Centrist Strategy and the Art of Revisionism

A Polemic with the FT, the Theoretical Heirs of Nahuel Moreno

The Trotskyist Fraction has its origins in a 1988 split that announced the beginning of the dissolution of the Argentina MAS (Movement towards Socialism) and the international organization (LIT) that Nahuel Moreno built. Of all the parties spun off from that process of dissolution, the PTS and the FT have presented themselves as the most critical of Moreno’s political legacy and deny that they are Morenoites. This act of reinvention, renouncing their past history to better rearm themselves for new political turns, is perfectly consistent with the political core of Moreno’s own practice. ^[1]

Moreno often reinvented his own politics and in even more significant ways – entryism in the Peronist Movement, hailing the OLAS and Che Guevara, an embrace of social democratic politics – alongside a long list of twists and turns driven by political expediency nationally and internationally. This creates a number of significant problems for those who claim to uphold his legacy – which Moreno do they uphold? 1955? 1968? 1972? 1982? Pick any of those years and you can find a set of politics at odds with and contradictory to any of the others.

Moreno combined this with a pattern of pretend orthodoxy abroad and opportunism at home which would characterize all the major Morenoite internationals. There is a consistent pattern of a more opportunist mother party commanding the international sections which are forced to tack left to compete with whatever the local dominant strains of pseudo-trotskyism are. The Brazilian MRT has often posed to the left of the PSTU in Brazil, while in Argentina the Argentine PSTU presents itself as a left critic of the FIT.

The Fraction Trotskista sells an image abroad of the PTS and its electoral interventions which is far to the left of the actual day to day practice which anyone living in Argentina would be familiar with. If however the visiting foreign militants of the FT were to stay in Argentina long enough, many would find that their own politics are not so close to the PTS as they might imagine.

Abandoning the weight of Moreno’s “theoretical” legacy has allowed the FT to be the most dynamic of the Morenoites locally and internationally. Moreno’s greatest students understood that they could only ascend to take his place by striking down their old master. They began this with the advantage of hindsight in Manolo Romano’s 1994 Polemic with the LIT and The Theoretical Legacy of Nahuel Moreno.^[2]  It was of course considered entirely unnecessary to engage with or reference those within the Trotskyist movement who had been criticizing Moreno’s revisionism for decades.

In this article they compare Moreno’s most flagrant revisionism of the Trotskyist program with Trotsky’s writings. They criticized most of the content of the Actualización del Programa de Transición. They also criticized the slogans of the LIT in East Germany and the other worker states for having limited themselves to democratic demands; but also for not taking seriously enough the national struggles for independence. They highlight a concept – more or less robbed from Moreno (who robbed it from Lambert) – which was to become a cornerstone of their understanding of the post-WWII world and plays a star role in Socialist Strategy and Military Art, “The Order of Yalta”. A supposed counter-revolutionary alliance between Imperialism and the Stalinist bureaucrats. 

Even in 1994, after the fall of the USSR, this perspective combined with their obsession around tailing nationalist struggles led them to absurd political conclusions: for the FT in this article, Serbia’s Milosevic was “endorsed by US Imperialism” in his war against Bosnia. US Imperialism as we all know had a very different perspective when it launched its relentless bombing campaigns. Even FT cadre will admit that the article is in many ways “outdated”, however while the FT is happy to criticize the dead Moreno it has never dared to openly criticize the positions formulated by the FT since its formation. A contradiction which will become flagrantly apparent in Socialist Strategy and Military Art when Albamonte and Maiello review the fall of the USSR.

This formal break from Moreno does pose an important question for the FT: if they had all been formed as cadres in a fundamentally revisionist political current, how do they justify their claim to revolutionary leadership? The answer for the FT is of course that every other Trotskyist political current must have degenerated. Albamonte in another of the FT’s defining texts claimed that “shortly after the period of 1951-1953 the Fourth International became a centrist movement, where the common denominator of its main tendencies was having lost the strategic orientation of an independent revolutionary party”.^[3] Bare threads of revolutionary continuity do exist and Albamonte claims to have one, but really everyone degenerated. We are all guilty of losing our “strategic orientation”.

This focus on “Strategic Orientation” is where the book Socialist Strategy and Military Art will pick up as it weaves together the theoretical and programmatic development of the Fraction Trotskista.

The starting point of the book is the reconstruction of the importance of Clausewitz as a military strategist and as a strategic inspiration for Lenin and Trotsky – a task with which they begin in order to set out a far more ambitious objective to “re-establish the unity of the Marxist Program and Revolutionary Strategy. Only in this way can the relation between strategy, marxism and military questions be brought back to its rightful place”.^[4] Clausewitz himself is invoked and studied much in the same way as he was invoked by Kautsky, Lenin and the other partisans of debate within the 2nd international – a scaffold around which a political and strategic debate took place. Here as then, Clausewitz finds himself the continuation of politics by other means.

The book is simultaneously an academic work, a programmatic exposition and a historical account. It is as a programmatic exposition of the FT’s most complete account of their interpretation of Trotskyism and as a historical reconstruction (or deconstruction in this case) of revolutionary continuity that we will concentrate our critique here. Socialist Strategy and Military Art consolidates what has been a nebulous and undefined theoretical tradition of the FT into a concentrated body which can be subject to a clear Trotskyist critique. It also helpfully marks out as early as the prologue some of the final destinations which these theoretical formulations are designed to justify.

Final Destinations: Egypt, Greece, Brazil

The book opens with a flurry of academic citations and quotes: Carl Schmitt, Laclau and Mouffe, Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou alongside left references to Bensaid, Antonio Negri, Alex Callinicos and others. These are mostly adornments, totems designed to attract the support of graduate students and ward off the unprepared reader from challenging the fundamental content within. Do not be distracted by the illustrations proclaiming “Here be Dragons” and focus instead on the actual cartography.

The course which the FT charts here is a proper Odyssey which passes through Egypt and Greece only to be spit out and shipwrecked on the coasts of Brazil. In their absorption of Gramscian categories Egypt becomes the “Eastern” and Greece the “Western” example of revolutions which were ultimately derailed. In Egypt the FT once polemicized against the Revolutionary Socialists (IST) call to vote for Morsi in the second round,^[5] rejecting the stageist approach which RS used to justify this out of their fear of the military. An interesting position for a current which was a few years after to justify voting for Haddad in Brazil out of fear of Bolsonaro.

The focus of Albamonte and Maiello is on Greece. Greece and SYRIZA is important, as it was once the basis for much of the FT’s left appeal. Whereas most of the world pseudo-trotskyist left was chasing after SYRIZA, actively participating in it, calling to vote for it and even working to export the model abroad, the FT criticized those who spread illusions in a “Left Government” and especially the USEC and other currents^[6] efforts to paint it as an extension of the Workers Government tactic:

In this way the US transforms a tactic designed to accelerate the experience of the masses with reformist leaderships, in situations of acute class struggle, into electoral support for candidates and programs of class collaboration.^[7]

However there is a noticeable and important turn present in the book. They no longer criticize SYRIZA in those same terms, as the “Government of the Left” being an excuse for “electoral support to candidates and programs of class collaboration.” The discontinuity here is important to point out because the FT has abandoned its opposition to voting for candidates and programs of class collaboration – Haddad in 2018 Brazil and Boric in 2021 Chile are the most obvious cases – but not the only ones. Though they have never acknowledged or justified the turn, the fact is the FT was once opposed to voting for candidates and programs of class collaboration, and now they are not. The rightward drift of the FT towards reformism means that they also have to reinvent and reinterpret their own left posturing around Greece. 

Albamonte and Maiello focus on the inability in Greece to constitute a United Front – but don’t detail what exactly they would conceive this United Front as being around. The essence of the United Front is to march separately, strike together – not as the FT have reinterpreted it to justify permanent electoral propaganda blocks – march together. Considerable sectors of the world-left which trailed after SYRIZA cried endlessly about the KKE’s (Greek Communist Party) principled refusal to form a co-government with SYRIZA. There are however very real, and very relevant criticisms of its refusal to form a united front around key worker and anti-fascist struggles.

They criticize (as many left supporters of Syriza did easily enough) the coalition with the right nationalist ANEL party. Their main jumping off point however is the referendum:

The overwhelming result of the referendum against austerity and the Troika was a huge missed opportunity to reverse that dynamic, one in which their could have been a fundamental role for the tactic of a “workers government”. A workers government in Greece in 2015 could have taken advantage of the will expressed in the referendum in order to impose base measure of self defense against the pass towards “direct action” by the big banks and the Troika through capital flight - something which, as Kouvelakis underlined himself, drastically changed the relation of forces - and on this basis implemented the refusal to pay the external debt. We could also say this in respect to the 30% of businesses which closed and could have been expropriated under workers control, among other resolutions.^[8]

The referendum was - and only could be given it was called directly by Tspiras for that purpose - a gesture intended to shore up the negotiating capacity of Tsipras before the banks. The duty of communists was to announce and fight against the impending betrayal which it necessarily implied. 

They instead want the referendum to have been the jumping off point for their vision of a “Workers Government”. A “Workers Government” with SYRIZA? They leave it ambiguous as to what form this would take. They take up the debate between Callinicos and Kouvelakis to say that neither was correct. This is the arithmetic they weave: the left platform in SYRIZA had the power to do something and didn't, Antarsya didn’t have the forces to intervene substantially and so offered no real alternative. 

“Now of course, without a doubt the first condition for a dynamic like this is the constitution of a material force capable of influencing events and constructing a revolutionary alternative to the neo-reformist Syriza. Without this, following the logic explained by Kouvelakis, the Left Platform – which constituted 30% of the organization – by mid 2015 was reduced to insignificance. However even those who did plant this, like the anti-capitalist Left Coalition, Antarsya, the main alliance to the left of Syriza and the CP, lacked material force or significant influence.

The greek experience shows the need for strategic work so that in the decisive moments the result is not already determined by the impotence and/or inexistence of a revolutionary alternative”^[9]

The parliamentary focus of this analysis is notable: SYRIZA after all never had a significant militant base in the key sectors of the working class even as it briefly convinced many to vote for it. The subsequent collapse of “Popular Unity”,  the left SYRIZA opposition, is a clear demonstration of how ephemeral that “material force” was. The decisive battleground in Greece was not in parliament or in the ballot boxes of the referendum, it was in the workplaces. Genuine Trotskyists called for action by the working class towards this end, compare the position laid out by the League for the Fourth International:

The League for the Fourth International says that the only way to defeat the bankers’ diktat and put an end to the devastating austerity program of the Eurobosses is by mobilizing the workers’ power on the road to a socialist revolution in Greece and throughout Europe. To stop the financial extortion, workers should occupy the banks and place them under control of elected workers commissions against the Eurobankers and the Greek capitalist government. Against the threat of privatization, workers in the ports of Piraeus, Thessaloniki and the Greek islands should occupy the ports (and airports)and place them under workers control. Make public health and public transportation permanently free, under workers control. As for the unpayable foreign debt, the workers should repudiate (cancel) it entirely, as the Russian workers did in October 1917. But that will take a revolution.^[10]

The real sectarianism of the KKE was not in parliament – where they drew a minimum line of class independence against SYRIZA. It was in the unions where they worked tirelessly to prevent any real united front actions to smash the fascist Golden Dawn or to launch a serious general strike which would pose the question of workers power in Greece. The “Material Force'' necessary in Greece was an embedded leninist-trotskyist party capable of disputing the KKE’s leadership of the working class and fighting for socialist revolution. That Albamonte and Maiello see “Material Force” in the pathetic “Left Platform” reformists is a testament to how deeply their political vision has degenerated under the influence of their pursuit of legislative banks for the Left and Workers Front (FIT) in Argentina.

The real meaning of their attention to the “Material Force” of Left Platform reveals itself when they step away from Greece and come closer to home, where they have had a real chance to intervene and apply their new political line:

This is not just about Syriza or Podemos. For example, at the end of 2016 in the middle of a crisis of the PT, the Party for Socialism and Liberty (PSOL) in Brasil, with Marcelo Freixo at its head, was fighting to win the municipal government of Rio de Janeiro, one of the most important cities of Latin America, which had seen great process of teacher, worker and student struggles. What would PSOL have done if it had won that election?

Their declared intention of agreements with businessmen, their plan to respect the Law of Fiscal Responsibility, etc. all make it seem like they would take a path similar to Syriza. However, the movement expressed in the vote in Rio planted the possibility of an alternative path of rupture with capitalism, where the city would transform into a revolutionary bastion for the rest of the country. This second alternative returns us to the problems of strategy and tactics, to the modification – rather than administration – of the relation of forces.^[11]

This small tidbit in the prologue is extremely significant. Today, it sounds like a particularly ambitious editorial from Jacobin endorsing Mamdami’s campaign in New York. Jim Robertson, a founder of the International Spartacist Tendency, was fond of stating that program generates theory. Given the FT’s preference for debating with academics over Trotskyists, we can suggest Umberto Eco’s famous phrase that ideas are “like a ladder, built to attain something”. Theoretical production generally exists to justify political ends. This shocking formulation around Freixo’s police socialist, bourgeois campaign is in effect the sort of political end which the rest of the book serves to justify. Strategy will be taken by Albamonte and Maiello on a world tour, but its final destination is nothing less than a justification for what Trotsky once derided as efforts by left centrists to “peddle their wares in the shadow of the Popular Front”. As such it requires special attention not only to the event itself, but the political context set in the Brazilian section of the FT which brought it to such a point.

The FT in Brazil - Centrist and Reformist Zigzags

Rio de Janeiro is where Albamonte and Maiello choose to make their stand in the prologue, and we’re happy to take up the FT on their chosen terrain. It is where the FT’s politics have left the most visible wreckage on its veering path from Centrism into an open embrace of reformist politics.

As an exercise here it will be useful to explain the character of PSOL entirely in the words of the FT’s Brazilian section. The Archives of Palavra Operario, the newspaper of the LER-QI, have been essentially scrubbed from the internet. Awfully convenient given the vast political turn that was implemented around the time Palavra Operária turned into Esquerdia Diario and the LER-QI became the MRT. A happy accident perhaps. However it is still possible to see in some of the pages of Estrategia Internacional, the old theoretical journal of the FT, the analysis which they once maintained around PSOL.

In a 2012 article^[12], they denounce PSOL for having formed open electoral coalitions with bourgeois and even right-wing parties like the PSDB, DEM, PMDB, PDT as well as the PT itself. They reject the PSTU’s characterization of PSOL as even being a workers party or a socialist party, instead marking it out as a “reformist party with a petty-bourgeois social base”. The pseudo-trotskyist currents like the MES and CST which performed long term entryism into PSOL were guilty of “liquidating themselves as Trotskyist traditions”. They had clear and harsh words for the PSTU’s tailing of PSOL:

The leadership of the PSTU continues with their “permanent tactic” of building fronts with reformists and conciliators, “compromises” which are, in truth, popular front politics. They think that just because there is no direct bourgeois party in the “agreement” that it can’t be considered as such.^[13]

The LER-QI was also quite active discussing and denouncing the most prominent example of a PSOL government – in the City of Macapa, Clecio Luis triumphed as PSOL’s candidate backed by alliances with bourgeois parties and with bourgeois money. The FT wrote the following analysis of this experience in 2014: 

In Macapa, capital of the state of Amapa, PSOL was elected in 2012 as part of a broad coalition which included the Communist Party of Brazil (PCB) and which had the support of the Democratic Party (DEM) and the PSB. Currently it governs together with a huge variety of bourgeois parties, respecting the so-called “law of fiscal responsibility” which obliges governments to put off social needs in order to guarantee the payment of interest and debt to big millionaires and international investors. To this end, they used the municipal guard to repress teachers who went on strike for better salaries and to defend education.^[14]

Did the original election of Clecio Luis have a “movement which was expressed in the vote” like what Albamonte points towards in order to justify the FT’s approach to Freixo’s quite similar campaign? Reduced to such vague terms, any vote, especially a winning one, necessarily expresses some amount of movement – at the very least from one's house to the polls. The final destination – a left face on the repression of striking teachers – was however easily predictable on the basis of PSOL’s reformist program and politics.

By the time of Frexio’s 2016 campaign in Rio de Janeiro however a number of significant political transformations had taken place within the party formerly known as the LER-QI, the MRT.

In 2015 the Argentine leadership of the FT grew impatient with the rate of growth and development of the Brazilian section and conversations were opened with its leadership on a “Strategic Impasse” at which it had arrived. The inability of the newly renamed MRT to project itself at the electoral level and construct “public figures” with national visibility posed the risk of degenerating as a tendency which was only capable of witnessing revolutionary crisis and not intervening decisively in one.

This went hand in hand with an analysis at the international level by the FT leadership that there was a “risk of sectarian degeneration for the latin-american groups of the FT”. An analysis that came out of the 9th International Conference of the FT held in May 2015 – and given its sweeping character, it’s safe to say that it came straight from the leaders of the PTS. The golden child of the FT at this moment was the French section – which had built itself through entryism into the NPA and was finding luck picking up militants who rejected the open liquidationism of the NPA leadership and who saw in SYRIZA an important betrayal of class politics.

An accusation of “sectarian degeneration” in the correct use of the term is not unwarranted, the LER-QI’s 2013 betrayal in the Sao Paulo subways^[15] where they didn’t vote for a strike, was indeed a “sectarian” betrayal and degeneration. However, what the leadership of the FT meant by sectarian was what all Centrist political leaders meant by it – too close to the political principles of Trotskyism. This was the moment of the Del Cañoification of the international parties of the FT. The global adoption of a strategy focused on artificially producing “media figures”, electoral maneuvering and prioritizing the likes and views of web articles. Put the copies of Cannon’s History of American Trotskyism away and get into the digital trenches around the real pressing issues for the proletariat, like the latest albums by Britney or Shakira.

The application of this “NPA turn” in Brazil meant a 180 degree turn on the FT’s analysis of PSOL and opened up a controversial debate within the LER-QI/MRT on adopting a tactic of entryism in PSOL. According to the leadership, examples like the government in Macapa could be ignored because they were “marginal local governments” although it was mentioned that if PSOL won more central mayorships AND if this changed “how the party is seen nationally” then this COULD invalidate the strategy. Here the potential of a Freixo campaign in 2016 in Rio was actually mentioned as a possibility of just such a change. The same excuse of “marginality” was made for PSOL’s coalitions with bourgeois parties. Couched in hard terms, making allusions to the experience of the French Turn in the 30s and with a few expulsions or drop outs along the way, the PSOL turn was adopted by the Congress.

The Argentine leadership was of course happy with this. In a July 2015 letter to the organization, they expressed their excitement with the fact that the article asking for entry in PSOL had accumulated “two thousand likes”. Requesting to join a party that shortly before they had been denouncing as class collaborationist apparently also meant that “certainly we will seem much more serious and as a far better alternative to the workers and students who sympathize with our program and politics”. If Facebook likes are your marker for political influence and your “seriousness” is expressed in your willingness to dramatically turn your back on years of previous critiques ... you might want to consider a career in digital marketing over revolutionary leadership.

The reformist leaders within PSOL saw right through the MRT – many of them were pseudo-trotskyists themselves of course who knew well what that kind of entryism could imply – and a combination of delays and rejection left the MRT in the awkward position of effectively carrying out political entryism from without as they were excluded from formally becoming members of PSOL.

This is the context in which the MRT’s participation in Freixo’s campaign for mayor of Rio de Janeiro takes place and which Albamonte here transforms into a model.

The Freixo Campaign

Marcelo Freixo made his name in politics as a state deputy in 2008 by opening up and leading an investigative commission into the role of the militias – criminal organizations in the favelas run by off-duty police officers and firefighters. His proposals here included raising police salaries, improving their training, tighter judicial control over the police, harsher punishment for the crimes involved in the militias, federal police oversight of… police corruption, a number of judicial and fiscal reforms, as well as two very significant proposals:

34. Set up in Rio and other municipalities, with the participation of the Municipal Guard, a politics for the ostentatious presence of police in neighborhoods and areas with the highest incidence of crimes, calling on community representatives and local commercial associations, taking away space from illegal security;

35. In the same sense, redistribute the police personnel, principally military personnel, having as basic criteria the rates of crime (proportion between number of crimes and the population in the area);^[16]

These two proposals for a heavier police presence were in their own way taken and implemented by the government of Rio de Janeiro with its program of UPPs: Units of Pacifying Police. These saw the massive deployment of police in overwhelming force to Favelas in locations strategic for tourism and industry. This deployment came hand in hand with a vicious campaign of racist terror, torture and murder – one of the most significant cases being that of Amarildo Dias de Souza in 2013, a black bricklayer from Rocinha disappeared by the police.

