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Core Argument¶
This chapter digest examines the alterations made to the International Conference document ‘The New Imperialist Peace and the Building of the Parties of the Fourth International’ between its original draft and the final published text, arguing that these changes represent a significant ideological shift that the document’s authors have failed to acknowledge or explain. The core narrative thrust is that the European Secretariat, having originally attacked the British RCP Majority’s amendments as counter to the general line, subsequently incorporated positions closely resembling those very amendments without attribution or admission, thereby obscuring rather than clarifying the real political differences within the International.
The chapter’s key claim is that the most striking unexplained change concerns the characterisation of regimes in Western Europe. The original draft, supported by the British Minority (Healy, Goffe, Finch) and figures such as Pierre Frank and William F. Warde, had consistently argued that Bonapartist or authoritarian regimes existed in countries like France, with Frank describing the French government as a “Bonapartist government covered with few democratic figleafs” and the editors of Fourth International insisting on the “Bonapartist character of the regime.” The British Majority had opposed this, proposing instead that these were “unstable bourgeois democratic regimes existing in a revolutionary period,” distinguished by the continued existence of mass working-class organisations and their rights, and warning that to declare Bonapartism already in place was to disarm the proletariat by implying its defeat.
The digest demonstrates that the final resolution deleted the original passage asserting that European finance capitalism had “grasped the state in an increasingly totalitarian vice” and was seeking “new authoritarian regimes” under a parliamentary cover. In its place, the text now acknowledges that the bourgeoisie, to halt the first revolutionary wave, had to concede “democratic” government, maintaining workers’ organisations and the right to strike, and that the proletariat “has not been decisively defeated in any country on the continent.” The final draft explicitly states that the bourgeoisie “prepares to go over to undisguised military or Bonapartist dictatorships” only in the future, not the present. Similarly, the original claim that only the “rapid construction” of revolutionary parties could prevent Bonapartist or fascist regimes was replaced with a conditional formulation: “Only if the Fourth International proves in the long run unable to build strong and influential sections.”
The chapter draws on the protracted internal discussion within the Fourth International over the nature of post-war European states, citing polemics from the US and France. It argues against the method of the European Secretariat and the editors of Quatrième Internationale and Fourth International, who presented the amended text as the original while suppressing the RCP’s amendments and offering no explanation for the shifts. The polemic is directed at the political dishonesty of correcting a position “empirically” without theoretical clarity, as when the Fourth International later suggested de Gaulle had merely “made a mistake” in attempting a Bonapartist dictatorship, rather than admitting the earlier characterisation was wrong. The chapter insists that such alterations, while welcome in content, serve only to obscure the real lessons and prevent the membership from understanding the political evolution at stake.