Matthew 7:16-20 King James Version
"By your friends shall ye be known"
Proverb
“That, in a Europe blood-stained by more than four years of
total war, crushed under the most hideous yoke of the imperialisms, whose
prisons and concentration camps are gorged with the victims of the most savage
and most systematic repression, our organization has been able to hold its
European assembly, to work out and define its political line of struggle, of
itself constitutes the most eloquent manifestation of its vitality, its
internationalist spirit, and the revolutionary ardour by which it is animated.
Fourth International statement
“The objective prerequisites for the proletarian revolution
have not only ‘ripened,’ they have begun to get somewhat rotten.”
Leon Trotsky
Michel Pablo, a renegade from Trotskyism, died at the age of
eighty-four in 1996. Pablo’s betrayal of his former political principles was
aptly celebrated by the Greek ruling elite at the time. When he died, the PASOK
(Panhellenic Socialist Movement) government gave him a state funeral. As the
proverb says, "By your friends shall ye be known"
Hall Greenland’s biography of Pablo is the first of its
kind. Alex de Jong, writing for the Pabloite International Viewpoint, believes
“He’s (Pablo) finally gotten the biography he deserves.”[1]De
Jong is correct because this is a politically naive account and largely
absolves Pablo of his treachery. Anyone expecting anything different from a
member of the Green Party is going to be sadly disappointed.
However, Greenland’s book is not without some merit, tracing
Pablo’s early political life. Pablo attended the founding conference of Leon
Trotsky’s Fourth International and took part alongside fellow Trotskyists in
the anti-Nazi resistance in wartime France. The book describes how many
Trotskyists during the war years were living on borrowed time; not only were
they hunted by the Gestapo, but they were murdered in droves by the Stalinists.
Many writers, including Greenland, imply that despite some
heroics, Trotskyists played “little or no part in the struggle to project a
revolutionary defeatist line,”
But as the Marxist David North points out, “ outside the
Fourth International, there was no other tendency in the workers’ movement that
opposed the imperialist war! The Trotskyists were hounded and persecuted by a
“popular front” of fascists, “democratic” imperialists and Stalinists precisely
because they upheld the banner of revolutionary defeatism and proletarian
internationalism.
He continues, “The French Trotskyists Marc Bourhis and
Pierre Gueguen were executed by the Nazis on October 22, 1941. Their comrade
Jules Joffre was shot in 1942. In October 1943, the secretary of the French
section, Marcel Hic, was arrested by the Gestapo, deported to Buchenwald and
then to Dora, where he was murdered. Dozens of other French Trotskyists were
arrested and also perished in the Nazi death camps. Despite the repression, the
Trotskyist PCI published, starting in August 1940, seventy-three clandestine
issues of its newspaper, La Verité, whose circulation was 15,000 copies.”[2]
Despite describing how the Stalinists murdered Trotskyists
at will Greenland follows in the footsteps of every Stalinist, Pabloite and
related middle-class radical organizations, and the intellectually corrupt
academic milieu of pseudo-leftists who in the words of North “continue to
ignore, deprecate and deny the overwhelming evidence that the penetration of
the US Socialist Workers Party SWP by GPU agents played a critical role in the
assassination of Trotsky. The role of Sylvia Callen (a.k.a. Sylvia Franklin,
Sylvia Caldwell, Sylvia Doxsee), the personal secretary of James P. Cannon, as
a GPU spy has been conclusively established. The same is true for Robert
Sheldon Harte.”[3]
There are many problems with this book. The main one being
is Greenland's complete lack of understanding of the origins and nature of
Pablo’s opportunism and subsequent betrayals caused by this opportunism. It is
impossible to go into any great detail of Pabloite opportunism. For anyone
interested, David North’s The Heritage We Defend is the best starting point.
