DECLARATION OF PRINCIPLES OF THE
INTERNATIONAL TROTSKYIST OPPOSITION

Adopted by the Second International Conference
of the Faction for the Trotskyist International/
Conference for the International Trotskyist Opposition

17 July 1992

1. The Urgent Necessity and Possibility of the World Socialist Revolution

Only socialism can resolve the problems of humanity. Only socialism can offer a perspective to the working class and the oppressed: in the advanced capitalist countries, where the working class is faced with unemployment, attacks on its social gains, and growing inequalities; in the former Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe, which are emerging from decades of Stalinism to find themselves faced with regimes that seek to restore capitalism; in the countries of the Third World, which are sinking into deeper and deeper poverty and social decay. In today's world, socialism is an urgent necessity: real socialism, which starts from the self-organization of the workers, from workers' democracy, not the Stalinist caricature of "really existing socialism."

We reject all theories that talk about "the end of the class struggle" or even "the end of history." History continues, the class struggle continues; and such events as the Gulf War, the civil war in the former Yugoslavia, and the famines in Africa are there to remind us that the choice is between socialism and barbarism.

The abolition of capitalism, the socialization of the means of production and exchange, and the process of constructing socialism presuppose the destruction of the bourgeois state in each country and also of capitalism's international agencies -- the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the European Community, etc.

This is only possible through the armed insurrection of the proletariat -- the only consistently revolutionary class in capitalist society -- drawing behind it the masses of the urban and rural petty bourgeoisie oppressed under capitalism. Only such an insurrection can enable the proletariat to seize political power and to put an end to the inevitable violent resistance by the ruling class and the forces allied to it against the socialist transformation of society.

Trotskyists must reject as illusory the expectation of reaching socialism by a peaceful, gradual road, as the result of a progressive development of democracy by the action of the proletariat within the framework of the bourgeois state. In the enormous majority of cases, such positions mask the wish not to challenge capitalist relations of production and property. Even where they express a genuine anticapitalist impulse, they retain a utopian character and can only lead to the defeat of the proletariat in the face of the violence of the bourgeois state, which history has always shown -- even recently -- will be manifested in the most brutal forms, when the bourgeoisie feels its domination of society to be challenged.

2. The World Character of the Struggle for Socialist Revolution

The advent of the imperialist epoch marked the domination of the capitalist mode of production on a world scale and its extension to all countries. Even in its phase of decay, imperialism is characterized by the increasing internationalization of production, exchange, finance, and the development of communications. This means that capitalism is more and more a world system. The continual crises -- economic, ecological, political, etc. -- that have marked its period of decline have also a more and more directly international character. This gives full force to the idea that the workers have no country and to the slogan "workers of all countries unite."

The attempts to build socialism in one country or even in a group of countries have proved their utter historical bankruptcy in the most spectacular fashion. Today the world economy can only be organized under the hegemony of one of the two fundamental classes, proletariat or bourgeoisie. As long as the latter continues to rule, humanity will experience increasingly convulsive crises, wars and revolutions, and the very existence of the human species will be at risk. Only the victory of the revolution and the building of socialism on a world scale offers a way forward to humanity.

3. Only the Working Class Can Lead the Struggle for Socialism

Recent history has disproved the claim that the proletariat is no longer the leading force in the struggle for socialism. In the neocolonial world, new mass trade unions and workers' struggles emerged in the 1980s, for example, in Brazil, in Korea, in South Africa. In the imperialist countries, in spite of an acute crisis of leadership, episodic defensive struggles have continued, and the workers' organizations, though weakened, have not been smashed. In the ex-Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, in spite of the lack of class political consciousness among the mass of the working class and the atomization of the class, the restorationists, both internal and external, remain frightened of the potential of mass workers' struggle when the real effects of restoration become seen. Important mass struggles have already occurred in Poland and Romania.

Thus, the revolutionary potential of the proletariat is evident, though this potential is undermined both by the weight of previous defeats and the severity of the economic crisis. The defeats the working class has already suffered are due both to the absence of revolutionary leadership and to the dominance of the working-class movement by counterrevolutionary leaderships. Now that these leaderships are in acute crisis, there remains an absence of genuine revolutionary leadership.

In spite of these difficulties, the working class remains the fundamental class opposed to the capitalist class in modern society. It continues to fight and to organize. Any revolutionary strategy, therefore, must be centered on the proletariat. All strategies based on other classes or class combinations have proved bankrupt. In the epoch of decadent imperialism, it is less than ever possible to talk about "national democratic stages," alliances with the "progressive" bourgeoisie, "advanced democracy" in the imperialist countries, or "democracy" without class content in Eastern Europe.

