This policy was described as one of entrism sui generis, entryism of a special kind, in which the Trotskyists were to join the Stalinist or Socialist mass parties with a long term perspective of working within them.
Some critics of the Open Letter counter that the SWP and their co-thinkers in The Club had failed to defend the French majority against Pablo, and that they had shared the 1951 perspectives of International on war-revolutions and the need for deep entryism in the Communist Parties.
The Open Letter went on to explain that, in the SWP's view, what it described as Pabloite Revisionism was the result of a lack of confidence in the revolutionary capabilities of the working class and an impressionistic, overly positive, assessment of the strength and prospects of Stalinism.
The supporters of the Open Letter read this to suggest there would be "centuries of deformed workers states", and this phrase is often mistaken attributed to Pablo or to his formulation of what was called the war-revolution thesis.
The founders of the ICFI wanted the International to maintain its organizational independence as the world party of the working-class, asserting that Pablo's policies would leave them an adjunct of the Stalinists.
An excerpt from the concluding part of the "Open Letter" reads: "To sum up: The lines of cleavage between Pablo’s revisionism and orthodox Trotskyism are so deep that no compromise is possible either politically or organizationally.
In the eyes of the ICFI, Pabloite entryism sui generis meant liquidationism or a permanent dissolution into the Communist Party in every country.
The ICFI sees similar pressures at work now: describing as "Pabloites" those former Trotskysists who today are enforcing IMF dictates in Brazil as members of the Lula government.
They maintained, however, the principle that only the Fourth International, as a consciously Marxist organization of the working class can lead the world revolution.
The SWP, partly because of McCarthyism and politically repressive laws, found it hard to cooperate on a world scale in a democratic centralist International.
The first conference could not take place until 1958, and the SWP officially only acted as observers at the event, being prevented from affiliating to the ICFI by US law[citation needed].
As early as the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the leadership of the American SWP was beginning to show signs of convergence with the developing political line of the organisations grouped in the ISFI.
In 1963 the SWP and the smaller Swiss, Canadian, Chinese and Latin American sections of the ICFI agreed to reunite with the ISFI at the World Congress, to form the United Secretariat of the Fourth International.
They saw the SWP's decision as an abandonment of the most basic principles of the Fourth International, and of Trotskyism, and as an attempt to ingratiate itself to the growing middle class protest movement in the United States.
They echoed the SWPs Open Letter, arguing that the leaders' turn to Pabloism coincided with the introduction of Stalinist ideas, followed by an expulsion of those members who exposed the leadership's lack of principles.
Robertson said this was due to exhaustion; the IC argued that Roberton's alleged refusal to apologise reflected a rejection of communist methods, and he was asked to leave.
The ICFI also says the Sparticists are nationalist in their orientation, refusing to be controlled by an international organization, as well as supporting politically affirmative action, black nationalism, Stalinist regimes and denying the existence of globalization.
This reflected growing differences, primarily over the OCI's support for the Partido Obrero Revolucionario (POR) and the SLL's emphasis on Marxist philosophy in the training of its newer members.
Some members of the SLL continued to support the OCI, later the PCI as it became known and set up the Socialist Labour Group in Britain, affiliated with the OCRFI and defending their positions.
In conjunction with a massive growth in membership and preparations for what they believed would be "mass influence", the SLL renamed itself the Workers Revolutionary Party in 1974 and remained a part of the ICFI along with affiliated sections in Ireland, Greece, Germany, Spain, Australia, the USA, Ceylon and Peru.
In the middle of the 1970s, two leaders of the ICFI group in the United States, Workers' League, developed political differences with the majority: Tim Wohlforth and Nancy Fields, his partner.
Intercontinental Press began a campaign denouncing the ICFI for the Wohlforth incident, with its editor Joseph Hansen writing that the concern over security indicated "paranoia" on the part of the IC's central leader, Gerry Healy.
The ICFI thought this reaction was surprising, given the role that state infiltration had played in the Trotskyist movement, including in the assassination of Trotsky.
In addition, this came only a few years after the revelations of the US government's Cointelpro program, in which the FBI illegally infiltrated many groups and political parties and conducted provocations against opponents of the war in Vietnam.
In May 1975, the sixth congress of the ICFI initiated a "Security and the Fourth International" investigation into "the circumstances surrounding the assassination of Leon Trotsky".
They noted that Joseph Hansen had met FBI agents numerous times over a number of months in 1940 to give them information about Stalinists in the US alleged to have participated in the assassination of Trotsky, and claimed that this was done without the knowledge of the Trotskyist movement.
The investigation of the ICFI later revealed that Cannon's secretary, Sylvia Callen, had been a Stalinist informer working through the CPUSA, and had been formerly married to a KGB agent, a fact that was confirmed by Grand Jury testimony.
Most Trotskyist organisations joined forces to defend the SWP leadership, including the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, Pierre Lambert's OCI, Nahuel Moreno's PST, Robertson's Spartacist League, the Chinese RCP, Lutte Ouvrière, the Revolutionary Workers Party in Sri Lanka and the SWP united to brand it "a Shameless Frame-up".
The various currents of the WRP attempted to found their own ICFIs each claiming to be the official one, yet they did not break with their old policies systematically and won no new international support.
(Source 'Marxist Review' September 2008 Volume 23 Issue Number 8) Anticipating an outbreak of US militarism after the collapse of the USSR,[7] the ICFI associated with the SEP prepared for a new radicalization of the working class.