For the Reconstruction of the
the Fourth
International
Part 2 (continued from IDM No 1).
Osvaldo Coggiola
[Translated: Chris Edwards]
The validity of the revolution in the relationships of production and in the
consciousness of the masses was proven in World War II, when the USSR was about
to be annihilated by Nazism, with which Stalin maintained a privileged alliance
up to 1941, when Germany invaded the USSR. After the spectacular initial
defeat, which decimated the Soviet army, the recomposition of the military
force of the
It was a historical victory for state planning, a moral victory for the
principles of the socialism. A world victory, in the measure
in which the defeat of Hitler in the
This historical balance-sheet, which considers the contradictions of development, is opposed in the highest degree to the fanciful versions that pretend that "the bureaucratic deformation had been deepened notably during and after the civil war" (that is to say, that the USSR was born as a bureaucratic state, because the civil war was immediately after the taking of power), in order to deduce that "the Stalinists counter-revolution changed the socio-economic bases of the USSR completely" (8), that is to say, that the USSR was a capitalist state, and its victory against Nazism in the War II, was the victory of one totalitarian state against another.
Another thing said is that the victory of the USSR was made possible by the
survival of the bureaucratic regime, which carried it out: 1) In the internal
plane, by the super exploitation of the workers (rationing, wage freeze with an
increase in inflation of 250%), by the increase of bureaucratic powers and the
re-establishment of ranks in the Red Army, which strengthened the body of
officials; 2) on the world plane, by the counter-revolutionary agreements with
world imperialism, celebrated in Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam. But that victory
and the expropriation of capital in
Certainly, it is necessary to undo the identification between statisation and socialism, used by imperialism in order to discredit the revolution. It was exactly Stalinism which introduced that identification, in order to justify the blockade of the revolution in a single country or region and also its privileges, based on state property. In accordance with Trotsky, in the already mentioned work: "Private property, in order to be changed socially, has to pass ineluctably through statisation. State property becomes that of the whole people in the measure that the privileges and social distinctions disappear and, consequently, the state loses its reason for being. In other words: state property becomes social in the measure that it stops being the property of the state. Reciprocally, the more the soviet state rises above the people, the more strongly it is opposed, as the guardian of property, to the people, and so much more clearly attests against the social character of state property."
Historical Role of Social Democracy
In the two world wars, Social Democracy played a key role, as much in the preparation of the conflicts as in avoiding a revolutionary outcome to their end. This role of the Second International demonstrates how much imperialism and the bourgeoisie depends on political forces not originating from its breast for its stability and political control (that is to say, its historical anachronism), which is verified until this very day, especially in Europe.
Social Democracy went over definitively to the bourgeois order when it became the accomplice of the first imperialist war. In the post-war period it was the lifeboat of the bourgeois state (a role that it could complete thanks to the support that vast labour sectors granted it, mainly in Western Europe), an apologist of the "Pax Americana" (the 14 points of the president Wilson) and butcher of revolutionaries (the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, ordered by the German Social Democratic minister Noske). It was just as much an accomplice as Stalinism to the politics of division of the German proletariat that led to the victory of Nazism.
During the second post-war period, it conserved all the qualities already
acquired, adding to them another. It was the tip of lance (with the Labour
Party) in the creation of the State of Israel against the Palestinian nation
and a wedge of imperialism in
In Turingia, bastion of the SPD, it was agreed to create the Workers' Party, unifying communists and socialists. The occupying army of the Great Powers intervened in order to block that perspective. In the East, the SPD consented to its absorption by the Stalinist party, giving rise to the PSU, that would create the political bases of bureaucratic power. In the West, the SPD was reorganised at the base on the interdiction of the PCA and with the participation of the North American services. The SPD was one of the pillars of the German division and of the division of the European proletariat, consecrated later by the "Wall of the Shame," as well as of the division of the European unions, financed by the CIA.
The SPD, and social democracy in general, looked for its own flight through
Ostpolitik, the politics of intermediation between the Russian bureaucracy and
of
The
counter-revolutionary collaboration
With the end of World War II and the military occupation of
The process of anti-bureaucratic revolution in the countries directly
dominated by Stalinism showed initially with the rebellion of the workers of
East Berlin, in 1953, contained with the aid of the Western powers and of the
then Mayor of West Berlin, Willy Brandt. The growing collaboration with
imperialism was not episodic. and it supplemented the
bureaucratic centralisation of the "socialist camp". The creation of
COMECON, in 1948, consecrated a politics of looting, by the Russian
bureaucracy, of the countries of Eastern Europe, which would create a
centrifugal force, to get rid of the bureaucracies imposed by the Kremlin, in
The combination of these contradictions was felt in the very
In 1959, the sector of producer goods projected a growth of 8.1% and realised 12%; in 1963, the sector of consumer goods projected 6.3% and only realised 5%. The growing stagnation of the economy and the ever greater disproportions between its diverse sectors put the crisis of the bureaucratic administration of the economy in evidence, compromising what remained of central planning.
The bureaucracies of East Europe preceded that of the
This economic process was the basis of the growing political approach of the
bureaucracy to imperialism, which confirms that it is a bourgeois layer inside
the workers' state. In 1975, in the Helsinki Agreement, the bureaucracy
compromised, with the representatives of imperialism, in maintaining the
status-quo in
But the questioning of the bureaucracy "from below" (the political
revolution) also grew, with a constant resistance in the factories and big
popular risings: 1956,
On the basis of state property, the bureaucratic administration did not
impede a gigantic development of the productive forces in the
The
Collapse of the Bureaucracy
In 1989, the antibureaucratic political revolution made a qualitative leap.
