For the Reconstruction
of the Fourth International
From En Defensa del Marxismo No 12 (
by Osvaldo Coggiola
[Translated by Chris Edwards]
May
1986
In 1934, Trotsky posed the
conclusions that were derived from the bankruptcy of the Third International,
passing in clear terms, through stalinism, to the camp of the bourgeois world
order, a fact demonstrated by its capitulation without combat in the face of
the advance of the nazism: "The proletariat has need of an International,
at all the times and under all the circumstances. If an
International does not exist now, it is necessary to say it openly and set out
immediately to prepare it" (1).
Worst
circumstances
The formal proclamation of the
Fourth International took place at the worst "times and
circumstances": those of the worst defeats of the world proletariat in all
history, crushed by Nazi-fascism in the West, atomized by Stalinism in the
country of the first victorious revolution; faced by the sure prospect of a new
world bloodbath which became inevitable after the defeats of the Spanish and
French proletariat, already on course with the invasion of China by the Japan
(and with the imminence of the Hitler-Stalin pact, predicted by Trotsky as the
inevitable consequence of the Munich Agreement, of 1938, between the
Nazi-fascism and the Western "democracies"). The crisis first, and
the bankruptcy later, of the Communist International, the highest expression of
the fusion of revolutionary Marxism and the world working class vanguard known
to this day, was a product of the setback of the revolution caused by the
betrayal of the social democracy, by the bureaucratization of the first
Workers' State that brought this setback, and by the defeat of the
revolutionary current headed by Trotsky. The bankruptcy of the Third
International begins with the betrayal of the Chinese revolution of 1927-28,
taking shape with the criminal capitulation of the German CP in 1932-34 and
consolidated with the alliance between the Soviet bureaucracy and the European
labour aristocracy, and of these with the shadow of the bourgeoisie, by means
of the Popular Fronts and the crystallization of reformism and "stageism"
of the CP, operative in the decade of the 1930s. These politics are responsible
for the defeat of the French proletariat in 1936 and of the Spanish Revolution
in 1931-39. From these unfavourable circumstances, Trotsky tried to extract the
forces for the new International, forging it not only upon the basis of the
revolutionary continuity of the three preceding Internationals
, but also of the thorough assimilation of the lessons left by the
defeats. This doesn't mean that it was a case of an International of doctrinaires:
in the 6 years that passed from the Nazi ascent to the proclamation of the
Fourth International, the forces regrouped by Trotsky got involved by putting
revolutionary parties on their feet, especially in Spain, France and the USA,
theatres of the most important class battles of the decade (the Spanish Civil
War, the French Popular Front and the North American movement of industrial
unionisation, the CIO). Trotsky makes an effort to convince his comrades that
this is only possible in the framework of an International: "starting from
the moment in which we began to build independent parties, from 1933, we are
already the Fourth International, although we are not a recognised
revolutionary leadership. This is because it is the movement to which we are
committed and on which we begin to organize ourselves. With the result that,
alongside those efforts, Trotsky tied to put an international framework on its
feet together with "left" centrists organisations like the SAP, the
OSP and the RSP from Holland and Germany, the French PSOP (to whose leader,
Marceau Pivert, Trotsky affirms that the bolshevik-leninists are a fraction of
the International that is being built," one of whose tasks will be "
to regenerate to a higher historical level the revolutionary democracy of the
proletarian vanguard"); through "entrism" in diverse Socialist
Parties, in order to accelerate the revolutionary differentiation of their left
wings etc. These efforts to build the Fourth International however, would fail.
The political limitations of these organizations are revealed as intractable in
the moment of transition to a new International and of rigorously assimilating
the revolutionary programme. The same Trotskyist nuclei were revealed immature,
on account of their youthfulness and their isolation from the masses.
