The need for a revolutionary International The need for a
revolutionary International Ernest Mandel and John Ross The internationalisation of the productive forces Since its inception capitalism has been oriented towards the world market. International trade in specialised goods, exports of commodities manufactured in the capitalist countries which first became industrialised, imports of commodities from 'underdeveloped' countries, conquest of markets in these countries, accompanied every step forward of the capitalist mode of production. By its very nature as a development of the productive forces capitalism was and is a world system. Any superior mode of production, replacing capitalism will necessarily be even more international in its character than the imperialist system. All concepts of 'socialism in one country' are not merely from a political but even from a directly economic point of view both reactionary and utopian.
The worldwide expansion of capitalism however took on an uneven and combined nature. Modern industrial mass production from the developed capitalist countries destroyed precapitalist production (domestic industry, village industry, initial forms of manufacturing) in those countries under their domination without, leading to a massive growth of modern industry in the dominated countries themselves.
Consequently the world economy becomes more and more a unit structured in favour of the imperialist centres. Over-specialised in the output and export of raw materials, and with even manufacturing structured by the export market, the dominated economies are at the mercy of sudden ups and downs in raw material prices and fluctuations in the world market. Even those economies achieving some industrial development remain subjected to the situation in the imperialist centres, while the weakest neocolonial economies suffer blows which condemn masses of poor peasants and workers to move from misery to sheer starvation. Social inequalities mount with consequent political instabilities and crises.
In late capitalism (a sub-period of the imperialist epoch beginning with the end of World War II), the emergence of the multinational corporations shows even more clearly a new and even higher phase of the internationalisation of the productive forces: no longer does this internationalisation manifest itself only through world trade of commodities and world movement of capital. It manifests itself now in an increasingly internotional organisation of production itself.
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The multinational corporations organise an international division of labour inside their own companies, have spare parts manufactured in one continent and assembly lines set up in another, transfer from one country to another, if not one continent to another, the manufacturing of this or
There is no better proof of the fact that not only (capitalist) private property but also the nation state have been outgrown by the level of development attained by the productive forces. In many branches of industry there are today high levels of technology, even single machines, which can only be applied profitably if they cater for half a dozen or a dozen countries at
All the key economic problems which face humanity today — the problem of overcoming hunger and underdevelopment in the third world; the problem of assuring and maintaining full employment; the problem of subordinating the 'spontaneous' developments of science and technology to the needs of humankind - can only be solved on an international scale.
But there still exists a tremendous gap between this objective need and the average level of consciousness needed to achieve it. As always con-
The idea of unfettered 'national sovereignty' which is progressive as long as it is used against remnants of feudalism and against imperialism becomes reactionary when applied to the building of a united socialist world, a World Federation of Socialist Republics. This also explains why all the attempts by the bureaucracies of the deformed and degenerated workers' states to build 'socialism in one country' are not only reactionary but utopian as well. No rational planning of world resources in favour of rapidly overcoming underdevelopment, suppressing starvation and misery, eliminating inequalities between 'rich' and 'poor' nations, is possible, if its 'own' automobile industry, its 'own' electronics industry, regardless of costs, and regardless of the huge advantages of international division of labour. This will be even more the case with revolutions in advanced in-
For sure, the way in which the international division of labour has functioned under capitalism, the way in which the priviliged bureaucracy which usurped power in the USSR has applied the same idea, i.e. upon the basis of inequality, has tremendously increased suspicions and prejudices towards international solidarity among many people (in Eastern Europe as well as in Asia and elsewhere). But this is no reason for revolutionary Marxists to close their eyes to the obvious: world socialism is only possible on a higher level of international organisation and planning of economic and
This is only possible if many restrictions of 'national sovereignty' are freely accepted by the mass of workers, who will be masters of their fate under world socialism, on the basis of strict equality between nations. Such a free acceptance is impossible without a high level of internationalist
By its very nature, i.e. its ties to private property, competition, exploita-
28 that type of product.
the same time.
sciousness lags behind objective reality.
each country wants to 'go it alone' dustrialised countries.
4 political life.
education and organisation.
2. The class struggle is international
International Marxist Review
, building each its 'own' steel industry,
tion and inequality, the capitalist class and its hangers-on (those parts of the petty bourgeoisie which share its ideology) are organically unable to implement any world solution of humanity's problems. The tremendous gaps between the objective internationalisation of productive forces on the one hand, and the survival of the bourgeois nation state on the other, are being papered over by all kids of international institutions and international mechanisms. But when one looks closer at the way these institutions operate and these mechanisms function, one will always discover that it is in favour of certain groups of capitalists (generally the strongest ones) and at the expense of others, as well as in favour of capital as a whole and at the expense of the exploited, and the oppressed the world over.
Capitalism cannot grow without at the same time developing the growth of wage labour. Capital accumulation has as its source surplus-value which only living wage labour can produce. Therefore, from its inception, a continuous class struggle between capital and labour accompanies the develop-
This class struggle however does not rise continuously and does not become conscious all the time. It experiences ups and downs in its sharpest forms (large-scale mass strikes, large-scale political prerevolutionary situations, revolutionary struggles for power). But even when it subsides temporarily it is pursued daily, at factory level, by the capitalist class. Every new machine introduced in a factory, every attempt to 'rationalise' organisation of production, is an attempt to extort more surplus value from labour by capital. Every firing of a worker is an attempt capitalist class, this daily class struggle by their class enemy, by massive, instead of individual or piecemeal reactions. These massive reactions go from mass strikes to the highest forms of proletarian class struggle: the struggle to overthrow the capitalists' state power and property, the struggle to
The higher the level of internationalisation of capital and of the productive forces, the more the class struggle itself becomes international. To take merely the most elementary development, already in the second half of the
19th century, employers tried to break strikes by either transferring orders for production to foreign countries or by 'importing' foreign labour. Nationalist reactions by the strikers, trying to present the 'foreigners' as their enemies, played into the hands of the employers and quickly showed themselves to be inefficient, even for winning strikes. On a long-term basis, they could only help the employers, the capitalist class, in trying to permanently divide the working class, in trying to introduce into the working class itself the kind of competition and strife between different nationalities, which is normal for capital but against the interests of labour.
Experience quickly taught the workers that their best response against these manoeuvers of the capitalists was to extend strike and trade union organisation on an international level. That was one of the main reasons why Marx and Engels succeeded in organising the First International Work-
Contrary to the capitalist class, the working class has no ties with competition linked to private property. Its' basic interests, tied even to the very
The need for a revolutionary International ment of capitalism.
to weaken the working class.
Periodically the workers achieve a victorious revolution.
ing Men's Association, as early as 1864.
answer these continuous attacks
29 mass actions, by the
30 International Marxist Revieu way in which it works inside the factory and in which it has to defend itself against its class enemies, are tied to cooperation and solidarity. And the way in which capital increasingly operates on an international scale, the way in which capital increasingly internationalises the class struggle, forces the working class to answer by extending cooperation and solidarity on an international scale, lest it is beaten in advance in an uneven game with cards heavily stacked against it.
It is true that proletarian consciousness has again and again lagged behind the objective needs of the proletarian class struggle. Again and again the bourgeoisie, and the labour bureaucracies that serve it, have succeeded in using nationalism, chauvinism, and racism to divide the workers, pitting them against each other instead of uniting them against their common class enemy. But each time this happened, each time the working class failed to understand its internationalist tasks, experience showed that only the capitalists gained from it and the workers were heavy losers.
Thus at the beginning of World War 1 the majority of the European workers initially bowed before the tremendous pressure of bourgeois and chauvinist propaganda transferred into their ranks by those leaders of their mass parties and unions who had capitulated before the imperialist bourgeoisie. This meant the collapse of the Second International. These workers in 1914 accepted going into the war as a war of 'national defence' while in reality it was a war of imperialist robbery. But they rapidly payed a heavy price. Millions of workers were killed, by their own class brothers of other countries. Tens of millions saw their standards of living decline rapidly, as a result of the acceptance of class collaboration with the employers, and the imposition of no strike pledges, made for the sake of 'national unity'. It became possible for the internationalists, a minority in the beginning of the war, to convince growing sectors of the working class that internationalism was neither a utopian pipedream nor an abstract 'ideal' which only a small vanguard could practice, but a reality which corresponded to the immediate common material interest of the workers of all countries.
In the same way, at the beginning of reactionary counter-revolutionary wars of colonial reconquest, like the one conducted by French imperialism against the Algerian revolution starting in November 1954, the mass of the workers were influenced by chauvinistic and racialist prejudices, especially as these were not counteracted vigorously from the start by the leaderships of the mass organisations of the working class. They remained aloof from their evident duty of solidarity with the freedom fight of those oppressed by their own exploiters. Again, they payed a heavy price for this: thousands of deaths and, in the case of France, a growing threat against their own elementary democratic freedoms, leading to the downfall of the Fourth Republic and the establishment of a Bonapartist strong state under General de Gaulle in 1958. That experience helped the small internationalist minorities in convincing sectors of the working class that it had to fight against that dirty war, that it had to oppose the 'war effort' by all means necessary.
The need to take up the class struggle at the international level was made clear by more recent struggles also. Today when multinational corporations organise production on a worldwide basis and when politics is
above all world politics, the attempt to solve even economic defensive issues of the working class on a strictly national basis becomes progressively more difficult. For example, while a deep structural crisis swept over all of Western Europe's steel industry in the last three years, leading to the sacking of more than 100,000 steel workers in twelve countries, the West
German steel workers were left alone in their first exemplary strike for the
35 hours week, which, if conquered internationally, would have saved all these jobs. Likewise, the striking power of the British steel workers in spite of their determination, was eroded because no serious attempts at international solidarity were organised. No boycotting of the transport of steel from European mills by European lorries and railways, through European ports, was seriously established. Even a limited number of determined unionists, coordinating their actions in all European countries, could have achieved partial suceess there, and could have exercised such growing pressure upon their union structures that in the end, international solidari-
These examples show how the international reality of the class struggle imposes itself on objective social processes. It therefore shows the duties and possibilities for the working class and revolutionaries. The objective need of proletarian internationalism is very simple. The class struggle is one in which every defeat for one side is a victory for the other. This is true not
The bourgeoisie fully understands this. Its leading circles have an exrevolutionary organisations (NATO, EEC, 'defence' agreements, ASEAN etc) and operations (Vietnam, the coup in Bolivia, the intervention in the scope. No matter what particular disagreements exist between them they fully cooperate in the most decisive counter-revolutionary operations.
The proletariat in contrast is drastically hampered by its Stalinst,
Eurocommunist and Social Democratic misleaders, and suffers greatly each time it fails to rise to its international duties. The failure of the Second International leadership to fight imperialism resulted in the catastrophic
The failure of the workers movement in Britain to meet the needs of solidarity with Ireland has directly created not only the division of that country but an ultra-reactionary enclave inside the British state. The failure of the leaderships of the workers movement in the imperialist countries to solidarise with the struggles against the Stalinist bureaucracy in
Eastern Europe leaves open the door for ultra-rightist currents in their own countries to assume the cloak of 'defenders of democracy'
Similarly, every time it has exercised international solidarity, even if initially from confused or unclear motives, the workers movement has gain-
Thus it was the growing refusal of Portuguese workers and youth to fight in the colonial wars in Africa, the penetration of this mood into the army, which lead to the crisis and overthrow of the hated fascist dictatorship
Another powerful example, particularly as it started from small beginnings in the world's most powerful imperialism, was the case of the anti-
The need for a revolutionary International ty would have prevailed.
only nationally but also internationally.
tremely developed
Persian Gulf, Salvador) are slaughter of the First World War.
ed.
of Salazar/Caetano in Portugal itself in 1974.
international consciousness.
31
Their counternot only national but fully international in
Vietnam war movement. The beginning of the all-out American military offensive in Vietnam in the mid 1960s was not at once met with mass active opposition in the United States. But the continuing toll of the war in human lives, its consequences for the American economy, the utterly naked face of imperialist aggression it revealed to young people, led to mounting op-
Internationalists, who at the beginning had been a small minority and only able to lead small protests, by the end of the war were capable of leading actions of hundreds of thousands and found themselves swimming with the tide of popular feeling. The outcome of this struggle, spurred on by the unbelievable heroism in struggle of the Vietnamese people imposed the heaviest defeat on the American ruling class it had suffered in its entire
Internationalism is thus no special 'gadget', 'exotic concern', or 'utopia' of the revolutionary Marxists. It directly affects the relation of forces, and therefore the possibilities of working class victories, in every country.
The need for an international organisation of the working class vanguard is not only rooted in the economic realities of our contemporary world. It is likewise rooted in the realities of the daily class struggle:
'Proletarian emancipation can only be an international deed' (Engels to
At least since the 20th century (and partially in the 19th century), the growth of the inner contradictions of capitalism leads to periodic violent explosions. The imperialist epoch becomes the epoch of wars, revolutions and counter-revolutions. And like wars, revolutions and counterrevolutions take on more and more the form of international revolutions
In fact, not a single important revolution has occurred in the twentieth century without both being pushed forward by international developments and without spreading to other countries. The Russian revolution quickly spread to Finland, Poland, Germany, Austria, Hungary and partially Italy.
In 1936 the Spanish revolution started to spread towards France. The
Chinese revolution of 1946-49 spread to Korea, Indochina, Indonesia,
Malaya. The Indochinese revolution spread to Algeria. The Algerian revolution spread to Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, from where it spread to Portugal. The Cuban revolution spread throughout Latin
America. Before our very eyes the Nicaraguan revolution is spreading to El
Likewise, as we have already seen, counter-revolution organises on an international scale. It is not content with financing and arming the ruling class of each country threatened by revolution in order to stay in power, or, after its overthrow, to recapture power. It organises economic and financial blackmail and commerical blockades against each and every revolution. It organises international groups of mercenaries in order to destabilise and help overthrow any revolutionary regime. When all that is not enough - and the relationship of forces inside the imperialist countries allows it — it organises open military intervention on the side of counter-revolution in the civil war (as it did in Finland 1918, Russia 1918-1920, Poland 1920. Spain
32 position to the war.
history.
