00060

THE

INVADINGSOCIALISTSOCIETY

FlORlDA ATLANTIC UNIVERSITY LIBRARY,SOCIAliST· lA8DR

'-fit:tHtH)H

BY

J. R. JOHNSON, F. FORESTand RIA STONE

-~-

PUBLISHED BY THE JOHNSON-FOREST TENDENCYSEPTEMBER, 1947 PRICE: FIFTY CENTS

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CONTENTSPage,

CHAPTER 1-WORLD WAR II AND SOCIAL R'EVOLUTION

(a) Trotsky 1940, Germain 1947 :................ ............................. I(b) The Historical Role of the. Fourth International .; 7(c) The Mass Movement Today :.:::'.' :: : ,.,,:. 9(d) The Communist Parties in Western Europe : :..:.12

I. The ' Proletarian and Revolutionary Character N

of the Stalinist Parties " , 12. 2. The Bourqeois and Counrer-Revcluficnerv

Character of the Stalinist Parties ::: :.15(e) The Nature of. t~e Part'i 1947 : :: : .'.. 20

CHAPTER lI-THE STATE AND REVOLUTION " ,,23

" ;,f. (a) The Revolution Thirty Years After ::.· ,*: 23 .

(b) The State Thirty Years After : ::.: 25(c) The Communist Parties of Russia and Eastern .

Europe " 1 : 28

CHAPTER 111-IMPERIALISM THIRTY YEARS AFTER 30

(a) "Vast state-capitalist and Military Trusts andSyndicates" " 30

(b) American Imperialism " " " 30(c) The Interweaving of Imperialist, Civil and

National wars : 31

CHHAPTER IV- . . ..POLAND-WHERE ALL ROADS MEET " : ".33

CHAPTER V-PARTIES, TENDENCIES AND PROGRAMS IN THEFOURTH INTERNATIONAL '

(a) Sectarianism Today " " 40(b) Menshevism Today ..: : ~..4 1

(c) Economism , " 44(d) The Method of Bolshevism " "" " " 47(e) The Transitional Program Today 52

Appendix: The Political Economy of Germain.

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Chapter IWorld War 'II .and Social Revolution

One of Trotsky' s last contributions to the Fourth. Internationalwas a hypot hetical prognosis of socia l development if the world revo­lution fa iled to come during or immediately after tha .war. Contraryto the belief of all the incurable Mensheviks and the panic st ricken,t his failure of the re volution wa s not, and could not. have been con­cei ved by Trotsky, of all people, metaphysically, as a .point in time,one mon th, six months, two yea rs. It was a dialectical forecast, as t ag-e in the devolpment of the inte rnation al cla ss st ruggle. If, in thecrisis that Trotsky foresaw, the bourgeoisie could restore economic

. stability and its social domina t ion over the proletariat, then he couldnot conceive another situat ion in which the proletariat could conquer,

I n 1938 when Trotsky posed the question stated above, he drewthe conclusion that, given the failure of the world r evolution, theevolution of Russia might prove in retrospect to be the socia l basisfor a . ne w evalua ti on of the laws of scie nt if ic socia lism. Ru ssia re­mains , the world revolution has not conque red, .and .a s _a .result, in

. every section of the International , from the I.E.C. downwards, theprocess of re-evaluation is taking place. •

As far back as 1941 the W.P. Minority. (Johnson-Forest), believ­ing with Trotsky that under no circumstaneesicould -bourgeois .r ela­tions of production save societ y from - barbarism after the impendingcrisi s, revised the official Russian position in the .light of .the .presentstag-e of d evelopment of captialism, st a t ificati on 00 production, andthe con sequent deepening , of the mass revolutionary _struggle. The.W.P. MajOrity, -(Shachtmanites), revised the wholecMar xist -Leninist ­Trot skyist st ra t egy in the light of the Ru ssian degeneration. . Theofficial Fourth International, under the blows of ·the, "dela yed" revo­lution, has continued to seek theoretical st abili t y in the "progressivecharacter" of the degenerated workers' st a te or · to - use its recurrentph rase " the dual character of the bureaucracy." Where .the Kremlina nd t he Red Army ad vance, t here the revolution has advanced. Wheret hey re treat, there the r evolu t ion has re treated. Where Trotsky sa wt he nat ionalizat ion 'of producti on as the last remaining conquest ofproletarian power, the Fourth International today accepts nationaliza­ti on of production as a stage in revolutionary development even ifth e ' revolut ion itself is brutally suppressed. Where Trotsky saw theRu ssian proletariat as dep endent u pon the impetus of the revolutionf rom t he proletari a t outside, the LE. C; sees as progressive the in­corpora t ion of millions f rom outside Ru ssia into the t otalitarian gripof the Russian bureaucracy. ~

(a) Trotsky 1940, Germain 1947The first thing to be done once and for all is to destroy Germain's

ill usion th at he is interpret ing Trotsk y' s positions of 1939. Trotskyin 1939 believed that the bureaucracy of the workers' sta t e wouldgive a n "impulse" to revolutionary action am ong the oppressed massesin the areas it invaded in order to create a basi s for itself. But thisachieved , its Bonapartist t end enci es would then a ssert themselvesand cr ush the revolutionary masses. As he proved unmistakably,this is what happened in Poland and was posed in Finland in 1939.

Events at the end of the war to ok, an entirely different course.The Ru ssian Army did not call upon workers and peasants t o revoltin order to create a basis for the bureaucracy. For country after

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country in Eastern Europe, Germain repeats with wcarisomsistence: "The approach of the Red Army unloosed a r evolut iupheaval." Undoubtedly many workers and peasant s in E a stern Eu ebelieved that Stalin's army wa s ' revolutionary, But it was t he breilk­down of bourgeois society which unloosed the revolutionary upheavalnot only in Poland and Rumania, but in Italy, the Philippines a ndParis . In reality, the agents of the bureaucracy carried on a sys t emat iccampa ign against all the r evolution a ry elements in Poland be­fore, during and after th e uprising. The Ru ssian army, the vanguardof the counter-revolution, in collaboration with British imperialism,took pains to have the 'Warsaw prolet ariat, the vanguard of the E uro­pean r evolutio n, destroyed by th e Nazi army. Ru ssia kept MarshalPaulus and th e German Junkers in re serve against what it called"a r epetition of 1918 in Germany." Hya Ehrenberg, specia l propa­gandist for the Europea n theatre, led the Stalinist pack in an unpre­cedented in ternational vilification of th e German people, which reachedits height in th e declaration that if the German worke rs made a revo­lution and approached t he Red Army as brothers, they would be sh otdow n lik e do gs. /

Desp ite th is, th e Ru ssian Arm y fo und r evolutionary formationsin existenc e, soviets , factory committees, militias. There wa s nobour geoisie and industry wa s in the 'h ands of the workers . The RussianArmy arrest ed, deported or murdered the revolutionary elements. It .destroyed step by step th e traditional Polish workers' parties andcreated new ones in its own image. It re stored remnants of the Polishbourgeoisie to positions of power and created what Germain admits isa ' bourgeois s tat e. Germain admits that the Ru ssian Army sa nct ionednationalization because where it entered, a virtual nationalization hadalready taken place. Then he coolly informs us, "The activity of theStalinist burea ucra cy in evi tably exhibits a double character: on theon e hand it h as f ac ilitated [facili t ated , if you please] in howeverlimited a measure, na t iona lizat ion, a grarian reform, the establi shmentof facto r y committees, etc.,' on the oth er hand it established the policeregi me. Th en he dares us to deny " t he dual character of bureaucraticint ervent ion." (Fourth In ternationa l, F eb. 1947.)

Wh oever wishes to a dvance th is infatuated inversion of greathistori cal events ma v do so bu t he will do so on hi s own authorityand u nder hi s own name. He will not in our mo ve ment ge t away withthis as "Trotsky's position."

We have de cla re d and will decl ar e again our opposition to Trotsky'spolicy of 1940. Bu t before attacking a policy, it is nec essary to under­st and it. It is even more nec essary t o do so when de fending it. In1940 'I' rot sky argued:

1) that the defeat of Ru ssia could mean the dismemberment ofthe U.S.S.R., and give im pe r ia lism a f urthe r lon g lea se oflife ; •

2) that only the defe at of the bu reaucrac y by the revolut ionwould preserve state property in the U .S.S.H. ;

3 ) that the Stalinist pa r ti es abroad would dese rt the Kremlinregime and capitulate t o their own bou r geoisies.

Which of these judgmen t s does Germain st ill defend '? He does n oteven face the m.

1) He and hi s school are probably th e onl y person s in th e wo~ldwho beli eve that t he imperialism of today, sh a t te red be yond repa1~,can have a lon g lease on life by the dismemberment of Ru ssia. ThISindeed is faith in ca pitalism.

2) F ur ther, if we under st and th e 1939 Trotsky at all, if we watchthe iron laws of economic development today and observe the bar­bar ism that is eating away at bourgeois societ y, the patching up ofthe universal r uin of -another war could not reverse but would accel-

erate the movement . to the nationalization not only of national butcontinental economies, 'But Germain con t inues t o vag'it a t e himself aboutthe prospects -of capitali st re storation after a new war by millionairecollective-farmers.

3 ) Finally, it it clear to all (again except Germain) that theStalinist parties are ti ed to the Kremlin by roots far deeper thanTrotsky believed. They did not join their national bourgeoisie duringthe war. They did not collapse and abdica te to the Fourth Interna­tional the leadersh ip of millions. We thus have today in fact a morecomplicated r ela tio n of f undamental forces a nd...perspectives t han thoseon which Trotsky base d hi s positions.

To these fundamen t al problem s Germai n has hi s an swer ready:" plan ned economy" and the "du al character of the bu reaucracy."There is not a trace,not one drop of Marxism, of the dialectical method,in this. . .

Socialism in a Single Country Is Dead. What is so terrible is that fundamental concepts are being changed,al tered, transformed, shifted around, wi thout the theoreticians evers topping to think of what .t hey are doing . It is pr oceeding, for themost part, unconscio usl y and empirica lly .

It is st ill our common belief that we subs cri be to the Leninistanalysi s of imperialism, a s the st ruggle of conflictin g imperialismsfor the re-division of the wosld. It is obvious that the I.K.D. andShachtman do not believe this. For them there is only one sig nif icantim perialist stataYn the Lenin ist sense of' the word. Th at is Americanimperialism. (It is ridiculous to consider Britain as a ser ious competitorwith the United States. ) They ca ll Ru ssia "bureaucratic imperialism"whatever that may mea n, but this has no scient ific relation to Ame­r ican imperialism, i.e. , a relation within the capital-labor an tagonis min the context of t he world market . .

But Germain also has complet ely reorganized in hi s own mindthe fo unda t ion of our period. For him al so the world market is sim­ilarly destroyed. For him also there is on ly one imperialist stat e. WallStreet is engaged in a st r ug gle not with anothe r imperia lis m but witha degenera te d workers ' st ate that can be tran sitional to socia lis m.Thu s the one world trust aims at dominating the rest of the world.There is no imperialist r ivalry be tween American imp er iali sm andthe U .S.S.R. There is t he cap italis t enemy and it s projected victim. -

Thus both Germain and Sh achtm an des t r oy all OUr concept ionsof the laws of t he world market and the domination of t he canital­labor re la t ion by these laws. It is not only possible but perfectlylegitimate t o t ake these tremendous t heoret ical step s. But it is abso­lutely intolerable that such tremendous the oretical r e-evaluationsshould take place without t heir being clearly state d and the conclu­sions drawn.

It i s when .th e normal trade 'con nect ions of the world-market a redestroyed that the law of value imp oses itself with unrestrainedferocity. Russ ia mu st fight for woi-ld domination or p er ish . It is sub­j ected to a ll the laws of the wor ld-market . Socialism in a s inglecoun t r y is dead even f or 'St a lin . All theories built on this a re a lso dead.

The bourgeoisi e sees Stalinist Russia, nat iona lized property, as"a ttack ing th e capita list -world." Germain sees na t ionalized propert ya s "defe nding" itself. Thereby Germain is unable to r eaffirm whatthe bou rgeoisie seeks to destroy-the revolutiona ry unity of the worldp roletariat,the only solut ion to the contemp orary barbarism.

The greatest en emy of the United States is not Stalinist Russia( this is a purely bourgeois conception). Its greatest enemy is at home,t he American proletariat in alliance 'with the world revolution. Butin the new necessity for world rule, equally, the great est enemy ofRu ss ian domination is not American imperialism but the Russian

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proletariat. As in th e moment of victor y it collaborated with H4tIert o destroy the revolutionary proletariat of Warsaw, so St alin ism willand must collaborate with American imperialism fo r the maintenanceof the condition of their joint existence-the suppression of the worldproletarian revolution. It was possible (possib le, if wrong) at onetime to spec ulate about t he revolutionary aspect of the bureaucracy,it s preservation of 'plan ned economy to s ave Russia from di smember­ment ami ruin and the consequent st rengt hening of imperialism. Th osedays are over. Today the t ask is to save the proletariat from a powerwhich contends with by no means inferior fo rces for world mastery.

This is not a que stion of Germany or defense of Ru ssia. Germain,viewing all hi storical development through the eyes of the theory ofthe dege nerated workers' st a te, is eating away at the theoreticalfoundations of our movement, i.e., the revolutionary mobilization oft he proletariat as t he sole solut ion to all the problems of the con­t emporar y barbarism. We join Germain in holding off Shachtman andthe other guerrillas in order to face him with the ori gin s and con ­sequences of hi s utterl y false political position.

Lenin and Socia lism

The st ruggle f or ' socialism is the struggle for proletariandemocracy. Proletarian democracy is not the crown of socia lis m. It isits basis. Proletarian democracy is not the result of socialis m. Socialismis the result of proletarian democracy. •To the degree that the prole­t a r ian mobilizes itself and the great masses of the peop le, the socialistr evolut ion is advanced. The proletariat mobilizes itself as a self-actingforce through its OWn committees, unions, part ies and other organiza­t ion s. ThfS is not the "Russian question." It is Marxism. Lerim basedeverything, yes, Comrade Germain , everything on this.

"The civil war agains t t he bourgeoisie is a wa r which is de mo­cratically or ganized and waged by the poor masses agarnst the proper­tied minority. The civil war is a lso a war, and consequently mustinevit ably put 'force' in the place of right . But force . .. cannot bereal ized without a democratic organization of the army and the 'rear.'The civi l war first of all and at once expropriates banks, factories,r ail ways, la rge agricultural estates, etc. But it is precisely for thisvery purpose of exp ropriation that it is imperative to in t roduce theelect ion by t he .people of all the officials and the army officers ; toaccomplish a complete fu sion of the army, which wages war againstthe bourgeoisie, with the masses of the population;.to int roduce •complete democracy in the matter of the control of food supplies,of production and distribution, etc. . . ". But this aim can be attainedneither from a purely military nor economic nor political st andpointwithout a simultaneous introduction and propagation of democracyamong ou r troops and at our rear-an int roduct ion and propagationwhich will deve lop in the course of that war. We te ll the massesno w . . . : 'You must lead and you will 'lead a really democratic wara gainst t he bourgeoisie and for the purpose of actually carrying outdemocracy and socia lism'. " (Bolshevik s and the Worl d War, pp.227-228.)

The same principle applies to the self-determinat ion of nations."Without actually organizing the ' relations between the nations

on a democr atic basis- and hence without granting f reedom of seces ­sion-there can be no civil war of the workers and the t oili ng massesof a ll nations agains t the bourgeoisie." (Ibid. , :~. 228.) . ,

We shall pu r sue Germai n rem orselessl y until he faces this issuea nd' answers.

Th e Comm un e, the first decisively prolet arian revolution, nation­alized nothing. For Ma rx, "The great s ocia l measure of t he Communewas its own working exi stence," its democratic mobili zat ion of the

masses of the people. In the 1917 revolution, the socialist revolution,we have precisely th e sam e theor y and t herefore the same practice.In 1917 Lenin attacked mercilessly not merel y nationalization butconfiscation. "The vital thing will be not so much confiscat ion ofcapitalist property as the establishment of universal, all-embracing

.workers' control over th e capitalists and their possible suppor ter s."

.A nd then, Comrade Germain, note this: "Confiscation alone willlead us nowhere ..." Lenin left no room for ambiguity on this que s­tion. He declared that the Bolsh evik s neve r used the t erm " workers'control" except in association with the dictat orship of the prolet ariat,"always putting it after t he latte r (by which) we t hereby ma ke pla inwhat state we have in mind."

State control-that wa s "a bourgeois-r efo rmist ph rase, in es­sence a purely Cadet f ormula ..." The Junker- capitalist state in

"Ger many during war time was ex er cis ing complete cla ss control over_the ' economy and it m eant "military penal labor" for t he workers.For Marx and Lenin, the re gime transi ti onal to socialism wa s thedictatorship of the prolet ar iat, the power of the working class, notthe r egim e of nationali zed proper ty. F or Le nin " the f un dame nt alid ea which runs like a re d thread through all of Mar x's works" isthat " the' democratic republic is the nearest approach to t he dicta t or ­ship to th e prole tariat ." Th e democratic r epublic wi th its opportunit yfor mass mobili za t ions, not bourgeois nationaliz ation of property.This explai ns Lenin' s merc iless enmity t o the bourgeois r egulati on ofeconomic life as a whole "according to a certain general pl an." Inf act, the leaders of the October Revolution specifically ex cluded con­fi scation of property from t heir immediate, program. Th ey were con­cerned with somethi ng else-the democratic, i.e., self -mobilization ofthe masses.

F or Lenin the solut ion to the economic ill s of r uined Ru ssia wasnot nationalization of prope rty but the rel ease of the energies of thepe ople. Thi s was and is so profoundly revolutionary, so oppo sed tobou rgeois conce pt ions th at eve n today, the word s st a re us in t he faceand we ca nnot understand t hem.

"In our opinion, in order to mitigate t he unt old burden s andmi series of the war, in order t o heal the t errible woun ds infli ct ed onthe people by t he war, revolutionary democracy is nece ssary, r evo­lutionary mea sures are needed, of t he ' kind descr ibed in the exampleof the allocation of dwellings in the intere sts of the poor: We mustp r oceed in exactly the sa me way, in both t own a nd country, withr ega rd to foodstuffs, clothes, boots, and so fo rth, and in the countrywith regard to the land, etc. For the administration of the state inthis spir it we can immedia tely se t up a strit e apparatus of about t enm ill ion , if not t went y mill ion people-an appa ratus unknown t o anycapitali st coun try. We alone can create such a n apparatus, fo r we ar ea ssured of the complete and devot ed sy mpathy of t he va st majorityof 't he population. Th is apparat us we alon e can creat e, because we haveclass conscious workers, disciplined by a long capitalist 'apprentice­sh ip' (not fo r naught did we serve apprenticeship to capitalism ),workers who are ca pab le of fo rm ing a: workers' militia and of g rad­uall y enlarging it (beginning to enla r ge it. immedia te ly) into a people'sm ili t ia. The class conscious workers must lead, but t hey can draw int othe work of administration th e real masses of the toiling oppressed."(Selected Works, Vol. VI , p. 274.)

Confiscation Will Solve Nothing

Is Germa in prep ared to subscr ibe t o t his progr am or not? Is hep repared to tell th e French workers to day that mere nationaliza tio n oreven confiscation will solve nothing ? He cannot do it because hi s

. .Ru ssian position sta nds over him like a janissary with sword draw n.

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For Lenin administration of the st at e by t he prolet a riat was thesame as administration of the economy. Without a break the passagepasses on to the solution of economic problems.

"The most important thing is to inspire the oppressed and thetoilers with confidence in their own strength, to show them in practicethat they can and must themselves undertake a cor rect, strictly order­ly and organized distribution of 'bread, food, milk, clothing, dwellings,and so forth, in the interes ts of the poor . Without this,' Russia ca nnotbe saved from collapse and ruin; whereas an honest, courageous anduniversal move to hand over the administration to the proletariansand semi-proletarians will arouse such unprecedented revolutionaryenthusiasm among the masse s, will so multiply the forces of thepeople in combating their miseries, that much that seemed impossibleto our old, narrow, bureaucratic forces wil l become practicable> forthe forces of the millions and millions of the masses when theybegin to work for themselves, and not under the whip, for the capital-ist, the master, the official." ,

The most important thing is to tell the workers , what is to bedone and that only ,they can do it. You can see the same in everyline of these pamphlets.

"O nly then shall we be able to see what untapped forces of re­sistance to capitalism are latent in the people; only then will whatEngels cal ls 'latent socia lism ' be ' made apparent; only then shall ' wefind that for every ten thousand open or concealed enemies of thepower of the working cla ss, who manifest themselves either by actionor by passive resistance, a million new fighters will arise, who untilthen had been politically dormant, languishing in poverty and despair,having lost faith in themselves as human beings, in - their right tolive, in the possibility that they too might be ser ved by the wholeforce of the modern ,centralized state and that their detachments ofproletarian militia might be fully trusted and called upon to takepart in the immediate, direct, day-to-day work of administration ofthe state." (Selected Works, Vol. VI , p. 287.)

As concrete, revolutionary policy for the masses to act upon;Lenin, with his incomparable concreteness, wa s placing before themnothing ,more than the theoretical conclus ions of Marx, that the solu­tion to the problems of capital accumulation wa s the human solut ion.

"It becomes a question of life and death for society to adaptthe mode of production to the normal functioning of this law. Modernindustry, indeed, compels societ y, und er penalty of death, to replacethe detail-worker of tod ay, crippled by life-long repetition of oneand the same trivial operation, and thus reduced to a mere fragmentof a man, by t he fully-developed individual fit for a variety of labors,ready to face an y change of production, and to whom the differentsocial functions he performs are but so many modes of giving freescope to his own natural and acquired powers." ( Ca pit al, Vol. 1, p. 534.)

The wh ole debate about nationalization should be mercilesslyswept aside with the brutality with which Lenin swept it aside.*Today, in 1947, it is no more than a means, and, with bourgeois andStalinists,' a delib erate means of blinding the masses to the needfor their own self-mobilizat ion. And Lenin was Lenin and Trotskyismwas Bolshevism precisely becau se . I t was the ruthless enemy of allthat impeded this self- mobili zat ion. ,

Today we are far, far beyond the stage for which Lenin 'waswriting. The crisis, as Trotsky foresaw it, and as we can see it today,demands that the International speak to the masses in a manner in­finitely sur passing in boldness and range the Lenin of 1917-1918.Where is it? Look at the press of the International. In words and

• LateT, we shaJJ. tatoo ,u p the ques'tion of the aotual use of the sl<>g1Wll ill 1947•

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re solutions it , attacks the ,.oppor tunist s (and feebly enough ) ; con­~retely" it cannot ' demonstrate '.it s , difference. Far better if it were,111 every .country, to donothmg more for three months than reprintweek after week the St a te and:- Revolution, The Threatening- Catas­trophe, Will the Bolshevik s Retain State-Power?, The Immediate Tasksof the Soviet. Government, Trotsky's Transitional Prog-ram and ab oveall the discu ssio ns that preceded it. The masses would learn more thanwe have taught them for , the .pa st yea r and we would al so. And yett oday even these are inadequate. '

U nder our eyes; the masse s, the fountain of all Marxist the or y,are creating the , ba sis of the Fourth Inte rnational. Bu t to see this,Germain will have to 't ea r himself f rom his mesmerized conte mplat ionof degeneration in 'Ru ssia and .grapple with t he r egeneration of theproletariat, wi th th e stages of development of our moveme nt and itspresent situation, shaped not by Ru ssian degeneration but by wor ldcapita lism. '

(b) The Historical Role of the Fourth InternationalI n 1 9 4'2 t he reactdcnarv laws o f t he! American bou rgeois i e mad e it n eces sa r v for

T rotskyis t t endencses in t he Un ited States to di s affilia te or ganiza t ionally from theFourth Internationl3.a. That, however, -ca nuor p revent our subscription. t o pohticalideas and a n itliterest ~Th t :he-il" ex p r es s i on in o rgarrizat.ions and t endencies. It i s int his sens e that we write "'-"Ire of the F our th I n t er naeional.

Germain, secur e in hi s exposit ion of " Trotsky's positions," has n oneed to show in pr ecise terms what organic changes ; if any, have takenplace in wor ld imperialism since Trotsky wro te in 1940. Exact ly simila ris hi s method with the laws of polit ical development. The Fourth I nter­na tional was sm all in. 1939. It is st ill small 'i n 1947, The masses a rem ore (or less) r evo lutionary as the ca se may be, etc. We must redoubleour energies, etc., etc. But how exactly does the Fourth Int ern at ionalin 1947 differ from the Fourth Intern at ional in 1939? What new con­ception can it have of itself and its tasks in the light of the develop­ments between 1940 and 1947? Germain does not even ask hi mselft hese questions.

. In the Manifest o of the Communist International, 1919, T rotskyst ates :

"If the F'irst .In ter na t ional p r esaged t he f ut ur e cou rse of develop­ment and indicat ed its paths; if t he Second Internation al gathered andorganized mill ions of workers ; the n 'the Thi rd International is theInternational of open mass a ction, the ' In t ernational of r evolutionaryrealiza tion, t he International of t he deed ."

We have t o examin e this concent rate d generalization, see whatit means, place each International in relation to its per iod and arrive atwhat the Fourth International means today. That is t he hi storic con­tinuity of our movement, not t he "dual character of t he bu reaucracy ."

The First International was fou nded in an epoch in wh ich smallbourgeois p r oduction predominated. :\Ia r x, ba sing himself u pon themost advanced .st age and te nde ncies of the ca pital-labor .r elat ion ofthose days, fought for the revolu ti onary mo biliza t ion of the proletariaton the ba si s of unifying its econom ic and political st r uggles . He had tost ruggle against conspiratorial Blanquists and Anarchists for the sys ­tematic politicalization of the everyday proletarian struggle.

The Second Int er nat ional was fou nde d on the realizat ion in lifeof the theoretical perspectives for whi ch Marx fought in the FirstInternational. The development of capitalism itself had solidified,unified and differentiated the proletariat from the re st of the nation,and clarrfied its role. Its clearly marked place in the socia l st ruct ure ofadvancing capitalism dictated ·the strategy of t he Second I nt er n at iona l,the mobilization ' of the proletariat for revolutionary action. Bu t thedevelopment of impenial isrn 'w-i th its super- prof its created the political

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democracy and social legislation which dissolved the uni fied social actionof the proletariat into an amorphous mass of electors d rowned in t hepetty-bourgeois swamp.

The dialectical development is now manifested with extraordinaryclarity. If the r evolui1"onUTi/ perepectiv ee of the First Internationalwere the concrete foundation of the Second, the revolutionary per­spectives of the Second In t erna t ional became in time the concretefo undations of the Tihi rd, The Third International was fo unded on theactual revolutionary upheaval of t-he masse s, the October Revolution,mass general et r ikes, soviets, ar.ned demonstrations on a Europeanscale. Capitalism had produced thess just as it produced the 10 \1 :u1a­tions at each stage of th e previ .ius labor orga niza t ion. And a t ~riC~l

successive s tage the degeneration of the proletarian party not onlyimitates capitalism but mu st t ake on to a grea ter de gree the contra-dictions which a re re.i..irig; ca p. t a lis m. .

Beginning will 1933, Fascism, th e bu r eaucratic con trol by thes t a te of $11 a spects of li f e, becomes the political method of the bou r­geois ie.Government even in democratic cou ntries maintains only theform of legislative procedure and be comes in .r ea lity go vernment byexecutive d ecree. The labor movement ever ywher e and the Third In­ternational a bove all complete a strictly parallel degeneration.

As in previous stages, with the degeneration of the labor move­ment, sociejy itself culminates in so cia l catastrophe, the ser ies ofdefeated revolutions which p re ceded 'World War II, the war itself, andthe in soluble c r is is of th e present. But here, the logical developmen tof the International becomes of fundamental importanc e fo r u s tounderstand our own present and our own future. 'I'he theoretical per­spectives of the 'I'h ird International, expressed most concretely byLenin f er Ru ssi a .in the art icles quoted, will 'logically become theconcrete actual foundation of the Fourth .

