LRCI: The Trotskyist Manifesto (1989)
The Iran-Iraq war: Generalised Defeatism - not the Marxist method (1980)
Trotsky, Lenin and the communist attitude to war (1984)
Arguments on the Malvinas (1982)
The Failed Coup in the USSR (August 1991)
The Degenerated Revolution: The Origin and Nature of the Stalinist States
The Death Agony of the Fourth International and the Tasks of Trotskyists Today
The SWP, imperialism and the "real Marxist tradition" (1995)
The politics of the SWP - a Trotskyist critique (1993)
An ongoing history: the LRCI ten years on (1999)
The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan (1988)
O Programa de Transição cinquenta anos depois
The 1952 Revolution in Bolivia
Gramsci and the Revolutionary Tradition
Barbaric Trotskyism: a History of Morenoism (Part 1+2)
1956: The Hungarian Revolution
Vor 55 Jahren: Die Revolution der ungarischen ArbeiterInnen wird in Blut ertränkt
MRCI Theses on Gorbachev (1987)
Russian Troops Out! Self-determination for Chechnya!
Save the Planet from Capitalist Destruction!
Rettet den Planeten vor der Zerstörung durch den Kapitalismus!
The EU Reform Treaty: what it is and how to fight it
Der EU-Reformvertrag, seine Hintergründe und die revolutionäre Strategie
Die Frage der Vereinigung Europas im Lichte der marxistischen Theorie (2008)
Vor einem neuen Wirtschaftsaufschwung? (2009)
Imperialism, Globalization & Decline of Capitalism (2008)
Imperialismus, Globalisierung und der Niedergang des Kapitalismus (2008)
Die widersprüchliche Entwicklung der Produktivkräfte im Kapitalismus
World economy – heading to a new upswing? (2009)
Compilation of Articles on the US/NATO Attack on Afghanistan 2001
Restoring Capitalism in China (2000)
Russia: Yeltsin’s October Counter-Revolution 1993
Balkan wars: A peace to end all peace? (1995)
20 Years Ago: The US-UK Invasion of Iraq (2003)
Review: Walter Daum – The Life and Death of Stalinism
Against the market: Planning the future
League for a Revolutionary Communist International, Summer 1989
Below we reprint the founding document of the predecessor organization of the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT) - the League for a Revolutionary Communist International (LRCI). This program was adopted at its congress in summer 1989. Naturally, a number of aspects of this program are already outdated or have been enhanced. The actual program of the RCIT, adopted in spring 2012, can be read here.
* * * * *
1989 Preface to the English Language Edition
During 1989 the foundations of the world order were shaken. The magnitude of the upheavals in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union can scarcely be underestimated. They will profoundly affect the future of these states and Stalinism as a force within the world labour movement. Whilst the epicentre of this earthquake is found in Moscow its shock waves have hit Washington, Tokyo, Bonn and London. From Central America to Southern Africa the impact of Stalinism's crisis has been felt.
Beginning with the February electoral debacle of the Polish United Workers' Party and later the dissolution of the Hungarian Stalinist party, the concessions on civil liberties in these two states lit the fuse that was to explode the charges under the monolith of the Stalinist regimes in the German Democratic Republic and Czechoslovakia.
In these countries beleaguered circles of dissident intellectuals gave way to mass movements of millions in a matter of weeks. Without the support and even with the security of the Kremlin, Honecker and Jakes came crashing down from their bureaucratic pedestals. Oppositionists who had been imprisoned were invited into dialogue and negotiations. An era of power sharing, pluralism and free elections was promised.
These events reverberated in the "west". German imperialism stepped forward to voice its own project of a reunited capitalist Germany. The US administration and its British adjunct were caught without a policy beyond a visceral desire to restore capitalism in Eastern Europe. They recognise in Gorbachev and the "reformers" people willing to assist them in the dismantling the planned property relations. But the imperialists are deeply uncertain as to how far to go with economic aid and the dissolving of alliances.
Even if the USA had the resources equivalent to the Marshal Aid Programme that saved Western Europe for capitalism in the 1940s, Pouring this volume of investment into states where the capitalist class has yet to be re-established would be a gamble of major proportions.
Likewise, to undertake a dismantling of NATO in conditions where a return to power of the hardliners is far from impossible is a risk they dare not take. Yet if they make no concessions of substance, what will happen to the reformers' uncompleted market "reforms"?
For these reasons the first flush of rejoicings amongst the imperialist leaders who launched the new Cold War has given way to dark mutterings about the dangers of instability. They preach the need for caution and the preservation of alliances-even or rather especially those of the "enemy". The governments of Bush and Thatcher, Kohl and Mitterrand clearly fear the spectre of revolution even when it appears to be bearing the gift of capitalist restoration. Why? Because they fear the unleashing of class struggle in these countries above everything-a struggle in which they may be obliged to take sides, a struggle which will open the rifts and conflicts of interest amongst themselves.
The USA, Britain and France clearly fear that Germany and Japan their defeated rivals of forty years along ago-may begin a whole new career of political and military independence and rivalry. For the Anglo-Saxon powers any fundamental change is likely to be for the worse.
Yet if the forces of world imperialism are obliged to temper their public rejoicings with private anxiety, the forces of world Stalinism are in open disarray. Those, like the Euro-communists who had during the mid1970s period of detente come close to Social Democracy, welcome not only the collapse of the unbridled dictatorship of the bureaucracy, but also shout for joy at the impending collapse of planned property. Like all converts they try to outdo the old believers in the fervour of their devotion to the "mixed economy", to market forces-in short, to capitalism. No abuse is too strong to hurl at the god who failed. Not only Stalinism but the October Revolution itself is vilified. The most important political event in twentieth century history is now an embarrassment to those who wish to fly headlong into the arms of the Social Democrats.
The erstwhile Stalinist parties of Eastern and Western Europe are forming an excited and disorderly queue at the portals of the Socialist International. The "party of Gramsci and Togliatti" can scarcely wait to transform itself into the Italian Labour Party and to bury the symbols of its past, the hammer and sickle.
Yet these unseemly celebrations cannot but alarm the vanguard workers who had falsely identified Stalinism with a more militant, class struggle policy and thought of it as some sort of builder of socialism. This anxiety will be shared by many on the left wing of Social Democracy and subjective revolutionaries who, whilst they never thought the USSR and its satellites were a socialist heaven on earth, at least saw them as bastions against the unbridled dominance of world capitalism. In the semi colonial world national liberation fighters also look with the gravest concern on the collapse of powers which, however capriciously and self-servingly, did occasionally supply them with arms, with training and with a place of exile.
Yet to all these vanguard fighters we have to say-it is not the god of socialism, communism or the planned economy that has failed, but the monstrous idol of Stalinism. For half of this century it stood apparently unshakable. Yet there was one voice that predicted its downfall-that of Leon Trotsky.
Trotsky analysed the fearful contradictions that lay beneath the monolithic facade. He predicted-albeit on too short a time-scale-its disintegration. But his error was of time-scale not one of substance. It was an error similar to those made in an earlier period by Marx, Engels Lenin and with all those for whom theory is a guide to revolutionary practice and not a form of intellectual consolation. It was Trotsky who realised that no bureaucratic tyranny erected on post-capitalist property relations could survive. The latter only made sense, could only develop and expand, could only conquer capitalism on a world scale if they were the tools of the conscious, revolutionary proletariat. He insisted against the combined forces of Stalinism and imperialism, against the Third and the Second Internationals that Stalin was not the continuer of Lenin's work, but its destroyer; not the great leader of world revolution, but its grave-digger.
As a result the Trotskyists had to be annihilated in the USSR, as indeed they were, by the tens of thousands, fifty years ago. Stalin's murderous hand was to reach out to the leaders of the young and weak Fourth International and finally to strike down Trotsky himself. Yet history, however painfully and slowly at times it seems to work, undermines and brings to destruction everything, no matter how powerful and imposing, that is based on force and fraud. Stalinism has proved itself an illegitimate, temporary setback in the proletariat's struggle for its own emancipation.
Amidst the thunder and crash of its disintegration we, the Trotskyists, have least of all cause for pessimism or mourning. Neither shall we indulge in the smug self-satisfaction of the venal leaders of Social Democracy. We turn-full of revolutionary optimism-to the workers of the
degenerate(d) workers' states. They are being roused to struggle for elementary civil liberties, for a decent standard of living, against the obscenity of bureaucratic privilege and are impelled to recreate a living workers' movement, factory councils and trade unions. We turn to these workers recognising that in the first instance the leaders they may find will be more or less hidden agents of the world bourgeoisie. But if this bourgeoisie successfully enters the workers' states, it will bear not only the offerings of consumer society, but also gross inequality, unemployment, and mass poverty. This ensures that if capitalism were to triumph then the class struggle will continue against the bourgeoisie and its agents.
Here and now we sound the alarm bells against the surrender of the nationalised economy, the monopoly of foreign trade and the centralised plan. With them goes the partial and inadequate commitment to full employment and the right to work. With them goes the equally inadequate social services and welfare system. These insufficient gains discredited even by the Stalinists identification of them with "actually existing socialism"-must be built on and not abandoned. They are the prerequisites for the transition to genuine socialism and can be used as such once they are £reed from the grip of the bureaucratic tyrants.
For actually existing capitalism is not the consumer dream-realised only to some extent in the lives of the west's bloated middle classes and labour aristocracy. It is the poverty, exploitation and starvation of three quarters of humanity. The fate of most of the workers' states, if the working class fails to defend its gains, will be similar-semi-colonial servitude and super-exploitation.
The working class can and will rise to this task and there is only one programme adequate to this task, that of the Trotskyists. Yet, this programme, as Trotsky wrote it, has long been abandoned by most of
those who now call themselves his followers. This programme-the Transitional Programme-has long gathered dust on their bookshelves whilst his successors have aped and parodied every passing fad and fashion in the world labour movement: Stalinism, Labourism, Maoism, Castroism, Sandinism, feminism and ecologism. Like chameleons they have appeared only in the colours of their surroundings. Consequently for forty years the programme of Leon Trotsky has made no solid conquests. This situation was historically explicable given the temporary strength of Stalinism and Social Democracy and the treason of the epigones such as Mandel, Lambert and Healey. But the historic changes now taking place open the road for the triumph of the Trotskyist programme. The pre-conditions for this are that this programme should be developed and elaborated to meet tasks not existing fifty years ago and that an internationally organised force of cadres exists to fight for new revolutionary parries and a new international. But the most essential pre-condition is that the defenders of this programme and the builders of this international party "disdain to conceal their views and aims", in Marx's words, and that "they openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions".
Today, these conditions include imperialist capitalism and moribund Stalinism. Our manifesto, our programme, is for the resolution of the long crisis of leadership that Stalinism and Social Democracy inflicted on the world labour movement. It is the programme for the revolutionary self-emancipation of the working class and for the liberation of the whole of exploited and oppressed humanity. Workers-in the semi-colonial, Stalinist and imperialist countries forward to the world socialist revolution!
London, December 1989
Introduction
The Marxist programme is based on the principles of scientific socialism. It analyses all social and political development from the standpoint of dialectical materialism. It asserts that the class struggle is the motor force of history and it recognises the working class as the only consistently revolutionary class. However, whilst the general Marxist programme embodies the theoretical method of dialectical materialism and the strategic goals of socialism, the great programmatic contributions in the history of the Marxist movement have been focused on the practical tasks flowing from these fundamental principles. They embody the strategy and tactics to achieve the general goals and do not separate these questions off from the programme. There is no brick wall between strategy, tactics and principles in the Marxist programme. This is clear from the Communist Manifesto through to the Transitional Programme of 1938. With this method we set out to develop the programme of the LRCI.
Social Democracy continues to peddle the minimum-maximum programme pioneered in the epoch of free competition capitalism. This programme was characterised by the rigid separation of the minimum demands (economic or political reforms achievable within the framework of capitalism) and the maximum goal of socialism. This separation of the two elements of the programme, enshrined in German Social Democracy's "Erfurt Programme", was the basis of its opportunist interpretation and application by the developing reformist wing of the Second International. Present day Social Democracy differs from its classical forebears only in the ever increasing feebleness of its pleadings for minimal reforms and in the ever decreasing use it has for holiday speechifying about socialism.
In the epoch of free competition capitalism the working class, especially in Europe, was obliged to fight for a series of economic and political rights in order to build an organised mass movement of trade unions and political parties. However, in this very process a reformist bureaucracy was crystallised out of the labour aristocracy. For this bureaucracy selected elements of the minimum programme, achieved by purely peaceful, legal and parliamentary methods, were ends in themselves. This stood in sharp contrast to the position of Engels and Lenin who argued that they were only means for developing an actual struggle for socialism. The onset of the imperialist epoch strengthened the reformist bureaucracy considerably. Exploiting the methodological weakness of the minimum-maximum programme, it enforced the rigid separation of the struggle for reforms from any revolutionary perspective for the overthrow of capitalism.
Reformism's strategic goal was to ensure a position of influence for itself within capitalism. To this end it attempted to subordinate working class struggles, transforming parliamentary electoral tactics into its central strategy for obtaining reforms under capitalism. World Stalinism, and even sections of petit bourgeois nationalism, misleads the masses with a variation of the minimum-maximum programme: the programme of stages based on the theory of socialism in one country. This programme and theory was fashioned by the conservative bureaucracy of the USSR in the 1920s during the period of its political counter-revolution against the working class. According to the programme of stages, the existence of the Soviet Union means that it is possible for revolutions to pass through a democratic stage prior to a peaceful evolution towards socialism. The theory argues that this democratic stage (variously called advanced democracy, people's democracy, anti -imperialist democracy) is rigidly separated from a socialist stage. Capitalism must be preserved during the democratic stage and socialism can then gradually and peacefully evolve according to the unique laws operating in each country.
This rehash of Menshevism is a cynical policy by the bureaucracy to limit the struggles against capitalism and be rewarded for its services with an endless period of peaceful co-existence with imperialism. This variation of the minimum-maximum programme, even in its most "left" form which argues that the implementation of the democratic stage cannot be left to the bourgeoisie but must be led by the proletariat, is a noose around the neck of the proletariat and the oppressed. Its consequence is always counter-revolution either by a capitalist class able to regroup during the "democratic" stage (Chile, Portugal, Iran) or by a Stalinist bureaucracy obliged to liquidate capitalism to defend itself, but only on the condition that it has already successfully politically expropriated the working class-as in Eastern Europe, China: Indo-China, and Cuba.
Whether in its Stalinist or Social Democratic garb the minimum maximum programme has outlived its progressive role and has been transformed into a means of obstructing not only the fight for socialism, but even an effective fight to win or defend reforms. Capitalism can provide neither permanent systematic social reforms nor lasting and fully-fledged bourgeois democracy. To solve its recurrent crises the bourgeoisie is obliged to attack every serious economic gain together with the political rights of the working class. The struggle to accommodate to such a system by the bureaucracy can only mean sacrificing even the minimum programme to the needs of the profit system. The defence of working class interests demands economic and political warfare against capitalism, even to achieve a decent wage or to secure a job.
The limits of the minimum-maximum programme are felt over the entire globe. Imperialism is incapable of overseeing radical and consistent agrarian reform or sustaining parliamentary democracy in much of the semi-colonial world. Despite periods of boom, and the attendant granting of reforms by capitalism to some sections of the world working class, this apparent justification for the minimum programme is only superficial. Even the proletariats of the most highly developed countries increasingly need a programme that links the most immediate defensive struggles with the main task of the epoch, the struggle for working class power. To advance the spontaneous class struggle towards socialist goals a bridge is needed. The programme of transitional demands is such a bridge.
Such demands were first systematically presented in Trotsky's Transitional Programme. Yet Marx and Engels formulated a set of transitional demands in the 1848 Communist Manifesto. Later, Lenin and the Bolshevik Party, followed by the Communist International (Comintern), at its first four congresses, formulated focused action programmes based on the transitional method. But Trotsky's 1938 work, the programmatic basis of the Fourth International, was the clearest and most complete expression of the programmatic development that had occurred in the preceding ninety years of Marxism. At every stage the programmatic declarations of Marxism were enriched as capitalist society developed. In each case the Marxists have found it necessary to refine and re-elaborate the programme in the light of experience, which, in Trotsky's words, is the supreme criterion of human re3son. In 1938 Trotsky produced a sharply focused action programme addressing the key questions of the day and answering them in the light of the experience of the previous two decades of struggle and crisis throughout the world. It embodied the lessons from the collapses of the first three Interntionals) as well as from the contributions that they made during their healthy years. It was a re-elaborated programme of revolutionary Marxism.
Fifty years on profound developments in world imperialism) world Stalinism) the semi-colonies) the struggles of the world working class and the oppressed all oblige us to re-elaborate the Transitional Programme. This we have done and our programme) like the 1938 programme) is a development of the previous programmes of revolutionary Marxism to date) not a break from them. It stands on the shoulders of the preceding gains of revolutionary Marxism. It bases itself on their method and incorporates all of their essential features as well as many of their demands. Like the preceding programmes it will have to be broken down into action programmes for particular countries) conjunctures or sections in struggle. Such action programmes will) like Trotsky’s own Action Programme for France) contain all of the key elements of the general programme itself but will sharply focus them to a particular situation or country.
Our programme is a world programme for the world party of socialist revolution) focused towards the burning problems characteristic of the crisis wracked closing years of the twentieth century. It is a programme of transition towards the socialist revolution and as such applies with full force to imperialist countries and semi-colonies alike. But it is equally a programme for the transition to socialism within the workers) states. It addresses the urgent tasks facing the workers in those states where capitalism has been abolished but where the Stalinist bureaucracy has politically expropriated the working class and the actual transition to socialism has) as a result) been blocked. It is a guide to action for the millions struggling to resolve the problems facing humanity. It is a programme that can pave the way to a society based on the satisfaction of human need) not one based on either the lust for profit or the satisfaction of the needs of a parasitic bureaucracy.
While our programme contains, at its core, a focused action programme similar to that of the 1938 programme it is also obliged to address problems not dealt with in that document. As a re-elaborated programme, it has had to confront the fact that the continuity of the revolutionary Marxist movement was broken in 1951 with the degeneration of the Fourth International into centrism. A period of almost forty years has elapsed since this degeneration. Perspectives, tactics and strategy during those forty years have never been analysed in a revolutionary manner, nor embodied in a consistently revolutionary programme. The lessons of the major events during this period-the creation of degenerate workers' states, the long imperialist boom, the anti-imperialist struggles and lessons of the key class struggles and revolutionary situations-have not been incorporated into a series of programmes, theses and documents. Instead the record of the centrists emerging from the Fourth International is one of systematic errors, of various opportunist or sectarian distortions of the Marxist programme.
Our programme is, therefore, not based on an unbroken record of revolutionary positions and cannot base itself, as the 1938 programme could, on fifteen years of documents, positions, theses and programmes (from the Left Opposition through to the founding of the Fourth International). It is obliged to be more analytical, more expansive, than the 1938 programme needed to be. If Trotsky thought that in 1938 he was obliged to include more commentary than was proper in a programme we have had to do so to a far greater extent. In this sense it is an attempt not only to guide the struggles of millions, but also to clearly define the LRCI as against the many varieties of centrism that claim to represent Trotskyism. It also has to demonstrate to the militants of such tendencies, as well as to those of other organisations within the world workers' movement, the lessons we need to draw from the past period and the answers to the crises which will arise in the future.
Clearly our programme is far from being the last word on the international class struggle and the tactics and strategy for revolution. Since 1984 the Movement for a Revolutionary Communist International (now the League for a Revolutionary Communist International-LRCI) has formulated resolutions and theses on the important questions of the international class struggle. They form a supplement to this programme. In addition we recognise that discussion with militants from countries where the LRCI has, as yet, no presence will enable us to enrich and develop the world character of our programme further. But we are firmly convinced that we have produced a programme that serves as the bedrock for such development. This programme, which in its method, its analysis, its demands and its tactics and strategy, embodies the living spirit of revolutionary Marxism, lays the basis for the re-establishment of authentic Trotskyism on a world scale.
Chapter 2 - The crisis of proletarian leadership
Capitalism, even in its imperialist death agony, will not depart the scene automatically. It needs to be consciously overthrown by the working class. For this to happen, a new revolutionary vanguard must be forged. This vanguard requires a conscious strategic plan, a programme and a working class vanguard party.
Today the central problem facing humanity remains: who leads the working class? On the eve of the last inter-imperialist war capitalism was gripped by a general economic depression which was plunging the whole world irreversibly into a revolutionary crisis. Trotsky's Transitional Programme, written in these years, pronounced that the crisis of humanity was reduced to the crisis of leadership. However, today it would be wrong simply to repeat that all contemporary crises are "reduced to a crisis of leadership".
The proletariat worldwide does not yet face the stark alternative of either taking power or seeing the destruction of all its past gains. Nevertheless, in many countries and, indeed, whole continents, the crisis of leadership does reach such a level of acuteness. Even in countries where this is not so a chronic crisis afflicts the workers' organisations, bringing about defeat, stagnation and even decline as a result of the repeated betrayals of the reformist leaders. Capitalism's inability to meet the basic needs of millions makes it both possible and necessary to transform the defensive struggles of the workers and poor peasants into the struggle for power. Yet none of the existing leaderships of the working class are willing or able to carry through such a fight. They are tied to the interests of the bourgeoisie or the parasitic bureaucracy of the Stalinist states. The imperialist bourgeoisie has long used its resources to sow divisions in the proletariat and even to accept the existence of a privileged layer, a "labour aristocracy", whose living standards were substantially better than those of the mass of the working class. This section of the working class formed the principal basis for a "labour bureaucracy" whose role was to negotiate with capital and whose spontaneous political outlook, therefore, was one of class collaboration.
In Europe, by 1914, the mass workers' parties had become dominated by the politics of the collaborators. This was true both of parties like the British Labour Party, which had been a reformist party from its foundation, and of the Social Democratic parties which maintained a formal adherence to Marxism. It culminated in the betrayal of the working class by the leaders of the Second (Socialist) International. In 1914 they became recruiting sergeants for the imperialist war. Then, as a wave of revolutions swept Europe (1917-23) they openly sided with bourgeois counter-revolution against the working masses.
Social Democracy thus took on its fundamental shape. It became strategically wedded both to the capitalist economy and the capitalist state, albeit in the idealised forms of state capitalism and bourgeois democracy. This was true even where capitalism had not yet developed fully-fledged labour aristocracies and bureaucracies. In Russia, for example, the Mensheviks, arguing for a long period of bourgeois democracy as a necessary stage of development, opposed the workers' revolution and took up arms against it. For the reformists, direct action and military force were measures that could only be utilised against the opponents of their bourgeois democratic goals, never as means of defeating the opponents of the working class.
The degeneration of the Comintern
The Comintern was formed out of the consistent fighters against Social Democracy's betrayals during the post-1917 revolutionary period. In its first four congresses the Comintern began to re-elaborate the revolutionary programme for the imperialist epoch. But it degenerated into bureaucratic centrism after 1923 under the impact of the political counterrevolution in the Soviet Union. The goal of world revolution was replaced by the reactionary utopia of "socialism in one country". The centrist communist parties led the working class to bloody and unnecessary defeats in China (1927) and Germany (1933).
After the defeat of the German masses in 1933, Trotsky considered that the Comintern had become irreformable. Later that year he declared that the Comintern, having failed to recognise and to correct its mistakes, was, whilst still bureaucratic centrist, irreformable and, "dead for the purposes of revolution". He, therefore, demanded, in the first instance, the building of a new party in Germany and then a new International world-wide, although the Stalinists had not yet definitively passed over to the camp of counter-revolution.
In 1934-35 the Comintern completed its evolution into a counter-revolutionary International. It concluded a strategic alliance with the bourgeoisie of the so called "democratic" imperialisms in the name of a new "strategy", that of the popular front. This class collaborationist policy was imposed on the sections of the Comintern by the Kremlin bureaucracy, in order to satisfy its diplomatic needs. The Stalinist bureaucracy, trying to establish a utopian "peaceful coexistence" with "democratic" imperialism and its allies, transformed the Communist Parties of those states into reformist parties preaching collaboration and "peaceful co-existence" between classes. It commended to the masses the defence of their own imperialisms, thus following Social Democracy into the ranks of counter-revolution. The turn to social patriotism coincided with the liquidation of the old Bolshevik vanguard in the Moscow Show Trials. In the second phase of the Second World War, after the Nazi invasion of the USSR, the Stalinists in non-Axis countries became super-patriots and, in countries occupied by the Nazis or at war with Germany, gained a new mass following.
Today, these parties are hostile to the proletarian revolution, the self emancipation of the working class and the dictatorship of the proletariat based on soviets. Despite the stolen banner of communism they remain hostile to the goal of a communist, i.e. a classless and stateless, society. As such they are not the opposite of Social Democracy but its twin, sharing with it the ideology of social patriotism and reformism. The loyalty of the Stalinist parties to their own bourgeoisies cannot be as total as that of the Social Democrats because of the support they give to, and receive from, the bureaucracy of the degenerated workers' state. Despite the advanced tendencies to "social democratisation" exhibited by certain Parties they cannot simply evolve into Social Democracy without a rupture. Even where the Stalinist parties have virtually eclipsed their Social Democratic rivals to become the major working class parties with a political practice essentially the same as the Social Democrats of other countries, their differing origins, structures and traditions set them apart, both in the eyes of the working class and of the bourgeoisie. Nonetheless, the division between Social Democracy and Stalinism is a division within reformism. Neither can be thought to have evolved into purely bourgeois parties, without internal splits, simply because of their ideological abandonment of programmatic pledges to "social ownership" or the "proletarian dictatorship". For this, a rupture with their organic links to the proletariat would have to occur. Even fascism could not completely extinguish Social Democratic and Stalinist reformism. Their existence will only be ended when revolutionaries have won political dominance in the class.
Both the Stalinist and Social Democratic parties are servants of the bourgeois world order, yet both are rooted in organisations that the proletariat has created to fight for its class interests. Both are dominated by a privileged bureaucracy that selves the imperialist bourgeoisie. The fundamental roots of Social Democracy are within capitalist society. Stalinism's historic roots lie in the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet Union and, therefore, in post-capitalist property relations. But Stalinism is no less a servant of the bourgeoisie than Social Democracy. Through its political dictatorship of the Soviet Union, and the other degenerate workers' states, it blocks the advance to socialism and discredits the very goal of a classless, stateless society communism. It blocks the internationalisation of the revolution, spreading chauvinism and class collaboration. It objectively promotes the potential for capitalist restoration within the workers' states and, in a decisive crisis, will provide in its upper layers the cadres for social counter-revolution.
The contradictory character that Stalinism and Social Democracy share is best summed up in the characterisation that they are bourgeois workers' parties. Neither is qualitatively preferable to the other. Of course, the fact that a party possesses a Social Democratic or Stalinist ideology does not, of itself, prove that it is a bourgeois workers' party. Significant numbers of parties of the Socialist International are bourgeois nationalist parties without any decisive organic links to their own proletariat. On the other hand there are Stalinist parties whose social base is the peasantry or the urban or rural petit-bourgeoisie. Yet, as world tendencies, both retain the character of bourgeois workers' parties
In certain countries towards the end of the Second World War revolutionary struggles developed (e.g. in Italy, the Balkans and France). But the combined forces of Social Democracy and Stalinism resolutely dissipated the spontaneous will of the masses to settle accounts with their discredited bourgeoisies. The Social Democratic parties and the Communist Parties, having performed their role as agents of democratic counter-revolution, were thrust to one side by the capitalists who then installed, wherever possible, openly bourgeois parties at the helm of the booming economies of the 1950s and 1960s.
The late 1960s initiated a new period of intense class struggle in the imperialist heartlands, invariably started from below by a confident and well organised working class. Throughout Europe the Stalinist and Social Democratic leaders and their trade union allies successfully fought to contain these struggles, to keep them within the limits of legality and official organisation. In France, Portugal and Spain, Stalinism and Social Democracy were given the chance to demonstrate yet again their counter-revolutionary loyalty to capitalism. With serious defeats in many countries of Western Europe by the mid 1970s, the European workers' movement was again thrown back and pacified for the next period.
By the onset of the second major recession, that of 1979-82, the existing leaderships had successfully demobilised working class resistance, opening the proletariat of the imperialist countries to a decade of austerity, anti-union laws and attacks on democratic rights. In government the traitors were only too happy to preside over and to initiate these attacks. Thus in the 1980s the crisis of leadership in the imperialist heartlands takes the form of the inability of the working class to resist the attacks of the Thatcherite-Reaganite economic liberals with its own existing parties, unions and politics, With the discrediting of Keynesian, social-liberal welfarism, with its "mixed economy" and state intervention in the economy, the Social Democratic and Stalinist Parties are thrown into ideological and policy crisis. The bourgeoisie does not want their old programme and, at the same time, that programme is pitifully inadequate to the needs of a working class hit by austerity and unemployment. The trade union bureaucracy cannot mount effective resistance to the attacks. The centrist forces of the 1970s are shrunken and demoralised. Yet the working class has fought back against its enemies. Massive and bitter workers' struggles have marked the 1980s, but not one of them has been able to gain a decisive victory. Only a new leadership and a new programme can solve the chronic crisis in the workers' movement of the imperialist heartlands. . In the degenerate(d) workers' states, the Stalinist bureaucracy has f I managed to discredit the very idea of socialism and communism in the r I eyes of the working class. The ruling castes have failed to legitimise their role in these societies, have failed to overcome the fundamental objection to their very existence: they are unnecessary to-indeed are a drain upon- the system of planned property relations.
In the post-war decades this caste has tried to shore up its rule by lurching from market experiments (to overcome stagnation) to a tightening of bureaucratic command in the economy. This experience has created factional strife within the bureaucracies and even political openings for an opposition from below.
The working class of the degenerate(d) workers' states has repeatedly proved itself to be the most determined force in this opposition. More than once it has hurled itself against bureaucratic privilege and political oppression. In the post-war era this struggle has taken the workers to the brink of proletarian political revolution. This has been demonstrated by the creation of soviets (Hungary 1956) and proto-soviet bodies (the inter-factory committees in Poland 1980 and China 1989).
But the absence of a political revolutionary strategy means that it has been defeated in every major political revolutionary crisis. Its spontaneous struggles have generated ideas that have served both to leave the power of the bureaucracy intact and, in certain instances, to positively strengthen the forces for capitalist restoration.
In Hungary and Poland in 1956 misplaced hopes in a section of the bureaucracy led the working class to ultimate defeat. Syndicalism and trade unionism, as with Solidarnosc in Poland, led the struggle away from the goal of political power and diverted it into a utopian struggle for independent trade unions co-existing with bureaucratic rule. Even the left wing of Solidarnosc peddled the illusion that self-managed enterprises rather than workers' management of the centralised planning mechanisms could overcome the crisis of the command economy.
In the USSR, nationalism strengthens the hand of bourgeois and clerical restorationists. In Eastern Europe and China, the workers aspire to parliamentary democracy, a sentiment that springs from the experience of a stifling autocracy. The bloody slaughter of the courageous forces of China's "Democracy Movement" by the tyrants of the Chinese Communist Party, served only to strengthen the bourgeois democratic current within the opposition movement.
But these hopes in "democracy", emptied of a working class content, are a cruel deception, one fostered by imperialism to ease the passage of the masses of these countries into the camp of capitalist exploitation. Without revolutionary leadership, and a revolutionary programme, the break up of Stalinism in its heartlands will benefit only a ruling minority inside these states. By contrast a majority of the multi-national firms within the imperialist countries will prosper.
Without revolutionary leadership the potential for political revolution, embodied in the events of Hungary 1956 and China 1989, cannot be realised. Without such leadership the ruling Stalinist parties will continue to be either the handmaidens of capitalist restoration or the harbingers of military bureaucratic retribution.
Stalinism against permanent revolution
The counter-revolutionary character of Stalinism is also expressed in its violent opposition to the perspective and programme of permanent revolution in the semi-colonies and wherever bourgeois democratic questions assume a revolutionary importance. Social Democracy has been less enduring in the semi-colonies. In these countries the labour aristocracy and labour trade union bureaucracy has been less firmly established because of the under-developed nature of capitalism. Also the more craven legalism and parliamentarism of Social Democracy has ensured that it more completely disappears when democracy and parliaments themselves fall victim to Bonapartism or dictatorship. From Indonesia through Chile to South Africa today, Stalinism has clung to the perspective of a democratic stage, which excludes the fight for working class power, but embraces all kinds of bourgeois, petit bourgeois, clerical and military Bonapartist allies. This popular frontist strategy which ushered in democratic counter-revolution after 1945 has resulted since then in bloody and decisive defeats in key revolutionary situations.
In Indonesia the PKI, the largest Stalinist party in the capitalist world, entered the left nationalist government of Sukarno in 1965, claiming it to be at the head of a "people's state". Unarmed and unwarned by their leaders, the masses of the PKI were then slaughtered by the military. This disaster bears direct comparison with events in China in 1927 and Germany in 1933.
In Chile, Stalinism and the Social Democratic Socialist Party led the workers and poor peasants to disaster. Allende's government, installed in 1970, was a popular front whose programme was limited to reforms. Allende renounced from the outset the arming of the workers and guaranteed the reactionary high command a monopoly of armed force.
Nevertheless, spontaneous working class militancy led to the creation of cordones industrial, proto-soviets, and even badly armed militias. It led to demands for expropriations which Allende stood firmly against. Economic crisis and sabotage created the climate for a coup d'etat by Pinochet in September 1973, which left tens of thousands dead, tortured or imprisoned and hundreds of thousands forced to flee the country. In Iran, the Stalinist Tudeh Party participated in the mass overthrow of the Shah, only to support the imposition of Khomeini's Islamic Republic. In the name of revolutionary loyalty the Tudeh assisted Islamic reaction in the slaughter of masses of workers, leftists and Kurdish rebels. In return Khomeini unleashed his repressive apparatus against the Tudeh itself.
As the leading force within the ANC, the South African Communist Party squandered a revolutionary opportunity with its policy of using the township revolts to seek negotiations with the "enlightened" wing of South African imperialism. Now, it is beating a retreat from all forms of revolutionary activity in the interests of the "global stability" sought by the Kremlin. The bankruptcy of Stalinism and Social Democracy has prolonged the life of bourgeois and petit bourgeois nationalism among wide sections of the semi-colonial working class. Despite their occasional ability to speak and act more radically than the workers' parties, the mass nationalist movements and parties remain incapable of solving the plight of the workers and peasants. Garcia's APRA, the Mexican PRI, the FSLN, the PLO, and Sinn Fein all remain strategically tied to capitalism. Their acts of defiance against imperialism are carried out only so long as the working class is absent, as an independent force, from the struggle. Once challenged by the distinct demands of the exploited, these "anti-imperialists" become the abject defenders of imperialism.
Unless a revolutionary party can dislodge all these forces from the leadership of the working class they threaten to repeat their mistakes in the mighty class battles ahead. To prevent this it is essential, in what remains of the twentieth century that the class conscious vanguard of workers and poor peasants throughout the world is regrouped around an international transitional programme.
Chapter 3 - A programme of transitional demands
The present period is punctuated by defensive mass economic struggles in the imperialist countries, by actual or latent political revolutionary crises in the degenerate(d) workers' states, and by pre-revolutionary and revolutionary crises in the semi-colonial countries. This continuing unevenness makes it impossible to speak, as Trotsky did in 1938, of a general world pre-revolutionary situation. But this in no way detracts from the urgency of arming the working class movement with a transitional programme.
Only such a programme can ensure that the gains made by the masses in this or that partial struggle, are built upon and consolidated and not stolen from them by the forces of reaction at the earliest opportunity. Only such a programme can resolve the fundamental contradiction that afflicts the international workers' movement: on the one hand the readiness of the masses to defend their gains, and even take the revolutionary offensive; whilst on the other, established leaderships are still capable of demobilising and betraying these same struggles.
A transitional programme strives to address this subjective weakness by building a bridge for the masses between their immediate defensive struggles and the struggle for socialist revolution. This bridge takes the form of an interlinked series of demands which, in their entirety, constitute an overt and direct challenge to capitalist rule. But revolutionaries are not sectarians. They fight for minimum demands, and in every partial struggle revolutionaries are the most thorough and most meticulous tacticians and organisers. We stand in the front line trenches of every struggle of the working class, no matter how partial. For this reason it would be false to counter pose the transitional programme to the existing struggles of the masses as an ultimatum.
But it is a centrist distortion of the transitional programme to dislocate individual demands entirely from the interlinked system and present them as thinly disguised isolated trade union demands. Similarly any attempt to present transitional demands as structural reforms of capitalism is grossly opportunist. The very purpose of transitional demands is to mobilise the masses against capitalism. The task of the revolutionary vanguard, therefore, is to use particular demands in the immediate struggles of the masses within the context of a fight for the programme as a whole.
In practice this will mean agitation within a particular struggle for focused, relevant transitional demands whilst making propaganda for the programme as a whole through the explanation of what the realisation of this or that demand will pose in the next phase of struggle. How is this gain to be consolidated, how can we prevent a counter-attack by the bosses? The relationship 'between such agitation and propaganda, the point at which propaganda is superseded by mass agitation, will have to be determined in response to the scope, tempo and intensity of the struggle, the transitional character of the system of demands is expressed by several features. In the first place such demands address the fundamental economic and political needs of the masses as determined by the objective situation. The demands do not depend for their correctness on their acceptability to the reformist consciousness of the masses; nor are they invalidated if the capitalists or the Stalinist bureaucrats are forced to grant such demands. Secondly, transitional demands seek to organise the masses independently of the open political representatives of the bourgeoisie and their reformist agents within the labour bureaucracy. This we strive to do through unions, factory committees, workers' councils and the revolutionary party.
Mobilised around these demands in such organisations the working class challenges the rule of the capitalists. It encroaches on this rule in the factory, office and school, on the picket line and on the streets, at the level of government itself. To this end each transitional demand embodies a fight for some element of direct workers' control over the capitalists. In establishing even elementary workers' control over production in the battle to protect jobs, the struggle will be forced onto a higher level. The question is posed: who is the power in the factory, the workers or the boss? In turn a successful struggle at plant level puts new challenges before the workers in relation to other branches of industry and to society as a whole.
In addition, the system of workers' control, by training the masses in running the factories, prepares them for the tasks ahead under the dictatorship of the proletariat. Thus transitional demands are both the means of transition from today's immediate struggles to a revolutionary assault on the whole capitalist regime and they are a school, a means of educating workers, in the tasks of the transition to socialism itself.
Against the capitalist offensive
The concerted offensive of the capitalists to resolve their crises and establish economic recovery has taken a heavy toll on the living conditions of the world working class and the oppressed peasantry. High prices, reaching the level of hyper-inflation in some semi-colonies, and mass unemployment are the cost of temporary stabilisation. To preserve its fighting strength, the working class is obliged to defend its right to work and earn a living wage. It is forced to defend and extend the welfare systems conceded by the bourgeoisie-the so called social wage. It is essential to advance demands that seek to put an end to the struggle for survival. In each country we fight for a legally guaranteed minimum wage at a rate decided by the labour movement not the bosses. This in no way implies that collective agreements limit themselves to such a minimum. The working class must constantly strive to advance beyond the minimum wage, which is merely a safety net to combat low pay and poverty for 'the most oppressed section of workers.
Inflation
Under conditions where the bosses use rising prices to pauperise the workers we fight to protect collective agreements against every price rise imposed by the bosses. To this end we fight for a sliding scale of wages which guarantees a rise to match any rise in the cost of living. Of course the bosses will try to dupe the masses with phoney indices to prove that the cost of living is not rising. Against this trickery we fight for a workers' I Cost of living index, assessed and decided upon by price watch committees delegates elected from the workplaces and the working class communities: the housing estates, the workers' districts, the barrios and shanty towns, the organisations of working class women and of proletarian consumers. In conditions of hyper-inflation further measures will be needed to protect the exploited and oppressed from starvation, the destruction of their security and meagre savings. They must fight for control over the necessities of life. This means workers' control over the food industry, the large farms, processing plants, transport and supermarket chains. It means establishing direct commercial links between the workers and peasants over the exchange of goods. It entails the building of workers' and peasants' committees to control food pricing and distribution.
But to bring a halt to hyper-inflation the workers must seize control of the banks; force their complete nationalisation including the confiscation of the assets of the bourgeoisie and the foreign multinationals. We demand action to prevent the transfer of capital abroad, the immediate repudiation of the foreign debt and the cessation of all interest payments on it. The savings of the workers, peasants and petit bourgeoisie should be guaranteed at pre-hyperinflationary values, all these measures point to the necessity for a state monopoly of foreign trade and the introduction of democratic planning by the producers. To carry through a workers' and peasants' programme against inflation a government of these classes is the indispensable instrument. Without this the bourgeoisie will use hyper-inflation to demoralise the workers and turn the peasantry and petit bourgeoisie against them (Bolivia 1985-86). It will try to solve the inflationary crisis through crushing the workers and imposing savage deflationary measures-slashing of the state budgets for health, education, cuts in wages and closures of factories and mines. Inflation and deflation are both weapons of the bourgeoisie to break the revolutionary momentum of the working class. Against both we rally the masses to a programme which insists "Make the rich pay"!
The scourge of unemployment
Mass unemployment is today a permanent feature of every capitalist country. In the semi-colonies the collapse of raw material prices on the world market leads to the devastation of entire industries, while agribusiness has driven millions of landless peasants into the cities where, unable to find work, they are forced down into the ranks of the lumpen proletariat. In the imperialist heartlands capitalist restructuring has left millions on the scrap heap of unemployment. Against this scourge our programme advances the demand for work for all regardless of sex, race, age, creed or sexual orientation. This demand is only realisable on the road of militant direct action: strikes against redundancies, occupations against closures, militant protests by the organisations of the unemployed. Such struggles must set as their goal the achievement of a sliding scale of hours. Under the regime of workers' control work should be shared amongst all the workers in an enterprise, and the working week reduced to facilitate this work-sharing. Under no circumstances should wages be reduced if hours are reduced. This is a conscious generalisation and revolutionary extension of the demands spontaneously being raised by workers for the 35 hour week with no loss of pay (Britain, Germany) or "30 for 40" (USA).
For those whom the capitalists leave on the dole queue we fight for work or full pay. If the bosses will not provide work we demand unemployment benefit, paid by the state at the level decided by the labour movement. When capitalism fails to provide socialised care and women are prevented from taking up full time work we demand full benefits. But this demand must be combined with the struggle for social provision for children, the sick and the disabled so that women are able to work. Full benefits should be demanded for all those whom capitalism casts aside from social production as a result of age, disability or sickness. For the elderly we demand the right to retire at an age agreed by the labour movement within each country. Pensions, indexed against inflation must be paid by the state and set at a level, decided by the labour movement that will maintain the living standards of the elderly. For those above the retirement age who wish to continue to work, jobs must be made available at full union rates.
The unemployed themselves must not be left as bystanders in the fight against unemployment. Communists strive to build fighting unity between the unemployed and the employed. We are for the right of the unemployed to be in the unions with full rights but reduced dues. We are also for the building of democratic mass unemployed workers' movements, with substantial financial support from the labour movement, with no strings attached to such funding and with full rights of representation within the labour movement. Such organisations will play a role in preventing the unemployed falling prey to the ideology of fascism (or other reactionary ideologies and movements), criminalisation and lumpenisation. They are a vital means of pressuring employed workers to take up an active struggle in defence of their unemployed brothers and sisters. In order to integrate all the jobless into the production process and to allow them to do socially useful work, we struggle relentlessly for a programme of public works under workers' control, paid for by the capitalist state. Everywhere the need for such a programme is evident in the imperialist heartlands all manner of public amenities are in need of improvement or renovation. In the semi-colonies the masses live in squalor, deprived of the most basic of amenities, (housing, water sanitation and fuel, education and health care). The programme of public works seeks to satisfy these burning needs-building houses, hospitals schools and amenities-as well as provide jobs for millions. More, it trains the working class to run the economy in a manner that meets their needs It is a school for the planned economy itself.
Allied to the fight for a programme of public works is the fight for or to defend and extend, the welfare provision that goes some way to protect the working class from the worst effects of capitalist exploitation Capitalism is not only willing to sacrifice our standard of living to satiate its lust for profits, it is prepared to sacrifice our right to be educated, t( enjoy what leisure time it leaves us and to be cared for when we are sick What more eloquent testimony to the rotten bankruptcy of capitalism could be required than the fact that the USA, the richest and most' powerful country in the world, has one of the highest infant mortality rates of all the industrialised countries. To combat such iniquities we fight for free education, free public amenities and leisure facilities and a free health service for all. These rights must be guaranteed by state funding at levels determined by the masses themselves. Such provision must be directed, not by capitalist appointed managers, but though workers control of the public services.
The rapacious search for profit degrades and destroys individuals well beyond the factory or office. Under capitalism the use of drugs drive hundreds of thousands beyond the limits of enjoyment and stimulation to the wastelands of dependency and enslavement: alcoholism and narcotic addiction wrecks the lives of many potential class fighters against the system which breeds such dependencies. We demand the decriminalisation of drug use and the confiscation of the massive profits that the narcotic barons make from illegal import and export of drugs. We are for a state monopoly, overseen by the workers' and peasants' price commit tees, of the sale of drugs for pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical use
We demand scientifically based education and information on the dangers of the use of particular narcotics for non-medical purposes.
There will be no shortage of bosses, bourgeois politicians, economic "experts" and reformist apologists for capitalism, who will "prove" that our demands on wages, jobs and services are unrealisable and cannot be afforded. To this we answer, we cannot afford to live without the achievement of our demands. We do not start from what the capitalist system claims it can afford. Throughout history our every demand has been met with the cry that our rulers cannot afford them. Yet we have won them because what can be afforded is decided by struggle: in sum reforms are the by-product of the revolutionary struggle against capitalism. If the bourgeois state rejects the demands of the masses for wages, work or social services with the argument that the budget would go into deficit, then we propose a revolutionary programme of taxation.
The workers in the factories and in the banks should calculate the fixed and liquid assets of the employers. On the basis of this capital and other possessions a strongly progressive wealth tax should be levied against them. With this revenue it will be possible to begin financing the needs of the masses. On the other hand, indirect taxation on the items of mass consumption and income tax for the property less masses should be scrapped. The progressive income and wealth tax on the capitalists must be controlled by the workers in order to uncover evasion and corruption by financial experts. Also, any attempt to unload the extra taxation of the capitalists onto the prices of mass consumption goods must be prevented by workers' control. If the capitalists refuse to pay their taxes, seek to evade them or claim inability to pay, then their assets must be confiscated.
The trade unions
In much of the world trade unions are durable, mass organisations of the working class. Revolutionaries must therefore have a central orientation to the unions, despite their reactionary leaderships. A correct revolutionary intervention into the unions requires a clear understanding of their nature, their limitations under capitalism, and a coherent strategy for their transformation into instruments of revolutionary struggle. 'Trade unionism on its own represents the class struggle carried on within the boundaries of capitalism. The trade unions have, generally, constituted themselves as elementary organisations for the defence of the working class against the excesses of capitalist exploitation, and of achieving the means of subsistence and improving the living standard of workers and their families. As such, pure trade unionism accepts the wages system, the system of wage slavery. As a form of consciousness remains on the terrain of bourgeois society, pure trade union consciousness is, therefore, a form of reformist, bourgeois consciousness inside the working class. However, the system of capitalist exploitation generates the class struggle, even if initially on a purely economic and fragmented basis. It does so because the bourgeoisie is driven by competition to lower it labour costs and to increase the intensity or length of the working day: This class struggle creates the objective basis for a challenge to the reformist limits of pure trade unionism. The working class resorts to class struggle methods that threaten to go beyond the bounds of reformist trade union solutions. This objective gives trade union organisation a contradictory character. On the one hand they reflect the self-limiting reformism of pure trade union consciousness. On the other they represent, intermittently, the revolutionary potential of a working cla1 compelled to use strikes, occupations and picket lines. They can the serve as "schools of war" for the working class.
The contradictory nature of trade union organisation reveals itself in many ways. Even with the expansion of the proletariat in the semi-colonies; world the trade unions still only organise a minority of the international working class. The established bureaucracies are characterised by conservative sluggishness in their attempts to bring in new layers of worker fearful that an influx of such workers will challenge their privileges and their quiet lives. The unions tend to organise the labour aristocracy, the skilled and more privileged sections of the class. They reflect the sectionalism and narrow craft consciousness of such layers. They demonstrate a self-defeating tendency to spurn politics, in the name of neutrality though at the same time the leaders often deliver union members' vote to reformist or liberal bourgeois parties.
Most importantly unions are generally dominated by a reformi1 bureaucracy. In the imperialist countries this bureaucracy arose out of the labour aristocracy during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and was centred on the organised skilled workers. In many semi colonies a bureaucracy has also arisen, again out of a labour aristocracy albeit one smaller and with fewer material privileges than that of the imperialist countries. This has been patronised by bourgeois nationalist or reformist forces interested in securing a base in society for themselves (as in Mexico, Argentina). In other cases, where an aristocracy of labour has either not yet developed or is not sizeable enough to influence the unions or reformist/nationalist parties, a reformist bureaucracy has constituted itself often through links with the international trade union movement and with the material aid of the bureaucracy of the imperialist countries.
The trade union bureaucracy is a distinct caste that owes its position and economic privileges (no matter how marginal they may be) to its role as a negotiator in the class struggle between workers and their employers. Its privileged position is often enhanced through its incorporation into the lower echelons of the capitalist state. To maintain its position the bureaucracy has an objective interest in maintaining the system of class exploitation and consequently strives to limit struggles and betray them. It acts as the labour lieutenant of capital inside the working class. It is the sworn enemy of militant class struggle and genuine working class democracy.
By contrast the rank and file of the unions have no objective interest in maintaining the system of capitalist exploitation. At moments of heightened or generalised class struggle the fundamental tendencies of rank and file workers stand revealed as the exact opposite of those of the bureaucracy. In the face of attacks from the bosses the rank and file repeatedly resort to direct action to defend their own interests. In the face of sectional divisions they strive to organise the unorganised and unite with rank and file workers from other industries and unions. And against the "non-political" stance of the bureaucracy there are countless examples of rank and file workers seeking to use their organisation for explicitly political objectives. The rank and file's fundamental interests are thus not merely distinct from those of the bureaucracy but in direct contradiction to them.
To develop the elementary class consciousness of the rank and file into revolutionary consciousness, it is necessary to fight for the revolutionary transformation of the unions. Either they will be turned into organisations for the subordination of the working class to the interests of capital; they will become instruments of revolutionary struggle against capital. There can be no such thing as trade union neutrality in the class struggle. The outcome of the struggle to transform the unions depends, in the first instance, on the organised strength of revolutionary communism within them. We strive to build communist fractions in the unions, founded by members of the revolutionary party and its sympathisers, openly challenging for leadership on the basis of the revolutionary programme.
To achieve our goal of ousting the bureaucracy we advocate rank and file opposition movements committed to rank and file democracy, the election and accountability of all officials and a programme of class struggle. We fight all restrictions on rank and file democracy, all bureaucratically imposed divisions, and all attempts to keep the unions "above politics" or rather, free from revolutionary influence. We oppose all witch hunts of revolutionaries and militants. We resist all efforts to sell out or sell short the struggles of the working class. We defend the right of the oppressed (women, youth, sexual and racial minorities) to their own caucuses. We are for trade union unity on a class struggle, democratic basis and for industrial unions.
The tactic of the rank and file opposition movement (modelled on the Minority Movement experience in Britain in the early 1920s) is not counter posed to the building of communist fractions in the union. It is a movement within which the communists constitute a fraction but seek to become a mass force, and through which they seek to gain leadership on the basis of an action programme of transitional demands. It is the form of the united front suitable to the unions where the communists constitute a minority but have the possibility of mobilising non-communist workers.
A history of reformist betrayal and the close integration of some unions into the state have led many sectarians to abandon the mass organisations and build purified trade unions, or "red unions", which do not comprise the masses or even significant sections of the working class. This policy of dual unionism is, in fact, a form of cowardly abstentionism. It abandons the masses to the bureaucracy. It leaves them under their influence and destined to defeat. Our policy is that we do not split from the reformist mass unions as a substitute for winning revolutionary leadership within them. We fight within them for full class independence from both the state and the bosses, organisationally and politically. Working class militants should even work within company or state controlled unions, if they group together large masses of workers, but only in order to encourage these masses to break to form a real class union. We do not fetishise trade union unity and are prepared to split with unions or confederations which become real scab organisations. It is especially the case that we should cut all links with gangster syndicates and with politicians of the openly bourgeois parties who pretend to be "friends of labour".
Nor are we trade union fetishists. Trade union organisations, by their very nature, must seek to unite the broadest layers. They are heterogeneous, including backward as well as advanced workers. They cannot therefore replace the politically selected vanguard-the revolutionary party. Unlike syndicalists or industrial unionists we do not see the unions as ends in themselves or as substitutes for the party and for workers' councils. Only the party can represent the strategic interests of the entire proletariat. Only the party can channel the many rivers through which the class struggle flows towards the defeat of the capitalist system itself. Trade unions, even ones led by revolutionaries, are but one of the many instruments for achieving our end-the socialist revolution. Only the triumph of the party and its programme in the unions, as in all other mass organisations of struggle, can guarantee a lasting victory for the proletariat against the profit system.
Workers' control and factory committees
The system of capitalist exploitation requires that the bosses control every aspect of the production process. The search for higher productivity and profits endangers safety, erodes health and intensifies exploitation. Increasingly, therefore, the working class is obliged to counter capitalist control with workers' control so that even basic and partial demands are met. For this reason the revolutionary vanguard places the struggle for workers' control at the centre of its propaganda and agitation. Against capitalist exploitation we fight for workers' control of production. In essence this means that we exercise the right of veto over the plans and actions of the bosses in every aspect of production, from the most basic level (speed of work, rights to breaks) to the higher level of factory administration itself (numbers employed, wages paid, production engaged in). We reject, categorically, the thousand and one schemes for worker participation that are advanced to try and incorporate the working ?ass into the machinations of capitalism. These aim to seduce the workers into taking responsibility for the failings of capitalist production. They are designed to secure agreement for attacks on jobs, wages and conditions. Workers' control at the factory level is incomplete if it is not extended to capitalist production as a whole. The capitalists keep their books and accounts a closely guarded secret from the workers (though not from each other). By these means they cheat and manipulate the working class. Against the mud of business secrecy, therefore, we fight for the opening of all the books and ledgers of the capitalist class-its firms and companies, its banks, its state-to the inspection of the workers themselves. The purpose of such control is not to concede defeat if this or that company reveals itself to be genuinely bankrupt. The pain of individual capitalists is not our fault. Nor is it our concern. No, the abolition of business secrecy is designed to expose the bankruptcy of the capitalist system as a whole, its dishonesty and mismanagement of the economy, its parasitism, its tendency to squander the wealth that workers create, and its grossly inequitable methods of distributing that wealth.
However, the greatly increased application of science and technology to production since 1945, demands still further-reaching forms of workers' control. Because science and technology are organised by capital the purpose and the consequences of the 'introduction of new technologies become ever more hidden from the workforce. They get to know about them only through rationalisation, work hazards, intensification of work or through their disastrous effects on the environment. The question of workers' control over technical and scientific planning of the state and business can even become a question of immediate survival, not only for the workforce but also for the surrounding community. This has been demonstrated time and again from Bhopal to Chernobyl. Workers' control over the technical and scientific apparatus, however, means the workers overcoming the division between manual and mental work. Success along this road will enable technical and scientific workers to be won to workers' control committees operating in co-operation with the factory floor workers.
The tendencies towards increased state regulation of industry in the epoch of imperialism have led various reformists and centrists to advance schemes for alternative production within capitalism. Workers have even been called upon to "manage" certain enterprises under the auspices of reformist or nationalist governments. Alternative planning under capitalism is a utopia. Of course in deep economic and social crises we advance a plan of action for a revolutionary workers' government as a solution to the crisis. But even the most elementary plan, if it is to make headway against capitalist chaos and sabotage, must be grounded in workers' control of production on a nationwide scale. To dislocate such a plan from a revolutionary struggle for workers' control, to advocate workers' management on the terrain of capitalist society, is to play the role of meek advisers to the bankrupt capitalist system. Workers' control is not a means to achieve the socialist planned economy by stealth. It must rather fuel the revolutionary struggle for power in society as a whole and so serve as a pre-requisite for workers' management once the revolution has triumphed.
Reformist led trade unions are at best only partially suited to exercising workers' control of production. Craft divisions within the factories, often reflected in, and reinforced by, craft based union organisations, limit the ability of those unions to exercise control of production. Apart from special ad hoc control commissions established for specific purposes, the best form of organisation for conducting the struggle for workers' control is the factory committee. By organising all the workers in a factory regardless of trade, shop, union affiliation or membership, the factory committee is able to unite the whole workforce, direct it towards a daily struggle for control and challenge the power of the boardroom. Moreover, it can playa role in the struggle to transform the unions themselves into class struggle industrial unions. The factory committee must be based on direct democracy, with delegates who are recallable and in daily contact with the workers elected by shop and mass meetings.
As "unofficial" bodies the factory committees will be attacked and sabotaged by the bosses and bureaucrats alike. The real reason for this hostility is their potential as fighting organs of the proletariat. They represent-as the factory occupation does-a challenge to management's right to manage, to the sacrosanct nature of private property and to the power of the union "officials" over the workers. They establish a regime of dual power in the factory and their presence demands an answer to the question-who rules the factory, the workers or the bosses? As such they are characteristic of intense periods of class warfare. And, just as dual Power in society cannot last for a protracted period, nor can it in the factory. The factory committee is compelled to advance, ever more consciously, in the fight for workers' control. If it does not it risks either disintegration or incorporation. In Germany and Austria after the First World War factory committees arose as organs of struggle. However, the defeat of the revolutions in those countries led to the transformation of these committees into organs collaboration with the bosses. These committees are used by the union bureaucracy and the bourgeoisie as pillars of social peace. This experience demonstrates precisely the danger of incorporation if the factory committee fails to develop in a revolutionary direction. Where they do not exist the factory committees must be built from the outset as organs of workers' control. Where they exist as organs of bureaucratic control they must be totally transformed so that they can perform this function.
Defend the environment through workers' control!
All modes of production have resulted in disturbance of the environment but the imperialist epoch of capitalism has made possible damage on a qualitatively new scale. The capitalist mode of production has created an environmental problem which embraces both physical damage (to living organisms, ecosystems, and the ozone layer) and its consequent social and psychological effects on human beings (disease, starvation, mental stress). The combination of scientific and technological advance has created the potential of abundance for all of humanity. However, continued private ownership of the means of production in the context of a world dominated by the imperialist powers has created a fourfold threat to humanity. Nuclear war threatens the complete destruction of humanity; the regenerative capacity of the natural environment is jeopardised by the reckless destruction of vital components of the ecological system; the population itself is threatened by the inadequately controlled application of dangerous substances and processes; the social consequences of imperialism's world wide division of labour starves millions and turns urbanisation into an environmental hazard in its own right.
In the degenerate(d) workers' states similar consequences have been created by the rule of a bureaucratic caste. This caste resorts to methods of production which are geared to maximising output in the short term. The long term impact on the environment is discounted. Like the bourgeoisie the bureaucracy has developed science but is indifferent to its consequences for the living conditions of the masses and therefore of the effects of the application of that science to production. Here too fundamental progress requires the overthrow of the ruling power.
Although it has been the proletariat and the peasantry that have suffered most from capitalism's destructive capacities, the present threat was recognised on a large scale first by sections of the petit bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia of the imperialist countries. Since the second half of the 1970s, for example, in the Federal Republic of Germany and in Austria, but later also in France and Italy, single issue campaigns have multiplied and finally come together into a broad ecology movement. These movements were primarily of the petit bourgeoisie. For the first time their neighbourhoods, their children, their health were put at risk and, given their social and cultural advantages, they were able to make the environment a political issue; some even highlighted the effects on the semi colonial countries. The politics of this petit bourgeois layer were limited but progressive in that they posed the problem of environmental destruction in a systematic form. They undertook mass mobilisations and as a result the ecology question had an a impact on popular consciousness for the first time. Moreover they were successful in involving significant numbers of qualified and well paid workers. The mainly utopian, even explicitly reactionary, answers that they gave do not alter the progressive role that they played, given that the reformist dominated workers' organisations stood complacently on the side of their bourgeoisies on this question.
At the same time the solutions proposed by the environmentalists, reflecting the social positions of the petit bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia, did not challenge the rule of private property in the means of production or the bourgeois state. The strategies and tactics proposed, apart from often being ineffectual, were also diversions from the necessary task of mobilising the social and economic power of the working class. However, where these movements initiate mobilisations for objectives which defend or advance working class interests then common actions between the working class and its organisations and these petit bourgeois movements are possible. Our aim in this is to win the most advanced elements to a proletarian orientation and, thus, to split the petit bourgeois movement.
The working class has a vital interest in combating imperialism's endangering of the environment. Throughout its history it has fought to stop dangerous production methods and impose safety standards on the capitalists as a whole. Through forcing legislation on the ruling class it has made gains in these areas, helping to create a habitable environment in which to live. This struggle, while it continues and must intensify, cannot be irreversibly successful without the overthrow of capitalism. The most successful methods of struggle, even for immediate improvements, are the methods of the class struggle-local, national and international.
Despite the frequent complacency of the existing leadership of the trade unions, it is vital that the fight to impose working class solutions to the environmental question be taken into the mass organisations of the working class. This is an integral part of the struggle to wrench leadership of the trade unions away from the reformists. To ensure that workers ha' access to independent expert advice, we demand the formation of advise commissions on environmental and safety matters within the union!
Against dangerous processes and practices within plants we fight £ factory committees and trade unions to impose a veto and to oversee t] introduction, at the expense of profits, of safer technology or working, conditions. Where the danger extends beyond the plant we are for dire action involving the workers in the plant and the local community, with the aim of forcing the government to impose the use of safer method and materials. Wherever the bosses or their state deny danger or the economic viability in defence of dangerous plants we call for the open of all relevant accounts and records to workers' inspection. We reject the demand for the immediate closure of all nuclear power stations. That do not mean that we ignore the dangers created by nuclear power station Against the demand for immediate closure we counter pose the demand for inspection by the workers or their chosen representatives. The revolutionary party does not prejudge the decision of such a scientific enquiry. Where either a workers' enquiry or a labour movement commission recommends closure, or in the face of acute or immediate danger. We rely on the mobilisation of the working class to demand and enforce closure. In such cases we demand the defence of the living standards the workforce by the state.
We fight for workers' control over research and planning within the technical scientific institutions of companies and the state. This" involve revealing the full nature of research and development propos: and formulating health and safety demands in relation to them. It also mean devising other research objectives in the context of a programme of useful public works.
The environmental question for the working class is not only preventative struggle. Much damage has already been done and must repaired. We demand that within programmes of public works restoration of the environment be given a high priority. The provision of adequate sanitation and reliable drinking water in shanty towns is a burning need for millions. Integrated regional rehabilitation programmes in areas desertification are essential now in large areas of Africa. Resources need to be directed at the construction of river and sea defences in the monsoon regions. For all these programmes the bourgeoisie should be made to undertake the necessary repairs.
Many dangers cannot be counteracted at the level of plan t modification or closure. Atmospheric and marine pollution, the destruction of entire eco-systems by deforestation or by mono-culture, or the complete exhaustion of natural resources, are often international phenomena even if their effects are more noticeable in some countries before others. At the national and international level we are in favour of establishing legal safeguards for the environment-but we fight for them by the methods of proletarian class struggle and we place no trust in the imperialists' international agencies to police such standards even when established. None of these demands may be made permanent without the seizure of political and economic control by the working class from the capitalists and the establishment of democratically managed international planning. Only along this road will it be possible to move towards the eradication of the conflict between town and country and harmonise human production with nature.
Expropriation and nationalisation
The socialist programme is for the complete expropriation of the capitalist class, the destruction of their state and the establishment of workers' power. In the imperialist epoch a whole series of state capitalist nationalisations have been carried through either by "consensus" conservative and reformist governments in the imperialist nations or, in the semi colonies, by nationalist governments.
In the former, state capitalist nationalisations are generally favours to the capitalist class as whole. They ensure the survival of essential that are too unprofitable for individual capitalists to maintain. They usually provide products and services for other branches of the economy at cheap rates. They are also the means of bailing out bankrupt mismanagers who receive lavish compensation for their incompetence.
In the semi-colonies nationalisation has been a method whereby a weak or embryonic bourgeois class has gathered together the resources for capital accumulation formerly in the hands of imperialism. It has been essential for the growth of a national bourgeoisie. However, while this or that nationalisation may strike a blow against imperialism (Nasser in Egypt, the nationalisation of copper mining by Allende in Chile) and may represent concessions to the masses, it does not result in the expropriation of capitalism. Rather the rule of the capitalist class as a whole in a given sector, or sectors, of the economy is exercised by the capitalist state. Nationalisation dupes the masses into thinking that this or that part of the economy is "theirs", whereas in fact it is a deceitful method of managing capitalism, not a method of overthrowing it. At the same time the workers in the state capitalist enterprises are prevented from exercising any control over production.
Where the workers are called upon to co-manage, it is generally to save the skin of the enterprise or of the bourgeois regime that has carried through the nationalisation and finds itself, temporarily at least, in conflict with imperialism (Mexico in the 1930s, Bolivia in the 1950s). The same is true for worker-management "buy-outs" of ailing industries or plants. Here the workers, often in the guise of "co-operatives", engage in self exploitation; to maintain employment they are forced to ruthlessly hold back or cut wages. When these nationalised sectors are profitable again the capitalist state will have no compunction in handing back to the private capitalist the once nationalised enterprises at bargain prices (Egypt under Sadat, Britain under Thatcher) and the reformists and nationalists will not do anything serious to obstruct such handovers.
When the bosses engage in privatisation projects we recognise, despite our criticism of bourgeois nationalisations, that privatisation is a regressive step carried through at the expense of the working class. The working class is forced to pay for privatisations directly, through loss of jobs and often through wage cuts. General social benefits, union organisation and negotiating rights are the victims of privatisation. The working class paid for these measures indirectly too, since the taxes it has surrendered to the state paid for the nationalisations in the first place. When these firms are sold off the working class, unlike the old bosses, receives no compensation from the new private owners. And, at a more general level, the tasks of the transition to socialism are rendered more difficult by the existence of privatised companies.
While we do not regard nationalised industries as socialist we do recognise that their centralisation, in the hands of the state, will be a marked advantage for the workers' state during the period of transition.
We demand of the reformists and nationalists who claim to oppose capitalism and imperialism that, in government, they re-nationalise all privatised industries with no compensation and under workers' control.
Against reformist and nationalist claptrap we advance the slogan of expropriation. To destroy the economic domination of the capitalist class the working class needs political power. Nevertheless where the bosses try to close down a plant or even an industry we argue for expropriation under workers' control and with no compensation to the bosses. A nationalisation carried out on such a basis forces the bosses as a whole to pay, through the state, for the crisis of their system. Nor do we shrink from the call to expropriate whole sectors of industry and of the key utilities (transport, fuel and water production) as a means of combating the anarchy of capitalist production. Every gain made by the workers in forcing through such expropriation poses to them the need for the expropriation of further sectors of the economy, to prevent those industries seized by the workers from being sabotaged by the capitalists. To break the monopoly the big capitalists exercise over information and propaganda through their so-called free press, we advance the slogan of the nationalisation of the newspapers, the television companies and the other media, under workers' control and with no compensation to the media magnates. Far from preventing a free press, such a measure would enable the workers to end the capitalists' ability to spread lies, attack workers in struggle and make filthy propaganda perpetrating sexism, racism and heterosexism. At the same time we defend the right of the workers' organisations and their political parties to organise their own press independent of state control.
Although the strategic aim of the working class is the expropriation of all capital, the working class must take account of the tactical importance of neutralising certain small capitalists and petit bourgeois proprietors. For this reason this layer, often numerically very important in the semi-colonies, should be relieved of their onerous debts towards finance capital. The expropriation of capital, whether small or large, in a young workers' state is decided upon by the rhythm of the class struggle within the country and internationally, and by the degree of expropriation required at any given moment to break capitalist resistance and ensure the development of the economy. Similarly, compensation can be paid to expropriated small capitalists and petit bourgeois investors where possible, if this helps neutralise these social layers.
Expropriation of a branch of industry places the workers in conflict with those who control the flow of money and credit-the banks and finance houses. Against the sabotage of these parasites, whose economic regime ruins not only the workers but also section of the petit bourgeoisie and the peasantry, we advance the slogan for the expropriation of the banks and finance houses. Only thus can credit for the peasants be made cheap. Only thus can the account ledgers of society be opened to the watchful eyes of the workers. Only thus can the debts piled up in numerous oppressed countries be repudiated without the risk of immediate internal economic dislocation. And only thus can steps to end the scourge of hyper-inflation be taken by the masses. Workers' control of the banks and finance houses will ensure that the small savers, the working class home owners, the small farmers, and the peasants are not squeezed dry by rapacious financiers.
Expropriations of branches of industry and of the banks and finance houses is transitional to the complete economic liquidation of the capitalist class. Only then will real planning be possible, that is, production geared to the fulfilment of human need, not profit. Disproportions between branches of industry, endemic to the system of private ownership of the means of production, will be ended in progressive fashion. So too will the society in which constant over-production stands alongside unfulfilled need because useful goods must remain unsold if they cannot realise a profit. However, the expropriation of the capitalist class will provide the basis for socialist planning only if state power passes completely from the hands of the capitalists and the Stalinist bureaucrats into the hands of the workers.
From picket line defence to the workers' militia
All decisive conflicts in history have ultimately been settled by force of arms. The reformists who bleat about a peaceful road to socialism are either naive fools, unaware of how history is made, or cynical servants of the bourgeoisie. No ruling class has ever departed from the scene of history without a fight. The proletariat is the only class in history whose interests lie in the abolition of all classes. To achieve this it must establish its dictatorship over the exploiters through an armed insurrection. The preparation of the working class for that insurrection passes through a series of demands and actions, all focused on the defence of workers in struggle and the destabilisation and destruction of the forces of the capitalist state.
From the earliest days of capitalist society the working class has been met with violence at work when it has attempted to fight for its rights. In the face of such attacks it has developed its own means of defence the picket line. For this reason the bourgeois state tries to restrict it to an ineffective protest on the other hand workers who are serious about winning have tried to build the picket into a mass force capable of routing strike breakers, company thugs and state police alike. But no matter how large it is, the picket line is insufficient to ensure either its own total effectiveness or the proper defence of workers in struggle. The workers must organise their own defence in every struggle and, in so doing, lay the basis for the workers' militia.
The first step is the defence of the strike picket line, and of the factory or land occupation. Every time the workers and poor peasantry try to enforce their will they are met with repression. The agents of such repression vary according to place and circumstance. But whether the strike-breakers and their protectors are the police (Western Europe), the army (many of the semi-colonies), or paid gun-thugs and "national guardsmen" (the USA), their function is to physically smash the workers' picket line. In conditions of extreme crisis the bourgeoisie will resort to fascist gangs on the model of Mussolini’s black shirts or Hitler's brown shirts or to shadowy "death squads" linked to the armed forces in order to break the fighting strength of the working class.
The strike-breakers join the fray with confidence because they feel they have the full weight of the bourgeois state behind them. But their successes are in direct proportion to the lack of organisation inside the working class and poor peasantry. Special units of strikers, supported by the mass but specially drilled for the purpose of armed combat, can destroy this confidence and put the scab rabble to flight. Thus the picket line can be transformed from either a purely token gesture or a disorganised demonstration, into a disciplined and effective squadron of the working class army. Thus, too, can the first elements of a workers' militia be assembled. In all phases of this struggle we are for the mobilisation and training of proletarian women so that they can play a full part in the military organisations of the working class.
Of course building such organisation must be carried through with due care for the existing consciousness of the masses and their existing levels of organisation. In a strike or occupation, defence squads are required. Even in "peaceful" periods of the class struggle, using whatever means and organisations we can, we recognise the need to train young working class fighters for the battles ahead. But under no circumstances must the task be postponed. Delay will lead to defeat and defeat to the prolongation of class society.
For the break up of the armed might of the state
Alone, the workers' militia will not be able to smash the power of the bourgeois state. The armed forces of the ruling class will have to be broken from within as well as from without. As every revolutionary situation has shown, in a decisive showdown with the working class, sections of the armed forces (police, army, navy, air force) have wavered and broken with their capitalist masters.
The nature of the armed forces and police organisations differ in many pans of the globe. In general the police forces constitute the day to day repressive apparatus of the capitalist state. In emergencies, martial law situations and under military regimes the army will also play this direct repressive role. Everywhere, therefore, we oppose the utopian idea that these bodies of armed men/women can be democratised or transformed into a neutral force or ally of the working class. They must be smashed and replaced by a mass popular militia based on the workers and poor peasants.
However, the variation in composition and organisation of the armed forces (professional or conscript armies, poor peasant or proletarian recruits) requires different tactics to break them up. But all the tactics aim at destabilising and breaking the chain of command and discipline within them. To this end we prosecute the class struggle within the military. The officer corps constitutes the most irreformable and dedicated anti-working class vanguard of the ruling class. The workers must fight to organise the rank and file soldiers and the non-commissioned officers against the authority, the privileges and corruption of this caste. To guide this work we endeavour to build clandestine communist cells in the armed forces producing bulletins aimed at the rank and file.
As well as undermining discipline it is essential that communists support the legitimate grievances of the rank and file soldier. Only on such a basis can we hope to undermine the repressive role of the armed forces and win the rank and file to solidarise with the working class by, for example, refusing to attack demonstrations and pickets and refusing to torture prisoners. Therefore, we demand the right of rank and file soldiers and police to organise unions and political organisations, to circulate political literature and to strike.
Whilst it is not our duty to advocate better wages or conditions for the army or police of the capitalist state, we do support the struggles of the rank and file where these bring them into progressive conflict with the capitalist state. To this end we fight for an end to the barracks system and for the election of all officers by the rank and file. We fight for tribunals of the rank and file to try officers accused of brutality, corruption, plotting and reactionary coups. In pre-revolutionary situations we agitate for the soldiers to form councils and to send delegates to the local, regional and national workers' councils of the workers and peasants.
However, so long as the police, prison guards and army remain under the unbroken command of the bourgeois state there can be no question of admitting their unions or organisations into the ranks of the labour movement, including its national or local union federations.
In fighting for the destruction of the bourgeoisie's armed power we start from the maxim not a penny, not a person for this system. We condemn all workers' representatives who vote for military budgets or war credits under the pretext of the defence of the nation. From this it follows that we oppose the bourgeoisie's conscription of young workers into their armies. We oppose its introduction and its existence. But we do this not at all from the standpoint of pacifism. We are in favour of the right and opportunity of all to learn military skills and to bear arms. This includes the right of women to military training in bourgeois armies. Down with the capitalists' monopoly of the means of coercion! Military training should be organised in the workplace and in the working class communities, under trade union control and in conjunction with soldiers' committees.
We support the right of individuals to refuse to be conscripted into the armed forces, but to advocate such a step is an act of petit bourgeois pacifism. Revolutionary communists go into the armies where the workers are to be found and work for the revolution from within. Where mass movements exist against a reactionary imperialist war, but are under pacifist or reformist leadership, we give them critical support insofar as they obstruct or sabotage the war effort. But we insist that refusal to be enlisted will never deprive the bourgeoisie of its armed might.
Against bourgeois militarism, against imperialist war!
The proletariat is an international class which has no interest in defending the bourgeois nation state. In the imperialist countries workers must therefore be unswerving in their defeatism. The Leninist position developed during 1914-18 retains all its validity. Revolutionary defeatism is based on the principle that the main enemy of the working class is the bourgeoisie in it own country. The defeat of its "own" imperialist bourgeoisie, as a result of the revolutionary struggle of the working class for power, is a lesser evil than the victory of the ruling class as a result of class collaboration and the sacrificing of proletarian independence during the war. The social chauvinists, espousing social peace, will argue that during a war labour should bow to the needs of the "nation" by speeding up production and accepting legal restraints on the right to strike.
By contrast, we must fight for no working class participation in the war effort. The workers' organisations must turn the imperialist war into a civil war. Faced with a war against a semi-colony or a workers' state, workers must give solidarity and aid to the enemy of the imperialists. In a conflict with a workers' state, no matter how degenerated and whatever the military means involved in the conflict (nuclear, biological, chemical or conventional weapons), workers must defend them against imperialist attack.
Outside the imperialist countries generalised defeatism is not the correct method with regard to all conflicts. Concrete conditions will vary and the revolutionary vanguard will have to fight for defeatism or defencism depending primarily on the nature of the states conducting the war. Within a semi-colony or degenerate workers' state in conflict with imperialism the proletariat must have a defencist position. With regard to wars between semi-colonies (India-Pakistan) or between degenerate(d) workers' states (China-Vietnam), workers' should generally adopt a defeatist position on both sides unless it is the case that one combatant is a cat's-paw for imperialism and that the international proletariat will be strengthened by the victory of one side.
The proletariat does not defend the semi-colonies and workers' states by the same methods as the bourgeoisie or bureaucracy. The independent mobilisation of the working class is necessary to ensure international solidarity and the defeat of the imperialists. Even where an imperialist power is in a military alliance with a workers' state, the proletariat in that imperialist country retains a defeatist position and under no conditions should suspend the class struggle. Only where the continuation of a particular action in the class struggle directly hinders the war effort of the workers' state would the proletariat suspend its action. In no way, however, would such an exceptional case signal a suspension of the policy of defeatism in relation to the imperialist war and the capitalist class.
The existence of vast arsenals of nuclear warheads, of biological and of chemical weapons capable of destroying humanity several times over, rightly strikes fear into the hearts of millions. Posed with this threat, the reformists of Social Democracy and Stalinism preach to the working class about world disarmament and the banishing of war from the planet. The question is not an abstract one of disarmament, but who is to be disarmed and by what means? The bourgeoisie will never give up its arms, without a fight. It must be forcibly disarmed by the revolutionary proletariat. To attempt to unite the workers and sections of this same bourgeoisie in a disarmament campaign is to create illusions that the bosses can be persuaded to give up the weapons they have to defend their monopoly of the means of production. In fact the negotiated agreements between the imperialists and the degenerate(d) workers' states to reduce certain types of weapons go hand in hand with a new round of re-armament. As before the two world wars international peace conferences can be a prelude to war as each side engages in elaborate propaganda ploys to present the other as the enemy of peace.
However, wherever the pacifists lead sections of workers and the petit bourgeoisie into direct conflict which undermines the military programme of the ruling class revolutionaries participate in such actions, whilst making clear their complete opposition to the utopian politics of the pacifists and advancing our transitional programme of demands on war and militarism.
The bourgeoisie will never give up its arms, unless it is forcibly disarmed by the revolutionary proletariat. To attempt to unite the workers and sections of this same bourgeoisie in a disarmament campaign is to create illusions that the bosses can be persuaded to give up the weapons they have to defend their monopoly of the means of production.
In fact the negotiated agreements between the imperialists and the degenerate(d) workers' states to reduce certain types of weapons go hand in hand with a new round of re-armament. As before the two world wars international peace conferences can be a prelude to war as each side engages in elaborate propaganda ploys to present the other as the enemy of peace.
However, wherever the pacifists lead sections of workers and the petit bourgeoisie into direct conflict which undermines the military programme of the ruling class revolutionaries participate in such actions, whilst making clear their complete opposition to the utopian politics of the pacifists and advancing our transitional programme of demands on war and militarism.
The war industries are immensely profitable for the ruling class. We fight to expose their business secrets, to confiscate their military profits and to expropriate them under workers' control. As the bourgeoisie prepares for war money and people will be pumped into the armed forces. In opposition to their obscene armaments programme we demand a programme of useful public works.
Even in times where there is no global conflict, the imperialists construct pacts and treaties in defence of their own interests, backed by the threat of military intervention. We demand the end to imperialist pacts and treaties and an end to secret diplomacy. All treaties and agreements should be exposed and published.
We place demands on the reformist bourgeois workers' parties that when in government they carry through the following demands in the interests of the class they claim to represent. We demand that they withdraw from NATO, ANZUS, SEATO, oppose military budgets and refuse to use armed force against the workers or oppressed peoples.
They must support and encourage full democratic rights for soldiers, recognise the right to set up soldiers' committees and unions, support workers' inspection and control of barracks, abolish military conscription and recognise the right of workers to set up self-defence organisations.
We must use the progressive desire of the workers for peace to fight for such demands within the workers' movement, whilst constantly warning against the bankrupt strategy of pacifism. The only way of preventing the horrifying barbarism of a nuclear war is the international socialist revolution.
Bourgeois democracy and democratic demands
In the imperialist countries, as long as they can maintain social and economic stability, the favoured form of rule is bourgeois democracy. It is the specific form of rule that the bourgeoisie, in its revolutionary epoch, developed as a means of enlisting the support of the masses in the struggle against feudalism, and of consolidating itself politically against the feudal estates.
Through parliament a democratic façade is erected to disguise the actual dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. By means of parliamentary democracy the bourgeoisie throws sops to the working class, grants it the right to vote every so often and incorporates its leadership into the administration of the bourgeois state. Through the media and the press the capitalists have a powerful propaganda machine at their disposal capable, for whole periods, of deceiving the masses and tying them to the illusion that under this system the people rule.
But behind the facade lies the reality of capitalist state power--the executive, the unelected (or where it is elected the unaccountable) judiciary and bureaucracy, the police and the armed forces. When the capitalists feel that their property or their rule are challenged by the working class, the full force of the repressive apparatus is brought into play.
The reformists in the parliamentary talking shop look on powerlessly as the police and army smash through picket lines and as the judges imprison trade-unionists. Even when a reformist majority in parliament attempts to enact the most feeble reforms in the interests of the workers the state bureaucracy sabotages them, the economic magnates use their financial control to blackmail the reformists into meek obedience and, always, the armed and security services wait in the wings, ever prepared to act should things get out of the control of the bosses. And in every bourgeois democracy the potential instruments of Bonapartist rule are maintained in the shape of monarchies or presidents.
In imperialist South Africa the parliamentary form of rule exists only for the white minority. The mass of the population, the blacks, are denied the most elementary democratic rights and are ruled by a ruthless dictatorship. In circumstances such as these the struggle of the working class for democratic rights, even those associated with bourgeois democracy, can serve as the detonator for revolutionary struggle. But while such a revolution can begin as a democratic one its victory will require its transformation into a socialist revolution.
The strategic task of the revolutionary vanguard lies in the destruction of all forms of bourgeois rule, including the democratic form. To this end we strive to expose the parliamentary sham to the working class and build organisations of proletarian democracy. However, the legal rights extracted by the working class under bourgeois democracy have been won in struggle from the bosses and represent gains to be defended against attack from the capitalists.
The recurrent crises of the present period do indeed oblige the capitalists to attack the democratic rights won by the workers. In the imperialist epoch there is always a tendency towards the negation of bourgeois democracy and its replacement with Bonapartist, openly dictatorial forms of rule.
This tendency is becoming more acute, throughout the imperialist heartlands. Anti-union laws, the curtailment of freedom of speech, the ability to enact laws by circumventing parliament altogether, the strengthening of the repressive apparatus, all represent embryonic forms of Bonapartism. In all such cases revolutionaries fight to defend the basic rights won by the workers' movement under bourgeois democracy: the right to strike, to free speech, access to the media, the right to free assembly and to form unions.
Moreover, we defend parliamentary democracy when it is threatened by Bonapartism and where we are not yet capable of replacing it with proletarian democracy. We do so, not as an end in itself, but as a means of preserving the legal right of the working class to organise and prosecute its struggle against the exploiters.
We fight the "mini-apartheid" style restrictions on democratic rights that are placed on immigrant workers all over the world. These restrictions are a means of facilitating the super-exploitation of immigrant workers and dividing the working class of a particular country along racial or national lines.
Basing ourselves on the principles of revolutionary internationalism we fight for the right to the free movement of labour--against all immigration and emigration controls imposed by the imperialist states, for the right of all workers to full democratic rights, including the vote, in the country in which they live and work.
In the semi-colonies we oppose all immigration controls and fight for those democratic rights except in the case of colonial settlement. We are against all nationality legislation which serves as a means to persecute and oppress immigrant workers.
In the struggle to win or defend democratic rights the proletariat uses the methods of class struggle. The right to strike, for example, will be won or defended to the extent that the working class is prepared to use the strike action in the struggle.
Defiance of restrictions on our rights, a refusal to bow before capitalist class based laws, a preparedness to use all the working class' fighting organisations and methods of struggle on the political terrain, including in the struggle for suffrage--these are the methods necessary to ensure that the working class gain from struggles over democracy. As in all struggles the sacrificing of the independent interests of the working class in the interests of unity with "progressive" or "democratic" bourgeois forces will be fatal for the proletariat and its struggle for socialist revolution.
Under conditions of deep social crisis the bourgeoisie can use a fascist movement in order to maintain their rule against the working class. Fascism, a reactionary mass movement mainly recruited from the ranks of a petit bourgeoisie and lumpenproletariat made desperate by the crisis of capitalism, has as its goal the destruction of the independent workers' movement and the establishment of the rule of finance capital unfettered by any elements of bourgeois democracy whatsoever.
It is a last resort for the bourgeoisie since it involves the suppression of its own parliamentary representatives. As Nazi Germany and Musolini's Italy show, it is a measure that will be taken if the situation demands it.
In the semi-colonial countries fascism can develop as a movement arising out of communalist conflicts or out of reactionary clerical movements. The phraseology of such movements can sometimes be anti-imperialist. But this should not blind us to the anti-communist, anti-working class nature of such movements.
This rhetoric is in the same mould as the demagogic "anti-capitalism" of the Nazis. With the triumph of communalism or clerical fascism in the semi-colonies the rule of imperialism wil remain intact or even strengthened.
From the moment that fascism emerges the working class must wage a merciless struggle to smash it. Even when it conceals its more general aims and concentrates on spreading the poisonous fumes of race hatred, the workers' united front must be organised to fight it. No democratic rights at all can be accorded to the fascists.
However, we do not raise the demand for them to be banned by the bourgeois state. The bourgeoisie cannot be entrusted with this task since they are the ultimate backers of the fascists. The state will in fact use bans to disarm and hamper resistance to fascism. The revolutionary vanguard mobilises the working class around the slogans: no platform for fascists, drive the fascists out of the workers' organisations.
We strive to physically confront their every mobilisation and organise workers' defence units to combat fascist attacks on the racially oppressed and the workers' movement.
The struggle to defend the democratic rights of the workers and to combat fascism does not in any way form a separate and distinct series of tasks from the transitional programme as whole. The struggle against Bonapartism and fascism will only be finally won through the realisation of the programme of transitional demands in its entirety.
Electoral tactics
Parliaments and elections cannot transfer power to the working class. It is the duty of revolutionaries to expose mercilessly all parliamentary cretinism while not yielding to the anti-electoral cretinism of the anarchists. Revolutionaries use parliaments as a tribune for addressing the masses. They give an opportunity to present the essentials of the communist action programme in a popular propaganda form.
The best method of doing so is to stand candidates of the revolutionary party on its programme. But if a revolutionary candidacy is impossible then it is possible to advance critical support to a reformist or centrist party that has the allegiance of a sizeable sector of the proletarian vanguard or the popular masses in general.
The purpose of the vote is to say to these layers--we will vote for your party, despite our total lack of confidence in its leaders and its programme, in order to help you put it to the test of action, in and out of government office. We call on you to fight to force your leaders to carry out measures clearly in the interests of the workers, to break with the bourgeoisie. This tactic requires revolutionaries to present their full criticism of reformism and centrism, of parliamentarism as well as of the record of betrayal of the given party.
Where only alien class parties or hopelessly insignificant reformist or centrist sects appear at the polls, we are obliged to call for a blank vote by the class conscious workers. This should not be confused with a boycott of the elections which is permissible as a tactic only when the workers' mass revolutionary struggle poses, as an immediate perspective, the overthrow of parliament.
The workers' and peasants' government and proletarian dictatorship
The strategic goal of the proletariat's struggle is the transition to communism. To effect that transition the proletariat must establish its own dictatorship. Having conquered state power the proletariat cannot immediately abandon it as the anarchists believe. On a national and international level the bourgeoisie will plot its counter-revolution.
To crush the resistance of the bourgeoisie, to protect the revolution, the working class is obliged to enforce its will over the whole of society. It openly exercises its class dictatorship on the basis of its own, distinctively proletarian, democracy (workers' councils, factory committees, the workers' militia). It centralises this democracy in a national government, a revolutionary workers' or workers' and peasants' government. The only consistently revolutionary workers' or workers' and peasants' government is that which exercises the dictatorship of the proletariat.
However, in the transitional epoch crises arise that pose the question of power to the proletariat before it has been won in its majority to the revolutionary party. In these situations the working class has naturally looked to its existing leaderships to enact a programme in its interests while in government.
It was under such circumstances that the Bolsheviks utilised, and the Commintern developed, the slogan of the workers' and the workers' and peasants' government. The essence of the Bolshevik tactic in relation to the Provisional Government was to demand of the petit bourgeois leaders of the workers (Mensheviks) and the peasants (Social Revolutionaries) that they break with the bourgeoisie and enter on the road of struggle for a real workers' and peasants' government.
Revolutionaries demand, not only a formal break with the bourgeois parties in government, but that the workers' leaders take immediate measures to solve the crisis at the expense of the bourgeoisie. This must involve the immediate expropriation of imperialist holdings and the big capitalists under workers' control, the seizure of the big estates, the immediate arming of the workers' organisations and the disarming of the bourgeois counter-revolution.
It must dismantle all of the repressive state forces used against the workers' and peasants' organisations and recognise the authority of all the organisations of workers' and peasants' democracy. On the road to such a government the working class offers its revolutionary aid against the attacks of the imperialists and the bourgeoisie, while maintaining its independence and taking no political responsibility for it as long as its majority consists of non-revolutionaries.
The experience of 1917 has shown that the refusal of the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries to follow such a course was not an aberration. All subsequent experience confirms this. Either through the popular front or through bourgeois workers' governments, the existing leaders of the workers and peasants will do their utmost to salvage capitalism from the ruins. Events in Spain and France during the 1930s, in Bolivia in the 1950s and 1980s, and in Nicaragua today testify to this fact.
Modern day centrists have followed the Stalinists in opportunistically distorting the slogan of a workers' and peasants' government. While the Stalinists revived Lenin's abandoned formula of the "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry" in the 1920s, declaring it to be a necessary bourgeois stage in the revolution, the latter day United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFI) does the same to Trotsky's formula of the "workers' and peasants' government".
In Algeria and Nicaragua petit bourgeois nationalist governments which had made no moves to break with the bourgeoisie were declared "revolutionary workers' and peasants' governments" worthy of political support.
The designation of governments of the workers' parties (Social Democrats and Stalinists) as "workers' governments" by various strands of centrist "Trotskyism" (the Lambertists in France and Portugal in the 1970s and 1980s) is a further deceitful and opportunist use of the slogan. Only when a government of the workers' parties is forced into a real struggle against the bourgeois order by the masses and obliged to base itself upon the mass organisations up to and including arming them, can it be regarded as a revolutionary workers' government.
Despite the chronic opportunist distortion of this slogan it remains a vital weapon for educating and preparing the masses for power. We use it to place demands on the workers' leaders, to expose to the rank and file their leaders' refusal to break with the bourgeoisie. It provides the possibility of splitting the reformist and petit bourgeois nationalist parties, winning the rank and file and the best leaders to a real fight against capitalism and imperialism.
Because each crisis situation differs and throws different leaderships to the fore, the slogan is necessarily algebraic. That is, the actual composition of such a government cannot be declared as fixed in advance of an actual struggle. If a workers' government that was other than the direct dictatorship of the proletariat came into existence, it would merely be a government of civil war against the bourgeoisie.
It would either have to retreat in the face of the bourgeoisie or prove itself a temporary bridge to that dictatorship. In no sense is the workers' government, in a united front form, a necessary historical stage that has to be gone through prior to the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Trotsky in his Transitional Programme posited the theoretical possibility that in an exceptional revolutionary crisis the traditional leaderships might be pushed into going further than they wished, breaking with the bourgeoisie and establishing a workers' government. History has indeed proved this possibility in practice several times, but always with a counter-revolutionary outcome. In exceptional circumstances in Eastern Europe, China, Indo-China and Cuba, the Stalinists did overthrow capitalism. The agencies of these social overturns were bureaucratic workers' governments They had nothing in common with a revolutionary workers' government which opens the road to the struggle for socialism.
While the bureaucratic workers' government liquidated capitalism it did so in a counter-revolutionary fashion, by at the same time strangling all independent organs of workers' democracy and establishing its caste rule.
The task of the proletariat in such circumstances is not to call a halt to the expropriation of the capitalists but to fight against the bureaucratic fashion in which it is being carried out. By placing to the fore the struggle for proletarian democracy, by demanding of the Stalinists that they recognise the regime of workers' control in the factories, by demanding the arming of the masses and the dissolution of the Stalinist controlled security forces, the masses can be organised to continue the process of expropriation but defeat the planned counter-revolutionary outcome: the creation of a degenerate workers' state which blocks the road to socialism.
Workers' councils and the struggle for working class power
The crowning slogan of the Transitional Programme is the slogan of soviets, or workers' councils. If the factory committee is the organ of dual power in the factory, then the workers' council, coordinated on a national basis, is the organ of dual power in society as a whole. As such real workers' councils on a local and national basis arise when society enters a revolutionary crisis, when the masses outgrow the confines of their traditional organisations and turn to revolutionary forms of struggle and organisation.
A revolutionary crisis exists when society reaches an impasse: the bourgeoisie is divided and stricken by governmental crises, the masses refuse to tolerate the old regime and repeatedly demonstrate their will to sacrifice all to defeat it.
Throughout the history of capitalism there have been a series of revolutionary periods, consisting of an extended series of economic and political crises which were resolved only when a fundamental defeat had been inflicted on one of the contending classes. Thereafter a radically new economic and political relationship of forces allowed for the stabilisation and further development of capitalism. Periods of revolutionary crisis embrace one country, a continent or the whole globe. They vary in longevity and depth, with the most severe being related to wars, successful revolutions or counter-revolutions.
A revolutionary period can consist of several shorter phases, or situations. A pre-revolutionary situation exists when a profound economic crisis induces massive inflation (or deflation), unemployment and bankruptcies. Through these catastrophes the moribund nature of the capitalist system is exposed to millions. A pre-revolutionary situation may also arise from military defeat, as in Russia during 1905.
Such situations of crisis tend to produce a political crisis, forcing the bourgeoisie to resort either to more authoritarian methods of rule, or to co-opt the workers' leaders into solving the crisis at the expense of the working class. Divisions within the ruling class over which course to take give an added impulse to the proletariat to embark on more and more militant, generalised and political forms of struggle. A revolutionary situation emerges.
In a pre-revolutionary situation the tasks of the revolutionary party centre on posing the most generalised slogans of political class struggle (general strike, workers' self-defence, the building of embryonic workers' councils such as councils of action, strike committees, united front committees). In a revolutionary situation it is essential to transform them into fully-formed workers' councils: the direct struggle for power can be postponed no longer.
Should the working class fail to make a victorious revolution then the counter-revolution will triumph either in the form of a dictatorship (fascist or bonapartist) over the working class and its allies or in the more limited form of the 'democratic counter-revolution. The latter leaves a bourgeois democratic constitution more or less in operation but subjects the revolutionary vanguard to military, police and judicial terror.
These counter-revolutions clearly terminate the revolutionary period. What ensues may prove to be a long counter-revolutionary period such as followed the defeat of the German workers in 1933 or the Chilean workers in 1973. On the other hand if a fundamental relaxation of the economic and political crisis occurs then a non-revolutionary period, a period of social stabilisation may occur.
However, where the fundamental contradictions giving rise to revolution persist and where the working class has not suffered a historic defeat then an inter-revolutionary period may open before battle is joined again between the working class and the bourgeoisie. The recognition of these changes of period can be critical to the growth or even the survival of a revolutionary party. It is essential to adopt the appropriate defensive or offensive, legal or illegal tactics and methods of organization.
Russia February 1917, Germany 1918, Spain in the 1930s and many other examples demonstrate that if the proletariat succeeds in establishing its own armed power but without simultaneously totally smashing the armed power of the bourgeoisie, then a situation of dual power comes into existence in which two regimes of different classes confront each other. This dual power situation is inherently unstable.
It can only exist for any length of time if the armed power of the workers is strong and the bourgeoisie has lost control over substantial sectors of its own armed forces and fears the final confrontation. Alternately, dual power can endure for some time if the proletariat's reformist or centrist leadership dithers and vacillates when confronted with the task of leading the struggle towards a final showdown.
Such forces inside the workers' movement either seek to dissolve dual power in favour of the "legitimate" (bourgeois) state or to create a permanent dual power state. This schema which seeks to create a hybrid state of parliament alongside workers' councils always ends in failure (Germany 1918-1923) since it tries to reconcile the unreconcilable. The attempts by left reformists or centrists to "combine" workers' councils with parliamentary democracy are simply ways of demobilising the revolutionary struggle of the masses.
A dual power situation, whilst it is a mighty step forward compared to the uncontested rule of the bourgeoisie, is not an inevitable stage nor a strategic objective in and of itself. Our objective is the total destruction of the bourgeois state, and we strive to replace dual power with the proletarian dictatorship established through the armed insurrection.
This goal can only be achieved if the revolutionary party wins leadership of the workers' councils. Only then can counter-revolution be defeated and the slogan of "all power to the workers' councils" actually be realised.
Embryonic workers' councils can emerge in many different forms--from revolutionised trade unions, from factory committees, or from action councils built around particular struggles. However, while we do not fetishise the question of form, we do insist that there is no substitute for organs of struggle that express the essence of the workers' council.
We seek to develop and direct the differing forms of embryonic workers' council to become actual workers' councils. Factory committees and unions, no matter how radical, cannot in themselves serve as workers' councils. The reasons for this are embedded in the very nature of workers' councils themselves.
Workers' councils are not factory or industry specific. Indeed they are vital means of organising and winning to the side of the proletariat sections of society such as the poor peasantry and the rank and file soldiers. All of those engaged in struggle are represented in such councils. They are made up of delegates from the factories, the unions, all the workplaces, the working class districts, the peasant committees, the workers' parties.
They break down sectional barriers and put fighting class-wide unity in their place. They have a territorial character drawing in all of the exploited and oppressed within a town or region. Through regular elections and recallability the most democratic form of representative organisation of the toilers in history is created. Free from pre-existing bureaucratic apparatuses they are immediately sensitive to the changes in mood, political outlook and militancy of the masses. Workers' councils are the surest means for deciding the actual will of the struggling proletariat.
Because of these features workers' councils are uniquely suited to revolutionary struggle. In periods of social peace the workers' council cannot be a durable organisation. It lives and breathes through daily combat with the bourgeoisie, checking its every move, organising resistance to its every attack, struggling for the interests of the masses it represents and raising the fighting confidence of the masses with every success achieved. No other form of organisation is as flexible as the workers' council in carrying through the tactical manoeuvres required in the revolutionary struggle with the bourgeoisie.
Last but by no means least, workers' councils are the administrative base of the future workers' state. They are organs of working class power. Likewise the workers' militia will be transformed from the tool of insurrection to a bastion for the defence of the workers' state against counter-revolution. Every revolutionary situation has proved that the working class cannot simply lay hold of the existing state machinery and use it to build socialism.
New proletarian organisations must take the place of the capitalist state. The workers' councils, which in a dual power situation are obliged to exercise control over production, public life and distribution, are ideally suited to the task of running the workers' state. They are both revolutionary instruments in the struggle for power and revolutionary organs of power. No one yet has invented a form of organisation superior to them for these purposes. Attempts to find substitutes for workers' councils invariably lead to opportunist errors.
The insurrection
The task of the revolutionary party in the workers' councils is to channel all struggles towards the goal of smashing the capitalist state. To realise this goal the general strike and the armed insurrection are key weapons. Insurrections have proven successful without a general strike (as in Petrograd, October 1917), but the general strike is under many circumstances a key revolutionary method of struggle since it paralyses the entire functioning of the capitalist enemy and its state.
It poses the question: who rules society, the bosses who own it, or the workers who run it? It places the struggle for power at the top of the agenda. But in itself a mass withdrawal of labour cannot answer the question, who rules? Therefore a general strike must prepare the way for the armed insurrection.
History shows that the proletariat can only deprive the bourgeoisie of state power by violent means. Of course, the amount of force needed will vary according to the balance of forces on the eve of the insurrection. It will particularly depend on the extent to which the armed forces have been won to the side of the proletariat. The working class must, however, count on meeting the maximum resistance from the bosses and must therefore maximise its own forces to counter and destroy this resistance.
Clearly, without a revolutionary situation in which the masses stand fully behind the revolutionary party, an insurrection led by a revolutionary minority will be an adventurist putsch and will lead to setbacks for the revolutionary struggle. The party must have won over the majority of the organised workers of the major cities and towns if the new regime established by the insurrection is to be stable and permanent.
Insurrections have, historically, occurred in two forms. First the "February revolution" (France 1848, Russia 1917): spontaneous mass insurrections against dictatorial regimes where no dominant conscious revolutionary party leads the masses. Here the outcome can be a democratic bourgeois regime, a dual power situation or, in rare and exceptional circumstances, a Paris Commune type triumph of the workers under a leadership that either does not wish to hold power or does not know how to consolidate or extend it.
The attitude of the revolutionary minority to such a spontaneous uprising is to participate fully in it, seeking to give it conscious leadership, especially through the fight for workers' councils and a revolutionary workers' and peasants' government based on them.
The other type of insurrection is the conscious, planned forcible transfer of state power to the proletariat on the model of the October Revolution in Russia. The carrying through of the insurrection is a technical task which demands conspiratorial planning. The workers' councils have to be won to the goal of insurrection and the workers' militia and the pro-working class regiments are the means of carrying through the rising. But the revolutionary party alone can provide the general staff to direct that rising.
While the party can utilise the aid of the non-commissioned officers the command of such officers must always be restricted to military actions, monitored by elected company and regimental committees. The seizure of the key installations, the organisation of the new regime's defence, the distribution of arms and the allocation of proletarian insurgents cannot be left to the spontaneity of the masses or "enlightened officers".
The party is decisive in coordinating this action. But on the morrow of a successful insurrection the rewards of such preparation will be clear: the smashing of the capitalist state and the establishment of a proletarian dictatorship on the basis of workers' council power.
Chapter 4 - Strategy and tactics in the semi-colonies
Since 1945 capitalism has completed its task of destroying or totally subordinating the remnants of previous modes of production. But despite this penetration of every corner of the former colonial world we have not witnessed the widespread development of strong national bourgeoisies. While imperialism has nurtured, even created, a semi-colonial bourgeoisie within formally independent states, it has not let slip its domination of the economic or political life of these states.
In the early part of the imperialist epoch the young and embryonic national bourgeoisies in the colonial countries experienced national oppression. Colonial, and later imperialist, powers pressed their large scale capital onto the oppressed nations and thereby destroyed many small local independent enterprises. In turn this deprived the local bourgeoisie of any serious political influence in the colonial administration.
Under these circumstances the colonial bourgeoisie was driven to play an important role in fighting imperialist rule. Using deceitful phrases and false promises, movements such as the Indian National Congress and the Kuomintang could mobilise a mass following of all plebeian classes in their service.
Yet these "national revolutionary movements", as the Comintern described them, were under the leadership of a class (the bourgeoisie) which was to show itself again and again unwilling to pursue a consistent struggle against imperialism. The bourgeoisie's fear of the revolutionary potential of the working class and of a land hungry peasantry made it a vacillating and treacherous leadership of anti-imperialist struggles. It showed itself willing at the first opportunity to compromise with, and sell out to, the imperialists, often drowning its "own" revolutionary movement in blood (Shanghai 1927).
After the Second World War, under the supervision of US imperialism, the old colonial empires were dismantled and gradually replaced by the semi-colonial system that prevails today. Throughout their empires the old weakened imperialist powers--Britain, France, Holland and Portugal--were forced to grant political independence to their colonies. The national bourgeoisie was unable, except episodically, to go beyond the strategy of peaceful pressure on the imperialists to withdraw.
In colony after colony, the petit bourgeois nationalists, often in alliance with the Stalinists, led the struggle for independence. Wherever the imperialists held on until the last moment (Algeria, Malaya, Vietnam, Aden, Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe) the petit bourgeois nationalists resorted to revolutionary nationalist methods of struggle.
Despite promises to the masses to alleviate the crushing burden of imperialist rule, once having achieved state power these same "revolutionaries" used it to repress the proletariat and the poor peasants, to shore up and develop capitalism and protect the imperialists' interests. Both bourgeois and petit bourgeois nationalists showed themselves incapable of fulfilling even the most basic bourgeois democratic tasks of the revolution against the imperialists. National independence remained a fiction as long as the countries' economies were dominated by imperialism.
Some of the new ruling classes--in Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, Iran, Kenya--relied on open collaboration with the imperialist powers to develop their industries and agriculture. These states developed economies tied totally to the world imperialist division of labour. They offered police state controlled labour movements and furnished a labour force that could be super-exploited as an encouragement to imperialist investment.
At the other extreme some semi-colonies experimented with nationally isolated attempts at development, minimising or severely reducing their links with imperialism, often through relying on economic links with the Soviet bloc. These regimes often took on a left Bonapartist character, balancing between imperialism on the one hand, and tightly controlled mobilisations of the masses on the other.
Consciously modelling their economic development on the experience of Stalin's industrialisation policy, they pursued major "state capitalist" projects and established large state bureaucracies as an important social prop. Through these methods such regimes sought a road to "independent capitalist development", in fact a road to join the select club of imperialist nations.
This strategy proved an economic disaster in country after country. Stagnation and imperialist pressure forced a collapse back into the arms of imperialism. Peron's Argentina, Nasser's Egypt, Bandaranaike's Sri Lanka, Nyerere's Tanzania are just a few examples of where this strategy failed. The crises in Burma, Algeria and Angola in the late 1980s show that other state capitalist regimes are following suit. Autarchy is a utopia and it is always the masses who are obliged to foot the bill for its failure.
Whichever strategy the semi-colonial bourgeoisies pursued, and some, like India tried a combination of both, the result was the same--chronically dependent economies, enormous poverty for the masses, stagnation and growing indebtedness to imperialism. Only in the exceptional circumstances of South Africa did it prove possible for a semi-colonial power to break out of this cycle and join the imperialists as a junior partner.
The bourgeois nationalists were incapable of achieving real independence and they were equally incapable of maintaining political democracy. While the imperialists hypocritically sang the virtues of "parliamentary democracy", even bequeathing constitutions modelled on their Westminster or Washington versions, they happily connived at its overthrow immediately democratically elected governments threatened their economic interests.
Only a minority of the most developed semi-colonies have been able to sustain parliamentary regimes for any significant period of time. And even here, as with the case of Chile in 1973, imperialism has directly intervened to overthrow democratic regimes that it felt threatened its interests.
Confronted with the demands of the peasantry for a comprehensive solution to land hunger, bourgeois nationalists have been unwilling to take any radical measures which could threaten their alliance with the semi-feudal landlords or big capitalist farmers.
Where they have been forced to introduce major land reforms--Bolivia, Peru, the Punjab in India--it has always been to avoid a revolutionary solution to the land question. A reformist solution imposed from above, while temporarily assuaging the land hunger of the peasants, merely delivered a new class of small peasants, starved of credit and machinery, into the hands of the usurers, banks and rich farmers.
In order to carry out and maintain its exploitation, part of the strategy of imperialism has always been to divide and rule. In many cases such divisions were introduced by imperialist powers who deliberately favoured a particular minority of the population in its colonial apparatus, as in Sri Lanka or Cyprus.
In other cases, where remnants of pre-capitalist and religious divisions were still in existence, these were seized upon, cultivated and preserved in imperialism's interests. For example, the hereditary division of labour upon which the Indian caste system rests was institutionalised by British colonialism and it helped to preserve a measure of rural docility.
Indigenous landlordism and capitalism were able to exploit this system to their advantage. Today, the systematic discrimination and institutionalised inequalities of the caste system remain strong despite the development of modern capitalism in India. Here too the "independent" bourgeoisie has been unable to unify its nation on the basis of equality of rights.
Despite the claims of the "third worldists" and dependency theorists that extensive capitalist development in the imperialised world was not possible, imperialist capital has achieved just this and in the process has created millions of new wage labourers.
In the last two decades this semi-colonial working class has entered the road of independent class action only to run up against the limits of its own syndicalist, Stalinist and nationalist leaderships. There is a crisis of leadership within the semi-colonial working class. In most countries even the nucleus of a revolutionary communist party is absent. This has allowed petit bourgeois political formations of all kinds to come to the head of anti-imperialist mass action and inevitably betray it.
In the struggle against exploitation--in the factories, mines and plantations of native as well as imperialist capital--the world working class must use the full range of transitional demands and tactics. In addition it falls to the working class to lead a revolutionary struggle for the completion of the remaining bourgeois democratic tasks.
National unity and independence, agrarian revolution and political democracy are the burning demands of millions of workers, peasants and semi-proletarians. The working class must approach the struggle for their complete fulfilment from the standpoint of permanent revolution.
The national, agrarian and democratic questions are themselves historically bourgeois questions. But in the imperialist epoch it is no longer possible to fully resolve these questions under capitalism. The military, political and economic dependence of the semi-colonies, their backwardness and economic unevenness are fundamental to the imperialist world order.
There can be no separate stage of the revolution in which capitalist property relations are maintained while the bourgeois democratic tasks are fully achieved. The whole history of the anti-imperialist struggle after 1945 confirms this basic tenet of Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution. The "victories" of anti-imperialist mass movements confirm it even more graphically than the numerous defeats.
By refusing to expropriate the companies and banks of the national as well as the imperialist bourgeoisie, by refusing to satisfy the demands of the poor and landless peasantry, the leaders of the revolutions in Nicaragua, Zimbabwe and Iran set the seal on their continued subservience to imperialism.
Even where, as in Burma, Egypt and Libya, military Bonapartist regimes were forced to nationalise the economy and create a state owned infrastructure, they have failed to break the economic chains binding the country to imperialism. Stagnation born of autarchy, debt, the re-emergence of a national bourgeoisie outside the state sector: this has been the pattern for the countries where Bonapartism entrenched itself.
Only where capitalism has been completely uprooted (China, Cuba, Vietnam, Kampuchea) have semi-colonial revolutions had the possibility to break the grip of the imperialist world economy over their countries. But even here the Stalinists have aborted the permanent revolution and have not successfully overcome the legacy of imperialist domination. In many of these states the oppression of national minorities has intensified, e.g. the Chinese in Vietnam or the Tibetans in China.
The combination of bureaucratic planning and Stalinism's "national road to socialism" has strangled the potential of the post-capitalist property relations, leaving the former semi-colonies as the weakest link in the chain of degenerate(d) workers' states. They remain heavily dependent on the willingness of the Soviet bureaucracy to underwrite their economies.
The growing reluctance of the Moscow bureaucracy to do this will increase internal restorationist pressures, strengthening the hand of those sections of the Stalinists who wish to open up the economies to imperialist penetration under the guise of "market socialism". In these countries only a political revolution which destroys the Stalinist bureaucracy and establishes genuine soviet democracy can offer a way forward for the workers and poor peasants and enable them to finally settle accounts with imperialism.
The expropriation of the major industries, banks and finance houses, the imposition of a state monopoly of foreign trade and the internationalisation of the revolution must be the first steps of every victorious semi-colonial revolution.
But only the proletariat, mobilised in workers' councils and a workers' militia can carry out these tasks in a wholly progressive manner. In the process the working class must draw to itself the massive peasant and semi-proletarian strata around the complete fulfilment of the national, agrarian and democratic questions.
Agrarian revolution in the semi-colonies
Today in the semi-colonies, taken as a whole, and despite the growth of the industrial proletariat, the peasantry remains an absolute majority of the population. The proletariat must harness the grievances and aspirations of the poor and landless peasants if its revolution is to be a truely global one.
Throughout the imperialist epoch the agrarian question has proved to be one of the major, and most explosive, uncompleted tasks of the bourgeois democratic revolution. The fight of the peasantry for land has been the locomotive of the fight for national independence against imperialism. So it was in China in the 1930s and 1940s and in Indo-China in the 1950s and 1960s. In addition the agrarian revolution provided a mighty social force for political democracy against autocracy in Russia in 1917.
Since the Second World War it has been a key detonator of uprisings against hated ruling oligarchies in the semi-colonies (e.g. Nicaragua 1979, Philippines 1985). Wherever the struggle of the peasantry for land has been deliberately separated from the fight for national independence (Ireland 1880-1921) or political democracy (Spain 1931-39) none of the bourgeois democratic tasks at hand were completed.
In the imperialist epoch the bourgeoisie, both imperialist and semi-colonial, abandoned any pretence of revolutionary struggle against pre-capitalist landlordism.
The imperialists attempted to curb the proletariat and the peasantry by alliances with the feudal landowners. In this way imperialism preserved the backwardness of the semi-colonies and subjected agriculture to its rule through trade or colonial plantation.
With the dissolution of the colonial empires and the establishment of US world hegemony the fight against the vestiges of semi-feudalism has been joined in the colonies and semi-colonies by the struggle against the effects of finance capital's deeper penetration of agriculture. Taking as its starting point the creation of a profitable world market for agricultural goods, finance capital spurred on the concentration and centralisation of land in the semi-colonies.
It placed huge territories under cultivation for cash crops aimed at the export market. On the one hand, finance capital helped buy out out the semi-feudal landlords or transformed them into agrarian capitalists, while on the other, they bullied, defrauded and expelled millions of peasants from their land.
As a result countries which were self-sufficient in food for the internal market have been transformed into importers of the basic necessities of life while huge profits accrue to the landed oligarchies and the multinational corporations. The main dynamic of the agrarian revolution today lies in the contradiction between the mass of peasants squeezed into smaller and smaller plots of infertile land on the one side and huge capitalist plantation owners producing for export on the other.
In the post-war decades agrarian reform from above has attempted to avert a revolutionary solution to the land question from below by creating a stable strata of conservative middle peasants.
While meeting with partial success in certain countries for limited periods of time, these programmes did not, and cannot, solve the fundamental dilemma facing the semi-colonial bourgeoisie; namely, that their enslavement to imperialism ensures that they are unable either to turn the surplus, land hungry peasantry into industrial or service workers in the urban centres, or to provide sufficient aid to the smallholders to prevent their descent into poverty.
The surviving semi-feudal landlords collude with finance capital to subordinate the peasant economy to the needs of large scale agrarian capitalism. This dictates that the peasantry's solution to land hunger, high rents, rural debt and primitive technique can only be reached through an alliance with the working class in the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and imperialism--permanent revolution.
Naturally, not all the rural classes will be firm allies along this road. The peasantry is not a modern class with a homogeneous relationship to the means of production. The further it has evolved from communal land ownership and working, the more it separates into rich capitalist farmers at one pole and rural proletarians at the other.
Where the peasantry has been able to establish a stable hold on small scale private property in the countryside it has always been capable of being mobilised as the mass base of support for reactionary Bonapartist regimes. When faced with a challenge from the proletariat these regimes demagogically portray the working class as the enemy of the small peasant.
Along the path of revolution the urban working class will look first to the growing agricultural proletariat who labour on the plantations, farms, ranches and the processing mills full time. Small in number but with great social power, these workers have shown themselves time and again to be the first to put down solid organisations (unions, committees) to fight for higher pay and better conditions. From the sugar workers in Cuba to the coffee workers in Nicaragua, it is this class that has often, by its action, decisively tipped the balance against hated dictators.
They must fight for immediate economic and transitional demands and establish a regime of workers' control and union organisation in plant and plantation alike. The history of this epoch also proves that it is vital for this layer to take the lead in defending their gains from the death squads of the landlord and planter by forming a workers' militia.
Next to this layer in importance comes the semi-proletariat: the seasonal farm labourer who has to scrape a living on his or her own tiny plot for the rest of the time; or the small peasant whose family cannot survive on the land and takes on work in the towns and cities. This class is large in Latin America, Africa and parts of Asia, often outnumbering the rural wage workers by ten to one.
Their contact with the plantations has raised them above a purely peasant outlook and they have embraced much of the fighting spirit and organisation of the proletariat. Their seasonal, migratory character has meant they have become, too, the key base of the guerrilla armies of Central America. For them it is essential to fight for equality of pay and conditions on the plantations; for permanent contracts for those who want them; for land to those who are forced to migrate because of land hunger.
The most desperate class in the countryside is the landless peasant, robbed of his or her inheritance by the oligarchy, colonial planter and "green revolution" alike. Today there are over 600 million landless peasants in the semi-colonies. In Pakistan, India and Bangladesh between a quarter and a half of the peasants are without land. In Central America over half of the rural population is landless. Most face starvation, a prospect relieved occasionally by day or seasonal labour. Many migrate to the towns in the hopeless search for work.
This class is a necessary ally of the proletariat and is the largest class. The continued support of this class must be won, even at the cost of the parcellisation of the larger estates. Before them the revolutionary working class must pledge itself to fight to realise the demands: land to those who work it; occupy the idle and under-used land; defend the land invasions of the plantations in the fight for subsistence; for committees and militias of landless peasants.
Trotskyists must stand at the head of the fight of the land hungry for land seizures, whether directed against semi-feudal or capitalist plantations. But it is essential to fight for the earliest possible formation of co-operatives as a transitional measure. To those already driven to the barrios and shanties of the big cities we must fight for a programme of public works to find them useful work and a living wage. This must go hand in hand with the organisation of the unemployed.
Struggling to prevent their own descent into the army of the landless are the poor peasants. Their smallholdings are either weighed down with onerous rent obligations or burdened with debt as a result of harsh purchase terms. Borrowing to buy equipment and fertilisers has added to this debt, a step forced on them because the size of the plot cannot guarantee subsistence for the poor peasant family.
The poor peasant may be oppressed by the big estates or by the richer peasant. Here the key immediate demands must be: abolition of rent and renunciation of all debts to the rural usurer and urban merchant; for state credits to purchase machinery and fertiliser; for incentives to encourage the subsistence farmers to voluntarily join production and marketing co-operatives.
Many peasants find that the only way to make a living is to cultivate crops related to the narcotics industry. They are ruthlessly exploited by the narcotic barons and persecuted by the imperialist "anti-narcotic" agencies. We demand the right of the peasants to cultivate narcotic related crops on a free and legal basis. We demand the purchase of such crops by the state at prices fixed by workers' and peasants' price committees.
The middle peasantry, usually a small layer that is suspicious that the proletariat plans to abolish its private property, generally has enough surplus to sell at a profit in the towns. Nevertheless, they too are often exploited by the middleman. In any clash over wages and conditions between the middle peasant and any labourers they employ the proletariat must support the latter.
Against the demands of the middle and small peasants for better prices for their products (a demand that arises especially in situations where the workers have forced governments to control the prices of basic goods) we put forward a different solution: make the bosses and landowners pay, not the workers! We demand the abolition of debt, extension of credit, the promotion of co-operatives and the building of joint price committees of workers and peasants, to plan and exchange the respective fruits of their labours.
The rich exploitative peasants will in general find themselves on the side of the bourgeoisie wherever semi-feudalism has been eradicated and imperialism, in alliance with the imperialised state, has integrated the rich peasant into the world market. Here revolutionaries will side with the poor peasants to expropriate the land of the rich peasant. But wherever semi-feudal bonds remain that also oppress the rich and the poor peasant a common struggle is possible to end that oppression.
The imperialist agribusiness, capitalist farmer and the absentee landlord will on the other hand find in the working class an implacable enemy. Their property stands before the workers and poor peasants as the mechanism of impoverishment.
We must impose upon the national bourgeoisie or petit bourgeoisie struggling against landed oligarchies the demand: nationalise their land without compensation; nationalise the imperialist plantations and place them under workers' and poor peasants' control; for a massive programme of public works to improve conditions for the masses of the countryside--electrification, irrigation of the land, provision of clean water and adequate sanitary facilities, the provision of cultural facilities.
Only such a programme can prevent the mass exodus of peasants, driven by sheer hunger to the cities. The transformation and planning of agricultural production will decrease the dependence on cash crops for export, improve the productivity of the land and increase the amount of food for home consumption.
Such measures in themselves will help ease the pressure on the rural environment. In transforming the countryside capitalism has extended the ecological crisis into ever new regions of the globe. Deforestation, destruction of traditional water systems for irrigation, pollution of rivers by industrial waste and chemical fertilisers continue to create real ecological disasters in many parts of the "third world". The proletariat and poor peasants' fight must include a programme of immediate measures to prevent ecological catastrophe--the ending of massive deforestation and the undertaking of replanting and irrigation schemes.
The years since 1945 have shown that the only real solution to the servitude of the poor peasantry and land hunger is the abolition of capitalism itself. The revolutionary party must lead the class struggle in the countryside to its culmination.
We put forward a programme for the revolutionary expropriation of all capitalist plantations and rich peasant farms without compensation by councils of workers and poor peasants. We fight for a policy of state farms together with voluntary collectivisation for the small and middle peasant as a programme of socialist transition in agriculture.
The national question in the semi-colonies
Although national unity and independence were political goals for the bourgeoisie, they had a social and economic purpose: the creation of a unified national market, protected against foreign competition, within which domestic capital could expand.
Today, despite formal national independence, imperialism's former colonies and mandates are in reality no nearer to this economic independence than they were at the dawn of the imperialist epoch. They remain oppressed nations. Backwardness and, at best one-sided, dependent industrialisation remain the norm in the semi-colonies. No amount of formal political independence can compensate for this.
The chains of economic dependence are forged from capitalist social relations and can only be smashed by the expropriation of capitalism itself. For this reason only the working class has the interest and ability to fully abolish the national oppression of the semi-colonies. It must fight for:
• The expulsion of all of imperialism's armed forces, the forces of its gendarmes, including the UN, and its security installations and advisers.
• The abolition of the standing armed forces--trained by and loyal to imperialism--and their replacement by an armed workers' and poor peasants' militia.
• The cancellation of all debts and interest payments to the imperialist finance houses. The imperialists do not want the debt to be paid off because this will mean an end to the super-profits it generates and the loss of one of its weapons for exercising economic, political and military control of the semi-colonies. The debt has been contracted under terms set by imperialism. But the limitations of the semi-colonial bourgeoisie's challenge to imperialist domination is evidenced by their acceptance of these terms. The practical effect of this cowardice is austerity for the masses, unemployment, restrictions on political and trade union activities, export oriented production and, as a result, starvation.
• Against the strategy of limiting repayments to a percentage of exports or GNP. Against the moratorium on the external debt which only means paying imperialism more later. This debt has been paid off several times already through extortionate interest rates and the looting of the semi-colonies' natural resources.
• The repatriation of all payments and the restoration of natural resources. For the repatriation of the priceless archaeological heritage stolen over the years by the imperialist plunderers.
• The nationalisation without compensation of the banks, finance houses and major industries and the cancellation of all special arrangements and joint ventures between state owned industries and finance capital.
As well as breaking imperialism's stranglehold on the semi-colonial economy the proletariat must fight for both national unity and the right of self-determination for the nationalities oppressed within the semi-colonies.
The arbitrary borders carved out by imperialism in its collective division and re-division of the world in the 1880s, 1919 and 1945 divided many nationalities and peoples, creating national minorities within the colonial and semi-colonial states. Whereas the nationalism of the developing bourgeoisie of the colonies had a relatively progressive content insofar as it was aimed against remnants of feudalism or against imperialism, on achieving political power this nationalism was often transformed into a weapon of oppression against national minorities, as in Turkey and Burma.
Far from solving the many national problems caused or exacerbated by imperialism's division of the world, the inability of the semi-colonial bourgeoisie to unify or economically develop the nation results in the deepening of regional economic differences, the re-emergence of old national antagonisms and the creation of new ones (e.g. in India).
Wherever a real national movement based in consciousness, language, culture and territory exists, the proletariat must support its right, as an oppressed nation, to self-determination. This support is unconditional: that is, we do not demand that the nationalists adopt communist methods of struggle before we give our support. However, just as we are critical of the goal of the nationalists, so we criticise their methods which frequently reduce the national struggle to the armed actions of a select few. However, no right to separate statehood exists where the exercise of self-determination is based on the national oppression of another people e.g. Israel, Northern Ireland.
The proletariat is an internationalist class seeking to unify, on a socialist basis, peoples and nations, through voluntary union or federation. Our general programme is not for the creation of ever more separate nation states or the breaking up of large "multi-national" states into a number of constituent parts as a means of liberating such countries from either imperialist or capitalist enslavement.
While arguing against these false solutions, communists recognise that once such a demand is embraced by the mass of workers and peasants, expressed for example in referenda or by mass armed struggle and civil war (Bangladesh), revolutionaries must move into the forefront of such a struggle to achieve a separate state. Both within the oppressor nation and in the secessionist area, communists raise this demand, while continuing to warn that only socialist revolution, not secession, will offer a lasting solution to the masses.
While the working class must champion the legitimate national rights of oppressed peoples, its internationalist strategy means that it fights all nationalist ideologies, even of those held to by the oppressed. Such nationalism will inevitably clash with the development of the working class into a conscious force, defending its own class interests, and will thus become reactionary. While we support the struggles for self-determination, up to and including secession, for example in Kurdistan, Tamil Eelam, Kashmir, Euskadi etc, we point out the utopianism of the nationalist project of developing these areas as truly independent bourgeois states.
The proletariat must fight for the expropriation of capitalism and the extension of democratic planning on the largest possible scale. There can be no solution to the basic economic demands of the oppressed nations through a retreat behind even more limited economic boundaries.
Against the imperialists' deliberate policies of "Balkanisation" aimed at dividing and ruling weak and unstable nation states, communists put forward the demand for a genuine federation of socialist states for those countries that are linked by historical ties of language, culture, trade etc. Such transitional slogans can have a powerful mobilising effect for the masses, for example in the Middle East, in Latin America and on the Indian sub-continent, cutting across both imperialist engineered divisions and bourgeois and petit bourgeois nationalist prejudices.
The struggle against military dictatorship and Bonapartism in the semi-colonies
Retarded in their economic and social development by imperialism, most semi-colonial regimes have been unable to sustain a stable bourgeois democracy. Elections and parliaments have been episodic, temporary or generally attenuated by various restrictions on the right to vote, the introduction of literacy and language qualifications, and a myriad of obstacles to voter registration.
Consequently various forms of Bonapartism have been the norm. Such regimes, while being resolute defenders of capitalism, have achieved a degree of independence from the ruling class, normally through their control of the army and state machine. They have deprived the capitalist class of its own direct political rule, as well as containing or repressing the exploited classes.
Bonapartist rule in the semi-colonies has varied between "anti-imperialist" and pro-imperialist forms. The "left" variant of Bonapartism has often taken the form of nationalist officers' movements drawn from the petit bourgeois middle strata and reflecting the outlook of this class.
This layer, seeing its future blighted by economic stagnation, corruption and the subservience of its own bourgeoisie to imperialism, has seized power in numerous countries since the Second World War--as in Argentina, Peru, Libya, Egypt, Burma for example. Their ideologies have borrowed elements from Stalinism, occasionally from fascism, and typically have proclaimed a "third way" between capitalism and communism.
These regimes have attempted to overcome the failure of economic development in their countries by restricting imperialist penetration. They have staked all on promoting "independent capitalist development"--utilising trade barriers, state capitalist industrialisation and land reform. They have often combined a vicious anti-communism with attempts to develop and co-opt the trade union movement and peasant organisations as a prop of support for their regimes against imperialist pressure from without and within.
But nowhere have such regimes opened the road to socialism, nor could they by their very nature. In fact they have re-fortified the capitalist state and economy through attacks on the workers, not stopping at full-scale repression and even massacres.
In the event of a serious clash between these regimes and imperialism and its most reactionary agents the proletariat may be obliged to struggle alongside the nationalist and democratic military sectors. But throughout the workers must maintain the firmest class independence and opposition to these temporary allies. The proletariat needs no military saviours or leaders. It can seize power only through its own insurrection, not by army coups.
It is the gravest error to establish strategic blocs with sections of the officers or to sow illusions in their capacity to arm and lead the proletariat. It leads to class collaboration and programmatic concessions and can do nothing but weaken the proletariat's drive to establish independent workers' militias and to organise the rank and file of the army.
The inevitable failure of this economic and political strategy, the repeated concessions to the imperialists and the resulting disillusionment of the masses, all prepare the way for the overthrow of these regimes and their replacement by more pliant, pro-imperialist ones.
Millions of workers and peasants throughout the world suffer at the hands of vicious right wing Bonapartist regimes. Such regimes have often emerged either from the failure of left Bonapartism (Indonesia 1965, Argentina 1955, Peru 1975) or, as in Chile during 1973 and Bolivia after 1971, from the crushing of revolutionary situations. These regimes are marked by their subservience to imperialism, their attempts to crush the workers' and peasants' organisations, and their use of death squads, torture and widespread violation of human rights.
The repeated utilisation of such dictatorships by the imperialists and their agents means that the demand for political democracy remains a burning issue for millions of proletarians and non-proletarians around the globe, from Indonesia to Paraguay. Wherever the proletariat fights alongside petit bourgeois and bourgeois forces for democratic rights it must do so from the standpoint of its strategic goal: workers' council power.
What it defends within bourgeois democracy is essentially its organisations of struggle, those legal and constitutional concessions wrung from the bourgeoisie and those forms of bourgeois democracy (parliaments etc) that the working class uses as a tribune to mobilise and agitate among the masses. But workers' council power is the most democratic form of class rule in history and it supersedes the democratic republic as a strategic aim in the imperialist epoch.
Despite our rejection of the confinement of the revolution to a separate democratic stage, we cannot conclude, like the sectarians, that democratic slogans are unnecessary. Brutal dictatorships constantly give rise to democratic aspirations and to illusions in bourgeois democratic institutions.
Only hardened sectarians, disdainful of the necessity of relating to what is progressive in the democratic illusions of the masses can believe that it is possible to "skip over" the consciousness of the masses. If these illusions are to be broken in practice more than the demand for socialism is necessary.
Where the ruling classes attempt to deny the full democratic rights of the masses, we mobilise around democratic slogans including that of the sovereign constituent assembly. We must fight for an election process in which there are no prior limitations or secret agreements, one which is really democratic for the masses: universal, direct, secret and equal suffrage with no property or literacy qualifications.
There should be freedom of publications and assembly for all the parties of the workers and peasants, defended by an armed militia. We must also demand the proportional representation of all parties in the assembly according to votes received, without any minimum threshold.
However, recognising the importance of such demands does not mean embracing the opportunist methods of the centrists who have turned the fight for the constituent assembly into a democratic stage through which the masses must pass. Centrism of a Trotskyist origin (Lambertism, Morenoism, the United Secretariat of the Fourth International) has consistently tailed the Stalinists or petit bourgeois nationalists by using the constituent assembly slogan in a way which relegates the fight for workers' councils and workers' power until after such an assembly has been won.
At the same time the centrists have sown illusions in the "socialist" potential of such assemblies. The "anti-imperialist" left Bonapartists have shown themselves equally adept at this. Be it the Dergue in Ethiopia, Mugabe's "one party state", Ortega's powerless "popular committees", or Qadhafi's people's committees, these organisations are actually used to deprive the workers and peasants of their freedom to organise.
The constituent assembly, therefore, contains no inherently progressive essence. It can be, and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred has been, merely a bourgeois parliament charged with drawing up a constitution. Worse, in semi-colonial countries (Brazil 1982), and even in some imperialist countries (Portugal 1975) it is only convened subject to military Bonapartist restrictions on its powers, and with a prior pact already made between the reformist parties and the military as to the constitutional outcome.
Often constituent assemblies have proved reactionary bodies counterposed to the revolutionary organs of struggle and power of the workers and peasants. This can happen in the semi-colonies where the huge weight of the peasantry can be used by the bourgeoisie against the working class.
The capitalists mobilise the equal votes of all "citizens" to act as a brake on the revolution. For this reason it is essential to fight for, and convene, the constituent assembly through the building of workers', soldiers' and poor peasants' councils. Only then can the assembly be a weapon of revolutionary democracy and not a tool of Bonapartism, only then can the assembly be pushed aside by the workers' and poor peasants' councils when its role has been exhausted.
Even under constitutional regimes in the semi-colonial countries, massive elements of Bonapartism exist and are repeatedly used against the working class: the presidency with its power to declare states of emergency; the senate, with its ability to check legislation; the unelected judiciary, and above all the paramilitary police and the standing army. All these offices and forces repeatedly reduce "democracy" to a completely empty shell.
Against these assaults on democratic rights, the working class should raise in its action programme the abolition of the presidency and the senate and the creation of a single chamber assembly elected at least biennially, with the power of the electors to recall their deputies. To this we should add the demand for the dissolution of the paramilitary squads, the police and standing army and the creation of an armed popular militia.
Stalinism, petit bourgeois nationalism and bourgeois democratic tasks
In all its forms Stalinism has remained implacably hostile to the theory and strategy of permanent revolution. The triumph of Stalinism was marked by the official adoption of the doctrine of socialism in one country by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The idea of a national road to socialism flowed from this theory.
In the semi-colonial and colonial countries this road involved passing through distinct and separate political stages: first the stage of fighting for political democracy and independent capitalist development in alliance with the national bourgeoisie; then the evolution towards socialism when the level of the productive forces were deemed ripe for this stage.
In the imperialist epoch this strategy could only mean the Stalinists sanctioned the denial of the proletariat's independent interests wherever they clashed with those of the national bourgeoisie in the democratic stage. Since the Second World War Stalinism has often abandoned any pretence that the second stage is possible for the semi-colonies, given that independent industrialisation is impossible.
We do not rule out that there may emerge "stages" in the living struggle for working class power. But there can never be self-contained stages, each based on a separate strategy for a separate period. The distinct tasks, bourgeois democratic and proletarian, are combined and openly fought for at every moment, with the single strategic goal of working class power.
But the working class must lead the urban and rural petit bourgeoisie in the fight for the democratic tasks. The whole of post-war development proves that the complete fulfilment of remaining democratic tasks will only be accomplished under the dictatorship of the proletariat, that is, on the basis of the destruction of capitalist private property and its system of nation states.
So thoroughly committed to the "democratic stage" has Stalinism been that it has even fused with petit bourgeois nationalist formations, all the better to "tighten the noose around the proletariat's neck", as Trotsky said.
Wherever the working class has spontaneously broken out of the limits that Stalinism has designated for the proletariat in the revolutionary process Stalinists have become the most fervent advocates of crushing the workers and pressing them back inside those limits. The bitter consequence has often been, not the realisation of the democratic stage, but bloody counter-revolution and dictatorship (Indonesia, Chile, Iran).
As the imperialist epoch has progressed petit bourgeois nationalism has increasingly taken up the mantle of the "national revolutionary" struggle in the semi-colonial era. It has often taken up revolutionary methods of struggle (insurrections, guerrilla warfare) in pursuit of national independence. On some occasions petit bourgeois forces have sanctioned, even if they have not organised, class struggle methods (strikes, occupations, land seizures). Nevertheless, the goal petit bourgeois nationalism sets out to achieve is a reactionary utopia.
The fight for an "independent capitalism" which espouses "social justice" at home and "non-alignment" abroad is, in the epoch of imperialism, an illusion. Usually led by urban professional classes, members of the intelligentsia and disillusioned sons and daughters of the ruling oligarchies, the petit bourgeois parties cannot break with capitalism. Only in exceptional circumstances can the aid of existing Stalinist states make it possible for such parties to bureaucratically overthrow capitalism. This course of action has only taken place when it has been forced upon them as their only means of surviving in a conflict with imperialism. In the process they fuse with or are transformed into Stalinist parties.
Where such parties rule for any length of time without overthrowing capitalism (Nicaragua) they rob the workers and peasants of the fruits of their struggle in the attempt to conciliate a "patriotic" capitalist class. This invariably ends with a conservative counter-revolution within the regime (Egypt, Algeria, Iran) and the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie or the overthrow of the petit bourgeois regime by pro-imperialist forces (Guatemala, Grenada).
Since their Stalinist degeneration the official pro-Moscow Communist Parties have time and again discredited not only themselves but the very idea of proletarian leadership by supporting reactionary dictatorships in the interests of the Kremlin's diplomatic manoeuvres. Bourgeois and petit bourgeois nationalism have drawn strength from these betrayals.
But in their turn these forces too have led the workers and peasants to defeat. This has allowed the masses to turn to religion for comfort and the inspiration to fight. Thus ideologies which at the dawn of capitalism receded in the face of a confident and rising bourgeoisie with its rationalism and secularism, now, in the reactionary epoch of capitalism are strengthened.
Religious institutions generally play a counter-revolutionary role in the struggles of the oppressed. For most of the time they purvey the ideology of submission or of peaceful reform. But at times they stand at the head of mass revolts with the aim of preventing the masses from attacking the capitalist order itself.
Most often in the guise of the leading church hierarchies they have acted to pacify resistance and poison the minds of the workers and peasants. On occasion in certain countries (e.g. Central America) the lower levels of the clergy or lay priests have helped peasants and rural workers to organise independent trade unions, encourage literacy, stimulate political consciousness and overcome passivity.
The reformist and class collaborationist projects that have informed this work have often in turn been cast aside by the workers and peasants; then the clergy have turned against the workers. This does not of course preclude individual members of the clergy, still less the mass of believers, becoming involved in militant or even revolutionary struggle. But the task of Marxists is resolutely to oppose the influence of all religious ideologies.
In Iran such a reactionary ideology hegemonised the majority of the exploited and oppressed even at the moment when the mass movement overthrew the pro-imperialist Shah. In power the full reactionary content of religious ideologies has been displayed: the denial of democratic rights, the persecution of independent proletarian organisations and the oppression of women, have all been the staple diet of semi-colonial capitalist states which have been infused with religious dogma. In the face of this revolutionaries must fight to protect proletarian democracy against religious castes and for the separation of church and state.
The anti-imperialist united front
Despite its dependence on imperialism, the semi-colonial bourgeoisie remains a national class capable of limited conflict with imperialism. The more openly imperialism solves its crises at the expense of the semi-colonial ruling class, the more the latter tends towards rhetorical and even actual resistance.
In no sense does this make the national bourgeoisie, or even fractions of it, revolutionary. But so long as bourgeois or petit bourgeois forces have a real mass influence in the anti-imperialist struggle it is necessary for the working class to use the tactic of the anti-imperialist united front. This involves striking tactical agreements with non-proletarian forces at both leadership and rank and file level. Such agreements might involve formal alliances or committees.
Where this is the case the fundamental pre-conditions for entering such blocs are: that the bourgeois or petit bourgeois forces are actually waging a struggle against imperialism, or its agents, that no limitations are placed on the political independence of the revolutionary organisation within this bloc and that there are no bureaucratic exclusions of significant forces struggling against imperialism.
It is even possible that this united front may have to be carried out within the base organs of a mass organisation with a popular frontist character within which distinct class parties have not yet emerged. What is vital is that this unity should be aimed at mobilising the broadest anti-imperialist forces for precise common objectives such as the introduction of democratic rights and the expulsion of the imperialists.
Whilst the struggles of the semi-colonial bourgeoisie are aimed at broadening their own scope for exploitation, the entry of the working class into that conflict carries the threat of ending exploitation altogether. Thus there is nothing consistently anti-imperialist or revolutionary about the semi-colonial bourgeoisie, and no permanent place for it should be reserved in an anti-imperialist united front.
The purpose of anti-imperialist united action must be to aid the proletariat to mobilise the masses so that they burst through the restraints of their traditional leaderships and organisations. For that reason the proletariat must advance the most audacious forms of mass direct action and organisation, strike committees, popular assemblies, mass meetings (cabildos) etc, which will aid the development of workers' and peasants' councils, workers' militias and soldiers' committees.
The proletariat must never give political support to "left" regimes or collude with their suppression of democratic rights. The working class vanguard should refrain from an armed insurrection against these regimes whilst democratic liberties exist and the majority of workers still support such regimes. The only support possible for these regimes is joint military co-operation against a reactionary coup, or against imperialist intervention. Thus Trotskyists can support military actions by bourgeois governments against imperialism. But we at no stage renounce our struggle to overthrow and replace these governments with a workers' and peasants' government.
The nationalists and reformists always want to transform the front for action against imperialism into a strategic bloc to win political power (a popular front). They seek to fuse the anti-imperialist forces into a governmental coalition that will guarantee the survival of "national capital" against the socialist revolution. Revolutionary communists fight to install governments which are based on workers' and peasants' councils and militias. Only a government of the proletariat, in alliance with the poor peasantry, can solve the unfinished tasks of the bourgeois democratic revolution.
The class content of the government is spelt out in advance. The slogan is for a revolutionary workers' and peasants' government. Such a government will not, indeed cannot, confine the revolution to a distinct democratic stage or it will succumb to the pressures of the counter-revolution. With this perspective the Bolsheviks were able to draw behind them the radicalised movements of the petit bourgeoisie like the left SRs and the peoples' parties of Central Asia. The constitution of a strategic bloc with diverse left forces without this objective will simply obstruct the road to the proletarian dictatorship. Entry into a government or a coalition government on the basis of the maintenance of private property, its armed forces and state, constitutes the highest form of treason to the proletariat.
The working class and the guerrilla strategy
Trotskyists are opposed to the strategy of guerrilla war whether in a "foco" or "peoples war" variant. Petit bourgeois guerrillaism is opposed to the construction of a workers' party, to workers' councils and to a Bolshevik insurrection. It wants to dissolve the proletariat's interests into the cross-class programme of the petit bourgeoisie. It wants to impose bureaucratic organisations and avoid the development of workers' councils and autonomous democratic workers' militias.
Even where it succeeds in downing a decrepit dictatorship (Cuba, Nicaragua) it paves the way for a Bonapartist solution. Guerrilla victories, even in the exceptional form of bureaucratic social overturns or, more usually, military-Bonapartist regimes, are always accompanied by the crushing of the proletariat's independent organisations.
Behind an ultra-left phraseology and methodology guerrillaism in fact evinces a tremendous lack of confidence in the working class and a predisposition to make deals with sections of the bourgeoisie. It involves surrendering political leadership to the urban bourgeoisie and petit bourgeoisie and, in so far as it seeks a mass base for its actions (i.e. people's war), it dissolves the independent interests of the working class into that of the petit bourgeoisie. In that sense guerrillaism as a strategy always has the tendency to be an armed popular front.
Guerrillaism downgrades economic and political struggle in favour of episodic and often desultory military action. Individual terrorism, the destruction of factories (centres of proletarian concentration) and spectacular military actions are methods counterposed to the strategy of the working class. Against Marxism's dictum that the emancipation of the workers can only be carried out by the workers themselves, the guerrillaists proclaim that liberation will be the act of external saviours.
By its undemocratic and elitist attitude towards the masses they claim to represent, the guerrilla leaders can often leave the masses defenceless in the face of the state's superior military forces or of vigilante groups.
To withdraw the most fearless and combative fighters from the factories, the urban centres and densely populated rural districts, is to strip the workers' and peasants' organisations of their cadres and their leaders. Guerrillaists may also attack the workers' organisations themselves, as in the case of Sendero Luminoso in Peru.
For Trotskyists guerrilla action is a tactic that can be used in the anti-imperialist struggle. We do not reject the military united front with guerrilla armies, either in the form of separate battalions or of communist cell work within bourgeois or Stalinist led armies. But the aim of this military united front is to prepare the widespread and independent arming of the working class and poor peasantry. By these means communists fight to force the guerrilla armies and their political apparatus to expropriate plantations, back land seizures and recognise the sovereignty of workers' and peasants' councils and militias.
But this remains a subordinate tactic to a strategy whose principal protagonist is the working class. The programme of permanent revolution subordinates all military action to what is politically appropriate, given the level of class struggle and revolutionary consciousness of the working class and poor peasantry. In general, broad military action by armed militia in town and country should only be undertaken when the existence of dual power and generalised workers' control sharply poses the need to organise the insurrection.
We categorically reject all generalised military action of a non-defensive nature that leaves the masses politically passive. At all costs the working class has to maintain its independence and opposition to guerrillaism. It must criticise, and in extreme cases condemn, any actions which are opposed to its perspectives.
In the armed conflict between the petit bourgeois guerrillas and the bourgeois state we at all times defend them against state repression. We do not recognise the state's right to judge those fighting against it. We fight for the right of prisoner of war status for captured guerrillas and for their release. In the case of guerrillas attacking the workers' organisations we do not call for defence by the capitalist state.
We demand the workers' movement itself, through meetings and in its trade unions, issue a verdict by organising workers' and peasants' defence squads against the guerrilla attacks. We do not flinch from the inevitable military confrontation with the bourgeois and Stalinist commanders which flow from the divergent programmes of the proletariat and the petit bourgeoisie.
Chapter 5 - Against capitalist restoration! For proletarian political revolution!
The counter-revolutionary character of the degenerated workers' states
From 1945-1991 the USSR acted as one of the two central pillars of the imperialist world order. Despite the military and economic rivalry between the USSR and the USA which spanned nearly half a century the Kremlin, its satellites and indeed its Stalinist rivals repeatedly acted to divert and abort the development of a victorious world-revolutionary wave which could have isolated and eventually defeated imperialism.
However the limited hot wars with imperialism; Korea, Vietnam, the logistical support for various national liberation struggles, the overthrow of capitalism by Stalinist parties covered the counterrevolutionary role of Stalinist strategy. Thus the downfall of the USSR appears an unmitigated catastrophe for millions of subjective anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist fighters world-wide. Certainly, the collapse of the USSR and other degenerate workers states represents an enormous material and moral victory for imperialism.
But it is a contradictory one since it involves not only the near destruction of the historic economic gains of the October revolution but also of a counter-revolutionary agency of imperialism within the movements of the exploited and oppressed world-wide.
The counter-revolutionary consequences of this victory are immediate and obvious. The pyrrhic nature of this victory will emerge relentlessly in the decade to come. Indeed the crisis of the very restoration process contributes mightily to deepening the period of general crisis which characterises the end of the twentieth century.
The prestige of the Kremlin was greatly enhanced by its victory over German imperialism and its territorial expansion after the war. The essential role of the planned economy, a key conquest of the October Revolution in the achievement of this victory, its post-war survival, reconstruction and extension, were the material preconditions for the creation of a series of degenerate workers' states, the political and economic duplicates of the USSR.
The very existence of the USSR and the defensive manoeuvres of its bureaucracy against imperialism led to the defeat and overthrow of a number of weakened capitalist classes in Eastern Europe and later in the colonial and semi-colonial world. These overthrows of capitalism took place either through the agency of the Soviet Armed forces or by means of Stalinist parties and guerrilla forces under their leadership. In the case of Cuba a petty bourgeois nationalist movement assimilated to Stalinism and transformed the island into a degenerated workers state.
Under Stalinist control, however, these victories over capitalism did not result in the international spread of the proletarian revolution but, rather, in the achievement of a relatively stable balance of power between the USSR and imperialism.
The Stalinist parties ensured that all elements of independent working class organisation were destroyed prior to the liquidation of capitalism. For the world proletariat the overall consequences of the social overturns were thus counter-revolutionary.
Although the pace and circumstances of these bureaucratic social overturns necessarily varied they had a number of essential features in common; Stalinist parties, or proto-Stalinist national liberation movements, came to lead powerful armed forces in the struggle against fascism and imperialism. The armed forces of the bourgeois states were defeated and disintegrated by the Stalinist forces.
The bourgeoisie were deprived completely or in large measure of political power. The Stalinists crushed all independent working class organisations, preventing the creation of healthy workers' states based on workers' democracy and ensuring that the regime created was a replica of the bureaucratic tyranny established by Stalin in the USSR. Despite widespread nationalisations of industry and the expropriation of the semi-feudal landowners there was originally no systematic expropriation of the bourgeoisie as a whole.
True to their counter-revolutionary stages programme, the Stalinists had initially no intention of overthrowing capitalism but on the contrary sought to preserve it via a popular front, open or concealed, with the local bourgeoisie and with the imperialist powers. The "peoples democracies" were in no way intended to be "socialist" states.
Throughout this phase the Stalinists actively prevented any attempt by the working class to take power from the virtually prostrate bourgeoisie. The Soviet occupation authorities systematically liquidated its revolutionary vanguard and, indeed, any independent political parties, trade unions or proto-soviet bodies. It defended capitalist property relations whilst seeking via nationalisations, joint enterprises etc to exploit them for the reconstruction of the Soviet economy.
The armed forces of the bourgeois state were defeated and smashed by the Stalinist forces. However originally, the resultant states were not workers' states. Rather Stalinism's intention was to maintain the existence of capitalism, which it proceeded to do. Stalin's objective was to ensure these states utter subordination, forming a buffer zone, a defensive glacis, for the USSR. The Stalinist bureaucracy thus carried out a pre-emptive bureaucratic counter-revolution against the working class and the poor peasantry, aborting the nascent revolutionary situation that the collapse of Nazi power had created.
Whilst doing this the Stalinists could rely on the active support of the indigenous bourgeoisie and the imperialist powers. In this way a form of dual power was established with the armed power of the Stalinists (the Soviet Armed forces or guerilla armies led by them) replacing that of the bourgeoisie.
However, the abortion of the post-war revolutionary wave and crushing of any independent proletarian class forces necessarily encouraged imperialism and the remaining forces of the bourgeoisie in eastern Europe to return to the offensive.
The continued pressure of Stalinist forces in the Balkans (without Stalin's approval) and the inability of British imperialism to stem it unaided, gave the new US administration the pretext to launch a economic and military push to strengthen the bourgeois states of the continent. Truman Iaunched Marshal aid as the carrot and the return of large numbers of US troops as the stick to prevent any further successes for the Stalinists and to encourage a roll-back in central and eastern Europe.
But the first attempts of bourgeois forces to use the contradictions of dual power and the popular front governments to pressure the Stalinists to accept Marshal aid or relax their grip on the armed power produced a defensive reflex fatal for capitalism in Eastern Europe.
At this point the Stalinists, using their control of the repressive forces of the state, acted to remove the threat from imperialism and its indigenous bourgeois agents, by expelling the representatives of the bourgeoisie from government and expropriating the capitalist class as a whole. By a series of bureaucratic and military measures the capitalist system was uprooted and replaced by the nationalisation of industry and land and a system of bureaucratic command; planning-modelled on the USSR-was introduced.
This bureaucratic overturn destroyed capitalism but because the working class, acting as an independent and conscious force, was excluded the revolution in property relations did not result in the creation of healthy workers' states. For us the consciousness, fighting capacity and revolutionary action of the working class is decisive for the prosecution of genuine proletarian revolutions.
Thus, while limited united fronts with the Stalinist regimes during the bureaucratic revolutions would have been permissible, the strategic aim of Trotskyists would have been to break the control of Stalinism over the destruction of capitalism, fight for genuine organs of workers' democracy and force the withdrawal of the the Soviet Armed forces from Eastern Europe.
The bureaucratic social revolution, despite depriving the bourgeoisie of their property, was essentially a counter-revolutionary act in that it took place against the rhythms and flow of the class struggle. It could only take place because both the working class and the bourgeoisie had previously been disarmed and the state forces lay in the hands of the Stalinists.
Nevertheless the expropriation of the capitalist class and the suppression of the operation of the law of value meant that the property relations this state defended were proletarian ones, albeit ones controlled by a totalitarian bureaucracy. Thus like the USSR by whose agency, direct or indirect it was created, these states were degenerated workers states even though they, unlike the USSR, had not undergone any degenerative process themselves from being a healthy (i.e. workers council) states.
Throughout this phase, the Stalinist governments ensured that there were no independent working class mobilisations that could have used the impetus of the defeat of the bourgeoisie to challenge the political dictatorship and parasitic privileges of the Stalinists, thus opening a political revolutionary crisis where the state power of workers' councils was posed as an alternative to the totalitarian dictatorship.
They were carried out by the Stalinist forces as a defensive reaction against imperialism and as a pre-emptive measure against a proletarian social revolution. Thus, these bureaucratic social overturns were, at the same time, political counter-revolutions against the proletariat. Their outcome was a blocking of the transition to socialism, the attempt to realise the reactionary utopia of "socialism in one country" rather than the international revolution.
This was also counter-revolutionary from the standpoint of the historic and strategic goals of the proletariat The transitional Stalinist governments which were the agencies of these bureaucratic social overturns can best be described as "bureaucratic, anti-capitalist" variants of the "workers' government" category identified by the Comintern.
In Cuba the key role in an essentially similar bureaucratic overthrow of capitalism was played by the July 26 Movement centred around the caudillo figure of Fidel Castro. It was a popular front with both bourgeois nationalist and left Stalinist wings. During its march to power and its first phase in government its overall tactics and programme remained those of revolutionary petit bourgeois nationalism. US hostility to its victory and to its attacks on US investments in Cuba led to a counter-offensive by the Cuban bourgeoisie in mid 1960.
This forced Castro to side with the left Stalinists, to seek alliance and fusion with the Cuban CP and massive economic and military assistance from the Soviet bureaucracy.
The Kremlin was willing to support this development for military-strategic purposes (missile siting), as well as to increase its ideological influence. From mid-1960 to early 1962 a bureaucratic anti-capitalist workers' government expropriated the native and imperialist bourgeoisie and instituted bureaucratic planning, creating a degenerate workers' state.
Thus, although all the degenerate workers' states share the counterrevolutionary character of the USSR, they were not created in the same manner. In the USSR, initial bureaucratic deformations grew until a qualitative leap, the Soviet Thermidor, or political counter-revolution, transformed the state into a degenerated workers' state.
By contrast, the other states were established as replicas of the USSR, they were degenerate from their very creation. Consequently, the programme of political revolution raised by Trotsky against the bureaucratic dictatorship of Stalin was applicable to these states from their establishment. As with the USSR, the bureaucracies of these states have consistently acted to hold back and to divert anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist struggles around the world. Despite their own anti-capitalist measures, their strategic but utopian goal was peaceful coexistence with imperialism.
Stalinism cramped the planned economies within the confines of its various "one countries". It actively prevented the spread of the proletarian revolution to the more economically developed areas, thus cutting the various economies off from all the benefits of access to the highest concentrations of the means of production, and integration into the international division of labour.
The state monopoly of foreign trade provides indispensable protection for the workers' state against competition from cheaper capitalist goods. But the aim of this monopoly is not to establish all possible agrarian and industrial sectors within the borders of one workers' state, such as can be found in the rest of the world. This path proved utopian (e.g. North Korea and Albania) and led to unneccesary and useless sacrifrices being made by the working class in those countries with a planned economy.
Only the spread of the social revolution to the centres of world capitalism will allow a decisive breakthrough to socialist construction and a world planned economy. However despite the bureaucratic stranglehold, these post-capitalist economies did achieve dramatic growth in the early stages of the creation, or reconstruction, of an industrial base. However, the more sophisticated and diverse the requirements of economic development have become the less the bureaucracy was able to fulfil them.
Because it suppressed proletarian democracy, it also ensured that its own planning was ill-informed and ignorant of the actual operation of the economy and the needs of society. Thus, in all respects, the narrow, nationalist programme of "socialism in one country" served to retard relatively and eventually absolutely the development of the productive forces. Bureaucratic planning scored some successes in the first decades when it was primarily a case of extensive industrial development. Increasingly however, innovation and constant technological renewal proved beyond the capacities of bureaucratic planning.
Having abolished the dynamic mainspring of competition the ruling caste refused to replace it with the creative, self-interested participation of the direct producers in the planning process. The result was an inevitable decline in labour productivity and a further catastrophic falling behind of imperialist democratic capitalism.
While the bureaucracies could marshal resources to meet their own lavish consumption needs, and to defend their tyrannical rule the further production and distribution was from these priorities the more shortages and poor quality of goods were the norm. Thus Military and defence spending, including the maintenance of a vast police apparatus, received top priority and were performed relatively efficiently.
But when it came to the consumption needs of the masses the bureaucratic planning mechanisms proved utterly unable to provide high quality and plentiful goods to lighten domestic labour, to both lighten and shorten productive labour and to increase the amount and quality of leisure. After some striking initial successes in the sphere of education and social welfare etc. even these fell victim to the stagnation of bureaucratic planning.
This experience eventually undermined the very idea of "planned" production in the consciousness of the working class, nationally and internationally. Bourgeois propaganda has spread with ever greater success the "lesson" that this was the necessary result of any attempt to plan an economy.
But Stalinist bureaucracy was and is not an expression of the logic of planning itself. Planning presupposes conscious control of production by the centralised and conscious will of the producers themselves. The goals of Stalinist command planning was drafted by a tiny core of planners, themselves dictated to by a bonapartist clique of top bureaucrats. The operation of the plan was thrown out of balance and disrupted by rival layers of the party and managerial bureaucracy.
The atomised and alienated work force who neither decided nor understood the goals of the plan increasingly treated production with apathy. A chronic stagnation moved in the 1980s into a critical situation throwing the ruling bureaucracies into ever deeper political crisis. From Moscow to Beijing, from Belgrade to Hanoi, the ruling bureaucracies divided into warring factions.
All attempts by the bankrupt bureaucracy to revive their system by admixtures of "market forces', so-called market socialism was doomed to failure. First in Hungary and Yugoslavia and then most spectacularly under Gorbachev in the USSR these measures disrupted and disorganised bureaucratic planning without creating a real capitalist economy. Dislocation and collapse of production, a rampant black market and corruption, gigantic state budget deficits and enterprise bankruptcy, staved off only by hyperinflation, mark the terrible final death agony of the bureaucratic planned economies
For the working class, the purpose of post-capitalist property relations is the transition to a classless, communist society. They make possible the planning of production to meet human need, to end oppression and progressively eradicate inequalities. To do this they need the conscious and active participation of the proletariat as producer and consumer.
They need the sovereignty of the direct producers themselves who, for the first time in history, have an immediate interest in, as well as the creative ability to, unleash the productive forces. The various workers' states have to follow a path of progressive economic integration and common planning in order to make the most effective use of the principle of international division of labour which remain valid even for a socialist economy.
The Stalinist bureaucracies were not capable of taking advantage of this principle. The first step in this direction for a healthy workers' state would be the formation of common planning bodies for important branches and common plans for two or three states together with a common currency. Such a system can only be created by the revolutionary action of the working class itself, conscious of its goals and objectives. If everywhere bureaucratic planning is in various stages of its death agony late twentieth century capitalism has shown no capacity to rapidly step in and fund the restoration process.
An extended period of crisis where the moribund planning system shorn of its central co-ordination obstructs the definitive triumph of the law of value creates the opportunity for the working class to shed its illusions in the market and rediscover the programme of democratic planning and workers council democracy.
The fracture and downfall of the Stalinist bureaucracies
The Stalinist bureaucracies are historically illegitimate castes with no title to their privileges. From their birth they tended to develop factions and wings in response to the long term pressure upon them both from imperialism and the working class. In the USSR, Hungary, Yugoslavia and China dominant sections of the ruling bureaucracies developed which sought to dismantle planning altogether and to determine prices, wages and production by "market mechanisms".
They sought to put an end to the social wage represented by subsidised foodstuffs, social services and amenities that have directly benefited the workers as a result of the abolition of capitalism.
These advocates of decentralisation, the free market and the opening of their economies to the imperialist multinationals became ever more openly restorationist despairing not only of the bureaucratic central plan, but eventually of their caste's ability to hold on to political power.
This faction was closely enmeshed with the managerial strata and hoped to emerge as direct agents, if not members, of a new capitalist class. Such conscious restorationists were, as events in the USSR/ClS after 1990-91 showed, able to shed their Stalinist skins with remarkable speed and take on a Social Democratic, Liberal, Christian democratic, and proto-fascist colours.
Trotsky expected a small revolutionary pole of the bureaucracy to emerge, one that would side with the working class in a political revolution. He never accorded to this faction any independent role let alone that of leading the political revolution.
This faction has not materialised in the death agony of Stalinism, nor is it inevitable that it should do so. In 1938 Trotsky could point to the figure of Ignace Reiss a defector to the Fourth International from the KGB in 1937. Likewise he could point to Fyodor Butenko a Soviet diplomat in the Romanian embassy who defected to Mussolini's Italy in 1938, as the representative of a proto-fascist restorationist wing of the bureaucracy. Trotsky saw the majority of the bureaucracy under Stalin as trying by ever more savage totalitarian means to avoid being crushed either by restoration or proletarian political revolution.
Whilst estimating that Stalin's trajectory was taking him nearer and nearer to the restorationist camp (in its fascist form) he did not rule out the possibility of Stalin and Co resisting a restorationist attack and therefore of the need to form a limited military united front in defence of the USSR. this latter perspective proved to be necessary after Trotsky's murder, in the second imperialist war.
The death agony of Stalinism was postponed for forty years by the victory of the USSR in the second world war. Therefore the factional line-ups within the Soviet bureaucracy and the other workers states were profoundly changed. The triumph of the imperialist democracies and the expansion of the productive forces for three decades or more gave new life and vitality to liberal, free market capitalism.
This in turn exerted a different pressure on the Soviet and other workers' states bureaucracies, creating a preponderantly pro-marketising faction.
The elapse of time and the destruction of the revolutionary generation of 1917-23, the crisis of revolutionary leadership including the destruction of Trotsky's Fourth International meant the disappearance of the "faction of Reiss". Only a profound development of independent class organisations in a political revolutionary crisis plus the recreation of a significant international revolutionary force could lead to the re-emergence of such a wing of the bureaucracy. But such a development is not, nor was it for Trotsky, an essential part of the revolutionary programme.
The preponderant faction of the bureaucracy in the post 1985 death agony phase was the Market-socialist wing. At the same time openly restorationist forces became increasingly stronger within and outside of the bureaucracy. Gorbachev, echoing elements of Bukharinism, did not seek the restoration of capitalism. Rather, he aimed at first to utilise market mechanisms to shore up the caste dictatorship on the basis of post-capitalist property relations.
This alliance eventually fractured the bureaucratic dictatorship and created a duality of power with the old bureaucracy. In his last two years Gorbachev was forced to raise himself more and more above the divided camps, giving rise to a weak form of bonapartism. Possessing only a utopian economic and political programme of its own-one incapable of realisation-this bonapartism veered between the two camps drawing strength in turn from one camp to resist the pressure of the other.
Finally, in August 1991 the heads of the CPSU party bureaucracy and interior security services attempted an abortive coup to forestall the rise of the open pro-imperialist and USSR disintegrationist comprador forces led by Yeltsin.
The abortive coup revealed the lack of a solid social base of the conservative bureaucracy in the population at large but also demonstrated a lack of belief in its own mission by the hard line elements in the bureaucracy as a whole. As a result of this failure Yeltsin inherited the Gorbachev executive and Presidential machinery, increased its powers and used them in the service of a fast track shock therapy restorationist economic policy.
But the failed coup and Yeltsin's seizure of the executive did not resolve the dual power between the rival sections of the bureaucracy but merely heightened it and brought it into direct confrontation with each other free from the obscuring effect of Gorbachev's bonapartism.
In the degenerate workers states of Eastern Europe the policies of Gorbachev after 1985 acted as a catalyst to quicken the tempo of developments in the economy and to hasten the denouement between the conservative bureaucracy and the bourgeois restorationists. By 1989 Gorbachev has signalled that the the Soviet Armed forces would not play any role in protecting the national bureaucracies from domestic protest.
The swift rise of amorphous "democratic" mass movements provided a solid base for the democratic intelligentsia and marketising wing of the bureaucracy-social layers far larger in Eastern Europe than in the USSR. In 1989/1990 the ruling Stalinist party apparatus in EE and armed forces crumbled in the face of mass protest.
Between 1989 and 1991 bourgeois elections brought to power bourgeois, bourgeois workers' or popular front governments throughout the region (including the seceding Baltic republics of the USSR)-with the exception of Serbia. Dual power in the state superstructure no where long survived, as it did in Russia. Here the protracted nature of the restoration process has been entirely due to the objective economic difficulties of converting the main means of production into capital
In China on the other hand Deng Xiaoping has attempted to combine radical marketisation with continued party dictatorship, resorting to bloody repression in Tiananmen Square to enforce this. The Chinese bureaucracy have a short lived historic opportunity to make this combination; police dictatorship for the workers and the urban intelligentsia and a near free market for the peasantry plus enormous concessions to capitalism in special economic zones.
The historic factor which created this opportunity is the enormous size of China's peasantry and its role not only on the farms but in the barracks. Deng and Co have allowed a near total market economy to develop in the countryside and have thus for a limited period won the passivity if not the support of the peasants. They thus have the historic foundation stone of bonapartism But the whole logic of the rapid growth of market forces in rural China and in the special zones will act to pressurise and fracture the Chinese bureaucracy.
When it splits and is forced to take its internecine warfare onto the streets (as it did in the mid-sixties and seventies and again at the end of the eighties), China too will face the alternatives of social counter-revolution or proletarian political revolution. In China too revolutionary leadership will be the deciding factor.
But not all the shock-treatment rapid restorationist elements within the bureaucracy are bourgeois democrats or liberalisers. Nor are most of the authoritarian bureaucratic conservatives committed to the defence of bureaucratically planned property relations.
In the USSR, for example, the conservative bureaucracy has evolved rapidly into Great Russian Chauvinists and anti-semites using populist and nationalist slogans to mobilise the most backward sections of society against the democratic rights of the workers and oppressed minorities fascist and proto-fascist parties have arisen with profound links to the ex-KGB and the army. Groups like Nashi and Zhirinovsky's LDP reject collaboration with western imperialism only because their programme is for the restoration of a specifically Russian imperialism.
The most authoritarian elements within the bureaucracy recognise in such proto-fascism a bulwark against the threat of proletarian political revolution and a potential alternative to future domination by foreign capital. The growth of fascist and semi-fascist forces was most clearly reflected in the electoral victory of Zhirinovsky in December 1993. The further development of fascism as a mass force depends partly on the degree of revival by the workers movement in the coming years.
If working class resistance to the economic and political attacks of the restorationists mounts the danger will become greater that the latter will turn to a mass fascist movement in order to crush this resistance.
On the other hand it is also possible that the weakness of the Russian embryo bourgeoisie and the stagnation of the restoration process itself could strengthen those bureaucratic forces which support a state-capitalist road to capitalism under chauvinist and fascist slogans which might then turn to mobilising the lumpenproletarian and petty-bourgeois masses to smash both rival bureaucratic factions and the threat of an explosion of working class resistance.
The restorationist governments all look to look to imperialism for assistance. But imperialism, though it ardently wishes the final and complete restoration of capitalism in the degenerated workers' states simply does not posses the resources to ensure a rapid transformation, one free of revolutionary crises.
Only in one state, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), was a rapid restoration possible and this has proved a tremendous strain on the strongest European imperialist power. Thus despite the installation of restorationist governments there still exists subsequent to this an extended period in which the programme of political revolution has to be combined with an anti-capitalist programme against restoration.
The remaining gains of the workers states must be fought for to the bitter end. Only those who can defend old gains will be able to make new ones. Not only the working class of the degenerated workers' states, but that of the entire world would suffer as a result of their wholesale destruction. On a global scale this would leave the working class at !east for a certain period, disoriented and ideologically disarmed. In addition, the anti-imperialist struggles of the semi-colonies would lose an important, if ultimately inadequate, source of weapons and aid.
Imperialist access to the raw materials, cheap labour and markets of the degenerate(d) workers' states could open the way to a new if limited expansion period in the imperialist epoch. Nevertheless this itself could heighten inter-imperialist rivalry and promote such a conflict-ridden new division of the world as would re-raise the spectre of war and revolution.
As bureaucratic planning disintegrates, only proletarian political revolution can defend, restore and then extend the planned property relations and, thereby, prevent the revitalisation of imperialism. The world proletariat, therefore, must stand with its brothers and sisters in the degenerated workers' states in defence of the remaining planned property relations.
The state monopoly of foreign trade, the nationalisation of industry, the principle of planning must be defended against internal restoration and imperialist attack. In defending these economic conquests we are defending the pre-requisites for the transition to socialism, not the bureaucracy that presides over them.
At present the imperialists are relying primarily on economic levers to engineer the restoration of capitalism. But any halt, any serious reverse to the process of social counterrevolution could lead to direct military intervention to complete the restoration of capitalism in the face of working class resistance. The world proletariat must continue to stand for the unconditional defence of the workers' states against imperialism and its agents. Therefore, we oppose any reductions in the military capabilities, of the degenerate workers' states, nuclear or conventional, that would open up these states to military or diplomatic coercion.
5For the working class, however, the best defence of planned property in the degenerated workers' states is an attack on the Stalinist bureaucracies who have led and are leading them to ruin. The proletarian programme for the degenerate workers' states, as well as for the struggle against imperialism, is not one of mere "democratisation" of the existing state and cannot be reduced to non-class specific demands for "people's power".
It is a programme of revolution, a programme for the establishment of the proletarian dictatorship against both bureaucrats, restorationist "democrats" and imperialists.
For a political revolution! For workers' council democracy!
The essence of the programme of political revolution, like that of the programme of social revolution in the capitalist states, lies in linking the ongoing struggles for the immediate needs of the working class to the fight for political power.
By combining intransigent defence of working class interests with the tactics of mass mobilisation, independent political organisation and the imposition of workers' control, revolutionaries can prepare the working class for the seizure of power. In all spheres of struggle, the proletariat must become conscious of its separate interests and identity, must become a class for itself.
For independent workplace organisation!
Because of the nature of the degenerated workers' states, any independent mobilisations of the working class immediately collide with the power of the bureaucratic state machine. Whatever the issue that led to the mobilisation, this collision poses the need for the working class to win the right to organise itself. Independent class organisations and consciousness is a pre-condition for acting as an independent force within the broad mass movements of opposition to Stalinism.
The social power of the proletariat is rooted in production and the class must be organised at the point of production. Within every workplace, democratic mass meetings must become the highest authority. Workers' committees, elected and recallable by mass meetings must fight to impose workers' control on every aspect of life in the plant, including the right to strike and the right to veto management and state plans.
For free trade unions!
Beyond the workplace, the proletariat must have trade unions independent of the Stalinists as a central element in its organisation as a class. Whether these are formed as the result of a thorough purging of the existing "state" unions or are created anew in struggle, they must be accountable to, and controllable by, their members. All officials of the unions must be elected and recallable, free from the, "leading role of the party", and be paid the average wage of their members.
From democratic rights to a real workers' democracy
In the struggles that announced the death agony of Stalinism the masses have primarily been drawn into battle against the bureaucracy behind demands for key democratic rights. The task of constructing the revolutionary party involves pushing the working class to the head of this struggle, to lead it and use revolutionary and working class forms of organisation to achieve them. In this fight the workers must not allow the bureaucracy or any section of it to decide who can and cannot be allowed to take advantage of any democratic rights.
The bureaucracy-in part or in whole-has proven itself to be the chief agent of restoration and in no wise can be trusted to be the guardian of the post-capitalist property relations.
Precisely because the bureaucracy is interested only in conceding as much democracy as will allow it to strike coalitions with other forces to become a new exploiting class the working class has every interest in the fullest and most revolutionary expansion of democratic rights in order to forestall this and to hasten the development of its own class consciousness, that is, recognise who is and who is not its enemy
Where the CP still monopolises the media and electoral process we fight to end this. Down with the bureaucracy's censorship laws! The workers themselves must decide what is to be published or broadcast. For access to the press, radio and television for all working class organisations under workers' control. Workers must enforce their own ban on fascist, pogromist, racist propaganda.
Likewise they will allow no freedom of the press or access to the media for pro-restorationist forces that are organising to overthrow the workers state by force. All candidates in elections must clearly account for their electoral funding. The masses should fight for a veto over any candidate receiving clandestine financial support from the regime or from counter-revolutionary agencies such as the CIA, the churches, or reactionary NGOs (non-governmental organisations). Any new legal code that the "reformist" wing of the bureaucracy proposes must be freely discussed by workers.
Any code must place elected workers' courts at the centre of the legal machinery. For the release of all political prisoners to workers' courts who shall decide on their future.
For the freedom to form political parties, except for fascists, pogromists, racists, for those restorationists (including those originating from within the bureaucracy) who are actively organising for civil war, and those which for other reasons have received the veto of the workers movement.
Whilst we will not defend these parties from repression by the conservative Stalinist regimes or from bourgeois restorationist governments, we recognise no government's right to judge who is a counter-revolutionary other than a revolutionary workers' government. The workers themselves, not the bureaucracy, must decide which parties they recognise as loyal to their own state power.
We fight to expose the anti-working class programme of confused or covertly restorationist parties and by political struggle to deprive them of mass support. We would advocate careful surveillance of their activities and severe measures against any attempts to overthrow the proletarian dictatorship. For the right of any group of workers and small peasants to put forward candidates in any elections.
For the smashing of the bureaucracy's repressive state apparatus, the instrument of tyranny against the working class and the instrument used by the Stalinists for capitalist restoration. This apparatus has been fashioned by the bureaucracy in the image of the capitalist state machine.
The political revolution must smash it on the road to the creation of healthy workers' state. For full political rights for soldiers, the right to hold meetings in the barracks to elect soldiers' councils free of all control by the officers and commanders, for the right to publish newspapers and have access to the media.
We fight for the right of rank and file soldiers, sailors etc to elect their own officers. For the right of all returning soldiers stationed abroad to have decent affordable housing for themselves and their families and the right to retraining and a new job after being demobilised. For the dissolution of the secret police and the punishment of all those guilty of crimes against the workers. A democratic workers state needs no secret police.
The plots of counter-revolutionary forces can be countered by workers' security commissions on the lines of the revolutionary Cheka of 1917. Dissolve the standing army of the bureaucracy and replace it with a revolutionary workers army linked to workers' territorial militias.
Down with privilege and inequality!
One of the earliest indications of the victory of the Stalinist political counterrevolution in the USSR was the arrogant condemnation of egalitarianism as a petit bourgeois deviation. But, as Trotsky predicted, the desire for equality and the hatred of privilege are instinctive and fundamental elements of proletarian class consciousness. On the road to the elimination of the bureaucracy's rule altogether the workers must fight to end abuses now.
They must mobilise to end the grotesquely privileged lifestyle of the bureaucracy. The special shops must be closed and the sanatoria, health resorts and leisure facilities currently reserved for the bureaucracy must be thrown open to the workers and poor peasants.
The role of a party or state official must cease to be a route to privilege and luxury. No party or state official should earn more than the average wage of a skilled worker.
In the workplaces a fight must be launched for the right of the workers to dismiss all officials/managers known to have profited from corruption or to have persecuted workers.
Workers' control of production and the plan
Economic decisions in a planned economy are not hidden behind a smokescreen of "market forces" as they are under capitalism. They are political decisions taken by the bureaucracy. Consequently any fight against the bureaucracy's decisions, in whatever sphere, are inherently challenges to the right of the bureaucracy to control the economic plan.
As that control breeds stagnation and decline, so the marketising wing of the bureaucracy and other restorationist forces attempt to divert working class struggle away from the state by encouraging workers to demand "self management" of their enterprises, free from the bureaucratic interference of the central plan. This doctrine of "market socialism" is a reactionary diversion designed to strengthen the most narrow forms of factory isolationism, to divide the proletariat as a class force and to break up the central plan itself.
Against it revolutionaries must fight to make every working class struggle a conscious challenge to bureaucratic power by raising the demand for workers' control of the plan. At the level of the workplace, this must include opening the books to workers' inspection and, at local, regional and national levels, a fight, drawing in the workers of the planning ministries, to expose the real priorities-and the swindles, the corruption and the sheer incompetence-of the bureaucracy's leaders.
Through its fight to defend itself against the bureaucracy's plan and to impose its class priorities on planning, the working class will not only safeguard its living standards and conditions but create the organisations which will be the very foundations of a revolutionary workers' state. These organisations will be the mechanism through which the workers' state will achieve a democratically centralised planned economy.
An isolated revolutionary workers' state will have to co-exist with, and utilise, market forces at the same time as seeking to overcome them. Without a doubt elements of the Stalinist bureaucratic elimination of the market have actually served to retard the development of sectors of the Soviet economy. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in agriculture and the meeting of the consumption needs of the masses. In these sectors our programme must be based on the following elements:
• Down with the serfdom of workers on the state and collectivised farms. For collective farms run by the toilers themselves. Down with any return to private family farming .
• For the democratic re-organisation of the farms, based on the democracy of the rural toilers, not on the whims of the functionaries. For councils of agricultural workers comprised of farm workers representing working units, and directly accountable to them. Agricultural production must be integrated into the national plan of production.
• For a massive injection of funds to raise the material and cultural level of the countryside to that of the cities, thereby overcoming the glaring inequalities in the conditions of life between town and country.
• Against all reforms which increase the influence of imperialist finance capital on the economies of the workers' states; against the abandonment of the state monopoly of foreign trade, against joint ventures in which workers' rights are reduced in comparison to those obtaining in state run plants. We oppose the bureaucracy's policy of subordination to the IMF. The disastrous consequences of this for the working class are already most clearly visible in Yugoslavia, Poland and Hungary.
• We demand that the bureaucracy repudiates the debts it has incurred towards international finance capital. A revolutionary workers' government will judge what obligations to honour from the point of view of revolutionary expediency. A workers council state will call on the exploited masses worldwide to mobilise for the total renunciation of the external debt and the expropriation of the imperialist multinationals.
Illusions in parliamentary elections and assemblies
The consequence of decades of political repression and economic failures of the bureaucracy have created widespread illusions in bourgeois parliamentary democracy. Both the bureaucracy and the pro-bourgeois opposition have used these illusions to block the self-organisation of the working class, to obstruct the creation of such workers' councils as arose most clearly in the Hungarian revolution of 1956 but also existed in less developed forms in Poland and in Czechoslovakia during the political-revolutionary situations of the 1950s, the 1960s and the 1980-81 Solidarnosc upheaval.
But only in Romania during the 1989-90 uprising did the embryos of workers committees develop and play an important role in the strikes which helped bring down the Ceaucescu regime. Elsewhere multi-party parliamentary elections were hastily improvised to block the road to working class self-organisation, direct democracy and mass participation in politics.
Our programme is not for the creation of bourgeois parliaments in workers' states. Elected by an atomised electorate, incapable of holding their representatives to account, and separated from the executive power parliaments can never be an adequate expression of workers' power. These institutions directly aid the restoration plans of the bureaucracy or the nascent bourgeoisie.
Parliamentary representatives, not recallable by their electors are eminently corruptible by those who have wealth and power. When the ruling bureaucracy attempts to stabilise its rule through the organisation of parliamentary elections we counterpose to this the proletarian democracy of workers' councils. We fight for their formation as organs of struggle against the bureaucracy and as the organs of the democracy of a revolutionary workers' state.
But where such revolutionary slogans find as yet no echo in the consciousness or experience of the masses it would be utterly sectarian bankruptcy to rest content with this. We must seek out every way of organising the working class to actively intervene as a politically independent force in the existing political situation. If contrary to our wishes this is the terrain of parliamentary elections then it is there we must fight.
We oppose every attempt of the bureaucracy to manipulate or restrict the electoral process by imposing its vetoes on the lists of candidates or of eligible parties. Against bureaucratically rigged elections we we fight to impose the principles and certain of the forms of proletarian democracy. We fight for workers to stand their own candidates, elected by workers' assemblies in the workplaces and the workers districts.
We fight for them to stand on a workers' programme against bureaucratic rule and privilege and restoration in all its forms, for the defence of the rights of national minorities, for a fighting action programme to defend all the workers rights and gains. We fight for all candidates to be directly responsible to workers' assemblies and to be paid no more than the average wage of a skilled worker.
We take no responsibility for the existence of the form of a bourgeois parliament in a workers state (the Volkskammer, the Supreme Soviet etc)
These were the creation of the Stalinists who destroyed or dared not create soviets. But we have to seriously address the democratic illusions of the masses, when the nascent bourgeois forces seek to utilise the "democratisation" of such parliaments to create a permanent and stable instrument for the restoration of capitalism.
Our aim is to prevent the creation of such a stable parliamentary regime. When the restorationists try to create a legal and institutional basis for the capitalist regime, by means of bonapartist plebiscites or the votes of existing undemocratic assemblies, but where the workers still have no experience of soviets or where their memory has been obliterated, revolutionaries can and should return to the revolutionary democratic demand for a sovereign constituent assembly.
This is not to call for a parliament (i.e. a permanent legislative body, part of a division of powers within a bourgeois regime), but rather to create an arena within which representatives of the conflicting classes will meet and fight over the political form and the very class basis of the state-embodied in its constitution. Of course we do not believe that the fight between restoration and proletarian power will be decided in any assembly. But the disguised and open agents of restoration can be exposed to the masses there.
The task in such conjunctures is for revolutionaries to become the vanguard of the revolutionary democratic struggle, in order if possible to tear the very weapon of political democracy out of the hands of the inconsistent (semi-bonapartist) bourgeois democrats.
We should advance the slogan of the CA in order to outflank the restorationists who will try and monopolise democratic slogans while in reality seeking to heavily restrict the powers of the parliament and surround it with bonapartist safeguards in case it falls too closely under the pressure of the masses. We can do this by fighting for the revolutionary democratic right of re-call. Every deputy must be subject to immediate recall by a majority of their electors.
We must fight to ensure that as much of the electoral campaign takes place before mass meetings in the work places where candidates can be cross-examined in detail on their programmes. We must fight for free and equal access to the media for all candidates except those of fascists or those seeking to overthrow planned property by force.
Of course, any actual constituent assembly can prove to be a force for counter-revolution, for the destruction of the workers' state's property relations. As such we must seek to expose it to the masses and mobilise the workers to dissolve it.
For workers' council democracy
For the working class to overthrow the dictatorship of the bureaucracy it must forge its own means of exercising state power. The independent organisations generated in the struggles against the bureaucracy must be welded together into genuine workers' councils. It will be these councils which will organise the mass insurrection of the working class, and their allies amongst the rural poor to smash the whole repressive machine of the Stalinist state apparatus which is the means of maintaining the political dictatorship of the bureaucracy over the proletariat.
Like the bourgeois state, upon which it is modelled, the essential elements of the Stalinist state machine are the "specialised bodies of armed men" and their apparatus of spies, gaolers and torturers. As the massacre of Tiananmen Square once again confirmed, even where the bureaucratic caste is internally divided, so long as the dominant faction has control of this apparatus they will use it to defend themselves against the insurgent masses. The spearhead of the programme of political revolution, then, is the formation of workers' councils and the arming of the proletariat.
As the Russian Revolution demonstrated, the workers' council is the form through which the working class exercises state power in a healthy workers' state. Rooted in the factories, the working class communities and the oppressed layers of society, they organise the great mass of the once-exploited to become rulers of their own state. Workers' council deputies will be directly elected by mass workers' meetings.
They are responsible to their electorates and, therefore, permanently recallable by them. Workers' councils are organs of class power, i.e. capitalists are excluded from the elections. The ruling sections of the bureaucracy must be also denied the right to vote. We fight politically against those representatives of the bureaucracy in whom the working masses still have illusions. The political revolution will only be successful if the bureaucrats are driven out of the workers' councils.
The workers' council combines in itself both executive and legislative functions which means that a living workers' council democracy will control the state bureaucracy, reduce it and, in the long term, replace it altogether with the self-administration of society. Such bodies have nothing in common either with the present soviets in the USSR which have a mock parliamentary form, or the "popular committees" of Cuba, which exist to rubber stamp the decisions of the bureaucracy.
Down with all forms of social oppression!
Thermidor, in the USSR, marked not only the establishment of bureaucratic tyranny over the economy and the state but also the reversal of many of the reforms introduced after 1917 to counter social oppression. This re-introduction of reactionary legislation and moral norms has since served as a model for the other degenerate workers' states.
The victorious bureaucracies have all sought to strengthen the bourgeois family and to determine its size in accordance with their immediate economic and military requirements. Bureaucratic planning abandoned the goal of the socialisation of child care and domestic labour. Women remained subordinated to the double and triple burden of job, household and child-rearing. Nor do the "reformers" intend to reverse the effects of Stalin's Thermidor on the family.
On the contrary, Gorbachev's policy of perestroika, for example, strengthens a reactionary image of women which will be used to reduce women's principal roles to those of wives and mothers and to force them out of certain branches of production.
Youth are taught their "rightful place" in the educational establishments, they are stultified by the reactionary morality of Stalinism, they are denied free cultural expression. Likewise the great gains made by the October Revolution in legally defending the rights of homosexuals have long since been smashed and the daily diet of lesbians and gay men from Cuba and Asia through to Eastern Europe and the USSR is repression and even persecution. Against oppression on the grounds of sex or sexuality we fight:
• Against the oppression of women-for real socialisation of housework. For the plan to provide the crèche facilities that can make this possible. For a massive programme to build restaurants, canteens and social amenities in order to lift the burden that women bear.
• For a woman's right to work and equal access to jobs not subject to protective legislation. In order to fight the legacy of male chauvinism and oppression, a legacy preserved by the bureaucracy, we fight for an independent working class based women's movement.
• No limitation on abortion right, but for the provision of free contraceptive devices for all to give women real control over their fertility. No to any enforced family size imposed by the bureaucracy.
• Abolish the reactionary laws against homosexuality and release all those imprisoned or condemned to psychiatric "hospitals" on this basis. For an end to all forms of discrimination against lesbians and gay men. For open recognition that AIDS exists in these states; for a state funded programme of research, treatment and education about the virus.
• Down with the oppression of youth. For student, parent and education workers' control of the schools and for committees of the youth to control their own entertainment, sporting and cultural facilities, clubs etc. Down with censorship which, far from protecting youth from reactionary ideas, cripples their intellect and fighting spirit and thus leaves them prey to such ideas. Abolish all laws that discriminate at work or in society against youth.
Political revolution and the national question
From its foundation, the revolutionary Soviet state had a federal character. As with every other aspect of Bolshevik political practice, Stalinism retained the form but emptied it of revolutionary content. Far from being a voluntary federation of peoples the USSR became a prison house of nations.
The pattern of denial of the rights of minority nationalities has been repeated in other degenerated workers' states, whether they have a federal character (as in Yugoslavia), are unitary states with supposed "autonomous regions" (as in China) or give no constitutional recognition to the existence of minorities (as in Rumania). The Kremlin has also oppressed nations outside the borders of the USSR and launched invasions to crush proletarian revolts against bureaucratic rule.
Opposition to the ruling bureaucracies has thus frequently taken on a nationalist character. Amongst these oppressed peoples revolutionaries champion and fight for the democratic rights of the oppressed nationalities as part of their struggle for the political revolution. We oppose every manifestation of Great Russian, Chinese and Serbian oppressor nationalism.
We support the right to the full cultural self-expression for all oppressed nationalities. This means full support for their right to use their own language in all public and state business as well as the right to be educated in their own language We fight against any discrimination in jobs and for the right of oppressed nationalities to veto immigration policies determined by the bureaucracies of the oppressor nationalities. Likewise we are against any reverse discrimination of former national majorities now turned minorities in newly independent states (e.g. Russians in Lithuania).
We fight for all multinational workers' states to be free federations of workers' republics. In general we do not seek the fragmentation of the degenerated workers' states into their component nationalities both because we are in favour of the largest integrated territories in order to advance the development of the productive forces, and because nationalism threatens to divide the working class and blind it to the need to destroy the bureaucracy and imperialism.
It can lead workers to side with "their own" national bureaucracy or to a belief that it is possible to achieve "independence" through capitalist restoration and with the aid of imperialism.
The capitalist offensive is attempting to disintegrate every element of class identity and collectivist consciousness, and develop in their place individualistic, religious and nationalist-ethnic ideas. In various republics, regions, small areas and even enterprises the restorationists are trying to spread the idea that only total independence from the official state will give them better access to the international market, better prices for their exports and better conditions for purchasing imports and attracting investments.
The USSR has disintegrated into fifteen independent republics and there are many further autonomous republics and regions within them which have serious separatist tendencies The bureaucrats and nationalists that are behind these independence movements are trying to create miniature bourgeois semi-colonies. In most of them other ethnic minorities suffer discrimination and oppression.
In the Baltic states,, for example, the Slavic minorities are not recognized as citizens and suffer a new apartheid. In former Yugoslavia, in the Caucasus, Moldava, Central Asia and other former "socialist block" states bloody and non-progressive inter-ethnic wars are under way.
In fact genuine independence for any of the presently oppressed nationalities in the workers' states is only achievable on the basis of democratically planned proletarian property relations. "Independence" under the leadership of restorationists can only lead to the subordination of any newly established states to imperialism, to their becoming semi-colonies.
This would see the working class ever more directly exploited by international capitalism and their democratic aspirations brutally suppressed in the interests of profit. We do not advocate secession because it weakens the workers state and hampers the development of the productive forces. But, in the concrete case where within a particular oppressed nation the great majority of its working class has illusions in separation we should raise the slogan for an independent workers council republic.
Which side we take in the case of a military conflict between an oppressed nation's pro-independence movement and the centralised Stalinist apparatus must depend on all the concrete circumstances. Should this movement be carrying out pogroms against other national minorities or be in an armed alliance with imperialism, it would be possible to side with the Stalinist central apparatus whilst not supporting it politically.
We could do this whilst simultaneously raising the slogan for an independent or autonomous workers council republic (as in Azerbaijan in 1990). On the other hand where it is a legitimate movement based on the working people we could take sides with the independence movement (without supporting its aims or the popular front) against military repression (as in Lithuania in 1990/91).
However, the alienation of so many nationalities from the degenerate workers' states is the product of decades of vicious national oppression. The vanguard of the political revolution must seek by the most vigorous means to allay the fears of these peoples and win them to the side of the preservation of their own planned property by unconditionally supporting their right to self determination, including to secession.
Where the majority of the people concerned call for independence, in mass demonstrations or workers' assemblies, in elections or plebiscites we will support by all means the winning of such independence. To do otherwise would be to cut ourselves off from the democratically expressed will of masses of workers and, therefore, to ensure they will fall under the leadership of reactionary forces.
However, only proletarian political power and proletarian property relations can guarantee the independence to which such mobilisations aspire. Therefore our positive slogan in these conditions is for an independent workers' council state
Even where existing separatist movements have espoused an overt social counter-revolutionary platform we will still defend the right to state independence whilst continuing the struggle against restoration. National independence is not simultaneous with the restoration of capitalism and the ending of national oppression will begin to untie the bonds between the representatives of opposing class interests.
We will continue to organise the workers for armed defence of the post-capitalist property relations. However, in conditions of war (external or civil) in any given workers state we may be obliged temporarily to subordinate the right of secession to the defence of workers' states under attack from the forces of imperialism and counter-revolution.
As an expression of our opposition to the reactionary utopia of building socialism in one country we stand for the widest federation possible of workers states, starting with regional federations. Thus the victorious political revolution will re-unite on a voluntary and equal basis the republics of the former USSR, Eastern Europe and beyond. In the regions where Stalinism and its successors have sown national antagonisms and wars we fight for workers state federations (e.g. in the Balkans and Indo-China) as a step toward their integration within the World Socialist Republic.
For a return to the proletarian internationalism of Lenin and Trotsky!
The Stalinists sullied the slogan of proletarian internationalism by identifying it with submission to the Soviet bureaucracies state interests. The foreign policy of a revolutionary workers' state has as its aim not primarily its own defence nor even the defence and support of other workers' states but the interests all those struggling against capitalism and imperialism.
The defence of any single workers states or any grouping thereof is a part of and therefore subordinated to the World Revolution. This is the unfalsified programme of proletarian internationalism. It is the polar opposite of the foreign policy of the degenerated workers' states over the last half century which were geared to their attempts to achieve peaceful coexistence with imperialism.
The Stalinists cynically manipulated and betrayed the struggles of the working class and colonial peoples around the world. Side by side with strengthening market mechanisms and capitalist forces inside the workers' states, the remaining ruling bureaucracies are globally in retreat in the face of imperialism. Stalinism has always pursued an essentially counter-revolutionary policy at home and abroad. In Afghanistan, Kampuchea, Central America and Southern Africa the USSR over the last decade played a counterrevolutionary role, both in the manner of its support for progressive forces and in its shameful desertion of those forces in pursuit of a deal with imperialism.
The secret diplomacy operated by the Stalinist bureaucracies must to be abandoned completely. This policy was part of the bureaucratic monopoly of information in the degenerated workers' states and only served to misinform and deceive the working class.
Negotiations between workers' states and capitalist states or other workers' states have to be carried out in view of the working class. The demands from both sides should be made public. Negotiations have to be used in order to make revolutionary propaganda. The nature of the negotiations have to be revealed to the masses.
Relations with capitalist states also have to be used by a workers state as a weapon. Diplomatic ties and trade relations with each country have to be examined carefully. Stalinists used diplomatic ties with capitalist countries to excuse the drowning of workers' movements in these countries in blood and also caused the Stalinists to raise the prestige of these butchers (e.g. China's relations with Pinochet). This was a common practice among Stalinists. Diplomatic and trade relations have to be useful for the building of a workers' state and must not limit or harm the formation of a revolutionary movement
In a situation of direct military attack on a workers' state, in or out of a political revolutionary crisis, it is legitimate to seek an armed united front with the armed forces of another workers' state.
In that united front the working class must not allow its forces to be subordinated to those of its allies, but must struggle for arms and assistance to be put under the control of its organisations and argue amongst the allied forces of the degenerated workers' state for internationalist political revolution.
We defend the right of the degenerate workers' states to possess nuclear weapons and, in wars with imperialism, use them when militarily necessary for the defence of the workers' states. But we oppose the bureaucracy's overall defence and military policy which has as its aim the realisation of the utopian goal of peaceful co-existence with world imperialism.
The foreign policy of a workers' state has to be subordinated to a revolutionary international. A genuine international can place the foreign policy of a workers' state in its rightful context within the pursuit of the world revolution. Only an international can effectively defend workers' states against imperialist intervention by co-ordinating the mobilisation of the working class across various imperialist countries.
For a Leninist-Trotskyist party!
The programme of political revolution, understood both as a linked system of demands and all the strategic and tactical means of achieving them, will not be arrived at by the spontaneous struggles of the working classes of the degenerate(d) workers' states. The experience of Hungary, Poland and China tragically shows that, as under capitalism, spontaneity must be harnessed to scientific class consciousness in the organisational form of a revolutionary party.
Although the first small nuclei of such a party may originate amongst the intelligentsia, the test of their 'communism" will be their recognition of the need to win and organise the working class leaders thrown up by the anti-bureaucratic struggle. All the norms of membership, organisation, internal life and external activity developed by the Leninist Bolshevik Party and, later, by the Left Oppositionists and the Trotskyists, will be applicable.
We reject the "leading role" of the Stalinist parties. They are the parties of the bureaucracy. The experience of the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1968 and of the "horizontal movement" within the Polish Workers' Party during the height of Solidarnosc's struggle, suggests that proletarian mobilisations will find a reflection in the ruling Communist Parties. This is so because a large number of workers are captive members of these parties.
We reject the idea that the ruling parties can be reformed or can peacefully evolve into centrist formations. These parties must be broken up as instruments of mass mobilisation in support of the repressive and privileged bureaucracy. Nevertheless, we do not ignore the fact that in an escalating political revolutionary situation, the bureaucracy may come under challenge from sections of the party membership or the proletariat.
The united front tactic, levelled at these forces and opposition groups outside the party, will be vital in breaking the masses from these mis-leaders, new or old. Where we cannot directly win rank and file working class elements to the ranks of Trotskyism, and recognising that such opposition will often be the first expression of political independence by such workers, we should encourage them to put the Communist Party, which they remain within, to the test by demanding:
Elections at every level, elections based on open platforms and political competition in open debate. For the lifting of the ban on the formation of factions and on the circulation of platforms, which was imposed as a purely temporary measure in the Russian Communist Party of Lenin and Trotsky in 1921, but which was turned into a repressive norm under Stalin.
The revolutionary party, forged anew in struggle must inscribe onto its banner the overthrow of the Stalinist dictatorships, the creation of a democracy of workers' councils, the installation of a democratic plan and above all the extension of the revolution internationally. If the workers' states undergo revolutionary regeneration then the death knell of imperialism and class rule will sound across the globe. Turn the bureaucratic prison houses once more into fortresses of the world revolution!
The programme during the restoration process
Due to the accumulated betrayals of the Stalinist bureaucracy and the prolonged crisis of revolutionary leadership a new form of transitional period has opened up-the transition from degenerated workers state to capitalism. The task of revolutionaries is to re-orient their programme to guide a struggle against the remains of bureaucratic tyranny and disorganisation and against the restoration of capitalism.
The road to restoration has most frequently been opened by the rise to power of a faction of the bureaucracy that set in train a series of concessions to the market. These had been advocated with ever greater insistence from economic experts from within the bureaucracy from the 1960s onwards; (Liberman, Ota Sik etc). They were carried out first on a significant scale in Hungary.
They centred on the stage by stage weakening and narrowing of the scope of the central plan, the creation of real or simulated market mechanisms between the enterprises, the puncturing of the state monopoly of foreign trade, the entry into the economic institutions of world capitalism, the IMF etc.
The utopian aspect of this programme for the bureaucracy was the idea that it would increase the efficiency, the level of technical innovation or the responsiveness of the economy to the needs of the consumers. Instead it hampered and disrupted the working of the planned economy whilst the continued existence of the latter obstructed the development of a real market, creating instead a massive "black economy", it created a criminal class before it created a bourgeoisie.
Both in those states where the marketising faction of the bureaucracy tried to carry out this programme with democratic reforms and in those where it tried to maintain its political dictatorship intact the result was the same-a severe political crisis where three fundamental alternatives were posed;
(a) restoration of the bureaucratic dictatorship and a halting or slowing of market reforms,
(b) the seizure of power by an openly restorationist regime that would set about the destruction of the central planning system and the rapid transition to the operation of law of value as the dominant force within the economy or,
(c) a proletarian political revolution introducing workers democracy and a democratically planned economy. Only the latter two alternatives were and are fundamentally viable. Bureaucratic-dictatorship however bloodily restored or maintained can never solve the death agony of bureaucratic planning and it alienates the masses hurling them into the arms of the democratic restorationists. Whilst in China, Korea, Vietnam and Cuba the bureaucracy tries by repressive means to avoid the fate of Gorbachev the development of pre-revolutionary and revolutionary situations are inevitable.
A greater or lesser degree and duration of dual power creates a situation where the forces of the old bureaucracy, the proletarian political revolution or the bourgeois counterrevolution must engage in a life or death struggle. If the forces of political revolution fail to develop then sooner or later, with this or that violent backward or forward lurch, restoration is possible and indeed inevitable.
Thus far the weaknesses of the forces consciously seeking to defend the planned economy and the other proletarian gains has resulted in the seizure of power by a series of bourgeois restorationist governments. These have set out first of all to resolve any remaining duality of power with the old bureaucracy via the purging of the state machine.
This purgation will vary according to the degree of political homogeneity of the armed forces. Where an important part remains convinced of the viability of bureaucratic rule, the purging may take on a violent form, even leading to civil war. At the end of this process the degenerate workers state will have been smashed. The resolution of this dual power, the simultaneous prevention of the working class from intervening to establish its own organs of power, is vital to the successful restoration process.
But even the establishment of a reliable state machine, bourgeois not only in its class form but in its class character in that it actively defends the growing elements of capitalism and attacks the disintegrating remnants of the planned economy, is not the end. Only when the laws of the former predominate over those of the latter, only when the economic base of the workers state has been destroyed can we say that the process is complete and capitalism restored.
The economic programmes of capitalist restoration striven for are extremely varied. The one immediate "success" was the integration of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) into the West German imperialist state, via a prolonged combination of state capitalist and privatisation measures after the central organs of the planned economy were abolished. In the other states where the resources of a major imperialism are not available the neo-liberal shock therapy has been applied.
This means freeing prices, dissolving the central planning and resource-allocation institutions, the abolition of the old state bank monopoly and its replacement with a fully commercial credit system under which loss making enterprises can and must go bankrupt, the transformation of the enterprises into private and/or state capitalist trusts.
The massive economic slump which is the result of the implementation of this policy itself creates repeated political crises, pre-revolutionary situations which a deepening class consciousness and militancy of the proletariat and the emergence of anti-restorationist defenders of workers democracy can turn into a fully developed revolution. This revolution will have a combined character.
It will be a political revolution in the sense that the expropriation of the bourgeoisie is not its central task but with enormous social, i.e. anti-capitalist tasks. If it remains a political revolution it is nevertheless aimed at a bourgeois regime which holds all or part of the state power. It will have the task of seizing state power and creating a workers state based on soviets.
The Action Programme Against Restoration
In the moribund degenerate workers states, where restorationist governments are in the process of carrying out the restoration of capitalism we must fight for a programme of immediate and transitional demands to halt and reverse the social counter-revolution; a programme which in its totality can only be the programme of a revolutionary workers government.
• For a basic living wage that guarantee a shopping basket of goods as determined by the rank and file workers' organisations
• For a sliding scale of wages-an automatic, equivalent rise in wages for every rise in prices determined by elected committees of workers, particularly women and pensioners-to fully compensate for every increase in prices.
• Stop all price rises. Prices of food, clothing, transportation, rents and fuel should be prevented from rising. Only a workers' government can reform the currency in the interests of the toilers rather than that of the speculators.
• Put all private and state warehouses and food storage under the control of armed workers' detachments, under workers inspection and distribution. Confiscate all goods hoarded by the bureaucrats, the black marketeers, or private businesses. Workers must control and distribute any aid received from imperialist countries.
• Elected committees of workers must inspect the accounts of the enterprises and the planning ministries, the bureaucracies special shops and the accounts of the new speculators. Only then will the scale of corruption, siphoning off and theft of the produce of the workers state be known, the culprits punished and a new plan of production and distribution be possible.
• Organise direct exchange between the cities and the countryside. The rural and urban workers should together work out fair exchange ratios and even prices between the products of industry and agriculture.
• Restore the right and opportunity to work. The existing unemployed must be offered work or paid at the average industrial wage. No to all redundancies without equivalent work at equivalent pay. Occupy all factories, mines, shops or offices declaring redundancies or attempting closure. Demand that the idle members of the bureaucracy, the enterprise managers and the parasitic speculators perform useful work in the factories and on the land at the average wage of a worker.
• For workers' management in every enterprise. No to privatisation even in the form of alienable shares distributed in whole or in part to the workers themselves. In a workers' state the factories already belong to the workers. No to expropriation of the workers' property.
• No cuts in the social services. For a massive programme of housing repairs and construction of new dwellings, crèches, schools and clinics. No one should be unemployed and no one should be idle whilst people lack these elementary necessities.
• For a minimum living wage for all and for all pensions to be no lower than this and to be protected by a sliding scale
• For emergency action to alleviate the housing shortage. Seize the dachas and the big apartments of the former bureaucrats and the new rich. Occupy all state buildings that are not serving the collective good of the working class and convert them to accommodation for young families, the unemployed.
• Workers committees must draw up an inventory of all state property as it stood before the restorationist governments came to power. The misappropriation and hoarding of the former bureaucracy must be brought to light and all the resources of the workers state restored to collective ownership. All the "expropriation" of state property must be reversed.
• Down with national chauvinism. Summary execution for the organisers of pogroms and "ethnic cleansing". Merciless repression of the fascists and anti-semites, racists, chauvinists that organise attacks on national minorities, on women, gays and on the workers organisations. No platform, no "democratic rights" for these vermin.
• Respect the decisions of minority nationalities to independence if that was their choice. Unconditionally defend the democratic rights of all the nationalities against old style Stalinist or new style nationalist or religious repression. But just as we defend the democratic rights of all the minorities inside Yugoslavia, China or USSR, we should defend the democratic rights of all the Great Russian, Serb and Han Chinese workers in areas in which now they are minorities and may suffer oppression.
• For a workers' militia to protect the workers' struggles, to crush the fascists and pogrom organisers and to smash the armed insurrections of the counterrevolutionaries.
But to prevent the restoration of capitalism the workers face a combined task, a struggle against a bourgeois executive power and a struggle to save the remains of the planned state-owned means of production and distribution. To do the latter they must take up the struggle to overthrow the restorationist governments and put into power workers' governments based on workers' councils.
The restorationist forces cannot be removed by peaceful means alone though the more decisively and the more strongly the workers mobilise the less costly will such a victory be. They can organise a workers militia which in turn must win over the rank and file soldiers.
There is no shortage of arms or the opportunity to acquire them. Most workers have undergone military service. The workers can and must arm themselves. Arms in hand workers can snuff out the flames of national hatred, protect all minorities, protect the strikes and occupations and as soon as the opportunity of seizing power arises armed units attached to the soviets can carry this through and establish a workers' government.
The workers government would have to organise the election of workers tribunals to try all those who have committed crimes against the working people either under the Stalinist dictatorship or under the restorationist regimes.
The central tasks of a workers' council government will be the crushing of the restorationists' plans and the rallying of the world working class movement to its defence against the inevitable imperialist pressure and blockade. In the economy the workers' government will have to develop and implement an emergency plan to save the economy from total disintegration. This [word missing?] an emergency plan drawn up by the workers representatives and put into action by the working class itself. The most urgent measures for such a plan should be:
• Restore the state monopoly of foreign trade with control of all international commerce by elected organs of workers' inspection. The seaport, airport, communications and banking workers can rapidly decide on what trade is in the interests of the workers' state and what is speculation or harmful profiteering. Urge the workers' movements of the capitalist countries to force their governments into undertaking trade agreements that will benefit the workers' government's emergency plan.
• Stop all de-nationalisation of the large scale means of production and renationalise all sectors already sold-off. Close down the stock exchanges and the commodity exchanges that have been set up. Inspect all previous dealings and punish those guilty of anti-working class profiteering.
• Restore a state monopoly of banking. Nationalise all private banks installing workers 'control and inspection. The dollar hoards of the speculators, the joint ventures, the pseudo-cooperatives and the private accounts of the bureaucrats must be confiscated for the workers state.
• Refuse to recognise the foreign debt, stop all payments and break all the chains to the IMF, the World Bank and the European Bank of Restoration! Kick out all the imperialist "economic advisers".
• Carry out a monetary reform in the interests of the toilers. Money as a measure of value must as accurately as possible gage the labour time embedded in the products of industry and agriculture. The inflation of the last years of bureaucratic mismanagement must be brought to an end so that workers can undertake rational accounting without which planning is impossible.
• Transform the collective farms into genuine democratic co-operatives on a one worker one vote basis. Establish workers control in the state farms. Aid the small farms towards co-operation by the provision of collective resources.
• Small sized private businesses, industrial production, distribution, retail trade and services should be left to operate and even to expand in number as in spheres where the state and the cooperatives cannot meet demand. This sector of private small capitalists and petty bourgeois can even be useful to the workers' state providing their workers are all unionised and have their working conditions and hours regulated by the local soviets, providing their accounts are subject to inspection and taxation is levied for the benefit of the workers' state.
• Re-organise a Central Commission for the Co-ordination of the Plan and create similar commissions at local, regional and city levels. The skilled statisticians, economists and administrators must be assembled and put to work under the control of elected workers representatives. There must be no re-emergence of bureaucratic privilege. No expert should earn more than the wage of a skilled worker and all planning organs must carry out the decisions of the appropriate organs of worker's democracy.
• The Emergency Plan must provide for a massive construction programme to improve the social infrastructure; house building and repairs, clinic and hospital building, and expansion of the nurseries, schools and further and higher education.
• The Emergency Plan must rapidly improve the communication, distribution and transport system. Military vehicles and aircraft must be drafted into an improved freight system so that food does not rot before it can reach the consumers. A longer term programme of road and railway construction, upgrading the telecommunication systems, creating a nationwide network of warehousing, cold storage, and freezer plants can ensure that the labour of the farmers is not shamefully wasted.
• The Emergency Plan must set as one of its central goals a series of measures that improve the condition of women. Improvements in the quality of goods, distribution and retailing must remove from women the crushing burden of the search for food and the endless queuing. Improvements in housing, in crèche and childcare facilities, in care for the sick and the elderly should take up the struggle to socialise domestic toil and liberate women so they can at last play a fully equal role in social and public life.
• For a woman's right to work, with equal pay for work of equal value; defend maternity leave and pay and the protection of women from harmful work. Resist moves to force women to work part time with lower pay and poor working conditions-reduce the working week for all workers. Defend the rights of women to abortion, and extend the availability of contraception.
• The churches and the mosques have begun to make claims to organise schools and to censor culture and education. They must have no control over the schools, the hospitals or the media. For scientific and rational education on sexuality free from clerical superstition and taboos.
The Workers' Government must offer international solidarity
The workers' government must break resolutely from the counter-revolutionary policies of the Walesas, the Yeltsins or the Havels. The allies of a workers' state cannot be the imperialist world devourers and the exploiters of the proletariat of the capitalist countries.
The victorious political revolution must appeal for direct aid and support to the workers' movements of the entire world and particularly to the rank and file. The victorious Russian Revolution in 1917 rallied massive support in Europe, Asia and the Americas such that the heroic resistance of the Russian workers could beat off the imperialist intervention. The international policy of the victorious political revolution must in return offer economic and military support to the struggles of the world's workers and oppressed peoples.
• Imperialist hands off Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea and the other bureaucratically ruled workers states. Military and economic assistance against the US blockade or intervention. For a socialist reunification of Korea, no to a capitalist reunification!
• Aid to the workers of these states to make a political revolution. Only revolutionary workers and peasants council governments will be able to save these states. For a world-wide alliance and ultimately a federation of workers states. For economic co-ordination of the plans of all the workers' states.
• Support for all national liberation struggles against imperialism. Support for all workers and oppressed peoples who are fighting austerity and privatisation plans dictated by the IMF.
• Opposition to the sell-outs deals and betrayals in the Middle East, Southern Africa, South-East Asia, Afghanistan and Central America.
• Support for the struggles of the workers of Eastern Europe against capitalist restoration.
• Support for both the immediate and the revolutionary class struggles of the workers of the entire capitalist world.
• For a new voluntary federation of socialist republics of the ex-USSR; for a new voluntary federation of the socialist republics in the Balkans.
• For a world socialist federation of workers council republics.
Chapter 6 - The fight against social oppression
All exploited classes face oppression. The systematic denial of real political and economic equality and personal freedoms is both an expression and a reinforcer of the exploitative relationship between the ruling class and the direct producers. But in addition to this class oppression, there are other systematic economic, social, legal and political inequalities which specifically affect women, youth, different racial and national groups, lesbians and gay men.
These specific forms of social oppression are a fundamental feature of class society. They are rooted in the social structures of the family and the nation state. The oppression of women was the first form of systematic oppression and originated alongside the emergence of classes.
Women's oppression remains the most fundamental form of social oppression. But all the special forms of social oppression have been transformed with each mode of production. They have reached their most developed, and in many ways most naked, form in the imperialist epoch.
The social structures upon which social oppression is based are essential to capitalism. Their functions are intimately and inseparably connected to the process of exploitation, but they create an oppression which is not confined to the working class.
Women of all classes face discrimination and disadvantage as a result of the particular role they have within the family of their class. But it is working class women, and likewise working class youth, blacks, lesbians and gay men, who face the most intense social oppression.
The working class is the only class with the decisive interest and capacity to overthrow the system which maintains all forms of oppression. Only under the leadership of the working class can oppressed sections of the exploited classes be drawn into the struggle for the proletarian dictatorship, which is a precondition for the ending of all oppression. The working class, therefore, must at all times be in the forefront of the struggle against all inequalities, oppression and exploitation.
However, the existing workers' organisations often fail to take up the battle against social oppression. Indeed, it is frequently the case that the reformist bureaucrats who dominate the labour movement actively encourage attitudes of hostility amongst the masses to the needs and plight of the oppressed.
The oppressed are subject to sexism, racism and heterosexism in such a way as to block their participation in trade union and political life. The task of the revolutionary vanguard lies in combating these prejudices and putting the mass organisations of the working class in the forefront of the struggle against oppression.
The oppressed themselves are not necessarily in the vanguard of struggles simply as a result of being the most down-trodden sections of society. Capitalist exploitation and oppression produce not only revolutionary fighters, but also backward and submissive layers.
Many may embrace reactionary ideas or retreat into private life. The most class conscious elements of the oppressed will be in the vanguard of the struggle for their own liberation. This vanguard's participation within the overall class struggle can ensure that their interests are actively taken up by the working class.
Special methods of agitation, propaganda and forms of work need to be used to win the socially oppressed to the communist programme, and as a result special forms of organisation may be necessary both to mobilise them to fight their own oppression, and to enable them to enter the ranks of the organised workers' movement on an equal basis with all other workers.
Within the working class movement revolutionaries must defend the right of the oppressed to organise and caucus in order to press for their demands to be taken up by the whole of the class. In certain conditions, working class movements of the oppressed have also proved necessary to achieve these goals.
Such special methods and organisational forms have nothing in common with separatism. They are a means of facilitating fighting unity inside the working class and ensuring that the workers' movement as a whole champions the struggles of the oppressed.
In the first place the revolutionary party has a duty to ensure that in its daily work and in its internal organisation it is responsive to the needs of the oppressed. Where mass revolutionary parties exist party sections, or party-led movements can be formed. These sections will organise the oppressed for communist struggle as party members and take the struggle against oppression into the heart of the workers' movement.
However, revolutionary communists are as yet a tiny minority inside the workers' movement, so the building of mass sections of the party organised to carry out special forms of work has to be approached by other forms of the united front.
In many countries, the common experience of the oppressed has led to the development of movements and campaigns amongst women, lesbians and gays, youth and the racially oppressed. The party cannot leave the leadership of these movements to the petit bourgeois utopians, the Social Democrats or the Stalinists.
We support the building of fighting united fronts against oppression, and argue that they must be based on, and led by, the proletariat utilising class struggle methods. In certain cases these united fronts may take the form of fully fledged movements, with branches, congresses and executive committees. But in each case the organisational form must be related to the concrete circumstances.
The length of time that such organisation may be needed depends upon the degree to which we are successful in winning the labour movement as a whole to our programme. Furthermore, if our temporary allies seek to split or sell out the struggle of the oppressed we will not flinch from splitting them.
We counterpose this tactic to all forms of autonomous or class collaborationist movements of the oppressed. Where bourgeois forces are involved in movements of the oppressed the revolutionary vanguard seeks to break the working class and other oppressed classes away from any alliance with them.
Indeed, by building proletarian movements of the oppressed and by fighting relentlessly for communist leadership within them, we are combating the tendencies to separatism and popular frontism that arise amongst the oppressed. Our aim is to build communist movements of the oppressed, although not all participants in such movements will be members of, and therefore under the discipline of, the revolutionary communist party.
The fight against discrimination
Other sections of society, who are not socially oppressed, face discrimination under capitalism. The elderly, the disabled and the sick, who do not fulfil the requirements of capitalism for wage labour, are discarded and treated as a burden on society. Important sections of the poor are stigmatised and criminalised for actions they take in order to survive. Others are defined as mentally ill and excluded from society. Bourgeois society utilises the marginalisation of these groups in order to impose its concepts of "normality" and its moral code upon the whole working class and to pursue its strategy of divide and rule.
For instance the enforced isolation of the elderly makes them prey to conservatism, the restrictions imposed on people with disabilities allow them to be used as non-union cheap labour. Revolutionaries must support the struggles of the elderly, the sick and people with disabilities against the discrimination they face.
This will facilitate their integration into the working class and thereby strengthen the fight against the common enemy. They should fight to ensure that the workers' movement allows the fullest possible access for all members of the working class to its organisations, meetings and social life. The revolutionary party should ensure that it sets an example to the rest of the workers' movement.
Revolutionaries seek to win the militant fighters from within the ranks of those who suffer discrimination. While supporting all struggles for reforms and improvements under capitalism, communists explain that the profit motive makes it impossible for capitalism to meet the needs of those it puts on the scrap heap. Furthermore, its rapacious nature creates sickness and disability. Only socialised and planned production can release the necessary resources to fully integrate these groups into society and lay the basis for liberation.
Women
The epoch of imperialism condemns millions of women all over the world to suffer the misery of raising children and running homes in conditions of enormous deprivation. Women bear the full brunt of inadequate housing, insufficient food and the struggle to stave off or cope with the effects of disease. Super-exploitation in the factory and on the capitalist or small peasant farm are likewise the norm for the majority of women in the world.
Women of all classes are denied economic, social, legal and political equality with men. The universal nature of women's subordination makes it appear as a natural result of their role in child-bearing. But the systematic social oppression of women only began with the birth of class society and the creation of the patriarchal family as the basic unit within which reproduction, child-care and day to day survival occur.
Throughout the different forms of class society the particular features of women's oppression have changed. But they all contain at their kernel, privatised domestic labour, a sphere of life which is the prime or exclusive responsibility of women.
In the imperialist epoch women perform much of the work on the land and in the factories, but their first responsibility remains to their household and family. This means that the two sexes have an unequal relationship to paid employment, which is at the root of women's continued oppression.
In many semi-colonies the family continues to function as a productive unit, with women and children integral to collective production. But women are still primarily responsible for domestic labour and child rearing, occupying a subordinate position to the male heads of household.
Capitalism has proved unable and unwilling to systematically socialise the labour done in the home and thereby is incapable of ending the oppression of women. The provision of socialised laundries, child-care and canteens has proved to be too much of a drain on surplus value for the bosses to provide them, other than partially in the exceptional situation of war.
For non-working class women oppression takes on a very different form. Even amongst some ruling classes women are denied full rights over property and inheritance and are kept as decorative assets and producers of heirs by their husbands. Their continued oppression, whilst a million miles away from the drudgery and misery of the working women of the world, is also due to their role in the family.
The production of heirs requires the strictest adherence to monogamy by the wives. However, ruling class women can offset many of the worst aspects of their oppression through the employment of working class women to perform their domestic labour and raise their children. Moreover they can be never be real allies of working class women since their stake in bourgeois society means they are completely wedded to the very society that is the material basis for women's oppression.
In the imperialist countries the numbers of women employed in wage labour has massively increased since the Second World War. In many countries the majority of married women now have paid employment. Whilst this development has tendencies towards undermining the economic and social dependence of women, the circumstances under which it has happened have proved a mixed blessing for women. Now most women have to combine their hours worked in the factory or office with their hours of domestic labour in the home.
There has been little increase in the amount of household work done by men, so women now have even longer hours to work to balance against the gain of receiving a wage. But since women still receive substantially lower wages than men, their economic independence is largely fictional. Legal restrictions reinforce continuing dependence of women on their husbands or fathers in most imperialist countries.
In addition to its role in the reproduction of labour power, the family also plays an important role in maintaining the social order of capitalist society. The family acts to reinforce the dominant ideas of the ruling class, maintaining the respective roles of men, women and children, inculcating obedience and servility.
Even when the nuclear family has ceased to be the most numerically common form of the household, as is now the case in many imperialist countries, the strength of it as the "ideal" is such that it continues to influence every aspect of women's lives. From the type of education girls receive, through the jobs women do, to the relationships they seek - all these are shaped by this bourgeois family "norm". This family is based on monogamy and heterosexuality, with intense pressure being exerted upon women and girls to conform. The roles of men and women in the family restrict the development of both sexes, but have a particularly repressive effect on women.
The family leads to a division within the working class which is maintained by the ideology of sexism. In the labour movement this is not just a question of backward ideas about women's role. It involves condoning or participating in the exclusion of women from many unions. Such sexism leads to a failure to fight for equal pay and refusal to support women in struggle. Whilst women's oppression is not caused by the attitudes of male workers, their sexism continually reinforces it. Often, through domestic violence and abuse, this happens in the most brutal way.
Male workers do enjoy real material benefits as a result of the oppression of women. They have a higher status within the household and social life. They secure better jobs and wages and have a lighter burden of domestic chores. These privileges help to reinforce sexist ideas and behaviour within the working class.
However, working class men will receive far more important gains from the final liberation of women--the collective responsibility for welfare, freedom in relationships, sexual liberation and the economic gains of socialism. All this means that viewed historically, working class men do not benefit decisively from the oppression of women, but are hindered in the realisation of their fundamental class interests. It is the ruling class, aided by their agents in the labour bureaucracy, who benefit from the division created between male and female workers.
The struggle against women's oppression in the semi-colonies
Proletarian women are, from earliest childhood, forced to work for pitiful wages and, after the extremely long working day, have to do the housework or take on extra work to ensure subsistence for the family. Things are no better for peasant women who often, on top of the housework, must also work the land because their men have to work in the cities. Poverty, miserable working conditions and unemployment force many women into prostitution.
Although imperialism undermines the economic basis for traditional patriarchal systems in these countries, nonetheless, old forms of women's oppression, such as dowries, bride price, clitorodectomy and polygamy, are retained. Widow burning in India is a brutal example of this. Among the women in the semi-colonies illiteracy is even higher than among the men.
Despite medical advances the mass of women in the semi-colonies have no control over their fertility and in Africa and Asia half a million babies die at birth each year. Only a very thin upper layer of society benefits from the advantages that capitalism brings, for example, in education and health services.
Under these conditions of oppression it is no wonder that thousands of women have taken part in the anti-imperialist struggles in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Palestine, the Philippines and paid a heavy price with their lives. But their interests have always been betrayed. The petit bourgeois and Stalinist movements have proven themselves completely incapable of carrying through the liberation of women. The PDPA in Afghanistan, for example, was prepared to halt the literacy campaign amongst women to win a compromise with the Islamic tribal leaders.
Against such betrayals we pose the struggle for the liberation of women as an inseparable component of any proletarian revolutionary strategy. Working class and peasant women must be organised around economic demands and for protective measures against rape, forced sterilisation, trade in women, and enforced confinement for sex tourism.
Even when semi-colonial women escape these miseries millions of immigrant and migrant women are drawn into the workforce within the imperialist heartland. There they perform the most menial tasks for very low pay, in apalling working conditions.
Immigration controls and restrictions on visas or work permits constantly menace migrant women. In particular they are denied access to many jobs and so are forced into working conditions that isolate them from other workers, the trade unions and labour movement. They are often employed in domestic service to rich families, where they remain unorganised and highly exploited.
They frequently have no right to unemployment benefits or protection from arbitrary dismissal. In addition they are denied political rights and social welfare provisions. In all countries we demand the right of domestic and home workers to be unionised, for an eight hour day, a minimum living wage and the right to social welfare. We demand of the trade union and labour movement special measures to organise this section of workers.
For a working class women's movement!
To end the oppression of women the fundamental separation of domestic labour from the totality of social production must be abolished. Only with women drawn fully and equally into production, with domestic work being organised collectively in a planned socialist economy, can women be free from oppression.
The socialist programme alone can guarantee the socialisation of housework and child care. But even under capitalism we can march towards this goal by struggling for women's rights to waged labour. Where the bosses say that there is no work available for women we argue for the sliding scale of hours, to share all available work with no loss of pay. Part time jobs for women have been used by the bosses to increase the exploitation of women workers through low pay and no employment protection, while providing a flexible workforce.
We demand full employment protection for part time work combined with the fight for reductions in the hours of all workers, with no loss of pay. We demand the provision of socialised care for children and other dependants to allow women to participate in social production equally with men.
Even where women have been drawn into waged labour on a large scale they have not become economically independent. Women must be granted equal pay for work of equal value to guard against the super-exploitation they currently suffer. This is in the interests of the whole working class.
The low wages of women, far from protecting male wage rates as many reformist union leaders have maintained, have a tendency to undermine male wage rates and therefore the living standards of the whole class. For an equal minimum wage for men and women at a level to be decided by the working class.
Women's earnings must be protected by the sliding scale of wages, where rising prices are matched by rising wages. Working class women will be essential participants in committees that determine price rises and set wage claims. For women in the semi-colonies there is an additional urgent need for equal rights to land holding and ownership.
The inequalities that women and girls experience in education and training make them unable to gain the same employment as men. Women must be given equal opportunities through education and re-training, paid for by the bosses and under the control of the unions, women workers and apprentices. Girls must have equal access to education. Literacy programmes must be instituted for women in countries where there are high levels of female illiteracy.
Since women still have primary responsibility for the raising of children, to have an equal ability to take up paid work there must be free child-care for all, under the control of women workers and the unions, with full pay for maternity leave. Paternity leave should be made available for fathers.
For women who are unable to get paid employment as a result of the inability of capitalism to provide social support for dependent children or other relatives, we demand that the state provides full unemployment benefits, at a level to be decided by the labour movement in each country. This demand must be combined with a struggle of the working class for precisely the social provision which would enable women with children or sick or disabled relatives to be able to work. We are for the collective provision of laundries and restaurants, subsidised by the state, under working class control.
A woman's reproductive role also means that there are certain types of work which may be dangerous to her health or that of her children. Protective legislation must be enacted to prevent the harm which may be done by certain types of work.
Where this has already been enacted by the bosses' state it has been due to a combination of working class pressure and the realisation by some sections of the ruling class that unbridled exploitation in pursuit of short term gains threatened the reproduction of the working class in the long term, and therefore the very basis of the profit system itself. In addition big capitalists also realised that such legislation would help to drive the smaller capitalists out of business.
However, the working class must oversee the implementation of protective legislation, as the bosses will cheat and always find ways to avoid the law so that they can maximise their exploitation of women. The labour aristocracy and trade union leaders have used the notion of protective legislation to exclude women from certain skilled trades in order to protect their sectional craft interests.
Women must not be excluded from any trade or industry. Committees of women workers, not union bureaucrats, must decide what tasks, if any, within a trade may be harmful to women's health.
Women are systematically denied control of their own bodies and are forced into having unwanted children, or prevented from having children they do want. Women are also forced into arranged marriages and obstructed from getting divorced. In short, women are denied control over their own fertility. Child-bearing must be a choice for women if they are to participate equally with men in production, social and political life.
The provision of free contraception and abortion on demand for all women is essential. In many parts of the semi-colonial world women suffer oppression stemming from previous modes of production and the attendant religious ideologies. We are against the forcible circumcision of women, which is part of that oppression. The semi-colonies also suffer from the pressure of imperialism to solve their so-called "population problem" at the expense of women's rights.
No woman should be forcibly sterilised. Women are restrained from participating in social life by legal, social and religious codes and frequently face psychological and physical abuse. Enforced marriage and the sale and trade of women must be legally outlawed and these laws enforced by the working class. Full legal rights and benefits must be available to all women regardless of their age or marital status. Down with the compulsory veiling of women or their exclusion from any aspect of public life.
Women cannot be liberated unless these demands for the immediate interests of women form part of a programme for working class power. But the fight for immediate and transitional demands can draw working class and peasant women into the united fight of the workers for that goal.
Unless women are won to such a united working class struggle they can remain a passive or even backward section of the class, subject as they are to the impact of bourgeois propaganda, particularly religion. But won to such action women can break working class men from the sexist ideology that splits and weakens the labour movement, as well as secure real gains for themselves as they advance towards the goals of socialist revolution and women's liberation.
Women must be recruited to the unions, and organised to press their demands on the union leaders. Where women work alongside men in industry we oppose the call for separate women's unions, even where the sexism of the union bureaucrats makes participation of women very difficult.
The struggle must be waged to unite male and female workers, whilst defending the right of women to caucus and organise within the unions and at all levels of the labour movement. We must demand that the union leaders fund and support campaigns for the recruitment of women, including part time workers who should be given full rights and reduced rates of dues.
We recognise that the legacy of women's role under capitalism as the prime carers and child rearers will mean that many women will be drawn into struggle around the organisation of welfare in times of heightened class struggle and revolutionary crises. However, the revolutionary party must agitate for special measures to ensure that women play a full a role in all aspects of the class struggle, and are not held back from any form of political activity due to their welfare role.
A proletarian women's movement, led by revolutionaries armed with a programme for the dictatorship of the proletariat, is essential if women are to play a positive and vital role in the revolutionary struggle. A movement which draws in wide layers of working class women is an essential way of organising those women who are excluded from production, i.e. housewives, unemployed and disabled women.
Such a movement, based on women organised in the factories, offices, on the farms, in the communities and in the unions can, at one and the same time, fight for the interests of women, against the prejudices of male workers, and for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.
In key battles of the working class, women frequently organise their own committees and groups. Whatever form these initial organisations of women take, revolutionaries must argue for their transformation into a proletarian movement which draws in all layers of women workers, poor peasants and oppressed sections of the petit bourgeoisie.
In the present period, where revolutionaries are not in the leadership of the mass of working class women, the tasks of organising such a movement still exist. We demand of the Social Democratic and Stalinist leaders of the working class that they provide resources and support for the building of such a movement. In this way we can enter in to a united front with the most militant sections of working class women and, through joint actions and communist propaganda, seek to win them away from their misleaders.
Women of other classes, most importantly peasant women but also urban petit bourgeois women, especially in the imperialised countries, will be drawn into this struggle, behind the leadership of proletarian women. To follow the feminist line of an all-class women's movement would be to surrender the interests of working class women.
The possibility exists of a temporary alliance with parts of the bourgeois women's movement in some semi-colonial countries. But such movements must fight and mobilise for at least bourgeois democratic demands (for instance the fight of the Congress Party in India against the burning of widows). United action also depends on freedom of propaganda and organisation for all tendencies that are prepared to fight. There must be no restrictions on Trotskyists in their revolutionary work.
We oppose the idea of an "autonomous" movement because it excludes the possibility of the women's movement being won to the revolutionary programme, and seeks to prevent communist women from intervening as disciplined members of their organisation. Communist women seek to win the majority of a proletarian women's movement to supporting the revolutionary programme and electing communists to its leadership.
The slogan of "autonomy" also involves the exclusion of men from the organisations, and often meetings, of women. Working class women cannot destroy capitalism and end their own oppression without uniting in struggle with the rest of their class, namely, men. The exclusion of men from the activities of a women's movement places an unnecessary barrier in the path of the fight against sexism. This fight must involve the education of male workers in the process of common struggle with women.
Youth and children
The sons and daughters of workers and peasants experience the most intense forms of capitalist exploitation and abuse. Youth are denied the most elementary rights to independence. Youth have no legal right to dispose of their own wages, no independent access to state benefits and, indeed, no right to choose where and how to live their lives. Despite this youth are deemed mature enough to be forcibly drafted into the armed forces where they will be sacrificed by the million in the military defence of the bourgeois order.
The social structure which creates and sustains the oppression of youth is the family. As with women, this subordination is not an eternal feature of human life but a product of class society. The individual family is where infants and children are raised and where the basic skills are learned. In addition it serves to instil into youth the rules by which they are expected to abide in adult life.
Working class children are raised to be obedient workers, and likewise the male children of the bourgeoisie are taught to be efficient captains of industry and generals of the armed forces, and girls, obedient wives and producers of future heirs.
Youth of the working class and poor peasantry are subject to the most intense oppression: oppression in the family co-exists with super-exploitation in production and poor levels of education. Such youth are the backbone of low waged industries. This reflects the position of youth in the family: their wage levels generally assume that they are part of a larger economic unit.
This in turn reinforces youth dependence on parents. As students in schools and colleges working class youth are given little or no income, poor quality training and an education designed to serve the interests of the bourgeoisie.
In its most extreme form the position of youth and child labour is a form of slavery, with all wages being paid to the head of the family, usually the father. Where child labour is common, as in many semi-colonies, the welfare of the growing child is of no concern to the bosses who grind these children into ill health and an early grave.
For the parents such is their own desperate poverty that they feel there is no alternative but to send their children into the hell of super-exploitation. Child protection laws are ignored by bosses and parents alike, proving the truth of Marx's dictum that right can never be higher than the economic foundation of society.
Another consequence of this economic and legal dependence is the repression of young peoples' sex lives. In class society this is an essential starting point for instilling conformity and obedience. Children are not allowed to achieve a rational understanding of their sexual feelings or the interaction of their sexual feelings with social responsibilities.
In fact their sexuality is denied any frank expression; even those feelings that conform to the heterosexual norm prescribed by bourgeois society are repressed. Instead young people are subjected to moral and religious taboos. These serve to cloud their consciousness with irrational fears. The child's whole emotional life is obliged to be centred and fixed on their parents. By these means bourgeois notions of the individual and the private are nurtured as against any co-operative or collective ideal.
To liberate youth from their economic, social, legal and sexual subordination requires the transformation of society to ensure that the individual family household is no longer the exclusive place for the performance of domestic labour and the raising of children.
Along with creating the conditions for the liberation of women, this would also free youth to be independent of their parents, with as much or as little contact with them as they wished, but with the social provision of housing, food, cleaning, clothing and leisure facilities, and childcare available to all.
Economic independence, proper education and freedom from super-exploitation are the key demands for youth. For those in paid employment, equal pay for work of equal value must be achieved under workers' control to overcome the gross pay differentials which exist between youth and adult workers.
Reduced hours should be worked by youth when they first enter employment, and they should have the right to longer holidays than adult workers. For youth and children under the school leaving age hours of work must be strictly limited and conditions of work overseen by the working class and committees of young workers. Protective legislation is necessary to forbid night work, long hours, and other work which may be injurious to the health and development of youth. This must be under the control of the workers and youth themselves.
Education and training for children and youth must be fought for by the whole class. The bosses must be forced to provide full time schooling with financial support for families and later for the students. Education should be free with all expenses paid by the state. It should be comprehensive and available to all, being compulsory up to an age agreed by the labour movement.
We fight for the abolition of tests or exams designed to restrict entry into educational institutions. A living grant must be paid to those staying in education beyond the school leaving age, at a level set by committees of students, workers and teachers and protected against inflation.
Education should be equally available for girls and boys and the workers' movement should strive to integrate boys' and girls' schooling. It must be secular--no religious propaganda in schools, no state funds to religious schools. We fight against the bourgeois class bias of the curriculum, for instruction in the history of the workers' movement and in the nature of capitalist exploitation.
In schools and colleges we fight for the integration of education and training with the experience of production, aiming to overcome the distinction between mental and manual labour which is a feature of all bourgeois education. At the same time, the workers' movement must fight to prevent the capitalists using students, apprentices and trainees as cheap labour. We fight for adequate cultural and sporting facilities, for free discussion of sexual, social and political questions in schools. We demand instruction for the youth in the use of weapons, while opposing any presence of the police or army in the schools, colleges and campuses.
We fight to place all educational facilities under the control of the working class and students. While fighting against private educational institutions and for the nationalisation of the universities, we fight for the autonomy of educational institutions from the capitalist state. The running of all educational institutions should be under the direct control of the workers, students and teachers involved and representatives of the labour movements.
The representatives must be elected from the mass meetings of all involved on the basis of one vote per person. For the right of school and college students to form unions and political organisations, for the right of access to the schools and colleges for the workers' representatives. Drive the fascists from the schools, colleges and campuses. Worker and student control bodies must fight for the right to veto the appointment of reactionary teachers.
Students as a whole are not automatically a natural ally of the working class. Many students are drawn from the upper and middle classes. Full time students are in a privileged position because they are not subject to the daily routine of the working class. Moreover, many students can and do receive privileges as a result of their education. Nevertheless many students--future scientists, technologists, lawyers and artists--can and must be won to the side of the revolutionary workers' movement, thereby strengthening it. Since the time of Marx and Engels the best elements of the intelligentsia in each generation have been won to the proletarian cause.
Mass student struggles--in the degenerated workers' states as well as the capitalist countries--show that students have a vital role to play, shoulder to shoulder with the proletarian vanguard, in the struggle for socialism.
