Letter from FLTI to Jorge Terracotta
Your position on moral issues brings you dangerously close to a Stalinist program
Comrade Jorge Terracotta,
On 5/26 we received a minute where you tell us that after an arduous study of works of revolutionary Marxism, you have arrived as a conclusion to the non-existence of any tradition in it referring to the Moral Commissions. Contrariwise, in our understanding, these have been and still are a constitutive part of it.
As you yourself affirm, the difference here arisen has to do with a part of the statutes and founding principles of our organization.
For you, all issues related to the honor and revolutionary morality of the militants are resolved through the political bodies that enforce party discipline.
Of course, we disagree with this question. As you will have read, in our Congresses we do not delegate the guarantee of the moral conduct of our militants to the political organizations or to the discipline that these guarantee in order to maintain the program and the revolutionary political action of the current.
What is more, there usually exist undisciplined comrades and tendencies, which at times even confront the program of a revolutionary party, and that does not mean that they can be accused of being police informers, agents of the enemy, sold out to the bosses, etc. These questions make up the class values and principles, for which we fight not only within the revolutionary parties, but also within the workers' organizations. It is a question of our morality and not of the decomposed morality of the worker aristocracies and bureaucracies.
We consider a foundational question of our organization the struggle to maintain the independence of moral questions with respect to political questions and party discipline, as it was historically in the world labor movement since its beginnings. This question was destroyed from 1914 with the beginning of the imperialist epoch, of corruption and decomposition of the workers' organizations.
Party discipline does not make moral questions, which have to do with honor and the elementary principles of every socialist militant and even of every worker with a minimum of class consciousness.
Likewise, we confront all types of persecution, such as those launched by Stalinism through slander, amalgamations and moral and physical attacks against the currents that have political differences and that even break the discipline of democratic-centralism.
We consider that using this method of moral accusations to break or discipline the will of struggle of the revolutionaries or dissidents in the political struggle, and to leave these questions to the free will of the party leaderships which here and there are the ones that decompose the revolutionary parties, is the worst tradition inherited from Stalinism.
The Fourth International in its centrist course from the second post-war period on, accompanying its process of political degeneration, was abandoning these foundational questions of the revolutionary movement. However, the Fourth International as a movement, with a principled policy, set up International Moral Tribunals during Yalta against the most brutal attacks against the most decomposed fractions such as those of Healy or Lambert, which trampled on the revolutionary honor of dozens of Trotskyist cadres.
Furthermore, during the post-war period it maintained the continuity in its national sections of the Control and Moral Commissions that existed in the parties of the Fourth International during Trotsky's lifetime. These Commissions could not be "international" since it would be impossible for them to act as such on the spot, as demonstrated by the different Control Commissions voted in the congresses of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union until 1923, during Lenin's lifetime.
The expulsion of Molinier by the Moral Commission of the French section for spending the funds of the organization in the casino, marked the entire founding phase of the Fourth International in 1938. The International Secretariat supported the resolution of the Moral Commission of the French league. For not vindicating this resolution and ignoring the Moral Commission of the French section, Molinier's fraction could not enter the World Congress of '38. Trotsky even proposed that Molinier's political current enter the Congress, but not him, who had been morally sanctioned.
The fact is that, precisely, Comrade Trotsky knew how to distinguish between moral questions and political questions due to his own experience of the Trotskyists in the USSR. In his work "Their Morals and Ours" he stated that there is a morality for the traitors of the proletariat and a very different one for the revolutionaries. Hence it is their morals and ours, and not only a program, a theory and a strategy what delimit us.
You make an amalgam. The statutes of the Marxist currents give an account of the democratic-centralism and the resolutions of functioning that govern each current. These statutes are based on the theory, the program and the morale of a revolutionary current. These, like democratic-centralism, are adapted to the development of the revolutionary Marxist organizations. For example, to the statutes of the Third International were incorporated the "21 conditions" which stated that all parliamentary or trade union leaders who did not obey the discipline of the Central Committees and the organization as a whole had to be expelled. They also stated that it was necessary to separate from the ranks of the Third International one third of its members to get rid of all the opportunist elements that went to the Communist Parties when these grew by millions after having led the seizure of power in the USSR.
