(This week we are beginning publication of majority and minority documents debated at the May 7-14 meeting of the International Executive Committee (IEC) of the Fourth International. Translations of these documents from the French are by the Bureau of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International.
[The U.S. government directly intervened to prevent the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) from participating in the May IEC meeting. Government lawyers in the April-June 1981 trial of the lawsuit brought by the SWP against secret police spying and harassment subpoenaed central SWP leaders who had planned to attend the IEC meeting and present counter reports there. Those subpoenaed were legally required to be available to appear in court on twentyfour-hours" notice when the government began its case and could not leave the United States. Material reflecting the views that SWP leaders would have presented at the IEC meeting will be published in forthcoming issues of Intercontinental Press.
[The following introduction to the IEC documents appeared in the July 6 issue of the French-language fortnightly Inprecor.]
The International Executive Committee (IEC) of the Fourth International met in May 1981.
The political questions at the center of discussions were the following: the general features of the world situation; the rising tide of the political revolution in Poland; the revolutionary developments in Central America and in the Caribbean, as well as the situation in Cuba; the deepening crisis in the semicolonial countries and the
[First of two parts]
Today on the one hand the world Situation is characterized by a continuation of revolutionary upsurges and processes (Central America, Poland, Iran) and on the other hand by the accentuation of the imperialist counteroffensive. Since the victories of the masses against Somoza in Nicaragua and the shah of Iran imperialism has reorganized its forces and has launched a series of counterattacks. The difference between the relative paralysis of American imperialism in the case of Nicaragua and
I. The general characteristics of the world situation
1. In the most recent period there has been an uneven development of the world revolution.
Today there are three struggles which constitute the most significant examples of the advance of the proletariat: the rise of the socialist revolution in Central America, the formidable dynamic of the struggle and self-organization of the Polish workers and the mass mobilizations which are continuing in Iran.
In this context we see the assertion of the increasingly central role of the working class and the growth of proletarian forms of struggle: general strikes and insurrectional strikes, the formation of independent mass organizations, the appearance of committees and militias, etc. The working class, in particular its best organized sectors in industry, is asserting its role at the head of the oppressed and the exploited.
At the present time the revolutionary process is being extended in present stage of the Iranian revolution; the situation of the workers movement in capitalist Europe in light of François Mitterrand's election victory in France, the process of radicalization within the British Labour Party, as well as the attempted coup in Spain.
A discussion took place with the aim of reevaluating the position the United Secretariat of the Fourth International adopted in January 1980 regarding the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan.
In addition, an initial assessment was drawn of the more systematic effort to root the Fourth International's sections in the key sectors of the industrial proletariat and of the solidarity campaigns with the Central American revolution, as well as with the struggle of the Polish workers for the political revolution. A declaration in solidarity with the hunger strike of the republican political prisoners in Northern Ireland was adopted.
The IEC adopted a message of solidarity with the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) of the United States, which must confront the Reagan administration's attacks. In fact, the American government, through judicial means, prevented members of the SWP leadership from participating as observers at this meeting of the IEC. Given this situation, the United Secretariat of the Fourth International will take the measures necessary to make known the points of view on the questions under discussion in the International.
Representatives from twenty-eight sections and sympathizing organizations of the Fourth International took part in this first meeting of the IEC since the Eleventh World Congress in November 1979.
its significant intervention in El Salvador illustrates this change. The imperialist counteroffensive and the success achieved by the ruling class in Turkey, in other semicolonial countries or the worsening of the situation in the Spanish state certainly has not qualitatively reversed the relationship of forces between the classes on the international level. But it has placed new obstacles in the path of possible victories of the toiling masses and has as a result accentuated still more the crisis of proletarian leadership.
Central America. In Nicaragua, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) is in the process of consolidating its power. It is arming the masses in the perspective of a showdown with the national and international counterrevolution. The development of the revolution in El Salvador represents a major challenge for American imperialism. It has from the beginning increased its efforts to prevent the repetition in that country of a revolutionary overthrow of the dictatorship as in Nicaragua. A major test of strength is therefore on the agenda in this region of the world.
The broad struggles of the Polish proletariat, the creation and growth of Solidarity, as well as the setting up of Rural Solidarity, are the hardest blows suffered by the international bureaucracy since it was consolidated. The Solidarity organizations are increasingly playing the role of a counterpower faced to the regime of the bureaucratic caste. The political revolution has begun in Poland. It is already having effects on the other workers states.
The objectives around which the Polish workers are mobilizing and organizing are the best arguments in favor of socialism in the imperialist countries. It saps the efforts of the bourgeoisie to relaunch a cold-war climate, which remains necessary for it to fully achieve its policy of rearmament and remilitarization. The leading role of the working class, drawing in behind it the intellectuals, peasants and students, has been clearly shown.