In 1864, the r evo lution a ime d ,a t achieving social em anci pation inthe future. Today, r evolution must beg i n with social emancipat ion .No conceivable fo rce ex is ts in t he world to begrn the regeneration ofsociety except the emancipated prole tariat. The Fourth Interna t ionalmust t ell the workers that 'on ly the free scope of their "own na turaland a cquired powe r s" and t he "latent socialism" of th eir cl ass cansatisf y their most elementa ry needs. This is the theoretical ba sis ofthe revolutionary international of 1947. Wh ere Marx fought-to unifyp olitical and economic str uggles , t oday , long past that stage, theFourth International has to a im at the unification in the st ruggle of thenational units of the proletariat, for the internation al recons truction ofecono mic li fe.

The emancipation mu st be social.Only the complete socia l ' transformation of man a s a productive

force can begin to cope with the ruin, economic, political and moral, towhich bourgeois societ y ha s reduced and is s t ill f ur ther reducing theworld.

The em a ncipat ion mu st be intern ational.1939-1947, and particularly 1945-1947, have demonstrated to the

.whole world, and particularly to the European proletariat, that the oldnatronal economies are sha t t ered beyond r epair. This was no t so in1940. The United States, the U.S .S .R. a nd the colonial countries areknit into an almost inextricable fabric with E urope. The world movesas a unit.

The tasks of the Fourth International have therefore undergonea qualitative change. Its mo st remote theories of 1940 have become in1947 practical necessities for millions. N either Yn theory nor in practicedoes Germain show any g rasp of this. He is too tied up in "property"and "nationalization" to perform the fir st task of today. It is toexamine and establish to wh at degree the objective movement and sub-

I

jective expression of the proletariat correspond to theobject'ive needs·of society ' and the subjective claims of his organization. Ger m a in 'st r ea t ment of this, where it exists, is su per ficia l and im pr essi oni s t ic.For the J oh nson-F orest tendency the correspondence is established and'IS the greatest polit ica l factor of our time. With the world socialistrevolution t he h istory of humanity will begin. And that is p reciselywhat is a lready shaking t he ' world. Va st millions of men are not t hink­ing or acting a s in the old days. They are flex ing themselves for a leapthat has become imperative for them-the leap from the realm of ca pi­talist necessity mto the realm of socia l freedom. This today is revo­lut iona r y poli t ics . The revolutionary writer who does n ot know this,scr a t ch es only on the surfa ce- a nd then begins to s lip backward.

(c) The Mass Movement TodayThe mass movement today i s not essentially the product of the

war. Its first appearance is in France in 1934, a f ter on e year's expe r i­ence by Europe of the bar baris m and degradation of Fascis m.

In the s pa ce of three or four months a f t er the June 1936 strikesi n France [om' million work ers j oin t he F r ench trade union movement"lining up for the class st ruggle." In S pain the wo rkers re volte dw ith a violence and de cis iveness n ever seen in any previous revolu­t ion . But i t is in the U .S .A . t hat t he phenomen on ca n be mo st in­st r uctive ly obser ved. Within t wo yea rs the Ameri can proletariatcreates the C.I.O." whioh i n t en yea r s becomes the mo st powerfulsocial force in the nati on , an achievement r arely exceeded in the historyof th e proletariat.

The v ictories of H itler seemed to hurl back this world-widem obiliz a t ion of the pr olet a r-i at, At the f i r st 'check he rece ived in 1941,t he p role tariat bega n the strug g le on a h igh er plane. The r esistancemovements were nothin g 'less than a higher st age of the self-m obiliza ­ti on of the prolet a r ia t a s lea der of the na tion now de serted b y thebou r ge oisi e. . . ~

T oday this mass m ovement conti nues in th e rush .to join theCommunist P arties . N owh ere in the writings of Germain -a nd his co­thinkers is it · po ssible ' to find a single paragraph wh.ich recognizes 'tha t thi s is the greatest socia l phenomenon of We age, the proletarianraobi lizat.ion corresponding to the de generation of bourg eo is societ y .

T omorrow if t he Comm u nist Parties in Western Europe shou ldser iously u m'..-:take a se r ies of decisive action s with the conquest ofpower as the open a im , the millions w ou ld po u r into it as t hey "pour edinto t he union s in 1936. T hi s i s in n o se nse a national or WesternEuropean phenomenon. In J apan, in Indonesia, in Shanghai, i n WestAfri ca , t he r e is the sa me type of self- mobi liza t ion. It has been growingwith a dva nces and retreats for thirtee n vea l's.

The Prenchvand ' I t a lia n wor kers of today are not the Russian. worker s of 1917 seizing f actories chaot ica lly and t r ying to r u n them

ind ivi dua lly. They h a ve .been trained a n d di sciplined in a mo re ad­va nced school of capit al ism, in a m Ol"e complex world , in a s ociet ywhere social collapse a nd barbarism a re very close. In th e t ightly­kni t network of Western E urope they a re profoundly aware of theinter-d ependence of the econom y, of thadim ini shing opposition betweennational and internat ional economy, between national and i nterna­ti onalpolitics, between peace and war, the need fo r centralized' or­g an iza tion ,

In the Resolution p n the role of the Communist Party at the- Se cond Congress of the Communist International, Zinoviev stated t hatthe former su bdivis ions of the workers' movement into the threeforms, party, union, co-operative, h ad exhausted i t self. The newforms of the dictatorship of the proletariat were Jya r t y" soviet and

9

industrial unions. The whole resolution is built around the idea thateven "on the ..day of the 'conquest of power the 'Communist Party con­stitutes only a fraction of the working class." This was the axis onwhichLenin worked f or Russia and f or the wh ole of Western Europe.What we are se eing in France and Italy sh ows how ia,r beyond 1919

, we are. . ', , .Any revolutionaryp~rty today which initiated actions for the

conquest of power would rally such a membership as ' would reduceto the vanishing- point the . organizational difference between vanguardand masse s, party, ' Soviet and union. The revolutionary party will.not be only a "fra.ction" of the working-class. In acoun-try like F'ranceat the moment of the conquest of power, we can well see practicallyevery member of the organized labor movement 'an d millions of thepetty-bourgeoisie a s m embers of the revolutionary .p a r ty .* For 'Sha cht ­man .and S'Ucl1, a ll bhis is st r a tosphe r i c "theory". Y et it is only withthis in mind (and not revolutionary waves which w ere unloosed by theRed Army) that we sh a ll begin to s ee the catastrophic roleplayed bythe [Red Army in Eastern Europe 'an d the le ssons for today.

In 1917 the February" and October Revolutions gave the impetusto the European revolution precisely because of the backwardness ofRussia. In 1944 the r evolutionary mobilization of the masses in theEastern European countries under the impending ,dlef'ea t of 'Ge rm a nywas historicallydue to be the sign a l and example for . 'such a m obiliza­tion in Western Europe as would have put the 1917-1923 revolutionsin the s ha de . It is this the Kremlin, deliberately and far-sightedlycounter-revolutionary, destroyed. Could Anglo-American imperialismhave held the population s of those countries down? L ook at the rest

. of the world and judge. We would have had a repetition of Greece,(Greece which G ermain so grievously misunderstands) .in eve ry -coun ­try in Eastern Europe; the Middle East a fla m e and a movement inWestern 'E u r ope to which even the present unprecedented self-mobil­izat ion of the masses woul d h a ve been me·rely a prelude,

Where the Red Army Has Not PassedTihe analysi s must be taken to its c onclusion , as our teach er s '

taught u s t o do and beca u se today hi storical de velopment takes a llprocesses to their logical conclusion. Already in the Spanish CivilWar in 1936 the French proletar .iat was seeth ing with the conscious­n ess that it was n ece ssa ry to g o to the aid of the Spanish proletariat.All through th e war the eleme nts of international action part­icu lar ly in Nort h Italy and the Balkans, existed. Stalinism corruptedand de stroyed .i t when it destroyed the , r ev·ol ution . Yet todaythe self-mobilization of th e masse s in Jtalyand F rance 'On a nationalscale has r each ed such a stage that g iven ser-ious a ction of any k ind,a lways decisive f or -prole taria n con sciou sness, it is bound to overflow .the ' n a t iona l boundaries. . ,

In , t h e "Cr-itique 'of the Gotha Program" (1875) lM(a rx drew at­t ention t o the f'act that t hirt y years befor e in t~e Communist Mani­f e st o, h e had warned that the class s t r ug g le ds n ational "in form"on ly hut no t in content. In 1-873 he had taken it further. R eferring t othe death of the First International h e h ad d eclared that ."The inter­national activity of the working class d oes not ,b y any means d e-pendon the e xi stence of the Internation al Workingmen's A ssociation."Had Churchill's vp la n for t he Anglo-American i n vasion of EasternEurope b een su ccessfu l, bhe r evolution a ry masse s of Europe, de spiteinternal divisions, wou,ld have f ac e-don an international scale oneenemy, Anglo-American Imperialism. That initial impulse has been

* How ridiciUlOiUS a.U -t .he dlspu t es about the d'icta'tons hip of the part,. 0\·...,.

the mas ses ...~!eady ';' eg in to appeair !

10

'beheaded , and corrupted .by the Kremlin bureaucracy and its army.Included .in this t erribl e se t-bac k for t he revolution is Germany,

Eastern and Western. In 'Belg r ade , Sof ia, and above all , in W arsaw,the German proletarian r evol ution w as u ndermined. Those bourgeois 'commentators who ' declare that but for the Red Army, all Europew ould have been communist today, n ot only spea k, far more wi selythan they know hut :ha ve infinitely more g rasp of the t ruth than all

- the "Mae-xism't of Germain's theses, And . as r ecompense for ·all thisw e have the barely concealed d efeatism by Germain in the oft-reit­erated prospect of "str uctural assimila tion t o the U.S .S.R. ", inc ludingEastern Ge rmany. And t o conclude, he g ives us the t ruly prepost er ouspiece of capi t a lism in a sing le country-"the growth of the -p r oduc t ivefo rces" in those ruined, -plundered, to rtured, st a r vin g countr-ies ofEastern Europe, the most s t r icke n a r eas .of a st r icken and collapsi ng 'continent, which in anot he r page Germain will assure us rriust a chie vethe Socialist United States of Eur ope"or perish .

All the lament ation s over the fate of the German proleta riat a ndthe 'n eed f or economic recovery bef ore i t can once more take its placein the revolu ti onary st r uggle a re the m ost pi t iful capit ulation t o bour­geois i deology a nd the direct r esult of a false m ethod of analysis. Butf or i ts ghastly experienc e wi t h "'th e Red Army, Germany todaymight have only one party, a revolutionary party of millions. But evengiven the present sta te of Germany, the revolut iona r y proleta r iat ofF rance 'an d Italy, d ragg in g with them the Ruhr workers, can a t ones troke lift the -Ger rna n p eopl e to their feet again .

Entangled in t h e meshes of hi s concep ts of bureaucracy, Germainhas cut himself off f rom understanding t he dynamics of the mass move­ment today. It will have periods of lull , r et reat and even defeat . Butits main out lines an d t he cou ,r se of development are already clea r .It is a w orld-wide ph en omen on. The unpreced ented m ovem en t of theJapanese p r olet a ri a t is only superficially different in kind. There isibeingpr epar ed in the United Stat es (and the b ourgeoi sie is f r anticin fear of it) a s elf- mobi lieation of. the g reat mass of the n ation whichwill a ssume a n ational a nd international scope t hat will shake the,g lc:be. Wherever the 'Red A rmy has not passed, there t hi s . mo vementexi sts,

, W e a re "not formalis t s. The logical deduction is f or us only t heguide 1\;0 proof by practice-in this ease empirical examination. GeT­m ain m ay say tha t mor e or less h e agrees. But if h e does, t ha t wouldonly ,be a not her ' ex ample of th e dilem m a in which h e f inds himself,between his r evolutionar y strivings and the t heoret ical - st r ang leholdof the ''dual char acter of t he bureaucracy." For if h e saw t he massmo vemen t 'of the proletariat as h e ought to see it, h e w ould r ecognizea nd declare and ibuil d policy on the f act that the extensio n of thepo we r of the Kremlin constitutes t he growth of the m os t de term ined,the most skillful, the m ost experienced, the m ost conscious enemy ofprecisely th is se1f-m obiliz a t ion of the ma sses.

(d) The Communist Parties in Western Europe(I) The Proletarian and Revolutionary Character of the Stalinist Parties

When the masses in one country move, the w orld theory ofBolshevism .lea ps forward. N ow t oday we h a ve t w o and a half millionsin one Italian Communist P a rty, before the seizure of p ower. E uropeh a s seen nothing like this since the Crusades, It is here that areconcent r a ted a ll the problem s of ou r a ge ."

• The member s h ip of t he Italian Com m.u.nis-t P arty is said to b e a " b<>ok" m'e m ­bel'Ship. The observa t fon is wit. hou t s-ense. F or the Italian workers t he pa r t y was alegend, t he party o f Lemn and T rotsky . The y i din 'ed it for action . Withou t a ctionrthey fall away. TrO'tsky's "r em a r k s on t he unions in 1919 are suffi 'c iient t o exposeBny superficial a;na.!ysis of ,t h e I~ian people and the Communist Par ty in Italy,

11:

Germain does not s ee h ere a new st age of/the mass movement,and therefore the n ew s t ag e of theoretical advance. He is busy instead--defeating S hachtma n .

Th e relation with World War I will show the new stage, AfterWorld War I there was a tremendous movement of the masses intothe Trade Urrion movement. 'Sa i d Trotsky in 1919.:

"'T:he workers join the trade unions solely for the sa ke of im­mediate gains,' reply the conciliators. This t :leo ry is false from be­g in n ing to end. The great influx of workers .i n t o the trade unions is

'e li cit ed not :by :pe t t y , day-to-day questions, but by the c olossal factof the ' World War. 'Th e working masses, not only the top layers butthe lowest depths .as well, are r oused and, alarmed by the greatesthistorical upheaval. Each individual proletarian has sensed to a neverequaled degree 'h is 'he1[>1e ssn ess in the face 'of the mighty imperialistmaohine.Tohe u,rge to establish ties, the urge to unification and con­s olidation of forces has manifested itself with unpr eceden t ed power.Hence flows the s ur ge of millions of workers into the trade unionsor into the Soviets of Deputies, r.e., into s u ch organizations as donot demand political preparation but r e pre sen t the m ost g ener a l andmost direct expression of the proletarian class struggle."

The workers today are aware of the tremendous problems involvedin the overthrow of b ourgeois socie t y'. T 'hey seek a philosophy of life,a p lace, an organization, a soci a l force which will not only be "thedired expression of the 'prolet a r ia n class s t r ugg le " but the directforce with which to r eb u ild s ociet y . In Indonesia and Indo-China,slight as is the p roletarian base, we see the sa me total m obiliza t ion .It is only the occupation forces in Japan that impede a s imila r man­ifestation. The genuine mass organization of the-American 'Proletariat,the sociall y most advanced socia l entity the world ,h a s ever s een , willshow that the :St a lin ism of the Stalinist parties is m erely a sub j ect iveexpression of the world vp r ole tai-la t , in stinctively, unifying and con­solidating socia l forces in the face 'of'.d a nger s and tasks. This is the[nvading socialist society of our day.

The Proletariat Then and Now

As late a s 1864 Marx's concrete economic program sh owed howclosely he differentiated between .t he boldness of his the or etical con ­clusions and the concrete s t age of economic development la n d itsreflection in the revolu t ion a r y proletariat. Even this seem ed to bemere Utopianism when the Commune er upt ed like a vo1cano and pro­jected t he proletariat .i t self f a r . 'beyon d his theories . Yet i ts s t r ict lyeconomic .program is t oday r idicu lous-on e of the things w hich Marxdetails with great pride is the abolitron of night-work fo r journey­men bakers.

The degeneration of the S econd International consis t ed prec iselyan the fact that it se pa r a t ed what the Commune at a high moment hadjoined together, m oderate econ omic con t en t but a n ew poli tical organ­ization of the masses . The S econd International .placed militant tradeunionism on on e side a nd soci a l legislation on the other. But in 1905·t h e Russian 'p rolet a r ia t linked the two together in the Sovie t whichbecame the pattern for revolu t ionar y action from 1917 onwards. Yet1n the consciousness of the workers, the Soviet s t ill remained a formof p olitical activity, prole t a rian politics, :but essentially r evolutionaryactivity against the bour-geoisie. Between 1923 and 1929 t h e failureof the world revolution and the stabilizing influence of Americancapital in 'Western Europe m ade it impossible for the backward Russianproletariat to give the 'Sovie t s that content (administration of thestate and .workers' control ofprodu,ction) which Lenin strove to dnsti ll

12 '

. ......

into the Sov iet form.'I'ihe failure of t he world revolution reintroduced the old sepan-ation

between economics -a n d politics. The unions and the. parties d ividedthe eco nomic and political st ruggle over the production and distribu­tion of the sur plus-v alue, With the increasing fal l in the :r:ate of profitand the increasing socialization of labor, the di sciplining, trainingand social education of the pr olet a ria t , this separation ,betw een eco­n omics and politics could not b e long m aintained. The proletariatreceived from Fasci sm a m er ciles s subjective education in the integra­tion of economics and politics which was not lost upon it .

Now, today, the p roletariat, on ·a higher plane, has drawn theultimate conclusion. Its revolt is not aga inst politics and the distribu­tion of the surplus-value. T he r evolt is against value produ ction itself.It mas made its O\V'11 compreh en sion of the pivot on which the compre­hen sion of political economy turns.

Be His Payment High or LowFrom end to end of the world, the miners in Germany, in Britain,

in the United States, in Russia do not seek merely higher pay ("!behis payment high or low") or better wo rking condition s. In peace orwar, in 'su mm er or b'1izzards, they do not w ant to work in the minesat all. Every word from Japan 'show s that the J a panese workers aimat nothing less than the complete reorganization of societ y, The pro­Iet a r ia t js n ot seeking as in the Commune a mere political form inwhich to work out t he emancipation of labor , nor is it seekin g as in the1917-1923 Sovi ets a means for revolutionary pol it ics , t o overth rowprivate property. Its aims a r e greater. It seeks a complete t r ansform­ation of the productive system .

The pivot of the whole sc ience of political economy a s MaTx con­ceived it, h is own sp ecial discovery, as ;he tells us in the first pages ofCapitol; was found in the dual character not of finished commoditieson the market (Ricardo could g et 110 .further) ibu t in the dual char­acter of the labor that created them, Labor's .funda;nental, its eternallynecessary function in all s ocieti es , past , present and: future, wa s tocreate u,se-va lues. In to t hi s org-anic function of 'a ll labor, capitalistproduction imposed the contradiction of producing value, an d moreparticularly surplus-value. Within this contradiction is cont a ined thenecessity for the division of societ y into direct producers (workers)and rulers of societ y, into manual a nd intellectual la bor er s. On thisclass di stinction r ests the b ourgeois di stinction .between economics andpolitics.

The proletariat in the a dvanced countri es has now given noticethat it is ready t o s olve th ese cont r,adictions and abolish labor as"labor", a s ,Ma rx u sed t he term before 1848. It seeks to s ubst ituteinstead a m eaningful creative activity w ith a social aim as the end andthe exercise of its natural and acquired f aculties as the me ans:

Nations like the United States, Britain, F r ance, and Germanycould withdraw millions of men from production, feed them, clothethem, educate them, supply them with the weapons of destruction,transport them to the ends of the earth and maintain them for years.To day it is perfectly possible for t he advanced nations by a self-mobil­ization of the population and modern method'S of ed ucation to trainand educate, t echnically and socially, a ll i t s "able-bodied population'between 15 and 35 wi thout drawing them f rom 'labor f or more thanhalf tile n ormal capitalis t working d ay of 8 h ours, Thus while withina decade civili zation can be tur ned .into .a barbarous sh ambles, withina decade a lso there can be cr ea t ed s uch u socia l f or ce fo r productiona nd t he d em ocratic .adm inist ration of things as .MaTx arrd Engelsand even Lenin thought would come only in the second generationof socialism. The need s of the proletariat today are thus a direct

13

response to the s t age of developm ent of capitalism itself.The s ocia l .a nd po'litical education of the proletariat is on a cor­

r esponding scale. The world now mo ve s ' f rom 'day to day 'by a seriesof giga nt ic convulsiol}". Men have to th ink in terms of global solu t ions.It .is p r eci sely the char ac te r of ou r ,age land . the maturity of humanitytha t obliterates the opposi t ion between theory and practice, betweent he intellectual preoccup a t ions of t he "educated" . and of the masse s.All the great philosophicat concepts, from the nature of the physic ailuniverse (atomic en ergy) t hr oug h the st r uc tu r e and function of pro­ductive systems (fr ee enter prise, "socia lism " , or "commun ism " ) , thenat r e of government (the st ate versus the individual) to the destinyof man (can mankind s urvive? ) these are no longer "theory", but arein the m a rket-place, t ied t ogether so t ha t they ca nno t be sepa r a ted,matter s on which the daily lives of millions upon millions depend.

The unending murders, the de struction of peoples, the be stialpassi ons, the sadism , the cruelties a nd the ,!ust s, all the manifestationsof barba r ism, of the last th ir ty yea rs 'a r e unparalleled in .h isto r y. Butth is bar ba ri sm exis ts onl y because no th ing els e can s upp ress ther eadiness for sac ri fice, i the dem ocra ti c in stincts and creati ve power ofthe great masses of t he people.

The w orld revolution manife sts itself n ot .in t he Red Army but 'in Palestine. The violence in Palestine is only seconda rily Jewish. Itis an indication of the st age of development of class antagonisms ona world scale and of the s oci al temper of the working mass es every­where. The same iho ld s t rue of the events in Indonesia, in Indo-China,in India, ,Ch in a 'a nd 'Bur ma . ' T h ese t ell IDS what is the revolu t ionarypotentiality of t he pro'letar iat in 'Br it a in , F rance, the United Statesand Holland.

\

TheSurface of the IcebergE xp erience in the factories has sh own that it i s precisely funda­

me ntal sol uti ons that wo rkers are r ea dy to listen ' t o because funda­mental questions a r e posed all around them bo t h objectively a n d sub­j ect ively. Th e s ubj ect ive f a ctor, m an a s m a n and not ,a s the slave ofca pit al , is now emerginga:s th e decisi ve force in history and is organ­izing itself to cON·espond. Th e · b ourgeoisie in e ver y coun try , butp a r-ticule.rly in the U ni t ed States h a s seen into this a s f ar a s it is 'possible fo r an 'a lien class to see. Not only in highly organized inves­tigations and reports; bu t, in journals cost ing n ickels 'an d dimes a ndsold t o the proletariat in m illions, t he American .bourg eoiaie is sho ckedbeyon d measu r e ,at t he incredible a nd apparently senseless beh avior oft he Ame r ican p r oletariat. It confesses its f ea r that the p ro letaria t willn ever again sla ve at the assembly li ne in the old w ay, 'a nd ' that it issocial f rustrat ion , t he cramping of pe r sonality, of i ts "natural andacquired 'powers," the need for universali ty (not w ages and 'higherstandard of Iliving ) which a r e .ruin ing The p r oduct ivity of Iabor a n ddriving the proleta riat t o r epeated ma nifestat ions of h ostility to thesociety. The condition is p ermane n t. It is n ot F r en ch, .it is not Italia n ,it is no t J a panese, it -i s not Stalinist. It is proleta rian and soci a lis t ,it has been developi ng since 1934, it is crushed t o the ground on ly toleap f orward again, broader 'and deeper, wh ile the t raditional organ­izations scu r ry in t er r or be f or e it. 'I'omorn-ow It will be the U nitedStates, where the s ame type of mai s, mobilizat ion, h eaving out fromthe very depths of soc iet y w ill t ake p la ce. '

'What theproletar.ia t ha s shown so far .is only the :su r fa ce .of theIceberg. J UEtas t he Commune leapt a bo ve the le vel of Europeansoc iety, and t he 'Sovie t s in 1905 creat ed .a political form undreamt oreven by Lenin- so today the prole tariat has n ot yet entered into itsnew creative period .of political-economic organization. The p r oductionrelations and the social and rpolitical problems of 194;7 h~ve created

14

, ,

a need for solut ions far beyond the mod est beginning of Marx's day.This is the s ocial ba sis of the g ro wth of the Stalinist parties.

The Stalinist parties where thi s mo vement has taken concrete formare .not political organizations in the old sense of the term. Behindthe smoke-screen of democratic parliamentarism in France and Italy,they are soci a l org anizations. Tihey symbolize the most pfofou nd massrevolt a gainst cap ital that we h ave yet seen. They exercise a varyingbut vsubst a n t ial control in their own way over wh ole sections of thearmy, police, ba nks , product ion and distribution. They constitutea f orm of state power w it hin t he national s tate, d om in ating t he p riv­ate lives of citizens and the intellectual life of the country in allspheres. It a ppea r s a s Stalinism in F rance and Italy. It may a ppeara s an organization of the ·C.I. O. burea ucrac y in the United Stat estomorr ow. I t call s i tself Socia l-Democratic in J ·apan. But until theFourth I nt ernational r ecognize s these fo r mations f or what they a re,and dra ws f ro m them the full conclusions, draws the arrow to thehead as Ma rx drew it be f ore 1848, in 1864 and afterwards in 1871,a s Lenin dr ew it in 1905 and a ga in in 1917 , and as Trotsky drewit in 1938, then just so long will th e Fourth International r emainu nable to understand the m odern proletar iat an d i t s own hi stor ic al ,r ole .

(2) The Bourgeois and Counter-Revolutionary Character of theStalinist Parties

Shachtman attacks Trotsky's analysis of- the Stalinist parties. Hedi sco vers ' t hat they ' a r e totalitarian parties. This theory is the mo stfooli sh of all Shachtman's theori es . But the more Germain writes in"defense" of T r otsky's idea s the clearer it becomes tha t Germaindo es not even know what he is "defending."

T rotsky had a world con ception. H e never operated from the basi sof Stalinism. When he said that t he Fourth International would beleading millions at the end of t he war or during t he po st-war, he wasno t "predicting," nor was he being "optimistic." Trotsky, st rictl y 'scient ific, ba sed hi s analysis on the bou r geois crisi s driving the Stal­inist par t ies to their national bourgeois ies. He saw' a repetition on ahigher sca le of 1914.

It was the most serious of all his errors." T'his is why he foresawat a certain st a ge the politi cal ' isol ation of St al inist Ru ssia , and theemerg ence of the r ev olutionary ma sses u nder the banner of the FourthInternational. Political isolation on t he one hand, the revolutionarymasses on t he other, were the alg ebraic forces which would pressureinto action ' the incipient revolutionary fo rces inside Russia. But therevolu ti on a r y fo rces , by . fo rce or fra ud, were capt u r ed by Stalinism.It is a t thi s poin t that the world con ception split open . It is just herethat the wh ole world picture is different from wh at Trotsky envisagedand has pr ofoundly affected all mankind and the fortune s of theFourth Inter national.

Trotsky be lieved that the traditional national I bourgeoisi es couldstill offer a cus h ion of super-profits to Stalini sm. I Here are hi s ownwords.

"Ten years ago it was predicted that the theory of so cialism inone countr y must inevitably lead to the gr owth of nationalist tenden­cies in the sec t ions of the Comintern. This prediction has become anobvious fact. But until recently, the chauvinism of the French, British,Belgian, Czechoslovak, American and other communist parties seemedto be, and to a certain extent, wa s, a refracted image of the interestsof Soviet diplomacy ('the defense of the U.S.S.R.'). Today, we canpredict with assurance the r inception of a new st a ge. The growth of

. • It hae a l<mg iIloIld d"'I€'Ply irustruc tive hi s torv,

15

imperialist antagonisms, the obvious proximity of the war danger andthe eq ually obvious iso lation of the U.S .S.R. must unavoidablystrengthen the centrifugal nation ali s t t endencies within the Comintern,E ach one of its sections will begin to evo lve a patriotic policy On itsown account. Stalin has reconciled the com munis t parties of imperial­ist democra cies with their national bourgeoisies. This stage has nowbeen passed. The Bonapartist procurer has played his role. Henceforththe communo-chauvinists will have to worry about their own hideswhose interests by no means always coincide with the 'defense of th~U. S.S.R.' . . .

"Fifteen years of uninte r rupted purges, degradation and corrup­tion have brought the bureaucracy of the ex-Comintern to such a de­gree of de moralization that it has become able and anxious to openlytake into its hands the banner of socia l-pa t r iotism . . .

"The ruling Moscow clique will reap the just fruits of fifteenyears' prostitution . of the Comintern." ("A Fresh Lesson," New Inter -national, Dec. 1938 , pp. 363-4.) .