Trotskyists must reject any revolutionary strategy centered on rural or urban guerrilla war. Such a strategy substitutes for the proletariat another class -- the peasantry, the urban petty bourgeoisie, or the declassed youth -- as the driving force of the revolution and so demonstrates its nonsocialist nature. In the same way, Trotskyists must reject the action of terrorist-guerrilla groups which claim to speak in the name of the proletariat. In reality, even when a majority of their members are workers, such groups represent layers cut off from the working class, and their adventurism is a disruptive element among the ranks of the proletariat.

4. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat

The proletariat will destroy the bourgeois state apparatus and replace the bourgeois state with its own state, the dictatorship of the proletariat, based on the organs of soviet democracy: workers' councils in factories, farms, and neighborhoods, centralized through higher levels of the workers' state. One of the central tasks of the proletarian state will be the struggle against the danger of bureaucratization. The dictatorship of the proletariat will provide for the election and recall of all state officials, whose functions must in no case yield them any special privileges. Indeed, state officials must be subordinated to supervision by the masses, and it is essential to "draw the broad masses into the work of state administration" (Lenin) through the rotation of state officials, among other mechanisms.

The Trotskyists must favor the fullest democracy within the workers' state. The concrete methods of operation of proletarian democracy will be determined by the concrete situation of the workers' state. As Trotsky explained:

It is a dictatorship. At the same time it is the only real proletarian democracy. Its breadth and depth depend on concrete historical conditions. The larger the number of states which enter on the road of the socialist revolution, the more the forms of the dictatorship will be free and flexible and the more workers' democracy will be broad and deep.

Our aim is precisely this broad and deep workers' democracy, to the point where the proletariat will be able to extend democratic rights even to the enemies of the revolution and fight against them by political means. But we refuse to bind ourselves in advance by legalistic formulae and schemas, which cannot take into account the concrete development of the revolutionary process and, in particular, the international context.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is a transitional stage that, together with the progressive development of the forces of production, will lead to the extinction of social classes and to socialism. This objective can only be achieved through the international extension of the proletarian revolution and the creation of a world federation of workers' councils. Once socialism has been achieved, the coercive functions of the proletarian dictatorship will diminish, leading to the withering away of the state.

5. The Necessity of the Revolutionary Party

The struggles and defeats of the proletariat over the past period have proved graphically the falsity of the conception according to which the proletariat does not need its own political party or needs only a loosely organized "movement." What remains of the "movements" of the years after 1968, or even of the "movements" that led the mass struggles against Stalinism in Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania? Nothing but fragments. Where have the trade unions proved an adequate political instrument to confront the bourgeois governments? Nowhere. The fundamental validity has yet again been shown of the need for a political party of the proletarian vanguard, a Leninist party.

This party represents the historical interests of the proletariat as the only consistently revolutionary class, and basing itself on the theoretical and strategic foundations of scientific socialism, leads the revolutionary process of destroying the bourgeois state and building the republic of workers' councils. Such an organization must be firmly based on the principles of Marxism and Leninism for our time, that is to say, Trotskyism.

The task of the Trotskyist parties is to struggle to raise the proletariat above its spontaneous consciousness -- trade-unionist in nature -- to socialist consciousness, the transformation of the "class in itself" into the "class for itself," to combat the bourgeois organizations and the agents of the bourgeoisie within the workers' movement, which today constitute the main leaderships of the workers' movement, as well as all forms of opportunism and adventurism within the mass movement. In these conditions, the maintenance of the political independence of the Trotskyist parties is a basic necessity.

Trotskyism sees democratic centralism as the structural basis of revolutionary political organization. Democratic-centralist principles imply the right to free debate, as well as the duty of discipline in action, with the subordination of the minority to the majority. Democratic centralism includes the right to build both tendencies and factions within the revolutionary organization. Trotskyists must reject practices reflecting the pressure of Stalinism, which invoke "democratic centralism" to block any possibility of effective tendency or factional struggle.

However, the immediate danger in the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFI) is not one of bureaucratic centralism but that posed by the International majority's increasing rejection of Leninism.

The International majority has for some time been progressively abandoning the perspective of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Now, in the face of the fall of the Stalinist regimes and under pressure from the reformist leaderships -- for example, the Lula leadership in the Brazilian Workers Party (PT) -- it is abandoning the concept of the Leninist party as the essential political instrument of the proletariat in the struggle for socialism. This political break with Leninism is reflected organizationally both in the dissolution of sections and, in those sections that remain, in an organizational regime in which the leaders do as they please and the members do as they please.

6. A Party of the Proletariat

The party that must be built is the party of the workers' vanguard. This vanguard consists of all those working-class militants active in fighting for the interests of their class and against the capitalists. The workers' vanguard is primarily concentrated in the trade unions, but also includes worker militants in nonunionized workplaces, militants who organize in the working-class districts, and militants of the various parties and other organizations that claim to stand for the interests of the working class.