We therefore fight for worker and student unity expressed in permanent links between the workers' movement and the student organisations, where students can be won to the side of the working class and where the enthusiasm and idealism of the students can help rank and file workers overcome their bureaucratic and conservative leaders. Students should take up class struggle tactics--strikes and occupations--to win their demands.
They should fight for rank and file control over the student unions, against state interference and control. In some countries a layer of student bureaucrats exists which, while not being part of the trade union bureaucracy, actively propagates the same ideology and methods of operation. These leaders must be challenged and the student organisations won to the support of workers' real struggles.
Unemployed youth must fight for genuine training and education with full economic support, plus the sliding scale of hours to share out available work under workers' control. For those not in work, full benefits must be available as soon as young people leave full time education, to ensure that unemployment does not result in complete economic dependence on the family.
Within the family the parents are the people immediately responsible for implementing the oppression of their children. This is true even where parents hold progressive ideas. More often parents oppress their children in a brutal way, treating disobedience with violence and abuse. Youth must therefore be given full legal and political rights within the family, as elsewhere, in order to help break the domination and power that parents exert over them.
Social restrictions that the family places on youth, often related to religion, are unbearably oppressive for many young women and men. Since the family denies them the right to pursue their chosen social and sexual activities, social centres must be provided where all the facilities for these activities are freely available. Information and education about sex should be available at the social centres, together with free contraception and abortion referrals.
Age of consent laws do nothing to protect youth in the family from sexual abuse. They do punish consensual sexual relations for individuals below a certain age. Abolish the age of consent!
Youth must also be given full political and legal rights in the public sphere. If youth are mature enough to be drafted into the bosses' army to defend their system of exploitation then they are mature enough to make responsible decisions in peacetime. The right to vote should be fixed at a legal minimum no higher than 16, and to be determined by each national labour movement. The right to make legally binding decisions in financial and civil matters must be guarateed at the same age.
Youth, mainly male, are the cannon fodder of bourgeois armies. Whether it be in the service of US imperialism in Vietnam or pursuing a diversionary war in Iran, hundreds of thousands of youth, of both genders, have been cynically sacrificed in the service of reaction.
It is necessary to educate the youth in the spirit of proletarian anti-imperialism and anti-militarism. Pacifism only dulls the mind and prepares the way for future slaughter. The youth must be trained in military techniques under the guidance of the labour movement. Youth will provide the backbone of the picket line defence squads and the core of the future workers' militia.
In times of acute crisis and class struggle, young unemployed workers who have no experience of production and solidarity can be mobilised as supporters for fascist gangs, or used to break strikes. In order to overcome these dangers the organised working class must draw youth into the unions. Reduced dues must be available for young workers joining unions, but with full membership rights. Youth must organise sections within the unions in order to press for their demands, educate themselves and recruit other young workers.
Great opportunities exist to win youth to the revolutionary vanguard of the working class. Naturally more concerned about the future than any other generation they can be quickly won to a revolutionary and socialist outlook. Youth generally lack the conservatism which has broken the spirit of so many older workers.They have not been worn down by experiencing years of reformist misleadership and betrayal.
A revolutionary youth movement must therefore be built as a key organisation in the struggle for working class power and youth liberation. Armed with the revolutionary transitional programme this movement will draw in youth from other classes, notably the poor peasants and urban petit bourgeoisie.
It should be represented at every level of the labour movement. This principle applies with redoubled force in the revolutionary party which should set an example to the whole of the labour movement.
Lesbians and gay men
Sexual oppression has been a feature of all class societies. The imposition of monogamy on women accompanied, and was integrally linked with, the rise of private property and classes. Under capitalism general sexual oppression still exists, especially for women and youth.
Capitalism has also given rise to the systematic oppression of lesbians and gay men. Capitalist society, whatever liberal gestures it has proved capable of in periods of prosperity, is inherently anti-homosexual.
The ideological and economic centrality of the family for capitalism means that any groups who undermine the monogamous, heterosexual "norm" of the bourgeois family are regarded as a dire threat to society and stigmatised accordingly. Lesbians and gay men pose a threat to the ideological underpinnings of the family and to its ideal nuclear structure, by demonstrating that sex is neither a purely functional activity related to reproduction nor a means of cementing the monogamous heterosexual marriage.
They testify to the fact that sex is a pleasurable pursuit in its own right. The fact that lesbian and gay sex is openly non-reproductive is a threat to the legitimacy of the bourgeois family.
Under capitalism lesbians and gay men have been systematically denounced, abused and criminalised. This has led to sexual misery for millions of individuals and fomented harmful divisions within the working class. The bourgeoisie through the manipulation of education, the media, religion and the legal system , and with the connivance of the trade union bureaucracy, promotes the idea that homosexuality is "unnatural".
In the 1980s the bourgeoisie in the imperialist countries used the development of the AIDS epidemic to step up the persecution of homosexuals, especially gay men, who were blamed as the perpetrators of the disease. Inside the working class these arguments have generally been accepted and a deep rooted fear of homosexuality (homophobia) is the norm.
This homophobia often creates the basis for active, and frequently violent, anti-lesbian and gay bigotry in the working class. However, the proletariat as a whole has no material or fundamental interest in maintaining lesbian or gay oppression or in perpetuating anti-lesbian and gay bigotry.
Lesbians and gay men suffer discrimination in all spheres, including legal sanctions. Whilst this oppression affects lesbians and gay men of all classes, it is again working class lesbians and gay men who are most acutely affected. Oppression affects employment opportunities. Men and women who are openly homosexual are less likely to get work, will be isolated and abused at work, and are more likely to lose their jobs, their homes and their children.
Unlike oppressed members of the ruling class, working class lesbians and gay men have no alternative but to seek work. Consequently they are frequently forced to deny their sexuality, suffering the psychological damage that such denial and suppression produces.
The working class must fight for an end to all legal discrimination against lesbians and gay men. This is a basic democratic right. The state should have no rights to interfere in people's sexuality where consenting individuals are concerned. Abolition of the age of consent is necessary to deprive the police and the courts of another weapon to harass and abuse young lesbians and gay men.
Discrimination in every sphere--including employment, housing and custody of children--must be fought. Legal rights should be campaigned for and defended by the working class. The state must be made to provide information about sexuality in schools without proscribing homosexuality as generally happens today. Religious anti-gay bigotry must be swept out of the classroom.
Millions of lesbians and gay men form part of the working class. The great majority do not acknowledge their sexuality through fear of victimisation or persecution. Those who have done so have suffered as a consequence.
The organisations of the working class must be won to supporting the right of all homosexuals to be open about their sexuality, to resist police or fascist harassment, to defend the right to work and to earn a living wage. An atmosphere of mutual respect for people with different sexual orientations must replace the atmosphere of sexist and heterosexist bigotry that currently pervades the world workers' movement.
Working class lesbians and gay men must have the right to caucus within the organisations of the working class in order to fight against homophobia and for full political and social equality. In order to take the struggle beyond specific sectional or local issues, such caucuses need to be linked up with specific united fronts and campaigns which could form part of a proletarian movement for lesbian and gay liberation.
Revolutionaries will fight for political leadership in such united front organisations to win lesbians and gay men to the programme of lesbian and gay liberation and revolutionary socialism.
The systematic oppression of lesbians and gay men will not be ended whilst the bourgeois family is promoted and defended as the model for social life. That is why the struggle to end this form of oppression must be linked to the programme for working class power.
Such a revolution will be able to free lesbian and gay proletarians from the material deprivations that are inflicted on them as a direct result of their oppression and exploitation by capitalism, and end the regime of sexual misery that blights the lives of millions throughout the world.
Racial oppression
Modern nations cannot be identified with so-called races. Racial oppression is the product of the emergence of the bourgeois nation. In the mercantilist period of early capitalism slavery was fundamental to the primitive accumulation of capital in certain countries. The extension of capitalist colonial empires brought with it the systematic denial of basic human rights and even genocide for the indigenous populations.
Racism has taken its most virulent form in the imperialist epoch: economic catastrophes, revolutions and wars have given birth to a modern pseudo-scientific racism. It exists as both a feverish fantasy of the petit bourgeoisie and a conscious tool of the imperialist bourgeoisie.
The "race" problem in our century is not one of supposed racial differences but is a function of racism: the oppression of people because of their (supposed) race. The victims of this systematic racism are many.
In the forefront stand the Jews, who suffered genocide during World War Two, and the black people of Africa, the Caribbean, the USA and those who have emigrated to Europe.
In South Africa the black majority has long laboured under the savage oppression of apartheid. In addition, the post-war boom sucked millions of workers from the semi colonies to the imperialist heartlands, from one semi-colony to another and from less developed to more highly developed imperialist countries. These migrant and immigrant workers are also racially oppressed.
The victims of racial oppression are systematically denied democratic rights. Police and state racism pour down on them. This further serves to encourage violent attacks by individual racists, gangs and organised fascists. The racially oppressed suffer discrimination in education and all spheres of welfare provision. They are subject to super-exploitation at work. Whenever capitalism enters recession racial minorities suffer most from unemployment and low pay.
For the working masses of the racially oppressed there is no capitalist solution to their oppression. Capitalism's tendency to integrate and stratify immigrant communities always benefits the petit bourgeois and bourgeois strata at the expense of the poorest masses. Even this tendency is repeatedly thrown into reverse as capitalism resorts to crude racism and national chauvinism in its periods of crisis.
The slaughter of over six million Jews under Hitler demonstrates the epoch's barbaric potential. No matter what level of "equal opportunity" or "affirmative action" is reached, imperialism's sharp turns in politics and economics will always leave the oppressed prey to the genocidal "final solution" of desperate finance capital.
Revolutionary communists conduct agitation and propaganda within the oppressed communities for the strictest separation of the class interests of the workers from the bourgeoisie, petit bourgeoisie and clergy. For this purpose the revolutionary party may set up special forms of organisation, but it resolutely opposes the call for a separate political party of any racial group, no matter what ultra-radical political content this is given. Separatism, nationalism and all lead to a dead end from the point of view of the struggle to end oppression and super-exploitation.
The experience of the black struggles in the USA demonstrates both the pitfalls and the revolutionary potential of the struggles against racial oppression. During the long post-war boom blacks lived under a "democratic" constitution and the formal abolition of slavery was a century behind them.
Yet even in these decades of "prosperity" blacks in the USA were still massively disenfranchised, super-exploited and subject to a form of apartheid in the southern states. Beginning with passive protest, led by the black clergy and the intelligentsia, the black resistance developed into mass revolt and armed clashes with the police and national guard.
But it was faced with a massive crisis of leadership. On the one side the integrationist petit bourgeoisie were ready to demobilise mass revolt for the sake of reforms and greater access to local and state government. The radical opposition to these sell-outs--the Black Panthers, Malcolm X--was unable to make a complete break with separatism and guerrillaism.
Cut off from the mass of white workers and from the masses of the black community the vanguard was crushed by the US state. After inflicting this defeat US imperialism incorporated a black bourgeoisie and a caste of professional politicians, leaving the overwhelming majority to rot in America's disintegrating inner-cities.
Only the overthrow of imperialism, the freeing of the productive forces from the chains of national capitalism, can remove the material roots of racial oppression. The struggle against racism must form an integral part of the programme and activity of the revolutionary party in every period.
It must focus its transitional action programme around the day to day struggles of the racially oppressed which hit at discrimination in education, wages, employment and working conditions. The party can and must find masses of heroic fighters amongst the men, women and youth of the racially oppressed to rally around this programme.
Because they are led by class collaborators and social chauvinists, the official labour movements of the imperialist heartlands reflect the racism and chauvinism of the ruling class, and are frequently instruments of it. But there is no road to liberation for the oppressed other than through a struggle to win the majority of the working class to united action against racism.
Revolutionary communists fight within the workers' movement for united action against all racist attacks and laws and for workers' defence squads against racist and fascist attack. We struggle for full citizenship and democratic rights for all racial and national minorities, immigrant and migrant workers.
We fight to abolish all immigration controls in the imperialist countries. In the semi-colonies we stand against colonial settlement and support the imposition of time limits and other restrictions on citizenship on white settlers. We are against all new colonial settlements by capitalists and rich farmers. This is the only exception we make to our generalised opposition to immigration controls in semi-colonial countries.
It is scandalous to suggest that the racially oppressed should remain passive or patiently endure racism until the mass of white workers and their organisations have been won to an anti-racist perspective. We demand workers' movement support for self-defence against racist attacks.
To help the racially oppressed to organise against racism within the labour movement and to participate fully within the struggles of the whole working class, we stand for the right of the oppressed to caucus and be represented at every level of the workers' movement, including within the revolutionary party.
The class struggle and the full system of transitional demands are not suspended within the oppressed communities, whatever the acute common oppression they may suffer. Whilst it is possible to conclude limited tactical agreements with non-proletarian organisations within the communities, these must be based on united action and the strictest separation of programmes. At all times the working class of the oppressed communities must be mobilised against its own exploiters of whatever race, and for the liberation of women, youth, lesbians and gay men.
Chapter 7 - For a revolutionary communist international
The working class needs a revolutionary party in order to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. Only a revolutionary party, which wins over the majority of the organised working class in the revolutionised unions, the factory committees, workers' militias and workers' councils, can take power.
Only a party can hold onto power against counter-revolution, protect it against bureaucratic degeneration and extend the revolution internationally. The building of a Leninist party in each country is the fundamental task of revolutionaries.
The revolutionary party must separate itself from all reformist or centrist elements while at the same time offering the firmest fighting unity to all layers of the working class. Any tendency to subordinate the party to united front bodies, or dissolve it into a permanent front which only addresses the masses on the basis of the lowest common denominator will lead the revolutionary party into centrist degeneration. The Argentinian MAS in the 1980s provides a classic example of this danger.
The Leninist vanguard party functions on the basis of democratic centralism. Democracy in the choice of leaders and the determination of strategy and tactics trains critical, self reliant cadres. Free expression of differences is thus essential.
Bureaucratism trains pliant tools not militant fighters. When serious and prolonged differences emerge in the party the formation of organised tendencies and even factions may be a "necessary evil". Therefore the right to form tendencies and factions must be jealously safeguarded. Just as Stalinism has corrupted and devalued the word "communism", so to it has turned Leninist party organisation into a bureaucratic caricature, based on a dead monolithism.
Centralised discipline is an essential means of concentrating all the force of the revolutionary vanguard on the bourgeoisie and its state. It renders each action of the party more effective. Discipline can be a life and death question when carrying on work in conditions of illegality, or in the face of brutal repression. Consequently, the revolutionary organisation is not a discussion club.
When political disputes are resolved by a vote inside the organisation then it is the duty of all members to carry out all decisions and actions that flow from such a vote, in a loyal and systematic fashion. After the carrying out of such decisions and actions it is entirely permissible to review the policy under dispute and attempt to change it. Such genuine democratic centralism is essential at all stages of party building.
Very often the initial stages of party building will be devoted primarily to propaganda. Where there are only a handful of revolutionaries in a given country the main task will be to clarify the most fundamental questions of programme.
Nevertheless, we always aim to test and apply our programme through intervention into the class struggle wherever possible. As the organisation grows to become a fighting propaganda group it will increasingly take part in mass struggles, fighting for leadership, making practical proposals for how struggles can be won and drawing the lessons of them in order to win over the most advanced elements of the class to the revolutionary programme.
The passage from the fighting propaganda group to the Leninist combat party cannot be achieved by launching a handful of cadre into shallow "mass work", or by making opportunist adaptations in situations of heightened class struggle. Where important leftward moving centrist forces exist within centrist or reformist parties it may be necessary to enter such organisations, with the twin objective of a united struggle against the right wing party leaders and the construction of a revolutionary tendency.
In this way the best class fighters can be rallied to the perspective of building a revolutionary party. This tactic is in no way an inevitable stage in party building. Nor does it have anything in common with the strategic "deep entry" practiced by various right centrist "Trotskyist" organisations since the late 1940s. These have become buried deep within the reformist parties and long ago abandoned the struggle for the revolutionary programme.
A genuine revolutionary party exercises a strong influence on the vanguard of the class. It is composed of communist cadres, has a sizeable national implantation in the advanced sectors of the proletariat, and is able to organise mass struggles. In revolutionary and pre-revolutionary situations the party must develop into a mass party in order to organise the masses for the seizure of power.
For a mass revolutionary workers' party
In many countries in the imperialised world, and even in certain imperialist countries, decades of capitalist growth have seen a massive expansion of the proletariat and its trade unions, without a corresponding growth in its political parties. The workers and the unions frequently remain loyal to bourgeois or petit bourgeois nationalist parties, or even to forms of Bonapartism. Under such conditions the fight to build a revolutionary party will be closely intertwined with the struggle for the political independence of the working class.
In the 1930s in the USA, Trotsky advanced the slogan of a workers' party based on the trade unions as a way of overcoming the political backwardness of the US workers and of answering the felt need for political organisation in the wake of the massive class struggles of the mid-1930s. This was in no way a call for a reformist, Social Democratic party, but a tactic advanced by Trotsky in the fight for a revolutionary party.
Generally an important device for making propaganda for class independence and to expose the bureaucrats' subservience to the bosses, the workers' party slogan can become on occasion a sharp agitational weapon. The call for a workers' party is a call for the trade unions to break with the open parties of the bourgeoisie and to fight for the construction of a party of the whole working class.
They should cease to pledge the loyalty of the working class to its class enemies. The unions are central to this call, precisely because it will generally become operative under conditions of heightened class struggle in which a massive influx of radicalised workers into the unions has taken place (USA in the 1930s, South Africa and Brazil in the 1980s).
In such circumstances the danger exists that if revolutionaries do not utilise the workers' party tactic and intervene in the process of its creation then the reformists themselves may well direct the radicalised workers towards the creation of a reformist party, or a renegotiated pact with the bourgeois or petit bourgeois parties.
The workers' party tactic is not an inevitable stage in the political development of the working class. Its agitational use will depend upon the concrete circumstances in each country. However, we are quite clear that in fighting for the creation of a workers' party, we propose that it should be based on the revolutionary programme.
We fight to prevent a reformist or centrist noose being placed around the neck of the proletariat. But the nature of this party cannot be laid down in advance as an ultimatum. Its nature will be determined by the struggle between revolutionaries and the misleaders.
Where there is no tradition of mass political organisation of the working class, the political struggle inside the workers' party to defend the interests of the workers allows for the polarisation of the existing political tendencies within the working class. This is shown by the development of the Brazilian Workers Party (PT) during the 1980s.
The revolutionary International
The imperialists and their henchmen in the semi-colonies and the workers' states co-ordinate their actions against the proletariat on an international scale through the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, Comecon, and military blocs such as NATO, the Warsaw Pact. Against their "Internationals", we have to build a working class mass revolutionary International, in order to overcome the chauvinism and racism that bourgeois society imposes on the ranks of the world working class.
The goal of this international will be the revolutionary destruction of capitalist and Stalinist rule throughout the world. It will take the lead in the liberation of the whole of humanity from the twin yokes of exploitation and oppression. The international dictatorship of the proletariat will lay the basis for a world socialist system and move to eradicate all traces of the old order in the march to world communism.
Before and after the revolution, the task of creating a revolutionary programme and party is an international one. There can be no question of fighting to build large national parties first and then linking them together in a mass international. National parties built in isolation will succumb to national narrowness and one-sidedness.
In the imperialist countries this will involve a tendency to accommodate to economism and social chauvinism. In the semi-colonies it will lead to yielding to petit bourgeois nationalism and to blunting the class independence of the proletariat.
In the Stalinist states it will result in accommodation to the "reforming" wing of the Stalinist bureaucracy. If the national pressures of each country are to be overcome it is vital to develop a global perspective and intervene in the international class struggle. At all times it is essential to forge practical solidarity between workers in different countries.
No proletarian revolutionary International exists today. The Socialist International collapsed into reformism in 1914 when its major sections supported their "own" bourgeoisie in the First World War. Today it acts as a co-ordinating centre for Social Democratic reformists and their anti-working class plans.
The Comintern, under the crushing weight of Stalinism, collapsed politically in 1933 when its policy facilitated Hitler's coming to power. In 1943 Stalin cynically dissolved it. Nevertheless, the links between Communist Parties and the ruling castes in the degenerate(d) workers' states are still strong.
A hidden bureaucratic international links a majority of the world's Communist Parties to Moscow. But the Kremlin no longer commands a monopoly of loyalty. Eurocommunism put distance between Moscow and the western CPs and for others Cuba and China provide an alternative source of inspiration and funds. All this testifies to the continued process of disintegration of the world Stalinist movement.
The last revolutionary International, the Fourth International (FI), founded by Trotsky in 1938, no longer exists. The FI was founded on the perspective that it would rapidly come to lead millions during the revolutionary crises provoked by the Second World War. This did not take place, as Stalinism and Social Democracy emerged strengthened from the conflict.
The FI, however, continued to operate with its pre-war perspectives of imminent war and revolution. Weakened by Stalinist and imperialist repression, and having suffered political and organisational dislocation and disarray during the war, the FI was unable to chart a course for the world working class in the new conditions which opened up after the end of the Second World War.
Between 1948 and 1951 the Fourth International moved further and further away from the Marxist method as it made a series of political adaptations, ceding the leading role in the class struggle to supposedly "centrist" forces of Stalinist, Social Democratic or petit bourgeois nationalist origin. The first and most dramatic example was that of Yugoslavia. Following the Tito-Stalin split in 1948, the FI declared that Tito was no longer a Stalinist and opposed the slogan of political revolution in Yugoslavia.
Underpinning this degeneration was a perspective of an impending world war which would be rapidly transformed into an international civil war. The failure to re-elaborate programme and perspectives led to the adoption of a systematic centrist method by the 1951 World Congress of the Fourth International; the FI was politically destroyed. In the Bolivian revolution of 1952 the centrist FI supported a bourgeois government of the nationalist MNR and criminally squandered the potential for proletarian power.
In 1951 the FI ceased to exist as a revolutionary organisation. In 1953 it ceased to exist as a united organisation when it split into warring centrist factions, none of which represented a political continuity with the revolutionary Fourth International of 1938-48.
After 1953 the International Secretariat (IS) side of the split pioneered the right centrist deviation of the FI. In its subsequent incarnation after 1963, the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFI), this trend has consistently adapted to various Stalinist, petit bourgeois nationalist and social democratic trends. The main opposition to the IS after 1953 was the International Committee (IC).
Despite certain partially correct criticisms of the IS, the IC fundamentally continued to apply the method of the centrist FI. Its British section's deep entry work into the Labour Party was thoroughly opportunist. It bent the knee to petit bourgeois nationalism and Maoism. Its hallmark was a catastrophist perspective woodenly lifted from the 1938 Transitional Programme.
As with the "Socialist" and "Communist" Internationals, the legacy of the political and organisational degeneration of the Fourth International persists today. There exist several international centrist currents which claim its heritage and with which we are in political combat. Yet all of them share the same incapacity to use the method of Lenin and Trotsky to guide the world working class to victory. The task of the day is clear: the construction of a new Revolutionary Communist International.
The LRCI is the instrument for the creation of a new Leninist-Trotskyist mass revolutionary international. We do not start this struggle from scratch. We stand in the political tradition of Marx and Engels' First International, the struggle of the revolutionary internationalists inside the Second International, the first four congresses of Lenin's Communist (Third) International, Trotsky's struggle for the defence and re-elaboration of the revolutionary programme, and the revolutionary positions of the Fourth International from 1938-48. We therefore begin our work on the basis of the struggles and programmatic gains of the last century and a half.
The struggle against centrism
Centrism occupies a middle position between revolutionary communism and reformism, eclectically combining theory stolen from the former and adapting to the "practical politics" of the latter. It is not a new phenomenon. Right from the outset of the Marxist movement, a century and a half ago, centrism has developed in the form of organisations moving rightwards away from revolutionary politics (the Socialist International pre-1914, the Stalinist Comintern in the 1920s and early 1930s, the Fourth International in the late 1940s and early 1950s). But as with the Pivertists in the French SFIO in the mid-1930s and tendencies within the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, we have also witnessed centrist tendencies moving leftwards away from reformism.
Centrism is congenitally incapable of leading the working class to victory. It makes fine sounding "revolutionary" declarations whilst refusing to commit itself to a definite strategy or a concrete programme. Unable to unite theory and practice, centrism's theoretical method is fundamentally based on impressionism: a light-minded development of "new theories" for an ever "new" reality which tramples on the doctrine and method of Marxism.
In the rapids of revolution centrism's wild zig-zags allow vital opportunities to pass and hand the initiative back to the consciously counter-revolutionary forces of Social Democracy and Stalinism. Hence its danger for the working class. Each time centrism has led the workers in a decisive conflict (Germany 1919, Italy 1920, China 1927, Spain 1937, Bolivia 1952, 1971 and 1976, to name but a few), the result has been disastrous.
The example of the POUM in the Spanish Civil War shows how a centrist organisation can obstruct the building of the revolutionary party. Far from leading the masses to victory, the centrist POUM provided left cover for the Stalinists' counter-revolutionary popular front and covered up for the betrayals of the anarchists, thus helping to pave the way for the crushing of the Spanish working class by Franco.
Centrism is above all a phenomenon of movement--of development or degeneration--to the left or the right. But in the absence of both mass revolutionary events and of a powerful revolutionary pole of attraction, centrism may be able to maintain itself for extended periods, taking on an ossified existence. This was the nature of the developing centrism of Karl Kautsky inside the Socialist International before 1914. Such right-centrism is consistently reformist in practice, but is prepared to use pseudo-revolutionary phraseology until its passage into the camp of reformism. This is the nature of many organisations around the world which claim to be "Trotskyist".
Sectarianism fears the living struggles of the working class. It justifies its inactivity in the name of the "preservation of principles". Sectarianism abstains from the mass organisations of the workers and prefers to hide in fake "revolutionary" bodies. In short, it has nothing in common with revolutionary Marxism and everything in common with centrism.
Despite what wooden sectarians might wish to imagine, sectarianism and opportunism are not opposites, but are the product of the same political method: both have no confidence in the ability of the working class to mobilise around the revolutionary programme. The opportunist seeks to dilute the programme, the sectarian abstains from decisive intervention in the class on the basis of that programme.
The essential identity of the two methods is shown by the sectarian lurch of the centrist Communist International between 1928-33, and the ultra-leftism of the USFI (1967-74).
The struggle against centrism of all sorts has been a decisive feature of the construction of every revolutionary international. Marx and Engels fought against the anarchists; Lenin and Luxemburg led the fight against the centrist leadership of the Socialist International. The Comintern won over the left centrist syndicalists in France and the German USPD, and broke the left wing from the Italian PSI.
In the fight to build the Fourth International, Trotsky directed his polemics against the centrist forces emerging from the Comintern (e.g. Bordiga, Treint, Souvarine) and from the Social Democracy (e.g. the Independent Labour Party--ILP--in Britain and Pivert in France). At the same time he proposed unity in action with centrists wherever possible. This is the way we orient to today's centrist forces.
The transition from centrism to revolutionary politics involves not merely a development but a decisive break. It is not a gradual or inevitable process. The great majority of centrist organisations have not become revolutionary.
Either they have disintegrated (like the ILP and the POUM in the 1930s) or they have degenerated into reformism (the MIRs of Latin America). Where centrist parties have become sizeable mass formations they cannot long balance between reform or revolution. Thus the PUM of Peru and Democrazia Proletaria in Italy are developing ever more pronouncedly reformist wings.
Forms of unstable centrism have also appeared during the last forty years under the impact of Maoism and of the Cuban Revolution, notably in the semi-colonies. Although the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1964-69) was in reality a bureaucratic faction fight, the radical phrase-mongering of the Maoist wing struck a sympathetic chord amongst both opponents of the Moscow Stalinists and anti-imperialist forces. Maoist groups in West Germany, Italy and a number of semi-colonies were founded upon radicalised, generally youthful forces, and many briefly passed though a period of centrist development.
The reactionary reality of Maoism, as expressed in the massacres of proletarian forces in Wuhan and Guangdong during the Cultural Revolution, and the rapprochement with Nixon and Pinochet, coupled with the rise in European Social Democracy, brought this period to an end in the early 1970s.
In the semi-colonial world the MIR groups, born under the influence of Guevarism and the Cuban Revolution, rapidly declined into Social Democratic, petit bourgeois nationalist or even outright bourgeois parties. Different in origin again, centrist tendencies inside the degenerate(d) workers' states have developed, faced with the crisis of Stalinism. They combine revolutionary hostility to the regime with confused, often Social Democratic influenced, programmes.
The main form of centrism which currently exists on an international scale is that which has its roots in the degeneration of the Fourth International. Organisations which have developed from this root have put forward partial critiques of Social Democracy, of Stalinism or of the degenerate fragments of the Fourth International.
Many have tried to re-establish a revolutionary continuity and yet in every case we know of this attempt has failed. None of these groups have been able to consistently put forward a revolutionary programme for the masses, nor to implement it in struggle on either a day to day basis or in the major revolutionary situations of the last forty years.
In general, their errors have been of little immediate consequence to the outcome of the struggles of the world proletariat due to their lack of implantation in it. Nevertheless, centrists who claimed to be Trotskyists have played important roles in the failure of the 1952 revolution in Bolivia and in the throwing away of a mass movement in Sri Lanka in 1964 and Peru 1978-80.
Corrupted by opportunist adaptation, these organisations have all repeated the mistake of the centrist Fourth International by placing their faith in the "revolutionary process", in tailing this or that "left" tendency within reformism or petit bourgeois nationalism in the hope that they will prove the new vehicle for the disembodied "world revolution".
This is true of the systematic adaptation of the USFI. They consider Nicaragua to be a healthy workers' state and do not fight to overthrow the bureaucratic Castro regime in Cuba. It is also the case for the International Workers League, founded by Nahuel Moreno, which first adapted first to Peronism and then to Stalinism in its home country, Argentina.
It is to be found no less obviously in the tailing of petit bourgeois nationalists and reformists which led the Lambertist current which founded the Fourth International (International Centre of Reconstruction) to hail Algerian nationalists as "Bolsheviks", and today leads them to propose the construction of a "workers' international" around a reformist programme centred on bourgeois democratic demands. The international tendency around the British "Militant" group, which hides its origins in the Fourth International, aims to transform Social Democratic parties.
The groupings around the British Socialist Workers Party and the French organisation Lutte Ouvrière tail the spontaneous working class struggle and make no operative use of a transitional programme. The fact that these organisations have continued to exist, in one form or another, for forty years, is a testimony to their isolation from the international working class, not to the strength or validity of their politics.
The forces for a new International will include many of the best class fighters who currently find themselves trapped within the centrist organisations. The sections of our own international organisation all have their origins in breaks with centrism. Splits, fusions and regroupments will prove necessary and for the LRCI it is particularly important to engage in polemic and joint action with those centrists who falsely lay claim to be Trotskyists. In this we start with Trotsky's injunction "programme first!".
Build the LRCI, build a Revolutionary Communist International!
Imperialism is a formidable enemy. It has rich resources which it uses to corrupt and coerce the proletariat's reformist leaders; it deploys a huge state apparatus to oppress and kill workers all over the world. But it cannot stop the class struggle that erupts ceaselessly out of capitalism's fundamental contradictions. Every cycle of expansion and prosperity brings confidence to the struggle. In every crisis it rouses the exploited to further assaults against the rulers of the world.
Whether the opportunity comes sooner or later to cast all the agents of capitalism into the abyss, the world working class needs an international revolutionary party. The LRCI is setting out to build such a world party of communist revolution. We have begun with the elaboration of a series of revolutionary positions on key international struggles, and with the re-elaboration of the international revolutionary programme.
This task is nearly fifty years overdue but in tackling it we base our programme on the politics and the method of unfalsified Trotskyism, of revolutionary Marxism. Our objective is the construction of a new world party of communist revolution, a refounded Leninist Trotskyist International.
Is the LRCI far from this goal? Are its forces too small faced with a challenge of this magnitude? It is certainly true that our forces are weak, weaker by far than Trotsky's Fourth International at its foundation in 1938. We have as yet but a handful of cadres in a handful of countries. But we have no right to let this fact daunt us, or deter us from taking up the struggle.
Despite a long mid-century period of imperialist stability, the imperialist epoch remains one of wars and revolutions. Yet events do not move at an even pace nor are parties built simply by a slow accumulation of cadres. There come periods of crisis and revolution when the tasks of years or decades can be accomplished in weeks or months. But for the proletariat to take advantage of such periods we must have a programme to build on and cadres to give leadership.
That is why there is no time to lose. We must lay the foundations now. We appeal to all militants who lay claim to the revolutionary traditions of the international proletariat, repulsed by centrist vacillations; we appeal to all working class fighters, revolted at the betrayals of reformism, petit bourgeois nationalism and the trade union bureaucracy: join us!
Originally published by Workers Power (Britain) in 1980
Note from the Editor: Workers Power (Britain) and its international organization, the LRCI, were the predecessor organization of the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency.
“We Marxists differ from both pacifists and anarchists in that we deem it necessary to study each war historically (from the standpoint of Marx’s dialectical materialism) and separately.” (Lenin-Socialism and War). The war between Iran and Iraq, a war between two non-imperialist but capitalist states has thrown Lenin’s injunction to study particular wars and their historical implications, into sharp relief.
Marxists have always understood that, despite their brutal nature, wars can play historically progressive roles. Marxists have never been against war ‘in general’. Wars of National liberation against imperialism for example are wars that we would regard as progressive. It was an understanding of this aspect of war that led Marx and Engels during the nineteenth century, to take sides in various wars between capitalist states They recognised that, in the era of the development of nation states in Europe, it was possible for capitalist states to play a Progressive role by destroying remnants of feudalism and establishing integrated national states and economies. This facilitated the development of a unified proletariat. Class Struggle against the bourgeoisie could take solace free from the need to struggle for national unity and independence alongside the bourgeoisie. It was legitimate for defence to support certain wars of national
Marx and Engels recognised the first phase of the Franco-Prussian war in 1870 as a justified war of defence on Germany’s part. They saw the war as a potential vehicle for the defeat of Bonapartism in France and for the national unification of Germany. They argued this in spite of the fact that Prussia was governed by the reactionary Junker Bismarck. The nature of the regime did not determine their attitude to the war, whilst that war was a purely defensive one: “That Lehmann (a nicknames for William I of Prussia -WP) Bismarck and Co., are in command and that it must minister to their temporary glorification if they conduct it successfully, we have to thank the miserable state of the German bourgeoisie, it is certainly very unpleasant, but it cannot be altered... In the first place, Bismarck, as in 1866 (the Austro-Prussian War - WP) so at present is doing a bit of our own work in his own way, and without meaning to, but all the same he is doing it.” Engels to Marx, August 15th, 1870)
The Social Chauvinistic
Marx and Engels’ support for Germany did not mean cessation of the class struggle. They opposed German chauvinism, and the annexations Bismarck planned. They argued against a war on the French people and they supported Bebel and Liebknecht who abstained on the vote for war credits in the German Reichstag. However, viewed from a historical standpoint, despite Bismarck, a successful defence of Germany was the most progressive outcome. The social chauvinists of the Second International, Kautsky, Plekhanov, Hyndman and Co sought to use Marx and Engels’ position on the Franco-Prussian war to justify their position of ‘defence of the fatherland’ in the imperialist war of 1914-18, This treachery was justified by a generalisation of Marx and Engels’ position on a specific ‘national’ war, to war ‘in general’. Lenin attacked the social chauvinists, who look no heed of the fact that since the 1890’s capitalism had entered into the imperialist epoch-an epoch of decline, with capitalism having outlived its progressive role. It was left to Lenin to designate the precise nature of the war and develop the only consistently revolutionary slogan with regard to it – ‘turn the imperialist war into a civil war’. For Lenin, in this war the ‘continuation of politics’ was the continuation of imperialist predatory politics. It was a war for the redivision of colonial slaves not a ‘national’ war of defence by either side. To side as the social chauvinists were doing with their own imperialist bourgeoisies, meant suspending the class struggle, abandoning a revolutionary perspective and sacrificing the interests and lives of the working class to the profit lusts of the monarchs, ministers and magnates of Europe and the USA. The position of revolutionary defeatism, that is arguing that the defeat of one’s own army is a lesser evil as compared with its victory as a result of the suspension of class struggle, flowed from Lenin’s assessment of the imperialist nature of this specific war. Lenin’s position did not flow from the fact that it was capitalist states that were doing the fighting. He argued that in general the age of justified national wars in advanced Europe was past, as most of these nations were clearly imperialist. However, he was also clear that national wars could still take place and that they would be justified ones deserving of the support of Marxists. This was most likely to be the case in areas such as the Balkans or Ireland, where the national question was unresolved, or in the ‘backward’ countries of Asia and Africa. Outside of the context of a generalised imperialist conflagration (i.e. one clearly aimed at the redivision of the world by the imperialists, in their interests and against the oppressed nationalities) a national war was possible even between two advanced capitalist powers: “In my view, admission of, ‘Defence of the Fatherland’ in a national war fully answers the requirements of Marxism. In 1891 the German Social Democrats really should have defended their fatherland in a war against Boulanger and Alexander (former French Minister of War and the Russian Tsar - WP), This would have been a peculiar variety of national war,” (Letter to Inessa Armand, November 30th, 1916).
Peculiar because it would have pitted Kaiser Wilhelm (William II) against Tsarist Russia and republican France. Justifiable because the French and Russian aim was to dismember the recently unified German nation. Lenin emphasised this possibility against those within his own ranks who played into the hands of the social chauvinists by renouncing national wars and ‘defence of the fatherland’ in general. For Lenin this error revealed a failure to understand that within an epoch there are varied phenomena: “in which in addition to the typical there is always something else.” (Letter to Zinoviev August 1914). In the same letter he went on to argue: “And you [Zinoviev] repeat this error, when you write in your remarks, ‘small countries cannot in the present epoch defend their fatherland,’ Untrue!! ... One should say, ‘Small countries, too, cannot in imperialist wars, which are most typical of the current imperialist epoch, defend their fatherland,’ That is quite different ... We are not at all against, ‘defence of the fatherland’ in general. You will never find that nonsense in a single resolution (cc in any of my articles). We are against defence of the fatherland and a defensive position in the imperialist, typical of the imperialist epoch. But, in the imperialist epoch there may he also ‘just’, ‘defensive’, revolutionary wars (namely, i) national, ii) civil, iii) socialist wars and suchlike),” (Collected Works Vol. 35 pp228-9, all emphases in original).
A ridiculous distortion
There is no doubt that for Lenin the position of revolutionary defeatism was only automatically the correct position with regard to wars that were definitively imperialist. To apply it to wars in general, even when those wars are conducted by capitalist states, is a ridiculous distortion of the Marxist position on war. The crucial thing is always to: “examine the policy pursued prior to the war, the policy that led to and brought about the war.” (Lenin-A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist Economism).
It is with this in mind that we must analyse the war between Iran and Iraq.
The Middle East, of which Iran and Iraq are a part, is an area where the borders have been drawn, not as a result of genuine national development, but according to the dictates of imperialism. The area is a ‘balkanised’ one. That is, its nationalities have been divided by states created by imperialism. The clearest example of this, although by no means the only one, is the Kurdish nation. The Kurd’s homeland is divided between five states, Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran and the USSR. The states that were created out of the break up of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War, into ‘mandates’ of French and British imperialists were turned into arms colonies with puppet rulers when these powers relaxed their direct control, to check the development of any anti-imperialist or socialist sentiments and activities amongst the masses. Thus when the British granted Iraq independence in 1932 they had already installed the Hashemite Emir Feisal I on the throne. Likewise in Iran, the British helped Reza Khan to the peacock throne in 1925. After the Second World War, following the consolidation of US imperialist hegemony the CIA toppled the bourgeois nationalist Mossadeq regime in 1953, thereby bringing the last Shah to power. In the various other countries of the oil rich region existing semi feudal regimes were bolstered (notably in the Arabian Peninsula) in order to guarantee that the West’s vital interests would be served. The Shah of Iran from 1953 to 1979 acted as a faithful gendarme for imperialism, guarding the West’s ‘jugular vein’ as he himself described the Straits of Hormuz.
The unresolved national questions and the maintenance of fiercely conservative regimes dominate the politics of the Middle East. In the West the existence of Israel and the denial of Palestinian national rights adds further dimension to this highly unstable region. Within this area the interests of the various imperialist powers meet and interlock and are confronted with the Soviet Union. The USSR shares borders with Iran and Turkey and has friendship treaties with Syria and Iraq (although as we shall see friendship with the latter is wearing a bit thin). This ‘arc of crisis’ by its very nature, is riddled with contradictions and will inevitably be dragged into wars and social upheavals. It is the modern equivalent to the Balkans. The imperialists have a direct interest in every move made in the area. It is in this context that the war between Iran and Iraq must be understood.
Iraq, until recently, was regarded as hostile to imperialism. It overthrew its monarchy in 1958 and since 1968 it has been ruled by the Ba’thist Socialist Party. It was friendly to the USSR and was a vocal supporter of the PLO. However, beneath this picture of apparent radicalism, there exists a repressive Bonapartism, embodied in Saddam Hussein, jealous of its power, savage to its opponents (the Kurds) and to the Iraqi Communist Party
Millions of US dollars
Hussein and his Tikrit clique (the place many of them come from) are keen to establish Baghdad as the qala’a -the citadel of the Arab revolution. In practice this means impressing the neighbouring monarchies, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the others that Iraq can fill the gap left by the departure of the Shah, as the power in the Gulf. To do this, however, Hussein needs to win the support, not only of Khaled and Hussein (of Jordan) but also of US, French and British Imperialism. His eagerness to achieve this was demonstrated by his murderous repression of the Iraqi CP, his condemnation of the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan and, most importantly, his escalation of oil production to meet the Wests’ needs, which has made Iraq the second largest exporter in the world. Iraq has tried to become less dependent on Moscow by turning to France, in particular for weapons and technology.
In 1972 Iraq got 95% of its weaponry from the USSR and nearly all of its non-military imports. Now only 70% of its arms are from Moscow and the Soviet Union ranks fourteenth in the list of Iraq’s trading partners, behind Japan, West Germany, France, Italy and Britain. France has financed the building of nuclear reactors in Iraq. The USA, which had until recently extremely cool relations with Baghdad, has been making extensive diplomatic and commercial overtures. Millions of US dollars are being pumped into a number of computer projects while Carter’s National Security Adviser Brzezinski declared on television that: “We see no fundamental incompatibility of interests between the United States and Iraq. We do not feel that American/Iraqi relations need to be frozen in antagonism,” (Newsweek 6.10.1980).
These sentiments were also expressed by the American bosses’ ‘Wall Street Journal’: “With revolutionary Iran creating so much tension in the Middle East Washington would clearly welcome any role that the Iraqis “will play in stabilising the Persian Gulf.” (6.4.1980). Hussein has not been slow to respond to such come-ons from the west: “We do not drink oil, we sell it, and we know that our major markets are in the West and in Japan.” he declared. (Time Magazine 6.10.1980). His bid to gain the favour of the West, prove himself to be a force to be reckoned with and fill the power vacuum left by the Shah, could well be clinched if he were to strike a death blow to Iran, whose revolutionary turmoil has been a source of instability to Imperialism’s clients in the Gulf region since February 1979. In looking at the politics being continued on Iraq’s part it is clear that it is an objectively pro-imperialist course that is being followed-one designed to allow imperialism to re-establish its control in a crucial region.
The mass movement that overthrew the Shah was objectively anti-imperialist i.e. it brought down the CIA’s chosen client who ran Iran as a semi-colony for US capital for a quarter of a century. Subjectively i.e. in terms of the consciousness of the masses, it was profoundly contradictory. The masses of the urban poor, the intellectuals and the working class were consciously anti-Imperialist, i.e. they saw that no improvement in their lives was possible without the destruction of the economic and military stranglehold of the United States. Furthermore differing sections participated in the revolution to achieve their own social and political goals-the workers to win freedom of organisation, to throw off the Savak guards and informers, the despotic managers and their American overseers. The nationalities fought to win their autonomy within a more democratic Iran. The peasants fought to get their land back from the Pahlavi court clique, the agribusinesses etc.
An Islamic safeguard
But they fought with profound religious prejudices. Khomeini’s intransigence and the bazaari-mullah organisation demagogically convinced them that an Islamic Republic would safeguard all their interests. In fact Bazargan, Bani Sadr, Khomeini and the Islamic Republican party have been able to use these prejudices to confuse and obscure the proletariat’s class consciousness and limit their shoras to the most elementary stage of workers control - a veto over local management and central government directives. The regime has been able to partially negate democratic rights-of speech, assembly, right to self-determination etc. It has inflicted ‘Islamic dress’ on women and Islamic law on the populace in general. It has launched vicious full-scale war on the Kurds and a dictatorial police regime in Khuzestan. Yet this repression is, we repeat, partial. Why? Because large sections of the population are armed and have resisted and even rolled back Khomeini’s attacks. The Kurds, the Left, the working class defend their gains against Khomeini. The question is, is the present war predominantly a continuation of the Khomeini regime’s brutal attacks on these gains or is it a continuation (by other means) of the masses’ struggle against Imperialist-Pahlavi oppression? Are the masses via their Islamic false consciousness being mobilised against Iraq to further crush democratic rights or smash the working class, or are the masses in spite of Islamic consciousness defending an invasion whose success would directly serve the interests of imperialism? We would argue that it is the latter that is dominant. The Khuzestani Arabs are fighting the Iraqis in Abadan and Khorramshahr not in the name of Persian chauvinism, but because they know that behind the Iraqi lines are the pro-Shah émigrés like Bakhtiar and General Oveissi, the notorious architect of the Black Friday massacre in Teheran. They know that the 5000 strong force of pro-Shah shock troops have been welded together, under the protection and encouragement of Hussein, the ‘butcher of Baghdad’. To deny the progressive aspect of the masses struggle against such elements in this war, and to see only that they are defending Khomeini and his counter-revolutionary aims, must logically lead to denying that the Iranian revolution had any progressive content.
Sectarian abstraction
Every revolution against Imperialism, to the extent that bourgeois forces participate in it and lead it, has forces of counter-revolution within it. Bourgeois (and pre-bourgeois forces) can only be episodically, tactically, in conflict with Imperialism. They can and will turn with bloody repression on the workers and peasants as did Chang Kai-Shek in China, as did Nasser in Egypt, Kassem in Iraq etc. But to draw from this the conclusion that ‘at night all ants are black’ is merely to testify that one has the bandage of sectarian-abstraction bound tight about your eyes. To see no difference between Restoration in arms against the gains of a revolution and that revolution’s internal foes, temporarily forced to defend it to save their own skins, is a frank confession of political bankruptcy. For those like the International Spartacist Tendency who never saw anything progressive in the overthrow of the Shah it is at least consistent. For those like Workers Action/Socialist Organiser and the Workers Socialist League it is a signal that they have given up on the Iranian Revolution-besmirched and disfigured as it now is by clerical reaction. Trotsky however did not assess revolutions on the basis of how pleasant or unpleasant it was to be associated with them: “a revolutionary cannot recognise the revolution as finished until objective indication leave no room for doubt?’ (The Spanish Kornilov’s and the Spanish Stalinists).
We argue that Iraq’s invasion is an attempt, from the outside, to finish off decisively the Iranian revolution, on behalf of Imperialism, the reactionary feudal states of the Gulf, and counter-revolution inside Iran. The fact that there are counter-revolutionary elements within Iran (Khomeini and Bani Sadr) who in the present situation pursuing an objectively progressive goal (the successful defence of Iran) is no mystery to those who have learnt anything from Marx and Engles assessment of Bismarck’s role in the Franco-Prussian war.
But the United States and all the other Imperialist powers are neutral in the present conflict. We know this because every bourgeois diplomat, and their camp followers in the press, repeatedly tell us that this is the case. This in itself is an immediate cause for Marxists to look beyond United Nations speeches. In an area so central for the imperialists, to think that they are not implicated in the events now talking place is ludicrous. As Lenin pointed out when the imperialists were busy pretending neutrality in the squabbles in the Balkans and Ottoman empire: - “Indeed it would be childish to believe the words of the diplomats and disregard their deeds, the collective action of the power against revolutionary Turkey (NB the revolution in Turkey at that time was a bourgeois nationalist one being led by the Young Turk movement-WP). The very fact that the present developments were preceded by meetings and conversations of the Foreign Ministers and Heads of State of several countries, is enough to dispel this naive faith in diplomatic statements,” (Events in the Balkans and in Persia October 16th 1908),
Like Lenin we prefer to look at the deeds that imperialism is performing in the Gulf. There can be no doubt that, via the channels of secret diplomacy and their satellite surveillance systems, the USA knew that the Iraqi invasion was in preparation. Indeed the US State Department admitted as much when it commented that Washington was “neither forewarned nor surprised by the fighting,” (8 Days October 4th 1980). The imperialists have acted, not to check the attack or discourage Iraq, but to prevent the war from spreading and further disrupting oil supplies. They are not bothered that Iran was attacked but merely that Iraq has not been able to finish the job off quickly enough. The Economist lucidly explained: “If Iran had cracked at the first tap of Iraq’s hammer, Mr Saddam Hussein, without much cost would have demonstrated his muscle, short circuited the spread of Shiite fundamentalism and, maybe, basked in the thanks of a grateful world.” (October 11th 1980).
Reinforcing the fleet
The US has supplied Saudi Arabia, whose King telephoned Baghdad at the start of the war to wish Hussein good luck in his adventure, and whose airfields have been used by Iraqi planes, with four AWACs. The US only has 19 of these specialised reconnaissance planes in its entire armoury. It has also reinforced its fleet in the Gulf with the guided missile destroyer the ‘Leahy’. The other imperialist powers have joined in, publicly renouncing the idea of a naval task force, hot to practice creating one. There are 150w 58 warships in the region-British, French, Australian and American. Since it is hardly likely that Iran is about to invade other Gulf States these gunboats have one express purpose-to intimidate Iran and prevent it from taking any action against Saudi Arabia or Oman should they enter the war. The US pretext was a supposed Iranian threat to the Straits of Hormuz, through which the oil tankers bound for the west pass. As the American magazine Newsweek put it: “These actions were designed, in part to reassure the Saudis and other Gulf states of US protection. But their primary goal was to counter any Iranian threat to the Persian Gulf oil supplies”. (October 13th 1980-our emphasis WP). Yet the recovery of the Tunb islands in the Straits was an Iraqi war aim and the only troops reported moving there were Iraqi ones. Success for Iraq would benefit the imperialists by putting an end to the destabilising effects that the Iranian revolution has been having. It would also pave the way for a new power bloc of Iraq/ Saudi Arabia/Jordan (two of whom are already armed by the US, the other increasingly so by France) which could replace the deposed Shah as gendarme. Hussein’s failure to win a swift and decisive victory, due mainly to the dogged resistance of the local population and the Islamic and left militias is already losing him friends. Sadat-the US’s staunch ally has done an about face and condemned Iraq. Hussein will discover that there is no honour amongst thieves. Faced with his failure the US may well move to apply pressure to terminate the war.
The reason cited for adopting a defeatist position by both the Socialist Organiser and the Socialist Press (paper of the Workers Socialist League), is that both regimes are capitalist and nasty. Socialist Press has perceptively noted that: “Though neither is a direct client sate of imperialism, their anti-imperialist rhetoric cannot hide the fact that both are reactionary governments administered by petty bourgeois demagogues within the framework of domestic and world capitalism.” (Socialist Press October 1980). Socialist Organiser doesn’t go any further: “The war between Iran and Iraq is a war between two reactionary regimes. The outcome can only be further misery for the masses and the national minorities in both countries.” (27th September 1980).
Both of these tendencies are guilty of seeing the Iranian revolution as over. They have both seemingly forgotten that the Iranian revolution did not topple capitalism, but was a revolution nevertheless which revolutionaries would have defended against Iraq if it had invaded in March, April, and May 1979 despite the then reactionary capitalist nature of the regime. It is not the nature of the regime that determines our attitude, precisely because it is not the regime that we are defending-it is specified gains of the revolution that the masses have won for themselves that we defend. We know the regime of Khomeini is ‘reactionary’, that it attacks the Kurds, women, the left. We know that even during the war the regime has slaughtered 80 Kurds and that Khomeiniite guards ordered the Fedayeen fighters to remove their red arm bands. Do we support or defend this? Of course not! We stand with the Kurds against Khomeini. We stand for total and uninterrupted political opposition to Khomeini. We favour his overthrow and the replacement of his Islamic -Republic by a workers State. We take every opportunity to denounce him and Bani Sadr, who is busily rebuilding the regular Iranian army for reactionary purposes. We would fight to build independent workers organisations-shoras and workers militia. But if revolutionary politics consisted merely in the repetition of such truths then life would be simple indeed-so it is the simple life that Socialist Organiser and Socialist Press, with their blissful disregard of the concrete circumstances obviously long for.
Childish in the extreme
Is the Iranian revolution over? We would argue that the fact that Khomeini has not been able to consolidate a reactionary regime and has had to rely on the mobilised strength of the armed masses to defend Iran is precisely the difference, not between Khomeini and Hussein’s intentions, but between the countries they rein over. Like Chiang Kai-Shek, who the left opposition and Fourth International tirelessly opposed, the Iranian regime can be forced, because it was installed by an anti-imperialist revolution in which the masses played an overwhelming part, into a role they abhor. We do not support them in any way, but while we cannot take the power ourselves, we will fight alongside them, independently and under our own slogans. We would not, if we had revolutionary deputies in the Majlis, give any vote of confidence to the Islamic government-we would not vote them war credits, or any other aid for their war effort. But, at the front, recognising the war as not simply one of capitalism versus capitalism, which is childish in the extreme, we would engage in a military united front against a common enemy, whilst in no way supporting the people that history has chosen, unfortunately, to put alongside us. As Trotsky explained with regard to Spain during a war between two capitalist governments (the one he was arguing for a military united front which was at the time killing Trotskyists and left centrists of the Poum):
‘‘We have not the slightest confidence in the capacity of this government to conduct the war and assure victory. We accuse this government of protecting the rich and starving the poor. This government must be smashed. So long as we are not strong enough to replace it, we are fighting under its command. But on every occasion we express openly our nonconfidence in it; it is the only possible way to mobilize the masses politically against this government and to prepare its overthrow. Any other politics would be a betrayal of the revolution.’’ (Trotsky – Answers to Questions on the Spanish situation)
The Socialist Organiser and Socialist Press are defeatist in more than one sense of that word. They are defeatist with regard to the uncompleted Iranian revolution. Its meandering course has led them to give up on developing precise tactics and a definite strategy in circumstances of war and revolution. In the imperialist Britain they will be punished for this only by polemic. In the battle for Abadan – objectively a battle to defend the Iranian revolution – there will be little room for the hollow phrasemongering of the WSL and Socialist Organiser.
Originally published by Workers Power (Britain) in 1984
Note from the Editor: Workers Power (Britain) and its international organization, the LRCI, were the predecessor organization of the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency.
Leon Trotsky's article "The Programme for Peace" , written during 1915-16 is a landmark in the development of Trotsky's political method.
The First World War demonstrated starkly that capitalism had outplayed its historically progressive role. "Permanent war or permanent revolution" were the choices that Trotsky saw as facing humanity.
The major tasks that had been inscribed on the banner of the bourgeois revolutions - national independence, the breaking up of the big estates, and equality under the law - remained unfulfilled for the great majority of mankind and unfulfillable on the basis of capitalist property relations in the new imperialist epoch.
In their turn, capitalist property relations and the political forms of bourgeois rule were themselves becoming ever greater impediments to the development of the productive forces. The national state, for example, served as a fetter on the rational international organisation of production required by the level of development of the productive forces.
It was Trotsky, more than any other Marxist, who most sharply understood the major programmatic consequences of imperialism's crisis and decay. For him it necessarily fell to the proletariat to take up as its own the unfulfilled democratic struggles of the oppressed and exploited, as part of its permanent revolution against capitalism. Only the proletariat was capable of giving effective leadership in those struggles: their realisation could only take the form of a proletarian revolution, no longer of partial struggles for a minimum democratic programme within capitalism. Only the international proletariat could sweep aside the nation states and mechanisms of exploitation that threatened mankind's productive forces with stagnation and decay. The only answer to imperialism's war and crisis, the only answer to the exploitation, oppression and misery of the masses, lay in the international proletarian revolution.
In this way, as we shall further see the Peace Programme projects onto an international scale the programme of permanent revolution that Trotsky had first systematically elaborated for Russia in his book Results and Prospects in 1906.
Although cramped in style because of its publication under the stern eye of the censor, Trotsky's Peace Programme is the most codified and developed version of his attempts to develop a programme of proletarian struggle against the First World War. As such it must be discussed in comparison with the abject surrender in 1914 of the majority of the leaders of European socialism to their "own" national bourgeoisies, and also with the programme advanced by Lenin, Zinoviev and the Bolsheviks. In this respect, the article shows the development of Trotsky's political method and the difficulties associated with some of his positions - and those of the Bolsheviks - in the years leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917.
SCIENTIFIC APPROACH
At the time that the Peace Programme was written, Trotsky was not a member of Lenin's Bolshevik Party. He did not finally join until July 1917. During the early years of the war, his writings were the subject of much hostile debate with the Bolsheviks. Their disputes, and the problems specifically associated with this article most notably those around the slogans of "The United States of Europe" and "Defeatism" - can make clear to us the struggle waged by both revolutionary tendencies to elaborate a new programme for the new epoch, and to build a new International. The disputes also show the kind of rigorous and scientific approach that we need to employ today in the struggle to re elaborate the communist programme and to build a new revolutionary international.
THE COLLAPSE OF THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL
The major parties of the Second (Socialist) International backed their respective bourgeoisies at the declaration of hostilities in August 1914. In the name of "national defence", the massive French and German socialist parties became recruiting sergeants for the carnage created by their "own" bosses. The International was in tatters. Its leading sections were calling on their members to slaughter fellow workers in the name of the "national interest".
Only a minority of European socialists stood against this stream of chauvinism and capitulation. A small left wing in the German party around Liebknecht and Luxemburg stood out against the war, as did others in Bulgaria and Russia.
Russian social democracy had experienced its division into revolutionary (Bolshevik) and opportunist (Menshevik) parties prior to the war. Trotsky adopted an ambiguous centrist stance with regard to that division. He sought to unify the two parties through the intervention of the Second International. Trotsky's initial response to the war was to reflect his stance towards the divisions in Russian social democracy.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks responded to the war in the theses "The Tasks of Revolutionary Social-Democracy in the European War" (September 1914). After denouncing the imperialist war and the social democratic traitors, the theses called for "all-embracing propaganda, involving the army and the theatre of hostilities as well, for the socialist revolution and the need to use weapons, not against their brothers, the wage slaves in other countries, but against the reactionary and bourgeois governments and parties of all countries". 1
They raised "as an immediate slogan" the call for republics in Germany, Poland and Russia, and "the transforming of all the separate states of Europe into a republican United States of Europe". 2
DEFEATISM
By early 1915, Lenin had elaborated the consequences of this call for soldiers to turn their arms on the bourgeoisie, to turn the imperialist war into a civil war. In theses prepared for a conference of Russian social democratic groups abroad, Lenin advanced the following position: "In each country, the struggle against a government that is waging an imperialist war should not falter at the possibility of that country's defeat as a result of revolutionary propaganda. The defeat of the government's army weakens the government, promotes the liberation of the nationalities it oppresses, and facilitates the civil war against the ruling class. This holds particularly true in respect of Russia. A victory for Russia will bring in its train a strengthening of reaction, both throughout the world and within the country, and will be accompanied by the complete enslavement of the peoples living in areas already seized. In view of this, we consider the defeat of Russia the lesser evil in all conditions" 3
For Lenin, the call for civil war against the ruling class necessarily meant that a defeat for the government and its army due to proletarian struggle was a "lesser evil" than an abstention from that struggle in the name of "defence" of the "nation".
Bolshevism also stood unequivocally for the need for a definitive break, not only with the Second International, not only with the outright traitors in its rank, but also with the opportunism which had marked its life prior to the great betrayal of 1914. "The Second International is dead, overcome by opportunism. Down with opportunism and long live the Third International purged not only of "turncoats"...but of opportunism as weIl".4
If Bolshevism stood firm on a programme of international civil war, Menshevism splintered and divided under the impact of the war. Plekhanov, "the father of Russian Marxism", enthusiastically embraced the Romanov war effort. Inside Russia, the Mensheviks advocated and organised workers' participation in industrial war committees set up to increase productivity in war industries.
In exile in Paris, however, Menshevism's historic leader - Martov - edited the anti-war newspaper Galas ("Voice").
It was in Galas that Trotsky first published his articles against the war.
WAR AND THE INTERNATIONAL
At the outbreak of war, Trotsky fled from exile in Vienna, where he was under immediate threat of internment, to neutral Switzerland - at that time also the home of Lenin, Zinoviev and their closest co-thinkers. In September and October 1914, during his stay in Zurich, Trotsky wrote a series of articles which were first published in Galas and shortly thereafter collected into a pamphlet War and the International.
The articles contain the analysis of the roots of the war which was later to inform the Peace Programme:
"The forces of production which capitalism has evolved have outgrown the limits of nation and state. The national state, the present political form, is too narrow for the exploitation of these productive forces...The present war is at bottom a revolt of the forces of production against the political form of nation and state. It means the collapse of the national state as an independent economic unit".5
This understanding, whilst inferior to the theory of Imperialism which Lenin was to develop over the next years, was nevertheless clearly that of a revolutionary struggling to come to terms with the new epoch of wars and revolutions, to provide a scientific analysis which could guide the world working class to victory.
It was this view of the contradiction between the internationalisation of the capitalist economy and the maintenance and reinforcement of national state structures - a global application of the perspective of permanent revolution which he and Parvus had developed during and after the 1905 revolution which was to eventually lead Trotsky to heavily emphasise the slogan of "The United States of Europe".
TROTSKY'S PROGRAMME
Both the analysis and the programme of War and the International contrasted sharply with that advanced by Lenin. Trotsky argued:
"'Immediate cessation of the war' is the watchword under which the social democracy can reassemble its scattered ranks, both within the national parties, and the whole International". 6
The struggle for peace was not, at this time, posed as an explicit call to struggle for proletarian revolution and class war against the imperialist bourgeoisie. It is posed as a means of reassembling the International's "scattered ranks" and "a fight to preserve the revolutionary energy of the proletariat" 7 around the slogans:
"No reparations
The right to every nation to self determination.
The united states of Europe - without monarchies, without standing armies, without feudal ruling castes, without secret diplomacy". 8
Despite Trotsky's denunciation of imperialism and the social democratic. traitors, this programme lacks the explicitly proletarian revolutionary character of the call issued by the Bolsheviks, and also did not raise the call for the building of a new international. (It should be noted, however, that by the fifth issue of Golos - 8th January 1915 - Trotsky was raising the call to "gather the forces of the Third International" 9).
As the war proceeded, Martov and the "Menshevik-Internationalists" - as they called themselves - were increasingly cramped and restrained by their co existence with the opportunist majority of Menshevism's leaders, and their consequent inability to fight opportunism. The hopes expressed by many, including Lenin, that the old divisions within Russian social democracy had been overcome and that the possibility existed for a re-alignment of the Russian internationalist left were repeatedly dashed by Martov's refusal to break with the opportunists.
However, in February 1915, Trotsky for the first time publicly broke with the Mensheviks. But he still refused to apply the logic of his position, and sought to occupy and a point midway between the two camps. His developing position on the war needs to be understood in this context.
NASHE SLOVO
The articles that make up the Peace Programme were published in the Paris based Russian paper Nashe Slovo ("Our Word"), which began publication after Galas closed down under the harassment of the censor, in January 1915.
Nashe Slovo was published in editions of between 2 and 4 pages, and was heavily subject to the censors' pencil, with white spaces where an article was disapproved of. Amongst its contributors were many who, like Trotsky, were not yet Bolsheviks, but who in the years to come were to play major roles in the Russian Revolution as members of that party. There were Menshevik Internationalists such as Antonov Ovseenko and pro-Bolsheviks like Lunacharsky and Manuilsky. Other contributors included Riazanov, to be a leading historian of the Bolshevik Party, Sokolnikov, future Commissar of Finance, and Karl Radek, Angelica Balabanov and Christian Rakovsky who were all leading members of the Communist International in the early 1920s.
Despite this wealth of talent, Nashe Slovo could not adopt a consistent and principled attitude towards the programme being advanced by the Bolsheviks. Enormous strains developed within this group as Martov continued to refuse to break with Menshevik opportunism, and as Bolshevism exerted ever stronger pressure by virtue of the clarity and intransigence of its stance. Throughout 1915 - within international left circles and within the Russian émigrés Trotsky continued to attempt to act as broker between the two camps.
ZIMMERWALD
This was made amply evident during the Zimmerwald conference. On September 5th 1915, 38 delegates met in the Swiss mountain village of Zimmerwald in an attempt to organise the international forces of anti-war socialism. On the right were the German delegates such as Haase who refused to countenance issuing a declaration that denounced the social chauvinists as traitors. They refused to even issue an unequivocal call for voting against war credits. The Bolsheviks constituted a left minority at the conference, and presented their antiwar policy in the form of a call for no restriction of the fight against the war "from considerations of the defeat of their own country", for turning "the imperialist war between the peoples into a civil war of the oppressed classes against their oppressors, a war for the expropriation of the class of capitalists, for the conquest of political power by the proletariat and the realisation of socialism". 10 They also argued for a remorseless struggle against social chauvinism and the "centre" that would not fight it.
At Zimmerwald, Trotsky demonstrated that he had still not broken with his centrist waverings between Bolshevism and opportunism. His draft manifesto which was eventually accepted - attacked the social democratic leaders but did not call for a break with them. It denounced the war in strident tones but in the name of "socialism", advanced the "fight for peace - for a peace without annexations or war indemnities". Against Lenin's call for civil war and defeat as a "lesser evil", Trotsky remained an advocate of a peace "without victors or vanquished". 11
PEACE WITHOUT ANNEXATIONS
Trotsky's calls were far more evasive and ambiguous than those of the Bolsheviks at this time. "Peace without annexations" is, in essence, not a position that is clearly counter posed to those these social democrats who like Kautsky, supported "national defence" and the war waged by their own bourgeoisie, as long as it was a defensive war with no annexations..
Much of the dispute between Trotsky and the Bolsheviks at this time centred on the question of "defeatism". We have already seen the early application by Lenin of the "defeat is a lesser evil" slogan. Throughout 1915-16, Trotsky stood firmly opposed to the slogan. Yet his arguments against it suggest that he did not really grasp the nature of Lenin's position.
CONTRADICTIONS
In 1915, Trotsky argued against Lenin in the following manner in the pages of Nashe Slovo:
"To the same extent that defeat, all other things being equal, shatters a given state structure, so does the victory of the other side which is implied by this defeat strengthen the state organisation of that other side. And we do not know of any European social and state organism which it is in the interest of the European proletariat to strengthen, nor do we assign to Russia the role of the state chosen to have its interests subordinated to those of the development of other European peoples.
But war is too contradictory, too double-edged a factor of historical development for a revolutionary party which feels firm class ground beneath its feet, and is sure of its future, to see in the road of defeat the road of political success. Defeat disorganises and demoralises the ruling reaction, but at the same time war disorganises the whole of social life, and above all, the working class...
Finally, a revolution which grows out of a defeat inherits an economy disordered to the utmost by war, exhausted state finances, and extremely strained international relations". 12 Trotsky plainly fails to grasp that Lenin was not advocating Russia's defeat at the hands of the German army, but rather at the hands of the Russian proletariat. Further, to hold back working class struggle for fear of the possible consequences of defeat, in the way that Trotsky outlines he, would be to necessarily encourage a "greater evil" the consolidation of the power of the imperialists against the world working class, and the respective national bourgeoisies against their national working classes. The question of "defeatism" remained a central point of difference between Lenin and Trotsky at this time, and Trotsky was not able to resolve this problem in the Peace Programme.
The basic analysis of the war put forward in the Peace Programme represents that developed in War and the International. Just as small and medium sized enterprises are systematically annihilated in capitalism's domestic markets, so too the independence of the small and medium size states was undermined by the workings of international capitalism:
"The fact remains that there can no longer be a return to independence for the small states. Whether Germany or England wins. in either case the question to be determined is who will be the direct master over the small nations". The development of capitalism itself rendered the re-creation of the pre-war world (status quo ante bellum) impossible. In this way Trotsky continues to show a profound grasp of the international nature of the imperialist economy, and the internationalist programme needed to combat it.
A STEP IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION?
For Trotsky it follows that the "peace without annexations" which he, and others, had advocated, could only be secured at the hands of the proletariat. Here, in the second section of the Peace Programme, he openly addresses the fact that only a proletarian offensive - a revolutionary force - can achieve that objective:
"In order to wrest annexations from the hands of the victorious party, which is armed to the teeth, the proletariat would naturally, regardless of its desires, be in need of a revolutionary force, which it will have to be ready to use openly".
This marks a definite step in the direction of Bolshevism's call for civil war and one which becomes clearer as the article proceeds.
Two burning tasks immediately confronted humanity in the midst of the war, according to Trotsky. On the one hand, the old nation states and tariff barriers had to be destroyed if the productive forces were to be freed from their fetters. On the other hand, there remained the task of safeguarding "to the national community its freedom of development (or dissolution) in the interests of material and spiritual culture." Imperialism is capable of achieving neither. Peace, the international organisation of production and the defence of the rights of national communities are only achievable as a result of proletarian revolution. "It is possible to overcome this regime only by means of a proletarian revolution. Thus, the centre of gravity lies in the union of the peace programme of the proletariat with that of the social revolution".
By this point, Trotsky was posing the struggle against imperialist war - its roots and its consequences - within the perspective of permanent revolution. He is explicitly combining the struggle against war and for key democratic slogans with the programme of social revolution in a manner which had not been apparent in War and the International or in the Zimmerwald draft.
Presuming that the international proletarian revolution must have as its object the international reorganisation of production so as to revolutionise the productive forces, it followed for Trotsky that the programme of social revolution must itself advance the necessary slogans to achieve that goal. It is because of this desire that in the Peace Programme, pride of place is given to the slogan of The United States of Europe, as "the most integral part of the proletarian'-peace programme".
KAUTSKY AND LEDEBOUR'S USE OF THE SLOGAN
The slogan first seems to have been raised within German social democracy in the face of the mounting war threat. Ledebour for example had argued:
"We put ...to capitalist society...the demand...that they (the statesmen) prepare to unite Europe in a United States of Europe in the interests of Europe's capitalist development, in order that later on Europe shall not be completely ruined in world competition." l3
Kautsky had also advanced the slogan, in 1911 in his own particular way: "Nevertheless the effort to peacefully unite the European states in a federative community is by no means hopeless. Its prospects are bound up with those of the revolution". 14
Kautsky, with his theory of "ultra imperialism", was later to argue that this form of rationalisation of European capital was perfectly possible in the "post imperialist" phase of capitalist development. He thus advocated it as a pacifist slogan for a non-imperialist capitalism.
As we have seen, at the outbreak of war, both Lenin and Trotsky raised the slogan, despite this murky pre-history. In "War and Russian Social Democracy" (October 1914), Lenin was to repeat the call: "The formation of a republican United States of Europe should be the immediate slogan of Europe's Social Democrats".15 Lenin wanted to raise the slogan as part of a democratic programme which would be false and meaningless", without the revolutionary overthrow of the German, the Austrian and the Russian monarchies". 16
UNITED STATES OF EUROPE
But Lenin soon dropped the slogan and polemicised against it at the time that Trotsky was placing increasing emphasis on it in his Nashe Slovo articles. Trotsky however stuck to his position. In December 1917, for example, in the first English language preface to The Peace Programme, Trotsky explained: "Into the peace-programme we include also the 'United States of Europe'. This motto does not belong to the official programme of the government of workmens' and soldiers' councils, nor has it as yet received recognition from our party. Nevertheless we believe that the programme of democratic peace leads to a republican World Federation beyond a European one (and a considerable part of the pamphlet is devoted to the statement of this opinion). This question is practically put to the European proletariat by the further development of the revolution". 17
Lenin's antagonism towards the slogan seems to have been prompted firstly by a fear of the economic consequences of the slogan, and also by hostility to the political practice of those including Trotsky - who placed such emphasis on the slogan. At heart, however, his dissatisfaction reflects the very real problems that Lenin himself was having in developing his own "stageist" view of watertight divisions between democratic demands and struggles and the proletarian socialist programme.
Until he had completed his work on imperialism, this view led Lenin to still see the coming Russian revolution as having an essentially national radical democratic character. Only his realisation of the ripeness of the world imperialist system for overthrow at the hands of the world proletariat broke him finally from that conception, although in a manner that, at least initially, led him to misunderstand the potential dynamic of some key democratic demands in the programme of proletarian revolution.
In rejecting the slogan of The United States of Europe, Lenin made a number of criticisms which, if they are aimed at Trotsky, do not stick. Lenin's quarrel is not with the politics of the slogan. In
August 1915, Lenin wrote that it remained "quite invulnerable as a political slogan,,18 But Lenin presumed the demand was posed as a demand within capitalism, therefore while it was "invulnerable" as a democratic political demand, its weaknesses lay in its economic consequences. He feared that its only outcome could be to create a cartel of European imperialisms in order to more efficiently exploit the colonial and semi-colonial world, and protect themselves against other imperialisms:
"Of course, temporary agreements are possible between capitalists and between states. In this sense, a United States of Europe is possible as an agreement between the European capitalists...but to what end? Only for the purpose of jointly suppressing socialism in Europe, of jointly protecting colonial booty against Japan and America".19
However, this argument does not offer us the basis for rejecting the slogan or Trotsky's argumentation. In the Peace Programme, Trotsky unambiguously posed the slogan as the slogan of international proletarian revolution, not as a democratic demand within capitalism, as Lenin thought. In his criticism of this slogan, Lenin showed that he had not yet fully grasped the fact that in the imperialist epoch, residual and unfulfilled democratic slogans take their place in the arsenal of the proletarian programme, possessing their own revolutionary dynamic, to the extent that they are fought for in a struggle led by a vanguard workers' party.
That is the sense in which Trotsky raised the slogan that is the sense in which we can say that it represented an internationalist development, a deepening of the programmatic method of permanent revolution which was to bring Lenin and Trotsky together in 1917.
STALINIST CRITIQUE
Lenin's last argument against the slogan has been grist to the mill of every Stalinist critique of Trotskyism to this day. Even conceding that the United States of Europe could be advanced as a programme of proletarian revolution Lenin remained alarmed that it could consequently be interpreted as a demand for a simultaneous proletarian revolution throughout Europe or none at all. As Lenin put it "it may be wrongly interpreted to mean that the victory of socialism in a single country is impossible, and it may also create misconceptions as to the relations of such a country to the others". 20
Is this an argument for "socialism in one country", as the Stalinists would have us believe? Firstly, Lenin doubtless meant by "victory of socialism" a successful proletarian seizure of power, and not the final consolidation of socialism as the Stalinists have always claimed. No other reading would be consistent with Lenin's politics. More importantly, there is no evidence from a reading of the Peace Programme that Trotsky used the slogan in that sense - witness Trotsky's own words: "It is profitable and necessary to reiterate the elementary thought that no single country in its struggle has to "wait" for the others, lest the idea of parallel international action be supplanted by the idea of procrastinating international action".
Lenin does not give adequate grounds for dismissing Trotsky's use of the slogan "For a United States of Europe". In the way it is used here, it is a form "of the dictatorship of the European proletariat", not a part of a programme of rationalised ultra-imperialism.
COMINTERN ADOPTS THE SLOGAN
It is in this manner which Trotsky successfully argued for the slogan to be adopted by the Communist International in June 1923: "The slogan of 'the united states of Europe' has its place on the same historical plane with the slogan 'A workers' and peasants' government' ; it is a transitional slogan, indicating a way out, a prospect of salvation, and furnishing at the same time a revolutionary impulse for the toiling masses.
Is the realisation of a 'workers' government' possible without the dictatorship of the proletariat? Only a conditional reply can be given to this question. In any case, we regard the "workers' government" as a stage toward the dictatorship of the proletariat. Therein lies the great value of the slogan for us. But the slogan 'the united states of Europe' has an exactly similar and parallel significance. Without this supplementary slogan the fundamental problems of Europe must remain suspended in mid-air" . 21
In order to make the slogan more precise, the revolutionary aspect of the slogan was made explicit (in the manner put forward by Trotsky in his 1922 post-script) and the "Soviet United States of Europe" became part of the Comintern's programmatic armoury.
Trotsky himself was later to dramatically relegate the importance of the demand. After 1928 it was never raised by Trotsky in any of his major programmatic documents. He used the "Soviet United States" slogan again in a discussion on Greece in 193222. In the only other recorded use of the slogan, in a discussion on Czechoslovakia in June 1938, he used the formulation "the United Socialist States of Europe". 22
We have examined some of the strengths of Trotsky's position. However, the truth is that Trotsky's view that the United States of Europe demand was the most important component of the programme and the key slogan of the hour was profoundly mistaken. While the slogan had excellent propaganda value in the midst of the imperialist war, it did not have the organising role, mobilising power or tactical leverage that Trotsky seemed to invest it with.
In all these spheres it was Lenin's slogans and tactics - and the party he built to fight for them - that proved indisputably more effective in developing organised proletarian struggle against the imperialist war. On the question of defeatism, Trotsky was definitely wrong. Much has been made by socialist writers of this division between the two men, generally in an attempt to suggest that there was merely a difference "of propagandist emphasis".24 However, Trotsky's later consistent use of Lenin's formulation makes it clear that he felt that there was a significant difference between the two positions. In his major theses on the coming war, "War and the Fourth International" (June 1934), Trotsky explicitly embraces Lenin's formulation, and in his famous "Transitional Programme" (April 1938), he quotes it verbatim:
"the defeat of your own (imperialist) government is the lesser evil". 25
There are other important differences between Lenin and Trotsky in this period, expressed in the Peace Programme, which deserve our attention, for they point to the rapid curve of development which Trotsky's thought was undergoing during these years.
Trotsky's desire to act as a "middle man" between Bolshevism and Menshevism stemmed from his failure to understand the kind of party the working class needs, and the kind of programme that party needs to be armed with.
PROGRAMME AND TACTICS
Lenin and the Bolsheviks put forward a programme and a series of tactics that enabled them both to construct a disciplined vanguard party in Tsarist Russia, and to intervene consistently in the struggles of the working class.
With that programme, tactics and experience, they waged an international struggle that laid the basis for the creation of the Communist International.
The approach was alien (although increasingly less so) to Trotsky during the war years. Not only did he reject much of the Bolsheviks' body of programmatic gains, he also barely applied himself to advancing key tactics that would enable a party to intervene in the class. Such tactics are notably absent from both War and the International and the Peace Programme.
Instead, Trotsky concentrates on the broad sweep of historical development, and addresses his programme to enunciating those tendencies, not to their intimate interaction with the struggles of the workers and poor peasants.
Part of the reason for this lay in his understanding of the epoch and of the role of "history". As was pointed out earlier, Trotsky's understanding of the epoch contained great strengths.
It enabled him, unlike Lenin's initial response, to see the coming period in Russia as one of socialist revolution, not a radical democratic stage. Lenin's views coalesced with Trotsky's in the rapids of revolution in 1917, when both appreciated the ability of the Russian workers and peasants to seize power and the necessity of a party to lead them in that task.
LACK OF PRECISION
However, his view of the epoch was also seriously flawed in a manner which led him to his errors over the split between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, and his attitude towards tactical questions at this time.
The pre-1917 Trotsky tended to see the permanent revolution as an objective process, driven onward by the motor of history separate from, and regardless of, the intervention of organised forces to shape and mould that process.
Hence his advancement of an analysis of the causes of the war as being primarily "a revolt of the forces of production against the political form of nation and state. It means the collapse of the national state as an independent economic unit". 26
This view of a bursting asunder of national boundaries in the face of the needs of the productive forces is focused at a different level of analysis from that of Lenin's more precise and scientific explanation of the imperialist role of the major powers in exploiting and carving up the world.
Both are correct to imply that imperialism was not "a policy", but a new and decisive internal development of capitalism - its "highest stage" as Lenin had it. But Lenin's approach led to a whole series of programmatic positions which Trotsky's more abstract approach could only hint at. For example, in the early sections of the Peace Program me, Trotsky deals with Belgium - a minor imperialist power - in the same manner as Serbia, Persia, Rumania, Greece and other imperialised countries. Belgian imperialism was an early loser in the inter-imperialist clash of 1914-18. The imperialised countries were always the victims of imperialist domination, and as such a different set of tactics needed to be advanced towards them.
A similar lack of precision is shown in the section on the right of nations to self-determination. Because of his understanding of the epoch, he correctly understood that the national question and the permanent revolution were intimately inter-related, but he failed to emphasise that the national question could be the beginning, the dynamic lead into the revolution, as had Lenin. Instead, the national question is completely bound up with the political union of Europe - the socialist revolution. No independent role for the national question is envisaged. It is one thing to recognise that a revolution will be necessary to achieve national liberation. It is quite another to always bind the two together.
At the root of these problems with Trotsky's approach at this time lies a certain "objectivism", a reliance upon the "laws" of permanent revolution and "history".-For this reason, before 1917, he tended to eschew ideological struggle with opportunism and the fight for defeatism in the ranks of the working class, and instead based his programme on ineluctable laws that would spontaneously propel the working class towards the international revolution.
This reliance upon a "process" is a one-sided, under-developed element in Trotsky's evolving politics at this time which has tragically come to represent "Trotskyism" for thousands of militants all over the world. The "objectivism" of pre-1917 Trotsky has come to be characteristic of post-war "Trotskyism".
The search for the epicenter of "the world revolution" has led these epigones to trail their coats behind every radical movement that has developed - from students, through petit-bourgeois nationalism to Stalinism. Their approach is a caricature of Trotsky's early method. They see the overall development of the "revolutionary process" and cheer from the sidelines whatever struggle is going on, dissolving themselves into the movement wherever possible.
At his worst, Trotsky was far superior to these characters: he was moving towards communist politics they are moving away.27
A HIGHER SYNTHESIS
The arguments between Lenin and Trotsky, and the development of their respective positions, were of profound importance in the construction of the party and programme that were to lead the Russian proletariat to power in 1917. Lenin was breaking with the radical stageist programme that informed Bolshevism before 1914. Trotsky was applying on the international terrain the programmatic method that he had developed out of the 1905 experience. The enormous strengths and continuing weaknesses of the traditions they represented are still in evidence in the period examined here. It was only in 1917 itself that Bolshevism was able to transcend the two traditions, creating a higher synthesis that broke Trotsky from "objectivism" and centrism, and won Lenin in practice to the programme of permanent revolution.
The Peace Programme is not a perfect, finished document. It is one frame from the film of Trotsky's political development at a key point in the struggle waged by Trotsky, Lenin and many other revolutionaries for a new communist programme and a new communist international. It is in that context that the article should be read and studied today.
The Peace Programme has had a chequered history, rarely being published in the same form over the past seventy years. Trotsky wrote the articles for Nashe Slovo in 1915-16, and then edited them into a pamphlet. In May 1917, Trotsky revised the articles, and wrote a new Introduction. This was published as a Bolshevik pamphlet in June of that year. In 1918 an English translation of the pamphlet was published in Petrograd.
The first English translation abroad was an abridged version edited by the veteran US socialist Louis C Fraina, which appeared in 1919 in the collection The Proletarian Revolution in Russia, by Lenin and Trotsky.
In 1942, the American SWP published a revised translation of Fraina's edition, taking the final Soviet edition of Trotsky's writings as their reference point. (It was for this edition of his collected works that the 1922 post-script was written).
In September 1944, the SWP published a new translation, taken direct from Trotsky's collected works, and including the sections which Fraina had omitted.
Having consulted the Russian version in the Collected Works, and the 1918 Petrograd translation, we decided that John G Wright's 1942 translation was in many respects better than that of 1944, especially in the early sections. We have therefore reproduced the 1942 translation directly from the SWP's Fourth International of May 1942 (hence the American spellings). To enable the reader to judge the differences between the 1942 and 1944 versions, we have included all the substantive differences between the two, in the form of footnotes, together with explanatory notes for today's reader. Abridged passages in the footnotes are denoted by square brackets.
We have been unable to check any of the post-1917 versions with the original articles from Nashe Slovo; it is not known how much Trotsky edited the articles prior to their publication as a pamphlet. The version we present here, however, is the best and most complete translation currently available.
Footnotes
1. Lenin Collected Works Vol. 21 p.18
2. ibid.
3. ibid. p. 163
4. ibid. p. 40
5. Trotsky War and the International Colombo 1971 p. vii. This 1915 pamphlet has only been reprinted once in English since 1918. The 1971 Sri Lankan edition can still be found in some bookshops.
6. ibid. p. 74
7. ibid.
8. ibid.
9. I. Deutscher The Prophet Armed Oxford 1970 p. 217
10. Lenin Collected Works Vol. 21 pp. 347"8
11. Trotsky op. cit. pp. 86-89
12. Labour Review (London) September 1980 p.246
13. Quoted in Lenin Collected Works Vol. 39 p. 383
14. Original emphasis. ibid. p.385
15. Lenin Collected Works Vol. 21 p. 33
16. ibid.
17. Trotsky What is a peace programme? Petrograd 1918
18. Lenin op. cit. p. 340
19. ibid. p. 34]
20. ibid. p. 342
21. Trotsky The First Five Years of the Communist International Vol. 2 p. 345 London 1953
22. Trotsky Writings Supplement 1929-33 New York 1979 p.130.
23. Trotsky Writings 1937-8 New York 1976 p.357
Trotsky never made clear his reason for this change of phrase, but it may reflect his coming to grips with the corruption of much of the experience and slogans of the Russian revolution under Stalin's rule. For millions of workers, the term "soviet" increasingly did not imply the mass activity of the working class organised into workers' councils, but the jackboots of Stalin's secret police crushing workers' democracy and instituting savage purges. As the chief revolutionary opponent to Stalin's regime of terror, Trotsky may have sought to reappropriate the legacy of the Russian revolution in its prime, whilst not identifying with its symbolic title of "soviet" when it had degenerated into political counter-revolution. This could therefore have led to him formulating the slogan as "the united socialist states".
24. Deutscher, op. cit. p. 236. See also, for example, Workers Action (London) No. 108 June 24th 1978 p.6
25. Trotsky The Transitional Programme for Socialist Revolution New York 1977 p. 13]
26 Trotsky War and the International p. vii
27. For a more detailed critique of the degeneration of the Fourth International, see our book, published jointly with the Irish Workers Group, The Death Agony of the Fourth International, London and Dublin 1983
Originally published by Workers Power (Britain) in WP 32 in May 1982.
Note from the Editor: Workers Power (Britain) and its international organization, the LRCI, were the predecessor organization of the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency.
IN TRADE UNION and Labour Party meetings many workers will voice support for Britain's war drive because it is being waged FOR "self determination" and AGAINST a "fascist junta'. We don't think that this is what this war is about. It is about Imperialism's ability to maintain its colonies and military bases to police and exploit the imperialised world. That's why we have no doubts as to which side we are on in this conflict. But socialists must be able to tackle these arguments -articulated most dishonestly and hypocritically by the Labour leaders - in their struggle to defeat Thatcher's war drive. The following article deals with some of the most common arguments that have been voiced within the labour movement.
YOU SOCIALISTS TALK a lot about "democratic rights" but what about the rights of the Falkland Islanders, don't we defend their right to live where they are and under what regime they choose?
The Falkland Islanders are not a distinct nation with their own culture, tradition and language. Their hold on the Falkland Islands depends on the power and commitment of British Imperialism to hold on to these South American islands. In fact they are all British settlers who were moved into the Malvinas after it was seized by the British from Argentina in 1833.
They have never expressed their desire to exercise any "rights of self determination" i.e. to become an independent state. Of course, in practice this would be impossible for 1800 people on an isolated island. Their practical dependence on Argentina has already been demonstrated. It was the soldiers of Argentina who built the only airstrip on the islands, which has now been blown up by the British. It was the Argentine air force which provided the only air service to the islands, it was Argentine hospitals which provided for the seriously ill, and Argentine colleges which provided the only route to higher education for the islanders.
What the islanders have declared in favour of it remaining part of the British Empire. Socialists can have no truck with this desire. To do so would allow every group of British settlers, or British citizens who benefit from imperialism, to continue to occupy someone else's territory. The Malvinas is a South American island, claimed by Argentina as early as 1820 after her struggle for independence from Spain and settled by her. The British settlers have two choices; either to live under Argentine rule, and, we would hope, join with their fellow Argentinean workers and small farmers in the fight to overthrow the dictatorship, or to leave the islands for somewhere of their own choosing. "
But doesn't support for Argentina mean supporting a fascist junta that is an even more ferocious enemy of the working class than Margaret Thatcher?
Not at all. We support the demands of the Argentinean people against British imperialism, not the Junta that is trying to solve its own crisis by fighting for those demands. The blood stained Junta hoped it would deflect attention away from the 13% unemployment and 130% inflation through a diversionary action that was certain to be popular with the masses. They hoped that exercising their rights over the Malvinas would head off mounting opposition from the working class.
However, the Junta has met with resistance. Their invasion of the Malvinas was popular, but it has not made the tyrannical Junta itself popular with the masses. Demonstrations in Buenos Aires have called the anti-imperialist credentials of the Junta into question. Peronist forces in the unions have openly taken to the streets with their own banners and slogans. The Left has been able to distribute 'leaflets and papers against the Junta and for Argentina's right to the Malvinas. Under pressure, the Junta, which is committed to the imperialists' stranglehold over the economy, was forced to block the repatriation of foreign profits and halt the removal of the foreign investments on April 21st.
The nationalist sentiments of the masses, which the Junta is trying to exploit, are rooted in the imperialised status of Argentina. The flag waving patriotism of the British, the extent that it is not a media creation, is rooted in Britain's imperialist past - and present. The task we set ourselves is to drive a wedge between the workers and the Junta, not to deny the rights of the Argentinean people, even if these happen to be advocated by the Junta at the moment.
The Argentinean workers can break with the Junta by developing and extending the struggle against imperialism, including the struggle for the Malvinas. Anyone who says the Argentinean masses only have the right to fight British imperialism once they have dumped the Junta is, whatever their claims, siding with the imperialists against the Argentine workers.
The workers of Argentina must take the opportunity the army gives them to take up arms and be trained in their use. They should take advantage of the present situation to strengthen and extend their own organisations. They should refuse to relinquish their arms when the Junta feels its adventure has gone too far. Against the 'anti-imperialist' Junta of Galtieri, which is selling off state industry to international capital, they must fight for all imperialist holdings to be nationalised under the control of the workers themselves.
Of course it is possible that the Junta might win a victory in the Malvinas over Thatcher and leave Esso and Royal Dutch Shell unscathed. Such a victory would not be a lasting one for the workers of Argentina. It would still leave them under the heel of imperialism. But a defeat for Thatcher would weaken one of their major props of the Junta and its like throughout Latin America. It would have served to arouse the workers themselves and weakened the base of the Galtieri regime.
But wouldn't a defeat for Argentina serve to weaken and undermine the blood stained regime far more immediately and dramatically?
By no means. Firstly, it would be a significant and potentially highly demoralising defeat for the oppressed Argentinean masses themselves. Secondly, there is no shortage of potential pro-imperialist right wing dictators to take Galtieri's place should the masses be demoralised and beaten back by Thatcher's imperialist war machine. Neither can we guarantee that the outcome would not be the chance for a Peron-type populist demagogue to come to power. Such a figure could use injured nationalism to further enslave the working class. A victory to Thatcher could even serve to tie the masses to the Galtieri regime. Whatever the outcome of such a defeat, the oppressed masses of Argentina have nothing to gain from a British victory.
In fact, the whole question of the credentials of the Argentinean regime is a complete red herring from the Labourites There was no dearth of opportunities for Labour's leaders to attack the regime before the Malvinas crisis. But the last Labour government was supplying 30% of the Junta's arms between 1974 and 1976. Diplomatic relations were broken because of friction over Britain's colony in the Malvinas - not because of Labour's anti-fascism.
Imperialism will always declare that its wars are directed against tyranny. Doesn't it claim that its nuclear arsenals are directed against the Russian dictatorship's threat to the 'freedom' and 'liberty' of the capitalist world Didn't it claim that the Allende regime in Chile was undemocratic and unrepresentative? Hasn't the Vietnamese regime portrayed as being despotic and totalitarian when it took on the armed might of the US forces occupying Vietnam?
Supporting Imperialism in the name of democracy pits Labour's anti-fascists behind the murderous Reagan and Thatcher war drive and against those struggling against oppression and exploitation at the hands of imperialism.
But wouldn't the best solution be to hand the question over to the UN? What way it would be out of the hands of both Thatcher and Galtieri?
No, it wouldn't be out of the hands of British Imperialism. The United Nations was formed after the Second World War to replace the previous "world organisation", the League of Nations which Lenin described quite rightly as a "thieves kitchen of the Imperialists". The great Imperialist powers, Britain, France and USA, together with the USSR and China, all have a complete veto over any actions which they think affect their direct interests. The Stalinists participate in the UN as part of their pursuance of a modus vivendi with imperialism, and are quite willing to sell out the interests of the oppressed nations if it suits their own purposes.
The history of the UN confirms that its major role has been settling disputes in the interests of imperialism. In 194718 it played a major role in setting up the imperialist settler state of Israel, with the USSR voting in favour. In 1950, it acted as the collective armed force of western imperialism in the Korean War, at one time advancing across North Korea almost to the Chinese border while its
General Assemblies called for the unification of a capitalist Korea. In 1960, it was used to intervene when Belgian imperialism was threatened in the Congo. It played a devious role in the secession of Katanga, a rich copper mining area of the Congo, only moving to end the rebellion when Patrice Lumumba the Prime Minister, who was seeking aid from the Soviet Union, was removed and murdered.
By the time UN forces left in 1964 the Congo Was once again safe for imperialism, having been redivided between the Belgians and the USA. To hand over the Malvinas question to the UN would be to just let the imperialists barter for which of them should have the biggest slice of the Cake. The future of the Malvinas question is one for the Argentinean people to decide, not the collective arm of imperialism.
Note from the Editor: Below we reprint two statements from our archive about the failed Stalinist coup in August 1991 in the decaying Soviet Union. They were published by the predecessor organization of the founder of the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT) - the League for a Revolutionary Communist International (LRCI). One statement (“The Failed Coup in the USSR”) was issued on 30 September 1991, the other (“Revolution and counter-revolution in the Soviet Union”) on 30 August that year.
A summary of the RCIT's theoretical understanding of Stalinism can be found in Michael Pröbsting's book "Cuba‘s Revolution Sold Out? The Road from Revolution to the Restoration of Capitalism" (see chapter II). It can be read online here. Michael Pröbsting is the International Secretary of the RCIT. He was a long-time leading member of the LRCI (1989-2011) until he and other comrades were expelled by the majority of this organization which had entered the road of centrist degeneration.
* * * * *
The Failed Coup in the USSR
30 September 1991
The failed coup d’état of 19-21 August has deepened the pre-revolutionary situation in the USSR. It opens up a new phase in the history of the disintegration of the rule of the Soviet bureaucracy. As in Eastern Europe in the last quarter of 1989 it poses the question of political revolution or social counter-revolution. It is this question that the Soviet proletariat will face and must find a solution to in the coming months and years. On 19 August the clique of “hardliners” within the Council of Ministers, discovering hitherto unsuspected medical capabilities, diagnosed Mikhail Gorbachev as too sick to continue to wield the State Presidency. In his place stepped Gennadi Yanayev and behind him the real junta: Pugo, Yazov, Kryuchov and the uncertain prime minister Pavlov, representatives of the layer of bureaucratic conservatives in the military, heavy industry, interior ministry, KGB and armed forces.
The conservative clique held back from acting until the very last possible minute, on the eve of the signing of the new Union Treaty. This in itself indicates the relative weakness and desperation of the coup makers Their chosen battleground—the maintenance of the integrative ministries and mechanisms of the all-Union federation—holds no appeal for the masses and is not a decisive issue for important layers of the bureaucracy in the republics. The coup makers acted because they had no other choice. They had to act even if their hand was not strong. Had they waited a day longer, Gorbachev’s concessions would have led to the radical dissolution of the powers and privileges of a major section of the Stalinist bureaucracy.
But behind this decision to oust Gorbachev lay months of a creeping coup, one which had been checked and frustrated by Gorbachev and by the Yeltsinite opposition both within the state apparatus and beyond. Late last year it was Gorbachev himself who, under pressure of the conservatives and the disintegrating economic and national situation, blocked with the conservatives and appointed his future jailors, Yanayev and Pavlov and boosted the powers of the rest. But this clique became disillusioned with Gorbachev’s failure to use his new presidential powers to arrest the economic and political decline.
This was sharply revealed in Gorbachev’s ineffectiveness in the face of the miners’ strike. From mid-April Gorbachev moved back towards making major concessions to the pro-market liberals and republic leaders. In June the clique unsuccessfully tried a constitutional coup by strengthening the powers of the Council of Ministers. Another insufferable attack on the bureaucracy was delivered by Yeltsin when he banned the CPSU from organising in the factories in the Russian Republic. When in July Gorbachev returned empty handed from the G7 summit and offered to give the republics most of the powers currently invested in the centre, the erstwhile allies and appointees of Gorbachev saw the writing on the wall and tried to extend the President’s holiday in the Crimea into a permanent retirement.
The State Committee’s state of emergency decree was a reactionary attempt to clamp down upon the forces unleashed by glasnost in order to preserve the caste’s privileges. The main orders banned political parties and strikes, proscribed opposition publications, closed down TV and radio stations; troops went onto the streets to enforce these provisions. None of decrees were undertaken to defend the post-capitalist planned property relations even if it could have led in the short term to a strengthening of the apparatus of bureaucratic control over distribution of food and essential supplies.
The members of the State Committee wanted to preserve their caste privileges and dictatorship. This might mean slowing down or even temporarily halting the process of restoration. For example, Geraschenko, the head of the state central bank, had opposed the Union Treaty on the grounds that it would make it “impossible to pursue a single monetary and credit policy”; another coup maker, Starodbtsev, in charge of state farms, feared the break up of the collectives into private holdings. But none of them dared to claim at the outset of the coup that they were defending in principle the post-capitalist property relations. Indeed, they have no strategic or principled opposition to the restoration of capitalism. Rather, they insist that they maintain their privileges in the process. In short, they wanted an authoritarian perestroika that would allow them to become a new ruling class in a capitalist Soviet Union.
Our tasks
It would have been wrong to have given even critical support to their actions. Our task is to get the working class to defend their post-capitalist property relations in the context of defending their democratic gains. The destruction of the democratic gains would have made it impossible to raise the consciousness of the masses to a level adequate to this task. Moreover, nothing the State Committee would have done would have halted the tempo or direction of capitalist restoration in Eastern Europe; on the contrary, the clique’s actions ensured that imperialism took steps to accelerate the process of integration and provide a further ideological weapon for the restorationists against the working class of Eastern Europe. Troop withdrawals from Eastern Europe were to continue. Finally, the coup makers rushed to assure the imperialists that all the pro-imperialist agreements undertaken by Gorbachev would be honoured.
The State Committee were emboldened to move by the widespread resentment towards Gorbachev inside the USSR, and sense that the masses are too disillusioned with his domestic failures to leap to his defense. The masses did not take up shouting Gorbachev’s name on the streets of Leningrad and Moscow. The cynical decree on price freezes and wage rises was calculated to drive a wedge into the opposition between those who are sceptical about the value of the democratic rights so far obtained and those who feel they are not worth defending if food can be put on the table by the new clique.
The opposition to the state of emergency was uneven and far from generalised. Miners went on strike in protest, as did some workers in Leningrad; makeshift barricades were erected in Moscow. From the outset the coup was hesitantly and unconfidently undertaken; communications lines within the USSR and to the outside world were left intact; few arrests of key oppositional figures were made. Given the fissures that already existed within the armed forces this relatively low level of resistance was sufficient to see the coup attempt fall apart. Quite simply, neither the army nor the interior ministry troops could be relied upon to carry out a Tiananmen Square style massacre in Red Square. That this was so was due in large measure to the incremental effects of six years of glasnost inspired changes in the Soviet high command and officer caste. It was also due no doubt to the lessons absorbed by the army as a result of its retreat from Eastern Europe in the face of popular discontent and the unwillingness to do differently in the USSR. It also failed because the coup makers had no genuine alternative political or economic policy to Gorbachev beyond the defence of their own narrow caste interests. The events of the last week have proven that the Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR was not qualitively different from the bureaucracies in the East European states in terms of its willingness or ability to defend the property relations upon which it draws its privileges and power.
The manner in which the coup attempt took place illustrated the profound disarray of the CPSU. The coup makers could not get a quorum for a Central Committee meeting to depose Gorbachev as General Secretary. Gorbachev was replaced as Soviet President, not as General Secretary. Party declarations on the coup were completely absent. Just as with the Jaruselski coup in Poland in 1981 the unreliable and fragmented Stalinist party had to be bypassed by the coup makers. Power within the nomenklatura resides clearly within the military industrial ministries, not with the party organs. Now the coup has failed, the CPSU is revealed as no longer the principal ruling power in the USSR. If it survives it will undergo further drastic changes. Its coming Congress was already due to adopt a social democratic programme in the style of the German PDS. As a power base for Gorbachev with such a transformed programme it may survive.
In the three days of the coup attempt it was essential for all proletarian forces to have blocked with all those forces actively resisting the coup to prevent the coup makers from achieving success in their aims. It was natural and necessary to bloc with all and anyone who by deeds was prepared to resist the closure of parties (except fascist ones), publications and democratically elected forums (e.g. republican parliaments) that the workers have expressed themselves through. As the days wore on the Russian parliament was increasingly the focus of the resistance to the coup; the mass demonstrations and the barricades was rapidly turning the parliament into the site of one side of an embryonic dual power. The strikes did not have time to spawn a network of alternative proletarian forms of organisation against the coup, and therefore also potentially against the democratic restorationists also. The ability of the pro-capitalist and nationalist Yeltsin to lead the limited resistance to the coup reveals the depth of the crisis of working class leadership. Such anti-working class forces gain a hearing in the working class due to the absence of a class conscious revolutionary leadership which would combine a struggle to destroy the bureaucracy with a defence of post-capitalist property relations. Imperialist agents have worked with the indigenous restorationists to consciously win the independent unions to their side.
But in these coup days there were strict limits to the bloc with the “democratic restorationists” and all such blocs had to be carried out within the context of no political support for Yeltsin at all. While other republic leaders appealed to imperialism for help or preached calm and sought to negotiate, Yeltsin thrust himself forward as the leader of mass resistance. He called for a general strike and openly incited the army to disaffection. It is clear why he, of all the republics’ leaders, had the most to gain from the Union Treaty and most to lose at the hands of the State Committee. Yeltsin’s calls—for active resistance to the coup, for a general strike against it—needed to be supported and taken up by workers’ organisations, which at the same time needed to retain their political independence from the Yeltsin restorationists.
Yeltsin—the greatest danger
The greatest danger to the working class now that the coup has collapsed is Yeltsin. The greatest tragedy for the Soviet working class would be to hitch itself to the wagon of Yeltsin or the Democratic Forum. A secondary danger is to actively seek the re-establishment of the power of Gorbachev. Yeltsin is no friend of the working class. He represents all the elements in the former bureaucratic caste who have abandoned the prospect of bureaucratic parasitism on proletarian property relations in favour of becoming the new ruling class of a restored capitalist Russia.
His pro-capitalist policies spell mass unemployment and a destruction of social welfare for tens of millions of workers; he wants to open up the 120 million Soviet workers to unbridled imperialist exploitation. His actions in promoting and then ending the miners’ strike of the spring show that his calls to mass action are motivated by his own narrow power struggles against a rival section of the disintegrating bureaucratic caste. In the aftermath of the failed coup Yeltsin is increasing his attempt to place the armed forces under his command. To the degree that he is successful he will deploy them in the future against the workers he has so cynically called to action.
Imperialism naturally frowned upon the coup. It feared where it may lead, how far the clampdown will lead to a retreat from the process of market reform and opening up of the USSR to imperialist penetration. But Gorbachev had already carried out most of his possible mandate; he had very nearly, if not entirely, exhausted his historic mission for them. He was a necessary detonator of the now irreversible process of reform in Eastern Europe; he was essential to the delivery of disarmament and the suicide of the Warsaw Pact. Gorbachev’s stability was very important in securing the alliances for the US victory in the Gulf War and the opening phase of the new world order. But these are past conquests for the imperialists.
That is why imperialism, especially the USA, at first reacted cautiously on news of the coup. Their first response was to insist that the coup makers reassure the west they would honour their commitments and treaties. The sanctions that were announced were diplomatic courtesies to Gorbachev and a gesture of solidarity with Yeltsin, but they were not intended to inspire the isolation of the USSR’s new rulers, still less re-run the Cold War. Some imperialists even voiced the opinion that a new leadership would stem the inevitable tide of economic refugees to the west as capitalism is restored in the USSR.
Only, later, when it became clear that the coup was failing, did they talk of the re-establishment of the status quo and even more importantly the role that Yeltsin played in rescuing Gorbachev. Indeed, new conquests for the imperialists lie in the direction of Yeltsin and the Democratic Forum. Despite their self-congratulation the imperialists are unable to guarantee a smooth and peaceful process of capitalist restoration over the next months and years. Under the leadership of Yeltsin and/or Gorbachev the transition ahead will be fraught with conflicts. The pre-revolutionary situation is far from over in the USSR.
In the immediate aftermath of the failed coup it is possible to discern only the main line of development. The events of the past week, whilst they have blocked the road to a Stalinist bureaucratic counter-revolution aimed against the political liberties of the working class, have acted as a catalyst to speed up the social counter-revolution; the cause of the democratic restorationists has been immeasurably advanced. The tempo of the demise of the nomenklatura has likewise been accelerated.
But it is also true that the bourgeois democratic and proletarian reform organisations will also be strengthened in the short term at least. Glasnost will be deepened and the working class may be awakened from its cynicism. Elections will be brought forward and become more universal as all forces seek a democratic mandate for their plans and in this way seek to dislodge the nomenklatura from their posts. The CPSU will fragment and a flowering and strengthening of bourgeois political forces will occur.
The future of Gorbachev is unclear. Certainly, the ground has been removed for a continuation of the previous form of Soviet Bonapartism that relied upon balancing between the camps of democratic restoration and conservative resistance. But a different kind of Gorbachev Bonapartism may emerge in the next period, one that balances between the ambitions of Yeltsin and imperialism, wherever they do not coincide. On the one side, Yeltsin seeks a further revision of the Union Treaty in the direction of more republican power and a confederation which leaves Russia with its own armed forces. But imperialism does not favour the break up of the USSR, beyond the inevitable departure of the Baltic states. They may well need Gorbachev to act as a check and balance against Yeltsin.
What is clear for revolutionaries and all those concerned with the strengthening of the newly founded organisations of the Soviet working class and of the preservation of the planned property relations is that the proletarian resistance to the coup must be deepened and broadened now into a fight against the pro-capitalist measures of Yeltsin and Gorbachev and resistance to all and any attempts to use the armed forces against working class resistance to capitalist restoration. Soviet workers must fight for:
• Out with the coup makers and their supporters at every level. For workers’ tribunals in every republic to try those involved. For workers’ commissions of inspection of the KGB and the army High Command
• Lift the ban on parties (except fascist ones), strikes, publications and the independent media; No coups, no constitutional dictators
• Self-determination for the republics; special armed forces and interior ministry troops out of the republics seeking independence. Recognise Estonian’s declaration of independence. For soviet workers’ republics in the Baltic states.
• No confidence in the help from imperialism; purge the media of bureaucrats and imperialist agents
• Release all political prisoners arrested under the state of emergency
• No political support for Gorbachev, Yeltsin or the Democratic Forum
• Down with constitutional dictators. End the Bonapartist powers of the presidencies of all republics and the Federation
• For workers’ councils elected in every workplace and region of the USSR
• Elect rank and file soldiers’ committees in the army. Disband immediately all special armed forces and the KGB. Open all the files of the KGB to workers’ inspection.
• Against emergency plans for the establishment of the market. For a workers’ emergency plan to combat the economic crisis drawn up by the workers’ organisations. For working class control of the plan; for elected workers’ and housewives’ committees to oversee food distribution
• For proletarian political revolution to smash the dictatorship of the Stalinists and prevent the restoration of capitalism
• For a Leninist Trotskyist party in the USSR
* * * * *
Revolution and counter-revolution in the Soviet Union
Adopted by the International Secretariat of the LRCI, 30 August 1991
The failure of the State Committee for the State of Emergency (SCSE) to carry out its coup of 19-20 August marks a turning point similar in magnitude to the 1989-90 events in Eastern Europe. Launched by the conservative core of the nomenklatura to halt the “malicious mockery of all the institutions of the state” the SCSE’s ignominious collapse has only served to propel their arch enemies into a dominant situation within the fragments of the state power in the USSR.
The coup itself turned an eighteen month pre-revolutionary crisis into a revolutionary situation in which the ruling Stalinists lost control over their armed forces and could no longer deploy them to defend their power. The working class failed to seize the initiative and overthrow the dictatorship with its own organisation and armed power and rescue the post-capitalist property relations from their deathly grip. Within the present dual power the working class can still open up the road to the political revolution on condition that it finds a political leadership willing and able to do this.
In the early weeks after the failed coup the working class of the USSR faces a dual task. On the one hand, it must complete the destruction of the dictatorship of the Stalinist caste by its own hand; on the other, it must turn its fire on the Yeltsinite regime that will conserve as much of the old dictatorship and political apparatus as will be needed to suppress the workers in the months and years ahead as they push towards capitalism.
Ever since the 1990 elections to municipal and city soviets and the presidential elections in the republics there has been a situation of growing dual power: on the one side, the conservative faction of the old nomenklatura, and on the other, a coalition of the forces of bourgeois restoration, republican independence and the workers and petit-bourgeoisie. The former hoped by their actions on 19 August to defend their privileges on the basis of post capitalist property relations and sought political legitimacy in the Supreme Soviet. Yet their real power base lay in the central economic control agencies (banking, planning industrial ministries etc), the central agencies of repression (KGB, MVD and the SAF) and the central administrative and social co-ordination apparatus (the all-Union federal administration, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), the remains of the old trade unions). Those for whom the SCSE spoke were all pragmatically opposed to Gorbachev’s “market socialist” reforms whenever they threatened them. On the other hand, they had no alternative programme of reform to his. Thus their only real proposals were to dilute and slow down Gorbachev’s various plans, so as to preserve their own institutions and to carry out what reforms this left in an authoritarian or dictatorial fashion.
By contrast, the coalition of the forces opposed to this conservative faction were heterogeneous: proto-exploiters keen to enlarge the scope of their wealth, workers determined to defend the democratic freedoms gained during the preceding years. This coalition, gathered around the Moscow parliament, hoisted Yeltsin to power. Its origins lie in two different camps. First, in the democratic and nationalist oppositions, rooted in the intelligentsia that pre-existed Gorbachev in the underground “dissident” movement. Secondly, a whole segment of the Gorbachevite faction of the bureaucracy itself.
The former layer of oppositionists, in the period between the Prague Spring and Jaruselski coup in Poland, lost almost all belief in reforming “really existing socialism” and were oriented to western democracy and a market economy as ideals. The latter—the ex-Gorbachevites—became disillusioned with Gorbachev‘s utopian project of “market socialism”, outraged by their leader’s vacillations and compromises with the conservatives and attracted into the service of imperialism as the restorers of capitalism in the USSR. What does the Yeltsin-headed coalition of forces politically represent? Yeltsin, Shevardnadze, and indeed the whole military and political entourage of the Russian President, represent a faction of the bureaucracy that has abandoned the defence of its caste privileges and their source—a degenerate workers’ state—in favour of becoming key members of a new bourgeois ruling class.
When the SCSE made its faltering grab for power they were not opposed by the elemental and inchoate forces of the masses, undifferentiated by class, formless in their opposition. On the contrary, they were confronted with real apparatuses and administrations, bolstered by “democratic mandates” and even possessing rudimentary armed forces. Moreover, utilising glasnost to the full they had eroded the homogeneity of the all-Union administrative and military apparatus and effected cold splits at a number of levels.
The result is now clear to see. What in Eastern and Central Europe took weeks of mass protest and months of wrestling with the nomenklatura to achieve, has been realised in days in the aftermath of the failed coup. The tempo of purgation of the nomenklatura is extremely rapid. Some 80% of the army high command at the level of general or above is or will be displaced. The KGB has effectively been purged of its leadership and ruling collegium, robbed of its 230,000 armed forces and subordinated to the regular army. The Soviet Union cabinet of ministers has been sacked and replacements largely chosen by the Yeltsinite camp. The conservatives headed by Kryuchkov, Pugo and Yazov have been displaced from all leading positions and their followers marginalised as a faction within the shattered and reeling bureaucracy.
The “conservative faction” is under fierce attack from the Yeltsinites and even from Gorbachev. But it still has redoubts and pockets of resistance. It still has large numbers of deputies in the Supreme and republican soviets. In Azerbaijan and some Central Asian republics it still holds power. There the duality of power has a territorial aspect. Unless they are removed in the next months they could launch a limited counter-attack as the restorationists themselves hit a crisis provoked by resistance to their programme.
An unstable partnership
In terms of the balance of forces within the USSR at present the situation is analogous to the first Solidarnosc government headed by Masowiecki but co-habiting with President Jaruselski. In short, there is now a restorationist government in of?ce, in a very strong position because of the coup but still without undivided power over the state apparatus. The regime is headed by an unstable partnership of Yeltsin and Gorbachev. The latter has now only a shadow of his former power. He has ?nally abandoned his attempts to cling to the remnants of “market socialism”. He is a ?rm supporter of a restorationist programme. But his bottom line is a defence of the centralised federal state. This obliges him to rely on the rump of the bureaucracy of the central state apparatus against the confederalists of the republics and the, as yet, undecided Yeltsin. Its inertia gives him what shrinking room he has for Bonapartist independence and manoeuvre.
The measures to deprive the Stalinists of all the levers of economic and political power are an essential stage, a prerequisite to turn to the next stage—the task of rapidly dismantling the instruments of central planning. We can expect the planning ministries, the central bank, the state farm sector to all be purged in the coming months. This process will decide whether Gorbachev retains any use for the restorationists.
The CPSU was the chief mechanism for preserving the Stalinist political dictatorship. Through its 5,000 regional of?ces, its factory cells, its political officers in the KGB and army and through its regulatory intervention into the economy the CPSU was the focal point of bureaucratic rule. But faced with the state of emergency the CPSU crumbled. The reasons lie in the previous two years of internal disintegration of the homogeneity of the party. At a CPSU conference in July 1989 Gorbachev signalled that dissent and proto-factions would not be outlawed. The foundation of the Democratic Platform in January 1990 openly contravened the ban on factions and attracted 100,000 party members; the main planks of programme were to destroy the bureaucratic centralism of the CPSU and replace them with horizontal links and to displace Marxism-Leninism as the ideology of the party. The emergence of the Democratic Platform served to encourage a multiplicity of tendencies within the CPSU.
Paralysis within the CPSU
The July 1990 28th Congress of the CPSU witnessed bitter debate between the factions, the resignation of Yeltsin and the open rebellion of many in the CPSU. The party was being paralysed and subject to defection of entire republican parties, as when the Baltic CPs split. During the course the 1991 the paralysis increased as the CPSU retreated more and more from the running of the economy and splits and defections mounted right up to the eve of the coup, as with Shevardnadze and Yakovlev. On the eve of the coup the CPSU was an increasingly demoralised entity.
If the military and secret police bases of the conservative faction of the bureaucracy crumbled without a serious fight the role, or rather the lack of a role, of the CPSU was truly miserable. The conspirators could make no use of it. Its Central Committee meekly succumbed after the event, but even parts of its press were banned by the decree of the State of Emergency. It tried to gather itself together on Gorbachev’s return to Moscow. For this reason the party has become, with the KGB, the principal target of the Yeltsinite offensive.
Gorbachev tried for two days to shield it. He tried to stick to his perspective of a congress at the end of the year to reform the party, giving it a social democratic programme and purging it of hard liners. But all this was too little and too late. In Moscow and other cities its buildings were seized and sealed, its newspapers suspended and the activities of its cells in the army, and even the KGB banned. Gorbachev was humiliatingly obliged to resign from the party altogether and call for it to dissolve itself. Finally the Supreme Soviet, with a huge “conservative” majority has been obliged to suspend all the operations of the party. The party was the glue that bound the different elements of the bureaucracy together. With its dissolution the bureaucracy will have to face its ?nal end with no coherent centralised leadership.
Revolutionaries share the workers’ hatred for all the real and symbolic representatives of their oppression. We support the closing down of the palatial CPSU offices, private shops and sanatoria, the rooting out of the KGB officers. But we put no trust in Yeltsin or the leadership of the main soviets in the chief towns and cities to carry out the destruction of the Stalinist dictatorship. We seek at every point to involve the masses independently in the process of the destruction of the CPSU dictatorship. We do so because the masses alone have every interest in the most thoroughgoing eradication of their privileges and power. It is the forces of restoration, the forces of “law and order” and “stability” who will seek to keep the destruction of the apparatus of repression within limits.
Yeltsin and Bakhtin will seek to keep the loyal elements of the KGB and seek to turn it into the secret service that can police the working class in the coming years; it will not seek to open up the secrets of the Lubyanka jail to workers’ inspection, and thereby show how far into the Yeltsin camp go the crimes of the Stalinist dictators before they converted to the dogma of the market. The workers must control the process of destruction of the Stalinists through to the end and not let Yeltsin preserve what is useful to him. In parts of the state apparatus (and even in whole republics) the tasks of the political revolution against the bureaucracy still exist and the working class must come to the head of this struggle with its own class organisations.
But the working class gives no support to the bureaucratic banning of the CPSU. All that we ask is that the privileges of the CPSU are brought to an end, that all their members in the factories lose their offices and are put back on the shop or office floor. Their press, their money, their offices must be put at the disposal of the working class organisations that have been bled dry over the years, so that a democratic and lively political culture springs up to replace the monolithism of Stalinism. The forces of restoration must not be allowed to expropriate the property and wealth of the CPSU for its own bourgeois design while bureaucratically banning all activities of the party.
Yeltsin rose to power by spearheading the drive of all the republics to free themselves of the control of the central bureaucratic stranglehold of the Kremlin, the Lubyanka and Gosplan. When these powers are safely shattered then it is likely that Yeltsin and Co will turn back towards a federal project, incorporating those other republics which are valuable and manageable. Given the exceptionally high level of economic interdependence and division between all the republics of the USSR then the erection of national barriers will send the already slumping economy into a complete tail-spin. This would minimise the possibility of stability in the process of capitalist restoration. Already there are clear signs of this change of line in Yeltsin’s threat to raise border questions with seceding republics.
Can and will Gorbachev continue to play a role in the process of restoration? Imperialism at least for the moment thinks it is cost effective to keep him there in a team with Yeltsin. He is a guarantee against “conservative” revival and his support will speed the self-dissolution of the party and the purge of the KGB and the army. In military strategic terms he can help safeguard the nuclear arsenal from falling into the wrong hands. In the international arena he can supervise the surrenders to imperialism in the Middle East, South Africa, in Indo-China and in the Caribbean. The foreign ministry and the task of relations with imperialism remain within Gorbachev’s grasp for the moment.
Internally the role he has set himself is to preserve a federal union with a central government which has some measure of authority in matters of defence, monetary, fiscal and banking policy and which can relate as a unitary power on the world stage. Some, if not all, these objectives are pleasing to imperialism which does not want to see a Yugoslav catastrophe on a grand scale, with borders being forcibly redrawn. In addition there are some signs that after the first flush of Yeltsinmania Washington, London and Bonn would prefer a Yeltsin under some restraint. Yeltsin himself may have continued use for his old rival or at least for his policies. Gorbachev, deprived of his social base within the CPSU, and restored to only a shadow of his former Bonapartist power, represents for the rump of the bureaucracy their best hope to preserve what ever they can of their privileges and power but now brutally made aware that the best it can hope for is to share power, even as a junior partner with the Yeltsin led forces.
Major questions are posed by these events. Was the perspective of political revolution an unreal, a utopian perspective? Was the resistance to the conservative coup in itself counter-revolutionary? Would a successful bureaucratic clamp-down have given the working class a breathing space? The answer to all of these questions is no!
In what sense could be it be said that SCSE “defended the planned property relations”? Only in this: that it resisted their abolition to the extent that they were the “host” off which it was parasitic. However, this massive social parasite was the principal cause of the sickness unto death of the bureaucratic centrally planned economy, of the consequent disillusion of the masses in it.
Through its totalitarian dictatorship the Stalinists were also an absolute bloc on the self-activity and self-consciousness of the proletariat and its ability to crystalise a new vanguard, which alone could have not merely preserved but renewed the “gains of October”. The full scale of this parasitism is only now likely to be revealed, but reports that after the coup the party’s business manager was trying to send £500 billion worth of assets out of the USSR indicates that we are not dealing with minor perks, but with a vast collective and individual plunder of the social product of the workers’ state. No wonder these people never could and never did put themselves at the head of the working class resistance to restoration.
The impending catastrophe and how to combat it
A prolonged pre-revolutionary situation has gripped the USSR at least since 1988. Despite the accumulated discredit that Stalinism’s brutal repression of the proletariat, and its parasitism and mismanagement of the planned economy, brought to the very idea of a workers’ state it would have been possible to struggle within the new strike committees and the trade unions for class independence and for a workers’ government with a programme of a democratically drawn up emergency plan as a solution to the economic crisis.
As long as the bureaucracy survives with any remaining hold on power and as long as there exist the decisive elements of the “gains of October” our programme must remain that of political revolution. We cannot abandon it because of the low level of class consciousness of the masses. The loss of the gains of October would be a historic defeat for the world working class. It would strengthen imperialism against all its enemies politically, economically and militarily. The Soviet bureaucracy for its own counter-revolutionary reasons gave material aid to the other workers’ states, to semi-colonial countries and to Stalinist or petit bourgeois nationalist movements against imperialism. These workers’ states and semi-colonies will now be prostrate before imperialism. Already reactionary pro-imperialist regional peace treaties are in discussion in South Africa, the Middle East and South East Asia. If the Soviet Union collapses then the crises of the Cuban, Vietnamese, Cambodian and North Korean regimes will be brought forward.
Though it may take longer the fate of the Chinese workers’ state is also called into question. The collapse of the Stalinist parties world-wide is politically no loss but in the context of a rightward moving social democracy and the acute crisis of revolutionary leadership, it will further undermine the elementary class identi?cation of the worlds’ labour movements. In the short term the bourgeoisie and its agents will use the collapse to proclaim the utopianism of the socialist project and Marxism itself. Thus the struggle for political revolution was not an optional extra, to be posed only if the masses were already sympathetic to it. It was an objective necessity to avoid a strategic defeat for the Soviet and the world working class.
The seeming disinterest of the Soviet masses in the social gains they have inherited from 1917 is primarily and principally the result of the Stalinist dictatorship. No continuation of it could conceivably aid revolutionaries in their central task of clearing the consciousness of the proletarian vanguard through democratic debate and active involvement in struggle so that they discover who their real allies and their real enemies are. No bloc with the Stalinist clamp-down could have done any thing but put a river of blood between revolutionaries and the working masses and oppressed nationalities. Thus we had to stand with and indeed take the front ranks in the fight to stop the coup. But at the same time revolutionaries have to oppose Yeltsin’s seizure and consolidation of power.
The fact that the first fruits of this present crisis is the installation of a counter-revolutionary government with mass support and considerable democratic illusions means that bringing the masses to oppose Yeltsin will not be swift or easy. Yeltsin is intent on resolving the instability of the post-coup revolutionary situation into a de?nitive victory for counter-revolution. He wishes to resolve the remaining duality of power with the remaining bureaucracy and create a regime with “democratic credentials”, possibly by plebiscitary, means, possibly by means of parliamentary elections. Such a regime would have a mandate to use the harshest police and military means to enforce its draconian economic measures to clear out all the bodies still stuffed with CPSU members.
The Soviet workers must seek to open a real duality of power between its own class organisations and both Yeltsin and Gorbachev, or for that matter the likes of Landsbergis and Gamsakhurdia. None of these people seek to bring democracy to the workers, collective farmers or the urban intelligentsia. Once installed in power and seeking to crystalise a new class of exploiters even full and consistent bourgeois democratic rights for the masses will become intolerable. Yeltsin’s eagerness to ban parties and newspapers, Gamsakhurdia’s repression of all nationalist opposition to himself indicates just what these democrats are made of.
The working class must launch an immediate struggle to defend its own democratic rights. But these democratic rights must not stop short—as they do in all capitalist countries—at the gate of the factory, the office, the school or the hospital. These institutions were not built by capital but by the intelligence and the sweat of three generations of Soviet workers. They must not be handed over to assorted foreign banks and multinationals, Soviet “mafiosi” and speculators let alone by Yeltsinite ex-bureaucrats.
The struggle for workers’ democracy must mean the organisations of the proletariat fighting for its independent class economic interests in the face of the economic crisis and against Yeltsin’s project of the rapid restoration of capitalism. Secondly, it must, in the course of such struggles, reforge its own organisations, politically and organisationally independent of the state structures of the USSR, the republican governments and the corrupting clutches of the AFL-CIO the TUC or the DGB, and countless assorted imperialist labour agencies.
The tasks of the Soviet workers are:
• to complete for themselves the most and radical and thorough smashing of bureaucratic power while resisting the consolidation of power by the restorationists.
• For workers’ action to drive out the party and KGB spies in the workplace, to abolish all party privileges, putting party property under the control of the factory committees.
• For workers’ inspection of all CPSU property and files and the nationalisation of all assets accumulated by it at the expense of the workers’ state. The handing over of all private sanatoria, party dachas,. to independent workers’ organisations and factory committees.
• Public trials by workers’ juries alone of the plotters and organisers of the attempted clamp-down. At the same time we must oppose any witch-hunt of the CPSU rank and file members by the new authorities. No mass sackings of party members against whom no charges of anti-working class actions can be proved. Abolish the death penalty. No bans on political parties including the CPSU except for fascist parties like Pamyat
• An immediate end to Gorbachev’s restrictions on strikes. Demand that Yeltsin and the so-called democrats who dominate the republican and city soviets repeal all restrictions on the right to strike to demonstrate to assemble.
• For workers’ control of the mass media and against all state censorship whether by the Stalinist bureaucrats or the Yeltsinites.
• The workers of the USSR need no new Tsars, Stalin’s or capitalist dictators either. Down with Bonapartism in all its forms! Build and arm independent workers’ organisations, fight for workers’/soldiers’ control of the factories/army. Abolish all the special powers of the Soviet and republican presidencies. Abolish all special armed forces in every republic.
• End Gorbachev and Yeltsin’s capitulations and concessions to world imperialism. Continue and increase aid without strings to all states and movements in conflict with imperialism and its agents. Military and economic support for Cuba and Vietnam and the other bureaucratically degenerate workers’ states. Support for any struggles by their workers to oust their bureaucrats including aid for a political revolution in China.
• Defend the remains of the gains of the October Revolution; defend state ownership of all large scale enterprises by putting them under workers’ management; smaller economic units and those in the production and distribution of consumer goods that wish to should be transformed into worker co-operatives. All collective farms should be transformed into genuine democratic co-operatives. Drive the parasitic party bureaucrats out of the collective farm system. Transform the fake co-operatives formed in the Gorbachev period into genuine democratic bodies of producers and consumers. Expropriate the racketeers. Resist privatisation.
• Defend free and universal provision of housing, education, crèches and care for the elderly and disabled under the control of the users and local workers’ representatives; massively improve the quality of these services out of the expropriated wealth of the party and bureaucratic apparatus.
• Defend free abortion on demand; massively expand the availability of contraception; defend women’s jobs; no forced return to the home as a result of the market.
• An emergency plan to stop the impending economic catastrophe. Immediate election of committees in every factory, office, shop, and collective farm and on the railways and in the haulage enterprises to draw up inventories of produce in all state, private and party storage. For town, city and regional councils of delegates from these committees to issue binding orders. The drawing up of an emergency plan for the winter at every level and its co-ordination by a union wide council of workers’ and collective farmers’ delegates. Only the workers and farmers can ensure that a speedy and equal distribution of food, fuel and clothing takes place.
• For an armed workers and collective farmers’ militia to enforce the emergency plan against the bureaucrats, the mafia, and all horders and speculators. Only such a militia can defend national minorities against pogromists, fascists and those who wish to make facts by changing borders against the will of their populations.
• For the immediate right to secession of all republics wishing to do so. Force the central government to recognise all “seceded” states and withdraw all SAF troops at once. Disband the special forces throughout the Union. For the right of self-determination of all oppressed nationalities within each of the republics, including autonomy or separation. For independent workers’ council states in all the seceding republics.
• At the same time workers and their organisations throughout the USSR should render fraternal aid to workers in any state resisting privatisations and the attacks of the nationalist and restorationist governments. For workers’ council states in every republic. For a voluntary federation of such states.
• Down with the undemocratic command planning of the bureaucrats in Gosplan, in the ministries, in the foreign trade bodies and in the state bank, including a thoroughgoing purge of the corrupt authoritarian and inefficient bureaucrats.
• No to the dissolution of the central planning bodies in favour of the economic institutions of the market and the capitalist state. Close the stock exchanges. For workers’ inspection and control, and the transformation and restructuring of Gosplan into organs of democratic workers’ planning.
• The creation in every town and city of councils of delegates elected in the workplaces and instantly recallable to co-ordinate both emergency economic planning and to organise the struggle against the attacks on all economic and social gains of the workers and collective farmers.
• As long as these gains survive the strategic task facing the working class remains the proletarian political revolution. For the creation of a democratic workers’ state as an instrument of socialist construction and the international revolution against capitalism and imperialism. With the restorationists now in power in many republics and in the central institutions a fierce revolutionary struggle will be needed to carry this out. Essential as workers’ councils and truly independent and democratic trade unions are to this struggle they cannot win without a centralised organisation of the best worker cadres from every struggle, of the most self-sacri?cing intellectuals who reject capitalist exploitation and world imperialism. This can be nothing else than a revolutionary workers’ party, an anti-bureaucratic and anti-capitalist combat force based on the principles of Lenin and Trotsky.
Note from the Editor: Below we reprint a book published by the predecessor organization of the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT) - the League for a Revolutionary Communist International (LRCI). It
was originally published in 1982 and reprinted in 2003 with a new Appendix which included some necessary
theoretical corrections.
A summary of the RCIT's theoretical understanding of Stalinism can be found in Michael Pröbsting's book "Cuba‘s Revolution Sold Out? The Road from Revolution to the Restoration of Capitalism" (see chapter II). It can be read online here.
Michael Pröbsting is the International Secretary of the
RCIT.
Contents
Introduction
The transition from capitalism to communism
From soviet power to soviet Bonapartism – the degeneration of the Russian Revolution
The survival and expansion of Stalinism after the Second World War
Bureaucratic social revolutions and the Marxist theory of the state
Tito and Mao: disobedient Stalinists
Vietnam's long revolution – a history of war, compromise and betrayal
Castro’s “Cuban road” - from populism to Stalinism
The permanent revolution aborted
Stalinism and the world working class
The programme of political revolution
The defence of the USSR and of the degenerate workers’ states
Centrism and Stalinism – the falsification of Trotsky’s analysis
Appendix: Marxism. Stalinism and the theory of the state
Introduction (2003)
Fifty years ago Stalinism was in crisis following the death of its world leader. Yet, the system he brutally forged lived on in the USSR and East Europe until 1989-91. Then, a combination of deep systemic crisis and democratic mass protests shattered the degenerate workers’ states one after another and, finally, the USSR itself.
The Degenerated Revolution was published 22 years ago, shortly after the brutal attempt by Polish Stalinists to maintain themselves by crushing Solidarnosc, and shortly before Mikhail Gorbachev tried to revive bureaucratic rule in the Soviet Union by introducing glasnost.
This book was written in the conviction that Stalinism’s days as a ruling force were numbered. This was rooted in Trotsky’s revolutionary analysis of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution and the Left Opposition’s alternative programme which are presented in the opening chapters.
But its novel contribution lay in its explanation of the creation of Stalinist states, in Eastern Europe and China, later in Cuba and South-east Asia. The contradiction that capitalism had been overt h rown but by co u n ter- revo luti on a ry methods which excluded the working class from power and, therefore, prevented any progress towards socialism, had disoriented the Trotskyist movement since the 1940’s.Within it, currents accommodated to one wing or another of Stalinism, seeing them as relatively progressive opponents of capitalism, rather than collective opponents of socialism.
The left’s reaction to the events of 1989-91 only served to confirm the validity of the book’s critique of centrism. The USFI’s programme of reform led it to back Gorbachev and deny any danger of capitalist restoration. More grotesquely, the iSt believed the bureaucratic regimes themselves were a defence against capitalism and so sided with them against mass working class mobilisations.
In contrast, the LRCI was able to develop the programme of political revolution amid the fast changing situation, defending the socialist programme against bureaucrat and capitalist alike.
Despite these strengths, however, there were flaws in this work, in particular in the chapter dealing with the “post war overturns” and the Marxist theory of the state. The book argued that the capitalist states were “smashed” prior to the bureaucratic overthrows of capitalism after 1945. In fact, the Stalinists were able to “take over”, or reconstruct, the bourgeois apparatus, and use it to destroy capitalism whilst maintaining the repression of the working class. In an appendix to this re-publication we set out the corrections needed to the Degenerated Revolution on this issue published in 1998.
In addition, 1989-91 revealed weaknesses in our programme of political revolution itself. Although anti-bureaucratic demands, including calls for democratic economic planning were raised, as expected, they were rapidly replaced by support for restoration of capitalism as the best guarantee of freedom and economic advance. We underestimated the degree to which Stalinist dictatorship had alienated the mass of workers from the idea of collective ownership and socially planned production. Worse, it had denied the working class any opportunity to develop its own organisations or leaders, and leadership was quickly provided by pro-Western forces. The tra n s i ti on to capitalism, h owever, has massively increased poverty and social inequality in the former degenerate workers’ states. Already, a new generation of young adults – with no living experience of Stalinist rule – resists. This edition is dedicated to them, that they may learn from their parents’ and grandparents’ history so that they do not have to relive it.
Chapter 1 The transition from capitalism to communism
Against those who asserted the eternity of the state machine and those who made the first act of the revolution its “abolition”, Marx and Engels argued that the proletariat could neither inaugurate a classless and stateless society at one blow nor use the existing state machine, but that:
“Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat . . . The proletarian revolution therefore inaugurates a new epoch in human history – the attempt to consciously construct a society which can ‘inscribe on its banners: From each according his ability, to each according to his needs’”.2
The central task facing the proletariat in the transition period is to transform property relations, social life and political power so as to make possible the final consolidation of a communist society. In this period not only are the productive forces themselves to be massively expanded, not only are the social relations of production to be revolutionised but the proletariat as a class, and its proletarian state, will themselves wither away. This was one of the earliest insights of Marx and Engels, one from which they never wavered.
“The working class, in the course of its development, will substitute for the old civil society an association which will exclude classes and their antagonisms, and there will be no more political power properly so called, since “political power is precisely the official expression of antagonism-in civil society”.3
And again:
“When the proletariat is victorious, it by no means becomes the absolute side of society, for it is victorious only by abolishing itself and its opposite. Then the proletariat disappears as well as the opposite which determines it, private property.” 4
The dictatorship of the proletariat is thus a temporary though indispensable, agency in the final eradication of capitalism and its social and economic laws. It is the means to the full realisation of the Marxist programme – communism.
Politics in the transition period
The proletarian dictatorship has a double function. It must ensure the repression and destruction of the former ruling class and the defence of the workers state against internal and external counter-revolution. But it also inaugurates the construction of a planned economy which will allow the proletariat to progressively eradicate the laws of motion of capitalist economy and, on the basis of material abundance, replace all its repressive social norms and institutions. Marx and Engels were clear that the first prerequisite for the opening of the transition was the seizure of political power by the proletariat and the forcible retention of that power:
“But before such a change can be accomplished it is necessary to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, whose prime condition is a proletarian army. The working classes have to win the right to emancipation in the battlefield.” 5
The purpose of the possession of state power – “the organised power of one class for oppressing another” – is to “sweep away by force, the old conditions of production” and thereby lay the basis for the abolition of its own supremacy as a class. The function of the proletarian dictatorship as the repressive agent against the bourgeoisie necessitates its dictatorial aspect. It is in Lenin’s terms “unfettered by any law” in its dealings with the bourgeoisie and their agents.
The attainment of communism via socialist construction imperatively demands the widest democracy for the toilers. To this end not only must the armed power of the bourgeoisie be taken from its hands but the whole military-bureaucratic machinery of the bourgeois state must be smashed and replaced with a state of a new type representing the power of the proletarians themselves.
Marx and Engels in their observations on the Paris Commune, Lenin and Trotsky in their concrete assessment of the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies in Russia, all isolated the distinct features of the state form the proletariat must construct if it is to organise itself to rule as a class. Most vitally, this state form must be based on: the abolition of the standing army and its replacement by a popular militia; and the recallability of all officials who shall be in receipt of no material privileges bar those of skilled workers. Lenin described the features of this semi-state thus:
“The workers after winning political power, will smash the old bureaucratic apparatus, shatter it to its very foundations, and raze it to the ground; the working class will replace it by a new one, consisting of the very same workers and other employees, against whose transformation into bureaucrats the measures will at once be taken which were specified in detail by Marx and Engels: 1) Not only election, but also recall at any time; 2) pay I not to exceed that of a workman; 3) immediate introduction of control and supervision by all, so that all may become “bureaucrats” for a time and that therefore, nobody may be able to become a “bureaucrat’”.6
The building of a classless and stateless society cannot be victorious in one country or group of countries. So long as capitalism retains its essential grip on the world’s productive forces and its arsenal of destruction, the successful revolution of the proletariat, can only prove ultimately victorious through the world-wide defeat of the bourgeoisie. The transitional period therefore must also be a period of the internationalisation of the proletarian revolution.
Economics in the transition period
The immediate task of the proletarian state is to complete the political destruction of the bourgeoisie, to expropriate the capitalists and thus centralise the means of production in the hands of the state representing the toilers themselves. But the expropriation of the capitalist class does not of itself eradicate the operation of the laws or norms of capitalist production and distribution. The Marxist programme aims to replace the capitalist system of production with production planned consciously to meet human need. This, of necessity, will entail a period of transition within which the working class fights to eradicate the norms of capitalist production, distribution and exchange.
Marx and Engels presumed that in the early stages of the transition considerable remnants of capitalist society would remain in operation. “What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birth marks of the old society from whose womb it emerged”. 7
Marx presumed, for example, that in the initial stages of transition, remuneration for labour would take place on the basis of a system whereby:
“The individual producer receives back from society – after the deductions have been made exactly what he gives to it. The same amount of labour which he has given to society in one form he receives back in another”. 8
But he pointed out that such a system would necessarily involve the perpetuation of bourgeois right.
“But one man is superior to another physically or mentally, and so supplies more labour in the same time, or can labour for a longer time; and labour, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement”;9 “it is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right”.10
He goes on:
“But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby”.11
The economy in the transition period is characterised by the continuation of the class struggle, but under different circumstances. Class conflict within the boundaries of a workers’ state is not principally determined by the opposition between wage labour and capital in the workplace.
However the proletariat remains a definite social class. It is not abolished by the revolution but is rather obliged to struggle against the remnants of capitalism within the workers’ state and against the continued domination of capitalism on a world scale.
In this struggle the proletariat in a workers’ state is no longer simply a class of wage slaves, but rather toilers consciously eradicating the material foundations of their slavery from the advantageous position of being organised as a ruling class. By continuing the class struggle, by raising the productivity of labour and eliminating scarcity the proletariat does not merely negate the bourgeoisie, it also progressively negates its own existence as a definite social class. This goal is completed by means of the transition, but the existence of a transition period implies the continuation of aspects of the “old society” – the proletariat, bourgeois methods of distribution and remnants of the operation of the law of value.
The task of the proletarian state is to progressively subordinate the operation of the laws of capitalist society and economy to the principles of conscious planning. It was E. Preobrazhensky, at the time a supporter of Trotsky’s Left Opposition, who, in The New Economics most sharply characterised the essence of the political economy of the transition period as a struggle to subordinate the law of value to the laws of planning.
While the bourgeois revolution is itself only an episode in the development and emancipation of bourgeois mode of production, the task of constructing a socialist economy only:
“begins its chronology with the seizure of power by the proletariat. Neither does that economy grow and develop automatically as the result of expropriation of the capitalists, it has to be consciously constructed by the proletarian state.”12
The development of any economic form means its ousting of other economic forms, the subordination of these forms to the new form, and their gradual “elimination”.13
Statified property in the hands of even a healthy proletarian state does not have, in the immediate aftermath of the proletarian revolution, an automatically socialist character.
The socialist, or otherwise, character of this post capitalist property is determined by whether or not the direction of those property relations is towards the triumph of conscious planning for the purpose of constructing a society based on the principle of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”. We know of no better short description of the specific characteristics of socialist property than that advanced by Trotsky himself:
“The latter has as its premise the dying away of the state as the guardian of property, the mitigation of inequality and the gradual dissolution of the property concept even in the morals and customs of society.”14
There can be no progressive mitigation of inequality, no final triumph of the conscious planning principle over the law of value, no withering away of the state except at the hands of the proletariat democratically organised to exercise its own power. “The emancipation of the working class” remains “the task of the workers themselves”.
Without direct control by the proletariat, the guarantee against the emergence of a distinct stratum of bureaucrats ceases to exist and the vital force that can revolutionise the productive forces in a rounded and dynamic way in order to meet human need – the creative energy of the proletariat itself – is excluded from the planning process.
But what happens in a state where capitalism has been abolished but where the working class has lost or never gained the power to exercise direct political power? It is precisely this question that has faced the Marxist movement ever since the final triumph of Stalin in the USSR.
The transition blocked
Can the working class be said to be a ruling class where its political power is not expressed by a revolutionary vanguard linked to the mass of the class by organs of proletarian democracy? Can the dictatorship, the class rule of the workers exist where a bureaucratic dictatorship over the working class has been established?
The history of the development of the capitalist mode of production shows us many instances where the capitalist class either did not exercise, or lost the ability to exercise, direct political power by and for itself. In France, the Napoleonic era, the Restoration period, and the Second Empire of Louis Napoleon all excluded the bourgeoisie from direct access to political power. But such is the nature of the capitalist mode of production and the capitalist class that this in no way hampered the development of the capitalist economy and capitalist relations of production.
Indeed Bonapartism is an inherent tendency of capitalism's political life – one which becomes dominant in the imperialist epoch. The bourgeoisie’s fear of the proletariat, the fact that its position as ruling class was assured by economic laws over which it had no conscious political control made it possible for the bourgeoisie to tolerate, and even desire in certain circumstances, a form of state that had a tendency to autonomy from direct control by the bourgeoisie itself. This is no way altered the class character of that state as long as it presided over and protected capitalist property relations.
But, as we have seen, the Marxist movement had always seen the proletariat’s direct control over its own state as an indispensable element without which the transition to communism cannot be effected. Trotsky, for example, in 1931 continued to express the view that the very designation of a state as a workers’ state – in this case the USSR – signified that the bourgeoisie would need an armed uprising in order to take power while the workers could revive the party and regime “with the methods and on the road to reform”.
The history of the rise of the bourgeoisie evidences a series of “political revolutions” where the politically expropriated bourgeoisie struggled to overthrow their political expropriators (after having already sealed the hegemony of capitalist relations of production). This was the case with the overthrow of the Bourbons in 1830 and the Orleanists at the hands of the French Revolution of 1848.
While the bourgeoisie resorted to revolutionary action and attempted to dress up its actions as a social revolution, these events did not signify the passing of social and economic power from one ruling class to another.
Before the work of Trotsky in the 1930s, based on the concrete experience of the political degeneration of the Soviet Union, the Marxist tradition had made no attempt to study the potential situation of a working class that had succeeded in crushing capitalist power and property but failed to prevent the emergence of a distinct bureaucracy strong enough to deprive the proletariat itself of political power.
Trotsky was the first Marxist to develop an analogy between the bourgeois “political revolution” and the tasks of the proletariat should it itself be politically expropriated without capitalist property relations having been restored in a social counter-revolution.
In Trotsky’s view the loss of direct political power by the proletariat and its vanguard does not lead immediately or automatically to the re-establishment of the capitalist mode of production. The experience of the USSR shows this to be the case. But should the proletariat and its conscious organised vanguard lose political power then the transition to socialism will be blocked because the only force with a material interest in that transition, and the ability to effect it, will have been prevented from doing so.
The result will be that “the state” will continue in precisely the form Marxists seek to abolish – set above and against the toilers. Far from a tendency to ever greater equality, inequalities will continue and solidify. The capitalist norms of distribution and exchange that Marxists seek to destroy and replace with conscious planning at the hands of the mass of toilers will continue and even strengthen. Family life, sexual oppression, the deadening cultural void of human relations under capitalism will not be transformed, but will live on in the post-capitalist society.
Such societies – although no longer dominated and determined by the laws of the capitalist system of production – can only advance to communism after the proletariat has seized political power again. The oppressive machinery in the hands of the ruling bureaucracies in the so-called socialist states, the jealously guarded material privileges of the bureaucrats mean that the proletariat cannot seize that power through reform. It will of necessity be forced on the road of political revolution.
Thus the monstrous bureaucratic degeneration of the Russian Revolution and the duplication of its essential features ab initio in a whole series of revolutions, does not introduce a question unforeseen by the founders of communism. It does not require a qualitative alteration of the Marxist programme but the development of the anti-bureaucratic content present from its creation.
A vital element of the Marxist programme for constructing communism – the expropriation of the capitalist class and the centralisation of production on the basis of a plan – has been implemented in the USSR and the other degenerate workers’ states.
For this reason we recognise these states to be a historic gain for the working class – states based on post-capitalist property forms. But without proletarian political power the potential of that property form to revolutionise the productive forces and lay the basis for a communist society cannot be realised. The political power of the bureaucracy and the state forms which defend it remain therefore an obstacle to the realisation of the historic interests of the working class.
Footnotes
1. Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme", Marx and Engels Selected Works, (Moscow, 1970), 3 vol., vol.3, p.26.
2. ibid., p.19.
3. Karl Marx, Marx and Engels Collected Works, (London, 1976), voI.6,pp.211-2.
4. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, (London, 1975), voI.4,p.36.
5.Marx, “Rede auf der Feier zum seibenten Jahrestag der Internationalen Arbeiter assoziation am 25. September 1871”, cited in K. Marx, F. Engels, V.I. Lenin: On Scientific Communism, (Moscow, 1976),p.244.
6. V.I.Lenin, Collected Works, (Moscow, 1964), vol.25,p.481 (our emphasis.)
7. Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme” op.cit., p.17.
8. ibid.,p.17.
9. ibid.,p.18. 10.lbid.,p.18. 11.lbid.,p.19.
12. E. Preobrazhensky, The New Economics, (Oxford, 1965),p.79.
13.ibid.,p.77.
14. L. Trotsky, “The Fourth International and the Soviet Union”, Writings 1935-36, (New York, 1977),p.354.
15. L. Trotsky, “Problems of the Development of the USSR", Writings 1930-31 (New York),p.225.
Chapter 2: From soviet power to soviet bonapartism
In October 1917 state power in Russia was seized by forces intent on using that state power to effect the transition from capitalism to communism. Never before in world history had conscious revolutionary communists taken state power. The October revolution inaugurated the first attempt to implement and develop the programme of revolutionary communism in the aftermath of a proletarian seizure of power.
State power in Russia lay in the hands of the workers and soldiers organised in workers’ councils – the Soviets – and a workers’ militia. The politically conscious vanguard of the workers was organised in the Bolshevik party – 250,000 strong at the time of the October revolution. That party commanded a majority at the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets that assumed power after the overthrow of the old Provisional Government. In the first Council of People’s Commissars – itself responsible to the Soviet Congress – the Bolsheviks had a majority of posts but shared governmental power with a section of the populist Social Revolutionary party – the Left SRs – who supported the creation of Soviet power.
Enormous material obstacles confronted the Soviet Government’s attempt to begin creating the socialist order. The Tsarist regime had developed industrial capitalism in Russia in conjunction with the major imperialist powers and to a large extent economically subordinate to them. As a result Russia experienced extreme unevenness in the development of her productive forces. Developed capitalist industry fostered by imperialism coexisted with under-development and pre-capitalist relations, particularly in agricultural production. On the eve of the first imperialist war the national income per capita in Tsarist Russia was 8 to 10 times less than in the United States.1
Four-fifths of the population earned their miserable livelihoods from agriculture. Although Tsarist Russia was a net exporter of grain, her wheat yield was on a level with that of India and well below that of the European states. Consequently the vast majority of the population eked out a pitiful living in conditions of extreme material and cultural backwardness.
Imperialist capital did however develop pockets of heavy industry amidst the rural squalor of Tsarist Russia. Over half the capital invested in the Donetz coal field in 1914 was foreign, as was over 80 per cent of the capital in iron mining, metallurgy and the oil industry.2 It was in these industries that the Russian proletariat was formed and grew to political maturity. The Russian working class was small but highly concentrated. In 1914 between two and three million were employed as factory workers, three-quarters of a million in the mines and one million on the railways.3
But the concentration of that proletariat in giant plants – enterprises employing over 1,000 workers employed 17.8 per cent of the American proletariat, but 41.4 per cent in Russia – gave it enormous social weight and political strength.4
Taken in isolation the material backwardness of revolutionary Russia was striking. Tsarist Russia had relied on western capitalism for both capital and key manufactured goods – chemicals in particular. Hence the unquestioned unanimity in the ranks of the Bolshevik party that the construction of the material base for a classless, stateless society could not be achieved in one country alone, let alone in one as backward as Russia.
The key planks of the Bolshevik Party’s programme for transition attempted to relate the programme developed by Marx and Engels to the particular circumstances of Russia and the part to be played by its revolution in the world proletarian revolution.
All the Bolshevik leaders saw their revolution as but an initial act in the world revolution. They saw the fate of their revolution as being tied indissolubly to that of the world proletarian revolution. This was stated clearly and unambiguously by Bukharin and Preobrazhensky in their commentary on the programme of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks):
“The Communist movement can be victorious only as a world revolution. If the state of affairs arose in which one country was ruled by the working class, while in other countries the working class not from fear but from conviction, remained submissive to capital, in the end the great robber states would crush the workers’ state of the first country.”5
At the heart of the Bolshevik programme for transition, therefore, was the struggle to internationalise the revolution. The Russian revolution was but one gain in the struggle for international revolution. The communist programme is a programme for the eventual abolition of classes and the state. Having smashed the armed power and executive bureaucracy of the old regime, Bolshevism was committed to the struggle to replace the old type of administrative and coercive apparatus with one that mobilised and actively engaged the toilers themselves.
In Russia this meant taking sovereign power into the hands of the working class organised in soviets. But it also meant the struggle to ensure that working class rule was not simply formal. A struggle had to be waged to enable the workers themselves to gain the experience and culture (in the first place) to be able to directly hold the administrative apparatus to account. This was a necessary staging post to being able to directly manage the economy and dissolve the administrative apparatus as a form separate from the working class.
In this struggle cultural obstacles as well as material ones confronted the Bolsheviks, not least the problem of illiteracy. The pre-revolutionary census of 1897 found that only 21.1 per cent of the population of the Russian empire (excluding Finland) were able to read and write.6 As a result the programme for transition in Russia required an increase not only in the social and political weight of the industrial proletarians but also a conscious struggle to raise the cultural level of the masses of Russian society to one commensurate with the tasks confronting them.
The Russian revolution was not, however, simply the work of the industrial proletariat. The proletarian insurrection took place alongside the seizure of land and the breakup of the old estates by the peasantry. It combined elements of a land war against the remnants of feudalism with a working class seizure of power.
As a result Russia’s arable land was divided into 25 million peasant farms. Not only did the size of these units present an obstacle to re-building agricultural production on a scale and with a technological level sufficient to ensure a qualitative transformation of agricultural production. It also served to strengthen petty-commodity production and primitive capitalist relations in the countryside.
The programme of transition therefore, had to win those peasants who had gained least from the revolution on the land the poor and middle peasants-to an alliance with the proletarian state against the rural capitalists and for cooperative large scale agricultural production, utilising developed technology. The Soviet Government referred to transition proceeding “gradually with the consent and confirmation of the majority of peasants following the teachings of their practical experience and of the workers.”7
These then were the broad outlines of the Bolshevik programme for effecting a transition to socialism in the aftermath of the Russian revolution. The initial period after the revolution saw an enormous extension of the sovereignty of the masses and, as a result, the break up of the authority and jurisdiction of the apparatus the old state machine.The October revolution immediately decreed that authority in the factories should reside with the workers’ committees therefore legitimising “workers’ control” over the capitalists. In December 1917 full power in the army was transferred to soldiers’ committees with the right to elect and dismiss officers.
The initial perspective for transition was therefore one of prioritising measures to break the power of the remnants of the old state apparatus, the employers and industrial managers and the officer caste, by subjecting them directly to the sovereignty of the Soviets and factory and soldiers’ committees. In February 1918 the old courts were abolished and a decree promulgated to ensure the election of judges.
The July 1918 constitution of the young Soviet republic systematised the achievements of Soviet power. Sovereign power formally resided with the All-Russian Congress of Soviets, whose constitution ensured the predominance of the proletariat’s voice within it. Rural and urban bourgeois were not granted the right to vote.
The franchise was weighted so as to give one seat in the Congress for every 25,000 urban voters and 125,000 provincial voters. In the provincial Soviets the vote was weighted to one seat for 2000 city voters and one for 10,000 rural voters. The Bolshevik programme aimed at combining democracy for the proletariat with proletariat’s dictatorship over the old exploiting classes and hegemony over the peasantry.
The formation of the Red Army
The tempo and nature of the transition was of necessity determined by both the material problems confronting the fledgling Soviet regime and the military/political struggle waged by its internal and external enemies. German imperialism resumed its advance against Soviet Russia until the regime signed the March 1918 Brest Litovsk treaty, ceding the majority of the Ukraine to Germany. Later in 1918, and during 1919, the armies of 14 capitalist states waged a war to overthrow the workers’ republic. The Social Revolutionaries and a majority of the Menshevik leaders sided with the White Armies of Yudenich, Denikin and Kolchak in the civil war that ensued. In White-dominated areas, with the backing of the SRs, the Soviets were dissolved and the power of the institutions of the Tsarist state – the Dumas and Zemstvos – was reinstated.
In the face of counter-revolutionary attack the Bolsheviks were compelled to make specific tactical retreats in order to ensure the survival of the workers’ dictatorship. The Red Terror exercised by the Extraordinary Commission (Cheka) was an indispensable weapon of the proletarian dictatorship. In order to effectively defend the revolution a standing army was re-created, but now to defend the gains of the working class and therefore in an important sense an army of a “new type”.
The Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army was created on 23 February 1918 and grew to be 5 million strong by 1920. 30,000 of the old Tsarist officers were enrolled into that army so that the workers’ state could take advantage of their military expertise.8 While political supervision of these officers by the workers’ state continued, the form that it now took was the appointment of political commissars to oversee their work.
In the middle of 1918 the right to elect officers in the Red Army was abolished. Such actions were necessary and justified because the military threat against the young workers’ state precluded the peaceful and gradual evolution of a group of capable commanders by way of the elective method. The needs of war in defence of the workers’ state demanded military expertise immediately. Appointment of officers and the Commissar system alone could achieve this.
The refusal of the Mensheviks and SRs to recognise the authority of the Soviet regime led to their expulsion from the Soviets in July 1918. They continued to legally operate outside the Soviets. A left shift by the Mensheviks in October 1918 led to their readmission to the Soviets in November of that year. After an armed attempt to destroy the Bolshevik-led regime, the Left SRs were expelled from the Soviets in July. In the factories the move towards workers’ management was halted and reversed in favour of the single authority of the director appointed by the workers' state. By the start of 1921 some 2,183 out of 2,483 enterprises were managed in this fashion. All of these measures marked a decisive shift towards the centralisation of political power in the hands of the party that organised the conscious layer of the Russian proletariat. These layers were rightly committed to holding state power for the working class as the prerequisite for the transition to socialism. The proletarian dictatorship in Russia took on the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat’s political party.
Anarchists denounced the dictatorship of the party without explaining how else counter-revolution could have been defeated.
On the other hand, by the early 1920s leading member of the Communist Party Gregori Zinoviev was laying down theoretical foundations for Stalinism. He idealised the dictatorship of the party, and made it synonymous with the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Neither position in any way serves the proletariat in the long term. Revolutionaries recognise that exceptional circumstances demand exceptional measures. The dictatorship of the party was such a measure, entirely justified and utilised correctly by Lenin, as a temporary and emergency method of defending the proletariat’s gains against a vicious counter-revolution.
The Civil War had a devastating effect on the industrial base of the Soviet Republic and therefore on the size and morale of the working class. In the proletarian citadel of Petrograd, for example, industrial production in early 1921 stood at only one-eighth of its 1913 level.9
In 1920 and 1921 the giant Putilov works, the symbolic heart of the Petrograd working class was working at only 3 per cent capacity.10 As a result the industrial workforce of Petrograd dropped from a registered 230,000 in January 1918 to only 79,500 in September 1920.11
Those workers most committed to the transition to socialism were drawn into the Red Army and the state apparatus, those least conscious were either forced back into the villages or forced to survive in appalling and demoralising material circumstances in the beleaguered and economically stagnant cities. By January 1921 there were only 3,462 members of the Russian Communist Party employed in Petrograd’s factories – comprising only 3.2 per cent of the city’s industrial workers.12 No wonder then that the factory committees and Soviets withered as effective, representative and dynamic instruments of the proletarian dictatorship.
In order to deploy and mobilise scarce resources for the battle front of the class struggle, the workers’ state made decisive revisions in the schedule for expropriating private property. On 28 June 1918 every important category of industry was nationalised. From the spring of 1918 “food detachments” from the towns were sent into the countryside to forcibly requisition grain from the peasants. The system of War Communism was deployed to ensure the survival of a regime that, at the height of the Civil War, controlled less than one-quarter of the territory of the old Russian Empire. It meant the virtual abolition of money as a means of exchange and the market as a means of distribution.
It also necessitated temporary measures to militarise the workforce so as to deploy them in the interests of the Red War effort. In November 1919 a decree was issued which placed the employees of state enterprises under military discipline.13
The eventual victory of the Red Army in the Civil War therefore had a contradictory character. On the one hand it marked a victory for forces still committed to the transition to communism.
On the other it was achieved at the expense of retarding both the material and political prerequisites of that transition. This retardation was compounded by the defeat of the post-war revolutionary movement of the European working class. The savage betrayal of the German revolution by the social democratic leaders – a betrayal paid for with the blood of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht – and the defeat of the Hungarian Soviet Republic left the victorious workers’ republic isolated in backward and ravaged Russia.
War Communism and international isolation gave birth to several alien and unscientific views of the transition, and false estimates of the relations between present political forms and those required of the workers’ state at its existing stage in the transition. Some, like Strumilin, who attempted to draw up a plan of production in a moneyless system, and Bukharin, who hailed the collapse of money and the de facto barter economy as advanced forms of the transition to communism, hopelessly overestimated the potential of the regime to effect measures to create an advanced transitional society.
Similarly utopian, and ultimately therefore reactionary, views were in evidence in the struggle of the Workers’ Opposition against the party majority in 1920 and 1921. This grouping around Shlyapnikov, Luovinov and Kollontai urged that the party should relinquish its hold over the battered economy and place it in the hands of a Congress of Producers. The reality of the morale, size and organisation of the Russian working class at this time made such proposals utopian in theory and potentially disruptive of the political power of the advanced layers of communists organised in the party.
At the same time however there was a definite tendency towards bureaucratism within the proletariat’s party and in the relation between that party and the state apparatus. At the Tenth Party Congress in 1921 the Secretarial triumvirate of Krestinsky, Preobrazhensky and Serebriakov who urged a relatively tolerant and open regime within the party were ousted and replaced by Molotov. The party also agreed to a temporary ban on the right to form factions within the party. While the party at the same time set out to purge indisciplined and careerist elements – 24 per cent of the party was expelled during 1921-4 – these measures served to strengthen the potential for the exercise of bureaucratic power in the party itself.
By the end of the Civil War the possibility of continuing the transition to socialism depended on the vanguard and its ability to comprehend the scale of deformation and retreat in the workers’ state, so as to be able to advance. In essence it depended on the commitment of the Bolsheviks to continue a relentless struggle, with the aid of the new Third International, for the international revolution of the working class. Meanwhile inside Russia itself the defence of the revolution and its advance now required a conscious struggle to recreate the working class as a material and political force.
The Kronstadt rebellion of February 1921 and a series of peasant revolts spreading from Tambov to Western Siberia highlighted the problems facing the victorious workers' state. A fuel and food crisis in Petrograd precipitated a strike wave amongst the city’s workers in February. The demoralised and impoverished workers were receptive to Social Revolutionary and Menshevik agitators and only emergency food supplies and a declaration of martial law in the region secured a return to work. This revealed that forces who had supported the Reds against White counterrevolution were themselves profoundly dissatisfied with the political and economic regime of War Communism. That dissatisfaction amongst the peasant sailors of Kronstadt for example served to increase the potential for counter-revolutionary elements, masquerading as the allies of the toiling masses, to mobilise mass discontent against the revolutionary regime.
The young workers’ state and the New Economic Policy
It is evidence of Lenin’s supremely concrete understanding of the problems confronting the proletarian regime that, in the face of this upsurge, the Party took specific measures both to strengthen its own monopoly of political power and to affect a retreat from the policies of War Communism. The Kronstadt rebellion was crushed. The alternative would have been to tolerate the opening of a new phase of civil war and the joining of a reactionary peasant war against the regime. But at the same time, with the inauguration of the New Economic Policy (NEP), major concessions were made to the private peasantry by the workers’ state. War Communism’s system of requisitions was replaced by a system of taxing the peasantry on the basis of a fixed proportion of each peasant farm’s net produce. The after-tax surplus of the peasants could be traded by the peasant on the free market.
In that it legalised the operation of the law of value, NEP represented a retreat by the regime. In that it served to revive agricultural production and won a breathing space for the internationally isolated regime it was a retreat that granted the regime the potential to make future advances along the road of transition.
Under NEP there existed two fundamental and conflicting elements in the economy of the Soviet Union. In agriculture and other petty commodity production the law of value was absolutely dominant. Yet in the statified economy – mainly heavy industry and transport – the law of value could be offset by state direction of investment and was, therefore, susceptible to the planning principle. In this period the major threat to the workers’ state and to its ability to extend its control over the economy through extending conscious economic planning was the spontaneous development of primitive capitalist accumulation in the countryside and the potential alliance between it and imperialist capital.
For that reason the state monopoly of foreign trade was an indispensable weapon without which direct imperialist penetration into the economy of the first workers’ state could not have been prevented. In the struggle against this threat the young workers’ state had accumulated three principle weapons with which to defend itself: the revolutionary expropriation of the industrial sector of the economy; the application and extension of the planning principle; and the state monopoly of foreign trade. These three measures, taken together, anti-capitalist by their very nature, form the characteristic defining property relations of a workers’ state.
NEP was a retreat and was recognised as such by Lenin. It made him acutely aware of the need to ensure that it did not pave the way for a rout. In the last two years of his active political life Lenin attempted to concretise and refocus the Bolshevik programme for transition. First, it was necessary to construct the mechanisms of economic planning and extend their authority over the Soviet economy. Enormous problems of experience and culture faced the young regime in its attempts to weld together an apparatus of economic planning in the material circumstances of post revolutionary Russia.
In February 1920 a Commission for the Electrification of Russia (GOELRO) was established with the brief to coordinate an all-Russian plan for electricity production. While the party programme called for “one general State Plan” the mechanism for creating such a plan had to be constructed gradually and on the basis of the first ever experience of the attempt to create planning mechanisms in the interests of subordinating and, eventually, extinguishing the operation of the law of value.
A Supreme Economic Council (Vesenkha) was established as early as December 1917. By the end of the Civil War it possessed the authority and experience to draw up plans for particular industries with the assistance of the state planning commission (GOSPLAN) which was established in 1921. It produced a Five-year plan for the metal industry in 1922-23 and in 1923 attempted to produce a general plan that would amalgamate Vesenkha’s plans for individual branches of industry. But in this period the planning mechanisms simply provided trusts with forecast “control figures” as dictated by their interpretation of market conditions within NEP. The strengthening and coordination of these mechanisms to a level capable of serious subordinating the law of value remained a prerequisite of effective transitional advance.
But the struggle against the law of value was not simply a struggle between industry and agriculture. Of necessity it involved a conscious struggle to wean the majority of the peasantry away from petty commodity production and from the economic and political dominance of the richer capitalist peasant farmers (the Kulaks). In Lenin’s last writings he advanced the programme of cooperation as the means of effecting an alliance (smychka) between the workers’ state and the poor and middle peasants on the road to building a socialist system of agricultural production:
“By adopting NEP we made a concession to the peasant as a trader, to the principle of private trade; it is precisely for this reason (contrary to what some people think) that the cooperative movement is of such immense importance.”15
Lenin realised that the small and middle peasants had gained insufficient land from the revolution to guarantee them a secure livelihood and to make possible the application of the labour-saving technologies utilisable only in larger agricultural units. Hence through the provision of equipment to the poorer peasants organised in cooperatives the workers’ state could both raise the technological level of Soviet agriculture and cement solid political ties with the mass of the peasantry against the layer of rich labour hiring Kulaks.
In On Co-operation Lenin therefore advocated a policy of the ruthless prioritisation of the provision of credits and machinery to those peasants organised in cooperatives as a means of recommencing the transition to socialism in the Soviet countryside.16
Any other policy would unleash the potential within NEP to strengthen the tendency to social differentiation within the peasantry and towards an increase in the social and economic weight of the anti-socialist Kulaks.
Lenin’s last writings also focus on the problem of developing the ability of the working masses to replace the old form of administrative apparatus and to subject the existing state apparatus to the authority of the workers’ state.
“Two main tasks confront us, which constitute the epoch: to reorganise our machinery of state, which is utterly useless, and which we took over in its entirety from the preceding epoch; during the past five years of struggle we did not, and could not, drastically reorganise it. Our second task is educational work among the peasants.”17
Repeatedly in the period after the Civil War Lenin emphasised the bureaucratically deformed nature of the Soviet workers’ state and struggled to reform that state apparatus:
“Our state apparatus is so deplorable, not to say wretched, that we must first think very carefully how to combat its defects, bearing in mind that these defects are rooted in the past, which, although it has been overthrown, has not been overcome, has not yet reached the stage of a culture that has receded into the distant past.”18. . . “The most harmful thing here would be haste. The most harmful thing would be to rely on the assumption that we know at least something, or that we have any considerable number of elements necessary for the building of a really new state apparatus, one really worthy to be called socialist, Soviet etc:”19
But this perspective of renovating the Soviet workers' state and recommencing the transition to socialism in alliance with the poor and middle peasants remained part of a programme for internationalising the workers’ revolution. The isolation of that revolution necessarily served to retard the development of the material pre-requisites of socialist construction
“The general feature of our present life is the following: we have destroyed capitalist industry and have done our best to raze to the ground the medieval institutions and landed proprietorship, and thus created a small and very small peasantry, which is following the lead of the proletariat because it believes in the results of its revolutionary work. It is not easy for us, however, to keep going until the socialist revolution is victorious in more developed countries merely with the aid of this confidence, because economic necessity, especially under NEP, keeps the productivity of labour of the small and very small peasants at an extremely low level. Moreover, the international situation, too, threw Russia back and, by and large, reduced the labour productivity of the people to a level considerably below pre-war.”20
What then were the roots of the bureaucratisation of the workers’ state that Lenin perceived and fought against in the early 1920s? The functional roots of the bureaucracy lay in the exhaustion and weariness of the internationally isolated Soviet society in the aftermath of the civil war, together with the material backwardness of the country inherited from Tsarism. In this context a series of “pre-socialist” and “non-socialist” tasks faced the young Soviet regime. Trotsky correctly outlined this process:
“No help came from the West. The power of the democratic Soviets proved cramping, even unendurable, when the task of the day was to accommodate those privileged groups whose existence was necessary for defence, for industry, for technique and science. In this decidedly not ‘socialist’ operation, taking from ten and giving to one, there crystallised out and developed a powerful caste of specialists in distribution...”21
While the armed forces and executive bureaucracy of the old ruling class were smashed, the proletarian state was forced to work with significant remnants of the old Tsarist state machine in order to administer the world’s first workers’ state. Lenin described this process-and its impact in the following way:
“We took over the old machinery of state and that was our misfortune. Very often this machinery operates against us. In 1917, after we captured power, the government officials sabotaged us. This frightened us very much and we pleaded: ‘Please come back’. They all came back, but that was our misfortune.”22
As we have seen, the Russian proletariat itself was decimated by the experience of the civil war that it fought to defend the workers’ state. Its most conscious element was drawn into administering the state machine, its advanced layers suffered death and privation to secure the victory of the Red Army. Of necessity the advance of the proletarian dictatorship in the direction of planning and equality depended on the small conscious vanguard section of the Russian working class organised in the Communist Party. Political degeneration in their ranks, a slackening of their direct commitment to socialist advance – nationally and internationally – would serve to undermine the proletariat’s only guarantee of advance towards socialism.
Enormous objective material factors therefore contributed to the process of bureaucratisation. These were strengthened by the operation of NEP within which the state apparatus was called upon to play the role of arbitration between the interests of the peasantry and the industrial working class. This process of bureaucratisation not only led to the continuation of the old form of administrative apparatus and to a considerable continuity of personnel between the old and new apparatus.
It also played an important role in shaping the character and leadership of the Bolshevik party itself. By 1923 less than 10 per cent of the party had pre-revolutionary records and two-thirds of the members and half of the candidates were involved in non-manual jobs. In Lenin’s last years alarming signs of bureaucratic degeneration were apparent in the party’s highest bodies.
In the face of these objective and subjective tendencies the key problem facing the workers’ state was whether the vanguard could regenerate itself and the working class as a whole, in a struggle against bureaucratism, national isolation and complacency. Lenin’s last writings show him to have been increasingly aware of bureaucratism in the party apparatus and that this was serving to render the party powerless in the face of the weight of the old state apparatus.
In turn this presented an obstacle to building a new state apparatus responsive to the vanguard itself and committed to the transition to socialism. In fact bureaucratism in the state was positively strengthening the “old ways” of Great Russian chauvinism, rudeness and bureaucratism within the party itself.
In his last battles Lenin concentrated on the regime in the party and the relation between the party and state apparatus as the key problems without the solution to which the transition to socialism would be retarded. Until his death he remained the most astute of all the party’s leaders as to the realities of Soviet Russia and to the type, nature and tasks of the workers’ state. His last testimony itself – Letter to Congress – contains an implicit criticism of the entire old guard of the party for its failure to grasp the urgency of, and the necessary concrete steps towards, regeneration.
Lenin’s eyes were opened to the degree of bureaucratic degeneration within the party by relations between Dzherzhinsky, Stalin and Ordzhonikidze and leading representatives of the Georgian Communist party. The latter were resisting plans to replace the loose federal structure of the young Soviet republic with a more centralised structure under the name of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. During the controversy Ordzhonikiadzhe struck Kabanidze, a supporter of the Georgian party leader Mdivani. While not in complete solidarity with the political stand of the Georgians, Lenin weighed in against the central leadership.
Lenin conceded that perhaps the unionisation plan had been premature:
“There is no doubt that that measure should have been delayed somewhat until we could say that we vouched for our apparatus as our own. But now, we must, in all conscience, admit the contrary; the apparatus we call ours is, in fact, still quite alien to us; it is a bourgeois and tsarist hotch-potch and there has been no possibility of getting rid of it in the course of the past five years without the help of other countries and because we have been ‘busy’ most of the time with military engagements and the fight against famine.
It is quite natural that in such circumstances the ‘freedom to secede from the union’ by which we justify ourselves will be a mere scrap of paper, unable to defend the non-Russians from the onslaught of that really Russian man, the Great-Russian chauvinist, in substance a rascal and a tyrant, such as the typical Russian bureaucrat is. There is no doubt that the infinitesimal percentage of Soviet and sovietised workers will drown in that tide of chauvinistic Great-Russian riffraff like a fly in milk.”23
Lenin urged exemplary punishment for Ordzhonikidze and that: “The political responsibility for all this truly Great-Russian nationalist campaign must, of course, be laid on Stalin and Dzherzhinsky.”24 At the same time Lenin urged on the party the strengthening of the accountability of the state machine through raising the political weight of the Workers and Peasants’ Inspection (RABKRIN).
Mindful of the developing bureaucratic regime in the party and Stalin’s evident unsuitedness to the post of Secretary that he had quietly assumed in 1922, Lenin urged the removal of Stalin from his post:
“Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealings amongst us Communists, becomes intolerable in a Secretary General. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man in his stead who in all other respects differs from Comrade Stalin in having only one advantage, namely, that of being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc.”25
As Lenin’s letters to Trotsky published first in The Stalin School of Falsification show, Lenin urged a bloc with Trotsky against Stalin on these issues.26
But the tendency towards bureaucratic arbitrary rule within the party continued throughout 1923. There is evidence of the formation of secretly organised opposition groups within the party which called for a struggle against the new bureaucratism.
The most significant – the Workers Truth group – was led by Miasnikov who had been expelled from the party in 1921.27 In response the party leadership responded to the working class discontent that this evidenced with an attempt to strengthen police dictatorship within the party itself. A special commission headed by Dzherzhinsky “demanded from communists the immediate denunciation, either to the Control Commission or to the GPU, of illegal groups within the party.”28
This crisis coincided with mounting imbalance within the NEP economy to the advantage of the private trader and farmer and to the disadvantage of the proletarian state. By 1922-23, 75 per cent of retail trade was in private hands. By 1923 industrial production stood at only 35 per cent of the pre-war level while the marketed agricultural surplus had reached 60 per cent of pre-war totals.29
This strengthened a tendency towards a “scissors crisis” – rising industrial prices and relatively declining agricultural prices – which threatened to result in a drop in peasant markets if state industry could not provide sufficient manufactured goods at cheap enough prices to encourage the peasants to sell their surpluses. At the 12th Party Congress in 1923 Trotsky showed that industrial prices were at 140 per cent of their 1913 level while agricultural prices stood at only 80 per cent. Only a strengthening of the planned industrial base of the USSR could have provided the material prerequisites of cooperation – for example tractors, manufactured implements and have served thus to isolate the prosperous Kulak layer of the peasantry which commanded the bulk of the surplus. Continued retardation of industry could only serve to strengthen the Kulak and the grip of the law of value within the Soviet state.
The growth of bureaucratism
But 1923 also saw mounting signs of the ossification of the party leadership in terms of its ability to aid and develop the international revolution of the proletariat. Under the direction of Zinoviev the Communist International seriously miscalculated tactics for a revolutionary offensive in Germany in the autumn of 1923. The bureaucratically deformed workers’ state remained isolated.
It is in the face of these manifest degenerative processes that Trotsky and the cadre of the Left Opposition launched their struggle against the party leadership in order to reactivate the struggle for socialism. True, Trotsky failed to activate the proposed bloc with Lenin at the 12th Party Congress in April 1923. He left Bukharin to fight alone against the bureaucratism of the party’s leading Troika of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin – an unholy alliance united by enmity towards Trotsky.
In 1924 he was complicit in the decision of the same party leadership to conceal the existence of Lenin’s call for the removal of Stalin. To this extent he clearly did not share the sense of urgency felt by Lenin as to the threat to socialist advance in the USSR. But the coincidence of Miasnikov’s grouping and Dzerhzhinsky’s police tactics stung Trotsky into a war against bureaucratism during the latter part of 1923. In October he wrote to the Central Committee denouncing party administration in general – particularly the demise of the elective principle – and Dzherzhinsky’s proposals in particular.
Trotsky had no doubt that bureaucratism had a profound material roots:
“It is unworthy of a Marxist to consider that bureaucratism is only the aggregate of the bad habits of office holders.
Bureaucratism is a social phenomenon in that it is a definite system of administration of men and things. Its profound causes lie in the heterogeneity of society, the difference between the daily and the fundamental interests of various groups of the population.”30
But Trotsky insisted this bureaucratism posed fundamental problems to the advance of the revolution:
“...bureaucratism in the state and party apparatus is the expression of the most vexatious tendencies inherent in our situation, of the defects and deviations in our work which, under certain social conditions, might sap the basis of the revolution. And, in this case as in many others, quantity will at a certain stage be transformed into quality.”31
For Trotsky only the struggle for democracy in the party could mobilise the vanguard against bureaucratism. The alternative was alienation and demoralisation amongst the ranks of worker communists.
“Not feeling that they are participating actively in the general work of the party and not getting a timely answer to their questions to the party, numerous communists start looking for a substitute for independent party activity in the form of groupings and factions of all sorts. It is in this sense precisely that we speak of the symptomatic importance of groupings like the Workers’ Group.”32
As a result “The task of the present is to shift the centre of party activity towards the masses of the party” because “There is not and cannot be any other means of triumphing over the corporatism, the caste spirit of the functionaries, than by the realisation of democracy.”33, 34
The offensive of Trotsky was complemented, in October, by the declaration of 46 Old Bolsheviks including Antonov Ovseenko, Serebriakov, Preobrazhensky and Pyatakov. Taken as a whole the two positions represented a platform of extending democracy in the party as the immediate form of extending workers’ democracy in the USSR and of developing industrial planning as the means of strengthening the smychka with the poorer peasants against the Kulaks. To this extent it represented an important development and refocusing of the programme of Bolshevism. It contained the key elements, in embryo, of the future programme of the Left Opposition.
The 1923 debate also showed that despite the party’s leadership, the careerists who had entered its ranks and the exhaustion of significant sections of its cadre, there remained a solid core within the party committed to the transition to socialism. Despite the campaign against “Trotskyism” that was launched by the ruling Troika the platform of proletarian democracy received widespread support in the party. It received strong support in Moscow, the Urals and Kharkov.35
As late as 1929 the Stalinist historian Yaroslavsky was admitting that the opposition won half the votes in certain areas of Moscow.36 The leadership was forced to concede the demand of the 46 for a special Central Committee meeting on the subject and a declaration in favour of democratising the party’s life in return for a Central Committee resolution condemning the activities of Trotsky and the 46. It would clearly be wrong therefore to conclude that the party at this time could simply be described as the property of its central and increasingly bureaucratic leadership.
The death of Lenin in 1924, following on from the first setback for the forces of the Left Opposition (the Central Committee confrontation), served to intensify the tendency towards revisionism and bureaucratism within the party leadership. Against the struggle for regeneration waged by Trotsky and the Left there were three major groupings all representing specific programmatic revisions and degenerations.
In 1924 and 1925 a definite Rightist tendency increased in confidence and weight within the party apparatus. Represented primarily by Bukharin, Tomsky and Rykov, this tendency reflected the pressure of the richer layers of the peasantry on the party/state apparatus. Its programme involved continued and extended concessions to the richer peasants in the name of building a specifically Russian peasant-based form of socialism. As its principle spokesman, Bukharin, put it:
“We have come to the conclusion that we can build socialism even on this wretched technological level... that we shall move at a snail’s pace, but that we shall be building socialism and that we shall build it.”37
During 1925, at both the 14th Party Conference and Congress Bukharin elaborated a specific new content to Lenin’s call for “an understanding with the peasantry.” It was to mean concessions to the peasantry in order to encourage their economy, it was to mean tailoring the pace of industrial development to these concessions. The policies of Bukharin were enshrined in the decision of the April 1925 Central Committee meeting to sanction the right to hire labour and extend the rights of land leasing and thus strengthen the operation of the law of value in the USSR. In April 1925 Bukharin delivered his famous speech to a mass party meeting in Moscow calling on the Russian peasants to “enrich yourselves.”
The Right had another social base within the bureaucratised apparatus of the workers’ state. An important section of the Soviet Trade Union leaders – particularly Tomsky – craved an unprincipled alliance with the reformist leaders of the Yellow Amsterdam-based International Trade Union Federation. For them potential alliances with the reformist trade union leaders-particularly in Britain-represented a potential road of protection and stability for the Soviet state in its existing bureaucratised form.
In essence the Right was therefore a tendency committed to strengthening capitalist forces within the USSR and securing peace with world capitalism through the medium of the reformist labour bureaucracies. The Right’s programme was a narrow nationalist one that sought to preserve the status quo – the bureaucratically deformed workers’ state. Objectively, however, the Right were in fact a tendency for capitalist restoration. This was the logical end point of their programme of concessions to rich private peasants. In the mid-1920s their reactionary views accorded with the doctrine of “Socialism in One Country”, a creed they shared with Stalin. But the Right’s policy of relative freedom for Soviet Trade Union officialdom and compromise with the rich peasant farmers meant that they were not of necessity wedded to the forms of bureaucratic rule later advanced by the group around Stalin.
In concert with this group against the Communist Left, but in material conflict with the Right’s programme, stood a bureaucratic left centre group around Zinoviev and Kamenev. Their social base was the industrial city of Leningrad and the Communist International. For the Rightists the failed German Revolution of 1923 underlined the fact that the proletariat of Western Europe could not be relied on to solve the problems of isolated and backward Russia. For Zinoviev however, it meant that a serious blow had been struck at the ability of the Soviet state to resist the developing bourgeois forces within its own boundaries. Zinoviev expressed this in the following terms:
“An alliance of a proletarian Germany with Soviet Russia would create a new phase of NEPism... would nip in the bud the tendency of a new bourgeoisie to assume a controlling position in the economic life of our republican union.”38
The 5th Congress of the Comintern, meeting in June and July 1924, reflected a profound disorientation in the strategy and tactics of the Communist International. Zinoviev responded to the German defeat and the appearance of capitalist stabilisation with a call to bureaucratically “Bolshevise” the Communist Parties and a turn to left rhetoric – effectively turning the Comintern against the decisions taken at its fourth Congress on the United Front tactic and the Workers’ Government slogan.39
It was at this Congress that the characterisation of Social Democracy as a wing of fascism was first aired – by none other than Zinoviev himself. In its aftermath Zinoviev probably ordered the abortive uprising in Estonia in December 1924.40
Victor Serge described Zinoviev’s bureaucratic leftist response:
“How could Zinoviev have initiated this imbecile adventure? The man terrified us. He refused to acknowledge the German defeat. In his eyes the rising had been only delayed and the KPD was still marching to power. The riots in Krakow were enough for him to announce revolution in Poland. I felt that he was obsessed by the error in his otherwise sensible judgement which had led him in 1917 to oppose the incipient Bolshevik revolution; in consequence, he had now swung into an authoritarian and exaggerated revolutionary optimism.”41
Under Zinoviev therefore the Comintern veered from ultraleft to opportunist tactics to secure success. The base of Zinoviev in Leningrad also served to shape his response to the Right.
The April 1925 concessions to the peasantry included a 25 per cent cut in taxation on the peasantry and the freeing of agricultural prices.42 This caused serious hardship and discontent amongst the workers of Leningrad. But while this bureaucratic left could, on occasion, reflect workers’ hostility to the effects of Rightist policies on the working class, they were themselves hostile to the programme of proletarian democracy waged by the Left Opposition.
The campaign against “Trotskyism” was particularly virulent in Leningrad. It was Zinoviev and Kamenev who demanded the expulsion of Trotsky from the party at the January 1925 Central Committee. Stalin opposed them!43 To this extent they were the pioneers of despotism within the party.
Alongside these two groups there existed a centre grouping around Stalin, with its base in the central party apparatus. Its hold on the secretariat of the party made it most wedded to the secretarial form of dictatorship in the party. It stood with the right for concessions to the Kulak to the extent that they presented no threat to the political power and modus vivendi of the central apparatus. The Stalinist group did not oppose industrial planning as such, to the extent that it developed at a tempo and in a form that would not disturb the smychka with the rich peasants.
The most important programmatic hallmark of the Stalin group was the theory of “Socialism in One Country”.
In an article directed against Trotsky in December 1924 Stalin first put forward his theory of the possibility of constructing “Socialism in One Country.”
“The victory of socialism in one country, even if this country is less developed in the capitalist sense, while capitalism is preserved in other countries, even if these countries are more developed in the capitalist sense – is quite possible and probable.”44
The programmatic logic of the “theory” was that given a sufficient period of peaceful relations between imperialism and the USSR it would be possible to build “Socialism in One Country”.
In this view the Soviet Union necessarily ceases to be an integral, and necessarily dependent, component of the world proletarian struggle to destroy capitalism. It is capable, from its own resources and in isolation, of building socialism without the assistance of the world revolution. Of necessity, this leads to a revision of the Marxist concept of socialism. Socialism – as a programmatic goal ceases to mean a developing classless and stateless society. It comes to mean the stability, order and interests of the USSR as they are construed by those who have political power in the USSR.
This theory, and its chief proponent, accurately reflected the conservatism of the Centre grouping. It was the conservatism of a still-developing bureaucracy keen to defend the marginal, but growing privileges that its role within the Soviet state had provided it with. Stalin and his grouping recognised that through “Socialism in One Country” – i.e. the abandonment of real socialism which is internationalist by definition, and the development of the Soviet economy under their control – these marginal privileges could be extended and the bureaucracy strengthened. This explains why the Stalin group did not wholly support the programme of the Right, which potentially threatened it with the growth of the Kulaks as a rival for power, or the programme of the Left, which threatened it with the revolutionary rule of the proletariat.
Yet it also explains why it could bureaucratically utilise elements of both of these programmes to consolidate its own position and eventually to secure its own victory over both the Right and the Left. The bureaucracy’s programme was eclectic, pragmatic and vacillating, guided centrally by the principle of self- interest.
In 1923 and 1924 Stalin, Zinoviev and Tomsky had a common interest in blocking in order to prevent the implementation of the programme of the Left Opposition. They orchestrated a scurrilous campaign against Trotskyism, introduced new degenerate norms of debate in the party and new levels of caste loyalty between themselves when they conspired to prevent the implementation of Lenin’s testimony and to keep it concealed from the party, (an agreement Trotsky mistakenly, went along with).
Further to this they flooded the party with new recruits via the Lenin Levy of 1924. In two years the party’s size was increased by more than two-thirds.45 Most of the recruits were either raw or careerists and their presence rendered the party far more susceptible to manipulation by the bureaucratic leaders, against the revolutionary left.
These measures, taken together, represent a systematic and conscious attempt to politically isolate and, ultimately decapitate, the revolutionary leadership of the proletariat. However, at this time no faction was, as yet, strong enough to drive it out of the party. This was the beginning of the process of the Thermidorean degeneration of the revolution, first fought under the slogans of “Socialism in One Country”, “enrich yourselves” and “fire to the left”.
When we use the term Thermidor in connection with the Russian Revolution we are using it to describe a process analogous with that which took place after the great French Revolution of 1789. In 1794 power was seized from the radical democratic Jacobins by the most conservative anti-democratic section of the bourgeoisie which proceeded to dismantle those elements of the first French Republic which made it the most thorough going bourgeois democracy in its time.
It marked a shift of power from the democratic and revolutionary to the conservative section of the same class – the bourgeoisie. It was not the transfer of power from one class to another. While the Zinovievites, Bukharinites, and Stalinists all had Thermidorian aspirations in 1923 and 1924, the form and pace of the victory of Thermidor was not determined at that time. Neither was its eventual triumph inevitable.
Alongside the development of Thermidor we do see a partial advance in the strengthening of the mechanisms of planning. By August 1925 Gosplan was able to produce outline control figures which economic departments were to take into account in structuring their own plans. Trotsky greeted these figures as “the glorious music of the rise of socialism.”46 But the majority of the party leaders could not comprehend the potential of the development of these mechanisms as a means of effecting transition.
Bukharinism was committed to a hybridised populist vision of a small proprietor peasant socialism. Neither Stalin nor Zinoviev evinced enthusiasm for the planning machinery and the potential of planning when they were discussed at the 14th Party Congress in December 1925. Only the Left Opposition-and in particular Preobrazhensky and Pyatakov waged an unflinching struggle, at this time, for the planned industrialisation of the USSR as the road to rebuild the proletariat and thus its social and political weight, in concert with the poor and middle peasants.
During 1925 a split occurred in the camp of the Thermidorians between the bureaucratic left centrists and the Stalin/Bukharin bloc. Defending their base in the major workers’ city (Leningrad) and the Comintern against the nationalist peasant line of the “majority”, Zinoviev and Kamenev began a struggle based on formal opposition to “Socialism in One Country” and the policies of concessions to the rich peasants.
It is evidence of the growing grip of the secretariat in the party that the Stalin group were able – after defeating the Leningraders at the 14th Congress in December 1925 – to immediately take the Leningrad organisation into their control through the person of Kirov. Kirov moved in to restore “order” in the party – that is to consolidate Stalinist control over the local party apparatus. In addition Zinoviev was removed as head of the Comintern.
The defeat of the left centrists pushed them in the direction of an alliance with the revolutionary Left Opposition. At a plenum of the Central Committee and Control Commission in June 1926 Zinoviev openly declared to Ordzhonokidze: “Yes, on the question of the deviation and on the question of bureaucratic oppression by the apparatus, Trotsky proved to be right against you.” [that is against the Stalinist Ordzhonokidze – eds]47 In the summer of that year Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev formed the United Opposition to wage what was to be the final, open campaign inside the party for reactivating the struggle for socialism in 1926 and 1927.
What was the balance sheet of transition in the period of the United Opposition campaign? First, social diversification was well developed in the Soviet countryside, giving an enormous bargaining position to the Kulaks. In late 1925 Zinoviev produced figures to show that 12 per cent of peasant farmers were producing 60 per cent of the grain supply.48
The United Opposition platform showed – quoting the Statistical Review – that on 1 April 1926 58 per cent of all the surplus grain in the country was in the hands of 6 per cent of peasant proprietors.49
The obverse of this process was the continued existence of 30 to 40 per cent of horseless and toolless properties.50 The regime had manifestly failed to raise the cultural and material level of the poorer peasants against the richer peasants through the medium of cooperation. By 1929, only one-third of the agricultural population were involved in any form of cooperative movement.51 They remained rudimentary, underfinanced and underdeveloped.
In the sphere of planned industrialisation with a view to developing the material base of socialism, and subordinating the law of value to the rule of conscious planning, the transition was similarly retarded. Gosplan recommended figures for a Five Year Plan to last from 1926-7 to 1930-1. It envisaged only a small growth in capital investment in industry (1,142 million rubles in 1928 and 1,205 million in 1931 – in line with the prevalent Bukharinite orthodoxy of achieving growth through maximising the use of then existing resources. Growth was set at rates between 4 and 9 per cent each year.52
The Soviet regime suffered from the fact that its manufactured goods were too scarce, too badly produced and too expensive (on average 2.5 times world market prices) to encourage the rich peasant to part with his grain. Hence the serious danger of grain strikes and shortages and of increased Kulak pressure to relinquish the state’s monopoly of foreign trade and open up the USSR as a market for imperialist-produced manufactured goods. But the Stalin/Bukharin bloc was proposing a state budget for 1931 of 16 per cent of national income, compared with the pre-war Tsarist budget of 18 per cent of national income.
Wretchedly slow rates of industrial growth were of enormous social and political consequence for the workers’ state. Officially registered unemployment in the USSR stood at 1,478,000 in April 1927.53 Gosplan’s projected Five Year Plan envisaged cutting that total by 400,000! Real wages increased until 1925 but decreased in 1926.
The trade unions were relatively moribund with decisions in the plants being taken by the appointed director and the chief trade union and party officials. The Soviets continued to be lifeless bodies usually subordinated to their executive bodies, meeting rarely for plenary sessions and with the period between elections increased in the mid-1920s. At a time when the working class was once again of pre-war proportions and industrial production was back to its pre-war tempo, only the Left Opposition espoused a programme for reactivating Soviet democracy in the USSR and thus recommencing the battle to construct a state apparatus of a new form.
The process of degeneration and stagnation was evident in the party too. The party underwent a process of deproletarianisation during 1925 and 1926. The 1927 Party Census showed that of those leaving the party in the first half of 1925 60 per cent were manual workers, a figure that reached 77 per cent by 1926.54
The census showed that as of January 1927, 42.8 per cent of party members recorded themselves as office employees, 30.0 per cent as factory and transport workers, 1.5 per cent as hired farm workers and 8.4 per cent as private farming peasants.
Alongside this tendency for the party to remain predominantly an organisation of officials grew a marked tendency to bureaucratisation against the workers’ vanguard within the party.
The campaign against the Opposition signalled a new and decisive phase of the Thermidorean degeneration of the Bolshevik Party. The bureaucrats and pro-Kulak elements in the party, that is the majority of the party, were separated by their privileges and interests from the authentic representatives of the proletarian vanguard. To them the Opposition’s fight for democracy and industrialisation inevitably meant a curtailment of their privileges and restrictions on the Kulaks. They were not prepared to allow that threat to become a reality. They adopted methods of “debate” that opened a period of qualitative degeneration of the Communist Party and laid the basis for Stalin’s later regime of terror.
In the place of the honest debates that were characteristic of Lenin’s party, the Stalin/Bukharin bloc stifled the voice of the Opposition. Articles submitted by Trotsky to the party press were rejected.
The Opposition’s platform was declared to be “illegal information” and the Politburo refused to allow it to be printed. When the Opposition tried to print it themselves the OGPU raided the print shop on 12 October 1927 and the leading Oppositionist, Mrachovsky, who was overseeing its production, was arrested and expelled from the party.
The technique of associating the Opposition with the outside counter-revolutionaries, later to become infamous at the Moscow trials, was initiated. One of the printers of the Opposition platform, it was falsely claimed, was in contact with a former member of the White army, Baron Wrangel, who was in turn in contact with a counter-revolutionary group. This whole story was an OGPU fabrication as even Stalin later admitted.
In addition to slander and bureaucratic repression, the Stalinists introduced into the debate that other barbarous hallmark of theirs – violence against the working class and its vanguard. Evoking anti-semitic sentiments – Zinoviev, Kamenev and Trotsky were all of Jewish origin – Stalin ordered hand-picked gangs of hooligans, rightly denounced as “Black Hundred” gangs by Trotsky, to physically smash up Opposition meetings. When the Opposition took their case to the factories the hooligans followed them, beating up speakers and inciting backward elements amongst the workers to denounce the Opposition and join in the campaign of physical intimidation against them.
After one factory meeting the hooligans left Preobrazhensky beaten almost lifeless at the factory gates. At the same time the Opposition’s public demonstrations were set upon by police squads.
Indeed one crucial development in the debate was the extension of police rule within the party. Lenin’s Extraordinary Commission (the Cheka) had under the direction of the Stalinist Dzerzhinsky been transformed into the OGPU (Unified State Political Administration) in 1923. The extension of the secret police was inevitable in isolated Russia. Sabotage and espionage were real dangers. However this extension was carried through under the direction of a Thermidorian bureaucrat, free from any meaningful workers’ control.
In these circumstances the Thermidorian leadership of the party were able to reverse the role of the secret police. From being a weapon of the state against counter-revolution, the OGPU was transformed into a weapon of the Thermidorians against their opponents within the party. Dzherzhinsky’s Thermidorian project for a police dictatorship over party oppositions was at last being fully implemented on the orders of General Secretary Stalin.
This process of Thermidorian reaction had major implications for the foreign policy of the Soviet State. In 1926 the British Communist Party tailed behind the TUC lefts of the Anglo-Soviet Committee who feted Tomsky and betrayed the General Strike of that year. The Chinese Communist Party was ordered to enter the nationalist Kuomintang as a subordinate partner to Chiang Kai Shek. It was thus disarmed when Chiang ordered a wholesale massacre of Communist Party-led workers in Shanghai on 12 April 1927.
The international friends of “Socialism in One Country” were given full license to betray and slaughter the advanced guard of the world working class. That the Soviet bureaucracy had not freed itself from the threat of armed imperialist intervention was demonstrated in May 1927 when the British Conservative government raided Soviet trading offices in London and broke off diplomatic and trading agreements with the USSR.
On every front the Thermidorian bloc of Stalin and Bukharin was poised to plunge the economy of the USSR into dislocation at the hands of restorationist forces, and to weaken and isolate the USSR in the face of a renewed anti-Soviet war drive. Hence the bitterness and venom with which the Thermidorians moved against the forces of the United Opposition during 1927. The leaders of the Opposition were hounded by the secret police, their supporters threatened with dismissal and reprisal on the grounds that they were fostering disunity in the face of danger. In November 1927 Trotsky and Zinoviev was expelled from the party.
Further expulsions followed at the 15th Party Congress in December. The leading figures were exiled from the major centres of the USSR. In driving out the section of the Old Guard still committed to an internationalist programme for transition the Thermidorian elements in the party had completed their task. With the defeat and expulsion of Trotsky, Preobrazhensky, Antonov-Ovsenko, Piatakov, Zinoviev and many other key figures in the Party’s heroic history, the Russian revolution experienced its own Thermidor. It was carried through by a bloc of the bureaucratic centre and rightist proto-restorationists presiding over a severe national and international crisis within which the Right and Centre could still agree to take joint action to politically expropriate the revolutionary vanguard of the working class.
No sooner had the final triumph of the Thermidorians been consolidated than the Thermidorian alliance began to fall apart. The rock on which this unity foundered was the Kulak anger of which the left had warned in 1926. In the winter of 1927-28, grain sales to the state agencies slumped. The Kulaks hoarded grain, trying to force up prices by starving the cities. From December 1927 through the early months of 1928 the party repeatedly passed resolutions for extraordinary measures against speculators and launched a purge against pro-rich peasant local communist cadres – part of the Bukharin faction’s social base.
The evident danger of Kulak-inspired economic warfare against the Soviet state coincided with renewed imperialist pressure against the Soviet Republic. In 1927 Britain broke off all diplomatic and trading links with the USSR. Bukharin’s policies of conciliating the rich peasants, “snail’s pace” industrialisation and right opportunism in international policy, had all suffered shipwreck. Stalin, an unoriginal man in all respects except as a brutal practitioner of repression, had been totally complicit in these policies. But the Stalin group acted swiftly to place the blame for the Soviet Republic’s crisis on Bukharin’s shoulders.
On 15 February 1928 Pravda published an article by Stalin entitled The Kulaks raise their heads again. Ten thousand urban cadres were dispatched to the countryside to carry out procurements in the style of war communism.
By the spring it was becoming obvious that a clash was brewing between Stalin, Kuibyshev, Molotov, Rudzutak and Voroshilov on the one hand and Bukharin, Rykov, Tomsky on the other with the Stalin group moving towards a total break with NEP on the industrial and agrarian fronts.
With the bureaucracy and for different reasons, alliance of workers, spurred on to defend the workers’ state against its internal and external foes, the Stalin faction turned violently to the left. It committed itself to rapid industrialisation and the end of NEP in the countryside. But this sharp turn in the direction of policies advocated by the Left Opposition carried with it enormous dangers for the Stalin group. An admission of past errors would have immeasurably strengthened the Left. It would have necessitated opening the highest bodies of the state and party to the revolutionary Left Opposition. Such a course was impossible for the Stalinists.
Instead their policies of break-neck industrialisation and collectivisation were carried out by bureaucratic dictat and massive police repression. This required the construction of the bonapartist Stalinist form of state alongside the industrialisation and collectivisation drives. Stalin’s left turn saw the centrist Stalin faction transformed into a bureaucratic caste committed to a political programme of counterrevolutionary Bonapartism.
The defeat of the Right proved relatively easy. They were already disorientated and demoralized by the collapse of the whole world of NEP. The only further step that they could have taken in pursuit of their own political line was to appeal directly to the Kulak, i.e. directly embrace the bourgeois counter-revolution. Since Bukharin, Rykov, Tomsky and the leading Rights were neither subjectively prepared, nor objectively well-placed, to go this far, they were doomed unless the Kulaks and external counter-revolution came to their albi by routing the Stalinist bureaucratic offensive.
As co-authors of Thermidor in the party, freshly implicated in the destruction of proletarian democracy in all these organs and centrally involved in the expulsion and persecution of the left opposition, they dared not and could not appeal to the proletariat inside or outside the party. Thus they surrendered position after position without a fight.
Firstly at the Sixth Comintern Congress held in mid-1928, Bukharin’s Comintern Policy was implicitly criticised and replaced with that of the “Third Period”, an adventurist pseudo-left policy of refusal of the united front “from above”, i.e. with the reformist leaders. In Germany this policy with its “red days” , “battles for the street”, its aping of right-wing nationalism, was eventually to prostrate the strongest party of the Third International under the Nazi jackboot.
By 1930 the Stalin Faction of the Thermidorians had triumphed over all their rivals. Kaganovich, Kirov, Rudzutak, Voroshilov, Molotov, Kuibyshev, Kalinin and Kossiov dominated the commanding heights of the party apparatus, the state bureaucracy, the army and the police. The repression meted out against the Right was, however, much milder than that aimed at the Left Opposition.
In February 1929 Trotsky was deported to Turkey. In March 2,000 Bolshevik-Leninists were arrested and deported to the Siberian isolators. In December 1929 Stalin opened what was to become a “river of blood” between his regime and the Left Opposition. Jakob Blumkin, a prominent Bolshevik since the civil war and an important official in the GPU, visited Trotsky in exile in Istanbul and returned with a political document. On his return he was arrested and shot.
Two other Oppositionists, Silov and Rabinovich, were shot for “sabotage of the railroad system”. From 1929-30 the left Opposition conducted its debates and published its manuscript organs in the isolators of Verkhne-Uralsk, Suzdal and Yaroslavl. The hunger strike was its principal form of struggle against the mounting Stalinist repression. From 1929 to 1932 a smuggled exchange continued between Trotsky in Turkey and the imprisoned Oppositionists. Then the repression severed the links.
Whilst the Bolshevik-Leninists were subjected to the full rigour of the OGPU, Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky retained their seats on the Central Committee and their followers (albeit demoted from positions of command) retained their status as functionaries as well as their party membership.
Bukharin was put in charge of the research department of the Commissariat for Heavy Industry in 1932 and later edited the official government paper Izvestia.
Stalin’s Brumaire was possible only on the basis of the Thermidorean destruction of the party and merely completed its transformation into a party of functionaries.
The weakness of the Bolshevik-Leninist resistance was partly due to the almost complete changeover of party membership since the heroic days of the Bolshevik Party. By 1929 only 8,000 had been members before February 1917 and only 130,000 out of one and a half million had joined before the end of the civil war.55 In these circumstances the overwhelming bulk of the party had known no other regime than that of the Stalinist apparatus.
Helene Carrere D’Encausse has noted that “From 1923 onwards, the field of action of the Police Apparatus extended to the party”.56 The Security Apparatus – renamed GPU in 1922 and OGPU in 1923 – became an instrument of Thermidorean persecution and violence against the Left Opposition.57 The collectivisation and industrialisation drive of the 1930s was accompanied by a massive increase in the role, powers and size of the OGPU. In 1930 Yagoda took over an expanding apparatus with its own network of transportation and labour camps – the GUlAG.58
In D’Encausse’s words, “the most profound change in the status of the police within the political system took place in 1929 with the economic revolution”.59 The Shaknty trial of bourgeois experts in July 1928 (five were executed) marked the onset of terror against “wreckers”.
Whilst some outright sabotage by bourgeois experts was possible, the main purpose was to silence all objections to the Stalinists’ arbitrary and adventurist economic targets and to prevent realistic reports being drawn up. Realistic and accurate reports could have served as a means of holding the Stalin faction to account. Stalin, in 1930, launched a campaign to terrorize and silence any potential source of criticism.
Having defeated the right and left factions of the party, Stalin set out to crush all “neutral” expert elements whose testimony might be raised against him. In April 1929 he announced that Shakhtyites are “now ensconced in every branch of our industry”.60 In 1930, OGPU reported the discovery of an illegal “Toiling Peasant Party” (TKP) under the leadership of the famous economist N.D. Kondratiev. In the Autumn a plot to disrupt the food supplies was “discovered”.
In November and December 1930 the OGPU unearthed a so-called “Industrial Party” (Prompartiia), responsible for “wrecking” in industry and in direct personal collusion with Raymond Poincare, the President of France! In March 1931 the members of a so-called “Union Bureau of the Central Committee of the Menshevik Party” were put on trial. In all these cases the accused confessed to the crimes.
The OGPU and Stalin began to strike at prominent non-factional theoreticians and intellectuals. The economist I.I. Rubin and the director and founder of the Marx-Engels Institute, D.B. Riazanov, were expelled from the party, tried, imprisoned and exiled. In these cases the OGPU utilized the full range of their repressive measures, including endless interrogation, torture and the seizure of relatives as hostages in order to extract confessions.
As leader of a factional clique that absolutely dominated the party and the state apparatus by administrative and repressive means, Stalin himself became the object of an obscene personality cult. The Bonapartists had to embellish and glorify the person of their Bonaparte. On Stalin’s 50th birthday the State Publishing House published a laudatory anthology wherein one could read that Comrade Stalin was Lenin’s “single most reliable aide, who differed from others by never faltering, by always moving hand in hand with Vladimir Ilyich at all the crucial stages of the revolution.”
Historians now had to revise and shamelessly falsify their works. Even long-time opponents of Trotsky, like M.N. Pokrovsky, fell in the wave of persecutions. By 1934 the torrent of glorification had mounted to obscene and ludicrous proportions. Pravda carried in January of that year a two page article by none other than the capitulator Radek which in Medvedev’s words heaped “orgiastic praise on Stalin”.61 “Lenin’s best pupil, the model of the Leninist party, bone of its bone, blood of its blood...as far sighted as Lenin.”
With this article the river of adulation burst its banks. The cult of the “all-seeing, all-knowing, wise, father of the peoples” Stalin put even the glorification of Hitler into the shade.
It was between 1927 and 1930 that all the essential elements of the Stalinist system were assembled in their own particular Bonapartist form. The events of 1927 to 1930 saw the establishment of a Bonapartist regime on the ruins of Lenin’s party, the soviet structures of the workers’ state and the ruins of the Thermidorean party.
The state of the mid-1920 Stalin’s “Eighteenth Brumaire”, like its preceding “Ninth Thermidor” was not a single act.62 It was carried out not by an insurrectionary coup d’etat, but by a series of blows that, having already definitively driven the revolutionary communist vanguard out of the party, drove the rightist wing of the Thermidoreans out of the leadership and subjected the entire Thermidorean bureaucracy to a one-man dictatorship. That dictatorship rested, of necessity, on a dramatically increased police apparatus able to intervene within the party.
The collectivisation of agriculture
As we have seen, the Stalin group had co-existed with the restorationist wing of the party tolerating the growth of Kulak farming, low industrial growth targets and ineffective planning machinery. At this stage in its development it was defined as a political tendency by its commitment to holding political power within the isolated Russian state on a programme of politically expropriating the most consciously revolutionary layers of the working class.
But it differed from the right in that in certain exceptional circumstances, should its political grip on the Soviet state be threatened, it was capable of bureaucratically moving against private property and of developing and extending a form of economic planning in conflict with the operation of the law of value. Its interest in developing forms of planning flowed from its need to hold on to the political power it had usurped, not from a commitment to socialism.
During 1927 the Soviet state faced difficulties in procuring grain from the peasants to the same level that it had achieved in 1926.63 Similar problems faced the state procurement agencies in 1928. The Thermidoreans were reaping the bitter fruits of under industrialisation and concessions to the Kulak. The centrist Stalin group made its decisive turn against the Bukharin wing and against the policies of late N EP. The prerequisite of the Stalin group being able to make that left turn was that the revolutionary left had been decisively ousted from power.
In December 1927 local Communist Party organisations were ordered, with little success, to step up their efforts to procure grain. At the same time Stalin was still declaring, “The way out is to unite the small and dwarf peasant farms gradually but surely, not by pressure but by example and persuasion, into large farms based on common, co-operative cultivation of the land.”64 The draft five year plan accepted in 1928 contained 15 per cent as an optimal target for collectivisation of agriculture in its duration.
Forcible collections of grain were carried out under the guidance of key Stalinists – Stalin himself, Zhdanov, Kossior and Mikoyan – during January and March 1928. The inevitable response of the peasants was to cut back on their sowings of wheat and rye in 1928. Either the Stalinists could face a threat to their political power by conceding to the private farmers by raising prices and importing cheap consumer goods from the West or they could move to break the hold of private property in the countryside.
It was in order to preserve their bureaucratic power, rather than because of any long-term plans for collectivising agriculture or expected immediate beneficial results in the agricultural sector, that the Stalinists decided to collectivise Soviet agriculture. The material base of the Soviet economy was hopelessly ill-prepared to provide the required resources to supply collectivised agriculture with the facilities needed to make it capable of achieving qualitatively higher yields.
In 1928 the USSR possessed only 27,000 tractors compared with the 200,000 it needed.65 The collectivisation of agriculture was undertaken without any formal discussion or decision making in an official party body. It was the work of the triumphant Stalin faction and a measure of their grip over the party at this time.
On 7 November 1929 the press carried an article by Stalin in which he hailed the “spontaneous turn of the broadest mass of poor and middle-peasant households towards collective forms of agriculture.” In December Stalin launched a campaign for the liquidation of the Kulaks “as a class” which was underwritten by a decree of 5 January 1930 proclaiming the State’s commitment to “total collectivisation.”
Within seven weeks of the decree over 50 per cent of the Soviet peasantry were members of rudimentary and ramshackle collectives. Active resistance automatically led to protesting peasants receiving the designation “Kulak” from the party organs. By July 1930 320,000 Kulak families had been expropriated and deported – a number that far exceeded the number of Kulaks claimed by Stalinist statisticians on the eve of collectivisation.
Collective farm membership figures for 1930 show quite how spurious were the Stalinists’ claims that collectivisation represented a spontaneous movement of the mass of the peasantry. A brief hint of relaxation from Stalin in a March 1930 Pravda article entitled “Dizzy with Success” precipitated a dramatic exodus from the collective farms. By early March 1930 58 per cent of the Soviet peasantry were enrolled in collectives. That figure had dropped to 23 per cent by June! In the highly fertile Central Black Earth Region membership dropped from 81.8 per cent to 15.7 per cent over the same period.
The uprooted peasantry found no resources or equipment in the new collectives. Neither the tempo of industrial development throughout the 1920s nor the targets of the First Five Year Plan made it possible for collectivisation to do other than simply generalise the want, squalor and backwardness of Russian agriculture. Peasant resistance to this process took on the character of a civil war. To the extent that the peasants were incapable of resisting collectivisation they slaughtered their own livestock as their sole means of thwarting the agencies of the central state. This is evidenced by the dramatic drop in Soviet livestock between 1929 and 1934.
In those years the number of horses and pigs declined by 55 per cent, of cattle by 40 per cent and sheep by 66 per cent. While 1930 was blessed with a good harvest, agricultural output dropped considerably in the first years of collectivisation. In 1932 cereal production was 25 per cent down on the average NEP years and famine re-appeared in the Soviet countryside on a horrific scale.
Faced with this resistance and the disastrous effects of collectivisation on agricultural production, the Stalinists did order a temporary retreat in 1930. But the collectivisation drive was resumed in 1931 as the means by which the Stalinists took a tight grip on the productive forces of Soviet agriculture.
They were prepared to retard the productive capacity of the Soviet countryside in order to achieve this desired effect for the Bonapartist regime. By 1932, 61.5 per cent of cultivated land was collectivised; there were 211,100 cooperative farms (Kholkhozes) and 4,337 State farms (Sovkhozes).66
While the Kholkhozes were formally established as co-operatives the local party organs appointed their secretaries and leading committees. In 1935 the Kholkhoz system received a definitive form. Agricultural machinery, agronomists, mechanics, educational, veterinary and training personnel were all to be concentrated in state machine tractor stations (MTS). Party and Security (NK VD) supervision of the countryside was also to be based in the MTS.
The Kholkhozes, in their turn, were to hire machinery and expertise from the local MTS. In this way a definite layer of privileged MTS workers was crystallised in the countryside alongside the perfection of an apparatus of repression and scrutiny over the mass of the peasantry.
Peasant income was made dependent on the income of the Kholkhoz after the state had purchased its crops and collected its tax tribute from the Kholkhoz. In 1935 the average household earned 247 rubles a year for Kholkhoz work – the cost of a pair of shoes! In addition the peasants were now to be allowed a small plot of no more than half a hectare from which the mass of the soviet peasantry gleaned the essentials of their miserable life.
The reintroduction of an internal passport system for the Kholkhozniki in 1933 effectively tied the peasants to the Kholkhoz. A law of 17 March 1933 stipulated that a peasant could not leave his Kholkhoz without a contract from an employing enterprise that had received the sanction of the Kholkhoz management.
The Soviet peasantry therefore experienced collectivisation as the loss of their “gains of October.” The Bonapartist bureaucracy had preserved its political power and material privileges by destroying the petty-commodity production base of the Kulak and the NEPman. In this way the ability of the peasantry to challenge the political rule of the bureaucracy through a grain strike was effectively destroyed.
But the result was not only the agricultural stagnation and inefficiency which haunts the Soviet bureaucracy to this day. It also created a sullen and rebellious peasantry held down by savage repression. The Stalinist victory over the peasantry created an enormous explosive charge in the very foundations of the workers’ state and necessitated a huge apparatus of repression – including the slave labour camps which grew alongside collectivisation – to keep the peasantry in the collective farms.
Bonapartism and industrialization
The left turn of the Stalinists in 1928 also marked the beginning of their drive to industrialise the economy of the Soviet Union. Throughout the period of the First Five Year Plans, up to the outbreak of war with Germany, the Stalin faction grappled with the problem of consolidating and extending their political control of Soviet society at the same time as they attempted to build a modern industrial economy.
At all times their guiding objective was to retain their political power and privileges and only in this context can the zigs and zags of their economic policies be understood. Like all non-revolutionary forces their policies were empirically determined as they searched for a way both to prevent the re-assertion of proletarian control over the soviet state, and to fend off the attacks of imperialism.
As such it was this period which was to provide Stalinism with its formative experience and furnish it with its characteristic methods and politics. The defining feature of Stalinist state power, the attempt to create a bureaucratically planned economy on the basis both of the destruction of capitalist property relations and the political expropriation of the proletariat, took shape in the period of the first two Five Year Plans.
As with all other situations where Stalinists were later to expropriate private capital and organise production on the basis of centralised planning, decisive measures against the remaining power of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie were only taken after the revolutionary leadership of the working class had been politically expropriated.
Up to that moment Stalinism sided with the Rightist pro-capitalist forces against the working class until it could guarantee that the working class did not have the resources to create organs of a healthy revolutionary workers’ state. However in order to defend its own privileges and political power it moved to defend and extend non-capitalist property relations but in a manner that ensured, and extended, the destruction of the remaining rights of the toilers themselves.
While opposed to the Marxist programme for the planned construction of socialism in the aftermath of destroying the bourgeoisie, Stalinism can expropriate bourgeois property and create planning mechanisms for its own non-socialist purposes.
As a bureaucratically controlled overturn of capitalist property relations, the First Five Year Plan and collectivisation drive pre-figured the post-second world war overturns in all its essential features save that the first workers’ state had as its direct origin the proletarian insurrection of October and the expropriations and nationalisations of 1918.
A politically degenerate a regime such as that represented by Stalinism standing on post-capitalist property forms must possess a highly contradictory character. The property relations, the potential of plannification itself, are stifled and distorted. The fact that the property relations of the USSR remained post-capitalist and that economic policy was the result of central planning, not the working of the law of value, did not mean that this statified property in the USSR had a socialist character.
In the hands of the Stalinist bureaucracy the statified economy was not being utilised to construct a society implementing a programme of socialist construction – a programme directed to the withering away of inequality and of the state itself. The bureaucracy’s means of administering the planned economy, and the goals they set for it, flowed from their interest in maintaining their rule and privileges. The massive cost of the repressive state machine built up to protect the bureaucracy constituted, in and of itself, an enormous burden on the property relations of the USSR.
The Stalinist form of planning is only possible after the proletariat has been politically expropriated. This means that the self-activity and democratic initiative of the toilers themselves – the very force that is indispensable to planning and developing the productive forces on the road to socialist construction – cannot be harnessed by the bureaucracy. Because the Stalinists deny the masses all political rights, they must also deny them access to the decision-making machinery of the central plan. In that the plan guarantees the privileges of the bureaucracy it must, in concealing these privileges, shroud the workings of the plan in a veil of secrecy.
As the bureaucracy denies the masses’ elementary rights and material needs so the toilers conceal the real workings of the economy from their bureaucratic overlords. Low labour productivity, high absenteeism and labour turnover are evidence of this. At each and every stage in the bargaining process that precedes agreements on plan targets, the bureaucrats and managers themselves conceal their real productive potential from their superiors in order to gain maximum leeway from the central state apparatus. These aspects of the bureaucratic plan were all in evidence in the First Five Year Plans.
They have been present in every plan since. Their cumulative effect is to periodically slow down growth rates, disrupt the economy, create shortages and throw the economy into crisis. Enthusiasm of the masses, evoked by promises of socialism, recedes as does the possibility of socialism or even of real and lasting economic improvement. The bureaucratic plan extends its potential as it increases inequality and fosters disproportionality in the economy. It cannot achieve sustained qualitative growth in the economy.
That is, while it has been able to modernise the USSR by copying capitalism’s highest achievements, it has not, in a rounded and developed way, ever been able to outstrip the economic achievements of the major imperialist powers.
Within the Stalinist regime, planning is necessarily crude and blind. The existence of that regime based on bureaucratic power means that the transition to socialism in the USSR is blocked. Although post-capitalist property forms remain in existence the Stalinist regime from its inception prevents them being consciously developed as a means of implementing the programme of revolutionary Marxism.
Many attempts have been made to challenge the Trotskyist characterisation of the property relations upon which the Soviet state is based. There certainly has been no shortage of pedantic intellectuals who use the published evidence of the non-fulfilment of plan targets as verification of their own heavily ground academic axe that the Soviet economy is planless – and has always been so.
The journal Critique invests its credibility, and that of its lead editor Hillel Ticktin, in this thesis. After rummaging in the academic bargain basement for what regularly passes as new ideas freed from the “stale orthodoxy” of the past, the leadership of the British Revolutionary Communist Party have decided they can plug a gap in their own theoretical dyke by opting to attempt to convince us of this same sophistry.
Seizing on the evident expansion of producer goods production at the expense of consumer goods and fortified by the manifest deterioration in the living standards of the working class, the founder of the British Socialist Workers Party Tony Cliff has deduced that the inauguration of the First Five Year Plan, taken in conjunction with the collectivisation of agriculture, signifies the re-introduction of capitalism – albeit in a bureaucratic state capitalist form – in the USSR.67
Other analysts purporting to stand in the Trotskyist tradition – notably Ernest Mandel – have sought to prove the non-capitalist nature of the property relations extended and fortified by Stalinism by reference simply to their statistically evident growth in comparison with world capitalism.68
None of these schools begin to tackle the fundamental problems presented to Marxists in defining the property relations presided over by Stalinism in the USSR. Whether non-capitalist property relations exist in the USSR depends on whether the fundamental law of capitalist production the law of value – determines the nature of production, remuneration and exchange in the USSR.
Even the healthiest of workers’ states, would – in a situation of blockade and encirclement – be forced to subordinate the consumption of the masses to the production of producer goods to survive in the face of imperialism. Whether the economy is planned or not depends on whether the fundamental laws of capitalist production have been subordinated as the principal laws governing production by a system of rules emanating from the centralised decision-making apparatus of the USSR. It flows from the fact of the political expropriation of the working class in the USSR that the norms of planning in the USSR will not conform to those for which revolutionary Marxists fight. However, the non-existence of the norms of socialist planning is not sufficient evidence to deduce the non-existence of planning per se in the USSR.
It is impossible to talk of Soviet planning as if the outcome of every productive operation was, or is, simply the execution of the will of the central planning bureaucracy. The periods of fastest growth have been during the First Five Year Plan and in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War.
In both cases relatively primitive tasks of construction and reconstruction had to be fulfilled, growth took place primarily in the producer goods sector and the bureaucracy could rely on a significant degree of enthusiasm and self-sacrifice from large sections of the working masses.
However, in general – for example at the end of the First Five Year Plan and increasingly in the post-war period – the Stalinist bureaucracy has desperately searched in vain for rational methods of administering the plan, of co-ordinating its various branches and measuring needs and output.
Under the capitalist system of production these decisions are taken by the laws of the market itself. In a healthy workers’ state they are the result of the conscious rule of the toilers themselves deciding on their tasks and needs in order to establish a socialist order.
Neither the anarchic laws of capitalism nor the rules of transition are determinant in the USSR. The historically illegitimate bureaucracy has to attempt to make order out of property relations that historically only has validity as the means by which the working class constructs socialism. Hence the particular gross absurdities, irrationalities and failures of Soviet planning.
The Stalinist model of planning
The Stalinists sought to expand their industrial base through a drive to both increase the USSR’s heavy industrial base and to extend the operation of centralised production planning in every major sphere of Soviet industrial production. Planning was, therefore, a vital means for asserting and maintaining the hold of the Stalinists over Soviet society as a whole. The Stalin group proceeded, at first, to revise the plan targets upwards in a particularly adventurist fashion and then to call, in December 1929, for the completion of the Five Year Plan in four years.
The target growth rate for 1931 was to be nearly double that originally intended. Over the four and a quarter years from October 1928 to December 1932 actual investment in heavy industry nearly doubled the original estimates. The Stalinists, breaking with the Right, attempted to establish a dynamic industrial economy through centralised planning.
It is necessary to understand the term “planning” as it can be applied to this stage of the development of the Soviet economy. At least in the early years of the First Five Year plan the targets were arbitrary to a large extent and played an exhortative rather than an immediately prescriptive role.
For example the maximum variant of the First Five Year Plan called for a quadrupling of investment in state industry, an 85 per cent in consumption expenditure, a 70 per cent increase in real wages and a 30 per cent increase in peasant incomes!69
In the realm of consumption expenditure, real wages and peasant incomes in reality bore no resemblance to these figures by the end of the First Five Year Plan.
The results of the first major round of Stalinist planning were uneven. For reasons we have already discussed agricultural production fell far short of planned targets. Similarly the production of consumer goods failed to reach planned targets. Even bourgeois commentators, however, are forced to accept that the production of producer goods increased considerably and on a scale beyond that envisaged by the plan formulators. Alongside this there were significant advances in the construction of an operative apparatus of planning in the USSR. A balance sheet of the achievements and short comings of the First Five Plan can be drawn from the following table:
1927-28 1932 Plan Target 1932 Actual
Producer goods 6.0 18.1 23.1
[in millions of rubles]
Consumer Goods 12.3 25.1 20.2 (70)
Agricultural Production 13.1 25.8 16.6
(Source: A. Nove: An Economic History of the USSR p191)
Stalinist planning did achieve notable successes during the First Five Plan period. Achievements were recorded primarily in the sphere of heavy industry, which received 80 per cent of total investments. Some 1,500 new factories were built with metal plants being established at Magnitogorsk, Kusnetsk, Zaporozhe. A new coalfield was built in Kazakhstan. The biggest hydro-electric station in Europe was built on the Dneiper. At a time when world capitalism was reeling under the effects of severe recession the First Five Year Plan increased Soviet production by 250 per cent. In the heavy industrial sphere this momentum was continued, albeit at a slightly slower pace, in the Second Five Year Plan. As a result coal and pig iron production increased five fold between 1928 and 1940, steel fourfold, and chemical production tenfold.
But to what extent can these achievements be attributed to planning? The drafting of plans was the joint responsibility of the party and government with the State Planning Commission – Gosplan. They were responsible for drawing up both a prospective plan for the Five Year period and a series of current plans which, initially, took the form of annual control figures. In 1931 an annual plan was produced for the first time and thereafter yearly. During the 1930s mechanisms were developed with a view to both maintaining an account of what was being produced and a material balance between quantities produced by various branches of industry.
It was not until the very late 1930s that the planning mechanisms were sufficiently well developed to draw up a general balance of the economy of the USSR as a whole. During the Second World War (1939-45) Gosplan was resorting to monthly plans as its means of organising and directing production. The execution of plans was the responsibility of the various Commissariats and other economic authorities under the Supreme Economic Council.
Targets were set in quantitative terms and, in the sphere of heavy industry, were generally fulfilled in the period of the First Five Year Plan. The Stalinist system showed that it could use the potential of a centralised planned economy to direct resources to the front of heavy industry. Figures for consumer goods production demonstrate the bureaucracy’s ability to ensure that available resources were primarily made available to its priority projects.
But quantitative successes should not blind us to the qualitative failures of Stalinist planning during this early period. Alongside the Stalinists’ adventurist upping of all plan targets, productivity was due to rise by 42.1 per cent in 1931 but rose by 20.5 per cent. Production costs in that year rose by 6 per cent rather than a planned 8 per cent reduction.
By the admission of the Stalinists themselves the quality of goods produced deteriorated during the First Five Year Plan. Hence Molotov could declare on January 1933, “In the course of the Second Five Year Plan we must focus our efforts not on the quantitative growth of production but on improving the quality of production and on the growth of labour productivity in industry”.72
Periodic breakdown of planning occurred particularly in the light industrial sector. Textile production, for example, fell in certain years of the First Five Year Plan.73 Rakovsky showed that for light industry during May and June 1931 “the plan was little more than 50 per cent fulfilled”.74
The Stalinist planners faced mounting problems both of maintaining proportional balance between the various sectors of the economy and in devising rational means of measuring production, needs and the rate of exchange between goods. These were not simply problems of the consumer goods sector. 16,000 kilometres of new railways were planned for the First Five Year Plan period – the materials were only made available to build 5,500 kms.
Bureaucratic planning, as the plan proceeded, faced mounting problems of distributing’ produced goods to the institutions most in need of them. In 1932 and 1933 the planning mechanisms came under considerable strain and disorganisation. The adventurist targets of the Stalinists were only an additional contributory factor rather than the root cause of the disorganisation of the Soviet economy by the end of the First Five Year Plan.
Consistent with the reactionary programme of Socialism in One Country the Stalinists aspired to the building of an autarchic planned economy separated from the operations of the world capitalist economy. In a manner that prefigures the projects of Pol Pot and Leng Sary, Stalinist planners theorised a transition to communism in the USSR through the achievement of complete autarchy and the utilisation of the USSR’s own resources.
But as Trotsky had warned in Towards Capitalism or Socialism in 1925, this attempt to create a planned economy in isolation proved a utopia. Despite the enormous resources of the USSR both the workings of the world market and imperialism’s hostile designs against the USSR periodically and inevitably disrupted the Stalinists’ goal of establishing an autarchic planned economy.
During the First Five Year Plan, for example, declining world prices for raw materials occasioned by world capitalism’s recession, obliged the Soviet planners to export more raw materials in order to purchase machinery and import less, for example, cotton and wool than had been planned.
The targets and priorities of the Second Five Year Plan were to be severely disrupted by the increasing obligation on the Soviet planners to prepare the military defence of the USSR.
Having attempted to send the mechanisms of the market “to the devil” the Stalinists faced insurmountable problems in devising rational pricing mechanisms within their economy. In 1930 and 1931 Soviet economists were again heard to rationalise the pricing chaos in the USSR as a symptom of the withering away of money!
Bread rationing was re-introduced in 1929 and was extended to most other manufactured consumer goods during 1930. In addition the same commodity could be purchased at five different prices: commercial prices in special restricted access shops for luxuries; open model stores with prices above “commercial” prices; special shops in workers’ districts that in theory sold goods at between commercial and ration prices; Torgsin stores selling in exchange for precious metals and foreign currency; and “free prices” on the private and black market.
Prices paid by the state to the Kholkhoz were planned on the basis of the state’s revenue requirements not determined on the basis of the law of value. For example, in the mid 1930s the peasants were paid 5.70 rubles for a centre of rye by state provincial agencies which sold it to state flour mills at 22.20 rubles a centre. The pricing mechanisms made possible a large revenue to the central state in the form of the “turnover” tax.
Failure to raise labour productivity in line with plan targets posed major problems to the Stalinists as to how the industrialisation was to be financed. The heavy taxation tribute extracted from the peasantry provided half the turnover tax yield to the state budget in 1935.75 But increasingly during the First Five Year Plan new investments were funded from the massive and inflationary expansion of the supply of printed money. In 1928 1.7 milliard rubles were in circulation – the figure reached 8.4 milliard by 1933.
As the Left Opposition tirelessly pointed out this inflationary spiral made it all the more impossible for the Soviet planners to measure, compare and judge achievement in the Soviet economy. The Stalinist bureaucracy did not have its own alternative rational measuring criteria with which to replace those of the law of value.
These contradictions within the Stalinist system took on an increasingly dramatic form in the last period of the First Five Year Plan occasioning a serious crisis in the planning system in 1932 and 1933. There were serious shortfalls in target achievement for electricity, pig iron, coal and oil in 1932. Steel production which had over-fulfilled its 1928-9 target figure was below the 1930 level in 1932 and the 1933 target was set at 7 per cent below the 1931 target.
Steel production suffered from a major failure to put new facilities into operation. In 1933 there was a 14 per cent drop in investment. In addition to the famine that struck the Soviet countryside that year there was a serious transport crisis and gross industrial production, which had been rising at 20 per cent per annum, rose by only 5 per cent.
The Soviet crisis of 1932 and 1933 had its roots not in the operation of the law of value on an internal or international scale. It was a crisis of a system based on consciously challenging the laws and dictates of market mechanisms by a Bonapartist bureaucracy which could not develop and sustain a planned and balanced growth of the productive forces at its disposal. It represented a crisis of Stalinist planning in a form that pre-figures the crises of proportionality and stagnation that have regularly interrupted the development of bureaucratic planned economies.
The very existence of this form of crisis was predicted and analysed by Trotsky in his writings on the Soviet economy. Writing in 1931 in Problems of Development of the USSR Trotsky evidenced the tendency to crisis that lurked behind the facade of success:
“the industrial successes of recent years in themselves do not at all assure an uninterrupted growth in the future. Precisely the speed of industrial development accumulates disproportions, partly inherited from the past, partly growing out of the complications of the new tasks, partly created by the methodological mistakes of the leadership in combination with direct sabotage.”77
He envisaged the principal elements of the form that the crisis of bureaucratic planning would take:
“the substitution of economic direction by administrative goading, with the absence of any serious collective verification, leads inevitably to the inclusion of mistakes in the very foundation of the economy and to the preparation of ‘tight places’ inside the economic process. The disproportions driven inward inevitably remain at the following stage in the form of disharmony between the means of production and raw materials, between transport and industry, between quantity and quality and finally in the disorganisation of the monetary system.”78
He developed this method of analysis with greater clarity during 1932:
“The whole trouble is that the wild leaps in industrialisation have brought the various elements of the plan into dire contradiction with each other. The trouble is that the economy functions without material reserves and without calculation.
The trouble is that the social and political instruments for the determination and effectiveness of the plan have been broken or mangled. The trouble is that the accrued disproportions threaten more and greater surprises. The trouble is that the uncontrolled bureaucracy has tied up its prestige with the subsequent accumulation of errors. The trouble is that a crisis is impending with a chain of consequences such as the enforced shutting down of factories and unemployment.”79
There was definitely a tendency for the Left Opposition in the early 1930s to envisage a complete collapse of the planning machinery and Stalin’s industrialisation project. Rakovsky’s The Five Year Plan in Crisis written in 1936 is built on a perspective of impending collapse drawn from a sharp and clear analysis of the tendency towards crisis. As the Critique editorial board gleefully points out, Rakovsky and the Mensheviks envisaged a developing and progressive “planlessness” in the Soviet economy. A similar telescoped perspective can also be found in some of Trotsky’s writings on the economy of the USSR in the early 1930s:
“In the sphere of money inflation, as in that of bureaucratic despotism, is summed up all the falseness of the policy of centrism in the field of the Soviet economy as well as in the field of the international proletarian movement. The Stalinist system is exhausted to the end and is doomed. Its break up is approaching with the same inevitability with which the victory of fascism approached in Germany.”80
Reality was, however, to show these perspectives to be too starkly drawn. History allows us, with Trotsky, to recognise that the planned property form did survive the 1932-3 crisis only for the general tendencies towards crisis that we have discussed to re-occur at the latter end of the Second Five Year Plan.
In the face of crisis the Stalinists dramatically re-drafted their plan targets during 1933. The plan targets for 1934-6 were relatively well fulfilled. In steel production, for example, 35 per cent, 22 per cent and 28 per cent of targets were met and marginally over fulfilled.81 In 1936 cotton cloth production rose 22.3 per cent over its 1935 level.
Again it would be difficult to attribute the relatively stable expansion of the USSR’s productive forces in this period either to the operation of the law of value or to the work of “planlessness”. While the tendency towards planlessness was always part of the Left Opposition’s theory of the roots of crisis, they never attempted to characterise the system as permanently “planless”. Neither can one seriously begin to explain the relatively stable mid-1950s in the Soviet economy without recognising the existence of and strengthening of, planning mechanisms during this period.
In 1935 the most rounded and even fulfilment of plan targets was achieved. That year also saw the planning agencies relatively free from the adventurist pressure of the Stalinists, chastened by the 1932-3 crisis. To this extent it was a period where the planning mechanisms had the greatest opportunity to prove their real potential. In this year quantitative growth targets were fulfilled, for the first time, by every all-union Commissariat. Labour productivity in heavy industry actually rose more than its planned target. 1936 was even more satisfactory than 1935 in most regards.
How then do we explain this relative success? Firstly it demonstrates the superiority of, and potential of, planned production itself. It pays tribute to the potential of the socialist organisation of production. This was recognised by Trotsky in 1936:
“With the bourgeois economists we have no longer anything to quarrel over. Socialism has demonstrated its right to victory, not on the pages of Das Kapital, but in an industrial arena comprising a sixth of the earth’s surface, not in the language of dialectics, but in the language of steel, cement and electricity.”82
On the basis of material experience, Trotsky’s estimate of the achievements of Soviet planning – but not of its deformations and tendency to breakdown – had been developed in the light of previously unobtainable experience. This has led the supporters of Critique to “accuse” Trotsky of changing his position in the mid- 1930s and breaking with the “correct” perspective that he and Rakovsky held to in the early 1930s.83
They are right to suggest that Trotsky modified his estimate of the achievements of Soviet planning. But it was Trotsky who was correct to modify his view of plannification in the USSR on the basis of learning from the unique and concrete experience of the USSR in the 1930s. Revolutionary perspectives are of necessity tentative and in permanent need of being tested and re-assessed. Academics can afford the luxury of orthodoxy and of “never changing their position” whatever may happen in the material world.
Unless revolutionary Marxist perspectives are permanently tested and re-assessed on the basis of living experience the door is open to dogmatism, to schematism and the collapse of the revolutionary programme as an instrument of intervention. .
