Originally published in Fourth International, Vol 7, No. 3, Spring 1972, pp. 107-121
I-Introduction: Our tasks in 1972, in relation to the founding of the Fourth International in 1938.
THE STRUGGLE to found the Fourth International in 1938 was undertaken in order to ensure the continuity of revolutionary leadership and of Marxist theory, from the first four Congresses of the Communist International, the work of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution, and the work of Marx and Engels. It had to be carried through in conditions created by a generation of great defeats for the international working class. This fight for the continuity of Marxism was a struggle against every form of adaptation to these defeats. It meant a fight to the death against the Stalinist bureaucracy which first ensured the defeats and then battened on their fruits. The opposition voiced by all those centrists who stood aside from the Fourth International of Trotsky was an adaptation to the bureaucracy, through the medium of which came an adaptation to imperialism. The founding conference of the Fourth International defined our epoch as one of capitalist decay, in which the historical crisis of humanity is concentrated and which must be resolved in the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the working class. Those who rejected, and still reject, the continuity in struggle of revolutionary Marxism with the Third International and the Russian Revolution, in fact reject the revolutionary role of the working class. Only the orientation to this class, whatever the temporary defeats, could provide the basis for the development of Marxist theory. Trotsky wrote: 'The laws of history are stronger than the bureaucratic apparatus'. The Fourth International, on this granite foundation, has continued to exist, and is being built today, only in constant struggle against all revisionism, which seeks to accept and adapt to the defeats of the inter-war years and the dominance of the bureaucracy, treating these as unalterable historical facts.
These theoretical foundations have been under continuous attack since the birth of the Fourth International. In the years conditioned by defeats, and with the capitalist class able, through the collaboration of the Stalinists, to implement policies of relative class peace, the defence and development of Marxist theory could only be a slow and difficult task, the responsibility of a handful of comrades who were to a great extent isolated from any mass movement. Those conditions have now decisively changed. But we shall get a development of Marxism and the building of revolutionary parties only by starting from the gains of the long struggle for revolutionary continuity in the Fourth International. The profoundly revolutionary character of the contradictions underlying the surface phenomena of capitalist and bureaucratic 'containment' of the working class since 1944 could be grasped only through a conscious struggle for dialectical materialism, against all enemies. In place of dialectical materialism, revisionism in the Fourth International put subjective impressionism. For many years, they accepted the inevitability of bureaucratic control of the workers' movement. The working class was considered only as an unconscious 'pressure' creating centrist and even revolutionary developments within the bureaucracy. In the course of the years of struggle against Pablo, Germain, and later the SWP leadership, it was necessary above all to uncover, underneath the capitulation to bureaucratic and petty-bourgeois nationalist leaderships, the theoretical roots of revisionism. These were: the abandonment of the Marxist theory of knowledge, of the relation between consciousness and reality, between theory and practice; capitulation to the idealist philosophy of the bourgeoisie. The struggle against this ideological pressure from the class enemy is the only foundation for training the cadres of our revolutionary parties. At the same time, the revisionists find themselves undermined by the objective developments: capitalist world crisis and the explosion of the 'neo-capitalism' myth; revolutionary struggles in the advanced countries since 1968; political revolution in Eastern Europe; exposure in struggle of the petty-bourgeois leaderships, particularly in Cuba and Algeria.
The Fourth Conference of the International Committee now takes place under new conditions. The maturing of the imperialist crisis, signalled by Nixon's measures of August 15, 1971, marks the beginning of a new stage of the crisis of leadership. The conditions for the development of Marxist theory by the revolutionary vanguard are now being transformed, as the masses in all countries ate thrust into revolutionary struggles by the disruption of their conditions of life. The task of our Fourth Conference is to grasp the decisiveness of the change implied in these conditions, to politically equip all our sections with the basis for winning leadership of the working class. The greatest mistake today would be to ignore or underestimate the change, to carry on with the same perspectives and methods to which sections have become accustomed in the period since 1938. Such conservatism holds the gravest dangers of descent into centrism and opportunist adaptation. The objective conditions have now reached a stage where, on the firm basis of our long struggle for the continuity of Marxism, we can resolve the crisis of revolutionary leadership. Trotskyism has been forced to go through a long period of isolation, in which it was necessary to beat back every influence from the pressure of imperialism and Stalinism. The real history of Trotskyism, as the force to resolve the crisis of revolutionary working-class leadership, begins now.
II - The Capitalist Crisis With the decisions of the American ruling class to remove the gold backing for the dollar, to impose import surcharges, to end the system of fixed parties, and to impose controls on wages, the basis has been removed for all the political relations through which the bourgeoisie has ruled since the Second World War. The post-war betrayals of international Stalinism had made possible the restoration of capitalist order in Europe, and thereby on a world scale. Despite the gigantic contradiction between the productive forces and the capitalist mode of production manifested in the Second World War, capitalism was able to survive, but only because of these betrayals. The Bretton Woods agreement of 1944, the new institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, and the inflationary Keynesian policies pursued in the advanced capitalist countries, were possible not because of some new-found strength of the capitalist system, but only because of the control of the working class's strength by the Stalinists, assisted by the reformists and the trade union bureaucracy. Now the intensified contradictions of capitalism have finally broken through these relations, which constituted essentially a retreat before the working class, and the class issues must inevitably be fought out. The dollar crisis can only mean a succession of struggles for power by the working class of the capitalist countries.
In the years before the Second World War, the capitalists had used fascism to smash the working class of Germany, Japan, Italy and Spain. But fascism, once in power, had threatened the major capitalist powers, and they were compelled to prosecute a world war which, as always, brought revolutionary crises all over the world. There ensued a series of major defeats for capitalism, in Yugoslavia, in China, and in the loss of fasten, Europe. The establishment of deformed workers' states in these countries was subordinated to the Stalinist strategy of international class-collaboration, but it meant the loss of a vast portion of the world to capitalism. In Western Europe and the United States, the capitalists confronted a working class recovered from the depression of the 1930s. The history of capitalism since 1944 has been one of adaptation to the strength of this working class. Until 1971, the capitalists' guiding strategy has been to find ways of avoiding an all-out clash with the proletariat. Since the middle 1960s, the capitalist class has been forced to recognize the need to take back from the working class all its historical gains, but so far it has continued to try and do this above all through the reformist and Stalinist leaders. Nixon's August 1971 speech was the high point of the rapid developments since the gold crisis and the French struggles of 1968, a period in which the capitalists have been preparing to go on to the attack, as with the return of the right-wing Tory government in Britain.
But the war had also accelerated other changes in the relationships within the world capitalist system, changes which have been determining factors in the subsequent development of the class struggle.
The inter-war period had seen the emergence of American imperialism as the dominant economic power. The First World War, followed by the economic and financial collapse of the 1930s, had dealt especially severe blows to British capitalism. The United States, enjoying all the advantages of a late start in economic development, unencumbered with feudal survivals, together with a wealth of natural resources and a large internal market, took over the role which had been Britain's in the nineteenth century. The decline of Britain was, however, part of the general decline of Europe, a decline which was accelerated by the Second World War. For capitalism to survive after 1945, it had to depend upon America in the economic as well as the military and political spheres.
Given the decisive betrayals of the Stalinist bureaucracy, it was largely on the basis of American aid that Western Europe was able to reconstruct its shattered economy after 1945. In the form of Lend Lease, then Marshall Aid, huge sums were directed into Europe by the US imperialists in a desperate attempt to control the social crisis which then threatened the whole of European capitalism after the war. This American state aid was followed and accompanied by large injections of private capital from American firms seeking the easy profits which a devastated Europe offered. This private and public capital has played a critical role in the European economy since the late 1940s, being closely connected with the tensions which have existed between Europe and America as well as with the subsequent development of monetary crises and now the chaos precipitated by Nixon's August measures.
