For the Reconstruction of the Fourth International--Part 2 (cont'd from IDM No 1.
Osvaldo Coggiola
The validity of the revolution in the relationships of production and in the consciousness of the masses was proven in World War II, when the USSR was about to be annihilated by Nazism, with which Stalin maintained a privileged alliance up to 1941, when Germany invaded the USSR. After the spectacular initial defeat, which decimated the Soviet army, the recomposition of the military force of the USSR was a socio-economic feat. A new industry in regions not occupied by Nazism was built, which produced 400 thousand aeroplanes in 1944 and 800 thousand tanks between 1941 and 1945. Whole factories were transferred to the east and all the natural resources were mobilised. The famous allied help to the USSR did not cover 10% of Soviet production. All this would have been impossible if private property in the means of production had existed (in the countries occupied by Nazism, the bourgeoisie was almost totally a collaborator).
It was a historical victory for state planning, a moral victory for the principles of the socialism. A world victory, in the measure in which the defeat of Hitler in the USSR liberated humanity from the Nazi military threat, the biggest war-machine in human history until then. How is it possible to affirm that it remains to be proven historically that socialism is superior to capitalism?
This historical balance-sheet, which considers the contradictions of development, is opposed in the highest degree to the fanciful versions that pretend that "the bureaucratic deformation had been deepened notably during and after the civil war" (that is to say, that the USSR was born as a bureaucratic state, because the civil war was immediately after the taking of power), in order to deduce that "the Stalinists counter-revolution changed the socio-economic bases of the USSR completely" (8), that is to say, that the USSR was a capitalist state, and its victory against Nazism in the War II, was the victory of one totalitarian state against another.
Another thing said is that the victory of the USSR was made possible by the survival of the bureaucratic regime, which carried it out: 1) In the internal plane, by the superexploitation of the workers (rationing, wage freeze with an increase in inflation of 250%), by the increase of bureaucratic powers and the re-establishment of ranks in the Red Army, which strengthened the body of officials; 2) on the world plane, by the counter-revolutionary agreements with world imperialism, celebrated in Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam. But that victory and the expropriation of capital in East Europe after the World War II generated an enormous development of the productive forces. With a central historical consequence: the unpublicised social strengthening of the Soviet and East Europe proletariat, as part of the world proletariat. In the USSR alone, the working class passed from 23.9 million in 1940 to 79.6 million in 1981; in percentage terms, from 36.1% of the active population in 1941 to 61% in 1982. This immense proletariat, now put in place, is one of the pillars of the world revolution.
Certainly, it is necessary to undo the identification between statisation and socialism, used by imperialism in order to discredit the revolution. It was exactly Stalinism which introduced that identification, in order to justify the blockade of the revolution in a single country or region and also its privileges, based on state property. In accordance with Trotsky, in the already mentioned work: "Private property, in order to be changed socially, has to pass ineluctably through statisation. State property becomes that of the whole people in the measure that the privileges and social distinctions disappear and, consequently, the state loses its reason for being. In other words: state property becomes social in the measure that it stops being the property of the state. Recíprocally, the more the soviet state rises above the people, the more strongly it is opposed, as the guardian of property, to the people, and so much more clearly attests against the social character of state property."
Historical Role of Social Democracy
In the two world wars, Social Democracy played a key role, as much in the preparation of the conflicts as in avoiding a revolutionary outcome to their end. This role of the Second International demonstrates how much imperialism and the bourgeoisie depends on political forces not originating from its breast for its stability and political control (that is to say, its historical anachronism), which is verified until this very day, especially in Europe.
Social Democracy went over definitively to the bourgeois order when it became the accomplice of the first imperialist war. In the post-war period it was the lifeboat of the bourgeois state (a role that it could complete thanks to the support that vast labour sectors granted it, mainly in Western Europe), an apologist of the "Pax Americana" (the 14 points of the president Wilson) and butcherer of revolutionaries (the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, ordered by the German Social Democratic minister Noske). It was just as much an accomplice as Stalinism to the politics of division of the German proletariat that led to the victory of Nazism.
During the second post-war period, it conserved all the qualities already acquired, adding to them another. It was the tip of lance (with the Labour Party) in the creation of the State of Israel against the Palestinian nation and a wedge of imperialism in Middle East. The key piece of the rebuilding of the Second International, in this period, was the German SPD, which experienced a serious crisis after the fall of Hitler and the German defeat, when the SPD resistance movement began a dynamic unity with the communists ("Unite! No more division and fratricidal fighting"!) and other organisations of the extreme left, in which was posed the bases of an anticapitalist united front and of the German revolution as pivot of the European revolution.
In Turingia, bastion of the SPD, it was agreed to create the Workers' Party, unifying communists and socialists. The occupying army of the Great Powers intervened in order to block that perspective. In the East, the SPD consented to its absorption by the Stalinist party, giving rise to the PSU, that would create the political bases of bureaucratic power. In the West, the SPD was reorganised at the base on the interdiction of the PCA and with the participation of the North American services. The SPD was one of the pillars of the German division and of the division of the European proletariat, consecrated later by the "Wall of the Shame," as well as of the division of the European unions, financed by the CIA.
The SPD, and social democracy in general, looked for its own flight through Ostpolitik, the politics of intermediation between the Russian bureaucracy and of East Europe, and imperialism, in the period called the "cold war." It is for this reason that the crash of the Stalinist bureaucracy destroys one of the pillars of support of social democracy, which loses the main governments of Western Europe, and has in East Europe a performance well below what it hoped for, having been conclusively defeated electorally by the right in Germany Eastern. In the East, social democracy is not an agent of democratisation, but of capitalist restoration and of the shielding of the old bureaucracy, to whom social democracy offers a new political apparatus.
The counter-revolutionary collaboration
With the end of World War II and the military occupation of Eastern Europe, the power of the Stalinist bureaucracy arrives to its zenith. It uses the world class struggle in order to complete its counter-revolutionary agreements with imperialism, and at the same time pressure it. But the same imperialistic crisis undermines the bases of the politics of pressure: starting from 1947 (Marshall Plan, 30 thousand million dollars in order to save European capitalism), Stalinist politics begins to enter into bankruptcy. The pressure no longer yielded effects: only revolutionary confrontation would push back imperialism, but the bureaucracy is viscerally hostile to revolution, which would place immediately in question its privileges and its domination. The crisis of Stalinism was evidenced with the Stalin-Tito rupture (1948), and the taking of power by the Chinese CP (1949) against the politics of "national unity" advocated by Stalin.
The process of anti-bureaucratic revolution in the countries directly dominated by Stalinism showed initially with the rebellion of the workers of East Berlin, in 1953, contained with the aid of the Western powers and of the then Mayor of West Berlin, Willy Brandt. The growing collaboration with imperialism was not episodic. and it supplemented the bureaucratic centralisation of the "socialist camp". The creation of COMECON, in 1948, consecrated a politics of looting, by the Russian bureaucracy, of the countries of Eastern Europe, which would create a centrifugal force, to get rid of the bureaucracies imposed by the Kremlin, in Eastern Europe, which would be ever more lured by the world capitalist market.
The combination of these contradictions was felt in the very USSR itself, where the index of economic growth passed from 8.3% in 1959 to 4.5% in 1963. Worse still, "the problem of the relationship between the elements of production and the diverse parts of the economy is the very essence of the socialist economy. The danger is less in slowest growth and more in the absence of correspondence between the diverse parts of the economy" (Trotsky).
In 1959, the sector of producer goods projected a growth of 8.1% and realised 12%; in 1963, the sector of consumer goods projected 6.3% and only realised 5%. The growing stagnation of the economy and the ever greater disproportions between its diverse sectors put the crisis of the bureaucratic administration of the economy in evidence, compromising what remained of central planning.
