For the Reconstruction of the Fourth International

by Osvaldo Coggiola

Translated from an article in En Defensa del Marxismo No12 (Argentina)

May 1986

 In 1934, Trotsky posed the conclusions that were derived from the bankruptcy of the Third International, passing in clear terms, through stalinism, to the camp of the bourgeois world order, a fact demonstrated by its capitulation without combat in the face of the advance of the nazism: "The proletariat has need of an International, at all the times and under all the circumstances. If an International does not exist now, it is necessary to say it openly and set out immediately to prepare it" (1).

Worst circumstances

The formal proclamation of the Fourth International took place at the worst "times and circumstances": those of the worst defeats of the world proletariat in all history, crushed by Nazi-fascism in the West, atomized by Stalinism in the country of the first victorious revolution; faced by the sure prospect of a new world bloodbath which became inevitable after the defeats of the Spanish and French proletariat, already on course with the invasion of China by the Japan (and with the imminence of the Hitler-Stalin pact, predicted by Trotsky as the inevitable consequence of the Munich Agreement, of 1938, between the Nazi-fascism and the Western "democracies"). The crisis first, and the bankruptcy later, of the Communist International, the highest expression of the fusion of revolutionary Marxism and the world working

class vanguard known to this day, was a product of the setback of the revolution caused by the betrayal of the social democracy, by the bureaucratization of the first Workers' State that brought this setback, and by the defeat of the revolutionary current headed by Trotsky. The bankruptcy of the Third International begins with

the betrayal of the Chinese revolution of 1927-28, taking shape with the criminal capitulation of the German CP in 1932-34 and consolidated with the alliance between the Soviet bureaucracy and the European labour aristocracy, and of these with the shadow of the bourgeoisie, by means of the Popular Fronts and the crystallization of reformism and "stagism" of the CP, operative in the decade of the 1930s. These politics are responsible for the defeat of the French