This American capital was one of the main bases for expansion after 1945. It was closely associated with another: the series of technical changes which occurred in branches of industry both during and after the war. Stimulated by the needs of war, a series of new processes and even new industries appeared in this period: in electronics, engineering, synthetic fibres, computers, etc. These new, expanding sectors of the economy provided a profitable outlet for the large volume of capital which had previously either been tied up in the old declining, unprofitable industries of the 1930s, or had simply lain idle. The state, particularly in Britain, was to play an important role in effecting this transfer of capital. Under a Labour government, several backward industries, notably coal and rails, were nationalized, their ex-owners heavily compensated, and state funds devoted to the restoration of these previously bankrupt industries so that they might provide cheap services and raw materials for the capitalist system. These changes were possible only because of the very depth of the crisis of the 1930s, a crisis which capitalism survived solely through the betrayals of Stalinism.
The so-called 'defence' industries were the centre for these technical and organizational changes. Expenditure on arms was to play an important role, along with a series of other changes, in the relative expansion which capitalism saw after the war. This was so particularly in the Korean War and the increased arms expenditure of the early 1950s. Through its state budgets, capitalism provided, often at very high rates of profit, a ready outlet for the commodities of the firms receiving defence contracts, and this tended to stimulate activity in related sectors of the economy.
These changes both in the overall structure of capitalism and in the relative weight between the capitalist economies were first reflected in the post-war monetary arrangements arrived at in the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference. It was at this Conference that the dominant role of American finance-capital and the dollar was formally recognized. For although sterling retained an important role in world monetary arrangements, it was a role which was now clearly acknowledged to be completely subordinated to that of the dollar. At Bretton Woods, it was agreed that all leading currencies should have their price fixed directly in terms of the dollar and that these prices should be fixed in fairly rigid limits which could only be altered through agreement with the leading capitalist countries and, in particular, with America. The basis of the system was the tying of the dollar to a fixed quantity of gold, at $35 an ounce.
These arrangements did not represent merely the attempt to find new technical arrangements to overcome the contradictions of the old-style gold standard which had collapsed with the sterling devaluation of 1931. There was little new of a technical nature agreed at Bretton Woods, except that the dollar should replace the pound as the basic currency in international trade and finance. What was new was the recognition that another crash on the scale of the 1930s would endanger the whole capitalist system, and the decision by the capitalists to embark on a deliberately inflationary course which they hoped would bring sufficient social stability to appease and contain the militancy of the working class. Bretton Woods was an indication of the weakness and not the strength of capitalism, and, in particular, the growing loss of confidence which the capitalist class had in the very future of its own system. It has been in retreat before the working class, particularly the working class of Western Europe, since 1945 and must now pay a heavy price for this retreat.
The post-war settlement defined clearly a new stage in the relations between the major capitalist powers. While the politics of the capitalist world in the inter-war years developed in the framework of historical rivalry between Europe and America, there now began a period of definitive American dominance, though of course this did not mean that inter-imperialist rivalries disappeared. Revisionists took this dominance of the United States as a factor of capitalism's strength in its ability to survive and to deal with the working class. In reality, it prepared the eruption of capitalism's contradictions in even more violent and universal form, as has now become clear.
The capitalist class of the United States was compelled to take on its own shoulders the concentrated weight of the contradictions of world capitalism. Certainly America has a superiority in industrial technique, in scale of industrial organization, and in material and capital resources, which Europe will never equal under capitalism. But this unassailable lead is established at the time of decline of the capitalist system, so that the leader must take on all the insoluble symptoms of a world system in its death agony. US imperialism has been forced to take responsibility for attempting to suppress the revolution in South-East Asia, and has done so only at the cost of precipitating profound social and ideological crisis in the United States itself. The stimulus which the American capitalists were forced to give to Europe and Japan in the post-war years has, similarly, led inevitably to a situation where these capitalist powers have forced America into a full-scale trade war in order to correct an impossible imbalance of payments and loss of gold reserves.
It is clear that in the actual evolution of the crisis since the Second World War the late 1950s represent a decisive turning point. It was in this period that the American balance of payments deficit began to assume considerable proportions and arouse increasing fear about the stability and future of the dollar. The continual outflow of government and private capital in the 1950s, together with expenditure on arms in Europe and elsewhere, was by this time beginning to produce a situation where the claims against the dollar were rising at a rate which threatened the American gold holdings. In 1949 at the outbreak of the Korean war, America possessed roughly $30 billion of gold in reserve. This has fallen to less than a third of that level, while foreign claims against the dollar — the cumulative result of the rapidly growing American deficit — amount to some four times the present gold figure. Yet the stability of post-war capitalism's international monetary management rests upon the guaranteed price of gold at $35 per fine ounce, the figure first established in 1934, since which time domestic American prices have increased threefold. Throughout the period of the 1960s, American economic policy has been dominated by an attempt to deal with this payments crisis and at the same time bring the rate of price inflation under control.
The early 1960s saw some attempt to solve the emerging crisis at the expense of the colonial and semi-colonial countries. It was at this time, under Kennedy, that the American aid programme was drastically reduced and some attempt made to stem the flow of capital into the 'backward' countries. While these measures made little impact upon the foreign payments deficit, they had disastrous consequences for the economic and political stability of the colonial and semi-colonial countries. Under the impact of these changes many regimes which had earlier been able to balance between imperialism on the one hand and the Kremlin bureaucracy on the other, toppled — Algeria, Ghana, Indonesia and elsewhere — to be replaced with regimes more directly and immediately subservient to the interests of American imperialism. But it was clear that so unbalanced was imperialism at this stage of its decline that these measures alone were inadequate. Thus Kennedy, and later Johnson, had to extend their measures to cover Europe, and plans were announced again aiming at reducing the outflow of capital, limiting expenditure abroad on tourism, making some cuts in military commitments, tightening up the conditions for the granting of foreign aid.
Thus the stage was now set for the squeeze to be put on Europe. But it would be wrong to think that the American imperialists embarked upon this phase of their policy with any great confidence or with any fum unity amongst the capitalist class. They sensed, particularly in relation to the problems of British capitalism and sterling, that any major crisis in Europe, economic or financial, could under certain conditions reverberate throughout the capitalist system and threaten its entire stability. So while driven increasingly into this conflict with European capitalism, the Americans also desperately tried to limit its immediate consequences, especially in the financial sphere. From 1964 onwards, after the election of the Labour government in October, until the very end of 1967 they threw all their resources into a defence of sterling. Although Bretton Woods had established the supremacy of the dollar, it had been impossible completely to remove the importance of sterling as the major world reserve currency. British capitalism still retained enough of its nineteenth-century resources to make this impossible, and in any case, American imperialism would have been unable to sustain its world role without some assistance from the City of London. So for the Americans, the defence of sterling was an international question. And the depth of the crisis, even at this stage, is indicated by the fact that with the November 1967 sterling devaluation their rescue attempt proved a failure, despite the huge injections of capital made available to the Wilson government throughout the period. The circumstances of the 1967 devaluation contain another important lesson in terms of the relation between the class struggle and the economic crisis. For it is clear that the real origin of this particular phase of the crisis is to be located in the period beginning in 1962. It was at this time — under Macmillan's Conservative government that the British ruling class made its first, if indecisive, attempt to deal with its mounting economic problems. This was the period of the Selwyn Lloyd 'pay pause' and the deliberate creation, in the winter of 1962-1963, of considerable unemployment in an attempt to make the policy effective. In fact, the British Conservative government, meeting violent resistance from the working class, was forced to retreat in the period immediately prior to the 1964 election, they were once more forced into a policy of reflation and credit expansion, even though this produced a record £800 million balance of payment deficit and plunged sterling into a major crisis which the Labour government inherited on taking office.
In the same way, all attempts by the American ruling class from the late 1950s onwards have been frustrated by the powerful American working class, a working class which all the revisionist groups have tried to write off in the post-war period. Despite its low level of political development and the absence up to now of its own independent political party, the American working class, organized through its unions, has been the decisive factor preventing Kennedy, then Johnson and now Nixon, from making any impact on the level of inflation. The working class has been able to maintain and even advance its living standards throughout the 1960s despite continually rising prices. Not only has this undermined all anti-inflationary policies, it has increasingly called into question the competitiveness of sectors of American capital in world markets.