When the Fourth International in
1938 is founded, the international political circumstances are worse than in
the preceding attempts: no ally has been conquered and the setback of the world
proletariat has been accentuated with the defeats in the Latin countries. One
month after the proclamation of the Fourth International the general strike in
Historical
Research
Historical research has proven
"1) that the Trotskyists between 1928 and 1940, were the only consistent
opponents of Stalinism with popular support, 2) they were the opponents which
terrified Stalin and his cohorts--even after their extermination. 3)
"against them it was necessary to use the most radical methods, the 'final
solution' in order to liquidate them" (3). The presence of the Soviet
Section of the Fourth International was not limited to the fields of
concentration camps (where, in 1938, the Trotskyists organize a mass struggle
against bureaucratic repression, before being exterminated) but it was also in
the factories, in the collective farms and in the army. For Trotsky, the
bolshevik-leninists "did not succeed in rescuing the Soviet regime from
degeneration and the difficulties of the personal dictatorship. But they saved
it from its complete break-up, and impeded the road to the restoration. For us
this is insufficient. But it is already something" (4).
Not by chance, one of the main
aims of the Stalinist GPU was the murder of the sponsor of the Soviet work in
the leadership of the Fourth International, León Sedov (son of León Trotsky),
accomplished in 1938. The Fourth International, was an objective factor in
world politics, which justified the agreement between Hitler and the French
Ambassador Coulondre, in 1939 (reported by the newspaper Le Temps) that the worst
danger of a World War rested in the possibility of the victorious emergence of
"Monsieur Trotsky." The murder of Trotsky by Stalinism, in 1940, was
not the product of personal vengeance, not even of a "settling of
accounts" between "communist" factions, but a political event of
first relevance, in which the bureaucracy acted on account of the world
bourgeoisie, which already had given it their early approval upon declaring the
"Moscow Trials" legal, in which Trotsky is the main accused and convicted
to death.
Marxism
and Party
The Fourth International was not
founded (as some 'Trotskyists' seem to believe) as a doctrinal sect destined to
preserve the revolutionary ideological inheritance in circumstances in which
its use became impossible. When Trotsky insisted that the Fourth International
swam against the current, coming to employ, for the Trotskyists, the expression
of "exiles from their own class," he was emphasizing difficulties and
objective political tasks, not an historical-metaphysical impossibility of
acting. It should not merely be claimed that the efforts of Trotsky and his
companions preserved the continuity of the revolutionary programme, but that
they put a functioning revolutionary organization on its feet in the arena of
the world class struggle and in the main countries. The well-known assertion of
Trotsky, "the party is its programme," is only valid with its
reverse, "the programme is the party": without a functioning
revolutionary party, the revolutionary program is an abstraction. Ernest Mandel
decisively delimited Trotskyism upon defining that its four pillars are:
"the theory and the practice of the permanent revolution, the
revolutionary road to socialism through the action of the working class in the
advanced capitalist countries, the political revolution for socialist democracy
in the Soviet bloc and in China, and proletarian internationalism" (5).
The main pillar, however, is the validity of the revolutionary party, without
which all the other pillars become ideology and not a guide for the action. The
programme of the Fourth International begins from the contradiction between the
objective and subjective conditions (the crisis of leadership of the world
proletariat) of the revolution. The maturity of the first is measured by the
degree of internationalisation of the productive forces (throughout the
century, world trade has grown quicker than production, and in Germany today,
for example, the external transactions of capital outweigh by five times the
international businesses of merchandisers) and the simultaneous reinforcement
of the national borders, a contradiction which become obsolete simultaneously
in the capitalist states and in the Stalinist Utopia of "socialism in a
single country." The immaturity of the second, by the delay and the
defeats of the world revolution in the face of capitalist imperialism and the
bureaucracy. In a text of 1931, Trotsky summarized the question consummately:
"If the theoretical edifice of Marxist political economy leans entirely on
the conception of value as materialized labour, the revolutionary politics of
Marxism leans on the conception of the party as vanguard of the
proletariat." On the other hand, the question of the party (that is to
say, of its programme) could only be posed, today, in international terms:
"The hour of the disappearance of the national programme has sounded
definitively in August 4 1914. The revolutionary party of the proletariat could
only be based on an international programme which corresponds to the character
of the present time, that of the great development and decline of capitalism.
