Draft International Perspectives

[p013] International Perspectives ‘IN PREPARATION FOR THE FOURTH CON GRESS OF THE C. OF THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL policies of relative class peace, the defence and development of Marxist theory could only be a slow and difficult task, the responsibility of a handful of comrades who were to a great extent isolated from any mass movement. Those con- ditions have now decisively changed. But we shall get a development of Marxism and the building of revolutionary parties only by starting from the gains of the long struggle for revolutionary con- tinuity in the Fourth International. The profoundly revolutionary character of the contradictions un- derlying the surface phenomena of capitalist and bureaucratic ‘containment’ of the working class since 1944 could be grasped only through a con- scious struggle for dialectical materialism, against all enemies. In place of dialectical materialism, revisionism in the Fourth Inter- national put subjective impressionism. For many years, they accepted the inevitability of bureau- cratic control of the. workers’ movement. The working class was considered only as an un- conscious ‘pressure’ creating centrist and even revolutionary developments within the bureau- cracy. In the course of the years of struggle against Pablo, Germain, and later the SWP leader- ship, it was necessary above all to uncover, under- neath the capitulation to bureaucratic and petty- bourgeois nationalist leaderships, the theoretical roots of revisionism. These were: the abandon- ment of the Marxist theory of knowledge, of the relation between consciousness and reality, be- tween theory and practice; capitulation to the idealist philosophy of the bourgeoisie. The struggle against this ideological pressure from the class enemy is the only foundation for training the cadres of our revolutionary parties. At the same time, the revisionists find themselves undermined by the objective developments: capitalist world crisis and the explosion of the ‘neo-capitalism’ myth; revolutionary struggles in the advanced countries since 1968; political revolution § in Eastern Europe; exposure in struggle of the petty- bourgeois leaderships, particularly in Cuba and Algeria. 107

[p014] international NATIONAL Saha TTED FOR GRESS OF THE 1C. OF THE FC I—Introduction: Our tasks in 1972, in relation to the founding of the Fourth International in 1938. THE STRUGGLE to found the Fourth International in 1938 was undertaken in order to ensure the continuity of revolutionary leadership and of Marxist theory, from the first four Congresses of the Communist International, the work of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolu- tion, and the work of Marx and Engels. It had to be carried through in conditions created by a generation of great defeats for the international working class. This fight for the continuity of Marxism was a struggle against every form of adaptation to these defeats. It meant a fight to the death against the Stalinist bureaucracy which first ensured the defeats and then battened on their fruits. The opposition voiced by all those centrists who stood aside from the Fourth Inter- national of Trotsky was an adaptation to the bureaucracy, through the medium of which came an adaptation to imperialism. The founding con- ference of the Fourth International defined our epoch as one of capitalist decay, in which the his- torical crisis of humanity is concentrated and which must be resolved in the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the working class. Those who rejected, and still reject, the continuity in struggle of revolutionary Marxism with the Third Inter- national and the Russian Revolution, in fact reject the revolutionary role of the working class. Only the orientation to this class, whatever the tem- porary defeats, could provide the basis for the development of Marxist theory. Trotsky wrote: ‘The laws of history are stronger than the bureau- cratic apparatus.’ The Fourth International, on this granite foundation, has continued to exist, and is being built today, only in constant struggle against all revisionism, which seeks to accept and adapt to the defeats of the inter-war years and the dominance of the bureaucracy, treating these as unalterable historical facts. These theoretical foundations have been under continuous attack since the birth of the Fourth International. In the years conditioned by defeats, and with the capitalist class able, through the collaboration of the Stalinists, to implement International Perspectives policies of relative class peace, the defence and development of Marxist theory could only be a slow and difficult task, the responsibility of a handful of comrades who were to a great extent isolated from any mass movement. Those con- ditions have now decisively changed. But we shall get a development of Marxism and the building of revolutionary parties only by starting from the gains of the long struggle for revolutionary con- tinuity in the Fourth International. The profoundly revolutionary character of the contradictions un- derlying the surface phenomena of capitalist and bureaucratic ‘containment’ of the working class since 1944 could be grasped only through a con- scious struggle for dialectical materialism, against all enemies. In place of dialectical materialism, revisionism in the Fourth Inter- national put subjective impressionism. For many years, they accepted the inevitability of bureau- cratic control of the workers’ movement. The working class was considered only as an un- conscious ‘pressure’ creating centrist and even revolutionary developments within the bureau- cracy. In the course of the years of struggle against Pablo, Germain, and later the SWP leader- ship, it was necessary above all to uncover, under- neath the capitulation to bureaucratic and petty- bourgeois nationalist leaderships, the theoretical roots of revisionism. These were: the abandon- ment of the Marxist theory of knowledge, of the relation between consciousness and reality, be- tween theory and practice; capitulation to the idealist philosophy of the bourgeoisie. The struggle against this ideological pressure from the class enemy is the only foundation for training the cadres of our revolutionary parties. At the same time, the revisionists find themselves undermined by the objective developments: capitalist world crisis and the explosion of the ‘neo-capitalism’ myth; revolutionary struggles in the advanced countries since 1968; political revolution in Eastern Europe; exposure in struggle of the petty- bourgeois leaderships, particularly in Cuba and Algeria. 107