proletariat in 1936 and of the Spanish Revolution in 1931-39. From these unfavourable circumstances, Trotsky tried to extract the forces for the new International, forging it not only upon the basis of the revolutionary continuity of the three preceding Internationals , but also of the thorough assimilation of the lessons left by the defeats.This doesn't mean that it was a case of an International of doctrinaires: in the 6 years that passed from the Nazi ascent to the proclamation of the Fourth International, the forces regrouped byTrotsky got involved by putting revolutionary parties on their feet, especially in Spain, France and the USA, theatres of the most important class battles of the decade (the Spanish Civil War, the French Popular Front and the North American movement of industrial unionisation, the CIO). Trotsky makes an effort to convince his comades that this is only possible in the framework of an International: "starting from the moment in which we began to build independent parties, from 1933, we are already the Fourth International, although we are not a recognised revolutionary leadership. This is because it is the movement to which we are committed and on which we begin to organize ourselves.With the result that, alongside those efforts, Trotsky tied to put an international framework on its feet together with "left" centrists organisations like the SAP, the OSP and the RSP from Holland and Germany, the French PSOP (to whose leader, Marceau Pivert, Trotsky affirms that the bolshevik-leninists are a fraction of the International that is being built," one of whose tasks will be " to regenerate to a higher historical level the revolutionary democracy of the proletarian vanguard"); through "entrism" in diverse Socialist Parties, in order to accelerate the revolutionary differentiation of their left wings etc. These efforts to build the Fourth International however, would fail. The political limitations of these organizations are revealed as intractable in the moment of transition to a new International and of rigorously assimilating the revolutionary programme. The same Trotskyist nuclei were revealed immature, on account of their youthfulness and their isolation from the masses. When the Fourth International in 1938 is founded, the international political circumstances are worse than in the preceding attempts: no ally has been conquered and the setback of the world proletariat has been accentuated with the defeats in the Latin countries. One month after the proclamation of the Fourth International the general strike in France fails, demonstrating the working class defeat. The Popular Front heads the political reaction, it expels the Communist Party and in 1940 gives the power to the Fascist Pétain, puppet of Hitler. Never in history was an international working class leadership created in more unfavorable circumstances, although the cases of the past are similar: the First International, founded under the dictatorships of Luis Napoleón in France and of Bismarck in Germany; the Second International, in the wake of the consequences of the defeat of the Paris Commune; or even the Third International with hardly a handful of revolutionaries, at the beginning of a world war and amid a general wave of chauvinism. Trotsky never hid those circumstances. The foundation of the Fourth International in a period of reaction and of crisis in its ranks is due to it being a matter of preparation of the revolutionary vanguard to traverse the world war, armed with a clear programme, that assimilated theoretically the meaning of the most colossal defeats; of the preparation of the working class for the revolutions that will be engendered by the new world conflict, and by the new cycle of wars and revolutions that will be the result of the setback of the world proletariat and of the decomposition of the capitalist states. There was not a magical moment when the Fourth International was founded because it was already founded for years, and because its foundation did not mean the conclusion of the task. In the founding conference, two of the 21 delegates proposed the postponement of its foundation, forgetting that the opportunity already was 5 years delayed. They said that the new International was born separated from the real workers' movement which posed the danger of its degeneration, forgeting that the dangers always exist. The Fourth International will have the eternal historical merit of having proclaimed the validity of the revolution, in moments in which the sceptic declared openly a historical definitive setback.The scepticism was made felt in the ranks of the Fourth International as we saw--it hesitated even in proclaiming itself. In Bolshevism and Stalinism, Trotsky analyzed the causes of those problems: "reactionary Epochs like the current one not only weaken and disintegrate the working class, isolating it from the vanguard, but rather they also reduce the general ideological level of the movement, throwing back political thought, even by stages overcome for a long time. In these conditions the task of the vanguard consists above all in not allowing itself to be influenced by the general ebb tide: it is necessary to swim against the current. In the face of blockheads, such politics appear "sectarian". In fact, it prepares a gigantic jump forward impelled by the upward wave of the new historical period" (2). The effort to build parties with a real intervention in the class struggle corresponded to that approach. We should not forget that the Fourth International, in 1938, had, as its "strongest section", the Soviet section.

Historical Research

Historical research has proven "1) that the Trotskyists between 1928 and 1940, were the only consistent opponents of Stalinism with popular support, 2) they were the opponents which terrified Stalin and his cohorts--even after their extermination. 3) "against them it was necessary to use the most radical methods, the 'final solution' in order to liquidate them" (3). The presence of the Soviet Section of the Fourth International was not limited to the fields of concentration camps (where, in 1938, the Trotskyists organize a mass struggle against bureaucratic repression, before being exterminated) but it was also in the factories, in the collective farms and in the army. For Trotsky, the bolshevik-leninists "did not succeed in rescuing the Soviet regime from degeneration and the difficulties of the personal dictatorship. But they saved it from its complete breakup, and impeded the road to the restoration. For us this is insufficient. But it is already something" (4).

Not by chance, one of the main aims of the Stalinist GPU was the murder of the sponsor of the Soviet work in the leadership of the Fourth International, León Sedov (son of León Trotsky), accomplished in 1938. The Fourth International, was an objective factor in world politics, which justified the agreement between Hitler and the French Ambassador Coulondre, in 1939 (reported by the newspaper Le Temps) that the worst danger of a World War rested in the possibility of the victorious emergence of "Monsieur Trotsky." The murder of Trotsky by Stalinism, in 1940, was not the product of personal vengeance, not even of a "settling of accounts" between "communist" factions, but a political event of first relevance, in which the bureaucracy acted on account of the world bourgeoisie, which already had given it their early approval upon declaring the "Moscow Trials" legal, in which Trotsky is the main accused and convicted to death.