The insurrectionary overthrow of the shah's dictatorship opened the way to the third Iranian revolution. It has considerably weakened one of the key bases of imperialism in this strategic region. After two years the rise of the struggles of the workers, peasants, and national minorities (above all the Kurds) in defense of their gains has not been broken. The Iranian revolution is continuing. It favors the mobilization of the workers and peasants of the whole region.
The gains accumulated by the workers in most of the imperialist countries during the years preceding the generalized recession of 1974- 75 prevented the ruling class being able to qualitatively modify the relationship of forces in its favor by utilizing the economic crisis. Certainly its austerity offensive has thrown the workers movement onto the defensive. But the main sector of the dynamic forces of the latter has not been affected. Thus despite the decline in living standards, massive unemployment and occasionally even a step back in the level of tradeunionization, the possibility exists in a whole series of countries for large-scale defensive struggles to be transformed into a counteroffensive of the working class.
The twin scourge of significant unemployment and high inflation has revealed the unrealistic character of any purely partial or sectoral response to the crisis. The growing involvement of trade-union industrial forces in the left turn of the Labour Party in Britain, as well as the social and political polarization expressed by the election of Mitterrand to the presidency of the Fifth Republic in France, indicate the type of evolution that could come about in the workers movement of various advanced capitalist countries. The search for an answer to the crisis and to austerity can stimulate the emergence and the recomposition of left currents in the traditional organizations.
2. The victory of the Vietnamese revolution in 1975 marked a major defeat for imperialism.
After 1975 imperialism therefore found itself relatively paralyzed faced with the national liberation movements in the Portuguese colonies and the overthrow by the insurgent masses of two key positions of its international strategic system: the shah's dictatorship in the Middle East and Somoza in Central America
Confronted with the possibility that such events could be repeated in these regions, imperialism has gone over to the counteroffensive. Its first steps along these lines was to prepare world opinion by trying to take advantage of the American "hostages" affair in Iran and in launching a campaign of mystification on the so-called "Soviet military superiority."
The accession of Reagan to the presidency of the U.S. symbolizes American imperialism's will to take a tougher line and go on to the counterattack. It has enormous economic and military resources to commit to this operation. It began to mobilize them from 1977-78, when the Carter administration launched a new escalation in the arms race.
It has systematically prepared for the possibility of new direct counterrevolutionary interventions on a large scale. It supported the repressive crackdown in South Korea. It has set up more rapid intervention forces ready to act in the Middle East, the Caribbean, Central America, and the Indian Ocean. The European and Japanese imperialists are organized to help along the same lines in Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East.
The Reagan administration is accentuating and broadening this course of action. The increased intervention in the Middle East, the reinforced aid to Chon in South Korea and to Pinochet in Chile, the budget decisions on arms spending, and above all the counterrevolutionary intervention in El Salvador and the threats against the Nicaraguan revolution and Cuba are already concrete examples of this. But this counteroffensive will not proceed without provoking new contradictions inside the very heart of the American ruling circles.
The austerity offensive of the international bourgeoisie and its attacks against the organized workers movement, which has deepened since the new 1980-81 recession, forms another aspect of its attempt to modify the balance of forces in its favor. This offensive is extended to attacks against the democratic rights of working people. The attempted military coup d'etat in the Spanish state, which was able to base itself on the institutions left over from the Francoist dictatorship, is a sharp expression of the ruling classes' counteroffensive.
The counteroffensive means that imperialism is ready to take more risks. The stakes have increased. But these attacks have already provoked new fightbacks and resistance from the masses. Capitalism cannot resolve its socioeconomic crisis without winning decisive victories against key sectors of the international proletariat. The crisis will therefore be long-lasting. The imperialist counteroffensive can make some gains in certain countries, but it is incapable of stabilizing in any way the international situation or preventing new waves of struggles or explosions.
3. The international policy of the Kremlin bureaucracy makes an essential contribution to imperialism's attempts to reinforce its bases.
In the colonial and semicolonial countries it supports bourgeois and petty-bourgeois leaderships whose function remains that of channelling and misleading the mass movement. It supports some corrupt, repressive regimes of the "national bourgeoisie," such as that of Indira Gandhi in India. It gives backing to some bloody military dictatorships such as in Argentina. It was one of the first to recognize the Bolivian military dictatorship.
In the imperialist countries, it defends the maintenance of bourgeois regimes which fit in with its diplomatic interests, whether it is a question of the Spanish monarchy or the support given right to the end of Giscard in France.
Its dictatorial regime severely affects the laboring masses in the USSR and the "People's Democracies.
" It discredits socialism in the eyes of decisive sectors of the world proletariat. Its counterrevolutionary attacks against the Polish workers feeds the anticommunist campaign of the bourgeoisie. This in addition brings ideological back-up to imperialism's remilitarization and austerity offensive.
