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 two organisations split from the Fourth International in 1979, before its 11th World Congress, after they had adopted a sectarian attitude 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 OCI 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 Parti Communiste 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 initiated in 1977-79 but a major retreat from it.
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 revolutionary party.'
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 bounds.
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 OSI 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 it, they played a negative one.
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 Simon Bolivar Brigade, which was built on the basis of lies and the appropriation of a banner to which it had no right.
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 International Committee. Thesis No.9 is entitled: Thirty Years of Great Revolutionary Victories, and Thesis No.11 An Unanticipated Prolonging of the Crisis of Revolutionary Leadership.
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 yet solved the worldwide crisis of leadership?
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 stabbed in the back by revisionists!
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 intractable reality of the class struggle.
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 Revolutions. In no country, even those in which the bourgeoisie has been expropriated, have these revolutionary processes led to the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.' (Thesis 12, p.27).
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) that '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 of February Revolutions.
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 statement is in direct contradiction to the theses of Trotsky, who in the sphere of theory was an eagle and not a dodo bird:
"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 dictatorship 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 'workers state', "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 objective criterion of the relationship between the classes:
"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 these countries."
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 political revolution.
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 version of the theory of revolution by stages.
For thirty years, we have been living in the stage of socialist revolutions 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 Marxism.
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 army and repressive apparatus remained in place.
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 consciousness to an unconscious socialist revolution.
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 its meaning.
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", even 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 with the Nicaraguan bourgeoisie.
Moreover, if the Chinese and Nicaraguan revolutions are both "Februaries", 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 unconsciously 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 the goats.
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 February revolutions must be eliminated.
2. The Second Negation — Leaderships that are not really leaderships
The essential thing is laid out already in Thesis No.1:
"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 Programme."(p.9)
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 the masses.
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 "took power", 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, 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, "While there 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 the bourgeoisie."
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 theory.
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 do.
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 counter-revolution? 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 convenient answer!
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 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.
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 extent an agent of imperialism in the workers state. Certainly, its international policy is counter-revolutionary.
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 state, "even the most revolutionary" bureaucracy has a bourgeois character, even the nascent bureaucracy of the early 1920s, when the Bolshevik party had not yet been Stalinised.
As its privileges accumulate and take on definite form, the bureaucracy achieves independence and raises itself above the class. In rising above the class, it "comes under the pressure of imperialism". (In Defence of Marxism). 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 the dual role of the bureaucracy?
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 "class differentiation". This is why, like any bureaucracy, it remains dependent on the social relations in which it is rooted and it has therefore to be defined in relationship to the fundamental classes.
Incidentally, when he talks about the workers state, Trotsky also refers to a "bourgeois state to a certain extent without a bourgeoisie..." or "to a 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 ambiguity: "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 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 power and lives or dies with them."
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 body.
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 of theoretical absurdity:
* The seizure of power in China, Yugoslavia, and Vietnam by "petty-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 bureaucratic system.
* 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 socially as bourgeois.
* 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 imperialism in the workers state leads to becoming enmeshed in the logic of the state capitalist theories!
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 production... 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 theoretical and practical consequences.
First of all, 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 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 Social 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 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 OCI (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 Assembly in a revolutionary period so that it smothers the proletarian revolution in a so-called democratic revolution is a betrayal of Trotskyist politics." (p. 44)
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 to Nicaragua in the spring of 1980?
Thus, these crusaders for "orthodox Trotskyism" end up in practice purely and simply hiding the secondary enemy behind the primary one, borrowing from Mao himself this dangerous formalist logic of the primacy and secondary contradiction.
4. Second Exorcism: The Enemy within
"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 be because it was betrayed from within...
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 revisionism within the Fourth International.
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 "orthodox Trotskyism", whose heir today is supposed to be the International Committee, and revisionism, which is said today to be embodied in the United Secretariat.
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 is March 2 1933, came in 1951. After this date, the International had to be "reconstructed". 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 America!
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 workers' 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 some of the positions held by these organisations."
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 Nicaragua.
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 1976 protocol.
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 for discussions or unification today?
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 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 advances (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.
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.
The practical conclusions of this general truth are of decisive importance. This means that we always determine our position on the basis of the world revolution, that is, on the basis of the historic interests of the world 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 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, 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.