Given that the average age for a United Kingdom postal worker is around fifty-five, it is a fair bet that the majority of postal workers have witnessed over four decades of betrayals by the Communication Workers Union(CWU).

A small number of postal workers in their late sixties or seventies, believe it or not, are still working. They would remember the first national postal strike in 1971[1]. I raise this matter because the most pressing question facing postal workers at the moment is the issue of leadership.

Over the last five decades, postal workers have witnessed betrayal after betrayal and have seen their pay and working conditions decimated. It is time to face the facts: the CWU is nothing more than a company union that is doing the current owner, Daniel Kretinsky’s, dirty work. There is no line it will not cross to impose Amazon-style working conditions that will turn Royal Mail into an Amazon-style company with all the implications that entails.[2]

Postal workers have not been taking these attacks by the company and the union lying down. They have met these attacks head-on with every weapon at their disposal. However, it is time to face the facts: the old way of struggle has not worked. Do not get me wrong, I am not saying not to strike, but what is the new perspective that postal workers must fight for?

Leadership is an art. As the Russian Marxist Leon Trotsky said, “There is an ancient, evolutionary-liberal epigram: Every people gets the government it deserves. History, however, shows that the same people may in the course of a comparatively brief epoch get very different governments (Russia, Italy, Germany, Spain, etc.) and that the order of these governments doesn’t at all proceed in the same direction: from despotism to freedom as was imagined by the evolutionist liberals. The secret is this, that a people is comprised of hostile classes, and the classes themselves are comprised of different and in part antagonistic layers which fall under different leadership; furthermore, every people falls under the influence of other peoples who are likewise comprised of classes. Governments do not express the systematically growing “maturity” of a “people”. Still, they are the product of the struggle between different classes and the different layers within the same class, and, finally, the action of external forces – alliances, conflicts, wars and so on. To this should be added that a government, once it has established itself, may endure much longer than the relationship of forces which produced it. It is precisely out of this historical contradiction that revolutions, coup d’etats, counterrevolutions, etc., arise.

The very same dialectic approach is necessary in dealing with the question of the leadership of a class. Imitating the liberals, our sages tacitly accept the axiom that every class gets the leadership it deserves. In reality, leadership is not at all a mere “reflection” of a class or the product of its own unrestrained creativeness. Leadership is shaped in the process of clashes between the different classes or the friction between the various layers within a given class. Having once arisen, the leadership invariably arises above its class and thereby becomes predisposed to the pressure and influence of other classes. The proletariat may “tolerate” for a long time a leadership that has already suffered a complete inner degeneration but has not as yet had the opportunity to express this degeneration amid significant events. A great historic shock is necessary to reveal sharply the contradiction between the leadership and the class. The mightiest historical shocks are wars and revolutions; precisely for this reason, the working class is often caught unawares by war and revolution.[3]

It is pretty clear that postal workers have been caught unawares by the unprecedented nature of the attacks on their pay and conditions. They have, in Trotsky’s words, witnessed a great historical shock. It is time to face reality square on and realise that the CWU is dead and is just waiting to be buried.

Postal workers have tolerated the CWU for a long time because they did not really have an alternative, but now they do. Firstly, they have the World Socialist Website (wsws.org). Its analysis has been second to none in terms of accuracy and perspective. It offers a new way forward for postal workers. The CWU bureaucracy knows it is in a fight to the finish, so much so that it has lashed out at the WSWS on several occasions.[4]

Postal workers need a new organisation. The way forward is the struggle to build the Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee (PWRFC). Although it is small at the moment, it has the only socialist perspective to take on both the CWU bureaucracy and Royal Mail. While it must join and build this new organisation, the task facing postal workers is a political one. The philosopher Hegel was fond of saying, “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the coming of the dusk”, and this is true for postal workers today. To be blunt, postal workers do not have much time to build this leadership. Any delay in building the PWRFC will mean that, soon, there will be nothing left to defend.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1971_United_Kingdom_postal_workers_strike

[2] UK postal workers discuss fightback against gutting of Royal Mail and Kretinsky takeover-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/04/29/zmzb-a29.html

[3] The Class, the Party and the Leadership-https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1940/xx/party.htm

[4] Communication Workers Union’s Martin Walsh attacks WSWS over opposition to “USO reform” pilots- http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/04/01/nxgz-a01.html

Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.