Its international policy aims to safeguard the status quo and to avoid revolutionary crises susceptible, in the last instance, of undermining its domination inside the USSR itself and in the Eastern European contries.
In the Polish case, there is an evident convergence between the Kremlin's necessity to break in the long term the movements and organizations which are endangering the bureaucratic regime, and imperialism's desire to avoid a political revolution which would favor an upsurge of the proletariat in the industrialized capitalist countries.
This defense of the international status quo does not however signify that the Stalinist bureaucracy is completely immobile. Faced with the rise of class struggles and the initiatives of imperialism, it can intervene to extend its strategic positions and to defend its interests. This can lead to limited and conjunctural conflicts with imperialist and proimperialist forces, as long as that does not result in a serious confrontation.
The Afghanistan intervention illustrates the overall negative effects of this policy. Carried out in function of the specific interests of the bureaucracy and by its traditional methods, violating the right of peoples to self-determination, seriously compromising the idea of socialism, it facilitates the work of reactionary forces inside the vast movement of spontaneous resistance against the occupation and divides the anti-imperialist forces in the country, the region, and on an international scale. It provides the imperialists with a cover for their counterrevolutionary interventions throughout the world and furnishes a pretext for their increased military preparations.
As for the Chinese bureaucracy, in the name of the priority of the struggle against the Soviet bureaucracy, it gives its support today to imperialist policy and to its most extremist representative (e.g., Thatcher), just as it supports the most reactionary regimes and dictators. It backs up military intervention in El Salvador. It continues to threaten the Vietnamese revolution, adding its military pressure to the imperialist economic blockade.
But the beginning of the political revolution in Poland, the sharp socioeconomic difficulties affecting a big part of the bureaucratized workers states. and the obstacles encountered by the Chinese bureaucracy in its attempts to stabilize its regime mark a new deepening of the crisis of the bureaucratic castes' systems of domination.
4. The struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie has a world character which is not reducible to the international anti-imperialist struggle. It also involves the struggle to overthrow bourgeois power in the imperialist centers and the battle between capital and labor in the semicolonial countries.
But the tasks are posed in different ways and the crisis of leadership bears a specific character in the colonial and semicolonial countries.
In the imperialist countries, the ruling class, solidly organized around its state apparatus and disposing of important reserves, makes full use of the control of the working class by the reformist apparatuses in order to develop its austerity plans. It bases itself on the open collaboration or divisive policies of these reformist leaderships. An effective workers response to the crisis in fact implies demands and solutions challenging the laws of the capitalist market and the existence of the bourgeois state. That is why the accumulated forces and combativity of the workers does not constitute sufficient conditions for an overall counteroffensive. The need for an anticapitalist strategy and a vanguard capable of putting this forward is of increasingly burning importance.
The struggle for the antibureaucratic political revolution is an integral part of the world revolution. In the last analysis such a revolution is the only means for preventing the bureaucratic caste undermining the fundamental bases of the workers states. The setting up of a socialist democracy will have, furthermore, a major role to play in bringing to maturity the consciousness of the working class of the industrialized capitalist countries. In this framework, the challenging of the bureaucratic management and domination, with all the despotic practices and wastage that goes with that, will end up very quickly posing the need for democratic planning based on the largest mass democracy. Similarly, it will
Arnold We ssberg IP
put on the agenda the most complex problems of the economy of a transitional society and the problem of the international consequences of a rise of the political revolution.
At the beginning, the political revolution can develop in a massive way within a national framework. It can take advantage of the relative weakness of the country's bureaucracy which, compared to the ruling class in the capitalist countries, does not have its own base in the relations of production. But this upsurge can only result in a lasting victory if there is a leadership conscious of the issues involved in setting up democratically structured workers power and its international implications—starting with the necessity of establishing a link between opposition proletarian forces in the "People's Democracies" and the USSR- even if these forces are as yet still embryonic.
In the more backward semicolonial countries, the ruling classes continue to have an extreme material and political weakness. Lacking a social base that is at all consistent they show signs of decomposition.
Thus in the specific conditions marked by the isolation of the Somoza dictatorship, the divisions of the bourgeoisie and the temporary paralysis of imperialism, the Nicaraguan revolution was able to overturn the dictatorial state. It took the road to the setting up of a workers state under the leadership of the FSLN, which had learned the lessons of the Cuban revolution and the other developments of the class struggle in Latin America.
This experience confirms the possibility that, despite the absence of a revolutionary Marxist party, the crisis of proletarian leadership can be overcome in exceptional cases in relation to the conquest of political power on the national level. Such leaderships have not, for all that, integrated the historic experiences of the international class struggles. This can lead them, on the one hand, to an abusive generalization of a specific experience in the definition of a revolutionary strategy in Latin America and, on the other hand, to wrong political positions on the proletarian struggles in the three sectors of the world revolution.