. It was po ssible to make Trotsky's mistake in 1940. No one seri ouslychallenged the st ri c tl y economic analy sis on which he based his expec­tations. But what is orie to say of a writer in 1947, who with t hewhole experience, the hard fa cts of Stalinism between 1940 and 1947behind him, proceeds to make it again and then puts this forwarda s Trotskyism?

The Repudiation of the National State

It is clear that we face a 'ser ious problem. It is not to be solved. by analysi s of "bureaucracies'Ybut by analysts of/capital.

. The economic program of the Fasci st party of Germany willteach us much. The program was not the expansion of . finance-capital

..in the classic manner but the integration of whole economies, alltheir capital and all their labor, into one solid continental bloc toserve the interests of capita l accumulation, political mobilization,strategic attack and defense. How organic to/the contemporary worldis this movement to break the old national chains is proved by theexample of Italy, the ally, and France, the enemy of Nazism. In thelast stages Italian Fascism became the direct agent of German capitalin Italy. P etain and Laval who had long dreamt · of a coordinatedFrench and German capital hesitated before and during 1940, butimmediately after the June defeat recognized the historic process.

This is the bourgeois movement. What Trotsky failed to see, butwhat we have no excuse for f a ili ng to see, is that such is the disintegra­tion of capitalism, that the proletarian parties even though counter­r evolut ionar y, can no longer pay allegiance to the old national bound­aries. Capitalism- had neither economic basi s nor ideology nor futuret o win the Stalinist leaderships and the Stalinist cadres to nationalallegiance. But breaking with the national st a te and all the phenomenaof capitalism and unable to t urn to t he "latent socialism" in themasse s as Lenin did in 1917, they held tightly to another pole ofpower, the Stalinist state and the Red Army.

Th e Stalinist parties do not aim at in depe ndent Stalinistst a t es. Th ey do not, as the pre-1914 Shachtman likes to think, aim ,at doing 'for themselves in France what the Russian CommunistParty had done in 1917. The Stalinists understand the movement oft he centralization of 'ca pit a l: In France and Italy they aim at theincorporation of these countries as sa t ell it es with greater or lesserfreedom into one coordinated European syndica t e. They may be forcedto do otherwise but that is their aim.

"All democracy," sa ys Lenin, "like every superst ruct ure in general,(which is inevitable until classe s have been abolished, u ntil classless

16

~ociety has been created) in the la st analysis serves production andIn the la st analysis is determined by the produc tion relations preva il­ing in a ' given society." Now that European F ascism is destroyed,Stalinism .in various stages of development is t he organic politicalsuperstructure of the day. I r r espect ive of t he will and consciousnessof men it serves or seeks to serve production. But it is capitalist pro­duction, which at the present stage .can live only by the suppressionof those mill ions whose very joining of the Communist Party ' butpartially ex presses their proletarian determination to remove them-

, selves forevermore f rom wage slavery which is precisely what Stalin­ism has in store for them. The concept of . abolishing wage slaverywould transform Stalinism into a revolutionary organization de­pending on mass force. That they cannot unloose without destroyingthemselves. They are therefore balanced ' between the fundamentalantagonisms of the capital-labor r elation on a razor's edge, combin­mg the extreme development of capital-already slipping f rom thehands of the bourgeoisie--and the proletariat, al so slipping out of theclutches of the bourgeoisie.

Stalinism-the Agent of State-Capital' E ngels would have recognized Stalinism at once. In hi s personal '

su pplement to Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, he wrote:"Partial recognition of the socia l character of the productive

forces forced upon the capitalists themselves. Taking over the greatin stitutions for production and communication first by joint-stockcompanies, later on by trusts, then by the State." .

The political agency of this la st is Stalinism and it will do itwith or without the bourgeoisie but so f ar always with the Red Army.

"The bourgeoisie is demonstrated to be a superfluous class. AlI itssocial functions are now performed by salaried employees."

But Engels did not end there. He cont inues :"Proletarian Revolution-Solution of the contradiction." (note

that, Comrade Germain, and note what fo llows.) "The proletariatseizes the public power, and by me ans of this transforms the soc ializedmeans of production, slipping from the hands of the bourgeoisie,into public property. By this act, the proletariat frees the means ofproduction from the charact er of capital they have thus far borne,and gives their socia lized character complete freedom to work itselfout. Socialized production upon a predetermined plan become s hence­forth po ssible."

The leader sh ip and policies of the Communist Parti es thereforecan be summed up as the-political form corresponding to t he finalform of capitalism, st at e capit a lis m, whi ch involves, not the expansionof finance-capital in the old way, but the incorporation of individualeconomies within powerful centralized economies operating on a con­t inent a l scale. These partie s are as organically related to capit alis min this st age of its development as was the Second International t o theclassic f'ina nce-caprtali sm of Leni n.

We understand -t hese parties best by realizing that even if Stal­inist Ru ssia had' ne ver ex is ted and the proletarian revolution had beendelayed, some such political formation as the Stalinist parties wouldhave appeared.

The Stalinist lead erships a re a further st age of develop ment ofMenshevism in 1917. T he Mensheviks trembled before the "anarchy"of t he revolutionary fervor ' of the masses and fear of the inevitableinte r vent ion, Th e Stalinist lead er s in F rance and Italy t r emble beforet he same phenomena infinitely mult ip lied. Hi storically, in appearance,subject ively, they suppor t the Kremlin a nd therefore they op pose theprolet a r ian revolution. But Marx never t ired of poin ti ng out howoften the appearance of things contradic ted their esse nce. The log ical

17

analysis of the Stalinists is the exact opposite of the appearance, i.e., '.t heir hi storical origin ' and' subjective motivati.;... :: ~ is because they-despa ir ed of, fear and oppose the tremendous leap in the dark ofthe proletarian ' revolution that they attach them selves like leechesto the tangible power of the Kremlin.

Germain, enclosed in th e t hlolory of power, prestige and ' r evenuesfor the Stalinist bureaucracy in Prance, just a s he. is enclosed in thetheory of power, prestige and r eve nues in Russia, cannot g rasp thefundamental movem ent. .

It is the Class s t r uggle which is deci sive for t he policy of Stalin­ism. If the irreparable bankruptcy of capital drives the Stalinist'leader ship to break with the nat iona l st a t e and look to an establishedpo wer, it is the d ri ving force of the mass m ovement which keepsthem there. It is only wh ere t here is a comparatively f eebl e masssuppor t that the subject ive deci sion is theirs. Bu t with the violent re­jection by the masses of bourgeois socie ty and the complete bank­ruptcy of the national state and the national ec on omy , the St alin is tleadership, unable t o turn to the m a sses, must look el sewhere. Theyare held to the Kremlin by as t ight a socia l bond as held t he reform­ists to the bourgeois ie. They are t errorized first by the revolu t ion arymasse s and only af ter war ds by the ' G.P.V.

The Petty-Bourgeoisie, Not the Kremlin

Impri so ned in h is anal ysi s of the Stalinist bureaucracy, Germaindoes not understand . the corruption of the Stalin ist parties. It i s onlysuperf icia ll y a \ St ali nist bureaucratic cor ruption. It is a class corru p­tion, corruption by the petty-bo urgeoisie.

In Left-Wing Communism, Lenin , analyzing the international.sig nif ica nce of the Russi an Revolution, in sisted that an exact ana ly sisin each country of the po sition of the petty-bourgeoisi e be tween th ebourgeoi sie and the proletariat wa s dec isive for the clarification ofr evolutionary politics. In the ear ly years the .pet t y-bour geoisie hadcontributed su bstan t iall y to the parliamentary corruption of t h eSecond International. .

The 'St alinis t s use t he pe tty-bourg eoisie who turn to it t o corruptthe proletariat. These petty-bourgeois element s? r evolutionized , a r eready to expropriate the national bourg eoisi e, and "plan the economy."But their conception of pl anning is the administration by themselvesof the productive fo rces, includin g the proletariat. 'The prejudices andfears of intennediate classes h ave been used by frightened leadersin every r ev olution t o corrupt an d demoralize t he vangu ard andst reng th en the rearguard against it . Nothing but the r evolutionarymovement of the proletarian m a sses will draw the petty-bour g eoisieto it, genuinely revolutionize it and leave thousands of b ureaucratswit hout a medium for corruption.

Thus, while not in a ny way minimizing the subjecti ve feat ur esof the Stalinist bureaucracies in France or Ital y and the origin ofth eir pract ices, we must firs t show that thei r corruption is funda­mentally bou rg eois, base d 'upon bou rgeois f ea r s, a bourgeoi s economicsolu tion of eco nomic 'pr oblem s and a bourgeois respo nse to the ac uteclass r elation s in the country.

The Errors of Munis and GermainOnce t he con trad ict{on ' between the proletar ian and the bo urgeois

con t ent .of the Stalinist Parties is g r aspe d, political policy f low s fromit. If it was necessar y t o r a is e the slogan of the Social-Demo cr acyt o power, t hen with a ll the m ore u r g ency it is ' n ecessa r y t o rai set he slogan of t he Communist Part y t o power. But Stalinism ha sa lready shown t hat it will strip capital of every cove r in g , in cludipgprivate property, in order to m aintain wage-labor, the pr olet a r ia t

18

as proletariat,' the fundamental condition of capitalist slavery. Abso­lutely unable to .make the leap that Lenin made in 1917, it is there­fo.re compelled in its own ' r -ight to become even more deeply thequintessential expression of capitalist barbarism. In the closest inter­penetration with this slogan therefore m ust be posed the completereorganization of society, soviets, factory committees, preparationfor the seizure of power, tearing to pieces of the old social order,abolition 'of the bourgeois state, "a boli t ion . of the bourgeois army,arming of all the ab le -bodied population, workers' control of pro­duction, peoples' courts. So acute are the contradictions of capitalistsociety that the slogan without the program concretely presented fort he f ull revolutionary trarfsformationof society is a betrayal of themasses. The revolutionary program without the slogan is a denial of­that mobilization for the socia l overturn which the Communist /Partiesrepresent.

At Ii la t er st a ge the masses may ' create other organizations oftheir own, soviets or nation-wide anti-Stalinist factory committees. 'When t hey do, a new sit ua t ion arises. But the very socia l characterof the Stalinist parties and the objective ac uteness of the socialrelations creates the po ssibilities of vast organized splits in-thatparty, impossib le in the old days when these parties were merelypolitical parties. It is the presence of a revolutionary program andnot mere agitation about wages which can accelerate, clarify anclso lidify t hese.

The contradiction contained in the very term critical supportbecomes al tered by the objective ' conditions. The support becomesmerely a basi s for the cr it icism , t he mercil ess ex posu re of Stalinismand the revolutionary ' release of the masse s which alone can over­come it.

Munis confuse s the Stalinist parties in Western E urope with .the Stalinist parties in Eastern Europe. H e opposes the slogan ofthe Communist Party to power in France because, according to him,the Stalinist P a r t ies immediately set out to de stroy the power oft he proletariat. The de struction of t he self -acting ·organs of t hep rolet a r ia t is a matter of the relationship of forces, national andinternabional, at a gi ven moment. In 1917, the Bol shevik Party first.su ppor t ed the slogan of the Soviets to power; then came to the con­clusion that the Soviets had gone completely over to the government,and decided that the revolution would have to be made against theSoviets; and finally, came to the conclusion that thi s judgment wasmi staken and returned to the policy of making the revolution throughthe Soviets. A Bol shevik party that cannot in ' theory' apply thisrevolutionary flexibility will be s wamped in the always violent oscilla­tions of'the revolu.tionarv st r ug gle for power. Anyp'olicy based u ponthe conception that Stalinism can at will de stroy the revolutionaryproletariat, is a denial of the premises of t he proletarian revolutionitself. Munis' policy is to be entirely. rejected. .

Munis - takes it for granted that the Communist Party in powerwill automatically mean the d estruction of the proletariat a n d re­p.udiates the sl oga n for Western Europe as well as for Eastern. ButGermain who at tacks Munis st icks t o the slogan in Eastern Europe.where the Communist P a rty is not only t he organizer of a bourgeoispo lice-state but is the unashamed agent of a foreign power. Worsestill, Germain has now begun t o an alyz e "the level of consciousness"and of "organ ization" of the proletariat in a manner which, H 'he weretaken .seriously, would make his use of the slogan a su ici da l adventure.How can "'h e correct Murris? .Sh a cht m a n hopes for a good long"democratic interlude" where evreyone would be able to talk thematter out democra tically. .

The In ternationa l should stop and ,ponder what this means. It is

19

y

not differences of views but lack of clarity which causes confusion. Itis lack of a firm guiding line from the leadership, the major'ity, a r oun dwhich differing tendencies can align themselves, that generates centri­fugal tendencies. The r esponsibjlity for this lies entirely on Germainand those who think like him. And none of the crimes of Shachtmans h ould prevent Ge.rmain being brought to book for the superficialityand falseness of his analysis of the Stalinist parties.

(e) The Nature of the Party 1947The s elf -m obili za t ion of the masse s is the dominating social and

polit.ical vfeatu.re of our age. Now that we see it in s uff icien t ly con­crete manifestation, it is po ssible to link these manifestations tothe recent historical past and draw st r a t eg ic conclusions for t he future., 'Th e old divisions between the economic management of production, -the social leadership ' of societ y, and the political !party-traditionalin the bourgeois national st at e and reflection of the capitalistic divisionof ' la bor , are doom ed . The classe s r-ecogn-ize the need for a newsocial organization and the response 'is the modern party. Yesterdaythe national state u se d the party. Today, to meet the changes, internaland external, the party u ses the national state.

Hitler in 1930 declared:"iI replace the s imu.la cr um of bourgeois patriotism iby the"national

solida r it y of my party and the s im ulac r um of /Marxian s ocialism bythe social justice of the same party. Whil« parIiamenbary Germanyfalls in ruins, a new Germany is being born."

He r ecognized the modern political party tas a new so cia l forma­t ion, and his efforts ,as an expres sion of it. The genius of Lenin, nour­ished by the needs of Russia, 'an t icipa t ed a s -a con scious organized ac­tivity, what is now turning out to be the necessity of the socia l s t r uc­ture.

Such 't remendous socia l expressions can only aeise f.rom profoundeconomic changes and needs, which a r e concentrated in the statifica ­t ion of modern production. A s the Johnson-Forest t endency st a ted inits :Resolut ion on the International ~Situation (April 27, 1946):

The Statification of Production" In France and Britain any movement of the masses brings them

immediately into direct conflict with their own Ieaders a s !rule r s ordirect representatives of the government. 'Th e s imp le st of immediatedemands concerriing the high cost of living, of the right to st r ike be­come questions of state policy arid continually pose before -the workersthe fundamental question ' of st a te power. Thus, the social st r u ct ur eof state ,p ower 'in st a t if ied production places the workers in a situationwhere any determined struggle compel s them t o face the problemof creating their own organization in order to Ibr ing pressure upon,and if n ecessary, to 'b r eak t he power of the labor Ieadenship as virtualfunctionaries of the existing g ove r nm ent ."Statlficatlon and Bo urgeois Democracy ,

"The .strugg le for demo cracy, particularly in the advanced coun­tries, is no longer the st r uggle for t he extension of papular r,i,ghts ..."Statification of 'P r od uct ion- The Ideological Struggle

"Today, :wh en t he ,p r olet a r ia t s a ys democracy, it means above all,not bourgeois d emocracy .. . Its sociaLconcep t s a re dominated by theidea that the catastrophes of m odern society are caused by the 'pl' iva teownership of the means of production . The neces sity that these betaken away from the m onopoli sts "an d be .r etu r n ed to the nation to :beplanned for the g ood of .all ha s now a chieved the 'fixity of a 'p opu la rprejudice.' This is one of the gr eatest advances ev er made by humanconsciousness 'bot h in its implicit r ejection of the concept of class di s-

20

tinction and in the scores of millions who hold it."Driven by the economic and soci a l transformations {arid the

p sychological responses engendered by these), the oppressed classesturn .a wa y f'rom vt he old political f or ms and seek to encompass theneed of theall-embracing s t a t if ied production by an all-embracingorganization. History is and will 'be inexhaustible in its combinations.Sovi ets and the mass 'p,a r t y may .a pp ea r together or in combined !forms.The new content constantly appears i n old forms. According toT rotsky, it was not until the Bo lsheviks ihad to di s solve the ConstituentA ssembly in 1918 that the 'con ce p t of proletar-ian democracy becameclear to Lenin. But the proletariat and the petty-bourgeoisie havealready sho wn enough to warn 'u s that, despite the inevitable defeats,advances a n d r etr eats" w e are in a new stage of mass mobilization.

In -th e light . of the above, a ll the proponents of the theory of thebackwardn ess of .t he modern proletariat sh ow nothing but their back­w ardness. They are completely in capable of analyzing' the actions ofthe proleta riat as revolutionary manif estations of the present stage ofthe capital-labor relation, i .e., s t a t if 'icat ion of production. For petty­bourgeoi si e and proleta.riat the m odern par t y is not a political partyf or voting . It is a s ocia l organization for action-a response to ob­j ective a n d psych ological n eeds. T'he American proletariat may notforma party at -.a ll u ntil it f eels t he n eed f or creatiing a party of thiskin d. It will be political only in the formal sense but its appearancew ill sign if y a r ea diness to ' break the , old society entirely to pieces.It is not on ly 'Sh achtman who d oes n ot understand this. Germainpreaches an abstra ct r evolutionism, attacks Shachtrnan w ith a lot ofwords, and then in J uly, 1947, 'in f or ms us that the post-war proletar­iat s t a r t ed "from a m uch lower le vel of consciousness and organiza­tion th an t hat of 1 918." This is monstrou sly false, a direct reversalof the objective t r uth, and the r esult of comp lete mi sunderstandingof the Mar xi st method. .

The or igin of this retr ogression is the same a s Shachtman's,Germa-in sees the iproletariat t oo m u ch f r om rabo ve , in its relation tothe Stalinist parties and n ot s u fficien t ly in its response to the capital­labor relation. And thi s (also like Shachman ) he practices becausehis basic theoretical con cep t ions a re .gove r ned by the t heor y o!f thedegenerated Workers State arid all -th a t this implies. The theory o'i.the degenerated Workers State 'im plie s the theory of the degenerated"'Workers. But never by one comma did 'I'rotsky govern his genet-adanalysi s by concepts of thi s kind,and we sh all pursue it wherever itappears. Germain's "Trotskyism" is his own misconception and mis­appropriation of certain of Trotsky's ideas, and the application ofthem in a manner and rn spheres alien to Bolshevik analysis .

The New Par iries and t he Old Slogans

From t his concept of the proletariat we can d raw certain politicalconclusions : .

1) We ca n s~e in a new light the full .sigrri f ica nce of Trotsky'saudacious use of the p ropaganda va nd agitation for the formation of

I 13. Labor P arty in the United States . With the tremendous self-mobili­zation of the masses' which 'he 'a n t i-cipa ted, he infused the slogan withthe full r evolutionary content, -exactly the same procedure thatLenin followed in his advocacy of t h e Constituent Assembly during1917. The driving mass movement, if 'it were powerful enough, wo uldin action .sl ough off the reformist shell of the slogan, aided as always,by the quit e unacademic education of the counter-revolution. This wasT-rotsky's con cep ti on of the Labor Party.slogan. The principle acquiresa burning actuality. The "consciousness" of the masses t oda y is noguide to the revolutionary violence of their explosion tomorrow and st illl es s a guide to the millions who rush to create the new .soci a l forma-

21

t ions, Slogans like N.ational Liberation, the Constituent :Assembly,and nationalization of industry (a s logan repudiated illy the ThirdCongress) acquire the same, no less and no more, significance thant he Labor Party slogan in the United States.

2) With a clear conception of what the revolutionary massesmean ,by a party the whole conception of the role of the BolshevikParty, Le ., of the Fourth In t er n a t iona l in the concrete circumstances,does not :na r row but expands. The rise of 'the mass movement raiseswith it the 'r ole of the Bols-hevik Party. Every Bolshevik becomes wiha tTrotsky warned in 1940 that he-not m erely the apparatus-s-rmistbecome, an officer in the proletarian army. The t heoretical range, thepractical political capa-city, the revolutionary dynamism, th~_ discipline,the cohe sion, 'a r e needed not so much to meet the offensive of thebo urgeoisie, as was the fate of a party based upon the s m a ll Russianproletariat. It is needed to me et the offensive of the .p r olet a ria t . Sub­jectiveand objective move t owards fusion. Every revolutiona-ry unitof "the subjective factor" be comes 'a n objective unit for the revolu­tionary , preparation 'a n d then a s a rallying 'cen ter for scores andperhaps hundreds of proletarians on the road to proletarian democracy.

This is the problem in Britain. The Labor Party is a party ofthe old .k ind, It is s t r a ng ling the new Britrsh proletariat. The ad­vanced worker s therefore either break out in sudden wildcat s t r ikes

, or face the government in. .impotent but implacable hostility. At acertain st ag e the proletariat will transform or fuse, but somehowtotally r eo r ganize in the modern se nse its organizations to meet theneeds and sa t isf y the de sires fo r whichvtha present Labor Party and

"th e union s are totally unfitted. To st im ula t e, observe and develop thisand nothi ng el se but thi s is the main task of the revolutionary van­guard in Britain. But to ca rry o ut this policy demands a clear con­ception of the origin and destiny of the social movement of the pro­letariat wh ich is devel-oping before our eyes.

3) At this stage of st a t if ication , sa ys Engles, the proletariatseizes the public power. 'T hese mass rushes to the party a r e the formwhereby the proletariat gi rds itself t o se ize the public p owe r andthereby beg in the withering aw ay of the st at e. But the _defense of the

#tatified production aaai n«: the p r oletariat involves a similar, mas'smobilization or organization . T he Co mm unist Party of Russia , is s ucha mass mobilization. In its completed fo rm it is not a proletarianparty at al l. In it the razor-sharp capital-labor contradiction thatexists ihet ween the proletariat and the Stal inist .leaderships in side. the ,parties of 'Western Europe has been r esolved entirely at the expenseof the proletariat and in f avor of statc-ca pit a l. The motive force ofthe Communist Parties in W est ern Europe is the attack on capital.The motive force of the Communist Party of Ru ssia is the defense ofcapital in its present form-state-capital. Thus they are exactopposites . For Ger ma in and Shachtman this organic di stinction doea ­notexist because they have continually evaded answering even t othemselves what Engels meant by state-capitalism .

22

Chapter II State Capitalism

I

"Tn t he tru8'ts·, ftreedom of competition c hanges into its velI"y o pp osite----'intom o nopoly; Hin d too p.rodu ctJion- w ithou t a rry d e finite p13.'n o f cap.iWist 8Ocl>etycaplftll lat'eis to t.he produc ti'on upo n ja d efin ite plan of the i nvading socialist s ocie t y:'- ENGELS, Socialism, S ci entific and Utopian

{a} The Revolution Thirty Years AfterThe s t at e in S tate and Revolution is the st a t e of state-capitalism.

In 1923, Lenin, ne ar the end of his w orking life, coul d sa y : "When­ever I wrote a bout the N ew Economic Policy I a lway s quoted t hearticle on st a t e-capitalism which I wrot e in 191 8." In the articlereferred t o (note t he date, 1918 ) Lenin sa id ca tego rically that frompetty-bourgeois ca pit a li sm "it is on e and the sa me r oad t hat lea ds .. .to large-scale state-capit a lism and to socia lism, through one a nd thesame intennediar y stat ion called 'national a ccount ing and control ofproduction and distr ibution.' T hose wh o fa il to understand t his arecommitting an u npardonable m istake in economics ." In 1916 Leninin Imper ia lism, a popular outline, did not g o beyond plain m onopolyca pi tali sm., He , was carefu l to p oint out the di f fi culties of capitali stpl annin g by tru st s. By 1917, he no ted in m anyplaces the r a pid a c­cel eration t o s tate-ca pi talism and in Sta te and Revolution h e modifiedhi s conception of plannin g. By October he moved st ill further anddeclared that the im perialis t state could orga nise product ion "accor d­ing to a general plan ."

Trotsky, under the infl u ence of th e Russian experience , attacker!t he id ea of national ac coun t ing and contro l by the ca pita li st stat e.I n . t he f ew pa ges devoted t o state-capitalis m in T he Revolu tionBe trayed, he wa s careful, h owever , t o leave the theoretica l p ossibilityopen. But Trot sk y a t a ny rate did not live to see contemporaryP oland, Yugo slavi a and Czechoslovakia ; Th e old argument u sed t obe t hat there w a s a 'qu a li t a t ive differ ence between the most advancedstatification b y t h e bo urgeoisie and the stat e property of Russiaachieved and achievable only by socia l r evolution. Th e argumentused t o be tha t bec ause of the antagoni sms of p r ivate ownership,t he capit a lists could no t pl an. But today in E ast ern Europe a ll thebasic indu stries are in t he hands -of the state. ' Ge rmain n ow givesa motley variety of r idicu lous reasons why plan nin g w ill be impos­sible in Yug osl avia , Czechoslovakia and Poland. They a r e al ready

-a mill-stone around h is neck. For Yugoslavia h a s publish eddts planand it is modelled on the -b lu epri nt of Stalin.

Behind a ll t he evasions of all that Marx, Engels and Lenin saidon state-capitalism, behind t he evasions of the Yugoslavian reality,so hum iliating t o contemplate, is h idden a de sp erate f ear that sho uldthe bourg eoisie or, for the sake of argu ment, any other agency, ho ldall the capital in it s hands, then it would be po ssible to , " r a ise theleve l of t he p r oductive forces ." Then the pr olet a ri a t would not bethe gravedigger of capitalism . Then Ma rxism would be Utopia. It isin this .t heor et ica l g r aveya r d that the bureaucr atic coll ectivist s dancetheir wi t ch es' dance.

The Proleta riat as Economi c ForceThe history ,of Stalin is t Russia has de monst rated in life that

t h e on ly solu t ion to th e basic antagonism of capitalism , on which restall other a n tagonisms, is the emancipat ion of la bor. The proletariatis t he greatest of a ll productiv e forces . It is its creative power whicha lone can raise the productivity of labor a nd establish societ y onnew foundations. It is precisely the necessity t o su ppr ess this un­p a rallele d economic f orce which is t he basis of t otalita ria nism -

Germain will no t listen to us- then maybe he will li sten t o t h is :

23

"Democracy is a form of st a te . . . at. a certain s t a ge in the dev lop­ment of democracy, it first rallies the proletariat as a revolutionaryclass against capitalism, and gives it the opport unity to c sh, tosmash to atoms, to wipe off the face of the earth the bourgeois,even the republican bourgeois, s t a t e machine, the standing army,the police and bureaucracy; to subst it u t e for all this a more demo­cratic, but s t ill a state machine in the sh ape of the armed masses ofworkers who become transformed into a universal peopl e's militia.

" Here 'quant it y is transformed into quality' : s uch , a degree ofdem ocr a cy is connected with overstepping t he boundaries of bo ur­geois society, with the beginning of its socialist reconstruction. If,indeed, all take . part in the a dmin ist r a t ion of the state, capit a li smca nnot retain its h old. The development of capitalism, in turn, itselfcreates the pre requisites that enable indeed 'all' to take par t in theadministration of the s t a t e. Some of these prerequisites are: universalliteracy, already achieved in most of the advanced capitalist countries,then the 'training and di sciplining' of millions , of workers by thehuge, complex a nd socia lised apparatus of the po st-office, the rail­ways, the big factories, larg e- scale commerce, banking; etc., etc."( Sel ected Works, -ver. YII, p. 91.)

We hope,but we doubt very much, that this is clear to you,Comrade Germain. The universal literacy, the training, disciplining,etc., t hese are t he new eco no m ic fo rces . Do you doubt it? T hen read on .

" W it h such econom ic prerequisites it is quite possible, immediately,overnight, afte r the overthrow of the capitalists and bureaucrats, t osupersede them in ,t he control of production and di stribution, in thework of keeping a ccount of labour and its products by the a r medworker s , by the whole of t he a r med population."

All the em phases are Len in 's . Is it any wonder t ha t Germain her etakes refuge in a n impenetra ble s ile nce, a silence as deep a s h issilence on th e state-ca pitalism of E n gel s ? H er e is Lenin again.

