Rebuilding the Fourth International: Resolution for the International Conference of the International Committee 1966

[p008] FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, AUGUST 1966 Resolution for the International Conference of the International Committee, 1966 Rebuilding the Fourth The class struggle is international. World capitalism has long since played out its historical role of laying down the objective bases for socialism; the struggles of the workers of all countries have meaning only in terms of the world socialist revolution which began in October 1917 in Russia, as part of the world proletarian revolution. The Third (Communist) International was set up to answer the needs of the working class in this epoch of wars and revolutions. Following the betrayals of Social Democracy after 1918, the degeneration of the CPSU and the Comintern led eventually to the defeats in Britain and China in 1926/27 and the victory of fascism in Italy, Germany and Spain. Between 1933 and 1938 Trotsky and the Bolshevik opposition prepared to establish a Fourth International in response to the needs of the working class in a period of defeats, when Stalinism passed definitively to the side of counter-revolution. The history of the class struggle since 1938 has proved correct the basic starting-point of Trotsky and the founders of the Fourth International: the working class remains oppressed by capitalism be- cause of the betrayals of the working-class leader- ship, particularly by the Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR; our epoch is the epoch of crisis of working-class leadership. All the economic and political developments since then have shown the correctness of insisting that the development of im- perialism constantly deepens the contradiction be- tween the productive forces and capitalist social relations. But at every critical stage in the develop- ment of this contradiction, the traitorous social- democratic and Stalinist leaderships and the Soviet bureaucracy have misled the workers; these petty- bourgeois formations have divided the workers along national and sectional lines and held back the development of a revolutionary consciousness. The post-war economic and political crisis in the advanced countries, the breakdown of capitalist tule in Eastern Europe, the victorious revolution in China, the mass struggles in the colonial countries—all of these international capitalism has survived because of the treachery of these mis- leaders who disarmed the working class. Only an international revolutionary Marxist leadership could have enabled these class struggles to be used for the overthrow of capitalism in the main centres, the advanced countries. Only the Fourth International and its parties, intervening in the class struggle in these countries, giving them international significance, could have given leader- ship to the independent organs of working-class power, and could have led the peasant masses beyond the leadership of the petty-bourgeois nationalists in the colonial countries. Imperialism was able to overcome its post- Second World War crisis through the collaboration of international Stalinism and of other petty- bourgeois tendencies. Such collaboration, fully developed in the bureaucracy’s strategy of peace- ful co-existence and peaceful competition between the two world systems since the death of Stalin and particularly since 1956, now takes on an added significance for the rebuilding of the Fourth Inter- national. This new and more advanced phase of the counter-revolutionary role of Stalinism is the response of the bureaucracy not only to the in- creased pressure of imperialism but also to the upsurge of the political revolution in Eastern Europe after 1953. At the same time, movements like the General Strike of August 1953 in France showed that the policies of the Stalinist and Social Democratic bureaucracies in the advanced capi- talist countries were coming into contradiction with the mass movement. The containment of the working class in those capitalist countries where the Stalinists had mass influence became more difficult and fraught with danger. Every partial mobilisation of the strength of the class threatened to rapidly develop into a general class confronta- tion, putting in question the whole capitalist system. The Stalinist bureaucratic leaderships of the working-class movement found themselves faced with the necessity of making themselves open agents of the maintenance of bourgeois order like the Social Democrats before them. In a different form, the historic defeat of French im- perialism at Dien-Bien-Phu forced the international Stalinist apparatus into direct collaboration with imperialism for the purpose of preventing the ex-

[p009] 106 FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, AUGUST 1966 Ktesolution for the International Conference of the International Committee, 1966 Rebuilding the Fourth The class struggle is international. World capitalism has long since played out its historical role of laying down the objective bases for socialism; the struggles of the workers of all countries have meaning only in terms of the world socialist revolution which began in October 1917 in Russia, as part of the world proletarian revolution. The Third (Communist) International was set up to answer the needs of the working class in this epoch of wars and revolutions. Following the betrayals of Social Democracy after 1918, the degeneration of the CPSU and the Comintern led eventually to the defeats in Britain and China in 1926/27 and the victory of fascism in Italy, Germany and Spain. Between 