[In this issue Intercontinental Press continues 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 cen-
International and the living
26. If the tasks of the socialist revolution are posed in a specific way in the different countries, in function of their particular social structures, they have a unity in the general objective of the workers taking power and then directly exercising it themselves.
The world character of the socialist revolution flows from the very nature of the problems it has to solve.
The increasingly accelerated internationalization of the productive forces and of capital implies an increasing internationalization of the class struggle itself, including at the level of immediate demands against the multinational exploiters.
Despite a series of partial revolutionary victories, the world market and the international division of labor remain dominated by capitalism as long as it maintains its power in the principal industrialized countries and benefits from an advance over the workers states concerning the average productivity of labor.
This is what permits the bourgeoisie of the imperialist countries, much more easily than in the colonial countries, to restabilize its power and to go through phases of growth, even after important proletarian victories (like that of the Chinese revolution). That is why mperialism will not suffer a decisive defeat as long as it is not overthrown in its principal bastions of Western Europe, the U.S. or in Japan. A victory of the political revolution in the USSR or China would greatly facilitate a victory of the proletariat in these strongholds.
Furthermore, the international bourgeoisie will never resign itself to the definitive loss of any part of the world as a field of investment for its capital or extension for its markets. Coexistence between states of a different social nature is, for it, a truce imposed by a relationship of forces that it will try and break at an opportune moment. The survival of capitalism in the imperialist countries and the industrializing semicolonial countries continues to exert a constant pressure on the workers states. In this way it reinforces the bases of the process of bureaucratization.
Finally the growing internationalization of the productive forces comes into increasingly explosive contradication with the maintenance of national states. It throws up decisive problems for the future of humanity, which can no longer be resolved either at the national or the continental level: to prevent nuclear war, to resolve the problem of hunger and malnutrition, the struggle against generalized pollution and the spread of deserts.
Only an international organization of resources in the framework of a planned economy is an adequate response to these colossal problems.
tral SWP leaders who had planned to attend the EC meeting and present counter reports there. Those subpoenaed were legally required to be available to appear in court on twenty-four 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 resolution on the world situation was passed by majority vote of the IEC.]
V. The unity of the world revolution, the necessity of the Fourth relevance of its program
27. The fundamental confrontation on a world scale is not between "camps" or states but, in the last analysis, between two fundamental classes. It demands the political independence of the proletariat and the intransigent defense of its interests in all countries, to forge in practice the international unity of the workers necessary for the overthrow of the reign of the bourgeoisie and of the bureaucratic dictatorship.
For more than a century already, the founders of Marxism saw in the International the logical conclusion and organizational concretization of their program. The Second International became definitively bankrupt at the time of the First World War. The Third, after Stalinism had politically destroyed the party of the world revolution, was formally dissolved by Stalin in 1943.
The Fourth International is today the only organization which defends in a consistent way the historic interests of the proletariat of the whole world and supports their mobilizations in all countries.
Its program integrates the strategic and tactical lessons of the whole history of the workers movement on a world scale. Like any scientific theory, it is susceptible of being enriched by any new important development of the class struggle and by any new revolutionary experience. The Paris commune, the Russian revolution, the German revolutions, the Spanish, Yugoslav, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions have all contributed to the enrichment of this program, as well as the workers uprisings in the bureaucratized workers states.
This program has been enriched also by the flourishing of a whole series of very broad-based social movements in the course of the last few years-which pose key questions for the emancipation and the future of humanity: above all the women's liberation movement, but also the antinuclear, ecological, and youth movements.
But none of these new contributions puts into question the basics of the revolutionary Marxist program: analysis of the contradications of the capitalist mode of production, of its imperialist phase and its decline; the historic actuality of the world socialist revolution, the necessity to destroy the bourgeois state apparatus and to set up the dictatorship of the proletariat; the theory of the permanent revolution; the necessity of the independent organization and unity of the proletariat; the strategy of transitional demands and the tactic of the workers united front to unify the workers struggles and lead them to pose the question of political power; the nature of the workers states and necessity of the political revolution in the bureaucratized workers states; the nature of the bureaucracy and the means of fighting against it in the struggle for socialist democracy; the necessity of a vanguard party and a democratically centralized International.
