This article consists of the translation into English of the Introduction to the recent Russian language edition of Leon Trotsky's book In Defense Of Marxism. This translation is our contribution to the Day of International Labor Solidarity, May 1st.
The ideological and the political heritage of Marxism has its prehistory in the rise of human civilization, in the work of the great thinkers of the epoch of Renaissance. As a science, Marxism started with the publication of the Communist Manifesto in 1847. The continuity of Marxism threads through the struggle of Marx and Engels to organize the First International; through the experience of the Paris Commune, the first workers government which lasted for 71 day. This thread runs through the struggle to construct the mighty national workers' parties and their unity in the Second International. After the collapse of the International in August 1914 Marxism finds its continuity in the struggle of the internationalists led by Lenin, Luxembourg and Trotsky against social-patriotism for the idea of the international socialist revolution. Marxism culminates in the October Revolution and the Civil War in the founding of the Third International in 1919.
The struggle for Marxism against its bureaucratic perversion at the hands of some of the "old Bolsheviks", the holders of the state power in the USSR was begun by Lenin himself in his last letters and articles in which he pointed out the danger of the bureaucratic degeneration of Bolshevism. This struggle took a sharp form in the Fall of 1923 by which time Lenin was taken out of action in the continuing fight for world communism.
By 1928, analyzing these heavy losses the various groups of communist
oppositionists in various countries began to contact each other and communicate.
Two works of Trotsky written in the summer of 1928,
It should be noted that two delegates to this Congress, James P. Cannon from
the American CP and Maurice Spector of the Canadian section received due to a
mistake on the part of the Stalinist organizers the English translation of
Trotsky's work. This document had the power of a bomb blast on them; they
abandoned the routine meetings, began to study the document assiduously and on
their return back home started to organize groups of cothinkers around Trotsky's
program.
Trotsky's exile from the Soviet Union in January 1929 contrary to Stalin's
expectation did not isolate him. Just the opposite, it gave him the possibility
to begin the organization of the small and isolated groups of communist
oppositionists into an international organization, based on a common program and
principles.
During these initial years of its existence, until Hitler's victory in
Germany the Bolshevik Leninist Opposition considered itself a faction, albeit an
illegal one, inside the Third International. It had for its aim a reform of the
International, the correction of its political line, its reorganization, a purge
of its cadres.
The International Left Opposition addressed itself to the advanced workers,
organized within the various Communist parties and directed to them its criticism
of the ultimatist, sectarian line of the Comintern. Pointing to the danger of
fascism, the Left Opposition tried to unite the communist and the
social-democratic workers into a united front. Inside the USSR the Left
Opposition supported the strategy of industrialization and collectivization but
insisted that the bureaucratic methods of Stalin Ñ the forced collectivization
which was not based on any material and technical preconditions, the absence of
advanced preparations or planning, the suppression of independent criticism on
the part of the masses, the persecution of that very party faction which for a
number of years had consistently argued for the need for planned
industrialization, the police measures of total dekulakization Ñ that all these
methods were leading to the weakening of the proletarian dictatorship and to
economic catastrophes.
But although the Comintern had become an agency of counterrevolution, the
social regime in the USSR did not revert to capitalism. The social relations
within the country became more and more contradictory. The inequality of social
layers widened and grew, the socialized economy became deformed in order to
provide the party and state bureaucracy with special benefits and privileges, the
anti-people police dictatorship grew ever more despotic. Trotsky called on the
Soviet working class to conduct a political, not a social, revolution, to
overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy, to cleanse the Soviets of their domination
by the reactionary petty bourgeois officials, to fix the planned economy of the
USSR from the point of view of the working class and the toiling peasantry.
The Left Opposition continued in its policy of defense of the Soviet Union
from the world imperialism. But its method fundamentally differed from Stalin's.
Marxists understood that the only real ally of the conquests of October was the
international proletariat, which would consciously struggle for its own
liberation. The defense of the USSR was a part of the development and expansion
of the world socialist revolution. As Trotsky many times explained, the methods
and tactic of this defense must be subordinated to the major strategic goal in
the same way as a part is subordinated to the whole.
In February 1938, during the peak of the bloody genocide of the fighters of
October 1917 down in the Lubianka cellars Trotsky wrote:
"The liberation of the workers can come only through the workers themselves.
There is, therefore, no greater crime than deceiving the masses, palming off
defeats as victories, friends as enemies, bribing workers' leaders, fabricating
legends, staging false trials, in a word, doing what the Stalinists do. These
means can serve only one end: lengthening the domination of a clique already
condemned by history." Trotsky elaborated: "Permissible and obligatory are those
and only those means, we answer, which unite the revolutionary proletariat, fill
their hearts with irreconcilable hostility to oppression, teach them contempt for
official morality and its democratic echoers, imbue them with consciousness of
their own historic mission, raise their courage and spirit of self-sacrifice in
the struggle" (Their Morals And Ours).
The 1930's were years of heavy political defeats of the world proletariat: in
1933 Hitler conquered and destroyed all organizations of the German working
class; the Spanish revolution was isolated and betrayed in the name of Stalin's
alliance with the European democracies and the status quo in Europe; the murder
of millions of communists and all the more enlightened witnesses of the October
Revolution had dealt a fatal blow to the public opinion of the Soviet and world
proletariat. In the midst of the mass confusion, pessimism and apathy, the
Trotskyist cadres were small and organizationally weak. But it was they alone who
assumed the responsibility for revolutionary leadership. In the Transitional
Program Trotsky wrote:
"The Fourth International has already arisen out of great events: the
greatest defeats of the proletariat in history. The cause of these defeats is to
be found in the degeneration and perfidy of the old leadership. The class
struggle does not tolerate an interruption. The Third International, following
the Second, is dead for purposes of revolution. Long live the Fourth
International!"