"To elucidate the que stion st ill m ore, let us f irs t of all t ake them ost conc rete exam ple o f st a t e-capit a lis m. E verybody kn ows wh a tthis example is . It "is Germa n y. Here we h a ve 'the last w ord ' inmoder n la r g e-sca le capitalist techniq ue a nd pla nned or g a ni sation ,subordinated to Junker-bourgeoi s imperialism, Cross ' out t he w ords initalics , a nd, in pl a ce of the m ilit arist, Junker-bourgeois imperialiststate, put a s tate, bu t of a di f f er ent socia l t yp e, of a diff erent classcontent-s-a Soviet , that is , a p r olet a ri a n s tat e, ari d yo u will h ave t hesum total of the con diti on s necessary for socia lism." ( Selected Works,Vol . YII, pp . 364-5.) ,

Lenin saw to t he last 'inch the cla ss and human difference in pr o­duct ion by the bou r g eois r evolu tio n and by t he p ro letarian revolution .

"The positi ve, or cr eative wor k of organis ing the new societ ywas carried out by t he pro per ty-own ing bour geois m ino r it y of thepop u la t ion. And the latter ca r ried out t his task r ela t ive ly easily, no t ­withst a ndi ng the resi stance of the wor ke rs and t he poo rest peasant snot 011 1~' be cause the resi stance of t he masse s that were exploitedby" ca p it a l was then ext remely we a k ow in g t o thei r sca t t er ed ~h31r­acter and ignorance, bu t also be cause t he f undamenta l or g am sm gf or ce of ari a rc h icall y-con strucj cd capita lis t society is t ho spontaneou slyexpandi ng national and int er nat io nal market ."

Today the worker s a re no long er i gnorant. T he wor ld-m a r ke t isin ch a os. What must be subs ti t uted 'I '

"In ' every socialis t revolution-and consequent ly in the socia lis trevolution in Russia which we st arted 011 November 7 (October 25),1917- t he p rincipal task of the proletariat, and of the poorest peas­antry which it leads, is the p ositiv e , or creative work of set t ing u pan extremely intricate and subt le system of new organisational rela­tionships ex tending" to the planned production and di stribution of the

2 4

s required for the existence of tens of millions of people. Suchvolution can be su ccessf ully carried ou t only if the majority of

the populaticn, and primarily the majority of the toilers, display'm de pend en t historical creative s p ir it ." (Selected Works, Vol. VII).

Ethics or EconomicsNote the words "intricate and s ub t le system of new organisa­

tional · relationships." The proletariat and the proletariat alone canreor ganize the s ocia l relations of labor. The average Americanw orker laughs at the boasted efficiency of American production.Once h is mental subordination is de stroyed, .h e can point out meansand ways of increasing the productivity of labor which are impos­s ib le in the relation between exploited, hounded, degraded, antagon­istic labor and the . oppressive and merciless super v ision which iscapital. ~

Not 'in Marx's theories b u t in lif e, this, with- its su perst r u ct u r a lrelation s, is the problem of the day, a nd with it mankind comes ofa ge. Germain in 1947 f ears t h a t the t ransformation of p rivateproperty int o s t a t e -p r op er t y, with the sit u a t ion of the worker un­changed, is a s olu t ion t o the econom ic problems of s ociety. It isthis that blinds him 't o the full sign if ica n ce of the r evolutionarymass movement -th a t h a s been develop ing under his e yes. H e ca nnotm eet .i t , a naly ze it, under stand it a nd help it to understand itself. Thew orkers control of production is the 'only emancipation of lab or, theonly reorganizat ion of so ci et y on a n ew productive basis. Historywill r ecord that nowhere w a s thi s idea f ought more bitterly than inthe revolu tion vanguar d it self. And this it d id because it h ad to defend-God hel p us!-th e revolu tronary a spect s of S tali n 's du al -chara cteredbure a ucra cy, not in 1940 but in 1947 ,

(b) The State Thirty Years AfterBut if t he revolu t ion h as thus m atured thirty ye a r s aft.ar 1917,

so h as t:,e counter-revolution. T he a chievemen t of st a te-ca p i t alism isat th'8 sa me time t he beginn ing of t he d isintegration of capitalism a sa so cia l system, a nd today we. ca n w a tch the process at a ll s t a g es ofd e vel opmen t . W e ihavea p er f ec t and con cret e example of it in S talin istR u ssia . Our analysis of S t alini st Russia,' incl uding t he v ictor y in ora r ou nd 1936 of t he cou nter -revolution over t he proletaria n state inRussia, can be found e lsewhere." Here w e are co ncerned w ith t h et h eo re t ica l con clu s ions for world development as a whole which mustbe drawn from the experience of Russia.

In t h e early s t a g es of ca pr t a li sm, the objective movemen t , i .e .,the expansion of surp lus v alue, and the d esi re f or prof it on t hepart of the ca p it a l ist s , the phenomenal ex p r ession of t h is obj ec t iv em ovement, coincide. The. ·ca p it a lis ts therefore, have a subjective inter­est in t h e syst em. Th e power of private capitali sts over th e soc ia lc on dit ion s of produ ction and t he power of capital a s a g en er a l social"l;ow er a r e on e and the sa me t h ing. Tdris is what is known a s p r iva teor free en terprise. And the s yst em ca n work beca u se it f i n ds in ita cl a s s of h u man b ein gs, in d ividuals who f reely represe n t i t . They .t a ke the l ead in t he st r-uggle for s ocial progress, the extensi on oftheir ow n democr atic r ight s and eve n the democratic r ig h t s of t h ep op u la tion a s a ,wh ole . .

With the .... incr ea si n g development of capital ism, however, the"

* Lnt.errial llulJ:emn of t he W!o"kcr .s P a.r-tv , Maa-ch 1 941 ; R e solution on theRus:sJi~n Que stion, O c uob or 1941; ·,'Ru s s:ia-A F'a s e is t S t arte. " New International,A p,r il . 1941; " Ru s sia a n d M a a-xt s m," N ew Internc\tional, Sept. 1 9 41; leAn A nalys iso f R us ai am Economy," N ew International, D ec • . 1 942, Ja:n. 1 94 3, F eb. 1943 : " lJ"heNlat u re of RusS!ilan EDooom'Y," New International, D ec . 1 9 4 6 , Jrol. 1 9 47; " After TeaY ears_ review of ~,otsky's Revolution B etrayed," New International, Oct, 1946.

/

Iaw of, value undergoes v iolen t and incessant revolution s'. A discove r

like atomic energy 'a lt e r s the v a lue com p osition of capital and t.hidisorder into all economies. " '. .

"To the extent that suc h revolutions in value :become ' acut andfrequent, the automatic nature of ·s elf -develop ing·v,a l u·e. make s itselffelt with the f orce o f {e lem en t a ry powers ' against the 'f or esi ght andcalculation s of the individual capita'list, the cou rse of normal sproduc ­tion becomes subject to abnormal specu la t ion , and the exi sten ce of theindividual capital s is endangered. These .per iodica l revolu t ions i nvalue, therefor e, prove that which they .a r e .alleged to r efute, namely,the i ndepen de n t nature of value in ' the 'form , o f capital a n d i ts in­crea sing independence in the ' c ourse of its de velop ment." ( Ca p.italV 01. II , p . 120.)

Capi t a l, as s tate-cap ital, is t he exac t reve rse of 'p la n ned . It isi ndepen dent a s never bef ore and r uns 'r iot . The d om in ating fo rce 'ofsociety becomes the'.obj ect ive m ovemen t o f . t he self -ex pa nsion of capita lwhich crushes everyt hi ng that s t an ds in its way. W hich capi t a lists orbureaucra t s can control t h is? R ussia sho ws anew that th ese are, a sMarx a nd E ngel s con t inually pointed out, t he target of it s destructivemalevolence. It destroys t hem.

"The con tradiction b etween capi tal . .a s a general socia l p ow erand as a p ower of priva t e capitalists ove r t he s ocia l con d itions · of

-p r odu ct ion d evelops in t o an ever m ore ir.reconc ilable clash, w h ichimplies t he dissolution of these .rela t ion s and the elaboration of theconditions of p r oduct ion in t o univei-sa l, common, s oci al c ondi t ions."( Capital, Vol. III, p. 310.) ,

The capi talis t is on ly the p ersonification of ca p it a l, 'a n d n ot onlys mall capitalists b u t a ll capi t al ist s lose a ll . righ t to existence beforet he sw ay or capital .a s t hi s strange, in de pe nd en t , elemental socialpower. I n rea/lity, i t i s t he nature of capital itself t o destroy capit a l­ists . It thr ows ou t sm all c a p it a lists, t h en one group of capitali sts ,( bhe Je ws ) then w ipes away practically .a whole capita li st class as inOerm an y, t ea r s whole se ct ions of them out of Poland, Y ug osla v ia ,Czech osl ovak ia . The t error of capital against the capitalists is onlyexc eeded by its t er r or a g ains t labor . Its h ighest peak is the incessantpur g es among the rulers o f R u ssia t hemselves. To continue to believet h a t thi s is ' not due to p roduction relations .is ·t o m ake these m enmasters o f their own fate and irrh uman monsters."

"I'he t er ror is root ed in the relations of production and the n eedt o control worker s. 'When the w or ke rs reach the st ag e that they aretoday, ·t hen the r el ations of p ro d u ction demand a terror which spread sthroug h 'a ll socie t y . It is b ecause of this,and not beca u se of tihewickedness of the Stalin ists a n d the Nazis, that t he m oder n barbar-ismi s t he m ost .ba r ba r ou:s hi story has ever seen . It is s uppr ess ion . of thedemocra cy of the modern masses, the mighties t of economic andsocial force s, which compels toahtarian savagery.

Idealism, Not Historica l Mate rialismTrotsky gave the motive po wer of the economy as t he "prestige,

power a nd revenues" of the burea ucracy . This is wrong in theor y a ndpractice. How do you measure prestige a nd po wer i n economic t erms?The proportionate r evenues of the bureaucracy a r e no more and in allprobability are much less than the r evenues of a ny ot her ruling class.

W ithm the categorie s of Marx ian political economy, it is the m a ­chinery, the indust rial plant, its need for constant expansion, it s r a pidob solescence and renewal in the com pet it ion on t he world-rnar ket-c--it isthis . (c-constant ca prta l ) t ha t dominates bo t h the wages (v- variablecapit a l ) and the surplus (s-s-sur plus value). Not man but capital r u les .How is it p ossible for Marx ist s today no t to see t ha t in R ussia it i s t he

* Sooner; or later. this q uestio n will ar-i s e,

26

ve for <!onst an t expansion, the d rive of capital for self-expansion,c0J.l1petit io n wi th United S t a t es capital, t he need to renew capit al

a ce rding to the law of value ; how is it possible not to see t hat this ist he eco~omic driving force of Stalinist economy and n ot prestige,power, and revenues? Today every po litician and econom ist governshi m sel f by t h is.

TJ:e r efusa l to recognize th is is beg in ning to stifle our movement .Ge rm a m * must say that social r e la t ions of production in Russia aresuperior to the productive relations of capitalism . Th is means " thewill and intelJigence" of m en are no longer sub or d ina t ed to t e objec­tive movement of production. They have risen super ior to it. That iswhat is meant by the capacity of the bureaucracy to pl an.

But this supposed advance, this fir st s te p in to the realm ,of free­dom, has resulted in the l!l0st horrible, the most de grading, the mostmonstrous tyranny mankind has ever known, and worst of a ll , a _tyranny that competes for world power, is n ow 'in Berlin and a ims a tt he Atlantic. A s long as Germain pe rsists in limiting its cr ime s to thesphere of consumption, he has to continue to say that the bureaucracyplans badly , it cheats, it di stributes u nequ a ll y. Its human capacitiesand human sen sib ili ties become social agencies. This is not even vulgar,far le s s hi storical materialism. It has a long history both in philosophyand political economy. It is idea lis m. Even before Marx, Hegel recog­nized thi s mode of thought and its political consequences.

The J oh ns on-F or es t t endency made this precise characterizationof Trotsky's position on Russia in 1941. Now in 1947 , as We see "t her esults of false t h eor y in ou r movement , we reaffirm our posit ion s. Foru s, jn'od uction in Russia is subject t o the la ws of the capitalist w orld­market. The bureaucracy is as subject ed to the basic laws of capita lismas is any capitalist class. All .the monstrosities of the Stalin ist societyare rooted 'm ,the' laws of the capital-labor relation which reach theirhighest ex pr ession in Russia. If not, then the road is open to subjec­tivism; the. interchanging of the dialectical role of party and m asses,exaggeration of the power of Stalinism in Russia and in WesternEur ope; inability to base t heory undeviat'mgly on the ob jective move­ment of the proletariat. From end to end our movement in varying butsubs t a nt ia l degrees, the process is at work. The theoretical r emedy isto kill it a t the primal root-tlhe production relations in the factoriesof Ru ssia.

Terror for Workers and for Rulers

" T he authority a ssum ed by the capi tali st iby :his personificationof capital in the d irect process of production, the socia l function per­form ed by him in his capacit y 'a s a manager and Tuler of production,i s essen t ia lly different f r om the authority exercised upon the basis ofproduction b y means of slaves, se rfs, etc."

Modern socral a u thority is the slave of capital."Upon the basis of capita:listproduction, the social chae-acter of

t he ir production im p r esses itself upon the m as s of direct producersa s a strict ly regulating authori ty and as a social mechanism of thelabor p r oce ss g raduated into a complete hierar chy. This authority is'ves t ed in its bearers only a s a personification of the r equiremen t s ofla bor s ta nd ing above the laborer. It is not vested in them in theircapacity as political or theoretical r u le r s, in the way that it u sed tobe u nd er former modes of production." (C a pital, Vol. III, p . 207) .

F or a period t he capitalistic auth or ity app ears t o b e se paratef.rom the .p ol itical, which 'in t er ve n es on ly per iodically, at first to helpin the relea se of constricting forc es (reform and r evolution) an.:.d later

• The absu-edttdes of Germain's p olitical econom y in r-egard to R ussda , t hecru dities o f his undec-conaump tlorclsm canmot d etn in u s h e r e . See A pp endi xa

27

by co unter-revolution to discipline the .a lw ays growing revolt of tproletariat, the revolt against the 'supp ression of what capitaliitself creates. In its latest stagescapital -as a regulating ,au t h or it yj' of 'the la bor process and particularly of socialized labor, .m ust bring thestate and a ll social relations and manifestations directly under itscontrol, BU,t the contradictionbetween the capitalistic productive forcesand the soc ial relations are not destroyed, they ca nnot even ibe s up:'p ressed yin the .deve loped stages of s t a te-ca p it a'lism . They are now, nolonger inherent,existing in essence.Tlhey take on reality, they appear.The antagonistic social relations, rela tions between peopl e, in Russiaa-re n ot s uppr ess ed. The relation ,becomes the a ctual daily stru g gleof the active antagonism driving' to its resolution, perpetual revolu­tion and counter-revolution. The mo dus vivendi of the economy canonly be political counter-revolution-the daily purges, the da ily de­struction and corruption of workers, workers organizations and ofmanagers. 'I'his is the national existence. The 'p oli t ica l s t r ug gle a ssumesthe f orm of the ,r u th less antagonism of p ro du ction. At a.cer-tain s t ag e,the .t r adit.ional functions 'a n d organization s of the s t a te , army, j udie­iary, admini stration cannot serve their purpose. Power rests in' thesecret police, Gestapo or N.K.V.D. The indus t ri a l reserve army a s­sumes the f orm of political prisoners. Political prisoners become theform of t he industrial reser ve army. Capital which, in Marx's words,came in t o the world dripping blood and dirt, now functions only )nbloo d. A nd a s this barbarism sp reads its shadow over Europe andA sia, and driven by its own logic; r eaches its tentacles out to the pro­let a r ia t of the world, Germain continues to r ep eat that this is thereg im e t r a nsition al -t o socia lis m , that. nationalized propery is progres- 's iv e, tha t this quintessence of socia l tyranny has its root in the st ru gg leof men over the di stribution of fo od and clothing. Thus, his analysts ofof Stalini st Russia today is the direct repudiation of what Marxstr uggled a ll his li fe to establish : t he objective basi s in productionrelation s of a ll the su bject ive manifestations of human evil.

Under st a t e-cap it a lism , the Russi an ,bur ea ucr acy is no "dual­character cd " hybrid , p r oduct of its r evolutionary origins and ca pit a l­ist dest ina t ion . It is the naked count e r-revolution. Trotsky's analy si si s that the growth 'of the bureaucracy and the power of the Staliniststate are du e to the st r u g g le over consumption, that the Stalinist statei s organized nine-tenths for s tea ling , that the coming revolution is nota socia l but a political revolution. All thi s cannot s t and repetitiontoday. The Stalinist s t ate is organized on the basis of capitalist pro­duction in the epoch of st ate-ca pit alism . The revolution will be pro­foundly socia l- a n economic revolution, the r elease of economic forces,the creative and productive f or ces of the proletariat. '

(c) The Communist Parties of Russia and EasternEurope

The -an a lys is - of the econom y defines the ruling party. The Rus­s ia n Com m unis t Party exists on the back s of the · defeated proletariat.

' B ut t he proletariat in Russia contains within itself the sam e explosivequalities a s the proletariat in Western civilization, subjectively moreso because of the experience of three revo lutions. The main purposeof the party , therefore, is to k eep the proletariat subjected to the pro­ce ss of capitalist production.

But suc h a process is no t achieved overnight. It was achievedand is maintained in Russ ia by the bloodiest, the m os t savage, a ndthe most cold-blooded counter-revolution in hi story. And it is thiswhich explains the ro le of the Communist ' Parties in Eastern Europe.They are the creatures of the Red Arm y and the economic, political

28

I

a d diplomatic _power, and di scipline a nd training of Stalinist Russia.It is under . the protection of .t he .K rernlin and the Red Army thatthe are see ki n g to complete a s fast a s they can ' and with whateverallie they can put t heir hands on , t he t r ansformation that hasa lr ea y taken place in Russia.

T Hese are colonial reg im es. N ot in a n article but in a de creewrit ten on the day after the day after the r evolution in October ,Lenin defined the colonial r egime :

"If any nation whatsoever is forcibly r etained within the bou nd­aries of a .given st a t e, if, in spite of its ex p ressed desire-no m atterwhet her that de sire is expr essed in t he press, at popula r m eetings, inpart y decisions, or in protest s and r ev olts against nat ional oppres­sion- it is not permitted the r ight to decide the fo rms of i ts st a t e.existence by a f r ee vo te, t aken after t he complete eva cuat ion of thet roops of the in corporating or, generally, of the s t r on ger nat ion ,without the least pressure bein g b ro ugh t to bear upon it , such in­co r po ration is annexation, i .e., seizu re and coer cion ." (Selected 'Yorks,Vol. VI, pp, 401-2.)

When a Marxist is unabl e t o accept this and cannot a pply it toregi mes like Poland, Yu g oslavi a and Hungary , t hen it 'IS t im e, Corn- :rade Germain, for him to s top arguing with hi s opponents a nd re­exa min e hi s own premise s.

The Polish individuals who rule Poland and admini ster its lawsand direct its armies are not Poles at all. They are as Russ ia n a sthe Kremlin, tied to it not only by t raining, fear, and the solida r it yof crim e, but by the far de ep er r eco gnition that within s ocie t y a s theysee it they. must be vassals of Russi an or Anglo-American imper ­ialism. Their allegi ance is not sub ject ively to the Kremlin but robject ­ively to the centralized capital of Russian st a t e-capitalism .

Let Germain deny this a nd a dd .y et another to the coil s of s teel­wire in w hich he is assiduous-ly ent a ngling h im self. Any support of theCommunis t Parties a s t hey are is a betrayal. They pl a y andmust pl a y the same r ole as t he Com munis t Party of Russia , withthe added burden of a colonial dependence as necessary to t hem asi t " is to t he imper ia lis t power.

•

, r

Chapter III - Imperialism Thirty Years Ai r(a) "Vast State-=Ca pitalist and Military Trusts and

SyndicatesThe imperialism of state-capitalism is the key to the under­

standing of the present st ag e of imperialism all over the worldand the concrete forms of its development. Lenin, writing in the heatof a similar, but less developed, type of world di sintegration was ableto give us a wonderful Marxist forecast of just the cont em por a r ydevelopments.

"Marxists have never forgotten that violence will be an inevitableaccompaniment of the col'lap se of capitalism on ' it s full s ca le and ofthe birth of a socialist societ y. And this violence will cover a historicalperiod, a whole era of wars of the most varied k inds--imperia li stwars, civil wars within the country, the interweaving of the formerwith the latter, national wars, the emancipation of the nationalitiescrushed by the imper ia list s and by various com bina t ions of imperialistpowers which will inevitably form various a lli a nces with each otherin the era of vast state-capitalist and military trusts and syndicates.This is an era of tremendous 'colla pses , of wholesale m ilitary deci­sions of a violent nature, of crises. It has already' begun, we see itclearly-it is on ly the beginning." ( Sel ected W or ks, Vol. VII , pp. 315-6.)

I What Lenin described in 1918 was the beginning of barbarism .Toda y we are thirty, years further. The whole wo rl d is caught into

. the im pe r ia lis t conflict. There are only two . divisions.If Stalinist Russia is a vast state-capitalist a nd militar y trust,

. American im perialism is a vast state-capitalist a nd military syndi­cate, and the distinction is evidence of the clear vision with whichLenin saw into the f uture. -

(b) American Imperialism'During t he war the United States government transformed itself

into a mighty state-trust. It planned its production a nd consum pt ion.But the American state-trust, in the struggle for world domination,embarked upon a government-regulated world-economic program. I tintegrated with its own the economy of Great Britain ; it pouredbillions into the thin economic veins of its allies ; it bought anddi str-ibuted agricultu.ral ,p r oduct ion on a wo rld-wide seale. ' It acted ascollective capitalist on a hitherto undreamt-of scale. .

With the end of the war approaching, Russia, through the Stal­inist parties , backed by the Red Army, operated directly -In the pro­le t a r ia t . The United States operated through the Social Democracyand the bourgeoisie, backed by the 'Amer ican army and Americaneconomic power. But the joint unity was against the proletariat only.The United States now carries on open preparation for war againstits rival.-From end to end of the world its economic power economicallysu ppor t s the most reactionary and oppressive regimes, at the headof which list stands the Chiang-kai-Shek regime in China. Americasupplies arms and economic resources to aid France in the ~uppres­

sion of Viet Nam, and the Dutch in the suppression of Indonesia. Itsupports t he reactionary regimes of Turkey, Iran and-, Greece andeven t he Fascist F r anco. It maintains the tottering capitalisticregime in J a pan.. It 'is the support 'a nd ally of every counter-revolu­tionary 'r egim e in Latin-America. It shares · eq ually with Russia themajor guilt in the drawing and quartering of Germany. The StateDepartment becomes the virtual dispenser of billions' of foreigntrade. T he la t est ventur e is the proposed " Marshall P la n"-a giganticscheme to reconst ruct the shattered economy of W est ern Europe,

d b y t h is means to co ntrol its 'econom y and politics completelya. an outpos t ~- Arne-ican tr~e and ., ha .,H,,~ <> ~.,; " .. + 1. A+"h C:O" A" _: ~+Ru sla and the pl:ol~tal:i~;l r~~~lution. ~ - v •• - .., _ • • • - . - - _ • • - ' - ' --"- -

Y its enormous, sw oll e n bureaucratic exp end it u r es at h ome, its-. war p,reparation, direct a nd indirect, its con t r ol of the World Banks

and U international economic agenci es, the State Department'smanipulations of foreign t r ade and foreign loans, the American_,government has become _t he econom ic arbiter of bill io ns of productivef or ces and h u n dreds . of mill ion s of people . Only a n economist f etish­ism can fall to see that in i t s s t r u g g le with Russian capit al for w or lddomina tion, the American s tate a cts as the center of a v a st s t a te-

.capitalist s yndica t e within which it dominates the econo m ics andp oli tics of its su b or di nate allies. T hes e s t ick to it f or t he sa m er eas ons that thei r counterparts s t ick £0 St a linist Rus si a, ter ro r oft h e proletarian revolu tion a nd fear of a rival im periali sm.

But g r eat a s is t he econom ic p ow er of America n impe r ia li sm,this is counter-balanced by t h e co los sal drain upon its resou rces ofmaintai ning the world-wide sys tem of s a t ellit e s within its s y ndica t e,the hatred i t engenders Inu-evolut.iouary f or ces everywhere, a nd therevolutionary instincts, s t r iving s a n d industrial org a n ization of t heAmerican proletariat, the g reatest socia l ' force the w orld h a s e verknown. Not in any ultimate hi s toric but in the im mediate sense ,Ameri can capita l f aces the sa me ca t astrop h ic v iole nt des t r uc t io n atthe hands of the proletariat as do es Stalinist Russia.

It is only when we have this as OUr basis that w e can a n alyze thedi sintegration of relations between n a t ions and the co nc r ete f or msof the tasks history now imposes upon the -classes.

We' must unclerstand the b ackground of Lenin's m ind whe n hemade his priceless formulation s.

(C) The Interweaving of Imperialist, Civil , andNational Wa rs

L enin in 1916 made a triple division of the countries of thew orld. D ivision I was t h e countr ie s of Western Europe and Americawhere t he progressivenes s of b our g e oi s national movem ents was ata n e n d. Divis ion II com p r ised the countries of Eastern E u r o pe includ­ing Russia. There t he b our geoi s n a tional m ovement s for nation a lli beration were _on the order of the d a y. In di vi si on III were I ndia,China , and other colon ial co untries wh ere the bourgeois nationalmovement s were just beg inning . T hose di vi sions , t h e r esult of g e o­g raphical co nd itions and -s ocia l r e lations, a re equally va lid t oday,with, h owever, trem e ndous ch a ng es w hich involve t he new relationsa nd new t actic al approaches t o t he struggle for s ocia lism .

In 1947 , Division I , a fter t h ir t y years of capita lis t d isintegr a t ion ,sh ows tha t the bourgeois- natio nal m ovem ents are no long er m erely"not progressive." They h ave abandoned their historic roles, Thebourgeoise of France, Italy, Germany and Japan' no lon ger believesin national independence.

It is t h e r efore n a tur a l -that among t he advanced cou n t r iesthi s m ovement t o t he synd icate 'is m os t p ow erful. The s yndic a tealone is su it ed to the a dvanced countrie s of W estern Europe.

A s so on a s we look a t L en in's Division II w e can s e e a nentirely different st r u ctu r a l f orm. Russia . was a n oppressor nat ionin 1916. But , 1917 sh ow ed t hat even i t s own bour g eoi s problemsw ere dependent upon the proletariat for s olu t ion. The h istory ofRussia to date , shows , that even the Rus sian proletariat, in isolation,has proved incapable of , solv ing not only the ' s ocia li s t p r obl ems , buteve n the democratic - p r ob lem of s elf-de t e r m in a t ion . H e nce T r otskyin 1939 r a ised the .. s log a n of an independen t Ukra ine. T he w hole

31

histol'Y of Russia since 1917 and the miserable , blood-count r ies of Eastern Europe ' since 1916 have shown, a s we wexpect, that there . is no salv a t ion for them a s capitalist cou ie s,But long before 1947' it was possible to see that there is no sa a tionfor t h em ' at all a s isolat ed coun t ries, capitalist or socialist, steni a ,Latvia, ' Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, the 'U k r a in e, the Balkan c u ntrie s,Greece, Poland, ' cannot s ur vive even as isolated socialist s tat es. Ger­main's Marxism does not k now what every P oli sh wor n k nows.For nearly two hundred years a bourgeois Poland w a s constantlypartitioned "a nd repartitioned. The Poland of 191 8 was an artific ialcreation, maintained by a b a lance of power wh ich was dest r oyed inthe war. N ow toda y Poland a s an isola ted nation, capitalist orsociali st, is finished forever, and t h e same is ,t r u e of t he othercountries of Eastern Central Europ e. ,

. Germain calls them "the bu ffer -cou nt r ies." . His pro-Stalinis m , thespect acles t.hrough which he views r elation s betw een nations as 00­tween c lasses, ha s led him t o endorse a t itle which is th e exact oppos it eof the truth. Buffer is precisely what t hey cannot be. Their wholehistory. shows that they have to belong. After 1848, Hun gar y a ndlater Czech os lovak ia, clustered a r ound Austria (h ence the . DualMonarchy) in order to sa ve them selves from a greater oppr es sio n­T sarist Russia. After 1918 so m e of them formed the Little .E ut ent e ,under the economic and politica l guidan ce of France. The decline ofFrance s we pt them into the, orbit and then the domination of Ge r many.It is no 'a cciden t that at the f irst sh ock Germany wipe d a way thePolish a nd- Yugoslav bourgeoisie. The defeat of Germany swe p t theminto the po wer of Russi a . Th e conclusi on is obvious. .t is that f orAustria, Yugosl avia, Cze choslovak ia, Greece and the ot h er s, anyeconomic org anisation which is not ba sed on .the Socia list U nitedStates of Europe or at the very le as t . on a Federation of SocialistStates in Eastern Europe is r eactionary.

