FOURTH INTERNATIONAL
ENGLISH - LANGUAGE EDITION OF THE THEORETICAL ORGANOF THE
INTERNATIONALEXECUTIVE COMMITTEE OF THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL
REFLECTIONS ON
INTERNATIONAL PROSPECTS imagination could have grasped a still short time ago, tionably the event of capital importance which cur-
Number 5
Editorial
The year 1959 began by endowing the life of man with a new dimension, that of the exploration of interplanetary space, the earth's attraction having been overcome by a human device that has become a satellite of the sun.
This is a fantastic exploit of man's science and technics, of his collective social power, a sure guarantee that no barrier will remain impassable to this power, which in truth has no limits.
Yet the marvelous conquest of nature contrasts more than ever with the uneven development of human society and its organization, so far from rational and scientific. Normally the men and women of this planet ought to be saluting, in the streets and public places, the flight of this cosmic rocket toward the sun. Instead, tormented by the fear inspired in them by the social use of this extraordinary feat, by the fear of atomic rockets in a possible conflict between what it has now become customary to call the East and the West, they have generally remained, in appearance at least, as blasés and unstirred as toward some minor news item from daily life.
As for the masters of the camp opposed to that which first launched this rocket, reaction was not slow in coming in what may be called the mad logic of the super-arms race : since "our Atlas" is outclassed, we must add new hundreds of millions of dollars to the already fantastic expenditures of "the rocket economy" in order to pick up the challenge and catch up on the lag as quickly as possible.
At the moment when there are opening up to humanity newer and more exalting horizons of activity and knowledge than anything that the most fertile
Winter 1959 it is realized that humanity has now got itself into a sort of impasse. Never has the contrast been more striking between scientific prospects concerning nature and immediate social perspectives.
In what does this present feeling of the impasse of post-war society consist? Mainly in a feeling of the powerlessness of the autonomous movement of the masses in face of the privileged minorities who are ruling in the West and East. This state of affairs tends to prevail especially among the worker and intellectual vanguard militants of a number of countries in the East and of the capitalist countries of Europe and North America.
In the countries of the East, this is the almost inevitable result of the disillusion that followed on the great hopes, just after Stalin's death, about the possibility of a rapid and unswerving destalinization and an opening up of socialist democracy and its new humanism. The fact that destalinization is currently blocked at the level of the Khrushchev period acts as a regressive and centrifugal factor in the ranks of a vanguard that had just begun to regroup ideologically and organizationally.
In the capitalist countries of the West we are witnessing the spread of a certain dismay in the most conscious circles of the revolutionary vanguard, who suddenly realize to what a degree the situation of the workers' movement has worsened as a result of long years of the impotent, opportunist, and class-collaborationist policy of the Socialist and Stalinist leaderships.
The fall of the French Fourth Republic is unques-
2 rently weighs on the whole of the workers' movement, particularly the European, and of which all the consequences have not yet been deduced.
In both the East and West, it is now as if revolutionary prospects had been temporarily blocked and as if the determinant actions in the world were now developing only on the plane of the policies of states and their antagonisms. But, on this same plane, a question is being raised without a clear and satisfactory answer : Are we evolving toward war, or are we witnessing a period of prolonged "peaceful coexistence" ?
It would be useless and harmful to deny that revolutionary prospects must now be reëxamined in detail, on the basis of the new situation that has been created in the world, globally and by regions. But any examination that took into account essentially the phenomenology of the situation and not its deeper tendencies, would be able to reach results only of slight validity, if indeed not completely false.
The difficulty of being specific about revolutionary prospects arises in reality from the extreme complexity of the factors currently determining the situation and its dynamism. Any analysis will be able only to schematize broadly. And yet this analysis is necessary.
The present situation is unquestionably characterized by the temporary ebb of the political revolution in the countries of the East, and of the socialist revolution' in the capitalist countries of the West. This contrasts with the steady progress of the colonial revolution, whose achievements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America continue to be spectacular.
On another plane, the advance taken by the rate of expansion of the economy of the USSR and the other workers' states is being confirmed and is speeding up. It is a question now of getting a better grasp of these fundamental traits of the present situation, each in itself and in their interpenetration, in order to derive therefrom some dominant perspectives and tasks. * THE PROSPECTS OF THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION
The ebb of the political revolution in the East as a result of the halting of the Polish and Hungarian Octobers, the stiffening of the bureaucracy in the US SR and in China, and the marking time, as it of destalinization at the Khrushchevian level, must be understood as a transitional stage in a context where basic forces are active in preparing inevitably a new and more advanced phase in the struggle against the bureaucracy. The fundamental fact in this field is the following: the speeded-up economic and cultural advance of the masses of the Soviet Union and of the other workers states, in the international context, confirms the establishment of a correlation of forces favorable to the Revolution.