The bureaucracies of East Europe preceded that of the USSR in the search for an exit from the crisis through entanglement with foreign capital. But the USSR did not stay behind: in 1959, imported equipment were responsible for 16% of the global investment; in 1975, for 27%. Of this equipment , in 1959, 2% came from the West; in 1975, 40% (!). But this, far from solving the problems of the Soviet economy, threw it into growing dependence on, and indebtedness to, the capitalist economies. In 1973, the USSR possessed 6.1% of the Western agricultural products market and 5.2% of manufactured goods. In 1983, those proportions fell to 4.5% and 3,2%, respectively. The capitalist crisis closed the markets, increased the debts (through the growing interest rate) and threw the bureaucratic economies into chaos, which had a spectacular manifestation in the Polish crisis of 1980, which caused the growth of the union Solidarity.
This economic process was the basis of the growing political approach of the bureaucracy to imperialism, which confirms that it is a bourgeois layer inside the workers' state. In 1975, in the Helsinki Agreement, the bureaucracy compromised, with the representatives of imperialism, in maintaining the status-quo in Europe (respect for the borders inherited by War War II) and permitting the "free circulation of merchandise and capital," in what the main newspapers of the city called a "New Holy Alliance" of conservative forces. Globally, the implementation of "regional agreements" led to the delivery of the revolutions in the Middle East and Latin America, determining the isolation of the Cuban Revolution.
But the questioning of the bureaucracy "from below" (the political revolution) also grew, with a constant resistance in the factories and big popular risings: 1956, Hungary and Poland; 1968, Czechoslovakia; 1970, Poland; 1980-81, Poland. In spite of censorship, the USSR could not remain unaware of the process: the workers rebellion of Novocherkass, in 1962, drowned in blood, only became known in 1973. In the USSR, a renovated proletariat only waited for the occasion to enter onto the scene: in 1970, half of the Soviet workers were less than 30 years old; in 1982, 85% of the people received secondary education (44% in 1970), the number of students in schools of middle level, technicians and professionals having increase 12 times in 10 years (a growth totally contradictory to the economic stagnation).
On the basis of state property, the bureaucratic administration did not impede a gigantic development of the productive forces in the USSR and Eastern Europe. But the more those forces are developed, the less capable is the bureaucracy to direct them. The crisis of the economic and political administration of the bureaucracy, the growing pressure of world capitalism in crisis, the resistance (sometimes revolutionary) of the workers: these are the elements that originated perestroika and caused the collapse of the bureaucracies of the USSR and of Eastern Europe.
The Collapse of the Bureaucracy
In 1989, the antibureaucratic political revolution made a qualitative leap. Gigantic mobilisations of the masses demolished the bureaucratic governments in Eastern Europe and shook the centre of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR. The resurgence of democratic, anti-communist elements (including, inside the very bureaucracy itself) was thoroughly publicised by the press of big capital, which nevertheless, kept silent about the powerful tendencies of the proletariat for its independent reorganisation, expressed in general strikes, in the organisation of unions and antibureaucratic and independent centres in Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and in the very USSR itself (for example, with the Strike Committees of Kuzbass).
After 70 years of pretence of the "construction of socialism", of bureaucratic regime, of the crushing of the labour movement, of repression and physical liquidation of the vanguard, of peaceful coexistence with capitalism and of class collaboration on a world scale, the Soviet economy was in deep stagnation. The productivity of labour is several times inferior to that of the capitalist countries; whole sectors of the economy are completely obsolete, the amount and quality of the produced articles does not succeed in satisfying the social demand, and the endless queues multiply. The USSR, in spite of gathering all the natural conditions, is not able to satisfy its necessities of feeding.
When the amount of work and of products should give place to quality, when the productivity of the labour should grow, when new advances would only have been possible through new methods of work, innovations, the bureaucracy showed itself to be an absolute obstacle to the development of the USSR.
The stagnation of the USSR and of the other workers states permitted imperialism to develop a politics of penetration, seeking to break up planning, the monopoly of foreign trade and state property. The foreign debt was an instrument of pressure in favour of politics dictated by the IMF, to which the bureaucracies were adapting. If the bureaucratic regime had impeded an improvement of the level of life of the masses, a minimum of material subsistence had been preserved, that would enlarge with the liquidation of bureaucratic privileges, the soviet operation of the society and workers' control. With Gorbachev, the bureaucracy chose a politics of disintegration of the working class, of reintroduction of unemployment and low wages and of competition between workers; in sum, of capitalist restoration through the retransformation of the workforce into a commodity. Even so, the bureaucratic desegregation continued, under the cross fire of imperialist pressure, of labour resistance and that of the oppressed nationalities, until it caused the collapse of the bureaucratic apparatus in August of 1991. In the face of the lack of any independent alternative, Yeltsin continued the procapitalist politics in an undisguised and open manner and with the support of the whole of the bureaucracy, by means of the conscious provocation of economic chaos, the expropriation of all the social conquests and savage attacks on the nationalities.
Starting from those historical and political premises, the Partido Obrero concluded that "the USSR has stopped being a workers state. State property only serves individual monopolisation, in relation to the restorationist bureaucrats. We are confronted by a workers' state in complete break-up, a state which is not working class. Without planning or a monopoly of foreign trade, without a currency, the workers' state is an abstraction, including that it is also simply the state. Naturally the destination of this gigantic process depends enormously upon the reaction of the international working class in the face of the capitalist crisis that is growing like a snowball" (Jorge Altamira, Where is the Former-USSR Going?). With diverse degrees and rhythms, this is also the social process in the rest of the ex-"socialist bloc". The economic mire in which the bureaucracy finds itself, and the political difficulties which it is experiencing, do not deny its basic social tendency: "Capitalist restoration does not mean, as the vulgar Trotskyists pretend, that it is necessary that each and every one of the big state companies should be consumed by privatisation. It would be enough that the economy--even an economy exhibiting a high percentage of statisation--is integrated into the circulation of world capital through external trade, the public debt and the progressive formation of a market. To these point the measures that have abolished the monopoly of the external trade and of finance, state planning, the liberation of the prices and the formation of mixed companies with foreign capital. Capitalist restoration fatally exhibits the pillaging, and an unprecedented destruction, of the statised productive forces. The transition of " socialism" to capitalism means an enormous social regression and its development is impossible without a victory of the counter-revolution on the political plane" (Luis Oviedo, The Character of the State in the Former-USSR).
China, Cuba, Yugoslavia
With specific variants, this framework is also applied to China and Cuba. Sustaining the existence of a workers' state in China due to the permanence of the CP in the power, is to ignore the fact that, exactly, the relative stability of the Chinese bureaucracy permitted the process of capitalist restoration to go farther in that country than in any another of the ex-"socialist bloc". This stability, in turn, is explained by the relative bureaucratic success in crushing the proletariat, starting from the massacres of 1989.
The impasse experienced by the Cuban revolution is only linked partly to the end of the USSR. The revolutionary victory a few miles from the imperialist giant was a blow to the politics of "peaceful coexistence" of Stalinism and opened the cycle of the socialist revolution in Latin America. After the politics of extension of the revolution via foquism fails, Castroism adapted to Stalinism (it supported the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the threats of invasion of Poland in 1981), passing to a democratist politics of seeking an agreement with the bourgeoisies of the continent: support to the governments of Velazco Alvarado, Perón and Allende, that that ended in political defeats, in the decade of the 70s.
Castro crowned this evolution formulating his own version of peaceful coexistence: the New International Order, different from the socialist revolution, affirming that Latin America is not mature for it and that the same social revolution solves nothing. This politics had a decisive influence on the setback of the Sandinista revolution which did not take the road of Castroism in 1959-61 (expropriation of the bourgeoisie) ending by returning the power to the "contras", on the pretext of` "democracy".