1933 and 1938 Trotsky and the Bolshevik opposition prepared to establish a Fourth International in response to the needs of the working class in a period of defeats, when Stalinism passed definitively to the side of counter-revolution. The history of the class struggle since 1938 has proved correct the basic starting-point of Trotsky and the founders of the Fourth International: the working class remains oppressed by capitalism be- cause of the betrayals of the working-class leader- ship, particularly by the Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR; our epoch is the epoch of crisis of working-class leadership. All the economic and political developments since then have shown the correctness of insisting that the development of im- perialism constantly deepens the contradiction be- tween the productive forces and capitalist social relations. But at every critical stage in the develop- ment of this contradiction, the traitorous social- democratic and Stalinist leaderships and the Soviet bureaucracy have misled the workers; these petty- bourgeois formations have divided the workers along national and sectional lines and held back the development of a revolutionary consciousness. The post-war economic and political crisis in the advanced countries, the breakdown of capitalist rule in Eastern Europe, the victorious revolution in China, the mass struggles in the colonial countries—all of these international capitalism has survived because of the treachery of these mis- leaders who disarmed the working class. Only an international revolutionary Marxist leadership could have enabled these class struggles to be used for the overthrow of capitalism in the main centres, the advanced countries. Only the Fourth International and its parties, intervening in the class struggle in these countries, giving them international significance, could have given leader- ship to the independent organs of working-class power, and could have led the peasant masses beyond the leadership of the petty-bourgeois nationalists in the colonial countries. Imperialism was able to overcome its post- Second World War crisis through the collaboration of international Stalinism and of other petty- bourgeois tendencies. Such collaboration, fully developed in the bureaucracy’s strategy of peace- ful co-existence and peaceful competition between the two world systems since the death of Stalin and particularly since 1956, now takes on an added significance for the rebuilding of the Fourth Inter- national. This new and more advanced phase of the counter-revolutionary role of Stalinism is the response of the bureaucracy not only to the in- creased pressure of imperialism but also to the upsurge of the political revolution in Eastern Europe after 1953. At the same time, movements like the General Strike of August 1953 in France showed that the policies of the Stalinist and Social Democratic bureaucracies in the advanced capi- talist countries were coming into contradiction with the mass movement. The containment of the working class in those capitalist countries where the Stalinists had mass influence became more difficult and fraught with danger. Every partial mobilisation of the strength of the class threatened to rapidly develop into a general class confronta- tion, putting in question the whole capitalist system. The Stalinist bureaucratic leaderships of the working-class movement found themselves faced with the necessity of making themselves open agents of the maintenance of bourgeois order like the Social Democrats before them. In a different form, the historic defeat of French im- perialism at Dien-Bien-Phu forced the international Stalinist apparatus into direct collaboration with imperialism for the purpose of preventing the ex-

[p010] International tension of the revolution in the colonial countries. The Hungarian Revolution represents the prin- cipal manifestation up to the present of the in- soluble contradiction between Stalinism and the extension of the socialist revolution, At the same time as it was the first political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy, and was for a time victorious, it was also an expression of the in- ternational class struggle taking its specific form in the countries of Eastern Europe. It posed the problem of workers’ power through workers’ councils not only in Hungary but throughout the USSR and Eastern Europe. Its actual develop- ment raised the question of the social revolution in the countries of Western Europe. Thus the in- creasingly international character of the prole- tarian revolution threatens the existence of both the Kremlin bureaucracy and imperialism. The Sino-Soviet conflict is another major external mani- festation of the insoluble contradiction between Stalinism and the international revolutionary struggle. This struggle must be led by a Marxist leadership if capitalist counter-revolution is to be prevented in China, the USSR and Eastern Europe, and if imperialism is to be defeated throughout the rest of the world. Another major principle of the founders of the Fourth International is thus more than confirmed. Stalinism is not a new social system but a regime of crisis in a degenerated workers’ state, a regime which will fall to the political revolution of the working class; the political revolution can succeed only under the leadership of parties of the Fourth International. This is the lesson of the recurrent crises in the USSR since 1953, the East German and Polish uprisings, the Hungarian revolution and the Sino-Soviet split; the establishment of de- generated or deformed workers‘ states in Eastern Europe and China, far from ending the isolation of the USSR and softening its contradictions, has accelerated and deepened them. The more the planned economy develops under the control of the Soviet bureaucracy, the sharper become the social contradictions, thus giving more and more concreteness to the alternative posed in the found- ing programme of the Fourth International. 