An explanation of the relatively stable mid-1930s period must also base itself upon an understanding of the operation of other contributory factors. A number of the major projects of the First Five Year Plan – including Magnitogorsk – only became fully operational during this period. The proportion of machinery imported from the West declined during this period as a result of the achievements of the First Five Year Plan.
A relaxation of rationing was accompanied by an increase in Labour productivity which continued through to 1937. Again it was the achievements of planning and not the operation of the laws of capitalism or the lawlessness of the USSR as viewed through the eyes of the Critique editorial board that explains this relative stability.
The last year of the Second Five Year Plan in 1937 experienced the onset of significant disequilibrium and stagnation. Steel production rose by only 4 per cent compared with 28 per cent in the previous year.84
It grew by only 2 per cent in 1938 and fell by 4 per cent in 1939. The effects of the disastrously bad harvest of 1936 were felt throughout the USSR in 1937. The Third Five Year Plan – prepared in 1937-8, inaugurated in 1938 and ratified at the 1939 18th Party Congress – was in the process of being fulfilled only in an extremely uneven and unsatisfactory manner at the time of Hitler’s invasion of the USSR in 1941. Sugar production declined, oil production was stagnant leading to a serious fuel shortage alongside the miserable performance of the steel industry.
How do we explain this second major crisis of planning in the USSR? Once again we are confronted with the major features of mounting disproportionality and developing stagnation towards the end of a planning period. Again the planning mechanisms were failing to sustain balanced growth and target figures were becoming increasingly fictional. With trade with the West diminishing and the market effectively subordinated within the USSR the root of this crisis cannot be found primarily in the effects of the spontaneous operation of the law of value. However we are once again faced with a tendency for the planning processes of Stalinism to break down.
Contingent and particular factors can be advanced as an explanation of the stagnation of the Soviet economy in the later 1930s. The period saw the dramatic re-organisation of Soviet production to meet the mounting war threat presented by imperialism. While defence expenditure as a percentage total of the Soviet budget stood at only 3.4 per cent in 1933, it grew to 11.1 per cent in 1935, 16.1 per cent in 1936 and 25.6 per cent in 1939.85 This had the effect of forcing the operative planning agencies to divert investment and goods earmarked for consumer good production into prioritised heavy industry and military projects.
This has been adduced by Cliffite theorists of “State Capitalism” as evidence of the existence of a Permanent Arms Economy which propelled the USSR to become locked into ever larger rounds of arms production in order to produce “use values” to survive successive rounds of arms-based competition between state capitalist Russia and the West.
But this arms production was organised by the Soviet bureaucracy – by its own methods – as a means of defending the planned economy of the USSR (and the privileges of the bureaucracy that depended on it) against the designs of German and Japanese imperialism to turn the USSR into a semi colony once again. Even the healthiest of workers’ states would act far more decisively to this end than did the Stalinist bureaucracy that placed its hopes for defence on alliance with one, or another, of the camps of imperialism.
The purges of the mid-30s had a devastating effect on the personnel and morale of the planning apparatus. Similarly relative success in the field of planning saw the recrudescence of the adventurist, arbitrary and bogus norms of Stalinist planning. Increases in labour productivity encouraged the Stalinists to inaugurate a major drive to storm production targets. This was the context of the Stakhanov movement launched in August 1935.
In August 1935 Stakhanov bust his work norm by mining 102 tons of coal in six hours. He did so with the help of a handpicked team and special training and provisions. His “achievement” was, however, to set the pace for Soviet labour in the next period. In October 1935 Makar Lashtoba fulfilled his work norm by 2,274 per cent when he mined 311 tons of coal in one day!
At the first all-union conference of Stakhanovites the ex-Oppositionist Pyatakov gave voice to the crude adventurism of the Stalinists when he declared:
“We will smash the devil himself and attain unheard of production results of which no one has ever dreamed....One must simply shout ‘the devil take it’”86
Competing for favour from the central planning agencies, local management showed a definite tendency in. this period to keep their acclaimed Stakhanovites fully supplied while shortages and bottlenecks kept the majority of the workforce idle. In its own peculiar way the Stakhanovite movement testified to the inability of the Stalinists to genuinely mobilise the working class to utilise the “gains of October” and the inability of the Stalinist bureaucracy to effect rational and long term methods to raise the productivity of labour.
But separated from these contingent factors the crisis of the late 1930s stands as evidence of the fundamental contradictions that are to be found at the heart of planning under Stalinist bureaucracies.
The planned economy as “state capitalism”
It is not possible within the confines of the present work to deal with all aspects of Tony Cliff’s analysis of the Soviet Union as a bureaucratic state capitalism. It is necessary, however, to point up the inadequacies of his fundamental thesis concerning the creation of Russian “state capitalism” and to draw out the most important political ramifications of his method.
Cliff interprets the creation of the bureaucratically planned economy of the USSR as a social counter-revolution that inaugurated bureaucratic state capitalism in the USSR. In this analysis the newly emerged ruling bureaucracy is seen as having been transformed into a collective capitalist by virtue of the fact that it undertook the “bourgeois” task of accumulation. In his attempt to make this theory stick, Cliff has to falsify both the realities of the Soviet economy in the 1930s and, indeed, the Marxist definition of capitalism itself.
Cliff wishes to prove that, at the same time as the working class lost political power, the bureaucracy which replaced it was in the process of developing into a capitalist class because of the economic measures that it was forced to take. Therefore, alongside data establishing the fact that the proletariat lost all semblance of control, direct or indirect, we find in Russia – A Marxist Analysis a constant emphasis on the parallels between the tasks the bureaucracy undertook and those undertaken by the nascent bourgeoisie.
For Cliff the significance of this lies in the fact that, “Under capitalism the consumption of the masses is subordinated to accumulation.” 87 He has no difficulty in presenting figures to show that the First Five Year Plan witnessed a significant change in priority from consumption to accumulation. Within the use to which Cliff puts these figures (which are not themselves in dispute) lies a most important element of Cliff’s method – the use of the syllogism: under the First Five Year Plan consumption was subordinated to accumulation; under capitalism consumption is subordinated to accumulation; ergo, the First Five Year Plan was capitalism!
The syllogistic method of formal logic is no substitute for dialectics in the analysis of social phenomena. Being formal it ignores the content of such phenomena, i.e. the class content. This is the tell-tale weakness of Cliff’s analysis.
The accumulation of the bourgeoisie is the accumulation of capital which can, of course, be expressed in the accumulation of the means of production such as factories, railways and power stations. However, whether such things are capital in any given circumstances is not determined by the mere fact that they are accumulated. Indeed, this point was one of the first advances made by Marx in his analysis of capitalism. In Wage Labour and Capital, for example, he argued:
“Capital consists not only of means of subsistence, instruments of labour and raw materials, not only of material products; it consists just as much of exchange values. All the products of which it consists are commodities. Capital is, therefore, not only a sum of material products; it is a sum of commodities, of exchange values, of social magnitudes.”88
He further argued that:
“Capital does not consist in accumulated labour serving living labour as a means for new production. It consists in living labour serving accumulated labour as a means of maintaining and multi plying the exchange value of the later.”89
The accumulation of the means of production in the Soviet Union in no way squared with this definition of capital. Neither the factories, mines, power stations and machinery nor the products made with them were commodities, they were not produced for eventual sale on the market. They were not built in order to, “multiply the exchange value” of accumulated labour but rather because they were necessary for the implementation of the industrialisation programme. In other words they were not capital but use values.
A workers’ state must, necessarily, accumulate use-values, in particular the means of production, since its task is to expand production on a massive scale. Whether this accumulation preponderates at any given time over consumption cannot be a test of the class nature of the state that presides over the economy. Production of munitions and material for the Red Army was an absolute priority during the wars of intervention against the young Soviet republic, and quite rightly too.
The same formalist method is extended by Cliff to “prove” that the bureaucracy is a collective capitalist. Basing himself on Lenin’s description of the historic task of the bourgeoisie to “increase in the productive forces of social labour and the socialisation of labour”, Cliff explains why the First Five Year Plan was the point of transformation of the bureaucracy into a collective capitalist:
“It was now, for the first time, that the bureaucracy sought to realise the historic mission of the bourgeoisie as quickly as possible. A quick accumulation of capital on the basis of a low level of production, of a small national income per capita, must put a burdensome pressure on the consumption of the masses, on their standard of living. Under such conditions the bureaucracy, transformed into a personification of capital, for whom the accumulation of capital is the be-all and end-all, must get rid of all remnants of workers’ control, must substitute conviction in the labour process by coercion, must atomise the working class, must force all social-political life into a totalitarian mould...
“Thus, industrialisation and a technical revolution in agriculture (collectivisation) in a backward country under conditions of siege transforms the bureaucracy from a layer which is under the direct and indirect pressure of the proletariat, into a ruling class...”90
Leaving aside the claim that collectivisation, i.e. the expropriation of all rural capital, big and small, was a mere “technical” question, the bureaucracy that undertook it and directed the Stalinist form of industrialisation on the basis of command planning now somehow becomes the most perfect example of a capitalist class because:
“The fact that the bureaucracy fulfils the tasks of the capitalist class, and by so doing transforms itself into a class, makes it the purest personification of this class. Although it is different from the capitalist class, it is at one and the same time the nearest to its historical essence.” 91
That any social grouping should be defined as a class because it undertakes a task “normally” associated with a class, let alone a particular class, is incompatible with Marxism. In the greater part of the world the task of industrialisation will fall to the proletariat. In many countries the proletariat will face the problems of economic dislocation and political isolation that were encountered in the Soviet Union in the 1920a if not on the same scale.
The implication of Cliff’s analysis of Russia in the years before the First Five Year Plan is that progress, indeed survival, will be determined solely by external factors. Internally, all policies must lead to the restoration of capitalism in one form or another. In the 1920s says Cliff, there were only two realistic economic programmes:
“One solution to the conflict between state industry and individualist agriculture would have been to make the development of industry depend an the rate at which agricultural surpluses developed.
Alternatively, the conflict between industry and agriculture might have been resolved by rapid industrialisation based on ‘primitive accumulation’ by expropriating the peasants and forcing them into large mechanised farms thus releasing labour power for industry and making agricultural surpluses available for the urban population.”92
In other words Bukharinism and Stalinism were the only choices that faced the Russian workers, revolutionaries could have had no alternative programme.
For Cliff there was no way forward for the Russian working class other than reliance on the European revolution which never came. The policies of the Left Opposition, designed to regenerate the proletariat via planned industrialisation and the siphoning of a surplus from the rich peasantry to pay for it, were a utopia for Cliff. He singles out Preobrazhensky as an example,:
“Actually the implementation of Preobrazhensky’s ‘socialist primitive accumulation’ would logically have led to a very different state of affairs from that which he envisaged. Any attempt to ‘squeeze’ the peasants would be likely to be met by a deliberate reduction in production, so that if the ‘terms of trade’ between agriculture and industry were in favour of the latter, the amount of trade would fall. There would be only one way to deal with such a strike and that would be to use violence against the peasants, to expropriate them, and to concentrate them on such large farms that it would be possible for the state to control their work and output.”93
Thus, the logical outcome of the policies of the Left Opposition would have been Stalinism! No doubt Preobrazhensky and the other capitulators developed similar justifications, that is no reason for today’s revolutionaries to argue that Stalin carried out the rational kernel of the Left Opposition’s programme.
This tacit acceptance that the proletariat cannot use state power to maintain and extend its interests in an underdeveloped country, that is to say, this rejection of the strategy of Permanent Revolution, is the consequence of Cliff’s revision of the nature of capitalist accumulation. It has a Menshevik logic that would leave communists in today’s imperialised countries as incapable of charting a way forward for the working class as Cliff believes the Left Oppositionists were in the 1920s.
Cliff’s characterisation of the Soviet Union as a state capitalism is founded upon a rejection of what, for Marxists, constitutes the defining feature of capitalism. He develops an economic model in which military competition between industrialised nations takes the place of generalised commodity production and the law of value as the dynamic of social production under capitalism. The model itself is based on a false extension of Bukharin’s theoretical prognostications (which themselves suffer from a characteristic one-sidedness) concerning the development of finance capital. In order to see clearly the scale of Cliff’s revisionism on this point it is first necessary briefly to outline the Marxist analysis of the defining characteristics of capitalism.
Capitalism is the mode of production in which both the prerequisites for production, including labour power, and the products themselves take the form of commodities, it is generalised commodity production. That is to say, all goods are produced for the market. On the market they are exchanged, in the last analysis, on the basis of the amount of socially necessary labour contained in each commodity. This is the law of value. It is a law that finds expression in the competition between individual capitals on the market. Through the operation of the law of value, capital tends constantly to flow to those sectors of production which will yield the greatest return on investment. Thus, production is not undertaken to satisfy human need but to create ever greater masses of capital. Within capitalism the division of the total labour of society, that is the determination of what shall be produced and in what quantities, is effected by the operation of the law of value.
It is in the nature of capitalism that on the basis of its own laws of motion, it tends towards the creation of ever greater formations of capital. Success in competition for one capital can only be at the expense of other capitals. Through a process of concentration and centralisation, capital tends towards monopolisation of whole branches of production. The creation of such a monopoly, in which every step of production is controlled by one capital, takes place on the basis of the law of value through a process of competitive destruction of other capitals, thereby removing competition within its own sphere of operation.
However, even the greatest monopoly is itself dominated by the law of value in that its products are destined for the market. The law of value now expresses itself in the competition between monopolies. Despite any rationalisation of production within the monopolies, the anarchy of capitalism dominates between them.
As monopolies develop and merge into an ever smaller number of ever greater capital formations they are able to exert greater and greater control over the societies out of which they develop. By a process of fusion, banking capital and industrial capital create finance capital. So powerful within modern capitalist society is finance capital that its requirements dominate the activity and policies of the state, itself the machinery of oppression which protects bourgeois property relations. The stage at which finance capital reaches this degree of pre-eminence in society is the imperialist epoch of capitalism. The economic order of the imperialist epoch is rightly called, “state monopoly capitalism”.
To conform to his model, Cliff has to prove that, as a result of its relationship to the world economy, the Soviet Union acts as a single block of capital, USSR Ltd which is, therefore, subject to the laws of capitalism. The problem for Cliff is that there is, effectively, no competition between USSR Ltd and other capital blocks on the world market and, therefore, no means by which to “execute the inner laws of capital” upon the Soviet Union. It is at this point that Cliff substitutes military competition for capitalist competition in order to provide the vital missing link in the chain between world capitalism and the Soviet economy.
It is worth reproducing the argument used by Cliff, if only to reveal most clearly the sleight of hand method by which logical contradiction masquerades as dialectics.
“If Russia traded extensively with countries outside her empire she would try to produce commodities which would fetch a high price on the world market, and to buy as cheaply as possible commodities from abroad. Thus, she would be aiming, like a private capitalist, at increasing the sum of use-values at her disposal by production of some use-value or other, regardless of what it would be...
But, as competition with other countries is mainly military, the state is interested in certain specific use-values, such as tanks and aeroplanes and so on. Value is the expression of competition between independent producers: Russia’s competition with the rest of the world is expressed by the elevation of use-values into an end, serving the ultimate end of victory in the competition. Use-values while being an end, still remain a means.”94
The first of these paragraphs is a complete red-herring – all trading implies the attempt to get the best price possible for one’s own goods and to pay as cheaply as possible for those goods that have to be imported. This would be equally true of a healthy workers’ state and was, indeed, a central element in the economic thinking of the Bolsheviks and the Left Opposition. For them the state monopoly of foreign trade was a device for increasing and manipulating contacts with the world market, not a means to the reactionary end of economic autarchy that it became under Stalin.
The fact that the Soviet state, as a consumer, is interested, among other things, in tanks and aeroplanes is not because of the workings of some ahistorical category called competition but because without these things the state would be unprotected from its enemies. Again, this is, and always has been, a feature of all states, capitalist or not.
In order to equate military competition with capitalist competition, Cliff has to resort to a completely meaningless scrambling of Marxist categories. Value is not the expression of competition between independent producers. It is the measure of socially necessary labour time congealed within a commodity.
By definition a commodity is a product made for exchange and it is through exchange that the owner of the commodity realises its value. The law of value, as discovered by Marx, is a codification of the fact that the exchange of commodities takes place on the basis of the amount of value contained in the commodities to be exchanged, like exchanging with like.
In its most simple form this does not involve any competition between the producers. This only arises where we are dealing with the realisation of the value of commodities in which there is contained surplus value, that is to say, commodities produced by proletarians but owned by capitalists, The competition consists in the various capitalists attempting to increase the proportion of surplus within their commodities which they can realise through sale. The successful capitalist is able to realise a greater amount of surplus value than his competitors and, as a result, increase his capital for the next cycle of production. Thus, the struggle to amass greater volumes of capital is the only way in which the law of value can express itself.
When Cliff argues that, “Because international competition takes mainly a military form the law of value expresses itself in its opposite, viz. a striving after use values” 95 he is again equating the accumulation of use-values with the accumulation of capital. “Striving after use-values” is only another way of saying, “striving to accumulate material wealth” something which has been a feature common to all societies save the most primitive.
This is not to say that there is no kernel of rationality whatsoever within Cliff’s argument. The pressure of military competition does exercise a distorting effect on the soviet economy, as it will on the economy of any workers' state, healthy or unhealthy. Certainly a degree of symmetry in the matter of military technique is imposed by this imperialist pressure and the limits of this pressure are related to the functioning of the law of value within, most importantly, the US economy. Again, this would be the state of affairs if we were examining quite the healthiest workers’ state and how its economy was affected by imperialist blockade. None of this means for a moment that military competition can take the place, or have the same results, as capitalist competition.
The Five Year Plans
The working class grew considerably as a result of Stalinist industrialisation. During the first Five Year Plan the cities grew by 44 per cent. In 1931 alone 4,100,000 peasants joined the city population. But this swelling army of proletarians was subject to severe dictatorship. The triangle arrangement of management, party and union administration in the plants, that had developed during NEP, was abandoned in 1929 for fierce managerial rule. The Stalinist Kaganovich declared “the earth should tremble when the director walks around the plant”96.
The First Five Year Plan initially saw an enormous turnover of labour. During 1929 the Soviet worker changed jobs, on average, every two months. This figure was down to four months in the coal and iron ore mining industries.97 In conditions of an acute labour shortage, Soviet workers resorted to defending themselves and their bargaining power through this labour turnover. The trades unions had been transformed into transmission belts for the directives of the Bonapartist state.
During the 1930s the bureaucracy acted to curtail this route of self-defence for the working class. From 1930 labour exchanges were instructed to keep lists of those who had “arbitrarily” terminated their employment. By September 1930 such workers were to permanently lose their rights to unemployment benefit. During 1931 every worker was issued with a wage book including details of every change of job and discharge from work.
By 1932 all employees had to show an internal passport to obtain work and had to have their place of work entered in their passport. Employees were obliged to discharge workers guilty of truancy (Progul) with one days absence from work being sufficient to justify dismissal. “Truants” were to be deprived of all food and merchandise ration coupons and to be evicted from any dwelling that went with the plant.
In December 1938 – at a time of serious disequilibrium in the Third Five Year Plan – new disciplinary provisions were introduced to the Soviet labour code. Arriving more than 20 minutes late for work was to constitute “unjustified absence”. Full sickness benefits were only to be made available after six years employment at a given plant.
Taken together these measures constituted the means by which the Bonapartist bureaucracy consolidated its political dictatorship over the Soviet working class. They were, however, accompanied by the development of forms of remuneration and retail outlets that enabled the Stalinists to stimulate the crystallisation of a distinct layer of skilled workers in the USSR who had a material interest, through their relative privileges compared with the unskilled, in the maintenance of the Stalinist regime.
The Stalinists have always made sure that a significant section of Soviet society has a material interest in not challenging the rule of the central bureaucracy.
In 1932, Stalin explicitly disavowed the Marxist goal of the gradual progressive abolition of inequality.
“Equalitarianism owes its origin to the individual peasant type of mentality, the psychology of share and share alike, the psychology of primitive communism. Equalitarianism has nothing in common with Marxist socialism. Only people who are unacquainted with Marxism can have the primitive notion that the Russian Bolsheviks want to pool all wealth and share it out equally. That is the notion of people who have nothing in common with Marxism.”98
For the mass of the Soviet workers, the First Five Year Plan led to a serious drop in their real wages. The doubling of labour productivity on which the achievement of the targets depended was not achieved. In industry as a whole, labour productivity grew by 41 per cent by 1934.99 As a consequence the working class suffered a severe drop in income to pay for the achievement of targets. The fall in living standards was about 40 per cent between 1929 and 1932.100 At the same time the range between salaries was increased and the old party maximum, which prevented a party member earning more than a skilled worker, was abolished.
Alongside Stalin’s critique of egalitarianism, wage differentials between skilled and unskilled workers were increased to a ratio of 3.7: 1. In addition, “Cadres” were to receive higher pay and privileges. “Shock workers” and management personnel were given access to closed shops, to special clothing allowances, and to top priority in housing lists.
The general dearth of consumer goods highlights the significance of these privileges. In the entire period prior to 1940, the urban population increased by 79.2 per cent, and the urban housing stock by a mere 27.6 per cent. Hence the importance of the seemingly marginal privileges that Stalinism was able to bestow on a skilled aristocratic layer of the Soviet working class.
The Stakhanov movement of 1935 represented a further attempt, on the part of the Stalinists, to create a privileged layer of workers separate from the mass of the working class and beholden to the Stalinists for their distinct and relatively luxurious lifestyle. By 1935 this layer of Stakhanovite “shock workers” in the industrial and agrarian work force was receiving on average between 500 and 2000 rubles a month compared with an average wage of 150 rubles. In 1933 20 per cent of urban workers received 40 per cent of the available wage fund.101
The Stalin turn in foreign policy
Up until the victory of Nazism in Germany in 1933, the Comintern, under Stalin, had pursued the ultra-left policies of the Third Period. Adventurism at home was reflected by adventurism abroad. The Third Period was designated the final period of capitalism. Communism was around the corner. As such all bourgeois parties – social democrats and fascists alike – were equal enemies of the working class. The Comintern characterised social democracy as “social fascism” and refused to unite with reformist workers in a struggle against the growing fascist danger. The tactic of the united front, developed by Lenin and Trotsky, was abandoned in favour of the “red front”.
Fascism, as the last phase of bourgeois rule, was even to be welcomed since their victory would simply mean “our turn next”!
These policies produced tragic results. Hitler came to power in March 1933, and proceeded to butcher the flower of the strongest working class movement in the world. Even the Kremlin bureaucracy could not fail to recognise that his ascension to power represented a dire threat to the USSR. In foreign policy, as in internal affairs, the Stalin group would admit of no mistakes. The Comintern sections continued to affirm the correctness of their line. However, the line was changed in typical bureaucratic fashion. The Comintern, a subservient tool of Soviet foreign policy, received new directives from the USSR.
In order to ward off the Nazi threat, Stalin now attempted to engineer a bloc with those “democratic” imperialisms that were likely to clash with Germany – principally Britain and France. In accord with the new diplomatic needs, Stalin flipped 1800 from ultraleftism to the right opportunism that was to become so central to Stalinist strategy.
The united front was embraced only to be turned into a popular front – an alliance between the workers and liberal, anti-fascist elements of the bourgeoisie in the democratic camp. This alliance could only mean the subordination of the workers’ interests to those of the bourgeoisie. The Stalin-Laval pact of 1934 was the first codified operative agreement to maintain peaceful coexistence between the Stalinists and a section of world imperialism – “democratic” France. That this bound the French working class hand and foot to the bourgeoisie became clear in 1936. In that year the Stalinists connived in the defeat of the biggest strike wave that had ever gripped France, in order to maintain the Popular Front.
The development of the Left Opposition’s analysis of Stalinism
Faced with the monstrous growth of this bureaucratic tyranny, raising itself above the working class and reducing its already heavily bureaucratised party, trade unions and soviets, to empty ciphers the Bolshevik Leninists (led by Rakovsky within the USSR and by Trotsky abroad) had to analyse these events and the conclusions for strategy and tactics they held.
Trotsky, Rakovsky and the expelled Left Opposition were faced with the task of analysing the results of their own defeat, of assessing the Stalinist “left turn”, the debacle of the Bukharinites, and the increased bureaucratic tyranny of the early 1930s. They were subjected to pressure from “left’ sectarian positions within the Opposition (the Democratic Centralists) and to right-opportunist forces (the capitulators to Stalinism for example Radek, Preobrazhensky and Pyatakov).``
In arguing with the Democratic Centralists, who claimed that the counter-revolution was victorious and that capitalism had been restored, or the capitulators who argued that Stalin had adopted the Left Opposition’s policies, Trotsky, Rakovsky and their co-thinkers were obliged to re-examine both the concrete stages in the development of the bureaucracy and the terminology and analogies they had used throughout the 1920s. Central to this process was the discussion of the question of Thermidor and Bonapartism.
The Left Opposition had operated with an analogy with the French Revolution of 1789-98. The Left Opposition, in combating the Stalin-Bukharin bloc in the years 1926 to 1928 had characterised the threat which the rightist policies posed to the workers’ state as one of concealed capitalist restoration. This danger they named Thermidor.
“What does the right danger signify in the present period? It is less the danger of an open, fully-fledged bourgeois counterrevolution than that of a Thermidor, that is a partial counterrevolutionary shift or upheaval which, precisely because it was partial, could for a fairly long time continue to disguise itself in revolutionary forms but which in essence would already have a decisively bourgeois character, so that a return from Thermidor to the dictatorship of the proletariat could only be effected through a new revolution”.102
Trotsky argued that a “strongly advanced process of dual power” existed in the Soviet Union. That power had slipped out of the hands of the proletariat “to a considerable degree, but still far from decisively”.103 The decisive question for Trotsky in 1928, and indeed to the end of his life was, had state power passed to the agents of the bourgeoisie, was capitalism being restored?
His answer was categorical:
“No ... the bourgeoisie could seize power only by the road of counterrevolutionary upheavals. As for the proletariat, it can regain full power, overhaul the bureaucracy and put it under its control by the road of reform of the party and the soviets”.104
The retreat of the proletariat on the one hand and the advance of the Kulak and NEPman on the other, in his view, gave the room for the “monstrous predominance of the bureaucratic apparatus oscillating between the classes”.105 However, in his and the Lefts’ use of the analogy, Trotsky mistakenly identified Thermidor with a social counter-revolution.
“Why do we speak precisely of Thermidor? Because, historically, it is the best known and most complete example of a counter-revolution which is masked, which still retains the outer forms and the ritual of revolution, but which changes irreversibly the class content of the state”.106
Trotsky saw Thermidor and Bonapartism as differing types of social counter-revolution. In 1931 he expressed it thus:
“By Thermidorean overthrow the Left Opposition always understood a decisive shift of power from the proletariat to the bourgeoisie, but accomplished formally within the framework of the Soviet system under the banner of one faction of the official party against the other. In contrast to this the Bonapartist overthrow appears as a more open, “riper” form of the bourgeois counterrevolution, carried out against the Soviet system and the Bolshevik party as a whole, in the form of the naked sword raised in the name of bourgeois property”.107
Thus for Trotsky the expulsion of the Left Opposition in 1927 was only a “party rehearsal for Thermidor”108. Moreover since “In the Soviet Union only the peasantry can become a force for Thermidor,”109 Trotsky looked to the Bukharinites with their openly pro-Kulak policy as the principal agents of the coming Thermidor even after their defeat in 1924. The Stalinist faction he saw as playing an auxiliary role to the Right.
However, despite the errors of this use of the analogy, Trotsky (and Rakovsky) did methodically analyse, step by step, the growth of Stalin’s Bonapartist power.
In late 1928 Trotsky pointed to the Bonapartist element in the position of the Stalin regime.
“The Master [Stalin – eds] says: ‘These cadres can be removed only by civil war’. Klim [Voroshilov, Commissar for War – eds] adds, ‘If you workers make too much fuss, remember that a great power stands behind me’. Both these statements point to elements of Bonapartism. In the first case speaks the party-state apparatus, which considers itself higher than everyone else, higher even than the army. In the second case speaks the military apparatus, which tomorrow will feel compelled to ‘put the civilians in their place’. A bloodless victory of the centrists’ party apparatus over the right would not do away with the Thermidorean-Bonapartist perspective but would only change and postpone it”.110
Whilst for Trotsky, the Bonapartist regime could only be fully actualised as an instrument of social overturn, he described and analysed its “preparation” in such a way that his self-revision was no sudden or ill-prepared leap. By 1931 Trotsky was talking of the “plebiscitary degeneration of the party apparatus (which) undoubtedly increases the chances of a Bonapartist form [of counter-revolution - eds]”.111
He referred many times in these years to the “Bonapartist features of the regime in the Soviet Communist party”.112 Furthermore he noted that “The party, as a party does not exist today. The centrist apparatus has strangled it”.113 Here it might be observed that there was a contradiction.
Trotsky and the Bolshevik-Leninists insisted that the bureaucracy could be ousted on the road of reform and that no new party was necessary. This paradox was more apparent than real.
Trotsky clearly regarded the Left Oppositionists as representing the nucleus of the Bolshevik party. He held that the “relation between the Left Opposition and the centrist apparatus ... is a substitute for the party and holds the right in check”114
Trotsky advocated that the Left Opposition mount a clear and independent defence of the interests of the working class in line with the Platform of the Opposition. This was to include the leading of struggles, wage struggles for example, against the bureaucracy. This being so, why did Trotsky hold back from the view that a new party was necessary?
The answer to this lies in essence in the international nature of the Opposition’s platform. The Russian party remained a section of the Comintern, an alliance of subjectively revolutionary mass parties albeit subjected to centrist misleadership. The years 1929 to 1933 were years of acute crisis in all capitalist countries. The mass CPs, especially the German Party faced the . question of fighting for power point blank. Indeed the latter faced the question of victory or destruction. The Comintern’s tactics, forced on the German Party, were disastrous. A united front with the Social Democracy was vital to obstruct the fascist onslaught.
The Comintern’s proscription of the united front except from below, its ludicrous characterisation of the reformists as “social fascists” created a situation of enormous political tension throughout the communist movement. If the German party managed to adjust its tactics in time – i.e. rallied to the Left Opposition’s tactics, then the domination of the Stalin leadership within the Russian party and state would have been called into question. Before the German revolutionary crisis was resolved it was impossible to abandon the Comintern as dead for the revolution. Therefore it was impossible to abandon the CPSU.
Trotsky’s change of analysis hinged not upon events in Russia, but in Germany – “the key to the international situation.”
The crushing defeat of the German Communist Party (KPD) in early 1933 demonstrated that the road of reform of the Comintern, the KPD and the CPSU was at an end. Trotsky, by October of this year, was drawing decisive new conclusions.
Firstly, he asserted the importance of the German debacle for the Soviet workers. In The Class Nature of the Soviet State, he wrote:
“The Soviet workers would have settled accounts with the despotism of the apparatus had other perspectives opened before them, had the Western horizon flamed not with the brown colour of fascism but with the red of revolution”.115
He concluded that with regard to the internal political situation a decisive shift had occurred, but this did not extend to the social roots of the proletarian dictatorship:
“the bureaucracy has expropriated the proletariat politically in order to guard its social conquests with its own methods. The anatomy of society is determined by its economic relations. So long as the forms of property that have been created by the October Revolution are not overthrown, the proletariat remains the ruling class.”116
Moreover, here for the first time Trotsky began to re-examine the Thermidor/Bonapartism analogy:
“If Urbahns wants to extend the concept of Bonapartism to include also the present Soviet regime, then we are ready to accept such a widened interpretation – under one condition: if the social content of the Soviet ‘Bonapartism’ will be defined with the requisite clarity. It is absolutely correct that the self-rule of the Soviet bureaucracy was built upon the soil of veering between class forces both internal as well as international.
Insofar as the bureaucratic veering has been crowned by the personal plebiscitary regime of Stalin, it is possible to speak of Soviet Bonapartism. But while the Bonapartism of both Bonapartes as well as their present pitiful followers has developed and is developing on the basis of a bourgeois regime, the Bonapartism of Soviet bureaucracy has under it the soil of a Soviet regime. Terminological innovations or historical analogies can serve as conveniences in one manner or another for analysis, but they cannot change the social nature of the Soviet state”.117
Alongside this re-examination of the analogy, Trotsky changed his position on the question of the new party and the possibility of peaceful reform. “No normal ‘constitutional’ ways remain to remove the ruling clique. The bureaucracy can be compelled to yield power into the hands of the proletarian vanguard only by force.”118
Trotsky insists that “it will be necessary to apply against it, not the measures of civil war but rather measures of a police character”.119 In essence Trotsky here presents for the first time the programme of political revolution, though he does not explicitly call it such. His programme is for a programme of political revolution because he continues to insist that no social overturn has occurred. But it remains a revolution nonetheless because no peaceful process of reform will remove the bureaucracy. The full elaboration of this position however took place only in February 1935 in Trotsky’s essay The Workers’ State, Thermidor and Bonapartism, and in 1936 in The Revolution Betrayed.
It was in these works that Trotsky finally came to terms with the contradictory nature of Stalin’s Russia. That it remained a workers’ state was evidenced by the fact that the fundamental property relations of the USSR were those created by a workers’ revolution which had expropriated the capitalists. The Soviet Thermidor and Stalin’s Bonapartism had developed on the basis of these property relations and had not overthrown them.
In July 1935 in The Workers’ State, Thermidor and Bonapartism, Trotsky fully revised his earlier position on Thermidor. He recognised it as a form of political counterrevolution that had taken place on the social foundation established by the revolution. The working class had been politically expropriated by the Thermidorian bureaucracy but that bureaucracy still rested on the planned property relations of the USSR.
Trotsky recognised that 1924, and the triumvirate’s campaign against himself and the Left, marked the beginning of Thermidor and that, once triumphant, the bureaucracy had resorted to a form of Bonapartism to exercise its rule:
“In the former case [Napoleon I – eds.] the question involved was the consolidation of the bourgeois revolution through the liquidation of its principles and political institutions.
In the latter case [Stalin – eds.] the question involved is the consolidation of the worker-peasant revolution through the smashing of its international programme, its leading party, its soviets ... What else should this regime be called, if not Soviet Bonapartism?”120
From this point on Trotsky is no longer ambiguous about the nature of Soviet Bonapartism or the tasks of revolutionaries in relation to it. In The Revolution Betrayed Trotsky analyses the material roots of the Soviet Thermidor:
“No help came from the West. The power of the democratic soviets proved cramping, even unendurable, when the task of the day was to accommodate those privileged groups whose existence was necessary for defence, for industry, for technique and science. In this decidedly not ‘socialist’ operation, taking from ten and giving to one, there crystallised out and developed a powerful caste of specialists in distribution.”121
In this situation “The young bureaucracy, which had arisen at first as an agent of the proletariat, began now to feel itself a court of arbitration between the classes.”122 For Trotsky the roots of Soviet Thermidor were to be found in the crystallisation of this agency into a distinct bureaucratic stratum with its own privileges and conservative interests separate from those of the proletariat: “The leaden rump of the bureaucracy outweighed the head of the revolution. That is the secret of the Soviet’s Thermidor.”123
The Soviet Thermidor – spearheaded by Stalin and Bukharin – had a Bonapartist logic from the start:
“The Bonapartist rule grew out of the fundamental contradiction between the bureaucracy and the people, and the supplementary contradiction between the revolutionists and the Thermidorians within the bureaucracy. Stalin rose by supporting himself primarily on the bureaucracy against the people, on the Thermidorians against the revolutionists. But at certain critical moments he was compelled to seek support among revolutionary elements, and, with their assistance, among the people against the over precipitate offensive of the privileged ones. But it is impossible to support oneself on a social contradiction that is turning into an allies. Hence the forced transition to Thermidorian ‘monolithism’ through the destruction of all vestiges of the revolutionary spirit and of the slightest manifestations of political self-activity on the part of the masses.”124
This led Trotsky to finally reject the term “bureaucratic centrism” as in any way applicable to the Stalinist bureaucracy in 1937.125 If Trotsky was now no longer ambiguous about either the “centrism” of Stalinism or the reformability of the Soviet State, he still had to grapple with the problem of developing a characterisation of, and perspective for, a state where post capitalist property forms remained but where all vestiges of proletarian political power had been destroyed by a Bonapartist bureaucracy. Despite its enormous privileges and power, Trotsky rejected the designation of the bureaucracy as a ruling class for reasons which we consider valid.
The Soviet bureaucracy does not have the characteristics of a ruling class in the Marxist sense. Within the Marxist tradition, classes are defined not within the relations of distribution or authority of any given society but by their position in the relations of production themselves. A class be it a ruled or ruling class – has a distinct, necessary and identifiable relation to the productive forces within the social relations of production. Layers of administrators are not classes in the scientific Marxist use of the term.
While the bourgeoisie under capitalism is a necessary component of the relations of production, the Soviet bureaucracy is not such a necessary element in the planned property relations of the USSR. On the contrary, its monopoly of political power, its control over distribution is, and always has been (even during the most dynamic phases of Soviet economic development) an obstacle to the full realisation of the potential of the property relations of the USSR. In all hitherto existing societies the property relations, and the class structures that necessarily flowed from them, became a brake on the development of the productive forces of mankind. In the USSR it is not the property relations but a layer of administrators and distributors who block the development of the productive forces.
The fundamental contradiction of hitherto existing societies on the eve of social revolution – that between the forces of production and the class relations of production - does not exist in the USSR. The bureaucracy is in fact unnecessary for the rational and progressive development of the productive forces within the system of planned property relations.
The contradiction at the heart of the Soviet Union is the contradiction between a system of property relations and a layer of administrators and distributors (the bureaucracy) who stand in the way of the working class dynamically developing the productive forces in its own, i.e. socialist, interests.
Because it is therefore a parasite on the property relations, not an indispensable part of them, we reject the view that the bureaucracy is the ruling class in the USSR.
For these reasons it remains the case that even in Stalin’s Russia the working class remained the ruling class because the property forms in existence were those that the working class requires in order to build socialism. The working class had, however, been politically expropriated by a caste of bureaucrats analogous to the caste of bureaucrats in the trade union movement under capitalism.
Along with Trotsky we say that the USSR:
“can be called a workers’ state in approximately the same sense – despite the vast difference of scale – in which the trade union, led and betrayed by opportunists, that is, by agents of capital, can be called a workers’ organisation. Just as the trade unions under capitalism are workers’ organisations run by class collaborationist bureaucratic castes in the working class, so the USSR remains a state where the working class is the ruling class but where power is in the hands of a reactionary bureaucratic caste.”126
It follows however, that this parasitic bureaucracy – as long as it retains power – blocks the transition to socialism in the workers’ states. Trotsky was adamant that in designating the USSR a “workers’ state”, albeit in a bureaucratically degenerated form, did not mean that the USSR could be characterised as socialist. In The Fourth International and the Soviet Union, written in July 1936, he explicitly rejected the attempt to describe the state property of the USSR as socialist property:
“for the latter has as its premise the dying away of the state as the guardian of property, the mitigation of inequality and the gradual dissolution of the property concept even in the morals and customs of society.
The real development in the Soviet Union in recent years has followed a directly opposite road. Inequality grows, and, together with it, state coercion.”127
A workers’ state within which the transition to socialism is blocked must prove a highly unstable and contradictory phenomenon. The bourgeoisie historically can tolerate the loss of direct political power within Bonapartist regimes so long as its property and economic life is safeguarded. But its property relations can prosper and expand under Bonapartism as can the bourgeoisie itself.
However the loss of political power by the proletariat undermines the very workings of the property forms established by the working class. Of necessity therefore Stalinist Bonapartism as a political regime has to maintain itself in power with a degree of terror and repression against society at large that testifies to its lack of historical legitimacy. Only ruthless terror and the atomisation of society can maintain the Stalinist bureaucracy in power. That is why the Stalinists have never been able to permanently coexist with independent organisations of the working masses and why all Stalinist regimes have ultimately relied on terror and large scale force to both establish and maintain their rule.
The Stalinist form of Bonapartism was, for Trotsky, unprecedented in the degree of independence from society that it had established for itself.
“The Stalin regime, rising above politically atomized society, resting upon a police and officers’ corps, and allowing of no control whatever, is obviously a variation of Bonapartism – a Bonapartism of a new type not before seen in history.”128
In political form the Stalinist regime and the fascist regimes in Western Europe “In many of their features they show a deadly symmetry.”129 And this symmetry itself testified to the inability of Stalinism to survive as anything other than a regime of terror.
From this analysis of the contradictory nature of the USSR Trotsky developed a perspective based on its inherent weakness and instability. The social base of the Soviet Bonapartism was particularly fragile. On the one hand, it based itself on the property relations of a workers’ state and a small privileged layer of those who prospered from the political expropriation of the working class within that state. This meant that the regime set itself against the overwhelming bulk of the population over which it ruled.
“In the USSR there are 12-15 million privileged individuals who concentrate in their hands about one half of the national income, and who call this regime ‘socialism’. On the other hand there are approximately 160,000,000 people oppressed by the bureaucracy and caught in the grip of dire poverty.”130
On the other hand, it based itself on constructing strategic alliances with sections of the world bourgeoisie as a means of buttressing and maintaining its power. However, the 1930s showed very clearly that imperialism’s alliances with the Stalinists were entered into by the imperialist powers only for tactical reasons. Whatever its hopes or expectations the Bonapartist regime could not eliminate the fundamental contradictions that existed between the property system it presided over and that of world imperialism. It followed for Trotsky that such a regime must, of necessity, prove a regime of permanent crisis and prove to be a short lived episode in the history of the transition to socialism.
He returned to this theme time and time again in the mid to late 1930s and in 1935 in The Workers’ State and the Question of Thermidor and Bonapartism he formulated this perspective in the following way:
“Bonapartism, by its very essence, cannot long maintain itself as a ball balanced on the point of a pyramid, it must invariably roll down on one side or the other.”131
The onset of the bloody purges of the mid and late 1930s seemed to provide ample evidence of the inability of the regime to stabilise itself and its rule:
“Severe crisis cannot be a permanent condition of society. A totalitarian state is capable of suppressing social contradictions during a certain period, but it is incapable of perpetuating itself, The monstrous purges in the USSR are most convincing testimony of the fact that Soviet society organically tends toward ejection of the bureaucracy ... symptomatic of his oncoming death agony, by the sweep and monstrous fraudulence of his purge, Stalin testifies to nothing else but the incapacity of the bureaucracy to transform itself into a stable ruling class.”132
The onset of the imperialist war furnished further evidence of the fragility of Stalinism’s base. The war itself opened the road for the final destruction of Stalinism. In his last years Trotsky presumed that either the proletariat would destroy the bureaucracy in the next period or that the bureaucracy, incapable of defending planned property relations, would open the door for the restoration of capitalism in one form or another. This was the immediate perspective upon which the Transitional Programme was based:
“either the bureaucracy, becoming ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie in the workers’ state, will overthrow the new forms of property and plunge the country back to capitalism; or the working class will crush the bureaucracy and open the way to socialism.”133
It was this perspective that Trotsky considered was confirmed by Stalin’s 1939 pact with Hitler and the Soviet bureaucracy’s humiliatingly unsuccessful bid to seize parts of Finland in 1939.
“Stalin’s apogee is behind him, Not a few fateful tests are before him, With the whole planet thrown out of equilibrium Stalin will not succeed in saving the unsteady equilibrium of totalitarian bureaucracy.”134
For Trotsky the impending destruction of the Stalinist regime either at the hands of the proletariat or of capitalist restoration flowed inevitably from the nature of the Stalinist bureaucracy itself. Hence the confidence with which he could declare,
“if this war provokes, as we firmly believe, a proletarian revolution ... To every single person it will become clear that in the process of the development of the world revolution the Soviet bureaucracy was only an episodic relapse.”135
And again:
“Either the Stalin regime is an abhorrent relapse in the process of transforming society into a socialist society, or the Stalin regime is the first stage of a new exploiting society.”136
We will return later to the problems posed to Trotsky’s perspective and analysis by the stabilisation and expansion of Stalinism in the aftermath of the Second World War. As we have already argued, perspectives must always be put to the test of real experience and adjusted accordingly. What lay at the heart of Trotsky’s analysis of the USSR during this period was the unswerving insistence that only if the proletariat seized political power through revolution in the USSR could the property relations of the Soviet Union be put to their correct historical use in the process of socialist construction.
The full development of Trotsky’s analysis of Soviet bonapartism took place alongside, and indeed made possible, the development of Trotsky’s programme for the degenerate workers' state. When the call for the Fourth International was first made Trotsky did not spell out that the tasks of the new Soviet section would be those of political revolution.
Without a clear understanding of the nature of the political counter-revolution that had taken place this was not surprising. So in 1933 he argued:
“Much more important is the fact that these organisations [parties of the F.I. – eds.] will acquire an enormous authority in the eyes of the Soviet workers and will thus finally create favourable conditions for the rebirth of a genuine Bolshevik party. It is only on this road that the reform of the Soviet state is possible without a new proletarian revolution.”137
Trotsky was hamstrung by his wrong conception of Thermidor. Germany had convinced him of the need to call for new parties – though he had effectively recognised that the last congress of the real Bolshevik party took place in 1923. However, he still erroneously held onto the perspective of reform.
Only after the development of the characterisation of the regime as a counter-revolutionary workers’ state ruled by a form of Bonapartism, did Trotsky fully appreciate the need for a new proletarian revolution:
“To believe that this state is capable of peacefully ‘withering away’ is to live in a world of theoretical delirium. The Bonapartist caste must be smashed, the Soviet state must be regenerated. Only then will the prospects of the withering away of the state open up.”138
This programmatic position was the decisive outcome of Trotsky’s theoretical analysis of the USSR. By recognising the possibility of a counter-revolutionary workers’ state, Trotsky was able to arm his supporters with a programme that dialectically combined defence of the property relations established by October with the most intransigent revolutionary opposition to the bureaucratic caste. That position remains valid today and applies to all of these states which we characterise as degenerate workers’ states.
Trotsky’s analysis of the USSR was in a state of constant development. While he was wrong not to have realised that Thermidor had been completed until 1935 his struggle, and that of the Left Opposition was historically justified. The events that unfolded in the USSR were not readily grasped in their complexity by the Left Opposition until the late 1930s. However throughout this entire period Trotsky waged a revolutionary struggle against Stalin’s Bonapartism.
In the end the argument over whether Trotsky was correct in the timing of his call for a new party in the USSR is a formal one. For Trotsky the key question was the best means of approaching the Soviet masses and winning them fighting to win leadership of “Lenin’s Party” or turning one’s back on it? Furthermore the possibility of reform of the party and the Comintern was linked to the existence of millions of subjective revolutionaries within the Comintern.
Their revolutionary consciousness made the struggle for reform both viable and politically correct. The defeat of the working class convinced Trotsky that their consciousness could no longer be turned into a material force for reform.
With the collapse of this perspective and amidst the welter of police repression that followed in the USSR, it was clear that Trotsky needed to ground new perspectives in theoretical analysis.
Like Marx and Engels in 1848 he had oriented his followers to pursue a consistent Marxist line. Like them the failure of that line to triumph forced him to consider the problem at a deeper level. His tardiness on the question of calling for a new political revolution is, therefore, explicable in terms of the enormity of the problems posed by the establishment of an entirely new formation – a degenerated workers’ state.
It was Trotsky’s genius that he learnt from the failures of his initial analysis and perspective and proved capable of constructing a new analysis and a new programme. His revolutionary genius developed the theory of a degenerated workers’ state and that same genius developed the Marxist programme to meet this new and unexpected eventuality.
Bonapatism in crisis: Stalin’s terror
All of the essential elements of Stalinist Bonapartism had been constructed by the early 1930s. However, the successes and failures of the Five Year plans and collectivisation and the enormous social contradictions that they created set a distinct limit to the “golden age” of Stalinist Bonapartism.
The road to untrammelled Bonapartist tyranny led through a series of zig-zags to a struggle, muted and repressed to be sure, within the Stalin faction which now felt the varied social pressures of Soviet society, the effects of collectivisation and the Five Year plan. The Thermidorians had denied to the proletariat and its vanguard the ability to consciously deal with the problems of the direction of the workers’ state. The revolutionists were imprisoned and exiled; the Right, who reflected the pressure of the better-off peasantry had been silenced. The pressure of the working class and peasantry now was distantly refracted, through the boorish bureaucrats, the “rude satraps” (Trotsky’s phrase for men like Kirov) but it could not be totally suppressed.
By 1932 the sufferings of the masses began to tell even on the nerves of their overworked taskmasters. The hard-pressed lower echelons of the bureaucracy’s desire for a halt were expressed in the Ryutin group. M.N. Ryutin, a member of the Central Committee and the man responsible for organising anti-opposition strong-arm squads in Moscow, tried to organise within this body for the removal of Stalin as general secretary. Stalin, informed by the OGPU, tried to order Ryutin and his fellow plotters to be executed. Yagoda, head of OGPU refused unless the Control Commission and the Politburo authorised it.
According to George Paloczi Horvath in his book Kruschev, Stalin’s motion to allow this in both the Central Committee and in the Politburo was defeated- twice.139 The upper levels of the bureaucracy, although they had initiated and officiated in the Stalin cult for the last two years, refused Stalin licence to terrorise them. Indeed Politburo members Kirov, Rudzutak and Ordzhonikadze led the opposition in this case. All three were dead by 1937.
The famine of 1933 and the under-fulfilment of much of the Five Year Plan served as a brake on the Stalinist bureaucracy’s adventurist stampede towards industrialisation. The famine in the countryside could not be allowed to spread into the cities. Fearing that the ferocity of the attacks on the peasantry would intensify the agricultural crisis, Stalin and Molotov circulated an instruction in May 1933 to curb excesses.
They denounced the “saturnalia of arrests” and ordered that future arrests should only be directed against “organised resistance.”140 By 1934 there was wide-spread desire within the bureaucracy for relaxation – for an easing of tempos in agriculture and industry. In the Politburo the three members cited above, often with the support of Kalinin and Voroshilov, resisted Stalin’s break-neck policies.
The Congress of Victors in 1934 was the public outcome of those internal Politburo decisions. In January 1934 the XVIIth Party Congress confirmed the complete victory of Stalinism over the revolutionary vanguard within the USSR.
At this congress the Stalinists were able to put on display an abject parade of repentant oppositionists from both the Left and the Right. Preobrazhensky declared the incorrectness of the Left Opposition’s economic policies, while saluting the far-sightedness of Stalin. Tomsky performed in a similar vein on behalf of the Right. Delighted at the “unity”, that is at their total victory over the main opposition, Kirov, on behalf of the Stalinists, declared: “Our successes are really immense. The devil take it, to speak frankly, one so wants to live and live! After all, look and see what is going on around us. It’s a fact.”141
The other side of the Congress was an attempt by Kirov and his supporters to curb the growth of Stalin’s bonapartist rule over themselves. While Stalin was reaffirmed in all of his positions the darling of the congress was undoubtedly Kirov. He had received the ovations. He, according to Roy Medvedev, only had three votes against him in the Central Committee elections, whereas Stalin is supposed to have had 270 cast against him.142
It was in the context of this that Stalin’s title was changed from General Secretary to Secretary. Clearly Kirov hoped to use his own enhanced position to curb Stalin’s personal rule. However, his unwillingness to fight to remove Stalin (unlike Ryutin) was to prove fatal for himself and for the great bulk of the “victors” who were to fall at the hands of Stalin’s regime of one-man Bonapartism.
Kirov’s failure to really challenge Stalin – or rather his inability to do so – meant that Stalin was able to use the Congress to further consolidate his plans for his dictatorship. The secretariat was dominated by his own key men – Zhdanov, Kaganovich and himself, plus Kirov. Yezhov became a full member of the Central Committee and was placed on the Orgburo and, as second in command to Kaganovich, in the Party Control Commission. The Central Committee itself came to be dominated by hand-picked police members, loyal to Stalin. Thus while the Congress of Victors signified the final victory of the Stalinist faction, it heralded the final victory of Stalin himself over his faction.
The moves towards relaxation were continued after the XVIIth Congress. The Congress had accepted a proposal from Ordzhonikidze for a slower rate of industrial growth than originally proposed in the draft Second Five Year Plan.
Later, in November 1934, it was announced that bread rationing was to be lifted and peasants on the collective farms were given the right to cultivate private plots. Throughout the year there were pronouncements emphasising raising the standard of life. Agricultural output began to rise for the first time since 1928. Towards the end of the year Stalin declared the slogan for 1935 to be: “Life has become better, comrades, life has become more joyous.” This was far from the truth. In 1934 attacks on the party had continued with 340,000 purged from membership. In Leningrad 30,000 Communist and non-party workers were deported.
Only by reforming the security apparatus and placing it under the control of his most trusted henchmen could Stalin hope to exercise the degree of terror necessary to prevent opposition to him from within his own faction. This he accomplished in 1934. In July of that year the OGPU was reorganised and renamed the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (the NKVD). Its head, Yagoda, had proved unreliable in the Ryutin case. While he remained at the head of the NKVD, he was now to be overseen by Yezhov – a key supporter of Stalin who, in 1935, was to succeed Yagoda.
Stalin was able to prepare this machinery without meeting any opposition because in the economic field and in foreign policy he continued to pursue the policies pushed for by Kirov. He appeared united with his political opponents while at the same time preparing to launch a devastating blow against them.
This blow, begun in the last month of 1934 and carried on through the Great Purges of 1936-8, constitute the transformation of Soviet Bonapartism from the Bonapartist rule of a faction into the Bonapartist rule of one man.
On 1 December 1934 Sergei Kirov was assassinated by the young Nikolayev. A degree of mystery surrounds this event. For example the NKVD officer responsible for Kirov’s safety died before anybody was able to question him.
Whether or not Stalin directly organised, or simply withdrew any obstacles to the murder, it served as the immediate signal to launch his full-scale war on the party’s old Bolshevik leaders.
In early 1935 Yezhov took over the Party Control Commission and succeeded Kirov as Secretary of the Central Committee. Khruschev, Malenkov and Beria – all absolutely trusted henchmen of Stalin – were moved into key positions within the party and the state. The murder provided these gangsters with the pretext they needed to exercise their total control. The rights of anyone accused of terrorist acts were suspended.
Thus the NKVD could select who it wished for immediate transportation and execution. From 1935 into 1936 Stalin, true to form, struck first at the Lefts – Zinovievites and the capitulators from the Trotskyist opposition. Zinoviev and Kamenev were tried and imprisoned in January 1935 for complicity in the assassination of Kirov.
Stalin chose his charge well – every bureaucrat from the party cell secretary in the Kolkhoz to the head of a ministry feared the silenced and brutally oppressed masses, they feared the appearance of “the avengers” that the Narodnik tradition had implanted in the Russian consciousness. Any sacrifice seemed justified to dispel the long shadow of terrorist revenge.
The bureaucracy raised above its head the guillotine it had for so long feared. After a lull of some eighteen months in August 1936 the great purges and the slaughter began. In the first trial of the “terrorist counter-revolutionary Trotskyist Zinovievist bloc”, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Yevdokimo and Ivan Smirnov made grotesque extorted “confessions”. At the instigation of “Judas Trotsky” they had become the “despicable servants and agents of Germano-Polish fascists”.
The defendants – the closest collaborators and comrades of Lenin for many years – were summarily shot. In January 1937 the second wave began, this time centring on the old members of the Left Opposition who had long since capitulated Pvatakov, Radek, Sokolnikov, Serebryakov, Muralov. In June 1937 Stalin attacked the leadership of the Red Army including Tukhachevsky. The purge was thoroughgoing; three out of five Soviet Marshals, 13 army commanders out of 15, 57 corps commanders out of 80, 70 divisional commanders out of 190, 75 of the 90 members of the Higher War Council – indeed over half the officer corps was purged. The road to the massive Soviet defeats of 1941 was opened by this holocaust.
That the old “left” were attacked first can be explained by the nature of Stalin’s bonapartism. The Stalinist Bonapartist state depended on negotiated alliance and co-existence with the governments of the imperialist states. From the time of Hitler’s rise to power the Stalinists sought to cement alliances with democratic imperialism. The Stalin-Laval pact signalled this. The Soviet bureaucracy was prepared to lend its weight, experience and police agents to drowning the Spanish workers’ vanguard in blood in order to keep alive this strategic element of international class collaboration in the Stalinist programme. Stalin was keen to make sure that the “democratic” imperialists were able to point to aspects of Soviet life that corresponded with the values and ideals of bourgeois democracy. The left, despite their capitulations, remained thorns in his side.
Zinoviev, for example, had been the bogey of the European democracies during his period as head of the Comintern in the 1920s. To allay suspicion Stalin aimed to discredit and destroy the “left”. By linking them with Germany and Japan – suggesting they were agents – Stalin was linking them to the enemies of “democratic” imperialism. At the same time he was linking them to a danger that ordinary Soviet citizens realised was a very real danger.
His Bonapartism also led him to once again ally with the Right, now broken and not a real threat. Bukharin, a symbol of the Right and therefore a symbol of appeasement with imperialism, was allowed to be the editor of Izvestia, the official government paper and was involved in drafting the 1936 Constitution. The Constitution itself was symbolic in that it reproduced bourgeois democratic norms – such as geographical representation – but confirmed the absolute supremacy of the Party. It was a piece of paper that liberal friends in the West could point to in their pursuit of the Popular Front, but it was also a tool in the hands of the police dictatorship.
But the terror did not stop at the old “left’. It was to engulf Soviet society for the last years of the 1930s. How do we begin to explain this particular bloody period of Stalinist Bonapartism?
In the late 1930s internal and external contradictions propelled the Bonapartist regime into deep crisis. In a manner that prefigures the experiences of Stalinist terror in Mao’s China and Pol Pot’s Kampuchea, the Stalinists could only respond to that crisis by unleashing their terror apparatus against every layer of Soviet society. Stalin’s purges represent this extraordinary form of Bonapartism’s response to crisis rather than the essence of Stalinism itself.
The later “de-Stalinisation” by Khruschev in the 1950s was an attempt to return to the norms of pre-1934 Stalinism rather than any attempt to dismantle the essential machinery of the Stalinist regime itself.
The key elements of Stalinism’s crisis were analysed and predicted by Trotsky and the International left Opposition.
The international position of the USSR deteriorated dramatically in the mid-1930s. On 25 November 1936 Japan and Nazi Germany signed the anti-Soviet anti-Comintern pact. In the face of the fascist offensive the Soviet bureaucracy’s alliance with the “Western Democracies” proved bankrupt.
The certain victory of Franco in the Spanish Civil War by 1938, the “Anschluss” of Austria with Nazi Germany in 1938, and the Munich agreement of September of that year whereby the British and French bourgeoisies recognised Hitler’s seizure of the Sudetenland, all testified to the weak and duplicitous nature of the “democratic” bourgeoisies.
Having slaughtered the left as a means of appeasing the democratic imperialists the Stalinists turned to slaughter the Bukharinites and Soviet military chiefs who, each for their own particular reasons, were pledged to pro-Western or anti-German policies. The purges made possible the dramatic about-turns in Stalinist foreign policy as the Soviet bureaucracy turned first to the Western bourgeoisie and then to the fascists with the 1939 Stalin-Hitler pact as a prop to sustain them in the accelerating international crisis.
Secondly, the late 1930s saw the increased articulation of the accumulated contradictions of autarchic bureaucratic planning. Even the most limited discussion or accountability proved intolerable for the Stalinist regime in these circumstances. Only massive purges and the expansion of the Gulag economy could plug the gaps and keep the system in operation during the Third Five Year Plan.
In these crisis circumstances the bureaucracy could not tolerate discussion within its own ranks. A recrudescence of factionalism erupted in 1932-34. Unless it was terrorised into submission, the bureaucracy itself threatened to so divide under the impact of internal and external pressure that the right and more dangerously the left stood to gain a hearing once again both within the ranks of officialdom and, more importantly, within the working class itself. Hence Stalin’s resort to extreme terror and the wholesale destruction of nearly all who had any connection with either the heroic or Thermidorian period of the Revolution.
The terror also served another purpose. The grotesque show trials and confessions could serve not only to silence the Soviet masses but also to explain shortages and increased work speeds. The visible shortcomings of Stalinist planning could be “blamed” on saboteurs and agents. The bureaucratic mis-managers, hiding behind the cloak of police terror, could cover their own incompetence and privileges from the scrutiny of the masses.
A final factor in explaining Stalin’s post 1934 offensive against the Thermidorian party was his terror of a revival of the left, following the German debacle. Trotsky had been proved so signally correct against Stalin and the fate of the German workers might have awakened sections of the Communist movement to this fact. Stalin could not risk such a possibility. This period saw not only the stigmatisation of all the “old Bolsheviks” as counter-revolutionaries, but also a worldwide campaign to implicate Trotsky and the Trotskyists in the crimes of fascism, In all the trials the “fascist” Trotsky was the chief defendant – in absentia. His followers were murdered by the NKVD: Klement, Ignace Reiss, Leon Sedov among them. The Bonapartist terror was aimed at destroying the Trotskyist movement inside the USSR and outside, and preventing it from becoming a challenge to Stalin. As Trotsky rightly pointed out:
“but under no condition is it permissible for the international proletarian vanguard to obtain the opportunity to verify freely and critically the ideas of Leninism through its own experience and to juxtapose Stalinism and so-called Trotskyism in the broad light of day.”143
The net result of the purges was the total destruction, not merely of Lenin’s party (which had occurred much earlier), but of virtually everybody who had been in Lenin’s party. Stalin successfully created a party that was his tool and was made up of his followers.
The XVIII Party Congress in 1939 was the first since the Congress of Victors. The victors had now been vanquished, with the majority of delegates to the 1934 Congress having been killed in the purges. As Molotov pointed out at the XVIII Congress, the party was dramatically transformed under the impact of police terror. Some 80 per cent of republic Party secretaries and 93 per cent of district secretaries had joined the party after 1924, and had known no other party regime than that of Stalin.144 Equally significantly the party dropped in size from 3,500,000 members in 1933 to 1,900,000 by 1937.
The 1937 census for the USSR revealed a population of 164 million – some 16.7 million less than the planned forecast. This shortfall gives some indication of the scale of the terror that Stalinism inflicted on Soviet society.
The monstrous barbarity of Stalin’s regime was not the result of his deranged personality. In order to free itself from all social restraint and to destroy any potential base for opposition, Stalinism had to create this apparatus and regime of terror. In its own way this testifies to the illegitimacy of the Stalinists’ usurpation of power and the inability of the Stalin clique to legitimise their regime in the eyes of the mass of Soviet toilers.
Their creation of an army of millions of slave labourers enabled them to both terrorise the Soviet working class with the threat of the camps and complete a series of industrial projects under the bayonets of the NKVD. As Roy Medvedev has explained it:
“State plans assigned an increasingly important role to Gulag. By the end of the thirties GULAG was responsible for much of the country’s lumbering and extraction of copper, gold and coal. GULAG built important canals, strategic roads, and many industrial enterprises in remote regions... The planning agencies frequently put pressure on the NKVD to speed up certain projects. Planning was done not only for projects assigned to GULAG but also for the growth of its labour force. Planning even encompassed the mortality rate in the camps – and in this respect achievement far exceeded plan goals”145
In the spheres of cultural and family life the Stalinists inaugurated a period of acute reaction. Incapable of legitimising their dictatorship as either socialist or the will of the working class the Stalinist bureaucracy decked out their dictatorship ever increasingly in the colours of Great Russian chauvinism. Medvedev highlights this well when he describes how,
“A symbol of the time was the absence in Moscow of a monument to Marx, to Engels, or even to Lenin, while a statue of Yuri Dolgorukii, a stupid and cruel twelfth century prince, went up on Soviet Square, replacing the Obelisk of Freedom that had been erected at Lenin’s suggestion.”146
Thermidor and the family
The reactionary impact of Stalinism is vividly illustrated by its erosion of the rights won for Soviet women by the October revolution and the proletarian dictatorship. In The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky correctly stated that “The October Revolution honestly fulfilled its obligations in relation to women.” The early Soviet government granted women full political, legal and economic equality and took important positive steps towards removing the burden of women’s oppression within the home. All legislation which assumed the subordinate position of women was repealed, and women were written into the constitution with equal rights and obligations. Protective legislation was extended to women, specifically in the areas of night and underground work, and any work considered injurious to a woman’s health. Equal pay for equal work was established as a fundamental principle.
All restriction on women’s movements were lifted – she no longer had to move with her husband. Inheritance and property laws were revised to weaken the strength of the nuclear family. In December 1917 civil registration of marriage and easy free divorce were granted, abortion was legalised in 1920 and made available free in Soviet hospitals. In Central Asia there were problems with the extreme oppression of Muslim women, and concessions were made on marriage laws, but abduction, forced marriage and the Kalym (bride price) were made criminal offences.
Alongside these legal measures:
“the revolution made a heroic effort to destroy the so-called ‘family hearth’ – that archaic, stuffy and stagnant institution in which the woman of the toiling classes performs galley labour from childhood to death”. 147
The family hearth was to be replaced by socialised institutions for child care, eating, laundry etc. These plans were made, and support for them built, but due to the poverty of the Soviet state and the exigencies of the civil war, they could never be adequately implemented. During the Civil War there were communal dining rooms, as there were during the industrialisation of the early 1930s, their popularity being probably due more to the absence of other sources of food than to a commitment to communal living.
The establishment of the Zhenotdel (Women’s Department in the Party) in 1918 was important as a means of positively mobilising and propagandising among women, but the female membership of the party still remained low – by 1922 only 8 per cent of party members were women.
The period of the NEP curtailed the limited social programmes that had been established, and the unemployment it created amongst women pushed them back into the home and, increasingly, onto the streets. The 1926 family legislation made married and unmarried couples responsible for supporting each other -– a measure dictated by the inability of the state to support the vast numbers of deserted women, and aiming to prevent them from abandoning their children and turning to prostitution.
Thermidor as it affected the family and women can be seen to develop from these early problems, but to then have been actively exacerbated and consolidated by Stalinism.
During the First Five Year Plan, women’s employment increased at a rate that exceeded the expectations of the planners – the number of women in industry and the national economy doubled from 1928-1932, and continued to rise to 41.6 per cent of the working population by 1939, 56 per cent after the Second World War, 51 per cent in 1970.
During the initial rise in the early 1930s, it was not accompanied by a correspondingly large increase in child-care and communal facilities. Women were simply working longer hours and doing all the housework. Childcare, of necessity, was expanded in the USSR, but it was still inadequate, both in numbers of places and the care received so that many women would prefer to use a “Babushked” – an unpaid member of the family, to look after the children. Protective legislation for women, particularly maternity leave, and pay declined proportionately with the increase in female labour. Thus the forced industrialisation policy meant that “A woman’s place is in the factory and the home”.
Up to the mid-1930s, the soviet government was still declaring that it would abolish the yolk of domestic slavery. “Down with the Kitchen!” was one of their slogans. In the mid-1930s this was abandoned alongside moves to strengthen the family. An ideological campaign was mounted, and backed up with legislation, to reinforce the family as a bastion of the “new socialist society”. This was officially justified partly as a response to the “promiscuity” and breakdown in family life that had been witnessed after the revolution.
The Stalinist state wished to re-establish the family as a performer of domestic labour, but more importantly as an institution for the maintenance of discipline and order, to put a check on the youth and return workers to the isolation of the nuclear family. Homelessness among children, and prostitution were both increasing and the state response was to punish both – parents who were forced by poverty and destitution to abandon their children were fined and imprisoned, harsh measures were taken for the first time by the Soviet state against prostitutes and homosexuals.
This change in position on the family was consolidated in the new family legislation of 1936, which made abortion illegal, emphasised the centrality of the nuclear family and made divorce much more difficult. Stalin made other direct attacks on the equality that had been established after the revolution – in education differentiation of male and female roles was emphasised in schools and courses, and in 1943 co-education was actually abolished in many schools.
Still to this day, girls are taught domestic science and needlework in school and an emphasis on the duty of motherhood remains.
The Marxist tradition has always held that the level of culture and emancipation of society as a whole can be gauged by the position of women within it. Just as Stalinism upholds and extends the oppressive apparatus associated with the old type of state. So it struggled to recreate the old forms of oppression in family life. The position of women in the USSR at the end of the 1930s served as a poignant symbol of the profound degeneration that the world’s first workers' state had undergone at the hands of the counter-revolutionary Stalinist regime.
Footnotes
1. L. Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, (London 1967) p27.
2. M. Dobb, Soviet Economic Development 1917 (London 1966) p 38.
3. Ibid, p36.
4. L. Trotsky, op.cit. p27.
5. N. Bukharin and E. Preobrazhensky, The ABC of Communism, (Harmondsworth 1969) p 186.
6. R. Pethybridge, The Social Prelude to Stalinism (London 1974) p137.
7. Quoted in Dobb, op.cit.p83.
8. E.H.Carr, The Russian Revolution from Lenin to Stalin 1917-29 (London 1979) p11.
9. N. Mironov and Z.V.Stepanov, Rabochie Leningrada (Leningrad 1975) p 184.
10. S.N.Kanev and V.M. Nanov, Ocherki Istorii Leningradskoi organizatsii KPSS (Leningrad 1968) p148.
11. O.I. Shkaratan, “Ismeneniya v sotsial'nom sostave fabrichnozavodskikh rabochikh Leningrada” in Voprosy Istorii (SSR 1959) No. 5 p22.
12. Ibid. p32.
13. P.R. Gregory and RC. Stuart, Soviet Economic Structure and Performance (New York 1981) p41.
14. H. Carrere O'Encausse, Lenin - Revolution and Power (London 1982) p131.
15. V.I. Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow 1966) pp 467-8 16. Published in Pravda May 26th and 27th. See Collected Works Volume 33.
17. Lenin, Collected Works, op. cit. Vol 33 p 474.
18. Ibid,p487.
19. Ibid, p 488.
20. Ibid, p 498.
21. L. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (London 1967) p 59.
22. Lenin,op.cit.p 428.
23. Lenin, Collected Works op. cit. Vol. 36. p 606.
24. Ibid. p 610.
25. Ibid, p 596.
26. L. Trotsky, The Stalin School of Falsification (New York 1937) pp 58 - 63.
27. H. C. O'Encausse, op.cit. p 154.
28. quoted in M. Schactman, The Struggle for the New Course (Michigan 1965) p 153.
29. Oobb, op. cit. pp 161-162.
30. L. Trotsky, The New Course (Michigan 1965) p 45.
31. Ibid. p 46.
32. Ibid, p 18.
33. Ibid, p 19.
34 Ibid, p 23.
35. M. Schactman, op. cit. p 169.
36. Quoted in ibid, p 170.
37. Chetyrnadtsaty S'Ezd VKP (b), Stenograficheski Otchet . (Moscow 1926) p 135. .
38. Quoted in W. Korey, Zinoviev and the Problem of World Revolution 1919 - 1927 (Unpublished PhD thesis, Columbia 1960) p 189.
39. For a fuller discussion of this see Workers Power Journal, (Autumn 1977) No 5, pp 10 - 15.
40. For more details see A. Neuberg, Armed Insurrection (London 1970) 41. V. Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary 1901-1941 (London 1963) p 177.
42. H.C. D’Encausse, op.cit. p 170.
43. Ibid, p 165.
44. J. Stalin, “The October Revolution and the Tactics of the Russian Communists” in Leninism (London 1940), pp 96 -97.
45. E. H. Carr, op. cit. p 69.
46. L. Trotsky, Towards Capitalism or Socialism? (London 1976) p 9.
47. L. Trotsky, The Third International After Lenin (New York, 1970), p 240.
48. Pravda, 20 October 1925.
49. Platform of the Joint Opposition (London 1973), p 28.
50. Ibid, p 28.
51. M. Lewin, Russia
Chapter 3: The survival and expansion of Stalinism after the second world war
The continued existence of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers’ state into the 1980s can only be understood and explained by an analysis of the expansion of Stalinism since the end of the Second World War. The theoretical and political problems posed by this expansion have caused programmatic confusion amongst those claiming to uphold the banner of Trotskyism. In part or in whole this confusion has stemmed from an inability to creatively elaborate Trotsky’s own analysis of Stalinism under the changed conditions of the war and its aftermath.
Ever since the early 1920s Trotsky sketched out the general contradictions which were pushing towards a new imperialist world war. He correctly recognised that the USA emerged from the First World War far stronger than both the victorious and the defeated imperialism of Europe. At that time Trotsky believed that a new war would arise out of a failed attempt at post-war USA expansion, a failure caused by an inability to accumulate sufficiently on a ruined European economy, and French and British unwillingness to be reduced to semi-colonies of the USA.1
The major impetus which forced Trotsky to concretise his analysis and discuss the tempo of the coming war in the 1930s, was of course, the rise to power of Hitler in 1933 in Germany.2 Precisely because Stalinism’s fate was inextricably tied to the respective fortunes of imperialism and the working class, Trotsky drew a number of conclusions regarding the fate of the Kremlin usurpers should the expected war materialise.
Trotsky argued that the imperialist war and its accompanying revolutionary upsurges would sweep away the Stalinist bureaucracy. Either it would succumb directly to the onslaught of imperialism aided by restorationist forces within the USSR or a series of successful proletarian revolutions in Europe, arising out of the war, would lead to political revolution in the Soviet Union and destroy the Kremlin bureaucracy.3
Taken as a strategic prognosis, Trotsky’s formulations retain their validity. The reactionary, utopian policy of “detente” practiced by Stalinism in the USSR will lead, inevitably, to the destruction of the collectivised property relations should the working class not first come to the rescue. This undeniable tendency towards the destruction of Stalinism was, however, offset during the course of the second world war, by a set of conjunctural factors which Trotsky did not, and, in some cases, could not anticipate.
Stalinism and class struggle in the second world war
The divisions within world imperialism weakened its offensive capacity against the USSR. The very nature of the imperialist war – bloody conflicts over the division of the world markets – led to the Allied or “democratic” imperialist nations (primarily Great Britain and the USA) eventually enlisting the support of the Stalinist bureaucracy for its war effort against the Axis Powers.
The defeat of the Axis countries and the various compromised national bourgeoisies at the close of the war was accompanied by large-scale anti-capitalist mobilisations. This confirmed the objective potential for the revolutionary variant of Trotsky’s programme for the war. In the Axis countries (Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary) the upsurges were most pronounced after the German defeat. In Bulgaria, for example, The Economist (7 October 1944) noted that throughout Thrace and Macedonia, “Soldiers councils have been set up, officers have been degraded, red flags hoisted and normal saluting has been abolished.”4
In Eastern Europe the working class was most to the fore in Czechoslovakia where plant committees, Councils and workers’ militias were created, and dual power existed for many months in 1944 and 1945. It was a full year before the government dared limit workers’ control in the factories. In Germany there were widespread workers’ uprisings, particularly in Halle and Magdeburg. It has become commonplace, even amongst bourgeois historians to recognise that the defeat of Hitler in France during 1944 provoked extremely favourable conditions for the working class to seize state power.6
The successful imperialist bloc in the war was itself not able to crush this movement. Imperialism was forced to lean upon the Kremlin and its armed agencies to abort this rising tide of war and rising class struggle. The use of the Red Army to forcibly end workers’ control in the factories was widespread, particularly in Poland, Romania and Bulgaria. In defeated Germany and Austria the working class suffered much worse. Many workers’ districts were terrorised. Vienna was looted and pillaged for three days.
The continuance of the alliance had the effect of delaying an immediate confrontation between Stalinism and world imperialism. This unholy alliance against the working class took on a sickening dimension in Indo-China where the Stalinists, from positions of great prominence in the ranks of the workers and peasants, helped butcher the vanguard and delivered a broken proletariat into the hands of imperialism.
In Greece the Stalinists, acting in accord with Stalin’s directives, were guilty of a similar betrayal. “Spheres of influence” deals struck between Churchill and Stalin in Moscow and by all the allies at Yalta had given Indo-China and Greece to the imperialists and Stalin was determined to honour this deal.
Trotsky’s prognosis had always insisted that the prerequisite for the revolutionary destruction of the Soviet bureaucracy during the war was the ascendancy of the leadership of the Fourth International (FI). However, the war came to a close, and working class struggles erupted, in a situation in which the FI cadre were aim completely marginalised, except for a few notable exceptions, such as Indo-China. The Stalinists in the USSR and elsewhere were able to survive, therefore, because the revolutionary upsurge lacked a leadership capable of directing it against the bureaucracy, as well as against imperialism. The role of the conscious factor in Trotsky’s prognosis should never be overlooked. Failure to recognise its importance led the FI movement, eventually, to believe that Stalinism and imperialism could be overthrown by the “objective process”, unfolding independently of human will. This method of thinking was alien to that of Trotsky. He believed that prognoses had to be revised and corrected in the light of experience.
The survival of the USSR and Stalinism within it cannot just be explained by a series of international factors. Important internal events must also be taken into account. The swift and extensive construction of a war economy displayed the progressive potential of the planned property relations in the USSR. But the survival of the Soviet Union is ultimately accounted for by the heroism of the Soviet masses (e.g. 20 million dead) in the face of German imperialist aggression.
The resistance of the people to fascism, despite the tyranny of Stalinist rule, is explained, on the one hand, by the sobering experience of fascist rule in large western areas of the USSR, and, by the relative weakening of the Bonapartist state machinery over the masses, enabling them to efficiently organise their own defence against German imperialism relatively free from bureaucratic oppression as happened in Leningrad.
Although the property relations of the USSR were to prove resilient to the attacks of imperialism the war did wreak havoc on the productive forces of the Soviet Union. This manifested itself most dramatically in a severe contraction in accumulation and an absolute decline in the level of productive forces. In all 31,850 industrial plants were destroyed. 65,000 kms of railway track, 15,800 locomotives and Y(?) (CHECK) 2 million freight cars were ruined. Coal and steel production fell between 40-50 per cent in 1942-3. It only reached the 1940 level again in 1946. In addition, 4.7 million houses, 1,710 towns and 70,000 villages were destroyed.
In agriculture the picture was equally grim. Some 98,000 collective and 1,876 state farms disappeared. Seven million horses were lost as were 20 out of 23 million pigs. Only 3 per cent of the tractors survived in German-occupied Russia.7 Centrifugal tendencies undermining the planned property relations became more and more pronounced between 1941 and 1944. Heavy industry, for example, suffered greatly as budget production costs were done away with in 1941, giving autonomy to the trusts. Light industry was often organised on a local scale and even reduced to handicraft production in some areas.
In the countryside the war witnessed an accelerated tempo of capitalist restoration in agriculture, with the extensive development of primitive capitalist accumulation which threatened to undermine the social regime in the USSR. As Germain observed:
“The corollary to greater freedom given to the richer peasants was a massive increase in draconian measures taken against the working class in the cities in order to meet the war’s demands. At the same time the privileges of the bureaucracy and its cohorts were extended. The right of inheritance was increased, the orthodox church re-established, and the army and GPU were given independence from the party. Despite this massive crisis the Kremlin rulers managed to reassert their rule and establish an unexpected level of stability. As the siege of Leningrad was lifted, for example, the GPU converged on the city once again. This was possible because of the exhaustion of the working class. Furthermore, the lend-lease aid given to the Kremlin by the Allies at Teheran and Potsdam served to shield the bureaucracy from the worst effects of its economic crisis. As it became clear that Hitler was going to be defeated the Kremlin took fright at the powerful restorationist forces it had unleashed and which threatened the collectivised property; a Five Year Plan (the Fourth) was drawn up for 1945-49 which aimed at a 10 per cent growth rate. At the end of 1944 large show trials of industrial bureaucrats were held for “misappropriations” and at the end of 1945 in official pronouncements, the terminology of “Marxism-Leninism” began to replace that of Great Russian/Imperial chauvinism that had been stoked up in the war.
Gradually the Bonapartist state machine was re-built up all over the country as a guardian of the bureaucracy’s interests against restorationist and proletarian threats to its existence. On the one hand, this bonapartism struck out against the elements of restoration in the countryside which had been let loose. At the same time, however, the Kremlin lashed out against the working class which had shown a developing independence from the bureaucracy during the process of defending the USSR.
However, the survival of the Stalinist caste was not, in the last analysis, a question to be settled on the national arena. Rather, it was the international scene at the close of the war which held the key to the future of the Kremlin bureaucrats.
Formal political and military contact between the USSR and the Allies was established in July 1941, a month after the German invasion of the USSR put an abrupt end to the Stalin-Hitler pact. The military bloc was always shot through with suspicion and hostility on both sides. Even the first meeting of the heads of the Grand Alliance in late 1943 in Teheran was a bitter affair at which the Soviet Union urged the immediate opening of a second front in Europe.
The Western Allies, in fact, had left the Soviet Union to take on the might of German imperialism in the East while they concentrated on reconquering lost colonies from Germany and Japan. While the US did give lend-lease aid to the USSR their policy was one of both defeating Germany and exhausting their Soviet ally. As token of its sincerity towards its democratic imperialist allies the Kremlin formally dissolved the Communist (Third) International in 1943, thus ending even the pretence of commitment to international revolution.
Diplomatic manoeuvres between Stalinism and imperialism
In the earlier part of the war the dominant thinking amongst US imperialist leaders was total US control over Europe. George Kennan, chief foreign policy advisor to Roosevelt and head of the Policy Planning Staff in the White House said in 1942:
“We endeavour to take over the whole system of control which the Germans have set up for the administration of the European economy, preserving the apparatus putting people of our own into the key positions to run it, and that we then apply this system to the execution of whatever policies we adopt for continental Europe, in the immediate post-war period.”9
The decisive shift in the balance of forces between Allied and Axis imperialism took place during the course of 1943, when the victory of the Allies became more and more assured. Soviet victory at Stalingrad and entry into Eastern Europe forced the imperialists to come to terms with the bargaining power of the Soviet bureaucracy within the anti-German alliance. At Teheran little consideration was given to post-war territorial divisions apart from a general agreement to dismember Germany. Stalin said: “There is no need to speak at the present time about any Soviet desires. But when the time comes, we will speak.”10
However, Roosevelt left the conference convinced that some tactical concessions would have to be made to the USSR after the war. It was only as the defeat of Germany became a certain prospect and the role that the USSR would play in the defeat became clear to the USA that such tactical concessions were even considered.
Roosevelt on his return from the Yalta conference in January 1945 confessed to a group of Senators:
“The occupying forces had the power in the areas where their arms were present and each knew that the others could not force things to an issue. The Russians had the power in Eastern Europe ... The only practical course was to use what influence we had to ameliorate the situation.”11
Even in these moments of weakness the imperialists did not give carte blanche to the USSR. They insisted on spheres of “influence”, not “control”. Faced with this prospect the Kremlin was confronted with several acute problems, all of which necessitated a right turn in international policy. The chief problems was the containment of the rising tide of anti-capitalist upsurge throughout Europe which was largely outside the control of the Soviet bureaucracy or was threatening to get out of control of the indigenous Stalinists. But the Soviet leaders also had to be wary of the strategic threat from Anglo-American imperialism. Although the tactical alliance with the latter bloc was necessitated by the threat of German imperialism, as this threat subsided, so the threat of Anglo-American aggression resurfaced. It was essential for Stalin to take steps to prepare for this threat.
Such tactical concessions to the Kremlin were opposed by sections of the US ruling class. Acting Secretary of State throughout most of 1945 was Joseph Grew, a warmonger who argued in December 1944 (the eve of Yalta):
“It will be far better and safer to have the showdown before Russia can reconstruct herself and develop her tremendous potential military, economic and territorial power”12
At the Potsdam Conference in June and July 1945, the fine details of the post-war carve up were agreed. On 16 July the USA exploded the first atomic bomb in New Mexico. The existence of the bomb would render redundant the US imperialists request for a Soviet drive against Japan at the end of European hostilities and serve to shift the balance within the alliance against the Soviet Union. Churchill, on behalf of the British, was delighted at the new weapon. Before the news of Churchill’s defeat in the July General Election forced him to take his leave of Potsdam, he wrote:
“We now have something in our hands which would redress the balance with the Russians. The secret of this explosive and the power to use it would completely alter the diplomatic equilibrium which was adrift since the defeat of Germany.”13
In addition Churchill was determined to keep the German army intact as a bulwark against the USSR.
Aware of this potential threat Stalin recognised the imperative need to rebuild the ravaged economy as quickly as possible so as to re-establish his security both internally against the working class and externally against the threat from imperialism. In order to put pressure on the Kremlin, lend lease aid to the USSR was stopped in June 1945, immediately prior to Potsdam.
The US also took a much tougher line on reparations. Both these measures were designed to punish the USSR for supposedly overstepping the limits of the Yalta agreements. Consequently at Potsdam reparations were the sticking point, as Stalin was determined to make Germany pay for the cost of the war. In the end, the seal of approval was given to any reparations taken from USSR occupied territory and 25 per cent of “unnecessary” capital equipment from the imperialist-controlled zone of Germany.
The politics of Stalinist reconstruction after the war
Given the crucial nature of the manifold threats to the existence of a stable, parasitic caste in the USSR, and the international character of the dilemma, the survival of Stalinism was inescapably bound up with the political consolidation of its military expansion in Eastern Europe.
Stalinism’s expansion was marked by a number of specific features. Stalinism fears above all the threat of genuine proletarian revolution. Consequently, the expansion of its political influence was achieved in a manner which subordinated the interests of the working class to itself, and through it to imperialism. The reactionary, utopian theory of “socialism in one country”, the credo of the Stalinist bureaucracy, leads programmatically to the illusory strategy of “peaceful co-existence” with world imperialism. The interests of the working class were sacrificed on the altar of this strategy.
However, under exceptional circumstances, the strategy of “detente” with private property on a world scale can lead, by its very logic, to its tactical negation on a local scale. In other words, the overall desire to strike a “modus vivendi” with private property leads to the abolition of private property in certain, local circumstances where this proves unavoidable for the Stalinists.
This proved to be the end result in most of the areas that the USSR had occupied at the end of the war. But this only occurs when the balance of “detente” has become very unfavourable to the Stalinists. It occurs only in order to re-establish “peaceful co-existence” with the imperialists on a more stable basis on a world scale.14 It does not indicate that Stalinism has in any way become a revolutionary factor in events.
An extremely important impulse for expansion was the crisis of accumulation within the USSR. For example, the Soviet Union sought to repair its war-torn economy at the close of the war through forced transfers of raw materials and energy (i.e. plundering) and through unequal exchange (i.e. the “mixed company”).
The previously Axis countries of Bulgaria, Rumania and Hungary were hit first and hardest. Immediately they were occupied, about 70 per cent of their industrial machinery was removed. In Hungary some 90 per cent of industrial capacity in the metal and engineering industries was removed in 1945.
In Rumania, between 23 August 1944 and 12 September 1944 equipment to the value of $2 billion was taken, including the entire war fleet, most of the merchant marine fleet, half the available railway stock, and the oil industry equipment. In Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia some 15-25 per cent of the industrial stock was removed. Sixty large industrial enterprises alone were dismantled from the Sudeten region of Czechoslovakia.
In that part of Germany annexed by Poland after the war, it is estimated that up to 30 per cent of industry was uprooted and taken to the USSR. In addition, up to 30 per cent of each occupied country’s annual GDP was siphoned off by the Kremlin.
In theory the “mixed company” was supposed to be an equal combination of Russian and national bourgeois capital. In reality very little of the Russian share was forthcoming. Under this guise lots of raw materials and energy supplies went to the USSR for next to nothing in exchange (e.g. Rumanian oil, Iranian oil, Yugoslavian bauxite).15
We must remember Trotsky’s own warning that the rapacious insatiable appetite of the bureaucracy, with its desire to enhance its privileges and prestige over other areas, will always be a factor in any expansion. However, this will be very much a subordinate factor since alone it would not be sufficient reason for the Stalinists to risk their “understanding” with imperialism nor provoke the possibility of unleashing unwanted revolutionary action by the oppressed masses.
In Eastern Europe (i.e. Hungary, Bulgaria, Rumania, East Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia) the political strategies pursued by the Stalinists at the end of the war, and the impetus behind them were essentially the same. In each of these countries the defeat and retreat of German imperialism was accompanied by uneven and potentially revolutionary mobilisations of the urban and rural workers and peasants.
Although anti-capitalist in direction, these actions of the masses were without revolutionary Trotskyist leadership. The hold of indigenous Stalinism on the other hand, over the vanguard of the masses was very uneven throughout Eastern Europe. Czechoslovakia was the only Eastern Europe country on the eve of war to have even a semblance of bourgeois democracy. This helped the CP to operate fairly openly. At its lowest pre-war point the KSC (Czechoslovakian CP) had a membership of 24,000. Electorally it always managed to pick up at least ? [CHECK] million votes, although it only controlled about 12 per cent of file? trade union membership. It survived the occupation emerging with a membership of 27,000 in May 1945 in the Czech areas alone. This grew to 1,159,164 by January 1946.
On the other hand the Polish Communist Party suffered from the Stalin purges of 1938. It was virtually liquidated, with 12 of its Central Committee members executed. Reconstituted in late 1941, after the breakdown of the Stalin-Hitler pact (in preparation for which the Polish Stalinists had been killed), it still only had a membership of about 4,000 in 1942-3.
In the last analysis, though, the weakness of certain indigenous Stalinist parties was compensated for by the role and control of the Red Army. Given the sporadic and atomised nature of the resistance movements in Eastern Europe the major force for sweeping German imperialism out was the Red Army – the armed wing of the Kremlin. From 1944 onwards, the defeat of German imperialism by the Red Army was accompanied by the deliberate destruction of the anti-fascist and anti capitalist movements of the Eastern European masses. Everywhere the Stalinists protected, and in some cases reintroduced, the rule of the bourgeoisie in the economy and prevented the seizure of private property by the workers and peasants. Where the workers had already seized factories then the Stalinists used nationalisation as a means of taking direct control away from the workers.
Molotov’s strictures to the Bulgarian working class were typical of this period: “If certain Communists continue their present conduct we will bring them to reason. Bulgaria will remain with her democratic government and present order.”16
Of Bulgaria, the French bourgeois paper, Le Monde, was pleased to note in June 1946: “Moreover, the Fatherland Front, has been able to maintain a sound economic situation and to safeguard the financial stability of the country.” The equally worthy Swiss publication, the Geneva Journal crowed the previous month, with regard to Hungary, “Wherever they can do so, the Russians block and oppose the taking over of large industrial enterprises under a new statist system.”
In Rumania, the fascist collaborator and big oil trust magnate Tatescu was vaunted by the Stalinists as a national hero. Even the discredited Rumanian monarch, King Michael was brought back, decorated by Stalin and put back on the throne.17
In the occupied countries of Eastern Europe such as Czechoslovakia the German bourgeoisie owned much of the capital. In 1945 in Czechoslovakia more than 60 per cent of the industry, and virtually the whole of the financial system was in German hands.
With the retreat of the fascists the workers established workers’ control throughout the nation. The workers’ councils set up national managements, which the Benes government were forced to recognise. A short time after there were some 10,000 national managements embracing some 75 per cent of industrial workers. Nationalisation by the state and the gradual introduction of state functionaries into the plants as managers was the only way, short of terrible blood letting, of defusing the revolutionary situation.
At the same time there was considerable popular pressure for nationalisations from the working class who believed it would mean an end to capitalist exploitation. As a result, the October 1945 nationalisation decrees brought 61.2 per cent of the working class into nationalised industries (16 per cent of the enterprises). This did not represent the expropriation of the whole capitalist class by the Czech workers. On the contrary, as the KSC put it: “By nationalisation we understand the transfer of the property of Germans, Hungarians, Traitors and collaborators to the hands of the Czech and Slovak nation.”19
One nationalisation decree was even more explicit, stating that the enterprises were to be administered in line with the principles of commercial business, independence, profit making and free competition.20 The impeccably bourgeois president of the first Czech government, Benes, stated the position clearly in an interview to the Manchester Guardian in December 1945:
“The Germans simply took control of all main industries and all the banks ... In this way they automatically prepared the economic and financial capital of our country for nationalisation. To return this property and the banks into the hands of Czech individuals or to consolidate them without considerable state assistance and without new financial guarantees was simply impossible.The state had to step in.”
Dual power in Eastern Europe, 1944-47
At the level of the state, the Red Army served to stabilise and in some cases reconstruct the forms of administrative and repressive state apparatus associated with bourgeois rule: government centralised in the hands of a distant and unaccountable executive; internal and external security centralised in the hands of a standing army above and opposed to the mass of direct producers.
Given the highly statised nature of the property relations in these countries and hence the relative weakness of the individual representatives of capital in the economy, it was particularly important for the Stalinists to construct coalition governments with the representatives of the bourgeoisie in high, if not crucial, places.
In Bulgaria, throughout 1945 there was a wave of political executions possibly numbering 20,000. Nevertheless, the popular Agrarian Party leader, Nikola Petkov was in the government. In November the elections took place with an overwhelming majority for the Fatherland Front, a Stalinist and bourgeois nationalist coalition headed by the strident anti-communist Prime Minister Georgiev. In Romania the first government after the German defeat was made up by the National Peasants and National Liberals in September 1944, the only Stalinist representative being the Minister of Justice Patrascanu.
The machinations and brutal force of the Red Army over the next months in Romania were designed to remove the two major bourgeois parties (The National Democratic Bloc) and replace them with a government of the National Democratic Front (NDF), consisting of Stalinists, Social Democrats, Union of Patriots and the Ploughman’s Front.
Such a government would be an extremely malleable one for the Kremlin. In this period the Kremlin charge, Vyshinsky, dictated the sequence of events to King Michael. Eventually after a period of armed demonstrations an ND F government was installed in March 1945 with 17 Cabinet positions going to the NDF and three economic ministries to the oil magnate Tatarescu who was installed as foreign minister. These measures were clearly designed to placate the “democratic” bourgeoisie.
A similar struggle took place in Poland this time between the US/GB backed London based group of Polish nationalists headed by Peasant Party leader Mikolajczyk and the Soviet backed Lublin Committee. In each of these cases the purges, intimidation and liquidation of prominent bourgeois figures must not be interpreted as the complete elimination of bourgeois rule, but as measures designed to crush bourgeois parties with strong roots in the national population and replace them with other bourgeois figures who would have little base from which to resist the designs of the Kremlin, but which could, at the same time, administer the economy in a way that would also serve the interests of the national bourgeoisie and even solicit aid from imperialism. In each of these countries the state apparatus had, to a greater or lesser extent, disintegrated in the last period of the imperialist war.
While the Stalinists prevented the workers and peasants from creating their own new state apparatus (based on Soviets and a workers’ militia) and re-established bourgeois control in the economy, they kept the key levers of the reconstructed state apparatus firmly in the grip of the Red Army and its local allies and agents. The leading Hungarian Stalinist Rakosi spoke for all his ilk in Eastern Europe in this period when he remarked:
“There was one position, control of which was claimed by our party from the first minute. One position where the party was not inclined to consider any distribution of the posts according to the strengths of the parties in the coalition. This was the State Security Authority. . . We kept this organisation in our hands from the first day of its establishment.”21
In fact, it was in Hungary where the Stalinists had to make the most concessions on the issue. The coalition which emerged from the October 1945 elections haggled over portfolios. Eventually Imre Nagy secured the Ministry of the Interior but responsibility for the police was delegated to the Smallholders Party. With the exception of Czechoslovakia, the Stalinists also retained the post of Defence, again reflecting the relative strength of the bourgeoisie in this country.
Everywhere the levers of armed power were used in this period to intimidate opponents, fix elections and in general guide policy down desired channels.
The result was a dual power situation that reflected the balance of forces between the world bourgeoisie and the USSR as it manifested itself in the Eastern European area. Political power was split, or rather shared, between the Stalinists and the bourgeoisie.
The Stalinists held a monopoly of repressive power but the bourgeoisie were reintegrated into the political superstructure via their control of the highly statified economy. Nowhere was this more clearly the case than in Czechoslovakia. The Germans were finally driven from Prague only in May 1945. The first post-war government set up was a coalition of four bourgeois parties and two bourgeois workers’ parties. The KSC emerged from the war the strongest and they were given first choice of ministries, the 22 portfolios being divided up equally among the parties. The KSC chose Interior, Information and Agriculture, leaving the economic ministries in the hands of the bourgeoisie.
By defining this period as one of dual power we can understand its instability and its eventual outcome. In Eastern Europe after 1945 the dual power consisted of a pact between the Stalinists and the bourgeoisie. Such a pact was necessary for the bourgeoisie because they were weak and depended on the Stalinists to maintain private property. It was necessary for the Stalinists because during the period 1945-47 they wanted to maintain private property to fulfil their deal with imperialism and in return secure economic aid. Dual power was also necessary for the Stalinists because it was a means of crushing the independent activity of the working class. Trotsky, drawing on the experience of the English and French revolutions (17th and 18th centuries) anticipated the possibility of such a form of dual power:
“The splitting of sovereignty foretells nothing less than civil war. But before the competing parties will go to that extreme – especially in case they dread the interference of a third force-they may feel compelled for quite a long time to endure, and even to sanction, a two power system.”22
The coalition governments were the sanction given by both parties in Eastern Europe in 1945 to the split sovereignty that existed. These governments had, to a greater or lesser extent, bonapartist characteristics. This was less so where the indigenous bourgeoisie and Stalinists represented genuine social forces, as for example in Czechoslovakia, more so where the new governmental form had little indigenous social foundations e.g. Soviet Occupied Germany.
The ability of the Stalinists to resolve the dual power from 1948 onwards without recourse to civil war can be explained by their dominance within those governments. Dual power does not necessarily mean that both sides are equal and balanced. The Soviet Army and police apparatuses established in Eastern Europe meant that repressive power lay exclusively in the hands of the Stalinists. There were therefore able to use this power to resolve dual power in a cold manner, when world imperialism moved against them.
Popular front and bourgeois workers’ government
Within the coalition governments in existence throughout Eastern Europe in this period the Stalinist parties were the decisive force because of their relations to the armed forces of the USSR.23 Committed to the maintenance of private property and the demobilisation and continued exploitation of the masses they acted either in a form of popular front with the bourgeoisie as in Czechoslovakia or as a specific form of a bourgeois workers government. These parties with roots in the national working class, owing their power to the Soviet bureaucracy, shaped the policies of government in the interests of a deal between imperialism, its own national bourgeoisie and the Soviet bureaucracy.
The two forms of government established by the Stalinist Parties were different. A popular front is an open coalition of bourgeois and workers’ parties, while the bourgeois workers’ government is a concealed coalition in which a workers’ party governs on behalf of and in the interests of, the bourgeoisie.
However, in content they are both designed to deflect the working class from seizing power and exercising it in its own name. Of the bourgeois workers’ government the Comintern rightly stated that they:
“are a means of deceiving the proletariat about the real class character of the State, or to ward off, with the help of corrupt workers leaders, the revolutionary offensive of the proletariat and to gain time.”24
Likewise with the popular front, as Trotsky pointed out, referring to its role in demobilising the French working class in 1936:
“The People’s Front in France took upon itself the same task as did the so-called ‘coalition’ of Cadets, Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries in Russia in February 1917 – checking the revolution at its first stage.”25
He went on to point out that, like a bourgeois workers’ government, the popular front disguises the real nature of bourgeois power from the workers:
“The workers were deprived of these instruments [party and soviets– Eds] because the leaders of the workers’ organisations formed a wall around the bourgeois power in order to disguise it, to render it unrecognisable and invulnerable. Thus the revolution that begun found itself braked, arrested, demoralised.”26
The bourgeois workers’ governments and popular fronts played exactly these roles in Eastern Europe. The bourgeoisie was extremely vulnerable. Its armed power was negligible. It lacked, at this time, decisive support from imperialism. The advance of the Red Army had aroused the expectations and activities of the masses. Everywhere the objective possibility of replacing the collapsed power of the bourgeoisie with genuine proletarian power existed. Such an outcome could have delivered a death blow to the Kremlin Stalinists.
For that very reason, rather than moving against the bourgeoisie, they either governed on their behalf (e.g. East Germany) in specific forms of bourgeois workers’ governments, or drew the bourgeoisie into open coalitions, i.e. popular fronts (eg Czechoslovakia and Romania). The dominance of the Stalinists in the bourgeois workers’ governments and the Popular Fronts did not alter their nature. It did alter the eventual outcome of these necessarily temporary government formations. The bourgeois workers’ government, as the Comintern predicted, could “objectively help to accelerate the process of disintegration of bourgeois power.”27 Thanks to the shift in imperialist policy and the dominance of the Stalinists, this objective possibility was realised.
The popular fronts were also superseded by governments in which the Stalinists had absolute control. They were able to dispense with their weaker coalition partners, when the main threat came from imperialism rather than genuine proletarian revolutions which the Popular Fronts laid served to check.
The nationalisations of the coalition period were carried through as the result of an agreement between the Stalinists and the bourgeoisie to nationalise that property which was owned by the Axis powers and their collaborators. Land reform affected only the largest estates and occurred generally within the first months of “liberation”, but was uneven between countries and inadequate in scope.
Given the weight of the peasant-based parties in the post-war coalitions, the large-scale evacuations of the land by former landlords in the wake of the German retreat and the immense contribution of the peasantry in the various partisan forces, it was expected that there would be a considerable movement pressing for land redistribution. In addition, the immediate need for increased food production required giving peasants the initiative to produce. The most sweeping reforms were in Hungary where all landholdings were reduced to 142 acres.
In Romania all holdings of more than 500 hectares were partitioned. Thousands more peasants “benefited” from such decrees but the social condition of most remained the same. This was because the Red Army took the best agricultural machinery to the USSR as reparations and left untouched the crippling system of credit, thus condemning the small peasantry to perpetual crisis.
It is clear than between 1944-47 the Kremlin and the local Stalinists were committed to resolving the dual power situation through the creation of capitalist states friendly to the USSR. To this end they sought to maintain or partially reconstruct the old (i.e. bourgeois) official apparatuses. Only these apparatuses could have permanently guaranteed the protection of bourgeois property. Thus, in the period of dual power the states in Eastern Europe can be described as still, essentially, capitalist. However, this general statement is insufficient to explain the dynamics of a dual power situation which by definition is transitional and lends to the state itself a contradictory, transitional character. As Trotsky pointed out with regard to the Russian Revolution after February (i.e. before the proletarian revolution):
“if the state is an organisation of class rule, and a revolution is the overthrow of the ruling class, then the transfer of power from the one class to the other must necessarily create self-contradictory state conditions, and first of all in the form of dual power...”28
The aim of the Stalinists was to prevent the resolution of dual power in a genuinely revolutionary direction. Two options alone were open to them in carrying this through. Either, they could fully reconstruct a capitalist state and cede power to it – a course that would in fact have resulted in the restored capitalists dumping them from government and attacking them (as happened in Vietnam in 1945).
Or they could have carried through a bureaucratic revolution which from the outset, excluded the proletariat from direct political power as they had done in the Baltic states and Eastern Poland at the beginning of the war. The possibility of these two options for the Stalinists invested the state machine in Eastern Europe between 1944-47 precisely with a self-contradictory character. The Stalinists reintegrated sections of the bourgeoisie into the state machine, but their fear of the reintroduction of imperialism into their newly established “buffer zone” led them to exclude the bourgeoisie from any control over the armed power of the state.
This does not mean, however, that these states became degenerate workers’ states immediately after the entry of the Red Army. We do not, as Marxists, define the form or the content of the state according to the social or political composition of its personnel. That the Stalinist personnel were in the last analysis largely dependent on post-capitalist property relations but found themselves defending capitalist property relations further underlines the contradictory, transitory nature of the period 1944-47.
From compromise to containment
Shortly before his death Trotsky commented that should the Stalinists successfully make their peace with capitalist property relations in those countries it dominated politically for any length of time, then we would be forced to revise our understanding of Stalinism and the social nature of the USSR.29
A closer appreciation of Trotsky’s reasoning on this score allows us to affirm the correctness of his analysis. Trotsky’s statement was based on the irrefutable fact that with regards to an isolated workers’ state, imperialism (i.e. world capitalism) remains stronger than the USSR. If Stalinists were to hold power then their reign must inevitably be short-lived as the national economic power of the bourgeoisie, itself drawing on the power of imperialism through its thousands of ties, would be marshalled to unseat the “alien body” in the bourgeoisie’s state.
In this way a bourgeois political counter-revolution would destroy the political rule of Stalinism and the contradiction within the social formation would be “resolved” in favour of imperialism. For this reason the Stalinist project of consolidating capitalist states was necessarily utopian.
It is within this perspective and not by abandoning it that we must understand the situation in Eastern Europe at the end of the war. A situation that allowed this contradiction to exist in reality, but only for a short period. The stagnation of world trade and the protectionism of the decade before the war was at its height during the war itself and spilled over into the post war period. With the partial exception of Czechoslovakia, the Eastern European countries had been bonapartist regimes throughout the 1930s and of semi-colonial status. Their economic and political ties with imperialism were severely dislocated during the war. The contraction of world trade and the fracturing of the world economy continued right through the 1944-7 years. However, relations between Anglo-American imperialism and the national bourgeoisies of Eastern Europe were virtually non-existent after the war.
In its turn, this reduced the power of the national bourgeoisies to resist the enforced direction of the Stalinists. This fracturing of the relations between imperialism and its national agents was a highly unstable, conjunctural factor which temporarily offset the contradiction between Stalinism and the bourgeoisie. But this strategic contradiction reasserted itself during 1947/8 when the long expected “united front” of the successful imperialisms was directed at the Kremlin’s role in Eastern Europe.
The tactical united front between imperialism and the bureaucracy, put together to deny the possibility of a European revolution now subsided along with the threat of a revolution itself. Relations between the USSR and the Western Allies had deteriorated with increased rapidity during the course of 1946, which was a watershed year, a transitional year from compromise to contain.ment on U.S. President Truman’s part. He had an ally in Churchill who had become the front runner for a more hawkish attitude ever since he detected a “betrayal” of the Yalta agreement in 1945.
In fact, the first reference to an “Iron Curtain” across Europe dates from five days after the German surrender in May of that year.
The celebrated reference in a major speech in the USA in March 1946 to the Iron Curtain was a pulling together of the threads of what was to later become called the Cold War stance of America and British imperialism against the USSR.
The reasons which underpin the gradual change in ideological stance in 1946 are not hard to find. The Yalta and Potsdam conferences had come to an agreement over “spheres of influence” which basically covered Europe and the Balkans. But the Kremlin’s refusal to take its troops out of Northern Iran in February 1946, Molotov’s claim to the “trusteeship” of Libya in North Africa, and the USSR’s fiery insistence on having the right of access to a warm water port in the Dardanelles in August, convinced the imperialists of the urgent need to contain the USSR. The imperialist offensive was led by the USA; the western nations, such as France and Great Britain, were in the midst of economic crises and were thus unable to relaunch a vigorous round of accumulation on their own.
British coal production in 1946 was 20 per cent down on its 1938 level; in Western Germany it was two-fifths of its 1938 level. Precisely because of the dominant position of Germany in the industrial field before the war, its crushing defeat was bound to have an enormous effect throughout Europe. In 1939, Germany had been responsible for one-fifth of all Europe’s industrial production.
Allied to all this was a severe agricultural and financial crisis in Europe. European wheat production fell in 1947 to less than half its 1938 level. In 1946, some 125 million Europeans were living on 1000-2000 calories a day, and this was to worsen. A measure of the financial instability can be gauged from the fact that wholesale prices in France in 1946 were rising at the rate of 80 per cent per annum.30 The USA’s own productive capital emerged from the war relatively untouched, indeed even strengthened.
Relative to its markets the productive forces were burgeoning. In 1945 the USA manufactured half the world’s products. In 1946 it accounted for half the world’s income. In short, it occupied a position of dominance in the world economy unparalleled since Britain of the 1850s. However the boom in the USA economy was facing the prospect of a major reversal if it allowed the stagnation in the markets of Western and Eastern Europe to continue.
Stalin’s hold in Eastern Europe and the spectre of revolution in the west, called forth the Truman Doctrine – the doctrine of containment, not immediate war against the USSR, backed up by massive economic aid for anti-communist governments. Greece proved to be the launching pad for this new policy. Rapidly crumbling as an imperialist power, Britain refused to financially underwrite Greece in February 1947, then in the midst of civil war.
Fearing a communist (ELAS) victory, the US made an unconditional commitment to the right-wing government. More than $300m was given immediately. On 12 March, Truman elaborated before Congress: “It must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure.”31 The economic complement of this doctrine was the Marshall Aid Programme and the plans to introduce a new currency unity in the imperialist-occupied zones of Germany.
General Marshall had replaced Byrnes as US Secretary of State in January 1947. His Plan was called the Truman Doctrine in Action and was announced in June though it was to take nearly a year to be ratified by Congress. It was not a programme of relief but of reconstruction, entailing some $17bn to Europe in return for massive US influence in domestic and foreign policy. Sixteen countries had applied and accepted its terms by September 1947.
With this twin attack the US codified its Cold War stance; to draw the line on USSR influence in Europe, to burden the Kremlin with sole responsibility for reconstruction in its own “spheres” and to eradicate its influence in the imperialist spheres. These events threw the Kremlin and the National Communist parties into a turmoil. In Western Europe the Stalinists were unceremoniously dumped from the bourgeois coalition governments. It was the social instability arising from the economic crisis that forced the French and Italian bourgeoisie to tolerate the Stalinists in government, since they could control the working class. In May Marshall wrote to De Gasperi, head of the Christian-Democrat Government, urging the expulsion of the CP and promising to underwrite their financial needs.
In Eastern Europe, where the levers of political power were in their hands, the Stalinists were compelled to choose whether to confront the imperialist offensive or retreat and concede to it.
Consistent with their attempt to construct a strategic alliance with capitalism, several of the national communist parties were prepared to accept Marshall Aid. The Marshall Aid Plan was formally open to the USSR, but this was merely a deliberate ploy to put the onus on the Kremlin to make the split. Molotov attended the preliminary discussions briefly before withdrawing.
The Czech and Polish Cabinets showed a positive response to the Plan, including the Stalinists. But they were soon forced to decline by USSR pressure. As a counter measure the Kremlin drew up a set of improvised trade agreements (the Molotov Plan) for Eastern Europe. If the road of the Marshall Plan had been accepted then sooner or later Stalinism would have lost complete control in Eastern Europe and imperialism would have stood knocking on the door of the USSR itself.
The Kremlin and Stalin were not prepared to risk this fate and so risk their own necks. Stalin tightened the reins of power and ordered the elimination, from above, of the economic roots of the bourgeoisie, and their political representatives in the state who could have been a potential point of departure for rebuilding their power in the future.
Counter-revolutionary social overturns in Eastern Europe
A preparatory and necessary step to the bureaucratic liquidation of bourgeois power in Eastern Europe was the complete bureaucratic control of the national communist parties over the working class. Primarily this meant the destruction of the influence of the Social-Democratic parties over the working class which rivalled and in most cases outshone that of the Stalinists. This was especially so in Poland, Hungary and in what was to become East Germany.
The method was usually the same; intimidations, purges and forced fusions. In September 1944, a new pro-Stalinist leadership was foisted on the Polish socialists (PPS) with a view to securing unification. The rank and file continuously refused to endorse this so in December 1947, it was done anyway, a further 12 leaders being removed and 82,000 members expelled. The term “salami tactic” was used by Hungarian Stalinist, Rakosi, to describe what was done. Persistent resistance from the Hungarian socialists (SDP) was finally overcome in February 1948 when the pro-Moscow minority in the SDP convened a Congress without the centre and right under the protection of the secret police and in June the merger was announced.32
Despite the risks this policy held for the future of “detente”, the Kremlin reckoned that not to take this road was to risk its own destruction. Not only would the USSR have had to give up the enormous productive potential of Eastern Europe to imperialism, but it would have seriously threatened the continued existence of the bureaucracy itself. Faced with this extremely disadvantageous turn in the relationship of “peaceful co-existence”– the Kremlin decided everywhere in these countries to economically and politically destroy the bourgeoisie. Everywhere the pattern was the same. Leading bourgeois figures were arrested or executed and opposition gradually banned. In Poland, the opposition leader, Mikolajczyk fled in 1947 to escape from the tightening hold of the Stalinists. In Romania King Michael was deposed in December and in early 1948 the now Stalinist dominated United Workers Party took control. The leader of the Agrarian Party in Bulgaria, Petkov, was arrested in June 1947 and executed in September.
20,000 were arrested and opposition papers closed for good. In Hungary, Kovacs, the former Smallholders leader, was arrested in May by the SAF. The Prime Minister fled to the USA in May. New elections in August saw the CP dominant, though they continued the facade of a coalition until the fusion with the socialists in 1948.
After 1947-48 the destruction of capitalism in these countries was undertaken bureaucratically from above and was combined with repression against the vanguard of the proletariat. One of the ways this repression occurred was through purging of the Communist Parties themselves. This was continuous after 1947 but received new momentum after the Stalin-Tito split in the summer of 1948.
In Poland, for example, between September and December 1948 30,000 members were expelled. The General Secretary, Gomulka was imprisoned. In Bulgaria, the vast majority of the leadership and 92,000 of the rank and file were expelled up to 1950. In Czechoslovakia, where the spirit of independence had long been nurtured via Czech nationalism, 100,000 were expelled between February and August 1948, The Stalinists were already in control of the political and repressive apparatus and could utilise this power against the bourgeoisie and its agents.
Only in Czechoslovakia, during February 1948, did the Stalinists mobilise forces outside their own security apparatus to overthrow the bourgeoisie. The period of dual power, an exact and precarious balance in the Czech Cabinet, came to a decisive end in late February 1948. On 20 February a dispute over Cabinet control of the police resulted in 12 non-CP ministers offering the bourgeois head of government, Benes, their resignations. It was understood that they would be refused, and was designed as an offensive against the KSC.
But the KSC staged mass demonstrations culminating in marches of armed trade union militia on 23 February. No independent organisations were thrown up; the demonstration was kept within strict limits designed to put pressure on Benes to accept the resignation which he did. The KSC was asked to form a government which it did comprising only the KSC and its allies.
The May elections went ahead under great repression, with one slate of candidates and a decree that a blank ballot paper was “tantamount to treason”, the results gave a juridicial seal to the “coup”.
Elsewhere demonstrations and rallies were used merely to legitimise the bureaucratic overturn in the eyes of the Stalinists base.
During this period the Stalinists did not constitute a “revolutionary workers’ government” acting under the pressure of the masses to take decisive measures against the bourgeoisie and its property.
The government was not a government of struggle based on independent workers’ organisations – militias and soviets. Instead the overturn was the work of a Stalinist bureaucratic anti-capitalist workers’ government which had ensured that the masses were so disorganised, and that the state force at its own disposal was so considerable as to prevent the working class carrying out the expropriation of the bourgeoisie itself and replacing it with the forms of revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat based on workers’ councils and a workers’ militia.
Such a prospect would have both challenged the privileges and authority of the bureaucratic caste that had been coalescing in these countries between 1944 and 1947 and stood to challenge the political rule of the Stalinists in the USSR itself.
The qualitative transformation of these bureaucratised states into a bureaucratically degenerate form of the dictatorship of the proletariat takes place at that point when the regimes have expropriated the bourgeoisie economically and set out to subordinate and curtail the operation of the essential law of the capitalist economy – the law of value-and organise their nationalised economies on the basis of the planning principle – albeit in a bureaucratically deformed manner.
None of this is possible without the prior existence of nationalisation, the monopoly of foreign trade and the political expropriation of the bourgeoisie. But in themselves the existence of these features do not necessarily constitute a form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e. a state based on post-capitalist property forms. Total planification and the complete elimination of the bourgeoisie was necessary on top of these features before a post capitalist economy could be established. This aspect of these degenerate workers states and their method of creation distinguishes them from the period of a healthy workers state in the USSR created by the October revolution.
The characterisation of Russia as a workers’ state in 1917 flows from the fact that state power was in the hands of the working class organised as ruling class with its own organs of class rule the soviets and the workers militia. This preceded nationalisation and planning in the USSR. In Eastern Europe the workers’ states Established as a result of Kremlin policy-were degenerate from birth. From their inception a political revolution against the bureaucratic caste was the prerequisite for the working class to take political power into its own hands. With the introduction of the Five Year Plans in the Buffer Zones: Bulgaria 1948, Czechoslovakia 1949, Hungaryt950, Poland 1950, Rumania and GDR 1951, the process of the creation of bureaucratically degenerate workers’ states was complete.
We reject the term “deformed workers state” for the states created by the post World War II overturns. Terminologically “deformed” does not adequately suggest the qualitative difference between such states and proletarian dictatorships where the working class holds political power. In the former case there may exist severe bureaucratic deformations – as Lenin admitted existed in Russia in 1921. But in this case the bureaucratic political counter-revolution still lay in the future, as does a political revolution to remedy it.
The post-war bureaucratic anti-capitalist revolutions were at the same time counter-revolutionary expropriations of the proletariat’s political power. Therefore we designate such states degenerate workers’ states as degenerate from birth.
Thus we identify these states in all fundamentals with the degenerated workers’ state in the USSR, there being only the latter’s origin in a genuine proletarian revolution to distinguish them.
Wherever it occurs and whatever form it takes, Stalinist bureaucratic social revolutions are counter-revolutionary. They are carried through against the prevailing level of consciousness of the forces necessary for the proletarian revolution in the country – i.e. the working class. They occur on the basis of a bureaucratic-repressive limitation of independent action of the working class and therefore devalue the very notion of “revolution”, “socialism”, “workers’” state and the planned economy in the eyes of the oppressed masses.
They retard the development of a revolutionary consciousness within the world proletariat. They create a congenitally bureaucratised state in which the working class is politically expropriated. The bureaucratic regimes represent an obstacle in the path of the world working class in the struggle for socialism and communism. The measures carried through by the Stalinists in the course of the social overturn (expropriation of the bourgeoisie, statification of the means of production), whilst themselves revolutionary in character, are achieved in a military bureaucratic fashion. This means that during the bureaucratic overturn, revolutionaries organised as an independent force, struggle to transform that overturn into a direct fight for proletarian power.
It was Trotsky himself who witnessed and recorded these things in the first case in which Stalinist expansion coincided with a bureaucratic social overturn – Poland and the Baltic states during 1939-40. Under the direct threat of invasion by German imperialism the Kremlin felt compelled to secure the Western flank of the USSR by invading those countries. This adventure was kept within the strict limits of a bureaucratic-military straitjacket and was followed by generalised repression against the working class and the poor peasantry. This invasion led to the incorporation of these countries into the USSR and the destruction of the private property relations within them. Trotsky summed up his understanding of the nature of these overturns thus:
“The primary political criterion for us is not the transformation of property relations in this or another area, however important these may be in themselves, but rather the change in the consciousness and organisation of the world proeltariat, the raising of their capacity for defending former conquests and accomplishing new ones. From this one, and the only decisive standpoint, the politics of Moscow, taken as a whole, completely retains its reactionary character and remains the chief obstacle on the road to the world revolution.”35
Footnotes
1. cf. L. Trotsky, Europe and America, (New York, 1972).
2. For a selection of his most prescient statements on this theme see “Uneven and combined development and the role of American Imperialism”, in Writings 1933-34, (New York, 1975),pp.116-120, March 1933; “Hitler and Disarmament”, ibid., pp.246-57, June 1933; “Hitler’s Victory”, ibid., pp.133-7, March 1933; “Hitler the Pacifist”, ibid., pp.144-8, November 1933. All these articles are full of a profound grasp of the central strategy of Hitler in Europe in his struggle against the Versailles Treaty and the USSR as well as an excellent insight into the diplomatic and military tactics that Hitler would have to employ to secure his aim. But perhaps the most perceptive estimate of the tempo and line up in the approaching war is to be found in “On the threshold of a new World War”, Writings 1936-7, (New York, 1978),pp.379-96. Trotsky also predicted the Stalin-Hitler pact after the downfall of Czechoslovakia in 1938, and because of that pact, the inevitability of war between the USSR and Germany.
3. “In either case the war will lead to Stalin’s downfall.” (Trotsky) Depending on which of Trotsky’s writings one reads, one can find sharp or guarded statements on the “inevitability” of the destruction of the Soviet bureaucracy in the war. For the former see for example “War and the Fourth International”, Writings 1933-4, (New York, 1975), Thesis 48,pp.316-7; or for one of the innumerable briefer passages on the theme see “The Kremlin’s role in the European Catastrophe”, Writings 1939-40, (New York, 1973), June 1940,pp.290-1. For a more guarded and considered view see “The USSR in War”, in In Defence of Marxism, (New York, 1973) ergo “War accelerates the various political processes. It may accelerate the process of the revolutionary regeneration of the USSR. But it may also accelerate the process of its final degeneration.” (p.21).
It may appear an obvious point, but against those who have taken this prognosis as an example of Trotsky’s one-sided “catastrophism” it needs to be stressed that Trotsky always saw these questions from the point of view of programme, that is, the need to outline to his supporters the main conflicting tendencies in order to orientate them for action to bring about the desired end.
4. Quoted in Y. Gluckstein, Stalin’s Satellites in Europe, (London, 1952). Leading member of the Fourth International, E. Germain also noted the widespread demonstrations and strikes throughout Romania and Bulgaria in the Autumn of 1944. See “The Soviet Union after the War”, September 1946 in the Internal Bulletin of the International Secretariat of the Fourth International,p.7.
5. cf. J.Bloomfield, Passive Revolution, (London, 1979),pp.50-51
6. For one such account, see E. Mortimer’s article on France in Communist Power in Europe 1944-49, (ed. M. McCauley, London, 1977)pp.151-3. He concludes that 1944 “was the most favourable moment for a revolutionary insurrection...”. In Italy the defeat of the German troops occurred in 1945 and they were also accompanied by massive workers’ strikes. Allum and Sassoon in ibid., show that in this period there was not a factory in the North and a few in the centre that was not armed. Churchill summed up the problem facing the imperialists in West Europe at this time in a letter to his Foreign Secretary Eden, in November 1944: “...every country that is liberated or converted by our victories is seething with Communism and only our influence with Russia prevents her actively stimulating this movement”. Quoted in R. Douglas, From War to Cold War 1942-48, (London, 1981 ),p.61.
7. cf. Germain, op.cit., pp.2-3, and D. Yergin, Shattered Peace, (Harmondsworth,1980),p.64.
8. Germain, op.cit.,p.3.
9. Quoted in Yergin, op.cit., p.55.
10. Quoted in Ibid., p.473.
11. Quoted in Ibid., p.58.
12. Quoted in Ibid.,p.91.
13. Quoted inlbid.,p.120.
14. Trotsky first recognised this in his analysis of the soviet invasion of Poland in 1939:”This overturn was forced upon the Kremlin oligarchy through its struggle for self-preservation under specific conditions. There was not the slightest ground for doubting that under analogous conditions it would find itself compelled to repeat the very same operation in Finland.” Trotsky, In Defence of Marxism, op.cit., p.175.
15. See Germain, op.cit., p.7; C. Georges, “Russian Economic Policy in Eastern Europe”, in SWP (US) Internal Bulletin vo113, no.8,p.10; L. Schwartz, “USSR and Stalinism”, in International Information Bulletin SWP(US), vol.1 ,no.2; C. Harman, Bureaucracy and Revolution in Eastern Europe, (London, 1974), pp.49- 53.
16. Quoted in Harman, op.cit., p.31.
17. P. Zinner in Revolution in Hungary, (New York, 1952), gives details of the factories returned to private owners. See also Schwartz, Germain and Harman. In Romania, Patrascanu, the Communist Minister of Justice, drew up a law allowing industrialists, businessmen and bankers to escape punishment as war criminals.
18 cf. Bloomfield, op.cit., Chapter 6.
19. Quoted in ibid., p.89
20. cf. Schwartz, op.cit., pp.32-33.
21. Quoted in Harman, op.cit., p.35.
22. L. Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, (London, 1977), p.225.
23. The SAF reached its maximum size in May 1945, at the moment of Germany’s defeat and the height of the independent actions of the workers and peasants, when it stood at an enormous 11,365,000. Demobilisation began in June and in early 1948 it was estimated at 2,874,000, still twice the size of the imperialist troop presence in Europe. The role of the SAF in Eastern Europe was uneven between nations. In Czechoslovakia in late 1946 British intelligence believed that only 5,000 troops were in the country. Shortly after the “Prague coup” in 1948 American intelligence thought there were as few as 500 USSR troops left in the country. In other words, the strength of indiginous Stalinism enabled the construction of native security forces that was not possible elsewhere. Poland’s security, on the other hand, depended heavily on the SAF and the Soviet Security Corps (NKGB). The latter were particularly notorious, having been granted full control 'over civiliansecurity in the Soviet Army’s rear' by the Committee of National Liberation, see McCauley, op.cit.,p.270, and Yergin, op.cit.,pp270-348.
24. J. Degras, The Communist International 1919-1943, (London, 1971) vol.1, p.421.
25. L. Trotsky, On France, (New York, 1979),p.193.
26. Ibid., p.201.
27. Degras, op.cit., p.427.
28. L. Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, op.cit.,p.231.
29. L. Trotsky, In Defence of Marxism, op.cit., p.18.
30. Yergin, op.cit., pp.303-310.
31. Quoted in Douglas, op.cit., p.153.
32. cf. Harman, op.cit.,p.36, and McCauley, op.cit.,p.102 33. cf. Harman, op.cit., p.54.
34. For the relevant passages see Trotsky , In Defence of Marxism, op.cit., pp.8-20,26-29,56-59,81-90, 130-137, 170-178.
35. Ibid., p.19.
Chapter 4: Bureaucratic social revolutions and the Marxist theory of the state
The bureaucratic anti-capitalist revolutions that have occurred in Eastern Europe, Asia and Cuba did not witness the destruction of the state by the proletariat organised in armed workers’ councils. Yet when the actual stages of these revolutions are examined it becomes clear that the abolition of capitalism by Stalinist parties did not contradict the Marxist theory of the state. The capitalist state was smashed in each bureaucratic revolution, but in a manner not envisaged by Marx, Engels or Lenin, nor in a manner that is at all desirable from the standpoint of revolutionary communism.
The bourgeois state and the Marxist programme
The state, fundamentally, is the oppressive apparatus used by the ruling class to defend its economic dominance in society.
Thus, we define the class nature of a state, not by its form (which for all states can vary tremendously), nor even by the specific features of its apparatus, but by the economic regime, the mode of production, that it defends. We recognise that the common feature of all states that have ever existed is the presence of a public force – bodies of armed men whose job it is to defend the given mode of production. As Engels noted: “We saw that an essential characteristic of the state is the existence of a public force differentiated from the mass of the people.”1 Or as Trotsky expressed it: “Friedrich Engels once wrote that the state, including the democratic republic, consists of detachments of armed men in defence of property; everything else serves only to embellish or camouflage this fact.”2
From this it follows that all social revolutions necessarily involve the passing of state power from one class to another: However for the bourgeoisie, during its revolutionary struggle against feudalism, it was not necessary for it to smash the feudal state or its public force. By virtue of its economic dominance prior to its achievement of political power it was possible for the bourgeoisie to merely capture the allegiance of the public force, of the whole state machine (through its influence and wealth). In other words the bourgeoisie captured and perfected the old state machine. It did not smash it:
“All revolutionaries perfected this machine instead of breaking it. The parties that contended in turn for domination regarded possession of this huge state edifice as the principal spoils of the victor.”3
But the nature of the proletariat as a class and the task of its revolution – the conscious construction of a communist society – require that the proletariat organise itself as a ruling class with unique and particular state forms. Unlike all “hitherto existing revolutionary classes” the proletariat cannot achieve its historical objective by laying hold of the existing machinery and form of state – its army, bureaucracy and officialdom – and use it to implement its programme.
This was the principal lesson that Marx and Engels drew from the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871: “But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready made machinery and wield it for their own purpose. The political instrument of their enslavement cannot serve as the political instrument of their emancipation.”4
The goal of Marxists is the abolition of classes and therefore also of all states. This is to be achieved in the first phase by the dictatorship of the proletariat; a state to be sure, but one that is, properly speaking only a semi-state:
“As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection, as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon the present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from this struggle, are removed, nothing more remains to be held in subjection – nothing necessitates a special coercive force, a state. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state [i.e. the workers’ state -Eds] is not ‘abolished’. It withers away.”5
Because the proletariat’s seizure of power inaugurates the transition to socialism, because the dictatorship of the proletariat is the first act in the very withering away of the state itself (i.e. of a form of coercive apparatus), the proletariat must smash the state of the bourgeoisie and replace it with a state of a new sort. Lenin, against the opportunists, made the necessity of this action clear: The supercession of the bourgeois state by the proletariat is impossible without a violent revolution. The abolition of the proletarian state i.e. of the state in general, is impossible except through a process of “withering away”.6
If the essential characteristic of the state is the existence of bodies of armed men in defence of property, then the essential element in the smashing of the state is the destruction of the armed power of the bourgeoisie. This is a fundamental law of proletarian revolution. By smashing the state we mean first and foremost smashing its armed apparatus. Marx left no room for doubt on this question:
“Paris could resist only because in consequence of the siege, it had got rid of the army and replaced it by a National Guard, the bulk of which consisted of working men. This fact was now to be transformed into an institution. The first decree of the Commune, therefore, was the suppression of the standing army, and the substitution for it of the armed people.”7
The Bolsheviks later codified this lesson into their programme:
“When the proletariat is fighting for the power, against whom and what is it fighting? In the first place against this bourgeois organisation [the state-Eds]. Now when it is fighting this organisation its task is to deliver blows that will destroy the organisation. But since the main strength of the government resides in the army, if we wish to gain victory over the bourgeoisie the first essential is to disorganise and destroy the bourgeois army.”8
The armed bodies of the bourgeoisie – its police and standing army – must be abolished and replaced by a militia of the armed proletariat. This repressive element of the state must be smashed, prior to or in the process of, the proletariat achieving state power. The degree of violence involved in that seizure of power will be determined by the degree to which the bourgeoisie have lost control over, and allegiance of, the coercive apparatus of the state. As long as the bourgeoisie’s armed power remains at all intact then the proletariat still faces the task of destroying it. Otherwise it will be used to crush the proletariat itself.
But, in addition to its armed forces the capitalist state maintains itself by alienating the mass of producers from the administration of society by means of a huge and powerful bureaucratic apparatus (civil service, judges etc.) This is directly and indirectly linked to the army and police etc. Thus the smashing of the state must also involve the destruction of this bureaucracy. The highest ranks of the executive bureaucracy – the top civil servants, the judges – must be immediately abolished by the proletariat revolution and replaced by responsible, recallable representatives of the proletariat. In this way the bourgeois executive is smashed.
This is vital for reasons made clear by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto: “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for the managing of the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”9
The bureaucracy of the modern state however, also consists of large numbers of lower ranking officials who possess administrative skills that would be vital to the functioning of a young workers’ state. Therefore, the bureaucracy in its entirety would not be smashed. Rather the ranks of the lower officialdom would be heavily purged and placed under the control of the workers themselves. Lenin, for example, distinguished between the smashing of the key elements of the oppressive apparatus and the need for the workers’ state to maintain certain elements of the administrative apparatus bequeathed it by the bourgeois state. He made this clear in advance of the seizure of state in “Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?”:
“In addition to the chiefly ‘oppressive’ apparatus the standing army, the police, the bureaucracy-the modern state possesses an apparatus which has extremely close connections with the banks and the syndicates ... This apparatus must not, and should not, be smashed.”10
The tasks of book-keeping, accounting and so forth would be fulfilled by those sections of the bureaucracy thus retained by the workers’ state. The Marxist tradition maintained that such initial acts as limiting the pay of all officials to that of a skilled worker, subjecting the apparatus to workers’ control, were in themselves, preparatory to the gradual disappearance of administration as a distinct element in the social division of labour separate from and set against the producers themselves. The task facing a proletarian state was to progressively eliminate the separate caste of full time administrators on the road to building a communist society. This task was always seen, however, as distinct from the immediate act of smashing the bourgeoisie’s oppressive machine.
Prior to the October revolution Lenin outlined the tasks of the Bolsheviks in this sphere of the state apparatus thus:
“Power to the Soviets means radically reshaping the entire old state apparatus, that bureaucratic apparatus which hampers everything democratic. It means removing this apparatus and substituting for it a new, popular one, ie a truly democratic apparatus of soviets, i.e. the organised and armed majority of the people – the workers, soldiers and peasants. It means allowing the majority of the people initiative and independence not only in the election of deputies, but also in state administration in effecting reforms and various other changes.”11
In addition to the destruction of the bourgeois state machine Marxists also insist that the proletarian revolution involves a positive action – the consolidation of a state of a completely new sort which is in the process of withering away from its very inception. In other words the organs of destruction (of the bourgeois state) are, in turn, the organs of reconstruction, of a workers’ state. The workers’ state itself will disappear with the advent of communism that is with the disappearance of classes. Marx and Lenin were clear the building up of the workers’ state was a process that took place after as well as during the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the seizure of state power by the proletariat. This process constitutes the final element of the smashing of the state. It constitutes the continuation of class struggle even after the conquest of power by the proletariat: After the overthrow of the exploiting classes Lenin “repeats and explains in every chapter of State and Revolution the proletariat will shatter the old bureaucratic machine and create its own apparatus out of employees and worker.”12
The victory and defeat of Soviet power
The October revolution marked the passing of state power to the proletariat organised to wield that power with new distinctively proletarian state forms – the workers’ militia, the factory committees and the soviets of workers, soldiers and peasants’ deputies.
The police and army of the Russian bourgeoisie had been smashed as instruments upon which the bourgeoisie could rely in order to defend its class rule. The last significant attempt of the Russian bourgeoisie to deploy the army in defence of its interests crumbled with the defeat of the Kornilov coup in August 1917. After that – in the struggle against the Moscow uprising and in the form of the White Guards of the civil war, the bourgeoisie could only deploy armed force as an instrument of counter revolution-against a victorious proletariat. In all of the major industrial centres the standing army and police force was replaced by the armed power of the workers’ militia. The most essential aspect of the smashing of the capitalist state was completed – i.e. the bourgeoisie was deprived of its powers of coercion.
The executive power of the bureaucracy – its civil service chiefs and judges – was smashed by the soviet power. But the young proletarian state faced the task of building new forms of administration and regulation on the basis of the armed power of the proletariat expressed in the soviets. It faced that task in conditions of extreme material backwardness and, increasingly, of International isolation. In order to ensure the very survival of proletarian power the young proletarian state was forced to maintain, and even reintroduce, capitalist state forms in a workers’ state. A standing army was created, material privileges were granted to officials with particular invaluable skills and experience and a standing bureaucracy had to be maintained in order to preside over the unequal distribution of goods in a situation of extreme shortages :and disruption of production. Lenin and Trotsky both noted and explained this inevitable development. First, Lenin:
“Bourgeois law in relation to the distribution of the objects of consumption assumes, of course, inevitably a bourgeois state, for law is nothing without an apparatus capable of compelling observance of its norms. It follows that under Communism not only will bourgeois law survive for a certain time, but also even a bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie.”
And for Trotsky:
“For the defence of ‘bourgeois law’ the workers’ state was compelled to create a ‘bourgeois’ type of instrument – that is the same old gendarmes although in a new uniform.”14.
By the death of Lenin the old administrative apparatus overwhelmingly determined the functioning and administration of the new soviet state. Lenin talked of Soviet Russia as a workers’ state with profound bureaucratic deformations. The administrative apparatus in Russia was not replaced by a state of a new sort in any permanent or lasting form. But, in our view, the forms of the state were not decisive. Despite its reversion to old forms of administration, the state was based on the defence, and that time particularly, the extension of new forms of property.
The possibility of different forms of the dictatorship of the proletariat has always been anticipated by Marxists, whose method is based on a dialectical analysis of concrete reality and not on the rigid application of schematic norms to reality. Thus Bukharin perceptively commented, against Kautsky:
“In his [Marx – Eds] analysis of capitalist production he took capitalist economy in its ‘pure’ form i.e. in a form uncomplicated by any vestiges of the old (feudal) relations of production, or any national peculiarities and so on, and he treats the question of the dictatorship of the working class in the same way, as a question of the workers’ dictatorship in general, that is to say a dictatorship which destroys capitalism in its pure form. And there was no other way to consider the question if he was to do it in abstract theoretical terms ie if he was to give the broadest algebraic formula for the dictatorship. Experience of the social struggle now permits concrete definition of. the question along the most diverse lines.”15
Likewise Lenin had not expected the dictatorship to have a universal form:
“Bourgeois states are most varied in form, but their essence is the same; all these states, whatever their form, in the final analysis are inevitably the Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie.
The transition from capitalism to communism is certainly bound to yield a tremendous abundance and variety of political forms, but the essence will inevitably be the same; the dictatorship of the proletariat.”16
The degeneration of the Russian Revolution and the Bolsheviks increased the diversity of these potential forms of the dictatorship of the proletariat with tragic consequences for the Soviet and international working class, leading Trotsky to comment:
“In the interim between the conquest of power and the dissolution of the workers’ state within socialist society the forms and methods of proletarian rule may change sharply depending on the course of the class struggle internally and externally.”17
What for Lenin and Trotsky had been a temporary retreat or truce in the direction of strengthening bourgeois state forms in order to consolidate the workers’ state, was embraced as a permanent and conscious goal by the Stalinists. They strove to consolidate and extend elements of the capitalist state form in the USSR as a base for their own material privileges and as an obstacle to the proletariat’s realisation of socialism. In that the Soviet state defends bourgeois norms of distribution, in that it maintains a massive standing bureaucracy, army and police force against the masses, it retains key features of the state of the old, bourgeois type.
In that it defends, albeit in the manner of the privileged bureaucracy, the property relations of October it retains a proletarian character. Within the degenerated workers’ state bourgeois state forms continue to present themselves to the proletariat as an obstacle to the transition to socialism. The political revolution will destroy the power of the bureaucracy and, in so doing, either destroy completely bourgeois state forms or, where necessary, place them under the strict controls of the organs of the healthy workers’ state.
However, from this we do not conclude that there are two types of state co-existant in the USSR. We describe the degenerate workers’ state as one that has a dual, contradictory nature. It defends proletarian property forms but it does so with coercive instruments normally associated with capitalist states. It does this because the working class have been politically expropriated by the bureaucracy. Trotsky described the dual nature of the USSR thus:
“The state assumes directly and from the very beginning [i.e. even in its healthy period – Eds] a dual character; socialistic, in so far as it defends social property in the means of production bourgeois, in so far as the distribution of life’s goods is carried out with a capitalistic measure of value and all the consequences ensuing there from.”
This dual character remains right up to today but we should add that the bureaucracy have a monopoly of political control over the bourgeois aspect of the state and it serves first and foremost their interests. The Stalinist programme is historically committed to the maintenance of bourgeois state forms and the suppression of proletarian state forms even should bourgeois property relations be overthrown.
The bureaucratic workers’ government
When we look at each of the post war overturns we can see that in no case did the Stalinists permit the old bourgeois state to be replaced by a state of a new sort based on workers’ councils and a workers’ militia. Throughout the process they tried as best they could to strengthen and maintain bourgeois state forms – a standing army and police force, a bureaucracy separate from, and in opposition to, the mass of toilers.
The realisation of this element of their programme placed the Stalinists alongside the bourgeoisie in the struggle to break up the embryonic organs of a healthy workers’ state that emerged, in some form, prior to the creation of degenerate workers’ states in each case, ie in the period 1944-47.
While this was the case – and the new workers’ states were therefore created in a form bureaucratically degenerate from birth – in each case the armed bodies of men of the old ruling class were smashed and broken up either by the entry of the Red Army into Eastern Europe, by Stalinist led partisans as in Yugoslavia, Albania and later China or, in the 1959-60 by the politically petty bourgeois July 26th Movement in Cuba. These coercive bodies were smashed to the extent that the bourgeoisie were no longer able to deploy armed force in defence of their remaining property rights, just as the coercive machinery of the Russian bourgeoisie its army and police – disintegrated prior to the direct seizure of power by the proletariat and, to that extent, was smashed before the October revolution. Thus it is indisputable that the armed power of the bourgeoisie was physically smashed prior to each of the bureaucratic revolutions that marked the expansion of Stalinism in the post war period. This is decisive in understanding why apparently peaceful bureaucratic revolutions were able to take place. The essential element of the smashing of the bourgeois state had, in fact, already been completed.
In each case the outcome of this initial act of smashing was – as had been the case in Russia during the process of the disintegration of the Russian bourgeoisie’s enormous standing army – a highly unstable period of dual power. In each case there coexisted:
a) the forms of a reassembled/reasserted bourgeois state kept in viable existence by the continuing direct links between the particular native bourgeoisies and the armed power of world imperialism, but in each case in need of decisive external aid in order to reconstruct and deploy armed power in defence of its property of its own accord;
b) the embryo of degenerate workers’ states – in the form of the Red Army itself or of Stalinist – led armed bodies, not inevitably forced to, but in exceptional circumstances capable of, resolving the contradictory dual power period through the medium of a bureaucratic workers’ government should either the interests of the Kremlin bureaucracy or the interests and privileges of a nascent Stalinist bureaucratic caste based on national proletarian forces come under threat in circumstances where the balance of forces between the Stalinists and the imperialists is unfavourable to the latter.
The Comintern recognised two types of “workers’ governments”: ostensible workers’ governments – liberal and Social Democratic – that were in reality bourgeois governments; and workers’ governments that could act as a bridge to the dictatorship of the proletariat. To the three types of the latter category: workers’ and peasants’ government, workers’ government in which communists participate and governments in which communists predominate, the experience after 1945 obliges us to add a fourth type: the bureaucratic workers’ government. In this new type Stalinists are politically dominant. The government has the programme of anti-capitalist measures constituting the expropriation of the bourgeoisie whilst simultaneously depriving the working class of political power.
Thus it prevents the formation or development of organs of proletarian struggle, self-organisations and democracy (soviets) with methods which range from political misleadership to outright military repression. Where the working class has a history of conscious revolutionary struggle, has an alternative revolutionary leadership, the element of repression, of breaking the proletariat's advance, of smashing and bureaucratising its parties, soviets and trade unions, will generally precede the formation of a bureaucratic workers’ government.
Where the proletariat is weak in numbers or where its class consciousness is obscured by petty bourgeois illusions, the process may take place while the masses are mobilised for non-socialist tasks but before clear class goals and the political forms are created to achieve and defend them, exist. In the latter case the element of repression, of Stalinist dictatorship may be attenuated for a whole period. However, what defines a bureaucratic workers' government is that it is not under the control or conscious pressure of the organs that can form the basis of a full political dictatorship of the proletariat. It is thus anti-capitalist but a bridge to a degenerate not a healthy workers' state.
Thus in Eastern Europe and in degenerate workers’ states created since the late 1940s the bourgeoisie is overthrown by an anti capitalist bureaucratic workers’ government. Such an overthrow of the bourgeoisie could only take place, in each case, after the potential organs of a healthy workers’ state had been either physically destroyed or rendered mere appendages to the Stalinists. In Eastern Europe what remained of the bourgeoisie's administrative apparatus, in each case was either deliberately maintained or reinstituted. The administrative apparatus – composed largely of the personnel of the old regime – was purged and key positions within it occupied by the Stalinists and their allies.
This utilisation of the capitalist state’s administrative apparatus (suitably purged) for the purposes of social revolution would have been impossible had the capitalist class not been deprived of their control of armed force. The armed power of a degenerate workers'’state (as in Yugoslavia, China, Vietnam and later Cuba, Stalinist-Ied peasants armies) can be said to have completed the first and essential stage in the smashing of the capitalist state. This alone facilitated the later complete political and economic expropriation of the bourgeoisie.
The resolution of dual power in each case did not occur on the basis of the programme of revolutionary Marxism. The Stalinists moved against the bourgeoisie, having already destroyed their armed power, with the full intention of maintaining a state profoundly similar to that of the old bourgeois type, not of replacing it with a state of a new soviet type. The creation of new workers’ states was the work not of the working class acting in its own name and through its own democratic organisations but of a counter revolutionary caste based on the working class. This process was complete only after the liquidation of the bourgeoisie and the establishment of proletarian property forms. At every stage in the process the programme of the working class would have remained the seizure of power by the working class itself and the establishment of a state of a new type based on soviets and the armed workers.
This process does not contradict the Marxist theory of the state. It demonstrates that the capitalist state can be destroyed by counter revolutionary workers’ parties only to the extent that these new states no longer defend capitalist property relations while retaining most of the features of bourgeois type states. They are therefore an obstacle to the socialist transformation of society. The creation of a healthy proletarian state, a genuine semi-state, remains a task of the working class political revolution against the bureaucratic caste.
This does not mean that workers’ states can be created without the smashing of the capitalist state. The bureaucratic revolutions were only possible because in each case the coercive apparatus of the bourgeoisie had been smashed. The Eastern European overturns were to prove that the historical and material preconditions for the creation of workers’ states had been revised and extended as a direct result of the creation of the first workers' state in October 1917 and its consequent degeneration.
The Russian revolution mapped out the only conscious and revolutionary road for the overthrow of capitalism and the building of communism. The healthy workers' state will be the revolutionary product of the independent actions and organs of the mass of the working class, headed by a revolutionary Trotskyist party, which seeks to preserve the revolution by its extension internationally.
However, the degeneration of the Russian Revolution has meant that in certain exceptional historical circumstances, the preservation of the remaining gains of the October Revolution, together with concern for its own privileges, has driven the Stalinist bureaucracy or Stalinist parties to overthrow capitalism in a counter-revolutionary manner which retards the working class struggle for socialism and communism.
Footnotes
1. F. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, (London, 1972),p.180.
2. L. Trotsky, Whither France, (London, 1974),p.108.
3. K. Marx, Marx and Engels Collected Works, (London, 1979) voI.11,p.186.
4. K. Marx, Marx and Engels on the Paris Commune, (Moscow, 1976) p.202.
5. F. Engels, Anti-Duhring, (Peking, 1976), p.363.
6. V.I.Lenin, Collected Works, (Moscow, 1964), vol.25,p.400.
7. K. Marx, The Civil War in France, (Moscow, 1972),p.53.
8. N. Bukharin and E. Preobrazhensky, The ABC of Communism, (Harmondsworth,1970),p.128.
9. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, (London, 1976),vol.6,p.486.
10. V.I.Lenin; Collected Works, (Moscow, 1964),-vol:26,pp.105-6:
11. Ibid., vol.25,p.368.
12. L. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, (New York, 1972),p.50 (our emphasis).
13. V.I. Lenin, op.cit., voI.25,p.471.
14. L. Trotsky, op.cit., p.53.
15. N. Bukharin, The Politics and Economics of the Transition Period, (London, 1979), p.37.
16. V.I.Lenin, Op.cit., vol. 25,p.413.
17. L. Trotsky, Writings 1934-35, (New York~974),p.172.
18. L. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, p.54.
Chapter 5: Vietnam's long revolution: a history of war, compromise and betrayal
For over thirty years the Vietnamese masses struggled against imperialist control of their country - by the Japanese, the British, the French and the Americans. This protracted anti-imperialist struggle ended with the creation of a degenerate workers’ state in Vietnam. The heroic struggle of the Vietnamese masses influenced a section of the Trotskyist movement to ignore the counter-revolutionary nature of the Stalinist leadership of this struggle.
During the 1970s the majority of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFI) denied that the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) was Stalinist and opposed the programme of political revolution for North Vietnam.1 Ernest Mandel argued:
“Because for us the Yugoslav, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean revolutionaries are distorted socialist revolutions led by bureaucratically distorted working class parties we prefer not to call the parties which led these revolutions ‘Stalinist Parties’” 2
The USFI’s Vietnam “expert” Pierre Rousset takes this point further:
“Of all these parties’ [i.e. Yugoslavian, Greek and Chinese – eds] the Vietnamese has travelled furthest in the direction of a rediscovery of the principles of Marxism” 3
However, the history of the VCP in the course of this struggle, and the nature of the social revolutions that have occurred in Vietnam, stand in sharp contradiction to this opportunist assessment by the USFI. The Vietnamese revolutions were carried through and betrayed by a thoroughly Stalinist leadership.
In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War as the Japanese armies retreated from Vietnam the Stalinist-led resistance movement - the Vietminh - took power.
The Vietminh, whose full title, “The Vietnam Doc Lap Dong Minh”, means the League for the Independence of Vietnam, was founded by the VCP, under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh in May 1941. It was a classic popular front embracing bourgeois and petit bourgeois nationalists, and announced a programme strictly limited to national independence. The VCP even dropped its slogan of “Land to the Tillers” in order to woo the bourgeois nationalists, it supported the Allied war effort – supplying the Americans and British with information about Japanese movements - and received aid and weapons from Chiang Kai Shek and the American Office of Strategic Services.
In the North it was in control by 20 August 1945 and then after out manoeuvring the Southern United National Front (which consisted of various nationalist groupings and a section of the Vietnamese Trotskyist movement) it established a “Provisional Executive Committee of South Vietnam” in Saigon. The independent and united Democratic Republic of Vietnam was declared by Ho Chi Minh on 2 September, at this time, apart from the armies of the Stalinist-led Vietminh, no coercive state apparatus existed.
The French had been disarmed by the Japanese in 1945. The Japanese forces were in complete disarray. The British expeditionary force that was to re-establish order on behalf of the French had not yet arrived. Thus the Vietminh, as a result of the “August Revolution” were in total control. Yet in these extremely advantageous circumstances the VCP proceeded to attack the Vietnamese working class, their revolutionary leaders (the Trotskyists) and lay the basis for a pact with imperialism that reopened Indo-China to imperialist armies of occupation for another 30 years. Such a historic betrayal underlines the Stalinist nature of the VCP. It reveals it as a counter-revolutionary party.
The August Revolution, at least in the South, and particularly in Saigon posed the objective possibility of the creation of a healthy workers state in Vietnam. Following the defeat of the Japanese, the workers in the South, often acting under Trotskyist leadership4 established some 150 “Peoples Committees”, these committees organised many thousands of workers, they were embryonic Soviets.5 They stood as a potential governmental alternative, and thus a second power, to the Vietminh coalition (with the ex-Emperor Bao Dai included in it by Ho!) The spectre of independent working class power terrified the Stalinists. Their project was for a negotiated settlement with imperialism, aimed merely at the guarantee of independence. Bourgeois property and the bourgeois state in Vietnam were to remain intact. As the Stalinist leader in the South, Nguyen Van Tao declared:
“Our government I repeat is a democratic and middle class government, even though the Communists are now in power.” 6
Thus, instead of basing themselves on the Peoples Committees, they proceeded to smash them. Ho Chi Minh based the constitution of his Democratic Republic on the bourgeois American Declaration of Independence (it opened with a sentence from that Declaration foreshadowing similar utterances from Fidel Castro). Five days after this declaration by Ho, the Stalinists issued a decree on 7 September , outlawing all armed bodies except their own. This was a direct attack on the armed workers.
Ten days after the declaration of independence on 12 September 1945, the Stalinists welcomed General Gracey, chief of the British expeditionary force, into Vietnam. In order to forestall organised working class resistance to this treachery, the Stalinists arrested and murdered the leaders of both the Trotskyist organisations. The Peoples Committees, robbed of their leaders, were effectively crushed by the British and the newly-returned French in heavy fighting in Saigon.
The Stalinists’ bloody services earned them little thanks from the imperialists. Preparing for the return of French troops to Vietnam was always the aim of the British. General Gracey had brought some French troops with him. He armed French troops who had been interned by the Japanese declared martial law in Saigon, forbade publication of Vietnamese language papers and allowed French troops and officials to take over all Vietminh-held public buildings in Saigon on 23 September. Having crushed the Saigon resistance to this restoration the British then stood aside leaving a clear field for the French General Leclerc to launch a campaign for the reconquest of the whole of Indochina.
Thus the Stalinist collaboration with the British resulted, in effect, in handing the South over to the French. The attempt to prevent this in October 1945 was doomed. The Saigon rising called by the Vietminh was abortive and the French, British and -Japanese troops, rearmed by the British, quickly massacred many of the insurgents. Ho, still in control in the North, then compounded his earlier treachery by seeking a negotiated pact with the French. The fruit of this was the 6 March 1946 agreement with the French which allowed them (with 25,000 troops) to enter Hanoi and the North. Having gained this enormous advantage the French repaid Ho by shelling the northern port of Haiphong in November 1946, deliberately provoking the Vietminh into war. Only when given no other option by imperialism did Ho sanction a war against the French by the Vietminh – a costly war made necessary by the actions of the Stalinists in August September of 1945.
Ho Chi Minh negotiates defeat
From the March settlement through to the shelling of Haiphong, Ho had been busy negotiating. In May 1946 he went to Paris in a bid to secure a referendum on independence in the South. The status of the South had been the outstanding problem in negotiations with France since March. In September Ho and the Socialist Minister of Overseas France, Marius Moulet, signed a “modus vivendi” in a bid to keep the negotiations open Despite this, the French imperialists had no intention of giving up their “right” to Vietnam. In November, following the formation of an army, under Va Nguyen Giap by Ho, the French General in Saigon – Vallay – telephoned the French commander in Haiphong and gave him the following message:
“Attempts at conciliation ... are out of season. The moment has come to give a severe lesson to those who have treacherously attacked you. Use all the means at your disposal to make yourself complete master of Haiphong and so bring the Vietnamese army around to a better understanding of the situation.” 7
On 23 November 1946, the town was shelled and some 20,000 Vietnamese were killed. Despite this, on 20 December Ho made yet another appeal (to Leon Blum) for negotiations. However, it is unlikely that the appeal reached him – the French generals held it up in Saigon. Ho was thus forced into a war of liberation by the imperialists.
These events demonstrate clearly that it is not the case that the Stalinists will inevitably carry through a social overturn whenever their repressive apparatus holds sway, and that of the capitalists has disintegrated.
There are two major reasons for this Vietnamese variant on the pattern elsewhere after the establishment of the armed hegemony of the Stalinists. Firstly, the Soviet bureaucracy had agreed to French imperialism’s claims for the re-establishment of its colonial power in Indochina. Vietnam, like Greece, had been definitively signed over to imperialism by the Kremlin. The imperialists could act with confidence to re-establish their state apparatus, knowing that the Soviet bureaucracy would not resist.
The second reason was that the Vietnamese Stalinists could not break with Stalin’s plans – as had the YCP and the CCP (however partially). This was due in the last analysis to the strength of the Vietnamese working class. Far more immediately than in China and Yugoslavia, the Stalinists were faced with the real threat of the establishment of genuine workers’ power. Their influence was rivalled by that of the Trotskyists, at least in the South. To have resisted the re-introduction of imperialist troops would have unleashed forces that the Stalinists would not have been able to contain. The Stalinist programme for the political expropriation of the working class had to be carried through in bloody alliance with imperialism.
The Vietnamese experience in 1945-46 shows how utterly false it is to believe that the Stalinists are compelled by some sort of objective process to economically and politically expropriate the bourgeoisie. It is completely false to characterise any regime within which the Stalinists have achieved armed hegemony as a workers’ state, or even a workers’ state in the process of formation. This position presumes that Stalinism is inevitably compelled to establish workers’ states and is therefore both expansionist and progressive.
In the war that raged from the end of 1946 through to July 1954, the Vietminh pursued a strategy identical to that of Mao’s CCP/PLA. The Vietminh withdrew its forces from the cities and began a strictly rural guerrilla war, leaving the small but, as 1945 had shown, strategically important working class of Vietnam in centres like Saigon, at the mercy of the French. It is true that the northern cities, especially Hanoi, were returned to the French only after very fierce fighting. However, once defeated in the cities, the Vietminh made no further attempt to base their war effort in any way on the urban population, until they had actually achieved victory.
Again, as in the war against the Japanese, the Stalinists fought on a purely nationalist programme. The struggle was called a “national democratic” struggle and Ho repeated many times that his aim was unity and independence on a capitalist basis and under the auspices of a coalition regime. Indeed, in the areas liberated by the Vietminh land reform – the crying need of the peasants who supported Ho’s army – was not granted until 1953.
The appeal of nationalism was very real in a country which had been directly controlled by the French since 1888. This domination squeezed every section of Vietnamese society including the national bourgeoisie which controlled only 5 per cent of private capital in Vietnam, and that mainly in the low profit agricultural sector.
In the course of the war the Stalinist leadership of the Vietminh, the VCP maintained themselves and their army by means of a tax on agricultural produce in the liberated areas. The Vietminh levied such a tax twice a year. It had 41 scales, ranging from 5 per cent to 45 per cent, depending on income. A trade tax (maximum of 28 per cent on net profits) was also levied. The Party branch in each village was responsible for the collection of taxes. They were also able to retain a portion of the taxes collected to use for local purposes.
During the 1956 Rectification of Errors campaign, many party cadres admitted to having “persuaded” peasants to pay more tax than they should have done. This taxation system was crucial in explaining the crystallisation of a Stalinist bureaucracy in advance of the creation of a degenerate workers’ state in Vietnam.
This bureaucratic caste had at its head Ho Chi Minh, Va Nguyen Giap, Pham Van Dong, Hoang Quoc Vet and Truong Chinh the established leadership of the VCP since the 1930s. Their brief enjoyment of government in 1945 had whetted the appetite of these bureaucrats for power, their dependence on a tax on the peasants who supported them and their Vietminh army provided a material base for the restoration of that power. Their programme was aimed at achieving governmental power, but not at smashing capitalism and the capitalist state in Vietnam. They were genuinely willing to co-exist with capitalism. Upon achieving power, however, the brutal realities of imperialism exposed this project as not only a reactionary one, but also an absolute utopia.
French imperialism emerged from the Second World War a considerably weakened world power. Their re-entry into Vietnam was only as a result of British intervention and a guarantee of non-intervention by the Soviet Union. Their early victories were a consequence of the Vietminh’s self-defeating treachery to the working class and the Vietnamese People in 1945. However, by the late 1940s the French were beginning to lose the war. A series of defeats enabled the Vietminh to launch an offensive in 1950.
The ability to launch this offensive was greatly facilitated by the victory of Mao in China, who officially recognised Ho’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam on 16 January 1950 and supplied the Vietminh with arms. Moscow only recognised the DRV after Mao had – on 31 January. No significant aid to the Vietminh was forthcoming from Moscow. The offensive was however defeated because in May the US decided to give military aid to the French. Anxious after Mao’s victory they were very concerned to keep Asia under imperialist control – via the French in Indochina and themselves directly in Korea. In July 1950, the first American military mission arrived in Vietnam. Despite American aid, which was not extensive enough, French imperialism was not able to sustain a successful war effort. In 1952 a second offensive by the Vietminh began.This culminated in the decisive defeat of the French in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu.
This defeat gave Ho Chi Minh absolute control of the North and considerable prestige and support in the South. Once again imperialism was at a tremendous disadvantage. Once again the VCP prevented the Vietnamese masses from consolidating a final victory.
U.S. imperialism fills the breach
Prior to the fall of Dien Bien Phu, the USA, Britain, France and the Kremlin had convened a peace conference in Geneva.
This opened on 26 April 1954. The US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles made clear that the US was not interested in a negotiated peace with Ho Chi Minh. Immediately after the fall of Dien Bien Phu, the then vice-president Nixon announced that if the French left, the US would move in. When the Geneva accords were signed, dividing Vietnam at the 17th parallel, recognising the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the North and providing for elections throughout a unified Vietnam in 1956, the US simply refused to sign.
They had strengthened their economic hold on the South, had installed a pro-American premier in June 1954 – Ngo Dinh Diem – and had increased their military aid to the French and the Saigon government’s forces. Their intentions were clear and yet Ho Chi Minh, with massive support throughout the country, with an army whose victories meant its morale was high, refused to move against the puppet Diem and instead signed the Geneva Accords on 21 July 1954.8 This was the Stalinists’ second historic betrayal in Vietnam, and one which, like the first, was to lead to many more years of war and suffering for the Vietnamese masses.
As his part of the bargain, Ho agreed not to move against capitalism in the North. He maintained the goal of achieving a capitalist democracy, despite the hegemony of Stalinist armed forces in the North. However, if, in 1945 it was the spectre of working class power that led the Stalinists to compromise with imperialism, between 1954-56 the intransigence of US imperialism’s puppet Diem forced them in the direction of overthrowing capitalism by means of a bureaucratic social revolution. Within months of the Geneva Accords, it became clear that Diem with the backing of the world’s most powerful imperialist nation – the USA – had no intention of allowing elections to take place.
Diem set about hunting out and killing all Southern Vietminh activists. He began military manoeuvres at the 17th parallel to provoke the North. At the same time the US blocked French aid to the DRV, and began an economic blockade of the North. In July 1955 Diem declared that South Vietnam had not signed the Geneva accords and did not therefore recognise them. In the following October he declared South Vietnam a Republic. This happened under the careful eye of the US. In November 1954, General Collins, Eisenhower’s special Ambassador to South Vietnam arrived in Saigon to give Diem backing against the French who remained sceptical of Diem. In January 1955 the (US started to give military aid directly to the South Vietnamese army instead of via the French, and a press campaign in the US, began in praise of Diem. The following month the US military mission took over training of the Southern Army from the French.
In these circumstances Ho was forced to change course. There was now no threat of independent working class power in the North. The wave of mass support that had followed Dien Bien Phu had largely receded. It was safe for Ho and the Stalinist caste that he represented to move against capitalism using bureaucratic means in the North. At the end of 1955 French businesses in the North were nationalised and a land reform programme was launched. A national planning board was set up and at the beginning of 1957 it implemented a one year plan. This was quickly followed by a three year plan:
“To liquidate capitalist ownership of the means of production in industry and trade”9
By 1960, no purely private enterprises remained in North Vietnam. Despite the miniscule size of the industrial base in the North (in 1954 there were only seven large-scale – French-owned – plants in the North), the drive to liquidate capitalism and plan the economy was facilitated by aid from Peking and Moscow. On 7 July 1955, Moscow concluded an aid deal with Hanoi with the establishment of a planned economy at the beginning of 1957, North Vietnam can be said the have become a degenerate workers’ state. On the basis of its planned property relations, North Vietnam was able to expand industrial output significantly. In 1955 state industries accounted for 40 per cent of total non-agricultural production (not including handicraft industries). By 1960 this had risen to 90 per cent of total non-agricultural production.10
Between 1954 and mid-1955 the government in Vietnam was a Stalinist-controlled bourgeois workers’ government. It acted, consciously in the interests of capitalism even though there were no bourgeois parties in the government. Bao Dai, who fled to the South in 1949 had been Ho’s main hope for a coalition. Between the second half of 1955 and 1957 however the blockade and sabotage of US imperialism and the actions of their puppet, Diem in South Vietnam, forced this government onto the road of systematic anti-capitalist measures, carried through bureaucratically.
Vietminh cadres, not independent workers and peasants’ organisations strictly controlled the nationalisations and land reform. The regime at this stage was a bureaucratic workers’ government. In the period up to the second half of 1955, this government presided over a situation of dual power. Its eventual resolution was in the interests of the Stalinists, as had happened in Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia and China. In this period, revolutionaries would have sought to break the bureaucratic stranglehold on the liquidation of capitalism and landlordism, by transforming it into a struggle for genuine workers’ power based on soviets, a workers’ militia. The bloody liquidation of Vietnamese Trotskyism had ensured that no such leadership existed.
The establishment of post-capitalist property forms in North Vietnam was achieved with counter-revolutionary consequences in both the North and the South. In the North, the working class was robbed of political power in the state by the Stalinist bureaucracy. In the South the struggle against imperialism suffered an enormous setback. Another 18 years of open war were inflicted on the Vietnamese masses, North and South, by the combined effects of Stalinist treachery and the US imperialist stranglehold.
By 1957 the US bad replaced the French as imperialist masters of South Vietnam. By 1957-58 US aid funded all of the South’s armed forces; the US funded 80 per cent of all other government expenditure and 90 per cent of all imports into the South were from the US. In addition, more than1,000 officers and men from the US were in the South training Diem’s army.
Diem’s state was vital to them as a bastion of anti-communism, a prop to the whole string of US semi-colonies in South-East Asia. It was a check to the “falling domino” effect that the Americans feared would result from a communist takeover in Indochina. With this backing, Diem was in a strong position to step up his repression against the Vietminh elements in the South. In 1957 captured Vietminh cadres were thrown into a network of concentration camps. Diem further antagonised the masses by carrying through a “land reform” programme that was explicitly designed to benefit the small number of catholic landlords who supported the catholic clique around Diem.
Prior to the land reform there were 600,000 landless peasants in the South. Over 50 per cent of the land was owned by 22 per cent of the total number of landowners, while 70 per cent owned a meagre 12 per cent of the land. The land reform launched by Diem did not give land to the landless. It merely introduced a maximum rent of 25 per cent of the crop harvested. Given that a majority of peasants had been paying no rent during the war, this was in fact a guaranteed income from rents to the big (catholic) landlords.
The repression and the mass opposition to Diem forced the Southern Vietminh (led by the VCP) into war. In 1957 the second Indochina war began. The southern National Liberation Front was officially formed in 1960, but the army that comprised it had already been fighting for three years. That army had fought during that period without any material support from the Hanoi government. Despite Diem’s obvious contempt for the Geneva Accords, Ho Chi Minh was determined to remain loyal to them. It was only in 1960 after three years of seeing his supporters fighting a difficult and bloody war against an imperialist backed dictatorship that Ho called for the commencement of a struggle in the South. Even then, however, the aid that Hanoi gave to the NLF, imperialist propaganda notwithstanding, was minimal. Pentagon figures revealed that of the NLF weapons captured between 1962-64, only 179 (less than 1 per cent) were neither home made nor from the US – i.e. could have come from the North.
The Americans had no such qualms as far as their puppet was concerned. They poured aid into South Vietnam. When Diem became an international embarrassment, after the brutal suppression of a Buddhist rising in 1963, the US backed a military coup that replaced Diem with an equally barbarous dictatorship, but one that included Buddhists to offset the charges of religious repression that had been aimed at Diem and his US-backers. However, instability reigned in the South. A general strike in Saigon brought down Diem’s successor. In the 20 months succeeding the coup (1 November 1963), nine governments came and went. By 1965, the US decided that drastic measures were needed. More troops were poured in and on 7 February the US began bombing North Vietnam.
American involvement had escalated sharply towards the end of the 1950s. Before Diem’s fall, Washington was giving him $1.5m dollars a day to smash the NLF. After Diem’s fall, troops were poured into the South. By August 1965 there were 125,000 US troops involved in the war. By 1966 this had risen to 400,000, and at the height of the war in the late 1960s, half a million US troops were involved.
The Popular Front is launched again
By 1960, the VCP was able to launch the N LF having already moulded the liberation movement in the popular frontist image of the Vietminh. As with its forerunner the NLF was dominated by the Stalinists. They controlled its strategy (capturing the cities by a rural takeover) which was always purely military and never sought to link the war with the struggles of the urban proletariat in Saigon and elsewhere.
The famous Tet Offensive of 1968, while serving as an example of the courage and determination of the NLF, also underlined the centrality of this non proletarian perspective. It left the urban masses as passive spectators of a rural military conflict.
The NLF’s programme repeated all the formulations of that of the Vietminh. It promised to guarantee capitalism and limit the revolution to a national democratic stage.11 The appeal of this programme to the mass of the peasantry was strong. In the same way as the Vietminh had based itself on the peasantry, so the NLF followed suit. On this basis they were able to sustain the war despite meagre aid from their “allies” in Moscow, Peking and Hanoi. By the early 1970s, it became clear that America could not win this protracted war. The anti-war movement in America and elsewhere was massive. Morale amongst American troops was low, whilst the prestige and morale of the NLF was high. For a third time the possibility of completely ousting imperialism and its puppets from Vietnam was on the agenda.
Yet for the third time, the Stalinists chose to sit at the negotiating table. In January 1973 the Paris Accords were signed, calling a ceasefire and recognising the legitimacy of the Southern state now ruled by General Thieu. The Stalinists hailed these accords which allowed Nixon and Kissinger, the bombers of Indochina, to present themselves as peacemakers a victory for the masses
The need for an agreement was also due to the terrible devastation the North was suffering as a result of American bombings. A tactical agreement (recognised as such) with imperialism, to gain a breathing space would be entirely legitimate for a workers’ state to undertake. However, this should not then be announced to the workers as a revolutionary victory. The Bolsheviks for example, did not regard Brest-Litovsk as a victory.
There was no way the Paris Accords could be regarded as a victory they were viewed as a strategic pact with imperialism of coarse this is precisely what the Stalinists were aiming for – a goal that could only have profoundly reactionary consequences for the Vietnamese masses.
General Thieu had no such intentions. Having gained a respite he regrouped his forces and, again with American aid, launched an attack on the NLF and the DRV. In July 1974, the Third Indochina War began. However, it was to be even more short lived and self-destructive for Thieu, than was Chiang Kai Shek’s 1945 offensive.
As victory for the combined NLF/DRV forces approached, the Stalinists again sought a compromise that would have left Thieu’s successor, General Minh, in power in Saigon, in coalition with the NLF. Their strategy remained the implementation of the Geneva Accords. However, Minh was intransigent and in April 1975, as the last panicky US officials scrambled, aboard their helicopters, the NLF/DRV forces entered Saigon.
The pattern established by the Stalinist takeovers in Eastern Europe, China and North Vietnam was closely followed in the South. Despite the collapse of the capitalists armed forces and the hegemony of those of the Stalinists, the VCP refused to move against capitalism. Instead, one of the first radio announcements made after Saigon fell was a plea to the Saigon workers, who had struck to greet the NLF/DRV forces, to return to work at once. The immediate pretext for keeping capitalism intact was the need to secure $3.25bn in aid from France and America. When the imperialist powers found pretexts to withhold the aid they had promised, the Stalinists had no alternative to carrying though a bureaucratic social revolution.
The Provisional Revolutionary Government, established in June 1975, was a Stalinist controlled bourgeois workers government which was quickly driven under the pressure of an imperialist blockade and a devastated economy onto the road of an anti capitalist bureaucratic workers government.
In August of 1975, this government nationalised the Southern banks, and took control of all southern industry. In September it raided the houses of the wealthiest inhabitants of the Cholon areas of Saigon. The period of dual power between the VCP and the mainly comprador bourgeoisie ended very quickly, because that bourgeoisie, detached from its lifeline to imperialism had little cause to collaborate with the Stalinists.
For their part the enormous devastation that the Stalinists inherited forced them to act against the extensive black market profiteering, which the comprador elements had engaged in. This way the VCP hoped to offset a developing state of chaos that could easily have produced their own downfall. The move to liquidate capitalism was imposed on the Stalinists by the need to preserve their newly-won governmental power.
During the course of 1976, the overturn of capitalism was consolidated by, first, the geographical assimilation of the South into the North, announced on 25 April 1976; secondly, the inauguration of the five-year plan in the summer of 1976 for both North and South; and thridly, the consolidation of an aid deal from China in 1976 followed by a series of aid deals with the USSR.
In no sense was the overturn the action of the masses themselves. The key moves against capitalism occurred after the decisive mobilisations of the Southern working class in April 1975 had abated. The mass demonstrations that did occur in the period from late 1975 to summer 1976 (the period of the bureaucratic workers’ government) did reflect the desire of the masses, after thirty years of civil war, to effect a fundamental change.
Nevertheless they were not mobilisations based on independent organs of workers’ power. They were organised and tightly controlled by the armed forces of the NLF/DRV.
Although the capitalist Cholon merchants existed as a very important force in South Vietnam up to 1978 (when they were expropriated by government edict), the launching of the plan in 1976 and the unification with the degenerate workers’ state in the North, can be said to be the point at which all of Vietnam became a degenerate workers’ state.
This bureaucratic social revolution, carried through in a counter revolutionary manner, involved the political expropriation of the Vietnamese working class. The political revolution against the Stalinist rulers of Vietnam, with the defence of the country against imperialism and its restorationist agents, is the central tasks facing the Vietnamese working class.
The case of ‘Democratic’ Kampuchea
While the creation of a degenerate workers’ state in Vietnam presents no theoretical problems for Trotskyists the same is not true of the genesis of Democratic Kampuchea. If this was a degenerate workers’ state, then careful consideration is needed of its dynamics and the means by which it came into existence in order to explain the horrendous crisis that gripped the country in the late 1970s. Here was a degenerate workers’ state which exhibited, apparently as its defining features, an absolute economic autarchy, genocide against its own population and perpetual famine. How is this to be explained?
In 1970 a military coup in Phnom Penh brought to power a US puppet regime, headed by Lon Nol, in Kampuchea. In the same year the South Vietnamese regime, with full backing from the US, entered Kampuchea to help Lon Nol crush the Khmer Rouge (the military wing of the Kampuchean Communist Party, CPK). The CPK, underground since 1963, had established a base of support amongst the peasantry in the late 1960s. With this support behind it, the CPK moved into war against Lon Nol and allied itself with his predecessor, Prince Sihanouk. The Kampuchean National United Front (FUNK) was formed to prosecute the war. It was described by one leading CPK member as, “the largest united front in the world – all the way up from the peasants to the former king of the country.”12 Indeed, the purpose of this “united front” was to bring to power the Royal Government of National Union of Kampuchea (RGNUK) .
From the earliest phase of the 1970-75 war against Lol Nol and his South Vietnamese and US allies, the anti imperialist fighters were grouped together in a popular front.
The Stalinist CPK (whose leading cadre had been educated in Paris and by the French GP) quickly moved into an alliance with Sihanouk after his fall, despite the fact that it had been Sihanouk’s repression which had originally driven them into the countryside. In Kampuchea itself, the Stalinists were the overwhelmingly dominant force in the popular front, Prince Sihanouk being unable to field many troops and relying on Chinese support for influence within the alliance. The real weakness of his position was sharply revealed after the fall of Lon Nol in April 1975 – he was at first kept out of the country altogether and then eventually forced to resign as head of state by the CPK in March 1976.
The war conducted by the People’s National Liberation Armed Forces of Kampuchea (KPNALF - Khmer Rouge – is actually an anti-communist term of abuse for this army) followed closely the patterns of peasant war applied by Mao in China. The KPNALF established a series of liberated zones in which land reform was carried out (e.g. freeing the peasants from the vice-like grip of the city merchants), hospitals were built (under the direction of Dr. Thiounn Thioeun, the former head of the Medical Faculty of the University of Phnom Penh) and a literacy campaign was undertaken. In return the peasants supplied manpower, food and shelter for the guerrillas. The CPK bureaucracy was in this way able to consolidate a material base for itself prior to the final seizure of power.
By this strategy the KPNALF was able to exercise control over virtually the whole countryside, to isolate the cities and to move slowly against them. In this project there was no shortage of peasant support. The peasantry of Kampuchea was exploited not primarily by landlords (agriculture consisted mainly of small holdings) but by a comprador mercantile bourgeoisie. This class, based in the cities, bought rice from the peasantry at deflated prices, sold goods and equipment to them at inflated prices and lent the peasants the money, at high rates of interest, to pay the difference! Indeed, the ferocity of the peasants towards city life (even as represented by inanimate objects such as typewriters which were smashed wholesale after the victory) can be accounted for by their relations to the merchants who exploited them.
By April 1975 Phnom Penh was completely surrounded. The torrent of US bombs, South Vietnamese troops and Lon Nol’s terror machine had failed to check the anti-imperialist advance. On 17 April, after most of Lon Nol’s regime had fled, the KPNALF entered Phnom Penh.
In the successful anti-imperialist struggle the potential for the future defeats of the Kampuchean masses was already lodged. First, the popular frontism of the CPK was to ensure that the masses themselves were prevented from taking the reins of political power into their own hands. Second, the peasant war strategy had weakened the anti-imperialists in the cities. Spontaneous urban uprisings against Lon Nol had been deliberately left isolated. They were cruelly repressed by Lon Nol. When the peasants met the urban population, the latter, or more particularly its proletarian and progressive elements, were too weak and disorganised to resist the CPK’s economic and political plans. Writing about China in 1932, Trotsky had warned of the dangers arising out of a Stalinist led victorious peasant army:
“The party actually tore itself away from its class. Thereby, in the last analysis, it can cause injury to the peasantry as well. For, should the proletariat continue to remain on the sidelines, without organisation, without leadership, then the peasant war even if fully victorious, will inevitably arrive in a blind alley.”13
The blind alley predicted by Trotsky was the restoration of a new bourgeois power. The experience of bureaucratic revolutions allows us to modify this prediction. The blind alley can be a degenerate workers’ state in which the economy, because it is being planned blind and according to the needs of the bureaucracy, can bring terrible ruin to the mass of the people. Following 17 April and the seizure of power by the Stalinist led peasant army, this was the path that was followed in Kampuchea. A degenerate workers’ state was established, but it proved to be a tragic blind alley for the masses of Kampuchea.
A land devastated by imperialism
The RG NUK, as the government was called until January 1976, inherited a land verging on total ruin. Under Lon Nol’s rule the area under his control had become a virtual desert.
According to UN figures, “[t]he area under rice production fell from 2,399,000 hectares in 1970 to 737,000 in 1973”14. It fell to 500,000 by 1975. In 1974, the Phnom Penh regime was importing 282,000 tons of rice – in 1968 Kampuchea had exported 230,000 tons of rice. Industrial production fell to 42 per cent below its pre-war level. Of the total resources of Lol Nol’s Kampuchea, only 2.2 per cent came from domestic production.
The rest came from the US (95.1 per cent) and a number of other countries (2.7 per cent). Phnom Penh and the other cities were gripped by economic chaos and increasing famine in 1975. This terrible situation was compounded by the 400,000 tons of US bombs dropped on Kampuchea’s countryside. The population of Phnom Penh swelled from 600,000 to 3 million, to create in the city a “Saigon syndrome” of corruption starvation, depravity and cruelty – before the entry of the KPNALF. Further, the war is estimated to have resulted, in the deaths of some 600,000 and at least as many wounded, out of a population of only 7 million.
This was the situation which faced the new government. It responded in a brutal, bureaucratic fashion. Its policies led to countless deaths (many people being murdered). The exact figure is difficult to determine amidst the imperialist lies and Stalinist counter-claims. However, given that sympathetic sources estimate at least 500,000 dead, it is probable that between that number and a million suffered death during the CPK’s regime. The policies of the CPK exposed thousands to exhaustion, malaria (on a massive scale) and semi-starvation.
The cardinal question is whether or not this terror is of a qualitatively different nature from that of Stalin or Mao which also led to countless deaths? It was not.
Despite its disgusting nature this was the terror of a bureaucracy based on post-capitalist property forms.
In the period April 1975 to January 1976 the RG NUK appeared to have the form of a popular front. Its initial gathering from 25-27 April was attended by 20 Buddhist clergy and 13 Sihanoukists. These delegates were outnumbered, however, by 125 “people’s delegates”, 112 army representatives and 14 FUNK delegates, all of whom were loyal to the CPK. Furthermore the RG NUK simply ceded real power to the Angkar (which means “revolutionary organisation” - a shadowy body which was in fact always the leading cadre of the CPK - Leng Sary, Saloth Sar, also known as Pol Pot, Son Sen, Khieu Samphan, Leng Thirith etc.), no evidence exists that any non-CPK figures held any ministerial power. The “popular front” was not a governmental alliance so much as a diplomatic charade that was designed to win and to further international credibility.
Sihanouk, the nominal head of state, was actually kept out of the country by the CPK until it had got a complete grip on the country. This government must, therefore, be defined by its policies.
The attempt to fulfill a reactionary dream
The economic policies of the Angkar were based on the doctoral thesis of Khieu Samphan. In essence the policy consisted of: mobilising the energy of the peasants to reconstruct the country, in the first place via hydraulic management and increased rice production; secondly, imposing autarchy to reduce foreign competition and the penetration of the economy by foreign capital. Success with these two policies was supposed to create a sound basis for industrial development. Leng Sary summed it up thus:
“After our total victory we extended to all Kampuchea the economic policy which had already been applied in the liberated zones. This policy consists of considering agriculture as the base and industry as the dominant factor. Our objective is to manoeuvre our country a modern agricultural and industrial country.”15
This schema was a reactionary utopian one. It was the Stalinist conception of Socialism in One Country, mixed with various petty bourgeois nationalist notions, taken to extreme xenophobic lengths. As in Russia, abandonment of internationalism could only lead to coercion of the masses on a huge scale, thereby creating new contradictions that would in fact undermine the planned economy.
The first steps taken by the Angkar involved depopulation of the cities and a population transfer (mainly to the countryside) of massive proportions, a drive to manage the water supply, vital for increased rice production, via the building of dams, reservoirs, canals and irrigation channels and, lastly, the collectivisation of agriculture and its organisation into cooperatives often up to 10,000 strong (on the model of the Chinese Communes). This policy was carried through rapidly in early 1976, and involved total collectivisation, including the collectivisation of cooking utensils! It was carried through against the wishes of the mass of peasants, going far beyond the simple communal organisation necessary for rice cultivation.
At the same time, however, by breaking the smallholding system it did create the conditions for improved harvests which, according to Western and Yugoslav diplomats did come about in 1976-77. However, achieved by coercion, it also led to new contradictions and sparked uprisings in 1977 in the West of Kampuchea together with a steady flow of refugees to Thailand and Vietnam.
In addition to the measures outlined above, all industry and foreign holdings (such as rubber plantations) were nationalised.
Kampuchean industry had always been a minor component of the country’s economy, as it was in the other countries of Indo-China. Between April 1975 and late 1976, the regime kept it that way. Industrial production was used only to serve the agricultural ‘revolution’ that was taking place. However, it was never destroyed. In the early days Pol Pot talked of maintaining industry, not of destroying it or expanding it. On 26 September 1975, the Far Eastern Economic Review reported that some 70 factories (mainly small workshops) in Phnom Penh were once again working although key installations, such as the oil refinery at Kompong Sam, were not.
By mid-1976, with the full collectivisation of agriculture more or less complete; the Far Eastern Economic Review Asian Yearbook for 1977 reported over 100 factories back in operation. At the same time a construction drive resulted in the restoration of the Kompong Som to Phnom Penh railway, the country’s seven airports and a traffic-worthy road system.
In 1977-78, a shift in industrial policy appears to have taken place and figures indicate that, compared with its pre1975 levels, industry underwent a limited expansion. The New China News Agency reported in August 1977 that for the first time new factories were being built in Kampuchea.
These included a shipbuilding yard, an acid works, a motor vehicle plant and a number of machine tool shops. That this is not fiction is borne out by trading figures for 1977. These show a dramatic increase as compared to previous years in the import of raw materials and steel products for construction purposes. In the first six months of 1977, Hong Kong and Japan supplied $13m worth of steel products, spare parts, car generators, rubber processing plant, rice husking machinery and medicine trade with Hong Kong Japan and Singapore rose to $19m in 1978. These two figures compare with a mere $2.5m of total trade with the same countries in 1976.
All of these indicators show a hesitant growth of the Kampuchean economy between 1976 and 1978. Trade with workers’ states was carried out from 1975 onwards. All trade with the capitalist world was monopolised by the state via the Ren Fung trading company, based in Hong Kong. Trade with other degenerate workers’ states was absolutely decisive in allowing the Kampuchean economy to grow at all. China, in particular, supplied 4,000 technical advisors and in 1975 alone gave $1bn worth of aid. Trading deals favourable to Kampuchea were also carried out with Yugoslavia, Rumania, North Korea and Albania.
These measures comprised the programme of the government of Kampuchea. They were carried out by the Angkar, acting as the central authority, with instruments of its rule acting at local and regional level in the numerous committees of the cooperatives. From mid-1976 the Angkar had definitely centralised planning in industry, agriculture and trade, all of which were under its control.
It did this via a National. Development Pia which, like the plans in other degenerate workers’ states, set itself wild targets for agricultural production and for industrial development (e.g. 3 tons of rice per hectare for each crop, a quota that would have severely exhausted an already overworked peasantry). In no sense was the plan (referred to by CPK leaders with regard to water conservancy, rice production, control of malaria and industrial expansion) a democratic one. It was a bureaucratic plan that, in fact, conflicted with needs of the masses.
However, it was a plan for an economy that exhibited none of the features of capitalism. The law of value had been suppressed through the state direction of investment and the abolition of an internal currency (which resulted in some barter but not in a barter economy). All industry and agriculture was in state hands, there was no private property at all and no bourgeoisie left in either the economy or the state. All foreign trade was controlled by the state. In other words the plan operated within a post-capitalist economy.
The means by which this post capitalist economy, a degenerate workers’ state, came about roughly follows the pattern exhibited in China and Vietnam. In April 1975 a Stalinist dominated popular front came to power. Although the form of the popular front was maintained until January 1976 (when Democratic Kampuchea was declared) the establishment of direct rule by the Angkar, that is the CPK, indicates that from May 1975 to mid-1976 a bureaucratic anti-capitalist workers’ government was in power. It destroyed capitalism and it destroyed all the aspects and the personnel of the previous state machine. In doing this it also acted against the masses, riding roughshod over their needs and either killing or causing the deaths of many, many thousands. Like all such governments, its action against capitalism were far outweighed by the counter-revolutionary manner in which they were carried out.
There was no dual power situation in Kampuchea after May of 1975, prior to that dual power on a territorial basis had existed between the KPNALF and the Lol Nol regime. The bureaucratic workers’ government very quickly ended this.
With aid from China and the organisation of a transferred population into cooperative units, the Angkar, by mid 1976, was able to implement its National Plan. With the commencement of this plan we can say that a degenerate workers’ state was created by the bureaucratic anti-capitalist workers’ government. This degenerate workers’ state made possible the economic growth that we have detailed. But it achieved this by coercing the masses and depriving them of many basic needs. As such it built up new contradictions. The masses began to resist. Revolts took place and there was passive resistance as well.
The regime tried to play the card of anti-Vietnamese chauvinism and moved into a border war with the Hanoi regime which was anxious for its Western borders. Indeed, the long term goal of the Hanoi Stalinists was the creation of an Indo-Chinese federation under their control. The crisis, into which the Pol Pot regime ran because of its policies, provided an opportunity for them to take a step in this direction. They related to a wing of the fracturing Kampuchean bureaucracy around Heng Samrin, a wing historically sympathetic to them, and used it as a cover to legitimise their invasion. In late 1978, the Vietnamese Army sent its best regiments into Kampuchea.
The most battle-hardened army in Asia encountered little difficulty in establishing its control. However, the fact that the war between the Khmer Rouge guerrillas and Vietnam is still raging four years later indicates that Heng Samrin’s pro-Vietnamese regime is far from stable.
Since Heng Samrin came to power the collectivisation scheme has been relaxed and a free market partially restored, but the economic system has not changed in any fundamental sense since the invasion. The measures taken by Heng Samrin’s regime did end the internal coercion of the Pol Pot government and, in that sense, did temporarily offset the explosive crisis into which bureaucratic planning was leading Kampuchea.
The nature of the Kampuchean bureaucratic anti-capitalist revolution had a number of specific features that shaped the fortunes of the workers' state but, in essence, this revolution was no different from the ones carried out in China or Vietnam. The CPK leadership decided to emulate the CCP. They adopted wholesale the voluntarism and xenophobia that Maoism exhibited during particular periods of its history (Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution).
In China the disastrous consequences of these policies became apparent to the CCP leadership before the Chinese economy was plunged into utter chaos. In Kampuchea these policies were carried out in a country proportionately more devastated by war than China, with a far smaller population, with far fewer natural resources and a less well developed industrial and agricultural infrastructure than China. In addition they were not checked by the CPK leadership and in a matter of months the hesitant revival of the economy seen by 1976 was facing constant crisis in 1977.
The immediate cause of the crisis was that the state was forced to expropriate all the peasants’ rice in order to finance trade and industrialisation plans. This, in turn, meant starvation and, therefore, the resistance of the peasantry. This crisis led to a fracturing of the bureaucracy in 1977 – along pro- and anti-Vietnam lines. The way was paved for a second destructive war - with Vietnam and entirely suited to Hanoi’s purposes. / We can say that the degenerate workers’ state of Kampuchea began its spiral towards total disintegration far more quickly than had been the case, so far, with any of the other degenerate workers’ states. The peculiarity of' Kampuchea was the speed of this development. The tendency to disintegration, however, is a feature of all economies where the plan operates blindly and bureaucratically and where the proletariat is politically expropriated.
The invasion of Kampuchea by Vietnam temporarily checked the process of internal disintegration but, because this was done by a counter-revolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy (in Hanoi) and because it was carried out by purely military means and did not involve the masses of Kampuchea at all, it has only offset the process of degeneration. It has not and cannot definitively check it. The political revolution in Kampuchea is desperately needed. Only by placing the post capitalist economy under the political control of the workers and peasants can the masses put an end to famine and war.
The case of Kampuchea shows, in an almost chemically pure form, what is meant by the counter revolutionary nature of Stalinist-led bureaucratic anti-capitalist revolutions. This dialectical formula was concretised in Kampuchea when the destruction of capitalism led, within a mere three years, to a process of degeneration the logical end point of which would have been, thanks to the Stalinists, the reintroduction of capitalism, probably courtesy of an ASEAN intervention - a course of action still being considered in Manila and Bangkok.
Footnotes
1. The Vietnamese Communist Party has existed under various names throughout this period - Indochinese Communist Party, People's Revolutionary Party, Association for the Study of Marxism etc. For convenience we will refer to it throughout as the VCP.
2. International, (London, 1972) Vol. 1 No.2 ,p.25
3. International, (London 1974) Vol.2 No.3, p.12
4. The Trotskyists: Though weakened as a result of Stalinist and imperialist repression, the Vietnamese Trotskyists had long enjoyed considerable support among the masses, particularly in the South. They were divided into two groups. The Struggle Group was led by Tha Thu Thau, after a period of collaboration with the Stalinists in the early Thirties it was attacked by them for criticising the Popular Front Government in France. The other Trotskyist group was the International Communist League which produced a daily paper, The Spark, and played a major role in the People's Committees. Both groups suffered massive repression and had their leaderships physically wiped out by the Stalinists in 1945.
5. cf. Stalinism and Trotskyism in Vietnam, Spartacist League Pamphlet p.21
6. Quoted in D.Jenness, War and Revolution in Vietnam, (New York 1965) p.8
7. Quoted in E.Hammer, The Struggle for Indo-China, (Stanford 1954) p.183
8. To illustrate the degree of support for Ho as compared with Diem it is worth comparing two bourgeois assessments. Eisenhower said of Ho, "I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indo-Chinese affairs who did not agree that if elections had been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly 80% of the population would have voted for Ho Chi Minh". Quoted in I.Birchall, Workers against the Monolith, (London 1974) p.15
9 The Economist magazine said of Diem, “Diem's problem is that he is not a leader who has been merely helped by the West; he has been created by the West ... The objectionable word, ‘puppet’ so often used by "both sides in a propaganda wars was in this case literally true.” Quoted in D.Horowitz, From Yalta to Vietnam, (Harmono~worth 1971) p.14 9. Quoted in Hoang Van Chi, From Colonialism to Communism, (London 1964) p.259
10. cf. C.Nyland, “Vietnam, the Plan/Market Contradiction and the Transition to Socialism” in journal of Contemporary Asia, Vol.11, No.4, p.431
11. Key clauses in the NLF programme were, “It [the N LF - Eds] has successfully consolidated its base among the broad masses of the people; at the same time it has engaged in joint action with many political and religious forces, and won over large numbers of manufacturers and traders, official functionaries of the puppet administration, and officers and soldiers of the puppet army.”' Programme of the NLF (Giai Publishing House). And, the NLF’s aim was to establish... a broad democratic national union administration, build an independent, democratic, peaceful, neutral and progressive South Vietnam." ibid) For workers it promised, “To settle disputes between employers and employees through negotiation between the two sides and mediation by the national democratic administration.” ibid) In short this programme contained not a whiff of independent working class power or of socialism or anything approaching it. It was designed to forestall such things in order to appease the capitalists who were being robbed of their imperialist paymasters.
12. Quoted in G.Hildebrand and G.Porter, Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution, (New York 1976) p.65
13. L Trotsky, On China, (New York 1976) p.527
14. M.Gomes, The Kampuchean Connection, (London 1980) p.40
15. Quoted in Hildebrand and Porter. Op. cit. D.88
16. The following figures also suggest a significant degree of economic growth within the country: 200 factories reported in operation in 1977. a rubber factory producing 15,000 bicycle tyres a day; a Phnom Penh textile mill producing 14,000 metres of cloth a day; Battambang Bag Factory – 10,000 bags a day; rubber processing plants -– 40-50 tons of cured rubber a day. Imports of medicinal compounds indicate a re-opening of laboratories in Phnom Penh.
Each region possessing at least one reservoir with a capacity of 100-22 million cubic metres of water. One-third of the countryside made cultivable. A steel mill under construction in 1978.
The Bor 3 Plastic factory at Chak Angee – 9,000 metres of plastic sheet, 1,500 metres of rubber hose and 100 fifteen litre containers per day. The year 1977-79 saw a population increase (the first significant one since the war) of 392,000, taking the population to a post war record of 7.8 million. Exports to Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore rose from US dollars 357,000 in 1976 to US dollars 680,000 in 1977, including 130,000 tons of rice. Figures from Far Eastern Economic Review Year Book 1975
Chapter 6: Castro's Cuban road from populism to Stalinism
The “unique” features of the Cuban revolution have produced endless confusion in the “Trotskyist” movement, rivalling the programmatic chaos and ensuing revisionism engendered by the Tito-Stalin split in 1948. The fundamental problem the Cuban revolution poses is how can a petit-bourgeois nationalist movement not only overthrow a pro-imperialist military dictatorship (i.e. a political revolution) but pass on under the same leadership to overthrow capitalism and establish a self-proclaimed “socialist state” indistinguishable in type from China or Vietnam?
From this problem flow questions relating to the fundamentals of revolutionary Marxist theory. Does the experience of the Cuban revolution contradict the Marxist notion of the historical limits of the petit-bourgeoisie as a class and of petit bourgeois nationalism as a programme for social revolution? Does the experience of the Cuban revolution contradict the Marxist theory of the state?
The “adaptations” made to the fundamentals of revolutionary Marxism, by all sections of the movement which claimed to be ‘Trotskyist, to “account for” the Cuban events were all, in fact, revisions of the first magnitude. Permanent revolution is reduced to an objective force, a historical process that works its will independent of the consciousness of human beings even with regard to the socialist revolution. Its petit-bourgeois agents can be “unconscious Marxists” or “unconscious Trotskyists”. Therefore a revolutionary party is a desirable, but not essential, instrument of this process. Revolutionary workers’ governments can exist without the “norms of proletarian democracy”, that is, without soviet-type bodies to express and exert the revolutionary pressure of the working class. Lastly, the proletarian dictatorship can exist “without the norms of proletarian democracy” yet be qualitatively a healthy workers’ state – one not in need of a political revolution.
The positions developed by Joseph Hansen and the SWP (US), which provided the basis for the re-unified United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFI), repeated in a starker manner the theoretical and the programmatic collapse that occurred after 1948. The importance of the Cuban revolution was realised in the context of the Nicaraguan revolution and the consequent split in the USFI (1979/80). The issues it raises are not matters of idle historical curiosity, but have a burning relevance for the struggle for revolution today.
Cuba’s whole history prior to 1959 was dominated by its colonial and then semi-colonial status. From being a Spanish colony it passed into the hands of US imperialism. Formal independence was an empty shell under both parliamentary bourgeois nationalist regimes and under repressive military dictatorships. Attempted constitutional “revolutions” like that of 1933-34 were rudely aborted by US-backed military coups. The underlying cause of this was Cuba’s integration with, and subordination to, the US economy. As with all semi-colonies in the imperialist epoch, this integration had not transformed Cuba into a balanced and developed capitalist economy.
Cuba was dominated by sugar production for the North American market. At the beginning of the 1950s sugar production accounted for 36 per cent of Cuba’s GNP, for 80 per cent of its export revenues; and 83 per cent of all cultivated land was under sugar cane.
With 41 per cent of labour tied to agricultural production and 20 per cent to tourism, Cuba’s economy was tied to the sweet tooth of the North American populace and the pleasures and vices of its bourgeoisie. This bourgeoisie directly owned a large part of the economy, 35 per cent of capital invested in sugar was US-based. In the late 1950s more than $1bn of US capital were invested in Cuba.
A small class of latifundists (less than 3,000 of them owned 70 per cent of the land) and a comprador and rentier bourgeoisie acted as the agents of US imperialism. Only a tiny fraction of the Cuban possessing classes were capable of any sustained opposition to US imperialism and even these turned sharply against the Castroite revolution as soon as it began to take limited measures of agrarian reform. The Cuban revolution confirmed to the hilt the Trotskyist assertion that in the epoch of imperialism the colonial and semi-colonial bourgeoisie are completely incapable of leading the struggle for national independence and independent (capitalist) economic development. On the other hand, the popular classes were not dominated by a peasantry chronically deprived of land. Cuban society was more urban than rural (57 per cent urban to 43 per cent rural in 1959).
Moreover, the countryside itself was dominated not by land hungry, small peasants but by rural proletarians suffering from chronic and massive unemployment, job insecurity, low wages and appalling social conditions. The sugar refineries were well organised in trade unions, as were the urban workers generally. The CTC (Cuban Trade Union Federation) unionised half the total workforce.
Cuba was possessed of a revolutionary nationalist tradition, that of Jose Marti and Antonio Maceo and the insurrectionary war against Spain and then US colonialism (1895-8); a tradition with parallels in the early years of the imperialist epoch (in China, Mexico, Turkey, Iran etc.) The island also had seen a reformist, constitutional attempt to break with US dominance.
In 1933-34 the democrat Dr. Grau San Martin was brought to power and driven from it 100 days later, by a military coup d’état engineered by Fulgencio Batista. Castro’s July 26th Movement was politically a continuation of these movements. There were no differences with Grau’s Autenticos of the 1930s or Chibas’ Ortodoxos of the late 1940s. Fidel Castro was a member of the latter party. The programme Castro was thus committed to was of political and economic independence and democracy.
History Will Absolve Me, Castro’s duly doctored (and re-written) speech from the court dock after the 1953 attack on Moncada Barracks was pure “Chibasism” in its programme. It promised restoration of the 1940 constitution, a “government of popular election”, a land reform to restrict large land holdings and nationalisation of US-owned electric and telephone companies. By December 1956, Castro had even renounced the nationalisation of the utilities and declared “Foreign investment will always be welcome and secure here.”1 His differences with the Chibas and the Ortodoxo party, which carried on the tradition after Chibas’ death, were that whereas they (and Grau and the Autenticos before them) were bourgeois nationalist reformists, he was (like Maceo and Marti) a bourgeois nationalist revolutionary – that is, he employed revolutionary methods of struggle not constitutional ones.
The July 26th Movement (J26M) however, never formulated a precise programme. It never held a conference or elected a leadership. It was in essence a military apparatus for overthrowing Batista. It was itself a miniature popular front. On its left wing stood figures like Raul Castro and Ernesto Che Guevara who were strongly influenced by Stalinism and privately had no objections to an overthrow of capitalism; and on its right wing stood the anti-communist figures like Hubert Matos and Faustino Perez.
The July 26th Movement – a coalition across classes
In the cities the J26M leaders, known as “the Plain” (“Llano”) were anti-communist bourgeois nationalists to the core. Nor were they an insignificant force. Frank Pais in Santiago and Faustino Perez in Havana controlled large movements of resistance and sabotage and supplied the rural guerrillas with arms and money. The Plain leaders were fiercely anti-communist and open defenders of private property. Faustino Perez reflected the views of this group in his attitude to the “extremist” Castro when he stressed in spring 1958 Castro will not be part of the Provisional Government:
“We shall create a climate of confidence and security for the investment of national and foreign capital” 2
On the left there were figures like Raul Castro, an ex-member of the CP youth and resolutely pro-communist (Stalinist). Guevara probably considered himself a Marxist from 1954 onwards.
His experience of the American backed coup against Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 and a reading of Lenin’s State and Revolution led him to reject the “peaceful road” to revolution.
All wings of the J26M were highly suspicious of, if not hostile to the PSP, the Cuban Stalinists. The PSP had a history of collaboration with Batista and openly condemned the Castroites before 1958 as “adventurous”. But by the spring of 1958, Bias Roca, the veteran Stalinist leader threw his weight behind Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, leader of the pro-Castro wing of the PSP and against Anibal Escalante. A number of PSP cadres including Rodriguez were sent to the Sierra Maestra, base of Castro’s guerrillas, where a secret pact was made between the PSP and the Castroites in March 1958. It is clear that the J26M was not simply a petit-bourgeois movement but rather a coalition of bourgeois and proletarian (albeit politically petit-bourgeois i.e. Stalinist or proto-Stalinist) forces.
In January 1959, the two year long civil war between the J26M, its “rebel” army and the Batista regime culminated in the overthrow of Batista. Batista had led a corrupt military dictatorship that had acted as an agent for US imperialism in its Cuban semi-colony since 1953. The 1959 revolution was not however a mere putsch or coup d’état. In the countryside it assumed, during 1958, the character of a serious movement of the rural proletarians and poor peasants. In the cities it had the support of important sections of the nationalist bourgeois and petit-bourgeois strata grouped in the Directorio and the Civic Resistance Under attack from such a wide spectrum of Cuban society and deserted by its US backers, Batista’s regime collapsed after the failure of its summer offensive of 1958. A general strike in Havana assured the complete disintegration of the old regime.
The high command and much of the officer caste of the army, the judiciary and high state bureaucracy fled en masse. Castro subjected the remaining forces to a far reaching purge with hundreds shot and thousands imprisoned. The units of the old army were integrated with the Rebel Army and placed under J26M officers and commanders.
From January 1959 there was, as a result of this disintegration, a specific form of dual power, a fragmentation of the state power. The bourgeoisie’s hold on the army was very weak because of the loss of most of the officer corps and the whole of the high command, but substantial sections of the air force and the old regiments existed and would have formed a basis for a reassertion of the bourgeoisie’s control over the army. On the other hand, was the 3,000 strong Rebel Army, which by January 1959 was made up of “three-fourths to four-fifths” of rural proletarians and small scale peasant proprietors under the leadership of pro-PSP or populist and centrist tendencies.3
The effect of this where the left-wing of the J26M was in command (Raul Castro in Oriente for example) was an immediate push to grant peasant-worker demands. In February, 22,500 families were awarded 67 acre plots. In Camaguev on the other hand, rightists under Hubert Matos and backed by figures like Diaz Lanz (head of the old air force) held up reform. The duality of power ran through the army and the J26M itself. Fidel Castro played the role of a bonaparte – the “lider maximo” balancing between, and obscuring, this division.
However, the actual balance of forces was heavily unfavourable to the bourgeoisie. Its real strength lay in the pro bourgeois, class collaborationist politics of the J26M, in Castro’s unwillingness to break from the utopian project of national independent capitalist development for Cuba. It also lay in the Raul Castro/Guevara wing’s inability to break with the “lider maximo” and put themselves at the head of (and therefore potentially under the control of) the workers and poor peasants. They refused to openly express class demands against the bourgeoisie. They would not give voice to the proletariat’s historic goal. Lastly it lay in the PSP’s popular front stagist programme which gave the weakened bourgeoisie pride of place in the popular front. These forces, not the Cuban bourgeoisie’s intrinsic strength, accounted for the nine-month period of dual power.
The Castroite project throughout this period was to maintain the popular front whilst striking at the working class/poor peasant or bourgeois elements should either of these classes attempt to decisively tip the balance in their own favour. A wave of strikes and land occupations in January and February caused a serious breach between the “Lider maximo” and the PSP (a military bloc had existed from March; a trade union pact from November 1958).
In April 1959, Castro classified communism Peronism and fascism as merely different kinds of “totalitarianism”. Castro declared that the Cuban revolution was “humanist” – capitalism bred hunger whilst communism “took away liberty”. The Cuban revolution was not red but “Olive Green”.4
Early in 1959, the J26M officered police stood by as members of the Havana Civic Resistance ransacked the offices of “Hoy”, the PSP’s newspaper, an action which led its editor, Carlos Rafael Rodriguez to declare the PSP had gone underground before and could do it again.5 By May 1959, a vitrolic campaign was being conducted in the pages of Revolution, the J26M’s paper, against the PSP. The Stalinists were denounced as “anti-revolutionary”, similar to the counter revolutionaries. Particularly singled out for attack was their encouragement of strikes for wage increases, and their involvement in peasant land seizures in San Luis.6
Castro is forced to break with his bourgeois allies
However, Castro’s anti-communist campaign inevitably encouraged the Cuban landowning bourgeoisie’s resistance to his own land reform. Although a moderate capitalist reform, its operation and implementation lay effectively with the armed guerrillas of the Rebel Army in a situation where the peasants and rural proletarian masses expectations had been aroused by the revolution. The first attempt at nationalisation and the methods used to enforce them touched the US and Cuban companies and land owners to the quick. Confirming the thesis of permanent revolution that none of the fundamental tasks of the bourgeois revolution can be carried out in colonial or semi-colonial countries under the leadership of the bourgeoisie, or any alleged “national” or “revolutionary” fraction of it, the Cuban landowning and capitalist class passed in its totality into the camp of counter-revolution. Castro was forced to move against the most vociferous opponents of agrarian reform in his government. A group of bourgeois ministers were sacked in June. In July he mobilised the workers and peasants in a general strike and mass demonstration, to remove the bourgeois president Urrutia and to purge the air force.
Castro’s reluctance to break his ties to the bourgeoisie can be seen in his hesitancy to purge all the bourgeois ministers. However, the activities of US imperialism and their agents in Cuba were to leave him no choice. On 11 June the US issued a strong protest against the agrarian reform measures, demanding “prompt, adequate and effective compensation.” Castro was faced with a choice: either concede on the agrarian reform and strengthen the bourgeoisie and its alliance with US capital – thus alienating his peasant base – or push ahead with the reform and strike out against the right wing.
He chose the latter. The day after the US note, Castro demanded the resignation of various bourgeois ministers – Sori Marin, Minister of Agriculture; Elena Mederos, Minister of Health; Luis Orlando Rodriguez, Minister of the Interior, Angel Fernandez, the Minister of Justice and Agramonte the Foreign Minister.
All these ministers were replaced by trusted members of the J26M, often close intimates of Castro. While the “political representatives” of the bourgeoisie were purged, the “economic representatives” were left untouched – bourgeois figures like Cas Fresquet (Finance) and Bunilla (Commerce) remained in their posts, while Pazos remained in charge of the Bank of Cuba.
These actions forced Castro into close reliance on his own left wing and consequently back into a bloc with the PSP in October/November, counter-revolutionary activity by US and native Cuban capitalist sabotage forced Castro to strike decisively at the bourgeoisie outside and the J26M effectively ending the latter as a popular front or indeed as a “movement” at all. Hubert Matos was arrested and J26M purged of “anti-communists”. The army was reduced by 50 per cent and renamed the “Revolutionary Armed Forces”. The Defence Ministry was completely purged and put under Raul Castro’s command. The organisation of a mass armed militia of workers and peasants was launched and standing army was integrated with the militia. Castro, forced to act with the left wing of the J26M, his brother, Guevara and Rodriguez against political and military agents of the Cuban capitalists, drove all the bourgeois ministers from the government. Fresquet at the Finance Ministry was the sole exception, took over the National Bank, and effectively economic power and policy emanated from there. By November 1959 the popular front had been ended, along with the duality of power.
These actions all necessitated a rapprochement with the principal political force within the Cuban working class, the 18,000-strong PSP. Having ousted them from the CTC completely in February/March and formed a bloc with the pro-bourgeois labour bureaucrats in the Frente Obrero Humanista, in November/January 1959-60, Castro was now forced to strike a new alliance with them and purge his former supporters.
The left wing of the J26M were now in the ascendant and the process of founding a unified party apparatus to replace the movement began in December 1959. Whatever Castro’s differences with sections of the PSP leadership, he had now irrevocably cast in his lot with the PSP. This process of fusion with a politically petit-bourgeois Stalinist workers’ party did not however immediately mean a break with US imperialism or a conscious and determined march towards socialism. If the Castro fusion with the PSP gave the government the appearance of a workers and peasants’ government, it was not a revolutionary workers and peasants’ government.
It was not anti-capitalist in its actions or programme, and it was not under the control of democratic armed organs of workers’ power i.e. soviets and a democratic workers and peoples’ militia. It commenced its life as a bourgeois workers and peasants’ government, but one born under special circumstances. Firstly, the bourgeoisie had lost all vestiges of control of its armed apparatus (the fundamental bastion of the bourgeois state had been smashed.). Henceforward the bourgeoisie could only recover its rule by armed counter-revolution, i.e. by. revolt from outside the state machine. Secondly the bourgeoisie, aided and abetted by the right wing of the US bourgeoisie (Nixon and the CIA) were in fact renewing counter-revolutionary civil war. Thirdly, the workers and peasants were being armed, and whilst they had no effective alternative leadership to the left J26M/PSP leaders, they formed an armed bulwark against capitulation and a pressure for decisive measures against the counter-revolution.
This government was in effect a “government of the parties of petit-bourgeois democracy”. Its programme and the intentions of its leaders did not go beyond bourgeois limits, its social roots were the urban and rural workers and poor peasants. It was in this sense a bourgeois “workers’ and peasants’ government”, i.e. one which is described in the Comintern’s 1922 theses as being “tolerated by the enfeebled bourgeoisie in critical times as a means of deceiving the proletariat about the real class character of the state, or to ward off, with the help of corrupt workers’ leaders the revolutionary offensive of the proletariat and gain time”.
However the growing class conflict in Cuba, the increasingly organised expression of the expectations of the armed workers and peasants, the response via sabotage and guerrilla activity of the Cuban bourgeoisie and its agents in the state bureaucracy, and the hostile blows of US imperialism forced this government “to go further than they themselves wished along the road to a break with the bourgeoisie”. 7
Attempts by this government to ease the stranglehold of US imperialism over its economy by entering into a trade agreement with the USSR led to a dramatic worsening of relations with Washington. In June 1960, US oil companies (and the European controlled firm Shell) refused to refine Soviet oil. The Castro government replied by nationalising them. In July, the US responded by cancelling the agreement to buy the sugar crop – only an agreement with the USSR and China to buy sugar saved the economy from disaster.
Between August and October 1960, the government nationalised all the US-owned sugar mills, electricity facilities and telecommunications industry, all the banks and all American and Cuban-owned large and medium industrial concerns. By the end of 1960, 80 per cent of Cuba’s industrial capacity was nationalised and the agrarian reform had been dramatically speeded up. Under the pressure of imperialism, the Castro government had been faced with a choice: either to submit to imperialism, or take the measures necessary to break the power of imperialism and its agents in Cuba by expropriating it.
While the Castroite government was forced to break with the bourgeoisie and take anti-capitalist measures, the form that this took was different to that envisaged by Trotsky. From the summer of 1960, the Castro government had become a bureaucratic anti-capitalist workers’ government – a government forced to attack and break the economic power of the bourgeoisie, but through carefully controlled bureaucratic measures and mobilisations. The Castro government was able to carry out this expropriation relatively “peacefully” because it had already broken the political and military power of the bourgeoisie within the state, and was able to use the Revolutionary Armed Forces and militia against internal resistance. The major threat to the government came from intervention by US imperialism either directly with US troops, or indirectly through armed Cuban counter-revolutionaries.
Castro fuses with the Stalinists
It was this threat that necessitated the controlled mass mobilisations under the control of the Castroites (loyally supported by the PSP). The Committees for the Defence of the Revolution (CDRs) were set up in September 1960 while the militia, integrated with the RAFs, reached 50,000 by the summer of 1960. The militia, which was made up of workers who did military training after work, had at its centre the purged rebel army, its officers trusted Fidelistas. The heads of the militia in the provinces were often heads of G2, the military-political intelligence organisation. The CRDs were headed by Jose Matar, a leading PSP member.
The militia was downgraded as the threat from US imperialist intervention receded. After the defeat of the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, a divisional command structure was reintroduced into the RA, and by 1964, the militia was disarmed, leaving the RAF as the sole armed force of the state.
By November 1960, a US trade embargo was in effect which completely cut off Cuba from its traditional markets of North and South America (80 per cent of Cuban imports came from the USA and from US oil companies in Venezuela). Only the support and aid from the Stalinist bloc (primarily the USSR) allowed the Cuban government to develop a workable economic strategy. At the end of 1960 Guevara led a trade delegation to the USSR and the Eastern bloc, which resulted in the entire 1961 sugar crop being taken up. At the same time (end of 1960), a team of Czech technical advisors arrived to help set up a planning agency.
In February 1961, the government departments and agencies were completely reorganised to fit in with the tasks of the new planned economy. JUCEPLAN was transformed into the central planning agency, which evolved the first plan which was in operation from the start of 1962.
The massive nationalisations of 1960, the expropriations of US holdings and of the Cuban bourgeoisie, and the establishment of the monopoly of foreign trade laid the pre-conditions and established the necessity for state planning. From the implementation of the first five year plan in 1962, we can speak of the creation of a degenerate workers’ state in Cuba.
The PSP cadres were central in the staffing of the administrative apparatus of this plan and this increased importance, plus their vital role in maintaining discipline within the trade unions was recognised in the fusion between the J26M and the PSP in the Integrated Revolutionary Organisation (ORI) in July 1961. This organisation was later to become the Cuban Communist Party in 1965.
The “fusion” in fact took the form of a takeover of the Stalinist party apparatus by the Castroites, a project which caused considerable conflict with “old guard” Stalinists. When the National Directorate of the ORI was announced, it consisted of 25 members: 14 from J26M, 10 from the PSP, one from the Revolutionary Directorate.8 By October 1961, offices of ORI had been set up in almost every town (100 out of 126 townships).
Anibal Escalante, the veteran Stalinist who had been given responsibility for organising the ORI, ensured that trusted Stalinists staffed the leading positions in the towns and provinces. Recognising this threat, Castro denounced Escalante for “sectarianism” and for creating a “counter-revolutionary monstrosity”, in March 1962. Escalante was expelled from the Directorate, having left hastily for Prague. A Secretariat of the ORI was set up with Fidelistas having five of the six places – Bias Roca being the only PSP member. PSP strength was further reduced in 1964 when the trial of Marcos Rodriguez, who had spied for Batista in the mid-1950s, but also worked for the PSP, was used to expose PSP complicity with Batista, and led to further explusions of PSP members.
When the Cuban Communist Party was set up in October 1965, the strength of the Fidelistas could be seen in the fact that of the 100 Central Committee members, 72 had military titles, i.e. were trusted Castroites from the Rebel Army. The entire eight-man Politbureau were Fidelistas. From 1961, the Castroites had consciously set out to construct a Stalinist party in their own image – taking over the PSP apparatus and purging it of its old guard leadership. The struggle with in the ORI explains the length of time it took to found the Cuban Communist Party.
By the summer of 1960, Castro had broken decisively with the remaining Cuban and US bourgeoisie. However, the absence of workers’ councils (soviets) and a revolutionary communist party comprising the vanguard of the proletariat, ensured that the outcome of these events was not a revolutionary workers’ government, i.e. a bridge to the full and direct political power of the proletariat, but a bureaucratic anti-capitalist workers’ government. This government under the Castro faction and the PSP, with the material aid of the Kremlin bureaucracy, became a bridge to a qualitatively bureaucratised workers’ state, one in which the working class and its vanguard were from the outset deprived of political power.
In a speech in February 1961, Guevara referred vaguely to “workers’ councils”, which could “approve plans and directives”.
These became technical councils which were to be transmission belts for government targets. In August 1961, the trade unions were reorganised to expedite work co-operation in fulfilling government production goals. By April 1962, Guevara was blaming the lack of labour discipline for the poor sugar harvest. In November 1962, the CTC congress and union congresses were held to “endorse” the government programmes. Guevara stated that the reluctance of some trade union leaders to endorse the new contracts “would not be tolerated”.9
In 1962 identity cards were introduced for workers and stringent laws on labour discipline were instituted. A law of 1964-1965 enforced sanctions for breaches of labour discipline. The Grievance Commissions established in 1961 were abolished as being “too lenient”. In the words of Martinez Sanchez, Minister of Labour, the law would,
“strengthen labour discipline and increase production and productivity. It will be applied to the kind of worker who is a residue of exploiting society. We still find workers who have not taken the revolutionary step and tend to discuss and protest any measure coming from the administration.”10
Whilst gains were made for and by the working class (the expropriation of the bourgeoisie, statified and planned economy, a state monopoly of foreign trade), the Castroite bonapartist clique and a privileged bureaucracy usurped power from the working class. The Cuban overturn had a predominantly counter-revolutionary character. It was not qualitatively different to the overturns that created the other degenerate workers’ states. In carrying through this programme, Castro proved himself a Stalinist. This regime from its foundation could only be removed by political revolution.
Many of the features of the petit-bourgeois populist origins of the Fidelista movement remained hybridised with the essential features of a Stalinist dictatorship. The People’s Power committees and so forth were never organs of working class power or proletarian democracy. Whilst the origin of the regime in an anti-imperialist revolution gave Castro’s power an overwhelming popularity, not seen in the USSR or Eastern Europe, the avenues for a peaceful transition to the political power of the working class do not exist in Cuba.
In this same period the Cuban supporters of the International Secretariat of the Fourth International (IS) were at first hounded out, then imprisoned by the Castroites and PSP. At the 1960 Youth Congress in Havana, the delegates identifying with “Voz Proletaria”, the paper of the Cuban section of the IS, were denounced publicly in the PSP’s press as CIA agents. In 1961, the paper’s press and the plates of Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution, which was being published, were smashed and the paper was suppressed. Later the supporters of Voz Proletaria were either imprisoned or deported as “counter revolutionaries”.
Is the petit-bourgeosie a ruling class?
The contradiction which might appear to exist between the positions of Lenin, Trotsky and the great revolutionary Marxists with regard to the role of petit-bourgeois political formations dissolves if the full dynamic of the Cuban events is understood.
The petit-bourgeoisie cannot be a ruling class – i.e. it cannot establish a state power defending its own class rule, just as petty commodity production cannot be a dominant mode of production, but is always dominated by a large-scale property belonging to another mode of production – slave, feudal or capitalist . The Cuban revolution in no way contradicts this fundamental Marxist assessment of this intermediate class.
Petit-bourgeois parties and their personnel can however be the instrument of the rule of other classes. By a process of internal differentiation, the grouping around Castro evolved from petit-bourgeois nationalism to petit-bourgeois Stalinism. The Fidelista clique assimilated themselves to the Stalinist party and programme whilst ousting most of the latter’s former leadership and hybridising its programme with elements of petit bourgeois nationalism (central role of the peasantry, rural guerrilla warfare), as Mao had done before.
Castro, who in 1959 was a bonaparte for the enfeebled Cuban bourgeoisie was, by 1962, a bonaparte “for” the politically expropriated Cuban working class. Trotsky considered in 1938 that “experience” (i.e. of Russia, Spain and France) confirmed the inability of the parties of petit-bourgeois democracy to create a “government independent of the bourgeoisie”. He thought that exceptional circumstances might force them to go further than they wished, that the establishment of such a government was “highly improbable” and that even if it occurred, it would be “merely a short episode on the road to the actual dictatorship of the proletariat”.11
The realisation of this “highly improbable” alternative in Trotsky’s prediction and then in a manner and with a result not foreseen by him, does not undermine either the Marxist method or the fundamentals of Trotskyism. It demands the application of that method to understand these events, developing the programme as a guide to action for the proletariat in situations unavoidably only dimly foreseen by Trotsky himself.
The condition which opened the “Cuban road” to the establishing of a degenerate workers’ state was the continued existence of the USSR and indeed, the proliferation of degenerate workers’ states. Without the political, economic and military aid from the USSR, the Castro government would eventually have gone down to defeat – either at the hands of Cuban-US counterrevolution, or at the hands of the Cuban proletariat led by a Trotskyist vanguard party. The willingness of the Soviet bureaucracy to assist Castro in avoiding such alternatives was due to the Kremlin’s tactical disagreements with imperialism and its strategic counter-revolutionary hostility to the seizure of power by the working class.
The desirability of Cuba as a missile base was prompted by the severe disparity in military capability between the USSR and the USA at the end of the 1950s. The refusal of the US bourgeoisie to discuss arms limitation talks, despite Soviet concessions on the citing of offensive missiles in NATO countries in 1958, led to the USSR seeking a counter-weight. Actions such as the walk-out of the 1960 summit by Kruschev signalled not an abandonment of “peaceful coexistence”, but a search for a greater bargaining power. The Cuban revolution was just such a political counter-weight. The arms programme of Kennedy on assuming office in 1960 made this even more imperative. Hence, whilst the Kremlin oligarchy did not plan, or incite Castro to, the creation of a degenerate workers’ state in Cuba (any more than they did in Yugoslavia, China or Vietnam), they economically and military acquiesced, for their own state interests.
In many instances it can be seen that it was the Castroites themselves who pushed ahead faster than either the USSR or their agents in Cuba liked. The nationalisations of August 1960 were coolly received by the PSP. Escalante declared at the 8th Congress of the PSP that the revolution should try to keep the national bourgeoisie “within the revolutionary camp”. Bias Roca goes on record as saying “some nationalisations could possibly have Been avoided”, and that “private enterprise which is not imperialistic is still necessary.”12. While the PSP was trying to maintain its alliance with “peace-loving” sections of capital, Guevara was declaring at the first Congress of Latin American Youth:
“If I were asked whether our revolution is communist, I would define it as Marxist. Our revolution has discovered by its own methods the paths that Marx pointed out”. 13
The considerable mass base of the Castro regime, the treachery of the Kremlin leaders over the Cuban missiles crisis in October 1962 (the decision to remove the missiles and the offer of United Nations observers in Cuba – both made without the consultation or participation of the Cubans), together with the limited economic aid, predisposed Castro, Guevara and co to a relatively independent foreign policy, especially in the years 1966-68. In this period Castro advocated and Guevara practiced a guerrilla strategy aimed at producing regimes similar to the one in Cuba.
The policy led to sharp clashes with the Latin American Stalinists, and ended in complete fiasco. By 1971-72, this policy was completely abandoned in favour of support for an orthodox popular front in Chile, and a statement of the unique “national roads” to be followed in Latin America. From 1972, with Cuba’s entry into Comecon, Cuba came to provide in return for USSR economic aid, an interventionist strike force in Africa. In Angola 1975-76, the Cubans aided the MPLA against South Africa, but also stiffened the MPLA leaders’ crack-down on the left nationalists and on working class action. In Ethiopia in 1978, Cuban troops assisted the nationally oppressive Dergue to impose its domination over Eritrea.
In short, the Stalinism that Castro tried to disguise with populism became more and more overt. His recent support for the crackdown on Solidarnosc is entirely consistent with his political trajectory since the early 1960s.
Footnotes
1. Quoted in A.M. Ritter, Economic Development of Revolutionary Cuba, (New York 1974) p.66
2. Quoted in H.Thomas, Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom, (New York 1971) p.981
3. L. Huberman and P.M. Sweezy, Cuba: Anatomy of a Revolution, (New York 1960) p.78
4. T. Draper, Castroism: Theory and Practice, (New York 1965) p.37 and H. Thomas, op. cit. p.1219
5. H. Thomas, op. cit. p.1199
6. Op. cit. p.1220
7. L Trotsky, Transitional Programme for Socialist Revolution, (New York 1973) p.135
8. E.Gonzalez, Cuba Under Castro, (Boston 1974) p.102
9. Hispanic American Reports, (June 1962) Vol. XV, No.9
10. Quoted in P. Binns and M.Gonzalez, “Cuba, Castro and Socialism” in International Socialism (London, spring 1980) No. 8, p.18
11. L Trotsky, op. cit. p.135
12. H Thomas, op. cit. p.1212
13. Ibid, p.12
Chapter 7: Permanent revolution aborted
Yugoslavia, China, Vietnam and Cuba have all been cited by the USFI as living examples of Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution. Here we have a series of revolutions in backward, overwhelmingly rural countries, all resulting in the establishment of workers states. For the USFI, at various times, Tito, Mao, Ho and Castro all became (and Castro still is) agents of the permanent revolution. To be sure they were all to a greater or lesser extent unconscious of this noble role, but the strength of the objective process, of the unfolding world revolution, compensated for this subjective deficiency. Hansen gives one of the clearest expositions of this version of permanent revolution:
“The question of the absence of direct proletarian leadership in the 1958-9 Cuba Revolution offers a complication, it is true, but on the main question – the tendency of a bourgeois democratic revolution in a backward country to go beyond its bourgeois-democratic limits – Cuba offers once again the most striking confirmation of Trotsky’s famous theory.
That the Cuban revolutionaries were unaware they were confirming something seemingly so abstract and remote makes it all the more impressive.”1
This interpretation is one-sided and therefore false. It is true that the objective factors of underdeveloped countries in the imperialist epoch create the essential objective conditions for the permanence of a revolution. It is not true that these objective factors, propelled in a revolutionary direction by their intrinsic features, can achieve a revolutionary communist outcome. Indeed one is forced to ask why the majority of anti- imperialist revolutions have not led to the establishment of workers’ states if the objective process is so all-powerful. The truth is that in all imperialised countries that have become workers’ states, the subjective factor, i.e. the working class’ political leadership, has been decisive. In Yugoslavia, China, Vietnam and Kampuchea Stalinism both in terms of the leadership of these struggles and the intervention of the pre-existing degenerate workers’ states, has played a decisive role in establishing the new workers’ states. Without Stalinism at the helm of government in such countries, the creation of a degenerate workers’ state would be impossible. In Cuba the non-Stalinist origin of the Castroites was overcome in the course of 1961 by the rallying to Stalinism of Castro and the assimilation and transformation of his own petit-bourgeois nationalist movement into a Stalinist party. In all of those countries where the Stalinists did not control the government – Algeria, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Iran etc., – far from growing over into socialism, objective factors have pushed the rulers of such countries back into the arms of imperialism to one degree or another. Without the conjuncture of world and local Stalinism the option of the conscious creation of a degenerate workers’ state does not exist. This was the stubborn fact that pushed Castro in a Stalinist direction.
However, while the creation of degenerate workers ’states in imperialised countries confirms the tenets of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, it simultaneously aborts the programmatic fulfilment of this theory. The goal of permanent revolution is not the creation of degenerate workers’ states that block the road to socialism, but the creation of healthy workers’ states as links in the chain of world revolution paving the way to international socialism. Thus Castro and Co. are not unconscious agents of permanent revolution – they are its conscious enemies. The strength of the objective process can do little to alter this because the fulfilment of permanent revolution rests in the final analysis on the subjective factor, on consciousness, on the revolutionary party and a self-organised, self conscious working class. This much is clear from all of Trotsky’s key writings on the permanent revolution.
Trotsky’s theory
Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution is not an abstract historical schema, not an objective process of History, it is a coherent strategy for the seizure of power by the proletariat based on a scientific appraisal of the laws of motion and contradictions of capitalism.
It is rooted in the theory of uneven and combined development. Out of the unevenness of the growth of capitalism in the world and the consequent existence of advanced and backward countries arises the phenomenon of combined development. The backward country does not simply follow the stages of development pioneered by the advanced, but is compelled to “leap over” stages of gradual evolutionary change. It does not thereby abolish its backwardness but combines it in a new formation. Tsarist Russia combined bureaucratic absolutism and semi-feudal agrarian relations with a small but modern proletariat. Concentrated in huge modern factories in certain strictly delineated areas, the Russian workers pioneered at the level of organisation and tactics all the key aspects of the modern class struggle.
They created the soviet; they developed the political mass strike. They gave their support to the most advanced Marxist party of the Second International – the Bolsheviks. Bolshevism learned all the lessons of the “advanced” West, of German Marxism and applied it critically and creatively to Russia – and hence developed Marxism on the question of the relationship between the bourgeois revolution and democratic tasks and the proletarian revolution and socialist measures.
Lenin disagreed with Trotsky’s theory before 1917, holding that the proletariat would have to share its dictatorship with the peasantry and consequently limit its programme initially to the most far reaching revolutionary democratic but not socialist measures. However life settled the dispute in Trotsky’s favour. Lenin’s April Theses and indeed all his major programmatic and tactical writings, (The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It, Can the Bolsheviks retain State Power, etc.) express the clear recognition that the task facing the proletariat and its party was to seize state power. Whilst it had to limit itself in its agrarian programme to the “capitalist” programme of division of the large estates to the peasants, it was equally necessary to use the proletarian dictatorship to take measures transitional to socialism. Trotsky had warned in 1907 that:
“While the anti-revolutionary aspects of Menshevism have already become fully apparent, those of Bolshevism are likely to become a serious threat only in the event of victory.” 2
Trotsky’s words proved prophetic – not with regard to Lenin but certainly with regard to his “Old Bolshevik” disciples Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev, at various points in 1917 and after 1923. Since Lenin fully accepted tactically the seizure of full power by the proletariat, an alliance with the peasantry socialist measures and reliance on and support for the international spread of the revolution no further disputes existed between him and Trotsky on this question. Indeed it seemed entirely a question of party history until the troika - Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev – started a campaign against “Trotskyism” based on unearthing all the disagreements between Lenin and Trotsky between 1903 and 1917.
This unprincipled factional onslaught, whose real social and political purpose was the defence of bureaucratism, of necessity focused on the theory which most clearly expressed the socialist and international goals of the Russian Revolution. The most consistent expression of this attack was Stalin and Bukharin’s theory of “socialism in one country.” No resurrection of Lenin’s “democratic dictatorship” slogan was possible – though Zinoviev tried to do so first against Trotsky’s theory then against Stalin’s. In fact, these two completely counter posed theories had developed and transcended Lenin’s theory. Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution expressed everything positive and revolutionary in Lenin’s theory, Stalin’s everything potentially retrograde. Indeed, it so developed the retrograde elements that it represented a complete Menshevik negation of Lenin’s theory.
The conflict within the International, the social dynamics and goals of the Chinese Revolution, obliged Trotsky to reassess the importance of his own theory. Prior to this he had regarded it as a historical question specific to Russia. His bloc with Zinoviev in 1926-7 both obliged and persuaded Trotsky to keep open or algebraic the question of proletarian supremacy or of the duality of power between workers and peasants in a revolutionary government in China. The Chinese revolution and counter-revolution convinced Trotsky of the general validity of the theory of permanent revolution in the imperialist epoch. Stalin and Bukharin’s stages theory led to murderous defeat for the Chinese proletariat at the hands of Chiang Kai Shek. In his work Permanent Revolution (1928) he summed up his theory thus:
“It is a question of the character, the inner connections and methods of the international revolution in general.” 3
With regard to colonial and semi-colonial countries, backward in terms of capitalist development, it meant that:
“the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as leader of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses:”4
The vital importance of the peasantry arises not only from the agrarian but also from the national questions and necessitates an:
“irreconcilable struggle against the influence of the national liberal bourgeoisie.” 5
The peasant-worker alliance can only be led by the proletariat organised in the communist party and only the dictatorship of the proletariat can solve all the tasks of the democratic revolution. The peasantry has a great revolutionary role to play but not an independent one – “the peasant follows either the worker or the bourgeois.”6
There is no intermediate stage between bourgeois regimes like those of Kerensky or the Kuomintang and the proletarian dictatorship. The former are counter-revolutionary bourgeois regimes disguised in “democratic” or anti-imperialist colours.
In a backward country the proletarian revolution will triumph because of the need to resolve the national-revolutionary and democratic tasks but their fulfilment will be accompanied by an assault on private property:
“The democratic revolution grows over directly into the socialist revolution and thereby becomes a permanent revolution.” 7
Conquest of power does not complete the revolution but opens it – heralding a series of civil wars and revolutionary wars. The socialist revolution cannot be completed within national limits it:
“begins on the national arena, it unfolds on the international arena and is completed on the world arena.”8
This is what Trotsky calls the “newer and broader” meaning of permanent revolution – i.e. its character as a world revolution. Whilst backward countries may arrive at the dictatorship of the proletariat sooner than advanced ones: “they will come later than the latter to socialism.”9
To say that this whole process is grounded in the law of uneven and combined development is not to say that this law operates and wins through independently of the actions of the leaderships of the various classes. A conscious revolutionary programme is needed to utilise the consequences and potential of the objective laws. Against those, such as the USFI, who would disagree with this and claim that the “laws of history” can successfully overcome subjective difficulties, we would repeat Trotsky’s criticism of the Chinese CP in 1928 who under the leadership of the Stalinist agent Lominadze, endeavoured to offload the responsibility of leadership onto History:
“Now, Lominadze has made of the possibility of a permanent revolution (on the condition that the communist policy be correct) a scholastic formula guaranteeing at one blow and for all time a revolutionary situation ‘for many years’. The permanent character of the revolution thus becomes a law placing itself above history, independent of the policy of the leadership and of the material development of revolutionary events.” 10
Hansen and the USFI seek to get round this problem by suggesting that the most conscious act in history – the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a bridge to the construction of communism – can be carried out by unconscious revolutionary communists. In saying this they in fact grant to Stalinism – the force that these unconscious agents invariably belong to or end up with – the capacity to carry out the programme of permanent revolution. This is a betrayal of revolutionary communism of the first magnitude.
As a political tendency Stalinism is absolutely opposed to the programme of permanent revolution. Instead, it deliberately subordinates the working class as a political force to the parties of the bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie, and in so doing espouses the petit-bourgeois utopia of a national-democratic stage in the anti-imperialist struggle. Stalinism thus seeks to divert the proletariat's objective propulsion towards the leadership of the revolution and does so either through enforcing political alliances with reactionary classes, or physical liquidation of revolutionary leadership within the working class, or a combination of both.
This programme for the anti-imperialist struggle is bloodily self-defeating. The bitter fruit of the subordination of the interests of the workers and peasants to “progressive” bourgeois politicians, petty bourgeois nationalist demagogues or military bonapartes has been seen in China (1925-7), Spain (1936), in Egypt and Iraq (1950s and 1960s), in Indonesia (1965), in Chile (1973) and in Iran in the 1980s.
But even should the Stalinists, exceptionally, outdistance their bourgeois “allies” and seize political power, as they did in Yugoslavia, China, Vietnam and Cuba, then their political expropriation of the working class creates a counter-revolutionary obstacle blocking the road of permanent revolution.
Both of these courses of action form part of the ever pragmatic and eclectic programme of Stalinism, and both of them are diametrically opposed to the programme of permanent revolution. They utilise and abuse the objective basis of permanent revolution to abort its fulfilment and defend their own bureaucratic interests.
The revolutionary variant of the opportunities presented by the law of uneven and combined development within imperialism retains all its validity and urgency. The experience of the creation and history of the degenerate workers’ states have proven that the cost of aborted permanent revolution is not only a blocked path to socialism, but a savage defeat for the democratic tasks of the revolution.
The vandalism inherent in the forced collectivisation of the peasantry, the abolition of all freedom for progressive movements, the cultivation of national and ethnic oppression and the strengthening of the reactionary elements in the old bourgeois culture (e.g. family life and religion) testify to this fact.
Footnotes
1. J. Hansen, Dynamics of the Cuban Revolution, (New York 1978) p.291
2. L.Trotsky, 1905, (Harmondsworth 1973) p.332
3. L.Trotsky, Permanent Revolution, (New York 1965) p.152
4. Ibid. p.152
5. ibid. p.153
6. ibid. p.153
7. ibid. p.154
8. ibid. p.155
9. ibid. p.155
10. L.Trotsky, On China, (New York 1976) p.349
Chapter 8: Stalinism and the world working class
The Soviet Union and the other degenerate workers' states rest on property forms that are qualitatively different from, historically superior to, and globally irreconcilable with capitalism.
