruction. All the props of the
postwar boom have become the motor forces for the crisis.
Every economic plus sign that has existed for the last
thirty years has turned into a minus sign.
The crucial role here is played by the dollar, the pillar of
the postwar monetary system. As one banking journal put
it:
“The Great Dollar Printing Machine is the root cause
of international financial, economic, and political insta­
bility. It functions because the United States exercises
that priceless and unique privilege — the power of
international seigneurage.” The extent to which U.S.
imperialism has issued dollars, and the enormous
expansion of credit and debt is almost beyond the grasp
of imagination.
An examination of the present state of the Euro-dollar
market — the pool of dollars existing in banks outside the
U.S. which is used to finance American business activity on
a world scale — shows the truth of the above-quoted as­
sessment.
The Eurocurrency markets had a gross value of $610
billion as of June, 1977. This is up from a gross value of
$110 billion in 1970. During that same seven-year period,
the amount of U.S. dollars in the Eurocurrency markets
rose from $89.1 billion to $466.1 billion. This represents a
staggering increase of 523 percent.
The ratio of dollars to other currencies in the Euro­
markets has remained roughly 80 percent of the total cur­
rency markets. But the ratio of dollars in the Euromarkets
relative to dollars within the United States has soared.
In 1970, Eurodollars accounted for 19.7 percent of the
broad U.S. domestic money supply. In June 1977, they
accounted for 56.8 percent of the broad domestic money
supply. If one excludes time deposits (money deposited
long term that is not available for circulation) from the
definition of the money supply, Eurodollars represent a
sum which is 147.3 percent greater than the value of dollars
circulating within the U.S.! This gigantic pool of paper
money is completely beyond the control of the United
States or, for that matter, any government.
It is this mass of liquidity, which is the main legacy of the
boom, that is now swamping the capitalist world. The
magnitude of the upheavals let loose on the world currency
markets by the disastrous collapse of the dollar can be seen
by examining the various currency realignments over a
recent twelve month period.
From late July 1977 to mid-June 1978, there were no less
than 109 major currency shifts. In one month alone (August
1977), there were no less than 15 major shifts in currency.
During two other months, there were 13 realignments each,
one month had 12, another 10, another 9, and so on. There
was not a single month which had less than 6 major cur­
rency shifts.
What these figures show is the sheer disintegration of the
world monetary system. The wild gyrations on the currency
markets from day to day (in contrast to conditions which
prevailed during the boom where currencies like the Yen or
the Mark did not shift so much as a percentage point in
more than 20 years!) make it impossible to conduct
international trade or investment within any kind of
orderly framework.
The instability reigning in financial markets has led to
what is generally described as an “investment strike”
throughout the major industrial countries. In the U.S.,
investment has virtually run dry in basic industry. In
Japan, which recorded a record number of bankruptcies
this year, capital investment grew by only 3 percent in
1977, compared with an average 13.5 percent growth during
the 1950s. In France, it grew by less than 4 percent while in
Italy it was a dismal 2 percent. As one U.S. banker put it:
“It used to be that profits were the most important
determinant... but today inflation and the lack of confi­
dence in the economic system are equally important.”
This brings out the magnitude of the contradictions rip­
ping apart world capitalism. The last period has seen an
unprecedented expansion of credit and liquidity. During
the boom, this was the driving force for the expansion of
production. Now the Eurodollar markets constitute the
largest edifice of credit ever constructed in the history of
capitalism. But, far from a record expansion of produc­
tion, basic industry is being strangled to death.
The same is true for international trade. The growth of

world trade has fallen from 14 percent in 1977 to 5 percent
in 1978. Whole industrial sectors have been withdrawn
from what is known as the “free trade system” — notably
textiles and more recently steel — and anti-dumping legis­
lation and outright tariff barriers are going up. These are
supplemented by various “voluntary” export restraint
agreements, such as the one Japan signed with the Com­
mon Market, to prevent its goods from being totally shut
out of Western Europe.
The Tokyo Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs
and Trade threatens to break down completely as the U.S.
moves to slap increased customs duties on Common
Market agricultural exports and the EEC prepares retalia­
tory measures. Meanwhile, GATT, which was designed to
“liberalize” international trade, is being gutted as at­
tempts are made to renegotiate Article 19 so as to enable
importing countries to apply selective controls on imports
from particular countries. Japan is obviously the prime
target for such measures.
As the “International Currency Review” pointed out,
“We are observing the progressively accelerating break­
down of the multilateral world trading and payments
system based on the General Agreement on Tariffs and
Trade, and on the Bretton Woods agreement. This process,
of course, had become well established even prior to the
escalation of oil prices; but the speed of disintegration has
now been accentuated by the impact of artificially high oil
prices, and by the headlong proliferation of external dollar
liquidity which has been its most profound and disturbing
consequence.”
The extent of the breakdown in world trade was high­
lighted by the statements of Japanese Prime Minister
Takeo Fukuda at the beginning of the year, when he said
that, were it not for the existence of nuclear weapons, the
Third World War would have already broken out.
U .S . Crisis
Another aspect of the Great Dollar Printing Machine has
been the growth of double-digit inflation in the U.S. The
current 12 percent inflation rate is having a staggering
impact on investment and vastly accelerating the slump in
basic industry.
Ever since Bretton Woods, U.S. imperialism has tried to
keep two sets of books — one for its domestic economy, and
the other for its international accounts.
On the international arena, it built up huge payments
(and, later, trade) deficits.
For the bourgeoisie of any other country, this would have
immediately had a sharp impact on the domestic economy.
Measures would have had to be taken, ultimately, to
deflate in order to dampen demand at home and shift
resources into exports to earn the necessary foreign
exchange (usually dollars) needed to repay debts to
overseas suppliers.
But this did not apply to the U.S. ruling class — pre­
cisely because of the unique role of the dollar. The U.S.
could continue to sustain massive payments and trade
deficits year after year. In order to repay suppliers overseas,
the U.S. bourgeoisie did not have to deflate the domestic
economy to earn foreign exchange because the currency
required to repay those debts was their own national
currency — the dollar. The deficits abroad could be
sustained through generating more paper dollars and credit
without having hardly any impact on the U.S. economy.
This was the direct cause of the massive accumulation of
9
dollars overseas and the onset of the liquidity crisis. While
the U.S. bourgeoisie was able, to a limited extent, to
insulate the domestic economy from the full brunt of the
crisis, especially through trade war measures, the raging
inflation now whipsawing through the economy is rapidly
bringing this period to an end.
The dollar itself has lost half its purchasing power within
the United States in the last 10 years. Its dramatic fall in
the world currency markets in the last 18 months has
driven up prices on all imported goods inside the country.
For the first nine months of the year, the purchasing power
of the American worker has fallen by 2.5 percent. This
skyrocketing rise in prices of food, clothing and housing has
been the driving force for the confrontations between the
working class and the Carter government.
“Business Week” warned about the implications of
double-digit inflation in the U.S.:
“The U.S. is still a long way from open class warfare, but
many people worry about what could happen if inflation
remains at anything approaching recent levels . . . Now the
economic outlook is clouded, inflation is no longer waning,
and this country could be heading into the worst period of
economic and social dislocation since the Civil War.”
The impact of the world crisis on the U.S. economy has
already been devastating. In the coming year, economic
growth is expected to fall as low as 1.5 percent, in effect
amounting to a full-scale recession.
In 1977, capital investment rose by 9 percent in the U.S.
Though this is in line with previous years, the fact is that
much of this investment went into retooling already
existing plant and machinery. In such industries as
computers, steel, textiles, tires and rubber, and airlines,
there has been virtually no growth of capital investment. In
steel, the most basic of industries, investment is down well
below 6 percent, which is not even enough to maintain
presently-existing facilities. The demise of Youngstown
Sheet & Tube and its merger with Jones & Laughlin shows
the completely precarious position which the biggest
industrial corporations now find themselves in.
In fact, the last year has seen a record growth of
industrial mergers, which are only a back-handed way of
carrying out outright liquidation of whole sections of
industry. Meanwhile, to the extent that there has been any
capital investment, it has gone into entirely non­
productive industries: leisure time, restaurants and hotels.
The dollar crisis has greatly exacerbated the falling rate
of profit in basic industry, which, in turn, makes U.S.
imperialism less able to satisfy the huge claims of a moun­
tain of paper credit being made on a relatively diminishing
amount of surplus value in industry.
Return on investment in the U.S. has fallen from 13.4
percent in 1966 to 9.2 percent in 1976. Moreover, the figures
for non-financial, i.e., primarily industrial, corporations
are much worse. In the last seven years they have
averaged only 4.3 percent. Total 1977 profits were only
about 70 percent of their 1966 level.
The auto industry, the cornerstone of U.S. capital,
demonstrates the impact of the falling rate of profit.
Return on investment during the 1920s and 1930s was 18.9
percent; during the five years after the Second World War,
it was 22.8 percent; during the years following the Korean
War, it was just over 20 percent. By 1969, however,
investment return was estimated to be 7 percent for
General Motors, 4.5 percent for Ford and 4.4 percent for
Chrysler. At Ford, which took in record profits last year,
the return on investment for domestic car production
10
plummetted to less than 2.5 percent.
The impact of inflation, along with the slump in
industry, has dealt a shattering blow to the stock market.
Stocks are worth no more today than they were in 1956! At
the same time, interest rates have soared to 9 and 10
percent. What this adds up to is a situation where the cost
of capital to major corporations has more than doubled
since the 1950s, leading to an unprecedented accumula­
tion of corporate debt. This is starkly revealed by the
change in the ratio of profits to interest payments. In 1966,
corporate profits were 11 times greater than the interest
charges they paid out. In 1977, profits were only 4 times
greater.
The U.S. economy is plunging head-first towards full-
scale recession. The unprecedented growth of debt is the
best indicator of this. In four years, total debt has
ballooned from $2.5 trillion to $4 trillion. Overall, for every
$3 owed in 1974, the U.S. now owes $4, a growth rate far
faster than the growth of the U.S. economy, even when
inflation is counted in economic growth.
In the last three years, corporate debt has gone up 36
percent to over $1 trillion; state and local governments
have been borrowing 33 percent more and now owe nearly
$300 billion; the federal government debt is up 47 percent
to $825 billion; and, most noticeably, consumer debt has
soared by over 50 percent to $110 billion.
What is even more ominous is the fact that most of this
record expansion in borrowing has involved short-term
loans. Nearly 60 percent of all corporate debt is pow short­
term. This dizzying pace in the increase of short-term debt
indicates the extent of the disintegration of traditional
sources for corporate funding, above all the stock market. It
means that companies have sucked in huge amounts of
debt in the last period in order to keep going a little while
longer, only to prepare all the more assuredly for outright
collapse in the next period.
This is the case for companies like American Motors
which long ago passed the dividing line between sol­
vency and bankruptcy, only to be kept going with injec­
tions of credit and for Chrysler, which is scrapping and
selling off its entire European operations in a last-ditch
attempt to keep its head above water. It is just as true for
corporations like General Motors and U.S. Steel, whose
apparent financial stability is built on the quicksand of
short-term borrowing.
The growth of debt, which directly feeds inflation, and in
turn, is fed by it, now drives the ruling class and the Carter
government towards slump policies — the liquidation of
non-profitable sectors of capital, along with massive cuts in
public expenditures.
‘Business Week’magazine warned: “As long as monetary
and fiscal policies stay as expansive as they have, even
today’s massive debt burden is bearable. But the same
policies that permit so many people to stay so deeply in
debt carry the seeds of their own destruction because they
breed inflation. At some point the Administration or the
Federal Reserve, or both, will have to pull in. Then, unless
the nation is very lucky indeed, the new debt economy —
already more than 50 percent higher than the old debt
economy — could come crashing down.”
The U.S. ruling class has no choice but to prosecute the
trade war abroad and ruthless slump policies at home.
Already, the Carter government has imposed its price
“trigger” measures on steel imports and now big business is
demanding the erection of tariff barriers and import
quotas. Meanwhile, Carter has given the green light for
U.S. business to make full use of the falling dollar to pene­
trate foreign markets and drive their competitors to the
wall. The Administration has swept aside any legislation —
from anti-bribery laws to environmental, health and safety
bans — which could hamper the effort and has pledged $2
billion in export credits to subsidize the trade war drive.
Within the U.S., public spending is being slashed to the
bone. The Democratic and Republican politicians and
mass media have masked this policy with their cynical
campaign about a “tax revolt” in order to appeal to the
middle class. But the reality is that social services are being
gutted and major cities, like Cleveland, are rapidly going
the way of New York to financial ruin. Meanwhile, the
Carter government plans to lop off more than $15 billion
from the federal budget this year — dealing staggering
blows especially, to health and safety, hospitals and
education.
T h e Banks
The explosion of liquidity and the falling rate of profit in
basic industry have led to a fundamental transformation in
the role of the banking system in the U.S. and interna­
tionally. Forced to look elsewhere for their profits, the
banks have found a completely new source — in the desper­
ate needs of underdeveloped countries to borrow massive
sums to pay import bills in a desperate bid to stave off
bankruptcies.
In the period from 1970 to 1975, over 95 percent of the
increase in total profits for the 13 largest banks in the
United States came from overseas loans and business
transactions. International credit expanded four times as
fast during that period as domestic loans.
The vast bulk of this credit has gone to the under­
developed countries, who, especially since 1973 but even
before then, have faced soaring costs for oil and imported
manufactured goods while the price of their major exports,
usually raw materials, has fallen sharply. By 1977, under­
developed countries as a whole had a total foreign debt of
over $250 billion, of which at least $75 billion was owed
directly to the private banks.
Many of these countries have been forced into a vicious
circle of borrowing to pay import bills and then having to
borrow again to pay back the interest on their first loans.
What develops is a snowballing of debt which generates
record business and profits, at least on paper, for the giant
banks. One recent study estimated that one out of every
four dollars currently borrowed by the underdeveloped
countries was being used to pay back previous loans and
that by 1980 the ratio will be one out of every two dollars!
The buildup of this mass of debt has changed the role of
the banks and the relation between finance capital and
industrial capital.
For the first time ever, the vast bulk of bank lending is
going to government or government guaranteed entities
rather than to private corporations and industry. As of
1976, the share of total loans taken by governments and
official institutions rose to 75 percent. A recent Senate
report stated:
“Thus, the private international banking system has
been transformed from a system whose chief function was
to provide investment capital for private corporations, to
one which is the primary source of balance of payments
financing for foreign governments.”
Basic industry in the advanced capitalist countries is
being starved by investment capital, underdeveloped
countries are being crushed under a mountain of debt

which they have no hope of repaying — and the banks are
reaping a bonanza! Lenin, extracting out of the whole
development of world capitalism at the time of the First
World War, analyzed that one of the essential charac­
teristics of the epoch of imperialism was the growth and
domination of finance capital over industrial capital. What
is now taking place is not only the domination but the
destruction of industrial capital by finance capital. The
banks are now feeding off the disintegration of their own
system. Consequently, this very process has undermined
the foundations of the banking system itself. As the indus­
trial base of the pyramid upon which credit is erected
becomes narrower and narrower, the entire credit structure
moves toward collapse. Most of the funds loaned out to the
underdeveloped countries on a long-term basis have come
from short-term deposits — primarily petrodollars and
speculative capital from Europe.
During a recent three year period, for instance, OPEC
countries invested over $33 billion in the United States. In
one year alone (1977), Saudi Arabia deposited $10 billion in
U.S. banks. The vast bulk of this money is in short-term
highly liquid assets. It is estimated that if so much as one
percent of this “hot money” shifts suddenly out of the
United States, it could precipitate a chain reaction of
banking failures with catastrophic impact.
U.S. imperialism has moved behind the scenes to try and
guarantee its access to petrodollars. It has done this
primarily through the secret pact with Saudi Arabia, the
largest of the oil producing countries. Worked out initially
by Henry Kissinger and confirmed by the Carter admini­
stration, this secret pact calls for the Saudi government to
use 50 percent of its annual balance of payments surpluses
and 87 percent of its existing liquid cash above what it
needs for domestic purposes for investment in the United
States. Furthermore, the Saudis pledged to prevent any oil
price hike above 5 percent per year until December 1984.
In exchange for all this, U.S. imperialism pledged to use
“its full political, military and economic resources to assist
the Saudi government in any way that may prove necessary
in the light of developing circumstances.”
The frailty of this arrangement was revealed with shat­
tering force through the Iranian revolution. The imme­
diate consequences of the Shah’s overthrow was the
world oil shortage and the steep rise in the price of crude
oil. By May 1979, spot prices for crude oil were more than
double the official prices of OPEC oil before the overthrow
of the Shah. Moreover, the frightened Saudi regime has
been forced to stake out a position of greater independence
from American foreign policy.
The Saudis have joined in the denunciation of the
Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty and have acceded to every
OPEC price rise. In the midst of the greatest oil shortage
ever, brought about by the Iranian revolution, the Saudis
have virtually abandoned U.S. imperialism in refusing to
increase oil production. A large share of the financial
stability of U.S. imperialism rests on the political policies
of the Saudi king. Nothing could more clearly express the
utter bankruptcy of U.S. imperialism.
The banks base themselves almost entirely on loans
which have no chance of ever being repaid. Mexico, one of
the two biggest borrowers from U.S. banks, has a total
foreign debt of over $25 billion. In 1976, it had to pay out
$5.5 billion in interest payments alone — amounting to 80
11
percent of its entire revenues from exports and services
abroad. There is no difference between such a situation and
outright bankruptcy except in the most formal sense of the
word.
Zaire, Peru, Jamaica, Turkey, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia
and Zambia face the same situation. The cancer of debt
afflicts the advanced capitalist countries, especially
Britain and Italy. But what is decisive is that the entire
capitalist banking system now stands like a house of cards
ready to be toppled under the impact of a default by one of
a whole series of countries.
A Senate report commented:
“Some observers argue that as the debt service burden
balloons for many countries toward the end of this decade,
the point may come when one or several of these countries
will find it more in their interest to simply default or repu­
diate their external debts rather than to have to continue
borrowing just to repay old loans. And if this happens, a
domino effect could take place in which other debtor
countries follow suit; the banks panic and start calling in
their international loans; the stock market drops precipi­
tously; and the international capital market collapses. This
doomsday scenario may be extreme in its pessimism, but it
is being taken seriously enough by responsible officials that
a concerted international effort is now underway to prevent
that first domino from falling.”
This is what lies behind the transformation of the role of
the International Monetary Fund in the last two years.
Instead of the “lender of last resort” whose job it was to
prevent mushrooming of payments crises and currency
disorders, the IMF has become the bill collector for the
giant U.S. banks.
It has done this by forcing governments in one country
after another to implement the most ferocious assault on
the living standards of the masses of workers, peasants and
youth in these countries.
The implications of the IMF policy for countries with
large external debts to U.S. commercial banks was
discussed with unusual frankness by an official report
produced by a subcommittee of the U.S. Senate.
This report, published in August 1977, stated that “there
appears to be a direct correlation between economic
hardship and political repression in many countries.” It
concluded: “The Carter Administration may therefore
have to choose between pressing its international human
rights efforts, and supporting creditor programs that can
only be undertaken at the expense of civil liberties in the
countries that undertake them.”
Carter has had no difficulty choosing between “human
rights” and the financial interests of the U.S. banking oli­
garchy. This is shown by the policies of the IMF in
countries like Peru.
It is estimated that no more than 30 percent of the
Peruvian population is presently receiving any sort of wage.
In February 1978, the representatives of several major
foreign banks — Citibank, Manufacturers Hanover, Wells
Fargo, Dresdner Bank, Bank of Tokyo — met in Lima to
dictate the terms of repayment of Peruvian loans.
The bankers insisted that Peru meet its debt servicing
obligation of $924 million for 1978. This represents more
than 50 percent of its earnings from exports. In 1979, Peru
will have to meet interest payments of more than $1 billion.
The military regime has been obliged to cut the bulk of
Peru’s food imports. Even more disastrous than the govern­
 12
ment debt is the position of private industries. They have
been declared in default of loans and are unable to
purchase parts from overseas suppliers.
Peru is by no means unique. Virtually identical condi­
tions of bankruptcy are emerging in Bolivia. Its state enter­
prises are heavily in debt. Gross indebtedness to foreign
commercial banks increased since 1971 from $89 million to
$650 million.
The total external indebtedness of Bolivia mushroomed
from $391 million to $2 billion during the past seven years.
Like so many countries in Latin America, Bolivia is depen­
dent on a favorable price for the commodities it exports.
But apart from tin, all its export commodities earned far
less than expected in 1977. Thus, its growing debt servicing
problems were compounded by a 1977 trade deficit of $14
million.
As a leading banking journal recently warned: “There
are thus ample grounds for our view that storm clouds are
gathering over Bolivia — both economically and politi­
cally; and that sooner or later, the crisis will break, as has
happened in Peru. For the time being, the country has been
partly shielded from reality by the high price of tin. When
this declines — either in response to deepening reces­
sionary trends or following the release of significant stock­
piles of tin from the United States’ strategic stockpile —
the International Monetary Fund’s now familiar road show
will doubtless swing into action, accompanied by the
Fund’s usual calls for austerity...”
Brazil reveals more sharply than any other country the
utterly fraudulent character of so-called “economic
development” during the postwar boom.
With the masses suffering under the merciless Geisel
dictatorship, the international banks invested heavily in
Braxil. The more barbaric the conditions imposed by the
Brazilian military and its favorite “death squads,” the
more lucrative became the investments of foreign banks.
Now the Wall Street bankers are terrified by the
consequences of their own policies; the international debt
of Brazil has reached $31.2 billion. A default by Brazil
would threaten the entire structure of world banking; but
the worsening slump is cutting off export markets required
by the country to obtain the earnings needed to repay its
debt.
The job of the IMF is to secure Wall Street’s invest­
ments from default at any price. It functions as nothing
else than the economic arm of the U.S. imperialist counter­
revolution, whose political arm is the CIA. The role of the
latter is to work to set up the type of brutal regimes that
can implement the policies demanded by the IMF. The
regimes of Pinochet and Videla are the models which
Yankee imperialism in alliance with the native bourgeoisie
intends to reproduce throughout Latin America and the
world.
But the dictates of the IMF are now pitching one country
after another towards open civil war. Insurrectionary
battles broke out in the streets of the major cities of Peru; a
massive strike wave has swept Brazil; mass riots greeted
IMF-dictated cuts in food subsidies in Egypt; powerful
labor struggles have swept Bolivia and Colombia and
armed struggle has gripped Nicaragua. The growing revolu­
tionary upsurge of the Latin American masses is now
decisively undermining the position of U.S. imperialism.
Eu ro p e and A m e ric a
The calamitous decline of the dollar has become the
spearhead of U.S. imperialism’s trade war drive against
European and Japanese capitalism.
Pressing for the full use of the price advantage created for
American exports, Carter has given the signal to begin a
cutthroat trade war and to ignore the Federal govern­
ment’s own rules on unethical practices in foreign trade.
This includes everything from bribery to infringing of anti­
trust laws and the “human rights” provisions governing
foreign trade, to the sale of nuclear reactors and toxic sub­
stances at present banned for ecology reasons.
Carter’s orders to go on the warpath in foreign trade
spells disaster for U.S. imperialism’s European and
Japanese competitors.
World capitalism cannot escape the dollar’s role as the
world reserve currency. The attempt by the French and
German bourgeoisie to establish a European “joint float”
against the dollar is a last-ditch effort to avoid drowning in
a sea of greenbacks. But to this day, over 80 percent of the
world’s currency reserves are held in dollars. The closest
competitor, the Deutsche-mark, accounts for only 6.7
percent.
The dollar cannot be replaced. No other currency or bloc
of currencies occupies a position in the world economy
comparable to that of U.S. imperialism during the 1940s
and 1950s. U.S. imperialism, which held 75 percent of the
world’s gold hoard at the end of the war, failed ultimately
in its attempts to bankroll the world. How can far weaker
countries hope to succeed today under conditions of world
slump?
The Franco-German plan drawn up on the eve of the
Bonn summit can do nothing to stabilize the capitalist
monetary system. The $50 billion fund being considered is
a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the tidal wave let
loose by the dollar’s collapse. The plan is a sign of the
irreversible breakdown of the monetary system and the
plunge into full-scale trade war, with the formation of rival
currency blocs. Meanwhile, more than $610 billion in U.S.
paper dollars and credit notes are held in the Eurocur­
rency markets. This mass of unregulated, inconvertible
and virtually worthless paper money is like a giant
wrecking ball swinging wildly through the world currency
markets and bashing up the structure of international
finance.
This underscores the relative predominance of U.S.
imperialism over its rivals. By normal standards — volume
of trade, gross national product — the specific weight of the
U.S. economy has declined. Japan and West Germany
have trade surpluses and stronger currencies. But what
were once assets have now become debits. Their trade
surpluses become the vehicle for destroying their trade
entirely, as they face the threat of being cut off from the
their biggest market — the United States. The strength of
their currencies prices their goods out of the world market.
The weaknesses of U.S. imperialism — its falling cur­
rency, its record trade deficit — become its greatest
weapons vis-a-vis its capitalist rivals. U.S. imperialism
remains the dominant imperialist power, but it maintains
that domination, not by stabilizing the world economy, but

by destroying it.
At the same time, the destructive forces let loose by U.S.
imperialism on the world economy rebound against it with
devastating impact. U.S. imperialism cannot insulate itself
from the economic and political shock waves now rocking
world capitalism.
In the 1920s, during its rise to world hegemony, U.S.
imperialism was able to “put Europe on rations.” Even
then, the collapse of European capitalism dealt a stag­
gering blow to U.S. imperialism in 1929 from which it
nearly did not recover.
Today, the links of U.S. imperialism to the world
economy are a thousand times greater. It is the very center
of the world crisis, the pressure cooker for all the enormous
contradictions ripping the system apart.
The objective development of the crisis drives U.S.
imperialism, not to place its rivals on rations, but to starve
13
them out. This is what lies behind the growing demands by
sections of the ruling class for full-scale trade warfare and
the instituting of a “siege economy.”
U.S. imperialism is not a vibrant, young capitalism
with an expanding home market, an entire continent to the
south to be exploited at will and enormous reserves of
wealth to fall back on. One after another, these props are
gone. Rather, it is a decrepit power, haunted by the
upsurge of the world revolution. The more it is forced to
lash out at its rivals, the more it sticks the knife into its
own belly.
The relentless intensification of the crisis now leaves it
only one option — to prepare the most brutal counter­
revolutionary measures against the working class of Europe
and Japan, against the national liberation struggles of the
masses of Africa, the Middle East and Latin America and
against the working class of the United States.
14
The Rise and Fall of the Dollar Republic
The United States is entering a period of
the greatest social and revolutionary
upheaval in its history. The disintegration of
world capitalism is shattering all the
material bases for compromise between the
bourgeoisie and the working class. The over­
riding necessity facing the U.S. ruling class
and the Carter administration is the brutal
lowering of living standards through delib­
erate slump-recession policies and uncon­
trolled inflation.
The growth of mass unemployment combined with
an almost daily depreciation in the purchasing power
of workers’ wages will be the immediate outcome of
the policies now being pursued by the Carter
administration. These attempts to drive down living
standards will themselves be augmented by the
introduction of wage controls — first as “voluntary
guidelines” introduced with the concent of the trade
union bureaucracy and then, not long after, as legal
statutes outlawing collective bargaining.
No choice is left open to the ruling class except to
attempt the imposition of the full burden of this crisis upon
the back of the working class. The land of unlimited
opportunity is now being ruthlessly transformed into the
land of no opportunity. American capitalism must now
proceed to extract an awful toll in human suffering from
workers and their families.
But this means an outbreak of social warfare between
classes whose only precedent in American history is the
Civil War of 1861-1865.
Millions of workers are being thrust, many for the first
time in their lives, into bitter strikes. Though starting
usually from disputes over basic contract issues, these
struggles rapidly escalate into direct struggles against the
Carter administration and the capitalist state, which
serves as the executive committee o^the ruling class.
The 111-day miners strike signalled the entrance of the
American working class onto the stage of political struggle.
This strike was an implicit challenge to the authority of the
capitalist state. For weeks the Carter administration
agonized over the question of whether it should issue a
Taft-Hartley “back-to-work” order. When it finally
obtained this injunction, the miners unanimously defied
the chief executive of the capitalist state.
The intransigence of the miners cannot be explained as
the product of their exceptional militancy. What appears
as “exceptional” in the miners is in fact the sharpest
expression of the actual stage at which the class struggle
has arrived in the United States.
This is proven by the entire course that the class struggle
has taken in the United States since the conclusion of the
miners strike.
A nationwide postal strike was averted only through the
treachery of the bureaucracy. The postal workers humilia­
ted Carter by voting down a contract which he had specifi­
cally praised.
During the last week of September, railroad workers
responded to a Presidential invocation of a state of emer­
gency to end their strike by extending the area of picket­
ing.
Section after section of the labor movement has come
forward to smash Carter’s wage guidelines. The 52-day
strike against American Cyanamid was followed by the
longest nationwide strike in Teamster history. The final
nail in the coffin was driven by the rubber workers,
especially the Uniroyal strikers who won a contract
settlement totalling over 40 percent for three years.
Shipyard workers in Newport News, Virginia striking for
union recognition, and striking dairy drivers and school bus
drivers in New York battled hundreds of state and city
police who were mobilized to protect government organized
scabbing.
In embarking upon a whole new stage of political
struggle, the working class is responding to the impact of
the world crisis and moving as part of the forces of the
world revolution.
The transformed practice of millions of workers has
prepared for a mass awakening of political consciousness.
The emergence of a mass political movement for a break
with the capitalist parties and the construction of a Labor
Party to force Carter out will signify the beginning of the
social revolution in the United States.
There is not the slightest element of exaggeration or false
optimism in this assessment. This revolutionary perspec­
tive takes as its point of departure the objective develop­
ment of the world crisis. Only in this way can the develop­
ment of the working class itself be understood.
An opposite and reactionary method is expressed by the
preoccupation of radicals, revisionists and Stalinists with
the “history of the American working class” as such. This
idealist approach is entirely bound up with the desire to
deduce some sort of “American exceptionalism” from their
own crude subjective impressions of the contradictory
development of the class struggle in the United States.
The history of the working class can be grasped only in
its dialectical relationship to the growth of the productive
forces of American capitalism. But the United States
cannot be understood except from the standpoint of the
history of European capitalism and the growth of the world
market.
That theories of American exceptionalism are worthless
should be virtually self-evident from the fact that the “New
World” could never have been discovered, let alone develop
in accordance with “exceptional laws,” had not the “Old
World,” in line with the laws of historical development,
begun to break out of the constraints of feudalism and
reached a certain level in the growth of the productive
forces.
If there is anything that is “exceptional” or “peculiar” to
America it is this: that the laws of the development of
world capitalism have worked themselves out most fully
and found their highest expression in this country.