This wasn’t just an incidental product of his report, Freixo has always had a consistent line on the police. The 2016 campaign was Freixo’s second attempt to campaign for Mayor. In the lead up to his first, in a 2011 interview, he gave his thoughts on the role of the police in Rio arguing that the “Look, I always defended community policing. I think that the principle of police presence is unquestionable.”  For Freixo the main problem was that the police “should be more valued with salaries and training… the salary is absurdly low, training is very precarious. And there needs to be some control over the police.”^[18] 

Back in 2011, in the LER-QI’s period of risking “Sectarian Degeneration”, they were able to recognize this position of Freixo and link it beyond him to the general character and objectives of PSOL:

Marcelo Freixo is the main voice of the PSOL in politics around human rights and violence. However his position are not individual and are a distillment, specifically, of the general line of his party: humanize the institutions of capitalism and brazilian bourgeois democracy. The PSOL nationally became known for its position of CPIs where they tried to “purify” parliament of its corruption, same as they try to do with the UPPs and CPIs around the militias. They want to improve the “democratic state of laws” (as they call it), believing that in this way the state’s class interests will be overcome and will become “public”.

We affirm the opposite! The so called “democratic state” is a mask for the bourgeois state. Its institutions need to be destroyed. Its repression cannot be humanized, it must be abolished!^[19]

Humanizing and purifying the institutions of the Brazilian bourgeoisie is an accurate characterization of the general political objective of Freixo and the PSOL as a whole. Freixo in 2014, even in the aftermath of protests against the disappearance of Amarildo, largely defended the basic principle of the UPPs, only wishing that they were better integrated with communities as he explained in an interview with El Pais:

The idea that the police should be present instead of entering, making war and leaving, is naturally valid. All societies need police, but no society only needs police. Rio needs a project of the city for the favelas. The police need to serve those residents, instead of controlling them.^[20]

In the same interview he criticized the fact that the UPP’s were mostly concentrated in strategic areas and that they weren’t present in favelas run by the militias. For Freixo, effectively an honest bourgeois reformer, the fundamental problem was one of having better paid, better trained, more transparent police subject to one or another form of “community control”.

Freixo has been nothing if not consistent in his positions around the police and his proposals – in the context of Brazil being an honest reformer of the bourgeois state has made him a target – but there is nothing here that would make him into the leader of “an alternative course of rupture with capitalism, where the city is transformed into a revolutionary bastion for the rest of the country”.

In 2015 Freixo restated his position on the police with the peculiarity that it was declared… IN AN INTERVIEW PUBLISHED UNCRITICALLY BY ESQUERDA DIARIO. Here in his brief comments he declared “The state must understand that it cannot just have police, the police have to be different”.^[21] Not even a critical comment was left afterwards by Esquerda Diario to challenge Freixo’s clear and well known pro-police politics.

In 2016 Marcelo Freixo running under the label of PSOL, a “class collaborationist” party which had previously unleashed police on striking teachers, managed to capture the support of wide sectors in Rio de Janeiro who rejected the conservative and corrupt politics of Crivella, the leading right wing candidate. He made it to the run-offs and though at a great disadvantage, it was not impossible to think he could win. He worked to calm Rio’s bourgeoisie with a symbolic “Open Letter to Cariocas”, copying Lula’s “Open Letter to the Brazilian People” and offered a similar commitment to disciplined, fiscally responsible capitalist governance.^[22]

In 2016 however the MRT offered clear support for Freixo’s campaign, declaring that it “Shows the disposition to resist of broad sectors. Freixo positioned himself against the coup, hasn’t received money from businessmen, has not made alliance with bourgeois parties and not even formal ones with the PT or PCdoB. He has positioned himself clearly as a defender of the oppressed sectors, as well as defending a series of workers rights like with the struggle now against the PEC 241.”^[23] After describing the reactionary politics of his opponent Crivella, Esquerda Diario declared “For this reason, we are accompanying the movement which struggles for the victory of Freixo”.^[24]

Freixo did reject open coalitions and campaign financing from business, but this doesn’t make his pro-police campaign – which the same article by ED even mentions clearly by citing a Military Police Officer’s endorsement of his campaign – anything other than a run of mill “progressive” expression of “sewer socialism”. With the fiscal commitments he took on as part of his campaign, “sewer socialism” is likely even an exaggeration – his regime would’ve been significantly to the right of Bernie Sanders' mayorship of Burlington.

From here they jump to a glorification of the “Participative Councils” developed as part of Freixo’s campaign, effectively neighborhood branches of his political campaign, and tried propagandistically to swap them in and out for what they defended as the

creation of sovereign Popular Assemblies, with the election of representatives in every region, which have full powers to implement decisions and effectively control the budget and legislative power. Without advancing towards this, “it is not possible to govern”.^[25]

A Constituent Assembly in One City? The MRT seemed convinced it could trick neighborhood campaign committees into becoming embryonic organs of some classless democratic control of the city. A utopian call for a democratic (not even socialist) sea of lemonade in the Bay of Rio de Janeiro.

However, as we know, Freixo is not anti-capitalist. He defends a series of progressive measures that we support and we will struggle for arm in arm, during the run-off and afterwards, but we want to say to everyone who is part of this great mobilization for Freixo: it’s necessary to go far beyond voting to advance in our struggle.^[26]

They acknowledge that Freixo, and the PSOL, aren’t even anti-capitalist. However they will struggle side by side with Freixo for his “progressive measures” before and AFTER the election. They then invite everyone to become even better fighters for Freixo’s campaign by joining them.

Fortunately for the MRT and FT, Freixo lost. From 2020 onward the MRT remembered that Freixo was what he never stopped being: a bourgeois politician who wants more money for police.^[27] In 2022 they concluded that he shouldn’t even be considered part of the left.^[28] Careful, this bourgeois politician who isn’t even part of the left ran a campaign that is still enshrined by Albamonte and Maiello as the FT’s theoretical example of an alternative strategy to the neo-reformism of Syriza and Podemos. The Brazilian comrades may find themselves accused once again of being vulnerable to “Sectarian Degeneration”.

For anyone capable of searching back to the MRT’s 2016 position, their current denouncement seems incoherent. Freixo may be more comfortably embedded in bourgeois politics than before, but he’s only changed labels since 2016 when he was leading the construction of their potential “revolutionary fortress”.

Providing a framework of unity to this political incoherence is however the essence of the “strategic” perspective defended and advanced in Socialist Strategy and Military Art. The programs and principles upheld by Lenin and Trotsky will everywhere be minimized and pushed aside in favor of conceiving of them as the unique product of their “military genius”. What is behind this emphasis? They want to retrospectively transform the leaders of revolutionary marxism into what they themselves strive to become: all knowing “strategic” leaders who guide the party through centrist political zig-zags. The classic centrist sect which jumps from movement to movement, drawing militants into its wake and then bringing them into their closed social-political world to be commanded by the “military genius” of Albamonte and his disciples as they frantically zigzag left and right to gather “forces” wherever it seems most opportune.

In this way something completely unthinkable from the class politics of Lenin and Trotsky, an embrace of a perfectly bourgeois candidate like Marcelo Freixo who was obviously on the road to respectability, becomes a movement which “planted the possibility of an alternative course of rupture with capitalism, where the city would be transformed into a revolutionary bastion for the rest of the country”. The strategic genius of Albamonte-Maiello thought reveals it. Work in the United States within an auxiliary wing of the Democratic Party (DSA), the party of war and genocide as Left Voice has previously? Share the same party affiliation as capitalist politicians that vote to fund imperialist wars? Go ahead, it’s all about the great strategy of accumulating “forces'' for the revolutionary turn the leadership will give one day. Don’t hold your breath waiting though.

Clausewitz, Strategy and Program

Those who pick up the book looking for an introduction to the thought of Clausewitz will be disappointed. This is a book about the USE of Clausewitz both in its subject matter (debates within Marxism around Clausewitz and military theory) and its own destination (their use of Clausewitz to revise the Marxist program). It does not actually take the time to provide a significant summary of or balance of Clausewitz for the reader. On Clausewitz and the general concept of strategy, even within the left, most readers will find a bourgeois historian’s account like Lawrence Freedman’s On Strategy a far more effective introduction. In Albamonte and Maiello’s work they will find Clausewitz in cropped pieces, here and there, deployed to make a point or justify a balance. A dangerous use from the standpoint of comprehension as one of the main websites dedicated to Clausewitz legacy warns:

But regardless of which source you draw a quotation from, beware that any quotation, taken out of context, may not mean at all what you think it does. This is especially the case with Clausewitz, whose dialectical methods required the assertion of arguments that constituted useful propositions but were, in themselves, inadequate reflections of a useful understanding.^[29]

Despite their pretensions, Albamonte and Maiello are far from the first to discover the influence of Clausewitz and to utilize him to rewrite the history of the Bolshevik Party. The British renegade from Trotskyism Tony Cliff in Lenin: Building the Party focused on the role of Clausewitz as well.^[30] Tony Cliff in that series was seeking to consolidate the loose International Socialists into a more disciplined organization. Cliff painted a picture of a Lenin who was a strategic and tactical genius, who knew how to at just the right moments “Bend the Stick”, to overemphasize and tack to one or another side, in order to guide the Bolshevik Party ultimately to its victory. Cliff’s goal was of course a theoretical coat of point on a “Disciplined” Centrist organization which zig-zagged from movement to movement, picking up and discarding militants along the way and guided by a bureaucratic central leadership.

What Albamonte and Maiello propose after drawing a parallel between their “rediscovery” of Clausewitz and Lenin’s rediscovery of Hegel, is that:

It is not possible today to understand and much less to recover the legacy of Marxism developed by the Third International in its first years without understanding Clausewitz, and his appropriation by Lenin and Trotsky, which would continue through the Left Opposition and the foundation of the Fourth International. This is what we will take on in the following chapters of this book.^[31]

Again despite claiming this, they do very little to provide a coherent, whole explanation of Clausewitz himself in the book. As a history of the USE of Clausewitz some of the very conclusions and analysis they develop contradict their own central claims. In particular in discussing and debating against the strategies of Protracted People's War in the Chinese and Vietnamese cases, as well as in Che’s Foquista concept, it becomes clear that Mao, Giap and Che themselves were clearly quite intimately familiar with Clausewitz. Indeed if a concept like “Military Genius” is to have any sense, Vietnam´s Vo Nguyen Giap certainly deserved it. Yet their limits flew from an incorrect understanding of class forces and other fundamentally POLITICAL, programmatic failures. Clausewitz did not and could not save them from Stalinism. So how can Clausewitz be our real guard against degeneration? Albamonte and Maiello advance the theory of Permanent Revolution as if it were a “Grand Strategy”. They do so thinking they are making Permanent Revolution something bigger, in reality they are stunting it and bringing it DOWN from the programmatic/political level.

Returning to the dictamen of Clausewitz that “War is the continuation of Politics by other means”, POLITICS is in command of war, that strategy and tactics serve as means for a PROGRAMMATIC foundation. This is why Trotsky at no point in his work constructing the Fourth International sought to focus on training cadres as “military geniuses” or set up a school of strategic mastery. If that were his intention we would surely have anecdotes of him sitting down James P Cannon and forcing the man to go through all of On War in his presence. Trotsky didn’t even have illusions as to his own military-strategic genius – the Red Army had better generals – he was a political and organizational commander. The core of his life was dedicated to laying the programmatic, political foundations of the Fourth Internationale. As Clausewitz himself explained, “If war is part of policy, policy will determine its character.”^[32] Policy, in our case program, must drive our work and will ensure our victory – tactical or strategic “genius” could help or compliment these – but it can never substitute or take precedence. It exists as an extension of the former and subordinate to it.

What Albamonte and Maiello do is place military-strategic genius above and over the actual political programmatic foundations which should command them. They reverse Mao’s famous saying and construct an interpretation in which “the Gun commands the Party”. In doing so they abandon just that vital political and programmatic understanding which was conquered in the heroic years of the Third and Fourth International. By prioritizing strategy and tactics over program, they flip Clausewitz himself on his head. In doing so they free themselves up in the name of “strategy” to betray that programmatic foundation and open the road to new defeats for the international working class.

Debates in Social Democracy/vs Lih

We can see this distorted methodology from the beginning of their account of the debates in Social Democracy. The bulk of the first chapter focuses on the debates in the early German SDP around the strategy of attrition vs the strategy of overthrow as they related to the experience of 1905 in Russia. Albamonte and Maiello correctly polemicize with Lars Lih’s attempts to put a Kautskyite straightjacket on Lenin – something which in the US has served as the theoretical cover for a whole generation of pseudo-Trotskyist self-liquidation into the DSA.

The serious problem with their account, criticism and the lessons they draw are however that they effectively reduce the political and even strategic questions at stake to questions of the quality of the individual strategists. Kautsky was proven wrong by subsequent events, and so despite being well read on the subject and happy to utilize strategic citations in his arguments he lacked the qualities of “military genius”. Luxemburg engaged in an important political fight early, and so “she had no lack of ‘military genius’”,^[33] but it was Kautsky and not Rosa who most thoroughly referenced their theory in military terms. Lenin and Trotsky’s character as “military geniuses” inspired by their appropriation of Clausewitz is the very foundation of the book, so we can take their labels for granted. Yet if Lenin’s serious appropriation of Clausewitz took place clearly in 1915; what relation did that have to the whole series of previous political and theoretical battles he waged to forge a Bolshevik party capable of rising to the heights of 1917?

There is a methodology at work here which is fundamentally at odds with actually extracting lessons from the debates and combat within international social democracy. What can we really conclude here? We need to be better strategists? But Kautsky studied and referenced more military strategy by far than Luxembourg, whose arguments were essentially political. Yet she was the better “military genius”. It’s a nebulous quality of leadership which is necessarily subjective, and can only be really determined years after the great political clashes involved.

Would reading Clausewitz have given Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht the insight to form a revolutionary party earlier? Or to go into hiding before the 1919 massacre which struck down the German Party’s two greatest leaders? Clausewitz is a brilliant theorist-philosopher of War. More useful perhaps even than Machiavelli, or Thucydides and Sun Tzu, all of whom have useful insights for revolutionaries. It might have helped, but his military theory and strategy is not the universal key to unlocking the mysteries of revolutionary leadership. No more so than Hegel’s Science of Logic, which Lenin gave an even more thorough endorsement. From a historical materialist viewpoint in which revolutionary leadership is the question of seizing power in the imperialist epoch, our epoch – it could not possibly be such a guide.

What is the real “Center of Gravity” for revolutionary leadership? Above all it is in the political and programmatic foundations. It is not a Clausewitzian coat of paint thrown on the debates between Rosa, Kautsky, Lenin and Trotsky in the lead up to the Russian Revolution. It’s a thorough study of the organizational and political questions at stake and assimilating those political lessons. Those lessons as they are distilled programmatically and as they are expressed in the revolutionary continuity of the organizations and practice of the working class. 

This is something that Albamonte and Maiello already begin to miss and misrepresent as early as these debates over the mass strike and German social democracy. They cite Rosa Luxemburg’s What Now? In which she polemicized against the Parliamentary Cretinism of the SDP and its turn focused on fighting the “Right”. It is a moment of Rosa frozen in time which is particularly convenient for Albamonte and Maiello where her more moderate intervention seeking to put the parliamentary posts at the service of the broader struggle lines up with how they like to envision their own use of the FIT-U in Argentina. Rosa in 1912 could not know that the Parliamentarians she wanted to fight for the 8 hour day, for a more aggressive working class politics, for using the parliament to strengthen the workers movement, were going to end up leading the most world-historic betrayal of the working class. The fact of 1914 changes one's attitude towards parliamentary work profoundly – not insignificantly it makes unity and propaganda blocks with pro-imperialist “socialists” (see the shameless support of the FIT-U’s MST and IS for US imperialism in Ukraine) completely unthinkable. Albamonte and Maiello want to dress up their own alliance with pro-imperialist parliamentary cretinism with a sprinkle of pre-war Rosa.

What was Rosa’s balance of parliamentary participation?

For real advocates of the revolution and of socialism, participation in the National Assembly today can have nothing in common with the customary traditional method of ‘exploiting parliament’ for so-called ‘positive gains’. We will not participate in the National Assembly in order to fall back into the old rut of parliamentarism, nor to apply minor corrective patches and cosmetics to the legislative bills, nor to ‘match forces’, nor to hold a review of our supporters, nor for any other reasons described in the well-known phraseology of the bourgeois-parliamentary treadmill and in the vocabulary of Haase and comrades.

Now we are in the middle of the revolution and the National Assembly is a counter-revolutionary stronghold erected against the revolutionary proletariat. The time has come, then, to assault and demolish this stronghold. The elections, the tribune of the National Assembly, must be utilized to mobilize the masses against the National Assembly and to rally them to the most exacting struggle. Our participation in the elections is necessary not in order to collaborate with the bourgeoisie and its shield-bearers in making laws, but to cast out the bourgeoisie and its shield-bearers from the temple, to storm the fortress of the counter-revolution, and to raise above it the victorious banner of the proletarian revolution.^[34]

“Counter-revolutionary stronghold”, there’s some military terminology for the FT. It’s also an accurate description of the profoundly counter-revolutionary role which a “Constituent Assembly” played in the German Revolution, where it laid the basis for the recomposition of bourgeois rule under the Weimar Republic. For Rosa this embryonic parliament was a “counter-revolutionary stronghold” which we enter, and we do enter it, to “storm the fortress of the counter-revolution, and to raise above it the victorious banner of the proletarian revolution.” We do not enter to laugh it up with Maximo Kirchner or to accuse the representatives of the bourgeois of being “traitors”,^[35] we explain that they are all loyal to their class. Because we are interested in tearing down the illusions of our class in its role, not building them up with fantastical appeals to a “Workers Government” of Tsipras or Freixo. You do not tear down a counter-revolutionary stronghold by telling everyone that it's actually capable of fulfilling revolutionary tasks.

Russian and German Revolutions

Stepping from the debates around Social-Democracy into the fundamental questions of organizing and winning insurrection there are no more important examples than the victorious Russian Revolution and the defeated German Revolution.

Albamonte and Maiello engage in a discussion over Trotsky’s theorization of the Civil War, relying on Trotsky’s Problem of Civil War as well as Nelson’s account of Trotsky as a military theorist. After discussing the strategy of presenting the insurrection as a defensive act with the Soviets, they go on to emphasize that:        

The success of this maneuver demonstrated the “military genius” of Trotsky, as well as the whole October Revolution in Petrograd, an example of preparation and execution of an insurrectional offensive.^[36]

A point which in isolation is indisputable, but contains the seed of a significant problem that will be revealed when they step on to the German terrain. They provide a useful summary of their analysis of the two revolutions in the crisis of the moment of the insurrection itself:

This is one of the moments of the greatest importance for the revolutionary party, since only an audacious and unyielding leadership, conscious of the pulse of the masses, can break with the old scheme and lead the movement to the seizure of power. In the Russian Revolution of 1917 the most decided sectors of the leadership imposed themselves, the wing of Lenin together with Trotsky, against Kamenev and Zinoviev who opposed the insurrection. In the German Revolution of 1923, for example, the conservative and wavering tendencies of the leadership triumphed, led by Brandler, and the insurrection was aborted. On the other hand, we also have cases of premature insurrections, where the “audacity” of the leadership did not match existing conditions, like the example of the “March Action in Germany in 1921. Or, as a positive example, the ‘containment of the premature insurrection of Petrograd in July 1917 by the Bolsheviks’.^[37]

We will take up this conservative withdrawal, which Albamonte and Maiello acknowledge Trotsky argues emerges almost like a law itself – but they do not explore it in more depth. They have what is effectively an alternative explanation to this more political one advanced by Trotsky in his work on Civil War and in a series of later writings. As Albamonte and Maiello will summarize after they review the events leading up to the defeat in Germany:

As we will try to sketch out in this brief overview of the events, the KPD did not orient itself from a strategic viewpoint, and that is where we must find the causes of the defeat.^[38]

The Russian Revolution triumphed in great part due to Trotsky’s possession of “military genius”, and the German Revolution failed centrally because the party did not have a “strategic” orientation, that is to say it lacked this character of “military genius”. That the German Revolution failed due in great part to a failure of revolutionary leadership is unquestionable – but the focus on “military genius” and the “strategic” element is subordinating the more fundamental political and programmatic elements at work. To understand this we should start with the explanations given by Trotsky which Albamonte and Maiello mention, but largely downplay in favor of this “strategic” orientation.