The Trotskyists must connect up with and seek to organize, mobilize and recruit the most politically advanced workers -- those workers most ready, both in word and deed, to oppose the capitalists and generalize the lessons of their struggles to an understanding of the exploitative and oppressive nature of the capitalist system as a whole and the necessity of its overthrow. Trotskyist parties must, therefore, seek actively and systematically, not only to intervene in workers' trade-union and other struggles and to fight for leadership of them, but also to win worker-communists to the Trotskyist parties from these struggles and to develop these fresh worker cadres politically. In this way Trotskyists both deepen the roots of Trotskyism in the working class and deepen the proletarianization of the Trotskyist parties.

Since the proletarian vanguard is primarily concentrated in the trade unions, the main arena of work for revolutionaries is the trade unions. In most countries where unions have some degree of independence from the state, they are led by petty-bourgeois bureaucracies -- direct or indirect agents of the bourgeoisie. The central task of Trotskyists is the struggle to remove these bureaucracies from the leadership of the unions and to replace them with a revolutionary leadership which ensures the independence of the unions from the bourgeois state.

In order to achieve their aims within the unions, Trotskyists should attempt to organize revolutionary trade-union caucuses under their political leadership. The program of these caucuses must be based on the general strategic and tactical lines of the Transitional Program.

Trotskyists must reject the position that, since the role of unions is different from that of the revolutionary party -- essentially the defense of the proletariat's living and working conditions -- unions cannot be won to a true revolutionary program but only to militancy in routine economic struggle. Trotskyists maintain that, although unions cannot achieve a finished program and full revolutionary activity, they can and must be transformed into auxiliary organs of proletarian revolution, breaking from both mere trade unionism and support for the bourgeois state.

7. The Transitional Program

The Trotskyist program incorporates the lessons of the entire history of the international working-class movement and is based, in particular, on the texts of the first four Congresses of the Communist International and the programmatic texts of the Fourth Internationalist movement in the 1930s. The Transitional Program concentrates this in the form of a program of action.

The strategic task of the next period -- a prerevolutionary period of agitation, propaganda and organization -- consists in overcoming the contradiction between the maturity of the objective revolutionary conditions and the immaturity of the proletariat and its vanguard (the confusion and disappointment of the older generation, the inexperience of the younger generation). It is necessary to help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demands and the socialist program of the revolution. This bridge should include a system of transitional demands, stemming from today's conditions and from today's consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat.

For a long time, there has been a tendency in the USFI to lose sight of the general value of the method as a system of intervention in mass struggle. There is a tendency to consider transitional demands simply as the "most radical" demands that can be used, when it is necessary to have a higher political profile.

There is also a tendency to forget the general methodological importance of using transitional demands as a form of agitation, where the objective situation and our forces allow it. It must also -- and always -- be used as a form of propaganda, as a necessary tool to take our revolutionary project forward inside the masses.

We have to elaborate constantly around the theme of transitional demands. This theme has to be developed in our general political intervention, in workers' struggle, and in all sectors of our intervention. In every domain, we must develop action programs based on transitional demands.

At the same time, we have to avoid all minimalist approaches or those of acritical support for the most basic demands expressed by the mass movement. We also have to reject a method that has marked the policy of the USFI in the past, that is, the pretension that we can seize on one "anticapitalist demand" that has a unique and central value for our action in the class struggle.

Any single demand, however important, has a value only insofar as it is situated in a system of transitional demands. In this system, a central aspect must be the democratic and independent self-organization of the masses in committees of workers' control, strike committees, councils of action, and so on, capable of concretely posing the question, defined by Trotsky in the Transitional Program as the one that "crowns the program of transitional demands," that is, "the slogan of soviets."

8. The Struggle to Resolve the Crisis of Proletarian Leadership

The Stalinist and social-democratic parties, which in most capitalist states, particularly the imperialist states, represent the principal leaderships of the mass movement, constitute agents of the bourgeoisie within the workers' movement -- bourgeois workers' parties. The link of these parties with the bourgeoisie and its state is a direct link in the case of the social-democratic parties and an historically indirect link in the case of the Stalinist parties, that is, a link determined and mediated by the politics of the ruling bureaucratic caste of the former USSR or the other degenerated or deformed workers' states. Over the last two decades, however, some Stalinist parties -- mainly the so-called "Eurocommunist" parties -- have developed links with their own bourgeoisies to the point that these links have become predominant over their links with any of the bureaucracies of the degenerated and deformed workers' states. This phenomenon has accelerated with the collapse of bureaucratic rule in Eastern Europe. The remaining communist parties show an increasing tendency to disintegrate and/or become more and more directly dependent on their own bourgeoisies. The policies of the social-democratic and Stalinist parties are dedicated to defending the bourgeois state and capitalist property relations. In the oppressed countries, the petty-bourgeois nationalist organizations play a similar role.