Lafargue 27 June 1893).
and international counter-revolutions.
Salvador and other Central American countries.
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3. The political basis of proletarian internationalism
1936, China 1946-49), or even takes over wholesale military intervention against the revolution itself, as it did in China in the thirties, in Korea
1950-53, in Indochina (first by French, then by American imperialism) for
The internationalisation of revolutions and counter-revolutions, constitutes the political basis for the need of a revolutionary International.
The success of a national revolution does not merely depend on national elements. A revolutionary leadership must therefore take into account not merely the national but also the international situation.
In our epoch, the tasks of an International cannot be reduced simply to opposition to strike breaking by the organisation of international solidarity.
Its tasks are of an increasingly wide scope politically. It must ensure that the international working class and oppressed people rising to conquer national and social liberation do not have to face worldwide imperialist alliances and violence in a completely dispersed manner - in which case their victory becomes more difficult, the price for victory much higher, and
'The crisis of humanity is the crisis of proletarian leadership'.The leadership which is needed is the one which will help the masses overcome this gap between their consciousness and objective reality. A leadership which will face up to its internationalist tasks, which will re-educate the workers movement in internationalism. The only internationalism which is finally decisive is the one which can be verified in practice and this finally is only possible through the building of a real International which functions
4. The historical struggle for a revolutionary International
It is precisely in response to these objective needs of the class struggle to bring its 'organisational' conclusions into line with its political analysis, that the entire political history of the workers movement is in fact bound up with the struggle to create a real revolutionary International. The idea that national revolutionary parties will suffice, or that first strong national revolutionary organisations have to be built before one can start building an international revolutionary organisation is utterly wrong.
It does not answer the question of how one can guarantee a minimum of programmatic and organisational coherence between national organisations built separately from each other. It does not answer the question of how internationalist education is possible without the practical day-to-day experience ot common international activity. It especially does not answer thequestion of how an adequate analysis of an extremely complex international situation and its evolution can guide a revolutionary party's activity, without the test of common practice in most parts of the world, mediated through organisations and militants who are members of the same world party. It fails to understand that grasping the greatest possible international experience through international organisation, formal organisation of an International, intervention and organisation on an international scale, do not cut across or contradict but on the contrary aids the creation of strong national leaderships and strong national parties. This is confirmed by the whole history of the international revolutionary movement and flows from its very nature. In a certain sense the very first 'International' defeat may result.
as such.
IMR Spring 82 - C
The need for a revolutionary International
33 thirty years, in Algeria 1954-1962 etc.
34 International Marxist Review in the history of Marxism were Marx and Engels themselves - people who never once in their whole lives established first a national organisation but always built simultaneously, whether with mass or tiny forces, an international simultaneously with national parties (Communist League, projected International with the Chartist leader Ernest Jones, First International, Second International). It is a truism, but one whose significance must be fully grasped, that Marxism was not a national product but an international one right from its origins — in that famous phrase 'the product of German philosophy, French politics, and British political economy'. Marx and Engels formed themselves and their ideas right from the beginning on the widest international field - the arena to which they were forced to look for answers by the very needs of the revolutionary struggle in Germany.
Did this 'obsession' with international developments, the refusal to establish simply national organisations but always to build international ones, lead to Marx or Engels being 'out of touch' with 'national realities and peculiarities' as is sometimes claimed? Quite the contrary. Precisely because they were such complete internationalists in their practice and ideas and they could see most clearly the universal decisive elements of the historical process, Marx and Engels had by far the best understanding of anyone in their own country, Germany, of the revolutionary process of 1848. No matter what particular errors occurred they had the best grasp of tactics, understanding of the concrete situation, and intervention. Their international basis led them to the most correct national line while the more parochial forces fell into error after error.
Similarly, did Marx and Engels reveal an 'incapacity of party building' or 'incapacity to understand specific national features' in their later activity? Not in the slightest. It was they who understood best how to build the First International and its sections, to grasp the significance and line of advance for the Paris Commune, and the features of the struggle in Germany. In his agitation for the creation of a mass workers party with no programmatic preconditions, (a 'Labour Party') in Britain, Engels was twenty years ahead in his understanding of the line of development of that and other workers movements, compared to those fixated in the so called 'national realities'
This is a general rule of the development of the international revolutionary movement - one reflecting the basic objective character of the economy, politics and the class struggle. Those currents most correct and revolutionary on the national field are those which not only have advanced revolutionary experience in their own countries but which are most inter nationally formed. We can illustrate this with the most elementary facts of the history of the workers movement.
The most revolutionary, and also most internationalist, wing of the German SPD was that led by Liebknecht and politically by Rosa Luxemburg. Yet Luxemburg herself was one of those who was totally integrated into international experiences and viewpoints. Born in a divided Poland she had the opportunity to be a militant in three parties simultaneously - the Polish, the Russian, and the German.
She simultaneously worked to construct a Polish organisation, lead a wing in the German party, and personally participated in the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the internal struggles of the Russian Party, in addi-
tion to work in the Second International. It was this international current which was the most realistic and revolutionary in Germany compared to all
What was Luxemburg's own conclusion on all this? That she had been excessively internationalist? On the contrary that the whole workers movement had not been internationally organised enough. As she wrote following the catastrophe of August 1914 and the collapse of the Second International: 'The centre of gravity of the organisation of the proletariat as a class is the International'. She did not in any way confine this to an 'exchange of ideas' but understood it as real international organisation
A second great example was that of the Bolsheviks themselves. The tremendous necessity for revolutionary ideas and solutions created by the pressure of the class struggle in Russia from the late nineteenth century onwards, coupled with the forced exile in the rest of the world of literally tens of thousands of political oppositionists in Russia, gave to the Russian party an intelligence network and an international experience totally unmatched by any other party in the world. As Lenin put it the Russian party was the and developments. This was not just an abstract but a real material question. Russian politics was completely determined by world politics. Both the 1905 and 1917 revolutions were precipitated by war. The Russian revolutionaries, due to their exile, had enormous international contacts with members in virtually every country. The translation of revolutionary literature of every variety into Russian was superior to that of almost any other country. The Bolsheviks, demonstrably the party most capable of grasping the 'national peculiarities of Russia', were the most international
But the Bolsheviks, as with Luxemburg, did not draw the conclusion from their experience that they had been 'too international'. This conclusion was not the one drawn by the revolutionaries but by the reformists of the Social Democracy who after the qualitative turning point of 1914 never again created an organisation with even the minimum international cohesion and commitment of the Second International. The Bolsheviks on the contrary drew the balance sheet that they had been insufficiently international - in particular by not formalising international organisation. This error, which was undoubtedly one of the reasons why Lenin failed to grasp the reality of the SPD's bureaucratisation early enough, was what they went out of their way to correct after the tremendous shock and lesson of
From the very beginning of the war, concretised in their goals in Zimmerwald, Kienthal, and the creation of the Communist International the
Bolsheviks set out to create a new international revolutionary organisation. The Russian revolution gave them the opportunity to create a revolutionary International on a truly mass scale. But they had already decided to
When Trotsky after 1933 oriented himself not to building simply one, or several, national parties but instead right from the beginning built an International, he was not retreating into romanticism, 'ignoring national realities' etc. He was following in the footsteps already carved out and followed by Marx, Engels, Luxemburg, Lenin and the other leaders of the
The need for a revolutionary International the preachers of 'national peculiarities' best acquainted with the 'last word' in international revolutionary ideas party in the whole Second International.
1914.
create such an international organisation before 1917.
35
represented, drew the conclusion of the need for international organisation - to orientate themselves to construct simultaneously an International and national parties. This itself reflected the conclusions forced on them by the objective reality of the international revolutionary process itself. Any revolutionary today who does not build a revolutionary International simultaneously with national parties bases her/himself not on the most advanced conclusions and practice of the international revolutionary movement and its leaders but instead on the false 'logic' of the reformists
Finally the necessity and correctness of this task of fighting to build a revolutionary International is shown even when success is not total. The
First International spread Marxism and initial working class organisation to almost every advanced capitalist country. The Second International created the mass ôrganisation of workers parties for the first time in a whole series of the most important countries of the world
Equally clear, despite its final degeneration, is the case of the Communist International. This, and the process that created it, achieved not only programmatic but great material gains for the world revolution and the
When Soviet Russia was forced to conclude peace under disastrous conditions with German and Austro-Hungarian imperialism at Brest-Litovsk, sacrificing large tracts of territory in order to maintain the workers state during a necessary breathing spell, the Bolsheviks simultaneously did everything in their power to assist by agitation, propaganda,and financial support, the German revolutionists. As a result of the tremendous echo which their (especially Trotsky's) revolutionary agitation had among German and Austrian workers and soldiers, as a result of the organisational help they provided to revolutionaries (and also, as a result of revolutionary education and organisation of Austrian and Hungarian prisoners of war in revolutionary Russia), the German, Austrian and Hungarian revolution were decisively speeded up, and actually broke out in the beginning of
November 1918, hardly six months after the conclusion of the Brest-
When in 1920 British imperialism prepared to intervene militarily in the war between Poland and Russia, thereby threatening to topple the Soviet regime which was exhausted after many years of war and civil war, the appeals of the Communist International to the British labour movement to actively oppose these war preparations were crowned by great success. An action committee uniting the Labour Party and the TUC called for a nationwide unlimited general strike in case of military intervention by Britain, issued a call for the setting up of local action committees to prepare that general strike - a call answered in more than 400 towns throughout the country. As a result of this internationalist stand British imperialism drew back from direct intervention in the Russian-Polish war. A war between
Britain and Soviet Russia was avoided, and Soviet Russia was saved, as a result of coordinated action by the European working class.
The Chinese revolution entered a new stage in the early twenties, through massive confrontations between Chinese intellectuals, students,
36 revolutionary movement.
and the centrists.
working class.
Litovsk treaty.
All these great revolutionary leaders,
International Marxist Review and the vanguard they
workers and parts of the Chinese bourgeoisie on the one hand, and imperialism on the other hand. Soviet Russia sent massive military help to
China and helped organise anti-imperialist resistance and struggle on a broad scale. It is true that as a result of wrong policies of tail-ending the bourgeois Kuomintang, that help led in the first stage to a bloody defeat of the Chinese working class in April 1927 and assisted Chiang Kai-chek in establishing his reactionary dictatorship which he maintained for two decades. But one cannot deny that Soviet assistance in the twenties prevented in a decisive way China from becoming a direct colony of imperialism, and through giving a powerful impulse to the creation of the
Chinese Communist Party and its transformation into a mass party, it indirectly contributed to the victory of the third Chinese revolution in 1949, i.e. to the final overthrow of capitalism in China, whatever were the counter-revolutionary policies towards China later practiced by the Soviet
From an economic, social and political point of view revolutionaries are faced with an increasingly international reality. The tasks flowing from the objective needs of the class struggle tend to be more and more on an inter-
It is key for the workers movement today to reconquer its origins - the traditions of internationalism which were at the root of the very first revolutionary workers organisation, that of Marx, Engels, and the Communist International in its revolutionary period. The task that they set out to achieve: to coordinate, on a world scale, the struggle of the working class for the overthrow of capitalism, to coordinate on a world scale the effort to paralyse international counter-revolution is a burning necessity of the class struggle. Failing to take up these internationalist tasks, as history has already shown, will lead the labour movement to enormous setbacks,
But particularly on this field, the consciousness of the masses lags far behind the objective reality. They have been miseducated for years by their reformist leaderships who, instead of raising their consciousness towards internationalism, taught them to defend their 'own' country and therefore their 'own' capitalists against all workers and oppressed of the rest of the
With the degeneration of the Communist International into a simple tool of the Soviet bureaucracy's foreign policy, the absence of a guiding and coordinating force of international revolutionary struggles made itself cruelly felt - especially because these struggles didn't subside. Instead of helping to support the Spanish revolution, the Stalinised Comintern strangled it, thereby making Hitler's conquest of Europe (and his aggression against the Soviet Union from an extremely favourable starting basis)
Instead of helping to support the revolutionary upsurges of the Greek,
Italian and French workers in 1944-48, Stalin delivered them to Western imperialism (only in Yugoslavia was a similar attempt thwarted by the
Yugoslav communists themselves). Instead of organising from the start international support for the Indochinese revolution, Stalin, Krushchev and bureaucracy.
losses, and bloody defeats.
world.
5. The need for a new leadership much easier.
37
The need for a revolutionary International national level and require international coordination.
38 International Marxist Review Brezhnev only gave it piecemeal support, preventing its collapse in face of imperialist aggression but postponing for decades a victory which could have been achieved much earlier. The economic consequences of three decades of aggression and war go a long way to explain the ensuing tragedies.
The need for a new revolutionary International made itself therefore felt from the moment that the end of the Comintern as a tool for world revolution became confirmed through decisive international events, i.e. from Hilters conquest of power in 1933. That is the political basis for the fight for the Fourth International ever since. a) Permanent revolution vs 'socialism in one country'
The failure of the Russian revolution to spread victoriously to key industrialised countries in the 1917-1923 period left it isolated in a relatively backward country. Thereby, a process of growing bureaucratisation of the Soviet state, and of the Communist Party itself set in, which led to the decline of the Communist International, and then to its destruction as a tool of world revolution. This process, whose political and ideological expression is Stalinism, reflects the fact that a new privileged layer, the Soviet bureaucracy - which however is not a new ruling class - has taken away the exercise of political power from the Soviet working class. It concentrates the control over the social surplus product in its own hands, thereby monopolises political power in all spheres of society, and uses this power to defend its own material privileges, which are considerable compared to the average standard of life of the Russian worker and peasant.
The first key revision of Marxism which expressed this usurpation of power by the Soviet bureaucracy from the working class, was the elabortion of the theory according to which a fully developed socialist society could be built in Russia, in isolation from the rest of the world, i.e. the so-called theory of 'socialism in one country'. This theory expressed the basic conservatism of the Soviet bureaucracy, its turning away from world revolution towards maintenance of the international 'status quo', i.e. peaceful coexistence with imperialism, or the division of the world into spheres of influence between the Soviet bureaucracy and international capitalism.
