From: dr.bedggood-AT-auckland.ac.nz
Date: Thu, 26 Dec 1996 09:52:07 +0000
Subject: Re: M-I: In Defense of Reality


> Date:          Thu, 26 Dec 1996 08:35:26 -0500 (EST)
> From:          Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
> To:            marxism-international-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
> Subject:       Re: M-I: In Defense of Reality
> Reply-to:      marxism-international-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
 
> >Dave : deeper than "subordinating to soviet foreign policy".  The 4I also 
> > capitulated to the petty bourgeoisie currents in the post-war period. 
> > What is common to all degenerations of healthy revolutionary currents 
> > is the failure to apply the Bolshevik method of uniting theory and 
> > practice in the class struggle.  The results are the grotesque 
> > deformations you speak of.  But unless we find the root cause, there 
> > is not stopping the same thing happening next time.  You do not 
> > provide any answers against this - my point.
> >  
> Louis: This is an evasion. I am describing cult-sect formations such as 
> the kind that Healy and the rest of the "International Committee"
> fostered. You, on the other hand, are continuing to wage war against
> Pablo's International Secretariat nearly fifty years after the fact. Pablo
> did "capitulate" to the CP but not far enough. He should have dissolved
> the Trotskyist movement once and for all. There were only a few short
> years until the Kruschchev revelations and the crisis of the CP
> internationally. Millions of communists would have been open to a
> revolutionary and anti-bureaucratic message, but the "International
> Committee" preferred to remain untainted in its holy little church of
> Trotskyism. Let the sinners come to us. That was the notion of Healy,
> Cannon et al. So they remained popes of their own little parties. The
> International Committee is of course the tradition you come from.

Yes I know you are describing something. That is the problem. You 
take surface impressions, and see a real difference between Pablo and 
Cannon etc.  I don't. I don't come from the IC. I don't think that 
Cannon, Healy, Robertson etc are better than Pablo. Why should I? I 
said that the 4I (by which I mean ALL post-war Trotskyism) collapsed 
into centrism. If you want to stick at the level of personality 
cults, you can only explain effects,  symptoms e.g.  a foot fetish.  

The collapse of the 4I , like the 2I and 3I, had its roots in the 
separation of the movement from the working class, and  its 
subordination to P/b and labour aristocratic layers. If  our  party is 
not democent, and not rooted in the working class, it automatically 
degenerates because of the class interests of the petty bourgeois are 
not to make revolution, but to reconcile the two main classes.  And 
there is no cutting edge against bourgeois ideology  etc etc etc. 

It is this p/b CLASS base which is the CAUSE of the bureaucratic centralism, 
which throws up PERSONALITIES, selected for their deviousness  who
shout "democent" while they are screwing  the cadres minds and bodies. 

If you had read my comment more carefully you would have seen that I 
was not waging war on any particular international or part of it, but 
against the common cause - menshevism.  Menshevism is not just a 
label, or term of abuse, but a method.  It has to be earned.  It 
is a scientific term which explains the counter-revolutionary 
behaviour of lots of "different" currents eg. anarchist, economist, 
evolutionist, pabloist, etc  merely understood as symptoms. 

The common cause is the abandonment of dialectics as a conscious, 
active unity of theory and practice in the class struggle, and the 
subordination of the working class to petty bourgeois misleadership. 

But lets await your analysis of `Leninism',  and I hope `dialectics', 
before jumping to unscientific conclusions about your method.  


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