Vacillating between reformism and Trotskyism, centrist organizations -- among which the most radical petty-bourgeois nationalist forces and the anarchist-type organizations can be included -- have not in general developed overt and consistent counterrevolutionary activity. But they constitute, with their opportunist policies, a supplementary obstacle to the proletarian revolution.

Consistent Trotskyists aim at breaking the hold of and politically destroying reformist, Stalinist, centrist and nationalist organizations, in the process of regrouping the political majority of the proletariat and the broadest possible sectors of other classes oppressed by capitalism, around the Trotskyist program. In the same way, consistent Trotskyists struggle to break the masses away from the influence of the reformist and centrist oppositions in the degenerated and deformed workers' states.

Orthodox Trotskyism rejects as revisionist those positions which envisage the transformation of opportunist organizations into "revolutionary leaderships" under the pressure of the mass movement. Similarly, it rejects the conception of the regeneration of the reformist and/or centrist organizations through a process of internal evolution.

Consistent Trotskyism struggles for revolutionary regroupment, that is, for the unification on the programmatic bases of Bolshevism of the forces of the vanguard of the proletariat. For this purpose Trotskyists may adopt -- where conditions call for it -- the tactic of entrism in reformist, centrist, or petty-bourgeois nationalist organizations, with the aim of provoking the break of the subjectively revolutionary members of such organizations from their respective leaderships and achieving their regroupment on Bolshevik bases.

Orthodox Trotskyism rejects as revisionist the policy of "revolutionary unity," that is, the position according to which the revolutionary party of the proletariat can be created through fusion on vague bases and as a result of some sort of compromise between Trotskyism and forces of a centrist type. Similarly, Trotskyism rejects deep or "sui generis" entrism, that is, a policy that seeks to reduce the role of Trotskyists to that of pressure groups within the opportunist parties, on the basis of revisionist illusions about the possible evolution of such parties in whole or in part.

9. The United Front

The strategy of the Trotskyists must be to fight for the unity of the proletariat and the oppressed masses in the struggle for workers' power. In this context, they propose tactical agreements to the opportunist organizations of the workers' movement, even on a broad range of tasks, provided that such agreements are clearly for the mobilization of the masses. We recognize that only in the fight to win sufficient forces to our program can we hope to force the established leaders of the workers' movement into an alliance with us. And we recognize that the fight to build and maintain united fronts is normally a prolonged and difficult fight. The aims of this policy are to counterpose the anticapitalist aspirations of the proletarian base to the politics of the leaderships; to facilitate revolutionary regroupment; to develop the consciousness of the masses; and, moreover, to the extent to which the united front is effectively realized, to win partial successes, both defensive and offensive, against the bourgeoisie.

On all occasions where the proletarian united front is actually realized, the aim of the Trotskyist party is to win hegemony over the masses in action, and in this way to win the majority of the proletariat. Trotskyists must reject the revisionist positions which transform the united front into a strategy for anticapitalist action, for building the party, or for the proletarian seizure of power, and so renounce the role of the vanguard party. Trotskyists also reject the conception of the establishment of the united front as a positive achievement in itself, without regard to the objectives it is based upon. They also reject united-front agreements which seek to end political struggle between the parties involved, or which are merely propaganda blocs.

The Stalinists turned the policy of the united front into a policy of mixing banners, that is, the organization of blocs with reformists on the basis of partial platforms, to which they subordinated their own political line. This policy usually involved capitulation to the reformists, but at times, as during the "third period," it involved a sectarian refusal to unite in action by insisting on the Communist Party's line as the basis for the bloc (the "united front from below"). In either case it denied the fundamental principle of the united front, united action on common aims without hiding political disagreements: "march separately, strike together."

For fifty years the Trotskyist movement has been under massive pressure from the Stalinists and reformists, and sections of it have adapted to the Stalinist conception of the united front as a policy of mixing banners, and even to the transformation of the united front into a popular front with directly bourgeois forces. In many cases, the small size of the Trotskyist organization has intensified the pressure, as the organization's independent agitation has seemed so weak as to be ineffective. Often the adaptation has taken the form of turning the united front into an abstract general principle to which the organization's independent propaganda is sacrificed. A Trotskyist rejection of mixing banners is then characterized as "sectarian."

The Fourth International must make a decisive break from this adaptation and return to the Leninist policy of the united front as an agreement on concrete practical action, within which the participants put out their own propaganda and agitation. Trotskyists, for tactical reasons, may decide to participate in blocs that do not conform to this principle. Indeed, where a Trotskyist group is small, it is likely that it will have to participate in mobilizations and organizations that do not conform to this, and find ways to defend its political line there. But Trotskyists should not take political responsibility for such blocs, should not build them except as part of a process of attempting to change their character or split them, and should not subordinate their independent political activity to them.