107 ‘The political prognosis has an_ alternative character: either the bureaucracy, becoming ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie in the workers’ state, will overthrow the new forms of property and plunge the country back to capitalism; or the working class will crush the bureaucracy and open the way to socialism.’ In neither event can there be any peaceful conclusion. The actual outcome will be the pro- duct of the world class struggle, primarily in the developed capitalist countries and in the USSR, Eastern Europe and China. The unity of the workers’ struggle in Eastern Europe with the workers’ movement in Western Europe now urgently requires conscious and concrete expres- sion. This can only be done by the rebuilding of the Fourth International of Marxist parties in every one of these countries. The Socialist United States of Europe is a living slogan: in Eastern Europe the bureaucracy clumsily attempts economic co-operation between the different workers’ states (Comecon); in Western Europe the capitalists try to discipline the working class and resolve their contradictions in the framework of the European Common Market, itself a reflection of sharpening inter-imperialist contradictions; between the im- perialists and the bureaucracy an uneasy series of compromises is negotiated, and the economy of Eastern Europe and Russia is penetrated more and more by the prevailing relationships and prices in the imperialist world market. Thus, along with its political rapprochement with imperialism since 1953, the bureaucracy is made more sensitive and responsive to the contradictory economic develop- ment of international capitalism. It is the task of the Fourth International to create working-class parties which consciously respond in struggle to these objective contradictions and potentialities. The historic division between the workers of Russia and Eastern Europe on the one hand, and those of Western Europe and America on the other, the result of Stalinism, can only be overcome through the conscious experience of the unity of their struggles; this conscious experience takes concrete form in the rebuilding of the Fourth International, rooted in the working class of the advanced coun-

[p011] international tension of the revolution in the colonial countries. The Hungarian Revolution represents the prin- cipal manifestation up to the present of the in- soluble contradiction between Stalinism and the extension of the socialist revolution. At the same time as it was the first political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy, and was for a time victorious, it was also an expression of the in- ternational class struggle taking its specific form in the countries of Eastern Europe. It posed the problem of workers’ power through workers’ councils not only in Hungary but throughout the USSR and Eastern Europe. Its actual develop- ment raised the question of the social revolution in the countries of Western Europe. Thus the in- creasingly international character of the prole- tarian revolution threatens the existence of both the Kremlin bureaucracy and imperialism. The Sino-Soviet conflict is another major external mani- festation of the insoluble contradiction between Stalinism and the international revolutionary struggle. This struggle must be led by a Marxist leadership if capitalist counter-revolution is to be prevented in China, the USSR and Eastern Europe, and if imperialism is to be defeated throughout the rest of the world. Another major principle of the founders of the Fourth International is thus more than confirmed. Stalinism is not a new social system but a regime of crisis in a degenerated workers’ state, a regime which will fall to the political revolution of the working class; the political revolution can succeed only under the leadership of parties of the Fourth International. This is the lesson of the recurrent crises in the USSR since 1953, the East German and Polish uprisings, the Hungarian revolution and the Sino-Soviet split; the establishment of de- generated or deformed workers‘ states in Eastern Europe and China, far from ending the isolation of the USSR and softening its contradictions, has accelerated and deepened them. The more the planned economy develops under the control of the Soviet bureaucracy, the sharper become the social contradictions, thus giving more and more concreteness to the alternative posed in the found- ing programme of the Fourth International. 107 ‘The political prognosis has an_ alternative character: either the bureaucracy, becoming ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie in the workers’ state, will overthrow the new forms of property and plunge the country back to capitalism; or the working class will crush the bureaucracy and open the way to socialism.’ In neither event can there be any peaceful conclusion. The actual outcome will be the pro- duct of the world class struggle, primarily in the developed capitalist countries and in the USSR, Eastern Europe and China. The unity of the workers’ struggle in Eastern Europe with the workers’ movement in Western Europe now urgently requires conscious and concrete expres- sion. This can only be done by the rebuilding of the Fourth International of Marxist parties in every one of these countries. The Socialist United States of Europe is a living slogan: in Eastern Europe the bureaucracy clumsily attempts economic co-operation between the different workers’ states (Comecon); in Western Europe the capitalists try to discipline the working class and resolve their contradictions in the framework of the European Common Market, itself a reflection of sharpening inter-imperialist contradictions; between the im- perialists and the bureaucracy an uneasy series of compromises is negotiated, and the economy of Eastern Europe and Russia is penetrated more and more by the prevailing relationships and prices in the imperialist world market. Thus, along with its political rapprochement with imperialism since 1953, the bureaucracy is made more sensitive and responsive to the contradictory economic develop- ment of international capitalism. It is the task of the Fourth International to create working-class parties which consciously respond in struggle to these objective contradictions and potentialities. The historic division between the workers of Russia and Eastern Europe on the one hand, and those of Western Europe and America on the other,:-the result of Stalinism, can only be overcome through the conscious experience of the unity of their struggles; this conscious experience takes concrete form in the rebuilding of the Fourth International, rooted in the working class of the advanced coun-

[p012] 108 tries as well as of the planned economies. There will be no spontaneous formation of such parties. In Hungary in 1956, despite a high level of political development and the formation of workers’ coun- cils, such a party was not built, and any conscious intervention by the Fourth International was sabotaged by the Pabloite revisionists. The workers’ struggle continues in these countries since 1956, and it is the responsibility of the Fourth International to provide conscious leadership which can build on the lessons of 1956. In the same way, the International and its parties are the key to the problems of the class struggle in the colonial countries. The petty-bourgeois nationalist leaders and their Stalinist collaborators restrict the struggle to the level of national liberation, or, at best, to a version of ‘socialism in one country’, sustained by subordination to the co- existence policies of the Soviet bureaucracy. In this way, all the gains of the struggle of the workers and peasants, not only in the Arab world, India, South East Asia, etc., but also in China and Cuba, are confined within the limits of imperialist domi- nation, or exposed to counter-revolution and imperialist intervention (the line-up against China, the Cuban missiles crisis, the Vietnam war, etc.). In each country, the organic link between the colonial workers and .the struggle of the workers in the advanced countries and in the workers’ states can be understood and given concrete expression only under the leadership of parties of the Fourth International. The period 1953-56 marks a turning point in the world situation. At the end of the Second World War, the changed relation of class forces on a world scale broke the old capitalist equilibrium. However, to the extent that the Stalinist and re- formist bureaucracies were able to contain or mani- pulate the strength of the working class in the advanced countries, the most decisive consequences of this changed situation were not immediately apparent in all their significance. There was a growing together of the social and economic contradictions of the advanced capitalist countries and of the planned economies. In the long term, imperialism cannot survive except by bringing the workers’ states back into the orbit of capitalist exploitation. At the same time, the harmonious development:of the planned economies of Russia and Eastern Europe demands that the most advanced productive forces in the world be included in socialist planning. But the economy cannot be considered in and of itself. Its con- tradictions must be translated into class terms. The Kremlin bureaucracy and all its satellite FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, AUGUST 1966 bureaucracies, precisely because they have the character of parasitic social groups, are no less — attached to a purely national framework, to national states, than the bourgeoisie of the various capitalist nations. These national states constitute the basis of their exploitation of the working class in their own country. The idea that it is possible to achieve ‘socialism in one country’ is not only a false theory; it is at the same time the ideological expression of the conditions of growth and survival of the parasitic bureaucracy and its material interests. A mechanical idea of working-class international- ism leads to a misunderstanding of the national factor in the struggle for emancipation of the work- ing classes subjected to imperialism and the Krem- lin bureaucracy. But it is no less dangerous to ignore the internationalist content of the workers’ struggles in these countries. The workers must liberate themselves from the oppression and exploitation both of imperialism and of the Kremlin bureaucracy, a task which goes beyond a struggle within national frameworks. Except in_ this context, national independence is meaningless. The struggle of the working class in Eastern Europe can only be understood as a struggle against regimes produced by a revolutionary movement which has been doubly distorted: (a) It is part of a revolutionary upsurge which threatened the very existence of capitalism in the whole of Europe, a threat