Gigantic mobilisations of the masses demolished the bureaucratic governments in
Eastern Europe and shook the centre of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the
After 70 years of pretence of the "construction of socialism", of
bureaucratic regime, of the crushing of the labour movement, of repression and
physical liquidation of the vanguard, of peaceful coexistence with capitalism
and of class collaboration on a world scale, the Soviet economy was in deep
stagnation. The productivity of labour is several times inferior to that of the
capitalist countries; whole sectors of the economy are completely obsolete, the
amount and quality of the produced articles does not succeed in satisfying the
social demand, and the endless queues multiply. The
When the amount of work and of products should give place to quality, when
the productivity of the labour should grow, when new advances would only have
been possible through new methods of work, innovations, the bureaucracy showed
itself to be an absolute obstacle to the development of the
The stagnation of the
Starting from those historical and political premises, the Partido Obrero
concluded that "the
With specific variants, this framework is also applied to
The impasse experienced by the Cuban revolution is only linked partly to the
end of the
Castro crowned this evolution formulating his own version of peaceful
coexistence: the New International Order, different from the socialist
revolution, affirming that
Besides these external politics, the reinforcement of the internal
bureaucratism configures for the Cuban revolution, which guaranteed to the
exploited social conquests not publicised in
The demand for "pluralism", made by the democratist left, is
located inside the Castro proposal ( "opening")
and capitulates in the face of imperialist pressure, because it does not
question the absence in
Evidence of the debacle of Morenoism is that it expounds the overthrow of
Castro as a precondition in order to expound the defence of
In relation to the civil war in ex-Yugoslavia, "Trotskyist" politics oscillated between support to the diverse bureaucratic factions in conflict (Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian), abandoning slogans tending towards the independent intervention of the masses (including the arming of the workers) and also, on the pretext of the "national question," the historical battle of Bolshevism for the Socialist Federation of the Balkans, leaving, in the name of the "democratisation of the army" and of the "defence of Bosnia," the whole destiny of the ex-Federation in the hands of the armed bands of the bureaucracy or of the imperialist armies (including the "blue helmets" of the UN).
Stability
and Capitalist Decomposition
The old expression of the ideological capitulation of the combined left, (Stalinist, social democratic and "Trotskyist") is verified in its exaltation of the post-war capitalist development as a period of new expansion of the productive forces, its capitulation in front of the myth of the "glorious thirty years," created retrospectively by the ideologues of imperialism.
The bourgeoisie succeeded in containing the revolutionary wave in
In the three post-war decades, capitalism found a framework of development,
a new formula for accumulation of capital, that makes
worse the whole of its contradictions, although under a form different from the
explosions of 1914 and 1939. This is not a plus in favour of imperialism: the
wars of
The reorganisation of the world economy under the hegemony of the
In spite of being prolonged in time, the prosperity was very unstable and permanently subjected to crises. Also, from the beginning of the decade of the 70s, the conditions are more and more critical, temporary and restrictive. The new technologies are not a synonym of stability and progressive expansion, and they gave rise to a type of development that unveils the increasingly reactionary character of capitalism. The whole previous stability was based, not in the free development of the capitalist productive forces, but in the direct intervention of the state in the economy: in the capitalist countries, the government spent between 30 and 45% of the GNP (9).
The
Validity of the Class Struggle and the Anti-imperialist Struggle
The whole literature on the "democratisation" of the imperialist countries collapses if their social, political and economic reality is studied. The bourgeoisie was obliged to a series of concessions to the labour movement in the years immediately following 1945, as the price for its political stability. The most notable thing is that the later decades of prosperity were accompanied by a structural necessity of the bourgeois state to liquidate those concessions. The only barrier against it was the resistance of the proletariat. More than ever, the "spontaneous" development of capitalism means social setback, and this when the material conditions of production permit a qualitatively different step for the satisfaction of human necessities.
The political system is openly dominated by bureaucratisation and by militarism. The state is indeed the executive committee of the bourgeois class, with the labour bureaucrats acting like mere extras. Here we observed that the capitalist development is identified with necessarily oppressive social and political relationships, which it could only accentuate; only the struggle of the masses could extract some conquests, permanently put in question by capitalist reproduction. Capitalism does not know any form of` humanisation, and the critics of Marxism confuse the growth of production and the temporary improvement of the conditions of life of some sectors of the working class of the imperialist countries, with an inversion of the laws of motion of the accumulation of capital.
As in the time of Marx, the only force of resistance to the immediately destructive effects of those laws is the political and social force of the working class. The difference is clear: in the upward period of capitalism those effects (for example, the arduous working day) were a cost of the progressive character of capitalist accumulation, and the proletariat could limit them for a whole historical period. Currently, in qualitatively much more favourable and abstract technological conditions, the results of purely trade union struggle, that is to say, for the value of the workforce, are more restricted and the brutality of the conditions of work are exclusively of the reactionary character of the capitalist development.
Without a doubt, the most notable aspect of what happens in the new phase, is the growing restriction of the relative benefits of accumulation. In this aspect, capitalism made qualitatively worse the forms of its transformation into an imperialist system. On a world scale, the backward countries and semi colonies collapse literally into penury and hunger, without any perspective. For most of humanity, the capitalist prosperity of those decades meant a qualitative and irreversible worsening of their social , material and moral conditions of life.