Besides these external politics, the reinforcement of the internal bureaucratism configures for the Cuban revolution, which guaranteed to the exploited social conquests not publicised in Latin America, a road of defeat, under the joint pressure of imperialism and of the bureaucracy, which is expressed in the progressive emptying of these conquests.
The demand for "pluralism", made by the democratist left, is located inside the Castro proposal ( "opening") and capitulates in the face of imperialist pressure, because it does not question the absence in Cuba of a power emanating from the organisations of the workers, demanding their democratic organisation and the right of expression in them for all the revolutionary tendencies. This poses the problem of the political revolution in Cuba and the necessity of an independent revolutionary politics for the Latin American revolution: only workers' and peasants power under the strategy of the socialist unity of Latin America, will guarantee the efficacy of the fight against the recolonisation of Cuba and of the continuity of the revolutionary cycle.
Evidence of the debacle of Morenoism is that it expounds the overthrow of Castro as a precondition in order to expound the defence of Cuba against the imperialistic blockade. As expounded the Partido Obrero, in its VI Congress: "in Cuba, the masses hit by the crisis encounter a block to independent action because they see in Castro, if not the resistance against imperialism, at least a limit to the exiles (gusanos) from Miami and to the civil war that would be unleashed by their return to the island. Expounding in the abstract the overthrow of Castro leads to tying more and more the masses to the Castro regime and favours the politics of imperialism. It is necessary to propose to the Cuban masses to organise independent unions that are instruments to defend itself against social differentiation, workers' control against the privileges of the bureaucracy, political freedom for all tendencies which defend the revolution, the dismantling of the bureaucratic regime. On the basis of the experience of the struggle for these demands, slogans of direct struggle for power could be posed. The blockade is the instrument of imperialism in order to impose a restorationist politics, justified as a tool in order to break the blockade. Thanks to it, capital imposes its conditions. The key is to outline a politics of opposition to restoration in order to unmask the ruling bureaucracy."
In relation to the civil war in ex-Yugoslavia, "Trotskyist" politics oscillated between support to the diverse bureaucratic factions in conflict (Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian), abandoning slogans tending towards the independent intervention of the masses (including the arming of the workers) and also, on the pretext of the "national question," the historical battle of Bolshevism for the Socialist Federation of the Balkans, leaving, in the name of the "democratisation of the army" and of the "defence of Bosnia," the whole destiny of the ex-Federation in the hands of the armed bands of the bureaucracy or of the imperialist armies (including the "blue helmets" of the UN).
Stability and Capitalist Decomposition
The old expression of the ideological capitulation of the combined left, (Stalinist, social democratic and "Trotskyist") is verified in its exaltation of the post-war capitalist development as a period of new expansion of the productive forces, its capitulation in front of the myth of the "glorious thirty years," created retrospectively by the ideologues of imperialism.
The bourgeoisie succeeded in containing the revolutionary wave in Europe in the post-war period thanks to the collaboration of Stalinism, which was in charge directly of a good part of the work, and to the help, always present, of social democracy. The bourgeois states were reconstructed in the West and the bureaucracy extended transitorily its power to the East, in order to stabilise the new form of imperialist balance, with the USA as centre and axis of dominance. The later revolutionary eruptions were contained in conditions of sharp political crisis.
In the three post-war decades, capitalism found a framework of development, a new formula for accumulation of capital, that makes worse the whole of its contradictions, although under a form different from the explosions of 1914 and 1939. This is not a plus in favour of imperialism: the wars of Korea, of Vietnam, of the Persian Gulf, and the multitude of localised interventions, should prove that war and destruction constitute a historical necessity for this regime, its form of domination. The absence of a world bellicose interimperialist conflict is one of the forms of the balance established starting from 1945, and of the role of the USA in it, although the murderous bombings continue being a daily reality for hundred of millions. The scientific-technological concentration in the arms industry is a political and economic necessity.
The reorganisation of the world economy under the hegemony of the USA was possible because the economy of that country could concentrate the benefits of the imperialist superexploitation and establish a relative solidity in its international relationships. In the other imperialistic countries, the process was more unstable and even chaotic, although of the same nature: the militarist economy plays a central role in that sense. The several decades of capitalist prosperity do not contradict the Marxist analysis nor the forecasts of revolutionaries. What were the forms of that prosperity? Are we facing a progressive historical development?
In spite of being prolonged in time, the prosperity was very unstable and permanently subjected to crises. Also, from the beginning of the decade of the 70s, the conditions are more and more critical, temporary and restrictive. The new technologies are not a synonym of stability and progressive expansion, and they gave rise to a type of development that unveils the increasingly reactionary character of capitalism. The whole previous stability was based, not in the free development of the capitalist productive forces, but in the direct intervention of the state in the economy: in the capitalist countries, the government spent between 30 and 45% of the GNP (9).
The Validity of the Class Struggle and the Anti-imperialist Struggle
The whole literature on the "democratisation" of the imperialist countries collapses if their social, political and economic reality is studied. The bourgeoisie was obliged to a series of concessions to the labour movement in the years immediately following 1945, as the price for its political stability. The most notable thing is that the later decades of prosperity were accompanied by a structural necessity of the bourgeois state to liquidate those concessions. The only barrier against it was the resistance of the proletariat. More than ever, the "spontaneous" development of capitalism means social setback, and this when the material conditions of production permit a qualitatively different step for the satisfaction of human necessities.
The political system is openly dominated by bureaucratisation and by militarism. The state is indeed the executive committee of the bourgeois class, with the labour bureaucrats acting like mere extras. Here we observed that the capitalist development is identified with necessarily oppressive social and political relationships, which it could only accentuate; only the struggle of the masses could extract some conquests, permanently put in question by capitalist reproduction. Capitalism does not know any form of` humanisation, and the critics of Marxism confuse the growth of production and the temporary improvement of the conditions of life of some sectors of the working class of the imperialist countries, with an inversion of the laws of motion of the accumulation of capital.
As in the time of Marx, the only force of resistance to the immediately destructive effects of those laws is the political and social force of the working class. The difference is clear: in the upward period of capitalism those effects (for example, the arduous working day) were a cost of the progressive character of capitalist accumulation, and the proletariat could limit them for a whole historical period. Currently, in qualitatively much more favourable and abstract technological conditions, the results of purely trade union struggle, that is to say, for the value of the workforce, are more restricted and the brutality of the conditions of work are exclusively of the reactionary character of the capitalist development.
Without a doubt, the most notable aspect of what happens in the new phase, is the growing restriction of the relative benefits of accumulation. In this aspect, capitalism made qualitatively worse the forms of its transformation into an imperialist system. On a world scale, the backward countries and semicolonies collapse literally into penury and hunger, without any perspective. For most of humanity, the capitalist prosperity of those decades meant a qualitative and irreversible worsening of their social , material and moral conditions of life.
Metropolitan capitalist development is also characterised by a growing social setback. The high levels of unemployment constitute a permanent fact of the cycle, which are not absorbed in the period of boom, and which are increased in the recessions. Still more, an ever greater part of the population is marginalised from the circuit of prosperity, and the evident example is the dozens of millions of poor in the USA. These fractions of the exploited masses will never enter into normal salary relationships; in the best of cases, they will have precarious employment, without qualifications or stability. This becomes characteristic of the relationships of work. Capital no longer transforms itself into salaried workers not even the masses of the imperialistic metropolises. Urban degradation translates this and gives to it its significance as the manifestation of a system that could only display its reactionary tendencies.
The dominant role of financial capital is characteristic of the imperialist phase of the capitalism. What characterise these decades is the extreme exacerbation of parasitism. Material production of surplus value appears subordinate to the necessities of the more speculative fractions of capital, which regulates the equalisation of the rates of gain in their benefit. Thus, a superexpansion of credit and of indebtedness is produced, with the explosion of the fictitious benefits implicated in this. It is possible to affirm that the current expansion of speculative capital is produced on the basis of the same speculative capital; the mountains of debts permit the structuring of new instruments of appropriation of the benefits. The state deficit feeds this engagement permanently.