Matthew 7:16-20 King James Version

“By your friends shall ye be known”

Proverb

“That, in a Europe blood-stained by more than four years of total war, crushed under the most hideous yoke of the imperialisms, whose prisons and concentration camps are gorged with the victims of the most savage and most systematic repression, our organization has been able to hold its European assembly, to work out and define its political line of struggle, of itself constitutes the most eloquent manifestation of its vitality, its internationalist spirit, and the revolutionary ardour by which it is animated.

Fourth International statement

“The objective prerequisites for the proletarian revolution have not only ‘ripened,’ they have begun to get somewhat rotten.”

Leon Trotsky

Michel Pablo, a renegade from Trotskyism, died at the age of eighty-four in 1996. Pablo’s betrayal of his former political principles was aptly celebrated by the Greek ruling elite at the time. When he died, the PASOK (Panhellenic Socialist Movement) government gave him a state funeral. As the proverb says, “By your friends shall ye be known”

Hall Greenland’s biography of Pablo is the first of its kind. Alex de Jong, writing for the Pabloite International Viewpoint, believes “He’s (Pablo) finally gotten the biography he deserves.”[1]De Jong is correct because this is a politically naive account and largely absolves Pablo of his treachery. Anyone expecting anything different from a member of the Green Party is going to be sadly disappointed.

However, Greenland’s book is not without some merit, tracing Pablo’s early political life. Pablo attended the founding conference of Leon Trotsky’s Fourth International and took part alongside fellow Trotskyists in the anti-Nazi resistance in wartime France. The book describes how many Trotskyists during the war years were living on borrowed time; not only were they hunted by the Gestapo, but they were murdered in droves by the Stalinists.

Many writers, including Greenland, imply that despite some heroics, Trotskyists played “little or no part in the struggle to project a revolutionary defeatist line,”

But as the Marxist David North points out, “ outside the Fourth International, there was no other tendency in the workers’ movement that opposed the imperialist war! The Trotskyists were hounded and persecuted by a “popular front” of fascists, “democratic” imperialists and Stalinists precisely because they upheld the banner of revolutionary defeatism and proletarian internationalism.

He continues, “The French Trotskyists Marc Bourhis and Pierre Gueguen were executed by the Nazis on October 22, 1941. Their comrade Jules Joffre was shot in 1942. In October 1943, the secretary of the French section, Marcel Hic, was arrested by the Gestapo, deported to Buchenwald and then to Dora, where he was murdered. Dozens of other French Trotskyists were arrested and also perished in the Nazi death camps. Despite the repression, the Trotskyist PCI published, starting in August 1940, seventy-three clandestine issues of its newspaper, La Verité, whose circulation was 15,000 copies.”[2]

Despite describing how the Stalinists murdered Trotskyists at will Greenland follows in the footsteps of every Stalinist, Pabloite and related middle-class radical organizations, and the intellectually corrupt academic milieu of pseudo-leftists who in the words of North “continue to ignore, deprecate and deny the overwhelming evidence that the penetration of the US Socialist Workers Party SWP by GPU agents played a critical role in the assassination of Trotsky. The role of Sylvia Callen (a.k.a. Sylvia Franklin, Sylvia Caldwell, Sylvia Doxsee), the personal secretary of James P. Cannon, as a GPU spy has been conclusively established. The same is true for Robert Sheldon Harte.”[3]

There are many problems with this book. The main one being is Greenland’s complete lack of understanding of the origins and nature of Pablo’s opportunism and subsequent betrayals caused by this opportunism. It is impossible to go into any great detail of Pabloite opportunism. For anyone interested, David North’s The Heritage We Defend is the best starting point.