It is this strength of the working class, culminating in the automobile and steel contracts won in 1970-1971, which has finally driven Nixon and his advisers to precipitate the breakdown of the entire post-war capitalist order. The great pressure from the US working class had already necessitated a massive flow of capital from America to Europe, seeking higher profits, and this led to an impossible pressure on the US balance of payments. The steel wages settlement would have been a fatal blow to the competitiveness of US steel (already 20 per cent dearer than some imported steels) and of the many industries dependent on steel purchases. The August measures of Nixon were no 'technical adjustment', and they are not open for negotiation. They are a life-and-death matter for US capitalism, and this struggle for survival will now dominate politics throughout the world. Brought to a head by the class struggle, focusing more and more on the US working class, this crisis will be resolved only after titanic class struggles, snuggles for state power.
In France, the struggles of 1968 had already demonstrated that the working class retained all its strength and fighting capacity, despite decades of betrayals. The General Strike threatened the very foundations of capitalist power. In 1945 in France a weak and discredited bourgeoisie had confronted a strong, militant and armed working class, which was held back from state power only by the Stalinists. Within a few years, French imperialism was driven out of Vietnam and challenged in Algeria by a powerful national liberation snuggle, but the Stalinists refused to mobilize the working class against these colonial wars, and did not take advantage of the crisis which they provoked for the French ruling class. In 1958 the reactionary forces in France combined with the revolt of the settlers to threaten military rule. With the open collaboration of the Stalinists and social democrats, the bourgeoisie was able to call on de Gaulle, who established a Bonapartist form of dictatorship. Through a devaluation of the franc and other measures, with world capitalist economy still booming, French capitalism held down wages and was able to resume expansion in the early 1960s. But the miners' strike of 1963 showed that the working class was far from broken, despite its leaders. The Stalinists held back from any struggle under de Gaulle because his foreign policy suited the Soviet bureaucracy. But the 1968 General Strike, with the real threat of revolution, showed that a more definitive defeat of the working class than anything achieved under de Gaulle was necessary if the French bourgeoisie was to survive the coming crisis, heralded by the gold crisis of March-April 1968. This was true not only for France. Ever since the war, even in times of class 'peace', the workers of all the advanced counties continued to vote for the traditional working-class parties in a confused striving for power.
The chain of events opened up in 1967-1968 (sterling devaluation, gold crisis), which has now culminated in the August 15 measures of Nixon, brought capitalism face-to-face with its basic contradictions, but in a more threatening and acute form than ever before. This time the inevitable economic breakdown manifested itself first in the monetary system, would have to be tackled with a working class strong and unbroken. Nothing fundamental was settled by the two tier gold system imposed in 1968. In effect the open recognition of the collapse of the gold and dollar system was only delayed. The inflation of the post-war years left the dollar three times overvalued, and its devaluation was inevitable. Typically, the British Labour government was doomed after May 1968, caught in this great contradiction: on the one hand, the need to handle the crisis produced by inflation; on the other, to face a working class which had strengthened itself through the period of inflation to a point where the ability of the reformists and Stalinists to control it had been stretched to its limits.
Mandel and other revisionists, even at this advanced stage of the crisis, find rationalizations to keep the working class tied to its reformist and bureaucratic leadership. They forecast capitalism settling down to a 'slower cycle of growth', and argue that a crisis in the field of money (the dollar) is a mere reflection of 'real' economic developments. In point of fact the tying of the whole world's economy through the dollar to gold was the most acute expression of all of the contradictory nature of United States dominance, and it was no mere accident or 'appearance' that the world crisis developed in this sphere. Money is not just a means of exchange, a way of technically arranging the system, not just 'liquidity'. It is the universal equivalent, it is materialized abstract labour, reflecting in a developed capitalist economy the total socialization of labour. To the accumulation of money as capital, the whole system is subordinated. Money is 'the individual incarnation of social labour, the independent form of exchange-value, the universal commodity'. And,' ... in a crisis, the antithesis between commodities and their value-form, money, becomes heightened into an absolute contradiction' (Marx). In the crisis of the dollar, a crisis in which there remains no stability of values, we find the most consummate expression of the basic contradictions of the whole epoch, between socialized production and private capital. Within the inflationary framework of dollar domination in the 1950s and 1960s, the basic strength of the working class remained unaltered. Inflationary policies became more and more necessary, and less and less possible. Far from capitalism having entered a new 'slower cycle of growth' (Mandel), it has in fact come to the point, with the collapse of the Bretton Woods agreement, where loss of confidence becomes predominant, and slump results. It is not a question of some son of cyclical development on the higher plane of 'neo-capitalism', but of the most acute class snuggle, as the monopolists strive to wipe out surplus capitals and to destroy vast productive forces, including millions of productive workers.
Against the revisionists, it was necessary to reaffirm the characterization of our epoch. Capitalism as a mode of production is historically doomed bemuse the further development of mankind's productive forces is barred by capitalist property relations. Revisionists reject this basic definition of the period in which we live: they characterize it as a period of 'neo-capitalism' which has been capable of producing a new industrial revolution. This question is fundamental. If neo-capitalism has succeeded imperialism then it was wrong to define imperialism as the last, highest stage of capitalism, the epoch of the proletarian revolution, which must lead to the construction of the new, necessary, socialist mode of production. Consequently, it would become a question of rejecting the revolutionary role of the working class. Revolutionism would become either a moral question or would have to be based on a sociological analysis showing what revolutionary forces are produced by neo-capitalism. Mandel's 'theory' is in fact an ideology, an inverted version of his real position, which is to justify the role of the new petty bourgeoisie, including the 'bureaucracy' of the working class in its pressure on the working class. This middle class certainly does have an important role in monopoly capitalism today, extending from business management to the state power, to the opportunist manipulation of the workers' movement, to the new forms of domination (including genocidal war as well as formal independence) over the oppressed nations, and to the imperialists' relations with the Stalinist bureaucracy.
Just as the revisionists' picture of the relation between their'theory' and the petty-bourgeoisie is an inverted one, so their explanation of capitalism's 'development of the productive forces' is the opposite of the objective situation. It represents the bourgeoisie's own interests in relation to the productive forces: viz, that all developments in technique, science, in being used for the augmentation of profit, must be turned against the principal productive force, the working class, against the capacity of mankind to control its destiny through the co-ordination of all productive capacity in the battle with nature. Monopoly capitalism undergoes many different phases of development: sometimes, on the basis of wars and counter-revolution, a period of expanded reproduction takes place; at others, a period of contracted production, overall destruction of means of production and the wiping out of many capitalists, is necessary. Within world imperialism there is uneven development, with different national capitalisms advancing to the detriment of others. In the competition between monopolies, in the conflict between nation-states, particularly in war, and in the reaction of the imperialists to the revolutionary gains made by the proletariat (the October Revolution, the third Chinese Revolution), there is a stimulus to technological and scientific innovation. But these developments are, in their origin, their life and their destiny, destructive of the productive forces, even though they express in contradictory form the potential satisfaction of human need under socialism. It is for the destruction of the working class, as the repository of human labour power, and for war, that these developments take place and which they serve.
Every development in technology and science therefore deepens the contradiction between the social relations of production under capitalism and further growth of the productive forces. International division of labour under a plan is a necessary condition of this further growth; the rivalry between the nation-state interests of finance capital and the monopolists therefore constantly prepares economic, political and military convulsions. Planned economy, with the abolition of private capitalist ownership, is an essential requirement of the growth of the productive forces; the primary necessity for the owners of capital, the finance capitalists and monopolists, on the other hand, is to harness technique only to the protection of their rate of profit. For these reasons, the technical and scientific elements in the productive forces are turned, in this revolutionary epoch, not against nature, as productive forces, but inwards, against society itself, to become forces of destruction of society and its productive forces. Far from capitalism having achieved a new lease of life, performed another 'industrial revolution', advanced the productive forces and become 'neo-capitalism', its continued existence has posed even more urgently the alternative 'socialism or barbarism'. August 1971 was a shattering verification of the Marxist struggle against revisionism; it created conditions where this alternative — socialism or barbarism — will be fought out.