10. The Anti-Imperialist United Front

In most oppressed countries, where national, democratic and agrarian demands play a pivotal role, Trotskyists may establish tactical agreements for an anti-imperialist united front with petty-bourgeois nationalist parties or organizations. Within such anti-imperialist united fronts, Trotskyists fight generally for the maximum of unity with and the leadership of proletarian forces and, in particular, for the revolutionary leadership of the Trotskyist party.

Trotskyists must reject the revisionist positions that, considering the nature of the countries oppressed by imperialism and the centrality of the struggle against imperialism, maintain (1) that it is possible to establish anti-imperialist united fronts with the national bourgeoisie of an oppressed country, or (2) that popular fronts have a progressive role in the oppressed countries. For Trotskyists, the anti-imperialist united front means, as Trotsky argued, "a bloc of the workers, peasants, and petty bourgeoisie...directed not only against imperialism and feudalism but also against the national bourgeoisie, which is bound up with them in all basic questions" ("The Revolution in India, Its Tasks and Dangers," 30 May 1930). To the extent that the parties of the national bourgeoisie actually enter into conflict with imperialism, it is possible to establish limited practical agreements with them -- in order to implement the policy of unconditional defense of the oppressed nations against imperialism -- while recognizing that such national bourgeoisies will never fully break with imperialism.

11. The Workers' Government

The struggle for the workers' government (or the workers' and farmers' government) is a central part of revolutionary strategy. In the general strategic perspective, the term "workers' government" is a popular expression for the dictatorship of the proletariat. In this sense, the workers' government is only realizable as a government of the Trotskyist party or a government which is led by the Trotskyist party. To the extent that the proletarian and peasant masses are not led by the Trotskyist party but are instead led by bourgeois workers' parties or petty-bourgeois nationalist parties, Trotskyists must counterpose to class-collaboration the need for the unity of the whole workers' movement and the masses on the basis of an anticapitalist program. By an anticapitalist program we mean that, as the Communist International explained, "The most elementary program of a workers' government must consist of arming the proletariat, disarming the counterrevolutionary bourgeois organizations, establishing control of production, making the rich bear the principal burden of taxes, and breaking the resistance of the counterrevolutionary bourgeoisie." Trotskyists must advance the perspective of a workers' (or workers' and farmers') government. As the Transitional Program declares:

Of all the parties and organizations which base themselves on the workers and peasants and speak in their name, we demand that they break politically from the bourgeoisie and enter upon the road of struggle for the workers' and farmers' government. On this road we promise them full support against capitalist reaction. At the same time, we indefatigably develop agitation around those transitional demands which should in our opinion form the program of the "workers' and farmers' government."

The essential purpose of this tactic is to counterpose the anticapitalist aspirations of the proletarian and mass base to the counterrevolutionary policies of their petty-bourgeois leaders, in order to facilitate the revolutionary regroupment of the vanguard and to develop the consciousness of the masses and the evolution in a revolutionary direction of the class struggle.

Trotskyists reject the revisionist conception according to which the creation of a "workers' and farmers' government" by the opportunist organizations is an inevitable stage in the development of the struggle for the socialist revolution. Trotskyists put forward the slogan of struggle for a workers' and farmers' government based on an anticapitalist program. We deny, on principle, any political support to any government -- whether it be a government of bourgeois workers' parties or a petty-bourgeois nationalist government -- which is based on a program of defending private property and the capitalist state, such a government being nothing but a masked form of collaboration with the bourgeoisie. Moreover, even in the exceptional case -- but not impossible, as the postwar experience shows -- where the petty-bourgeois parties break effectively with the bourgeoisie and form a "workers' and farmers' government," Trotskyists "promise them full support against capitalist reaction" (the above quote from the Transitional Program) but not unconditional political support. The attitude of Trotskyists will always be determined by the central aim of their activity: the creation of a workers' government over which the Trotskyist party has hegemony, the sole guarantee of the revolutionary continuity of the workers' government.

To this end, we fight on the basis of our program of demands against both capitalist and bureaucratic Stalinist governments for the construction of organs of workers' control of production, workers' self-defense, and workers' power -- factory committees, occupation committees, workers' militias, and soviets. The most elementary form is the strike committee with pickets, and the highest form is the workers' council with workers' militia. In this way the working class creates the means of its struggle and at the same time establishes the foundations of its own state power in order to become, as Marx said, "the proletariat organized as a ruling class." Only on the basis of such organs of workers' power can the working class -- led by a revolutionary party -- develop the necessary independent strength to carry through the overthrow of capitalist rule and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

12. Uniting All the Oppressed and Exploited under Proletarian Leadership

The proletariat and its party must act as a "tribune of the people", championing the struggles of all the oppressed and exploited. In fact, the majority of humanity suffers forms of oppression of a specific type that cannot be reduced simply to class oppression. Starting from different historical roots, the most important of those oppressions include: the oppression of women, lesbians and gay men, youth, the racially oppressed, the disabled, and those oppressed as national minorities.