Marxism and Party

The Fourth International was not founded (as some 'Trotskyists' seem to believe) as a doctrinal sect destined to preserve the revolutionary ideological inheritance in circumstances in which its use became impossible. When Trotsky insisted that the Fourth International swam against the current, coming to employ, for the Trotskyists, the expression of "exiles from their own class," he was emphasizing difficulties and objective political tasks, not an historical-metaphysical impossibility of acting. It should not merely be claimed that the efforts of Trotsky and his companions preserved the continuity of the revolutionary programme, but that they put a functioning revolutionary organization on its feet in the arena of the world class struggle and in the main countries. The well-known assertion of Trotsky, "the party is its programme," is only valid with its reverse, "the programme is the party": without a functioning revolutionary party, the revolutionary program is an abstraction. Ernest Mandel decisively delimited Trotskyism upon defining that its four pillars are: "the theory and the practice of the permanent revolution, the revolutionary road to socialism through the action of the working class in the advanced capitalist countries, the political revolution for socialist democracy in the Soviet bloc and in China, and proletarian internationalism" (5). The main pillar, however, is the validity of the revolutionary party, without which all the other pillars become ideology and not a guide for the action. The programme of the Fourth International begins from the contradiction between the objective and subjective conditions (the crisis of leadership of the world proletariat) of the revolution. The maturity of the first is measured by the degree of internationalisation of the productive forces (throughout the century, world trade has grown quicker than production, and in Germany today, for example, the external transactions of capital outweigh by five times the international businesses of merchandisers) and the simultaneous reinforcement of the national borders, a contradiction which become obsolete simultaneously in the capitalist states and in the Stalinist Utopia of "socialism in a single country." The immaturity of the second, by the delay and the defeats of the world revolution in the face of capitalist imperialism and the bureaucracy. In a text of 1931, Trotsky summarized the question consumately: "If the theoretical edifice of Marxist political economy leans entirely on the conception of value as materialized labour, the revolutionary politics of Marxism leans on the conception of the party as vanguard of the proletariat." On the other hand, the question of the party (that is to say, of its programme) could only be posed, today, in international terms: "The hour of the disappearance of the national programme has sounded definitively in August 4 1914. The revolutionary party of the proletariat could only be based on an international programme which corresponds to the character of the present time, that of the great development and decline of capitalism.

International Viewpoint

An international communist programme is not a sum of national programmes or an amalgam of their common characteristics. One should take directly as a starting point the analysis of the conditions and tendencies of the economy and of the political state of the world, as a whole, with its inter-relations and contradictions, that is to say, with the mutual dependency which counterposes its components to each other. In the present times, infinitely more than in the preceding, one must, and can, only deduce the direction in which the proletariat is going from the national point of view, from the direction followed in the international domain, and not the opposite way round. In this consists the fundamental difference which separates, in its point of departure, communist internationalism from the diverse versions of national socialism. To join together in a system of dependencies and contradictions countries and continents which have attained different degrees of evolution, narrowing the diverse levels of their development and widening them immediately after, opposing relentlessly all the countries to each other, the world economy has become a powerful reality that dominates the diverse countries and continents. This single fundamental fact gives a deeply realistic character to the idea of the world communist party." (6). From that it is a matter of verifying the validity of the objective and subjective conditions of the revolution in the current historical stage in order, on this basis, to pose the consequent political task of the fight for the revolutionary International.

Imperialism and historical regression

In no other time of history, has human society presented such violent contrasts, such unbearable contradictions as today. A field of science or of the technique does not exist in which human knowledge and power are not duplicated every 10 years, or less. With astronomy, molecular biology, medicine, archaeology, geology, electronics, computer science, engineering of foods, genetics, etc., man conquers the secrets of nature the better to govern it. Humanity devoured the fruits of the tree of science, converting itself into a power greater than anything the gods, who were terrified by their own powers, imagined. The mechanical and electronic aids that the human genius created are there, ready to liberate it for ever from the necessity of winning bread with the perspiration of the forehead: the substitution of the work by free creative activity. The thousand sources of abundance demand a step in order to satisfy the necessities of 6 thousand million human beings that live on the earth, or of ten times that amount, if it be necessary.