[p015] The Fourth Conference of the International Committee now takes place under new conditions. The maturing of the imperialist crisis, signalled by Nixon’s measures of August 15, 1971, marks the beginning of a new stage of the crisis of leadership. The conditions for the development of Marxist theory by the revolutionary vanguard are now being transformed, as the masses in all countries are thrust into revolutionary struggles by the disruption of their conditions of life. The task of our Fourth Conference is to grasp the decisiveness of the change implied in these con- ditions, to politically equip all our sections with the basis for winning leadership of the working class. The greatest mistake today would be to ignore or underestimate the change, to carry on with the same perspectives and methods to which sections have become accustomed in the period since 1938. Such conservatism holds the gravest dangers of descent into centrism and opportunist adaptation. The objective conditions have now reached a stage where, on the firm basis of our long struggle for the continuity of Marxism, we can resolve the crisis of revolutionary leadership. Trotskyism has been forced to go through a long period of isolation, in which it was necessary to beat back every influence from the pressure of imperialism and Stalinism. The real history of Trotskyism, as the force to resolve the crisis of revolutionary working-class leadership, begins Ii—The capitalist crisis With the decisions of the American ruling class to remove the gold backing for the dollar, to impose import surcharges, to end the system of fixed parities, and to impose controls on wages, the basis has been removed for all the political relations through which the bourgeoisie has ruled since the Second World War. The post-war be- trayals of international Stalinism had made pos- sible the restoration of capitalist order in Europe, and thereby on a world scale. Despite the gigantic contradiction between the productive forces and the capitalist mode of production manifested in the Second World War, capitalism was able to survive, but only because of these betrayals. The Bretton Woods agreement of 1944, the new insti- tutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, and the inflationary Keynesian policies pursued in the advanced capitalist coun- tries, were possible not because of some new- found strength of the capitalist system, but only because of the control of the working class’s strength by the Stalinists, assisted by the reformists and the trade union bureaucracy. Now the inten- sified contradictions of capitalism have finally broken through these relations, which constituted essentially a retreat before the working class, and the class issues must inevitably be fought out. The dollar crisis can only mean a succession of struggles for power by the working class of the capitalist countries. In the years before the Second World War, the capitalists had used fascism to smash the working class of Germany, Japan, Italy and Spain. But fascism, once in power, had threatened the major capitalist powers, and they were compelled to prosecute a world war which, as always, brought revolutionary crises all over the world. There ensued a series of major defeats for capitalism, in Yugoslavia, in China, and in the loss of Eastern Europe. The establishment of deformed workers’ states in these countries was subordinated to the Stalinist strategy of international class- collaboration, but it meant the loss of a vast portion of the world to capitalism. In Western . Europe and the United States, the capitalists con- fronted a working class recovered from the depression of the 1930s. The history of capitalism 106 since 1944 has been one of adaptation to the strength of this working class. Until 1971, the capitalists’ guiding strategy has been to find ways of avoiding an all-out clash with the proletariat. Since the middle 1960s, the capitalist class has been forced to recognize the need to take back from the working class all its historical gains, but so far it has continued to try and do this above all through the reformist and Stalinist leaders. Nixon’s August 1971 speech was the high point of the rapid developments since the gold crisis and the French struggles of 1968, a period in which the capitalists have been preparing to go on to the attack, as with the return of the right-wing Tory government in Britain. But the war had also accelerated other changes in the relationships within the world capitalist system, changes which have been determining factors in the subsequent development of the class struggle. The inter-war period had seen the emergence of American imperialism as the dominant economic power. The First World War, followed by the economic and financial collapse of the 1930s, had dealt especially ,severe blows to British capitalism. The United States, enjoying all the advantages of a late start in economic development, unencumbered with feudal sur- vivals, together with a wealth of natural resources and a large internal ‘market, took over the role which had been Britain’s in. the’ nineteenth cen- tury. The decline of Britain was, however, part of the general decline of Europe, a decline which was accelerated by the Second World War. For capitalism to survive after 1945, it had to depend upon America in the economic as well as the military and political spheres. Given the decisive betrayals of the Stalinist bureaucracy, it was largely on the basis of American aid that Western Europe was able to reconstruct its shattered economy after 1945. In the form of Lend Lease, then Marshall Aid, huge sums were directed into Europe by the US im- perialists in a desperate attempt to control the social crisis which then threatened the whole of European capitalism after the war. This American state atd was followed and accompanied by large Fourth International Spring 1972