International
Viewpoint
An international communist
programme is not a sum of national programmes or an amalgam of their common
characteristics. One should take directly as a starting point the analysis of
the conditions and tendencies of the economy and of the political state of the
world, as a whole, with its inter-relations and contradictions, that is to say,
with the mutual dependency which counterposes its components to each other. In
the present times, infinitely more than in the preceding, one must, and can,
only deduce the direction in which the proletariat is going from the national
point of view, from the direction followed in the international domain, and not
the opposite way round. In this consists the fundamental difference which
separates, in its point of departure, communist internationalism from the
diverse versions of national socialism. To join together in a system of
dependencies and contradictions countries and continents which have attained
different degrees of evolution, narrowing the diverse levels of their
development and widening them immediately after, opposing relentlessly all the
countries to each other, the world economy has become a powerful reality that
dominates the diverse countries and continents. This single fundamental fact
gives a deeply realistic character to the idea of the world communist
party." (6). From that it is a matter of verifying the validity of the
objective and subjective conditions of the revolution in the current historical
stage in order, on this basis, to pose the consequent political task of the
fight for the revolutionary International.
Imperialism
and historical regression
In no other time of history, has
human society presented such violent contrasts, such unbearable contradictions
as today. A field of science or of the technique does not exist in which human
knowledge and power are not duplicated every 10 years, or less. With astronomy,
molecular biology, medicine, archaeology, geology, electronics, computer
science, engineering of foods, genetics, etc., man conquers the secrets of
nature the better to govern it. Humanity devoured the fruits of the tree of
science, converting itself into a power greater than anything the gods, who
were terrified by their own powers, imagined. The mechanical and electronic
aids that the human genius created are there, ready to liberate it for ever
from the necessity of winning bread with the perspiration of the forehead: the
substitution of the work by free creative activity. The thousand sources of
abundance demand a step in order to satisfy the necessities of 6 thousand
million human beings that live on the earth, or of ten times that amount, if it
be necessary.
However, 4/5 of humanity, in the
backward countries, and including the growing pockets of poverty in the
advanced countries, do not have access, during a whole life, to the vital
biological minimum of 2 thousand daily calories, and are condemned to a narrow
and short life. Epidemics of hunger still shake the "Third World": in
If now, competition in the world
market forces the introduction of automation on a growing scale, this neither
results in a reduction of the working day nor in the improvement of the
conditions of life of the workers. On the contrary, under capitalism, "the
uninterrupted and more and more rapid improvement of machinery, makes the
situation of the workers more and more precarious" (Communist Manifesto):
capital only knows the lucrative necessities. It does not exist in order to
satisfy the necessities of the immense majority, but in order to increase the
profits of the tiny minority of big capitalists. Automation is, for that
reason, a synonym of disqualification and unemployment: leading the working
class to professional decadence and to a lack of culture without perspectives.
Right now, the ILO calculates world unemployment to be more than 900 million
out of a total workforce not much more than 2 thousand million people: at the
same time, never in the history have so many children and adolescents worked (3
million in
Under the reign of financial
capital, the senile and last stage of the capitalism, all scientific and
technical progress is transformed into its opposite. The new energy resources
and the intensive use of the old resources do not bring an improvement in well-being
but rather produce ecological catastrophes (oil or of atomic energy). Almost
all scientific investigation, especially in the advanced countries, is linked
to arms production. In 1985, military expenditure amounted to almost a trillion
dollars, much more than the whole income of the poorest half of the world
population. This expenditure does not decrease in periods of recession, and its
relative reduction after the end of the "cold war" (which was used as
an ideological pretext) has been a ridiculous (the Gulf War was seen above all
as the search for a new pretext in order to increase those expenses). Only with
the production of destructive armaments did the bourgeoisie succeed in
preventing the productive forces from breaking out of the strait-jacket of private
property in the means of production and exchange, and of national states, which
obstruct absolutely the development of those forces.
Far from becoming obsolete the
notion of imperialism, as was defined by Lenin, the current time accentuates
its characteristics, as summarized by Trotsky: "In order to close the gap
between the countries economically and equalise the level of their development,
capitalism works with its anarchical methods that undermines its own work
continually, opposing a country and a branch of production to another,
favouring the development of certain parts of the world economy, braking or
paralyzing that of another. Only the combination of these two fundamental
tendencies, centripetal and centrifugal, levelling and unrevealing, both
consequences of the nature of capitalism, explain to us the living
interrelationships of the historical process. Because of the universality, of
the mobility, of the dispersion of financial capital, which penetrates
everywhere, imperialism still accentuates those two tendencies. Imperialism
unites with much greater speed and profundity into a single whole the diverse
national and continental groups: it creates a vital and most intimate
dependence between them; it brings closer together their economic methods,
their social forms and their levels of evolution. At the same time, it pursues
this end by procedures so antagonistic, giving rise to such discontinuities,
making such [razzias] in the backward countries regions, that it itself
undermines the unification and levelling of the world economy, with violence
and convulsions that were unknown in the preceding times " (7).