The revolutionary party must build mass movements of the oppressed and exploited around these issues, mobilizing not only the proletariat but also the nonproletarian oppressed and the middle layers.

These mass movements are not exclusively proletarian. They attempt to struggle around contradictions which cannot be resolved without the overthrow of the bourgeois state and capitalism. They are therefore continually brought into conflict with the capitalist class and its state. Trotskyists must intervene with a method analogous to that adopted in intervening in proletarian struggles: that is, they base their action on the Transitional Program.

They must fight against the petty-bourgeois (or sometimes bourgeois) leaderships of these movements, struggling for proletarian leadership of the nonproletarian mass movements. This perspective implies two simultaneous aspects: on the one hand, the struggle within the proletariat for it to take over directly the demands of the nonproletarian mass movements, which implies a struggle directly against any reactionary ideology and attitudes within the working class regarding these movements (for example, racism, sexism, antigay bigotry); on the other hand, action within these movements to defeat bourgeois and reformist ideology and "autonomist" or "separatist" positions and to lead each such movement to the understanding that only participation in an alliance led by the revolutionary working class in the struggle against the bourgeoisie can lead to real victory.

In particular, where the specially oppressed sectors of the working class tend to be especially militant and class-conscious, the intervention of Trotskyists in the mass movements and struggles of the specially oppressed is an essential part of the process of mobilizing the proletarian vanguard, winning the most advanced workers to the revolutionary program, and building the revolutionary leadership of the working class.

In all mass movements, which are generally barely organized, due to their instability, Trotskyists struggle for the building of well-structured mass organizations. Where such organizations do exist or are being built under opportunist leaderships, Trotskyists must act as they do within the unions: they must organize revolutionary caucuses based on the general line of the Transitional Program, aiming to win the leadership of these organizations. Consistent Trotskyism rejects as liquidationist those positions which assume that mass movements should develop in an "autonomous" manner and which, therefore, lead Trotskyists merely to participate in these movements without fighting to win them to a proletarian perspective.

13. The Struggle against Imperialism

The fundamental dynamics among the capitalist states arise from the interaction of the international proletarian class struggle with both interimperialist rivalries and the contradiction between the imperialist and the oppressed nations. In the final analysis, these dynamics express the fundamental contradiction of capitalism, the antagonism between its increasingly socialized, interdependent forces of production and its private relations of production, as ever-intensified throughout the epoch of imperialism by the contradiction between the international character of capitalist production and the acutely disruptive restraints of national boundaries.

For several decades the existence of an important group of deformed and degenerated workers' states, where capitalist property relations had been overturned, intensified these basic contradictions and in certain respects limited the ability of each imperialist nation to resolve its own contradictions at the expense of its rivals, whom it had also to maintain as allies against the threat of both the collectivized economies and the colonial and semicolonial world's anti-imperialist aspirations.

Under these conditions, the class-collaborationist treachery of the Stalinist and social-democratic bureaucracies was repeatedly decisive in providing the imperialists with the possibility of avoiding or surviving major defeats and setbacks. Within the colonial and semicolonial world, the treachery of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalist leaderships has played a similar role. Imperialism also leans heavily on states of a colonial settler type to maintain its domination in key areas of the world. This is most clearly the case for Israel in the Middle East and still to a certain extent South Africa, in spite of the deep crisis provoked by the revolutionary mobilization of the black masses.

In the present historical epoch, Marxism recognizes the decisive distinction between oppressor and oppressed nations. There are qualitative differences between the different capitalist states, based on the differences in the level of development of the productive forces and on the specific relationship of each national economy to the entire imperialist system -- that is, to the world capitalist economy as a whole.

The imperialist states (the principal ones being the USA, Germany, Japan, France, Britain, Italy, Canada), dominated by monopolies and finance capital with a supranational character (export of capital), represent the overlords of the world, which they exploit and plunder on the basis of the international division of labor: they thus play the role of oppressor states. In these countries the productive forces have reached a high level of development, and the proletariat is more concentrated and constitutes the majority of the working population. In the end, the fate of the socialist revolution is determined by the victory of the proletarian revolution in these imperialist centers.

The colonial and semicolonial states, or, in general, those oppressed by imperialism, comprise a wide range of social situations. The majority of the states of Asia and all the states of Africa (except South Africa) and Latin America (except Cuba) are in this category, as states in which the degree of development of the productive forces is low. They are in general subjected to imperialist exploitation and pillage. Nearly always, the working class constitutes a definite minority of the population.