Trotsky in his work on Civil War that Albamonte and Maiello cite kicks off emphasizing again the primacy of politics around the question of Civil War:

We remain, therewith, in the sphere of revolutionary politics, for, after all, isn't insurrection the continuation of politics by other means?^[39]

In line with this primacy of politics which Trotsky extracts from Clausewitz, when he addresses the failure of Germany he finds the foundation for it in fundamentally political causes:

However, there has been till very recently in the German Communist Party still a very strong current of revolutionary fatalism. The revolution is coming, it was said; it will bring the insurrection and power. As for the party, its role at this time is to make revolutionary agitation and await its outcome. Under such conditions, posing squarely the question of the timing of the insurrection means snatching the party from passivity and fatalism and bringing it face to face with the principal problems of revolution, namely, the conscious organization of the insurrection in order to drive the enemy from power.^[40]

Trotsky prepared this text precisely as a guide and manual to explain, based on the victorious October revolution, the process of insurrection and political evolution of it. In this intervention his focus was on rendering clear the historical lessons which were the conquest of the Russian Revolution and the bitter harvest of the German defeat. There is no reference in it to “military genius”, and it could even be said as a criticism that it doesn't actually touch on the question of the party leadership – beyond mentioning the doubts which can surge within it similar to what happened with Kamenev and Zinoiev.

In a 1926 letter to Bordiga a, a revolutionary for whom Trotsky had tremendously more respect than Gramsci, Trotsky adds to this political analysis of the German failure:

One of the main experiences of the German insurrection was the fact that at the decisive moment, upon which, as I have said, the long-term outcome of the revolution depended, and in all the Communist Parties, a social democratic regression was, to a greater or lesser extent, inevitable. In our revolution, thanks to the whole past of the party and to the exemplary role played by Lenin, this regression was kept to a minimum; and this despite the fact that at certain moments the success of the party in the struggle was put into danger. It seemed to me, and seems all the more so now, that these social democratic regressions are unavoidable at decisive moments in the European Communist Parties, which are younger and less tempered. This point of view should enable us to evaluate the work of the party, its experience, its offensive, its retreats in all stages of the preparation for the seizure of power. By basing ourselves on this experience the leading cadres of the party can be selected.^[41]

Social-Democratic retrogression is a considerably more refined political analysis which does not force us to rely on a nebulous concept of “military genius”. Rather it is a clearly defined political process which we can see directly has unfolded in most revolutionary workers parties who face a revolutionary situation.

Indeed it’s important when reviewing the German Revolution when so much emphasis is placed on the fight against ultra leftism, the failures of the 1919 Spartacist Uprising and the flaws of the 1921 March Action to remember that neither of those left or adventurist mistakes were what buried the revolutionary opportunity. Albamote and Maiello place the March action and the missed opportunity of 1923 on essentially equal planes, both failures of a leadership who were insufficiently “strategic”.

Even in defeat so long as it is not a decisive one, a failed uprising can raise the expectations of the class in the decisiveness and seriousness of the revolutionary party when a real opportunity emerges. In so far as there was a revolutionary opportunity in 1923 it was partly the consequence of precisely this process unfolding as an outcome of the failed, left putsches of 1921 and 1919. One social-democratic deviation in the decisive moment of the struggle for power however and the entire revolutionary opportunity can be buried for a whole period. The class can forgive those who fight too zealously in its name, but never those who desert the battlefield at the decisive moment.

This is also inherently a much more practical lesson: afterall how can we prepare for “military genius” or a “strategic orientation”? We can argue subjectively for far more than 600 pages what constitutes a good strategy. The danger of “social democratic regression” is much more actionable for a revolutionary organization and gives a clearer direction of march for the party. That within the party in the decisive moment it is likely that there will surge a Kamenev, a Zinoieve, a Brandt or… in the Italian case… an Antonio Gramsci.

Gramsci vs Trotsky

The Fraction Trotskista in their break from Trotskyism, far from seeking to guard against social-democratic regression, have built their theoretical innovations on the foundation laid by the great theoretical master of the “Social-Democratic regression”, Antonio Gramsci.

There is no more accurate way to define Gramsci and the general direction of his political thought. He was not, of course, the crass reformist who the latter day PCI and its academic sycophants turned him into. He was a communist, much like Zinoiev and Kamenev despite their own “social-democratic regressions”. Zinoiev’s loss of nerve in October didn’t prevent him from playing a decisive role of world-historic importance winning over the USPD against Martov in the famous Halle debate. Gramsci, subordinate to a revolutionary leadership, could have achieved great things – unfortunately he ended up subordinating himself to Zinoieve and the “Bolshevization” of the Comintern. As a leader, Gramsci’s regression in 1920 was an important element of the defeat of the Italian revolution. As Norden argued in another polemic with the FT on Gramsci:

Everyone, including spokesmen of the bourgeoisie, expected that the metal workers, with Gramsci’s Ordine Nuovo group at their head, would use the opportunity to strike the final blow. But no: although they had occupied the factories, they did not take to the streets to fight against the very weak police and military forces, they did not call on the railroad workers to go on general strike throughout Italy. In fact, they did not even stop production in those factories. Why not? Because in the Gramscian conception of factory councils, the point was to show the bosses, and the workers themselves, that they were capable of directing production. For Lenin and Trotsky and the young Communist International, in contrast, workers control was the prelude to insurrection. But neither in 1920 nor in his Notebooks did Gramsci concern himself with the preparation of workers insurrection. Instead, he fought to conquer hegemony in society.^[42]

There is a significant parallel to be drawn here between Gramsci’s efforts to maintain workers control within bourgeois society, and the arguments advanced by Zinoieve and Kamenev on the eve of insurrection. As Trotsky recounted their arguments in his History of the Russian Revolution:

Before history, before the international proletariat, before the Russian revolution and the Russian working-class,” they wrote, “we have no right to stake the whole future at the present moment upon the card of armed insurrection.”

Their plan was to enter as a strong opposition party into the Constituent Assembly, which “in its revolutionary work can rely only upon the soviets.” Hence their formula: “Constituent Assembly and soviets – that, is, the combined type of state institution toward which we are travelling.” The Constituent Assembly where the Bolsheviks, it was assured, would be a minority, and the soviets where the Bolsheviks were a majority – that is, the organ of the bourgeoisie and the organ of the proletariat – were to be “combined” in a peaceful system of dual power. That had not succeeded even under the leadership of the Compromisers. How could it succeed when the soviets were Bolshevik?

“It is a profound historic error,” concluded Zinoviev and Kamenev, “to pose the question of the transfer of power to the proletarian party – either now or at any time. No, the party of the proletariat will grow, its programme will become clear to broader and broader masses.^[43]

Gramsci’s position in the face of the revolutionary events of the Biennio Rossi was not that different from Zinoviev and Kamenev – replace “Constituent Assembly and Soviets” for “Workers Control and the Bourgeois State”. One could easily imagine in the aftermath of a missed opportunity for the Russian Revolution, Zinoieve or Kamenev going on to write voluminous tomes about how much more was needed, culturally, politically, industrially, for there to have been a victorious Russian Revolution. Thankfully Lenin and Trotsky’s decisive battle for the insurrection gave us the world’s first workers state and spared us from a bleak future of Zinoievite and Kamenevite academics.

Albamonte and Maiello attempt to wield together a supposed “convergence” between Trotsky and Gramsci around the Lyon Thesis. It is a deeply dishonest attempt which could only be made under the assumption of almost total ignorance among the readers as to the purpose of the Lyon Thesis, the state of the Comintern and the battles within the Italian Communist Party of that time.

Albamonte and Maiello talk about the Lyon Thesis as if it were some independent intellectual investigation, some doctoral thesis of Gramsci in which the embryos of his real thought can be found, “un documento fundamental en su pensamiento maduro”.^[44] It was a party document which applied the prevailing, Zinovievite Comintern orthodoxy of 1926 to the conditions of Italy. Its central aim was to sideline Bordiga’s left faction and install the “Bolshevization” of the party as one commanded bureaucratically and totally subordinate to Moscow. It was cowritten with Togliatti, the great betrayer of the Italian working class who guaranteed the world-historic capitulation of the PCI after WWII. A fact Albamonte and Maiello must know but choose to exclude from the record.

What did Trotsky have to say about Togliatti (Ercoli)? 

The barren casuistry of his speeches is always directed in the last analysis to the defense of opportunism, representing the diametric opposite to the living, muscular and full-blooded revolutionary thought of Amadeo Bordiga. Wasn’t it Ercoli, by the way, who tried to adapt to Italy the idea of the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” in the form of a slogan for an Italian Constitutional Assembly, resting on “workers and peasants assemblies?”^[45]

That is Trotsky’s verdict on the coauthor of the Lyon Thesis, and his defense of the counterposed “muscular and full-blooded revolutionary thought of Amadeo Bordiga”. How could this document possibly be the source of “convergences” between Trotsky and Togliatti’s co-conspirator, Gramsci? Yet this is in truth only the beginnings of the problems with the Lyon Thesis, based on interpreting it textually rather than understanding its context within the Italian Communist Party. The Lyon Thesis was the culmination of a historic crime against the international working class which laid the foundations for the betrayal by Togliatti 20 years later. 

An extensive treatment of Bordiga and the Sinistra, the left within the Italian Socialist Party is beyond the scope of this work. The demonization of Bordiga went hand in hand with the cult of Gramsci with which the post-war PCI consecrated its historic betrayal of the working class – much of this demonization has passed on to non-party historians and academics who absorbed it. It is worth restating that Bordiga was one of the few figures of international social democracy to call for a consequential struggle against the war, that he held the loyalty of an overwhelmingly militant, working class base of the Sinistra and PCI. There are few figures for whom Trotsky and Lenin held more respect – this does not and should not minimize political differences – but Bordiga in this period was a leader elevated by the most militant vanguard of the Italian working class and who held their loyalty in a manner comparable within the International to Lenin, Liebknecht, Luxembourg and Trotsky.

Gramsci had no such history or base and relied overwhelmingly on the backing of the Stalinizing Comintern. The sordid details of Gramsci’s campaign in the lead up to the Lyon Thesis are told in masterful detail by John Chiaradia in Amadeo Bordiga and the Myth of Antonio Gramsci.^[46] It begins with Gramsci being appointed by the Comintern in 1924 as the “General Secretary” of the Italian Party, an entirely new post for the party. Gramsci, based essentially around the group of petty-bourgeois intellectuals of New Order, together with Togliatti and other Comintern agents launched a campaign to wrest the party from Bordiga’s working class supporters.

This campaign reached its height at the same time as the anti-Trotsky campaign in the USSR did, after the publication of Trotksy’s Lessons of October. Bordiga wrote an article in defense of Lessons of October^[47] and was prevented from publishing this in the PCI paper. For the Gramsci-Togliatti center, this became a useful point to link the struggles against Bordigism and Trotskyism. However, even slanderous political methods were unable to break the loyalty of the PCI’s worker militants to the left.

A vicious campaign of abuse and bureaucratic diktats was launched aimed at cutting down the overwhelming radical, working class base of the PCI which supported Bordiga. Within the Comintern only the struggle within the Soviet Party itself against Trotsky is comparable. Open censorship blocked any effective written responses. At the organizational level there was the enforced adoption of cell based structures that – effectively – isolated worker militants from the broader political discussion.

In the lead up to the 1926 conference that produced the Lyon Thesis, this saw entire city branches effectively disaffiliated in order to build “loyal” groups from scratch. Gramsci established a 90.8% majority which was mathematically and politically impossible to achieve in an honest way. Any “abstaining” (under conditions of fascism!) Sinistra member who didn’t vote otherwise was considered a vote for Gramsci’s center. Provincial conferences were held and where Bordiga’s wing easily carried the discussions, it was of course considered unnecessary to vote or hold any resolutions.

The results on the PCI’s militancy and its working class base were of course devastating. “Party membership in the industrial centers typified by Turin and Milan had halved in the period 1925-1926”.^[48]

This vicious, demoralizing and destructive campaign was carried out throughout 1924-26 under the conditions of Fascism, of the move by Mussolini to consolidate his power which would result in both Gramsci and Bordiga being arrested. Bordiga was stripped of his staff position and was forced to look for work! The Italian Left was sidelined in a moment where openly organizing a political alternative was almost impossible! The best, most serious militants capable of taking on underground work were isolated or disaffiliated. Whatever differences there may have been with Bordiga around the United Front, it is nothing compared to the work of demoralizing, deaffiliating and burying the working class base of the PCI. Gramsci was responsible for turning the most important vanguard organization of the Italian working class into a lifeless husk. 

In the face of this vicious campaign, where there was a real “convergence” between Trotsky and a major Italian Communist in 1926 it was between Trotsky and Bordiga. In a Letter available on the PTS own theoretical website^[49] Trotsky in reference to a 1925 document (not 1926 as he writes it) declares: “The Platform of the Left (1926) produced a great impression on me. I think that it is one of the best documents published by the international opposition, which preserves its significance in many things to this very day.”

This Platform of the Left is in fact the Platform of the Committee of Intesa^[50], a key document grouping together the left opposition to Gramsci and Togliatti’s Bolshevization of the PCI. It is important to clarify that Trotsky followed up this correspondence with more critical remarks which, while still endorsing the 1925 document for its time, argued that it did not provide sufficient answers for the situation of 1930. Trotsky had a falling out with Bordiga’s followers even as he retained considerable respect for Bordiga himself.

However, given that Albamonte and Maiello are attempting to make the Lyon Thesis the bridge with which to connect Trotsky and Gramsci, Trotsky’s open endorsement of a document against which the Lyon Thesis was directed is impossible to ignore.

All this is not to brush over Bordiga’s real political divergences with Trotsky and Trotskyism, but the fact is in the face of the degeneration of the Comintern, the most important issue of the time, Bordiga had the political instincts and understanding to be on the right side. On the stage of revolutionary class leadership rather than academic citation count, Bordiga was a giant compared to Gramsci.

These issues are even on display in the recorded discussion (after the organizational crimes had been committed) around the Lyon Thesis itself by Gramsci, Togliatti, Bordiga and others. As the record shows, Gramsci “Advances a historical justification of the value of the process of "Bolshevization" of the proletarian parties that was begun after the Fifth World Congress and the Enlarged Executive meeting of April 1925”.^[52] Indeed Gramsci goes much further and adopts directly Stalinist arguments: “Comrade Naples has protested against the way in which the campaign against the far left's factionalism has been conducted. I maintain that this campaign was fully justified. It was I who wrote that to create a faction in the Communist Party, in our present situation, was to act as agent provocateurs, and I still stand by that assertion today.”^[53] Accusing the left of being agent provocateurs, police agents, is about as deep an embrace of Stalinism as was possible. From an “agent provocateur” of Mussolini’s Italy we are only a short conceptual ride away from the “Trotskyite-Zinoievite terrorist center”.

Bordiga by contrast argued against Gramsci that “The system followed in creating leaderships for the individual parties is incorrect, as is the system whereby discussions for the World Congresses are imposed and directed. In this field. we accept the criticisms formulated by Trotsky of the International's method of work.”^[54]

Gramsci’s Letter to the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party makes his support of Stalin against the United Opposition amply clear. His appeals to Unity in the party line up more or less perfectly with that of the capitulations of Zinoieve and Kamenev to Stalinism. This direct stance against Trotskyism was, alongside the ambiguity of his writings under prison censorship, the foundation that was necessary for the later day Reformist PCI to make him the chief intellectual base of their own reformist turns and build Gramsci into an academic idol. Anti-Trotskyism was and remains today a fundamental requisite for academic prestige. A limit the bourgeois state imposes on efforts to grasp “cultural hegemony”.

From the totally subordinated Stalinist structure implemented in the PCI by Gramsci and Togliatti, we are only a short nod from Moscow away from Togliatti’s ultimate betrayal of the Italian Working Class. Albamonte and Maiello will go on extensively about the supposed “Order of Yalta” and its role in burying the post-war revolution. Yet none of this would have been possible in Italy without Gramsci’s tireless bureaucratic work culminating in the Lyon Thesis which they so value.

Bordiga’s final political destination lay far away from Trotskyism – but his destination was also tied intrinsically with that path that brought him there. It is impossible to speculate too deeply on what a PCI driven by the radical working class base of Bordiga would have or could have done – if it would have been up to the challenge of the post-war struggle for power or not. We can never know, because Gramsci together with the Stalinized Comintern destroyed the Italian Communist Party as it was. The Lyon Thesis was the gravestone that marked the death of this once vibrant radical working class organization. The re-appropriation of the Lyon Thesis by self-proclaimed “Trotskyists” is nothing less than grotesque.

Gramsci and Democratic Demands

What exactly are Albamonte and Maiello attempting to establish with these supposed “convergences” between Trotsky and Gramsci rooted in the Lyon Thesis? Afterall even in most of the comparisons they develop throughout the book, Trotsky comes off as having a superior understanding of the conjuncture and fundamental political questions of the epoch (the role of the bureaucracy, united vs popular front, etc.). Reading it one can’t help but be struck by the impression it is an effort to sell Gramscian academics on the value of Trotsky, rather than to explain the value Gramsci offers to a revolutionary workers party.

In their earlier theoretical article on the subject, they focused on the value of Gramsci’s concept of passive revolutions for understanding the post-WWII boom, both from the capitalist side of US domination and economic growth, as well as from the side of “proletarian passive revolutions” with the establishment of the Deformed Workers States.^[55] This formulation conceals an essential process in the creation of those Deformed Workers States – the smashing by the Red Army of the old capitalist state. A concept of “Proletarian Passive Revolution” skips over this vital component and can easily lead to deep confusion as it does for the FT. Rather than a parallel with late Nineteenth century Italy, the more correct parallel is to be drawn with those bourgeois states established in the wake of Napoleon’s Grande Army as it tore down the old feudal structures in its wake. A march that also had its counter-revolutionary components – most notably Napoleon’s attempt to reconquer and restore slavery in revolutionary Haiti. This is a historic parallel already founded in Trotsky’s analysis of a Soviet Thermidor and Soviet Bonapartism.

What Albamonte and Maiello here attempt to wring out of the Lyon Thesis and the rest of these “convergences” is a justification for a series of “radical democratic” demands. They use an article from 1931 by Trotsky on Spain and then link it to the Lyon Thesis, making the latter out to be a precursor of permanent revolution!

The “Thesis…” planted the impossibility of an “intermediate” democratic revolution in the face of fascism and characterized that what was ahead was the socialist revolution, coinciding in fact with this aspect of Trotsky, which had sustained the theory-program on the permanent revolution for Russia.^[56]

So apparently, Togliatti signed on to a document that endorsed the permanent revolution? A document which was the culmination of a campaign waged against a Left which had defended against Gramsci and Togliatti Trotsky’s Lessons of October? How fortunate for him that no-one let Stalin know about it during his extended stay in the USSR…

Of course defending the formal perspective of socialist revolution in Italy, an advanced capitalist country, was largely Communist orthodoxy right up to the Popular Front. In the context of a party campaign against a militant workers left, maintaining this was essential. The United Anti-Imperialist Front and the perspective of a democratic revolution first then applied only to semi-colonial countries. By Albamonte and Maiello’s logic we can talk about “convergences” between the Permanent Revolution and 90% of the Stalinist Comintern right up to the period of the Popular Front. Something which should highlight just how tenuous all these supposed “convergences” are and just how important the fundamental differences were.

We have at this point amply demonstrated the bankruptcy of “convergences” between Trotsky and the Lyon Thesis, so let’s focus directly on the political objective, the ultimate destination at which the FT wants to arrive as they summarize themselves:

In this sense, what we have attempted to show are the roads and tools with which to struggle for that hegemony, necessarily “anti-regime”, which were sustained by Lenin. Taking from Gramsci his developments and his productivity in analyzing the processes of aggregation and disaggregation of classes through which the bourgeoisie maintains its hegemony, alongside the precise tactical and strategic articulation of Trotsky. A vision which escapes from the economist caricatures of “permanent catastrophe” and of masses always located 180 degrees from their leadership. From here the role of democratic-radical demands, vital to avoid both assimilation by the regime and sectarian impotence; the articulation of the united front and the struggle (in politics and unions) against the bureaucracy; the fight against the “democratic” parties of the petty-bourgeoisie to conquer hegemony over the middle sectors; the articulation of these elements with the development of the offensive united front (soviets) and the workers government, in the anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist sense which Trotsky emphasized against the popular fronts.^[57]

Assimilation of a Gramscian rather than Leninist conception of hegemony opens a dangerous road towards opportunism – one which historically tends to take parties out of the factories and into graduate seminars – resulting in rambling discussions about Foucault. A full polemic against Gramsci’s views on hegemony is out of scope, but we can pose a simple question. When have Gramscian concepts actually served as an effective lever of revolutionary theory and action, rather than an effective way to pad academic resumes and sweep up grant funding?