In the summer of 1938 twenty one representative from eleven national sections
of the Left Opposition had gathered near Paris and took the decision to found the
Fourth International. Although poor in numbers and in political apparatus, the
International was rich in program, principles, experience, traditions. It was
around its banner that the proletarian vanguard was destined to gather. But for
now, the tiny sections of the FI lived under tremendous pressure from all sides:
in Germany, Italy and in other fascist states they were hunted by the forces of
the Gestapo; in the USSR, Spain and in the regions occupied by Stalin they were
persecuted by the butchers of the GPU; while in the "democratic" countries they
were hunted by Stalin's spies, attacked by the local CPs, legally hampered by the
police and government agencies and were in general under constant pressure of the
hired press, the Church and the other bastions of the bourgeois public opinion.
Initially, the American section was formed primarily out of the opposition
elements of the American CP. In the fall and winter of 1928-29 Cannon, Shachtman,
Abern and some other leaders and dozens of rank and file members of the CP USA
were expelled from the Party for their open defense of Trotsky. They established
the Communist League of America and began to publish the theoretical and
political documents of the Left Opposition. In the course of the next few years
the CLA busied itself with the theoretical criticism of the false theories of the
"Third Period", "social-fascism" and "socialism in a single country". Stalinists
and social-reformists were mostly successful in isolating the proletarian masses
from the influence of Trotskyists. Fighting against the current, these circles
and groups of Trotskyists of necessity worked on propaganda, in small circles and
with individuals. During this period, lasting until around 1933, the party could
win to its banner only individual members, primarily intellectuals, some young
workers and students, those who were concerned about the theoretical explanation
for historical problems and defeats of the world workers' movement.
These were the years of necessary education of the future vanguard of the
American proletariat, years of imposed isolation, years of swimming against the
stream. But in and of itself such ideological work could not attract to the party
wider worker masses. It was only in 1933-34 that the Communist League was able to
make a significant turn towards the masses.
Firstly, the International League of Communists-Internationalists (as the
international movement was then called) met the victory of Hitler fully armed
with both theory and perspectives. Trotsky had earlier explained the nature of
fascism and showed the measures necessary to fight it. The defeat of the German
proletariat had shaken the world workers' movement; the guilt of the Third and of
the Second Internationals was obvious; the warnings given by Trotsky and the Left
Opposition were fresh in everyone's mind.
Secondly, the European proletariat, which became demoralized by the defeats
of the British General Strike of 1926 and of the Second Chinese Revolution in
1927, had now begun to recover and to move forward against the stagnation and
collapse which characterized the whole post-War period. The Spanish revolution
broke out in 1931 and the European working class began to straighten itself up
and to grow more active.
Thirdly, within the United States the masses began to move against the
consequences of the Great Depression: there was the movement of the unemployed,
the Patterson textile workers strike, some other strikes in which young
Trotskyists were able to intervene. In 1934 a strike wave swept the US and
members of the CLA led an important Teamsters strike in Minneapolis.
Within the party and throughout the world movement there opened up a struggle
against the natural consequence of long isolation, against sectarianism. There
were members in the party who were so proud of the purity of their ranks that
they refused to make a turn towards the "impure" masses, to begin a recruitment
of workers at the point of class struggle.
As mentioned above, the fascist victory in Germany had shaken up the workers'
movement throughout the world, made the rank and file of the Stalinist parties
somewhat more open to Trotskyist propaganda, led to a rise of a number of
left-radical factions among the rank and file of the social-democratic parties,
especially among the working class and student youth. A number of socialist and
syndicalist mass movements split and exhibited significant leftward moving
trends.
In 1936 the American Trotskyists were given another chance to open to wider
working class audiences. The sizable reformist Socialist party headed by Norman
Thomas united in its ranks some radical workers and youth but also numbers of
pacifists, religious mystics, Sunday preachers, syndicalist and cooperative
reformers and various other "progressives" and "radicals". Influenced by the
victory of fascism in Germany and Austria, pushed by the sit down strikes in
France and the widening trade union movement in the US, shocked by the beginning
of the Spanish revolution and Civil War, this party exhibited a quickly growing
left wing which soon took over the leadership of the party. It was vital to
exploit the ferment inside the Socialist Party and the Cannon-Shachtman
leadership of the Workers Party began to orient the party towards an organized
entry of party members into the Socialist Party, so as to open up immediately the
propaganda among the radicalizing workers and intellectuals.
In June 1936, the conference of the Workers Party decided to join the
Socialist party. Some leaders of the group, specifically Muste and Abern, argued
against entry, but the overwhelming majority of the party understood this step as
an opening to a tremendous victory of Trotskyism. Cannon, the outstanding leader
of American Trotskyism remembers in his book The History Of American
Trotskyism:
"We went into the Socialist Party confidently because we knew that we had a
disciplined group and a program that was bound in the end to prevail. When, a
little later, the leaders of the Socialist Party began to repent of the whole
business, wishing that they had never heard the name of Trotskyism, wishing to
reconsider their decision to admit us, it was already too late. Our people were
already inside the Socialist party and beginning the work of integrating
themselves in the local organizations. We issued a declaration in the last number
of the Militant, published in June 1936, announcing that we were joining the
Socialist Party and suspending the Militant. We stated our position very clearly,
so that nobody could misunderstand us; no one could have any ground to believe
that we were joining as capitulators, as renegades from Communism. We said: "We
enter the Socialist Party as we are, with our ideas." These world conquering
ideas once again were on the march. And there was a fruitful year of work ahead
of us in the Socialist Party" (The History of American Trotskyism,
Pathfinder Press, 1972, pp. 232-3).
