"THE WORLD IS OUR
PICKET LINE"
--Liverpool
Dockers Internet Page
Archibald
O'Reilly
The Liverpool dockers have shown
that to be effective against an employer, it is necessary to organise working
people on an international basis. Because of advances in telecommunications
technology over the past couple of decades, it is now possible to communicate
easily across the globe using the Internet. International messages can be sent
for the price of a local telephone call. Working people in different continents
can write to each other on a daily basis if necessary. The importance of this
is not to be underestimated for organising working people across the globe.
Various attempts have been made over the past century to organise working
people into an international framework. Marx and Engels launched the
International Working Men's
Association (also known as the
First International) in the last century. This organised support for the Paris
Commune before it collapsed through lack of political coherence as Marxists and
Anarchists fought bitter factional battles.This was followed by the Socialist
International (also known as the Second International) after the First
International collapsed. It became the first mass workers International and it
promoted revolutionary internationalism throughout the world including in
Russia where Lenin was a member of its Russian section. However, it failed the
test of the First World War. Instead of opposing the war, the various national
sections of the Second International supported their own governments in the war
sending their members into battle against their former comrades in countries
which were at war with them. Lenin and Trotsky in Russia, Karl Leibknecht in
Germany and John McClean and Sylvia Pankhurst in Britain were among a select
few who had the political courage to denounce the national chauvinism of the
the Second International. Karl Leibknecht, a Deputy in the German Reichstag,
denounced the war and was imprisoned for doing so. Lenin sang his praises to
the heavens. In Britain, John McClean led a movement on the Red Clyde against
the war and he too was imprisoned until the mass movement forced his release.
The Russian war effort collapsed in 1917 and the Czar was overthrown. The
Bolsheviks came to power on the slogan of "land, peace and bread" and
the withdrawal of Russia from the First World War. The first action of the
Bolsheviks in power was to implement the withdrawal of Russia from the war.
The
Third (Communist) International
The Russian communists then went
on to establish the Communist International (also known as the Third
International) and four international congresses held in Moscow drew
representatives of workers political parties and trade unionists from all over
the world. It became a mass movement in Germany, France and many other
countries promoting revolutionary internationalism. In Britain, however, the
oldest and richest capitalist country, the Communist Party was marginalised as
the Labour Party opened itself up to individual membership and adopted the
radical sounding Clause 4, Part 4 to take the wind out of the sails of the
Communists. But the failure of the German revolution in the early twenties left
the Russian revolution isolated. The British General Strike in 1926 was also
defeated. The tremendous efforts of the Bolsheviks and their international
co-thinkers to spread the revolution abroad were defeated as capitalism
consolidated its rule in Europe. The consequences of the failure of the Russian
revolution to spread to the rest of Europe were catastrophic for the workers
movement internationally. With the defeat of the revolution in Germany and the
defeat of the Italian sit-down strikes in Turin, fascism was financed by big
business to smash the workers movement once and for all. The Italian and German
Communists were banned and arrested. In Britain, where the threat from the
Communists had been less severe, it was not necessary to put the fascist Mosley
movement in power. Instead they were allowed to harass and divide the workers
movement sufficient to keep the Communists as a marginal force. At the same
time Stalin came to power in Russia after Lenin died. Rather than continue the
struggle against capitalism in the West, he adopted a policy of live and let
live. In return for restricting the Communist parties in the West to a policy
of peaceful reform of capitalism, like the British Labour party, Russia would
be allowed to live in peace with the West. The interests of Western workers
were to be sacrificed and betrayed in order that the Russian Communist
bureaucrats could enjoy a life of corrupt prosperity. This was enshrined in the
policy of socialism in one country which essentially meant the abandoning of
any attempt to spread the revolution abroad. This policy was opposed all the
way down the line by Leon Trotsky, the chair of the Petrograd Soviet in the
1905 and 1917 revolutions, the organiser of the insurrection that established
the Bolshevik government and the founder and leader of the Red Army which
defeated the counter-revolution and invasion by Western armies. He argued
against the abandonment of the perspective of trying to spread the Russian
Revolution to the West, but was unsuccessful in his efforts. He was expelled
from Russia by Stalin and eventually murdered by him in Mexico in 1940. The
internationalist and anti-imperialist war sentiments which gave rise to the
Communist International were finally abandoned when the French Communist Party
was allowed to endorse the rearmament of the French army in 1935. The Communist
International became an instrument of strangling revolutions abroad instead of
aiding them. The Spanish Civil War was a good example. Those who wanted to turn
the civil war against Franco into a social revolution to overthrow capitalism
were murdered by Stalin`s agents and the Spanish Communist Party. The Communist
International itself was dissolved by Stalin during the Second World war to
appease Churchill.
The
Fourth International
Trotsky initiated the Fourth
International in 1938. But the conditions in which he tried to do so were not
good. The fascists were in power in much of Europe and would soon be in control
of all of it as the Second World War loomed. As with the minority who had
resisted the collapse of the Second International in 1914, the revolutionary internationalist
vanguard was reduced to a rump. The sections of the Fourth International were
tiny propaganda organisations consisting of, at most, a few thousand members
and in many cases a few hundreds. Throughout the war the tiny bands of
Trotskyists played a modest, but nonetheles heroic, role in maintaining the
interests of the working class. The Stalinists at first opposed the the war
because Stalin had reached an agreement with Hitler (the Hitler-Stalin Pact).