However, 4/5 of humanity, in the backward countries, and including the growing pockets of poverty in the advanced countries, do not have access, during a whole life, to the vital biological minimum of 2 thousand daily calories, and are are condemned to a narrow and short life. Epidemics of hunger still shake the "Third World": in Brazil and Latin America, illnesses controlled for a long time by medicines (cholera, mal de Chagas, [leptospirose]) threaten to cause social catastrophes. In the advanced countries, nevertheless, the governments don't know what to do with the overproduction of foods that threatens to demolish prices, and they subsidize the regression of the productive forces. Forty years ago, the creator of cybernetics demonstrated that with the technical means of the time the assembly line could be substituted, in less than 5 years, in all the great industry of the planet, by an automatic system. Finance capital retarded that progress, which would lead to the bankruptcy the all capital not redeemed.

If now, competition in the world market forces the introduction of automation on a growing scale, this neither results in a reduction of the working day nor in the improvement of the conditions of life of the workers. On the contrary, under capitalism, "the uninterrupted and more and more rapid improvement of machinery, makes the situation of the workers more and more precarious" (Communist Manifesto): capital only knows the lucrative necessities. It does not exist in order to satisfy the necessities of the immense majority, but in order to increase the profits of the tiny minority of big capitalists. Automation is, for that reason, a synonym of disqualification and unemployment: leading the working class to professional decadence and to a lack of culture without perspectives. Right now, the ILO calculates world unemployment to be more than 900 million out of a total workforce not much more than 2 thousand million people: at the same time, never in the history have so many children and adolescents worked (3 million in Brazil, 55 million in tndia alone!).

Under the reign of financial capital, the senile and last stage of the capitalism, all scientific and technical progress is transformed into its opposite. The new energy resources and the intensive use of the old resources do noy bring an improvement in well-being but rather produce ecological catastrophes (oil or of atomic energy). Almost all scientific investigation, especially in the advanced countries, is linked to arms production. In 1985, military expenditure amounted to almost a trillion dollars, much more than the whole income of the poorest half of the world population. This expenditure does not decrease in periods of recession, and its relative reduction after the end of the "cold war" (which was used as an ideological pretext) has been a ridiculous (the Gulf War was seen above all as the search for a new pretext in order to increase those expenses). Only with the production of destructive armaments did the bourgeoisie succeed in preventing the productive forces from breaking out of the strait-jacket of private property in the means of production and exchange, and of national states, which obstruct absolutely the development of those forces.

Far from becoming obsolete the notion of imperialism, as was defined by Lenin, the current time accentuates its characteristics, as summarized by Trotsky: "In order to close the gap between the countries economically and equalise the level of their development, capitalism works with its anarchical methods that undermines its own work continually, opposing a country and a branch of production to another, favoring the development of certain parts of the world economy, braking or paralyzing that of another. Only the combination of these two fundamental tendencies, centripetal and centrifugal, leveling and unleveling, both consequences of the nature of capitalism, explain to us the living interelationships of the historical process. Because of the universality, of the mobility, of the dispersion of financial capital, which penetrates everywhere, imperialism still accentuates those two tendencies. Imperialism unites with much greater speed and profundity into a single whole the diverse national and continental groups: it creates a vital and most intimate dependence between them; it brings closer together their economic methods, their social forms and their levels of evolution. At the same time, it pursues this end by procedures so antagonistic, giving rise to such discontinuities, making such [razzias] in the backward countries regions, that it itself undermines the unification and leveling of the world economy, with violence and convulsions that were unknown in the preceding times " (7).

Marxism, State and Internationalism

The revolutionary and internationalist character of the workers' movement was not an invention of the Marxism. On the contrary: the Marxist doctrine theoretically expressed that character, which preceded it.

Already in the decades of 1830, 1840, the workers led revolutionary struggles against capital, notably the insurrection of the textiles workers of Lyon, in 1844. During one of the first modern strikes, that of the workers of the English city of Manchester, in 1832, the workers of Lyon (France), in their newspaper The Echo of the Factories, made a call for solidarity towards their class brothers of the "enemy country." The historical flag of the proletarian internationalism "Proletarians of the World, Uníte!", (propagated in the Communist Manifesto of 1848) was the expression of a tendency already existing in the international working class, when the nation states were still in formation and capitalism fought in order to conquer the world.