Metropolitan capitalist development is also characterised by a growing
social setback. The high levels of unemployment constitute a permanent fact of
the cycle, which are not absorbed in the period of
boom, and which are increased in the recessions. Still more, an ever greater
part of the population is marginalised from the circuit of prosperity, and the
evident example is the dozens of millions of poor in the
The dominant role of financial capital is characteristic of the imperialist phase of the capitalism. What characterise these decades is the extreme exacerbation of parasitism. Material production of surplus value appears subordinate to the necessities of the more speculative fractions of capital, which regulates the equalisation of the rates of gain in their benefit. Thus, a super expansion of credit and of indebtedness is produced, with the explosion of the fictitious benefits implicated in this. It is possible to affirm that the current expansion of speculative capital is produced on the basis of the same speculative capital; the mountains of debts permit the structuring of new instruments of appropriation of the benefits. The state deficit feeds this engagement permanently.
With each more and more abrupt step from prosperity to crisis on the world stage, we see the evidence of a process that embraces the group of countries and social forces which contributed to build the relationships following World War II. The forms of eruption of the crisis could not be foreseen. The fall of the Stalinist bureaucracy is a manifestation of the progress of that movement, as well as the lack of stability in the bourgeois regimes of the backward countries. The bourgeoisie will continue having time and the initiative while there is not a beginning of a solution, on an international scale, to the crisis of leadership of the proletariat, condemning humanity to historical setback.
The Gulf War in 1990 was not an isolated episode, but the manifestation of
all the aggressive, destructive and parasitic tendencies characteristic of
imperialism. More than a thousand million daily dollars were spent in order to
reduce an oppressed nation to trash. But it is not a matter of a manifestation
of a political offensive of imperialism. On the contrary, the political and
military control of the Persian Gulf (and of the whole Middle East) is a vital
necessity for the USA, due to the crisis that its is traversing: among other
things, it is a vital arm in the struggle against European and Japanese
imperialism. That control was to check the successive risings of masses in the
region (civil war in the
World
crisis
The world crisis configures a historical category related to the moment in which the decomposition of the whole of capitalism acquires the form of a political crisis and a revolutionary crisis, integrating the bureaucratised workers states, already linked to the world capitalist economic circulation, and to the bureaucracy as an organ of the world bourgeoisie inside those states. The development of the world crisis is the development of the combined crisis of imperialism and the bureaucracy. The Stalinist bureaucracy is, considered globally, as an agency of the bourgeoisie in the interior of the workers' states. Its pretence of exploiting the conquests of the revolution in its profit is linked to the whole of the world economy and politics. In that framework, it is a specimen of the counter-revolution. Trotsky pointed out that "the political prognosis (he referred to the workers' states) has an alternative character: either the bureaucracy, being more and more the agent of the bourgeoisie in the workers' state, demolishes the new forms of property and pushes the country towards capitalism, or the working class crushes the bureaucracy and opens a road towards socialism" (The Revolution Betrayed).
For the apologists of capitalism, including the bureaucracy, there should be nothing less than a victory of capitalism over socialism. This hypothesis was foreseen by Marxists as a consequence of the superiority of the world capitalist regime over isolated nations where the revolution triumphed, superiority not because they are capitalists (what would the superiority of the anarchy of production signify over planning?) but because capitalism, a world system, still represents the more advanced historical entity of society, while the revolution triumphed in the backward countries from the economic and cultural point of view. Marxism was the one that first to foresee that not only was it probable but also, ultimately, inevitable, that if the revolution did not triumph in most of the big capitalist countries, the capitalist pressure would reverse the victories and revolutionary conquests, restoring capitalism.
A very diffused opinion pretends that it is a
matter of a capitalist victory as a consequence of the fact that capitalism, in
contrast to the planned economy, was able to revolutionise the productive
forces, elevating the productivity of labour constantly, a "scientific-technical"
revolution that facilitated the victory of competition against
"socialism." The truth, on the contrary, is that "in its process
of disintegration, capitalism placed the immense majority of the capitalist
economy in a state of obsolescence; the process of world valorisation of
capital could not continue without destroying the whole of surplus capital
which it created and which did not find a place in the market. Over a long
period, capitalism tried to hide this overproduction through arms production,
without perceiving that if there is any branch which creates a surplus of
capital, it is arms production, where the component of fixed capital,
technology and primary materials is much more intense, in relation to the
workforce, than in any another industry. The deindustrialisation not only
characterises the backward nations and the "socialist" countries, but
also entire regions and branches of the developed countries. The devaluation of
banking and financial capitals or of industries like the steel plant,
automobiles or whole sectors of the electronics and chemicals, surpass in scale
all the "capital" of the workers states, and this abyss is now much
greater as a consequence of the gigantic dismantling of state property carried
out in the last years by the bureaucracy. The politics of capitalist
restoration of the bureaucracy, of abolition of the monopoly of foreign trade,
of freedom of exchange, the liquidating of the limitations and restrictions to
the action of the world market inside their own countries, put automatically in
obsolescence the industry of the workers' states. The only thing that could be
expected in those conditions is a gigantic process of destruction of productive
forces and, therefore, an immense social catastrophe. That was what happened
with
Economic
crisis
At the base of the world crisis is the economic crisis of capital, a crisis of overproduction which concretises the capitalist tendency toward the anarchy of production, the devaluation of capitals and goods and, ultimately, toward the self-abolition of capital ("the limit of capital is the same capital"). In the capitalist vision, on the other hand, it is a matter of a crisis of the "Keynsian model" of state intervention in the economy (in which the crisis of the former-USSR must be included).