Capitalism's own remorseless inner logic drives it to attempt to subordinate the whole world to its laws and needs. Its survival ultimately depends on this. But the very existence of the degenerate workers states means that huge markets and vast natural resources are closed to direct imperialist exploitation. Capitalism's crises drive it to attempt to reconquer these areas of the world and subject them again to its exploitation.
Its entire history proves that Stalinism has no qualitatively new or distinct programme or ideology. As a petty bourgeois political tendency it borrows ideologically from the two fundamental classes on a world scale – the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Its programme of “peaceful coexistence” between social systems, of “peaceful competition” rooted in socialism in one country, is a petty bourgeois utopia, historically borrowed from social democracy. Its “peaceful” parliamentary road to socialism via social reform conducted in a series of stages is borrowed from bourgeois liberalism and its labourite or social democratic mimics.
The Stalinists attempt to conceal the counter-revolutionary content of their programme from the proletariat of the world with the emptied husks of Marxism and Leninism, which they have borrowed, or rather stolen, from the revolutionary workers’ movement. In the workers’ states it identifies its police state dictatorship over the proletariat and its vanguard – a dictatorship which is the principal obstacle to the advance towards socialism – with socialism itself. It identifies the dictatorship of the proletariat with a weapon of bureaucratic violence against the working class. It poisons the very goal of the Marxist workers’ movement before the workers of the world.
Stalinism necessarily has a highly contradictory character. The Stalinist bureaucracies and parties rest upon proletarian formations – either workers’ states or proletarian parties. The objective sharpening of the class struggle, which the bureaucracy is incapable of indefinitely avoiding, can force it, despite itself, to act against the bourgeoisie. When it acts thus it is forced to do so under the pressure of both the working class and the class enemy.
Whenever the bureaucracy is forced to fight against the bourgeoisie, genuine revolutionaries, if they are not able to immediately overthrow and replace the Stalinist bureaucrats, must act together with them in a united front in order to defend the interests of the working class. In such struggles the Stalinists do not cease to be a counter-revolutionary force. If their leadership is not broken in struggle then either the workers’ organisation or state will suffer defeat, or it will be defended or even extended, in a counter-revolutionary fashion.
By this we mean that the working class will be denied proletarian democratic control of their own organisation or state. They will be obstructed from utilising their conquests to serve their own historic goals. Their revolutionary communist vanguard and all tenacious defenders of the working class will be subject to brutal police terror.
All such bureaucratic “victories” have the effect on the working class of atomization, demoralisation and the strengthening of petty-bourgeois and lumpen proletarian consciousness in its ranks (i.e. religion, nationalism, racism). Despite the tactical victory of fending off an attack from the class enemy, the victory for the bureaucracy retains its counter-revolutionary character, judged from the perspective of the revolutionary consciousness of the working class.
It is wrong to characterise Stalinism as monolithically reactionary – “counter-revolutionary through and through” – in the manner pioneered by the SWP (US) in its anti-Pabloite period.
Such a view is dangerously undialectical. It can, and does, lead to thoroughly opportunist adaptations to Stalinism itself and to social democracy. Within the Fourth International in the 1940s this position led the movement to deny the Stalinist nature of the Yugoslav Communist Party under Tito because the YCP had led a revolution and because Stalinists were “counter-revolutionary through and through”, it was deduced that the YCP could not be Stalinist. This “logical” deduction ignores the fact that Stalinists can and do lead revolutions, and can, and do, carry out acts which, taken by themselves, are progressive.
However the predominantly counter-revolutionary nature of Stalinism, which is a constant factor, means that where acts, progressive in themselves, are carried out by Stalinists, they are done in a counter-revolutionary manner and with counter-revolutionary results. The “victory” of the YCP and its transformation of the property relations in Yugoslavia (an act in itself progressive) was accompanied by the political expropriation of the working class and the creation of planned property relations that, in the hands of the bureaucracy, remained an obstacle to the transition to communism.
The position that Stalinist parties are “counter-revolutionary through and through” has another logic – equally dangerous for Marxists. It can lead to Stalinophobia – i.e. a differential hostility to the Stalinist parties as opposed to social democracy. This position is best exemplified today by the PCI (formerly the OCI) in France, an organisation whose hostility to Stalinism has led them, repeatedly, to adapt to social democracy.
But it is similarly wrong to argue that Stalinism has a “dual nature.” Theories of Stalinism’s “dual nature” lead to the petty bourgeois eclecticism of choosing the “good” or “positive” acts or aspects of Stalinist policy and supporting them uncritically while rejecting the “bad” or “reactionary” ones. The Spartacists with their “Hail the Red Army” position on the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan typify this position.
Stalinism came to power in the Soviet Union under the slogan of “socialism in one country” against the International Left Opposition. Its fundamental political platform (from which all other positions were derived) was that socialism could be constructed in the Soviet Union, without the victory of the proletariat in an advanced capitalist country as long as the Soviet Union was protected against armed intervention.
Turning their back on the International programme of the Comintern and the Leninist Bolshevik Party, the Stalin faction amalgamated with the philistine conservative Russian bureaucracy on the basis of a nationalist programme.
It follows inevitably that if socialism can be built “in one country”, then there must be a series of national programmes, of national roads to socialism. The theory of “socialism in one country” propounded for Russia, leads inevitably to each Stalinist party adopting national programmes for its particular socialism. Trotsky pointed this out as early as 1928 (in The Third International After Lenin):
“If socialism can be realised within the national boundaries of backward Russia, then there is all the more reason to believe that it can be achieved in advanced Germany. Tomorrow the leaders of the Communist Party of Germany will undertake to propound this theory. The draft programme empowered them to do so. The day after tomorrow the French will have its turn. It will be the beginning of the disintegration of the Comintern along the lines of social patriotism.”
The process of disintegration along the lines of social patriotism, of petty-bourgeois Stalinism, led it to accommodate to, and seek to amalgamate with, the labour bureaucracy in the metropolitan countries and both the labour bureaucracy and layers of the petty-bourgeois in the imperialised and semi-colonial countries. It means that the Stalinist parties cannot simply be understood as agents of the Kremlin.
In the imperialised and semi-colonial countries the Stalinists seek, via the labour bureaucracy, to bind the working class to alliances with the “national” or “progressive” bourgeoisie on a programme of realising the “stage” of national independence and “bourgeois” democracy. In practice such alliances can only mean the subordination of working class interests to those of the bourgeoisie or petty bourgeoisie. In every instance where the working class has attempted to act in its own interests the bourgeoisie have immediately broken the alliance and meted out violence and repression against the workers, and their parties, including the Stalinist parties. From 1927 in China to Chile in 1973, this strategy has proved a death trap for the proletariat and its vanguard.
Stalinism has necessarily accommodated ideologically and programmatically to the petty-bourgeois of the imperialised world. Its Menshevik programme for a national democratic revolution gives expression to the utopian horizons of petty bourgeois nationalism. In concrete circumstances the model of the Soviet bureaucratic plan and economic assistance from the USSR can stand as a strategy for sections of the petty bourgeoisie in their struggle for freedom from imperialism’s yoke, and in order to overcome the massive unevenness and underdevelopment of the productive forces that imperialism has maintained in these countries.
Stalinism in the west
The communist parties of Western Europe are reformist in their domestic policies (i.e. bourgeois workers’ parties). Their political programme is one of peaceful transformation of the capitalist state via a reactionary utopian cross class alliance (“anti-monopoly alliance”, “historic compromise”, “new” or “advanced” democracy, etc.), a stage prior to “socialist” measures. A “peaceful” progressive anti-monopoly section of the Western bourgeoisie is appealed to for a common front to isolate the war-mongers. The origins of this policy of Stalinism lie in the Popular Front of 1935-39 and the war-time alliance of 1941-45.
The communist parties’ programmes are in essence similar to those of “left” social democracy with the addition of the central role of the Soviet Union as a force for world peace and socialism that must be defended. Powerful social democratic tendencies have developed within these parties (“Eurocommunism”) which involve the junking of the long-dead ideological baggage of Stalinism, such as the “dictatorship of the proletariat”.
The Eurocommunists reject the “Russian model” and express criticism of the USSR’s “human rights” record. Carillo of the Spanish CP has developed this to the furthest point in an attempt to prove to the Spanish and the US bourgeoisie the governmental trustworthiness of his party. Both the Spanish and the Italian CP accept NATO and the Western Alliance. Yet the Western bourgeoisie will not trust them with governmental office except in an extreme revolutionary crisis and then only temporarily, as in 1945-47.
The objective basis for this lies in the continued Stalinist nature of these parties. To the extent that they recognise the USSR as socialist, i.e. a higher historical form of society than capitalism, to the extent that they recognise the USSR as the force for world peace, their patriotic fervour rings falsely in the bourgeoisie’s ears. They may peddle chauvinist poison to the working class in the place of communist internationalism but can they be relied upon to be patriotic against the USSR? Despite individual leaders’ statements, none of these parties has definitively and historically put itself at the service of imperialism against the Soviet bureaucracy.
In Spain, Italy and France, these parties have repeatedly aborted revolutionary situations and mass movements of the working class. But unless - like the social democracy - they effectively deny that the USSR and the other workers’ states are historic gains of the working class, i.e. deny their “socialist” or working class character, unless they espouse (bourgeois) democracy as a higher good to be defended against totalitarianism they remain Stalinist parties.
Are these parties then “defenders of the USSR?” No, they are defenders of the Kremlin bureaucracy and its international policy of class collaboration. They “defend the USSR” via the popular front and petty bourgeois pacifism and through the subordination of the class struggle in their own countries to these strategies. In so doing they abort the only decisive act against imperialist war and capitalist restoration - the over throw of the bourgeoisie in the capitalist countries.
An important contradiction exists, however, within the make-up of these parties. Added to the contradiction that exists within social democratic reformism (i.e. between its working class base and the bourgeois programme of the labour bureaucracy) these parties are historically committed to the defence of the bureaucracies of the workers’ states. They are counter-revolutionary workers’ parties which serve the bourgeoisie to the extent that its interests are at one with the bureaucracy of the workers’ states.
The bureaucracies of the workers’ states strategically pursue collaboration with imperialism whilst tactically being forced to engage in actions which conflict with imperialism in order to buttress and extend its bargaining position. Imperialism, in its turn, has struck only a tactical compromise with the workers’ states – crisis and decay will force it to seize the opportunity to reverse the overturns in these states.
War presents the Stalinist parties with the decisive choice of loyalty to “its own” bourgeoisie, or the Kremlin. There can be little doubt that the largest section of the apparatus of these parties and their trade union and municipal functionaries indistinguishable in their social conditions and integration into bourgeois society from their social democratic peers within the labour bureaucracy with which they have historically amalgamated – will serve the fatherland in war as in peace. But large sections of the proletarian base of these parties consist of the more militant spontaneously class conscious sections of the proletariat. They are isolated from the bourgeois public opinion by the same bureaucratic apparatus that stifles workers’ democracy in their ranks.
They have not experienced the same degree of integration into bourgeois society via the labour bureaucracy.It is this section of Stalinism’s base, hardened by isolation in bourgeois society that will turn from the social patriotic apparatus with revulsion. The task of unfalsified Trotskyism is to provide the programme, the rallying point for internationalist opposition to the war drives of the bourgeoisie, for defence of the USSR and the other bureaucratically degenerate workers’ states, for unremitting struggle for a political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracies, for socialist revolution in the imperialist heartlands based on proletarian soviet democracy, and led by a Leninist democratic centralist party.
Chapter 10: Centrism and Stalinism - the falsification of Trotsky's analysis
Between the European conference of 1944 and the Third World Congress of 1951, no section of the Fourth International (FI), nor any tendencies within the sections, developed a correct appraisal of the role of world Stalinism in Eastern Europe. Up until the Second World Congress of 1948 this did not preclude the Fourth International from making a series of meaningful insights into the nature of and role of Stalinism.
Nor did it lead to the abandonment of the Trotskyist analysis of Stalinism as counterrevolutionary. However the errors were to become amplified and extended, under the impact of the Stalin-Tito break of 1948, into a qualitative revision of the Trotskyist understanding of Stalinism.
The resolutions of the 1944 and 1946 gatherings of the FI made two interconnected errors on Stalinism and East Europe. On the one hand, they underestimated the counter-revolutionary role of the Kremlin in Eastern Europe; on the other, they overestimated the instability of Stalinism and the potential for its revolutionary defeat at the hands of the working class. The perspective of the coming “death knell” of Stalinism with which the Trotskyists entered the war continued to operate, unmodified after the war. In the theses passed by the 1944 Congress, the Fourth International declared:
“The war, sharpening intolerably the contradictions of the Russian economy, has sounded the knell of the inevitable liquidation of the Bonapartist Stalinist bureaucracy. The latter is destined to perish without fail, under the blows of world imperialism or under those of the proletarian world revolution.”1
This perspective was contradicted by events in Russia itself, in the buffer zone, in Italy, Greece and France. However the FI in its later theses, refused to abandon or even partially correct its original perspective. Consequently, although the FI recognised the counter-revolutionary role played by the Red Army in demobilising the independent struggles of the masses, they suggested that these struggles would quickly throw aside Stalinism. Trotsky’s statement that the “laws of history are stronger than the bureaucratic apparatus” (true at a general level) was used to justify a prognosis for the immediate future. This prognosis left out of account both the subjective weaknesses of the masses (the absence of revolutionary parties) and objective difficulties (such as the armed might of the Soviet bureaucracy, and its enhanced prestige after the defeat of Nazism.) In short, it was a wrong prognosis. Refusal to acknowledge this led the F I to overestimate the “revolutionary” developments taking place in the buffer zone. In 1946 the FI argued:
“The Soviet occupation and control have given an impetus, although in varying degrees, to civil war and the development of a regime of dual power.” 2
This was untrue. The occupation checked and arrested the development of civil war. Moreover, the regime of dual power consisted of the Stalinists and the bourgeoisie, not the Stalinists and independent workers’ organisations.
This error of prognosis did not have an immediate programmatic consequence. The programmatic tenets of Trotsky still held good for the FI. The theses of 1944 and 1946 do clearly and unequivocally call for the revolutionary overthrow of Stalinist rule and the expropriation of the capitalist economies in Eastern Europe, and for the building of independent sections of the FI to lead such overthrows. In a resolution of the International Executive Committee published in the June 1946 issue of Fourth International, the FI made clear their refusal to compromise with Stalinism:
“The Fourth International demands the withdrawal of all foreign armies, including the Red Army, from all occupied territories.”3
Further, the FI raised a programme of transitional demands for the East and the West which argued for political revolution, defence of the USSR and the overthrow of capitalism in the buffer zone and the west by the independent organisations of the working class under Trotskyist leadership.
The leadership of the FI, particularly the young European leader Germain, developed an analysis of the buffer zone as capitalist states, but ones which could potentially become “structurally assimilated” into the Soviet Union. By this Germain meant that the states of the buffer zone could, under certain conditions, be geographically integrated into the USSR and at the same time be economically transformed – from capitalist into degenerated workers’ states like the USSR. But Germain, dogmatically clinging to Trotsky's analysis of the pre-war bureaucratic social overturn in Eastern Poland, insisted on maintaining that the condition for “structural assimilation” was the independent intervention of the masses.
“But in order to completely assimilate a given territory, that is to say, in order to expropriate and destroy as a class the landed proprietors and capitalists, the bureaucracy is compelled – even if in a limited way and with the aim of always controlling it and crushing it when necessary – to call upon the autonomous action of the masses. It is precisely for this reason, among others, and precisely because the bureaucracy fears the autonomous action of the masses like the plague, that it will be unable to accomplish assimilation except on a relatively limited scale.” 4
While such an intervention of the masses (free of Stalinist control) is a condition for the creation of a healthy workers' state, this is not as a general rule necessary for the creation of degenerate workers’ states. Germain, however, only approached the problem at a general level. He ignored the specific features of the buffer zone – dislocation from the world market, decimation of the indigenous capitalists, monopoly of control by the Stalinists over the repressive apparatus, demobilised working class – that were all crucial to facilitating precisely an overturn of capitalism without the intervention of the masses.
In circumstances where, as Germain rightly states in his document, the principal foreign policy objectives of the Kremlin were the creation of a military buffer to rebuild Socialism in One Country, his theses appeared plausible. However after 1947, when conditions changed dramatically and Moscow was forced to carry through overturns in the buffer zone to counter the plans of the imperialists, Germain’s maintenance of his preconditions for an overturn of capitalism proved his theory to be a rigid and useless dogma. This became apparent by 1948 and, disarming Germain in the Yugoslav question, led him to support Pablo’s revision of the Trotskyist position in 1951.
Germain’s insistence on the need for mass mobilisations to accompany an overturn had a definite opportunistic kernel. Tied to the prognosis of the imminent collapse of Stalinism, this analysis caused the F I to constantly look for and anticipate the development of such mobilisations. Further it was conceded that such mobilisations could lead to a turn in the policies of the communist parties themselves:
“All of these countries, including Yugoslavia, will however be exposed to an especially powerful pressure from imperialism. It is not excluded that in this case the Communist Parties, basing themselves firmly on the revolutionary aspirations of the masses, will move forward and abolish the remnants of bourgeois power and property.” 5
Such a development, it was thought, could only testify to the crisis of Stalinism. However, when the FI applied this prediction in practice to the Tito-Stalin split, they insisted that Tito had split from Stalinism. In so doing they believed that their prediction about revolutionary upheavals in the buffer zone had been fulfilled. This belief had serious consequences for the revolutionary integrity of the FI. The 1948 Congress and its resolution on “The USSR and Stalinism” did little to guard the FI from these consequences. In fact it merely codified all of the earlier errors of perspective. The theses detailed the counter revolutionary role of the Kremlin in the preceding years, yet still insisted on the same artificial pre-conditions for the carrying through of bureaucratic social revolutions as before (the need for mass mobilisations and geographical assimilation). They maintained their fundamentally erroneous perspective with regard to the crisis of Stalinism. At no point between 1944 and 1947 did the FI make an exception of Yugoslavia in its analysis of Eastern, Europe.
After 1948, the liquidation of the capitalist economies in Eastern Europe and the Tito-Stalin split propelled the FI leadership into a further re-examination of the nature of Stalinism.
Defining Stalinism narrowly as the subordination of each CP to the interests of the Kremlin, the 1948 Theses stated:
“under Stalinist leadership they have turned into organisations whose only function is to serve the diplomatic manoeuvres of the Soviet bureaucracy.” (our emphasis). The FI concluded that the Tito-Stalin split signified that the YCP had ceased to be Stalinist.
Unable, or unwilling, to recognise that Stalinism remains true to itself even while breaking up along nationalist, social-patriotic lines, the FI used the split to re-read events in Yugoslavia from 1943 onwards. The FI saw the split as a verification of their perspective with regard to the crisis of Stalinism. They saw it as the latest manifestation of a break with Stalinism that had been effectively completed when the YCP in 1945 was said to have led the masses, under pressure, in a genuine proletarian revolution, which successfully overthrew capitalism and created a “deformed workers’ state” not in need of political revolution.
Michel Pablo was the principal advocate of this position. In August 1948 Pablo hesitantly began to lay the foundations for his revisions of Trotskyism on the Yugoslav question. In the article The Yugoslav Affair he claimed:
“As against all the other Communist parties in the ‘buffer zone’ which won their power thanks to the direct support of the Kremlin and the Red Army, the Yugoslav Communist Party (YCP) during the war led a real mass movement with distinct revolutionary tendencies which brought it to power.” 6
The revolutionary tendencies of the masses had imparted to the YCP a “special character”. At this stage Pablo did not claim that the YCP was as yet centrist.
He did, however, suggest that independence from Moscow gave the YCP, as a whole, the potential to break from Stalinism thus rendering the need for a new Trotskyist party in Yugoslavia obsolete. His programmatic conclusion in this article was that the Fourth International should seek to pressure the YCP onto the road of self-reform.
By September 1949, building on his incorrect appraisal of the potential for self-reform of the YCP, Pablo correctly designated Yugoslavia as a workers’ state. It was his definition of it as a deformed workers’ state that was fundamentally wrong. In using this term, Pablo implied that the bureaucratic deformation of the Yugoslav workers’ state was only qualitative. That is, political power to some extent lay in the hands of the working class:
“Within this framework of a workers’ state, defined in this sense, can be contained for a long time a partially bourgeois content both in the sphere of distribution norms as well as in several aspects of political power.” 7
Such a formulation is true for a healthy workers’ state as well. It will contain bourgeois features in its economy and its political superstructures. But what distinguishes a healthy workers’ state or even a workers’ state with bureaucratic deformations, is that political power still lies with the working class or in the hands of a revolutionary party, not in the hands of a consolidated bureaucratic caste set against the working class and with its own distinct interests.
The existence of such a caste, and one clearly existed in Yugoslavia, signified a qualitative difference between a healthy and a degenerate workers’ state and necessitated in the latter case a political revolution to take political power back into the hands of the working class. Failure to make this distinction led Pablo at first to fudge the question of political revolution in Yugoslavia and later to completely abandon the call for it.
Instead Pablo merely called for the extension of the world revolution as a means of gradually undermining the material base (backwardness) of bureaucratic deformations in countries such as Yugoslavia. In February 1950, therefore, he argued:
“between capitalism and socialism there will be an entire historic period and a whole gamut of transitional regimes which, while ceasing to be capitalist, will undergo various degrees of evolution with regard to one another and in relation to socialism in which the state (state apparatus) will be more or less deformed by the bureaucracy; in which the (deformed) laws of capitalism will continue to operate to some extent or another, and in which all these difficulties and obstacles will be overcome only by the extension of the revolution on the world arena.” 8
Not only was the programme of political revolution rendered irrelevant in this formula, so too was the Marxist programme for the struggle against bureaucracy in the transition period.
Pablo compounded these errors by claiming that, given the experience of Yugoslavia and the YCP (a Stalinist party transformed into a centrist party by the pressure of the masses). Stalinism generally could be transformed by such pressure. In his report to the 1951 Congress of the Fourth International he argued:
“We have made clear that the CPs are not exactly reformist parties and that under certain exceptional conditions they possess the possibility of projecting a revolutionary orientation.” 9
Pablo’s positions on Yugoslavia were adopted by the FI at its 1951 Third World Congress. It was subscribed to by all the major sections and leading figures of the FI. There was no revolutionary opposition to Pablo’s centrist position that:
“In Yugoslavia the first country where the proletariat took power since the degeneration of the USSR, Stalinism no longer exists today as an effective factor in the workers’ movement, which, however, does not exclude its possible re-emergence under certain conditions.” 10
Germain’s objections to this position had become obsolete in the face of the reality of the Yugoslav workers’ state, and useless in terms of explaining the counter-revolutionary nature of the party that brought that state into being. At the same conference the FI did recognise the rest of Eastern Europe as deformed workers’ states in need of political revolutions. But the resolutions of Eastern Europe and Yugoslavia were seen as a complementary whole and this whole entailed a right centrist revision of the Trotskyist position on Stalinism.
This revision entailed redefining Stalinism as having a “dual nature”. The bureaucratic social revolutions in the buffer zone were seen as examples of the counter-revolutionary role of Stalinism. The progressive side of Stalinism is regarded as being the ability of some of the CPs, acting under the pressure of the masses, to break with the Kremlin and project a “revolutionary orientation.” This was what the FI claimed had happened in Yugoslavia and later in China. It fell to Germain, now obediently following Pablo’s line, to give this revision theoretical expression in his Ten Theses on Stalinism:
“The contradictory nature of the Soviet bureaucracy is only partially reflected in the Stalinist parties. The dual nature of these parties is of a different social origin; it does not flow from the special role of a parasitic bureaucracy in a workers’ state but from the dual function of these parties, which are working class because of their mass base in their own country as well as international instruments of the Soviet bureaucracy.” 11
It was only the latter characteristic that defined them as Stalinist. The former characteristic could, under certain conditions, serve to negate this Stalinism. Thus:
“The Yugoslav and Chinese examples have demonstrated that, placed in certain exceptional conditions, entire Communist parties can modify their political line and lead the struggle of the masses up to the conquest of power, while passing beyond the objectives of the Kremlin.
Under such conditions these parties cease being Stalinist parties in the classical sense of the world.” 12
That is, they became centrist parties.
We reject the view that Stalinist parties are defined as such exclusively by virtue of their relationship to the Kremlin. This forms only one important constituent part of a Stalinist party’s programme and overall nature. Further we reject the notion that Stalinism has a dual nature and that it can be pushed in a revolutionary direction without first breaking up and being replaced by a revolutionary party.
Against this notion of Stalinism as possessing both a progressive and counter-revolutionary side, each weighing equally in the scales and separated in time and space, we re-assert the Trotskyist conception of Stalinism as predominantly counter-revolutionary but with contradictory characteristics. We recognise this contradiction as an intensely dialectical one; that is, that Stalinism is capable of achieving (in exceptional circumstances) results which, taken in isolation are progressive (the liquidation of capitalism).
But Stalinism achieves these results by counter-revolutionary means. In recognising this we by no means equate the progressive and reactionary elements. We recognise that the progressive part is permeated and dominated by the counter-revolutionary whole.
By dissolving this dialectical understanding of Stalinism into a pair of formally opposed and separable elements – progressive and reactionary – the FI after 1951 opened the way to a liquidation of the revolutionary programme in favour of an orientation (deep entryism) which sought to pressure the national CPs into taking the progressive path.
Finally, the FI’s revisionism on the question of Stalinism cannot be fully understood without reference to the positions taken on the FI’s other major concern of the period – the continuing instability of imperialism. Up to 1948 this instability was understood in terms of chronic economic stagnation. After 1948 this instability came to be expressed, according to the FI, more and more in terms of preparations for a third world war against the USSR and Eastern Europe.
The errors on Stalinism and East Europe and on the prospects for imperialism came together in the 1951 Congress resolutions on Orientation and Perspectives. These argued that a new world war was imminent, that the balance of forces was weighed against imperialism in favour of the workers’ states, and that the newly discovered potentially progressive character of Stalinism would mean that the new war would take the form of an international civil war. The end result of this would be a series of revolutions at least as healthy and progressive as the Yugoslav one.
An opposition that purported to defend Trotskyism against Pablo’s revisionism on the question of Stalinism was the Vern/Ryan tendency inside the SWP(US) during 1950-53. This tendency argued that the FI had been wrong to delay for so long in characterising Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia included, as workers’ states.
They argued that the only decisive criterion for the characterisation of the class nature of a state was which class’s representatives controlled the repressive apparatus of the state machine. In Eastern Europe the entry of the Red Army (the repressive apparatus of a workers’ state) marked the establishment of workers’ states – i.e. as early as 1944-5. They reasoned that it was “Here in this superstructure of society, is where the revolution of our time takes place.”13 Stalinism is rooted in the working class – therefore the Stalinists in power always equal a distorted form of workers’ power. Stalinism could not possibly rest on capitalist property relations, or prop up a capitalist state, even for a limited period, because it itself rests on the post-capitalist property relations.
These undialectical positions of the Vern/Ryan tendency which failed to recognise the contradictory nature of Stalinism, foreshadowed many of the errors of the international Spartacist tendency (iSt) on the Russian question. Their position can be defined as Stalinophile.
It rests in the first place on an incorrect analogy with the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. Because the Bolsheviks in state power presided over private property in whole sections of the economy the Vern/Ryan tendency disregarded economic criteria altogether. They equated a healthy revolution, in which the capitalist state was decisively smashed by the direct action of the masses led by a revolutionary party and a new type of state established, with the Stalinist bureaucratic overturns of capitalism and the establishment of degenerate workers’ states.
The same criterion was applied to two distinct historical phenomena. This was done because the Vern/Ryan tendency regarded the counter-revolutionary bureaucracy as only qualitatively different from the early Bolshevik state functionaries. They define the bureaucracy solely as part of the working class, ignoring their nature as a caste within Soviet society – that is based on the working class but with interests distinct from, and opposed to, the working class. They deny the predominantly counterrevolutionary nature of the bureaucracy. They deny the reality of Stalinism in Eastern Europe after the war. They ignore the reality that Stalinism did defend capitalist property relations for a period and that it did hand back countries it controlled, like Finland and Austria to the imperialists rather than abolish capitalism in them. This tendency’s one-sided analysis of Stalinism grants to the Soviet bureaucracy a revolutionary dynamic it does not possess. The criterion for establishing whether a degenerate workers’ state exists is not, in the first place dependent upon whether the Stalinists have secured political power. As we have shown, this is a precondition for the creation of a degenerate workers’ state. But it does not follow that fulfilment of this condition will inevitably lead to the establishment of planned property relations. This fact was proved beyond doubt by Austria, Finland and Vietnam (in 1945).
In the period 1948 to 1953 (in 1953 the FI split into the International Committee (IC) and the International Secretariat (IS) there was no revolutionary opposition to Pablo’s revisionist positions on Stalinism. The American SWP, the British Healy group and the French PCI (all of which joined the IC) repeatedly expressed their support for the FI’s positions, up to and including the 1951 Congress documents on Yugoslavia. ostensibly the IC’s split with Pablo involved a rejection of his tactical orientation towards Stalinist parties and his organisational methods, not his analysis and understanding of Stalinism.
The Germain opposition to Pablo on the Yugoslav question was not able to sustain an alternative position.
Their dogmatism proved to be increasingly at variance with reality in Eastern Europe. Their conversion to Pablo’s viewpoint was made easy by the fact that throughout the debate they accepted all of the premises that Pablo drew his conclusions from – the exceptional nature of the Yugoslav revolution, the centrist nature of the YCP and the conception of the Tito-Stalin split as a “proletarian revolt against the anti-proletarian, counterrevolutionary policy of the Kremlin” (Germain).
At the 1951 Congress Pablo's centrist position on Yugoslavia and on Stalinism was passed, unchallenged by any section of the FI or even any section of a section, on a revolutionary basis.
This was quickly to take programmatic effect in the tactics and slogans raised by the FI. For example. in 1953 during the East German uprising, the FI (IS) refused to call for political revolution.
That is why we recognise the 1951 Congress as the point at which the FI – codifying its errors instead of rectifying them and abandoning the Trotskyist position on Stalinism – completed its collapse into centrism.
Mandel’s orthodox revisions
In the demonology of the “anti-Pabloite”, Fourth International International Committee (lC) tradition, the chief demon was, and remains, Michel Pablo. While it is certainly true that he ushered in the “theoretical rearmament” of the Fourth International (F I) that was to rob it of every vestige of authentic Trotskyism, he rapidly lost the role of principal theoretical revisionist of the FI after the 1953 split. The IC’s constant harping on “Pabloite revisionism” was actually a testimony to their own theoretical bankruptcy. It replaced any attempt to theoretically refute the chief spokesman for the FI’s International Secretariat (IS), Ernest Germain, later to become better known as Ernest Mandel.
He was the architect of the analysis of the crisis within Stalinism after Stalin’s death in 1953, and was chiefly responsible for formulating the IS programmatic response to the events surrounding the “crisis” of Stalinism at the 1954, 1957 and 1961 Congresses of the IS. He played a leading role in the re-unification discussions with the main grouping in the IC, the Socialist Workers Party (US), reaching agreement with its leader, Joseph Hansen over the analysis of the Cuban revolution. From the reunification in 1963 – when the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFI) was established – to the present day, Mandel has retained his position as the major USFI theoretician on Stalinism, the USSR and the degenerate workers’ states.
After 1950, Germain (Mandel) was forced to concede his error on the Yugoslav revolution. Pablo had been right to characterise Tito’s Yugoslavia as a “deformed workers’ state”. His defeat – or rather his collapse – on this question prompted him to carry out a task that has since become the trade mark of his books, pamphlets and articles. He set to work to disguise the FI’s revisions of Trotskyism with the gloss of Marxist “orthodoxy”. In 1951, he reaffirmed the Trotskyist position on Stalinism in the USSR, but revised it with regard to other Stalinist parties. In his Ten Theses, he argued:
“The contradictory nature of the Soviet bureaucracy is only partially reflected in the Stalinist parties. The dual nature of these parties is of a different social origin; it does not flow from the special role of a parasitic bureaucracy in a workers’ state, but from the dual function of these parties, which are working class because of their mass base in their own country as well as international instruments of the Soviet bureaucracy...For the Kremlin, the usefulness of this mass base consists exclusively in serving its diplomatic designs. But these designs periodically involve a political line diametrically opposed to the most elementary aspirations of the masses. From this flows the possibility of the outstripping of the Communist parties by their own base, which, in action, can go beyond the objectives set by the Kremlin and escape from its control. This possibility has always been one of the fundamental perspectives of the Trotskyist movement”.14
In the event of this happening, claims Germain, such parties cease to be Stalinist.
This analysis leads to a practical capitulation to what remain, in essence, Stalinist parties. Mandel uses the apparently orthodox analysis of Stalinism as contradictory to obscure the real nature of Stalinism behind a spurious “dual nature”, a bad side under Kremlin orders; a good side under mass pressure. When the latter becomes predominant, Stalinism turns into “centrism” or an “empirically revolutionary tendency”. This fails completely to comprehend why Stalinism is counter-revolutionary.
As we have shown, wherever a break with the Kremlin takes place and the indigenous Stalinists carry through an overturn of capitalism, as in Yugoslavia and China, this is prompted by the need for self-preservation on the part of the already-established bureaucracies of these parties, not as a result of pressure from their mass base. Where such pressure is involved, it plays only a secondary, coincidental role, and is usually accompanied by increased repression against the masses. While the possibility of such fractures within world Stalinism has indeed always been part of Trotskyism’s perspectives, the belief that parties breaking from Kremlin control thereby cease to be Stalinist has never been part of those perspectives.
Germain applied this position to the Chinese revolution. Mao became a second Tito.15 The position of the Chinese Trotskyists on the1949 revolution which attacked Mao’s Stalinist popular frontist project, was replaced by Germain’s analysis of the Chinese coalition government as a “workers’ and farmers’ government”, following the Yugoslav road:
“Many reasons permit us to hope for such a development (a left turn – Eds). More than any other Communist Party the Chinese CP has been obliged to keep a less bureaucractic and centralised structure, to maintain a constant metabolism between its own aspirations and pre-occupations and those of the masses. The objective situation pushes it along this road.” 6
In 1977, Mandel maintained that the Chinese CP, which had ceased to be Stalinist, did indeed take the sought-after left turn:
“The victory of the third Chinese revolution in 1949 was the most important gain for the world revolution since the victory of the October socialist revolution.” 17
This assessment, stemming from his false analysis of Stalinism’s dual nature, ignores the massive counter-revolutionary setback for the Chinese working class that this revolution involved. Since 1949 the Chinese Stalinists have excluded the masses from any real political power, but have rather used them as cannon fodder for their inter-bureaucratic faction fights.
The programmatic logic of this analysis of Stalinism in China (and Yugoslavia) was to return to Trotsky’s pre-1934 position, namely a position calling for the political reform of these Stalinist regimes. The 1954 Congress resolution, subscribed to (if not indeed written by) Germain, explicitly rejects political revolution for China and Yugoslavia together with the perspective of a new party. It argues instead for the creation of soviets, as forms of proletarian democracy, and factions inside the Chinese and Yugoslav CPs, whose objective should be to replace the “centrist” leaderships of those parties through a democratic process of reform:
“Since both the Chinese and to a certain extent also the Yugoslav CP are in reality bureaucratic centrist parties, which, however, still find themselves under the pressure of the revolution in their countries, we do not call upon the proletariat of these countries to constitute new revolutionary parties or to prepare a political revolution in these countries.”18
This position had the advantage of pre-1934 Trotskyist “orthodoxy”. But whilst Germain borrowed the term, his purpose was to wipe out the historical gain of Trotsky’s analysis of the Stalinism after 1934. Moreover, Germain’s position ignored the reality that the working class had been politically expropriated by a bureaucratic caste. It ignored the fact that in all fundamentals the ruling parties practiced the Stalinist programme of “socialism in one country”, the stifling of any independent political life for the masses, the bureaucratic operation of the plan, and the subordination of international revolution to the strategic deal of the bureaucracy with imperialism.
Since the 1950s, the brutal reality of Stalinism has impinged on Mandel’s consciousness, and has led him to change his stance on these countries. His method, though, remains exactly the same, and the USFI has on various occasions found replacements for China and Yugoslavia as non-Stalinist workers’ states, in Vietnam and Cuba.
With regard to Eastern Europe, 1954 witnessed the beginning of a new stage of the FI’s revision of the programme of political revolution. The crisis of Stalinism after Stalin’s death and the East German workers’ uprising, threw the bonapartist clique in the Kremlin into a turmoil, and led to a relative loosening of the bureaucracy’s stranglehold on the political life of the masses of Eastern Europe. Mandel recognised that the measures promulgated by Stalin's successors in the USSR and Eastern Europe were, in fact, measures of self-preservation, concessions designed to buy, them time for retrenchment.
Nevertheless, he did argue that the rumblings in Eastern Europe did open up a persepective of fragmentation in the national CPs, with a section (defined as being “closest to the masses”) placing themselves at the head of the struggle for political revolution. While the fragmentation has occurred, Mandel went further and argued that the IS programme should centre on developing such a split as the best means of achieving the political revolution. To this end, an entry tactic was advocated, and the “prioritised” programme of political revolution was reduced to the call for a series of reforms that would be palatable to a potentially revolutionary section of the bureaucracy:
“1. Freedom for working class prisoners.
2. Abolition of repressive anti-tabor legislation.
3. Democratisation of the workers’ parties and organisations.
4. Legalisation of all workers’ parties and organisations.
5. Election and democratic functioning of mass committees.
6. Independence of the trade unions in relation to the government.
7. Democratic elaboration of the economic plan by the masses for the masses.
8. Effective right of self-determination for the peoples.”19
The programme fails to link these demands to the struggle to overthrow the bureaucracy and establish genuine workers’ power. Indeed, calls for this course of action are not raised precisely because of the IS’s new view of the bureaucracy as containing within it potentially centrist elements.
Between 1954 and the Fifth World Congress in 1957, further enormous upheavals occurred in the degenerate workers’ states and the USSR. The 20th Congress of the CPSU “secret speech” by Kruschev and the ensuing concessions, the revolutionary uprising against the bureaucracy in Hungary and in Poland – all in 1956 – made a deep impression upon the IS’s perspectives. Mandel gave the report to the Congress on the crisis within Stalinism. The reactions of the YCP and the CCP leaderships to the Hungarian events, whilst uneven, were held to be progressive, confirming the perspective of reform.
Yet a major change in orientation to the buffer zone and the USSR was outlined by Mandel. For him and the IS leadership, the Hungarian and Polish events had proven that a wing of the bureaucracy would follow the Tito-Mao road: in Hungary – Nagy, in Poland – Gomulka. In the USSR the “centrist” faction of Kruschev was crowded on its left by Malenkov and Mikoyan, who whilst not of the Nagy-Gomulka mold, presaged the emergence of such a tendency.
In a bid to facilitate the development of such tendencies in the bureaucracy, the programme of political revolution for Eastern Europe and the USSR was completely revised. Since the prospect of political revolution was seen to depend upon a section or wing of the bureaucracy, soviets could not be organs of struggle against the bureaucracy. Political revolution was considered as (i.e. was replaced by) competition between an “FI faction” and the rest of the bureaucracy for the leadership of the working class.
From this point onwards, the notion of workers’ councils or soviets as revolutionary organs of struggle is lost, and replaced by the conception of soviets as organs of administration, for bringing the masses into democratic life, to participate in the plan. The political revolution is thus reduced to the peaceful withering away of the bureaucratic caste.
This programme of political “revolution” emerges from the Fifth Congress as a unified strategy for all workers’ states. It was merely a question of the ease and rapidity with which the objective crisis in Stalinism would produce the necessary tendencies and splits within the bureaucracies.
In 1961, the Sixth Congress, and again the 1963 Reunification Congress, merely repeated these same formulae, and added nothing new by way of programme.
During the last decade, Mandel has further revised the programme of political revolution. As we have shown, he first revised it by degutting the soviets as organs of struggle against the bureaucracy. At that time (1957), he was still clear that soviets should at least exercise the workers class’s dictatorship against restorationists. But in the 1970s, a social-democratic wing emerged within the Stalinist parties – “Eurocommunism” which identified Bolshevism with Stalinism, and advocated greater use of bourgeois parliamentary institutions as a guarantee against the “natural tendency” to dictatorial/bureaucratic abuse that is supposed to accompany rule by soviets.
Whilst Mandel has attacked such conceptions, he has made unwarranted concessions to this wing of Stalinism. He has done so by accepting that soviet power must include representatives of the bourgeoisie, at least in the transition period, if not in the struggle for political power. Mandel explicitly rejects Lenin’s and Trotsky’s justifications for such exclusion, a justification which he himself accepted in earlier years.
In short, Mandel, most particularly in his Theses on Socialist Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, passed at the USFI’s World Congress in 1979, obliterates the repressive character of the workers’ dictatorship, in a way similar to Kautsky’s denial of the repressive character of all political forms of the bourgeoisie’s dictatorship. Applied to the programme of political revolution, this can only mean support for open restorationists or counter-revolutionary Stalinist bureaucrats – sworn enemies of the proletariat – in the workers’ councils.
Mandel’s political perspective is intimately tied to his economic understanding of the Soviet Union and the degenerate workers’ states. Mandel laid down his basic position in Marxist Economic Theory. While not uncritical, he presents a picture of the Soviet economy as an ever-expanding one:
“This progress is not to be explained primarily by the enormous backwardness it had to overcome, in comparison with the industry of the most advanced capitalist countries. It has continued after this backwardness has already been, by and large, overcome. This progress is proceeding apace especially in the directions of increase and modernisation of the country’s stock of machines and of striving to automatise production.” 20
This process is, for Mandel, proof of the superiority of planning over capitalist anarchy. However, he does recognise that managerial self-interest and bureaucratic control of the state leading to hyper-centralisation – act as a fetter on the planned economy, particularly in the sphere of the production of consumer goods. But while Mandel accepts that the bureaucracy act as a fetter, he does not believe that they undermine the working of the plan and threaten to plunge it into reverse, opening the way to capitalist restoration. How this accords with his analysis of Kampuchea, which was a planned economy thrown into reverse, he has never deigned to explain.21
The planned economy of the USSR is not without its contradictions, and the chief contradiction is, for the “orthodox” Mandel, the one that Marx pointed out would inevitably exist in the period of the transition from capitalism to communism:
“In fact, Soviet economy is marked by the contradictory combination of a non-capitalist mode of production and a till basically bourgeois mode of distribution. Such a contradictory combination points to an economic system which had a ready gone beyond capitalism, but which has not yet reached socialism, a system which is passing through a period of transition between capitalism and socialism, during which, as Le nin already showed, the economy inevitably combines features of the past with features of the future.”22
In a 1979 work, Mandel elaborated on this point:
“Just because a transition is more complex and – to put it paradoxically less dynamic, since it transits less rapidly than expected, is no reason to say that it is not transitional.” 23
As well as planning, the other key feature in Mandel’s analysis of the USSR is that is is a transitional society in the classical Marxist sense.
A further element of his analysis to be noted is his position on the Soviet bureaucracy. He regards it, as a whole, as becoming objectively weaker, even redundant, as, the productive forces grow, since its social role as an arbiter in the distribution of scarce goods declines as production increases. The growth of the working class concomitant with this is a further objective factor operating against the bureaucracy. He developed the kernel of this position in 1952:
“The level of development of the productive forces has become incompatible with bureaucratic management”.24
Once again this position has the advantage of orthodoxy. It starts with Trotsky’s prognosis of Stalinism as a regime of crisis and objectively creating its own grave digger.
However, through the 1950s and 1960s, Mandel added his own prognoses to this orthodoxy, and built out of it constant predictions of developing centrist/reform wings of the bureaucracy, in turn citing this as evidence for his essentially “objectivist” view of the bureaucracy’s crisis.
Taken together, Mandel’s positions on planning, the transition and the bureaucracy constitute a thoroughly false, non-revolutionary Marxist understanding of the economic and political nature of the USSR and the degenerate workers’ states.
They lay the basis for his reduction of the programme of political revolution to a series of structural reforms which can, potentially, be carried out in alliance with a wing of the bureaucracy.
Mandel’s explanation of the progress of the Soviet economy is based on a one-sided assessment of the planned economy which ignores the bureaucratic and blind nature of the plan itself. By attributing this bureaucratic plan with the power of unlimited economic growth (albeit at a slower rate than would be possible with a democratic plan), Mandel overlooks the existence of a series of intrinsic contradictions that the planned economies of the USSR and of the degenerate workers’ states suffer from.
The bureaucracy, according to Mandel, undermines the efficiency but not the existence of the plan. In his view, the main threats to the plan are external to it – imperialism and the plan/ market contradiction inside the workers’ states.
But these threats would inevitably exist with regard to a healthy workers’ state. The problems facing the plans of the USSR and the degenerate workers’ states are of a different order. Poland, Yugoslavia, China, the USSR itself and other workers’ states have all suffered from serious economic crises that have included unemployment, wage cuts etc – features which Mandel suggests have been removed in these countries.
Of course the bureaucracy (and Mandel) disguise such crises with figures indicating overall economic growth. Nevertheless this growth is increasingly artifical in that it is not, and cannot be, short of political revolution, qualitative economic growth. The bureaucratic plan has proved itself incapable of outstripping the highest economic and technical achievements of capitalism. It lags behind the world’s largest imperialist power, the USA. This is an inevitable product of the plan’s internal contradictions its inability to mobilise the creativity of the masses, its tendency to increase disparity between branches of economic life, its tendency to increase inequality, and so on.
The dynamism of the plan that does exist (and has been shown by the industrialisation of backward countries) is strictly limited to the tasks of catching up with capitalism. Periods of economic growth in the planned economies, as Trotsky pointed out in The Revolution Betrayed, are those periods when the bureaucracy builds up industry by copying the industrial, achievements of the capitalist countries. While this frees degenerate workers’ states from the yoke of imperialism and facilitates growth rates that are unthinkable in imperialised countries, it does not enable those economies to create the material base necessary for socialism.
This is because the plan is not merely threatened by external factors. It is threatened by the caste that politically controls it the bureaucracy. Trotsky was clear on this in a period when the economic growth of the USSR was dazzling fellow-travellers and enemies alike:
“While the growth of industry and the bringing of agriculture into the sphere of state planning vastly complicates the task of leadership, bringing to the front the problem of quality, bureaucratism destroys the creative initiative and the feeling of responsibility without which there is not, and cannot be, qualitative progress”25
In other words, bureaucratism is not simply an inefficient fetter on the functioning of the planned economy. It actually blocks and threatens the existence of the planned economy.
Mandel’s inability to see this, his faithful retailing of official Soviet figures to prove his case, is tied to his position of the “transition” question. To accept that the Soviet Union is a transitional society is, necessarily to accept that it is still moving towards socialism. Mandel argues that this is so, but at a slower pace than expected by earlier Marxists. Mindful of orthodoxy on this question, Mandel justifies his position by arguing:
“First of all there is no ‘Marxist tradition’ on this subject in the real sense of the word”26. On the contrary! Marx, Engels and the Bolsheviks were clear on the key aspects of a transitional society, and on the programme necessary to direct the transition to socialism. Apart from the economic expropriation of the bourgeoisie, these aspects do not exist in the USSR or any of the degenerate workers’ states.
All the political features of a society transitional to socialism have been crushed except those which are left-overs of the old, corrupt, capitalist past. These features the bureaucracy have rapidly developed!
In other words, in these post-capitalist societies, the transition in the Marxist sense (from capitalism to communism) has been blocked and thrown into reverse by the bureaucracy. These states are degenerating back towards capitalism, a process that can, of course, only be completed by an actual social counterrevolution. For the transition to be restarted, a political revolution is required. Contradictions will continue to exist after the victory of the revolution, but the political rule of a bureaucracy fanning the flames of those contradictions and preventing their resolution by the workers, will not.
The ever-upward motion of the planned economy detailed by Mandel in his writings as proof of the continuing “transitional” nature of the USSR, facilitate his interpretation of the bureaucracy’s impending fate. To justify his old position on Yugoslavia, Pablo was forced to offer a different explanation of the power of the bureaucracy than the one put forward by Trotsky.
Trotsky had been clear that the functional roots of the bureaucracy lay in the backwardness of Soviet Russia and the scarcity of goods that such backwardness implied. The bureaucracy arose as a gendarme over the distribution of scarce goods. However, the nature of that bureaucracy was qualitatively transformed when, from being an agent of the workers’ soviets, it usurped political power and wielded it in its own interests, smashing the vanguard of the working class, the Left Opposition of the party, in the process.
Pablo ignored the political nature of the bureaucracy that this process resulted in (i.e. its counter-revolutionary nature), and analysed Stalinist bureaucracies purely from the standpoint of their functional roots. He was convinced by the colonial revolutions that the world revolution would spread from the periphery (backward countries) to the centre (advanced countries). Therefore, he concluded, bureaucratic deformations would be an inevitable, indeed necessary, feature of transitional societies for some time to come. However, as productive forces grew, and as the world revolution spread, so the material base of these bureaucracies would disappear as would the bureaucracies themselves. This conveniently left out the need for political revolution against the counter-revolutionary bureaucracy that rules in every existing post-capitalist society on the planet.
Pablo explained this revisionist position in polemics with no less a person than Ernest Germain:
“Thus in the historic period of the transition from capitalism to socialism we shall witness the rise not of normal workers’ states, but of more or less degenerated workers’ states that is, states with strong bureaucratic deformations which can reach the point of complete political expropriation of the proletariat.”27
But Pablo did not despair at this prospect since the forward march of deformed revolution is guaranteed by the objective situation and with it the withering away of the deformations.
Mandel’s position on the bureaucracy are taken straight from his one-time adversary and long-time master, Pablo. The plan guarantees growth. Growth guarantees that the proletariat will increase in size and culture and that the bureaucracy will weaken. When faced with this contradiction posed to it acutely, at times of crisis, a section of the bureaucracy will move closer to the masses and become a leading force in the process (Mandel's favourite word) of political revolution. Indeed, Mandel sometimes implies that the process has already made qualitative leaps forward:
“Can it be said that the Soviet Union in which oppositionists were found only in Gulag camps and the Soviet Union today with its ferment of political currents, samizdat and discussions at all sorts of levels (not only among intellectuals, but also in the unions) are one and the same thing”28
Trotskyists recognise that for a real change to take place in the USSR and the degenerate workers’ states, the power of the bureaucracy must be smashed decisively by the working class.
Therefore to Mandel’s question – flowing from his crass impressionism – the answer would be yes!; in essence the Soviet Union today is the same as the Soviet Union under Stalin. It remains the land of bureaucratic tyranny over the workers.
In his long-forgotten polemics with Pablo in the 1940s, the young and rash Germain argued vehemently:
“Any revision, either current or retrospective, of the results of this analysis [of the buffer zone as capitalist states – Eds] implying both a revision of the criteria employed and a revision of the Marxist theory of the state, could only have disastrous consequences for the Fourth International.”29
At that time, Mandel was wrong in his characterisation of Eastern Europe, but right in his estimation of the dangers of Pablo’s position. However, having been defeated by 1951, Mandel has spent over 30 years providing a theoretical justification for those “consequences” with a sophistry and alacrity of which Pablo was incapable. His responsibility for the destruction of the international Trotskyist movement as a revolutionary force is far greater then Pablo’s. And it continues up to the present. Authentic Trotskyism has no place for Mandel’s “orthodox” concoctions – they are a mockery of the Marxism of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky.
In the 1953 split within the FI the analysis of Stalinism developed by Pablo, and refined and modified by Germain (Mandel) was not really in dispute. Therefore once the immediate tactical issue in the dispute – orientation to national Stalinist parties became irrelevant, unification of the International Secretariat and the International Committee again became a possibility.
Hansen on Cuba
The Cuban Revolution showed that Mandel’s theories had an advocate within the Socialist Workers Party (USA). His name was Joseph Hansen.
In late 1949 Hansen emerged as a major protagonist in the debate on Eastern Europe arguing a line very close to that being defended by Pablo and against those who continued to regard Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe as “capitalist states on the road to structural assimilation”, principally Germain (Mandel):
“This degenerated workers’ state [the USSR – Eds] spilling over the frontiers fixed at the close of World War 1, has upset capitalist property relations in Eastern Europe and given rise to formations that are pretty much replicas of the USSR.” 30
Hansen observed that the European and American opponents of Pablo’s crude impressionism were wrestling with the “norms” of Trotsky’s programme – civil war, direct action of the masses, soviets, “real” planning. They were seeking to defend this programme against the revisions they instinctively felt would be ushered in by accepting these misbegotten Stalinist monsters as workers’ states.
Hansen, however, had no such misgivings and mercilessly mocked their “normative” method with quotes from Trotsky. He was easily able to trip them up in the contradictions of their own confused dialectic. After all, by 1949 capitalism and the capitalists palpably did not exist in Eastern Europe. Here, a good American pragmatist, unhampered by “dialectical” baggage, could see and say that “the Emperor had no clothes.”
In this assessment Hansen was not wrong. He utilised the empirical shrewdness which he later applied to Cuba. Against those who were inventing all sorts of new criteria for the existence of workers’ states, Hansen insisted:
“In my opinion, in a country where the rule of the bourgeoisie has been broken AND the principal sectors of the economy nationalised, we must place the state in the general category of ‘workers’ state’ no matter how widely or monstrously it departs from our norms. This change cannot occur without a civil war although this civil war may also be a mutilation of the type, differing in important respects from our norms.” 31
This position contains two key errors that laid the basis tor Hansen’s acceptance of Pablo’s revisionism on Yugoslavia and for his own application of that revisionism to the Cuban events.
Hansen is wrong to equate the political expropriation of the bourgeoisie and extensive nationalisation with the establishment of post-capitalist property relations. Eastern Europe between 1944 and 1948 showed instances where the political power of the bourgeoisie was broken (crucially their control of armed bodies of men defending their property, was gone), the economy nationalised the Stalinists in power and yet these countries (e.g. Poland and East Germany) remained capitalist.
For Hansen to be consistent he would have to date the creation of workers’ states in these countries between 194 and 1946, a position he did not hold. Thus his empiricism in 1949 did not enable him to isolate what was the defining attributez of the workers states, nor the means by which they were created. As we have shown, the political expropriation of bourgeoisie and nationalisation are pre-requisites for the establishment of a degenerate workers’ state. But only when the economies are planned on the basis of suppressing the operation of the law of value can we talk of degenerate workers’ states having been established.
Hansen’s second error, and one that he shared with his opponents in 1949, was his insistence on the need for “civil war” for the creation of degenerate workers’ states. Although he accepts that such civil wars can be of a “mutilated” type he does argue: “Overturns in property relations cannot occur without the revolutionary mobilisations of the masses.” 32
But Hansen’s dating of such mobilisations in Eastern Europe takes him back to the time of the entry of the Red Army not to the actual times of the overturns. Precisely because the workers’ states are degenerate from birth, their creation can be accomplished in the special circumstances detailed elsewhere in this book, without the revolutionary mobilisation of the masses by a Stalinist bureaucracy. Moreover, as Czechoslovakia showed, even where mobilisations do take place, they are completely bureaucratically controlled by the Stalinists. No organs of working class democratic power – soviets – are formed.
While Hansen in his 1949 document, The Problem of Eastern Europe attacks those who have a “normative” notion of civil war, it must be said that his alternative is really to operate with an idealist notion of civil war. That is, he is forced to invent civil wars where they did not take place.
The real weakness of this method was exposed when it was applied to Yugoslavia. Here there was a fairly “normal” civil war, though under a leadership “with Stalinist origins”, as Pablo afterwards put it. Such a war is essential to the overturn of property relations. The Yugoslav civil war ushered in a workers’ state before this had happened in the rest of Eastern Europe. Further, as this civil war only deviated slightly from the norm, so, the Yugoslav workers’ state itself must only have deviated slightly from the norm. That is, Hansen’s method led him, by 1951, to concede that the Yugoslav revolution and the workers’ state it created only deviated from the norm quantitatively not qualitatively.
Hansen rejected the normative method but not from the standpoint of the genuine materialist method which can evaluate what the deviations from the norm mean. Hansen effectively rejected the “norms” – soviets, proletarian democracy, direct participation of the masses in their own emancipation as “secondary”, “not essential” or merely “formal” questions. The full flowering of Hansen’s pragmatism was to take place over his analysis of Cuba.
In 1960 Hansen stepped forward to re-apply the method that had yielded these liquidationist conclusions with regard to Tito. The adaptation to Castroism copied the capitulation to Titoism. This methodology was unable to combat the petit bourgeois “anti-imperialism” and Stalinism and 22 years later blinds its followers to the necessity for a political revolution.
Nevertheless Hansen did empirically register the decisive political and “economic” events and even the stages of the Cuban revolution.
In this he retained the advantage over his “anti-Pabloite” critics. Mage, Wolforth, Healy all constructed lifeless abstract and idealist schemas – classless “transitional state”, “structural assimilation”, “capitalist state” – which not only involved serious revisions of the Marxist theory of the state but also blinded their authors to the major events and turning points of the Cuban revolution.
However, Hansen’s evaluation of the significance of the Cuban revolution, whilst able to perceive the breaks with imperialism and the Cuban bourgeoisie, the decisive importance of the material links with the USSR and the expropriation of capitalist property, was nevertheless hopelessly at sea when it came to the evaluation of political tendencies, governments and, consequently, strategy and tactics for the proletarian vanguard.
Whilst Hansen based his approach on the 1948-50 Fourth International analysis of Titoism, a “new” problem posed was the non-Stalinist origins of the July 26th Movement (J26M), indeed its non-proletarian origins both in social and political terms.
Hansen argued that the Castro movement was a radical petit-bourgeois movement with a bourgeois democratic programme. Its programme promised thoroughgoing agrarian reform and industrialisation to break Cuba’s dependent status vis-a-vis the USA. The Castroites however, were serious about their programme and as a matter of principle insisted on “revolutionary methods” to oust Batista.
During the civil war phase in the Sierra Maestra Castro mobilised the poor peasants and the agrarian proletariat, “the decisive sector of the Cuban working class”. By a reciprocal action the J26M leaders’ “outlook became modified.” 33 The urban workers on the other hand proved unable to bring their power to bear at this stage, but later rallied to Castro.
Castro destroyed Batista’s armed forces and took power in January 1959 inaugurating a process of smashing the bourgeois state machine. It was a “popular political revolution” but “appeared to be limited to democratic aims.”34 The government was a coalition with important bourgeois democratic elements. The attempt to carry through the agrarian reform and other measures led to a clash with US imperialism and its Cuban agents.
Castro broke with the bourgeoisie, expelled their representatives from the government and formed a “workers’ and farmers’ government” in autumn 1959.35 Cuba’s workers’ and farmers’ government could be so designated because of its firm resistance to imperialism and its Cuban agents; its resolute pursuit of the agrarian reform; its disarming of reaction and its arming of the people; its carrying out of pro-working class measures at the expense of the bourgeoisie; and its conflict with imperialism forced it to take increasingly radical measures.
The period of the workers’ and farmers’ government was completed by late 1960 with the establishment of a workers’ state. The decisive measures were: the establishment of a monopoly of foreign trade, the nationalisation of the latifundia, the expropriation of the US and Cuban capitalist holdings in all the key sectors of the economy. This process was completed in the August 1960 period and Hansen could therefore proclaim that “planning is now (December 1960) firmly established.” 6 In his view planning developed “concomitantly with the nationalisation of industry.” 37
The procedure for planning the economy was based on a study of the USSR and Eastern Europe and “thus in the final analysis the overturn in property relations is an echo of the October revolution in Russia.”38
The Castro movement and the state that it had created had however “unique” features. The Cuban workers’ state was neither degenerate nor deformed, indeed “it was a pretty good looking one.”39 However, it was “lacking as yet in the forms of democratic proletarian rule”.40 Though if it were to develop freely, “its democratic tendency would undoubtedly lead to the early creation of proletarian democratic forms.”41
There were no bureaucratic obstacles to the advance to socialism in Cuba or to the international spread of the revolution. The Castro leadership by their failure to “proclaim socialist aims” during the course of the revolution demonstrated that “the subjective factor in the revolution remained unclear.”42 Nevertheless, the Castro current was empirically revolutionary and above all not Stalinist, “a fact of world wide significance”43
The non-Stalinist and indeed profoundly democratic essence of Castroism meant that the Cuban CP could itself be purged of its legacy of Stalinism. There was no need to programmatically counterpose Trotskyism to Castroism since there was no need to build a separate Trotskyist party. Hansen rejected political revolution and a Trotskyist party for Cuba. He gives exceptionalist reasons to explain why a Trotskyist leadership is not necessary – capitalism is weaker in imperialised countries and there, a “socialist minded” leadership will do because of the strength of the objective process of revolution. 44
Hansen’s analysis is thoroughly liquidationist in its programmatic conclusions. In the first place by entrusting the tasks of a revolutionary communist party leading a working class organised in armed, democratic organs of direct power, to the Castroites his position represents a capitulation to an agent of the petit-bourgeoisie. Castro’s programme in 1959 was absolutely clear. He held back on developing institutions of democracy – bourgeois or proletarian – because his role was that of a bonaparte demagogically appeasing the masses but acting in defence of capitalism.
The fact that Castro had employed revolutionary methods – i.e. armed struggle – does not make him a communist, conscious or unconscious. Countless nationalists in the imperialised world – Chiang Kai Shek, for example – have used non-constitutional methods to achieve power. Hansen’s attempt to distinguish Castro from other nationalist leaders by referring to his base amongst the rural proletariat is equally spurious. The rural proletariat was never as well organised as the urban workers and was never as class conscious as them.
For this very reason Castro was able to utilise them in this guerrilla war in exactly the same way as he was able to use the poor peasants. That is, their form of struggle under Castro’s leadership was not a specific proletarian form of struggle. Indeed, against Hansen, we would argue that it was the very absence of the well organised urban working class led by a revolutionary party from the Cuban revolutionary struggle that made possible the bureaucratisation of the movement and the creation of a degenerate workers’ state.
His attempt to give the Castroites revolutionary proletarian credentials leads Hansen to ignore the popular frontist character of the J26M. In his Draft Theses on the Cuban Revolution in 1960 Hansen concedes that the initial government was a “coalition”, including in it “bourgeois democratic elements”.45 However this feature of the J26M, its limitation to a bourgeois programme, and the class polarisation that resulted when this coalition was placed under the combined and conflicting pressures of the Cuban masses and US imperialism, is completely ignored.
Castro can be portrayed as a revolutionary driven left simply by US imperialism:
“The conflict between American imperialism and the Castro forces precipitated a political crisis in Havana. This was resolved by a decided turn to the left.”46
The J26M becomes simply “the Castro forces”, an undifferentiated bloc. This is vital for Hansen’s analysis. This way he can paint Castro as a consistent revolutionary constantly evolving leftwards, albeit unconsciously. This obscures Castro’s real role as a bonaparte for capitalism in the first nine months of 1959. It also provides Hansen with an explanation of why Castro was eventually able to create a workers’ state. Castro’s liquidation of the J26M into Cuban Stalinism, which was possible because a pro-Stalinist wing existed in the movement, and the creation of a degenerate workers’ state by this force, are ignored in the interests of Hansen’s capitulationist schema of Cuba as a healthy workers’ state not in need of political revolution.
Hansen observes the anti-capitalist aspects of Castro’s “workers’ government” but assimilates it to the norm of the Comintern’s revolutionary workers’ government. He obscures the fact that the Cuban workers’ and farmers’ government was not under the control of or answerable to the proletariat and the poor peasantry. For it to have been so, democratic workers’ militia and workers’ and peasants’ councils would have had to have come into being. Such bodies did not come into being and in addition the existing workers’ organisations, especially the trade unions, were purged of their pro-capitalist bureaucracy.
This was immediately replaced with a Stalinist one. Whilst the anti-capitalist measures leading to the creation of a workers’ state are observed even if in a telescoped form by Hansen, the bureaucratic exclusion from political power of the working class is completely ignored. In fact, if this latter process is taken into account, one is forced to conclude that Castro’s government was not a revolutionary, but a bureaucratic workers’ and peasant’ government.
The reason Hansen feels able to dismiss the fact that the Cuban proletariat had no real self-organised, armed, democratic bodies, is because he reduces such bodies to mere “forms of proletarian democracy”:
“If the Cuban revolution were permitted to develop freely, its democratic tendency would undoubtedly lead to the early creation of proletarian democratic forms adapted to Cuba's own needs.”47
Not only can a healthy workers’ state be created without a revolutionary party, it can also be created on behalf of the masses, rather than by them, without soviets or a workers’ militia. If this is the case, then the task for Trotskyists should simply be to encourage petit-bourgeois nationalists leftwards, to coax them to act on behalf of the masses. There is no need for a party, nor for a programme based on the struggle for the seizure of power by the working class organised in soviets. These things, Hansen assures us, will some day eventually evolve naturally!
Against this distortion of Marxism it needs to be re-affirmed that soviets and a workers’ militia are not mere “forms of proletarian democracy”. They are the indispensable weapons that the working class has in the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and they are the means by which the working class exercises its direct political rule in a healthy workers’ state.
Their temporary atrophy can be offset by the existence of a consciously revolutionary party (e.g. Russia 1920) but not by a petit-bourgeois nationalist movement that assimilated itself to Stalinism. Besides if the evolution of these democratic forms was really possible in Cuba then the followers of Hansen would have to explain why, twenty-two years later, such organs of power still do not exist in Cuba.
Hansen was unable to raise an independent revolutionary programme for Cuba. As happened with Yugoslavia, the SWP (USA), fooled by one of Stalinism’s disguises, reduced its own role to that of being friendly advisor to Castro. If this applied to Cuba then it would equally apply to a host of other imperialised countries. Hansen’s theory, building on and developing the Fourth International’s earlier errors, cleared the way for reunification with Pablo and Germain's International Secretariat. The United Secretariat of the Fourth International was founded on a programme that bore no resemblance to authentic Trotskyism’s characterisation of Stalinism.
The theory of structural assimilation
The theory of structural assimilation holds that the creation of workers’ states in Eastern Europe, Indochina and Cuba was, in essence, the result of the assimilation of these societies into the USSR. For the theorists of structural assimilation – most notably in the recent period, Tim Wohlforth – the process of the creation of new workers’ states has ultimately been the process of the extension of the property relations established by the workers’ revolution in Russia:
“Thus all post-war overturns were in essence extensions of the new property forms thrown up by the October Revolution and the bureaucratic caste which usurped these property forms.” 48
The superficial attraction of this theory lies in the fact that, within its terms, neither Stalinist parties nor petit-bourgeoisie nationalist forces are deemed capable of creating workers’ states. even of a form degenerate from birth. They can do so only as extensions of the degenerate October Revolution.
“The theory of structural assimilation explained a process of the creation of deformed workers’ states through the extension of the degenerated workers’ state. That is it answered the question of origins without in any sense undermining the revolutionary role of the proletariat.”49
By “proving” that the agency of social revolution remains, albeit in a highly refracted and degenerate form, the October Revolution, Wohlforth thought he had discovered a “theory” which would ward off the opportunist deviations of Pabloism.
Wohlforth’s position has changed significantly over the years, particularly on the question of China and Cuba. But a common thread of an erroneous and non-Marxist position of the state links his positions from 1961 to the present day.
Wohlforth is never absolutely clear as to what precisely happened to the capitalist state in the countries of Eastern Europe following the victories of the Red Army. or in China in 1949 or in Cuba in 1959. One can interpret his position in two ways: either the capitalist state apparatus was never smashed; or it was, but was immediately reconstituted by the Stalinists or petit-bourgeois nationalists, On Eastern Europe he argues:
“(structural assimilation) was not carried through by the destruction of the old bourgeois state in its entirety and the erection of a new working class state apparatus. Not only has much of the administrative structure been kept intact to this day, but a good section of the personnel of the old state administration has been maihtained.”50
While on China he states the following:
“Rather it [the CCP – eds] devoted its efforts to the creation of a coalition government with the remnants of the national bourgeoisie and petit bourgeois forces, guaranteed the sanctity of private property in the immediate period, and set to work to reconstruct the bourgeois state apparatus.”51
The confusion arises because Wohlforth defines the class nature of the state, not on the basis of what mode of production it defends (i.e. its class content), but on the basis of its form. What becomes important to Wohlforth in determining the class nature of these states is the fact that a standing army was recreated, and that the old personnel and administration were maintained. This also explains why he has no conception of the existence of dual power (except as “territorial” dual power in China) in this period of overturn.
The class nature of the state apparatus becomes subsumed by its form. Having relegated the question of which property form the state presides over to the level of a secondary question. the crucial events leading to the characterisation of these states as deformed workers’ states therefore takes place at the level of the superstructure, within the state apparatus:
“The actual social transformation was carried through in the state sector by a process of purging a section of the state bureaucracy, the inundation of the state apparatus with supporters of the Stalinists, and the fusion of the state and Communist Party bureaucracies.”52
This virtual separation of base and superstructure leads Wohlforth into a serious error on the nature of the nationalisations during this period. Wohlforth argues:
“The direct economic power of the bourgeois class in Eastern Europe had been basically eroded with the nationalisations which followed the war. And when it comes to social ownership therefore, the structural transformation process simply completed a process basically finished.” 54
But these nationalisations – by capitalist states in Eastern Europe in the period 1944-45 – did not decisively “erode” the economic power of the bourgeoisie, any more than they did for the Egyptian bourgeoisie under Nasser. What really “eroded” the power of the bourgeoisie in this period was the smashing of its coercive apparatus. The crucial question for Wohlforth in the creation of workers’ states therefore becomes, “In whose hands is the state power?”:
“The completion of the destruction of the economic underpinning of the bourgeois forces in these countries did not represent such a drastic change as the destruction of their political power. In most of these countries, by 1947, the commanding heights of industry were in the hands of the state, thus the critical question was in whose hands the state was, rather than the mopping up operation on the remnants of private capitalist holdings.”55
The introduction of state planning, we should note in passing, must have been part of this “mopping up operation”!
This gives rise to Wohlforth’s concentration on the fusion of the CPs and the Social Democrats and the “interpenetration of the monolithic party with the state apparatus” (tightening of the Stalinists’ grip on the state, and that state’s grip on society) as the decisive points that mark the creation of a workers’ state albeit of a degenerate form. As Wohlforth himself describes the process:
“Essentially structural assimilation is a combined process of the destruction of the political and social power of the bourgeoisie through administrative means, the consolidation of a monolithic party which is essentially an extension of the soviet bureaucracy, the purging of the state apparatus of bourgeois elements and the fusion of the party and the state bureaucracies into a single ruling bureaucratic caste.”56
Underlying Wohlforth’s theory of structural assimilation is a conception of the state, and therefore of the transition from one type of state to another, which owes more to Kautsky than to Marx.57
For Wohlforth it is possible for the proletariat, or a caste within it, to lay hold of the existing state machine and use it as an instrument for the creation of a workers’ state, as a means of carrying through the social revolution. At no point in this process is the bourgeois state “smashed”; rather it is “purged”.
There is no qualitative break, rather the bourgeois state grows over through an evolutionary process into a degenerate workers’ state:
“The problem of dating, like the problem of the destruction of the bourgeois state through ‘fusion and purging’, is a reflection of the very process of structural assimilation. Wherever this problem occurs – as long as it is crystal clear that a social overturn has taken place – one knows one is dealing with this process.”58
This method stands in sharp contrast to our analysis of the formation of degenerate workers’ states which analyses at every point the class nature of the state and the programmatic and tactical implications which flow from it. For Wohlforth, and presumably for any party which adhered to his theory, they could only know a workers’ state had come into existence, or even that the process had started, after the event!
Wohlforth’s explanation of the creation of new workers’ states is also based on an erroneous analysis of the nature of Stalinism and the Stalinist parties. In his original 1963 essay, the Communist parties were described as being in all essentials, extensions of the Kremlin bureaucracy. Hence it is the Kremlin bureaucracy, based upon the property relations established by a workers’ revolution, that is laying hold of these state machines and using them as a means for the transformation of bourgeois states into workers’ states through a process of “purgation”.
The degenerated workers’ state, which emanated from the October Revolution, has extended itself through its agents into large contiguous areas surrounding the USSR – a process we call “defensive expansionism”.59 And again, in argument with the bureaucratic collectivists:
“But Stalinism did not expand in the post-war world on this basis. It did not grow out of the managerial strata of capitalist society at all. Rather it extended itself from the USSR. Thus the identity of Stalinism with the USSR its extension through its own agents and in opposition to all strata of the countries in which the transformation took place cannot be explained through the theory of bureaucratic collectivism.” 60
This analysis is extended, but only with difficulty, to Yugoslavia and China. On the Yugoslav Communist Party he argues:
“Once the buffer in general is really understood there are no theoretical problems connected with the Yugoslav developments in particular. The basic point is to recognise the nature of the domestic CPs as essentially an extension of the Soviet bureaucracy itself. Once this is recognised then social transformations of a more ‘indigenous’ character like Yugoslavia can be comprehended. Yugoslavia differed only in degree in this respect – this was not a qualitative difference.”61
While on the question of the Chinese Communist Party the following analysis is put forward:
“To the extent that the CCP was and is independent of domestic social classes, it is dependent upon – is essentially an extension of – the bureaucratic caste of the USSR, the distorted product of a workers’ revolution.”62
This is a fundamentally undialectical and therefore false characterisation of the national communist parties. Ever since the beginning of the bureaucratic thermidor in the USSR which was carried through under the nationalist slogan of “socialism in one country”, the Comintern underwent a process of disintegration along the lines of national chauvinism. The national CPs accommodated to specific strata of the petit-bourgeoisie in the imperialised countries and to the labour bureaucracy in the imperialist countries.
This process of accommodation took an accelerated form in the civil wars in Yugoslavia and China. As Wohlforth himself in his second document points out, this process led to the crystallisation of a bureaucratic caste in those societies, with its own distinct interests, separate from, and counter posed to, not only the masses of its particular society, but also to the national interests of the Soviet bureaucracy.
The timing and speed of the social overturn in Yugoslavia, the very seizure of power in China, took place contrary to the immediate interests and desires of the Kremlin bureaucracy.
These Stalinist bureaucracies have been capable of making their own alliances with imperialism, against the Soviet bureaucracy, up to and including breaking from the Soviet bloc and entering into military alliance and cooperation with imperialism (for example, Yugoslavia and the Korean war, China’s relations with the USA in the late 1970s).
In a more recent document, Wohlforth appears to recognise the untenability of his previous analysis of Stalinism, as he attempts to grapple with the problems of the Chinese and Cuban revolutions. He states:
“I have proven that all the post-war social overturns have been initiated from on top by military-bureaucratic means and have led to the establishment of deformed workers’ states identical in all essentials with the USSR. However the path which led to these social transformations differed significantly in the case of the Chinese Variant and the Cuban Variant. Yet none of these processes were totally independent of the Soviet Stalinist State.”63
Historical reality has pushed Wohlforth from a position where these parties were seen as little more than “extensions of the Kremlin bureaucracy” to one where they are seen as not “totally independent” of the Kremlin. The theory of structural assimilation, which argued that Stalinist and petit-bourgeois nationalist movements were incapable of creating deformed workers’ states except as extensions of the Kremlin bureaucracy, has been stretched to breaking point!
It is false to see the Stalinist parties as simply extensions of the Soviet bureaucracy. The logic of this very argument led Pablo to conclude that the Yugoslav Communist Party had ceased to be a Stalinist one once it broke with the Kremlin! However, the ability of the forces of Stalinism to carry through bureaucratic social revolutions cannot be abstracted historically from the existence of the USSR and its strength vis-a-vis imperialism. In the case of Yugoslavia, China and Cuba, the bureaucratic revolutions were carried through in a situation where the world bourgeoisie was insufficiently strong in relation to the USSR to directly and successfully intervene to protect the native bourgeoisie and the capitalist property relations.
The very existence of the USSR can, of course, serve to materially aid the native Stalinist forces directly. That this will not always be the case, should those forces not be advancing the interests of the Kremlin bureaucracy, is demonstrated by the Greek events of 1944-45.
The USSR can, by its very existence and armed might, undermine the possibility of internationally- backed capitalist retaliation and counter-revolution. It can serve as an alternative source of economic aid and cooperation to forces struggling to break the stranglehold of imperialism over their national economies, as in the case of Cuba. But such assistance will only ever be forthcoming from the USSR should the overturn potentially strengthen the bargaining position of the Kremlin bureaucracy without upsetting the Kremlin’s strategy of peaceful co-existence with imperialism.
Within Wohlforth’s theory of the state is a reformist political logic which stands outside the tradition of the Third and Fourth Internationals. This is most clearly seen in Wohlforth’s most recent article, Transition to the Transition in New Left Review.
Defining the class nature of the state according to its superstructural form rather than on the basis of what property forms it defends, has led him to question, like Kautsky before him, the soviet system itself. Hailing looked more closely at the “Soviet type of the early period of the USSR”, Wohlforth is obviously no longer sure as to whether it was “fundamentally different” from and superior to, the bureaucratic East European or Mussolini state types, which were both, for him, capitalist in form.
In this article, Wohlforth contents himself with attacking Soviet democracy as “undemocratic” and proposes instead a good dose of bourgeois democracy for the early Soviet State. If the early Soviet Union also has a “capitalist state form”, then it is only logical to argue for capitalist forms of democracy. Thus the “failure” of the early Bolshevik government to transform the Soviets into a “practical government structure” exposed the impossibility of directly combining the decentralised Soviet system with the needs of a modernised centralised state, as well as revealing the ambiguities (sic) in the Leninist counter position of “proletarian” versus “bourgeois democracy.”64
Wohlforth believes it is “utopian” to imagine the establishment of direct democratic rule and is only willing to defend “the vision and possibility” of such a system.65 The Bolsheviks were forced to use “much of the old administrative personnel” and were forced to watch over “what was in many respects the reconstitution of the old state apparatus.”66
Rather than the “expansion of democracy” (class character not given), democracy was “restricted.”67 Once again Wohlforth is allowing his preoccupation with the “form” of the state to totally blind him to the content of Soviet democracy. The early Soviet state represented the dictatorship of the proletariat; that was why the bourgeoisie were excluded from the suffrage, why the working class was given greater weight than the peasants in the soviets. Wohlforth, like Kautsky before him, empties democracy of its class content, protests against the violations of “democracy” in general.
Lenin had this to say when Kautsky complained of restrictions in democracy in the young Soviet Republic:
“It is natural for a liberal to speak of ‘democracy’ in general; but a Marxist will never forget to ask, for what class?”68
Undaunted, the liberal Wohlforth continues:
“It is hard to view the young Soviet state as structurally superior to the systems of parliamentary bourgeois democracy excoriated in Leninist doctrine.’69
He then proceeds to recommend a constituent assembly as a stage on the road to soviets after the seizure of power by the proletariat:
“The specific function of representative democracy, therefore is to ensure that the power that still rests at the centralised summit of the state is elected directly through pluralistic competition, universal suffrage and the secret ballot. Representative Democracy is necessary to mediate the contradiction between Sovietism and centralism, and to guarantee the space for, the gradual transfer of power from centralised, representative institutions to decentralised, participatory bodies of a Soviet or communal type.”70
All this is nothing new of course; these were exactly the points on which Kautsky attacked the dictatorship of the proletariat in the young Soviet Republic.
Wohlforth now has agreement with Kautsky not only on the question of the state but also on rejecting the dictatorship of the proletariat. In 1919 in Terrorism and Communism Kautsky defined the USSR as a “bureaucratic dictatorship” where the bureaucracy represented a “new ruling class presiding over a ‘state capitalist’ economy.” Having long had theoretical agreement on the state, it will undoubtedly not be long before Wohlforth reaches agreement with Kautsky on the class nature of the Soviet Union!
The Spartacist school of Stalinophilia
The Cuban Revolution created a new basis for agreement between the two principal camps of world “Trotskyism”. It enabled Joseph Hansen and the SWP (USA) and Ernest Mandel and the International Secretariat to reunite around similar positions on Cuba, that stemmed from their shared erroneous assessment of the Yugoslav revolution in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The SWP’s positions on Cuba did not, however, go unchallenged within that organisation.
During the latter half of 1960, a minority tendency within the SWP (USA) led by Mage, Wohlforth and Robertson, developed an alternative position to the SWP majority on the Cuban revolution. This led, in 1961, to the formation of the Revolutionary Tendency (RT – later to become the international Spartacist tendency iSt ). Wohlforth was quickly to abandon the positions he helped to develop within the opposition and, in alliance with Healy, was to side with the SWP majority in the bureaucratic expulsion of the RT.
The initial positions were further developed within the iSt and have by implication rather than through theoretical elaboration, been extended to cover Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia and China. (Indeed it is astonishing that over twenty years later barely a few lines have been written by the iSt on the Eastern European overturns). Motivated initially by a desire to avoid the chronic opportunism and liquidationism of the Hansen majority, the RT/iSt proceeded to make a series of major revisions of the Marxist theory of the state, which in their implications for the Marxist programme are no less erroneous and dangerous than those made by either Hansen or Wohlforth.
The core of the iSt’s error lies in the characterisation of the nature of the state that existed in Cuba between January 1959 and late 1960. For them the government which controlled Cuba was,:
“an inherently transitory and fundamentally unstable phenomenon – a petitbourgeois government which was not committed to the defence of either bourgeois private property or the collectivist property forms of proletarian class rule.”71
The government came to power in a situation where
“a capitalist state, namely armed bodies of men dedicated to defending a particular property form, did not exist in the Marxist sense.”72
The armed force on which this state rested was led by commanders who had had their
“previous direct connections with oppositional liberal elements broken and had become episodically autonomous from their class...the Cuban bourgeoisie”73
Despite the attempts to distance themselves from the original Mage/Wohlforth position of a “transitional state” with no defined class character – a position defined as “indefensible” in Cuba and Marxist Theory – this is precisely the characterisation the iSt itself used. Cuba and Marxist Theory declares: “at no point was there a classless ‘transitiona’' state in Cuba”, there was “a petit-bourgeois government – not a class neutral one.” The use of the term “petit-bourgeois government” does not get round this problem. Does this mean we have a petit-bourgeois state, based on a petit-bourgeois mode of production?
The iSt recoils from this further revision of Marxism by remaining silent on this interesting new state form. Instead it prefers to define this state negatively, as one which neither defends bourgeois private property nor proletarian property forms.
Either this is a “class neutral” state, or the iSt is trying to breed a unicorn. Such a position directly overthrows the Marxist analysis of the state as elaborated from the Communist Manifesto onwards, that the state is a machine for maintaining the rule of one class over others. It is an organ of class rule which defends, even in its bonapartist form, one set of property forms.
A state which defends neither capitalist nor proletarian property forms is therefore a classless state, a state which is no longer an organ of class rule, and a contradiction of the Marxist theory of the state!
The iSt further argue that a state is defined as “armed bodies of men dedicated to defending a particular property form” 74 [our emphasis]. This IS an idealist notion of the relationship between property relations and the state machine. We judge the class nature of a state by its actions, not by the “dedication” of the individuals who make up its apparatus. This revision is essential for the iSt in giving a theoretical gloss to their notion of a “petit-bourgeois government”, in which the property relations the state chooses to defend at any given time, depends upon indecision in the minds of those in political power.
This fundamentally false analysis has been extended to Nicaragua, where we are expected to believe that (at the time of writing) a government that has been in existence since the summer of 1979, presiding over an economy overwhelmingly in the hands of private capital, does not defend capitalism. It is, rather, not yet decisively “committed” to capitalism or to proletarian property forms!
Such an analysis of the Cuban events is unable to explain the class character of the popular front which came to power in January 1959, which the iSt assures was not capitalist. It ignores the pro-capitalist, bourgeois aspect of the July 26th Movement. When this aspect was dominant (i.e. during the popular front), the J26M crushed all attempts by the workers and peasants to go beyond the bourgeois limits set by the Castro leadership. Further, this analysis sows illusions in the petit-bourgeois leadership of the Rebel Army, declaring them to be somehow committed to no class interests, implying that the Army was somehow “neutral” between workers and peasants on the one hand and the capitalists and landowners on the other.
It therefore cannot explain the struggle – in the form of dual power between the bourgeoisie and its supporters in the army on the one side and the petit-bourgeois leadership around Castro representing, in however a distorted form, the demands and pressure of the aroused workers and peasant masses. The programmatic conclusions of such analysis are necessarily vague – because the Spartacists could not perceive the dual power situation, they had no programme for resolving it.
The basis on which Cuba is characterised as a “deformed workers’ state” by the iSt is also wrong:
“Cuba became a deformed workers’ state with the pervasive nationalisations in the summer and fall of 1960.”75
The equation put forward here: “Nationalisations = deformed workers’ state” is completely false. The monopoly of foreign trade, and most vitally the introduction of planning on the basis of the suppression of the law of value, as well as nationalisations, are the features which, taken together, define an economy as post-capitalist. Further, this position implies that a “petit-bourgeois government” can overturn capitalism and construct a “deformed” workers’ state merely through massive nationalisations.
On this basis, no real distinction can be made between Cuba and other “petit-bourgeois governments” which have followed a similar course, such as Algeria, Egypt, Burma, etc – expect on the basis of the percentage of the economy nationalised. Were all of these capitalist states “deformed workers’ states in the process of formation?” By answering “No”, the Spartacists are forced to contradict their own methodology.
The Spartacists also do not recognise in any form the essential role played by Stalinism in the Cuban Revolution. They do not recognise the proto-Stalinist wing of the pre-1959 J26M.
They do not recognise the alliance of Castro with the Cuban Stalinists from November 1959. They do not recognise the essential assimilation of Castroism to Stalinism, and the reliance on the PSP bureaucratic apparatus during the period of the bureaucratic workers’ government, complete by the onset of planning in 1962. Nor do they recognise that such a process would have been impossible without the economic and military support of the Kremlin. Consequently, they assign to the petit-bourgeoisie the ability. to form a “deformed” workers’ state – a revision of Marxism with regard to the fundamental characteristics of this class.
The fragmentary references of the iSt to the formation of “deformed” workers’ states in Eastern Europe imply the existence of similar periods of “classless states” or “workers’ states in the process of formation.” From the entry of the Red Army, the class nature of the state is indeterminate. The only flaw which the iSt sees in the Vern-Ryan tendency’s equation of entry of Red Army with formation of “deformed” workers’ state, is that in some cases the soviet forces withdraw – e.g. in Austria, leaving behind a capitalist state.76 But the preferred term “workers’ state in the process of formation” is a designation of no use. It can only be used after the event, as a description.
This is a position which, as in Cuba, will not define the class character of the state, its government, or what property forms its army defends at each stage, and thus fails to provide any coherent revolutionary programme during the period of dual power, or the period of an anti-capitalist bureaucratic workers’ government.
Not only a revisionist position on the state emerges from this analysis. In echoing the positions of the Vern-Ryan tendency, the iSt have made a fundamental revision of the Trotskyist understanding of Stalinism. For the iSt, Stalinism has a “dual character” – it has a “bad”, counter-revolutionary side, and a “good”, progressive one. Its bad side involves it in crushing workers’ democracy, expropriating the proletariat from political power; its good side is that it can overturn capitalism, and the two weigh equally in the balance.
This position is evidenced in the increasingly Stalinophile programme of the iSt, particularly with regard to Afghanistan and Poland. In these countries, the “dual” character of Stalinism is reflected in the supposed ability of the Stalinists to act as “liberators in a social as well as national sense” in particular countries, and in its inability to carry through the proletarian revolution on a world scale.77 Both Mandel (in his "Ten Theses" 1951) and the Vern - Ryan tendency (in their description of Stalin ism as centrist) articulated a similar position. This position is absolutely false. It has nothing in common with genuine Trotskyism.
Stalinism does not have two competing aspects, one of which at anyone time predominates over another. Rather, it has a contradictory character because its privileged caste existence in the USSR is based on the post-capitalist property forms established by the October Revolution. To defend these property forms, the very basis of this caste’s existence, the Stalinist bureaucracy is sometimes forced to carry through measures which, if taken in isolation from the way they are carried out and the effects they have on the international class struggle, would be considered progressive.
But these measures are never carried through in isolation, they are always carried through in a counterrevolutionary manner, and always involve the political expropriation of the working class in the country concerned. The Stalinist bureaucracies have a contradictory character, but form a predominantly counter-revolutionary whole. This caste does not have the potential for fulfilling the mission of the proletariat – genuine proletarian revolutions are the prerequisite for building world socialism.
The retreat from the revolutionary programme that the Spartacist position involves can be accurately gauged from the answers that they have offered to the Afghan and Polish masses.
In Afghanistan the iSt reject the perspective of permanent revolution for that country, because of its backwardness. They make a false analogy between the healthy Soviet workers’ state of the early 1920s that assimilated certain backward Asian countries, and the counter-revolutionary international designs of the bonapartist clique in the Kremlin. Events in Afghanistan are viewed not from the standpoint of international class struggle (which would link the struggle of progressive Afghans with that of their fellow Afghan workers resident in Iran, Pakistan etc as part of a struggle for a socialist federation of south west Asia), but from the abstract standpoint of “progress” “now led by Russian tanks”, versus “backwardness.”78
The Spartacists call on the bureaucracy to extend the social gains of the October revolution. They “Hail the Red (sic) Army” as the agent of this process. That is, behind the radical verbiage, they call for, as part of their own programme for Afghanistan, the establishment of a degenerate workers' state. This is not a tactical united front, it is an abandonment of an independent programme. This reliance on the Soviet bureaucrats as second best given the weakness of the Afghan working class, leads inexorably to a strategic bloc with Stalinism.
On the events in Poland 1980-81, the iSt have gone from simple hostility to the Polish workers’ movement right up to a bloc with the Stalinists to help crush that movement. They started their analysis of Poland not from the revolutionary possibilities that existed, but from a supposed threat posed by the Polish workers’ action to the property relations in Poland and the USSR. Their excuse for this stance was their exaggerated view of the immediacy of the Catholic church’s restorationist intentions.
After trying to square the circle – giving limited support to the misled Polish workers, and opposing a Russian invasion (by “hissing at tanks” as Workers Vanguard advised), by late 1981 the iSt gave up and decided that Solidarnosc was counterrevolutionary to the core, and should be crushed, by Kremlin tanks if necessary:
“Solidarity’s counter-revolutionary course must be stopped! If the Kremlin Stalinists, in their necessarily brutal, stupid way, intervene militarily to stop it, we will support this. And we take responsibility in advance for this; whatever the idiocies and atrocities they will commit, we do not flinch from defending the crushing of Solidarity's counterrevolution.” 79
When the Jaruzelski coup was launched on 13 December 1981, when Polish tanks moved to crush the 10 million strong movement of Polish workers, the Spartacists were quick to offer their support. They warned the Polish workers against any resistance, and cynically described the crackdown as a “cold shower” for the Polish proletariat. Upset by over a year of class struggle, these miserable pedants, who can only imagine winning the working class to their cruel caricature of Trotskyism in the sterile atmosphere of the propagandists’ school room (separate from the actual struggles of workers), called for a return to Gierek’s 1970s’ style of government:
“If the present crackdown restores something like the tenuous social equilibrium which existed in Poland before the Gdansk strikes last August, a tacit understanding that if the people left the government alone, the government would leave the people alone – conditions will be opened again for the crystallisation of a Leninist-Trotskyist party.” 80
The iSt have blood on their hands. The “good” side of Stalinism’s “dual nature”, the side that the iSt call on revolutionaries to support, has become its willingness and ability to crush the independent activity of the working class. Programmatic confusion on Cuba in 1960 has become metamorphosed into Stalinophile clarity in 1982. At no stage in this evolution did the Spartacists represent a revolutionary challenge to the bankrupt centrism of the USFI.
Footnotes
1. Fourth International, (New York, May 1945) p.153
2. Fourth International, (New York, June 1946) p.172
3. ibid. p.255
4. International Information Bulletin, (New York, March 1947) p.8
5. ibid. p.16
6. Fourth International, (New York,December 1948) p.241
7. International Information Bulletin, (New York, December 1949) p.27
8. International Information Bulletin, (New York, May 1950) p.18
9. Fourth International, (New York November/December 1951)
10. Class, Party and State in the Eastern European Revolution, (New York 1969) p.57 11. Towards a History of the Fourth International, (New York 1974) Part 4, Vol.l p.17 12. ibid. p'.1~
13. D.Vern, “Method, Doctrine and the Buffer States” 1951 , in Documents of the Vern -Ryan Tendency, (Communard Publishers n.d.) p.13
14. Towards a History of the Fourth International, (New York 1974) Part 4, Vol. 1 pp.17-18
15. cf C.L. Liu, “China: An Aborted Revolution” in, Fourth International, (New York, January/February 1950)
16. Fourth International, (New York, January/February 1951) p.24
17. E.Mandel, From Class Society to Communism, (London 1977) p.
18. The Development and Disintegration of World Stalinism, (New York 1970) p.20 19. ibid. p.23
20. E.Mandel, Marxist Economic Theory, (London 1968) p.558
21. cf Intercontinental Press, (New York) Vol. 17, No.13
22. E.Mandel, Marxist Economic Theory, op. cit. p.565
23. E.Mandel, Revolutionary Marxism Today, (London 1979) p.120
24. Fourth International, (New York, November/December 1952) p.192
25. L Trotsky,The Revolution Betrayed, (New York 1972) p.275
26. E.Mandel, Revolutionary Marxism Today, OR. cit. p.116
27. International Information Bulletin (New York, December 1949) p.2
28. E.Mandel, Revolutionary Marxism Today, OR. cit. p.136
29. International Information Bulletin, (New York January 1950) p.43
30. Class, Party and State and the Eastern European Revolution,op.cit.p.24
31. ibid. p.35
32. ibid. p.31
33. J.Hansen, Dynamics of the Cuban Revolution,(New York 1978) p.73
34. ibid.p.73
35. ibid. p.74
36. ibid. p.74
37. ibid. p.74
38. ibid. p.74
39. ibid. p.85
40. ibid. p.75
41. ibid. p.75
42. ibid. p.75
43. ibid. p.76
44. ibid. p.202-3
45. ibid. p.73
46. ibid. p.74
47. ibid. p.75
48. T Wohlforth, The Post War Social Overturns and Marxist Theory, (SWP-US internal discussion document, May 1979) p.72 (henceforth referred to as Wohlforth, 1979)
49. Quoted in T Kerry, “The Wohlforth Way: A Methodological Mutation” in, Class,Party and State and the Eastern European Revolution, OR. cit. p.6
50. T Wohlforth, “The Theory of Structural Assimilation”. This 1963 essay was reprinted in, Communists Against Revolution, (London 1978). All references are from this book, henceforth referred to as Wohlforth-1978
51. T Wohlforth 1963,p.28 51. ibid. p.71 (our emphasis)
52. ibid. p.47
53. ibid. p.23
54. ibid. p.31 (our emphasis)
55. ibid. p.24-5 (our emphasis;
56. ibid. p.35 (emphasis in original)
57. It is clear that Wohlforth’s position on the state both predates and underpins the theory of structural assimilation. Thus, he argues in 1961 in a document that predates structural assimilation: “It (the concept of the transitional state) is said to be in contradiction with the Marxist theory of the state as at all times the instrument of the ruling class of a particular society... I will expand on the challenge and state categorically all the emerging deformed workers’ states - Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia, China, North Korea, North Vietnam, Cuba - went through transitional periods of more or less extended periods of time during which a bonapartist state apparatus administering a capitalist economy was transformed into a state apparatus, still bonapartist, administering a nationalised economy. (T.Wohlforth, “Cuba and the Deformed Workers’ States” 1961,p.12 in, Cuba and Marxist Theory (Spartacist League Pamphlet). Again we see a state which, because it is not defined in Marxist terms, i.e. in terms of property relations that it defends, is able to “float free” from its economic base and become, “transformed” from a bonapartist (capitalist) state into a bonapartist (degenerated workers’) state without that state ever being smashed. (This is, of course, also the origin of the iSt’s “transitional state” which owes more to the “Kautskyite Wohlforth” than they care to admit.)
58. T Wohlforth 1963, p.87 (emphasis in original)
59. ibid. p.82
60. ibid. p.85 (emphasis in original)
61. ibid. p.62
62. ibid. p.75 (emphasis in original!
63. T Wohlforth 1979, p.79
64. T. Wohlforth,”The Transition to the Transition” in New Left Review No. 130, p.69
65. ibid. p.68
66. ibid. p.76
67. ibid. p.78
68. V I Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow 1965) Vol.28,p.235
69. T Wohlforth, New Left Review op. cit. p.80
70. ibid. p.79
71. “Guerillas in Power” in Workers Vanguard No. 102
72. ibid.
73. Cuba and Marxist Theory op. cit.
76. cf. section of this volume on the Fourth International after the Second World War.
77. “Whose Poland” in Spartacist Britain No. 32
78. Spartacist (Theoretical journal of the Spartacist League) Winter 1979/80
79. “Stop Solidarity’s Counter-Revolution” in Spartacist Britain No.36
80. “Power Bid Spiked” in Workers Vanguard No. 295
Appendix: Marxism, Stalinism and the theory of the state
An internal debate in the League during the 1990s focussed on the question of the process of capitalist restoration in Eastern Europe. It concluded that some of the formulations in the Degenerated Revolution had been incorrect. This Appendix was printed in Trotskyist International Number 23 as a correction
In 1956 the Hungarian Uprising demonstrated to the world both the possibility of a political revolution against Stalinist bureaucracy and the character it would take.
It showed that the ruling Communist Party, the army, the secret police and the state administration would act as agents of repression against any working class attempt to establish its own control over a state which claimed to be proletarian. Newly created fighting organisations (workers' councils, a militia) would be necessary to forcibly overthrow Stalinist tyranny.
Even though the power of the Hungarian workers’ councils was crushed by Soviet tanks, these events put flesh and blood on the positive scenario contained in Leon Trotsky’s prognosis in the Transitional Programme that:
“either the bureaucracy, becoming ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie in the worker’s state, will overthrow the new forms of property and plunge the country back to capitalism or the working class will crush the bureaucracy and open the way to socialism.”
Three and a half decades later, after further revolutionary crises and Soviet interventions or threats of them, a general and terminal crisis hit the states of Eastern Europe and spread to the USSR itself. Whilst events in 1989-91 vindicated Leon Trotsky’s analysis of these countries as degenerate workers’ states, they also confirmed the negative alternative prognosis he had made in 1938, that the Stalinist bureaucracy would be the main agent of social counter-revolution.
Events of such great historic moment should force revolutionaries to reflect upon the key aspects of their inherited doctrine and theory. Has it stood the test of great events? One aspect of this challenge has been to the Marxist theory of the state in general and more particularly Trotsky’s concept of the bureaucratic state machine in the post-capitalist societies of the USSR, China, S.E. Asia, Eastern Europe and Cuba. The last seven years have given us ample evidence of the impact the capitalist restoration process has had on the ruling parties and the different components of the state machine.
In 1982 Workers Power and the Irish Workers Group published The Degenerated Revolution, the Origin and Nature of the Stalinist States in which we set out the implications for Marxist theory and programme of the creation of a series of Stalinist states after World War Two. This book was a landmark in the theoretical rearming of Trotskyism and a break with previous centrist analyses of these events. It provided a revolutionary account of the way in which Stalinist parties and armies crushed or derailed the working class challenge to capitalism in the aftermath of World War Two, before bureaucratically overthrowing capitalism as a defensive measure in the face of imperialist aggression.
While the bulk of the book served to orient Trotskyists to the coming death agony of Stalinism, one aspect was—we have since decided—flawed: the book contains a false attempt at a re-elaborated Marxist theory of the state.1
What do Marxists mean by the state?
At its most general (and imprecise) level the term state is used by Marxists and non-Marxists alike to signify the whole “social formation”—to indicate the political superstructure, as well as the means of production and social classes that live within a definite territory. So, for example, when we speak of a “degenerated workers’ state” we have this totality in mind. This is a dialectical, a contradictory conception, one which reflects and expresses real socio-economic and political contradictions.
When we use the term state in this way and seek to define its fundamental class character we do so according to the property relations that are predominant and are actually protected by the political superstructure, no matter what class character this superstructure might have if analysed in isolation from this economic base. Hence, the USSR under Stalin remained a workers’ state despite the monstrous totalitarian character of its apparatus of repression.
When the occasion arises we are forced to be more precise, often to isolate our political tasks, or to differentiate our political from our economic tasks. Then we have to distinguish between the “state” and “civil society”. By the latter we mean the nexus of economic relations and the various social classes, and other cultural forms that arise out of them. In a market economy these economic and social relations operate “blindly” and do not need direction from any political, external force, though the political public force acts as a guarantor of their reproduction.
In this duality we use the term “state” in a narrower sense to mean the political superstructure. Within this category we include not only the essential core of the state—police, standing army, bureaucracy—but in addition, the governmental regimes: parliamentary assemblies, monarchies, republican presidencies, theocracies. For Marxists the latter, however important they may be, are not “the essence” of the state. Thus even the most representative of these institutions, subject to periodic elections under a system of universal suffrage, come and go, rise and fall, without anything fundamental changing about the essence of the “state”.
Finally, when we want to focus the discussion even more narrowly we can isolate the core institutions of police, standing army and bureaucracy, and designate these alone as the “state-machine”.
As early as the German Ideology (1845), but fully codified in the 1870s (Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State), Marx and Engels give us a consistent class and materialist account of the nature and origin of the state, in the second sense explained above, that is, a public force or political superstructure rising out of and above civil society.
Quite simply, it arises on two conditions: first, that there should be a condition of generalised scarcity of goods; secondly, that classes have appeared and that the level of material wealth has developed sufficiently so as to give rise to a large enough surplus for society to sustain an armed public force separate and distinct from the rest of the population. Such a public force is necessary when society is divided into antagonistic classes (i.e. exploiters and exploited) since otherwise the latter will use their weapons to overturn their exploiters. This ostensibly public force is an instrument of the ruling economic class and serves to perpetuate its domination.2 Through a historic process of revolutions and counter-revolutions in different class societies, the bureaucratic-military state machine core becomes more hypertrophied and powerful vis-a-vis other components of the state.
The more generalised and sharp the class conflict generated by this exploitation and oppression all the more does the state machine isolate itself from any democratic and accountable pressure. 3
In his early writings Marx had no clear idea of what the tasks of the working class were in relation to this public force. Could it be seized as it was and used to emancipate the working class? By the time of the Communist Manifesto (1848) Marx had concluded that economic emancipation would not be possible for the working class without winning “the battle for democracy”, i.e. to replace the state machine with the “proletariat organised as the ruling class”. That is, it had to win political power in order to liberate itself from its exploitation. But, as Lenin remarked, in the Communist Manifesto, “the state is still treated in an extremely abstract manner, in the most general terms and expressions.”4
Having lived through the bourgeois revolutions and counter-revolutions in Europe between 1848 and 1851 Marx was able, in Lenin’s words, to “take a tremendous step forward” in respect of his theory of the state. In 1851, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Marx analysed what had occurred during the ebbs and flows of the French revolution of 1848-51. Behind the frequently changing scenery of parliamentary and presidential republics, conventions and assemblies, and ultimately the restoration of a monarchy, Marx perceived the essence of the state, the “executive power with its enormous bureaucratic and military organisation”.
This executive or state machine was the prize over which revolutions were fought, around which parliamentary, bonapartist or monarchical institutions were assembled. Marx finally concluded what the proletariat’s tasks were in relation to this machine:
“All revolutions perfected this machine instead of smashing it. The parties that contended in turn for domination regarded the possession of this huge edifice as the principal spoils of the victor”.5
By 1871—with France once more in revolution—Marx re-affirmed this conclusion and elaborated upon it. For the first time the proletriat had seized power , in a great modern city. Marx believed that the actions of the Paris Commune had proved:
“The proletariat cannot, as the ruling classes and their various competing factions have done after their victory, simply take possession of the existing machinery of state and employ this ready-made machinery for its own purposes. The prime condition for retaining its political power is to reconstruct this inherited political machine and to destroy it as an instrument of class domination.”6
Lenin says of this: “This conclusion is the chief and fundamental point in the Marxist theory of the state”.
Marx was now, after the Paris Commune, able to flesh out exactly what “smashing” the state machine, as opposed to “taking it over”, means. For Marx the idea of smashing the state signified above all the replacement of the bourgeois state institutions—standing army, unaccountable executive, unrecallable legislature—by institutions of proletarian democracy: a territorial workers’ militia, defending a body that fused a legislature and executive and which was in turn fully and immediately recallable by its electorate.
In The Eighteenth Brumaire Marx explicitly drew a fundamental dividing line between the classical bourgeois French Revolution and the nature of the impending proletarian revolution.
He argued that whereas the former had ultimately only taken over the old military bureaucratic apparatus of feudal absolutism and developed it anew, the task of the proletarian revolution was to smash that very apparatus of social and political oppression. Marx counterposed the most thoroughgoing bourgeois revolution from below to the programme of the proletarian revolution in that the latter will entail the “smashing” of the old state machine, whereas the former did not.
And yet the French Revolution involved the total destruction of the old absolutist army replacing it with a new revolutionary arming of the people. It involved the establishment of organs of popular bourgeois democratic dictatorship which routed the old aristocratic rule. Marx knew all this but still refused to grant that the old absolutist state machine had been smashed in the sense of his new conception.
Merely violently destroying and then recomposing the former institutions to serve a new master was, in his view, not smashing but rather, “taking hold of” the state machine. In an all out war for example one state machine can be totally destroyed by the actions of another state; one set of rulers thereby completely obliterated by another, without this conforming to the smashing of the state in the sense outlined by Marx. Human history is replete with such examples, involving the most diverse stages of development and the most diverse classes and nations in conflict.
Following the experience of the Paris Commune Marx began to elaborate the tasks of the proletariat in smashing the state. He saw the Commune as a specific form of republic that could end class rule, through implementing its programme:
“The first decree of the Commune (...) was the suppression of the standing army, and its replacement by the armed people.”
All officials were to be elected and subject to recall and to be paid the same wages as workers. Lenin argues that these changes may appear to be merely “fuller democracy”, but in fact they represent a replacement of state institutions by others of a “fundamentally different type.” He goes on:
“This is exactly a case of “quantity being transformed into quality”: democracy, introduced as fully and consistently as is at all conceivable, is transformed from bourgeois into proletarian democracy; from the state (= a special force for the suppression of a particular class) into something which is no longer the state proper.”7.
Through the experience of the Commune, and later of the Russian Revolutions, Marx and then Lenin were able to make concrete the difference between the tasks of the proletarian revolution and those of earlier revolutions, that previously Marx had only been able to point to in abstract. These concrete acts–the replacement of the standing army with the armed people, and the subordination of all officials to the rule of the people–led to the qualitative transformation that is the essential difference between all previous revolutions and the proletarian revolution.
The proletariat does not “abolish” the state. Indeed it requires a force to suppress the inevitable resistance of the bourgeoisie and its allies. Why then does Lenin say that this is “no longer the state proper”? He argues that as the organ of suppression is the majority of the population, there is no need for a special force, and therefore the state, in its essence as a special force, necessarily begins to wither away. The proletarian state retains key tasks, but it is transformed into something qualitatively different from all previous forms of the state.
“(Marx) stated that the “smashing” of the state machine was required by the interests of both the workers and the peasants, that it united them, that it placed before them the common task of removing the “parasite” and of replacing it by something new”.
Lenin argued that the creation of this something new, the semi-state, must begin immediately upon the workers seizing power. He saw it as inseparable from the general tasks of the proletarian revolution, with the workers organising large-scale production based on their own experience and backed by the state power of the armed workers, alongside the reduction of the role of state officials to “modestly paid foremen and accountants”. This will inevitably lead to the gradual withering away of bureaucracy, and end a state with a separate and special function.
The Russian Revolution and the bourgeois state machine
In essence, Lenin adds nothing new to Marx’s theory except to show how the Russian Soviets of 1917 corresponded to the proletarian type of state that must smash the bourgeois state machine. As Lenin says: “The Soviet power is a new type of state, without bureaucracy, without a police force, without a standing army.”8
Trotsky echoed Lenin in this regard:
“Lenin, following Marx and Engels, saw the distinguishing feature of the proletarian revolution in the fact that, having expropriated the exploiters, it would abolish the necessity of a bureaucratic apparatus raised above society—and above all, a police and standing army.”9
In other words, the working class needs a state that is constructed in such a way that it immediately begins to die away—a semi-state. Moreover, this applied to all aspects of the state machine;
“This same bold view of the state in a proletarian dictatorship found finished expression a year and a half after the conquest of power in the programme of the Bolshevik Party, including its section on the army. A strong state, but without mandarins; armed power, but without the Samurai! It is not the tasks of defence which create a military and state bureaucracy, but the class structure of society carried over into the organisation of defence. The army is only a copy of the social relations. The struggle against foreign danger necessitates, of course, in the workers’ state as in others, a specialised military-technical organisation, but in no case a privileged officer caste. The party programme demands a replacement of the standing army by an armed people.”10
The army is the core of the state machine. In Engels’ words “in the last analysis the state is reducible to bodies of armed men.”11 Therefore, the smashing of this part of the state machine goes to the heart of the programme of socialist transition in a workers’ state. Trotsky, as head of the Red Army, naturally recognised that a workers’ state needs a “specialised military-technical organisation” to defend itself from threats. Yet Trotsky was in no doubt that the Red Army during 1918-23 was qualitatively different from the bourgeois standing army:
“The great French Revolution created its army by amalgamating the new formations with the royal battalions of the line. The October Revolution dissolved the Tsar’s army wholly and without leaving a trace. The Red Army was built anew from the first brick.”12
Trotsky located the special and unique character of a revolutionary army in a workers semi-state in the amalgamation of the regular forces with the militia system and the abolition of military ranks.
In March 1919 the 8th CPSU Congress argued for the creation of an army “as far as possible by extra-barrack room methods—that is, in a set-up close to the labour conditions of the working class.” Divisions in the army were to coincide territorially with the factories, mines, villages etc and through the closest connection with the working class a “co-operative spirit instilled by the barracks, and inculcate conscious discipline without the elevation above the army of a professional officer’s corps.”13
But Trotsky was aware that the programmatic norm—territorial militia—required for its fullest flowering a certain minimum material foundation in economic life; that is, the relative homogeneity between town and country, a minimum level of infrastructure. A considerable depth of economic foundations were required for the introduction and universalisation of the cheaper and more efficient and effective territorial militia system. But they barely existed. So:
“the Red Army was created from the very beginning as a necessary compromise between the two systems, with the emphasis on regular troops.”
This can also be seen in the Red Army’s experience with the officer corps. The standing army of the bourgeoisie needs one. It sets the officers aloof from the ranks and has a political and social function reflecting the class society it is based upon. With rank comes privilege and the chain of command that allows for the army to be set up against the people. Trotsky argued that in the Red Army, by contrast:
“The growth of internal solidarity of the detachments, the development in the soldier of a critical attitude to himself and his commanders will create favourable conditions in which the principle of the electivity of the commanding personnel can receive wider and wider application.”14
The fact that a professional armed force needs to be assembled and trained to fight to secure the borders of the workers’ state does not in itself make it a “standing army” in the Marxist sense of this term. A healthy workers’ state needs an army and an intelligence service to protect itself against imperialist aggression.
But such an army would be drawn from an armed people, would live for the most part among the people when not fighting, would not enjoy privileges over the rest of the population and while observing military discipline in the face of the enemy would not be hierarchically stratified with the usual privileges that goes with this in a standing army. A people armed always undergoing military training at some level and capable of being sent to the front in turn is the antithesis of the bourgeois “standing army”.
There is no doubt that the programmatic norm of the Bolsheviks and Trotsky after October was for such an army. But almost immediately they were thrown into a civil war and the norm was compromised with the reality as they inherited it—the Tsar’s army, with its ranks and general staff. Trotsky had to make use of this army. They did subject it to workers’ control—party commissars supervising generals etc—as the next best bet in the circumstances. But it was not what they aspired to.
This can be seen in the fact that at the earliest opportunity—in 1920—Trotsky proposed (and it was adopted) at the Ninth Conference of the CPSU that the Red Army be turned into a Popular Militia. Trotsky wrote years later on this attempt:
“In the Red Army the problem of shifting to a militia system played an enormous role in our work as well as in our military conceptions. We considered the question one of principle.
We believed that only a socialist state could allow itself to shift over to a militia system. ‘If we are carrying out this shift gradually,’ I wrote in May 1923, ‘it is not out of political apprehensions but for reasons of an organisational and technical nature: it is a new undertaking—one of immeasurable importance—and we do not want to advance to the second stage without securing the first’. All this great work came to nothing. The militia was abolished in favour of a standing army. The reasoning was purely political: the bureaucracy ceased to have any confidence in an army scattered among the people, merged with the people. It needed a purely barracks army, isolated from the people.”15
The Degenerated Revolution revises the Marxist theory of the state
The Degenerated Revolution analysed in detail the process of Stalinist expansion after World War Two. Faced with a revolutionary tide sweeping across central Europe after 1944, Stalin’s Soviet Armed Forces and national Communist Parties sought to contain its anti-capitalist thrust. The Stalinists came to the rescue of imperialism and constructed a series of class collaborationist governments across the region.
Where it was unavoidable these governments nationalised industries to take them out of the hands of the workers. They disarmed the popular militias or guerrilla bands that had been forged to fight occupying fascist or collaborationist armies. In short, they rebuilt the shattered foundations of the capitalist state machine and underpinned the much weakened capitalist economies.
Of course, this was no normal bourgeois state machine; military power was in the hands not of the national bourgeoisie but of Stalinist bureaucracies under the ultimate control of Moscow. The armed power of the bourgeoisie had been broken in East Europe as it was to be later in China, Cuba and Vietnam. The Degenerated Revolution is clear that the state machine reconstructed in 1945-46 throughout Eastern and Central Europe was bourgeois in form, and as such that it was an obstacle to the transition to socialism.
For a couple of years, until the political offensive launched by US imperialism in 1947-48, the form of this state machine and the content of the economy it defended – capitalism – were in an uneasy harmony. But under threat of being ousted by a resurgent national bourgeoisie with stronger ties with imperialism, Stalin’s national agents moved to bureaucratically overthrow capitalist social relations, dump their political representatives from the Popular Front governments and through the medium of bureaucratic workers’ governments, create degenerate workers’ states.
The result of this process embodied an enormous contradiction, between the bourgeois form of the state machine and the proletarian content of the social relations of production defended by this machine. One clear dynamic flowed from this contradiction, one already evident in the USSR. There could be no possibility of a transition towards socialism so long as an unaccountable and savagely repressive political machine towered over the working class. On the contrary, this machine would serve to destabilise the nationalised planned economic foundations of each country and would claim more and more of the surplus product to satisfy the life styles of those who ran it.
As a description of the course of events and a class characterisation of the structures that emerged The Degenerated Revolution is spot on. The problem lay elsewhere – in its theorisation of this process. Speaking of these 1947 social overturns in East Europe the book says:
“ . . . when the actual stages of these revolutions are examined it becomes clear that the abolition of capitalism by Stalinist parties did not contradict the Marxist theory of the state.
The capitalist state was smashed in each bureaucratic revolution, but in a manner not envisaged by Marx, Engels or Lenin, nor in a manner that is at all desirable from the standpoint of revolutionary communism.”16
This point is emphasised later when it said that The Degenerated Revolution rejects the idea:
“. . . that workers’ states can be created without the smashing of the capitalist state. The bureaucratic revolutions were only possible because in each case the coercive apparatus of the bourgeoisie had been smashed.”17
A further passage describes what this smashing consisted of:
“If the essential characteristic of the state is the existence of bodies of armed men in defence of property, then the essential element in the smashing of the state is the destruction of the armed power of the bourgeoisie. This is a fundamental law of proletarian revolution. By smashing the state we mean first and foremost smashing its armed apparatus.”
But since the state is also “a huge and powerful bureaucratic apparatus (civil service, judges etc) . . .”, then, “the smashing of the state must also involve the destruction of this bureaucracy.”18
Other parts of the bureaucracy (lower rank administrators, for example) would not have to be smashed but heavily purged and taken over and put to use under the control of the workers.
Thus, while the smashing of the capitalist state is a process that begins with destructive tasks and ends with the building of a state of an entirely new kind (soviet based), the essential moment of this proces, is that “the armed power of the bourgeoisie was physically smashed prior to each of the bureaucratic revolutions that marked the expansion of Stalinism in the post-war period.“19
Since the essential part of the smashing had been completed, the future creation of a healthy proletarian semi-state, while necessary, would not have to smash the state.
Without being conscious of it, in these formulations The Degenerated Revolution revised the Marxist theory of the state by reducing the process of the smashing of the capitalist state to what it has in common with earlier forms of political revolutions in class society rather than what is historically unique and specific about the process.
The position in The Degenerated Revolution laudably tried to avoid “formalism” with respect to the Marxist theory of the state by developing a more abstract concept of “smashing” that could be applied equally to the quite distinct historical experiences of 1917 and the period between 1945-49. We did not realise that in the attempt to deepen the concept we merely ended up regressing to a concept that had been rejected by Marx and Lenin.
We decided that “smashing” the state was an elongated process with several “moments”. But the essence of the smashing, the key moment as it were, was to be found in the violent destruction of the armed power, the destruction of the ability of the bourgeoisie to apply coercive power to defend its property relations.
But the book muddled the following distinguishable “moments” in the unfolding of a revolution: first, the defeat and disintegration of one standing army by another; second, the emergence of a dual power situation; third, the seizure of power by the proletariat by methods of armed insurrection; fourth, the smashing by the victorious proletariat of the old bourgeois state machine and its replacement by the armed people and popular self-administration of the soviets.
This last task, no matter how much it depends upon, or has been prepared for by the preceding moments, is what Marx and Lenin insisted was the qualitative difference with previous transformations. This is therefore the specific meaning of the “smashing of the state” required by the proletarian revolution in contrast to all previous revolutions.
The Degenerated Revolution confused the question of violent revolution with the task of state smashing, and then to fit it in with the actual events of the bureaucratic social overturns in 1947-48 (no soviets, militia etc.) it reduced the essential tasks of smashing to the violent seizure of power.
Obviously, for the proletariat to be able to set about the task of smashing the state presupposes a “violent revolution”, that is, forcibly depriving the bourgeoisie of its control over its “special bodies of armed men“. This can occur as a result of defeat in war, the mutiny and internal disintegration of the armed forces or by an insurrectionary rising by the armed workers—or all three in varying combinations.
Equally obviously, this can and usually does occur “in parts”, via a period of dual power. But none of these are what Marx and Engels referred to as the “smashing of the bureaucratic-military machine”. They constitute a violent revolution, no more and no less. All revolutions, bourgeois as well as proletarian, which are worthy of the name involve this forcible seizure of power.
But worse was to follow. In order to prop up this false idea the book looked again at the process of the Russian Revolution in order to see if the same sequence of events happened there too. And this is what we found:
“. . . the coercive machinery of the Russian bourgeoisie—its army and police—disintegrated prior to the direct seizure of power by the proletariat and to this extent was smashed before the October Revolution”.20
Thus to bolster one false idea Workers Power and the IWG were forced to revise an important part of the established understanding of the course of the Russian Revolution during 1917.
It is true that the February Revolution instigated a situation of dual power, or rather a twin set of dual power situations. First, between the Tsarist forces, the high command and much of the officer corps of the army on the one hand, and those opposed to Tsarism among the Russian bourgeoisie, the peasants and the workers on the other. More importantly, there was dual power between the soviets and the Provisional Government. Clearly the February Revolution took the army out of the undivided control of the high command and forced it to accept the abdication of the Tsar (and then the dynasty), putting the army at the service of the imperialist bourgeoisie.
This process obviously weakened the army, undermined the authority of the officer caste and strengthened the rank and file soldiers’ committees. Especially after the July-August offensive widespread disintegration of morale set in among the army. This made the job of the October Revolution easier, deepening and completing this disintegrative process. But October produced the qualitative watershed when the smashing of the state became the conscious act of a revolutionary party at the head of the masses; it did not “to this extent” occur before October.
The whole thrust of Lenin and Trotsky’s writings on this subject push in this direction. First Trotsky:
“. . . the destruction of the Tsarist bureaucratic and military apparatus, the introduction of national equality and national self-determination—all this was the elementary democratic work that the February revolution barely even addressed itself to before leaving it, almost untouched, for the October Revolution to inherit.”21
In this Trotsky was merely following Lenin who recognised that far from smashing anything in February the state machine was “taken over” by the Russian bourgeoisie and taken (half-heartedly) out of the hands of the Tsarist followers
Here is Lenin’s judgment on February:
“The development, perfection and strengthening of the bureaucratic and military apparatus proceeded during all the numerous bourgeois revolutions which Europe has witnessed since the fall of feudalism . . . Consider what happened in Russia during the six months following February 27, 1917. The official posts which formerly were given by preference to the Black Hundreds have now become the spoils of the Cadets, Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. Nobody has seriously thought of introducing any serious reforms.
Every effort has been made to put them off ‘until the Constituent Assembly meets’, and to steadily put off its convocation until after the war! But there has been no delay, no waiting for the Constituent Assembly, in the matter of dividing the spoils, of getting the lucrative jobs of ministers, deputy ministers, governor-generals etc etc! (...) But the more the bureaucratic apparatus is ‘redistributed’ among the various bourgeois and petty bourgeois parties . . . the more keenly aware the oppressed classes, and the proletariat at their head, become of their irreconcilable hostility to the whole of bourgeois society. Hence the need for the bourgeois parties . . . to intensify repressive measures against the revolutionary proletariat, to strengthen the apparatus of coercion, i.e. the state machine.
This course of events compels the revolution ‘to concentrate all its forces of destruction’ against the state power, and to set itself the aim, not of improving the state machine, but of smashing and destroying it.”22
The conclusion could not be clearer. The February Revolution did not smash the state; rather the Russian bourgeoisie got its hands on it and began to purge it of Tsarist placemen and start to perfect the executive power which is nothing other than centralising the repressive apparatus against the popular classes even more. While they did not achieve much in terms of “perfecting” the state machine, this was the clear intent of the Provisional Government in its service of the bourgeoisie.
The Marxist programmatic conception of the smashing of the old state is historically and class specific. It is impossible to abstract it from its working class nature, from the nature of the class force and class state which carries out the smashing and replaces the old machine, without thereby transforming it into a bare ahistorical abstraction.
The Degenerated Revolution did this unconsciously, without even being aware of it and its implications. Its “false abstraction” was to hit upon a description of what the 1917 process and 1947-51 process had in common. Thus:
“These coercive bodies were smashed to the extent that the bourgeoisies were no longer able to deploy armed force in defence of their remaining property rights . . ”23
And there we have it.
The process of smashing is redefined so that it can embrace quite different historical processes and outcomes. Theoretical consistency was sacrificed for superficial historical description.
Against this we can now say that the capitalist state was not “smashed” in February 1917 nor in the post-war period in Eastern Europe. Between February and October 1917 the Russian bourgeoisie did have an armed force, albeit one that was in disarray due to the enormous pressure it was under from the contending forces of dual power.
After the Second World War the Stalinist bureaucracy, far from smashing the capitalist state, simply took hold of the old apparatus of political domination and, utilising bureaucratic, military, police measures transformed/purged its structures and functions in its own image and in its own interests. In the first period this state, controlled by the Stalinists, was used to defend and rebuild capitalism, and then later the same state machine was used as a lever for the economic expropriation of the bourgeoisie.
In some parts of Eastern Europe, for example in Austria, the Stalinists took hold of the state in the post-war period in exactly the same way as in Poland or Eastern Germany. However, in Austria that state, having been used to help rebuild capitalism, was never used to expropriate the bourgeoisie but rather handed back to the bourgeoisie. In this case the Austrian bourgeoisie did not have to carry out a revolution, or “re-smash” the state to make it work in their interests, as it had remained, throughout, a bourgeois state.
In those Eastern European countires where capitalism was abolished, the working class was excluded, through counter-revolutionary measures, from seizing state power in its own right. As a result the Stalinist bureaucracy was able to construct an apparatus which was a bourgeois organ in a workers’ state. 24
It can be argued that in “taking over” the apparatus of the bourgeois state machine the Stalinists continued to “perfect” it, as for example, in respect to the standing army.
The Stalinists everywhere introduced modifications such as the existence of controlled “popular” militias (e.g. Committees for the Defence of the Cuban Revolution) or party militias attached to party cells in factories, as supplements to or extensions of the standing army.
These modifications can be seen as further perfecting the bourgeois state machine in the workers’ state since they represent nothing other than a further method by which the state enforces repression, atomises and renders completely unaccountable the political administration.
In the Soviet Union the smashing of the Stalinist state machine had been a programmatic necessity ever since the counter-revolutionary political expropriation of the working class by the Stalinist caste. In Eastern Europe such a task was necessary from the moment of their creation as workers’ states.
Trotsky on the “bourgeois-bureaucratic”state machine
That The Degenerated Revolution could fall into these errors was in part conditioned by the fact that the legacy of Trotsky on the issue of the class character of the state machine in the USSR is at best ambiguous. Nowhere did he clearly point to the fact that, conceived in abstraction from the property relations defended by the bureaucracy, this state machine was bourgeois. To understand his thinking we have to establish the progression of his thought on this question.
In the Critique of the Gotha Programme Marx argued that in the lowest stage of communism “bourgeois right” (i.e. bourgeois law) would still be in force in the sphere of the distribution of that part of society’s total product destined for individual consumption. He argued that immediately after the socialist revolution, in the lowest stage of communism, the state can enforce “only” equal rights in the sphere of consumption (from each according to their ability to each according to their work); that is to say, there is not as yet such material abundance that naturally unequal individuals can receive “according to their needs”.
In State and Revolution Lenin took Marx’s idea and developed it into a clear theoretical conclusion. He insisted that not only bourgeois right survives “but also even a bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie” even in the healthiest, most prosperous case, even in America. In a backward country like Russia a workers’ state will not for some time be able even to introduce full equality. It will have to accord privileges to some (skilled workers, bureaucrats, army officers) in order to retain services which are essential to the survival of the workers’ state.
Trotsky found in this conclusion the key to a scientific understanding of the nature and dynamics of the rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union:
“In so far as the State which assumes the task of Socialist transformation is compelled to defend inequality—that is material privileges of a minority—by methods of compulsion, in so far does it remain a bourgeois state even though without a bourgeoisie.”25
Both Marx and Lenin held that the state would wither away under the highest stage of communism when the productive forces of social labour had reached the stage of development where the objects of social and individual consumption could be distributed on the basis of human need alone. Lenin grasped that what this meant was not the withering away of voting etc. but the final withering away of this “bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie”, the final withering away of even the most democratic instrument of political and social repression.
This withering away would be achieved through a process of conscious political, cultural and social reform beginning in the transitional period of the dictatorship of the proletariat and culminating in the lowest stage of communism or socialism. However, soviet reality in imperialist-encircled and backward revolutionary Russia immediately started to come into contradiction with this perspective and the associated programme.
The bureaucracy of the new workers’ state, the very embodiment of the “bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie” did not begin to wither away at all; it began to grow apace, assert its power and appropriate a large share of the social product. Lenin himself became increasingly alarmed about this growth of “bureaucratic deformations” within the workers’ state. His response was a programme of political reform designed to enable the proletariat to control this burgeoning bureaucracy through its soviets and its party.
Trotsky’s theory of the intensified degeneration of the Soviet Union was a further development of Lenin’s idea through to and beyond that point at which quantity passed into quality. The Stalinist apparatus of state power—the ruling bureaucracy within a workers’ state—strangled the soviets and the vanguard party which it once had to serve and with which it had shared power. The counter-revolutionary Thermidor was completed in 1927 with the expulsion of Trotsky from the party and the outlawing of the Left Opposition.
Trotsky had to chart the consolidation in power of a bonapartist bureaucracy which enjoyed more and more privileges whilst still defending the revolutionary social foundations established by the October Revolution. This led inexorably to a qualitative political degeneration of the Soviet state. These were no longer deformations which could be reformed if the Stalinists were displaced from power.
In the Revolution Betrayed Trotsky refers to “the crushing of Soviet democracy by an all-powerful bureaucracy”.26 But in his 1935 article, The Workers’ State, Thermidor and Bonapartism, Trotsky developed this brief formula in a way characteristic of his position both before and after 1936:
“the present-day domination of Stalin in no way resembles the Soviet rule during the initial years of the revolution. The substitution of one regime for the other occurred not at a single stroke but through a series of measures, by means of a number of minor civil wars waged by the bureaucracy against the proletarian vanguard. In the last historical analysis, soviet democracy was blown up by the pressure of social contradictions.
Exploiting the latter, the bureaucracy wrested the power from the hands of mass organisations.”27
Or again:
“The toiling masses lived on hopes or fell into apathy . . . Such power (of the Stalinist bureaucracy) could be obtained only by strangling the party, the soviets, the working class as a whole.”28
And, “The old cadres of Bolshevism have been smashed. Revolutionists have been smashed.”29
Organs of democratic workers’ power can also be said to have been “smashed” by the Stalinist bureaucracy in the other degenerate workers’ states after the second world war. In these cases this occured before the Stalinist bureaucracy could consolidate its own power, later used to expropriate the bourgeoisie. The Stalinist caste first crushed the workers, and then blocked their path to power.
The “smashing” of the political rule of the working class by the bureaucracy of the workers’ state cannot be seen as a simple mirror image of the smashing of the old bourgeois state through workers’ revolution. The smashing of a bureaucratic-military state machine cannot but differ in its very essentials from the destruction of democratic soviet power by a bureaucratic-military state machine.
Trotsky clearly enumerates these concrete differences in the course of his analysis of the evolution of the political expropriation of the working class in the Soviet Union. The basis of the whole process was the chronic backwardness of Russia exacerbated by the destruction and depredations of the civil war, the lack of culture, particularly political culture of the mass of Soviet workers increasingly drawn directly from the ranks of the peasantry. Capping this was a series of important defeats of the international revolution.
We should place the passages from Trotsky, written in 1935, against this background. These conditions explain the growing apathy and quiescence of broad layers of the Soviet workers and the stultification of the soviets from the early 1920s onwards as well as the growing isolation of the revolutionary vanguard in the party as represented by the Left Opposition. All this was both cause and, increasingly, effect of the continuously growing power of the bureaucracy. In these circumstances the momentum, or mobile inertia, of the centralised bureaucratic juggernaut led to a process of grinding down of activity, organisation and initiative on the part of the mass of the population.
The drawn out character of the process is one reason why it was so difficult for the Left Opposition, or indeed anyone, to determine the exact moment of transition from counter-revolutionary political quantity to quality in the life of the country. Nonetheless, the outcome of this process was clear enough to Trotsky long before 1935 – Soviet power had been comprehensively smashed or “blown up” and replaced by the absolutist rule of a totalitarian bourgeois bureaucratic-military state machine, but one which drew the source of its power and material privileges from nationalised property and planned economy.
The contradictions of the first degenerate workers’ state can be summed up thus: the dictatorship of the proletariat had taken the paradoxical form of a political dictatorship of “a bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie” over the proletariat. It had taken the form of the rule of a politically counter-revolutionary bonapartist state machine which still rested upon the post-capitalist social foundations established by the October Revolution. That state machine was still the organ of a workers’ state because it defended those revolutionary property relations. But it defended them in its own way and in its own material interests, in order to maintain its caste privileges against the working class.
It is clear that after 1935 Trotsky completely understood the character of the state machine that arose on the debris of Soviet power—it was “bourgeois-bureaucratic”30 (even fascistic). But here then arises a further problem. Why then did Trotsky never argue that the Stalinist state machine should be “smashed” in the course of the political revolution?
Trotsky was aware that a bald counterposition between the state superstructure and civil society in the USSR was of limited value both theoretically and an insufficient guide to practical action. Why? Quite simply, because although there is a unity of form in regard to the state machine of a bourgeois state superstructure and a degenerated workers’ state there was no identity. It is clear if we ponder the significance of the following passages:
“In a number of previous writings we established the fact that despite its economic successes, which were determined by the nationalisation of the means of production, Soviet society completely preserves a contradictory transitional character, and measured by the inequality of living conditions and the privileges of the bureaucracy, it still stands much closer to the regime of capitalism than to future communism.
At the same time, we established the fact that despite monstrous bureaucratic degeneration, the Soviet state still remains the historical instrument of the working class insofar as it assures the development of economy and culture on the basis of nationalised means of production and, by virtue of this, prepares the conditions for a genuine emancipation of the toilers through the liquidation of the bureaucracy and of social inequality (...) Raising itself above the toiling masses, the bureaucracy regulates these contradictions... By its uncontrolled and self-willed rule, subject to no appeal, the bureaucracy accumulates new contradictions. Exploiting the latter, it creates the regime of bureaucratic absolutism.”31
Here Trotsky conceptually distinguishes between “state” and “society” in the USSR. The “state” includes within it both the progressive aspects of nationalised property relations and the wholly reactionary aspect of bureaucratic absolutism. In turn, this distinction flows from some important differences of the USSR as compared to capitalism. This he defines in the following way:
“Once liberated from the fetters of feudalism, bourgeois relations develop automatically (...) It is altogether otherwise with the development of social relations. The proletarian revolution not only frees the productive forces from the fetters of private ownership but also transfers them to the direct disposal of the state that it itself creates. While the bourgeois state, after the revolution, confines itself to a police role, leaving the market to its own laws, the workers’ state assumes the direct role of economist and organiser.”32
So political revolution in the degenerate workers’ state involves a dual task; on the one hand, the smashing of the “bourgeois- bureaucratic” state machine (police, standing army, bureaucracy). This Trotsky calls sometimes the “bonapartist apparatus”, sometimes “bureaucratic absolutism”; on the other hand, having smashed this apparatus the victorious proletariat in its soviets will rescue and take over the apparatuses associated with the monopoly of foreign trade, the administrative organs of planning, purge them, and wield them for its own purposes. Naturally, this clearing out process will be very far reaching since the apparatus of economic administration has also been distorted to reproduce bureaucratic privilege.
But did Trotsky still not at least formulate the task of smashing the state machine more narrowly defined? Yes and no. It is a fact that Trotsky’s theoretical and programmatic development lagged behind the evolution of the Soviet Union in some important respects, a fact he openly recognised himself.
In the first place Trotsky had to openly correct his initial analogy with Thermidor in the French revolution in an article written in 1935. He argued that Thermidor in the Russian revolution should no longer be regarded as the counter-revolutionary restoration of capitalism but as the politically counter-revolutionary consolidation of the bonapartist power of the Stalinist bureaucracy still remaining on the foundations established by October.
In other words Trotsky openly admitted that the Soviet Thermidor stood not in the future as he had previously thought but some eight years in the past. Without doubt this self-critical theoretical appraisal followed from the fact that Trotsky had been compelled to develop a dramatic new programmatic stance: the abandonment of a programme of political reform and the development of the programme of political revolution. But Trotsky’s new theory of the Soviet Thermidor which placed its completion in 1927 raised an obvious problem; namely, that the development of the programme of political revolution had been delayed for eight years.
Trotsky’s belated development of this programme retained a certain algebraic character up to his death. One reason for this was that nobody then had had the chance to go through the experience of an actual political revolutionary rising of the working class in a degenerate workers’ state. Trotsky knew that nobody could be exactly sure of the dynamics and overall character of the political revolution without the benefit of the experience of the class struggle itself. Hence, it is not surprising that he did not leap into print with the idea that the bonapartist state machine would be smashed in the classical Marxist sense in the political revolution.
Indeed, in the Transitional Programme of 1938 Trotsky still poses the tasks of the political revolution in a form that lies somewhere between the old reform perspective and the new revolutionary one. On the one hand, Trotsky recognises that the political “apparatus of the workers’ state . . . was transformed from a weapon of the working class into a weapon of bureaucratic violence against the working class”.
On the other hand, he calls for the “regeneration of Soviet democracy” and “democratisation of the soviets” as though the soviets existed but only needed to be purged:
“It is necessary to return to the soviets not only their free democratic form but also their class content. As once the bourgeoisie and kulaks were not permitted to enter the soviets, so now it is necessary to drive the bureaucracy and new aristocracy out of the soviets.”33
Yet it was clear that although they may have been called soviets they had nothing in common with the organs set up in 1905 and 1917. They were powerless “parliamentary” bodies made up of pre-selected members of the bureaucracy and labour aristocracy, subordinated entirely to the bonapartist clique around Stalin. As structures they needed to be smashed.
Indeed, later in May 1939 Trotsky drew the necessary inference in a passage for the first and only time:
“To believe that this [Stalinist] state is capable of peacefully “withering away” is to live in a world of theoretical delirium. The bonapartist caste must be smashed, the soviet state must be regenerated. Only then will the prospects of the withering away of the state open up.“34
This plays the same role in Trotsky’s theoretical development as did Marx’s observations in Eighteenth BrumaireBut Trotsky did not live to see the political revolution’s equivalent of 1871. If he had seen the Hungarian revolution of 1956, which generated Soviets outside of and counterposed to the existing state apparatus of Hungarian and Russian Stalinism, Trotsky would undoubtedly have recognised that the lack of sharpness in the Transitional Programme would have had to have been changed.
The Degenerated Revolution and the programme of political revolution
Faced with the challenge posed by Trotsky’s ambiguities The Degenerated Revolution opted for theoretical conservatism. Basing itself on the revision regarding the “smashing” of the state, it chose to interpret Trotsky’s 1939 formulation—“the bonapartist caste must be smashed, the soviet state must be regenerated”—in a very specific way when it came to its implications for the programme of the political revolution.
Since Trotsky did not say that the “state” must be smashed in the political revolution and given that The Degenerated Revolution had insisted that this had already been done in the process of overthrowing capitalism then, with Trotsky, we restricted ourselves to saying that while the castehad to be smashed the state could be “regenerated” (i.e. “taken over” and purged).
The counterposition of the “caste” to the “state” can as we have shown be given a meaning that does not impair the tasks of the political revolution; that is, providing we understand Trotsky to be arguing for the smashing of the military-bureaucratic core of the state machine and “regenerating” or purging the organs of economic administration.
But The Degenerated Revolution took us in an altogether different direction. Since the section on the nature of the state had argued that the state was essentially “bodies of armed men” then it must mean that Trotsky’s words could be interpreted to mean that the state as bodies of armed men must not be smashed in the political revolution but “regenerated”.
Even at first glance this idea was incoherent since it suggested that the bureaucratic caste could be smashed without smashing its armed power. But The Degenerated Revolution consciously rejected the simple idea that the whole standing army of the Stalinist bureaucracy must be abolished and replaced by a workers’ militia. Instead it argued:
“The bureaucracy maintains a massive standing army and specialised armed squads to defend its privileges in times of political revolutionary crisis. The working class will need to build its own workers’ militia to defend its organisations against police and military attack. It will in the course of the political revolution have to create armed forces capable of dissolving and defeating all armed forces loyal to the bureaucracy. It will seek its weapons in the arsenals, and from the hands of, the conscript army. To win the troops to the side of the political revolution the proletariat must advance the slogans:
• Full political rights for soldiers, culminating in the calls for soldiers’ councils to send delegates to the workers and peasants’ soviets.
• Dissolution of the officer corps, abolition of the titles and privileges of the generals and marshals – commanders, officers and NCOs to be democratically elected or selected.
• For the immediate dissolution of the paramilitary repression apparatus, the secret police and militia.
The victorious political revolution will arm and train all those workers capable of bearing arms. The workers’ state will rest upon the armed proletariat. For the military defence of the workers’ states against imperialism the maintenance of a standing army is necessary. The political revolution will, however, transform the existing armies – instruments of bureaucratic tyranny as well as defence – into Red Armies of the type founded by L D Trotsky.”35
This is quite clear and in line with the false view of the “necessary” character of a standing army in any workers’ state already outlined. The programme adds a further twist however, saying that it is necessary because one is needed to defend a workers’ state from attack.36 It is a conception that potentially bolsters illusions in the standing army of a Stalinist caste by suggesting that it is necessary to defend the workers’ state from restorationist attack, when in truth it is an agency perfectly suited to overseeing the capitalist restoration process – as we have seen since 1989.
The Degenerated Revolution subordinated a crystal clear formulation of the strategy of political revolution to formulations on the possible need for united fronts with the Stalinist standing army against imperialist attack. But the formulation that the standing armies of the Stalinist caste have a dual character – “instruments of bureaucratic tyranny as well as defence” surrenders too much to the Stalinists, above all in the light of events since 1989.37
The mistake was to believe that Lenin’s position, as expressed in Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power? concerning taking over parts of the lower bureaucratic administration of the Tsarist regime and using them in the transition to socialism, could be applied to the standing army in a Stalinist state once those “loyal to the bureaucracy” had been defeated.
In truth what was needed was a clear statement that the armed struggle of the workers’ councils and militia against the bonapartist standing army is the process of smashing the state machine in the political revolution, essentially identical to the arming of the whole population in contradistinction to the maintenance of a standing army above the masses.
Trotsky on the state machine and capitalist restoration
The Degenerated Revolution could not find anywhere in Trotsky’s analysis the idea that the bourgeois state machine would not and could not be smashed in a bureaucratic social overturn. It did not draw a theoretical inference which flowed directly from the whole of the rest of his conception and which should have followed from an analysis of the actual events of the bureaucratic social overturns after Trotsky’s death.
Similarly, the book stuck rigidly to the letter of Trotsky’s programme on political revolution when a certain re-elaboration was needed. What then of an interconnected question; namely, what would happen to the Stalinist “bourgeois-bureaucratic” state machine in the context of capitalist restoration?
A moment’s reflection reveals that if it is legitimate to apply the Marxist category of the smashing of the state to the counter-revolutionary overthrow of Soviet power then the same line of thought surely indicates that in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China and Cuba, the “smashing of the state” on the road to capitalist restoration stands not in front of us but far behind, in the counter-revolutionary consolidation of the bonapartist state power of the Stalinist bureaucracy.
In The Revolution Betrayed, written in 1936, we find three hypotheses concerning the possible future course of development of the Soviet Union:
“Let us assume first that the Soviet bureaucracy is overthrown by a revolutionary party having all the attributes of the old Bolshevism, enriched moreover by the world experience of the recent period. Such a party would begin with the restoration of democracy in the trade unions and the Soviets. It would be able to, and would have to, restore freedom of Soviet parties. Together with the masses, and at their head, it would carry out a ruthless purgation of the state apparatus . . . But so far as concerns property relations the new power would not have to resort to revolutionary measures. It would retain and further develop the experiment of planned economy. After the political revolution—that is the deposing of the bureaucracy—the proletariat would have to introduce in the economy a series of very important reforms, but not another social revolution.
If—to adopt another hypothesis—a bourgeois party were to overthrow the ruling Soviet caste, it would find no small number of ready servants among the present bureaucrats, administrators, technicians, directors, party secretaries and privileged upper circles in general. A purgation of the state would of course, be necessary in this case too. But a bourgeois restoration . . . would probably have to clean out fewer people than a revolutionary party. The chief task of the new power would be to restore private property in the means of production. . . Notwithstanding that the Soviet bureaucracy has gone far toward preparing a bourgeois restoration, the new regime would have to introduce in the matter of forms of property and methods of industry not a reform, but a social revolution.
Let us assume—to take a third variant—that neither a revolutionary nor a counter-revolutionary party seizes power. The bureaucracy continues at the head of the state. Even under these conditions social relations will not gel . . . it (the bureaucracy) must inevitably in future stages seek support for . . . itself in property relations . . . It is not enough to be the director of a trust; it is necessary to be a stockholder. The victory of the bureaucracy in this decisive sphere would mean its conversion into a new possessing class . . . The third variant consequently brings us back to the two first.”38
Trotsky asserts that both a political revolution and a social counter-revolution would involve a “purgation” of one and the same Soviet state apparatus. This is a curious argument because it strongly implies that the same state—while transformed in opposite directions—could preside over either a restored capitalist economy or—in the democratised form of a revived workers’ power—over the transition to socialism.
It was necessary to break with this suggestion and consciously revise the idea that the political revolution will involve the purgation of the Stalinist bureaucratic-military state machine. Rather, The Degenerated Revolution should have asserted that that the bonapartist state apparatus must be smashed by the armed working, class organised in its own democratic workers’ councils.
Only after the smashing of all the armed executive in the political revolution would the question of the “purgation” of its bureaucracy arise, i.e. the utilisation, where necessary, of some of the old officials in the apparatus of the new power.
On closer inspection Trotsky introduced a deliberate asymmetry into his hypothetical cases involving the “purgation of the state apparatus”. The political revolution, he asserts, will involve a “ruthless purgation” while capitalist restoration “would probably have to clean out fewer people”.
What is more, in his third hypothesis he goes much further. He assumes the possibility that the Stalinist bureaucracy “continues at the head of the state” and, through the destruction of nationalised property, converts itself into a “new possessing class”, that is, a bourgeoisie.
In the light of the experience since 1989 we can now assert that even in this, Trotsky’s third, case the Stalinist bureaucracy would undergo an internal purgation due to the inevitable splits and conflicts within its own ranks.
In any case, Trotsky argued that the overthrow of the degenerated workers’ state along the line of the restoration of capitalism would, in all events, involve a lesser transformation of the state superstructure than would a political revolution.
Since 1989 it is Trotsky’s third variant that has predominated, or at least a combination of the first and third.39 The successful counter-revolutionary bureaucracy/bourgeoisie coalition in Eastern Europe has taken hold of the bureaucratic state machine, purged it, and then used this to smash those elements of the state which were responsible for the system of economic administration.
The parliamentary forums that may or may not exist, may or may not have been the means by which the restorationists managed to take hold of the state machine is irrelevant in the last analysis. Also, that the “smashing” of the system of economic administration—planning organs, economic Ministries—is taking place with little violence has nothing to do with the essence of the matter. What is interesting is that this process involves a dialectical inversion of the process that would be necessary in the proletarian political revolution. In the latter case the soviets would have to smash the executive power and purge the organs of economic administration.
A healthy debate
It is a mark of the health of a revolutionary tendency that it can study its own past critically. If doctrine is not to be turned into dogma then revolutionaries are obliged to subject all theory to scrutiny in the light of major new events.
Serious debate with in the ranks of the LRCI over an extended period has allowed it to correct a mistake and thereby rearm itself politically. In the process all sides in the debate realised that despite their differences they were bound together in complete agreement on the programmatic tasks facing the working class after 1989.
We did not have any differences over the programme of political revolution from 1989 onwards which was based solidly on continued defence of these states against imperialism, the absolute necessity of soviets as instruments of the revolution, the smashing of the Stalinist states’ apparatus of repression and the erection of a Paris Commune or Russia 1917-style semi state.
Thus the Degenerated Revolution proved a strong enough pillar of the LRCI to bear the weight of an important but narrowly circumscribed theoretical difference.
Footnotes
1. When Workers Power and the IWG first wrote the book we had differences within our ranks over the question of what exactly happened to the bourgeois state machine during the overthrow of capitalism by the Stalinists. Was it “smashed” in the sense that Marxists use the term? The majority insisted that it must have been, believing that to say anything less was to suggest that a social overturn was possible by the road of reform, A minority argued the positions developed in this article. After a joint conference of the IWG and Workers Power which agreed the contents of The Degenerated Revolution the debate ceased for ten years.
Under the impact of the events in Eastern Europe, which raised the question “would the state machine, as distinct from the planned economy and the Stalinist parties, have to be smashed or would it be sufficient to drastically purge the “special bodies of armed men etc” the debate broke out anew in 1993. This time some members of the former majority joined the old minority. After four years of internal discussion within the LRCI including two congresses (1994 and 1997) and with many documents written on either side, this error was corrected. No side in the debate called into question for a moment Trotsky’s designation of the USSR (or the later Stalinist states) as degenerate workers’ states.
2. Moreover, the state public force also has its own interests and possesses certain caste-like features that set it off from classes in civil society. Hegel first spoke of these as being security of employment and guaranteed income.
3. The first species of standing army, dating from the end of the 15th century, although standing apart and opposed to the common people, still reflected its origins in feudalism. The standing army was not made up, as later was to be the case, by national conscripts. This was because the nobility rightly feared arming its peasantry which might exert revolutionary democratic pressure upon the ruling class. Instead they were primarily mercenary armies, made up of foreigners whose loyalty could be bought.
4. Lenin, State and Revolution, p30
5. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte – quoted in Lenin State and Revolution p411 CW vol. 25. It is worth noting in passing that when they talk of “perfecting” the bourgeois state machine, Marx and Lenin do not mean developing more representative forms of government (e.g. parliamentary democracy). Quite the opposite, for “perfecting” means purging it of the revolutionary-democratic aspects of the revolution and centralising the executive power against them. This is the whole point of Marx and Engels’ analysis of the rise and fall of the Great French revolution from Jacobin clubs to the centralising measures of Napoleon.
6. Draft of the Civil War in France
7. Quoted in Lenin State and Revolution, op cit:p.242.
8. E Mandel, From Class Sciety to Communism, London, p46
9. L Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, London 1973, p49
10. ibid, p50-51
11. F Engels, The Origin of the Family Private Property and the State, New York, 1978, p24
12. L Trotsky op cit, p209
13. ibid, p216
14. ibid p222. As Trotsky argued: “The right to a commanding position is guaranteed by study, endowment, character, experience, which need continual and moreover individual appraisal. The rank of major adds nothing to the commander of a battalion.”, p223
15. L Trotsky Writings Supplement 1934-40 p883
16. Workers Power and the Irish Workers Group, The Degenerated Revolution, Londn 1982, p48
17. ibid, p51
18. ibid, p49
19. ibid, pp50-51
20. ibid, p50
21. ibid, p54 This idea is nothing other than a restatement of permanent revolution; that is, far from carrying out a task which was the object of the proletarian revolution it failed miserably to carry out any serious task of the bourgeois revolution.
22. Lenin, State and Revolution op cit, pp31-32
23. The Degenerated Revolution, op cit, p50
24. Only under fascist bourgeois states (e.g. Hitler’s Germany) have we seen similar “perfections”. A standing army—just because this army defends post-capitalist property—does not thereby become a proletarian form of military technical organisation. It still needs to be replaced by “an armed people”.
25 Revolution Betrayed, op cit, p 58
26 ibid, pp268
27 ibid, pp172-73
28 ibid, p175
29 ibid, p178
30. L Trotsky Preface to Ukrainian edition of My Life, Writings 1938 p?
31. L Trotsky, Writings 1934-35 pl70-171; original emphasis
32. ibid pl79
33. L Trotsky, Transitional Programme, New York 1977, p145
34. L Trotsky, “The Bonapartist Philosophy of the State”, Writings, 1938-39, New York 1974, p325
35. The Degenerated Revolution op cit p79.
36. The Trotskyist Manifesto (1989) compounded this error with an even worse formulation: “For the standing army to be reduced to a size commensurate with the legitimate defence needs of the workers’ states against imperialism.” London 1989, p97 This was corrected in 1994.
37 The programme in The Degenerated Revolution singles out the secret police as needing to be dissolved but not the standing army, as though the former agency did not also have a role to play in defence of the workers’ state from imperialism. Eventually, in the Trotskyist Manifesto revised chapter on political revolution adopted in 1994, the LRCI removed all ambiguity in respect of the tasks of the proletarian revolution where it states that the workers councils will “smash the whole repressive machine of the Stalinist state apparatus”. See Trotskyist International 15 October 1994 p42.
38. The Revolution Betrayed, London 1973, p253-54
39. For example, Yeltsin’s split with the nomenklatura in 1990 helped realign the restorationist forces from outside the bureaucracy (e.g. Chubais) around his clique which after 1991 then isolated a hardline Stalinist faction, before co-opting decisive elements of the Stalinist bureaucracy (e.g. Chernomyrdin) into the restoration process. A similar combination occurred in Hungary. In Serbia, Croatia and Slovakia the whole bureaucracy is playing the decisive role in line with Trotsky’s third variant.
Note from the RCIT's Editorial Board:
This month, we celebrate the 80-years anniversary of the foundation of the Fourth International. The construction of the Fourth International has been one of the two most important achievements of Leon Trotsky (the other was the organizing and defending of the Russia Revolution in 1917 and the following years of civil war).
The Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT) is a Trotskyist organization and, hence, stands in the tradition of Trotsky’s Fourth International. We defend the revolutionary legacy of the Fourth International until its degeneration in 1948-52 under the leadership of the epigones. (i)
In order to provide our readers with an overview of the history of the creation of the Fourth International in 1933-40, we republish below an important book of our movement. This book has been published by our predecessor organization, Workers Power (Britain), in 1983.
In order to defend our revolutionary legacy, we had to fight against the subsequent degeneration of this organization into centrism for which we were bureaucratically expelled by the majority of its leadership in April 2011. (ii)
The struggle for a revolutionary future is impossible without defending the revolutionary gains of the past. This is both true for theoretical as well as practical achievements. In this spirit we recommend readers to study the following document and to join the RCIT in fighting for building a Revolutionary World Party!
Footnotes
(i) See on this e.g. Workers Power’s book “The Death Agony of the Fourth International and the Tasks of Trotskyists Today”; see also Michael Pröbsting: Healy’s Pupils Fail to Break with their Master. The revolutionary tradition of the Fourth International and the centrist tradition of its Epigones Gerry Healy and the ”International Committee”, October 2013, https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/healy-and-fourth-international/; Yossi Schwartz: The Lambertists - Road to Nowhere. The Pseudo-Marxism of the so-called “Fourth International” founded by Pierre Lambert and its historical background, November 2017, https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/the-lambertist-road-to-nowhere/
(ii) We refer readers for a historical assessment of our predecessor organization and an overview of the political and organizational background of the RCIT to the following book: Michael Pröbsting: Building the Revolutionary Party in Theory and Practice. Looking Back and Ahead after 25 Years of Organized Struggle for Bolshevism, RCIT Books, December 2014, https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/rcit-party-building/. There are also critical assessments of various so-called Trotskyist organizations in our books The Great Robbery of the South (Chapter 13) and Anti-Imperialism in the Age of Great Power Rivalry.
* * * * *
Contents
Introduction
Chapter One: Trotsky's defence and development of the communist programme, 1933-1940
Chapter Two: The epigones destroy Trotsky's International, 1940-1953
Chapter Three: The degenerate fragments of the Fourth International, 1953 -1983
Chapter Four: After the splits the splinters, 1961-1983
Chapter Five: A radical re-statement of programme is necessary
Introduction
Forty-five years ago, Leon Trotsky wrote that the crisis facing mankind was reducible to a crisis of proletarian leadership. For Trotsky, this statement had a precise meaning. The old leadership of the working class - the social democratic and Stalinist parties - had paved the way for terrible defeats in China, Germany, Austria and Spain.
They were useless to the working class as the storm clouds of world-wide war gathered. Unless a new party, a new leadership for the working class could be built and could lead genuine proletarian revolutions, then the war would not merely lead to untold suffering for millions, but would set back the struggle of the international working class for decades. The building of a party, an international revolutionary party, capable of leading the proletariat, was the only hope of averting, or bringing to a speedy revolutionary conclusion, the crisis that engulfed the entire world in the late 1930s.
The new leadership was to be forged by the Fourth International.
This organisation, comprising the most dedicated fighters for the cause of the proletariat, was not compromised by the defeats and betrayals of the past. Its leader, ~on Trotsky, had waged a revolutionary struggle against the bureaucratic usurpers in the USSR led by Stalin. He forged a world movement that carried out a courageous and active defence of revolutionary communism under conditions of defeat which drove tens of thousands of militants from other parties to utter despair.
The Fourth International never became the leadership of the proletariat on a significant scale. The war shattered its weak structures. The fascists, the imperialist Allies and the Kremlin's army of hired assassins murdered its finest cadres. The Allied victory ensured that the world was shaped according to a pattern unforeseen (and unforeseeable) by Trotsky. The forces of the Fourth International remained marginal to the class struggle. They became disoriented by the falsification of Trotsky's perspectives. Their banner, alas, was not taken up by millions.
The problem of leadership remained unresolved, and capitalism gained a respite that, on a world scale, has lasted to this day.
These developments contributed to the destruction of the Fourth International. It was destroyed at two levels. First, its inability to develop the Marxist programme in the face of new developments undermined its adherence to that programme.
By 1951 it had embraced a programme at odds with Marxism. Second, the confusion in its ranks produced a muddled organisational conflict that led, in 1953, to a split in the Fourth International. Thus, it died in an organisational sense too.
The original, politically unclear, fragmentation of what had been the Trotskyist movement, inevitably bred further ideological confusion and further splits. What is patently clear is that no Fourth International in the tradition of Leon Trotsky exists today.
Certain organisations, for example the Socialist Workers Party (GB), use this fact to scoff at any talk of building "Internationals". The fragmentation of ostensible Trotskyists is a cause for philistine jokes inside such profoundly national sects. In contrast, we believe that the destruction of the Fourth International poses the urgent need to build a new International.
Today the relative social peace, engendered by the "long boom", has drawn to an end. Since the late 1960s, successive economic and political crises have rocked France, Britain and Italy. At the same time, the conflicts between imperialism, its agents and the anti-imperialist movements, draw the capitalist powers and the USSR ever closer to war.
The stockpiling of nuclear weapons; the struggles in the Middle East, Asia, Central America and Southern Africa; the belligerent stance by imperialism against threats to its interests, exemplified by Britain's war against Argentina, are all examples of the present unstable period. They are graphic reminders of Lenin's description of the imperialist epoch as one of wars and revolutions.
The danger is, that faced with this sharpening world crisis, the working class finds itself, once again, led by traitors and vacillators. Once again the revolutionary communists are in a tiny minority. The task of building a new leadership is inextricably linked to the struggle to pull the world back from the brink of a nuclear catastrophe. Imperialism will destroy the world, rather than let itself be destroyed. The working class must be won to a revolution against imperialism.
The task, therefore, is enormous. There is a world to win. In order to take that struggle forward, to build an international revolutionary party, it is necessary to look clearly and carefully at the history of the Fourth International, to examine the origins and nature of its political and organisational collapse. Many tendencies have attempted this task, some providing useful insights. Most have failed to "settle accounts" with the tendency from which they emerged, thus carrying with them the political errors which blinded their predecessors.
Workers Power's break from one of the fragments of the Fourth International (SWP-GB) was political as well as organisational. It has enabled us, we believe, to look at the history of the FI from its foundation to its collapse in 1951, without detracting from the achievements of its cadres, or refusing to criticise its errors.
The document is divided into five sections. The first looks at the development of the Fourth International's programme and method.
The second deals with the inability of the FI after the war to develop Trotsky's programme in the face of a temporary stabilisation of the imperialist world order and a strengthened Stalinism. It traces the origins of the 1953 split to this disorientation, showing clearly that neither side were able to offer a revolutionary perspective and programme for the class struggle: The third and fourth sections examine the political record of these major fragments, as well as the "splinters" which have been thrown off them. It demonstrates the centrist bankruptcy of the major currents, and the failure of any of the recent splits to fundamentally break with their politics and method.
However, this work is not simply a history of the FI. History is necessary as a guide to understanding; understanding is a guide to action. In the final section, we delineate the tasks that face genuine Trotskyists in fulfilling the goal that Trotsky set his followers - to resolve the crisis of leadership by building a World Party of Socialist Revolution.
Finally, a word on the origins and intention of this book. It was originally produced as a set of theses for discussion inside the Workers Power Group. At an extended National Committee of Workers .Power in January 1983, the theses were amended and adopted. They have since been agreed by the Irish Workers Group. For both organisations, they represent our most developed position to date on the Fourth International. Our intention in publishing them is to submit them for discussion amongst all those tendencies, internationally, who are committed to a thoroughgoing analysis of the Fourth International and the tasks that face Trotskyists today. We are committed to having such discussions on an open and honest basis. Unlike the centrists, we have nor fear of public polemic and criticism. We believe that it will be through discussion of the fundamental questions raised in this book that a new revolutionary banner can be raised.
March 1983
Chapter One: Trotsky's defence and development of the communist programme, 1933-1940
At its foundation in 1938, the Fourth International was the only consistent revolutionary communist tendency in the world. Other tendencies emerging from the degenerating Comintern either collapsed into reformism like the Right Opposition (Bukharin, Brandler, Maurin, Lovestone), or locked themselves up in ossified sectarianism (Urbahns, Bordiga). Many of the leading figures of the International Left Opposition - prominent founders of Comintern sections - failed to resist the pressures arising from the terrible defeats of the working class in the 1930s.
The defeats in Germany, Spain, France and above all the bloody triumph of Stalin's bonapartist clique in the USSR, propelled Left Oppositionists such as Nin, Sneevliet and Rosmer into centrist waverings. This included an unwillingness to support Trotsky's struggle to found a new International. Trotsky had hoped and expected to rally wider forces and a broader spectrum of historic communist leaders from the Leninist period of the Comintern into the new International. It was not to be. The International Communist League (ICL), and then the Movement for the Fourth International (MFI), alone held to the fundamental principles and tactics of the first four congresses of the Comintern. They alone developed these principles and tactics to face the enormous challenge of the 1930s.
The bureaucratic degeneration of the Russian Revolution had immediate repercussions beyond the borders of the Soviet Union. In the Comintern its negative effects were felt over the question of the KPD's failure to lead an insurrection in 1923. Under Zinoviev's leadership it went on to commit a series of disastrous ultra-left errors (e.g. the rising in Estonia). The Comintern sections were heavily bureaucratised under the slogan of "Bolshevisation". National leaderships were selected on the basis of their loyalty to the leading faction of the CPSU.
With the ascendancy of the Stalin-Bukharin bloc, the Comintern swung rapidly into I right opportunism in its relations to the British Trade Union bureaucracy. The bloc with them - the Anglo-Russian Committe – was maintained despite the betrayal of 1926 by the TUC. Then, in 1927, after a policy of liquidating the Chinese CP into the bourgeois nationalist Kuornintang led to a catastrophe in Shanghai, the Comintern veered left again. It launched the Canton Commune. This ill-prepared rising was brutally suppressed by the former honorary member of the Comintern, Chiang Kai Shek. In Russia itself the emerging bureaucratic caste - headed by Stalin - crushed party democracy, used police methods against all oppositions and vacillated wildly in its economic policies.
On all of these issues, the Left Opposition, led by Leon Trotsky, waged a determined struggle to return the Comintern to the revolutionary course it had followed at its first four congresses. Originating in the Russian Party, the Left Opposition, after Trotsky's expulsion from the Soviet Union, established itself as an International (external) Faction of the Comintern, with the expressed aim of reforming the International, its sections, and the one state where a section held power - the Soviet Union.
The positions of the International Left Opposition on the Soviet Union, Germany 1923, Britain 1926 and China 1927, were based on the programmatic gains of the Bolshevik party and the Theses and Resolutions passed by the first four congresses of the Comintern.
The Comintern, built in the post-war revolutionary period of 1919-1923, developed an organisation and a political method that stand as models for communists to this day. Its Congresses were democratic forums where the best communist leaders of the day could debate their tactics. Its Executive Committee (ECCI) and its network of agents were the centralised structure through which the decisions taken at those Congresses could be effectively implemented internationally.
The Comintern systematised the method of democratic centralism as the form of organisation for revolutionary combat parties and the world party of communist revolution. It drew a sharp line between communism and reformism by generalising from the experience of the Russian Revolution, and making its goal the revolutionary conquest of power by the proletariat and the internationalisation of the revolution. Not content with a mere declaration of aims, the Comintern sought to build up a number of strong active sections, capable of achieving these aims through the use of revolutionary tactics.
To this end the Comintern from 1919-22 subjected the ever changing world political and economic situation and the balance of class forces thus engendered, to constant scrutiny. It operated with an understanding of the imperialist epoch as one of capitalist decay, wars and revolutions. But it also understood the importance of periods within this epoch - revolutionary or pre-revolutionary periods, periods of stability or retreat, counter-revolutionary periods, etc. On the basis of its understanding of perspectives as a guide to action, it was able to re-focus its programme and adjust its tactical line as different periods opened up after the war.
Thus at the first two congresses the principal slogans were rightly directed at the formation of Soviets and the struggle for power. The victory of the Russian Revolution, the upheavals in Germany, the Hungarian events all pointed to the viability of this line of advance.
However, with the defeats of 1919-20 in Germany, Hungary and Italy, thanks to the treachery of the Second International parties and the vacillation of the centrist USPD and PSI, the Comintern immediately re-examined its perspectives. At the Third Congress in June 1921 these defeats, their impact on the working class and the temporary respite they gave to the principal capitalist governments were acknowledged.
The line of advance was changed from the immediate conquest of power to "conquest of the masses". The sections utilised the method employed by the Bolsheviks in February to September 1917 - the method of the united front with reformist parties and the demand that they break with the bourgeoisie and base themselves on the masses.
This method led directly to the "workers' government" slogan and to transitional demands as a means of winning the masses to communist leadership. These positions were embodied in the Third Congress' Theses on Tactics. They were elaborated further in the Fourth Congress' Theses on Tactics (December 1922), the Programme of Action in the Unions (Third Congress) and the Theses on the United Front (Fourth Congress).
In addition to its general tactical and programmatic guidelines, the Comintern developed positions on a whole range of specific questions. On the National Question, and later the Anti-Imperialist United Front, its Theses pointed to the progressive nature of national liberation struggles, and the duty of communists to support them against' imperialism. But at the same time it stressed the centrality of maintaining the independence of the working class in the oppressed nations.
National liberation for the Comintern was not the end goal. It was a component part of the struggle for proletarian revolution.
Work amongst the oppressed masses - women, youth, blacks, the unemployed, the peasantry - was stressed by the Comintern as obligatory for Communists. In this the Comintern broke resolutely with the labour aristocratic aloofness of the Second International which had given scant attention to the colonial masses and the oppressed' nationalities.
At the centre of all of the Comintern's positions lay two fundamental principles - the political independence of the working class, that is to say, of its programme; and the use of tactics like the united front as a means to win the masses to the communist goal, the dictatorship of the proletariat. The first condition of a tactical compromise was that the Communists publicly express their strategic positions and retain the freedom to criticise their temporary allies.
The Comintern never completed its work of re-elaborating the Marxist programme. The bloc of restorationists and bureaucratic centrists under Bukharin and Stalin eventually enshrined their reactionary slogan of "socialism in one country" in the Comintern's degenerate programme.
The failure of the Comintern to complete its tasks of programmatic re-elaboration and re-focusing was to be of enormous significance to those communists who fought to refound a communist international after the degeneration of the Comintern.
All of these principles were sacrificed by the Stalinised Comintern.
In Britain the Trade Union leaders were praised, not fought in, 1926; in China the banner of the proletariat was pulled down by the communists while that of the bourgeois nationalists was hoisted up.
In the ultra-left "Third Period" the Comintern committed opposite, but equally disastrous errors. The programme of the Sixth Congress in 1928 infused with the theory and practice of "Socialism in One Country", abandoned the internationalism of the early Comintern.
Sections became pawns of Stalin's foreign policy. The united front was rejected in favour of the Red Front, of “United Front from below" a tactic predicated on the idea that Social Democracy and Fascism were twins. The programme itself was confined to abstract generalities about capitalism. It failed, as the positions of the early Comintern had not, to base itself on the most recent vital experiences of the international class struggle.
The Sixth Congress highlighted the thoroughgoing Stalinisation of the Comintern. The rotten fruit of this process was finally borne in 1933 when the pride of the Communist International, the KPD, was destroyed by fascism without a fight. It was not primarily the guns and knives of the fascists that defeated the German working class.
It was the treachery of the Social Democracy and the ultra-left politics of the KPD. Their abandonment of the united front led directly to the defeat in Germany. This event was decisive. It exposed the criminal policies of Stalinism. Yet not one single Comintern section acknowledged this.
Stalin's line on Germany was endorsed retrospectively by all of them.
The Comintern thus proved definitively incapable of learning from its errors. It was dead for revolution.
Trotsky and the left Opposition held a position that, up to 1933, the German defeat and its aftermath, the Comintern could have been reformed. The International Left Opposition repeatedly requested to be re-admitted to the Comintern as a faction. This in no way hindered the International Left Opposition from raising its position on Britain, China and later on Germany and the rise of fascism. Trotsky was clear that the Comintern had abandoned the revolutionary programme at its Sixth Congress, when it adopted Bukharin's programme.
Thus the programme of the Comintern was not decisive for Trotsky's reform perspective. At the same time the definitive class collaborationist turn (crossing of class lines) of the Comintern did not come until 1935 with the Stalin- Llval pact and the turn to the Popular Front policy in France, and later internationally.
For Trotsky, what was decisive in the reform perspective was that during its revolutionary period, the Comintern had, in certain key countries, organised a mass revolutionary vanguard. The existence of this vanguard, particularly in Germany where the fate of Europe was being decided, was seen by the International Left Opposition as a potential lever of reform in the Comintern. It was potentially a very powerful force that could be turned against the Stalin clique. But the condition of this was that it could remove its leaders before their policy led to its own destruction at the hands of fascism. This consideration, the existence of a mass vanguard, determined the Left Opposition's orientation up to 1933. The destruction of the mass KPD and the failure of any other section to respond correctly to this event, undermined the basis of the reform perspective.
The other communist parties had, themselves, withered under the impact of the policies of the "Third Period". The loss of membership was dramatic, reducing many of the parties to small sects. In France the PCF, which in 1924 claimed 110,000 members against the SFIO's 35,000 was down to a claimed membership of 30,000 in 1932, with probably no more than half of that number being active members. In Britain the same process, on a smaller scale, was evident. By 1930 party membership had slumped to 2,500, less than half the number claimed in 1922. It was a relatively huge drop in numbers from the 1926 highpoint of 10,000 members.
The perspective of reform had to be changed. Max Shachtman, a leading member of the International Left Opposition in 1933, spelled this out in his foreword to "The History and Principles of the Left Opposition". 'The collapse of the German Communist Party removes from the dwindling ranks of the Communist International the last of its sections possessing any mass following or influence...Suffice it to say that the German events, and the bureaucratic self contentment and unconcern, deepening of the errors and disintegration of Stalinism and its parties which have followed them bring us to the ineluctable conclusion: That the Communist International has been strangled by Stalinism, is bankrupt, is beyond recovery or restoration on Marxist foundations". 1
Thus it was the ability of the Stalinist bureaucracy to strangle the Comintern and the masses grouped within it, that proved that those masses were not, and could not become, a lever for reform. Henceforth the Trotskyists set out to rebuild new parties and a new International.
The task became one of breaking the masses from the Comintern, social democracy and all forms of centrism, and winning them to a new International. In a period of defeats (the 1930s), this proved enormously difficult. However, the ILO/ICL/MFI forces kept alive the traditions, methods and theoretical conquests of the communist movement. As such their struggle was a pledge for their future. Trotsky himself realised the importance of this achievement, limited as it may seem to those who, impatient to become leaders of the masses, end up regarding communism as an obstacle between them and the masses:
"How the new International will take form, through what stages it will pass, what final shape it will assume - this no-one can foretell today.
And indeed there is no need to do so: historical events will show us.
But it is necessary to begin by proclaiming a programme that meets the tasks of our epoch. On the basis of this programme it is necessary to mobilise co-thinkers, the pioneers of the new International. No other road is possible".2
Under Trotsky's guidance the International Left Opposition and its descendants (ICL/MFI) had correctly analysed the class nature, role and dynamic of fascism - a mass movement based on the petit-bourgeoisie and lumpenproletariat, whose service to finance capital was to crush into atoms the proletariat's organisations. The revolutionary tactical answer to this threat was the anti-fascist workers' united front.
Such a tactic could have allowed the communists to expose the bankruptcy of the reformist leaders without jeopardising the united struggle of the working class. It could have crushed fascism, allowed the communists to win the leadership of the working class and thereby enabled them to go forward to the seizure of power. The Trotskyists analysed the degenerative process in the USSR. The isolation of the Soviet state and the extreme material and cultural backwardness of Russian society at the time of the revolution had provided fertile soil for the growth of a vast parasitic bureaucracy. This caste, headed by the Stalin faction, had usurped political power from the working class, terrorising and annihilating its vanguard.
The Trotskyists explained this degeneration at each stage and formulated the strategy of political revolution against the bureaucracy as the only means of restoring proletarian political power in the degenerated workers' state. At the same time, the ICL/MFI correctly maintained a policy of unconditional defence of the remaining gains of the October Revolution (statified industry, monopoly of foreign trade, planning) against the capitalist restorationist efforts of the imperialists.
In France and Spain, the Trotskyists analysed and fought the Stalinist and Social Democratic class collaborationist policy of the Popular Front, which subordinated the organisations and interests of the working class to the policy of the imperialist bourgeoisie. Trotsky guided the small groups of the Fourth International movement in the use of tactics adapted to conditions in the more stable imperialist democracies Britain and the USA. In these countries and in France he developed "entryism" as a short or medium term tactical manoeuvre aimed at placing revolutionaries at the head of vanguard elements of the proletariat unwilling (temporarily) to break with the mass reformist organisations.
This tactic involved the creation of a revolutionary communist wing and a sharp 'struggle .against left centrist "revolutionary" opposition as well as the right-wing bureaucratic leadership. Whilst the development of centrist tendencies by the reformist parties was the context of entry, in no sense was it the task of Trotskyists to create such a centrist bloc or themselves to advance centrist policies. No inevitable stage of centrist leaderships or parties was envisaged, let alone advocated, by the Fourth Internationalists.
Trotsky also developed the tactic of splits and fusions in relation to leftward moving centrist organisations, on the basis of winning them to a clear revolutionary programme. In the colonial and semi-colonial countries (Asia, Latin America, Africa), the Trotskyist movement, even where it participated in the Anti-Imperialist United Front with non proletarian elements, fought for the programme of proletarian, permanent revolution, against the "stages theory" - a Menshevik theory resurrected by Stalin, which subord1nated the independent interests of the proletariat to the national (bourgeois) revolution.
By 1938, with the second imperialist world war imminent, Trotsky drew together the fundamental doctrines and method of the communist tradition (from Marx to the first four Congresses of the Comintern) extending, developing and enriching them with the lessons learnt by the Trotskyists since 1923. This resulted in the production of a programme 'The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International' - the Transitional Programme.3The FI was founded on the basis of this programme. We affirm the absolute correctness of the FI's formation in 1938.
Indeed, had the FI not been founded in 1938, there would undoubtedly have been an even greater dispersion and weakening of revolutionary forces during the war and even less possibility for the voice of revolutionary internationalism to be heard. Neither the organisation nor the 'internationalism' of the centrists (British ILP, French PSOP, Spanish POUM etc) stood the test of war. In no way can the later disintegration be attributed to the FI's 'premature' formation.
We also reject the linked error that only mass national parties with deep roots in the proletariat of their respective countries can form an International. This conception is a thoroughly nationalist, Second Internationalist one.
Faced with the degeneration of the Second and Third Internationals and the hesitations of the centrists, the internationalist revolutionary programme of the Trotskyists required an international party. The centrists who argued against the founding of the FI had themselves set up national parties. This double standard showed how, for the centrists, an international party was a luxury, thus betraying their nationalism. If the party is the programme then this applies also to the World Party.
As soon as a developed international programme exists, as soon as a stable international leadership, united around this programme has been established, then there can be no cause for delay. This was the case in 1938. Even though the political leadership of the FI existed mainly in the person of Leon Trotsky, this was initially sufficient in the period of the FI's formation. He was, in many respects, an embodiment of the FI's continuity with Bolshevism.
The FI was an "International" which unlike the First, Second and Third did not consist of mass workers' organisations. It comprised in most countries propaganda groups struggling to escape the isolation that their numbers and the murderous hostility of the Stalinists forced on them. Partial exceptions were the USA where the SWP had developed systematic agitation in the blue collar unions and led sections of workers on a local basis (Minneapolis), and the deep roots of the Vietnamese Trotskyists in the proletariat of Saigon.
But, if the Fourth International was weak in numbers it was in Trotsky's words "strong in doctrine, programme, tradition, in the incomparable tempering of its cadres. Trotsky's perspective was that the national sections of the FI and the international itself were posed to develop rapidly into a serious force within the proletariat. In the proletariat's crisis of leadership which the imperialist war would immeasurably sharpen, the FI would, given the correct programme and a firm and seasoned international leadership, develop into a decisive mass force capable of resolving the crisis. That this perspective did not materialise in no way invalidates in our view the decision to found the FI in 1938. Trotsky's FI, its programme, its theses and its cadres, despite the later degeneration, saved and communicated to a later generation the precious heritage of Marx, Engels and Lenin.
We stand in the tradition of the FI founded by Trotsky. Its programme, the Transitional Programme, represented the culmination of the programmatic work of previous generations of revolutionary Marxists. It was developed on the shoulders of all previous Marxist programmes - the Communist Manifesto, the programmatic declaration of the Bolshevik Party, and above all, on the principles and tactics developed by the revolutionary Comintern.
It represented a transcending of the old Social Democratic programme, divided into minimum and maximum demands, which in the imperialist epoch enshrined the reformist practice of the Second International, and developed instead, on the basis of work already started in the programmatic debates of the revolutionary Comintern, a system of transitional demands.
The Transitional Programme was, after Trotsky's death, both misused and misunderstood by his supposed disciples. As we shall see it was eventually liquidated as an operative programme and worshipped as a lifeless idol. Unlike the Third International, the Fourth had no proletarian masses grouped beneath its banner. Its integrity and its ability to survive was concentrated in the scientific correctness of its programme and in its cadres' ability to win the' proletarian vanguard to it.
Defence of the programme against its vastly stronger opponents; utilisation in the class struggle; the development and re-elaboration of it to meet new situations and new tasks, were heavy responsibilities for a cadre weak in numbers with limited class struggle experience and with few theoreticians of stature. A correct understanding of the Transitional Programme - its nature, doctrine and method is thus vital to Trotskyists who seek to rediscover and re-appropriate these historic gains - long distorted and obscured by the 'theory' and practice of Trotsky's epigones.
Trotsky's programme marked the successful resolution of programmatic problems that originated with the Erfurt Programme of 1891. It represented the programmatic resolution of the problem of the disjuncture between the struggle over immediate and partial demands and the struggle for power.
The old minimum programme was limited to demands within the framework of capitalism. These included demands for the amelioration of the proletariat's conditions - the 8 hour day, measures of social welfare, improvement of wages, and a series of democratic demands universal suffrage and a sovereign assembly, an elected judiciary, the dissolution of the standing army and the creation of a people's militia etc. These demands did not transcend the concessions possible within the framework of bourgeois society though in many countries the most militant, indeed revolutionary, methods of struggle would be necessary to win them.
In the early 1890s, Engels, who supported the Erfurt Programme with reservations, hoped that the mobilisation of the masses by parliamentary and trade union means to fight for these goals would result in a decisive struggle that would crack the framework of the capitalist state and the bureaucratic, semi-absolutist regimes of many continental states, opening the road to proletarian power. Engels' successors (Kautsky, Bernstein, Bebel etc) transformed this perspective into one of peaceful evolutionary growth in the present, combined with an inevitable collapse or catastrophe for capitalism at some time in the distant future. They thus falsified Engels' perspective and the strategic and tactical methods of the founders of Marxism.
In practice, in a period of capitalist expansion (the opening phase" of the imperialist epoch) significant concessions were made to the working class simply on the basis of the threat posed by the growth (in numbers and in votes gained) by the workers' parties and in response to trade union action. The leaders of the social democracy, for their part, were content to achieve piecemeal reforms and build up the parties and unions - ie to struggle for reforms outside and apart from the perspective of proletarian power. The latter became a distant 'final goal', the subject of abstract propaganda. The strategy of the conquest of power was replaced by the isolated tactic of social reform.
Thus a chasm opened between the maximum and minimum programme. Bernstein, the father of revisionism argued that this contradiction should be resolved by Social Democracy daring to appear as what it was - a democratic party of social reform. The 'final goal' was nothing, the 'movement' was everything.
The radical left of Social Democracy, especially Lenin and Luxemburg, argued for revolutionary tactics in pursuit of the major demands of the minimum programme (ie mass strike, armed insurrection etc to attain the democratic republic). They fought to purge the ranks of the workers' parties of the revisionists and reformists. They noted and analysed the gathering forces within modern capitalism making for reaction at home and wars abroad (Imperialism).
In a partial manner the prewar Social Democratic Left posed the necessity of transcending the Erfurt style programme and the associated parliamentary and pure trade union tactics. They raised the 'final goal' as the strategic object of revolutionary tactics. Within the left, Trotsky, despite a series of vacillating positions, particularly on the question of the Party and Bolshevik/Menshevik unity, came nearest to completely transcending the minimum/maximum divide. The theory of Permanent Revolution, at that time applied only to Russia by Trotsky, raised as the immediate goal of the proletariat (with the mass strike and insurrection to achieve it) a proletarian revolution and a workers' government that would not stop at solving the democratic tasks, but would press on, to fulfil the tasks of a socialist revolution. In a backward country like Russia, made up pr~ominant1y of peasants, Trotsky recognised that the proletarian revolution would have to win the support of the peasants and would have to be linked to the internationalisation of the revolution. However even Trotsky did not develop a fully rounded programmatic alternative to the Erfurt programme.
The "Marxist Centre" of Social Democracy, represented by Bebel and Kautsky, refused to unite theory and practice as Bernstein and Luxemburg, in different ways, wished. They defended an increasingly abstract inevitabilist Marxism against Bernstein. They defended parliamentary and trade union cretinism against Luxemburg.
The sharpening crises, economic and political, of the pre-war period, heralded an epoch of wars and revolutions, that made the Erfurt synthesis a disguise for the rise of a conservative, counter-revolutionary bureaucracy within the workers' organisations. The Second International, under pressure from the proletariat and the Left, was committed to opposing any European war (which it defined in advance as imperialist On the part of all the major powers) and of transforming any such war into the occasion for struggling to overthrow capitalism. In August 1914, the voting of war credits by. the German SPD indicated the renunciation by the leaders of that party ( and they were soon followed by all the major parties of the Second International) of their formal Marxism, in favour of social chauvinism.
The Bolsheviks were the only major party to carry out their pre-war promises and obligations via the policy of revolutionary defeatism ("Turn the imperialist war into a civil war";" Defeat of one's own country is the lesser evil"). Elsewhere minorities fought the social chauvinists (Liebknecht - "The main enemy is at home"). Bolshevism developed an understanding of the real roots of the war in the theory of imperialism as a new epoch of capitalist crisis, war and revolution.
The Bolsheviks also developed revolutionary methods of struggle for power - the united front, the mass strike, armed insurrection - and an understanding of the nature of proletarian state power - the smashing of the bourgeois bureaucratic military state machine and its replacement with soviet power, the commune-type state etc. These theoretical and practical conquests made Bolshevism by 1917, the crucible for the creation of a new programme - a programme dominated by the posing of the need for the proletariat to seize power as an immediate task.
This did not obliterate the need to raise immediate and partial demands, but it posed the question of revolutionary methods of struggle, and of demands which met vital and immediate needs (war, famine, unemployment, inflation, economic chaos - all caused by the convulsive crises of imperialism). The struggle for such demands organised and directed workers towards the struggle for power. These transitional demands utilised by the Bolsheviks in 1917 (see Lenin's programmatic pamphlet "The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat it") became part of the international proletariat's armoury as a result of the work of the Comintern between 1919 and 1923.
In the Third and Fourth Congresses the CI systematised the United Front tactic, the action programme of immediate and transitional demands, the workers' government as means of overcoming the ideological subjective weakness of the proletariat evidenced by the existence of reformist leaderships, in order to facilitate its struggle for the conquest of power.
The CI broke resolutely from the Kautskyian heritage of the Second International. First of all it recognised the nature of the epoch as transitional - transitional between capitalism and socialism. This was not an objective process. It existed thanks to objective conditions, but its resolution depended on a struggle between parties and classes. From this analysis the CI concluded: "The character of the transitional epoch makes it obligatory for all communist parties to raise to the utmost their readiness for struggle.
Any struggle may turn into a struggle for power. Thus, in the imperialist epoch, where immediate demands clashed with capitalist priorities, direct action for such demands posed the possibility of developing into a struggle for power. Therefore, revolutionaries has to stress the interlinked nature of all proletarian demands, and the need to fight for all demands and to organise itself at. every level for this. Because this confronted capitalism it was necessary to state the consequence: destroy capitalism to defend ourselves.
"The communist parties do not put forward any minimum programme to strengthen and improve the tottering structure 'of capitalism. The destruction of that structure remains their guiding aim and their immediate mission. But to carry out this mission the communist parties must put forward demands whose fulfilment is an immediate and urgent working class need, and they must fight for these demands in mass struggle, regardless of whether they are compatible with the profit economy of the capitalist class or not."6 And again, "'If the demands correspond to the vital needs of the broad proletarian masses and if these masses feel they cannot exist unless these demands are met, then the struggle for these demands will become the starting point of the struggle for power.
In place of the minimum programme. of the reformists and centrists, the Communist International puts the struggle for the concrete needs of the proletariat, for a system of demands which in their totality disintegrate the power of the bourgeoisie, organise the proletariat, represent stages in the struggle for the proletarian dictatorship, and each of which expresses in itself the need of the broadest masses, even if the masses themselves are not yet consciously in favour of the proletarian dictatorship."7
The Comintern developed the idea of a bridge to facilitate the transition from the struggle within capitalism to the struggle against capitalism. Clearly this bridge, this system of demands, this programme, had to correspond to objective conditions - the state of the economy, the actual needs of the masses, the nature of the period, the recent experiences of the international class struggle and their impact on the masses. These considerations guided, for example, the various action programmes developed by the CI. .
However, by the time that the CI came to debate its programme the authors of the Theses on Tactics - the CI's "Transitional Programme" had been expelled. The "scholastic" Bukharin, acting as hired scribe for the bureaucratic philistine Stalin, drew up the programme. In order to cover over the Comintern's errors and justify the reactionary theory and practice of "Socialism in One Country" the programme was reduced to being an abstract, redundant document. The transitional method was gone. The need to relate the programme to objective conditions went with it. Trotsky in his critique of Bukharin's document defended and developed the Comintern's earlier position:
"But a programme of revolutionary action naturally cannot be approached as a bare collection of abstract propositions without any relation to all that has occurred during these epoch-making years. A programme cannot, of course, go into a description of the events of the past, but it must proceed from these events, base itself upon them, encompass them, and relate to them. A programme by the position it takes, must make it possible to understand all the major facts of the struggle of the proletariat, and all the important facts relating to the ideological struggle within the Comintern. If this is true with regard to the programme as a whole, then it is all the truer with regard to that part of it which is specifically devoted to the question of strategy and tactics. Here, in the words of Lenin, in addition to what has been conquered there must also be registered that which has been lost which can be transformed into a 'conquest' if it has been understood and assimilated. The proletarian vanguard needs not a catalogue of truisms but a manual of action. "8
Confronting the task of developing a new International, Trotsky had to develop a Transitional Programme. The fundamental features of the 1938 programme, "The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International" embodied the lessons of the Comintern and its collapse. In the first place it was a programme that corresponded to the objective situation - acute economic crisis, impending war, the rise of fascism, the collapse of the Communist International.
It was sharply focused towards resolving the crisis of leadership within the pre-revolutionary situation that these factors were bound to create. Those who accuse this programme of "catastrophism" should consider the magnitude of the catastrophe - the war - that followed its publication. like Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto, it anticipated a sharp crisis and tried to orient the working class towards a revolutionary outcome. In this sense it was not fatalist, but imbued with the spirit of revolutionary optimism and the will to triumph over the most daunting obstacles.
It proceeded from the experience of the class struggle over the preceding ten years. Unlike Bukharin, Trotsky had nothing to hide in his programme. The lessons of the German defeat. the Popular Front in France and Spain, the degeneration of the Russian Revolution, the anti imperialist struggle in China were all encompassed in the programme.
Its slogans flowed from the experience - positive and negative - of these momentous events.
The programme was an international programme. The impending war pointed to the urgent need for an international line of march. Trotsky provided it, drawing on the experience of the MFI's sections, analysing the contradictions and inter-connections within the world capitalist system and the USSR. In the Transitional Pogramme is a codification of Permanent Revolution. That is, the revolution must internationalise itself or go down to defeat. In backward countries the tasks of the democratic revolution can only be solved by proletarian revolution.
This whole strategy can only be fulfilled if the crisis of leadership is resolved by revolutionary communist parties winning the loyalty of the masses and leading them into permanent revolution against imperialism.
Most important, the Transitional Programme was - like the famous Section Two in the Communist Manifesto, the Theses on Tactics of the Comintern, the "Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It" of the Bolsheviks - an action programme, focused towards the tasks of the period ahead. It was truly a guide to action. In the "Review of the Founding Conference" in 1938, the FI recognised this crucial aspect of the programme: "What a contrast it offers to the vague generalisations and deceptive abstractions which the official leaderships of the working class offer as guides to action in the present tumultuous world situation!
It is not, or rather is not so much, the basic programme of the Fourth International, as it is its programme of action for the immediate period in which we live" 9
Its programme of action for the proletariat was transitional. Its demands were interlinked and allied to the same goal - the seizure of state power by the proletariat. For this reason every demand designed to meet the needs of the masses (against unemployment, for example), is linked to the struggle for workers' control, the formation of factory committees, mass action, factory occupations, etc. These fighting organs of the proletariat culminate in the keystone of the programme, the call for Soviets as organs of struggle against the capitalist regime.
The demands for a sliding scale of wages and hours, for the opening of the books, etc, expose the anarchy of capitalism, pose the essence of the planned economy and create the organised forces both to win and exercise the state power necessary to effect a transition to a fully planned economy.
Only such a programme allows the fight for socialist revolution to be linked to the everyday struggles of the proletariat. Trotsky spelt this out in the programme itself: "The strategic task of the Fourth International lies not in reforming capitalism, but in its overthrow. Its political aim is the conquest of power by the proletariat for the purpose of expropriating the bourgeoisie. However, the achievement of this strategic task is unthinkable without the most considered attention to all, even small and partial, questions of tactics. All sections of the proletariat - all its layers, occupations and groups - should be drawn into the revolutionary movement. The present epoch is distinguished not because it frees the revolutionary party from day to day work but because it permits this work to be carried out indissolubly with the actual tasks of the revolution". 10
The means for doing this was the system of transitional demands, demands which start with today's needs (not today's mentality of the workers, a fact Trotsky repeated to SWP (US) members) and lead to the revolution. Since Trotsky's death, many avowed Trotskyists have used individual demands, plucked from the system of transitional demands, either as isolated trade union demands or as part of a programme for reforming the institutions of the capitalist state (Ernest Mandel of the USFI put them forward in the 1960s as a series of "structural reforms").
Others like the British "Militant" group advance them as a trick - "fight for these demands now" is what they shout; "and later we'll reveal that they're directed against capitalism" is what they whisper amongst themselves. Both views lead inevitably to opportunism. Trotsky himself was clear that Transitional Demands were neither reforms nor tricks, not one of our demands will be realised under capitalism. That is why we are calling them transitional demands.
It creates a bridge to the mentality of the workers and then a material bridge to the socialist revolution. The whole question is how to mobilise the masses for struggle...The revolutionaries always consider that the reforms and acquisitions are only a by-product of revolutionary struggle. If we say that we will only demand what they can give, the ruling class will only give one tenth or more of what we demand.
When we demand more and can improve our demands, the capitalists are compelled to give the maximum. The more extended and militant the spirit of the workers, the more is demanded and won. They are not sterile slogans; they are a means of pressure on the bourgeoisie, and will give the greatest possible material results immediately". 11
Thus they are both a means of winning real concessions and a means of mobilising the masses on the basis of their own needs against capitalism in a struggle that can easily turn into a struggle for power.
Of course the use of the Transitional Programme and its demands inevitably varies in different circumstances. The emphasis on particular demands, the refocusing of the programme itself, will depend on the state of the class struggle, the state of the economy, the state of political life and so on. But what remains valid, in periods of boom as well as crisis, periods of retreat as well as of advance, in backward countries and in advanced ones, is precisely the method lodged within the Transitional Programme - that the goal of revolutionaries is to take workers across the "transitional bridge" from their present situation to the socialist revolution. All of these features were embodied within the Transitional Programme. This programme was not the invention of Trotsky. In his words: "It is the summation of the collective work up until today".12
After Trotsky's murder in 1940, preceded by the Stalinists' extermination of his closest collaborators (his son Sedov, Rudolf Klement, Erwin Wolf etc), and the desertion of leading members of the International (Serge, Leonetti, Muste, Zeller, Fischer, Naville, Rous, Shachtman, etc), the central leadership of the FI effectively ceased to exist. The Trotskyists were responsible for acts of unparalleled heroism during the war, but as an international organisation the FI disintegrated.
This collapse, exacerbated by war-time dislocation, might be the fate of any revolutionary organisation without mass parties or state resources at its disposal. Initially the sections had the Transitional Programme and the FI's declarations on the war and other issues, as their basis for unity. However the sections soon began to diverge from these positions and from each other.
Chapter Two: The epigones destroy Trotsky's International, 1940-1953
The general decimation of cadre before and during the war (including the loss of some 40 per cent of the SWP(US) in the split with the Shachtmanites) was paralleled by a series of opportunist and sectarian deviations that politically weakened the forces of Trotskyism. In the USA the SWP, led by Cannon, distorted Trotsky's proletarian military policy when faced with the actual entry of the US into the war in late 1941.
The SWP placed their entire emphasis on the tar-Heal compromise involved in this policy (acceptance of bourgeois militarisation programmes, but combined with a fight to place them under workers' control), but obscured the strategic context that Trotsky always set this policy in - that is a clear and unambiguous struggle for the policy of revolutionary defeatism when confronted with the actuality of imperialist war. Using the pretext of the need to maintain its legality at all costs, Cannon delayed the party from issuing a statement on the war when it broke out.
Only under pressure from oppositionists, largely inspired by the Spanish-Mexican Trotskyist Grandizo Munis, did the SWP issue a statement. It was first published in the January 1942 issue of "Fourth International", the theoretical organ of the party. It was not published in the party's newspaper, "The Militant", despite the wider circulation of that paper. The statement was however unequivocally against the war and raised the banner of internationalism against the mad stampede towards the slaughter. However it did not spell out, at any point, that American Marxists regarded the defeat of the American bourgeoisie's armies as a lesser evil. It was an internationalist anti-war statement, but. not a Leninist defeatist statement.
The party went even further, suggesting on a number of occasions that fascism, and not the American "democratic" imperialists, was the American workers' main enemy. The Transitional Programme had laid down the guiding principles for the FI in the imperialist countries:
"In this struggle the basic principle is 'the chief enemy is in your own country' or 'the defeat of your own (imperialist) government is the lesser evil". 13
The Frs Manifesto on War had stated in 1940: "The Fourth International builds its policy not on the military fortunes of the capitalist states but on the transformation of the imperialist war into a war of the workers against the capitalists".14 Indeed, Trotsky had had occasion earlier to denounce his Palestinian co-thinkers for deviating from this line.
The SWP, in the heat of war and with prosecutions looming, retreated from the FI’s positions. In "Socialism on Trial" Cannon refused to make clear, in a mass sale pamphlet, that the main enemy was at home: "Q. Is it true that the party is as equally opposed to Hitler as it is to the capitalist claims of the United States?
A. That is unanswerable. We consider Hitler and Hitlerism the greatest enemy of mankind. We want to wipe it off the face of the earth. The reason we do not support a declaration of war by American arms is because we do not believe the American capitalists can defeat Hitler and fascism. We think Hitlerism can be destroyed only be conducting a war under the leadership of the workers".15 There are three centrist waverings in this short exchange: 1) Hitler, not the "Sixty families", becomes the US workers' greatest enemy;
2) Cannon proposes a war - presumably an invasion of Germany - as the way of defeating Hitler. Trotsky, on the other hand, rightly told the Palestinian group who proposed a similar war: "No, in this way we shall not help the German workers to rouse themselves from their stupor. We must show them in action that revolutionary politics consists in a simultaneous struggle against the respective imperialist governments in all the warring countries. This 'simultaneity' must not of course be taken mechanically...For Hitler and Mussolini the success of a socialist revolution in anyone of the advanced countries is infinitely more terrible than the combined armaments of all the imperialist 'democracies'.16
3) Cannon talks merely of the "leadership" of the workers. This is so vague as to be meaningless. We say, only when the government is our government, a real workers' government, will we "defend the fatherland". On that there can be no equivocation. Yet the SWP did equivocate. They transformed the revolutionary defeatist slogan of "Turn the imperialist war into a civil war" into the evasive democratic slogan: "The real solution is to transform the imperialist war into a war against fascism".17 This slogan was raised even before the entry of the US into the war.
The significance of this vacillation was that it reflected the SWP's tendency to submit to national pressures and considerations, allowing them to override internationalist ones. All of Cannon's justifications for his careful phraseology (in fact policy), are couched in terms of reaching out to the consciousness of the" American workers" - as it currently existed. This, in itself correct and commendable desire, was not combined with a recognition of the need for the SWP to i) stand against that consciousness which was in the first phase of the war, chauvinist, ii) to fulfil its internationalist duty as the strongest party of the Trotskyist movement, operating in the best conditions, to speak out to the world working class in clear revolutionary defeatist terms.
While the SWP members in the merchant navy and armed forces made courageous efforts to establish international contacts, the party did not act as an international organising centre for the FI. Nor did it establish such a centre in a neutral European country to liaise with the fragmented European sections. Such a project, though difficult, was not impossible.
As it turned out, the Europeans themselves were able to re-establish contact in 1943, when they held international gatherings in countries occupied by the Nazis. An international centre, in Switzerland for example, would have made this process of regroupment less difficult. The SWP did not act decisively to arrest the organisational dislocation caused by the war. Had they done so some of its ill-effects might have been offset. The SWP further abdicated its responsibilities as leading section of the world movement (which despite its being legally debarred from actual membership of the FI it nevertheless was) when, after the war it willingly ceded leadership to the young and inexperienced Europeans - Pablo and Germain (now Mandel).
As well as the errors of the SWP, the wartime history of the FI saw a number of other sections veer away from a consistent revolutionary line on the war. In France there existed no official section of the FI at the beginning of the war.
Former members of the POI (official section - dissolved by the International Executive Committee in June 1939), grouped under the name of "the French Committees for the Fourth International", adopted social-patriotic positions and nationalist demands faced with the German occupation of France. They saw the national struggle of a section of their own imperialist bourgeoisie as progressive. These concessions by the POI to the nationalism of the' petty-bourgeoisie were particularly significant in that, at the beginning of the war, the French proletariat had not yet been infected with the "anti-boche" chauvinist poison that the PCF was later to propagate.
The other main group was the CCI (which stemmed mainly from Molinier/Frank's pre-war PC!). This group, while holding fast against the tide of petit-bourgeois nationalism and refusing to support the struggle of the Gaullist section of the French bourgeoisie, fell into abstract propagandism and a sectarian attitude towards those struggles by French workers and peasants which brought them into confrontation with the armed forces of German imperialism.
In France, a Provisional European Secretariat of the FI was set up under Pablo's leadership in 1943. In February 1944 it organised a conference of European sections. One of the aims this conference gave itself was to secure the unification of the two main French groups. The Conference criticised the nationalist deviation of the POI; but accepted the false contention of the PO I that it had been infected by the nationalism of the masses at the start of the war. Furthermore, the Conference also criticised what it saw as the sectarian attitude of the CCI towards the partisan movement i in such a way that they implied that the CCI's sectarianism was on a par with the nationalist opportunism of the POI. (Indeed centrists such as Mandel still today argue that the principal mistake was not to have fully participated in the Gaullist/Stalinist-led military resistance movements against German imperialism).
There was no attempt to search for the real roots of the CCI's sectarianism. In a desire to achieve unification, no mention was made, for example, of the CCI's incorrect perspectives and its confusion over the relationship between party and class. Its attempt to set up ."workers' groups" as embryonic soviets was similar to Molinier/Frank's centrist position, developed in 1936/36, of Revolutionary Action Groups as embryonic soviets (see Braun's "The Mass Paper" in "The Crisis of the French Section").Therefore a complete and honest balance sheet of the war period was not drawn up in France.
The German section, the IKD, veered in a Menshevik direction, arguing that the victory of the Nazis had, once again, placed the "democratic revolution" on the agenda, as against the proletarian revolution.
In Britain the two Trotskyist groups committed similar errors. The Workers' International League (WIL), while it carried out good work in the factories, leading strikes etc, eventually fell in with the line advanced by Cannon. Prior to the fall of France, the WIL maintained a clear defeatist position. In December 1938, the WIL argued that the "only way to act is to show the German working class that we struggle against our own bosses and by example encourage them to overthrow Hitler".18 Indeed, foreshadowing the errors later to be committed by the Revolutionary Socialist league (RSL), the other Trotskyist group, the WIL adopted a sectarian approach to practical problems posed by the onset of war. They argued that demands for adequate air-raid shelters for workers was tantamount to aiding the war effort. However, after the fall of France in 1940, the line began to change. With the "enemy at the door", the WIL began to buckle before chauvinist pressure.
Defeat was no longer an abstract "lesser evil". It was a real possibility.
The WIL declared, in February 1941, that the task was "turning the present imperialist war into a real struggle of the workers against Nazism".' The WIL linked this more explicitly than the SWP did, with a struggle against the British capitalists. However their slogan was not a consistently revolutionary defeatist one. The smaller official section of the FI, the RSL, maintained a harder defeatist position. However, 'like the CCI, they exhibited definite sectarian tendencies, particularly in their tactical application of this policy.
It would be wrong to give equal weight to sectarianism and opportunism in time of imperialist war. Lenin, during World War 1, was precisely prepared to bloc with sectarians (without endorsing their overall politics) in a bid to rally the most consistently internationalist forces.
We think the FI in its post-war fusions in Britain and France, was wrong to condemn the two errors as though they were of equal weight. The opportunist errors of the POI, the SWP and the WIL reflected the pressure of social chauvinism. Where the sectarian trend did not involve passive abstention from struggle (as it clearly did not in France), it was clearly superior. Also ominous was the failure of the FI or the SWP itself to draw up an honest balance sheet accounting for and correcting the SWP's war-time errors.
In 1944 several of the European sections of the FI regrouped at a conference held inside Nazi-occupied Europe. They adopted the "Theses on the Liquidation of World War 2 and the Revolutionary Upsurge".
These testified to the continuing revolutionary potential of the sections of the Fourth International. The theses, written at a time when anti German chauvinism and pro-allied sentiments were growing rapidly in Europe, espoused a defeatist position in the war. They indicated that the reconstruction of the FI on a revolutionary basis was a real possibility. However, severe disorientation over the crucial question of perspectives, obstructed this development from taking final shape.
The aftermath of the Second World War was not as Trotsky had predicted it. Key elements of his perspectives, when he wrote the Transitional Programme, for the period ahead were:
a) a massive revolutionary wave - particularly in Germany, Italy, France, Britain and the USA;
b) the qualitative transformation of the FI into a mass force able to use the Transitional Programme to relate to and win leadership in the revolutionary upsurge;
c) the death agony of capitalism or its survival only on a totalitarian basis;
d) the destruction of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR either by political revolution or by a victorious imperialism;
e) the disintegration of the old leaderships of the working class - the social democrats and the Stalinists, as their material roots disappeared crumbs from the table of imperialism and bureaucratic privilege in the USSR.
As we have shown, the Transitional Programme was not a collection of timeless Marxist truisms, it was a "manual of action"'. As such it was necessary to constantly test its demands, tactics and perspectives against reality, and to develop the programme accordingly. The followers of Trotsky repeatedly failed to do this after the war.
Trotsky's perspective at the beginning of the Second World War was that it would engender revolutionary upheavals as great as or greater than, those succeeding the First World War. Capitalist economy, bourgeois society and its reformist parasites would be thrown into mortal crisis.
Likewise, the Stalinist bureaucracy, if it survived a military debacle at the hands of the imperialist aggressor, would succumb to the political revolution of the proletariat aroused by revolutionary events in the west.
Criticisms can certainly be made of Trotsky's telescoped timetable for the historic exhaustion of US monopoly capitalism. However, this is an error Marx, Engels and Lenin made before him, and is a risk of error inseparable from revolutionary optimism.
Thus Trotsky considered an earlier error of perspective (at the Third World Congress of the Comintern) in the following way: "We had not predicted a solar eclipse, i.e. an event beyond our will and entirely independent of our actions. Involved is an historical event which can and will occur with our participation. When we spoke of the revolution resulting from the world war, it meant that we were and are striving to utilise the consequences of the world war in order to speed the revolution in every way possible".20
Trotsky's perspective was falsified by events after the war. Firstly, by powerful objective factors of the first magnitude. Whilst Britain and France, two of the three "democratic imperialisms" proved as rotten and prone to instability as Trotsky had observed, this was far from being the case with the United States. The colossal scale and dynamism of its productive forces enabled it to sustain the moribund British Empire and raise French imperialism from the grave - as client or subordinate powers, unable to challenge their Wall St masters.
Likewise in the Russian workers' state, planned economy proved stronger than the sabotage and bungling of the Stalinist bureaucracy.
Though Stalin and his clique brought the' workers' state to the edge of the abyss in 1941, the heroic resistance of the proletariat and the rallying to the workers' state of the peasantry and the nationalities, despite Stalin's crimes, and because of fascist atrocities, gave the USSR victory. This victory, however, strengthened not only the state but also the bonapartist bureaucracy. The advance of American and Russian armies across the European continent placed foreign armies hostile to proletarian revolution amongst the proletariat of France, Italy and Germany. The victory of Stalinism and Anglo-American (democratic) imperialism, strengthened the political forces dependent on these tendencies.
On the one hand, the openly bourgeois parties and social democracy were revivified due to the victory of the "democracies". On the other hand, the Stalinist parties with the weight of Russian victory and their own partisan struggles were likewise strengthened. Far from these forces facing the loss of their material basis, or suffering political demise and organisational disintegration, they emerged from the war much stronger than they were in the late 1930s.
Moreover, the politics of class collaboration - established via the Popular Front before the war, and having behind it the prestige of the Second and Third Internationals, were not disrupted until 1946/7, when the post-war crisis had been overcome. The whole weight of bourgeois democracy and Stalinism was thrown into the scales against proletarian revolution.
Once the immediate potentially revolutionary situations were weathered, the enormous economic power of the USA was brought to bear in the West through Marshall Aid, and the Kremlin bureaucracy sealed off its East European glacis and began the process of transforming them into degenerate workers' states, having expropriated the proletariat politically in advance. In Germany the working class upsurge was very weak and was suppressed immediately by Allied and Russian military means. In Italy and France the Stalinists demobilised the partisan militias. In Central and Eastern Europe a varied combination of Soviet forces and indigenous Stalinists and their popular frontist allies were able to prevent any revolutionary upsurge from occurring.
Thus not only were the Trotskyists weak and disorganised, but the conditions for them to emerge from the situation of marginalised propaganda groups did not materialise. Instead, the counter-revolutionary social democracy and Stalinist parties grew in strength, isolating the Trotskyists yet again. Thus social democracy and Stalinism exerted tremendous pressure on the tiny and disoriented forces of the Fourth International.
Whilst it was certainly possible to expect renewed political and social crisis with a further capitalist crisis - clearly by 1946/7 a new assessment of perspectives, an accounting for the failure of the previous ones, was necessary. Had this been done, it is unlikely that such a one sided, false perspective would have emerged based on catastrophic crisis, an immediately renewed war and the delayed revolution. The transformation of the Marxist understanding of crises, of war, of revolution from events into long processes was the result of a purblind empiricism which sought at all costs to prolong the "revolutionary perspective".
The isolated and defeated FI leaders could not face the fact that they were passing from an aborted revolutionary period (1944/5), to a counter-revolutionary period, albeit one of democratic counterrevolution in the principle imperialist countries, rather than bonapartist or fascist reaction. The majority of the old FI leaders simply shut their eyes and held on to "orthodoxy".
However the new European and then International leadership around Michel Pablo and Ernest Germain began to transform Trotsky's tactics, strategy and programme in a piecemeal and empirical fashion under the cover of an apparent fidelity to his revolutionary perspectives. To preserve these, "revolution" became a world objective process which chose here the Stalinist bureaucracy, there the Titoite partisans, elsewhere the Bevanite parliamentarians, as its agents for a whole historic stage. It was only a matter of time before this piecemeal revision was systematised. This Pablo attempted in 1950 - 1951.
The FI developed perspectives for after the war based on a combination of dogmatism and blind optimism. This dogmatism spawned a series of errors which oscillated between sectarianism and opportunism. In time the political vibrations broke up the FI into two factions both equally tainted with these errors. Despite the signs of economic boom in the USA, Cannon insisted that the American revolution was imminent. Furthermore the perspective of a third world war meant that the world tottered on the verge of a permanently pre revolutionary situation. The documents of the 1946 International Congress clearly reveal this tendency in the FI. Thus in "The New Imperialist Peace and the Building of Parties of the FI", they argued:
"The war has aggravated the disorganisation of capitalist economy and has destroyed the last possibilities of a relatively stable equilibrium in social and international relations". 21 And again: "If the war did not immediately create in Europe a revolutionary upsurge of the scope and tempo we anticipated, it is nevertheless undeniable that it destroyed capitalist equilibrium on a world scale, thus opening up a long revolutionary period".22 This "long revolutionary period" became an ever-expanding one, and as such ceased to have any useful specific meaning.
The potential for rectifying these errors of perspective and of reconstructing the FI on a revolutionary basis existed within the forces of Trotskyism. There were challenges to the leadership's rigid adherence to Trotsky's perspectives. In the SWP, for example, Felix Morrow led an opposition that argued: "Trotsky tried to teach us to understand that it is necessary to make a prognosis but equally necessary to understand that it is impossible to guess the tempos in advance for a prolonged period, and hence one must introduce the necessary correctives into it in the course of experience" .23 Similarly the British RCP (a product of a 1944 fusion between the RSL and the WIL) argued against the "New Imperialist Peace" document, that Stalinism had been strengthened and not thrown into mortal crisis. It pointed to the danger of disorientation that the failure to recognise this could lead to. The SWP contended in 1946 that the war was still on. The FI hesitated before calling for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from occupied territories. Initially, it rejected a British amendment to this effect, though it later corrected its position. The French section argued that the USSR, in 1946, was more threatened than at the darkest hour of the war. Perhaps more astonishing was the answer the Trotskyist "Neuer Spartakus" gave to the question: "Why does Stalin rob? Because he lost the war".24
Also on the question of the immediacy of imperialism's own economic crisis, the RCP contended "But in a resolution that seeks to orientate our own cadres on immediate economic perspectives - from which the next stage of the class struggle will largely low, and thus our immediate propaganda and tactics - the perspective is clearly false... For the second time in a generation capitalism has been enabled to gain a breathing space. The theory of spontaneous collapse of capitalism is entirely alien to Bolshevism".25
Both the Morrow and RCP oppositions made correct criticisms of the FI's line. Neither matured into a Left Opposition, however. This fact is decisive in understanding why later errors were able to go by unchecked. The Morrow opposition drew from its conclusions that a return to the democratic - as opposed to the transitional - programme was necessary in Europe. Further their hostility to the Stalinist counterrevolutionary occupation of Eastern Europe, catapulted them into adopting "New Class" theories and abandoning defencism altogether.
The SWP's leadership's insistence that the entry of Soviet troops saw the commencement of a classical dual power situation did little to offset Morrow's "New Class" tendencies. The end result was that this tendency drifted out of the SWP and into the renegade Shachtman group.
The fate of the RCP was different. As a result of its criticisms of the Frs perspectives and its refusal to accept the "deep entry" policy into the Labour Party that the International Secretariat favoured, it incurred the emnity of Pablo and Germain. Cannon and the SWP had their own grudge against the Haston/Grant leadership of the RCP dating from the fusion negotiations before the war. Against this leadership the SWP and the IS sponsored a faction, led by Gerry Healy and John Lawrence, who split in 1947 to carry out the deep entry perspective. This effectively wrecked the RCP, weakening and demoralising the old leadership and strengthening the Healy group. With Cannon and Pablo's blessing the two wings were re-united in 1949, but with the old Minority being given a majority on the leading committees. With a vigour that was later to become his trademark, Healy set about expelling his former opponents and turned the RCP, now called "The Club", into a Pablo/Cannon loyal section.
Thus, the critics of the 1946/8 period were removed from the FI by the time it was thrown into a new crisis of perspectives in the early 1950s. In 1951, no force existed which was able to argue for the correction of earlier errors as the basis for avoiding new ones.
Under the leadership of Pablo, and with the approval of Cannon and the SWP, the Second World Congress of the FI in 1948, systematised its erroneous perspectives and tentatively suggested that the imminent world war would be transformed into an "international civil war" 26. This perspective, put forward as a possibility that did not rule out "other important factors in the political developments in other countries" 27, was later turned into the over-riding perspective of the FI by Pablo. He used the false positions of the FI to suggest that a war between imperialism and the USSR was imminent and inevitable.
Thus the perspectives document of 1948. which had been used as a justification for a mass party building turn by the FI, later became a tool in Pablo's hands when he developed the perspective of liquidating Trotskyist factions into social democratic and Stalinist parties. This later abuse of the earlier perspective was absolutely connected to its essential falseness. The optimism about the likely spontaneous transformation of a war into a civil war embodied a key methodological error committed by the post-War FI. Trotsky's perspectives and prognoses were turned into a prophecy that had to come true in the short term. The collapse of capitalism and the eruption of a revolutionary tide were designated as the inevitable outcomes of an unfolding objective process to which Trotskyists had to relate.
However, whilst capitalist crises and upsurges of working class struggle clearly do arise out of the objective contradictions of capitalism, there is no "objective process" which resolves such crises. Without the victory of the subjective factor - the revolutionary party - there can be no lasting victories for the working class, courtesy of the "objective process" alone.
The FI did not lead the working class in any country in 1948.
Furthermore, the revolutionary or pre-revolutionary crises of the immediately post-war period were clearly over. Yet the FI held to its perspectives. At the 1948 FI Congress, the Theses on Stalinism did not describe the events in Eastern Europe (including Yugoslavia) as part of any revolutionary process. This retention of the earlier perspectives was what allowed the FI to maintain its orthodox political standpoint.
As such we stand by the programmatic declarations of the 1948 Congress as well as of the 1938 Congress. However, as the FI leadership's world view became increasingly at variance with reality, so their orthodoxy became ever more fragile. All that was needed to dislodge the F. from the orthodox positions it held until 19-48 was a sharp twist in world events.
That twist in events came almost immediately after the 1948 Congress. In the summer of 1948 the Tito-Stalin split was made public.
The Yugoslavian Communist Party (YCP) was expelled from the Cominform and was denounced as, variously, "Trotskyist" and "Fascist".
Out of the Yugoslav events the FI developed centrist conclusions and positions. They saw in them only a confirmation of their wrong perspectives. Thus, according to the FI leadership, Yugoslavia demonstrated the crisis of Stalinism that they had been predicting since 1944.
Further the whole development was a part of the successful revolutionary upsurge that had always been a key component of their perspectives. The partisan war was now described, post facto, as a "proletarian revolution" (initially only by Pablo, but, by 1951, by the whole of the FI leadership). The state established by that "revolution" was a workers' state which was seen to be suffering from merely quantitative deformations, it was not seen as a qualitatively degenerate workers' state. Tito's parasitic bureaucracy was, correspondingly, not a counterrevolutionary factor but a "Leninist" friend who needed the FIs advice - not its revolutionary opposition. The Open Letter from the International Secretariat requesting attendance rights at the YCP Congress of July 1948 declared 'We understand exactly the tremendous responsibility weighing upon you, and we consider it our
Michel Pablo, the leader of the FI at the time, used the Yugoslav affair to attack a number of key positions of the Trotskyist movement; on Stalinism, on the revolutionary party, the nature of revolutions and on the tactic of entryism and, through a distortion of this tactic, he attacked the communist premises of the united front tactic. Further, he argued that the process occurring in Yugoslavia (which was genuinely revolutionary according to him), would also take place in the rest of the Eastern European "buffer zone" as well; indeed, he already saw it taking place in China.29
Pablo's positions on Yugoslavia were adopted by the FI at its Third World Congress in 1951. They were subscribed to by all the major Sections and leading figures of the FI. There was no revolutionary opposition to Pablo's centrist position that "In Yugoslavia, the first country where the proletariat took power since the degeneration of the USSR, Stalinism no longer exists today as an effective factor in the workers' movement which, however, does not exclude its possible re-emergence under certain conditions".30
Essential to Pablo's position was a revision of the Trotskyist understanding of Stalinism, i.e. that it is invariably a counterrevolutionary force. This does not mean that Stalinism can never carry out progressive measures, even up to the transformation of property relations. What it does mean is that always, under all conditions, the Stalinists will obstruct the working class from taking political power directly into its own hands and using that power in its own class interests. In place of this appraisal of Stalinism, Pablo argued in his Report to the 1951 Congress that "We have made clear that the CP's are not exactly reformist parties and that under certain exceptional conditions they possess the possibility of projecting a revolutionary orientation ". 31
Pablo combined this revision with an attack on Lenin's theory of imperialism as the epoch of wars and revolutions. He replaced this with a formula that was ridiculous both as an immediate perspective and as a description of a defining feature of the epoch: "In their stead, it is the conception of Revolution-War, of War-Revolution which is emerging and upon which the perspectives and orientation of revolutionary Marxists in our epoch should rest". 32
Using this theoretical "rearmament" (i.e. revision) as his pretext, Pablo embarked upon a tactical course which involved the complete liquidation of the Trotskyist programme. This liquidation was necessitated by the organisational and political concessions that were involved in Pablo's "entrism sui generis" ("entryism of a special type", based on long-term entry and the hiding of the revolutionary programme). Pablo argued that the imminent War-Revolution left no time to build Trotskyist parties, but that this was no longer a crucial problem because in the coming period a variety of political formations could embark on the struggle for power. The Stalinists, for example, could be forced as parties to project a revolutionary orientation. Entryism was needed in order to generate the necessary pressure. In other formations, such as social democracy or petty bourgeois nationalism, the perspective was one of centrist splits away from the parties. Here entryism was necessary in order to prepare and develop such a split. In both cases the entryism that was to be undertaken was not that advocated by Trotsky, around the time of the "French Turn", that is entryism conceived of as a united front tactic to win leftward moving workers to the communist programme, a tactic that could not be a long-term one. The entryism "of a special type" had to be deep and long term, the open fight for the revolutionary programme had to be "temporarily" abandoned.33
This thorough-going opportunism propelled the FI along a sharp rightward-moving centrist course. In 1951, Pablo characterised the Peronist movement in Argentina as "anti-capitalist". The Chinese Communist Party soon became, like the YCP, a revolutionary factor.
In Britain, the left reformist Aneurin Bevan became' a "left centrist". In 1952, Pablo instructed the French section to make a deep entry into the PCF, to integrate itself into the working class movement "as it was".
Such concessions inevitably entailed the abandonment of any fight for principled politics against the leaderships of the parties or movements into which the Trotskyists entered.
By 1953 the Pablo-Ied International Secretariat (IS) was leading the International into headlong programmatic liquidation: "entryism sui generis', the "revolutionary" nature of Stalinism, the epoch of "War Revolution" , the subordinate role of the Party; all of these were Pablo's contribution to the FI's centrist collapse.
The principal forces who organised the 1953 split with the Pablo-led IS - the SWP (US), the PCI (France) and the Healy group in Britain were not a revolutionary "Left Opposition". The International Committee (lC) that they formed does not constitute a "continuity" of Trotskyism as against Pabloite revisionism. They failed to break decisively with the liquidationist positions of the 1951 Congress which paved the way for Pablo's tactical turns. They did not criticise (i.e. including self-criticism) the post-war reconstruction of the FI and the undermining of Trotsky's programme and method that this involved.
The IC embodied the national isolationism of its three largest components, each of which only opposed Pablo's bureaucratically centralised drive to implement the perspectives of the 1951 Congress when it affected them. In the IC itself they rejected democratic centralism outright. Moreover, by not going beyond the framework of a public faction, they refused to wage an intransigent fight against Pablo-Mandel.
The split of 1953 therefore, was both too late and too early. Politically it was too late because all the IC groups had already endorsed and re-endorsed the liquidation of the line in the period 1948-51. It was too early in the sense that it came before any fight within the framework of the FI to win a majority at the following congress. Indeed, the decision to move straight to a split pre-empted such a fight. The IC groupings had no distinct and thoroughgoing political alternative to Pablo-Mandel and, therefore, they remained immobilised in' a position where factional heat was a substitute for political light.
Despite acceptance of the 1948/51 revisionism, the IC was able, on occasion, to make isolated but valid criticisms of the IS. However, such criticisms, born out of both factional point- scoring and revulsion at IS betrayals, only occasionally went beyond a sterile defence of what they called "orthodoxy". In reality this was a revisionist melange of catastrophism, Stalinophobia and softness on social democracy - a mixture that Cannon, Bleibtreu-Favre and then Lambert and Healy had long pioneered. An examination of each of these groups' record before and during the split proves this conclusively.34
The SWP had political agreement with Pablo right up to 1953. On Yugoslavia they had fully supported Pablo's orientation to Tito, and endorsed the 1951 Congress resolution on Yugoslavia. As early as 1948, an SWP NC statement insisted that Tito had been "compelled by the logic of the struggle" and had ceased to be a Stalinist. 35 Thus when the PCI contacted Cannon to help them resist Pablo's policies and bureaucratic manoeuvres, he had no hesitation in replying: "I think that the Third World Congress made a correct analysis of the new post-war reality in the world and the unforeseen turns this reality has taken...It is the unanimous opinion of the leading people that the authors of these documents have rendered a great service to the movement for which they deserve appreciation and comradely support, not distrust and denigration".36
This was the same leadership that was to declare in the "Open Letter': of November 1953 (the de facto split document) 37 that this very same leadership was "an uncontrolled, secret, personal faction in the administration of the Fourth International which has abandoned the basic programme of Trotskyism".
Yet the SWP document "Against Pabloite Revisionism" 38accepted all of the tenets of Pablo's positions. The Second World War produced a revolutionary wave of "greater scope, intensity and resistance than the First World War" we are told. This produced "the revolutionary victories in Yugoslavia and China". 39
The principled positions against Stalinism that the "Open Letter" took were compatible with the SWP's centrism. Their opposition to the Stalinists' betrayal of the French General Strike, their position for the withdrawal of Russian troops from East Germany after the 1953 rising there, and their refusal to accept the post-Stalin liberalisation in the USSR as good coin, were all in themselves principled positions. A revolutionary opposition would have shared these positions.
However such an opposition - unlike the SWP and the IC - would not have pretended that the failure of the IS to hold these positions was the result of the influence of one man - Pablo - as the Open Letter insisted. On the contrary, they would have located these errors in past errors. This the SWP would not do in 1953. These issues, as can be seen by the later unity overtures made by the SWP towards the IS, were merely the pretext for the split.
The real cause was, in fact, an organisational one. The SWP turned against Pablo only as a result of his "interference" in the SWP (via the Cochran-Clarke faction). True to their national-isolationist tradition (revealed previously during the war) the SWP leaders refused to be treated as a "branch office" of the FI; that is, they refused to undertake a tactical decision that had been agreed by the majority of the leadership of the FI at an International Executive Committee meeting. The breaking point came when Pablo supported the Cochran Clarke faction. The SWP leaders discovered a number of political disagreements and went straight for a split. Prior to this Cannon had believed that his previous support for Pablo would ensure that the SWP would not be subjected to IS discipline. That discipline had been alright for the PCI in France, but not for the SWP. He declared in May 1953:
"But what if Pablo and the IS should come out in support of the minority. If such a thing could occur - and I'm not saying it will; I'm just assuming that the absolutely incredible arrogance of the Cochranites is based on some rumour that they are going to have the support of the IS - if that should occur, it would not oblige us to change our minds about anything. We wouldn't do so".40
When this did occur a few months after Cannon made this speech, he was true to his word. But even then he failed to nail the methodological and programmatic errors of the IS and the Cochran-Clarke faction. In true IC fashion, he criticised them and their degeneration from a purely sociological standpoint. The Clarke group were petit bourgeois (true). The Cochran group were tired workers in retreat (true). Both were intent on liquidating the party (true). All of these failures were important and Cannon was right to point to them. But he was wrong to conclude that these factors contained the essence of the problem and by extension the essence of "Pabloism”. For when it became clear that Pablo had not liquidated – i.e. organisationally dissolved - the FI, the road back to the Pablo-led IS was again open.
The essence of Pablo's politics was to be located in his programmatic premises first, his tactical conclusions second, and his organisational methods last. On the SWP's part, therefore, the split stemmed from national considerations and centred for the most part on organisational questions. It was not a definitive, principled political split, despite Cannon's oaths to the contrary.
With the Healy group in Britain the American pattern was followed almost exactly. The lack of serious political differences on the issues at stake was reflected in more than just the fact that Healy, like Pablo, had a portrait of Tito in his office! Healy himself had been Cannon's man in the RCP from 1944/7. He worked closely with Pablo to destroy the Haston Grant leadership - a process urgently speeded up after Haston had expressed criticisms of the softness shown by Pablo towards Tito. In particular, Healy could make no "root and branch" criticism of "entryism sui generis" since he and Lawrence had actually pioneered this from 1947 onwards.
This "tactic" flowed from a "perspective" which foresaw the evolution to centrism of the left reformist leaders. Behind them a mass movement would be created which would force the removal of the right-reformist leaders. The task of Trotskyists in all this was to amalgamate with the left and assist in this development. To do this required the public abandonment of the Transitional Programme, the FI and the revolutionary party, and it meant not producing a specifically revolutionary propaganda organ. In their place there was to be a highly secret faction and a public left-centrist grouping publishing a newspaper which would express the politics appropriate to such a formation. This policy was put into practice by Healy after the collapse of the RCP.
The British section was turned into "The Club", a secret Trotskyist grouping. The broader, public grouping known as the Socialist Fellowship included Labour MPs and union bureaucrats, gathered around the newspaper "Socialist Outlook".
Pablo approved of this tactic and embodied its experience in his "entryism sui generis" which applied to Stalinist parties as well as to social democrats.41
This new type of entryism was explicitly demarcated and distinguished from that advocated by Trotsky. That had been based on the open building of a revolutionary tendency within a reformist party in circumstances where the evolution of the class struggle and the influx of subjectively revolutionary proletarian elements made it possible to unfurl the banner of the FI, at least temporarily. Trotsky recognised that such an entry would last for a limited period, possibly a mere episode.
When one comes to look at the Healyites' own account of their split with Pabloism, the political questions are less than clear.42
The dispute arose when Lawrence (like Clarke in America) became a direct agent for Pablo and challenged Healy's leadership. Over the Korean war he pushed a pro-Stalinist position on the Editorial Board of "Socialist Outlook", in alliance with the "centrists" (Healy's term for left reformists). This breach of discipline and its consequences form the substance of "The Struggle in the British Section". 43
No political documents appeared at the time of the split itself. It was an organisational battle in which the number of legal shareholders in "Socialist Outlook" counted for more than the errors of the 1951 Congress and before.
However, the political differences underlying the split were real enough With the advent of the Korean war in 1950, Pablo saw the realisation of his "war-revolution" perspective as imminent. The British section made sure that Socialist Outlook followed the Pablo line, with a number of pro-Stalinist articles appearing. Healy and Lawrence coexisted peacefully at this time. However, after the tactical turn towards entryism into Stalinist parties in 1952, Pablo, having succeeded in wrecking the French section, began to foist his tactic on other sections. By 1953, Lawrence, in cahoots with Pablo, was pushing for a much more definite pro-Stalinist orientation in Britain. Healy's longstanding' and long term orientation to the Bevanites conflicted with this tactical turn. Fearing a Pabloite victory, Healy threw in his lot with Cannon, who feared similar moves in the US. He moved against Lawrence in Britain and, eventually, Pablo internationally.
The PCI in France differed from the SWP and the Healy group insofar as it had waged a limited political fight against Pablo from 1951 onwards. For their efforts, the leadership of the PCI were connived against by Pablo, Healy and Cannon! But the politics that the PCI fought on were not revolutionary politics.
In June 1951 the PCI leader .Bleibtreu-Favre, supported by Pierre Lambert and the majority of the organisation, produced a response to Pablo's revisionist document "Where are we going?". The French document "Where is Comrade Pablo going? " was delayed in its publication by Germain (Ernest Mandel).44, 45
He had duplicitously pretended to oppose Pablo on "democratic" grounds, but warned Bleibtreu-Favre against provoking Pablo into taking disciplinary measures by putting out the document. Because Bleibtreu-Favre, Lambert and the others supported Germain's document "What should be modified and what should be maintained in the Theses of the Second World Congress of the Fourth International on the Question of Stalinism? " (the famous "Ten Theses")46, the French accepted his advice. The result was that Pablo, in collaboration with Germain, built up a Pabloite minority faction around Michel Mestre.
Pablo effectively isolated the French majority after refusing to circulate Bleibtreu-Favre's document before the Third World Congress.
The French were left declaring their support for the "Ten Theses", which were not voted on at the Congress. In January 1952, Pablo proposed that the PCI should carry out an "entryism sui generis" tactic in the PCF - then in a leftist phase. The French majority, preferring an orientation to the looser SFIO, opposed this turn on tactical grounds.
After a struggle, in June 1952, Pablo, Germain and Healy (with Cannon's approval) expelled the majority of the French Central Committee!
However much we would sympathise with the PCI as a victim of bureaucratic methods, their struggle was, in the end, a vacillating, politically incorrect one. First, by supporting what we have described elsewhere as Mandel's "Orthodox Revisionism,,4 ~ Finding the idea that Stalinist parties had led what the FI regarded as healthy revolutions to victory in Yugoslavia and China, unpalatable from an "orthodox" standpoint, Mandel revised the Trotskyist position on Stalinism.
It had a "dual character" - a good side and a bad side. The pressure of the masses could serve to allow the good side to win out. Thus: "The Yugoslav and Chinese examples have demonstrated that, placed in certain exceptional conditions, entire Communist Parties can modify their political line and lead the struggle of the masses up to the conquest of power, while passing beyond the ob.iectives of the Kremlin, Under such conditions these parties cease to be Stalinist in the classical sense of the words".48
Bleibtreu-Favre's document expressed an identical view, particularly with regard to the Chinese bureaucracy. They bitterly attacked the Chinese Trotskyists for failing to enter the CCP (which was imprisoning Trotskyists at the time) quickly enough. In other words, the French accepted Pablo's analysis of Yugoslavia and China. What they could not accept was that these states were dominated by Stalinist parties. It was for this reason that they, like everybody else in the FI, were prepared to endorse the 1951 Congress position on Yugoslavia, a position that liquidated the programme of Trotskyism.
Criticising Pablo's "objections", the French introduced their own.
China, they argued, proved that "The reality of the class struggle will prove more powerful than the Kremlin apparatus, despite the non existence of a revolutionary party".49 The reason was because the CPs were subordinated to the Kremlin. If they went against the Kremlin then they could not be Stalinist: "In any event it is absurd to speak of a Stalinist party in China, and still more absurd to foster belief in even the resemblance of a 'victory of Stalinism in China' ".50
Trotsky's analysis of Stalinism as contradictory but predominantly counter-revolutionary even when it breaks up along social patriotic lines was junked. The PCI leadership capitulated to Stalinist parties and then, to save their "Trotskyist" souls, conveniently concluded that these parties were not Stalinist at all.
In 1951 the centrist positions of the Third World Congress on Stalinism, on Yugoslavia, and general perspectives (the impending "civil war" perspective) proved, beyond doubt, that a programmatic collapse of the Fourth International had taken place. The fact that no section voted against the Yugoslav resolution - the cornerstone of all the errors - is a fact of enormous significance.
The FI as a whole had collapsed into centrism. From this point on, the task facing Trotskyists was the refoundation of a Leninist-Trotskyist International on the basis of a re-elaborated programme of revolutionary communism. Manoeuvres to replace the leadership of the FI were entirely insufficient. The programmatic basis of the FI had to be changed. The manner by which this could have been done in the early 1950s is a matter of tactical speculation. What is decisive for us is that it was not done. The historical continuity of Trotskyism was shattered - as was evidenced by Pablo's use of the Congress documents at the Tenth Plenum of the International Executive Committee in February 1952, to usher in "entrism sui generis" The opposition in America, Britain and France that did emerge in 1952-3 was subjectively committed to opposing Pablo. However, they have to be judged not by their impulse but by their politics. Their "orthodoxy" was both sterile and based on post-war revisionism, prompted by the Yugoslav events. It was not authentic Trotskyism.
Thus we cannot view either component of the 1953 split as the "continuators" of Trotskyism. Both were centrist.
The IC, itself developing in a rightward direction (e.g. Healy's work in the Labour Party) was distinguished from the IS by the pace of its development. It recoiled from the most blatant expressions of liquidationism issuing from the IS, but not from the right-centrist documents that underpinned that liquidationism. Therefore the IC did not constitute a "left centrist" alternative to the IS.
The IS was a right-ward moving centrist group using the 1951 positions to draw what were entirely logical conclusions. The correct positions on East Germany and Hungary taken by the IC may have determined the tactics of a Left Opposition if it had existed. It could not have determined its estimate of the IC.
Disorientation after the war led to a programmatic collapse of the FI. After the CI's programmatic collapse, Trotsky's Left Opposition maintained a reform perspective because the Cl contained within it a mass movement. After the FIs programmatic collapse, and the failure of an Opposition to materialise, the FI was left without a programme and had never contained a mass vanguard within it.
The FI, unlike the CI, was in an essential sense its programme. That is why we say that after 1951, whatever the tactics that may have been employed, authentic Trotskyists had to elaborate a new programme and thus build the International anew.
Chapter Three: The degenerate fragments of the Fourth International, 1953 -1983
The principal tendencies that emerged from the 1953 split failed either then or subsequently to raise themselves out of the centrism into which the FI as a whole had sunk. Neither the international Committee nor the International Secretariat, nor any of the tendencies claiming continuity with them, have proved capable of regenerating a democratic centralist international based upon a transitional programme re-elaborated to encompass the new circumstances and tasks of the last thirty years.
The Pablo-led IS had given definitive proof of its centrism during the events in Bolivia in 1951-2. In this country the FI had an organisation that enjoyed mass influence - the POR, led by Guillermo Lora.
The POR's positions and the IS' attitude to these positions indicated that the revision of the Trotskyist programme had been a question of deeds and not merely a theoretical question in the period leading up to the Third World Congress in 1951. Pablo, in his report to the 1951 congress stated that: ".....the anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist mass movement often assumes confused forms, under a petty bourgeois leadership as with APRA in Peru, with the MNR in Bolivia." 51
This description of the MNR, which was undoubtedly a bourgeois party, gave the seal of approval to the POR's conciliatory attitude to this movement, particularly when it assumed government. In the crucial test of revolution the POR failed to advance an independent communist programme.
The revolution in Bolivia on April 9th 1951 brought to power the bourgeois nationalist MNR, under Pal Estensorro. This capitalist government presided over a situation approaching dual power. Its position was highly unstable. Increasingly the question of class power was being posed. A determined revolutionary policy could have won the masses from the MNR, in whom they had illusions, to the Trotskyists.
