Statement on The Ulster Crisis (25/3/72)

[p017] future of the dollar. The continual outflow of government and private capital in the 1950s, together with expenditure on arms in Europe and elsewhere, was by this time beginning to produce a situation where the claims against the dollar were rising at a rate which threatened the Ameri- can gold holdings. In 1949, at the outbreak of the Korean war, America possessed roughly $30 billion of gold in reserve. This has fallen to less than a third of that level, while foreign claims against the dollar—the cumulative result of the rapidly growing American deficit—amount to some four times the present gold figure. Yet the stability of post-war capitalism’s international monetary management rests upon the guaranteed price of gold at $35 per fine ounce, the figure first estab- lished in 1934, since which time domestic Ameri- can prices have increased threefold. Throughout the period of the 1960s, American economic policy has been dominated by an attempt to deal with this payments crisis and at the same time bring the rate of price inflation under control. The early 1960s saw some attempt to solve the emerging crisis at the expense of the colonial and semi-colonial countries. It was at this time, under Kennedy, that the American aid programme was drastically reduced and some attempt made to stem the flow of capital into the ‘backward’ coun- tries. While these measures made little impact upon the foreign payments deficit, they had dis- astrous consequences for the economic and poli- tical stability of the colonial and semi-colonial countries. Under the impact of these changes many regimes which had earlier been able to balance between imperialism on the one hand and the Kremlin bureaucracy on the other, toppled— Algeria, Ghana, Indonesia and elsewhere—to be replaced with regimes more directly and immedi- ately subservient to the interests of American imperialism. But it was clear that so unbalanced was imperialism at this stage of its decline that these measures alone were inadequate. Thus Kennedy, and later Johnson, had to extend their measures to cover Europe, and plans were an- nounced again aiming at reducing the outflow of capital, limiting expenditure abroad on tourism, making some cuts in military commitments, tightening up the conditions for the granting of foreign aid. Thus the stage was now set for the squeeze to be put on Europe. But it would be wrong to think that the American imperialists embarked upon this phase of their policy with any great confidence or with any firm unity amongst the capitalist class. They sensed, particularly in re- lation to the problems of British capitalism and sterling, that any major crisis in Europe economic or financial, could under certain conditions rever- berate throughout the capitalist system and threaten its entire stability. So while driven in- creasingly into this conflict with European capi- talism, the Americans also desperately tried to limit its immediate consequences, especially in the financial sphere. From 1964 onwards, after -the election of the Labour government in October, until the very end of 1967 they threw all their resources into a defence of sterling. Although 110 Bretton Woods had established the supremacy of the dollar, it had been impossible completely to remove the importance of sterling as the major world reserve currency. British capitalism still retained enough of its nineteenth-century re- sources to make this impossible, and in any case, American imperialism would have been unable to sustain its world role without some assistance from the City of London. So for the Americans, the defence of sterling was an international ques- tion. And the depth of the crisis, even at this stage ,is indicated by the fact that with the November 1967 sterling devaluation their rescue attempt proved afailure, despite the huge injec- tions of capital made available to the Wilson government throughout the period. The circumstances of the 1967 devaluation contain another important lesson in terms of the relation between the class struggle and the economic crisis. For it is clear that the real origin of this particular phase of the crisis is to be located in the period beginning in 1962. It was at this time—under Macmillan’s Conservative gov- ernment—that the British ruling class made its first, if indecisive, attempt to deal with its mount- ing economic problems. This was the period of the Selwyn Lloyd ‘pay pause’ and the deliberate creation, in the winter of 1962-1963, of consider- able unemployment in an attempt to make the policy effective. In fact, the British Conservative government, meeting violent resistance from the working class, was forced to retreat in the period immediately prior to the 1964 election, they were once more forced into a policy of reflation and credit expansion, even though this produced a record £800 million balance of payment deficit and plunged sterling into a major crisis which the Labour government inherited on taking office. In the same way, all attempts by the American ruling class from the late 1950s onwards have been frustrated by the powerful American work- ing class, a working class which all the, revisionist groups have tried to write off in the post-war period. Despite its low level of political develop- ment and the absence up to now of its own in- dependent political party, the American working class, organized through its unions, has been the decisive factor preventing Kennedy, then Johnson and now Nixon, from making any impact on the level of inflation. The working class has been able to maintain and even advance its living standards throughout the 1960s despite ‘continually rising prices. Not only has this undermined all anti- inflationary policies, it has increasingly called into question the competitiveness of sectors of American capital in world markets. It is this strength of the working class, cul- minating in the automobile and steel contracts won in 1970-1971, which has finally driven Nixon and his advisers to precipitate the breakdown of the entire post-war capitalist order. The great pressure from the US working class had already necessitated a massive flow of capital from America to Europe, seeking higher profits, and this led to an impossible pressure on the US balance of payments. The steel wages settlement would have been a fatal blow to the competitive- Fourth International Spring 1972