Radical democratic demands are the real destination, Trotsky and Gramsci are mostly along for the ride. Albamonte and Maiello are mostly content in the book to point to this radical-democratic emphasis without explicitly defending the FT’s use of them (for example calls for Constituent Assemblies under bourgeois-democratic regimes wherever they can be found).

As part of this they take up Trotsky’s 1930 letter to the Italian Communists opposing the slogan of a “national assembly” that had been raised. Let us review Trotsky’s key formulations on democratic demands in this context:

But does this mean that we communists reject in advance all democratic slogans, all transitional or preparatory slogans, limiting ourselves strictly to the proletarian dictatorship? That would be a display of sterile, doctrinaire sectarianism. We do not believe for one moment that a single revolutionary leap suffices to cross what separates the fascist regime from the proletarian dictatorship. In no way do we deny a transitional period with its transitional demands including democratic demands. But it is precisely with the aid of these transitional slogans, which are always the starting point on the road to the proletarian dictatorship, that the communist vanguard will have to win the whole working class and that the latter will have to unite around itself all the oppressed masses of the nation. And I do not even exclude the possibility of the Constituent Assembly which in certain circumstances, could be imposed by the course of events or, more precisely, by the process of the revolutionary awakening of the oppressed masses. To be sure, on the broad historical scale that is from the perspective of a whole number of years the fate of Italy is undoubtedly reduced to the following alternative: Fascism or Communism. But to claim that this alternative has already penetrated the consciousness of the oppressed classes of the nation is to engage in wishful thinking and to consider as solved the colossal task that still fully confronts the weak Communist Party. If the revolutionary crisis were to break out, for example, in the course of the next months (under the influence of the economic crisis on the one hand, and under the revolutionary influence coming from Spain, on the other), the masses of toilers, workers as well as peasants, would certainly follow up their economic demands with democratic slogans (such as freedom of assembly, of press, of trade union organisation, democratic representation in parliament and in the municipalities). Does this mean that the Communist Party should reject these demands? On the contrary. It will have to invest them with the most audacious and resolute character possible. For the proletarian dictatorship cannot be imposed upon the popular masses. It can be realised only by carrying on a battle – a battle in full – for all the transitional demands, requirements, and needs of the masses, and at the head of the masses.^[58]

Obviously defense of workers democracy has always been a foundational element of Trotskyism. We denounce the undemocratic character of a whole series of Bourgeois institutions and know that the bourgeois state will use any anti-democratic legislation against us – as the United States did imprisoning the leaders of the SWP under the Smith Act. The issue of the Constituent Assembly is however quite different from the defense of democratic rights.

The case of Italy here is important, as we are talking about the demand for a Constituent Assembly raised within the context of a Fascist State. Under those conditions – where the demand necessarily points towards tearing down that state as a precondition of its realization, the demand for a Constituent Assembly can potentially (though certainly not always) play a revolutionary role. Not always however, and Trotsky here is clear that while he is potentially open to the slogan under future conditions, he doesn’t advocate it for now. If Trotsky is so cautious around its use under a fascist dictatorship, how could it possibly take on the universal significance that the FT gives the slogan under bourgeois democracies?

In the context of say, Pinochet’s military dictatorship, it could have been raised as a counterpoint to the bourgeois movement for a negotiated exit. In the context of military dictatorship it CAN POTENTIALLY be useful as a tool which poses the destruction of the regime itself as a precondition. However it fundamentally CANNOT play such a role under a bourgeois-democratic regime – where the “democratic” conditions for elections to such a CA are already in place. In this context, like that most recently of Chile, it can only play the role of derailing the revolutionary movement towards a reconstitution of a more efficient, more popular bourgeois-democratic state when the latter is in crisis. 

The demand in a bourgeois democracy loses its “transitional” character as it is incapable of posing the overthrow of the regime and loses all revolutionary significance, paving the road to a counter-revolutionary restoration of bourgeois stability under a new more efficient regime. The handwringing not only from the FT but also from the tradition of the Partido Obrero around the Constituent Assemblies in Chile, Bolivia and other countries not being “true” Constituent Assemblies since they didn’t tear down the regime is a dead end. The demand is only capable of posing the destruction of the regime under conditions of dictatorship – it is only potentially revolutionary in a context where the regime cannot possibly resolve it.

This is why while Trotsky leaves himself open to the potential of such a slogan for Italy, you will not find him advocating it for any bourgeois democracy – the most you will see there as present in his A Program of Action For France is a general defense of democratic rights and the abolition of anti-democratic institutions like the Senate and Presidency. Those are linked however to a very clear explanation that “The task is to replace the capitalist state, which functions for the profit of the big exploiters, by the workers’ and peasants’ proletarian state.”^[59] These democratic demands are not isolated calls but part of a clear program that advocates for the working class to take power itself. The defense of workers democracy in Trotsky goes hand in hand everywhere with a clear and patient explanation that the bourgeoisie trends towards destroying these rights and that only a workers revolution to establish a workers state can resolve the crisis. To do otherwise, to raise them in isolation as the FT does is to strengthen, rather than to undermine, the democratic illusions which chain the working class.

The Comintern - School of Revolutionary Strategy

As exemplified by their isolated, textual interpretation of the Togliatti-Gramsci Lyon Thesis, Albamonte and Maiello either are entirely ignorant of the real debates and battles within the Comintern or are deliberately engaging in a falsification of the events to cover over their Gramscian turn. Their emphasis on “military genius” in Luxembourg, Lenin and Trotsky to the detriment of political and programmatic foundations requires an effort to set the record straight as well as to emphasize those parts of Clausewitz which genuinely inspired Lenin.

It is striking, and deeply symptomatic of the their academic, textual orientation that Albamonte and Maiello in a book on “Socialist Strategy” have much to say about individual interventions by Trotsky or Gramsci, but little to say about the actual School of Revolutionary Strategy that was the Comintern. They have time for Foucault and a string of academic posers, but none for the Hungarian Revolution, the Bavarian Uprising, somehow they even discuss Gramsci while practically ignoring the Biennio Rossi. The United Front, which they so painstakingly paint as a unique idea floating around the heads of Trotsky and Gramsci, was a collective conquest of international communism. It was a product of the stormy debates and hard revolutionary lessons forged over the course of the first four congresses of the Comintern. An unparalleled international experience of debate, struggle, uprisings, massacres, revolutions and counter-revolutions. The forging of the world party of revolution in the fires of revolutionary struggle.

In a chapter from The First Five Years of the Communist International, “The School of Revolutionary Strategy”, Trotsky synthesized his approach to learning strategy with a declaration that “The art of tactics and strategy, the art of revolutionary struggle can be mastered only through experience, through criticism and self-criticism.”^[60] Lenin had his own quite similar take on what built the Bolshevik Party into one that was capable of taking power:

On the other hand, Bolshevism, which had arisen on this granite foundation of theory, went through fifteen years of practical history (1903–17) unequalled anywhere in the world in its wealth of experience. During those fifteen years, no other country knew anything even approximating to that revolutionary experience, that rapid and varied succession of different forms of the movement—legal and illegal, peaceful and stormy, underground and open, local circles and mass movements, and parliamentary and terrorist forms. In no other country has there been concentrated, in so brief a period, such a wealth of forms, shades, and methods of struggle of all classes of modern society, a struggle which, owing to the backwardness of the country and the severity of the tsarist yoke, matured with exceptional rapidity, and assimilated most eagerly and successfully the appropriate “last word” of American and European political experience.^[61]

A political, programmatic foundation forms the base. A passage from Clausewitz which Lenin took the effort to copy out by hand emphasizes this point: “Nothing is more important in life than finding the right standpoint for seeing and judging events, and then adhering to it. One point and one only yields an integrated view of all phenomena; and only by holding to that point of view can one avoid inconsistency.”^[62] In Lenin’s notes on Clausewitz he characterizes Chapter 6, that focused on the political aspect and foundation of war, the most important. Among the passages he copies out and emphasizes from here is: “The subordination of the political viewpoint to the military would be absurd because politics created war. Politics is the brain, war merely the instrument and not vice versa. Therefore, only the subordination of the military viewpoint to the political remains possible.”^[63]

Politics, program, this is the foundation. This program than comes into experience with the “practical history”, the “revolutionary experience” which of course can only be processed, incorporated and formed into the strategy and tactics of the revolutionary movement through the “criticism and self-criticism” which Trotsky refers to and which was the purpose of the Communist International. When the Fifth Congress of the Comintern refused to touch on the topic of the 1923 defeat in Germany for fear of demoralizing the ranks, this was a considerable betrayal. This historic task which was left unfinished was then taken up and continued as best it could be by the nascent International Left Opposition and the Fourth International. To recreate such a school of revolutionary strategy is inseparable from the political task of reforging the Fourth International as a genuine world party of revolution. Such a task requires a full account of the history of world trotskyism and a balance of its work – including in the face of the fall of the Soviet Union – something which we will see shortly would involve far more self-criticism than the founders of the FT are willing to engage in.

It seems fair to say that Albamonte and Maiello, perhaps in pursuit of the academic respectability which Gramscists so treasure as part of their fight for “cultural hegemony”, have lost their heads. The latter would explain how they came to see everything upside down; from a conception of Clausewitz where “military genius” rules over politics to a conception of the Comintern in which something as foundational as the United Front is understood as individualist ideas, products of the “military genius” of Trotsky and Gramsci.

The Proletarian Military Policy

After a very general discussion of the 2nd World War, more or less conveying Mandel’s thoughts on it, Albamonte and Maiello jump into a surprising polemic with the International Spartacist Tendency – a tendency they will a few pages later pretend doesn’t exist in their account of the Fourth International – over the issue of Trotsky’s Proletarian Military Policy. They reference only a 2012 article by the ICL and do not actually bother to address its central arguments, nor to take up the extensive documentation and analysis that was present in Prometheus Research Series No. 2, “Documents on the ‘Proletarian Military Policy’”^[64] that is referenced within. You would think the book’s focus on “Military Strategy” would make precisely this kind of debate more important, but apparently not. They try to argue that the PMP is essentially in line with Lenin’s policy in The Military Program of the Proletarian Revolution

On the question of a militia, we should say: We are not in favor of a bourgeois militia; we are in favor only of a proletarian militia. Therefore, “not a penny, not a man”, not only for a standing army, but even for a bourgeois militia, even in countries like the United States, or Switzerland, Norway, etc. … We can demand popular election of officers, abolition of all military law, equal rights for foreign and native-born workers… Further, we can demand the right of every hundred, say, inhabitants of a given country to form voluntary military-training associations, with free election of instructors paid by the state, etc. Only under these conditions could the proletariat acquire military training for itself and not for its slaveowners; and the need for such training is imperatively dictated by the interests of the proletariat.^[65]

For Albamonte and Maiello this quote settles the debate. However the right of inhabitants of a given area to form voluntary military-training associations is a demand for free, universal military training for all – effectively an extension of public education. This is DISTINCT from the PMP’s call:

We demand federal funds for the military training of workers and worker-officers under the control of the trade unions. Military appropriations? Yes—but only for the establishment and equipment of worker training camps! Compulsory military training of workers? Yes—but only under the control of the trade unions!^[66]

The PMP moves from Lenin’s demand of universal military education to a demand for trade union control of the bourgeois state’s military apparatus. There is obviously a significant jump here between the two positions. It is also frankly incompatible with the criticisms that Trotsky raised against the POUM in 1937: 

The fourth point proclaims: “For the creation of an army controlled by the working class.” The bourgeoisie in alliance with the reformists should create an army that Nin will control. On the most crucial question, the army, the lifelessness of the positions of the POUM leaders appears in the most deadly form. The army is a weapon of the ruling class and cannot be anything else. The army is controlled by whoever commands it, that is, by whoever holds state power. The proletariat cannot “control” an army created by the bourgeoisie and its reformist lackeys. The revolutionary party can and must build its cells in such an army, preparing the advanced sections of the army to pass over to the side of the workers.^[67]

Again as Albamonte & Maiello cite the Spartacist document only to completely dismiss its arguments relying on the quote from Lenin, it’s difficult to carry the polemic much further.

We can however try to make the debate more concrete: in the face of the US imperialist war against Afghanistan and Iraq, should trotskyists have raised the demand for union control of recruitment and training? In the Korean War? In the Vietnam War? Will Left Voice raise it should the US open up a full war with a draft against Iran or Russia? If the FT really defends the PMP, they should answer affirmatively here. Posing the question, for anyone with an ounce of political principle, makes the answer obvious. The PMP was conditioned by and a concession to growing social-patriotic feeling in favor of the war – complicated further by the likelihood that the US would be an ally of the Soviet Union. It was from the start plainly apparent that its corollary demands on the other side of the war would be insane (Germany, Italy, Japan). The FT insofar as they embrace it are looking less to its application in the myriad imperialist and regional wars since (shall we demand trade union control of military training in Israel??!!) and it is rather to provide retrospective cover for the social-patriotic appetites of their forbear Moreno in the 1982 Malvinas War – for whom the PMP provided an attractive precedent.

It is also fairly rich to hear this defense of military training via the PMP from central leaders of the PTS: a party which has made no effort in its political campaigns in Argentina to defend the right of the working class to bear arms. What else does Lenin declare in the document they quote? “An oppressed class which does not strive to learn to use arms, to acquire arms, only deserves to be treated like slaves.”^[68] Yet any defense of the right of the working class to defend itself with arms in Argentina would awaken the memory of the revolutionary working class of the 70s, of not just the guerillas but the left and worker militants who in the Cordobazo resisted with pistols and rifles the advance of the army. It would be a call to break with the pacifist, “democratic”, “human rights”, progressive consensus which has dominated since the return of Argentina’s bourgeois democratic order.

For the reformist political orientation which the FIT-U maintains, the PMP serves better as an excuse precisely to avoid the practical and political battle involved in constructing and defending real armed workers self defense – something which would necessarily be in conflict with the state rather than an essentially utopian agitational demand that can be carried from the parliamentary theater.

Where the PMP has taken them in the opposite direction is however most painfully on display in the United States. Here they call for, essentially, an anti-PMP, a program for disarmament:

Any politics of control should at the minimum base itself on it not being the administration of Trump or the bipartisan parliamentarians on which the gun industries lobbyists and right wing white supremacist organizations operate. Instead it should be realized by workers organizations, students, social and human rights activists.^[69]

A demand for worker, student, social and “human rights organizations” control of…. gun control…. The AFL-CIO together with Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International should work together to implement effective gun control in the United States.

Trotsky’s position on the PMP should be criticized and is incompatible with some of his own previous declarations. However Trotsky should in no way bear responsibility for the sort of perverse, liberal tailing, reformist end which the FT has taken this opportunist policy. An anti-PMP for workers control of their own disarmament.

The Fate of the Fourth International

The superficial mention of the International Spartacist Tendency in the previous debate is important to highlight however, as they will disappear this tendency from existence in their account of the post-war decline of Trotskyism. For the FT – whose own origin in a revisionist current requires bringing the rest of world Trotskyism down with them – it is vital to demolish or obfuscate any claims to revolutionary continuity.

Their first line of attack is from the perspective of strategic and economic orientation. After declaring an analysis of the post-war economic period built around rescuing the concept of unstable equilibrium. A concept which they pretend to have discovered as another link between Trotsky and Gramsci’s thought (Gramsci’s writing on America and Fordism in particular), but which was of course a product of the debates within the Comintern, and was first raised by Lenin in this report to the Third Congress.^[70]

In this mark, the Fourth International divided in 1953 between the International Secretariat led by Pablo, Mandel, Frank, Maitan and Posadas, and the International Committee led by the Socialist Workers Party of the US and Cannon, of which Moreno, Healy and Lambert were a part. However neither of the two tendencies were able to determine the characteristics of this new capitalist equilibrium and establish a strategic mark with which to orient revolutionaries based on a “grand strategy” of the theory of permanent revolution.^[71]

Now, let us take this to its logical conclusion. The orthodoxy of the anti-pabloite forces was perhaps best encapsulated in Cannon’s insistence that World War II was not over even in the post war period. This orthodoxy was an insistence on the line laid out by Leon Trotsky. The “strategic orientation” of Trotsky which lay behind much of pre-war Trotskyism proved to be wrong – WWII heralded neither the fall of the USSR nor the world revolution. This disoriented the forces of the 4th international – but can we say that for an ultimately incorrect “strategic orientation” that neither Trotsky nor the Fourth International represented the continuity of revolutionary marxism? Indeed lets go further - The bolsheviks made the revolution with the “strategic orientation” that it would spark revolution in the west – those revolutions were defeated. Shall we renounce Lenin for his incorrect “strategic orientation”?

What Albamonte and Maiello are arguing here, “a plague on both your houses”, is not at all a new argument within the world trotskyist movement. What distinguishes them is their idealist method, focused on “strategic orientation”, but the basic line is in continuity with much of what other groups like Workers Power (also a “left” split from a reformist current, coincidentally) argued around Yugoslavia or even Bolivia.

In Jan Norden’s Yugoslavia, East Europe and the Fourth International: The Evolution of Pabloist Liquidationism these arguments were dealt with in depth, and it is worth quoting extensively from that document as it applies to this case:

A main reason for their neutralist stance on the 1951-53 fight is to deny the revolutionary political continuity of Trotskyism represented by the Spartacist tendency. If the Fourth International had already “degenerated” (WP) over Yugoslavia, or if this was the starting point for the FI’s “complete abandonment of Trotskyism” (CSL), they assert, then the fight against Pablo’s liquidationism in the ’50s did not defend Trotskyism. Hence the RT’s fight in the American SWP against the party’s Pabloist adaptation to Fidel Castro was of no particular consequence. What this disavowal of the importance of the 1953 split reveals is the utter lack of seriousness of these dilettantes, for whom the destruction of the Fourth International as the centralized world party of socialist revolution means nothing. Most of these self-styled “theoreticians” fancy themselves as the first Trotskyists since Trotsky (or, in the case of the RSL, the first Trotskyists ever). At least the CSL had the “consistency” to call for a “Fifth International.

Typically, these groups explain the demise of the Fourth International by a failure of analysis and creative thought, rather than seeing that there was a programmatic fight, and they offer a recipe reflecting their particular peculiar origins.^[72]

The degeneration of the Fourth International, like that of the second and third, can only be found and determined in the course of an actual fundamental betrayal of the working class:

Does this mean that already by the end of the war the Fourth International had “degenerated”? At the same time, 18 leaders of the American SWP and the Minneapolis Teamsters were jailed by Roosevelt for their opposition to the imperialist war. And the very same wing of the French Trotskyists that capitulated to the bourgeois-nationalist Resistance leadership also carried out the heroic internationalist underground work that produced the Arbeiter und Soldat newspaper which circulated clandestinely in German Wehrmacht units in France. Moreover, at the end of the war there was a political reckoning, in which the Fourth International, in founding a fused organization, the Parti Communiste Internationaliste, criticized the weaknesses of both the POI and CCI.

Or let us go back further in history: the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in 1922 passed the famous “Theses on the Eastern Question” containing the call for an “anti-imperialist united front.” These theses were revisionist, laying the basis for popular-front politics in the colonial and backward capitalist countries. This followed on the Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East in 1920, which praised Kemal Pasha (Atatürk), at a time when he was repressing the Turkish Communists, and called for a “jihad” (Islamic holy war) against imperialism—also revisionist. The 1922 theses were a foretaste of advancing bureaucratic conservatism in the Comintern. And it was no abstract question: this was the theoretical basis that Stalin used to justify ordering the Chinese Communist Party to join and stay in the bourgeois-nationalist Kuomintang. That led of course to the Shanghai massacre of 1927.