III - The Relationship of Class Forces and the Tasks of Revolutionary Leadership
What political conclusions flowed in the recent period from our stress on the economic crisis? Inevitably these conclusions were the direct opposite of the political line of revisionism, which starts from the apparent stabilization of capitalism and the control of the working class by its bureaucratic agents. Revisionism, in the course of the post-war period, arrived at the 'strategy' of structural reforms of the capitalist societies and self-liberalization of the Stalinist bureaucracy. In the Belgian General Strike of 1960-1961, Germain and the Pabloites advocated a coalition of the Socialist Party with the bourgeois Christian-Democrats on a 'structural reform' programme. It was the counterpart of this treachery to advise the Hungarian workers in 1956 to follow the Polish example and accept a 'realistic' centrist-Stalinist policy such as that of Gomulka, returning to the control of the Kremlin bureaucracy. The entry of the LSSP majority leadership into the coalition of Mrs. Bandaranaike in Ceylon in 1964 was part of the same abandonment of the revolutionary role of the working class and capitulation to imperialism, despite all the 'theories' about the 'epicentre of the revolution' being in the Third World. Algeria and Cuba were to prove that this talk of epicentre of revolution was only the 'left' face of petty-bourgeois opposition to the building of independent working-class leadership, abandonment of the building of independent revolutionary parties of the working class.
The economic problems of the United States, Japan and the European capitalist powers produce an acute political contradiction. All the techniques of adjustment through the use of social-democratic, Stalinist and trade unionist working-class leadership (collaboration of unions with the state, social-democratic and coalition governments, inflationary policies, etc.) have since 1967-1968 become for the capitalists not merely temporarily inappropriate but dangerous because they conflict with the need of capitalism to attack all the gains of the working class. Forced on by the economic crisis, the capitalist class, while utilizing to the last ounce the class collaborationist services of the Stalinist and social-democratic apparatuses, must actually drive towards an open clash with the working class: civil war and the preparation of corporatist forms of rule are on the agenda of history. The 'democratic' path is not a 'parliamentary, peaceful road to socialism', as the Stalinists claim, but a phase during which the elements of civil war are prepared. The institutions of this phase are not those of 'advanced democracy', but of an advanced stage of capitalist decay which has totally rotted capitalist democracy from within. Behind the face of 'advanced democracy' brutal suppression is planned. This contradiction is the dominant feature in the class struggle throughout Europe, and more and more in America.
But the Stalinist bureaucracy and its Communist Parties, together with the trade union apparatuses and the social-democrats and centrists of all types in the labour movement, are not spent forces. They are active and deadly agents of counter-revolution. Their betrayals are an essential instrument of the preparations of the imperialists. They play this role all the more consistently because the revolutionary wave of working-class struggle threatens their own very existence, and they act in full consciousness of their solidarity with the imperialists. Whatever the incidental phases of speech-making and demagogy by their leaderships, they will not in this period become the expression of leftward-moving forces, but on the contrary will be mobilized, together, or in rapid succession, or with a division of labour, to break up or head off the upsurge of the working class.
The undefeated proletariat is rapidly testing out, working through and exhausting the forms of struggle familiar within its established organizations. The role of the social democrats, centrists, Stalinists, and their revisionist apologists, is at all costs to restrict the working class to these forms, to perpetuate the fatal illusion that a quantitative build-up of pressure through these forms will achieve the workers' aims. Such a political line leaves intact the bureaucratic leadership (with perhaps a few 'left' modifications or infusions from the Stalinists, the centrists, and the revisionists themselves, as in the Belgian General Strike, the administration of Ben Bella, the British Pabloites' services to the'left' trade union bureaucrats, etc.) In fact, of course, the 25 years since 1945, in which the bourgeoisie — and particularly US imperialism — have used to the utmost these compromise forms of control, have covered over the accumulation of contradictions which require an entirely opposite solution. The role of revolutionary leadership is to give direction to the mounting workers' struggles in such a way as to prepare for the real perspectives of capitalist development. The essence of this preparation has been to fight to give independent leadership in the struggle of the working class, to break the working class from reformist and Stalinist leadership of all kinds, to take advantage of the last period's upsurge in the class struggle, to differentiate before millions of workers the revolutionary leadership of Trotskyism from the capitulation of the revisionists.
There has been a new revolutionary wave in the struggle of the international working class, especially since 1968. This new wave, coming after a long period without major defeats, has provided the basic changed conditions in which the Fourth International, founded necessarily in the period of catastrophic defeats of the 1930s and growing up under the heavy blows of fascism and Stalinism, will be built as the international revolutionary leadership. But this success will come only out of a theoretical and practical overcoming of all the contradictions of the development of the class struggle, of the crisis of working-class leadership and of the struggle against revisionism within the Fourth International. In the situation of preparation of struggles of revolutionary magnitude, there is inevitably the threat of counter-revolution on a massive and bloody scale. This threat is concealed behind the screen of reformism, Stalinism and revisionism, defending the mechanism of class compromise.
The workers' own experience brings them into actual conflict with the mechanisms of reformism and Stalinism but it cannot by itself break through them. On the contrary, the last 25 years encourage the illusions in trade union militancy and reform measures by mass reformist and Stalinist parties. The working class is in danger, therefore, of being driven to the very brink of the struggle for power while still being reinforced in reformist illusions. To smash through this contradiction, to prepare the conscious vanguard within the working class for this struggle for power, this is the essence of the fight against revisionism since the 1940s, of the construction of the parties of the Fourth International.
These were the elements of a qualitative change in the international relationship of class forces accumulated by the end of the 1960s. The revolutionary struggles of the French and Czechoslovak workers in 1968 were the first major battles to express the breaking up of the post-war political class relations. These struggles had already been anticipated by the turn of the situation in Greece. There, even a return from the post-civil war repressions to limited 'democracy' with the direct collaboration of the Stalinists in 1966 had proved impossible, and had ended in the imposition of military rule. Since the 1968 struggles, the continuous strike movements in Italy, parallelled by the resurgence of fascism, the 1970 martial-law measures in Canada, and the virtual civil war in Northern Ireland, together with the return of the right-wing Tory government in Britain, have all indicated very concretely the qualitatively new dimension of the class struggles inevitably prepared by the gathering economic crisis which has now struck.
In every one of these countries — and in all others, for the capitalist economy is now more than ever before an inter-connected whole, in which the law of uneven development makes the situation more explosive, rather than providing sectors which will escape the main trends — this new dimension is the preparation of confrontations between the classes on the decisive question of state power. In industrial trade union struggles, workers will proceed as if the old forms of organization and consciousness, the old mistrustful coexistence with opportunist leaders, remain as effective as during the boom. Great dangers confront the workers' movement because this conservatism enters into the sharpest contradiction with the objective political developments at national and international level. The bourgeoisie, with its state power and its agents within the labour movement, prepares consciously to break the working class and to behead its revolutionary leadership. The ruling class senses, from the vantage point of all its economic and political requirements, the need to impose entirely new forms of rule, and it proceeds very deliberately to act.
The decisive role of the Trotskyist movement has been and must be to develop political consciousness, Marxist theory, in order that the conscious preparation of the proletariat can defeat that of the class enemy. This can be done only on the basis of a correct appreciation of the economic crisis, and of the inevitable break-up of the reformist compromise.
If these were the rapidly maturing elements of the change in the world political situation, then the August 1971 measures of the US government, acting for the great monopolies and banks, made inevitable by the same basic economic developments, had the role of crystallizing these elements into that changed situation: a situation characterized by struggle for state power. In the class battles leading up to the conquest of power the working class, because of its political backwardness, will in some cases be able to march forward only after the shock produced by sectional or temporary defeats, in which reformist illusions must be shattered only by the actual new experiences in the class struggle. And only through the independent intervention by the revolutionary forces before, during and after such actions, can the necessary lessons be learned. The working class has demonstrated beyond any doubt that it is capable of fighting stubbornly and tenaciously, but there is no way of escaping the legacy of reformist and Stalinist leadership: it must be faced up to and combated through every experience of the working class in struggle. This is what places such a heavy responsibility on the Trotskyist forces. The sections of the International Committee will have to consist of cadres trained in the basic theory and history of the Marxist movement, able at every stage, through upsurges of the class as well as setbacks, to wage the struggle against Stalinism and reformism, at the same time boldly advancing the policy and programme on which the working class must fight to defeat the ruling class.