The POR chose a different line of advance however the MNR government was not characterised clearly as a bourgeois obstacle to a genuine revolutionary workers' and peasants' government. Lora offered the following alternative view: "Today, far from succumbing to the hysteria of a struggle against the MNR, whom the pro-imperialists have described as 'fascists' we are marching with the masses to make the April 9th movement the prelude to the triumph of the workers' and peasants' government. "
It was for this reason that the POR raised as a central slogan: "Restoration of the constitution of the country through the formation of an MNR government which obtained a majority in the 1951 elections".53 By this method the POR claimed to facilitate a "differentiation" within the MNR mass base, between revolutionary and reactionary elements. In fact it capitulated to the illusions of the masses in the MNR. It led to disastrous tactical conclusions. Lora put forward the demand for "worker ministers" from the COB (Bolivian Trade Union Central) to be admitted to the capitalist government. The POR did not call for a workers' and peasants' government based on soviets and a militia.
They did not demand that the COB leaders break with the bourgeoisie and take the road of struggle against it and the MNR government. Instead the POR posed a workers' and peasants' government as a future "natural emanation" from the left wing of the MNR and the workers' organisation, which would follow the "prelude" (in other words, stage) of an MNR government.
Instead of combining opposition to, and non-confidence in, the MNR government with independent support for its progressive measures and military defence of it against imperialism and domestic reaction, the POR gave it "critical support": "The POR began by justifiably granting critical support to the MNR government." 54 This formulation can only mean political support for the government, not simply critical support for its actions.
The POR's justification for giving a bourgeois government a form of political support and not just defence against reaction (an important distinction as Lenin showed in relation to the Kerensky government during the Kornilov coup) was the supposed "exceptional" nature of Bolivia and its revolution. The government was a petit- bourgeois government (defending whose class interests?). In addition it was declared to be an example of "Bonapartism sui generis". This latter neologism was quite in keeping with Pablo's method vis-a-vis "entrism sui generis." Lora's view of Bonapartism sui generis was that it rested on the proletariat against imperialism - and vice versa. This happy duality meant that one could support it insofar as it struggled against domestic reaction and imperialism. This was, in essence, the same policy that Stalin and Kamenev applied towards the Provisional Government in Russia before the appearance of Lenin's April Theses, and that Stalin applied in China in 1926.
The POR operated throughout 1951-2 under the slogan "For total control of the Cabinet by the Left". Even in 1953 Lora still referred to the Pal Estensorro government as "the transitional government of the Bolivian revolution." 55 In 1954 the majority of the POR followed the logic of the organisation's position, broke from it and joined the MNR.
Neither the IS nor the IC carried out any serious analysis or drew up any balance sheet of these events, so rich in experience and mistakes.
Their silence at the time and since can only be interpreted as approval of the POR's line. Thus the international leaderships, like the POR itself, failed the test of revolution. For its part the POR, dislocated from the FI after the revolutionary events, was abandoned to its fate.
Lora remained without international links until the late 1960s and played no role in the 1953 split. Under these conditions the POR developed a Bolivian-centred "national Trotskyist" outlook.
The Pablo-Mandel IS consistently failed to raise Trotsky's programme of political revolution in the repeated crises and upheavals that wracked Stalinism in the 1950s, '60s and '70s. In the early '50s, it held out hopes for a process of reform led by Tito-ite tendencies from within the bureaucracy. Consequently it failed to advance the political revolutionary programme at the time of the East German workers' rising of 1953.
Although the document, "Rise, Decline and Perspectives for the Fall of Stalinism" passed at the "Fourth World Congress" in 1954 did contain certain "orthodox" statements (as a result of amendments from the LSSP) with regard to the necessity of political revolution, it is nevertheless based upon a shallow optimistic fatalism: "What is entirely new in the situation is that we have reached the stage, forecast in the transitional programme, where the 'laws of history' reveal themselves as 'stronger than the bureaucratic apparatus'.
Of the two forces determining the orientation of the masses - the death agony of capitalism which unleashes immense revolutionary forces on a world scale and the policy of the reformist and Stalinist bureaucratic apparatuses, which play the role of a brake upon the masses - it is the first which is coming more and more to the fore." 56
The "Soviet bureaucracy" it is stated, "is no 10l~er capable of smashing and arresting" this "revolutionary tide." The suggestion that Trotsky believed that at some future stage "objective processes" would of themselves resolve the balance of forces between the proletariat, imperialism and Stalinism is a complete travesty of his position. What Trotsky did see was that the objective conditions of capitalist decay and crisis together with the treacherous and self defeating policies of Stalinism and social democracy, created a "crisis of leadership".
Because the "revolutionary will of the proletariat" cannot, historically, be obliterated, despite the strength of the old apparatuses, then this crisis, "can be resolved only by the Fourth International". Trotsky's dialectical understanding of the relationship between objective and subjective factors in the class struggle was replaced in the Pablo-Mandel schema by an evolutionary optimism which was more akin to the method of Kautsky - but so much the more false and ridiculous in that it came fifty years post festum. This method derived directly from the false analyses of the post-war bureaucratic revolutions.
The International Secretariat applied exactly the same method to the crisis of Stalinism in the 1950s. Furthermore "splitting from the Kremlin" a la Tito, was identified as tantamount to a movement from counter-revolutionary Stalinism to mere "centrism" or "opportunism". Thus, from the starting point that the Yugoslav and Chinese CPs had "led victorious revolutions" and "in these instances ceased to be Stalinist parties in the proper meaning of the term" the inescapable conclusion was drawn that "since both the CCP and to a certain extent the YCP are in reality bureaucratic centrist parties which, however, still find themselves under pressure of the revolution in their countries, we do not call upon the proletariat of these countries to constitute new revolutionary parties or to prepare a political revolution in these countries." 58
Even in the Russian and East European states a strategy of entrism in the state parties was advocated. The programme of political revolution was reduced to eight "democratic" demands entirely devoid of any tactical or strategic orientation. Whilst de-Stalinisation and the "New Course" were seen as having positive effects in that they promoted differentiation and were a motor of change, no attention was paid to the strategy and tactics of political revolution, the tasks posed by the overthrow of the bureaucracy. The role and function of soviets, the general strike, the arming of the working class, the struggle against restorationist forces - none of these are even mentioned.
The proposed programme of reforms was intended to be palatable to the ever hoped for "centrist" section of the bureaucracy:
"1. Freedom for working class prisoners.
2. Abolition of repressive anti-labour legislation.
3. Democratisation of the workers parties and organisations.
4. Legalisation of the workers parties and organisations.
S. Election and democratic functioning of mass committees.
6. Independence of the trade unions in relation to the government.
7. Democratic elaboration of the economic plan by the masses for the . masses.
8. Effective right of self-determination for the peoples." 59
This programme fails to link any of these demands to the struggle to overthrow the bureaucracy and establish proletarian power. Indeed, a strategy for this goal is not raised, precisely because of the IS's view of the bureaucracy as containing potential centrists within it.
Between 1954 and the Fifth World Congress in 1957, further enormous upheavals occurred in the degenerate workers' states and the USSR.
The 20th Congress of the CPSU "Secret Speech" by Khruschev and the ensuing concessions, the revolutionary uprisings against the bureaucracy in Hungary and Poland - all in 1956 - made a deep impression on the IS leadership. Mandel gave the report to the Congress on the crisis within Stalinism. The reactions of the YCP and the CCP to the Hungarian events, while admitted to be uneven, were held to be progressive, confirming the reform perspective.
Whilst the revolutionary upsurge in Hungary produced an apparent move to the left by the IS leaders – i.e. they openly supported it, they accompanied this with a full-scale and explicit revision of the programme of political revolution. For Mandel and the IS leadership the Hungarian and Polish events had proven that a wing of the bureaucracy would follow the Tito-Mao road: in Hungary-Nagy, in Poland - Gomulka. Even in the USSR the "centrist" faction of Khruschev was crowded on its left by Malenkov and Mikoyan, who, whilst not of the Nagy/Gomulka mould, presaged the emergence of such a tendency. In a bid to facilitate such tendencies in the bureaucracy, the programme of the political revolution for Eastern Europe 'and the USSR was completed revised.
Since the prospect of political revolution was seen to depend upon a section or wing of the bureaucracy, soviets could not be posed as organs of struggle against the whole bureaucracy. Political revolution was considered as (Le. replaced by) peaceful competition between an "FI faction" and the rest of the bureaucracy for the leadership of the working class.
From this point onwards the notion of workers' councils or soviets as revolutionary organs of struggle is lost and replaced by the conception of soviets merely as organs of administration, for bringing the disembodied "world, revolution'" masses into political life, and to ensure that the plan is agreed in a democratic forum.
The political revolution is thus reduced to a peaceful withering away of the bureaucratic caste. This programme of "political revolution" emerged from the Fifth Congress as a unified strategy for all workers' states. It was merely a question of the ease and rapidity with which the objective crisis within Stalinism would produce the necessary tendencies and splits within the bureaucratic castes. The later congresses of the IS and then the USFI merely repeated these formulae, adding nothing by way of programme.
The Leninist Comintern and Trotsky's Fourth International operated with an understanding of the imperialist epoch as one of wars and revolutions, the epoch of the historic decline of capitalism. The Leninist CI clearly recognised the existence of revolutionary periods and pre-revolutionary situations as well as their opposites. The "world revolution" did not mean for the CI some disembodied objective process, it was the combination of the proletarian revolutions in the developed imperialist countries and the anti-imperialist upheavals of the colonies and semi-colonies.
Likewise Trotsky understood the "Permanent Revolution" as a strategy for the winning of working class power in the imperialised countries. The basis of this strategy was a programme and tactics to enable a party to lead the working class and the oppressed masses from the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic and national revolution to the proletarian and international revolution.
By contrast, in the Pablo-Mandel method the "World Revolution" was elevated into a "process", a demiurge which was always advancing somewhere or in some form. In addition to the "World Revolution" this process was given equally spurious regional or pan-national character, for example the "Central American" revolution or the "Arab" revolution. This not only confused the "laws of history" with the strategic objectives for which the party had to organise the struggle but, in addition, it threw into the melting pot the democratic, anti-imperialist and proletarian goals. Consequently, instead of developing "perspectives" in which the tasks of revolutionaries were identified on the basis of scientific analysis, the Pablo-Mandel IS reduced "perspectives" to speculation, often highly fanciful, about what direction history would take next and, as a result, to which political formation they should next adapt themselves in order not to be left behind.
The "historical process" could now drive Stalinists, left social democrats, petit-bourgeois nationalists and anti-imperialists to act as the revolution's unconscious agents. It could force them, as its "blunt instrument", to follow a "roughly revolutionary" orientation. Accordingly the Pablo Mandel leadership turned the IS into a specialist at adapting to all such currents. The inconvenient shattered remains of Trotskyist groups in China, Vietnam and Cuba were ignored and even slandered, so that the IS could play the role of friendly critics to their Stalinist gaolers and executioners.
In the imperialist countries, "deep entry" or "entrism sui generis" survived several different "perspectives" which were supposed to justify it at particular times. First the post-war revolutionary crisis, then the impending "pre-World War 3 " crisis were supposed to create a mass left-centrist current which could be helped to evolve towards Trotskyism by friendly criticism and organisational assistance. 'To ensure this, however, Trotskyists had to avoid frightening this current or isolating themselves from it. Hence it became urgently necessary to hide the Trotskyist programme. Whilst Pablo acted as advisor to the petit bourgeois nationalist FLN, Mandel edited the paper of the Belgian left reformists.
Both of necessity, acted as apologists for their respective employers. In the early 1960s the transitional demands of the programme were diluted into a series of "structural reforms" centred on a left reformist version of "workers control" (self-management or autogestion). Both the Leninist Party and the Trotskyist programme were liquidated. The policy of this period can only be characterised as right centrist. That IS to say it was at the level of practice indistinguishable from left reform ism or petty bourgeois nationalism (in the metropolitan and colonial countries respectively). Yet the IS tendency (and later the USFI) was still centrist capable of swinging towards revolutionary positions under the external pressure of events. Under its existing leadership, however, the tendency was not capable of developing a stable leadership based o~ a re-elaborated revolutionary programme.
Both the Pablo-Mandel IS and, later, the Mandel USFI were capable of left and right zigzags; to the right from 1963-68, left from 1969-74 and then again to the right.
At the IS Fifth Congress (October 1957) a hardening of the position towards the Kremlin had taken place. This was a shift away from Pablo and towards Mandel, Frank and Maitan. The IS was now increasingly orienting itself towards the Algerian revolution and Pierre Frank's theses on the "Colonial Revolution" stressed the importance of the colonial world as the epicentre of world revolution.
Two years later the Cuban Revolution solidly confirmed the IS\in its turn away from adaptation to reform currents within metropolitan Stalinism in favour of Third World guerrilla, nationalist movements. Frank pioneered the revision of "Permanent Revolution" into a semi-automatic process whereby, as a result of the weakness of the colonial bourgeoisie, a blunt instrument was enough to cut down Third World Capitalism. This coincided exactly with the response from Cannon and Hansen to the Cuban Revolution. It was this rapprochement which broke up the SWP – Healy/Lambert non-aggression pact within the IC. The SWP could not ignore developments in Cuba and they could only analyse the overturn of property relations there by using the method that had been used for Yugoslavia i.e. Pablo's method.
With both the IS and the SWP undertaking identical liquidationism with regard to Castro the only remaining block to unity was Pablo and his "personal regime" in the international. However Pablo was a waning force in the IS and was greatly weakened by the defection of his Latin American lieutenant, Posadas, in 1962. Pablo did not survive the 1963 re-unification, leaving the USFI the following year.
Whilst the SWP's adhesion to the United Secretariat marked the acceptance of all the fundamentals of "Pabloism", the IS dropped its attempts to impose 'any discipline on the SWP. Thus, the latter's view of "internationalism" prevailed in the new formation. The political basis of the USFI is well expressed in "The Dynamics of World Revolution Today" (1963). It centres on the Third World "epicentre"; it divides World Revolution into "great ethnographical zones" each with its own sub-revolution. Within these zones, Permanent Revolution becomes an automatic process whereby the anti-imperialist and democratic struggles are driven over into socialist struggles: "continual mass movements have drawn one backward country after another into the process of permanent revolution"60.
The "strategy" and tactics that the USFI drew from this were characteristically chameleon-like. If in the Stalinist states they should take on the colouration of democratic reformers or "reform communists" and in Western Europe they were to take on the appearance of "centrist" social democrats or Stalinists then, in the colonial world, they became artificial petit-bourgeois populists. "The Dynamics of World Revolution Today" solemnly writes off the "industrial factory workers" as not the "main strength" of the proletariat, which is now seen as "miners, plantation hands, agricultural workers and the largely unemployed" 61. '
It cheerfully "admits" that Marxist theory did not forecast the radical and decisive role of the peasantry, i.e. it accepts the Stalinist slander that Trotskyism "underestimates the peasantry". It remarks that peasants, living under tribal conditions, will, "remain an ally of the proletariat throughout the whole process of permanent revolution." 6 Again "The Dynamics of World Revolution Today "asserts the possibility” of coming to power with a blunted instrument,,63. It is conceded that guerrilla warfare, on the basis of the Cuban model can "play a decisive role".
Thus the USFI was founded upon an aggravated repetition of the adaptation to alien class forces that had been pioneered in the period from 1948-51. The main target then was petit-bourgeois Stalinism; the new one was petit-bourgeois nationalism and the various forms of Stalinism in the colonial world; Maoism, Castroism-Guevarism etc.
Once again the inability of this brand of degenerate Trotskyism to prove itself a communist current, in decisive events, was demonstrated. In Ceylon the IS and then the USFI had, in the LSSP, a section with a mass following. As in Bolivia in the early 1950s,it was possible to test the USFI leaders in action. Once again it was a story of failure on the part of the section and complicity in that failure by the international leadership.
In Ceylon the LSSP was more like a social democratic party than a Leninist one, as regards both its structure and the consciousness of its lower cadre. Mandel himself was later to acknowledge this: "While being formally a Trotskyist party the LSSP functioned in several areas comparably to a left Social-Democratic party in a relatively 'prosperous' semi-colonial country." 64 Obviously the leaders of the FI knew this all along, but they saw no reason to drastically correct it. After all, if a left social democracy could itself project a revolutionary orientation then so could the "social democratised" LSSP.
Further, if in the semi-colonial countries a "blunt instrument" was sufficient for revolutionary purposes, then it would be stupid for the FI to cut itself off from the LSSP and the prestige of its electoral successes and mass base just for the sake of some of the "old Trotskyist" principles. Thus it did not matter that N.M. Perera, a leading trade unionist and MP, was clearly a reformist, with whom the Marxist centre of the LSSP had split in 1942. When the same centre wanted to re-unite with him in 1950 the proposal was given the blessing of Pablo and Mandel.
Throughout the 1950s the practice of the LSSP was increasingly limited to elections and trade unionism, not revolutionary agitation. In 1960 when the SLFP of the Bandaranaike family gained the largest number of seats and the LSSP lost two of their previous 12 seats, the "Marxist" leaders, Leslie Goonewardene, Colin de Silva and .Bernard Soyaa were thrown into crisis. In 1956 they had given the bourgeois SLFP (which had enjoyed widespread support amongst the peasants, whom the LSSP had largely ignored) "responsive co-operation" when it was hi government.
In 1960 they opted to give the new Bandaranaike government "critical support". Here again, as in Bolivia, an FI section went beyond the defence of a government, which was carrying out democratic or anti-imperialist measures against domestic or imperialist reaction, to political support for that government (albeit with "criticisms"). Only in 1961 did the IS and its World Congress call for a radical change in the political course being carried out by the LSSP, after the LSSP had voted for the SLFP's budget in 1960. This criticism was too little, too late. The failure of the IS and later the USFI to support the building of a fraction of the left in the LSSP, paved the way for the later treachery.
In the context of what was to happen in 1964, Pierre Frank's explanation of why the IS refused to call a left faction into being is nothing short of disgraceful. In his oily and deceitful history of the FI, he says that the left, in the persons of Edmund Samarakoddy and Bala Tampoe, "defended correct, principled positions, but in a political form that the International considered sectarian".65
This "sectarianism" consisted of a refusal to go peacefully along with the class collaboration being cooked up by Perera and not properly opposed by Goonewardene. Obviously too much for Trotsky's former foe, the unreconstructed opportunist Frank, to stomach. The results of the IS's refusal to give wholehearted support to the left, and the left's own failure to organise an independent faction fight, quickly followed.
In 1963 the LSSP formed a popular front with the Stalinists and a small party called the MEP, which was predominantly petit- bourgeois in composition, on the basis of a government programme of limited reform demands. This United Left Front, as Mandel and Frank termed it, was the policy argued for by the FI leaders. In April 1964 the USFI wrote to the LSSP: "The United Front of the left, strengthened by mass struggle and directed to the - establishment of its own political power on a genuinely socialist programme, provides a means of stemming the tide of reaction and uniting the masses and ranks of our own party for the ultimate realisation of our perspectives, Ceylon can provide another Cuba or Algeria and prove to be of even greater inspiration to revolutionary minded workers throughout the world," 66
The goal of the "Trotskyists" had thus become to provide the world working class with another Castro or Ben Bella! For the LSSP the choice soon became one between a popular front in government with the SLFP, or a popular front out in the cold against the SLFP. The USFI were not able to provide any principled timely guidance.
When mass strikes threatened to topple the SLFP government strikes in some cases led by LSSP left wingers - in the spring of 1964, the LSSP leader Perera entered into negotiations with Mrs Bandaranaike who, since her husbands' death, was leader of the SLFP. An agreement was struck, The LSSP congress voted by a big majority in favour of a deal and Perera entered the government as Finance Minister. The arrival of Pierre Frank armed with the FIs belated threat of expulsion one day before the LSSP's conference could not stop the LSSP leaders.
In Ceylon, as in Bolivia, Pablo, Mandel, Frank and the SWP leaders' politics were carried into life and revealed as thoroughly Menshevik in nature. The semi-colonial bourgeoisie (or an anti-imperialist wing of it) and thoroughly bourgeois nationalist parties were given "critical support" in the manner of the Stalin-Bukharin Comintern.
The 1966/7 "left turn" of the Castroites (OLAS, Guevara's intervention in Bolivia etc) had a dramatic effect on the USFI. By the time of its 1969 Congress the adaptation had reached the stage of espousal of guerrilla warfare as the strategy of the Third World "revolution'~ Such armed struggle was stressed "not merely as one of the aspects of the revolutionary work, but as a fundamental aspect on a continental scale." 67 In this way the whole programme of this "Fourth International" amounted to nothing more than a carbon copy of Guevarism.
The central and leading role of the proletariat, its tactics and methods of struggle, soviets, democratic and transitional demands, the Leninist Party, everything was thrown unceremoniously overboard. It was only the chaos that this policy wreaked in the Latin American sections, together with the failure of Guevarism and Castro's return to "orthodox" Stalinist tactics in the early 1970s that brought an end to this experiment.
The SWP(US) and its allies in the Leninist-Trotskyist Tendency/ Faction, were able to mount many formally correct "orthodox" criticisms of this policy. The SWP and its European supporters were motivated, however, by a desire not to see the ultra-leftism associated with guerrillaism applied in the metropolitan countries. They were strengthened in their opposition by support from the Latin American USFI leaders who knew from bitter experience the suicidal consequences of Guevarist schemas.
Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s the evidence against the 1969 decision mounted. The Argentine PRT (Combatiente) actually set up a guerrilla force, the ERP (People's Revolutionary Army) in 1970.
It suffered terribly from state repression and evolved politically towards populism/terrorism and broke from the USFI in 1973. Similar events occurred in Bolivia. From 1972 to 1977 the USFI was divided by factional strife over the issue. Eventually, in 1979, the 11th World Congress blandly announced that "the Fourth International promoted an incorrect political orientation for several years." 68
In the years 1968-74, in response to the major class struggles in France, Italy and Britain, the USFI made a sharp "left" turn. But this did not escape the orbit of left centrism, that is, it saw no return to the Leninist- Trotskyist programme or tactics. From 1969, in the metropolitan imperialist countries the USFI adapted to the consciousness of the student movement under the slogan of the "New Youth Vanguard".
This was based on an impressionistic "theory" of the May '68 events in France; that students could act as a "detonator", that colleges and universities should become "Red Bases", that the struggle was "from the periphery to the centre." These theories only aII1iounted to an excuse for stunts among the radical petty-bourgeoisie and an adamant refusal to orient the newly radicalised youth towards the working class and its traditional parties and trade unions.
In essence this "leftism" was an opportunist avoidance of the need to combat reformism in the working class. The USFI sections were consequently on the sidelines of the class struggle eruptions of the early'70s (e.g. in Britain 1972-4.) It was in this period (1972-4) that the Mandel-Frank-Maitan "European" majority developed their theory of a "New Vanguard of a Mass Character." This was to be an amalgamation of the youth (students) of the late 60s with the struggles of the Italian, Spanish and British workers. It was defined, conveniently, as "the totality of forces acting independently and to the left of traditional bureaucratic leadership of the mass movement." 69
The "Women's Movement" was to be added later. The perspective of this vanguard was the "creation of situations of dual power." The events in Portugal in 1974-5 completely wrecked this centrist policy and revealed the political bankruptcy that had devised it. In Portugal the "new mass vanguard" of young soldiers, workers, and students certainly existed and it was towards this formation that the IC (the' 'majority" USFI section) adapted itself. This milieu was characterised by illusions in the MFA(the Armed Force Movement) particularly in its charismatic leader Carvalho. When the Socialist Party of Mario Soares, excluded from power by the CP/MFA, turned to inciting counter-revolutionary attacks on the CP in the Summer of 1975, the LCI joined a popular front in support of the left-Bonapartist 6th Provisional Government. After the fall of that government they swung to the left and became involved in the "insurrection" that was provoked in November of that year.
Meanwhile, the pro-SWP section in Portugal supported Soares' counter-revolutionary campaign throughout the period on the pretext of "defending democracy". Neither section was actually able to pose a consistent defence of democratic rights against both the MF A and the counter-revolution, neither could utilise the united front tactic to win the proletarian rank and file of the CP and the SF. Thus, Portugal revealed in a particularly stark fashion the bankruptcy and inveterate centrism of the USFI, even in its leftward oscillations. Their positions amounted to a complete inability, indeed unwillingness, to fight against the misleaders of the working class, whether they be Stalinists, social democrats or petit-bourgeois nationalists.
The shipwreck of the majority's leftist position in the mid to late '70s resulted in a turn to the right and, therefore, to a certain rapprochement with the SWP. This turn was reflected in the 1979 Congress Documents. Once again it was the more circumspect and verbally more orthodox Mandel who pulled back from the leftist phase and prepared for a new adaptationist turn towards the "traditional bureaucratic leaderships" which the earlier phase had attempted to bypass. The. banner of the 1979 Congress was adaptation to left social democracy and Eurostalinism on the one hand and to petty bourgeois nationalism (the Sandinistas) on the other.
The USFI leaders prepared an adaptationist response to the development of "Eurocommunism". Mandel's "Theses on Socialist Democracy" discuss the question in an entirely formal, abstract and therefore fundamentally false and centrist fashion. His starting point is not the class struggle, particularly the struggle for power, but a debate on the desirability of an "extension of democratic rights for the toilers beyond those already enjoyed under conditions of advanced bourgeois democracy". 70
Thus, he envisages Soviets, first and foremost, as instruments of self-administration and not as instruments of struggle. From this angle he is anxious to defend the democratic rights of all parties, including bourgeois ones, provided they "in practice respect collective property and the workers' state constitution",71
This utopian recipe is served up as the only way to convince workers that communism is "democratic". In this the 1979 Congress, following Mandel, obscured the whole period of civil war that precedes and follows the seizure of power. In his eagerness to soothe the democratic illusions of the western proletariat and radical petit-bourgeois, Mandel covers over that "most authoritarian thing" - the revolution. He obscures the nature of parties as organs of class combat, he obscures the class nature and limits of proletarian democracy.
In Nicaragua the USFI's concern for democracy, bourgeois or proletarian, is, however, conspicuous by its absence. Here, after the Sandinistas took power, the USFI unceremoniously dropped its previous programme in favour of gentle advice to the FSLN that it should follow the "Cuban Road" (a policy strongly argued against by none other than Fidel Castro himself). The USFI informed the world that "The character and history of the leadership of the FSLN ...show that it would be an error to place any a priori limits beyond which decisive sectors of the FSLN leadership cannot go as the process of permanent revolution unfolds." 72
For this reason the GNR government, with its bourgeois ministers was supported by the USFI. This government was clearly a popular front Le. a class collaborationist one based on a programme of capitalist reconstruction and the demobilisation of the committees and spontaneous armed militias that had formed in the anti-Somoza insurrection. The USFI and the SWP offer, at best, a "Cuban" resolution to the situation. That is a controlled Stalinist overturn of property relations after the democratic workers' and peasants' organs of struggle have been converted into bureaucratic tools of the FSLN. There would be no question of proletarian democracy or of a healthy workers' state.
Thus the USFI confirmed once again that it had no programmatic alternative to the Castroite Stalinist programme. It therefore followed that the USFI intervened directly in Nicaragua to prevent the formation of a "Trotskyist" party, provoking a split with the forces of Moreno's Bolshevik Fraction on the eve of the 1979 World Congress.
In summation, the consequence of the ingrained centrism of the leadership of the USFI has been the dissolution of the principles of a disciplined combat party and of democratic centralism. The national section and the international itself are loose coalitions of permanent factionalists. In every serious pre-revolutionary or revolutionary situation the "sections of the International" have failed to maintain any strategic or organisational unity (Portugal, Iran, Nicaragua). The USFI sections systematically adapt to petit-bourgeois forces within and without the workers' movement. In the trade unions they baulk at the task of organising a communist-led movement of the base, of the rank and file, against the trade union bureaucrats of left and right.
The term "class struggle tendency" becomes a cover for a political bloc with the "left" elements of the bureaucracy and an alibi for not raising a communist action programme for the transformation of the unions and the throwing out of the bureaucrats. With regard to movements of the oppressed: women, nationalities, blacks and immigrants, gays, the USFI advocates "autonomous movements". It thus advocates "all class", i.e. class collaborationist movements, and dissociates itself from the struggle for proletarian and communist leadership in these struggles. It rejects the perspective of a party-led mass working class women's movement or rank and file movement in the trade unions. Furthermore it adapts to the petit-bourgeois ideologies within these spheres and struggles.
As we have seen neither the IC nor any of its principal components constituted a revolutionary opposition to the Pablo led IS.
They constituted one of the degenerating fragments of world Trotskyism, not a force for principled regeneration. Certain groupings today claim that the IC in 1953 did represent, albeit in a partial and inadequate manner an attempt to regenerate Trotskyism. Further, they would argue that the "IC Tradition" represents the continuity of Trotskyism, not withstanding the criticisms that might now be made of that tradition with hindsight. Not surprisingly it is groups emerging from or at some point involved with, the IC tradition that hold to such positions the British WSL, the iSt, groupings within the OCRFI/FI OCR) tradition etc. These judgements stem from a refusal to recognise that "Trotskyism': if it means anything, is the continuity of revolutionary communism. The formal adherence to dogma that characterised the IC was not revolutionary communism; in tactics, strategy and programme the IC groupings subverted communism.
The first thing to note about the "IC Tradition" is that it is a myth. It simply does not exist. The IC was never a coherent, programmatically united and democratically organised tendency. In the name of "orthodox Trotskyism" which was defined at the purely abstract level of being in favour of the building of Trotskyist parties (something the "Pabloites" had never had any real difficulty in accepting and articulating) - the IC groups split the Fl without a political fight in the sections or at the scheduled World Congress.
Apart from the SWP's Open Letter" and a handful of documents from the French and the Americans against "Pabloite Revisionism" - all of which actually centre on conjunctural events and do not draw up a political balance sheet of the method and emergence of "Pabloism" - no major documents of the IC were produced in 1953 or for a long time after. Several short resolutions were produced in 1954 and 1955 on Vietnam and Algeria, but that was all. The large sections of the IC- the SWP, the French and the British-gave no central direction to the smaller groups in Canada, Chile, New Zealand, Argentina (Moreno's FOR), Iceland, Switzerland, Greece and the Chinese exiles. The French, and then the British held the secretaryship but were unable or unwilling to galvanise the IC into active life as an international organisation.
In fact, the IC's lack of democratic centralism, or even a common internal or external organ, resulted in its sections being, in reality, national sects which developed along their own lines and adapted to the peculiarities of their respective countries on the basis of the Pablo/Mandel method. The smaller groups tended to suffer political colonisation by one or other of the larger ones; the Latin Americans by the SWP, the Europeans by either the British section (Socialist Labour League SLL - after 1959), or the French PCI (OCI after 1966, PCI again in 1982!). The SWP, the group with the largest resources published only six international discussion bulletins in ten years and "led" the IC much in the same way that it had "led" the Fl after Trotsky's death.
There was only one IC congress whilst the SWP .were members. It was held in Britain in 1958. On behalf of the SWP, Farrell Dobbs attended but refused to participate on a political basis. By this time the SWP was manoeuvring to cut loose from the IC and reunify with the IS . The Healy group produced no major attack on the politics of Pabloism until 1957 with W. Sinclair's (Bill Hunter) "Under a Stolen Flag". This belated reply to the Pabloites' analysis of Stalinism repeats the need for political revolution, warns against making concessions to the bureaucracy, but fails completely to trace the roots of Pablo's analysis of Stalinism. The failure to do this later allowed the SLL to accommodate to the Chinese Stalinists during the Cultural Revolution and sowed the seeds of Healy's support for the Mao wing of the Chinese bureaucracy. By this time the SWP, hungry for unity, had ceased criticising the IS publicly at all. Indeed public polemic was halted in June 1954!
Thus the "IC Tradition" as such cannot be said to have existed as a coherent body of politics in the 1950s at all. To all those who point to this non-existent tradition as the "continuity of Trotskyism" we throw back the question - in what documents, theses or positions?
The incoherent nature of the IC was demonstrated by the fact that a principal leader, Cannon, re-opened discussions with Pablo and the IS (via the LSSP) in 1954 (seven months after the split). He wrote to Goonewardene in May 1954 that "there.. . . . is still a chance" for reunification if only the world congress were postponed 7 3. That is, reunification was now only blocked by an organisational consideration.
This, despite the fact that the 1953 split was described thus, in the "Open Letter" "The lines of cleavage between Pablo's revisionism and orthodox Trotskyism are so deep that no compromise is possible either politically or organisationally." 74 In a word, this was rhetoric purely for public consumption. By 1956, Cannon and the SWP were again pushing for unity. In 1957, Cannon proposed a "sweeping organisational compromise, which would permit the formal unification of the international movement before the dispute is settled. This organisational compromise cannot be left to the chance decision of a Congress." 75
In fact, from early 1957, while Cannon and the SWP had nor changed their mind about Pablo's intolerable regime, they were drawing closer to the Mandel/Frank/Maitan axis, whose greater "formal orthodoxy" and verbal anti-Stalinism was gaining ground in the IS after the Hungarian revolution. This event rudely disturbed illusions of an uninterrupted process of reforms within Stalinism.
Khruschev and company were starkly revealed as the butchers of the Hungarian proletariat; Nagy and Gomulka as the treacherous misleaders of powerful political revolutionary movements. This did not, however, prevent the IS from describing the Gomulka-ites as "a centrist tendency evolving to the Left".
The triumph of Mandel's "harder" positions convinced Cannon that a deal could be struck. This, however, would have seriously endangered the separate national projects of Lambert and Healy who, consequently now revived their interest in the fight against "Pabloism". It was this Cannon opens the door to unity with the Pabloites in 1954 that prompted Healy to print Hunter's "Under a Stolen Flag" which declared that" the gulf between Pabloite revisionism and ourselves grows wider and wider.76
Healy pushed for a conference of the IC. When it took place in 1958, the one thing the SWP did ensure was that it did not proclaim itself "The Fourth World Congress of the FI" as the British proposed.
What did unite the IC groups in the '50s was their enmity towards Pablo and their resistance to his attempts to interfere with their national tactics. The Lambert La Verite group had been expelled by him in 1952. The British and Americans had witnessed his agents at work trying to foist a Stalinist oriented perspective on their organisations, at a time when they were working with union "progressives" in the US and left reformists in Britain. They all saw him as a challenge to the "constituted" national leaderships - Cannon, Healy and Lambert.
Thus the SWP talked endlessly of the "cult" of Pablo. Gerry Healy explained to the SLL in 1966 that:
"Then, in 1951, came Pablo". 77 Actually Healy had, at that time been working closely with Pablo for at least five years. The interminable series of splits that were later to take place within the IC arose because there was no common political basis to this "anti-Pabloism”. Each group had their own view of what the "essence of Pabloism" was. For the SWP, Pabloism equalled the "liquidation" of the party that is the organisational dissolution of the party. Whatever else Cannon proved himself willing to junk, he was determined to hang onto "the party". The problem for the SWP arose when the IS did not liquidate the FI or its sections. The barrier to unity was effectively removed.
For the Healy group the essence of Pabloism was an ever changing variety of things. It was capitulation to Stalinism, failure to build parties, an "objectivist" view of the revolution. All of these assessments changed as the Healyites own activities and political positions changed, often into what had once been characterised as "Pabloite" by Healy.
Thus, Healy was driven to discover the "roots" of Pabloism. His post1959 discoveries concentrated on the question of "method" and "dialectical materialism".
Building on Trotsky's strictures to the SWP to fight against pragmatism, Healy developed an abstract "philosophical" critique of Pabloism and of the Americans' later submission to it. This enabled him to turn his back on questions of programme and tactics where his own record was so compromised that it would not bear any serious inspection.
In 1966 he argued: "The differences between revisionism and revolutionary Marxism today boils itself down to the differences between idealism and dialectical materialism and not what this individual or that individual is supposed to have done".78 Very convenient for Healy! His "method" enabled him to wipe his own slate clean. But it was a far cry from Trotsky's method which always started with and returned to, experience, the supreme criterion of human knowledge.
For the French, the Lambert-led QCI, Pabloism was in essence neither liquidation of the party, nor a wrong philosophical method. Their initial and abiding hostility to Pabloism lay in their Stalinophobia. In their most refined definition of Pabloism, the OCI declared that Pablo's "formal" Marxism and his mechanical application of Trotsky's perspectives "had its finished expression in the conception of a finished Fourth International and parties, endowed with a pryramid style hierarchy, with world congresses, of ultra-centralist status, which had only to strengthen itself progressively". 79
This definition - a systematisation and' a defence of the IC's history of complete federalism - was elaborated, as usual, to suit a factional purpose. The OCI had no intentions of falling under the "democratic centralist" control of an SLL-dominated IC in 1966.
In all three groupings we find a shifting analysis of "Pabloism". The definitions produced were virtually all motivated by conjunctural, factional considerations. Of course there were a number of shared assumptions. The ridiculous idea that all evil stemmed from the person of Pablo, and that this was due to his petit-bourgeois class origins was a common thread inside the IC.
This was merely a useful means of diverting attention from the programmatic issues at stake. We assess the nature of somebody's political positions first and then deduce and demonstrate the class origins of those positions. This was how Trotsky dealt with the Burnham/Shachtman faction. The IC inverted Trotsky's approach, yelling petit- bourgeois at Pablo first, and giving his political positions only scant attention second.
In sum, we can see that "anti-Pabloism" is a meaningless term, an unscientific, non-political term. To assess the worth of the IC, therefore, it is necessary to look at the separate politics of its constituent parts.
As we have shown, from 1954 onwards the SWP lapsed from a position of fighting the IS, to one of fighting to re-unify the IC with the IS. Only organisational considerations were raised as an obstacle to early reunification. Ignoring the supposed political issues of the 1953 split, the SWP hagiographer Les Evans explained: "By 1956 their public line (i.e. the IS's -Eds) became very close to that of the International Committee, and the leadership of the SWP concluded that, on the political positions on which the two sides stood, continuation of the split could not be justified. It was time to consider re-unification".80
Following this "turn" by the SWP, Joseph Hansen carried out pioneering work to show that the SWP could outdo the IS in its capitulation to Stalinism. In 1958 he crisply summed up what the IS had obfuscated with sophistry - namely that the political revolution was merely a series of reforms. In his "Proposed Roads to Soviet Democracy" he wrote: "It is much closer to reality to view the programme of political revolution as the total series of reforms, gained through militant struggle, culminating in the transfer of power to the workers".81 Hansen really got his teeth into this theme after the Cuban revolution. Empirically registering the existence of an economy which was in essentials identical to Eastern Europe in Cuba, and noting the absence of a "Stalinist" leadership in the July 26th Movement, Hansen concluded that Cuba was a healthy workers' state.
Strong on pragmatism, but not too hot with dialectics, Hansen decided that there was no need for a Trotskyist party in Cuba, that Castro was an "unconscious Trotskyist" and that, therefore, the programme of political revolution did not apply to Cuba. We have dealt elsewhere with the Cuban revolution and Hansen's analysis of it.82 Suffice it to say that Hansen "overlooked" the absence of independent working class action and organisation in the Cuban revolution - soviets, a real workers' militia, workers' control in the planned economy, etc. He overlooked the stages of the Cuban revolution during which Castro became assimilated to Stalinism, he overlooked the demobilisation of the working class consciously carried out by Castro after the Bay of Pigs invasion. In short, he held a completely anti-Trotskyist view of the Cuban revolution.
This particular piece of revisionism not only cleared the way to re-unification with the IS in 1963. It provided a theoretical justification for the guerrilla-ist turn of the USFI in the late 1960s (despite Hansen's opposition to that turn). Today it has brought the SWP to the threshold of an abandonment of even the trappings of formal "Trotskyism".
Attacks on the theory of Permanent Revolution by Doug Jenness, a leader of the SWP, is a sign of things to come. The SWP is lurching ever closer to crossing into the Stalinist camp via the "Cuban road".
By 1963, with agreement on Cuba and the "Dynamics of World Revolution Today", the SWP quickly and unceremoniously cut loose from Healy and Lambert. Cannon, who had praised Healy's Labour Party work in 1962 was denouncing that same work as "Oehlerite" in 1963. A tirade against ultra-leftism was launched, and the United Secretariat of the Fourth International was formed.
The history of the IC after the desertion of the SWP in 1963 to form the USFI, and the history of the Organising Committee for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International (OCRFI - CORQI) after the split between Lambert and Healy in no way represents the continuity of the Fourth International of Trotsky. It was not a more healthy current than the USFI. The topic at the heart of the split with the SWP - Cuba - was itself inauspicious. Healy and Lambert were unable to differ in method from the Hansen-Mandel analysis and were, therefore, forced simply to deny that an overturn in property relations had taken place in Cuba.
Healy and Slaughter insisted that Cuba was state capitalist, and Castro a bourgeois bonaparte like Nasser or Peron. To defend this curious and inconsistent position, they borrowed "normative" arguments from the new class theorists, and hid them under a barrage of Hegelianised "dialectics". The OCI, on the other hand, decided that a "phantom bourgeoisie" held power in Cuba, via Castro.
Such positions prevented any serious or searching analysis of the roots of the degeneration of the FI after the war. The SLL and the OCI, therefore, built into their politics different elements of the 1948-5 I revisionism. Whilst the IC was united only by the hostility to the USFI, and expressed this in a vacuous "anti-Pabloism", the two key organisations within it, the OCI and the SLL, were politically very different organisations which were moving in different directions.
Each filled the vacuum of "anti-Pabloism" with its own content. To understand the later turns of these organisations, to understand the entire process of their degeneration, it is necessary to trace their history prior to the split.
The Healy group, after the 1953 split, carried on for a short period with their own version of entryism sui generis, around the paper "Socialist Outlook". From 1954 when the paper was banned, Healy had no problems in switching his group into the Tribune milieu, selling Tribune until 1957 when the group supported the launch of "The Newsletter", supposedly an independent newspaper.
After the Hungarian revolution, defections from the British CP and the creation of loose socialist forums provided Healy with a new audience and recruits. After 1957, the Newsletter also served to rally a number of rank and file trade union militants around it. The theoretical journal "Labour Review" attracted some able intellectuals. Originally, Healy had insisted that both publications were not "sectional Trotskyist publications". This was in line with his earlier "deep entry" project.
The prospect of recruitment from the CP, however, modified this perspective and pushed the Healy group to more of an independent orientation. In 1959 the Socialist Labour League (SLL) was founded as an independent group, although 100 of its 159 founding members were still in the Labour Party. A relatively open and pugnacious campaign followed in the Labour Party's new youth organisation, the Young Socialists. It was led by SLL members, and resulted in the closing down of the YS and mass expulsions in 1964.
The same period had seen the SLL carrying out active trade union work, attracting 700 delegates to a rank and file conference in November 1959. The SLL also grew as a result of its active intervention within the CND. Here it dropped criticisms of the "disarmament" slogan in order to recruit, despite having levelled sharp criticisms of the IS in 1954 for having supported similar disarmament slogans.
By 1963, flushed with success, the Healy group returned to catastrophist perspectives of the type that Pablo had pioneered in 1950.
The difference lay in the conclusion drawn from the imminent collapse.
Healy substituted for Pablo's and his own former deep entry, a hysterical "third period" style fetishisation of "building the party". At its Fifth Annual Conference in 1963, the SLL Perspectives declared: "The problems of the British economy are so acute, and the relations between capital and its agents so full of contradictions, that the problem of power is in fact continually posed, provided there can be built a leadership".83 This involves a total confusion of the objective and the subjective.
A revolutionary situation in which the question of power is posed can materialise without a revolutionary leadership having been built in time to resolve the question in a communist direction. Furthermore, the suggestion that there was an immediate possibility of a revolutionary situation developing in Britain in 1963 was laughable. No matter, both parts of this formulation served to justify a dramatic turn towards "building the leadership" - an exaggerated party fetishism that was justified by the "impending catastrophe". The fact that reality repeatedly confounded this perspective was overcome by "philosophy".
That which had exorcised Pablo proved useful in exorcising reality from the SLL's perspectives documents. Such philosophy 'saved' the SLL from allowing "surface reality" (i.e. the continuing long boom and its effects on the working class) to obscure its "understanding" of the impending revolutionary crisis out of which the SLL would be ready to lead the workers. Hence the daily paper, hyper-activism and a huge turnover in membership.
Error began to turn into paranoia. Bad philosophy not only meant mistakes, it resulted in its adherents becoming enemies of the SLL, and therefore the raw material for...police infiltration. The SLL's/WRP's ludicrous elevation of "philosophy" in the name of party building, to a level way beyond the real world, inevitably produced not only sectarianism, but also twisted fantasy: "From time to time it is possible for the method of subjectivism and gossip to make an impact on cynics and tired refugees from the class struggle, but this is purely temporary...It is also very easy to exploit those tendencies who slander and gossip. The police do this constantly. They simply send agents into these groups (reference to the Cliff and Grant groups - Eds) who will be prepared to join heartily in condemning the SLL...It is simply that the irresponsible anti SLL factional climate in their group assists the police".84 By a sleight of hand, opposition to the SLL becomes assistance to the bourgeois state - and thus absolves the SLL from political debate with its opponents.
The SLL's catastrophism led inexorably to pronounced sectarian practice. From 1964 the SLL's perspectives were coupled with a profound misunderstanding of the socio-economic roots of reformism and a grossly schematic view of the "betrayals" of the Labour and trade union leaders. These leaders were presented as being constantly on the verge of completely discrediting themselves. As a result the party had to be fully ready to take over, and could be built by exposure (i.e. by purely literary means) of those leaders. The united front was rejected on the spurious grounds that it was only possible between mass parties.
They defined it as "a relationship between mass workers' parties of a temporary character for the purpose of winning the masses to the communist party".85 This was a narrow, one sided and false view of the united front. It led directly to the abandonment of organising a rank and file movement in the unions. In place of this, the SLL built the All Trades Union Alliance as its very own trade union organisation that put on impressive rallies, attracted unsuspecting militants and tried to rope them into the party.
This sectarianism was also extended to the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC). By the late 1960s, the VSC was mobilising thousands on the streets against US imperialism's slaughter of the Vietnamese. The masters of the dialectic, however, understood better the real nature of such demonstrations. In his "Balance Sheet of Revisionism", SLL/WRP "theoretician" Slaughter declared: "The content of the October 27th demonstration, the essential aim of the VSC and its political directors was, remains, the rallying together of some alternative to the building of the Socialist Labour League as the revolutionary Marxist party, and its daily paper". 86
Such sectarian hysterics did not stand in the way of profoundly opportunist politics. The Healyites supported the Mao wing of the Chinese bureaucracy during the "Cultural Revolution", They refused to recognise the struggle as one between wings of the bureaucracy with the masses being demagogically used as a stage army. After the Arab/Israeli war, the SLL began to venerate the "Arab Revolution" as part of their factional struggle with the OC!. By the 1970s, this veneration had turned the SLL/WRP and its press into the cheerleaders of the national bourgeoisies in Syria, Iraq, and most of all, Libya.
After the Iranian revolution' in 1978/9, the WRP's newspaper, "Newsline", became a constant apologist for the butcher Khomeini. The evolution of the SLL was a living proof of Trotsky's understanding of sectarianism, divorced from reality, leading to extreme factional irritability. This led, in the mid 1970s, to a full-scale conspiracy theory, which included an explanation of all the major problems of the FI as being the result of the activities of GPU and FBI agents in the SWP(US).
The La Verite group, later OCI, now known as the PCI, gave its own particular stamp to "anti-Pabloism", Under Lambert's leadership, the French group developed a thorough-going Stalinophobia, as an antipode to Pablo's Stalinophile revisionism. This was combined with a remarkable softness towards social democracy. Under the pressure of the Cold War, they turned to (and to this day remain active within) the anti-Communist union federation, Force Ouvriere.
Despite their "anti-Pabloism", the OCI capitulated to non revolutionary communist forces in the anti-imperialist struggle. During the Algerian war of independence, the Lambertists supported the MNA of Messali Hadj. The French inspired the 1955 resolution of the IC which declared: "In the person of Messali Hadj, the oppressed and exploited of the world possess a living symbol of this (anti imperialist/working class- Eds) struggle". 7 They supported the MNA against the Moscow-supported petit bourgeois nationalist FLN, on the grounds that the MNA had a proletarian orientation.
La Verite offered to defend "the genuine Algerian revolutionaries against FLN killers". 88 Their "anti-Pabloism" thus led the OCI to support a group of vacillating nationalists around Hadj against the more consistent nationalists of the FLN. The truth was that the MNA soon became a pawn in the hands of the French government against the FLN and the national struggle. The MNA ended up in a block with the OAS. Their "working class" orientation, presented by the Lambertists as a token of their revolutionism, did not prevent them from betraying the anti-imperialist struggle.
The Lambertists belatedly were forced themselves to admit this. However, it led them into a sectarian position with regard to anti-imperialist struggles. They refused to call for the victory of the NLF in its battle with American imperialism in the Vietnam war. In the 1967 Arab/Israeli war, the OCI condemned both sides as bourgeois and counter-revolutionary, and took a dual defeatist position.
A product of the OCI's Stalinophobia and softness on social democracy, was its chronic tendency to substitute democratic programmes for the Transitional Programme. In France after de Gaulle's 1958 coup, Lambert advanced "Defense des Acquis" - a strictly democratic programme. In the colonial and semi-colonial world, the Constituent Assembly demand was turned into a strategic demand. In the 1980s this demand was advanced in a potentially counter-revolutionary way in the context of the political revolution in Poland. In Nicaragua after 1979 it was used as the central slogan, at the expense of demands focusing on building soviets and the struggle for workers' power.
Furthermore, the OCI/PCI has, in a number of cases, supported forces of reaction against Stalinism. In 1969, it refused to support the CP Presidential candidate who was then the left's main candidate against Pompidou. In 1980, they supported the pro-imperialist Mullah-led Afghan rebels against the PDPA/Soviet troops.
Flowing from these positions is the transformation of the United Front into a strategy. The OCI/PCI calls for the "unity" of the workers' parties, for a CP/SP government, which they characterise as a workers' government, for class against class. However, by using these slogans in a strategic: sense, the OCI/PCI present them in purely literary terms. The "workers' government" and united front slogans bear no relation to working class action. They are passive slogans and can lead to abstentionism.
Thus, where unity in action was posed in the stormy days of May 1968, the OCI raised class unity slogans as an alternative to joining the battles against the state. On the night of the barricades, the OCI held a meeting and decided to march to convince the students not to continue fighting. When the students refused, the OCI marched off, consoling themselves with chants of working class unity.
This policy was an equal and opposite response to the SLL's abandonment of the united front. Dramatically opposite, it was equally removed from a revolutionary communist position. Thus the OCl's Central Committee- declared in 1971 of the united front: "It is a strategic line in the sense that it is always (that is, independent of circumstances, relationship of forces, tactical considerations in the strict sense of the word) present in a revolutionary party".89
Finally, the OCl's inveterate hostility to any centralism in the IC indicates their essentially "national Trotskyist" outlook. Using the pretext that the FI was destroyed by Pabloism - a discovery only announced at the Third Congress of the IC in 1966 - the Lambertists insisted that democratic centralism had no place in the IC, as it was not the FI.
They admitted the existence of federalism, arguing: "The SLL has had its own international activity, so has the OCI. Germany and Eastern Europe have remained- the "private hunting grounds" of the QCI in co-operation with the Hungarian organisation".90
They wanted to keep things that way so as not to come under SLL control, and keep their channels open to the "Pabloite" USFI.
Undoubtedly, it was Healy who led the IC until the late 1960s and imposed the SLL's views upon its public pronouncements. Lambert was increasingly opposed to Healy and- Banda as they inclined more and more towards Third Worldism. Lambert himself would have preferred to reject the Arab revolution in favour of accommodation to Zionism (recognition of the" self-determination" of the Jewish workers). Lambert, to boost himself, sought to bring into the IC Guillermo Lora's POR of Bolivia.
Healy at first stalled the 4th Congress of the IC, and then staged a split at the International Youth Rally at Essen. Healy seized on the pretext of Lora's concessions to the CP in the Popular Assembly and the two groups engaged in a ludicrous argument over whether dialectical materialism or the transitional programme was the golden calf to be worshipped by the IC faithful: "Is, or is not, the transitional programme of the FI the highest expression of Marxism?", asked Lambert. 91 After the 1971 split, the IC existed solely as a backyard to the SLL (WRP after 1973),whilst the OCI set up the loose, federal OCRFI, rechristened the Fourth International (International Centre of Reconstruction) after a failed fusion with the Moreno split from the USFI.
The Transitional Programme of 1938 was not re-elaborated to meet the tasks of the post-war period. It was however revised piecemeal and, by 1951, systematically in a series of theses and documents which were accepted by the whole International. None of the breaks and splits from 1953 onwards has disavowed these revisions or traced to its roots the centrism into which the FI collapsed.
The revolutionary, programmatic continuity of the FI was decisively broken. The task of developing a new programme based on the fundamental doctrine and method of the 1938 programme is a task which directly faces us. Only on this basis can a new Leninist-Trotskyist International be founded.
Chapter Four: After the splits the splinters, 1961-1983
Since the early 1960s various splits from the IC and USFI have attempted to found international tendencies. The slogans of each tendency with regard to the Fourth International differed, but all shared a fundamental error. The calls to "reconstruct", "reunify" or even "for the rebirth of" the Fourth International, were all based on the premise that the continuity of Trotskyism had been safeguarded by one of the two sides in the 1953 split. Thus, each tendency inevitably defended the tradition that they had emerged from up to the point at which they broke from it.
None were prepared to radically re-evaluate these traditions. Calls for "reconstruction" etc., therefore, were calls for a return to one or other post-1953 tradition. Yet those who will not learn from the errors of the past are condemned to repeat them, often in the manner of Marx's famous dictum. Without tracing the errors of the epigones to their roots in the post-war programmatic collapse, no basis for a lasting break with "Pabloism" and "Healyism" existed.
Thus all attempts to "reconstruct" or "reunify" the Fourth International were calls on the existing degenerate fragments to return to their practice prior to the emergence of the particular tendency in question. Even the apparently more far-reaching call for "the rebirth of the FI" put forward by the Spartacist League (US), was an appeal for the reincarnation of an already degenerate (post-l 951) FI.
Not surprisingly, despite making valuable contributions on specific questions and despite offering valid, if partial, criticisms of the IC and USFI, all of the tendencies to emerge since the sixties have failed in their attempts at "reconstruction".
All of them have been hamstrung by their failure to understand the nature of the programmatic tasks that face authentic Trotskyists in the struggle for a new International. In this section we will deal with the main splits from the IC and the USFI. The purpose of examining these tendencies is to demonstrate why the failure to take on the key task of re-elaborating the Trotskyist Programme as the basis of a refounded Trotskyist International has meant that these tendencies have been unable to transcend the centrism of their parent organisations. We cannot here deal with every grouping that claims to be Trotskyist. However, in dealing with the principal splits we will demonstrate the failures that need to be avoided in the construction of an international tendency.
The earliest major split from the IC was the group later to become the international Spartacist tendency. Originating in the SWP(US) as the Revolutionary Tendency (R T) in 1961, the Spartacist grouping saw itself initially as the defender of IC orthodoxy inside the SWP.
The group centred on a number of ex-Shachtmanite youth around lames Robertson, Shane Mage and Tim Wohlforth. It emerged in opposition to the Dobbs-Hansen SWP leadership over the question of the Cuban Revolution. While it recoiled in horror from the SWP's liquidationist positions on Cuba, the RT did not develop a coherent alternative to them. Wohlforth, the author of the "Theory of Structural Assimilation" - the only serious attempt to look at the pre-1951 FI positions critically - was later to join Healy in regarding Cuba as state capitalist. Robertson and the Spartacists insisted, in an idealist fashion, that the Cuban workers' state had been ushered in by a "petit bourgeois government" (the Castroites) who, from 1959-60 presided over a state, the class character of which was indeterminate. Such a standpoint in Cuba would have left Trotskyists without an operative programme (for soviets and a workers' militia) in this period.
The RT grouping itself was soon to split under the impact of Hansen's bureaucratic onslaught on it. Robertson linked the SWP's positions on Cuba to a series of errors the party was committing. He argued that it was necessary to characterise the SWP as centrist ,and did so in the document "The Centrism of the SWP and the Tasks of the Minority." This produced a rupture with Wohlforth and Healy. Hitherto Healy had seen the RT as a means of exercising pressure on the SWP leadership, thus preventing it from decamping to the IS. As such Healy could not tolerate the Robertson group characterising the party he wanted to keep in the IC, as centrist. Healy's loyal agent Wohlforth therefore split with the RT and even supported its bureaucratic expulsion. The document on the reorganisation by Healy of the Tendency in 1963 argued:
"The tendency must recognise that the SWP is the main instrument for the realisation of socialism in the US....The tendency must not make premature characterisations of the leadership of the SWP, except those, such as Weiss and Swabeck, who have clearly revealed their Pabloism in theory and practice “.....The tendency shall dissolve and shall re-establish itself on the basis of the preceding points." 92
Wohlforth himself was, thereafter, to find himself outside the SWP after the 1963 split in the IC.
Clearly the Robertson group were correct to characterise the politics of the SWP as centrist, though they were over ten years late in their dating of this collapse. Hansen's line on Cuba represented a centrist capitulation par excellence but it was entirely of a piece with the 1948 capitulation to Tito.
Healy absolutely refused to make even such a belated characterisation. The political questions involved were, as always, entirely subordinated to factional manoeuvres. The claim by Wohlforth that to characterise the SWP as centrist was to abandon its "proletarian kernel" was pure demagogy. Latter day attempts such as that by John Lister in his "Spartacist Truth Kit" 93 to suggest that this concern for the workers was at the heart of Healy and Wohlforth's attitude to the SWP, tell us more about Lister's unbroken links with Healyism than about the history of the events in question.
Apart from the fact that the SWP had almost entirely lost its worker base, was a much depleted organisation whose only left elements were youth won from the petit bourgeois radical milieu, political characterisation is not an optional extra made or withheld for diplomatic purposes. Trotsky had a thousand times more reason for seeking to win the proletarian kernel of the Russian CP and the sections of the Comintern. It did not prevent him from clearly characterising the Stalin-Bukharin leadership as centrist.
Healist position (and Lister's defence of it) is entirely consistent with the USFI's current practice. "Centrism" is the forbidden word - utter it and all discussion stops. Thus these gentlemen confirm Trotsky's observation "centrism does not like to be called by its name." The centrist "views with hatred the revolutionary principle: state what is. He is inclined to substitute for a principled policy personal manoeuvring and petty organisational diplomacy" .94
However correct the Robertson group were in relation to their characterisation of the SWP they were profoundly wrong in their attitude to the IC. The Robertson group, which became the Spartacist League in 1964, saw its place as being within the "orthodox", and increasingly sectarian, SLL-dominated IC. Thus it failed, not only on Cuba but also on the question of the IC, to develop a fully rounded programmatic alternative to the degenerate fragments of Trotskyism.
Its call for the "rebirth" of the Fourth International was thus founded upon an acceptance of the political method of the SLL and the QCI as good coin. The Spartacists were not completely uncritical of the SLL and I but their criticisms were premised on the belief that there was a qualitative difference between the IC and the IS. Thus Robertson's remarks to the IC conference in April 1966 stated: "We are present at this conference on the basis of our fundamental agreement with the International Resolution of the IC; moreover, the report of Comrade Slaughter was for us solidly communist, unified throughout by revolutionary determination." 95
This sycophancy to Healy's chief intellectual hack availed them little. The conference ended with Healy expelling the SL from the IC, in essence because of the polite criticisms of the IC raised by Robertson.
The failure to go beyond a negative response to "Pabloism" over Cuba, and their loyalty to the IC, prevented the Spartacists from developing towards revolutionary communism. Their errors became codified into a bad method, marked henceforth by a rabid and increasingly rightwing sectarianism. The Spartacist conception of a "fighting propaganda group" is passive and propagandist in nature and therefore sectarian. It is most precisely expressed as follows: "We recognise that a currently embryonic party organisation must necessarily constitute itself in the form of a 'fighting propaganda group' in order by destroying ostensibly revolutionary organisations, to initiate and for drive forward a regroupment process in order thereby to build up one's own organisation." Combined with the demolition squad approach to rival tendencies is the most utter abstention from the class struggle or the organisations of the labour movement. The fig-leaf of a little "exemplary" work is maintained but even here it is stressed that this is not real leadership of real struggles.
"In doing so the character of this work must always be regarded as exemplary, rejecting out of hand any voluntaristic notion of intervening as a propaganda group into all the daily struggles of the working class inasmuch as this would lead to dissipating one's own forces and to liquidating the programme." 96
There are two distortions of the concept of a fighting propaganda group here. First, the fighting propaganda group is portrayed as a stage during which the main task is to "destroy" other groups. Note the choice of words. The Spartacists seek not to win leftward moving centrists to communism, but to destroy them. This perspective leads characteristically to politically disloyal manoeuvres and provocations. In place of political debate, political combat and the destruction of opponents' political arguments, Spartacist groups have engaged in a vicious circle of disruptions, physical confrontations, occupations of meeting rooms and pickets of other tendencies' events. The iSt has consequently developed from a sect into a bizarre cult, well on the road to auto destruction.
Integrally linked to this mission to "destroy" all other tendencies is their adamant refusal to get involved in what they consider to be "minor" struggles of the working class. Their tasks are conceived of in rigid stages; first destroy the left groups, then and only then, turn to the class.
Thus, although as an organisation they do intervene in strikes they consider to be of national importance, .individual members (unless they are carrying out exemplary work) abstain from any union activity at work. During the Health Strike in Britain in 1982 their members in the NHS studiously refused to get involved in any activity around the strike. This story is repeated in many other instances. The Spartacists' notion of a fighting propaganda group is a thoroughly abstentionist one. The fighting is only with left groups, not with the class enemy and its agents in the mass organisations of the working class, and the propaganda bears no relation to the key struggles of the proletariat.
The fighting propaganda group is not, for the Spartacists, a vehicle for programmatic re-elaboration (they do not do any), a vehicle for carrying focussed propaganda into the working class (they de-prioritise such propaganda) or a painful but necessary step which communists strive to outgrow (they revel in remaining a propaganda group). The Spartacist conception of a fighting propaganda group is not ours. Ours is rooted in the methods of Lenin and Trotsky 97. Their conception is alien to the communist tradition.
The content of the Spartacists' propaganda is, as we have said, mainly abuse. Where they do have distinct positions the Spartacists show a complete lack of understanding of the basic tenets of the Marxist programme.
The Spartacists have developed scandalously right-wing positions on the national question in backward countries. They reject Lenin's theory of imperialism (tacitly) and its understanding of oppressed and oppressor nations. In its place they have put concepts such as states consisting of "interpenetrated peoples". The national rights of all "interpenetrated peoples" weigh equally for the Spartacists. Thus in Northern Ireland the Protestant community are "interpenetrated" with the Catholics.
Their "national" rights have to be carefully protected. The Spartacists are therefore unsparing in their criticisms of the Republicans' "sectarian" violence. Attacks in which civilians are killed, such as the Ballykelly pub bombing, are described as "indefensible." 98 This position ignores the fact that one section of these "interpenetrated peoples" - the Catholics -have been imprisoned in a pro-imperialist, artificially imposed statelet. They are subjected to pro-imperialist rule with the complicity of the other people - the Protestants. The national rights of the whole of the Irish people have been subverted by the creation of the Northern statelet. Those fighting to smash that state - the Republicans - despite the inadequacies of their programme, should be supported unconditionally, though critically, by Marxists in Britain. They cannot be equated with the agents of imperialism in the North, the Protestants, as just another side of the same sectarian coin.
The concept of "interpenetrated peoples" is little more than a gloss for the Spartacists ' abstentionism in the conflict between the oppressed and their imperialist oppressors. The Spartacists, not surprisingly, apply this method to Israel. The Zionist state becomes a case of "interpenetrated peoples" - the Hebrew masses and the Palestinians - whose national rights have to be respected. The blacks and the Boer Afrikaaners in South Africa are another case in point.
In all cases they ignore or minimise the role of imperialism and refuse to adopt Lenin's fundamental standpoint of the difference between oppressed and oppressor nations. In-' deed their great sensitivity to the "national" rights of the Zionist colonists, Protestant bigots land; Afrikaaner racists contrasts sharply with their venomous attacks on the latters' victims. Underlying all of these positions is a metropolitan chauvinism and an aversion to petit-bourgeois led nationalist movements and an identification with labour aristocrats and privileged strata of the proletariat - Protestants in Northern Ireland, Jews in Israel, whites in South Africa.
These positions led to the most pronounced case of abstentionism in the Iranian revolution of 1978/9. Here the mullah-led movement was equated with the Shah in the self-confessedly inoperable slogan "Down with the Shah! Down with the Mullahs! ". The Spartacists completely abandoned the tactic of the anti-imperialist united front, which they also reject in theory, stigmatising it as a "Popular Front". Here again they revealed an inability to distinguish between imperialist countries and their semi-colonial victims. In its place they argued for a strategy of ideological combat against the religious ideas of the Iranian masses.
They ended up, once again, holding an abstentionist position in the test of revolution, and justified it with rationalist, idealist arguments that owed more to Voltaire than Marx and Lenin.
A refusal to identify with the struggles of the oppressed also results in a reactionary identification with the bosses' attempts to keep immigrants out of the metropolitan countries. The Spartacists advocate a racist position on immigration controls: "However, on a sufficiently large scale, immigration plans could wipe out the national identity of the recipient country....If, for example, there were unlimited immigration into Northern Europe, the population influx from the Mediterranean basin would tend to dissolve the continued identity of small countries like Holland and Belgium." 99 The job of Leninists is to protect this national identity according to the Spartacists!
As well as scab positions on the national question, the other distinctive feature of the Spartacists is their Stalinophilia. Starting from the anti-Trotskyist position that Stalinism has a dual nature - a good side and a bad side - the Spartacists see their role as encouraging the good side which has increasingly come to the fore. In Afghanistan this meant "Hailing the Red Army", as the agents of revolution for this backward country - the masses of which get treated to a tirade of chauvinist abuse from the Spartacists.
The political revolutionary situation in Poland in 1980/81 was also not to the liking of the Spartacists. Fearing Catholic restorationism, they decided that the best outcome to the crisis was a Soviet invasion to crush the Polish working class. When this didn't materialise they were more than ready to applaud the bloody Jaruzelski coup and the clampdown on the Polish workers' organisations that came with it.
They argued: "If the present crackdown restores something like the tenuous social equilibrium which existed in Poland before the Gdansk strikes last August, a tacit understanding that if the people left the government alone, the government would leave the people alone - conditions will be opened again for the crystallisation of a Leninist-Trotskyist party.,,100 What a confession of bankruptcy. Stalinist "social equilibrium" is preferred by the iSt to a political revolutionary crisis, as the best conditions for building a party.
The iSt are a Stalinophilic right-sectarian cult. They have reproduced in a bizarre parody Pablo's Stalinophile positions of 1949-51, a living proof that they never understood "the roots of Pabloism." The Spartacists, as a neo-Bordigist sect, reject transitional demands such as nationalisation under workers control in favour of calls to"'seize and sell" bankrupt firms. In Chrysler they argued that the sale of stocks and plant should be shared out as redundancy pay. The alibi offered for this unheard of reactionary petit-bourgeois utopia was the backwardness of the American workers!
The Spartacists are totally incapable of developing action programmes and tactics for the present period of crisis and intensified class battles. However, they occasionally seize upon and fetishize one tactic to beat the detested rivals over the head. Under the apparently innocuous (and for communists, banal), slogan "Picket lines mean don't cross" they "elevated" the picket-line to a principle.
Thus they attack workers (or more probably members of the groups they wish to destroy) for "crossing picket lines" where only pickets of supplies are mounted or where the picket is aimed at a different section of the workforce. Their venom against "scabs" and their posing as defenders of picket lines rings rather hollow given their systematic abstentionism from most workers' struggles and their restriction of their "activities" to so-called exemplary cases (Le. situations where they can directly attack rival groups). Thus, their class struggle activity turns out, on insl'1ection, to be merely a sub-category of their demolition job aimed at ostensibly Trotskyist organisations. They totally reject the united front tactic. In practice they are incapable of advocating any tactics based on it, apart from clownish ultimatums to rival groupings to join their demonstrations and pickets.
They reject all applications and extensions of it; critical electoral support of workers' parties, where they pose as a prerequisite areas of programmatic agreement; work within the proletarian organisations involved in a popular front to achieve a "break with the bourgeoisie"; the workers' government, which they treat as a pseudonym for the proletarian dictatorship; the Labor Party slogan which they present as an ultimatum ("Dump the bureaucrats!") and use as a pseudonym for the revolutionary party. In all these cases sectarian intransigence covers gross opportunist appetites. Thus whilst they refused critical support to Labour in 1979 and 1982 they found Benn on the right side of a "class struggle line" on the question of Soviet defencism! All this represents a complete break from the Transitional Programme, and the Comintern and ILO heritage on which it was founded.
The degenerating sections of the iSt are little more than branches of the SL/US - a reversal of the situation pertaining in the Healyite IC but in essence the same. The iSt is manifestly a dead sect totally incapable of furthering (and increasingly incapable of hindering) the fight for a new International.
In. March 1976 a number of organisations to the left of the USFI launched the Necessary International Initiative. These groups saw the USFI as qualitatively better than the IC or OCRFI and saw their initiative as an attempt to orient towards the USFI. These groups were the FMR (whose main organisation was the La Classe group led by Roberto Massari in Italy), the Spartacusbund (BRD), and two Austrian groups who were later to become the IKL. In September 1976 the British I-CL joined the NIL.
The NII was based on a common assessment of the defects of the major international "Trotskyist" tendencies on the Portugese revolution of 1974/5. It was not, however, based on a positive and fully defined programmatic position on that revolution. The NII was in fact in agreement only on a series of negative positions. It never had any common programmatic positions beyond very general state" ments about Portugal. It was also marked by an adaptationist attitude to the USFI which it characterised as "centrism sui generis." The main inspirers of this position, Roberto Massari's FMR, maintained that of all the fragments of the Fourth International the USFI was the healthiest and the one that could- through external pressure rather than internal reform - find its way back to revolutionary Marxism, while it could never, in its present state, pass over to reformism. The FMR's self-critical balance sheet of the NIl made this clear when it argued:
"In particular we didn't keep in account that the programmatic declarations of the FMR states very clear that the best energies which pledge allegiance to Trotskyism are today those inside the USec...” 101
The substance of "centrism sui generis" (with which the British I-CL made known their disagreement while they were in the NII) was that formal adherence to Trotskyism prevented the USFI from going the way of previous centrists such as Kautsky -i.e. into reformism. In other words here was a species of centrism which, unlike any other, did not vacillate between reform and revolution with the consequent possibility of its going over definitively to reformism. Such an analysis is based on a shallow interpretation of the FI's post-war history. There have been cases of sections going over to reformism - the LSSP in Ceylon. Under Pablo the IS went very near to complete capitulation to Stalinism and petit-bourgeois nationalism.
Today it is declared that no section of the USFI is needed in Nicaragua. All of these experiences clearly indicate that the possibility of the USFI as a whole passing into the camp of social democracy, Stalinism or petit-bourgeois nationalism does exist and will be decided by the march of events. The only real difference between t~e USFI and a centrist like Kautsky is that since the USFI , unlike the SPD and the Second International, does not lead mass forces it has not et been put .to a decisive test. This has allowed its international leadership 0 enjoy a prolonged existence as a vacillating centrist organisation.
While the CL held back from describing the USFI as "centrism sui generis" the nevertheless maintained an equivocal position that it was the "mainstream" Trotskyist current. That is, they refused to characterise it clearly as centrist or indeed to give it any political characterisation. Sean Matgamna of the I-CL wrote in 1976 that: "The I-CL continues to believe that the USFI is the mainstream that has emerged from the communist tendency personified by Leon Trotsky." 102
The real weakness of this position - its potential accommodation to the USFI- was offset in the fusion document between Workers' Fight and Workers Power which argued clearly that the USFI was: "a centrist obstacle to the building of such an International." 103
However, even this document contained the flaw built into the "mainstream" position which we would now criticise. We emphatically reject the view that the USFI represented a qualitatively better tradition than that of the IC. Any choice between these two tendencies reflects a failure to analyse their common origin in centrist degeneration and prepares a repetition of their chronic errors.
Lacking any common programmatic positions as a basis for their Initiative, the tendencies in the NII descended into manoeuvres against one another followed by fragmentation. The I-CL and IKL formed a bloc to resist the FMR's utilisation of the NII as a vehicle for recruitment to itself. Having plundered the Spartacusbund and IKL for recruits the FMR left the NII complaining that discussion was impossible because the I-CL and IKL had failed to produce an internal bulletin.
After a period of independent existence the FMR, which still had as its aim a return to the USFI set its course firmly towards liquidationism.
The Italian section disappeared into Democrazia Proletaria, a group emerging from the break up of the semi-Maoist tradition in Italy with the expressed popular frontist aim of building a "broad democratic opposition" in Italy.
The I-CL became increasingly an Anglo-centric sect burying itself ever deeper in the Labour Party (until later it ended up in the TILC via its fusion with the WSL - an indication of how seriously it takes international regroupment is that it now belongs to a body that it had previously sharply criticised e.g. at the TILC summer 1980 rally.)104 The IKL/Spartacusbund maintained the fiction of an international tendency without having established a programmatic basis or an international leadership.
The unreality of this tendency's existence was cruelly exposed when, in late 1980, it was thrown into disarray by the desertion of key leaders within the IKL. These leaders left because they claimed that the tendency was not capable of developing politically. The remainder of the IKL has continued to exist since the split and, on the question of the basis for an international tendency, does recognise that programmatic clarity and agreement has to come first. The Spartacusbund, savaged by a series of splits (to the FMR, the iSt') were unable to maintain the tendency under their leadership, being basically immobilised by adherence to a collection of established positions (e.g. on Social Democracy) that they were unable to develop or apply tactically in the BRD.
Consequently the organisation dissolved in the course of 1981 into a discussion grouping in Berlin and a group which established itself in May 1982 as the Gruppe Arbeitermacht.
The lesson of the NII experience is clear. Any international regroupment has to be based on far more than just a series of appraisals about what the centrists are doing wrong. We are convinced that it has to be based on a clear statement of common goals and a firm intention to re-elaborate the programme.
The Fourth Internationalist Tendency (FIT) has its origins within the Lambertist OCRFI. The two principal organisations within the FIT, Politica Obrera (PO) of Argentina, and the Partido Obrero Revolutionario (POR) of Bolivia, were amongst the founding organisations of the OCRFI.
The POR joined the International Committee during the factional struggle between Healy and Lambert. It was the first time the POR, led y Guillermo Lora, had established even the semblance of real international links since the 1952 revolution in Bolivia. For Lambert the POR were a valuable weapon in the struggle against Healy. Thus, while some criticisms of the POR's positions in the 1971 revolutionary turmoil were made at the OCRFI's founding conference, the debacle of 1952 was not examined. Furthermore, the criticisms of the POR's role in 1971 were made within a context of overall agreement with its policy in 1971: "The organisations present affirm first of all their total agreement with the policy carried out by the POR in the course of the Bolivian revolution of 1970-71".105 The criticisms of the POR centred on the distinction that it made between the "national bourgeoisie" and the "imperialist bourgeoisie".
They did not deal with the programmatic and practical consequences of this distinction. Lora's policies in the 1970-71 revolutionary crisis in Bolivia represented a continuation of the same fatal opportunist positions he had developed in 1952. Once again, he gave critical support to a left nationalist government, used the united front tactic in an opportunist manner and, as a result, failed to organise the workers and peasants to seize power.
This time there could be no excuse about the influence of the "Pabloites". The Bolivian supporters of the USFI had formed their own separate organisation, POR (Gonzales), which was pursuing an equally disastrous policy for the Bolivian working class, through its concentration on guerrilla struggle as a road to socialist revolution.
The revolutionary situation opened in October 1970 when Regelio Miranda's military coup against General Ovando's government was thwarted by a massive general strike called by the Bolivian Trade Union Centre (COB). Armed workers controlled the capital, La Paz, and a "Comando Politico" was formed by the trade unions and various left political parties.
Both the Bolivian Communist Party (PCB) and the POR(Lora) were important forces within this command. At the same time the "leftist" General Juan Jose Torres declared himself in rebellion against both Miranda and Ovando.
What should a revolutionary party have done in a situation where the army was so divided and fearful of the masses that it was forced to put forward its most "leftist" figure at the head of the struggle'? Within the Political Command it would have argued for the workers and peasant~ to take the power. As a result it would have fought for a call for every factory, mine and workplace to elect delegates to local soviets and to a national soviet, convened by the Political Command. It would have called on the workers to form their own committees and (or the formation of soldiers' committees in the army, these to send delegates to the soviets. It would have fought for a workers' and peasants' government directly accountable to the soviets, in order to open the road to the formation of a proletarian state.
Recognising the strength of the nationalist parties and groups, the overwhelming weight of the peasantry in Bolivia, and the history of suppression of democratic rights, it would have been in favour of the convening of a Constituent Assembly under the most democratic conditions.
Measured against these tasks the POR (Lora) miserably failed its second test. In discussions between the Political Command and Torres, POR supported the entry of "worker ministers" into the Torres government. Lora makes this clear in his own description of events:
"But the opportunist tendency was brought under control since the Comando Politico was persuaded (by the POR? . Eds) to attach such conditions for accepting the ministries that they would have been effectively removed from the control of the President. Thus the ministers would be appointed by the Comando, which would mandate them and could recall them at any time; a political advisor would work alongside each minister etc. However this experiment was never put to the test, since Torres withdrew his offer'" 106, This interesting "experiment" as Lora chooses to call it, was nothing new at all. It was no more than an agreement to enter a bourgeois government and was no different from the Menshevik entry into the Russian Provisional Government; and this after the experience of "worker ministers" in 1952!
The Political Command effectively ceded power after the aborted negotiations on "power sharing". POR posed no alternative to this. In fact there is evidence that the POR did little to challenge the illusions of the Bolivian masses in the left Bonapartist Torres. As in 1952, the POR confused the defence of a government against the threat of a right wing coup, with giving political support to such a government, through the creation of worker ministers.
Lora expected the "force of events" to compel Torres to arm the workers. This he makes clear when he declares "Everyone (including the POR? Eds) supposed that Torres, a friend of Ovando, would in view of the difficult situation he confronted have no alternative but to arm the people, as the only way to strengthen his own position. But as time passed the hope grew fainter and fainter that a clash between opposing sectors of the military would enable the masses to arm themselves".' 107
Instead of fighting for a workers' and peasants' government based on soviets, the POR showed a fatal reliance on left Bonapartism. As the quote above shows, Lora and the POR were waiting for a clash in the army between "progressive" and "reactionary" forces, rather than raising slogans for the arming of the workers and the organisation of the soldiers for a sharp clash with Torres. By the time the POR came to the conclusion that Torres was not going to fight or arm the workers, it was too late.
In January 1971, the right wing struck back and attempted to overthrow Torres. The move deepened the revolutionary crisis in Bolivia.
The plot was discovered and massive mobilisations culminated in miners, armed with dynamite, virtually occupying La Pal.
In the face of the right wing threat, the "Popular Assembly" was formed on the initiative of Comando Politico. The Assembly was a hybrid body. It was a proto-soviet which could have been transformed, under the correct political leadership, into a real leading soviet based on La Pal. A majority of its delegates represented workers' organisations (132, or 60%). A further 23 came from the Independent Peasants Confederation. A large block of delegates (53) were allocated to petit bourgeois elements such as professionals, teachers, students, etc.
As the name "Popular Assembly" implies, the forces of the Bolivian left saw the Assembly as representative of an anti-imperialist united front. The Stalinist PCB wanted to build it as a popular front on the Chilean model in order to mobilise support for Torres. The POR(Lora) saw it as part of a "Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist Front", but at the same time declared it an organ of "dual power and soviet type organisation, which has made for the predominance of the proletariat in the revolutionary process".' 0 Whether the Popular Assembly actually became a "soviet type" body depended on how the revolutionary forces within it fought to build it.
Again there is no evidence that Lora's POR fought to turn the Assembly into a leading soviet in Bolivia. At the same time, their line on the Torres regime remained the same, with the POR even opposing the slogan "All Power to the Popular Assembly".
Revolutionaries would have fought for the Assembly to be transformed into a real soviet, and for all delegates to be elected by rank and file factory and workplace committees (many delegates were elected by the trade union leaderships). They would have called for the construction of soldiers' committees, and for them to send delegates to the workers' 'councils. They would have supported all land seizures and occupations, and called for the building of committees of poor peasants. They would have raised the slogan "All Power to the Popular Assembly" and counterposed the call for a "Workers' and Peasants' Government" to the Bonapartist regime of Torres. Above all, they would have fought for the arming of the workers, and the formation of a workers' militia.
This was not the perspective of the POR(Lora). On the 19th August the army struck back, led by General Banzer and backed by the Brazilian government. As late as the 23rd August, the Comando Politico and the POR were still pleading for arms from Torres: "That night discussions in the Comando Politico revolved entirely around the problems of arms. Torres and his ministers had promised time and again that they would, if the need arose give arms to the people...the Comando resolved to send one last commission composed of Lechin, myself (Lora -Eds), Mercado, Lopez, Reyes and led to the Presidential palace.
We were to inform the President that if he failed to keep his promise and hand over the arms, the Popular Assembly would take action into its own hands".109 This with the rightist forces already in control of several centres!
The results were predictable. Torres refused to give arms on the ground that it would split the army, and troops moved on La Pal. Despite heroic resistance from poorly armed workers and students in La Pal, the military crushed all resistance, ushering in a period of black reaction in Bolivia.
As a leading force within the Bolivian working class, the POR (Lora) has to bear a major responsibility for the crushing defeat inflicted on the Bolivian masses. Lora has yet to make one self-criticism of the policies pursued in 1970/71. Worse still, having learned nothing after the coup, the POR proceeded to form in exile another of their "Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist Fronts" (the FRA). This popular front included not only the pro-Moscow and pro-Chinese CPs, and both the PORs, but also the MIR (a petit-bourgeois guerrillaist group) and General Torres.
The FRA, which within its ranks bound all organisations to the "fundamental line of the founding documents", declared in its Manifesto:
"the need is undeniably to build a fighting unity of all the revolutionary, democratic, and progressive forces so that the great battle can be begun in conditions offering a real perspective for a popular and national government". 110
The FIT has never examined, let alone criticised, the opportunist record of the POR. Neither has it carried out a proper critical evaluation of its own past in the OCRFI. They regard the OCRFI (and before it the IC) as the guardian of the Trotskyist programme up until the end of 1978/beginning of 1979, when Politica Obrera was expelled from the OCRFI. The founding document of the FIT, issued after the founding conference in April 1979, makes this loyalty to the OCRFI clear.
Denouncing the fusion manoeuvres between the OCRFI and the USFI the FIT say of the OCRFI: "We denounce this as a shameful capitulation on the part of those who, up until yesterday were raising the banner of struggle against revisionist Pabloism." 11. This banner was, in fact, a tattered and centrist one. The OCRFI was founded in July 1972 on a federalist, revisionist basis. In the Stalinist states and the imperialised countries the OCRFI advocated a purely democratic rather than a clear transitional programme. This liquidation was, and is, covered up by endless references to the correctness of the theory of Permanent Revolution. According to the OCRFI the national bourgeoisie and the Stalinist bureaucracies were incapable under all circumstances, of establishing or co-existing with bourgeois democracy.
For the OCRFI therefore the fight for Permanent Revolution is reduced to a fight for bourgeois democracy against the bourgeoisie and bureaucracy. This twaddle is a travesty of Trotsky's theory which advocates democratic demands within the context of a clear programme for the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The OCRFI, and it would seem the FIT, advance a democratic programme as their goal.
Thus on Palestine, the founding documents of the OCRFI advanced not the call for a Workers' Republic of Palestine but merely argue that a 'Constituent Assembly of Palestine is a necessary condition for the struggle against reactionary Zionism and the no less reactionary concept of the Arab nation." 112
This position is in fact still held by the FIT, through its Palestinian group the Workers' League of Palestine, who advocate a "democratic and secular state in Palestine". Thus they set in advance a democratic outcome for revolutionary struggle in Palestine as a "stage" on the road to the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The corollary of the OCRFI's democratism was its strategic view of the united front. This manifests itself in the FIT in their strategic conception of the anti-imperialist united front, evidenced particularly in the politics of the POR.
The FIT does claim to have waged a struggle within the OCRFI against Lambert's OCI. Certainly there was a dispute in 1978 over work in the Argentinian unions. Politica Obrera were correct, against Lambert, in recognising that despite Videla's coup, these unions remained workers' organisations and not fascist unions. Indeed this was the issue that led to the split in the OCRFI. However apart from this issue we have, as yet, come across no evidence to support the view that the FIT groupings had advanced a revolutionary critique of the OCRFI. To this day they have not renounced the revisionist founding documents of the OCRFI. Indeed many of their positions represent a political continuity with this tradition. Furthermore like the OCRFI, the FIT appears to adhere to a non-democratic centralist and federalist basis for their international tendency.
The FIT do, correctly, reject the term "world Trotskyist movement" as a meaningful political label. However, in its place they have erected a theory that the USFI is, in fact, counter-revolutionary. Their founding document states: "If the OCRFI has ceased to be the channel by which the party of world revolution may be constructed, the ill-named United Secretariat has already moved over to the camp of the class enemy and has abandoned the Trotskyist programme." 113
Like all of the other fragments, the FIT shy away from calling things by their right name. Yes, the USFI have abandoned the Trotskyist programme. Yes, indeed, the sections of the USFI, as the case of the LSSP showed, can go over to the camp of the class enemy. However to classify the USFI as a world organisation as "counter-revolutionary" is to totally misunderstand its nature. The USFI remains centrist and capable of vacillations to both left and right.
To characterise it as counter-revolutionary is to say in advance that in all revolutionary crises and class struggle situations it will as a whole side with the class enemy against the working class. This puts it in the same camp as the Stalinists and reformists and says in advance that they will act as the Social Democrats in Germany did in 1918/19 or as the Stalinists did in Spain in 1936/7. To say as we do, that the centrist vacillations and programme of the USFI help to disarm the working class and can in periods of revolutionary crisis therefore objectively aid the counterrevolution is one thing. But to label the USFI as counter-revolutionary is quite another. It might make FIT militants feel better or be used as a block to any section moving too close to the USFI but it is politically incorrect and will tactically disarm FIT militants in relation to centrism.
In common with all of the major currents that we have discussed the FIT militants do not have a dialectical grasp of the character and meaning of centrism.
While our assessments of the FIT's positions have necessarily a provisional character we believe the FIT have adopted a number of centrist positions which we think flow from their failure to break from the politics of the OCRFI.
On the Nicaraguan revolution the FIT was clear that the FSLN did not represent the proletariat's own revolutionary party. They castigated the USFI, quite rightly, for its liquidationism and capitulation to the FSLN. They raised the call on the workers' organisations to break with the bourgeoisie and for a workers' and peasants' government. However in their July 1979 statement on Nicaragua, at a time when the revolution was nearing its climax, the FIT lapsed into the democratism that had characterised the OCRFI. Thus, their central slogan was: "Against the tendency of the bourgeois leadership to build a government for reconstructing the state and to put off indefinitely the expression of popular sovereignty, the FIT calls for the convocation of a sovereign and democratic constituent assembly as being the form of the further development of political democratic aspirations and, in the end to expose the democratic demagogy of the bourgeoisie. For the FIT it is a question of a policy of. transition which is part of the strategy of proletarian revolution." 114
The problem with this formulation is twofold. The idea that the Constituent Assembly is a "policy of transition" implies that it is a necessary stage for the Nicaraguan revolution to pass through. While we would have agreed with the call for a Constituent Assembly we would not (and did not) pose it as a necessary, transitional stage. This points to the second problem in the FIT's slogan and its use. Who do they address their call for an Assembly to? There is no mention in their statement of the need to build soviets of workers and peasants, as the only force that could guarantee the convocation of an assembly. There is no mention of the fact that such soviets could supercede the democracy of an Assembly and be the only force that could lay the basis for the transition to a proletarian state.
This omission also leaves the FIT's call for a workers' and peasants' government abstract. What is such a government to be based on, soviets or the Constituent Assembly? We do not propose counterposing the call for soviets to the call for an Assembly. In the context of the crumbling Somoza regime and the Sandinista revolution this would amount to equally abstract ultimatism. We do argue, however, that it was necessary to make clear how the struggle for soviets could be combined with the struggle around democratic demands thus making concrete the strategy of Permanent Revolution.
The failure to pose the question of the Constituent Assembly and soviets in this fashion was, in our view, to follow the dangerous path of turning the tactical slogan of the Constituent Assembly into a strategy.
It appeared to address only the FSLN and not the masses. It failed to warn that without soviets there could be no guarantee of an Assembly being convoked. Indeed this has been proven by the course of the Nicaraguan revolution.
On the whole question of soviets and what they are, the FIT is in our view, confused. This was apparent in their position on Poland and Jaruzelski's coup d'etat. The FIT argued that the trade union Solidarnosc was a developing soviet: "By its own organic law of development, the movement which erupted in August 1980, has broken all possibility of national accord. The FIT has shown how Solidarity has more and more taken on the character of a soviet.
Starting from immediate demands, the workers' organisations were transformed into a veritable independent power, opposed to the state power and with a growing influence in other strata of the population." 115
The logic of this position expressed itself in the FIT's call for "Solidarnosc to Power." This position is wrong, and the characterisation of Solidarnosc as a soviet-type body is at odds with reality. The inter-factory strike committees (MKS) that were thrown up in August 1980 were the potential embryos of soviets. They were replaced by Solidarnosc which was clearly a trade union, not a soviet, organisation. Solidarnosc's structure and methods of decision making, local organisations etc., were not of the soviet type. Therefore to call for "Solidarnosc to Power" is in no way analogous to "All power to the Soviets".
Worse, the call for "Solidarnosc to Power" is premised on an incorrect estimate of the leadership of Solidarnosc. If the fault of the iSt was that it equated the movement with the leadership, then the fault of the FIT was that it equated the leadership with the movement. It failed to recognise that the dominant factions within the leadership advocated programmes that were either directly or indirectly restorationist.
The call for "Solidarnosc to Power" must mean the call for the implementation of its leadership's programme. But, if implemented, the programme of the Solidarnosc leadership would have strengthened the forces of capitalist restoration in Poland. We do not advocate that restorationists take the political power from the Stalinists or that the working class should struggle to make this possible. The introduction of the programme of Walesa, Kuron etc., would not represent a gain for the proletariat but would have meant the implementation of measures directly counterposed to the programme of political revolution and the transition to socialism. In our view, therefore, the FIT's advocacy of such a slogan ~represents a serious error on the part of that tendency.
The unrepudiated legacy of the OCRFI, the centrist record of Lora's POR, the federalist conception of an international tendency and the positions on Nicaragua and Poland lead us to regard the FIT as no alternative to the principal tendencies of the degenerated Trotskyist movement.
An international tendency based on such a record and such politics is unlikely to be able to grapple with the programmatic questions that need to be resolved in the struggle to rebuild an International. Whether or not constituent organisations within the FIT, such as Politica Obrera of Argentina, can be won away from the FIT's methods remains to be seen. Certainly their willingness to debate serious issues of programme with other tendencies, including ourselves, makes this a possibility. But such discussions, if they are to move forward, must eschew the diplomacy and manoeuvring that characterised, for example, the Parity Commission 'discussions., For our part we intend to press for such honest political discussions with groupings within the FIT such as Politica Obrera.
Not long after the formation of the FIT the OCRFI was busy playing master of ceremonies in yet another unprincipled attempt to "reconstruct" the Fourth International. The USFI's blatant liquidation of party and programme in Nicaragua in 1979 and its connivance in having the "Trotskyist" Simon Bolivar Brigade expelled from Nicaragua, was a dramatic confirmation of the lengths to which these centrists will go in their accommodation to petit-bourgeois nationalist groupings. Their positions conflicted with those of the Bolshevik Faction which, together with the L TT, split from the USFI on the eve of the 1979 World Congress. This split, which was led by the BF's major party, the Argentinian PST led by Nahuel Moreno, undermined the USFI's ludicrous claim to represent the Fourth International. Immediately following their split the BF and the L TT majority joined forces with Pierre Lambert's Organising Committee for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International.
Having won such a prize Lambert unceremoniously wound up the unity discussions that he had been having with the USFI - without of course providing any political accounting of his move! Together Moreno and Lambert launched the Parity Committee (Commission). Its expressed aim was to call an open conference of "the world Trotskyist movement" aimed at "rooting out revisionism" through a "democratically organised and exhaustive discussion". In the event no open conference took place. Workers Power, the Irish Workers Group and other tendencies that applied to attend this mythical conference were effectively barred from what became a "unity" congress between the Morenoites and Lambertists in December 1980. This conference produced yet another misbegotten parody of Trotsky's FI - the Fourth International (International Committee.)
It was precisely in such a period of flux and disorientation amongst (subjectively) revolutionary militants that it was necessary for communists to be absolutely clear about the nature of the split and the history and direction of the component parts of the Parity Committee.
To do otherwise, despite the apparent left criticism of the USFI by the Morenoites, would have sown illusions in the Committee and its constituent organisations.
Workers Power and the Irish Workers Group pointed to the record of the two major groups - the OCRFI and the Morenoites. We catalogued the deeply opportunist politics of Moreno and his organisations their history of adaptation to Peronism, Castroism and even Maoism.
We pointed to the fact that the OCRFI offered only a stagist democratic programme for the Nicaraguan masses, in line with their constant refusal to distinguish between democratic and socialist demands. We were clear that such an amalgam forming an international tendency with the declared aim of reconstructing the Fourth International could "have no common programme which can be applied in a revolutionary situation." 116 Having done this we did not ignore the proposed "open conference", but applied to attend it in order to argue our positions at it. Needless to say these many-times-over opportunists were not interested in the prospect of such an honest and searching discussion.
The sorry history of the Parity Committee/Fourth International (IC) demonstrated that our criticisms of the forces involved retained all their validity. The Parity Committee itself was marked by the Stalinophobic views of the OCRFI, hailing the imperialist-backed Islamic rebels in Afghanistan as vanguard fighters in "the development of the proletarian revolution in the whole area." 117
The declarations of the Committee centred exclusively on areas of general agreement between the participants, brushing under the table former slight disagreements (such as over the class character of Cuba). Not surprisingly when declarations were made on key issues of the class struggle they remained general, vague and entirely insufficient as guides to action.
This exercise reached its peak with the formation of the FI(IC). The OCRFI who had formerly claimed criticism of Moreno for his adaptation to Peronism was an "indispensible task" for Trotskyists, brushed this reservation aside when the leader of its largest section (the French OCT) Pierre Lambert, declared of the formation of the FI(IC): "The only comparable advance in the history of the world's workers' movement is the one that led to the formation of the Third International after the victory of the Russian Revolution." 118
This bombast could not long conceal the politically flimsy basis of the FI(IC). The"Forty Theses" of the FI(IC) were marked by centrist evasions or generalities. They did not in any way account for or explain the differences on Peronism, Cuba and Portugal that had formerly divided Moreno and Lambert. They destroyed the possibility of agreement over perspectives by substituting windy generalisations about the imminence of revolution and the continuity of the world revolution since 1945. The depth of opportunism to which the FI(IC) was prepared to sink was revealed by the Theses' attitude to trade unions in Argentina.
While the OCI's characterisation of the Argentinian unions as "fascist" was important enough to use as a pretext to expel Politica Obrera from the OCRFI in 1978, the accommodation by the Morenoites to work in these very same unions was swallowed with consummate ease: "But the discussion whether we can transform these organisations or have to create others is a wasted discussion which will be solved by history." 119 At the time of its foundation we argued that such an unprincipled basis for the fusion would inevitably produce new splits and further disorientation of subjectively revolutionary militants trapped in these bankrupt groups: "The formation of the FI(IC) merely lays the basis for new splits in the future." 120 Within a year we were proved right.
In the summer of 1981 Moreno suddenly "discovered" that on the question of the Mitterrand Government "We have differences of 180 degrees." 121 Moreno claimed that he wrote to Lambert on July 13th describing the French Section's orientation towards the Mitterrand Government as being one of "critical support" for a Popular Front:
"The leadership of the OCI(u) does not dare to put a name to its policy but it accords uncritical and almost total support to a popular front government." 122
A reading of the OCI(u)'s paper "Informations Ouvrieres" from May to September 1981 reveals that this is a justified criticism. But nothing in the OCI's past record of adaptation to social democracy could have led one to expect any other response. Since serious programmatic differences had not been discussed openly before the FI(IC) was founded it was unlikely that Lambert would do so after fusion had been achieved.
Doubtless Moreno, a seasoned and cynical factionalist, knew this very well. Indeed, Moreno's supporters within the OCI(u) had supported Lambert's adaptation to social democracy, which existed before the May 1981 Presidential election. This took the form, for example, of the OCI(u) refusing to stand its own candidate (in case it took votes away from Mitterriand) and calling for a vote for Mitterrand (in preference to the Stalinist candidate, Marchais) from round one of this (two round) election.
When on September 22nd 1981 Moreno submitted a long article attacking the OCI's position on Mitterrand, for publication in Correspondence Internationale, it was tantamount to a declaration of a split. Events thereafter took on a familiar ring to those who have experienced or studied the splits and fusions of the "Fourth Internationals" since 1953.
Lambert began to level accusations at supporters of Moreno in France that they were involved in a Stalinist, LCR, fascist, Morenoite provocation against the OCI Napuri, a leader of the Peruvian tendency that had been part of the OCRFI, the POMR, was expelled and denounced as a bourgeois agent- because he opposed the expulsions of the Morenoites. This method of denunciation is an old tactic. Enemies are bourgeois agents.
They need to be dealt with organisationally not politically. As a result of these moves the Morenoites boycotted a General Council of the FI(IC) in the Autumn of 1981 whereupon Lambert declared that they had therefore split. Moreno then decamped to form the International Workers League, having achieved a foothold in Europe.
We confidently predict that this organisation will tread the opportunist path already pioneered by its leader. For Lambert the exercise was not too rewarding. However despite a steady loss of members the OCI have changed their name to the PCI - Parti Communiste Internationaliste declaring themselves a party. They have continued their adaptationist approach to Mitterrand and in Poland put forward a purely democratic programme for political revolution. At a meeting on 21-23 December 1981 with the rump of the OCRFI this farce was continued with the declaration of the "Fourth International - International Centre of Reconstruction" !
The whole episode reveals the degenerate nature of both elements in the split. They are both led by centrists who continue to constitute road blocks to the building of a revolutionary International and the reelaboration of a revolutionary programme.
The Trotskyist International Liason Committee (TILC) formed at the end of 1979 represents an attempt by the WSL (Workers Socialist League) in Britain and various other groups in Italy, the USA and Denmark to form an international tendency aiming to "reconstruct the Fourth International". Workers Power and the Irish Workers Group attended the international pre-conference of the TILC in December 1979 as observers. At that meeting our groupings expressed disagreement with the basis and method on which the TILC was initiated. The WSL, the largest organisation and the main political influence within the TILC, originated out of a factional struggle in the Healyite Workers Revolutionary Party, British section of the International Committee. Crystallised around the evident gap between the WRP's perspectives - economic collapse and imminent military coup - and the real state of the class struggle the central theme of the opposition was the call for a "return to the transitional programme." 123
In the formative period during and immediately after the split in the WRP, the leaders of the WSL were considerably influenced by the OC!.
In particular they adopted the OCI's fetishistic use of the Transitional Programme as the highest possible and entirely sufficient formulation of communist principles. They added to this a home grown view of the "fight for the transitional programme" which was largely posed in terms of resolutions on the sliding scale of wages to trade union conferences.
Thus the WSL conducted propaganda for those transitional demands which were closest to the current wage struggle.
On the Labour Party they adopted wholesale the old methods and slogans of the Socialist Labour League including a version of Healy's "Make the left MPs fight", cut down to "Make the Lefts fight". This slogan presented itself as a sharply polemical exposure of the lefts with calls on them to kick out the right-wing leaders. It had however beneath its "left" appearance a right adaptationist essence. Was this an inevitable stage; first the left reformists, then our turn? Was there a fundamental difference between the "left" and "right" social democratic leaders? The WSL privately said "no" and that this was "proved" by the MP's refusal to fight. But what if the left leaders did "fight"? What if they even moved to kick out Healy and the right wing? In 198081 Benn and a small nucleus of left MPs put themselves at the head of the Labour Party Democracy movement. The WSL criticism of them weakened and collapsed. Simultaneously they fused their organisation with the ever more opportunist I-CL. The old slogan has not been raised by the new organisation despite the retreat of Benn and Co and their manifest failure to carry their "fight" to a decisive conclusion. 54. Whilst the WSL rejected the WRP's early'70s sectarianism it returned to all the fundamentals that had led it in that direction. Their work was conducted in the old 1960s Healy style.
As the "alternative leadership" the WSL was built as a miniature version of a future mass party (mini-mass party). The WSL indignantly rejected the role and tasks of a fighting propaganda group. Consequently it developed all the classic faults of 1960s Healyism - a rapid turnover of members, a low level of cadre training and development, and inflated expectations that led to demoralisation and collapse. Raided twice by the Spartacist sectarians who took off their "left" elements the demoralised WSL collapsed into a fusion with the right-centrist I-CL in 1981.
The WSL's sponsorship and foundation of TILC was a product of its declining years. In essence the WSL failed to break from the IC's fetishisation of the Transitional Programme and their turning of it into abstract principles - i.e. dogma. This approach necessarily separates programmatic principles from tactics, and directs attention away from the tasks of programmatic re-elaboration. This in effect denies both the programmatic degeneration of the FI and its collapse into centrism.
Thus the WSL argued in March 1978 that the route to building a principled basis for a reconstructed FI lay not in: "the arithmetical piecing together of the existing splintered fragments, but as a process of reaffirming both in theory and practice the fundamental principles on which the Fourth International was founded." 124 All groupings which claim to stand on the "principles" of the Transitional Programme are therefore part of a "world Trotskyist Movement" and simply have to be won back to an existing fundamentally correct programme.
The WSL's original conception of the Transitional Programme as "valid today" has done nothing to prevent it from sinking into an opportunist quagmire on its own national terrain. Small wonder that this understanding of programme is incapable of guiding the creation of an international tendency.
The collapse of the Fourth International is seen simply as a period of "prolonged disorientation." 125Here the WSL has recourse to some crude sociology. The leaders of the post-war FI were unfortunately petit-bourgeois and therefore incapable of defending the revolutionary programme. This is most clearly expressed in the WSL's submission to the XI World Congress of the USFI, "The Poisoned Well". It describes "Pabloism" thus: "It reflects the ideological approach of the petit bourgeoisie," 126
Fair enough. But then it continues: "The danger of such a method emerging remains acute whenever (and for whatever reasons) Trotskyism becomes dependent for its existence upon middle class intellectual forces with little experience and few links to the working class- forced to contemplate the class struggle from the outside, and more than ever dependent upon an analysis which finds it difficult to penetrate beneath the surface of events," 127
Now while it is true that a revolutionary organisation needs to become in class composition as well as in political character, a party of the proletarian vanguard, it is not true that the failure to do this was decisive in the FI's collapse. Whilst Pablo and Mandel were the principal theorists, the "proletarian" leaders Healy and Cannon were equally complicit in its practice. One group that blocked with Pablo, the Cochran Clarke faction, had a large proletarian base. The real problem with this one-sided sociological analysis is that it leads the WSL to defend the IC tradition. It does this on the spurious grounds that the IC maintained a working class orientation. But then so did the LSSP in Ceylon, yet it joined a popular front. So did Lora in Bolivia, yet in two revolutionary situations he took a Menshevik not a Bolshevik position. To make a fundamental distinction between the IS and the IC on the basis of a supposed working class rather than a petit-bourgeois orientation, is at bottom an apolitical way of viewing the split in the FI and the nature of the IC.
We reject the WSL's view, built into the founding document of the TILC that: "We critically defend these forces - initially in the International committee - that took, however partially and inadequately, a stand in defence of the primacy of the task of constructing independent Trotskyist parties as the sole guarantor of the political independence of the working class." 128 Neither politically nor organisationally is it true that the IC groups maintained "independence". Was Healy's anonymous club selling Tribune defending proletarian independence? The TILC was founded on the notion: today we have "The Programme" - the task is to win the Trotskyist movement back to it. This approach leads to a false conception of the operative basis for unity, regroupment and. fusion, both nationally and internationally.
The basis for unity becomes generalised abstract principles rather than agreement on programme, tactics, strategy and perspectives. This approach was mirrored in the positions of the GBL(now LOR) of Italy. In their "Theses on the Crisis of the Fourth International and the tasks of the Bolshevik Leninists" (Nov.1979) and drawn up for the TILC pre-conference, the GBL put forward a similar view of the "world trotskyist movement" . Thus they argue: "The FI is not dead, nor was it destroyed. It underwent a political degeneration process, leading to organisational scattering. Today it lives in its different factions." 129
The GBL proceeds to define why the tradition of the FI still "lives" in this world Trostkyist movement: "Firstly they do cluster the most conscious portion of (the) world proletarian vanguard. The politics is generally centrist in nature but with special features. Actually it still does not reflect a complete break from the programmatic basis of Bolshevism - even less does it constitute a direct reflection of social forces foreign to the proletariat (worker aristocracy, Stalinist parasitic bureaucracy, petit-bourgeois intelligentsia and so on) unlike Stalinist, social democratic and partly also centrist politics." 130
As well as talking of centrism "with special features", the document also frequently characterises the FI fragments as "centrist type" organisations. In fact the GBL (LOR)'s position is just a repetition of Roberto Masari's "centrism sui generis" - a form of centrism which is somehow incapable of going over to reformism. Firstly, there is no evidence to support this rosy prediction. Indeed the GBL itself excludes the LSSP and the Posadists from the "world Trotskyist movement" because they "definitively entered the counter-revolutionary camp". What is to stop other centrist fragments following? Secondly, it is a mistake to argue that the centrism of the FI fragments is "special" because it does not "constitute a direct reflection of social forces foreign to the proletariat".
All centrism precisely reflects the social weight of the petit-bourgeoisie, a stratum which vacillates between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
Since the labour aristocracy in the imperialist countries has, due to its sharing in the feast of super profits, the life conditions of a comfortable petit-bourgeois, such consciousness is not (as the WSL theoreticians like to think) limited to shop-keepers or people with a college education.
The history of the FI after 1948 is the history of capitulation to these forces, either to the petit-bourgeois utopian programmes of the Stalinists - e.g. the Chinese and Vietnamese Communist Parties, or to petit-bourgeois nationalists - e.g. Algeria, Nicaragua. The suggestion that these antics and betrayals do not represent a "complete break from the programme of Bolshevism" is to besmirch the programme of Lenin and Trotsky.
From this misunderstanding of centrism, the LOR and WSL have developed a set of tactics to relate to the "world Trotskyist movement" through "regenerating" it, all of which are fundamentally wrong. TILC is seen as relating to this world movement in the manner of an "orthodox" international faction of it. An analogy is made with the struggle of the International Left Opposition: "It is necessary instead to engage (in) a struggle for regeneration and Bolshevik reorganising of the FI, similar to the struggle of the Left Opposition 1929-33".131
This analogy is a false one. Trotsky and the ILO related to the Communist International in this way because it represented the mass vanguard party of the proletariat. In no sense do any of the fragments of the FI represent this. They are not mass organisations anywhere in the world, neither do they encompass the proletarian vanguard in the obvious sense that the CI did between 1923-33. Of course, important numbers of subjectively revolutionary militants are attracted by these groups (as they are to other centrist groups defined by the WSL as outside the "Trotskyist movement" - the PRP in Portugal, Avanguardia Operaia and Lotta Continua in Italy in the mid 1970s, and the SWP in Britain, for example). This may make an orientation to such groups essential. This necessitates polemic, theoretical debate, united action etc.
However, to be principled it must be on the basis of a clear recognition of their centrist character. In contrast the -TILC sees itself as a faction of this "movement", sometimes inside it, sometimes outside it, desperately trying to bring it together in "open conferences" and willing to diplomatically tailor its criticisms to do so.
Two conditions govern a communist approach to centrist organisations. Firstly, in what direction is a centrist current moving - to the left or the right? Trotsky was absolutely clear about this in his advice to the British section of the ILO to enter the leftward moving centrist Independent Labour Party: "Centrism as we have said more than once, is a general name for the most varied tendencies and groupings spread out between reformism and Marxism. In front of each centrist grouping it is necessary to place an arrow indicating the direction of its development; from right to left or from left to right".132
Of course communists would orient to, even enter, leftward moving centrist groups, attempting to bring them to a fully communist position as Trotsky did with the Block of Four. But this method does not inform the TILC method of relating to the FI fragments. The TILC prefers to relate to the "whole movement" and proceeds to do so either on the basis that it is not centrist (WSL), or that it is centrism with "special features" (GBL LOR).
The second condition which determines a communist organisation's ability to relate to centrism is a firm grasp of, and determination to fight for, its own programme. Without a clearly worked-out programme which guides strategy and tactics in a democratic centralist fashion, an international tendency is disarmed in the face of centrism. Again, when Trotsky was discussing the question with the British LO, he emphasised that the ILO criticised the Walcher-Frolich group not for entering the left centrist SAP, but "because they had entered it without a complete programme and without an organ of their own...The great advantage of the Left Opposition lies in the fact that it has a theoretically elaborated programme, international experience and international control".133
The great "disadvantage" of the TILC is that it has none of these things, but could still found itself on the perspective of entering centrist organisations. In these circumstances this was nothing short of a liquidationists' charter. In fact its founding "programme" was inadequate even to guide or hold its own tendency together, let alone enter combat with much larger centrist formations.
The founding document of the TILC - "The Transitional Programme in Today's Class Struggle" explicitly confines itself to "revolutionary principles", leaving the tactical application of these principles by the
[...]
For the TILC, what crucially separates these tendencies from centrism is their formal adherence to the Transitional Programme. The TILC declaration of intent speaks of this world movement "oscillating around the Trotskyist programme' 137 . In saying this the TILC is in fact covering over the real nature of these organisations and their leaderships. They are failing in the elementary Marxist duty hammered home by Trotsky in his struggle against the centrists "to say what is".
Motivated by a healthy desire to relate to the "militants who aspire to be, and regard themselves as revolutionary Marxists" the TILC will end by making concession after concession to the unhealthy desire to be involved in discussions of the "world movement" at the cost of putting aside their criticisms. We know of course that the only basis that the gentlemen who lead the USFI, the FI(ICR) and the IWL etc., will allow discussion to take place is the precondition of not calling them centrists.
The dangers of this method were shown by the TILC’s attitude to the Moreno Lambert Parity Committee and Open Conference. Clear characterisations of the nature of these tendencies - as inveterate centrists and misleaders of the working class - was replaced by a refusal to be drawn on the political nature of these currents. Instead the TILC's major criticism of these professional tricksters was over their failure to live up to their promises of calling an "open conference".
In this way TILC sacrificed its political criticisms, and along with them the necessity of issuing warnings to militants following the Parity Committee down the same old centrist cul-de-sac, in the interests of holding a "discussion" with part of the "world movement." These developments in the short life span of the TILC have confirmed the criticisms made by the IWG and Workers Power at the TILC preconference in 1979. The TILC, founded on a wrong method and without having established real programmatic unity, has proved incapable of surmounting its first major international test - an imperialist war against a semi-colony.
It remains to be seen whether the sections of the TILC will draw the necessary conclusions from this debacle and break from this fundamentally centrist method. For our part we will continue to debate issues with the TILC, try to help its sections to break from that method, but we will do so by keeping to the forefront our criticisms and disagreements. We do this not out of a fanatical desire to disagree but out of a desire to achieve the sort of 'programmatic clarity that is absolutely necessary for the building of a genuinely democratic centralist Trotskyist international tendency.
Chapter Five: A radical re-statement of programme is necessary
We have characterised the principal forces who lay claim to Trotskyism as centrist. This term has been abused, distorted or ignored by these forces. As Trotsky said centrists hate to be called by their real name. It is important therefore to understand what centrism is, and how it can be fought.
Historically, centrism has emerged from either Marxism or reformism.
It is a vacillating, transitional phenomenon between the two. Centrism that emerges from Marxism has normally arisen either as a result of serious defeats or prolonged apathy amongst the working class. It reflects both of these things. Thus the centrism of the Second International grew out of the relatively stable years prior to 1905. It maintained a formal Marxist orthodoxy but practiced limited, largely electoralist tactics. The strategy of socialist revolution was relegated to the distant future.
The early centrism of the Comintern (typified by Zinoviev on the left, Stalin in the bureaucratic centre, and Bukharin on the right), arose out of the defeat of the post-war revolutionary upsurge and the bureaucratisation of the revolution. Both of these species of centrism existed for relatively lengthy periods. Their decisive crossing over to the camp of counter-revolution was the end-point of their centrism, an endpoint that genuine Marxists did not passively wait for, but one they fought. The end-point came when these formations were forced to choose the path of revolution or the path of democratic counter revolution.
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there has been not one, but several centres claiming to be the FI, and that none of them represented revolutionary, programmatic continuity with Trotsky's FI, are doomed to failure. Our approach to building an international is to state-"Programme First". We regard the principal epigone tendencies of the FI (USFI, IC,FI (ICR» as definitely centrist.
However, the FIs centrism, whilst sharing the general characteristics of all centrism, has to be seen as distinct in form from the pre-1914 Second International or the pre-1935 Comintern. We call the centrism of the post-war FI petrified centrism that is a centrism which is paradoxically relatively stable, in that it has continued to exist for over 30 years. This form of centrism is not new. Trotsky observed the same phenomenon in the old London Bureau of the 1930s, which included the ILP and which he designated "a petrified centrism without masses"141.
This centrism is divorced from the masses, and as. a result can remain relatively immune to the pressure of the masses during great social upheavals. It can thus constantly postpone making decisive choices.
The Second and Third Internationals were rooted deep within the working class. The Second International came to reflect the privileged social layers of the labour aristocracy and bureaucracy. The Comintern leaders were based upon a privileged social caste within the Soviet Union, with the resources of state power at their disposa1. In the last analysis their politics became anchored, through these layers, to the conservative interests of states, capitalist in one case, degenerated workers' state in the other.
The magnetic pull of these counter-revolutionary social forces proved irresistible to the incoherent politics of centrism. The Fourth International movement has never directly rested upon such privileged social forces. In the 1930s and 1940s its cadres were courageous individuals capable of swimming against the tide of fascist, Stalinist and reformist persecution. These cadres came from the ranks of advanced workers and from those intellectuals willing and able to break from their class of origin. In the years 1933-1948 the FI deepened its proletarian roots. This greatly assisted its programmatic firmness.
With the recovery of US and European capitalism and the onset of the cold war the FI sections were increasingly isolated from any revolutionary proletarian forces. The proletariat of the principal imperialist powers sank back into reformism, political apathy, economism. New revolutionary recruits became fewer and fewer. Within the thinning ranks of the Trotskyist groups, conservative older workers and petit-bourgeois came to predominate. The isolation from the masses sealed the Trotskyists from having to take decisions, yet the social pressure on them was increasingly from a petit-bourgeois milieu and petit-bourgeois movements.
It would be merely vulgar materialism and crude workerism that sought to identify the causes of the FIs degeneration in either its leaders' petit-bourgeois class origins (the SWP leaders' class credentials were impeccable) or in the class composition of its membership, but given the political collapse of the FI into centrism, alien class forces nourished and preserved this. Where the centrist "Trotskyists" had a mass base and where decisive actions were required of them by developments within the class struggle (e.g. the LSSP in Ceylon) right centrism collapsed into open reformism. This petrified centrism is defined by more than just its lack of a mass base. Its programme is a mutation, a hybrid of revolution and reform.
The ILP's distinctiveness was its pacifism but this was embroidered by strong elements of pro-Stalinist positions and concessions to social democracy (e.g. parliamentarianism). In the case of the FI after the war, its "Trotskyism" became increasingly disfigured by Stalinist social democratic or petit-bourgeois nationalist influences. The FI and its fragments have prevented this hotch-potch from being torn apart into its constituent elements because it has never, as an International, been in the leadership of large sections of the working class in pre-revolutionary or revolutionary situations.
In the imperialist countries the predominant drift of this centrism in the 1950s and 1960s was to the right. All the fragments became reconciled to the 'social peace' of the post war boom, politically adapting themselves to the dominant hold of Stalinism or social democracy. Even in the upheavals in the semi-colonies during this period, right opportunism was apparent in the attitude of the fragmented FI to petit-bourgeois nationalism.
Yet centrism would not be centrism if it was incapable of shifts to the left. The Healy grouping in the IC was pushed to the left by forces breaking from the CPGB under the impact of a crisis within Stalinism after Hungary 1956. The anti-war struggles, the general strike in France, the Italian and British strike waves of the late 1960s and early 1970s produced left-centrist turns in the USFI and in various national sects. This 'left' turn was riven with errors and contradictions and soon resulted in a turn back to the right. This in turn produced smaller leftward breakaways, to one of which, in the SWP(GB) we owe our origins. Future sharp turns in the class struggle are likely to generate more such splits. Moreover, we recognise in "left" centrist splits potential recruits to communism. But for that to take place, the banner of communism has to be raised once again as an alternative to the numerous banners of centrism that parade the FIs symbol.
The organisational disintegration of the FI reflects nothing less than the programmatic disintegration of that organisation in the period after the Second World War. The subsequent history of all of the FIs fragments since the early 1950s confirms this analysis to the letter. For this reason we understand the refounding of a revolutionary International in programmatic terms.
For us the task is not to "reunify" or "reconstruct" the Flout of the degenerate fragments of Trotskyism, but rather a task of rallying the best elements within those fragments to a new, unspotted programmatic banner. In the first place this means that genuine Trotskyists must set as their central task the re-elaboration of the Trotskyist programme, refocusing it towards the new period of economic and political crisis that has opened up in the 1970s/80s.
It is precisely this political instability in the world, the hallmark of the epoch of imperialism, the epoch of wars and revolutions, which gives revolutionary strategy and tactics their central importance as guides to action for millions. There is no room for vagueness or ambiguities within such strategies and tactics. We live in a period of dramatic fluctuations in the class struggle where revolutionary or pre-revolutionary situations can rapidly turn into periods of black reaction, as in Chile, Iran, or Turkey for example. Only with a clear programme, that includes precise tactics which flow from and are subordinated to a revolutionary strategy, is it possible to build a revolutionary party and International which can lead the working class to power and defeat the threat of reaction.
There is no brick wall between principles, strategy and tactics. Serious and persistent errors of tactics, which remain uncorrected, inevitably lead to a liquidation of the programme. This was the road along which the post-war FI travelled. All the centrist fragments, the USFI, the Healyites, Lambertists, Morenoites, and national based groups like to claim adherence to the Transitional Programme.
They can do so with impunity because they have turned that programme into abstract principles which do not in any sense guide or inform their strategy and tactics. The Transitional Programme is for them an icon to be brought out every now and then to reassure their followers of their 'continuity' with Trotsky's FI. This explains the collapse of democratic centralism without real programmatic unity. Democratic centralism is replaced in the case of the Healyites and the iSt with bureaucratic centralism (i.e. subordination of the small groups to one large group), and in the case of the USFI and the Lambertists by federalism and the principle of non-interference in the respective national sections' "spheres of influence."
For us, therefore, revolutionary credentials are not valid if they are based on a formal declaration of loyalty to the Transitional Programme. Such formal adherence has, as we have shown, disguised opportunist and sectarian distortions of the programme and the method underlying it. The Transitional Programme was developed on the basis of the whole tradition of revolutionary Marxism. It represented the continuity and development of that tradition since the publication of The Communist Manifesto. Embodying the method of its predecessors it stands on the shoulders of these programmes as a document of enormous historic significance. However, like the work of Marx, Engels and Lenin, whole elements of it were specific, necessarily so, to its immediate period.
Trotsky himself was clear that all programmes are specific to some extent precisely because they are a summation of the general lessons of the preceding period of class struggle and revolutionary thought and practice. Programmes develop a strategy of action for the coming period based on an analysis of the lessons of the preceding period. Writing in 1937 Trotsky reminded his followers of this important rule with regard to revolutionary programmes:
"What other book could even be distantly compared with The Communist Manifesto? But this does not imply that after ninety y.....of unprecedented development of productive forces and vast social I struggles, the Manifesto needs neither corrections nor additions. Revolutionary thought has nothing in common with idol worship. Programme and proposes are tested and corrected in the tight of experience..which is the supreme criterion of human thought. The Manifesto too required...corrections and additions. However, as is evidenced by historical experience itself, these corrections and additions can be successful. Only by proceeding in accord with the method lodged in the foundation of the Manifesto itself."142
This method guided Marx and Engels themselves. They said of their own "Transitional Programme":
"That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today. In view of the gigantic strides of Modem Industry in the last twenty five years, and of the accompanying improved and extended party organisation of the working class, in view of the practical experience gained, first in the February revolution, and then, still more, in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat for the first time held political power for two whole months, this programme has in some respects become antiquated."143
Forty four years after the publication of the Transitional Programme we have to maK~ "corrections and additions" to it, in the same way as Trotsky made "corrections and additions to The Communist Manifesto. We must re-elaborate Trotsky's programme by proceeding according to the method lodged within it. This involves more than just 'bringing the Transitional Programme up to date'.
The Transitional Programme itself was not the complete programme of the FI in two senses.
In the first place it represented the "summation" of the collective work and struggles of the Left Opposition, the ICL and the MFI over 15 years. In these struggles, against Stalinism, social democracy, centrism, fascism, imperialism etc., the Trotskyists developed the programme of the International Tendency in polemics, declarations, resolutions, documents and theses:
"The Left Opposition, therefore, has a colossal experience of an international character. There was not a single important historic event that did not force the Left Opposition to counterpose its slogans and methods to the slogans and methods of the bureaucracy of the Comintem.” 144
In the struggles around questions of the Soviet economy, the regime of the CPSU, the Chinese Revolution, the Anglo Russian Committee and later the Spanish revolution, the struggle against fascism and war etc., the Trotskyists hammered out an international organisation based on a common programme and method that was rooted in a common analysis of actual revolutionary events. In this sense, therefore, the Transitional Programme was rooted in agreements over far more than a set of general principles.
Secondly, the Transitional Programme was a focused programme heavily oriented towards providing an action programme for the rapidly developing crisis. It was based on a perspective of immediate war and resultant revolution-"The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International". That is, as with "The Action Programme for France" the programme concentrates heavily on short term perspectives and tasks, without fully analysing epochal developments, such as the changes within world imperialism. Trotsky himself recognised this shortly after drafting the programme he pointed out that not only - the beginning section on modern capitalism in the imperialist epoch not complete but:
"Also the end of the programme is not complete because we don't speak here about the social revolution, about the seizure of power by insurrection, the transformation of capitalist society into the dictatorship, the dictatorship into the socialist society. This brings the reader only to the doorstep. It is a programme for action from today until the beginning of the socialist revolution. "145
Thus the programme reflected the necessary turn of the FI towards mass work. This turn was based on the perspective of impending revolutionary upheaval with the FI coming to the head of the masses during the war and the programme becoming the guide to millions. As we have shown this perspective did not materialise, and its failure to do so clearly has programmatic implications. It required of Trotskyists that they test and correct their programme in the light of experience.
In his discussion of the Transitional Programme with the SWP, Trotsky had insisted that the programme was directed towards expected upheaval. He, more than anyone, realised that if this perspective was not realised, a review of the programme would be necessary:
"You can raise the objection that we cannot predict the rhythm and tempo of the development, and that possibly the bourgeoisie will find a political respite. That is not excluded-but then we will be obliged to realise a strategic retreat. But in the present situation we must be oriented for a strategic offensive, not a retreat."'46 Trotsky's perspective, unlike that of the post-war FI, had an alternate character.
The task of re-elaborating the programme has to start from a recognition that, in the light of world developments since 1945, new lessons and experiences of the class struggle need to be analysed and understood before a new programmatic summation can be made. This is all the more necessary since, unlike the FI in 1938, we do not have an unbroken series of correct positions and documents to look back to and build upon. From 1945/46 when the FI reconstituted itself, its documents were only partially correct analyses and programmes for the new world situation. Since the 1951 Congress the documents of all the fragments, of all the sections, have been fatally flawed by centrism, sectarianism and opportunism. Re-elaboration involves a review of the post war period, of the responses to that period by the centrists and a restatement of programme in the light of this analysis. Trotsky used an analogous approach in relation to the period of centrist degeneration of the Comintern:
"The Left Opposition. . . considers necessary a radical restatement of the programme of the Comintern, whose Marxist gold has been rendered completely worthless by centristic alloy."147
The first stage of re-elaboration is to develop clear positions on the key questions that have caused chaos within or been thoroughly revised by the post war degenerated Trotskyist movement:
a) Imperialism- Trotsky's perspective was based on the view that all the imperialist powers would face collapse and catastrophe as a result of a prolonged and unimaginably destructive war. The outcome would be a profound revolutionary situation from which capitalism if it survived would do so at tremendously reduced levels of production and under fascist or bonapartist regimes. This proved a false perspective. US imperialism emerged from the war immensely strengthened-the expansion of its productive capacity, its enormous export of capital led the way to a prolonged boom. Democratic regimes were re-established in the major imperialist powers. Social democracy maintained or regained its hold on the working class of Britain and Germany. Stalinism dominated the French and Italian labour movements. A new relationship of forces, unforeseen and unforeseeable by Trotsky emerged. The long boom, the period of unchallenged US hegemony in the imperialist world, the armed truce with the Stalinist bureaucracy, replacement of the Franco British colonial empires by a system of semi-colonial client states, the emergence of new areas of Balkanisation (the Middle East) all necessitate perspectival and programmatic analysis. Only thus can the period of renewed crisis, class struggle and war, preparations for which have characterised the 1970s and '80s, be understood and acted upon.
b) Stalinism-Trotsky predicted the destruction of Stalinism either by an imperialist victory or as a result of political revolution. Neither eventuality occurred. Indeed a process of Stalinist expansion took place which, occurring through a number of stages, resulted in the establishment of workers' states, degenerate from birth. In these states, rather than in the USSR itself, the most acute political revolutionary crises have occurred-Hungary, East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia. The real nature of the Stalinist expansion and the lessons of the various political revolutionary crises were never understood by the FI's fragments.
Pablo, Mandel, Cannon and Healy all capitulated to various shades of Stalinism at different times, while others, like Cliff and CLR lames turned their backs on the Trotskyist analysis of the USSR. A revolutionary understanding of Stalinism, its expansion, the dynamics of its crises and of the strategy of political revolution will be integral elements within a re-elaborated programme.
c) Permanent Revolution-The Transitional Programme was extremely condensed in its tactical conclusions for the struggle in the colonial and semi-colonial countries, although it was supplemented by Trotsky's writings on India and Latin America. The extensive capitulations to petit-bourgeois nationalism by the Healyites, the USFI and other tendencies, all highlight the urgent need for a restatement of the tactical conclusions that flow from Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution.
Permanent revolution itself needs to be defined, not as an ever forward moving 'objective process', but as a strategy that has to be fought for by a conscious revolutionary party. Its tactical conclusions (anti imperialist united front, democratic demands etc) need to be understood as being premised on the maintenance of the independence of the working class and the refusal by it to subordinate its struggles or interests to the needs of a 'national democratic' (i.e. bourgeois) stage of the revolution.
d) Work in the unions and reformist parties -In the Transitional Programme Trotsky wrote that the crisis of leadership in the trade unions should be resolved in the following way:
[...]
working class in Germany, and the role of the Comintern and ;social democracy in that defeat. This call drew sharp distinctions between all those who could be won to revolutionary politics through making a clean break with the old Internationals and those who wished to keep their bridges open to the twin camps of reformism (social democracy and Stalinism). In other words Trotsky urged an alliance around something that was a burning question facing the international working class and all those who claimed to represent its revolutionary interests. But in urging this alliance Trotsky always made clear that taking it forward meant developing an international programme that would seal the uncertain elements (OSP, SAP, RSP) to clear revolutionary action:
"Not only are denunciations of the Second and Third Internationals insufficient to advanced workers but the bare admission of the necessity of a new International does not suffice either. It is necessary to say clearly what International we have in mind: the restoration of the miserable Two and a Half International or the unification of the international proletarian vanguard on the basis of a revolutionary programme that actually corresponds to the problems of our epoch. "'48 The fight for this programme meant that the ILO (ICL) kept its programmatic positions intact and promulgated them within the programme commission that was established by the Four (but did not get very far).
The ICL entered the Bloc of Four well aware that its allies were leftward moving centrists. But at no time did Trotsky fail to criticise the politics and leaders of these organisations on every vacillation they made to the right. He also made clear that the Bloc did not mean that the ICL took any political responsibility for the other groups positions. Thus Trotsky could write in March 1934 when his allies were backtracking from their declaration:
"With regard to the OSP, as in all other cases, we draw a distinction between the centrism of the workers, which is only a transition stage for them, and the professional centrism of many leaders, among whom there are also incurables. That we will meet with the majority of the OSP workers on the road to the Fourth International-of this we are quite certain."149
This does not mean that today we regard all forms of centrism alike. In fact it is only by recognising centrism in all its variegated colours and stages that we can distinguish between a left break from centrism, to which we must reach out and win individuals or whole groupings to revolutionary Marxism, from the left vacillations of the inveterate centrists. We say quite openly that the history and record of the leaderships of all the centrist currents, Healy, Lambert, Mandel, Barnes, Moreno etc., have shown them to be incurable centrists, incapable of learning through their mistakes. A revolutionary international will be built with the best elements from within these currents but only through an implacable struggle against their leaders.
For us a necessary and inevitable stage in the struggle to re-found an International is the stage of building fighting propaganda groups. This term is profoundly misunderstood. Organisations such as the WSL insist that it is the equivalent of a sectarian turn away from the working class: the programme exists, the task is to win the "world Trotskyist movement" back to applying it. For the iSt on the other hand, the fighting propaganda group has been turned into a barren sectarian concept. Divorced from class struggle and programmatic re-elaboration, the Robertson cult has turned it into a provocation machine aimed directly at breaking up opposition tendencies.
The essence of a fighting propaganda group is neither of these things. It is a recognition of two real, fundamental and interrelated problems facing genuine Trotskyists. First we do not, and cannot yet have, full programmatic clarity. We have around us chaos, confusion and fragmentation. In these circumstances, genuine Marxists cannot bury their heads. Confusion on programme and theory leads to practical errors.
The fighting propaganda group's raison d'etre is to solve these theoretical problems. Lenin was clear on this during the Bolsheviks' period as a type of fighting propaganda group.
"Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement".
This idea cannot be insisted upon too strongly at a time when the fashionable preaching of opposition goes hand in hand with an infatuation for the narrowest forms of practical activity. . . our party is only in the process of formation, its features are only just becoming defined and it has as yet far from settled accounts with the other trends of revolutionary thought that threaten to divert the movement from the correct path. . . Under these circumstances what at first sight appears to be an "unimportant" error may lead to most deplorable consequences and only short sighted people can consider factional disputes and a straight differentiation between shades of opinion inopportune or superfluous."150
The confusion in the post-war FI was even greater than that in the RSDLP in 1902. It is vital that our first task is to understand and overcome this confusion. But while it is our first task, it is not our only task. The second fundamental problem facing post-war Trotskyism was its continuing isolation from the working class. This was related to its programmatic weakness. The fighting propaganda group, therefore, does not turn its back on practical work.
It attempts to focus its programmatic work towards the fundamental needs, interests and concerns of the working class. This is its only method of avoiding sectarianism. However, our size and implantation, and, we would contend, the size and implantation of most ostensibly Trotskyist groups, mean that a direct orientation to mass work is severely limited, not by choice, but by the conditions we find ourselves in. Thus our work has to be of an exemplary communist nature. Where circumstances allow-and we search such circumstances out actively-we fight for our communist politics inside the working class. We utilise tactical compromises, (e.g. the united front) to win support for revolutionary strategy and tactics and to win a hearing for our propaganda.
The question of whether a group is a propaganda group is not, in the first place, a question of numbers. It is rather a question of the stage of development of the Marxist nucleus and the working class movement. Thus an organisation of thousands can be a propaganda society a grouping of a few hundreds, a party. The reduced numbers in the underground circles of the Bolsheviks in 1914-17 represented the nuclei of a vanguard party that had led the workers in revolutionary mass struggles (in 1905 and 1912-14). It was consequently able to become a mass party within months of the restoration of legality.
Propaganda circles represent the first stage, the embryo stage of party building. In situations of illegality and repression this work would be heavily dominated by "discussion type activity" 151 It is the period of the development of programme and the training of cadres.
Marxists however, are characterised by the striving to unite theory and practice, to enrich each with the other. Therefore they seek always to find every possible avenue to the working class in struggle. The stages of growth of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) and its Bolshevik wing have rich lessons for communists at all stages of party building. As the RSDLP passed from the period of propaganda circles to that of creating the framework of an illegal party, Lenin had cause to attack sharply those who wished to utilise this vital transition to dissolve or liquidate the programmatic gains and dilute the training of cadres (the Economists and the Mensheviks).
These stages and the transition between them are not however historical curiosities or unrepeatable events. The defeat or degeneration of parties and internationals can and do represent these problems.
Trotsky himself passed from circle-propagandist to clandestine party leader, to mass agitator, to leader of a mass party and International in the first twenty years of his political life.
In Trotsky's last exile he was again obliged to turn to the task of leading what were in effect propaganda groups and indeed to founding an International - most of whose sections were still propaganda groups. From 1929 to 1933 the International Left Opposition considered itself an expelled faction of the Comintern. It therefore devoted the overwhelming bulk of its activity to propaganda against the programmatic degeneration of the Comintern (against Socialism in One Country) and against the disastrous "Third Period" tactics. After the German catastrophe, the International Communist League was formed to openly address the workers aroused to struggle by the Fascist menace.
Trotsky had to purge the ICL's ranks of the sectarian traits which had developed in the imposed isolation and propagandism of the "Third Period." Trotsky therefore stressed the need to turn to the masses, to involve the small ICL nuclei in the mass organisations of the class - the trade unions and between 1934 and 1936 the Socialist Parties, where these were destabilized by the political and economic crisis. Yet Trotsky realised that the ICL sections remained propaganda groups, but ones that sought to orient to the class struggle. At the time of the French Turn he stressed that the French section was not a party, but only the embryo of one -i.e. its leadership was the first layer of cadre. It had yet to win a leading role within the proletarian vanguard.
Trotsky more than once characterised the ICL after 1933 as "instruments for the creation of revolutionary parties". 152 We can put this another way, namely, propaganda groups seeking to transcend their existence as propaganda groups. At no time did Trotsky abandon this characterisation, although given the favourable position of the SWP(US) in the American labour movement and the inevitability of war, Trotsky emphasised the great prospects enjoyed by the FI after 1938 for becoming a mass party through the convulsions brought on by the war.
The fighting propaganda group is thus a dialectical concept. It puts programme first not merely in theory, but in its practical struggle within the working class, albeit forced to do so on a small scale. This way we seek to win and train future cadres for the movement real leaders who understand and can apply communist politics. A return to this stage of work has been imposed upon us by the post-war collapse of Trotskyism. It cannot be wished away or jumped over. Faced with the collapse of the Comintern in the 1930s, Trotsky understood the importance of such a stage in the development of .new revolutionary parties: "The real initiators of the FI begin with Marxist quality and turn it afterwards into mass quantity. The small but well-hardened and sharply ground axe splits, hews and shapes heavy beams. We should begin with an axe of steel. Even here the means of production are decisive." 153
However we reject absolutely any attempt to justify abstract propagandism. We do not advocate study circles divorced from the class struggle. Our programme is for the action of millions, not for saving our souls. We focus our propaganda on the key issues of the international and national class struggle. We take our place in the mass organisations of the working class, we orient to every major struggle - strikes, campaigns around democratic rights, the struggle of the unemployed, democratic reform in the unions, or the mass reformist parties.
We reject with contempt any attempt to turn Marxism into a sterile dogma justifying separation from or indifference to the struggles of the working class or other progressive forces. The neo-Bordigism of such groups as the iSt is absolutely foreign to us.
Nevertheless no small groupings in the present conditions can jump over the stage of focused propaganda. Those that attempt to do so, to pretend to be a party, to involve their members in constant shallow agitation, to engage in "mass" recruitment simply dig their own grave. The results are a leadership with primitive politics which develop sectarian and eventually cult-like features; a membership with no education unable to check or criticise the leadership. The "party" or league will eventually develop a rapid turnover of membership.
We stand by Trotsky's posing of the question in a similar stage:
"Our strength at the given stage lies in a correct appreciation, in a Marxian conception, in a correct revolutionary prognosis. These qualities we must present first of all to the proletarian vanguard. We act in the first place as propagandists. We are too weak to attempt to give answers to all questions, to intervene in all the specific conflicts, to formulate everywhere and in all places the slogans and replies of the left opposition. The chase after such a universality, with our weaknesses and the inexperience of many comrades, will often lead to too hasty conclusions, to imprudent slogans, to wrong solutions. By false steps in particulars we will be the ones to compromise ourselves by preventing the workers from appreciating the fundamental qualities of the Left Opposition. I do not want in any way to say by this that we must stand aside from the real struggle of the working class. Nothing of the sort. The advanced workers can test the revolutionary advantage of the Left Opposition only by living experiences, but one must learn to select the most vital, the most burning, and the most principled questions and on these question engage in combat without dispersing oneself in trifles and details." 154
The present world situation makes the building of an International and in the first place an international tendency, an urgent task. The 1980s are witnessing profound crises that indicate nothing less than a disruption of the world order achieved by imperialism after the Second World War. The renewed period of cold war by the USA against the USSR, the turmoil and wars in the Middle East, the attack on Argentina by Britain, revolutionary upheavals in Asia and Latin America all reveal this.
These events demonstrate that Lenin's characterisation of the epoch as one of wars and revolutions is becoming a generalised feature of the coming period. These events find their reflection also in the degenerate workers' states. The upheavals in Poland show that the new period will see challenges to the stranglehold of Stalinist bureaucratic rule in these states. The job of revolutionary Trotskyists is to lead the revolutionary upheavals that occur to success - to the conquest of power by the working class. This can only be achieved by building revolutionary parties and an International firmly united around an international revolutionary programme. Such a programme will, in the sharp test of practice, win workers from Stalinism and social 'democracy and centrism only if it is re-elaborated for the new period.
The destruction of the FI after the war and its fragmentation and disorientation, make the job of building an International a more difficult one. But we are not fatalists. The class struggle will act as a constant spur to new layers of the proletariat, both within and outside of the existing movement that claims to be Trotskyist. It will propel these forces into a search for revolutionary answers. The task of the hour is to develop these answers. All talk of leading the masses without specifying exactly what programme they are to be led on is to lay the basis for further confusion and defeats.
We recognise that the development of a communist programme is an international task. A grouping isolated in one country will invariably succumb to national pressures - the SWP(GB) are a classic example of that. The Irish Workers Group and Workers Power have jointly attempted to begin these programmatic tasks.
Together we work as fraternal organisations. The aim of our two groups is ultimately to achieve a degree of programmatic agreement sufficient to facilitate the establishment of a genuine democratic centralist international tendency.
This in turn needs to be done through international discussion with other tendencies and groupings. We wish to seek out other groups who agree with our method and tasks. We wish to establish fraternal relations with other groups so that the work can be carried forward. We invite groups and individuals who agree with the positions and propositions in this document to enter into programmatic discussion with us, with the aim of jointly pursuing these programmatic tasks. It is precisely through the successful completion of these tasks that an international tendency based on a common method and programme and on democratic centralism, will be forged.
Within the disintegrating fragments of the Fourth International political disagreements have either been "overcome" by bureaucratic dictat or federalism. Both traditions represent a travesty of the traditions of democratic centralism pioneered by the Bolsheviks, the Comintern and the Fourth International.
In the process of forging an international tendency it is obvious that fully fledged democratic centralism will not arise simply though formal agreement on basic position documents or through joint work alone.
Democratic centralism itself will develop as part of the process of establishing operative agreement only all key programmatic, strategic and tactical questions. It will be preceded by a period of collaboration, of fraternal relations.
The construction of a democratic centralist international tendency will at first entail the establishment of a series of international conferences representing nationally elected leaderships. To the extent that binding agreement on programme and operative questions of principle can be reached an authoritative international leadership will be forged out of the national sections.
It will then be possible, finally, to elect an international leadership, invested with executive political power over the decisions of the national sections. By establishing democratic centralism in this manner real debate and decisions over the national tactics of constituent organisations can take place. Obviously an international leadership would take the opinions of a national section into serious consideration. It may even allow tactical experiments where minor differences of orientation or emphasis exist. However the international leadership would carefully oversee national work, check it against international developments, and ensure that it was carried out in a strictly principled communist fashion.
This is not "bureaucratic interference" or mere "collaboration". It is the common discipline that is built as a result of programmatic agreement.
The majority of subjectively revolutionary militants who we as a communist tendency can hope to relate to, remain within the centrist groups who claim to be Trotskyist. While we have no illusions in the leaderships of these tendencies, the international class struggle will continue to throw these organisations into crisis, leading to splits.
An international communist tendency would aim to win the best cadres from these groupings through intransigent criticism, programmatic debate and where possible common action against the class enemy. We do not hide, however from the fact that all of the FI's fragments are caricatures of Trotskyism.
This testifies to the fact that the Fourth International no longer exists as a revolutionary international. It is necessary to build a new world party of Socialist Revolution.
Whether that new International will be able to take up the banner of the Fourth International once again is not yet decided. It has not yet been proven whether the various fragments will travel along the reformist road of the LSSP. It may be that the hammer blows of the class struggle and the criticisms of an international communist tendency will break up the centrist amalgams and allow for a principled regroupment under the banner of a programmatically and organisationally rebuilt Fourth International.
It is possible that the so-called Trotskyists will openly abandon even formal adherence to the Fourth International and become qualitatively indistinguishable from social democracy or Stalinism - as the SWP(US) appears intent on doing. Should this happen with the major international fragments, then it may be possible for revolutionaries to , re-appropriate the banner of the Fourth International as their own.
What we can say is none of the existing claimants to the banner of the Fourth International represent the basis for the rebuilding of a revolutionary international. If they succeed in definitely liquidating the banner of the Fourth International into the camp of either social democracy or Stalinism in the full view of significant sections of the international working class then we will not flinch from pronouncing the Fourth International to be dead in number as well as in programme.
At present our perspective and tasks point to one inescapable conclusion - the FI no longer exists as a revolutionary international:
FORW ARD TO THE REFOUNDlNG OF A LENINIST TROTSKYIST INTERNATIONAL!
FOR A NEW WORLD PARTY OF SOCIALIST REVOLUTION!
FOOTNOTES
1. M.Shachtman, Ten Years - History and Principles of the Left Opposition (New York,1974) p.5.
2. L Trotsky, Writings 1935-36 (New York,1977) p.159.
3. This will be referred to hereafter as The Transitional Programme. All references are to L Trotsky, The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (New York, 1977).
4. ibid., p.152.
5. Jane Degras, The Communist International 1919-1943 (London,1971) Vol 1, p.250.
6. ibid, pp. 248-9 7. ibid, p 249 (our emphasis) 8. L Trotsky The Third International After Lenin (New York,1970), p.79.
9. Documents of the Fourth International 1933-1940 (New York,1973), p.161.
10. L Trotsky, The Transitional Programme, op.cit., p.114.
11. L Trotsky, "The Political Backwardness of the American Workers" in ibid., ppI59-160.
12. L Trotsky, "Completing the Programme and Putting it to Work", in ibid, p.1I2
13. L Trotsky, ibid, p.l3!.
14. L Trotsky, Writings 1939-40 (New York, 1973), p.222.
15. J. Cannon, Socialism on Trial (New York,1973), p.52. (Our emphasis).
16. L Trotsky, Writings 1938-39 (New York,1974) p.213.
17. Militant (New York, 15th March 1941).
18. Workers International News (December 1938) 19. Youth for Socialism (February 1941).
20. L Trotsky, The First Five Years of the Communist International (New York, 1972) Vol1.. p: 179.
21. Fourth International (New York, June 1946), p.169.
22. ibid., p. 175.
23. Felix Morrow, "International Report (Minority Report)" in SWP Internal Bulletin Vol III No.8 (1945), p.32.
24. All examples given are quoted from RCP Conference Documents (September 1946), pp. 6-7.
25. ibid., p. l0.
26. Fourth International (New York, June 1948), p.l01.
27. ibid.
28. Fourth International (New York, August 1948), p.181.
29. see M. Pablo, "The Yugoslav Affair", in Fourth International (New York, December 1948) 30. Class, Party and State in the Eastern European Revolution (New York, 1969) p.57.
31. Fourth International (New York, November/December 1951) (original emphasis).
32. M. Pablo, "Where Are We Going?" in International Secretariat Documents 19511954 (New York, 1974) Vol1. p. 7 (original emphasis).
33. See the advice to the Austrian section "not to push forward programmatic and principled questions" (International Information Bulletin, New York, December 1951).
34. Theories abound as to whether Bleibtreu-Favre (or Favre-Bleibtreu - the name has been printed both ways) was one or two people. Further, it seems that Favre is a pen-name of Pierre Lambert. We do not know the truth behind this mystery. Nor do we care - the politics pioneered by Bleibtreu-Favre provided the (incorrect) basis for the Lambert group.
35. Fourth International (New York, October 1949), p.259.
36. "Letter from James. P. Cannon to Daniel Renard", May 29th 1952, in International Committee Documents 1951-54 (New York 1974), Vol1. p.23.
37. "A Letter to Trotskyists Throughout the World" in ibid, Vol 3. p 152.
38. ibid., pp. 138-152, 39. ibid., p. 139.
40. J.Cannon, Speeches to the Party (New York, 1973) p. 89.
41. For a more detailed treatment of this period, see Workers Power 7,39 and 40.
42. Trotskyism versus Revisionism (London 1974-5) Six volumes.
43. ibid., Vo!. 2, pp 72-84.
44. See footnote 34.
45. International Committee Documents 1951-54 (New York, 1974) Vo!. 1. pp.9-20.
46. International Secretariat Documents 1951-54 (New York,1974), Vo!. 1, pp 16-24.
47. See Workers Power & Irish Workers Group The Degenerated Revolution (London,1982), pp.90-93.
48. International Secretariat Documents 1951-54 (New York, 1974) Vo!. 1, p.18.
49. International Committee Documents 1951-54 (New York, 1974) Vo!. 1.,p.16.
50. ibid., p. 16.
51. Fourth International (New York, November/December 1951).
52. From an interview in Militant May 12th-19th 1952, quoted in Documents of the Vern-Ryan Tendency (Communard Publishers) p. 41.
53. ibid., p. 43.
54. From G. Lora, "One Year of the Bolivian Revolution", quoted in ibid., p. 80.
55. G. Lora, Bolivie: de la Naissance du POR A L'Assemblee Populair p.35 (Our translation).
56. The Development and Disintegration of World Stalinism (New York,1970) p.16.
57. ibid., p. 16.
58. ibid., p. 20. 59. ibid., p. 23.
60. Dynamics of World Revolution Today (New York, 1974), p. 30.
61. ibid., p. 37.
62. ibid., p. 38.
63. See also E. Mande1's recent defence of this position in Revolutionary Marxism Today (London 1979) p. 96.
64. Revolutionary Marxism vs Class Collaboration in Sri Lanka (New York, 1975) p.8.
65. P. Frank The Fourth International (London,1979) p.116.
66. Quoted in Trotskyism versus Revisionism (London 1974) Vol 4, p. 235.
67. Intercontinental Press (New York, July 14th 1969), Vol 7, No. 26, p. 270.
68. Intercontinental Press (New York, January 1980) Special Supplement.
69. The USFI's clearest espousal of this theory is to be found in the 1974 "Theses on Building of Revolutionary Parties in Capitalist Europe" in Intercontinental Press (New York, December 23rd 1974) Vol 12, No. 46, p 1822.
70. E. Mandel, Socialist Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (Toronto, 1977) p. 13.
71. ibid., p. 27.
72. "Revolution on the March" in Intercontinental Press (New York, January 1980).
73. Trotskyism versus Revisionism (London, 1974) Vo!. 2, p. 154.
74. International Committee Documents 1951-54 (New York, 1974) Vol. 3, p. 137.
75. Trotskyism versus Revisionism op. cit. Vol. 3 p.22.
76. W. Sinclair, "Under a Stolen Flag", in ibid., p. 5.
77. ibid., Vo14. p. 274.
78. ibid., p. 307.
79. ibid., Vol. 5, p. 72.
80. Towards a History of the Fourth International (New York, 1973) Part 1, p. 17.
81. International Socialist Review (New York, Spring 1958) p. 50.
82. See Workers Power & Irish Workers Group, The Degenerated Revolution (London 1982), pp. 93 - 96.
83. Quoted in T. Polan The SLL - An Autopsy (Trotskyist Tendency, n.d.), p.16.
84. Trotskyism versus Revisionism op. cit. Vol. 4, p. 302.
85. Quoted in ibid., Vol. 6, p. 64.
86. Polan, op. cit., p. 8.
87. Quoted in Trotskyism versus Revisionism op. cit., V 01. 3, p. 132.
88. "La Verite" was the newspaper of the Lambert grouping.
89. Trotskyism versus Revisionism op. cit. Vol. 6. p. 64. (Our emphasis).
90. ibid., Vol. 5., p. 86.
91. ibid., Vol. 6, p. 54.
92. ibid., Vol. 4, pp. 154-5.
93. J. Lister,Spartacist Truth Kit (London, 1982).
94. L. Trotsky, Writings 1933-34 (New York, 1975), p.233.
95. Marxist Bulletin (New York, n.d.) No. 9, p.5.
96. Quoted in Lister, op.cit., p.12.
97. This question is dealt with at greater length in the final section of this book.
98. Spartacist Britain No. 47.
99. Spartacist Britain No. 1. 100. Workers Vanguard No. 295.
101. FMR, Self Critical Balance Sheet of the NIl (Frankfurt, 1977), 102. The I-CL and the Fourth International (London 1976), p.6.
103. ibid., p. 8.
104. See section on the TlLC for a fuller discussion of this fusion.
105. Documents of the Founding Conference of the OCRFI (Dublin, n.d.) p. 11.
106. G. Lora, History of the Bolivian Labour Movement (Cambridge, 1977) p. 363.
107. ibid., p. 362.
108. G. Lora;Programmatic Basis of the POR (English Translation by the Socialist Labour Group, n.d.) p.57.
109. G. Lora, History of the Bolivian Labour Movement op. cit. p. 368.
110. "Manifesto of Bolivian Front Against the Dictatorship" in Intercontinental Press (New York, December 6th 1971) p. 1078.
111. Declaration of the Fourth Internationalist Tendency (Lima, 1979) (Our translation).
112. Documents of the Founding Conference of the OCRFI op. cit., p. 17.
113. Declaration of the FIT op. cit.
114. Declaration of the FIT on Nicaragua (La Paz, 1979) (Our translation).
115. Pour la Defense et le Soutien du Proletariat Polonais!! (Paris, 1'981) - this was published by European based militants of the FIT. (Our translation).
116. Workers Power No. 17 and Class Struggle No.7.
117. International Correspondence No. 1.
118. Quoted in International Marxist Review (London, Spring 1982), p.54.
119. Draft Theses for the Reorganisation (Reconstruction) of the Fourth International, Thesis 31.
120. For a more detailed critique of the "Forty Theses" see Workers Power No.22.
121. Correspondance Internationale, No. 14 p.l0.
122. ibid., p. 11.
123. Workers Socialist League, The Battle for Trotskyism, (London, 1979)
124. Trotskyism Today No.2 p.1. 125. Trotskyism Today No.3 p.28.
126. Workers Socialist League The Poisoned Well (London), p.3.
121. ibid.
128. Workers Socialist League The Transitional Programme in Today's Class Srtuggle (London, 1919) ~.21 119. G L, Theses on the Crisis of the Fourth International and the tasks of the Bolshevik Leninists (Genoa, 1979).
130. ibid.
13\. ibid.
132. L. Trotsky, Writings on Britain (London 1974) Vol. 3, p. 87.
133. ibi.r, p. 87.
134. Workers Socialist League, The Transitional Programme in Today's Class Struggle op. cit., p.8.
135. L. Trotsky, Writings 1937-38 (New York, 1976), p. 90.
136. Workers Socialist League The Transitional Programme in Today's Class Struggle op. cit., p. 18.
137. TILC International Discussion Bulletin (London, 1980) No.2, p. 16.
138. L. Trotsky, Writings 1930 (New York, 1975), pp. 236-7.
139. L. Trotsky, Writings 1934-35 (New York, 1974) p.278.
140. ibid., p. 274
141. L. Trotsky, Writings 1931-38 (New York, 1976) p 286.
142. ibid., p. 22.
143. K. Marx and F. Engels, "Preface to the German Edition of 1872" in The Communist Manifesto (New York, 1970) p. 12.
144. L. Trotsky, Writings 1933-34 (New York, 1975), p.73.
145. L. Trotsky, "Completing the Programme and Putting it to work" in The Transitional programme p.113.
146. ibid., p.l01.
147. L. Trotsky, Writings 1932-33 (New York, 1972) p.52.
148. L. Trotsky, Writings 1933-34 op. cit., p. 67.
149. ibid., p. 268.
150. V. Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow, 1961) Vol. 5, p. 369.
151. G. Zinoviev, History of the Bolshevik Party (London, 1973) p. 55.
152. For example, see L. Trotsky, Writings (Supplement) 1934-40 (New York, 1979) p. 533: "The ICL cannot act as an independent party of the proletariat, it is only the instrument for the creation of independent parties".
153. L. Trotsky, Writings 1933-34 op. cit., p. 268;
154. L. Trotsky, Writings 1930-31 (New York, 1973), p.297.
Note by the Editor: The following document has been published in 1997 by our predecessor organization – the League for a Revolutionary Communist International (renamed to League for the Fifth International in 2003). It was initially published in the LRCI’s theoretical journal “Trotskyist International” No. 21 (January-June 1997).
The founding members of the RCIT were partly long-time and leading members of this organization before they were bureaucratically expelled in April 2011 – a few weeks after they formed a faction in opposition against the increasing centrist degeneration of the LFI. Immediately after their expulsion these comrades built a new organization and went on to form the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT) together with a number of other comrades. Today the RCIT is present in more than a dozen countries.
* * * * *
Postmodernism is not yet the dominant form of bourgeois thought. But it is, increasingly, the predominant form of critical academic thought. A Marxist critique of postmodernism has to challenge its intellectual core and uncover its material roots. The aims of this article are: to summarise the theory which underpins postmodernism; to offer a Marxist critique of that theory; and to explain the material roots of its plausibility.\n“The last few years have been marked by an inverted millenarianism in which premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by the end of this or that (the end of ideology, art or social class, the ‘crisis’ of Leninism, social democracy or the welfare state etc. etc.); taken together, all of these perhaps constitute what is increasingly called postmodernism.”(Frederick Jameson)1
If there is a late 20th century zeitgeist – a spirit of the age which pervades culture, academic thought and politics – it is to be found in the ideas grouped under the banner of postmodernism. We could add to Jameson’s list the idea of “post-industrial” society, chaos theories in science and, of course, the “end of history”.
Postmodernism is not yet the dominant form of bourgeois thought. But it is, increasingly, the predominant form of critical academic thought. A Marxist critique of postmodernism has to challenge its intellectual core and uncover its material roots. The aims of this article are: to summarise the theory which underpins postmodernism; to offer a Marxist critique of that theory; and to explain the material roots of its plausibility.
In social science, cultural theory, politics and philosophy postmodernism’s enemy number one is Marxism. The old bourgeois liberalism – while it retained its predominance – lost its dynamism and coherence with the onset of the crises of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In the 1970s Marxism – albeit in a variety of academic forms – was the main methodological standpoint adopted by those searching for a coherent critique of modern society.
Today, in the English speaking world, Marxism has been virtually banished from the universities. A whole generation of academics has “converted” to postmodernism. Among students there is little knowledge of Marxism, still less study of it, other than in the form of distorted summaries provided by its opponents.
So in anthropology, sociology, psychology, politics and philosophy postmodernism has almost become the new orthodoxy. That is to say nothing of academic disciplines such as “post-colonial studies” – where the word imperialism is banned – whose very existence is premised on postmodernist methods.
If postmodernism were popular in universities but subject to a sustained challenge in intellectual life outside them, in particular by a vibrant workers’ movement, the task of combating it would be less important. But its theoretical premises align fundamentally with the “common sense” of a whole generation which has seen Stalinism collapse, Labourism commit suicide and popular radicalism fragment into a variety of single issue campaigns.
That is why fighting postmodernist ideas is of prime importance to Marxism.
It cannot be done by wearing a T-shirt bearing the slogan “bollocks to postmodernism”. Nor can it be done by bowing and scraping in front of the gurus of postmodernism, asserting that – at their best – they were really Marxists.
The works of the French post-structuralists – Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard and Baudrillard etc. – are the philosophical foundations of postmodernism.
Alongside them, reaching similar conclusions from different starting points, stand the “neo-sceptics” of modern American philosophy: Quine, Rorty, De Man and Stanley Fish. If this article deals predominantly with the European proponents of postmodernism it is because theirs is the standpoint generated specifically via a critique of Marxism.
Defenders of postmodernism often argue that it is impossible to lump all the postmodern thinkers together; that the weak points of one postmodern theorist were recognised and overcome by another; that there are important debates within postmodernism, and self-critical re-assessments within the works of its major thinkers.
All of this is true. But in the first five minutes of any argument between a Marxist and a postmodernist a set of common themes will emerge. These are:
• there is no objective truth to be comprehended by scientific thought;
• there is no pre-given human subject; the human individual is only a complex of interrelated outside influences and determinants;
• language cannot represent reality; therefore, the concept of ideology, where false ideas mask reality, is meaningless;
• the idea of historical progression and necessity is meaningless: social formations in history, sociology and anthropology must be “mapped” – not judged or categorised;
• all social movements or societies based on the possibility of scientific knowledge and objective truth rely on “grand narratives” rather than inner logic to legitimise them; these “meta-narratives” inevitably lead to the legitimising of oppression;
• the class struggle and socialism are precise examples of such meta-narratives; in any case they have become outmoded by developments in the modern world;
• the only form of resistance to oppression that does not lead to another form of oppression is limited, local, piecemeal resistance; the surest form of resistance is to change ourselves, aspiring ultimately to turn our own lives into a “work of art”.
Thus, philosophical postmodernism overtly rejects more than three hundred years of progressive thinking associated with the consistent rationalism of the 18th century Enlightenment. The attempt to think scientifically about society as well as nature – and all systematic thought based on this endeavour – is rejected by postmodernism as part of the “Enlightenment project”, a project which Francois Lyotard argues:
“ . . . legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse – the dialectics of the Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject or the creation of wealth.”2
At the very heart of postmodernist theory lies the rejection of human thought’s ability to comprehend objective truth. While they have expressed it in different ways, and with different degrees of confidence, the chief theorists of postmodernism all stand by a variant of philosophical scepticism: we cannot know anything for certain; even provisional theories about the world presuppose that there is an objective truth to be grasped. Jean Baudrillard quotes approvingly the words of the 19th century philosopher Frederick Nietzsche:
“Down with all hypotheses that have allowed the belief in a true world.”3
This view is, in turn, rooted in postmodernism’s rejection of the ability of language to represent reality.
The postmodernists found their way to this idea via a critique of the “structuralism” of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Writing in the early 20th century Saussure sought to understand the structure of language by uncovering the relationship between a word and the idea it signifies (the signifier and the signified).
Saussure set aside – for the purpose of study – the relationship between the concept and the thing being conceptualised. He was concerned with the relative autonomy of the structure of language from the world it discussed.
Out of this specific line of investigation a whole methodology – “structuralism” – was evolved after World War Two. It was applied not just to the study of language but to society and culture in general, particularly in the social sciences.
A generation of radical intellectuals in the 1950s and 1960s became preoccupied with the problems of generalising structural linguistics into a “science of signs” – semiotics. Structuralism also found a voice in the writings of the most influential academic Marxist of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Louis Althusser. Meanwhile structural linguistics itself experienced a “crisis” during which many of its leading proponents began to reject any correlation between the sign and the real object being signified.
According to Foucault scholars, McHoul and Grace:
“In essence, theories of the relation between language and the ‘real’ were abandoned in favour of theories relating linguistic element to linguistic element. Semiotics and structuralism, that is, moved towards the signifier side of things. Discourse, then, took on the guise of a relatively autonomous, yet quite material, sphere in its own right. This position became known as the ‘materiality of then signifier’.”4
Out of the crisis of structural linguistics “post-structuralism” was born and it no longer confined its pronouncements to the sphere of linguistics.
Its basic tenet – that signs are more real than the things they represent – was codified into a world view, an anti-philosophy. The most radical proponents of this have been Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard.
For Derrida all forms of language and communication are summed up in the word “text”. And, in Derrida’s famous phrase, there is “nothing outside the text”.5 For Derrida, however, the lack of correspondence between language and reality does not absolve us from subjecting culture to criticism. This gives rise to one of postmodernism’s most important ideas: deconstruction.
All “texts”, according to Derrida, are made up of metaphors and other linguistic devices which conceal the real meaning, often concealing the flaw in the logical structure. The task of a critical thinker is to “deconstruct” the text, reveal its inner meaning – or lack of meaning – through a “close reading”. Like a psychiatrist who looks for chance remarks and physical twitches in the patient to uncover what is really the cause of mental illness, Derrida sees the “marginal text” as the best starting point for a critique of a set of ideas.
Derrida’s work takes the form of literary commentaries on various aspects of Western culture. He does not posit an absolute truth which the allegedly dishonest forms of language cover up: like all postmodernists he rejects the concept of ideology.
Since the role of the critic is not to analyse but to commentate, literary ramblings are just as valid as rigorous analytical presentations. The US writer Paul De Man, a follower of Derrida, wrote:
“Literature turns out to be the main topic of philosophy and the model of the kind of truth to which it aspires”6
Jean Baudrillard poses the problem of the relationship of language to the real world in a different and more culturally specific way. He claims that mass communications, and the popular culture they have given birth to, make a nonsense of the question “does language reflect the real world?”.
Traditional language, according to Baudrillard, tried to “represent” the real world, giving rise to the philosophical “problem of representation” (i.e. is the representation accurate?). The structure of knowledge in the late 20th century means that, for Baudrillard representation has given way to “simulation”. Simulation “bears no relation to reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum”.7
Instead of reality we have “hyper-reality” – where signs are more real than the things they signify. As a result, Baudrillard too rejects the concept of ideology:
“Ideology corresponds to a betrayal of reality by signs; simulation corresponds to a short-circuit of reality and its reduplication by signs.”8
Television, for example, is more real than the world it represents. This outlook allowed Baudrillard infamously to predict, in January 1991, that the Gulf War could not happen. After it was over he wrote a book entitled The Gulf War Did Not Take Place.9
Within postmodernism itself there is controversy over what the inability of language to reflect truth means.
An obvious problem raised by Baudrillard’s arguments for rejecting rationality is its historically specific and therefore limited premise. Whereas Derrida makes a general statement about knowledge, Baudrillard makes a historically specific one: for him it is the age of mass communications which has made truth impossible.
The clearest line is drawn, however, between Foucault and Derrida. Whereas Derrida denies that there is a knowable world beyond the text, Foucault sees – in the hidden meanings uncovered by deconstruction – a reflection of the power relationships in human society.
Postmodernists argue that any meta-discourse or meta-narrative, will legitimise political power and oppression. Enlightenment rationality gave rise to a number of such meta-discourses: liberalism, Marxism, fascism, Hegelian philosophy, Social Darwinism etc. The task, they say, is to subject rationality itself to a critique so that such abuses of social power cannot recur.
Michel Foucault, declared, “I am simply a Nietzschean”.10 Postmodernism’s views on the problem of “power” – social oppression and repression – also owe much to Nietzsche. Nietzsche saw the class struggle as only one expression of a more fundamental struggle in human society – what he called the “will to power”. Foucault refuses to make a value judgement between repression and the “power” exerted by social movements which resist it.
But Foucault refuses to order those power relationships politically, socially or morally. He refuses to write “history” preferring “genealogy” i.e. a temporal progression which does not suggest progress, lawfulness or necessity.
His three volume History of Sexuality provides a commentary on the historically changing and determined nature of this fundamental facet of human culture. But – though its subject matter is the rise of capitalism and its effects on the pre-capitalist family – he refuses to structure his investigations around that historical fact.
Both Foucault and Derrida have their quasi-Marxist followers. Derrida has claimed to see value in Marxist socialism as a form of resistance once it is shorn of its “meta-narrative” and reduced to a utopian good idea.11
Foucault – though avowedly anti-Marxist – is seen by many as the more “materialist”, because of his desire to explain unequal power structures as underpinning the hidden meaning of language, and because his subject matter has been the historically changing form social oppression.
But the arguments between the postmodernists only serve to underline the key points of agreement, all of which form the starting point for their critique of Marxism. Fundamentally, all of them reject the possibility of knowing the objective world.
When considering the social world, all reject historicism. All see modern philosophical thought – from the Enlightenment of the 1760s to Marxism and beyond – as rooted in an unjustifiable rationalism. They reject the specific value of philosophical thought over literature and commentary.
Finally, all reject the concept of the human subject. Western philosophy has been rooted in the concept of the individual human being (the subject) comprehending the outside world (the object) through thinking. According to Foucault:
“The individual is not a pre-given entity which is seized on by the exercise of power. The individual, with his identity and characteristics, is the product of a relation of power exercised over bodies, multiplicities, movements, desires, forces.”12
While much of Foucault’s work focuses on the creation of human subjectivity by society, postmodernism’s attack on the subject has important implications for the theory of knowledge. We cannot know objective truth: not only because language cannot depict reality but also because there is no “independent” human thinker to comprehend the truth.
The Marxist critique of postmodernism has to start with the epistemological questions – i.e. questions about knowledge and how we know what we know.
Marxists defend science, rationality, the idea of an objective, knowable world and human subjectivity – but we do so critically. We defend them from the standpoint of dialectical materialism.
Dialectical materialism sees all scientific thought as a “series of successive approximations to the truth” (Lenin); it sees the subject/object model of knowledge as one sided because it presupposes an absolute opposition between the thinking mind and “matter”.
In addition it is only revolutionary Marxism which can provide a coherent critique of “meta-narratives” where they serve as justification for oppression, including where – as in the case of Stalinism – that “meta-narrative” is a degeneration originating in the Marxist movement itself.
Let us start with the arguments for and against an objective reality, whose laws of motion are real and discoverable.
Millions of people, every day, board passenger jets. They are prepared to believe that a machine based on the laws of aerodynamics can defy gravity. They believe, provisionally, that science has discovered a real objective law; they trust science’s prediction that the jet will fly. Aeroplanes work because their design is based on accurately observed and understood laws of nature.13
At a deeper level, however, some of the laws of physics on which aerodynamics is based – essentially the physics discovered by the scientists of the much maligned “Enlightenment” – are called into question by modern scientific discoveries. Even the two great advances of 20th century physical science (the general theory of relativity and the theory of quantum mechanics) conflict with each other.
Because of this the most consistent scientific thinkers are forced to view their theories as provisional summaries of the truth; approximations formed in the human mind to the actual laws of the objective world.
Scientific method
Does the provisional and approximate nature of scientific theory mean that, ultimately, there is no knowable objective world?
The most influential modern argument in favour of this comes not from European post-structuralism but from North American “neo-pragmatist” philosophy. W.V.Quine, in his essay “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”14 argued that there are as many ways of describing an observed event as there are sentences held to be true at a given time.
For Quine even non-theoretical “observation sentences” – such as “the jumbo jet is flying” – are already value-laden, bound up in a pre-existing belief system (“It will fly”). For Quine, therefore, scientific statements and mystical statements have equal validity: they are all hypotheses. We may choose one set of statements to represent truth, says Quine, but in fact we are only choosing one set of metaphors for the world, one “ontological scheme”.15
However, when Quine wants to cross the Atlantic he gets on a jumbo jet.
Faced with the choice of two sentences – “the jet will fly” and “I could fly by flapping my arms” – Quine chooses to act as if the second statement were false.
In doing so, he is not just exhibiting an urge to self preservation. Nor is he simply choosing an “ontological scheme”. He is making exactly the same link between scientifically formulated laws and human action that forms the basis of so called Enlightenment rationalism.
It could easily be proved that Quine cannot fly by dropping him from a tall building. It can be proved that jumbo jets will fly by observing them. Ultimately the proof of scientific hypotheses lies in practice.
The physicist Stephen Hawking describes the way Einstein’s general theory of relativity was reinforced – as against classical Newtonian physics – by observing small movements in the path of the planet Mercury:
“The fact that Einstein’s predictions matched what was seen, while Newton’s did not, was one of the crucial confirmations of the new theory. However we still use Newton’s theory for all practical purposes because the difference between its predictions and those of general relativity is very small in situations that we normally deal with.”16
Marxism shares with all consistent scientific method and rationalism the belief in the concreteness of truth, and the provisional hypothetical nature of scientific theory. But the revelation – through scientific research – that one theory is inadequate; its replacement by another; even a period of generalised scientific uncertainty such as our own; all of this does not add up to a case for rejecting the possibility of scientific truth.
In the late 20th century science is undergoing a massive historical transformation, in which many of the certainties and models of reality are being shaken up. The goal of the absolute majority of scientists is to re-order scientific thought at the end of this process. Hawking, for example, sees the possibility of current partial and conflicting theories giving rise to a “complete unified theory that will describe everything in the universe”.17
A small minority of scientists have been influenced by postmodernism. But calls for a “postmodern science” based on chaos theory have received little support, even from those like Hawking who believe that theory “exists only in our minds and does not have any other reality”18.
The postmodernist call for a “re-enchantment of nature”19 has produced little resonance precisely because science is a search for truth in the physical world.
Richard Appignanesi, a recent populariser of postmodernism, points out ruefully:
“The emerging theories of chaos and complexity completely demolish the notion of control and certainty in science . . . Both theories promise a postmodern revolution in science based on notions of holism, interconnection and order out of chaos . . . While both chaos and complexity have forced us to ask sensible questions and to stop making naive assumptions, both are presented by their champions as new theories of everything.”20
Of course, under capitalist society scientific research is subject to many restraints. The scientific community is often, and increasingly, a handmaiden of business. The fracturing of scientific research into a series of overlapping but uncoordinated “disciplines” can hinder the search for truth.21
But while science is hampered by the social relations of capitalism under which is it practised, and while many of the new disciplines of science have contributed buzzwords to the postmodern lexicon (chaos, fractals, Heisenbergian uncertainty etc.), not one of these scientific disciplines proceeds in practice from an absolute scepticism or relativism.
That is because scientific thought is not qualitatively different from the common, everyday thoughts of the air traveller checking in his/her luggage at the airport: it proceeds from practice and is verified through practice – that is to say through our senses.
Materialist dialectics counterposes to all scepticism the historical fact that humanity has conquered nature through knowing it more accurately. The progress of the productive forces – from stone tools to the internet – has occurred because of the interaction between human thought, consciousness, and the objective world.
If the objective world were unknowable through our senses then this progression could not have taken place.
Language and reality
Postmodernism has adopted and reinforced the general philosophical relativism outlined above in its theory of language. Richard Rorty, the American postmodernist writes:
“To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations. Truth cannot be out there – cannot exist independently of the human mind – because sentences cannot so exist.”22
Postmodernist thinkers fall into two camps on the question of language:
• language cannot represent reality;
• language can no longer represent reality.
For both standpoints the problem of knowledge is shifted from sensation to consciousness. Whether or not we can see a true picture of the objective world we cannot think it – because the language in which we think cannot accurately comprehend that world.
Language is demonstrably a product of human history. Humankind’s interaction with nature, through practice, has produced successive linguistic structures. In Greenland there are more than twenty different words for snow; in the England of Sir Francis Drake there were over forty different words for a sailing ship.
For Marxists this history of language is a confirmation of the dialectical materialist assertion that being determines consciousness. A visit to any museum of antiquity shows that the rising level of human mastery over nature created “languages” that described and comprehended the world with increasing accuracy: from hieroglyphics and crude human representations to the alphabet and unsurpassed sculptural realism.
Structural linguistics originated in an attempt to understand the inner laws of humanity’s successive ways of thinking expressed through language.
Its original focus was historic languages and the living languages of surviving pre-capitalist (often pre-class) civilisations. It attempted to look beneath conscious speech to the unconscious infrastructure of language. It searched for an inner structure or system in languages with the aim of discovering general laws of language itself. It focused not on historical change, but abstracted from the changes within language.
Many of structuralism’s insights were useful, both to the study of “primitive” cultures and also the development of language in children. But generalised into a method of analysing all human society, most importantly in the work of the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, structuralism became a mixture of mechanical materialism and idealism.
Its mechanical materialism lies in its assertion that human subjectivity and action played no part in the “structure” of society. We are simply the products of our circumstances. The analysis of a given social structure depends on taking a “snapshot” of society and elaborating its general rules. The human subject is not free to think outside the language rules of the society in which they live. Because of this structuralism is unable to understand – and often uninterested in – the process of historical development.
At the same time, precisely because of its emphasis on language as the determining factor in consciousness (as opposed to practice), structuralism is a form of idealism.
It was out of the collapse of structuralism – its failure to hold up as a general theory of social reality – that post-structuralism and postmodernism were born.
Derrida and Foucault both began working within a structuralist framework. They shared with structuralism the idea that the human subject (what Levi Strauss called the “spoilt brat of philosophy”) was merely the product of its surroundings and therefore, not valid as a concept. They also shared with Levi-Strauss his opposition to the idea of historical progress. His anthropology had rejected, as “Euro-centric”, the idea that modern capitalist society represented a form of progress over the pre-class societies he studied.
Structuralism had also gone a long way to undermining the possibility of language reflecting truth. It “bracketed” (i.e. temporarily ignored) the thing, in order study the sign representing the thing. Thus it paved the way for its own self-destruction.
Derrida led structuralism’s movement to the “signifier side of things” by asserting that since the relationship between word and concept were already arbitrary, language was nothing more than a “free-floating collection of signifiers”.
At a theoretical level the most fundamental objection to this retreat to linguistic relativism is that it contains its own refutation. If language has no reference to the material world, if there can be no truth, then there can also be no coherent theory. The “theory” that language cannot reflect reality is – by its own criteria – invalid, because there can be no theory.
This may seem like a cheap shot at postmodernism. But its validity has been recognised by the postmodernists themselves.
Alongside the retreat to linguistic relativism – the idea that truth, in Nietzsche’s words, is just a “mobile army of metaphors” – goes a retreat away from attempts to theorise. In Derrida’s work the attempt to theorise is replaced by a fragmentary series of “non-judgmental” commentaries.
This is also the method of Jean Baudrillard, but taken to extremes.
Baudrillard began as loosely committed Marxist in the early 1960s but developed a new, basically idealist explanation of mass production and consumption, in which the categories of Marxist economics are torn away and applied to semiology.
For Baudrillard commodities do not simply have use value and exchange value (as in the scheme outlined in Marx’s Capital23), they are also “signifiers” in a language system.
And their signifying role is more important than either their use value or exchange value. Ultimately Baudrillard concluded that both use value and exchange value were merely “alibis” for the sign. The whole “system of signs” which Marxism calls ideology, the whole culture of mass consumption, advertising etc. was not the result of capitalist production but its prime cause.
As we have indicated, there is a logical contradiction between the generalised relativism of Foucault and Derrida and the historically specific relativism of Baudrillard. But what they share is a retreat from theory, justified by a retreat from linguistic meaning.
Marxists object to this: not because we believe that language reflects reality in a constantly “true” and unmediated way, but because the linguistic “problem of representation” can only be solved historically.
If there is “only” language, and it bears no relationship to objective reality – in Derrida’s version of post-structuralism – then why does language change? If “discourse”, as Foucault understands it, is not merely language but the means whereby power systems come into being and legitimise themselves, then what is the impulse which drives one power structure to be replaced by another? It cannot be the subjective action of human individuals since the human subject is hopelessly trapped in the “determined” language and the predominant discourse of its time.
There is no convincing answer to these questions in the work of Foucault and Derrida. The only consistent answer can be found in Marxism.
Dialectical materialism rejects the distinction between “knowing” and “doing”. The “truth claims” and “truth sentences”, derided by postmodernists on both linguistic and epistemological grounds, are always, in the first place, the product of human action not of thinking divorced from action. For Marxists knowledge is transforming action.
And this is not just a “theory”, or rival speculation. It is provable with reference to every historical advance in knowledge. Every advance in knowledge is at the same time an advance in technique.
Until very recently human knowledge, of necessity, trailed behind technique. Hunting leads to language, the stone tool to drawing – not the other way round.
The answer to all scepticism – whether of the Quine, Rorty, Foucault or Derrida types – was given by Marx as early as 1845 in the Theses on Feuerbach:
“The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. In practice man must prove the truth, i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.”24
Ideology
As we have seen, both French post-structuralism and American philosophical scepticism reject the possibility of ideology.
Ideology – broadly speaking – means a set of ideas arising from social conditions which serve to obscure the truth about society, legitimising a specific form of class society as the only “natural” or inevitable social formation.
Marxism did not invent the concept: it was originated by the mechanical materialism of the Enlightenment and the French revolution, and taken up by Marx’s idealist precursor, Hegel. Even in Marxism there has been intense debate about the nature and role of ideology.25
Nevertheless, it remains a crucial concept for explaining the role of language and logic in comprehending reality; for explaining why humankind – despite being engaged constantly in “practice” – comes up with false ideas.
In the earliest exposition of the concept, The German Ideology26, Marx and Engels start from the fact that, before there is thinking there is being: before mind there is matter. Matter existed for millennia before it produced a thinking animal. The human brain, where thinking takes place, is also matter. Human consciousness was produced, historically, by our interaction with the environment – more specifically our attempts to change it.
This biological fact is at the same time a social fact: humans are social animals. In order to interact successfully with our environment we must do so in societies. Our social existence is crucial in producing our consciousness.
As soon as human beings raised their minds to questions of explaining the world around them they formed sets of ideas which were conditioned by their social and physical environment: seaboard societies worshipped sea gods.
But why did they worship gods at all?
The religious impulse appeared to the early materialists as an absence of reason: ideology was humanity’s substitute for not being able to know the natural world and thus control it. Marx and Engels went beyond this rationalist view of ideology by showing how false ideas, as well as true ones, have real material roots:
“We set out from real, active men and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life process.”
But:
“If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside down as in a camera obscura [a pinhole camera], this phenomenon arises just as much as from their historical life process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life process.”
The act of subordinating nature to human control did not just push back the boundaries of ideology. It was done through society, and because all society until now has been systematically unequal – class based – social development created and reinforced ideology.
Ideology is formed not just by physical conditions but by social conditions. Specifically the most fundamental social conditions – the way we produce wealth, what Marx called the economic “structure” or base – give rise to a whole series of social institutions and modes of behaviour which in turn condition human thought:
“The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life processes in general.”27
The many-layered mediating process between economic production and social thought means that ideology can be varied within a given society. There can be ideologies of resistance as well as of reaction. “The blacks are taking our jobs and destroying our national culture” is one example of ideology. So is the idea that fascist councillor Derek Beacon came to power in London’s Isle of Dogs by exploiting the magical power of a “lay-line” which ran beneath his house.
For the same reason that we have jumbo jets that fly we can have ideas that challenge ideology. Science, applied to the physical world, produces hypotheses provable by interaction with that world. Social practice can equip us with the vision to see beneath the external appearances thrown up by social structures.
Anybody wanting to free humanity from the necessity of having to endure exploitation at work, to starve and suffer oppression has to identify the obstacles that stand in the way of freedom. Collective struggle has the power to blow away ideology – maybe only partially but at least in the most crucial areas – and allow those resisting oppression to come to a scientific view of their predicament.
It is a fact that the collective class struggle is the greatest counterweight to crude, overt and crippling racism of the kind quoted above. The active struggle can prove that fascists like Derek Beackon have no power – magical or otherwise – to resist a mass, political and physical working class response.
Ultimately the working class will not dispel capitalist ideology- in all its forms – without uprooting capitalism itself. But the most collectively active section of the working class is able to see through the decisive parts of that ideology, especially when its spontaneous insights are combined with, and codified into, a scientific counter-argument for socialism.
Contrast all this with the views of post-structuralism and neo-scepticism.
Neither Michel Foucault nor Stanley Fish deny that our beliefs are conditioned by our surroundings. Both agree that we cannot escape such conditioning. According to Fish:
“That is the one thing a historically conditioned consciousness cannot do, conduct a rational examination of its own convictions.”28
For the post-structuralists, while deconstructive criticism can unmask the logical flaws and sleights of hand in discourse, and even uncover the structure of an ideology, it cannot replace it. Unless it retreats to the personal, or the fragmentary, the critique of one ideology will only be done from the standpoint of another.
In one sense the postmodernists have grasped the truth here. They are rooted in the “Western Marxist” tradition which divides the revolutionary party into “intellectuals” and “masses”. No individual theorist, however erudite, can hope to escape ideology by theoretical practice alone. As individuals we all possess a consciousness that is more or less shaped by the predominant ideas of the ruling class. This is even true of revolutionary socialists.
But as a collective, through a party that unites our everyday experience as individuals with the historic experience of the organised working class, and is armed with a scientific understanding of the interests of the working class, we can combat ideology.
It was the experience of the Stalinist parties’ misleadership and betrayal of the working class which drove the French post-structuralists away from the concept of ideology and towards the concept that Marxism was just another “meta-narrative”.
The class struggle “taught” Foucault, Baudrillard and co that the working class could not rise to become a revolutionary subject. It could not learn collectively from practice. It was a short journey from this idea to the rejection of human subjectivity in general.
True to the influence of Nietzsche, Foucault in particular sees the class struggle as only one example of a more fundamental impulse in humanity, namely the “will to power”.
The first question a materialist must ask about the “will to power” is where does it come from? If it is a biologically determined trait of humanity, and it underpins all social conflict, then the human race is doomed genetically to suffer oppression. That would leave postmodernism as little more than a rehashed version of the religious theory of “original sin”.29
If, on the other hand, the will to power has social roots then it is already called into question as the fundamental category. What in society produces and reproduces this will? What exists prior to it? Foucault’s investigations into “discourse” as a means of legitimising power structures, and into historically successive discourses, refuse to answer these questions. The history of society is reduced to the “power struggle” without any explanation of where the power struggle comes from.
Instead Foucault observes the effects of the rise of capitalism on human relations, not just at the level of class struggle, but in the sphere of punishment, training, social oppression and sexual repression. He argues that, whereas feudalism had imposed a political power relationship from above, rising capitalism imposed “self discipline” through a variety of new social institutions:
“This new mechanism of power is more dependent upon bodies and what they do than upon the earth and its products. It is a mechanism of power which permits time and labour, rather than wealth and commodities, to be extracted from bodies. It is a type of power which is constantly exercised by means of surveillance rather than in a discontinuous manner by means of a system of levies or obligations distributed over time. It presupposes a tightly knit grid of material coercions rather than the physical existence of a sovereign. It is ultimately dependent on the principle that one must be able simultaneously both to increase the subjected forces and to improve the force and efficacy of that which subjects them.”30
If these observations were allied to Marxism they would form an interesting and useful insight into the social effects of the rise of capitalism.
Instead they are raised to the status of a theory, specifically opposed to the class struggle as an explanation of historical change:
“One should not assume a massive and primal condition of domination, a binary structure with ‘dominators’ on one side and ‘dominated’ on the other, but rather a multiform production of relations of domination.”31
In the first place, these two statements, taken from the same book of interviews, are materially at odds. Who is the “one” who must be able to increase the numbers of those subjected while increasing the force that subjects them? Who are the “subjected”? The answer is clear if we view history as the history of class struggle.
Rising capitalism required a new system of labour discipline, in which the worker was responsible – within limits – for the quality and duration of work. No longer to be ruled by the seasons and the sun, as agricultural labour was, but by the rhythms of the factory, the new working class had to be taught the “discipline” of the factory.
Foucault’s polemic against Marxism rests on the assertion that Marxism reduces history to just one set of power relationships – class structure – whereas “power” itself is a more fundamental category. But Marxism does not do this. For Marx the fundamental human category was not class struggle, nor power, but labour. Because humans have to labour in order to live, and because their labour is social, they create societies as a means to carrying out labour.
Marxism does not have to ignore or reject a relationship between power structures and human biology – as the Foucault/Nietzsche model does. It sees human beings as “social animals” and is able to understand power relationships in connection to the most fundamental human activity – social labour.
It is not true that Marxism reduces all power struggles to class. But we insist that the major social struggles can be defined in relation to class.
Women’s oppression emerges with the transformation of an accidental biological division of labour into a socially codified one. It does not happen until society is advanced enough to create a surplus and therefore a struggle over the surplus.
Racial oppression – as opposed to simple and widespread prejudice against the outsider – does not emerge until the rise of a specific form of class exploitation in early capitalism, namely chattel slavery, and is systematised by the emergence of a specifically capitalist “power structure”, the nation state. Systematic oppression of lesbians and gay men emerges even later, with the imposition of the bourgeois family.32
Foucault’s “reduction” of all inequalities to the concept of power is not a reduction at all: it is a mystification. It cannot explain the reasons for power without reference to power. It is also self-contradictory, recognising oppressors and oppressed but refusing to recognise oppression.
It also relies on an utterly one-sided understanding of human subjectivity.
An earlier generation of humanist French thinkers (e.g. Sartre) saw the human subject as capable of doing and thinking anything – in defiance of its circumstances. Post-structuralism replaced this with an equally one-sided view of the human individual completely trapped by power structures and equally responsible for maintaining them, whether oppressor or oppressed.
Only Marxism can provide a coherent account of the power structures in society and of human subjectivity. Power structures reflect class interests. The state defends the property of the ruling class but petty theft in the inner cities does not summon many police sirens. A strike is an elementary form of power struggle between the working class and the bourgeoisie.
Only somebody who equated Marxism with Stalinism – in particular with its economism and one-sided economic determinism – could see social struggles beyond the workplace as proof of its invalidity. But that is exactly the kind of “Marxism” which surrounded Michel Foucault as a member of the French Communist Party in the 1950s.
In the late 1960s an international working class offensive coincided with explosive struggles of women, youth, gays, black people and third world peasants. Foucault wrote:
“What has happened since 1968, and arguably what made 1968 possible, is profoundly anti-Marxist.”33
In the last part of this section we will try to explain how this judgement rests on a misinterpretation of the facts and a blatant misunderstanding of Marxism.
Fighting oppression
Marxism lays claim to be the only scientific form of thought about society precisely because it uniquely combines a search for totality with the realisation that thought is provisional and reality is in a constant process of change.
Marxism was able to stand on the shoulders of three strands of the Enlightenment – utopian socialism, Hegelian idealism and classical bourgeois political economy – only because it was able to see what was unscientific about them. It saw their tendency to present truth as a closed system and reality as a finished evolution.
For Lyotard the meta-narrative is defined by its “great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal”.34 Marxism arose by subjecting every one of these elements, in what have become known as its “three sources and component parts”, to a scientific critique. Did it replace them with heroes, dangers, voyages and goals of its own? In the sense Lyotard means, it did not. The working class – which would constitute the “hero” if Marxism were a meta-narrative – is destined to abolish itself in the process of liberating humanity. The “great danger” in the Marxist theoretical scheme – society’s collapse into barbarism – does not come from outside of its historical scheme: it is a possibility built into capitalist development.
Hence Marxism’s “goal” is completely different to that of rationalism, Hegelianism and classical political economy: it is not assured by the rationality and all-knowing totality of the theoretical system. It is only one possible outcome of the inner laws of society. And in Marxism of course the “goal” is not merely socialism or communism but the total emancipation of the human individual from need. Our goal is to start human history, not bring it to a conclusion.
Marxism is a synthesis of all that was progressive in early 19th century philosophy, economics and utopian socialism, made possible only by an attack on their one sided and false “totalising” claims.
As for the reactionary meta-narratives of the 20th century – Social Darwinism, national chauvinism, fascism, Cold War liberalism – revolutionary Marxism has been the only theory that did not give an inch to them, and the only force which combated them effectively in practice. There is no more cogent theory of fascism, for example, than that of Marxism: it was and is the politics of counter-revolutionary despair. Fostered by big business, but rooted among the middle class victims of capitalism, it was to do the job that the state apparatus could not – destroy the organised workers’ movements.
To the list above we should of course add Stalinism. Leon Trotsky, the last of the great “classical” Marxists, fought a long battle against the rise of Stalinism. When we survey that battle from the standpoint of the current debate what is striking is just how sensitive Trotsky and his followers were to Stalinism’s corruption of Marxism as a theory.
From the struggle against proletkultism and the effects of bureaucratism on social life in the early Soviet Republic right through to the defence of dialectical materialism against the Stalinist professors, real revolutionary Marxism saw and resisted every attempt to turn Marxism into a “meta-narrative”.
When Stalin declared that “socialism” had been achieved in pre-1939 Russia, and that “communism” was only years ahead, it was Trotskyists who held this up to ridicule. Meanwhile the liberal intelligentsia of the West crawled at Stalin’s feet.
The Trotskyists treated Stalin’s claim for Russia just as Marx treated Hegel’s claims for monarchic Prussia, Adam Smith’s claims for the capitalism of the 14 hour day, Robert Owen’s claims for New Harmony. They refused to accept it as the end of history. They roused the masses to struggle against it. They exposed the legitimising theory as ideology.
This was not the case with the precursors of postmodernism. All accepted Stalinism as Marxism. Thus they experienced the crisis of Stalinism as the death of Marxism.
In 1968 French workers launched the biggest general strike in history. It was sparked into life by a political crisis arising from a student uprising, at a time when a majority of university students could have legitimately been described as middle class. It took place against a backdrop of the rising women’s struggles and black struggles of the late 1960s and a near universal youth radicalisation.
Postmodernist psychologists Deleuze and Guattari argue that “May 68 in France was molecular . . . irreducible to the segmentarity of class”.35 Refracted through three decades of defeat, the working class seems to disappear totally from today’s postmodernist accounts of the 1968 events:
“Paris was in riot. In France 10 million people went on strike. Non-violent marches became pitched battles – the tools were barricades, burning cars and Molotov cocktails. Even Baudrillard’s faculty was disrupted for two months. Who was responsible? Students known as the Enragés – maniacs – and some were taught by Baudrillard. But they drew their inspiration from the Situationist International . . . The revolution failed. Some historians think it expired because the students went on summer holiday.”36
In fact the 10 million strikers were workers. The majority of student radicals drew their inspiration not from the artistic poseurs of the Situationist International but from Maoism, Stalinism and Trotskyism. The revolution failed because of the strength of Stalinism, which demobilised the workers and tried to divide them off from the student uprising.
Within a decade the majority of French intellectuals had abandoned Marxism and openly embraced French capitalism. Those who wanted to maintain a critical stance towards capitalism without Marxism had to evolve structuralism into the anti-rational orthodoxy that is the subject of this discussion. Sebastiano Timpanaro37 has explained the crucial role of Louis Althusser – the influential academic Marxist, who sought to fuse Marxism with structuralism – in precipitating this transition (see box).
Today the only revolutionary critique of capitalism and Stalinism is Trotskyism. Contrary to McHoul and Grace you will see revolutionary Marxists fighting for leadership on every contemporary barricade: the picket line, the black self defence group, the women’s campaign against domestic violence, the struggle against imperialist war. But you will not find many postmodernists there. Hampered by scepticism, paralysed by fear of the meta-narrative they retreat into the local and fragmentary. But it is to a local and fragmentary world far removed even from the vision of Foucault, who at least immersed himself in the struggle for the rights of prisoners.
Today’s postmodernists are more at home in the polite protests of middle class environmentalism; the ritual conflicts of the anti-road movement; the hand-wringing anti-humanism of animal rights; and of course in the ultimate form of postmodern protest – to dress outrageously and stay at home.
Postmodernism is part of the ideology of decaying capitalism. Like all ideology it does not spring up instantly and unmediated out of its economic roots. Its process of formation occurs in the world of ideas. Only after this, under the impact of events, do the ideas assume a mass character and therefore become a material force themselves.
In turn its arguments, “proofs”, methods and metaphors are drawn not just from culture, but from changes in the economic base itself. What follows is a brief attempt to explain that process.
There are many sources of postmodernist ideas: we have already discussed the crisis of Structuralism, and the so-called crisis of Marxism. Another strand is the crisis of artistic modernism.38
Modernism in art helped to define an important aspect of the ideology of the big bourgeoisie in the imperialist epoch. The very small upper layer of the bourgeoisie (and their later corporate equivalents) were able to persuade themselves of the dynamism of their system and the liberalism of their politics through their patronage of progressive artistic creativity.
After 1945 it experienced a “golden age”. Not just tolerated but actively promoted by the US imperialist establishment – including the CIA – post-war modernism was meant to adorn a booming, technologically progressive capitalism plucked from the ashes of World War Two, and to act as a siren call for dissident intellectuals in the Stalinist states.
But as capitalism’s long boom drew to a close modernism underwent another crisis of direction. It seemed to collapse in fragmentary directions. Where modernism had been put to functional use – most famously in architecture – its confidence was even further dented as, one after the other, the “cities in the sky” turned to slums and many were dynamited.
The inner contradictions of a modernism almost wholly divorced from any belief in social progress – capitalist or socialist – ultimately produced an art that reflected this growing pessimism. At first, few of those now acclaimed as postmodernists recognised themselves as such. Some still refuse to do so.
For the majority, however, it has become a convenient label to justify an art that denies or ignores the human subject; that refuses to comment on suffering; that maintains an ironic coolness towards all serious questions; that absolutely refuses to be associated with progressive movements; that is constantly pastiching itself.
The most fundamental ideological change however is the crisis of belief in the progressiveness of capitalism itself. Postmodernism is just one product of this. We also find it echoed within all mainstream bourgeois thought, as well as the “common sense” of a generation that can see no future other than one relentlessly like the present.
In this sense postmodernism stands firmly within the irrationalist tradition which formed the counterpoint to bourgeois rationalism ever since the Enlightenment itself.
We can trace a line from Schopenhauer, via Nietzsche to the gurus of postmodernism which asserts that rationalism is only the tool of power or the will, and that human life is meaningless. Alongside this philosophical tradition go various artistic expressions of it, all of which are characterised by a reactionary romantic opposition to capitalism.
In the 19th century, when capitalism was a relatively progressive system, this tradition remained on the sidelines of bourgeois ideology. In the 20th century, as capitalism begins to go rotten, it grows in strength. It is manifested not just in the desolate thoughts of adolescent poets but in the ideology of dictators. But still it does not achieve predominance.
Bourgeois liberalism remains the dominant ideology, and is given a new lease of life by the post-war boom.
Only in the last 25 years has the irrationalist streak of bourgeois thought seriously contended for dominance. And that is because of the coincidence of circumstances accumulated over three decades: the end of the post-war economic boom, with no return in sight; the defeat of working class struggles – many of them strategic defeats with long-term implications; finally the collapse of Stalinism.
These fundamental, developments in the economy and the class struggle unleash new developments in both base and superstructure: the destruction of traditional productive industries in the imperialist countries, the collapse of the “state capitalist” model in the third world and the resultant break-up of multinational states, the fragmentation of the political establishments of most of the imperialist countries as Cold War priorities receded.
Frederick Jameson has argued that postmodernism is the “cultural logic of late capitalism”. While Jameson never succeeds in specifying what exactly this late capitalism is he is correct in his insight that postmodernism is a spontaneous ideological reflection of capitalism in a period of decay, compounded by working class defeat.
And the fact that the champions of postmodernism in the English speaking world have originated in the left tells us that postmodernism reflects the particular outlook of a whole generation of disillusioned left intellectuals.
Alex Callinicos goes further, attempting to root postmodernism in the specific outlook of the “new middle class” – a concept originated by sociologist Eric Olin Wright and imported into Marxism by Callinicos himself. This is unconvincing, both because the new middle class analysis has serious flaws39 and because even if we accept its existence, it existed before postmodernism.
Postmodernism may have originated in the intelligentsia, it may be transmitted via the middle managerial and technical strata, but then again this is true of religious fundamentalism, Blair-ite Christian socialism and a whole host of ideologies in the late 20th century.
A materialist explanation of postmodernism does not need to situate its material roots in an intermediate stratum of society.
The immediate material impulses are economic stagnation, Stalinist collapse and working class defeat.
But the historic roots of postmodernism are the same as those of all post-1789 irrationalism: irrationalism with its emphasis on the individual will and power is the guilty self-hatred of the capitalist system. It is not a critique of capitalism, only a more desolate attempt to justify it.
Instead of enslaving millions in the factories in the name of “liberty, equality and fraternity” the irrationalist tradition says clearly that modern society is just the survival of the fittest.
Not even thought itself escapes this process: reason and theory are only tools to the competitive human will.
Whereas Nietzsche celebrated this will to power the proponents of postmodernism can only bemoan it – while accepting that there is no alternative.
Some, like Derrida, clearly recoil from this world without hope, and turn pleadingly back to Marxism for a radical theory: if only Marxism could shed itself of its “scientific” illusions and promote itself as a new utopianism then it could provide a point of light, Derrida believes.40
Others, like Rorty, passionately embrace the new reactionary reality, urging us to accept modern day America as “an example of the best kind of society so far invented”41 and expressing the hope that “America will continue to set an example of increasing tolerance and equality”42.
With views as divergent as these underpinning the most fashionable form of theoretical critique it is no surprise that, in the 1990s, we have started to hear about the “crisis of postmodernism”.
In this respect Jean Baudrillard has performed sterling work in pointing his followers towards the utter futility of postmodernism as a world view:
“Postmodernism is a regression. It’s the most degenerate, artificial and eclectic phase. It doesn’t have a meaning. It’s impossible to define what’s going on now. There’s a void which I analyse”.43
Marxists should view the crisis of postmodernism not with passive satisfaction but as an opportunity to intervene into the political crisis of a whole new generation which has grown up knowing only defeat.
Our aim is to convince today’s followers of postmodernism that the only healthy scepticism is dialectical materialism; the only coherent critique of Enlightenment rationality comes from the tradition which synthesised it and overcame it; that there is an alternative to a future of endless Bosnias and Rwandas.
The possibility of that future exists because of one product of the late 18th century that has not gone away: the organised working class. It is a growing class. It has suffered retreat and defeat across the developed world – particularly in the English speaking countries – but will recover its confidence and strength for new rounds of struggle.
Elsewhere it is already on the offensive. It is the only social force left in the world with the power to impose a progressive order against the onset of barbarism.
Its theoretical expression – Marxism – is the only product of the “Enlightenment tradition” which still thinks the Enlightenment was a good idea.
Postmodernism is the ideology of dying capitalism. Revolutionary socialism is the only guide to survival for humanity. And Marxists are not ashamed to say to the postmodernist generation: choose life!
Althusser’s Marxism
In the 1970s, the French philosopher, Louis Althusser, influenced a generation of Marxist intellectuals and professional academics in the social sciences and cultural studies.
Until his death in 1990 he was, for most of his adult life, a member of the French Communist Party (PCF). Like many he was deeply effected by Khruschev’s speech at the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956 which revealed the crimes of Stalin. His attempts to make sense of Marxism in the aftermath of this make up Althusser’s work.
During his “re-reading” of Marx in the 1960s the key influences on his thought were writers such as Derrida, Lacan and other structuralists. By contrast Althusser showed no interest in studying or learning from the left’s anti-Stalinist critique of the degeneration of the Russian revolution. Indeed, he defended most of the political and social results of Stalinism’s bloody counter-revolution against the Soviet working class.
His reflections were philosophical in nature. He concentrated his fire upon what he saw as alien influences on Marxism that had led to Stalinism’s deviations, namely a view of history that emphasised the forces of production and technology as the key to human development. This he termed “economism”.
But he rejected the “liberal” critique of Stalinism after 1956, which he labelled “humanism”:
“ . . . a profound ideological reaction . . . ethical in tendency which spontaneously rediscovered the old philosophical themes of ‘freedom’, ‘man’, ‘the human person’ and “alienation’.” (L. Althusser For Marx)
Both economism and humanism were products, according to Althusser, of the Second International’s reformist “Marxism” and had to be rejected. But the Second International did not invent them; rather, they were to be found in the early writings of the young Marx.
Althusser pointed the finger of blame for this type of Marxism at Hegel. Hegel was the one who bequeathed Marx a false view of history whereby history unfolds automatically to a pre-determined goal (teleology); this could be due either to objective economic laws (economism) or, alternatively, to the working class becoming more and more class conscious of its own destiny (humanism).
Marx’s early works were tainted with these views, according to Althusser, but, through an “epistemological break” around 1845, were gradually thrown off in his later works, above all, in Capital.
In short, Althusser set himself the task of redefining historical materialism and rescuing Marxism. He did neither. To rid Marxism of its Hegelian “defect” it was necessary to junk the idea of history or society as “an expressive totality”, that is, a combination of forces and relations of production in which the economic determines the legal, cultural and ideological. In its place Althusser argued, following the structuralists, that history and society were not in a contradictory movement towards a goal but were, rather, a series of structures or “instances” within the social formation which were relatively autonomous and moved in different “timeframes”. While the ideological spheres were “ultimately” determined by economic forces, this time “never arrived”.
This threw up the banal conclusion that economics, politics and culture affected each other equally. Causality and hierarchy were rejected, rendering historical materialism useless as an explanatory tool. These separate structures may or may not collide and a specific society at a specific point in time may be burdened by too much history to the point where the social formation is “overdetermined” and revolution breaks out. Structures may change but they may or may not effect consciousness. None of these influences can be compared, generalised or quantified; in short, they cannot be foreseen.
Althusser’s concept of science was another victim of his “re-reading”. In the first place, science was not about understanding the real, objectively existing world, but only the concept of that world. In contrast, empiricism opposes “a given subject to a given object and calls knowledge the abstraction by the subject of the essence of the object”, a view of science Althusser completely rejected. Theory could not generate knowledge of the real world and nor could this world be the source material for theoretical reflection.
In a manner analogous to Derrida and his view of “texts” Althusser saw the raw material of science as the key works of Marx and his job, as a scientist, to “deconstruct” them. The task was to “discover” the “scientific problematic” buried within the text, and reject concepts used by Marx (even if he used them consciously) which were inconsistent with this problematic. Naturally, all Hegelian concepts were purged.
Science, for Althusser, was not the servant of the real world, rather it is a separated-off sphere of social practice. The hole in Althusser’s argument is clear. If the real world is not the legitimate starting point for the generation of theoretical knowledge then what is? For Althusser it was nothing other than a “reading” by the dispassionate scientist, hence its idealism.
But Marx in contrast started from certain real premises, from which it is not possible to abstract; namely, that humans are purposive and social by nature. This nature is constrained and alienated by the class exploitative social relations within which labour is carried out. Capitalism produced the first society in history where the potential existed for humans to free themselves from this historical constraint by overthrowing capitalism and class society in general.
Althusser managed the remarkable trick for a Marxist in sundering theory from the real world and offered no account of how theory could guide practical intervention into the world in order to change it. In short, he reverted to a form of rationalist idealism in which the truth was a series of internally coherent imposed logical constructs within the body of a work.
It is clear that Althusser, like the postmodernists ended up with a belief that the objective world, and an account of its contradictory movement in thought, is not possible. Indeed, all that is open to mere humans is ideology. Ideas generated by individuals and classes and how they see their place in the world (a “system of lived relations”) are the stuff of ideology. From Lacan, Althusser borrowed the idea that the real world cannot be known consciously and hence people can only be trapped in an imaginary understanding of that world and their place within it.
Althusser began his search for an authentic non-Stalinist historical materialism by rejecting a meta-theorist, Hegel. Unlike Marx he did not just reject Hegel’s idealism, but rather Hegel’s comprehensive and systemic account of history. He ended up gutting Marxism of its coherence, its materialist premises and the central notion that conscious human beings are the active agents of social change.
By the 1980s many “Althusserians” went beyond his structuralism altogether. They realised that you could not hope to savage Hegel and leave the Marxist “meta-narrative” standing. Without history as a process with a determinate direction, without humans as conscious social agents of transformation, without science as a series of mental approximations to the real objective world, then, quite simply, there is no Marxism.
Footnotes
1. F. Jameson Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London 1991
2 J-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition – a report on knowledge, Manchester 1984
3 J. Baudrillard Simulations New York 1983
4 A. McHoul and W. Grace A Foucault Primer Melbourne 1993
5 J. Derrida Of Grammatology Baltimore 1976
6 Quoted in C. Norris Deconstruction London 1981
7 J. Baudrillard op cit.
8 J. Baudrillard ibid.
9 J Baudrillard The Gulf War Did Not Take Place Sydney 1995
10 Quoted in L Ferry and A Renaut, La Pensee 68 Paris 1985
11 J. Derrida Spectres of Marx London 1994. See also G. Hyle “Exorcising the red spectre”, Trotskyist International No 18, London 1995
12 M. Foucault Power/Knowledge London 1980.
13 Even where they do not work the problem can generally be solved according to the same scientifically formulated laws.
14 W.V.Quine From a Logical Point of View New York 1953
15 i.e. a theory of being or existence
16 S. Hawking A Brief History of Time London 1988
17 S Hawking ibid
18 ibid
19 D. Griffin The Re-enchantment of Science: Postmodern Proposals Albany 1988
20 R Appignanesi and C. Garratt, Postmodernism for Beginners Cambridge 1995
21 See Richard Leavens Edinburgh lecture in International Socialism 72 Autumn 1995
22 R.Rorty Contingency, Irony and Solidarity Cambridge 1989
23 K. Marx Capital (Vol 1) Harmondsworth 1973
24 K.Marx “Concerning Feuerbach” Early Writings Harmondsworth 1975
25 For a well documented, if inconclusive, discussion see T. Eagleton Ideology – an introduction London 1991
26 K. Marx and F.Engels The German Ideology London 1974
27 ibid
28 S. Fish Doing What Comes Naturally Oxford 1989.
29 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, (in Anti-Oedipus Minneapolis 1983) do advocate to a form of psycho-biological determinism, declaring “desire” to be the source of power.
30 M. Foucault Power/Knowledge op cit.
31 ibid.
32 For a Marxist account of the specific origins of various forms of social oppression see: LRCI Marxism and Women’s Liberation London 1993, Workers Power Lesbian and Gay Liberation – a Trotskyist strategy London 1989 and Workers Power Black Liberation and Socialism London 1995
33 M. Foucault Power/Knowledge op cit.
34 J-F Lyotard The Postmodern Condition Minneapolis 1984
35 quoted in A.Callinicos Against Postmodernism op cit.
36 C. Horrocks and Z Jevtic Baudrillard for Beginners Cambridge 1996
37 S. Timpanaro On Materialism London 1975 See also S. Clegg “The remains of Louis Althusser” International Socialism No 53 London 1991
38 In this article “art” refers to the whole of artistic creation in both “high culture” and “popular culture” – ie music, film, literature etc. It is not the task of the revolutionary party to offer a unified “critique” of such art. We stand in the tradition of Leon Trotsky ( Literature and Revolution Ann Arbor 1975) , who vilified nascent Stalinism’s attempt to impose a “party line” on art. To the question “what does Marxism oppose in postmodern art?” we answer: nothing. Of course individual Marxists – whether they be professional art critics or amateur thrash-metal guitarists – have a right to their own critical views. Many of them have disliked modernism, let alone post modernism. In the conflict between the modernist cultural establishment in the West and its postmodern critics the revolutionary party should be strictly neutral.
39 See P Morris “SWP, imperialism and the ‘real Marxist tradition’” in Trotskyist International No 17 1995 and K Hassell & G Binette, “The British Working Class Today ” Permanent Revolution No 7 1988
40 See G. Hyle in Trotskyist International op cit
41 R. Rorty op cit
42 in M Edmundson Wild Orchids and Trotsky New York 1993
43 quoted in C. Horrocks and Z Jervin op cit.
44L Althusser, For Marx, p10
Note by the Editor: The following document has been published in 1988 by our predecessor organization – the League for a Revolutionary Communist International (renamed to League for the Fifth International in 2003). It was initially published in “Permanent Revolution” No. 7 (Spring 1988) – the theoretical journal of the British section “Workers Power”.
The founding members of the RCIT were partly long-time and leading members of this organization before they were bureaucratically expelled in April 2011 – a few weeks after they formed a faction in opposition against the increasing centrist degeneration of the LFI. Immediately after their expulsion these comrades built a new organization and went on to form the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT) together with a number of other comrades. Today the RCIT is present in more than a dozen countries.
* * * * *
Half a century has passed since the Transitional Programme (TP)1 of Leon Trotsky was written. In those fifty years much has occurred that Trotsky’s programme neither foresaw nor prepared for. Trotsky’s perspectives were based on the premise that ‘Mankind’s productive forces stagnate’.2 Yet, in the metropolitan countries the second imperialist war was followed by an unprecedented economic boom for almost twenty years. In turn this boom created the conditions for the resurgence of social-democratic reformism, a force Trotsky believed would be decisively destroyed in the war. Stalinism too not merely survived but gained a new lease of life through its expansion into eastern Europe and eventually parts of Asia. The condition for these unforeseen developments was the defeat of the revolutionary upsurge that occurred during the war in Europe. The defeat of that upsurge was achieved by counter-revolutionary force in the areas occupied by the Soviet Armed Forces and Allied imperialism. It fell victim to the no less fatal snares of democratic counter-revolution in much of western Europe.
Clearly, at least at the level of perspectives, the post-war reality did not correspond to the picture of generalised and synchronised crisis that Trotsky had drawn shortly before his death. Such a development is not unique in the history of Marxism. The predictions of Marx and Engels were, on a number of occasions, confounded by a variety of unexpected developments. All this tells us is that Marxism possesses no mystical powers that guarantee the fulfilment of predictions. Marxism’s prediction—its formulation of perspectives—is necessarily a constant process of assessment and re-assessment of trends within the economy, the ruling class, the working class and the class struggle. On the basis of such concrete analyses perspectives need to be formulated and tested. If they fail the test they need to be re-formulated. Trotsky himself, in the 1930s, demonstrated again and again the Marxist method of ‘testing and correcting’ his own programmes.
The method of the Transitional Programme
At the end of the 1920s an economic crisis began that wracked the entire capitalist world. A new period of political and economic crisis succeeded the period of capitalist boom in the 1920s. The rise of fascism in Germany, the popular front in France, the civil war in Spain, the Sino-Japanese war, were all explosive manifestations of world capitalism’s chronic weakness. The enormous depth as well as the world wide extension of this crisis and the repeated failures and defeats of the proletariat between 1921 and 1933 led to a new phenomenon. Just as the years 1917-21 had seen the foundation and establishment through civil war of the world’s first workers’ state, so the succeeding decade or so saw its bureaucratic degeneration. The Russian Communist Party, through its domination of the Comintern, became an instrument of chronic misleadership within the world workers’ movement. Stalin’s ultra-left policies facilitated Hitler’s triumph in 1933. The obstruction of the united front to fight fascism was criminal. Yet, in the aftermath of the defeat, all of the Comintern sections bar none subscribed to Stalin’s view that its policies had been entirely correct. Trotsky recognised the true significance of this and declared the Comintern to be dead for revolution. As the decade progressed the experience of the popular front governments in France and Spain revealed that the Comintern was not simply dead for revolution. It had became an instrument for counter-revolution. Under Stalin it became a counter-revolutionary reformist organisation.
Trotsky’s response to these developments was to dedicate his remaining years to the building of the Fourth International (FI). This struggle underwent many phases. It was conducted against a back-cloth of terrible defeats for the working class. This objective fact meant that it was constantly swimming against the stream. Its adherents numbered only a few thousand on the eve of the world war.
Trotsky resisted, throughout the 1930s, the temptation to short-circuit the process of building a revolutionary international through any compromises on the question of programme. While always making a serious attempt to win left-centrist elements (the Block of Four, the ILP, the PSOP, the Muste group etc), Trotsky always insisted that they subscribe to a clear, revolutionary programme. The centrists of Trotsky’s day accused him of issuing ultimatums about programme. In so doing characters like Fenner Brockway of the ILP poured scorn upon ‘rigid’, ‘dogmatic’ attitudes to programme. What they wanted was to be absolutely free to change their programme at will. Their principles, their strategy and tactics were so chameleon-like, consisting as they did of various adaptations to the dominant forces in the labour movement, that the last thing they wanted was to be obliged to formulate them clearly and precisely. Brockway fulminated against Trotsky’s ‘sectarianism’. He was denounced as a dictator whose method of building the FI was ‘the artificial method of imposing a rigid programme and then inviting parties to associate with it.’3 How centrism abhors a rigid—that is a definite—programme.
Trotsky never strayed from his course. He believed that the FI had to delineate itself from reformism and centrism by virtue of its programme. Only if it was revolutionary in programme would it be able to confront the crisis that was engulfing the world. Only with a firm programme could it steer an even course, despite being small and despite working in profoundly unfavourable objective conditions. During the period of the entry tactic in France when the majority of the French Trotskyists entered the SFIO (Socialist Party) as an organised faction he sharply castigated those, like Raymond Molinier, who sacrificed programme for illusory gains of the moment. He attacked Molinier and Frank’s ‘mass paper’ La Commune and said to them:
‘Programme first! “Mass Paper”? Revolutionary action? Regroupment? Communes everywhere? . . . very well, very well . . . But programme first! Your political passports please, gentleman! And not false ones if you please—real ones! If you don’t have any, then pipe down!’ 4
Trotsky began to develop his ideas of what that programme was through intervening in the class struggle on a Marxist basis. This way alone could ideas be tested in practice and then codified into a programme. The period before 1938, when The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International—the Transitional Programme—was written, saw Trotsky elaborate the key elements of the Marxist programme focused to the period he was living through.
The Left Opposition had learnt from the Bolshevik Party in 1917 and from the healthy Comintern that transitional slogans were essential. In particular, the centrality of workers’ control was recognised by Trotsky. While the Stalinists during the ultra-left Third Period counterposed the struggle for power to the struggle for control, Trotsky conceived of the latter as a bridge to the former. That is, he recognised that if a real struggle for control was launched and was in any way successful, then the workers would be compelled to go further:
‘Under the influence of the crisis, unemployment, and the predatory manipulations of the capitalists, the working class in its majority may turn out to be ready to fight for the abolition of business secrecy and for control over banks, commerce and production before it has come to understand the necessity of the revolutionary conquest of power.
After taking the path of control of production, the proletariat will inevitably press forward in the direction of the seizure of power and of the means of production.’5
In an important sense Trotsky was here getting to the very kernel of transitional demands. Minimum or immediate demands can, under certain conditions, be granted by capitalism as a means of pacifying the working class. Transitional demands, on the other hand, providing they really correspond to the objective situation, cannot be granted in full by capitalism. If they are fought for and even partially won then they raise class warfare to a qualitatively higher level, at once obliging the proletariat to move more and more against the very foundations of class society and at the same time creating the consciousness and organisation capable of a socialist solution. They pose a solution, a way forward from the impasse of normal immediate demands (reforms) and methods of struggle towards more effective ones, which organise working class strength so that it challenges the very logic of capitalist economy, as well as the capitalists’ control and direction of that economy. Against this transitional demands pose the ‘political economy of the working class’; planned production to meet human needs. But it does so, not in the form of sterile Sunday sermonising about socialism, but as a concrete answer to a concrete problem facing workers in struggle.
Trotsky’s Action programme for France
Trotsky’s grasp of the method lodged in transitional demands was revealed by the crisis that developed in France in 1934. The Comintern had, during its ultra-left phase, condemned immediate and transitional demands as opportunist. Everything was reduced to the question of power. As it moved rightwards towards the popular front, it reversed its previous position and counterposed immediate demands in France, to the question of power. In both cases it abandoned the transitional method of relating the needs of the moment to the struggle for power. Trotsky showed how in fact, transitional demands had, by virtue of the scale of the crisis, become of immediate relevance. They corresponded with the burning needs of the masses at the immediate level, and moreover, the question of power itself was becoming an immediate, burning issue:
‘The general Marxist thesis, “Social reforms are only the by-products of revolutionary struggle”, has in the epoch of the decline of capitalism the most immediate and burning importance. The capitalists are able to cede something to the workers only if they are threatened with the danger of losing everything.
However, even the greatest “concessions” of which contemporary capitalism—itself in a blind alley—is capable are completely insignificant in comparison with the misery of the masses and the depth of the social crisis. This is why the most immediate of all demands must be for the expropriation of the capitalists and the nationalisation (socialisation) of the means of production. But is not this demand unrealisable under the rule of the bourgeoisie? Quite so! That is why we must seize power.’ 6
By the same token the armed mobilisations of the fascist gangs posed as an immediate necessity the arming of the proletariat in order to protect its existing organisations. Of course, an armed working class is incompatible with the existence of capitalism for any length of time. The acuteness of the social crisis made demands which took the masses to the threshold of revolution an immediate necessity. The old order of society was collapsing. The masses were prepared to struggle but a treacherous leadership left them passive and confused and paved the way for defeat. In an important sense this is what Trotsky thought of as a pre-revolutionary situation. The old order crumbles, but the crisis of leadership in the working class prevents the masses from exploiting the cracks in the ruling class, stops them rallying to its side the confused and desperate intermediate strata and classes. Transitional demands are crucial as a whole system of demands aimed at resolving this crisis of leadership by mobilising the working class on a programme that introduces it to socialism, breaks it from the traitors and causes them to look for new leadership in the Trotskyists.
An early example of this method being applied was the Action Programme for France of 1934. This was a transitional programme sharply focused towards the pre-revolutionary situation in France. It sounded the alarm against the fascist danger. It outlined the method by which the French bourgeoisie were attacking the working class—deflation and unemployment. It counterposed to those dangers a programme of workers’ control measures and forms of organisation that challenged the foundations of capitalist society. It sought to mobilise alongside the proletariat the progressive sections of the petit bourgeoisie and did not shirk from demanding the eradication of all traces of Bonapartism from the bourgeois constitution. The Action Programme is a model of its kind. But models exist not to be copied slavishly but to be creatively applied to a concrete situation. If anybody said today that the Action Programme, was ‘valid today’, sensible people would consider them a trifle mad. It was not timeless. In enshrining the transitional method, it applied it to a particular juncture. That method was carried forward to the TP in a different period
The Transitional Programme
The first draft of the TP was completed by Trotsky in the spring of 1938. It was written after extensive discussions with leaders of the Socialist Workers Party of the United States (SWP(US)), including James Cannon. Trotsky very much regarded it as a codification, a summation of the experience and lessons of the preceeding period and a codification of the Left Opposition/FI’s response to the events of that period. As Trotsky himself said ‘It is the summation of the collective work up till today.’7
Such a summation was vital to ensure that past experience and future perspectives were generalised to the whole FI (as opposed to just the French section). It was a new version of Section II of the Communist Manifesto:
‘It is necessary to make a summary of concrete, precise demands, such as workers’ control of industry as opposed to technocracy . . . A series of transitional measures which correspond to the stage of monopolistic capitalism and the dictatorship of the proletariat with a section corresponding to colonial and semi-colonial countries. We have prepared such a document. It corresponds to that part of the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels which they themselves declared outdated. It’s only partially outdated, partially it’s very good, and is to be replaced by our conference.’8
And like the of Manifesto, the TP consisted of interrelated constituent parts. To understand the whole we must understand these parts, and their relationship to each other.
Like the great Manifesto Trotsky’s programme is based on a short-term perspective of acute crisis. Trotsky, recognising that the imperialist epoch meant ever deeper and more violent crises, was catastrophic in his predictions. He fully understood that the result of nearly a decade of capitalist crisis would be an imperialist war. He was absolutely right in these predictions. Those who accuse Trotsky of ‘catastrophism’ would appear not to recognise that the Second World War did plunge humanity into an enormous catastrophe. Conventional weaponry left millions dead and maimed. Whole national economies were devastated. Such was the scale of the catastrophe that Trotsky brilliantly foresaw in his programme.
But Trotsky’s perspective was not simply one of general catastrophe. It was more detailed than that, taking into account the specific problems confronting particular capitalist countries and those confronting Stalinism. Trotsky embodied in the TP the perspective that capitalism was far weaker than it had been at the beginning of the first world war. The very weakness of capitalism meant, in Trotsky’s view, that a revolutionary crisis would bring about the collapse of the whole capitalist system. In early 1939 he argued ‘Yes I do not doubt that the new world war will provoke with absolute inevitability the world revolution and the collapse of the capitalist system.’9 Again in 1940 he stated: ‘The capitalist system is in a blind alley. Without an entire reconstruction of the economic system on a European and a world scale our civilisation is doomed.’10
Nor did he exempt the USA from this perspective. Trotsky again correctly foresaw that Roosevelt would take his country into the war. He believed that US imperialism was as internally weak as European capitalism. Therefore it would be subject to a similar collapse and revolutionary crisis as that facing Europe:
‘The inner contradictions of American capitalism—the crisis and unemployment—are incomparably more mature for a revolution than the consciousness of the American workers . . . We know that subjective conditions—the consciousness of the masses, the growth of the revolutionary party—are not a fundamental factor.’11
The other two elements of Trotsky’s analysis were his recognition that the colonial revolution would be provoked on an ever wider scale by the war, and his belief that the survival of the USSR as a workers’ state was conditional upon a political revolution. Again Trotsky correctly predicted the Nazi onslaught when the smug Kremlin bureaucrats imagined that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had turned the wolf from the door:
‘Only the overthrow of the Moscow totalitarian clique, only the regeneration of Soviet democracy can unleash the forces of the Soviet people for the fight against the inevitable and fast-approaching blow from imperialist Germany.12
Without a political revolution Trotsky foresaw only collapse and the restoration of capitalism. Moreover, he thought that if capitalism did survive the catastrophe then it would only be on the basis of transforming itself into a totalitarian regime, or series of regimes. These perspectives were far from fanciful. But they were not, and could not be, exact prophecies. They were hypotheses. Trotsky himself recognised this: ‘Political prognosis is only a working hypothesis. It must be constantly checked, rendered more precise, brought closer to reality.’13
As such they were designed to guide the FI for the period immediately confronting them. This period was, in Trotsky’s view, likely to be a protracted pre-revolutionary period. Trotsky, unlike his epigones, was precise in his definition of why the period was pre-revolutionary and what was required to make it revolutionary:
‘The economy, the state, the bourgeoisie’s politics and its international relations are completely blighted by a social crisis characteristic of a pre-revolutionary state of society. The chief obstacle in the path of transforming the pre-revolutionary one is the opportunist character of proletarian leadership . . . The multi-millioned masses again and again enter the road of revolution. But each time they are blocked by their own conservative bureaucratic machines.’14
This is Trotsky’s understanding of the crisis of proletarian leadership on the eve of the war. In the pre-revolutionary situation the masses—particularly in Europe—had entered the road of revolution. The struggles of the French and Spanish workers were not of of a purely sectional, economic or episodic character. They were generalised struggles pregnant with revolutionary potential. The specific feature of the crisis of proletarian leadership at that time was the ability of the old leaderships to stop this potential being realised. The Stalinists and social-democracy had shown their capacity for treachery in both France and Spain in 1936 and 1937. At the same time the forces of Trotskyism were too weak to challenge for leadership. In Trotsky’s view the potential for resolving this crisis of leadership existed in the short term. The political corollary of his analysis of the crisis was that it would bring about the collapse of Stalinism and social-democracy precisely at the point when the masses would be propelled, once again, to enter the road of revolutionary struggle. For Trotsky, therefore, it was vital to arm the FI with the means of taking advantage of revolutionary struggle and the decay of the old leaderships. A decisive turn to the mass movement was necessary, with the TP itself being the means to take the sections of the FI to the head of the mass movement: ‘Henceforth the Fourth International stands face to face with the tasks of the mass movement. The Transitional Programme is a reflection of this important turn.’15
These perspectives were short to medium term, not epochal—a matter of years not decades or half a century. They applied to the period—the pre-revolutionary period—Trotsky confronted. The beginning and end of such a period is determined by world historic events. The period on which Trotsky based his perspectives can, roughly speaking, be said to have begun with the victory of Hitler and ended with the victory of US imperialism at the end of the Second World War. For that period Trotsky’s perspectives were both realistic—they took stock of the enormity of the crisis facing mankind—and filled with revolutionary optimism. That is they counted, on the subjective side, on the will of the FI—embodied in its programme—to resolve that crisis in a revolutionary fashion. In the context of 1938 to have advanced any other perspective than Trotsky’s for proletarian triumph would have been merely an excuse for either treachery or abstentionism.
These perspectives required extensive modification after the war. The boom in the imperialist countries, the national struggles in Asia, Africa and Latin America and the political revolutionary crisis in those countries where capitalism had been overthrown but where Stalinist bureaucracies ruled, all presented a different picture to that forseen by Trotsky. This development required two things of Marxists. First they needed to elaborate new perspectives in the new conditions as a means of re-focusing their programme. Second they needed to draw up a critical balance sheet of Trotksy’s own perspective in order to isolate and overcome any errors that were contained within them. In the event the post war Trotskyists proved incapable of fulfilling either task.
Its leading section, the SWP(US), effectively withdrew from the international scene as a leading force. The European and Asian cadres were decimated in the war itself. In most of Africa Trotskyism had no influence at all while in Latin America, where it was much stronger, national isolation preyed on all of the Trotskyist groupings leaving them as ill-equipped as their US comrades to play a leading role within the FI. The cadres that confronted the task of developing Trotskyism were relatively inexperienced and, ominously, not leaders of parties with significant numbers rooted in, at least, sections of the working class. Experienced and seasoned militants such as James P Cannon of the SWP(US), were incapable or unwilling to play the central, international leading role that Trotsky had until his death.
The result was that the FI, without a leadership capable of re-elaborating the programme in the light of new developments, was, as a whole, profoundly disoriented by these developments.16 On the question of the TP itself two responses emerged. The first was manifested by Cannon and the European leaders. They clung to the perspectives contained in the TP despite their general inapplicability in much of the world after the war.
Blind to the real impact of the USA’s military victory, enormous economic buoyancy and to the fact that the huge post war strike wave had been bureaucratically contained, Cannon simply pushed the pre-war perspective of crisis back, arguing that it was just about to happen. Moreover, the crisis was understood as being, inevitably, a fully revolutionary one. Cannon characterised any challenge to this view as sceptical and defeatist. It was considered a slur on the American working class to suggest that they were not moving onto a revolutionary offensive. The basis for this view was a one-sided reflection of the USA’s new found world dominance. Instead of admiting the possibility of economic recovery on the basis of this dominance Cannon insisted in 1946:
‘The blind-ally in which world capitalism has arrived, and the US with it, excludes a new organic era of capitalist stabilisation. The dominant world position of American imperialism now accentuates and aggravates the death agony of capitalism as a whole.’17
Cannon forgot Lenin and Trotsky’s insistence that there are no hopeless situations for the bourgeoisie. He admitted the possibility of a short-term boom but said that it would be followed quickly by a depression that would ‘make the 1929-32 conditions look prosperous’.18
In Europe Mandel and Pablo19 were singing a similar tune. Their theses on the world situation in 1948 contained the same fatalistic faith in Trotsky’s prognosis. They paid lip service to the ‘unstable equilibrium’ that prevailed, but argued:
‘The capitalist system, in decline and decay, and the regime established by the Soviet bureaucracy in the USSR, accumulate and sharpen their inherent contradictions. They paralyse the development of productive forces; steadily lower the living standards of millions of people in the world; increase the pressure of the bureaucratic and police state on social and private life, stifling creativity in all fields; reduce highly industrialised countries like Germany and Japan to the level of colonies; and increase national oppression.’20
There is not the slightest hint of a serious balance sheet based on the actual outcome of the war, in this perspective. It is a paraphrasing of Trotsky in 1938.
The false perspectives were close. lt connected to a false understanding of the nature of the TP itself. The ‘orthodox’ Trotskyists—those who fetishised the TP—argued that the programme was geared only towards an actual revolutionary crisis. They concluded, therefore, that such a state of crisis was a permanent feature of post-war society. Cannon typified this approach. After the war he wrote:
‘The Transitional Programme does not have any meaning unless one has in mind a revolutionary perspective. The very fact that you go over from the concept of the maximum and the minimum programme—that is, the minimum programme of daily small change, the maximum programme of ultimate goal that you talk about on Sunday—to a transitional programme, presupposes a development of a revolutionary nature, with the prospects of a showdown in sight.’ 21
Having defined the transitional methods—so painstakingly developed by Marxism for almost a hundred years22—in the narrowest possible sense Cannon was obliged to ignore the reality of the post-war boom. His perspective, for a whole period, was that the economic recovery and maintenance of bourgeois democracy in the US and much of western Europe, was merely a short term interruption of the crisis. The boom and the social peace it led to in the west became an aberration. In its extreme form this ‘orthodoxy’ was manifested by the International Committee’s crisis mongering. Members were kept in a feverish state of expectation for the economic collapse and revolutionary crisis that was just around the corner. While Gerry Healy was a typical exponent of this view, Cannon, in many respects, is its original author. He wrote, after the war, that economic crisis was imminent and that there was an inevitable correlation between such a crisis and revolution:
‘As a consequence [the economic crisis] will open up the most grandiose revolutionary possibilities in the United States. That conception must be at the base of the policy and perspectives of our party from now on.’ 23
The disparity between real life and these grandiose perspectives forced the SWP(US) to abandon the TP as the centre of its propaganda and agitation from 1950 on, while insisting that it be ritually worshipped as a condition for being admitted into the ‘orthodox’ fold.
Against this type of analysis factions of the SWP(US) and British RCP did attempt to advance alternatives based on a recognition of the stability that had emerged in western Europe as a result of the war. Ted Grant, for example, correctly argued that a ‘democratic counter-revolution’ had taken place. However these oppositions were dealt with bureaucratically by the FI leadership and prevented from developing into sizeable and influential forces.
The Cliffites, developing out of the RCP, did register the change in conditions. In so doing, however, they merely proved the truth of the old maxim that a little learning is a dangerous thing. In the 1950s and 60s their empirical recognition of Stalinism’s survival and capitalism’s boom led them to embrace state capitalism as a theory for explaining the class nature of the USSR and their rejection of Lenin’s theory of imperialism and Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution. The baby was thrown out with the bathwater. Nowhere was this clearer than in their approach to the TP. In the 1960s Hallas, keen to defend elements of Trotskyism, correctly argued that, at the 1948 FI Congress:
‘A fundamental reappraisal of the situation and of the perspectives of the Transitional Programme was required. The movement, in its majority proved incapable of rising to this task.’24
However, far from making such a reappraisal the Cliffite Socialist Workers Party of Great Britain (SWP(GB) itself has decided that Trotsky’s perspectives in 1938 were wrong and therefore so was his programme. John Molyneux, in his book on Trotsky, puts it clearly:
‘Thus Trotsky’s characterisation of capitalism in 1938 was strictly speaking an empirical impression. As such it was particularly vulnerable as a prediction of the future. In short, the economic analysis was the foundation of the TP and it was a faulty foundation.’25
At first sight the positions of the Cliffites appear to be a million miles away from Cannon’s. Yet in their rationalisation for rejecting the TP they define its essence in exactly the same way as Cannon did. They argue that the programme can only be regarded as relevant if there is an immediate revolutionary crisis. This view, which has always been argued by the Cliff tendency, was expressed recently in an article, ironically enough, on James P Cannon. Its author, Chris Bambery, attacked the SWP(US) for clinging on to the TP since:
‘Transitional demands, acting in Trotsky’s words as a bridge between the struggle for reformist and economic demands and the struggle for power—only have meaning within a particular revolutionary context.’ 26
This supposed critique of Cannon sounds more like an echo of his own words! The Cliffites, therefore, rejected Trotsky’s programme because, seeing it as relevant only for a directly revolutionary crisis, they had, unlike Cannon, Healy, Mandel and Pablo et al, registered the fact that no such crisis was imminent in the US and western Europe. In fact, as we shall see, their own one-sided definition of the TP led them to deepen their revisionism in a manner no less damaging to the cause of revolutionary Marxism than the barren orthodoxy of post-war ‘Trotskyists’.
Against both of these tendencies we would argue that Trotsky’s perspectives were the basis for a specific action programme element of the TP. After the war the re-elaboration of both elements was necessary. On perspectives we have made clear what we think the strength of Trotsky’s ‘catastrophism’ was. It foresaw the war and, emerging from it, a revolutionary upsurge. Both occurred. The revolutionary upsurge was evident most clearly in Italy, Greece, Vietnam, China and Yugoslavia. Much weaker reverberations were felt in Britain and France and the USA.
However, a combination of factors, unforeseen by Trotsky, meant that the war and the revolutionary upsurge did not develop in the direction and to the degree that he expected. The revolutionary upsurge took place in the context of Anglo-American imperialism and its ally, the USSR, marching through Europe under the banner of anti-fascism. Stalinism and social democracy were able in these circumstances to justify the derailing of the revolutionary upsurge. Its goals were limited to the restoration of bourgeois democracy. In France and Italy the communist parties entered coalition governments with the bourgeoisie. Where such betrayals were insufficient to quell the revolutionary struggles the brute force of the Soviet Armed Forces and the troops of Allied imperialism were used in the service of counter-revolution (Poland, Greece, Vietnam). The absence of a mass FI capable of challenging Stalinism and social democracy for leadership in the revolutionary upsurge was a crucial factor in enabling democratic or Stalinist counter-revolution to triumph relatively easily compared with the post-first world war situation.
On the basis of these defeats Stalinism and US imperialism, the real victors in the war, consolidated their positions and fashioned a new post war reality. The FI however, failed to register the enormous significance of the stifling of the revolutionary upsurge or the victories of US imperialism and Stalinism. Worse, their perspectives underestimated both. A new perspective, based on these developments would have had to prepare for the impact of an economic upturn (even if a long boom could not have been predicted) in the imperialist countries, for the development of national liberation struggles as the US imposed its will and the British Empire disintegrated, and for revolts against Stalinist rule in the east. In point of fact no section of the FI elaborated such perspectives.