So...at what point do you say that the Comintern and the Bolshevik Party degenerated? In 1922, or even in 1920, when there were revisionist responses on key questions? Or perhaps only in December 1924, when Stalin first formulated his revisionist “theory” of “socialism in one country”? No, it was in 1923-24, when there was a fight, and the Stalinist-led bureaucracy usurped power, defeating the Bolshevik internationalists. Likewise, when do you declare the Third International dead for the revolution and call for a new International? Trotsky insisted that only great events could decide such matters, and continued to fight as an expelled faction of the Comintern until 1933, when the CI let Hitler march unopposed to power (and then approved this criminal policy). Moreover, in the case of the Fourth International, it is not just the question of a date. The FI was destroyed as a world party, but it did not betray the revolutionary proletariat; and its leading section, the SWP led by James P. Cannon, despite its many weaknesses, did not succumb to Pabloist liquidationism until some years later.

Serious communists do not write off their international party until it has shown in deeds that it is dead for the revolution, that it has betrayed the cause of the proletariat and gone over to the side of the bourgeoisie. Lenin continued to fight within the framework of the Second International until the German Social Democrats’ vote for the Kaiser’s war credits on 4 August 1914.^[73]

The second line of attack by Albamonte and Maiello against the Fourth International will step away from this pure emphasis on “strategic orientation” and bring the focus to the capitulation of the latter reunified Fourth International around Cuba. Here though as they step into the territory of real betrayals they find it necessary to totally disappear the struggle of the Revolutionary Tendency and the International Spartacist Tendency against Pabloite revisionism.

Among those who stayed out of that reunification the “normativist” positions prevailed. This was the case for the current led by Pierre Lambert, who combined with a prolonged theoretical-political absentionism over the subject. The Socialist Labour League of Gerry Healy, even if correct in its arguments around the absence of soviet organizations and the petty-bourgeois character of the leadership, reached the conclusion that Cuba was a capitalist state with a bonapartist government.^[74]

In a footnote they further condemn Healy’s current for its lack of participation in the October 1968 demonstration against the Vietnam War (a somewhat odd choice among the rich buffet of options available for denouncing Healy…) , and they condemn the Lambertists for their failure to participate actively on the barricades in May of 68.

Readers even vaguely familiar with the history of the US SWP will notice that something quite significant has been skipped over here: the Revolutionary Tendency within the SWP which opposed the reunification with Mandel’s Pabloite international and which clearly defined Cuba as a deformed workers state before any other current.^[75] This Revolutionary Tendency gave birth to the International Spartacist Tendency; whose latter day articles the authors have actually cited on two previous occasions in the text. What’s more, as far back at 2012 they polemicized against the latter day ICL’s total rejection of the Workers Government slogan.^[76] The authors have time in the (600 page!) book to take up polemics with individual bloggers and academic theoreticians. Yet at this crucial moment in the history of the Fourth International, one on which they are basing their analysis of its failure and degeneration, they don’t have any time to dedicate even a single line to the Revolutionary Tendency and the International Spartacist Tendency. This is not an exclusion born of ignorance: we are before a deliberate, purposeful airbrushing out of a significant tendency in world trotskyism. The tendency which maintained the lines of revolutionary continuity in this period of disorientation and collapse. 

Yet it is a tendency whose historical existence presents a comprehensive threat to the entire structure of Albamonte and Maiello’s account of the Fourth International. For them it is essential to effectively condemn all sides of post-war Trotskyism, playing down Cannon’s struggle against Pabloism and ignoring the revolutionary tendencies which carried this forward against the reunification. This is because as repentant disciples of Nahuel Moreno, they ultimately have to provide an excuse for their origin in Moreno’s deeply unprincipled and opportunist internationale.

Albamonte and Maiello are not academics flirting with a study of Trotskyism, we cannot possibly assume ignorance on this issue, only deliberate obfuscation. A politically honest approach would develop and explain a critique of the Revolutionary Tendency and the International Spartacist Tendency. We are dealing with the degeneration of the Fourth International: a very serious subject for anyone seeking to reconstruct it. Yet the authors have nothing to say here. And the reasoning one can infer is quite transparent: they would prefer their cadre and members have no idea that such a tendency ever existed. To acknowledge its existence, to develop a serious political critique of it, would expose their own membership to its political arguments.

Having skipped this important point, they go on to state that “The reunification on the correct base of the defense of the Cuban Revolution and the new Workers State however, by not underlining the deformed character of this state and raising a program of political revolution, substituted for this a (critical) political support like that which the International Secretariat had adopted for China after the war.”^[77]

The “Test” which Albamonte and Maiello place centrally here, around Cuba, is one that the iST passed with flying colors before any other. While Moreno was flirting with guerilla warfare, the predecessors of the iST had a clear and consistent political program on Cuba – and were denouncing the SWPs march towards reformism and abandonment of Trotskyism.

After dwelling on the final degeneration of the SWP under Jack Barnes, Albamonte and Maiello declare that “In this way, all these referenced currents of the IV international were struck through with those two tendencies, normativism and adaptation to the bureaucracy, which Trotsky had fought against around the USSR.”^[78]

Their final “proof” of the collective bankruptcy of every other Trotskyist tendency? Poland. This subject deserves an extensive treatment, but first we must pass through the “strategic orientation” which frames the FT’s entire interpretation of the post war period: The “Pact of Yalta”.

“Pact of Yalta”

What Albamonte and Maiello see as fundamental to understanding the post-war period, the “strategic orientation” which neither side of the split held is explained by them with the following:

None of the currents defined that they found themselves in a US world order “cogoverned” with the stalinist bureaucracy to impede the revolution.^[79]

This concept of the post-war order is nothing new, it’s a simple rehash of Pierre Lambert’s “Holy Alliance between stalinism and imperialism", which is likely the inspiration for Nahuel Moreno’s formulation on the subject in his Actualización del Programa de Transición:

In this war not only has the united counter-revolutionary capitalist and imperialist front united, but there has been established a counter-revolutionary united front between imperialism and the Kremlin bureaucracy. This is on the basis of peaceful co-existence, sealed at Yalta, Potsdam and the new world order…^[80]

Albamonte and Maiello plagiarize this concept from their mentor without feeling any need to cite it. Yes, the Stalinist bureaucracy did agree to a division of influence at Yalta, much as they had previously divided up Poland and the Baltic states as part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact with Nazi Germany. In some cases the post-war reality escaped this division: Yugoslavia’s independent revolution under Tito for example. In Greece it was buried bloodily, and in Italy more or less peacefully (thanks to Gramsci’s hard work making the PCI a totally subordinate tool of Moscow foreign policy). It would be hard to argue that this was somehow qualitative transformation compared toStalinism’s previous work to bury the Spanish revolution.

However this does not constitute anything like a “co-government”, or a “counter-revolutionary united front”. Tensions and conflicts were already coming to a head around, for example, the fate of Poland. Operation Unthinkable, a drive to the east by the allies, was drawn out under Churchill's orders to ensure a “square deal for Poland”, though abandoned as politically and militarily impossible.

Maiello and Albamonte partially acknowledge this when they move into discussing the US strategy of “Containment” but they attempt to weld every significant conflict back to the “Order of Yalta”. The Korean war becomes a “redefinition” within the “limits of Yalta”. 

Perhaps the strangest and most artificial attempt emerges around the Cuban revolution.

The expropriation of the capitalists and the constitution of a new Workers State in Cuba was an assault on the strategy of “peaceful co-existence” by the Kremlin. In the face of this the missiles had a dual function for the USSR: on the one hand supporting an ally, on the other, controlling it to assimilate it into the order of Yalta…

So it is that as soon as the new status quo that the triumph of the Cuban Revolution implied for imperialism was accepted and the stalinization of the island’s regime was initiated in accord with the USSR, immediately “peaceful coexistence” imposed itself on the terrain of the class struggle.^[81]

This is a puzzling formulation, the Cuban missile crisis was in 1962. Yet Cuba in its own way hardly adapted fully to “peaceful co-existence” at this point. Castro’s “adventures” were often a sore point for relations with the Kremlin. Perhaps Albamonte and Maiello have forgotten, but there was a bit of a fad around guerilla warfare which took over most of Latin America and which they dedicate most of a chapter to discuss. Ultimately a disaster for the left but it is absurd to propose that Castro’s Cuba, which helped arm and train the PRT-ERP, did so as part of a cunning plan to help maintain the “Order of Yalta”. Castro’s foreign policy wavered between supporting guerilla adventures and left-nationalist bourgeois allies, often even supporting both at the same time.

As for the missiles, Kennedy and US Imperialists obviously didn’t see the same thing in them as Albamonte and Maiello do – they were ready to plunge the world into a nuclear holocaust to get them off Cuba.

The Soviet strategy of “peaceful co-existence” was unquestionably a betrayal of the global working class. However this peaceful co-existence was an illusion of the bureaucracy which never blunted the US drive for capitalist restoration. 

The foundation of this “cogovernment” account lies in another fundamental, Morenoite mythology of Soviet exploitation of the “captive nations”. They understand the uprisings in Berlin and Hungary in the 50’s, as well as much of the subsequent workers uprisings, from a perspective less of proletarian political revolution and more of an uprising primarily against national oppression and resource “extraction”:

These contradictions in the Cold War were expressed in this stage with the advance of Stalinism in the national oppression of the countries of Eastern Europe, with the objective of gaining resources needed to ward off the internal contradictions of the USSR. To maintain this scheme the active counter-revolutionary intervention of the Red Army was needed, which simultanouesly demoralized the workers movement in the capitalist states.

These elements of national oppression maintained with counter-revolutionary methods are inseparable from the economic development of the USSR. The same which awakened such hopes in those who, like Deutscher, placed their expectations in the reformist regeneration of the bureaucracy. It was the geopolitical base for the bureaucracy to prioritize “peaceful coexistence” over the new development of international class struggle.^[82]

There is no attempt to justify the sweeping claims around the economic exploitation of the deformed workers states being what propped up the Soviet economy. The opposite is true, supporting militarily and economically the various Stalinist puppet regimes generally cost the Soviet Union economically. Hungary and Czechoslovakia, then later Poland, had some of the best standards of living in the Soviet world, as the bureaucracy sought to essentially buy off the uprisings. Gorbachev's withdrawal was in no small part motivated by wanting to stop paying the costs of maintaining those regimes – his withdrawal from Germany, Eastern Europe and Afghanistan was an anti-internationalist betrayal.

The origin for this theology is of course not to be found in any serious study of these states, the relation with the USSR or economic data. Its origin is the holy creed passed down from Nahuel Moreno in which national oppression took precedence over the class line to such an extent that he called for the expansion of Khomeini’s “Islamic Revolution” into the heartlands of the USSR. A politics in which, in sharp distinction to the line laid out by Trotsky on the Finnish Events, openly counter-revolutionary struggles for “national independence” like that of the CIA backed Taliban were made into the vanguard of the world revolution.

Albamonte and Maiello retreat from the worst examples of this, here for example is their revised take on Afghanistan:

At the end of 1979, the relation of forces was firmly in favor of the counter-revolution. The bureaucracy of the USSR felt the consequences of this change in the relation of forces and interpreted it as a retreat in its geopolitical influence. Its response was the invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, which only accelerated the decadence of the USSR.^[83]

An improvement over Moreno’s perspective that it was a “counter-revolutionary” intervention of the bureaucracy to stop the spread of the “Iranian Revolution towards the interior of the Soviet Union”. Yet as with the rest of their criticism and distancing from Moreno, they merely remove themselves from the most obviously absurd, plainly revisionist positions of Moreno so that they can better reconstruct the political core of Morenoism. In this case the myth of a Soviet Union which economically exploited the rest of the workers states as if they were colonies. We will see just how dangerous this conception is when we look at the real positions the PTS held in the face of the fall of the USSR.

After a brief stop off on the period of “Detente” as a "reaffirmation of the counter-revolutionary agreement between the Kremlin and the White House” they arrive at what for them was the key turning point of history:

However, there was still one last opportunity to stop the advance of the counter-revolution: the political revolution in Poland, which began a wave of strike in 1980 and was centered around the shipyards of Gdansk. In the heat of this process the union Solidarnosc grew to have 10 million members. Around Solidarity important elements of democracy direct developed, although it was heavily influenced by the Catholic Church which represented the procapitalist wing of the process. The possibility of separating the anti-burocratic banners from the restorationist ones was planted as a way to develop a revolutionary course of class independence. But at this moment there was no revolutionary leadership able to struggle for this perspective and the process was defeated by the dictatorship of Jaruzelski.^[84]

Poland

In Poland we come full circle with a whole series of arguments by Albamonte and Maiello. The international analysis we quote above connects with their balance on the final degeneration of world trotskyism in the same place.

Decades after the Cuban Revolution, in the face of the Polish Revolution of 1980–81, none of the major currents of Trotskyism were then capable of maintaining that logic and with it, the unity of the program of the political revolution. The centre was in how the bureaucracy should be defeated, if using the slogan “all power to Solidarity” and arming the union as Moreno planted, or if Soviets should surge from outside Solidarity as Lambert maintained. However, none of them raised together with this as an axis the need to, for example, revise the plan of benefits for producers and consumers, as well as all those demands which could respond to the needs of the masses and help maintain the defense of the conquests so as to distinguish themselves from the restorationist currents of Solidarity. The United Secretariat, unlike the other currents, maintained a politics of self-management of nationalized industries, but which was disconnected from the defense of planning and the monopoly on external commerce and so compatible with a course towards capitalist restoration.

In this form, in the second half of the Twentieth century, the program of political revolution was dissolved, first with critical support to Castroism and after with generalized anti-stalinism. The fact that they did not present an alternative and soon could not understand the cause of the defeat had implications which went beyond the particular processes, since it was a complete disarmament in the face of the process of capitalist restoration which exploded at the end of the 1980s.^[85]

What did revolutionary trotskyists say and do in the face of the uprising of Polish workers? In 1980 the Spartacist League in ‘A Workers Poland Yes! The Pope’s Poland No!’ clearly outlined the possibilities both for proletarian political revolution under a revolutionary leadership, and the growing threat of a restorationist leadership:

Poland in the late '70s was locked in a deepening crisis heading toward explosion. An explosion which could bring either proletarian political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy or capitalist counterrevolution led by Pope Wojtyla’s church.^[86]

To understand the context of the movement one must begin by understanding the real role that Poland played at this moment. Far from the caricature of a Soviet Union extracting resources and value from it’s “Captive Nations”, Poland was a key link in the imperialist exploitation of the Soviet Union via finance capital:

In 1978 over 50 percent of Poland's hard currency earnings were absorbed by debt service, in 1979 over 80 percent and today over 90 percent. Poland has avoided becoming the world's biggest bankrupt only by agreeing to austerity programs imposed by its imperialist creditors. At the same time, the Russian leadership, fearing a popular explosion if the Polish masses are pushed too hard, is paying a good part of Warsaw's foreign debt. In one sense Poland has become the intermediary through which Western finance capital sucks surplus out of the Soviet workers and peasants (whose living standards are substantially lower than those of the Poles).^[87]

Poland was generally speaking a weak link among the various deformed workers states – a strong catholic church, a significant peasantry which had never been collectivized and strong nationalist feeling that was often tied to the Catholic Church. Far from the completely unfounded presentation of an alliance between the bureaucracy and Washington, Reagan and his team were deeply focused on exploiting the events in Poland however best they could in order to drive towards capitalist restoration in the USSR. Despite this however as late as April of 1981 the Spartacists still called for an effort to split Solidarnosc:

We have therefore insisted that the key strategic task for a Trotskyist vanguard in Poland was to split the mass of workers from reactionary forces. This means fighting for a series of programmatic demands including strict separation of church and state, defense of collectivized property, defense of the Soviet bloc degenerated/deformed workers states against imperialism. A Trotskyist vanguard would seek to polarize the workers movement, attracting those who seek a genuinely socialist solution and are hostile to the Vatican and Western capitalism.^[88]

These were an absolute requisite for a working class leadership to crystallize around a program that would drive towards proletarian political revolution rather than capitalist restoration. Only a program based on the defense of the social gains of the workers states could have possibly convinced Soviet Soldiers to side with Polish workers and drove toward proletarian political revolution in the rest of the Eastern Bloc nations.

In the first Congress of Solidarnosc In October 1981 at Gdansk however, the movement clearly and unequivocally embraced a program calling for capitalist restoration:

It is necessary to sweep away the bureaucratic barriers which make it impossible for the market to operate. The central organs of economic administration should not limit enterprise activity or prescribe supplies and buyers for its output. Enterprises shall be able to operate freely on the internal market, except in fields where a licence is compulsory. International trade must be accessible to all enterprises. The union appreciates the importance of exports, which are of value to the country and to the workers. Consumers' associations and anti-monopoly legislation should ensure that enterprises do not carve out a privileged place in the market. A special law must be introduced to protect consumers' rights. The relationship between supply and demand must determine price levels….

In our view, the government should investigate the conditions under which Poland might join the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and present them to the public. At the same time, we should do everything possible to maximize output by using the country's existing resources.^[89]

A movement calling for joining the IMF and prioritizing above all the market as the key to economic development, is this a program for proletarian political revolution? Albamonte and Maiello don’t bother to discuss in detail the development of Solidarnosc because they do not want to break too hard from Moreno’s (and Albamonte’s) cheerleading of its restorationist tendencies. Reagan and the entire West could wholeheartedly endorse this kind of political program for Poland, and it’s what they did.

Trotskyists defend political rights and workers' democracy for all tendencies which defend the base of the workers state. We do not defend the political rights of openly restorationist tendencies, and Solidarnosc with the Gdansk program had openly embraced this before the Soviet intervention and “the dictatorship of Jaruzelski”. By citing the Soviet intervention and Jaruzelski the FT attempt to perform an act of political acrobatics in which the good Solidarnosc was destroyed by the bureaucratic-imperialist alliance, which led to the “bad Solidarnosc” of capitalist restoration to emerge afterwards. They cite no historical evidence to support this assertion. The capitalist counter-revolution which Solidarnosc led in Poland and which brought Lech Walesa to power was wholly in line with the program they adopted in 1981 embracing the IMF and the Market.

In the face of this mass movement embracing capitalist restoration, the place of Trotskyists was on the other side defending the base of the workers state against capitalist counter-revolution. The crackdown of 1981 was essentially a defensive act of the leadership in its own bureaucratic way against capitalist counter-revolution – It was the difference between the Eastern Bloc collapsing at the end of the decade rather than at the beginning.

The Fall of the Workers States

What came soon after 1981 was not a “Second Cold War” but rather the strategic realization by imperialism – through the neoliberal offensive – of the ample victory in the class struggle which it had achieved in the previous decade. The bureaucracy, as a lesser partner, took advantage of the situation to appropriate the means of production as part of processes of capitalist restoration.^[90]

The Soviet Union did not fall in 1981 – though if the FT had their way with Solidarnosc it would have. If Trotsky characterized part of the failure of the German Revolution as lying in “revolutionary fatalism”, the attitude of Albamonte and Maiello on the final defeat of the USSR could only be characterized as counter-revolutionary fatalism. A fatalism that has been enshrined as a retroactive principle in order to preserve the prestige of the FT’s international leadership. Fatalism carried to the level of absurdity when they propose that there could be no revolutionary intervention into the process which brought about the fall of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc nations.

The reason for this fatalism is that the PTS emerged in 1988. Many of the key authors in the early days of Avanzada Socialista – their first newspaper – Emilio Albamonte, Paula Bach, Juan Chingo, Christian Castillo – continue to be the major theoretical voices of the FT. In the face of the collapse of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc nations they were spectacularly, demonstrably wrong. Rather than own their mistakes, analyze their causes and seek to rectify this for the future they prefer to conclude that none of it matters, the outcome of the decisive struggle to defend the existence of the Soviet Workers State was already decided beforehand.

It is the duty of revolutionists to defend every conquest of the working class even though it may be distorted by the pressure of hostile forces. Those who cannot defend old positions will never conquer new ones. - Leon Trotsky, Balance Sheet of the Finnish Events

Those who cannot defend old positions will never conquer new ones. Let’s find out what Albamonte and his disciples were doing when capitalist counter-revolution was storming the gates. Let’s compare it to the place that genuine revolutionary trotskyists took up defending the old positions till the last moment.