IV - Leadership and the Fight Against Revisionism
Whilst the rapidly deepening recession and collapse of the world monetary system drive the capitalist class to the right, the Fourth International has the responsibility of answering the ruling class in a way which concentrates everything on the central issue of resolving the crisis of leadership, defeating the Stalinists and the reformists, taking advantage of the insoluble crisis in their ranks. Such a task can only be accomplished by parties which start from the most profound analysis of the historic tendencies of the world capitalist crisis, and which have based themselves completely on the long struggle against revisionism in the Fourth International.
The political essence of this revisionism was liquidationism. During the post-war period and the boom of the 1950s and 1960s, this liquidationism led to wholesale treachery, in which the Pabloites in one country after another collaborated with reformists and Stalinists, in many cases directly against the Trotskyists of the International Committee. In Ceylon and Algeria they collaborated openly with the bourgeois governments, even entering the coalition of Mrs. Bandaranaike. In every case they worked with counter-revolutionary forces against the construction of independent revolutionary parties. The cadres who fell into this revisionist trap were told to adapt themselves to the supposedly inevitable appearance of left centrist trends within the bureaucratic apparatuses. In the period which has now opened up such liquidationism and capitulation to opportunism and centrism becomes even more deadly. The evolution of N.M. Perera and the LSSP in Ceylon is only a mild anticipation of this process. From 'united left front' they went to a bourgeois coalition government, and thence, via the 'peaceful road to socialism', to the brutal suppression and incarceration of thousands of worker and peasant youth. In the situation now entered into by the workers of the advanced capitalist countries, any capitulation to centrism, any compromise with theories that revolutionary parties can be developed naturally out of the radicalization of the working class, or through the regrouping of 'leftward-moving' forces, will be treachery, with fatal results. Everything now depends on the training, in practice and theory, of a cadre which understands that it is the independent leadership of the Fourth International alone which can provide the pole of attraction for all the best elements of the working class and the youth, who are driven towards revolutionary consciousness by the crisis, because of the decisive breaks in the old relations, but who cannot attain that consciousness except in a struggle between our own forces and the Stalinists and reformists. This must predominate over all tactical considerations in our work in the labour movement. It is only the assembling and educating in struggle of such revolutionary parties which can provide the real possibility for the working class to win to its side the best forces from the intellectuals and the middle classes and peasantry. Centrist waiting and spontaneism of any kind is a direct assistance to the ruling class and the Stalinist bureaucracy, facilitating their conscious day-to-day work of breaking up every manifestation of the growth of revolutionary consciousness.
In the United States, the inevitable concentration of the economic crisis on the dollar means that the American working class moves to the centre of the political stage. Insulated to a certain extent from the accumulating international contradictions in the recent period, so long as these were covered up by the incessant inflation of the dollar, the US working class is now exposed to the shock waves of all these contradictions at a new level. Yet this working class is equipped with only economic organizations and individualistic trade union consciousness adequate to the boom and the days of undisputed US world domination. Nowhere more sharply than here, therefore, is the question of revolutionary leadership posed.
The revisionists of the Socialist Workers' Party have played a treacherous role in obstructing the revolutionary preparation of a cadre in the United States. When the Socialist Workers' Party in 1963 broke relations with the International Committee and openly returned to Pabloism in the so-called United Secretariat, they evaded ah principled questions of the continuity of the Marxist movement, and proceeded from the appearance of agreement on the immediate concrete' issue of the Cuban revolution. Far from being, as was aimed, a turn towards revolutionary developments, this was the very opposite. By accepting the theory of an epicentre of world revolution in the colonial countries, the SWP was writing off the American working class.
By welcoming Castro's regime as a workers' state and Castro as a 'natural Marxist', the SWP waged a frontal attack on the very fundamentals of Marxist theory and on the building of independent revolutionary parties. The SWP's Cuba campaign was actually a turn to the liberals and the middle class through the 'Fair Play for Cuba Committee'. Their telegram of condolences to Mrs. Kennedy was the crude but true expression of this reactionary course.
Such an orientation could only produce a party and a youth movement, the Young Socialist Alliance, which was dominated by the politics of middle-class protest, suppression of the independent programme of the working class, and open hostility to Marxist theory. It was from this standpoint that the SWP along with the whole United Secretariat, developed the 'analysis' of sectors of radicalization: of the youth, of the Negroes, of women, etc. They worked in these spheres, develop the independent line and organization of the working-class revolutionary leadership. In every case the independent demands of the working class were subordinated to the preservation of alliances with the middle class, and this was excused by references to the dangers of sectarianism and the need for a truly mass movement. The fight for the American Labour Party, the building of revolutionary fractions in the trade unions, the training of a force of young Marxist revolutionaries to carry this snuggle into every sector of the labour movement — this was left to the Workers' League, in collaboration with the International Committee, which has been built through a consistent fight against the opportunism and anti-internationalism the SWP.
The verbal opposition of Hansen and Peng in the recent period to he line of Germain-Maitan-Frank is not a departure from these revisionist politics, but a further development of them. According to Hansen, it is now necessary to turn away from the Germain-Maitan thesis of guerrilla struggles, particularly concentrated in the colonial countries. Hansen draws attention to the disorientation of the Latin American revolutionary forces by Castroism and guerrilla-ism, and calls for a return to the 'orthodox' Marxist positions on the urban struggle, on the central role of the proletariat, and on the revolutionary youth. Not only was Hansen the chief agent imposing these disastrous theories on the revolutionary cadres in Latin America in 1961-1963, but his own party, the SWP, has also shown in its politics that Hansen's 'orthodoxy' is but a cover for consistent disorientation of the youth into the camp of petty-bourgeois radicalism.
Most important of all, Hansen himself proposes to 'correct' the course of the United Secretariat without any political and theoretical accounting. To do so would mean an objective analysis of Hansen's own role in 1963, the essence of which was to engineer an unprincipled unification without any theoretical or historical discussion. The SWP's original 1953 break with Pablo had remained at a purely empirical and national level, without going to the class roots and the theoretical essence of Pablo's tendency. Now the SWP has turned full circle after a tortuous 20-year-long empirical blundering. Hansen once again asserts 'orthodox' Trotskyism against the crudest Pabloism, having himself been the creator of the very situation in the world movement which he seeks to change. The development of the world Trotskyist movement can in no circumstances take place along the road of compromise or fusion with this anti-theory tendency, but only by the most implacable theoretical and political struggle against it. A generation of Trotskyists will be trained in the United States only through a determined struggle to turn to the working class and consciously develop dialectical materialism against pragmatism and against this disastrous leadership of the SWP. The building of the Workers' League, fighting on the programme of the International Committee, is therefore at the centre of the tasks of the IC. From this development will come the source, for the international movement, of a qualitative leap in Marxist consciousness, precisely because in the consistent tasks of the American proletariat are concentrated in highest form international contradictions.
Nixon's measures of August 15, 1971, denote the beginning of an entirely new stage in the class relations in the United States, not only in the long term but immediately. Industrial struggles, through Nixon's insistence on wage control, are brought into the centre of politics. The imperialists now restrict cheap imported goods, reduce the purchasing power of the dollar through devaluation, and step up an intensified exploitation for competition abroad. Inevitably this means direct attacks on the living standards of American workers. It means that the resistance to these attacks, beginning as trade union struggles, is immediately answered by the ruling class as sabotage of the national interest. The US imperialists are forced in the direction of political reaction, and must strike blows against the working class of a type not experienced by a whole generation. This will be a rude shock to millions of workers with reformist illusions bred by the boom. These struggles will be the framework within which Marxists must The student, Negro, and anti-war movements of the late 1960s in the US, like the anti-Vietnam war protests and the 'student power' manifestations in Europe and Japan, were not, as the revisionists claimed, the first wave of a new type of revolutionary anti-authority movement springing out of the specific contradictions of 'neo- capitalism'. On the contrary, they were but the heat-lightning flashes anticipating the entry on to the scene of the working class all over the world. The petty bourgeois and the student youth are moved by various separate expressions of the crisis, expressions in the ideological and political super-structure. But these elements can never produce the decisive class force for the socialist revolution. The proletariat will also from time to time reflect the developments in the super-structure, but great changes in the mass movement, the indispensable prerequisite for revolution, derive from the shocks produced by the contradictions in the very economic foundations of the capitalist order. The only correct orientation for the radicalized youth of the 1960s was a turn to prepare the resources and cadres for the great working-class struggles now placed on today's agenda by the economic crisis. This was the meaning of the IC's struggle for Marxist theory against impressionism, for the building of revolutionary parties against liquidation into middle-class protest movements, for the theory and programme of struggle against imperialism and bureaucracy, against the revisionist theories of a new stage of capitalism with new types of basic contradictions and new revolutionary elites. The training of cadres is not a formal task of education plus organizational experience, in preparation for deepening crises and intensified struggles. The revolutionary leadership must constantly struggle to integrate all the effects of the historical crisis, not only as they appear in the experience of the working class but also in the objective relations between all classes, and in the reflection of these relations in the consciousness of all classes.