28. Despite the long struggle against the current, the vitality of the Fourth International cannot be reduced to a tenacious defense of this program. It has also been proved by the test of practice, by its concrete attitude faced with the events and the tasks of the world revolution, in particular faced with new victorious revolutions. It has, without concessions towards their leaderships and without ever looking for a "new socialist fatherland," known how to bring its support to the Yugoslav revolution, as well as the Chinese, the Cuban, and the Vietnamese revolutions. It also understood the importance and the process of the Nicaraguan revolution and committed itself to its defense in an international campaign mobilizing all its forces. It is doing the same with regard to the struggles unfolding in Central America and Poland
This differentiates it from tendencies like those grouped in the Parity Committee (International Committee) which combine opportunism towards the reformist or nationalist populist apparatuses with a dogmatic sectarianism towards revolutionary movements, indeed towards authentic revolutions like the Nicaraguan revolution. The split they provoked in the Fourth International in 1979 strongly reflects this sectarian refusal to recognize that the FSLN was leading the revolutionary process in Nicaragua, whatever might be its programmatic limitations.
29. Stalinism still constitutes the most formidable obstacle to the solution of the crisis of the subjective factor.
The social democratic bureaucracy bears the main responsibility for the failure of the revolutionary wave that followed the First World War. It also carries a big responsibility in the stifling of the revolutionary possibilities after the Second World War. More recently it was directly responsible for the restoration of bourgeois order in Portugal, from summer 1975 on. It has been the main political instrument for ensuring the relative stability of bourgeois order in the whole of Northern Europe.
But the maintenance and the periodic renaissance of social democratic influence inside the proletariat are in a large part a consequence of Stalinism. Without the reinforcement of the latter, the revolutionary crisis of the 1930s and 1940s would have resulted in the formation of mass revolutionary parties.
Stalinism is directly responsible for the crushing defeats of the proletariat, in particular in Germany in 1933, Spain 1936-39, Greece 1944, Iran 1945 and 1953, Indonesia in 1965, and Chile in 1973.
Even in the cases where it has not directly provoked bloody defeats, Stalinism has succeeded in sabotaging and causing the failure of mobilizations capable of ending in victory in a large number of imperialist countries (notably in France and Italy) and semicolonial countries. It has also alimented divisions and accumulated disappointments in the broad masses. It has perverted the conceptions and practice of proletarian internationalism by identifying it with the defense of the diplomatic maneuvers of the Kremlin. More generally after several decades of class collaboration and miseducation of workers, one can say that Stalinism has worked in the sense of a fragmentation and a regression of the political consciousness of the proletariat in numerous countries.
Last but not least, in the beginning a product of the isolation of the Russian revolution and the bureaucratization of the workers states in conditions of socioeconomic backwardness, Stalinism became an active agent of this degeneration. It is responsible in the USSR and in the bureaucratized workers states for a political system which oppresses the workers to the point of depriving them of certain political and tradeunion liberties that they have been able to win in the bourgeois regimes.
Daily repression, the absence of real political power for the masses, the military interventions against the political revolution in Hungary and in Czechoslovakia, the threats against the self-organization of the Polish proletariat, casts deep doubt and discredit on the meaning of socialism in the eyes of a significant part of the world proletariat. The more the bureaucracy does everything to define its regime as that of "really existing socialism" the more it facilitates the ideological/political campaign of the bourgeoisie which aims to disorient the working class and sow skepticism in its ranks.
30. In the framework of the rise and coming to power of the Stalinist
bureaucracy in the USSR, the Stalinization of the Communist International (CI) and the operation of subordination of the communist parties to the interests of this bureaucracy, were not extended at the same time and to the same degree in the whole of the international communist movement.
In the exceptional conditions of the decay of the ruling classes, the Chinese, Yugoslav, and Vietnamese CPs were led by teams formed at the time of the rise of Stalinism in the Cl, marked by empiricism and bureaucratic cynicism but also by the will to take power. They led the revolution up to the overthrow of capitalism in their own countries, against the will, plans and orders of Stalin.
