[Marxism] Re: Livio Maitan

["Richard Fidler" <rfidler@xxxxxxxxxx>]

The International Socialist Group writes:

"He was one of a small group of comrades who led the Fourth
International during the difficult years of the 1950s and early 1960s.
First elected in 1951, he remained a member of the International
leadership, reelected at each congress, until his death. Opponents of
the Fourth International talked about the "Mandel-Frank-Maitan"
leadership of the FI, following the departure of Pablo."

Comment:

I hate to rain on anyone's parade (least of all when it is funeral
procession), but a few clarifications are in order.

The reference to the "Mandel-Frank-Maitan" leadership (actually, the
Mandel-Maitan-Frank or "MMF" leadership) was not by "opponents of the
Fourth International"; the expression was coined, as I recall, by U.S.
Socialist Workers Party leaders in the late 1960s to describe a
developing but as yet undeclared faction within the FI's United
Secretariat that was represented by the above three individuals: Ernest
Mandel (Belgium), Pierre Frank (France) and Livio Maitan (Italy), who
signed as such in responses they wrote to criticisms of the majority
line on Latin America adopted at the FI's 9th World Congress in 1967.
That line had projected a "strategy" of rural-based guerrilla warfare on
a continental scale for adoption by the national sections of the FI in
Latin America. It was the contention of a minority of comrades led by
the SWP - and ultimately accepted by the majority, albeit not until
1976 -  that the attempted application of this line had a disastrous
effect on a number of Latin American sections, including some promising
groups in Argentina, Bolivia and Peru. Livio Maitan was the main
architect of that continental "strategy" (actually a tactic), and the
majority reporter on the question at both the 9th and 10th World
Congresses of the FI, and no real balance sheet on his life and
contributions (and there were many) should omit that story.

Although the SWP, which would have been the official U.S. section of the
FI, later abandoned the International in the 1980s, it led the fight for
almost a decade to reverse the error on Latin America and what it and
its allies regarded as a tendency within some FI sections outside Latin
America as well to emulate its adventurist premises. One of their
strongest arguments was of course the fact that at the very time the
line was being adopted in the 1960s the Cubans (whom Livio and others
had looked to for support) were rethinking their own conception of armed
struggle and beginning to critique strategies that relied on rural-based
guerrillas, under the influence of a growing urbanization and
proletarianization of the struggle throughout the continent. But that is
another story, the latest chapter of which is being written today in
Venezuela.

Richard Fidler
(delegate to the 10th World Congress, 1974
former member of FI International Executive Committee)


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