RE: [Marxism] Re: Livio Maitan

["Mark Lause" <MLause@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Richard Fidler wrote:

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.

My response:

The first time I heard the MMF bullshit, it was from the Sparts.  The
SWP leadership liked the sound and took it up later.  Anyway, this is
like listening to the Bushies blame Clinton for the economic
downturn...and terrorism, of course.  Much of this is pure and simple
sock puppet history that uncritically swallows the Barnes leadership's
interpretation of these problems permeates this description.  It sounds
as though the leadership of the European sections were forming a faction
against the International, while, in fact, it was only the SWP and its
satellites that took a directly different view of this.  More than most,
Livio flirted with guerilla warfare to destabilize authoritarian regimes
in Latin America, but the European sections and their leaderships were
not then--and never have espoused something that silly.

The portrayal of the SWP as the paragon of Trotskyist theory standing
against the barbaric hordes of European is worthy of a Monty Python skit
and little else.  It overlooks the obvious fact that the SWP's approach
(building left wings of existing unions, establishing youth groups,
running in elections, etc.) didn't work for its co-thinkers in Latin
America and that you also had the Sandinistas who came to power doing
it worked for Sandinistas, though, didn't it?

My point here is NOT that one side or another was right in the factional
battles of the early 1970s, but that neither can claim a clear
vindication without entirely rewriting history.  ....of course, I think
the SWP used to hold classes in that....

Solidarity!
Mark L.




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