The process unfolding in the USSR and Warsaw Pact countries was, at least superficially, at the very heart of the PTS split from the MAS. In their first public document they complained that “The party hasn’t done anything around the entrance of Yankee troops in Central America, nor around the political revolution that has started in the USSR with the strike of Armenian workers, nor around the great struggle of the Polish workers.”^[91]

The Political Revolution which began with the strike of Armenian workers? The PTS consistently emphasizes their supposed break with Morenoism and cynically criticizes the Morenoite embrace of “democratic counter-revolution”. What they are so eager to pass over however is their wholehearted embrace of nationalist counter-revolution. So much so that the entire framework with which they understood the unfolding fall of the USSR was one in which “proletarian political revolution” was made identical with whichever side of developing fratricidal conflicts the PTS leadership decided was progressive.

The struggle for the national rights of the peoples of the USSR is inseparable from the struggle to defeat the bureaucracy. For years there have been people struggle like the Tartars of Crimea –  who lost their territory – or the Baltic nations, who demand more autonomy. But since the beginning of the year the world’s attention has been capture by the struggle of the Armenian people who demand the reunification of the region of Nogorn-Karabaj. Their fight marks the highest point of the rising struggles that the USSR is living through.^[92]

Here the Armenians are the good progressive nation, and their national struggle against the bureaucracy was the high point of the political revolution. This conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh with the later fall of the USSR turned towards open warfare and involved the forced expulsion of over a million civilians across both sides, as well as tens of thousands of casualties. The recent renewal of that same war, with new waves of expulsions and ethnic cleansing, is a testament to how twisted this nationalist driven interpretation of events in the USSR was.

This was not limited to small, oppressed nations but was also expanded in large part to their initial analysis of the situation in Germany. In the first issue of Cuadernos de Avanzada Socialista, they briefly polemicized against the LIT around Germany warning of the possibility of imperialist unification, but proposing the following:

For a Germany of the workers and people, free from the invading troops of NATO and the Warsaw Pact! This would be a decisive step towards the United Soviet States of Europe. Connected to this should be demands designed to develop autonomous organizations of the working class in Germany which have been expressed in an embryonic form through Citizens committees and factory committees. Only organizations of this type together with the development of worker militias under their control can guarantee real democracy, expel foreign troops, break with the Warsaw Pact and NATO and other political agreements and impose a truly sovereign Constituent Assembly.^[93]

Warsaw Pact and NATO troops out of Germany! One supposes then that the West German army should have crossed the Rhine for a Parisian vacation while the East German army did a tour through Poland!  A “Constituent Assembly” which could only serve to crown a democratic counter-revolution. All framed within a context where the Kremlin Bureaucracy is considered the central culprit of the “national oppression” of Germany.

The broad theoretical perspective which will underlie their intervention is highlighted in a document the PTS has of course never bothered to make available, but which can be dug up in the archives: Emilio Albamonte’s April 1990 Tesis sobre la Revolucion Politica.

They presented these theses as ones arguing against those who saw the advance of imperialism and counter-revolution in the processes then unfolding in the workers' states. They declare instead:

In the six chapters in which we have divided these thesis we will attempt to demonstrate how incorrect this affirmation is in relation to the situation of imperialism, which is currently in crisis, and the workers movement, which far from suffering defeat after defeat (like the period from 1923 to 1943) is on the offensive. Definitively the process which we are living through is one of political revolution and not capitalist counter-revolution.^[94]

The position of the PTS and FT, far from a serious critique of the Morenoite embrace of democratic counter-revolution, proclaimed it to be an unfolding proletarian political revolution! It is actually a WORSE formulation, at least the LIT had the honesty to openly embrace the democratic counter-revolution rather than disguise it as a proletarian political revolution.

The foundation of this analysis is of course the “New world order of Yalta and Potsdam”,^[95] the very same “Order of Yalta” which they continue to utilize today.

Here they went so far as to state that “The support of the Kremlin allowed imperialism to achieve the economic boom of the last 20 years.”^[96] As part of this order, the post-war “stability” of Stalinism was in fact built off “the sacking of the countries of Eastern Europe”, repeating again the anti-communist myth of the “captive”, exploited nations.

Following Albamonte, in response to the economic crisis the workers states integrated themselves more deeply into the imperialist economic chains, as they took on more debt: “This made them into weak links of the world imperialist economy, which is the foundation of the current events.”^[98] Rather than seeing this as an effort by imperialism to undermine and destroy them, the workers states are in effect merged with the imperialist world and for Albamonte any strike against them was a strike against imperialism.

The fall of the Berlin Wall is the graphic demonstration of the beginning of the European revolution, which combined political revolution in the East with social revolution in the West. This unity of political revolution and social revolution has its neurological center in Germany.^[99]

The launch of a proletarian political revolution would of course require a corresponding drive west, but Albamonte saw in the unfolding democratic counter-revolution the proletarian political revolution which it was the responsibility of Trotskyists to build. A proletarian political revolution which could only be built from the base of defending the foundations of the workers' states rather than rallying behind any reactionary force which threw itself against the bureaucracy.

Yet for the FT, not only was the bureaucracy the main ally of imperialism, it was worse than imperialism: “the masses are sending flying into the air the principal counter-revolutionary apparatus in the world: the stalinist bureaucracy.”^[100] The “principal counter-revolutionary apparatus” was not apparently the CIA or the Pentagon, but the stalinist bureaucracy! Indeed for the FT the loss of the “stalinist apparatus” was a grave blow for imperialism:

For imperialism the crisis of the world stalinist apparatus was the loss of its most efficient agent within the workers movement, especially when the working class started its revolutionary mobilization.^[101]

In a helpful section on page 10, ‘What is the Bureaucracy’, Albamonte revisits the idea that the bureaucracy is transmitting the interests of imperialism, and then declares:

These elements that we describe make it unthinkable to characterize, as some Trotskyist sectors have wrongly done, that the bureaucracy can have a dual character, which is to say that it can play a revolutionary role in some situations….

2. In the first place, the only possibility to extend the conquests achieved with the expropriation of imperialism and the planning of production, is the overthrow in a revolutionary form of the bureaucracy to convert these into bastions of the world revolution.

3. The bureaucracy is counter-revolutionary to the marrow. It is incapable of playing a revolutionary role and on the contrary, “it has converted itself into a transmission link of imperialist politics".^[102]

Beyond this they also assign the analysis of a “dual character” of the bureaucracy to Michel Pablo – rather than its real origin, which is of course with Trotsky. It is a useful summary by Albamonte, clearly declaring their revisionist view that the bureaucracy was “counter-revolutionary to the marrow” and that it has no dual character. The argument around the dual character of the Soviet Bureaucracy was clear enough from Trotsky:

The bureaucracy is not a ruling class. But the further development of the bureaucratic regime can lead to the inception of a new ruling class: not organically, through degeneration, but through counterrevolution. We call the Stalinist apparatus centrist precisely because it fulfills a dual role; today, when there is no longer a Marxist leadership, and none forthcoming as yet, it defends the proletarian dictatorship with its own methods; but these methods are such as facilitate the victory of the enemy tomorrow. Whoever fails to understand this dual role of Stalinism in the USSR has understood nothing.^[103]

Yet the entire theoretical structure of the “Order of Yalta”, championed by Moreno and carried forward by Albamonte, was essentially to propose that a “cogovernment” fundamentally changed the Trotskyist analysis of the bureaucracy. However any serious analysis of the actual processes in Berlin 1953, Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968 show that again, even under this “Order of Yalta”, under the pressure of proletarian political revolution the bureaucracy split.

Albamonte’s gloating celebration of the unfolding collapse is then summarized under the title Who Cries for the Crisis of Stalinism?:

The workers vanguard should breath relaxed, since what is falling is the apparatus that has betrayed the struggle of the workers and has led them to defeat in benefit of its own interests. Today there is a more favorable situation for the development of revolutionary struggle and for the construction of revolutionary parties to defeat imperialism at the world level. Today the masses are in better conditions since the number 1 partner of imperialism is falling. Today there are better conditions here, in Argentina and in the world, to construct sections of the Fourth International.^[104]

While they attempt to distance themselves from the LIT, marking out the dangers of a “democratic counter-revolution”, their final destination is largely the same.

The central objective of the Trotskyist program for the bureaucratized Workers States is the revolutionary overthrow of the bureaucracy.^[105]

Contrast that line with Trotsky’s declaration in The USSR in War:

We must not lose sight for a single moment of the fact that the question of overthrowing the Soviet bureaucracy is for us subordinate to the question of preserving state property in the means of production of the USSR: that the question of preserving state property in the means of production in the USSR is subordinate for us to the question of the world proletarian revolution.^[106]

In Albamonte’s analysis, everything was subordinate to overthrowing the bureaucracy. For genuine Trotskyists it was the responsibility of revolutionaries to build towards a real proletarian political revolution which would split the bureaucracy and the military and open the road to a revolutionary alternative. The FT instead gleefully proclaimed any anti-bureaucratic movement: from Armenian and Lithuanian nationalists to the “masses” behind Yeltsin as the political revolution.

We will return shortly to the most nefarious and absurd ends which the FT’s interpretation of the fall took them to. First however we will review and contrast the work of revolutionary Trotskyists in the face of the collapse of the East European Workers States.

Trotskyism on the Last Barricades

Every political tendency that waves its hand hopelessly at the Soviet Union, under the pretext of its “non-proletarian” character, runs the risk of becoming the passive instrument of imperialism. And from our standpoint, of course, the tragic possibility is not excluded that the first workers’ state, weakened by its bureaucracy, will fall under the joint blows of its internal and external enemies. But in the event of this worst possible variant, a tremendous significance for the subsequent course of the revolutionary struggle will be borne by the question: where are those guilty for the catastrophe? Not the slightest taint of guilt must fall upon the revolutionary internationalists. In the hour of mortal danger, they must remain on the last barricade.^[107]

In the face of the political crisis unfolding in Eastern Europe, the then revolutionary international Spartacist Tendency immediately recognized the seriousness of the situation and mobilized all of their very modest resources to the end of fighting for workers political revolution. While the PTS largely used the crisis as a chance to score points and compete against the MAS in Argentina, something like a third of all members of the iST passed through East Germany, with the rest contributing significant resources towards the effort.

East Germany was key to the international conjuncture. It had no real equivalent to Perestroika and it was the major industrial and military power of the Warsaw Pact states. Whereas the FT characterized it as a “Doubly Deformed Workers State”^[108] when they tried to explain the triumph of capitalist reunification, in fact Germany BECAUSE it was divided from the West had to rely on justifying its existence by drawing the class line. The bureaucracy could not wrap itself in a nationalist mythology and instead had to base themselves on the struggle against fascism and for socialism. Germans were able to choose their side in the aftermath of the second world war and when the Berlin wall itself came down the opening effectively self-selected for those who wanted to defend the economic base of the workers state. This combined with the overwhelming industrial power and size of the East German working class made it the key battleground for the fight for proletarian political revolution.

In October 1989 the Stalinist ruling bureaucracy, isolated by the triumph of Solidarity in Poland and under pressure from a series of local protests, entered a period of paralysis and crisis which continued until its end. When in November the Berlin Wall came down the iST crossed over and set to work fighting for genuine proletarian political revolution. A daily newsletter was established with print runs of 10,000 on weekdays and 50,000 on the weekends which was widely distributed and the focal point of bringing revolutionary trotskyism to the East German workers and soldiers. The Spartacists actually organized workers and soldier councils, including even among elite soldiers detachments:

Late in 1989 pockets of soldiers throughout the country, initially under the guidance and leadership of ICL, began to form councils suitable for wielding dual power. One of them in the north of the DDR was part of the elite Felix Dzerzhinksy Guards Regiment, the armed forces tasked with guarding SED personnel and infrastructure. In a December issue of ARPREKORR, a member of the council revealed that it existed “to put soldiers rights into effect, against revanchist statements on the part of superiors.” And its members were “absolutely for the socialist gains'' and wanted to ensure that “one person by himself” would never again exercise “all the power.” In other words, the councils were mobilizing in incipiently revolutionary ways geared toward re-energizing a socialist system through the rule of the workers themselves. All that was missing was a political leadership capable of organizing and leading such councils on a wide scale.^[109]

In response to the fascist defacement of the Treptow Monument in late December, the Spartacists called for a united front action to repudiate this and succeeded in forcing the SED to join: the result was historic, 250,000 German Workers listening to a Trotskyist speaker argue for political revolution and denounce the inability of the stalinist SED to fight against capitalist counter-revolution. Yet this demonstration, which sparked deep concern among the counter-revolutionary forces in both the west and east, is entirely absent from PTS documents and newspaper coverage from the period. Of course, it flew in the face of their anti-communist “Order of Yalta” theory which they maintain to this day. It was the most significant demonstration against capitalist counter-revolution in the whole period and it was only possible because the Spartacists maintained the Trotskyist program and analysis of the dual character of the Stalinist bureaucracy and of the need to fight for the defense of the gains of the workers' states.

Ultimately the Spartacists did not have sufficient forces to reverse the growing drive for capitalist counter-revolution, driven in the east not by the Stalinist bureaucracy but by the imperialist backed SPD and crowned by Kohl’s electoral victory. Yet even this significant reversal did not yet seal the fate of the workers states – there was still the possibility of fighting for proletarian political revolution in the USSR.

The Spartacist intervention in the USSR began in the DDR among the Soviet troops who the PTS so desperately wanted to kick out of Germany:

During the 1989-90 upheaval in the DDR, as part of the ICL's struggle "to effect a proletarian political revolution in East Germany, we issued Russian-language propaganda addressed to and widely disseminated among Soviet troops stationed there, and later spoke to assemblies of· Soviet officers and soldiers. In 1991; on the anniversary of the Red Army's victory over Nazi Germany, the Spartakist Workers Party of Germany and·the Spartakusowska Grupa Polski held a joint forum for several hundred Soviet military personnel at an air base outside Berlin.^[110]

It was possible to intervene, build soldiers councils and even recruit low level officers (impossible under the Morenoite conception of the character of the bureaucracy) to Trotskyist politics. Intervention in the Soviet Union was even more difficult than in Germany, but revolutionary Trotskyists gave everything they could to intervene in this struggle, arguing before Soviet workers AND soldiers the need for the formation of genuine soviets to fight capitalist counter-revolution and struggle for international socialist revolution. Addressing a Moscow Workers Conference in July, the ICL speaker warned:

Our comrades of the German and Polish sections of the International Communist League ask us to pass along to you their warning: now is the time to fight in the Soviet Union. Because it is much harder, it is much worse to have to fight the capitalists after they have gained state power –  it is necessary to organize defense against their attacks!^[111]

Trotskyists were not, and could not be indifferent before the question of the Capitalists carrying forward a counter-revolution and gaining state power in the Soviet Union. This question came to a head in August 1991 with the hard-line bureaucracy’s attempted Perestroika Coup and Yeltsin’s restorationist counter-coup.

The ICL Declared that “As the crowd of yuppies, students and assorted Russian nationalists, including fascists and priests, gathered at the start of the coup outside the Russian parliament, Yeltsin's "White House," a call on Moscow workers to clean out this counterrevolutionary rabble was in order.” Yet only the independent action of the Soviet working class was capable of achieving this. When the coup attempt collapsed and Yeltsin launched his counter-offensive the old state apparatus of the Soviet Degenerated Workers State was smashed and Yeltsin began the process of constructing a counter-revolutionary, capitalist state apparatus. The opportunity for proletarian political revolution was posed in August 1991, but it was posed by the challenge of independently sweeping away the counter-revolutionary forces. Unfortunately revolutionary trotskyists did not have the forces and organization in the USSR needed to lead this.

For Albamonte and the FT by contrast however August of 1991 was the beginning of the proletarian political revolution. In the December 1991-March 1992 issue of Estrategia Internacional in an article on “The Paradoxes of the August Revolution” they proclaimed:

In this way the putsch, weak and incapable of containing the accumulating contradictions, ending up making itself into the midwife of revolution…

The overthrow of the Stalinist regime, based in the CCCP, the Red Army and the KGB, constitutes without any doubt a great leap forward for the masses.

The FT criticized Yeltsin as a restorationist bureaucrat, but for them the main enemy capable of restoring capitalism was the “bloody boot of the armed bands of the counter-revolution, like the KGB and the 'Red' Army, who can liquidate the grandiose conquests of October”^[112]

This was the logical outcome of their fervently anti-communist perspective, based around the “Order of Yalta”, that the bureaucracy was the principal counter-revolutionary apparatus in the world. To maintain it in the face of reality, they were then forced to rewrite reality and declare that what was left in Yeltsin’s Russia was a “Decomposing Workers State”. Even as Yeltsin carried out brutal anti-communist purges and began the hard work of arming a bourgeois military state apparatus, the FT cheered on these blows as helping to weaken the main enemy –  the already defeated stalinist bureaucracy.

Whereas Albamonte and the FT were happy to cheer on counter-revolution from abroad and proclaim it to be proletarian political revolution, the struggle for real proletarian political revolution by the ICL made the Spartacists a target. On February 9th, 1992 one of the principal leaders of the ICL’s intervention, Martha Phillips, was murdered in Moscow. Ultimately the defeats in Germany and the Soviet Union played a major demoralizing role which led to the degeneration of the ICL and the expulsions from which the LFI was born.

However, that the battle ended in defeat does not mean, as Albamonte cynically claims to cover his own betrayals, that there was not an opportunity to fight for and win a proletarian political revolution. Albamonte’s cover story is the same as that of the cynical traitors of the working class in the face of every buried revolution: Spain, Greece, Italy, Bolivia, Portugal, Chile, Argentina and many others. If there was nothing to win, the leadership bears no responsibility for defeat.

Revolutionary trotskyists can afford no such self-indulgent illusions. The monumental task of reforging the fourth international as the party of world revolution can only be achieved on a firm programmatic basis and in continuity with those who in “the hour of mortal danger” remained on the “last barricade”. The Bolshevik Revolution could never have been achieved by those who, in the face of the fall of the Paris Commune, gleefully cheered on the process of its destruction. 

The FT’s Long March Through the 90s

Given that the FT has mostly tried to bury their embarrassing history in the 1990’s, it’s worth highlighting some of the reactionary destinations their political perspectives led them. Positions which, in the best traditions of Centrist political organizations, they prefer to pretend never existed rather than critically examine the political foundations which led them to betray the working class.

In the July-September 1992 issue of Estrategia Internacional, Juan Chingo doubled down on the overthrow of the bureaucracy having been a blow against imperialism:

These facts have led important sectors of the left and Trotskist movement to maintain that the fall of Stalinism has increased the margin of manuever for imperialism and that it is better positioned for its counter-revolutionary objectives

Far from this, we maintained at the start of the 90s that the fall of the regimes in Eastern Europe and the ex USSR, facts created by the real or potential action of the mass movements, signified the fall of the counter-revolutionary post-war order designed at the Yalta and Potsdam conferences, and that their fall opens up a crisis for imperialist domination.^[113]

This political perspective led to a manifestly absurd and deeply reactionary position in the unfolding nationalist bloodbath in Yugoslavia.

The politics of imperialism have been the guarantor of a “Pax Serbia”, that is to say a peace based on the military triumph of the oppressors and negotiating with them a regional status quo… Today for imperialism, the most secure path to capitalist restoration is the defeat of the working class and the oppressed nations of the ex-Yugoslavia at the hands of Milosevic.^[114]

Not only was there still a “Decomposing Workers State” in 1993 Yugoslavia, but imperialism was apparently conspiring to leave Yugoslavia in the hands of Milosevic to ensure capitalist restoration! The FT found themselves cheering on first the Slovenian and Croatian uprisings (the latter led, effectively, by Nazi apologists not dissimilar from Ukrainian fans of Stepan Bandera), then seeing Bosnia as the progressive key to the situation and finally settling in Kosovo as the key to the world revolution. In the July-August 1998 Estrategia Internacional Gabriela Liszt declared:

The recent show of force by NATO, with the collective intervention of 13 countries over the borders of Albania and Macedonia, the permanent installation of warship in the Port of Durres show that the imperialism “military threats” are aimed especially against radicalized Albanians and not their genocidal Serbian oppressors.