Trotskyists spent one year inside the Socialist Party. They utilized the wide
forum of this sizable party in order to disprove the notorious Moscow Trials
which had exterminated all of the comrades of Lenin. Cannon and Shachtman
organized a Committee of Defense under the leadership of the famous philosopher
John Dewey, and the Committee conducted a wide ranging investigation of the
Stalinist accusations against Leon Trotsky. The Committee concluded that the
accusations were groundless and amounted to a monstrous judicial forgery. The
Trotskyists conducted a mass campaign of propaganda inside the Socialist Party
and taught the revolutionary program of Marxism to the thousands of formerly
platonic socialists; they recruited hundreds of new adherents to the Trotskyist
movement. Cannon, Shachtman and their cothinkers succeeded to conquer for
socialism the majority of revolution minded worker members of the Socialist Party
and were able to bring over to the side of Trotskyism the majority of the members
of the SP youth movement.
In the fall of 1937 the "democratic" wing of the Socialist Party expelled the
supporters of Trotskyism. The expelled members and whole expelled branches
quickly organized themselves into a new Trotskyist party in the United States --
the Socialist Workers Party. The Socialist Party quickly decayed and never again
posed a pole of attraction for socialist minded American workers. American
Trotskyism came out of its "French turn" stronger politically, ideologically and
numerically.
The SWP expanded work among workers, organized strong party factions in the
major industries: in transport, the merchant marine, steel making and machine
building, the automobile industries, etc. The SWP became a leading section of the
Fourth International and when the Second World War began it was able to assume
the difficult task of the central organizer and defender of international
Trotskyism.
But the social composition of the party harmed its work: the number of
intellectuals within the SWP in places exceeded the number of workers; the long
years of isolation, on the one hand, the political immaturity of the American
proletariat, on the other, was reflected in weaknesses as far as the social
composition of the party. In New York City there were relatively many
intellectuals insufficiently surrounded by proletarian cadres. While the USSR was
on the side of the democracies and of status quo, these intellectual elements
within the party stood for the defense of the workers' state. But when in August
1939 Stalin fraternized with Hitler against the bourgeois democracies, the middle
class environment and the strength of public opinion fell like a great weight
over the more sensitive and less sturdy middle class radicals, who were not yet
tempered in the party's cauldron.
The whole anthology In Defense Of Marxism tells the story of the
internal party struggle during this initial period of the war. There is no need
to retell this story.
After the split, the Socialist Workers Party continued its penetration of the
American proletariat. It advocated the strategy of revolutionary defeatism during
the Second World War, uncovered the imperialist aims of the American and Allied
governments, yet it defended the USSR and China. In the summer of 1941 the
American government accused the leaders of the Party and of the Minneapolis
Teamsters local (it was since the famous 1934 strike under Trotskyist leadership)
of the crime of state treason for their anti-war propaganda. The behavior of the
accused Trotskyists in court was impeccable, in the spirit of Luxembourg and
Liebknecht.
While the Stalinist Comintern misled and disarmed the working class by
changing from day to day its strategic orientation depending on the diplomatic
needs of the Kremlin, the policies of the SWP and of the Fourth International
exemplified internationalism and uncovered before the whole proletariat the
social-chauvinism of the "Communist" parties. These latter, having concluded a
truce with their own bourgeoisie, played the role of overseer over the workers
during the Second Imperialist War.
During the strike wave which swept Britain in the spring of 1944, Trotskyists
actively participated and led in the growing radicalization of the proletariat.
Churchill's government, aided actively by Stalinists, attacked the revolutionary
leadership of the working class, arrested four leaders of the Revolutionary
Communist Party (the British section of the Fourth International) and jailed
three of them for the Marxist policy of revolutionary defeatism.
In Europe, sections of the Fourth International existed under extremely
difficult conditions. With the exception of Britain, they were forced
underground; they were hunted by the Gestapo, betrayed by the Stalinists, the
nationalists and the bourgeois "democrats". In Belgium, Trotskyists succeeded in
starting revolutionary defeatist agitation among the German soldiers and for a
time published a clandestine paper Worker and Soldier.
The working class was engaged in class struggles the world over, capitalism
and colonialism lost all authority; but the Stalinist leadership deflected the
fighting attitude of the proletariat into the channel of reformism. The
"socialist" and laborite leaders in a number of countries (France, Italy, Great
Britain) and the trade union leaders in the US convinced the working class to be
satisfied with economic gains alone. The world capitalist system was put on the
dollar rations of the Marshall Plan, placed under the control of the economic
hegemony of the United States. It succeeded in recovering, patched up the war
wounds and developed and broadened on the basis of the inflationary government
budgets, multiplication of the various credit instruments and mutually
reciprocating, wildly growing debts.
Stalinism expanded into eastern, southern and central Europe. On the orders
from the Kremlin, with the passive support of the working class, overseen by the
torturers of the NKVD and the Soviet Army, Stalinist regimes arose in Hungary,
Poland, Czechoslovakia and other countries of Eastern Europe. They conducted
nationalization and set up regimes of bureaucratic economic planning. In China,
the peasant armies of Mao Zedong took power due to the weakness of the local
bourgeoisie and the impotence of imperialists.