In the oppressed countries, democratic tasks (real national independence, agrarian reform, political democracy, etc.) have a central importance. Trotskyism responds to this situation on the basis of the perspective of permanent revolution. That is, it takes on the task of regrouping, under the leadership of the proletariat and its vanguard party, the peasant and, in general, petty-bourgeois masses. It aims at the achievement of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which, realizing democratic tasks, passes without break on to socialist tasks, doing away with the private ownership of the means of production -- with regard not only to imperialism but also to the national bourgeoisie -- and replacing it with a planned economy. Trotskyism, therefore, rejects any conception that sees in the theory of permanent revolution only a description of an objective process: for Trotskyism, permanent revolution is a strategy of action and cannot be realized by any other means.

In countries where there is an agrarian question and an important peasantry, Trotskyists seek to organize the peasant masses in alliance with the workers' movement. This implies a struggle against all the political forces that seek to maintain the peasantry under the domination of the bourgeois-landowning bloc.

14. The National Question

National oppression is one of the most widespread types of oppression in the imperialist epoch, under various forms. In the first place, there is the oppression of colonial countries by imperialism. Under the form of direct colonial rule, there remain few examples. Nevertheless we fight for the independence of the remaining colonies, notably French and British. In the countries economically dominated by imperialism, real as against formal national independence is impossible without overthrowing the imperialist yoke. In this sense, it is inseparable from the socialist revolution.

But national oppression is not limited to the imperialist oppression of dependent countries. It exists also within imperialist countries, within dependent countries, and in the deformed and degenerated workers' states. Trotskyists fight against all forms of national oppression, which is an obstacle to the unity of the working class and to working-class leadership of the peasantry and the petty-bourgeois sectors. In fighting against national oppression, we aim to create the most favorable conditions for working-class unity across frontiers and for the development of class antagonisms that are masked by national antagonisms.

Trotskyists apply the Leninist policy of the right of nations to self-determination. They are neither for nor against separation in principle. Within multinational states they are for the widest cultural and linguistic freedom. Where national oppression produces a movement of the oppressed nation, they participate in this movement, fighting against all bourgeois and petty-bourgeois leaderships and seeking to "place the proletariat at the head of the nation." They do not fight for independence in general but for socialist independence, which is the only way to free the oppressed nation from imperialist domination, or to prevent this domination replacing the Stalinist yoke. But we see socialist independence as a first step toward the creation of a federation or federations of socialist republics based on the free adhesion of each of them.

15. The Deformed Workers' States

Until the 1980s the degenerated workers' states (USSR, Mongolia) and the deformed workers' states (in the approximate historical order of the overthrow of capitalist property relations: Yugoslavia, Albania; Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, East Germany, North Korea; China; Vietnam; Cuba; Laos, Kampuchea) were characterized by the contradiction between the socialized (proletarian) nature of the relations of production -- and therefore of ownership -- and the fact that the proletariat had been robbed of political power by a bureaucratic caste with a petty-bourgeois character. This caste exercised an oppressive dictatorship over the masses and made use of its dominance to maintain and reenforce its material privileges. The ruling bureaucracy constituted a fundamental obstacle to further socialist development, and its defense of its material privileges and political power made it an element of fundamental instability, a block to the development of the workers' state, and a vehicle for bringing the pressure exerted by world capitalism into the workers' state itself. Thus, the task of the proletariat was to overthrow, by means of political revolution, the ruling Stalinist bureaucratic caste, whose power tended in the end to place in danger the very social bases of the state.

Trotskyism, therefore, rejected the theory according to which there exists between the workers' state (the dictatorship of the proletariat) and the degenerated workers' state a difference that is only quantitative and not clearly qualitative. Consequently, Trotskyism also rejected the conception of the parasitic bureaucracy as a part of the workers' movement. Further, it rejected as revisionist and liquidationist, theories of the possibility of the regeneration of some or all of the degenerated and/or deformed workers' states by an internal process of reform or under the pressure of mass mobilization. All the more, it rejected the revisionist positions which regarded one or more states dominated by a Stalinist bureaucracy (in particular, Cuba) as nondeformed workers' states.

Beginning with the 1980s, the contradictions derived from bureaucratic domination led to the crisis and then collapse of the majority of the degenerated and deformed workers' states. The process began with the terminal crisis of the bureaucracy of the USSR, the historic source of the bureaucratic castes of all the deformed workers' states. The USSR's political domination of the majority of the deformed workers states, first of all, those of Eastern Europe, inevitably led to crises there.

Today the degenerated and deformed workers' states are in a transitional situation, with the exception of China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos and Cuba, which remain deformed workers' states in the full sense described above, and the former East Germany, which has been reintegrated into capitalism via its annexation to West Germany. In the countries in a transitional situation, the state apparatus as a whole no longer defends state property in the means of production, even, as before, for its own goals and in a deformed manner. On the contrary, the state apparatus is now the conscious instrument of the restoration of private property in the means of production. The state institutions are bourgeois-democratic (more or less authoritarian), and the state constitutions reflect the role and class nature of the new state apparatus.