To what extent was Trotsky himself guilty of disorienting his followers? Trotsky recognised that, in the sphere of political economy, both he and the FI as a whole had an inadequate understanding. He said of the first section of the TP, which deals with the world economy ‘The beginning of the Programme is not complete. The first chapter is only a hint and not a complete expression’.27
The problem is that, despite recognising the admitedly provisional nature of the perspective, the Transitional Programme is categorical in its economic prognosis. Trotsky wrote:
‘The economic prerequisite for the proletarian revolution has already in general achieved the highest point of fruition that can be reached under capitalism. Mankind’s productive forces stagnate.’28
This phrase has been at the centre of inumerable disputes in the Trotskyist movement. After the war, when Felix Morrow in the SWP(US) pointed out that Trotsky’s assertion was proving to be false, he was roundly denounced as a sceptic and a defeatist. Now, with the reality of the post-war boom behind us, only an idiot, or perhaps a charlatan like Gerry Healy, would describe Trotsky’s categorical declaration as correct. However, we reject the idea that Trotsky’s error stems from an objectivist and fatalist methodology on his part. This charge—leveled at him by theoretical cheapskates like John Molyneux—does not stand up for one minute. Molyneux argues that Trotsky’s isolation led him to place more and more emphasis on the role of history as an objective, forward moving force, solving the crisis facing mankind. This, in turn, stemmed from and was an echo of his essentially fatalist Second International method:
‘But if it is not hard to see why apocalyptic prediction became predominant at this time, it is also not hard to see that its theoretical roots lay in the mechanical materialism and determinism of the Second International.’29
To make such a statement implies that Molyneux neither understands the significance of Trotsky’s struggle against Stalinism from the mid-1920s to the end of his life, nor that of his struggle to build the FI. Trotsky never said that history would solve the crisis in a socialist fashion. He insisted time and again that the crisis merely furnished conditions under which the revolutionary party and the international could triumph. That is the whole point of his emphasis on the crisis of leadership. Indeed Trotsky’s polemics against centrism throughout the 1930s again and again attack the idea that history is a force independent of the actions of people. Indeed in December 1938, some months after the TP was written, he warned his followers:
‘Recent history has furnished a series of tragic confirmations of the fact that it is not from every revolutionary situation that a revolution arises, but that a revolutionary situation becomes counter-revolutionary if the subjective factor, that is, the revolutionary offensive of the revolutionary class does not come in time to aid the objective factor.’30
Trotsky’s error was not determinism. His prediction was wrong because it seriously under-estimated the strength of US imperialism. This was an important error. It led Trotsky to believe that the possibility of a way-out of the economic crisis short of fascism in the US was highly unlikely. Thus when he conceded the possibility of an alternative to a revolutionary outcome, it was always presented as a totalitarian one. This, he reasoned, would mean that any respite for capitalism would be temporary. In fact the economic strength of US imperialism enabled it to fund a democratic counter-revolution on a massive scale in much of Europe after the war. Moreover, the same strength enabled it to act as the motor of the world economy paving the way for an expansion of the productive forces after the war. In this error both Trotsky and the SWP(US) were culpable. Their premise was that the very rapidity of the US economy’s growth was the guarantee of its equally rapid downfall. Trotsky reasoned that the war would be such a tremendous drain on resources that any country involved would encounter economic collapse. This exchange between himself and one of the SWP(US) leaders makes this quite clear:
‘Shachtman: Supposing its is a European war, into which the USA does not yet enter?
Trotsky: In that case the USA will have a postponement of the economic collapse. What is clear is that in the countries involved in the war the collapse will come in not four or six years, but in six to twelve months, because the capitalist countries are not richer but poorer than in 1914, materially . . . You can say that all these unemployed [in the US] will be absorbed in the war industry, but that signifies the creation of a terrible pump for absorbing all the riches of the nation.’31
This is a dangerously one-sided view of the US and other capitalist economies. It fails to recognise that, in certain cases, war can regenerate the profitability of the capitalist economy and not simply act as a drain on it. This was particularly true for the USA, which, as everybody recognised from very early on, would not have to fight the war on its own soil, nor risk the destruction of its industries by bombing raids. Supplying the hard pressed British war machine as well as its own, did not merely absorb riches in the USA, it helped generate them as well. In arguing against the ‘final crisis’ theory of the Stalinists during their ‘third period’, Trotsky warned that such a view would lead to fatalism at the level of politics—our turn next’. In presenting a one-sided characterisation of the world economic crisis he tied his followers to a perspective that was in important respects proved wrong. Its errors, stemming from the failure of the revolutionary communist movement (the healthy Comintern and later the Trotskyists) to develop Lenin’s theory of imperialism, disorientated Trotsky’s followers after the war. They were certainly guilty of fatalism, episodically at first and later systematically. But this was a product of their slide into centrism, and away from Trotskyism. They clung onto his perspective at first because of a sincere confusion between perspectives and principles. Later they used it as a fig-leaf to cover their accumulated centrist errors.
A clear example of this was Pablo’s use of a single phrase in the TP itself. Following Tito’s break with the Kremlin in 1948 Pablo wrote:
‘At the very moment when the power and internal stability of the Stalinist apparatus, directing the USSR and the Communist parties from the Kremlin, seemed to many people more impressive than ever, the Yugoslav affair came to remind them of a factor on which revolutionary optimism rests, namely: the laws of history which will in the final analysis prove stronger than any type of bureaucratic apparatus.’32
Since Pablo uttered this half-quote from the TP, this line of fatalist thinking has dominated the centrist fragments of the FI. It became the basis for Healy’s permanent ‘revolutionary crisis’, for Mandel’s unstoppable (and undifferentiated) ‘revolutionary process’, and for Lambert’s definition of a never-ending pre-revolutionary situation. In short it became the excuse for offloading onto the historical process the work of revolutionaries. The objective factor became all powerful. Pablo makes clear that the historic law at work in Yugoslavia was the pressure of the masses. This pressure is so strong it can turn Stalinist butchers like Tito into rough and ready revolutionaries. Today the same law has led the Sandinistas, according to the USFI, to turn Nicaragua into a proletarian dictatorship! We assert that this fatalism is based on a wilful distortion of the TP which was far more dialectical in its understanding of the relationship of the historic process and the treacherous leaders:
‘. . . the laws of history are stronger than the bureaucratic apparatus. No matter how the methods of the social betrayers may differ . . . they will never succeed in breaking the revolutionary will of the proletariat. As time goes on, their desperate efforts to hold back the wheel of history will demonstrate more clearly to the masses that the crisis of proletarian leadership, having become the crisis in mankind’s culture, can be resolved only by the Fourth International.’33
For Trotsky the laws of history—the fact that the proletariat is objectively the revolutionary class—will ensure that the class struggle will continue and create the conditions for the eventual triumph of the subjective factor in the shape of the revolutionary party. No ‘blunt instruments’ or unconscious agents would or could fulfill this role for Trotsky.
Action programme
Trotsky repeatedly argued that a revolutionary programme had to be a guide to action. That meant that the action orienting element—transitional slogans—stood in the foreground reducing to some degree the more general aspects of the programme. Of course, the action programme component proceeded from general revolutionary principles, but it was a sharply focused application of them. The key transitional demands in the programme had as their premise the perspectives outlined previously. That is, the full potential of the TP as an action programme, would be realised in the context of a revolutionary struggle for power:
‘On the other hand the Fourth International’s programme of transitional demands, which seemed so “unreal” to nearsighted politicians, will reveal its full significance in the process of the mobilisation of the masses for the conquest of state power.’34
It was a programme of action for transforming the pre-revolutionary situation into a revolutionary situation. It based itself primarily on the objective conditions of its own period. It proceeded from the actual experience of the class struggle during the preceding years. The lessons of the German defeat, the popular front in Spain and France, the degeneration of the Russian Revolution, the explosive trade union struggles in the USA, and the anti-imperialist struggle in China, were all encompassed in the programme. Its slogans flowed from the experience—both positive and negative—of these momentous events. It was these events that invested Trotsky’s understanding of the crisis of leadership with a precision that his epigones never matched. The crisis of leadership had as its context an immediate contradiction between objective conditions (crisis torn capitalism driven to its second world war in just over twenty years) and the proletariat’s subjective weaknesses. That is war and revolution were looming in the immediate future and yet the proletariat lacked a revolutionary leadership. Of course within the imperialist epoch the conditions for revolution repeatedly come into existence objectively, in a number of isolated countries. But an international action programme cannot and should not base itself on generalities such as this. The reason for this is clear from the existence of periods in the imperialist epoch when the explosive character of this contradiction is, for whole sections of the world, subdued. The crisis of leadership that manifests itself in a trade union struggle that is sold out is an underdeveloped anticipation of the crisis Trotsky talked of. But to confuse the two would be to mistake every strike for the opening shot of a revolution within the context of a permanent pre-revolutionary or revolutionary situation. Trotsky himself was quite clear about the nature of the period his action programme focused towards. It was not focused to the imperialist epoch in general but to a feverish crisis typical of that epoch:
‘The strategic task of the next period—a pre-revolutionary period of agitation, propaganda and organisation—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).’35
The very fact that Trotsky talks of the specific features of specific generations of workers should indicate the focused nature of his programme. Indeed in its review of its conference the FI came to the same conclusion as Trotsky that the programme was meant as a guide to action:
‘What a contrast it offers to the vague generalisations and deceptive abstractions which the official leaderships of the working class offer as guides to action in the present tumultuous world situation! It is not, or rather it is not so much, the basic programme of the Fourth International, as it is its programme of action for the immediate period in which we live.’36
As an action programme it had to be understood as a specific expression of the general programme of Marxism (embodying the key principles, strategy and tactics) but as such not, in itself, immutable. It had a definite connection with a perspective of immediate war, crisis and revolution. A dramatic shift in perspective would, Trotsky believed, require a re-focusing of the programme:
‘You can raise the objection that we cannot predict the rhythm and tempo of the development, and that possibly the bourgeoisie will find a political respite. That is not excluded—but then we will be obliged to realise a strategic retreat. But in the present situation we must be oriented for a strategic offensive, not a retreat.’37
Trotsky anchored his action programme in his perspectives, but never forgot that perspectives are not Delphic oracles. Unfortunately, his epigones forgot precisely that.
However, having stressed this we must go on to assert that the TP was not simply an action programme. Lodged within it is the explanation of the whole method of transitional demands. Such demands form a system which seeks to take each partial struggle of the proletariat a decisive step further towards the goal of socialist revolution and towards the transition to socialism itself. An action programme must be focused towards a particular international crisis, like that of 1938, or towards a national crisis, like that of France in 1934, or indeed towards the struggles of a section of workers outside of the context of a pre-revolutionary or revolutionary crisis, like our own action programme for the British miners.38 But whatever the focus of a particular action programme, it must encompass within it the overall strategy of the TP. It must apply that method if it is to transcend the divide between the minimum and partial demands generated in every struggle and the goal of socialist revolution. The bridging of that divide is crucial if the dangers of tailism—of simply echoing the demands spontaneously raised by workers—and of pragmatism are to be avoided. For even within periods that are not in their general character revolutionary, the character of the imperialist epoch poses the possibility of taking steps, sometimes quite limited, towards the revolution. Moreover, transitional demands can, when carried into life, train workers for the tasks of the socialist transition, as well as mobilise them around a fight for their immediate interests. Transitional demands are therefore essential in any action programme. Trotsky explained why:
‘However, the achievement of this strategic task [socialist revolution] is unthinkable without the most considered attention to all, even small and partial questions of tactics. All sections of the proletariat—all its layers, occupations and groups—should be drawn into the revolutionary movement. The present epoch is distinguished not because it frees the revolutionary party from day-to-day work, but because it permits this work to be carried on indissolubly with the actual tasks of revolution.’39
The theoreticians of the SWP(GB) are ever ready to argue that the day to day tasks cannot be linked to socialism with transitional demands. Their pragmatism leads them to argue that such demands do not really exist. The key thing, they argue, is purely and simply to get the masses to act. Duncan Hallas expresses this most clearly:
‘The problem at each stage is to find and advance those slogans which not only strike a chord in at least some sections of the class (ideally of course the whole of it) but which are also capable of leading to working class actions. Often they will not be transitional in Trotsky’s very restricted definition.’40
The point is the class struggle itself compels workers to take action, to strike, to mobilise. And it is ABC to raise demands that workers undertake strikes. But our job as revolutionaries is not only to get workers to act, it is to win them, in the course of such action to socialism. It is precisely this job of leading workers beyond their everyday demands by fighting for a transitional action programme—a job the SWP(GB) refuse ever to undertake—that we can win them to revolutionary socialism. We can make the task of socialist revolution relevant to their everyday concerns. In fact the SWP(GB), like the Second International in its centrist days, ends up supporting the existing demands of workers and preaching socialism to them.
The claims that transitional demands are a product of Trotsky’s isolation in 1938 ignores the fact that he was developing the Comintern’s conceptions of them from a much earlier period. In 1931 in Spain, when the crisis that led to civil war war was still only maturing, Trotsky recognised the need to go beyond the partial demands of the moment:
‘Alongside these [minimum demands] however, demands of a transitional character must be advanced even now; nationalisation of mineral resources; nationalisation of the banks; workers’ control of industry; and finally state regulation of the economy. All of these demands are bound up with the transition from a bourgeois to a proletarian regime; they prepare for this transition so that, after nationalisation of the banks and industry, they can become part of a system of measures for a planned economy, preparing the way for the socialist economy, preparing the way for the socialist society.’41
The nature of transitional demands
In codifying a set of transitional demands into a programme Trotsky finally resolved the ‘programme question’ at the level of method. The TP marked the successful resolution of the programmatic problems that originated with the Erfurt Programme of 1891. It overcame the problem of the disjuncture between the struggle over immediate and partial demands and the struggle for power. It completed the work of the Comintern in this regard. Lenin and the Comintern had an understanding of transitional demands as primarily a bridge to the transitional society during a revolutionary situation. The degenerate Comintern seized on this position—which was only partially correct—in order to condemn the use of transitional demands as opportunist except in a revolutionary situation (prior to dumping them altogether). The reason Lenin’s view of transitional demands was only partially correct was because he had not then worked out the relationship of the general programme to the minimum programme. Trotsky precisely worked out this relationship. He viewed the imperialist epoch as one within which it was possible to tear down the brick wall between minimum and transitional demands. Immediate demands fought for by revolutionary tactics could become the starting point for winning the masses to broader transitional demands: ‘Every local, partial, economic demand must be an approach to a general demand in our transitional programme’.42
Struggles over wage demands could, in circumstances of high inflation, pose questions (the way the cost of living is calculated under capitalism, for example) that workers would seek general answers to. This logic would facilitate the transition from partial demands to transitional, demands provided those transitional demands could be rendered concrete and used as the basis for a mobilisation of workers for struggle:
‘It is necessary to interpret these fundamental ideas by breaking them up into more concrete and partial ones, dependent upon the course of events and the orientation of thought of the masses.’43
Trotsky’s method of firmness and flexibility combined within the framework of a clearly defned strategy is so refreshing compared with the lifeless schematism of that wing of his epigones who think that revolutionary credentials depend on the ability to repeat in all circumstances slogans ripped from the programme and learnt by heart. The ability to take partial struggles as a starting point, generalise them, and then express this generalisation through a concrete demand, is at the heart of the transitional method.
The other addition Trotsky made to Lenin and the Comintern’s position was the use of transitional demands as a bridge not simply to socialism, but to the socialist revolution. The fulfilment of this task, winning the vanguard of the proletariat to the programme of socialist revolution, could only—and can only—be achieved by means of a transitional programme. The programme would, by freeing the proletariat from its bankrupt leaders, clear a path to the revolution. At that point a programme of transition in Lenin’s sense—to socialism—would become necessary:
‘Only a general revolutionary upsurge of the proletariat can place the complete expropriation of the bourgeoisie on the order of the day. The tasks of transitional demands is to prepare the proletariat to solve this problem.’44
Transitional demands, providing they really become a focus for mass struggle could introduce a reformist led proletariat to the very need for revolution:
‘It is necessary to help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demands and the socialist programme of revolution. This bridge should include a system of transitional demands stemming from the day’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.’45
Lodged within every transitional demand is the struggle for vital working class needs over capitalism’s pursuit of profit via the establishment of workers’ control over capitalist production and distribution. At the same time each transitional demand contains a call for the organisation of the working class in bodies capable of exercising this control. By fighting for workers’ control and by building organisations that correspond to this fight the working class can block their bosses exercise of his or her ‘right to manage’ against the interests of workers. This denial of managements’ ability to be master in ‘their own’ house is a sort of dual power. Dual power in a single factory must lead to dual power in an industry and indeed in all industries if it is to effectively check the bosses. This in turn will create the beginnings of dual power in society as a whole. In order to defend each and every gain from the inevitable attacks of the capitalists the working class can, through transitional demands, be won to taking this road.
In that sense workers’ control at both a primitive level (over hiring and firing, for example, in a single factory) and an advanced level, (by forcing throughout society the abolition of business secrecy, and the right to veto all plans of the bosses) has the capacity to transform the most basic defensive struggles (against unemployment, for better pay) into offensive struggles leading inexorably towards the creation of a dual power situation. But for this to happen the demands must have an internal logic and interconnection. They are a system of demands, which can only achieve the goal of taking the working class to the threshold of revolution on the condition that they are actually fought for by significant sections of the class and that in the course of that struggle, the demands are extended up to and including the fight for a workers’ government. At the point where the working class, or its vanguard, are fighting in this manner, the transitional programme will be transformed into the programme of soviet power and the dictatorship of the proletariat:
‘Dual power in its turn is the culminating point of the transitional period. Two regimes, the bourgeois and the proletariat, are irreconcilably opposed to each other. Conflict between them is inevitable. The fate of society depends on the outcome.’46
The struggle for transitional demands, therefore, has an integral logic. Each demand has as its essence this logic of propelling the working class further along the road towards revolution. If they are fought for then ‘ever more openly and decisively they will by directed against the very foundations of the bourgeois regime’.47 for this reason it would be profoundly wrong to fetishise the fight for one particular transitional slogan, and conduct that fight irrespective of objective conditions. Transitional slogans, if they are to fulfil their purpose of compelling the proletariat to make ever deeper inroads on capitalism, cannot be used in a timeless fashion. They are rooted first and foremost in actual conditions. The demand for a sliding scale of wages is a case in point. This is nowhere to be found in the Action Programme for France. To those who reverence the TP without either understanding it or being able to creatively develop it, this appears simply to be an oversight. Thus, an article in the old Workers Socialist League’s journal, Trotskyism Today, argued:
‘The Programme of Action in many respects exactly anticipates demands of the Transitional Programme four years later—though the sliding scale of wages and sliding scale of hours were not included and appear not to have been thought of in 1934.’ 48
This is a light minded comment. The sliding scale of hours, while not expressed via that phrase, can be found in the demands of the healthy Comintern and RILU. Workers’ control of hours worked was how it was expressed. As for the sliding scale of wages, it was a demand pioneered in the German communist movement as early as 1923. However—undoubtedly Trotsky did not include it for the simple reason that it was not of central relevance in the given concrete circumstances. Whether or not it had been ‘thought of’ is totally beside the point. It was not relevant. As such it would not have generalised the working class struggle on the wages front. Inflation was not the common grievance of the working class. It could not have been mobilised in a struggle against capitalism around such a demand at that time. Trotsky gives us a fairly obvious reason why not: ‘Brutal deflation is the first step in the plan of the French capitalists.’ 49
In addition if this demand is dislocated from its workers’ control element (the workers’ cost of living index and workers’ and housewives’ committee) it loses its transitional element. It becomes merely partial demand, an immediate reform. And if a situation of monetary stability and low inflation obtains, it will do very little to either mobilise the working class at all let alone generalise a mobilisation of the class. Capitalism could (and has in Italy and Belgium) granted forms of sliding scale which in periods of low inflation do not advance the class towards the socialist revolution. Of course, defence of these sliding scales in a period of crisis and high inflation can become the starting point for transforming the struggle into one for workers’ control. For this reason to have advanced this slogan in the major capitalist powers of Europe or the USA in the period of the long boom, when inflation was relatively insignificant, would have been a departure from Trotsky’s transitional method. He advanced the slogan in the TP not as a universal panacea but as an action slogan for a period characterised by the threat of an enormous leap in prices:
‘Against a bounding rise in prices which with the approach of war will assume an ever more unbridled character, one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages.’50
The SWP(GB), on the other hand, will counter that in periods where insignificant inflation exists the demand is wrong. This is only half-true. It is inappropriate for such periods, but it should not be junked altogether and forever driven out of the party’s programme. In fact the SWP(GB) hate it at all times because it is a transitional demand, because it challenges trade union reformism. The SWP(GB) opposed the demand in Britain in the 1970s when inflation made it once again timely. Their hostility was rooted in their economism. They wrongly believed that the sliding scale would dampen wage militancy which was, for them, the one and only road to socialist consciousness. The idea that wage militancy could be transformed through a fight to give workers protection against inflation, without at all limiting their demands for additional rises, was anathema to the SWP(GB). Indeed their opposition to the demand became quite infantile. One of their ‘big’ theoreticians, John Molyneux, warned against the demand ‘. . . because it precludes wage claims that exceed price rises.’51
How? Nowhere in the TP does Trotsky say to workers thou shalt not strike for increases in excess of the current retail price index! It merely seeks to direct militancy from the plane of piecemeal demands on the boss for lump sum rises to a higher plane in which workers are challenging the right of the capitalists to use inflation to encroach upon their living standards. Trotsky says that the workers ‘must defend their mouthful of bread, if they cannot increase or better it’.52 In no sense should this be read as a warning against high wage demands. Indeed Trotsky adds:
‘There is neither the need nor the opportunity to enumerate here those separate, partial demands which time and again arise on the basis of concrete circumstances—national, local, trade union.’ 53
Clearly the objective conditions determined the use and revolutionary significance of the slogan. The same rule applies to all of the principal transitional slogans.
Pedagogic tasks
Taking objective conditions as his starting point was vital for Trotsky to combat another danger. As well as a wooden counterposing of transitional to immediate demands, Trotsky had to combat tendencies to limit programme to the existing consciousness of the masses. He tirelessly stressed the need to take into account the consciousness (backward or otherwise) of the working class in explaining transitional demands, in adapting them to specific situations. However, he argued that these fundamentally pedagogic considerations could not form the starting point in formulating the central tasks that the party had to arm the proletariat to fulfil. That is, the actual demands in the programme had to correspond to the acute social and political crisis of the world at the end of the 1930s. This objective criterion requires of revolutionaries that they advance demands that are necessary rather than ones which revolutionaries gauge as being possible because of the backward consciousness of a particular working class:
‘Our tasks don’t depend on the mentality of the workers. The task is to develop the mentality of the workers. That is what the programme should formulate and present before the advanced workers. Some will say: good, the programme is a scientific programme; it corresponds to the objective situation—but if the workers won’t accept this programme, it will be sterile. Possibly. But this signifies only that the workers will be crushed, since the crisis can’t be solved in any other way but by the socialist revolution.’54
This spells out clearly that the job of revolutionaries is to lead the workers not to politically adapt to their state of consciousness which in any case is not a fixed or stable thing but undergoes leaps and transformations brought on by crisis and struggle. Transitional demands have to be fought for if they are objectively necessary even though they may appear too advanced in relation to the consciousness of workers at the time:
‘But we cannot adapt the programme to the backward mentality of the workers; the mentality, the mood is a secondary factor—the prime factor is the objective situation.’55
A vexed question that always arises with young revolutionaries and which inveterate centrists can never answer is whether transitional demands can be realised under capitalism. The short answer is no. Because of their inbuilt challenge to the profit logic and mastery of the capitalists over production they are unrealisable as a stable and permanent gain under capitalism. But neither are they simply ‘impossible’ or utopian demands. If they were then they would be unable to address current problems and would be unable to win the allegiance of workers who did not already fully realise the necessity of abolishing capitalism.
Like other serious immediate demands, capitalists can be forced to concede one or another of them temporarily or partially if the working class is strong enough and is threatening the whole system with its actions. Concessions stemming from the struggle for transitional demands can increase workers’ confidence and lead to an offensive struggle. Their successful realisation depends precisely on broadening the struggle to ever wider layers of the working class and interlinking the transitional, immediate and democratic demands until the question of the necessity of a workers’ government to realise them is grasped by the ‘multi-millioned masses’. Organisationally this must be expressed in the massive growth of the influence of the revolutionary party and the creation of soviet-type organs of struggle.
The question of any one demand being realisable or unrealisable, practical or unpractical does not arise in the abstract metaphysical way that this question is usually put. The fate of each separate demand will be settled in the course of struggle. The system of demands will however only be realised by the destruction of bourgeois political and economic power. Lenin, in dealing with the same problem in relation to certain minimum demands, outlined the correct method of dealing with this question. In a letter to Radek in 1910 he argued:
‘The criteria of what is “impractical” within the framework of capitalism should not be taken in the sense that the bourgeoisie will not allow it, that it cannot be achieved etc. In that sense very many demands in our minimum programme are “impractical”, but are none the less obligatory.’56
In dealing with transitional demands Trotsky echoed this point, making clear that these demands were not meant to be a means of ‘tricking’ the workers into socialist struggle, but a means of mobilising them for their vital needs:
‘Not one of our demands will be realised under capitalism. That is why we are calling them transitional demands. It creates a bridge to the mentality of the workers and then a material bridge to the socialist revolution. The whole question is how to mobilise the masses for struggle . . . The revolutionaries always consider that the reforms and acquisitions are only a by-product of revolutionary struggle. If we say that we will only demand what they can give, the ruling class will only give one tenth or more of what we demand. When we demand more and can improve our demands, the capitalists are compelled to give the maximum. The more extended and militant the spirit of the workers, the more is demanded and won. They are not sterile slogans; they are a means of pressure on the bourgeoisie, and will give the greatest possible material results immediately.’57
A world programme
The Transitional Programme was a programme for the Fourth International. It was based on the contradictions of world capitalism, the crisis of the Stalinist regime and the experiences of the international proletariat. The opening lines indicate the basis from which the programme starts: ‘The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterised by a historical crisis of leadership’.58
The opening sections are heavily oriented to the problems of revolutionary strategy within the trade unions. Their focus is towards mobilising the workers for a break with established trade union and reformist leaders. Clearly the most immediate (thought not exclusive) field of application for such policies was in the countries where trade union bureaucracies and reformist apparatuses were the decisive obstacles to revolution—the imperialist heartlands. In the discussions of the programme that Trotsky held with SWP(US) members this emphasis is apparent. However, Trotsky goes on to examine the relationship of the trade union oriented transitional demands to democratic demands that have a burning significance for the semi-colonial world. The depth of Trotsky’s grasp of the internationalist nature of the communist programme is revealed in the manner in which he develops the link between democratic and transitional demands. His theory of Permanent Revolution, based as it was on an understanding of the uneven but combined character of development in the imperialist epoch, enabled him to combine the democratic programme and the transitional programme, where the Stalinists and nationalists alike counterposed democracy to socialism:
‘Democratic slogans, transitional demands and the problems of the socialist revolution are not divided into separate historical epochs in this struggle, but stem directly from one another.’59
In particular, it was the experience of the revolutions in Russia, Spain and China that enabled Trotsky to concretely demonstrate how the tasks of the democratic revolution are indissolubly linked with those of the socialist revolution. Trotsky argued that the weight given to democratic demands depended on the degree of backwardness in a particular country, and on the extent of the strength of democratic aspirations. His starting point in raising democratic demands was to solidarise not with the illusions that the masses harboured in bourgeois democracy but with what was progressive about the aspiration (the yearning for freedom of speech and assembly, the right to organise trade unions and political parties). By taking up these demands in conditions where the bourgeoisie refused them or at best used them in a deceitful manner a bridge to transitional and socialist demands could be opened. This is what Trotsky meant when he called for a transitional democratic programme in China, for example. The method of utilising democratic demands in this transitional fashion—enshrined in the programme—was anticipated by Trotsky’s use of the call for a constituent assembly (Cortes) in Spain:
‘The masses of the city and countryside can be united at the present time only under democratic slogans. These include the election of a constituent Cortes on the basis of universal, equal, direct and secret suffrage. I do not think that in the present situation you can avoid this slogan. Soviets are as yet non-existent. The Spanish workers—not to speak of the peasants—do not know what soviets are; at any rate not from their own experiences. Nevertheless, the struggle around the Cortes in the coming period will constitute the whole political life of the country. To counterpose the slogan of soviets, under these circumstances to the slogan of the Cortes, would be incorrect.
On the other hand, it will obviously be possible to build soviets in the near future only by mobilising the masses on the basis of democratic slogans. This means: to prevent the monarchy from convening a false, deceptive, conservative Cortes; and so that this Cortes can give land to the peasants, and do many other things, workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ soviets must be created to fortify the positions of the toiling masses.’60
This method of combining democratic demands with transitional ones, stands in stark contrast to the positions of degenerate Trotskyism today in Latin America, Africa and Asia. They interpret Trotsky’s reference to arming workers with a democratic programme as a ‘primary step’61 to mean the fight for democracy as a distinct stage. Thus they mimic the Stalinist stages theory. The sense of Trotsky’s talk of a ‘primary step’ is clear from the reference above to Spain. A revolutionary fight for the democratic programme can, in certain circumstances, be the first step towards the programme of Soviets. But this step can only be made if the fight for soviets is linked to the struggle for democracy. Neither Trotsky nor Lenin in 1917 before October abandoned the call for the constituent assembly, even while at the same time calling for all power to be placed in the hands of the Soviets. This position reflected the combined tasks of the Russian Revolution, not counterposed stages of that revolution.
The international scope of the TP is equally evident in the section on the USSR. Trotsky elaborates a clear programme aimed at overthrowing the bureaucracy. This section was of vital importance in countering those in the FI who saw political revolution as a mere self-reform process by sections of the bureaucracy. Trotsky made clear that ‘. . . the chief political task in the USSR still remains the overthrow of this same Thermidorian bureaucracy’.62
Trotsky’s programme was prescient in identifying the struggle against social inequality and political oppression as the starting point of political revolution. Hungary and Poland both demonstrate the correctness of his prediction. However, the lack of experience of actual political revolutionary crises necessarily limited Trotsky’s ability to elaborate detailed tactics and demands. He could only begin to elaborate a programme. Once again the actual experiences of the post-war period, in East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and, most recently Poland, oblige us to go further. It is proof of the bankruptcy of the FI’s fragments that they emptied Trotsky’s programme of its revolutionary kernel and went backwards to a reform perspective. For their part the Cliffites, with the theory of State Capitalism, abandoned the programme of political revolution altogether. For them there is only the perspective of a new February 1917, a spontaneous democratic revolution. As Cliff puts it:
‘The spontaneous revolution, in smashing the iron heel of the Stalinist bureaucracy, will open the field for the free activity of all the parties, tendencies and groups in the working class. It will be the first chapter in the victorious proletarian revolution.’63
The land of the first successful workers’ revolution must return to chapter one—bourgeois democracy—before the transition to socialism can be effected. The transitional method is abandoned and its place is taken by spontaneism—a position every bit as fatalist and prostrate before the objective process as that taken by the principal fragments of the FI that the Cliffites claimed to be opposing.
Re-elaborating the Transitional Programme
In our book, The Death Agony of the Fourth International and the Tasks of Trotskyists Today, we stated that our objective was the re-foundation of a revolutionary international on the basis of a re-elaborated programme. As we have seen regular re-elaborations of the programme have taken place in the Marxist tradition. The method lodged in the Communist Manifesto was retained in the TP. But Trotsky did not simply reprint the Manifesto because it was, at a methodological level, still valid. He re-elaborated it. He encompassed new developments, new perspectives and a new balance sheet of the class struggle in his programme. This is entirely Marxist. Yet our call to do just the same fifty years on from when the TP was written, has been greeted with horror and dismay by a miscellany of centrist groups that originated from the FI. How dare we propose to tamper with a text, which for them, has become a holy icon! For us the programme must be a guide to action. For them it is something to look at, admire and perhaps even worship. We say clearly that just as Trotsky declared the Communist Manifesto to be his programme, and just as he re-elaborated it to fit new circumstances, so we say the TP is our programme and we simply intend to re-elaborate it for the period we face.
For us the need for re-elaboration stems from several factors. The first and most straightforward, is that it was not complete. Anyone who thinks it was should consider Trotsky’s own remarks about the programme. When the SWP(US) National Committee hesitated in adopting the programme Trotsky re-assured them that it was a general ‘working hypothesis’ that ‘can and surely will be modified in the fire of experience’64. He even offered it as a basis for discussion with the French PSOP led by the centrist Marceau Pivert, inviting the latter to submit amendments. And in his discussions of the programme with the SWP(US) leaders he insisted:
‘The draft programme is not a complete programme . . . The programme is only the first approximation. It is too general in the sense in which it is presented to the international conference in the next period.’65
He believed it lacked a precise enough analysis of the contemporary stage of imperialism and its contradictions and developments. He knew full well it lacked precise slogans for establishing and consolidating of the proletarian dictatorship. He recognised that ‘peculiar conditions in each country and even in each part of the country’,66 would affect the particular focus of the programme when applied in a given nation. In short, Trotsky signalled the areas where he felt further development was necessary.
The first point, concerning the imperialist epoch, is decisive for any re-elaboration of the programme. This is because the lack of this analysis disarmed Trotsky’s followers after the war when his prognoses for acute and prolonged economic crisis failed to materialise, at least in the imperialist heartlands. Trotsky’s perspective as we have seen under-estimated the economic strength of US imperialism.
But not only do we have Trotsky’s own admitted shortcomings that require work from us in the development of the programme, we also have to overcome the distortions of the programme by the centrists. The final factor that renders re-elaboration necessary is the profound changes and their effects on the class struggle and its major protagonists (reformists, nationalists, centrists and revolutionists) that have occured in the last fifty years. The problems of imperialism in the aftermath of its long boom, the complexities of the struggles in the imperialised world, the effects of its own expansion on Stalinism, the flowering of movements of the oppressed and so on, all have to be encompassed in a re-elaborated programme.
This task would have been considerably easier had not revolutionary continuity been shattered. Had Trotsky‘s epigones re-elaborated his programme in the 1950s many of the difficulties we face today would not exist. And such re-elaboration was possible. In the imperialist countries, where the boom engendered relative social peace, Trotsky’s warning that a strategic retreat might prove necessary should have warned and encouraged the next generation of Trotskyists. It would have encouraged them that, even in the conditions of boom and the isolation of revolutionaries, they could retreat to dealing with a lower level of class struggle, but in a revolutionary manner. Retreat need not mean revision. That retreat, in the face of a capitalist boom, should not have been a retreat back to the minimum programme. It should have looked at the tasks of building opposition inside the trade unions to the reformist bureaucracies. It should have meant developing the tactic of the rank and file movement—the revolutionary use of the united front in the unions—so as to be able to seize every opportunity to exact new gains from the capitalists, encroaching upon their control in the workplace and weakening the ability of the bureaucrats to play their role as lieutenants of capital inside the labour movement. Yet the TP’s call for ‘independent militant organisations’ was left as a dead letter.
The failure to carry out a ‘strategic retreat’ for the imperialist countries by formulating a policy for the unions was mirrored by the failure to re-elaborate the programme to deal with the resurgence of reformism. The TP deals with reformism—in both its social democratic and Stalinist garb—at a very general level. Trotsky firmly believed its death knell had been sounded. He did not feel the need to repeat the tactics towards it any detail. Yet after the war in Britain, Italy, France and West Germany reformism played a vital role in facilitating the stabilisation of capitalism. It saved capitalism and itself. In place of the Transitional Programme’s general denunciation of reformism a programme of action utilising the tactics of the united front was required. Instead, the FI’s fragments in imperialist Europe simply saw every current of left reformism is evidence of Trotsky’s prediction that reformism as a whole was disintegrating. At the level of tactics all the fragments, to one degree or another, capitulated to left reformism, hailing it as centrist or assimilating themselves to it as its left wing.
These failures to develop the programme inevitably disarmed the centrist groupings which originated from the FI. In Belgium 1961 and France 1968 the cost of either abandoning or distorting the transitional method proved to be a tendency to accommodate to the labour and trade union bureaucracy or a tendency to simply tail the workers’ struggles in the hope that they would spontaneously overcome their illusions in that bureaucracy. The same tendencies manifested themselves when the developments of movements of the oppressed (women, blacks, lesbians and gays) developed. With no real point of reference in the Transitional Programme and blind to its methods, the centrists practiced liquidationism or economism.
In the semi-colonies the development of the programme to relate to the rise of petit bourgeois nationalist movements was required. Bolivia in 1952 provided a test case.67 The problem of soviets, of the workers’ and peasants’ government, of workers’ control and the relationship of democratic and transitional demands, could have been rendered precise. The tactics and strategy of Trotskyism, however, were unceremoniously dumped by the epigones. The programme was ignored, not enriched.
And, in the degenerate workers’ states, the need to develop the programme of political revolution was demonstrated by the regular explosions of rebellion against the Stalinist rulers. But here too the foundation stones laid by Trotsky were dynamited, not built upon. Instead fractions of the bureaucracy were tailed.
The crisis of leadership has, in the latter part of the twentieth century, seen a further development. The collapse of the FI means that centrism stands as the major alternative for workers breaking with reformism. The forces of revolutionary communism are a tiny minority. They lack numbers, resources, theoreticians of the stature of Trotsky and many things beside. But these forces exist. Under the banner of the MRCI they are fighting. True, today we must largely fight with the weapons of criticism. In transcending this stage and in overcoming the obstacles we do possess one vital weapon—Trotsky’s revolutionary method. Enshrined in the Transitional Programme are all the answers for us in re-elaborating that programme to meet the new period of social and economic crisis that imperialism has plunged into. By tearing away the shrouds that centrism wrapped Trotskyism’s real method and programme in, we can compensate for all weaknesses. We can prepare our cadre, root ourselves in the class struggle and accumulate experience. We can march forward confidently and produce the new programme, on the shoulders of each previous Marxist programme, especially the TP. And in so doing we will build the new International and new parties that are so desperately needed. In doing so we heed Trotsky’s words:
‘The significance of the programme is the significance of the party . . . Now what is the party? In what does the cohesion exist? This cohesion is a common understanding of the events, of the tasks; and this common understanding—that is the programme of the party. Just as modern workers cannot work without tools any more than the barbarians could, so in the party the programme is the instrument.’68
With such a programme we can arm the working class with a strategy to despatch capitalism into the rubbish bin of history.
Endnotes
1 Leon Trotsky, The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (TP), (New York 1977)—all future references to the Transitional Programme and discussions on it are to this edition.
2 Ibid, p111
3 Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson, Against the Stream, (London 1986) p183
4 Leon Trotsky, The Crisis in the French Section, (New York 1977) p119
5 Leon Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, (Harmondsworth 1975) p40
6 Leon Trotsky, Whither France?, (London 1974) p50
7 Leon Trotsky, TP, p172
8 Leon Trotsky, Writings 1937-38 (W 37-38), (New York 1976) p284
9 Leon Trotsky, W 38-39, (New York 1974) p232
10 Leon Trotsky, W 39-40, (New York 1973) p159
11 Leon Trotsky, TP, p99
12 Leon Trotsky, W 39-40, p291
13 Leon Trotsky, W 38-39, p341
14 Leon Trotsky, TP, p112
15 Leon Trotsky, W 37-38, pp438-39
16 For a full account of the effects of this disorientation see: Workers Power/Irish Workers Group, The Death Agony of the Fourth International and the Tasks of Trotskyists Today, (London 1983)
17 James P Cannon, The Struggle for Socialism in the American Century, (New York 1977) p256
18 Ibid, p263
19 Mandel and Pablo were, with Pierre Frank, the International Secretariat which was based in Paris at that time
20 ‘The World Situation and Tasks of the Fourth International’, Fourth International , June 1948 (New York)
21 James P Cannon, op cit, pp276-77
22 See Mark Hoskisson, ‘Programme in the Imperialist Epoch’, Permanent Revolution No 6 (London 1987)
23 James P Cannon, op cit, p298
24 Duncan Hallas, ‘Against the Stream’, International Socialism 1:53, (London 1972) p39
25 John Molyneux, Leon Trotsky’s Theory of Revolution, (Brighton 1981) p179
26 Chris Bambery, ‘The Politics of James P Cannon’, International Socialism 2:36 (London 1987) p77
27 Leon Trotsky, TP, p173
28 Ibid, p111
29 John Molyneux, op cit, p185
30 Leon Trotsky, On France, (New York 1979) p200
31 Leon Trotsky, TP, pp103-04
32 ‘The Yugoslav Affair’, Fourth International December 1948, (New York) p238
33 Leon Trotsky, TP, p113
34 Documents of the Fourth International, (New York 1973) p348
35 Leon Trotsky, TP, pp113-14 (our emphasis)
36 Documents of the Fourth International, p161 (our emphasis)
37 Leon Trotsky, TP, p101
38 Workers Power, Where Next for the NUM?, (London 1985)
39 Leon Trotsky, TP, p114
40 Duncan Hallas, Trotsky’s Marxism, (London 1979) p104
41 Leon Trotsky, The Spanish Revolution, (New York 1973) p80
42 Leon Trotsky, TP, p135
43 Ibid, p102
44 Ibid, p129
45 Ibid, p122
46 Ibid, pp136-37
47 Ibid, p137
48 Workers Socialist League, Trotskyism Today No4, p5 (London 1979)
49 Leon Trotsky, Whither France?, p146
50 Ibid, p115 (our emphasis)
51 John Molyneux, op cit, p152
52 Leon Trotsky, TP, p115
53 Ibid, p115
54 Ibid, p157
55 Ibid, p176
56 V I Lenin, Collected Works Volume 36, p172 (Moscow 1966)
57 Leon Trotsky, TP, pp159-60
58 Ibid, p111
59 Ibid, p137
60 Leon Trotsky, The Spanish Revolution, p137
61 Leon Trotsky, TP, p137
62 Ibid, p145
63 Tony Cliff, State Capitalism in Russia, p264 (London 1974)
64 Leon Trotsky, W 37-38, p343
65 Leon Trotsky, TP, p173
66 Ibid, p173
67 See Workers Power, Permanent Revolution No2, (London 1984)
68 Leon Trotsky, TP, p171
Meio século se passou desde que o Programa de Transição (PT) 1 de Leon Trotsky foi escrito. Nesses cinquenta anos, muitas coisas aconteceram que o programa de Trotsky não previu nem preparou. As perspectivas de Trotsky baseavam-se na premissa de que "as forças produtivas da humanidade estagnam" .2 No entanto, nos países metropolitanos, a segunda guerra imperialista foi seguida por um boom econômico sem precedentes por quase vinte anos. Por sua vez, esse boom criou as condições para o ressurgimento do reformismo social-democrata, uma força que Trotsky acreditava que seria destruída de forma decisiva na guerra. O stalinismo também não apenas sobreviveu, mas ganhou um novo sopro de vida por meio de sua expansão na Europa Oriental e, por fim, em partes da Ásia. A condição para esses desenvolvimentos imprevistos foi a derrota do levante revolucionário que ocorreu durante a guerra na Europa. A derrota desse levante foi alcançada pela força contrarrevolucionária nas áreas ocupadas pelas Forças Armadas Soviéticas e pelo imperialismo Aliado. Foi vítima das armadilhas não menos fatais da contrarrevolução democrática em grande parte da Europa Ocidental.
É claro que, pelo menos no nível das perspectivas, a realidade do pós-guerra não correspondia ao quadro de crise generalizada e sincronizada que Trotsky havia desenhado pouco antes de sua morte. Tal desenvolvimento não é único na história do marxismo. As previsões de Marx e Engels foram, em várias ocasiões, confundidas por uma variedade de desenvolvimentos inesperados. Tudo isso nos diz que o marxismo não possui poderes místicos que garantam o cumprimento das previsões. A previsão do marxismo - sua formulação de perspectivas - é necessariamente um processo constante de avaliação e reavaliação das tendências dentro da economia, da classe dominante, da classe trabalhadora e da luta de classes. Com base em tais análises concretas, as perspectivas precisam ser formuladas e testadas. Se eles falharem no teste, eles precisam ser reformulados. O próprio Trotsky, na década de 1930,demonstrou repetidamente o método marxista de 'testar e corrigir' seus próprios programas.
O método do Programa de Transição
No final da década de 1920 teve início uma crise econômica que assolou todo o mundo capitalista. Um novo período de crise política e econômica sucedeu ao período de boom capitalista na década de 1920. A ascensão do fascismo na Alemanha, a frente popular na França, a guerra civil na Espanha, a guerra sino-japonesa, foram todas manifestações explosivas da fraqueza crônica do capitalismo mundial. A enorme profundidade, bem como a extensão mundial desta crise e os repetidos fracassos e derrotas do proletariado entre 1921 e 1933, conduziram a um novo fenômeno. Assim como os anos 1917-21 viram a fundação e o estabelecimento através da guerra civil do primeiro estado operário do mundo, a década seguinte viu sua degeneração burocrática. O Partido Comunista Russo, por meio de seu domínio do Comintern, tornou-se um instrumento de má liderança crônica dentro do movimento mundial dos trabalhadores. As políticas ultra-esquerdistas de Stalin facilitaram o triunfo de Hitler em 1933. A obstrução da frente única para combater o fascismo foi criminosa. No entanto, após a derrota, todas as seções do Comintern, sem exceção , concordaram com a visão de Stalin de que suas políticas haviam sido inteiramente corretas. Trotsky reconheceu o verdadeiro significado disso e declarou que o Comintern estava morto para a revolução. À medida que a década avançava, a experiência dos governos de frente popular na França e na Espanha revelou que o Comintern não estava simplesmente morto para a revolução. Tornou-se um instrumento para a contrarrevolução. Sob Stalin, tornou-se uma organização reformista contrarrevolucionária.
A resposta de Trotsky a esses acontecimentos foi dedicar seus anos restantes à construção da Quarta Internacional (Fourth International-FI). Essa luta passou por muitas fases. Foi conduzida contra um pano de fundo de terríveis derrotas para a classe trabalhadora. Este fato objetivo significava que ele estava constantemente nadando contra a corrente. Seus adeptos somavam apenas alguns milhares na véspera da guerra mundial.
Trotsky resistiu, ao longo da década de 1930, à tentação de curto-circuitar o processo de construção de uma internacional revolucionária por meio de qualquer compromisso na questão do programa. Enquanto sempre fazia uma tentativa séria de ganhar elementos de centro-esquerda (o Bloco dos Quatro, o ILP, o PSOP, o grupo Muste etc.), Trotsky sempre insistiu que eles se inscrevessem em um programa claro e revolucionário. Os centristas da época de Trotsky o acusaram de dar ultimatos sobre o programa. Ao fazê-lo, personagens como Fenner Brockway, do ILP, desprezaram atitudes "rígidas" e "dogmáticas" em relação ao programa. O que eles queriam era ser absolutamente livre para mudar seu programa à vontade. Seus princípios, suas estratégias e táticas eram tão camaleônicas, consistindo em várias adaptações às forças dominantes no movimento trabalhista, que a última coisa que eles queriam era ser obrigado a formulá-los com clareza e precisão. Brockway fulminou contra o "sectarismo" de Trotsky. Ele foi denunciado como um ditador cujo método de construir a FI era "o método artificial de impor um programa rígido e depois convidar as partes a se associarem a ele".3 Como o centrismo abomina um programa rígido - isto é, definido.
Trotsky nunca se desviou de seu curso. Ele acreditava que a FI deveria se distanciar do reformismo e do centrismo em virtude de seu programa. Somente se tivesse um programa revolucionário seria capaz de enfrentar a crise que estava engolfando o mundo. Somente com um programa firme poderia seguir um curso regular, apesar de ser pequeno e trabalhar em condições objetivas profundamente desfavoráveis. Durante o período da tática de entrismo na França, quando a maioria dos trotskistas franceses entrou no SFIO (Partido Socialista) como uma facção organizada, ele castigou fortemente aqueles, como Raymond Molinier, que sacrificaram o programa por ganhos ilusórios do momento. Ele atacou o 'jornal de massa' La Commune de Molinier e Frank e disse-lhes:
'Programa primeiro! “Mass Paper”? Ação revolucionária? Reagrupamento? Comunas em todos os lugares? . . . muito bem, muito bem. . . Mas programa primeiro! Seus passaportes políticos, por favor, cavalheiro! E não falsos, por favor - verdadeiros! Se você não tiver nenhum, então diminua o ritmo! ' 4
Trotsky começou a desenvolver suas ideias sobre o que era esse programa, intervindo na luta de classes com base marxista. Só dessa forma as ideias poderiam ser testadas na prática e, em seguida, codificadas em um programa. O período anterior a 1938, quando a agonia de morte do capitalismo e as tarefas da Quarta Internacional - o Programa de Transição - foi escrito, viu Trotsky elaborar os elementos-chave do programa marxista voltados para o período que estava vivendo.
A Oposição de Esquerda aprendera com o Partido Bolchevique em 1917 e com o saudável Comintern que os slogans de transição eram essenciais. Em particular, a centralidade do controle dos trabalhadores foi reconhecida por Trotsky. Enquanto os stalinistas durante o Terceiro Período ultra-esquerdista contrapuseram a luta pelo poder à luta pelo controle, Trotsky concebeu esta última como uma ponte para a primeira. Ou seja, ele reconheceu que se uma verdadeira luta pelo controle fosse lançada e fosse de alguma forma bem-sucedida, os trabalhadores seriam compelidos a ir mais longe:
'Sob a influência da crise, do desemprego e das manipulações predatórias dos capitalistas, a classe trabalhadora em sua maioria pode estar pronta para lutar pela abolição do sigilo comercial e pelo controle dos bancos, comércio e produção antes que venha a compreender a necessidade da conquista revolucionária do poder.
Depois de tomar o caminho do controle da produção, o proletariado irá inevitavelmente avançar na direção da tomada do poder e dos meios de produção. ”5
Em um sentido importante, Trotsky estava chegando ao cerne das demandas transitórias. Demandas mínimas ou imediatas podem, sob certas condições, ser atendidas pelo capitalismo como um meio de pacificar a classe trabalhadora. As demandas transitórias, por outro lado, desde que correspondam realmente à situação objetiva, não podem ser atendidas integralmente pelo capitalismo. Caso se lute por elas e mesmo parcialmente vencidas, então elas elevam a luta de classes a um nível qualitativamente mais alto, ao mesmo tempo obrigando o proletariado a se mover cada vez mais contra os próprios fundamentos da sociedade de classes e ao mesmo tempo criando a consciência e organização capazes de uma solução socialista. Elas representam uma solução, um caminho a partir do impasse das demandas imediatas normais (reformas) e métodos de luta para outros mais eficazes, que organizam a força da classe trabalhadora para que ela desafie a própria lógica da economia capitalista, bem como o controle e direção dos capitalistas dessa economia. Contra essas demandas transitórias se colocam a 'economia política da classe trabalhadora'; produção planejada para atender às necessidades humanas. Mas o faz, não na forma de sermões estéreis de domingo sobre o socialismo, mas como uma resposta concreta a um problema concreto enfrentado pelos trabalhadores em luta.
Programa de ação de Trotsky para a França
A compreensão de Trotsky do método alojado nas demandas transitórias foi revelada pela crise que se desenvolveu na França em 1934. O Comintern, durante sua fase ultra-esquerdista, condenou as demandas imediatas e transitórias como oportunistas. Tudo foi reduzido à questão do poder. À medida que avançava em direção à frente popular, inverteu sua posição anterior e contrapôs as demandas imediatas na França, à questão do poder. Em ambos os casos, abandonou o método de transição de relacionar as necessidades do momento com a luta pelo poder. Trotsky mostrou como, de fato, as demandas transitórias tinham, em virtude da escala da crise, se tornado de relevância imediata. Elas correspondiam às necessidades urgentes das massas no nível imediato e, além disso, a própria questão do poder estava se tornando uma questão urgente e imediata:
'A tese marxista geral,' As reformas sociais são apenas subprodutos da luta revolucionária ', tem na época do declínio do capitalismo a importância mais imediata e ardente. Os capitalistas podem ceder algo aos trabalhadores somente se eles forem ameaçados com o perigo de perder tudo.
No entanto, mesmo as maiores “concessões” de que o capitalismo contemporâneo - ele mesmo em um beco sem saída - for capaz são completamente insignificantes em comparação com a miséria das massas e a profundidade da crise social. É por isso que a mais imediata de todas as reivindicações deve ser a expropriação dos capitalistas e a nacionalização (socialização) dos meios de produção. Mas essa demanda é irrealizável sob o domínio da burguesia? Isso mesmo! É por isso que devemos tomar o poder. ' 6
Da mesma forma, as mobilizações armadas das gangues fascistas colocaram como uma necessidade imediata o armamento do proletariado para proteger suas organizações existentes. Claro, uma classe trabalhadora armada é incompatível com a existência do capitalismo por qualquer período de tempo. A agudeza da crise social tornou as demandas que levaram as massas ao limiar da revolução uma necessidade imediata. A velha ordem da sociedade estava entrando em colapso. As massas estavam preparadas para lutar, mas uma liderança traiçoeira os deixou passivos e confusos e abriu o caminho para a derrota. Em um sentido importante, isso é o que Trotsky considerava uma situação pré-revolucionária. A velha ordem desmorona, mas a crise de liderança na classe trabalhadora impede que as massas explorem as rachaduras na classe dominante, os impede de reunir ao seu lado as classes e camadas intermediárias confusas e desesperadas. As demandas transitórias são cruciais como todo um sistema de demandas voltado para resolver esta crise de liderança, mobilizando a classe trabalhadora em um programa que o introduz ao socialismo, o separa dos traidores e os leva a buscar uma nova liderança nos trotskistas.
Um dos primeiros exemplos desse método sendo aplicado foi o Programa de Ação para a França de 1934. Este foi um programa de transição fortemente focado na situação pré-revolucionária na França. Soou o alarme contra o perigo fascista. Descreveu o método pelo qual a burguesia francesa estava atacando a classe trabalhadora - deflação e desemprego. Ele contrapôs a esses perigos um programa de medidas de controle dos trabalhadores e formas de organização que desafiava os fundamentos da sociedade capitalista. Procurou mobilizar ao lado do proletariado os setores progressistas da pequena burguesia e não se esquivou de exigir a erradicação de todos os vestígios de bonapartismo da constituição burguesa. O Programa de Ação é um modelo desse tipo. Mas os modelos não existem para serem copiados cegamente, mas para serem aplicados criativamente a uma situação concreta. Se alguém dissesse hoje que o Programa de Ação é 'válido hoje', as pessoas sensatas iriam considerá-lo um tanto louco. Não foi atemporal. Ao consagrar o método transicional, aplicou-o a uma conjuntura particular. Esse método foi transportado para o PT em um período diferente
O Programa de Transição-PT
O primeiro esboço do PT foi concluído por Trotsky na primavera de 1938. Ele foi escrito após extensas discussões com líderes do Partido Socialista dos Trabalhadores dos Estados Unidos (SWP (EUA)), incluindo James Cannon. Trotsky considerou isso como uma codificação, um somatório da experiência e lições do período anterior e uma codificação da resposta da Oposição de Esquerda / FI aos eventos daquele período. Como disse o próprio Trotsky, "É a soma do trabalho coletivo até hoje" .7
Tal soma era vital para garantir que a experiência passada e as perspectivas futuras fossem generalizadas para toda a FI (em oposição apenas à seção francesa). Era uma nova versão da Seção II do Manifesto Comunista:
“É necessário fazer um resumo das demandas concretas e precisas, como o controle operário da indústria em oposição à tecnocracia. . . Uma série de medidas de transição que correspondem à fase do capitalismo monopolista e da ditadura do proletariado com uma seção correspondente aos países coloniais e semicoloniais. Preparamos esse documento. Corresponde à parte do Manifesto Comunista de Marx e Engels que eles próprios declararam desatualizada. Está apenas parcialmente desatualizado, parcialmente é muito bom e deve ser substituído por nossa conferência.'8
E como o do Manifesto, o PT consistia em partes constituintes inter-relacionadas. Para entender o todo, devemos entender essas partes e sua relação umas com as outras.
Como o grande Manifesto, o programa de Trotsky é baseado em uma perspectiva de curto prazo de crise aguda. Trotsky, reconhecendo que a época imperialista significava crises cada vez mais profundas e violentas, foi catastrófico em suas previsões. Ele entendeu perfeitamente que o resultado de quase uma década de crise capitalista seria uma guerra imperialista. Ele estava absolutamente certo nessas previsões. Aqueles que acusam Trotsky de "catastrofismo" parecem não reconhecer que a Segunda Guerra Mundial mergulhou a humanidade em uma enorme catástrofe. O armamento convencional deixou milhões de mortos e mutilados. Economias nacionais inteiras foram devastadas. Tal foi a escala da catástrofe que Trotsky brilhantemente previu em seu programa.
Mas a perspectiva de Trotsky não era simplesmente uma catástrofe geral. Foi mais detalhado do que isso, levando em consideração os problemas específicos enfrentados por determinados países capitalistas e aqueles que enfrentam o stalinismo. Trotsky incorporou no PT a perspectiva de que o capitalismo estava muito mais fraco do que no início da Primeira Guerra Mundial. A própria fraqueza do capitalismo significava, na visão de Trotsky, que uma crise revolucionária traria o colapso de todo o sistema capitalista. No início de 1939, ele argumentou: 'Sim, não tenho dúvidas de que a nova guerra mundial provocará com absoluta inevitabilidade a revolução mundial e o colapso do sistema capitalista' .9 Novamente em 1940, ele afirmou: 'O sistema capitalista está em um beco sem saída. Sem uma reconstrução completa do sistema económico à escala europeia e mundial, a nossa civilização está condenada.'10
Ele também não isentou os EUA dessa perspectiva. Trotsky mais uma vez previu corretamente que Roosevelt levaria seu país à guerra. Ele acreditava que o imperialismo dos EUA era tão fraco internamente quanto o capitalismo europeu. Portanto, estaria sujeito a um colapso e crise revolucionária semelhantes aos que a Europa enfrenta:
“As contradições internas do capitalismo americano - a crise e o desemprego - são incomparavelmente mais maduras para uma revolução do que a consciência dos trabalhadores americanos. . . Sabemos que as condições subjetivas - a consciência das massas, o crescimento do partido revolucionário - não são um fator fundamental. '11
Os outros dois elementos da análise de Trotsky foram seu reconhecimento de que a revolução colonial seria provocada em uma escala cada vez mais ampla pela guerra, e sua crença de que a sobrevivência da URSS como um estado operário estava condicionada a uma revolução política. Mais uma vez, Trotsky previu corretamente o ataque nazista quando os burocratas presunçosos do Kremlin imaginaram que o Pacto Molotov-Ribbentrop havia expulsado o lobo da porta:
'Apenas a derrubada da camarilha totalitária de Moscou, apenas a regeneração da democracia soviética pode liberar as forças do povo soviético para a luta contra o golpe inevitável e que se aproxima rapidamente da Alemanha imperialista.”12
Sem uma revolução política, Trotsky previu apenas o colapso e a restauração do capitalismo. Além disso, ele pensava que, se o capitalismo sobrevivesse à catástrofe, seria apenas com base em sua transformação em um regime totalitário, ou em uma série de regimes. Essas perspectivas estavam longe de serem fantasiosas. Mas não eram, e não podiam ser, profecias exatas. Elas eram hipóteses. O próprio Trotsky reconheceu isso: 'O prognóstico político é apenas uma hipótese de trabalho. Deve ser constantemente verificado, tornado mais preciso, trazido para mais perto da realidade.”13
Como tal, foram concebidos para orientar a FI para o período imediatamente confrontado com eles. Esse período era, na opinião de Trotsky, provavelmente um período pré-revolucionário prolongado. Trotsky, ao contrário de seus discípulos, foi preciso em sua definição de por que o período era pré-revolucionário e o que era necessário para torná-lo revolucionário:
“A economia, o estado, a política da burguesia e suas relações internacionais estão completamente arruinados por uma crise social característica de um estado pré-revolucionário da sociedade. O principal obstáculo no caminho da transformação do pré-revolucionário é o caráter oportunista da direção proletária. . . As massas multitudinárias entram repetidamente na estrada da revolução. Mas, a cada vez, elas são bloqueadas por suas próprias máquinas burocráticas conservadoras. ”14
Esta é a compreensão de Trotsky da crise da liderança proletária nas vésperas da guerra. Na situação pré-revolucionária, as massas - particularmente na Europa - haviam entrado no caminho da revolução. As lutas dos trabalhadores franceses e espanhóis não foram de caráter puramente seccional, econômico ou episódico. Foram lutas generalizadas prenhes de potencial revolucionário. A característica específica da crise da direção proletária naquela época era a capacidade das antigas direções de impedir que esse potencial se realizasse. Os stalinistas e a social-democracia mostraram sua capacidade de traição na França e na Espanha em 1936 e 1937. Ao mesmo tempo, as forças do trotskismo eram fracas demais para serem desafiadas pela liderança. Na opinião de Trotsky, o potencial para resolver essa crise de liderança existia no curto prazo. O corolário político de sua análise da crise foi que ela provocaria o colapso do stalinismo e da social-democracia precisamente no momento em que as massas seriam impelidas, mais uma vez, a entrar no caminho da luta revolucionária. Para Trotsky, portanto, era vital armar a FI com os meios para aproveitar a luta revolucionária e a decadência das antigas direções. Era necessária uma virada decisiva para o movimento de massa, com o próprio PT sendo o meio para levar as seções da FI à cabeça do movimento de massa: 'Doravante, a Quarta Internacional fica frente a frente com as tarefas do movimento de massa. O Programa de Transição é um reflexo dessa importante virada.”
Essas perspectivas eram de curto a médio prazo, não de época - uma questão de anos, não décadas ou meio século. Eles se aplicavam ao período - o período pré-revolucionário - que Trotsky confrontou. O início e o fim de tal período são determinados por eventos históricos mundiais. Pode-se dizer que o período em que Trotsky baseou suas perspectivas, grosso modo, começou com a vitória de Hitler e terminou com a vitória do imperialismo norte-americano no final da Segunda Guerra Mundial. Para aquele período, as perspectivas de Trotsky eram realistas - avaliavam a enormidade da crise que a humanidade enfrentava - e repletas de otimismo revolucionário. Ou seja, eles contavam, do lado subjetivo, com a vontade da FI - incorporada em seu programa - de resolver aquela crise de forma revolucionária. No contexto de 1938, ter avançado qualquer outra perspectiva que a de Trotsky para o triunfo proletário teria sido apenas uma desculpa para traição ou abstencionismo.
Essas perspectivas exigiram ampla modificação após a guerra. O boom dos países imperialistas, as lutas nacionais na Ásia, África e América Latina e a crise política revolucionária nos países onde o capitalismo foi derrubado, mas onde as burocracias stalinistas governaram, todos apresentavam um quadro diferente daquele previsto por Trotsky. Este desenvolvimento exigiu duas coisas dos marxistas. Primeiro, eles precisaram elaborar novas perspectivas nas novas condições como um meio de redirecionar seu programa. Em segundo lugar, eles precisavam fazer um balanço crítico da perspectiva do próprio Trotksy, a fim de isolar e superar quaisquer erros que estivessem contidos neles. No evento, os trotskistas do pós-guerra se mostraram incapazes de cumprir qualquer uma das tarefas.
Sua seção dirigente, o SWP (EUA), efetivamente se retirou do cenário internacional como força dirigente. Os quadros europeus e asiáticos foram dizimados na própria guerra. Na maior parte da África, o trotskismo não teve nenhuma influência, enquanto na América Latina, onde era muito mais forte, o isolamento nacional atacou todos os grupos trotskistas, deixando-os tão mal equipados quanto seus camaradas norte-americanos para desempenhar um papel de liderança dentro da FI. Os quadros que enfrentaram a tarefa de desenvolver o trotskismo eram relativamente inexperientes e, de forma preocupante, não eram líderes de partidos com um número significativo de raízes, pelo menos, em setores da classe trabalhadora. Militantes experientes e experientes, como James P Cannon, do SWP (EUA), foram incapazes ou não quiseram desempenhar o papel de liderança internacional que Trotsky teve até sua morte.
O resultado foi que a FI, sem uma liderança capaz de reelaborar o programa à luz dos novos desenvolvimentos, ficou, como um todo, profundamente desorientada por esses desenvolvimentos.16 Sobre a questão do próprio PT surgiram duas respostas. O primeiro foi manifestado por Cannon e os líderes europeus. Eles se apegaram às perspectivas contidas no PT, apesar de sua inaplicabilidade geral em grande parte do mundo após a guerra.
Cego para o impacto real da vitória militar dos EUA, para a enorme flutuabilidade econômica e para o fato de que a enorme onda de greves do pós-guerra foi burocraticamente contida, Cannon simplesmente empurrou de volta a perspectiva pré-guerra da crise, argumentando que estava prestes a acontecer. Além disso, a crise foi entendida como sendo, inevitavelmente, totalmente revolucionária. Cannon caracterizou qualquer desafio a essa visão como cético e derrotista. Foi considerado um insulto à classe trabalhadora americana sugerir que eles não estavam partindo para uma ofensiva revolucionária. A base para essa visão era um reflexo unilateral do novo domínio mundial descoberto pelos EUA. Em vez de admitir a possibilidade de recuperação econômica com base nesse domínio, Cannon insistiu em 1946:
“O cegamente em que o capitalismo mundial chegou, e os EUA com ele, exclui uma nova era orgânica de estabilização capitalista. A posição mundial dominante do imperialismo americano agora acentua e agrava a agonia de morte do capitalismo como um todo.”17
Cannon esqueceu a insistência de Lênin e Trotsky de que não há situações desesperadoras para a burguesia. Ele admitiu a possibilidade de um boom de curto prazo, mas disse que seria seguido rapidamente por uma depressão que "faria as condições de 1929-32 parecerem prósperas" .18
Na Europa, Mandel e Pablo 19 cantavam uma melodia semelhante. Suas teses sobre a situação mundial em 1948 continham a mesma fé fatalista no prognóstico de Trotsky. Eles falaram da boca para fora sobre o 'equilíbrio instável' que prevalecia, mas argumentaram:
“O sistema capitalista, em declínio e decadência, e o regime estabelecido pela burocracia soviética na URSS, acumulam e acentuam suas contradições inerentes. Eles paralisam o desenvolvimento das forças produtivas; reduzir constantemente os padrões de vida de milhões de pessoas no mundo; aumentar a pressão do Estado burocrático e policial sobre a vida social e privada, sufocando a criatividade em todos os campos; reduzir países altamente industrializados como Alemanha e Japão ao nível de colônias; e aumentar a opressão nacional. '20
Não há o menor indício de um balanço sério baseado no resultado real da guerra, nesta perspectiva. É uma paráfrase de Trotsky em 1938.
As falsas perspectivas estavam próximas. Está ligado a uma falsa compreensão da natureza do próprio PT. Os trotskistas "ortodoxos" - aqueles que fetichizaram o PT - argumentaram que o programa era voltado apenas para uma crise revolucionária real. Concluíram, portanto, que tal estado de crise era uma característica permanente da sociedade do pós-guerra. Cannon tipificou essa abordagem. Depois da guerra, ele escreveu:
'O Programa de Transição não tem nenhum significado a menos que se tenha em mente uma perspectiva revolucionária. O próprio fato de você passar do conceito de programa máximo e mínimo - isto é, o programa mínimo de pequenas mudanças diárias, o programa máximo de objetivo final de que você fala no domingo - para um programa de transição, pressupõe um desenvolvimento de natureza revolucionária, com a perspectiva de um confronto à vista. ' 21
Tendo definido os métodos de transição - tão meticulosamente desenvolvidos pelo marxismo por quase cem anos 22 - no sentido mais estreito possível, Cannon foi obrigado a ignorar a realidade do boom do pós-guerra. Sua perspectiva, durante todo um período, foi de que a recuperação econômica e a manutenção da democracia burguesa nos Estados Unidos e em grande parte da Europa ocidental foram apenas uma interrupção de curto prazo da crise. O boom e a paz social que gerou no Ocidente tornaram-se uma aberração. Em sua forma extrema, essa "ortodoxia" foi manifestada pela promoção da crise do Comitê Internacional. Os membros foram mantidos em um estado febril de expectativa pelo colapso econômico e pela crise revolucionária que estava por vir. Enquanto Gerry Healy era um expoente típico dessa visão, Cannon, em muitos aspectos, é seu autor original. Ele escreveu, depois da guerra, que a crise econômica era iminente e que havia uma correlação inevitável entre tal crise e revolução:
'Como consequência [a crise econômica] abrirá as possibilidades revolucionárias mais grandiosas nos Estados Unidos. Essa concepção deve estar na base da política e das perspectivas do nosso partido de agora em diante. ' 23
A disparidade entre a vida real e essas perspectivas grandiosas forçou o SWP (EUA) a abandonar o PT como o centro de sua propaganda e agitação a partir de 1950, enquanto insistia em que ele fosse ritualmente adorado como condição para ser admitido no rebanho 'ortodoxo' .
Contra esse tipo de análise, as facções do SWP (EUA) e do RCP britânico tentaram apresentar alternativas baseadas no reconhecimento da estabilidade que surgira na Europa Ocidental como resultado da guerra. Ted Grant, por exemplo, argumentou corretamente que uma 'contrarrevolução democrática' havia ocorrido. No entanto, essas oposições foram tratadas burocraticamente pela liderança da FI e impedidas de se transformarem em forças consideráveis e influentes.
Os Cliffitistas, desenvolvido a partir do RCP, registrou a mudança nas condições. Ao fazer isso, no entanto, eles apenas provaram a verdade da velha máxima de que pouco de aprendizado é uma coisa perigosa. Nas décadas de 1950 e 60, seu reconhecimento empírico da sobrevivência do estalinismo e do boom do capitalismo os levou a abraçar o capitalismo de estado como uma teoria para explicar a natureza de classe da URSS e sua rejeição da teoria do imperialismo de Lenin e da teoria da Revolução Permanente de Trotsky. O bebê foi jogado fora com a água do banho. Em nenhum lugar isso ficou mais claro do que em sua abordagem ao PT. Na década de 1960, Hallas, interessado em defender elementos do trotskismo, argumentou corretamente que, no Congresso da FI de 1948:'Foi necessária uma reavaliação fundamental da situação e das perspectivas do Programa de Transição. O movimento, em sua maioria, mostrou-se incapaz de cumprir essa tarefa. ”24
No entanto, longe de fazer tal reavaliação, o próprio Partido Socialista dos Trabalhadores de Cliffite da Grã-Bretanha (SWP (GB) decidiu que as perspectivas de Trotsky em 1938 estavam erradas e, portanto, o seu programa também. John Molyneux, em seu livro sobre Trotsky, coloca isso claramente :
“Assim, a caracterização do capitalismo feita por Trotsky em 1938 foi, estritamente falando, uma impressão empírica. Como tal, era particularmente vulnerável como uma previsão do futuro. Em suma, a análise econômica era a base do PT e era uma base defeituosa.”25
À primeira vista, as posições dos Cliffitistas parecem estar a um milhão de milhas de distância de Cannon. Ainda assim, em sua racionalização para rejeitar o PT, eles definem sua essência exatamente da mesma maneira que Cannon o fez. Eles argumentam que o programa só pode ser considerado relevante se houver uma crise revolucionária imediata. Essa visão, que sempre foi argumentada pela tendência de Cliff, foi expressa recentemente em um artigo, ironicamente, sobre James P Cannon. Seu autor, Chris Bambery, atacou o SWP (EUA) por se agarrar ao PT desde:
'As demandas transitórias, agindo nas palavras de Trotsky como uma ponte entre a luta pelas demandas reformistas e econômicas e a luta pelo poder - só têm significado dentro de um contexto revolucionário particular.' 26
Essa suposta crítica a Cannon soa mais como um eco de suas próprias palavras! Os Cliffitistas, portanto, rejeitaram o programa de Trotsky porque, vendo-o como relevante apenas para uma crise diretamente revolucionária, eles, ao contrário de Cannon, Healy, Mandel e Pablo et al, registraram o fato de que nenhuma crise desse tipo era iminente nos Estados Unidos e na Europa Ocidental. Na verdade, como veremos, sua própria definição unilateral do PT os levou a aprofundar seu revisionismo de uma maneira não menos prejudicial à causa do marxismo revolucionário do que a ortodoxia estéril dos "trotskistas" do pós-guerra.
Contra essas duas tendências, poderíamos argumentar que as perspectivas de Trotsky foram a base para um elemento específico do programa de ação do PT. Após a guerra, a reelaboração de ambos os elementos foi necessária. Sobre as perspectivas, deixamos claro o que pensamos ser a força do "catastrofismo" de Trotsky. Ele previu a guerra e, emergindo dela, um surto revolucionário. Ambos ocorreram. O surto revolucionário ficou evidente com mais clareza na Itália, Grécia, Vietnã, China e Iugoslávia. Reverberações muito mais fracas foram sentidas na Grã-Bretanha, na França e nos Estados Unidos.
No entanto, uma combinação de fatores, não previstos por Trotsky, fez com que a guerra e o levante revolucionário não se desenvolvessem na direção e no grau que ele esperava. O levante revolucionário ocorreu no contexto do imperialismo anglo-americano e seu aliado, a URSS, marchando pela Europa sob a bandeira do antifascismo. O stalinismo e a social-democracia foram capazes, nessas circunstâncias, de justificar o descarrilamento do levante revolucionário. Seus objetivos se limitavam à restauração da democracia burguesa. Na França e na Itália, os partidos comunistas entraram em governos de coalizão com a burguesia. Onde tais traições foram insuficientes para sufocar as lutas revolucionárias, a força bruta das Forças Armadas Soviéticas e as tropas do imperialismo Aliado foram usadas a serviço da contrarrevolução (Polônia, Grécia, Vietnã). A ausência de uma FI de massa capaz de desafiar o stalinismo e a social-democracia pela liderança no levante revolucionário foi um fator crucial para permitir que a contrarrevolução democrática ou stalinista triunfasse com relativa facilidade em comparação com a situação pós-primeira guerra mundial.
Com base nessas derrotas, o stalinismo e o imperialismo norte-americano, os verdadeiros vencedores da guerra, consolidaram suas posições e moldaram uma nova realidade do pós-guerra. A FI, no entanto, não conseguiu registrar o enorme significado do sufocamento do levante revolucionário ou das vitórias do imperialismo e do stalinismo dos Estados Unidos. Pior, suas perspectivas subestimaram ambos. Uma nova perspectiva, baseada nestes desenvolvimentos, teria que se preparar para o impacto de uma retomada econômica (mesmo que um longo boom não pudesse ser previsto) nos países imperialistas, para o desenvolvimento das lutas de libertação nacional conforme os EUA impusessem sua vontade e o Império Britânico se desintegrasse, e por revoltas contra o domínio stalinista no Leste. Na verdade, nenhuma seção da FI elaborou tais perspectivas.
Até que ponto o próprio Trotsky era culpado de desorientar seus seguidores? Trotsky reconheceu que, na esfera da economia política, tanto ele quanto a FI como um todo tinham um entendimento inadequado. Ele disse sobre a primeira seção do PT, que trata da economia mundial 'O início do Programa não está completo. O primeiro capítulo é apenas uma sugestão e não uma expressão completa'.27
O problema é que, apesar de reconhecer o caráter admitidamente provisório da perspectiva, o Programa de Transição é categórico em seu prognóstico econômico. Trotsky escreveu:
“O pré-requisito econômico para a revolução proletária já alcançou em geral o ponto mais alto de fruição que pode ser alcançado sob o capitalismo. As forças produtivas da humanidade se estagnam. ”28
Essa frase tem estado no centro de inúmeras disputas no movimento trotskista. Depois da guerra, quando Felix Morrow, do SWP (EUA), apontou que a afirmação de Trotsky estava se revelando falsa, ele foi fortemente denunciado como cético e derrotista. Agora, com a realidade do boom do pós-guerra atrás de nós, apenas um idiota, ou talvez um charlatão como Gerry Healy, descreveria a declaração categórica de Trotsky como correta. No entanto, rejeitamos a ideia de que o erro de Trotsky decorra de uma metodologia objetivista e fatalista de sua parte. Essa acusação - feita contra ele por teóricos mesquinhos como John Molyneux - não se sustenta por um minuto. Molyneux argumenta que o isolamento de Trotsky o levou a colocar cada vez mais ênfase no papel da história como uma força motriz objetiva, para a frente, resolvendo a crise que a humanidade enfrenta. Isto por sua vez, derivou e foi um eco de seu método essencialmente fatalista da Segunda Internacional:
“Mas se não é difícil ver por que a predição apocalíptica tornou-se predominante nesta época, também não é difícil ver que suas raízes teóricas estão no materialismo mecânico e no determinismo da Segunda Internacional.” 29
Fazer tal declaração implica que Molyneux não entende o significado da luta de Trotsky contra o stalinismo de meados da década de 1920 até o fim de sua vida, nem de sua luta para construir a FI. Trotsky nunca disse que a história resolveria a crise de uma forma socialista. Ele insistiu repetidas vezes que a crise meramente fornecia condições sob as quais o partido revolucionário e a internacional poderiam triunfar. Esse é o ponto principal de sua ênfase na crise de liderança. Na verdade, a polêmica de Trotsky contra o centrismo ao longo da década de 1930 ataca repetidamente a ideia de que a história é uma força independente das ações das pessoas. De fato, em dezembro de 1938, alguns meses após a redação do PT, ele advertiu seus seguidores:
'A história recente forneceu uma série de confirmações trágicas do fato de que não é de toda situação revolucionária que uma revolução surge, mas que uma situação revolucionária se torna contrarrevolucionária se o fator subjetivo, isto é, a ofensiva revolucionária da classe revolucionária não chega a tempo de ajudar o fator objetivo.'30
O erro de Trotsky não foi determinismo. Sua previsão estava errada porque subestimava seriamente a força do imperialismo dos EUA. Este foi um erro importante. Isso levou Trotsky a acreditar que a possibilidade de uma saída para a crise econômica sem o fascismo nos Estados Unidos era altamente improvável. Assim, quando ele admitiu a possibilidade de uma alternativa a um resultado revolucionário, ela sempre foi apresentada como totalitária. Isso, ele raciocinou, significaria que qualquer trégua para o capitalismo seria temporária. Na verdade, a força econômica do imperialismo dos EUA permitiu-lhe financiar uma contrarrevolução democrática em grande escala em grande parte da Europa no pós-guerra. Além disso, a mesma força lhe permitiu atuar como motor da economia mundial, abrindo caminho para a expansão das forças produtivas após a guerra. Nesse erro, tanto Trotsky quanto o SWP (EUA) foram culpados. A premissa deles era que a própria rapidez do crescimento da economia dos Estados Unidos era a garantia de sua queda igualmente rápida. Trotsky raciocinou que a guerra seria um dreno tão tremendo de recursos que qualquer país envolvido enfrentaria um colapso econômico. Essa troca entre ele e um dos líderes do SWP (EUA) deixa isso bem claro:
'Shachtman: Suponha que seja uma guerra europeia, na qual os EUA ainda não entraram?
Trotsky: Nesse caso, os EUA adiarão o colapso econômico. O que está claro é que nos países envolvidos na guerra o colapso virá não em quatro ou seis anos, mas em seis a doze meses, porque os países capitalistas não são mais ricos, mas sim mais pobres do que em 1914, materialmente. . . Pode-se dizer que todos esses desempregados [nos Estados Unidos] serão absorvidos pela indústria bélica, mas isso significa a criação de uma terrível bomba para absorver todas as riquezas da nação ”.31
Esta é uma visão perigosamente unilateral dos Estados Unidos e de outras economias capitalistas. Ele falha em reconhecer que, em certos casos, a guerra pode regenerar a lucratividade da economia capitalista e não simplesmente agir como um dreno dela. Isso era particularmente verdadeiro para os EUA, que, como todos reconheceram desde muito cedo, não teriam que lutar a guerra em seu próprio solo, nem arriscar a destruição de suas indústrias por bombardeios. Fornecer à máquina de guerra britânica duramente pressionada, bem como a sua própria, não apenas absorveu riquezas nos EUA, mas ajudou a gerá-las também. Ao argumentar contra a teoria da "crise final" dos estalinistas durante seu "terceiro período", Trotsky advertiu que tal visão levaria ao fatalismo no nível da política - nossa próxima vez ". Ao apresentar uma caracterização unilateral da crise econômica mundial, ele vinculou seus seguidores a uma perspectiva que, em aspectos importantes, se mostrou errada. Seus erros, decorrentes do fracasso do movimento comunista revolucionário (o saudável Comintern e mais tarde os trotskistas) em desenvolver a teoria do imperialismo de Lenin, desorientaram os seguidores de Trotsky após a guerra. Eles eram certamente culpados de fatalismo, primeiro episodicamente e depois sistematicamente. Mas isso foi um produto de sua queda para o centrismo e para longe do trotskismo. Eles se apegaram a sua perspectiva a princípio por causa de uma confusão sincera entre perspectivas e princípios. Mais tarde, eles o usaram como nuvem para encobrir seus erros centristas acumulados.
Um exemplo claro disso foi o uso de uma única frase por Pablo sobre o próprio PT. Após a ruptura de Tito com o Kremlin em 1948, Pablo escreveu:
'No exato momento em que o poder e a estabilidade interna do aparelho stalinista, dirigindo a URSS e os partidos comunistas do Kremlin, pareciam a muitas pessoas mais impressionantes do que nunca, o caso iugoslavo veio a lembrá-los de um fator sobre o qual o otimismo revolucionário repousa, a saber: as leis da história que, em última análise, se revelarão mais fortes do que qualquer tipo de aparato burocrático ”.
Desde que Pablo proferiu essa meia citação do PT, essa linha de pensamento fatalista dominou os fragmentos centristas do FI. Tornou-se a base para a "crise revolucionária" permanente de Healy, para o "processo revolucionário" imparável (e indiferenciado) de Mandel e para a definição de Lambert de uma situação pré-revolucionária sem fim. Em suma, tornou-se a desculpa para descarregar no processo histórico o trabalho dos revolucionários. O fator objetivo tornou-se todo poderoso. Pablo deixa claro que a lei histórica em vigor na Iugoslávia foi a pressão das massas. Essa pressão é tão forte que pode transformar açougueiros stalinistas como Tito em revolucionários rudes e prontos. Hoje, a mesma lei levou os sandinistas, segundo a USFI, a transformar a Nicarágua em uma ditadura do proletariado! Afirmamos que esse fatalismo se baseia em uma distorção intencional do PT que era muito mais dialética em sua compreensão da relação do processo histórico e os líderes traiçoeiros:
'. . . as leis da história são mais fortes do que o aparato burocrático. Não importa como os métodos dos traidores sociais possam diferir. . . eles nunca conseguirão quebrar a vontade revolucionária do proletariado. Com o passar do tempo, seus esforços desesperados para segurar a roda da história demonstrarão mais claramente às massas que a crise da direção proletária, tendo se tornado a crise da cultura da humanidade, só pode ser resolvida pela Quarta Internacional ”33.
Para Trotsky, as leis da história - o fato de que o proletariado é objetivamente a classe revolucionária - garantirão a continuidade da luta de classes e criarão as condições para o triunfo final do fator subjetivo na forma do partido revolucionário. Nenhum "instrumento cego" ou agente inconsciente iria ou poderia cumprir esse papel para o programa de ação de Trotsky.
Trotsky repetidamente argumentou que um programa revolucionário deve ser um guia para a ação. Isso significava que o elemento orientador da ação - slogans de transição - ficou em primeiro plano, reduzindo em certo grau os aspectos mais gerais do programa. É claro que o componente do programa de ação partiu de princípios revolucionários gerais, mas foi uma aplicação bem focada deles. As principais demandas de transição do programa tiveram como premissa as perspectivas delineadas anteriormente. Ou seja, todo o potencial do PT como programa de ação seria realizado no contexto de uma luta revolucionária pelo poder:
'Por outro lado, o programa de demandas transitórias da Quarta Internacional, que parecia tão' irreal 'para políticos míopes, revelará todo o seu significado no processo de mobilização das massas para a conquista do poder do Estado.”.34
Foi um programa de ação para transformar a situação pré-revolucionária em uma situação revolucionária. Baseou-se principalmente nas condições objetivas de seu próprio período. Resultou da experiência real da luta de classes durante os anos anteriores. As lições da derrota alemã, a frente popular na Espanha e na França, a degeneração da Revolução Russa, as explosivas lutas sindicais nos EUA e a luta anti-imperialista na China, foram todas incluídas no programa. Seus slogans fluíram da experiência - tanto positiva quanto negativa - desses eventos momentosos. Foram esses eventos que investiram a compreensão de Trotsky da crise de liderança com uma precisão que seus discípulos nunca igualaram. A crise de liderança teve como contexto uma contradição imediata entre as condições objetivas (o capitalismo dilacerado pela crise conduzido à sua segunda guerra mundial em pouco mais de vinte anos) e as fraquezas subjetivas do proletariado. Ou seja, a guerra e a revolução estavam se aproximando no futuro imediato e, no entanto, o proletariado carecia de uma direção revolucionária. É claro que, na época imperialista, as condições para a revolução surgem repetidamente de forma objetiva, em vários países isolados. Mas um programa de ação internacional não pode e não deve se basear em generalidades como esta. A razão para isso é clara pela existência de períodos na época imperialista em que o caráter explosivo dessa contradição é, para seções inteiras do mundo, subjugado. A crise de liderança que se manifesta em uma luta sindical esgotada é uma antecipação subdesenvolvida da crise de que falava Trotsky. Mas confundir os dois seria confundir cada golpe com o tiro inicial de uma revolução no contexto de uma situação pré-revolucionária ou revolucionária permanente. O próprio Trotsky foi bastante claro sobre a natureza do período para o qual seu programa de ação se concentrou. Não foi focado na época imperialista em geral, mas em uma crise febril típica dessa época:
'A tarefa estratégica do próximo período - um período pré-revolucionário de agitação, propaganda e organização - consiste em superar a contradição entre a maturidade das condições revolucionárias objetivas e a imaturidade do proletariado e sua vanguarda (a confusão e decepção da geração mais velha, à inexperiência da geração mais jovem). '35
O próprio fato de Trotsky falar das características específicas de gerações específicas de trabalhadores indica a natureza focalizada de seu programa. De fato, em sua revisão de sua conferência, a FI chegou à mesma conclusão de Trotsky de que o programa era um guia para a ação:
'Que contraste oferece às vagas generalizações e abstrações enganosas que as lideranças oficiais da classe trabalhadora oferecem como guias para a ação na atual situação mundial tumultuada! Não é, ou melhor, não é tanto o programa básico da Quarta Internacional, mas sim o seu programa de ação para o período imediato em que vivemos.”36
Como um programa de ação, ele deve ser entendido como uma expressão específica do programa geral do marxismo (incorporando os princípios-chave, estratégia e tática), mas como tal não é, em si mesmo, imutável. Tinha uma conexão definitiva com uma perspectiva de guerra, crise e revolução imediatas. Uma mudança dramática de perspectiva, acreditava Trotsky, exigiria uma reorientação do programa:
'Você pode levantar a objeção de que não podemos prever o ritmo e o andamento do desenvolvimento, e que possivelmente a burguesia encontrará uma trégua política. Isso não está excluído - mas então seremos obrigados a realizar um recuo estratégico. Mas, na situação atual, devemos estar orientados para uma ofensiva estratégica, não para uma retirada.”37
Trotsky ancorou seu programa de ação em suas perspectivas, mas nunca se esqueceu de que as perspectivas não são oráculos délficos. Infelizmente, seus discípulos esqueceram exatamente isso.
No entanto, tendo sublinhado isto, devemos prosseguir afirmando que o PT não era simplesmente um programa de ação. Alojado nele está a explicação de todo o método das demandas transitórias. Tais demandas constituem um sistema que busca levar cada luta parcial do proletariado a um passo decisivo adiante em direção ao objetivo da revolução socialista e à própria transição para o socialismo. Um programa de ação deve estar voltado para uma determinada crise internacional, como a de 1938, ou para uma crise nacional, como a da França em 1934, ou mesmo para as lutas de um setor de trabalhadores fora do contexto de um período pré-revolucionário ou crise revolucionária, como nosso próprio programa de ação para os mineiros britânicos. 38 Mas qualquer que seja o foco de um programa de ação específico, ele deve abranger a estratégia geral do PT. Deve aplicar esse método se quiser transcender a divisão entre as demandas mínimas e parciais geradas em cada luta e o objetivo da revolução socialista. A redução dessa divisão é crucial se os perigos de simplesmente ecoar as demandas espontaneamente levantadas pelos trabalhadores - e do pragmatismo devem ser evitados. Pois mesmo em períodos que não são revolucionários em seu caráter geral, o caráter da época imperialista apresenta a possibilidade de dar passos, às vezes bastante limitados, em direção à revolução. Além disso, as demandas transitórias podem, quando concretizadas, formar os trabalhadores para as tarefas da transição socialista, bem como mobilizá-los em torno de uma luta por seus interesses imediatos. As demandas transitórias são, portanto, essenciais em qualquer programa de ação. Trotsky explicou o porquê:
“No entanto, a realização desta tarefa estratégica [revolução socialista] é impensável sem a atenção mais ponderada de todos, mesmo pequenas e parciais questões de tática. Todas as seções do proletariado - todas as suas camadas, ocupações e grupos - devem ser atraídas para o movimento revolucionário. A época atual distingue-se não porque liberta o partido revolucionário do trabalho quotidiano, mas porque permite que este trabalho prossiga indissoluvelmente com as tarefas reais da revolução».
Os teóricos do SWP (GB) estão sempre prontos para argumentar que as tarefas do dia a dia não podem ser vinculadas ao socialismo com demandas transitórias. Seu pragmatismo os leva a argumentar que tais demandas não existem realmente. O ponto-chave, argumentam eles, é pura e simplesmente fazer com que as massas ajam. Duncan Hallas expressa isso de forma mais clara:
“O problema em cada estágio é encontrar e promover aqueles slogans que não apenas afetem pelo menos alguns setores da classe (idealmente, é claro, em todo o grupo), mas que também sejam capazes de levar a ações da classe trabalhadora. Frequentemente, eles não serão transitórios na definição muito restrita de Trotsky”.40
A questão é que a própria luta de classes obriga os trabalhadores a entrar em ação, fazer greve, se mobilizar. E é essencial levantar demandas para que os trabalhadores façam greves. Mas nosso trabalho como revolucionários não é apenas fazer os trabalhadores agirem, é ganhá-los no curso de tal ação para o socialismo. É precisamente essa tarefa de liderar os trabalhadores além de suas demandas diárias, lutando por um programa de ação transicional - uma tarefa que o SWP (GB) se recusa a empreender - que podemos ganhá-los para o socialismo revolucionário. Podemos tornar a tarefa da revolução socialista relevante para suas preocupações cotidianas. Na verdade, o SWP (GB), como a Segunda Internacional em seus dias de centro, acaba apoiando as reivindicações existentes dos trabalhadores e pregando o socialismo para eles.
As afirmações de que as demandas transitórias são um produto do isolamento de Trotsky em 1938 ignora o fato de que ele estava desenvolvendo as concepções do Comintern sobre um período muito anterior. Em 1931, na Espanha, quando a crise que levou à guerra civil ainda estava apenas amadurecendo, Trotsky reconheceu a necessidade de ir além das demandas parciais do momento:
'Paralelamente a essas [exigências mínimas], porém, as exigências de um caráter transicional devem ser apresentadas mesmo agora; nacionalização de recursos minerais; nacionalização dos bancos; controle operário da indústria; e, finalmente, a regulação estatal da economia. Todas essas demandas estão ligadas à transição de um regime burguês para um regime proletário; eles se preparam para essa transição para que, após a nacionalização dos bancos e da indústria, eles possam se tornar parte de um sistema de medidas para uma economia planejada, preparando o caminho para a economia socialista, preparando o caminho para a sociedade socialista.”41
A natureza das demandas de transição
Ao codificar um conjunto de demandas transitórias em um programa, Trotsky finalmente resolveu a "questão do programa" no nível do método. O PT marcou a resolução bem-sucedida dos problemas programáticos que se originaram com o Programa de Erfurt de 1891. Superou o problema da disjunção entre a luta por demandas imediatas e parciais e a luta pelo poder. Concluiu o trabalho do Comintern a esse respeito. Lenin e o Comintern tinham uma compreensão das demandas de transição principalmente como uma ponte para a sociedade de transição durante uma situação revolucionária. O degenerado Comintern aproveitou esta posição - que era apenas parcialmente correta - para condenar o uso de demandas transitórias como oportunistas, exceto em uma situação revolucionária (antes de abandoná-las por completo).A razão pela qual a visão de Lenin das demandas transitórias era apenas parcialmente correta era porque ele ainda não havia elaborado a relação do programa geral com o programa mínimo. Trotsky elaborou essa relação com precisão. Ele via a época imperialista como aquela dentro da qual era possível derrubar a parede de tijolos entre as demandas mínimas e transitórias. Demandas imediatas lutadas por táticas revolucionárias poderiam se tornar o ponto de partida para ganhar as massas para demandas de transição mais amplas: 'Cada demanda econômica local, parcial deve ser uma abordagem para uma demanda geral em nosso programa de transição' 42.
As lutas pelas demandas salariais poderiam, em circunstâncias de alta inflação, levantar questões (a maneira como o custo de vida é calculado no capitalismo, por exemplo) para as quais os trabalhadores buscariam respostas gerais. Essa lógica facilitaria a transição das demandas parciais para as transitórias, desde que essas demandas transitórias pudessem ser concretizadas e utilizadas como base para uma mobilização dos trabalhadores para a luta:
"É necessário interpretar essas ideias fundamentais, dividindo-as em outras mais concretas e parciais, dependendo do curso dos acontecimentos e da orientação do pensamento das massas." 43
O método de firmeza e flexibilidade de Trotsky combinados na estrutura de uma estratégia claramente definida é tão revigorante em comparação com o esquematismo sem vida daquela ala de seus discípulos que pensam que as credenciais revolucionárias dependem da capacidade de repetir em os circunstanciais slogans retirados do programa e aprendidos de cor. A capacidade de tomar as lutas parciais como ponto de partida, generalizá-las e depois expressar essa generalização por meio de uma demanda concreta está no cerne do método de transição.
O outro acréscimo que Trotsky fez a Lenin e à posição do Comintern foi o uso de demandas transitórias como uma ponte não apenas para o socialismo, mas para a revolução socialista. O cumprimento desta tarefa, conquistando a vanguarda do proletariado para o programa da revolução socialista, só poderia - e só pode - ser alcançado por meio de um programa de transição. O programa, ao libertar o proletariado de seus líderes falidos, abriria o caminho para a revolução. Nesse ponto, um programa de transição no sentido de Lenin - para o socialismo - se tornaria necessário:
“Só uma ascensão revolucionária geral do proletariado pode colocar a expropriação completa da burguesia na ordem do dia. A tarefa das demandas transitórias é preparar o proletariado para resolver este problema.”44
As demandas transitórias, desde que realmente se tornem um foco para a luta de massas, poderiam introduzir um proletariado liderado por reformistas na própria necessidade de revolução:
“É necessário ajudar as massas no processo da luta diária para encontrar a ponte entre as reivindicações atuais e o programa socialista de revolução. Esta ponte deve incluir um sistema de demandas transitórias decorrentes das condições do dia e da consciência de hoje de amplas camadas da classe trabalhadora e conduzindo inalteravelmente a uma conclusão final: a conquista do poder pelo proletariado.”45
Alojada dentro de cada demanda de transição está a luta pelas necessidades vitais da classe trabalhadora com relação à busca do lucro do capitalismo por meio do estabelecimento do controle dos trabalhadores sobre a produção e distribuição capitalistas. Ao mesmo tempo, cada demanda transitória contém um apelo à organização da classe trabalhadora em órgãos capazes de exercer esse controle. Lutando pelo controle dos trabalhadores e construindo organizações que correspondam a essa luta, a classe trabalhadora pode impedir que seus patrões exerçam seu "direito de administrar" contra os interesses dos trabalhadores. Essa negação da capacidade dos administradores de serem donos "em sua própria" casa é uma espécie de duplo poder. O poder duplo em uma única fábrica deve levar ao poder duplo em uma indústria e, na verdade, em todas as indústrias, se for para controlar efetivamente os patrões. Isso, por sua vez, criará o início do poder dual na sociedade como um todo. Para defender todo e qualquer ganho dos ataques inevitáveis dos capitalistas, a classe trabalhadora pode, por meio de demandas transitórias, ser levada a tomar esse caminho.
Nesse sentido, o controle dos trabalhadores tanto em um nível primitivo (sobre a contratação e demissão, por exemplo, em uma única fábrica) e em um nível avançado, (ao forçar em toda a sociedade a abolição do sigilo comercial e o direito de vetar todos os planos da patrões) tem a capacidade de transformar as lutas defensivas mais básicas (contra o desemprego, por melhores salários) em lutas ofensivas que conduzem inexoravelmente à criação de uma situação de duplo poder. Mas para que isso aconteça as demandas devem ter uma lógica interna e interligada. São um sistema de reivindicações, que só pode atingir o objetivo de levar a classe trabalhadora ao limiar da revolução com a condição de que sejam realmente lutadas por setores significativos da classe e que no decorrer dessa luta, as reivindicações se estendam até e incluindo a luta por um governo operário. No momento em que a classe operária, ou sua vanguarda, estiver lutando desta maneira, o programa de transição se transformará no programa do poder soviético e na ditadura do proletariado:
“O duplo poder, por sua vez, é o ponto culminante do período de transição. Dois regimes, o burguês e o proletariado, opõem-se irreconciliavelmente um ao outro. O conflito entre eles é inevitável. O destino da sociedade depende do resultado.”46
A luta por demandas transitórias, portanto, tem uma lógica integral. Cada demanda tem como essência essa lógica de impulsionar a classe trabalhadora ainda mais no caminho da revolução. Se eles forem batalhados, então "cada vez mais aberta e decididamente, eles o farão contra os próprios fundamentos do regime burguês". 47, por esta razão, seria profundamente errado fetichizar a luta por um determinado slogan de transição e conduzir essa luta independentemente de condições objetivas. Slogans de transição, se pretendem cumprir seu propósito de compelir o proletariado a fazer incursões cada vez mais profundas no capitalismo, não podem ser usados de uma forma atemporal. Eles estão enraizados principalmente nas condições reais. A demanda por uma escala móvel de salários é um exemplo disso. Isto não se encontra em parte alguma do Programa de Ação para a França. Para aqueles que reverenciam o PT sem compreendê-lo ou sem serem capazes de desenvolvê-lo criativamente, isso parece simplesmente um descuido. Assim, um artigo no jornal da velha Liga Socialista dos Trabalhadores, Trotskyismo Today, argumentou:
'O Programa de Ação em muitos aspectos antecipa exatamente as demandas do Programa de Transição quatro anos depois - embora a escala móvel de salários e a escala móvel de horas não tenham sido incluídas e pareçam não ter sido pensadas em 1934.' 48
Este é um comentário leve. A escala móvel de horas, embora não expressa por meio dessa frase, pode ser encontrada nas demandas do Comintern e RILU saudáveis. O controle dos trabalhadores sobre as horas trabalhadas era como isso se expressava. Quanto à escala móvel de salários, foi uma demanda pioneira no movimento comunista alemão já em 1923. No entanto - sem dúvida Trotsky não a incluiu pela simples razão de que não era de relevância central nas circunstâncias concretas dadas. Se foi ou não "pensado", isso não vem ao caso. Não era relevante. Como tal, não teria generalizado a luta da classe trabalhadora na frente salarial. A inflação não era a queixa comum da classe trabalhadora. Não poderia ter sido mobilizado em uma luta contra o capitalismo em torno de tal demanda naquela época. Trotsky nos dá uma razão bastante óbvia do porquê não: 'A deflação brutal é o primeiro passo no plano dos capitalistas franceses.' 49
Além disso, se essa demanda for deslocada de seu elemento de controle dos trabalhadores (o índice de custo de vida dos trabalhadores e o comitê de trabalhadores e donas de casa), ela perde seu elemento de transição. Torna-se uma demanda meramente parcial, uma reforma imediata. E se uma situação de estabilidade monetária e baixa inflação prevalecer, pouco fará para mobilizar a classe trabalhadora, muito menos generalizar uma mobilização da classe. O capitalismo poderia (e tem na Itália e na Bélgica) concedido formas de escala móvel que, em períodos de baixa inflação, não levam a classe à revolução socialista. É claro que a defesa dessas escalas deslizantes em um período de crise e alta inflação pode se tornar o ponto de partida para transformar a luta em uma luta pelo controle dos trabalhadores. Por isso, ter avançado esse slogan nas grandes potências capitalistas da Europa ou dos Estados Unidos no período do longo boom, quando a inflação era relativamente insignificante, teria sido um afastamento do método de transição de Trotsky. Ele avançou o slogan no PT não como uma solução universal, mas como um slogan de ação para um período caracterizado pela ameaça de um enorme salto nos preços:
"Contra um aumento vertiginoso dos preços que, com a aproximação da guerra, assumirá um caráter cada vez mais desenfreado, só se pode lutar sob o slogan de uma escala móvel de salários."
O SWP (GB), por outro lado, irá contrariar que em períodos onde existe inflação insignificante a demanda está errada. Isso é apenas meia verdade. É impróprio para tais períodos, mas não deve ser totalmente descartado e para sempre expulso do programa do partido. Na verdade, o SWP (GB) a odeia o tempo todo porque é uma demanda transitória, porque desafia o reformismo sindical. O SWP (GB) se opôs à demanda na Grã-Bretanha na década de 1970, quando a inflação a tornou mais uma vez oportuna. Sua hostilidade estava enraizada em seu economismo. Eles acreditaram erroneamente que a escala móvel diminuiria a militância salarial que era, para eles, o único caminho para a consciência socialista. A ideia de que a militância salarial poderia ser transformada por meio de uma luta para dar proteção aos trabalhadores contra a inflação, sem de forma alguma limitar suas demandas por aumentos adicionais, era um anátema para o SWP (GB). Na verdade, sua oposição à demanda tornou-se bastante infantil. Um de seus 'grandes' teóricos, John Molyneux, alertou contra a demanda '. . . porque impede reivindicações salariais que excedam os aumentos de preços. '51
Como? Em nenhum lugar do PT Trotsky diz aos trabalhadores que vocês não farão greve por aumentos que excedam o atual índice de preços de varejo! Ele meramente visa direcionar a militância do plano das demandas graduais sobre o patrão por aumentos de quantia global para um plano superior no qual os trabalhadores estão desafiando o direito dos capitalistas de usar a inflação para invadir seus padrões de vida. Trotsky diz que os trabalhadores "devem defender sua boca cheia de pão, se não podem aumentá-la ou melhorá-la" .52 Em nenhum sentido isso deve ser interpretado como um alerta contra as altas demandas salariais. Na verdade, Trotsky acrescenta:
"Não há necessidade nem oportunidade de enumerar aqui aquelas demandas separadas e parciais que surgem repetidamente com base em circunstâncias concretas - nacional, local, sindical." 53
Claramente, as condições objetivas determinaram o uso e o significado revolucionário do slogan. A mesma regra se aplica a todos os principais slogans de transição.
Tarefas pedagógicas
Tomar as condições objetivas como ponto de partida foi vital para Trotsky combater outro perigo. Assim como uma contraposição das demandas transitórias às imediatas, Trotsky teve que combater as tendências de limitar o programa à consciência existente das massas. Enfatizou incansavelmente a necessidade de levar em conta a consciência (atrasada ou não) da classe trabalhadora na explicação das demandas transitórias, adaptando-as a situações específicas. No entanto, ele argumentou que essas considerações fundamentalmente pedagógicas não poderiam constituir o ponto de partida na formulação das tarefas centrais que o partido deveria armar o proletariado para cumprir. Ou seja, as reais demandas do programa deveriam corresponder à aguda crise social e política mundial do final da década de 1930.Este critério objetivo exige que os revolucionários apresentem demandas que sejam necessárias, em vez de aquelas que os revolucionários consideram possíveis devido à consciência retrógrada de uma classe trabalhadora particular:
'Nossas tarefas não dependem da mentalidade dos trabalhadores. A tarefa é desenvolver a mentalidade dos trabalhadores. Isso é o que o programa deve formular e apresentar aos trabalhadores avançados. Alguns dirão: bom, o programa é um programa científico; corresponde à situação objetiva - mas se os trabalhadores não aceitarem este programa, será estéril. Possivelmente. Mas isso significa apenas que os trabalhadores serão esmagados, já que a crise não pode ser resolvida de outra forma senão pela revolução socialista.”54
Isso deixa claro que o trabalho dos revolucionários é fazer com que os trabalhadores não se adaptem politicamente ao seu estado de consciência que, em todo caso, não é uma coisa fixa ou estável, mas sofre saltos e transformações provocados pela crise e pela luta. As demandas transitórias devem ser lutadas se forem objetivamente necessárias, embora possam parecer muito avançadas em relação à consciência dos trabalhadores da época:
“Mas não podemos adaptar o programa à mentalidade retrógrada dos trabalhadores; a mentalidade, o humor é um fator secundário - o fator primordial é a situação objetiva.”55
Uma questão incômoda que sempre surge com os jovens revolucionários e que os centristas inveterados nunca podem responder é se as demandas transitórias podem ser realizadas sob o capitalismo. A resposta curta é não. Por causa de seu desafio embutido à lógica do lucro e ao domínio dos capitalistas sobre a produção, eles são irrealizáveis como um ganho estável e permanente sob o capitalismo. Mas também não são simplesmente demandas "impossíveis" ou utópicas. Se assim fosse, não seriam capazes de resolver os problemas atuais e de conquistar a lealdade dos trabalhadores que ainda não perceberam plenamente a necessidade de abolir o capitalismo.
Como outras demandas imediatas sérias, os capitalistas podem ser forçados a conceder uma ou outra delas temporária ou parcialmente se a classe trabalhadora for forte o suficiente e estiver ameaçando todo o sistema com suas ações. As concessões decorrentes da luta por demandas transitórias podem aumentar a confiança dos trabalhadores e levar a uma luta ofensiva. Sua realização bem-sucedida depende precisamente de ampliar a luta para camadas cada vez maiores da classe trabalhadora e interligar as demandas transitórias, imediatas e democráticas até que a questão da necessidade de um governo dos trabalhadores para realizá-las seja apreendida pelas 'massas multimilionárias' . Organizacionalmente, isso deve ser expresso no crescimento maciço da influência do partido revolucionário e na criação de órgãos de luta do tipo soviético.
A questão de qualquer demanda ser realizável ou irrealizável, prática ou impraticável não surge da maneira metafísica abstrata que essa pergunta costuma ser colocada. O destino de cada demanda separada será decidido no decorrer da luta. O sistema de demandas, entretanto, só será realizado com a destruição do poder político e econômico burguês. Lênin, ao lidar com o mesmo problema em relação a certas demandas mínimas, delineou o método correto de lidar com essa questão. Em uma carta a Radek em 1910, ele argumentou:
'O critério do que é 'impraticável 'no quadro do capitalismo não deve ser tomado no sentido de que a burguesia não o permitirá, que não pode ser alcançado etc. Nesse sentido, muitas demandas em nosso programa mínimo são' impraticáveis ' , mas não são menos obrigatórios. ”56
Ao lidar com as demandas de transição, Trotsky ecoou este ponto, deixando claro que essas demandas não pretendiam ser um meio de 'enganar' os trabalhadores para a luta socialista, mas um meio de mobilizá-los para suas necessidades vitais:
'Nenhuma de nossas demandas será realizada sob o capitalismo. É por isso que as chamamos de demandas transitórias. Ele cria uma ponte para a mentalidade dos trabalhadores e, em seguida, uma ponte material para a revolução socialista. A questão toda é como mobilizar as massas para a luta. . . Os revolucionários sempre consideram que as reformas e aquisições são apenas um subproduto da luta revolucionária. Se dissermos que exigiremos apenas o que eles podem dar, a classe dominante dará apenas um décimo ou mais do que exigimos. Quando exigimos mais e podemos melhorar nossas demandas, os capitalistas são obrigados a dar o máximo. Quanto mais extenso e militante é o espírito dos trabalhadores, mais é exigido e conquistado. Eles não são slogans estéreis; eles são um meio de pressão sobre a burguesia, e dará os maiores resultados materiais possíveis imediatamente. ”57
Um programa mundial
O Programa de Transição foi um programa para a Quarta Internacional. Foi baseado nas contradições do capitalismo mundial, na crise do regime stalinista e nas experiências do proletariado internacional. As linhas de abertura indicam a base a partir da qual o programa começa: 'A situação política mundial como um todo é caracterizada principalmente por uma crise histórica de liderança' .58
As seções de abertura são fortemente orientadas para os problemas de estratégia revolucionária dentro dos sindicatos. Seu foco é mobilizar os trabalhadores para uma ruptura com os líderes sindicais e reformistas estabelecidos. Claramente, o campo de aplicação mais imediato (pensado não exclusivo) para tais políticas foi nos países onde as burocracias sindicais e os aparatos reformistas foram os obstáculos decisivos para a revolução - os centros imperialistas. Nas discussões do programa que Trotsky manteve com membros do SWP (EUA), essa ênfase é aparente. No entanto, Trotsky passa a examinar a relação entre as demandas de transição orientadas pelos sindicatos e as demandas democráticas que têm um significado ardente para o mundo semicolonial. A profundidade da compreensão de Trotsky da natureza internacionalista do programa comunista é revelada na maneira como ele desenvolve o vínculo entre as demandas democráticas e transitórias. Sua teoria da Revolução Permanente, baseada em uma compreensão do caráter desigual, mas combinado do desenvolvimento na época imperialista, permitiu-lhe combinar o programa democrático e o programa de transição, onde os estalinistas e os nacionalistas contrapunham a democracia ao socialismo:
'Slogans democráticos, demandas transitórias e os problemas da revolução socialista não estão divididos em épocas históricas separadas nesta luta, mas derivam diretamente uma da outra.'
Em especial, foi a experiência das revoluções na Rússia, Espanha e China que permitiu a Trotsky demonstrar concretamente como as tarefas da revolução democrática estão indissoluvelmente ligadas às da revolução socialista. Trotsky argumentou que o peso dado às demandas democráticas dependia do grau de atraso de um determinado país e da extensão da força das aspirações democráticas. Seu ponto de partida ao levantar demandas democráticas foi solidarizar-se não com as ilusões que as massas alimentavam na democracia burguesa, mas com o que havia de progressista na aspiração (o desejo de liberdade de expressão e de reunião, o direito de organizar sindicatos e partidos políticos).Ao aceitar essas demandas em condições em que a burguesia as recusasse ou, na melhor das hipóteses, as usasse de maneira enganosa, uma ponte para as demandas transicionais e socialistas poderia ser aberta. Isso é o que Trotsky quis dizer quando pediu um programa democrático de transição na China, por exemplo. O método de utilizar as demandas democráticas nesta forma de transição - consagrado no programa - foi antecipado pelo uso de Trotsky da convocação de uma assembleia constituinte (Cortes) na Espanha:
“As massas da cidade e do campo podem se unir atualmente apenas sob slogans democráticos. Isso inclui a eleição das Cortes constituintes com base no sufrágio universal, igual, direto e secreto. Não creio que na situação atual você possa evitar esse slogan. Os soviéticos ainda não existem. Os operários espanhóis - para não falar dos camponeses - não sabem o que são os sovietes; de qualquer forma, não de suas próprias experiências. No entanto, a luta em torno das Cortes no próximo período constituirá toda a vida política do país. Contrapor a palavra de ordem dos sovietes, nessas circunstâncias, à palavra de ordem das Cortes, seria incorreto.
Por outro lado, obviamente será possível construir sovietes no futuro próximo apenas mobilizando as massas com base em slogans democráticos. Isso significa: impedir que a monarquia convoque Cortes falsas, enganosas e conservadoras; e para que estas Cortes possam dar terras aos camponeses e fazer muitas outras coisas, deve-se criar sovietes de operários, soldados e camponeses para fortalecer as posições das massas trabalhadoras.'60
Este método de combinar as demandas democráticas com as transitórias contrasta fortemente com as posições do trotskismo degenerado hoje na América Latina, África e Ásia. Eles interpretam a referência de Trotsky a armar os trabalhadores com um programa democrático como um 'passo primário' 61 para significar a luta pela democracia como um estágio distinto. Assim, eles imitam a teoria dos estágios stalinistas. O sentido da conversa de Trotsky sobre um "passo primário" fica claro a partir da referência acima à Espanha. Uma luta revolucionária pelo programa democrático pode, em certas circunstâncias, ser o primeiro passo para o programa dos Sovietes. Mas esse passo só pode ser dado se a luta pelos sovietes estiver ligada à luta pela democracia. Nem Trotsky nem Lenin em 1917 antes de outubro abandonaram a convocação para a assembleia constituinte, ao mesmo tempo que clama para que todo o poder seja colocado nas mãos dos soviéticos. Essa posição refletia as tarefas combinadas da Revolução Russa, não os estágios contrapostos dessa revolução.
O alcance internacional do PT é igualmente evidente na seção sobre a URSS. Trotsky elabora um programa claro com o objetivo de derrubar a burocracia. Esta seção foi de vital importância para combater aqueles na FI que viam a revolução política como um mero processo de auto-reforma por setores da burocracia. Trotsky deixou claro isso '. . . a principal tarefa política na URSS continua sendo a derrubada dessa mesma burocracia termidoriana ”.62
O programa de Trotsky foi presciente 9 (capacidade de antecipar o futuro) ao identificar a luta contra a desigualdade social e a opressão política como o ponto de partida da revolução política. Hungria e Polônia demonstram a exatidão de sua previsão. No entanto, a falta de experiência de crises políticas revolucionárias reais necessariamente limitou a capacidade de Trotsky de elaborar táticas e demandas detalhadas. Ele só poderia começar a elaborar um programa. Mais uma vez, as experiências reais do pós-guerra, na Alemanha Oriental, Hungria, Tchecoslováquia e, mais recentemente, na Polônia, obrigam-nos a ir mais longe. É prova da falência dos fragmentos da FI de que eles esvaziaram o programa de Trotsky de seu núcleo revolucionário e retrocederam para uma perspectiva de reforma. Por sua vez, os Cliffitistas, com a teoria do Capitalismo de Estado, abandonaram completamente o programa de revolução política. Para eles, existe apenas a perspectiva de um novo fevereiro de 1917, uma revolução democrática espontânea. Como diz Cliff:
'A revolução espontânea, ao quebrar o calcanhar de ferro da burocracia stalinista, abrirá o campo para a atividade livre de todos os partidos, tendências e grupos da classe trabalhadora. Será o primeiro capítulo da revolução proletária vitoriosa ”.63
A terra da primeira revolução operária bem-sucedida deve retornar ao capítulo um - a democracia burguesa - antes que a transição para o socialismo possa ser efetuada. O método transicional é abandonado e seu lugar é tomado pelo espontaneísmo - uma posição tão fatalista e prostrada diante do processo objetivo quanto aquela assumida pelos principais fragmentos da FI aos quais os Cliffitistas afirmavam se opor.
Reelaborando o Programa de Transição
Em nosso livro, A Agonia de Morte da Quarta Internacional e as Tarefas dos Trotskistas Hoje, afirmamos que nosso objetivo era a refundação de uma internacional revolucionária com base em um programa reelaborado. Como vimos, reelaborações regulares do programa ocorreram na tradição marxista. O método apresentado no Manifesto Comunista foi mantido no TP. Mas Trotsky não apenas reimprimiu o Manifesto porque era, em um nível metodológico, ainda válido. Ele o reelaborou. Ele incluiu novos desenvolvimentos, novas perspectivas e um novo balanço da luta de classes em seu programa. Isso é inteiramente marxista. No entanto, nosso chamado para fazer exatamente o mesmo cinquenta anos depois de escrito o TP foi recebido com horror e consternação por uma miscelânea de grupos centristas originários da FI. Como ousamos propor adulterar um texto que para eles se tornou um ícone sagrado! Para nós, o programa deve ser um guia para a ação. Para eles, é algo para olhar, admirar e talvez até adorar. Dizemos claramente que assim como Trotsky declarou o Manifesto Comunista como seu programa, e assim como o reelaborou para se ajustar a novas circunstâncias, dizemos que o TP é o nosso programa e pretendemos simplesmente reelaborá-lo para o período em que enfrentamos.
Para nós, a necessidade de reelaboração decorre de vários fatores. O primeiro e mais simples é que não estava completo. Quem pensa que sim deve considerar as próprias observações de Trotsky sobre o programa. Quando o Comitê Nacional do SWP (EUA) hesitou em adotar o programa, Trotsky reassegurou-lhes que se tratava de uma 'hipótese de trabalho' geral que 'pode e certamente será modificada no fogo da experiência' 64. Ele até o ofereceu como base para discussão com o PSOP francês liderado pelo centrista Marceau Pivert, convidando este último a apresentar emendas. E em suas discussões sobre o programa com os líderes do SWP (EUA), ele insistiu:
«O projeto de programa não é um programa completo. . . O programa é apenas a primeira aproximação. É muito geral no sentido em que é apresentado à conferência internacional no próximo período”.65
Ele acreditava que faltava uma análise precisa o suficiente do estágio contemporâneo do imperialismo e suas contradições e desenvolvimentos. Ele sabia muito bem que faltavam palavras de ordem precisas para estabelecer e consolidar a ditadura do proletariado. Ele reconheceu que 'condições peculiares em cada país e mesmo em cada parte do país', 66 afetariam o foco particular do programa quando aplicado em uma dada nação. Em suma, Trotsky sinalizou as áreas onde sentia que era necessário um maior desenvolvimento.
O primeiro ponto, relativo à época imperialista, é decisivo para qualquer reelaboração do programa. Isso porque a falta dessa análise desarmou os seguidores de Trotsky depois da guerra, quando seus prognósticos para uma crise econômica aguda e prolongada não se concretizaram, pelo menos nos centros imperialistas. A perspectiva de Trotsky, como vimos, subestimou a força econômica do imperialismo dos EUA.
Mas não apenas temos as próprias deficiências reconhecidas de Trotsky que exigem nosso trabalho no desenvolvimento do programa, mas também temos que superar as distorções do programa pelos centristas. O último fator que torna necessária a reelaboração são as profundas mudanças e seus efeitos sobre a luta de classes e seus principais protagonistas (reformistas, nacionalistas, centristas e revolucionários) que ocorreram nos últimos cinquenta anos. Os problemas do imperialismo após seu longo boom, as complexidades das lutas no mundo imperializado, os efeitos de sua própria expansão sobre o stalinismo, o florescimento dos movimentos dos oprimidos e assim por diante, todos devem ser englobados em um programa re-elaborado.
Essa tarefa teria sido consideravelmente mais fácil se a continuidade revolucionária não tivesse sido quebrada. Se os discípulos de Trotsky tivessem reelaborado seu programa na década de 1950, muitas das dificuldades que enfrentamos hoje não existiriam. E essa reelaboração foi possível. Nos países imperialistas, onde o boom gerou uma paz social relativa, a advertência de Trotsky de que uma retirada estratégica poderia ser necessária deveria ter alertado e encorajado a próxima geração de trotskistas. Isso os teria encorajado que, mesmo nas condições de boom e isolamento dos revolucionários, eles poderiam recuar para lidar com um nível inferior de luta de classes, mas de uma forma revolucionária. Recuar não significa necessariamente revisão. Esse recuo, em face de um boom capitalista, não deveria ter sido um recuo para o programa mínimo. Deveria ter examinado as tarefas de construir oposição dentro dos sindicatos às burocracias reformistas. Deveria ter significado desenvolver a tática do movimento de base - o uso revolucionário da frente única nos sindicatos - de modo a ser capaz de aproveitar todas as oportunidades para obter novos ganhos dos capitalistas, invadindo seu controle no local de trabalho e enfraquecendo a capacidade dos burocratas de desempenhar seu papel como tenentes do capital dentro do movimento trabalhista. No entanto, o apelo do TP por 'organizações militantes independentes' foi deixado como letra morta.
O fracasso em realizar um 'recuo estratégico' para os países imperialistas, formulando uma política para os sindicatos, foi espelhado pelo fracasso em reelaborar o programa para lidar com o ressurgimento do reformismo. O TP lida com o reformismo - em sua roupagem social-democrata e stalinista - em um nível muito geral. Trotsky acreditava firmemente que sua sentença de morte havia soado. Ele não sentiu a necessidade de repetir as táticas em relação a isso em nenhum detalhe. Mesmo assim, após a guerra na Grã-Bretanha, Itália, França e Alemanha Ocidental, o reformismo desempenhou um papel vital em facilitar a estabilização do capitalismo. Ele salvou o capitalismo e a si mesmo. No lugar da denúncia geral do Programa de Transição ao reformismo, foi necessário um programa de ação utilizando as táticas da frente única. Em vez dos fragmentos da FI na Europa imperialista simplesmente viram que cada corrente de reformismo de esquerda é evidência da previsão de Trotsky de que o reformismo como um todo estava se desintegrando. No plano tático, todos os fragmentos, em um grau ou outro, capitularam ao reformismo de esquerda, aclamando-o como centrista ou assimilando-se a ele como sua ala esquerda.
Essas falhas no desenvolvimento do programa desarmaram inevitavelmente os agrupamentos centristas oriundos da FI. Na Bélgica 1961 e na França 1968, o custo de abandonar ou distorcer o método de transição provou ser uma tendência para se acomodar à burocracia trabalhista e sindical ou uma tendência a simplesmente seguir as lutas dos trabalhadores na esperança de que eles espontaneamente superassem suas ilusões nessa burocracia. As mesmas tendências se manifestaram quando se desenvolveu o desenvolvimento dos movimentos dos oprimidos (mulheres, negros, lésbicas e gays). Sem nenhum ponto de referência real no Programa de Transição e cegos aos seus métodos, os centristas praticavam o liquidacionismo ou o economicismo.
Nas semicolônias, o desenvolvimento do programa relacionado com a ascensão dos movimentos nacionalistas pequeno-burgueses era necessário. A Bolívia em 1952 forneceu um caso-teste.67 O problema dos sovietes, do governo operário e camponês, do controle operário e da relação entre as demandas democráticas e transitórias poderia ter se tornado preciso. A tática e a estratégia do trotskismo, entretanto, foram abandonadas sem cerimônia pelos discípulos. O programa foi ignorado, não foi enriquecido.
E, nos estados operários degenerados, a necessidade de desenvolver o programa de revolução política foi demonstrada pelas explosões regulares de rebelião contra os governantes stalinistas. Mas também aqui as pedras fundamentais colocadas por Trotsky foram dinamitadas, não construídas. Em vez disso, frações da burocracia foram eliminadas.
A crise de liderança, na última parte do século XX, teve um novo desenvolvimento. O colapso da FI significa que o centrismo permanece como a principal alternativa para os trabalhadores rompendo com o reformismo. As forças do comunismo revolucionário são uma pequena minoria. Faltam números, recursos, teóricos da estatura de Trotsky e muitas outras coisas ao lado. Mas essas forças existem. Sob a bandeira do MRCI, eles estão lutando. É verdade que hoje devemos lutar em grande parte com as armas da crítica. Ao transcender esse estágio e superar os obstáculos, possuímos uma arma vital - o método revolucionário de Trotsky. Estão consagradas no Programa de Transição todas as respostas para nós na reelaboração desse programa para enfrentar o novo período de crise social e econômica em que o imperialismo mergulhou. Arrancando as mortalhas em que o centrismo envolveu o método e programa reais do trotskismo, podemos compensar todas as fraquezas. Podemos preparar nossos quadros, enraizar-nos na luta de classes e acumular experiência. Podemos marchar em frente com confiança e produzir o novo programa, sobre os ombros de cada programa marxista anterior, especialmente o TP. E assim fazendo, construiremos a nova Internacional e novos partidos que são tão desesperadamente necessários. Ao fazer isso, atendemos às palavras de Trotsky:
“O significado do programa é o significado do partido. . . Agora, qual é o partido? Em que existe a coesão? Essa coesão é um entendimento comum dos eventos, das tarefas; e esse entendimento comum - esse é o programa do partido. Assim como os trabalhadores modernos não podem trabalhar sem ferramentas mais do que os bárbaros, também no partido o programa é o instrumento”.68
Com esse programa, podemos armar a classe trabalhadora com uma estratégia para despachar o capitalismo para a lata de lixo da história.
Notas de rodapé
1 Leon Trotsky, A Agonia da Morte do Capitalismo e as Tarefas da Quarta Internacional (TP), (Nova York 1977) - todas as referências futuras ao Programa de Transição e as discussões sobre ele são para esta edição.
2 Ibid, p111
3 Sam Bornstein e Al Richardson, Against the Stream, (Londres 1986) p183
4 Leon Trotsky, The Crisis in the French Section, (New York 1977) p119
5 Leon Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, (Harmondsworth 1975) p40
6 Leon Trotsky, Whither France ?, (London 1974) p50
7 Leon Trotsky, TP, p172
8 Leon Trotsky, Writings 1937-38 (W 37-38), (New York 1976) p284
9 Leon Trotsky, W 38 -39, (New York 1974) p232
10 Leon Trotsky, W 39-40, (New York 1973) p159
11 Leon Trotsky, TP, p99
12 Leon Trotsky, W 39-40, p291
13 Leon Trotsky, W 38-39, p341
14 Leon Trotsky, TP, p112
15 Leon Trotsky, W 37-38, pp438-39
16 Para um relato completo dos efeitos desta desorientação ver: Workers Power / Irish Workers Group, The Death Agony of the Fourth International and the Tasks of Trotskyists Today, (Londres 1983)
17 James P Cannon, The Struggle for Socialism in the American Century, (New York 1977) p256
18 Ibid, p263
19 Mandel e Pablo eram, com Pierre Frank, o Secretariado Internacional que estava sediado em Paris naquela época
20 'A Situação Mundial e Tarefas da Quarta Internacional', Quarta Internacional, junho de 1948 (Nova York)
21 James P Cannon, op cit, pp276-77
22 Ver Mark Hoskisson, 'Program in the Imperialist Epoch', Permanent Revolution No 6 (Londres 1987)
23 James P Cannon, op cit, p. 298
24 Duncan Hallas, 'Against the Stream', International Socialism 1:53, (Londres 1972) p39
25 John Molyneux, Leon Trotsky's Theory of Revolution, (Brighton 1981) p179
26 Chris Bambery, 'The Politics of James P Cannon', International Socialism 2:36 (Londres 1987) p77
27 Leon Trotsky, TP, p173
28 Ibid, p111
29 John Molyneux, op cit, p185
30 Leon Trotsky, On France, (New York 1979) p200
31 Leon Trotsky, TP, pp103-04
32 'The Yugoslav Affair', Fourth International December 1948, (New York) p238
33 Leon Trotsky , TP, p113
34 Documents of the Fourth International, (New York 1973) p.348
35 Leon Trotsky, TP, pp 113-14 (grifo nosso)
36 Documents of the Fourth International, p161 (grifo nosso)
37 Leon Trotsky, TP, p.101
38 Workers Power, Where Next for the NUM ?, (Londres 1985)
39 Leon Trotsky, TP, p114
40 Duncan Hallas, Trotsky's Marxism, (Londres 1979) p104
41 Leon Trotsky, The Spanish Revolution, (New York 1973) p80
42 Leon Trotsky, TP, p135
43 Ibid, p102
44 Ibid, p129
45 Ibid, p122
46 Ibid, pp136-37
47 Ibid, p137
48 Workers Socialist League, Trotskyism Today No4, p5 (Londres 1979)
49 Leon Trotsky, Whither France ?, p146
50 Ibid, p115 ( nossa ênfase)
51 John Molyneux, op cit, p152
52 Leon Trotsky, TP, p115
53 Ibid, p115
54 Ibid, p157
55 Ibid, p176
56 VI Lenin, Collected Works Volume 36, p172 (Moscou 1966)
57 Leon Trotsky, TP, pp159-60
58 Ibid, p111
59 Ibid, p137
60 Leon Trotsky, The Spanish Revolution, p137
61 Leon Trotsky, TP, p137
62 Ibid, p145
63 Tony Cliff, State Capitalism in Russia, p264 (Londres 1974)
64 Leon Trotsky, W 37-38 , p.343
65 Leon Trotsky, TP, p.173
66 Ibid, p.173
67 Ver Workers Power, Permanent Revolution No2, (Londres 1984)
68 Leon Trotsky, TP, p171
By José Villa
Introduction by the Editorial Board
Below we republish a long document on the history of the Bolivian Revolution in 1952. It was written in 1992 by José Villa, a Bolivian comrade who was at that time a member of the RCIT’s predecessor organization – the League for a Revolutionary Communist International (LRCI).
The document was published in Spanish language in the journal Bases No.5 (Autumn 1992). A shortened English language version appeared in the special Bolivia issue of Revolutionary History Vol.4, No.3 (Summer 1992). Later, the Marxist Internet Archive published the complete version (https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/supplem/bolivia/villamen.htm). The text was translated by Mike Jones.
* * * * *
The 1952 Revolution
How the 4th International and the POR betrayed the revolution which could have carried Trotskyism to power.
by José Villa
Chapters
1. Introduction
2. The Menshevik positions of the POR and of Lora in April
3. International repercussions of the interview with Lora
4. Rebelión against the Permanent Revolution
5. The POR supports the Bourgeois Government
6. Co-Government
7. The POR seeks to enter the bourgeois government
8. The collaborationist programme of the POR
9. The POR did not struggle for the occupation of the enterprises
10. All Power to the COB!
11. Turn the COB Into A Soviet!
12. The MNR-POR Government
13. All power to the MNR Left Wing!
14. The POR adapts itself to The MNR Left.
15. The POR believed that Paz would be able to create an anti-capitalist government
16. The Nationalisation of the mines
17. The disintegration and reorganisation of the armed forces
18. The desire to transform the MNR
19. The Peasant uprising
20. The opportunist international orientation of the POR
21. The leadership of the Fourth International identifies itself with this Menshevik policy
22. References
* * * * *
Part 1: Introduction
When the February revolution occurred in 1917, the Bolsheviks had been in existence for fifteen years. When the revolution of April 1952 happened the POR had been in existence for seventeen years. Both movements operated in countries with a peasant and petty bourgeois majority but with a modern, geographically concentrated, proletariat. Both parties had the benefit of working with the introducers of ‘Marxism’ into their respective countries (Plekhanov and Marof) and their cadres had taken part in forming the first working class organisations. While Bolshevism had been formed by its confrontation with other Marxist currents (economists, Mensheviks, etc.), petty bourgeois socialists (SRs) and bourgeois democrats (Cadets), the POR had had to fight against the ‘Marxists’ of Marof and Stalinism, the different wings of the MNR and ‘socialism’ of both bourgeois and military varieties.
Bolshevism was tempered during the working class upsurge which culminated in the 1905 revolution, in the reactionary phase which followed it, in the new wave of strikes and the struggle against World War 1. The POR was born in the fight against the Chaco War and was forged during two great mass insurgencies, which brought down the governments in 1936 and 1946, in great strikes and massacres, in constant changes of government, coups and a short civil war. While the ‘general rehearsal’ of 1905 was smashed, both of the two rehearsals of revolutionary crises experienced by the POR ended with toppling the governments. Bolivian ‘Trotskyism’ had its programme endorsed by the university students and the miners and could pride itself on having had within its ranks the main leaders of the FSTMB and the CON. (1)
The role of the POR in the April events was such that even one of the founders of the Stalinist party recognised that of the five main leaders of the insurrection, one was of the MNR right, another was of the pro-POR wing of the MNR, and three were POR:
“This armed uprising was led and guided to victory by the leading personnel of the MNR, Hernán Siles Zuazo, Juan Lechín Oquendo, Edwin Moller, Alandia Pantojas, Villegas and others”. (2) (Memorias del primer ministro obrero, Waldo Alvarez, La Paz, 1986 p.188).
In Lucha Obrera, the POR boasted that
“when top MNR leaders thought about flight, it was our comrades who lead the people and proletariat of Oruro to victory (…) our militants were the real leaders in the defence of Villa Pavon and Miraflores that in practice saved the difficult situation for the revolutionaries when the enemy already appeared to be triumphant within the city”. (3) (LO 12.6.52, p.3).
Within the COB, the dominant power in the country, the POR was the most important and influential party. The historian Alexander states that: “The POR which had in large part been able to determine the ideological orientation and dynamism of the Workers Center”, “For the first six months the COB was practically in the hands of the Trotskyists”. (4)
Lora admits that:
“Immediately after the 9th April 1952, the MNR operated as a inactive minority within the trade union organisations. It had little success because mass radicalisation had reached its highest point.” (5) (Sindicatos y revolución, G. Lora, La Paz 1960, p.31).
“The whole of the opening struggle for the formation of the Trade Union Centre was in the hands of POR militants and a large part of the full-time Staff and the whole orientation of the brand new COB was Trotskyist. Lechín did no more than operate under the powerful pressure of the masses and the POR. In the speeches of the workers’ leaders of this period and in the plans presented to the Paz Estenssoro Cabinet can be found the imprint of the POR”. (6) (La Revolución boliviana: Análisis crítico, Guillermo Lora, La Paz 1963, p.254).
While the MNR was weak for several months after the uprising of April, the POR CC continued boasting to itself about its majority in the COB. “Our unchallenged present majority is a clear proof of our slow but solid and sure work, undertaken by the party in this sense”. (7) (Boletin Interno, no 13, POR, 1953, p.11).
The COB was born brandishing the Theses of Pulacayo, and with a POR programme and orientation. When it was founded the POR displayed its total identification with its conduct. “The COB was born then with a clear conception of its independent class position, faithfully interpreting in its transitional programme the broad mass movement” (8) (LO, 18.4.52., p.2).
The historian Dunkerley maintains that “much of the preparatory work (of founding the COB) was undertaken by the POR representatives, Edwin Moller, Miguel Alandia and José Zegada”. (9) (Rebelión en las venas, James Dunkerley, Ed Quipus, 1982, La Paz, p.50, Verso edition p.45). “The POR allegedly controlled at least half the COB’s 13 man central committee”. (10) (ibid., p.67, Verso Edition, p.64. The editor of the English text omitted ‘allegedly’ before ‘controlled’).
In October 1952 a journalist, claiming to be a Trotskyist critical of the POR, admitted that within the COB “the largest fraction is that of the POR; next comes the group of Lechín and Torres, that is the nationalist wing of the unions while the Stalinists are in third place with scarcely five votes”. (11)
It took the Russian Bolsheviks from February to October to obtain a majority in the Soviets and when they had got it they moved to insurrection. The POR however controlled the COB from its first moments. While the Bolsheviks were a minority within the Russian working class for these eight months the POR led the COB for the first crucial six months after the insurrection which dispersed the bourgeois army. The programme, the leadership and the press of the COB were the work of the POR. The main leader of the COB functioned by reading out speeches written by the POR.
However, there was a huge difference between the POR and Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks demanded of the Soviets that they should give no class support to the bourgeois-democratic, reformist coalition government and that instead they should break with the bourgeoisie and take all power in their own hands. The POR, in contrast, gave ‘critical support’ to the bourgeois government and asked to be given ministerial posts. While the Bolsheviks attacked the Mensheviks and the SRs without pity, seeking to remove them from leadership positions, the POR identified itself with the labour bureaucracy (for whom they drafted speeches and ministerial plans) and sought to transform the bourgeois party and its government. The Bolshevik strategy was to make a new revolution while that of the POR was to reform the MNR and its government. In short, while Bolshevism was Leninist, the POR was Lechínist.
Part 2: The Menshevik positions of the POR and of Lora in April
Trying to explain the behaviour of the POR as objectively as possible, Dunkerley maintains that those from the section of the Fourth International “were from an early stage highly critical of the MNR regime, they made no call for an immediate workers government, demanding instead a radicalisation of proposed reforms, the defence of the regime against imperialism and the revolutionary education of the masses”. (12) (Rebelión en las venas, p.52 – Verso Edition, p.46).
Just before the April events the POR had published “an open letter to the government, demanding that power be handed over to the Nationalist MNR without a new election”. (13) The strategy of the POR was limited to pressurising the government periodically so as to change the leadership of the bourgeois state with the aim of allowing the MNR to take over the presidency by constitutional means. In that way, a legitimate government could be restored, which, through pressure, would be forced to adopt radical measures and would also have to appoint worker ministers.
During the April events Lora had been in France where he gave statements to La Verité which The Militant then reproduced. They were the main weeklies of the Fourth International. In his history of the POR, Lora says that “Up to now not enough importance has been given to the call for the Trotskyist programme made by Lora in Paris a few days after the arrival of the MNR in power”. With great cynicism he states that there he said that the working class “in order to triumph had no other way than by going over the political corpse of the MNR and also over that of Lechínism”. (14) (Contribución …, G. Lora, Vol.2, pp.237-238). As far as we are concerned, we do not want to give ‘enough importance’ to such statements. Exactly the opposite was said. Let us see:
“The central slogans put forward by our party were:
1) Restore the constitution of the country through the formation of an MNR government which obtained a majority in the 1951 election.
2) The struggle for the improvement of wages and working conditions
3) Struggle for democratic rights
4) Mobilisation of the masses against imperialism, for the nationalisation of the mines, and for the abrogation of the UN agreement”. (15) (The Militant 12.5.52, Lora interview Part 1, SWP, New York.)
Of all these demands only the last one is really radical and even that did not go beyond the limits of bourgeois democracy, or what the anti-communist Paz would do a few months later. The first seeks a constitutional bourgeois state with a populist government. Instead of seeking to differentiate itself from the latter by raising anti-capitalist and class-based slogans, the whole of the POR platform was exactly the same as that raised by the bourgeois MNR. Lora did not put forward as his dominant idea any proletarian slogan (expropriation without compensation of the bourgeoisie, workers control, disarming the bourgeois armed forces and their replacement by worker and peasant militias, occupation mines, factories and land, etc.). Instead of wanting to make the COB into a soviet, break with the bourgeoisie and take all power, Lora called for the MNR bourgeois government to change direction and limited himself to asking for some reforms which did not go beyond the framework of the capitalist state.
“The subversive movement of the ninth of April was no surprise for our party and occurred as we had foreseen in our theoretical analysis”. (16)
If a party was aware that it was approaching the main revolution of its history it ought to have done all it could to have kept its most important individual in the country, or at least, not far away. However, Lora stayed in Paris for more than half a year after the end of the 3rd World Congress of the Fourth International which was why he was in Europe. By boasting that his party had predicted what was going to happen and with his view that he should stay outside in the imperialist world, Lora was either blustering, or worse, he did not place much importance on his own endeavours to get rid of the MNR but instead agreed with trying to put pressure on it.]
“The struggle which immediately began is a struggle of the masses to impose their demands on the April 9th government”. (17)
If the POR was in the forefront of the struggle its objective should have been to put itself forward as an alternative leadership which called on the COB to kick out Paz. However, Lora called for support of the bourgeois government and its ‘left-wing’ ministers. Instead of opposing the trap of inviting labour ministers into the capitalist cabinet, so attempting to improve the regime’s disguise preparatory to disarming and then counter-attacking the workers, Lora identified himself with the tactic. “The textile workers decided to impose their conditions on the right wing of the MNR, they obliged it to accept the working class elements in the new cabinet who constitute its left faction”. (18) (The Militant, 12.5.52, Lora Interview Part 1).
“In this connection, the essential mission of the POR is to assume the role of the vigilant guide to prevent the aspirations of the workers from being diluted by vague promises or by manoeuvres of right wing elements”. (19)
For the POR, the enemy was not the bourgeois government but only the ministers who were to the right of the anti-communist Paz. As far as Paz was concerned, ‘the government was to be defended to the utmost’.
Lora wanted to uphold this reformist position by characterising the regime as petty bourgeois. The petty bourgeoisie is incapable of installing its own mode of production and regime. Small property engenders large property. A society of small owners is impossible and cannot avoid competition so forcing some to enrich themselves to accumulate while others become poor and are turned into proletarians. When the petty bourgeoisie is not allied to the proletariat it is marching behind the bourgeoisie aiming to reform its state.
A government that is not subordinate to the Soviets and workers militias is one that is against the proletariat. A petty bourgeois government which oscillates between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie cannot exist. By upholding such a possibility, Lora put forward the view that these ‘petty bourgeois’ governments, should have pressure put on them to try to fill them with extra labour ministers, with the aim of gradually achieving a workers and peasants government. This is a gradualist and reformist conception that led the POR to prop up the military socialist dictatorship, and it would later lead them to ask for ministers in the cabinet of General Torres. Whenever you try to put ‘red’ ministers in the populist governments of the bourgeoisie and sow further illusions, the more the ruling class is helped make use of these demagogues so as to confuse and disorientate the masses and to prepare a reactionary coup.
Neither the MNR government nor the party were petty bourgeois. The MNR, like every party with popular support, reflects the composition of the society in which it operates. A populist party, even though it has a majority of members from the most oppressed strata, just as elsewhere within capitalism, is run from the top down. Almost all the top leadership of the MNR were people who came from the oligarchic families, who had collaborated with German imperialism, propped up the bloody nationalist dictatorship of Villarroel and who were socially, ideologically and organically, an expression of a sector of the national bourgeoisie. The MNR, like Bolivian society, might have a majority of members and voters in the petty bourgeoisie, but it was led by politicians of and for the bourgeoisie.
Part 3: International repercussions of the interview with Lora
These scandalous declarations were published in the mouth-piece of those who called themselves bastions of ‘anti-pabloism’: the SWP (USA) and PCI (France). From ‘Pabloists’ to ‘anti-Pabloists’ all fully supported these positions. In all of the factional struggles which were to split the Fourth International in 1953, nobody ever objected to this criminal Menshevik policy which betrayed the Bolivian Revolution.
The only discordant voice known within the Fourth International at that time was that of a small tendency in California, headed by Vern and Ryan. This had the great merit of severely questioning the Menshevik declarations of Lora.
“The POR has been presented the opportunity of leading a revolution and thereby rendering a great service to our international movement.”
“The MNR is a bourgeois party, which politically exploits the masses.”
“… it is incontestable that the present Bolivian government is a bourgeois government, whose task and aim is to defend by all means available to it the interests of the bourgeoisie and of imperialism (…) This government is therefore the deadly enemy of the workers and peasants, and especially of the Marxist party.”
“A united front with a bourgeois party with the aim of establishing a bourgeois constitution and placing the bourgeois party in power is not a united front but a people’s front.
“The united front that the Marxists advocate aims to unite the workers and peasants on a minimum programme embodying a stage of the revolutionary transitional program. This united front, in a revolutionary situation, turns into workers’ and peasants’ soviets. And even in the soviets the struggle goes on. Far from accepting the conciliationist programme which may be imposed on the soviets, the Marxists advocate their own programme, calling on the soviets to break with the bourgeoisie, their parties and their government, and take the complete power, establishing a workers’ and peasants’ government.
“But comrade Lora does not raise the question of a break with the bourgeois government. The workers’ and peasants’ government he advocates appears as some ultimate conclusion to a gradual reshuffling of the personnel of the bourgeois government, whereby the right wingers will be forced out and the cabinet take on a more and more left tinge”. (20)
The Vern-Ryan tendency received no reply to its criticism against the Menshevik line in Bolivia. From then until today, all the currents which derive from the ‘anti-Pabloist’ International Committee continue to ignore these questionings of a policy which they, opportunistically, totally endorsed.
In spite of the progressive nature of its criticism this tendency soon dissolved itself. Its positions, although on the left of the deformed Fourth International, contained a series of ambiguities. The most important of them was its conception that a government directed by a Stalinist military apparatus would be enough (regardless of whether capitalist social relations had been expropriated or not) to recognise the creation of a new deformed workers state.
Part 4: Rebelión against the Permanent Revolution
The POR was proud that it edited the mouthpiece of the COB bureaucracy.
“Our points of view were imposed by a crushing majority and the newspaper Rebelión of the COB presented our own political position in the workers camp”. (21) (Boletin Interno, No.13, POR, undated, p.10)
“The three first issues of Rebelión, the last of which was published on the occasion of the First Congress of the COB (31st October 1954), appeared under the direction of M. Alandia and wholly expressed the programme of the Centre at that time. The first issue contained a hearty greeting to the General Secretary of the POR”. (22) (La revolución boliviana: Análisis crítico, G. Lora, La Paz 1963, p.254).
But what did this mouthpiece have to say? Did it put forward a revolutionary policy whose basic principles could only be a demand for the COB to break with Paz and call for the occupation of the mines, factories and the land, and to take power? On the contrary, Rebelión identified itself with the bourgeois regime. It stated that the MNR government was its own and that it had to be propped up. In its first issue under POR direction it said:
“The defeat of the oligarchy and the birth of the MNR government is the work of the working masses; it is our creation (…) in order to survive the present government requires from the workers that the workers supporting it, being vigilant will be able to attain great achievements”. (23) (Rebelión, 1.5.52, pp.8-9)
They not only mortgaged themselves to the MNR but paid homage to the memory of a military man, Gualberto Villarroel, who was involved in the Catavi massacre of 1942, and who was a pro-imperialist dictator overthrown by a popular uprising. (24) “Our proletarian homage to the memory of the martyr president” (ibid., p.9).
How could that be the position of a revolutionary? This was an orientation which could only help to disarm and demobilise the COB, asking it, in spite of having the real power, to continue helping a bourgeois government that was destined to line up behind imperialism and massacre the workers.
In June, Lucha Obrera maintained that the MNR should thank the POR for helping it achieve power and for its support. Its task would now be to put pressure on the MNR to carry out reforms which would benefit the working and middle classes.
“If the MNR has to give thanks to anyone, and greatly for our help, it is without doubt, to the POR (…) The POR will continue in carrying out its task of guiding the proletariat and of ensuring that the actions which deposed one government and raised up another, which enjoys the support of all the people, are carried out in a way beneficial to the proletariat and the oppressed sectors of the middle class”. (25) (LO, 12.6.52, p.3).
“Never before had a party like the MNR that can count on uniform backing from an armed people and proletariat, achieved power; and never, therefore, did anyone have the opportunity of adopting measures with a real revolutionary content. The government has closed its eyes, or has not wanted to see the magnificent opportunity, and has preferred to deceive the proletariat which supported it unconditionally”. (26) (LO, 29.6.52, p.4)
Never before had the party had such an opportunity to make a social revolution, but the MNR hesitated. The POR opposed the view that the deficiency was because of the bourgeois class character of the MNR, but said it was due to its lack of tactical ability. The task was to open its eyes and make it see the magnificent opportunity. The whole policy of the POR was completely Menshevik. Instead of calling on the workers to reject the MNR and to struggle to put the COB into power, the POR boasted of having served the MNR and of wanting it to mull over things and see reality – an orientation that was simply limited to seeking to serve as an adviser to the MNR in order to reform it.
Part 5: The POR supports the bourgeois government
Nine days after the uprising of 9th April, the mouthpiece of the POR declared that:
“to the extent that it carries out the promised programme, it supports the Government which arose out of the popular insurrection of 9th April, (…) It had two worker ministers in the petty bourgeois cabinet, but was entirely controlled and tied to the decisions of the COB”. (27) (LO, 18.4.52, p.2).
Under no circumstances can the proletariat support the government of a section of its exploiters. On the contrary, the aim of a Marxist party should be to undermine it and to struggle for its revolutionary overthrow. Supporters of it would be compromised with a policy of maintaining backward and semi-colonial capitalism. In the case of an attempt at a reactionary coup the Trotskyists should have followed the same policy as Russian Bolshevism in the face of the Kornilov revolt. Without giving an ounce of support to the Kerensky government the Leninists joined its supporters in the streets to fight with arms in order to crush ultra-reaction. At all times they called on the workers to have no confidence in, or to give support to, the government, and to prepare to depose it in a revolutionary way, once the monarchist coup attempt had been crushed.
However, in Bolivia at the time imperialism had no intention of carrying out a coup. It much preferred to help Paz and Siles, who knew how to use demagogy together with reformists like Lechín and their agents in the POR, in order to exhaust the masses, so that they could free themselves from working class pressure and succeed in rebuilding the bourgeois armed forces and so maintaining semi-colonial capitalism. The rightist coups (such as the adventure of the MNR right-wing in January 1953) could not count on the patronage of the USA. The Yanks had no wish to provoke a popular counter-reaction. They knew that the MNR was led by bourgeois and they knew how to use such people against the workers.
The USA never armed a counter-revolutionary guerrilla force as it did later in Nicaragua, Angola or Afghanistan. Nor did it encourage bellicose sentiments among the reactionary governments of the region for an invasion. The imperialist trump card was Paz. They knew that the latter would be made to nationalise the larger mines and to carry out some social reforms. But they also knew that he did it under pressure of the armed masses and that he would try to moderate those reforms when he could. As soon as populist demagogy had helped the rebuilding of the repressive bourgeois military machine and the workers activity had ebbed, that would be the time for a policy of destabilisation. The Eder and Triangular plans applied later by Paz, Siles or Lechín would seek to follow the designs of imperialism against the exploited of Bolivia.
To believe that ministers in a cabinet could have a policy contrary to that of the government was shown to be a reactionary illusion. Rather, those ‘red’ ministers were obliged to implement the decisions of an anti-working class government. It was not the COB that controlled its ministers, but it was the government, through its trade unionist ministers, which controlled the COB.
During the April events, the “Central Committee issued a resolution in the form of adhering to the revolution, advancing a programme of immediate demands. The fundamental points demanded a struggle for (…) A Bolivian government that would obey the will of the Bolivians”. (28) (Boletin Interno, No.13, 1953, p.7).
In May, Lucha Obrera called for a struggle to change the direction of the Victor Paz government. It demanded “A Bolivian government which will obey the will of the Bolivians and not of the Yanks”. “The petty bourgeois government, owing to the force of political circumstances, has the possibility of being transformed and changed into a phase of the Workers and Peasants government”. (29) (LO, 25.5.52, p.3).
The Bolivians living in that country are from every class. A government ‘of the Bolivians’ can only be that of the ruling class of the said republic. The POR, instead of struggling to overthrow the bourgeois government in order to create one of the workers and peasants, suggested that the MNR should rather take up the aim of developing a sovereign national bourgeoisie and that it should stop conciliating the USA to such an extent. If it did the latter it would be able to turn itself into a workers’ and peasants’ government.
For Marxism, the proletariat can come into power only on the basis of the destruction of the existing state machinery and the removal of the bourgeoisie from power. For the POR, the workers could attain power by Bolivianising and improving the regime of the bourgeois MNR. The POR faithfully followed the teachings of Aguirre and Marof, of trying to serve nationalist governments with the aim of changing their direction.
Part 6: Co-Government
After the success of the April revolution a quarrel began between the different wings of the MNR about sharing out the quotas of power. When Lechín withdrew, protesting at the few posts given to him for his followers, the leader of the right-wing gave way. According to Lechín’s story, Siles followed him as far as the palace staircase: ‘Juan, come back and we will talk. Put your points of view, and so that they can be carried out, name four ministers’. Lechín went back, named four minsters almost at random, and thus co-government was born”. (30) (ibid. p.301).
“The top layer of the left-wing supported by some union leaders, were content to impose two worker ministers and three centrists in the cabinet and to challenging the right to posts and positions in the administrative bureaucracy”. (31) (Boletin Interno, No 13, of the POR, undated, p.8.)
As far as the POR was concerned Lechín should have fought for more portfolios and perhaps some for the POR.
Supported by all the POR votes the newly born COB resolved:
“To grant comrades Juan Lechín and Germán Butrón the absolute confidence of the working class and to reaffirm its solidarity and support in the ministerial posts they hold at present”. (32) (Movimiento obrero y procesos politicos en Bolivia: Historia de la COB 1952-1987, Jorge Lazarte, EDOBOL, La Paz 1989, p.280).
The POR, after identifying itself with the Lechínist ministers, did ask them to resign in protest about the delay in nationalising the mines. But, on other occasions, later, the POR was once more to demand the capture of ministries on behalf of Lechínism.
In July, the POR said:
“When the COB was organised the situation of the worker ministers in the cabinet was defined as spokesmen of the working class in the government and agents of the government in the workers’ camp. The action of the workers ministers, as a minority, is difficult. Faced with that fact, there was undoubtedly no other alternative but to resign”. (33) (LO, 15.7.52, p.1).
In November, the POR issued a ‘self-criticism’: “In spite of all their bold statements, these workers representatives, instead of proletarianising the cabinet as had been proposed, only succeeded in ministerialising the Central Obrera Boliviana”. (34) (LO, 29.11.52, p.2)
Towards the end of 1953, the POR leadership presented a Report in which it stated that:
“The new upsurge comes from the demand to Lechín to leave the cabinet put forward by the mining unions, backed by the COB and curbed by Lechín. Our union fraction then took up a neutral and vacillating position”. “We have no doubt that this new period of upsurge will culminate with the adoption of our political theses”. (35) (Boletin Interno, No.13, POR, p.11).
The POR admitted that its trade unionists adapted to the pressures from Lechín. The policy of demanding the resignation of the labour ministers was an opportunist manoeuvre. It did not accompany the call for the COB to take power. Some weeks later, during the key events which frustrated the rightist January coup, the POR was to demand that ‘the comrade President’ Bolivianise his government and allow them to join it. For those reasons, the ‘new period of upsurge’ did not end with the victory of the POR theses but in the victory of the MNR, which was to succeed by absorbing most of the membership and periphery of the POR.
Part 7: The POR Seeks to enter the bourgeois government
During the 1952 revolution it was vitally important that any party, in the slightest way Marxist, had to have a policy of total independence from and opposition to the new bourgeois government of the MNR. The POR not only did the opposite, supported this new regime and identified itself fully with its ‘Leftist’ ministers, but even tried to enter it. At its 3rd World Congress in 1951, the Fourth International, unanimously adopted a line favouring the POR joining a future MNR government, and the POR had already previously joined the military ‘socialist’ government.
A journalist, claiming to be Trotskyist, related how:
“One of the old militants of the POR told us likewise with pride, that the MNR offered two ministries to the POR.” (36)
“The Executive Power invited the revolutionary painter Alandia to take up the post of Minister of Culture (…) The POR authorised its member to accept the invitation”. (37) (LO, 1.6.52, p.2).
Alandia, who until the end of his life was a well-known leader of Lora’s POR, succeeded in being the Editor of the trade union organ of the MNR bureaucracy, and he joined the government in the capacity of Minister of Culture.
The Californian Trotskyist Ryan sent a letter to the leadership of the SWP and the Fourth International, demanding that it give an answer with information on the details of POR participation in the government. Up until now we are not aware of any explanation or denial of such facts, just as we are unaware of any source which can ascertain their reliability or otherwise:
“According to these reports received from non-Trotskyist sources, the POR is accepting posts in the government machinery: Guillermo Lora, former secretary of the party, has been appointed [to] the Stabilization office; Comrade Moller, present Secretary of the POR, is director of the Workers Savings Bank, which is controlled by Juan Lechín, a member of the Cabinet; Ayala Mercado, another POR leader, is a member of the Agrarian Commission.” (38)
Bolshevism emerged in the struggle against ministerialism. The followers of Lenin were opposed to socialists entering bourgeois-democratic governments in Western Europe and equally that of Kerensky in the Russia of 1917. The only governments in which the Bolsheviks would have participated critically, would be those based on workers militias and councils which could attack and disarm the capitalist class. The Fourth International was founded in the struggle against the POUM of Nin which joined the anti-fascist bourgeois government of Barcelona in 1937. Taking part in a non-working class government only serves the enemies of the proletariat by confusing it and preparing the conditions for a later offensive against it.
In 1952, the POR had a ministerialist attitude. If it did not succeed in getting portfolios in the government but only managed secretarial posts in ministries or departments, it is because the MNR did not consider it to have any weight independent of the Lechínist faction, and it could point to its presence as a way of calming the masses. It preferred to keep the POR outside the cabinet but subordinate to it through the union bureaucracy.
Part 8: The collaborationist programme of the POR
In every issue of Lucha Obrera after April 1952, a new version of The Programme of the Exploited, was reproduced, which we reprint in its entirety:
“1. To prevent the revolution that begun on 9th April being strangled within the bourgeois and democratic framework.
2. The Strengthening of the working class, and consolidating the COB.
3. The mobilisation of the peasants behind the slogan of nationalisation of land and expropriation of the large estates without compensation, in order to allow the revolutionary process to end in victory.
4. The gaining of democratic guarantees for the exploited. The development of union democracy within the unions. Freedom of propaganda for revolutionary parties. The cancelling of all privileges for the rosca (39) counter-revolution.
5. Armed workers militias as a substitute for the regular army.
6. Better conditions of living and work. A basic living wage and sliding scale of wages. Collective contracts.
7. Nationalisation of mines and railways without compensation and under workers control.
8. The expulsion of imperialism. The cancelling of the international treaties which bind the country to imperialism. The rejection of the agreement on technical aid with the UN”. (40) (LO, 25.5.52).
We are not questioning those slogans, but the absence of key and essential slogans. That programme is limited and is adapted to the tastes of the Lechín wing of the MNR. The union bureaucracy could accommodate itself to all these slogans.
The central demands which were completely ignored in the POR press during those months were those of the occupation of the Mines, factories and large estates; no support for the new bourgeois government nor for the Lechín union bureaucracy; no to Co-government; that workers ministers should resign from the capitalist cabinet; All Power to the COB.
The POR talked about “preventing the revolution being strangled” when they themselves were strangling it with ‘critical’ support to the capitalist government. They demanded the “consolidation of the COB” but they opposed struggling for the most elementary tasks of achieving such an aim: an open struggle against the bureaucracy of Lechín and the MNR for the election and recall of all leaders by rank-and-file mass meetings and for an immediate conference of the COB in order to equip it with a soviet-type structure and for it to take complete power. The POR did not struggle to transform the COB into a Supreme Soviet in order to seize power, but wanted to put pressure on its summit so that it would recite its speeches and improve governmental decrees.
It called for the nationalisation of the land, mines and railways but did not demand its imposition by the workers and peasants with their own hands through occupations. Its position was limited to requesting and putting pressure on the government to carry out such measures, which created dangerous illusions in the masses, helping to demobilise them and keeping them in a state of dependency (instead of calling on them to do things themselves). At no time did it call for the bourgeoisie to be expropriated. Workers’ control was only demanded for state enterprises. The factories (Said, Soligno, etc.), shopping chains (Casa Grace, etc.) and other private companies continued operating as before. There was no demand for their nationalisation (not even with compensation), for workers, control, or the payment of higher taxes.
They wanted “freedom of propaganda for revolutionary parties”. By this the POR acknowledged that, apart from itself, other ‘revolutionaries’ existed, among them the MNR and Stalinism. What was correct was to call for the broadest democratic liberties. At the same time there had to be a struggle for the expropriation of the mass media and its handing over to organisations of workers and ordinary people. “The cancellation of all privileges of the rosca counter- revolution” was demanded. But what does the cancellation of privileges mean? What was needed was the demand for its total expropriation along with the creation of people’s courts to try the executioners and butchers of the oligarchic regime.
The slogan about expelling imperialism was very vague. It was not tied to demands to expropriate all its enterprises or to repudiate the foreign debt. Anyway, the POR itself said repeatedly that, if it got into power, it would try to force the USA to recognise it and establish diplomatic relations.
Neither did the POR raise the main slogan for a thorough-going bourgeois democracy: the sovereign Constituent Assembly, where all those over the age of 18 (or 16) would have the right to vote and to be elected. New elections on as democratic and as broad a basis as possible, and the creation of a new Constituent Assembly where the main national problems could be debated, would have let the revolutionary party more easily unmask the nature of the MNR and of parliamentarianism. The POR envisaged something else which flung dust in the workers’ eyes: to restore the reactionary constitution which put Paz into the Presidential Palace.
This programme lacked the slightest internationalist slogans. It did not call for solidarity with the other workers of the world and with anti-imperialist struggles, the defence of the workers’ states against imperialism, support for revolutions against the bourgeoisie and the bureaucracies, the internationalisation of the revolution; and for the building of the United Socialist States of Latin America and of the world, not to mention the struggle for the worker-peasant government or for the socialist republic. The POR merely wanted to pressurise the bourgeois government behind whose ‘left’ wing it was always searching for a compromise to carry out the programme further.
The POR action programme was that of a party which had repudiated the strategy of permanent revolution and which only wanted a bourgeois-democratic transformation within the segregated framework of one, isolated, landlocked and backward country.
Part 9: The POR did not struggle for the occupation of the Enterprises.
After the April events, the bourgeois armed forces were virtually destroyed. All power was in the hands of the peoples’ and workers’ militias and the COB. In those circumstances the next step on the agenda was to call on the COB to cease to support a non-working class government and to take all power in its own hands.
According to Lora:
“From the 9th of April on, the unions of the most important districts simply took over the solution of the vital problems, and the authorities, thus replaced, had no other course than to accept their decisions. It was these unions which operated as organs of workers power and raised the issue of the duality of local and national authority. Controlling the daily life of the masses, they took on legislative and executive attributes (they had the power of compulsion to execute their decisions), and even succeeded in administrating justice. The union assembly was turned into the ultimate arbiter and the supreme authority. This phenomenon was almost general in the mines and, on occasion, could be seen in the factories.
Unfortunately, this reality was not fully understood by the vanguard of the proletariat and a favourable moment for carrying out the demand for the immediate occupation of the mines, which would have made the proletariat fight a battle to determine the question of dual power in its favour, was thrown away. In this first period the union leadership and assembly operated as organs of workers’ power”. (41) (ibid., p.277).
“One of the POR slogans which most gripped the workers was that of the occupation of the mines (…) Why was this demand not carried through by workers action, at the time of their greatest mobilisation and radicalisation? If the mines had been occupied, and it was possible that this could have occurred, it is clear that the course of the revolution would have undergone a radical change (..) The occupation of the mines would have raised, sooner or later, the question of power, and created the basis for the rapid supersession of the nationalist positions adopted by the working class; at the same time, the POR would have been able, quite quickly, to recover its control”. (42) (Contribución …, G. Lora, Vol 2, p.231-232).
If the issues of Lucha Obrera and the POR programme for 1952 are examined, the slogan of immediate occupation of the mines, factories and land will be found. The only time an enterprise is was taken over was to prevent the closure of the Corocoro mine.
The reason the POR did not raise that slogan is connected to its refusal to call for workers’ control for the private businesses, to nationalise the factories and to formulate anti-capitalist demands. The POR was tailing Lechín and pressuring the Paz government.
Part 10: All power to the COB!
“Through the COB, the working class left-wing was a government within the government and, in a certain sense, more powerful than the government itself. The COB had a basis of support greater than that of the party of which it officially formed a part. It proposed that the MNR assume the power and responsibility of government and of governing the state officially, but the COB set itself up as a centre without rival capable of initiative and veto in relation to the central power. That is to say it had the power of government but not the responsibility”. (43) (Bolivia: la revolución inconclusa, James M. Malloy, Ceres, La Paz 1989, p.243).
“In reality, the COB was the real government of the Bolivian workers and, hence, of the national economy. In fact, it possessed the symbolic and functional characteristics of a sovereign entity, including executive, deliberative and judicial organs, a defined area of authority, electors and, what is more important, armed forces”. (44) (ibid, p.243-244).
“The COB was the master of the country, and indeed for a certain period it was the only centre of power worthy of the name”. (45) (A History …, Lora, p.281). “For the majority of the masses, the COB was their only leader and their only government.” (46) (ibid., p.284).
The situation in Bolivia after 9-11th April 1952, was similar to that in Russia after the February 1917 revolution. Two powers existed in the country, but the strongest, the one with mass character, was that of the peoples’ and workers’ organisations, which, owing to their conciliatory leaderships, handed over power to a weak bourgeois government. The governments of Kerensky and Paz had to flirt with the upsurge and demands of the masses at the same time as they tried to spin out time to exhaust them, and then, by rebuilding the armed forces and their authority, to open the way to a situation of bourgeois stabilisation.
In order to face up to such a situation, the Bolsheviks demanded that the Soviets break with the leftist provisional government of the bourgeoisie and take all power themselves. In the Bolivian case, the demand should have been to struggle for all power to the COB. The COB, just as with the Russian Soviets, had the arms and the power but, because of its conciliatory leadership, gave away the latter to the bourgeoisie. The seizure of power by the Soviets and the COB could have been done peacefully. The old military apparatus had already collapsed through a violent revolution. The road was open for workers power, which had its own arms and the people behind it, and could have had total power. The only obstacle to the COB and the Russian Soviets carrying out that task was that their leadership was so insistent on rescuing the bourgeoisie.
In spite of the COB being the real power in the country and the POR being its main directing force, the section of the Fourth International opposed the slogan of All Power to the COB. On the contrary, it called on the COB to join the bourgeois government, thus weakening its alternative power and so becoming a body more and more subordinate to the bourgeois government. The slogan of the POR was that of shifting the Paz administration leftwards via ministerial changes. With that treacherous line it helped Paz and Lechín to dilute the power of the COB and go on to reconstitute the bourgeois state and the army.
In his ‘self-criticism’ Lora recognised that:
“The POR brigade used these events to launch the slogan of ‘total control of the cabinet by the left’ (…) The slogan, however, contained the signs of an enormous ideological error: to believe that the workers could attain power via Lechín – behind the slogan of ‘All Power to the COB’”. (47) (La revolución boliviana: Análisis crítico, Lora, La Paz 1963, p.267).
“The watch-word of ‘All Power to the COB’ could have led to the victory of the workers on two exceptionally favourable occasions. The first was when the agitation around the immediate nationalisation of the mines without compensation and under workers’ control reached its high point (first half of 1952). The second arose with the defeat of the coup d’etat on 6th January 1953. Not taking due advantage of these opportunities and adapting to marching behind and mouthing the slogans of the MNR left, were the greatest errors of the POR”. (48) (ibid., p.270).
As we have seen, on the first occasion the POR did not call for the seizure of the enterprises but for support to the MNR government. On the second occasion, the POR insisted on the treacherous line of support for, and pushing for a change of policy by, Paz.
“On the morning of the 6th January 1953, the Minister of Peasant Affairs was kidnapped, as a preliminary to a coup d’etat (…) But towards evening the failure of the coup attempt was already evident (…) The COB called the workers and peasants militias to a mass mobilisation on a national scale. On the morning of 7th January, a massive demonstration, sponsored by the COB, took place. The demonstrators demanded immediate and unrestricted agrarian reform (…) Paz took measures against the rightists but in a moderate way (…) The government dissolved the Grupos de Honor and demoted and exiled many of the key conspirators. There was no bloodletting (…) Among the measures included were wage increases, vouchers, protection against dismissal, rent control, price control, subsidies to food stores and a series of measures on social security and other aspects of ‘consumption’ (…) sacked workers were re-employed”. (49) (ibid., p.298-299).
In the massive demonstration of 7th January, Edwin Moller, secretary of the POR at the time, spoke for the COB in the Plaza San Francisco. In his speech, instead of calling on the workers to have no confidence in the bourgeois government of Paz and to make its own Trade Union Centre take power, he ended his intervention saying “We want, comrade Paz Estenssoro, a government of Bolivians for the Bolivians”. (50) (LO, 23.1.53).
On that occasion, when Lora himself recognised that it would have been enough to have agitated around the slogan ‘All Power to the COB’, in order to have gained victory for the proletarian revolution, the POR put forward exactly the opposite. The POR called upon its ‘comrade’ president to set up a bourgeois nationalist government. In the crucial moments of the revolution, the POR showed that its strategy was limited to correcting the bourgeois government and not to overthrow it with a workers uprising.
“The counter-revolutionary forced obliged the MNR to base itself more and more firmly upon the left. In an attempt literally to frighten the opposition in order to obtain its agreement, the centrist tendency of the MNR and the leftist axis of the COB called demonstration after demonstration of their armed might. Militias of miners and peasants were brought permanently to the city in lorries and marched there in front of the population, crazily discharging their rifles”.
In spite of those extraordinary conditions, the POR delayed almost a year before launching the slogan for a COB government. In March 1953, Lucha Obrera argued: “That the culmination of the Altiplano Revolution cannot be anything else or occur in any other way than by a government formed by the COB embodied as the organ of power”. (51) (LO, March 1953, p.1).
However, it must be said that there are distinct ways and methods of launching such a slogan. The position of ‘All Power to the COB’, which was launched too late by the POR, was a variant of its idea of ‘all power to the left of the MNR’. For the POR, the launching of that slogan was not in order to unmask the Lechín leadership, but was more bothered to govern jointly with it. Instead of trying to oppose the COB to the MNR government, the position of the POR consisted in continually replacing the Paz cabinet with ministers from the COB until finally there would be a government of the COB bureaucracy of the MNR. The slogan of ‘All Power to the COB’ should have gone hand in hand with the raising of anti-capitalist slogans with an impeccable denunciation of the ‘left’ of the MNR.
Lechín has often said that his great mistake was not taking power in April 1952. (52) (see interview in Facetas, 5.7.87.) If Lechín had been anointed president based on the COB, it would not have created a revolutionary workers’ government. Villarroel’s ex-prefect would have done everything possible to maintain capitalism and to co-exist with the national and world bourgeoisie. A revolutionary party would only have been able to participate critically in that government if it had broken with the bourgeois MNR, based itself directly on the working class organisations and their militias and attacked and disarmed the bourgeoisie. Such an eventuality was highly unlikely. A Lechín government would have been a government of the Kerensky type or a bourgeois labour government. In the exceptional circumstances of the revolutionaries participating in a COB government as a minority, it would necessarily have required conditions of a considerable differentiation with Lechínism and the unmasking its counter-revolutionary character. They would have had to have persisted in brandishing the Trotskyist programme in opposition to its waverings and would have to seek to displace it from power so that it could give way to a Trotskyist dictatorship. (53)
(Nahuel Moreno always claimed that he called for ‘All Power to the COB’, as opposed to the POR policy of adaptation to the MNR left-wing. But Moreno’s slogan was only a variant of the popular-frontist resolutions of the 3rd congress of the Fourth International and the ‘government of the MNR left-wing’ position. In May, his paper put forward the “Demand that the worker ministers elected and controlled by the Miners Federation and the new Workers Centre are taken into the Paz Estenssoro government”. (Frente Proletario, 29.5.52. Quoted in Prensa Obrera 131, 3.5.86 – presumably PO Argentine – eds.).
Moreno’s position was akin to Lora’s. In reality, co-government was a cabinet of all the wings of the MNR. The worker ministers constantly reported back in detail to the COB, but that, instead of modifying the government and changing it into a proletarian one (an impossibility) simply confused the class. Moreno’s paper said that “the two wings which now exist within the MNR express the interests of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie”. (ibid.). Presumably Lechín represented the proletariat. But a sector that stays within a bourgeois party cannot represent the interests of the proletariat. By 1953 Moreno was proposing the “development, support and strengthening of a left wing inside the MNR”. (Estrategia, April 1966, quoted in ibid.). One proposed a government of Lechín’s faction of the MNR, while the other preferred a government of Lechín’s bureaucracy of the COB – the same jam but in different jars. Anyway the slogan ‘All Power to the COB is invalid once a dual power situation no longer exists (that is since 1952.) It only generates illusions in its bureaucracy.)
Part 11: Turn the COB into a Soviet!
For Lenin and Trotsky, the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat could be based only on bodies like the Russian Soviets of 1917. In every revolution it is vital to struggle to give Soviet features to the mass organs and organs of power created by the exploited. A Soviet is an organ of struggle of the proletariat whose delegates are directly elected and revocable in rank-and-file assemblies, which include all workers, small- holders, peasants, soldiers, housewives, unemployed and other oppressed sectors of the area. While the unions are bodies which unite workers in an enterprise or branch of production, Soviets are territorial organisms which encompass the broadest masses, both non-unionised and unionised.
In the eyes of the POR, the COB, like a mass meeting or an open town council meeting, was a Soviet. Not every Soviet has dual or alternative power, Not every dual power is a Soviet. A parallel power could be a parliament, an army or another institution which possesses an armed force and governmental authority over a significant part of a country.
The COB, although it had Soviet tendencies, was an organism with trade union, vertical and bureaucratic features. “One of the gravest errors in the organisation of the COB consisted in its originating from the top summit leaders, who would soon end up completely tied to the petty bourgeois government, and it crystallised through the middle layers of leadership (…) The correct thing would have been to proceed in the opposite way, that is to say, from the bottom up. The workers adhered to the COB through their trade union leaders (…) The founders of the COB called upon the old leaders and not on the democratically elected rank-and-file delegates. This organisational defect already contained the cause of its infirmity, which eased its bureaucratisation, its isolation from the masses and the skilful control of it by the government”. (54) (La Revolución Boliviana, G. Lora, p.262-263).
The COB delegates were neither elected nor controlled and subject to recall through rank-and-file mass meetings. The first congress of the COB took place two and a half years after its foundation. The bureaucracy did everything possible to run the union with boss’ type bureaucratic criteria. A revolutionary party should have struggled for the immediate organisation of a congress a few days or weeks after it was founded. Only in this way could the COB have been democratised and have acquired soviet-type features. However, the POR was in the top leadership of the COB and did not object to a bureaucratic structure which allowed it to get along better with Lechín, in order accommodate to him.
The COB was founded at a meeting called by the Miners’ Federation on 17th April 1952. The leaderships of the confederations of factory workers, railway workers and peasants, the federation of bank employees and allied branches, commercial and industrial employees, and graphical, construction, bricklayers and bakers unions took part in that assembly. (55) (Movimento obrero y processos politícos en Bolivia, Jorge Lazarte, p.6). Note that fact that the squatters, the unemployed and rank-and-file soldiers were not organised within it. The COB aimed to be a union centre based on leaderships elected at labour congresses every ‘X’ years. A Soviet should be based on all the oppressed sectors and directly elected at rank and file assemblies. In this way, the organisation can grow and be de-bureaucratised. This meeting elected an executive committee which held office until the congress in October 1954.
It was headed by Lechín (Executive Secretary), Germán Butrón (General Secretary) and Mario Torres (Secretary of Relations). As the two key figures in the COB had to be ministers, the job of day-to-day leadership at the centre fell on PORists like Edwin Moller (Organisation Secretary), José Zegada (Minutes Secretary) or Miguel Alandia Pantoja (Director of the Press). “This first Management Committee was declared provisional until the election of a proper committee by a national congress which would meet shortly.” (56) (ibid., p.7). However, that congress took place with extreme delay, after the COB had ceased to be an alternative dual power and had surrendered to the official bourgeois power.
The COB developed in the same way like all organs of ‘popular power’ that bourgeois nationalists governments create. The ‘Committees in Defence of the Revolution’ in Nicaragua, the ‘Shoras’ in Iran or the ‘Popular Assemblies’ in various nationalist processes are organisations which unite union leaders and those of mass bodies, to ensure that they support nationalist regimes or projects. Instead of structuring themselves as alternative workers’ power which fight to overthrow the bourgeoisie and to consolidate all power, these organisms are committed to building a popular basis for nationalism. They use ‘anti-imperialism’ in order to discipline the masses and to maintain themselves against their enemies.
Dual power cannot last for long. One power must rule over the other. If a workers’ power does not crush that of the bourgeoisie then the latter will be imposed (whether via bloody liquidation or by regimentation and domestication). (57)
(As Stuart King so rightly says:
“Is not Workers Power absolutely right when it describes the COB as an ‘embryo’ or ‘proto-Soviet’ which could have developed into a full Soviet only through political struggle against the bonapartist project of the MNR? This would have involved concentrating on building Soviets both in and outside La Paz, drawing in and organising peasant syndicates in the localities, calling for the construction of rank and file soldiers committees in the army, drawing their delegates into the Soviets, strengthening and placing under Soviet discipline the militias, and ensuring that all delegates were elected by rank and file factory and workplace committees subject to immediate recall”. Permanent Revolution, No.2, p.36).
The POR did not fight to make the COB soviet. To do so required a constant daily battle against the MNR and the Lechínist bureaucracy. On the contrary, the POR, was one of the main causes of the COB being limited, bureaucratised and tied to officialdom.
Part 12: The MNR-POR government
At its 1952 congress, the Fourth International, with no votes against, adopted the slogan of an MNR-POR government. After April 1952, the POR tried to apply this recipe with a small difference. It demanded the removal of the MNR right wing:
“The worker-peasant government is not the dictatorship of the proletariat: it is in transition toward it, an inevitable period in the sense that, as a political party of the working class, we do not yet constitute a majority of it (…) The Worker-Peasant government will surely emerge before the dictatorship of the proletariat in Bolivia, on the fundamental basis of two important political forces: the POR and the MNR left-wing, to which we should try to give the essential organisational consciousness, security and firmness, so that the way to political power is opened to us, which the militant working masses will offer us in the future”. (58) (Boletin Interno, No.13, POR, p.12).
This worker-peasant government notion is more like that of Stalinism than of Leninist Trotskyism. In its earlier period, Stalinism also spoke of the worker-peasant government, but in a stageist sense. It proposed a dictatorship together with class collaboration in which the proletariat had to give up its own objectives and subordinate itself to the bourgeois-democratic programme of the rural and urban petty bourgeoisie. For that same reason, Trotsky objected to using the slogan for a time, and only did so after explaining that his strategy was that of a government of workers and poor peasants led by the proletariat and aiming to apply a socialist programme.
The idea of the centrist Fourth International and the POR was that of a joint government where the so-called workers party was led by a party of another class. But the MNR did not represent the peasantry (and even less the poor or landless sectors), and neither did the MNR bother to organise this class or to place in its top leadership some leader from the national majority. The MNR was an unmistakably bourgeois party. Its members came from various capitalist and cacique parties that had presided over anti-working class government. Paz had been the governor of the Central Bank and Finance Minister in two bosses governments. The MNR had sympathised with the German Führer who massacred the biggest labour movement of the world. When they were in the government they repressed the left and put in power a pro-imperialist dictatorship which was thrown out by a popular insurrection.
“For the solution of the basic national tasks, not only the big bourgeoisie but also the petty bourgeoisie was incapable of producing a political force, a party, or a faction, in conjunction with which the party of the proletariat might be able to solve the tasks of the democratic bourgeois revolution”. (59) The Third International After Lenin, Trotsky, Pathfinder, New York, 1970, p.181. Stalin, el gran organizador de derrotas, La III Internacional despues de Lenin, Trotski, El Yunque, Bs As. 1974, p.241).
The proletariat should not dilute its programme and accept the democratic one of the bourgeoisie, whether petty, medium or big. Under this programme it is impossible to break with imperialism and backwardness. The only manner of resolving the outstanding bourgeois democratic tasks is through a Socialist revolution which, in passing, completes the unfinished democratic tasks within a framework of the expropriation of the bourgeoisie, of a socialised and planned economy established by popular and workers councils, and by the internationalisation of the revolution.
In its more than 55 years of existence the POR has never put forward the strategy of the internationalist socialist revolution. It was born calling for an anti-imperialist and agrarian revolution in order to establish a multi-class and capitalist government which could be achieved by a military coup or the metamorphosis of a bourgeois government. Later, in the Theses of Pulacayo, it put forward the idea of a bourgeois democratic revolution led by the proletariat. That position held similarities with that of Parvus, which meant, according to Trotsky’s argument “the conquest of power by the proletariat was seen as the path towards democracy and not to socialism”. (60) Through the strategy of opposing a socialist revolution in order to limit itself to a bourgeois-democratic and national one, the POR was subservient to strategic blocks with and behind Lechínism, and then with the whole MNR and Stalinism.
An MNR-POR government would be a bourgeois one with ‘Trotskyist’ ministers, good at helping Paz and Lechín to confuse the workers and at compromising themselves by defending the capitalist regime.
In the Fourth Congress of the Communist International Lenin and Trotsky clearly differentiated five types of workers’ government. Liberal and Social Democratic workers governments can never be supported by communist ministers. In certain circumstances a workers’ government or worker-peasant government could emerge in which the communists would be able to join the cabinet as a minority.
“The two types (of workers government) in which the communists may take part, do not represent the dictatorship of the proletariat, they are not even a historically inevitable transition stage towards the dictatorship. But where they are formed they may become an important starting point for the fight for the dictatorship. The complete dictatorship is represented only by the real workers’ government which consists of communists”. (61) (The Communist International 1919-43: Documents, Ed. Jane Degras, Vol.1, Cass, 1971, p.427.)
The author is wrong, Zinoviev drafted the theses which represented a compromise between the lefts and the right. In Dialogue with Heinrich Brandler (Marxism, Wars and Revolutions, Deutscher, Verso, 1985) the latter says “Radek was accused by Moscow of being the author of my definition of the five forms of workers government. In reality he tried to prevent this definition from being adopted; not because he thought it incorrect but, as I learned years later, because it irritated Zinoviev, and Radek found this inconvenient for his factional struggle in Moscow.” pp.158-159. Brandler advanced it at the 8th Congress of the KPD in January 1923 just after the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in Nov-Dec 1922.) See Revolutionary History Vol.2 no.3 pp.1-20.)
The conditions advanced by the CI were very clear. “The overriding tasks of the workers’ government must be to arm the proletariat, to disarm bourgeois and counter-revolutionary organisations, to introduce the control of production, to transfer the main burden of taxation to the rich, and to break the resistance of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie”. (62) (ibid., p.426).
“In certain circumstances communists must declare themselves ready to form a workers’ government with non-communist workers’ parties and workers organisations. But they can do so only if there are guarantees that the workers government will really conduct a struggle against the bourgeoisie in the sense mentioned above”. (63) (ibid., p.426).
However, whichever wing of the MNR was in government it would not have fulfilled these conditions. The MNR was a party representing an emerging bourgeoisie. Far from wishing to disarm and expropriate itself, that is to say, to commit suicide as a class, the MNR bourgeoisie aspired to strengthen the state through reforms which would extend the internal market. A government of one or more wings of the MNR would have been a government for the defence of the bourgeois state.
To sum up: an MNR-POR government of whatever variant would have been the opposite of a worker-peasant government. It would have been a bourgeois government with a decoration of workers.
Part 13: All Power to the MNR Left Wing!
“When the struggle within the cabinet between the right and left tendencies of the MNR broke out (within the latter tendency were numbered the “worker” ministers who were the base of Lechínism), the POR launched the slogan of more workers’ ministers and, thereby, the expulsion from the government of the right, a demand which turned out to be far too ambitious for Lechín and Co.”. (64)
(Contribución a la historia politica de Boliviana, Lora, Vol.2, La Paz 1978, p.253).
At its 9th national conference, the POR ratified the line of identifying with the national-reformist wing of Lechín and Ñuflo Chavez. “The national political report fixed the position of the POR before the government in the following points: 1) Support to the government in face of the attacks by imperialism and the rosca, (2) Support for all the progressive measures it enacts, always indicating their scope and limitations (…) 3) In the struggle of the MNR wings, the POR supports the left (…) The POR will support the MNR left in its struggle against the right of the party, in all its activity that tends to destroy the structures on which the feudal bourgeoisie and imperialist exploitation rest, every attempt to deepen the revolution and to carry out the workers programme, such as the complete control of the government so replacing the right wing”. (65) (LO, 11.11.52, p.3).
In that same newspaper it also says:
“The working class must actively intervene in the formation of the new Cabinet. It is the workers who must run the state with a revolutionary programme that will start to destroy the capitalist structure. The COB, representing the worker-peasant forces, must join in the new cabinet with a majority of ministers who come from it, representing the different sectors of workers”. (66) (LO, 11.11.52, p.2).
The MNR is clearly a bourgeois party. Within every populist bourgeois party which tries to discipline the unions there is always a workerist wing that tries to mediate between the pressures of the workers and the needs of following a bourgeois policy. A party of various classes cannot be. The one which commands is the one that owns the capital. A horse and its rider are not in an equal alliance. One rides the other. The union bureaucracy and the reformist wings are like a saddle. They lie on the proletariat to relieve the weight and rule of the capitalist boss in order to help him to continue giving orders.
The ‘left’ wing of the MNR is not a proletarian or revolutionary wing. The fact is that it claims the bourgeois programme as its own and its insertion in such a conglomerate of capital makes it a counter-revolutionary sector. It is always possible that youth and worker sections in the nationalist movement will shift to the left towards centrism, and, if so, everything possibly must be done to conquer their prejudices and win them to Trotskyist politics. However, known bureaucrats, with a long career of betrayals, who have served a dictatorship such as Villarroel’s and have brought forth an anti-communist party that did not at first disguise its flirtation with racism and nazi-fascism, cannot evolve in a revolutionary direction.
The Lechín and Chavez ‘left’ wing defended capitalism and so only wanted to reform it. The MNR needed them in order to be able to control the masses. With the right hand it initiated the reorganisation of the armed forces, set up the para-military commandoes and the secret-police (the ‘Commando Politico’), stirred up anti-communist hysteria to mobilise the petty bourgeoisie against the proletarian ‘excesses’ and pressed for approaches to imperialism. With its left hand it tried to flirt with working class radicalism while aiming to tame it. MNR trade unionists, while they uttered the most incendiary speeches, did everything possible to use that authority hold back the COB’s mobilisation and demands, tried to empty it of its dual power content and turn it into a force that would be subordinated to, and would collaborate with, the bourgeois regime.
Faced with a struggle between two wings of a bourgeois party, the proletariat should try to assert its own class independence and its opposition to both wings. Of course we must undertake very limited practical actions of a mass direct action character with the MNR ‘left’ when it undertakes the defence of popular and working class demands. But preferably, we should take the initiative and try to unmask those ‘leftists’ with a policy that constantly asks them to fight and break with the bourgeois party.
However, the POR did more than serve Lechínism. They edited its union paper, they wrote its speeches and totally supported it. While Paz wanted to line up behind imperialism, Lechín lined up behind Paz and the POR behind Lechín.
From the first weeks of the 1952 revolution until at least the end of 1953, the POR “works so that the masses and the left-wing sector of the governing party will proceed to their logical conclusion, that is to say, evolve towards a worker-peasant government”. “The evolution towards the left of the government and its consequent transformation will be determined by the exploited. Owing to the pressure to political circumstances, the petty bourgeois government may possibly be superseded and be turned into a stage of worker-peasant government. It is the most probable tendency of that unstable moment and only in this sense do we speak of the only outcome. The aforementioned involves the political defeat of the right and the active participation in the state of the proletariat and the peasants”. (67) (LO, 25.5.52, p.3).
According to the POR, a month after the creation of the COB, it was probable that the exploited would put pressure on the MNR to the point that it had to shift leftwards and be transformed into a worker-peasant government. Paz and the MNR were not ‘neutral’ forces or ‘wild-cards’ flitting between the various classes. The MNR was an unswervingly bourgeois force and incapable of changing its class content. However much a monkey wants to learn to fly it is impossible. Paz’s MNR had absolutely no possibility of evolving into a worker-peasant government. The only ones who could evolve were the PORists … but towards a greater conciliation with the bourgeois MNR. Revolutionaries do not call upon the workers to have a more ‘active participation’ within the state but to overturn it.
In the second half of 1953, they still persisted. The 10th POR conference stated that:
“The total predominance of this sector (MNR ‘left’) would profoundly modify the nature of the MNR and would enable it to come significantly closer to the POR (…) Only in such conditions could one speak of a possible coalition government of the POR and the MNR, which would be a form of creating the formula of the ‘worker-peasant government’, which, in its turn, would constitute the transitory stage towards the dictatorship of the proletariat”. The Political Bureau of the POR, on 23rd of June, 1953, raised the call, “The whole of this struggle must revolve around the slogan: Total Control of the State by the Left Wing of the MNR.”
Liborio Justo correctly made the following observation:
“The POR would support the left in its struggle against the right, it would help it to position itself ideologically, it would push it forward towards the most advanced positions and simultaneously it would mobilise the MNR rank-and-file so that it called on the leftist leadership to adopt the programme of proletarian revolution. That is to say, that the revolution would be carried out by the MNR left wing, which the POR ‘instructed’ to cease being petty bourgeois and an agent of the reaction and this would help its rank-and-file push it to adopt the programme of the proletarian revolution’”. (68) (Bolivia: la revolución derrotada, Liborio Justo, Cochabamba 1967, p.224). This was just a utopia to disarm the class.
In August, after a ministerial crisis had occurred, Lucha Obrera opined: “The only political outcome of the present situation: the displacement of the MNR right-wing from power by the left-wing.
“All power to the left”! is a suitable slogan in the case of a cabinet crisis. Such a new kind of MNR government would carry out the new tasks of the revolution. Total control of the state by the left (…) the POR will help the left in this job, it will guide it politically and support it critically”. (69) (LO 2.8.53, p.1)
Instead of fighting to unmask and politically destroy the ‘left-wing’, the POR offered itself as a prop and adviser to the left of the official bourgeois party. Instead of struggling for a worker-peasant government it asked for a ‘new kind of MNR government’. Instead of wanting to overthrow a social class, the POR was limited to asking for a new cabinet to which it would lend itself and offer its services. Instead of calling for the overthrow of the bourgeois state, the POR called for its regeneration under the control of the left of bourgeois officialdom.
Even though the ‘left’ wing of the MNR would have had the majority and even every ministry, the state that they would have controlled and defended would been bourgeois.
When the Bolsheviks agitated for ‘All Power to the Soviets’ they knew that the government could end up falling into the hands of the reformists. Lenin thought that a collaborationist government without capitalist ministers was preferable. But he always said that even if an entirely Menshevik-Socialist Revolutionary government emerged, the Bolsheviks would not support or enter it. The only compromise that he would adopt was that of struggling together with them against any reactionary coup and of renouncing any attempt to take power as they had not won a majority among the workers and in the soviets.
The MNR ‘left’ wing was in no way a reformist workers party (as was Menshevism) with a certain degree of independence with respect to other capitalist paries. It was part of the same bourgeois MNR party. While Lechín did break with the MNR some 11 or 12 years after 1952 (and with quite a pro-United States orientation) other ‘leftists’ carried on working with the MNR longer.
When an independent and mass organisation of workers exists, it is feasible for Communists to call for a critical vote for it or to help it get into power “as a noose supports a hanging man” said Lenin, with the aim of better unmasking its leaders. However that policy cannot be applied to a section of a party that includes a sector of the bourgeoisie from which it has not broken, that does not represent a step towards class independence, even in embryonic form. Stalinism, ignoring Leninism, always put forward the line of tailing this or that “progressive “ sector of the bourgeoisie. To follow the MNR ‘left’, or that of APRA or Peronism, is only helping to reinforce bourgeois nationalism and prevents the workers from breaking with it.
Calling on the labour leaders to break with the bourgeoisie and to struggle for an independent workers’ party is a very different tactic. In this case it encourages the class struggle and helps to unmask collaborators. Choosing which of the bosses executioners it is better or worse to follow, is an old Stalinist strategy that has always meant the disarmament of the exploited to benefit reaction. In any case it is a vicious circle that cannot be broken. Within the left there will always be another left, and within the latter yet another one. At the end of the this pursuit of left wings of the bourgeois parties the route to the proletarian revolution is lost and we are changed into vulgar followers of the bourgeois nationalists.
Not one leader of the MNR ‘left’ wing evolved towards forming a reformist workers party or even centrism let alone Marxism. In 1963 when Lechín split the MNR in order to form his own ‘leftist‘ party, the POR characterised it as reactionary and anti-working class. If the POR made a grave error in capitulating to Lechín in 1952, it adopted a sectarian policy when Lechín split from the MNR in 1963. It had then been necessary to attack Lechín implacably for having been Paz’s Vice-President and for having gone to China to abase himself before the Guomindang but at the same time, by putting forward the demand an independent working class candidate, the tactic of the workers United Front should have been used.
Ryan was correct when he maintained that “The POR occupies, on all the major questions, the positions occupied by Menshevism in the Russian Revolution, and by Stalinism in the Second Chinese Revolution of 1925-27.” (71) In China Stalinism would first support the Guomindang and then its ‘left-wing’. Both ended up using the Chinese Communists to get more power and once they felt secure the Communists were massacred. It is worth pointing out that the Guomindang was, both in its origins and programme, more radical than the MNR. So while the MNR was born with a declaration of principles influenced by racism and Nazi ideas the Guomindang was at first a sympathising section of the Communist International.
Part 14: The POR adapts itself to the MNR left
The least that a party which called itself revolutionary should have done was to have constantly denounced the counter revolutionary and turncoat role of Lechín, the dictatorship’s ex-prefect and now the appointed union leader. But the POR went on tail-ending the corrupt old bureaucrat.
“There can be no doubt that with the creation of a political organisation of a left-wing, independent of the right that controls the MNR and government, the imminent split will ensure the vanquishing of all vacillating and centrist positions, ensuring that, faced with this situation, all the leftists in the MNR will turn to the Party initially with no other aim than to win positions from the right and so deepen the revolutionary process. (72)
According to the POR Lechín had to be helped to create an independent faction and this would guarantee the defeat of the “vacillators and centrists” and would “deepen the revolutionary process”. The POR believed that the revolutionary party would be Lechín’s with which it could then unite.
“A group of intellectuals within the leading layer of the POR had got the COB started with the full agreement of the Executive Secretary of the FSTMB with whom they were old friends through bonds forged in old struggles going back to the Theses of Pulacayo. The relationship was so close that they believed that they could control the Labour movement through him while he used them for his own aims.
“The POR could not hide its servile attitude to the Executive Secretary on every question which came up in the COB. For example all the members of the POR voted with the majority to reject the credentials of the delegates of the university students; but when their leader asked them to reconsider the matter they all changed their minds without hesitation.
“Many cases could be cited but the most serious, which is almost a betrayal of the proletariat, was to give way to the requests of the top leaders about the launching of a manifesto to nationalise the mines. On this the workers demanded workers control because they thought workers point of view to be absolutely revolutionary. But when the Executive Secretary intervened asking for the amendment to be withdrawn in accordance with government policy only one POR member stood firm and supported the workers, the rest softened their position and, docilely attacked the government directive, and in order to disguise things asked for the amendment to be sent to the government in a separate note.“So on a number of occasions, the POR’s slavish attitude to the main COB leader, led it to making concessions prejudicial to the real revolutionary mood of the working class”. (73) (Memorias del primer ministro obrero, Waldo Alvarez, La Paz, 1986, pp.283-84.)
According to Catoira, when Lechín was “put in charge of the COB by the government, as soon as he became Minister of HydroCarbons and Mining, he shed the Trotskyist clothing in which the POR had clad him and put himself forward as simply a loyal MNR supporter.” (74) (El Sindicalismo Boliviano, Ricardo Catoira Marín, La Paz, p.43.) Whereas according to Lora, “Lechín who went back to Trotskyist posturing immediately after 9th April could be found at Paz’s side, but not in advance of him and thus accommodated himself to the radicalisation of the masses. He surrounded himself with POR members and, where he could, recited speeches written by the latter. (75)(Contribución …, Vol 2 Lora, La Paz 1978, p.228)
Notice that Lora recognises that the COB’s great traitor had the same ideology in 1952. Some people thought Lechín had evolved from the MNR to the POR in 1952 whereas others thought the opposite. What is certain is that nobody knew for whom that crafty individual was working. Lechín made use of everyone. The MNR let him have a certain independence and verbal radicalism so that he could consolidate his position in the labour movement and tame it. The POR thought that by writing his theses, speeches and programmes it was using him to reach out to the class. But it was the clever bureaucrat who used the POR to gain authority over the most militant workers and thus negotiate for a share of power within his party and his government. In exchange for mouthing the POR’s incendiary slogans Lechín got mild criticism and even support from the POR.
During the revolutionary euphoria of the 1950’s Lechín lived in the Hotel Crillon, the most luxurious hotel in La Paz. In contrast the workers who had made him their irreplaceable leader have always lived in the most degraded conditions of squalor, a situation which remains the same today”. (76) (El Sindicalismo Boliviano …, p.48.) This was never denounced by his POR hacks who made such efforts serving as his secretaries.
The POR went as far as to claim the line of the Lechínist newspaper Vanguardia as its own: “Its orientation is defined and determined by the route that the proletariat boldly opened up during the April events (…) Take care! The people are not the servants of the government. The government are the servants of the people’. A revolutionary fluency can be seen incarnated in its editors, interpreters of the majority views of the rank and file of its party formed by proletarians, peasants and office workers (…) if Vanguardia maintains its line, the path on which it is set will bring these bold lads the object of their desires when the working masses judge that feudal exploitation in the countryside must be liquidated. With them we will be firm in principles and consistent in revolutionary practice”. (77) (LO. 3.5.52, p.3.)
The POR identified itself with the Lechínist slogan of making the government the servant of the people. Within the capitalist state it is impossible to imagine that any government can defend the proletariat’s aims. The POR bet on the MNR left being able to enlighten the popular and working class majority in the MNR so as to reorient it and enable it to put the MNR government “at the service of the people”. (78) (LO. 25.5.52, p.1.)
Part 15: The POR believed that Paz would be able to create an anti-capitalist government
The nationalisation of the mines was the main demand which the working class talked about. Paz did everything possible to delay and moderate the measure but finally he carried it out in August 1952. When the government delayed carrying out the measure the POR said, “We cannot understand how a government that has the proletariat on a war-footing and prepared to defend it against any counter-revolutionary, retreats after taking a step forward. (79) (LO, 12.6.52, p.1)
A Marxist on the other hand could clearly explain why the government oscillated. It was a bourgeois government under pressure from the masses trying to do everything possible to hold back the latter and, though making concessions, at the same sought time to maintain semi-colonial capitalism. The POR could not explain the tremendous shifts of the regime because of the tremendous illusions that it had.
Like gullible petit-bourgeois the POR believed that the government was a product of the ‘revolutionary will of the masses’ and therefore they should be subordinated to it. “With arms in hand, the working class will know how to consolidate and carry forward any step in this sense made by the present government thrown up by the revolutionary will of the masses.” (80) (LO, 12.6.52, p.2.) Instead of seeing the MNR government as its own, which only needed a push, the party of the proletariat should have denounced it as a usurper which had to be deposed.
The illusions of the POR went to the extreme of believing that Paz himself could initiate a turn to revolution.
“It is possible that the President could have made some good proposals for achieving a real economic transformation of the country. But the reactionary element in the cabinet and its brigade of technicians are all openly right wing and therefore make it impossible to improve conditions for the proletariat (..) The left wing will not be able to stand up to the crushing majority which constitutes the MNR right wing unless it is based on the mobilisation of the masses. Meanwhile the present President of the Republic has his hands tied in front of his party comrades and, faced with creating of government of the people or staying President, seems to have chosen the latter”. (81) (LO 12.6.52, p.3.)
The job of a revolutionary party should have been to do everything possible to make the workers distrust Paz and to propose his removal by a new insurrection. For the POR on the other hand he had to be convinced to create a ‘government for the people’. In order to help the President ‘achieve a true economic transformation’ his most right wing ministers had to be removed.
While the POR’s aim was attempting to build up and influence the left of the bourgeois MNR, the latter in its turn was to influence the President to shift his position. The POR abandoned the promotion of class struggle. It replaced it by class persuasion. All revolutionary politics were replaced by a series of pressures on the leadership with the aim of reforming the official bourgeois bureaucracy and thus the President himself.
Every time that President started a speech to ingratiate himself with the radicalised masses, a Marxist should have denounced it as a trick to disorient the masses and an attempt to dress the wolf in sheep’s clothing.
“The bourgeoisie will make you any promises you want! It will even send its delegates to Moscow, enter the Peasants’ International, adhere as a ‘sympathising’ party to the Comintern, peek into the Red International of Red Trade Unions. In short, it will promise anything that will give it the opportunity (with our assistance) to dupe the workers and peasants, more efficiently, more easily, and the more completely to throw sand in their eyes – until the first opportunity, such as was offered in Shanghai”(82) (The Third International after Lenin, L.D. Trotsky, Pathfinder, New York, p.169-170.)
However the POR always ended up saluting every demagogic outburst by Paz. “His speech of the 21st July (1952) is quite clear. He not only offered to ‘nationalise the mines and carry the revolution to the countryside regardless of the consequences’ but promised ‘to arm the miners and factory workers’ so that they could defend the revolution in their own way.” (83) (LO, 3.8.52, p.3.)
This policy of sowing illusions in the revolutionary and even anti-bourgeois potential of Paz was to continue until after the first year of the revolution: “The President, revising the whole of his past political attitude, points to anti-capitalist and not merely anti-imperialist and anti-feudal aims for the revolution. This speech can very easily be regarded as Trotskyist (…) With these words Victor Paz has gone further than all his leftist collaborators who are so determined to hold back and obstruct the liquidation of the latifundia (…) in order that the left turns its victory into effective governmental influence (…) its only solution to the situation created was for the left to impose the total domination of the left in the cabinet”. (84) (LO, 5.8.53, p.1.)
Its complete adaptation to Paz was such that it believed that he was capable of breaking with and expropriating his own social class!
The origins of this individual whom the POR believed would open the road to an anti-capitalist government must be remembered. Víctor Paz came from a family of aristocrats and generals from Tarija. He had been a lawyer for the Patiño concern. He made his debut in politics supporting the bonapartist dictatorships which tried to imitate certain features of fascism (Toro, Busch and Villarroel). He was the President of the Central Bank and Finance Minister in the anti-working class governments of Peñaranda and Villarroel. He founded the MNR with a clearly anti-semitic, racist, ferociously anti-communist platform inspired by nazism and sympathetic to the imperialist axis of Hitler, Mussolini and the Mikado. When his party was in power from 1943 to 1946 it did not touch even one big mining concern or ranch.
On the contrary the MNR aimed its repression at union leaders and at peasants who occupied land. Its symbol was a dictator who was lynched,(85) it massacred the oppressed and took part in the butchery at Catavi. In 1947 it supported Hertzog for the Presidency. Then it spent the whole six years of reactionary rule conspiring with whatever butcher and rosca minister it could. In power it became the best weapon that imperialism had for holding back and reversing the revolution. Once he reorganised and revived the bourgeois state and armed forces Paz accentuated the turn to the right. Víctor Paz was directly responsible for the carnage at Sora-Sora (1964) as well as the atrocities during the period of Banzer’s dictatorship. When he returned to the government in 1985 he was the author of the worst attack on the social gains of the Bolivian workers in history. In just one month he raised prices by fifteen times and then sacked three-quarters of the mining proletariat.
It was a serious crime for a party claiming to be working class to disseminate even the faintest illusion that it was possible that such a reactionary could have ever installed an anti- capitalist government. All wings and sections of the post-Trotsky Fourth International are besmirched with that significant historical betrayal since they always supported this policy and never questioned it.
Part 16: The nationalisation of the Mines
In order to make sure that the President carried out the tasks of the proletarian dictatorship, a cabinet of the union bureaucracy had to be imposed. In a manifesto aimed at the February 1953 Convention of the MNR, the POR suggested to Paz that he alter his cabinet to achieve “the overcoming of the present bonapartist government by another anti-imperialist and anti-feudal one which would be sustained by a front of revolutionaries and workers” (86) (LO. 6.2.53, p.1.)
While Paz, supported by Lechín, did everything possible to ensure that the workers did not occupy the mines and instead waited for a solution from above, the POR, far from denouncing these manoeuvres, took pains to idealise Lechín:
“The Minister of Mines and Petroleum, supported by those round him, quite clearly advocated expropriation without compensation”. (87)(LO, 29.6.52, p.4.).
A revolutionary party should have done the opposite. It should have drawn attention to the fact that while Lechín spouted radical phrases he was, as events showed, preparing nationalisation with compensation for enterprises in a poor state.
“ We agree with comrade Lechín when he states that the decree nationalising the mines is just the start of the economic and social transformation of the country.” (88) (LO, 11.11.52, p.1.)
Just prior to the nationalisation of the mines the POR said: “The balance of forces favours the interests of the workers, who, with certainty and firmness, have been winning ground inch by inch in spite of the vacillations of the MNR left-wing which has yet to put itself at the head of events (…) the nationalisation of the mines which will be announced shortly will be the starting point that will make the continuation of the capitalist system on the basis of the classical forms of exploitation impossible.” (89) (Boletin Interno, No.13. POR, p.9.)
Nationalisation is not an anti-capitalist measure in itself. It can just as well be a mechanism used by the bourgeoisie to help its development. The nationalisation of large scale mining allowed the state to obtain more resources to invest within the country, the small and medium mining sectors of the bourgeoisie could grow without having to face the competition of the big private monopolies while the other bourgeois sectors could develop by commerce and the production of goods, tied to, or derived from, large scale mining.
The nationalisation of large scale mining was not the start of the open destruction of capitalism, it strengthened it. The POR helped that process by limiting itself to raising the bourgeois democratic programme and by tailing the MNR and its ‘left’.
The MNR adopted the demand for nationalisation without compensation under workers control. However it ended by paying up so as to keep in with imperialism. ‘Workers Control’ was applied in the following way: the directorate of the Corporación Minera de Bolivia (COMIBOL) was run by Carbajal (the first General Secretary of the FSTMB) and two of its seven directors were nominated by the FSTMB. The latter were not elected with a mandate and they were not recallable by rank and file assemblies. In actual fact this sort of ‘workers control’ was getting the participation of the workers in the business in order to stop them striking and so get them to break their backs for ‘their’ company. Workers control means the workers supervising the administration of the business with the aim of creating a dual power there that will gradually be extended. Of necessity it should culminate in workers control of every enterprise with a national committee of workers control and a struggle for power.
But when exercised by bureaucrats, with no control by the rank and file, it turns into the integration of a layer of workers, who had sold out, into the directorate of the business. “The worker leader Torres admitted that he earned 90,000 bolivianos per month for running COMIBOL (…) when a skilled worker earned 4,000 bs per month.” (90) (Revolution Bolivienne 1952-1954, Pierre Scali, La Verité, sup.333, 22.4.54, p.20.)
The POR limited itself to asking for workers control only in state enterprises while it did not question the prevailing regime in the private sector. It adapted to the bureaucracy controlling COMIBOL. Later on it raised the reformist alternative of getting a majority on the COMIBOL board. Faced with this position it should have tried to ask for the opening of the accounts of all enterprises and of the government so that they could be controlled and inspected by the workers through rank and file meetings and by delegates supervised by them with the aim eventually the forming soviets and struggling to seize power.
At the international level the POR said: “We demand a free market for tin”. (91) (LO, May 1953, p.2). What was really required was a producers’ cartel instead.
Part 17: The disintegration and reorganisation of the armed forces
After the April events in the armed forces “All the units had to face a serious problem: the troops recruited a few weeks previously had very little combat training and instruction. A large part of their working hours in the previous weeks had been used for practice drills for the military parade planned to coincide with the repatriation of the remains of Eduardo Avaroa. The soldiers were able to parade very well but they did not know how to fight”. (92) (Poder y Fuerzas Armadas 1949-1982, General Gary Prado Salmón, Cochabamba 1984, p.33.)
“In the first months of the revolution, only the COB possessed an armed force, the armed worker and peasant militias. The arming of the workers began with union militias when conditions did not exist for the formation of a similar force linked to the MNR. The meetings were impressive parades of armed workers and peasants (…) The COB assembly and the rank and file organisations, unlike the Executive Committee, were serious about the task of consolidating these militias, improving their armament, disciplining them and creating a unified command. Paz Estenssoro and Lechín instructed their followers to obstruct the efforts being made to strengthen the armed workers nuclei as they represented the greatest threat to the government. Taking advantage of the resources available because of their monopoly of power they began to organise militias in the zonal commands of the MNR, independent of the trade union militias and gave them the job of overseeing the main centres; the moviemento leaders, closely helped by Stalinism were given the means to sabotage the consolidation of the COB militias.” (93) (La revolución boliviana, G. Lora, p.271.)
A key problem in every revolution is the armed forces. A revolutionary party should have opposed the reorganisation of the bourgeois army in any form and put forward the demand to replace it by the armed people organised in militias. As the revolution deepens the repulse of any external or internal aggression should be based on the latter so as to move towards an internationalist and proletarian Red Army.
But this was not the policy of Lechín and his followers in the POR. While the MNR did everything possible to reorganise the traditional armed forces, Lechín tricked the workers with the fable that he only wanted a peaceful, technical and construction brigade type of bourgeois army. An armed force like that does not stop being guard dogs of capital, and its benign postures tend to give it popular support in order to justify its armed defence of the capitalist state. Costa Rica does not possess an army but a national guard that serves capital very well in terms of making the exploited work. Yankee imperialism has now sought to dismantle the Panamanian army in order to replace it by Civil Guards.
In July the POR identified with Lechín: “The position of the miners’ leader is well known as it has been put forward many times on workers demonstrations locally and elsewhere: he opposes the army which existed before the insurrection of the 9th April and favours instead the creation of a new technical army with industrial and farming functions.” (94) (LO, 15.7.52, p.1.)
Immediately after the April insurrection, the Bolivian armed forces were disintegrating. The well-known anti-communist general Gary Prado tells us what it was like at that time:
“In the barracks the situation was tense as the officers were split between those who supported and those who condemned the revolution. Nobody did anything except stand guard so that as much military equipment was preserved from the revolutionary host. A sense of defeat however was made worse when we learned the details of what had occurred in the three days of fighting confirming that the army had been beaten on every hand. The flight of the High Command made the officers feel even more abandoned. A number, fearing repression, deserted their units without delay and sought asylum in foreign embassies or voluntarily went into exile. Others, forgetting their duty, went home to await developments. A few stayed in the barracks trying to regroup their units, control the soldiers and keep an appearance of order and discipline.” (95) (Poder y Fuerzas Armadas 1949-1982, p.40.)
While this was happening (the 17th June 1952) the COB adopted (…) the draft presented by the mining representatives that said:
“The National Corps of Armed Militias of the Central Obrera de Bolivia will be organised in the following way 1. The National Command 2. Departmental and Special Commands. The National Command will consist (of) the National Leader, Comrade Víctor Paz Estenssoro. Commander-in-Chief, Comrade Juan Lechín Oquendo (…) The commanders of the cells will be elected by the departmental militiamen, by the Departmental Centres and the National Command of the COB.”
Gary Prado continues with his analysis:
“The analysis of the military commands is different. They thought that resolution was an attack on the institution of the Armed Forces and furthermore it was humiliating. However, faced with the impossibility of putting forward arguments at the time good enough to prevent the formation of militias in the prevailing political situation and by the precarious balance occurring then and in order to enable the army to survive it was decided to try to maintain some degree of control over the militias in some way.”
“With that aim by means of deceit, the Chief of the General Staff Germán Armando Fortún, offered to supply the COB with all the advice needed to improve the organisation of the Armed Militias such as the appointment of enough instructors to instil into the militiamen disciplined attitudes, basic military training and responsibility on the understanding that the militias will be, in the final analysis, the reserve of the Armed Forces of the Nation”.
“The General Staff offer was warmly accepted by the COB (…) In this way it succeeded to a certain extent in dealing with the problem of the militias, at least inasmuch as it prevented them from becoming a structure that would turn them into a parallel army. The National Command of the militias never functioned properly”. (96) Poder y Fuerzas Armadas 1949-1982, pp.52-54.)
Instead of struggling to make the workers militias independent and opposed to the previous bourgeois armed forces which carried out the massacres of Uncia, Catavi, Villa Victoria and others, the COB leadership of Lechín and the POR “warmly accepted” the proposal of the high command of the defeated genocidal army which had as its aim the castration of the militias to make sure that they did not transcend the boundaries of the bourgeois state and to subordinate them to the control of the armed spinal column of the class dictatorship of capital. They also accepted, as the national leader of the militias, a class enemy, Víctor Paz.
Lechín tried to avoid the construction of an independent force of armed workers the whole time. He wanted to transform them into the MNR’s armed guards or the militia reserves of the regular bourgeois army.
In his memoirs Lechín always boasts of having defended the ‘fatherland’ and ‘army’ in the slaughter of the Chaco War. He also boasts that in April 1952 he handed over to the police the arms thrown down by the soldiers. “I calculate that there were about 3,000 deaths. In Corioco Street many women and children and men died. Eventually we were able to take the Caiconi arsenal and all the arms captured we handed over to the Carabineros.” (97) (Historia de una leyenda: Vida y palabra de Juan Lechín Oquendo, Lupe Cajias, La Paz 1989, p.148.) However Lechín does not want to say that he was one of the authors of the military reorganisation and that he failed to establish people’s courts to punish the perpetrators of the massacres.
In mid-1952 there was a drunken brawl between militiamen and soldiers. This was used as a pretext for weakening the militias and encouraging the further re-establishment of the armed forces. The POR dealt with Lechín in a very fawning manner:
“The immediate re-organisation and ‘goose-stepping’ of the army that the said gentlemen tried to carry out, taking advantage of a bloody incident between drunks in the ‘Ciros’ night-club, instigated by falangists in the pay of the rosca, was soon stopped with singular energy by Minister Lechín. The above mentioned incident led to a triumph of the MNR left wing over the rightist, conciliatory and opportunist bureaucracy.
“We revolutionary workers see this with sympathy and, relying on our own forces, we fraternally salute all the triumphs of the MNR left-wing, represented by Lechín and the newspaper Vanguardia.” (98) (LO, 3.8.52, p.3.)
Part 18: The desire to transform the MNR
The huge adaptation of the POR to the MNR is seen not only in its attempts to shift the cabinet leftwards but in wanting to transform the bourgeois MNR so that it would be turned into an anti-capitalist revolutionary party. The POR went so far as to write an open letter to the MNR convention where it put forward the position that, if the MNR moved leftward, it could absorb the POR.
“The convention should be worker-peasant and not bureaucratic (…) The left wing should impose revolutionary demands without fear of reaction and imperialism”. (99) (LO, supplement, 3.2.53, p.4.)
The POR held the suicidal belief that Lechínism could declare and impose a revolutionary programme to turn the MNR in a revolutionary direction.
“The MNR is certainly a party in transition from traditional or reformist politics to the new politics of the revolutionary transformation of the proletariat as the leader of the whole oppressed society.” (100) (LO 11.11.52, p.3.)
“The main essential doctrinal foundation required to play a decisive role in the present period can only be obtained by modifying, in its turn, the social composition of the party. Its uniform social nature could be achieved around the main social force of anti-imperialist struggle. The most powerful and decisive social force is made up of exploited workers and peasants. It is around these social forces that the unity of the party must be attained.”
According to the POR a struggle had to continue so that “the workers and peasants of the MNR impose a programme that reflects their own interests, and likewise impose a leadership that reflects the interests of the exploited. The present task is to ensure that the MNR must be controlled by the exploited masses”. The exploited will never be able to control a party created by and for the bourgeoisie.
“Only on condition that it takes the consistent progressive step of adopting a programme of principles in accord with the upsurge of the masses then carrying it out, will the MNR be able to play the role imposed on it by circumstances.”
“Solid worker cadres in the MNR, elimination of counter-revolutionary tendencies, a political programme which represents the interests of the exploited classes, in brief the absolute pre-eminence of the working class within the MNR ranks is the only thing that can give the MNR an important role in the revolutionary course towards the Worker-Peasant government.” (101) (LO, 11.11.52, p.3.)
The POR distinguishes counter revolutionary wings from another, or others, supposedly revolutionary ones. The one certain thing is that all wings of the MNR were and are counter-revolutionary.
“If the MNR wants to maintain its status as a mass party it will have to be more sensitive to their aspirations; it will have to integrate the demands for which they fought and which they will never renounce, into its programme. That will not be done unless the representatives of caciquism and imperialism are expelled from the party (…) This is the only possibility of survival remaining open to the MNR: to stop keeping the workers and peasants out of its ranks but, on the contrary, to give them the greatest influence over the party leadership.” (102) (LO, 29.11.52, p.2.)
“If the MNR does not organically change itself, expelling the rightists, freemasons, adventurers, businessmen and carpetbaggers from its ranks, it will become the gravedigger of the revolution (…) If the left wing succeeds in taking charge and having a working class face, the POR is ready to work with it and even to fuse with it. This new party form ought to be reflected in the forms of government which can only be a worker- peasant government.” (103)(LO, Supplement, 3.2.53, p.3.)
No matter how many workers a bourgeois party has it does not change its class character. While the POR struggled to get more workers into the MNR Trotskyists should have struggled for more workers to leave it. The POR’s line had been much more serious than simply seeking to reform the government and so advance towards a worker-peasant government. The POR based its whole strategy on trying to reform the solidly bourgeois MNR. This demanded greater participation of the labour bureaucrats in the leadership, greater ‘sensitivity’ from the top chiefs and more verbiage. All the problems of Bolivia could have been dealt with if more workers had been in the MNR and they had strengthened the left wing which would have been the most demagogic of them.
It proposed that the same party which only four years before it had labelled ‘nazi-fascist’ should now turn itself in the party of the social revolution. Furthermore if the rightist elements had been purged and the Chávez and Lechín left wing had taken charge the POR would have agreed to fuse with the MNR. A revolutionary party can never fuse with a counter-revolutionary one, even less so when it is leading the class enemy.
The positions of the POR were worse than those of Stalinism when it betrayed the Chinese revolution in 1927. In the latter, thanks to the policy of the Chinese CP which wanted to support and transform the Guomindang, bourgeois nationalism, once it had used the Communists to gain power, massacred them in the slaughter of Shanghai. Trotsky attacked the Stalinist Comintern for:
“consider(ing) the Kuomintang not as a bourgeois party, but as a neutral area of struggle for the masses (…) to assist the (summit) to convert ever broader masses into ‘cattle’, and under conditions most favourable to it to prepare the Shanghai coup d’etat (…) they imagined that by means of ordinary elections at Kuomintang Congresses power would pass from the hands of the bourgeoisie to the proletariat.” (104) (The Third International After Lenin, Pathfinder, New York, 1970, p.218.)
The left wing was no more than a demagogic tribune used by that bourgeois party in order to distract the masses and to get them to accept a solution of complete capitulation to imperialism. Chávez ended up as vice president to the leader of the MNR right-wing. Lechín ended up supporting all the imperialists’ plans totally, such as the triangular one and by visiting Nationalist China with the object of getting US endorsement for his management of their semi-colony.
As a consequence of that line, in 1954, the whole of the POR old guard (Warqui, Ayala etc) all the POR leaders of the COB, (Moller, Zegada) and the great majority of Lora’s Leninist Workers Faction dissolved themselves and went into the MNR.
Part 19: The peasant uprising
The insurrections of 1936, 1946 and 1952 as well as the civil war and the great struggles undertaken between the end of the Chaco War and 1952, had the cities and mines of Bolivia as their arena. At that time at least 70% of the population lived in the country. The peasants lived on the margins of the national economy, did not vote and had little direct part in politics.
The peasant masses spoke Amerindian languages and the great majority were illiterate. Their main relations of production were still based on serfdom. The Indians had to pay the cacique in labour, products or money.
Villarroel had been demagogic in his calling of the congress of the indigenous peoples. The peasant masses were gradually awakening. When the army of the rosca collapsed the Indian tenants organised themselves and a few months after April 1952, a strong movement of land occupations broke out – mainly in the valleys of Cochabamba and Titicaca which had trading links with the cities. These movements were not guided by Marxist ideology. The MNR immediately took them over.
“The only substantial incident of ‘communist’ influence involved the POR, which under the direction of its erstwhile leader Warqui had established something of a presence among the peasants of Ucureña. This was soon to prove ephemeral and had only been made possible by supporting a faction in conflict with the leader of the regional confederation over financial questions.” (106) (Rebellion in the Veins, Dunkerley, Verso, pp.70-71.)
Once the peasant mobilisations for land began to get under way the POR succeeded in attaining great influence in the convulsed valley of Cochabamba. In 1953 it correctly launched the slogan of occupation of the land and expropriation of the latifundiae. However its agrarian programme did not go beyond the limits of the bourgeois democratic revolution.
When a peasant receivers a plot of land he becomes a petit- bourgeois. Competition and the operation of the market results in some small proprietors becoming rich and turning into bourgeois farmers, buying lorries or tractors, acquiring new land and hiring labourers while others lose their plots and sink into the proletariat. Land does not deal with all the peasantry’s problems and neither dos it mean that there will be a great increase in the supply of farming produce to the country. There must be electricity, mechanisation and modernisation of the agricultural sector as well as an improvement in communications and means of exchange.
In order to achieve the latter industry and the banks must be expropriated and placed under the control of the workers and small peasants. Thereby the peasants can more easily get credit and urban products. The expropriation of the rich and the nationalisation of large scale transport will mean investment in agriculture, lower transport costs and lower prices for goods traded between town and country. By eliminating the private distributors and middlemen and being in direct contact with their markets, the peasants will get better terms for their trade. The state monopoly of foreign trade will allow the agricultural sector to be protected and provided with goods at subsidised prices.
In order to do this it is vital that the revolution spreads internationally and it must try to control the main cities, banks and factories in the region. A workers state should try to encourage the peasants to develop associated forms of large scale production voluntarily. But such collective farms will inevitably fail if the revolution remains isolated in one country and a backward one at that.
Three more important problems for the peasant are education, culture and political democracy. Plans for literacy campaigns and education could only be carried out on the basis of substantial sums obtained by confiscation from the rich and by a general mobilisation of educational volunteers (something that the MNR did not want to do.)
Even now in Bolivia the majority of the population not only still live in the countryside but still speak Quechua, Aymara and other Amerindian languages. In order to try to integrate them into modern society and the struggle for socialism, the proletariat must unconditionally defend the right to national self-determination for these nationalities before the bourgeoisie. That should entail a struggle for the official recognition of the Amerindian languages so that the great majority of Bolivians can develop their own culture or be educated or examined in their own mother tongue. If a strong feeling for autonomy or separation emerges, the proletariat should struggle for the right of these nationalities to opt for that course but also to persuade them that the best course is that of a soviet region or republic in the framework of a socialist federation. The POR did not raise any slogan favouring self-determination of the Indian nationalities. When, decades later, it did so, it clothed itself in populism and idealised the obscurantist pre-Columbian religion.
The MNR introduced adult suffrage. The illiterate Bolivian peasants were able to vote for the first time. The POR did not make either that demand or the one for an Constituent Assembly. Later it demanded that illiterates be eligible for election and that the proletariat have a preferential vote.
The POR did not demand the expropriation of industry and credit in order to put them under workers control. It programme was limited to a bourgeois and national framework. The way to realise it was to put pressure on the ‘comrade President’, Paz.
“While we all waited for the government to make its position clear on the problem of the latifundia while taking up the hopes of the exploited masses, President Paz Estenssoro answered our worries with the needs of the Indian, of labour and sacrifices.” (107) (LO, 29.6.52, p.4.)
Once more the POR pinned its hopes on Paz. What was needed was to alert the masses constantly that the entire MNR was not interested in carrying out an agrarian revolution.
One of the personalities most supported by the POR was Ñuflo Chavez, one of the leaders of the MNR left wing, who had worked very closely with the POR and, in spite of being a rancher’s son, had been put in charge of peasant matters by the COB and was peasant’ minister. “The Minister of Peasant Affairs has forbidden the Federation to collect dues. Is this the way to encourage organisation in the countryside?” (108) (LO, 6.2.53, p.1) Once more the POR was surprised that its friend was inconsistent and pleaded with him to be consistent. The minister should have been denounced for wanting to disorganise the peasantry in order to moderate and regiment it.
Eventually the MNR adopted an agrarian reform that failed to pull the agricultural sector out of its backwardness. “between 1954 and 1968 only about eight million of some 36 million hectares of cultivated land changed hands. After two years 51% of the latifundia in La Paz, 49% in Chuquisaca and 76% in Oruro had been affected, but in Tarija the figure was 33% in Santa Cruz 36% and in Cochabamba only 16%, the national total being 28.5%.” (109) (Dunkerley, Verso, p.73.)
Part 20: The opportunist international orientation of the POR
The Bolivian revolution could never have overcome its impoverished capitalist semi-colonial condition by remaining isolated in a backward and landlocked country. The internationalisation of the revolution was vital in order to ward off counter-revolution and to establish the material basis for socialist construction.
The MNR did everything possible to isolate the revolution within its own boundaries. It did not even dare to organise or encourage insurgent movements in other countries of the continent however moderate the programmes of these insurgents were. Víctor Paz took great pains to be imperialism’s trump card. Lechín and his POR scribes took great pains to promote him.
If the POR press and its programme of action is examined no serious fight for the international expansion of the revolution will be found. It did not even call for a struggle for the Socialist United States of Latin America. Even the most pro-nationalist wing of the Latin American ‘Trotskyist movement’, the Ramos current criticised the section of the Fourth International for its provincialism. “the POR, far from basing its policy on the development of the struggle in Latin America, limits itself only to Bolivia. This is a suicidal but neither a working class nor revolutionary policy (…) A Workers Government is only conceivable on the plane of a revolutionary struggle in all Latin America, not in one of its isolated ‘provinces’.” (110) (Trotsky ante la revolución Latinoamericana, Juan Ramon Peñaloza, Bs As 1953, pp.152-154)
The POR has never been renowned for regarding international politics as important. However in the few articles written by the POR about other countries a line of colossal capitulation to counter-revolution can be seen.
A report from the POR CC said: “First Peron and Vargas in Argentina and Brazil, then Paz Estenssoro in Bolivia and later Velasco Ibarra in Ecuador and finally Ibañez in Chile, unifying the revolutionary and anti-imperialist aspirations of their own peoples, express in their broad electoral victories, not only the discontent of the working masses for the system of capitalist exploitation, but the fundamental defeat of imperialism’s subjection of our semi-colonial countries through the traditional methods of economic slavery. Such mass movements fully identify themselves with the revolutionary actions that are liberating China, Korea, Indonesia and Indo-China and which enable these markets to escape the influence and exploitation of imperialism (…)” (111) (Boletin Interno, no.13, POR, p.3)
The POR maintained that the bourgeois governments of Peron Vargas, Paz and Ibañez had defeated imperialism and “fully identified themselves” with the revolutions that were overthrowing the bourgeoisie in Asia. In Indonesia the bourgeoisie was never deposed and, furthermore, thanks to the popular frontist policy of the CP, it demobilised the workers and paved the way for a coup that would assassinate a million opponents. The nationalist Latin American governments did not question the backward capitalist semi-colonial nature of the countries that they ran. They simply sought to generate better conditions for the development of a national bourgeoisie. The aim of their social reforms was to widen the internal market and control the organisations of labour. All these regimes were anti-communist and ended up supporting imperialism and repressing the workers.
The POR openly showed its sympathy for the PSP of Chile. Instead of denouncing its reformist politics of entering a capitalist government, the POR promoted it and presented it as an anti- Stalinist party derived from Trotskyism and with a semi- Trotskyist orientation.
“The Partido Socialista Popular is a centrist party which recently shifted to the left and, for some time, gave the Ibañez government a socialist tinge. As to be expected, the policy of the PSP could not be achieved by the cabinet and its leadership, energetically pressured by its rank and file, had no other remedy than of giving expression to the popular discontent by the ministerial crisis (…) it should be noted that the PSP is anti-Stalinist and it is derived from the Left Opposition.” (112) (LO, 27.9.53, p.4.)
The POR’s most scandalous position was its open support for Zionism. In an article called Israel gives a lesson to imperialism the POR called for support to the main bastion of imperialism in the Middle East against Jordan. It is the duty of any Marxist to defend any Arab semi-colony (no matter how reactionary it regime) in face of the racist aircraft-carrier of imperialism.
“The tiny republic of Israel, also apparently received ‘free aid from the USA’. The conflict with Jordan had the virtue of showing the game played by imperialism. The Yankee chancellery told Israel to stop engineering works on the river Jordan under threat of a suspension of US aid to this tiny state. The reply of this young country with a population of less than two million was a hard lesson for Yankee imperialism. The Israeli Chancellor Moshe Sherrett declared that ‘Israel does not sell its sovereignty or independence for any type of help.’
“This lesson of not compromising national sovereignty to imperialism for a few tons of food should be learnt by every ruler.’” (113)(LO, 3.11.53, p.1.)
By that time Israel had destroyed the Palestinian state and had expelled hundreds of thousands of Arabs from its territory. The USA did not want its ‘guard-dog’ to continue carrying our further ‘excesses’. The POR saw in this even more reactionary attitude of Israel a dignified gesture for the MNR government to imitate. It is as if anyone today could be proud of a South African government which defied the USA by refusing to repeal racist laws.
Part 21: The leadership of the Fourth International identifies itself with this Menshevik policy
The whole of the treacherous policy of the POR was given total support by the Fourth International. Furthermore the latter admitted to being its guide.
The resolution adopted by the IEC of the Fourth International at its 12th Plenum (November 1952) said:
“The way in which the POR has operated so far is, in general correct, and corresponds both to the objective reality and to the real strength of the party.
“Ideologically preparing since before the events of 9th April, the POR was not surprised by them and, above, all it did not fail to correctly interpret them and to adequately adjust its policy (…) This double support was concretised in the critical support given to the MNR government” (114) (Contribución …, p.241)
Early in 1953 the journal Fourth International asserted: “The POR began by justifying granting critical support to the MNR government (…) it gave the government critical support against attacks of imperialism and reaction and it supported all progressive measures.” (115)(Fourth International, January- February 1953, p.16.)
“Ideologically prepared in advance for the events of April 9, the POR was not surprised by them and above all did not fail to interpret them correctly and to adequately adjust its own policy.” (116) (International Information Bulletin, January 1953, SWP, New York, p.24.)
In 1953 the factional break-up of the Fourth International began between the International Secretariat of Michel Pablo, Ernest Mandel and Posadas and the International Committee of the SWP (USA), the French PCI of Bleibtreu-Favre and Lambert and the groups of Gerry Healy and Nahuel Moreno. The split was the result of the latter grouping’s rejection of the tactic of deep entrism within Stalinism. Nevertheless the IC carried out, or would later, deep entrism into social democracy or bourgeois nationalism.
During the split the Bolivian revolution was not discussed. All had supported the POR line. The split was not between ‘orthodox’ and revisionist’ forces but between two wings which had already supported the centrist orientation of seeking to reform dissident Stalinists (such as Tito) or nationalists (such as the MNR).
Much later in the search to find arguments for their factional battles, the anti-Pabloists discovered the betrayal of 1952 which they had endorsed at the time.
The International Committee of Healy published a vast collection of seven books entitled Trotskyism versus Revisionism which contained hundreds of letters and documents which were supposed to show its struggle against revisionism. However in none of those volumes is the 1952 revolution mentioned. The extensive first volume is dedicated to the split with Pabloism. More than fifty texts of that polemic are reproduced. Nevertheless in all those documents Bolivia is only mentioned in two brief and passing references of a purely administrative nature. The Vern and Ryan texts are totally ignored. All this merely confirms that the ‘anti-Pabloists’ never questioned the Menshevik strategy at all which was unanimously adopted by the Fourth International and that the latter had already shifted towards centrism between 1948 and 1951.
At the beginning of the 70s the Healy current was to develop a particular interest in Bolivia arising from its wish to engage in a factional manoeuvre against the PCI of Lambert, at that time linked to Lora and because it had begun to form its first very active South American section in Peru. In 1971-72 it launched a massive political offensive against the POR, accusing it, correctly, of having conciliated the nationalist Torres government. But these criticisms were made from a sectarian angle as it denounced Lora for having dared to engage in joint anti- gorilla actions with Torres and for not having dared to agitate for the slogan ‘Down With Torres!’ which would have been a blunder at the time as only reaction would have replaced him. Later the journal Clave, in its first number, published an analysis of the crisis of the Trotskyist movement in which many of the criticisms made at the time by the anti-defencists Shachtman and Robles were repeated.
However all these criticism were made under pressure. Healyism supported the pro-nationalist line of the POR in 1952. Its sectarian orientation in the Andes ran counter to its total capitulation to the bourgeois movements of Khomeini, Arafat, Qaddafi and Ortega at the same time. Healyism went so far as to justify the massacres by the theocratic dictatorship of Iran of the Kurds, women refusing to wear the oppressive veil and ‘Trotskyists’.
In 1980 the currents of Moreno and Lambert fused to give birth to the Parity Committee and then the Fourth International – International Committee. In the programme that it adopted it said:
“The synthesis of Pabloist betrayal occurred in Bolivia. In this country the POR (Partido Obrero Revolucionario), Bolivian section of the international, led by the hand of Pablo, committed one of the greatest betrayals against the revolution so far this century, equal to, or greater than, that of the Mensheviks during the Russian revolution, than that of the social democrats during and after the First World War, than that of the Stalinists in China, in Germany, in Spain etc. In Bolivia the working class, educated by Trotskyism, carried out – at the start of 1952 – one of the most perfect working class revolutions known: it destroyed the bourgeois army, built up workers and peasants militias as the only real power in the country, and organised the Central Obrera Boliviana in order to centralise the workers movement and the militias. The bureaucracy that led the COB handed over power – which it had in its hands – to the bourgeois nationalist party the MNR (Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario). Bolivian Trotskyism was a power, it had great influence in the labour and mass movement, it had participated as co-leadership of the working class and popular insurrection that destroyed the army. The International Secretariat (IS), led by Pablo, laid down the treacherous and reformist line of critically supporting the bourgeois government. The present crisis of Bolivian Trotskyism, the present crisis of the whole of the Fourth International, the strengthening of Stalinism in Bolivia and of all the petty bourgeois nationalist movements in Latin America, derives from that criminal policy of class collaboration which Pablo obliged the whole of the International to carry out in Bolivia. The Pabloite revisionist principle was always the same; the MNR pressured by the mass movement would see itself obliged to make a socialist revolution”. (117) (Actualización del programa de transición, Nahuel Moreno, Caracteres Ed, Bogota, 1990, pp.40-41.)
What this demonstrated was the greatest cynicism. Lambertism had worked very closely with Lora before subscribing to that position. It was the international current that showed the greatest eagerness to demonstrate that Lora’s POR had always advanced a revolutionary orientation. Pierre Broué, its great historian, wrote a small book in which he defended the official line of the POR in 1952.
The Moreno current never questioned the right-centrist policy of the POR in 1952. In fact it made it its own. While the POR capitulated to the MNR, Moreno was engaged in total adaptation to Peronism. For a decade he was to be dissolved inside it giving allegiance to the leadership and economic programme of the bourgeois Peron. When the POR began to break up in the mid-1950s, the SLATO (American Secretariat of Orthodox Trotskyism), headed by Moreno and Vitale, had a greater affinity with the majority of the Fracción Obrera Leninista of Moller which was dissolved into the MNR. In his major work Moreno admits that Vitale took great pains to win the Moller group to SLATO. Those who went over to the MNR did so under the powerful influence of the pro-Peronist PSRN, within which Moreno, Ramos and pro-Peronist social democrats worked together.
Another current that has just ‘discovered’ that Lora committed serious errors in 1952, is the Partido Obrero of Argentina. This current was one which had unconditionally defended the whole pro-nationalist line of the POR. Its historian Coggiola based the whole of his analysis of the history of Trotskyism in his country and continent, on the basis of total adherence to the conceptions and actions of the POR-MASAS. In its daily practice it has struggled to impose worker ministers onto Peronism and for a front with bourgeois sectors behind a bourgeois democratic programme and a joint presidential candidate. Now it has decided to break with Lora because he supported a dissident faction. Without drawing up any balance sheet of its co-habitation with Lora, Pablo Rieznik published a brief and deficient article in which he belatedly initiates an attack on Lora in 1952.
All the currents that claim to come from the Fourth International since 1951-52 are compromised with the historic betrayal of the Bolivian revolution. The lack of a radical balance sheet of the lessons of that crime has meant that all those currents continue to practice different varieties of adaptation to forces foreign to the proletarian revolution.
The heirs of Pablo’s IS capitulated before the FLN in Algeria, to Mao, Castro and Ho Chi Minh’s Stalinism, to Sandinism, to Khomeini, to Euro-Communism and bourgeois pacifism and ecology. The Latin American Bureau would end up following Posadas until its transformation into a puppet of the conservative Stalinists. The different variants of the IC would capitulate to the MNA in Algeria, Peronism & Belaundism in the 50s, where its sections ensconced themselves) Social Democracy and Sandinism. Healy would die converted into an emulator of Arafat, Gaddafi, Khomeini and Gorbachev.
The SWP(USA) has ended up openly reneging on Trotskyism and unconditionally hailing Castro, the FSLN and the FMLN. Lambertism survives wishing to form a new international and reformist parties like that of Lula in Brazil and based on the strategy of forming bourgeois democratic governments. Morenoism was always characterised by its embrace of whatever was in fashion among left currents (at different times it was Peronist, Castroist, Maoist, standard bearers of the formation of sections of the Social-Democrat Socialist International, apologists of Walesa’s ‘Solidarity’ and for the immediate capitalist unification of Germany.)