With each more and more abrupt step from prosperity to crisis on the world stage, we see the evidence of a process that embraces the group of countries and social forces which contributed to build the relationships following World War II. The forms of eruption of the crisis could not be foreseen. The fall of the Stalinist bureaucracy is a manifestation of the progress of that movement, as well as the lack of stability in the bourgeois regimes of the backward countries. The bourgeoisie will continue having time and the initiative while there is not a beginning of a solution, on an international scale, to the crisis of leadership of the proletariat, condemning humanity to historical setback.
The Gulf War in 1990 was not an isolated episode, but the manifestation of all the aggressive, destructive and parasitic tendencies characteristic of imperialism. More than a thousand million daily dollars were spent in order to reduce an oppressed nation to trash. But it is not a matter of a manifestation of a political offensive of imperialism. On the contrary, the political and military control of the Persian Gulf (and of the whole Middle East) is a vital necessity for the USA, due to the crisis that its is traversing: among other things, it is a vital arm in the struggle against European and Japanese imperialism. That control was to check the successive risings of masses in the region (civil war in the Lebanon, fall of the Shah of Iran, the Palestinian Intifada. The fabrication of the crisis of the Gulf, using the old peon of the big powers against the Iranian revolution (Saddam Hussein), was aimed to create the pretext for a direct military intervention, and reflected the crisis of the system of imperialist control in the region, truly an expression of its crisis as a whole, globally.
World crisis
The world crisis configures a historical category related to the moment in which the decomposition of the whole of capitalism acquires the form of a political crisis and a revolutionary crisis, integrating the bureaucratised workers states, already linked to the world capitalist economic circulation, and to the bureaucracy as an organ of the world bourgeoisie inside those states. The development of the world crisis is the development of the combined crisis of imperialism and the bureaucracy. The Stalinist bureaucracy is, considered globally, as an agency of the bourgeoisie in the interior of the workers' states. Its pretence of exploiting the conquests of the revolution in its profit is linked to the whole of the world economy and politics. In that framework, it is a specimen of the counter-revolution. Trotsky pointed out that "the political prognosis (he referred to the workers' states) has an alternative character: either the bureaucracy, being more and more the agent of the bourgeoisie in the workers' state, demolishes the new forms of property and pushes the country towards capitalism, or the working class crushes the bureaucracy and opens a road towards socialism" (The Revolution Betrayed).
For the apologists of capitalism, including the bureaucracy, there should be nothing less than a victory of capitalism over socialism. This hypothesis was foreseen by Marxists as a consequence of the superiority of the world capitalist regime over isolated nations where the revolution triumphed, superiority not because they are capitalists (what would the superiority of the anarchy of production signify over planning?) but because capitalism, a world system, still represents the more advanced historical entity of society, while the revolution triumphed in the backward countries from the economic and cultural point of view. Marxism was the one that first to foresee that not only was it probable but also, ultimately, inevitable, that if the revolution did not triumph in most of the big capitalist countries, the capitalist pressure would reverse the victories and revolutionary conquests, restoring capitalism.
A very diffused opinion pretends that it is a matter of a capitalist victory as a consequence of the fact that capitalism, in contrast to the planned economy, was able to revolutionise the productive forces, elevating the productivity of labour constantly, a "scientific-technical" revolution that facilitated the victory of competition against "socialism." The truth, on the contrary, is that "in its process of disintegration, capitalism placed the immense majority of the capitalist economy in a state of obsolescence; the process of world valorisation of capital could not continue without destroying the whole of surplus capital which it created and which did not find a place in the market. Over a long period, capitalism tried to hide this overproduction through arms production, without perceiving that if there is any branch which creates a surplus of capital, it is arms production, where the component of fixed capital, technology and primary materials is much more intense, in relation to the workforce, than in any another industry. The deindustrialisation not only characterises the backward nations and the "socialist" countries, but also entire regions and branches of the developed countries. The devaluation of banking and financial capitals or of industries like the steel plant, automobiles or whole sectors of the electronics and chemicals, surpass in scale all the "capital" of the workers states, and this abyss is now much greater as a consequence of the gigantic dismantling of state property carried out in the last years by the bureaucracy. The politics of capitalist restoration of the bureaucracy, of abolition of the monopoly of foreign trade, of freedom of exchange, the liquidating of the limitations and restrictions to the action of the world market inside their own countries, put automatically in obsolescence the industry of the workers' states. The only thing that could be expected in those conditions is a gigantic process of destruction of productive forces and, therefore, an immense social catastrophe. That was what happened with Eastern Germany: the politics of the Western bourgeoisie was to eliminate a competitor, not to rearrange the eastern industry. If it had rearranged it, it would have placed several more producers in a world market over-saturated with products and capitals. From the point of view of the world circulation of goods, capitals and productive forces, the crisis of the USSR, China, Poland or Cuba are nothing more than a manifestation of the general crisis of capitalism, which is refracted in the workers states by the absolute exhaustion of the possibilities of the bureaucracy playing a role of intermediary between imperialism and the masses, and that also shows in the collapse of most of the backward nations, which having industrialised themselves at the beginning of the 1950s, today have 90% of their industry outside of circulation, unable to compete in the world market" (10).
Economic crisis
At the base of the world crisis is the economic crisis of capital, a crisis of overproduction which concretises the capitalist tendency toward the anarchy of production, the devaluation of capitals and goods and, ultimately, toward the self-abolition of capital ("the limit of capital is the same capital"). In the capitalist vision, on the other hand, it is a matter of a crisis of the "Keynsian model" of state intervention in the economy (in which the crisis of the former-USSR must be included).
So-called "neoliberalism" does not come to pass from an ideological illusion, since it is based on a new intervention of the state , as much in the economic arena (in the financial markets, the monetary parities, the national and international flows of capital: the capitalist process is guaranteed with extra-economic means, demanding a daily, external, political intervention) as in the political-repressive function: to guarantee the destruction of social conquests (including the public services) and crush the reaction of the labour movement. The whole blah-blah-blah about the "minimum State" seeks to hide the ineluctable tendency, characteristic of senile imperialism, toward the strong and totalitarian state.
On the left (including some "Trotskyists"), tributary visions of the anterior prevail, which constitute the deepest evidence that the left is more and more the appendix of capital. In the writings of "regularism", the crisis is characterised as a "process of productive restructuring" (what the bourgeois economists call "creative destruction") or as the exhaustion of a "model of accumulation": the current crisis would mark the exit of a "model of Fordist administration " toward another based on robotisation and on microelectronics. In this technologist vision, we would be faced by a "crisis of Fordism" and not faced by a crisis of capital. The crisis of the "mode of regulation" is a screen for the crisis in the mode of production.
Related to this analysis--in fact, serving it fundamentally, is the thesis (defended especially by Mandel) that the crisis would evidence the end of a "long wave" of capitalist development ( "Kondratieff cycle") and the entrance into a "long depressive cycle", cycles linked to the lifetime of capital goods, and therefore to their renovation. Independently of its theoretical value, this thesis contradicts the whole of empirical evidence. In the last edition of the official Survey of Current Business, it is verified that the rates of investment in fixed capital of companies grew from an average of 9% in the five years prior to 1974, to one of 11% in the following five years (that is to say, in the crisis). This did not impede a fall of the growth of the GNP of 5-6% annually before, to 2-3% after. That is to say, it did not impede the fall of the productivity of labour or, crucially, the rate of profit, with its sequel of financial and monetary runs and a permanent perspective of` markets crashes.