In the year 1918-1919, Bolshevism adjusted its statutes / democratic-centralism, prohibiting the entry to its cells. Only groups of sympathizers could be organized. The fact is that they had just taken power and waves of opportunists wanted to enter their ranks. With the statutes and democratic-centralism, the Bolsheviks selected the cream of the cream of the proletariat and got rid of any opportunist element.
This same thing, but in reverse, happened during the civil war in the USSR. Any worker or young man who wanted to join the Soviet Communist Party was immediately accepted: he was given a rifle to go to the battle front.
These are the questions that make up the statutes, the functioning of democratic-centralism, which are adapted, as we have already said, to each process of development of a revolutionary current. Our statutes pertain to a small league of cadres and are adequate to our current stage of construction.
But at the base of the statutes, of the theory and of the program of a revolutionary party are the questions of morals and principles of each one of its militants, questions that in the 19th century, we insist, were basic in every workers' organization that stood up, both among Marxists and anarchists.
Any serious Marxist who has investigated deeply will see that the first Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Worker Party, which had to delimit its foundational nucleus from any opportunism and fundamentally from the liberal bourgeoisie, put in its statutes and in its "declaration of foundation" a moral question of the first order: "no member of the Russian Social-Democratic Worker Party who exploits workers and has them in his charge, can be a militant of the same".
Likewise, returning to the experience of the Fourth International in the second post-war period, we feel ourselves continuators of the exemplary battle given by the U.S. SWP against the scoundrel of Healy who in the 1970s launched a brutal public attack inside the Trotskyist movement and before the world vanguard, accusing Hansen of having been the one who sold Trotsky out to Mercader. A despicable method that led to the constitution of an International Moral Tribunal of more than 80 workers organizations and of the Fourth International that saved the good name and the revolutionary and anti-Stalinist honor of comrade Hansen and the leadership of the American SWP.
Without this battle, as we have been insisting, today the history of Trotskyism would have been written differently. 80 organizations in a Moral Tribunal defeated the vile slander of Healy who accused Hansen and the Trotskyist revolutionaries of the SWP of having sold Trotsky out to Stalin to kill him. A monstrosity.
That is why it is so strange the casualness and lightness with which you treat moral questions in the revolutionary movement. Clearly your position has to do with how you treat with personal attacks without proofs to leftist leaders in Argentina, and this, beyond the deep differences that we revolutionaries have with the reformists. But this forms workers in the method of the trade union bureaucracy and Stalinism. We have been insisting on this question for a long time.
In relation to the slander against Hansen that was defeated by the principled forces of the Fourth International, today the WSWS (the U.S. SEP) continues with that denigrating campaign, although in solitude. That is why we never made any kind of rapprochement with that current. What is more, a comrade was separated from our ranks for not having broken with that conception that she carried with her from that organization from which she came and with which she maintained ties.
It was also Moral Tribunals and Honor Commissions of healthy forces of the Trotskyist movement that managed to clear the good name and honor of the Hungarian leader Varga, who had to flee from the processes of political revolution in his country persecuted by Stalinism and was accused of being a "CIA agent" by Lambert of the French OCI.
We also vindicate the Moral Commission that defended comrade Napurí, accused of misappropriating funds from the bourgeois Parliament in Peru and whom Lambert wanted to discipline as the former was breaking politically with him. And this beyond the enormous political and disciplinary differences that we have with both Napurí and the Hungarian Varga.
We also vindicated our own experience of calling for an International Moral Tribunal to condemn the Workers Party (Argentina) which, after beating up our comrade Juan Pico, handed him over to the police and even to a criminal trial, by denouncing him. It was this campaign of our current to call for a Moral Tribunal that caused a hard defeat to Altamira and his party. This marked an objective limit that aimed to prevent new physical aggressions against our current.
These are only examples in the struggle to keep the Trotskyist movement minimally healthy at a time when it still maintained threads of continuity with the Marxist program, as part of its struggle against its most decomposed fractions.