References
1. The CON was the predecessor of the COB.
2. Memorias del primer ministro obrero, Waldo Alvarez, La Paz 1986, p.188.
3. Lucha Obrera, 12.6.52, p.3.
4. Trotskyism in Latin America, Robert J. Alexander, Hoover Institution Press, California 1973, p.134.
5. Sindicatos y revolución, G. Lora, La Paz 1960.
6. La Revolución Boliviana: Análisis crítico, Guillermo Lora, La Paz 1963, p.254.
7. Boletin Interno, no.13, POR, 1953, p.11.
8. Lucha Obrera, 18.4.52, p.2.
9. Rebelión en las venas, James Dunkerley, Ed Quipus, 1982, La Paz, p.50 – Verso edition p.45.
10. Rebellion in the Veins, Verso, London 1984, p.64. (The editor of the English text omitted ‘allegedly’ before ‘controlled’. Note by Eds of RH)
11. Labor Action, 27.10.52. Shachtman’s paper.
12. Rebelión en las venas, p.52, Verso Edition, p.46.
13. Labor Action, 7.4.52.
14. Contribución a la historia politica de Boliviana, G. Lora, Vol.2, pp.237-238.
15. The Militant, 12.5.52, Lora interview Part 1, SWP New York.
16. The Militant, 12.5.52, Lora interview Part 1, SWP New York.
17. The Militant, 19.5.52, Lora interview Part 2, SWP, New York.
18. The Militant, 12.5.52, Lora interview Part 1, SWP, New York.
19. The Militant, 19.5.52, Lora interview Part 2, SWP, New York.
20. “A Letter on the Bolivian Revolution”, S Ryan, 1.6.52, SWP Internal Bulletin.
21. Boletin Interno, no.13, POR, undated, p.10.
22. La revolución boliviana: Análisis crítico, G. Lora, La Paz, 1963, p.254.
23. Rebelión, 1.5.52, p.8-9.
24. “Gualberty Villarroel (…) Our proletarian homage to the memory of the martyr president”, ibid., p.9.
25. Lucha Obrera, 12.6.52, p.3.
26. Lucha Obrera, 29.6.52, p.4.
27. Lucha Obrera, 18.4.52, p.2.
28. Boletin Interno, no.13, 1953, p.7.
29. Lucha Obrera, 25.5.52, p.3.
30. ibid., p.301.
31. Boletin Interno, no.13, POR, undated, p.8.
32. Movimiento obrero y procesos politicos en Bolivia: Historia de la COB 1952-1957, Jorge Lazarte, EDOBOL, La Paz 1989, p.280.
33. Lucha Obrera, 15.7.52, p.1.
34. Lucha Obrera, 29.1.52, p.2.
35. Boletin Interno, no.13, POR, p.11.
36. Trotskyism in Latin America, Robert J. Alexander, p.125.
37. Lucha Obrera, 1.6.52, p.2.
38. Internal Bulletin, no.17, August 1953, SWP, New York, p.40. The second Ryan letter, dated 4.8.53.
39. ROSCA was the mining oligarchy – Eds note.
40. Lucha Obrera, 25.5.52.
41. ibid., p.277.
42. Contribución a la historia politica de Boliviana, G. Lora, Vol 2, p.231-232.
43. Bolivia: la revolución inconclusa, James M. Malloy, Ceres, La Paz 1989, p.243.
44. ibid., p.243-244.
45. A History of the Bolivian Labour Movement, Lora, Cambridge, p.281.
46. ibid., p.284.
47. La revolución Boliviana: Análisis crítico, Lora, La Paz, 1963, p.267.
48. ibid., p.270.
49. ibid., p.298-299.
50. Lucha Obrera, 23.1.53.
51. Lucha Obrera, March 1953, p.1.
52. See interview in Facetas, 5.7.87.
53. Nahuel Moreno always claimed … in its bureaucracy.
54. La Revolución Boliviana, G. Lora, p.262-263.
55. Movimento obrero y processos politícos en Bolivia, Jorge Lazarte, p.6.
56. ibid., p.7.
57. As Stuart King so …. Permanent Revolution, no.2, p.36.
58. Boletin Interno, no.13, POR, p.12.
59. The Third International after Lenin, Trotsky, Pathfinder, New York 1970, p.181. Stalin, el gran organizador de derrotas. La III Internacional despues de Lenin, Trotski, El Yunque, Bs As 1974, p.241.
60. The author may be incorrect in assuming that.
61. The Communist International 1919-1943: Documents, ed. Jane Degras, Vol.1, Cass, 1971, p.427. (The author is wrong. Zinoviev drafted the theses which represented a compromise between the lefts and right. In Dialogue with Heinrich Brandler (Marxism, Wars and Revolutions, Deutscher, Verso, 1984) the latter says: “Radek was accused by Moscow of being the author of my definition of the five forms of workers’ government. In reality, he tried to prevent this definition from being adopted; not because he thought it incorrect but, as I learned years later, because it irritated Zinoviev, and Radek found this inconvenient for his factional struggle in Moscow.” pp.158-159. Brandler advanced it at the 8th Congress of the KPD in January 1923, just after the Fourth Congress of the Communist International which took place in Nov-Dec 1922. See Revolutionary History Vol.2 no.3, pp.1-20. Eds note)
62. ibid., p.426.
63. ibid., p.426.
64. Contribución a la historia politica de Boliviana, Lora, Vol.2, La Paz 1978, p.253.
65. Lucha Obrera, 11.11.52, p.3.
66. Lucha Obrera, 11.11.52, p.2.
67. Lucha Obrera, 25.5.52, p.3.
68. Bolivia: la revolución derrotada, Liborio Justo, Cochabamba 1967, p.224.
69. Lucha Obrera, 2.8.53, p.1.
70. This reference is missing in the text available to me – ETOL
71. Internal Bulletin, no 17, August 1953, SWP New York, p.50.
72. ibid., p.10.
73. Memorias del primer ministro obrero, Waldo Alvarez, La Paz, 1986, pp.283-84.
74. El Sindicalismo Boliviano, Ricardo Catoira Marín, La Paz, 1987, p.43.
75. Contribución …, Vol.2, Lora, La Paz 1978, p.228.
76. El Sindicalismo Boliviano …, p.48.
77. LO, 3.5.52, p.3.
78. LO, 25.5.52. p.1.
79. LO, 12.6.52, p.1.
80. LO, 12.6.52, p.2.
81. LO 12.6.52, p.3.
82. The Third International After Lenin, L.D. Trotsky, Pathfinder, New York, pp.169-170.
83. LO, 3.8.52, p.3.
84. LO, 5.8.53, p.1.
85. Villarroel was lynched in 1946. Eds note.
86. LO, 6.2.53, p.1.
87. LO, 29.6.52.p.4.
88. LO, 11.11.52, p.1.
89. Boletin Interno, no.13, POR, p.9.
90. Revolution Bolivienne 1952-1954, Pierre Scali, La Verité, supp. no.333, 22.4.54, p.20.
91. LO, May 1953, p.2.
92. Poder y Fuerzas Armadas 1949-1982, General Gary Prado Salmón, Cochabamba 1984, p.33.
93. La revolución boliviana, G. Lora, p.271.
94. LO, 15.7.52, p.1.
95. Poder y Fuerzas Armadas 1949-1982, p.40.
96. Poder y Fuerzas Armadas 1949-1982, pp.52-54.
97. Historia de una leyenda: Vida y palabra de Juan Lechín Oquendo, Lupe Cajias, La Paz 1989, p.148.
98. LO, 3.8.52, p.3.
99. LO, Supplement 3.2.53, p.4.
100. LO, 11.11.52, p.3.
101. LO, 11.11.52, p.3.
102. LO, 29.11.52, p.2.
103. LO, Supplement 3.2.53, p.3.
104. The Third International After Lenin, Pathfinder, New York, 1970, p.218.
105. This note seems to be missing.
106. Rebellion in the Veins, Dunkerley, Verso, pp.70-71.
107. LO, 29.6.52, p.4.
108. LO, 6.2.53, p.1.
109. Rebellion in the Veins, Dunkerley, Verso, p.73.
110. Trotsky ante la revolución nacional latinoamericana, Juan Ramon Peñaloza, Bs. As., 1953, pp.152-154.
111. Boletin Interno, no.13, POR, p.3.
112. LO, 27.9.53, p.4.
113. LO, 3.11.53, p.1.
114. Contribución a la historia política de Bolivia, G. Lora, Vol.2, La Paz 1978, p.241.
115. Fourth International, January-February 1953, p.16.
116. International Information Bulletin, January 1953, SWP New York, p.24.
117. Actualización del programa de transición, Nahuel Moreno, Caracteres Ed, Bogota 1990, pp.40-41.
Note from the Editor: Below we reprint a resolution published by the predecessor organization of the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT) - the League for a Revolutionary Communist International (LRCI). It was originally published in 2000. This resolution provides a useful analysis of the process of capitalist restoration in China in the 1990s.
The RCIT has published a number of works on capitalism in China. They are collected in special sub-page on our website. A comprehensive analysis can be read in chapter 10 of Michael Pröbsting's book "The Great Robbery of the South. It can be read online here.
Michael Pröbsting is the International Secretary of the RCIT.
* * * * *
At its Fifth Congress this summer, the LRCI concluded that capitalism had been restored in China by 1996 and that this was made possible by changes in the class character of the state in 1992. But why has the triumph of capitalism in China not been accompanied by the same political upheaval as in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union?
Capitalism was restored in China by 1996. The fact that this was carried out relatively smoothly under the continued rule of the Chinese Communist Party was made possible by two principal factors.
First, nearly two decades of “market reforms” had created powerful capitalist sectors within China, and secondly, the crushing of working class political opposition in the aftermath of the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square had removed the most important social obstacle to capitalism’s return.
The key to understanding the Chinese pattern of restoration lies in the bonapartist character of the political regime established after the revolution of 1949 – a regime sufficiently detached from the pressure of the main classes in society to pursue a determined policy in the face of determined resistance.
The Chinese Communist Party’s own bureaucratic-military rule was assembled during the war against Japan after 1937 and this became the basis of the new administration after 1949.
With its social basis in the peasant majority, high prestige amongst the small urban working class and a bourgeoisie that had lost most of its wealth under Chiang Kai-shek, the CCP faced almost no social constraints when it decided to adopt the Soviet model of bureaucratic command planning to modernise China.
But from the outset factional struggles and the consequent shifts in policy rocked society. Three years of famine with twenty million dead resulted from the voluntarist experiment of the Great Leap Forward and the People’s Communes, while the Cultural Revolution closed down all education.
The decisive turning point in the succession of factional battles came with the return of Deng Xiaoping from internal exile in 1978. By this time, growth rates in both agriculture and industry were declining, not fundamentally because they were subject to centralised planning but because the dictatorship of the party suffocated the initiative and denied the creativity of workers and peasants themselves.
Deng’s solution in agriculture was to encourage the movement away from the communes and allow the peasants to decide for themselves what to grow and how to grow it. Releasing the peasantry from bureaucratic control led to immediate improvements.
In industry, however, Deng’s reforms were unsuccessful because they could not address the inherent limitation of the Soviet model of planning.
Although it is possible to construct and operate the basic industries by bureaucratic command, it is not possible either to raise productivity or to dynamise consumer goods production without the creativity and enthusiasm of the workers themselves. But this required democracy in the planning process – the one thing the Stalinist bureaucracy could not contemplate.
Instead, Deng relied on greater autonomy for the enterprise managers. Throughout the 1980s, a series of reforms were introduced to allow them to retain profits, seek new markets, reduce the workforce and increase production.
However, the overall mechanisms of the command planning system could not accommodate factory level decision-making. An important basis of support for the whole regime was the planning bureaucracy it had itself created.
Time and again the reforms were delayed, diluted and even derailed by the powerful and entrenched interests within the state sector.
Quite apart from factional opposition to reform, the actual structure of the planned sector militated against change. Managers often wanted to introduce greater financial stringency or new product lines.
But it was impossible to evaluate costs, obtain raw materials or invest in newer technology in a system where all resources were allocated from on high and prices were laid down by Beijing.
The only way in which the system could increase production was by building new capacity and taking on new workers. As a result, although productivity stagnated, output continued to grow in the state sector.
Nonetheless, a combination of constant pressure from the Politburo, headed by Deng, and the consequences of other reforms such as those in agriculture, the Township and Village Enterprises (TVEs), the Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and the introduction of foreign direct investment, did begin to loosen controls and increase managerial autonomy from the mid-1980s.
Economically, increased contact with the TVEs allowed industrial managers to start making profits, “on the side” whilst more than fulfilling their quotas for the planning authorities.
At the same time, decentralisation of the planning authorities themselves strengthened provincial institutions, especially banks, which extended credit for the building of yet more new capacity, thereby adding indebtedness to the problems of the state sector.
Politically, tensions increased both within party and state as different factions proposed different courses of action. It became impossible to keep these arguments secret and by the mid-1980s a semi-public discussion over economic policy was under way.
Attempts by the authorities to suppress this movement only served to highlight the lack of “democracy” within China and thus the seeds of the “democracy movement” were sown which grew after 1987.
Popular discontent, however, was not confined to political issues.
Fuelled by inflation, which rose to 18 per cent in 1988, and the manifest corruption of the new rich and many officials, economic grievances drew in the working class. At first, the leadership of the party was slow to respond to the rising discontent. Its own ranks were seriously divided.
The “reformers”, supported by an increasing number of managers and economists who had already given up any hope of reforming the planned economy, tended to support the demands for greater openness and public debate but the defenders of the “old regime” sympathised with the anti-corruption demands of the masses.
However, when protests became huge the leadership began to close ranks. Zhao Ziyang, who was believed to be sympathetic to the demonstrators, was replaced by Li Peng.
Finally, when increasing numbers of workers’ delegations from around the country began arriving in Tiananmen Square in 1989, Deng and Li decided to send in the reliable troops from rural provinces.
Although the immediate consequence of this bloodbath was a return to power by the military and supporters of command planning, the destruction of the workers’ movement inevitably strengthened the pro-restorationist forces in the long run.
To regain stability, the regime not only froze prices and purged a number of conspicuously corrupt officials but also raised wages and restored many central controls over the economy.
In the short term the suppression of the Democracy Movement showed both the solidity of the regime’s support in the countryside and the continued strength of the factions opposed to the market reforms. However, over the next two years, it became clear that a return to the past was impossible.
Although inflation was brought under control and production in State Owned Enterprises briefly rose in 1991, by 1992 it was the southern provinces – especially Guangdong – which were the most market-dominated and which were growing fastest.
Having crushed and cowed the industrial working class and emboldened by the inability of the “old guard” to reverse earlier reforms, Deng and the “technocrats” around Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji decided the time was ripe for a decisive change of policy.
This was first signalled by Deng’s “Southern Tour” in January 1992 during which he praised the Shenzhen SEZ as the way forward for the whole of China.
This was then codified into a series of policy statements including the opening up of the border regions to trade, relaxation of foreign investment regulations in cities along the Yangzi River and in a further 18 provincial cities, the complete opening for foreign trade of a series of coastal cities and the abolition of the Production Office of the State Council and its replacement by the State Council Office of Economic Trade, under Zhu Rongji.
The change of policy culminated in the adoption of a new programme for a “socialist market economy” by the Fourteenth Party Congress in October 1992. At the time, Workers Power judged this programme to be similar in vein to the “market socialist” policies that had been adopted years earlier in, for example, Hungary and Yugoslavia.
These had weakened, but not destroyed, the fundamentals of central planning in those countries. In the light of the events in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union where capitalist restoration took the form of the so-called “big bang” strategy of closing down planning ministries, liberalising prices and, thereby, practically halting production, we concluded that Beijing had chosen to retain some modified form of central planning. We were wrong.
With hindsight we can now see that this was the point at which the character of the state changed. Whilst continuing to be a bonapartist regime that had to secure its own economic base and at the same time balance between the main social classes, it consciously decided to transform its economic base from a planned economy to a state capitalist one.
Politically, the old guard had to be ousted from all positions of decisive power but a thorough purging was not necessary because the two years after 1989 had proved that they were, ultimately, a spent force, especially as their only realistic basis of support – the working class – had been suppressed in 1989.
Economically, the shift in policy was possible because the planned sector was by now only responsible for slightly more than 50 per cent of production. Any serious shortfalls in production could be made good either from the private and TVE sectors or from the world market.
The crucial evidence that the government was committed to the destruction of the planned economy came at a Central Committee Plenum in November 1993 which adopted “Fifty Articles for a Market Economy”.
This laid down the strategy for systematically dismantling the planning controls over the state owned enterprises and their transformation into independent “trusts”.
At the same time, it proposed a radical reform of banking, a move towards convertibility of the Renminbi, removal of restrictions on where foreign investment would be allowed and the end of the “iron rice bowl” labour regulations which guaranteed urban industrial workers job security, education rights, housing, healthcare and pensions.
Similar proposals had been made before but had not been implemented and although, in 1993, the state sector for the first time produced less than 50 per cent of all industrial production, it continued to dominate the industrial core, the “commanding heights” and remained the single most important sector.
Since no actual dismantling of the planning system had yet taken place, we continued to characterise China as a degenerate workers’ state. We should have recognised it as a bourgeois restorationist state which was still preparing to push through its programme.
The next two years, however, saw a dramatic change in the Chinese economy under the impact of “trustification”, the first closures of planning ministries and a flood of foreign capital. In fact, a serious degree of economic instability developed as enterprise managers sought to take advantage of growth rates of up to 18 per cent .
Characteristically, many opted for extending their production facilities rather than improving the productivity of existing plant and equipment. As a result, the state owned sector continued to grow at an annual rate of some 8 per cent even though this left a majority of its firms in debt and unable to make a profit.
It was during this period that the basis of production shifted decisively in favour of capitalist methods. Figures for 1996 show state owned industry producing only 28.3 per cent of industrial production while the collectively owned, mainly TVE industry, accounted for 39.4 and, very significantly, production in private hands (15.5 per cent ) and foreign owned companies (16.6 per cent ) amounted to 32.1 per cent .
In subsequent years, state policy focused on the incorporation of the 1,000 biggest and most productive plants in the state sector, leaving some 49,000 smaller enterprises to find their own solutions in the new economic landscape.
The majority of them appear to have been privatised at give away prices to their own managers. Others have merged to form more viable units and the remainder have been closed altogether.
However, there is now a clear trend towards not just “corporatising” state owned enterprises, as envisaged in the mid-1980s, but towards full privatisation in the form of shareholding joint stock companies.
The Fifteenth Party Congress in September 1997 officially sanctioned such companies, justifying them by the remarkable argument that they were a form of collective ownership and, therefore, entirely compatible with its socialist principles. This represents an important shift towards the developing bourgeois class within China.
Since that Congress, Zhu Rongji has been made Premier by the People’s Congress and, as head of the first government that contains no military figures, has overseen the dismantling of the remaining planning ministries, the divesting of the PLA’s entire industrial empire and the negotiation of an agreement with the USA to allow China to enter the World Trade Organisation. This deal, which included the opening of China to foreign firms and banks, is likely to result in a further dramatic restructuring of the Chinese economy.
The prospect for China, therefore, is one of mounting instability. The imposition of capitalist norms in industry has already led, according to the World Bank, to some 10 million redundancies per year for the last three years and this has generated a wave of political struggles across China.
Two decades of reform, culminating in the restoration of capitalism have not only changed the face of China but transformed and massively enlarged the Chinese working class, now the biggest single working class in the world. Out of its experiences and its current struggles, that class will find its own political voice and create its own political organisations.
The task of revolutionaries everywhere is to ensure that these are won to a revolutionary programme that destroys for good the dictatorship of the bureaucracy, expropriates the new capitalists and takes power into the hands of workers’ councils and a workers’ militia.
Restoring capitalism: Planting the seeds of capitalism
How the Chinese Communist Party brought more market relations into the fields
On the eve of the 1978 reforms, agriculture employed between 70 and 80 per cent of the total workforce. It was organised on the basis of the “People’s Communes” which embraced whole districts, the production brigade, numbering up to 100 households, and the production team which was essentially the traditional village or hamlet.
All decisions over production were taken at Commune level in keeping with the requirements of the central planning authorities. Although the system brought some advantages in spreading modern techniques and organising large scale projects such as irrigation, its disadvantages were beginning to outweigh these.
In particular, concentration on single crops not only ignored local variations but also required expensive transportation of products that could have been produced in all localities. Prices for agricultural goods were almost entirely laid down by the state.
By the mid-1970s, the rate of increase in food production had been overtaken by the rate of growth of the population. In several provinces, peasants were already turning away from the communes and returning to “family farming” and local party officials were turning a blind eye because the results were greatly improved harvests.
Faced with the choice of losing authority altogether or a second famine, Beijing sanctioned the break up of the communes
What emerged was the “Household Responsibility” system in which peasants decided their own land use but were obliged to deliver a quota of specified crops to the state at fixed prices. Production in excess of the quota could be sold on the free market or to the state at a “negotiated price” between the fixed prices and the free market
To ensure adequate supplies, the state guaranteed to buy everything above the quota output.
The result was an immediate increase in production; grain production rose by 3.7 per cent per year for the next six years, cotton by 18 per cent per year and meat by 8.9 per cent . Overall, peasant incomes rose by 12.3 per cent per year in the same period.
This increase in production and income stimulated other economic activity. The number of rural markets increased from 38,000 in 1980 to 67,000 by 1993. In addition, the agricultural sector was the initial stimulus to the development of local small scale industrial and commercial activity in the so-called TVE sector
It was a source of capital accumulation, not only in farming but in associated sectors, and a new developing indigenous capitalist class, a social force that had been eradicated for nearly four decades.
Restoring capitalism: Enclaves of capitalism
The role of Special Export Zones in China
Originally, the Special Economic Zones (SEZs) which were set up after 1979, were kept entirely separate from the rest of the Chinese economy. Their role was to attract foreign capital investment, high technology and to give China access to modern management techniques and foreign currency.
Their output was destined for export, not for the domestic market. In return, foreign companies were offered tax breaks, cheap labour and subsidised infrastructural development.
In the 1980s, the SEZs developed rapidly with double digit growth rates throughout the decade. As they grew, they shifted their emphasis from the original cheap labour assembly of toys and plastic goods to textiles and then to electronic and optical instruments.
By the 1990s production facilities of all sorts had begun to move away to lower wage areas such as the Pearl River delta between Hong Kong and Canton. The SEZs were increasingly concentrating on “service” industries such as real estate management, insurance and banking.
From this it is clear that, despite their character as supposedly sealed enclaves, separate from the rest of China, the SEZs began to have an impact beyond their borders within a decade of their foundation. Not only did they provide employment they were also a growing market for all kinds of goods and services, often supplied from the TVE sector.
Over the last ten years the influence of the SEZs strengthened as the barriers to the domestic market were lowered and foreign firms were allowed to set up elsewhere.
As sources of foreign trained management and legitimisers of, for example, short term contract labour and what has been called “frontier capitalism”, they have exerted an immense gravitational effect.
Especially in the coastal provinces, they have diverted resources from the state sector, pulled the TVEs into their own orbit and established economic links between the world market and the non-state sectors.
Today, their “special” status is being relinquished under the terms of the World Trade Organisation agreement signed last November. From the point of view of the restorationists, their job has been done.
Restoring capitalism: The role of foreign investment in capitalist restoration
What is the role of foreign direct investment (FDI) on China's path to capitalism?
Until 1979, foreign investment in Chinese enterprises was simply forbidden. Given the country’s political instability, it is doubtful whether there would have been many volunteers even without the ban.
FDI was very slow to take off to begin with. Until 1984, only 250 state owned enterprises were allowed to take in foreign partners as “joint ventures”. Between 1979 and 1984 only US$1.8bn was actually invested, although the state borrowed some US$11bn as well.
Although the figures did increase for the rest of the decade, before falling back sharply in the aftermath of the Tienanmen massacre, it was not until the fundamental change of policy in 1992 that the floodgates opened. By 1994 China was second only to the USA in terms of FDI – attracting US$33bn that year.
Enterprises were dropped and all provinces were allowed to invite in foreign investment. By 1995, according to the official industrial census, there were 59,000 firms in China with foreign investment. They employed nearly nine million people, 13.6 per cent of the industrial workforce and produced 13.1 per cent of total industrial output.
Investment on this scale clearly has implications for the character of the economy. While loans to the government are guaranteed a return, investment into joint ventures on a shareholding basis, or into wholly owned companies, is obviously investment in production and foreign capitalists will want to ensure their profits by influencing, if not controlling, production.
Consequently, the availability of huge volumes of foreign capital acted as a solvent of the production and distribution linkages established under the planned economy and accelerated the creation of new ones determined by the pursuit of profit.
This is particularly important with regard to the scrapping of controls on foreign investment into the large scale industry of the state sector after 1992.
Restoring capitalism: Let a thousand enterprises bloom
How is capitalism growing in China?
The Township and Village Enterprise sector (TVE), as it has come to be called, was a direct product of the agricultural reforms of the late 1970s and 1980s.
When the communes were formally dissolved, in 1994, the workshops and small scale industries which they had developed passed into the hands of the local authorities, de facto the party secretaries.
In keeping with central demands for initiative and economic growth, they were then developed to respond to increased farm incomes by supplying building materials, tools, transport, slaughterhouses, food processing plants and similar products.
From these humble origins, and often using the networks of contacts of the state and party officials, the TVEs grew rapidly in the 1980s to become not only an important source of manufactured goods (32 per cent of industrial production by 1992) but also the provider of employment for 130 million rural workers (30 per cent of all rural workers, 1996 figures).
According to official statistics for 1995, the TVE sector as a whole produced 44 per cent by value of total national industrial output.
The precise status of the TVEs has caused considerable confusion because they are listed as “collectively owned” in Chinese statistics. As a result, western commentators, particularly those who wish to deny the progress of capitalist restoration, have added them to the “state sector” to show that some 70 per cent of the economy is "not capitalist".
They make a double mistake. The first is terminological. Despite the characterisation as “collectively owned”, 90 per cent of the total number of TVEs in 1994 were owned by individuals, although these were very small scale and accounted for only 30 per cent of output by value.
More importantly, whether these enterprises are capitalist or not is not primarily a matter of legal definitions of property forms. The point is that these are all independent enterprises, not part of any planned system of production.
Two-thirds of output is produced by wage labour, all production is for the market and their investment funds originate either in retained profits or commercial credit. They are, in a word, capitalist.
Numerically, the majority are very small capital formations but the development of the sector as a whole follows a predictable pattern from small, local and labour intensive operations to increasingly larger, more highly capitalised firms which are capable of operating not only across the whole home market but even abroad on the world market.
As the TVE sector has grown and become more capital intensive, the sector has been unable to absorb labour at the same rate as it could in its early days and adds to mounting rural unemployment.
The importance of the TVE sector when assessing the character of the Chinese economy is not simply its percentage of total industrial output, significant as this is. Production is still in small units and the sector could not be said to dominate the national economy as a whole.
However, it does employ a growing percentage of the working class, it is a source of capital accumulation and it is the basis of a new industrial bourgeoisie and petit bourgeoisie able to take advantage of the privatisation drive of the state since the mid-1990s.
Note of the Editorial Board: The essay below was first published in the journal Permanent Revolution No. 6 (Autumn 1987). Permanent Revolution was the theoretical journal of the British section of our predecessor organization – the League for a Revolutionary Communist International. The founding cadres of the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT) were expelled from this organization in 2011 when they fought against its centrist degeneration. The RCIT has today sections and activists in 11 countries.
We republish this article because it elaborates a Marxist assessment of the Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci. It recognizes his important activities to found and build the Communist Party in Italy in the early 1920s. However, it also critically evaluates his theoretical conceptions which disabled him to fight against the Stalinist degeneration of the Communist International. It is important for Marxists today to combine appreciation for Gramsci’s activities as well as insights with a clear demarcation of his centrist theoretical conceptions (“hegemony”, “war of position“ etc.) which could later be misused by various Stalinists and reformists.
* * * * *
This year marks the seventieth anniversary of the death of the Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci. In 1926 he was arrested by Mussolini’s fascists and two years later sentenced after a show trial to twenty years imprisonment. Although released in 1937 he was too ill to survive. He died in April that year.
The commemoration of his death has once again provided the occasion for quite distinct tendencies on the left to wrestle over his legacy. Marxism Today (MT), the journal of the Euro-Stalinist CPGB, reminded its audience in its April issue that:
‘Without doubt, Gramsci has been the most important single theoretical influence on Marxism Today over the last decade.’(1)
This influence was filtered through the Italian Communist Party (PCI). Yet the PCI had not always been so ready to recognise Gramsci’s contribution to Marxism. It was ten years after Gramsci’s death before the PCI decided to publish an edition of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, suitably censored to remove any favourable references to Trotsky or hints of oppositon to Stalin’s policies in the 1930s.
But the crisis of Stalinism after 1956 produced an ideological vacuum in the ranks of the western Stalinist parties. In Gramsci the PCI found an ‘Italian Marxism’ that could fit the bill. It could claim continuity with the formation of the PCI, yet distance itself from the ‘excesses’ of Stalinism in the 1930s; it could claim to find in Gramsci’s work a critique of ‘statism’ that could allow it to reject the monolithism of Stalinism without collapsing into social-democratism or conceding to the revolutionary (i.e. Trotskyist) critique of Stalinism.
The PCI were to argue that Gramsci’s conception of ‘hegemony’ lent support to their policy in the 1970s for parliamentary backing to the anti-working class government of Christian-Democracy (the ‘historic compromise’).
In the last few years, however, the reformist trajectory of the PCI has led this party to put some distance between itself and Gramsci. Earlier this year the PCI leader, Natta, claimed that Gramsci was too ‘fundamentalist’. It is no surprise, therefore, to find it increasingly common for anti-Stalinists to lay claim to Gramsci’s heritage.
Fifty years ago in an obituary to Gramsci the Italian Trotskyist Pietro Tresso said it was vital to not allow the Stalinists to ‘make use of Gramsci’s personality for their own purposes’(2). This remains the case. But modern centrism attempts to go further. For example Livio Maitan’s appreciation of the Italian revolutionary’s life in the Mandelite review of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International seeks to establish that there is a ‘completely revolutionary core’ to Gramsci’s work and that ‘Revolutionary Marxists have the right and the duty to claim the heritage of Antonio Gramsci’(3)
The Socialist Workers Party (GB), while correctly taking Stalinism to task for seeking to depict Gramsci as a reformist, have, like Maitan, failed completely to generalise out of the Italian revolutionist’s life a communist appraisal of his contribution to Marxism. John Molyneux says of the years 1922-26:
‘Even a casual glance at Gramsci’s writings of this period show that he remains firmly on the terrain of revolution.’(4)
Chris Harman’s pamphlet for the SWP — Gramsci versus reformism—adopts a similarly one-sided view of Gramsci. For Harman it is good enough that Gramsci believed in revolution not reform, never abandoned the insurrectionary road and recognised both the need for a Bolshevik-type party and the seeds of a workers’ state lodged within the factory councils’ movement.
In essence, Harman, Molyneux and Maitan only display an inverted error to the Stalinists. In their account Gramsci’s contribution to the PCI up until his arrest is unproblematic and shows him to stand four square on the ground of the revolutionary Comintern. The ‘Lyon Theses’ of 1926 are represented as the pinnacle of his political work. His work after that time, as found in the Prison Notebooks, whilst containing certain errors, does not represent a rupture with the revolutionary Gramsci. For Maitan, ‘there is an undeniable continuity in Gramsci’s thought and approach from his writings in the years of the Russian revolution . . . to the 1935 notes when the Notebooks end(5). ‘In Harman’s view, it was simply that the fascists succeeded:
‘. . . in preventing his Marxism from fully realising the potential displayed in L’Ordine Nuovo and the “Lyons Theses”.’(6)
In effect these accounts only serve to underline the truth of Trotsky’s adage that it is very difficult for centrists to recognise centrism in others. It is necessary to analyse things more deeply than this. It is precisely because the present day SWP or USFI judge matters from a series of revolutionary principles and disdain to measure their own (or others) contributions by the yardstick of programme, that they fail to assess Gramsci’s political theory and practice against the background of the leadership and policies of the Comintern in the period 1919-26.
When analysed from this perspective it is possible to show that while Gramsci was never a reformist, his politics were in serious measure at variance with the practice and theory of Lenin and Trotsky while they were in the leadership of the Comintern. In short, it can be seen that in fact Gramsci traversed a classical centrist evolution, in his case from ultra-leftism to right-centrism.
Gramsci 1915-21
Born in Ales on the island of Sardinia, Gramsci went to Turin in 1911 to study at the University. It was there that he was to come into contact with the powerful Turin labour movement whose centre of gravity was to be found in the Fiat car plants and related industries. In 1913 he joined the Socialist Party (PSI).
Drawn more and more into the work of the party Gramsci gave up his studies in November 1915 to join the editorial board of the PSI paper Il Grido del Popolo. Within months he was writing for the Turin edition of the official PSI daily Avanti!. In these years as an active militant but before the Russian Revolution of 1917 shook the foundations of European social democracy, Gramsci’s politics were a considerable distance from those of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, despite the fact that Italy and Russia presented very similiar strategic and tactical tasks. By the time Gramsci became a conscious revolutionary in 1915 the Bolsheviks had gone through the experience of one revolution and counter-revolution and in the process had clearly formulated their positions on the revolutionary party and the agrarian question. The implications of these positions were to elude the lefts in the PSI until 1921. By 1915 Lenin had come to grasp the reasons for the collapse of the Second International in the face of imperialist war and the need for a complete political break with it. Gramsci and the left in the PSI were ignorant of Lenin’s attitude to these events.
Gramsci’s own political apprenticeship had been markedly different to Lenin’s. It was not the classically ‘orthodox’ Marxist tradition of Kautsky and the German SPD or Plekhanov which formed Gramsci’s background but rather a specifically Italianised version of Marxism which found its way to Gramsci through the works of Croce, Labriola and Gentile. It was to these figures that Gramsci turned for a remedy to the weaknesses that he perceived in the practice and theory of the right wing in the Second International and the PSI. Gramsci felt that the passivity and fatalism of this trend was itself related to an original flaw in the historical materialism of Marx and Engels. He considered that Marx’s critique of political economy as found in Capital was in fact mechanical materialism which ignored the role and power of the subjective factor (the working class) to become conscious of its own exploitation and rise up to overthrow a system regardless of economic conditions. Thus he saw the materialism of Marxism as deficient and in need of a return to Hegel, which Croce advocated, in order to inject a dose of idealism and provide an adequate account of the subjective political factor in revolutionary politics.
Lenin and Trotsky’s approach to the problems of the Russian Revolution were very different to this. As early as 1899 Lenin, in polemics with the Narodniks, argued against their mechanistic interpretation of Marx’s political economy which led them to conclude that the backwardness of Russia’s internal market meant that the development of capitalism in Russia could be avoided. As early as 1905 Trotsky outlined in his theory of ‘permanent revolution’ that Russian capitalism had to be understood in the context of the uneven and combined development of capitalism on a world scale. In alliance with European, especially French, capitalism, the Tsarist autocracy had overseen the rapid extension of capitalism in Russia. Precisely because of this both Lenin and Trotsky contested the legal Marxist view, however, which insisted that because of this development the leadership of the bourgeois revolution against the Tsar fell to the Russian bourgeoisie.
They proved that the weakness of an indigenous Russian bourgeoisie and the social weight of the Russian proletariat combined to guarantee that the former would bloc with reaction against the working class when faced with a real fight to force through bourgeois democratic demands.
Whereas for Gramsci the revolution in backward Italy had to be carried through despite its social relations through an act of will, for Lenin and Trotsky the revolution in backward Russia would occur precisely because of the contradictions in the material fabric of Russian capitalism. The flaws in Gramsci’s methodological grasp of Marxism betrayed a real weakness in his grasp of historical materialism. For a while in the 1920’s, as Gramsci was propelled towards the positions of the revolutionary Comintern, the significance of these weaknesses became obscured. The full significance of them were only to be fully revealed in the Prison Notebooks in his discussion of ‘civil society’ and the ‘state’.
Gramsci and the Russian Revolution
It was with this method that Gramsci greeted the Russian Revolution of 1917. While welcoming it as a ‘proletarian act . . . [which] must naturally result in a socialist regime’(7), he regarded it as a confirmation of his own view of Marxism. He considered it a ‘Revolution against Das Kapital’ and saw in the Bolsheviks’ work ‘the continuation of Italian and German idealist thought, and which in Marx was contaminated by positivistic and naturalistic incrustations.’(8)
Yet despite this attack on ‘Marxism’ in methodological terms his real target was the Menshevik strategy which believed that there was a:
‘. . . fatal necessity for a bourgeoisie to be formed in Russia, for a capitalist era to open, before the proletariat might even think of rising up, of their own class demands, of their revolution.’(9)
In Lenin he saw the kind of leader that could force the pace of history by an act of organised will rather than someone who could give a conscious expression of the social contradictions in Russian society.
As the revolutionary crisis deepened in Italy in the years after the Russian Revolution Gramsci had occasion to reflect further on the lessons that could be learned from Lenin. In August 1917 workers in Turin led an insurrection against the local state which was supported by a general strike throughout the whole of the Piedmont region. Eventually defeated at the cost of 500 lives and another 2,000 casulties the Turin workers refused to be subdued. The working class movement rose again in an unprecedented manner during the years 1919-20. In these years the PSI grew from 81,000 in 1919 to 216,000 in 1920. The trade union federation under the direction of the PSI—the GCL—mushroomed from 320,000 to 2.3 million between 1914 and 1920.
In April 1919 Gramsci with others set up the paper L’Ordine Nuovo. Very quickly Gramsci steered it away from a simple diet of abstract propagandism with a heavy emphasis on cultural items towards a paper that sought to transform the growing movement of factory committees into something akin to the soviets in Russia. In June he wrote of the workers’ state:
‘This state does not pop up by magic: the Bolsheviks worked for eight months to spread and make their slogans concrete: all power to the Soviets, and the Soviets were already known to to the Russian workers in 1905. Italian communists must treasure the Russian experience and save on time and labour.’(10)
In October 1919 the PSI affiliated to the Comintern and the following month fought a general election on a programme which called for the dictatorship of the proletariat. They won the largest bloc of seats in the new parliament—156 seats out of 508. In early 1920 the PSI went on to win control in over half the municipal councils. Without question the Italian workers were seeking the path of revolution.
By the spring of 1920 the struggle in the factories had risen to a higher stage with the formation of the Internal Commissions which enabled the workers to control whole aspects of the factory. Throughout the summer of 1920 in excess of a half a million workers were involved in the commissions and councils. Gramsci grasped exactly what was at stake:
‘Under the capitalists the factory was a minature state, ruled over by a despotic board. Today after the workers occupations, this despotic power in the factories has been smashed; the right to choose passed into the hands of the working class. Every factory that has industrial executives has become an illegal state, a proletarian republic living from day to day, awaiting the outcome of events.’(11)
But this was the crux of the matter: how to direct the ‘outcome of events’? How to turn dual power in the factories into a challenge for national state power? Here Gramsci’s weaknesses over the party question were cruelly exposed.
Certainly the maximalist leadership around Serrati were guilty of refusing to take responsiblity for organising the working class through the party to prepare for the seizure of state power. But Gramsci had always failed to strive for a revolutionary communist party. Even after the affiliation to the Comintern Gramsci was reluctant to fight the Turati reformist wing up to the point of expulsions. He did not even share Bordiga’s grasp of the need to organise to fight for one’s factional views on a national scale within the PSI.
It is a remarkable fact then that Harman in his pamphlet should skate over the failings of Gramsci and the party with the remark that when it came to valuing the role of Marxist intervention in the class struggle:
‘His own activity in 1919-20 and 1924-26 was a shining (although not, of course, perfect) example of such intervention.’(12)
Lenin and Trotsky were much harder on the failings of all sections in the PSI. Trotsky said of the PSI:
‘The Party carried on agitation in favour of the soviet power, in favour of the hammer and sickle, in favour of Soviet Russia, etc. The Italian working class en masse took this seriously and entered the road of open revolutionary struggle. But precisely at the moment when the party should have drawn all the practical and political conclusions from its own agitation it became scared of its responsibilty and shied away, leaving the rear of the proletariat unprotected.’(13)
Lenin was equally harsh:
‘Did a single communist show his mettle when the workers seized the factories in Italy? No. At the time there was as yet no communism in Italy.’(14)
In fact Gramsci retrospectively was a lot harder on himself than Harman is prepared to be. In 1924 he wrote:
In 1919/20 we made extremely serious mistakes which ultimately we are paying for today. For fear of being called upstarts and careerists we did not form a faction and organise this throughout Italy. We were not ready to give the Turin councils an autonomous directive centre, which could have exercised an immense influence throughout the country for fear of a split in the unions and of being prematurely expelled from the Socialist Party.’ (15)
It was this quality of self-criticism—no matter how closely connected personally to the events and how costly the mistakes proved—a quality possessed by all great revolutionists, that enabled Gramsci to turn to the Comintern.
The Formation of the PCI
The failure of the PSI in the revolutionary situation in Italy in 1920 did at least force the left in the party to finally break with the reformist leadership. The Communist Party of Italy (PCI) was finally formed in January 1921 at Livorno. It was established in a period of ebb in the international class struggle; in Italy’s case a period of strengthening reaction and the growth of fascism.
At its founding conference the PCI had between 40,000 and 60,000 members. By the time of Mussolini’s march on Rome (a fascist coup) in October 1922 the party had shrunk to 25,000. Under the impact of the first round of repression that followed membership fell to around 5,000 by early 1923.
In these difficult years the PCI’s leadership found itself in conflict with the Comintern’s leadership as it sought to develop its perspectives for the early 1920’s. By the time of the PCI’s formation there had already been two Comintern congresses (1919, 1920). The perspectives and tactics outlined at these had been designed to take full advantage of the crisis of the bourgeoise in Europe and the weakness of social democracy. It was a time of resolute splits with reformism and the formation of communist parties, of preparing for the seizure of power.
By the time of the PCI’s founding congress and the Comintern’s Third Congress in June/July 1921 the situation was changing. Opportunities had been lost, the bourgeoisie had endured the worst and survived. It gathered confidence and returned to the offensive. Social democracy, despite its treacherous aid to the ruling class, had been strengthened. A re-evaluation of perspectives and tactics was essential.
This reassessment was clearest around the question of the united front tactic. This tactic, applied by the Bolsheviks in the years leading up to the revolution, was codified and generalised in the Third and Fourth Congresses of the Comintern in 1921 and 1922. With reformism rather than communism in the ascendancy it was essential to break the working class from reformist and centrist organisations.
The resolution on tactics at the Fourth Congress stated:
‘The systematically organised international capitalist offensive against all the gains of the working class has swept across the world like a whirl wind . . . is forcing the working class to defend itself.
There is consequently an obvious need for the united front tactic. The slogan of the Third Congress, “To the masses”, is now more relevant than ever . . . Using the united front tactic means that the communist vanguard is at the forefront of the day to day struggle of the broad masses for their most vital interests. For the sake of this struggle communists are even prepared to negotiate with the scab leaders of the social democrats.’(16)
Of course, merciless criticism of the shortcomings and treachery of the leaders of the reformist parties and unions was obligatory if this joint action was to lead to the strengthening of the Communist Party.
The PSI rejected this outlook. Moreover in 1921 there was hardly an ounce of difference in the political outlook of Gramsci and the ultra-left leadership grouped around Amadeo Bordiga. Both resisted attempts to implement fully the Comintern’s line of the Third and Fourth Congresses and instead gravitated towards the ultra-left positions of Bukharin who, in Trotsky’s words:
‘. . . fought against the policy of the united front and the transitional demands, proceeding from his mechanical understanding of the permanence of the revolutionary process.’(17)
In December 1921 the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) issued a document outlining its united front policy towards the socialist parties and the trade unions. In January 1922 the Comintern published an appeal to the international working class based upon it. A month later an enlarged meeting of the ECCI took place with representatives of the PCI present to discuss the united front question at which the PCI delegates were in a minority.
At the same time as these events the PCI leaders, including Gramsci, drew up theses for the forthcoming Rome Congress of the PCI. They were published in January 1922 and revealed just how far the PCI was from Comintern thinking.
At one level the ‘Rome Theses’ accepted that there was no contradiction between:
‘. . . participation in the struggles for contingent and limited objectives, and the preparation of the final and general revolutionary struggle.’ (18)
Indeed, to this end the PCI agreed to participate:
‘. . . in the organisational life of all forms of the proletariat’s economic organisation open to workers of all political faiths . . . which involves entering into the thick of struggle and action and helping the workers to derive the most useful experience from them.’(19)
But the PCI refused to contemplate agreements for common action between different political parties despite the fact that the PSI continued to hold the allegiance of a majority of the vanguard workers in Italy. Whereas the PCI would consider supporting:
‘the demands put forward by the left parties . . . of such a kind that is appropriate to call upon the proletariat to move directly to implement them . . . the Communist Party will propose them as objectives for a coalition of trade union organisms, avoiding the setting-up of committees to direct the struggle and agitation in which the Communist Party would be represented and engaged alongside other political parties.’(20)
It believed that only in this way would the PCI remain:
‘. . . free from any share in responsibility for the activity of the parties which express verbal support for the proletariat’s cause through opportunism and with counter-revolutionary intentions.’(21)
This distinction between trade union and political blocs was an artificial one when approached from a correct understanding of the united front. Such an approach agrees to struggle for limited political or economic demands if they mobilise broad layers in a fight for them and their achievement would be a limited gain for the working class, strengthening its political independence and organisation thus taking the proletariat further along the path of revolution. The communists do not take responsibility for the failure of the socialists in either the economic or the political sphere.
The danger of the PCI approach is that it implies opportunism in relation to the trade union united front, only to be compensated for by a rigid sectarianism in the political field for fear of the consequences of such opportunism on the communist party. For example the Rome Theses stated that:
‘Communists taking part in struggles in proletarian economic organisms led by socialists, syndicalists or anarchists will not refuse to follow their actions unless the masses as a whole, in a spontaneous movement, should rebel against it.’(22)
It is this attitude to spontaneity, embedded in the very foundations of Gramsci’s politics, that motivated the PCI’s ultra-leftism. Years later Gramsci admitted that such positions were ‘essentially inspired by Crocean philosophy’(23). Spontaneous economic or trade union struggles are good in and of themselves and can be followed uncritically. Political struggles, unless under the leadership of the PCI are not. But ‘bitter polemics’ and prophecies of treachery will eventually lead the masses to break with the PSI. Such was the PCI method.
The twin dangers of opportunism and sectarianism come through clearly in a passage from the theses which manages to get the method of the united front completely the wrong way round:
‘It [the PCI] cannot propose a tactic with an occasional and transitory criterion, reckoning that it will be able subsequently, at the moment when such a tactic ceases to be applicable, to execute a sudden switch and change of front, transforming its allies of yesterday into enemies. If one does not wish to compromise one’s links with the masses and their reinforcement at the very moment when it is most essential that these should come to the fore, it will be necessary to pursue in public and official declarations and attitudes a continuity of method and intention that is strictly consistent with the uninterrupted propaganda and preparation for the final struggle.’ (24)
For Lenin and Trotsky, the making of principled agreements and the breaking of them when one’s ‘allies’—by their irresoluteness or treachery faced with carrying through this agreement—transform themselves into ‘enemies’ represents precisely a ‘continuity of method’ that prepares the way to the ‘final struggle’.
Gramsci stood by this PCI position through 1922 and the Fourth World Congress and continued his bloc with the Bordigists in the June 1923 Enlarged Executive meeting of the Comintern leadership. This meeting, at which Trotsky and Zinoviev headed a unified Executive delegation, witnessed the PCI majority (including Gramsci) and the minority around Tasca argue out their differences. Trotsky backed Tasca’s minority report critical of the record of the PCI leadership.
This report outlined how the PCI had obstructed the Fourth Congress’ decision to seek fusion between the PCI and the PSI by imposing ultimatistic conditions. While minimising publicity of the call for fusion the PCI did publish an editorial which characterised the PSI as a ‘corpse’, which of course played into the hands of the anti-fusionists in the PSI who were able to play ‘on the “patriotism” of workers who feel a certain attachment to their party’(25). The PCI showed just how little they had adopted the united front tactic of Lenin and Trotsky when they further wrote in Il Lavoratore in May 1923:
‘We conceive the tactic of blocs and of the united front as a means to pursue the struggle against those who betray the proletariat on a new level . . . That is why we have proposed it.’(26)
As Tasca and the Comintern leadership concluded of Gramsci and the PSI majority:
‘The conception which these comrades have of the party and its relations with the masses is perfectly designed to maintain the “sect” mentality which is one of the most serious defects of our organisation’(27)
Gramsci’s Objections
Beyond his flawed attitude to spontaneity there were other reasons behind Gramsci’s opposition to the Comintern’s policy. At a conjunctural, tactical level he resisted it because he felt that the rightist minority in the PCI around Tasca who supported the Comintern theses would be strengthened and that they represented a liquidationist tendency in the PCI who had not fully broken with the politics of the PSI and who resisted the necessary re-orientation to illegal work in conditions of fascist repression. In June 1923 he said that:
‘The attitude of the Comintern and the activity of its representatives is bringing disunity and corruption into the communist ranks. We are determined to struggle against the elements who would liquidate our Party.’(28)
In short, Gramsci is indicating that he felt that it was necessary to bloc with the abstentionists around Bordiga, despite differences with them in order to complete the belated break with reformism and centrism in the period 1921/22. Some confirmation of this is found in a letter he wrote to the PCI leaders inside Italy in February 1924. He argued that he accepted the PCI’s ‘Rome Theses’ on tactics:
‘. . . only for contingent motives of party organisation and declared myself in favour of a united front right through to its normal conclusion in a workers’ government’(29)
In fact no record of such an opposition at that time exists and this letter was written after Gramsci had changed his position on the Comintern’s Fourth Congress resolutions and had decided to break with Bordiga. If true, however, it would have been an unprincipled position to have taken and one which only served to further fatally delay the crystallisation of a truly Bolshevik PCI.
But there is a far deeper reason for Gramsci’s unbending attitude to the politics of Lenin and Trotsky in these years. It was based on a conception of differing strategies for the ‘east’ and ‘west’ in Europe. Unless we understand this conception of Gramsci’s we cannot grasp how and why he was to change his attitude to the Fourth Congress resolutions without at the same time correcting his false political methodology.
The notion of ‘east’ and ‘west’ was less a question of geography and more a matter of political economy. For Gramsci the ‘east’ consisted of the ‘backward’ capitalist world whereas the ‘west’ was the advanced world of Western Europe. This dividing line was essential to Gramsci’s opposition to the Comintern. He wrote:
‘In Germany the movement tending towards the establishment of a social-democratic government is based on the working class masses; but the tactic of the united front has no value except for industrial countries, where the backward workers can hope to be able to carry on a defensive activity by conquering a parliamentary majority. Here [in Italy] the situation is different . . . If we launched the slogan of a workers’ government and tried to implement it, we would return to the socialist ambivalence, when the party was condemned to inactivity because it could not decide to be either solely a party of workers or solely a party of peasants . . . The trade union united front, by contrast, has an aim which is of primary importance for political struggle in Italy . . .
‘When one speaks of a political united front, and hence of a workers’ government, one must understand a “united front” between parties whose social base is furnished only by industrial and agricultural workers and not by peasants . . .
‘In Italy there do not exist, as in Germany, exclusively workers’ parties between which a political united front too can be conceived. In Italy the only party with such a character is the Communist Party.’(30)
After he had broken from Bordiga, Gramsci was to accurately describe the former’s rejection of such tactics as based on the reasoning that:
‘Since the working class is in a minority in the Italian working population, there is a constant danger that its party will be corrupted by infiltrations from other classes, and in particular from the petit bourgeoisie.’(31)
In the first place this view was profoundly at odds with the conception of an international programme, perspectives and tactics. The united front is a tactic designed to maximise working class unity in a struggle against the bosses and their state. But the working class finds itself confronted with these tasks across the world wherever it exists. The international character of this fight ensures that the tactic cannot be confined to either the ‘east’ or ‘west’.
In fact, in those countries where the peasantry is a large class and where imperialism has multiplied the problems of land hunger—such as in Italy—the ‘political’ united front has a greater application. This is so since the peasantry, as a petit bourgeois strata, gives rise to parties outside of the Communist or Socialist Parties with which it is possible to bloc in the fight against the unified camp of industrial capital and the large landholders. Such was the case in Italy.
Such a possiblity underwrote the Bolsheviks bloc with the left Social Revolutionaries after October 1917. The fact that in Italy the PSI and PCI were less well embedded in the peasantry of Southern Italy than they should have been only meant that the tactic of the united front was more, not less, urgent.
A Shift of Position?
During the course of 1923/24 the Comintern leadership began to have some success in driving a wedge between Gramsci and Bordiga. Although in a bloc within the PCI, their politics were never identical. Their differences over the factory councils in 1920 was symptomatic of the divergence. The politics of passivity and abstention were the hall mark of Bordiga. Whatever his ultra-leftism this was totally alien to Gramsci who saw the necessity to go beyond passive propagandism, merely stating fundamental truths and waiting for the inevitable process of disillusionment among the workers to benefit the PCI. After the Fourth World Congress in 1922 Bordiga became more and more intransigent and inward looking. Bordiga’s faction refused to serve on the leading committees of the PCI because of their divergences with the Comintern. Gramsci felt this was bound to deliver the PCI into the hands of the minority around Tasca who, Gramsci felt, was an opportunist towards the trade union leaders.
Events inside Italy also convinced Gramsci that passivity on the PCI’s part preventing it from intervening in the crisis of the fascist regime. In the spring of 1923 important divisions opened up within the Popular Party which had hitherto firmly backed Mussolini’s rule. Significant discontent with this support began to be voiced both in the Popular Party (which had a large peasant following) and increasingly within the urban republican petit bourgeoisie during the course of 1923 and 1924. The PCI needed tactics designed to relate to this discontent in a way that would prevent the republican bourgeoisie and social democracy being the beneficiaries.
Hence Gramsci came to the view, by the close of 1923, that it was impossible to make any concessions to Bordiga. A complete break with him and the creation of a new leadership of the ‘centre’ was essential if the party was to turn to mass work and lead the anti-fascist resistance.
Taken together these considerations pushed Gramsci back towards the Comintern. In September 1923 he abandoned his resistance to the ‘political’ united front in Italy and urged the PCI to adopt the call for a workers’ and peasants’ government in Italy. To all intents and purposes Gramsci had reconciled himself to the positions of Lenin and Trotsky. In January 1924 he wrote:
‘I absolutely do not believe that the tactics which have been developed by the Enlarged Executive meeting and the Fourth Congress are mistaken.’ (32)
He stressed in this letter to Scoccimarro that in launching a fight to redirect the PCI he would:
‘. . . take the doctrine and tactics of the Comintern as the basis for an action programme for activity in the future.’(33)
Gramsci articulated his shift in position in a manner that was identical to the arguments of Lenin and Trotsky. In a letter to Togliatti written from Vienna in February 1924 he argued that he could no longer agree with Bordiga on the united front:
‘Firstly, because the political conception of the Russian communists was formed on an international and not on a national terrain. Secondly, because in Central and Western Europe the development of capitalism has not only determined the formation of broad proletarian strata, but also—and as a consequence—has created the higher strata, the labour aristocracy, with its appendages in the trade union bureaucracy and the social democratic groups. The determination, which in Russia was direct and drove the masses onto the streets for a revolutionary uprising, in Central and Western Europe is complicated by all these political superstructures, created by the greater development of capitalism. This makes the action of the masses slower and more prudent, and therefore requires of the revolutionary party a strategy and tactics more complex and long term than those that were necessary for the Bolsheviks in the period between March and November 1917.’(34)
This was a genuine step forward for Gramsci and an important break with the methodology and theoretical justification for his previous position.
Previously, Gramsci had considered that Italy was part of the ‘east’ in which the united front was obsolete. Here he does not simply transfer Italy to the ‘west’ but rather, and much more importantly, he states that the tactic has international relevance. The possibility of avoiding ultra-leftism in the ‘east’ and opportunism in the ‘west’ is at least predicated on such a shift of analysis.
However, the practical consequences of this shift for the PCI in 1924 were less clear to see. In January 1924 the PCI proposed an electoral bloc to the other working class parties for the April 1924 elections. But the terms of this pact were designed to meet with a refusal. Togliatti—leading the party in Italy in Gramsci’s absence—wrote to the Comintern executive that the basis for the propaganda of this pact was that:
‘Fascism had opened up a period of permanent revolution for the proletariat, and the proletarian party which forgets this point and helps to sustain the illusion among the workers that it is possible to change the present situation while remaining on the terrain of liberal and constitutional opposition will, in the last analysis, give support to the enemies of the Italian working class and peasantry.’(35)
Being reformists and constitutionalists the PSI was being asked to abandon its raison d’être in order to be in the bloc, something they could hardly be expected to do.
The tragedy of Gramsci is that just as he was breaking with the ultimatism of Bordiga (rejection of the united front on principle) events in the Comintern leadership were to ensure that his complete progress to the positions of Lenin and Trotsky would be derailed.
The Rise of Stalinism
Events within the Comintern at the end of 1923 and its repercussions in the Russian party were to cut short Gramsci’s positive evolution. It was the defeat of the German revolution in October 1923 which gave an impetus to Stalinism. Trotsky argued that with this defeat capitalism had secured for itself a period of relative economic and political stabilisation. This unfavourable shift in the international balance of class forces demanded of the Comintern and its sections a recognition that considerable preparatory work was needed in order to win the masses again. He thus placed emphasis firmly on the united front tactic.
On the other hand Zinoviev and Stalin refused to admit that a serious defeat had occured. On the contrary, they insisted that the Comintern was confronted, especially in Germany, with an imminent revolutionary situation.
In June 1924 the Fifth Congress of the Comintern backed this ultra-left view. In the same month Stalin took up the pen to contest Trotsky’s view that bourgois stabilisation was also indicated by a strengthening of social democracy in Europe. Stalin rejected this by claiming that social-democracy was a form of fascism:
‘It would therefore be a mistake to think that “pacifism” signifies the liquidation of fascism. In the present situation, “pacifism” is the strengthening of fascism with its moderate, social democratic wing being pushed into the foreground’(36)
And since fascism and social democracy ‘do not negate, but supplement each other, they are not antipodes, they are twins’(37), a united front with the leaders of such parties was therefore out of the question. They excluded the use of the united front tactic except ‘from below’, that is, without the leaders of the reformist and centrist trade unions and political parties. The Fifth Congress declared:
‘The tactics of the united front from below are the most important, that is, a united front under communist leadership concerning communist, social democratic, and non-party workers in factory, factory council, trade union.’(38)
In short it was little more than an ultimatum issued to the rank and file workers in these organisations to abandon their parties unconditionally. Since these workers believed in their leaders it could be seen by them as little more than a trick and in fact help strengthen social democracy not weaken it.
So just as Gramsci had attained undisputed leadership of the PCI and was moving in the direction of the Comintern’s Fourth Congress positions, the Comintern in effect moved to encompass Gramsci’s own ultra-leftism. The PCI during the autumn of 1924, with Gramsci back in Italy, launched a campaign for workers’ and peasants’ committees and the Peasants Defence Association which the PCI ran and was counterposed to the socialist controlled peasants’ trade union federation.
In addition, during 1924 and 1925 the PCI set up Agitational Committees of Proletarian Unity, under their leadership but in open confict with the unions of the General Workers’ Confederation (CGL). Thus, while Gramsci accepted the applicability of the united front for Italy it was implemented in the Fifth Congress form. While he moved away from Bordiga’s rejection of the united front in principle he moved to a position of united front from below.
In fact the Fifth Congress resolutions on tactics and perspectives are pivotal to an understanding of Gramsci’s evolution from 1924 to the conceptions in the Prison Notebooks. While ultra-leftism had held sway since the German defeat the perspectives before the Congress were more moderated, not least because of the battle waged by Trotsky against them. In Section 13 of the ‘Theses on Tactics’, entitled ‘Two Perspectives’ Zinoviev outlined alternative developments:
‘The epoch of international revolution has commenced. The rate of development as a whole or partially, the rate of development of revolutionary events in any particular continent or in any particular country, cannot be foretold with precision. The whole situation is such that two perspectives are open: (a) a possible slow and prolonged development of the proletarian revolution, and (b) on the other hand that the ground under capitalism has been mined to such an extent and that the contradictions of capitalism as a whole have developed so rapidly, that the solution in one country or another may come in the not so distant future.’(39)
This was a very vague and flexible perspective. On the one side it justified the ultra-leftism then in force and yet it could also serve to justify a right-opportunist turn if necessary. In fact, of course, such a turn did occur in mid-1925. When it came Zinoviev, at the Sixth Plenum of the ECCI in early 1926, used the Fifth Congress resolution to justify it.
The right-centrist turn of 1925 was based on a belated recognition that stability had occurred in Europe. Given this and given the Stalinist conception that socialism could be built in the Soviet Union if outside intervention could be prevented the Comintern leadership began the search for alliances in the European countries that could help prevent such intervention. In Britain the Anglo-Russian Committee was set up in 1925 between the Russian and British trade unions with this in mind.
How did this right turn effect Gramsci’s understanding of the united front? At one level Gramsci was capable of formulating the problem of strategy and tactics in a formally correct manner. So in the ‘Lyon Theses’ for the PCI’s Third Congress in January 1926 Gramsci posed the problem in the following way:
‘The tactic of the united front as political activity (manoeuvre) designed to unmask so-called proletarian and revolutionary parties and groups which have a mass base, is closely linked with the problem of how the Communist Party is to lead the masses and how it is to win a majority. In the form in which it has been defined by the World Congresses, it is applicable in all cases in which, because of the mass support of the groups against which we are fighting, frontal struggle against them is not sufficient to give us rapid and far reaching results . . .
‘In Italy, the united front tactic must continue to be utilised by the party, in so far as it is still far from having won a decisive influence over the majority of the working class and the working population.’(40)
At one level this position is correct and a repetition of the statement of early 1924. But taken together with other writings of Gramsci during 1926 it is possible to detect the influence of the right centrist turn in the Comintern which we find amplified in the Prison Notebooks. In a report to the Party’s executive in August 1926 on the Italian situation Gramsci drew a distinction once again between ‘advanced capitalist countries’ (England and Germany) and ‘peripheral states’ such as Italy. In the first group ‘the ruling class possess political and organisational reserves’ which means that ‘even the most serious economic crises do not have immediate repercussions in the political sphere’ because the ‘state apparatus is far more resistant than is often possible to believe’.(41)
In countries such as Italy ‘the state forces are less efficient’. However, Gramsci does not go on to say, as he did with Bordiga in the early 1920’s, that the united front is only applicable in the first case but not the second. On the contrary he maintains that the tactic is applicable in both cases.
The purpose of drawing the distinction is different. In the ‘peripheral states’ there are many intermediate classes between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. These classes in the Europe of the mid-1920s are being radicalised to such an extent that the tasks of the party and the class are those ‘between the political and technical preparation of the revolution’. In Italy at this time it meant a united front under communist leadership based on a perspective of the imminent demise of Mussolini. In the advanced countries, however, ‘the problem is still one of political preparation’.
Drawing these distinctions is not an idle matter for Gramsci for in each case he is concerned to address a ‘fundamental problem’, namely:
‘. . . the problem of transition from the united front tactic, understood in a general sense, to a specific tactic which confronts the concrete problems of national life and operates on the basis of the popular forces as they are historically determined.’(42)
In the case of England Gramsci argued that the trade unions were the concrete form in which the ‘popular forces’ would operate. And it is at this point that we see the right centrist interpretation that Gramsci gave to the united front where long political preparation is necessary. Despite the experience of the betrayal of the General Strike of 1926, including the lefts in the TUC, Gramsci believed that:
‘The Anglo-Russian Committee should be maintained, because it is the best terrain to revolutionise not only the English trade union world, but also the Amsterdam unions. In only one event should there be a break between the communists and the English left: if England was on the eve of the proletarian revolution, and our party was strong enough to lead the insurrection on its own.’(43)
This contrasted sharply with the revolutionary assessment of the role of the Anglo-Russian Committee as expressed by Trotsky after the General Strike:
‘. . . the Politburo majority has pursued a profoundly incorrect policy on the question of the Anglo-Russian Committee. The point at which the working masses of Britain exerted the greatest opposing force to the General Council was when the general strike was being broken. What was necessary was to keep step with the most active forces of the British proletariat and to break at that moment with the General Council as the betrayer of the general strike . . . without this, the struggle for the masses always threatens to turn into an opportunist kowtowing to spontaneity . . . The line of the Politburo majority on the question of the Anglo-Russian Committee was clearly a transgression in terms of the revolutionary essence of the united front policy.’(44)
On Gramsci’s part all this is a reversion away from the international application of the united front that he espoused in early 1924 and back towards a differential application based on the ultimately false division between ‘east’ and ‘west’. At the same time, given he was dealing with England, he reverts to a rightist, an opportunist variant of this tactic. In a sense all Gramsci was doing was utilising the Fifth Congress positions for his own twin perspectives for the ‘east’ and ‘west’. His position on the Anglo-Russian Committee is a concrete expression of Zinoviev’s perspective of the ‘slow and prolonged development of the proletarian revolution’.
Having said this there was still a considerable distance between Gramsci’s strategic and tactical prescriptions and those in force in the Comintern under Stalin. It was precisely in 1926 that Stalin was insisting that in China the Communist Party dissolve itself into the Kuomintang and, under the slogan of ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’, abandon the Leninist position of the leading and directing role of the proletariat.
Gramsci at the Lyons Congress in January 1926 recognised that:
‘The proletariat must struggle to tear the peasants from the bourgeoisie’s influence, and place them under its own political guidance.’(45)
Indeed, Gramsci insisted to the PCI that given that the weak Italian bourgeoisie rested for its power on the peasantry this question ‘is the central point of the political problems which the party must resolve in the immediate future’.(46)
He recognised that the slogan of the ‘workers’ and peasants’ government’ was a way of drawing in the peasantry behind the working class, ‘the means to transport them onto the terrain of the more advanced proletarian vanguard (struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat).’(47)
Far from accepting, like Stalin, that the governmental alliance of workers and peasants was distinct stage separate to, and prior to, the struggle for socialism, Gramsci argued that:
‘. . . the party cannot conceive of a realisation of this slogan except as the beginning of a direct revolutionary struggle: i.e.of a civil war waged by the proletariat, in alliance with the peasantry, with the aim of winnning power. The party could be led into serious deviations from its task as leader of the revolution if it were to interpret the workers’ and peasants’ government as corresponding to a real phase of development of the struggle for power: in other words, if it considered that this slogan indicated the possibility for the problem of the state to be resolved in the interests of the working class in any other form than the dictatorship of the proletariat’.(48)
If anything Gramsci’s formulations indicate that right up until his imprisonment he veered in the direction of ultra-leftism.
Captive Thoughts
Gramci’s reflections on problems of strategy and tactics in the Prison Notebooks continue his rupture with ultra-leftism. But in its place he developed further the conception that owes its origin to the right-centrist turn of 1925-27. The final triumph of fascism in 1926 led Gramsci to reassess his views about the stability and strength of bourgois rule in the west including Italy. In the Prison Notebooks he states:
‘It seems to me that Ilitch [Lenin] understood a change was necessary, from the war of manoeuvre applied victoriously in the east in 1917, to a war of position, which was the only form possible in the west—when as Krasnov observes, armies could rapidly accumulate endless quantities of munitions, and where the social structures were of themselves still capable of becoming heavily armed fortifications. This is what the formula of the “united front” seems to me to mean, and it corresponds to the conception of a single front for the Entente under the sole command of Foch.’(49)
Here Gramsci has abandoned the idea he presented in 1926 of the united front tactic as a war of manoeuvre and turned it into a war of position in the west; that is, he has turned the united front into a prolonged strategy through which the party and the class succeed in capturing positions in society, gradually surrounding and laying seige to the state. This is the antithesis of the revolutionary use of the united front as elaborated and practised in the Comintern under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky.
At one and the same time Gramsci outlines in the Prison Notebooks a simplistically one-sided view of the Russian Revolution, with its absurd implication that the united front was absent from Bolshevik’s tactical armoury and that Lenin led a continuous ‘revolutionary offensive’ against an unfortified Tsarist state; yet he holds to an opportunist view of strategy in the west which sees a seamless united front in operation between the communists and the the reformists (and even liberal/democratic bourgeois forces) right up to the seizure of power. Gramsci is unaware that the ends and the means contradict themselves in this view. The seizure of power depends upon the growth in influence of the communist party and this in turn can only be done at the expense of, and in struggle with, the reformists and centrists. This can only occur if common fronts for specific limited actions are combined with ruthless criticism of the limitations of the partners in the alliance of struggle, exposing their half-heartedness and inconsistencies together with the limitations of their own prescriptions.
Did all this amount to reformism as the Euro-Stalinists insist? Not one bit! Gramsci may have turned a tactic into a strategy but this is not the same as turning revolution into reform. In part Gramsci’s right centrist conception in the Prison Notebooks was an undialectical response to the opposition he maintained to the ultra-left turn of Stalin in 1928/29, about the time he began to write his notebooks. If anything it is a Bukharinite rightist critique of the Third Period that we find in Gramsci’s Notebooks. This emphasises the distance between him and Trotsky, but it also serves to underline the gap that separated Gramsci from Stalin.
This gap is further evidenced by the reports of discussions with a fellow prisoner, Athos Lisa, from 1930. Commissioned and then supressed by Togliatti they underline that Gramsci objected to the Third Period, could not agree to the expulsion of oppositionists in the PCI and that he retained his belief in the need for an insurrection:
‘The violent conquest of power necessitates the creation by the party of the working class of an organisation of a military type, pervasively implanted in every branch of the bourgeois state apparatus, and capable of wounding and inflicting grave blows on it at the decisive moment of struggle.’(50)
Gramsci was no longer well enough to write by 1935, the year of the Stalinist Comintern’s definitive passage from bureaucratic centrism into counter-revolution and reformism. The signing of the Stalin-Laval Pact in that year gave a green light for the French Stalinists to embrace patriotism with the full backing of the Kremlin. There is nothing in Gramsci’s life or work which can give comfort to today’s Euro-Stalinists in their attempt to turn Gramsci into the patron saint of the Popular Front.
Quite the contrary. In a couple of striking passages by Gramsci in 1926 he explicity argues against a popular front to defeat fascism in a manner which almost anticipates the apologetic arguments of Togliatti ten years later about Spain. He disputes the arguments of the bourgeoisie who:
‘. . . have an interest in maintaining that fascism is a pre-democratic regime: that fascism is related to an incipient and still backward phase of capitalism.’(51)
This leads to the view that:
‘The best tactic is one whose aim is, if not an actual bourgeois-proletarian bloc for the constitutional elimination of fascism, at least a passivity of the revolutionary vanguard, a non-intervention of the Communist Party in the immediate political struggle, thus allowing the bourgeoisie to use the proletariat as electoral troops against fascism.’(52)
Whereas:
‘For us communists, the fascist regime is the expression of the most advanced stage of capitalist society. It precisely serves to demonstrate how all the conquests and all the institutions which the toilng classes succeed in realising . . . are destined for annihilation, if at a given moment the working class does not seize state power with revolutionary means.’(53)
‘Permanent Revolution’ or ‘Socialism in One Country’?
There is still another way to judge Gramsci’s evolution. What was his attitude to the theoretical underpinnings of centrism in the Comintern—‘socialism in one country’—and to its revolutionary critique—‘permanent revolution’?
His passages in the Prison Notebooks on these questions give no support to the arguments of those, like Perry Anderson, who see an affinity between the positions of Gramsci and Trotsky in their respective critiques of the ultra-leftism of Stalin after 1928.
The truth is that Gramsci, from the middle of 1924, is a savage critic of Trotsky’s theory. The last favourable reference to Trotsky on this score occurs in February 1924. He sympathetically surveys the Opposition’s attacks on bureaucracy in the USSR and says further:
‘It is well known that in 1905, Trotsky already thought a socialist and working class revolution could take place in Russia while the Bolsheviks only aimed to establish a political dictatorship of the proletariat allied to the peasantry that would serve as a framework for the development of capitalism, which was not to be touched in its economic structure. It is well known that in November 1917 Lenin . . . and the majority of the party had gone over to Trotsky’s view and intended to take over not merely political power but also economic power.’(54)
Yet within six months, by the time of the Fifth World Congress, Gramsci had abandoned this view and gone over to the faction of the Stalin/Zinoviev/Kamenev troika. The immediate impetus to this is Gramsci’s attitude to factional activity:
‘Trotsky’s conceptions . . . represent a danger inasmuch as the lack of party unity, in a country in which there is only one party, splits the state. This produces a counter-revolutionary movement; it does not, however, mean that Trotsky is a counter-revolutionary, for in that case we would ask for his expulsion.
Finally, lessons should be drawn fromthe Trotsky question for our party. Before the last disciplinary measures, Trotsky was in the same position as Bordiga is at present in our party.’(55)
This tragic mistake, namely, a right-opportunist identification of Marxism as ultra-leftism, is repeated and amplified many times in the Prison Notebooks. In the fervour of his own 1924 break with Bordiga he was only to willing to side with the majority in the CPSU in the campaign, launched at the Fifth Congress, of ‘Bolshevisation’. This was in fact the first step in the strangling of inner-party life in the communist parties and led Gramsci into opposing all factional activity.
While as late as October 1926 Gramsci was still prepared to argue for disciplinary leniency with regard to the Joint Opposition by the early 1930’s he argued that:
‘The tendency represented by Lev Davidovitch [Trotsky] was closely connected to this series of problems . . . an over resolute (and therefore not rationalised) will to give supremacy in national life to industry and industrial methods, to accelerate through coercion, from outside the growth of discipline and order in production, and to adapt customs to the necessities of work. Given the general way in which all the problems connected with this tendency were conceived it was destined necessarily to end up in Bonapartism. Hence the inexorable necessity of crushing it.’ (56)
Given this attitude and assessment it was not surprising that Gramsci would review his 1924 attitude towards Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution:
‘Bronstein [Trotsky] in his memoirs recals being told that his theory had been proved true . . . fifteen years later . . . In reality his theory, as such was good neither fifteen years earlier nor fifteen years later. As happens to the obstinate . . . he guessed more or less correctly; that is to say, he was right in his more general prediction. It is as if one was to prophesy that a little four year old girl would become a mother, and when at twenty she did one said “I guessed that she would”— overlooking the fact that, however, that when she was four years old one had tried to rape the girl, in the belief that she would become a mother even then.’(57)
This rejection of what he understands to be Trotsky’s theory is at the heart of his overall strategic and tactical conceptions in the Prison Notebooks. Thus the:
‘. . . political concept of the so-called “permanent revolution” which emerged before 1848 as a scientifically evolved expression of Jacobin experience from 1789 to Thermidor. The formula belongs to an historical period in which the great mass political parties and the great economic trade unions did not yet exist, and society was still, so to speak, in a state of fluidity from many points of view: greater backwardness of the countryside, and almost complete monopoly of political and state power by a few cities or even by a single one (Paris in the case of France); a relatively rudimentary state apparatus, and greater autonomy of civil society from state activity; a specific system of military forces and of national armed services; greater autonomy of the national economies from the economic relations of the world market, etc. In the period after 1870, with the colonial expansion of Europe, all these elements change: the internal and international organisational, relations of the state become more complex and massive, and the Forty-Eightist formula of the “permanent revolution” is expanded and transcended in political science by the formula of “civil hegemony”. The same thing happens in the art of politics as happens in military art: war of movement increasingly becomes war of position, and it can be said that a state will win a war in so far as it prepares for it minutely and technically in peacetime.’ (58)
So Trotsky is accused of being behind the times regarding strategy for the advanced west. He accuses Trotsky of being ‘the political theorist of frontal attack in a period when it only leads to defeats’.(59)
Such a conception forms the basis of modern day Euro-Stalinism’s critque of Trotskyism. The first thing that needs to be said is that Gramsci’s exposition which equates ‘permanent revolution’ with frontal attack or war of movement has got nothing to do with Trotsky’s theory. Trotsky took as his point of departure the combined, uninterrupted, character of the bourgeios and proletarian revolutions in certain situations. So Trotsky could not, and did not, apply this aspect of his theory to the ‘west’ where the bourgeois revolution had been completed in all essentials.
If anyone was guilty of the conceptions that Gramsci accuses Trotsky of holding then it is Bukharin at the Third and Fourth Congresses:
‘who held to his standpoint of the scholastic permanence of both the economic crisis and the revolution as a whole.’(60)
Gramsci agreed with Bukharin at the time. It could also be a conception attributable to Zinoviev and Stalin at the Fifth Congress, again which Gramsci did not dissent from.
The painful truth is that Gramsci held a position between 1922 and 1924 not dissimilar to the one he criticises here. He argued that the collapse of the fascist regime was both imminent and could not give way to a transitional regime of bourgeois democracy. In January 1924 he maintained that:
‘. . . in reality fascism has posed a very crude sharp dilemma in Italy: that of the permanent revolution, and of the impossibility not only of changing the form of the state, but even of changing the government, other than by armed force.’ (61)
After his ultra-left illusions were weakened with his break with Bordiga, and shattered for good with the final triumph of Mussolini in 1926, Gramsci altered his strategic conception to the right; but while attacking Trotsky’s theory he was in reality attacking his own ultra-left past.
The fact that Gramsci identified his own previous stance with that of Trotsky can only be explained by the fact that he accepted completely the Stalinist lies about ‘Trotskyism’ pushed in the Comintern after 1923. If Trotsky indeed had been guilty, as the Stalinists, claimed of advocating a ‘leap over’ the bourgeois stage of the Russian Revolution, if Trotsky had indeed ‘underestimated the peasantry’, as his opponents insisted, thus giving the Russian Revolution a purely ‘socialist’ working class character, then Gramsci’s jibes may have had some point. But they were not true. If anything it was Gramsci who ‘underestimated the peasantry’ in his ultra-left period.
A National Road
Nor did Gramsci remain silent on the other issue at stake between Trotsky and Stalin while in prison. He wrote several passages on the methodological questions at stake in the dispute over ‘socialism in one country’ which is intimately connected with the question of permanent revolution. He reasoned as follows:
‘Do international relations precede or follow (logically) fundamental social relations? There can be no doubt that they follow. Any organic innovation in the social structure, through its technical military expression, modifies organically absolute and relative relations in the international field too. Even the geographical position of a national State does not precede but follows (logically) structural changes, although it also reacts back upon them to a certain extent (to the extent precisely to which superstructures react upon the structure, politics on economics, etc)’ (62)
Gramsci gets it all upside down. By ‘fundamental social relations’ he means capitalist relations of production. He counterposes these to ‘international relations’ and thereby implicitly argues that capitalism is nationally defined. Having done that it is then possible, argues Gramsci, to examine the relations between the national and international. By analogy the international relations are the ‘superstructures and the national the ‘base’. This is the starting point for Stalin’s ‘socialism in one country’.
Marxism reasons in an opposite fashion. It starts from the fact that capitalism is a world entity and its relations encompass the globe. National economies can be examined and are determined in this light.
For Gramsci, starting with the ‘national’ played the same role as starting from the ‘uneven’ nature of world economy instead of the ‘uneven and combined’ nature of that economy as Trotsky did. Gramsci, like Stalin felt that this was the only way to appreciate what was ‘unique’, and ‘specific’ about a particular country at a particular time:
‘In reality, the internal relations of any nation are the result of a combination which is “original” and (in a certain sense) unique: these relations must be understood and conceived in their originality and uniqueness if one wishes to dominate them and direct them. To be sure the line of development is towards internationalism, but the point of departure is “national”—and it it is from this point of departure that one must begin. Yet the perspective is international and cannot be otherwise . . . The leading class is in fact only such if it accurately interprets this combination—of which it is itself a component and precisely as such is able to give the moment a certain direction, within certain perspectives. It is on this point in my opinion, that the fundamental disagreement between Lev Davidovitch [Trotsky] and Vissarionovitch [Stalin] as interpreter of the majority movement [Bolshevism] really hinges. The accusations of nationalism are inept if they refer to the nucleus of the question. If one studies the majoritarian struggle from 1902 to 1917, one can see that its originality consisted in purging internationalism of every vague and purely ideological (in the perjorative sense) element, to give it a realistic political content. It is in the concept of hegemony that those exigencies which are national in character are knotted together.’(63)
Thus for Gramsci Lenin’s ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’ was hegemonic and national while the theory of ‘permanent revolution’ was incapable of grasping and dealing with the specific realities of Russian society.
Of course, Trotsky did precisely what Gramsci accuses him of failing to achieve. Trotsky’s analysis of Russia was based on a detailed examination of its history and specific social relations. In his work, Results and Prospects, from 1906 Trotsky compares and contrasts the Russia of 1905 to France of 1870 and Germany of 1848 on the basis of tracing the evolution of international developments. Then he was able to outline in a remarkable manner the specific features that were present in Tsarist Russia which destined Russia to experience a socialist revolution before the ‘advanced’ and ‘mature’ countries and yet be unable to sustain it without international help.
Since the national is a specific combination of the international trends it is precisely impossible to really grasp the national without first understanding the international.
The connection between Gramsci’s view of the relation between national and international relations and the strategic and tactical tasks of the working class are fully revealed. Only the national is specific and hegemonic; what separates countries is more important than what connects them. Hence, although Italy and England can in one period be very different types of nation and then later in the same camp, the fact is that different types of united front are applicable depending on which type of country we are dealing with; united front from below and a war of manoeuvre in the ‘backward’ or ‘peripheral’ states, a strategic united front and a war of position in the advanced capitalist countries. Only briefly, in early 1924, having decided to break politically with Bordiga did Gramsci pose the problem correctly. But these insights were not sustained and Gramsci surrendered to rightism.
Conclusion
The prosecutor at Gramsci’s trial demanded that any sentence ‘stop this brain working for twenty years’. They failed. But it has now stopped working for fifty years. Many are eager to claim him as their own. This hagiographical attitude to the greatest of Italian revolutionists would have appalled Gramsci. We approach Gramsci’s political life critically. By breaking with the ultra-leftism of Bordiga in 1923-24 Gramsci set himself the conscious project of steering the infant and repressed PCI between the ultra-leftism of Bordiga and the opportunism of Tasca. In doing so his goal was to return to the postions of the revolutionary Comintern of Lenin.
In trying to reach that goal Gramsci was responsible for a considerable body of perceptive work on the errors of Bordigism, on the history, class structure and strategic problems of Italian society. Every revolutionary militant today will find much in his work that is valuable and inspiring.
But Gramsci failed to build Bolshevism in Italy precisely because the bureaucratic centrist ‘Bolshevisation’ of Stalin and Zinoviev intersected his evolution. In the period up until his arrest, this ensured that a PCI under Gramsci’s direction failed to expunge a milder form of ultra-leftism in Italy and an affinity for the growing right opportunism in the ‘west’. In prison, his further reflections based on a one-sided rejection of his own ultra-leftism and nurtured by the Stalinists’ myth about Trotsky, led Gramsci further into the camp of right centrism. Gramsci did not so much expand the boundaries of Marxism but rather narrowed its concerns. His insights were often not unique, once they transgressed the bounds of Italian history and society and were often overly abstract and even ambiguous. In the historical period that opens with the degeneration of the USSR it is Trotskyism, not Gramscism, that stands on the shoulders of Leninism and makes Marxism taller by a head.
Despite that, during this, the fiftieth year since Gramsci’s cruel and painful death, we can find inspiration in his life and struggle. We can only hope to preserve him from the grasp of his ‘friends’.
Footnotes:
1 Marxism Today, April 1987
2 O Blasco [Tresso], ‘Un grand militant est mort . . . Gramsci.’, La Lutte Ouvriére No. 44, 14 May 1937
3 L Maitan, ‘The Legacy of Antonio Gramsci’, in International Marxist Review, Summer 1987
4 Socialist Worker Review, April 1987
5 Maitan, op cit, p35
6 C Harman, Gramsci versus Reformism, p28
7 Quoted in A Davidson, ‘Gramsci and Lenin, 1919-22’, Socialist Register 1974, p131.
8 A Gramsci, Selections from the Political Writings, Vol 1 (SPW1), p34 (London 1977)
9 Ibid
10 Ibid, p68
11 Ibid
12 Harman, op cit, p16
13 L D Trotsky, Speech to the General Party Membership in Moscow
14 Lenin, Collected Works Vol 32, p465 (Moscow)
15 A Gramsci, Selections from the Political Writings, Vol 2 (SPW2) p189 (London 1978)
16 Theses, Resolutions and Manifestoes of the First Four Congresses of The Communist International, pp391-6 (London 1980)
17 L Trotsky,The Third International After Lenin , p90 (New York 1970)
18 SPW2, p96
19 Ibid, p97
20 Ibid, pp107-8
21 Ibid, p108
22 Ibid, p99
23 Ibid, p392
24 Ibid, p105
25 Ibid, p148
26 Ibid, p146
27 Ibid, p153
28 Ibid, p155
29 Ibid, p196
30 Ibid, p121-24
31 Ibid, p359
32 Ibid, p174-5
33 Ibid
34 Ibid, p199-200
35 Ibid, p489
36 J Stalin, ‘Concerning the International Situation’, Collected Works Vol 6, p295
37 Ibid
38 ‘Theses on tactics’, in Resolutions and Theses of the Fifth Congress, (London 1924)
39 Ibid
40 SPW2, p373
41 Ibid, p410
42 Ibid, p410
43 Ibid, p411
44 L Trotsky, On Britain, p253-55 (New York 1972)
45 SPW2, p331
46 Ibid
47 Ibid
48 Ibid, p375
49 A Gramsci, Selection from the Prison Notebooks (SPN), p237-78 (London 1971)
50 Quoted in Perry Anderson, ‘The Antimonies of Antonio Gramsci’, New Left Review No100, p72
51 SPW2, p414
52 Ibid, p359
53 Ibid, p414
54 Ibid, p192
55 Ibid, p284
56 SPN, p301
57 Ibid, p237
58 Ibid, p242-3
59 Ibid, p238
60 Trotsky, The Third International After Lenin, op cit, p90
61 SPW2, p176
62 SPN, p176
63 Ibid, p240-241
Below you find part 1 and, after this, part 2.
Morenoism - Part one; 1941–1978
Originally published in Trotskyist International No.1, Theoretical Journal of the League for the Revolutionary Communist International (1988)
Note from the Editor: The LRCI was the predecessor organization of the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency.
“I believe that we have made many more mistakes than Trotsky or the Bolsheviks. When I say that ours has been a barbaric Trotskyism it is because I believe it to be the harsh truth and I am not being demagogic.”1
It is little more than a decade since Nahuel Moreno’s Argentinian party (then the PST) declared itself to be “the largest Trotskyist party in the world”. Despite the possible objections to this claim we must accept that the International Workers League (LIT), built around that party, is numerically the largest international “Fourthist” organisation to arise in the semi-colonial world and is the group which has the greatest majority of militants in Latin America. Nowadays the Morenoites maintain that they, along with the Mandelites, are the only two truly international organisations in the “world Trotskyist movement”. In this article we propose to analyse the history and the programmatic ideas of Morenoism from its origin through to the late 1970s.
Moreno the anti-Peronist
During the early 1940s there appeared within the ranks of Argentinian Trotskyism an important discussion on the character of the revolution in the semi-colonial countries. One section maintained that the slogan of “national liberation” was reactionary and that the main enemy was their own national bourgeoisie. This position failed to understand that Argentina was a nation dominated by imperialism and that this gave a lop-sided and dependent character to the development of the productive forces in the country. By equating an oppressed nation with an oppressor nation this position would fall into the gravest error of identifying the nationalist and anti-imperialist movements of Latin America with European fascism. The other section of Argentinian Trotskyism, led by Liborio Justo, (“Quebracho”) maintained that the slogan of “national liberation” was part of the democratic programme that the proletarian revolution had to complete. Even though this position of Justo was the closest to that of Lenin, he nevertheless held a series of stageist and sectarian conceptions.
In 1941 the Socialist Workers Party, (SWP(US)) and the Fourth International (FI) sent Sherry Mangan to Argentina and Chile to try to reorganise the Trotskyist ranks in those countries. Mangan committed an error in encouraging an organisational unification without a sufficient programmatic basis around those who counterposed the class struggle and socialist revolution to the struggle for “national liberation”. Justo refused to join the fused organisation, the PORS, and by 1942 had broken with the FI. His organisation, the LOR, disintegrated shortly afterwards.
It was in the context of these discussions that the young Hugo Bressano (Nahuel Moreno) entered Trotskyist politics. Initially he was with the official section of the FI. He then went over to Liborio Justo’s group where he took the party name of Nahuel Moreno. Later he broke with this group to launch his own organisation, the GOM, in 1944, renamed the POR in 1946.
The relationship between the struggle for “national liberation” and the struggle for socialism was raised again, and with burning immediacy, during the rise to power of Colonel Juan Peron in the mid-1940s. The onset of war in Europe produced a growing economic and political crisis as the Argentinian government struggled to cope with the disruption of the country’s trade. While the USA could, and to some extent did, replace Britain’s exports of fuel supplies and manufactured goods to Argentina, US protectionism kept her markets firmly shut to Argentinian grain and beef. This provoked growing antagonism from the Argentinian bourgeoisie and encouraged anti-Yankee nationalism. This was exacerbated by the State Department’s attempts to bludgeon Argentina, through economic sanctions, into declaring war on Germany, Italy and Japan and joining the Pan-American Defence Alliance.
By 1943 the conservative government of Castillo, which was already fragmenting, was removed by a military coup. General Ramirez’s military government had a powerful nationalist faction represented by the United Officers’ Group, which included Peron. Peron’s group had gained the upper hand in the government by the start of 1944. Both “moderate” and “nationalist” wings of the military had been united by their anti-communism and the military regime marked its coming to power by breaking a major meat packers strike. Peron, however, recognised the need to lean on the working class organisations for support—both against the bourgeois and landowning opposition at home and against the pressures of US imperialism.
Through his control of the “Secretariat for Labour and Social Welfare” Peron set about winning over the trade unions to support the military regime. Through intervening in disputes and imposing settlements favourable to the workers as well as through introducing state welfare measures—such as accident insurance—Peron had increasing success. By 1944, when both the USA and Britain had broken off diplomatic relations and the USA had frozen Argentina’s gold assets and imposed an embargo on oil and machinery, the powerful railway workers’ unions could be mobilised to demonstrate in the regime’s defence. At the same time “opposition” unions, normally ones dominated by the Communist Party (CP) or Socialist Party, both of which supported the war and the allies’ pressure on the regime, were not recognised as having “legal standing”. These were often put under the control of government appointees.
Peron outlined his intentions very clearly to the Buenos Aires stock exchange in August 1944:
“Señores Capitalistas: don’t be afraid of my unionism. Never has capitalism been firmer than now. . . What I want to do is to organise the workers through the state, so that the state shows them the way forward. In this way the revolutionary currents endangering capitalist society in the post war period can be neutralised.”2
In this Peron succeeded. In 1945 an attempt from within the military to remove him from power resulted in the powerful strike movement of 17 October 1945. It restored Peron to power and led to his victory in the presidential elections of 1946.
Between 1946 and the early 1950s Peron consolidated his support amongst the urban workers and established control over a massively expanded trade union movement. The Peronist CGT went from half a million in 1945 to almost two and a half million in 1954. During this period, a favourable one economically for Argentina, the trade unions made significant gains in wages and conditions. Peron combined bombastic anti-imperialist rhetoric and demands for “national sovereignty” with very generous compensation for imperialist assets taken over (e.g. the British-owned railways). A nascent Labour Party formed out of the 1945 strike wave, which supported Peron as candidate in 1946, was dissolved by Peron in the same year and replaced by a Peronist “Party”. It claimed to be committed to “social justice” [“justicialismo”] as a supposed third way between capitalism and communism. Despite the fact that in the last years of Peron’s rule, before he was ousted by the military in 1955, the Peronist unions had become little more than the agents of the government’s austerity measures, the Peronist movement retained a lasting influence over the labour movement, tying the workers’ organisations to bourgeois nationalism.
The growth of Peronism from the mid-1940s disoriented the Argentinian Trotskyist groups even further. The group around Jorge Abelardo Ramos, an ex-member of the PORS, which published the journal October, went over from a sectarian position on the national problem to total opportunism. He began to develop a series of theories based on the idea that the national bourgeoisie was capable of taking revolutionary positions in the struggle against imperialism, that it was necessary to give critical support to anti-imperialist bourgeois governments and that it was necessary to move towards building a Latin American “national” left. Ramos would finally end up in the camp of bourgeois nationalism. Another group around Pedro Milesi refused to break with their economistic conceptions in relation to the national question and eventually disintegrated. The two most important Trotskyist groups that remained in existence during Peron’s rule were the GCI of Juan Posadas and the GOM/POR of Nahuel Moreno. While the GCI moved in the direction of adapting opportunistically to the rising Peronist movement and, as a result, became the official section of the FI by 1951, Moreno’s GOM/POR if anything tended to take a sectarian position in relation to the Peronist dominated trade unions and workers’ organisations.
Moreno’s GOM/POR correctly declared that “Peronism is a reactionary right wing movement”. It wrote in capital letters that it was the “VANGUARD OF THE BOURGEOIS OFFENSIVE AGAINST THE GREATEST GAINS OF THE WORKING CLASS”.3
While this was an accurate description of Peron’s aims it should not have led revolutionaries to ignore or write off the workers being organised into Peronist led unions. Doing just this the GOM/POR proposed the destruction of the Peronist inclined CGT, siding with the minority “CGT No 2” controlled by the CP and Socialist Party, whose leadership sided with the US embassy and had a record of sabotaging strikes which affected “anti-fascist” employers.
Sectarianism is the response of the opportunist who is afraid of his own shadow. The sectarian, on losing time and resources through his policies and on realising that this method is a dead end, then tries to recover lost time through opportunist policies. Sectarian abstention from the Peronist unions was transformed by Moreno into complete integration into the Peronist Party.
Moreno the Peronist
The 1951 third world congress of the FI not only endorsed and codified the centrist positions developed on Yugoslavia since 1948, but also extended these liquidationist positions to Latin America. The resolution “Latin America: Problems and Tasks”, while containing some orthodox general formulations on the relation of communists to “anti-imperialist movements”, was pervaded by exhortations to the sections not to “isolate” themselves from the masses through sectarianism.
At this time, a distinction was made between bourgeois nationalism—e.g. Cardenas, Peron, (Peron was described as “a reactionary government of the national bourgeoisie”)—and supposed “petit bourgeois anti-imperialist movements” such as the MNR of Bolivia, the APRA of Peru, Auténticos in Cuba, etc. These latter movements were held to be potentially “revolutionary” in their struggle with imperialism (later Peron was added to this list).
Thus in Bolivia the FI section was advised that in a situation where the (in fact bourgeois nationalist) MNR led a mobilisation against the government, they were not to abstain:
“. . . but on the contrary intervene energetically in it with the aim of pushing it as far as possible up to the seizure of power by the MNR on the basis of the progressive programme of the anti-imperialist united front.”4
In such a circumstance the section would advance the slogan of a “workers’ and peasants’ government” based on the Trotskyists and the MNR! Developing later out of this perspective was the idea of “entryism sui generis” into this movement, entering for long periods with the objective of winning over the left wing or even “winning over the whole movement”.
Moreno’s group which was present and participating in the congress, enthusiastically endorsed this resolution as well as the proposal to fuse all the Argentinian groups with the, now official, section, the GCI:
“Our party enthusiastically welcomes this revolutionary measure . . . According to this judgement the militants of the POR prepare themselves for entry into the section . . . The third world congress of the FI . . . has recognised one of the organisations that lays claim to the FI, the GCI, as its Argentinian section. The event is simply magnificent and trancends the limitations of our own Trotskyist organisations to become one of the most auspicious acts in the life of the Argentinian working class in particular and Latin America in general.”5
Despite this egregious praise the process of integrating Moreno into the Posadas group did not prosper. A little later Moreno joined with the SWP(US), the PCI (Lambert) and Healy’s group around Socialist Outlook to form the “International Committee”. This new organisation was born in dispute with the “Pabloite” leadership of the FI and was built as a new organisational alternative. The IC criticised Pablo for putting forward deep entryism into the Stalinist movement. However the sections of the IC would practise a much deeper entryism in the very heart of the social democratic and bourgeois nationalist movements, none more so than the Argentinian IC section under Moreno.
Change of line
In Argentina, while Posadas’ Pabloite group kept to an opportunist line but maintained an independent party, the Moreno group agreed to dissolve itself into Peronism. As one of the leaders of the POR at the time put it:
“We were opponents of the Peronista government, implacable adversaries until 1954, when we saw the coming of an imperialist and anti-labour wave, and we reacted against it.”6
Certainly by 1954 all the indications were that the ruling class was moving to get rid of Peron. Mobilised behind the Catholic Church, driven on by a deepening economic crisis, the bourgeois and petit bourgeois poured onto the streets until the army delivered the coup de grâs in September 1955. But far from defending an independent proletarian standpoint—being neither for Peron nor for bourgeois reaction—Moreno’s grouping made a 180 degree turn and became the most slavish opportunists in relation to Peron and his movement. In 1954 the POR dissolved itself to join the newly formed Socialist Party of National Revolution (PSRN), which was a pro-Peronist party, having split from the Socialist Party because of its anti-Peronist stance. In the PSRN the Morenoites joined up with the likes of Jorge Abelardo Ramos, who helped develop the PSRN programme. This was a classic “Stalinist” programme—first pressurise the national bourgeoisie to achieve independence from imperialism, then develop the proletarian revolution. Moreno soon controlled the PSRN mouthpiece La Verdad (The Truth) in Buenos Aires.
When Peron was overthrown in 1955 and the PSRN declared illegal, Moreno’s group continued to work with the Peronists producing a paper called Palabra Obrero (PO) which declared itself an “organ of revolutionary workers’ Peronism” produced “under the discipline of General Peron and the Peronist Supreme Council”. The paper was linked to a group of “left” Peronist trade union leaders called the “62 organisations” which acted as the transmission belt for maintaining the hold of Peronism—bourgeois nationalism—over the Argentinian trade unions.
The entry tactic, as developed by Trotsky and the ICL in the 1930s, was aimed at the social democratic parties—especially in Europe. The victory of fascism in Germany and the transparent responsibility of Stalinism had given rise to strong left currents in these parties, initially resistant to Stalinism and open to the revolutionary ideas of Trotskyists. Trotsky recognised the possibility of winning over these centrist currents to revolutionary communism by a short term entry into these parties, raising the Trotskyist programme and winning the best elements in a sharp struggle with the reformists. Moreno’s strategy was the opposite of this policy. Moreno entered an overtly bourgeois party, not a workers’ party, for a protracted period without raising any criticism of Peron.
An example of this is shown in issue 100 of PO of 4 September 1959. The edition is dedicated to reporting the first Congress of PO. In not a single congress resolution, nor in any part of the periodical can we find the least reference to Marx, Engels, Lenin or Trotsky; instead we find a long quotation from Peron with his picture accompanied by fulsome and extensive praise. Neither are we liable to find the least reference to communism, socialism, a workers’ government or the need to build a workers’ party; instead we find the promise of the vindication of Peron and his programme:
“Palabra Obrera is not a publishing enterprise to show off photos of Peron . . . [we believe] in complying with Peron and the movement . . . Along the road we have, more than once, had to confront a campaign by our very own comrades, especially leaders, who allege that we are not Peronists, that we are splitters in saying what we think. Analysis of our progress shows that we do not pick fights with anyone; in order to maintain the unity of Peronism we propose to the best activists . . . that they join PO to give the Peronist movement the direction that the working class deserves, along with General Peron.”7
Throughout the whole of this special edition there is not a trace of a class analysis of Peronism. Instead of proposing that the working class breaks with this bourgeois movement which was ever more tied to the Yankees and anti-communism, they proposed that there should be more “worker” candidates on the lists of a bourgeois party that they defended more than anyone else, in order to preserve its unity!
According to PO, Peronism was made up of two wings: the “softs” and the “hards”. PO placed itself in the “hard” line, loyal to Peron:
“Workers’ Peronism of the hard line, PO carries to its ultimate conclusion the economic programme begun by General Peron.”8
The duty of all Marxists consists of prosecuting the class war, in preserving the independence of the working class from the bourgeoisie and its institutions. Morenoism, instead of attacking the most prominent and dangerous employers’ party there has been in the history of Argentina and trying to make the workers break with Peron, attempted the impossible by climbing on board the bourgeois bandwagon and identifying itself with Peronism. Morenoism not only renounced the strategy of building workers’ parties to make the proletarian revolution, but also took as its own the “economic programme begun by General Peron”. That is to say, one of the absolute defence of private property against the proletariat.
In the 1950s no other current claiming to be of the FI went to the same extreme of class collaboration. The “Revolutionary Workers Peronism” group of Moreno even found itself further to the right than the right-centrist Posadas.
In 1958 elections were staged in Argentina. Peron was not permitted to stand so he cobbled together an alliance with one of the right wing representatives of imperialism and the oligarchy. Bourgeois nationalism, increasingly anti-working class, sought legitimacy before the most conservative sections of its own dominant class. Thus Peronism called for a vote for the reactionary Frondizi. Nevertheless, hundreds of thousands of workers who had supported Peron refused to obey this order to vote for Frondizi. The whole of the mass electoral movement against Frondizi was expressed by a million abstentions, 36% of votes being blank.
In these circumstances it was essential to try to intervene in order to drive a wedge between the working class and the Peronist bourgeoisie and launch a campaign for workers’ candidates. Electoral tendencies to class independence did exist. Even the small party of Posadas, Pablo and Mandel presented itself in the guise of the “Workers’ Party” and in only three districts in the province of Buenos Aires they won a significant total of 15,424 votes.
The subordination of Morenoism before Peronism was so acute that they called for a vote for the oligarchist Frondizi:
“On deciding to call for a vote for Frondizi, Palabra Obrera, despite considering it extremely dangerous that splits could appear in the masses when everyone is ‘carried away’ with the blank vote, accedes in a disciplined way, not because it considers it better than a blank vote, but in order to safeguard the unity of Peronism and only for that.”9
The unity of Peronism was more important than the independence of the working class!
The Morenoites spoke the truth when they stated that “analysis of our progress shows how we do not pick fights with anyone, in order to maintain the unity of Peronism”. Peronism was an expression of private property. Morenoism was the guardian of its unity. Perhaps the famous call of Marx and Engels should have been changed to: “Workers of the world unite . . . behind General Peron!”.
This same line was applied in other areas. In Peru for example the group allied to Moreno participated in the creation of Belaunde’s party Accíon Popular. In 1956 the Peruvian POR split between those persuaded by the tactic of “entryism” into the APRA (supporters of the International Secretariat) and those who preferred to do the same with Belaundism (supporters of the IC). Belaundism was born as a bourgeois nationalist movement with a tenuous connection with the trade unions. Never at any time did it have any serious organic weight in the workers’ movement (as did other nationalist parties from the APRA to the MNR) and its political positions were always very timid. Inside the Belaundists the IC section edited the periodical Left. Years later the same Belaunde would go on to massacre the peasant rebellion and sentence Hugo Blanco and other Morenoites to long gaol terms.
The “Revolutionary Workers’ Peronism” of Argentina along with the POR of Chile and the POR of Peru were the basis of the foundation in 1957 of the Latin American Secretariat of Orthodox Trotskyism (SLATO) that under the dominance of Moreno, acted as the bureau of the IC for this continent. If this was orthodoxy what could revisionism do worse! In fact the apologists for the IC tradition dare not look at their Latin American representatives in this period.
From Peronism to Castroism
Moreno’s subservience to Peronism even led him for a short time to back Batista against Castro! Peron was on very close terms with Batista and Franco. When the 1959 revolution occurred Moreno equated it with the counter-revolution which overthrew Peron. The outcome was logical; it was necessary to have fought along with Batista against Castro.
After holding this reactionary position for a short time (through his attachment to Peron) Moreno rapidly became a Castroite (and also a Maoist) convert. By 1961 Moreno was more than willing to dump the theory of permanent revolution as the price for the favour of these Stalinist currents:
“Of course, life has brought out the gaps, omissions and errors of the programme of permanent revolution . . . The dogma that only the working class can accomplish the democratic tasks is false. Sectors of the urban middle class and peasantry are, on occasion, the revolutionary leadership . . . History has rejected the theory that the proletariat, in the backward countries, is the revolutionary leadership . . . Mao Tse Tungism, or the theory of guerrilla war, is the particular reflection in the field of theory of the present stage of world revolution.”10
It is little wonder that, given this developing position, by 1964 Moreno has joined the SWP(US) in reunifying with the International Secretariat to form the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFI). The key to this reunification was uncritical support for the Castroites in Cuba, the recognition that a “blunt instrument” was indeed sufficient to achieve a socialist revolution. Thus Palabra Obrera declared:
“Fidel, like Peron here, brought together under his leadership diverse sectors of the Cuban economy, politics and society. With them he took power and smashed the corrupt bureaucracy of the old regime. But the Cuban employers and oligarchy did not want to compete for the fruits of victory with the peasants and workers. The oligarchy and imperialism put pressure on in a thousand different economic, political and military ways. And Fidel had to choose; continue the revolution to its ultimate end or build a bridge to conciliation. Fidel did not doubt for an instant; he broke all the bridges which connected him to the exploitative oligarchy and strengthened those which linked him to the most downcast sections of the people. A consequently revolutionary leadership thus forged its new revolutionary cadres with a programme and organisation linked closely to the Cuban poor.”11
Not a word of criticism of this regime is uttered. The suppression of the “Trotskyists” of the Posadas current, the purging of the trade unions, the stifling of workers’ democracy all go by without a protest from Moreno. The message is clear; Fidel Castro is a substitute for the revolutionary party. In Argentina we have to find from within Peronism a new Fidel and this principle can be applied elsewhere in Latin America.
In the 1950s the Morenoite strategy had consisted of integrating themselves with the bourgeois nationalist movements (such as Peronism). The 1960s saw the same method applied to Castroite currents. The Cuban revolution had an important impact on the left wings of both the nationalist and Stalinist parties. Now they were stirred to try to apply the old bourgeois anti-imperialist programme (which the traditional nationalist parties, MNR, APRA, etc, had put to one side in their pacts with the oligarchies) by armed methods. Thus were born everywhere new Castroite “movements”, “fronts” and “armies”. In 1964 Moreno’s group in Argentina fused with the openly Castroite current, the FRIP, to form the Partido Revolucionario de Trabajadores (PRT). From then until 1968 Moreno was at one with the policy of the USFI leaders, supporting the “guerrillaist” turn.
Castroism was a special synthesis of classical Latin American revolutionary nationalism and Stalinism. Originally a petit bourgeois nationalist movement, Castroism was forced to break with its right wing and with the, at first reluctant, support of Moscow, bureaucratically expropriate the bourgeoisie in order to build what from the start would be a degenerate workers’ state. Encircled by imperialism, Castro chose to support all those governments and parties of the bourgeoisie that had not broken off relations with Cuba and as a form of blackmail support petit bourgeois guerrilla struggles in those countries which were for the blockade. The strategy of Castro was one of popular fronts and peaceful coexistence. The call to arms at specific moments was subordinate to this perspective. Castroism is inimical to the building of workers’ parties. Instead it favours armed petit bourgeois movements. The Castroite bureaucracy was the enemy of workers’ councils in Cuba, Czechoslovakia and anywhere else. Its goal was always to tie the proletariat to other social classes. It was to this movement that Moreno subordinated SLATO and later the USFI sections in Latin America with disastrous results.
The guerrilla line in Peru
The practical implications of Moreno’s turn towards Castroism and Maoism were not long in coming. In Peru, where the POR had split between International Secretariat supporters (POR(T)) and the supporters of the International Committee (POR), the latter rapidly turned towards the Stalinist and nationalist currents influenced by Castroism and Maoism. They proposed to these currents the formation of a single party. Their slogan was, “The dissident APRA, the Leninist Committee, the MSP and the independents must declare if they are with the party of the Peruvian revolution”. The dissident Apristas (APRA Rebelde) were a radical faction led by De la Puente and Valle Riestra which later became the MIR. The MSP was the party of Ruiz Elderdge, Sofocleto, Moncloa and other bourgeois third-worldists. Note that it is the Peruvian revolution that is spoken of—that is a national and not a proletarian, socialist or internationalist revolution. The programme they proposed for this fusion consisted of five points:
1 That elections are a fraud
2 That there was no peaceful road to the Peruvian revolution
3 For nationalisation of the large imperialist companies
4 Introduction of agrarian reform
5 Urban reform.12
Note that they did not propose that the nationalisations be under workers’ control and without compensation and moreover that they refused to call for the nationalisation of the property of the national bourgeoisie and the “small imperialist companies”.
This is a programme limited to bourgeois democratic demands and which accepts the maintenance of private property. It is also a little more moderate than the original five-point plan of the APRA.
With this line the Peruvian group formed the FIR (Front of the Revolutionary Left) in 1961. Similar positions led the Chilean POR to form the People’s Socialist Party (PSP) and then the Chilean MIR. In Argentina Moreno’s group united with the “Frente Revolucionario Indoamericanista Popular” of Santucho to found the PRT. These parties were created with populist policies sprinkled with Marxist phrases and abounding in the terminology of the armed struggle and Castroism.
The POR was the first group within the SLATO to implement the new guerrilla line. At its November 1960 congress, it adopted a set of “insurrectional theses” which outlined a strategy of guerrilla warfare, based on the peasantry, as a means of seizing power. A few months later, a full meeting of the Latin American Secretariat of Orthodox (sic) Trotskyism endorsed this line (April 1961) and promised to raise funds for the struggle going on in La Convencion Valley in Peru.
There, Hugo Blanco, a member of the POR recruited by Moreno in Argentina, had been working amongst peasant unions since late 1958. Returning to Cuzco in 1960, carrying the new guerrillaist line, the POR/FIR set about organising the armed struggle.
Blanco maintained at the time that the revolutionary party in Peru would have to be of a “special type” because it would be composed of the peasant unions. A union, as a united front body which groups together many diverse currents of thought and is composed generally of workers who have not broken with the ideology of the dominant class, can never replace the revolutionary party. Even less when the union is of a non-proletarian class—the peasantry. While the “Trotskyists” in Cuzco were bravely pursuing peasant unionism, in Lima the FIR was pulling the worker and university cadres out of their centres in order to dedicate themselves to the “expropriation” of banks.
The development of peasant organs of a soviet type and armed militias in the countryside is a correct policy that must be tied to the creation of similar proletarian movements in the cities. Alongside this must go a campaign to build a workers’ party. The formation of “liberated zones” which require the abandonment of work in the proletarian movement and its subordination to a petit bourgeois leadership is a strategy that has never and will never lead to the socialist revolution. This was the Maoist and Castroite strategy of “surrounding the cities from the countryside”, a strategy that relegated the proletariat of the cities to a passive, supportive role. The main theoretical work of the Peruvian Morenoites, the “Insurrectional Theses”, openly said that there was no need to apply the old model revolution of Lenin and Trotsky in Peru. Rather it was necessary to follow the road of China, Cuba and Algeria of proceeding from a prolonged war in the countryside to the city and thence to the construction of “popular revolutionary governments”.
This strategy led to disaster for the POR/FIR in Peru. The bank “expropriations” of late 1961 and 1962 led to massive repression in La Convencion and by 1962 Blanco and his small band of followers were on the run in the mountains, with most of the FIR members in prison or in hiding. Blanco was caught in 1963 and spent the next seven years in prison. The launching of the Chilean MIR led to similar disastrous results, with the “Trotskyists” being unceremoniously expelled as the MIR became assimilated to Castroism.
Blanco and Moreno were later to claim, in their faction fight with the Mandelites of the International Majority Tendency (IMT) over guerrillaism, that they had always opposed the worst excesses of the guerrillaist strategy. Certainly it was true that as things went badly wrong in La Convencion, Moreno drew back from the practical conclusions of the “insurrectional line” (endorsed by SLATO) as he was to do later in Argentina. But Moreno’s criticisms at the time were related to the universal application of the guerrilla strategy throughout Latin America and the danger of developing armed actions isolated from the masses. His critique drew not on the lessons of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, but instead held up the model of Mao’s Stalinist-led mass peasant movement in China.
The OLAS episode
In Argentina, Moreno was once more to become an enthusiast for Castroite guerrillaism at the end of 1967. Moreno’s slavish opportunism in relation to every twist and turn of the Castroites was demonstrated even more clearly in this period. The launching of the Organisation of Latin American Solidarity (OLAS) in Havana in August 1967 was seen by the USFI leadership and Moreno as a signal that Castro was about to throw his weight behind the guerrilla organisations in Latin America. This, combined with the despatching of Che Guevara to Bolivia, turned Moreno into a fervent guerrillaist again. Once again the tactic of “entryism”, this time into OLAS, was placed firmly on the agenda. Moreno declared that:
“If in the past the trade union was our organisational vehicle for posing the question of power, today OLAS, with its national combat organisations for armed struggle, is the only organisational vehicle for power.”13
This position was justified retrospectively by Moreno on the basis that the whole USFI thought that the foundation of OLAS presaged the opening up of a “continental civil war” in Latin America in which the “Trotskyists” had to participate “critically”.14 Of course there was no criticism at the time, only a rush to “enter” OLAS.
Moreno only reversed his position when it became clear that the Cubans, following the disaster in Bolivia and death of Guevara, were quickly abandoning the OLAS strategy and mending their fences with Moscow and the Latin American Stalinist parties. When a section of the PRT (with the encouragement of Livio Maitan) prepared to launch a guerrilla movement, the ERP (Peoples’ Revolutionary Army), Moreno split the PRT and moved into opposition to “the guerrillaist turn” in the USFI, a turn he had helped to foster.
The examination of the positions and practice of the Morenoites during this period destroys two myths. Firstly, that the politics of the IC sections in Latin America represented any sort of “orthodox Trotskyism”, any revolutionary alternative to the centrism of the Posadas dominated “Pabloite” sections. The sections of SLATO committed as systematic and equally opportunist errors as their International Secretariat brethren. Both currents demonstrated again and again that they represented a form of centrism which had nothing in common with Trotskyism.
Secondly, the record dispels the myth assiduously peddled by Moreno himself as well as his epigones that this current stood against the guerrillaist wave which led many hundreds of militants adhering to the IS or IC fragments of the Fourth International to their deaths.
Sorry to say, there was not one tendency throughout Latin America which defended the proletarian perspective of Trotskyism against petit bourgeois guerrillaist deviations in the 1960s.
From Castroite parties to reformist socialist parties
The late 1960s saw the Morenoite current on a rightist turn. Moreno’s PRT (Verdad)—named after his journal—allied with Hansen of the SWP(US) to oppose the full scale guerrillaist turn launched at the ninth congress of the USFI in 1969. This belated retreat from the capitulation to Castroism and Maoism did not herald any fundamental change in Moreno’s politics. In fact, it represented an electoralist, rightist reaction to ultra-left adventurism, not a revolutionary critique of it.
By 1972, Moreno had found a new, social democratic group to fuse with, led by a long time reformist, Juan Carlos Coral of the Socialist Party of Argentina (PSA). The fusion programme of what became the PST was printed in the 13 November 1972 Intercontinental Press. In an accompanying interview, Moreno amazingly described the party as “95% Trotskyist”. In fact it put forward a democratic programme, albeit dressed up in revolutionary verbiage, rather than a communist transitional one. It called for the “building of a great socialist, a revolutionary workers’ party deeply rooted in the realities of the nation in solidarity with the socialist movement of Latin America and the world”.
The “socialist movement” was (deliberately) left unspecified. The reader could assume Castroism, Maoism or even the Second International. The unification agreement did, however, reject any “outside control or direction”, a token of its internationalist commitment! It called for the “democratisation of the armed forces” and the end of “their use in the service of capital” and the suppression of their “repressive role”. Whether this wretched social democratic formulation was considered by Moreno to be part of the 95% Trotskyism or part of the 5% something else was not made clear. Finally, the emergence of a “socialist” government was seen in purely parliamentary terms through the “Constituent Assembly [which would] appoint a workers’ and people’s popular government which would expel the [foreign] bases and construct a socialist Argentina”.15
Communists know that the armed forces have a central purpose; the defence of the interests of the dominant class and repression of the remaining classes. To ask the armed forces to stop being repressive is tantamount to asking a lion to stop eating its victims. This position is a classic social democratic and Stalinist one, sowing fatal illusions in the democratisation of capitalist armies. The demand for a workers’ government elected via a constituent assembly is a Menshevik demand but it remained a permanent Morenoite formula.
Revolutionaries are obliged to fight for democratic demands (including a sovereign constituent assembly) at the same time as maintaining that only direct action and the formation of workers’ councils can impose proletarian demands. The workers’ government must be the product of the workers’ councils and the armed militias. The reformists want the workers to believe that a socialist government may come out of a parliamentary majority. Communists know that although the “socialists” might control parliament, the real power resides with the bourgeoisie and its armed forces. To deceive the masses with the idea that socialism can come through the parliamentary road or by “abolishing the repressive role of the armed forces” is to politically disarm the proletariat and limit it to the arena of bourgeois democracy.
Moreno’s fusion with Coral’s Socialist Party represented a complete capitulation to social democratic reformism. Having taken on the colours of Peronism for many years, Moreno’s organisation was now to combine it with a chronic adaptation to “constitutionalism”. Far from “being a revolutionary workers’ party”, the PST distinguished itself by its fawning opportunism towards Peronism which, at this time, was on the verge of its “second coming”.
The overthrow of Peron had been followed by numerous regimes, either direct military ones or civilian regimes tolerated by the army as long as the Peronists were prohibited from participating in the elections. Peronism, however, remained the major political force in Argentina, especially within the trade unions. By the end of the 1960s there was a growing working class struggle, including an important popular struggle in Cordoba, led by the car workers in May 1969 which shook the regime. Major strikes accompanied by growing guerrilla actions by sections of the Peronist movement—the Montoneros, as well as by the ERP—provided a growing crisis in the military regime of General Lannusse in the early 1970s.
The PST’s accord with the bourgeoisie
There was a growing belief amongst the ruling class that the only person who could control the working class, through the Peronist trade unions, and disarm the left was Peron, who was in exile in Spain. Having participated in the Grand National Accord of General Lannusse, which aimed at a carefully controlled return to a restricted democracy, Avanzada Socialista (the PST’s paper) on 8 November 1972 commented on Peron’s imminent return: “Why is Peron coming? Hopefully it will be to impose fighting workers’ candidates and not to make deals with the oligarchy”. In peddling such illusions in Peron, the PST joined the rest of the Peronist “left” in looking to Peron to help fight the growing rightward forces.
Far from supporting the left Peronists, after his assumption of power in October 1973, Peron, with the support of the army and the Peronist bureaucrats in the CGT, proceeded to attack the Montoneros and the Peronist Youth Movement, introducing new measures against “terrorism”. Meanwhile, the activities of the “Argentinian Anti-Communist Alliance”—a right wing death squad linked to the federal police—were ignored. In the second half of 1974 this organisation murdered seventy prominent leftist intellectuals, lawyers and workers. By early 1975 they were kidnapping and killing leftists at the rate of fifty a week. Peron died in July 1974, leaving his wife, Isabel Peron, in control of an increasingly crisis-wracked regime facing a rising workers’ movement defending its living standards in a growing economic slump.
During this last period of Peron’s government the PST became a craven defender of “institutionalisation”, that is of the existing bourgeois democratic system. In March 1974, in the situation of increasing right wing killings and left wing guerrilla activity, the PST was drawn into an accord with six bourgeois parties and the CP. In the presence of General Peron the PST (represented by Coral), promised to adhere to “the institutional process”, that is to renounce revolutionary struggle. It took Avanzada Socialista three months, under pressure from the IMT, to announce that this had been a mistake (!) and that they had in fact not signed it!
Signed or not, their agreement with this perspective was clear. After one of many meetings in the government palace, Juan Carlos Coral is quoted as saying to Isabel Peron, then president:
“The PST declares its categorical opposition to a coup d’etat and violence in the form of terrorism and guerrilla activity which, although with different motives, are equal in provoking coups and thus stand in opposition to the democratic demands of the masses. We have no illusion that we can change the policy of the government by speeches but surely you Señora Presidente, and your ministers have taken note of some of our observations.”16
This scandalous equating of the “left” Peronist and ERP guerrilla forces with the right wing death squads was only equalled by the PST’s response to Videla’s coup when it actually came on 24 March 1976—a coup that was to lead to 30,000 dead and “disappeared” Argentinians.
A militant of the PST at the time explained the situation within the organisation thus:
“The coup d’etat found the party plunged into confusion. In December 1975 we had embarked on the preparations for the forthcoming elections, starting from the position that there existed a dominant ’institutionalist’ section in the armed forces, backed by wide layers of the bourgeoisie. When in March, one week before the coup, the strikes against the Mondelli plan spread across the whole of the country, and it was the time to press for a general strike against the government and the supporters of the military coup, there appeared in Avanzada an article on the situation explaining that the National Committee was not united and therefore we had no position! Once the coup had happened the party spread hopes in its moderate and democratic character.”17
The new press of the PST declared:
“We are in the presence of the most democratic military government in Latin America. It was impossible to wait for another nine months in this situation of nightmare until the election took place. The whole people were crying out against the government [of Isabel Peron] . . . The eruption of 24 March can be traced to these causes. Despite the principled objections that any healthy democratic person would raise against military coups or any concrete judgement of the measures of the present government, it is a fact that the military carried out in their own way what the popular wave of anti-government discontent was unable to do because of the defection of its leadership”.18
What could this mean other than that the dictatorship of Videla was progressive! The second issue of the PST’s press after the coup—it changed its name to La Yesca (The Flint) because it was a semi-legal publication—continued the same line despite the growing repression:
“La Yesca continues to exercise its right to freedom. Its continuation is proof that the democratic breach is widening and that freedom, this freedom with which it speaks to General Videla who has no wish for an obedient press, is strengthened.”19
General Videla responded to this craven appeal by banning both publications!
Morenoism was seeking to gain legal space by making political concessions to the most bloodthirsty dictatorship in the history of Argentina. Shortly after the defeat of the 1905 insurrection in Russia the Bolsheviks started calling the most rightwing Mensheviks “liquidationist” because they held that it was necessary to maintain a legal workers’ party at all costs by liquidating clandestine organisations and adapting them to what might be permitted by the Tsar. Moreno followed the liquidationists and not Lenin. On the occasion of the boycott of the world football championship of 1978 held in Argentina, the PST stated that, “the campaign mounted abroad by the ultra-left” had benefitted the dictatorship because:
“It only helped its plans with the ambiguous and utopian boycott tactic and by exaggerations [sic] and inaccuracies on the nature of the repression we endure . . . It is this inadequacy of the government’s response to human rights which is provoking the increased international outcry.”20
Morenoite policy consisted of pressurising the dictatorship into democratising itself and correcting its “inadequacies” on “the matter of human rights”. This led to the call to form a Popular Front with the civilian parties of the bourgeoisie in order to seek a return to the oligarchist constitution of 1853 (which defended private property and repressive forces against the workers):
“The socialists make a call for unity in action to all political parties, especially to the Justice Party [Peronists], the UCR [the party of Alfonsin] the PI and the PC [Communist Party], to launch a huge workers’ and popular movement for the full implementation of the 1853 constitution.”21
At the same time it led to the seeking out of an alliance with the gangster-like Argentinian union bureaucracy which, in contrast with many other countries, is so reactionary that never in any way has it bothered itself by getting involved with any reformist workers’ party and had assisted the dictatorship against many worker activists.
The Brazilian “Convergence”
In Brazil the military dictatorship halfway through the 1970s was facing growing opposition. In 1974 the Portugese revolution took place, which overthrew the fifty year old fascist dictatorship and which in turn affected many countries (especially Brazil). Morenoism was determined to capitalise on the leftest image of the Portuguese Socialist Party (PSP). To those many thousands of anti-militarist activists who put their hopes on the PSP of Soares, Moreno offered the idea of forming a grand Brazilian socialist party. Apeing the symbol of the Portugese SP (which even now is used by the Brazilian section) and brandishing a reformist programme, the Morenoites summoned a convergence of the socialists. His Brazilian section soon became the “Socialist Convergence”. They called upon such people as bourgeois ex-minister Alfonso to participate in this project. In the 1978 elections the Morenoites called for a vote for “worker” and “socialist” candidates of the MDB. This was the only opposition party permitted by the dictatorship, the forerunner of the current governing party in Brazil and it had an unmistakeably bourgeois programme. The Morenoites called for a vote for those candidates of a bourgeois pro-imperialist party that showed sympathy for social democracy!
Trotskyists would have proposed a totally different policy. Rather than attempts to form a reformist or centrist socialist party that would help the bourgeoisie tame the masses and eliminate any danger of going beyond the process of “democratisation”, it had to call for the formation of a workers’ party. Here it would have used the revolutionary workers’ party tactic developed by Trotsky in discussion with the SWP(US) in the 1930s. Fighting to build a mass movement of workers and trade unionists to break with the bourgeois parties and fighting within that movement for a revolutionary socialist programme to be adopted by such a party. Moreno’s “socialist convergences” and “movements towards socialism” were a centrist parody of this tactic.
Rather than the alternative of voting for one of two reactionary parties of the dictatorship, revolutionaries had to call for a spoiled vote. Rather than peddle reformist theses creating illusions in a parliamentary road to socialism, Trotskyists advocate a struggle for democracy fought for by revolutionary means, struggling to build workers’ and peasants’ committees against the dictatorship, mobilised around the demand for a sovereign constituent assembly. In this context Trotskyists would have argued for any workers’ parties to take up the burning demands of the masses: land to the tiller—for agrarian revolution, expropriation of the imperialist holdings and of the capitalists, for nationalised industry under workers’ control, for breaking up the army and its replacement by workers’ and popular militias. This was the method of struggle both for a revolutionary constituent assembly and for the struggle for workers’ councils—soviets—and a workers’ and peasants’ government.
In contrast to the revolutionary programme of Trotskyism Moreno’s group peddled only parliamentary cretinism:
“In the constituent assembly we will struggle for the workers to secure the vote for a constitution that will organise the country in a new way, under socialist planning. Or we will struggle for it to vote in a workers’ government and a socialist constitution that will create the basis for the construction of a socialist Brazil.”22
Blanco and FOCEP’s failures
In Peru despite the revolutionary possibilities opened up in the period 1978-80 the Morenoites showed themselves incapable of transcending their hopeless electoralism. A massive general strike in 1978 had forced the right wing military government of Bermudez to concede a “constituent assembly” based on a restricted franchise whose powers were limited to drawing up a constitution. While the Mandelites joined the UDP, an electoral coalition of Maoists, Castroites, the Stalinists and the bourgeois nationalists of the PSR, Moreno’s group the PST—led at that time by Hugo Blanco—helped form FOCEP (the Workers’, Peasants’, Students’ and People’s Front).
While FOCEP rejected alliances with bourgeois parties, a departure from Moreno’s normal practice, the PST was incapable of developing a revolutionary programme for power. The PST’s programme for the elections (which never once mentioned the fact that the party claimed to be Trotskyist!) did not even address the crucial question of the nature of bourgeois power and the need to break up the armed forces. Instead the transition to a socialist state is seen in terms of an evolution of mass struggles and “peoples’ assemblies” until a workers’ government emerged out of a coalition of workers’ parties based either on a future democratic constituent assembly or peoples’ assembly. None of the crucial tactics for achieving workers’ power—the use of the indefinite general strike, the formation of workers’ councils, the construction of workers’ militias, figure in this “programme”.
FOCEP’s success in gaining 12% of the vote was to strengthen further its parliamentary illusions. On arriving at the Constituent Assembly the FOCEP deputies, instead of denouncing the reactionary character of it and its right wing majority and calling for immediate elections to a sovereign constituent assembly, moved to the right of their initial programme. They proposed that the existing assembly take the power in order to carry out democratic and anti-imperialist tasks. It was a Menshevik slogan not only because it sowed parliamentary illusions but because of its idea of a transitional “socialist” government. Ledesma, the president of FOCEP, called for the transformation of the undemocratic assembly into a Paris Commune. The PST proposed that it elect Blanco President of the Republic! The first “Trotskyist” President of a bourgeois republic!
The programme the PST wanted Blanco to carry out was one that was limited and bourgeois. Blanco had to be president not in order to expropriate the bourgeoisie . . . but in order to call new elections within three months and thus democratise the dictatorship of the capitalist class! Such was the confusion of these “Trotskyist” deputies and parties once their mass fronts had placed them in the bourgeois parliament. Within less than two years the threadbare nature of these policies, their failure to offer the workers and peasants any concrete means of struggle, and thus their inability to turn mass support into a revolutionary party rooted in the work places and farms, led to a collapse of the Peruvian far left and with it the influence of “Trotskyism”. “Trotskyism” in Peru entered a decline so profound that today there are very few people who lay claim to these ideas in the country.
Launching the LIT
For the first three decades of its existence Morenoism had taken few steps to build its own international tendency. It had shown itself, like the other fragments of degenerate Trotskyism, capable of the most gross opportunism and capitulation in whichever faction it found itself at the time—the International Committee, USFI, Leninist-Trotskyist Faction, etc. In 1979 it was to launch its own international project under the banner of “orthodox” defender of the revolutionary party against the USFI’s liquidationism in Nicaragua. The second part of this article will look at the hollowness of this “left turn” and the increasingly crisis wracked nature of the Internationalist Workers Party (LIT) today.
NOTES:
1. Nahuel Moreno: “Conversations on Trotskyism”, in: Notebooks from “El Socialisa”, p. 47
2. Quoted in D. Rock: Argentina 1516-1987, London 1987, p. 257
3. Nahuel Moreno: “Anti-imperialist mobilizations or class mobilizations; in: Permanent Revolution (Theoretical Organ of the POR Argentina), No. 1, p. 20
4. “Latin America: Problems and Tasks”, Resolution of the Third World Congress; in: Fourth International, New York, November/December 1951
5. Proletarian Front, No. 72, 3 December 1951
6. Ezequiel Reyes, quoted in Robert Alexander: Trotskyism in Latin America, Hoover Institute, p. 61
7. Palabra Obrera, No. 100, 4 September 1959
8. Palabra Obrera, ibid
9. Palabra Obrera, ibid
10. Nahuel Moreno: La Revolucion Latinoamericana, Buenos Aires 1961
11. Palabra Obrera, 1964
12. Nahuel Moreno: La Revolucion Latinoamericana, op cit
13. Nahuel Moreno: La Revolucion Latinoamericana, Argentina y Nuestras Tareas; quoted in SWP(US): International Internal Discussion Bulletin, Vol. X, No. 4
15. “The Basis for Unification of the PSA/PRT”, in: Intercontinental Press 13, November 1972
16. Avanzada Socialista 15, October 1974
17. Quoted in “On the Positions of the Argentinean PST”, Politica Obrear Publications
18 Cambio No. 1, quoted in ibid
19. La Yesca (The Flint), quoted in ibid
20. Opcion, August 1978
21. Correo Internacional
22. Convergencia Socialista, No. 5, November 1978, p. 4; quoted in Internacionalism (Review of the FIT), Vol. 2, No. 4, April 1982
* * * * *
Barbaric Trotskyism: a History of Morenoism (Part 2)
Originally published in Trotskyist International No.9, Theoretical Journal of the League for the Revolutionary Communist International (1992)
Morenoism and the IWL: Opportunism and failed manoeuvres
Five years after the death of their leader, Nahuel Moreno, the International Workers’ League is undergoing its sharpest crisis yet. Jack Tully examines its record since its foundation in 1982
In January 1982 the International Workers’ League (Fourth International) (IWL) was founded at a conference of twenty delegates, held in São Paolo, Brazil and presided over by its leader, Nahuel Moreno.1 The foundation of the IWL completed the transformation of “Morenoism” into an independent and clearly defined international tendency. Previously it had constituted a primarily Latin American adjunct to one or other of the major international centrist tendencies claiming the mantle of Trotsky’s Fourth International (FI). 2
According to the IWL, their international influence had grown substantially over the previous period. In 1969 they claim to have had only 65 members outside of Argentina. At its foundation the IWL claimed to have 3,500 members,3 with sections in twenty countries. The Argentine section, the MAS—by far the largest component—has claimed up to 6,000 members.
A decade later, the IWL has been rocked by a serious split in the MAS, a third of whose members have left, taking with them the organisation’s parliamentary deputies. This followed hard on the heels of the IWL’s recent World Congress, held in February/March 1992, where four conflicting tendencies proved unable to resolve their differences. A new Congress had to be scheduled for 1994, the fourth in five years.
The IWL claims to represent “orthodox” Trotskyism as against the revisionism of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFI) and the other major tendencies. This is a false claim. The IWL is rooted in the common centrist degeneration which the Fourth International underwent between 1948-51. For this reason it commits exactly the same type of gross opportunist errors as its international rivals.
The IWL has been hit especially hard by the contrast between its wildly optimistic revolutionary perspectives and the serious reverses suffered by the working class and progressive forces in Argentina and the world after 1989. More specifically, it is suffering the consequences of a decade of opportunist electoral tactics since the Malvinas war and ensuing discredit and downfall of the military junta. The chase after electoral success in a rotten block with reformist figures led inexorably to the junking of more and more of the Trotskyist programme and the rejection in practice of the Leninist conception of a revolutionary party.
At its foundation, the most important section of the IWL was the Argentine Partido Socialista des Trabajadores (PST—Socialist Workers’ Party). At that time the IWL saw its most important task as being the consolidation of the PST which had been working in clandestinity since shortly after General Videla’s military coup of 1976.4
The unions and the left began to recover by the early 1980s. It was the recovery of the unions, including a major protest demonstration in March 1982, that drove General Galtieri to gamble on seizing the Malvinas. He was obliged to allow, indeed encourage mass anti-British demonstrations which clearly enabled the left and the workers’ organisations to organise on a mass basis.
Ten years later the MAS would say that this badly calculated military adventure was doomed to failure given the determination of British imperialism. But at the time the PST overestimated the revolutionary, anti-imperialist potential of the war itself.
They argued that with the sending of troops in April, “there begins the most extraordinary revolutionary ascent which has ever occurred in the country . . . the socialist revolution is on the march”. 5
When the war ended in defeat in June 1982, the traditional bourgeois parties and the left shared in the disorientation and demoralisation and failed to press home the attack on the junta. The combination of a severe economic crisis, divisions within the ruling class and military, the revival of working class militancy, and the demonstrations of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, all indicated that a pre-revolutionary situation existed. What was missing was a revolutionary leadership armed with a revolutionary programme.
The task facing Argentine revolutionaries in these conditions was to agitate around the key slogans of an action programme, raising demands to meet workers’ economic needs and democratic demands, focusing on the fight for a general strike to drive the military from power and convoke a sovereign constituent assembly. At the centre of all its slogans—economic, transitional and democratic—should have been the direct mass action of the working class.
In these conditions it was essential to pose the necessity of a break with the baleful legacy of Peronism, the building of a revolutionary workers’ party and the fight for a revolutionary workers’ government based on workers’ councils. The PST’s orientation was in sharp contrast to this.
In July 1982 bourgeois political parties were legalised and the PST also began to work more openly. By September it had decided that this meant a central focus on electoralism. The PST argued:
“The phase which is opening is not only legal, but fundamentally electoral. The conclusion is obvious: not only should we use legality by every means, but our main aim must be to intervene in elections, as long as we do not consider that a new phase has opened, that of mass struggles. If we recognise and accept the fact that the phase which has opened will be essentially electoral, our politics must also be so.” 6
In fact, throughout the second half of 1982 and early 1983 it was the developing mass movement that dominated the political scene, not elections. The latter were not to come until October 1983 and then only after a very brief election campaign. This itself was due to the timidity of the Peronist and Radical bourgeois opposition parties which did not even insist on immediate elections in their negotiations with the military.
There were tax and rates strikes in opposition to the government. But it was the movement headed by the mothers of the “disappeared” victims of the military junta and then, towards the end of 1982, the trade unions which took to the streets in increasing numbers. This phase culminated in a general strike and 100,000 strong march on 16 December, sealing the fate of the military, which was forced to set the date for elections.
For Trotskyists, no phase of politics—except the campaign itself—can be “essentially electoral”. To adopt this stance over a year before elections, months before they were announced, and in the face of a growing social protest movement, indicated a particularly crass electoral cretinism. In order to carry out this perspective, the PST began to cast around for electoral partners. They eventually found it in the shape of the Movimiento Al Socialismo (MAS—Movement Towards Socialism), a small social democratic organisation.
The idea was:
“. . . to create a socialist front which will use legality and will stand in elections, with as its minimum basis, a socialist Argentina as its programme and independence of all the bourgeois or popular frontist parties or electoral fronts . . . Fundamentally, we want to attract thousands and thousands of workers and militants to a broad, non-sectarian socialist front, in which it will not be a condition to be a Trotskyist.” 7
More succinctly, Nahuel Moreno himself explained to the PST Central Committee that the aim of the MAS was to create “a reformist, non-revolutionary front or party”.8
Consciously or not, this unprincipled scheme owed a great deal to Raymond Molinier and Pierre Frank’s project of “La Commune”, a “broad organisation” set up in France in 1935 in order to attract the masses to a centrist programme. The only difference was that whereas Molinier and Frank tried to found their organisation on a centrist basis Moreno set out to build his on a nakedly reformist programme.
The “La Commune” enterprise was bitterly attacked by Trotsky in terms which therefore apply with double force to Moreno nearly half a century later:
“Quite often revolutionary impatience (which becomes transformed easily into opportunist impatience) leads to this conclusion: The masses do not come to us because our ideas are too complicated and our slogans too advanced. It is therefore necessary to simplify our programme, water down our slogans—in short, to throw out some ballast.” 9
After seven years of dictatorship Moreno considered that Trotskyism would be too difficult for the masses to grasp. Undoubtedly, in the first phase of the democratic opening it was unlikely that the revolutionary party could seize the leadership of the masses. Bolshevism itself was unable to accomplish this in February 1917, despite its deep roots and spotless revolutionary record. But it was essential to address the vanguard of the working class: to patiently help it regroup politically whilst at the same time putting forward slogans that could unite the whole working class for concrete actions.
Rather than fighting for a clear revolutionary alternative, Moreno and the PST assessed that there was a social-democratic space opening up in Argentine political life. Judging that Menshevism was the next stage for the Argentine workers they set out to become Mensheviks. Bolshevism and Trotskyism would be a sheer encumbrance now and were relegated to a future stage.
Trained in the years of centrist degeneration of the FI Moreno looked for roughly adequate vehicles to carry forward the “revolutionary process”. One of the first items of ballast which Moreno threw overboard was the key Marxist position on the nature of the state and the armed forces. In its first May Day Manifesto (1983),10 which contains a long programme “for a socialist Argentina”, the MAS managed to say not one word about the state! When a position was finally adopted, it was Moreno’s old centrist formulation calling for the “democratisation” of the armed forces (see opposite)!
If you really want to appear to the masses as social democrats and co-habit with real reformists in a single party then indeed the Marxist position on the class nature of the state will have to be ditched. But probably in no country and at no time was such a policy more out of place than in Argentina, still reeling from the effects of brutal military rule which had claimed 30,000 victims.
The MAS centred its appeal to the Argentine working class around the old bourgeois nationalist slogan “For a second independence”. For the bourgeois nationalists, the first “independence” was from Spain, the “second” will involve the creation of a native capitalism and a sovereign bourgeois state independent from imperialism. The MAS aimed to give this call a left twist with an “action programme” which called for the nationalisation of the banks and monopolies. What it studiously avoided were any demands for expropriation of the capitalist class and the formation of a workers’ government that would be needed to carry this out.
Even one of the most burning necessities for Latin America, the repudiation of the external debt, was rejected in favour of the call “For the suspension of the payment of the external debt. For the formation of an international front of debtor countries to stop the payment of the debt.”11
The demand for “suspension” of the debt in Latin America is typical of bourgeois and reformist currents that seek not to pay the debt today but will be prepared to do the imperialists’ bidding tomorrow. This was no “mistake” but a deliberate tailoring of the revolutionary programme to meet the needs of an opportunist alliance with social democratic and bourgeois national forces.
Perhaps most indicative of the MAS’s whole orientation was its governmental slogan: “For the immediate resignation of the military government! For the immediate convocation of the 1976 Congress, which must elect a provisional government and call elections without any restrictions and without a state of siege.” 12
With the military dictatorship forced onto the defensive by a mass movement, the most these “revolutionaries” could find to say was to call on the discredited Peronist parliamentary majority of 1976 to form a new government! This was a criminal position not only because it abandoned the proletariat’s historic and immediate class goals. It did not even address the growing democratic illusions of the masses.
The political tide was turning away from the Peronists and towards the Radicals, clearly around the issue of “democracy not authoritarianism”. Alfonsin was able to portray Peronist corrupt corporatism as being little different from the military that displaced it in the 1976 coup. The idea of appealing to the status quo ante was suicidal. Even working class members and supporters of the Communist Party were being drawn behind the Radicals’ campaign.
Under these conditions the focus for political democracy should have been the call for a revolutionary constituent assembly, convened, supervised and defended by the mass workers’ and human rights organisations. This would have cut against the shallow and deceitful calls for democracy by the Radicals, who nevertheless were only too happy to work within the framework dictated by the retiring military junta. It would have aided the working class to break free from the Bonapartist political structures of the Peronist movement. Most importantly, it could have engaged all those determined to prevent the military from getting legal backing for their judicial whitewash over the “disappeared”.
But the MAS, when it came to political slogans, as well as its social programme, took its point of departure not from the revolutionary interests of the working class but from a schema based on a systematic centrist adaptation to Peronism’s influence in the working class.
The platform of the MAS, like all centrist programmes, does includes some elements extracted from the communist programme. This might tempt the unwary into thinking that here we have a qualitative improvement on reformism or nationalism. But the essence of the revolutionary programme does not lie in the excellence of one or another individual demands, but in the combination of them into a strategy for the conquest of power. A party, like the MAS, which routinely stands in elections on a platform that only includes disconnected parts of this revolutionary strategy and mixes them with parts of its direct opposite, the strategy of reform, is a party that would lead the working class to disaster in any serious test of the class struggle.
The October 1983 elections were a disaster for the MAS. Despite throwing thousands of members into the field, despite a supposedly vote-winning slogan of “A socialist Argentina, without generals or capitalists”, despite opening 600 local offices throughout the country,13 and despite a claimed 60,000 affiliated voters,14 the MAS only mustered around a third of the PST’s share of the vote in the 1970s. They polled less than 1% of the popular vote.15
Meanwhile the Radical Party candidate, Alfonsin, swept the board with 52% of the votes cast. This outcome did not sit easily with the MAS analysis, shortly before the elections, that Argentina had entered a revolutionary situation.16
Not only were the election results poor for the MAS, but the campaign had not led to any qualitative change in the structure and size of the organisation. The vast majority of members were still the “Trotskyists” of the PST. Both as an electoral front and as a recruiting stunt, the MAS was an abject failure. In these circumstances, the conversion of the organisation into an avowedly “Trotskyist” organisation was a simple affair.17
Nahuel Moreno recognised that one of his famous “self-criticisms” was called for. In the past they never resulted in any lasting change in political method, merely a temporary change in direction. Moreno accepted that there had been “an electoralist deviation”:
“We became drunk with our successes and with the welcome we received, and we stopped being objective. We stopped seeing reality, we stopped listening, we stopped recognising what was really happening in the working class.” 18
In fact, the criticism was only prompted by the failure of the opportunism to bring the expected results. In typical centrist fashion the search for scapegoats began with the working class whose “political backwardness” 19 was held to account, rather than the MAS’ failure to relate to the key concerns of the working class.
The leadership’s “self-criticism” was designed to pre-empt a more searching examination of the systematic centrist method that lay behind years of seemingly isolated tactical mistakes. Moreno swiftly shuffled off the blame: “It was a mistake by the whole party, by the rank and file as well as by the leadership.” 20 Perhaps the leadership should censure the membership for failing to correct it, indeed for leading it astray!
The inconsequential nature of such “self-criticism” was clear from the next bout of opportunist electoralism. The first two years of Alfonsin’s rule were dominated by the workers’ economic struggle. Disillusioned by the IMF-inspired austerity programmes that the government imposed upon them workers were returning to the fray.
By mid 1985 inflation was 2,000% p.a. By August that year real wages were 27% down on July 1984. In July 1985 Alfonsin froze prices and wages and an immediate recession set in for the rest of the year, with many job losses.
Workers fought back. In 1984 there were 717 strikes involving 4.5 million workers. In January of that year the CGT—which had split under the military—fused again. Moreover, a wave of new union elections strengthened rank and file organisation. In May 1985 the regime was rocked by two general strikes in protest against attacks on workers’ living standards. However, despite these struggles the Peronist CGT leadership remained firmly in control and committed to a social contract with the Alfonsin government.
On the political front the failure of the Peronist Justicialist Party to regain power in the October 1983 elections had led to it splitting into thirty different currents. By 1985, with growing disillusion in Alfonsin and many dissident Peronists emerging in opposition to the CGT leaders’ betrayals, the MAS was ready to return to the electoral arena, using the same method as before. Long negotiations with the Argentine Communist Party (PCA) and “Workers’ Peronism” led to the setting up in Autumn 1985 of the Frente del Pueblo (FREPU—Peoples’ Front).
FREPU’s programme was essentially a duplicate of the reformist MAS programme of thirty months previously. Its “socialist” demands were limited to calls for a ten year moratorium on the repayment of the debt, nationalisation of the banks and monopolies and for land reform. The question of the state was once more dealt with reformist sensitivity to the class rule of the bourgeoisie: “For the full respect and application of the democratic liberties contained in the National Constitution”,21 one of which, as in all bourgeois constitutions, was the right to hold private property!
Given the disillusionment with Alfonsin and the disarray in the Peronist Justicialist Party both main parties suffered a drop of 6% in their vote. The November elections indicated a polarisation of political life. The PI, a left split from the Radicals, got 6% in third place while FREPU won 360,000 votes (2%). On the right the UCD too doubled its vote over 1983.
But what did the workers vote for when they put a cross in the FREPU box? The lightweight reformist programme and the emphasis on state capitalist measures all corresponded to the bourgeois nationalist reformism of the Peronism. So too did the FREPU’s “FP” symbol, which deliberately aped the V-sign “FP” of the Peronists! In political terms it was the Peronist workers who had won over the “socialists” to their programme not vice versa!
Thus the vanguard workers could express their dissatisfaction with the disarray of the Justicialist Party while still not breaking from the limits of the Peronist programme in its leftist guise.
For the PCA, this gross adaptationism was hardly surprising. Stalinism has made the class collaborationist popular front a hallmark of its anti-working class politics since 1935. Such lifelong reformists and the “Workers’ Peronism” can agree on their fundamental perspective: the preservation and reform of the capitalist state. But for revolutionaries there can be no compromise on this question.
Revolutionaries win over reformist workers to their banner by united action around concrete struggles, and by an indefatigable struggle against reformist illusions, not by peddling such nonsense to the masses. But this was not the method of Moreno’s centrism in 1985, nor before, nor afterwards.
Argentina has always been the centre of the IWL’s activity. An International Executive Committee meeting in April 1988 restated the position by claiming that “Argentina is the central axis of the world revolution” 22 and that “the responsibility and the central task of the whole IWL-FI and in particular of its leadership is to maintain and deepen the political turn towards Argentina”. 23
The economic and political situation in Argentina in 1987-88 was not stable, but in many ways the most militant working class challenges to Alfonsin had already taken place. The army was restless, both because of the failure of the government to control the working class and also because of Alfonsin’s ambiguity faced with pressure to bring those responsible for atrocities and torture to trial. There were a series of barracks revolts (especially Easter 1987) and rumours abounded of an attempted coup.
In fact in April 1987 Alfonsin managed to steer a middle way by using the threat of a military coup to get all the major opposition parties—including the PCA—to sign a “Pact for Democratic Compromise” which involved fundamental concessions to the military.
The MAS refused to sign the pact and the FREPU electoral bloc with the PCA broke up. For the next period the MAS drifted with the stream, uncertain of how to orient itself. The September congressional and municipal elections of 1987 saw a revival in the fortunes of the Peronist party, which won important seats and major cities were brought back under its control.
Within a year, however, the decisive question of the PCA’s pro-Alfonsin position was forgotten, and the MAS was courting the Stalinists once again. In October 1988 the Izquierda Unida (IU—United Left) was set up between the MAS, the PCA and a number of fringe bourgeois and petit bourgeois parties. As with the FREPU, the IU’s programme was carefully tailored—first to suit the reformist politics of the PCA, then so as not to “scare off” the bourgeois nationalists.24
The IWL hailed the IU as having “a working class, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist programme”.25 Yet the programme envisages a parliamentary, reformist road to “socialism” (although the word is never mentioned!) Far from calling for the expropriation of capitalist property it only dares call for price controls on the leading companies “where they agree”!
In a situation where inflation was running at over 80% per month, the MAS did not even dare press the IU to raise the slogan of a sliding scale of wages! A strange form of “anti-capitalism”! Yet again the Morenoites jettisoned revolutionary baggage as the price of a rotten alliance with Stalinists and bourgeois nationalists.
In June 1988 the Third Congress of the MAS argued that the growing tensions in Argentine society would bring about:
“. . . the struggle of classes for political power. That is to say, the triumph of the workers’ revolution, the socialist October, or the bourgeois counter-revolution. Because the aim now is not the change of regime but the change of the class in power, to establish a workers’ state.” 26
The May 1989 parliamentary elections bought a sweeping victory for President-elect Menem’s Justicialist Party. But also at long last it brought a measure of success to the MAS’s electoralism. The IU garnered 500,000 votes, enough to win a national deputy’s seat for the MAS public figurehead, Luis Zamora, and a regional deputy’s seat for Silvia Diaz. The MAS felt the wind in their sails; the leadership felt even bigger successes lay just around the corner.
On 28 May 1989 the masses of Rosario, Argentina’s second city, rebelled against the 12,000% p.a. hyper-inflation in a three-day riot which left 15 dead and hundreds of shops looted. Barricades were set up and a state of emergency was declared. The following issue of the IWL journal, Correo Internacional, proclaimed “The socialist revolution has begun” and went on to explain that:
“Without instructions or political leadership and without institutionalising as yet an alternative workers’ power, they have made a massive popular anti-capitalist insurrection in the true Leninist sense.” 27
This revolutionary hyperbole was as far from Leninism as the reformist electoral programme on which they won their parliamentary seats. What is an “anti-capitalist insurrection in the true Leninist sense” except the seizure of state power by the armed militias of workers’ councils led by the revolutionary party? It is organised and planned action to resolve the duality of power which already exists in a fully developed revolutionary situation. Indeed, with an insurrection one can say that socialist revolution has been successful, not “begun”.
What in fact occurred in Rosario was a mass spontaneous uprising against the misery imposed by the government’s austerity measures. But without conscious, organised leadership it did not even develop into a nationwide strike wave let alone approach the creation of a situation of dual power. In short it did not herald the start of the socialist revolution but warned the bourgeoisie of the mounting tide of resentment to its policies.
This crass impressionism was codified at the Fourth Congress of the MAS, which drew a parallel between the Menem government and the Provisional Government set up by Kerensky after the February 1917 revolution. The implication was clear: if February was behind the Argentine masses, October could not be far away!
The MAS claimed that Argentina was characterised by “an atomised dual power” composed of various rank and file co-ordinating committees, trade unions and popular soup kitchens! 28
“We can win,” they argued, “because the government and the regime are weak, because the masses are struggling, because Peronism has split apart and because the party is winning mass influence.” 29 Are the masses then supposed to take state power armed only with soup ladles?
With a claimed circulation of 85,000 for the newspaper (but a membership stable at around 6,000) the MAS sought to orient towards Peronist workers disoriented and outraged by the actions of “their” government. This was of course absolutely necessary. The MAS proclaimed it had the intention of organising a “principled opposition”:
“We can and we must organise these hundreds of thousands of workers; act so that they naturally choose to take their place in the groups or amongst our periphery, as part of the party . . . Our proposal for action, which we address to the masses, and in particular to the Peronist workers who reflect the disarray of their party, is to call on them to build our party with us. We must do everything possible to encourage the Peronist workers to join our groups and branches! We must build the party with them!” 30
But the programme the MAS held out to these Peronist workers was as usual woefully inadequate. As well as overestimating the collapse of Peronism’s influence in the working class and the weakness of the Menem government, the MAS’s programme did not offer the critical Peronist worker a radical break with the politics they were supposedly gravitating away from.
The “revolutionary party” was to be built on a programme centred around four headings:
“Against the Menem government, for a workers’ and socialist government; For rank and file control! For democratic self-determination and of the labour and popular movement!; For the unification of the struggles of the Southern Cone of Latin America; Build the party together!” 31
As with the previous programmes put forward by the MAS for the masses, there was no call for the expropriation of the bourgeoisie, for occupations, a general strike or for the sliding scale of wages; there was not one mention of the nature of the state or of the need to create workers’ defence squads to defend strikes and occupations and prepare themselves against the intervention of the army.
Most tellingly there was no programme for resolving the “atomised dual power” which the MAS claimed to be able to detect, no unifying or centralising demands that could overcome the atomisation and create, actual, developed dual power, i.e. genuine soviet-type bodies. No, for the MAS “rank and file control” was to be limited to the democratisation of the Peronist trade unions and support for the soup kitchens. This centrist paradox has always been a hallmark of Morenoism: a wild exaggeration of the revolutionary situation and a scandalously non-revolutionary programme for intervening in it.
Despite such intoxicating illusions it was not long before the real balance of class forces in Argentina after Menem’s election made itself felt in the MAS. The riots in Rosario were not the harbinger of revolution, the Argentine masses were not flooding into the MAS.
During the next two years Menem tore up many of the traditional planks of the Peronist-CGT alliance, rooted above all in state-owned industries and public sector services. Struggles against this did occur, often bitter and protracted ones. But the intervention of the CGT bureaucracy ensured their defeat and this pointed up the glaring crisis of leadership within the working class.32
By the autumn of 1991, sections of the IWL leadership began to admit that all was not as they had foreseen. And, as always, the key was Argentina. Despite having suggested in 1990 that support for the MAS was running at 16% in the Buenos Aires region, in the October 1991 elections the MAS got a mere 2.5% of the votes. Peronism, far from being fatally split, gathered together its forces and won a decisive victory in the elections.
The IWL’s explanation was straightforward:
“When Menem came to power he embodied the mass mobilisations and, for this reason, was weak. But the simple fact of staying in government and thus preserving the bourgeois democratic regime, despite the chaotic situation, enabled him to resolve the revolutionary crisis.” 33
If the IWL had been more honest they would have said: Menem did not embody the mass mobilisations, rather he embodied the masses’ illusions that a stop could be put to Alfonsin’s programme by a return to traditional Peronist measures. In short austerity could be stopped without further mass mobilisations. The expected mass radicalisation did not come about. Menem was able to use his Peronist credentials and democratic mandate to take on and defeat the workers section by section.
The hold of Peronism over the union bureaucracy greatly aided the imposition of a horrendous austerity programme which made the Argentine masses pay for the defeat of hyper-inflation. “Menem will not be able to derail this movement” the MAS had boasted.34 And yet that is just what Menem was able to do.
Nothing had happened the way the MAS had predicted. A culprit would have to be found. Stalinism fitted the bill perfectly. First, as far as Argentina was concerned, then on the world stage. As far as the MAS’s failure was concerned, this was explained thus. The Argentine bourgeoisie, like its brothers and sisters all over the world, had launched an ideological offensive identifying Stalinism with socialism (something the Stalinists had been fairly keen on, and which the IWL had been ambiguous about).
Despite breaking the proposed joint list with the PCA shortly before the elections (because of allegations of corruption), the existence of this “electoral alliance with the Argentine CP, that is the agent of the Stalinist bureaucracy in that country, had also weakened the Argentine Trotskyists’ ability to oppose this campaign of the bourgeoisie.” 35
In other words, thanks to a lack of political differentiation by the MAS, the differences between Trotskyism and Stalinism were not obvious to the working class. The MAS’s long-term electoral identification with the PCA had finally paid off—or rather backfired.
In December 1990 the MAS held an Extraordinary Congress. The leadership was split over perspectives and programme. At the subsequent Congress, held in spring 1991, around a third of the membership formed a “Moreno-ist tendency” arguing that the seizure of power was still close, that the crisis of Stalinism and of Peronism would inevitably bring their fruits and that the electoral alliance with the PCA must be maintained at all costs.
Not surprisingly, this grouping was led by those who had gained most from the strategic electoralist perspective of Morenoism, the MAS’s two parliamentary representatives, Zamora and Diaz.
The Fourth World Congress of the IWL, held in February/March 1992 was fiercely contested. Split into four tendencies, the IWL began a process of blood-letting and factional feuding which still continues. In the firing line were the perspectives the organisation had been functioning with, which were, in fact, methodologically the continuation of those adopted in 1982.
The IWL leadership ignored this essential point and concentrated on the most obvious errors, rather than seeking to find the root of the problem. As in Argentina, the IWL pinned the blame fairly and squarely on Stalinism’s ability to bewilder the poor Trotskyists by not collapsing in the way Moreno had predicted:
“At its Second and Third Congresses (July 1989 and May 1990), the IWL(FI) adopted an orientation which, today, the whole of the International agrees was ‘globally mistaken’. The two previous Congresses had mechanically drawn from the terminal crisis of Stalinism the mistaken conclusion that ‘the hour of Trotskyism’ had sounded and that the possibility had thus opened of ‘new Octobers’—that is of revolutions led by revolutionary Marxists. This superficial and ‘objectivist’ analysis led to the main sections of the International orienting themselves towards the ‘construction of mass parties’, also posing, in the case of Argentina, the question of the preparation of ‘the struggle for power’. The balance-sheet adopted by a majority at the Fourth Congress indicated that this orientation, ultra-left in its characterisations, had in practice led to a classic opportunist deviation.” 36
The Zamora-Diaz tendency, organised into the International Moreno-ist Tendency (IMT), had around 15% of the delegates, and basically argued for the line to continue as before. No sooner had the Congress finished its work than the MAS split. Shortly before May Day the “Moreno-ist Tendency” (MT), led by Diaz and Zamora, left taking around one third of the membership with them.
This has provided the remaining MAS leaders with a perfect opportunity to restore their flagging left credibility.37 In a speech to the 1 May rally MAS leader Ernesto González stated:
“In taking advantage of elections and other success, we forgot that our raison d’être was the workers’ movement. We dedicated ourselves more to the election campaigns than to binding ourselves closely to our class. We adapted to a democracy which is not ours, which is not workers’ democracy, but an electoral and parliamentary farce of the bourgeoisie and imperialism . . . We thought that the alliances with other currents that work in the labour movement, such as the Communist Party, were more important than the consolidation of the revolutionary party. At the same time we covered over this opportunist course with a shallow and foolish analysis of the world and Argentine reality. This got worse because, at the same time, in Europe the anti-bureaucratic revolution broke out. While the Berlin Wall fell and the workers started to crush the bureaucrats and the communist parties, we appeared in front of the masses arm in arm with Patricio Echegaray [PCA leader].” 38
There is more than a hint of opportunism in this. For decades many workers identified in the USSR and Cuba some kind of “socialism” and the MAS was happy enough to accommodate to this. Now that has changed and the MAS’s previous electoral allies must be dumped.
The truth is the defection of Zamora is functional for the MAS leaders. But the critique of the electoralist deviation is still only skin deep. As long as the MAS leaders affirm the record of “maestro” Moreno up to his death, until they go to the roots of the centrist degeneration of the FI between 1948 and 1951 all the errors will return.
In the wake of the MAS’s acknowledgement that the seizure of power was not on the agenda, the sections, which had all been faultless in their defence of the MAS’s opportunism, suddenly discovered their voice and spoke out with a bitterness born of betrayal. One of the leaders of the French section, which for many years had been reduced to a publicity agency for its Argentine comrades, expressed himself in the following way:
“It was in Argentina the deviation reached its culmination. Misinterpreting the first developments of the political revolution in the East, losing their heads following organisational successes which could partly be explained by conjunctural factors . . . the leadership of the MAS launched itself into adventurist speculations about the possibility of a short-term seizure of power by the workers . . . The drift from a conjunctural tactic which should serve to break up the obstacle represented by the Argentine Stalinist party to the conception of a quasi-strategic alliance (like the policy of the USFI), [was] spectacularly expressed at the May 1990 Congress of the MAS, when a section of the leadership went so far as to envisage the formation of a common party with the PCA.” 39
More significant still, two tendencies—the Tendency for the Unity and Reorientation of the IWL, based in Brazil and Europe, and the Colombian section—criticised the IEC majority, arguing that programmatic re-elaboration was necessary.
If either of these two critical tendencies want to go to the heart of the recent errors then they must re-examine the very foundations of the IWL and the MAS. Agreeing to dissolve the tendencies and settling for another Congress in 1994 will not help the process of breaking with the past. Despite the recent turn, the IWL is far from having broken with its centrist method.
An opportunistically motivated break with Stalinist bloc partners is not the same as repudiation of the method of the “revolutionary united front” and the restless search for non-Trotskyist half-way homes to reside in. Without such a repudiation other bloc partners—such as Peronists—will be courted in the future.
Many of the criticisms voiced now inside the IWL were made three, four and even ten years ago by the LRCI. Our criticisms were indignantly rejected then by members of the IWL. Today they have adopted some of them. The IWL has said that one of the themes of its next Congress will be “programmatic re-elaboration”. Three years ago, whilst the IWL was dreaming of taking power in Buenos Aires, the LRCI actually performed this fundamental programmatic task.
Our re-elaborated Transitional Programme, the Trotskyist Manifesto, provides many of the answers the revolutionary critics in and around the IWL are looking for. Our tradition, our intervention and our critical analyses can aid comrades who have seen through Morenoism but have not lost the ability to think and the will to struggle.
If we were to reach programmatic unity and a common democratic centralist discipline this would be a great leap forward in the work of reviving authentic Trotskyism. A starting point must be a critical examination of the whole history of Morenoism, and its roots in the centrist degeneration of the Fourth International.
NOTES
1 Less than a year earlier, amidst much pomp, they had fused with Pierre Lambert’s international organisation to set up the Fourth International (International Committee) (FI-IC). The FI-IC had been greeted by its creators as “the greatest step forward since the creation of the Communist International”. Within nine months the FI-IC had split into its component parts, blown apart by the political differences which it had sought to paper over.
2 See Trotskyist International 1, Summer 1988, for our critique of Morenoism up to 1979
3 LST (France) Bulletin Interne 4, p5
4 LST (France) Bulletin Interne, 29.9.83
5 Quoted in R Munck, Latin America: The Transition to Democracy (London 1989, p107)
6 “Projet de document national” (15.9.82) Bulletin Interne LST (France), N° 5, 1982, p9
7 Ibid., p12
8 Ibid. This opportunist project was not new. In 1972 Moreno had formed the PST by fusing with Carlos Coral’s social-democratic Partido Socialista d’Argentina.
9 L. Trotsky, The crisis of the French section (New York 1977) p97
10 Solidaridad Socialista 22.4.83
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid
13 MAS Internal Circular N° 27, 4.11.83
14 Tribune Ouvrière, 20.5.83, p4
15 This included 42,359 votes in the presidential elections.
16 Tribune Ouvrière 17, October 1983, p4. Despite this assertion, the key slogans advanced by the MAS for 1984, far from centering on the question of taking power as might be expected, were essentially economic demands calling for pay increases, for the reinstatement of workers sacked during the military junta, for factory meetings and the election of shop stewards. This failure to take its own analysis seriously suggests that, at most, Argentina was going through a pre-revolutionary situation in 1983-84. MAS Central Committee perspectives document 8.12.83
17 After all, Moreno had already gone through the process once before, following the failure of the initial PST bloc with Coral to attract the masses.
18 MAS Internal Circular N° 27, 4.11.83, p1
19 See R Munck op. cit.
20 MAS Internal Circular N° 27, 4.11.83, p1
21 Tribune Ouvrière 30, 29.11.85, p20
22 Tribune Ouvrière 52, July 1988, p12
23 Ibid.
24 For a reproduction of the IU programme and our full critique, see Trotskyist International 3, Summer 1989, p58-62
25 International Courier 38, January 1989, p37
26 Courrier International, November 1989, p28
27 Tribune Ouvrière 59, September 1989, p2
28 Tribune Ouvrière 60, October 1989, p5
29 Ibid., p4
30 Tribune Ouvrière 60, October 1989, pp8-10
31 Ibid., pp9-10
32 See the comments on Argentina in the article on South America in this issue.
33 Coordination 10, November 1991, p7
34 International Courier, November 1989, p21
35 Coordination 10, November 1991, p8
36 Coordination 14, April 1992, p6
37 Hoping that the rank and file will not remember Moreno’s conception of the MAS, they have had the cheek to claim that “the MT defended the conception of a ‘party of action’, the politics of which would be expressed in three or four slogans, as against the Leninist-Trotskyist-Morenoite(!) conception of a party of socialism with a transitional programme, building itself through a combination of agitational, propagandistic and organisational tasks.”
Coordination Supplément International 5, May 1992, p23
38 Solidaridad Socialista 6.5.92
39 Coordination Supplément International 5, May 1992, p23
Note by the Editor: The following article has been published by the predecessor organization of the RCIT (the League for a Revolutionary Communist International; later renamed into League for the Fifth International) in 2006. The founding cadres of the RCIT have been expelled from the LFI in 2011 when the protested against the centrist degeneration of this organization.
* * * * *
In mid-October 1956 students in Szeged marched for the right to form their own organisation independent of party control. They also struck against the compulsory learning of Russian. The students of Budapest’s Technological University followed with a demonstration on the 23 October in solidarity with Poland.
The 23 October demonstration was the spark that lit the Hungarian revolution. The government asked the leaders of the Petofi circle, a discussion circle led by members of the Communist Party’s youth organisation that had been banned just a few months earlier, to lead the demonstration.
Balazs Nagy (later known as the Trotskyist Michel Vargas) said: “At this time, and subsequently also, the Petofi circle curbed rather than encouraged the movement, considering that the hastening of events could lead to a catastrophe."
From 1953 the leadership of the Hungarian Communist Party was split between Matyas Rakosi, the leader since the Stalinists came to power after the war, and Imre Nagy who wanted to pursue a policy called the New Course, which called for greater spending on consumer goods and would allow farmers to leave the collective farms. This struggle was given added impetus by the death of head of the Soviet Union Stalin and his denounciation by his successor Kruchshev in February 1956.
Throughout Eastern Europe, the Stalinists had expropriated capitalism after the war but created regimes that had no workers’ democracy and were instead ruled by Stalinist bureaucracies. Under Stalinism workers had been denied democratic rights including the right to strike or to form their own organsiations, and faced repression for criticising the regimes. In the factories, members of the party militia and trade unions policed workers, and suppressed any fightback against exploitation.
Krushchev’s speech gave the green light to the opposition in Eastern Europe to take to the streets. In June and July 1956, there were a series of strikes in Sepal and Budapest. On 28 July the workers of Poznan, Poland, demonstrated but were brutally fired upon by the internal security forces which killed 54 and wounded at least 300.
In Hungary it erupted again with the student demonstrations of October. “Now or never - Most vagy Soha - became one of the slogans of the uprising. The students presented 16 demands, including “New leadership, new direction, require new leaders!", “We shall not stop halfway - we will destroy Stalinism", and “Worker-peasant power!’. The masses also called for Imre Nagy, who had been expelled from the central committee at the beginning of the year, to be reinstated.
The 23 October demonstration moved to the radio station where the crowds wanted their demands broadcasted. There the AVH (secret political police) opened fire on the demonstrators who returned fire from arms provided by fraternising Hungarians troops.
Now Nagy appeared, after refusing to attend the demonstration. His speech to the crowd showed how alien his bureaucratic outlook was from that of the students and workers. He said: “It is by negotiation in the bosom of the party and by the discussion of problems that we will travel the road that leads toward the settlement of our conflicts. We want to safeguard constitutional order and discipline. The government will not delay in arriving at its decision."
Faced with a massive demonstration, active fraternisation between workers and soldiers, including soviet soldiers, and armed clashes with the AVH, the Stalinists called on Soviet troops to restore order in Budapest and declared martial law. They also called on Nagy to head a new government.
Meanwhile groups of workers were already doing battle with Soviet tanks on the streets of Budapest. Throughout the length and breadth of Hungary, the workers responded to the Soviet intervention with strike action. By 26 October, virtually all work had stopped. Moreover these days saw the formation of workers’ councils in every factory and mine and also the link up of those councils into the regional revolutionary committees in major industrial centres, such as Gyor and Miskolc.
The revolutionary committees of Gyor and Miskolc also controlled local radio stations and broadcasted messages of solidarity to the Soviet troops.
Miskolc declared: “Our people did not revolt against you, but for the achievement of legal demands. Our interests are identical. We and you are all fighting together for a better socialist life."
Gyor workers committee addressed soviet soldiers with: "Soviet soldiers! We the workers from the railroad factory in Gyor inform you that in our democratic state, workers are the guardians of the socialist achievements. That means with all their might, they are speaking out against returning factories and banks to the capitalists. At the same time we are against any Rakosite Stalinist restoration."
These statements were typical of the workers: on the one hand wanting to preserve socialism against the capitalists but also fighting for democratic and political rights against a military clampdown.
In most areas the workers’ councils busied themselves with local or factory problems involved in maintaining the general strike and giving critical support to Nagy. The leaders of the movement saw their committees as alternative local government but ceded central political power to Nagy and his reformist faction in the Communist Party.
While the working class base of the party and certain elements of its apparatus went over to the insurrection, its leading circles sought desperately to diffuse the crisis and re-establish bureaucratic rule - behind Soviet tanks.
The repression of the uprising
At the end of October, under the pressure of the masses the Stalinists appointed Imre Nagy as Prime Minister. The country had been brought to a standstill by a general strike. The masses had driven out the hated secret police, the ÁVH, and were demanding the withdrawal of the Soviet troops.
The Soviet troops had been brought in swiftly from western Hungary to crush the uprising, evoking a non-existent clause of the Warsaw Treaty, but the soldiers quickly began fraternising with the locals. They had been in the country for some time and knew far more about the situation than the troops of the second intervention that were rushed in from Rumania. Many Soviet soldiers deserted to the Hungarians.
Each day the papers printed reports from the provinces that showed that the revolt was nationwide. Revolutionary councils were formed in the principle towns: Debrecen, Györ, Magyaróvár, Tatabánya, Miskolc, and Veszprém. Power was in the workers hands, as well as the railways, which refused to transport Soviet troops and supplies.
The Stalinists frantically tried to regain control as the Soviet intervention was falling apart. Then Nagy played the role he was brought in to play – to calm the situation, to call an end to the fighting, and to disarm the working class. He announced that the next election would be under the multi-party system; he called on the Soviet troops to withdraw from the capital and promised to begin negotiations for a complete withdrawal from the country. He recognised the organs set up by the revolution and asked for their support.
On 31 October, the fighting ended and the Soviet troops began to leave Budapest. The insurgents were releasing political prisoners – up to 5,500 were freed. Budapest began to look more like normal – the buses started running and work was beginning again in the large factories.
Although some budding revolutionary organisations, many formed from ex-members of the Communist Party, warned that the freedom fighters should not to lay down their arms until the demands of the revolution had been fully implemented, after a decade of severe state repression, their organisations were weak and they did not have the influence needed to lead the struggle.
The masses also believed that Nagy could resolve the issue of state power and so the workers’ councils refused to challenge him and the Stalinists for political power. The committees saw themselves as potential alternative local government but ceded central political power to Nagy.
At this point the effective power in Hungary was divided between the Nagy government and the armed people themselves, as represented and led by their national committees. It was dual power. But without a political party with a revolutionary programme that laid out in concrete terms the need for revolution, to struggle for power with the Nagy government, to call for “All Power to the Workers Councils”, to smash the stranglehold of the Stalinist bureaucrats and re-order society, the revolution would stall and eventually fail.
Nagy of course had no intention to resolve the question of power in the hands of the workers. “My friends, the revolution has been victorious,” he told a mass demonstration in front of the parliament on 31 October. He demobilised the people and lulled them into the belief that the struggle was over. Yet, at that moment, Nagy was in secret negotiations with Russian officers and their troops were already on their way back on the eve of 1 November.
Hungary was important for geo-political reasons, it was an important buffer for the Russians from the West, it was industrialised and had natural resources. But above all, if the they lost control of Hungary then revolutionary movements would spring up across all Soviet Republics, as was seen in Poland earlier in the year. It was necessary to repress the Hungarian uprising before the unravelling began.
On 2 November, the Soviet media launched an all-out attack against Nagy and the “clique of counter-revolutionaries who had come to power in Hungary”. On 4 November, after the Hungarian delegation had been arrested, the Soviet army launched a surprise attack on Budapest at dawn. Armed resistance was hastily organised but it was powerless to stop the Soviet forces.
Janos Kádár, the first secretary of the central committee of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (the re-named Stalinist party) announced that a new government had been formed which has appealed for the Soviet Union for military assistance: “The Hungarian Government of Revolutionary Workers and Peasants requests the assistance of the Soviet Army Command in helping our nation smash the forces of reaction and restore law and order to the country in the interest of our people, the working class and the peasantry.” Nagy sought political asylum in the Yugoslav embassy.
Despite a general strike and fierce street fighting against superior Soviet armoured units, the Soviet’s military intervention was effectively over by 10-11 November. Young workers accounted for 80 to 90 per cent of the wounded, while students represented 3 – 5 per cent. Nearly 20,000 Hungarians were killed and there was aerial bombardment of the major proletarian strongholds.
The workers tried to prolong the revolution by forming the Central Workers’ Council on 14 November, but it was too late – Stalinists had regained control and the repression began again. Thousands of people were sent to prison and Soviet forced labour camps. Some 2,00 people were executed.
The events of October and November 1956 in Hungary showed the workers’ and students’ will to fight when they took up arms against two Soviet military interventions. They toppled a hated Stalinist government and smashed the secret police, the ÁVH. They created workers and revolutionary councils that became the real power in every factory and most localities.
The workers organisations and the government were in a struggle for power and a dual power situation developed. The Hungarian revolution showed that without a revolutionary programme -and a political party to fight for it – the spontaneity of the masses could not develop a strategy to take power and the uprising was crushed.
The tragedy of the Hungarian revolution was that the workers were unable to create a revolutionary leadership and programme of action that could establish a government and take power to defend the political revolution and extend it to the rest of Eastern Europe and the USSR.
Revolutionär-Kommunistischen Organisation zur Befreiung (RKOB), 9. November 2011
Vor 55 Jahren, genauer gesagt im Oktober und November des Jahres 1956, fand in Ungarn ein Aufstand statt, der in seiner Größe zum damaligen Zeitpunkt eine Einmaligkeit darstellte. Noch nie zuvor in der Geschichte, hatte sich eine dermaßen breite Volksbewegung, noch dazu derart deutlich, gegen die stalinistische Unterdrückung in einem Ostblockland aufgelehnt. Es waren die ArbeiterInnen, Bauern und Bäuerinnen selbst - aber auch die StudentInnen -, die diese Bewegung vorwärts trieben, und eine verhaßte stalinistische Regierung zu Sturz brachten. Es kam zur Bildung von revolutionären ArbeiterInnen- und Bauernräten, die auch die meisten Fabriken und Agrosiedlungen kontrollierten. Leider aber endete diese hoffnungsvolle Massenbewegung in einem Meer von Blut, ohne viel bewirkt zu haben. Die Geschehnisse des Herbstes 1956 in Ungarn stellen sicherlich weit mehr dar, als nur die Auflehnung der Bevölkerung gegen eine ungeliebte Regierung, vielmehr waren sie eine der wenigen Chancen in der Geschichte der Arbeiterschaft in den stalinistischen Staaten Osteuropas die verhaßte, alles beherrschende Bürokratie durch die direkte Herrschaft der ProduzentInnen (ArbeiterInnen, Bauern und BäuerInnen) zu ersetzen.
Nach dem Tod Stalins im Jahre 1953, gab es einen gewissen Kurswechsel in Moskau. Die neue “kollektive” Führung (Troika) unter Malenkow, Chrustschow und Mikojan traute sich nicht, die Stalinsche Politik der äußerst harschen Konfrontation mit den ArbeiterInnen fortzusetzen. Letztlich braucht auch das stalinistische Terrorregime ein gewisses Ausmaß an Unterstützung oder zumindest Neutralität innerhalb der Massen. Folglich verkündete die neue Kremlführung eine (freilich limitierte) Lockerung der Repression, ein Aufholen der Konsumgüterindustrie gegenüber der Schwerindustrie und Zugeständnisse an jene Bauern und Bäuerinnen, die den Kollektivfarmen ablehnend gegenüberstanden.
In den osteuropäischen Ländern hielten die StalinistInnen seit dem Einmarsch der sowjetischen Armee in den letzten Kriegsjahren de facto den Staatsapparat in den Händen. Um ihre Macht nicht zu verlieren, sahen sie sich zu Beginn des Kalten Krieges Ende der 1940er Jahre gezwungen, den UnternehmerInnen die Betriebe wegzunehmen um mittels bürokratischer Wirtschaftspläne das kapitalistische Wertgesetz außer Kraft zu setzen. An dieser sozialen Revolution konnte die ArbeiterInnenklasse selbst nicht mitwirken - im Gegenteil, die StalinistInnen an den Schalthebel der Macht unterdrückten schon seit Kriegsende jede größere, eigenständige Bewegung der Massen. Das war auch der Grund, weshalb die Planwirtschaft an den realen Bedürfnissen und Möglichkeiten der arbeitenden Bevölkerung völlig vorbeiging, den utopischen Projekten der BürokratInnen (“Sozialismus in einem Land”) und den Privilegien der KP-Nomenklatur diente und daher zu ständigen Engpässen und Wirtschaftskrisen führte, deren Folgen dann erst recht wieder bürokratisch unterdrückt werden mußten.
Der “neue Kurs” in Moskau kam natürlich auch in den osteuropäischen Ländern zur Anwendung, nur hatte er dort weitreichendere Auswirkungen. Weshalb? Weil es in diesen Staaten eine unter Stalins Lebzeiten an den Rand gedrängte Fraktion innerhalb der stalinistischen KPs gab, die einen relativ unabhängigen Weg gegenüber Moskau gehen wollten. Ihr Vorbild war Titos Jugoslawien, das die Staatsmacht ja unabhängig von der sowjetischen Armee erobert hatte und daher nicht Wirtschaftsverträge mit der Sowjetunion, die eindeutig zum ökonomischen Vorteil Moskaus geschaffen wurden, eingehen mußte und keine Reparationszahlungen zu leisten hatten. Diese “national-stalinistischen” Fraktionen waren natürlich nicht weniger bürokratisch, erfreuten sich aber einer gewissen Popularität unter den Massen, weshalb sie auch in den Augen der Troika besser geeignet schienen, die stalinistische Herrschaft zu stabilisieren.
Ungarn Anfang der 1950er Jahre
In Ungarn wiederum war die “national-stalinistische” Fraktion extrem beliebt und Stalins Statthalter extrem unbeliebt. Das hängt damit zusammen, daß Ungarn bis in die 1940er Jahre vorwiegend ein Agrarland war und daher unglaubliche Arbeitshetze und politische Repression am Arbeitsplatz notwendig waren, um mittels des Arbeitsschweiß der ArbeiterInnen eine umfangreiche Schwerindustrie in nur wenigen Jahren aus den Boden zu stampfen. Viele Bauern und Bäuerinnen wurden in unproduktiven Kooperativen gezwungen und trauerten ihrer eigenen Scholle nach. Die Preise von landwirtschaftlichen Produkten wurden gemäß den Akkumulationsinteressen der Schwerindustrie festgelegt.
Es ist daher kein Zufall, daß der unbeliebteste Politiker dieser Zeit der “kleine Stalin” namens Rakosi war. Dieser lenkte die Geschicke der KP seit 1948, und führte das Land so nebenbei sozial in den Abgrund. Ihn völlig abzuservieren war der Moskauer Troika aber doch zu riskant und so einigte man sich 1953 darauf, als Zeichen der Erneuerung einen neuen Premier einzusetzen.
Dieser hieß Imre Nagy. Er konnte dem rechten Flügel innerhalb des Stalinismus zugeordnet werden, wurde aber bald zum Volksheld. Warum? Noch gar nicht lange im Amt, wurde er bereits 1955 wieder entlassen, und zog so das Wohlwollen der ArbeiterInnen und StudentInnen auf sich, sah man ihn doch als Rivalen des verhaßten Rakosi an. Abgesehen davon stand Nagys Unterschrift unter der ersten richtigen Bodenreform Ungarns kurz nach dem zweiten Weltkrieg. Den Adel und den Großgrundbesitz entmachtet zu haben - eine fortschrittliche bürgerliche Aufgabe, zu der das ungarische Bürgertum politisch immer zu schwach war - das vergaß die Landbevölkerung aber auch die “Bauern in Fabrikskittel” nicht.
Dem Aufstand entgegen
Große Wellen schlug damals auch der Fall “Rajk”. Rajk war innerhalb der ArbeiterInnenschaft relativ beliebt, weil er die ungarischen KP in der Illegalität während der deutschen Besatzung geleitet hatte, während sich Rakosi die Zeit im Moskauer Exil mit der Denunzierung von ArbeiterInnenführern an den Geheimdienst NKWD vertrieb. Die Popularität Rajks unter den ungarischen ArbeiterInnen ging der sowjetischen Führung dann doch zu weit, und er wurde nach Moskau ins “Exil” verfrachtet.
1954 wurde dann der sogenannte Petofi-Zirkel gegründet, ein offeneres Diskussionsforum, welches der bürokratischen Führung des Landes natürlich ein Dorn im Auge war. Also erzwang man - mit einer Welle von Verhaftungen - im Juni 1956 die Schließung des Petofi-Zirkels, der nachhaltig die Rede- und Pressefreiheit, sowie die Rückkehr Nagys in sein Amt gefordert hatte. Dies erzürnte natürlich auch die ArbeiterInnen.
Ermutigt durch die großen Streiks, die zur selben Zeit in Polen stattfanden, streikte man daraufhin auch in Budapest - und Moskau mußte erneut reagieren. Diesmal brachte man statt Rakosi einen gewissen Gero, der dessen bravster Gefolgsmann war.
Doch die ArbeiterInnen ließen sich nicht mehr täuschen: Am 6. Oktober war es soweit. Über 20.0000 Menschen demonstrierten für die Rückkehr Nagys nach Budapest. Rote Fahnen in den Händen der proletarischen Jugend waren zu sehen, und man konnte den Spruch lesen: “Wir werden erst aufgeben, wenn der Stalinismus zerstört ist”.
Und dann die Demonstration am 23. Oktober: Geführt vom Petofi-Zirkel, sang man die Internationale und forderte “Nagy an die Macht, Rakosi in die Donau”. Angesichts solcher Ausschreitungen, und insbesondere auch unter dem Gesichtspunkt der zunehmenden Verbrüderung zwischen ArbeiterInnen und Soldaten, hatte die ungarische KP akuten Handlungsbedarf, welcher sich folgendermaßen äußerte: Erstens forderte man Truppen vom großen Bruder aus Moskau an und zweitens brachte man Nagy tatsächlich erneut ins Amt, in der Hoffnung er könne die Massen alsbald beruhigen.
Aber nichts dergleichen war mehr möglich. Als die ungarischen Sicherheitskräfte unbewaffnete DemonstrantInnen aus dem Hinterhalt erschossen, strömte die Menge zu den Kasernen. Es bedurfte nicht langer Erklärungen, um die ungarischen Soldaten zu der Herausgabe von Waffen zu bewegen. Der Aufstand war ausgebrochen. Russische Panzer wurden losgeschickt, die auch auf Frauen und Kinder schossen, die sich um Brot anstellten.
Doch mitunter kam es anders. Denn auch die sowjetischen Soldaten waren nicht die blinden Kampfmaschinen, die sich Gero & Co. erhofft hatten. In der Erwartung, aus der Sowjetunion geschickt worden zu sein, um einen faschistischen Aufstand niederzuschlagen, mußte die Soldaten nur zu bald die Erfahrung machen, daß es sich hier um das pure Gegenteil handelte, nämlich um fortschrittliche, kämpfende ArbeiterInnen. Ein wichtiges Ereignis fand in dieser Hinsicht am 25. Oktober statt, als die sowjetischen Soldaten eine Gruppe jubelnder DemonstrantInnen zum Parlament geleitete und von den umliegenden Hausdächern durch ungarische Sicherheitskräfte beschossen wurden. Dabei starben 100 ZivilistInnen und russische Soldaten.
Mitunter wechselten selbst KP-Funktionäre die Fronten: Major Maleter, ein alter Spanienkämpfer, schilderte im Radio den Aufstands, den er mit seinen Truppen eigentlich niederschlagen hätte sollen: “Als ich dort hinkam, entdeckte ich, daß die Kämpfer für die Freiheit keineswegs Banditen sind, sondern vielmehr loyale Kinder Ungarns. Darum informierte ich das Verteidigungsministerium, daß ich mich den Aufständischen anschließen werde.” Ein anderes Mal sagte der Major: “Wenn wir die Russen endlich los sind, kehren wir sicher nicht zu den alten Zeiten zurück. Wir wollen nicht den Kapitalismus. In Ungarn wollen wir Sozialismus.” Diese Aussagen beweisen einmal mehr, daß die Aufständischen keineswegs „Agenten des Imperialismus“ oder „Faschisten“ waren (wie es die stalinistischen Bürokraten behaupteten), sondern für einen demokratischeren ArbeiterInnenstaat kämpften.
ArbeiterInnenräte
Ab 26. Oktober wurde die Arbeit total niedergelegt, Massenstreiks breiteten sich aus, was sehr bald zu Betriebsbesetzungen führte, um der Bürokratie ein Weiterlaufen der Fabriksmaschinen zu verunmöglichen. Spontan entstanden Koordinationsformen für diese Aufgaben: Räte. Auf dem flachen Land bildeten sich Bauern- und Bäuerinnenkomitees. Diese Räte und Komitees, die innerhalb kurzer Zeit überall in Ungarn aus dem Boden sprossen, waren das Herz der Revolution. Niemand konnte bisher flexiblere und effektivere Instrumente des Aufstandes “erfinden”, als es die Räte sind, in die die Massen KämpferInnen ihres Vertrauens entsandten.
Politisch gesehen waren die ungarischen Räte 1956 nicht geeint, sie stellten mitunter ziemlich unterschiedliche, auch lokale Forderungen auf. Das ist auch nicht verwunderlich, alles mußte schnell gehen, unmittelbare politische Erfahrungen gab es keine; von einer Partei, die den Aufstand angeleitet hätte, ganz zu schweigen. Insgesamt aber gab es innerhalb der Räte kaum Stimmen für eine Wiederherstellung des Kapitalismus oder ein Zurück hinter die Landreform.
Viele Forderungen waren eindeutig gegen die politische Repression durch den Stalinismus gerichtet (Rede- und Organisationsfreiheit), andere waren eher ein Reaktion gegen den bürokratischen Zentralismus in der Wirtschaft (Selbstverwaltung der Betriebe). Wandere Losungen forderten den Abzug der russischen Truppen sowie den Austritt Ungarns aus dem Warschauer Pakt - nationale Selbstbestimmung war neben den Kampf gegen die heimische stalinistische Repression überhaupt ein zentraler Motor.
Die Massen in Waffen und der politische Druck der Räte und Komitees zwangen die sowjetischen Truppen vorerst zum Abzug (31. Oktober). Ein erster Sieg für die Revolution.
Verrat und Niederlage
Trotz dieses enormen Potentials, hielten die Massen an einer - teilweise kritischen - Unterstützung für Nagy fest. Das ist auch nicht weiter verwunderlich, weil sich die Nagy-Fraktion – auch wenn sie ein überzeugter Stalinist war und somit dem System angehörte, das sie bekämpfen wollten – jahrelang innerhalb der KP-Bürokratie als Alternative gebärden konnte. Sie war ja auch nicht an der Macht gewesen und somit konnten die breiten Massen in der kurzen Zeit keine ausreichenden Erfahrungen mit ihr sammeln. Nun an die Macht gekommen, trieb die Nagy-Fraktion teils vor den Massen her (Nagy erklärte Ungarn für neutral und erkannte die Räte formal an), teils versuchte sie den Aufstand zu sabotieren (Nagy verkündete das Standrecht).
So benutzte Nagy das Vertrauen, das ihm von den Aufständischen entgegengebracht wurde. Aufgrund ihrer materiellen Lage als Teil der privilegierten Bürokratie wollte die Nagy-Führung natürlich nicht die erstarrte Bürokratie durch ArbeiterInnenräte ersetzen. Sie tat stattdessen das, was im Stalinismus immer bei solchen Gelegenheiten passiert: Um ja zu verhindern daß es zu einem gesunden ArbeiterInnenstaat kam, ging sie eine Koalition mit offen bürgerlichen und reaktionären Kräften ein. Am 27. Oktober präsentierte er seine neue Regierung, die zum Beispiel SozialdemokratInnen enthielt.
Gut möglich, daß dies als Fenster in Richtung Imperialismus gedacht war. Doch die ganze (auch internationale) Konstellation ließ in den 1950er Jahren eine Wiederherstellung des Kapitalismus noch nicht zu. Blieb für die ungarische KP (und ironischerweise auch für Nagy selbst!) nur Moskau.
Dafür mußte innerhalb der KP natürlich ein neuer Mann her - dieser hieß Kadar. Mit Hilfe neuer russischer Truppen aus Asien “normalisierte” er die Verhältnisse. Am 4. November beginnt die russische Armee einen konzentrierten Angriff auf Budapest. Die Revolution hat gegen diese Übermacht keine Chance und wird in die Defensive gedrängt.
Monatelang wehren sich noch die ungarischen ArbeiterInnen mit Streiks und passiven Widerstand. Am 14. November 1956 wird der „Zentrale Arbeiterrat von Budapest“ gegründet. Noch im Dezember ruft dieser Arbeiterrat zu einem 48-stündigen Generalstreik auf. Doch letztlich erstickte der Aufstand unter der Stahllawine sowjetischen Militärgeräts.
Fehlen einer revolutionären Partei
Der ungarische ArbeiterInnenaufstand 1956 war ein zentrales Ereignis der Nachkriegsgeschichte und einer der heroischsten Versuche des Proletariats, die grausame Herrschaft der stalinistischen Bürokratie zu stürzen und durch einen gesunden, sozialistischen ArbeiterInnenstaat zu ersetzen. Doch trotz der Entschlossenheit der Massen zum Kampf gegen die Bürokratie und der Schaffung von Räten der ArbeiterInnen und Bauern/Bäuerinnen endete die Revolution in einer Niederlage.
Die Hauptursache für diese Niederlage war das Fehlen einer revolutionären Partei. Die Massen waren spontan in der Lage, die Regierung zu stürzen und Räte aufzubauen. Doch spontan konnten sie natürlich nicht ein Programm der Errichtung der tatsächlichen Diktatur des Proletariats – also der Machtergreifung der ArbeiterInnenklasse und nicht der Kapitalisten oder der Bürokraten – entwickeln und die dafür notwendigen Taktiken ableiten. Ein solches Programm erfordert die wissenschaftliche Aufarbeitung der geschichtlichen Erfahrungen des internationalen Klassenkampfes, die Ausbildung von Kadern, die diese Lehren verstehen und in der Lage anzuwenden sind, und die im Proletariat verankert sind. Eine solche revolutionäre Partei existierte nicht und das war die fatale Schwäche der ungarischen Revolution.
Eine solche Partei hätte eine systematische Zersetzungsarbeit in der sowjetischen Armee eingeleitet, den Aufbau von ArbeiterInnen- und Bauernmilizen vorangetrieben und ein klares Programm der auf ArbeiterInnenräte und –milizen gestützten Regierung entwickelt. Sie hätte die Einheitsfronttaktik gegenüber der Fraktion Nagy betrieben und gleichzeitig vor deren unausweichlichen Verrat und Unzulänglichkeit gewarnt.
Die Revolutionär-Kommunistische Organisation zur Befreiung (RKOB) tritt für den Aufbau einer solchen revolutionären Partei ein. Wir können dem Heldenmut und dem sozialistischen Streben der ungarischen Arbeiterinnen und Arbeiter am besten dadurch gedenken, im dem wir heute entschlossen und organisiert für die Sache der internationalen ArbeiterInnenrevolution kämpfen.
Anmerkung der Redaktion: Wir haben diesen Artikel erstmals in unserer damaligen Zeitung ArbeiterInnenstandpunkt im Oktober 2006 veröffentlicht und für diese Ausgabe überarbeitet und erweitert.
by the League for the Revolutionary Communist International (LRCI) and the Trotskyist Faction, 30.06.1996
Note by the Editor: The following document is a resolution adopted by the predecessor organization of the RCIT (the League for a Revolutionary Communist International) and the Trotskyist Faction (an international tendency around the PTS in Argentina) in 1996.
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In March the LRCI and the Trotskyist Faction agreed a joint declaration on the Russian occupation of Chechnya. This statement is part of the process of regroupment discussions set out by both tendencies in December 1995
In mid-January the war in Chechnya once again exploded, shaking Russia’s political system to its foundations.
When a 250-300 strong unit of guerrilla fighters loyal to Chechen president Dzhokar Dudayev —the “lone wolves”—launched a raid on an airfield in Kizlyar in neighbouring Dagestan. Forced to retreat they first occupied a hospital taking patients and a platoon of Russian OMON “special forces” as hostages.
After negotiations they departed in a fleet of buses for the Chechen border. A potentially disastrous humiliation faced Yeltsin, already beleaguered after the December elections in which the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and assorted Great Russian nationalists trounced the radical market reformers. At the same time a wave of teachers strikes was coming to a head and the first national miners strike (over unpaid wages), since 1989, took place and Yeltsin was forced to quickly cave in. Since the elections Yeltsin has dismissed market reformers and pro-western officials like Anatoly Chubais and Andrei Kosyrev. Playing the Great Russian nationalist strong leader he announced he would crush the “Chechen bandits”.
Unfortunately for Yeltsin, Russian “crack units” bungled the task and the Chechen fighters successfully dug-in with their hostages at the border village of Pervomayskoye.
Three days of all out attack by the Alpha units of elite Russian assault troops failed totally to take it from the Chechen guerrilla fighters. Yeltsin then ordered a murderous bombardment by Grad multiple rocket launchers killing not only Chechen fighters but also hostages and villagers who remained.
Yeltsin proclaimed a great victory yet within days it was revealed that more than a hundred of the Chechen fighters, including their leader (Dudayev’s relative, Salman Budayev), had escaped from Pervomayskoye. The whole bloody fiasco brought down a storm of criticism on Yeltsin. But beyond the partial criticisms of this or that episode in the war, all political wings of the restorationist bureaucracy in Russia (from the CP to the liberal leaders of Yavlinsky, from Yeltsin and Chernomydin to the fascist Zhironovsky that urged him to “napalm Chechnya”) have placed themselves in the camp of Great Russian oppressor nationalism against the oppressed Chechen nation. For all these forces the war is for “reasons of state”. If Yeltsin has not fallen due to the great crisis into which Yeltsin has been put by the brave resistance of the Chechen people it is due precisely to the support “in the last instance” that his political rivals have extended him; all of them defend oppressor Great Russian chauvinism and are enemies of the self-determination of the oppressed peoples. Yet within weeks of the bloody fiasco at Pervomayskoe thousands of Dudayev supporters were demonstrating in Grozny in front of the wrecked presidential palace. By mid- February Russian troops were again making heavy work of surrounding and storming another guerrilla unit at Novogroznensky. Clearly the Russian army, divided and demoralised is unable to win a decisive victory over a small but courageous people fighting for its independence.
Conquest of Chechnya
The recent fighting is only the latest of a series of brutal attempts to crush the struggle for national independence by the Chechen people. Just over a year ago (11 Dec. 1994) Yeltsin sent the Russian armies into the mountain republic. The capital Grozny, with a mixed Chechen and Russian population of 400,000, was subjected to a savage bombing. But the land assault on the city turned into a near fiasco. Lightly armed Chechen fighters fought the Russian tanks street by street, destroying many of them and inflicting many casualties. Yeltsin mercilessly bombarded housing blocks and government buildings to rubble. Thousands of civilians were killed or injured and 400,000 refugees from Chechnya have fled into neighbouring republics of Ingushetia and Dagestan. Large numbers of Russian conscript soldiers met their death or suffered maiming whilst Yeltsin cruelly concealed their fate from their families. By January 1995 4,000 Russian troops had been killed and 5,000 injured in just over one year of war. Civilian casualties in Grozny alone were given as 8,500 in the same period (Nizavisimaya Gazzeta 30.1.’95)
For six months the Chechen fighters— commanded by Dudayev— held out in the presidential palace and the survivors broke through the encircling Russian forces and withdrew into the mountains.
Up to 60,000 are waging a guerrilla war against the Russian army of occupation. In June 1995 a unit humiliated the Russians by taking hostages in Budyonovsk in southern Russia. The Russians, however, installed a puppet regime in Chechnya, headed by Doku Zavgayev, the pre-1991 Stalinist leader of Chechen-Ingushetia. In December it was recently “legitimised” by a blatantly rigged election.
Dzhokar Dudayev is, according to Yeltsin, simply a gangster guilty of siphoning off his country’s resources to amass a huge personal fortune and linked to the so-called “mafia”. If this is true then he differs little from Russia’s rulers.
Minister of Defence Pavel Grachev is under suspicion of wholesale corruption during the Soviet exodus from Eastern Europe. Virtually all politicians in power in the former CIS states, virtually every banker or “businessman” is connected with the criminal gangs who go under the collective name mafia. Dudayev, whatever his reliance on the Chechen mafia, is also a nationalist politician, even a North Caucasian nationalist, militantly opposed to Russian rule over all the republics of the region.
Dudayev’s party Vainakh (Our people) won the 27 October elections with 85% of the votes against the Islamists (Islamic Revival Party), the Greens and other parties. A week later he proclaimed Chechnya’s independence and when the Ingush objected allowed them to secede peacefully. Dudayev originally won mass support by opposing both the old nomenklatura and the new privatising businessmen. Nevertheless he only wishes to seize the state assests for himself and his clique. Chechen (and Russian) workers have no reason to place any trust whatsoever in Dudayev. He is just as much an agent of capitalist restoration as Yeltsin and his agent Zavgayev. The republic was riven from the outset with factionalism between various clans and local mafias—fomented from Moscow. At one point there were nine large armed bands operating in the republic.
In early 1992 MVD and KGB troops flew into Grozny and abortively attempted to overthrow Dudayev. Met with a mass mobilisation of the armed populace they had to surrender and were bundled out of the country in humiliating circumstances. This merely gave Dudayev manifest reasons to refuse to sign the new Russian Federative treaty on 31 March 1992. Yeltsin proclaimed that this intervention was prompted by their concern for the Russian minority living in Chechnya yet there is no evidence that the country’s 300,000 Slav population were subject to any persecution or discrimination.
Since then Yeltsin has bankrolled every opposition and supervised Russian secret service operations. He imposed an air blockade and, with less effect, a land blockade in 1993. The Anti-Dudayev forces did make progress within Chechnya over the next two years. Dudayev’s regime narrowed rapidly into a military bonapartist dictatorship, dependent only on certain clans and more and more on the so-called Chechen mafia. This is in part because social base for Dudayev amongst a potential new ruling class was very narrow.
The former ruling bureaucrats, the Chechen nomenklatura continued to support Doku Zavgayev and his new master Yeltsin, whilst the pro-market intelligentsia opposed Dudayev because he would not privatise industry and the natural resources and instead imposed heavy taxes on profits. In addition his support amongst the workers and the poor, to whom he had made demagogic promises in 1991, declined sharply. The intervention of Ruslan Khasbulatov, speaker of the Russian parliament till November 1993 in Chechen affairs added to the divisions and conflict in the independent republic .
In mid-1994 the Chechen opposition forces sponsored by Russia headed by Labazanov and Khasbulatov invaded the republic. They scored early successes which testified to Dudadyev’s loss of support amongst Chechens. However, when the advance was halted overt Russian assistance deprived them of most of their popular support and they too suffered a crushing defeat. It was this further fiasco for their agents that forced Grachev and Yeltsin to resort to a full scale Russian invasion on December 1994. They claimed that they were intervening to crush a “criminal state” where the Mafia had seized power.
Yeltsin made his real objectives clear enough in his 1995 New Year address: “Russian soldiers are [in Chechnya] to defend Russian unity. Not a single territory has the right to withdraw from Russia”. This is a flagrant denial of the elementary democratic right to self-determination, the right to secede from the Russian Federation.
It is because Dudayev, whatever his crimes, defended the countries independence that Yeltsin launched the war. The majority of the Chechen people, rejecting centuries of Moscow’s rule under the Tsars and then under Stalinism, clearly support him in this if in nothing else.
Oppression of the Chechens
The Chechens are a historically oppressed people. The annexation of the Caucasus mountains by the Tsarist empire, which commenced in 1785 was not completed till 1864. The fiercest resistance from its largely Islamic peoples came from the Chechens, who subsequently revolted several times.
In 1921 after the Civil War the Bolsheviks recognised a unitary Mountain Autonomous Republic but in 1924, under Stalin’s Commissariat of the Nationalities, the process began of dividing up the north Caucasian peoples, fostering as many ethnicities and languages as possible. The Stalinists as well as dividing them denied them real self-determination or a federation free from Great Russian domination.
Under Stalin’s Great Purges (1936-38) thing’s went from ‘divide and rule’ to wholesale annihilation of the cultural elites and attempts to destroy Islam by forces. Nevertheless, Chechen uprisings took place in 1926, 1929-30 1940 and 1942.
But this was not the worst that the Chechen people had to suffer. In 1944 Stalin deported four entire Muslim Caucasian nations (including 400,000 Chechens) into the Kazakhstan steppe. One third of them perished during transportation alone. Stalin did this ostensibly as a collective punishment for the Chechen nationalist rising two years previously, which erupted when German forces entered the northern Caucasus. Not all Chechens supported this rising and in any case by 1944 the danger to the USSR from Germany had passed. In reality Stalin was simply trying to complete the depopulation of the region and settle it with Russians. Only in 1958, after riots in Grozny did Krushchev allow the exiled Chechens to return home en masse.
As a bonapartist with collapsing popular support, and with no majority in the parliament, Yeltsin is dependent on the high command of the army, or rather on the dominant faction within it. This faction, headed by defence minister Pavel Grachev, is itself fighting for its life within the army elite, accused of corruption on a grand scale. A whole series of top commanders have resigned over the Chechen war and a potential candidate for the presidency Alexandr Lebed, former commander in Moldova, has publicly denounced the war from the outset.
In addition to the issue of Yeltsin’s prestige there are real strategic and economic reasons to hold on to Chechnya. Whilst it has only medium sized oil reserves itself in an oilfield around Grozny it has large refinery complexes which produce aviation fuel for Russia and the other CIS states. Even more important is the fact that main the pipeline which links Russia to the enormous oil fields of Azerbaijan crosses Chechen territory. Azerbaijan itself has been openly threatened by Yeltsin for striking a deal with western oil companies and for planning to export oil via Turkey or Iran, rather than through Russia.
The Kremlin sees the whole region as a part of their “near abroad”, somewhere they must dominate if not rule directly. They fear that if Chechnya goes, others may follow and the entire region could slip out of Russian control. Tatarstan, for example, has a strong independence movement which has been crudely coerced into staying within the federation, as have the other north Caucasus republics.
Yeltsin was initially encouraged to intervene in Chechnya by the benevolent attitude shown by the Western imperialist powers who have insisted all along that “Chechnya is a part of Russia”. They were willing enough to see him as the local policeman of the New World Order amongst the “barbaric” peoples of the former Soviet Union in return for Russia’s support to pressure the Serbs into a deal in Bosnia.
But the imperialists are fickle friends. Once the invasion became bogged down in the bloody battles of Grozny Kohl and Clinton started to criticise him for the bloodshed. These hypocrites are in reality worried not by the piles of Chechen dead, but that Yeltsin himself might fall if the war is a complete fiasco.
Even if it is a success it may mark Yeltsin’s absorption into the most aggressive, would-be imperialist faction of the army and the secret police. Russia could become a “military threat” once more. In addition, they are terrified that a prolonged war with a Muslim nation may ultimately embroil others, both in the Caucasus and beyond.
But whilst imperialism’s support and understanding are important, internal pressures are the determining factor in making compromise or withdrawal impossible. Yeltsin is facing a deepening political crisis and continued economic stagnation on the road to completing capitalist restoration. As might be expected in a period of deep economic crisis, racism and the search for scapegoats, is rife in Russia.
The peoples of the Caucasus are a particular butt of racism. They are blamed for the corruption and lawlessness which the market economy has brought. Russia’s capitalist restoration process is in deep crisis and Yeltsin’s answer is an increasingly dictatorial government, using his bonapartist powers to rule and trying to recover some mass support by stirring up national chauvinist feelings against the Chechens.
Within the first year of fighting alone 4,000 Russian troops had been killed and 5,000 injured in just over one year of war, The Chechen war has however provoked opposition in Russia. There were immediate street protests when the troops went in. these involved involving veterans of the Afghan war and mothers of conscripts. The latter sent delegations to Chechnya to try to find out the fate of their sons. So far however, the widespread hatred of Yeltsin has not yet turned into mass action against him.
What is to be done?
It is vital that workers defend and extend the very limited democratic freedoms they gained after the disintegration of the Stalinist regime. Alongside defence of their political rights there is the vital task of defending jobs, wages and living conditions against the ravages of the restoration process. The recent strikes of the Russian miners and teachers show that workers are beginning to shake off illusions in the market-reformers and the paralysis which descended on them with the shock therapy of 1992.
The higher turn out in the parliamentary elections also shows a decline in political passivity which bodes ill for the present rulers. Defending the Chechens’ right to self-determination, as well as refusing to be fooled by the poison of Russian nationalism, are crucial if Russian workers are to defend themselves against the tribble social results of the attempt to restore capitalism. As Marx said “a nation which oppresses another can never itself be free”.
The Chechen fighters, the Russian workers, and the ordinary Russian soldiers themselves have the power to inflict a huge political defeat on Yeltsin. The workers have the power to use the crisis in Chechnya to drive Yeltsin and his warmongers from office.
Workers everywhere must support the right of the Chechen people in their struggle against Russian domination and oppression. The Russian people—beginning with the workers who have shown their potential in the recent strike wave—must unite their struggles and demands with those of their oppressed class brothers and struggle for the immediate withdrawal of Russian troops and for the unconditional right of self-determination for Chechnya.
It is the revolutionary mobilisation of the Russian people and of the ex-USSR who must call for the victory of the Chechen masses, and to have no confidence in Dudayev who at every turn wants to enlist “democratic imperialism” to help him.
As Trotsky said in his writings on Ukraine, ‘in the imperialist epoch the question of national independence is indissolubly linked to the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat.’ For this reason we raise. the need to fight for an independent workers’ republic in Chechnya
Only the Chechen workers and peasants can do that. The Chechens as the foremost fighters for national freedom in a region with many intermixed national minorities cannot solve the question of their free and independent national life without reference to the other peoples. An isolated Chechnya will in any case be an economic disaster. That is why as a minimum they must set themselves the goal of a federation of all the peoples of the Caucasus.
Unless such a republic is based upon preserved and strengthened state ownership of large scale production and the natural resources then it will continue to be plundered by the mafia, to have a heavy toll levied on its exports by Russia and may even fall into the hands of the Western oil monopolies. Such nationalised production requires efficient and democratic planning— which only the working class of all the nationalities can bring about.
Therefore an independent federation of Caucasus republics has to be based on workers’ council (and militia) power allied to councils of the peasants and rural population. Such a power can prevent the national differences of the peoples of the Caucasus being used as playthings by restorationist elites and the Kremlin.
Last but not least the urban and rural workers of the region must unite with their Russian brothers and sisters to overthrow Yeltsin and his clique and all wings of the restorationist bureaucracy and reverse the restoration of capitalism—opening the road to a free and equal federation of workers states across the entire former Soviet Union and beyond.
In order to struggle for this perspective, which is nothing other that what Lenin and Trotsky stated in their time, it is essential to build an international Trotskyist party in Russia and the ex-USSR.
Note by the Editor: The following document has been discussed and adopted in 2008 by our predecessor organization – the League for a Revolutionary Communist International (renamed to League for the Fifth International in 2003). The founding members of our organization were partly long-time and leading members of this organization before they were bureaucratically expelled in April 2011 a few weeks after they formed a faction in opposition against the increasing centrist degeneration of the LFI. The expelled comrades built immediately after their expulsion a new organization and went on to build the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT) together with a number of other comrades. Today the RCIT is present in 11 countries.
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The environmental question
1. Global warming, melting of large parts of the polar ice-caps, climate change, expansion of the deserts, urbanization and the destruction of the rain forest...
2. There can be no question that we are living through a period in which changes in the natural environment of humanity threaten the imminent destruction of the living conditions of millions, if not of the whole of humanity over a longer period of time.
3. This danger is now recognised by the whole of society. Even the most ignorant sections of the ruling classes can no longer ignore it. At the very least, they have to concede that an environmental question exists. For the first time this qualitative shift takes place not at the local or regional level but at the highest, global level in the form of climate change, along with a host of narrower, often related crises in global fish stocks, rainforest destruction, and mass extinction.
4. Even those ultimately responsible for the system, which threatens the whole of humanity with an environmental and social catastrophe, have to concede that something has to be done about it. No UN assembly, no G8 meeting, no governmental programme is complete without a claim to have prioritised the question and promises of action plans - but their results are pathetic.
5. The danger of the destruction of the natural foundations of human life has become a truly global question. Every political and social force has to put forward and, increasingly they do put forward, a programme to answer the “environmental question”.
6. Whole movements have developed around this issue. They started as movements and political currents of the middle strata, of the intelligentsia, larger sections of the youth in the imperialist and Stalinist states in the 1970s and ’80s. In this period, they met not only the outright hostility of the bourgeoisies in the imperialist and semi-colonial world but also of the Stalinist and social-democratic and trade union bureaucrats. They also met outright denial and ignorance of the very existence of the issues they raised, even by the organisations of the far left.
7. Today, nobody can deny these dangers anymore. Environmental issues have become issues for every party. The mainstream of the former radical petit bourgeois movement has become an “eco-reformist” or even “eco-marketising” party, with “green” companies manufacturing “green” commodities.
8. Other sections of the environmental movement still advocate various forms of petty bourgeois, backward and ultimately reactionary solution based on a return to forms of small-scale commodity production and the “de-industrialisation” of society.
9. It is an irony of history that the moment that were the Greens’ biggest successes, the taking up of their issues by all parties and the whole of society, has actually revealed the utopian and bourgeois, or petit-bourgeois, character of their solutions. The demonstration of the emptiness of their answers has also revealed the incorrect understanding of the environmental question by the main currents of the green movement, including its left wing, the eco-socialists.
10. At the same time as environmental issues have became everybody’s concern, the movements fighting against the effects of environmental destruction have also changed. For example, the struggles of the landless peasants, of indigenous people for land rights and against the large multi-nationals, the questions of fighting for humane conditions for the masses in the shanty towns of the mega-cities in the semi-colonies, the questions of the transport systems and energy systems in all their aspects, meant that the working class, the peasantry, the youth, the poor became active and central components of the struggles against the destruction of the human environment - but under the leadership and influence of petit-bourgeois or bourgeois forces and ideologies.
11. Such leaderships were able to dominate because of the political ignorance of the reformist bureaucracies, the social-democratic and Stalinist parties or bourgeois nationalists in the Third World. They could prevail also because of the adaptations made by the far left to ‘environmentalism’ as a distinct petit bourgeois ideological current.
12. This problem can only be overcome, if the working class advances its own programme, its own revolutionary solution to the environmental questions of the 21st century. The struggle against the destruction of the natural foundations for human life, and for a rational, conscious relationship between humanity and nature, is a central question of the socialist revolution today, a central question of building a classless, communist society.
13. Therefore, it is the task of revolutionaries to advance and fight for a programme of transitional demands to save the planet, a programme linking the daily struggles to the struggle for socialist revolution.
Humanity – Nature
14. The capitalist mode of production is not the first one to interfere in nature and so-called ‘natural equilibriums’ on a massive scale. Any notion or idea that humanity once had a ‘truly harmonic’ relation to nature that has been destroyed is thoroughly illusionary. Human society has always interfered, and had to interfere, in nature - and nature itself has always changed.
15. Only permanent change, the movement of matter, is a real constant in natural history. All species had to, and have to, adapt to this and cope with it. However, what distinguishes humanity from any other species is that the relation between man and nature is a social one from its very beginning, a relationship mediated via social labour.
16. From the very beginning, humanity has tried to ensure the reproduction of its own existence, which necessarily involves making the conditions for survival, the satisfaction of needs, permanent and to safeguard them against the constant uncertainties and dangers of natural development (as much as this is possible).
17. Certainly, at the beginning of human development, this was all very primitive, very limited, but it set in motion a process of social development that would also develop the collective knowledge of society concerning the conditions of its natural development, of the laws of motion of nature, of its purposeful change, of technical and technological interventions in nature, which allowed for the development of humanity to a higher level on the basis of a social labour process. The development of society, of civilisations, and their reproduction, was only possible in this way.
18. But the relation between man and nature is always on the basis of a more or less limited knowledge of natural developments and their lawfulness and has led to catastrophic developments throughout human history, including the breakdown of whole civilisations.
19. All societies have interfered in nature. All societies destroyed and formed the human environment, created it, just as their own development was also determined by the concrete, local or regional environmental conditions in which they evolved.
20. With the development of class societies, the relation between man and nature was not only differentiated along regional lines, but also along class lines.
21. ’Nature’, and the ‘natural’ environment, was never the same for the working classes, for those who fought with nature, as it was for the ruling classes who lived under safer and better ‘natural’ conditions and first developed a contemplative view of natural beauty.
22. On the other hand, actual knowledge about nature and natural processes was concentrated in the labouring classes, be they peasants, miners, craftsmen, and so on. At the same time, the ruling classes were forced to appropriate, to control and centralise this knowledge into their own hands (or at least certain functions of it).
Capitalism
23. With the development of bourgeois society and the capitalist mode of production, important changes took place. All previous modes of production had also massively interfered in the natural environment, had developed new techniques in agriculture, interfered in natural selection, and this had led to the extinction of whole species or promoted the development of others. What distinguished capitalism was, and is, the scale on which it intervenes. Capitalism is truly a global, a world system. It destroys the local peculiarities of previous modes of production.
24. At the same time, it also constantly revolutionises its productive basis but it does so on the basis of generalised commodity production, in an anarchic form. Therefore, the effects of capitalism on the environment are not only of a quantitative, but also qualitative character.
25. The material basis for this is the development of the productive forces - the development and combination of large scale industry and science. Large industry goes hand in hand with the industrialisation of agriculture, destroying the last resort of previous class societies. It forces the peasantry from the land to the city or turns the peasant into a rural labourer. However, by doing so, it also increases the separation of the land from the city. It develops agriculture by destroying the soil, thereby undermining the conditions for its own advance. This not only provides the means for the creation of an urban proletariat, but also develops them in a way that undermines the living conditions and the health of the workers. It does so by pushing the alienation of the producer from the means of production to its very limits.
26. Capitalist production, therefore, develops the technique and combination of the social production process by undermining the foundations of all its wealth: the earth and the labourer. However, large scale industry, the industrialisation of agriculture, the advance of science, do not only develop the problem. They also provide the basis for its solution - a rational combination of industry and science on an environmentally sustainable basis.
27. In pre-capitalist societies, the relation between town and countryside, the relation between man and nature, developed under naturally created conditions. Under capitalism, as generalised commodity production becomes dominant, production furthermore is social production, but under private appropriation. It therefore destroys not only the traditional bonds of the countryside but also their local or regional peculiarities.
28. The destruction of these bonds, also means that the creation of a rational, and conscious relation of industry and agriculture, of agrarian production and manufacturing, becomes a necessity, if one wants to avoid, or repair, the destructive effects of social production under an anarchic system based on private property.
29. Under capitalism it is impossible to create a rational, lasting relation between man and nature, a relation that could allow for a sustainable and lasting reproduction of humanity and its natural living conditions. As generalised commodity production, the success and rationality of all economic activity is measured post festum, whether or not a product finds buyer, a need on the market. Everything that does not conform to this is constantly threatened with elimination from social or natural reproduction.
30. Indeed, since capitalist production is geared towards creating surplus value, the rational decisions of the competing capitals to improve their competitiveness and profitability will necessarily clash with any rational and lasting relation to the environment.
31. For example, whilst ‘lean production’ reduces the cost of fixed capital for storage and thereby raises the rate of profit - one obvious effect is the increased use of transport and therefore of pollution - the costs of which have to be paid for by society.
The environmental question and the imperialist epoch
32. One of the features of capitalist production as social production is its increasing incorporation of science into production. With the development of the capitalist mode of production, science became more and more a branch of industry and even becames a commodity itself. This clearly went hand in hand with the enormous leap in centralisation and concentration of capital at the end of the 19th century, the formation of modern monopoly and finance capital.
33. The opening of the imperialist epoch also meant an enormous concentration of research and development of natural science in the hands of large monopolies, foundations or in state institutions that became more and more directly geared towards the interests of the capitalist class by the imperialist state.
34. Scientific research and its results have become private property, part of business plans and business secrets. Monopolisation has not only often meant that advances were only geared towards more profit making, it also inevitably meant that advances were held back, that research was not undertaken or was suppressed where it threatened profits.
35. This reflects the increasing social character of production and, on the other hand, the fetter that private property increasingly becomes on production.
36. Under imperialism, further massive leaps in the revolutionisation of agriculture took place, turning agrarian countries into industrial ones where the farmers or peasants only constituted a minimal part of the population.
37. Massive agrarian monopolies and scientific changes also turned agriculture in the semi-colonies upside down: destroying the old forms of production, expropriating the peasants from their corps and then from their land. However, in many cases, it also meant that new farming methods destroyed the soil, leaving devastation, poverty, hunger and flight from the land.
Monopoly capital accelerates the destructive effects of capitalism
38. The very measures to improve profitability under globalisation, for example, the privatisation of former state owned energy companies, the creation of large monopoly markets in energy, water, and the transport industry, credit geared towards these, the sheer amount of fixed capital embodied in them, all mean that the ruling classes of all major capitalist states cannot allow any effective means to combat climate change or global warming, since this would mean massive interventions into the private property of the imperialist bourgeoisie, of the large finance capitals of this world.
39. Furthermore, they unavoidably also come up against another central contradiction marking the imperialist epoch and globalisation in particular - the international character of production and exchange on the one hand and the continued nation state form in which it takes place. The “environmental question”, and the main threats it poses, are obviously international ones and can only be solved on the international level.
40. Whilst the bourgeois governments of all states are already pathetic in their internal actions against the destruction of the environment, they are even more so on the international level.
41. Secondly, all the measures of the national, as well as those from the international “community”, have the character of measures of bourgeois and imperialist “environmentalism”. They put the costs of measures onto the labouring classes and the semi-colonies. Trading with “pollution certificates”, destruction of the rainforest to grow crops for “biofuel” (and thereby further evictions of the landless in countries like Brazil) are just perverse, but highly profitable, forms of this “environmentalism”.
42. Eco-Taxes, calls on consumers to separate the waste which has first been produced by the large monopolies are all more or less hopeless and cynical means to make the poor pay for, and take responsibility for, repairing the damage done by the irrational character of a system humanity cannot afford much longer.
43. Today, we face the results of the capitalist production process of the last centuries and its effects on the human environment. We face dangers that threaten the future existence of humanity itself. Neo-liberal globalisation, the latest phase of imperialism, accelerates this tendency dramatically. The various measures to improve profits, to counter the tendency of the rate of profit to fall over the past decades, have all led to an enormous increase in the destructive effects of this mode of production on the natural environment of humanity. This is a necessary product of neo-liberalism, which goes hand in hand with its increased attacks on the working class, the peasants, the poor.
44. The environmental question has been a central question raised by the anti-capitalist movement from the very beginning, particularly in the semi-colonial world.
45. It has mobilised around questions of climate change, of transport, the land question, the privatisation and commodification of natural resources.
A programme to reclaim the human environment
46. Even the most modest calculations assume an increase in the average temperature on earth of between 1 and 1.5 degrees in the next 20 years. Others calculate it up to 4.5 degrees. In the last 100 years, the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased by 20 percent. Larger and larger areas of the polar icecaps are melting, tides may shift dramatically and sea levels will rise. This will lead to enormous changes, including the flooding of whole coastal regions and large parts of some countries. It is no longer a question of whether these dramatic changes will happen - but only whether, and how, humanity can adapt to these changes and change the course of development rapidly and decisively to avoid exacerbating them further, by massively reversing emissions.
47. It would be foolish to think, that “the market” and the capitalist class would be able to solve these questions. They have already proved that they are unable to do this. Whilst the principal means for a rational reorganisation of what Marx called the “metabolism” between humanity and nature - large scale industry and science - are in existence, they can only become such a means if they are taken out of the hands of the ruling class, i.e. expropriated by the workers.
48. Only under a global planned economy can a system be developed that not only satisfies and develops the needs of humanity but is also self-sustaining and dynamic, that is to say, a metabolism between social production and nature that can adapt to the changes in the environment itself. The struggle for this goal must start by addressing, advancing and generalising the burning issues of the day.
49. Against the threat of global warming and in order to counter its development and prepare for its increasing impact, we fight for global and national emergency plans to reduce emissions, to reorganise energy and transport systems, but also to provide the means by which whole regions can be as well prepared as possible to survive the effects of climate change. Capitalist business and governments will not be able to develop or implement the radical measures needed, only a mass climate change movement based on the organisations and action of the working class can develop such a plan and fight to carry it out against the capitalists’ resistance
50. Such plans require that the means to achieve such changes - large scale industry in energy production, agriculture, the transport system, science and the financial resources to achieve them - have to be centralised and taken out of the hands of the large monopolies.
51. Large capital is not just “doing nothing”. The major capitalist forces are actively advancing their own plans, which will mean further advancing the destruction of the human environment, to make a profit out of “eco-business” or financial businesses that see opportunities for capital accumulation flowing from the on-going environmental crisis.
52. Often workers’ struggles will start with the call for opening the business plans, the books and the research plans of the polluting companies. We call for the opening of these books, for the opening of research, its results, and for the abolition of business secrecy. All scientific research has to be taken out of the hands of private capital and put under workers’ control. We call for an independent enquiry by the workers and climate change movements into the investment plans of the government and big business.
53. Under capitalism, science becomes a ‘servant’ of capital. This also means that research and development is directed to short term profit calculations. Many research projects, additional testing and proving of hypotheses, as well as ‘pure science’, that is, theoretical research into the foundations of science, are cut, since, for capital as a whole, they are just extra cost factors like any others.
54. Given our still very limited knowledge about the development and the laws of motion of the natural environment, the effects of our constant reshaping of it and so on, a drastic shift in the objectives of research, opening it up, generalising and exchanging results is needed, as is a massive increase in research itself.
55. We call for the expropriation without compensation of the large energy producers, of all those industries that monopolise basic goods (like water), of the large agri-businesses and the large transport companies like rail, airlines and road transport. They must be (re)nationalised under workers’ control.
56. We fight for the reorganisation of the energy and transportation systems to make them as energy-efficient effective as possible. This will include a plan to phase out the reliance on fossil fuels of the current energy system. In some cases - such as brown coal - we call for an immediate halt to production.
57. We call for a plan to phase out and replace fossil fuels and nuclear energy not only for environmental reasons, but also because the limited reserves of these resources make it necessary that they be replaced by sustainable and reproducible energy resources during this century. We do not call for the immediate closure of all these plants, but for a planned closure/phasing out - the tempo of which will have to take into account the different national conditions and their relation to other social objectives (e.g. electrification of country, fighting against hunger and poverty).
58. An emergency plan’s measures will not only affect the energy producers. It will also mean that the whole transport system has to be reorganised under workers’ control and public ownership. We call for a dramatic shift from the individual car to effective public transportation systems. This means a huge investment and extension of them. They should be provided for free at all levels.
59. Under neo-liberal globalisation, the transport system develops in the opposite direction - a shift to planes and the maintenance of the car as the main transport system. As a part of the struggle for a rational system, we give support to struggles against the further building of “mega” airports like Heathrow. Of course, this does not mean that we oppose the building of every airport on the globe, but it means that the working class not only can but also must be prepared to fight for a halt to projects that just add to the environmental hazards created by the ruling class.
60. But equally important is the shift of transportation in goods. Ultimately, this, like all the other problems, can only be solved in a planned economy, as part of the building of a socialist society. But it also means that we fight to force the capitalists to implement immediate beneficial measures, for example, a reduction in exhaust gases for motor vehicles, and we fight for taxation of these capitalists to pay for the damage they cause to the environment.
61. A programme on the environment must not be confined to just those sections of the capitalist class who make profits out of energy or transportation industries or those related to them. In all countries, we call for a programme of public works to introduce a more sustainable transport system, to repair and to improve housing to the highest energy-efficient standards, so that society is better equipped to deal with the degree of climate change that is already inevitable.
62. In the semi-colonial countries, it will often be impossible to generate the necessary resources from within the countries themselves. We call for the expropriation of imperialist capital and ventures in these countries without compensation, and for complete cancellation of the semi-colonial countries’ debts to the imperialist banks. But we also call for the imperialist governments to be forced to provide the means necessary to build and construct housing and facilities that can meet the effects of climate change, such as the flooding of whole regions. We reject green taxes and other measures that end up forcing the working class and poor to pay for these programmes and initiatives, they should be funded by taxing the rich and big business. We call for an immediate ban on luxury, wasteful forms of transport and where necessary rationing based on need, organised under the control of the workers and users in the industry and ultimately a workers’ state.
63. The agrarian question is a central part of the environmental question, as Marx already pointed out. In the semi-colonial world, in particular, capitalist agriculture led to destruction of rain forest, desertification, pollution, destruction of species and crop varieties, monopolisation, and the destruction of fertility as result of the short sightedness of agrarian production under large monopolies.
64. Urbanisation and disastrous living conditions in mega-cities are the other side of the same process, and are accelerated by impoverishment and privatisation of basic goods (water etc.)
65. We call for (re)nationalisation and expropriation of these industries and a programme of public works for decent housing, electricity, sanitation - all paid for by taxing the rich.
66. Some industries and forms of transport will need to be massively restructured, shrunk or even closed down (eg coal mines, junk mailers) in favour of sustainable, renewable alternatives. Marxists demand that the capitalists pay for the clean-up and conversion of these industries, with retraining programmes overseen by the workers and guaranteed jobs with no loss of pay, conditions or pension for the workforce. By means of such demands we would seek to win workers in such industries to the climate change movement, while within that movement and in the course of developing an emergency plan, we would fight all instances of sectionalism that placed the interests of particular groups of workers, defending their current forms of work and industry, above the global climate emergency. We condemn the union bureaucracy when it falls in behind the greenwash of the government or employer (eg British Air Line Pilots supporting government’s airport expansion plans, NUM arguing for coal expansion on the basis of currently untested carbon storage), putting loyalty to capitalism before humanity’s needs.
67. In agriculture, we fight for the expropriation of the large agri-business multi-nationals and chemical industries. We fight for control over research in new fertilisation techniques and genetic modifications and a halt to their implementation without previous testing. On the other hand, we are aware that GM could be a potential improvement of productivity and agricultural development, so that we call for massive research under control of the producers, agrarian labourers (workers and peasants) and consumers. Where governments or business have undertaken unsafe tests of GM crops or planted them without such tests, we support actions taken to destroy such crops
The workers’ movement must change
68. The struggle to save the planet has already awoken many working class people and peasants - be it by fighting for control of their land, against pollution, etc.
69. The environmental question also demonstrates the limits and, ultimately, the inadequacy not only of bourgeois and petit-bourgeois environmentalism, but also of ‘pure trade-unionism’, nationalism and reformism. Firstly, the limits of trade-unionism are clear enough. All too often, the trade union bureaucrats use narrow worker interests (for example, of workers employed in coal industries) as a means to promote ignorance about the general and long term interests of the class. This is a major means by which union bureaucracies tie these workers to “their” capitals.
70. Secondly, bourgeois nationalism in the semi-colonies and reformism, and also a wing of the Green movement, has promised “environmental” change via entering or forming bourgeois governments, sowing the illusion that one could implement such politics without challenging the power of the ruling class, the bourgeois state apparatus itself.
71. This meant not only that their “reforms” were indistinguishable from those of the “environmentalist” wing of the imperialist bourgeoisie itself but also that they used the state apparatus, that was supposed to implement their reforms, against movements fighting the destruction of their human environment (for example, the SPD/Green government in Germany or Lula against the land-occupations and protests against the latifundistas and agribusiness).
72. While we reject the bourgeois claims that corporate-engineered consumerism is natural, against the greens we insist that the majority of humanity’s living standards can continue to rise in a sustainable manner through democratic economic planning and voluntary, collective forms of living in order create a harmonious relationship between nature and humanity. State provided canteens, childcare, laundries, and more communal forms of housing and leisure could socialise the wasteful duplication of private household tasks, in the process liberating women from the “second shift”.
73. The destructive division of town and country, the pollution and overcrowding along with unplanned sprawl, can only be reversed with democratic planning of the economy in the hands of a workers state takes hold and begins to reshape the human environment.
74. Therefore, the fight on the environmental question is closely linked to the fight for organs of self-organisation, of control, of self-defence of the working class and the peasantry. The question of the destruction of the human environment also means that a programme for an emergency plan has to be a central part of the struggle for workers’ governments, the creation of working class power and for the transition to socialism by means of world revolution.
Thesen zur Umweltfrage
Vorwort der Redaktion: Im Folgenden veröffentlichen wir eine Resolution, die wir in unserer Vorläuferorganisation – der Liga für eine Revolutionär-Kommunistische Internationale (ab 2003 in Liga für die Fünfte Internationale umbenannt) – im Jahr 2008 diskutierten und annahmen. Sie wurde in Revolutionärer Marxismus Nr. 40 – unserem damaligen deutschsprachigen Organ – veröffentlicht. Die Gründer unserer heutigen Organisation – der Revolutionär-Kommunistischen Internationalen Tendenz (RCIT) – waren zum Teil langjährige führende Mitglieder der LRKI/LFI und wurden im April 2011 von der Mehrheit ausgeschlossen, als sie sich der zunehmenden zentristischen Degeneration der LFI widersetzten. Gemeinsam mit Genossinnen und Genossen in anderen Ländern bauten sie mit der RCIT eine neue internationale Organisation auf, die heute in 11 Ländern präsent ist.
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Die Umweltfrage - eine Kernfrage unserer Epoche
Globale Erwärmung, Abschmelzen größerer Teile der Poleiskappen, Klimaveränderung, Ausdehnung der Wüsten, Verstädterung, Vernichtung des Regenwaldes …
Es ist keine Frage: Wir leben in einem Zeitalter, in dem gewisse Veränderungen der natürlichen Umwelt des Menschen mit der unmittelbarer Zerstörung der Lebensbedingungen von Millionen, wenn nicht langfristig sogar der gesamten Menschheit verbunden sind.
Diese Gefahr ist inzwischen allgemein anerkannt. Selbst die borniertesten Elemente der herrschenden Klassen können sie nicht länger ignorieren. Zumindest müssen sie eingestehen, dass es eine „Umweltfrage“ gibt. Zum ersten Mal beruhen diese dramatischen Veränderungen nicht auf örtlichem oder regionalem Eingreifen des Menschen in natürliche Kreisläufe, sondern menschengemachte Natureingriffe haben in Gestalt des Klimawandels globale Folgen. Diese Bedrohung ist mit einer Reihe mehr oder weniger begrenzterer Krisen wie der Ausrottung der Fischbestände, der Zerstörung des Regenwaldes und des massenhaften Artensterbens, welche oft damit zusammenhängen, verbunden.
Selbst jene, die für das System verantwortlich zeichnen, das die komplette Menschheit mit Umwelt- und Gesellschaftskatastrophen bedroht, müssen zugeben, dass etwas geschehen muss. Keine UNO-Versammlung, kein G8-Treffen, kein Regierungsprogramm kommt mehr ohne Behauptungen aus, diese Frage in den Vordergrund gerückt zu haben, und ohne das Versprechen von „Aktionsplänen“ - auch wenn deren Resultate nur erbärmlich genannt werden können.
Die drohende Zerstörung der natürlichen Grundlagen menschlichen Lebens ist zu einer wahrhaft erdumspannenden Frage geworden. Alle sozialen und politischen Kräfte haben ein Programm zur „Lösung“ des Umweltproblems vorgelegt und überbieten sich dabei gegenseitig.
Ganze Bewegungen sind um dieses Thema herum entstanden. Sie starteten als Bewegungen und politische Strömungen der Mittelschichten, der Intelligenz, bedeutender Teile der Jugend in den imperialistischen und stalinistischen Staaten der 70er und 80er Jahre. In dieser Zeit stießen sie nicht nur auf die regelrechte Feindseligkeit der Bourgeoisien in der imperialistischen und halbkolonialen Welt sowie der stalinistischen, sozialdemokratischen und GewerkschaftsbürokratInnen. Sie gerieten auch mit einer „revolutionären“ oder „sozialistischen“ Linken aneinander, die selbst die Existenz der von ihnen aufgeworfenen Fragen geradeheraus leugnete oder oft nicht wahrhaben wollte.
Heute kann niemand mehr diese Gefahren ausklammern. Die „grünen“ Themen sind Punkte für jede Partei geworden. Die Hauptströmung der ehedem radikalen kleinbürgerlichen Bewegung ist „öko-reformistisch“ oder wurde sogar zur „öko-marktwirtschafts“-Partei mit „grünen“ Firmen für „grüne“ Erzeugnisse.
Andere Teile der Umweltbewegung treten noch für verschiedene Spielarten kleinbürgerlicher, rückwärts gewandter und letztlich reaktionärer Lösungen ein, die auf Rückkehr zur kleinen Warenproduktion und einer „Deindustrialisierung“ der Gesellschaft fußen.
Die Ironie der Geschichte will es, dass der Augenblick des größten Erfolgs der GRÜNEN, des Aufgreifens ihrer Sachthemen durch alle Parteien und die Gesellschaft, die utopische und bürgerliche bzw. kleinbürgerliche Natur ihrer Lösungswege enthüllt. Die offensichtliche Hohlheit ihrer Antworten hat auch das falsche Verständnis der Ökologiefrage seitens des Hauptzweigs der grünen Strömungen einschließlich ihres linken Flügels, der ÖkosozialistInnen, aufgedeckt.
