12th World Congress

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in the April issue of Critique Communiste, the theoretical magazine of the LCR, and was translated in tull in the June 17, 1985, issue of International Viewpoint.

Question: In accordance with the stalemated world situation that you have just described, it seems that the forces of our International have not experienced any notable growth in the recent years. Five years after the last world congress, how does the strength of the Fourth International look in those countries where it has organizations?

Daniel Bensaid: Except in Mexico and to a lesser extent in Brazil, the International has not grown numerically since the Eleventh World Congress. Overall, we have maintained our forces. There have been gains in terms of new sections, mainly in Brazil, Uruguay, and Ecuador. Our first African section has been recognized in Senegal.

The fact that we have maintained our strength might seem to represent a static situation. But in Latin America, where we were badly weakened by the split that followed the Eleventh World Congress, the International has been rebuilt, consolidated, or advanced in most countries of the continent, leaving aside Central America.

In Europe, our strength has remained the same or declined in some cases. But at the same time we have made progress in terms of our organizations putting down social roots, stabilizing their functioning, and building leadership teams.

This is very important when you remember that after 1968 the organizational continuity of the sections emerging from entryism was precarious. In 15 years this capital has been rebuilt. In the last years it has been consolidated. Finally, the dominant note at our congress was a determination to go about political work differently.

Question: There, you have to make clear what you are talking about.

Bensaid: You have to remember that in the past, the International, not exclusively but mainly, served as a point of reference for analysis and for defending our program in the most general terms.

That was in part the inevitable result of isolation and having to struggle against the current, even though there was a constant striving to keep the connection with practical work and to do the utmost with our limited resources, as is shown by the help we gave to the Algerian revolution.

For example, we defended the concept of permanent revolution against the Stalinist theory of revolution by stages, with a feeling that from this flowed quite naturally the answer to political situations. For many sections there was no difference between putting forward their general ideas in propaganda and political activity in the form of initiatives, tactics, operations, answers to day-to-day political problems.

This situation was particularly dangerous because every concrete political response to a given problem tended to appear either as a direct confirmation or betrayal of the program. There was no flexibility, no room in between. This mechanism is no doubt behind a lot of the splits we have seen.

What is new is the idea that we are trying to respond to concrete political problems. We could for example discuss in general terms the permanent revolution, the worker-peasant alliance, determine whether in the context of the democratic tasks in antidictatorial struggles, we can make alliances with sections of the bourgeoisie.

But for all the Latin American sections today POLA d We offer a special introductory offer of three issues for $3. A sixmonth subscription is $22, and one year of International Viewpoint is available for $42. Subscribe now!

14 SOCIALIST ACTION OCTOBER 1985 Student upsurge in May 1968 in Paris. French Fourth Internationalists were in the leadership of this fight.

these questions are no longer something to be discussed on the level of principles alone or general theory. Because every one of them faces a concrete problem that it has to solve.

Should we be in the Izquierda Unida in Peru?' How should we fight against extending this coalition to the APRA, which is a full-fledged bourgeois party? How should the electoral battle be waged from this stand point?

In Brazil our comrades took part in the formation of a mass workers' party, the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT). But this. is neither the major nor the only party of the working class. How should we appeal to other sectors and continue to build the PT? This party exists as an independent working-class party. But independence in and of itself is not a complete class program.

In Uruguay, should we join the Frente Amplio, a broad front which does include a bourgeois party but also embodies the united resistance to the dictatorship, which has been the political expression of the united reorganization of the trade-union movement, which gave rise to a thousand local and street committees, etc. in Montevideo?

And if we should be in this front, what sort of fight should we wage in it? These are the problem that the sections want to discuss now.

Question: Fine. But there are still the basic problems that arose in the International under the impact of the Polish and Nicaraguan revolutions. What is more, our movement is absent as an active force from the Central American scene. How did the World Congress respond to this situation?

Bensaid: In a way, the Nicaraguan revolution represents a challenge for us. It is a revolution made by others, and at the beginning we understood it badly.

This situation could produce two extreme reactions in our ranks. One is to reject a programmatic The resolutions adopted by the 12th World Congress of the Fourth International are now available in a special issue of International Viewpoint. Copies of this issue can be purchased for only $6.00 from Socialist Action.

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Return to 3435 Army St. Rm. 308 San Francisco, CA 94110 guide that they think kept us from recognizing the Sandinista revolution and linking ourselves to it.

For the comrades who are developing this position in the International, the theory of permanent revolution is a sectarian theory that leads us away from understanding real processes. So, we have to get rid of it.

What remains valid about Trotsky, according to these comrades, is his defense of the traditions of the Third International, of its first four congresses. On the other hand, they think that what Trotsky added in the 1920s and the 1930s handicaps us This reaction could give rise to a debate counterposing revision and orthodoxy, which would have been disastrous. To the contrary, we tried through a concrete study of the Nicaraguan revolution to determine whether our programmatic guidelines were relevant and how they had to be updated.

Did the Sandinistas lead their revolution in spite of themselves, despite their policy of alliances with sections of the bourgeoisie, despite their conception of economic transition? Or did they do so thanks to their policy? Today, while we might make some criticisms of certain aspects, we recognize that the Sandinistas won thanks to their policy and not "in spite of it."

It is necessary to study this policy and to determine where it creates problems for us. We collectively reread Trotsky's work on permanent revolution and eliminate some confusion. While the bourgeois-democratic and socialist tasks of the revolution are not separated in time by a Chinese wall, they are not totally telescoped either. The proletariat can have different allies at different times in the revolutionary process.

Unfortunately, some Trotskyists put forward a version of the theory of permanent revolution in the dependent countries that resembles the one that the Stalinists criticize, that is, an ultra-leftist one, the struggle for power right away and not as the result of a revolutionary process that may "We are a current that has preserved an international view of revolution."

begin by struggles around democratic, antidictatorial, and national demands.

Another danger was to fall into a certain masochism and false humility. Other people have made revolutions. We should learn from them. We reject this. Of course, we always have to learn from experiences.

But we are a historical current that preserves one little thing in particular, an international view of revolution, which from its origins has represented an alternative to Stalinism. Unfortunately, today, even among revolutionists, you don't find very many who share our position of supporting both Solidarnosc in Poland and the revolution in El Salvador.

In the same way, we, who have maintained a programmatic tradition for decades, should not run away from it at the very time that other people in Latin America are discovering that the democratic and socialist phases of the revolution are part of the same process, when the Salvadoran Communist Party, under the pressure of events, is rejecting the old Menshevik and Stalinist theory of "two revolutions," a democratic one and a socialist one separated in time.

It is not for us to retreat at a time like that! There iș no reason to hang your head or eat humble pie when history proves you right.

We can integrate ourselves completely into this rethinking and re-examination if we are involved in the work and are an integral part of the process. The determination to do this was general in the World Congress and there was a confidence in the role that the International can play if we are clear about what can be done and achieved today.

1-Izquierda Unida (Left Unity) is an electoral coalition whose dominant component is the Peruvian Communist Party. It includes within it bourgeois political representatives and is committed to a program that goes no further than radical reforms within capitalist boundaries-Socialist Action.

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