When Hitler broke the agreement and invaded Russia, the Western Communist
Parties did an abrupt U-turn and supported the Allied war effort, breaking
strikes and acting as the most loyal lieutenants of Western Governments. After
the war, the Communist Parties disarmed the partisans as part of a deal with
the capitalist West. Peaceful coexistence with capitalism was maintained as
Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill partitioned the world at the Yalta, Tehran and
Potsdam conferences. The Fourth International sunk roots in the mass movement
in a few Third World countries: Vietnam, Bolivia and Sri Lanka. But the
sections of the Fourth International either lacked political independence from
local misleaders of the workers movement or suffered massive repression which
wiped them out as a mass force, Elsewhere it remained marginalised as the post
war economic boom enabled US imperialism to consolidate capitalism in the areas
adjacent to the Eastern Communist bloc--through massive economic and military
aid. The Stalinist system had extended itself enormously after the war to
China, Korea, and eastern Europe. But capitalism remained the dominant system
in the world and the riches amassed by the US ruling elite enabled it to
rebuild and consolidate the capitalist system throughout the world. The Fourth
International reacted to the post-war restabilisation of capitalism by going
into crisis and disarray. The Western Stalinist Communist Parties had gained a
certain respectability by supporting their own capitalist governments` war
efforts. In France, Greece and Italy they had led the partisan movements during
the war and, despite their role in disarming this movement at the end of the
war, they retained a large degree of credibility in the eyes of masses of
working people. After the war, it was the Stalinists and not the Trotskyists
(too small to make a difference) who grew into mass parties.
Crisis
of the Fourth International
The main line of disagreement in
the post war congresses of the the Fourth International were over tactics to
overcome the marginalisation of the Trotskyists. Some, the majority, led by
Pablo, the secretary of the Fourth International, wanted to enter the mass
Communists Parties to overcome the isolation of the Trotskyists from the broad
workers vanguard. Others, the minority, opposed this either because they wanted
to orient towards the Socialist and Labour parties that tended to be the mass
parties in the Anglo Saxon world or because they could not countenance working
in the Stalinist parties because they had had such a bitter experience of them
over the preceding decades. In some cases this was an adaptation to the
particularly virulent anticommunism (McCarthyism etc.) prevailing in the
Anglo-Saxon world. This minority failed to struggle for their views within the
International, choosing to split and divide the International.
Marginalisation
The post-war history of the
Fourth International is a complex one which cannot be dealt with adequately
here. In the metropolitan heartlands of Europe and America it generally did not
break out of its marginalisation. Where it did gain a significant base in
Britain (the Socialist Labour League and Militant) it did so through entries in
the Labour Party and by diluting its politics to that of left Labourism,
understating its revolutionary politics to the point of invisibility.
Trotskyism only became a significant force in Britain by abandoning Trotskyism
and adopting left Labourism.The political backwardness of the working class
which stems from its location in the oldest and historically most privileged
capitalist country meant that great pressure existed on the left to adapt to
this consciousness by understating its politics, self-censorship, diplomacy
etc. The marginalisation and profound fragmentation of the Fourth International
must not be allowed to obstruct attempts to organisationally reconstruct and
politically regenerate it as a mass workers` International. It is necessary to
understand the context in which this fragmentation and disarray takes place.
New developments like the Party for Communist Refoundation in Italy, the US
Labor Party, Izquierda Unida (United Left) in Spain, the Workers Party in
Brazil and the Red Green Party in Denmark indicate a shift to the left by a
sector of the broad workers vanguard. The Socialist Labour Party in Britain
represents a similar and parallel development. These movements must be won to a
revolutionary internationalist perspective and a break from the Stalinist ideas
which inform many of their leaderships` politics. The Italian PRC must break
from the Olive Tree coalition which is led by Blairites for example. The
dangerous chauvinist drivel about "British sovereignty" being
over-ruled by the European Union and the fudged position on immigration
controls in the SLP policy documents must be opposed.
Lessons
of the Dockers struggle
If the lessons of the Liverpool
dockers` campaign are to be fully realised, then it is necessary to take this
initiative a stage further to the political plane. The International Transport
Federation which links Transport Unions internationally is reportedly worried
because the international links established by the Liverpool dockers in the
course of their dispute are seen as a threat to its bureaucratic hegemony--and
rightly so. The Bolsheviks not only established an international trade union organisation--the
Red International of Labour Unions (RILU)--but also an international
organisation of political parties, or rather a single world party of working
class militants. In order to realise the latter, it is necessary to recognise
that an understanding of the need for revolution must go hand in hand with an
understanding of the need for working class internationalism. The two ideas are
inextricably interwoven. The post-1989 events demonstrated that the theory of
Socialism in One Country, or several countries, is dead. The
degenerated/deformed workers states of the Eastern bloc have not yet been
overthrown. The gains of October have been eroded but not demolished. Only the
extension of the revolution to the rest of the globe can end the crisis of the Eastern
bloc. The newly (re)mobilised forces of the SLP and similar developments in
other countries must play there part in this process