It is a fact that capitalism, and the nation states, were born in the framework of the world economy. Long before the main modern States were structured, international trade already had developed to quite a large extent. That trade was one of the factors which gave an impulse to the English Revolution of the XVII century. Capitalism and the already established nation states were obliged to have a foreign policy and to ally with some against others, in furtherence of their contradictory commercial interests and in relation to the self-determination of the backward nations. It was incorrect for the labour movement to limit itself to the national framework, to the extent that the force of those nation states depended essentially upon the international relationships that were established in the whole world.

The labour movement, therefore, could only triumph in the international arena. From there also it is to be concluded that socialism is only realizable in the international plane. The socialisation of the means of production means the abolition of national borders. The idea that the socialism can be built in a single country is completely alien to Marxism.

In the revolutions of 1848, the proletariat tried to take the leadership of the democratic revolution, transforming it into proletarian revolution. In the measure in which that didn't happen, the same democratic revolution miscarried (monarchies and authoritarian states were restored). But in 1871, the Paris Commune was the theatre of the first seizure of the power by the working class.

That event demonstrated that: 1) The working class could not be limited to the appropriation of the existing bureaucratic state machine: it must destroy it; 2) the new emergent power (the dictatorship of the proletariat), government of struggle against the bourgeois domain, is characterized by the tendency to the breakup of the separation between state and society. That is, to the radical elimination of all the forms of social oppression and politics (disappearance of the state). History gave rise to the proletarian dictatorship as the only possible means to the leadership of socialist society.

The Revolution of October

The victory of the Revolution of October of 1917, first act of the proletarian world revolution, inaugurated the historical era of the socialist revolution. It exploded in a country in which were interwoven characteristics of an imperialistic nation and of an economically and politically backward country. The tasks of the democratic-bourgeois revolution (including agrarian reform), the motor of the revolution, were not fulfilled, but the proletariat already was highly concentrated. But if Russia was the weakest link of the imperialistic chain, its revolution was not an exception. It was largely a response to the bloodbath of the First Imperialistic World War, indicative of the historical anachronism of capitalism. Proletarian revolutions (defeated) also happened in most of the countries from Eastern and Western Europe.

The Russian victory was possible thanks to the existence of a revolutionary leadership of a stature equal to the task (Bolshevism), although that leadership would not have gotten anything without the conscious movement of the workers, taking the form of self organisation in workers councils (soviets).

Lenin was not expressing a personal idea, but the objective dynamic of a movement, upon affirming: "our revolution is the prelude to the world socialist revolution, a step in its direction. The Russian proletariat is not able, by its own forces, to conclude successfully the socialist revolution. But it could give rise to an extension of its revolution able to create better conditions for the socialist revolution, and up to a certain point, begin it. It could create the most favourable situation for the entrance onto the scene, in the decisive battles, of its main and most dependable collaborator, the European and North American socialist proletariat."

The abandonment of the perspective indicated above by Lenin, replaced by the Stalinist thesis of the "construction of the socialism in a single country," was the reflection of the setback of the revolution and of the bureaucratization of the State that emerged from it. Two factors were decisive: 1) The failure of the international revolution, due to the historical betrayal of social democracy and the inexperience of the young revolutionary nuclei; 2) the exhaustion, demoralisation and disintegration of the Russian working class, after years of sacrifices, civil war and foreign interventions.