This fact far-and-away predominates over passing defeats and stimulates the regrouping of the forces of
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL the political revolution. All the retreats and crimes of Khrushchev must not obscure the fact that the US SR is no longer in Stalinist times, that the terror and arbitrariness of the police have been considerably reduced, as well as the forms of mass physical extermination of opponents.
These are some of the manifestations of a new relationship being established between the bureaucracy and the masses, the pressure of the latter steadily increasing and imperceptibly erasing the picture of the Stalinist period.
The situation has naturally gone backward in Poland without having fallen to the level of that prior to October 1956, and especially in China, which is at present throwing all its weight into the adoption of a style of neo-Stalinist orthodoxy. But the contribution of China to the evolution of Stalinism is in reality more complex. Practice, quite empirical though it be, remains in China essentially revolutionary and independent of the Soviet "model." China is following its own paths, and this fact is going to become more and more one of the main ferments of contradictions within the international Stalinist bureaucracy.
And finally there is the nowise negligible fact of the Jugoslav way, which has received a very clear expression in the elaboration of the new programme of the Jugoslav Communists. The fact that a mass Communist current has separated from Stalinism on very important questions of doctrine, with brilliance and success, is in one sense a highly encouraging and significant historical event. In fact it points out the inevitable path on which the communist tendency in all the workers' states must set out as soon as it begins to meditate with its own head about the problems of socialist construction during the period of transition.
The prospect in the workers' states, and in the first place in the USS R, is not a return to Stalin, but "destalinization" distorted through the Khrushchevian experence, which for the moment combines concessions, promises, and reforms, with the tendency to forbid ideological and political expressions that inva•riably bring the bureaucracy into question. EBB OF THE EUROPEAN WORKERS MOVEMENT
In reality what is now weighing heaviest on the world socialist vanguard is the ebb of the revolutionary movement in the capitalist countries, in Western Europe and especially in the United States.
Marxists had too long cherished the schema of the European revolution, and partly even that of the American revolution, considered as the vanguard uf the world revolution, to be able to get used to the picture now presented by the workers' movement in these countries, the de facto rear-guard of the world revolution for a number of years already.
The revolution in the developed capitalist countries was long considered the precondition for the victory of the colonial revolution and of the political revo-
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL lution in the US SR. What then is to be concluded from the present situation of the revolutionary movement in the capitalist countries? Must the abdication of this movement from its leading role in the world revolution be furthermore accepted as definitive?
All these questions, and still others, emerge inescapably into consciousness as a result particularly of the recent evolution in Europe and the United States, which culminated in the defeat of the French Fourth Republic. The imperceptible passing over of the initiative to the bourgeoisie almost everywhere in these countries; the growing disaffection of the masses toward the traditional parties and even the trade unions; the very considerable lowering of the activity and spontaneous combativity of the masses; the strengthened anti-parliamentary tendencies - these are the very clear characteristics of this evolution. Naturally the intensity of these characteristics perceptibly differs from one country to another. - The ease and speed with which the French Republic was overthrown, without any remarkable reactions being shown either in the traditional parties or in the class, expressed in the highest degree what appears to be the general sag in class reactions at the present stage in Europe.
Certain apologists for a so-called "updated socialism" have already hastened to doubt even the objective existence of the working class, and to explain this sag by the pretext of so-called structural social and economic transformations in capitalism. These gentlemen, in order the better to excuse their own powerless reformist policy — no less responsible than that of the Mollets, Gaitskells, and Brandts, for the degradation of the European Socialist movement -raise the doubt whether there still exists a social regime, a class, and a state, of an essence that is more capitalist than ever.
The de Gaulle experience in France soon gave these "new" questions a smashing answer. The state — supposedly an arbiter, inter-class, administered by a bureaucracy and a technocracy allegedly independent of big capital — has just imposed an economic and general policy in contormity at all points with the well understood interests of big capital at the present moment in the French and international conjuncture, and to the obvious detriment of the class of wage-earners, the latter losing at one blow a very large part of the economic and political gains painfully achieved in the years of euphoric expansion of French capital-
The social nature of the regime, of the state, the reciprocal relations among classes, and the reality or unreality of capitalism, the reality or unreality of the class of wage-earners — all these questions were instantly cleared up in the garish light of the policy of the new regime in France, which represents the greatest concentration of power that French big capital has known since at least the end of the last war.