which was dispelled by the complementary actions of American imperial- ism, the Soviet bureaucracy and its agencies, the European Social-Democracy; (b) The Kremlin bureaucracy used its power to decapitate the revolutionary action of the workers of these countries, using for this purpose the old apparatus of the capitalist state. The movements of August 1953 and of the summer of 1955 in France, together with the rising revolutionary wave in Eastern Europe, rnust be considered in their histrical continuity, at the same time as marking a turning point in the world class struggle. From one point of view, they carried forward the revolutionary struggles in Europe of the years 1943-45; from another, they inaugurated a new period in the international struggle of the working class. Independently of their level of consciousness of the question, the working classes of Eastern Europe and of France in particular fought struggles which

[p013] REBUILDING THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL tended towards the dictatorship of the proletariat; only through this dictatorship is it possible to achieve the planned use of the productive forces of the world, based on common property in the means of production and the breaking down of national boundaries. In this sense the struggles of this period were the response of the working class to the contradictions both of the capitalist system and of the planned economies. In these struggles, they came into direct conflict with the Soviet bureaucracy, with its international Stalinist agents, and with the reformist bureaucracies, as well as with the bourgeois state machines. The linked crisis of imperialism and of the Soviet bureaucracy does not arise solely from the contradiction between capitalist economy as a whole and the planned economies. It consists also of contradictions between the imperialist powers themselves, which constantly nourish the class struggle and give it sharper forms in the advanced countries, and of the inability of imperialism to arrest the development of the revolution in the backward countries; the crisis is also fed by the fact that the Kremlin and satellite bureaucracies cannot resolve the problems posed by the develop- ment of the planned economy, whose harmonious development demands not only the extension of social ownership and planning to the means of production in the advanced countries, but also the No starting point for revolutionary practice y in the present international political situa- tion can be found simply from contempla- tion of the ‘objective forces’ at work. The lessons of the struggles within the revolutionary Marxist movement are decisive to the grasping of these opportunities in the objective situation. The Fourth International has successfully resisted and defeated the attempts of petty-bourgeois oppor- tunism, in the shape of a hardened revisionist tendency which penetrated all sections of the Trotskyist movement, to destroy it politically and organisationally. The struggle against this tendency was and remains the necessary preparation for the rebuilding of the Fourth International as a centrali- ised proletarian leadership. This revisionist ten- dency developed into a centre for liquidation of the revolutionary party and the International, now gathered in the self-styled ‘Unified Secretariat’, which is the product of fusion between the Inter- national Secretariat of Pablo and the revisionist groups previously associated with the International 109 participation of the working class in the manage- ment and control of industry; this is only possible if they exercise political power, which is impossible without the overthrow of the bureaucracy. This linked crisis creates the conditions for intensifica- tion of the world class struggle, and it is in that struggle that the crisis will find its solution. For this reason, the struggles engaged in by the workers of the advanced countries during the years between 1953 and 1956, and the changed relationship which these struggles expressed between the workers and the bureaucratic apparatus of the labour movement, were decisive factors. This fact was partially obscured by the defeat of the Hungarian Revolution, which was basically a victory for imperialism, encouraging pro-capitalist tendencies in the USSR and Eastern Europe and reformist trends in the Communist Parties. None- theless, this defeat was temporary and not funda- mental, since in not a single advanced country has the working class been subjected to a defeat like those of the 1920s. It is the perspective of combined revolutionary struggles threatening at the same time the existence of imperialism and of the Kremlin bureaucracy, bringing the proletariat into conflict with the bureaucratic apparatuses which control the workers’ movement, which demands and makes possible the rebuilding of the Fourth International. Committee and the SWP of the USA. Revisionism became liquidationism when the French section was expelled from the International because of its defence of Trotskyism, of the Transitional Pro- gramme, and of its own very existence. The on- slaught of the revisionists reached its peak in the split of 1952-1953. The liquidationist centre has become a major obstacle to the rebuilding of the Fourth International. Revisionism and liquidationism in the Fourth International, with its primary political expression subordination to the bureaucratic instruments of imperialist penetration of the workers’ and national-liberation movements, must be seen not only as a result but also as an objective contribu- tory factor to the success of these bureaucracies