Marxism,
State and Internationalism
The revolutionary and
internationalist character of the workers' movement was not an invention of the
Marxism. On the contrary: the Marxist doctrine theoretically expressed that
character, which preceded it.
Already in the decades of 1830,
1840, the workers led revolutionary struggles against capital, notably the
insurrection of the textiles workers of Lyon, in 1844. During one of the first
modern strikes, that of the workers of the English city of Manchester, in 1832,
the workers of Lyon (France), in their newspaper The Echo of the Factories,
made a call for solidarity towards their class brothers of the "enemy
country." The historical flag of the proletarian internationalism
"Proletarians of the World, Uníte!", (propagated in the Communist
Manifesto of 1848) was the expression of a tendency already existing in the
international working class, when the nation states were still in formation and
capitalism fought in order to conquer the world.
It is a fact that capitalism,
and the nation states, were born in the framework of the world economy. Long
before the main modern States were structured, international trade already had
developed to quite a large extent. That trade was one of the factors which gave
an impulse to the English Revolution of the XVII century. Capitalism and the
already established nation states were obliged to have a foreign policy and to ally
with some against others, in furtherance of their contradictory commercial
interests and in relation to the self-determination of the backward nations. It
was incorrect for the labour movement to limit itself to the national
framework, to the extent that the force of those nation states depended
essentially upon the international relationships that were established in the
whole world.
The labour movement, therefore,
could only triumph in the international arena. From there also it is to be
concluded that socialism is only realizable in the international plane. The
socialisation of the means of production means the abolition of national
borders. The idea that the socialism can be built in a single country is
completely alien to Marxism.
In the revolutions of 1848, the
proletariat tried to take the leadership of the democratic revolution,
transforming it into proletarian revolution. In the measure in which that
didn't happen, the same democratic revolution miscarried (monarchies and
authoritarian states were restored). But in 1871, the Paris Commune was the
theatre of the first seizure of the power by the working class.
That event demonstrated that: 1)
The working class could not be limited to the appropriation of the existing
bureaucratic state machine: it must destroy it; 2) the new emergent power (the
dictatorship of the proletariat), government of struggle against the bourgeois
domain, is characterized by the tendency to the break-up of the separation
between state and society. That is, to the radical elimination of all the forms
of social oppression and politics (disappearance of the state). History gave
rise to the proletarian dictatorship as the only possible means to the
leadership of socialist society.
The
Revolution of October
The victory of the Revolution of
October of 1917, first act of the proletarian world revolution, inaugurated the
historical era of the socialist revolution. It exploded in a country in which
were interwoven characteristics of an imperialistic nation and of an
economically and politically backward country. The tasks of the
democratic-bourgeois revolution (including agrarian reform), the motor of the
revolution, were not fulfilled, but the proletariat already was highly
concentrated. But if Russia was the weakest link of the imperialistic chain,
its revolution was not an exception. It was largely a response to the bloodbath
of the First Imperialistic World War, indicative of the historical anachronism
of capitalism. Proletarian revolutions (defeated) also happened in most of the
countries from Eastern and Western Europe.
The Russian victory was possible
thanks to the existence of a revolutionary leadership of a stature equal to the
task (Bolshevism), although that leadership would not have gotten anything
without the conscious movement of the workers, taking the form of self
organisation in workers councils (soviets).
Lenin was not expressing a
personal idea, but the objective dynamic of a movement, upon affirming:
"our revolution is the prelude to the world socialist revolution, a step
in its direction. The Russian proletariat is not able, by its own forces, to
conclude successfully the socialist revolution. But it could give rise to an
extension of its revolution able to create better conditions for the socialist
revolution, and up to a certain point, begin it. It could create the most
favourable situation for the entrance onto the scene, in the decisive battles,
of its main and most dependable collaborator, the European and North American
socialist proletariat."