[p018] ness of US steel (already 20 per cent dearer than some imported steels) and of the many industries dependent on _ steel purchases. The August measures of Nixon were no ‘technical adjustment’, and they are not open for negotiation. They are a life-and-death matter for US capitalism, and this struggle for survival will now dominate politics throughout the world. Brought to a head by the class struggle, focusing more and more on the US working class, this crisis will be resolved only after titanic class struggles, struggles for state power. In France, the struggles of 1968 had already demonstrated that the working class retained all its strength and fighting capacity, despite decades of betrayals. The General Strike threatened the very foundations of capitalist power. In 1945 in France a weak and discredited bourgeoisie had confronted a strong, militant and armed working class, which was held back from state power only by the Stalinists. Within a few years, French imperialism was driven out of Vietnam and challenged in Algeria by a powerful national libera- tion struggle, but the Stalinists refused to mobilize the working class against these colonial wars, and did not take advantage of the crisis which they provoked for the French ruling class. In 1958 the reactionary forces in France combined with the revolt of the settlers to threaten military rule. With the open collaboration of the Stalinists and social-democrats, the bourgeoisie was able to call on de Gaulle, who established a Bonapartist form of dictatorship. Through a devaluation of the franc and other measures, with world capitalist economy still booming, French capitalism held down wages and was able to resume expansion in the early 1960s. But the miners’ strike of 1963 showed that the working class was far from broken, despite its leaders. The Stalinists held back from any struggle under de Gaulle because his foreign policy suited the Soviet bureaucracy. But the 1968 General Strike, with the real threat of revolution, showed that a more definitive defeat of the working class than anything achieved under de Gaulle was necessary if the French bourgeoisie was to survive the coming crisis, heralded by the gold crisis of March-April 1968. This was true not only for France. Ever since the war, even in times of class ‘peace’, the workers of all the advanced countries continued to vote for the traditional working-class parties in a confused striving for power. . The chain of events opened up in 1967-1968 (sterling devaluation, gold crisis), which has now culminated in the August 15 measures of Nixon, brought capitalism face-to-face with its basic con- tradictions, but in a more threatening and acute form than ever before. This time the inevitable economic breakdown manifested itself first in the monetary system, would have to be tackled with a working class strong and unbroken. Nothing funda- mental was settled by the two-tier gold system imposed in 1968. In effect the open recognition of the collapse of the gold and dollar-system was only delayed. The inflation of the post-war years left the dollar three times overvalued, and its devalua- tion was inevitable. Typically, the British Labour ~ International Perspectives government was doomed after May 1968, caught in this great contradiction: on the one hand, the need to handle the crisis produced by inflation; on the other, to face a working class which had strengthened itself through the period of inflation to a point where the ability of the reformists and Stalinists to control it had been stretched to its limits. Mande! and other revisionists, even at this advanced stage of the crisis, find rationalizations to keep the working class tied to its reformist and bureaucratic leadership. They forecast capitalism settling down to a ‘slower cycle of growth’, and argue that a crisis in the field of money (the dollar) is a mere reflection of ‘real’ economic developments. In point of fact the tying of the whole world’s economy through the dollar to gold was the most acute expression of all of the contradictory nature of United States dominance, and it was no mere accident or ‘appearance’ that the world crisis developed in this sphere. Money is not just a means of exchange, a way of tech- nically arranging the system, not just ‘liquidity’. It is the universal equivalent, it is materialized abstract labour, reflecting in a developed capitalist economy the total socialization of labour. To the accumulation of money as capital, the whole system is subordinated. Money is ‘the individual incarnation of social labour, the independent form of exchange-value, the universal commodity’. And, ‘... in a crisis, the antithesis between commodi- ties and their value-form, money, becomes heightened into an absolute contradiction’ (Marx). In the crisis of the dollar, a crisis in which there remains no stability of values, we find the most consummate expression of the basic con- tradictions of the whole epoch, between socialized production and private capital. Within the in- flationary framework of dollar domination in the 1950s and 1960s, the basic strength of the work- ing class remained unaltered. Inflationary policies became more and more necessary, and less and less possible. Far from capitalism having entered a new ‘slower cycle of growth’ (Mandel), it has in fact come to the point, with the collapse of the Bretton Woods agreement, where loss of con- fidence becomes predominant, and slump results. It is not a question of some sort of cyclical devel- opment on the higher plane of ‘neo-capitalism’, but of the most acute class struggle, as the mono- polists strive to wipe out surplus capitals and to destroy vast productive forces, including millions of productive workers. Against the revisionists, it was necessary to reaffirm the characterization of our epoch. Capi- talism as a mode of production is historically doomed because the further development of man- kind’s productive forces is barred by capitalist property relations. Revisionists reject this basic definition of the period in which we live: they characterize it as a period of ‘neo-capitalism’ which has been capable of producing a new industrial revolution. This question is funda- mental. If neo-capitalism has succeeded imperial- ism then it was wrong to define imperialism as the last, highest stage of capitalism, the epoch of the proletarian revolution, which must lead to 119