All these technologist visions are tributaries, ultimately, of the "fetishism of capital," which forget that capitalism, "a contradiction in process" (Marx), is a contradictory unity of a process of production and of valorisation, and that its crisis does not evidence its tendency toward self-renewal, but toward self-destruction: "for time enough, world capitalism registers a series of explosions in all the branches of industry and of trade. The banks have observed the fall from their pedestal of Credit Lyonnais and Baring Brothers, among others; the German and French military industries are in bankruptcy, with announcements of closures and mergers; the European naval industry is in the hands of creditors, clamouring for a commercial war against Japan; ATT had to discharge 40 thousand people; the German automobile industry announced a plan to eliminate 100 thousand jobs. The whole of the Japanese financial system is in intensive care under the control of the main central banks. The list is considerably longer; financial and capitalist speculation in particular takes place in a framework of systematic explosions of the capitalist regime. The last aspect of the financial crisis that is visualised is the setback of enterprise profits, even in the areas of high technology, which is due in all cases to an excess of capacity of production in relation to demand, which forces a reduction in prices. This means that after 20 years of` international restructuring , massive losses, superexploitation and economic concentration, capitalism has not been able to overcome the tendency of the falling rate of long term profits" (11).
Actuality of the Revolution
The historical validity of the proletarian revolution refers to the validity of its objective and subjective premises ( the crisis of society and existence of a revolutionary class). It does not serve to respond to the defenders of the "end of the socialism" by saying that capitalism is also in crisis: what they question is the very existence of an alternative social perspective , that is to say, the capacity of a social class to put it into practice.
Trotskyist thinking is the only one which is opposed consistently to this argument: the bureaucracy, a bourgeois agent in the workers' organisations (including states), has, for that reason, its bases of social control undermined by the capitalist crisis. The resulting collapse brings face to face the alternatives of antibureaucratic revolution and of capitalist counter-revolution, only possible by violent means (Yugoslavia, Chechnia, Tienanmen.). To talk of the "crisis of Marxism," when only Marxist thinking was capable of such a precise, historical prognosis is to give proof of complete ignorance.
The conclusion drawn by Trotsky continues to be effective: the socialist revolution continues to be effective in the consciousness of the masses (expressed also in the antibureaucratic rebellions of the past and of the present) and in the world capitalist crisis. The validity of revolutionary premises could only be measured in the world environment, beginning by not identifying a supposed "decadence of the working class" with the decadence of the left that spoke in its name.
The same conditions of financial speculation and external indebtedness which constitutes the main manifestation of the world capitalist crisis, were the basis of the collapse of "socialism" (the debts per capita from Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia were/are equal to those of the Latin American countries). The fall of the bureaucracies destroys one of the pillars of the old world order, established in the agreements between the bureaucracy and imperialism. The diplomatic and even military confrontations of the so-called "cold" war did not put those agreements in question: they were, on the contrary, limited by those in control in order not to question them.
The Russian bureaucracy is a part (now unveiled) of the capitalist world order: in that framework in the last years, a process of economic integration was mounted that tends to reverse the rejection of the Marshall Plan and the entrance of the IMF and the World Bank on the part of Stalin at the end of the World War II. The fall of the bureaucracies, by the direct action of the masses or reflecting the resistance of these indirectly, is for that reason an event of revolutionary characteristics, independently of its immediate unfolding.
The mobilisations of the workers of the East spread to reinvigorate the Western proletariat: in Germany, the unpublicised strikes of metalworkers and public sector workers not only point out the difficulties of the capitalist unification, but rather point toward the reunification of the most powerful proletariat of Europe. The objective perspective opened is the re-posing, on a much wider basis than in the past (capitalism created, from the end of World War II, a thousand million jobs), of proletarian internationalism, cleansed of the reactionary barriers which divided artificially the workers, symbolised by the Berlin Wall.
The economic crisis evidences the structural limitations of capitalism in its current historical stage. As a historically progressive regime, capitalism arrived a while ago to its limits, with World War I, the crisis of 1930 and World War II. By means of the political resources of the state, of an enormous economic centralisation, it found the means in the past to solve the crisis in cyclical terms. Those means unmasked a regime that has survived as such: it was not the productive forces of capital which, unwrapping themselves freely, overcame the obstacles, but the intervention of an external force, of the political power of the state, of wars. Capitalism thoroughly used the possibilities of arms production, of parasitic development, of fictitious capitals, of artificial development of the backward nations in order to create markets for its capitals and goods, in a systematic way, draining their resources in that process.
The crisis is structural: it is possible to have production booms and slumps, but not a new historical expansion of the productive forces. The economic expansion of Reagan was the first in which, in the metropolises, there was not an absorption of the jobless but an increase in unemployment. The precariousness of the transitory solutions puts into relief the weakness of the stabilisation plans, as the recent Mexican crisis demonstrates, reflected in all Latin America, and also the world. The perspective of a collapse of international finance starting from a country which weighs so small in the international economic arena not only evidences the enormous connection between all the economic and financial systems. The fact that the crisis of a small link threatens the whole chain is only possible in conditions of extreme crisis of the whole chain. A cold, in a healthy individual, does not cause big problems. In a terminally or chronically sick person, it could cause death.
The "stabilisation" did not solve any of the existing problems: unemployment and foreign debt are higher than ever, in spite of the privatizations and refinancings of the type of the Brady Plan. There is again a situation of cessation of payments. Capitalism could not survive without producing a more and more intense and deep crisis.
"Flexibility" "total quality", "arbitration," do not sum up the "substitution of a technological paradigm for another", configuring a new historical development of the productive forces. That computer science advances by means of "flexibility" and precariousness, reveals that it is a matter of a resource to increase superexploitation. Upon intensifying (in extension and depth) the working day, and favouring, on a wider scale still, the reintroduction of antediluvian and backward forms of exploitation of work reveals that it is a matter of a means by which capital can adapt to its own crisis, multiplying the resources in order to obtain superprofits
Against this process, the labour mobilisations grow throughout the world; especially in the imperialist countries (for labour stability and the reduction of the working day), and throughout the world against the destruction of social conquests, with the notable example of the big mobilisations in defence of the social security and pensions (France!).
The resistance to the discharge of the crisis on to the backs of the workers is the ultimate foundation of the recurrent crises of the political regimes, mainly in the imperialist countries: decomposition of the Italian and Japanese regimes, defeat of Bush in the USA (after the "victory" of the Gulf!), which pointed out the end of the "conservative revolution," and now of Clinton; the general exhaustion of all the governments. The maturation of the objective and subjective conditions enter into ever greater contradiction with the absence of the revolutionary party.
Validity of Trotskyism
After the death of Trotsky, the Trotskyist program received, in its strategic lines, its total confirmation: 1) In the backward countries, the revolution was only victorious in those in which the passing of the democratic revolution toward the socialist was operated, that is to say, toward the expropriation of capital (China, Cuba); 2) against theories of all credos and colours, the workers' revolution also proved its objective validity in the imperialist metropolises (from the immediate post-war period until the Portuguese revolution, passing through the French May), that is, its global validity; 3) the Popular Fronts proved themselves to be a politics of defeat, of abortion of the revolution until the Fascist victory: all Western Europe in the post-war period, Portugal, Chile 1970-73, Nicaragua in the decade of the 80s, Indonesia in the decade of the 60s, etc.; 4) in the absence of an international revolutionary leadership, at the head of , or inserted into, the main sectors of the proletariat and the exploited of the whole world, the revolutionary processes miscarried or, when victorious in the national plane, did not initiate the world revolution or its continental extension, which led to an impasse or degeneration; 5) the bureaucratisation of the workers' states led those societies to a complete impasse. The search for reforms that gave a way out, without touching the bases of bureaucratic control, opened the way toward situations that leave the alternatives of the revolution and counter-revolution face to face.