Th e D e ve lo p m e n t o f U .S . Capitalism
The United States (and, indeed, the entire North Ameri­
can continent) was ideally suited for the development of
capitalism. Its huge territories and unlimited natural
resources provided it with the material resources for large
scale agricultural production and raw material extraction.
A large population insured a ready market at home for
manufactured goods.
Historically, as well, the American bourgeoisie inherited
important advantages. Whatever obstacles it did encounter
on the road of historical development, it was able to
overcome far more decisively, and ruthlessly, than any
other capitalist class.
From the beginning of colonization, in the New World,
capitalist relations were already being laid. This was the
product of the great bourgeois revolutions in Europe, parti­
cularly those of England and Holland. As well, the first
settlers — Pilgrims and other religious sects — brought
with them an ideology of possessive individualism
supremely suited to a nation of small capitalist farmers,
artisans, and merchants.
It was the further development of world capitalism, espe­
cially the expansion of world trade, which brought the
colonial bourgeoisie into conflict with the British crown
over the restrictions it imposed on trade by the 13 colonies.
The New England merchants, in alliance with the planter
aristocracy in the South, rose up against the British yoke
and by mobilizing masses of small farmers and artisans
into a revolutionary army, succeeded in gaining indepen­
dence. This social revolution cleared the way for the
development of commerce and agriculture in the coming
period. In this great Revolution, the European contribu­
tion to the political philosophy of the fight against the
Crown was of immense significance. But the struggle of the
Americans had its impact in Europe. What had been called
the “rights of Englishmen” was transformed into the more
universal “Rights of Man.”
Throughout the first half of the 19th century, the
compromise that had been forged between the Southern
Slavocracy and the Northern bourgeoisie began to break
down. The driving force behind this conflict was the
profound changes taking place within world capitalism.
This is how one Civil War historian explained it:
“The America which had seemed as pastoral as Eden
was becoming a very different sort of place, and the condi­
tions under which slavery existed grew extremely complex;
and presently the very forces that made slavery more and
more of an anachronism worked powerfully to keep it alive.
Modern industrialism, taking shape beyond the seas but
touching America as well, exerted a pressure beneath
which the Southern states of America were all but
helpless...
“A profound change was taking place. Because of such
unconsidered factors as the invention of the steam engine,
the development of semi-automatic machinery, the growth
of world-wide systems of cheap transportation and finance,
and the opening of limitless markets that had never existed
before, the existence of the industrial nation became
possible. It was possible, that is, for a busy nation to
sustain itself by selling, to a market beyond its own
borders, goods made from raw materials which it did not
produce. To a certain extent what was happening in
America now — what was putting the 1860 election outside
of political rationality — was simply a reflection of this
fact.”
15
The vast transformations of the productive forces on a
world scale that were taking place in the mid-19th century
were making it impossible for capitalism and slavery to
continue coexisting within the United States. Slavery had
become an absolute historical obstacle to the further
development of the productive forces. These were the
unseen forces which drove the United States inexorably
towards the “irrepressible conflict.”
The old political parties, Democrat and Whig, which
based themselves on the compromise between these two
antagonistic social systems, were practically overnight
supplanted by the Republican Party, which was thrown up
in 1854 as the combat party of the Northern bourgeoisie
and swept to power six years later.
Men make history, but not under conditions of their own
choosing. When the South rebelled and seceded from the
Union following Lincoln’s election, the North set out to
preserve the union. But though Lincoln and others firmly
disavowed it at the beginning, the preservation of the
Union demanded the systematic destruction of slavery —
that is, the carrying out of a profound social revolution.
One recent historican remarked: “The country had entered
upon a revolution, even though it was not quite clear just
who was making the revolution or whom the revolution was
directed against, and it would at last wring from Lincoln
the bitter cry (in which austere Davis might well have
joined) that he could not claim to have controlled events
but must admit rather that events had controlled him.”
In the land where the bourgeoisie has waged the most
persistent ideological struggle against materialist dialec­
tics, the dialectic of historical development has asserted
itself most powerfully.
In the end, the industrial might of the North, itself a
reflection of the superiority of the capitalist mode of
production over the slave system, proved a far more deci­
sive factor than the military talents of the Southern
generals.
Following the defeat of the Secessionist states, the
Northern bourgeoisie destroyed root and branch the socio­
economic basis of the slavocracy during the period of
“Reconstruction.” The slaves were freed and the planta­
tion owners were expropriated. The victorious Northern
bourgeoisie used the combined tactics of imposing mili­
tary dictatorships on the Southern states and simul­
taneously mobilizing the freed slaves and poor white
farmers in order to politically suppress the former slave­
owners. The Civil War and Reconstruction accomplished
their task — they wiped chattel slavery off the face of the
North American continent for all time. At the cost of over
one million dead, capitalism had established itself more
thoroughly and more completely in the United States than
in any other country.
Once the job was done and the bourgeoisie was assured of
its unchallenged supremacy throughout the Union, Recon­
struction was wound up. Sections of the former Southern
Slavocracy were integrated into the network of capitalist
relations, becoming the minor partners and political repre­
sentatives of the Northern bourgeoisie in the South.
Having no further need of the support of the freed slaves
and poor farmers, the Radical Republican agrarian and
democratic program of Reconstruction was uncere­
moniously scrapped and gave way to Jim-Crowism and
clubhouse politics.
Having completed the bourgeois revolution through the
Civil War and Reconstruction, the bourgeoisie turned its
 16
energy toward the serious business of enriching itself in the
latter part of the 19th century.
By the turn of the century, the old Jeffersonian ideal of a
nation of small farmers was gone forever. The urban
population began to predominate over the countryside. The
concentration of capital was creating the modern
monopolies and trusts over the corpses of the small
businessmen. Millions from the farms and small towns
were being drawn into the ranks of the proletariat in the
large cities. Among the farmers and sections of the urban
petty bourgeoisie, populism sprang up as a protest against
the development of monopoly capitalism.
This development was concurrent with America’s emer­
gence as one of the strongest industrial powers of the world.
In the period from 1869 to 1901, the U.S. gross national
product rose from $9.1 billion to $37.1 billion. Farming
continued to provide a steady source of income, but it was
manufactured goods and transportation (chiefly rails)
which saw the greatest expansion.
From 1865 to 1900 total exports increased in value from
$281 million to $1,394 billion. In fact, a fundamental
change had taken place — the United States was producing
a greater value of goods than was consumed domestically.
This dictated a fundamental change in U.S. foreign
policy. As long as there was still a frontier left to conquer
and a home market large enough to consume the products
of U.S. industry, the U.S. bourgeoisie had little concern
with foreign relations aside from assuring that there was no
external threat to its development. In fact, as late as 1880,
the only thing that President Rutherford B. Hayes could
say about foreign relations in his annual message to
Congress was that “our relations with all foreign countries
have been those of undisturbed peace.”
As far as Latin America was concerned, U.S. policy was
opposed to efforts by major European powers, especially
Great Britain, to penetrate the region. In fact, Lincoln and
the Northern bourgeoisie had welcomed and deliberately
encouraged the bourgeois democratic revolutionary
movement of Benito Juarez in Mexico, as a counter-weight
to efforts by France to control the country.
But by the turn of the century the U.S. had entered full-
scale into the world market. The search for new markets to
plunder and new areas for the investment of capital
brought the U.S. into contention with the older imperialist
powers of Europe as their newest rival.
U.S. foreign policy began to actively pursue a predatory
and militarist character. The Spanish-American war and
the seizure of Panama soon established the U.S. as the
leading imperialist power exploiting the resources of South
and Central America and extending its influence across the
Pacific Ocean as far as the Philippines. Latin America
became the source of immense superprofits for Yankee
imperialism. The Caribbean was turned into little more
than an American lake, Puerto Rico became a U.S. colony
and Cuba little more than that.
By the time of the First World War, the United States
was a full-fledged imperialist power. Its empire did not so
much consist of conquered territories (even in Latin
America, it annexed relatively ltttle land.) It consisted
much more in establishing whole regions of the globe where
capital could be exported and natural resources and cheap
labor exploited without hindrance.
The First World War signalled the fact that capitalism
had reached its historical limits as a progressive social
system. The entire world had become too narrow for the
further growth of capitalist exploitation. The world had
been divided among a tiny group of older imperialist
powers led by Great Britain. The newer, more dynamic
industrial powers such as Germany and Japan were
starving for lack of colonies to exploit. Consequently, the
world had to be redivided — a violent struggle broke out
aimed at reestablishing a new equilibrium for the world
division of labor to the advantage of one group of imper­
ialist powers at the expense of their competitors.
Yet the First World War proved far most costly and
longer than anyone had anticipated. To finance their war
efforts, the European countries had to divert enormous
revenue and manpower from basic production into the war
enterprises. The result of the war was the impoverishment
of Europe. Both victors and vanquished suffered a sharp
deterioration of national wealth, productive capacity and
faced enormous debts.
But chief among the costs to imperialism was the
victorious October Revolution. The specter that had
haunted Europe since 1848 had been given materiality
through the practice of the Russian working class, led by
the Bolshevik party. This wrenched from capitalism one-
sixth of the earth’s land, at the very point in history when
the entire globe had already proved too small to allow
further imperialist expansion.
But more important than the loss of potential markets
was the threat of world revolution itself. Every decision
made by world imperialism from that point on took into
account that threat. What the backward masses of Russia
had done, so the workers of the industrial countries could
do. Only the betrayal of the parties of the Second Interna­
tional and the absence of experienced Bolshevik parties
saved European capitalism from the “Red Plague” in 1918-
1919, and they lived from then on in its shadow.
While Europe emerged from the war about one-third
poorer than she was prior to it, America had cor­
respondingly grown, and at the direct expense of Europe.
By 1920 America had entered onto the high road of world
imperialism, having emerged from the war as the single
most powerful imperialist power and the only one in an
economic position to dictate conditions to the rest of the
capitalist world.
Corresponding to its economic ascendancy, American
capitalism rapidly expanded its military and state
machine. Whereas before the war, the American fleet was
1/7 that of Great Britain’s, by the end of the war, it was
comparable to Britain’s. Yet the rise of America as the
leading imperialist power proceeded side by side with the
rise of American “pacifist” ideology. The American
bourgeoisie used the peculiarities of its historical develop­
ment, its relatively isolated development throughout the
19th century and its belated entry into the brigandage of
the planet, to camouflage its ruthlessness.
The history of the interwar years was largely the history
of the working out of the irresolvable contradictions of U.S.
imperialism. Throughout the 1920s the American
bourgeoisie proceeded on a strategy of putting Europe on
rations. Desperate to maintain the wartime export market
in Europe, U.S. imperialism allowed Europe to rise again,
backed by American credit and investment. At the same
time, very definite limits were dictated beyond which the
European bourgeoisie could not go. Thereby, the American
bourgeoisie sought to keep for itself a lion’s share of the
world market.
American capitalism now became the source of the crisis
of world imperialism. The decline in world trade and
investment in turn, soon reverberated back into the United
States. Once the boom of the 1920s had reached its peak,
the collapse of world trade by the end of the decade threw

the bottom out of American capitalism.
Practically overnight, industry had come to a standstill.
National income plummetted from a total of $81 billion in
1919 to $40 billion in 1932. Some 20 million workers were
unemployed, ten times the number during the previous
decade. The myth of a benevolent American capitalism
leading the rest of the capitalist world out of the dark ages
of poverty and war was shattered. Shattered likewise was
the old basis of class collaboration. If the American bour­
geoisie was to ward off the “European” specter of social
revolution as well as its radical, if unpleasant “cure,” fas­
cism, then it had to find new forms of class rule.
The European bourgeoisie had no choice but to swallow
the fascist “medicine.” (The betrayal of social democracy
and Stalinism sealed the fate of the European proletariat
for an entire generation.) The American bourgeoisie,
however, had one advantage over their European col­
leagues. American capitalism still had a huge reserve of
wealth accumulated in the past. A portion of this wealth
could be called on to artifically stimulate the economy and
finance, though on a very meager scale, a number of social
programs. On this basis the American bourgeoisie hoped to
reestablish a new basis for class collaboration. This policy
was the essence of Roosevelt’s “New Deal.” A senile
capitalism was being kept alive by feeding off the fat it had
accumulated in its youth.
Th e Em ergence o f th e W orkin g Class
We have so far traced certain aspects of the economic
development of U.S. capitalism after the Civil War. But, of
course, it must be recognized that the most significant
product of the Civil War, arising out of the growth of indus­
try, was the real development of the working class as a
powerful social force increasingly conscious of its own
distinct interests. The sectional divisions receded from
everyday consciousness in the decade following the war.
But what emerged more and more openly within American
society were the fundamental class divisions.
From the emergence of the National Labor Union in 1866
until the outbreak of the railroad strike of 1877, the forma­
tion of the working class proceeded with extreme rapidity
— a reflection of the monumental strides being taken by
capitalism itself. The events of 1877 arising out of the
railroad strike marked a blood-soaked beginning of heroic
working class struggles which would not achieve their
culmination in the cherished goal of industrial organiza­
tion until some 60 years later. The decisive stages of these
struggles in the early period was the political movement for
the eight-hour-day which led up to the notorious Haymar-
ket provocation of May 1886 and the great Pullman strike
of 1894 led by Eugene Debs.
The whole history of this period in the development of
the American working class is one of incomparable mili­
tancy and sacrifice. The central issue in all these struggles
was the fight for organization — the recognition of a union
and the right to negotiate agreements on wages and
working conditions. But the working class came up against
the awesome power of American capitalism whose leading
representatives — Morgan, Carnegie, Rockefeller and
DuPont — ruthlessly suppressed one industrial uprising
after another.
An important aspect of these early struggles in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was that most of
these struggles were led by a relatively small section of
17
militant workers. They provided the yeast for the develop­
ment of the early socialist and communist movements.
Furthermore, a large section of the left-wing of the workers’
movement was comprised of foreign born workers, this
being the inevitable expression of the fact that the working
class population was swelled by the immigration of millions
from all parts of Europe. For the most part, the American
Federation of Labor remained utterly indifferent to the fate
of the hundreds of thousands herded into the factories of
basic industry. The attention of men such as Gompers —
the teacher of George Meany — was fixed on the mainten­
ance of small craft unions.
The many bitter experiences made by the working class
in the pre-World War I period, the excruciating difficulties
confronted in each struggle against the employers, reflected
the fact that U.S. capitalism occupied such a powerful
position in a world capitalist system still in the period of its
ascendancy.
Great changes began at the end of World War I. In the
general revolutionary upsurge launched by the October
Revolution, the American working class sought to move
forward. In an action of unprecedented daring, steel
workers’ leaders decided to call a national strike against
the Great Steel Trust. Begun in the summer of 1919, it
mobilized 300,000 workers in the greatest strike in U.S.
history. The capitalist class met it with characteristic
brutality. It declared martial law in many areas, whipped
up anti-communist hysteria in the middle class and used
hoardes of police and strikebreakers. Eventually, the steel
workers were defeated.
The conditions facing the labor movement worsened
during the boom of the 1920s. The boom itself was a conse­
quence in many respects of the defeat of the German
working class in 1923 and the restabilization of European
capitalism. The unions which existed in the United States
lost members. The United Mine Workers was among the
hardest hit — losing the bulk of its members in Appala­
chia. During this entire period, there never once emerged a
powerful movement for an independent labor party, and it
is hardly surprising in so far as the industrial working class
— the bedrock of independent class politics — remained
largely unorganized. As for the impressive development of
the early socialist parties — particularly that of Debs —
between 1900 and 1912, these movements represented, in a
certain sense, the fusion of the old agrarian populism with
certain sections of workers activated by the struggles of the
IWW and, of course, the more radical elements to be found
among the foreign-born workers.
The real beginning of a great independent movement by
the industrial working class came in the wake of the
spectacular collapse of Wall Street in 1929 and the onset of
the Great Depression. After an initial shock left by the
numbing impact of mass unemployment (15 to 20 million
workers without jobs), the working class went into action in
1934 with three historic struggles: the Toledo Auto-Lite
strike, the Minneapolis General Strike (led by the Trotsky­
ist movement) and the San Francisco General Strike.
These explosions, producing notable victories, created the
impetus for the founding in 1935 of the Committee for
Industrial Organization. The CIO was built as the outcome
of a split inside the AFL whose leadership remained ada­
mantly opposed to any industrial organization.
It was in the United States that an entirely new form of
industrial struggle emerged — the sit-down strike which
made its first appearance in an Akron rubber plant in 1934.
This was not accidental. The American worker was forged
in the development of U.S. capitalist industry and techno­
18
logy. His whole existence as a worker was entirely bound up
with the development of the most advanced techniques of
production. Thus, as soon as the workers recovered from
the first great shock of the Depression, they moved to
regain their position and conquer new ones by seizing the
means of production.
In the wave of industrial struggles which followed the
formation of the CIO, corporations which had ruled over
workers as bastions of anti-unionism for decades were
smashed into submission overnight.
This is how Cannon described it: “American capitalism
took millions of bare-footed country boys from the bank­
rupted farms of the country; put shoes on them and
marched them into regimented ranks of socially-operated
modern industry; wet them in the rain of the assembly line;
starved them on the bread-line; mistreated and abused
them; and finally succeeded in pounding them into a
coherent body which emerged as a section of the most
powerful and militant trade union movement the world has
ever known.
“American capitalism took hundreds of thousands of
Negroes from the South, and exploiting their ignorance,
and their poverty, and their fears, and their individual
helplessness, herded them into the steel mills as strike­
breakers in the steel strike of 1919. And in the brief space of
one generation, by its mistreatment, abuse and exploita­
tion of these innocent and ignorant Negro strike-breakers,
this same capitalism succeeded in transforming them and
their sons into one of the most militant and reliable detach­
ments of the great victorious steel strike of 1946.
“This same capitalism took tens of thousands and
hundreds of thousands of prejudiced hill-billies from the
South, many of them members and sympathizers of the Ku
Klux Klan; and thinking to use them, with their ignor­
ance and their prejudices, as a barrier against unionism,
sucked them into the auto and rubber factories of Detroit,
Akron and other industrial centers. There it sweated them,
humiliated them and made new men out of them. In that
harsh school the imported southerners learned to exchange
the insignia of the KKK for the union button of the CIO,
and to turn the Klansman’s fiery cross into a bonfire to
warm pickets at a factory gate...
“The American working class covered the great distance
from atomization, from non-existence as an organized
force, to trade union consciousness and organization, in one
gigantic leap, in one brief decade.”
The building of the CIO represented a monumental
historical achievement of the American working class and a
great conquest of the international working class. This was
especially true in light of the fact that it took place under
conditions of historic defeats of the European working
class. However, this powerful movement which, as Trotsky
said, represented the most “indisputable expression of the
instinctive striving of the American workers to raise them­
selves to the level of the tasks imposed on them by history,”
stopped short of the building of an independent labor party
and a break with the Democratic Party of Roosevelt.
This was not, however, the product of the so-called
“backwardness” of the American working class. It was the
reflection of the immense objective weight of the counter­
revolution upon the development of the class struggle in
the United States. The forestalling of the labor party
movement was chiefly due to the defeats of the working
class in Europe and the terrible counter-revolutionary
betrayals of the working class by the Stalinist bureauc­
racy. The defeats of the European working class led to both
the outbreak of the Second World War and the entrance of
the Roosevelt Administration into the war. It was the war
which enabled the American bourgeoisie to finally alle­
viate the economic recession on the basis of vast war expen­
ditures. Furthermore, the Communist Party of the United
States — working in accordance with the counter-revolu-
tionary policies of the Soviet bureaucracy — used its then-
powerful position in the CIO to dragoon the working class
into the war and then subordinate it entirely to the Soviet-
imperialist alliance during the war.
But once the American working class had organized
itself, things could never be the same again. Even at the
height of the war, while the Stalinists and CIO bureau­
crats were enforcing the “no-strike” pledge, the miners
staged a powerful strike in 1943. Finally, with the end of
the war, the biggest strike wave in history engulfed the
country, as millions of workers demonstrated their
incomparable determination to consolidate the gains made
through the founding of the unions.
The postwar period opened up a whole new stage in the
working class movement. Its significance, however, has
been totally distorted by the Stalinists and revisionists in
such a way as to write off the revolutionary role of the
American working class. This is intimately bound up with
attempts, particularly by the revisionists, to deny that the
postwar development of world capitalism was essentially a
compounding of its crisis and a deepening of its death
agony.
The 1950s and 1960s are largely presented as a period of
right-wing backlash, McCarthyism, the driving of
militants out of positions of leadership in the unions, etc.
— in short, as a complete repudiation of the great mili­
tancy shown in the initial CIO upsurge. An expression of
this outlook by the Socialist Workers Party in the early
1950s was its position that McCarthyism represented the
onset of fascism in the United States. Even more serious, in
the years to come after the SWP’s break with the
International Committee of the Fourth International and
its abandonment of Trotskyism, was its writing off of the
working class as a revolutionary force. This was used to
justify the revisionists’ adaptation to all sorts of middle
class protest movements — student power, black nation­
alism, feminism, etc.
In fact, the postwar development of the U.S. working
class can only be understood within the framework of the
deepening crisis of U.S. and world imperialism following
the Bretton Woods agreements and its conscious policy of
retreat before the strength of the international working
class, and above all, the American working class.
There was, of course, a degree of reaction in this period,
on the basis of the capitalist boom and, at the same time,
there was no spectacular movement in the working class of
the kind that had taken place during the sit-down strikes.
But the fact is that the struggles of the working class to
consolidate the CIO, to build up its standard of living, to
defend its collective bargaining rights and its contracts —
all this represented an enormous advance based on the con­
quests of the CIO movement. The 1950s and the 1960s were
not lived in vain, as the revisionists and Stalinists would
have us believe. The working class built up its living stan­
dards, and made decisive gains like the Master Freight
contract of the Teamsters, the Guaranteed Annual Income
of the longshoremen, and the spread of the union shop to
wide sections of industry and to the public services, where
unions had never existed before.