Marxist theory must be developed through intervention in all these spheres, and in struggle against the existing level of consciousness in the working class. The spontaneous consciousness of the effects of the crisis in the working class is an inadequate and conservative consciousness. Not only is it restricted by the objective limits of the workers' experience, but it is all the time subjected to the developments in bourgeois ideology and its agencies in the workers' movement. Only a conscious fight for dialectical materialism against this ideology at every point can be the basis for the training of cadres.
Revisionism in the Fourth International has always been directly opposed to this conception. Pabloism abandoned the revolutionary party and attributed a revolutionary role to sections of the Stalinist bureaucracy and the nationalist petty bourgeoisie. It is just as dangerous to proceed, as the OCI does, on the basis of elaborating a programme to 'correspond' to the aspirations of the working class. This mechanical and anti-Marxist approach to the question of consciousness actually leads to a capitulation to existing opportunist trends in the labour movement. It assumes that the experience imposed on the workers by capitalism will bring about a growing rejection of the Stalinists and reformists, leaving scope for a 'regroupment' around the revolutionary party. The politics arising from this false theory are called, wrongly, the working class united front.
The fruits of this revisionist approach have now been seen at the international level. The OCI's 'reconstruction' of the International amounts to a series of organizational blocs with centrists and opportunists in opposition to the Trotskyists of the IC majority. Essen was the open manifestation of this, to be followed by the OCI's declarations on the Bolivian revolution. The real construction of the FI must proceed by the assembling and training of the most advanced workers and youth into independent revolutionary parties, and not on such regroupments'.
Since 1944, the national-liberation struggles of the colonial peoples have occupied the front line of the direct struggle of the masses against imperialism. This colonial revolution, which the military oppression of the imperialist powers has failed to stop, has however remained isolated from the struggle of the proletariat in the metropolitan countries. In this, the counter-revolutionary role of Stalinism in all its treachery is most thoroughly exposed. Whether in its Soviet or Chinese form Stalinism has claimed to give solidarity and support to the colonial peoples but in fact has played a decisive role in disciplining the workers of the advanced capitalist countries while the capitalists pursued compromise Keynesian policies. Vietnam, Cuba, Indonesia, Korea, and the Latin American, African and Asian liberation struggles of the last 27 years — all have received verbal and even limited military support from Stalinism. But the essence has been that Stalinism has been the principal obstacle to the international mobilization of the only force, the working class, whose struggle can guarantee the completion of the process of permanent revolution and resolve the problems of the colonial masses. 'Peaceful co-existence' means in fact the maintenance of brutal military oppression and the eventual success in some cases of extreme right-wing accessions to state power which they use to suppress the masses. These are the tendencies expressed from Vietnam to Algeria, from Indonesia to Egypt, from West Africa to Cuba and Latin America.
The role of the revisionists was to serve as an accessory of counterrevolutionary Stalinism in these great struggles. Not only did Pabloites join the Ceylon coalition in 1964, and Pablo serve as Ben Bella's official adviser; they conducted the protests against the Vietnam war in such a way as to deliberately obscure the counter-revolutionary role of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Leninism was vulgarized and trampled on. The protest movement was justified, in the words of the Pabloites themselves, by an appeal to quotations from Lenin to the effect that the first duty of a revolutionist in an imperialist country is to support the liberation struggles of the colonial peoples. Behind this vile deception, alliances with liberals and Stalinists were placed higher than the independent interests of the working class and the building of the Fourth International. In the name of Lenin and Trotsky, the essence of their work, the building of independent proletarian parties, was rejected, and the colonial peoples were stabbed in the back yet again.
Inside the colonial and semi-colonial countries, revisionism again directly assisted the Stalinist bureaucracy and the nationalist agents of imperialism,.by accepting petty bourgeois nationalist leaders as the revolutionary representatives of the masses. They completely rejected the essence of Lenin's position and the theory of Permanent Revolution: the construction of independent proletarian parties, leading the working class at the head of the oppressed peasantry, as the only force able to resolve the tasks of the democratic revolution and go beyond them to the workers' power, as part of the international proletarian revolution.
The prospects for the proletariat in the colonial revolution now undergo a transformation, as the working class of Europe, America and Japan is inevitably drawn into the battle for state power by the precipitate development of the economic crisis. The struggles in the colonial countries, having raged since 1944, now come together with the revival of the revolutionary struggle in the metropolitan countries at an entirely new level. But this coming together of the struggles poses the most acute contradictions and dangers. Imperialism hastens to impose its crisis, so far as possible, on the colonial masses. It impels a brutal swing to the right in the Sudan, Egypt, and throughout the Middle East and it seeks the direct collaboration of the Chinese as well as the Moscow Stalinists to impose military dictatorship in India and Ceylon. The Stalinists' support of the junta in Peru and the right-wing coup in Bolivia are proof that the same class relationships have matured in Latin America. The end of the boom has meant a quick end to the middle-of-the-road role of sections of the nationalist bourgeoisie, and everything now depends on the independent role of the working class which can be exercised only under the leadership of parties of the Fourth International. The sections of the Fourth International in the colonial countries will therefore be faced with mobilizing the working class to repel the attacks of reaction, to lead every new mass struggle produced by the convulsions of the economic crisis, and to participate consciously in the building of the international revolutionary leadership. Above all it is necessary to orientate completely along the line of the independent revolutionary party against Stalinism and petty-bourgeois nationalism. These are the lessons of the whole post-war period and of the fight against Pabloite revisionism, confirming all the basic positions of Lenin, Trotsky and the Third International. If these lessons are not learned now, then the new period we have entered holds the gravest dangers.
Latin America, with the Cuban question at the centre, similarly manifested the decisive issues in the world class struggle and in the fight to build the Fourth International. In 1963, the 'reunification' of the Pabloite forces led by Frank, Mandel-Germain and Maitan with the Socialist Workers' Party, was effected primarily on the supposed establishment of a Cuban workers' state by a petty-bourgeois leadership under Castro, which had thereby become Marxist or Trotskyist through a process of natural evolution. Here was to be found the concrete historical expression of the long-advocated liquidation of the Fourth International in favour of spontaneous development from the 'new world reality'. The 'reunification' also held out the prospect of Algeria following in- the footsteps of Cuba and becoming the first workers' state in Africa, with Ben Bella 'another Castro'. The International Committee was condemned as sectarian and blind to the 'facts' of Cuba's supposed break with imperialism. Dynamics of World Revolution Today, published in June 1963 as the document of the 'reunification' said:
The emergence of mass revolutionary forces led by parties or tendencies which have developed outside the realm of Stalinist control (Cuba, Algeria) has introduced a most powerful disintegrating element into international Stalinism, favouring the development of a revolutionary left wing. (page 15)
From Cuba the conclusion was drawn that the revolution could succeed in colonial countries 'even with a blunt instrument' (page 5). Fidel Castro's purging of the Escalante group in Cuba was welcomed as a critique of bureaucracy in the tradition of Lenin and Trotsky! (page 35).