In periods of the continuous expansion of capital-
3 ism, there is created the illusion of a society run essentially by the play of political democracy, viz, bourgeois parliamentarianism, in which the proletariat and wage-earners in general are somehow dissolved in the different professional categories, often making demands each on a different and sometimes even opposed level. But it suffices for the conjuncture to turn to crisis (economic, or financial, or political) for the class mechanism of society to appear clearly, the state in the hands of big capital endeavoring to apply a line that aims precisely at surmounting the crisis and strengthening the position of capital thanks to "national" sacrifices hitting the whole of one class -suddenly homogenized socially - that of the wage-earners, ie, all those paid at about the level of an industrial worker.
There has thus been verified one of the essential principles of revolutionary Marxism, that in reality, without an effective control over the state by the wage-earners, it is hardly possible to ensure substantial and continuous gains under the capitalist regime. The guarantee and integration of "reforms" are to be found in the conquest of the state, i e, in the Revolution.
The sag in class reactions that we are at present observing in Europe is not due to a so-called destructuration of the working class, as a result of an evolution stripping capitalism of its essence. It is due essentially to the disorientation, disillusion, and weariness of the masses who for years on end followed the traditional Socialist and Communist Parties. These parties, when they were not flatly applying the policy of capital, limited themselves in the best of cases to a practice as powerless as it was anachronistic, partial demands and reforms within the capitalist framework. Now such a policy, absurd in relation to the socialist goal these parties claim to have, is inacceptable also to capitalism, which is not working for the construction of the welfare state on earth, but for as productive and competitive a production apparatus as possible,
This policy has resulted in depoliticizing the masses from the class viewpoint, disorganizing them as a class, and lastly wearying them by its routine and
True, the economic conjuncture of capitalism in these last years, characterized by continuous expansion, has accentuated the sag in class reactions by affording the possibility of an improvement in living levels obtained essentially by family overwork. In reaction away from the parties and trade unions, ineffective and devoid of prospects, the ideologically atomized class has taken refuge in individual material solutions. There has thus occurred a certain effective de politicization of the working class, due essentially to the behavior of the traditional leaderships, and only in the second place to the effects of the conjuncture.
The workers' defeat in France, however, is going
4 to show that partial gains or individual solutions cannot in the long run resist the ups-and-downs and the contradictory demands of the evolution of capitalism. In France at present the masses are undergoing at the hands of capitalism an offensive of unusual brutality. There is admittedly the danger that, caught unprepared by this offensive, and lacking on the political plane parties capable of making an adequate coun ter-attack, the masses may undergo even graver defeat by the transformation of the Bonapartist regime of de Gaulle into open fascism.
Nothing yet shows, however, that this transformation could be carried out in a completely peaceful way. In any case, the trend is toward an aggravation of the class struggle in France, with profound and original repercussions on the structure of the workers' movement in that country, and its ideological and organizational regrouping.
There will furthermore be seen in Europe generally a stepping-up of the offensive of the bourgeoisie, cheered by its victory in France and spurred on by the needs of revived international competition. Class tensions will therefore grow in all the capitalist countries, but in a correlation of forces which is at the present stage unfavorable to the proletariat.
In what way will the evolution of the economic conjuncture intervene? We must not count on a prolonged aggravation of the current recession, transforming itself within a foreseeable future into a classical cyclic crisis of great scope. European capitalism now possesses "dirigist" means, on its own scale comparable to those of American capitalism, to keep the economic ebb within the limits of a "recession" and not a genuine crisis with abrupt and catastrophic developments.
It is necessary to expect rather a slowing down of the rate of expansion, a certain amount of unemployment, and especially a perceptible decrease in overtime; simultaneously a direct lowering of the masses' living standards in order to avoid internal inflation and to support an increased effort toward competitive exports.
In general an economic climate that should not be judged to be unfavorable to resistance and counter-offensive by the workers provided that these are illuminated by more general political prospects.
The case of Spain should be seperately emphasized, as a real possibility of the eruption of a genuine revolutionary hotbed in Europe, despite the counter-blow received through the events in France. In Spain the economic situation is again rapidly worsening, and the maintenance of the Franco dictatorship is leading this country into a genuine impasse.