As North points out in his book, the origins of Pablo’s
opportunism began over the debate over the class nature of Yugoslavia and the
Eastern European buffer states had become transformed, under the pressure of
alien class forces, into a political platform for sweeping opportunist
revisions of the basic Trotskyist program and its historical perspective. Pablo
was the living embodiment of Trotsky’s sayings, “Without correct theory, there
cannot be correct politics or more precisely, 'every sociological definition is
at the bottom a historical prognosis."
North writes, “ The theories advanced by Pablo of 'generations
of deformed workers’ states” and “war-revolution” articulated the pessimism and
demoralisation of broad layers of the Fourth International beneath the impact
of unfavourable objective conditions. The political conceptions which were to
become known as Pabloism emerged as an adaptation to the restabilization of
capitalism, on the one hand, and to the apparent strengthening of the Stalinist
bureaucracy, on the other.
Refracted through the political prism of the Cold War, the
objective situation appeared to be dominated by the global conflict between the
imperialist forces, spearheaded by the United States, and the Soviet Union and
those labour and national revolutionary movements dominated by Stalinism. The
real underlying conflict between the world bourgeoisie and the international
proletariat—of which the Cold War was only a partial and distorted
manifestation—receded from the political consciousness of those within the
Fourth International who were reacting impressionistically to world events.[4]
Pablo’s capitulation to hostile class forces was not a
pretty one to watch and had disastrous consequences for the working class.
After he rejected revolutionary politics, Pablo, up to his death, was a
supporter of ecology movements and women’s liberation. Along with his other renegades
from Trotskyism, Ernest Mandel Pablo, he advocated not the revolutionary overthrow
of capitalism but that workers should undertake a form of Self-Management to
counteract capitalism's attacks on them.
Pablo advocated ‘generalised self-management or direct democracy’.
He utilised his friendship with the Algerian bourgeois nationalists to put this
experiment into practice. As Peter Schwarz writes, “Pablo himself and other
leading French Pabloites placed themselves unconditionally at the service of
the Algerian Liberation Front (FLN), and took over organisational
responsibilities, such as the printing of illegal newspapers, fake banknotes
and counterfeit passports. They even set up a weapons factory in Morocco. After
the victory of the FLN over the French colonial regime, Pablo entered into the
service of the Algerian government. As special advisor to the head of state,
Ben Bella, Pablo was responsible for the introduction in Algerian factories of
the forms of “workers’ self-management” first initiated in post-war Yugoslavia.”[5]
In his book Self-management in the struggle for socialism, Pablo
explains, “In the economic sphere, the purpose of the plan is to determine the
general conditions under which the self-managed enterprises can act and coordinate
their efforts for the ultimate interests of society as a whole. We use the term
social rather than economic plan to stress the fact that the plan seeks the
balanced overall evolution of the society towards socialism, and that this
affects the determination of so-called economic aims; the real aim of the plan
is to satisfy the real social needs of the working people and citizens, with
decisions made democratically from the bottom up and vice-versa, in a process
of interaction which is constantly readjusting the objectives sought, even
while the plan is being executed.[6]
As the above quote shows, Pablo’s self-management plan would
be introduced peacefully and with the full cooperation of the capitalists; at
no stage did Pablo advocate, let alone attempt, the revolutionary overthrow of
capitalism.
Although Greenland’s book is the first and only biography of
Pablo, it should not be the last. It is incumbent on the Trotskyist movement to
write its biography of this renegade from Trotskyism to train and arm future
revolutionaries as to the nature of Pablo’s opportunism and betrayals.
[1]
The Revolutionary Life and Times of Michel Pablo-internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article8471
[2]
The Fourth International in World War II-The Heritage we Defend-www.wsws.org/en/special/library/heritage/07.html
[3]
The place of Security and the Fourth International in the history of the
Trotskyist movement-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/08/14/dujg-a14.html
[4]
The Nature of Pabloite Opportunism-The Heritage We Defend
[5]
The politics of opportunism: the “radical left” in France-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2004/05/lft4-m22.html
[6]
Self-management in the struggle for socialism-https://www.marxists.org/archive/pablo/1972/selfman/main.htm