While revolutionary Marxists never called upon the Soviet Union, its workers government, to artificially 'provoke' revolutions elsewhere to 'further' them through military adventures abroad, or to 'sit and wait' before developing the Soviet economy and society towards socialism till international revolution would finally triumph, they fully understood that the fate of the Soviet Union (including the evolution and variants of its inner structure) remained intimately and finally tied to the outcome of class struggles on a world scale. In the same way as the international working class has the duty to defend the Soviet Union against attempts of imperialism to restore capitalism there, the Soviet Union had the duty to help and further world revolution in all those cases where revolutionary mass struggles and deep revolutionary crises in one or several countries clearly testified to the objective possibilities of achieving new revolutionary victories. This mutual duty corresponds to a mutual common interest.
Each defeat of world revolution objectively weakens the Soviet Union
by strengthening world imperialism. Likewise, the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union (and other workers states) would tremendously strenghten world imperialism and thereby objectively weaken world revolution, the world proletariat and all anti-imperialist forces throughout
The break with that classical doctrine of proletarian internationalism as outlined by the Communist International in its first years of existence, i.e.
since the emergence of the first workers state, was a break with the interests of world revolution and therefore of the world proletariat. It did tremendous harm to the world proletariat, causing avoidable, unnecessary defeats for a whole series of revolutions, thereby simultaneously imposing avoidable, unnecessary sacrifices upon the Soviet workers for the defence of their state. Its gravest consequences revealed themselves much later, although Trotsky and the Soviet Left Opposition had foreseen them from
The theory of 'socialism in one country' implies the subordination of the interests of the workers of the world to the alleged interest of a 'socialist fortress' (in reality: the interests of the Soviet bureaucracy, quite distinct from those of the Soviet proletariat and the Soviet state as such). But such subordination implies in turn what Trotsky called a 'messianic function' for a specific country or at least the working class movement (the communist movement) and the proletariat of that country. Such messianic 'nationalcommunism' is however by no law of history tied to one country (the Soviet
Union) and one country only. On the contrary, once the theory of 'socialism in one country' is fully assimilated by all leaders and cadres of Communist
Parties under Stalinism, it can be reproduced at will in any country
Thus the Chinese CP, after the outbreak of the Sino-Soviet conflict, considered itself to have become 'the bastion of world revolution' instead of the Soviet Union, where capitalism had been allegedly restored. Thus, any forces throughout the world against the Soviet Union (with the Shah of
Iran, with the Pakistani military dictators, with US imperialism, with with the Chilean military butcher Pinochet, with Franz Josef
Strauss) is justified in the name of the 'defence of the socialist fortress' identified with the Chinese state. The final tragic outcome of the false doctrines of 'national communism' are open wars between 'socialist countries' for which only the governing privileged bureaucracies, and not socialism or communism or the working class in any way, are responsible.
b) The necessity of a democratic centralist International
The bitter fruits of 'national communism' are also increased nationalism suspicion among nations even after the overthrow of capitalism. They have also created for a whole period a distrust of any form of international organisation by important sectors of the workers' and revolutionary movement throughout the world. It saw the disastrous experience of Stalinism, in all its variants and ideological offshoots such as
Maoism, identify 'internationalism' with subordination of the interests of workers and revolutionaries of different countries to the manoeuvers of the bureaucratised state apparatus of a single country. In over -reacting against international Stalinist bureaucratic centralism (the Stalinist leader the world the start.
disgusting counter-revolutionary
Sadat, and national
The need for a revolutionary International where capitalism has been overthrown association with reactionary bourgeois
39
International Marxist Revieu of the French CP, Maurice Thorez, had actually coined the phrase, 'Proletarian internationalism today means solidarity with the Soviet Union in each and every situation'), many revolutionaries themselves ended up by throwing out the baby together with the dirty bath-water and rejected any form of international democratic centralism.
This, although historically comprehensible, was a tremendous step backward not only compared to objective needs of the class struggle but also compared to what revolutionary theory and practice had established even during the first decades of our century. Despite its superficial, and not infrequently demagogic, attractions it has to be rejected out of hand as any way forward. No more than revolutionaries can reject the dictatorship of the proletariat, or the very idea of class struggle, simply because they have been monstrously distorted and defiled by Stalinism neither can they reject proletarian internationalism or the need of building a revolutionary International, because of the use to which these terms have been put by sundry bureaucracies.
Confronted with increasingly internationalised forms of revolution and counter-revolution, with increasingly centralised imperialist counterrevolutionary strategy and actions, any seperation of the anti-imperialist and proletarian forces into purely 'national' or 'regional' sectors operating independently from each other, with no international organisation, can onLy greatly weaken the forces of revolution to the exclusive advantage of the class enemy. The centralisation of imperialism's counter-revolutionary role demands as an answer an international co-ordination of revolutionary activities, the absence of which greatly strengthens the enemy. The rejection of international organisation only makes sense from a theoretical and practical point of view if it is assumed that 'socialism in one country' is indeed possible — as is in fact the assumption not only of the Stalinists but of the Eurocommunists, the left reformists and various centrist formations. 6. The building of the Fourth International, the only existing world organisation of the working class which actually functions as such.
It is for these reasons that both the Communist International and Trotsky and his co-thinkers, from the first day they launched the idea that it was necessary to build a new Fourth International, staunchly stuck to the idea that the International had to function as a real organisation, based upon a freely accepted common discipline from its very inception, regardless of its relative weakness or strength.
We understand perfectly that the Fourth International is still very weak, although it is many times stronger than at the time it was founded in 1938 or on the first aftermath of World War II, at its second world congress of 1948. We are only the first nucleus of the future communist mass International which will be the final real general staff of the world revolution, actually coordinating all important revolutionary struggles throughout the world. Likewise, our national sections are not yet mass revolutionary parties actually leading day-to-day struggles of significant sectors of the masses of their respective countries.
These nuclei will have to go through many fusions with newly emerging revolutionary forces, many regroupments with oppositional tendencies
The need for a revolutionary International 41 breaking away from social-democratic mass parties and CPs in prerevolutionary and revolutionary periods, before they will attain the status of fully developed revolutionary mass parties capable of leading the proletariat and poor peasantry to victorious socialist revolutions.
But these nuclei bring to the building of the future revolutionary mass parties and the future revolutionary mass International a programme which summarises the lessons of 150 years of proletarian class struggles throughout the world - and also a crucial nucleus of cadres trained in that programme and experienced in its application to the most varied concrete tactical situations of the class struggle in all parts of the world. They bring to these mass parties and that mass International of tomorrow the invaluable training and capacity of education in embodied practical internationalism, applied on a daily basis.
Experience has shown again and again that it is absolutely impossible to attain even an elementary level of international co-ordination and action on a purely spontaneous basis. It would be total utopia to believe that the degree of internationalism in theory and practice needed by the present stage of the worldwide class struggle and revolutionary struggle can be in anyway attained, without the conscious and deliberate preparation of thousands and tens of thousands of cadres and militants in that orientation, years and years in advance.
That is why the fact that the Fourth International, weak as it still is, the only tendency of the international labour movement actually functioning as an international organisation in more than fifty countries throughout the world is not accidental at all. It is the product of the deliberate education and training in internationalism, as against the Stalinist 'nationalcommunism' concept, from the very inception of the Trotskyist movement, in the tradition of the Communist International and all the internationalists during World War I like Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.
The Fourth International is not a pure fetish or a simple signboard. It is a source of multiplication of strength in day-to-day action, and a constant pole of attraction for revolutionary forces throughout the world.
In tact, the presence of the Fourth International today in double the number of countries than it was present at the time of Trotsky's death or on the aftermath of World War II explains itself both by the fact that revolutionaries in more and more countries, through experience of their own revolutionary activities and struggles, reach programmatic conclusions identical to those of the F.I. and by the fact that they understand through that same experience the need of starting to build an international organisation, here and now. 7. The relation between the International and national sections
Here it is worth dispelling one more myth. This is that the existence of international organisation cuts across the development of correct tactics by national parties — a view propagated by centrists, Eurocommunists, and even Stalinists of the traditional type concerning the Communist International. It is simply false that the existence of the Communist International cut across the development of the correct tactics by national parties.
For example it was the experience of the Communist International which helped decisively to correct the disastrous ultra-left line of the early
German Communist Party as exemplified both by the Spartacists and the whole dynamic in the early United Communist Party of 1920-21 (March action of 1921). It was the Communist International which helped sort out the mess of opportunism, individualism, and rightism which the early French development', which helped develop the qualitatively superior tactics of the British CP compared to anything that had gone before in that country, on such questions as electoral policies, attitudes to the Labour Party and
Cannon in his First Ten Years of American Communism gives an excellent account of the innumerable ways in which the early Communist International helped to correct the tactics of the early American CP and allowed it to surmount problems in a way it could never have done by drawing on purely national political resources. The whole experience of such debates and decisions as the Third and Fourth Congresses of the Communist International on the United Front was a decisive aid to the national
As international organisation functioning in a democratic and not a bureaucratic way does not prevent the formulation of national tactics and the creation of national leaderships. The errors of the Third International made in the period of Zinoviev and Bukharin from its Fifth Congress onwards, and later its crimes committed in the period of Stalin, were not a result of international organisation but of the bureaucratisation of the
Soviet State, the Comintern, and the adoption of the organisational methods appropriate to this — overturning of national leaderships, preventing the holding of national congresses before congresses of the Comintern, imposition of national tactics by the International Centre, creation of a layer of servile functionaries by massive permanent international subsidies etc. The Fourth International has consciously integrated the lessons of
Each national revolutionary organisation has to learn through its own experience how to develop a cadre and leadership capable of encompassing, besides all the lessons of the international class struggle, the national specificities of its own country, of its working class, of its labour movement, and the working out of correct tactics there. The International as a whole, and other sections, can advise and urge but they have no right to decide anything on these fields. That is why the statutes of the Fourth International explicitly forbid international bodies to change national leader-
The Fourth International however also understands that the bourgeoisie refuses to confine its action to the national level and therefore the proletariat cannot do this either. It requires international struggle, internadiscipline. For example the precise way in which to carry out solidarity with the Nicaraguan and Salvadorian revolutions is a question of national tactics. But the need for an international solidarity campaign with the
Nicaraguan revolution is something which flows from international needs of the class struggle. On these key questions of international strategy and policy the International does, and must, have the right to take decisions and sections must accept that democratic discipline (i.e. after democratic
42
CP displayed. It the united front, policies in the trade unions etc.
parties in working out and determining their tactics.
these errors.
ships or to determine national tactics of sections.
tional organisation, and
International Marxist Review was the Communist International,
'British not therefore where appropriate international
The need for a revolutionary International 43 debate and majority vote). International decisions of this type are binding for all organisations which want genuinely to meet the needs of the class struggle and build a world party. The only alternative to that form of binding international organisation is precisely 'national-communism'. The final essence of this was clearly and tellingly summarised by Rosa Luxemburg after the collapse of the Second International at the outbreak of World War I in the bitter slogan 'Workers of all countries, unite in times of peace and kill each other in time of war'
In order to clarify the relationship between the International and national sections there is a second objection to be answered. Some people state that there exists no such thing as an 'international' revolution. Or else they use and distort the words of Lenin who said 'there is one, and only one, kind of real internationalism, and that is - working whole-heartedly for the development of the revolutionary struggle in one's own country, and supporting...this struggle, this, and only this, line in every country without exception'. Does that mean that Lenin championed national revolutions, as against world revolution because it is impossible to have a 'world' revolution? Not at all. Lenin had simply a very clear view of the relation between national revolutions and the world revolution, while expressing this view in a slightly paradoxical way.
If world revolution is understood as a simultaneous act in all countries, as a common overthrow at the same time of all the ruling classes, it is a mere utopia, and would only lead to passivity in the expectancy of the 'Great Day'. The Fourth International, which calls itself the world party socialist revolution, holds a completely opposite view of things. It sees the proletarian world revolution not as a simultaneous act but as a process of which the Russian revolution opened the first stage.
The relation between national revolution andinternational revolution is a dialectical one. It is a reflection of the contradiction between the national boundaries of the bourgeois state and the enormous development of the productive forces outside the national limits. This growth of the productive forces has made the class struggle international and for this reason there is not only an organic interdependency of all the 'national' economies but of all revolutionary class struggles as well. Imperialism is a chain. As all chains it breaks at its weakest link. It would be better if it broke at all its links at the same time, but that is from the domain of dreams and not from a reality which functions according to certain laws of development. But on the other hand there is no 'purely national' revolution. The revolution starts at the national level but it spreads and has immediate influence on the international level. That is what we mean by an international revolution: a permanent process of which the national link is not simply an aim in itself, not a final act, but the initial act.
Furthermore just as much as there is no strictly national revolution, no purely national economy, there is no bourgeoisie which confines its action to purely national terrain. We are living in the epoch of imperialism; the bourgeoisie organises itself internationally to try to defend its interests. In order to win a revolution at a national scale, we find that starting on a purely 'national' level is insufficient - in Vietnam it was not only the national ruling class which had to be overthrown, it was American imperialism, preceded by French imperialism and earlier Japanese im-
International Marxist Review perialism which had to be fought. This shows how utopian it would be to retreat into purely 'national' politics in order to start even the very first act of the revolution.