As North points out in his book, the origins of Pablo’s opportunism began over the debate over the class nature of Yugoslavia and the Eastern European buffer states had become transformed, under the pressure of alien class forces, into a political platform for sweeping opportunist revisions of the basic Trotskyist program and its historical perspective. Pablo was the living embodiment of Trotsky’s sayings, “Without correct theory, there cannot be correct politics or more precisely, ‘every sociological definition is at the bottom a historical prognosis.”

North writes, “ The theories advanced by Pablo of ‘generations of deformed workers’ states” and “war-revolution” articulated the pessimism and demoralisation of broad layers of the Fourth International beneath the impact of unfavourable objective conditions. The political conceptions which were to become known as Pabloism emerged as an adaptation to the restabilization of capitalism, on the one hand, and to the apparent strengthening of the Stalinist bureaucracy, on the other.

Refracted through the political prism of the Cold War, the objective situation appeared to be dominated by the global conflict between the imperialist forces, spearheaded by the United States, and the Soviet Union and those labour and national revolutionary movements dominated by Stalinism. The real underlying conflict between the world bourgeoisie and the international proletariat—of which the Cold War was only a partial and distorted manifestation—receded from the political consciousness of those within the Fourth International who were reacting impressionistically to world events.[4]

Pablo’s capitulation to hostile class forces was not a pretty one to watch and had disastrous consequences for the working class. After he rejected revolutionary politics, Pablo, up to his death, was a supporter of ecology movements and women’s liberation. Along with his other renegades from Trotskyism, Ernest Mandel Pablo, he advocated not the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism but that workers should undertake a form of Self-Management to counteract capitalism’s attacks on them.

Pablo advocated ‘generalised self-management or direct democracy’. He utilised his friendship with the Algerian bourgeois nationalists to put this experiment into practice. As Peter Schwarz writes, “Pablo himself and other leading French Pabloites placed themselves unconditionally at the service of the Algerian Liberation Front (FLN), and took over organisational responsibilities, such as the printing of illegal newspapers, fake banknotes and counterfeit passports. They even set up a weapons factory in Morocco. After the victory of the FLN over the French colonial regime, Pablo entered into the service of the Algerian government. As special advisor to the head of state, Ben Bella, Pablo was responsible for the introduction in Algerian factories of the forms of “workers’ self-management” first initiated in post-war Yugoslavia.”[5]

In his book Self-management in the struggle for socialism, Pablo explains, “In the economic sphere, the purpose of the plan is to determine the general conditions under which the self-managed enterprises can act and coordinate their efforts for the ultimate interests of society as a whole. We use the term social rather than economic plan to stress the fact that the plan seeks the balanced overall evolution of the society towards socialism, and that this affects the determination of so-called economic aims; the real aim of the plan is to satisfy the real social needs of the working people and citizens, with decisions made democratically from the bottom up and vice-versa, in a process of interaction which is constantly readjusting the objectives sought, even while the plan is being executed.[6]

As the above quote shows, Pablo’s self-management plan would be introduced peacefully and with the full cooperation of the capitalists; at no stage did Pablo advocate, let alone attempt, the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.

Although Greenland’s book is the first and only biography of Pablo, it should not be the last. It is incumbent on the Trotskyist movement to write its biography of this renegade from Trotskyism to train and arm future revolutionaries as to the nature of Pablo’s opportunism and betrayals.

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[1] The Revolutionary Life and Times of Michel Pablo-internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article8471

[2] The Fourth International in World War II-The Heritage we Defend-www.wsws.org/en/special/library/heritage/07.html

[3] The place of Security and the Fourth International in the history of the Trotskyist movement-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/08/14/dujg-a14.html

[4] The Nature of Pabloite Opportunism-The Heritage We Defend

[5] The politics of opportunism: the “radical left” in France-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2004/05/lft4-m22.html

[6] Self-management in the struggle for socialism-https://www.marxists.org/archive/pablo/1972/selfman/main.htm