The basic conception of Trotskyism was and continues to be -- the
construction of a revolutionary party and its assumption of the leadership of the
working class. As opposed to that, the conception of Pabloism stated that
Stalinism and petty bourgeois nationalism can play a progressive role in the move
from capitalism to socialism, that the role of Trotskyism under conditions of
continuing isolation of the revolutionary elements lies in criticism, in pushing
these "mass movements" to the left. During the early 1950's Pablo, Pierre Frank,
Ernest Mandel and many other leaders gave in to the apparent omnipotence of
Stalinism and led the 4th International into a series of self-liquidations.
They used their own authority and the authority of the Fourth International,
giving directions to the sections of the FI to liquidate themselves into the
various Stalinist parties. The differences between the tactic of the "French
turn" of the 1930's and the Pabloite strategy of "integration in mass movements"
consists in the following. Firstly, in the 1930's some of the social-democratic
and centrist mass parties were of an amorphous, indeterminate character, often
lacking a defined program, traditions and coloration. The Stalinists of the 50's
and 60's had a definite counterrevolutionary tradition. Secondly, following
Hitler's victory, inside the French, American and some other socialist parties
there developed a strong left wing which had to be wrested from the clutches of
the social-democrats and the Stalinists and directed towards revolutionary
Marxism. In the post-War period, under conditions of worldwide stabilization of
capitalism and the growth of opportunism, the reformist tendencies of the
Stalinists and social-democrats could successfully suppress and isolate any
leftist criticism.
The third, and most important distinction was that the "French turn" was a
temporary tactic, subordinated to the strategy of conquering the advanced masses
to the banner of Trotskyism. Pabloite world view, on the other hand, assigned a
progressive role to Stalinism or petty bourgeois nationalism. Trotskyism was seen
only as a movement of pressure and left criticism. According to Pablo and his
cohort Ernest Mandel, the Fourth International was bound to dissolve in the mass
Stalinist parties or movements of national liberation.
The developments of the past 40 years justified this step. Stalinism time and
time again betrayed the revolutionary attempts of the proletarian masses in the
advanced capitalist countries: in Italy, the giant Communist party played the
part of loyal opposition, and with its passivity contributed to today's dangerous
situation, when the fascists once again sit in the government; the giant French
CP saved the capitalist regime after the war and many times since, for example in
May 1968. In the backward countries, the petty-bourgeois nationalists, helped by
the Stalinists and the fake-Trotskyist Pabloites repeatedly led the masses away
from the revolutionary path and brought them into the dead end of reforms,
coexistence with imperialism and illusory programs of nationally isolated
development.
The International Committee conducted this fight in defense of the
theoretical perspective of Trotskyism in exceedingly difficult conditions. The
post-War boom and the softening of the class struggle in the advanced capitalist
countries, on the one hand, the successes of Stalinism and petty bourgeois
nationalism, on the other, both combined into a tremendous conservative force,
pressing down on the modest cadres of Trotskyism. This pressure reflected itself
in the comparative isolation of the sections of the ICFI, subjectivism, splits,
loss of cadres, and all the other ills of stagnation. Frequently, splits occurred
for secondary reasons and were inadequately documented. In 1971, the French
section, the Organisation Communiste Internationaliste broke with the ICFI
without an adequate explanation of the differences. There were other individual
and subjective splits. In the early 1980's the leadership of the Workers
Revolutionary Party, the British section of the ICFI, the largest and most
authoritative section, surrendered the principles of permanent revolution and
conducted an accomodationist policy with respect to the Arab petty bourgeois
nationalists. The leader of the WRP Jerry Healy abandoned materialist dialectics.
With the help of high blown and vacuous discussions of dialectics in general he
started justifying the betrayal of the Trotskyist program and his own secret
sellouts to the Arab bourgeois regimes.
But the turn in the whole international situation stopped any further
disruption of the Fourth International. The victory of the National Liberation
Front in Vietnam and of Khomeinism in Iran were the last political successes of
Stalinism and petty bourgeois nationalism. During the 1980's the structural
crisis of the whole world system of capitalism became the determining factor of
the world situation.
The period of unchallenged world economic domination by the United States
came to an end. The long period of the post-War boom rested on this hegemony and
on the system of mutual indebtedness, budget deficits, the "magic" growth of
speculative values on the world's stock markets, the never-ending credits,
monetary instruments, and so on. But all these measures could only delay, but not
prevent the eventual collapse of the economic system. In the early 1980's the
United States from the world's creditor turned into the greatest debtor. In the
political sphere this meant that from a stabilizing force the US now changed into
a dangerously explosive factor.
Firstly, the capitalists in the advanced countries were forced to direct
their attacks against their own working classes. Secondly, the world agencies of
imperialism (the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Paris Club and
others) began to cut the rations which they allotted to the local bourgeoisie of
the backward countries. Thirdly, imperialists strengthened their pressure on the
Stalinist regimes in order to bring this huge portion of the globe back under
their direct exploitation. All class questions sharpened and took on a decidedly
international character.
In 1985 the rotten abscess within the WRP burst and there began an open
struggle between the fake and the real Trotskyists within the ICFI. For the first
time since 1939-40 this struggle was conducted out in the open, with documents in
hand, in full view of the advanced Trotskyist cadres of the whole world. A
leading role in this struggle was played by David North, the leader of the
American Workers League, who beginning in 1982 detected the falsity and the
subjectivism within the philosophical and political method of Gerry Healy and the
other leaders of the WRP.