Therefore, it is necessary to avoid any mechanical interpretation of the relation between the national and international levels of revolution. Lenin argued against the 'empty assurances of devotion to internationalism', of so called 'internationalists' who utilise the same type of abstract internationalism in words of the Eurocommunists, Social Democrats, and Stalinists of our time. But to deduce from this type of quotation that all that matters is to prepare the first stage of the revolution i.e. to focus one's concerns solely on the national level, would be to totally misunderstand that the national specificity of each revolution is only relative and partial and not all absolute. As Rosa Luxemburg put it 'The class struggle against the ruling classes within the boundaries of the bourgeois states, and international solidarity of the workers of all countries, are the two rules of life, inherent in the working class in struggle and of world historic importance for its emancipation'
In fact, if we were to make an evaluation of the Fourth International today we would not say that it is too much occupied by international problems and experiences, or excessively centralised, but that insufficient common experiences still existed. The various national sections have not enough assimilated the experiences of other countries and the International as a whole. Precisely one of the most important tasks facing the International today and one that will aid national tactics, is to develop in the greatest possible way the common experience of the International. International discussion, international trips, the visits of comrades to different sections, a wider layer of cadres involved in international work and discussion, the strengthening of international journals, and above all, as discussed below, common international tasks directed at key revolutionary processes and issues are what is required both by the International and by its national parties. 8. International campaigns and actions
So far we dealt with the necessity of an International from the point of view of programmatic homogenity and the need of a rounded internationalist vision for national leaderships through the process of exchanging and drawing the lessons of international struggles - such need being rooted in the objective world character of the class struggle. The international centralisation of experiences helps reinforce the elaboration of the programme. But this programme is not an academic commentary on world reality, it is the basis for an attempt to change that reality. As such, it can only be tested in practice on a world scale. A caricature of internationalism would be to reduce it to an analysis of the world situation, leaving immediate practice solely to the national sections. There is indeed another aspect of this internationalism. This is the dialectic betueen the construction of the revolutionary International and the creation of national revolutionary parties themselves. Again it is not the case that building an International is counterposed to building national revolutionary parties, but on the contrary that it aids it. This is illustrated not only by theory but by concrete revolutionary experience.
For example, following the First World War it was inevitable there would be a tremendous ferment and creation of diverse revolutionary currents of different types. This occurred in every country. But what was not at all inevitable was that these would fuse and mature to create serious revolutionary parties. This did not and could not occur 'spontaneously'. It took the conscious drive to create a real revolutionary International. It was not 'German, French, British, American or Italian conditions' allowed the building of significantly larger and more advanced, and in key cases mass revolutionary communist parties in these countries. It took the conscious intervention, the 'voluntarism' if you like, of the Communist International to create them — although of course in reality it was not voluntarism but merely the subjective understanding of the needs of the objec-
This meant the International functioning not just as an ideological discussion and programmatic circle but as a real organisation. The International sent cadres, publications, advice, and money to these countries to create these parties. Furthermore, as we have seen, these methods, during the first four years of the Comintern did not cut across but aided the creation of national revolutionary parties. We repeat: it was not strong international organisation but Stalinist bureaucracy which destroyed both the
Communist International and national revolutionary parties.
Let us add that even after the conquest of power by one or several revolutionary parties, the danger of their bureaucratic degeneration or of an insufficiently coherent internationalist orientation on their behalf would be considerably hindered by the existence of a powerful International, independent from them because assembling revolutionary parties
But the International can in no sense be seen just as an accumulation of national parties. An International, and internationalism cannot be just a nice idea. It has to be concrete - it has to take the form of an organisation which does work internationally. A strong International will be a greater strength for the building of national revolutionary parties.
Take for example an international question such as today's imperialist war drive, or at an earlier period the war in Vietnam. Can these be considered simply 'national' questions? On the contrary: they require international campaigns against them. That requires organisation. Similarly it would be false to believe that the Nicaraguan and Salvadorian revolutions are an affair for the American comrades, or the Polish events for European ones. Neither from the point of view of the needs of international solidarity, nor from the point of view of influencing and winning currents to organise themselves in these countries, nor from the point of view of exploiting the international repercussions in the workers movements, do crucially depend on how much the weight of Fourth International as a whole, and as an international organisation, is brought to bear on these pro-
It is the same with key party building tasks of the Fourth International such as its drive today to implant itself in the industrial working class - the turn to industry. Initiatives for this may start in particular countries, but the forms, precise tactics and leadership must be decided nationally (as is
The need for a revolutionary International tive process.
from different countries.
these events create a 'division of lahour' blems.
45
, that
. Success in all these tasks will
specified by the statutes of the International) but the general turn and drive must be led forward by the International as whole and as an organisation. This is the only way to ensure the process goes forward and simultaneously, to ensure that costly errors can be avoided by national sections through mistaking particular local feaures for basic trends, illegitimately transposing the forms adopted in other sections to different
A whole series of other examples could be added to this list - anti- nuclear work, Iran, the international abortion campaign. These organised activities by the International do not cut across but aid the building of na-
Put more precisely we may say that the International in this aspect has to deal with and orient to the key developments, the 'weak links' chain of international reaction both for the objective needs of the class struggle and for party building purposes. This itself is a reflection of the nature of the process of permanent revolution - a process where the revolution develops unevenly with fierce outbreaks in particular weak links, with international ramifications and international tasks for solidarity party building resulting from them. In this sense again this poses crucial questions of international organisation - and the expression of this
Even now, before it has mass parties which have actually led revolutions, the Fourth International in no sense is an international organisation solely limited to fields of programme and political analysis, internationalist propaganda and education. With a correct understanding of its role, and with correct functioning, the Fourth International is already capable of organising internatinal actions — actions which mass parties could of course organise with much greater effieicency but which they refuse to do because they have long ceased to be revolutionary formations. To show that this is no theoretical speculation but a concrete reality we can take a few outstanding examples from the recent history of the Fourth International.
In the late fifties, the small French section of the Fourth International was the only current in the French labour movement to act consistently in active solidarity and support of the Algerian revolution (several groups of individuals outside the organised labour movement also acted in that way).
The Fourth International, much weaker at that time than now, actually succeeded in setting up the first factory producing light modern weapons for
- the forces of the Fourth International throughout the world, in the middle and late sixties, were very actively engaged, in many countries in leading positions, in organising and co-ordinating mass actions in solidarity with the
Vietnamese revolution. In particular, the role of our comrades in the USA in organising a massive anti-war movement made objectively an enormous contribution to the victory of the Vietnamese revolution by forcing upon US imperialism the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam.
- in 1971, the Fourth International was the only organisation to launch a worldwide protest (including through its own Sri Lanka comrades) against the mass murder and oppression of the revolutionary youth of that island by the Bandaranaike government which was supported by Washington, Lon-
46 conditions etc.
tional parties.
in real international campaigns and initiatives.
the Algerian revolution in a period isolated from any international help.
International Marxist Review when that struggle was practically
don, Moscow, Peking, New Delhi, Islamabad, i.e. practically all established powers and states in the world. The life of the leader of the JVP, Rohane Wijeweera, was saved as a result of that international action.
- when the revolutionary peasant leader of Peru, Hugo Blanco, was first condemned to death by the authorities of his country, the Fourth International organised a world-wide defence campaign which saved his life. When he was later exiled from his country, a similar campaign was organised for
- when the decaying Franco dictatorship condemned six Basque nationalists to death at the infamous Burgos trial in December 1970 the Fourth throughout Europe to save their lives. As a result of these actions by the
Fourth International and others the death sentence was not carried out.
- when, after the overthrow of the infamous Shah dictatorship, the Khomeini forces, in summer 1979, started to repress the revolutionary left and the oppressed nationalities such as the Kurds in Iran, they singled out, among others, the young Trotskyist organisation for attack because of its solidarity with the Kurdish struggle. Fourteen comrades were arrested and condemned to death. The Fourth International succeeded in organising the largest international defence campaign in its history in favour of these comrades, receiving the support of many of the mass currents of the European labour movement and large part of the trade unions elsewhere in the world.
As a result of these actions the comrades were not executed and afterwards
- starting in 1979 the Fourth International has been organising or participating on a world scale in solidarity campaigns with the Nicaraguan and
Salvadorian revolutions. This had a significant scope, even with material gains for the revolution, in Canada, France, Spain, Mexico, Columbia, the
United States, Switzerland, Belgium and other countries.
-following the strikes and crisis in summer 1980 in Poland the Social
Democratic and mass working class organisations at first rejected, despite many words to the contrary, building practical solidarity with the new
Polish workers unions. The Fourth International was able in a series of countries to take the first initiatives to send delegations, material aid, establish links with the workers organisations to aid the Polish workers struggle and build a campaign against the threat of military intervention.
9. From a cadre organisation to mass parties and a mass International
Finally we may note a last ditch defence against the idea that it is necessary to build a revolutionary International today. The argument is sometimes advanced ' Well, of course, a revolutionary International is necessary; national parties alone are not enough; but it cannot be built now.
', and even cuts off working with other revolutionaries. We must wait for great events, and mass parties, which alone can create a mass revolutionary International current — that is the way the Third Interna-
As we have already seen this argument is not even historically correct — the Bolshevik leadership were already oriented to the construction of a new
International before the Russian revolution (indeed from the collapse of the old International onwards). More important than historical error however
The need for a revolutionary International his return. This met with success too.
International organised powerful mass actions all were free.
It is 'premature' tional was formed. '
47 and demonstrations
48 International Marxist Review this argument misunderstands the whole dynamic by which authentically mass revolutionary parties are built.
The argument advanced against building a revolutionary International today not actually an argument against building a revolutionary International, but against building any revolutionary organisation at all, even on a national scale. In the overwhelming majority of countries it is improbable that revolutionary organisations of a mass character will be built now or in a very near future. The fact this argument is not applied against building revolutionary organisations at a national level but is so used at an international one, shows only the weight of national boundaries and the nation state bears down.
Once there is agreement on basic politics then the more developed and stronger the form of 'organisation the better is the application of these politics. This is the basic principle of organisation on a national level. It applies precisely on an international level. The links between the different national sections, their common experiences, the simple fact of having far more minds and class struggle experiences to bring to bear on the problems does, and inevitably must, aid politics enormously. Anything else is to substitute idealism, belief in timeless programmes, 'inspired leaders' etc. for a basic materialist understanding on how politics is developed.
Indeed we might put it paradoxically by saying that in a certain sense, that of maintaining a correct a political orientation and understanding, it is particularly necessary to build an International when national revolutionary organisations are not of a mass character — because the pressures on small formations to fall into one-sided appreciations, subjectivism, etc, are truly enormous. They can only be neutralised to a certain point by integration in an international organisation. This is not an argument that an International would no longer be necessary when there are mass parties, because then there exist different types of tasks, pressures and needs which require an International. But it shows clearly why the whole argument of 'waiting' to build an international is thoroughly false.
It was for this reason that Trotsky was above all concerned to create the Fourth International before the outbreak of the Second World War - at the end of which he knew the opportunities for building revolutionary organisations would greatly increase, but also the scale of events and national pressures would be truly enormous. The result was as Trotsky had foreseen. The groups of the Fourth International survived the war and emerged strengthened from its great events and tests, even if their growth was much slower than Trotsky had thought. The national revolutionary organisations were shattered and dispersed amid a hurricane of subjectivism, confusion, national capitulation. The POUM in Spain, SAP in Germany, RSAP in Holland, PSOP in France, the Shachtmanites in the US etc. all disappeared. It was the preparation for these great events, including the task of consciously building an international organisation, that alone allowed the organisations of the Fourth International to come through the huge test of the war and its struggles and to emerge strengthened.
A similar experience has occurred in Europe and the United States in the period since the May/June 1968 events in France and their international effects. Out of these events, and the social processes which produced them, not merely the forces of the Fourth International but a whole series of other
organisations seeking a revolutionary road developed on a European scale
- the latter often initially growing much more rapidly than the Fourth In-
But the struggle in Europe is a very long and serious one and that in the
USA even more so. The ruling classes in the imperialist countries will not be overthrown on the basis of one or two great explosions but only on the basis of severe and protracted struggles requiring many different political turns and solutions. The organisations which had grown rapidly after 1968, but rejected a fully constituted revolutionary programme and International, were thrown into total crisis, and in the great majority of cases shattered and disappeared, by the first serious problem encountered - that of the bourgeois counter-offensive from the second half of the 1970s onwards.
(For example, the KPD in West Germany, PT in Spain, Lotta Continua in Italy, MES in Portugal). The organisations of the Fourth International and Trotskyism in contrast, while naturally not wholly escaping the objective situation and suffering some setbacks compared to the earlier gains, nevertheless essentially maintained themselves and their organisations intact and in a position to prepare for the next upswing in struggle. This included consolidating themselves organisationally and increasing their implantation in
These different results were not simply due to international organisation. They also depended on their political programme — although it is no accident that those with the basically correct positions demonstrated in practice to be most adequate for meeting the situation were also those who understood the need to engage in building a revolutionary International.
Nevertheless the 'organisational' fact of the building of this International simultaneously with the national organisation, and all the political conclusions that flowed from it, was a powerful element in providing a more coherent, rounded and basic political stability, an ability to orient on the basic features and not get lost in side issues, which was a major element in the different results between the Trotskyists and the other organisations.
This 'organisational' aspect of the building of revolutionary parties and a revolutionary International even when only existing as a small force, or more precisely the understanding that all questions of politics have organisational consequences, is one of the most basic aspects of Leninism.
The view that simply out of great struggles and events an adequate organisation will be 'spontaneously' created, a leadership spontaneously arise, a strategy be spontaneously developed, or that all this can be created in the short space of time in revolutionary crises, is idealism.
The masses, of course, only achieve revolutionary consciousness, only fully break with reformism, under conditions of mass revolutionary events
- events which by their very nature are very limited in time. But the organisation and leadership itself must be prepared in advance through years of hard struggles. This is one of the basic dialectics of revolution which
Lenin was the first among his contemporaries to fully understand and to
The Bolshevik party with a real revolutionary policy in 1917 was the result of years of work to build a cadre organisation with links with the masses, but not yet of mass dimensions, which was created before the revolutionary outbreaks of 1905 and 1917. The idea that we must 'wait' for ternational.
turn into a practical reality.
IMR Spring 82 - D
49
The need for a revolutionary International the working class, despite some other losses.
great events before struggling to build a revolutionary party, or a revolutionary International, is to fall into spontaneism and to abandon the terrain
We can show this by looking not only at the great achievements and strengths of revolutionaries such as Luxemburg, Liebknecht or Trotsky on some basic theoretical issues were superior to Lenin before 1917 - but also their errors - the reason why Trotsky was making no idle personal gesture when he said that on this basic question Lenin had been correct against all his opponents and on which had depended the outcome of the revolution itself. We will look first at the negative case. Prior to 1918 Luxemburg and
Liebknecht were not faced in Germany with the immediate perspective of the creation of a mass revolutionary party. It took the revolution of 1918 and the struggle afterwards to break sections of the proletariat from the
There was nothing Luxemburg and Liebknecht could have done to voluntaristically create a mass party before 1919. But what was possible in Germany, and which they failed to undertake, was to create a serious political cadre organisation, a fraction in the SPD prior to 1914, which grouped the most advanced workers, women, and youth, who were rejecting the policies of the reformist leaderships of the mass organisations. Under the conditions of authentically revolutionary crises of the 1918-19 type, this sort of organisation, which could have been thousands, could have fused with real currents of the masses to create, with a solid leadership, the revolutionary party of the masses, with hundreds of thousands of worker members, without which all talk of a victorious revolution in a major country is mere
What cannot be achieved however, even in the most revolutionary situation, is to go from nothing, or from small groups of a few hundred, to the creation of a mass revolutionary party capable of achieving victory.