In all these gains, the working class, however
silently, was carrying out its role as the gravedigger of
capitalism.
If it didn’t look like the 1930s, it was because the bour­
geoisie felt obliged to retreat and cling to the inflationary
framework of Bretton Woods. These gains by the U.S.
working class, and by the workers in western Europe and
Japan, not to speak of the advances made in the planned
economies of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and China,
continuously undermined imperialism and vastly
strengthened the emerging national liberation move­
ments.
The approach to history which writes off this period is
entirely subjective. Contained in this period is the buildup
of the quantitative changes which ultimately produced a
qualitative leap. Throughout this entire period, the
American working class, whatever the lag of its conscious­
ness, remained the most decisive pillar of the world
revolution.
This relationship between the struggles of the working
class and the crisis of imperialism became clear in the
1960s — in the explosions of black workers and youth in the
ghettoes, in the powerful strike movement in the U.S. espe­
cially after 1966 and in the massive movement of the prole­
tariat of Western Europe especially the May-June events in
France in 1968.
H istorical Background and Political
Significance o f th e Fig h t fo r th e Lab o r P a r ty
The working class has come to a historic turning point.
For forty years, it has been able to make gains and defend
its rights through trade union struggle. But the onrush of
the crisis now means that the militant trade unionism of
the past, though an absolutely essential prerequisite, is by
itself today completely inadequate to stop the attacks of
the ruling class.
The working class now confronts the task of construct­
ing an independent labor party. This represents an entirely
new stage in the movement of the working class, the nega­
tion of the whole period opened up by the founding of the
CIO. Once again the United States faces an irrepressible
conflict. The massive wave of militant trade union strug­
gles is the run-up to an enormous political conflagration as
the working class moves to wrench itself free from the
stranglehold of capitalist politics. The building of a Labor
Party means the transition to the struggle for power.
The demand for a Labor Party goes back to the earliest
days of the development of the American working class.
The first big upsurge of labor struggle in the post-Civil War
period — the national rail strike of 1877, the fight for the
eight-hour day and the formation of the Knights of Labor
— saw the emergence for the first time of support among
sections of the working class for independent political
action. This took the form of a number of labor candidates
running for office against the Democrats and Republicans,
among them Henry George who ran for mayor in New York
in 1886 and won 70,000 votes.
Friedrich Engels, writing to the German-American
Marxist F.A. Sorge in New York at the time, stressed the
19
The development of a mass movement in the working
class for the building of a Labor Party and the opening up
of the struggle for power cannot be understood as a return
to the 1930s. It is, certainly, the outcome of the 1930s but it
also contains within it all subsequent developments — all
the rich lessons and history of struggles to consolidate the
unions and the militant battles to defend basic rights.
This emerges so clearly in the fact that the high standard
of living of the worker, for a long time the most
conservative element of his thinking, now becomes the
driving force for his political awakening as he has to defend
it from the attacks of the ruling class and the capitalist
state. This explains the enormous militancy demonstrated
by workers throughout the last year in strike after strike,
their rebellion against the labor bureaucracy and their
fierce intransigence.
The 1930s do not live in the consciousness of the working
class simply as some recollections about the heroic sit-
down strikes, but in all the gains they have made since
then, in their own experiences of struggle. That is why the
1930s can be negated in the great new movement of the
working class today, (the movement to its political
independence and to the struggle for power) and the revolu­
tionary energy and dynamism of that period can and will
be carried forward on an entirely new basis.
It is within this context that the present struggles of the
working class and the confrontation with the Carter
administration must be grasped.
importance of fighting for an independent party of the
working class:
“The rottenest side of the K. of L. (Knights of Labor)
was their political neutrality ... but the edge of this has
been taken off by the behavior of the masses in the Novem­
ber elections, especially in New York. The first great step of
importance for every country newly entering into the
movement is always the constitution of the workers as an
independent political party, no matter how, so long as it is
a distinct workers’ party. And this step has been taken,
much more rapidly than we had a right to expect, and that
is the main thing.”
In fighting the prevalent sectarianism of the supporters
of Marxism within the United States (largely, then,
German emigre circles with little contact with the
American working class) Engels stressed:
“The great thing is to get the working class to move, as a
class; that once obtained they will soon find the right
direction, and all who resist, H.G. (Henry George) or
Powderly (leader of the Knights of Labor) will be left out in
the cold with small sects of their own . . . ”
Engels was absolutely right — “the great thing is to get
the working class to move as a class.” But this was even­
tually to emerge not on the plane of politics but in the
movement to build industrial trade unions. Before it was
possible to build a national labor party, it was necessary to
construct a national labor movement. The first experi­
ments in independent labor political action failed pre­
cisely because vast sections of the working class, in the
20
early period of labor struggles, lacked any form of
independent organization.
This remained the fundamental obstacle to the building
of a Labor Party right up through the 1930s. Each time a
major upsurge of the struggle swept the working class — as
in 1919, with the national steel and coal strikes, the general
strike in Seattle and the textile strike in Lawrence, Massa­
chusetts — demands immediately surfaced throughout the
country for the formation of a third party. But the defeat
by U.S. capital of the fight for unions by industrial workers
led to the dissolution of nascent labor party formations.
Nonetheless, Lenin and the leaders of the Communist
International fought against the tendency of the leaders of
the young American Communist Party to oppose the
demand for a Labor Party. They urged the Communist
Party to adopt the demand for a Labor Party and fight for
it in the working class as part of a strategy to win over the
leadership of masses of workers.
It was the great struggles to found the CIO in the mid
and late 1930s which again placed the issue of the forma­
tion of a labor party on the agenda for millions of workers.
T r o ts k y 's C o n trib u tio n
These were the conditions in which Trotsky made a
decisive contribution to the revolutionary movement in the
United States, in his formulation of the fight for a labor
party.
The issue had arisen soon after the founding of the Left
Opposition in the United States. In discussions with
American comrades in 1932, Trotsky did not favor
advancing the slogan for a Labor Party.
In his 1938 discussion with the leaders of the SWP, he
referred to this earlier period: “This question is very impor­
tant and very complicated. When for the first time the
(Communist) League (of America) considered this
question, some seven-eight years ago — whether we should
favor a labor party or not, whether we should develop
initiative on this score, then the prevailing sentiment was
not to do it, and that was absolutely correct. The perspec­
tive for development was not clear, but I believe that the
majority of us hoped that the development of our own
organization will be more speedy. On the other hand I
believe no one in our ranks foresaw during that period the
appearance of the CIO with this rapidity and this power. In
our perspective, we overestimated the possibility of the
development of our party at the expense of the Stalinists on
one hand, and on the other hand we didn’t see this powerful
trade union movement, and the rapid decline of American
capitalism.”
It was the transformation of the world political situa­
tion, and its reflection in the United States with the emer­
gence of the CIO, that now placed the Labor Party issue on
the agenda.
Trotsky developed the demand for a Labor Party in the
U.S. as a special motion alongside the transitional
program. He posed the demand for a labor party in opposi­
tion to all conceptions of a reformist solution to the crisis of
capitalism. For Trotsky, the demand for a Labor Party
corresponded to the next step the American working class
would be forced to take on the road to the socialist revolu­
tion.
It derived from a world historical analysis. It was never
based on considerations of exceptional American condi­
tions, but was the outcome of his profound study of the
death agony of capitalism and the crisis of American
imperialism.
The development of America as the leading imperialist
power meant that it had to absorb within its class relations
at home all the insoluble contradictions of world capital­
ism. All the historical privileges employed by the American
bourgeoisie to contain the working class, particularly its
ability to prevent the development of an independent labor
party, were being transformed into their opposites.
The volcanic explosions by which the American working
class had shattered the decades-long resistance of the bour­
geoisie to the building of industrial unions indicated that
the ability of the bourgeoisie to hold back the working class
politically was quickly being exhausted.
In discussion with SWP leaders in 1938, Trotsky posed
the emergence of a Labor Party in the following way:
“Now in the United States we can say that the charac­
teristic features of English development are presented in
even more concentrated form in a shorter period because
the whole history of the United States is shorter.
Practically, the development of the trade unions in the
United States began after the Civil War but these trade
unions were very backward even compared with the trade
unions of Great Britain. To a great degree they were mixed
trade unions of employers and employees, not fighting,
militant trade unions. They were sectional and tiny. They
were based on the craft system not according to industry,
and we see that it is only during the last two or three years
that the genuine trade unions developed in the United
States. This new movement is the CIO.
“What is the reason for the appearance of the CIO? It is
the decay of American capitalism. In Great Britain the
beginning of the decay of the capitalist system forced the
existing trade unions to unite into a political party. In the
United States, the same phenomena — the beginning of
the decline — produced only the industrial trade unions,
but these unions appeared on the scene only in time to
meet the new chapter of the decline of capitalism, or —
more correct — we can say that the first crisis of 1929-1933
gave the push and ended in the organization of the CIO.
But scarcely organized, the CIO meets the second crisis,
1937-1938 which continues and deepens.
“What does this fact signify? That it was a long time in
the United States before the organizations of trade unions
but now that genuine trade unions exist, they must make
the same evolution as the English trade unions. That is, on
the basis of declining capital, they are forced to turn to
political action. I believe that this is the most important
fact of the whole matter.”
Within the SWP leadership, Shachtman, in particular,
objected to the demand, claiming there was no support for
a labor party in the working class. Trotsky immediately
took up the fight against this impressionist position:
“We have no machine to take a referendum. We can
measure the mood only by action if the slogan is put on the
agenda. But what we can say is that the objective situation
is absolutely decisive. The trade unions as trade unions can
have only a defensive activity, losing members and
becoming more and more weak as the crisis deepens,
creating more and more unemployed...
“I say here what I said about the whole program of
transitional demands. The problem is not the mood of the
masses but the objective situation, and our job is to
confront the backward material of the masses with the
tasks which are determined by objective facts and not by
psychology. The same is absolutely correct for this specific
question on the labor party. If the class struggle is not to be

crushed, replaced by demoralization, then the movement
must find a new channel and this channel is political. That
is the fundamental argument in favor of this slogan.”
Trotsky showed that the development of this demand
was directly linked to the entire scientific world outlook of
Marxism, that a formal or impressionist approach on this
question was not just a difference on tactics but betrayed a
pragmatic method which, in fact, amounted to having no
strategy for power in the United States:
“We claim to have Marxism or Scientific Socialism.
What does ‘Scientific Socialism’ signify in reality? It
signifies that the party which represents this social science,
departs, as every science not from subjective wishes,
tendencies or moods but from objective facts, from the
material situation of the different classes and their rela­
tionships. Only by this method can we establish demands
adequate to the objective situation and only after this can
we adapt these demands and slogans to the given mentality
of the masses. But to begin with this mentality as the
fundamental fact would signify not a scientific but a
conjunctural, demagogic or adventuristic policy.
“One can ask why we didn’t foresee this development
five, six, seven years ago? Why did we declare during the
past period that we were not willing to fight for this slogan
of the labor party? The explanation is very simple. We were
absolutely sure, we Marxists, the initiators of the American
movement for the Fourth International, that world capital­
ism had entered into a period of decline. That is the period
when the working class is objectively educated and moves
subjectively, preparing for the socialist revolution. The
direction was the same in the United States, but the
question of direction is not sufficient. The other question is
the speed of its development; and in this respect, in view of
the strength of American capitalism, some of us, and
myself included, imagined that the ability of American
capitalism to resist against the destructive inner contra­
dictions would be greater and that for a certain period
American capitalism might use the decline of European
capital to cover a period of prosperity before its own
decline. How long a period? Ten to thirty years one could
say? Any way, I personally didn’t see that this sharp crisis
or series of crises would begin in the next period and
become deeper and deeper. That is why eight years ago
when I discussed this same question with American
comrades I was very cautious. I was very cautious in my
prognosis. My opinion was that we couldn’t foresee when
the American trade unions would come into a period where
they could be forced into political action. If this critical
period started in ten to fifteen years, then we, the revolu­
tionary organization, could become a great power directly
influencing the trade unions and becoming the leading
force.
“Now we must not reckon by our prognosis of yesterday
but by the situation of today. American capitalism is very
strong but its contradictions are stronger than capitalism
itself. The speed of decline came at American speed and
this created a new situation for the new trade unions, the
CIO even more than the AFL. In this situation it is worse
for the CIO than the AFL because the AFL is more capable
of resistance due to its aristocratic base. We must change
our program because the objective situation is totally
different from our former prognosis.
“What does this signify? That we are sure the working
class — the trade unions will adhere to the slogan of the
labor party? No, we are not sure that the workers will
adhere to the slogan of the labor party. When we begin the
fight we cannot be sure of being victorious. We can only say
21
our slogan corresponds to the objective situation and the
best elements will understand and the most backward
elements who don’t understand will be compromised.
“In Minneapolis we cannot say to the trade unions you
should adhere to the Socialist Workers Party. It would be a
joke even in Minneapolis. Why? Because the decline of
capitalism develops ten — a hundred times faster than the
speed of our party. It is a new discrepancy. The necessity of
a political party for the workers is given by the objective
conditions, but our party is too small with too little
authority in order to organize the workers into its own
ranks. That is why we must say to the workers, the masses,
you must have a party. But we cannot say immediately to
these masses, you must join our party. In a mass meeting
500 would agree on the need for a labor party, only five
agree to join our party, which shows that the slogan of a
labor party is an agitational slogan. The second slogan is
for the more advanced.
“Should we use both slogans or one? I say both. The first,
independent labor party, prepares the arena for our party.
The first slogan prepares and helps the workers to advance
and prepares the path for our party.”
Trotsky linked the demand for a labor party to agitation
on the full program of transitional demands. He specifi­
cally proposed that agitation for a labor party be combined
with agitation for a workers’ militia and workers’ control of
production. The task of the revolutionary party was to
translate into popular slogans the full objective revolu­
tionary content implied in the development of a labor
party.
Whereas the working class, in the initial stage of its
break from capitalist politics, may perceive the labor party
as an appendage to trade unionism, the revolutionary
party, as it forges links with the mass movement, must
fight to break it from spontaneous illusions:
“These demands are transitory because they lead from
capitalist society to the proletarian revolution, a conse­
quence insofar as they become the demands of the masses
as the proletarian government. We can’t stop only with the
day to day demands of the proletariat. We must give to the
most backward workers some concrete slogans that corres­
pond to their needs and that lead dialectically to the
conquest of power.”
Finally, Trotsky added one further point to his discus­
sions on the labor party with SWP leaders: “Before
finishing — a correction in the formulation of the ques­
tion: The labor party proposal is not a part of the program
of transitional demands but is a special motion.”
In other words, the labor party demand was not simply
one among many demands advanced by the party. It was
the cornerstone of the strategy for the social revolution in
the United States. It was from this standpoint that Trotsky
put forward the demand.
Trotsky’s discussions on the labor party represented an
immense contribution to the elaboration of a revolutionary
perspective in the United States. This pioneer work was
based on Trotsky’s vast historical experience in the
Russian Revolution and the fight against Stalinism.
Though presented in the somewhat fragmented form of
discussions, his analysis was the most advanced ever made
of the crisis of U.S. imperialism and the place of the Ameri­
can proletariat in the world revolution. His work on the
labor party question represented the first systematic
hammering out of a revolutionary strategy for the working
class in the heartland of imperialism.
22
It was one of the most decisive contributions that
Trotsky made to the building of the revolutionary party in
the United States. His assassination in 1940 at the hands of
the Stalinist GPU was an especially terrible blow to the
American working class.
C an n o n 's "A m e ric a n T h e s e s "
In the period during and following the Second World
War, James P. Cannon tried to take forward Trotsky’s work
on the labor party demand. Cannon’s “American Theses”
represented a serious attempt to elaborate a revolutionary
strategy for the American working class. The theses
reflected Cannon’s great confidence in the revolutionary
role of the American working class. It was, of course, impos­
sible for Cannon or anyone else to predict at that time the
precise way in which the crisis of world capitalism would
develop in the postwar period.
Nonetheless, Cannon’s contribution was significant: “In
reality, the American ruling class faces more insurmount­
able obstacles in ‘organizing the world’ than confronted
the German bourgeoisie in its repeated and abortive
attempt to attain a much more modest goal, namely:
‘organizing Europe.’
“The meteoric rise of U.S. imperialism to world supre­
macy comes too late. Moreover, American imperialism
rests increasingly on the foundations of world economy, in
sharp contrast to the situation prevailing before the First
World War, when it rested primarily on the internal market
— the source of its previous successes and equilibrium. But
the world foundation is today shot through with insoluble
contradictions; it suffers from chronic dislocations and is
mined with revolutionary powder kegs.
“American capitalism, hitherto only partially involved
in the death agony of capitalism as a world system, is
henceforth subject to the full and direct impact of all the
forces and contradictions that have debilitated the old
capitalist countries of Europe.”
Cannon’s thesis was, essentially, that American imper­
ialism was now the center of the world crisis and that,
therefore, “The revolutionary movement of the American
workers is an organic part of the world revolutionary
process. The revolutionary upheavals of the European
proletariat which lie ahead will complement, reinforce and
accelerate the revolutionary developments in the U.S. The
liberationist struggles of the colonial peoples against
imperialism which are unfolding before our eyes will exert a
similar influence. Conversely, each blow dealt by the
American proletariat to the imperialists at home will
stimulate, supplement and intensify the revolutionary
struggles in Europe and the colonies. Every reversal
suffered by imperialism anywhere will, in turn, produce
ever greater repercussions in this country, generating such
speed and power as will tend to reduce all time-intervals
both at home and abroad.”
Cannon lashed out at those who dismissed the prospects
for the socialist revolution in the United States because of
the “backwardness” of the American working class. “Much
has been said about the ‘backwardness’ of the American
working class as a justification for a pessimistic outlook,
the postponement of the socialist revolution to a remote
future and withdrawal from the struggle. This is a very
superficial view of the American workers and their
prospects.
“It is true that this class, in many respects the most ad­
vanced and progressive in the world, has hot yet taken the
road of independent political action on a mass scale. But
this weakness can be swiftly overcome. Under the compul­
sion of objective necessity not only backward peoples but
backward classes in advanced countries find themselves
driven to clear great distances in single leaps. As a matter
of fact, the American working class has already made one
such leap which has advanced it far ahead of its old
positions.”'
Thus Cannon pointed out: “The hopeless contradictions
of American capitalism, inextricably tied up with the death
agony of capitalism, are bound to lead to a social crisis of
such catastrophic proportions as will place the proletarian
revolution on the order of the day.
“In this crisis, it is realistic to expect that the American
workers, who attained trade-union consciousness and
organization within a single decade, will pass through
another great transformation in their mentality, attaining
political consciousness and organization.
“If in the course of this dynamic development a mass
labor party based on the trade unions is formed, it will not
represent a detour into reformist stagnation and futility, as
happened in England and elsewhere in the period of
capitalist ascent. From all indications, it will rather repre­
sent a preliminary stage in the political radicalization of
the American workers, preparing them for the direct
leadership of the revolutionary party.”
Cannon’s thesis, while based on Trotsky’s profound
analysis of the contradictions of U.S. imperialism, repre­
sented an important development on Trotsky’s work.
However, Cannon developed a completely mechanical
schema that the U.S. was heading for an immediate revolu­
tionary situation in the period of 1946-47.
In fact, the main line of Cannon’s perspectives were
vindicated — not in the immediate collapse of U.S. imper­
ialism, as he had predicted, but in the inflationary boom
which extended and deepened the crisis and prepared the
way for the emergence of the world revolution on a histori­
cally unprecedented scale.
However, instead of subjecting his perspective to a
thorough-going reexamination in light of the development
of the boom, tracing how the crisis of capitalism had
reached a new stage through it, Cannon gave way to the
surface impressions of the strength of U.S. imperialism, the
consolidation of the right-wing bureaucracy in the labor
movement and the growing McCarthyite witchhunts
against union militants (aided at all points by the work of
the agents of imperialism). His disorientation flowed
directly from the fact that he had paid hardly any serious
attention to the fight for dialectical materialism within the
party against pragmatism. When his perspectives were
confirmed, in a contradictory way, he was unable to grasp
it, develop the perspective or orient the movement
correctly. The famous Cannon “confidence” in the Ameri­
can working class turned into bitter cynicism. This was the
basis for the abandonment of Trotskyism by Cannon and
the SWP in 1963 and their reunification with the Pabloites.
The fight for the Labor Party, as part of the strategy of
the world revolution, now passed over to the International
Committee and to those who stood in political solidarity
with it in the United States — the Workers League. The
Workers League has maintained and developed this fight
throughout its entire history as the center of its struggle to
penetrate the working class. This issue was at the center of

the International Committee’s fight against the arch-rene­
gade Tim Wohlforth, who continuously tended to drop the
fight for a labor party and, in effect, abandon any perspec­
tive for bringing the working class to power.
The fight against Wohlforth’s brand of opportunism
within the Workers League meant a firm struggle to turn
out to the working class and to train a cadre to lead the
fight for the building of a labor party. Now this struggle has
reached a new stage.
Th e La b o r P a r ty and th e
S tra te g y fo r P o w e r
As developed by Trotsky and fought for by the Trotskyist
movement, the struggle for the labor party is the corner­
stone of the strategy for power in the United States. It is the
central “problem” of the American socialist revolution.
The solution of this “problem,” that is, the waging of a
determined, sustained and principled struggle for the
building of the labor party, can be undertaken only by a
revolutionary organization that is consciously developing
Marxism as a guide to its practice. Unless this is
understood and taken to heart by every member of the
Workers League, the “struggle for the labor party” will
never pass beyond the level of propagandism — or it can
become a left phrase that serves as a cover for opportunism
in practice.
Let us now sum up the position of the Workers League on
the historical significance of the struggle for the labor
party.
1. It is the world crisis and the world revolution that is
providing the impulse for the entrance of the working class
into the field of independent class political struggle. The
emergence of a mass labor party will be the historic link of
the struggles of the American working class with the new
stage in the world revolution. The growth of the labor party
: movement will proceed out of and alongside of the most
i explosive class battles in the history of this country. The
j masses will be driven forward by the brutal impact of the
| capitalist crisis on all the conditions of life. This process
has already begun, indeed, it is much further advanced
than those who are already in the revolutionary movement
are prepared to believe. The crisis will produce vast
changes in the consciousness of millions. The America
| which they may have seen as “the land of unlimited
i opportunity” will be seen as “the land of unlimited
’,suffering.”
Statistics have already shown that millions of working
class and middle class people in the United States have
tried to keep abreast of inflation by obtaining various forms
of credit — from charge plates and bank loans to
mortgages. A colossal burden is weighing down upon
countless people who slave week after week to earn a
paycheck that is substantially used up in the repayment of
old debts. What vast tensions are building up within the
inner structure of society. Millions are dependent upon a
job tomorrow in order to pay for necessities purchased
23
yesterday! The credit figures boggle the imagination. There
are presently 600 million credit cards in circulation. The
average working class family uses as much as 40 percent of
its monthly income to meet payments on loans and credit.
The total debt for privately owned housing in the United
States is more than one trillion dollars. American
capitalism is burning the candle at both ends. On the one
hand, it has deliberately employed credit to foster an
artificial consumer boom. But the growth of recession and
inflation undercuts that boom. In fact, the crisis creates a
vicious cycle: as workers are hit by layoffs and mounting
inflation, their debts go unpaid, credit is cancelled,
consumers stop buying because they have no money — and
the whole credit structure tilts over and collapses. What is
unfolding is an economic chain reaction of disintegration.
Threatened with the destruction of all they have worked
for, with the destruction of their lives and their futures,
millions will move into unyielding struggle. This will be the
motor force for the development of the labor party.
2. The Workers League insists that the labor party is at
the very center of the revolutionary strategy in the United
States. We reject any suggestion that the labor party is
nothing more than a working hypothesis. The fate of the
working class cannot be left to either guesswork or idle
speculation. But here we must make a decisive
qualification: the struggle for the labor party proceeds
from and is inseparable from the struggle to construct the
Workers League as the revolutionary leadership of the
working class. The labor party will not emerge
spontaneously. Only metaphysicians would speak of
I “inevitable” stages of development. The labor party must
i be made inevitable through the conscious intervention
j j of the revolutionary party in the ever-expanding
\ j spontaneous movement of the working class.
3. Any discussion on the labor party which sees this
developm ent outside of the active struggle for
revolutionary leadership within the working class is
nothing else but a form of opportunism and treachery. The
old formal conception that a labor party is needed in order
to make the working class “ripe” for revolutionary ideas is
based on petty-bourgeois skepticism about the role of both
the working class and the revolutionary party. The implicit
argument contained in this perspective is that the working
class must first go through the school of labor party
reformism before it can be mobilized around a
revolutionary program. In practice, this position means
subservience to the trade union bureaucracy. Moreover,
the Party is pushed into the background because the
development of the labor party is seen as something sealed
off from the struggle of the Party and the training of the
cadre as Marxists.
This skeptical and opportunist view was summed up
most clearly by James P. Cannon in 1954 in his article,
“Implications of the Labor Party.” He wrote:
“To imagine that the present official leaders can make
the great shift from the Democratic Party to independent
labor politics, and maintain their leadership smoothly in
an entirely new and different situation, requires one to
overlook the basic causes which will force them to make
this shift. That is, the radicalization of the rank and file
24
and their revolt against the old policy. No matter how it is
formally brought about, a labor party will be the product
of a radical upsurge in the ranks of the trade unionists.
The more the officialdom resists the great change, the
stronger will grow the sentiment for a different leadership.
Even if the present leaders sponsor the labor party at
the start, they will be under strong criticism for their tardi­
ness. The real movement for a labor party, which will
come from below, will begin to throw up alternative
leadership in the course of its development/' (Emphasis
added.)
This prognosis, written in the years of Cannon’s political
degeneration and capitulation to Pabloism, is utterly
opportunist and anti-Marxist. It openly portrays the trade
union bureaucracy as the motivators of the labor party. But
the whole experience of the AFL-CIO has shown that the
bureaucracy will stop at nothing to destroy any genuine
independent political movement by the working class
against the two capitalist parties. Any political movement
of any sort led by any section of the trade union
bureaucracy, whether for a “third” party or even for
something called a “labor party,” would in no sense
represent a real political break from the apron strings of the
bourgeoisie. Cannon’s talk of a “great shift from the
Democratic Party to independent labor politics” is
something quite different from “independent class
politics.” Independent labor politics is social democratic
reformist politics, something entirely different than the
independent political mobilization of the working class
against the bourgeoisie. The bureaucracy might, under
certain conditions, accept the necessity for embarking on
some form of “independent labor politics” — that is,
something like the New Democratic Party in Canada or,
perhaps, something which recreates the fraudulent
“Progressive Party” Wallace movement in 1948 which was
run by the Stalinists. Today, the Socialist Workers Party
and the Communist Party are for “labor politics” — that
is, the politics of the ruling class carried out from within
the labor movement.
“Independent class politics” is possible only through the
intervention of the revolutionary party within the
spontaneous movement of the working class. While the
working class, beneath the impact of the crisis,
spontaneously gravitates toward a break with the bourgeois
parties, this break cannot be consummated without the
conscious struggle of the Workers League against all forms
of opportunism within the workers movement, and, finally,
against all manifestations of the domination of bourgeois
ideology over the working class.
4. We have quoted Cannon extensively precisely because
his position sums up what has for so long passed for the
“official” view on the labor party — a view which divorced
the whole conception of the labor party from the
fundamental issues of the struggle for Marxism. This
Cannonite position was explicitly opportunist. The heart of
the matter is this: the Workers League does not have a
strategy for the labor party; it has a strategy for the
socialist revolution. The central historical significance of
the labor party in the context of the development of the
American proletariat is that it is the vehicle through which
the working class will transcend the spontaneity of
bourgeois trade unionism and begin the struggle for power.
That no labor party exists in the United States is the
outcome of particular conditions relating to the specific
development of American capitalism. This has given the
question of the labor party such great significance in the
workers movement because, under the guidance of the
revolutionary party, it focuses the attention of the working
class on the burning importance of independent class
politics — the struggle for power — directed against the
ruling class. But the essential issue is that which confronts
the working class in every country. It is through the form of
the struggle for the labor party that Marxism must be
brought into the American working class. That is, the
essential content of the struggle for the labor party is the
training of revolutionary Marxist cadre from the working
class, youth, students and all strata willing to fight
capitalism.
Cannon proceeded from abstract guesswork about the
possibilities for a labor party. He then saw this labor party
as the “salvation” of the Trotskyist movement in the
United States, giving it its first real opportunity to win the
leadership of the working class. Ironically, this position
tacitly suggested that the prospects for Trotskyism in the
United States depend upon some section of the
bureaucracy making the mistake of launching a labor party
of which it would eventually lose control!
But in reality, the labor party itself — as the transitional
form through which the spontaneous movement of the
masses shall pass on the road to power — will be the
historical by-product of the struggle for Marxism waged by
the Workers League.
The emergence of a mass labor party will open up
tremendous opportunities for the Workers League to win
the masses. But the emergence of this mass labor party
depends entirely on the ability of the Trotskyist movement
to recruit and train the vanguard of the working class in the
months ahead. In practice, this means that the struggle for
the labor party will be led by the Workers League. It is the
forces that our party recruits and trains from all sections of
the working class and the most devoted sections of the
middle class that will spearhead the struggle for the
political independence of the working class.
5. The labor party will not simply be a product “of a
radical upsurge in the ranks of the trade unionists.” There
is no question that the spontaneous upsurge in trade union
struggles will play a crucial role in the emergence of the
labor party. But this is a narrow view whose basic error is to
conceive of the struggle for the labor party as nothing more
than the direct extension of trade unionism into the
domain of politics. This is a reformist conception. The
mass movement for a break with the politics of the
bourgeoisie will emerge out of a spontaneous explosion
sparked by the anger of all sections of the oppressed — the
unemployed, housewives with hungry families, trade
unionists, workers without trade unions, and, above all, the
youth.
6. The most serious error made by Cannon in his
examination of the labor party question was his assertion:

“The real movement for a labor party, which will come
from below, will begin to throw up an alternative
leadership in the course of its development.” This is out-
and-out opportunism and it reveals what has been the
main weakness of all previous “campaigns” for the labor
party: the ever-recurring tendency to formally separate the
problems of the struggle for the labor party from the
historical problems of the development of revolutionary
leadership. In the past, the labor party question has been
seen from only one side — that is, as a strategy for breaking
the working class from the stranglehold of bourgeois
politics. But the problem of this stranglehold of bourgeois
politics over the working class has been seen as simply a
problem of the working class as a thing-in-itself. That is,
the labor party slogan has been seen as a means for
overcoming the lag in the political development of the
working class.
But this one-sided approach ignores the following: the
labor party question is not just a problem of the working
class in general. It is principally a problem of the
consciousness of the revolutionary vanguard. Nothing is
Th e Com bined C o u n te r- R e vo lu tio n a ry Role o f
Stalinism and Revisionism in th e U n ite d S ta te s
The entrance of the American working
class into the field of political struggles
against the state inevitably obliges the
Stalinists to play the role of criminal sabo­
teurs more cynically and despicably than
ever.
Working alongside of the Stalinists, unashamedly
accompanying them in their move to the right, is the
Socialist Workers Party. It can be said without any
exaggeration that the interventions of the SWP
within the workers movement are virtually indis­
tinguishable from those of the Stalinists.
The Communist Party and the SWP play what amounts
to a combined counter-revolutionary role within the labor
movement in the United States. That a reactionary
division of labor exists between the CP and the SWP was
25
more insidious than the formal and metaphysical
counterposing of the consciousness of the class to the
consciousness of the Party. This leads to the subjective
idealist counterposing of the “correct ideas” of the Party to
the “backwardness” of the class.
“Physician, heal thyself!” The working class has not
broken from the stranglehold of the bourgeoisie because
there has not yet emerged a revolutionary leadership
sufficiently mature and ideologically grounded in Marxism
to divert the spontaneous movement of the working class
into consciously directed revolutionary channels. The
Workers League — and only the Workers League — is
building such a leadership. The movement for a labor party
will not come “from below” and new leadership won’t be
thrown up “in the course of its development.” The
movement for the labor party will come from above, from
the Trotskyist cadre trained in the Workers League in the
course of 12 years of struggle against all forms of
opportunism and bourgeois ideology in the workers’
movement.
more or less conceded by revisionist leader Mary-Alice
Waters in a recent speech. Comparing the policies of the
Stalinists and the SWP, she was hard put to find any
differences between their programs. Referring to an article
in the Stalinist Daily World by its labor editor, Waters
said: “Aside from a few words, it sounds like something we
could have written.”
No organization has been more slavish in its adaptation
to the Soviet bureaucracy than the American Communist
Party. Dating all the way back to the days when the Love-
stone-Foster faction expelled Cannon from the Commun­
ist Party in 1928, the American Stalinists have functioned
as a tool of Soviet Stalinist policies. Its whole history has
been one of drastic twists and turns (euphemistically called
“change of line”) in accordance with the needs of the
foreign policy of the Soviet bureaucracy. In the early 1930s,
the Stalinists carried out the ultra-leftist policies of the
Third Period with devastating consequences to their own
development within the labor movement. They then
26
switched to the policies of the Popular Front. When Stalin
signed the Non-Aggression Pact with Hitler, the CP went
into temporary opposition to Roosevelt and campaigned
against his plans to involve the United States in the
imperialist war. Immediately after the invasion of the
USSR in 1941, the CP became the most patriotic party in
the United States and provided the muscle for the enforce­
ment of the notorious “no-strike” pledge. Following the
Stalin-Roosevelt-Churchill conference in Casablanca and
Teheran, the Communist Party adapted itself to the policy
of Stalinist-imperialist collaboration by formally dis­
solving itself as a political party.
Then, as the Cold War began to loom, French Stalinist
leader and GPU agent Jacques Duclos sent his famous
letter criticizing the policies of CPUSA leader Earl
Browder — even though his liquidation of the CP had been
carried out on Stalin’s instructions. The Central Com­
mittee of the CP immediately removed Browder and
shifted course. In order to counter the Marshall Plan, the
CP opposed Truman by supporting Henry Wallace, a self-
proclaimed American “Tory” whose only disagreement
with Truman was that he believed that it was in the best
interests of U.S. imperialism to arrive at an agreement with
the Kremlin bureaucracy.
From the 1930s on, the CP was not only a political agency
of the Kremlin bureaucracy. It was also a direct instru­
ment of the bureaucracy’s political police, the GPU. The
Communist Party played a central role in all the conspira­
cies prepared by the GPU against the life of Trotsky and
the whole Fourth International. The ring of informers
working inside the SWP who helped set up the murder of
Trotsky — like Cannon’s secretary, Sylvia Franklin, and
Floyd Cleveland Miller — were provided by the Commun­
ist Party. The Communist Party enthusiastically
applauded the Moscow Trials and the liquidation of the
Old Bolsheviks. The Communist Party is drenched in their
blood. The present leaders of the Communist Party, such
as Gus Hall, came into prominence after Khrushchev’s
revelations of Stalin’s crimes and then the suppression of
the Hungarian Revolution which led to the desertion of
nearly four out of five members.
Today, the American Stalinists seek to reproduce their
counter-revolutionary role of the 1930s, but on an even
more criminal scale. The CP stands today for the total
subordination of the class struggle in the United States to
the reactionary “Detente” policies of the Soviet bureauc­
racy. In practice, this means that the political activity of
the working class is not to extend beyond the bounds of
pressuring the Carter administration to conciliate with the
Kremlin. The central task of the labor movement, the
Stalinists insist, is to pressure Carter to sign a treaty on
Strategic Arms Limitations. The program of the CP for the
American working class reduces itself to backing that
faction within the Carter administration which appears
more amenable to detente. In a recent article, Stalinist
Victor Perlo wrote:
“What is the role of the Left and the Communists, in the
peace movement? We must enter and build the broadest
possible coalitions with other peace groups, we must join
many of them, we must on occasion even be in de facto
alliance with the Vances and the Warnkes in the Adminis­
tration.”
In other words, the Stalinists openly proclaim that their
Party is committed toward collaboration with the most
ruthless imperialist government in the world.
But it should be understood that the role of Stalinism
within the United States is not merely a matter of tactical
maneuvers aimed at pressuring the U.S. ruling class to
pursue diplomacy favorable to the Kremlin. If the policies
of the CP are seen as only the reflection of Soviet diploma­
tic needs, then the door is left open for the totally revision­
ist conception that the worsening relations between the
USSR and the U.S. might create conditions in which the
American Stalinists are driven to pursue revolutionary
policies. While it is possible that the CP may be obliged to
make various gestures to the left, Stalinism will never be
anything else except the principal counter-revolutionary
agency within the workers' movement. More vital to the
Kremlin bureaucracy than the services provided by the
Stalinists to its diplomacy is the CP’s role as the principal
political instrument through which the American working
class is deflected away from revolutionary struggle.
The Soviet bureaucracy fears the revolutionary poten­
tial of the American working class more than anything
except... that of the working class in the USSR. It instinc­
tively recognizes that any independent class movement by
the American workers represents a mortal danger to U.S.
imperialism and, hence, to itself. For Stalinism, its most
fundamental requirement is the political strangulation of
the American working class. It will pursue whatever
methods the bureaucracy deems suitable to achieve this
goal. This accounts for the utter political depravity which
the American Stalinists have demonstrated within the
workers movement m the United States for the past 45
years.
Nevertheless, it would be mistaken to see the Commun­
ist Party only as an entity that has been artificially grafted
on to the American labor movement by the Soviet bureauc­
racy. In the United States, Stalinism found a national base
of support for policies that originated in the needs of the
Soviet bureaucracy. Like the medieval plagues that ori­
ginated in the East but flourished in the unsanitary condi­
tions of life in Western Europe, Stalinism quite naturally
hooked itself into the milieu of the trade anion bureauc­
racy and middle class radicalism. Similarly, Stalinism
found that the traditions of pragmatism and even popu­
lism provided a very hospitable political climate. In other
words, the Stalinists have been able to utilize all that was
backward in the political development of the American
labor movement. We make this point only to emphasize
that there is no escaping the struggle against Stalinism in
the United States. To maintain that the American
Communist Party is not part of the workers movement in
the United States — as Cannon told Trotsky in 1940 — is to
dangerously underestimate the role of Stalinism. It is as
much a “part” of the labor movement — if one wishes to
use this awkward phrase — as the labor bureaucracy of the
AFL-CIO.
Furthermore — and this is the most important — the
American working class can only be brought consciously
into the world revolution if its vanguard is systematically
educated in the whole history of Bolshevism and the
struggle against Stalinism. The American working class, no
less than the Russian, is the legitimate heir of the October
Revolution. Its own historic development cannot be under­
stood if examined only from the standpoint of immediate
American experiences. The American working class bears
on its shoulders the weight of Stalinism which, though it
grew within the Soviet Union on the basis of the bureauc­
racy, also depended upon specific international condi­
tions: the delay and then the defeats of the European
revolution. The struggle against Stalinism in the United
States is thus an integral part of the world offensive against
Stalinism through which the criminal policies of the

bureaucracy will be defeated and the road paved for both
the political revolutions in the Soviet Union, Eastern
Europe and China and the social revolutions in the capital­
ist countries.
The right-wing trade union bureaucracy desperately
depends upon the services of the Communist Party. And
the Stalinists specifically orient themselves toward colla­
boration with the bureaucracy on the common program of
beheading any independent political development by the
American working class. In a recently-published pamphlet
outlining the “strategy” of the Communist Party, its secre­
tary Gus Hall wrote:
“However, it would be wrong to believe that it is no
longer possible to influence Carter’s course. His very oppor­
tunism means that he will respond to pressure from
another direction. But the pressure must be consid­
erable enough to indicate where the people really
stand.'* (Emphasis in the original).
The Stalinists advance the most reactionary of all
perspectives: that the state is a supra-class structure that
can be won over to the side of the working class through the
exertion of superior pressure. Carter is presented as a be­
fuddled “opportunist” (the word is applied absurdly in this
context) whose only fault is that he does not know of the
grief of the people. Here, the Stalinists come close to
substituting a fairy tale for political analysis.
The strategy of the Communist Party boils down toward
totally subordinating the working class to the Democratic
Party. As Hall wrote about the 1978 Congressional elec­
tions:
“This November the entire House of Representatives
(435 members) will be elected, about a third of the Senate,
and governors and legislators in many states. This means
there will be electoral activity in every state, and consid­
erable public debate on the major issues of the day. We
must be deeply involved in affecting the debate and the
outcome of the elections; we must raise the major issues,
work to defeat the reactionary candidates, and help to elect
a progressive bloc.”
Nothing could be clearer: the electoral activity of the
Communist Party, irregardless of whether it rims candi­
dates, is directed toward propping up the Democratic
Party. It stands absolutely opposed to the construction of
an independent labor party. Occasionally, of course, the
Stalinists talk about “independent action” by the labor
movement. What they mean by this is a Popular Front
amalgam of liberals and labor bureaucrats. Hall provided
an example of what the CP considers to be “forces begin­
ning — but only beginning — to mobilize a political and
electoral resistance to the Right and to Carter’s policies.”
He listed the Democratic Agenda Movement — “composed
of leading forces in the unions, the ADA and some other
liberal Democrats.” Hall specifically insisted that the
Communist Party, in organizing these coalitions for
“independent action,” “does not insist that its members
break their ties with the old parties.”
Within the trade unions, the Stalinists are again directed
toward buttressing the bureaucracy against the upsurge of
the rank and file. They call this alliance “Left-Center
Unity.” Hall explained this in the following way:
“As the crisis deepens so do the policies of class colla­
boration go into a deeper crisis. It is much more difficult for
the Right elements to put over their ideas. As a result, the
Right has been losing its influence on the Center forces.
The Right forces have become more isolated, and the
Center forces have become more active. These forces have
started to look for alliances and relationships with more
27
Left forces.”
In other words, with the trade union bureaucracy in
crisis, it seeks to strengthen its position against a rebel­
lious working class by forging closer ties with the Stalin­
ists. The policy of the Stalinists is to utilize this “oppor­
tunity” to bolster the bureaucracy and place a straitjacket
over the movement of the working class.
There is no question that the American working class will
have an opportunity to see the Stalinists in action, exer­
cising their unlimited capacity for treachery. Workers will
develop the most profound hatred for Stalinism. Stalinism
can and will be laid low — but this requires that the Party
systematically educate the working class in the lessons of
Trotsky’s struggle against bureaucracy.
The main opponents of this fight have been the revision­
ists of the Socialist Workers Party. Since their split with
the International Committee and abandonment of
Trotskyism in 1963, they have worked in harness with the
Stalinists to block the building of Trotskyist leadership in
the working class.
This is what lies behind the revisionists’ latest “turn” on
the labor party question. For years, they shelved the
demand while they sank themselves in the swamp of
middle class protest politics. Now they cynically revive this
demand as part of their division of labor with the Stalin­
ists to prop up the bureaucracy and block the struggle for
power.
The Stalinists are the open opponents of the Labor
Party, desperately seeking to channel the movement of the
working class back into a refurbished, “progressive,
people’s” Democratic Party. They were the main backers
and the ideological spearhead of UAW chief Douglas
Fraser’s “liberal-labor” strategy conference in Detroit on
October 17.
But they know that, if this effort fails, they must have a
safety valve to relieve the enormous pressure building up in
the ranks for a total break with the capitalist parties. This
is where the revisionists come in.
Their job is to cut off the labor party from its revolu­
tionary content, to strangle the mass movement of the
working class and buttress the counter-revolutionary
bureaucracy.
In the course of their radicalization, the masses pass
through centrist stages of development, including the labor
party. But this is a mass movement, explosive in its
development, as millions wrench themselves free from the
domination of capitalist politics and enter powerful battles
against the ruling class and its state machine, which bring
them face to face with the struggle for power.
The revisionists however are out to set a trap for the
masses, to block their independent political movement.
Instead of a break by the masses from the two capitalist
parties, they want to add another one on — a third, govern­
ment party “with labor participation,” dominated by the
bureaucracy to smother the mass movement of the
working class and chain it all the more effectively to the
capitalist state.
To cany this out, the revisionists totally repudiate the
Transitional Program and the Labor Party demand, as
Trotsky formulated it.
This is made very clear in a recent article by SWP leader
Frank Lovell entitled: “The Transitional Program: A Stra­
tegy for the Unions Today.”
The title itself reveals the complete rejection of Trotsky’s
perspective. The Transitional Program is not a “strategy
for the unions,” today or any other time.
Trotsky made this clear in the Transitional Program:
 28
“Trade unions do not offer, and in line with their task,
composition, and manner of recruiting membership,
cannot offer a finished revolutionary program; in conse­
quence, they cannot replace the party. The building of
national revolutionary parties as sections of the Fourth
International is the central task of the transitional epoch.”
The Transitional Program was a strategy for power in the
international working class, for the “systematic mobiliza­
tion of the masses for the proletarian revolution.” Bolshe­
vik politics never begin from the trade unions, but from the
building of the party. But this is precisely what Lovell’s
and the SWP’s position is aimed against. Their purpose is
to turn the Transitional Program into a grab-bag of
reformist demands, refitted for the use of any labor
bureaucrat.
Thus, Lovell writes that the program’s purpose “was to
bridge the gap between the daily social demands of the
workers and other victims of capitalism and the winning of
government power by mass working class parties every­
where.”
This is a blatant distortion of Trotskyism, borrowed
straight from the handbook of Social Democracy. It omits
one thing — the Fourth International.
What “mass working class parties” are the revisionists
talking about? The German Social Democrats and the
British Labourites are both “mass working class parties”
who have won “government power” — that is, they run the
capitalist state to attack the working class and open the
door to the counter-revolution.
The Transitional Program was written precisely to break
the stranglehold of these “old workers’ organizations” over
the masses.
“The Fourth International declares uncompromising war
on the bureaucracies of the Second, Third, Amsterdam and
Anarcho-syndicalist Internationals, as on their centrist
satellites; on reformism without reforms; democracy in
alliance with the GPU; pacifism without peace; anarchism
in the service of the bourgeoisie; on ‘revolutionists’ who live
in deathly fear of revolution.”
But the revisionists propose to “bridge the gap” be­
tween the masses and the bureaucrats, that is, boost them
up and provide them with a left cover.
Trotsky warned in the Transitional Program: “In periods
of acute class struggle, the leading bodies of the trade
unions aim to become masters of the mass movement in
order to render it harmless. This is already occurring
during the period of simple strikes, especially in the case of
the mass sit-down strikes which shake the principle of
bourgeois property. In time of war or revolution, when the
bourgeoisie is plunged into exceptional difficulties, trade
union leaders usually become bourgeois ministers.”
Nothing more clearly brings out the kind of “labor
party” the revisionists are talking about: one in which
trade union leaders become “bourgeois ministers” in order
to render the mass movement “harmless.” Lovell’s descrip­
tion makes this clear:
“The labor party will put miners, auto workers, truck
drivers, carpenters, and other working men and women in
city and county governments, state legislatures and in the
U.S. Congress. These workers will support mass rallies and
demonstrations of workers for jobs, universal health care,
public education and all other working class needs. They
will be the legislative representatives of working people,
just as the Republicans and Democrats are representatives
of employers and other rich people.”
When the revisionists call for a labor party, they mean
the creation of a popular front — lending assistance to the
capitalist parties in disciplining the working class. During
the Chicago mayoralty campaign, SWP candidate Andrew
Pulley attended a closed back room meeting with the
defeated Daley machine candidate, Michael Bilandic, the
Democratic candidate Jane Byrne and the Republican
candidate. Among the topics discussed was how the police
department was to be run and to settle differences on the
choosing of the police commissioner.
The revisionists’ conception of a labor party is a political
machine for the bureaucracy, which occasionally places
token demands on the Democrats and Republicans but
which, at all times, blocks the independent movement of
the working class against the capitalist state.
Contained within all these formulations is the revision­
ists’ attack on the Marxist theory of the state.
“If humanity is to survive and move forward,” they
write, “the working class must have its own mass party, a
party that intends to win government power, establish a
workers administration, and bring about socialism.”
Since when has it been the position of the Trotskyist
movement that the labor party will establish socialism?
That can only be carried out through the revolutionary
overthrow and smashing of the capitalist state and the
establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The
labor party and the demand for a workers’ government are
necessary only insofar as they prepare the masses for that
struggle.
But the revisionists’ position is a slightly more sophis­
ticated version of the “peaceful road to socialism” via the
election to office of a “workers’ administration.” “Govern­
ment power,” “workers’ administration,” “mass working
class parties” — all these are carefully calculated revisions
and alterations introduced by the SWP to establish a basis
for collaboration with Stalinism and the labor bureauc­
racy against the working class.
Whenever the revisionists do speak about a labor party,
they do so in conjunction with their demands for a black
party, a Chicano party, a Puerto Rican party, etc., etc.
There is nothing inconsistent in this — one demand tries to
divert the working class away from independent political
action, the others try to split workers, in the most reac­
tionary way, along racial lines.
The revisionists have become the foremost defenders of
every action by the capitalist state to foment racial divi­
sions in the working class.
In 1975 they led the yells for “Federal troops in Boston”
to enforce court-ordered busing. They placed the respon­
sibility for school segregation on the “racist white workers”
and led a whole campaign demanding the government send
in the army to occupy whole working class neighborhoods
to enforce the court desegregation order.
This year, they have joined in with the Stalinists on the
Bakke case to demand the federal courts enforce racial
quotas on the campuses and at work locations.
Undoubtedly, one of the first things the revisionists
would have a “workers’ administration” do would be to
send troops in to occupy major cities in order to enforce
racial quotas!
Thus, Stalinism and revisionism play today a combined

counter-revolutionary role within the American labor
movement, under conditions of the disintegration of the
Democratic Party, the growing crisis and panic of the
bureaucracy, and the mass upsurge of the working class.
The recent “liberal-labor” strategy session held in
Detroit was designed to head off the movement of the
working class towards a labor party and prop up the
Democrats. Though it ended in a shambles, the conference
29
did have one merit — it provided a clear picture of the
lineup of forces emerging in the working class.
This gathering was sponsored by Walter Mondale,
chaired by Douglas Fraser, politically orchestrated by the
Stalinists and hailed by the revisionists. This is the lineup
for the American Popular Front.
Only the Workers League fights to expose and smash up
this conspiracy against the working class while fighting to
organize and lead the mass movement for a labor party.
 PART II
T H E I N T E R N A T IO N A L C O M M IT T E E
A N D T H E S T R U G G L E F O R T R O T S K Y IS M
T H E F IG H T A G A I N S T P A B L O IS M A N D T H E F O U N D I N G
O F T H E I N T E R N A T I O N A L C O M M IT T E E
The historic responsibility for the building of the revolu­
tionary party and the conquest of power in the United
States belongs irrefutably and uniquely to the Workers
League. The correctness of this proposition has been veri­
fied in the course of more than 12 years of struggle to
defend the continuity of Trotskyism against the crimes and
betrayals of Stalinism, revisionism and all the agencies of
world imperialism. Though barred from affiliation by the
reactionary Voorhis Act, the Workers League is first and
foremost the product of the International Committee’s 25
years of principled struggle against Pabloite revisionism,
which has found its most counter-revolutionary expression
in the leadership and politics of the Socialist Workers
Party. The quarter-century history of the International
Committee, dating back to 1953, constitutes the richest
chapter in the development of world Trotskyism.
The foundation for revolutionary practice, the indis­
pensable basis for any real orientation to the working class
from the standpoint of the struggle for power, is the tho­
rough assimilation of the entire body of historical
experiences through which the International Committee
has passed since 1953. The training of Trotskyist cadre is
only possible in the struggle to base every aspect and detail
of the party’s political work on the historical conquests of
the International Committee, derived from the battle
against revisionism. This is because it has been
indisputably demonstrated on a world scale that the monu­
mental political heritage of Trotsky’s struggle against
Stalinism — beginning with his October 1922 alliance with
Lenin to defend the monopoly of foreign trade in the USSR
and with the founding of the Left Opposition on the basis of
Trotsky’s earliest warnings against the dangers of bureau­
cratism in the fall of 1923 — has been carried forward into
the present period solely along the historical lines laid
down with the formation of the International Committee of
the Fourth International in the autumn of 1953.
The emergence of Pabloite revisionism within the Fourth
International in the early 1950s represented the most
serious attack on Trotskyism since the period of the Mos­
cow Trials and the assassination of Trotsky. It represented
an outright capitulation to the pressures exerted by world
imperialism upon the Trotskyist movement in an entirely
new stage of the former’s political and economic crisis.
Pabloism entirely rejected any independent political role
for either the working class or the Trotskyist movement.
The perspective of the Fourth International and the social
revolution was replaced in favor of the idealist conception
of bureaucratic “self-reform” and centuries of degenerated
workers states. The driving force of the regeneration of the
USSR was no longer considered to be the political
revolution against Stalinism but rather maneuvers within
the Kremlin bureaucratic clique.
The International Committee was formed in November
1953 to combat Pabloite revisionism. The historical
significance of this struggle was articulated in the “Open
Letter” written by James P. Cannon, founder and leader of
the Socialist Workers Party.
“This faction,” he wrote, referring to the Pabloites, “ is
now working consciously and deliberately to disrupt, split,
and break up the historically created cadres of Trotskyism
in the various countries and to liquidate the Fourth
International.”
The real nature of Pabloism as the political expression of
wholesale capitulation to imperialism was made abso­
lutely clear in the methods and positions of its faction in
the United States. The main leaders of the Pabloite faction
(Clarke, Cochran and Bartell) called for a virtual end of all
Trotskyist activity in the working class. They demanded
the liquidation of “The Militant” and an exclusive orienta­
tion to the shattered remnants of the Stalinist forces in the
trade unions. Their battle cry was “Junk the old
Trotskyism!” This was an out-and-out right-wing tendency
which found in Pabloism a platform for renegacy. It is no
accident that the leader of the American Pabloites, Bert
Cochran, is today a toady of the Democratic Party, the
author of an adoring biography of Harry Truman, and a
good friend of Zbigniew Brzezinski.
The International Committee was founded principally
by the British and French sections and the SWP in order to
organize the struggle internationally against Pabloite
revisionism on the basis of the “Open Letter.” However,
within months of the consummation of the split, the SWP
began to pull back from the struggle against Pabloism.
This was due in no small measure to the fact that Cannon
feared the consequences of a full-going struggle against
revisionism among those he counted as his supporters
inside the SWP. When the struggle against the Cochranites
first began, Cannon had found himself within the minority.
Significantly, among the sympathizers of Pablo in the
leadership of the SWP were Joseph Hansen and George
Novack — the former an unmasked FBI agent and the
latter his accomplice. The impact of the post-war boom
was making itself felt inside the SWP with a growing
skepticism and pessimism about the revolutionary role of
the American working class. The extent of disorientation
within the SWP. was reflected in the belief that the
emergence of McCarthyism represented the beginnings of
fascism in the United States. This position was not so
much the product of an episodic misjudgment as it was the
indication of a very incorrect assessment of the whole

nature of the post-war period.
This growing cynicism and pessimism within the SWP
left it disarmed at the very point when the political
explosions which wracked Stalinism in 1956—Khrush­
chev’s secret speech which admitted a portion of Stalin’s
crimes and the Hungarian Revolution — not only provided
a complete political vindication of Trotskyism but also an
unchallengeable historical verification of its perspective for
the political revolution.
The reasons for Cannon’s political degeneration cannot
be explained solely by the unfavorable objective condi­
tions in the United States during the 1950s. While conser­
vatism predominated in the American working class, the
overall political situation held great promise. Stalinism
was being torn apart. Great national liberation move­
ments were driving forward against imperialism. World
capitalism had been completely incapable of inflicting a
defeat upon the working class in any advanced capitalist
country. The main reason for Cannon’s political collapse in
the 1950s, after having defended Trotskyism, many times
heroically, for nearly thirty years, is to be found in his
failure to develop dialectical materialist theory as a guide
to practice.
In the months before his assassination, Leon Trotsky
made his last great contribution to ensuring the historical
continuity of Bolshevism. In 1939-1940, there emerged
within the Socialist Workers Party a petty-bourgeois
minority faction led by Max Shachtman, James Burnham
and Martin Abern. They constituted an unprincipled bloc
which, succumbing to the pressures of American imper­
ialism on the eve of the Second World War, sought to over­
throw all the historical principles and traditions reasserted
in the founding of the Fourth International. The immediate
issue which united them was opposition to the SWP’s
defense of the USSR as a workers state in the wake of the
Stalin-Hitler Pact and the Soviet invasion of Finland.
Their refusal to defend the USSR against imperialism was
the manifestation of their capitulation to the pressures of
democratic public opinion in the United States.
But more fundamentally, they were drawn together by
their hostility to dialectical materialism, the world scien­
tific outlook of Marxism. The petty-bourgeois professor in
New York University, Burnham, openly rejected Marxism
in favor of pragmatism; Shachtman assumed the position
of an agnostic, stating that the value of dialectical
materialism to revolutionary politics had never been estab­
lished.
It was Trotsky who had to assume the leading role in the
struggle against the first major revisionist trend to emerge
within the Fourth International. None of the leaders of the
SWP were theoretically prepared to consciously direct the
struggle in defense of Marxism against Burnham and
Shachtman. Trotsky had long been aware of this serious
theoretical weakness within the American movement. His
first words upon arriving in Mexico on January 9,1937 were
to insist that the leaders of the SWP take up a conscious
fight against the “curse” of pragmatism within the cadre of
the revolutionary party.
While Cannon dealt firmly with the complaints by the
petty-bourgeois minority against Bolshevik organizational
pract ices, he left the field of the theoretical struggle against
Burnham and Shachtman exclusively to Trotsky.
In his first major contribution to the struggle against the
minority, “A Petty-Bourgeois Opposition in the Socialist
Workers Party,” Trotsky stated that “Dialectic training of
the mind” is “as necessary to a revolutionary fighter as
31
finger exercises to a pianist...”
Shachtman and Burnham charged that Trotsky had
introduced the issue of dialectical materialism as a pole­
mical trick to avoid discussion on the “concrete” political
questions.
“The opposition, permit me to assure you, has invented
nothing new,” wrote Trotsky in response to this charge. “It
is continuing the tradition of revisionism in theory and
opportunism in politics.”
Trotsky continued: “Toward the close of the last century
the revisionist attempts of Bernstein, who in England came
under the influence of Anglo-Saxon empiricism and utili­
tarianism — the most wretched of philosophies! — were
mercilessly repulsed. Whereupon the German oppor­
tunists recoiled from philosophy and sociology.”
In this great political struggle, conducted under condi­
tions in which the GPU was closing in as Trotsky’s own
guard was penetrated by Stalinist agents, the co-leader of
the October Revolution insisted that the essence of cadre
training was the development of dialectical materialist
theory as a guide to practice.
While the struggle in 1940 was directed against the petty-
bourgeois minority, Trotsky’s contribution on dialectical
materialism was a challenge to Cannon, the SWP and the
cadre of the Fourth International all over the world. For the
continuity of the revolutionary movement could not be
maintained simply on the basis of an orthodox defense of
program, but it required a continuous struggle to defend
and deepen the Marxist method of dialectical materialism
as the basis of revolutionary action.
It was this great lesson that guided the International
Committee, above all its British section, in the struggle
against Pabloism from 1953 on.
But the predominance of pragmatism within the SWP
left it vulnerable to the intensified pressures of imper­
ialism. Its increasingly nationalist orientation was an
expression of the serious theoretical unpreparedness of the
SWP. Cannon’s famous “proletarian orientation” could
not serve as a substitute for Marxism. Despite Cannon’s
well-known and real “feel” for the American worker, the
problems in his own theoretical development finally caused
him to “lose touch” with the class, and turn toward — after
so many years of struggle — the American petty-
bourgeoisie.
Cannon’s political demoralization and abandonment ol
Trotskyist principles in the years after 1956, combined with
the behind-the-scenes activities of long-standing and high-
placed agents within the SWP leadership, served the
deepest objective needs of imperialism to prevent the
emergence of alternative revolutionary, i.e., Trotskyist,
leadership in the working class. From 1957 on, having
already initiated an orientation toward the right-wing
Stalinist milieu, Cannon embarked upon an unprincipled
campaign for reunification with the Pabloites — without
discussing any of the unresolved political issues arising out
of the split which had obliged Cannon himself to write in
1953: “The lines of cleavage between Pablo’s revisionism
and orthodox Trotskyism are so deep that no compromise is
possible either politically or organizationally.”
This return to revisionism on the part of the SWP was
resisted principally by the British Trotskyists who in 1959
founded the Socialist Labour League (the forerunner of the
Workers Revolutionary Party). They now defended the
continuity of the International Committee against the
efforts of Cannon, Farrell Dobbs and Hansen to completely
cover up the historical implications of the split with
32
Pabloism. It was Hansen who came forward as the most
unprincipled and vicious opponent of the International
Committee and Marxism. Years before it was possible to
expose his connections with the FBI and the GPU, his
thorough-going opposition to Marxism was established
when he declared that Marxism is nothing more than
Th e Building o f th e W orke rs League
It was out of the struggle waged by the International
Committee against the treachery of the Socialist Workers
Party that the Workers League emerged. A group of SWP
members, mainly from its newly-founded youth
movement, the Young Socialist Alliance, began to support
the insistence of the British section of the International
Committee that there could be no unification with the
Pabloites without a proper political and historical
examination of the fundamental issues of the 1953 split and
subsequent differences. The British section pointed out
that the original differences with Pablo had in fact been
considerably deepened with the development of the devas­
tating crisis within the Communist Parties in the wake of
the Secret Speech and the Hungarian Revolution.
However, the SWP wanted to stampede the International
Committee into a reunification with the remnants of the
Pabloite forces that had continued to function after the
1953 split. A letter from the Central Committee of the
Socialist Labour League to the SWP leadership written on
January 2, 1961 called for an international congress of
orthodox Trotskyists to clarify the world movement’s
position on Pabloite revisionism. The letter also called
attention to signs of a movement by the SWP against the
International Committee and toward capitulation to
Pabloism.
The collaboration between the International Committee
and those within the SWP who opposed its right-wing
evolution proceeded on the basis of a principled defense of
the continuity of Trotskyism. The British comrades of the
International Committee repeatedly insisted that colla­
boration was only possible if international considerations
and the historical issues confronting the world Trotskyist
movement were made the starting point of the struggle by
the opposition within the SWP. It was on this basis that the
International Committee began to collaborate with Tim
Wohlforth. The International Committee made it clear
that its struggle with the SWP did not proceed from the
standpoint of isolated political differences over Cuba, but
rather from the fundamental historical principles
elaborated by Trotsky in the course of the struggle to found
the Fourth International. The training of cadre could only
proceed on the basis of the struggle to defend the historical
continuity of world Trotskyism. This method clashed
sharply with the pragmatic and subjective method of
James Robertson, the leader of another opposition group
within the SWP, who claimed agreement with the positions
of the International Committee against the opportunism of
the SWP, but insisted on placing factional considerations
above the questions of internationalism.
In the late spring of 1963, the SWP deserted the
International Committee and carried out its unprincipled
reunification with the Pabloites to form the rump “Unified
Secretariat.” Its claim to be defending the Cuban Revolu­
tion by opportunistically glorifying Castro as a “natural
“consistent empiricism.” This statement alone branded
Hansen as an adherent of the most reactionary school of
subjective idealism, that is, the Vienna school of logical
positivists who openly describe their philosophy as “...
consistent empiricism,” which, they proudly proclaim, is
the unrepentant enemy of Marxist “metaphysics.”
Marxist” was nothing more than the most transparent
cover for its orientation to the protest circles of the
American middle class, and, through this route, its
capitulation to U.S. imperialism. This was proven within
months of the 1963 split when the Socialist Workers Party,
just hours after the assassination of the imperialist butcher
Kennedy, sent condolences to his widow and called upon
the “nation” to “abjure violence.”
This historical dimension of the SWP’s betrayal emerged
within just one year of the split when the majority of the
Ceylonese section of the Pabloite “International” — the
LSSP — joined the bourgeois coalition government of
Madame Bandaranaike. The SWP was politically
implicated in this betrayal of the Ceylonese and
international working class. The betrayal of the LSSP had
vast historical implications. For the first time in history a
movement which traced its origins to the founding of the
Fourth International, had entered into a political alliance
with a bourgeois governing party. This was clear proof that
revisionism had now become an indispensable element in
the defense of world capitalism against the proletarian
revolution. The SWP could not escape responsibility for
the events in Ceylon. It had repeatedly bolstered the
reputation of these notorious parliamentary opportunists
and had worked with them to organize the reunification
and the splitting of the International Committee. With
unparalleled cynicism, the SWP attempted to cover up the
political implications of what had occurred in Ceylon. The
damage having been done, the Unified Secretariat expelled
the majority of the LSSP as a face-saving device, but
refused to permit discussion within its ranks concerning the
political background of the betrayal.
It was on this question of international principle that the
struggle within the SWP against Pabloite opportunism was
brought to a head. It was not an American question on
which the foundation of the Workers League was set, but
rather on the question of the betrayal of Ceylon. When Tim
Wohlforth attempted to raise the question of the events in
Ceylon within the SWP, he was expelled along with eight
other supporters of the International Committee. The man
who organized the expulsions was Joseph Hansen. The nine
expelled members then formed the American Committee
for the Fourth International (ACFI) and immediately
began publishing the mimeographed “Bulletin of Interna­
tional Socialism.”
Between 1964 and 1966, there was a struggle to assess the
lessons of the fight against revisionism and to establish a
principled basis for the formation of the revolutionary
party in the United States. The International Committee
fought continuously to clarify the historical foundations of
the Trotskyist movement. In doing so, it insisted again and
again that the degeneration of the SWP had to be seen as
an international issue, and not as a national problem that