The documents of theirs struggle are many; a part of them has already been
published in the Russian language in ICFI journal Bulletin of the 4th
International. ICFI is also preparing for publication a translation of
The Heritage We Defend, the 500-page book of David North dealing with
the history of the 4th International. The major programmatic theses of the ICFI
adopted in August 1988 are as important today. Here are some extracts:
"In the founding document of the Fourth International, Trotsky advanced two
interrelated propositions. He defined the epoch as that of imperialism's death
agony. At the same time he insisted that the crisis of mankind was, in essence,
the crisis of revolutionary leadership in the working class. The content of the
first proposition was an objective historical assessment of the desperate and
insoluble character of the contradictions of world capitalism. Contained in the
second proposition was the warning that the resolution of this historical crisis
on a socially-progressive basis depended, in the final analysis, upon the
building of the Fourth International" (Fourth International,
July-December 1988, p. 4).
"The fall in the rate of profit in the 1970s and the general economic
stagnation provided the impulse for an explosive growth in the activity of
transnational corporations. The result has been an unprecedented integration of
the world market and internationalization of production. The absolute and active
predominance of the world economy over all national economies, including that of
the United States, is a basic fact of modern life. Advances in technology
associated with the invention and perfection of the integrated circuit have
produced revolutionary changes in communications which, in turn, have accelerated
the process of global economic integration. But these economic and technological
developments, far from opening up new historic vistas for capitalism, have raised
the fundamental contradiction between world economy and the capitalist
nation-state system, and between social production and private ownership, to an
unprecedented level of intensity.
"The phenomena of massive transnational corporations and the globalization of
production are inextricably linked with another factor which has profoundly
revolutionary implications: the loss by the United States of its global economic
hegemony, in both relative and absolute terms. The historic change in the world
position of US imperialism, expressed in the transformation of the United States
from the world's principal creditor into its largest debtor, is the underlying
cause of the dramatic decline in workers' living standards and must lead to a
period of revolutionary class confrontations in the US.
"A third factor, manifesting the irrevocable breakdown of the entire economic
and geopolitical framework of the postwar reconstruction of world capitalism
under the hegemony of the United States, is the rise of Japan as the most potent
industrial power and the largest exporter of capital. It challenges American
capitalism in every corner of the globe. The conflict between the United States
and Japan is the most explosive, but by no means the only expression of steadily
worsening inter imperialist antagonisms. The old "Atlantic Alliance" of the
postwar era is breaking down completely as the European bourgeoisie strives to
transform the Economic Community into a trade and financial bloc capable of
challenging both Japanese and American capital. This is the significance of the
plans to establish a single European market by 1992.
"A fourth factor of great revolutionary significance is the extraordinary
rapid development of the economies of the Asian Pacific Rim, which has brought
into existence large working classes that are being thrust into struggle against
the native bourgeoisie, whose economic position is entirely dependent on
unsustainable export markets. The movement of the working class in South Korea
signifies the entrance of young but powerful detachments of the industrial
proletariat throughout Asia into the arena of world revolution. Moreover, it is
not in Asia alone that the export of capital by imperialism has given rise to
these new battalions of the working class. The same process is well advanced in
Africa and Latin America (especially Mexico).
"The fifth factor to which we draw attention is the impoverishment of the
backward countries and the collapse of all the myriad "development" strategies of
the impotent national bourgeoisie. The countries of Latin America, Africa and the
Indian subcontinent, while by no means identical in terms of their industrial and
general economic development, are all social powder kegs. There is no escape from
the suffering and degradation produced by imperialism and the policies of its
national bourgeois henchmen except through socialist revolution.
"Finally, a sixth factor, to which we have already made reference, is the
revolutionary consequences which must flow from the turn by all ruling Stalinist
bureaucracies in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and China to the policies of
the market economy. In China there is a revival of forms of poverty not seen in
more than 35 years as a consequence of the Stalinist bureaucracy's encouragement
of capitalist relations in the city and countryside. Inflation and unemployment
are already making their impact felt. As the recent strikes in Poland have
demonstrated, the workers in the Stalinist-ruled countries will not peacefully
accept the reintroduction of capitalism." (Ibid., pp. 21-23).
The ICFI was the only tendency from among those pretending to Marxism or
Trotskyism which correctly evaluated the turn of the Stalinist bureaucracies
towards the program of the restoration of capitalism. ICFI's statement of March
1987 explained that Gorbachev's program of "Glasnost and Perestroika" consisted
of two interdependent elements: 1) within the country, Gorbachev's actions
attempted to develop and strengthen new bourgeois and petty bourgeois social
layers to serve as a new social basis for the bureaucracy; and 2)
internationally, Stalinist bureaucracy rejected an independent geopolitical
strategy and charted a course towards the integration of the Soviet economy into
the system of world capitalism. (cf. What Is Happening In the USSR?).
In 1989, one of the leaders of the ICFI David North published a book
Perestroika versus Socialism which in detail explained the
restorationist policy of Gorbachev. This book was also published in Russian in
the new journal of the ICFI, Bulletin of the 4th International, #1,
January 1990.
Influenced by the long boom and the conservatism of the American proletariat,
the SWP transferred its hopes to the petty bourgeois revolutionists of the type
of Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba. Forgetting the lessons of Marxist
dialectics, learned in 1939--40, the leadership of the SWP eclectically separated
the Cuban revolution, the liberation movements in the Congo, Algiers and so on
from the whole world situation. Such movements grew and succeeded as a result of
the temporary equilibrium between imperialism and Stalinism. But the stability of
Stalinism and the successes of the petty bourgeois radicals had a transitory and
contradictory character. The Pabloite conclusions that the victories of such
national liberation movements remove the need for a real revolutionary leadership
were fatally dangerous to world Marxism.