On the economic level, the major means of production in these countries are still state-owned, and their economies have not yet been reintegrated into the international division of labor. But this is because of the lack of international capital investment on a scale large enough for massive privatization and reintegration into the world market. Despite this, to the extent that prices have been freed, the goods produced and marketed in these countries again have the nature of commodities.

The transitional situation of these countries means that the revolution that Trotskyists seek to lead is no longer an antibureaucratic political revolution, as indicated by Trotskyism in the past historic period. It is not yet an anticapitalist social revolution, because the state-owned sector of the economy is still dominant and the bourgeoisie is not yet reconstituted as a class. Rather, the revolution Trotskyists seek to lead is a political revolution of a special type, which will develop in the framework of the enormous contradiction between the fully reactionary bourgeois state apparatus and the economic and social base, which is still postcapitalist.

Revolutionaries must develop a program consistent with the new situation. The program must include a strong defense of the social property against the process of capitalist restoration and a struggle for democratically centralized planning of the economy by the workers as producers and consumers. This must be placed in an international perspective of the seizure of power by the proletariat and the building of a federation of soviet republics, based on the strictest equality among different nationalities.

Trotskyists must reject the utopian perspective of "self-management" and any project of mixing bourgeois democracy in the government with some sort of workers' control of the economy. Our project is all power to the workers' councils, both political and economic -- in other words, the dictatorship of the proletariat. Trotskyists also must reject the idea that a consistently revolutionary program could be advanced by any of the forces presently organized in the workers and popular masses, on the basis of whatever objective dynamics. Only a Leninist-Trotskyist party could elaborate that program and develop it concretely in the social and political struggles in these countries.

16. Wars between States and Nations

In the face of conflicts between states, Trotskyist positions are determined as follows:

1. Trotskyism adopts a position of revolutionary defeatism in conflicts between imperialist states, which are caused by the struggle for markets and for economic domination of the world.

2. Trotskyism unconditionally defends the oppressed, colonial and semicolonial states or nations over against the imperialist powers. The unconditional defense of these states in no case signifies political support for the feudal-bourgeois, bourgeois, or petty-bourgeois regimes of the oppressed states. We also defend nations oppressed by other semicolonial or oppressed states (for example, Kurdistan by Iran and Iraq -- as well as by Turkey).

3. Trotskyism unconditionally defends the degenerated and deformed workers' states in conflicts between them and capitalist states. Such a position does not in any instance signify political support for the parasitic bureaucracy ruling a degenerated or deformed workers' state involved in such a conflict.

In all cases, Trotskyists seek to exploit the situation created by war in order to overthrow the bourgeoisie and the parasitic bureaucracy and to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat.

17. The Urgent Necessity of International Coordinated Action of the Proletariat

The growing internationalization of capital leads to an increasing convergence of the class struggle in different countries. This can occur in the form of struggles against multinational companies operating in different countries. It also can take the form of struggles against anti-working-class policies applied in a coordinated way in several countries, notably in Europe, Latin America and East Asia, and to resistance to specific forms of imperialist oppression -- IMF plans, the debt question, etc.

This places on the agenda international campaigns, for example, against the debt which already exists. It also makes necessary international coordination of workers' struggles. This type of coordination is neither spontaneous nor organized by the political and trade-union bureaucracies of the workers' movement. Trotskyists should aim, with their limited resources, to begin to struggle to overcome these national limits, through, for example, international trade-union coordination of workers employed by the same multinational corporation or international coordination by industry (rail, auto, etc.). For example, in the event of the Maastricht Treaty being implemented, European workers will face big battles to defend their gains and to fight for the harmonization of social legislation at the highest levels. This will require international coordinated action.

Another way in which coordinated international action is possible and necessary today, is in the defense of political prisoners -- revolutionary socialists, working-class militants, nationalist militants, and all militants imprisoned for their action in defense of the working class and the oppressed. All forms of international coordination are useful, but what is really necessary is the formation of a structure such as the International Red Aid, organized on the initiative of the Communist International in the 1920s. We support all steps toward the creation of such a body.

18. World Party of Socialist Revolution and International Democratic Centralism

Everything that has been said so far in this platform indicates that the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is worldwide and that the proletariat needs a world party. This party must be politically centralized and operating on the basis of free debate among its members, which means a democratically centralized Fourth International.

Orthodox Trotskyism rejects the conception that democratic centralism should apply fully only at the national level, while at the international level it is limited by the autonomy of each national party. It also rejects the practice of world organizations whose different factions carry out essentially independent policies. Further, it rejects practices which invoke "democratic centralism" to block any possibility of effective tendency or factional struggle. Similarly, it rejects any conception which discriminates between "major" national organizations, with the right to decide on lines and principles, and "minor" organizations, which must be subordinated to the "major" organizations.