The tragedy of the German revolution was that when war broke our Luxemburg and Liebknecht had an organised force of no more than a few hundred people, and even those not politically homogeneous. Therefore when
1918 came they were totally unable to influence the upsurge of the masses and Luxemburg was even defeated within her own organisation by the ultra-lefts who pursued the fatally wrong line of December 1918-March
It was the same type of disastrous mistake which was made by Trotsky prior to 1917 — when not merely did he not join the Bolsheviks, which was the biggest mistake of his entire life, but when he did not build up a serious
In consequence Trotsky entered the Russian Revolution with an excellent programme, and some brilliant cadres, but with an organisation (the
Mezhrayoutsi) so small that it could never have built even in the revolutionary conditions of Russia a party capable of taking power in 1917.
It was Lenin who prior to this period, including in the ultra-difficult phases of black reaction when he was working with tiny groups, who had built up the organisation actually capable in 1917 of fusing with the mass
In Russia the first groups of revolutionaries, first a few tens, then hundreds and then a few thousands, were consolidated from the 1880s on-
50 on which Lenin was superior to his contemporaries.
phrasemongering.
1919.
force in Russia of any major dimensions.
process and leading the revolution.
International Marxist Revieu' domination of the reformist and centrist organisations.
wards. However even by the time of the famous Second Congress of the
RSDLP in 1903, the organised Russian revolutionaries, contrary to some general impression, were still only a few thousands. The first fusion of the
Bolsheviks with the masses, as a faction of the RDLP, came only in 1905 - twenty years after the start of systematic organised Marxist work oriented towards Russia and 11 years after the start of Lenin's and attempts to create a party. But both prior to 1905, and then again after 1907, the Bolsheviks succeeded in building up a real cadre organisation in Russia — one again that survived the period of reaction which started immediately after 1914.
Periodically this organisation succeeded in authentically participating in mass struggles and fusing with sections of the masses - above all in 1905 and
But the actual dimensions of this cadre, although not insignificant, was still extremely limited compared to a mass party - for example in February
1917 the Bolsheviks had approximately 15-20,000 members. However this entire apparatus cadre meant that in periods of huge struggle, and when therefore the objective possibility of building a mass party existed, the
Bolsheviks could fuse with sections of the masses to build such parties. For example by October 1917 the Bolsheviks had grown to over 240,000 members from their original February number - an increase of over tenfold. But this did not result, as in Germany in 1919, in unlimited confusion, errors, lack of leadership ete but on the contrary the fusing of the existing simultaneously concretising and developing not only its organisational structure but also its political line. The key to this was precisely the cadre formation and nucleus built up by the Bolsheviks prior to 1917.
This example illustrates the dialectic of organisations and masses which
Lenin understood, with triumphant results. Tragically, Luxemburg or Trotsky prior to 1917 did not. We should honour the great revolutionaries but not follow their mistakes - when they themselves later realised they had
It is this fundamental lesson of practical politics that the Fourth International applies today. It does not believe that it is yet a mass International, nor that it can become so in a unilineal fashion without fusions with other revolutionary forces, currents coming from the mass parties etc. These will be products of authentic mass struggles and political developments which cannot be precipitated voluntaristically by the Fourth International. But to prepare such parties is vital. And this can only be done by constructing the strongest possible organisation now and not simply waiting and commenting on events. To do that is to revert into a pre-Leninist past and in the name of
'realism' fall into utopias. Furthermore the construction of the International, as we have seen, does not hinder but aids the construction of national revolutionary organisations and parties - and they in turn aid the construction of the International and national revolutionary parties in other countries on which, finally, the fate of the revolution in any particular coun-
Furthermore because they do not correspond to sectarian concerns and stunts, but to the real international logic of the class struggle, the activities
The need for a revolutionary International in 1912-14.
vanguard organisation made distastrous errors.
10. The Fourth International today try will depend.
51 with the decisive sections of the masses —
52 International Marxist Review and campaigns of the International do not cut across but aid the process of the construction of national revolutionary parties. Again we can show this through concrete examples. - the important role of the Jeunesse Communiste Revolutionnaire (JCR) in May 1968 in France and the creation of the Ligue Communiste out if it, an achievement supported by real political and material international aid, was a major step forward in party building in France. But that step forwards enormously aided the construction of the Fourth International and other national parties. A whole series of sections today — the Spanish, the Swedish, the British, the Antilles, to take only the most direct examples - owe either their very existence or a major part of their strength to that success in France. - the campaign to save the life of Hugo Blanco was objectively required by the needs of international solidarity, independently of any considerations of recruitment or party building. But because it did correspond to objective needs it was also a significant step forward for building the party. Hugo Blanco is today the best known figure on the Peruvian left. This, together with the assistance given by the International, aids the building of a significant national section in Peru, building sections in other parts of Latin America, and building the Fourth International as a whole. - the campaign against the Vietnam war was dictated by objective considerations and should have been launched even if not one single member would have been gained. It was crucial not only for the outcome of the antiwar movement but also enormously important for building the Fourth International in many countries, that there was in the United States, in the chief imperialist power waging the war, an organisation, the Socialist Workers Party, in political solidarity with the Fourth International. The existence of this organisation helped build not only the anti-war movement but also the Fourth International - with particularly direct implications in countries such as Australia, New Zealand, and Britain but also a general effect in the whole International. - the international campaign against the Burgos trials undertaken by the Fourth International was dictated by the needs of solidarity. But its result, against showing its correct character, was not only to aid saving the militants but to help win over a whole section of Basque nationalist revolutionaries to the Spanish section of the Fourth International.
In short it is not only theory, or the experience of the mass parties of the Communist International, but the concrete tests of the class struggle in this period which shows that the building of national revolutionary parties and a revolutionary International are not counterposed but interdependent parts of the class struggle.
The sectarian mythology of the 'International Committee' 53
The sectarian mythology of the
International Committee
Daniel Bensaid The following article by Daniel Bensaid is a polemic against the 'Theses' adopted by the 'International Committee' of the Fourth Interantional at its founding coungress in December 1980. The 'International Committee' was formed from the coming together of three organisations: the French Organisation Communiste Internationaliste (OCI), the Bolshevik Faction of the Fourth International led by Nahuel Moreno, and the Leninist Trotskyist Tendency. The French OCI comprises several thousand militants and has some importance in French left wing politics. The latter tuo organisations split from the Fourth International in 1979, before its 11th World Congress, after they had adopted a sectarian atlitude to the developing revolution in Nicaragua.
Bensaid's polemic against the 'International Committee' may seem at first sight an exercise in arcane and obscurantist debate. But the central issues posed by the polemic are crucial for all those calling themselves Trotskyist. Why, after more than 40 years of existence have the Trotskyist organisations not become mass parties? What is the character of the revolutions which have taken place led by non-Trotskyist leaderships? Given that Trotskyists have not led revolutions, what is the role for international Trotskyist organisations?
After this article was written the International Committee, whose foundation was hailed by the French OCH leader Pierre Lambert as the most important event in the history of the world workers movement since the foundation of the Third International, split into its component parts after a dispute about the character of the French Socialist Party government. Continuing with its characteristic bombast and self-proclamation, the OCI promptly changed its name to the PartiCommuniste Internationaliste. The theses adopted at the December 1980 World Congress of the Parity Committee sealed the bloc between the Bolshevik Faction and the OCRFI and gave a new and more hardened sectarian form to the political positions of this combination.
The basis on which the Parity Committee, and subsequently the International Committee, were formed was in fact the denial of the revolution in Nicaragua and the failure to comply with the most elementary internationalist duties.
This inauspicious birth, for an organisation that claims to be Trotskyist, finds its fitting reflection in the theses adopted by the Parity Committee congress. This statement is in reality designed to build up a consistent theoretical framework around what could have been a political mistake, indeed a serious one, but which in itself could have been rectified. In this respect the formation of the International Committee represents not merely a detour from the process of reunifying the Trotskyist forces that was in-
From this standpoint, it was all the more deplorable, in fact grotesque, that in his speech to the OCI school in March 1981 Pierre Lambert chose to hail the founding of the International Committee in such exaggerated terms
' In one year, we have made a leap forward that is unprecedented in the history of the Fourth International. The only comparable advance in the history of the world workers movement is the one that led to the formation of the Third International after the victory of the Russian revolution, which opened up immense possibilities for building a worldwide revolu-
And Informations Ouvrières repeated these statements without the slightest trace of embarrassment. Thus the December 1980 World Congress of the Parity Committee is supposed to have an importance in the history of the world workers movement that ranks just after that of the founding of the Third International, and before that of the founding of the First, Second, and even the Fourth International. Sectarian raving knows no
This, alas, was no slip. It was the expression of the view of the world that was consolidated and codified in the theses of this conference, which after the arbitrary explusion of the OST of Costa Rica and the OS of El
Salvador, after the refusal to admit a dissident tendency of the Argentine
PST, was no longer in any respect an open conference.
Behind this comedy, lies a real historic problem, a decisive one for the survival and future of the Fourth International. In Nicaragua and in Central
America a new proletarian revolution emerged in 1979. Not only did the organisations there that claimed to be Trotskyist not play a leading role in
This was true of Fausto Amador, who analysed the situation existing in
Nicaragua at the beginning of 1979 as one of an ebb resulting from the bloody repression of autumn 1978, and therefore denounced the offensive policy of the Sandinsta front as adventurist. It was also true of the LMR in
Nicaragua, which seeing things the same way, held on to the democratic slogan calling for 'trade-unionisation of the National Guard ' when the
Sandinista Front was actively preparing for the offensive that was to lead to the dismantling of this body. It was true as well of the adventure of the
Forty years after the founding of the Fourth International, after the victories of the Yugoslav, Chinese, Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions, the development of the Nicaraguan revolution once again has posed the question of the Fourth International's reason for existence and of a balance sheet of its history. This question lies at the heart of the theses of the Inter-
54 itiated in 1977-79 but a major retreat from it.
tionary party.
it, they played a negative one.
Simon Bolivar Brigade, which propriation of a banner to which it had no right.
International Marxist Review was built on the basis of lies and the ap-
The sectarian mythology of the 'International Committee' national Committee. Thesis No.9 is entitled: Thirty Years of Great Revolutionary Victories, and Thesis No.11 An Unanticipated Prolonging of the
The contradiction lies in the juxtaposition of these titles. It raises a series of key questions. Why were these victories possible without revolutionary Marxist leadership? What is the nature of the parties that have led these revolutions? If the objective conditions were so favourable, why has the Fourth International not become a mass international? Why has it not
Instead of taking up these questions in an honest and serious way, on the basis of a thoroughgoing study of the world revolution, the International Committee tries to demonstrate its exemplary firmness in defending the Fourth International by turning its back on reality.
First of all, the celebrated victories evoked in Thesis No. 9 are not supposed to be real revolutions, but halfway revolutions, "February revolutions" cut off from their October. Secondly the leaderships of these revolutions are not supposed to have led them in any respect but rather to have sabotaged them. They are supposed to have taken power only against their will, forced to do so by the pressure of the masses. Finally, if the Fourth International has not led a revolution and has not become a mass International, this is not supposed to have anything to do with the objective conditions (which, as everything knows, were excellent) but because it was stab-
There is, however, no need for such a fairy story to demonstrate the need for the Fourth International. The firmness of the sectarians has feet of clay, because it rests on a tissue of manipulable myths and not on the in-
1. The First Negation-Revolutions that aren't revolutions
As long as possible, the sectarians have tried to deny that revolutions have taken place, since such events in the real world are always affronts to their wooden schemas. So, as the evidence cannot be explained away, they have invented a theory designed to minimise the importance of these revolutions. All the victorious revolutions since the Russian are supposed to have only gone halfway: ' Although the post-World War II period has been the most revolutionary epoch in history, it has produced only February Revolupropriated, have these revolutionary processes led to the revolutionary dic-
Thus the China, Vietnam, and Cuba of today are dumped together into the catch-all category of February Revolutions, with Spinola's Portugal in
1974. Khomeini's Iran, and Mengistu's Ethiopia. There is only one little thing that differentiates these revolutions. That is as Thesis 1 notes (p. 10)
'some of them have gone to the point of expropriating the bourgeoisie. ' This minor detail is only what distinguishes a bourgeois from a workers state. But this difference is lost in the vagueness of the category
At the same time, the theses still recognise that China, Yugoslavia, and
Cuba are workers states, while not acknowledging that these revolutions led to the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This state-
Crisis of Revolutionary Leadership.
yet solved the worldwide crisis of leadership?
bed in the back by revisionists!
tractable reality of the class struggle.
in which the bourgeoisie has been extions. In no country, even those tatorship of the proletariat. ' (Thesis 12, p.27).
that of February Revolutions.
55
ment is in direct contradiction to the theses of Trotsky, who in the sphere
'The dominant role played by the Social Democracy in the government and the soviets in Germany in 1918-1919 had nothing in common with the dietatorship of the proletariat, inasmuch as it left bourgeois property intact.