Such attitudes within the SWP naturally led to a break in its adherence to
the International Committee, and in 1963 the SWP went over to the International
Secretariat, renamed the United Secretariat. The reader should bear in mind that
due to the reactionary Voorhis Act the SWP could not formally join an
international socialist organization.
This gentleman summarizes the world situation in the following manner:
"1. A huge shift in the overall relationship of forces on an international
scale, to the advantage of socialism.
"2. A tremendous impetus to the colonial revolution, which thenceforth would
spread from one colonized continent to another; outbreak of the Korean war in
1950; continuation of the Vietnamese revolution, first against French
imperialism, later against American imperialism; extension of the colonial
revolution to Latin America and victory of the socialist revolution in Cuba in
1959; extension of the colonial revolution to the Middle East, to North Africa in
the 1950s, then to Black Africa from 1960 on.
"3. Extension of the crisis of Stalinism" (The Fourth International,
Ink Links, 1979, p. 73).
Mister Frank later on cites the report of Ernest Mandel at the 5th congress
of the U. Sec. in October 1957 on the question of Stalinism and the "workers
states" (Trotskyists commonly refer to the "degenerated" or the "deformed"
workers' states). Mandel reported on the various maneuvers of the Stalinists, the
different splits and zigzags in their line, and concluded: "henceforth there can
be no danger, except in the highly improbable case of defeat in a world war, of a
restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union" (ibid., p. 98). It should be noted
here that this thought of Mandel's repeats quite literally the thesis of Stalin
and Bukharin about the possibility of constructing socialism in the isolated
USSR.
Thirty years later in 1988 Mr. Mandel wrote a whole book about Gorbachev,
Beyond Perestroika; The Future Of Gorbachev's USSR. In this book Mandel
describes the process of de-Stalinization, democratization, political pluralism,
and calls for giving Gorbachev critical support. He ridicules "the ridiculous
theory that the Soviet leader is trying to reintroduce capitalism into the Soviet
Union" (Beyond Perestroika, Verso, 1989, p. 129).
Generally speaking, the United Secretariat represents the inner interests of
the imperialist bourgeoisie; it fits itself into the public opinion of the
European capitalist countries.
The Posadas group, named for its founder and leader Juan Posadas, differs
through its coarser and more primitive form of opportunism. This tendency begins
and finishes with the adaptation to the national liberation movement in the
colonial and semicolonial states of Latin America, Africa and Asia. It split with
the U. Sec. at the end of 1950s, early 1960s, proclaiming that the radical
guerrillas of the Che Guevara type represent the new ideal of revolutionary. This
group later liquidated itself into the various guerrilla movements of Latin
America.
The Spartacist League may be described as a third type of opportunism. They
are characterized by their "strrrrident" "rrrrrevolutionary" language, a facade
of "Trotskyist" orthodoxy and catholicism which hide their complete veneration of
the iron fist of Stalinism. They justify any crime of the bureaucracy against the
working class and the exploited masses: the suppression of the mass Solidarity
movement in Poland, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the police actions of the
KGB against the dissident democrats or nationalists, etc. In August 1991 they
criticized the Emergency Committee for its lack of resolution in conducting state
terror. At the same time, their agitation and propaganda lacks any educational
content and limits itself to loud phrases. These caricature-Trotskyists do not
distinguish between Lenin's and Trotsky's revolutionary Red terror of the period
of the October Revolution and Civil War and the counterrevolutionary terror of
Stalin-Brezhnev-Gorbachev.
All these types as well as other varieties of Pabloism, not mentioned here
for lack of time, are characterized by their adaptation to the existing fact.
They surrendered to the pressure of imperialism, petty bourgeois nationalism or
Stalinism.
Firstly, we must state the fact that Marxists had always realized the
difficulty of building a classless society. Marx and Engels on purpose
schematically differentiated between a lower stage -- socialism, and a higher
stage -- communism. They appreciated that immediately following a socialist
revolution, even in an advanced and cultured country where proletariat
predominates, Ñ conditions which did not prevail in Russia, Ñ a radical
government is threatened with the danger of degeneration of the revolutionists,
the revival of the old abominations of the class society, and the restoration of
capitalism.
During the Trade Union dispute in 1920-21 Lenin defined the young Soviet
state thus: "É we, in fact, have a workers' state, but firstly with the
peculiarity that the predominant class in the country is not the workers but the
peasantry; secondly, that this workers' state is suffering from a bureaucratic
deformation". The discussions within the CP during the 1920s on the question of
the Thermidor attempted to define those levels, where the bureaucratic
deformation of the party and the state changes qualitatively into the creation of
as new class of exploiters. The opposition grouping of the Democratic Centralists
led by T. V. Sapronov and V. M. Smirnov had already in 1926 come to the
conclusion that the Soviet state had degenerated from a workers' to a
bureaucratic-capitalist state.
Trotsky had always tried to define the economic and social, i.e. class
factors as clearly as possible; to move beyond the purely verbal and
terminological discussion to the analysis of the material changes in the class
nature of the USSR. Using the method of analysis he tried to identify the level
of the backsliding of the Soviet state from the precepts of socialism towards the
bourgeois degeneration; he differentiated between the political and ideological
degeneration of the ruling layer and the party and state bureaucracy, on the one
hand, and the qualitative cataclysm of the social counterrevolution.
As opposed to the scientific method of Trotsky, during the decades in the
workers movement there formed numerous factions and tendencies which had rejected
the method of material, historical and dialectical analysis and reached
superficial conclusions about the formation in the Soviet Union (or in other
Stalinist states) of a new ruling social class, or even a new class system.