In drawing up the balance sheet of these political positions, it is above all necessary to emphasize the method of constructing the Fourth International that is at stake, and to draw the lessons today. The International Committee proposed then, as it proposes in a different context and a different form today, a discussion of all outstanding political questions which embraces all sections attached to both the International Committee and the Pabloite Secretariat (now the 'Unified Secretariat'). It is, of course, no accident that Ceylon, for example, is missing from the 1968 and 1969 documents of the Unified Secretariat's World Conference. In 1963, the Ceylon section was mentioned in Dynamics of World Revolution Today as the only mass party in the Fourth International — only one year before this party entered a bourgeois coalition! 'Unification' was effected in 1963 only on the basis of suppressing discussion of differences and excluding the International Committee from the discussion. Ben Bella was imprisoned by the Boumedienne regime, which imposed a more right-wing nationalist regime in Algeria. Algerian militants under the influence of the revisionists, especially Pablo himself, were blinded by the theory of'blunted instruments' and became the victims of the rightwing coup, as against any supposed 'left' development. The FLN produced no revolutionary development and drove no Stalinist party in a 'revolutionary direction'.
In Cuba the Castro movement, already merged with the Cuban Stalinists, moved completely into the policy orbit of world Stalinism. As foreseen by the analysis of the International Committee, the Castro government, through its control of the state offices and its alliance with counter-revolutionary Stalinism, entered upon the course which eventually will increase the dependence of Cuba on world imperialism and deprive the working class of many of the conquests won in the last ten years.
Castro began in 1966 his open assault on Trotskyism in Latin America; the 'Castroite' guerrilla strategy failed in one country after another. Loyal to the Stalinist bureaucracy which guaranteed prices for the sugar crop, Castro kept silent on France May-June 1968 and then supported the Warsaw Pact intervention in Czechoslovakia. Under pressure from the Soviet bureaucracy to restore good relations in Latin America, the Castro regime did not support the persecuted students of Mexico. Now, as the Stalinists welcome the Peruvian junta as a 'revolutionary' government, so does Castro abandon any pretence of fighting a Latin American revolution and seeks agreements with the so-called 'left' governments of these countries.
Undoubtedly the US investments of the past decade in Latin America have encouraged an upsurge of the workers' and peasants' movements. This rise of the working class, which gives the real hope to the historic struggle of the rural poor, continuing throughout the continent, requires Trotskyist leadership; requires proletarian revolutionary parties able to oppose the Stalinists' collaboration with imperialism. This upsurge of the working class, together with the inescapable problems of vying to build up an autonomous Cuban economy on the basis of sugar-culture, is the forcing-house behind Castro's inevitable acceptance of the Stalinist bureaucracy's pressure to move back to the American imperialist camp, via closer relations with Peru and then with the Organization of American States. The Castro government, far from being the leadership of a revolutionary party at the head of a workers' state, was on the contrary a Bonapartist caretaker for the Cuban bourgeoisie, holding the masses in check.
Just as the militants, particularly youth, coming forward in struggle in the advanced capitalist countries can go rapidly through the experience of exhausting the traditional leaderships and testing out centrist tendencies, so in Latin America the 'Castroite' appearance of an alternative to Stalinism has had to show its true nature. In both cases it is the depth of the world crisis which has forced this development. Revisionism' s crisis naturally reflects directly this rapid exhaustion of the centrist and petty-bourgeois layers upon which it depends.
Castro now follows the Kremlin bureaucracy in bailing the regime of the military junta in Peru as 'revolutionary'. What the junta represents is a bonapartist dictatorship, directly subservient economically to US imperialism, but politically able temporarily to control sections of the masses through measures of so-called 'nationalization'. This will more and more be the pattern in Latin America. Brutal suppression of the peasant masses in their struggle for land accompanied by 'land reform' benefiting a better-off minority; a period of relative expansion and 'reform' in industry through new relations negotiated with the US monopolists; integration of the trade unions into the state machine; preparations for repression of all independent working-class organization; 'revolutionary' nationalist demagogy of the bonapartist rulers, supported by the Stalinists. Castroism, aided by the revisionists, has become the apologist for this development, poisoning the development of all those militants it could influence among the workers, the youth and the poor peasantry.
The election of Allende in Chile holds the same dangers. His 'Marxism' represents the immediate needs of US imperialism: to lull the masses to sleep while the best conditions are created for the expansion of US investment. The Stalinists and Castroites, behind the deception of a unity against the most reactionary forces, support such regimes and use them to strike out against the building of independent revolutionary parties based on the strategy of the permanent revolution and the programme of the Fourth International.
The Pabloite revisionists inevitably enter an insoluble crisis in Latin America at this point. It is the very entry of the proletariat as the decisive force, now needing a leadership and strategy to lead the poor peasantry behind it and armed with the programme of Trotskyism, that makes necessary the changed political nature of those Latin American regimes. This, and not adaptation to the new regimes, provides the basis for the development in Marxism in Latin America, and already produces the determined elements who are fighting to build the Fourth International in Latin America around the International Committee.
The lessons of Bolivia, following on Ceylon, Algeria and Cuba, bring home with the greatest urgency the necessity of parties of the Fourth international fighting on the basis of the Permanent Revolution. Necessary above all else, after the accession to power of Torres, was to build a party which was proletarian and revolutionary in programme and composition, able to lead the masses on the question of land reform. But the workers' organizations were subordinated to the centrist policy of conditional support for Torres. The way was left open for the right-wing militarists and fascists to win time and support in the countryside and effect a successful coup d'etat. Support for Torres could only have this outcome. Caught in the illusion of a 'dual power' which could effect a gradual transition through struggle against reaction, the revolutionary vanguard was politically disarmed, and this meant the working class was disarmed. While the masses laboured under this illusion, the right wing prepared the counterrevolution. The resistance of die workers and students was soon overcome because there was no independent revolutionary preparation.
The regroupment of Trotskyist forces in South and Central America will take place only if the lessons of the Bolivian events, and the lessons of the Pabloite capitulation to Castroism, are learned. The only road is: the construction of independent proletarian parties as part of the building of the Fourth International.
In Asia, the people of Vietnam are now directly joined in struggle by the masses in Ceylon and in Bengal. But this new upsurge of the colonial masses coincides with the deepest crisis in the advanced countries. For this reason the Stalinist bureaucracy, in Peking as well as Moscow, turns more resolutely to the imperialists. When the bureaucracy supports reaction in Pakistan against Bangladesh, and supports the Bandaranaike government in Ceylon, it is betraying the future interests of the Vietnamese revolution as well as building up for massive repressions in India and Ceylon. But this is a natural consequence of the Stalinist bureaucracy's policy since 1968. They betrayed the revolution in France and brutally suppressed the Czech workers, they helped break the Spanish miners' strike, they shot down the Polish workers in 1970. The fact that Mao's as well as Brezhnev's counter-revolutionary role is more and more expressed in these first stages of the economic crisis of capitalism can constitute a great advantage to the Trotskyist movement, provided we fight everywhere to train the independent leadership through the struggle against these betrayals.
V - The Tasks of Building Revolutionary Parties.
The Stalinist bureaucracy senses very well that the insoluble imperialist crisis means mass revolutionary struggles. These struggles, with power as their perspective, threaten every basic premise of the bureaucracy's relations with imperialism, and open up to the workers of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union the prospect of a united international revolutionary struggle, for the social revolution against capitalism, and for their own political revolution against the bureaucracy. It is for this reason that the bureaucracy turns on the one hand to the imperialists and on the other to sharper repression at home.
It was always true that the bureaucratic-military means to which the bureaucracy restricted the defence of the USSR actually defeated their object, because they operated as pare of an overall strategy which strangled the only real force able to defend the gains of October, i.e. the international working class. Thus today, the collaboration of world Stalinism with imperialism, far from making it more 'peaceful', actually opens the door to the growing right-wing and militaristic tendencies which always arise at times of capitalist crisis. The capitalists are driven by necessity in the direction of re-conquest of the USSR, Eastern Europe and China, and the Stalinist betrayals are calculated to divide and weaken the working class within each capitalist country which must fight for its own power if capitalist reaction is to be halted. As part of the international role of Stalinism, Stalinist parties will undoubtedly lead workers in some cases to defeats.
There will be no short cuts around these experiences as the working class goes through its preparation for the decisive struggle for power. The working class will test out its existing leaders and organizations, and the IC sections must find every way of breaking the masses in action from the Stalinists and reformists, posing always the question to all those who still command the allegiance of the working class: take the state power, break with the bourgeoisie.