On the other hand, a regime that defends expropriated and nationalised property against imperialism is, independently of its political forms, the dictatorship of the proletariat." (In Defence of Marxism)
Trotsky uses the term, dictatorship of the proletariat, as a synonym for
' "independently of its political forms", regardless of whether he is referring to the direct power of the soviets, the bureaucratic centrism of the late 1920s, or the bureaucratic dictatorship of the degenerated workers state. The starting point he takes is the ubjective
'We are on firm ground in saying that a proletariat ruling in a single backward and isolated country remains an exploited class. World imperialism is the source of this oppression, the bureaucracy serves as the mechanism for transmitting it. If there is a contradiction in the term exploited ruling class, this does not derive from faulty thinking but from the contradiction in the actual situation of the USSR. This is precisely why we reject the theory of socialism in one country. " (In Defence of Marxism p. 99)
Moreover in the following passage the author of Thesis No. 27 seems to correct the writer of Thesis No. 12 or to correct himself:
"Currents that revise Trotskyism maintain that, given the bureaucratic.
"counter-revolutionary character of the ruling party in the USSR, China and the other workers states, the dictatorship of the proletariat does not exist in
This does not make it any the less true that, from the stand-point of our programme and the socialism we want to build, the dictatorship of the proletariat must mean the broadest democracy for the masses, the sovereignty of the workers councils, the independence of the unions from the state, and political pluralism, in line with the perspective laid out by Lenin in State and
Revolution, which Trotsky largely re-projected in his programme for the
In making a purely subjective distinction between February and October, the sectarians are turning their backs on this method. The Theses say: "A
February revolution is a socialist revolution in the general sense because it breaks up the capitalist apparatus by means of a revolutionary mobilisation of the workers. " (p.28). However, 'the difference between February and
October is the subjective factor. In a nutshell, the February revolution is unconsciously socialist, while the October is consciously so. We might say, paraphrasing Hegel, that the first is a 'socialist revolution in itself' while the second is a 'socialist revolution for itself.' Here we have a new and novel
For thirty years, we have been living in the stage of socialist revolutions
56 of theory was an eagle and not a dodo bird:
'workers state' these countries.
political revolution.
version of the theory of revolution by stages.
International Marxist Review criterion of the relationship between the classes:
The sectarian mythology of the 'International Committee' in themselves, of the "unconscious" establishment of workers states and the "unconscious" planning of the economy of the world's largest country.
Consciousness will come in the second stage, as the owl, the bird sacred to
Minerva, appeared at twilight on the fields where battles were already fought out. Such an unwholesome philosophical concoction is a blow against
The different between "February" and "October" is not subjective but objective. A "February" revolution is a proletarian revolution from the standpoint of the forces that go into motion, but from the standpoint of the relations between the classes and the nature of the state, it remains a bourgeois democratic revolution. After the February revolution, the Russian state remained a bourgeois state that had to be overthrown by a new revolution. The Kerensky government remained a bourgeois government, which was responsible for the repression in July; and the bulk of the Czarist
February began a process of permanent revolution and ushered in a situation of dual power. October resolved this situation by overthrowing the bourgeois state and transferring the political power fully into the hands of the proletariat. This was an objective change in the political and social relationship between the classes and not a mere adding of the crowning touch of
The result of this approach can be judged. It their own theses the sectarians analyse the 1974-75 Portuguese revolution as a "February':
"The proletarian revolution that began in Portugal in 1974, exhibiting the entire process expressed in a February revolution, has not yet transformed itself into an October. This has enabled the forces of counterrevolution, actively aided by the petty-bourgeois apparatuses in control of the workers movement, to impose the reactionary Eanes government." (p.28)
But there is one slight difference between the Portuguese February and the Chinese or Cuban "February revolutions." Unlike in Portugal, to impose a Eanes in China or Cuba what would be needed is the restoration of capitalism, that is, a violent social counterrevoltuion and not a gradual one.
Otherwise, the characterisation of these states as workers states would lose
Clearly the theoretical innovation represented by this category of a
"February" revolution rebounds against those who use it. In fact, it spins a tangle of contradictions. If the Portuguese revolution was a February, the
Nicaraguan revolution after the overthrow of Somoza must be at least a
February. If this February revolution is "socialist in a general sense"
if unconsciously so, it has to be defended against the restorationist projects of the bourgeoisie, notably against its campaigns for a constituent assembly and free elections. But on this key question, the sectarians join in the chorus
, that is revolutions that are "socialist in the general sense,"
although unconsciously so, why in the first case call for defending the workers state and in the second for overthrowing the bourgeois government? And if the Cuban, Nicaraguan and Vietnamese revolutions are all
February revolutions that are socialist in the general sense, while un-
Marxism.
its meaning.
with the Nicaraguan bourgeoisie.
Moreover, if the Chinese
"Februaries"
army and repressive apparatus remained in place.
consciousness to an unconscious socialist revolution.
57
, even and Nicaraguan revolutions are both
consciously so, how can you call for political revolution before calling for an
October? Unless you consider that October 1917 was the first political revolution, in the context of a revolution ushered in by the Russian
February that was socialist in the general sense but unconsciously so.
Let those who have eyes to see, see. Trotsky would know the sheep from
For these sectarians, the essential thing, their reason for existence, is secure. They are the belated and unappreciated consciousness of the unconscious revolutions. Their time will come with the realisation of reason in history, in accordance with a metaphysical view of the world that Marx did not consider himself obliged to take from Hegel. In order for this to occur, every trace of consciousness in the unconscious phase represented by the
2. The Second Negation - Leaderships that are not really leaderships
'The most spectacular of these new problems has been the appearance for one third of humanity of numerous bureaucratic states. These are the result of the revolutionary upsurge of the workers, who have forced their petty- bourgeois, bureaucratic, and counter-revoltionary leaderships to break with the bourgeoisie, to expropriate the capitalist class, and take power.
other words, the variant that Trotsky considered unlikely has thus far been the only one to occur in the post-war period. In more than one respect this process has assumed unanticipated dimensions. But it fully confirms the conditions set down in the Transitional Programme, even though it was there viewed as an unlikely variant. That is, the petty-bourgeois apparatuses have been forced to go beyond their own programme toward breaking with the bourgeoisie. In their upsurge, the masses have compelled their leaderships to go to the point of expropriating the native and foreign exploiters in accordance with the method advocated by the Transitional
Thus, the Yugoslav, Chinese, Vietnamese, and the Castroist leadership as well, have found their hands forced. They have not led revolutions; they have been compelled to undergo them by the pressure of the masses, in spite of their counter-revolutionary character, they have been obliged to follow
However, Thesis No.9 opens up a breach, if not a contradiction, in this theory: "The cases of China and Yugoslavia, while they fit into this overall framework, must be analyzed separately. It was against Stalin's will that
Tito and Mao took power. But in both China and Yugoslavia, the bureaucrats consolidated their power in close collaboration with Stalin. " Let us leave aside the matter of this "close collaboration" - exemplified, one supposes, by the hysterical campaign conducted againt Titoism after 1948 or by the unrelenting economic blackmail exercised against the young Chinese workers state. That still leaves the sectarians admitting that Mao and Tito
, an operation that represents an act of will, and that they did so "against Stalin's will," in other words, in contradiction to the line and the interests of the Kremlin bureaucracy. This fact, by the way, is why the theses of the Third World Congress of the Fourth International in 1951,
58 the goats.
Programme. "(p.9)
the masses.
"took power"
February revolutions must be eliminated.
The essential thing is laid out already in Thesis No. 1:
International Marxist Review
The sectarian mythology of the 'International Committee' which were adopted before the split, concluded that to that extent the
Yugoslav party was not a Stalinist one "in the strict sense."
Anxious to fill this disconcerting gap, the sectarians dissolve black and white into an indistinguishable grey. They recognise that there have been in fact three distinct processes by which new workers states have been formed. In East Europe, there was the case of Yugoslavia; in Asia, those of Vietnam and China; and finally the case of Cuba. But, they say, have been three distinct processes as regards the conditions and leaderships, all of them are identical in essence... All these leaderships have been petty bourgeois, and despite their differences, they have had the same general policy, which has consisted of trying to prevent an October revolution and of striving to keep within the limits of a national democratic revolution, up until the time they found themselves forced to expropriate
In this way, Romania, East Germany, and Bulgaria are lumped together with Yugoslavia, Vietnam, China, or Cuba, where there were real revolutions; mass mobilisations, and civil wars involving millions of deaths, as well as victories won after long years of fighting, not just the local bourgeoisie but the Japanese armies, French and American imperialism, and the opposition and sabotage of Stalin... The "unconscious" revolutions required a certain consistency of purpose to overcome so many obstacles.
But sectarians are not interested in what is different. They seek at all costs to fuse everything together into abstract categories. To accomplish this, they do not shrink from any outrage against revolutionary Marxist
Let us start with the celebrated little phrase in the Transitional Programme. It did predict that in exceptional circumstances, petty-bourgeois leaderships ("including the Stalinists") could go further than they intended toward breaking with the bourgeoisie. The fact that they have gone so far as to establish workers states embracing one third of humanity is something, however, that cannot exactly be said to have been foretold. That is, it cannot exactly be said to have been foreseen unless the vague term "further" is given a very far reaching interpretation, which Trotsky was careful not to
The exception became the rule for the postwar revolutions. And this immediately raises a question: Why exactly did these leaderships go further, while others preferred to commit suicide or went over openly to counterrevolution? The sectarians will certainly offer a totally objectivist answer:
because the mass pressure was sufficient in China but not sufficient in Indonesia, it was sufficient in Yugoslavia but not in Greece, sufficient in Vietnam but not in Chile, sufficient in Cuba, but not in Algeria... that is a conve-
The mobilisation of the masses is a necessary conditions for a revolutionary situation. It is not a sufficient one for such a situation to lead to the overthrow of capitalism. The resolution of the Third Congress of the Fourth
International in 1951 proceeded more correctly. It based its analysis on a combination of mass pressure and the deliberate will of the Yugoslav CP to take power, of the objective and subjective factors. If you do not do this, you cannot go beyond pure assertion and you cannot escape from a tautology:
the revolution is victorious when the masses push hard enough; the betrayal bourgeoisie."
theory.
do.
nient answer!
59
'While there the
International Marxist Review 60 is successful when they do not. From this to the conclusion that in the second case the situation was not revolutionary is only a step, and one that reformists of all sorts would be quick to take. Finally, this method (insofar as it is still possible to speak of method with respect to such elastic formulas) inevitably raises other questions. If the thrust of the masses was strong enough in China and in Vietnam to force the Communist parties there to win against their own will (not only against Chiang Kai-shek but against the Japanese occupier, American aid, and Stalin's sabotage; not only against Diem and Thieu but against the French and then the American occupier and the sabotage of Brezhnev and Mao). why was it insufficient to throw up significant revolutionary parties against these traitor leaderships? If the pressure of the masses was strong enough to carry the Sandinista front to power, why was it not strong enough to open the eyes of the "Trotskyist" Amador, who was talking about an ebb in the struggle and was seeking to organise a retreat a month before the victorious insurrection? Why was it not strong enough to open the eyes of the "Trotskists" of the LMR, who sought to trade-unionise the National Guard when the task was to destroy it? The attempt to explain thirty years of history and the establishment of four workers states representing one third of humanity solely by the degree of mass pressure that existed is purely metaphysical. To claim that the Chinese, Yugoslav, Vietnamese or Cuban revolutions were unconscious revolutions requires overestimating the power of spontaneity and decisively undermining the programmatic necessity of a Leninist vanguard party.
Revolutions that are not revolutions and leaderships that are not leaderships: these are two negatives that are supposed to make a positive - the need for the Fourth International. Next the sectarians have to exorcise two interconnected betrayals - the betrayal of the bureaucrats in the workers movement and of the revisionists in the ranks of the Trotskyists themselves. 3. The First Exorcism: Agents are Everywhere The sectarians' view of the world obliges them to see the bureaucracy simply as the global agent of imperialism. Thesis No. 16 says: "In order to justify their adaptation to the bureaucracy, the revisionists have developed the theory of the dual nature of the bureaucracy. According' to them it has a bourgeois aspect and a proletarian one. More precisely, the bureaucracy is supposed to be socially part of the working class, with only its policy distinguishing it as bourgeois. This analysis breaks from the Trotskyist one, which explains that the Soviet bureaucracy is a bourgeois organ of imperialism within the workers state, on which it lives as a parasite. The same is true of the bureaucracies that control the organisations built by the working class; they constitute within these organisations apparatuses which as such have a bourgeois character. " (p.34)
To be sure, these apparatuses advocate a policy of class collaboration and in this sense have a bourgeois character. But what matters here also is what is different, not what is the same. The Social Democratic or Stalinist bureaucracies are not bourgeois apparatuses in the same way as a Christian
Democratic party or a bourgeois nationalist party of the Peronist type.
The sectarian mythology of the 'International Committee'
To be sure, the Stalinist bureaucracy has gone over definitively to the side of the bourgeois order, since 1933 at least. Certainly, it is to a certain ex tent an agent of imperialism in the workers state. Certainly, its international
But this is only a partial analysis of the bureaucracy and its role.
In the discussion for the Eleventh World Congress, the Fourth International's Leninist Trotskyist Tendency already defined the bureaucracy in a nutshell as an "organ, petty-bourgeois in composition, bourgeois in nature." Trotsky did in fact write and often that the bureaucracy "to a certain point" or "to a certain exent" has a bourgeois character, To the extent that it is rooted in a bourgeois system of distribution within the workers character, even the nascent bureaucracy of the early 1920s, when the
As its privileges accumulate and take on definite form, the bureaucracy achieves independence and raises itself above the class. In rising above the ism). As a bonapartist caste, it bases itself "sometimes on the proletariat against imperialism, sometimes on imperialism against the proletariat." In writing this, was Trotsky laying the foundations of the revisionist theory of
In The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky explains quite clearly that the Nazi state belonged only to a certain point to the Nazi bureaucracy, since this state continued in the last analysis to serve capitalist relations of production. As a parasitic bocy within the workers state, the bureaucracy is rooted in the proletariat. It is the product of "social differentiation" and not of dent on the social relations in which it is rooted and it has therefore to be
Incidentally, when he talks about the workers state, Trotsky also refers to a "bourgeois state to a certain extent without a bourgeoisie...
certain point" ("'The three little words Craipeau overlooks," in Defence of
Marxism) The bureaucracy of the workers state is bourgeois in the same way as the state itself, to a certain extent or to a certain point.