That the posthumous victory of Trotsky is, for the time being, merely theoretical, not political, does not justify the currents of the left which talk about the failure of Trotskyism, when they are not able to at least boast of theoretical victories (on the contrary, they could only count spectacular failures on that plane). They are the same currents that greeted the fall of the "wall of the shame" during the day and cried the "death of the socialism" in the night, which shows their complete anachronism. Only the Trotskyist program integrates the antibureaucratic fight in the perspective of world proletarian and anticapitalist revolution: it is at the moment the only program that defends explicitly the historical perspective of socialism, that constitutes, yes, its victory and historical justification.
The actuality of Trotsky consists in the verification that the basic lines of contemporary development confirm the main points of the Trotskyist program . Starting from that recognition it is possible to determine the strategic lines of an international revolutionary current, which are those of the program of the Fourth International. In the last 60 years, the historical premises of proletarian internationalism were developed as never before: the inability of capitalism to overcome the antagonism between the international development of the productive forces and national states, the inability of the bureaucracy to build "socialism in a single country," the inability of bourgeois nationalism and the petit bourgeoisie to lead achieve national autonomy.
Only the proletarian revolution could give a progressive exit to the world crisis, in conditions in which, of all the political tendencies which were born as a consequence of the crisis of leadership of the working class, only the Fourth International maintained its validity as a political program, which became the ideological thread of the recomposition of the international workers' movement.
The Fourth International.
The most vulgar explanation concerning the crisis of the Fourth International (or rather of the fact that it was not transformed after the Second World War, as Trotsky supposed, into the organisation and banner of million of workers) was the summary made by Morenoism: the murder of Trotsky, and various of its leading participants during the Second World War, had left the Fourth International weakened, led by young and/or inexperienced people who were unable to transform it into an organisation of the masses. Besides being subjective, by situating in its centre a "generational" problem, this explanation avoids all the political and programmatic problems encountered by the International.
Through such shallowness, it deprecates the organisations and militants that fought during the Second World War on a principled line (12); who established the European Secretariat of the Fourth International, in 1942, under the very noses of the Nazi-fascist army; who were the only ones to struggle to transform the imperialist war into a civil war, defending "revolutionary militarism", and who developed a clandestine activity conducive to the revolutionary fraternisation of the soldiers of the Nazi army and the occupied peoples.
The historians today remain stupefied when faced by the vitality of the clandestine Trotskyist press in Nazi-fascist Europe, and faced by the declaration, widely distributed in 1944, before the Allied troops disembarked, which was directed to the "workers of Europe, and to the German and Allied soldiers":
"With extreme violence, the forces of the American and British imperialists who wilfully remained a long time in inaction, in order to weaken simultaneously Germany and the USSR, are returning to a Europe incapable through exhaustion of resisting their domination, and are throwing themselves now into an assault in order to gain a victory. After nourishing the Nazi war machine against the USSR...smilingly assisting the crushing of Europe under the boot of Hitler.....destroying with massive bombardments the most populated cities, the Yankee and British financiers, the great bankers and industrialists, believe that now the opportune moment has arrived to consolidate their gains. The victory of the 'Allies' is the subjection of Europe: it is a monstrous lie to say that those who oppress in their colonies more than 500 million people...are able now to bring liberty to the people of Europe. Those that fight their own strikers with the police, the army and the prisons, are able to guarantee to the European proletaiat democratic liberties...in place of Hitler, Laval, Quisling, of their Gestapo and SS, , of their police and of their malitia, they send you Eisenhower and his generals who are proposing, to assume, indefinitely, the government of the 'liberated' countries. Only your action is able to make them retreat!" (13)
The same Trotsky also, in his last public document, emphasised the revolutionary role of the Fourth International during the war:
"The immense majority of our comrades in the different countries have passed the first test of the war. This fact is of inestimable significance for the future of the Fourth International. All members of our organisation not only have the entitlement, but are obliged to consider themselves as an officer in the revolutionary army that will be created in the fire of events...a single revolutionary in a factory, in a mine, in a trade union, in a regiment, on a warship is worth infinitely more than hundreds of petit-bourgeois pseudo-revolutionaries stewing in their own juice." (14)
In her organisational report to the European Conference of the Fourth International (1946), the representative of the International Executive Committee (Sherry Mangan) registered the survival of almost all national sections in the difficult conditions of the war and their growth in the year immediately afterwards.
The Political Crisis.
In terms of an orientation and of revolutionary action, the Trotskyists, nevertheless, faced serious problems which they did not manage to resolve, either at the level of each country or at the level of a world political orientation. For Trotsky the Fourth International was better armed than Bolshevism, possessed a more solid programme, which neither the repression nor the war could prevent from becoming transformed into the axis that would help the Fourth international convert itself into a great revolutionary party, that would exploit the war for the victory of the revolution:
"It was not this that succeeded, but the confusion and the disputes in the ranks of the Fourth International during the war. Sectors of the Fourth International and its own leadership began to defend slogans of national liberation for imperialist countries, such as France and Italy. without seeing that the fact that these countries were already imperialist did not give a primary role to national agitation in them, even though they were occupied by Nazism. The national question was certainly posed in the colonies and semi-colonies. It was necessary to take account of the mentality of the workers in each country in order to impose a strategic "turn" in the war. Another error was the lack of participation in general in the armed struggle. Maintaining that the world war deepened the class struggle, they said that the armed struggle was not appropriate, as if the class struggle in a period of war might be carried out without arms. The Trotskyists maintained a revolutionary ideal, proletarian internationalism, within the limits of an ideology. They left for future generations an indelible memory for this reason, but came out weakened from the major crisis of world capitalism through not having operated correctly in the face of the political problems, in spite of the fact that Trotsky endeavoured to analyse them carefully, they were not able to complete the task owing to his assassination by Stalinism. The problems were also manifested in the post-war period, which for the Trotskyists did not involve the possibility of a stay of execution for the bourgeois regimes, that is to say, the counterrevolution in a democratic guise. The democratic imperialist governments, they said, would be rapidly transformed into totalitarian dictatorships: there were examples that corroborated it. Yankee imperialism, in order to invade the North Africa made an agreement with the notorious French fascist, General Darlan who became a "democrat". The colonial revolts in the "democratic" empires were drowned in blood: the day of the liberation of Paris from the Nazis--today celebrated throughout the world--the same French assassinated en masse the colonial peoples in Argelia and Madagascar. But one had to take account that the war had not ended as the imperialists wanted it to end. There were revolutions and the Red Army continued, in spite of Stalinism, to defeat the Nazis in an impressive effort- by the Soviet working class and peasantry with guerrilla warfare and heroic defence of cities. There were heavy blows received by imperialism. These were not, then, conditions for the immediate installation of totalitarian regimes. Not perceiving this, the Trotskyists did not exploit, as they ought to have done, the democratic opening created at the end of the war." (15)
In a declaration at the end of 1945, the Fourth International affirmed that "a long and relatively stable intermediate democratic era until the triumph of the socialist revolution or of fascism is revealed as impossible." Even in 1948, Ernest Mandel polemicised against Tony Cliff (a leader of the British section) maintaining that a new period of capitalist economic growth was completely impossible (a sin of which Mandel redeemed himself defending afterwards, during a whole life, the contrary). The international perspective traced in the post-war era was equally simplistic: "A Third World War, in the form of an attack of world imperialism, under American leadership, against the USSR, is inevitable if victorious socialist revolutions are not achieved beforehand." (16) An "opening" (already visible in the agreements of Yalta and Potsdam) was also impossible, for the Fourth International, on the international plane.
Balance Sheet and Empiricism
For Mandel, the reasons for the failure are objective and subjective..