We may note in the 1920s the growth of the ultra-leftist groupings of an
anarcho-syndicalist strain: Democratic Centralists in Russia; Maslow and Ruth
Fischer in Germany; Amadeo Bordiga in Italy. During the 1930s, due to the
bureaucratization of the Russian CP and of the Comintern the ideological babel
inside the socialist and communist movement continued to grow. In 1939 the
Italian Oppositionist Communist Bruno Rizzi wrote a book, The
Bureaucratization Of the World in which he attempted to synthesize the
features of the Soviet, fascist and capitalist bureaucracies and to ascribe to
them the character of an independent class.
Influenced by the successes of Stalinism at the end of World War II and the
expansion of Stalinism into Eastern Europe and China, there grew two
interdependent trends in revisionism. We have already discussed the first of
them: Pabloism. The second trend at first glance radically differed from
Pabloism. The so called "state capitalists" (supporters of the theory of state
capitalism in the USSR, China, Yugoslavia and the other Stalinist bureaucratic
states) proclaimed that in these countries there formed a qualitatively new class
of exploiters, the bureaucracy, and a new class system -- state capitalism.
The "state capitalists" argued among themselves about the exact timing of a
social counterrevolution in the USSR and the coming to power of the new class of
"collective capitalists" -- bureaucrats. In the international field this position
opened for them the road of cooperation with the western imperialists against the
"Soviet imperialism", based on neutrality, the "third camp" theory, etc.
Among the "state capitalists" there are more right wing pro-imperialist
trends typified by Milovan Djilas. There are also more leftist platonic
"socialist internationalists" of the Tony Cliff type. Both the first and the
second stand close to the social-democrats of various colorations.
Today, we are able to reach a final conclusion as to the barrenness and
bankruptcy of this theory. If Stalin and the Soviet bureaucracy up to and
including Gorbachev, while possessing a total and omnipresent machine of state
terror still could not abolish the major social conquests of the Russian
proletariat in the October revolution, then how can one explain the current
processes of social counterrevolution, taking place on the territory of the
former USSR and the other bureaucratic states? Here we clearly see in action the
difference between Stalinism -- a parasitic growth on the body of the workers'
state, and capitalism -- a social regime which acts according to the laws of the
market and of private property.
The penetration of enemy agents of Stalinism and imperialism into the FI did
not stop with the murder of Trotsky but continues to this day. One of the
byproducts of Senator Joe McCarthy's witch hunt during the 1950s was the exposure
of many Stalinist spies within the American socialist movement, especially inside
the SWP. Unfortunately, at that time the Fourth International did not assign due
significance to this important information and did not conduct an independent
investigation into the activity of Stalinist agents within its ranks. The
political attitudes among Pabloites and their accommodation to Stalinism did not
motivate them towards vigilance. A new investigation into spying inside the
Fourth International fell to the International Committee.
In 1975 the ICFI began its investigation and shortly discovered that Cannon's
New York secretary at the end of 1930s, one Sylvia Franklin was a secret agent of
the GPU. Discovery of other astounding evidence and archival documents showed
that one of Trotsky's guards and secretaries in Mexico, Joseph Hansen was sent
into the Trotskyist movement in 1934 at the order of the GPU. After the
successful assassination of Trotsky Hansen switched his allegiance to the
American State Department and the FBI. Hansen advanced inside the party and in
the 1960s assumed a leading role. All these facts were published by the
International Committee during the course of their investigation. Some of them
appeared in Russian in the Bulletin of the 4th International, #3 in
September 1990.
It was Hansen himself who brought into the SWP thirteen student agents from
Carleton, a small college in Northfield, Minnesota. All of his proteges were
later promoted into leadership positions within the party and its organizations.
During the 1960s and 70s more than a thousand agents swamped the SWP and its
youth movement, the Young Socialist Alliance. With the help of these agents the
American government was able to observe and control the youth radicalization
during the Vietnam War.
In the early 1980s the head of the SWP James Barnes (one of the former
students from Carleton) proclaimed that "the old Trotskyism should be buried",
that the SWP "should return to Leninism" (i.e. merge with Stalinism). During the
1970s and 80's almost all the older members of the party, all those with at least
a platonic tie to Trotskyism, were expelled from the SWP. The SWP lost any
definite political line and the propaganda of this group is today limited to
hosannas addressed to this or another petty bourgeois radical organization in the
backward countries: praise for Castro in Cuba, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, New
Jewel in Grenada, Frelimo in Mozambique, Mandela in South Africa, etc. The SWP
has split from the United Secretariat (the mainstream Pabloites) and today is
mainly acting as a spy agency on behalf of imperialism (with the necessary
radical journalist cover).
Although all these organizations (the Socialist Workers Party, the various
sections of U. Sec., the Spartacists, the "state capitalists" an others) are
formally independent and skirmish among themselves, they are united in the
defense of Hansen and the other agents of imperialism within the ranks and in
their attacks on the International Committee of the Fourth International.
We began to discuss the continuity of Marxism. Today, it is precisely the
International Committee of the Fourth International and the members and
supporters of the Fourth International organized under its leadership who carry
through and preserve Marxist continuity.
The founding of the Fourth International
Hitler's bloodless victory and the surrender of the German CP without a fight
drove the International Left Opposition to make a reassessment of the Comintern.