In fact, in In Defence of Marxism, Trotsky says without the least arbiguity: "In a very distorted form, the interests of the workers state are in the last analysis refracted through those of the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy in the
USSR is based on the economy of a workers state in which it is rooted."
There is a revisionist enormity for you: the interests of the workers state are in the last analysis refracted through those of the bureaucracy?
And this is logical. It is precisely because the bureaucracy is not a class, because it has no independent base for reproduction in the relationships of production, that it remains heterogeneous and liable to be torn apart under pressure. In this respect it is Trotsky and not you who remains faithful to the method employed in 1933 in The Fourth International and the USSR:
"A class is distinguished not by its share in the distribution of the national income but by an independent role in the overall structure of the economy, by having roots of its own in the economic foundations of society. The bureaucracy lacks all these essential features. It does not have independent bases of ownership. Its role is tied up essentially with the political technique policy is counter-revolutionary.
"even the most revolutionary" bureaucracy state,
Bolshevik party had not yet been Stalinised.
class, it "comes under the pressure of imperialism' the dual role of the bureaucracy?
"class differentiation' defined in relationship to the fundamental classes.
61 has a bourgeois
• (In Defence of Marx-
This is why, like any bureaucracy, it remains depen-
" or "to a
of class rule. The existence of a bureaucracy with all the differences in form and specific social weight, is characteristic of class rule in general. Its strength is derivative. The bureaucracy is indissolubly bound to the dominant economic power. It draws its substence from the social roots of this
The bureaucracy lives or dies with the roots of the workers state... All the metaphors that Trotsky uses to describe the bureaucracy - syphilis, a cancer, or gangrene - also stress the dependence of this parasite on its host
Having gone over definitively to the side of bourgeois order, the bureaucracy is politically reactionary and counterrevolutionary. Internationally, it serves to uphold the established order. It is in this respect that it can be said to be politically bourgeois or petty bourgeois. But to say that it is socially bourgeois leads to series of contradictions that go to the outer limits bourgeois Stalinist" parties would not mean a change in the world relationship of forces in favour of the proletariat but a worldwide upsurge of the petty-bourgeoisie. This would take us to the brinks of fundamentally revising the theory of permanent revolution. There would be no crisis of
Stalinism but rather an incomparable extension and reinforcement of the
* Unity between the SPs and the CPs would already be in itself a popular front between a bourgeois Social Democratic workers party and a petty- bourgeois Stalinist party. That is, it would be unless the Stalinist parties remained bourgeois workers parties, with the Stalinist bureaucracy of the
Kremlin, to which they are supposedly subordinated, being characterised
* Finally, by its international policy of upholding the status quo, the bureaucracy in the last analysis defends private property. But to deduce from this that it is based on private property and is therefore a direct agent of imperalism in the workers state leads to becoming enmeshed in the logic
The authors of the theses have in fact sensed this danger, and they feel the need to take evasive action: 'There is no possibility of a socially petty- bourgeois state, of a socially petty-bourgeois dictatorship. The dominant economic form, the relations of production, cannot be petty-bourgeois. This is why the dictatorship has to be defined by the social relations of produc-
We maintain strongly that the bureaucracy is a petty-bourgeois stratum, an organ of imperialism. But it exists within workers states. We cannot fall into the confusion of denying the working-class character of the dictatorships existing in the bureaucratic workers states." It is high time in fact to watch your step .... because you are already on a slippery slope.
This approach to the problem of the bureaucracy leads to a series of
,if all the bureaucracies are the agents of the Kremlin bureaucracy, which is itself a direct agent (the "spearhead"') of imperialism within the workers states, we would have to conclude from this that, far from decaying, the bureaucratic system has grown steadily stronger over
62 power and lives or dies with them."
body.
of theoretical absurdity:
bureaucratic system.
socially as bourgeois.
of the state capitalist theories!
tion...
theoretical and practical consequences.
First of all,
* The seizure of power in China, Yugoslavia, and
International Marxist Review
| Vietnam by "petty-
The sectarian mythology of the 'International 'committee' 63 the last thrity years. In fact, "the workers states are, without exception, controlled by the bureaucracy and counterrevolutionary leaders in the direct or indirect service of imperialism, in the first instance by the Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR... All these recognised leaderships serve the counterrevolution." (Thesis No.3, p14) In the last analysis, therefore, the rise of the world revolution leads to a strengthening of imperialism and its agents!
Secondly, this view of the nature and worldwide role of the bureaucracy leads to making the Stalinist bureaucracies and the CPs into the main enemy and the Social Democratic bureaucracies into merely secondary foes. The first are supposed to be counter-revolutionary, the second merely reformist. This is said explicitly in These No. 1: "Stalinism plays the main role among the counter-revolutionary apparatuses, since it has complete control of the principal workers state, a source of unbounded privileges. " (p. 11.)
To illustrate this fundamental idea, the authors of the Theses spare no effort to minimise or belittle the counter-revolutionary role of the Social Democracy. Thus, the Socíal Democratic bureaucracy is supposed to be less formidable than the Stalinist because 'while (based on big working class organisations in each national state) it has not succeeded in taking the helm of any workers state. When it has governed, this has been in the framework of a bourgeois state." (Thesis No. 16. p.35) This is a more than convoluted formulation. The Social Democracy "has not succeeded in taking the helm of any workers' state"? For good reason! It would be more accurate to say that wherever it has been in government it has quite successfully prevented the emergence of a new workers' state by every means, including massacre. And this sinister success is praised by the pens of the crusaders for "orthodox Trotskyism': the gentle, inoffensive Social Democratic bureaucracy has not succeded in taking the helm of a workers' state, and by so doing it has avoided becoming a wicked Stalinist bureaucracy, fattened by unbounded privileges.
With a certain coherence, to give then their due, the crusaders of 'orthodox Trotskyism' conclude that the usefulness of the Social Democratic bureaucracy for the bourgeoisie belongs largely to the past: 'There is a difference with respect to the counterrevoltionary apparatuses. The apparatus formed by the Social Democratic leadership continues to fulfill its counterrevoltionary role, which was decisive in the period following the first World War. But for holding back and betraying revolutions, the Stalinists have no equal. Stalinism is a product of the revolutionary epoch, the most gigantic counter-revolutionary apparatus that history has ever known. We are talking about counterrevolutionary usefulness and not aptitudes. There is nothing that is so much the agent of the bourgeoisie as a Social Democratic leadership, but its usefulness for the bourgeoisie is much less than that of Stalinism on a world scale." (Thesis No.3, p.14)
So, the international counterrevolutionary role of the Stalinism is decisive for saving imperialism. That is true, and it can never be said enough. But was the role of Social Democracy "decisive" only in the period following the first World War? And did it play a negligible role in the reconstruction of bourgeois states in France, in Germany, in Britain, and in Italy after the second World War, and in Spain and Portugal after the fall of
64 International Marxist Revieu the dictatorships? Is it playing a negligible role today on the international scale, in Africa and in Latin America, as the agent of the imperialist bourgeoisie?
Such an assertion is obviously not serious. It lead the crusaders of 'orthodox Trotskyism' to paint a picture of recent and contemporary history that constitutes either an unwitting or deliberate falsification of the facts for the rising generations:
'The essential thing is subordination to the Moscow bureaucracy. Thus, for the sake of the peaceful coexistence policy dictated by the needs of the Kremlin bureaucracy, the Spanish CP supports the monarchy, the French CP supports the bonapartist Giscard government, the Argentine CP supports the Videla dictatorship. In Portugal, in the Vasco Gonzalvez period, the CP backed the attempt to establish a bonapartist government, fighting by all the means available to it against the Constituent Assembly. This last example is one of the most significant.' (Thesis No. 16, p.36)
So, twenty years from now the readers of these historic Theses (whose publication is the greatest event in the history of the workers movement since the founding of the Third International!) will learn that the Spanish CP supported the monarchy. It is doing so, in fact, with all its strength. At the same time, this does not prevent it from coming into conflict with the interests of the Kremlin with regard to Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan, Europe, and Poland. But the readers in 2,000 A.D. will not be informed that the Spanish PSOE supported the monarchy just as strongly; organised demonstrations to welcome the King in the Basque country; voted for anti-terrorist laws and provisions in defense of the monarchist constitution that represented an open attack on the rights of workers; and even, through its youth organisation, proposed the king for the Nobel Peace Price in appreciation for the exemplary attitude he adopted on the occasion of the February 23, 1981 attempted coup d'etat...
Readers in the year 2,000 will learn that the PCF supported the Giscard regime by its policy of division. But they will not learn that the candidate Mitterrand in the 1981 elections, supported in the first round by the OC! (which did not even support the right of the LCR, the French Section of the Fourth International, to stand a Trotskyist candidate, against the bourgeoisie's law) conducted a bonapartist campaign identifying himself with Gaullism and offering himself as the last defense of the institutions of the Fifth Republic.
Last but not least, readers in the year 2,000 will learn that the Portuguese CP made deals with the military officers to block a proletarian revolution. But they will not learn that it was the Social Democracy that preached a democratic counter-revolution in the name of defending the bourgeois insitutions, which counterposed the Constituent Assembly to the "chaos" in the street and the factory committees, which in government directly took charge of bourgeois normalisation and the bourgeois counter-offensive to impose austerity.
Curiously, Thesis No. 21, seems to be an absolutely proper warning with respect to the Constituent Assembly: "In any case, the use of the slogan for a Constituent Assembly for revolutionary purposes must not make us forget for a single instant that this is in essence a bourgeois slogan... To put forward the slogan of a Constituent
The sectarian mythology of the 'International Committee'
Assembly in a revolutionary period so that it smothers the proletarian revolution in a so-called democratic revolution is a betrayal of Trotskyist
Since the Theses cite no example, we cannot know to what these strong words apply. Why could they not apply to Portugal in the summer of 1975 or
Thus, these crusaders for "orthodox Trotskyism" end up in practice urely and simply hiding the secondary enemy behind the primary one, bor rowing from Mao himself this dangerous formalist logic of the primacy an‹
"For more than forty years, a colossal revolutionary rise has been unfolding. In many countries it has led to the expropriation on the bourgeoisie through victorious revolutions, without our International having led any of these triumphant struggles. Despite this rise and the victories in which it has resulted, our International has suffered a crisis of perspectives. "(Thesis
No.37,p.65) The objective conditions for proletarian revolution on an international scale were thus assembled and the pressure of the masses even forced counter-revolutionary leaderships to take power. If, in such a context, the Fourth International has not made a massive breakthrough, it must
Thus, the sectarian myth was born and spread, peopling the universe with traitors, police agents, and grey double agents. Indefatigably, a police version of history has been built up. The main enemy becomes the saboteur;
the last bulwark of the bourgeoisie, more than Stalinism itself,is the revi-
Back in 1951, the Fourth International was betrayed and destroyed as a revolutionary organisation: "The year 1951 divides the history of our International in two. It marks the appearance of Pabloite revisionism. "(p.65)
Henceforth, history is reduced to a continual confrontation between "or-
Committee, and revisionism, which is said today to be embodied in the
The crusaders of "orthodox Trotskyism", it must be acknowledged do not take words lightly. They give them their full weight. Thus, the term revisionist is by no means a ritual insult. It expresses a profound political conviction. In the clash between classes, revisionism stands on the side of the bourgeoisie. "The revisionists have abandoned all independent Trotskyist activity clearly differentiated from all the opportunist currents. "(p.66)
There are, of course, nuances of differences within revisionism, between consistent revisionism and centrist revisionism. 'But there is in practice a division of tasks between these two shades, a relationship very similar to the one that existed between Bernstein and Kautsky after 1914''(p.67).
This has to be noted carefully. This passage does not say 1903 or 1910. It says after 1914, that is, after the Social Democracy as a whole, including
Bernstein and Kautsky willy nilly, went over definitively to the side of the bourgeois order. The sectarians are categorical. The date in the history of the Fourth International that makes the dividing line, is August 3 1914, or it politics." (p. 44)
to Nicaragua in the spring of 1980?
secondary contradiction.
4. Second Exorcism: The Enemy within be because it was betrayed from within...
sionism within the Fourth International.
thodox Trotskyism"
United Secretariat.
IMA Spring 32 - E
', whose heir today is supposed to be the International
65
is March 2 1933, came in 1951. After this date, the International had to be
. We might, therefore, ask how and why a second August 4
1914, or March 2 1933, a second destruction of an already built International, was possible in August 1979 in connection with the development of the Nicaraguan revolution. Thus, the "orthodox Trotskyists" are having some difficulties in forging the myth of their continuity.
Indeed, barely a year ago the Leninist Trotskyist Tendency and the
Bolshevik Faction were still in the Fourth International. In the two-year period of discussion for the Eleventh World Congress, they never denounced liquidationism, never said that the Fourth International was unsalvageable or hopelessly degenerate. On the seven points on the agenda, the Bolshevik Faction put forward only one counter-resolution, on socialist democracy; and the TLT, only two - on Europe and Indochina. Nothing on the world resolution! Nothing on women's liberation! Nothing even on Latin
In his interview in Informations Ouvrières after the split, Comrade
Manuel Moreno was still trying to justify his past and his participation in the
1963 reunification: "In the opinion of our faction generally and in mine, the
1963-64 reunification was lame and ridden with questions. But despite this, it was very progressive because it was based on recognising Cuba as a state." So, what was the meaning of the rejection of reunification and the refusal to recognise Cuba as a workers' state by the Lambertist current which claimed to be combating the liquidation of Trotskyism?
In the protocol signed on October 27 1976, by the OCRFI, which opened discussions with the Fourth Interantional with a view toward the reunification of the Trotskyist movement, it was written: "The OCRFI and the OCI state that the Fourth International and its French section, the LCR, are revolutionary organisations, although we have profound differences with
Thus, the Fourth International was a revolutionary organisation in 1976.