[p016] injections of private capital from American firms seeking the easy profits which a devastated Europe offered. This private and public capital has played a critical role in the European economy since the late 1940s, being closely connected with the tensions which have existed between Europe and America as well as with the subsequent development of monetary crises and now the chaos precipitated by Nixon’s August measures. This American capital was one of the main bases for expansion after 1945. It was closely associated with another: the series of technical changes which occurred in branches of industry both during and after the war. Stimulated by the needs of war, a series of new processes and even new industries appeared in this period: in elec- tronics, engineering, synthetic fibres, computers, etc. These new, expanding sectors of the economy provided a profitable outlet for the large volume of capital which had previously either been tied up in the old declining, unprofitable industries of the 1930s, or had simply lain idle. The state, par- ticularly in Britain, was to play an important role in effecting this transfer of capital. Under a Labour government, several backward industries, notably coal and rails, were nationalized, their ex-owners heavily compensated, and state funds devoted to the restoration of these previously bankrupt industries so that they might provide cheap services and raw materials for the capitalist system. These changes were possible only because of the very depth of the crisis of the 1930s, a crisis which capitalism survived solely through the betrayals of Stalinism. The so-called ‘defence’ industries were the centre for these technical and _ organizational changes. Expenditure on arms was to play an important role, along with a series of other -aw after the war. This was so particularly in the changes, in the relative expansion which capitalism Korean War and the increased arms expenditure of the early 1950s. Through its state budgets, capitalism provided, often at very high rates of profit, a ready outlet for the commodities of the firms receiving defence contracts, and this tended to stimulate activity in related sectors of the economy. These changes both in the overall structure of © capitalism and in the relative weight between the capitalist economies were first reflected in the post-war monetary arrangements arrived at in the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference. It was at this Conference that the dominant role of Ameri- can finance-capital and the dollar was .formally recognized. For although sterling retained an important role in world monetary arrangements, it was a role which was now clearly acknowledged to be completely subordinated to that of the dollar. At Bretton Woods, it was agreed that all leading currencies should have their price fixed directly in terms of the dollar and that these prices should be fixed in fairly rigid limits which could only be altered through agreement with the leading capitalist countries and, in particular, with America. The basis of the system was the tying of the dollar to a fixed quantity of gold. at $35 an ounce. International Perspectives These arrangements did not represent merely the attempt to find new technical arrangements to overcome the contradictions of the old-style gold standard which had collapsed with the ster- ling devaluation of 1931. There was little new of a technical nature agreed at Bretton Woods, except that the dollar should replace the pound as the basic currency in international trade and finance. What was new was the recognition that another crash on the scale of the 1930s would endanger the whole capitalist system, and the decision by the capitalists to embark on a deliberately in- flationary course which they hoped would bring sufficient social stability to appease and contain the militancy of the working class. Bretton Woods was an indication of the weakness and not the strength of capitalism, and, in particular, the growing loss of confidence which the capitalist class had in the very future of its own system. It has been in retreat before the working class, particularly the working class of Western Europe, since 1945 and must now pay a heavy price for this retreat. , The post-war settlement defined clearly a new Stage in the relations between the major capi- talist powers. While the politics of the capitalist world in the inter-war years developed in the framework of historical rivalry between Europe and America, there now began a period of defini- tive American dominance, though of course this did not mean that inter-imperialist rivalries dis- appeared. Revisionists took this dominance of the United States as a factor of capitalism’s strength in its ability to survive and to deal with the working class. In reality, it prepared the eruption of capitalism’s contradictions in even more violent and universal form. as has now become clear. The capitalist class of the United States was compelled to take on its own shoulders the con- centrated weight of the contradictions of world capitalism. Certainly America has a superiority in industrial technique, in scale of industrial or- ganization, and in material and capital resources, which Europe will never equal under capitalism. But this unassailable lead is established at the time of decline of the capitalist system, so that the leader must take on all the insoluble symp- toms of a world system in its death agony. US imperialism has been forced to take responsibility for attempting to suppress the revolution in South-East Asia, and has done so only at the _ cost of precipitating profound social and ideolo- gical crisis in the United States itself. The stimulus which the American capitalists were forced to give to Europe and Japan in the post-war years has, similarly, led inevitably to a situation where these capitalist powers have forced America into a full-scale trade war in order to correct an impossible imbalance of payments and loss of gold reserves. It is clear that in the actual evolution of the crisis since the Second World War the late 1950s represent a decisive turning point. It was in this period that the American balance of payments deficit began to assume considerable proportions and arouse increasing fear about the stability and 109