The abandonment of the
perspective indicated above by Lenin, replaced by the Stalinist thesis of the
"construction of the socialism in a single country," was the
reflection of the setback of the revolution and of the bureaucratization of the
State that emerged from it. Two factors were decisive: 1) The failure of the
international revolution, due to the historical betrayal of social democracy
and the inexperience of the young revolutionary nuclei; 2) the exhaustion,
demoralisation and disintegration of the Russian working class, after years of
sacrifices, civil war and foreign interventions.
In 1917, the Russian working
class had 3 million members: in 1922, 1 million 240 thousand. Seeking to
analyze the bureaucratization of the USSR starting from sentences taken from
texts twenty years after the revolution, passing over this painful historical
process, is to give proof of absolute idiocy. The bureaucracy arises where the
struggle for individual existence occupies a dominant place in the energy of
society. Its function is to alleviate the conflicts which this struggle
originates, extracting privileges from this function. The bureaucracy possesses
as the basis of its authority the absence of consumer goods, and the struggle
of all against all that results from that absence. It is contrary to the truth
and to the slightest shade of intelligence to affirm that the alienation of the
workers and the bureaucracy is a product of the ideological option for the
heavy industry, instead of light industry and of consumption: the
bureaucratization of the USSR and of the Communist party was already more than
complete before the earliest step in the direction of heavy industry was taken.
Bureaucratization
and its limits
All workers' states have a
double nature: socialist to the extent that they defend the collective property
of the means of production, bourgeois to the extent that the distribution is
operated in accordance with capitalist norms ( "to each according to their
work"). The definitive physiognomy of the state is defined by the changing
relationship between those two tendencies, socialist and bourgeois. Stalinism
expressed the victory of the second over the first, based on the political
expropriation of the workers in favour of a privileged anti-working class and anti-socialist
bureaucracy.
Saying that the
counter-revolutionary bureaucracy was written in What is to be Done, the Moscow
Trials, in the prohibition of the fractions inside the party, etc., ignore the
foreign intervention against the young Soviet republic, the alliance of German
social democracy with the greater German state, the same capitalist system
responsible for the World War, for the backwardness of Russian society and for
the victorious barbarism. It is to deny the intervention in history of the conscious
will under the elementary form of the organization, to praise renouncement and
resignation, condemn struggle and even the partial victories.
The revolution was defeated, but
not destroyed. Nazism and fascism made the international proletariat pay dearly
for the audacity of having made the Revolution of October, but private property
was not restored in the USSR, which proved the depth of the revolutionary wave,
including in the hour of the defeat. The anti-working class Stalinist regime
and the bureaucratic administration of the economy was the five pesetas price
paid by the Soviet proletariat for the bureaucratization, but the maintenance
of a good part of the economic and social conquests of the revolution
(nationalization of industry and of land, state monopoly of foreign trade,
central planning of the economy) had immense consequences. So, Trotsky, enemy
and main victim of Stalinism, could write in The Revolution Betrayed: "The
immense results obtained by industry, the beginning, full of promise, of a jump
in agriculture, the extraordinary growth of the old industrial cities, and the
creation of new ones, the rapid increase in the number of workers, the
elevation of the cultural level and of the necessities, they are incontestable
results of the Revolution of October, in which the prophets of the old world
sought to see the tomb of civilisation. Now there is no necessity of
discussions with the bourgeois economist gentlemen: socialism demonstrated its
right to the victory, not only in the pages of Capital, but in an economic
arena that covers a sixth of the surface of the globe, not in the language of
dialectics, but in that of iron, cement and electricity. Although the
Notes
1. León Trotsky. Oeuvres, Paris,
ILT, v.2, p.193.
2. León Trotsky. Bolshevism and
Stalinismo, Buenos Aires, The Anvil, 1974, p. 9.
3. Pierre Broué. The Trotskistas
in the USSR, Buenos Aires, Rebellion, [s.d.p]., p. 90.
4. León Trotsky. How Stalin
defeated to the opposition, Writings, 1935-36, Bogotá, Feather, 1976, p.3.
5. Ernest Mandel. What is Trotskyism?
London, Books Net, 1975, p. 16.
6. León Trotsky. Stalin. The
Great Organizer of Defeats, Buenos Aires, The Anvil, 1974, p. 80.
7. idem pp 94-95.