It was still one in 1978 when we jointly celebrated the anniversary of the founding congress of the Fourth International. But it was no longer one in
August 1979, after the explusion of the Simon Bolivar Brigade from
Today, the Leninist Trotskyist Tendency and the Bolshevik Faction no longer talk about the Reunification Congress of 1963, which was a common reference point for all of us. Nor does the OCRFI talk any more about the
Either the LTT and the BF were sincere and honest when they were still in the ranks of the Fourth International (in the "womb" of the United
Secretariat, as Ernesto Gonzales says in his report here), and therefore they have made a spectacular change of position, endorsing the whole history of the OCRFI. Or else they were lying and manoeuvering in the Fourth International. And if they were, how much trust could anyone put in their proposals
Either the OCRFI was sincere in 1976, and must explain on the basis of a balance sheet of the Nicaraguan revolution in what respect and how the
Fourth International toppled over onto the side of counter-revolutionary revisionism. Or else the OCRFI was lying and manoeuvering in 1976.
In either case, such forked-tongue language and unprincipled
66
"reconstructed"
America!
workers'
Nicaragua.
1976 protocol.
some of the positions held by these organisations.
for discussions or unification today?
International Marxist Review
The sectarian mythology of the 'International Committee' 67 manoeuvres show that we are not dealing with organisations that are prepared to develop honest relationships in order to overcome differences and join the ranks of a common revolutionary organisation.
The purpose of this myth of an all-out struggle between orthodoxy and revisionism is transparent. It makes it possible to arm their members agaisnt an omnipresent foreign body, while explaining why, despite exceptionally favourable circumstances, their leaderhsips have to this day had no more success than we have.
If Nahuel Moreno and Pierre Lambert have not yet taken power and constucted or reconstructed a mass International, it is because they have spent their time in attacking the revisionism within. If they have not been more successful, it is the fault of Pablo, then the SWP, then Healy, and more generally Mandel, and that does not end the list.... This is ridiculous.
Trotsky wrote that the laws of history are stronger than apparatuses, and he was thinking of the formidable bureaucratic apparatuses. They are infinitely stronger than the minuscule apparatuses in the Fourth International. If the construction of a mass Fourth International were objectively possible, Lambert and Moreno could not shift the blame for their failure onto anyone else. They say themselves that they were the majority in the 1950s and that the International Committee of the time included 80 per cent of the forces adhering to Trotskyism. Nothing could have stopped them from succeeding
If the circumstances made success possible and they did not succeed, it can only be because they were hopelessly bankrupt. Or else the question must be infinitely more complex, and there is no alibi that holds water. Who said? The mountain laboured and brought forth a mouse.
The method followed by these crusaders of orthodoxy therefore explains nothing. Nonetheless, it is not without consequences. It has led in fact to founding a new organisation based not on the tasks of the period opening up, on the key elements of the revolutionary Marxist programme, and on a defnition of democratic functioning — but on the adoption of an official version of thirty years of history: "Our fight is the same as the one waged in 1950-53, which made it necessary to build the International Committee of the Fourth International in 1953. The liquidation of the IC of the Fourth International was the result of the capitulation by the SWP leadership, etc." (Thesis No.41, p.72)
This method does not lead to building a living International but to perpetuating a monolithic faction and its sectarian shibboleths.
The battle over the productive forces, made into a dividing line between orthodoxy and revisionism, is one of these shibboleths.
The theses do not hesitate to make a ridiculous caricature of Marxism, by making unsupported assertions that the productive forces have stopped growing. And this is then immediately contradicted on the following page: '3.... The bourgeois economic boom made possible by the support of the Kremlin bueaucracy, while based on parasitism and an arms economy, has been the most colossal one in the entire history of capitalism... "4. The greatest technological revolution in the entire history of humanity was achieved under the domination of imperialism. These technological ad-
68 International Marxist Review vances (cybernetics, rockets, atomic energy, petrochemicals, chemical fertilisers, scientific discoveries in all fields, such as penicillin, the new medicines, etc) are crowned by the most spectacular steps forward yet made by humanity - the beginning of the conquest of the cosmos, of the universe. The achievements are nonetheless based essentially on the unbridled waste of the productive forces that is the characteristic feature of the arms economy. It is based on fantasic military budgets that have become the mainspring of the entire world economy... (Thesis No.11, p.26)
The most agile of theoretical contortions cannot justify this thesis that the productive forces have not grown for a half century. An unfortunate quotation from The German Ideology, even twisted unmercifully, cannot hold up against the sum of Capital.
5. The Need to Fight for the Fourth International Today 1. Trotsky's formula that the crisis of humanity in the last analysis is the crisis of revolutionary leadership has never been more timely. It obviously does not mean that the world is ripe for socialism in the sense that it is like a jigsaw puzzle that lacks only one piece, revolutionary leadership.
This crisis of leadership, or crisis of the subjective factor, which has persisted since the failure of the Third International, has had cumulative effects, both for the world working class (miseducation, disorganisation, and partial setbacks of class consciousness) and for the bourgeoisie (political reorganisation of the ruling classes). This is a dialectical chain of events.
But it is essential to understand what is the master link, the link by which the chain must be grasped - the need to resolve the crisis of leadership.
An 'objectivist' view of the world situation could only lead to resignation and abdication, when the need for socialist revolution today has been more than ever confirmed by the repeated crises of imperialism, wars and revolutionary explosions.
2. The unfolding of the class struggle internationally is more and more marked by the central role being played by the industrial proletariat. Those who speculated before 1968 about the 'embourgeoisement' or disappearance of the proletariat were refuted forcefully by the most massive general strike in history.
Those who backslid in 1979, saying their "goodbyes" to the proletariat, got a new slap in the face, this time from the Polish workers. But these proletarian characteristics of the class struggle (mass strikes, committees, and urban insurrections) are not limited to the imperialist countries or to the workers states, where the industrial proletariat is the most concentrated. They are more and more manifested in semicolonial countries such as Iran, Brazil, South Korea, and even in much less developed countries such as Nicaragua or El Salvador, where forms of the revolutionary process such as general strikes, urban insurrections, and the formation of committees are more prominent than in the Cuban revolution. This general trend has not yet, however, led to the entry of the heaviest proletarian batallions into action (the U.S., the USSR, and Germany) nor to victories in the imperialist countries or in the workers states that could qualitatively change the world relationship of forces and the conditions for building the international.
The sectarian mythology of the 'International Committee' 69
3. The need for the International flows from the dialectical unity of the class struggle on the world scale. There are, to be sure, differences in the tasks in the three sectors (the semicolonial countries, imperialist countries, and bureaucratised workers states). But in the last analysis, there is one struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, whose objective everywhere is the establishment of workers power and the building of socialism. This implies notably that this is a struggle whose driving force is the confrontation between classes and not between states or camps. proletariat. In no case do we sacrifice the revolution in the imperialist countries and the political revolution in the workers states in order to concentrate on the struggle against imperialism as the main front.
We do not sacrifice the political revolution in the semicolonial and imperialist countries to the defence of the worker's states as they are. We in no way subordinate the revolution in the semicolonial countries and the political revolution to any idea that the bourgeoisie has to be overthrown first in its own imperialist strongholds. There is no way to establish priorities among the tasks of the world revolution ahead of time. Advances in one sector, far from weakening the other sectors, reinforce them. Mobilising the workers in the imperialist countries thus represents an objective aid to the revolution in the colonial countries, just as the political revolution would give a formidable boost notably to the revolution in the imperialist countries.
4. The programme of the Fourth International has been basically confirmed and not refuted by the developments in the class struggle since 1938 - the immediacy of socialist revolution, the validity of permanent revolution against revolution by stages and socialism in one country; class unity and independence, the united front, against the popular front and sectarianism of the third period type; the role of transitional demands; the analysis of the bureaucracy and the programme for political revolution; the dictatorship of the proletariat and socialist democracy; the need for a vanguard party and for a democratically centralised revolutionary International. Whether defeated or victorious, the revolutions that have developed have enriched the experience of the working class internationally. We must study them attentively and learn from their history.
But is cannot be said that new programmatic elements have appeared capable of bringing about new alignments in the world workers movement comparable to those registered by the first congresses of the Communist International or by the programme of the Left Opposition in the struggle against Stalinism. The vitality of the International does not derive solely from the timeliness of its programme. Such a long struggle against the stream in isolation and suffering the blows of repression, inevitably gives rise to a danger of sectarianism, which can lead to bankruptcy. The Fourth International, however, has been able to recognise, support, and defend such revolutions as the Chinese, Yugoslav, Cuban, Vietnamese, and today the Nicaraguan, even when its members have been excluded or persecuted by the leaderships of these revolutions.
5. Since the second World War a certain number of revolutions have
70 International Marxist Review culminated in the emergence of new workers' states led by non-revolutionary Marxist leaderships. We have no difficulty in looking history directly in the face. We see no reason, in fact quite the contrary, to question the need for the founding of the Fourth International and the need to build it everywhere as a world party.
In the 1930s, the Stalinisation of the Communist International did not spread simultaneously and evenly to all the Communist parties. This was a historical process of subordinating the sections of the Communist International to the interests of the Kremlin bureaucracy that at times involved sharp battles. In France, for example, the process was definitively completed with the consolidation of the Thorez leadership. But in China, Yugoslavia, and in Vietnam, it has never been completed.
The historic testimonies are more and more abundant and probing today. The Maoist leadership was forged at the end of the 1930s in opposition to Stalin's directives and to his lieutenants. As early as 1937, the Tito leadership began to take its distance from the Kremlin. This was reflected in both cases by an original and unorthodox interpretation of the frontist line laid down in 1935 by the Seventh Congress of the Communist International by a refusal to accept the logic of the Yalta accords.
6. The revolutions led by these parties led to the formation of new workers' states marked from their birth by profound bureaucratic deformations. The process of the crystallisation of a national bureaucracy or "national Stalinism" must be analysed concretely in each case and not viewed as the simple emanation of the Kremlin bureaucracy. It has to be approached rather as a specific case of degeneration with its own roots, and with watersheds and qualitative turns comparable to those that Trotsky pinpointed for the USSR from 1924 to 1935. In fact, while the ties of these leaderships with the masses that they led to the seizure of power have been bureaucratic from the start, they were not sufficiently so to determine that from the day they attained power they became counter-revolutionary forces that went over definitively to the side of the bourgeois order. It is no less true that these leaderships, which have played a revolutionary role in so far as they have led an anticapitalist revolution in their countries, have not brought a solution to the crisis of revolutionary leadership on a world scale. In order to do that, they would have had to go over to the positions of revolutionary marxism. Since we determine our policy from the standpoint of the world revolution, the victories of the Chinese, Vietnamese, or Yugolsav CPs have not for a moment put in question the need for the Fourth International and for upholding an independent line both internationally and in every country.
7. The case of the Cuban revolution is special inasmuch as it is the only victorious leadership of a non-Stalinist origin. It is the one that has gone furthest in drawing theoretical conclusions from its own experience that lead in the direction of the theory of permanent revolution and extending the revolution, at least on the continental scale.
However, as the result of its economic failures and its relative isolation, particularly at the end of the 1970s, is has suffered from increased economic and military dependence on the Soviet bureaucracy and from a worsening of its own bureaucratic deformations. It has nonetheless not yet passed the qualitative threshold that would justify calling for a political revolution,
The sectarian mythology of the 'International Committee' 71 that is, for overthrowing the regime. It is continuing to aid actively the development of the revolution in some sectors (Central America). But on the world scale it upholds a hardened "campist" position, which goes so far as to justify an eventual Soviet intervention in Poland. Saying that a political revolution is not on the agenda in Cuba in no way means however that the revolutionary Marxists do not have a programme of their own to maintain in opposition to the Castroist leadership. They have such a programme both for the development of socialist democracy in Cuba itself as well as for the world revolution. It involves in particular the need for a political revolution in the USSR, in China, and in the East European countries.
8. All these examples largely confirm the observation made by Lenin and Trotsky after the victory of the Russian revolution. The more economically developed a country is, the better the ruling class is organised politically, and the more difficult it is to take political power (even though it will be easier to retain it).
On the other hand, the industrialisation of a significant number of semicolonial countries is bringing about a situation in which this pattern applies more and more broadly in the semicolonial countries (and not just in the imperialist centres). Those cases in which victories can be won by pragmatic revolutionary leaderships arising essentially out of specific national experiences are becoming still more exceptional. The guiding star of building the International is the world revolution as a whole. Building the International as a world party means building it throughout the world on the basis of a programme that sums up the most advanced experiences of the class struggle. It is not an "international"' for the imperialist countries alone, which would delegate to the Castroist current the role of revolutionary leadership for the colonial countries, or assign such a role to Lech Walesa or anyone else in the workers states. Our approach to the Castroist leadership is not one of balancing the pluses against the minuses, of weighing its contributions against its failings. The Cuban leadership's lack of a programme for world revolution is reflected concretely by its adopting reactionary positions on the question of the political revolution in countries such as Poland and Czechoslovakia.
In countries where the revolution has triumphed and where there is not yet the sort of bureaucratic degeneration that would justify calling for a political revolution to overthrow the leadership in power, the need to build the International does not necessarily involve a call for forming a new party. But it does, nonetheless, require an appropriate form of grouping together those militants prepared to stand behind our programme as a whole. The question is not: to build the Interantional or not to build it and to liquidate what has been built. The question posed is: How to build it, based on the selecting out of the best activists and cadres by the decisive test of a revolution.
SOLiDARNON
MAZOWSZE mere
The ideology of the bureaucracy
The bureaucratic counter-revolution initiated in Poland on December 13th
1981 by General Jaruzelski's Military Council for National Salvation draws into sharp relief the point continually made by the Fourth International — that bureaucratic rule is incompatible with the existence of free workers organisations. The free trade union Solidarity inevitably began to challenge the perogatives of the bureaucracy, and was met with an equally inevitable response — the resort to repression. Before the military's move last December, a propaganda campaign was carefully orchestrated, both by the bureaucrats in Poland and their counterparts in the Soviet Union.
While worthless as scientific or analytical documents, the polemics of the bureaucrats demonstrate vividly their ideology and highlight a number of crucial aspects of their political dictatorship. Here we publish extracts from a keynote article by F. Kouznetsov, First Secretary of the Union of Moscou
Writers published in Literatournia Gazeta, together with a reply by Ernest
Mandel. In his article Mandel draws out the problems posed for the working class in taking power in the bureaucratised East European states.