Re: J.P. Cannon on the Vanguard Party

["Alan Bradley" <alanb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

A quick and slightly silly comment on the Fourth International in general.
I will read the Cannon article in more depth later.

> From: "Richard Fidler"
> However, Cannon does subsequently cite this assertion in the TP,
> together with Trotsky's categorical statement that "the crisis of the
> proletarian leadership ... can be resolved only by the Fourth
> International," the World Party of the Socialist Revolution [sic]. And
> Cannon concludes his essay with a similar statement.

I was thinking about this stuff last night, and it occured to me that all
the relatively healthy "Marxist" currents in Australia today are more or
less derived from Trotskyism.  The currents that were derived from the CPA
have either ceased to exist or are moribund.

The Third International is dead.  It's time for the Fourth to show what it
is capable of.

The situation in other countries varies, of course.

> - - "The vanguard party cannot be proclaimed by sectarian fiat...." This
> is in clear contradiction with the Cannon declarations referred to
> earlier.  This view was so widely held in the Fourth International in my
> time (roughly 1960-1980) that some members of our youth organization in
> Canada had satirized it with a song to the effect that the road to
> revolution can't be travelled by a sectarian Fiat!

:)  I have saved this for referring to other comrades.

It might help explain, though, why the Left is so often protrayed as
humourless:  this is a very obscure joke that nobody else is likely to
understand!

Alan Bradley
alanb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx