Fifty years later
This issue of the International Marxist Review is published exactly fifty years after the founding congress of the Fourth International, which took place on 3 September 1938.
At a time when we recall the reasons for the foundation of our movement and why we continue with our fight now, it is important to look at the context in which the fight to build an international revolutionary movement continues. Without ignoring what is happening in other regions of the world — we will come back to this — the major event of the last few months has been the crisis which has shaken the Soviet Union from top to bottom. This transitional society, which seemed more and more sterilised by the aging caste which rules it.
The denunciations of Stalin and of Stalinism, which take on a new scope each day, are a very real vindication of the correctness of the analyses made by our movement since the mid-1920s and the stubborn struggle that we have waged on an international scale against the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union.
For decades, the bureaucrats presented the Stalinist project, that is building socialism in one country with authoritarian methods and mass repression, as the only 'realistic' solution, or indeed as the 'model' that other countries should follow.
Millions of communist cadre throughout the world sincerely accepted this interpretation, even when they had to make tragic choices. Today the Soviet press itself is questioning more and more radically the fundamental decisions of Stalin and his caste, and even the leading circles have to recognise that seventy years after the revolution the USSR is far from being a 'model' of socialism and that radical changes are necessary at all levels.
We were always convinced that the frozen age would not last indefin-
itely in the Soviet Union either, because we believe in the elemental truth that, in the last analysis, the dynamic of social forces is more powerful than all political structures and apparatuses and even the most systematic police repression. We are nevertheless astonished by the scope of what has shaken the Soviet Union in such a short time, by the range and level of the innumerable political discussions, the level of consciousness reached by sections of the population, the intellectual and moral courage of vanguard groups which have formed, of the strength of certain mass mobilisations. A new historical phase has really opened, with a tendency towards a dynamic of the anti-bureaucratic political revolution.
Our international press has explained the reasons for this several times and we will not go into it again here. But we would like to draw attention to the Gorbachovian approach to the questions we take up in this issue, that is to say the problems of the international workers' movement.'
Gorbachov's ideas on this question are expressed, for example, in his book, and in his speech on the 70th anniversary of the Russian Revolution.
It is not we who would contest the after all elementary remark that there is 'a growing tendency to interdependence of the states of the world community'. Still less would we challenge the necessity to take practical steps towards disarmament, starting with nuclear disarmament. It goes without saying, moreover, that the international workers' movement has today to take up political and theoretical questions which were not posed — or not in the same terms — at the time of the First and Second Internationals, and not even at the foundation of the Third and Fourth. This point is touched on, directly or indirectly, in other articles in this issue.
But we do not in the least agree with the conclusions that Gorbachov draws out from these premises. In fact, he proposes a new version of peaceful coexistence. He speaks more precisely of 'peaceful competition history to judge the merits of each particular system. It will choose. Each
(Perestroika) The underlying idea is that capitalism still has a whole historical phase before it and that we have to wait patiently for the verdict of history. One of his keenest supporters, Yuri Afanasev, has explicitly state that 'history has been different (from what Marx and Lenin thought)
in the sense that the period analysed by Marx (and also by Lenin who defined the imperialist stage of the development of capitalism) was only one of the first stages of capitalism'. And he adds, 'We have been faced with the co-existence of two systems, not for a year or two, but for a whole historical period; this means that there must be a dialogue between them, this sense hare shod be caceful on in ich inches word one e
Starting from such a viewpoint cannot but abandon all perspective of an overthrow of capitalism and thus of revolutionary struggle on a world
6 International Marxist Review which necessarily involves co-operation' nation decides what is the best future.' (Rinascita, 11 June 1988)
" According to him, 'it will be for system for it, the best ideology.'
50 years later 7 scale. At the same time, it inevitably leads to blotting out the historical divisions in the international workers' movement. As a consequence, the Communist Parties, or what remains of these parties, draw nearer to the social-democratic parties. There is no question of projecting a relaunch of an international workers' movement. The Italian Communist Party has this understood very well, which is why its leaders are among the warmest supporters of Gorbachov.
All this indicates that the battle for internationalism and to build a revolutionary International will continue to be very difficult in the Soviet Union. It will be the same in the countries of Eastern Europe where for decades the bureaucrats have presented as 'internationalism' the subordination to the Moscow bureaucracy and the political and theoretical disarray is far from being overcome. Those who understand what internationalism really means, and the need to give the workers' movement an organised international framework are only very small minority nuclei.
The internationalist fight also remains very difficult in the capitalist countries of Western Europe, and with even more reason in North America or Japan. The dramatic events of the last decade - from the war between China and Vietnam to the entry of Soviet troops into Afghanistan - have provoked deep disappointment and demoralisation, particularly in sections of the workers' and anti-imperialist movements which were involved in the fight for solidarity during the Vietnam war. The consistent media barrage has had considerable effect and the bureaucrats of the workers' movement have most often capitulated faced with the ideological offensive coupled with attacks on the standard of living, the gains and the democratic rights of the workers. When any perspective for the overthrow of capitalism is given up and the idea that it will last indefinitely is accepted, there is no longer much room for internationalism and any project of an international proletarian organisation seems left over from a previous era.
The outlook is more encouraging in other regions of the world. In Latin America, successful revolutions are engaged in a courageous struggle against imperialism and other revolutionary movements are making the neo-colonial regimes in their countries quake with fear. Internationalist ideas are keeping their power of attraction, and internationalism has a real, practical meaning: Cuba and Nicaragua have given shining examples of this.
But nor do the leaders of these two countries share the conception that for us is fundamental: the dialectic of the three sectors of the world revolution. If they have aided and continue to aid revolutionary movements in other countries, they have not considered, and do not today, the question of building an International. The Cuban leaders in particular are largely inspired by a campist conception of the world which has led them to unacceptable political attitudes such as approving the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968 or support to the Polish bureaucracy against
It is in this general context that our battle for the internationalist ideas which were at the origin of our movement, and to build a mass International, is more necessary than ever, and we are going to continue it
Does this mean that we have a narrow, self-proclamatory conception of the International, as our adversaries and critics claimed fifty years ago,
The articles we publish in this issue show that the decision to found the
Fourth International was not dictated by some desire for abstract self- proclamation or by immediate perspectives. It was dictated by the conviction that only an international organisational framework, limited as it might be, would make it possible to maintain the necessary link between the existing revolutionary groups, to ensure the continuity of Marxism and
Leninism, to take up all the new questions that would arise and, in addition, to involve the forces thus brought together in the battles within the workers' movement in the different regions of the world. This was a historically necessary task, a task that we have fundamentally
Finally, we have never defended the idea that we would build the mass revolutionary International alone. In the discussions of the 1930s, and up to today, we have explicitly stated that this International would be born from the convergence of different revolutionary currents and movements and that our project was not a linear growth of the organisations which joined the Left Opposition and then the Fourth International. This approach is even more valid today than before. If we defend the International as it exists today with the greatest tenacity and fight to strengthen it, this is precisely because it is an irreplaceable instrument for moving towards the foundation of a qualitatively superior International: a mass
In his writings on our movement in the 1930s, leading American Fourth
Internationalist George Brietman called it 'The rocky road to the Fourth
International'. The situation today is very different from that of the 1930s, but the road is no less rocky. Our choice is to continue to travel down it
8 International Marxist Review whatever the difficulties we encounter.
and some still claim today?
accomplished.
revolutionary International
1.
Solidarnosc and the mass revolt of the working class.
Notes
See IMR Vol 2 No 4 and International Viewpoint.
ERNEST MANDEL