As national uni t s they are doomed either to participation in asocialis t f ederat ion or .su bor dina t ion t o a vast state-capitalist trustor syndicate. This is the given s tage of t h e given epoch, the resultof the ce n t r a li za t ion of capital. This is the economic a n d socia l move­m ent g rowing stea d ily th ro ugh the decades which has now reached aclimax in the 'coa lescence around the st a t e -capi t a li s t milit a r y t rust ofRussia . Th e concrete movement might have b een otherwisevbut it ison ly a theory which can explain it. Lenin did not j oin the ' t e r m s ,·S t a te , capit a l , military a n d trust by a cc ide nt . The com pe it ion on theworld -market fuses these into on e cen t ral.ized f or ce. .P olit.ics b ecomesthe m ost h ig h ly con cen trat ed. and comprehen si ve expressi on of t helaws of bh e world-market. Germain, in the face of the r eality, con­tinues to d iv id e the eeonom ic f ro m t he 's t r a t egi c needs of a tot al itarianstate.

T oda y in .E ur ops as far south a s Greece, but above all in Poland,t here is and ca n be no isolated civi l war. E very co nfe renc e, ev'eryec cnomic deal , all loan s, " rel ief'," peace-settlements, p roduction,g rabs of ter. rttorv. withdra wal or maintenance of troop s , elections ,are g ove r ned by the st r u ggle for the domination of E urope betweenthe United States and Ru ssia. All p olitical opposites, national andin ternational, p olitics a nd economics, peace and , war, are beginningto assume i·dentity. In 1940 th e small s t a t es , pawns in t he hand s of 't he b ig ones, only had freedom to a Iimited extent, to ch oose betweentheir masters. Today G ermany, t h e heart of Europe has no freedomof choice. In the cabinets of France and Italy the rival p owershave their representatives evenly match ed , and every s tep is ca l­culated for its effect on the world proletar-iat and the s t r ug g le forpower between a s t a te-ea p rt alis t m ilita ry trust a nd a state-capit a listmilitary syndicate.

32

hapter IV - Poland - Whete·All Roads.·MeetThere is no better ex am ple than Poland itself of how a national

sit u tion develops. -how Marxist poli cy changes, a n d how we must. cone tely apply Marxist fundamentals. In dealing with P oland .a n d

.vself -d ermination in 1903, Lenin. poses two epoch s-(1) the epoch ofthe fo , a t ion of national sta tes ending about 1871 and 2) the epochof 1903, 'the age of desper ate r-eaction, of extreme .t en sion of all f orceson the eve of the proletarian revolution . . ."* During bo th per iods,Poland was divided between Germany, Austa-ia-Hungary and Russia.Yet the policy for each peri od was sh a rply di stinct. In the firstperiod Marx. 'a nd ..Engels rai sed the slogan of se lf-deter m ina t ion f oran independent bou r g eois P oland to 'h elp defend democratic Europeagainst T sarist r eact ion. In the secon d period Franz iMehring de­nounced this policy. The Polish S ocialist Party, t he P.P..S., w a s gain­in g ground among t he p et t y-bo u r geoisie with it s s loga ns of a r m edinsur r ect ion and terror ism a ga in st T sarism. It sou ght to unite thethr ee p a rts of P oland into a bour-ge ois st a te. .By 1902, sa id Mehring,

. an dn depende nt .bou r geois P oland is impossi ble an d therefor e th eP oli sh proletariat in all three s ect ions s houl d f ight " un r eser ve dly" withits class brother s. Lenin, ca ut iou s a s always, st ated t ha t h e would no td eclare th e impossibility of a bourgeoi s Poland as 'categor ically a s didMehring. But h e agreed su fficiently fo r the time wit h the analysis toaccept the political conclus ion as a bsolutely correct. The unity of theproletariat of the oppressed and oppressing nations, a car dinal pointin the " Leninist doctrine of . self -determ ina t ion , he re a ssumed anextreme form.

Yet long before 1916 the s pecif ic h istorical ci rcum stances, a lli­ances, relations, etc. which cu lmin a t ed in the war of 1914 had openedu p new possibilities for an indep en dent bourgeoi s P olan d. Len in saidso pl a inly and now d efen de d t he r ight of sel f -determin a t ion fo r a

-b ourg eois P oland a gain st T sar ist Russia . His m a in reason now wasthat the right of self-d etermin ation did not and cou ld n ot u nderca pi t alism mean freed om f rom an economic dom inat ion by greatpowers.Su,ch freedom w a s im poss ible unde r capi t alism. But t he r ightof self -det ermina t ion meant political freedom of a st a t e, freedom forthe full and free development of the class st r u ggle, freedom for theproletariat to develop its democratic instincts and, t endencies. F urther,;the s loga n of self -de termi n a t ion h ad unde rgone a cla ss development.The Russian 'libera l b ourgeoisie had h itherto suppor ted t he s log an ,but under the bl ows of t he Russian p ro letariat , 1:Jhey b ecame antag on­istic to it. Thus Bolsh evi sm took ove r t he slogan a s a proletari andemand. .

This at once involv es t he im portant distinc tion be tween the ri gh t .of self-de te rmin a t ion and the raising of t h e dem an d.

So ten t ative and condi t ione d is the actual dem an d a s di sti nct fromthe abst ract r igh t , that Len in, 'wh ile de fe nd in g the ri ght of , N orwa yt o secede from Sweden , st a tes th at if such . a demand could r esult ina E uro pean war, then whi le the ri ght sho uld be fought fo r , the dem and

. should not be raised. That is f or the Shachtmanit es to t h ink over.On the ot her hand, Lenin , in 1916, quotes Engels to the effect thatcolo nial India would be j ustif ied in making a revolution against"victorious soc ialism " in Britain . And th is is f or Germa in and . h isco-thinker s to ponder over.

A Stage Beyond 1916The Johnson-For est tendency, in it s st r a tegy a nd t actics on the

question of self-determination, has never a t any t ime lost s ight of

• Lenin li ved perp'etu:ally wit h these id ea s , even i n 1 9 0 3.

3.3

the relation between the gfven stage of the epoch,tJhe particular typb.f count r y involved, and t he g iven st age of -ela ss ,,re :at ion s ; .a nd

-eff'ect of this c,e::: ,:::nd in Europe, fo r in stance,upon thc etruggle,t he "com mon goal, the Socialist United States of Europe.

In 1943, immediately after Stalingrad, which outlined the'cou r se of bourgeois Europe, the Johnson-Forest tendency, 'i nopposition to the .Sh a ch tman ite thesis on the national question,out tha t henceforth there cou ld be no in depe ndent bour geo sof E stonia , Latvia, and Lithuania.

In 1946, this time against the I.K.D., we poured a s uch scorna s we could on their idea of "auton omous," "bourgeois states" a s p re-liminary to s ocia lism. We said : ,

" During Wor.ld War I it wa s on e of Lenin's basic arguments onself -det er mi na t ion that economic dominat ion did not mean politica ldomination. Today, and that is the new st a ge, economic 'a n d poli t ica l

' domina t ion g o hand in hand." (Historical Retrogression or Soci alistRevolution" New International, Jan., Feb., 1946.)

This was a vt r emendous step fo rward from Lenin's position . By'Moay 1946 our analysi s of the stage of the epoch' had :been in our viewsufficient ly confi rmed by the concrete happenings in 'Europe. In ourinternational resolution 't herefor e we elaborated policy., "The Anglo-American hourgeoisia and the Second International

seek to bribe the 'pr olet a r ia t to accept the overlordship of Americanimperialism in return for bonrgeois-democratic forms and Americaneconomic aid.

"Russian imperialism arid its Stalinist satellites seek to tyrannizeand then to bribe the proletariat to accept the virtual overlordshipof Ru ssian imperialism under the guise of the European continentin a new social order . . : '

"U n der these circumstances it is a matter of life and death f orthe F ou rth International to op pose both these ruinous roads, and itca n do so only by linking the struggle for national economic r ehabili­tationvto the s t r uggle ,f or the Socialist United States of Europe.

"A Socialist France in a Socialist ,United States of Europe"A Socialist Poland in a Socialist United States of Europe"A Socialist Germany in a Socia list United States of Europe."F r om this basic analysis we t hen out.lined a concrete 'policy f or

Russian-dominated Eur ope and Asia :"In Easter n Europe the proleta r iat faces the colossal task of

,over th r owing not the delegated but the di rect_military power of th eRussian st ate. In its Tea r , it h a s t h e armed 'f orces of Russia occupyingGermany. Under these circum stances, t he movement against Ru ssiandomination in t he sepa r a t e countries must therefore orient to wardsthe unification of pr olet a r ian st r uggle in the directly opp r esse d states,..includin g Germany. A ma ss r evo lutionary movement with a , commonprogram an d an advanced socia l g oal h as the best possibility of sh aki ngt he discipline of the Russian a rmies , and re-awakening in them thet r adi t ion s of the Octobe r R evolution. .

"With vbh is rperspect ive the prolet a r ia t is a ssisted in 1Jhe carryingout of the daily vstrugg les ag ains t the oppres sing imperialist pow er, ''Wit hout a per sp ective of international st r uggle, t he a dva nce d work­er s will be le ss f ortified a gainst Stalinist propaganda or the defeatism'Which will ' a wa it intervention on t he part of another imperialistpo we r a s the only me ans of r id din g itself of the Russian domination ,exploitat ion andp.Junder.

"A s imil a r s it ua ti on in E astern Asia (Korea, ,Man ch uri a , etc.)poses simila r task s for the Fourth International."

We have ne ver waver ed. Ou r s is a poli t ica l position, rooted inthe mo st caref uJ, ·sys t emat ic analysis of t he developing relations be­tween t he cla sses and the nat ions within the st r uggle for the wor ld.

34

two vast state-capitalist trusts and sy n dicates.Now today it is possible to surnma rizo our position even more

cretely and bring to beai- upon it our whole analysis .1. Class rule over the proletariat in Poland is impossible without

a ct i e support from a n outside imperialist power. .2. Poland cannot be ruled by the Polish proletariat 'a s long as

the p sent balance of power .cont inu es ,3. Far more than ~e:hring and Lenin in 1903, it i s necessary to

see tha the Polish ' proletariat must orient itself first and foremosttowards its class brothers. The objective situation demands that sam erepudiation of both sides which Trotsky envisaged in Spain in 1938in case the intervention on both sides assumed dominance. The politicsof Poland is the politics of war.

4. This exemplifies the form t aken i.n our day of the perpetualMarxist stru,ggle for the u n it y of the proletariat. In .Ma rx's day itwas a struggle to integrate the economic and .poli tical a spects . \Ve.nave traced it a n d s hown that today, objectively, as a result of theconcrete .cond it ions of decaying capitalism and the concretely develop­ing and invading socialist society , revolutionary p olicy must unite theproletariat international'ly for the solution of immediate needs.

Shachtman and Bourgeois PoliticsExamination of the policies of Shachtrnan 'and Germain shows the

confusion into which they f a ll because neither has taken the troubleto establish a sou nd theoret ical basis.

Shachtman begins by d ecl a r ing the complete independence of therevolutionary pa rty. Th er eb y he is ready to show t hat the r evol u­tionary party is f or everything revolutionary, inclu ding the SocialistU nit ed S t a t es of t he World . . Having, as he believes, covered himselfu p from ' 'a ll "attacks" ('literary sq uabbling's a nd debating 'points ) he

. t hen gets d ow n t o b usiness , His policy is the policy of "critical sup p or tto Mickolajczk". N ow crjt ical sup por t of Mickolajczkcan mean onJyone thing-that Sh achtman is for the victory of lMick ola jczk , not fora ll time, but 'a s a f ir s t stage. This policy is bo urgeois politics, pureand simple. To say t hat Poland will be f ree under Mickolajczk is afantasy. Mickolajczk stands or falls by Anglo-American im p er ia ii sm.

It is necessary to remind this realistic practicalist of a littlerealism. Stalin in Cent r a l Europe is not playing games or making de­batmg points in pr e-convent ion di scussions. T oda y he is holdingPoland-the gateway to Germany. .

Furthermore, with Ru ss ia n troops in Germany, to open ou.t aser ious struggle in Poland under the l eadership .a n d with the prospectof victory to Mickolajczk is to invite at on ce the complete militaryoccupation of 'P olan d by R ussla, and as far a s human reason canjudge, to take the responsibility of pushing the world towards worldwar. It is po ssible f or a revolutionary party to advocate this. But it isobvious that Shachtman writes .his little a rticles and scores · h is littlepoints, devoid of any serious consideration of what his policies imply.

. Germain and Bourgeois Economics.Som e of thi s, more or l ess, Germain sees and points out with

devastating effect. But what is Germain's ow n policy? Germain advo-. cates cr-itical support of the 'Be ir u t r egime. He s ees and ca lcul atesboldly on the inevitable intervention which alone can make .Mick ol­aj czk a s e r tou s contender for power. He is politically ;bli n d to theactual concrete in tervention which alone 'm ak es Be irut able to .h old

' t h e .p ow e'r, I s:n't this sh a m ef ul ? Germain does not say a s a seriousTrotskyist m ight say : " In this s it u a t ion , control of Poland is neededto defend the .p r ec iou s 'planned econo my' of R u ssia. Therefore we

'<, repudiate self -det ermin a t ion and declare that the P olish workers mustf or the time being d~fend the regime in t he interests of the/degenerated

3$

but proletarian state." He does not sa y : "This Polish economy ise con omy of a workers' st a t e, and is or can :be, transitional to socialiTherefore ' it must be defended ." Instead he denounces the .r egi asbcurgeois a nd declares that the n at ionali za ti ons a re qualitative thesame t ype as those of France or .B r itain . He knows, he must now,that t hese bourgeois n a ti on alizations a r e defended and m aintained :bythe power of a foreign oppressing power which makes Poland a pawnof it s economic and political pl ans f or the 'domi n at ion of Europe andA sia . H e knows, he says later , t ha t the Polish proletariat f aces thismo rtal ene m y of its ow n se lf -determina t ion. The !political de cisionsabout the P olish regi me a re made in Moscow. The contending partiest r avel t her e and lay t he case befo r e Stalin who tell s them what to do.A nd yet he says that this regime must be ' cr-itically s upported. Inreali ty he is objectively committing a n unpardonable d eception. He isdefen din g Stal inist R ussia but does not dare to f.ace it.

T he price is already be ing pa id an d a bitter price it is. Germain. n ow subscribes to the com pletely pet t y-bourgeois conception .tha t it is

t he Beirut regime which defen ds the Polish proletar-iat and its sup­pose d conq ues ts from Mickolaj czk. As we ll sa y that British imper iali smdefended the democratic rights of Britain against H itlerism.

In r eality it is not the attacks of Mickolajzck which compe l Russiandomination. ,I t is the Russian domination of Poland wh ich g ives suchstrength as he has ' to the atta ck s of Mickolajczk. For years the P oli shp roleta r ia t has been under a sys te m a tic terror from Stalinism a s the[pr eliminary to the domination of Poland. R}1ssia's first s te p in Pol an dwas t o h a nd over the Warsaw p ro letaria t to the Nazis. If Russia nt r oops were ' withdrawn eve n today, the Polish ;prol etariat and t hemasses wou ld ibe able to t ake ca r e of .Mick ola jczk , It is to mi su nder ­s t a nd completely the hi story of Easte rn Europe to believe that it usR us sian troops which p re ven t the v ictory of the Fasc ists. The Fascistswoul d be a s hehpless as in Greece . A genuine p roletarian up ri sing inP ola nd would fi n d Mick ola j czk ready to come t o t erms wi th . Beirutas he has already tried to do and as many in his party are doin g now.\Ve are of cou rse under n o ill usio ns about any withdrawals in Eur opeby a ny occupying power . But it is someth in g enti rely new in ourmovement t o ca ll the bourgeois police s t a t e the defender of the pr o­letariat and it s "gain s."

Shachtman Meets Germain

The price Germain pays exte n ds f ro m his own theories andPoland to t·he rest of Eur ope. Germain (an d her e he is at one 'withShachtman) has not a single word to sa y abou t the burni ng que stionof the r elation to the p ro letariat of E urope, to begin with, Germa ny .It is beyon d credibility. W h at p reoccupies a ll othe r part icipant s andobserver s ·gets no t a si ngle word from Germa in .

Not only is the r elation of P oland t o W estern Europ e general.It .is pa r t icul ar. What is t o happen t o Easter n Germany whi ch isnow W estern P ola nd ? The Germans have been driven ou t. Mill ionsof P oles a re installe d. Do Germain and Shachtman propose to acceptt hi s? A r e t hey for "restoration" t o Germany? Then they will driveout or tenderly lead out the Poles ? Are they for the old bounda riesor the new ones? The bour geoisi e and t he Stalinists r eco gnise thatt he old Europe is g one . They are crea t ing a new one in their ownimage. The people too know that the old world is gone. The power shold m illions of Ger mans. Benes transfers millions of Sudeten Ger­mans . The J ew s fight their war into Palestine. Stalin has transferredpra ctically the whole popu la tions of E stonia, Latvia and Lithua n ia .In the French Zone there are comm un it ies of Germans ready t oaccept French citizenship. Millio~s of Germans may become F r ench

'3 6

c Izens, and welcome ones, to-morrow, Vast numbers of Europeansa ready to emigrate, so violent is the revulsion against the oldsoc t y . Still more significant. After the war, all the .power ofStal 's police was unable to s tem the tide 'of the great' migra­taon Back to Western Russia from war work in Siberia. With the firstserious break-down . in military di scipline we shall probably see tre­mendous mass migrations and re-transferences initiated by the whoJepeoples themselves.

Ten per cent of Russian soldiers in the occupying armies de sert.That is a warning, a warning that at a new stage the masse s, byfraternization among themselves can break the discipline of Stalin'sarmy.

To-day, the revolutionary movement sh ould issue slogans a nda ppeal s for fraternization among the ,peoples. The Fourth Interna­tional sh ould take the lead in s t imula t ing and holding before Polesin Wester n Poland and Germany ev erywhere the concept of a f raternalmingling of peoples aiming in t im e at a mass, a revolutionary disre­gard of the bourgeois national boundaries. The scales of bourgeoisviolence and barbarism can be matched only by revolutionary violenceon a cor responding scale.

. Germain finds that Shachtma n 's sloga n of the "free Republic" isa subs t it ut e of "empty and abstract s logans r eflecting petty-bourg eoisa nd bou rgeois n ationalist id eolog y" instea d of t he immedi a te strugglefor material interests. But 'wha t does Germain substitute in stead ?He subst tt ut es the slogan of a n " Inde pendent Soviet Poland." IfShach t ma ri's free Republic is an ab straction there are no words toexp re ss the ethereal character of the st ruggle Germain outlines f ora So viet Poland.

"The duty of Polish revolutionists is to explain patiently to thema sse s that Stalinism con s t itutes the a nt it hesis of Leninism ; thatt he st rug g le for the socia lis t revolut ion means the st r uggle fo r aworkers democracy, a genuine S oviet democracy; that the activ itiesof the Stalinist emissaries a re a conde mnat ion of the Soviet bureauc ­racy but not of . the Communis t ideal wh ich the latter extir pate inRus sia i t self in rivers of blood; that the Bolshevik-Leninist s a rer es olut e partisans of the ri ght of peoples t o self -de t er mination ; thatcon sequently the ce nt r a l s logan a r ound which they must mobilize ist hat of an INDEPENDENT SOVIET POLAND, which would dif­ferent iate us a s much from the conser vative bourgeoisi e a s from thedegen era t e bureaucracy." (Fourth International, Feb. 1947.)

" P a t ientl y explain." Is this refer enc e recognized ? OJ. course itis. This is what Lenin told the Russi an Bolsheviks to do in 1917 whent he , vor ker s had in essence political po wer but believed in t he Sovi et.T h is is what Trotsky preached t o the Russian workers a gai nst theusurpat ions of the Stalinist r egi me in a deformed workers st a te.Ge r main equates the bourgeois nat ionali za ti on and the police regimewith the Soviet and the democr atic self -m obiliza t ion of the massesin . Russ ia bef or e October. From the id ealization of n ationalizationiu Stalinist Russia comes this idea liz a ti on of bourgeois nat ionaliza­t io n in Stalinist Poland. Show us a single line of Trotsky . t o justifythis monstrosity as Trotskyism. .

Germain says that the Shachtmanito thesi s and the thes is ofthe Fourth ' International show their differences be st on the Kielc ep rogr a m. They do. Shachtman is suppor t ing critically Mickolajczk'scam p which participated in the pogroms. And Germain? He says that" if t he armed struggle between the militia and the illegal bandshad been drawn out ... there can be n o doubt we would have calledu pon t he workers of Kielce t o mobilize on their own." (our e mphas is ) .This is indeed a revelation.. Is ' t h is to o Trotsk y's policy? The Transi­tional Program says that a t every conceivable opportunity the worker s

·3 7

shl?uld form their own gua rds for their own defence. But f or Gerrna iBeirut's 'p olice-s t a t e is a stage to the S~iet regime. This too h e sded uced from the theory of the degene r a ted workers s tat e. Germ .. '8Trotskyism therefore now t ell s the Polish workers to wait an seeh ow " t he ir" regime protects them from Fasci sm before intervening.

From Opportunism to AnarchismGermain's position pur sues h im everywhe re, driving him t o right

a nd left. Shachtrnan prop oses t hat the Trieste workers vote t o jo inthe Italia n bourg eois democracy. Germain denounces h im a nd wi ns oneof hi s u su a l easy victories. But Germ a in must have a po si tion . H e da ren ot tell the T ries t e w orker s t o join T it o's sta te. H e says h imself t hatt his would m ean "the bureaucratic strangling of the . wor ker s ' m ove­ment." Opportunism now m akes its plung e into anarchism . Germaincomes out fo r " A Sovi et Co m m une in T riest e." This , even if it lasted"for on ly a fe w week s" wou ld, we are told, act a s a m agne t t o thea d va nced m ass es of t he countries occupie d by the U .S .S .R. a nd givea powerful impetus t o the cl a s s s t ruggle iri Ita ly. And this pi ece ofr om a ntic desperation go es unr ebuked in ou r m ovement.

I n r ea li t y, t oday , the F ou rth Internationalists in Trieste sh ou ldwarn the T rieste worker s a gain s t such sui cida l nationalistic action .They sho u ld ruthles sl y in their policy denounce t he national boundariesand preach da y in and day out th e u nification and coordination of theT r ieste working cla ss m ovement primarily with the Italian proletariat.The y shou ld denounce both the Italia n democracy and the Tit o police­s tate a s a g ents in the s t rangu lat ion and destruction of E u rope, Theysh oul d s t r ive to incul cate the necessity for united, coordinated actionwi th the p r og r am, concre t ely w orked out, of a socialist f ederation. TheT r ieste wo r kers sho u ld be taug h t t o look upon themselves as a part oft he pro letaria t of 'Southern Eur op e. They h ave the right of self-de term i­n a t ion, but that right is h is t or icall y and poli tically condition ed. Theys hould be fold t hat th is right exercised for and by themse lves m eanseconomic and political r u in . I ma g ine a 1947 Marxi st a dvocating anationalized econom y for T ri es t e! If Germain cannot see the town ofTrieste a s a part of the in ternational prolet ar ian st r uggle , h ow can hes ee Poland ? The T r ieste workers may be compelled t o fight a batt lefor power in Triest e. Every st r oke of po licy sh ou ld sh ow tha t they h avebeen forced into this, and do not s ee it a s any prog r am of their own.And the only way to prevent this action be ing fo rced u pon them is tomake them u nd er s t and and st r uggle for t he mass intervent ion (massstrikes, dem onst r a t ions j - of the Italian proletar iat on their behalf a tthe s lig htest sign of pressure. They shou ld be t aug h t that t heir ow na ct ions sh u ld be theor etically and organizationally linked to the actionsof the Italian prolet aria t a nd the t'esistance to Ti t o. Thi s is not onl ysou nd Bolshevis m. I t is exactly the type of pol icy which the wo rkers inSou theaster n E urope fo llowed in t he la s t st ages of the w a r . The So vietCommune of Tries t e sho u ld be driven ou t of our m ovement. Theprop e r t y not being na t iona li zed, the wo rkers a re ther efo re a dvised todie g lor iously " po u r encou r ager les autres."

Germ ai n on on e side (and Sh acht rna n on the other) , cannot recog ­n ize t hat the sloga n of the Socialist U nited States of Europ e is th eonl y practical, concrete basi s of revolu t iona r y policy. I n the s pe ci ficf or ms of their er r ors they com ple men t t heir joint r efu sa l to se e inter­na ti on al socia lis m a s the solut ion , not to-morrow, but to-d ay. Germainis viole nt a g a in st Ang lo-American in ter ven t ion . Shach tman is viol en ta ga in st Russian intervention. N either can say " W e denounce bo thinterventions." Neither can se e the E urope a n proletariat a s the basisof p r oleta r ian strat egy to-d a y . N either u nd er s t a nds what is meant bym aking the Socialist U nit ed States of E urope t he u nif ying slog a n ofr evolution ary policy in E urope, T hey r e ma in theoretically within theuat.innal boundarie s of Poland when a ll participa nts in t he st r ug gle ,

38

'e ll' .t he Polish workers, recognize that the s t rug g le is InternationalrS chtman, swinging in the "air , can "only hope In iv ain for' "bourgeois'po ·t ica l 'dem ocr a cy ." Germain falls back on the bourgeois nationaliza­t ion . The.ipoficy we advocated in May 1946 has corresponded exactlyto t I{l: actions-of the mo stvadvanced of the ',Polish workers:"They sawthe " ivil war" for what it was and held aloof from it. In Cracow theproletaniat vot-ed neither for .Mick ola j czk nor for Be irut. An indepen­dent iSocia l ist P a r t y has been formed s uppor olng neither side. But thi s 'po licy is s upposed to 'be a policy of abstentionism. '

So when Hitler attacked Czechoslovakia in 1938 and the Austrianwork er s sa id "Down with , .H it le r ! Not for Schusnrrigg," this was pre­sumably an abstention. When' Trotsky sa id that you could not ab stractHit le r 's attack on Czechoslovakia from the whole complex of modernEurope and told the workers to oppose both, this too becomes absten­tion . And today when we refuse to abstract Poland from a milieu inwhich is concentrated the fundamental conflicts of world politics, a nddraw policy to su it , this t oo ,becomes abstention,. , We .ha ve ot he r alli es than ,Mic kolajczk to st r uggle f or and wi th . ,\Vehave to win over the s old iers of the oppressing power-Rus si a.

The Russi an soldi ers will seeMickola j czk ,as the v anguard of Anglo­Amer ican imperialism. In Germany all the defea ted classes and fascis t ice lemen t s will rally to the support of 'Micko la jczk . '\V'ij;hin the RussianArmy itself , a ll the Kravchenkos , th ose who se e sa lvation for Russiain bo urgeois democracy, these are t he defeatists who will be pulled overto t he side of Mi ckolajczk . The genuinely .p role t a r-ian elements of theRussia n army ca n bewon over nei t he r b y 'Beir u t nor Mickolaj czk. Theymust s ee the European proletariat. This is 1947.