"The international ascent was produced more extensively than after World war 1, if we include Britain among the countries that desired an immediate socialist transformation in 1944-45. But their forces were more confused from the political point of view, and thus more manipulable by the traditional apparatuses. The interaction between these two given factors resulted in a much greater brake on the revolutionary ascent, and its political scope was much less than that signified by the First World War. Trotsky had underestimated what I call the rupture of continuity of the revolutionary socialist tradition." (17)
Besides introducing elements of difficult evaluation, this explanation suffers from the defect of impeding a balance sheet of the politics of the Fourth International, falling into the error denounced by Trotsky in Class, Party and Leadership: to blame the class for the errors of its leadership, real or potential. In its conservative-twin version (Lambertism) the "confusion" was turned into a "law": the obligatory shift (sic) in the direction of the revolutionary ascent by the "traditional organisations"· The United Secretariat of the Fourth International completed the Mandelite subjectivism with an "objectivist" explanation. "The reasons for the minority existence of the Fourth International are of an objective order. They result from the consequences of the World War, of the temporary consolidation of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR, of the low level of activity of the proletariat in the decisive countries, the USSR and the USA" (18) What was "low level of class consciousness" in the revolutionary context was transformed into "low level of activity" in a context of stability.
The problem, however, is not the errors but the incapacity to face up to them and, following on from there, overcoming them. The Second World Congress of the Fourth International, in 1948, liquidated the problem of a balance sheet of 10 years of activity, from the foundation, passing through the Second World War, the revolutionary ascent, and the initiation of the Cold War, and all the rest, in scarcely an hour of report and discussion! This blind empiricism was the culture medium for all types of bureaucratic impositions, as would succeed with the Pabloite programme approved in the Third World Congress (1951). This panorama gives the measure of the fallacy of the Lambertist affirmation, according to which, before this Congress:
"The leadership acted as an authentic political centre and not only as an administrative or organisational framework. In relation to the vital problems of the revolution and counterrevolution, Trotskyist politics were unique in possessing a clearly defined orientation, on an international scale, and inscribed in the struggle, in each country, for the construction of sections of the new International, in which they selected the forces which would compose the Fourth International, and traced-out its contours." (19)
Our current was born exactly from the struggle against this blind empiricism and its inevitable sequel of manifest opportunism:
"During the war, the vanguard of Leninism-Trotskyism is liquidated. Some--Abraham Leon--by Hitlerism. Others--Leon Trotsky--by Stalinism. It is a very hard blow for the international Trotskyist current. In this context, the sectors most removed from the revolutionary struggle that were within Trotskyism were pressing for a course toward the right. The Yankee wing of the Fourth International took a position of "socialist" pacifism faced by the Second World War and, under its responsibility, in the name of the whole International; this position repudiated the correct position of the Fourth International maintained in the Transitional Programme until the death of Leon Trotsky. The terrible weakness of Trotskyism, without militants and without organisation, cancelled out its role in the revolutionary crisis of the war; the most opportunist elements raised their heads and imposed their agenda. Under these conditions, the national Trotskyist sections, left to their own devices, followed an uneven and contradictory role in the evolution of the crisis. These disorientated elements followed narrowly national perspectives and responded, in the main, to centrifugal and opportunist forces on the scale of the international current. For this reason, the failure to undertake a thorough examination of this past was at the heart of the opportunism of the last reunification Congress (1963, that originated the United Secretariat)" (20)
What is surprising in the "Pabloite" turn (the attribution of an objective revolutionary role to the Russian bureaucracy, justified particularly in relation to the imminence of the World War, a role that negated that of the world proletariat, condemning it to tail-ending the bureaucracy) is the ease with which a practice concentrated on narrowly national problems, and an incipient bureaucratisation of the international apparatus, was imposed, at the level of almost the whole of the International. This was the point of view which was defended by those who opposed "Pabloism" from the start:
"The entire International had made the greatest sacrifices from 1944 in order to permit the construction of the current leadership, beginning from the specialisation of certain comrades in the international work. But the latter, whose selection was very artificial, and who were far removed from the activity of the national section which in the same period threw themselves, ever more deeply, into the work of the masses, were exposed to the pressure of forces hostile to our movement. The new leadership had to be reconstructed not by the specialisation of some comrades, but by an ever more active participation of all the sections of the International. Only through an intense political life of the International, and not by some statutory measure (although these might be necessary) would the danger of a new degeneration of the international leadership be avoided. The more the sections sprouted roots in the masses of their own country, the more they · felt the necessity of international participation, for their own particular needs of their mass work. The members of the international leadership must not be suspended in mid-air, without real responsibility on the front line of the movement and the masses. They must not be selected according to artificial criteria (availability, selection in the struggle of tendencies etc.), they must not be "professional migrants", but effective representatives of their sections, and an expression of Trotskyist activity in the masses and not only of Trotskyist ideas" (21)
The organisational disintegration of the united Fourth International was linked, as was correctly affirmed by the International Committee which appeared, in 1953, "the development of revisionism in 'liquidationism". Later, Pabloism was considered as merely an "ideological turn" by those who assumed "antiPabloism", as a pretext for diplomatic manoeuvres that barely hid what in reality did not go beyond a dispute in the apparatus:
"The reconstruction of the Fourth International, was shipwrecked in the past 25 years, after the crisis of 1951-55, because the tendencies that raised the banner of struggle against Pabloism were organised in a political context that possessed, as its axis of reference, the supposed regeneration of revisionism. In order to preserve this axis, and their consequent unification manoeuvres, they organised a federal framework, which questioned the principle element of democratic centralism. Thus it was with the SWP/US and International Committee before 1963, with the OCI (Lambert) and Healy until 1971, and with the ORCFI from its foundation. The common characteristic of negating work based on centralism barely hid the intention of reaching an agreement with revisionism at the first opportunity. It was the determination of the revisionists in rnaintaining themselves as a centralised organisation, in the face of the federalism of their opponents, that guaranteed their survival. The so-called continuity of the Fourth International, that filled Lambert and Co. with such pride, is refuted by the fact that it is impossible to conserve the thread of international revolutionary continuity in a federation of debates." (22)
The current coming directly from Pabloite revisionism has the advantage, over shamefaced revisionism, and the non-confession of others, of taking the revision to its ultimate conclusion, negating the sharp cutting-edge of the Trotskyist programme. According to its principal current leader:
"The crisis of revolutionary leadership is not reduced any more to a crisis of the vanguard and the necessity of replacing the traditional bankrupt leadership by a pure substitute. What is posed is the political, trade union, social reorganisation of the workers movement and its allies on a global scale." (23)
To counterpose this "reorganisation" to the crisis of leadership--that is to say, that Trotsky never proposed to substitute the leadership of organisations that remain as bureaucratic as they are--signifies taking up a position outside of the organisations of the workers movement and of the masses.
For an International Trotskyist Tendency.
The reconstruction of the Fourth International is posed simultaneously by the validity of its programme and by the shift of the international "Trotskyist" currents toward the conception which, in order not to abuse the time or the patience of the reader, is encapsulated in a sentence written by that cultivated epitome of all the common places of the left that is the famous historian Eric J. Hobsbawm:
"1988...signified the end of an era of world history revolving around the October revolution" (24), that is to say, the idea that the epoch of world socialist revolution is closed.
In the current political period, this idea converges with the democratist politics promoted by imperialism which are put forward in a strategically defensive situation, necessitating, for this reason, all the points of political support (the real content of imperialist "democratism"). In the current revisionist discourse, the convergence was promoted by the defence of the dictatorship of the proletariat as an extension, and an amplification, of the democratic liberties existing under the bourgeois regime (25) (or, as the French section affirmed in 1978, "revolutionary politics is the politics of workers' democracy") in order to be transformed afterwards into an abandonment, pure and simple, of this cardinal notion of Marxism, and, finally of the very idea of the revolutionary party.
In its "leftist" variant (the diverse, indigenous fractions of Morenism), the revision passed through the defence of "socialism with democracy" in which the leading role of the party was negated. The October Revolution was presented as the product of the decision of the soviets accepted by Bolshevism, when in truth the insurrection was not executed by the masses, although these were mobilised in the workplaces, where they pronounced themselves in favour, or against, the new revolutionary government. These millions of people approved the coup de etat carried out by Lenin and Bolshevism and were disposed to support and defend it, arms in hand, if it became necessary, as it did in the later bloody civil war. What this current evolution, now, towards a negation of the revolutionary character of October does not signify is that it is not necessary to combat a conception which, because it is opposed superficially to "one party" Stalinism, concludes by profoundly negating the function of the revolutionary party, in the name of a democracy, including soviet democracy.