could be solved by a group of American radicals claiming
agreement with the International Committee.
The refounding of the Trotskyist movement in the
United States required far more than simply opposing the
immediate policies of the SWP and then claiming
agreement with those of the International Committee.
Confronting those who wished to build a movement in
political solidarity with the International Committee was
the task of basing the fight for the construction of the
revolutionary party on an unflagging defense of the
historical continuity of the Fourth International. This
could only be done if those who undertook this
responsibility subordinated themselves and all national
considerations entirely to the historical requirements of the
fight to build the International Committee as the World
Party of Socialist Revolution. Here was the source of
conflict between the International Committee and the
method of pragmatism so strongly ingrained in the United
States, particularly in the milieu of American radicalism.
Discussions were organized to prepare the founding of
the Trotskyist movement in the United States on the
principles fought for by the International Committee.
Participating was not only the ACFI but also the
“Spartacist” tendency led by James Robertson. The
question of the formal unification of these two groups
claiming adherence to the principles of the International
Committee was to be considered at its international con­
ference in April 1966. But at the conference, the Robert-
sonites demonstrated that they would not subordinate
their faction and its clique interests to the discipline and
the historically established authority of the International
Committee. Robertson exposed himself as an incorrigible
pragmatist and subjective idealist, a representative of a
petty bourgeois American radical sect whose fundamental
class position was one of total hostility to Marxist
principles. When Robertson refused to attend sessions of
the international conference at which criticisms of his own
report were to be heard, on grounds of “personal privilege,”
and then refused to apologize to the assembled delegates of
the International Committee for his behavior, he was
expelled. The ACFI repudiated the anti-internationalism
and chauvinism of the Spartacist tendency. This princi­
pled stand taken by the ACFI was a fundamental gain for
world Trotskyism and made possible the founding of the
Workers League.
The chauvinism and petty-bourgeois subjective idealism
of Robertson made him ideally suited to serve as a politi­
cal hitman for Hansen. It soon became clear that Robert­
son had attended the Third Congress of the International
Committee as an agent for Hansen and that his job was to
have been the disruption of the conference. In fact as far
back as 1962 the real function of Robertson’s “opposition”
sect had been to divert political discussion away from the
principled questions of Trotskyism and also to sabotage the
political struggle against Pabloism inside the SWP.
After being expelled from the IC conference, Robertson
attempted to salvage his mission by handing over to
Hansen documents from the International Committee.
Hansen used these documents in order to launch a criminal
political campaign aimed at framing Comrade G. Healy, a
leader of the SLL (predecessor to the WRP). This was
followed by the orchestration of an incident involving a
Pabloite provocateur, E. Tate, which was set up by Hansen
to frame the International Committee and Comrade Healy
as “violent.” This provocation was soon exposed when a
newspaper which had reprinted Tate’s allegations was
33
forced to withdraw them. Hansen’s libels about violence
and ultra-leftism were the modern day “big lie” equiva­
lents of Stalin’s slanders and falsification directed against
Trotsky, beginning with the so-called “underestimation of
the peasantry.” Robertson’s function has been nothing
more than to lend out his services for whatever sinister uses
required by Hansen.
During the first eight years of its existence, the Workers
League was led by Tim Wohlforth. His defense of interna­
tionalism undertaken in numerous pamphlets and articles
proved valuable in assembling new cadres in the United
States. Yet from 1971 on, Wohlforth came into ever-
deepening conflict with the International Committee.
There were two major factors involved in his rapid
degeneration. The first was the enormous change in the
world situation following the collapse of the Bretton Woods
system in August 1971. Despite his correct defense of Trot­
skyist principles against the opportunism of the SWP
during the decade of the 1960s, Wohlforth’s practice was
essentially propagandist. However, the crisis unleashed in
August 1971 now required an entirely new turn to the
working class. But Wohlforth became increasingly hostile
to the requirements of serious changes in his own practice.
He now turned back into the middle class. This was
expressed politically in an ever-more frequent tendency to
drop the demand for a labor party while suggesting that the
development of Marxism would proceed entirely outside
the struggles of the working class. For example, at one
point Wohlforth developed the position that radicalized
prisoners in the American penal system would be the most
advanced section in the development of Marxism.
The second factor in his deepening conflict with the
International Committee was Wohlforth’s inability to
break from the pragmatic methods from which he had
never really broken despite his principled stand against the
opportunism of the SWP. This was repeatedly expressed in
Wohlforth’s attempts to adapt to the forms of the political
work of the International Committee, especially to that of
its leading section, the SLL (which became in 1973 the
Workers Revolutionary Party), without ever assimilating
the dialectical materialist method through which its inter­
ventions in the working class are continuously prepared.
Wohlforth never came to grips with the fact that the
essence of the political work of the International Commit­
tee was the unceasing struggle to train cadre on the basis of
the historical continuity of its struggle for Trotskyism. In
1973, Wohlforth’s growing hostility to the perspectives and
historical achievements of the International Committee
crystallized when he invited the thoroughly reactionary
and middle-class “Spartacist” sect — with whom the
International Committee had totally settled political
accounts in 1966 and whom it had exposed as hitmen for
Hansen — for joint debates on the history of the Trotskyist
movement since 1953!
The International Committee fought patiently to correct
Wohlforth, but the development of the crisis drove him
further to the right. The last year of his leadership in the
Workers League was one of unprecedented crisis for world
imperialism and U.S. capitalism. The disintegration of the
Nixon administration, the fall of the Tory government in
Great Britain, the Arab-Israeli War, the quadrupling of oil
prices, the collapse of the fascist regime in Portugal and the
breakdown of the military junta in Greece were the
manifestations of the qualitative transformation in the
world crisis as the outcome of the August 1971 measures
which ended the Bretton Woods system. At this point,
 34
Wohlforth collapsed politically beneath the pressures
exerted by imperialism upon the revolutionary movement.
The form which this collapse ultimately assumed was his
violation of the most fundamental security requirements of
the revolutionary party. He concealed from the leadership
of the Workers League and the International Committee
the fact that his personal companion, Nancy Fields, had
close family connections with the Central Intelligence
Agency. While concealing the fact that Fields might be a
security risk, he brought her into the central leadership of
the Workers League and delegated to her virtually
unlimited authority to direct the work of the Party
branches. In the course of one year, nearly one hundred
members of the Workers League had been driven out of the
Party — including more than one half of its Central
Committee. The wrecking operation undertaken by Fields
could not have been more destructive to the Party had it
been organized by the “Dirty Tricks” department of the
CIA! Fields’ activities were supported — indeed, they had
been made possible — by Wohlforth. He went so far as to
nominate her to attend an important international
conference in the Spring of 1974.
This smashing-up operation was stopped in August 1974
when the Central Committee of the Workers League
discovered Fields’ CIA associations for the first time. Just
two weeks before this discovery was made, Wohlforth was
specifically asked by comrades in the international
movement if he had any grounds to suspect that Fields
might have connections with the CIA. Wohlforth
emphatically said no. However, when confronted with
definite proof that the uncle in whose home she had been
raised and who had supported her financially through
college, Albert Morris, was an important figure in the CIA
and a friend of Richard Helms, Wohlforth admitted that he
had concealed this information from the Party. He stated
that he had not thought the information to be important.
However, he supported — along with Fields — a motion
introduced and unanimously carried on the Central
Committee for his removal as national secretary. Another
unanimously accepted motion called for the suspension of
Nancy Fields pending an investigation by an international
commission into this serious breach of security.
The leadership of the Workers League had acted in an
absolutely principled way. It would under no conditions
place the individual prestige of any member above the
security of the international movement.
But less than one month after supporting the motions on
the Central Committee, Wohlforth suddenly resigned from
the Workers League and sent a vitriolic letter denouncing
the International Committee and stating his refusal to
participate in the commission of inquiry that was due to
begin within a few days. Nancy Fields did not even bother
to inform the Party ofTier decision to desert the movement.
Not a single member of the Workers League followed
Wohlforth out of the Party.
The pace of Wohlforth’s ensuing degeneration into a
political prostitute for revisionism and the agencies of
counter-revolution can find no parallel in the history of the
Trotskyist movement. He resigned from the Workers
League on September 29, 1974. By January 1975 Wohlforth
was already renouncing his entire history as a supporter of
the International Committee dating back to 1960! After
having spent more than a decade publicly denouncing
Hansen (while privately advancing the opinion that he was
a police agent), Wohlforth turned almost overnight into a
supporter of Hansen and all the political lines he had
opposed in writing for years. Hansen readily took
Wohlforth in, stating that “his sincerity is undeniable” and
wishing him better luck in his next venture — which
proved to be Wohlforth’s election to the national commit­
tee of the SWP.
But far from being a loss for the International Commit­
tee, the lessons derived from the struggle against Wohlforth
provided invaluable historical and theoretical lessons for
the building of the Trotskyist movement in the United
States and throughout the world.
It was Hansen’s defense of Wohlforth’s violation of the
Workers League’s security that immediately raised the
historical questions long unanswered in the Fourth
International arising from the assassination of Leon
Trotsky. Wohlforth’s desertion, quite to his own dismay
and that of those who sanctioned his betrayal, led to the
unmasking of the vast apparatus of agents assembled by
the Stalinists and imperialists within the Trotskyist
movement.
This was by no means accidental. Wohlforth’s betrayal
cannot be understood as the product of his personal faults.
Working through Wohlforth were definite class interests to
which the “personality” question was entirely subordinate.
The class pressures to which Wohlforth succumbed were
produced by changes in the world crisis and the
development of the class struggle on an international scale.
The renegacy of Wohlforth in the United States was by no
means an isolated event. It was foreshadowed in the
abandonment of Trotskyism by the French OCI in the
period between 1967 and 1971, culminating in the split at
Essen in July of the latter year. Almost at the same time as
Wohlforth was preparing to desert the Workers League,
Alan Thomett, a member of the Central Committee of the
WRP in Great Britain, went over to revisionism and set out
to smash the Party. The political content of his right-wing
turn was a capitulation to social democracy following the
election of the Labour Government in February 1974. But
the leadership of the Party defeated Thornett and he was
expelled for violating the discipline of the WRP. One year
later, Sklavos, the leader of the Greek section of the Inter­
national Committee, had to be expelled after breaking the
discipline of his own movement. He soon became an
accomplice of Hansen and is today a supporter of Euro-
Stalinism.
The desertion of Wohlforth from the Workers League in
September 1974 marked a decisive turning point in the
development of Trotskyism in the United States. The
struggle by the leadership of the Workers League, in colla­
boration with the International Committee, against the
pragmatic methods which underlay Wohlforth’s renegacy
has established an indestructible basis for the building of
the revolutionary party. The essence of the struggle against
pragmatism has been contained in the fight to base the
practice of the Workers League on the historical continuity
of the World Trotskyist Movement embodied in the 40 year
history of the Fourth International and the 25 year history
of the International Committee’s struggle to defend its
revolutionary principles against all forms of revisionism
and pragmatism.

Th e You ng Socialists
There can be no revolutionary party without a
revolutionary youth movement. The key to the
transformation of the Workers League is the training of a
cadre among the youth on the principles of Trotskyism, the
Marxism of today.
It is from among the youth that the party will get the
forces that can fight for the building of a labor party
against the entire labor bureaucracy, the Stalinists and
revisionists.
The revolutions in Iran, Vietnam and Angola and the
struggles of the PLO, SWAPO and the Patriotic Front
(ZANU and ZAPU) have shown the endless capacity of the
youth to sacrifice for the revolution. But they require
leadership.
While the youth spontaneously move towards revolution
in their practice, they remain dom inated by the
consciousness of the bourgeoisie. Without the NLF in
Vietnam, the MPLA in Angola, the Khomeini movement
in Iran and the many years of struggle by the leadership of
the PLO, SWAPO and the Patriotic Front, the youth could
not have been trained and prepared for the revolution.
But in the advanced capitalist countries, in the United
States which is the center of imperialist reaction, the
struggle for the most advanced level of theory becomes
absolutely decisive to combat bourgeois ideology.
While youth in the United States are being forced more
and more to revolution by the development of the crisis,
their consciousness remains under the influence of the
ruling class.
It is only through the practice and struggle of the Young
Socialists set up by the Workers League that youth can be
broken from the thinking of the bourgeoisie and
scientifically conduct the struggle for power.
The party does not have two perspectives: one for youth
and one for workers. It is one perspective: outlining the
strategy for power which must especially be fought for
among the youth.
The assassination of Tom Henehan was above all
directed against the building and training of a leadership
among the youth armed with a perspective for the social
revolution. It showed the enormous fear of the ruling class
to facing the power of a conscious leadership among the
youth.
Tom represented the forces which are coming forward
out of the working class and the youth to fight capitalism in
the United States. His training as a revolutionary could
only have come from the struggle conducted by the
Workers League. Tom became a leader of the party because
he fought to organize and train other youth and workers on
the necessity for the building of a labor party as a necessary
step in the struggle for socialism.
It is this which terrified the ruling class so much. Tom
was singled out for assassination for his role in the party as
a leader of the Young Socialists.
In building and training a leadership among the youth,
the Workers League has the vast experiences of the
35
International Committee. Without the struggle against the
OCI, the IC would not have been able to develop a single
youth as a revolutionary. When the OCI rejected the need
for Marxism as the basis for the building of a revolutionary
youth movement, they were bowing to the spontaneous
consciousness of the working class.
The experience of the Euro Marches has shown that
youth will be trained only out of the most advanced theory
and practices. The youth on the march were not trained by
narrow discussion on the conditions in this or that city or
town which the march was passing through, but only by the
political struggle over the basic questions facing our
movement — the role of Stalinism and revisionism; the
historic role of the working class in the social revolution
and the relationship of the youth; what the nature of
capitalism is and the development of the economic crisis.
This political fight could only be taken up at the same
time as an organized practice was set up to turn the
marchers to the labor movement to fight for socialist
policies, recruit members and build new sections of the
International Committee.
In establishing the building of a labor party as the
cornerstone of the party’s strategy for power in the United
States, the Workers League is setting out the perspective
for the building of the revolutionary youth movement.
The fight to bring Marxism into the working class must
above all be carried out by the youth in struggle against the
trade union bureaucracy, Stalinism and revisionism. The
Party does not direct the youth to the unions so that they
can become trade unionists but precisely so that they can
divert the spontaneous consciousness of the working class
to independent class politics.
It is in the fight to turn youth to the unions for the
building of a labor party that we will be able to fight out all
the backwardness among the youth of individualism,
racism and nationalism.
A so-called turn to the trade unions without fighting to
organize the youth on the party’s perspectives can only
mean the most opportunist relationships with the working
class, in which the party will only be able to attract the
most conservative layers in the trade unions.
The organization of the YS cannot be separated from its
politics. The fight for the setting up of branches, branch
committees, federations and regions is not a haphazard
practice. It was scientifically developed by the ICFI,
particularly through the experiences of the British YS in its
struggle against the bankrupt policies of the British Labour
Party.
The Young Socialists is the only mass organization of the
party through which thousands of youth must pass. It will
be in the fight to hold the organization and to place youth
in responsibilities of leadership, even if it isjust organizing
a dance or sports activity, and continuously fighting for the
party’s perspectives that we will be able to train and select
the most advanced youth who will become future leaders of
the party.
36
The Historical C o n tin u ity o f Tro tskyis m as th e Basis
o f Cadre Training and th e Struggle A g a in st Pragm atism
The orientation of the Workers League to the working
class and its struggle to prepare the class for its historic role
has not been a matter of a so-called “proletarian orienta­
tion” as conceived by Cannon. There can be no real turn to
the working class outside of the conscious struggle to pre­
serve the lines of historical continuity between the present
struggles of the working class and the revolutionary party
as a unity of opposites and the whole content of the
objective historical experiences of the class and the
development of Bolshevism. It is only from the standpoint
of the struggle to base the whole work of the Party on the
historical gains of the struggle against revisionism and the
immense political and theoretical capital that is the heri­
tage left behind by Trotsky to the Fourth International
that the fight against pragmatism within the ranks of the
Party and, therefore, in the working class itself can be
seriously mounted. As soon as the struggle against
pragmatism is detached from the fight to maintain the
direct historical connections between the daily practice of
the cadres and the whole body of historical experiences
through which the Trotskyist movement has passed, it
degenerates into the most impotent forms of verbal
jousting. Or, to put it even more accurately, it becomes
simply another variety of pragmatism itself.
What is essential to an understanding of pragmatism is
that it belongs to the most reactionary school of subjective
idealism. It manifestly rejects the scientific standpoint of
Marxism which holds that governing the development of
nature, society and consciousness are the general
dialectical laws of the universal movement of matter. This
scientific world outlook was explained by Engels when he
wrote in “Dialectics of Nature”:
“The fact that our subjective thought and the objective
world are subject to the same laws, and hence, too, that in
the final analysis they cannot contradict each other in
their results, but must coincide, governs absolutely our
whole theoretical thought ...
“In the present work dialectics is conceived as the science
of the most general laws of all motion. This implies that
the laws must be valid just as much for motion in nature
and human history as for the motion of thought. Such a
law can be recognized in two of these three spheres,
indeed even in all three, without the metaphysical philis­
tine being clearly aware that it is one and the same law
that he has come to know.” (Progress Publishers, 1974,
pp. 266-7)
The pragmatist denies the existence of any objective
laws governing the movement of nature, society or
consciousness. In fact, the pragmatist considers it entirely
irrelevant to even inquire into the existence of such
objective laws. The two basic schools of philosophy which
have developed historically are those of materialism and
idealism. The former takes as its starting point the primacy
of matter over consciousness while the latter insists on the
primacy of thought over matter. Pragmatism adopts the
second, idealist standpoint, but in its most reactionary
form. It not only rejects the primacy of matter, but it
denies that consciousness itself has any objective content.
Thus, as explained by the pragmatist writer William
James, the world consists neither of m atter nor
consciousness. Of what, then, does it consist?
James explained: “My thesis is that if we start with the
supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material
in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if
we call that stuff ‘pure experience,’ then knowing can easily
be explained as a particular sort of relation toward one
another into which portions of pure experience may enter.”
Thus, for James, the only reality he was prepared to
recognize was that which presented itself as his own sub­
jective experience. He called this form of solipsism “radical
empiricism.” He wrote:
“To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into
its constructions any element that is not directly exper­
ienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly
experienced. For such a philosophy, the relations that
connect experiences must themselves be experienced
relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be
accounted as ‘real’ as anything else in the system.”
Now we can see the significance of James’ frequently
noted conception of truth as “what works.” Quite often, an
attempt is made to give James a materialist veneer by
suggesting that this somehow parallels the Marxist concep­
tion of practice as the criterion of truth. This is an
abominable distortion of Marxism. The truth of which
pragmatists speak is the entirely subjective, unscientific
and ultimately illusory “truth” of the individual uncon­
scious of the objective social laws governing his own
activity (including thinking) and of the objective inter­
connections between himself, nature and the totality of
historically developed society. Marxism, on the other hand,
grasps truth as the objective scientific reflection of the
movement of universal material nature in the historically
developed social consciousness of man. The development of
knowledge is not the product of individual insights by
isolated but clever human beings; rather, it is the objective
historical product of man’s collective social practice. Man’s
thinking does not develop in a random and casual way. His
development from the unconscious to the conscious,
proceeds in accordance with the objective dialectical laws
of matter in motion.
This is what Trotsky meant when he wrote: “Human
consciousness nevertheless tends toward a certain homo­
geneity. Philosophy and logic are compelled to rely upon
this homogeneity of human consciousness and not upon
what this homogeneity lacks, that is, inconsistency.” (“In
Defense of Marxism,” New Park, p. 62.)
Pragmatism, however, bases itself on nothing else but
the “inconsistency” of human thinking in so far as its
development is viewed solely as the isolated thought opera­
tions of different people. In short, the pragmatist takes his
own experience as the only source of truth. Of the historical
forces determining his practice and always building up