So-called "neoliberalism" does not come to pass from an ideological illusion, since it is based on a new intervention of the state , as much in the economic arena (in the financial markets, the monetary parities, the national and international flows of capital: the capitalist process is guaranteed with extra-economic means, demanding a daily, external, political intervention) as in the political-repressive function: to guarantee the destruction of social conquests (including the public services) and crush the reaction of the labour movement. The whole blah-blah-blah about the "minimum State" seeks to hide the ineluctable tendency, characteristic of senile imperialism, toward the strong and totalitarian state.
On the left (including some "Trotskyists"), tributary visions of the anterior prevail, which constitute the deepest evidence that the left is more and more the appendix of capital. In the writings of "regularism", the crisis is characterised as a "process of productive restructuring" (what the bourgeois economists call "creative destruction") or as the exhaustion of a "model of accumulation": the current crisis would mark the exit of a "model of Fordist administration " toward another based on robotisation and on microelectronics. In this technologist vision, we would be faced by a "crisis of Fordism" and not faced by a crisis of capital. The crisis of the "mode of regulation" is a screen for the crisis in the mode of production.
Related to this analysis--in fact, serving it fundamentally, is the thesis (defended especially by Mandel) that the crisis would evidence the end of a "long wave" of capitalist development ( "Kondratieff cycle") and the entrance into a "long depressive cycle", cycles linked to the lifetime of capital goods, and therefore to their renovation. Independently of its theoretical value, this thesis contradicts the whole of empirical evidence. In the last edition of the official Survey of Current Business, it is verified that the rates of investment in fixed capital of companies grew from an average of 9% in the five years prior to 1974, to one of 11% in the following five years (that is to say, in the crisis). This did not impede a fall of the growth of the GNP of 5-6% annually before, to 2-3% after. That is to say, it did not impede the fall of the productivity of labour or, crucially, the rate of profit, with its sequel of financial and monetary runs and a permanent perspective of` markets crashes.
All these technologist visions are tributaries, ultimately, of the "fetishism of capital," which forget that capitalism, "a contradiction in process" (Marx), is a contradictory unity of a process of production and of valorisation, and that its crisis does not evidence its tendency toward self-renewal, but toward self-destruction: "for time enough, world capitalism registers a series of explosions in all the branches of industry and of trade. The banks have observed the fall from their pedestal of Credit Lyonnais and Baring Brothers, among others; the German and French military industries are in bankruptcy, with announcements of closures and mergers; the European naval industry is in the hands of creditors, clamouring for a commercial war against Japan; ATT had to discharge 40 thousand people; the German automobile industry announced a plan to eliminate 100 thousand jobs. The whole of the Japanese financial system is in intensive care under the control of the main central banks. The list is considerably longer; financial and capitalist speculation in particular takes place in a framework of systematic explosions of the capitalist regime. The last aspect of the financial crisis that is visualised is the setback of enterprise profits, even in the areas of high technology, which is due in all cases to an excess of capacity of production in relation to demand, which forces a reduction in prices. This means that after 20 years of` international restructuring , massive losses, super exploitation and economic concentration, capitalism has not been able to overcome the tendency of the falling rate of long term profits" (11).
Actuality
of the Revolution
The historical validity of the proletarian revolution refers to the validity of its objective and subjective premises ( the crisis of society and existence of a revolutionary class). It does not serve to respond to the defenders of the "end of the socialism" by saying that capitalism is also in crisis: what they question is the very existence of an alternative social perspective , that is to say, the capacity of a social class to put it into practice.
Trotskyist thinking is the only one which is opposed consistently to this
argument: the bureaucracy, a bourgeois agent in the workers' organisations
(including states), has, for that reason, its bases of social control
undermined by the capitalist crisis. The resulting collapse brings face to face
the alternatives of antibureaucratic revolution and of capitalist
counter-revolution, only possible by violent means (
The conclusion drawn by Trotsky continues to be effective: the socialist revolution continues to be effective in the consciousness of the masses (expressed also in the antibureaucratic rebellions of the past and of the present) and in the world capitalist crisis. The validity of revolutionary premises could only be measured in the world environment, beginning by not identifying a supposed "decadence of the working class" with the decadence of the left that spoke in its name.
The same conditions of financial speculation and external indebtedness which
constitutes the main manifestation of the world capitalist crisis,
were the basis of the collapse of "socialism" (the debts per capita
from
The Russian bureaucracy is a part (now unveiled) of the capitalist world order: in that framework in the last years, a process of economic integration was mounted that tends to reverse the rejection of the Marshall Plan and the entrance of the IMF and the World Bank on the part of Stalin at the end of the World War II. The fall of the bureaucracies, by the direct action of the masses or reflecting the resistance of these indirectly, is for that reason an event of revolutionary characteristics, independently of its immediate unfolding.
The mobilisations of the workers of the East spread to reinvigorate the
Western proletariat: in
The economic crisis evidences the structural limitations of capitalism in its current historical stage. As a historically progressive regime, capitalism arrived a while ago to its limits, with World War I, the crisis of 1930 and World War II. By means of the political resources of the state, of an enormous economic centralisation, it found the means in the past to solve the crisis in cyclical terms. Those means unmasked a regime that has survived as such: it was not the productive forces of capital which, unwrapping themselves freely, overcame the obstacles, but the intervention of an external force, of the political power of the state, of wars. Capitalism thoroughly used the possibilities of arms production, of parasitic development, of fictitious capitals, of artificial development of the backward nations in order to create markets for its capitals and goods, in a systematic way, draining their resources in that process.