A nd the German pr oletaria n vangua r d? ,Does Germa in believe thatthey will demon str ate, 'make a general 's t r ik e, initiate political activityf or the vict or y of Beirut ? This will mean n ot h ing m or e than the t ighten­ing cf t he ir own 'noose. And t he victory of Mick olajczk? For the Germanworkers it m eans onl y the f urt her entrenchment of Anglo-Americanimperialism. 'T he German w or kers want a destruction' of both imperial­ism s . The Russian wo r kers want the destruction of both. T he Polishwor k er s need t he sa me. H ence in ca se of a Civil war in Poland t herevolutionary vanguard in the army of Beir ut will have a defea tistpolicy. It will see to it that ' its r epresentatives i n Mickolajczk 's army dothe same. Itsd e.clar e s in adva n,ce : a 'plag ue on both yo ur :houses. Theproletariat will car ryon mass demonstrations against t hi s pseudo­civil war. But if the war does come, it does not abstain. It does notshu n the war. It h olds on t o what arms it can get and struggles tocr eate against both 'Mickolajczk and .Be iru t an a rrny fo r a socia listP ola nd, freed from both Anglo-American .impe riabism and Russian, andreaching ou t to Russian so ldiers, the German proletariat, and all theot her proletariats oppres sed by Russian imperialism. It does not precipi­t a te such a struggle. I t work s patiently to build its cadres....lt bitterlyopposes being forced in to war. But if the war shou ld come this is thepolicy it 'will carry ou t .

Shachtman will eay with e la.boi -atc s a r cas m : The Johnson-Forestp osi ti on is -based on the "Cannorrite" conception that the war is stilIgoing on. For occupied E urope it is. Imperialist a rmed occupationof a .cou n t r-y i s a st a t e of war. .Io irit occup a t ion of one country and of awhole continent 'is a st a t e of war. But there is more to thi s.

The 1944 T hese s of the Fourth International (Fourth Interna­tional, March 1945 ) r ef er r ed to t he "integrat ion of m ili t a r y action s ofser vice to the U.S.S.R . within t he framework of a_ genera l working'class offensi ve." Does Ger ma in ' propose t o ;prepare the Germanproletaa-iat and the French proletariat t oda y f or this tomorrow? Ordoes h e 'a ct uall y propose to dra w t h is to i ts conclusion. . lif the RedA:rmy marched on France? I s this .to o Trotsky's position ? ' Wh ere.

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and when will this stop? Day after day duringwe stand more and more bewildered ' before this question: Whatvantage, what single advantage does Germain gain f or the prolet 'atby this def ense of the U.S.S.R. in return for . the monumerita con­fusions and . burdens which it places upon the Fourth Internationaland the working class?

l

Chapter V-- Parties, Tendencies AndPrograms in the Fourth InternationalFrom the conc:rtte exposition of policy in one of the mo st difficult

a nd therefore most revealing problems in the modern struggle forsoc ia lism , it is necessary now to pass to the political tendencies in theF ou rth International. But here also the terms sec t a r ian, Menshevik,Econ omist, Bol shevik, make no sens e except in st r ict relation to theanalysi s of the -m ass movement.

(a) Sectarianism TodayHow difficult and mi sleading it is t o use these words like sectarian

unless within the framework of an a na lysis of the epoch is demon­s t r at ed by the example of Munis , In 1944 Munis and Peralta putforward the following program for the European workers; and in 1946repeated it in another publication.

"1. The arming of the proletariat must be extended to the entireproletarian class and t o the poor peasants. At the same time, we mustdemand the disarmament and di ssolution of the armed forces of thebourgeoisi e (army, poli ce, etc.) and achi eve this a s soon as the -occa-s ion present s itse lf. . . . / \

. "2. . . . The nationalization of industr y, of fin ance capital or of thela nd by t he ca pita list st a t e m ust n ot deceive the masses. T ha t will bea tri ck of bourgeois , 'St a linist a nd r efo rmist coa li t ions t o preser vecapitali st p ro perty. Any confi scated property must n ot -be delivered tothe bo urgeois e tate. Th e proletaria t mu st a dm inist er t he econ omy byIt se lf a nd establi sh a single pla n for ail countrie s t o t he degree t hat

, in terna t ional contact a mong the ex ploit ed per mits t his. It is al r eadyposs ible to el aborate a project of u ni fied pr oduction between t he F rench ,Ita lia n and Belgian pr olet a r ia t ; tomorro w it will be possible with theGen n an, Spani sh , Greek, R ussian wor kers, etc. Althou gh the coalitionsbetween bourgeois, Stalin ist s and " social ists," supported by the bayonetsof Wall Street, of t he City and of the K r emlin, prevent fo r the momentthe putting into pr acti ce of a social plan f or Europe, the pr oject;'ou ghtt o be established and defended by the r evolutiona r ies of ev ery country.I n t he face of t he reactionary desig ns of t he governme ntal coa litions, itwould be an enormous f orce for prop aga nda, of' pe r su a sion ~d ofsocialist a git a t ion.

"3" ... W he r e . . . com mi ttees do no t ex is t , the im mediate objectiveof the ma sses ou ght to be their est abli shment. Wher e they exist, theymust be u ni ted on a national scale by the means of the Congress ofCommitt ees wh ich ' will st udy and reso lve t he problems of t he m asse sand of t he socia l r evo lu t ion. The commit tees, of wo rker s , peasants andsold ie r s of differ ent nation aliti es ought t o make cont a ct on the fir stocca s ion possible a nd create a Supreme -Council of European Commit­te es . " . .What preced es can be sum me d up in this slog a n : All politicalpower to the Comm ittees of W orkers , Peasants and Soldiers and, forthe masses in ge ne r a l : Socialist United ' States of Europe." (LEGRO UPE ESPAGNOL OF THE 4th INTERNATIONAL IN MEXICO,Manifesto of October 31, 1944, translated from the F'rench. )

We .need not subscribe to every word. But the conception is mag-

~Q

nificent ly concrete. Munis also m akes -it perfectlyclear that -a lull int he offensive of the proletariat does not alter the validity of this ' pro­gram. As we sh all show, iri this .he is absolutely correct. There is notat ounce of sectarianism in this and people who in one place preachthe approaching downf all of civilization and then reject -as sectarian ap r og ram for the international mobilization of the proletariat are -play­ing wit h revolution:.

Yet Murr is is a s ect aria n. His s ectarta ni sm consists essentially inhas r ejection of the slogan, the Communist Party to power. We un­cea sing ly ipropagate the committees a n d the international ' plan, hutuntil we have the comm it tees , the Stalinist parties ' 'rep resen t a pro­found mass mobilization and must be su p por t ed as we have described.The q uest ion is: What does tMu n ia r epresent? .

I n 1920 during the revolutionary turmoil after the last war theComm unist International faced the disease of infantile leftism, at thebottom of which was a refusal to make a r evolutionary use of b ourgeoisparliaments. This sect a r ia nism had its or igin in the failure of the revo­lut ion bec a use of the corruption of the Social-Democracy by bourgeoispa rliam ent a r is m. -'

\ Munis r epresents the infantile leftism of today. Where bourgeoispar liamentarism corrupted the proletariat in the period that culminatedin the f ounda t ion of the Third I nternat ional, the devel oped objectivesitua t ion h a s produced a new t ype of betr ayal, the betra yal of t heSocia l-Democracy a nd Com m unist P art ies wi t h the act ual st a te powe rill their hands. .Just a s the Left in 1919 reacted too vi olently again stt he corrupt ion t hat had p r eced ed. .them~ so Munis reacts against thecorr u pt ion t hat h as preceded the hi storic op po r t unitie s pre sent ed to theFou r t h Int er national. .

Germain, who is a ble to e xplain li ttle, cannot explain Mu rris . H etherefore ca nnot prepare the F ourth International for what can be 'I.very serious da ng er : the vi olent reaction of increasing la yer s of therevo lutionary masses as they see through Stalinism and t heir r efusalt o recognize the necessi t y of t act ical com p ro m ises wi th even the bureau­cracies of t he Communist P arties 'in W estern Europe .

But with Mu nis, h is po litical po sitions carryover '111t O h is organi­za tional practi ces . The same un-B olshevik ferocity th at he displays tothe labor leader ship- not Stali ni sm alone-he displ ays in r ega r d to theleadership of t he Fou r t h International. I .

Munis r epr esents a t end ency which has emancipat ed itself fromthe preoccupa t ion with Stalinism a s a mod e of t h ou gh t . His attack is 'onti le la bor bureaucracies, bo th Stalinist and ref ormist. H is basi s isob vio usly the proletarian revolutio n, the mass m ovement , as we haveoutlined it in this pam p hl et. It ,is fa r di ffe rent wi t h the other tendencies.

(b) Menshevism; Today'I'he J oh nson-F or est tend ency in 19L16, ana lyzed "the du al her it a g e"

in th e posit.ionTeft by Trotsky to t he Fourth Int ernation a l : on t he oneh and, the Lenini st program for t he mo bilization of t he p roletaria t fo rt he world p ro let a r ia n r evolut iou: on the other, the Russian posi t ion .W e point ed out f ur t he r that the mo ve ment was dividing a lon g t wol ines-not on mere defeatism, bu t on t he 'R ussia n experienc e rn relationt o the wo r ld revolution .

N ow it is becoming perfectl y clear that the politica l t en dencies inthe Internat io nal are dividing a long t he li nes we h ave indica t ed. The

\L Ie.D., in its t heor y of historical r et ro gression, h a s el aborat ed the mostf ull y a nd drawn to its u lt im a t e conclusi on t h ose theories which arer ooted in t he degene r ation of the R uss ian revolution.

The t heory of r etrogression claims t hat the deg enera t ion of bour­geois socie t y brings wit h i t t he degeneration of the prolet ariat. This

41,

has received)ts mo st finished -and .revealing. manifestation in a .passagef rom a thesis submitted to the 1946 Convention by the I.K.D. Fightingt o break througn . the ,wall of conservatism of. the W. P. Majority, theJohnso~-Forest tendencyJrad challenged, it with the s t a t ement that inthe .•Umted States no one could exclude the possibility that within twoyears a ' g eneral str ike could take pl ace and the workers could form,if not SOv1etS, worker s' co uncils. The W. P. Majorit y , which, in a fewmonths (such is centrism) w ould go much f ur ther than this , not intheory but concretely, professed to see in this a forecast of thelast s tages of t he insurrection and the st ruggle for power. The LK.D.,however, t ook up t he chall enge directly a nd produced the following.T he quota t ion is long but it has the ad vanta ge of sa ying ever ything,, The I.K.D. on Socialism

" The necessit y fo r a revolutionary leadershi p is recognized in words,but one has not t he least not ion how it has to be constituted. In orderto convince ourse lves of this let us push the insanity to ex t r emes anda ssume that J. R. Johnson takes power with his party in the spring of1948 . Of cou r se, J ohnson will have sovie ts a ll ove r an d ha ve a t hiscommand any number of different kinds of ' wor kers' com mit tees.' Ina ddition the party will be imbued with the k ind of wisdom wh ich J ohn­son t akes for 'Marxism.' We a ssume further that even the mass ofworke rs have understood J oh nson 'fully and completely.' Then what '?

"On the ba sis of the 'conception' of the par t y which especiallyJohnson an d t he officia l F ourth hold, we would then .experie nce acatastrophe of unimaginable extent,

. " We would be faced by this problem : Ar my and indust r y , nationaland international poli tics, agriculturo an d trade, import s a nd exports,educational system a nd propaganda, scient ific r esearch ' and technicala ppara t us, st a t istics and medicine, administration, housing and a hun­dred other branches would not only have to be re-organized, but alsocon trolled and led. W e would find ourselves in a concre te sit ua ti onfa cing Stalinism as well a s the ch urch , the r eformists, the other parties,the international diplomacy and the armed counter-revolution. Fina nce,regula t ion of currency , legis la t ion, postal se r vice, radio, the m otionp ictures, psychology, philosophy, pedago gy, literat ure, a r t , family life,sports, recrea t ion, pe nolog y and a t housand other questions wouldcreate t r oubles wh ich Joh ns on's book-learning doe s not dream of. Faced 'with all these difficu lties which (let us repeat emphatically) cannot beenumera t ed and a re of g'igant ic dimen sions, Johnson would reali ze thathe ha s not underst ood "Das Kapital " if fo r no other reason t han thath e doesn't under st a nd an ything a bout bourgeois s ociet y . Where eno r­mous knowledge and utmost many-sidedness are required he wouldoperate with a de ad sche mata . He would be a t the mercy of the bou r ­geois spe cia lis ts in every de tail, for bette r or for worse .

"Does anyone imagine that one could do without this army ofspecialists or force them to cooperate through the 'dictatorship' be­cau se there are sufficient numbers of technically t rained workers to ke ep ­production running ? But just t o ma int a in p rodu cti on and distribution ,e conomists , archit ects, technicians, en gineers, physici st s, chemists, ex­perts iii forestry, mining, transportati on, agricult ure, etc., are needed'without end. All these people would not let themselves be commandeeredby a pa rty which is not in a po sition t o chec k up on them. Under suchcircumst ances even la rge stratas of workers would a ssume definitetraits of a "ruling" cla ss in the bad se nse and . fall prey to this ever­present danger, the easier the more ignorant the party, and thus bringthe wor ke r s t o power as pure pro ducts of t he capit alist enviro nment.The workers then would have practically no mor e to offer than their~ ' pro letarian" 'self -conceit or tha -arrogance of their 'hi st orical ' mi ssion.Thev would commit st upidit y after st u pidit y, They wou ld be forced torule' by nake d powe r, arouse all t he wor ld a gainst themselves and

Ierurthen the chain of diffi culties from this unforeseen point t o the finaldecline of the r evolution.

" I n civ ilized countries the conquest a nd the main t a in ing of powerare m uch more difficult than in backward ones (for exam ple, in barbaricR ussia ) , The m ore developed a country the m or e knowledge is r equired,and t h e more d ifficu lt is it t o convince t he s pecialists, t o win them over ,and t o discipline them. If Johnso n , t rusting in t h e development of theclass strugg le , wou ld , after t aking -power, a ssem ble them and subm ithis ' p lans ' the y would remark to each other a fter the first address :'Why, this is a prattler! -H e t h inks he ca n solve diffi cult questions withagita t iona l s peech es .' .

" Of course, every grea t revo lu tion 'm a k es a g reat number ofsch ola r s , s pecia lis t s , i n t ellectu als of all ki nds w illing to join and be a t'Its di sposa l. Onl y it has to be a great revolution and no t a J oh nsonnadeupon w hich one will look with a superior sm il e or w ith p anic a s upon afolly, a childish ness , a q ueer id ea or a n insane adventure. In t h e abse nceof a party which h a s a lready g a ined g rea t p olitical and m oral a u t h orit ythe a chie vement of socialism 'will be lo st every time." (" The Cr is i s ofSocialism a nd H ow t o Over com e It," BULLETIN OF THE W,P.,Vol. I , N o. 17 , p p . 16-17. )

The strict ly p oli tica l implicatio n s of th is a re of profoun d import a ncefor t h e clari fication of our movement and the u n der s t anding of the classs t r ngg le. The ext ract sh ows that the s tat e-capitali sm of the LK.D. ismerely a no t her name for bureaucratic collectivism or the managerialsociet y of Burnham. The technici ans a nd the man a g ers will defeat themost powerful proletariat in the world in t h e most a dvanced soci et y inthe wor ld b ecause of the absence, not of a party, but of a s pe cial t ypeof par ty. So special is this t ype of part y that of n ecessity there loomsthe probability of " a third alterna tive ." It is n ot only t h e seizure ofpower tha t is feared . It is what happens after.

T his party obviou s ly is not a narty consisting p r edom in a nt ly ofworker s. It is a ua r ty able to handle the fear-some hub of problemsdetailed bv the LK.D .. a pa r t y of the ed u ca t ed elite. T h is is in t h eor ythe class hasi s .of the Sta li ni st corruption of the proletariat in West er nEurope, Thus t he L IZ.D . .r e p rese n t s not Menshevik tendencies in general.It is a Menshevik terrd enc v which corres ponds t o the deg eneration ofthe Thir d I nte r na t ional a s class ic Me n sh ev ism co r res ponded to the de ­gene r a t ion of t he Second. Becau se Germa in is una bl e t o analyze theproletar iar and the Stali ni s t narties , he is thereb y a s unable t o anal y zethe ,L K .n . a s h e is b~d b y Muni s ,

The practical consequences of t he po lic y of t he LK.n. are n o lessimportant. All who hold t hese views a r e a n d must be mortal enemies ofthe r evolutiona r y struggle fo r powe r and t he r evolu tionary propagandaa nd agitati on which go with it. Thes e m us t wa it fo r the party. ·Agitationfo r r evolut ion , p r ona g andn for revolutio n . is pushing the proletariat toit s certain des truction. The proletariat is n ot r eady . The party is, notread y.

From t h is flows the u nb r idl ed , the ungovernable ferocity and rasrewith which t h e extr eme r epresen t a ti ves of this t endency atta ck theF ou r th I n t ern at ional, the bit t e rn es s a n d hate w ith wh ich t h e y r e v ie wth e wh ole past h is tor y of t he prole tariat, and the p latoni c construc tionwhich they call t he role of , t he party., .A s always in the historical manifestations of a lo gical line . the

su p por ters 0 the LK.D. show every va r ie t y of deviation a nd combina­t ion of contradictory phenomena, usually a n empirical response t o na­t ion a l conditions. But all t h r ough run certain conceptions, e .g ., t h eback wa r dness of the m a sses, and the predilection for a "reali stic,""praCtic a l, " " no n-sect a r ian" policy, in other w ords , the drowning ofBolshevism in ill-conceale d Me nshevik politics . The y sh ow a fan a ticalinteres t in s tat is t ics of boom and ec onomic " stabilization." T h e mainte-

43

na nce of some sort of equilibrium by an American financed "recovery"is vi t a l for th ese t endencies. Without it the st r uggle mi ght be precipi­tated by the backward proletariat upon the unready party. In varyingdegree s the policy is the polic y of "the lesser evil ," i.e., the labor statusquo, until such t ime as the proletariat and the party are ready. Forthem al ways t he status qu o. In the U. S. they capitulate to Americanpett y-bourgeois r ad ica lism an d t he union bureaucracy; in Britain theycapitulate to t he labor g overnment ; in France they capitulate to theStalinist bureaucracy. F or a sec ond it might appear that the Frenchcapitulation to Stalinism is out of line. It is not. France is accustomedto a variety of revoluti onary and counter-revolutionary r egimes. Stalin­'Ism leads the mass labor movement in France and is unlikely forsome ti me to do more than maintain the democratic r egime with somemore nationalizati on.

The Worker s P arty h as a dded a new theoretical clarifica tio n t othese tendencies. It has now declared that there hangs a g re at questionma rk over the ab ility of the proletariat to r ea ssemble a revolutionaryleadership before it is "destroyed" by disintegrating ca pitalism .

Under these compuls ions s log ans such as National Liber at ion, Con­stituent As sem bly, nationalization, for the Labor P art y in the Uni t edStates, and all variety of "democratic demands" assume the m ost con­servat ive, not to say r eact ionar y, cha racter. At t he back of a ll this isa conc eption of the proletariat, learned in the Ru ssian degene rat ionand fortified by the defeat s in Europe .

Trot sky stood for the defense of t he degenerated workers state butnever, except a s a t heore t ical pr ognosis fo r the purpose of sho wingwhat wa s involved, did he adulterate the Bolshe vism of the world revo­luti on by the faintest t race of this poison .

(C) Economism\ Ve have elsewhere defined the tendency of Germain as an E conomist

te ndency: I"In 1902 , the Economists gover ned t hemselve s by t he economic

necessity of lar ge scal e pr odu ct ion rather than the mobiliz a ti on of themasses to fight Tsarism and establish t heir political uni fica ti on in t hedemocratic dic tatorsh ip of the proletariat an d peasantry. In 1916, theimperiali st E conomist s governed the ms elve s by the economic nece ssityof supr a-na t iona l cen tralization rather than the unification and mobili­zation of the prolet a ri at and peasantry of the oppressed and oppressingcount ries . In 1918, Bukharin posed the economic necessity of nationali­zation rather than the mobiliza t ion of the Ru ssian masses into their ownorganiza tions to control product ion and safeg uard against counte r -revolut ion . . .

"What does Germain pr opose today? In t he full Economist tradi­tion, ada pted to the presen t sit ua t ion , 'he continues to speak of theeconomically progressive char acte r of nationaliza t ion and plannedeco nomy. Already in Po land, h is position sh ows the political se rio us nessof hi s ba sic error. The Economists of 1902 thought that they were onlydefending the economic organization of large scale capit ali sm. In reality,they were defending T sar ism because only the revolut ionary demo craticm obilization of the proletariat and peasa nt r y could destroy politica lfeuda lism. The imperialist E conomists in 1916 thoug ht they were only­defending the economic centralizatio n accomplished by imperialism. Inr eal it y, t hey were defending imperialism becaus e only th e mobilizationof t he masses of the oppre ssed and oppressing countries could destroynational domination. Germain in 1947 thinks he is only defending thenationaliz ation and planned econom y of the bureaucracy. In r eality, heis defending Stalinism because only the strategic pe rspective of r evolu­tionary reconstruction by the European masses as a unit, and particu­larly in Russia, E astern E urope and Germany, can oppose both t he

44

internationalism of Stalinist Russia a nd the internat ionalism of A meri­can imperialism. No m atter how loudly Ge rmain pr oclaims that Stalin­ism is the main danger, no matter how h e shif t s on defeatism or defens­ism in Russia, he cannot wi ggle out of his capitulation t o Stalinism solong as he continues to look to economic centralization and planningfor social ·p r og r ess." .(" Th e Economist Tendency In The Fourth Inter­national.")

The basis for the Economist tendency of Germain lies in its spec ia lreaction to Trotsky's heritage. It is the only tendency which tries to

.maintain "the dual heritage" as a unified world conception under cir­cumstances which demand a development of the theory. The result isthat the Germain tendency neither "defends" Russia by Trotsky'smethod, nor fully advocates the world revolution by T rotsky's method.

It continually vacillates on the d efense -of the wo r ke r s ' s t a te. It. dared not call for the vict or y of Stalinist Russian over J apanesetroops and only the rapid end of the war saved it f r om the full conse­quences of its false position. It finally call s for the withdrawal of thetroops of the Red Army from the occupied regions, a policy whichcould not possibly be advocated by a political tendency which .hadthought through and was willing to face a ll the dmplica t ions of itsposition.

The Red Army and the Kremlin are "introducing" in. Germanyaccording to Germain, "progressive property forms through bureau­cratic measures." American imperialism, a s its maneuvers in regardto the Ruhr show, seeks '''1.0 preserve reactionary property formsthrough reactionary measures." Whenever faced with this choice, sa ysTrotsky, we choose "the le sser evil." The Fourth International ca nnotch oose . The sou r ce .of these v acillations is rooted deep in th-eory.

The Russian ProletariatShachtman defines the r ela tion s of production in Russi a a s

"slavery," a defin it ion of no value whatsoever except that ~' negationli t excludes the Russian prole t a r ia t a s 'being .pr ep a r ed for the socialistrrevolu tion by the mechanism of p r oduct ion itself. But t he tendency ofG ermain, h y in sisting that the orig in of the 'St a l in is t bureaucracy is inconsumption only, implies that the r elation s of p r oduction lin Russiaa re socialist (or transitional to .socia lism ) and thereby makes ther evolu tion of the Russian proletariat a resp onse t o "tyranny" a n d"oppression" or stimulation from exter n a l fo rces. Germain contin uest.oinsi st that the if-evolution in Russia is a political revolu t ion . Thus,:Ileand Shachman exclude a revolufion of the Russian proletariatbased .u pon the 'p r ocess of production . The result is that, despitephrases, both in practice exclude the Russian proletar-iat a s a revolu­t ionary force from their calculation s of r evolution on a w orld sca le.

Shachtman sees the world p ro le t a r iat essentiaIly throu gh t hes am e defeatist sp ectacles t hrough which h e v iews t he Russ-ian p role­ariat, He places a big question mark on the 'w h ole r evolutionar y per­s pect ive. H e hands over the theoretical deci sion which h e has to m a ket o an em piri ca l mystici sm which h e eu phem ist ically c a ll s " struggle ."\Vhat is h is policy therefore? 'H e h olds on t o t h e " democratic" laboribu rea ucracy a s the French Maj ority h old s on t o t he S t.alin is t bureau­c r a cy. They want "a .dem ocratic interlude." They w ant thepr oleta­i a n revolution to wait until the mass p arty can guarantee a st r ugglewithout possibility of catastrophe.

·Ger m a in and hi s co-thinkers apply to the Russian proletariat t ep olicy that Shachtman appl.ies to the world p roletar iat. WhereShachtman and Co . hold on to t he labor bureaucracy, Germain andhis co-thinkers hold on to the nationalized property. They elevatein to a policy Trotsky's analogy of the Russian s t a t e as a big tradeunion. Their ' defensism continues because . they are terrifi-ed of theproletarian revolution in Russia unless a mass .r evolu t ion a ry party can

guarantee that dmporialism wil l not profit 'by the defeat of t hebureaucracy.

. Shachtman vacillates between a ver ba l r evolu t ion ism and h isa ct ua l subordination to the "democratic interlude" of the labor leader­ship. Germain vacillates between a real revolutionism in WesternEur.ope and the Kremlin and Red Army. Sha cht man's .r evolu ti onismis wrecked against hi s need to support the bureaucracies of WesternEurope. Germain's revolutioni sm is .wrecked against his defense ofthe nationalized property, i.e., the Kremlin and the Red Army.

With the in creasing suc cess, i.e. lease on life, of ' the labor bureauc­r acy, Shachtman, the petty-bourgeois, becomes more de fensi st, d.e .,mo r e ' Men shevik in hi s politics. With the increasing success of theKremlin and the Red ·A rmy, however, Germain, a Bolshevik, is com­pelled to become increa singly defeatist in regard to the Kremlinbureaucracy. The great difference lie s in the perspective of worldproleta r ian revolution con si stently maintained by Germain and ques­tioned by Shachtman. That is why Shachtman, beginning with 3

conditional defensism 'in 1941 , ends with an uncondit iona l defeatism in 'regard to Russia based upon a defeatist attit ude to the proletariatev er yw here. It is the con cept of the world proletarian revolutionwhich is driving Germain from a conditional to an unconditional de­f ea t ism in regard to the Kremlin and the Red Army.

The vacillations of Shachtman can be cured gnly by a .recogrriti onof the elemental and iins t in ct ive drive of the .prolet a riat on a worldsca le; and particularly, in hi s own country, to re construct societ y oncommunist beginnin g s. The vacillations of Germain can be cured on ly:by the recognition of the . elemental and instinctive drive of · theRu ssian proletariat to reconstruct Bodey on communist beginnings.

The Vacillations RepeatedBut if Russia and "nationalized property" are not adequately de­

fended, the world revolutionary aspect of Trotsky's heritage is not'a dequat ely defended either. The vacillation on Russian defense is re­flected in the 'pr opaga nda f or the world revolution by the Fourth In-ternational. .

The concept of the predominant role of the party, learnt in Ru ssia,is transferred to We stern Europe. It ba ses the corruption of thebureaucracies of the Commu nis t Parties on the machinations of theK r emlin and not on the developed antagonism s of th e bourgeoisie , theproletar ia t and the petty-bourgeoisie . Thereby, it is unable to meeton a fundamental cla ss basis the demoralized opportunism of Shacht­man and the IKD nor the infantile lefti sm of Munis. _

Its r evolutionary propaganda tends to demand certain actions ofthe proletariat rather than elicit and develop its own proletarian ex­periences. Hence it s embar rassme nt when these actions do not takeplace and 'Sh a cht man an d the I.K.Dv'ers demand: w here is the revolu­t ion you promrsed ?'; its unrewarding concentration on is su eslike the vote on the r eferendum. As we demonstrated, it promulgatesthe r evolutionary readiness of the ma sses but cannot motivate it fromthe objective manifestations a s Trotsky did in r eg ard to the unionmove ment in 1919. It a nnounces r ather than analyzes. Its r evolution ismcon s.ist s m ore in exhortat ion , and in manifestos r ather than the con­cret e daily presentation of the revolutionary program. It does not seethe or ganic unity between the part y and the r evolut ionary masses bu tis far too much governed by the false idea of Lenin in "What is t o beDone ," that the party brings socialist cons cious ne ss to the massesfrom the outside-dir ect re sult of the theory of the de generated work­ers' st a t e. Worse st ill, Germain now begins to find the consciousnessa n d organization of the proletariat in 1944 lower than it was in 1918.He finds that th e phenomenal growth of Stalinism corresponds to t he"h is t or ic retreat" of the ; workers -movement. If the vacillation on the

46

Russian que stion is to be corrected by the revusron, no t the exposition,of Trotsky's theory . on Ru ssia, the vacillation 0 1: : ," ~ "':~:~ld revolutionis to b e corrected by the , most resolute s t r ugg le fo r the rn ethod-of.Bol shevism. We sh a ll t ake a s a model the Third 'Cong ress of the -Com­in t er n , dominated by -T r otsky, the same Trotsky who wrote the,T ransitional Program. " "

(d) The Method of BolshevismIn 1921 the Third International recognized t hat the revolutionary

wa ve which began in October 1917 had passed." Th e first 'pe r iod of the r ev olut ion a r y movemen t after the war is

ch a r act er ized by the elem ent a l nature of the on slaught, by the con­, sider able fo rmlessness of its m ethods and aims 'a n d by the ext remep a nic of the ruling cla ss es; 'a nd it may be regard ed by and large astermin a ted."