Zur gleichen Zeit, als die grüne Thematik zur alltäglichen Tagesordnung wurde, änderten sich auch die gegen die Auswirkungen der Umweltzerstörung kämpfenden Bewegungen. Die Auseinandersetzungen der Landlosen, der einheimischen Bevölkerungen für das Recht auf Landbesitz und gegen die multinationalen Agrarkonzerne, das Eintreten für menschenwürdige Verhältnisse in den Slums der Megastädte der Halbkolonien, die diversen Verkehrs- und Energiekonzepte - all das deutet darauf hin, dass die Arbeiterklasse, die Bauernschaft, die Jugend und die Armut aktive und wesentliche Komponenten der Kämpfe gegen die Vernichtung der Umwelt geworden sind; aber sie unterliegen der Vorherrschaft und dem Einfluss bürgerlicher oder kleinbürgerlicher Kräfte und Ideologien.
Solche Führungen konnten die Oberhand gewinnen - aufgrund der Ignoranz durch reformistische Bürokratien, die sozialdemokratischen oder stalinistischen Parteien bzw. bürgerliche NationalistInnen in der „Dritten Welt“. Sie konnten sich auch wegen der Anpassung des Zentrismus an die „Umwelttümelei“ durchsetzen.
Das kann erst überwunden werden, wenn die arbeitende Klasse ihr eigenes Programm hervorbringt, ihre eigene Lösung für die Umweltfrage. Der Kampf gegen die Vernichtung der natürlichen Grundlagen des menschlichen Lebens und für ein vernünftiges, bewusstes Verhältnis zwischen Mensch und Natur ist heute zu einer zentralen Frage der sozialistischen Revolution geworden, einer zentralen Frage auch für den Aufbau einer klassenlosen, kommunistischen Gesellschaft.
Deshalb ist es die Aufgabe von RevolutionärInnen, ein Programm von Übergangsforderungen zu entwerfen und dafür einzutreten, das auch in diesen Fragen die Tageskämpfe mit dem Ziel der sozialistischen Revolution verknüpft.
Mensch und Natur
Die kapitalistische Produktionsweise hat nicht als erste massiv in die Natur und das „natürliche Gleichgewicht“ eingegriffen. Jede Ansicht oder Vorstellung, die Menschheit habe einst ein „wahrhaft harmonisches“ Verhältnis zur Natur gehabt, das verlustig gegangen sei, ist eine Illusion. Die Menschheit hat immer in die Natur eingegriffen - und musste es auch. Doch auch die Natur selbst hat sich stets verändert.
In der Naturgeschichte ist einzig der ständige Wandel, die Bewegung der Materie, eine wirkliche Konstante. Alle Lebewesen müssen sich diesem anpassen und damit fertigwerden. Was die Menschheit aber von anderen Spezies unterscheidet: die Beziehung zwischen Mensch und Natur ist von ihren ersten Ursprüngen her ein soziales, ein durch gesellschaftliche Arbeit vermitteltes Verhältnis.
Buchstäblich von Anfang an musste die Menschheit die Reproduktion ihrer eigenen Existenz sichern. Dies umfasste notwendigerweise, die Überlebensbedingungen, die Bedürfnisbefriedigung gegen die ständigen Unwägbarkeiten und Gefahren durch die Naturentwicklung zu verstetigen (sofern dies möglich ist).
Sicher war all das zu Beginn der Menschentwicklung sehr primitiv, sehr beschränkt, setzte aber eine Gesellschaftsentwicklung in Gang, die immer auch Entfaltung des gesellschaftlichen Wissens beinhaltete, in Bezug auf die Umstände ihres natürlichen Fortschritts, der Bewegungsgesetze der Natur, ihrer zweckgerichteten Umwandlung, die technischen und technologischen Eingriffe in die Natur, welche die Höherentwicklung der Menschheit auf Basis eines gesellschaftlichen Arbeitsprozesses gestatteten. Die Entwicklung von Gesellschaftlichkeit und Zivilisation war nur auf diesem Wege möglich.
Aber der Stoffwechsel zwischen Mensch und Natur vollzieht sich die ganze Menschheitsgeschichte hindurch stets auf der Grundlage eines mehr oder weniger beschränkten Wissens über Naturprozesse und deren Gesetzmäßigkeiten. Das hat zu katastrophalen Ereignissen in der Geschichte geführt, einschließlich des Untergangs kompletter Zivilisationen.
Alle Gesellschaften griffen in die Natur ein. Alle Gesellschaften vernichteten und formten die menschlich/natürliche Umwelt, ja schufen sie, so wie ihre eigene Entwicklung auch von den konkreten lokalen oder regionalen Umweltverhältnissen, in denen sie sich herausbildeten, geprägt war.
Mit der Entstehung von Klassengesellschaften unterschieden sich die Beziehungen zwischen Mensch und Natur nicht nur nach Regionen, sondern auch nach Klassen.
„Natur“ und ihre „natürliche“ Umwelt waren nie das Gleiche für die werktätigen Klassen, die mit der Natur rangen, wie für die herrschenden Klassen, die unter besseren und sichereren „natürlichen“ Verhältnissen lebten und als erste eine beschauliche Sichtweise von „Naturschönheit“ an den Tag legten.
Andererseits konzentrierte sich wirkliches Wissen über Natur und ihre Vorgänge in den arbeitenden Klassen, seien es Bauern/Bäuerinnen, Bergleute, Handwerker etc. Zugleich waren die herrschenden Klassen gezwungen, sich diese Kenntnisse anzueignen, sie zu kontrollieren und in ihren Händen zu zentralisieren (oder wenigstens zentrale Teile davon).
Kapitalismus
Mit der Entwicklung der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft und der kapitalistischen Produktionsweise vollzogen sich bedeutende Wandlungen im Mensch/Natur-Verhältnis.
Auch alle vorherigen Produktionsweisen hatten massiv in die „natürliche“ Umwelt eingegriffen, neue Ackeranbaumethoden hervorgebracht, die „natürliche Auslese“ beeinflusst. Das führte zum Verschwinden ganzer Arten und förderte die Entwicklung anderer. Was den Kapitalismus davon unterscheidet, war und ist die Dimension seiner Eingriffe. Sein explosives Wachstum industrieller Produktion war von Anfang an mit einem gegenüber früheren Epochen qualitativ höheren Wachstum der Nutzung fossiler Energieträger verbunden. Auf der Jagd nach diesem "Stoff" unterwirft er sich entlegenste Weltgegenden und hinterlässt Wüstenlandschaften. Der Kapitalismus ist ein wahrhaft globales, ein Weltsystem. Er planiert alle lokalen Besonderheiten vorangegangener Produktionsweisen.
Gleichzeitig wälzt er beständig seine Produktionsbasis um, aber auf der Basis verallgemeinerter Warenproduktion, auf anarchische Weise.
Folglich sind die Auswirkungen des Kapitalismus auf die Umwelt nicht nur quantitativer, sondern auch qualitativer Art.
Die materielle Grundlage dafür bildet die Entwicklung der Produktivkräfte - das Hervorbringen und die Kombination von Großindustrie und Wissenschaft. Die Großindustrie geht einher mit der Industrialisierung der Landwirtschaft und zerstört die letzte Zufluchtsstätte vorheriger Klassengesellschaften. Sie vertreibt die Bauernschaft von Grund und Boden in die Großstadt oder verwandelt den „Kleinbauern“ in einen Landarbeiter. Mit diesem Prozess treibt sie jedoch auch die Trennung von Stadt und Land auf die Spitze und fördert die Industrialisierung der Agrikultur. Die kapitalistische Form dieses Prozesses zerstört zugleich zunehmend den natürlichen Reichtum des Bodens und untergräbt damit langfristig die Voraussetzungen seiner eigenen Existenz. Auf diesem Weg entsteht also nicht nur ein städtisches Proletariat. Sondern die Großindustrie entwickelt dieses Verhältnis auf eine Art, welche die Lebensgrundlagen und Gesundheit der LohnarbeiterInnen untergraben. Sie treibt die Entfremdung des Produzenten von den Produktionsmitteln an ihre äußersten Grenzen.
Die kapitalistische Produktion vervollkommnet deshalb die Technik und Kombination des gesellschaftlichen Produktionsprozesses, indem sie zugleich die Grundlagen ihres Reichtums beschädigt: die Erde und den Arbeiter. Doch Großindustrie, Industrialisierung des Feldbaus, Fortschritt der Wissenschaften, treiben nicht nur das Problem auf neue Höhen. Sie liefern auch die Basis für dessen Bewältigung: eine rationale Verbindung von Industrie und Wissenschaft.
In vorkapitalistischen Gesellschaften entfalteten sich die Beziehungen zwischen Stadt und Land, zwischen Mensch und Natur unter natürlich gewachsenen Bedingungen. Im Kapitalismus als verallgemeinerter Warenproduktion ist die Produktion eine gesellschaftliche, aber die Aneignung erfolgt privat. Er zerreißt darum nicht nur die überlieferten Bande des Dorfes, sondern auch seine lokalen bzw. regionalen Eigenarten.
Das Zerreißen dieser Bindungen erfordert auch notwendig die Etablierung eines vernünftigen, bewussten Stoffwechsels zwischen Stadt und Land, zwischen Agrarproduktion und verarbeitendem Gewerbe, wenn man die zerstörerischen Auswüchse gesellschaftlicher Produktion unter einem anarchischen System, das auf Privateigentum beruht, vermeiden oder „reparieren“ will.
Im Kapitalismus ist es unmöglich, rationale, dauerhafte Beziehungen zwischen Mensch und Natur herzustellen, die eine nachhaltige und fortwährende Reproduktion der Menschheit und ihrer Lebensbedingungen gestatten. In einer allgemeinen Warenproduktion werden Erfolg und Vernunft aller Wirtschaftsaktivitäten erst im Nachhinein ermittelt, ob ein Erzeugnis KäuferInnen, eine Nachfrage auf dem Markt findet oder nicht. Alles was sich damit nicht verträgt, ist ständig vom Verschwinden aus gesellschaftlicher oder natürlicher Produktion bedroht.
Da kapitalistische Produktion tatsächlich auf die Erzeugung von Mehrwert ausgerichtet ist, werden für im Wettbewerb stehende Einzelkapitale Entscheidungen, die ihre Konkurrenzfähigkeit und Profitabilität verbessern, notwendig mit jedem rationalen und stetigen Verhältnis zur Umwelt kollidieren.
Während z.B. die „schlanke Produktion“ die Kosten für fixes Kapital und Lagerhaltung mindert und deswegen die Profitrate steigert, sind ihre offensichtlichen Folgen vermehrte Transporte und massive Umweltzerstörung. Deren Kosten müssen von der Gesellschaft bezahlt werden.
Umweltfrage und imperialistische Epoche
Eine der Eigenarten kapitalistischer Produktion als vergesellschafteter ist ihre zunehmende Einverleibung der Wissenschaft. Mit der Entwicklung der kapitalistischen Produktionsweise geriet die Wissenschaft mehr und mehr zu einem Industriezweig und wurde selbst zur Ware. Das ging Hand in Hand mit dem enormen Konzentrations- und Zentralisationsschub des Kapitals Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts, der Herausbildung des modernen Monopol- und Finanzkapitals.
Die Morgenröte der imperialistischen Epoche trug auch eine enorme Konzentration von Forschung und naturwissenschaftlicher Entwicklung in Händen großer Monopole, Stiftungen oder Staatsinstitutionen mit sich, die immer direkter durch den imperialistischen Staat gemäß den Interessen der Kapitalistenklasse gelenkt wurden.
Wissenschaftliche Forschung und ihre Resultate sind Privateigentum geworden, Teil von Geschäftsplänen und -geheimnissen. Die Monopolisierung bedeutete nicht nur oft, dass Fortschritte nur in Richtung Profitmacherei gelenkt wurden; sie hielt auch unausweichlich Verbesserungen zurück, behinderte Kontrollen oder stellte sie ein, wo sie Profite gefährdeten.
Dies spiegelt den zunehmend gesellschaftlichen Charakter der Produktion wider, verweist aber andererseits darauf, dass das Privateigentum immer mehr zu einer Fessel wird.
Im Imperialismus erfolgten regelrechte Sprünge in der Revolutionierung des Ackerbaus, welche die Agrarländer in industrielle transformierten, in denen Farmer oder Landwirte nur einen Bruchteil der Bevölkerung ausmachen.
Riesige Agrokonzerne und wissenschaftliche Neuerungen stellten auch in den Halbkolonien die Landwirtschaft auf den Kopf, zerstörten die alten Kultivierungsmethoden, enteigneten Ernten und schließlich die Böden der Bauern. In vielen Fällen bedeutete dies auch, dass die neuen Bewirtschaftungsweisen den Boden zugrunde richteten und Verwüstung, Armut, Hunger und Landflucht bewirkten.
Das Monopolkapital beschleunigt die zerstörerischen Auswirkungen des Kapitalismus
Allein die Maßnahmen zur Steigerung der Profitabilität unter den Bedingungen der Globalisierung, z. B. die Privatisierung von früher staatlichen Energiekonzernen, die Schaffung von großen monopolisierten Märkten im Bereich Energie, Wasser und Transportindustrie, die durch Finanzgeschäfte weiter vorangetrieben werden, die enorme Menge von fixem Kapital, die darin steckt - all dies bedeutet, dass die herrschenden Klassen aller großen kapitalistischen Staaten keinen Einsatz wirkungsvoller Mittel zur Bekämpfung des Klimawandels oder der Erwärmung der Erde zulassen können, denn das würde massive Eingriffe in das Privateigentum der imperialistischen Bourgeoisie und der großen Finanzkapitale mit sich bringen müssen.
Außerdem wären sie unausweichlich mit einem weiteren gravierenden Widerspruch konfrontiert, welcher der imperialistischen Epoche und der Globalisierung innewohnt: der internationale Charakter der Produktion und des Warenumschlags auf der einen Seite und die weiter bestehende nationalstaatliche Form, in der dies vonstatten geht. Die Umweltfrage und die damit verbundene weltweite Bedrohung sind dem Wesen nach international und auch nur international zu lösen.
Während die bürgerlichen Regierungen aller Staaten mit großen Worten ihre Maßnahmen im Kleinen gegen die Umweltzerstörung ins Licht zu rücken versuchen, tun sie dies erst recht in internationalem Maßstab.
Alle Maßnahmen der nationalen wie der „Weltgemeinschaft“ tragen die Handschrift des bürgerlichen und imperialistischen „Ökologismus“. Ob beabsichtigt oder nicht, werden die Kosten für die Maßnahmen den arbeitenden Klassen und den Halbkolonien aufgebürdet. Der Handel mit „Schadstoffzertifikaten“, die Zerstörung des Regenwaldes zwecks Anbau von „Biokraftstoffpflanzen“ (und damit die weitere Vertreibung der Landlosen in Staaten wie Brasilien) sind nichts als perverse, aber höchst profitable, Formen dieser Art von „Umweltschutz“-Ideologie.
Ökosteuern, Appelle an Verbraucher zur Trennung von Müll, der vorher von großen Monopolen produziert worden ist, sind mehr oder weniger hoffnungslose oder zynische Mittel, die Armen für die Ausbesserung von Schäden zahlen zu lassen und dafür verantwortlich zu machen, die durch den irrationalen Charakter eines Systems erst entstanden sind, welches sich die Menschheit einfach nicht mehr länger leisten kann.
Heute stehen wir vor den Folgen von Jahrzehnten und Jahrhunderten kapitalistischer Produktionweise und deren Einfluss auf die menschliche Umwelt. Gefahren drohen, die die Zukunft der Menscheit selbst in Frage stellen. Die neoliberale Globalisierung, die Endphase des Imperialismus, beschleunigt diese Tendenz dramatisch. Die verschiedenen Maßnahmen zur Profitmaximierung, um dem tendenziellen Fall der Profitrate in den letzten Jahrzehnten gegensteuern zu können, haben sämtlich zu einem wahnsinnigen Anwachsen der zerstörerischen Auswirkungen dieser Produktionsweise auf die natürliche Umwelt des Menschen geführt. Sie sind eine notwendige Folge des Neoliberalismus, die sich parallel zu den wachsenden Angriffen auf die Arbeiterklasse, die Bauern und die Armen entwickeln.
Die Umweltfrage ist ein zentrales Problem, das von der antikapitalistischen Bewegung von Anfang an und besonders in der halbkolonialen Welt aufgeworfen wurde.
Sie hat sich um Fragen des Klimawandels, des Transports, der Landproblematik, der Privatisierung und Verwandlung von natürlichen Vorräten in Waren gebildet.
Ein Programm zur Wiederherstellung menschenwürdiger Umweltverhältnisse
Selbst die nüchternsten Berechnungen unterstellen einen Anstieg der Durchschnittstemperatur von 1 bis 1,5 Grad Celsius auf der Erde in den nächsten 20 Jahren. Andere Zahlen gehen von einer Zunahme um 4,5 Grad aus. In den vergangenen 100 Jahren hat sich der Anteil von Kohlendioxid an der Erdatmosphäre um 20% erhöht. Immer größere Teile der Polkappen schmelzen, lebenswichtige Meeresströmungen könnten sich ändern, der Meeresspiegel steigt. Das führt zu gewaltigen Veränderungen, die etliche Küstenlandstriche und sogar große Teile einiger Länder überfluten werden. Es steht schon längst außer Zweifel, dass dieser einschneidende Wandel geschehen wird, es geht nur darum, ob und wie die Menschheit sich an diese neuen Bedingungen anpassen und den Lauf der Entwicklung schnell und entschlossen beeinflussen wird, um eine weitere Verschärfung der Lage durch massiven Rückgang der Emissionen vermeiden zu können.
Es wäre töricht zu glauben, dass der „Markt“ und die Kapitalistenklasse diese Probleme lösen könnten. Sie hatten hinlänglich Gelegenheit dazu und haben sich als unfähig erwiesen. Die grundsätzlichen Mittel für eine durchdachte Umgestaltung des - wie Marx ihn nannte - „Metabolismus“ (Stoffwechsels) zwischen Menschheit und Natur, Großindustrie und Wissenschaft, sind vorhanden; sie können aber erst dann nutzbringend angewendet werden, wenn sie den Händen der herrschenden Klasse entwunden, wenn sie vergesellschaftet werden.
Nur unter einer weltumspannend geplanten Wirtschaft kann ein System aufgebaut werden, das nicht nur die Bedürfnisse der Menschheit stillt und ausbaut, sondern das außerdem nachhaltig und dynamisch wirkt, d. h. einen Metabolismus zwischen gesellschaftlicher Produktion und Natur schafft, der sich diesen Umweltveränderungen anpassen kann. Der Kampf für dieses Ziel muss damit beginnen, sich den brennenden Gegenwartsfragen jetzt zuzuwenden, sie zuzuspitzen und zu verallgemeinern.
Gegen die Gefahr der globalen Erwärmung, ihre Folgen und deren zunehmenden Einfluss müssen wir auf Landes- und Weltebene Notpläne zum Abbau von Schadstoffaustoß, zur Umrüstung des Energie- und Verkehrswesens erarbeiten, aber auch Vorkehrungen treffen, dass alle Erdregionen so gut es geht die Auswirkungen des Klimawandels überleben können. Privatunternehmen und Regierungen sind unfähig, die hierzu notwendigen radikalen Maßnahmen zu ergreifen und durchzuführen. Nur eine massenhafte Bewegung, die sich mit dem Klimawandel befasst und von Organisationen und Aktionen der Arbeiterklasse getragen wird, kann einen solchen Plan ausarbeiten und ihn gegen kapitalistische Widerstände auch umsetzen.
54. Solche Pläne bedürfen der Zentralisierung der Mittel für deren Durchsetzung: großindustrielle Energieerzeugung, Großraumbewirtschaftung, engmaschiges Verkehrsnetz, Wissenschaft und großzügige Geldmittel - sie müssen den großen Monopolen aus der Hand genommen werden.
Das Großkapital ist in dieser Angelegenheit nicht einfach nur „untätig“. Die kapitalistischen Großmächte verfolgen ihre eigenen Pläne. Das bedeutet, sie zerstören die menschliche Umwelt immer weiter, versuchen Profit aus dem Ökogeschäft zu ziehen oder sich durch abgeleitete Finanzgeschäfte (Versicherungen usw.) zu bereichern.
Kämpfe dagegen können oft an die Forderung nach Einsichtnahme in die Geschäfts- und Forschungsplanungen sowie die Transaktionen solcher Konzerne anknüpfen. Wir fordern die Einsicht in alle Geschäftsvorgänge, Forschungen, ihre Resultate und die Abschaffung des Geschäftsgeheimnisses. Die Forschung muss dem privaten Kapital aus der Hand gerissen und unter Arbeiterkontrolle gestellt werden. Wir fordern eine unabhängige Untersuchung der Investitionspläne von Regierungen und Großkapital durch Arbeiter- und Umweltbewegung, die sich mit der Klimaveränderung auseinandersetzt.
Unter dem Kapitalismus wird Wissenschaft zum „Diener“ des Kapitals. Das bedeutet, dass Forschung und Produktentwicklung kurzfristigen Profitkalkulationen unterworfen sind. Viele Forschungsvorhaben, zusätzliche Tests und Beweise für Hypothesen werden genau wie der „reine Wissenschaftsbetrieb“, also die theoretische Grundlagenforschung, gekürzt, zumal diese für das Kapital als ganzes nur zusätzliche Kostenfaktoren sind wie andere auch.
Angesichts unserer noch sehr begrenzten Kenntnisse über Entwicklungen und Bewegungsgesetze der natürlichen Umwelt, der Folgen der ständigen menschlichen Eingriffe in diese Abläufe, ist eine völlige Neubestimmung der Forschungsziele, ihre Offenlegung, Verallgemeinerung und des Austauschs ihrer Ergebnisse notwendig, genauso wie ein massiver Mehraufwand an Forschung selbst.
Wir fordern die entschädigungslose Enteignung der Energiekonzerne und aller Industrien, die Grundversorgungsgüter wie etwa Wasser monopolisieren, der Großagrarindustrie und der großen Gesellschaften im Schienen-, Luft-, Wasser- und Straßenverkehr. Sie müssen unter Arbeiterkontrolle (wieder)verstaatlicht werden.
Wir setzen uns für die Umgestaltung der Energie- und Transportsysteme ein, um sie so sparsam und flächendeckend wie möglich zu machen. Darin soll ein Plan enthalten sein, um die Abhängigkeit von fossilen Brennstoffen in den gegenwärtigen Energiesystemen abzubauen. In manchen Fällen fordern wir allerdings den sofortigen Förderstopp.
Wir fordern einen Plan zum Auslauf und zur Ersetzung von fossilen Brennstoffen und der Kernspaltungsenergie - nicht nur aus Gründen der Umweltschonung, sondern auch, weil die begrenzten Vorräte dieser Rohstoffe es notwendig machen, sie durch nachhaltige und erneuerbare Energiequellen im Laufe des Jahrhunderts zu ersetzen. Wir rufen nicht zur sofortigen Schließung aller dieser Anlagen auf, sondern für eine geplante Stilllegung bzw. den Ausstieg aus der Energieform. Das Tempo dieser Maßnahmen wird mit Rücksicht auf die unterschiedlichen nationalen Gegebenheiten und ihr Verhältnis zu anderen gesellschaftlichen Zielen (z.B. Elektrifizierung des Landes, Kampf gegen Hunger und Armut) festgesetzt.
Ein solcher Notplan ist nicht nur für die Energieproduktion wichtig, auch das gesamte Verkehrssystem muss unter Arbeiterkontrolle in öffentliches Eigentum umgewandelt werden. Wir fordern einen konsequenten Umstieg vom Individualverkehr auf effektive öffentliche Verkehrssysteme. Dazu muss ein großes Investitions- und Ausbauprogramm aufgelegt werden. Die Verkehrsmittel sollten im Nah- und Regionalbereich kostenlos genutzt werden können.
Mit der neoliberalen Globalisierung entwickelte sich das Transportsystem in die entgegengesetzte Richtung - Verstärkung des Flugverkehrs und Festhalten am Auto als Haupttransportmittel. Im Sinne eines rationalen Systems sind wir gegen den Ausbau von „Mega“flughäfen wie Frankfurt/Main. Wir sind nicht gegen jeden Flughafen, aber die Arbeiterklasse kann nicht nur, sie muss allen Projekten Einhalt zu gebieten, die den umweltzerstörerischen Wahnsinn der herrschenden Klasse noch weiter treiben.
Genauso bedeutsam ist ein tiefgreifender Wandel im Güterverkehr. Auch dies kann - wie alles andere auch - letzten Endes nur in einer gesellschaftlich geplanten Wirtschaftsordnung als Teil des Aufbaus einer sozialistischen Gesellschaft gelöst werden. Gleichzeitig müssen wir aber auch versuchen, die Kapitalisten zu zwingen, positive Sofortmaßnahmen einzuleiten, etwa eine Abgasverringerung bei Autos und die Besteuerung der Firmen, die für die von ihnen verursachten Umweltschäden aufkommen müssen.
Ein Umweltprogramm darf jedoch nicht auf jene Teile der Kapitalistenklasse beschränkt sein, die Profite im Energie- und Transportwesen oder damit verbundenen Industrien machen.
Wir treten in allen Ländern für ein Programm öffentlicher Arbeiten ein, um ein nachhaltigeres Verkehrssystem einzuführen, um Wohnungen mit der besten Energietechnologie auszustatten, so dass die Gesellschaft für den unvermeidlichen Klimawandel besser gerüstet ist.
In den halbkolonialen Staaten wird es oft unmöglich sein, die notwendigen Ressourcen im eigenen Land aufzubringen. Wir fordern die entschädigungslose Enteignung des imperialistischen Kapitals und von Gemeinschaftsunternehmen mit der heimischen Bourgeoisie und die ersatzlose Streichung aller Schulden von halbkolonialen Ländern bei imperialistischen Banken. Aber wir rufen auch dazu auf, die imperialistischen Regierungen zu zwingen, die nötigen Mittel bereit zu stellen, um die Folgen des Klimawandels zu mildern, z.B. gegen die Überflutung ganzer Regionen. Wir weisen Ökosteuern und andere Maßnahmen zurück, die letzten Endes den ArbeiterInnen und Armen die Kosten für diese Programme und Initiativen aufhalsen. Sie sollten stattdessen aus Steuergeldern von den Reichen und dem Großkapital bezahlt werden. Wir fordern ein sofortiges Verbot aller verschwenderischen Luxusformen von Transport und, wo nötig, auch die Zuteilung nach Gesichtspunkten der Bedürftigkeit, organisiert unter Kontrolle der ArbeiterInnen und NutzerInnen und letzten Endes in einer Planwirtschaft.
Schon Marx betonte, dass die Landfrage ein zentraler Teil der Umweltproblematik ist. Besonders in der halbkolonialen Welt hat die kapitalistische Landwirtschaft zur Zerstörung des Regenwaldes, der Wüstenausbreitung, zu Verschmutzung und zum Aussterben von Tierarten und Verringerung der genetischen Pflanzenvielfalt, zu Monopolisierung und Unfruchtbarkeit als Folge der kurzsichtigen Agrarproduktion unter Kontrolle großer Monopole geführt.
Die Verstädterung und die katastrophalen Lebensbedingungen in den Megastädten sind die Kehrseite desselben Prozesses. Sie werden beschleunigt durch Verknappung und gleichzeitige Privatisierung von Grundversorgungsgütern wie z.B. Wasser.
Wir fordern die (Wieder)Verstaatlichung und Enteignung dieser Industrien und ein Programm von öffentlichen Arbeiten für menschenwürdige Wohnungen, Stromversorgung, Gesundheit und Hygiene, bezahlt durch Besteuerung der Reichen.
Einige Industrien und Formen des Verkehrs müssen zu Gunsten von nachhaltigen und erneuerbaren Alternativen massiv umgebaut, zurückgefahren oder gar abgeschafft werden (z.B. Kohlegruben). MarxistInnen fordern, dass die Kapitalisten für die Säuberung und Umwandlung dieser Industrien samt Umschulungsprogrammen unter Arbeiterkontrolle und Arbeitsplatzgarantien ohne Lohn- und Rentenverlust oder Verschlechterung der Arbeitsbedingungen bezahlen sollen.
Durch solche Forderungen versuchen wir, die ArbeiterInnen solcher Industrien für die Umweltbewegung in Hinblick auf den Klimawandel zu gewinnen. In dieser Bewegung und im Laufe der Erarbeitung eines Notplans werden wir alle Formen von Sektoralismus bekämpfen, die die Interessen von bestimmten ArbeiterInnen die ihre derzeitigen Arbeits- und Industriebedingungen verteidigen, über den globalen Klimanotstand stellen wollen. Wir verurteilen die Gewerkschaftsbürokratie, wenn sie die ökologische Schaumschlägerei der Regierung und der Unternehmer mitträgt, wenn z.B. Pilotenvereinigungen die Ausbaupläne für Flughäfen oder Gewerkschaften die Ausdehnung von Kohleförderung auf der Basis der gegenwärtig noch unerprobten Einlagerung von Kohlendioxid in tiefen Erdschichten unterstützen - aus Hörigkeit gegenüber dem Kapitalismus und gegen die Bedürfnisse der Menschheit.
In der Landwirtschaft engagieren wir uns für die Enteignung der großen internationalen Agrokonzerne und der chemischen Industrie. Die Forschung im Bereich Düngemittel- und Gentechnologien muss unter Arbeiterkontrolle gestellt werden und darf nicht ohne ausgiebige Überprüfungen angewendet werden. Wir sind uns jedoch bewusst, dass die Gentechnologie eine entscheidende Steigerung der Produktivität und des landwirtschaftlichen Anbaus mit sich bringen kann, so dass wir deren massive Erforschung unter Kontrolle der ErzeugerInnen, LandarbeiterInnen, Kleinbauern und VerbraucherInnen fordern. Wo Regierungen oder Firmen unsichere Tests von genmanipulierten Pflanzen oder deren Anbau ohne solche Tests genehmigen und durchführen, befürworten wir Maßnahmen zur Vernichtung solcher Anpflanzungen.
Die Arbeiterbewegung muss sich neu aufstellen
Das Ringen um die Rettung unseres Planeten hat schon viele ArbeiterInnen und Bauern wachgerüttelt, durch Kampf um ihr Land, gegen lebensfeindliche Zerstörung ihrer Umgebung usw.
Die Umweltfrage zeigt die Grenzen und letzten Endes das falsche Herangehen nicht nur des bürgerlichen und kleinbürgerlichen Ökologismus, sondern auch die Borniertheit des gewerkschaftlichen Ökonomismus, Nationalismus und Reformismus. Die Beschränktheit des Gewerkschaftertums ist klar: all zu oft nutzt die Bürokratie sektorale „Arbeiterinteressen“, z. B. die der Beschäftigten im Kohlebergbau, als Mittel, um die Missachtung von allgemeinen und langfristigen Interessen der Klasse zu fördern. Damit können die Gewerkschaftsbürokraten diese ArbeiterInnen leichter an „ihr“ Kapital binden.
Zum anderen haben der bürgerliche Nationalismus in den Halbkolonien, der Reformismus und ebenso ein Flügel der Ökologiebewegung einen Wechsel in der „Umweltpolitik“ versprochen, wenn sie in bürgerliche Regierungen eintreten oder sie bilden. Sie streuen die Illusion, dass eine solche Politik ohne Angriff auf die Macht der herrschenden Klasse, auf den bürgerlichen Staatsapparat, durchsetzbar wäre.
Ihre „Reformen“ waren einerseits ununterscheidbar vom „ökologistischen“ Flügel der imperialistischen Bourgeoisie; andererseits setzten sie den Staatsapparat, der engeblich ihre Reformen umsetzen sollte, gegen die Bewegungen ein, die die Zerstörung der menschlichen Umwelt bekämpften, wie z.B. die SPD/Grüne-Regierung in Deutschland oder die Lula-Regierung in Brasilien, die gegen die Landbesetzungen und Proteste gegen den Großgrundbesitz und die Agrokonzerne vorging.
Wir weisen die bürgerlichen Behauptungen zurück, dass Verbraucherbedürfnisse auf natürliche Weise von den kapitalistischen Konzernen mit ihren Produktionstechniken befriedigt werden. Genauso beharren wir gegenüber den Grünen darauf, dass menschlichen Lebensstandards am nachhaltigsten durch demokratische Wirtschaftsplanung und freiwillige, kollektive Lebensformen angehoben werden können, um eine harmonische Beziehung zwischen Natur und Menschheit herzustellen. Staatliche Kantinen, Kinderbetreuung, Wäschereien und mehr gemeinschaftliche Wohn- und Freizeitformen könnten die verschwenderische Vervielfältigung von Aufgaben, die in Privathaushalten anfallen, vergesellschaften und damit v.a. Frauen von der „zweiten Schicht“ (nach der Berufsarbeit) befreien.
Die zerstörerische Spaltung zwischen Stadt und Land, die Umweltzerstörung, „Überbevölkerung“ und planlose Verschwendung ist nur umkehrbar, wenn sich eine demokratische Planung der Wirtschaft in der Hand eines Arbeiterstaates entfaltet und die menschliche Umwelt umzuwandeln beginnt.
Deshalb ist der Kampf um die Umweltfrage eng mit dem Kampf für Organe der Selbstorganisation, der Kontrolle, der Selbstverteidigung der Arbeiterklasse und der Bauernschaft verbunden. Das Problem der Zerstörung der menschlichen Umwelt macht auch ein Programm für einen Umweltnotplan zu einem zentralen Bestandteil des Kampfes für eine Arbeiterregierung, letztlich die Errichtung von Arbeitermacht und den Übergang zum Sozialismus durch die proletarische Revolution notwendig.
By Michael Pröbsting
Note by the Editor: The following document is an abridged English translation of a pamphlet of comrade Pröbsting which the Austrian section of the League for the Fifth International published in spring 2008. It was published in Fifth International journal Vol.3, No.1, 2008.
Comrade Pröbsting – a member of the international leadership of the LFI at that time – was bureaucratically expelled from this organization in April 2011 together with other comrades a few weeks after they formed a faction in opposition against the increasing centrist degeneration of the LFI. The expelled comrades built immediately after their expulsion a new organization and founded together with sister organizations in Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the USA the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT) in April 2012.
We republish this document because, while it was written five years ago, its fundamental programmatic answer against the imperialist European Union remains correct.
* * * * *
Part of the general attack by the imperialist bourgeoisie
What fundamentally is the purpose of the EU reform treaty? It is to take forward and strengthen the European Union as a common economic, political and military organisation of the imperialist ruling classes of Europe, that is, of European monopoly capital.
The EU reform treaty means the advance of turbo capitalism. “An open market economy with free competition” is to be written in as a fundamental basis of the EU constitution that will facilitate the privatisation by the capitalists of state property and the dismantling of social gains.
The EU reform treaty means permanent rearmament and war. In its struggle with the USA for worldwide spheres of influence, the EU is using the means of “Americanisation”: EU battle groups, under the hypocritical excuse of democracy and human rights will undertake wars to secure raw materials and geostrategic interests.
In order to achieve this, an EU state apparatus is to be built over and above the state apparatuses of the individual capitalist nation states and it will not be subject even to the minimal bourgeois democratic standards of parliamentarism in the individual states. The EU Commission President, Manuel Barroso has himself made clear the character of the future European Union: “sometimes I compare the EU with the model of organisation of an empire. We have the scale of an empire.” (1)
The question of the EU reform treaty, therefore, is objectively of the greatest importance for the class struggle in Europe and in Austria because the treaty would mean the consolidation and strengthening of EU imperialism and its wars against the working class domestically and against the oppressed peoples externally.
The EU reform treaty: the EU Constitution in new packaging
That is why the rulers want to force this treaty through at any price. It is why they want to prevent any referendums that would threaten defeats as in France and Holland in the spring of 2005. In order to justify this to the population, they have formulated the text of the reform treaty in even less clear language than the draft constitution. The Belgian Foreign Minister Karel de Gucht admitted this openly: “The aim with the constitution treaty was to make it more readable; the aim with this treaty is to make it unreadable. The constitution aimed at clarity while this treaty must be unclear. That is a success.” (2)
In fact, the EU reform treaty is simply a new edition of the defeated EU constitution. Thus it differs from the draft constitution in only 10 of the 250 proposals. In other words, 96 per cent of the text of the defeated constitutional treaty has been taken over.3 Leading representatives of European monopoly capital justify this. EU Parliamentary President Hans-Gert Poettering explained, “the substance of the constitutional treaty has been successfully defended.” (4) Even Giscard d’Estaing, the former President of France and, as the EU Convention President, the architect of the EU constitution, compared the EU reform treaty with the defeated constitutional draft in the tone of an arrogant imperial ruler: “with regard to the content the proposal is largely unaltered, it has simply been presented differently. The reason is that the new text should not look too similar to the constitutional treaty”. The EU governments have agreed upon “cosmetic changes so that the constitution can be more easily swallowed” in order to avoid the now risky referendums. (5)
The “amending treaty” alters two existing treaties; the “European Union Treaty” (EUT) and the treaty upon which the European Community was founded, now known as “the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union” (TFEU). (6)
Free-market economy
One important function of the reform treaty is the justification of the dismantling of workers’ rights and social gains and the extended privatisation of state property. Because of this the emphasis on the capitalist order runs like a red thread throughout the treaty with its various keywords such as “open market economy” and “free competition”. Thus, for example, article 119 says:
“The activities of the member states and the union in the meaning of article 3 of the Treaty on the European Union embraces in the terms of the treaty the introduction of an economic policy which aims at the closer coordination of economic policies of member states, the domestic market and the identification of common aims and they are subordinated to the fundamental rule of an open market economy with free competition. Parallel to this, under the terms of the treaty, these activities embrace the therein anticipated measures for a unified currency, the euro, as well as the formulation and introduction of a unified monetary and interest rate policy with the objective of achieving price stability and alongside this general economic policy of the union and the observation of the fundamental rules of an open market economy with free competition.” (7)
Equally, free trade, that is trade that benefits the strongest corporations, is promoted. It is to be a task of the EU “to take forward the integration of all the countries in the world economy among other things through the step by step dismantling of all limits on international trade”. (8) Similarly, adherence to the neoliberal Lisbon Strategy is explicitly written into the treaty with reference both to the “Growth and Stability Pact” and the objective of achieving budgetary surpluses at time of economic growth. (9)
Thus we have here the treaty-based commitment of the states to advance neoliberal economic reforms and investments by corporations and, simultaneously, a commitment to massive savings in state expenditure, that is, above all, in social and health provision. Indeed, the policy is now to be made even sharper; according to Austrian Finance Minister Grasser it means not just a nil deficit in prosperous times but a budget surplus.
Privatisation of public services
In the same spirit, the EU reform treaty would mean subordinating public services to the rules of competition. Article 86 makes clear that it will be the EU commission alone that will decide over such matters. (10)
This establishes the danger that many service sectors that have for a long time been untouched by the “blessings of the free market economy” will now be privatised, beginning with water, electricity and waste disposal through to public transport. It is no accident, for example, that the section dealing with transport policy has been amended. Previously, unanimity by all member states was required in order to implement measures over a common transport policy if their implementation endangered quality of life, or the functioning of means of transport. With the EU reform treaty such matters are now only to be noted. The French anti-globalisation activist Pierre Khalfa rightly concluded that, “a defence of public transport facilities is hereby removed.” (11) Similar measures of liberalisation of the energy sector are also anticipated.
Armaments and military interventions
The reform treaty confirms and accelerates the militarist armament and expansion plans of the EU. The “common security and defence policy” will become an integral component of the union. The EU Defence Agency would now become treaty based. Equally, every member state would become obliged to develop their defence capabilities and involvement in European plans so that at the latest by 2010 they are able to provide armed units to participate as national contingents or as parts of a multinational unit in proposed missions. (12)
Armament and the formation of multinational troop units are obviously not ends in themselves but serve the military interests of EU imperialism. With interventionist units, the EU will be able to carry out military operations abroad. Chad, in which even Austrian troops are participating, is only the first taste of future colonial adventures by European imperialism. (13)
The justifications for leading such wars are consciously left broad and open. Thus, a case for war could be established even if just one single EU state were “attacked”: “in the event of an armed attack on the territory of a member state the other member states will provide all possible help and support in their power.” (14)
However, it does not even need to be an attack, it is enough if the “Values of the Union” are endangered: “the Council can commission a group of member states to undertake a mission in order to defend the values of the Union and in service of its interests.” (15)
But the ruling classes are not only interested in fighting wars abroad. They also need an army for civil war domestically. The solidarity clause in Article 188r of the Lisbon Treaty specifies the conditions, such as terrorist attack, natural catastrophe or “man-made catastrophe” in which the Union and “member states will act together, using the military means available to them to defend democratic institutions or if requested to give support to a member state’s political institutions.” (16)
It is not difficult to understand that behind these legalistic phrases is hidden the possible suppression of uprisings and unrest within the EU by a civil war intervention by EU armies. We have always emphasised that the central problem of the EU is that it is far weaker militarily than its competitor, the USA. Against a background of increasing rivalry between the USA and the EU, the ruling class of Europe needs a change of course:
“However to become a power on a similar scale to the USA, Europe needs a fundamental change in its military policy. Which is why it is written into the constitution that European imperialism has the ability to undertake wars around the world in order to defend its political and economic interests (Values).” (17)
At first sight, the EU reform treaty appears to be contradictory. On the one hand it confirms close collaboration with NATO, which means that any powers within the EU that wanted to achieve any military policy independent from that of the US American competitors would not be able to carry this out fully. On the other hand, however, the powers around the German French block have opened the way to an independent military role, by the creation of their own confederation, the so-called “permanently structured cooperation”. (18)
Who is the boss?
The EU reform treaty, like the constitution before it, anticipates that the EU will be seen as an independent legal personality. The EU, or its representatives, could thus conclude treaties that would be binding on all members. (19)
In connection with this, the EU reform treaty foresees the formation of central state power structures. The ruling class sees in this the only possibility for building an effective central state apparatus that could overcome the conflicting interests between member states and force through measures against the working class. With this aim in mind, the number of decisions that can only be taken on the basis of unanimity has been greatly reduced, while the number that can be decided on the principle of “qualified majority” has increased, from 137 to 181. There has been conflict over what weight the individual states should have in this. In the end, an amendment to the advantage of the big countries was adopted. From November 1, 2014, the qualified majority will be changed to one half of the member states and 55 per cent of the population, with complicated transitional rules that will be valid until 2017.
Even more important, however, is the fact that, alongside the EU Council, that is the common representative of the governments of the member states, the EU Commission will play the central role. This is set out in the following Article: Article 9d:
“1. The Commission shall promote the general interest of the Union and take appropriate initiatives to that end. It shall ensure the application of the Treaties, and measures adopted by the institutions pursuant to them. It shall oversee the application of Union law under the control of the Court of Justice of the European Union. It shall execute the budget and manage programmes. It shall exercise coordinating, executive and management functions, as laid down in the Treaties. With the exception of the common foreign and security policy, and other cases provided for in the Treaties, it shall ensure the Union’s external representation. It shall initiate the Union’s annual and multi-annual programming with a view to achieving inter-institutional agreements.
2. Union legislative acts may be adopted only on the basis of a Commission proposal, except where the Treaties provide otherwise. Other acts shall be adopted on the basis of a Commission proposal where the Treaties so provide.” (20)
The rights of the EU Parliament, by contrast, are minimal and citizens’ initiatives have only the right to make requests to the Commission. (21)
Reactionary ideology is written into the Constitution
Alongside the principle of the free market economy, the Constitution establishes further important ideological principles of the bourgeois order. The preamble to the “Treaty of the European Union” has been amended by the introduction of the following paragraph: “created out of the cultural, religious and humanist heritage of Europe from which the inalienable and inviolable human rights such as freedom, democracy, equality and the rule of law have developed as universal values”. (22)
The reference to the “religious heritage of Europe”, in other words Christianity, is noteworthy. This is a religion in whose name innumerable wars and mass murders have been committed throughout history. This means, as the Catholic Church and the conservative forces demand, nothing less than the elevation of Christianity to the status of the constitution. This apparently innocent choice of words could, if necessary, be used by the ruling class as an ideological justification for numerous attacks, for example, setting aside the separation between state and religion, and for actions against atheists, questioning the right to abortion, justification of military intervention in defence of Christianity, for example, against Islam, and so on.
Fundamental causes: the decline of capitalism
It is obvious that all progressive organisations and activists oppose the EU reform treaty. However there is very little clarity about its origins and what alternatives there are and with what strategy we can fight it.
The EU reform treaty is not the result of a sudden lust for power on the part of the bourgeoisie, as various left reformist currents believe. Even less is it a conspiracy by various bureaucrats in Brussels, as in the fantasies of the editorial offices of the Kronen newspaper or in the Freedom party.
The struggle against the EU reform treaty cannot possibly be won if it is based on illusory and utopian foundations. The basic mistake of many Lefts today is to believe that the policy of the ruling class, which people usually call neoliberalism or militarism, is simply one of several possible options for the capitalist system. It is generally argued that the bourgeois rulers really have a range of possibilities as to how to exercise their power. The programme of relentless attacks on the social and democratic achievements of the working class and the imperialist war offensive is therefore not seen as an unavoidable, and from their own point of view absolutely necessary, policy of the ruling class but rather as a “mistaken policy” which could be replaced by a “correct policy” such as the development of the social state, full employment, disarmament and peace, whilst at the same time maintaining capitalism.
In reality, the neoliberal militarist offensive of the ruling class is the necessary result of the decline of capitalism against a background of increased competition between the monopolies and the great powers. Since the 1970s, the world economy has been characterised by a tendency towards stagnation of the productive forces. (23) This development holds true for the period of globalisation even though here we can see that there has been an uneven development where the tendency to stagnation dominates in the imperialist metropoles and in broad areas of the so-called Third World, while at the same time there are important exceptions such as China or India.
The formation of the EU as an answer of the imperialist capitals of Western Europe
It is the crisis ridden developmental tendency of the capitalist global economy which drives monopoly capital to sharper attacks on the working class and the increased exploitation of the semi-colonial world and, simultaneously, sharpens the competitive struggle between the great powers - above all between the two most powerful blocks, the USA and the EU. This results, on the one hand, in a common approach by the great powers when it is a matter, for example, of opening the semi-colonial countries to the great corporations but, on the other, also leads to political and economic conflict between the two blocks when their interests conflict.
The formation of the European Union as not only an economic domestic market but also as a political and military power bloc is the answer of the ruling class of Europe, above all of the core states, Germany and France, to increased competition and the necessity to pursue their interests in an increasingly unstable world with all the means at their disposal. We had already made this clear in an analysis three years ago: “the formation of a European capital and imperialism which can offer a rival to the USA as the leading world power is and remains a strategic aim of the German and French capitalist classes and their political executives.” (24)
That is why it is no accident that, after the ruling classes of Europe suffered the defeat of the referendum on the constitutional treaty in 2005, they soon began a renewed attempt. “The general attack on the workers will be maintained across the whole of Europe with unlimited, indeed increased, sharpness. Even if, in individual countries, there are short-term tactical retreats by the ruling class in response to mass mobilisations, these will lead quickly to even harsher attacks. The ruling classes will consciously take steps towards the formation of an imperialist bloc.” (25)
This remains our position: the aggressive policy of the ruling classes of Europe in the direction of a neoliberal dismantling of social services, militarisation and the building of the central EU state apparatus is the unavoidable result of the interests of capital in a time of stagnation, increased competition and instability. They have to pursue these policies otherwise the USA, and other powers, will in the long run degrade their European rivals from an advancing empire into a dwarf among the imperialist powers. Flowing from this, there will be rapidly developing sharp political crises up to the revolutionary situations. Any attempt to move the capitalist class to adopt different policies by negotiation or petitions is, therefore, nothing more than a reformist daydream.
That does not of course mean that absolutely no changes or modifications in the policy of the ruling class are possible without the immediate development of a revolutionary situation. It is possible to block this or that attack temporarily by hard class struggle or to reduce their impact. However, such changes are temporary defensive successes and, as long as the capitalist relations of exploitation remain, cannot lead to a fundamental and permanent improvement in the situation of the working class.
Reforming the EU in the interests of the oppressed?
A good proportion of the left holds a reformist politics that would like to change the EU and create a “social, peaceful and democratic Europe”. Two examples can be dealt with here. ATTAC, for example, demands the election of a constitutional assembly in the EU from which a reformed EU could proceed. (26) The ATTAC founder in Austria, Christian Felber, hopes that through such democratic and social reforms a more effective EU can be created: “the effectiveness of the EU in comparison to the present situation would be improved through such new structures.” (27)
Similar hopes are held by the European Left Party whose Austrian component is the Kommunistische Partei Österreichs (KPO): “we believe that the EU is in a position to disarm and should do this and that the military budgets of the member states should be reduced and they should give up thinking in military categories.” (28)
It is noteworthy that the Socialist Party youth organisation has never brought itself to make a clear rejection of the EU reform treaty. In their one public position they did indeed demand a referendum but did not take a position. At the same time, they opened the columns of their newspaper to Socialist Party propagandists for the EU reform treaty and declined to offer any criticism. Once again this shows that the Socialist Youth, unlike their self-characterisation, are neither autonomous nor Marxist but rather the left reformist drummer boys of the Socialist Party apparatus in the ranks of the youth.
Despite differences of nuance, these positions have in common a deeply reformist petty bourgeois logic. Namely, that it is possible to create a “democratic socially just and peaceful EU” without posing the question of property and power in Europe. How can a socially just Europe be possible as long as capitalist property relations are maintained, as long as a tiny minority of employers hold all the means of production in their hands? How can a peaceful Europe be possible as long as the corporations and the generals, who intend to further their interests globally by military means, exist? How can there be any real democracy so long as the ruling class is in power and is daily strengthening the police state?
Reformist politics have no clear class understanding that our society is divided between a ruling class, at whose head is monopoly capital and its professional politicians, and the working class, that is to say those dependent on wages and their families.
Naturally this lack of understanding is not accidental, it has a material basis. Behind the reformist view that neoliberalism is simply a “mistaken policy” which can be resolved through “another politics” with “another government”, there is a political perspective. Namely, the hope by forces such as the European Left Party that they can become part of a government coalition in the capitalist EU member states and thereby get their noses into the trough of power and its associated privileges. In Italy, this has already been carried out and the Rifondazione Communista (PRC) played a substantial role in the neoliberal and militaristic government of Prodi (which, with the help of the PRC, raised the pension age, participated in the occupation of Afghanistan and built up the NATO military base in Vincenza). In Berlin, the Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus (PDS) has been in a coalition with the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) for three years and undertaken dismantling of social provisions. Behind the reformists’ phrases of a “social and peaceful Europe” is hidden the reality of their desire to participate in capitalist power.
The League for Socialist Revolution (the Austrian section of the L5I) stands for a socialist Europe and rejects the slogan of a “social Europe”. At best, this formulation leaves open which class should rule in such a Europe. But those who leave this question open are basically accepting that those who rule today shall also rule in the future. In other words, their “social Europe” is nothing more than a social democratic, that is, a bourgeois and imperialist, Europe.
We do not want to reform the EU, we want to destroy it – but not in order to return to the nation state, the form of social organisation which corresponded to the level of development of the productive forces in the 19th century. We want to go forwards: to a European revolution over the corpse of the EU towards the United Socialist States of Europe.
Is an exit from the EU an alternative for the working class?
An apparent alternative to this is the strategy of various left organisations such as the KPO Steiermark and the Communist Initiative, which propose that Austria should leave the EU. This demand for a return to the old nation state is deeply illusionary and dangerous. It is wrong to believe that Austria, if it were to free itself from the EU, would be any less reactionary, any less hostile to the working class, as a state. Austria is an imperialist state, it has not been led astray by the “bad EU”, rather, domestic capital sees its interests best served, for the moment, in the EU. The capitalists are not attacking the working class because of some “diktat from Brussels” but out of their own basic interests in profit. It is therefore all the more damaging when various lefts strengthen this excuse from fractions of domestic small and medium-sized capital and echo the lies that are spread by the bourgeois media. The ideology of the “good” old nation state would in reality mean the retreat of the working class from the stage of the class struggle by a united global proletariat and back to narrow, reactionary, national horizons. Austrian capital does not only exploit the working class here at home but also in numerous semi-colonies, above all in Eastern Europe, through its massive foreign investments from which it gains super profits. It was not for nothing that the ruling class of Austria was strongly in favour of the EU entry of the east European countries.
In the capitalist world, the individual capitalist states do not exist entirely independently of each other and neither could they. Rather, what we see is a constantly increasing involvement of individual countries within the global economy. Austria is one part of the global economy and cannot change this by leaving the EU. All of its involvements would continue to exist even if Austria were to leave the EU. The leader of the Russian October Revolution in 1917, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, characterised nationally limited politics such as those of the “leave the EU” current very accurately:
“The petty striving of petty states to hold aloof, the petty-bourgeois desire to keep as far away as possible from the great battles of world history, to take advantage of one’s relatively monopolistic position in order to remain in hidebound passivity—this is the objective social environment which may ensure the disarmament idea a certain degree of success and a certain degree of popularity in some of the small states. That striving is, of course, reactionary and is based entirely on illusions, for, in one way or another, imperialism draws the small states into the vortex of world economy and world politics.” (29)
At heart, the “leave the EU” perspective shares the same fundamental error as the left EU reformers, that is, they completely ignore the class question. Whose EU? Whose Austria? The EU that really exists is the EU of the corporations and the generals. And the Austria that really exists is equally the Austria of the corporations and the generals. As long as this class holds the power in the economy and the society there can be no long-lasting reforms. Only their overthrow will open the way to the future.
Revolutionary strategy
Today we are facing an all-embracing offensive by the ruling classes of Europe. They want to destroy the social and democratic gains of the working class, whatever the cost, and establish the EU as the second military superpower, alongside the USA.
Resistance to this can only be successful if we orient ourselves not towards appeals and petitions to the rulers or to the achievement of governmental posts but towards a Europe-wide organisation and struggle by the working class and youth. That is why we in the LSR, together with our international comrades in the League for the Fifth International, stand for mass demonstrations and strikes up to a general strike against the EU reform treaty and other attacks. This is necessary both in individual countries and across Europe.
We need an organisation of resistance from below at every level. That is why we call for the building of action committees, social forums and alliances at every level, local, regional and national. Equally, we need a European wide coordination of the struggles. This demand is directed at all organisations of the working class, all parties which are against the war and neoliberalism, all the groupings within the anti-globalisation movement, the antiwar movement, immigrant organisations, youth organisations and student representatives.
How can we stop the reform treaty?
The resistance against the EU reform treaty demands broad struggle both in Austria and across Europe. In this way we can build on a broad rejection of the EU reform treaty and popular demand for a referendum across the whole of Europe. Just in Austria, 70 per cent of those asked in the most recent opinion poll were in favour of a referendum and in another poll twice as many people saw a disadvantage in the treaty as those that saw an advantage, 39 per cent to 19 per cent.
The League of Socialist Revolution supports the demand for a referendum over the EU reform treaty as one form, although limited, of opposition. We are, therefore, active in the referendum campaign. The majority of organisations in this alliance see its priority as small media actions, press conferences, petitions and the winning of individual officials and sectors of the established parties, they hope for support from the Kronen newspaper and so on. We by no means reject such steps, in particular circumstances they could indeed play a subordinate but positive role. However, the centre of gravity of the resistance must lie in a working class, class struggle perspective in order to force a referendum. The whole campaign can only be successful if it concentrates itself on organising broad mass actions, meetings oriented towards the masses and the building of local committees rooted in the masses. In concrete terms we call for:
The trade unions as well as the student organisations and progressive immigrant organisations should be won to opposition to the reform treaty and a perspective of class struggle against it through strikes and demonstrations.
We propose coordinated interventions by the organisations participating in the campaign in the planned so-called “information meetings” over the EU reform treaty to be organised by the government.
We are in favour of the organisation of local action committees in factories, schools and universities and also locally, following the example of the 900 local Committees for a No against the EU constitution in France in 2005.
We propose the organisation of at least one major demonstration as well as further direct actions in the spring.
For a programme of struggle against the general offensive of EU capital
The struggle against the general offensive of capital cannot limit itself to the EU reform treaty but must include all fronts. For that it needs a clear programme of defensive struggles.
Stop the social attacks!
Unemployment, under employment and poverty affect millions and millions in Eastern and Western Europe. As unifying key demands in the struggle we propose:
• Europe-wide introduction of the 35 hour week with no loss of pay or jobs.
• A minimum wage established by the labour movement of each country.
• For a struggle against privatisation of public services and mass redundancies.
• For a programme of socially useful public works under the control of the workers, the unemployed and consumers.
• Progressive taxation of firms and the rich to finance these measures.
Fight racism
The division of the working class and the oppressed along national and ethnic lines is a central problem for any common struggle. The EU and the national bourgeoisies and governments are consciously deepening the divisions. Workers from Eastern Europe and from the semi-colonial countries outside the EU are excluded from the Western labour market, dealt with as second-class workers or forced into illegality where they have to work in the worst possible conditions.
Within the EU, national and ethnic minorities such as the Basques or the Roma are denied their democratic rights. Moslem, Turkish, Arabs and migrants from the Balkans or from Africa are subjected to systematic hate and oppression. Fascist and racist forces are spreading the poison of anti-semitism. Against all this we fight for:
• Full and equal social and political rights for all who live in Europe.
• We are against immigration controls, for open borders.
• For self defence organisations of the racially or nationally oppressed against fascist or racist attacks.
• For a common struggle of migrant and indigenous workers against such attacks.
• Down with all reactionary “anti-terror laws”
Against war and occupation
The EU and its member states are open or covert supporters of the occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan and of the US threats to Iran. Therefore we are:
• For the immediate withdrawal of all troops from Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon.
• Support the legitimate liberation struggle of the Iraqi and Afghan resistance against the occupiers and, likewise, the resistance of the Palestinians.
• EU states are not only passive supporters of the USA. Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia are practically colonies of the EU. Germany participates in the occupation of Afghanistan and France regularly intervenes in Africa. And now the EU and Austria are also sending troops into Chad.
• No to all EU interventions whether under US leadership, the EU or UN flags! Withdrawal of all troops stationed abroad!
No to the building of the police state
The ruling classes are consciously building a police state under the cover of security for citizens and the “war against terror”. Democratic rights are being systematically hollowed out or even completely repealed.
• Against the permanent surveillance state. Down with all permanent surveillance cameras in public places. No online surveillance.
• Stop all dragnets and bugging operations. Against all security police authority. For self defence units to defend demonstrations against attacks by the police.
• Police out of the localities. Maintenance of public order by self defence units based on elections and control by mass meetings in the factories and housing estates.
For a constituent assembly
The question of the EU reform treaty is a democratic question. It is a matter of determining the constitution of a future federation. The ruling class has been trying to bring this about with either undemocratic or plebiscitary measures. All future attempts by the ruling class will have a similar character because of the internal contradictions within the national capitalist classes. The question of a constitution and of democracy can and must, under these circumstances, be made into a means of mobilising the masses but not for some “other” bourgeois constitution as suggested in the reformist daydreams of groups like ATTAC. Instead, we need a consistent democratic form for the unification process, a constituent assembly elected by all the inhabitants of the EU as well as those countries that wish to join a united Europe.
Such a slogan has a revolutionary democratic character if it is understood as a means of mobilisation, a means of using bourgeois democratic hopes and illusions against the rulers in order to make it easier to take the steps necessary for the overthrow of the ruling class.
Through the European revolution…
A decisive, Europe-wide struggle by the working class, the youth and the migrants will, sooner or later, raise the question of power: who rules in Europe, the capitalists or the oppressed? In order to rid ourselves of social cuts, racism and war for good we must overthrow the power of the ruling class. For that, we need a Europe-wide socialist revolution. Such a revolution will not be brought about by proposals in Parliament or buy peaceful pressure on the streets but only by the struggle and armed uprising of the mass of the working class. Only through such a revolution can we really build our Europe, a socialist Europe.
Already, 160 years ago, in the year 1848, working class and oppressed layers first rose up against their rulers. Such a revolution, but this time with a clear socialist perspective, is more necessary than ever today in Europe.
The European revolution will not be a spontaneous process that grows organically out of a steady broadening and expansion in class struggle beyond the limits of the national states to a European level. Equally, it will not be a matter of conspiratorial and simultaneous coups in all the main EU countries. A precise description of how European working class revolution would develop is, of course, impossible. We can, however, make the following observations: the economic unification of Europe by capitalism will inevitably develop an Europeanization of the class struggle, even if it is delayed and distorted. The only progressive aspect of the development of the EU, an unintended side effect of the bourgeoisie’s policy, so to say, is an inevitable international linkage of struggles by workers, youth and migrants. We have already seen the first signs of this in Europe-wide strikes or the echoes in other countries of the rising by immigrant youth in the Parisian suburbs in 2005.
Against a background of a Europe-wide wave of class struggle, there will develop in this or that country, perhaps even across the continent, pre-revolutionary and revolutionary situations. Against this background, in one or more countries, a revolutionary party based in the working class will lead the overthrow of the ruling class. If the revolution is victorious in one or more countries this will quickly have widespread effects across the rest of the European Union. It will have a dynamising and inspiring effect on other class brothers and sisters as well as alarming the capitalist classes. It is therefore likely that a successful socialist workers’ republic in one or more countries could not survive for very long, either it will extend itself across the whole continent to form the United Socialist States of Europe or it will be quickly destroyed by an armed counterrevolution.
It is obvious that a successful European revolution would have an enormous impact on the imperialist states, above all the USA, and in the rest of the world. In 1923, Trotsky made the following observations that, of course, cannot be applied directly today because of the changed historical situation. Nonetheless his observations summarise clearly and sharply the possible worldwide effects.
“It must not be overlooked that the very danger arising from the United States of America (which is spurring the destruction of Europe, and is ready to step in subsequently as Europe’s master) furnishes a very substantial bond for uniting the peoples of Europe who are ruining one another into a “European United States of Workers and Peasants”. This opposition between Europe and the United States stems organically from the differences in the objective situations of the European countries and of the mighty transatlantic republic, and is not in any way directed against the international solidarity of the proletariat, or against the interests of the revolution in America. One of the reasons for the retarded development of the revolution throughout the world is the degrading European dependence on the rich American uncle (Wilsonism, the charitable feeding of the worst famine districts of Europe, American “loans”, etc., etc.). The sooner the popular masses of Europe regain the confidence in their own strength which was sapped by the war, and the more closely they rally around the slogan of “United Workers’, and Peasants’, Republics of Europe”, the more rapidly will the revolution develop on both sides of the Atlantic. For just as the triumph of the proletariat in Russia gave a mighty impetus to the development of the Communist parties of Europe so, and even to an incomparably greater degree, will the triumph of the revolution in Europe give an impetus to the revolution in America and in all parts of the world. Although, when we abstract ourselves from Europe, we are obliged to peer into the mists of decades to perceive the American revolution, yet we may safely assert that by the natural sequence of historical events the triumphant revolution in Europe will serve in a very few years to shatter the power of the American bourgeoisie.” (30)
…to the United Socialist States of Europe
The alternative of the League for the Socialist Revolution and the League for the Fifth International to the EU reform treaty of an imperialist Europe is therefore neither a reactionary return to “independent” national states and the reintroduction of schillings, Deutschmarks, French francs and other national currencies, nor a “social” but, in reality, social chauvinist, Europe.
The capitalist unification of Europe, the development of European monopolies and corporate alliances cannot be fought via reactionary and utopian attempts to turn back the wheel of history.
On the contrary, the fight against the formation of a European imperialism and European monopolies needs the working class itself at all levels to give a political answer to the problem of European unification. That means fighting the attacks of the ruling class and fighting for the United Socialist States of Europe as a step toward world revolution.
This would create a basis for a complete reorganisation of the European and global economy on the basis of democratic planning. Central problems such as mass unemployment can only really be solved on this basis. Only on this basis can long lasting national and racist oppression really be overcome. A socialist Europe would, for example, implement the right of self-determination for the Basques and it would allow the possibility of overcoming the national divisions on the Balkans. Both these tasks would be possible if we recognised the rights of the various nations to self-determination, while at the same time creating the possibility of voluntary alliance without allowing the profit interests of the imperialist capitals and the national bourgeoisies to intervene. The following declaration of the Marxist revolutionary and leader of the October revolution of 1917, Leon Trotsky, summarises our goals in the revolution for the United Socialist States of Europe:
“In the person of the Opposition the vanguard of the European proletariat tells its present rulers: In order to unify Europe it is first of all necessary to wrest power out of your hands. We will do it. We will unite Europe. We will unite it against the hostile capitalist world. We will turn it into a mighty drill-ground of militant socialism. We will make it the cornerstone of the world socialist federation.” (31)
For new revolutionary parties, for the Fifth International
A revolutionary perspective remains an illusion if no fighting parties exist nationally or internationally. The League for the Socialist Revolution is under no illusions that the exploiting class will ever voluntarily and peacefully give up their rule. Only a socialist revolution in Austria and worldwide, only the armed insurrection of the working class, can open the door to the future of freedom and justice. Such an uprising will not come about spontaneously but demands systematic preparation and organisation of the revolution. For that it needs a party, an organisation in which the most conscious sections of the working class and the youth are organised under the banner of revolution. The creation of such a party of socialist revolution in Austria and worldwide, the Fifth International, is therefore the most urgent task of all workers and youth who wish to struggle for a socialist future with us. The building of such a party and international can accept no delay. We cannot wait until revolution is at the door. Then, as history shows us, it is already too late to begin serious political and organisational preparations.
Let us unite into an international party of the working class, in a Fifth International! Forward in struggle for socialist Europe! Forward in struggle for a socialist world!
Endnotes
(1) EU Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso, Telegraph, 18.07.2007, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/07/11weu111.xml
(2) http://www.free-europe.org/blog/?itemid=383
(3) http://www.openeurope.org.uk/media-centre/pressrelease.aspx?pressrelease...
(4) http://www.merkur-online.de/politik/art8808,869823
(5) Reform treaty: cosmetic changes to avoid referendums, says Giscard d'Estaing, 17.7.2007, http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/expert/infopress_page/003-9201-197-07-29-901-20070716IPR09200-16-07-2007-2007-false/default_de.htm
(6) References to the Treaties signed in December 2007 are according to the version published on December 17, 2007 and published on http://eurolex.europa.eu/
(7) TEU Article 119
(8) TEU Article 21e
(9) See: Final Act Declaration: Nr.30. Clarification of Article 104 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU
(10) Lisbon Treaty Article 86
(11) Pierre Khalfa: EU Reform Treaty: Both Method and Content are Unacceptable (August 2007)
(12) Protocol regarding permanently structured cooperation, according to Article 28a TEU, Article 13 “Article 28 1. The tasks referred to in Article 27(1), in the course of which the Union may use civilian and military means, shall include joint disarmament operations, humanitarian and rescue tasks, military advice and assistance tasks, conflict prevention and peace-keeping tasks, tasks of combat forces in crisis management, including peace-making and post-conflict stabilisation. All these tasks may contribute to the fight against terrorism, including by supporting third countries in combating terrorism in their territories.
2. The Council shall adopt decisions relating to the tasks referred to in paragraph 1, defining their objectives and scope and the general conditions for their implementation. The High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, acting under the authority of the Council and in close and constant contact with the Political and Security Committee, shall ensure coordination of the civilian and military aspects of such tasks.” (Lisbon Treaty on Changing…)
(13) We have explained the our anti-imperialist position against the EU intervention in Chad in the declaration: Austria and EU: Get Out of Chad! Stop the imperialist military intervention! Solidarity with the resistance of the rebel movements in Chad against the Austrian and EU troops! 6.12.2007, http://www.fifthinternational.org/content/austria-and-eu-get-out-chad. A longer elaboration of this subject including a polemic against the reformist and centrist left can be read in German language in the article by Michael Pröbsting: Der Tschad-Einsatz und die Linke. Über jene Linke, die ihren Schein-Antiimperialismus mit marxistischen Phrasen tarnen; in: Unter der Fahne der Revolution, No. 2-3 (2008) (Theoretical Journal of the Liga der Sozialistischen Revolution).
(14) Lisbon Treaty on Changing…
(15) Lisbon Treaty on Changing…
(16) Lisbon Treaty on Changing… Article 188r
(17) Translated for this article from Michael Pröbsting: ‚Amerikanisierung oder Niedergang’. Widersprüche und Hausforderungen für das imperialistische Projekt der Europäischen Vereinigung. In Revolutionärer Marxismus Nr.35, Berlin, 2005 p.39
(18) Article 28a of the Lisbon Treaty refers to those powers which “have met the demanding criteria in respect of military abilities” forming this “Structured Cooperation” within the framework of the Union.
(19) This is to be found in the Final Act, Declaration on Priority
(20) Treaty of Lisbon
(21) Article 8b, para 4: Not less than one million citizens who are nationals of a significant number of Member States may take the initiative of inviting the Commission, within the framework of its powers, to submit any appropriate proposal on matters where citizens consider that a legal act of the Union is required for the purpose of implementing the Treaties. The procedures and conditions required for such a citizens’ initiative shall be determined in accordance with the first paragraph of Article 21 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.
(22) TEU
(23) By “productive forces” Marxists understand both the material means and the results of production, thus the term includes means of production (machinery etc) and produced goods and also the people who serve the means of production and, for this purpose, enter into particular forms of social division of labour. Obviously, means of production and people stand in a relationship to one another and, from the point of view of capital, the purpose of setting the worker to work on the means of production is to produce goods and, thereby, surplus value. Productive forces, therefore, are not simply a collection of things but include people and their living conditions. The point is discussed further in Michael Pröbsting: Die widersprüchliche Entwicklung der Produktivkräfte in Kapitalismus, in Revolutionärer Marxismus 37, Berlin, 2007
(24) Martin Suchanek/Michael Pröbsting: EU in der Krise. Soziales oder sozialistisches Europa?; in: Revolutionärer Marxismus Nr.35, Berlin, 2005, p. 6
(25) ibid, p7
(26) See: “Attacs 10 Prinzipien für einen demokratischen EU-Vertrag”, http://www.attac.at/uploads/media/10_Prinzipien_fuer_einen_demokratische...
(27) Christian Felber: Mein europäischer Traum; in: DER STANDARD, 5.12.2007 p28
(28) ELP: In the name of a democratic and social Europe: “THE GOVERNMENT’S TREATY MUST BE PUT TO REFERENDUM IN THE EU”, 19. October 2007, http://www.europeanleft.org/nc/english/news/news_archive/news_archive/br...
(29) V.I. Lenin: The Military Programme of the Proletarian Revolution; in: Collected Works, Vol. 23, Moscow, p.86
(30) Leo Trotzki: Über die Aktualität der Parole „Vereinigte Staaten von Europa“ (1923); in: Leo Trotzki, Wohin treibt England/Europa und Amerika, Verlag Neuer Kurs, Berlin 1972, S. 95f.; in English: Is the slogan of “The United States of Europe” a timely one?; in: Leon Trotsky: The First Five Years of the Communist International, Vo. 2, London 1975, p. 344, http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1923/06/europe.htm
(31) Leon Trotsky: Disarmament and the United States of Europe in Writings, 1929, New York,.1975, p 357
von Michael Pröbsting, www.thecommunists.net
(Die Graphiken in diesem Dokument können in der unten angehängten pdf Version eingesehen werden.)
Vorwort der Redaktion: Die folgende Studie wurde erstmals im Frühjahr 2008 als Broschüre der Liga der Sozialistischen Revolution (LSR) veröffentlicht. die LSR war die damalige österreichische Sektion der Liga für die Fünfte Internationale (LFI). Der Autor, Genosse Pröbsting, war damals Mitglied der internationalen Leitung der LFI. Er wurde im April 2011 gemeinsam mit anderen Genossinnen und Genossen von der Mehrheit der LFI-Führung bürokratisch ausgeschlossen, nachdem sie wenige Wochen zuvor eine Fraktion gegründet hatten, um der zentristischen Degeneration der LFI entgegenzuwirken. Die ausgeschlossenen Genossinnen und Genossen gründeten daraufhin umgehend in Österreich die Revolutionär-Kommunistische Organisation zur Befreiung (RKOB). Iim April 2012 schlossen sie sich gemeinsam mit Schwesterorganisationen in Pakistan, Sri Lanka und den USA zu einer internationalen Organisation – der Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT) – zusammen. Die RCIT hat heute Sektionen und Aktivisten in neun Ländern. Michael Pröbsting ist heute der Internationale Sekretär der RCIT. Wie aus dem Dokument ersichtlich wurde es in der Zeit der Kampagne gegen den EU-Vertrag verfaßt. Wir haben uns zur Wiederveröffentlichung der Studie entschlossen, da sie in mehrerer Hinsicht von höchst aktueller Bedeutung ist. Die in ihr enthaltene marxistische Analyse der inneren Widersprüche der imperialistischen EU behält volle Gültigkeit.
* * * * *
Der EU-Reformvertrag ist ein Anschlag auf die Interessen der breiten Bevölkerungsmehrheit Europas - der Lohnabhängigen, der Jugendlichen und der MigrantInnen. Er dient ausschließlich den Interessen der Konzerne und Machteliten in Europa und in Österreich. Deswegen müssen wir den EU-Reformvertrag verhindern. Dazu brauchen wir eine klare Analyse über die Ziele und Hintergründe des EU-Reformvertrages sowie eine klare Strategie für den Abwehrkampf. Eine solche Analyse, wie auch die daraus erwachsende Kampfstrategie muß den ureigensten Interessen der Lohnabhängigen, der Jugendlichen und MigrantInnen entsprechen. Sie muß hierfür eine Strategie des Proletariats sein, muß eine revolutionäre, marxistische Strategie sein, sonst werden alle Maßnahmen des Widerstandes im Nichts verlaufen. Aus diesem Grund legen wir im Folgenden die Ansichten und Vorschläge der Liga der Sozialistische Revolution (LSR) dar.
Teil des Generalangriffs der imperialistischen Bourgeoisie
Worum geht es bei dem EU-Reformvertrag in den groben Zügen? Es geht um die Stärkung und Vorantreibung der Europäischen Union als eine gemeinsame wirtschaftliche, politische und militärische Organisation der imperialistischen herrschenden Klassen Europas, d.h. des europäischen Monopolkapitals.
Der EU-Reformvertrag bedeutet die Vorantreibung des Turbo-Kapitalismus. „Offene Marktwirtschaft mit freiem Wettbewerb“ wird als Grundpfeiler der EU-Verfassung festgeschrieben und die Privatisierung von staatlichem Eigentum sowie der Abbau sozialer Errungenschaften für die KapitalistInnen erleichtert.
Der EU-Reformvertrag bedeutet permanente Aufrüstung und Krieg. Im Wettstreit mit den USA um weltweite Einflußsphären greift die EU zum Mittel der „Amerikanisierung“: EU-Battlegroups sollen – unter dem heuchlerischen Vorwand von Demokratie und Menschenrechte – Kriege für die Sicherung von Rohstoffquellen und geostrategischen Interessen führen.
Zu diesem Zweck wird über den Staatsapparaten der einzelnen kapitalistischen Nationalstaaten ein EU-Staatsapparat ausgebaut, der nicht einmal die minimalen bürgerlich-demokratischen Standards des Parlamentarismus auf einzelstaatlicher Ebene kennt. Der EU-Kommissionspräsident Jose Manuel Barroso selbst gibt den Charakter der Europäischen Union unumwunden zu: „Manchmal vergleiche ich die EU gerne mit einem Gebilde zur Organisation eines Imperiums. Wir haben die Ausmaße eines Imperiums“ [1]
Die Frage des EU-Reformvertrages ist also objektiv von großer Bedeutung für den Klassenkampf in Europa und in Österreich, da der Vertrag eine Konsolidierung und Stärkung des EU-Imperialismus und seines Krieges gegen die ArbeiterInnenklasse im Inneren und gegen die unterdrückten Völker nach Außen bedeutet.
EU-Reformvertrag: EU-Verfassung in neuem Gewand
Deswegen wollen die Herrschenden diesen Vertrag um jeden Preis durchboxen, deswegen wollen sie verhindern, daß es zu Volksabstimmungen mit drohenden Niederlagen wie in Frankreich und den Niederlanden im Frühjahr 2005 kommt. Um dies gegenüber der Bevölkerung zu tarnen, haben sie den Reformvertrag-Text noch unverständlicher als den Verfassungsentwurf formuliert. Der belgische Außenminister Karel de Gucht gesteht dies offen ein: „Das Ziel des Verfassungsvertrages war, besser lesbar zu sein; das Ziel dieses Vertrages ist, unlesbar zu sein… Die Verfassung zielte darauf ab, klar zu sein, während dieser Vertrag unklar sein musste. Das ist ein Erfolg.“ [2]
Tatsächlich ist der EU-Reformvertrag weitestgehend eine bloße Neuauflage der gescheiterten EU-Verfassung. So unterscheidet sich der Reformvertrag vom Verfassungsentwurf nur in 10 von 250 Vorschlägen, mit anderen Worten: 96% des Textes des gescheiterten Verfassungsvertrags wurden übernommen. [3] Dies stellen führende Vertreter des europäischen Monopolkapitals auch mit Genugtuung fest. EU-Parlamentspräsident Hans-Gert Pöttering meinte, „die Substanz des Verfassungsvertrages sei mit Erfolg verteidigt worden“ [4] Auch Giscard d`Estaing, der frühere Präsident Frankreichs und als EU-Konventspräsident Architekt der EU-Verfassung, vergleicht den EU-Reformvertrag mit dem gescheiterten Verfassungsentwurf offen im Ton eines arroganten Imperial-Herrschers: „In Bezug auf den Inhalt ist der Vorschlag weitgehend unverändert, er wird einfach nur auf andere Weise präsentiert. (…) Der Grund ist, daß der neue Text nicht mehr allzu ähnlich aussehen konnte wie der Verfassungsvertrag“ Die EU-Regierungen einigten sich daher auf „kosmetischen Änderungen, damit die Verfassung leichter geschluckt werden kann“ um so neuerliche riskante Volksabstimmungen vermeiden zu können. [5]
Der EU-Reformvertrag im Detail
Der „Veränderungsvertrag“ ändert die beiden existierenden Verträge, den „Vertrag über die Europäische Union“ (im folgendem abgekürzt mit VEU) und den Vertrag, der die Europäische Gemeinschaft gründet, der nun den Namen „Vertrag über die Arbeitsweise der Europäischen Union“ (VAEU) annimmt. [6]
Freie Marktwirtschaft
Eine wichtige Funktion des Reformvertrages ist die Rechtfertigung des Abbaus von ArbeiterInnenrechten, sozialen Errungenschaften und der ausweitenden Privatisierung des staatlichen Eigentums. Deswegen zieht sich die Betonung der kapitalistischen Ordnung mit ihren Schlagworten wie „offenen Marktwirtschaft“ und „freier Wettbewerb“ wie ein roter Faden durch den Vertrag. So besagt z.B. Artikel 119:
„(1) Die Tätigkeit der Mitgliedstaaten und der Union im Sinne des Artikels 3 des Vertrags über die Europäische Union umfasst nach Maßgabe der Verträge die Einführung einer Wirtschaftspolitik, die auf einer engen Koordinierung der Wirtschaftspolitik der Mitgliedstaaten, dem Binnenmarkt und der Festlegung gemeinsamer Ziele beruht und dem Grundsatz einer offenen Marktwirtschaft mit freiem Wettbewerb verpflichtet ist.
(2) Parallel dazu umfasst diese Tätigkeit nach Maßgabe der Verträge und der darin vorgesehenen Verfahren eine einheitliche Währung, den Euro, sowie die Festlegung und Durchführung einer einheitlichen Geld- sowie Wechselkurspolitik, die beide vorrangig das Ziel der Preisstabilität verfolgen und unbeschadet dieses Zieles die allgemeine Wirtschaftspolitik in der Union unter Beachtung des Grundsatzes einer offenen Marktwirtschaft mit freiem Wettbewerb unterstützen sollen.“
Ebenso soll der freie Handel – also jener Handel, der die stärksten Unternehmen, die Konzerne, begünstigt – gefördert werden: Aufgabe der EU sei es, „die Integration aller Länder in die Weltwirtschaft zu fördern, unter anderem auch durch den schrittweisen Abbau internationaler Handelshemmnisse“ (VEU Artikel 21e).
Ebenso wird die neoliberale Lissabonner Strategie festgeschrieben:
„In Bezug auf Artikel 104 bekräftigt die Konferenz, dass die Wirtschafts- und Haushaltspolitik der Union und der Mitgliedstaaten auf die beiden fundamentalen Ziele ausgerichtet ist, das Wachstumspotenzial zu steigern und eine solide Haushaltslage zu gewährleisten. Der Stabilitäts- und Wachstumspakt ist ein wichtiges Instrument für die Verwirklichung dieser Ziele. In diesem Zusammenhang erneuert die Konferenz ferner ihr Bekenntnis zu den Zielen der Lissabonner Strategie: Schaffung von Arbeitsplätzen, Strukturreformen und sozialer Zusammenhalt.
Die Union strebt ein ausgewogenes Wirtschaftswachstum und Preisstabilität an. Deshalb muss die Wirtschafts- und Haushaltspolitik in Zeiten schwachen Wirtschaftswachstums die entsprechenden Prioritäten in Bezug auf Wirtschaftsreformen, Innovation, Wettbewerbsfähigkeit und Steigerung der privaten Investitionen und des privaten Verbrauchs setzen. (…) Die Konferenz kommt überein, dass die Mitgliedstaaten Phasen der wirtschaftlichen Erholung aktiv nutzen sollten, um die öffentlichen Finanzen zu konsolidieren und ihre Haushaltslage zu verbessern. Das Ziel ist dabei, in Zeiten günstiger Konjunktur schrittweise einen Haushaltsüberschuss zu erreichen, um in Zeiten der konjunkturellen Abschwächung über den nötigen Spielraum zu verfügen und so zur langfristigen Tragfähigkeit der öffentlichen Finanzen beizutragen.“ [7]
Hier haben wir also die vertraglich-bindende Anhaltung des Staates, neoliberale Wirtschaftsreformen, Investitionen der Unternehmer usw. zu fördern und gleichzeitig massiv bei den staatlichen Ausgaben – d.h. vor allem bei den Sozial- und Gesundheitsleitungen – einzusparen. Diesmal wird der Kurs sogar noch mehr verschärft: Hieß es unter Finanzminister Grasser noch Nulldefizit in Zeiten der guten Konjunktur, soll nun sogar ein Haushaltsüberschuß erzielt werden.
Privatisierung der öffentlichen Dienstleistungen
Im gleichen Geiste werden mit dem EU-Reformvertrag die öffentlichen Dienstleistungen den Regeln des Wettbewerbs unterworfen. Es ist die EU-Kommission, welche alleine darüber entscheidet.
„Für Unternehmen, die mit Dienstleistungen von allgemeinem wirtschaftlichem Interesse betraut sind oder den Charakter eines Finanzmonopols haben, gelten die Vorschriften der Verträge, insbesondere die Wettbewerbsregeln, soweit die Anwendung dieser Vorschriften nicht die Erfüllung der ihnen übertragenen besonderen Aufgabe rechtlich oder tatsächlich verhindert. Die Entwicklung des Handelsverkehrs darf nicht in einem Ausmaß beeinträchtigt werden, das dem Interesse der Union zuwiderläuft.
Die Kommission achtet auf die Anwendung dieses Artikels und richtet erforderlichenfalls geeignete Richtlinien oder Beschlüsse an die Mitgliedstaaten.“ [8]
Damit besteht nun die Gefahr, daß in vielen Dienstleistungsbereichen, die bislang von den „Segnungen der freien Marktwirtschaft“ verschont blieben, privatisiert werden: angefangen von Wasser, Strom, der Müllabfuhr bis hin zum öffentlichen Transport. Nicht zufällig wurde z.B. ein Absatz zur Verkehrspolitik verändert. So war früher die Einstimmigkeit der Mitgliedsstaaten erforderlich, um im Rahmen der gemeinsamen Transportpolitik, Maßnahmen zu ergreifen, wenn deren Anwendung, die Lebensqualität, die Anstellung oder den Betrieb der Transportmittel zu gefährden. Mit dem EU-Reformvertrag sind bei der gemeinsamen Transportpolitik solche Fälle nur noch „zu berücksichtigen“. Der französische Antiglobalisierungsaktivist Pierre Kalfa schlußfolgert zu Recht: „Ein Schloss zur Sicherung des öffentlichen Transportwesens ist hiermit gesprungen.“ [9]
Ähnliche Maßnahmen der Liberalisierung sind für den Energiesektor vorgesehen.
Aufrüstung und Kriegseinsätze
Der Reformvertrag befestigt und beschleunigt die militaristischen Aufrüstungs- und Expansionspläne der EU. Die ‚Gemeinsame Sicherheits- und Verteidigungspolitik‘ wird zum integralen Bestandteil der Union. Die EU-Rüstungsagentur wird vertraglich verankert. Ebenso wird jeder Mitgliedsstaat verpflichtet, seine „Verteidigungsfähigkeiten durch Ausbau seiner nationalen Beiträge und gegebenenfalls durch Beteiligung an multinationalen Streitkräften, an den wichtigsten europäischen Ausrüstungsprogrammen und an der Tätigkeit der Agentur für die Bereiche Entwicklung der Verteidigungsfähigkeiten, Forschung, Beschaffung und Rüstung (Europäische Verteidigungsagentur) intensiver zu entwickeln und spätestens 2010 über die Fähigkeit zu verfügen, entweder als nationales Kontingent oder als Teil von multinationalen Truppenverbänden bewaffnete Einheiten bereitzustellen, die auf die in Aussicht genommenen Missionen ausgerichtet sind, taktisch als Gefechtsverband konzipiert sind,…“ [10]
Aufrüstung und Bildung multinationaler Truppeneinheiten sind natürlich kein Selbstzweck, sondern dienen den militärischen Interessen des EU-Imperialismus. Mit einsatzfähigen Kriegstruppen will die EU Militäroperationen im Ausland durchführen. Der Tschad, an dem sich ja auch österreichische Truppen beteiligen, ist nur ein erster Vorgeschmack auf zukünftige Kolonialabenteuer des europäischen Imperialismus.
„Die in Artikel 28a Absatz 1 vorgesehenen Missionen, bei deren Durchführung die Union auf zivile und militärische Mittel zurückgreifen kann, umfassen … Aufgaben der militärischen Beratung und Unterstützung, Aufgaben der Konfliktverhütung und der Erhaltung des Friedens sowie Kampfeinsätze im Rahmen der Krisenbewältigung einschließlich Frieden schaffender Maßnahmen und Operationen zur Stabilisierung der Lage nach Konflikten. Mit allen diesen Missionen kann zur Bekämpfung des Terrorismus beigetragen werden, unter anderem auch durch die Unterstützung für Drittländer bei der Bekämpfung des Terrorismus in ihrem Hoheitsgebiet.“ [11]
Die Rechtfertigungen, solche Kriege zu führen, sind bewußt breit und offen gehalten. So kann ein Kriegsfall bereits dann eintreten, wenn auch nur ein einziger EU-Staat „angegriffen“ wird: „Im Falle eines bewaffneten Angriffs auf das Hoheitsgebiet eines Mitgliedstaats schulden die anderen Mitgliedstaaten ihm alle in ihrer Macht stehende Hilfe und Unterstützung“ [12]
Aber es bedarf nicht einmal eines Angriffs – es reicht schon, wenn die „Werte der Union“ in Gefahr sind:
„Der Rat kann zur Wahrung der Werte der Union und im Dienste ihrer Interessen eine Gruppe von Mitgliedstaaten mit der Durchführung einer Mission im Rahmen der Union beauftragen.“ [13]
Aber der herrschenden Klasse geht es natürlich nicht nur um das Krieg führen im Ausland, sie braucht auch eine Bürgerkriegsarmee im Inneren:
„(1) Die Union und ihre Mitgliedstaaten handeln gemeinsam im Geiste der Solidarität, wenn ein Mitgliedstaat von einem Terroranschlag, einer Naturkatastrophe oder einer vom Menschen verursachten Katastrophe betroffen ist. Die Union mobilisiert alle ihr zur Verfügung stehenden Mittel, einschließlich der ihr von den Mitgliedstaaten bereitgestellten militärischen Mittel, um
(a) – terroristische Bedrohungen im Hoheitsgebiet von Mitgliedstaaten abzuwenden;
– die demokratischen Institutionen und die Zivilbevölkerung vor etwaigen Terroranschlägen zu schützen;
– im Falle eines Terroranschlags einen Mitgliedstaat auf Ersuchen seiner politischen Organe innerhalb seines Hoheitsgebiets zu unterstützen;
(b) im Falle einer Naturkatastrophe oder einer vom Menschen verursachten Katastrophe einen Mitgliedstaat auf Ersuchen seiner politischen Organe innerhalb seines Hoheitsgebiets zu unterstützen.
(2) Ist ein Mitgliedstaat von einem Terroranschlag, einer Naturkatastrophe oder einer vom Menschen verursachten Katastrophe betroffen, so leisten die anderen Mitgliedstaaten ihm auf Ersuchen seiner politischen Organe Unterstützung. Zu diesem Zweck sprechen die Mitgliedstaaten sich im Rat ab.“ [14]
Es ist nicht schwer zu erkennen, daß hinter diesem Polizeijuristendeutsch angesichts möglicher Aufstände und Unruhen innerhalb der EU der mögliche Hammer einer Bürgerkriegseinsatzes von EU-Armeen hervorlugt.
Wir haben immer betont, daß ein zentrales Problem der EU darin besteht, daß sie militärisch viel schwächer ist als ihr Konkurrent, die USA. Vor dem Hintergrund der verschärften Rivalität zwischen der EU und der USA braucht die herrschende Klasse Europas daher einen Kurswechsel:
„Doch um eine Macht ähnlicher Größenordnung wie die USA zu werden, braucht Europa einen grundlegenden Wandel in seiner Militärpolitik. (…) Worum es geht, wird in der Verfassung unumwunden ausgesprochen: um die Fähigkeit des europäischen Imperialismus, rund um den Globus Krieg zu führen, um seine politischen und ökonomischen Interessen („Werte“) zu verteidigen.“ [15]
Der EU-Reformvertrag erscheint auf den ersten Blick widersprüchlich. Einerseits legt er eine enge Zusammenarbeit mit der NATO fest, was bedeutet, daß jene Kräfte in der EU, die eine vom US-amerikanischen Konkurrenten unabhängige Militärpolitik erreichen wollten, sich hier nicht vollständig durchsetzen konnten. Andererseits jedoch haben sich die Kräfte um den deutsch-französischen Block eine Möglichkeit für einen eigenständigen militärischen Weg eröffnet, nämlich der Schaffung eines eigenen Verbandes – der sogenannten Ständigen Strukturierten Zusammenarbeit:
„Die Mitgliedstaaten, die anspruchsvollere Kriterien in Bezug auf die militärischen Fähigkeiten erfüllen und die im Hinblick auf Missionen mit höchsten Anforderungen untereinander weiter gehende Verpflichtungen eingegangen sind, begründen eine Ständige Strukturierte Zusammenarbeit im Rahmen der Union.“ [16]
Who is the Boss?
Der EU-Reformvertrag sieht – wie schon zuvor die Verfassung – vor, daß die EU mit einer juristischen Persönlichkeit versehen wird. Die EU bzw. ihre Vertreter können damit Verträge abschließen, die bindend sind für ihre Mitglieder.
„Die Konferenz weist darauf hin, dass die Verträge und das von der Union auf der Grundlage der Verträge gesetzte Recht im Einklang mit der ständigen Rechtsprechung des Gerichtshofs der Europäischen Union unter den in dieser Rechtsprechung festgelegten Bedingungen Vorrang vor dem Recht der Mitgliedstaaten haben.“ [17]
Darüberhinaus sieht der EU-Reformvertrag den Ausbau zentralstaatlicher Machtstrukturen bzw. –befugnisse vor. Darin sieht die herrschende Klasse die einzige Möglichkeit, um einen schlagfähigen zentralen Staatsapparat aufbauen zu können, der die widerstreitenden Interessen zwischen den Mitgliedsstaaten überwindet und gegen die ArbeiterInnenklasse durchpeitschen kann. Diese Zielsetzung führt einerseits dazu, daß jene Entscheidungen, die nur nach dem Einstimmigkeitsprinzip getroffen werden können, massiv zurückgedrängt werden, während viele Entscheidungen nun nach dem Prinzip der „qualifizierten Mehrheit“ getroffen werden sollen. So wuchs die Zahl der Politikfelder, die mit qualifizierter Mehrheit beschlossen werden können, von 137 auf 181. [18] Daher gab es auch zuletzt einen Konflikt drüber, welches Gewicht die einzelnen Nationalstaaten haben sollen. Schließlich wurde eine Änderung zugunsten der großen Länder durchgesetzt. Ab dem 1. November 2014 ändert sich die qualifizierte Mehrheit und besteht dann aus der Hälfte der Mitgliedsstaaten und 55% der Bevölkerung, mit komplizierten Übergangsregelungen, die bis 2017 gelten können.
Noch wichtiger jedoch ist, daß neben dem EU-Rat – also der gemeinsamen Vertretung der Regierungen der EU-Mitgliedsstaaten – die EU-Kommission die zentrale Rolle spielt. So besagt der neue Artikel 9d:
„(1) Die Kommission fördert die allgemeinen Interessen der Union und ergreift geeignete Initiativen zu diesem Zweck. Sie sorgt für die Anwendung der Verträge sowie der von den Organen kraft der Verträge erlassenen Maßnahmen. Sie überwacht die Anwendung des Unionsrechts unter der Kontrolle des Gerichtshofs der Europäischen Union. Sie führt den Haushaltsplan aus und verwaltet die Programme. Sie übt nach Maßgabe der Verträge Koordinierungs-, Exekutiv- und Verwaltungsfunktionen aus. Außer in der Gemeinsamen Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik und den übrigen in den Verträgen vorgesehenen Fällen nimmt sie die Vertretung der Union nach außen wahr. Sie leitet die jährliche und die mehrjährige Programmplanung der Union mit dem Ziel ein, interinstitutionelle Vereinbarungen zu erreichen.
(2) Soweit in den Verträgen nichts anderes festgelegt ist, darf ein Gesetzgebungsakt der Union nur auf Vorschlag der Kommission erlassen werden. Andere Rechtsakte werden auf der Grundlage eines Kommissionsvorschlags erlassen, wenn dies in den Verträgen vorgesehen ist.
Die Rechte des EU-Parlaments hingegen sind minimal und Bürgerinitiativen haben gerade mal das Recht … die Kommission zu bitten! „Bürger der Union, in einer Anzahl von mindestens einer Million, die Bürger einer beträchtlichen Zahl von Mitgliedsstaaten sind, können die Initiative ergreifen, die Kommission, im Rahmen ihrer Zuständigkeit, zu bitten, einen Vorschlag zu Fragen zu unterbreiten, von denen diese Bürger meinen, dass ein Rechtsakt der Union notwendig ist, um die Anwendung der Verträge zu gewährleisten.“ [19]
Reaktionäre Ideologie in der Verfassung festgeschrieben
Neben dem Prinzip der freien Marktwirtschaft schreibt die Verfassung noch weitere wichtige ideologische Grundpfeiler der bürgerlichen Ordnung fest. So ist die Präambel des „Vertrag über die Europäische Union“ durch die Hinzufügung folgenden Absatzes geändert worden:
"SCHÖPFEND aus dem kulturellen, religiösen und humanistischen Erbe Europas, aus dem sich die unverletzlichen und unveräußerlichen Rechte des Menschen sowie Freiheit, Demokratie, Gleichheit und Rechtsstaatlichkeit als universelle Werte entwickelt haben,…".[20]
An dieser Änderung sind zwei Dinge interessant und bezeichnend für die Richtung, in die sich der EU-Imperialismus entwickelt. Erstens die Berufung auf das „religiöse Erbe Europas“ – also das Christentum, jene Religion, in deren Namen in der Geschichte unzählige Kriege und Massenmorde verübt wurden. Dies bedeutet – wie es den Forderungen der katholischen Kirche und der konservativen Kräfte entspricht – nichts anderes als die Hebung des Christentums in den Verfassungsrang. Diese scheinbar unverdächtige Wortwahl können die herrschenden Klassen bei Bedarf als ideologische Rechtfertigung für zahlreiche Angriffe ausnützen: z.B. die Aufhebung der Trennung von Staat und Religion und das Vorgehen gegen die atheistische Weltanschauung, die Infragestellung des Rechts auf Abtreibung, die Rechtfertigung von militärischen Interventionen zur Verteidigung des Christentums z.B. gegen den Islam usw. [21]
Zweitens kennen wir die Erklärung der „unverletzlichen und unveräußerlichen Rechte des Menschen sowie Freiheit, Demokratie, Gleichheit und Rechtsstaatlichkeit als universelle Werte“ aus dem Munde von George Bush und seinen neokonservativen Kriegstreibern. Universelle Werte haben per Definition weltweite Gültigkeit und können somit als Rechtfertigung für die Einmischung und militärische Intervention der Europäischen Union rund um den Globus verwendet werden. Vergessen wir nicht, daß der imperialistische Krieg in Afghanistan und in Irak neben den Vorwänden der Terrorismus-Bekämpfung auch mit dem angeblichen Einsatz für Menschenrechte und Demokratie geführt wird.
Tieferliegende Ursache: Der Niedergang des Kapitalismus
Es liegt auf der Hand, daß alle fortschrittlichen Organisationen und AktivistInnen den EU-Reformvertrag ablehnen. Aber die Frage, worüber bei Vielen Unklarheit herrscht, ist die der Ursachen des EU-Reformvertrages, welche Alternativen es dazu gibt und mit welcher Strategie wir dagegen kämpfen können.
Der EU-Reformvertrag ist kein Resultat eines Anfalls von Machtgeilheit seitens der Bourgeoisie wie es diverse links-reformistische Strömungen glauben. Noch weniger handelt es sich um eine Verschwörung irgendwelcher Bürokraten in Brüssel, wie es die Einfaltspinsel in den Redaktionstuben der Kronen Zeitung oder in der FPÖ daher phantasieren.
Der Kampf gegen den EU-Reformvertrag kann unmöglich gewonnen werden, wenn er auf einer illusionären, utopischen Grundlage aufgebaut ist. Der Grundfehler vieler Linker heutzutage besteht darin, daß sie die Politik der herrschenden Klasse – welche man gewöhnlich als Neoliberalismus, als Militarismus usw. bezeichnet – als bloß eine von mehreren möglichen Optionen im kapitalistischen Gesellschaftssystem betrachten. Es wird unterstellt, daß die bürgerlichen Herrschenden eigentlich verschiedene Möglichkeiten hätten, ihre Macht auszuüben. Das Programm der rücksichtlosen Angriffe auf die sozialen und demokratischen Errungenschaften der ArbeiterInnenklasse und der imperialistischen Kriegsoffensive wird daher nicht als unausweichliche, von ihrem Standpunkt aus notwendige, Politik der herrschenden Klasse verstanden, sondern als „falsche Politik“, die bei gleichzeitiger Aufrechterhaltung des Kapitalismus durch eine „richtige Politik“ – wie z.B. Ausbau des Sozialstaates, Vollbeschäftigung, Abrüstung und Frieden – ersetzt werden könnte.
Tatsächlich ist die neoliberale, militaristische Offensive der herrschenden Klasse das notwendige Resultat des Niedergangs des Kapitalismus und vor diesem Hintergrund eine verschärfte Konkurrenz zwischen den Monopolen und den Großmächten. Die Weltwirtschaft zeichnet sich insgesamt seit den 1970er Jahren durch eine Tendenz zur Stagnation der Produktivkräfte aus. [22] Diese Entwicklung hält auch in der Periode der Globalisierung an, auch wenn hier eine uneinheitliche Entwicklung zu beobachten ist, wo die Stagnationstendenz in den imperialistischen Metropolen und in weiten Teilen der sogenannten III. Welt vorherrschen, während es andererseits auch wichtige Ausnahmen wie China oder Indien gibt. Die in dieser Broschüre abgebildeten Tabellen sollen einen kurzen Überblick über die niedergehende Wachstumsdynamik des Kapitalismus weltweit und in den imperialistischen Zentren geben.
Tabelle 1: Wachstumsraten des Welt-Brutto-Inlandsproduktes (in % pro Jahr) [23]
1971-1980 |
+3.8% |
1981-1990 |
+3.2% |
1991-2000 |
+2.6% |
2001-2006 |
+2.7% |
Die gleiche Entwicklungstendenz findet sich auch im Herzen der Schaffung des kapitalistischen Mehrwerts – der Industrieproduktion. (siehe Tabelle 2)
Tabelle 2: Wachstumsraten der weltweiten Industrieproduktion (in % pro Jahr) [24]
1980-1990 |
+3.0% |
1990-2000 |
+2.4% |
2000-2004 |
+1.4% |
Betrachten wir nun die imperialistische Staaten, wo auch die große Masse des Weltkapitals beheimatet ist, etwas genauer. (siehe Tabelle 3)
Tabelle 3: Wachstumsraten des Brutto-Inlandsproduktes in den imperialistischen Staaten (in % pro Jahr) [25]
|
Wachstumsraten des Brutto-Inlandsproduktes (in % pro Jahr) |
|||||||
|
imperialistische Staaten |
USA |
Japan |
EU-15 |
||||
|
BIP |
BIP pro Kopf |
BIP |
BIP p.K. |
BIP |
BIP p.K. |
BIP |
BIP p.K. |
1960-1969 |
+5.1% |
+3.8% |
+4.6% |
+3.3% |
+10.2% |
+9.0% |
+5.3% |
+3.5% |
1970-1980 |
+3.4% |
+2.5% |
+3.2% |
+2.1% |
+4.4% |
+3.3% |
+3.0% |
+2.6% |
1980-1990 |
+3.0% |
+2.3% |
+3.2% |
+2.2 % |
+4.1% |
+3.5% |
+2.4% |
+2.1% |
1990-2000 |
+2.5% |
+1.8% |
+3.2% |
+2.2% |
+1.3% |
+1.1% |
+2.0% |
+1.7% |
2000-2005 |
+2.2% |
-- |
+2.8% |
-- |
+1.3% |
-- |
+2.0% |
-- |
Exkurs: Marx und das Gesetz der kapitalistischen Akkumulation
Die Ursache dieser niedergehenden Wachstumsdynamik liegt in folgendem Dilemma der kapitalistischen Produktionsweise, auf welches schon Karl Marx hinwies. Der Zweck der kapitalistischen Produktionsweise ist die Selbstverwertung der Kapitals, mit anderen Worten: die Akkumulation von Kapital zum Zwecke der Profitmaximierung. Unter Akkumulation des Kapitals verstehen MarxistInnen die „Anwendung von Mehrwert als Kapital oder Rückverwandlung von Mehrwert in Kapital“ [26] oder anders formuliert die Verwendung eines Teils des Wertprodukts nicht zur individuellen Konsumtion, sondern zur Vergrößerung des Kapitals. Dazu versuchen die KapitalistInnen beständig die Produktivkraft der Arbeit zu steigern. Das heißt, durch die Weiterentwicklung der Technik, der Organisation der Arbeit, Modernisierung des Maschinenparks etc. kann die Produktivität des einzelnen Arbeiters bzw. Arbeiterin gesteigert werden, er bzw. sie kann also mit seiner/ihrer Arbeitskraft eine stets größere Menge von Produktionsmitteln in Bewegung setzen. Dieser an sich für alle Gesellschaftsordnungen gültige Prozeß des technischen und ökonomischen Fortschritts besitzt nun im Kapitalismus eine besondere Eigentümlichkeit. Die kapitalistische Produktionsweise zeichnet sich nämlich gerade dadurch aus, daß der Arbeitsprozeß zugleich ein Verwertungsprozeß ist, d.h. die Produktionsmittel und die Arbeitskraft haben sowohl einen Gebrauchswert als auch einen Tauschwert.
Nun dient die Produktion von Waren, Tauschwerten, nicht der Herstellung von Gebrauchswerten, sondern umgekehrt, der Produktionsprozeß dient der Schaffung von Tauschwerten, sprich der Vermehrung des Kapitals (Akkumulation), sprich der Vermehrung des Mehrwerts, des Profits der KapitalistInnen:
„…daß das Kapital und seine Selbstverwertung als Ausgangspunkt und Endpunkt, als Motiv und Zweck der Produktion erscheint, daß die Produktion nur Produktion für das Kapital ist, und nicht umgekehrt die Produktionsmittel bloße Mittel für eine stets sich erweiternde Gestaltung des Lebensprozesses für die Gesellschaft der Produzenten sind.“ [27]
Die Verschärfung seiner inneren Widersprüche sind letztlich eine logische Folge des Kapitalismus als System, in denen Kapital als Einzelkapitale existiert und nur existieren kann, wenn diese miteinander in schärfster Konkurrenz stehen (was zeitweilige Allianzen keineswegs ausschließt, die jedoch unweigerlich zu umso schärferen Auseinandersetzungen führen). [28] Daher sind die KapitalistInnen und somit das Gesamtkapital gezwungen, sich beständig auszudehnen und zu akkumulieren. Marx beschreibt den Sachzwang, dem die KapitalistInnen unterliegen, folgendermaßen:
„... macht die Entwicklung der kapitalistischen Produktion eine fortwährende Steigerung des in einem industriellen Unternehmen angelegten Kapitals zur Notwendigkeit, und die Konkurrenz herrscht jedem individuellen Kapitalisten die immanenten Gesetze der kapitalistischen Produktionsweise als äußere Zwangsgesetze auf. Sie zwingt ihn, sein Kapital fortwährend auszudehnen, um es zu erhalten, und ausdehnen kann er es nur vermittelst progressiver Akkumulation.“ [29]
Der technische Fortschritt, die Entwicklung der Produktivkraft der Arbeit, die sich – verhältnismäßig – in immer mehr Produktionsmittel und immer weniger Arbeitskraft ausdrückt, führt also zur kapitalistischen Akkumulation, dem beständigen Anwachsen des konstanten Kapitals im Verhältnis zum variablen. Immer mehr Kapital wird in die Maschinerie (fixes konstantes Kapital) und in Rohstoffe (zirkulierendes konstantes Kapital) angelegt, immer weniger – im Verhältnis zum ersteren weniger – in Arbeitslöhnen (variables Kapital). Marx nennt diesen Prozeß die Erhöhung der organischen Zusammensetzung des Kapitals.
Nun ist aber nur die lebendige Arbeit, anders ausgedrückt der variable, in Arbeitslöhnen steckende Kapitalteil, die einzige Quelle des Mehrwerts/Profits. Dies wiederum bedeutet, daß mit der verhältnismäßigen Abnahme dieses Teils auch der Profit geringer werden. Marx spricht hier vom Gesetz des tendenziellen Falls der Profitrate. Da aber der Profit die Triebfeder der kapitalistischen Produktion ist, wird die Akkumulation nur solange fortgesetzt werden, als sie eben profitabel ist.
„Diese erzeugt mit der fortschreitenden relativen Abnahme des variablen Kapitals gegen das konstante eine steigend höhere organische Zusammensetzung des Gesamtkapitals, deren unmittelbare Folge ist, daß die Rate des Mehrwerts bei gleichbleibendem und selbst bei steigendem Exploitationsgrad (Ausbeutungsgrad, Anm.d.Red.) der Arbeit sich in einer beständig sinkenden allgemeinen Profitrate ausdrückt. (Es wird sich weiter zeigen warum dies Sinken nicht in dieser absoluten Form, sondern mehr in Tendenz zum progressiven Fall hervortritt.) Die progressive Tendenz der allgemeinen Profitrate zum Sinken ist also nur ein der kapitalistischen Produktionsweise eigentümlicher Ausdruck für die fortschreitende Entwicklung der gesellschaftlichen Produktivkraft der Arbeit. Es ist damit nicht gesagt, daß die Profitrate nicht auch aus andren Gründen vorübergehend fallen kann, aber es ist damit aus dem Wesen der kapitalistischen Produktionsweise als eine selbstverständliche Notwendigkeit bewiesen, daß in ihrem Fortschritt die allgemeine Durchschnittsrate des Mehrwerts sich in einer fallenden allgemeinen Profitrate ausdrücken muß. Da die Masse der angewandten lebendigen Arbeit stets abnimmt im Verhältnis zu der Masse der von ihr in Bewegung gesetzten vergegenständlichten Arbeit, der produktiv konsumierten Produktionsmittel, so muß auch der Teil dieser lebendigen Arbeit, der unbezahlt ist und sich in Mehrwert vergegenständlicht, in einem stets abnehmenden Verhältnis stehn zum Wertumfang des angewandten Gesamtkapitals. Dies Verhältnis der Mehrwertsmasse zum Wert des angewandten Gesamtkapitals bildet aber die Profitrate, die daher beständig fallen muß.“ [30]
Das Resultat dieser Entwicklung ist, daß das Kapital mit verschiedensten Methoden versucht, die Profitrate trotz der wachsenden organischen Zusammensetzung zu steigern bzw. deren Fall aufzuhalten. Marx spricht hier von den „entgegenwirkenden Ursachen“ und nennt darunter die Erhöhung des Exploitationsgrads der Arbeit, die Herunterdrücken des Arbeitslohns unter seinen Wert, die Verbilligung der Elemente des konstanten Kapitals, die relative Überbevölkerung, den auswärtigen Handel und die Zunahme des Aktienkapitals. Doch letztlich können diese entgegenwirkenden Ursachen den Fall der Durchschnittsprofitrate nicht aufhalten.
Für das Kapital wachsen also die Schwierigkeiten, Kapital profitabel anzulegen. Es existiert eine Überproduktion an Kapital im Verhältnis zu den real existierenden profitablen Anlagemöglichkeiten. Wir sprechen hier von einer Überakkumulation des Kapitals. Daraus folgt das verstärkte Suchen des Kapitals nach Gewinn in der Spekulationssphäre u.ä. Die Kehrseite davon ist die Verlangsamung der Akkumulationsrate. Akkumulation des Kapitals beschränkt sich mehr und mehr auf Rationalisierungsinvestitionen (Ersetzung bestehender Kapitalanlagen zwecks Abbaus von Arbeitskräften) und nicht Erweiterungsinvestitionen (Ausbau des Maschinenparks zwecks Erweiterung der Produktionskapazitäten). Aufgrund der Überakkumulation von Kapital sehen wir daher insgesamt, weltweit, eine abnehmende Dynamik der Kapitalakkumulation. (siehe Tabelle 4 und Graphik 1, die das Verhältnis von Netto-Investitionen zum Netto-Inlandsprodukt darstellt)
Tabelle 4: Wachstumsraten der weltweiten Kapitalakkumulation (in % pro Jahr) [31]
1980-1990 |
+3.9% |
1990-2000 |
+3.2% |
2000-2004 |
+1.2% |
Graphik 1: Netto-Investitionen als Anteil am Netto-Inlandsprodukt in den imperialistischen Ökonomien, 1980-2006 [32]
Die Formierung der EU als Antwort des imperialistischen Kapitals Westeuropas
Es sind diese krisenhaften Entwicklungstendenzen der kapitalistischen Weltwirtschaft, die das Monopolkapital zu verschärften Attacken auf die ArbeiterInnenklasse und zur Steigerung der Ausbeutung der halbkolonialen Welt antreibt [33] und gleichzeitig den Konkurrenzkampf zwischen den Großmächten anheizen – allen voran zwischen den beiden mächtigsten Blöcken, den USA und der EU. Daher einerseits das gemeinsame Vorgehen der Großmächte, wenn es z.B. darum geht, halbkoloniale Länder zur Öffnung ihrer Wirtschaft für die Großkonzerne zu öffnen, andererseits aber auch die politischen und wirtschaftlichen Konflikte zwischen den beiden Blöcken wenn ihre Interessen aufeinanderprallen.
Die Formierung der Europäischen Union nicht nur als ein wirtschaftlicher Binnenmarkt, sondern auch als ein politischer und militärischer Machtblock ist die Antwort der herrschenden Klassen Europas – allen voran ihrer Kernstaaten Deutschland und Frankreichs – auf die verschärfte Konkurrenz und die Notwendigkeit, ihre Interessen in einer instabiler werdenden Welt mit allen zu Gebote stehenden Mitteln durchzusetzen. In diesem Sinne haben wir schon in einer Analyse vor drei Jahren festgehalten:
„Die Formierung eines europäischen Kapitals und Imperialismus, der den USA als führende Weltmacht Paroli bieten kann, ist und bleibt daher das strategische Ziele der deutschen und französischen Kapitalistenklassen und ihrer politischen Exekutiven.“ [34]
Daher ist es auch kein Zufall, daß die herrschenden Klassen Europas nach der Niederlage bei den Referenden zum Verfassungsentwurf 2005 bald einen erneuten Versuch starteten.
„Der Generalangriff auf die Lohnabhängigen wird in ganz Europa mit unverminderter, ja größerer Schärfe fortgeführt. Auch wenn es in einzelnen Ländern zu kurzfristigen taktischen Rückzügen der herrschenden Klasse aufgrund von Massenmobilisierungen kommen sollte, so nur, um bald noch heftigere Angriffe zu starten. (…)
Die herrschenden Klassen werden bewußt einen neuen Anlauf zur Formierung eines imperialistischen Blocks nehmen.“ [35]
Wir halten also fest: der aggressive Kurs der herrschenden Klassen Europas in Richtung neoliberaler Sozialabbau, Militarisierung und Aufbau eines zentralen EU-Staatsapparates ist das unausweichliche Resultat der Interessen des Kapitals in Zeiten von Stagnation, verschärfter Konkurrenz und Instabilität. Sie müssen diese Politik betreiben, sonst würden die USA – und auch andere Mächte – ihre europäische Konkurrentin für lange Zeit von einem angehenden Imperium zu einem Zwerg unter den imperialistischen Mächten degradieren. Damit einhergehend würden sehr rasch scharfe politische Krisen bis hin zu revolutionären Situationen ausbrechen. Jeder Versuch, die KapitalistInnenklasse durch Zureden oder Petitionen zu einer anderen Politik zu bewegen, ist daher nichts anderes als reformistische Tagträumerei.
Das bedeutet natürlich keineswegs, daß überhaupt keine Veränderungen, Modifikationen der Politik der herrschenden Klasse möglich wären, ohne nicht unmittelbar in eine revolutionäre Situation zu münden. Durch harten Klassenkampf ist es möglich, diesen oder jenen Angriff kurzfristig abzuwehren, diese oder jene Attacke abzumildern. Aber diese Änderungen sind vorübergehende Defensiverfolge und können nicht – solange die kapitalistischen Ausbeutungsverhältnisse weiter bestehen bleiben – zu einer grundlegenden, nachhaltigen Verbesserung der Lage der ArbeiterInnenklasse führen.
Ist eine Reform der EU im Interesse der ArbeiterInnen, Jugendlichen und MigrantInnen möglich?
Ein Gutteil der Linken hängt der reformistischen Politik an, die die EU verändern und eine „soziales, friedliches, demokratisches Europa“ schaffen möchte. Wir führen hier nur ein paar Beispiele an. ATTAC z. B. fordert die Wahl zu einer Verfassungsgebenden Versammlung in der EU, aus der dann eine reformierte EU hervorgehen könnte. [36] . Der ATTAC-Gründer in Österreich, Christian Felber, erhofft sich durch solche demokratischen und sozialen Reformen die Schaffung einer schlagkräftigeren EU: „Die Handlungsfähigkeit der EU wird durch die neuen Strukturen gegenüber dem Ist-Zustand verbessert“. [37]
Ähnlich illusionäre Hoffnungen hegt die Europäische Linkspartei, deren österreichischer Ableger die KPÖ ist: „Wir glauben, daß die EU in der Lage ist abzurüsten und dies auch tun sollte, daß sie die Militärbudgets ihrer Mitgliedsländer reduzieren und aufhören sollte, in militärischen Kategorien zu denken.“ [38]
Es ist bezeichnend, daß die SPÖ-Jugendorganisation – die Sozialistische Jugend – sich nicht einmal zu einer klaren Ablehnung des EU-Reformvertrages durchringen kann. In ihrer einzigen Stellungnahme fordert sie gerade mal eine Volksabstimmung, bezieht jedoch keine Position. [39] Gleichzeitig öffnet sie die Spalten ihrer Zeitung für die SP-Parteipropagandisten des EU-Reformvertrages und verzichtet dabei auf jegliche Kritik. [40] Einmal mehr zeigt sich, daß die SJ entgegen ihrer Selbstdarstellung weder eigenständig noch marxistisch ist, sondern die linksreformistischen Werbetrommler des SPÖ-Apparates in den Reihen der Jugend.
Trotz unterschiedlicher Nuancen haben diese Positionen eine zutiefst reformistische, kleinbürgerliche Logik gemein. Nämlich daß es möglich sei, eine „demokratische, sozial gerechte und friedliche EU“ zu schaffen ohne die Eigentums- und Machtfrage in Europa zu stellen. [41] Wie soll denn ein sozial gerechtes Europa möglich sein, solange die kapitalistischen Eigentumsverhältnisse unangetastet bleiben, solange also die kleine Minderheit der Unternehmer die wirtschaftlichen Produktionsmittel in ihren Händen hat?! Wie soll denn ein „friedliches Europa“ möglich sein, solange Konzerne und Generäle existieren, die ihre Interessen weltweit mit militärischen Mitteln durchzusetzen suchen?! Wie soll denn eine wirkliche Demokratie möglich sein, solange die herrschende Klasse an der Macht ist, die Tag für Tag den Polizeistaat ausbaut?!
Der reformistischen Politik ist kein klares Klassendenken inne, kein Verständnis davon, daß unsere Gesellschaft gespalten ist in eine herrschende Klasse – an deren Spitze das Monopolkapital und seine Berufspolitiker steht – und die breite Mehrheit der Bevölkerung, die ArbeiterInnenklasse (also die Lohnabhängigen und deren Familien).
Natürlich ist dieses Unverständnis kein Zufall, sondern hat eine materielle Basis. Hinter der reformistischen Sichtweise, daß der Neoliberalismus bloß eine „falsche Politik“ sei, die durch eine „andere Politik“ mit einer „anderen Regierung“ abgelöst werden kann, steckt eine politische Perspektive. Nämlich die Hoffnung von Kräften wie der Europäischen Linkspartei, Teil einer Regierungskoalition in den kapitalistischen EU-Mitgliedsstaaten zu werden und so am Futtertrog der Macht mit den damit verbundenen Privilegien mitnaschen zu können. In Italien ist ihnen das bereits gelungen und dort spielt die Rifundazione Communista (PRC) eine tragende Rolle in der neoliberalen und militaristischen Regierung Prodi (die so mit Hilfe der PRC u.a. das Pensionseintrittsalter anhob, die Besatzungstruppen in Afghanistan beläßt, die NATO-Militärbasis in Vincenza ausbaut usw.). In Berlin bildet die PDS/Linkspartei seit Jahren eine Koalition mit der SPD und betreibt hemmungslosen Sozialabbau. Hinter den reformistischen Phrasen des „sozialen und friedlichen Europas“ verbirgt sich also in Wirklichkeit der Wille zur Teilhabe an der kapitalistischen Macht.
Die Liga der Sozialistischen Revolution tritt daher für ein sozialistisches Europa ein und lehnt die Losung eines "sozialen Europas" ab. Diese Formel läßt - bestenfalls - offen, welche Klasse in einem solchen Europa herrschen soll. Doch wer das offen läßt, beläßt es im Grunde nur dabei, daß jene, die heute herrschen, auch zukünftig herrschen. Das "soziale" Europa läuft also auf nichts anderes als auf ein sozialdemokratisches, das heißt bürgerliches und imperialistisches Europa hinaus.
Wir wollen die EU nicht reformieren, sondern zerschlagen. Zerschlagen aber nicht, um sie durch einen Rückschritt zum Nationalstaat – jener gesellschaftlichen Organisationsform, die dem Entwicklungsstand der Produktivkräfte des 19. Jahrhunderts entsprach – zu ersetzen. Sondern wir gehen vorwärts: auf dem Wege der europäischen Revolution über die Leiche der EU hin zu den Vereinigten Sozialistischen Staaten von Europa!
Ist der Austritt aus der EU eine Alternative für die ArbeiterInnenklasse?
Eine scheinbare Alternative dazu ist die Strategie diverser linker Organisationen wie der KPÖ Steiermark, der Kommunistischen Initiative oder der AIK, die einen Austritt Österreichs aus der EU propagieren. Doch die Forderung nach einem Zurück zum alten Nationalstaat ist zutiefst illusionär und gefährlich. Es ist ein Irrglaube, daß Österreich, wenn es sich nur von der EU befreien könnte, ein weniger reaktionärer, weniger arbeiterInnenfeindlicher Staat wäre. Österreich ist ein imperialistischer Staat, der keineswegs von der „bösen EU“ verführt wird, sondern in der das heimische Kapital seine Interessen momentan am besten aufgehoben sieht. Das Kapital greift die ArbeiterInnenklasse nicht wegen dem „Diktat aus Brüssel“ an, sondern aus seinen ureigensten Profitinteressen. Es würde diese Angriffe auch genauso dann durchführen, wenn Österreich nicht in der EU wäre. Umso schändlicher ist es, daß diverse Linke diese Ausreden von Fraktionen des heimischen Klein- und Mittelkapitals bekräftigen, und somit die durch bürgerliche Medien verbreiteten Lügen, mit denen die ArbeiterInnenklasse abgelenkt werden soll, nachplappern. Die Ideologie des „guten“ alten Nationalstaates würde in Wirklichkeit den Rückzug der ArbeiterInnenklasse von der Bühne eines Klassenkampfes des vereinigten weltweiten Proletariats hin zur reaktionären Nationalboniertheit bedeuten.
Das österreichische Kapital beutet nicht nur die ArbeiterInnenklasse hierzulande aus, sondern bezieht durch seine massiven Auslandsinvestitionen in zahlreichen Halbkolonien – v.a. in Osteuropa – große Extraprofite. Nicht umsonst hat sich die herrschende Klasse Österreichs für den EU-Beitritt der osteuropäischen Länder stark gemacht. [42]
In der kapitalistischen Welt existieren die einzelnen kapitalistischen Länder der Welt nicht unabhängig voneinander und können dies auch gar nicht. Vielmehr sehen wir stetig zunehmende Verflechtungen der einzelnen Länder mit der Weltwirtschaft. Österreich ist Teil der Weltwirtschaft und kann dies nicht durch einen Austritt aus der EU „abschaffen“. All diese Verflechtungen würden genauso existieren, wenn Österreich aus der EU austreten würde.
Der Führer der russische Oktoberrevolution 1917, Wladimir Iljitsch Lenin, charakterisierte eine solche national-bornierte Politik des „Raus aus der EU“ treffend: “Kleinstaatliches Beiseite-stehen-wollen, kleinbürgerliches Streben, den großen Weltkämpfen fernzubleiben, die eigene relative Monopolstellung zu einem engherzigen Passivsein auszunützen das sind die objektiven gesellschaftlichen Umstände, die der Idee der Entwaffnung in einigen Kleinstaaten einen gewissen Erfolg und eine gewisse Verbreitung sichern. Natürlich ist ein solches Streben reaktionär und auf nichts als Illusionen gegründet, denn die kleinen Staaten werden so oder anders vom Imperialismus in den Strudel der Weltwirtschaft und der Weltpolitik hineingezogen.” [43]
Im Kern teilt die „Raus aus der EU“-Perspektive den gleichen Grundfehler wie die linken EU-Reformer: nämlich das völlige Ignorieren der Klassenfrage. Wessen EU? Wessen Österreich? Die EU, die real existiert, ist die EU der Konzerne und Generäle. Und das Österreich, das real existiert, ist ebenfalls das Österreich der Konzerne und Generäle. Solange diese Klasse die Macht in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft inne hat, gibt es keine dauerhaften Reformen. Nur ihr Sturz eröffnet den Weg in die Zukunft.
Die Heuchelei der FPÖ und des BZÖ
An dieser Stelle sei nur kurz darauf hingewiesen, daß die Forderung von BZÖ und FPÖ nach Volksabstimmung über den EU-Reformvertrag nichts anderes als Demagogie ist. Sie soll davon ablenken, wie sehr diese Parteien in das EU-Machtkartell selber involviert sind. Mit Ausnahme einer einzigen Abgeordneten haben alle damaligen Mandatare dieser Parteien im Mai 2005 für die EU-Verfassung gestimmt! Diese Parteien haben jahrelang in der Regierung den EU-Kurs ohne Wenn und Aber mitgetragen. Diese Parteien haben in ihrer sechsjährigen Regierungszeit bewiesen, daß sie für die gleiche Politik wie die im EU-Reformvertrag festgeschriebene stehen: Militarismus und Sozialabbau. Mittels eines widerwärtigen Rassismus gegen MigrantInnen und die Türkei versuchen sie, von ihren politischen Verbrechen als rechte Einpeitscher von Militarismus und Sozialabbau abzulenken.
Unter den fortschrittlichen AktivistInnen taucht immer wieder die Frage auf, wie man sich angesichts der FPÖ-Kampagne gegen den EU-Reformvertrag und für eine Volksabstimmung taktisch verhalten sollte. Manche meinen, daß dies ein Grund gegen unsere Volksabstimmungskampagne sei, andere wiederum sehen einen Spielraum für taktische Manöver.
Die Liga der Sozialistischen Revolution lehnt jeden Versuch eines „taktischen Ausnützens“ von FPÖ und BZÖ ab. Im Gegenteil, die linke Bewegung für eine Volksabstimmung muß bei jedem Schritt und Tritt ihren frontale Opposition gegen die rechten Hetzer klar machen. Natürlich wäre es dumm, auf unsere Kampagne gegen den EU-Reformvertrag und für eine Volksabstimmung zu verzichten, nur weil die FPÖ das gleiche fordert. Tatsächlich wäre es ein politisches Verbrechen, würde man die wichtige Frage des EU-Reformvertrages den Rechten überlassen. Genausowenig lassen wir uns von unserer Ablehnung der imperialistischen Truppenentsendung in den Tschad abbringen, nur weil FPÖ, BZÖ und Grüne aus taktischen Gründen das gleiche fordern. Ebenso haben wir in den 1990er Jahren öfters erlebt, daß ein Jörg Haider gegen den Sozialraub der SPÖ/ÖVP-Regierung wetterte, was uns jedoch keineswegs zu Anhängern der kapitalistischen Raubritter werden ließ.
Jedenfalls darf es keine Überschneidungen zwischen unserer Kampagne gegen den EU-Reformvertrag und den rechten Demagogen geben. Der Graben, der zwischen uns und ihnen existiert, besteht nicht nur in den unterschiedlichen Zielen – wir wollen eine europäische Revolution zum Aufbau der Vereinigten Sozialistischen Staaten von Europa während das ideologische Ziel der FPÖ der bürgerliche Nationalstaat (nach einer Massenvertreibung unserer migrantischen MitbürgerInnen) und das imperialistische „Europa der Vaterländer“ ist. Diese unterschiedlichen Ziele drücken sich auch in unterschiedlichen Kampfmethoden gegen Reformvertrag aus. Eben weil wir eine internationalistische Perspektive haben und weil uns die europäischen Klassenschwestern und –brüder genauso nahe sind wie die österreichischen, treten wir für einen europaweiten Klassenkampf gegen den EU-Reformvertrag ein und beschränken uns nicht auf Österreich. Und zu einer internationalistischen Kampagne gehört auch die Herausgabe mehrsprachiger Agitationsmaterialien, denn Österreich – wie auch die meisten anderen Staaten Europas – ist ein multinationales Land, in dem MigrantInnen einen wichtigen Teil der ArbeiterInnenklasse ausmachen.
Revolutionäre Strategie
Wir stehen heute vor einer umfassenden Offensive der herrschenden Klassen Europas. Sie wollen um jeden Preis die sozialen und demokratischen Errungenschaften der ArbeiterInnenklasse zertrümmern und die EU als zweite militärische Supermacht neben den USA etablieren. Sie müssen dies erreichen, sonst gehen sie im gnadenlosen weltweiten Konkurrenzkampf der imperialistischen Großmächte unter. Deswegen müssen wir uns eine umfassende Strategie des Klassenkampfes zur Verteidigung unserer Interessen zu Eigen machen.
Unser Widerstand kann nur dann Erfolg haben, wenn wir uns nicht auf Appelle und Petitionen an die Herrschenden oder die Eroberung von Regierungsposten orientieren, sondern auf die europaweite Organisierung und Kampf der ArbeiterInnenklasse und Jugend. Deswegen treten wir von der LSR gemeinsam mit unseren internationalen GenossInnen der Liga für die 5. Internationale (LFI) für Massendemonstrationen und Streiks bis hin zu Generalstreiks gegen den EU-Reformvertrag und andere Angriffe ein. Dies ist sowohl in jeden einzelnen Land notwendig wie auch europaweit.
Wir brauchen eine Organisierung des Abwehrkampfes von unten auf allen Ebenen. Deswegen treten wir für den Aufbau von Aktionskomitees, Sozialforen und Bündnissen auf allen Ebenen – lokal, regional, landesweit – ein. Und ebenso brauchen wir eine europaweite Koordinierung dieser Kämpfe. Diese Forderung richtet sich an alle Organisationen der Arbeiterbewegung, Parteien, die gegen Krieg und Neo-Liberalismus zu kämpfen vorgeben usw., alle Gruppierungen der Anti-Globalisierungsbewegung, der Anti-Kriegsbewegung, ImmigrantInnenorganisationen, Jugendorganisationen, SchülerInnen- und StudentInnenvertretungen.
Wie können wir den Reformvertrag stoppen?
Der Widerstand gegen den EU-Reformvertrag erfordert breite Kampfaktionen sowohl in Österreich als auch europaweit. Dabei können wir in ganz Europa auf eine breite Ablehnung des EU-Reformvertrages und auf die populäre Forderung nach einer Volkabstimmung in der ArbeiterInnenklasse aufbauen. Alleine in Österreich treten 70 Prozent der Befragten laut der neuesten IMAS-Studie für eine Volksabstimmung ein und laut einer anderen Umfrage sehen im Reformvertrag über doppelt so viele ÖsterreicherInnen mehr Nachteile (39% aller Befragten) als Vorteile (nur 19%)!
Die Liga der Sozialistischen Revolution unterstützt die Forderung nach einer Volksabstimmung über den EU-Reformvertrag als ein – wenn auch begrenztes – Widerstandsmittel. Wir arbeiten daher in der Plattform Volxabstimmung über den EU-Reformvertrag mit. Die meisten Organisationen in dem Bündnis sehen den Schwerpunkt der Protestaktivitäten auf kleine Medienaktionen, Pressekonferenzen, Unterschriftensammeln, Gewinnen von einzelnen FunktionärInnen und Sektoren der etablierten Parteien, Hoffnung auf die Unterstützung durch die Kronen Zeitung usw. Wir lehnen solche Schritte keineswegs vollkommen ab. Sie können als untergeordnete Begleitmaßnahmen in bestimmten Situationen durchaus eine positive Rolle spielen. Aber das Schwergewicht des Widerstandes muß auf einer proletarischen, klassenkämpferischen Perspektive liegen, um eine Volksabstimmung zu erzwingen. Die ganze Kampagne kann nur dann Erfolg haben, wenn sie sich auf die Organisierung von breiten Massenaktionen, von Agitationsveranstaltungen, die sich an die Massen richten, sowie in den Massen verankerte Basiskomitees konzentriert. Im Konkreten treten wir ein für:
* Die Gewerkschaften sowie die SchülerInnen- und StudentInnenvertretungen, wie auch fortschrittliche ImmigrantInnenorganisationen sollen für eine Ablehnung des Reformvertrages und eine Perspektive des Klassenkampfes dagegen (Streiks, Demonstrationen etc.) gewonnen werden.
* Wir schlagen koordinierte Agitationsinterventionen der an der Plattform beteiligten Organisationen bei den geplanten sogenannten „Informationsveranstaltungen“ der Regierung über den EU-Reformvertrag vor.
* Wir treten für die Organisierung von lokalen Aktionskomitees in Betrieben, Schulen, Universitäten und Stadtteilen ein – im Sinne der 900 lokalen Komitees für ein NEIN gegen die EU-Verfassung in Frankreich im Jahr 2005.
* Wir schlagen die Organisierung zumindest einer Großdemonstrationen sowie weiterer direkter Aktionen im Frühjahr vor.
Unsere Einschätzung der Plattform Volxabstimmung
Die Plattform Volxabstimmung gegen den EU-Reformvertrag ist ein breites Bündnis zahlreicher Organisationen und Einzelpersonen (u.a. Werkstatt für Frieden und Solidarität, SJ, KPÖ, KPÖ Steiermark, KSV, KJÖ, GLB, Initiative für eine sozialistische Politik der SPÖ, akin, ATTAC, ARGE Daten, Steirische Friedensplattform, diverse NGO’s, Leo Gabriel, Hermann Dworczak…). Politisch sind die meisten als reformistisch bzw. kleinbürgerlich zu charakterisieren, d.h. sie stehen für eine Politik innerhalb bzw. außerhalb der ArbeiterInnenbewegung, die glaubt, den Kapitalismus mittels schrittweiser Reformen verändern zu können.
Die Grundlage dieser Aktionseinheit ist die Forderung nach einer Volksabstimmung über den EU-Reformvertrag. Darüberhinaus haben die Organisationen unterschiedliche Positionen – teilweise sind sie für einen Austritt aus der EU und eine Perspektive eines neutralen Österreich (z.B. Werkstatt und KPÖ Steiermark), teilweise für eine „soziale und demokratische Reform der EU“ (z.B. ATTAC, KPÖ, SJ). Ebenso gibt es unterschiedliche Meinungen zur Frage der Sinnhaftigkeit eines Volksbegehrens für eine Volksabstimmung (v.a. IG EuroVision favorisiert ein solches) sowie der Propagierung einer alternativen EU-Verfassung und eines europäischen Bürgerkonvents (ATTAC, Leo Gabriel u.a.).
Die Frage, ob die Plattform tatsächlich zu einem kraftvollen Mittel des Widerstandes gegen den EU-Reformvertrag werden kann, die Frage ob sie somit unterstützenswert bleibt, entscheidet sich daran, ob sie sich für oder gegen eine Politik der Mobilisierung auf der Straße und der Gewinnung der ArbeiterInnenbewegung entscheidet.
Für ein Programm des Abwehrkampfes gegen die Generaloffensive des EU-Kapitals
Der Kampf gegen die Generaloffensive des Kapitals kann sich nicht nur auf den EU-Reformvertrag beschränken, sondern muß sich auf allen Fronten entfalten. Dazu braucht es eines klaren Programms des Abwehrkampfes.
Stoppt die sozialen Angriffe!
Arbeitslosigkeit, Unterbeschäftigung und Armut treffen Millionen und Abermillionen in Ost- und Westeuropa. Als vereinheitlichenden Schlüsselforderungen im Abwehrkampf schlagen wir vor:
* Europaweite Einführung der 35-Stunden-Woche bei vollem Lohn- und Personalausgleich!
* Ein Mindestlohn, der von der Arbeiterbewegung des jeweiligen Landes festgelegt wird.
* Kampf gegen Privatisierung des Öffentlichen Dienstes und Massenentlassungen!
*Für eine Programm gesellschaftlich nützlicher, öffentlicher Arbeiten unter Kontrolle der Beschäftigen, Arbeitslosen und KonsumentInnen!
* Progressive Besteuerung der Unternehmen und der Reichen zur Finanzierung dieser Maßnahmen.
Kampf dem Rassismus!
Die Spaltung der ArbeiterInnenklasse, der Unterdrückten entlang nationaler und ethnischer Linien ist ein zentrales Problem für einen gemeinsamen Abwehrkampf. Bewußt werden die Spaltungslinien durch die EU und die nationalen Bourgeoisien und Regierungen vertieft. ArbeiterInnen aus Osteuropa und aus den halb-kolonialen Ländern außerhalb der EU werden aus dem westlichen Arbeitsmarkt ausgeschlossen, als Beschäftigte zweiter Klasse behandelt oder in die Illegalität gedrängt, wo sie als Billiglöhner zu miesesten Bedingungen schuften müssen.
In der EU werden nationalen und ethnischen Minderheiten wie den Basken oder den Roma ihre demokratischen Rechte verwehrt. Moslemische, türkische, arabische aus dem Balkan oder aus Afrika stammende MigrantInnen sind systematischer Hetze und Unterdrückung ausgesetzt. Faschistische und rassistische Kräfte verbreiten das Gift des Antisemitismus. Dagegen kämpfen wir für:
* Gleiche und volle soziale und politische Rechte für alle, die in Europa leben.
* Wir kämpfen gegen alle Einreisekontrollen. Für offene Grenzen!
*Für Selbstverteidigungsorganisationen der rassistisch oder national Unterdrückten gegen faschistische oder rassistische Angriffe!
*Für einen gemeinsamen Kampf migrantischer und heimischer ArbeiterInnen gegen solche Angriffe!
* Weg mit allen reaktionären "Antiterrorgesetzen"!
Gegen Krieg und Besetzung!
Die EU und ihre Mitgliedsstaaten sind offene oder verdeckte Unterstützer der Besetzung des Iraks, Afghanistans und der US-Kriegsdrohungen gegen den Iran. Deswegen sind wir:
* Für den sofortigen Rückzug aller Truppen aus dem Irak, Afghanistan und Libanon!
* Unterstützung des legitimen Befreiungskampfes des irakischen und afghanischen Widerstandes gegen die Besatzer und des Widerstandes der PalästinenserInnen!
* Die EU-Staaten sind nicht nur passive Unterstützer der USA. Bosnien, Kosovo, Mazedonien sind praktisch Kolonien der EU. Deutschland führt die Besatzung Afghanistans mit an, Frankreich interveniert regelmäßig in Afrika. Und jetzt entsenden die EU und Österreich auch Truppenkontingente in den Tschad. Nein zu allen EU-Interventionen – egal ob unter US-Führung, EU oder UN-Flagge!
* Abzug aller im Ausland stationierten Truppen!
Nein zum Ausbau des Polizeistaates!
Unter dem Vorwand der Sicherheit der Bürger und des Krieges gegen den Terror bauen die herrschenden Klassen zielgerichtet einen Polizeistaat auf. Demokratische Rechte werden systematisch ausgehöhlt oder überhaupt abgeschafft.
*Gegen den allgegenwärtigen Überwachungsstaat! Weg mit den allgegenwärtigen Überwachungskameras in der Öffentlichkeit! Keine Online-Überwachung!
* Rücknahme von Rasterfahndung und Lauschangriff! Gegen alle sicherheitspolizeilichen Befugnisse! Selbstverteidigungseinheiten zum Schutz von Demonstrationen u.ä. gegen Angriffe durch die Polizei!
*Polizei raus aus den Stadtteilen! Aufrechterhaltung der öffentlichen Sicherheit durch Selbstverteidigungseinheiten, die auf Vollversammlungen in den Betrieben und Nachbarschaftsblocks gewählt und kontrolliert werden!
Die Verfassungsgebende Versammlung
Die Frage des EU-Reformvertrages ist eine demokratische Frage. Es geht dabei um die Verfaßtheit einer zukünftigen Föderation. Bislang hat die herrschende Klasse das über eine undemokratische oder plebiszitäre Weise zu tun versucht.
Auch alle zukünftigen Versuche der herrschenden Klasse werden einen ähnlichen Charakter haben, ja aufgrund der inneren Gegensätze der nationalen KapitalistInnenklassen haben müssen. Die Frage der Verfassung und der Demokratie kann und muß unter diesen Umständen zu einem Mittel der Mobilisierung der Massen gegen die herrschenden Klassen gemacht werden – nicht indem eine "andere" bürgerliche Verfassung im luftleeren Raum reformistischer Tagträume entworfen wird wie es ATTAC tut. Sondern indem eine konsequente demokratische Form des Vereinigungsprozesses eingefordert wird – eine Konstituierende Versammlung, die von allen EinwohnerInnen der EU wie der Staaten, die einem Vereinigten Europa beitreten wollen, gewählt wird.
Eine solche Losung hat einen revolutionär-demokratischen Charakter, wenn sie als Mittel der Mobilisierung betrachtet wird, als Mittel, die bürgerlich-demokratischen Hoffnungen und Illusionen gegen die Herrschenden zu bündeln und den notwendigen Schritt hin zum Sturz der herrschenden Klasse greifbarer zu machen.
Durch die europäische Revolution…
Ein entschlossener europaweiter Abwehrkampf der ArbeiterInnenklasse, der Jugend und der MigrantInnen wird früher oder später die Machtfrage aufwerfen: Wer hat in Europa das Sagen – die KapitalisteInnenklasse oder die Unterdrückten? Damit Sozialabbau, Rassismus und Krieg ein für alle mal aus der Welt geschaffen werden, müssen wir die Macht der herrschenden Klasse stürzen. Dafür brauchen wir eine europaweite, sozialistische Revolution. Eine solche Revolution wird nicht durch Anträge im Parlament und auch nicht durch friedlichen Druck auf der Straße stattfinden, sondern nur durch den Kampf und den bewaffneten Aufstand der Masse des Proletariats. Erst durch eine solche Revolution können wir UNSER Europa, ein sozialistisches Europa, aufbauen!
Schon vor 160 Jahren – im Jahre 1848 – erhoben sich die ArbeiterInnenklasse und die unterdrückten Schichten erstmals europaweit gegen die Herrschenden. Eine solche Revolution – aber diesmal mit einer klaren sozialistischen Perspektive – ist heute in Europa notwendiger denn je.
Die europäische Revolution wird kein spontaner Prozeß, der sich organisch aus einer schrittweiser Ausbreitung und Steigerung von Klassenkämpfen über die nationalstaatlichen Grenzen auf europäische Ebene ergibt. Genausowenig werden wir es mit einem verschwörerischen, gleichzeitigen Losschlagen in allen wesentlichen EU-Staaten zu tun haben.
Eine genaue Vorhersage des Entwicklungsganges der europäischen ArbeiterInnenrevolution ist natürlich unmöglich. Aber folgende Überlegungen lassen sich sehr wohl anstellen: Die wirtschaftliche Vereinigung Europas durch den Kapitalismus bewirkt notwendigerweise – wenn auch verspätet und verzerrt – eine Europäisierung des Klassenkampfes. Es wird früher oder später notwendigerweise – und dies ist der einzig fortschrittliche Aspekt der Herausbildung der EU, sozusagen ein von der Bourgeoisie unbeabsichtigter Nebeneffekt – zu einer internationalen Vernetzung von Kämpfen der ArbeiterInnen, Jugendlichen und MigrantInnen kommen. In Ansätzen konnten wir das bereits in der Vergangenheit bei einigen europaweiten Streiks sehen oder den Nachahmungen des Aufstandes der MigrantInnenjugendlichen in den Banlieues 2005 im Ausland.
Vor dem Hintergrund europaweiter Wellen des Klassenkampfes werden sich in einem oder mehreren Ländern – vielleicht sogar europaweit – vor-revolutionäre und revolutionäre Situationen herausbilden. Vor diesem Hintergrund wird eine in der ArbeiterInnenklasse verankerte revolutionäre Partei in einem oder mehreren Ländern den Sturz der herrschenden Klasse vorantreiben. Sollte die Revolution in einem oder mehreren Ländern siegen, wird dies rasch und umgehend massive Auswirkungen auf den Rest der Europäischen Union haben. Sie wird sowohl anfeuernd und inspirierend auf die anderen Klassenbrüder und –schwestern wirken als auch alarmierend auf die anderen KapitalistInnenklassen. Es ist daher wahrscheinlich, daß eine erfolgreich geschaffene sozialistische ArbeiterInnenrepublik in einem oder mehreren Ländern Europas nicht sehr lange als solches bestehen bleibt, sondern entweder sich ausbreiten und am ganzen Kontinent die „Vereinigten Sozialistischen Staaten von Europa“ errichten wird oder ziemlich rasch von der bewaffneten Konterrevolution zerschlagen wird.
Es liegt auf der Hand, daß eine siegreiche europäische Revolution enorme Auswirkungen auf die anderen imperialistischen Staaten – allen voran die USA – sowie die ganze Welt hätte. Im Jahre 1923 stellte Trotzki folgende Überlegungen an, die natürlich aufgrund der veränderten historischen Situation nicht eins zu eins auf heute übertragen werden können. Nichtsdestotrotz umreißen seine Überlegungen klar und scharf mögliche weltweite Auswirkungen:
„Man darf nicht den Umstand übersehen, daß die Gefahr seitens US-Amerikas, das den Verfall Europas mit allen Mitteln fördert und sich schon bereit macht, das europäische Erbe anzutreten, die Notwendigkeit eines Zusammenschlusses der einander entgegenarbeitenden europäischen Völker und die Bildung der „Vereinigten Staaten der europäischen Arbeiter und Bauer“ besonders dringlich macht. Diese Gegenüberstellung von Amerika und Europa ergibt sich aus der Verschiedenheit der objektiven Lage der europäischen Länder und der transozeanischen mächtigen Republik und richtet sich natürlich keineswegs gegen die internationale Solidarität des Proletariats oder gegen die Interessen der amerikanischen Revolution. Im Gegenteil. Eine der Ursachen für die langsame Entwicklung der Revolution in der ganzen Welt besteht in der banalen europäischen Hoffnung auf den guten amerikanischen Onkel (Wilsonismus, philanthropische Unterstützung der hungernden Europäer, amerikanischen „Anleihen“ usw. usw.), je schneller die Volksmassen das Vertrauen zu den eigenen Kräften zurückgewinnen, desto enger werden sie sich unter der Parole „Union der Arbeiter- und Bauernrepubliken Europas“ zusammenschließen, desto schneller wird das Entwicklungstempo der Revolution sein – diesseits und auch jenseits des Ozeans. Ebenso wie der Sieg des Proletariats in Rußland einen gewaltigen Anstoß für die Entwicklung der Kommunistischen Parteien in Europa gegeben hat, wird auch der Sieg der europäischen Revolution – aber in einem unvergleichlich größeren Maße – ein Antrieb für die Revolution in Amerika und der ganzen Welt sein. Wenn wir oben die Aussichten für die amerikanische Revolution – unter Ausschluß europäischer Einflüsse – in die Ferne von Jahrzehnten gerückt sahen, so können wir, die Wechselwirkung der historischen Ereignisse berücksichtigend, mit Sicherheit behaupten, daß der revolutionäre Sieg in Europa die Machtstellung der amerikanischen Bourgeoisie in Amerika in wenigen Jahren erschüttern wird.“ [44]
… zu den Vereinigten Sozialistischen Staaten von Europa
Die Alternative der Liga der Sozialistischen Revolution und der LFI zum EU-Reformvertrag eines imperialistischen Europas ist also weder die reaktionäre Rückkehr zum "unabhängigen" Nationalstaat und die Wiedereinführung von Schilling, DM, Franc und anderer nationaler Währungen, noch die eines "sozialen", in Wirklichkeit sozialchauvinistischen Europa.
Die kapitalistische Vereinigung Europas, die Herausbildung europäischer Monopole und Unternehmensallianzen kann nicht bekämpft werden, indem man den reaktionären und utopischen Versuch unternimmt, das Rad der geschichtlichen Entwicklung zurückzudrehen.
Vielmehr geht es darum, die Formierung eines europäischen Imperialismus und europäischer Monopole zu bekämpfen, indem die ArbeiterInnenklasse selbst auf allen Ebenen eine politische Antwort auf das Problem der europäischen Einigung gibt. Das bedeutet den Kampf gegen die Angriffe der Herrschenden bündeln und für die Vereinigten Sozialistischen Staaten von Europa als Schritt zur Weltrevolution zu kämpfen.
Diese würden die Voraussetzungen schaffen für eine ausgewogene Reorganisation der europäischen und der Weltwirtschaft auf Grundlage demokratischer Planung. Zentrale Probleme wie die Massenarbeitslosigkeit können nur auf dieser Grundlage wirklich gelöst werden. Nur auf dieser Grundlage wäre auch die Überwindung langjähriger nationaler und rassistischer Unterdrückung möglich. Ein sozialistisches Europa würde z.B. das Selbstbestimmungsrecht der Basken verwirklichen, es würde die Möglichkeiten einer Überwindung des nationalen Haders am Balkan schaffen, indem es einerseits den verschiedenen Nationen ihr Selbstbestimmungsrecht, andererseits die Möglichkeiten eines freiwilligen Zusammenschlusses schaffen würde, ohne daß die Profitinteressen der imperialistischen Kapitale wie der nationalen Bourgeoisien dazwischenkommen.
Folgende Deklaration des marxistischen Revolutionärs und Führers der Oktoberrevolution 1917, Leo Trotzki, gibt auch unsere Ziele der Revolution für die Vereinigten Sozialistischen Staaten von Europa wieder:
"In der Person der Opposition (der trotzkistischen Opposition, d. Red.) erklärt die Avantgarde des europäischen Proletariats seinen gegenwärtigen Herrschern: Um Europa zu vereinigen, ist es zu aller erst notwendig, die Macht euren Händen zu entreißen. Wir werden das machen. Wir werden Europa vereinigen. Wir werden es gegen die feindliche kapitalistische Welt vereinigen. Wir werden es in eine machtvollen Exerzierplatz des militanten Sozialismus verwandeln. Wir werden es zu einem Eckpfeiler der Sozialistischen Weltföderation machen." [45]
Für neue revolutionäre Parteien, für die 5. Internationale!
Eine revolutionäre Perspektive bleibt eine Illusion, wenn keine Kampfparteien national und international für die Revolution existieren. Die Liga der Sozialistischen Revolution macht sich keine Illusionen darüber, daß die Ausbeuterklasse freiwillig und ohne Gewaltanwendung ihre Herrschaft abtreten wird. Nur eine sozialistische Revolution in Österreich und weltweit, nur der bewaffnete Aufstand der ArbeiterInnenklasse kann das Tor zu einer Zukunft der Freiheit und Gerechtigkeit aufstoßen. Ein solcher Aufstand wird nicht spontan zustande kommen, sondern verlangt eine systematische Vorbereitung und Organisierung der Revolution. Dafür bedarf es einer Partei – einer Organisation, in der die bewußtesten Teile der ArbeiterInnenklasse und der Jugend unter dem Banner der Revolution organisiert sind. Die Schaffung einer solchen Partei der sozialistischen Revolution in Österreich und weltweit – der 5. Internationale – ist daher die vordringlichste Aufgabe aller ArbeiterInnen und Jugendlichen, die mit uns für eine sozialistische Zukunft kämpfen wollen. Der Aufbau einer solchen Partei und Internationale duldet keinen Aufschub. Wir können damit nicht warten, bis die Revolution vor der Türe steht. Denn – wie die Geschichte es uns zeigte – ist es dann zu spät, um ernsthafte politische und organisatorische Vorbereitungen zu treffen!
Vereinigen wir uns zu einer internationalen Partei des Proletariats, zu einer Fünften Internationalen! Auf in den Kampf für ein sozialistisches Europa! Auf in den Kampf für eine sozialistische Welt!
[1] EU-Kommissionspräsident Jose Manuel Barroso, Telegraph, 18.07.2007, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/07/11/weu111.xml
[5] Reform treaty: cosmetic changes to avoid referendums, says Giscard d'Estaing, 17.7.2007, http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/expert/infopress_page/003-9201-197-07-29-901-20070716IPR09200-16-07-2007-2007-false/default_de.htm
[6] Die im Dezember 2007 unterzeichneten Verträge werden im folgendem nach der Version im „Amtsblatt der Europäischen Union, 17.12.2007“ zitiert (veröffentlicht auf der Homepage http://eur-lex.europa.eu/de/treaties/index.htm).
[7] Schlußakte Erklärung Nr. 30. Erklärung zu Artikel 104 des Vertrags über die Arbeitsweise der Europäischen Union
[8] Vertrag von Lissabon zur Änderungen …. Artikel 86
[9] Pierre Khalfa: Veränderungsvertrag der EU: Sowohl Methode als auch Inhalt sind inakzeptabel (August 2007)
[10] Protokoll über die ständige Strukturierte Zusammenarbeit nach Artikel 28a des Vertrags über die Europäische Union, Artikel 1
[11] Vertrag von Lissabon zur Änderungen …. Artikel 28b
[12] Vertrag von Lissabon zur Änderungen …. Artikel 28a
[13] Vertrag von Lissabon zur Änderungen …. Artikel 28a
[14] Vertrag von Lissabon zur Änderungen …. Solidaritätsklausel Artikel 188r
[15] Michael Pröbsting: ‚Amerikanisierung oder Niedergang‘. Widersprüche und Herausforderungen für das imperialistische Projekt der europäischen Vereinigung; in: Revolutionärer Marxismus Nr. 35, S. 39 bzw. 40
[16] Vertrag von Lissabon zur Änderungen …. Artikel 28a
[17] Schlußakte, Erklärung Nr. 17. Erklärung zum Vorrang
[18] Siehe Centrum für Europäische Politik: Nizza – Verfassung – Reformvertrag, www.cep.eu/442.html
[19] Vertrag von Lissabon zur Änderungen …. Artikel 8 B
[20] Vertrag von Lissabon zur Änderungen … . Präambel
[21] Zur Rolle des Vatikans als Ideologielieferant für den europäischen Imperialismus siehe u.a. Michael Pröbsting: Das Christentum als Rechtfertigungsideologie des imperialistischen “Krieg gegen den Terror”; in: Unter der Fahne der Revolution (Theoretisches Journal der Liga der Sozialistischen Revolution), Nr. 1, September 2007, S. 15-20; www.sozialistische-revolution.org
[22] Unter Produktivkräften verstehen MarxistInnen sowohl die materiellen Mitteln und Resultate der Produktion – also Produktionsmittel (Maschinen etc.) und Waren – als auch die Menschen, die die Produktionsmittel bedienen und zu diesem Zweck bestimmte Formen der gesellschaftlichen Arbeitsteilung eingehen. Es liegt in der Natur der Sache, daß Produktionsmittel und Arbeiter einander gegenseitig bedingen. Vom kapitalistischen Gesichtspunkt aus gesehen besteht der Zweck der Anwendung der Arbeiter an den kapitalistischen Produktionsmitteln darin, Waren und dadurch Mehrwert zu produzieren. Produktivkräfte sind also nicht bloß eine Ansammlung von materiellen Dingen, sondern beinhalten auch und vor allem die Menschen und ihre Lebensbedingungen. Näheres dazu siehe in Michael Pröbsting: Die widersprüchliche Entwicklung der Produktivkräfte im Kapitalismus; in: Revolutionärer Marxismus 37 (2007)
[23] Für 1971-2000 siehe World Bank: Global Economic Prospect 2002, S. 234; für 2001-2006 siehe United Nations: World Economic Situation and Prospects 2007, S. 2 bzw. United Nations: World Economic Situation and Prospects 2008, S. 1. Die Zahlenreihe zwischen 1971-2000 beruht auf Weltbank-Berechnungen des GDP zu konstanten Preisen und Wechselkursen von 1995. Die Zahlenreihe zwischen 2001-2005 beruht auf UN-Berechnungen des GDP zu konstanten Preisen und Wechselkursen von 2000. Die 2.7% ergeben sich aus dem arithmetischen Mittel der Angaben für die Jahre 2001-2006 (1.6%, 1.9%, 2.7%, 4.0% 3.4% sowie 3.9%).
[24] World Bank Indicators 2005, http://www.worldbank.org/data/wdi2005/wditext/Section4.htm, World Bank: World Development Indicators 2006, Table 4.1 http://devdata.worldbank.org/wdi2006/contents/Section4.htm
[25] Für die Jahre 1970-2000: OECD - Understanding Economic Growth (2004), http://213.253.134.29/oecd/pdfs/browseit/1104011E.PDF, S. 18f.; Die Statistik bezieht sich auf die 24 Mitgliedsstaaten der OECD. Sie umfaßt daher nicht nur imperialistische Länder, sondern auch Staaten – wie Ungarn, Tschechische Republik, die Slowakei, Mexiko oder Neuseeland – die einen halbkolonialen Charakter besitzen. Diese Länder hatten in den letzten Jahren eine Wachstumsrate, die über dem Durchschnitt der imperialistischen Ökonomien lag. Insoferne verzerren sie diesen OECD-Durchschnitt etwas nach oben. Nichtsdestotrotz sind diese OECD-Zahlen nützliche Annäherungswerte, da die halbkolonialen Staaten innerhalb der OECD gegenüber den imperialistischen Ländern nicht allzu sehr ins Gewicht fallen. Die Angaben für 2000-2005 beziehen sich – mit Ausnahme jener für die EU – auf: World Bank: World Development Report 2007, S. 295. Für die Jahre 1960-1969 haben wir die OECD-Statistik zitiert aus: Robert Brenner, The Boom and the Bubble. The US in the World Economy, London 2002, S. 47. Bei diesen Angaben beziehen sich die Zahlen für die imperialistischen Staaten auf die G-7. Die Angaben für die EU-15 für die Jahre 1960-1969 beziehen sich nur auf Deutschland. Die Angaben für die EU-15 für die Jahre 1999-2005 beziehen sich auf die 11 zur Euro-Area gehörenden EU-Staaten und entstammen folgender Quelle: European Commission: THE EU ECONOMY 2006 REVIEW, S.61, http://ec.europa.eu/economy_finance/publications/european_economy/2006/ee606_en.pdf
[26] Karl Marx: Das Kapital, Band I, MEW 23, S. 605
[27] Karl Marx: Das Kapital, Band III, MEW 25, S. 260 (Hervorhebung im Original)
[28] „Begrifflich ist die Konkurrenz nichts als die innere Natur des Kapitals, seine wesentliche Bestimmung, erscheinend und realisiert als Wechselwirkung der vielen Kapitalien aufeinander, die innere Tendenz als äußerliche Notwendigkeit. (Kapital existiert und kann nur existieren als viele Kapitalien und seine Selbstbestimmung erscheint daher als Wechselwirkung derselben aufeinander.)“ Karl Marx: Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (1858); in: MEW 42, S. 327
[29] Karl Marx: Kapiatl Band I, MEW 23, S. 618
[30] Karl Marx: Das Kapital, Band III, MEW 25, S. 223 (Hervorhebung im Original)
[31] World Bank: World Development Indicators 2004, S. 220, World Bank: World Development Indicators 2006, Table 4.9 http://devdata.worldbank.org/wdi2006/contents/Section4.htm
[32] Barclays Capital (2006) “Global Outlook: Implications for Financial Markets”, Economic and Market Strategy, December 2006, S. 17
[33] Zur Intensivierung der imperialistischen Ausbeutung der halbkolonialen Welt in der Periode der Globalisierung siehe auch Michael Pröbsting: Imperialismus, Globalisierung und die Ausbeutung der Halbkolonien; in: ArbeiterInnenstandpunkt Nr. 154, Oktober 2007, http://arbeiterinnenstandpunkt.net/phpwcms/index.php?id=18,332,0,0,1,0
[34] Martin Suchanek/Michael Pröbsting: EU in der Krise. Soziales oder sozialistisches Europa?; in: Revolutionärer Marxismus Nr. 35, S. 6
[35] Martin Suchanek/Michael Pröbsting: EU in der Krise. Soziales oder sozialistisches Europa?; in: Revolutionärer Marxismus Nr. 35, S. 7
[36] siehe: „Attacs 10 Prinzipien für einen demokratischen EU-Vertrag“, http://www.attac.at/uploads/media/10_Prinzipien_fuer_einen_demokratischen_EU-Vertrag_02.pdf
[37] Christian Felber: Mein europäischer Traum; in: DER STANDARD, 5.12.2007
[38] ELP: In the name of a democratic and social Europe: “THE GOVERNMENT’S TREATY MUST BE PUT TO REFERENDUM IN THE EU”, 19. October 2007, http://www.european-left.org/nc/english/news/news_archive/news_archive/browse/1/zurueck/news-archive/artikel/in-the-name-of-a-democratic-and-social-europe-the-governments-treaty-must-be-put-to-referendu/
[39] „Sozialistische Jugend fordert europaweite Volksabstimmung zu EU-Reformvertrag“ (13.12.2007); http://www.sjoe.at/content/oest/presse/pas/article/3641.html
[40] Interview mit Karin Scheele (Leiterin der SPÖ-Delegation im Europäischen Parlament): „Die europäische Integration braucht ein fundamentales Vertragswerk…“ in: Sozialistische Jugend: TROTZDEM, Dezember 2007, S. 8
[41] Dieser Fehler trifft im Grunde auch auf die anderen, nicht der ELP angeschlossenen, kommunistischen Parteien zu. Sie glauben zwar nicht an eine Reformierung der EU, sondern sind für den Austritt der einzelnen Mitgliedsstaaten. Aber auch sie halten die Schaffung eines friedlichen Europas – eben ohne Rahmen der EU – ohne vorhergehenden Umsturz der kapitalistischen Gesellschaftsordnung für möglich. Siehe z.B. die jüngste Erklärung: „Im tiefen Vertrauen, dass ein anderes Europa möglich ist, ein Europa der Zusammenarbeit, des wirtschaftlichen und sozialen Fortschritts und des Friedens, vereinbaren die Kommunistischen und Arbeiterparteien und weiteren fortschrittlichen Linkskräfte …“ (Kommunistische Parteien fordern Volksabstimmung über den EU-Vertrag, www.kominform.at)
[42] Siehe dazu auch Roman Birke: Welches Europa? Europa zwischen sozialer Rhetorik und imperialistischer Praxis; in: ArbeiterInnenstandpunkt Nr. 141, Jänner 2006
[43] Wladimir Iljitsch Lenin: Das Militärprogramm der proletarischen Revolution (1916); in: LW 23, S.99f.
[44] Leo Trotzki: Über die Aktualität der Parole „Vereinigte Staaten von Europa“ (1923); in: Leo Trotzki, Wohin treibt England/Europa und Amerika, Verlag Neuer Kurs, Berlin 1972, S. 95f. Trotzki’s Konzeption der Vereinigten Sozialistischen Staaten von Europa wurde von der Kommunistischen Internationale im Juni 1923 offiziell angenommen und erst auf Stalin’s Druck im Jahre 1928 verworfen.
[45] Leo Trotzki: Disarmament and The United States of Europe (1929), in: Trotsky Writings 1929, S. 357 (unsere Übersetzung)
Zur Frage eines supranationalen Staatsapparates des EU-Imperialismus und der marxistischen Staatstheorie.
Die Diskussion zur Losung der Vereinigten Sozialistischen Staaten von Europa bei Lenin und Trotzki und ihre Anwendung unter den heutigen Bedingungen des Klassenkampfes.
von Michael Pröbsting, www.thecommunists.net
(Die Graphiken in diesem Dokument können in der unten angehängten pdf Version eingesehen werden.)
Vorwort der Redaktion: Die folgende Studie wurde erstmals im April 2008 in der Zeitschrift „Unter der Fahne der Revolution“ (FAREV) Nr. 2/3 veröffentlicht. Das FAREV war das theoretische Organ der Liga der Sozialistischen Revolution (LSR), die damalige österreichische Sektion der Liga für die Fünfte Internationale (LFI).
Der Autor, Genosse Pröbsting, war damals Mitglied der internationalen Leitung der LFI. Er wurde im April 2011 gemeinsam mit anderen Genossinnen und Genossen von der Mehrheit der LFI-Führung bürokratisch ausgeschlossen, nachdem sie wenige Wochen zuvor eine Fraktion gegründet hatten, um der zentristischen Degeneration der LFI entgegenzuwirken. Die ausgeschlossenen Genossinnen und Genossen gründeten daraufhin umgehend in Österreich die Revolutionär-Kommunistische Organisation zur Befreiung (RKOB). Iim April 2012 schlossen sie sich gemeinsam mit Schwesterorganisationen in Pakistan, Sri Lanka und den USA zu einer internationalen Organisation – der Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT) – zusammen.
Wie aus dem Dokument ersichtlich wurde es in der Zeit der Kampagne gegen den EU-Vertrag verfaßt. Wir haben uns zur Wiederveröffentlichung der Studie entschlossen, da sie in mehrerer Hinsicht von höchst aktueller Bedeutung ist. Die in ihr enthaltene marxistische Analyse der inneren Widersprüche der imperialistischen EU behält volle Gültigkeit. Auch die Auseinandersetzung mit der Haltung der marxistischen Klassiker zur europäischen Einigung sowie der revolutionären Taktik heute hat nichts an Aktualität eingebüßt.
* * *
In unserer Broschüre „EU-Reformvertrag – Hintergründe und revolutionäre Antworten“ haben wir den widersprüchlichen Charakter der Herausbildung eines supranationalen Staatsapparates des EU-Imperialismus behandelt. In diesem Beitrag wollen wir uns – nach einer kurzen Darlegung unserer Position zum EU-Vertrag – mit einigen damit verbundenen theoretischen Fragen auseinandersetzen.
* Welche Faktoren befördern und welche Faktoren behindern den Herausbildungsprozeß eines supranationalen Staatsapparates des EU-Imperialismus?
* Ist eine Vereinigung Europas auf kapitalistischer Grundlage überhaupt möglich?
* Auf welchen strategischen Überlegungen beruht die marxistische Losung der „Vereinigten Sozialistischen Staaten von Europa“?
* Welche Haltung nahmen Lenin und Trotzki zur Losung der Vereinigten Staaten von Europa ein und welche Überlegungen steckten dahinter?
I. Die Haltung der marxistischen Revolutionäre zum EU-Vertrag
Beginnen wir mit einer kurzen Zusammenfassung der Position der Liga der Sozialistischen Revolution (LSR) zum EU-Vertrag in einigen wenigen Thesen: [1]
1. Der EU-Vertrag ist ein Anschlag auf die Interessen der Arbeiterklasse und aller unterdrückten Schichten - der Lohnabhängigen, der Jugendlichen, der Migranten. Er dient ausschließlich den Interessen der Konzerne und Machteliten in Europa und in Österreich. Er bedeutet eine Verschärfung der neoliberalen und militaristischen Offensive der herrschenden Klasse. Mit anderen Worten: er bedeutet für uns mehr Krieg, mehr Sozialabbau und weniger Demokratie.
2. Deswegen tritt die LSR für einen massiven Widerstand gegen den EU-Vertrag ein: Demonstrationen, Streiks bis hin zum Generalstreik– in Österreich und europaweit. Wir fordern die Arbeiterbewegung – die Gewerkschaften, die verschiedenen Teilorganisationen der Sozialdemokratie usw. – auf, in diesem Sinne aktiv zu werden. Wir sind für den Aufbau von Aktionskomitees in den Betrieben, Schulen und Universitäten. Ebenso treten wir für eine europaweite Koordinierung des Widerstandes ein.
3. Da die Kräfte, die eine solche klassenkämpferische Orientierung umsetzen würden, gegenwärtig sehr schwach sind, unterstützen wir die Forderung nach einer Volkabstimmung über den EU-Vertrag und arbeiten – als linker, revolutionärer Flügel – innerhalb der Plattform Volxabstimmung mit.
4. Unsere Alternative zur imperialistischen EU ist weder die Rückkehr zum kleinen imperialistischen Nationalstaat Österreich noch eine „soziale, friedliche Reformierung“ der EU. Unsere Alternative ist die Zerschlagung der EU durch eine europaweite Revolution und der Aufbau der Vereinigten Sozialistischen Staaten von Europa.
Zusammengefaßt lauten unsere Hauptlosungen:
* EU-Vertrag bedeutet mehr Krieg, mehr Sozialabbau und weniger Demokratie!
* Kampf dem EU-Vertrag! Für eine Volksabstimmung!
* Für Demonstrationen und Streiks gegen den EU-Vertrag – in Österreich und europaweit! Für den Aufbau von Aktionskomitees!
* Für eine europaweite sozialistische Revolution! Für die Vereinigten Sozialistischen Staaten von Europa!
II. Einige Gesichtspunkte der marxistischen Staatstheorie
Wir haben in unserer Broschüre zum EU-Vertrag sowie auch an anderer Stelle den Prozeß der Herausbildung eines supranationalen – also nationalstaats-übergreifenden – EU-Staatsapparates und seine inneren Widersprüchlichkeiten festgestellt. [2] Doch bevor wir diese Frage genauer behandeln, ist es vonnöten, zuerst einige Worte über das Wesen des kapitalistischen Staates zu verlieren.
II.1. Basis und Überbau. Staat und Ökonomie im Kapitalismus
Der Kapitalismus als System stellt die Gesamtheit sozialer Ausbeutungs- und Unterdrückungsverhältnisse einer in gegensätzliche – herrschende und beherrschte – Klassen gespaltene Gesellschaftsformation (Marx) dar. Die Basis dieser Gesellschaftsformation verkörpern die ökonomischen Produktionsverhältnisse – das Privateigentum an Produktionsmitteln –, welche der besitzenden Kapitalistenklasse die unentgeltliche Aneignung eines Mehrwertes (dem Profit) aus dem von der Arbeiterklasse geschaffenen gesellschaftlichen Wertprodukt erlaubt. Auf der Grundlage dieser ökonomischen Produktionsbedingungen erhebt sich ein politischer und ideologischer Überbau (Staat, Kultur etc.). Karl Marx beschrieb dieses Verhältnis folgendermaßen:
„Die spezifische ökonomische Form, in der unbezahlte Mehrarbeit aus den unmittelbaren Produzenten ausgepumpt wird, bestimmt das Herrschafts- und Knechtschaftsverhältnis, wie es unmittelbar aus der Produktion selbst hervorwächst und seinerseits bestimmend auf sie zurückwirkt. Hierauf aber gründet sich die ganze Gestaltung des ökonomischen, aus den Produktionsverhältnissen selbst hervorwachsenden Gemeinwesens und damit zugleich seine spezifische politische Gestalt. Es ist jedesmal das unmittelbare Verhältnis der Eigentümer der Produktionsbedingungen zu den unmittelbaren Produzenten - ein Verhältnis, dessen jedesmalige Form stets naturgemäß einer bestimmten Entwicklungsstufe der Art und Weise der Arbeit und daher ihrer gesellschaftlichen Produktivkraft entspricht -, worin wir das innerste Geheimnis, die verborgne Grundlage der ganzen gesellschaftlichen Konstruktion und daher auch der politischen Form des Souveränitäts- und Abhängigkeitsverhältnisses, kurz, der jedesmaligen spezifischen Staatsform finden. Dies hindert nicht, daß dieselbe ökonomische Basis - dieselbe den Hauptbedingungen nach - durch zahllos verschiedne empirische Umstände, Naturbedingungen, Racenverhältnisse, von außen wirkende geschichtliche Einflüsse usw., unendliche Variationen und Abstufungen in der Erscheinung zeigen kann, die nur durch Analyse dieser empirisch gegebnen Umstände zu begreifen sind.“ [3]
Der Staat ist jedoch nicht einfach ein Beiwerk zur Ökonomie, sondern stellt eine notwendige Voraussetzung für das Funktionieren der wirtschaftlichen Ausbeutung einer Klasse durch die andere dar. In der Tat könnten die Ausbeutungsverhältnisse keinen Tag lang bestehen bleiben, würde es nicht einen sich über diese ökonomische Basis erhebenden politischen und ideologischen Überbau geben. Trotzki merkte einmal zu Recht an, daß „eine reine Ökonomie also eine Fiktion (ist)“ [4] Dies beginnt bei der Rechtssicherheit, die der Unternehmer beim Warenhandel benötigt und die durch staatliche Organe gewährleistet wird und geht bis zur Rolle des Staates bei der Aufrechterhaltung öffentlicher Dienstleistungen und einer Infrastruktur, ohne die der wirtschaftliche Organismus des Kapitalismus nicht pulsieren könnte. Darüberhinaus zeichnet sich die kapitalistische Klassengesellschaft durch enorme, scharfe Gegensätze aus. Warum sollten sich Arbeiter Entlassungen, Lohnkürzungen, Preiserhöhungen etc. gefallen lassen, während sich die Kapitalisten unabläßlich und offensichtlich bereichern? Warum sollten sich Migrant in allen Lebensbereichen als Bürger 2. Klasse benachteiligen und überausbeuten lassen? Warum sollten sich Jugendliche in der Schule von einem einzelnen Direktor (bzw. der über diesem stehenden Schulbehörde) Ablauf und Inhalt des Unterrichts aufzwingen lassen? Die Antwort darauf lautet: weil es einen bürgerlichen Klassenstaat und eine bürgerliche Klassenideologie gibt.
Der bürgerliche Staat zwingt die unterdrückten Klassen mit seinen ungeheuren Machtmitteln zur Respektierung der herrschenden Verhältnisse.
„Die bisherige, sich in Klassengegensätzen bewegende Gesellschaft hatte den Staat nötig, das heißt eine Organisation der jedesmaligen ausbeutenden Klasse zur Aufrechterhaltung ihrer äußeren Produktionsbedingungen, also namentlich zur gewaltsamen Niederhaltung der ausgebeuteten Klasse in den durch die bestehende Produktionsweise gegebnen Bedingungen der Unterdrückung (Sklaverei, Leibeigenschaft oder Hörigkeit, Lohnarbeit).“ [5]
Der Kapitalist weiß daß er bzw. sie sich jederzeit auf die Hilfe der Polizei, der Justiz und anderer Staatsorgane verlassen kann und läßt dies auch die Lohnabhängigen wissen. Das gleiche gilt für alle anderen gesellschaftlichen Unterdrückungsbereiche. Marxisten bezeichnen daher den Staat als „besondere Machtorganisation, eine Organisation der Gewalt zur Unterdrückung einer Klasse.“ [6]
Ebenso dient die bürgerliche Klassenideologie der Aufrechterhaltung der herrschenden Verhältnisse. Die bürgerliche Klassenideologie setzt an den von der Arbeiterklasse spontan als undurchschaubar empfundenen kapitalistischen Ausbeutungs- und Unterdrückungsverhältnisse an – dem Warenfetischismus, der sich immerwährend als gesellschaftlicher Nebel über die kapitalistischen Produktionsverhältnisse erhebt. [7] Auf dieser Grundlage hämmert der bürgerliche Herrschaftsapparat den unterdrückten Klassen permanent zahlreiche Rechtfertigungs- und Vertröstungsideologien ein – angefangen von der Schule bis hin zu den Medien. Lenin beschrieb diesen Sachverhalt folgendermaßen:
„Der Kapitalismus wäre kein Kapitalismus, wenn er nicht einerseits die Massen zu einem Zustand der Geducktheit, Unterdrücktheit, Einschüchterung, Zersplitterung (im Dorfe!) und Unwissenheit verurteilte und wenn er nicht andererseits der Bourgeoisie einen gigantischen Lügen- und Betrugsapparat in die Hände gebe, einen Apparat, um die Arbeiter- und Bauernmassen zu betrügen, sie zu verdummen usw.“ [8]
Kapitalismus setzt also nicht nur die Herstellung und Wiederherstellung von Waren und Kapital voraus, sondern auch – und damit naturnotwendig verbunden – die Herstellung und Wiederherstellung der gesellschaftlichen Rahmenbedingungen, die ersteres erst ermöglichen.
„Der Prozeß der Reproduktion ist nicht nur ein Prozeß der Reproduktion der materiellen Elemente der Produktion, sondern ein Prozeß der Reproduktion der Produktionsverhältnisse selbst.“ [9]
II.2. Der Staat als Maschine der Klassenherrschaft
Doch damit der Staat auch tatsächlich die kapitalistischen Ausbeutungs- und Unterdrückungsverhältnisse aufrechterhalten und verteidigen kann, bedarf er einer entsprechenden inneren Gestaltung. Der kapitalistische Staat kann nur deswegen diese Funktion erfüllen, weil er auch tatsächlich ein von oben nach unten, streng hierarchisch gegliedertes und eng mit dem Kapital verwobenes Instrument der Klassenherrschaft ist.
Ihrem Wesen nach ist der kapitalistische Staat eine “bürokratisch-militärische Maschinerie”. [10] Wenn wir vom kapitalistischen Überbau, vom bürgerlichen Herrschaftsapparat sprechen, so meinen wir damit nicht nur die Repressionsorgane (wie Armee, Polizei, Gericht etc.), sondern auch den gesamten staatlichen Verwaltungsapparat, Ausbildungssektor usw. Darüberhinaus umfaßt der Herrschaftsapparat der Bourgeoisie nicht nur die staatlichen Organe, sondern auch diverse nicht-staatliche Organe wie Medien, Kirche u.ä. Nur diese Herrschaftsmaschinerie in ihrer Gesamtheit ist in der Lage, die von scharfen Gegensätzen zerfressene Klassengesellschaft zusammenzuhalten.
„Wieso aber wird unter solchen Umstände das Gleichgewicht im Aufbau der Klassengesellschaft erreicht? Wieso zerfällt sie nicht in jedem Moment? (…) Es muß etwas geben, was die Rolle eines Reifens spielt, der die Klassen zusammenhält und die Gesellschaft hindert, zu bersten, auseinanderzufallen, sich endgültig zu spalten. Ein solcher Reifen ist der Staat. Der Staat ist eine Organisation, die mit unzähligen Fäden die ganze Gesellschaft umspinnt und sie in dem Netz ihrer Fangarme hält. Aber was ist das für eine Organisation? (…) Die staatliche Organisation ist ganz und gar eine Organisation der ‚herrschenden Klassen‘.“ [11]
Diese Maschinerie entstand in Europa in der Zeit der Feudalherrschaft und beruht auf dem Prinzip der Herrschaft von oben nach unten – also einem strikt autoritären Aufbau – aus.
„Die zentralisierte Staatsmacht, mit ihren allgegenwärtigen Organen stehende Armee, Polizei, Bürokratie, Geistlichkeit, Richterstand, Organe, geschaffen nach dem Plan einer systematischen und hierarchischen Teilung der Arbeit – stammt her aus den Zeiten der absoluten Monarchie, wo sie der entstehenden Bourgeoisgesellschaft als eine mächtige Waffe in ihren Kämpfen gegen den Feudalismus diente. (...) änderte sich ihr politischer Charakter gleichzeitig mit den ökonomischen Veränderungen der Gesellschaft. In dem Maß, wie der Fortschritt der modernen Industrie den Klassengegensatz zwischen Kapital und Arbeit entwickelte, erweiterte, vertiefte, in demselben Maß erhielt die Staatsmacht mehr und mehr den Charakter einer öffentlichen Gewalt zur Unterdrückung der Arbeiterklasse, einer Maschine der Klassenherrschaft.“ [12]
Aufbau des Staates und herrschende Ideologie entsprechen also der Anatomie der ökonomischen Basis. Die Diktatur des Unternehmers im Betrieb findet ihr Gegenstück in der Diktatur des Direktors an der Schule, des Abteilungsleiters in der Verwaltung oder des Medienkonzerninhabers über die bürgerlichen Publikationen. Das gleiche schließlich auch in der zentralen Stellung Gottes in der Religion oder des „Recht des Stärkeren“ in diversen flachen Alltagsphilosophien.
Dieses Prinzip der Herrschaft von oben nach unten sehen wir in allen Teilbereichen des Staatsapparates – angefangen von der Armee und der Polizei, der Justiz bis hin zur Verwaltung, der Schule oder der Jugendfürsorge. Überall haben wir das Kommando von oben nach unten, nirgendwo werden die Leiter von der Basis – den Lohnabhängigen, der Jugendlichen usw. – von unten nach oben kontrolliert oder sind gar abwählbar.
Auch die demokratische Form der bürgerlichen Herrschaft – der Parlamentarismus – ändert nichts am autoritären Charakter des Staatsapparates. Denn die Parlamentswahlen ermöglichen bloß die Wahl der obersten Spitzenvertretern im Staat. Wie diese dann ihre Macht ausüben, ob sie ihre Wahlversprechen einhalten, welche Entscheidungen in den 4-5 Jahren zwischen den Wahlen stattfinden – all das entzieht sich der Kontrolle oder gar der Mitbestimmung der Bevölkerung.
In Wirklichkeit stellt die herrschende Klasse über unzähligen Mechanismen sicher, daß die politischen Machthaber im Interesse des Kapitals arbeiten – angefangen von Posten, Karrieremöglichkeiten, direkte Bestechung, zukünftige Jobs in Konzernen usw. Das Parlament ist daher auch nicht das wirkliche Machtzentrum. Denn in Wirklichkeit koordinieren die führenden Politiker die allermeisten wichtigen Entscheidungen in informellen Gesprächen mit Vertreteren der besitzenden Klasse – dem Kapital. (Industriellenvereinigung, Wirtschaftsbund, Wirtschaftsforschungsinstitute, sogenannte unabhängige Experten, die in ihrer beruflichen Existenz zumeist direkt von Aufträgen von Regierung und Konzernen abhängen, EU-Offizielle usw.).
Bürgerliche Herrschaft bedeutet keineswegs, daß die mächtigsten Kapitalisten direkt die Regierungsgeschäfte leiten. Für diese Aufgaben halten sie sich politische Funktionäre (Schüssel ist als jahrzehntelanger Wirtschaftsbundfunktionär ein Paradebeispiel dafür). Im Umfeld der Herrschenden befindet sich jedoch stets ein Netz von Zuträgern, Interessensvertretern, Beratern, Medienmagnaten usw., die über unzählige Verbindungen, Aufträge, Geschäftsinteressen usw. miteinander verwoben sind. Zusätzlich gibt es stark entwickelte Institutionen der Herrschenden, deren Wort starkes Gewicht im Staatsapparat hat. So hat z.B. die Industriellenvereinigung oft Vertreter in diversen Expertenkommissionen, die von der Regierung eingesetzt werden.
Natürlich gibt es auch Interessenskonflikte innerhalb der herrschenden Klasse, die sich dann entsprechend in Fraktionsbildungen innerhalb der politischen Elite niederschlagen. Ihren Ausdruck findet diese dann in vielfältigster Form – angefangen von unterschiedlichen bürgerlichen politischen Parteien, unterschiedlichen „Expertenmeinungen“, unterschiedliche Zeitungen und Kommentare „angesehener“ Journalisten, gegensätzlichen Vorhersagen von Wirtschaftsforschungs- oder auch Meinungsforschungsinstituten usw.
Hinzu kommt der stetige Kampf zwischen den Klassen und zwar zuerst und vor allem zwischen der Bourgeoisie und dem Proletariat, aber auch den Interessenskonflikten der Zwischenschichten und –klassen wie der Bauernschaft, dem städtischen Kleinbürgertum, den Mittelschichten usw. Der Staat als der Staat der herrschenden Klasse ist der „ideelle Gesamtkapitalist“ [13] Aber um eben seine Rolle als ideellen Gesamtkapitalisten erfüllen zu können, muß er in der einen oder anderen Form auch Kompromisse mit anderen Klassen eingehen, dieses oder jenes Zugeständnis machen oder bestimmte Allianzen schmieden, ohne deswegen seine grundlegende Funktion als Maschine des Kapitalistenklasse in Frage zu stellen.
Sollte sich dieses parlamentarische Netz bürgerlicher Herrschaft einmal als zu schwach erweisen, um die soziale Sprengkraft gegensätzlicher Klasseninteressen abzufedern oder sollte sich gar eine linke Mehrheit im Parlament erdreisten, radikale fortschrittliche Gesetz zu beschließen, dann greift die herrschende Klasse auf ihre sicheren Bataillone zurück: den Repressionsapparat (Polizei, Armee, Geheimdienst, paramilitärische Verbände). Unzählige Beispiele wie der Februar 1934 in Österreich oder auch der Oktoberstreik 1950, der Staatstreich in Chile gegen die linke Regierung Allende 1973 oder eines General Francos in Spanien 1936 legen beredetes Zeugnis davon ab.
Der Staat ist also eine kapitalistische Herrschaftsmaschine sowohl unter den Bedingungen der offenen Diktatur (Militärdiktatur, Faschismus etc.) als auch der bürgerlichen Demokratie. Während also reformistische Politiker und Theoretiker behaupten, daß der Klassencharakter des bürgerlich-demokratischen Staates neutral sei – also bei „richtiger“ Besetzung der Spitzenposten im Interesse der Arbeiterklasse ausnützbar sei – betonten die marxistischen Klassiker immer wieder den reaktionären, unreformierbaren Charakter des Staates:
„Die höchste Staatsform, die demokratische Republik, die in unsern modernen Gesellschaftsverhältnissen mehr und mehr unvermeidliche Notwendigkeit wird und die Staatsform ist, in der der letzte Entscheidungskampf zwischen Proletariat und Bourgeoisie allein ausgekämpft werden kann - die demokratische Republik weiß offiziell nichts mehr von Besitzunterschieden. In ihr übt der Reichtum seine Macht indirekt, aber um so sichrer aus. Einerseits in der Form der direkten Beamtenkorruption, wofür Amerika klassisches Muster, andrerseits in der Form der Allianz von Regierung und Börse, die sich um so leichter vollzieht, je mehr die Staatsschulden steigen und je mehr Aktiengesellschaften nicht nur den Transport, sondern auch die Produktion selbst in ihren Händen konzentrieren und wiederum in der Börse ihren Mittelpunkt finden. Dafür ist außer Amerika die neueste französische Republik ein schlagendes Beispiel, und auch die biedre Schweiz hat auf diesem Felde das ihrige geleistet. Daß aber zu diesem Bruderbund von Regierung und Börse keine demokratische Republik erforderlich, beweist außer England das neue deutsche Reich, wo man nicht sagen kann, wen das allgemeine Stimmrecht höher gehoben hat, Bismarck oder Bleichröder. Und endlich herrscht die besitzende Klasse direkt mittelst des allgemeinen Stimmrechts. Solange die unterdrückte Klasse, also in unserm Fall das Proletariat, noch nicht reif ist zu seiner Selbstbefreiung, solange wird sie, der Mehrzahl nach, die bestehende Gesellschaftsordnung als die einzig mögliche erkennen und politisch der Schwanz der Kapitalistenklasse, ihr äußerster linker Flügel sein. In dem Maß aber, worin sie ihrer Selbstemanzipation entgegenreift, in dem Maß konstituiert sie sich als eigne Partei, wählt ihre eignen Vertreter, nicht die der Kapitalisten. Das allgemeine Stimmrecht ist so der Gradmesser der Reife der Arbeiterklasse. Mehr kann und wird es nie sein im heutigen Staat; aber das genügt auch. An dem Tage, wo das Thermometer des allgemeinen Stimmrechts den Siedepunkt bei den Arbeitern anzeigt, wissen sie sowohl wie die Kapitalisten, woran sie sind.“ [14]
Daran ansetzend betonte auch Lenin:
„In der demokratischen Republik, fährt Engels fort, ‘übt der Reichtum seine Macht indirekt, aber um so sicherer aus’, und zwar erstens durch seine ‘direkte Beamtenkorruption’ (Amerika) und zweitens durch die ‘Allianz von Regierung und Börse’ (Frankreich und Amerika).
Heute haben Imperialismus und Herrschaft der Banken diese beiden Methoden, die Allmacht des Reichtums in jeder beliebigen demokratischen Republik zu behaupten und auszuüben, zu einer außergewöhnlichen Kunst ‘entwickelt’. Wenn beispielsweise schon in den ersten Monaten der demokratischen Republik in Rußland, sozusagen im Honigmond des Ehebundes der ‘Sozialisten’ – der Sozialrevolutionäre und der Menschewiki – mit der Bourgeoisie, Herr Paltschinski in der Koalitionsregierung alle Maßnahmen zur Zügelung der Kapitalisten und ihrer Raubgier, ihrer Plünderung der Staatskasse durch Heereslieferungen, sabotierte, wenn dann der aus dem Ministerium ausgetretene Herr Paltschinski (der natürlich durch einen anderen, ebensolchen Paltschinski ersetzt worden ist) von den Kapitalisten durch ein Pöstchen mit einem Gehalt von 120.000 Rubel jährlich ‘belohnt’ wurde – wie nennt man das dann? Direkte Korruption oder indirekte? Allianz der Regierung mit den Syndikaten oder ‘nur’ freundschaftliche Beziehungen? Welche Rolle spielen die Tschernow und Zereteli, die Awksentjew und Skobelew? Sind sie ‘direkte’ Bundesgenossen der Millionäre, die den Staat bestehlen, oder nur indirekte?
Die Allmacht des ‘Reichtums’ ist in der demokratischen Republik deshalb sicherer, weil sie nicht von einzelnen Mängeln des politischen Mechanismus, von einer schlechten politischen Hülle des Kapitalismus abhängig ist. Die demokratische Republik ist die denkbar beste politische Hülle des Kapitalismus, und daher begründet das Kapital, nachdem es (…) von dieser besten Hülle Besitz ergriffen hat, seine Macht derart zuverlässig, derart sicher, daß kein Wechsel, weder der Personen noch der Institutionen noch der Parteien der bürgerlich-demokratischen Republik, diese Macht erschüttern kann.“ [15]
Diese Methoden der seine „direkte Beamtenkorruption“ und der ‘Allianz von Regierung und Börse’ gehören keineswegs der Vergangenheit an, sondern sind aktueller und ausgeprägter denn je. Dies trifft auf alle kapitalistischen Länder zu – sowohl in den USA (siehe den Enron-Skandal, die enge Allianz der Ölmultis und der Bush-Cheney-Administration usw.) als auch hierzulande (Steuerskandal in Deutschland, Postenschacher, Bestechungen, BAWAG-Skandal in Österreich). [16]
Tatsächlich wird mit der fortwährenden Existenz des Kapitalismus die Verflechtung von Staatsapparat und Kapital immer enger. Engels wies auf diesen Prozeß hin:
„Damit aber diese Gegensätze, Klassen mit widerstreitenden ökonomischen Interessen nicht sich und die Gesellschaft in fruchtlosem Kampf verzehren, ist eine scheinbar über der Gesellschaft stehende Macht nötig geworden, die den Konflikt dämpfen, innerhalb der Schranken der ‚Ordnung‘ halten soll; und diese, aus der Gesellschaft hervorgegangne, aber sich über sie stellende, sich ihr mehr und mehr entfremdende Macht ist der Staat.“ [17]
Unter Entfremdung verstehen wir hierbei vor allem die Inbesitznahme des Staates durch die jeweilige herrschende Klasse. Ist der Staat aus den jeweiligen gesellschaftlichen Auseinandersetzungen selbst hervorgegangen, entfremdet er sich immer mehr vom gesellschaftlichen Interesse der unterdrückten Klasse und wird vielmehr zu einem direkten und abgehobenen Instrument zu deren Unterdrückung.
Mit diesem Prozeß der zunehmenden Entfremdung des Staatsapparates geht in der Epoche des Imperialismus auch der Ausbau der Repression einher. Dies beweist nicht nur das 20. Jahrhundert mit seiner Unzahl an Kriegen, faschistischer Herrschaft und Holocaust. Dies zeigt sich auch gegenwärtig am Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts mit den Präventivkriegen „gegen den Terror“ – in Wirklichkeit gegen Völker, die sich nicht dem imperialistischen Diktat unterordnen –, dem Ausbau des Überwachungsstaates und den Methoden von Guantanamo und Abu Ghraib sowie der zunehmenden Aufrüstung und Militarisierung.
„Insbesondere aber weist der Imperialismus, weist die Epoche des Bankkapitals, die Epoche der gigantischen kapitalistischen Monopole, die Epoche des Hinüberwachsens des monopolistischen Kapitalismus in den staatsmonopolistischen Kapitalismus, eine ungewöhnliche Stärkung der ‘Staatsmaschinerie’ auf, ein unerhörtes Anwachsen ihres Beamten- und Militärapparates in Verbindung mit verstärkten Repressalien gegen das Proletariat sowohl in den monarchistischen als auch in den freiesten, republikanischen Ländern.“ [18]
Während also die Epoche des aufstrebenden Kapitalismus im 19. Jahrhundert eine Tendenz des Voranschreitens der Demokratie sah, zeichnet sich die Epoche des niedergehenden Kapitalismus durch eine Untergrabung der Demokratie aus. Lenin faßte diese Entwicklung folgendermaßen zusammen.
„Der politische Überbau über der neuen Ökonomik, über dem monopolistischen Kapitalismus (Imperialismus ist monopolistischer Kapitalismus) ist die Wendung von der Demokratie zur politischen Reaktion. Der freien Konkurrenz entspricht die Demokratie. Dem Monopol entspricht die politische Reaktion.“ [19]
Jedoch ist es durchaus auch in der Epoche des Imperialismus möglich, daß gegenläufige Tendenzen zur politischen Reaktion auftreten. Vor allem in der Periode nach dem zweiten Weltkrieg – dem langen Boom 1950-1970 – konnten durch die massive Zerstörung von Kapital durch den Krieg und der daraus resultierenden höheren Profitrate die oberen Schichten der ArbeiterInnenklasse in das System des Kapitalismus integriert werden. Diese Stufe der Klassenkollaboration – die in ihrer höchsten Stufe den Namen Sozialpartnerschaft bekommen hat – ist jedoch eine Ausnahme zur allgemeinen Tendenz der imperialistischen Epoche. Die heutige politische Reaktion hat ihr Gesicht vor allem im sogenannten Krieg gegen den Terror gefunden und hat mit dem verstärkten Kampf gegen die Halbkolonien und dem massiven Angriff auf die ArbeiterInnenklasse durch die neoliberale Konterrevolution die „normale“ Form des imperialistischen Angriffs wieder angenommen.
II.3. Der kapitalistische Staat und seine relative Autonomie von der kapitalistischen Ökonomie
Wir haben also die zentrale, unabdingbare Stellung des Staates in der kapitalistischen Gesellschaft gesehen sowie seinen Charakter als bürokratisch-militärische Maschine der Klassenherrschaft. Nun gilt es, ein weiteres wesentliches Merkmal des bürgerlichen Staatsapparates zu verstehen: nämlich seine aktive, intervenierende Rolle in die kapitalistische Gesamtgesellschaft. Erst durch diese aktive, intervenierende Rolle kann der Staat seine Rolle als ideellen Gesamtkapitalisten spielen. Er muß die kapitalistischen Ausbeutungs- und Unterdrückungsverhältnisse nicht nur aufrechterhalten und verteidigen, sondern auch weiterentwickeln und entsprechend den Bedürfnissen des Kapitals modifizieren.
Wie oben bereits festgestellt vertritt der kapitalistische Staat als Maschine der herrschenden Klasse zuerst und vor allem die Interessen ihrer mächtigsten Fraktion – dem Monopolkapital. Doch dieses Monopolkapital existiert nicht isoliert, sondern kann seine Geschäfte nur im täglichen Warenaustausch mit den anderen Fraktionen des Kapitals tätigen. Hinzu kommen die zeitweise widersprüchlichen Interessen der Zwischenklassen und –schichten, die ja oft wichtige politische Bündnispartner für die Bourgeoisie darstellen. Schließlich und vor allem der Klassengegensatz zwischen Monopolkapital und dem Proletariat und der daraus entspringenden Notwendigkeit, einerseits die Spitzen der Arbeiterbewegung zu integrieren und zu korrumpieren und andererseits auch gewisse Zugeständnisse zu machen, insbesondere an die privilegiertesten Schichten, der Arbeiteraristokratie.
Friedrich Engels wies auf diesen Aspekt des modernen Staates seit seiner Existenz hin:
„Da der Staat entstanden ist aus dem Bedürfnis, Klassengegensätze im Zaum zu halten, da er aber gleichzeitig mitten im Konflikt dieser Klassen entstanden ist, so ist er in der Regel Staat der mächtigsten, ökonomisch herrschenden Klasse, die vermittelst seiner auch politisch herrschende Klasse wird und so neue Mittel erwirbt zur Niederhaltung und Ausbeutung der unterdrückten Klasse. So war der antike Staat vor allem Staat der Sklavenbesitzer zur Niederhaltung der Sklaven, wie der Feudalstaat Organ des Adels zur Niederhaltung der leibeignen und hörigen Bauern und der moderne Repräsentativstaat Werkzeug der Ausbeutung der Lohnarbeit durch das Kapital. Ausnahmsweise indes kommen Perioden vor, wo die kämpfenden Klassen einander so nahe das Gleichgewicht halten, daß die Staatsgewalt als scheinbare Vermittlerin momentan eine gewisse Selbständigkeit gegenüber beiden erhält. So die absolute Monarchie des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts, die Adel und Bürgertum gegeneinander balanciert; so der Bonapartismus des ersten und namentlich des zweiten französischen Kaiserreichs, der das Proletariat gegen die Bourgeoisie und die Bourgeoisie gegen das Proletariat ausspielte. Die neueste Leistung in dieser Art, bei der Herrscher und Beherrschte gleich komisch erscheinen, ist das neue deutsche Reich Bismarckscher Nation: Hier werden Kapitalisten und Arbeiter gegeneinander balanciert und gleichmäßig geprellt zum Besten der verkommnen preußischen Krautjunker. [20]
Der Staat ist also nicht bloß die passive Wiederspiegelung eines ökonomisch erreichten Entwicklungsstandes der Produktivkräfte. Das war er nie und das ist er in der Epoche des Imperialismus noch weniger. Der permanente Zusammenstoß zwischen Produktivkräften und Produktionsverhältnissen, die stetigen Konflikte zwischen den Großmächten, der Konkurrenzdruck am Weltmarkt, der auf den Schulter der Monopolkapitalisten lastet, der Antagonismus, der nicht aufhebbare Grundwiderspruch zwischen der Bourgeoisie und dem Proletariat – all das zwingt die Monopolbourgeoisie dazu, daß ihr imperialistischer Staat eine aktive, eingreifende Rolle einnimmt.
Diese aktive Rolle kann der Staat nur deswegen einnehmen, weil er eine gewisse, relative Autonomie gegenüber der ökonomischen Basis innehat. Natürlich agiert der Staat nicht im luftleeren Raum, sondern kann dies nur auf der Grundlage der gegebenen Produktionsverhältnisse und objektiven Klasseninteressen. Er kann nur solche politische Fragen lösen, die durch die Bedürfnisse der Ökonomie, der Produktivkräfte aufgeworfen werden. Es gibt also eine subjektive Rolle des Staates dort, wo die objektive Notwendigkeit der Ökonomie existiert.
Aber ebenso wäre es plattester ökonomischer Objektivismus, würde man nur von einer einseitigen Determinierung der ökonomischen Basis auf den politischen Überbau ausgehen und die Wirkung des Überbaus auf die Basis leugnen. In der Tat findet hier – wie Engels immer wieder betonte – eine Wechselwirkung statt, wie wohl in letzter Instanz die Ökonomie ausschlaggebend ist.
„Die politische, rechtliche, philosophische, religiöse, literarische, künstlerische etc. Entwicklung beruht auf der ökonomischen. Aber sie alle reagieren auch auf einander und auf die ökonomische Basis. Es ist nicht, daß die ökonomische Lage Ursache, allein aktiv ist und alles andere nur passive Wirkung. Sondern es ist Wechselwirkung auf Grundlage der in letzter Instanz stets sich durchsetzenden ökonomischen Notwendigkeit. (…) Es ist also nicht, wie man sich hier und da bequemerweise vorstellen will, eine automatische Wirkung der ökonomischen Lage, sondern die Menschen machen ihre Geschichte selbst, aber in einem gegebenen, sie bedingenden Milieu (...).“ [21]
Diese dialektische Auffassung des Staates ist entscheidend für das Verständnis der Rolle, die der bürgerliche Staat spielen kann, um der „ökonomischen Notwendigkeit“ tatsächlich zur Durchsetzung zu verhelfen.
Natürlich ist mit der Idee der relativen Autonomie des Staates von Seiten reformistischer Theoretiker (von Kautsky über Otto Bauer bis Poulantzas und Althusser) viel Schindluder betrieben worden. Und zwar in der Hinsicht, daß der grundsätzliche reaktionäre Klassencharakter des bürgerlichen Staates zumindest vorübergehend, zeitweise, aufgehoben werden könnte. Das ist reaktionärer Unsinn.
Aber wir haben in der modernen Geschichte schon oftmals gesehen, daß der Staat unter dem mannigfaltigen Druck der Antagonismen zwischen den verschiedenen Klassen bzw. Klassenfraktionen auf unterschiedliche Weise die Rolle des ideellen Gesamtkapitalisten einnimmt. Diese Rolle als scheinbar über den Klassen stehendender Staat verkörpert natürlich nicht den Durchschnitt des Willens aller Fraktionen des Kapitals. Dies ist eigentlich nie der Fall, weil sich in der Regel die mächtigsten Fraktionen des Kapitals durchsetzen bzw. auf der Grundlage ihrer Interessen ein Kompromiß mit anderen Klassen und Schichten formuliert wird.
Der Staat ist ideeller Gesamtkapitalist im Sinne des vorausschauenden Akteurs im Interesse der objektiven ökonomischen Notwendigkeiten des Kapitals und hier v.a. des Monopolkapitals. Das heißt der Staat ist aktiver Vorantreiber bestimmter ökonomischer Notwendigkeiten des Kapitals ohne zuerst darauf zu warten, daß sich diese Notwendigkeiten bereits spontan innerhalb des kapitalistischen Produktions- und Reproduktionsprozeß vollziehen oder das sie von den einzelnen Kapitalisten bereits als solche subjektiv wahrgenommen werden.
Dafür lassen sich zahlreiche Beispiele anführen. Im späten 19. Jahrhundert zum Beispiel erzwang der Staat in Westeuropa das Verbot von Kinderarbeit. Er sicherte damit dem Kapital bei Verletzung seiner kurzfristigen Profitinteressen die langfristige Erhaltung des Nachschubs an ausbeutbaren Arbeitskräften. Oder nehmen wir die politischen Schritte des preußischen Kanzlers Otto von Bismarck, der sowohl bestimmte Sozialreformen als auch entscheidende Schritte zur Vereinigung Deutschlands unter preußischer Vorherrschaft setzte. Aber auch im 20. Jahrhundert finden wir zahlreiche Beispiele für die aktive Rolle des Staates sowohl auf politischer Ebene als auch bei der Vorantreibung ökonomischer Entwicklungen. So z.B. die Versuche der Importsubstituierenden Industrialisierung in einigen halbkolonialen Staaten (Peron in Argentinien, Nasser in Ägypten, Nehru in Indien usw.), die wirtschaftliche Modernisierung unter dem Faschismus oder auch z.B. unter einem Kreisky im Österreich der 1970er Jahre.
Schließen wir also dieses Kapitel mit einer Zusammenfassung unserer Schlußfolgerungen ab:
i. Der Staat ist immer der Staat der herrschenden Klasse. Der Staat im Kapitalismus ist also immer der Staat der Kapitalisten.
ii. Der kapitalistische Staat ist eine „bürokratisch-militärische Maschine“, eine Organisation zur Unterdrückung der Arbeiterklasse, die nach dem Kommandoprinzip von oben nach unten aufgebaut ist.
iii. Diesen Charakter trägt der kapitalistische Staat immer – unabhängig davon, ober er die Form einer offenen politischen Diktatur oder die der parlamentarischen Demokratie annimmt, wenngleich in diesen unterschiedlichen Formen der bürgerlichen Herrschaft verschiedene Bereiche der staatlichen Herrschaft stärker als andere ausgeprägt sind.
iv. Der Staat ist jedoch keine passive Wiederspiegelung der ökonomischen Produktionsverhältnisse, sondern beeinflußt auch die die Entwicklung der ökonomischen Basis und besitzt eine gewisse, relative, Autonomie.
v. Der kapitalistische Staat ist der ideelle Gesamtkapitalist und als solcher kann er auch unter bestimmten Bedingungen eine aktive, den ökonomischen Notwendigkeiten zur Durchsetzung verhelfende Rolle spielen und Entwicklungen hervorbringen, die das Kapital „spontan“, auf wirtschaftlicher Ebene, nicht hätte erreichen können.
III. Schwierigkeiten und Notwendigkeiten für das Monopolkapitals bei der Formierung eines supranationalen EU-Staatsapparates
Damit kommen wir auch wieder zur Frage der Herausbildung eines supranationalen Staatsapparates. Beginnen wir mit einer kurzen Darlegung des Hintergrundes vor dem sich diese Frage stellt.
Der historische Hintergrund, vor dem sich die Europäische Union formiert, sind die krisenhaften Entwicklungstendenzen der kapitalistischen Weltwirtschaft. Vor dem Hintergrund einer strukturellen Überakkumulationskrise und dem tendenziellen Fall der Profitrate – vereinfacht gesagt gibt es immer weniger profitable Anlagemöglichkeiten für eine immer größere Menge angehäuften Kapitals – versucht das Monopolkapital seine Profite mittels verschärfter Attacken auf die Arbeiterklasse, der Schaffung neuer Anlagemöglichkeiten durch Privatisierung öffentlichen Eigentums sowie mittels Intensivierung der Ausbeutung der halbkolonialen Welt zu steigern.
Daher kommt es zu einer Verlangsamung der Kapitalakkumulation, d.h. die Unternehmer investieren weniger als zuvor. (siehe dazu Graphik 1 und Tabelle 1, die den Anteil der Investitionen im Verhältnis zum jährlichen Output darstellen)
Graphik 1: Globale Spar- und Investitionsquote als Anteil am Brutto-Inlandsprodukt, 1970-2004 [22]
Tabelle 1: Kapitalakkumulation in der Welt, 1970-2004 [23]
Investitionen als Anteil am Bruttoinlandsprodukt, weltweit und in den imperialistischen Staaten
|
1970-1980 |
1981-1990 |
1991-2000 |
2001 |
2002 |
2003 |
2004 |
Welt |
24.0% |
22.8% |
22.3% |
21.4% |
20.7% |
20.9% |
21.5% |
Imperialistische Staaten |
24.3% |
22.6% |
21.6% |
20.7% |
19.7% |
19.8% |
20.3% |
Ein Blick auf die langfristige Entwicklung der Netto-Profitraten in den imperialistischen Kernländern seit dem Beginn des Nachkriegs-Booms Ende der 1940er Jahre zeigt, warum die Bereitschaft der Unternehmer zu investieren sinkt: Es findet ein langfristiger Fall der Profitrate statt, d.h. der Anteil des Profits im Verhältnis zum gesamten eingesetzten Kapital (Löhne, Maschinen, Rohstoffe etc.) sinkt. (siehe Tabelle 2)
Tabelle 2: Netto-Profitraten im nicht-finanziellen Unternehmenssektor in den USA, Japan und Deutschland, 1948-2000 [24]
|
USA |
Japan |
Deutschland |
1948–1959 |
14.3% |
17.3% |
23.4% |
1959–1969 |
15% |
25.4% |
17.5% |
1969–1979 |
10.3% |
20.5% |
12.8% |
1979–1990 |
9.0% |
16.7% |
11.8% |
1990–2000 |
10.1% |
10.8% |
10.4% |
Daher die immer intensiveren Bemühungen des Kapitals, die Ausbeutung der Arbeiterklasse zu verschärfen und die Löhne zu drücken, mit dem Resultat, daß die Reallöhne in den imperialistischen Staaten stagnieren oder gar sinken. So schätzt der US-amerikanische Ökonom Doug Henwood, daß der Reallohn des durchschnittlichen Arbeiters in den USA zwischen 1973 und 1996 um 14.1% fiel! [25]
Aus dem gleichen Grund findet auch eine gesteigerte Ausbeutung der halbkolonialen Welt statt. So fand z.B. alleine in den Jahren 1995-2006 einen Netto-Abfluß von 2.877,7 Milliarden US-Dollar statt, die von den halb-kolonialen Ländern in Richtung imperialistische Zentren flossen! [26]
Die Verschärfung der dem Kapitalismus innewohnenden Widersprüche heizt gleichzeitig auch den Konkurrenzkampf zwischen den Großmächten an – vor allem zwischen den beiden mächtigsten Blöcken, den USA und der EU. Vor diesem Hintergrund kommt es einerseits zu einem stellenweisen, gemeinsamen Vorgehen der Großmächte, wenn es z.B. darum geht, halbkoloniale Länder zur Öffnung ihrer Wirtschaft für die Großkonzerne zu öffnen. Andererseits aber kommt es auch immer wieder zu politischen und wirtschaftlichen Konflikte zwischen den beiden Blöcken, wenn ihre Interessen aufeinanderprallen.
III.1. Überblick über die wirtschaftliche Position der EU im Verhältnis zur USA
Die für die europäische Monopolbourgeoisie bestehende Dringlichkeit der Schaffung eines supranationalen Staatsapparates wird ersichtlich, wenn man einen Blick auf die wirtschaftliche, politische und militärische Stellung der EU in der Welt wirft.
In unserem Artikel „Amerikanisierung oder Niedergang. Widersprüche und Herausforderungen für das imperialistische Projekt der europäischen Vereinigung“ haben wir uns eingehender mit den spezifischen Stärken und Schwächen des EU-Kapitals auseinandergesetzt. Wir wollen an dieser Stelle nur die wichtigsten Ergebnisse zusammenfassen, die für das hier behandelte Thema relevant sind.
1. Insgesamt konnte sich das europäische Kapital in den letzten Jahrzehnten gegenüber seinen Konkurrenten stärken.
2. Trotzdem sind die USA nach wie vor die weltweit führende Macht – auf wirtschaftlicher Ebene und noch mehr auf politischer und militärischer Ebene.
3. Die EU ist die einzige Macht weltweit, die den USA auf absehbare Zeit die globale Vorherrschaft streitig machen kann.
4. Um tatsächlich den Anspruch als globale Führungsmacht durchzusetzen, muß die EU erstens die Ausbeutung der heimischen Arbeiterklasse erhöhen und zweitens zu einer einheitlichen, schlagkräftigen Macht werden, die ihre Interessen weltweit durchsetzen kann.
5. Um dies jedoch zu erreichen, muß die EU einen qualitativen Schritt vorwärts machen und einen supranationalen Staatsapparat aufbauen.
Betrachten wir die wirtschaftliche Position der EU insbesondere zu ihren Konkurrenten. Aus der Tabelle 3 können wir ersehen, daß die EU ihre Position im Welthandel ausbauen und insbesondere bei den Warenexporten ihre Stellung gegenüber den USA verbessern konnte.
Tabelle 3: Anteile der Staaten und Regionen am Welthandel 1948-2003 [27]
Anteil an den Exporten weltweit |
|||||||
|
1948 |
1953 |
1963 |
1973 |
1983 |
1993 |
2005 |
USA |
21.7% |
18.8% |
14.9% |
12.3% |
11.2% |
12.6% |
8.9% |
EU |
6.8% |
11.9% |
27.5% |
38.6% |
30.4% |
36.1% |
39.4% |
Japan |
0.4% |
1.5% |
3.5% |
6.4% |
8.0% |
9.9% |
5.9% |
China |
0.9% |
1.2% |
1.3% |
1.0% |
1.2% |
2.5% |
7.5% |
Indien |
2.2% |
1.3% |
1.0% |
0.5% |
0.5% |
0.6% |
0.9% |
Südamerika |
12.3% |
10.5% |
7.0% |
4.7% |
4.4% |
3.0% |
3.5% |
Naher Osten |
2.0% |
2.7% |
3.2% |
4.1% |
6.8% |
3.5% |
5.3% |
Afrika |
7.3% |
6.5% |
5.7% |
4.8% |
4.5% |
2.5% |
2.9% |
Anteil an den Importen weltweit |
|||||||
|
1948 |
1953 |
1963 |
1973 |
1983 |
1993 |
2005 |
USA |
13.0% |
13.9% |
11.4% |
12.3% |
14.3% |
16.0% |
16.5% |
EU |
9.6% |
12.4% |
29.0% |
39.2% |
31.3% |
34.3% |
39.3% |
Japan |
1.1% |
1.7% |
0.9% |
0.9% |
6.7% |
6.4% |
4.9% |
China |
1.0% |
2.9% |
4.1% |
6.5% |
1.1% |
2.8% |
6.3% |
Indien |
3.1% |
1.4% |
1.5% |
0.5% |
0.7% |
0.6% |
1.3% |
Südamerika |
10.6% |
9.3% |
6.8% |
5.1% |
3.8% |
3.3% |
2.8% |
Naher Osten |
1.7% |
2.0% |
2.3% |
2.8% |
6.2% |
3.4% |
3.1% |
Afrika |
7.6% |
7.0% |
5.5% |
4.0% |
4.6% |
2.6% |
2.4% |
In der nächsten Tabelle zeigen wir die Entwicklungen im Bereich des Kapitalexportes. Im Zeitalter des Imperialismus – wo das Kapital außerhalb seines Heimatmarktes immer verzweifelter nach neuen profitablen Anlagemöglichkeiten suchen muß – gewinnt der Kapitalexport an entscheidender Bedeutung und ist ein wichtiger Gradmesser der Stärke der jeweiligen Monopolkapitalgruppen, da es die Ausweitung der finanzielle Herrschaft über andere Länder bzw. Regionen darstellt. In der Tabelle 4 sehen wir die Entwicklung der im Ausland getätigten Direktinvestitionen, das sind v.a. jene Investitionen, die nicht in Form von Krediten oder Finanzmarktspekulationen getätigt werden, sondern in den Unternehmensbereich fließen (dies umfaßt sowohl Investitionen als auch die Kosten für Fusionen und Firmenübernahmen). Auch hier können wir feststellen, daß die EU eine weltweit starke Position besitzt und z.T. ihre Position gegenüber den USA ausbauen konnte.
Tabelle 4: Verteilung der weltweiten ausländischen Direktinvestitionen nach Staaten und Regionen [28]
Verteilung der weltweiten ausländischen Direktinvestitionen, Bestände |
||||||||
|
Bestände Inland |
Bestände Ausland |
||||||
|
1980 |
1990 |
2000 |
2005 |
1980 |
1990 |
2000 |
2005 |
USA |
14.8% |
22.1% |
21.7% |
16.0% |
37.7% |
24.0% |
20.3% |
19.2% |
Europäische Union |
42.5% |
42.9% |
37.6% |
44.4% |
37.2% |
45.2% |
47.1% |
51.3% |
Japan |
0.6% |
0.6% |
0.9% |
1.0% |
3.4% |
11.2% |
4.3% |
3.6% |
Süd-, Ost- und Südostasien |
8.8% |
8.5% |
17.2% |
13.8% |
2.5% |
3.4% |
9.3% |
7.8% |
Verteilung der weltweiten ausländischen Direktinvestitionen, Ströme |
||||||||
|
Jährliche Ströme Inland |
Jährliche Ströme Ausland |
||||||
|
1980 |
1990 |
2000 |
2005 |
1980 |
1990 |
2000 |
2005 |
USA |
23.8% |
31.5% |
24.0% |
12.6% |
39.7% |
13.6% |
15.9% |
15.7% |
Europäische Union |
39.1% |
40.3% |
46.0% |
40.7% |
44.8% |
50.6% |
64.4% |
54.6% |
Japan |
0.4% |
0.04% |
0.8% |
0.8% |
4.9% |
19.7% |
2.6% |
4.9% |
Süd-, Ost- und Südostasien |
6.7% |
10.0% |
10.7% |
18.4% |
0.6% |
5.1% |
5.0% |
7.7% |
Vergleichen wir nun die Stärke des europäischen Monopolkapitals im Vergleich mit den anderen größten Konzernen weltweit. Aus der Tabelle 5 aus dem Jahre 2003 können wir erkennen, daß die US-Konzerne nach wie vor eine dominierende Stellung ausüben. Mit 488 der Top 1000 Konzerne hat fast die Hälfte der größten Multis ihr Hauptquartier in den USA. Ebenso vereinigen sie 42% der Gesamtumsatzes dieser Creme de la Creme der Großbourgeoisie. Nimmt man die einzelnen Nationalstaaten her, so liegt Japan mit 129 Konzernen und einem Gesamtumsatzanteil von 15,8% an zweiter Stelle, während danach Britannien (77 Konzerne bzw. 8,7%), Frankreich (48 Konzerne bzw. 8,7%) sowie Deutschland (38 Konzerne bzw. 8,4%) kommen. Rechnet man jedoch die in der EU beheimateten Konzerne zusammen, so stellen diese mit 278 Konzernen und 36,5% des Gesamtumsatzes durchaus eine Herausforderung für den US-amerikanischen Konkurrenten dar.
Diese Schlußfolgerung wird durch eine andere Untersuchung jüngeren Datums bestätigt. In ihrem aktuellen „World Investment Report“ veröffentlicht die UNCTAD eine Liste der 100 multinationalen nicht-finanziellen Konzerne mit den größten Auslandsinvestitionen. [29] Danach haben von diesen Konzernen 23 ihren Stammsitz in den USA, 9 in Japan, aber bereits jeweils 13 in Deutschland, Frankreich und Britannien. Insgesamt stellt die EU 51 dieser größten 100 Multis. Aus einer anderen Statistik des UNCTAD-Berichts, die jene 50 multinationalen Finanzkonzerne mit der größten geographischen Ausdehnung erfaßt, geht hervor, daß von diesen sogar 30 ihren Ursprung in der EU haben (und 9 in den USA sowie 3 in Japan). [30]
Tabelle 5: Nationale Zusammensetzung der Top 1000 Konzerne (2003) [31]
Nationale Herkunft Anzahl der Umsatz (Anteil am Gesamtumsatz)
der Konzerne Konzerne
Gesamtumsatz der Top 1000: 13.258.090 Mil. US-Dollar
Europäische Union 278 4.840.972 (=36,5%)
Belgien 9 69.291
Britannien 77 1.153.790 (=8,7%)
Dänemark 6 37.708
Deutschland 38 1.112.393 (=8,4%)
Finnland 5 76.490
Frankreich 48 1.147.998 (=8,7%)
Griechenland 7 16.341
Irland 4 13.104
Italien 24 345.680
Niederlande 19 556.248
Österreich 2 3.667
Portugal 4 14.071
Schweden 17 120.551
Spanien 18 173.640
Norwegen 5 74225
Schweiz 17 250661
USA 488 5570810 (=42%)
Kanada 41 226041
Japan 129 2098160 (=15,8%)
Hong Kong 18
Singapure 6
Australien 27 139402
Neuseeland 1
III.2. Überblick über die wirtschaftliche Integration der EU
Aber diese Vergleichszahlen der EU mit den USA besitzen insofern nur relative Aussagekraft, da die EU eben kein einheitliches Gebilde ist. Schauen wir uns also den Grad der wirtschaftlichen Integration der EU an. Dies hilft uns ein Bild davon zu bekommen, wie weit der Prozeß der wechselseitigen Abhängigkeit und Interessensidentität der nationalen Kapitalien der zahlreichen Mitgliedsstaaten der EU vorangeschritten ist.
Beginnen wir wieder mit dem Warenhandel der EU-15 Staaten. Während sich die Handelstätigkeit in den letzten Jahrzehnten insgesamt intensivierte, stiegen die Exporte von EU-Staaten an andere EU-Staaten rascher als an Staaten außerhalb der EU bzw. blieben dann auf einem hohen Niveau. Insgesamt kann man sagen, daß die EU-Staaten doppelt soviel innerhalb wie außerhalb der EU exportieren. So wuchs der Anteil der innerhalb der EU gehandelten Exporte am jährlichen Brutto-Inlandsprodukt von 9.8% (1970), 13.1% (1980), 14.4% (1990), 19.4% (2000) auf 21.0% (2007). Der Anteil der außerhalb der EU gehandelten Exporte am jährlichen Brutto-Inlandsprodukt stieg von 6.7% (1970), 8.4% (1980), 7.1% (1990), 9.4% (2000) auf 10.5% (2007). [32]
Ein ähnliches Bild sehen wir in der Graphik 2 bei der Entwicklung der Industrieexporte.
Graphik 2: Entwicklung der EU-Industrieexporte innerhalb und außerhalb der EU 1995-2005 (als Anteil am BIP) [33]
Nichtsdestotrotz ist die wirtschaftliche Integration noch immer deutlich niedriger als z.B. innerhalb der USA. So weist eine EU-Studie darauf hin, daß die Industrieexporte (gemessen am Anteil am BIP) zwischen den einzelnen US-Bundesstaaten um ein Drittel über dem Niveau liegen, das zwischen den Staaten der Euro-Zone existiert. [34]
Ebenso ist der Kapitalexport innerhalb der EU intensiver geworden, immer mehr Investitionen von EU-Konzernen gehen in andere EU-Staaten. So z.B. stammten 1995 50% aller ausgehenden und 53% aller eingehenden Auslandsdirektinvestitionen in den EU15-Staaten aus anderen EU15-Staaten. Zehn Jahre später ist dieser Anteil bereits auf 66% bzw. 78% angewachsen. Für die EU25-Staaten beträgt der Anteil 70% bzw. 82%. [35]
Nichtsdestotrotz besteht das zentrale Problem, daß das Kapital in Europa nach wie vor nationales und nicht pan-europäisches Kapital ist. Das heißt, Kapital in Europa ist noch immer deutscher, französischer, britischer usw. Herkunft und nicht europäisch. Es gibt fast keine Konzerne, die einen nicht-nationalen Charakter besitzen. (eine Ausnahme ist hier EADS).
III.3. Welche Probleme muß das europäische Monopolkapital überwinden?
Die nationale Zerklüftung der europäischen Monopole widerspiegelt die unvollständige Vereinigung der Europäischen Union. Dies hängt nicht nur mit historischen Gründen zusammen, die mit der Geschichte der jeweiligen Nationalstaaten verbunden sind. Ebenso hängt dies mit den z.T. unterschiedlichen Interessen der nationalen Bourgeoisien zusammen. Während das deutsche Kapital z.B. eine starke Orientierung auf Osteuropa hat, ist das französische Kapital mehr auf Afrika orientiert. Das britische Kapital wiederum hat aufgrund seiner starken Position im Finanz- sowie im Erdölsektor und den damit verbundenen globalen Interessen einerseits und seiner schwachen Position im Industriesektor andererseits nicht die gleichen Schwerpunkte wie die deutsch-französische Achse.
Damit soll nicht angedeutet werden, daß diese Interessenskonflikte unüberwindlich sind. Aber sie bedeuten ein permanentes Kompromisse suchen und eine Schwächung der Handlungsfähigkeit als einheitlicher Block. Dies wurde in den vergangenen Jahren besonders deutlich, als Britannien den USA in ihrem Krieg gegen den Terror bedingungslos folgte und Deutschland und Frankreich einen anderen Kurs anstrebten. Ähnlich unterschiedlich ist die Haltung z.B. zu den EU-Agrarsubventionen oder der Frage eines supranationalen EU-Staates selbst (wo Britannien eine sehr ablehnende Haltung einnimmt).
Gerade die Fragen des einheitlichen Auftretens der EU in der Weltpolitik und der militärischen Interventionen rund um den Globus zeigten in den letzten Jahren die Schwächen der EU in der Formierung als Block. Während die USA die Hälfte aller weltweiten Rüstungsausgaben bestreiten, die mit Abstand größte Atommacht ist und weltweit über 700 Militärstützpunkte verfügen, liegen die EU-Großmächte weit abgeschlagen dahinter.
Um all dies zu ändern, ist eine deutliche Erhöhung der Ausgaben für Rüstung und für die Aufstellung einer EU-Armee nötig, ist der Aufbau einer einheitlichen EU-Staatsführung notwendig und schließlich ebenso die Erhöhung der Konkurrenzfähigkeit der europäischen Konzerne am Weltmarkt.
In unserem Artikel im Revolutionären Marxismus Nr. 35 haben wir betont, daß ein entscheidender Vorteil des US-amerikanischen gegenüber dem europäischen Monopolkapital in der weit höheren Ausbeutungsrate besteht. Zusammengefaßt arbeitet der durchschnittliche US-amerikanische Arbeiter mehr Stunden im Jahr für den Kapitalisten und bekommt dafür weniger Lohn. Während die europäischen Arbeiter noch ein gewisses staatliches Sozial- und Gesundheitsnetz erhalten haben und nach wie vor über einen nicht unbeträchtlichen gewerkschaftlichen Organisationsgrad verfügen, sieht dies in den USA ganz anders aus. [36]
Kurz und gut, eine massive Erhöhung der Ausbeutung der Arbeiterklasse ist eine entscheidende Voraussetzung für die Stärkung der europäischen Konzerne gegenüber ihrer Konkurrenz als auch die Schaffung der finanziellen Ressourcen für die notwendige Aufrüstung und Staatsformierung.
Doch sie ist nur eine Vorbedingung und nicht an und für sich ausreichend. Denn um im Konkurrenzkampf gegen die USA bestehen zu können, muß die Europäische Union – die ja an sich ein Zusammenschluß von mittlerweile 27 verschiedenen Nationalstaaten ist – ihren Vereinheitlichung als Block vorantreiben. Daher haben wir betont, daß „die Formierung der Europäischen Union nicht nur als ein wirtschaftlicher Binnenmarkt, sondern auch als ein politischer und militärischer Machtblock die Antwort der herrschenden Klassen Europas – allen voran ihrer Kernstaaten Deutschland und Frankreichs – auf die verschärfte Konkurrenz und die Notwendigkeit, ihre Interessen in einer instabiler werdenden Welt mit allen zu Gebote stehenden Mitteln durchzusetzen (ist).“ [37]
IV. Der supranationale EU-Staatsapparat. Der Nationalstaat und seine Grenzen im Zeitalter der Globalisierung
Die Formierung eines solchen politischen, wirtschaftlichen und militärischen Machtblocks erfordert notwendigerweise die Bildung eines EU-Staatsapparates, der über den Staatsapparaten der einzelnen kapitalistischen Nationalstaaten steht. Nur ein solcher supranationaler Staatsapparat mit seinen entsprechenden zentralstaatlichen Machtstrukturen bzw. –befugnissen kann das nötige Interventionsinstrument bieten, welches die widerstreitenden Interessen zwischen den herrschenden Klassen der Mitgliedsstaaten überwinden und ihre gemeinsamen Interessen gegen die Arbeiterklasse durchpeitschen kann. Nur ein solcher supranationaler Staatsapparat kann zur Formierung eines nationalstaats-übergreifenden, europäischen imperialistischen Klasseninteresses beitragen. Letztlich ist die Herausbildung eines solchen supranationalen Staatsapparates auch entscheidend dafür, ob eine nationalstaats-übergreifende, europäische imperialistische Bourgeoisie als mehr oder weniger geeinte Klasse entsteht.
Mehr noch: um einen EU-Staat aufzubauen, bedarf es nicht nur einer europäischen Bourgeoisie. Die Bourgeoisie regiert in der Regel nie alleine – dazu ist die Klasse numerisch zu klein –, sondern in Form eines herrschenden Blocks, also einer Allianz mit anderen Klassen(-fraktionen) und Schichten. Daher auch das Bemühen, eine EU-orientierte Mittelschicht zu formieren (z.B. über Förderung von Auslandsstudien, Sprachenförderung in der Ausbildung, Förderung von Auslandsjobs in der EU und gleiche Rechte für alle EU-Bürger in allen EU-Staaten), ein europäisches „National“bewußtsein zu schaffen (daher die EU-Verfassung, Flagge, Hymne usw.), daher auch die Propagierung europäischer Werte und Traditionen usw.
Nun ist die mangelnde staatliche Vereinigung Europas Ausdruck der mangelnden Existenz eines pan-europäischen Kapitals. Daraus könnte man den Umkehrschluß ziehen, daß es zu keinem supranationalen Staatsapparat kommen könne, solange sich nicht zuerst auf ökonomischer Ebene ein pan-europäisches Monopolkapital herausgebildet hat. Doch warum kann es nicht auch umgekehrt sein?! Und ist die Frage nicht viel mehr, daß es – wenn überhaupt – eigentlich nur umgekehrt sein kann?!
Damit kommen wir wieder auf das oben angeführte Verständnis des Marxismus von der aktiven Rolle des Staates im Kapitalismus. Wir haben festgehalten, daß der Staat ideeller Gesamtkapitalist auch in der Hinsicht ist, daß er als vorausschauender Akteur im Interesse der objektiven ökonomischen Notwendigkeiten des Kapitals und hier v.a. des Monopolkapitals agiert. Das heißt der Staat setzt bestimmte politische und ökonomische Schritte im Interesse des Kapitals ohne zuerst darauf zu warten, daß sich diese Schritte bereits spontan innerhalb des kapitalistischen Produktions- und Reproduktionsprozesses vollziehen.
Wir haben oben bereits verschiedene Beispiele für eine solche intervenierende Rolle des Staates angeführt. Diese Rolle spielte der kapitalistische Staat nicht nur in Bezug auf ökonomische und soziale Reformen, sondern auch in Bezug auf die Herausbildung von Nationalstaaten. Es wäre eine Illusion zu glauben, daß sich im 19. Jahrhundert zuerst ein gesamtdeutsches Kapital formiert hätte – also ohne jegliche besondere Bindung an Preußen oder andere Einzelstaaten – bevor der preußische Kanzler Otto von Bismarck in den 1860er Jahren die entscheidenden Schritte zur Herausbildung eines deutschen Reiches setzte.
Der EU-Reformvertrag – als Wiederaufwärmung der 2005 gescheiterten EU-Verfassung – verkörpert gerade einen solchen Versuch der europäischen Monopolbourgeoisie, einen entscheidenden Schritt in Richtung Herausbildung eines imperialistischen Vereinigten Europas zu setzen.
IV.1. Globalisierung und Nationalstaat
Nun leben wir heute in einer anderen Epoche als zur Zeit Bismarcks. Die Epoche des 19. Jahrhunderts war jene des aufstrebenden Kapitalismus. Seit Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts befindet sich der Kapitalismus in seiner Epoche des Niedergangs. Der Kapitalismus hat sein Potential, zum Fortschritt der Produktionsmittel zum Wohle der Menschheit beizutragen, erschöpft und gefährdet vielmehr zusehends die menschliche Lebensgrundlage.
Doch das bedeutet keineswegs, daß der Kapitalismus in seinem imperialistischen Stadium einfach nur ein lebloser Körper ist, der bloß vor sich hinvegetiert. In Wirklichkeit bleibt der Imperialismus keineswegs unverändert und erstarrt stehen, sondern entwickelt sich notwendigerweise weiter. Für Marxisten, d.h. für Anhänger der materialistisch-dialektischen Entwicklungslehre, ist dies eine alles anderes als überraschende Erkenntnis. Betonte doch Friedrich Engels, daß „die Bewegung die Daseinsweise der Materie (ist). (…) Materie ohne Bewegung ist ebenso undenkbar wie Bewegung ohne Materie. Die Bewegung ist daher ebenso unerschaffbar und unzerstörbar wie die Materie selbst." [38]
Faßt man im Sinne der marxistischen Philosophie die Wirklichkeit als eine unendliche Vielfalt an Einheiten von Gegensätzen auf, in der die Einheit der Gegensätze vergänglich ist, der Kampf der einander ausschließenden Gegensätze jedoch absolut, so liegt es auf der Hand, daß sich die Entwicklung gerade aus dem Kampf der Gegensätze ergibt. [39]
Im Zeitalter des Imperialismus sehen wir daher eine Vorantreibung der grundlegenden Widersprüche des Kapitalismus, also der wachsenden Kluft und dem Antagonismus zwischen den Produktivkräften einerseits und den gegebenen Produktionsverhältnissen (Privateigentum an Produktionsmittel, Nationalstaat) andererseits. Sowohl die Dynamik als auch die Fragilität des kapitalistischen Produktions- und Reproduktionsprozeß haben in der imperialistischen Epoche im Allgemeinen und der gegenwärtigen Periode der Globalisierung im Besonderen an Schärfe gewonnen. So sehen wir Verschärfung der Gegensätze zwischen den verschiedenen Sektoren des kapitalistischen Weltmarktes. Daher erleben wir auf wirtschaftlicher Ebene einen stetigen Konzentrations- und Zentralisationsprozeß des Kapitals, also der Herausbildung großer Monopole.
Ebenso bedeutet dies, daß sich die Gegensätze zwischen den Tendenzen der imperialistischen Ökonomie, der imperialistischen Politik und der imperialistischen Ideologie(n) verstärken und schärfer, explosiver werden. Die Wirtschaft wird immer internationaler vernetzt und daher verstärkt sich die objektive Notwendigkeit eines Weltstaates, der als Überbau den relativ reibungslosen Ablauf des Geschäftsganges gewährleistet. Doch ein solcher Weltstaat kann nicht entstehen, denn es existieren bereits eine Reihe von Großmächten, von denen jede um Ausweitung ihres Einflusses ringt. Die gleiche Rivalität existiert zwischen den großen Monopolkapitalgruppen. Die einerseits existierende Tendenz zur weltweiten Vereinheitlichung des Kapitals und des Staates bringt also andererseits gleichzeitig auch eine verschärfte Rivalität und somit gegenläufige Tendenzen zur Internationalisierung hervor. Ähnliches auf ideologischer Ebene: Einerseits erfordert die Internationalisierung des Kapitalismus eine weitgehende Öffnung der Grenzen, der Mobilität der Arbeitskräfte, die Umwandlung der Kultur in Richtung Weltkultur. Gleichzeitig jedoch provozieren die verschärften Rivalitäten zwischen den Nationalstaaten und den nationalen Kapitalgruppen den Chauvinismus.
Ebenso gehört der Widerspruch zwischen den Produktivkräften und den Nationalstaaten zu einem der grundlegendsten im Kapitalismus – und in der Epoche des Monopolkapitalismus (Imperialismus) gilt das in einem noch größeren Ausmaße. Trotzki schrieb dazu:
„Als klassische Arena schuf sich der Kapitalismus im Kampf mit dem mittelalterlichen Partikularismus den Nationalstaat. Doch kaum richtig zusammengefügt; begann er sich schon in eine Bremse für die wirtschaftliche und kulturelle Entwicklung zu verwandeln. Aus dem Widerspruch zwischen den Produktivkräften und dem Rahmen des Nationalstaats, in Verbindung mit dem Grundwiderspruch – zwischen den Produktivkräften und dem Privateigentum an den Produktionsmitteln –, erwuchs eben die Krise des Kapitalismus als der Weltgesellschaftsordnung.“ [40]
Daher strebt der Kapitalismus stetig zur Herausbildung immer größerer, immer umfassenderer Monopole. Und ebenso strebt der Kapitalismus daher stetig zur Überwindung der nationalstaatlichen Grenzen, die wie Fesseln an den Produktivkräften liegen, ohne die Nationalstaaten wirklich überwinden zu können. Gleichzeitig brauchen die einzelnen Monopolkapitalgruppen in einer Epoche der verschärften Konkurrenz immer dringender die Unterstützung existierender staatlicher Strukturen und somit der bestehenden Nationalstaaten gegen den jeweiligen Gegner.
Die beiden folgenden Tabellen zeigen am Beispiel des Kapitalexports (konkret die Auslandsdirektinvestitionen im Verhältnis zu allen Investitionen bzw. im Verhältnis zum jährlichen Output), in welchen Ausmaß die Globalisierung bereits vorangeschritten ist, wie zentral bereits die Auslandsmärkte für das imperialistische Kapital geworden sind. Tabelle 6 zeigt darüberhinaus, daß insbesondere für das europäische Kapital die nationalstaatlichen Grenzen zu eng geworden sind.
Tabelle 6: Globalisierung und Kapitalexport der imperialistischen Staaten [41]
|
Anteil der jährlichen ADI-Ströme an den Brutto-Anlageinvestitionen |
ADI-Bestände im Verhältnis zum BIP |
|||||||
|
|
1981-1985 |
1993 |
1998 |
2006 |
1980 |
1990 |
2000 |
2006 |
Welt
|
im Inland |
2.3% |
4.3% |
11.1% |
9.4% |
4.9% |
8.5% |
18.3% |
22.7% |
im Ausland |
2.1% |
4.4% |
11.5% |
8.3% |
5.4% |
8.6% |
20.6% |
23.9% |
|
Imperialistische Staaten |
im Inland |
2.2% |
3.5% |
10.9% |
11.4% |
4.7% |
8.2% |
16.4% |
24.2% |
im Ausland |
2.7% |
5.2% |