The crisis is structural: it is possible to have production booms and slumps,
but not a new historical expansion of the productive forces. The economic
expansion of Reagan was the first in which, in the metropolises, there was not an absorption of the jobless but an increase in
unemployment. The precariousness of the transitory solutions puts into relief
the weakness of the stabilisation plans, as the recent Mexican crisis
demonstrates, reflected in all
The "stabilisation" did not solve any of the existing problems: unemployment and foreign debt are higher than ever, in spite of the privatizations and refinancings of the type of the Brady Plan. There is again a situation of cessation of payments. Capitalism could not survive without producing a more and more intense and deep crisis.
"Flexibility" "total quality", "arbitration," do not sum up the "substitution of a technological paradigm for another", configuring a new historical development of the productive forces. That computer science advances by means of "flexibility" and precariousness, reveals that it is a matter of a resource to increase super exploitation. Upon intensifying (in extension and depth) the working day, and favouring, on a wider scale still, the reintroduction of antediluvian and backward forms of exploitation of work reveals that it is a matter of a means by which capital can adapt to its own crisis, multiplying the resources in order to obtain superprofits
Against this process, the labour mobilisations grow throughout the world;
especially in the imperialist countries (for labour stability and the reduction
of the working day), and throughout the world against the destruction of social
conquests, with the notable example of the big mobilisations in defence of the
social security and pensions (
The resistance to the discharge of the crisis on to the backs of the workers is the ultimate foundation of the recurrent crises of the political regimes, mainly in the imperialist countries: decomposition of the Italian and Japanese regimes, defeat of Bush in the USA (after the "victory" of the Gulf!), which pointed out the end of the "conservative revolution," and now of Clinton; the general exhaustion of all the governments. The maturation of the objective and subjective conditions enter into ever greater contradiction with the absence of the revolutionary party.
Validity
of Trotskyism
After the death of Trotsky, the Trotskyist program received, in its strategic lines, its total confirmation: 1) In the backward countries, the revolution was only victorious in those in which the passing of the democratic revolution toward the socialist was operated, that is to say, toward the expropriation of capital (China, Cuba); 2) against theories of all credos and colours, the workers' revolution also proved its objective validity in the imperialist metropolises (from the immediate post-war period until the Portuguese revolution, passing through the French May), that is, its global validity; 3) the Popular Fronts proved themselves to be a politics of defeat, of abortion of the revolution until the Fascist victory: all Western Europe in the post-war period, Portugal, Chile 1970-73, Nicaragua in the decade of the 80s, Indonesia in the decade of the 60s, etc.; 4) in the absence of an international revolutionary leadership, at the head of , or inserted into, the main sectors of the proletariat and the exploited of the whole world, the revolutionary processes miscarried or, when victorious in the national plane, did not initiate the world revolution or its continental extension, which led to an impasse or degeneration; 5) the bureaucratisation of the workers' states led those societies to a complete impasse. The search for reforms that gave a way out, without touching the bases of bureaucratic control, opened the way toward situations that leave the alternatives of the revolution and counter-revolution face to face.
That the posthumous victory of Trotsky is, for the time being, merely theoretical, not political, does not justify the currents of the left which talk about the failure of Trotskyism, when they are not able to at least boast of theoretical victories (on the contrary, they could only count spectacular failures on that plane). They are the same currents that greeted the fall of the "wall of the shame" during the day and cried the "death of the socialism" in the night, which shows their complete anachronism. Only the Trotskyist program integrates the antibureaucratic fight in the perspective of world proletarian and anticapitalist revolution: it is at the moment the only program that defends explicitly the historical perspective of socialism, that constitutes, yes, its victory and historical justification.
The actuality of Trotsky consists in the verification that the basic lines of contemporary development confirm the main points of the Trotskyist program . Starting from that recognition it is possible to determine the strategic lines of an international revolutionary current, which are those of the program of the Fourth International. In the last 60 years, the historical premises of proletarian internationalism were developed as never before: the inability of capitalism to overcome the antagonism between the international development of the productive forces and national states, the inability of the bureaucracy to build "socialism in a single country," the inability of bourgeois nationalism and the petit bourgeoisie to lead achieve national autonomy.
Only the proletarian revolution could give a progressive exit to the world crisis, in conditions in which, of all the political tendencies which were born as a consequence of the crisis of leadership of the working class, only the Fourth International maintained its validity as a political program, which became the ideological thread of the recomposition of the international workers' movement.
The Fourth International.
The most vulgar explanation concerning the crisis of the Fourth International (or rather of the fact that it was not transformed after the Second World War, as Trotsky supposed, into the organisation and banner of million of workers) was the summary made by Morenoism: the murder of Trotsky, and various of its leading participants during the Second World War, had left the Fourth International weakened, led by young and/or inexperienced people who were unable to transform it into an organisation of the masses. Besides being subjective, by situating in its centre a "generational" problem, this explanation avoids all the political and programmatic problems encountered by the International.
Through such shallowness, it deprecates the organisations and militants that fought during the Second World War on a principled line (12); who established the European Secretariat of the Fourth International, in 1942, under the very noses of the Nazi-fascist army; who were the only ones to struggle to transform the imperialist war into a civil war, defending "revolutionary militarism", and who developed a clandestine activity conducive to the revolutionary fraternisation of the soldiers of the Nazi army and the occupied peoples.