Moral Tribunals were also those who guaranteed, educated and trained cadres against Stalinism and against the most degenerated wings of the Fourth International during Yalta. Without them, the milestones of theoretical, political and strategic continuity would not have existed.
There are questions of morality and principles that every workers' organization with a minimum of class consciousness must defend and demand them from all its militants. These questions go beyond program and politics, but have to do with the foundation of the international workers' movement: that we do not betray comrades, that we do not surrender strikes, that we do not corrupt ourselves before the bosses, that we do not hand out fighters to the bourgeois states, that we do not invent slanders against dissidents. These are elementary class questions that Stalinism and the entire reformism break at every step.
This is a central aspect in the combat against the traitorous leaderships and against the pressures of bourgeois society on our ranks. Hence the institutions such as the Control Commissions that defend these principles on a daily basis and are independent of the leadership, to watch over them.
We consider that this discussion is part of the tradition and the programmatic conception of the socialist movement and that it indeed deserves a debate. On our part, we debate these questions of foundational principles in our Congresses.
This foundational point of ours has to do also with our experience: we sustained and suffered it in our rupture with the MAS in '88 and with the PTS in '98. And we believe that it is part of the best traditions of the national sections of the Third and Fourth International. That is why the LOI-CI of Argentina has incorporated them in its founding statutes.
We have promoted this policy at a 180° angle, for example, with the decomposition demonstrated by the MAS of Argentina in its outbreak at the end of the 80s and beginning of the 90s. Its political decomposition was followed by a ferocious moral decomposition, with military attacks on its locals in its splits, with jagged disputes over the financial apparatus, like the same methods of stealing communications and information from the leaders as was expressed in the rupture of the PO and even, turning the entire security apparatus not to confront the bosses, the bureaucracy or Stalinism, but to do intelligence work on the entire militant base of the regions, as spies of the apparatus to "detect dissidents". The "icing on the cake" of this moral and political decomposition was when Luis Zamora brought flowers to the murderous military of La Tablada. To the rank and file militants of that party, this seemed normal. This morals of servants of the bourgeois state was instilled in the MAS militants as a by-product of a policy which they also maintained for years of "unionizing the police". They even had as a program "one police per team". You can corroborate what we are saying here since you belonged to MAS and went through that whole process.
We are awaiting your document in which you deepen your position and make explicit what your program is, which makes the construction of the revolutionary movement in this aspect. Apparently, your program is that the leadership bodies are the ones that rule, as judges, on the morality of the militants and of the tendencies or fractions that arise in that current. From now on, you are dangerously close to an openly Stalinist conception of party.
We are waiting to know your programmatic proposals that are derived from your political conception, which you are surely elaborating.
We have had a close political relationship with you for several years. This difference has arisen sharply recently, although we had been discussing specific issues in this regard. Until then we were not aware of your political evolution in this regard, which is clear from your note sent to us on 5/26. The best way to collaborate with your elaboration, which is in progress, is to give you these first opinions of ours, so that you can debate against them with more clarity.
We consider that you are a sympathizer of our organization and, as it is well known, you are not under the discipline of the centralist-democratic organisms of the same. You have been collaborating politically with us, based on political and programmatic agreements that we have. We have united some points of struggle against reformism and revisionism in Marxism.
Likewise, we have also had and still have sharp differences. Some of them have been published as Opinion Columns of yours in our website. The fact is that we give voice to every independent socialist who wants to contribute to the cause of the working class and who maintains certain political principles in the struggle against the system, the state and the traitorous leaderships.
Our current will be holding during the second half of this year an International Conference to evaluate the progress of the resolutions of our Fifth Congress.
We propose and we want you to know that when the pre-Conference period opens, we will publish the foundations of your minutes and of your difference that you are developing, in the Internal Bulletin towards the Conference. At that time we will open that debate with you as an item of the latter.
The International Conference of the International Conference of the FLTI then, would be the instance of debate that makes the foundational questions since the Congresses are the only ones that can resolve on the matter.
We are then waiting for the foundations of your position, respecting the time you consider necessary.
Toty, Villa, Alejandro, Raúl Palomares and Lourdes
For the International Executive Committee
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