To achieve independence, the Kosovans need to unite their struggle with that of all the people who suffer from Great Serbian and Great Croatian oppression to tear down the Dayton Accords, kick out Serbian troops and the imperialist troops who are there to support Milosevic.^[115]

The imperialist NATO forces as we all know, went on to launch a brutal bombing campaign against Serbia aimed at bringing it to heel and forcing the ouster of Milosevic as well as his later imprisonment for war crimes. Yet this did not change the FT’s perspective, it merely forced them to reformulate it as another imperialist intervention to avoid the true liberating impact of the Kosovan struggle. Here just as in Armenia in 1988, the national struggle of the people chosen by the FT as progressive and to be championed was fundamentally anti-imperialist and the key to the world situation:

The independence of Kosovo would have meant the destabilization of the Dayton Accords, the redesign of all the borders and would have motivated all oppressed nations, Turkish Kurds, Basques, the Irish and Palestinians. It would have been a phenomenal blow the bureaucratic and restorationist regime of Milsoevich and with this open the possibility for the revolutionary overthrow of the regime at the hands of the Serbian working class rather than NATO bombs, whos triumph allows imperialism to place double chains on the Yugoslav masses. It would have allows a phenomenal blow to the social imperialist government of Europe and favored the struggle of the working class. In synthesis, the right to national self determination was the motor of class struggle for the proletariat and the poor masses of Europe^[116]

Here in 1999 they still called Milosevic a “restorationist bureaucrat”, implying of course that Serbia (all of Yugoslavia even?) was STILL a “Decomposing Workers State”. Indeed for the FT, in May-June of 1998, in an article by Juan Chingo and Christian Castillo they had argued that Russia remained a “Decomposing Workers State”!

Does this mean that restoration has been consummated? Not yet. The social counter-revolution which is underway still has not been able to give a stable form to property, create a true free market of labor and transform the market into the regulator of the business of the bourgeoisie. In the absence of a better definition we have defined the social character of contemporary Russia as a Degenerated Workers State in decomposition^[117]

Obviously having proclaimed the beginning of the overthrow of the Soviet Degenerated Workers State to be the “Political Revolution”, it was quite difficult for them to choose a clear moment to define the capitalist counter-revolution. They continued, also in 1998, to double down on their initial formulations:

But with all its contradictions, these were without a doubt true strikes “from the left” to the plans for a “cold” restoration pushed by the bureaucracy working with imperialism as part of its “neoliberal” offensive. Revolutionary mobilizations which overthrew the party-state regimes based on the Communist Parties, weakening their repressive capacity, provoked the liquidation of the world Stalinist apparatus and with it the fall of the order of Yalta.^[118]

One will struggle in vain, searching through the archives of Estrategia Internacional, to find a clear definition of the point at which the “Workers States in Decomposition” disappeared completely. Nor will there be any serious critical balance of the FT’s own political stances in the face of this process, merely the kind of drawling ruminations of an outside observer like those you can find in Socialist Strategy and Military Art. By the time Matias Maiello joined Albamonte as a key “theoretician” within the FT, they would write criticisms of the LIT around the fall of the USSR with no reference to their own existence in 1988 and positions in the face of the same events.^[119] They retain much of the same essential analysis around the Order of Yalta, Poland and the role of the bureaucracy, and then cynically put forward that essentially nothing could be done, so why interrogate their own previous positions?

It is possible to trace however, that not longer after the close of the process in Yugoslavia and as the capitalist character of Russia became increasingly undeniable the FT began to find the new theoretical cover for their actions: It was in the 2003 issue of Estrategia Internacional that they announced their Gramscian turn with ‘Trotsky and Gramsci, Convergences and Divergences’.^[120]

Indeed while they retain certain elements of it the FT has largely abandoned their peculiar strategic obsession with national struggles. In the conflict around Syria they correctly identified that revolutionaries had no clear side in the unfolding ethnic and religious civil war, other than opposition to US intervention and US imperialism. One suspects this has to do also with the 1998 departure from the PTS of the founders of Democracia Obrera – who would carry on this kind of politics to embrace the organization of guerilla brigades to fight on the side of NATO against Gaddafi in Libya and then together with the Islamists in Syria. The FT feigns amnesia on the first decade of its existence.

Convergences with… Nahuel Moreno

This whole political shift suggests a far deeper continuity with the real methods and approach they learned from Nahuel Moreno than they would ever admit.

Nahuel Moreno afterall did just the same sort of thing: long period of entryism in Peronism, long period of flirtation with Castro’s guerillas, long period of social democratic adaptation, culminating in the formation of the MAS and the latter’s breakup after his death. Often at the theoretical and programmatic level these were in flagrant contradiction with his previous positions. The guiding ideology was always to tail whatever was in vogue in a desperate effort to build his organization. The theoretical elaborations were nothing more than a cynical pseudo-trotskyist cover to justify the latest get rich quick scheme. Then when the reformist MAS finally got “rich”, it all exploded and left the most fragmented political tradition in world Trotskyism.

The FT, in the true spirit of Nahuel Moreno, can be said to have clearly passed through at least two such great stages already. The first from their formation in 1988 to the end of the Yugoslav conflict was marked by their obsession with the national struggles of Armenia, Croatia, Lithuania, Kosovo and others, championed and transformed into the vanguard of a supposed proletarian political revolution. The next great stage, which we are a part of today and of which Socialist Strategy and Military Art is something like the culminating programmatic document, is their Gramscian turn. The political flexibility of Gramsci combined with dashes of Clausewitzian military theory provide a theoretical scaffold which can be used by the leadership to justify anything.

What were those words of Trotsky on how to master tactics and strategy? “The art of tactics and strategy, the art of revolutionary struggle can be mastered only through experience, through criticism and self-criticism.” Where is the self-criticism for the FT’s shameful position in the face of the fall of the USSR? They save their criticism for Moreno, who was already dead while they themselves carried his anti-soviet cheerleading to its logical conclusion.

This demonstrates a deeply unserious approach to politics. Albamonte and Maiello are basing themselves from a dishonest position designed to hide their own complicity with a world-historic defeat for the working class. In 600 pages, they have no time to address their OWN position that what was unfolding was “political revolution and not capitalist counter-revolution”. It is the job of revolutionary trotskyists to expose these past betrayals and their continuity with the same programmatic foundations which the FT revives under a new guise today.

Like with the rest of Moreno’s social democratic and anti-soviet betrayals, the FT has largely used Gramsci to build new theoretical structures to recommit the same crimes as Moreno. On the Russian Question of today, the Chinese Deformed Workers State, the FT has concluded that capitalism was peacefully restored – justified by the same theoreticians who upheld Capitalist Russia being a “Decomposing Workers State” for nearly ten years after Yeltsin’s triumph. So in the face of any great new crisis, driven by internal capitalist counter-revolution or external US imperialism, the FT has set itself up to once more sit on the sidelines and applaud the advance of counter-revolution from abroad.

If the forces of revolutionary trotskyism prove insufficient to intervene decisively in the next great crisis in China or Cuba, Matias Maiello, recoiling before the corpse of the Cuban and Chinese workers states after the FT cheers on their destruction, could perhaps go on to write a new book about the weakness of the old PTS, swap Moreno for Albamonte, and proclaim the generalized bankruptcy of the Trotskyism of the post-soviet period. It would be the best political tribute he could pay to the shifting opportunist politics of Emilio Albamonte and Nahuel Moreno.

Chile, The Popular Front and Moreno’s Method

The element of Morenosim that the FT is most eager to reconstruct under a new guise is a flexible embrace of Popular Front politics. This was the final destination announced by Albamonte and Maiello with their endorsement of the Marcelo Freixo campaign. It is remarkable that in all of Socialist Strategy and Military Art’s world tour of the Twentieth century, they have very little time to address the Chilean experience. This was after all not just a proving ground for the Popular Front in Latin America, but was also a proving ground for how the Left relates to Popular Fronts. The justification they provide for their support of Marcelo Freixo’s campaign, based in the “mass movement” it expressed and the character of the “participative councils”, is based on a campaign that was only the faintest echo of the movement behind Salvador Allende’s presidential campaign and Unidad Popular.

Yet in the book it is ambiguous if they even define Unidad Popular as a Popular Front. They at one point refer to “Popular Frontism in the central countries as an adaptation to the bourgeois regime under the mark of new reformist bases”,^[121] leaving open the possibility that the Popular Front is limited to the “central countries”. Their most explicit reference to Chile is as part of a discussion on the role of the bureaucracy, in which they talk about the popular front but leave it ambiguous as to whether it is the popular front or just the bureaucratic workers parties they are referring to when they talk of “for example in Chile, where the Socialist and Communist parties had a fundamental role in the defeat with the incorporation of Pinochet to the government, tying the hands of the Cordones Industriales in the face of the coup.”^[122]

This ambiguity is further reflected in some of the longer theoretical and historical texts they’ve published on the Chilean experience since. For Example in ‘Que Ocurria cuando la Unidad Popular ganó las elecciones’, they don’t once use the term Popular Front.^[123] Nor do they mention it in an article on ‘A 45 años del golpe militar’^[124] and another on ‘51 años Cordones Industriales’.^[125] A politically significant omission, after all if Allende’s UP was a popular front one needs to engage in impressive mental arithmetic to believe their support for Marcelo Freixo in Rio was not one. One of their most in-depth articles from their Chilean organization does however describe Allende’s government as a Popular Front – whether the Argentine leadership will see another “risk of sectarian degeneration'' here remains to be seen.

They do not dwell on the use of the Popular Front term in this article, however when they discuss Allende’s turn towards disarming workers and cracking down on strikes in 1972 they declare:

The government, debilitated, went forward with a turn to the right with a change to a pre-bonapartist regime that gave ever more power to the generals that under the Popular Front were winning positions and “moderating”, which is what the Cristian Democrats demanded and would lead the government to confront the workers vanguard in the Cordones.

Although the Armed Forces did not yet constitute the main arbiter of the political situation, they configured themselves as one of the principal actors. They were pushed by the politics of the government which in the face of the bosses strike looked for a “bonapartist” solution, marking a tendency for a pass from a government of a “more classic Popular Front, with the support of reformist workers parties” to one with traces of more left pre-bonapartist government, expressed in those declarations which we spoke of by the Military-Civilian Cabinet. Its center, in many accounts, was in two fundamental politics: the return of businesses and a law for gun control.^[126]

They do not pause to explain the meaning of a Popular Front in this context, and the passage as a whole demonstrates that they do not actually understand how the Popular Front worked in Spain. The idea that the government passed from a “classic popular front” towards a “left pre-bonapartist” government with its move to disarm workers and defend private property implies there is some sort of contradiction between a popular front and the latter. In Spain it was the popular front which disarmed the left, suppressed the Barcelona uprising and which tortured and executed suspected “Trotskyists”. No “traces of more left pre-bonapartist” needed.

What they propose as the actual politics that Trotskyists should have had vis a vi the Popular Front is described earlier. After showing extensively the role of Carlos Altamirano, a Socialist Party Politician, in Unidad Popular who played in their own words “a role of an arbiter between the more radicalized sectors of his own party and the working class vanguard”, IE, someone who provided a left face for the UP government, they declare:

Despite this, the phenomenon of the SP and its link with the vanguard of workers shows that there was fertile terrain for a revolutionary organization to intervene, which could have proposed a politics of entryism in the SP to accelerate the conclusions of the more radicalized sectors, convert itself into a tendency and a political faction to constitute an alternative not just to Allende but also to the centrist leaders of the SP. It could in this way propose an alternative path to the institutional one of confidence in bourgeois sectors advanced by Popular Unity, concentrating their forces in strengthening and multiplying the industrial Cordones as a reference for the rest of the working class and oppressed masses, as a center of resistance against the threats of a Coup.^[127]

The left talking face put on by its most prominent leader means in the eyes of the FT that this would have been a ripe opportunity for a Chilean “French Turn”. Yet the French Turn of Trotsky towards the various socialist parties was predicated on fighting to wrest militants away from the Stalinist Peoples Fronts before the socialists were brought into these. When the French Socialist Party moved towards endorsing the multi-class People’s Front was when for Trotsky the usefulness of the tactic exhausted itself and it was necessary to split from the Socialist Party.^[128] 

The FT’s orientation here towards entryism in a socialist party actively participating in a governing popular front is a total repudiation of Trotskyist principles – it would have meant a call for the French Trotskyists to pursue entryism in the socialist party while Leon Blum was Prime Minister of the Popular Front government. Trotsky’s call to prepare for a new turn was based on the political understanding that it was necessary to break workers from the Popular Front from an organization outside of it and which clearly denounces its class collaboration and treason.

In a separate article focused on the history of the MIR, the FT proclaims that Popular Unity was a Popular Front and develops a critique of how the MIR acted in this period. They develop a series of criticisms around its orientation towards politicians within UP, its militarist focus, its call for democratization of the military and its failure to apply the workers front. What they do not criticize however was the MIR’s call pushing a vote for the Popular Front:

They based themselves on a correct analysis that the triumph of Popular Unity would unchain the energy and mobilization of the masses, something which would clash with both the reactionary response of the bourgeoisie and the conciliationist sectors of the UP, they planted that the great task of the period was the conquest of power by the workers. The MIR advanced that the triumph of Allende did not yet constitute the seizure of power by the working class, but that it “constituted an immense advance in the struggle by the people to conquer power and it objectively favored the development of a revolutionary path in Chile, and so would favour the revolutionary left.^[129]

This would of course be consistent with their call to vote for even bourgeois (nowhere near even a popular front) candidates like that of Boric. They do not call for a break from the political support that such voting entailed – and effectively propose that with more political elements borrowed from Trotskyism, it would have been possible for a group like the MIR to do centrism better. To maneuver in and around the Popular Front in a better way to accumulate forces.

For principled trotskyists it was however tragically easy to predict the fate of the Chilean Popular Front. In 1970 in the face of Allende’s electoral victory the International Spartacist Tendency uniquely among the International Trotskyist left declared: 

It is the most elementary duty for revolutionaries Marxists to irreconcilably oppose the Popular Front in the election and to place absolutely no confidence in it in power. Any "critical support" to the Allende coalition is class treason, paving the way for a bloody defeat for the Chilean working people when domestic reaction, abetted by international imperialism, is ready.

This went alongside a clear analysis of what principled tactic needed to be applied to actually challenge the mass support among workers for this class collaborationist party:

Within reformist workers' parties there is a profound contradiction between their proletarian base and formal ideology and the class-collaborationist aims and personal appetites of their leaderships. This is why Marxists, when they are not themselves embodied in a mass working-class party, give reformist parties such "critical support" – against overt agents of capital – as will tend to regroup the proletarian base around a revolutionary program. But when these parties enter a coalition government with the parties of capitalism, any such "critical support" would be a betrayal because the coalition has suppressed the class contradiction in the bourgeoisie's favor. It is our job then to re-create the basis for struggle within such parties by demanding they break with the coalition. This break must be the elementary precondition for even the most critical support.^[130]

It is worth emphasizing how this position was unique among the international Trotskyist left at the time. Both denouncing UP as a popular front and refusing to call for a vote for it (other Trotskyist currents refused to identify UP as a Popular Front precisely because this would imply that it was a betrayal to vote for it).

It also came alongside exactly the political program and approach that was needed to break workers from their support for the popular front. The purpose of the “critical vote” has always been to draw the class line – putting forward as a condition that the reformist workers parties BREAK from the bourgeois parties is a precondition for any vote. Class independence lies at the foundation of class consciousness.

What the FT embrace instead, historically in Chile with its tragic outcome, and contemporarily with their wholehearted embrace of Marcelo Freixo’s campaign in Rio or the “anti-right” votes for Boric or Lula, is a different methodology totally alien to trotskyism and revolutionary working class politics. They seek instead to offer up their votes – sacrificing the political independence of the working class – in order to purchase the good will of petty-bourgeois and reformist political opinion. In Rio de Janeiro they embraced class collaboration and the champion of the UPP police control over the favelas – it was just the price they had to pay to try and fish potential members out of PSOL’s petty-bourgeois left milieu.

Yet when the turn has ended, when it’s time to criticize Freixo rather than put him forward as the head of a “revolutionary bastion”, they inevitably find themselves politically weaker due to their lack of any firm principle on which to stand. They run into precisely the problem which Trotsky pointed to in his criticism of Nin and the POUM, in a letter partially hosted by the PTS own CEIP:

The new party soon found itself in the tow of Azaña. But to say about this fact: “it is only a small, temporary technical electoral agreement,” seems to me to be absolutely inadmissible. The party undersigned the most miserable of all Popular Front programs of Azaña and simultaneously also its death sentence for years to come. For at every attempt at criticism of the Popular Front (and Marín-Nin are now making such desperate attempts) they will always receive the stereotyped reply from the radical bourgeois, from the Social Democrats and the communists: But didn’t you yourselves take part in the creation of the Popular Front and sign its program? And if these gentleman then try to make use of the rotten subterfuge: “it was only a technical maneuver of our party” – they will only make themselves ridiculous.^[131]

However the PTS utilize a butchered version of this letter – a fuller version of which is available in the Pathfinder Press collection of Trotsky on The Spanish Revolution 1931-39. With this partial version, the PTS can try to claim that the decisive betrayal was the POUM signing on to the Popular Front’s program. However Trotsky follows this with a much more sweeping denunciation that leaves no room for doubt:

The question of questions at present is the Popular Front. The left centrists seek to present this question as a tactical or even as a technical maneuver, so as to be able to peddle their wares in the shadow of the Popular Front. In reality, the Popular Front is the main question of proletarian class strategy for this epoch. It also offers the best criterion for the difference between Bolshevism and Menshevism. For it is often forgotten that the greatest historical example of the Popular Front is the February 1917 revolution. From February to October, the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries, who represent a very good parallel to the “Communists” and the Social Democrats, were in the closest alliance and in a permanent coalition with the bourgeois part of the Cadets, together with whom they formed a series of coalition governments. Under the sign of this Popular Front stood the whole mass of the people, including the workers’, peasants´ and soldiers´ councils. To be sure, the Bolsheviks participated in the councils. But they did not make the slightest concession to the Popular Front. Their demand was to break this Popular Front, to destroy the alliance with the Cadets, and to create a genuine workers’ and peasants’ government.

All the Popular Fronts in Europe are only a pale copy and often a caricature of the Russian Popular Front of 1917, which could, after all, lay claim to a much greater justification for its existence, for it was still a question of the struggle against czarism and the remnants of feudalism.^[132]

Here Trotsky is clear and unequivocal on the Popular Front and on “left centrists” who want to “peddle their wares in the shadow of the Popular Front”. This clear denunciation from Trotsky was why most pseudo-Trotskyist currents in the face of Allende’s victory attempted to justify their own efforts to peddle their wares in its shadow by DENYING that the government represented a Popular Front. The FT however does, in some articles, characterize UP as a Popular Front, only to go on and advocate a strategy that would politically endorse it (via vote, they effectively endorse the MIR position on this) and even pursue entryism into its component parties (while it governed). This matches up with their effort to sell their wares in the shadow of Marcelo Freixo in Rio de Janeiro.

This kind of centrist political maneuvering is alien to Trotskyism and the relentless struggle against the Centrism of parties like the POUM which Trotsky had to wage within and around the construction of the Fourth International. However while it is alien to Trotskyism, it is not alien to the PTS own political tradition: Moreno never let the principle of class independence get in the way of his own entryism “Under the discipline of General Peron”. He was a pioneer of trotskyist revisionism when he brought Pabloist entryism into the sphere of a bourgeois nationalist movement led by a General. Moreno chose a short-term get rich quick scheme hoping to recruit Peronists rather than the long term work of winning the class to political independence.

What were the consequences of this for the Argentine working class? Peronism and political confidence in a Popular Front with it dominated wide sectors of the left and working class, leaving it open to be contained by General Peron’s return in 1973. Moreno’s PST joined in with this popular front, offering their “proletarian solidarity”^[133] to the government of Campora. Peron went on to launch the Alianza Anticomunista Argentina – kidnapping and murdering leftist militants including members of Moreno’s own PST. When the working class began, finally, to break from Peronism in 1975 it lacked the independent revolutionary party capable of leading it to victory – the result was the world-historic defeat ushered in by the 1976 coup.

History charged with interest the political debts taken on by Moreno’s opportunist maneuvering. What could the working class have achieved if those years in Peronism had been spent breaking the working class from it?  How will history charge with interest the centrist opportunism of the FT today?

The FT now, decades later, criticizes many of Moreno’s historic positions; opportunism never looks attractive with the benefit of historical hindsight. Few today would openly claim the legacy of Bernstein, Kautsky, Andres Nin or Michel Pablo. This is why to continue to practice opportunism effectively it is necessary to constantly reinvent it. Moreno was the master of reinventing his politics to chase the latest fad and Albamonte and Maiello continue this tradition – the real political core of Morenoism – far more effectively than any organization which tries in vain to base itself on the “principles” of Morenoism could. Socialist Strategy and Military Art represents a theoretical and programmatic codification of these “tactical and even technical maneuvers” which break from Trotskyist principles.