However, in a growing number of semicolonial countries, industrialization, concentration of the urban proletariat and its combativity is allied to a reinforcement of the repressive apparatus and new forms of political organization of the ruling classes (for example the specific role of the armed forces). Democratic and anti-imperialist tasks are consequently more immediately tied to anticapitalist tasks, and demand a more important degree of organization and political preparation of the revolutionary vanguard.
5. The present stage of the rise of the world revolution is marked by a growing differentiation inside the mass organizations, by a periodic putting into question of the control of the reformist and national populist leaderships and by emergence of currents and organizations which break with these traditional leaderships.
The Cuban, Nicaraguan, Grenadian, and Salvadoran leaderships have firmly stood up to the accentuated imperialist offensive. Whatever might be its overall weakness, the orientation of this current reflects progress in the political development of the vanguard of these countries. The refusal of this current to capitulate to the violent offensive of American imperialism and its perspective of encouraging a socialist breakthrough in Central America create conditions for restarting discussions on revolutionary strategy in its ranks. Our capacity to be in solidarity with it on a united-front basis can contribute to facilitating the defense of our perspectives for ensuring the progress of the world revolution faced with this current.
In Poland the rise of the mass struggles has given birth to a layer of real workers' leaders. They are today leading national, regional, and workplace organizations of Solidarity. While stimulating the workers' self-organization, in the course of the conflicts with the bureaucracy this leadership is going through a process of differentiations which reflect many political and ideological orientations. This creates the best situation since the consolidation of Stalinism during the 1920s for the formation of a working-class vanguard in the Eastern European countries, for political clarification within this force, and for the winning of new currents to revolutionary positions.
7. Since the beginning of the period opened up in 1968, the socialist revolution has seen a victorious outcome in Vietnam in 1975. Today, the rise of the revolution in Central America is accelerating the passage to the establishment of a workers state in Nicaragua and in Grenada and results in El Salvador in generalized military and political confrontations between the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) and the military junta which is directly supported by imperialism. It is in Central America that the dynamic of the revolution in the semicolonial countries has reached its highpoint at the present time. It constitutes a major challenge to American imperialism, which has continually, since 1960, tried to prevent the emergence of a new Cuba.
The victory of the popular insurrection led by the FSLN in Nicaragua in July 1979 took place in a context marked by the deterioration of the relationship of forces to the disfavor of imperialism. On the other hand, the extension of the revolution in El Salvador, and even more so in Guatemala, must confront a vast political and military intervention set up by imperialism in agreement with the Central American dictatorships and governments like those in Venezuela and Colombia. A test of strength is becoming outlined in the area. The Cuban revolution is an integral part of this and its leadership is preparing for it through, among other things, relaunching the territorial militias in a massive way.
But a direct confrontation between the revolutionary forces and the international counterrevolution in Central America would provoke an enormous tide of anti-imperialist feeling and political radicalization among the masses of Latin America. It is that which certain Latin American bourgeoisies are above all afraid of when they demonstrate they are not too favorable to the "big stick" policy of the United States. One can add to this, as in the case of Mexico, their more specific economic interests in their relations with Central America. In the citadel of imperialism itself, reaction against direct intervention could take on a resonance analogous to that of the movement against the Vietnam war. The first reactions against the intervention in El Salvador are a demonstration of this.
The consolidation of one or two new workers states in Central Ameri-
In the advanced capitalist countries the workers are looking for political answers to the overall problems they are faced with. The way in which they are looking for such a response stimulates a recomposition of the left wing of the workers movement. Thus the preconditions are appearing for the building of class-struggle left-wing currents. Therefore new possibilities are emerging for revolutionary Marxists to link up with leading cadres of the working class.
However, in various sectors of the world revolution it is still a question of an uneven process which up to now has still not permitted the gap between the maturity of the objective conditions necessary for the revolution and the weakness of the subjective factor to be bridged.
6. The developments of the international class struggle are increasingly closely interlinked. The immediate perspective is that of chronic social instability in the colonial countries, with setbacks but also real revolutionary crises, and a sharp crisis of bureaucratic domination in some workers states. In the imperialist countries, resistance to austerity —with the hard, explosive struggles that the latter can produce-plays a key role in the world relationship of forces, even if it does not in the short term, result in decisive victories.
Revolutions have resulted in the overthrow of capitalism in one country or region and they have weakened imperialism and reinforced the proletariat. But none of them, since the victory of the Stalinist counterrevolution in the USSR has permitted the resolution of the leadership crisis of the international workers movement.
The solution of this crisis of leadership, on which the historical outcome of the struggle for workers power depends, requires the construction of a new mass communist International on the basis of a world program which synthesizes the most advanced experiences of class struggle in all countries. To work towards this end is the raison d'etre of the Fourth International.