No su ch situation e xi sts today. The extreme p anic of the ruling 'classes 'is f a.r greater than in 1921. The quojation a bove 'Con t inues :

"The class s elf -confiden ce of the bourgeoisie a nd the outwar dst ab il it y of its st a t e organs have undoubtedly ,becom e s t rengt hene d. Thedread of Communism has abated, if not com pletely disa ppeared. Theleaders of the bourgeoi sie are now even boasting a bou t the might ofthei r s t ate apparatus and have ever ywh er e a ssumed the offen siveaga in st the wo rking mass es, on both t he ' econ om i.c and political

.f'r on t s." ,Now som e s uch per iod as th is is wha t Trotsky had in mind when

. he wrote in: 1939 that if, during or after the war the pr oletariat did not.s uc cee d in making the , r evolution and was thrown back on 'a ll f ronts',t h en he could not conceive a nother situation in which i t could conquer.If there are those who think that such a situ a t ion has now been 'reached, let them say so and s t op their intolerable pl aying with greatquest ions.

Of the proletariat itself the These s of the Third Con gress st a tc :. "The elements of stabil ity, of conserva t is m and of tradition, com ­

pletely upset in socia l relations , have lost mo st of thei r au thor ity overthe consciousness of the toiling m asses."

We ask: When were t h e worker s all over the 'World ever s o f r eeof a ll elements 'of st abil it y, of con servatism, of tradition? If Stalinismcor ru pt s the r ev olutionary u rge of the masses , in 1947, the Social­D emocracy corrupted it il'\ 1921. If Stalini sm is the extreme cor r uptiontha t it ts, that is because of the ex treme r evolution is m of the m a ss es.This is s t rictly in ac cor danc a with the laws of socia l development a ndis riot the product of the Kremlin.'

, T he Theses call the capitalism of 1921 "Cap it a li sm in dts death­agony." The whole of world civilization is no lon ger in its deatha g ony. Putrefaction and gangrene have set in . But the International "ca n not see this because 'it pers ists in seeing pr og ress in t h e m on str ou sbarba r is m of Russia and the s pr ead of this into iE ur ope and Asiav>

The Third Congress in its Thesi s on T a ctics, did not deb ate thele vel of consciousn ess Of the masses. It g ave f reely to the cen t r-ist sail that they wanted of this. It a t tribu t ed the failur e of the r evolutionto t he treachery of the workers' parties and added furt her :

". , . it is this wh ich .dur ing the period of apparent prosperity of19 19-20 en cour aged new h op es in t he Ip:r oletaria t of im proving itscon dit ions wi thin the frame wo rk of capit a lism, the essent ia l cause oft.he defeat of the risings' in 191 9 a nd of the decline of the r ovolubionarymovements in 1919 -1920." •

Tak e that a n d do your b est w ith it, Comrade Shachtman 'a n d allyo ur co- thi nke r s. The Con gress a dmi t ted that: "th e majority oft he wor ker s is not yet under the in flu ence of communis m; ab ov e

"a ll, in t he cou n t ri es where t he power of finance-c a pital is :p ar t icu la r ly

, 4 7

strong and has given birth to va st layers of workers corrupted qyimperialism ' (for example ' in England and the United States) andwhere genuine 'l' ev9lu t iona r y propaganda among the masses i s justbeginning." Most important of all, the greatest fight at this Congress

·· wa s a r oun d rejecting the theory ' of the offensive and the 'Cong ressin sist ed that there was no possibility of the revolution until t hemajority of the proletariat accepted the leadership of the Commun­ists.

Take it all, Comrade Shachtman and all the rest of you: Inventf or 1947 a bourgeoisie confident, vast layers of workers corrupted bydm pe r fa li smva majority mot acc epting ;revolut ion , m ake your reaction-.a r y fantasies into a thesis; The International wastes its time a nd \betrays its own vacillations when it argues with you on that basis.

•Bolshevism in 1921It wastes its time. It betrays its own -vacillations. Because in

19 21 after registering the se t -ba ck , the decline of the mass revolts , theconfidence and boasting of the bourgeoisie, the Third Congress thenput forward policy. And what w as this policy?

"All agitation and propaganda, every action of the CommunistParty ought to be permeated by this se nt im ent , that on the capitalistbasis, no durable amelioration of the condition of the great body ofthe proletariat is po s sible: that only the overthrow of the bourgeoisieand the destruction of the capitalist s t a te will make it possible t ow ork for the improvement of the condit ions of the p r olet a r ia t a nd torestore the n ational economy r uined by ca pitaldsm ."

For 1947, is this Bolshevik policy or not? 'Th is is the qu es ti onthat must be answered. But f or it to be answered, it must be askedand the example must be set . This is and has been the basic posi t ionof the Johnson-Forest tendency since 1943. Is it sec tar ia n ism, ul t ra­left ism, semi-syndica li sm , phrase-m ongering? Then Iet us have i t.asked 'an d clearl y answe red on a ll sides.

The Thesis warns that this , of course, shoul d not preven t thes t r ugg le for v it a l, actual an d immed iate demands of the worker s. B utthese wer e not t o be subst it u ted f or the p r op aganda and agitation f orthe revolutionary overth r ow of boureg ois societ y. These theses, itshou ld be noted, were not li terary or h istoric. su rveys. They werew r it t en in 1921 t o g uide the paaties until 1922:

"The revolution ary character of the present epoch consi sts p re­ci selv in this that the m ost m odest co n dibion s of exisencs fo r thewo rking m asse s a r e i ncompati ble wi t h the ex is tence of ca pit ali st satiety,and t hat for t h is r ea son even t he strug g le fo r the m ost modest dem a ndstakes on the p ropor t ions of a stru ggle f or commun ism ."

• The Task of the PartyThe 192 1 Theses sa y that the strugg les m a y be defensive bu t it

is the duty of the party t o deepen the defensi ve s t r uggle, to amplifyjt 'an d tu r n it in t o a n offens-ive .

To t he F rench .Party the thesis offered som e a dvi ce . The re actionagain st the w a r was develop ing mo r e s lowly dn F rance than in t heother count r ies. In ot her words, t he F r en ch p r oletaria t w a s more"backwar d" than t he othe r s of continen tal Europe. The a dvice ofths Thir d Congress was :

" The pr actica l ag it a t ion ough t to t ake a chara cter very muchm are poin ted a nd more energetic. It oug h t not to di ssip a te itself onincident a l si t ua t ions a nd the sh ift ing and variable combin ations of dailypol itics., ,I n a ll events small or la rg e, the agitation of . t he p a rty'sho u ld dra w the same f undamen ta l revolu ti on ar y conclusions and in ­culca te them int o the worki ng masses even the m os t backward."

Th is is Bolshevism. Or is it sectarianism?

48

-,

In 1922 the Fourth Congress met. It said that fasci sm, whiteterror and the sta t e of sieg e against the proletariat was ri sing . It saidthat there was ,approaching an ,e r a , of democratic-pacifist illusions,a nd democratic-pacifist governments in France and Britain. It warned"t hat there were many stages bet wee n xiefeat and victor y. It showedthat 'wit h the decline of the revolutionary wave, the centrists hadmo ved awa y from the Third In te r na ti onal and gone back to the'Second. But it d id not then begin waili ng about t he iHusion s of themasses or speculating on the date of the insur rection. Instead i t de­clared :

" The conception 'accord ing to which, in the unstable equilibr iumof contempora ry bourgeois society, the g ravest crisi s ca n suddenlyburst ,as t he .result of a 'g rea t strike, a co lonia l u prjsing or a newwar, or even a parliam ent a ry crisi s , is eve n truer "t oday than it wasat the time of t he Third Congress.

" Rut it is 'pr ecisely becau se of this that th e 's ubjective' fa ctor,tha t is to say, the degree of understa nd ing , of will, of combat iv rty, andof organ ization of t he working cl ass and of its va ng ua r d acquires an .en ormous importance.

'The majorit y of the wo rki ng class of the United States and ofE uro pe ou ght t o be won, that is t he essent ial task of the Commu nist 'I nt er national t oday as formerl y." )

, The Bolshevism of 1947

N ow we ask: If this was Bol shevi sm in 1921, where is Bol shevismin 1947? A mi ghty debate sha kes the conference halls of the BritishC ong ress. On what ? Entry or. non-entry into t.l1e Labor P arty. Thewh ole British party, majority and minority, ,.despit e su pe rficia l 'differ­ences, is united on the mo st backward, the most su pe rficia l conceptions ,of the world e conomy and the crisis in Britain. Under its nose arespon si ble bourgeois journal wri tes : -

"T he sever it y of the problems t hat face the country 'is such thatthe grea t majori t y of people wo uld endorse a ny policyfhat offered a '

_rea ! prospect of emer ging f rom them. This does not exclude ev en theext re me fo r ms of Socialism, enforced by dictat orial methods , that areadvocated by t he 'Keep Left' school.'?'

Th is is a -serrous warning to the International and can be verifi edin innumerable ways. The a r t icle appea red in the week that the PrimeMinis ter and the Leader of t he Oppositi on warned the British pe opleof a crisis surpassing the crisis of the war. In the same week t heCongress debated on -the le vel of: 'Illusions , no illusions ; boom, noboom ; lu ll , no lull. For this the Intern a ti onal bear s the ent ire r espon­s ibili t )· a s it does for the sha meful and sui c'ida l policies of the FrenchMa jori t y. I n a world of g rea t st r ikes , of continuou s parliamentarycrise s, of colon ial revolts on a n u nheard-of scale, and universal fearof wa r , in a societ y .where no s ta t e ha s firm f ou ndati ons under it sfee t , where all go ver nments leap fro m one adventure t o anothe r, inth is world unable to stand st ill , wher e all the negative fe atu res of1921 a re mult iplied ten times over and the positive f eatures have dis ­appeared, here the International, in no t one sing le documen t or discus­s ion can f a ce the Menshevik tendencies even with the Bolsh evi sm of1921, fa r less .wit h what is r equired in 1947.

The inevitable result could have have been foretold. Organizationaland pett y political problems such a s ent r y or non-entry become dividingli ne s an d the Russian question becomes a football in which ext reme 'r ight and ex t r eme left maneu ver, each for its own purposes, wholeso meor otherwise.

Ye t even with this di sorder rampant in its ranks the International

-The E,conomist. August 16, 19H

49r.

is poli tically u nabl e t o defend Bolshevism for our e poch and di fferen­tiate itself f rom other t enden ices . I n J u ly-August 1947 , it publi shes aneditorial in the jo urnal Quatrieme International with the p ortentoustitle "New St a g e." The new stage is not as in 1.921, t he r ec og nition ofdefeat. No, it 'I S quite t h e reverse.

"For the first time since the "liberation" the prole t a r ia t (inFrance, Belgium, Italy and Holland) has taken th~ fie ld in a vast classmovement, conquering inertia and even the opposit ion of the bureau­cratic apparatus of the Stalinist and reformist leadership, and partiallydi srupting them.

"There has taken place a sh a r p break, very important, above allfrom the consequences which it will have in the near future, betweenlarge layers of the proletarian vanguard and tl¥se leaderships . . .The experience acquired by the masses which have joined the battlewith such vitality and dynamism in the great struggles of the pastweeks will serve to reenforce the rapidity of revolutionary emergencefrom the treacherous tutelage of Stalinism and r ef orm ism."

Here in the midst of the g r ea test di slocation of society ever knowni s a great movement of the proletariat on a continental scale, accom­panied by vast col onial movements '111 the Near East, the Far East andAfrica. But the conclusion betrays the un-Leninist vacil.lation andtimidity.

"F'i na lly, after " ca r ef u ll y w ei ghing' everything, one is compelledto conclude that we probably have before us a period of at least som eyears during which no deci sion will be arrived at either in the sph er eof war or in the sph er e of triumphant Revolution, but which will becharacteriz ed b y t he instability of the bourgeoisie, by great economicand political difficulties, by convulsions 'a nd crisis, and which wi ll un­loose, in the inevit able s t ruggles whi ch will be waged by the worldproletaria t and t h e colonial peopl e s, new revolutionary forces freedfrom Stalinist t utel a ge."

The w rit er is "compell ed to co nclude" that we probably havebef ore u s a per iod of "at le a s t some years ."

Wha t is t h is doing here ? All the centri sts, Shachtman in the lead,w i ll pounce u pon t h is, declaring that this i s what they have beensaving wh en in r eality t hey h ave bee n saying- s om et h in g fundamentall ydi fferent . Who ever pr om ised the v ictor ious r evolution ' a s the over­throw of capitalism on a world or at lea st a continental s cale exce pta fte r lon g years of a dvancing a nd r etreating st rugg le?

This pas s a g-e in t hi s place is a concession, one of the perpetualconcessi ons to t he centrists which the y u se t o advance -their own reac­tionary p olicies. T rotsky s a id in 193 8 to the American com r ades : Youm a y be perfectly able to co nquer the po wer in ten years. Thereforebegin the r evolutionary prep a r ation f or the masses now. And whenShachtrna n in 193 8 thought a s he s t ill thinks that the timefor revol utiona ry sl oga ns is wh en the seizu re of power was approach­ing, Trot sky sh ou t ed a t him, "How can w e in such a critical situationa s 'now ex ists in the whole world, in the U . S. measure the stage ofde velopment of the w or ke rs ' movem ents?"

'rVe a sk these editorial writers the sam e : How can you, in thes it u a t ion of 1947 measure the development of "the new s t a g e" ?Either the st a tement means noth'ing except what every Marxist k nowssince Ma r x 's t h esis of 185 0, (it can be found in the T hesi s of t heThird Congress) or it is a po litical capitulation. Every li ne of theThird Congress is directed again st precisely t.h 'is " some years bef or et he revolution" thesis, the political haven of lef t Mensh evism.

I m m ed ia t ely after this the editorial swings away to the left ." The new stage is above all marked by the broadest and most

fertile intervention of t he p r olet a r iat, w hich upsets all t h e calc ulationsof t h e bourgeoisie and of the Stalinist bureaucracy •••"

60; .'

The words we have underlined should not be written if they arenot meant. But before the sentence is over we are on the right again.

"... which can and must decide the historic alternative, not inthe direction of war but in that of the world socia list revolution."

The revolution is opposed no t to the counter-revolution but to thewa r . That is precisely what all defeatists do and the extreme rightistsare now doing .

Finally to clinch the confusion, the editorial ends as follows:" It is for us, world movement of the Fourth International, t o

unfold before the oppressed masses of the world, clearly, audaciously,t his perspectrva of the po ssible preparation of the Revolution whichcan prevent the war and lead tortured mankind from the impasse andt he toils in which it is plunged by imperialism and the soviet bureau­cracv. . ."

• 'The war again is posed as .alternative to the "possible" preparationof the revolution. We prefer not to try to explain what this means. Bu tt!1e la st sentence cannot be ignored.

"The new stage into which we enter is that of the hardening ofthe revolut ionary f or ces for the preparation, s low perhaps, but su re,of t he Revolution."

All Can ~gree on 'iSlow But Sure"Th at last sentence is a political catastrophe. Shachtman, the

French Majority, the British Party. the LK.D., ever y conservativet e ndency in the International can hold to their posrtions and agreecomple t ely with this. How does one carry .ou t a preparation , s low,pe rha ps, but su re for a revolution! The difference lies then in theperha ps. Shachtman is ab solutely certain that the preparation willbe sl ow . Some of his clo sest sup por ters think it will be twent y year s.Otherwis e, de spite the great question-mark, Sha ch tman, who is liberalabout these things, will be willing' t o be su re of the ul t imate revolutionj us t a s long as t he preparation is s low. And if , no w that the proletar­ia t in one great series of s t r ikes has " ups et a ll the calcul a ti on s of thebour geoisie and of the Stalinist bureaucracy" , if with thi } new stage,we declare that now the preparation is to be s low ( perhaps) but sure,t hen during the two previous ye a rs when t he proletariat did notadvance to the new st age what exactly sho uld have been the tempo ofthe prepar a t ion-pres umably extremel y s low and conversely extremelysure .

During t wo years the centrif ugal elem e nt s in the International )ha ve wi th no slowness at all , (he re they are never s low) a nd wi th ag rowing sur eness, ,gathered their reactionary forces and a re no wdecla ring them selves. At this t ime , when t he I nterna t ional , on theba sis of the ne w sta ge, shou ld .h ave swept this continual setting t het ime for the r evolution into the dus t bin*and m et them with the st iffesta nd most uncom promising prog ra mmatic cou nter-attack , t hi s is thet ime it chooses to dall y with them a nd in ' ad dit ion to stat istics ofb oom , offers t he m united fron ts on the t ime-table of the r evolu t ion .T he in surrection will com e when it will come, the wor ld r evo lutionwill triumph in the who le world or in part in it s own t ime. T his ha sb(Jen and can be legitimate subject for di sc ussion. But only after t hereis program m atic agreement . These questions, when r a ised in themidst of a world crisis never mean what t hey say on the surface buta re a cove r for retreat and react ion. Ou r task is to recognize, in thewords of the Third Congress :

"The revolutionary character of t he p resent epoch consi st s p re -

• The J ",h!n.so n .FoII1est t ondener m.et t hi s " a m e ..eact'i<J!n<l.r)· p r e- l>C cUpa t i"",w it.h per s pec.t i ves of boom fTom the W o'rkers P<l",ty Majo rit y .>1> 1946. W e categ-or­,iClally rcfused t o .su betrtute th~ ned herring o f dis c u<&s',071 on 'JOOm f or the s tra t eg icqu.~:nion s .

51

cisely in this tha t the most mod est condit ions of the masses are in­compat ible with the existence of capit a lis t society and that for thisreason even the struggle for the mo st mo dest demands t akes on theproportions of a struggle for communism."

How is it pos sible in the face of this to telI the worke rs ab outthe slow but sure preparation of the revolution. The y a re then slowlybut surely to starve and shiver without houses, without clothes, withoutfuel. '

Over and over again, in reading the debat es between ri ght andleft, we are reminded of t he pr egnant wor ds of Chaulreu and Mont al,French Minorityites: "O nly t he vocab ula ry dis t inguishes Frank fromGeoffroy."

The basis, t he spearhead of Bolshevism in our time is the un­compromising presentation of the need and the meth ods of socialr evolution. Nothing else can be the ba si s. It is th e lack of t his basiswhich make it somet imes almost impossible ' to distinguish ri ght f ro mleft at some plenum debates except by the names of t he speake rs.And this feebleness is not accidental. We can only repeat. It is theRussian position which ho lds back the International from making aBolshevik use of the Transitional Program.

(e) The Transitional Program TodayIt h as been necessary to establi sh the method of Bolshevism, be­

cau se of the fate t hat has overtaken t he Transitional Program ofTrotsky. The Transitional P rogram is one of the great documents ofMarxism , Bolshevism of o"ur time. Yet it is being m ad e the vehicle forthe most reactionary theory and , practice .

We shall here show what it was, what it is and to what degree1947 has made readjustments and extensions necessary.

The Transitional Program of 1938 was a program for the " system­atic mobilization of the masses for the prolet arian revolution."

. E xcept on this ba sis the Transitional Program could no t h aveab olis hed the old distinction between the minimal demands and t hemaximum demands by linking "day-t o-day work . . . indissolubly . ..with the actual tasks of the revolution."

Ail minimal demands mu st be linked to factory commit tees, f orworkers' control of production and workers' mili tia. These are preci selywhat separ a ted the Transitional Program from t he old mrnimumprogram. Anybody ca n demand anything. It , is the method that makesthe demands of the Transit ional Pr ogram transit ory t o the proletar ianrevolution. Demands for workers' control of produ ction and workers'militia are not demands 'on the bourgeoisie but .on the proletariat topr epar e it ,f or the proletarian revolution.

Th e Transitional Program was to 'Implant the id ea int o the mindsof the comrades, of "the general (i.e., profoundly revolutionary) char­acter and tempo of our epoch."

" In our minds 'It th e slogan of workers 'and farmers gover nmentleads to the "dictatorsh ip of the proletariat."

The transitional demands became revolutionary in fact "insofara s t hey "b ecome the deman ds of the masses as the proletarian gov­ernmen t " , i.e. , insofar a s the masses take over contr ol of product ionand form t hem selves in to worker s ' militia, workers' and farmers'government . Th e Transitional .P r og ram is a program for the armingof the ,workers, a pro g ram with the Soviets in mind.

Trot sky was no putschist. He said repeatedly that these were"ideas" to be implanted as propaganda. But not a line in the programis to be seen except as an idea which only awaited mass mobilizationto be translated into r evolutionary action of the most violent kind. Themilit ary program is a case in point. The program says simply :

52

" Mili t a r y training and a r min g' of workers a nd fanners underd irect control of workers and farmers' com mit tees ; creation 'of .m il­itary schools for the training of commanders among the toilers, chosen .' ,by workers ' organization; s ubs t it u t ion for the st an din g army ' of , apeople's militla, indissolubly linked up with facto ri es , mines, fa rms',etc." .

In those s'imple sentences the leader of t he October Revolutionand the organi zer of the Red Army was pr epar ing the revolutionaryprolet a ria t to sp lit t he bourgeois army, take over a se ct ion of it, organ­ize it as a Red Army, build u p a proletarian force and then arm thewhole population. This is the signif ica nce of the T ra nsit iona l Program;

1938 and 1947 'The posi ti on of t he Johnson-Forest tendency is clear. For u s the

main difference bet wee n 193 8 and 1947 can be su mm ed up in twoconcepts. -

I. I T I S THE TASK OF THE F OURTH I N T E RN ATION A L -TODRIVE AS CLEAR A LIN E BETWEEN BOURGEOIS NATIONAL­I ZATION A ND PROLETA RI A N NATIONALI ZATION AS T HE REV­OLUTIONARY THIRD INTERNATIONAL DROVE BETWEENBO URGEOIS DEMOCRACY AND P RO LETA RIA N DEMOCRACY.

II. THE STRATEGIC ORIE NTATION I S T H E U N IFICATIONO F PROLETARIAN STRUGGLE ON AN INTERNATIONAL SCALEAS EXEMP LIF IED IN T H E STRUGGLE FOR THE SOCIALISTUNITED STATES OF EUR OPE. '

This understood we sha ll take the key features of the program asit was in 1938 and compare 'It a s a program for 1947.

"T H E OBJECTIVE PREREQUISITES FOR ASOCI ALIST REVOLUTION"

1938. "T he wor ld political si t ua t ion a s a whole is chi e fl y ch ar­act er ized by a historical cri si s of the leadership of t he proletariat. "

This is t he key sent ence of the Transitional P r ogram. Why ? _"Democratic regimes, as we ll as fascis t, stag ger on from one

bankr u ptcy to a nother." T he bou r geoi si e it se lf sees no way ou t ..." In countries where it has a lready been forced to stake its last

u po n t he ca rd of fascism, it now tobaggons with closed eyes t owa rda n economic a nd milita r y ca tastrophe. .

" ! n t he historically-privileged cou ntrie s . .. all of capital's tra-ditiona l pa r t ies are in a s t a t e of pe rplexity, border ing on a par a lysisof w ill . .

"Inter na t ion al relations pres ent no better pi ct ur e . . • "This is the classi c formul a for the pre-revolu tionary sit uation.

,The bourgeoisie cannot g ove rn in t he old way. That is ,wh y "Thehistorical crisis of mankind is r educed to the cris is of the r evolut ion-ary lead ership." , ,

1947. The war has come. There 'IS not one single regime, bo ur­ge ois- dem ocra t ic, socia l-dem ocra tic, or m ili t ary occu pation , to which1938 would not se em a paradise. There is no longer perplexity, t h ereis on ly t error and fear. ' The problems are in soluble. '

From the bourgeoisi e Trotsky now passe s to t he ' proletaria t ."THE PROLE T ARIAT AND ITS LE A DE RSHIP"

, 1938. " The econom y, the s t a te, t he poli t ics of the bo urgeo is ie amiit s interna t ional r e la tions a re completel y blighted by a social cri sis,character is t ic of a pre-revolutiona r y s t a t e of society."

1947. The economy, the s t a t e and the po litics of the b ourgeoisieand its international r elations are no longer, completely blighted asin 1938. Barbaris m is a lready eating away at t he heart of E uropeancivilization a nd t he colonial pe riphery. The regimes of Stalin and hissatellites surpass the traditional bourgeois regimes only 'in - the, depth

· 53

of the decline and the hypocrisy of their rulers.1938. "In all countries, the proletariat is wracked by a deep

di squiet: In millions, the ma sses again and again move onto the roadof .the revolutionary outbreaks. But each time they ,a r e blocked bytheir own conservative apparatus." ) ,

1947. Smce 1938 the proletariat and the peasantry have repeatedl yshake n deca ying bourgeois society t o the ground as in country aftercount r y during 1944 or paral yzed it with mighty convulsions as in thegreat strikes of t he United States. But the con servative appara t usesh ave picked up p r ostr a t e bourgeois society, set it on its feet againa nd are ho lding it t og et her . Wrthout them bour geois society wouldnot exist.

1938. "The definite pa ssin g over of the Comintern to t he side oftlie bourgeois order, its cynicall y count er -r evolut ionar y rol e through ­out the world. particularly in S pa in, France, the Uni t ed States a ndother "democrat ic" countries, cr eated except ional supplementary dif­fi culties for the world proletariat . .. The laws of history are strongerth an the bureaucratic apparatus. No matter how the methods of the /socia l-bet rayers differ-from th e socia l legislation of Blum to thejudicial f rame-ups of -St a lin-s-t hey will never succeed in breaking therevolutionary will of the prolet ariat."

1947. The r eformist bureaucracy precisely because it is reformistcan ' no longer hold the allegiance of the masses . They ha ve pouredby the hundreds of thousands and th e m ill ions into the CommunistP a r t ies , thereby decla ri ng as never before, the ir under stand ing ofthe need for a revolutionary t ransformation of society. Bu t convincedof the bankruptcy of the national bourgeoisie and the n ati onal st a te /and in terrible fear of the proletarian revolution, the Comintern seekst o create in Europe and Asia national sa t elli t es of Stalinist Ru ssiawith the Red Army as it s main protector .against pr olet a r ian upri sin gswithin and intervention from without. In vain. No sign ofstabilization appears. The new re gimes are driven along the road oft ot alit a r iani sm. The parties of the Comintern seek to corrupt therevolutionary will of the masse s by the prejudices of the petty­bourgeoisie, bringing into play all the t reacherous devices learnt inthe school of the Kremlin. But already th e masses have in all sphe r esshown their capacity to confound and upset the mo st carefully laidcalculations of the leadership. In major countries, already for broadmasses, the term Trotskyi sm has become synonymous. with the ideaof revolutionary proletarian st r ugg le for power as opposed to theKremlin--dominated policies of the Cominte rn.

It is at this st age that Trotsk y in 1938, having establish ed theunbreakable drive to the r evolutionary power of the proletariat,di stinguishes between the Transitional Program and the minimumprogram. Trotsky then talks of t he n ece ssary question of t actics.But here 1947 is not 1938.