In 1917, the Russian working class had 3 million members: in 1922, 1 million 240 thousand. Seeking to analyze the bureaucratization of the USSR starting from sentences taken from texts twenty years after the revolution, passing over this painful historical process, is to give proof of absolute idiocy. The bureaucracy arises where the struugle for individual existence occupies a dominant place in the energy of society. Its function is to alleviate the conflicts which this struggle originates, extracting privileges from this function. The bureaucracy possesses as the basis of its authority the absence of consumer goods, and the struggle of all against all that results from that absence. It is contrary to the truth and to the slightest shade of intelligence to affirm that the alienation of the workers and the bureaucracy is a product of the ideological option for the heavy industry, instead of light industry and of consumption: the bureaucratization of the USSR and of the Communist party was already more than complete before the earliest step in the direction of heavy industry was taken.

Bureaucratization and its limits

All workers' states have a double nature: socialist to the extent that they defend the collective property of the means of production, bourgeois to the extent that the distribution is operated in accordance with capitalist norms ( "to each according to their work"). The definitive physiognomy of the state is defined by the changing relationship between those two tendencies, socialist and bourgeois. Stalinism expressed the victory of the second over the first, based on the political expropriation of the workers in favour of a privileged anti-working class and anti-socialist bureaucracy.

Saying that the counter-revolutionary bureaucracy was written in What is to be Done, the Moscow Trials, in the prohibition of the fractions inside the party, etc., ignore the foreign intervention against the young Soviet republic, the alliance of German social democracy with the greater German state, the same capitalist system responsible for the World War, for the backwardness of Russian society and for the victorious barbarism. It is to deny the intervention in history of the conscious will under the elementary form of the organization, to praise renouncement and resignation, condemn struggle and even the partial victories.

The revolution was defeated, but not destroyed. Nazism and fascism made the international proletariat pay dearly for the audacity of having made the Revolution of October, but private property was not restored in the USSR, which proved the depth of the revolutionary wave, including in the hour of the defeat. The anti-working class Stalinist regime and the bureaucratic administration of the economy was the five pesetas price paid by the Soviet proletariat for the bureaucratization, but the maintenance of a good part of the economic and social conquests of the revolution (nationalization of industry and of land, state monopoly of foreign trade, central planning of the economy) had immense consequences. So, Trotsky, enemy and main victim of Stalinism, could write in The Revolution Betrayed: "The immense results obtained by industry, the beginning, full of promise, of a jump in agriculture, the extraordinary growth of the old industrial cities, and the creation of new ones, the rapid increase in the number of workers, the elevation of the cultural level and of the necessities, they are incontestable results of the Revolution of October, in which the prophets of the old world sought to see the tomb of civilisation. Now there is no necessity of discussions with the bourgeois economist gentlemen: socialism demonstrated its right to the victory, not only in the pages of Capital, but in an economic arena that covers a sixth of the surface of the globe, not in the language of dialectics, but in that of iron, cement and electricity. Although the USSR succumbs under the external blows that we hope will not succeed and through the errors of its leaders, it will continue, as proof for the future of the indistructible fact that only the proletarian revolution permitted a backward country to obtain unprecedented results in history in less than 20 years. So it closes the debate with the reformists in the labour movement. Could we compare their mice-like agitation to the titanic work of a people called by the revolution to a new life? If in 1918, German social democracy took advantage of having the power which the workers conferred on it in order to consummate the socialist revolution, and not to save capitalism, it is not difficult to conceive, on the basis of the Russian example, the invincible economic power that the eastern and central European socialist bloc would have today, and also of a considerable part of Asia. The peoples of the world will still have to pay with new wars and revolutions for the historical crimes of reformism."

Notes

1. León Trotsky. Oeuvres, Paris, ILT, v.2, p.193.

2. León Trotsky. Bolshevism and Stalinismo, Buenos Aires, The Anvil, 1974, p. 9.

3. Pierre Broué. The Trotskistas in the USSR, Buenos Aires, Rebellion, [s.d.p]., p. 90.

4. León Trotsky. How Stalin defeated to the opposition, Writings, 1935-36, Bogotá, Feather, 1976, p.3.

5. Ernest Mandel. What is Trotskyism? London, Books Net, 1975, p. 16.

6. León Trotsky. Stalin. The Great Organizer of Defeats, Buenos Aires, The Anvil, 1974, p. 80.

7. idem pp 94-95.