The historians today remain stupefied when faced by the vitality of the
clandestine Trotskyist press in Nazi-fascist Europe, and faced by the
declaration, widely distributed in 1944, before the Allied troops disembarked,
which was directed to the "workers of
"With extreme violence, the forces of the American and British
imperialists who wilfully remained a long time in inaction, in order to weaken
simultaneously
The same Trotsky also, in his last public document, emphasised the revolutionary role of the Fourth International during the war:
"The immense majority of our comrades in the different countries have passed the first test of the war. This fact is of inestimable significance for the future of the Fourth International. All members of our organisation not only have the entitlement, but are obliged to consider themselves as an officer in the revolutionary army that will be created in the fire of events...a single revolutionary in a factory, in a mine, in a trade union, in a regiment, on a warship is worth infinitely more than hundreds of petit-bourgeois pseudo-revolutionaries stewing in their own juice." (14)
In her organisational report to the European Conference of the Fourth
International (1946), the representative of the International Executive
Committee (Sherry Mangan) registered the survival of almost all national
sections in the difficult conditions of the war and their growth in the year
immediately afterwards.
The Political Crisis.
In terms of an orientation and of revolutionary action, the Trotskyists, nevertheless, faced serious problems which they did not manage to resolve, either at the level of each country or at the level of a world political orientation. For Trotsky the Fourth International was better armed than Bolshevism, possessed a more solid programme, which neither the repression nor the war could prevent from becoming transformed into the axis that would help the Fourth international convert itself into a great revolutionary party, that would exploit the war for the victory of the revolution:
"It was not this that succeeded, but the confusion and the disputes in
the ranks of the Fourth International during the war. Sectors of the Fourth
International and its own leadership began to defend slogans of national
liberation for imperialist countries, such as
In a declaration at the end of 1945, the Fourth International affirmed that
"a long and relatively stable intermediate democratic era until the
triumph of the socialist revolution or of fascism is revealed as impossible."
Even in 1948, Ernest Mandel polemicised against Tony
Balance
Sheet and Empiricism
For Mandel, the reasons for the failure are objective and subjective..
"The international ascent was produced more extensively than after
World war 1, if we include
Besides introducing elements of difficult evaluation, this explanation suffers from the defect of impeding a balance sheet of the politics of the Fourth International, falling into the error denounced by Trotsky in Class, Party and Leadership: to blame the class for the errors of its leadership, real or potential. In its conservative-twin version (Lambertism) the "confusion" was turned into a "law": the obligatory shift (sic) in the direction of the revolutionary ascent by the "traditional organisations"· The United Secretariat of the Fourth International completed the Mandelite subjectivism with an "objectivist" explanation. "The reasons for the minority existence of the Fourth International are of an objective order. They result from the consequences of the World War, of the temporary consolidation of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR, of the low level of activity of the proletariat in the decisive countries, the USSR and the USA" (18) What was "low level of class consciousness" in the revolutionary context was transformed into "low level of activity" in a context of stability.
The problem, however, is not the errors but the incapacity to face up to them and, following on from there, overcoming them. The Second World Congress of the Fourth International, in 1948, liquidated the problem of a balance sheet of 10 years of activity, from the foundation, passing through the Second World War, the revolutionary ascent, and the initiation of the Cold War, and all the rest, in scarcely an hour of report and discussion! This blind empiricism was the culture medium for all types of bureaucratic impositions, as would succeed with the Pabloite programme approved in the Third World Congress (1951). This panorama gives the measure of the fallacy of the Lambertist affirmation, according to which, before this Congress:
"The leadership acted as an authentic political centre and not only as an administrative or organisational framework. In relation to the vital problems of the revolution and counterrevolution, Trotskyist politics were unique in possessing a clearly defined orientation, on an international scale, and inscribed in the struggle, in each country, for the construction of sections of the new International, in which they selected the forces which would compose the Fourth International, and traced-out its contours." (19)
Our current was born exactly from the struggle against this blind empiricism and its inevitable sequel of manifest opportunism:
"During the war, the vanguard of Leninism-Trotskyism is liquidated. Some--Abraham Leon--by Hitlerism. Others--Leon Trotsky--by Stalinism. It is a very hard blow for the international Trotskyist current. In this context, the sectors most removed from the revolutionary struggle that were within Trotskyism were pressing for a course toward the right. The Yankee wing of the Fourth International took a position of "socialist" pacifism faced by the Second World War and, under its responsibility, in the name of the whole International; this position repudiated the correct position of the Fourth International maintained in the Transitional Programme until the death of Leon Trotsky. The terrible weakness of Trotskyism, without militants and without organisation, cancelled out its role in the revolutionary crisis of the war; the most opportunist elements raised their heads and imposed their agenda. Under these conditions, the national Trotskyist sections, left to their own devices, followed an uneven and contradictory role in the evolution of the crisis. These disorientated elements followed narrowly national perspectives and responded, in the main, to centrifugal and opportunist forces on the scale of the international current. For this reason, the failure to undertake a thorough examination of this past was at the heart of the opportunism of the last reunification Congress (1963, that originated the United Secretariat)" (20)
What is surprising in the "Pabloite" turn (the attribution of an objective revolutionary role to the Russian bureaucracy, justified particularly in relation to the imminence of the World War, a role that negated that of the world proletariat, condemning it to tail-ending the bureaucracy) is the ease with which a practice concentrated on narrowly national problems, and an incipient bureaucratisation of the international apparatus, was imposed, at the level of almost the whole of the International. This was the point of view which was defended by those who opposed "Pabloism" from the start:
"The entire International had made the greatest sacrifices from 1944 in order to permit the construction of the current leadership, beginning from the specialisation of certain comrades in the international work. But the latter, whose selection was very artificial, and who were far removed from the activity of the national section which in the same period threw themselves, ever more deeply, into the work of the masses, were exposed to the pressure of forces hostile to our movement. The new leadership had to be reconstructed not by the specialisation of some comrades, but by an ever more active participation of all the sections of the International. Only through an intense political life of the International, and not by some statutory measure (although these might be necessary) would the danger of a new degeneration of the international leadership be avoided. The more the sections sprouted roots in the masses of their own country, the more they · felt the necessity of international participation, for their own particular needs of their mass work. The members of the international leadership must not be suspended in mid-air, without real responsibility on the front line of the movement and the masses. They must not be selected according to artificial criteria (availability, selection in the struggle of tendencies etc.), they must not be "professional migrants", but effective representatives of their sections, and an expression of Trotskyist activity in the masses and not only of Trotskyist ideas" (21)
The organisational disintegration of the united Fourth International was linked, as was correctly affirmed by the International Committee which appeared, in 1953, "the development of revisionism in 'liquidationism". Later, Pabloism was considered as merely an "ideological turn" by those who assumed "antiPabloism", as a pretext for diplomatic manoeuvres that barely hid what in reality did not go beyond a dispute in the apparatus:
"The reconstruction of the Fourth International, was shipwrecked in the past 25 years, after the crisis of 1951-55, because the tendencies that raised the banner of struggle against Pabloism were organised in a political context that possessed, as its axis of reference, the supposed regeneration of revisionism. In order to preserve this axis, and their consequent unification manoeuvres, they organised a federal framework, which questioned the principle element of democratic centralism. Thus it was with the SWP/US and International Committee before 1963, with the OCI (Lambert) and Healy until 1971, and with the ORCFI from its foundation. The common characteristic of negating work based on centralism barely hid the intention of reaching an agreement with revisionism at the first opportunity. It was the determination of the revisionists in maintaining themselves as a centralised organisation, in the face of the federalism of their opponents, that guaranteed their survival. The so-called continuity of the Fourth International, that filled Lambert and Co. with such pride, is refuted by the fact that it is impossible to conserve the thread of international revolutionary continuity in a federation of debates." (22)
The current coming directly from Pabloite revisionism has the advantage, over shamefaced revisionism, and the non-confession of others, of taking the revision to its ultimate conclusion, negating the sharp cutting-edge of the Trotskyist programme. According to its principal current leader:
"The crisis of revolutionary leadership is not reduced any more to a crisis of the vanguard and the necessity of replacing the traditional bankrupt leadership by a pure substitute. What is posed is the political, trade union, social reorganisation of the workers movement and its allies on a global scale." (23)
To counterpose this "reorganisation" to the crisis of leadership--that is to say, that Trotsky never proposed to substitute the leadership of organisations that remain as bureaucratic as they are--signifies taking up a position outside of the organisations of the workers movement and of the masses.
For an International Trotskyist Tendency.
The reconstruction of the Fourth International is posed simultaneously by the validity of its programme and by the shift of the international "Trotskyist" currents toward the conception which, in order not to abuse the time or the patience of the reader, is encapsulated in a sentence written by that cultivated epitome of all the common places of the left that is the famous historian Eric J. Hobsbawm:
"1988...signified the end of an era of world history revolving around the October revolution" (24), that is to say, the idea that the epoch of world socialist revolution is closed.
In the current political period, this idea converges with the democratist politics promoted by imperialism which are put forward in a strategically defensive situation, necessitating, for this reason, all the points of political support (the real content of imperialist "democratism"). In the current revisionist discourse, the convergence was promoted by the defence of the dictatorship of the proletariat as an extension, and an amplification, of the democratic liberties existing under the bourgeois regime (25) (or, as the French section affirmed in 1978, "revolutionary politics is the politics of workers' democracy") in order to be transformed afterwards into an abandonment, pure and simple, of this cardinal notion of Marxism, and, finally of the very idea of the revolutionary party.
In its "leftist" variant (the diverse, indigenous fractions of Morenism), the revision passed through the defence of "socialism with democracy" in which the leading role of the party was negated. The October Revolution was presented as the product of the decision of the soviets accepted by Bolshevism, when in truth the insurrection was not executed by the masses, although these were mobilised in the workplaces, where they pronounced themselves in favour, or against, the new revolutionary government. These millions of people approved the coup d’état carried out by Lenin and Bolshevism and were disposed to support and defend it, arms in hand, if it became necessary, as it did in the later bloody civil war. What this current evolution, now, towards a negation of the revolutionary character of October does not signify is that it is not necessary to combat a conception which, because it is opposed superficially to "one party" Stalinism, concludes by profoundly negating the function of the revolutionary party, in the name of a democracy, including soviet democracy.
The soviets, however, do not contain the key to power. They are a structure of dual power, and in this sense, pose the question of power. This could not be regulated in the framework of the soviets by the peaceful development of its democratic form. To believe in this is to adhere to a democratist-pacifist understanding of the proletarian revolution which was proved wrong in diverse historic experiences (China 1927, Germany 1919, Spain 1937 etc.): in these the revolutionary movement had the power in fact, but permitted it to be violently snatched away, because it did not go beyond the duality of power and destroy the apparatus of the bourgeois state. On the subject of revolution, democracy is not a decisive criterion. For this reason Lenin, considering the soviets as a superior form of democracy, saw them from the point of view of the insurrection and defined them as organs of struggle. The soviets prefigured the workers state, not abstractly in terms of democracy, but concretely in terms of the destruction f the apparatus of the bourgeois state.