behind him, he knows absolutely nothing — and doesn’t
care!
Pragmatism guides a practice which is invariably hostile
to considerations of political principle. Such practice is
organically incapable of basing itself on the requirements
of the working class in the struggle for power because
pragmatism takes the subjective “needs” of the individual
as its starting point while the class struggle is an objective
process determined in its development by historical
materialist laws. Inevitably, the pragmatist who guides his
practice on the basis of the inner “truth” revealed to him in
his experience becomes the servant of objective social
forces — regardless of whether he wishes to recognize their
authority. As Trotsky wrote in relation to the leaders of the
petty-bourgeois minority in the SWP during the 1939-40
faction fight: “Burnham does not recognize the dialectic,
but the dialectic recognizes Burnham, that is, extends its
sway over him. Schachtman thinks that the dialectic has
no importance in political conclusions, but in the political
conclusions of Shachtman himself we see the deplorable
fruits of his disdainful attitude toward the dialectic. We
should include this example in the textbooks on dialectical
materialism.” (“In Defense of Marxism,” p. 62.)
A more recent case for the “textbooks” is that of
Wohlforth. Nothing illustrates more clearly the utter
bankruptcy of the pragmatic method than his evolution.
When Wohlforth threw overboard more than a decade of
political history without so much as an explanation, he was
simply acting upon the outlook of that famous pragmatist
Henry Ford who once explained the essence of his world
outlook with the words: “History is bunk!”
The reasons for the predominance of pragmatism as the
national ideology are to be found in the particular charac­
teristics of the historical development of the United States.
As Trotsky explained, “In no other country has there been
such rejection of the class struggle as in the land of
‘unlimited opportunity.’ The denial of social contradic­
tions as the moving force of development led to the denial
of the dialectic as the logic of contradictions in the domain
of theoretical thought.”
Trotsky continued: “ Pragmatism, a mixture of
rationalism and empiricism, became the national
philosophy of the United States. The theoretical method­
ology of Max Eastman is not fundamentally different from
the methodology of Henry Ford — both regard living
society from the point of view of an ‘engineer’ (East­
man— platonically). Historically the present disdainful
attitude toward the dialectic is explained simply by the
fact that the grandfathers and great-grandmothers of Max
Eastman and others did not need the dialectic in order to
conquer territory and enrich themselves. But times have
changed and the philosophy of pragmatism has entered a
period of bankruptcy just as has American capitalism.”
(“In Defense of Marxism,” p. 57)
Combined with the rejection of the class struggle, in no
other country did the outlook of “rugged individualism”
take hold as powerfully as in the United States. The whole
manner in which the United States was settled powerfully
reinforced in the minds of millions the idea that each
individual fashioned his life according to his individual
plans and individual capacities. No matter that the
migration from the Old World to the New World was the
product of objective historical forces, or that the masses,
upon arriving in the New World, were automatically
subjected to the laws of developing capitalism and the
world market. Precisely because the vast wealth and
37
immense reservoir of natural resources of America did pro­
vide — within the bounds of definite historical limitations
— certain room for the exercise of “individualism,”
pragmatism enjoyed almost universal (though usually
unconscious) support as the philosophy of individualism.
In a land where “common sense” could resolve the main
problems of the day because, as Trotsky said, the law of
value did everyone’s thinking for them, William James’
suggestion that ideas be judged by their “cash value”
seemed like good sound advice.
What finally delivered a shattering blow to the
philosophy of individualism was the outbreak of the
catastrophic social crisis of the Great Depression. The
American worker learned social thinking under conditions
of mass unemployment, mass hunger and mass suffering.
Individualism could not even help the small farmers who
now were being driven off the land and into the big cities.
Millions of workers were thrust into the historic social
practice of the CIO movement.
While individualism reasserted itself in the period of
post-war boom, through the impact of the high standard of
living, this was far less important than the fact that
workers were now organized in the largest trade union
movement in the world, and that they defend these gains
not as individuals but through their mass organizations.
Now, objective conditions make possible a final reckoning
with the pragmatic mode of thinking whose bankruptcy
becomes more self-evident every day. The transforma­
tion of the “land of unlimited opportunity” into the “land
of unlimited suffering” will produce immense possibilities
for the development of Marxism. We may paraphrase Trot­
sky afresh: The acceptance of social contradictions as the
moving force of development will lead to the acceptance of
the dialectic as the logic of contradictions in the domain of
theoretical thought.
But the struggle against pragmatism must be waged
consciously within the Party each day. The essence of this
struggle is the training of cadre on the basis of the historical
continuity of Trotskyism.
To understand this more clearly, let us consider the two
objective elements which serve as the starting point of
revolutionary practice.
The first is the highest point achieved in the spontaneous
development of the world economic and political crisis of
capitalism. We are speaking here of all the manifestations
of the world crisis: the fall of the dollar, trade figures, a rise
in interest rates, a strike, a raid conducted by freedom
fighters in Zimbabwe, an economic summit of imperialist
leaders, a mass demonstration, etc. All these developments
are the outcome of the historical development of the crisis
of world capitalism.
The second element is the highest point achieved in the
conscious struggle of the revolutionary party on a world
scale for the development of Marxism. This high point,
naturally, is the outcome of the vast historical legacy of
Trotsky’s struggle: begun in 1923, carried through into the
founding of the Fourth International in 1938 and developed
into the present day on the basis of the struggle of the
International Committee against Pabloism since 1953.
This second element — the high point of conscious
practice by the International Committee of the Fourth
International — arises on the basis of the objective
development of the world crisis. But the cadre of the
revolutionary party must be trained to sensuously perceive
the world crisis from the highest development of the
 38
historically elaborated practice of the world Trotskyist
movement, the International Committee. In other words,
the development of the crisis and the class struggle can
only be understood through the objective, collective,
historically-verified and scientific practice of the Party.
It is something else entirely, in fact, totally pragmatic, to
“follow” the crisis through the newspapers or purely
individual experiences and, on this paltry basis, improvise
Se cu rity and th e Fo u rth In te rn a tio n a l
The struggle to train revolutionary cadre on the basis of
the historical continuity of Trotskyism has attained unpre­
cedented power and scope through the investigation
mounted by the International Committee — beginning in
the spring of 1975 at the Sixth World Congress — into the
circumstances surrounding the assassination of Trotsky in
1940.
Security and the Fourth International represents nothing
less than the reclamation of the whole historical continuity
of Bolshevism through the Fourth International and the
International Committee from the evil grip of Stalinist
counter-revolution and falsification. All the lies and dis­
tortions and crimes committed by Stalinism against Trot­
skyism, the political embodiment of the struggle for the
world October; all the monstrous acts committed to
confuse and disorient generations of workers about the real
history of the October Revolution and the role of Trotsky —
these have been dealt a blow from which Stalinism and all
the agencies of imperialist counter-revolution will never
recover.
Through its investigation, relentlessly unmasking the
murders, provocations and disruptions carried out by a
vast apparatus of Stalinist and imperialist agents working
within the Trotskyist movement, the International
Committee has floodlit the whole history of the Fourth
International.
From 1923 on, when the first slanders were raised about
Trotsky’s so-called “under-estimation of the peasantry”
and stories were concocted about his alleged disagree­
ments with Lenin, reaction wielded the weapon of the “Big
Lie” to distort and discredit the principled political line
defended by Leon Trotsky, the co-leader of the October
Revolution. The lies of the Thermidorians in the mid-1920s
paved the way for the bestial amalgams and fabrications of
the Stalinist bureaucracy. The Moscow Trials, which
resulted in the liquidation of the whole surviving cadre of
the Bolshevik Party, was the most naked historical expres­
sion of the counter-revolutionary function of the political
lie. The political liar is the handy-man of the counter­
revolution.
As the investigation into Security and the Fourth
International has shown, the Stalinist bureaucracy sought
to flood the Trotskyist movement with agents. Their
ultimate goal was the murder of Trotsky, his son Sedov,
their most trusted co-workers, and, through these crimes,
destroy the Fourth International. The infiltration of the
some sort of activity whose “success” is then to be tested in
the immediate results that are produced.
The real heart of cadre training and the struggle against
pragmatism is to defeat the theory and practice of
subjective idealism, to create the conditions of political
work in which cadres are developed through the
subordination of all individualist practice to the discipline,
principles and history of Trotskyism.
Trotskyist movement by these agents was the most terrible
price paid by the international working class for the defeats
of the 1920s and 1930s. These agents were the spearhead of
the counter-revolution. They were the embodiment of the
consequences of the defeats of the working class.
It has been irrefutably established that among the agents
working for the destruction of Trotskyism and the personal
destruction of Trotsky has been, dating back to the 1930s
and until his death on January 18, 1979, the long-time
leader of the Socialist Workers Party, Joseph Hansen.
Since the International Committee first discovered in 1975
what Hansen had deliberately concealed from the
Trotskyist movement since 1940 — that he held private
meetings with the FBI immediately after the assassination
of Trotsky — Hansen’s role as a double agent within the
Trotskyist movement has been documented so fully that no
one, least of all Hansen and the SWP, has dared to
challenge it. And he went to his grave a proven informer of
the FBI.
The ability of agents like Hansen to flourish and disrupt
the work of the Fourth International reflected the
domination of the counter-revolution and the long period of
the post-war boom. But now the tables have been turned,
both as a result of the change in the objective situation and
the intransigent struggle waged by the International
Committee for principles. The high point of this struggle
was the fight against Wohlforth by the International
Committee and the Workers League. This struggle not only
revealed the reactionary idealist basis of Wohlforth’s
politics, but succeeded in flushing Hansen out into the
open.
As its prosecution of the investigation into Security and
the Fourth International has been the expression of the
International Committee’s devotion to the principles of
Trotskyism, the response of the SWP and revisionist
organizations all over the world has been the most
unmistakable demonstration of their utter political
depravity. As for the SWP itself, it can be said without any
exaggeration whatsoever that it is the first party ever
claiming to be Trotskyist that has been completely taken
over by the combined agencies of imperialism and
Stalinism. The SWP could be called far more appro­
priately — the “Socialist Agents Party.” Its silence in the
face of the overwhelming evidence presented by the
International Committee of Hansen’s role as a double agent
of the GPU-KGB and of the FBI is proof of this.

The SWP’s silence on Hansen only serves to bring out the
squalid degradation of revisionism. Everyone in the SWP
knows that Hansen was an agent, but they live with this
day after day. Irresistibly, the SWP is being forced down a
one-way street toward political disaster and oblivion. As
Trotsky once said: “The great events which rush upon
mankind will not leave of these outlived organizations one
stone upon another.” Through its toleration of agents and
the accomplices of Trotsky’s killer, the SWP has forfeited
irrevocably any claim to political connection with
Trotskyism.
What has already been exposed by the International
Committee is devastating. The following has been proven
about Hansen’s activities during the course of the
Investigation:
* He established contact with the FBI immediately after
Trotsky’s assassination, held unauthorized discussions
with its representatives, turned over party manuscripts,
documents and correspondence, and then offered to supply
confidential information to top FBI officers on the condi­
tion that his impunity was guaranteed.
* Hansen was suspected by the FBI of being associated
with the GPU, and Hoover wanted him questioned for his
possible involvement in the alleged murder of George
Mink, a notorious GPU killer.
* Hansen met with the director of the FBI in New York
City, Mr. B.E. Sackett, after “respectfully” thanking a
Government official for arranging the interview.
* The material Hansen handed over the Government,
containing names of possible GPU agents, was virtually
identical to that made available secretly by the notorious
stoolpigeon, Whittaker Chambers, approximately one year
earlier.
* The real identity of the GPU agent “John,” whom
Hansen met — according to his own account to the FBI —
for a period of several months in 1939, was none other than
the assassin of Trotsky, the GPU killer Ramon Mercader.
When Mercader passed through the gates of Trotsky’s villa
in order to murder the great Bolshevik leader, he was
known as a GPU agent to Hansen — who was on guard duty
the afternoon of the assassination and admitted Mercader
into the compound.
* Hansen had systematically sought to protect the
exposure of his GPU associates who worked with him in the
plot against Trotsky and the Fourth International. He
defended as an “exemplary comrade” the proven GPU
agent Sylvia Franklin — who worked as Cannon’s personal
secretary in the national headquarters of the SWP between
1938 and 1947.
* Hansen left behind him an organization of carefully
trained agents placed strategically inside the leadership of
the revisionist groups throughout the world. The head­
quarters of Hansen’s operation was and remains the weekly
magazine Intercontinental Press set up in 1963 and
published in the New York City national offices of the SWP
and with a special bureau in Paris. Included in Hansen’s
world network are Fausto Amador, the United Secre­
tariat’s representative in Central America, and Allen
Myers, leader of the Australian Socialist Workers Party,
and his companion Helen Jarvis. All of these figures have
proven CIA and State Department connections.
39
Not one of these charges has ever been answered. The
case against Hansen is beyond refutation. He was the key
figure in the conspiracy by imperialism to destroy the
Fourth International. His activities within the Fourth
International — the destruction of sections, the gross
political disorientation of its members, the organization of
provocations like the notorious Tate affair in 1966 — have
simply been an extension of the role he played as an accom­
plice in Trotsky’s assassination. We raise the issue of
Hansen not because he was an individual criminal —
which, of course, he was — but because he personified the
principal strategy of the counter-revolution: TO
PREVENT AT ALL COSTS THE BUILDING OF
IN D E P E N D E N T R E V O L U T IO N A R Y , i .e .,
TROTSKYIST LEADERSHIP IN THE WORKING
CLASS.
The importance to imperialism of the gang of agents led
by Hansen within the SWP was clearly demonstrated when
Attorney General Griffin Bell was called by President
Carter to a secret conference in Camp David, where he re­
ceived instructions that he was to risk conviction for
contempt of court and a possible jail sentence rather than
hand over to SWP lawyers the names of 18 out of 66 FBI
informers now operating within the SWP.
During the appeal of the contempt citation in November,
1978, U.S. attorney Robert Fiske, Jr. stated that the
government was prepared to forfeit $40 million rather than
release the contested files. He claimed that to name the 18
agents would cause “incalculable harm to the nation’s
ability to protect itself.”
This meant that Hansen was operating with the direct
protection of American imperialism. No other agent in
history has had such sustained high-level backing.
The proof that the SWP is stage managed by the FBI
itself is that SWP leaders have told the government that
they will drop legal efforts to obtain the identities of the
FBI agents inside the organization in exchange for a $5
million cash settlement.
This poses grave dangers to the Workers League and the
International Committee. Hansen could not answer these
charges with words and neither will his agents. Their only
recourse is to prepare fresh attacks, new frame-ups,
provocations, slanders, and, through all these insidious
methods, lay the groundwork for new assassinations.
Hansen and the nest of FBI-KGB agents within the SWP
are the tools of the counter-revolution. As the history of
GPU violence against the Trotskyist movement has amply
demonstrated, and as the more recent revelations concern­
ing the murderous activities of FBI informers have shown,
the central task of agents is to prepare and then carry out
assassinations. Nothing could be more grotesque than the
SWP’s justification for allowing agents to roam at will
through their party — “Agents do good work.” This
statement, heard so often from SWP “leaders” and
members, is a confession of the most servile cowardice,
spinelessness and political impotence. They are admitting
that political control of the SWP rests in the hands of
agents and informers whose combined role is the
organization of assassinations and other forms of violence
against the Trotskyist movement.
All these forces and agencies of the Kremlin bureau­
cracy and the imperialist state recognize that Trotskyism
40
— the International Committee of the Fourth Interna­
tional — represents the greatest danger to their continued
existence. This is not only because of the “revelations” of
Security and the Fourth International. This investigation
is the most advanced material expression of the struggle by
the International Committee for the political indepen­
dence of the working class under the leadership of the
revolutionary party. Security and the Fourth
International is the outcome of the struggle for principles.
That it has carried through this struggle to expose the
agents of Stalinism and imperialism flowed from the entire
political history of the International Committee. Through
this long historical struggle to defend the continuity of
Th e Assa ssin a tio n o f To m H enehan
The International Committee and the Workers League
have paid a heavy historical price for their fight to liberate
the world Trotskyist movement from the grip of the agents
in the service of Stalinism and imperialism. The assas­
sination of Comrade Tom Henehan, a member of the
Political Committee of the Workers League, and the
wounding of another member, Comrade Jacques Vielot, on
October 16, 1977 was the savage response of the forces of
world imperialism to our struggle for Trotskyist principles.
Neither the silence of the capitalist press nor the obscene
claims by the revisionists that Henehan’s death was “non­
political” can disguise the fact that his assassination was
the most important political killing ever to take place in
the United States.
It came only two months after the International Commit­
tee had exposed the FBI connections of Joseph Hansen.
Earlier, in May 1977 after the International Committee
had blown the cover of Hansen’s defense of Sylvia Franklin
by locating and interviewing Cannon’s GPU secretary in
the Midwest we warned that provocations would be pre­
pared against sections and supporters of the International
Committee all over the world. Within weeks of this warning
the SWP under the direction of Joseph Hansen began a
campaign to label the Workers League as a violent
organization. Incidents were fabricated and published in
The Militant to create an atmosphere of hysteria in order to
facilitate the use of violence against our party. Hansen
himself stated that as a result of the investigation into
Seturity and the Fourth International the International
Committee faced “deadly consequences.” Finally, at a
political function of the Young Socialists being supervised
by members of the Workers League, a gang of professional
assassins murdered Henehan and wounded Vielot. The
capitalist press printed nothing about this political
murder. This silence was maintained as well by the
Stalinists in their organ, The Daily World, and by the
revisionists in their newspaper, The Militant. For the
Communist Party its silence is entirely in keeping with its
longstanding policy of supporting the murder of Trot­
skyists. As for the claim of the revisionists that Henehan’s
death was non-political and therefore does not deserve to
Trotskyism it has established itself indisputably as the
Fourth International.
In turn, as a result of its 12 years of principled struggle
against revisionism, its fight to assimilate and base its
practice on the lessons of the struggle against
W ohlforth’s opportunism , and its un h esitatin g
collaboration with the International Committee in the
historic battle of Security and the Fourth International, the
Workers League has unquestionably established that the
struggle for Trotskyism in the United States has proceeded
through the struggle to build the Workers League.
be reported, this line not only repeats the position of the
police, who have carried out no investigation, but is also in
all essentials identical to the line used by the Stalinists
after the assassination of Trotsky: that he was killed by a
“disgruntled Trotskyist” and it was thus not a political
murder. The assassination of Trotsky on August 20, 1940
marked the highpoint in the spread of counter-revolution
based on the defeats of the working class in Europe. The
murder of Tom Henehan, however, came at the very point
of the qualitative advance of the world revolution to new
heights. Nothing could be more dangerous than to
underestimate the historical significance of the struggles of
the International Committee. The defeats it has inflicted
upon revisionism represent devastating blows to world
imperialism. One can say with irreproachable accuracy
that there are three events which occurred in the mid-1970s
from wich American imperialism will never recover. The
first was the defeat in Vietnam. The second was the
political defeat of Wohlforth in the Central Committee of
the Workers League. And the third was the launching and
prosecution of the investigation into Security and the
Fourth International.
Of these three, it can be said without the slightest
immodesty that the last two shall prove to have been the
most historically decisive in sealing the fate of imperialism
— understanding, of course, that the impetus to the
political conquests of the International Committee has
been precisely the heroic upsurge of the world revolution as
expressed in the indomitable national liberation struggles.
In the struggle against Wohlforth, powerful foundations
were laid down by the Intemationl Committee for the
building of the revolutionary party in the heart of world
imperialism.
In the launching of the investigation into Security and
the Fourth International, the conditions were created to
drive the agencies of imperialism and Stalinism out of the
Trotskyist movement, and create unprecedented
opportunities for the forging of the world party of socialist
revolution. There is no prospect which frightens American
imperialism and the Kremlin bureaucracy more.
It was none other than Carter’s national security adviser,

Zbigniew Brzezinski, who once wrote that the capitalist
state’s “use of force must be designed not only to eliminate
the revolutionary challenge, but to make certain that the
revolutionary forces cannot later rally again under the
same leadership. If that leadership cannot be physically
liquidated, it can at least be expelled from the country (or
area) in which the revolution is taking place.”
Comrade Henehan made the supreme sacrifice of a
revolutionary. His life represents a conquest of the
International Com m ittee’s struggle for Trotskyist
principles in the United States. That struggle was the
driving force of Tom Henehan’s political development. He
represented not only the best element of the American
working class, but also foreshadowed the type of heroic
revolutionary fighters who will emerge by the thousands
out of the American working class and drive forward like a
tidal wave into the Trotskyist movement.
Thousands of workers have signed petitions and officials
representing millions of workers in the trade union
movement, as well as student and professional leaders have
already sent letters to Brooklyn District Attorney Eugene
Gold demanding that a full investigation into the murder
get underway. This reflects the widespread and growing
outrage over the buildup of state violence and provocations
against the working class.
The Workers League will continue to campaign tirelessly
for the exposure of those who plotted and executed the
political murder of Tom Henehan. It will continue to bring
to the attention of millions of workers, students and
professionals the facts of Tom Henehan’s murder, and it
will mobilize the broadest support for action to uncover the
guilty.
But, at the same time, it views the assassination of
Henehan as a serious political warning. The political
training of every cadre must include as a central element
the conscious embedding of a deep appreciation of the need
for security. It is not enough to warn that the assassin is
preparing to strike. The plans of the enemy must be
41
defeated. The practice of security is the conscious struggle
each day for the maximum political awareness and the
most refined sensitivity toward changes in the world crisis.
It requires a daily fight against all forms of impressionism
and routinism which render comrades disarmed and
incapable of sensuously perceiving the transitions and
interconnections between phenomena in the class struggle,
without which it is impossible to orient the movement
under conditions of rapid change.
If the method is the man, then security is the party. It is
not what men say, but what they do, that counts. A revolu­
tionary perspective without the practice of security is as
incompatible as Marxism and pacifism. The working class
will respect and adhere only to a movement which shows
that it is capable of defending itself against the attacks of
imperialism. In this, too, we base ourselves on the
traditions of Leninism which, as Trotsky said, is “warlike
from head to foot.”
The murder of Tom Henehan has proven with brutal
clarity that the struggle for power in the United States will
be no less bitter and protracted than in any other country
in the world. In fact, in no other country will the
bourgeoisie resist the social revolution with greater ferocity
than in the land of “free enterprise.”
It would be a serious mistake to conceive of the American
revolution solely from the standpoint of the great strike
strugggles of the 1930s. The historical task at hand is not
the organization of trade unions in basic industry, but
rather the establishment of the dictatorship of the prole­
tariat in the most advanced capitalist country. Under
certain conditions, the ruling class can be compelled to
confer recognition on the claims of a trade union as a result
of a sit-down strike. Under no conditions can the ruling
class recognize the claims of the revolutionary party — its
overthrow.
All the general features of the development of the world
revolution will inevitably find their most concentrated
expression in the American social revolution.
42
PART III
TASKS OF THE WORKERS LEAGUE
The preparation of the struggle for power in the workers
movement must be centered on the fight for the building of
a mass labor party to establish the political independence
of the working class. This is the indispensable political
foundation for the organization of the masses for the over­
throw of capitalism in the United States. The emergence of
the mass movement for a labor party — consciously fought
for by the Workers League — will signify the real begin­
ning of the struggle for power in the United States.
The labor party will not be — whatever its initial ex­
ternal form — a reformist appeal for improved representa­
tion in Congress. It will be an explosive and violent
outburst from the depths of the American working class
against the whole political and social order of capitalism. It
will draw millions into a political struggle that will inexor­
ably grow into a vast revolutionary upheaval unequalled in
world history. Strikes and industrial conflicts will be just
the first and by no means exclusive forms this struggle will
assume. The American working class will drive relent­
lessly ahead, testing every form of struggle, until it has
found the means to break the back of the employers by
smashing their state.
The call for a Congress of Labor to establish a labor party
and the inseparable complementary demand for a
Workers and Farmers Government have the essential
significance of directing the working class toward this
historically-imperative revolutionary goal. But neither the
labor party nor a Workers and Farmers Government can
achieve that goal. The overthrow of capitalism and the
establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat is the
exclusive historical responsibility of the Trotskyist-led
revolutionary party.
The immediate task ahead, the preparation of the
masses for the struggle for power, consists in providing the
mass movement with the necessary political orientation.
This orientation is provided through the fight for a Labor
Party.
The Workers League fights for the Labor Party and for a
Workers and Farmers government to carry out a program of
socialist policies:
Program
STOP UNEMPLOYMENT AND INFLATION.
The whole policy of the ruling class is to make the
working class pay the savage price for this crisis through
the destruction of living standards and jobs and the
systematic impoverishment of millions. The working class
must have its own policy to meet this crisis, to stop
unemployment and inflation, to defend the rights workers
have won in struggle, to expropriate the bankrupt ruling
class and to establish a planned economy, organized to
meet the needs of millions of workers and middle class
people rather than the profits of the tiny handful of mono­
polists.
* Nationalize basic industry and the banks, insurance
companies and mutual funds, under workers’ control
without any compensation to the owners. Open the books of
big business to establish the case for nationalization.
*Take the profit out of food by nationalizing the food
monopolies and retail chains. End all speculation in food,
land, and raw materials by abolishing the commodities
markets, the Stock Exchange, the currency and gold ex­
changes.
*End unemployment. The right of every worker to a job
at union-scale wages. Create millions of new jobs by
establishing a 30 hour week at 40 hours pay. Reopen all
closed plants and facilities and bring up production to full
capacity at partially utilized plants. Establish a centrally
planned economy to meet needs, not profit!
*Abolish all forms of wage controls. Full cost-of-living
escalator clauses in every contract and big wage increases
to compensate for the recent loss in real purchasing power.
Guaranteed minimum wage set at average annual cost of
living. End all forms of government conciliation, media­
tion and arbitration.

STOP THE BUDGET CUTS! EXPAND SOCIAL
SERVICES!
At the heart of the government’s attacks on the working
class are the massive cuts in public spending and the
gutting of essential social services. Millions of workers and
their families are being condemned to live in the worst pos­
sible conditions, as whole cities are turned into slums,
roads decay, hospitals and schools are closed down,
garbage lies uncollected and fires burn out of control.
Meanwhile, public service workers are being thrown on the
unemployment lines or are having their wages and contract
rights ripped apart. Social services are not a privilege but a
right won by the working class.
*Publicly financed construction to provide high quality
housing for working class families, with rent to be set at no
more than 10 percent of monthly income!
*Free medical care for all, including hospitalization,
surgery, dental and optical care!
*Billions more for education. Free university education
for all. Every youth has the right to adequate job training.
*Abolish Proposition 13 and all similar measures aimed
at slashing social services and attacking the jobs of public
service workers. The “tax revolt” campaign is a cynical
fraud pushed by the government to hide its ruthless
budget cutting while big business gets a massive tax break.
Instead, there must be 100 percent taxation on all annual
incomes over $50,000 to pay for the expansion of social ser­
vices while all taxes on annual incomes below $25,000
should be abolished.
FOR D E C E N T AND S AFE WORKI N G
CONDITIONS!
*Stop brown lung, black lung and all other occupa­
tional diseases and hazards. Guaranteed standards to elim­
inate all risks to workers’ health, to be enforced by union
committees. Full compensation to the millions of workers
and their families who have been exposed to the hundreds
of carcinogens and toxic substances because of big
business’ ruthless profit drive.
DEFEND THE RIGHTS OF SENIOR CITIZENS!
Capitalism squeezes evory ounce of profit out of workers
during their productive lives, then throws them on the
scrap heap. It offers nothing to the elderly except miser­
ably inadequate pensions and an early grave. A Workers
and Farmers government must provide a guaranteed
annual income for all senior citizens which adequately
meets the cost of living and is adjusted for any rise in infla­
tion. The right to full pensions at age 55!
EQUAL RIGHTS FOR WOMEN WORKERS!
* Free day care facilities for all working mothers! The
right to free and medically safe abortions for all women!
Equal pay for equal work!
DEFEND THE RIGHTS OF SMALL FARMERS!
The small family farmer is being driven into bankruptcy
at a record pace, as the banks cut off credit and foreclose on
mortgages and the government works hand in glove with
the giant agribusinesses to economically strangle the small
farmer. The recent farmers’ strike showed that the small
farmer will be a powerful ally of the working class in its
struggle against the Carter government and the ruling
class.
A Workers and Farmers government must guarantee
parity to small farmers. State banks must be established to
43
provide ready access to cheap credit. Massive publicly
financed flood-control and irrigation programs must be set
up in rural areas.
The agricultural monopolies and giant ranches must be
nationalized without compensation under workers’ control.
Full union-scale wages and working conditions for all
agricultural workers, including all migrant laborers.
D E F E N D THE RI G HT S OF I M MI G R A N T
WORKERS!
Millions of workers, especially from Latin America, are
subjected to the most ruthless exploitation, working for
starvation wages and constantly subject to arrest and
deportation by Immigration and Naturalization Service
agents. At the same time these workers are used as a
whipping post by the government and the ruling class to
justify unemployment. The methods used against immi­
grant workers, especially proposals for a national ID card
system, are the preparation for attacks on the entire
working class.
* Stop all deportations! Disband the INS! Full rights for
all workers from all countries to work in the U.S. and to join
trade unions!
FULL RIGHTS FOR NATIVE AMERICANS!
The American Indians were the first victims of the
ruthless drive for profit by U.S. capitalism. The latter
prepared for its role as an imperialist power through the
systematic genocide of the native population. Ever since
then, the treaty rights of the Indian population have been
continuously abrogated and organizations, especially the
American Indian Movement, have been subject to ruthless
attacks by the FBI.
* Stop the attacks on native Americans! Full compliance
with all treaty rights! Drop all charges against Dennis
Banks and other members of AIM!
DEFEND WORKERS’ DEMOCRATIC RIGHTS!
DEFEND THE TRADE UNIONS!
The democratic rights of the working class were not
granted by the ruling class and its bourgeois democratic
state but were won in struggle against them.
In its earliest days, the bourgeoisie was forced to grant
certain universal rights in order in order to unify the nation
behind it in its struggle against the colonial power. These
included the right to assembly, free speech, the press, etc.,
which are contained in the Constitution. Then, as always,
the cardinal right recognized by the bourgeoisie was the
right to own private property and to make profit.
The bourgeois democratic state fought tooth-and-nail
against every attempt of the working class to establish its
own democratic rights — the right to organize trade unions,
to bargain collectively, to picket and to strike. Each one of
these rights was won in battle and consolidated in blood.
Now, in the period of capitalism’s death agony, bourgeois
democracy not only tries to dispense with those original
rights it granted in the Constitution, but launches the most
ruthless assault on the democratic rights of the working
class. The bourgeois democratic state is today the ante­
chamber for police-military dictatorship. The rights of the
working class can only be defended through the struggle for
power.
A Workers and Farmers government must:
*Abolish all anti-union laws such as Taft-Hartley, Lan­
drum-Griffin, the Taylor Law and the Ferguson Act.
Outlaw all ‘Open Shop’ statutes. No restrictions on the
44
right of all workers to organize unions, bargain collec­
tively, the right to strike, and the right to picket.
* Free all political prisoners including Gary Tyler,
“Hurricane” Carter, John Artis and the Wilmington Ten.
Abolish the death penalty.
* Abolish the Supreme Court, which in countless rulings
has revealed itself as a reactionary club of the ruling class
against the democratic rights of the working class.
* Abolish the Presidency. The White House was exposed
by the Watergate scandal as the center of Bonapartist
conspiracies by the ruling class against the working class.
* Abolish Congress, the rubber stamp of the monopolies
and the military. Replace it with workers’ councils elected
from the factories and working class districts.
* Dismantle the CIA, FBI and all military intelligence
agencies. Dismantle all state and local police forces and all
National Guard. Replace them with workers’ defense
guards. Disarm the capitalist class and its state. No to gun
control! Full right of all workers to bear arms!
The bourgeois democratic state is the greatest threat to
the democratic rights of the working class. These rights can
be defended only through the seizure of state power by the
working class and the systematic dismantling of the
capitalist state machine.
STOP THE DRIVE TO WAR!
* Abolish the Pentagon. Dismantle the standing army,
navy, and air force. Replace them with a workers’ militia.
No reintroduction of the draft. Military training of all
workers under union control.
* Nationalize and dismantle the arms industry. Destroy
all nuclear weapons, warheads, and missiles. Halt all
nuclear power plant construction. Convert all present
nuclear facilities to peace-time use.
Fo r th e U n ite d Socialist S ta te s o f N o r th ,
C e n tra l and South A m e ric a !
The building of the revolutionary party in the United
States must be based upon a perspective which embraces
the problems of the development of the Trotskyist
movement'in all the countries which constitute the Ameri­
cas. The history of the United States comprises only a part
of the historical development of the New World. This part
can only be understood in relationship to a whole out of
which its own particular identity emerged through a
dialectical process of historical interaction. The conditions
for the emergence of the United States as a “world power”
— an economic tyrant among nations — were immediately
derived from its subjugation of the lands to its south. What
is. in fact, known as the “continental United States”
includes vast tracts of land violently extorted and
expropriated from other countries. The “Manifest Destiny”
of the United States was the “manifest misfortune” of the
people of South America and the Caribbean. American
imperialism began, first of all, with the abominable crimes
UNITE ALL WORKERS AGAINST THE POISON OF
RACISM!
* End all racial discrimination in employment, housing,
and education. Equal rights for all. Abolish all forms of
racial quotas. The answer to racism is not quotas but jobs
for all.
* Disband and outlaw all racist and fascist organiza­
tions. Establish workers’ defense guards to defend the
working class against strikebreakers and racists.
FOR A SOCIALIST FOREIGN POLICY!
* Disband NATO and all imperialist alliances. Eva­
cuate all foreign bases. Dismantle the giant multinational
corporations. All U.S.-owned plants and industries
overseas to be handed over to the control of the people of
each country.
*Support all national liberation movements. Victory to
the PLO, SWAPO and the Patriotic Front!
* End all relations with racist and fascist regimes such as
Chile, Argentina, South Africa and Israel.
* Establish friendly relations with all workers’ states and
radical nationalist regimes such as Angola, Libya and Iraq.
* For an independent and socialist Puerto Rico.
* Panama for the Panamanians! Immediate U.S.
withdrawal from the Canal Zone!
* Evacuate Guantanamo! Lift the blockade of Cuba!
* Full restitution to Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia to
assist in their postwar reconstruction.
The fight for a Labor Party, for a Workers and Farmers
government and for this socialist program cannot be taken
piecemeal, as a grab-bag of demands to be used whenever it
is convenient. Capitalism in its death agony cannot fulfill
any of these demands. The mobilization of the working
class around these policies poses directly to the masses the
absolute necessity for the overthrow of capitalism.
Certain tasks of the Workers League must be further
elaborated.
committed by the U.S. ruling class in Cuba, Puerto Rico,
Mexico and, ultimately, against all the countries of Latin
America.
Thus, as the revolutionary party in the United States,
the Workers League recognizes that the defeat of American
imperialism is only possible through the mobilization of the
masses throughout the Americas. The development of the
world crisis will now make possible through the building of
sections of the International Committee the conscious
unification of the struggles of the North American prole­
tariat and those of the proletariat and peasantry of Latin
America and the Caribbean.
The Workers League must pay the greatest attention to
the fight for the building of Trotskyist parties throughout
this portion of the Western Hemisphere. Its slogan must
be: For the United Socialist States of North, Central and
South America!