Concluding that a reform of the International is impossible, Trotskyists revised
their program and took a course towards the organization of a new, the Fourth
International. The new crimes of Stalinism, on the one hand its abandonment of an
independent class line in favor of the policy of the reforms of capitalism,
People's Fronts and the support of the status quo in Europe, and on the other,
the total extermination of the generation of October by the Stalin regime meant
that the Communist International was dead for the purpose of world revolution and
had now become an agency of the Stalinist bureaucracy and of world reaction.
Stalinism drew a river of blood of the betrayed and murdered communists between
itself and the world revolutionary movement.
The American section of the Fourth International
The North American groups of Trotsky's supporters began to organize seriously
in 1928. As shown above, the principled program for opposition groups consisted
of the documents criticizing the program of the Sixth Congress of the CI and the
policies of Stalin-Bukharin.
The tactic of the "French turn"
On Trotsky's advice, opposition groups in a number of countries changed their
tactic and with varying degrees of success adopted an entryist tactic, named the
"French turn". In 1934, in France, the Trotskyist group had entered the Socialist
party as an organized fraction and attempted to influence the Socialist left
wing. In the fall of 1934, the American CLA joined together with equal to itself
in size American Labor Party and in this way expanded its influence among much
wider audience of workers. The new organization received the name Workers Party.
Due to the high theoretical and ideological caliber of the Trotskyist fraction,
the new organization was solidly grounded on Marxism.
The Second World War
The opening of the conflict did not astonish the party (SWP). Trotsky's
political analysis had previously exposed the fragility of the European system of
alliances and antagonisms; his theoretical analysis of Stalinism foresaw the
possibility of Stalin's switching to Hitler's side.
The end of World War II
The results of World War II took the Fourth International by surprise.
European capitalism finished the war in a much weakened condition. The police
dictatorship inside the USSR was weakened as well: the Soviet people expected the
victory over fascism to bring them delivery from the terror of the GPU and real
social equality. Despite the expectations of Trotsky, the defeat of fascism in
Europe did not usher in a socialist revolution in the capitalist countries, nor
the political revolution within the USSR. Stalinism and imperialism leaned on
each other in this mutually dangerous moment. Stalin ordered the western CPs to
support the restoration of "democracy" in France, Italy, Greece and other
countries; in return, Truman and Churchill turned half of Europe over to Stalin.
Pabloism -- the disruption of the Fourth International
In such conditions of the stabilization of capitalism and the apparent
successes of Stalinism, there developed within the Fourth International an
opportunist wing which took this temporary stabilization for a permanent and
normal phenomenon. Trotsky defined Stalinism as a temporary reaction against
socialism, and a counterrevolutionary agency of imperialism in the working class.
In 1949 and again in 1951, the leader of the International Secretariat of the
Fourth International Michel Pablo began to insist that Stalinism is a legitimate
phase along the road to socialism, that the Stalinist states will spread and
widen, that these vile anti-worker police states will last for centuries. Pablo
even advanced a grotesque pessimist theory about a nuclear war-revolution between
the systems of Stalinism and imperialism, using this perspective to justify his
move to support Stalinism. Pablo and Ernest Mandel insisted that Stalin's death
in 1953 opened a process of the "self-reform" of Stalinism to the left.
The International Committee of the Fourth International.
In 1953, the orthodox Trotskyists rebelled against this opportunist line.
James Cannon published his Open Letter to the Trotskyist groups around
the world and together with the majority of the French, British and some other
sections of the Fourth International established the International Committee as a
new organizing center of revolutionary Marxism.
In the chapter The Objective Basis for a New Revolutionary Crisis the ICFI
stated:
"The visible crisis of the international workers' movement has been seized
upon by propagandists of the bourgeoisie to proclaim a new golden age of
capitalism. But despite the enormous growth of poverty, the bourgeoisie has been
unable to extricate itself from the deepening world crisis of the entire
capitalist order. The crisis which confronts the bourgeoisie on a world scale is
of a historic and systemic, and not simply conjunctural, character.
Degeneration of the Socialist Workers Party
But what had happened to the SWP? The Open Letter turned out to be
the swan song of James P. Cannon. The privileged situation of the American
proletariat slowly put out the revolutionary fire within the Socialist Workers
Party. By the end of 1950's the SWP accommodated itself to the influence of
American particularism, lost its belief in the revolutionary potential of the
proletariat and began to adjust to the "progressive" movements of the petty
bourgeoisie and the various movements of national liberation. With the passing
from the scene of the older generation of American Trotskyists (the generation of
Cannon, Vincent Dunne, Farrel Dobbs and others), the SWP even abandoned the
formal adherence to the program of Trotskyism.
The United Secretariat, the Posadas group, the Spartacus League and Pabloism in
general.
The United Secretariat today is a confederation of parties which grew out of
the adaptation towards Stalinism and the petty bourgeois movements of national
liberation. In 1969 they published in their journal Quatrieme
Internationale a survey of their own history written by one of the principal
leaders of U. Sec. Mr. Pierre Frank.
Bureaucracy as a new class, or the theory of "state capitalism"
To complete our survey of the disputes about the nature of the Soviet state
which were fought out within and around the Marxist movement, we must touch upon
the various theories of the Soviet bureaucracy as a "new class".
Stalinists and agents of imperialism inside the Fourth International
Here we should mention the role of agents of Stalinism and imperialism within
the ranks of the Fourth International. Persons, familiar with the story of Evno
Azef and Roman Malinovsky will not be surprised to find out that Stalinist and
imperialist agents penetrated into the center of the Trotskyist movement in
Europe and the United States. Stalin's spies organized the murder of several
leading fighters of the Fourth International, set up a medical murder of
Trotsky's son Leon Sedov in Paris and the assassination of Leon Trotsky himself
in Mexico.
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