Party and Revolution.
The question of the revolutionary party is posed, in the face of the emergency of the revolutionary situation, which has an objectivist character, that is to say, independent of the will of parties and classes in conflict. The revolutionary situation is, in the final instance, the product of the irreconcilable contradiction between the forces of production, which are developed on a capitalist basis, and the relations of production, a contradiction which has reached a point of maturity. The revolutionary situation is the result of the incapacity of capitalism historically to arrest the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the basis of the current social regime.
The nationalist political currents, social democrats, fascists or popular frontists, are nothing other than exceptional attempts to overcome the deadly contradictions of capitalism within this framework. They are attempts to avoid a shift to a revolutionary situation, and the revolution, to overcome or arrest the historic tendency towards capitalist collapse with exceptional political measures. In place of declaring the automatic character of the formation of revolutionary situations, it is necessary to highlight the role of the conscious factor and the clear delimitation from the political movements which imperialism utilises as its last means of survival. The question of the revolutionary situation is concentrated on the political quality of the revolutionary programme.
In actuality, it is not only with respect to the countries of imperialism and the semicolonies that the rhythm of revolutionary development is uneven. Also, it is with respect to the development of the struggle in the "ex-socialist countries", their contradictions and antibureaucratic mobilisations. The global unity that constitutes the process of revolution does not result from a spontaneous development, but requires conscious leadership from the globally organised vanguard.
The political tendency of the workers' movement to regroup itself politically on new axes is present in the international situation which puts on the table the question of the party and the International. If this question is evident in the frequent social explosions led by the working class and the youth of diverse countries, it is particularly evident in the two most numerous proletariats of the planet. In the ex-USSR, by the mortal crisis of Stalinism, by the bold forms of struggle adopted in decisive moments permanent strike committees) and by the slow movement of the masses towards the left. In the US, it is evident in the crisis of the trade union organisations, the growth of the workers' struggle, especially the black workers, in the election of a new (bureaucratic) leadership "of the left" in the AFL-CIO, and even in the emergence of a confused, incipient movement that poses the question of a Labor Party. (20)
The struggle of the Workers' Party (Partido Obrero) in
Notes
1) Leon Trotsky. Oeuvres, Paris, ILT, v.2, p.193.
2) Leon Trotsky. Bolshevismo y Stalinismo, (Bolshevism and Stalinism)
3) Pierre Broué. Los Trotskystas en el URSS, (The Trotskyists in the
4) Leon Trotsky. Como Stalin derroto a la oposicion, (How Stalin defeated
the opposition) Escritos 1935-36.. Pluma,
5) Ernest Mandel. What is Trotskyism?, Red Books,
6) Leon Trotsky. Stalin. El Gran Organizador de Derrotas (Stalin. The Great
Organiser of Defeats),
7) Ibidem, [pp]. 94-95.
8) Andrés Romero. Despues del Stalinismo (After
Stalinism),
9) Michael Kidron. El Capitalismo Occidental de Posguerra (Western
Capitalism Since the War),
10) Jorge Altamira. La Crisis Mundial, (World Crisis) En Defensa del Marxismo No 4.
11) Jorge Altamira. En visperas de otro crac financiero
internacional? (On the eve of another international
financial crash?) Prensa Obrero 483,
12) Cf. Declaracion de los Comunistas en Buchenvald
(Declaration of the Communists in
13) Declaracion del CE Europeo de la IV Internacional (Declaration of the European EC of the Fourth International), junio 1944.
14) La Guerra Imperialista la Revolution Mundial Proletaria. (The
Imperialist War and the Proletarian World Revolution),.
Accion Obrera.
15) Jorge Altamira. A II Guerra Mundial e o Papel
da Esquerda. (The Second World War and the Role of the Left)
in 0. Coggiola. A Segunda
Guerra Mundial. Um Balanco Historico.
16) Document et Resolutions du II Congres Mondial
de la IV Internationale. (Documents and Resolutions of the
17) Ernest Mandel. Actualite de Trotskisme. (The Actuality of Trotskyism)
Critique Communiste no 25.
18) La recomposicion
19) OCI. Crisis y reconstruction de la IVa Internacional (Crisis and Reconstruction of the Fourth International) 1976.
20) Jorge Altamira. Vigencia and continuidad historica
21) Documents de 1953 scission dans la IVe Internationale, (Documents of the 1953 Split in the
Fourth International) Cahiers du CERMTRI. no 47.
22) TCI. sobre la
division del SU v la formacion
23) Daniel Bensaid. "Entre Histoire et Memoire" ("Between History and Memoire") in: F. Moreau, Combats et Debats de la IVe. Internationale. Horisbriand. Vent d'Ouest. 1993, p31
24) Hobsbawm. Adeus a todo aquilo,
(Goodbye to all aquilo) in R. Blackburn Depois de Queda.
25) SU del IVe Internacional. Democracia Socialista v Dictadura del Proletaria. (Socialist Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat) 1987.
26) See: J. Martin. Nueva direccion en la AFL-CIO. (New
Leadership for the AFL-CIO) Prensa Obrera no 437.