La tin Am erica
Trotsky’s warning that the epoch of capitalism’s death
agony poses before the masses the alternatives of socialism
or barbarism is finding its most brutal confirmation in
Latin America.
The fate of every country in Latin America — be it the
Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Mexico, Peru or Chile —
demonstrates that the imperialists and their lackeys in the
native bourgeosie see no way out of the crisis except to
organize the systematic starvation of vast sections of the
population.
Again and again the heroic workers and peasants of Latin
America have shown their unflinching courage and
unbreakable determination to overthrow capitalism. The
existence of the military dictatorships in Chile, Argentina,
Uruguay and Peru reveal not the inability of the working
class of Latin America to conquer power, but rather the
bankruptcy and treachery of its past and present lea­
derships.
It is within the framework of the world crisis and the
world revolution that the struggles of the working class and
oppressed peasantry in Latin America are now unfolding.
The struggles of the Latin American working class will
drastically undermine the whole world position of U.S.
imperialism, which, historically, is principally based on the
oppression of the countries to its south.
But it must be remembered at all times that the essen­
tial consent of the revolutionary struggles in Latin America
is not “national” but social. The national bourgeoisie in
Latin America is the direct tool of U.S. imperialism. The
liberation of the masses from the yoke of imperialism can
only come through the overthrow of the national
bourgeoisie and the establishment of a proletarian dicta­
torship. The demands of the oppressed peasantry can be
realized only if it is mobilized behind the working class led
by the revolutionary party.
We have already discussed in this document the
enormous economic crisis gripping Latin America and the
role of the IMF which, as the economic arm of the U.S.
counter-revolution, works with the CIA to impose the
brutal military dictatorships to guarantee the investments
of U.S. capital. But a new stage of struggle has now broken
out against these regimes.
In the front line of this struggle is the renewed outbreak
of civil war against the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua.
Led by the Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional
(FSLN), and backed by a general strike in the capital city
of Managua, the Nicaraguan masses are in a powerful
position to defeat the blood-stained Somoza dictatorship.
The impending collapse of the Somoza regime — even if
it is able to stagger on a bit longer — reflects not only the
bankruptcy of this dictatorship but the crisis of U.S.
imperialism throughout Latin America.
In neighboring El Salvador, a popular revolt against the
Romero dictatorship grows despite a state of siege imposed
by the government. These developments mean that
revolutionary conflict throughout Latin America is well
underway.
This makes the fight for revolutionary leadership, the
construction of sections of the International Committee
throughout Latin America, of vital importance. This can
only be carried out through assimilating the entire history
45
of struggle by the International Committee against
Stalinism and revisionism, which have been the props for
the counter-revolution in Latin America.
The defeat inflicted on the Chilean working class in
September 1973 provides for the proletariat of Latin
America a grim example of the inevitable outcome of the
policies of Stalinism. There was nothing accidental about
the defeat of the Chilean working class. It was carefully
prepared by the policies of the Chilean Communist Party
which deliberately disarmed the workers in the face of the
impending threat of military dictatorship.
Nor has the Chilean catastrophe led the Stalinists to
alter their course. To this day, Corvalan speaks of the
“unarmed road of the revolution” and prepares to resurrect
the Popular Front policy through a rotten alliance with the
discredited Christian Democratic Party of Eduardo Frei —
who is deeply implicated in Allende’s overthrow.
The struggle against Stalinism is historically bound up
with the preparation of the armed insurrection, the
smashing of the capitalist state and the establishment of
the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Turning away from this struggle signifies in practice a
rejection of the armed insurrection as the only path to
socialism. This itself is related to a nationalist conception,
which, in abandoning international principles as the basis
for the construction of the revolutionary party, leads
inevitably to a capitulation to the native bourgeoisie.
The bankrupt “national” bourgeoisies of Latin America
were given a temporary lease on life, an illusory rebirth, by
the years of the Second World War and the post-war infla­
tionary boom. But their desperate weakness, which has
characterized the whole history of their existence, becomes
ever more transparent as the crisis worsens. Even their
most grandiose dreams of economic development are
inevitably and rudely shattered by the reality of a world
market dominated by a handful of imperialist powers,
above all, the United States.
No matter how boastful the “anti-imperialist” rhetoric
of the various bourgeois regimes may become, they are, in
the final analysis, clients of the rapacious imperialist
“neighbor” of the north. As instruments of American
imperialism, all those national bourgeois regimes — no
matter how "left” they claim to be, regardless of whether
they are garbed in military uniform like the late Torres of
Bolivia or decorated with the Presidential sash like Allende
of Chile — are incapable of answering the social needs of
the people.
This applies not only to the revolutionary, socialist
demands of the proletariat but also to the demands of the
peasantry. Throughout Latin America the bourgeoisie has
been completely unable to meet the demand of the
peasants for land freed from the oppression of the Latifun­
dists. Thus the liberation of the peasantry, in accordance
with the formula of the Permanent Revolution, can be
carried out only in alliance with the proletariat. The
interests of the peasantry can in no wise be protected
within the framework of the bourgeois state. Historically, it
is too late in the day for this. The alliance of workers and
peasants can only be forged and maintained through the
overthrow of the capitalist state and the establishment of
the dictatorship of the proletariat.
This perspective, however, has been continuously
opposed by the Stalinists. They are presently enthusiastic
supporters of the transition to so-called “civilian”rule which
46
the bourgeoisie is proposing in a number of countries —
Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia and Brazil — as it searches
desperately for an alternative to the crumbling and
discredited military dictatorships.
The Stalinists endorse the proposal for “civilian” rule as
a means of establishing “popular front” regimes that could
more effectively strangle the revolutionary movement of
the working class. In any case, these “civilian” govern­
ments — were they to actually materialize — would be
grotesque frauds. Behind the scenes, the preparations for
Pinochet-style coups would proceed more frantically than
ever.
It should be pointed out, however, that the Stalinists are
by no means necessarily opposed to the rule of military
juntas. As infamous as their slavish support to Peruvian
General Velasco was, that crime has been surpassed by the
Stalinists’ growing fondness for General Videla in
Argentina.
Standing within the workers movement as the chief
obstacle to the defeat of Stalinism, the establishment of
the independence of the working class from the national
bourgeoisie and the training of a revolutionary vanguard on
the basis of Trotskyist principles is Pabloite revisionism.
When the SWP carried out its unprincipled reunifica­
tion with the Pabloites in 1963, representatives of the SWP
travelled throughout Latin America to deliberately
disorient adherents of the Fourth International, turn them
against the International Committee and break them from
Trotskyism. They were not loath to employ the most
sinister slanders and to cynically play upon the
inexperience and theoretical confusion of the forces in
Latin America. This policy — directed by the leader of the
SWP, Joseph Hansen — was carried out consciously in the
interests of American imperialism. Its consequences in
Latin America have been disastrous. For the crimes of
Hansen and Pabloite revisionism, thousands have paid
with their lives.
The particular expression of Pabloism within Latin
America has been the subordination of the proletariat and
its vanguard to the “left wing” of the national bourgeoisie.
The various forms of this adaptation have included the
grovelling before Castroism, the support of Peronism, the
adulation of Guevarism; in every case the content of these
policies has been the rejection of the political indepen­
dence and leading role of the proletariat which can only be
correctly expressed through the construction of indepen­
dent revolutionary parties — sections of the International
Committee.
But the real foundations of liquidationism in Latin
America were laid down by Joseph Hansen. It was he who
deliberately set out to smash any attempt to construct
revolutionary Trotskyist leadership by arguing that the
working class did not need the leadership of a Marxist
party to come to power. Hansen attacked the essence of the
world historic perspective of Leon Trotsky — that “the
historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the
revolutionary leadership” — by cynically proposing that
the working class could come to power with a “blunted
instrument,” i.e., with a non-Marxist, non-Trotskyist, non­
proletarian leadership.
In actual practice, what this meant was that the
conscious struggle for the development of Marxist revolu­
tionary leadership in the working class was to be totally
abandoned in favor of a shamelessly opportunist adapta­
tion to the national bourgeoisie and its petty-bourgeois
representatives.
Hansen’s theory of the “blunted instrument” was
applied with unparalleled cynicism to the events
surrounding the overthrow of Batista and the coming to
power of Castro in Cuba. The victory in Cuba was seized
upon by Hansen to prove that the revolutionary leadership
could emerge spontaneously under the direction of “uncon­
scious Marxists” who had absolutely no connection to the
Fourth International.
The devastating political implications of Hansen’s
position for the development of Trotskyism in Latin
America were immediately exposed by the International
Committee. If someone could be an “unconscious” Marxist
and, furthermore, establish a workers’ state without even
building a revolutionary proletarian party, then Trot­
skyism could not have any role to play. This emerged as the
line of the SWP whose leaders began suggesting that a new,
fifth International should perhaps be formed under the
leadership of Fidel Castro!
The opportunist policies of Hansen, united with the old
Pabloite Ernest Mandel in the rump “United Secretariat,”
led to the disorientation of the existing Trotskyist cadres in
Latin America and the eventual decimation of their forces.
The “guerrilla” strategy embarked upon by the United
Secretariat resulted in the wholesale destruction of their
movement, particularly in Argentina.
Once the “catastrophe” (Hansen’s own words) had
happened, Hansen adopted a fake orthodoxy of “proletarian
orientation” which was, in fact, nothing more than an
acceptance of Moreno’s prostration before Peron. Moreno
went so far as to declare that his movement functioned
under the discipline of the decrepit dictator. “Left
Peronism’’was nothing more than the 60-year-old tendency
in Latin America to tie the working class to the “anti­
imperialist” bourgeoisie.
In Bolivia, the opportunist policy of Lora — supported
by the French revisionists OCI group — was essentially the
same as that of Moreno in Argentina. Lora also abandoned
the principle of the revolutionary independence of the
working class and of the Trotskyist party in favor of wor­
shipping the Popular Assembly. At the same time, Lora
relied on Torres and the “left” colonels to save the working
class from the counter-revolution.
In 1962, Hansen warned the International Committee
that failure to uncritically support Castro would make it
impossible to build revolutionary parties in Latin America.
Now the balance sheet can be drawn. The Pabloite parties
are deeply implicated in the defeats suffered by the
working class in Chile, Bolivia and Argentina. At this very
moment, Hansen’s man in Peru, Hugo Blanco, is being
groomed by the ruling class to divert the threatening social
revolution.
However, new and more vicious betrayals are being
prepared. Hansen’s recruit, Fausto Amador, has been
installed as the United Secretariat’s representative in
Latin America. Amador deserted the Sandinista Front, fled
the country and then utilized his father’s personal friend­
ship with Somoza to re-enter Nicaragua and gain
immunity. Once back in Nicaragua, Amador spied and
informed on the Sandinista Front, and called a press
conference in which he called on its fighters to give
themselves up to Somoza. He betrayed countless former

comrades among the guerrillas in the Sandinista Front,
including his own brother, Carlos Fonseca Amador, a
founder of the Sandinistas in 1962, who was murdered by
the brutal Nicaraguan dictatorship in 1976. Amador then
went on to take a diplomatic post at the Nicaraguan
embassy in Brussels.
The leaders of the Pabloite parties in Latin America,
true to their opportunist history, accept Amador as a
“Trotskyist leader” although they know all of his history.
All the lessons of these betrayals must be drawn by
Trotskyists in Latin America. But in doing this, it is
absolutely essential that the role of Hansen as a double
agent be examined by Latin American Trotskyists within
the light of the investigation conducted by the
International Committee into the history of Stalinist and
imperialist police penetration of the Fourth International.
Only on this basis will it be possible to take forward the
struggles for the construction of sections of the Interna­
tional Committee of the Fourth International throughout
Latin America.
P u e rto Rico
The Workers League has a direct responsibility for the
construction of a Trotskyist party in Puerto Rico, in
political solidarity with the International Committee.
1978 marks 80 years of U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico.
Since 1898, the island has been held in bondage by the U.S.
bourgeoisie through its government in Washington for the
purpose of the ruthless exploitation of the Puerto Rican
people.
In these 80 years, U.S. colonialism has taken various
forms — from outright military rule to an appointed
civilian government to the “autonomous” elected govern­
ment under the present “free associated state” or
“commonwealth.” But whatever the form, the essence of
the relationship between the U.S. and Puerto Rico has been
one of an oppressor nation to an oppressed nation.
All land and resources in Puerto Rico and in the sur­
rounding coastal waters are ihe property of the U.S.; there
is no Puerto Rican citizenship, customs or money. The
island’s government is entirely subordinate to the govern­
ment in Washington.
While bearing U.S. citizenship, the Puerto Rican people
have no representation in the Congress and cannot vote for
the President, although these are the bodies which make
the real decisions about Puerto Rico.
Yet, despite its colonial status, the last 30 years have wit­
nessed the enormous development of industrialization
under the auspices of U.S. capital, and its supplanting of
the remnants of the once-dominant sugar economy. This
was largely due to U.S. investors who took advantage of the
high level of unemployment and the pool of cheap labor to
amass great profits.
This has created a modern industrial working class,
highly unionized and extremely militant, which, through
its struggles to raise its standard of living, has come into
head-on collision with the comprador bourgeoisie and its
masters on Wall Street. This is shown by the strikes of the
longshoremen, utility workers and San Juan bus drivers.
The policies of the comprador bourgeoisie — both
“statehood” and “commonwealth” — are completely
reactionary and flow, not from the needs of the Puerto
47
Rican people, but from the interests of U.S. imperialism.
They can play no independent role and are totally inca­
pable of resolving even the question of self-determination.
The new stage of struggle by the Puerto Rican working
class shows that it is the only class capable of leading the
fight for independence. But this question is entirely bound
up with the fight for socialism.
The Workers League has a dual responsibility towards
Puerto Rico: first, mobilizing support in the American
working class for the unconditional support of indepen­
dence for Puerto Rico against U.S. imperialism; second,
the construction of a Trotskyist party in Puerto Rico basing
itself on the perspective of the Permanent Revolution.
We reject entirely the positions of the petty-bourgeois
nationalists of the PSP, and their Stalinist and revisionist
allies who advocate the “two-stage” theory — first
independence, later socialism — which, in practice,
amounts to channeling off the mass movement of the
Puerto Rican working class into the deadend of protest and
pressure on the comprador bourgeois regimes.
At the same time, we recognize that the struggles of the
Puerto Rican working class are intimately bound up with
the struggles of the American working class and that the
fight for independence and socialism in Puerto Rico will
undermine U.S. imperialism and greatly strengthen the
American working class.
The Workers League fights for an independent, socialist
Puerto Rico as part of the United Socialist States of North,
Central and South America.
Canada
The Workers League’s responsibility for the develop­
ment of a section in Canada is not just a matter of the
geographical proximity of Canada and the United States.
Despite major historical differences, the development of
U.S. and Canadian capitalism has been profoundly inter­
linked. Now, under conditions of the death agony of U.S.
imperialism, the unity of the Canadian and American
working class is one of the most powerful factors in the
emergence of the social revolution on the North American
continent.
The crushing defeat of the Liberal government of Pierre
Trudeau in the May 22 elections marks an enormous shift
to the left by the Canadian working class. The record two
million votes polled by the New Democratic Party
represents a historic step towards independent working
class political action for the first time on the North
American continent.
Millions of Canadian workers are now headed into mass
struggles against the right-wing government of the new
Progressive Conservative prime minister Joe Clark, under
conditions of the greatest economic crisis in Canadian
history.
It is not possible here within the limits of this document
to trace the development of Canadian capitalism except to
say that, though the Canadian ruling class had sufficiently
independent class interests to resist absorption into the
United States, it was too weak to develop capitalist indus­
try on its own. For the exploitation of its vast natural
resources and the establishment of modern manu­
facturing, it was dependent, first on British, m -.Hi then on
 48
U.S. capital.
Furthermore, the bourgeoisie never united Canada on
the basis of a revolutionary upheaval or a civil war. In fact,
the Confederation of 1867 was the reaction of the Cana­
dian Tories to the American Civil War and their fear that
once the armies of the Union had finished off the slavocracy
of the South, they would be turned around and moved
north.
Canada represents the halfway point between the
development of British and American capitalism. But the
vast extent to which U.S. capital has penetrated the
country has united the development of the Canadian and
American working class. When the sit-down strikes to
found the CIO swept through Detroit and Flint, they
spread to Oshawa, Windsor and across Canada. Today, a
majority of industrial workers in both countries are mem­
bers of the same international unions.
The Canadian economy, rooted in foreign capital and
vastly dependent on the export of raw materials, is acutely
sensitive to the transformations of the world capitalist
economy. Its “special relationship” with U.S. capital, long
the source of economic stability, now becomes the source of
the greatest crisis within Canada. Of all the world’s major
currencies, only the Canadian dollar has dropped more
rapidly in value than the U.S. dollar. It now stands at U.S.
$0.85.
Unemployment has skyrocketed as manufacturing
industry faces wholesale collapse. In a country of 22 mil­
lion people, nearly 1.5 million are unemployed. In some
areas, like the Maritime provinces, the jobless rate has
reached the depression levels of nearly 40 percent.
The world economic crisis is devastating Canadian
capitalism. Canada is the most bankrupt of the advanced
capitalist countries, with $60 billion in net foreign debt.
Federal budget deficits alone have mushroomed from $676
million in 1974 to over $12 billion in 1978. Last year’s trade
deficit was $5.3 billion and this year’s is expected to top $6
billion.
To stave off financial disaster, the Canadian bourgeoisie
has borrowed massively on the foreign markets. In 1977, it
borrowed more than twice as much as any other country in
the world and accounted for nearly 12 percent of all lending
that year.
Despite the borrowing of $6 billion U.S. over the last 15
months to prop up its currency, the Canadian dollar
remains at its lowest point in the post-war period.
Bank of Canada and government officials admit to
having drawn on reserves to the danger point where at the
next crisis of confidence in the Canadian dollar they will be
forced to go hat in hand to the International Monetary
Fund. IMF loans will be conditional on the most savage
austerity policies — the wiping out of social services, wage
cuts and mass layoffs.
“The government’s foreign borrowing to prop up our
falling dollar cannot be continued without exhausting our
credit and putting us into the hands of the International
Monetary Fund, which would impose real restraints on
Canada.” — The Globe and Mail, May 3, 1979.
The program of the IMF is the program of class war. In
every country where the IMF has intervened, from Peru to
Egypt, to England and Italy, its policies have brought the
working class onto the streets.
It was the powerful resistance of the working class during
the eleven years of Trudeau’s administration that
eventually smashed the government. The last three years
have seen one battle after another between the labor
movement and the Liberal government, especially the
General Strike of October 1976 and the nationwide postal
strike last October.
The election results are a powerful mandate to the NDP
to lead the struggle against the Clark government. But the
right-wing Broadbent leadership is completely opposed to
any struggle against Clark. From its inception in 1961, the
NDP leaders have never fought for the working class to take
power.
Formed by disgruntled trade union bureaucrats and the
remnants of the reformist CCF to exert pressure on the
Liberals and Tories, the NDP has never had the
perspective of a workers’ government and socialist policies.
Parliamentary maneuvers and deals with Clark or Tru­
deau will not save jobs, halt skyrocketing prices, defend
workers against union busting, or stop the conspiracies of
the RCMP and the military brass against democratic
rights.
The struggle for a workers’ government in Canada
presupposes the fight for the unity of the entire working
class, French and English speaking, against the hopelessly
bankrupt Canadian bourgeoisie. The working class has no
interest in the regionalist schemes of the reactionary Parti
Quebecois.
While the economic crisis exacerbates day by day the
regional disparities within Canadian capitalism, it at the
same time leaves no room for the development of a belated
independent Quebec based on capitalist property relations.
The Parti Quebecois advocates separation for the French-
speaking province in order to establish an even more direct
linkup with Wall Street.
The NDP leaders, working as a left prop of Canadian
capitalism, bear direct responsibility for the confusion in
the working class on this issue. They have given the back of
the hand to the Quebec working class, leaving French
workers to the reactionary influence of the bourgeois and
petty bourgeois separatists or the deadend of syndicalism.
After two decades, the NDP has failed to win working class
support in Quebec.
The autonomy of Quebec with language rights
guaranteed to the French majority and the English
minority there, is only conceivable within the framework of
a socialist Canada, part of the United Socialist States of
North, Central and South America.
What is required is the mobilization of the strength of the
entire working class, French and English speaking, against
the right-wing Clark government and the fight for an NDP
government based on socialist policies. This is the policy
fought for by the Trotskyists in the Workers League of
Canada.
The defeat of the bureaucracy in the Canadian Labour
Congress and the reformist leadership of the NDP requires
the building of independent revolutionary leadership. The
Workers League is completely hostile to the Stalinists of
the Communist Party and the revisionist R.W.L. (Revolu­
tionary Workers League).

Stalinism has played the most pernicious, counter­
revolutionary role in the Canadian labor movement.
Opposed from the beginning to the formation of any
independent labor party, the Stalinists have been the most
consistent advocates of “Canadian nationalism” — the
formation of an alliance between the working class and
sections of the “anti-imperialist” bourgeoisie against US
imperialism. In this way, they hope to chain the working
class to the capitalist state.
The revisionist “Revolutionary Workers League,” the
result of a reunion of the supporters of Hansen and Mandel
in Canada, buttresses the role of Stalinism and reformism.
Full Su p port to N a tio n a l Lib e ra tio n S tru g g le s!
The Workers League defends the just national liberation
struggles being waged by the masses of the colonial and
semi-colonial countries against imperialist domination.
The national liberation struggles are an essential
component of the world socialist revolution. Throughout
the postwar boom, imperialism attempted to hold back the
mass upsurge of struggle through investment, foreign aid,
higher prices for raw materials and the handing of political
power to the native bourgeoisie in countries like India. But
the world crisis now means economic devastation and
outright starvation for the masses in Asia, Africa and the
Middle East.
This is the driving force behind the struggles of the
colonial masses. Inspired by the victories in Indochina,
millions of workers, peasants, and youth have taken up the
armed struggle and dealt hammer blows to imperialism,
undermining drastically its position internationally and
creating the conditions for the onset of revolutionary
struggles by the working class of the major metropolitan
countries.
Moreover, the fight to tear free from the yoke of national
oppression becomes fused with the struggle for social
liberation.
The front line of this struggle is the fight of the Pales­
tinian people, under their sole legitimate representative,
the Palestine Liberation Organization, for the liberation of
their homeland against Zionist and U.S. imperialism.
The bastard state of Israel was created in 1948 for the
sole purpose of establishing a bastion under the direct
control of imperialism to protect its vital oil supplies in the
Middle East. It was aimed, not just against the Pales­
tinian people who were driven from their homeland en
masses, but against the entire Arab people to block their
fight to unify against imperialism.
The Zionists have pursued a policy of genocide against
the Palestinian people. They are backed by the fascist
scum of the Lebanese Phalange. But the crisis of U.S.
imperialism and its Zionist puppets and the heroic
determination of the Palestinian liberation fighters has
now forced Carter, Vance and Brzezinski to call upon the
support of the traitor Sadat and the Egyptian bourgeoisie.
This is the reactionary base for the sinister conspiracies
plotted at Camp David. The Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty,
orchestrated by Carter, is a complete fraud and only
exposes the enormous weakness of imperialism. Behind the
49
They are the most slavish supporters of bourgeois
nationalism in Quebec. They opposed the fight to bring
down the Trudeau government, and are the perennial
backers of the “left wing” in the NDP, a formation whose
sole purpose it is to render harmless any movement in
opposition to the reformist bureaucracy.
A section of the International Commmittee must be built
in Canada, basing itself on the most uncompromising
struggle against reformism, Stalinism and revisionism.
This can only be carried out by those forces who con­
sciously base their practice on the entire history of the
International Committee’s struggle against revisionism.
cover of this “peace treaty,” the Zionists have launched
new raids and bombing missions in South Lebanon aimed
at destroying the Palestinian liberation movement.
The attempt to isolate the PLO has been a failure as
every section of the Arab world has united, as never before,
against Sadat’s betrayal. It is Sadat who now stands along,
a political leper throughout the Middle East.
The only road to peace in the Middle East is through the
destruction of the State of Israel and the establishment of a
democratic, secular state of Palestine. Zionism is a
thoroughly racist ideology which, as Trotsky made clear, is
a trap for Jewish workers themselves. Their real enemy is
not the Palestinian people but the Zionists and their
imperialist masters in Washington. The eruption of the
industrial struggles against the regime of the terrorist
Begin makes clear that Zionism is resting on a political
volcano.
In southern Africa, the masses have come into head-on
collision with the hated apartheid regimes. Every attempt
by British and American imperialism to forestall the
outbreak of full-scale armed struggle, especially in
Zimbabwe, has met with dismal failure. The fraudulent
elections orchestrated by Smith to give a black face to
imperialist rule have been a disaster. No African state
recognizes them and even Smith’s stooge Reverend Sithole
has denounced them.
U.S. imperialism has sought to use its bloodhounds —
the Zionists and the Phalangists in the Middle East and
the white settler regimes in southern Africa — against the
liberation fighters, rather than intervene directly. This was
shown most tellingly during the recent U.S. visit by Smith
and his accomplice Sithole, when Rhodesian troops carried
out their bloody massacre in Zambia.
But this only underscores the desperation of imper­
ialism. Even in Namibia, the Anglo-U.S. imperialist
inspired peace accord has collapsed. Now the masses of
South Africa (Azania) are moving to the armed struggle
against Botha’s regime and are striking one of the most
sensitive spots for world imperialism, its supply depot for
gold.
The Workers League is the only movement in the United
States which defends the national liberation struggles in
southern Africa and the Middle East against imperialism.
We stand with the PLO, the Patriotic Front in Zimbabwe,
SWAPO in Namibia, and the liberation fighters in South
50
Africa. Our position, entirely in line with that If Lenin,
Trotsky and the principles hammered out at the first four
Congresses of the Communist International, is based on the
scientific perspective of the world revolution, and the
crucial role played by the revolutionary national liberation
movements.
This is in the sharpest contrast to the despicable role of
Stalinism. For the Kremlin bureaucracy, the national
liberation struggles are pawns in their diplomatic maneu­
vers to maintain “peaceful coexistence” with imper­
ialism. When the liberation forces come into conflict with
the bureaucracy’s interests, they cut these movements off
from vitally needed arms and supplies.
For this reason, the Stalinists seek to sow the maximum
political disorientation and confusion within the liberation
forces. The most blatant sign of the bureaucracy’s treach­
erous role was its support for the Ethiopian Dergue against
the clearly justified national liberation struggle of both the
Somalian people in the Ogaden and the Eritrean people.
Revisionism functions as a reactionary apologist for
imperialism and Stalinism against the national liberation
struggles. This was exemplified by the SWP’s position on
Angola, which amounted to open support for the CIA’s
stooges, UNITA and FNLA, against the genuine national
liberation struggle being led the MPLA.
Since then, the SWP has publicly condemned the PLO
for “terrorism,” joining in the hysterical and pernicious
Fo r th e Unconditional D e fen se o f th e Soviet U nion! Fo r th e
Political R e vo lu tio n A g a in s t th e Stalinist Bureaucracy!
The defense of the Soviet Union and the deformed
workers’ states of eastern Europe, southeast Asia and
China against imperialist attack is a task of the Fourth
International arising from its strategy of the world revolu­
tion. Despite the counter-revolutionary policies of the
Stalinist bureaucracies that have usurped political power
from the working class, the overthrow of capitalism in these
countries represents enormous blows to world imperi­
alism. The new property relations established in the USSR
as a result of the October Revolution remain intact, and
provide a powerful foundation for the extension of the
world revolution.
The deepening crisis of world capitalism raises the
specter of a new World War. Should such a war break out,
it would be principally directed, whatever its initial forms,
against the Soviet Union. The political responsibility of the
Workers League would be to defend the Soviet Union
against attack and to fight for the defeat of the imperialist
aggressor.
In the history of the Fourth International, there are
sufficient examples of what it means to abandon the
defense of the workers’ states. Burnham — who refused to
defend the Soviet Union in 1939 — quickly became a raving
anti-communist and writes today for the ultra-right
National Review. Shachtman, who shared Burnham’s line
in the 1939-40 faction fight, ended up as an accomplice of
the U.S. State Department and a supporter of the bombing
of North Vietnam. Those who would not defend the
campaign of the imperialist press against the heroic March
11 raid by PLO commandos inside occupied Palestine.
This is the same reactionary motive that lies behind the
Stalinists’ desperate attack on the Arab Ba’ath Socialist
Party, which holds power in Iraq. The Stalinists are
infuriated by the principled stand taken by the Ba’athists
against imperialism and their refusal to participate in the
diplomatic charade at Geneva.
The revisionists’ open defense of the CIA and the State
Department was already prefigured by their refusal to call
for “Victory to the NLF” during the Vietnamese War. Only
the Workers League stood for that position, fighting to
unite the struggle of the Vietnamese liberation forces
against U.S. imperialism with the fight of the American
working class against the U.S. government.
Without an uncompromising struggle at every point
against imperialist oppression, defending unconditionally
the struggles for national liberation, it is impossible to
carry out a successful struggle for power within the
imperialist countries, above all the United States. This
struggle can only be carried forward through the methods
of of the socialist revolution, which has nothing in common
with sectarian abstentionism or with the fraudulent “anti­
imperialism” which subordinates the fight against
imperialism to the native bourgeoisie.
conquests of the international working class were
inevitably finished as revolutionaries. The defense of the
USSR and all the other workers’ states is an unconditional
requirement for membership in the Workers League.
However, defense of the Soviet Union does not imply the
slightest concession to Stalinism. In fact, the defense of the
USSR is conceivable only from the standpoint of the
struggle for the political revolution against the bureau­
cracy. In every way, politically, militarily and
economically, the bureaucracy sabotages the development
and defense of the Soviet Union. The policies of the
bureaucracy, both domestic and international, are directed
toward securing its own privileges — not toward the de­
fense of the planned economy and the extension of the
revolution. The recent rash of defectors from the Soviet
Union to the United States — most recently, the top Soviet
diplomat to the United Nations — demonstrates that
within the highest circles of the bureaucracy there exist not
a few potential Quislings. The whole foreign policy of the
Soviet Union actually weakens its world position since it is
directed against the development of revolution. The
“national defense” policy of the bureaucracy is totally
inimical to the interests of the USSR, because the defense
of the workers’ state against imperialism is possible only on
the basis of an international revolutionary strategy. No
series of diplomatic “coups” for the Soviet Union can
fundamentally strengthen the position of the USSR vis-
a-vis world imperialism. The survival of the Soviet