In the Far East the case of Japan must also be borne in mind: the only big capitalist country that is passing through a genuine revolutionary crisis, where the working class, with astonishing dynamism, is engaged in writing some of the finest pages of contemporary proletarian struggles.
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL THE PLACE AND PROSPECTS ÖF THE COLONIAL REVOLUTION
The most striking contrast that has imperceptibly been created between the situation of the workers' movement in the advanced capitalist countries and the colonial revolution lies in the vigor of the spontaneous reactions of the masses in the colonial and dependent countries in spite of the lack or weakness of proletarian leadership. The much more explosive social and political contradictions of these societies, and the much graver effects on these countries of the present recession and the general fluctuations of capitalism, stimulate a revolutionary activity of their masses that is without possible comparison with that of the advanced capitalist countries.
The considerations of capital importance to be kept in mind in this field are the following:
These societies are at present striving to emerge from their colonial or semi-colonial condition by engaging in a struggle for the liquidation of the consequences of imperialism, and for industrialization. New bourgeois strata in formation are now emerging from the position of compradores and are capitalizing on this process in their own favor. They are often, directly or through petty-bourgeois ideologists, at the head of the current phase of the colonial revolution. But there is no chance for them to catch up with the advanced industrial countries by the path of capitalist development, for evolution now works out in a direction that aggravates rather than lessens the gap between the colonial and dependent countries and the advanced countries. The economic fluctuations of capitalism, furthermore, however slight they may be for the advanced countries, are felt in underdeveloped countries as genuine crises.
As a result, the colonial revolution has a dynamism :. * that cannot be exhausted by its reaching some given stage of capitalist stabilization, but which drives it to grow over into a socialist revolution. For this reason the colonial revolution is in fact at the present moment in the vanguard of the socialist revolution, and has in practice taken over the role formerly played by the European revolution.
The greatest chances for a whole period to see the socialist revolution progress exist in fact, objectively and subjectively (from the viewpoint of the spontaneous activity of the masses), in the colonial and dependent countries. It is necessary to start out squarely from this observation, which flows from a reëvaluation of the objective and subjective conditions of the revolution at the present stage, draw all the conclusions therefrom, and take action in consequence.
In this view, the revolution in the advanced capitalist countries appears as broadly influenced by the advances of the colonial revolution, which sap the possibilities of capitalist stabilization and the economic foundations of reformism.
In this concrete process of the development of the
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL socialist revolution in our time, where the colonial revolution aids and in a way prepares the revolution in the advanced countries, it was necessary for the workers' parties in the metropolitan countries to work to the maximum extent for an effective tie-up between the metropolitan movement and the colonial revolution, by according the latter an unconditional and active support. But instead of that, these parties, hostile to revolutionary prospects, in reality acted as instruments for transmitting the instinctive repulsion which the progress of the colonial revolution caused among the social strata who profited from the imperialist exploitation of these underdeveloped countries.
The degree of depoliticization and the sag in class reaction of the workers' movement in the capitalist countries is shown especially in an indifference, if not a passive hostility, toward the colonial revolution. Naturally the development of the latter is seriously han- dicapped by the factual break with the metropolitan
There is a risk that the phase of bourgeois-democratic leadership of the colonial revolution will drag on before the clearer autonomous role of the proletariat and its parties emerges.
In any case, the prospects for the colonial revolution remain wide open in the different countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In Asia (in Indonesia, Ceylon, India, Iraq and the other countries of the Middle East) ; in practically all of Africa; and in Latin America — the revolution has real and relatively short-term chances.
The Iraq, Algerian, Bolivian, Colombian, Venezuelan, and Cuban revolutions, and the tireless activity of the Argentine and Chilean proletariats for years on end, are some sufficiently eloquent illustrations of " the degree of strength of the mass movement in these countries.
At the same moment that a big capitalist country with the long democratic and revolutionary traditions of France was succumbing without a fight to the blackmail of a military-political camarilla at the service of big capital, the Algerian people, deprived of everything, has been standing up for more than four years already to the bulk of the military forces of French imperialism, while the army of partisans of Fidel Castro, starting out with practically nothing two years ago, has overthrown a ferocious dictatorship, under the very nose of it powerful protector, Yankee imperialism.