However, the new crisis after August 15 will very soon have effects in which the time taken to pass through some of these experiences is greatly reduced. Sections of workers will be placed in situations where they will learn more in a few weeks than in a lifetime. But this does not mean a pleasant educational exercise under 'favourable' conditions. Rather, it involves profound shocks in the whole way of life and thinking of the working class. Only Marxists who struggle to develop their understanding of dialectical materialism, of the real development of consciousness, will be able to break from routine, from formal expectations and propaganda methods, and instead find new ways of extracting new knowledge from the objective changes, and from this developing theory and programme for the next stage of the practical revolutionary struggle. It is in this sense that only parties trained in a conscious struggle to develop dialectical materialism against all enemies, all forms of idealism, will be equipped for the approaching struggles.
The crisis is fundamentally one of revolutionary leadership. Our task is by no means just to find adequate expression for the developing moods and demands of the masses as they are spontaneously driven into action. It is to give leadership against the centrist traps into which these spontaneous movements will fall. The initial struggle will shatter the existing relationships and conceptions, but left to itself the result will merely be a coexistence of militancy and 'left' thinking with the existing reformist and Stalinist leadership. The Trotskyists must conduct an all-round political and theoretical struggle against capitalist ideology in all its forms in order to break the ideological domination imposed by the bourgeoisie through reformism, Stalinism and revisionism. This means a conscious fight to start from the building of the independent revolutionary cadre in every country, at the same time studying with the greatest care the actual development of the working class, but in no case confusing the latter with its pale reflection in sectors of the apparatus.
In the course of development of the new phase of capitalist crisis, centrism will appear at every major turn. In appearance it corresponds to the level reached by sections of the working class just breaking from reformism. Given the independent intervention by Trotskyism against centrism, then we can expect the enormous tension created by the economic crisis to provide conditions in which the centrists will be very rapidly exposed for the opportunists they are. But here lies great danger: the capitalist class needs every new upsurge of the working class to be broken in its early stages, and it relies on the centrist leaders to carry out the necessary betrayal. To combat and defeat this centrism is not therefore a propaganda task, but a life-and-death matter for the working class. It can be dealt with only by a party whose cadres are trained on the whole body of Marxist theory.
What flows, therefore, from out theoretical analysis of the present economic and political situation, and from all the basic experience of our movement, is the paramount need to struggle on the basis of dialectical materialism for the independent development of our own revolutionary party in every country. This, the creation of a decisive pole of attraction for the best elements driven forward by the crisis, and not some centrist adaptation to 'new forces', is the fundamental requirement of the working class and the youth. To go deeper and deeper into the masses, as the new stage of the crisis requires, is a task that cannot be undertaken except through the most decisive concentration on the development of Marxist theory.
The Third Conference of the International Committee in 1966 adopted a resolution based on the report of the Conference Commission on 'Rebuilding the Fourth International and the Tasks of the IC'. Asserting the continuity of the Fourth International since 1938 in struggle against Stalinism and against Pabloite liquidationism, this resolution emphasized above all else the building of independent revolutionary parties in every country. Such parties can only be built in opposition to all tendencies to syndicalism and spontaneity. In the epoch of wars and revolutions, and especially in the period since the early 1930s where the crisis of revolutionary leadership predominates, all such tendencies quickly fall prey to centrist treachery. The very fact that the imperialist crisis forces more and more millions of the masses into conflict demands precisely that a leadership is forged which can establish the political independence of the working class.
The proletariat will not abandon its traditional trade union and political organizations immediately to take the road of revolution. It will first act while still within the framework of these organizations, producing a crisis within them. The resolution of this crisis is a conscious task which can be undertaken only by parties of the Fourth International. The cadres of the Fourth International fight within the mass organizations of the working class to defend the trade unions from the capitalist state; they conduct a political struggle to remove the opportunist and Stalinist leaderships as the basis of the fight for proletarian democracy within the trade unions. All sectarianism, turning away from the mass organizations, must be resolutely opposed. It is essentially in this fight against the opportunist leadership, intervening on all the basic questions confronting the working class to win cadres and build the revolutionary party, that the struggle to unite the working class takes place. In this period of the crisis of revolutionary leadership, the struggle to build the independent centralized revolutionary leadership is a fundamental, principled issue. To the building of the party all tactical questions are subordinated in the direct sense that every aspect of work — in the unions, in the youth movement, in propaganda, etc. — is planned and controlled from the party, with its perspectives worked out from the standpoint of building the party necessary to lead the working class to power.
The role of a daily party newspaper in this fight is indispensable. It is the organizer of the party, constantly struggling to create a political homogeneity of the work and consciousness of all members of the revolutionary party. It gives the party the necessary striking power in reacting to the sharp political turns characteristic of this revolutionary period. It takes to a new level the struggle of Trotskyism against Stalinism and all the agents of capitalism within the working class. It is the concrete realization of the perspective of resolving the crisis of leadership, enabling the fight for revolutionary consciousness to be conducted on the political, the economic and the theoretical fronts in a way which is enriched and unified by the daily necessity of intervention in the class struggle.
The Third Conference of the International Committee also decided to set up a youth commission working under its direction. This youth commission undertook the immediate tasks placed before it organization of mass participation in the Liege demonstration against NATO and the Vietnam war in October 1966, and convening an international conference of revolutionary youth organizations (begun as the International Youth Assembly, summer 1967). There is no doubt that the radicalization of youth in the 1960s was, as always, the anticipation of a renewed revolutionary upsurge of working-class struggle. For this reason the orientation of the sections of the International Committee towards the youth was correct and of great importance. It has strengthened the cadre of the IC sections in preparation for the great class battles which began in 1968. This new revolutionary stage of the class struggle provides qualitatively new conditions for a mass Trotskyist youth movement. The youth can now march forward no longer comparatively isolated from the adult workers, but on the contrary, given strength and confidence by the actions of large sections of the working class.
The political development of the revolutionary youth is greatly facilitated by this relationship and the struggle against all forms of opportunism and adventurism in the youth can be carried through under very favourable conditions. Naturally the youth come into the struggle with no experience of the fundamental clash between imperialism and the proletariat. Their enthusiasm and energy, so essential to the building of the revolutionary party, have to be tempered and given greater force through the absorption of all the lessons of the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat. These lessons can only be learned in the school of Lenin and Trotsky, in the building of parties of the Fourth International. There is thus no separation whatsoever between the building of the revolutionary party and the building of the mass revolutionary youth organization and youth International. The International Committee thus has a primary responsibility for the development of an international youth organization which places itself clearly and openly under the banner of Trotskyism, of the Fourth International.
The history of the Fourth International, as of the Third International set up under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky, proves beyond any shadow of doubt that the laying down of a correct programme, even with the most impeccable historical forebears and preconditions, does not provide automatic sureties of the development of revolutionary leadership. Not complacency, but the most vigilant, combative and scrupulous attention to theoretical questions, checking on every perspective and every development, constantly turning the cadres of every section towards fundamental theoretical questions, will build the revolutionary party. This is the most decisive lesson of the history of the Fourth International and the struggle against the revisionists. Development will not come from any combination of adherence to programme with the enthusiasm of the youth and the influx of fresh forces from the struggle of the working class. It will come from the battle to develop and deepen Marxist theory against every pressure from bourgeois ideology. The deeper the crisis of imperialism, and consequently of its bureaucratic agencies in the labour movement, the more pressing the tasks posed before the revolutionary leadership, the sharper is the pressure of all forms of idealist thinking inside the revolutionary party. There is no road to the building of the revolutionary party, no road to workers' power, except this one. It is precisely the possibility, under today's conditions, of building the Fourth International into the world leadership at which Trotsky aimed, that poses the task of deepening dialectical materialism in the conflict against all forms of revisionism, of negating the whole period since 1938. The struggle against revisionism is the essence of preparation. It prepares the revolutionary party to fight for the leadership of the working class in overturning all the defeats and obstacles placed in its way by imperialism and the Stalinist bureaucracy.
The essential task before the Fourth Conference of the International Committee is the theoretical and political preparation of all its sections, and of all those now coming towards the International Committee, to establish in the immediate future parties which will successfully challenge the Stalinist and reformist leaderships and lead the struggle for workers' power.
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Last updated 17.8.2003