Centrism at the Crossroads

The emergence of the PTS from the wrecks of the MAS was a break from Reformism towards Centrism. Initially in the 90’s, competing with the larger MAS they pitched left. They eventually abandoned their initial Morenoite position on the police^[134] and formally rejected Moreno.Their very name, PTS, was a throwback to the SWP of the United States. 

Looking for a guide to orient themselves, many of their militants dived into the available works of Trotsky. Those with time in the Argentine left tell how in the 90s and 00s the militants of the PTS were known for being able to basically quote Trotsky out of hand and were considered “sectarian” by much of the left. They actively discussed the threat of the Popular Front, and even went so far as to take on the threat of Centrism and parties “POUMistas” in relation to those Popular Fronts, for the case of Brazil they declared:

Will CS or the PSTU support this bourgeois popular front government like the POUM did in Spain against Trotsky’s politics? Will they maintain themselves in the opposition but pressure based on continued hope that Lula and the CUT leadership will assume a revolutionary course?

The harsh criticisms that we make, as the Internationalist Fraction, are to avoid this possibility and so that the honest militants of the CS don’t have the same disastrous destiny as those led by Andrés Nin.^[135]

If we swap Lula for Marcelo Freixo, we can answer affirmatively about the FT to all those questions they once posed to the PSTU. The only difference is that the “theorists” of the FT have built elaborate, if shaky, theoretical justifications for a “strategic orientation” which takes them to that same final destination. Our intervention and debate here is aimed towards precisely those honest militants in the FT who can be won from the project of a centrist, POUMista party towards embracing the program of revolutionary trotskyism.

A significant amount of Trotsky’s time in the Fourth International was dedicated to fighting not just against reformism or stalinism, but against Centrism.

For the revolutionary Marxist the struggle against reformism now changes itself almost completely into struggle against centrism. The mere empty opposing of legal struggle to illegal struggle, of peaceful means to violent, of democracy to dictatorship in the majority of cases now passes; for the frightened reformists, who must now disavow themselves, are ready to accept the most “revolutionary” of formulas, if only they are not obliged today to break with the hybridity, irresolution, “passivity” which are native to them. That is why the struggle against the hidden or masked opportunists must principally transport itself into the sphere of the practical conclusions from revolutionary promises.^[136]

There are few today who openly embrace Lasalle, Bernstein, Kautsky, Andres Nin or Michel Pablo. The Albamonte of 2018 can’t even embrace the Albamonte of 1990, nor does he have the political integrity for a self-criticism. The records of reformism and centrism are always abysmal, incapable of withstanding a historical archive. Its practice requires a continuous theoretical reinvention and re-justification under new guises. The FT’s first reinvention saw it cheering on counter-revolution in the USSR even as it drew a limited class line against the Popular Front in Latin America. Its second reinvention, embodied in Socialist Strategy and Military Art, sees it abandoning the shaky class line which it once tried to draw. A new reinvention under a “Trotskyist” and Gramscian cover of old reformist ends.

Albamonte himself was in 2008 remarkably self-aware of the dangerous, wavering position of the FT. In this moment they sought some sort of unified party together with the PO and LIT on a classically centrist search for unprincipled political unity, but which came with a useful reflection:

None of the currents we have described above, including of course ourselves, is exempt from degeneration into centrism or reformism. For this reason the discussion of subjects of strategy, tactics and program is an ever more important imperative to avoid both sectarian impotence and the dead end of opportunism.^[137]

Yet we see in what we have reviewed here the deeply distorted vision of strategy and tactics which they have adopted. Their vision of strategy rather than warding off reformism has built them a highway to the worst reformist betrayals – could any militant of the PTS in 2008 imagine themselves proclaiming Marcelo Freixo the potential leader of a “revolutionary fortress”? In 2015 an electoral alliance with the MST was denounced as unthinkable and PTS militants bragged about how viciously they were attacked for defending a blank vote in the runoffs between Scioli and Macri. In 2023 half the FIT called to vote for Massa, and the PTS refused to fight for any sort of campaign for a blank vote. This betrayal by the MST and IS hasn’t even called into question the unity of the FIT-U. What would the FT of 2008 think of an electoral coalition with those who called to vote for Peronism? “Opportunist Dead End” would fall short.

One of the most exceptional quotes by Clausewitz, which Albamonte and Maiello do use well in defending the Permanent Revolution against the Anti-Imperialist United Front, is the following:

A short jump is certainly easier than a long one, but no one wanting to get across a wide ditch would begin by jumping half-way.

As Lenin was clear to point out, political time is much slower than military time. For a political organization it can take years, even decades to arrive at its final destination. In 1988 the PTS began its great jump, but even as it moved left it ultimately recoiled before any arrival at the revolutionary destination of principled Trotskyism. 

In 1990, trying to find itself away around the Trotskyist world, two of their leading comrades from their Mexican party, then called the POS, were given the task of studying the positions of the International Spartacist Tendency. The arguments of the Spartacists, especially around the situation in Germany, were convincing and Arturo and Humberto openly presented their criticisms within the party. The Central Committee of the PTS reacted immediately demanding and implementing a bureaucratic expulsion of these founding members of the POS.^[138] A classic centrist leadership, which in the model set by Nin in Spain or Sneevliet in the Netherlands worked above all to protect its membership from contagion by the revolutionary criticism of Trotskyism.

It is no mistake that in Socialist Strategy and Military Art, they airbrush out the existence of the Spartacist Tendency rather than attempt a critique of it. Even their revised tour through the Fourth International would show that the Spartacists passed the test of Cuba and would require Albamonte to extensively defend the Morenoite embrace of counter-revolution in Poland. Albamonte grasps enough of Clausewitz to know it’s better not to give battle than to do so from such catastrophically disadvantageous terrain – in discussing the PTS record around the workers states we have shown in depth the deeply counter-revolutionary ends to which those conceptions brought the PTS.

Recoiling before even a serious engagement with the tradition of revolutionary trotskyism,  the experience of the PTS ended in the middle of the centrist ditch. Slowly, but surely it is climbing out. The leadership has found in Gramsci the ladder they need to get up… back to their original reformist starting point. Back to the worst reformist opportunism of Nahuel Moreno, back to the electoral opportunism of the MAS, all reconstructed with a new theoretical and political cover that would make the political chameleon Nahuel Moreno proud of his onetime students. Gramsci too would be thrilled to know that he has helped to steer one more political organization away from the “Trotskyite-Bordigism” he so mercilessly crushed in his party. 

For those that joined the FT looking for something else, we invite them to discuss how to make the leap to the other side. How to build a revolutionary working class organization which bases itself on the real Trotskyist program. With a revolutionary continuity reaching back to Cannon and Trotsky. Which passed the most important test of world trotskyism – which stood alone on the barricades in the face of the world-historic defeat that overthrew the USSR and the deformed workers states of the Warsaw Pact. Which today stands alone in defending what remains of those gains against US imperialism and capitalist restoration in China, Vietnam and Korea.

There is no greater, more difficult task than reforging the Fourth International as the World Party of Revolution that Trotsky intended it to be. Such a colossal task needs above all a firm, unyielding, principled political foundation on which to build.

^[1] See La Verdad Sobre Moreno, Spartacist diciembre 1982, for a detailed analysis of the dramatic transformations Moreno oversaw until that point. With the formation of the MAS the social-democratic and nationalist turn accelerated dramatically compared to the days of the PST. In his 1984 Escuela de Cuadros he goes so far as to posit supporting a bourgeois-democratic Argentina in a war against Pinochet’s Chile.
^[2] https://ceip.org.ar/Polemica-con-la-LIT-y-el-legado-teorico-de-Nahuel-Moreno
^[3] https://ceip.org.ar/En-los-limites-de-la-restauracion-burguesa
^[4] Albamonte y Maiell, p. 18
^[5] https://www.ft-ci.org/Egipto-y-la-revolucion-permanente-Parte-I?lang=es
^[6] See also their critique of the PO: https://www.ft-ci.org/Grecia-o-el-enorme-oportunismo-politico-de-PO?lang=es And
https://www.ft-ci.org/Los-revolucionarios-y-la-cuestion-del-gobierno-de-izquierda?lang=es
^[7] https://www.ft-ci.org/Los-revolucionarios-frente-a-SYRIZA?lang=es
^[8] Albamonte y Maiello, p. 33
^[9] Albamonte y Maiello, p. 34
^[10] https://www.internationalist.org/greekworkersdefeatbankersdiktat1507.html
^[11] Albamonte y Maiello, p. 34–5
^[12] https://ft-ci.org/Esquerda-avanca-em-base-a-conciliacao-de-classes?lang=pt_br
^[13] https://ft-ci.org/Esquerda-avanca-em-base-a-conciliacao-de-classes?lang=pt_br
^[14] https://www.laizquierdadiario.com/La-vieja-politica-tambien-salpica-a-la-candidatura-del-Partido-Socialismo-y-Libertad
^[15] https://www.internationalist.org/brasillerfuragrevemetrosp1308.html
^[16] https://static.poder360.com.br/2024/01/relatorio-final-cpi-das-milicias-marcelo-alerj-2008.pdf
^[17] https://revistatrip.uol.com.br/trip/marcelo-freixo
^[18] Ibid
^[19] https://www.ft-ci.org/Frente-ao-questionamento-ao-exercito-e-UPPS-no-Alemao-e-na-Cidade-de-Deus
^[20] https://elpais.com/internacional/2014/06/11/actualidad/1402508040_711308.html
^[21] https://www.esquerdadiario.com.br/marcelo-freixo-upp
^[22] https://www.cartacapital.com.br/politica/em-carta-aos-cariocas-freixo-assume-compromissos-caso-eleito-no-rio/
^[23] https://www.esquerdadiario.com.br/Carolina-Cacau-Precisamos-derrotar-Crivella-e-os-ataques-com-a-forca-dos-trabalhadores
^[24] ibid
^[25] ibid
^[26] ibid
^[27] https://www.esquerdadiario.com.br/Marcelo-Freixo-e-sua-vergonhosa-luta-por-mais-verbas-para-a-policia?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Newsletter
^[28] https://www.esquerdadiario.com.br/Marcelo-Freixo-assume-seu-projeto-burgues-no-PSB-um-dialogo-com-quem-ainda-acha-que-ele-e-de
^[29] https://www.clausewitz.com/readings/Cquotations.htm
^[30] https://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1975/lenin1/chap14.htm
^[31] Page.137
^[32] Clausewitz On War, Howard and Parett, p. 606
^[33]Albamonte y Maiello p. 122
^[34] https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/12/23.htm
^[35] https://www.pagina12.com.ar/692147-myriam-bregman-sin-traidores-muchas-leyes-de-milei-van-a-que
^[36] Albamonte and Maiello p. 155
^[37] p.157
^[38] p.190
^[39] Page 6. https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isr/vol31/no02/v31n02-w197-mar-apr-1970-int-soc-rev.pdf
^[40] Page 11. https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isr/vol31/no02/v31n02-w197-mar-apr-1970-int-soc-rev.pdf
^[41] Correspondence between Bordiga and Trotsky, Trotsky’s Reply to Bordiga, March 2, 1926. https://libcom.org/article/correspondence-between-bordiga-and-trotsky
^[42] https://www.internationalist.org/trotskyism-vs-gramscism-2108.html
^[43] https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/hrr/ch42.htm
^[44] Albamonte e Maiello p.237
^[45] https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1929/09/ital-lc.htm
Note here: PTS website has a version where Consitutional Assembly is translated differently: https://ceip.org.ar/Carta-a-los-Comunistas-de-Izquierda-italianos
^[46] https://files.libcom.org/files/Chiaradia-Bordiga-Gramsci.pdf
^[47] The Trotsky Question, https://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1925/trotsky.htm this contains one of Bordiga’s most iconic phrases: “Our Great Elector is the rifle in the hands of the insurgent worker, who does not dream of depositing a paper ballot but of striking the enemy.”
^[48] Cited in Chiaradia, p.67
^[49] https://ceip.org.ar/Carta-a-los-Comunistas-de-Izquierda-italianos available in english at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1929/09/ital-lc.htm
^[50] Available in English here: https://www.leftcom.org/files/Platform%20of%20the%20Committee%20of%20Intesa%201925%20%282011%29_0.pdf
^[51] https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/06/fi-a.htm
^[52] Antonio Gramsci, Selectons from Political Writings 1921-1926, p.313, excerpt is composed of notes not by Gramsci but taken of the general discussion in the PCI leadership around the Lyon Thesis
^[53] Ibid p. 333
^[54] Ibid p. 321
^[55] https://ceip.org.ar/Trotsky-y-Gramsci-Convergencias-y-divergencias
^[56] Albamonte and Maiello p. 237
^[57] Albamonte y Maiello, p. 290
^[58] https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/italy.htm
^[59] https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1934/06/paf.htm
^[60] https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/ffyci-2/01.htm
^[61] https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ch02.htm
^[62] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=a3c88715713afbd505cc73825992d53e22bca1b1
^[63] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=a3c88715713afbd505cc73825992d53e22bca1b1
^[64] https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/icl-spartacists/prs2-pmp/
^[65] https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/miliprog/iii.htm cited in Albamonte and Maiello p.332
^[66] Cited in https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/icl-spartacists/prs2-pmp/appx-pmp.html
^[67] Leon Trotsky, Is Victory Possible in Spain, 1937. Cited in The Spanish Revolution 1931-39, Pathfinder Press p.319
^[68] https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/miliprog/ii.htm
^[69] https://www.laizquierdadiario.com/Control-de-armas-en-Estados-Unidos-un-debate-sobre-violencia-y-Estado
^[70] https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/jun/12.htm
^[71] Maiello y Albamonte, p.449
^[72] https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/icl-spartacists/prs4-yugo/yugo-3.html#pseudotrot
^[73] Ibid
^[74] Albamonte y Maiello p.458–9
^[75] See for example https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/icl-spartacists/periodicals/spartacist-espanol/01_Cuadernos-Marxistas.pdf
^[76] https://www.ft-ci.org/Trotsky-y-Gramsci-debates-de-estrategia-sobre-la-revolucion-en-occidente?lang=es
^[77] Albamonte y Maiello p.459–60
^[78] Ibid p.460
^[79] Ibid p.449
^[80] https://www.marxists.org/espanol/moreno/actual/apt_1b.htm
^[81] Albamonte y Maiello, p.508
^[82] Albamonte y Maiello, p.499
^[83] Albamonte y Maiello, p.519
^[84] Albamonte y Maiello p.519–20
^[85] Albamonte and Maiello, p.460–1
^[86] https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/spartacist-us/1972-1980/0030_Autumn_1980.pdf
^[87] Ibid
^[88] ‘Whose Poland’, Workers Vanguard n.279 https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/workersvanguard/1981/0279_29_04_1981.pdf
^[89] Solidarity Sourcebook, available online at: https://bolshevik.org/Pamphlets/Solidarnosc/solidarnosc_appendix.html
^[90] Albamonte y Maiello, p. 520
^[91] Boletín de la Tendencia Bolchevique Internacionalista-Fracción del MAS - Carta abierta a los compañeros del partido
^[92] Avanzada Socialist Año I N.2
^[93]  Cuadernos de Avanzada Socialista, Izquierda Unida Un Triunfo Del Stalinismo
^[94] Tesis sobre la Revolucion Politica, Cuadernos de Avanzada Socialista N.4, April 1990, p. 1
^[95] Ibid p. 2
^[96] Ibid p. 3
^[97] Ibid p. 3
^[98] Ibid p. 5
^[99] Ibid p. 7
^[100] Ibid p. 8–9
^[101] Ibid p.9
^[102] Ibid p.10
^[103] https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1933/10/sovstate.htm
^[104] Ibid p.13
^[105] Ibid p.19
^[106] https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/09/ussr-war.htm
^[107] https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1933/10/sovstate.htm
^[108] Avanzada Socialista 33, 13 de Agosto de 1990, “Esto es lo que le da, en nuestra opinión, un carácter doblemente deformado: al caracter burocratico que le imprime desde su origen la dirección stalinista, se le agrega el artificial producto de la división de Alemania, a diferencia de los otros estados obreros surgidos en Europa del Este que lo fueron sobre la base de unidades nacionales históricas.”
^[109] https://instruggle.wordpress.com/2019/06/18/anschluss-1-opportunity which cites and references: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/icl-spartacists/periodicals/spartakist-apk/apk_11.pdf
^[110] https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/spartacist-us/1988-1993/Spartacist%20Pamphlet_Soviet%20Workers%20State.pdf
^[111] https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/workersvanguard/1991/0532_02_08_1991.pdf
^[112] Estrategia Internacional Diciembre 1991-Marzo 1992, Las Paradoja de la revolución de Agosto
^[113] Estrategia Internacional, July-September 1992, p.12
^[114] Rebelión de los Trabajadores No 26, 13 de Mayo de 1993 https://ceip.org.ar/Rebelion-de-los-Trabajadores-No-26
^[115] http://www.ft.org.ar/estrategia/ei9/ei9kosovo.html
^[116] http://www.ft.org.ar/estrategia/ei13/ei13balcanes.htm
^[117] http://www.ft.org.ar/estrategia/ei8/ei8rusia.html
^[118] http://www.ft.org.ar/estrategia/ei8/ei8dossier.html
^[119] See En los limites del la “restauracion burguesa”, Emilio Albamonte y Matias Maiello https://ceip.org.ar/En-los-limites-de-la-restauracion-burguesa
^[120] https://www.estrategiainternacional.org/Revista-Estrategia-Internacional-Nro-19?lang=es
^[121] Albamonte y Maiello, p.449–50
^[122] Albamonte y Maiello, p.287
^[123] https://www.laizquierdadiario.com/Que-ocurria-cuando-la-Unidad-Popular-gano-las-elecciones
^[124] https://www.laizquierdadiario.com/A-45-anos-del-derrocamiento-de-Allende
^[125] https://www.laizquierdadiario.com/Retomemos-lo-mejor-de-esta-experiencia-de-coordinacion-y-socialismo-desde-abajo-para-las-luchas-del
^[126] https://www.laizquierdadiario.com/Chile-era-posible-la-victoria-171898
^[127] https://www.laizquierdadiario.com/Chile-era-posible-la-victoria-171898
^[128] See A New Turn is Necessary, June 10 1935, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1934-35. Also available in Spanish via the CEIP, in a SIGNIFICANTLY reduced version: https://www.marxists.org/espanol//trotsky/ceip/escritos/libro4/T06V218.htm
^[129] https://www.laizquierdadiario.com/El-MIR-y-el-gobierno-de-Allende-apuntes-para-un-balance-estrategico
^[130] Spartacist 19 https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/spartacist-us/1964-1971/019_11-12_1970.pdf
^[131] English taken from Leon Trotsky, The Spanish Revolution 1931-39, p.269. Hosted in Spanish by the CEIP at: https://ceip.org.ar/Maurin-y-Nin-rehenes-del-frente-popular
^[132] Leon Trotsky, The Spanish Revolution 1931–39, p.269–70
^[133] See citations from Avanzada Socialista in La Verdad Sobre Moreno, https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/icl-spartacists/periodicals/spartacist-espanol/11_1982_12-SpartSpan.pdf
^[134] “Es en el interés de esos trabajadores que visten uniforme al organizarse….. En segundo lugar, organizarse en sindicatos para exigir mejores salarios y condiciones de trabajo y una regulación que les permita rechazar cualquier orden de reprimir trabajadores por cuestiones políticas, sindicales o movimientos de protesta social. Sólo esa organización y esa lucha, les permitirá a los policías honestos, o los que provienen de la clase obrera el volver a ella, esta vez como aliados y no como son vistos muchas veces, enemigos.” Avanzada Socialista Año I Número 4
^[135] https://ceip.org.ar/Polemica-con-la-LIT-y-el-legado-teorico-de-Nahuel-Moreno
^[136] https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1934/02/centrism.htm
^[137] https://www.estrategiainternacional.org/Apuntes-sobre-la-crisis-capitalista-en-curso-y-la-reconstruccion-de-la-IV-Internacional?lang=es
^[138] See Del morenismo al trotskismo–La Cuestión Rusa a quemarropa, Documentos de la lucha de la Fracción Trotskista del Partido Obrero Socialista, con documentos de la Liga Comunista Internacional (Cuartainternacionalista)