In the underdeveloped countries, the mobilization of a whole people, resorting to the highest forms of struggle, has to a certain extent made up for the lack of leaderships. In the developed countries the "going bourgeois," the opportunism, and the reformism of the policy of the traditional parties is otherwise determinant of the activity of the class. Here, without a revolutionary leadership which- not just occasionally but for years on end — advocates and applies a consistent class line, often against the current of the inas-
5 ses reformist illusions, it is scarcely possible to exploit the moments of revolutionary crises which ripen only at intervals, often a good ten years, if not more, apart.
The revolutionary fire of the masses of the underdeveloped countries is the expression of both their intolerable living conditions and their lack of a skepticism natural to politically organized classes who have matured in a series of disappointing experiences. The masses of the underdeveloped countries first plunge fully into the fight and leave it till afterward to see where they are going. The metropolitan masses, taught by experience, get thoroughly involved only on the basis of trust in the organization and policy of their leaderships. THE DEVELOPMENT OF EAST-WEST RELATIONS
It remains to examine the international prospects that emerge from the development of the relations between the states of the East and the West.
Will these relations evolve toward war or will they stay within the framework of a ". peaceful coexistence" ?
Everybody seems at present to have reached the conclusion that "coexistence" is in any case not possible on the basis of the plain status quo, which is an abstraction, but that it must be looked at in its dynamics. On this point both Khrushchev and Dulles are now in agreement.
Now what are these dynamics? On the strictly economic level, the new element is the confirmation of a rate of steady expansion of the economy of the US S R and the other workers' states that is more than double (7 % against 3 %) the average attributed to the development of the American economy in its boom periods.
It results from this that we have in fact entered the decisive decade which may see the gap between the Soviet economy and the US economy considerably reduced, and the US SR reach — at least in certain important branches of agricultural and industrial production — a per capita production higher than in the United States.
Just calculate the explosive implications of such a trend.
What is more, this lead in the rate of expansion taken by the workers' states will enable them to increase their exchanges with the underdeveloped countries and compete very seriously with imperialism in this field, so important, if not crucial, for the latter.
Granted, capitalism is going to react to these prospects, which can in the long run quietly settle its fate, including on the economic plane, by developing "dirigist" and "planning" elements on an equally "supernational" scale to the maximum extent compatible with its anarchic, antagonistic, and contradictory nature. There is no doubt but that, clutched in a daily struggle to the death with the workers' states, capitalism finds therein a sort of stimulus to its own development.
The European Common Market, the trend toward
6 a united Europe, the concessions that the United States may be led to make to the Latin American bourgeoifinally granting their request for a customs union and the creation of a bank of Latin American investments; the constantly renewed efforts of the United States to get hold of Arab nationalism and the panAfricanism of N'Krumah for its own advantage ; increased economic aid to India - all these attempts and plans contain real possibilities of seeing a strengthening of capitalism's dynamism, and must not be minimized. The main reaction of imperialism, however, to the threats involved for its regime in the economic strengthening of the workers' states will not be able to be shown on the economic plane but on the politico-military plane: alliances, bases, and arms.
The plans, or the economic gains, are invariably transformed 'into politico-military strong cards played by each adversary against the other in the game of "coexistence." Thus the projected unification of capitalist Europe is clearly aimed at tying Western Germany up inseparably with the Atlantic alliance and permitting the atomic rearming of all this part of Europe.
All those who cherish the hope that a "neutralized" and "disarmed" Western or "unified" Germany may be the price of a major bargain between the East and West guaranteeing for years a competitive "coexistence" on the economic plane, fail to recognize realities and fundamental interests.
Even if they leave aside the economic integration of East Germany in the Soviet bloc and of West Germany in the Europe of the Six, and even if they visualize the transitional formula of a "confederation" of the two German states, it would remain to be seen whether the Atlantic bourgeoisie would ever be able to accept depriving itself of one of its most dynamic elements, at the risk of seeing its military situation in Europe and the world gravely deteriorate.
The Kremlin is currently reopening the question of Berlin and Germany, on the one hand because it considers that it has attained — at least momentarily — military superiority, and on the other hand because it is forced to find a way out of the situation of instability and ferment that the existence of West Berlin involves for the Eastern zone. The Kremlin believes that it is in a position to bring about a change in the status quo in these fields that will be favorable to itself. But imperialism cannot retreat very far on these questions without causing a more general retreat and disintegration of its positions in Europe and throughout the world.
From this point of view, the test of Berlin and Germany is destined to open a graver crisis than those -which, furthermore, are not yet settled - of the Middle East and of Formosa, imperialism's margins for retreat becoming steadily narrower.