As contrasted with those CPs who accepted their role of agents of the counterrevolutionary politics of the Kremlin to the point of their own suicide or liquidation, these parties, under the pressure of the masses, knew how to lead the struggle at one and the same time against the occupier and imperialism and against their own bourgeoisie. In this sense they carried out a revolutionary role.
But due to their Stalinist education, their authoritarian relationship with the masses, the stifling of self-organization of the proletariat and their taking up of the theory of building socialism in one country, these new workers states were bureaucratic from their origin, in their functioning and constitution. This fact has considerably facilitated the rapid growth of a bureaucratic caste.
31. The Cuban revolution, which gave birth to the first workers state in the Americas, presents the particularity of having been led by a team of non-Stalinist origin.
Instead of banking on the building of socialism in one country, this leadership posed the problem of the extension of the revolution, at least on a continental scale. It has gone the furthest on the basis of its own experience, in developing in the 1960s a line concretized in the formula: "socialist revolution or a caricature of revolution"-which came closest to the orientation of the permanent revolution. It has established and maintained relations with the masses different from the bureaucratic control exercised by the Chinese or Vietnamese leaderships.
These initial characteristics of the Castroist leadership have evolved and continue to evolve in function of several factors: the imperatives of the defense of the Cuban workers state under the direct threat of the main imperialist power; the military and economic dependence on the Soviet bureaucracy; the fluctuations of the Latin American revolution, which has repercussions on the mobilizations and the state of consciousness of the masses in Cuba itself; and finally, the specific ideological weight of this leadership which has integrated significant elements of the Soviet bureaucracy's conceptions.
The bureaucratization of society, state and party under the effect of these factors has not resulted in a political counterrevolution and the birth of a crystallized bureaucratic caste. Cuba is therefore still a workers state with bureaucratic deformations.
In the framework of a period of rise, and not decline, of the world revolution, the Cuban leadership firmly supports the revolutionary struggles in Central America. It is capable of evolving, at the price of differentiations and ruptures, under the influence of new revolutionary victories.
Neither the degree of consolidation of bureaucratic privileges, nor the rupture between the masses and the leadership, nor the relations with the international bourgeoisie are such that they justify in Cuba the call for political revolution.
The question of the political revolution can only be posed when the concrete experiences and events of the class struggle have demonstrated that the possibilities of reform are exhausted: that an irredeemable gap has already been opened up between the masses and the leadership; that the bureaucracy, to defend its power and privileges, would crush the masses through its dictatorship; and that it has a counterrevolutionary function on an international scale.
To say that a political revolution, that is, the violent overthrow of a government, is not justified in Cuba does not mean at all that revolutionary Marxists must give up their own program faced with the Castroist leadership.
The program of the Fourth International cannot be divided up. It forms a totality and as such the Fl has to be built throughout the world.
32. The beginning of the political revolution in Poland has confirmed the unity of the world revolution in a particularly sharp way. To the extent that the fundamental confrontation puts the Polish proletariat strategically against the Soviet bureaucracy, the political revolution cannot definitively triumph within the frontiers of Poland. The support and the extension of the revolutionary movement of the Polish workers is not only necessary in Eastern Europe and in the USSR, but also in capitalist Europe and on a world scale.
In a situation where all the conservative forces of the world are joining forces against the most audacious actions of the Polish proletariat —from the Western bankers to the Kremlin, from the Vatican to international social democracy-the natural allies of this proletariat are the workers of all countries. It is urgent and necessary to make the latter conscious of the stakes involved in the coming test of strength.
A victory for the political revolution in Poland would stimulate its extension into the other bureaucratized workers states and a new rise of the socialist revolution in a whole series of capitalist countries. Conversely a defeat of this revolution by a brutal repressive intervention by the Kremlin would strike a very serious blow against the whole international workers movement, above all in capitalist Europe, North America, and Japan.
Certainly, the forces that have been liberated by the massive rise of the Polish proletariat since July-August 1980 are too broad for a defeat to be devastating as it was in Hungary in 1956 or in Czechoslovakia in 1968. In the medium and long term, the continuation of the resistance and the deepening of the world crisis of Stalinism will be themselves a motor for the solution of the crisis of the subjective factor. However the immediate negative effects of a Kremlin intervention would be felt on a world scale and must in no way be underestimated.