Today the proletariat fac es and k now s that it faces an economyand socia l order so sha t tere d that .nothin g but t he mo st unparalleledefforts can destroy the counter-revolution, rebuild the economy andfinally ex t inguish I the spreading flames of war. Every passmg dayshows to the proletariat that its nearest every-day immedia t e need scan be sa t is f ied only by actions of the mo st far-reaching hi storicalcharacter. The struggle for pow er therefore beco mes t he main objec­tive of the r evo lutionary education of the masses. -

WAR AND THE ARM ING OF T HE PROLETARIAT1938. "The present cris is can sharpen the class struggle to an

extre me point and bring ne arer t he mo ment of denouement. Bu t t hatdoes not mean th at a r evolutionary sit ua t ion comes on at one st ro ke.Ac tua lly, its approach is sig na lized by a continuous series 'of convu l­sions •. • The problem of the sections of the Fourth International is

t o , help the proletarian ' vanguard" understand the ' ge nera l character , ''and tempo of our epoch, and ' to 'f ruct ify in time the ,s tr uggle of 'the 'masses : with evermore ' r esolute ,and"militant "organ izat lona l -measures,'

', "Strike pickets are the ba sic ' nuclei of the proletarian- arm y." .This ,is our point of vdeparture.- Iniconnection with ' every ,st r ike ands tr eet demonstration, ' it .. is imperative to ' pr opa ga te ' the,'necessit y ' ofcr ea t ing workers' groups for self-defense. It is necessary to write this.slogan into the program of the ' r evolutionary win g 'of the trade' unions'.It is imperative wherever. possible, beginning with t he ' youth groups,t o organize gr ou ps for se lf-de fens e, to drill and acquaint them 'wit ht he use of arms.

"A new upsurge of the mass movement should serve not 'onl;t to ­• increase the number of these units but al so to unite them accordinu

- to neighborhoods, .cit ies, regions. 'It is nec essa ry to give organizedexpression to the valid hatred of the workers t oward scabs: and bandsof gangst ers and fa sci sts. It is nec essary to , advance the slogan ofa workers' ,militia as the one se r ious ,guaran tee for the in violabilit yof workers' organizations, meetings and press." ,

This does not dep end on the consciousness of ,t he masses. It .isprecisely t he consci ousness of t he , masses which is t o be altered.

"Only with the help of such systema t ic, pe rsi stent, indefatigable,courageous a gitational and organiza tional wor k, a lw ays on the basisof the experience of the masses themselves, is it possible t o root ou tfr om their cons cious ness the tradi tions of submissiveness a nd pass­iv ity .. ..'

1947. The objective conditions of 1947, the great experiences ofmilitary and class warfare that the proletariat has gone through' since1938 makes the 1938 point of departure inadequate. Today in largea reas of t he worl d the point of departure 'is the arming of the pro let ar­iat . The slogan of a workers' militia embodying the whole population.me n and women, is needed not for defense but as the basis of t heseizur o of power, a new form of stat e administration and the rec on­'st r uct ion of t he na t iona l economy.

A LLIANCE OF WO RKERS AN D FARMERSOn the same revolutionary sca le is the program for the alliance

of the workers and farmers. In 1938 there i s not one word of par­Jiament ar lsm in t he hundreds of words devoted to this.

1938. "Committees elected by sm all farmers should make th eirappea r ance on the national sce ne and jointly with workers' committeesand com mittees of bank employees take into their hands control oftransport, credit , and mer cant ile operations affecting agriculture." '

1947. The vanguard, in the f ace of tne st a rving nation, summo nst he proletariat to lead the nation and particul arly the f armers, t oover t hr ow the bourgeois re gime in order to be gin the reconstructi onof the economy. '

WORKE RS CONTROL OF PRODUCTION1938. "The ' wor king out of even the most elementary economic

plan-from t he point of view of the exploited, not the exploiters-isimposs ible wit hout workers' control, that is, without the penetrationof the workers' eye into all open and con cealed springs of capitalistecon om y. Commit tees representing in dividual business enterprise sshould meet at conferences to choose corresp onding committees of+ usts, whole br anch es of indust r y, economic reg-ions and finally, ofn tional ind ust r y as a whole. Thus, workers' contro l becomes a schoolfor planned economy. On th e basis of ,the experience of control, t heproletariat will pr epare it self fo r dir ect management of nationalized ,indus t ry when t he hour for that eventuality strikes."

1947. The workers no longer need to pene trate into any of t hesprings of capitalist economy. I n some of the most important coun-

;; 55

t r ies of the world the ruin a nd thievery of capitalist economy areope n secrets to the workers. Workers' control - of production by anoverall plan becomes the sole means whereby it would be possible tor ebuild the ruined nationalized economy.

The ruin of the economy '1S complemented by the demonstratedne ed and desires of millions of workers to finish once and for a llwith the slave ry of capitalist production and to exercise to the fu llthe vast productive capaciti es created in them by capitalism. Theexperience of the Russian Revolu tion has proved beyond a sha dow ofdoubt that workers' control of production is the deepest expression ofproletarian democracy and that without it, it is impossible to solve

. the basic antagonisms of value production,1938. "The necessity of advancing the slogan of expropriation i~

the course of daily agitation . in partial form, and not only in ourpropaganda in its most comprehensive aspects, is dictated by the factthat different brandies of industry are on different levels of develop­ment, occupy a different place in the life of society, and pass throughdifferent stages of the class struggle. Only a general revolutionar yupsurge of the proletar-iat can place the complete expropriation of thebourgeoisie on the order of the day. T he task of transitional demand.is to prepare the proletariat to solve this problem."

1947. The cr isis of national eco nomies like those of France a ndBrit ain compel the immed iate ex pr opriation of an the ba sic mdust.ri esof the nat iona l economy by the armed proletariat. Piece-meal ex pro­pr iation with or without compen sation is doomed to failure. Far f ro magita t ing for t he partial expropri ation of individual industries, t he

. ' need now is fo r total expr opriat ion under wor kers ' control and com­prehensive plans for the integ ration of na t iona l economies int o aninternational production. N ot only the ruin of the econom y bu t theca pitulation of the impotent bou rgeoisie to the need for internationa l­ization forms a su r e basis fo r the agitation and propaganda of inter­national socia l cons t ruction.

- The " Marshall P lan" forms the latest climax to the n eed for aplan of the 'inva ding' socialist society, im po sing itself on t he ca pitali stproductive f orces. Precisel y becau se of their ca pita list nat ure, a llsuch plans can result ul t imately in no thing else but di sruption of t heworld economy, in crea sed dri ve to war and the degradation of t hewo r ld proletariat. - .

T o these pseudo-international plans of the bourgeoisie, ithevanguard '111 ever y cou ntr y and part icula rly in the United St a t es

" m u st aim at preparing the proletariat for a genuinely internationa laction : workers ' control of the main sour ces of production, interna­tional workers' cont r ol of a ll means of tra nsport; an inter nat ionalplan for the r econstruction of t he world econo my upon a socialistbasis.

Without such pla ns the pro le tariat is weak ened before the r eac ­t.ionary and m a lignant mani pulation by the bourgeoisi e of the inher entneed of the produc t ive forces to be organi zed on an internationalsocia lis t basis . Ab ove · all, the vanguard exposes t he world-widecounter-revolutionary r ole of A merican imperi alism a nd the hypo­critical character of its economic "gifts,"

1938. "However, the st a te-iza tion of the banks will produce t hesefavora ble results only if the st a t e power it self pa sses completely fromt he hands of the exploiters into the hands of the' toilers."

1947. Only if the nat ion alization takes place under the worker s 'control r of pr oduction and the st at e power in the hands of the t oiler s ,will t he st a t if ica t ion of banks and other basic industries produce any­thing except frustration, demora li zation a nd ultimat ely penal laborfo r t h e working class. The slogans of workers' control of product ion,

56

nationalization can no longer be used except as Lenin used them, inthe closest relation with the slogan of a workers' . and farmers" gov­ernment, on the road to the dictatorship of the proletariat.

THE U.S.S.R. AND PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION1938. "From this perspective, impelling concreteness is imparted

to the question of 'the 'defense ·.Gf the USSR.' If tomorrow the bour­geois-fascist grouping, the 'faction of Butenko,' so to speak, shouldattempt ,the conquest of power, the 'faction of Reiss' inevitably wouldalign itself on 'the opposite side of the barracades, Although it wouldfind itself temporarrly the ally of Stalin, it would nevertheless defendnot the Bonapartist clique but the social base of the USSR, i.e., theproperty wrenched away from the capitalists and transformed intostate property, Should the 'faction of Butenko'prove to .be in alliancewith Hitler, then the 'faction of Reiss' would defend th.e USSR frommilitary intervention, inside the country as well as on the worldarena. Any other course would be a betrayal." ,

1947. The rise of Ru ssia .a s a vast state-capitalist trust, drivenby the contradictions of capitalist production and the struggle for thecontrol of the world-market, . has rendered obsolete prognoses aboutelements in the Stalinist bureaucracy who seek the r estoration ofprivate property. Neither the tendencies in world economy nor theeconomic and social development of the U.S.S.R. itself, gives theslightest, indication of any tendency towards the restoration of privateproperty. The bureaucracy defends the state-property and will continueto defend it. It no longer confines itself to the reactionary utopia ofsafeguarding socialism in a sing le country. Allied to the CommunistParties, it is a seri ous contender fo rc.world power and its veryexistence is the greatest sour ce of corruption of the world proletariat.It is . the g r ea tes t counter-revolutionary force in the world today. N or emnant of the October Revolution remains. And the Russian proletar­iat in particular, and the world proletariat' in general, must make nodi stinction whatever between Ru ssian st a t e-capit alism and Americanimperialism as the enemies of the proletariat a nd the chi ef t orturer sand oppressors and dec eivers of hundreds of millions of workers andpeasants. Above all, the vanguard pursues with the utmost r elent­les sn ess any theory which implies that a st a t e reorganization ofproperty by any agency whatever cont ains in it anything else butan int ens if ica t ion 'of the fundamental antagonisms of capitalist pro­duction and the degradation of all classe s in society. It base s itselfunshakably upon the theoretical conception, now demonstrated inpractice, that the only solu tion to the antagonism of capit alist pro­duction is the creative power of the modern worker r elieved from thest a t us of proletarian.

1938. "A revision of planned eConomy from top it o bottom in t heinterests of producers and consumers'. Factory committees shoul dbe returned the right to control production, A democratically organ­ized consumers' cooperative should control the quality and pr-ice ofproducts." "

1947. The planned economy of Stalinist Russia cannot be revised.The proletariat alone through its factory i committees, its free tradeunions and its own proletarian party can plan the economy. All ot herplans con sist first and foremost of terror ag ai nst the prolet ariat,--­the chief of the productive forces, to enforce submission to the un­resolved fundamental antagonism s of capitalist production. The a ntag­oni sms are in soluble except by in stituting proletarian democracy.

THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL AND THE PROLETARIAT1938. "Of course, .even among the workers who had at one t ime

ri sen to the first ranks, there are not a few tired and disillusionedones. They will remain, at least for the next period, as by-standers•

•57

When a program or an organization wears out, the -generation whichcarried .it on It sshoulders wears out ith it. .The movement is revital­ized by -t he youth who are free of ' responsibility for the ,,pa s t . TheF our t h International pays particular attention to the young genera­tion of , the proletariat, All of its policies strive to inspire the youthwith belief in its own strength and in the future. Only the f r eshenth us ias m and a ggressi ve spirit of the youth can g uar ant ee the ,preliminary successes in the s t r uggle] . only , these successes can returnthe best elements of the older generation to the road of revolution.Thus it was, thus it will be."

1947. The Fourth dnternational does no t confo und its own f orceswith the objective r evolutionary situat ion and the m ovement of thep ro letariat. Pre cisely because of its small f orc es, i t add r esse s itselfalways to t he vang uar d of t he proletariat, p articular ly t he youth.B~' placing b efor e them the revolutiona r y program in all its ampli­t ude but based always on concret e ci r cumstances a nd experiences, itwins over the most aggressive elem ent s who in t urn will lea dthe less advanced la ye rs in - r ev olu t ion a ry st r uggle . T he F ourthInter n a t ional r ej ects without r eservation a ll iplans to base r evol ut iona rypoli cy u pon the backwardne ss of the masses or the smallness of theBo lshevik Party.

1938 . " Wi t hou t inner democra cy-no revolutionary educa t ion.Without discipl ine-no revolutionary action. The in ner struct ure of theF ourth 'Interna tiona l is based on the principles of democratic central­ism ; full freedom - in discu ssion , complete unity in a ction ."

1947. The cris is of humanity sharp ens a ll con t r adict ions, eventhose w ithin the revolutionary mo vemen t i t self . N ever w as it 'm or enecessar y for the inter national party of wo rl d socia lism t o pract icethe most ruthl es s f r eed om of discussi on . Never was i t m or e necessa r yto have th e m ost rigid discipline in a ction. Theor etical intransigea ncem ust be combined wi th organizational flexibility. A t the m omen tw h en the proletar iat is in process of making a great historic a dva n ce,sects, h istorically progressive in periods of qui escence, become r eac­tionary. F or all wh o oppose the democratic imper ialisms and Stali n- 'ism, un it y in one party is essen tial. The Fourth I nt erna t ion a l .will.pursue with out m ercy th ose enemies of prole tar ian !power who f lyt he banner of T rotskyism , and yet seek t o di srupt t he continuit yof ou r m ovement .

Th e above is not a program f or adoption . N ot even a draf tprogram can reasonably com e ex cept from a n internat ion a lcen t re, the work of comrades of .v ar ied k n owledge a nd r ecen t a n dconcr ete exper iences with the pr oletariat . But enough h as beensaid t o make it impossibl e :

1 ) for Menshevism t o conceal itself behind a t reachero us inter -pretation of the Transi tional Progra m. .

2) for Bolshevi sm to allow ,Menshevik t endencie s to obscur ethe fundamen ta:!s of ou r m et hod w ith picayune di sputes a imed atwhittling a way its r evolu ti onary dyna mism, conf id ence and audacity ,demanded now as n ever before 'by the objecti ve r ela t ions of society.There can be n either -r ig ht, n or left n or cent re h ere, T hi s is Bol-shsvism a nd opposed to it are its enem ies. '

ConclusionWe have t o draw the theoretical 'a r row to the head. 'H ist orv has

shown that in moments of grea t social crisis, dt s farthest f ligh tsfall short of the r eality of the proletarian r evolu t ion. Never .w as thep r oleta riat so r eady f'or the r evol ution ary strugg le, never w a s theneed fo r it so great, neve r was it mor e cer t a in that th e 'Proletar ia nupheaval, h owever lon g delayed, will on ly the m or e certain ly t akehumanity forward in the g r ea t es t leap forward it has hitherto made.

58/

The p er iods of retreat, of quiescence, of inevitable d efeats a remere episodes in the face of the ab solute nature of the crisis . WroteMarx in 1851, ,

"Proletarian .revolut ions . . • criticize themselves constantly,interrupt themselves continually in their own course, come back to theapparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh, deride with un­merciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesse s and paltrinessesof their first attempts, seem to throw down their adversary onl y inorder that he may draw new st r en gth from the earth and ri se againmore gigantic before them, r ecoil ever and anon from the indefiniteprodigiousness of their own aims, un t il the situation has been createdwhich makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions them­selves cry out . . ."

T oday f rom end , to end of the wo rld th ere can be no tur ningback. But the democr atic instincts and needs of hundreds of m ill ionsof people are cry ing ou t for an ex-pression which only t he socia lis trevolution can :gi ve. Th ere is n o .p ow er on ea r t h that can suppress t hem .They will n ot be su ppressed.

September 15, 1947

Ap~ndix

The Political Economy Of GermainGoverning all economic conceptions are certain philosophic con­

ceptions, whether the econom is ts a re a ware of them or not. Andequally go ver ning all political concept ions are certain economic con­ce pt ions. Germain's whole a nal ysi s of Russia is governed by ane conomi c analysis; It i s u nder consu mptionism.

In h'is Draft Theses (International Bulletin , P ublished by t h eSoci a li st Workers Party, p. 13 ) Germain writes:

"The t endency t oward str uctural assimil a t ion is u ndeniable. Th'ist endency does not stem f ro m t he need fo r 'i nterna l accumulat ion ofcapital,' that .is, f r om any pursuit of profits. It is precisely her e thatt he essentia l ec onomic differ ence between ca pitalist economy andS oviet eco no my lies . T he cent r a l problem of " capital'ist ,econom y isthe problem of gettin g s ur plus -va lue--that is t o sa y, the pursuit ofprofits (un de r t he capitalist syst em accumulation of capital is t heca pit aliza t ion of t he sur plus-va lue ; this can be achieved only if su r ­pl us -value is gotten ). But wit h Soviet eco no m y the ba sic ques tion isex pansion of pr oduction, in dependently of t he mat ter of pr ofits (t heeconomist Leontiev, in a n article published in 1943, ack n ow le dges "t h a tbetween 1928 a nd 1935 t he Soviet m etallurgical industry operated ,at a st ea dy loss a n d cou ld not have survived and grown ex ceptwith the help of state subsidies) . W herea s imperialism consists es­sent ia lly in the search for 'new spher es of capital investmen t in orderto combat t he tende ncy toward a s t ea dy decline in the averag e rateof profit, Soviet expansioni sm looks f or sou r ces of r aw materials,fini shed g oods , etc., independently of the question of prof it s , con ­si deri ng only. t he needs of production and of the planned econom y."

Germain po ssesse s the v irtue of making all hi s m ist a kes pow er­fully and clearly. It is difficult to see how it is po ssible to make morefanta stic mistakes t h a n he concentrates in t his passage.

T he Soviet met a llu rg ica l industr y operated at a loss. All thatth is means is that su r plus-la bor ext r a ct ed from one spher e of t heeconomy was used to bol ster up a nother spher e. A capitalist eco nomy,pa r t icul a r ly economies that, are controlled by the state, doe s exactlythe sa me t hing. Ther e is no specia l "Soviet virt ue" in thi s. T heBritish st a t e to day will h ave no hesitation whatever in p ro ducin g inone sphere at a loss in order t o bol ster su ch over-all purposes a sit has. Germain obv iously bel ieves that today a capitalis t economywould se e a vital industry not grow an d ~ven not survive because itcould no t sh ow a profit on the book s.

Germain informs us that "with Soviet econom y the basic qu est ionis ex pansion of production, in dep end entl y of the 'matter o f profi t s ."A ccording to this political econom y, Soviet econ omy just has t oproduce and p ro duce and produ ce.

An econom y can only produce with what it has. The nationalproduction must attend to the absolute needs of the popu la t ion inthe broadest sens e ; it must renew the worn-out plant and then itcan expand on ly with what remain s. Now 'if a s in Russia , it is apo ve rty-stricken eco nomy f unctioning within the world-market, thes urplus is strictl y li mited. It m ust pay t he worker a t hi s value, itcannot afford t o pay him more. T o do so would lessen t he precio ussu rp lus. And fo rthwith it is in the gr ip of v alu e production.

This is wh at Mar x 'ta ught , that once t he ,prole tariat is 'hu mil ia t ed,degraded, a proleta r ian , then automatically t he on ly way of raisi ngthe productivity of labor is by expanding the cons t a nt capital, t he

,6 0

m ach ine ry , the plant, at the expense of the workers, Stalin woulddoubt less be delighted to be able to raise "the standard of living"of t he Russian workers. He cannot do it. Even where a plant is doinga dequat e. service, the discovery and popularrzation of a superior typeof ma chiner y in Western Europe compels the rapid depreciation invalue, Le., the scr ap ping of this particular type of production andth e subst itu t ion of the higher. Stalin doe s not need to know politicaleconomy in order to do this. Self-preservation dictates this con stantreorganiza t ion of the economy, as far a s possible, in order to maintaina re a sonable relation with the other economies of the world. Whent he wor ld-mark et exi sted a s a funct ioning communication, this te staccordin g to value acted automatically often by violent crises.T-oday, when the world-market is in ruins, the same necessity exists.The planner s, particularly in backward Ru ssia, have no guide at a llexc ept the mo st ruthless production of sur plus -labor to fe ed the insa­tia ble needs of the econ omy. Engels in Ant i-Duhr ing summe d upSta lin 's dilemma with a stonishing precision. The st a t e-ownership ofca pit al, he sa ys , po ssesses the "technical means" of solving thepr oblems of capitalist production. Technica ll y, production in Ru ssiahas an unlimited market. It is into this unlimited pit that the under­consumpt ionrst s fall and drown themselves. It would, for example,be insanit y t o produce vast quantities of food and cotton- goods. Thewa ges of workers must be limited. So are the appetites of evenStal inist bureaucrats.

St ali nis m cannot produce and produce and produce. It is con­s ta nt ly caught between the contradiction that it cannot get surplus ­la bor except from labor-power. And it m us t keep the cost of labor­powe r a s cheap as possible; otherwise the cos t of the commodity,Le. th e labor that go es rnto it r ise s t o a de gree that imperils t hew hole economy in its relation to other economies. Marx took specialca re t o warn of preci sely ,this when he wro te :

"Cent r a liza t ion in a certain line of indus try would have reachedi t" ext r eme limit, if all the individual capit al s invested in it wouldh ave become amalgamated into one s ingle capital.. " Th is limit wou ld not be reached in a ny particular so ciety until

th e en t ir e social capital would be u nited , erther in the hands of onesingle capitalist, or in those of one s ingle corporation." (C a pit al,Vol. I , p. 688) ' .

. In a given economy, Le., in ' a st a te-ca pitalist corporation whi chfun ct ioned within the world-market, there would be a struggl e . tomaint a in a certain relation between con stant and variable capital ,bet ween industrial plant and labor. And as long a s other econo miesdeve loped their sys t ems, the s t a t e-ca pitalist corporation would h aveto maint a in a simila r r elation. That 'rs precisely the dil emma ofSt ali nism . The planning only a llows the planners, insofar as t he ycan guess at wh at is ,r equir ed ) to manipulate the econ om y and t heworkers t he mo r e easily for the production of sur plus-value. If, how­ever , t he economy were a st a t e-capit a list cor por a t ion embracin g thewh ole worl d, then and only then would the wh ole problem be altered.The worl d-mar ket would have been abolished. Value production wouldcease, and 'If men would st and for it, a plan could work. That, how­eve r, would not be capitalism, and as Le nin sa id, we are a long wayf r om that. .

The question could be st be illuminated by a few theoretical obs er­va t ions on the "Marshall Plan." If, abstractly speaking, the UnitedSta t es did use its surplus ' to equip the continent of Europe, in a fewyea rs it would be faced with a modernized economy, so super ior to'Its own that its own products would be driven out of the Americanrr.a rket. Forthwith it would find that it needed to struggle now for

Gl

su rplus -va lue to re-equip its own plant now depreciated, not by windand rain, but in value. And so it would go.

Th e mode of appropriation, i.e., by individual private capitalists,u ndoubtedly creat~d a certain anarchy of production, particularlyof the old commercial type of crises. But the basic contradiction isin production, not :in the market, and lies in the con tradiction betweent he const an t expansi on of capital a nd the relat ive diminut ion oflabor . It is not the real ization of s u r plus-va lue but the falling rateof prof it , .i.e., the falling r elation of the total sur plus -value to thetot al sooialca pit a l. This relation i s determined :by capital on a world,sca le and ,St alin ism can never esc ape it. In t he early days it madea le ap but that . relation soon caught up wi t h it and now it is trapped.

What is the solu t ion ? It i s not an ex tend ed market. If thew orld-m a rket for the sal e of consumpti on goods w ere incr eased byt he discover y of millions of s t a rv in g people with gold to pay, it wouldsolve no thi ng. The solution i s the raising of the productivity of labor.If capital could double the 'p roduct iv.ity of labor and make the vastprofits of its early d ays , there are .st ill vast areas of the .world toexploit. It do es n ot need Russi a. There is China, India, L atin- America,Africa. But the m ar gin of profit i s so low ·t ha t expansion on thegigantic scale now r equired is prohibited to it. H ence it stagnatesa nd fooli sh capitalists and still m ore fo olish econ omi sts then beginto speculate on "raising the standa r d of living of the workers toprovide a m arket." If capital had d epen ded upon raising the s t an da rdof living of the wor ke r s as a market, there would have be en only ·on ecapitabist and he would not have lasted very long.

Ma r x saw that produ ct ivity on the basi s of expanding planta nd degr ad ed workers would 'r ea:ch a limit. And then he made atremendous step f'orward, so tremendous that even now we cannotg'rasp vit . It was m ade only because his specif ic economic theorieswere g uided ,by the dia lect ical materialis t theory. He sh owed thaton ly by la bor 'it self be coming f r ee could the new level s of produ ctivity

' be a ch ieved. For h im this cou ld n ot ,possibly h ave been a humani­t a r ian f lower in th e buttonhole of nati on a liz ed pr operty. Man, edu ­cated, trained by t he achievemen ts of ca pitalis m, would ,r a ise thep ro duc t ivit y of labor by r ever sing the capitabist method, ex pansionof pl an t and degradation of t he worker. Only by the increasingde velopme nt of the worker a s a h uman being, cou ld t he capitalistmo vement be r eve r sed . Bureaucratic collectivism , manag er ial societ y,d egener-a ted workers st a te, all can plan t o the la st v itami n. Theycan ne ver r ever se t his m ovem ent.

The whole question of t he Marxist a nal ysis of capitalis t CrIS IS

has been debated fo r m any yea r s. L eni n, in par ticula r, in debatesw it h the N ar odni ks a t the tu r n of t he century, and lat er , nevertolerated .any theories which made t he decline of ca pitalism t urnon t he r ealization of s u rplus value, i.e., market economics. N ow theexperience of R us sia , and in dt s w ay, t he development of t he A me­r ica n p r olet aria t , sets the sea l on the debate.

Today this is not a question' of theory. The validity of Marx'sthesis is proved by the fact that ever y econ omy, Stalinist, Ameri cana nd British is fa ced with the pr obl em. of the pr odu ctivity of labor.The wo rkers are revo lt ing p r eci sely against being made merely theinstruments of increa si ng pro du ct ivity. Marx saw and st a ted thatt he incr easing degradation h ad its a ffi rmat ive side, the instinct of theworkers t hemselves t o take over production a nd thus ca r ry out thepractica l solu t ion of wh at h e s aw theoretically. This is the inevitabler es ult of va lue production.

The increase of con stant capital not onl y degrades the workersbut mus t a lso throw out millions which it must hold in r eserve for

62

J. R. J.

· the -increa sing bursts of pr oducti on whe the r in the old da ys in ord in­a ry ma r ke t competition or a s t oda y in t he compet it ion of war. Stalinistp rod uction not only degrades the worki ng class with the same resultsa s in traditional capitalism. Be in g' va lue production it must alsocontinually throw out millions of wo rkers from production and havet hem f or future spasmodic bu rst s despite the present decli ne . of theworld market. This is the significa nce of the mill ion s of slave lab orerswho are no more than the capitalist industrial r eserve a rmy of labor.

U nless this is understood as the basis of the capitalist economy,the ro ad is open not onl y t o the mi su nderstanding of the Stal inisteconomy but al so to basing t he r evolutionary instincts of the pr olet ar­iat u pon the ab senc e of employment or t he n eed fo r a "higher st andar dof liv ing." From this flo ws t he constant preoccupation with boom a ndstabil iza t ion . The perspective of r evolut ion 'IS based upon the mo stvulga r ~conomist analysis of wor ld econ omy and of the proletariat.It is the r esult of an inabilit.yto see that today " be h is paym ent hi gh01' low," the proletariat has been developed by capitalism t o a st a geof e lement a l r evolutioni sm. This im pedes a ll per spective of any ser iousecon omic recove r y a ltogethe r apart fro m economi c st a tist ics. Thef ulfil ment of this r ev olutionism is pr eci sel y wh at Marx called thereal history of humanity. And it is because the ' r eal hi story ofh uma nit y 'is rejecting t he capi talist sys tem that the antagonism s areshaking the soc iet y t o pieces. .

Thus Ma rxian economi cs itself develops and bec ome s fused withthe irresis t ible so cializat ion of labor and its po li ti ca l expressi on int he r is ing mass movemen t . Of all thi s . there is no t ' a hint in thepolitical eco nom y of Germain. .

This is a b ri ef po pula r .st a t ement , The question has been moreadequately d ealt w ith in1. The Development of Capital ism in Russia by Lenin,

Chapte r I, T r ansla t ed b y F. Forest, New Internat ional, Oct.,Nov., Dec., 1943.

2. Produc ti on fo r P r oducti on 's :Sake, by J. R. J ohn son ,Int ernal Bulletin of t he Workers Party, May, 1943.

3. A Restatement of some F unda men tals of Ma rxi sm , b y F . F orest,In ternal Bu lletin of Workers Party, IMar ch 1944.

4. Luxem bour g 's Theor y of Accumula ti on , by F. ForestNew In ternationa l. A pril and May, 1946.

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•AFTER TEN YEARS

( Review of T rotsky 's The R evolution B etrayed)B"y J. R. JOHNSON

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