Union, as well as China and all the workers* states,
depends upon the victory of the world revolution. The
defeat of the working class in Western Europe and the
United States would spell doom for the Soviet Union.
New dangers to the Soviet Union are contained in the
collaboration of Stalinism and imperialism in the signing of
the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II). The
major concessions, in terms of nuclear delivery rockets are
coming from the Soviet Union. The SALT treaty is the
cover behind which Carter is carrying out the biggest
military buildup of forces. Before the ink was dry on the
treaty, Washington was mapping out plans for the
deployment of the MX missile system and shipping off
1,000 nuclear missiles to the NATO forces in Europe.
The SALT treaty and the policy of detente will no more
defend the Soviet Union than did the Stalin-Hitler pact
signed on the eve of World War II. Quite the contrary, it
was nothing but window-dressing for the Nazi war
machine’s preparations for an invasion which brought
untold devastation to the Soviet Union.
The relationship between the defense of the Soviet Union
and the struggle against Stalinism was explained by
Trotsky in his article “After Munich”:
“Only the overthrow of the Bonapartist Kremlin clique
can make possible the regeneration of the military strength
of the U.S.S.R. Only the liquidation of the ex-Comintern
will clear the way for revolutionary internationalism. The
struggle against war, imperialism, and fascism demands a
ruthless struggle against Stalinism splotched with crimes.
Whoever defends Stalinism directly or indirectly, whoever
keeps silent about its betrayals or exaggerates its military
strength is the worst enemy of the revolution, of socialism,
and of the oppressed peoples. The sooner the Kremlin gang
is overthrown by the armed offensive of the workers, the
greater will be the chances for a socialist regeneration of the
U.S.S.R., the closer and broader will be the perspectives of
the international revolution.”
The conditions for the defeat of the bureaucracy emerge
out of the advance of the world revolution, for the growth of
bureaucracy was the outcome of the isolation of the first
workers’ state and the defeats of the international working
class. The world revolution has dealt Stalinism hammer
blows. The inevitability of the political revolution against
the Stalinist bureaucracies throughout Eastern Europe,
Asia and in the Soviet Union has been foreshadowed in the
great Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the rebellions of
the Polish workers in 1970 and 1976.
In recent years, there has been a growing “dissident”
movement within the USSR which has received consi­
derable publicity in the capitalist press.
Among these dissidents is to be found a wide range of
views. Not a few of the best known have emerged as out-
and-out right-wingers who stand openly for the reesta­
blishment of capitalism in the Soviet Union — like
Solzhenitsyn, Amalrik, Bukovsky. Others, like Sakharov,
adopt the standpoint of petty-bourgeois democracy and
thus irresistibly gravitate towards the imperialist powers.
Many of these right-wingers reflect a section of interests
within the bureaucracy itself. What they and virtually all
of the best known “dissidents” have in common is
contempt and hostility toward the Soviet working class.
While the Soviet Union must defend itself against the
51
direct agents of imperialism, such as those who engage in
espionage on behalf of a capitalist power, the recent trials
against various groups of dissidents were undertaken in the
interests of the bureaucracy. The espionage charges
produced against Shcharansky were trumped up by the
bureaucracy. While the Workers League grants these
dissidents no political confidence whatsoever and issues a
clear warning about their reactionary political outlook, the
repression organized by the bureaucracy is directed against
the Soviet workers. Furthermore, under conditions of the
upsurge of the world revolution, it is not the isolated and
individualistic Shcharansky who poses a grave threat to the
Soviet Union, but the politics of the bureaucracy. We
oppose the trials from the standpoint of the struggle for the
regeneration of Soviet democracy through the struggle
against the bureaucracy.
Moreover, the central issue cannot be posed as “For or
against the dissidents?” The emergence of these dissidents
is only a very distorted reflection of the emerging conflict
within the Soviet Union between the working class and the
bureaucracy. With the first great movements of the Soviet
working class against the bureaucracy — as a result of the
advance of the social revolution into Europe — the
“dissident” of today will for the most part fade into the
distant background or take sides alongside the
bureaucracy. Then, the real “dissident” movement will
emerge in the mold of the first great “dissidents” —
Trotsky and the Left Opposition.
“If we are to examine ‘Trotskyism’ as a finished program,
and, even more to the point, as an organization, then
unquestionably ‘Trotskyism’ is extremely weak in the
USSR. However, its indestructible force stems from the
fact that it expresses not only revolutionary tradition but
also today’s actual opposition of the Russian working class.
The social hatred stored up by the workers against the
bureaucracy — this is precisely what from the viewpoint of
the Kremlin clique constitutes ‘Trotskyism.’ It fears with a
deathly and thoroughly well-grounded fear the bond
between the deep but inarticulate indignation of the
workers and the organization of the Fourth International.”
(The Transitional Program: The USSR and the problems
of the transitional epoch.)
The political revolution will be prepared and led by a
Soviet section of the International Committee of the
Fourth International.
Of the policies of the Chinese Stalinists, it can only be
said that in the conduct of their unspeakably reactionary
diplomacy — their support of the Chilean junta, their
meetings with every leading European reactionary, their
call for greater military vigilance on the part of imperialism
against the Soviet Union — they are proving themselves to
be the most avid pupil of Joseph Stalin himself.
The emergence of Euro-Communism does not signify any
sort of progressive or anti-Stalinist current within the
traditional Communist Parties, but represents the outcome
of the counter-revolutionary policies of the Soviet bureau­
cracy. The “Euro-Communist” (better known as the
“Euro-Stalinist”) opponents of the Soviet bureaucracy
share the latter’s main political outlook, but in the
interests of the national bourgeoisie and the local appara­
tus have translated the theory and practice of Stalinism
into the native tongue.
52
Berlinguer, Marchais and Carrillo all desperately seek to
convince the bourgeoisie that they can be entrusted with
ministerial portfolios in a Popular Front coalition. They are
trying to break whatever tenuous historical connection still
remains between these parties and the traditions of the
October Revolution Thus, the French CP dropped any
mention of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” from its
program. The Spanish CP, at its last conference, dropped
its designation as “Marxist-Leninist.” The Italian CP is
planning to do likewise at its next congress.
These parties are consciously adapting themselves to the
anti-communist prejudices generated in the middle class
by bourgeois democracy.
This lineup in defense of the bourgeois state points to the
nearness of the social revolution in Europe. The Euro-
Stalinists sense this and come forward on behalf of their
masters as the last line of defense of the capitalist state.
The bourgeoisie, while they have not yet reconciled
themselves to officially giving the Stalinists ministerial
posts, consciously seek to use the Stalinists to contain the
working class.
If a coalition government does not exist de jure in Italy,
it exists de facto in the form of the “Historic Compro­
mise.” But the Euro-Stalinists, in carrying out this right-
wing turn, are inescapably caught in the vise of profound
contradictions. Their mass base in the industrial prole­
tariat has been built up on the basis of the historic identi­
fication millions of workers made between these parties
and the traditions of Leninism and the October Revolu­
tion. This most advanced section of the working class, now
impelled into direct conflict with the state, is moving into
head-on collision with the leaders and policies of Euro-
Stalinism.

For th e Rehabilitation o f T ro ts k y and
A ll V ic tim s o f th e M oscow Tria ls!
The Moscow Trials were the greatest frameups in
history, drowning in blood the entire generation of Bolshe­
viks that had led the October Revolution. They were the
most despicable crime committed by the Stalinist bureauc­
racy against the international working class.
To this day, the Kremlin bureaucracy and their hacks
around the world, including the CPUSA, completely
defend the trials and every crime of Stalinism.
Recently, leaders of the Italian Communist Party have
joined the calls for the rehabilitation of Bukharin, the
Bolshevik and leader of the Right Opposition murdered in
the Moscow Trials. One Italian CP leader has raised the
question of Trotsky’s rehabilitation. This does not repre­
sent a favor by the Euro-Stalinists to the Trotskyist
movement. The former remain more committed than ever
to the counter-revolutionary policies of Stalinism.
Their emphasis on rehabilitating Bukharin, in fact,
The Struggle A g a in s t Im perialist W ar
The insoluble crisis of world capitalism now compels the
ruling class in the United States to prepare the launching
of a third imperialist war.
The Carter administration has drawn up a record
military budget of over $126 billion. It has given the green
light for the development of the ultimate capitalist
weapon, the neutron bomb, which subjects humans to
lethal levels of radiation while leaving property intact. This
is part of an arsenal of new strategic and tactical nuclear
weapons — the Trident submarine, MXmissile and cruise
missile.
War is the inevitable and objective outcome of the
contradictions within the world capitalist economy. It
cannot be prevented through diplomacy or peace confer­
ences. Not even the ‘fear’ of nuclear annihilation will
prevent the bourgeoisie from launching a world war. They
themselves are imprisoned by the historical laws of the
crisis. As Trotsky said, they toboggan toward disaster.
Nevertheless, the launching of war is a conscious policy. In
each country the ruling class seeks to obtain, principally
through the defeat of ‘their’ working class, the most favor­
able position for conducting the war.
Lenin wrote: “War is a continuation of policy by other
means. All wars are inseparable from the political systems
that engender them. The policy which a given state, a given
class within that state, pursued for a long time before the
war is inevitably continued by that same class during the
53
represents a desperate attempt to justify their own right-
wing turn.
While the Workers League continues its principled fight
for the rehabilitation of all the victims of the Moscow
Trials, including Bukharin, we insist that there can be no
accounting of this hideous crime without the full rehabili­
tation of Trotsky. It was Trotsky and his son Leon Sedov
who were the principal defendants-in-absentia at the trials.
The death sentences passed against both of them were
carried out by Stalin’s gang of assassins in the GPU.
The bureaucracy is absolutely terrified of the demand for
the rehabilitation of Trotsky because they know that to
even raise this issue would not only expose the crimes of
Stalin but also those of his heirs in the Kremlin today.
The Workers League demands a full review of the
Moscow Trials, the exposure of every one of the crimes and
frameups of Stalinism, and the full rehabilitation of all the
victims of the trials, above all Trotsky and Sedov.
war, the form of action alone being changed.”
The greatest obstacle to imperialism’s war drive is the
undefeated strength of the working class. The road to
imperialist war, therefore, is inseparable from imposing a
decisive setback or smashing outright the strength of the
working class through police-military dictatorship and
fascism.
What this means of course is that the struggle against
war is inseparable from the mobilization of the working
class for the overthrow of capitalism. This is precisely the
essence of the struggle to build the revolutionary party. But
it is necessary to clearly define the position of the Workers
League in relation to any outbreak of imperialist war. This
is particularly vital in light of the advanced preparations of
the Carter administration for military intervention in the
Middle East and the definite turn it has taken in the most
recent period toward holding back at all costs the further
advance of liberation struggles in Africa.
The policy of the Workers League in any war entered
by U.S. imperialism must be to fight unconditionally for
the defeat of this government and its armies. We base
our position on the objective historical interests of the
working class from the standpoint of the world revolu­
tion and not on the temporary confusion that may exist
within the class in the opening period of the new war.
 54
We totally reject the policy pursued by the Socialist
Workers Party at the Minneapolis frameup trial in 1941
and their subsequent line during World War II. The SWP
refused to campaign politically for the defeat of U.S.
imperialism, implicitly accepting U.S. imperialism as the
lesser evil to German imperialism. It assumed a semi-
defensist position which amounted to protesting the way in
which the war was being conducted and that the sacrifice
was not being shared equally. The claim of SWP leaders
that the American working class was not prepared to toler­
ate the position of defeatism, expressed in Lenin’s slogan
“Turn the imperialist war into a civil war,” is essentially no
different from the reactionary justification given by Social
Democracy in 1914 for its endorsement of the First World
War.
We are the foremost fighters against the thoroughly reac­
tionary policy of the pro-CIA labor bureaucracy which
seeks to dragoon millions of workers into the imperialist
slaughterhouse by lining them up to defend imperialism, as
they did most recently in the Vietnam War.
At the same time the Workers League rejects with
contempt “anti-war” campaigns which confine themselves
to bankrupt protest, appeals for peace and base them­
selves on alliances with bourgeois politicians and all sorts
of representatives of the class responsible for the war.
A g a in s t Individual Terrorism
The Workers League completely opposes the method of
individual terrorism. Though there has not been much
activity by groups advocating individual terrorism within
the U.S. in the recent period, groups in Europe such as
Baader-Meinhof and the Red Brigades have received wide­
spread notoriety. In the late 1960s, the same tendency
manifested itself with the Weathermen in the U.S.
What these groups share in common is the fact that their
use of individual terrorism is totally separated from the
revolutionary struggle of the working class for the over­
throw of capitalism.
The opposition of Marxists to individual terrorism has
nothing to do with that of revisionists, moralists and paci­
fists who declaim loudly against individual terror only to
bow and scrape all the more slavishly before the organized
violence of the capitalist state.
Marxists have historically opposed individual terrorism
because it is completely counterproductive. It counter­
poses the heroics of a single individual to the movement of
the masses. In so doing, it not only spreads confusion in the
working class but provides the authorities with a
convenient excuse for carrying out repressive measures.
These groups display an entirely middle class pessimism
about and hostility to the independent movement of the
masses. In that sense, individual terrorism is the flip-side
of reformism — protest, only with a gun in hand.
Lenin, during the early struggles against the Socialist
Revolutionaries in Russia, wrote about their advocacy of
terrorism:
“...The Socialist-Revolutionaries, by including ter­
rorism in their program and advocating it in its present-
day form as a means of political struggle, are thereby doing
the most serious harm to the movement, destroying the
History has demonstrated that the “anti-war” movement
led by the revisionists and Stalinists in the period of the
Vietnam War aided imperialism by channelling mass
opposition to the war among workers and youth away from
a political struggle against the ruling class. The only force
that can prevent imperialist war or stop it once it has begun
is the working class.
The Workers League fights for the dismantling of the
U.S. imperialist war machine — the Pentagon, the massive
arms industry, the standing army, navy, air force and
marines, the vast intelligence apparatus.
We demand the expropriation of the war industries
under workers’ control. We call for the complete abolition
of all secret diplomacy and demand that all treaties and
pacts be made public. We demand the substitution of the
standing armed forces with a workers’ militia indissolubly
linked to the mass organizations of the working class.
We reject pacifism and middle class protest against war.
In the event of war and the forced conscription of millions
of workers and youth into the armed forces, the task of
revolutionaries is to remain with their class, fighting to
rally the rank-and-file soldiers around the revolutionary
program. At the same time, we advocate military training
of workers and youth under the control of the trade unions.
indissoluble ties between socialist work and the mass of the
revolutionary class. No verbal assurances and vows can
disprove the unquestionable fact that present-day terror­
ism, as practiced and advocated by the Socialist-Revolu-
tionaries, is not connected in any way with work among
the masses, for the masses, or together with the masses;
that the organization of terroristic acts by the Party
distracts our very scanty organizational forces from their
difficult and by no means completed task of organizing a
revolutionary workers’ party; that in practice the
terrorism of the Socialist-Revolutionaries is nothing else
than single combat, a method that has been wholly
condemned by the experience of history.”
Terrorism is, in fact, based on an entirely reactionary
idealist conception which rejects the only doctrine that can
liberate the working class, the scientific world outlook of
Marxism. Trotsky, in “In Defense of Marxism,” discussed,
this in relation to the struggle of Bolshevism against the
Socialist Revolutionaries:
“The main argument of the Social Revolutionists was as
follows: ‘Iskra’ wants to found a school of dialectic mater­
ialism while we want to overthrow Czarist autocracy. It
must be said that the Narodnik terrorists took their own
words very seriously: bomb in hand they sacrificed their
lives... It is historical experience that the greatest
revolution in all history was not led by the party which
started out with bombs but by the party which started out
with dialectic materialism.”
No matter how commendable the courage shown by
members of these groups, the methods of individual
terrorism are completely contrary to the struggle to build
mass revolutionary parties to lead the working class to
power.

Fo r th e U n ite d Socialist S ta te s o f Europe!
Fo rw ard w ith th e Eu ro -M a rc h e s 8
The struggle for the United Socialist States of Europe
assumes enormous importance in the face of the staggering
crisis ripping apart western European capitalism.
The bourgeoisies of Europe have been incapable of
uniting Europe within the Common Market. The latter is
seen by millions of workers as a conspiracy of the
monopolists and bankers to impose mass unemployment,
spiralling inflation, the jacking up of food prices, and the
center of preparations for police-military dictatorships.
Only the International Committee of the Fourth Interna­
tional, and its youth section, the International Youth Com­
mittee of the Fourth International, fights to unite the
S tu d y th e W orks o f M a r x , En g e ls,
Lenin and T ro ts k y !
The works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky
constitute the invaluable theoretical capital of our
movement. In turning out to the mass movement of the
working class, it is absolutely vital to continuously study
these works, not from the standpoint of knowledge for
knowledge’s sake, but as a guide to action to build the
party and prepare the struggle for power.
These works constitute the foundations of the party’s
body of knowledge through which we determinate the
semblances obtained from living perception. Only through
the continuous study of the major works of Marxism,
including “Dialectics of Nature,” “Anti-Duhring,”
“ Materialism and Em pirio-Criticism,” and the
“Philosophical Notebooks” as well as the priceless
contributions of Trotsky on Stalinism, is it possible to
orient the movement correctly and train the forces brought
forward by the crisis.
The mastery of this theoretical capital is inseparable
from a continuous study of the world scientific outlook of
Marxism, whose method is dialectical materialism.
Every party member must be encouraged to concern
himself and herself with the world scientific outlook and
consciously attempt to develop the dialectical materialist
method.
The fight for the development of dialectical materialism
as the theory of knowledge of Marxism has been the corner­
stone of the International Committee’s struggle against
revisionism. At the heart of the SWP’s degeneration and its
final abandonment of Trotskyism in 1963 was Hansen’s
position that Marxism was nothing more than “consistent
empiricism.” The basis of the OCI’s break with Trotskyism
in 1971 was its rejection of dialectical materialism as the
theory of knowledge of Marxism and its assertion that all
that was required was the defense of the Transitional
Program.
Finally, the group of renegades led by Alan Thornett in
Britain summed up their hostility to Marxism by contemp­
55
European proletariat under the banner of the United
Socialist States of Europe.
This is why it has launched the historic Euro-Marches,
bringing together youth from throughout Europe in a fight
for jobs, for socialist policies, to mobilize the working class
in the struggle for power against the capitalist state and the
Common Market.
The tremendous support received by the Euromarchers
from every section of the working class and youth through­
out Europe is testimony to the enormous power of the prin­
ciples of Trotskyism fought for by the International Com­
mittee. The Euro-marches have been carried forward
successfully despite the all-out opposition of the Social
Democratic and Euro-Stalinist bureaucracies.
tuously dismissing dialectical materialism as “gobbledy-
gook.” In the struggle against every one of these revisionist
tendencies, the International Committee has made
absolutely decisive contributions to the development of
Marxism. The decisive role of dialectical materialism in
the training of revolutionary cadre was made clear by a
resolution presented by the International Committee at the
Essen youth rally in the summer of 1971 and rejected by the
OCI:
“There can be no revolutionary party without revolu­
tionary theory. Behind every opportunist development in
the history of the workers’ movement, and especially of
Stalinism, has been the revision of Marxist theory. The
continuity of the struggle for revolutionary Marxist theory
in the past, the struggle of the Fourth International and the
International Committee, was the only basis for the initia­
tives which led to this rally and for the struggle to build the
international revolutionary youth movement. Revolu­
tionary youth everywhere must devote themselves above all
to the task of developing Marxist theory through the
struggle against bourgeois ideology in all the forms it takes
in the workers’ movement. This is the only basis for
combating the dangers of adventurism, activism and ‘pure’
militancy with which revisionists and Maoists mislead the
youth, and which can only lead to historic defeats for the
working class.”
The discoveries and advances by the sciences provide the
most powerful impetus for the development of dialectical
materialism.
Among the chief tasks of the party will be the founding of
a theoretical journal to wage a sustained struggle for
Marxism against pragmatism and all forms of idealism.
This must be combined with continuous classes on the
world scientific outlook of Marxism and the history of the
Fourth International.
56
Fo rw ard to th e D a ily R e vo lu tio n a ry N e w sp a p e r!
The preparation of the working class for the struggle for
power does not proceed apart from the preparation of the
party itself. A qualitative development in the revolu­
tionary practice of the Workers League is required by the
qualitative transformation of the objective crisis.
Since the founding of the Workers League in 1966, it has
continuously insisted that the demand for a labor party
was the basis for a correct political orientation to the
working class.
The essence of the fight for the Labor Party is the
building of the revolutionary party. Without that content,
the fight for a Labor Party becomes either a hollow formula
or a potential trap for the working class. We do not have a
strategy for a Labor Party. On the contrary, the Labor
Party is a basic component of the revolutionary party’s
strategy for power.
As the Labor Party is no longer a propaganda demand
but an actual task posed before the party, it cannot be
fought for by improving our propaganda or advancing the
slogan more often. It requires a fundamental change in the
practice of the party in correspondence with the change in
the world crisis. This requires the intervention of the party
in the mass movement of the working class t®^ actually
organize the cadres within the trade unions who will lead
the fight for the building of the Labor Party.
The struggle within the party for a qualitative develop­
ment in its practice produces dialectically a change in the
practice of the masses. The conscious orientation by the
leadership toward preparing the struggle for power will
produce qualitative changes in the cadres of the party
which, in turn, will produce powerful changes in the
practice of the working class itself.
The basis for this change is the campaign within the
mass movement of the working class for the Labor Party.
The new practice which must be established is the
construction and sustaining of a daily revolutionary
newspaper, dedicated to leading the fight for the Labor
Party.
This paper will be the organizer of the party’s fight in the
working class. It will give a powerful lead to whole new
sections of workers and youth coming into struggle for the
first time in their lives. It will be the indispensable weapon
for the training of Bolshevik cadres within the trade unions
and throughout the working class.
The practice of constructing and maintaining the daily
paper is the foundation for transforming the Workers
League into the Revolutionary Party.
The fight for the daily revolutionary newspaper is inse­
parable from the struggle to build the Young Socialists. It
is the youth who will lead the fight for the daily and carry
this fight into the entire working class movement. The
training of a youth cadre in the leadership of the YS is the
cornerstone of the fight to transform the League into the
Party.
This requires the broadest work among all sections of
working class youth and students. It requires a persistent
struggle to expand the circulation of the “Young Socialist”
newspaper and to set up new branches of the YS with func­
tioning committees as a vital part of the training of youth
as party cadres.
This requires a constant struggle against individualism
and idealism, in all its manifestations among the youth.
The heart of the fight of the YS is to turn youth to the
strength of the working class, to lead the fight for the
building of a Labor Party and to train youth on the basis of
revolutionary internationalism.
The party’s work in the trade unions requires the greatest
attention. The trade unions are now a cockpit of enormous
struggles, as the ranks come into head-on collision with the
bureaucracy. This is the center of the fight for the Labor
Party. Here the Trade Union Alliance for a Labor Party
must be developed as the party’s arm in the unions. The
central task before the party must be the recruiting and
training of a whole new layer of industrial workers in the
major trade unions.
This task requires the sharpest battle each day
against idealist practices in every form — lack of attention
to details, lack of consistency, no systematic recruitment or
training of workers — which are the hallmarks of reac­
tionary middle class radicalism. The party is fighting for
the leadership of the trade unions. The battering ram of its
fight is the campaign for the Labor Party, carried out in a
ruthless struggle against bureaucracy and all its Stalinist
and revisionist hangers-on. This fight for the training of a
Bolshevik cadre in the trade unions is the key to the
transformation of the party’s practice.
The Workers League now enters the most decisive period
in its history. This is our period—the period of the world
revolution. Now Trotskyism on a world scale and in the
very center of world imperialism can assume the great his­
toric role for which the Fourth International was founded
40 years ago—resolving the crisis of leadership in the
working class through building the mass revolutionary
party which will lead the working class in the fight for
workers’ power and the establishment of socialism.
The Workers League enters this period with immense
stature. Because we have stood with the International
Committee (though we are barred from membership) our
party is the only movement in the United States which
represents the continuity of Trotskyism. We are the only
party that can open the pages of our history. We have
nothing to hide from the working class.
This principled history is our most powerful weapon to
build the party today. The coming year, 1979, will be the
centennial of Trotsky’s birth. It must be celebrated by our
party recruiting and training cadres on a scale as never
before.
•Build the Workers League!
•Long live the International Committee of the Fourth
International!
•Long live the teachings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and
Trotsky!
•Long live the example of Tom Henehan, martyr of the
Fourth International!
•Down with Stalinism! For the political revolution
against the bureaucracy!
•Down with revisionism! Expel Hansen and all the
agents and accomplices of imperialism and Stalinism!
•Forward to the world socialist revolution!