Hence the stiffening that was observed at Formosa and that will be seen to reappear at Berlin if the Kremlin does not work out in time an acceptable
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL compromise position. But in that case there is a risk of essentially perpetuating the present status quo, with all the dangers that that involves for a rebound of the crisis at a later stage.
Just the "balance of terror" by the superarms of both sides is naturally not a "guarantee of peace." Such a conception runs the risk simply of perpetuating the arms race, with technical progress constantly changing the balance.
The possible compromises in this field, such as, for piling atomic arms which both sides consider satisfactory.
In reality the situation threatens to remain explosive, marked by more frequent and grave crises, each of which literally skirts the "brink of the abyss," just as long as the competition between the two social systems has not been settled by the definitive retreat of one of them.
Such a retreat by imperialism, furthermore, is practically inconceivable. It cannot be visualized that it be gradually and peacefully carried out, so long as imperialism, even though weakened, still solidly hangs on, both in the United States and in Western Europe.
* IT IS NECESSARY TO FIGHT FOR A TRANSITIONAL PROGRAMME TO SOCIALISM
If we take as a point of departure this evalution of international prospects, what are the main tasks to be set ?
That the sector that needs to be straightened up on the international front of struggle is that of the workers' movement in the advanced capitalist countries ; that the chances of the progress of the revolutionary Marxist tendency and of the revolution in the colonial and dependent countries remain excellent, and must be fully grasped by according a greater attention than ever to implanting the International in that currently most living sector of the revolution.
The straightening up of the European workers' movement will be in proportion to the vanguard's ability to draw radical conclusions from experience and to concretize the revolutionary and socialist solution.
What has gone bankrupt in the advanced countries, particularly those of Western Europe, as the French experience strikingly illustrates, is the vulgar reformism and opportunism of the traditional leaderships, which, in the best of cases, cling to the pure and simple defense of bourgeois democracy.
By abandoning systematic propaganda and consistent struggle for a transitional programme that spreads out into the revolutionary socialist solution, these leaderships inevitably throw the disoriented and weary masses into the arms of reactionary "saviors" and "reformers" à la de Gaulle. This happens as soon as the
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL regime of bourgeois democracy, suitable to the boom stage in the capitalist cycle, becomes inoperative in case of crisis.
In various centrist circles there is much talk of the "new road to socialism" in each country, indirectly blaming revolutionary Marxist orthodoxy as responsible for the sclerosis and ineffectiveness of the European revolutionary movement. But it is a question first of all of ardently wanting to carry on a consistent struggle for socialism, and not of limiting oneself in practice to a minimum programme of reforms within the capitalist framework.
The programme cannot be either abstract propaganda for final goals or down-to-earth adaptation to immediate demands. It must be a programme of transition to socialism, adapted to the special conditions of each country, socialism being here detined - at least as tar as its initial stage is concerned — as the regime of a statified and planified economy, under workers' management, combined with genuine proletarian political democracy.
Such a regime is suited not only to just colonial and dependent countries; it is no less urgent for advanced capitalist countries. Its installation would mean for these countries, instead of contemplating with self-satisfaction the mediocre comfort that capitalism lavishes during the years of its expansion — only to take it away again in periods of depression - putting oneself in the orbit of a steady economic expansion managed by the society of free workers.
It is in this field that European socialism would easily be able to surpass the experiments still controlled by the Kremlin and put itselt at the head of economic progress and of freedom.
The programme of transition must contain not only the slogans, the concrete transitional economic and social solutions for each coutry, but also the concrete transitional political solution for carrying out such a programme. That political solution, under present conditions, could not be anything except a workers' vernment, of the overwhelmingly majority workers party, or of the workers parties that share influence in the class, based on trade-union organizations and committees.
It is as a result necessary to guide the struggle in each advanced country in a way that such a perspective is imposed in the traditional parties by the political victory of their left wings, and that there be created in the whole class a climate favorable to such a solu-
Formulating a programme of transition for each country and illuminating by a political solution of transition in such a direction, means to trace out in each concrete case the only "new path to socialism." That is now the central task of the revolutionary Marxist tendency in the advanced countries.
One danger would be that the revolutionary Marxist tendency — independent or entered into mass organizations — may be itself influenced by the negative aspects of the situation in the advanced countries, adapt itself in part to the weaknesses of its surroundings, and fall into routine, practical defeatism, and ideological centrism. The best guarantee against such a danger will once more be the solid international organization of the revolutionary Marxists which will know how to maintain a policy and an activity determined by the global view of the prospects and tasks of the world revolution.