The soviets, however, do not contain the key to power. They are a structure of dual power, and in this sense, pose the question of power. This could not be regulated in the framework of the soviets by the peaceful development of its democratic form. To believe in this is to adhere to a democratist-pacifist understanding of the proletarian revolution which was proved wrong in diverse historic experiences (China 1927, Germany 1919, Spain 1937 etc.): in these the revolutionary movement had the power in fact, but permitted it to be violently snatched away, because it did not go beyond the duality of power and destroy the apparatus of the bourgeois state. On the subject of revolution, democracy is not a decisive criterion. For this reason Lenin, considering the soviets as a superior form of democracy, saw them from the point of view of the insurrection and defined them as organs of struggle. The soviets prefigured the workers state, not abstractly in terms of democracy, but concretely in terms of the destruction f the apparatus of the bourgeois state.
Party and Revolution.
The question of the revolutionary party is posed, in the face of the emergency of the revolutionary situation, which has an objectivist character, that is to say, independent of the will of parties and classes in conflict. The revolutionary situation is, in the final instance, the product of the irreconcilable contradiction between the forces of production, which are developed on a capitalist basis, and the relations of production, a contradiction which has reached a point of maturity. The revolutionary situation is the result of the incapacity of capitalism historically to arrest the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the basis of the current social regime.
The nationalist political currents, social democrats, fascists or popular frontists, are nothing other than exceptional attempts to overcome the deadly contradictions of capitalism within this framework. They are attempts to avoid a shift to a revolutionary situation, and the revolution, to overcome or arrest the historic tendency towards capitalist collapse with exceptional political measures. In place of declaring the automatic character of the formation of revolutionary situations, it is necessary to highlight the role of the conscious factor and the clear delimitation from the political movements which imperialism utilises as its last means of survival. The question of the revolutionary situation is concentrated on the political quality of the revolutionary programme.
In actuality, it is not only with respect to the countries of imperialism and the semicolonies that the rhythm of revolutionary development is uneven. Also, it is with respect to the development of the struggle in the "ex-socialist countries", their contradictions and antibureaucratic mobilisations. The global unity that constitutes the process of revolution does not result from a spontaneous development, but requires conscious leadership from the globally organised vanguard.
The political tendency of the workers' movement to regroup itself politically on new axes is present in the international situation which puts on the table the question of the party and the International. If this question is evident in the frequent social explosions led by the working class and the youth of diverse countries, it is particularly evident in the two most numerous proletariats of the planet. In the ex-USSR, by the mortal crisis of Stalinism, by the bold forms of struggle adopted in decisive moments permanent strike committees) and by the slow movement of the masses towards the left. In the US, it is evident in the crisis of the trade union organisations, the growth of the workers' struggle, especially the black workers, in the election of a new (bureaucratic) leadership "of the left" in the AFL-CIO, and even in the emergence of a confused, incipient movement that poses the question of a Labor Party. (20)
The struggle of the Workers' Party (Partido Obrero) in Argentina has an international projection. The initiation of regroupment on this plane, with revolutionary groups differentiated in a revolutionary way from Pabloism, opens enormous perspectives if it continues to express programmatically, in a thorough-going way, the world process.
Notes
1) Leon Trotsky. Oeuvres, Paris, ILT, v.2, p.193.
2) Leon Trotsky. Bolshevismo y Stalinismo, (Bolshevism and Stalinism) Buenos Aires, El Anvil, 1974, p. 9.
3) Pierre Broué. Los Trotskystas en el URSS, (The Trotskyists in the USSR) Buenos Aires, Rebellion, [s.d.p]., p. 90.
4) Leon Trotsky. Como Stalin derroto a la oposicion, (How Stalin defeated the opposition) Escritos 1935-36.. Pluma, Bogota 1976, .
5) Ernest Mandel. What is Trotskyism?, Red Books, London, 1975, p. 16.
6) Leon Trotsky. Stalin. El Gran Organizador de Derrotas (Stalin. The Great Organiser of Defeats), Buenos Aires, Ele Yunque, 1974, p. 80.
7) Ibidem, [pp]. 94-95.
8) Andrés Romero. Despues del Stalinismo (After Stalinism), Buenos Aires, Antidoto, 1995, [pp]. 23-25.
9) Michael Kidron. El Capitalismo Occidental de Posguerra (Western Capitalism Since the War), Madrid, Guadarrama, 1971, p. 21.
10) Jorge Altamira. La Crisis Mundial, (World Crisis) En Defensa del Marxismo No 4. Buenos Aires, setiembre 1992.
11) Jorge Altamira. En visperas de otro crac financiero internacional? (On the eve of another international financial crash?) Prensa Obrero 483, Buenos Aires, 29 de febrero1996.
12) Cf. Declaracion de los Comunistas en Buchenvald (Declaration of the Communists in Buchenwald) En Defensa del Marxismo no 8. Buenos Aires. September 1995.
13) Declaracion del CE Europeo de la IV Internacional (Declaration of the European EC of the Fourth International), junio 1944.
14) La Guerra Imperialista la Revolution Mundial Proletaria. (The Imperialist War and the Proletarian World Revolution),. Accion Obrera. Buenos Aires, 1940. p32.
15) Jorge Altamira. A II Guerra Mundial e o Papel da Esquerda. (The Second World War and the Role of the Left) in 0. Coggiola. A Segunda Guerra Mundial. Um Balanco Historico. Sao Paulo. Xama. 1995.
16) Document et Resolutions du II Congres Mondial de la IV Internationale. (Documents and Resolutions of the Second World Congress of the Fourth International). Quatrieme International nos 3-4-5. Paris. March 1948.
17) Ernest Mandel. Actualite de Trotskisme. (The Actuality of Trotskyism) Critique Communiste no 25. Paris, November 1978.
18) La recomposicion del movimiento obrero y la construccion de la IV internacional. (The recomposition of the workers movement and the construction of the Fourth International) XII Congresso Mundial de la IV interncional. 1985
19) OCI. Crisis y reconstruction de la IVa Internacional (Crisis and Reconstruction of the Fourth International) 1976.
20) Jorge Altamira. Vigencia and continuidad historica del leninismo-trotskismo. (The Validity and Historic Continuity of Leninist-Trotskyism) Politica Obrera no 4. Buenos Aires. March 1965. -
21) Documents de 1953 scission dans la IVe Internationale, (Documents of the 1953 Split in the Fourth International) Cahiers du CERMTRI. no 47. Paris. December 1987.
22) TCI. sobre la division del SU v la formacion del Comite Paritario. (On the division of the USFI and the Formation of the Parity Commission). December 1975.
23) Daniel Bensaid. "Entre Histoire et Memoire" ("Between History and Memoire") in: F. Moreau, Combats et Debats de la IVe. Internationale. Horisbriand. Vent d'Ouest. 1993, p31
24) Hobsbawm. Adeus a todo aquilo, (Goodbye to all aquilo) in R. Blackburn Depois de Queda. Rio de Janeiro. Paz e Terra. 1992. p93.
25) SU del IVe Internacional. Democracia Socialista v Dictadura del Proletaria. (Socialist Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat) 1987.
26) See: J. Martin. Nueva direccion en la AFL-CIO. (New Leadership for the AFL-CIO) Prensa Obrera no 437. Buenos Aires, 14 November 1995; and L. Morgan. Vers un Parti Ouvrier aux Etats-Unis? Le Marxisme Ajourd'hui No 8 La Tronche. December 1991.