[p019] the construction of the new, necessary, socialist mode of production. Consequently, it would be- come a question of rejecting the revolutionary role of the working class. Revolutionism would become either a moral question or would have to be based on a sociological analysis showing what revolutionary forces are produced by neo- capitalism. Mandel’s ‘theory’ is in fact an ideology, an inverted version of his real position, which is to justify the role of the new petty bourgeoisie, including the ‘bureaucracy’ of the working class in its pressure on the working class. This middle class certainly does have an important role in monopoly capitalism today, extending from busi- ness management to the state power, to the opportunist manipulation of the workers’ move- ment, to the new forms of domination (including genocidal war as well as formal independence) over the oppressed nations, and to the imperialists’ relations with the Stalinist bureaucracy. Just as the revisionists’ picture of the relation between their ‘theory’ and the petty-bourgeoisie is an inverted one, so their explanation of capi- talism’s ‘development of the productive forces’ is the opposite of the objective situation. It repre- sents the bourgeoisie’s own interests in relation to the productive forces: viz, that all develop- ments in technique, science, in being used for the augmentation of profit, must be turned against the principal productive force, the working class, against the capacity of mankind to control its destiny through the co-ordination of all productive capacity in the battle with nature. Monopoly capitalism undergoes many different phases of development: sometimes, on the basis of wars and counter-revolution, a period of expanded repro- duction takes place: at others, a period of con- tracted production, overall destruction of means of production and the wiping out of many capitalists, is necessary. Within world imperialism there is uneven development, with different national capitalisms advancing to the detriment of others. In the competition between monopolies, in the conflict between nation-states, particularly in war, and in the reaction of the imperialists to the revolutionary gains made by the proletariat (the October Revolution, the third Chinese Revo- lution), there is a stimulus to technological and scientific innovation. But these developments are, in their origin, their life and their destiny, destruc- tive of the productive forces, even though they express in contradictory form the potential satis- faction of human need under socialism. It is for the destruction of the working class, as the reposi- tory of human labour power, and for war, that these developments take place and which they serve. Every development in technology and science therefore deepens the contradiction between the social relations of production under capitalism and further growth of the productive forces. In- ternational division of labour under a plan is a necessary condition of this further growth; the rivalry between the nation-state interests of finance capital and the monopolists therefore constantly prepares economic, political and military convulsions. Planned economy, with the abolition of private capitalist ownership, is an_ essential requirement of the growth of the productive forces: the primary necessity for the owners of capital, the finance capitalists and monopolists, on the other hand, is to harness technique only to the protection of their rate of profit. For these reasons, the technical and scientific elements in the productive forces are turned, in this revolu- tionary epoch, not against nature, as productive forces, but inwards, against society itself, to be- come forces of destruction of society and its productive forces. Far from capitalism having achieved a new lease of life. performed arother ‘industrial revolution’, advanced the productive forces and become ‘neo-capitalism’. its continued existence has posed even more urgently the alter- native ‘socialism or barbarism’. August 1971 was a shattering verification of the Marxisst’ struggle against revisionism: it created conditions where this alternative—socialism or barbarism—will be fought out. II1I—The relationship of class forces and the tasks of revolutionary leadership. What political conclusions flowed in the recent period from our stress'on the economic crisis? Inevitably these conclusions were the direct opposite of the political line of revisionism, which starts from the apparent stabilization of capi- talism and the control of the working class by its bureaucratic agents. Revisionism, in the course of the post-war period, arrived at the ‘strategy’ of structural reforms of the capitalist ' societies and self-liberalization of the Stalinist bureaucracy. In the Belgian General Strike of 1960-1961, Germain and the Pabloites advocated a coalition of the Socialist Party with the bour-. geois Christian-Democrats on a ‘structural reform’ programme. It was the counterpart of this treachery to advise the Hungarian workers in 1956 to follow the Polish example and accept a ‘realistic’ centrist-Stalinist policy such as that of Gomulka, returning to the control of the Kremlin 112 bureaucracy. The entry of the LSSP majority leadership into the coalition of Mrs Bandaranaike in Cevion in 1964 was part of the same abandon- ment of the revolutionary role of the working class and capitulation to imperialism, despite all the ‘theories’ about the ‘epicentre of the revolu- tion’ being in the Third World. Algeria and Cuba were to prove that this talk of epicentre of revolution was only the ‘left’ face of petty- bourgeois opposition to the building of indepen- dent working-class leadership, abandonment of the building of independent revolutionary parties of the working class. The economic problems of the United States, Japan and the European capitalist powers produce an acute political contradiction. All the techniques of adjustment through the use of social-democratic. Stalinist and trade unionist working-class leader- ship (collaboration of unions with the state. social- Fourth international Spring 1972

[p020] democratic and coalition governments, inflationary policies, etc.) have since 1967-1968 become for the capitalists not merely temporarily inappro- priate but dangerous because they conflict with the need of capitalism to attack all the gains of the working class. Forced on by the economic crisis, the capitalist class, while utilizing to the last ounce the class collaborationist services of the Stalinist and social-democratic apparatuses, must actually drive towards an open clash with the working class: civil war and the preparation of corporatist forms of rule are on the agenda of history. The ‘democratic’ path is not a ‘parlia- mentary, peaceful road to socialism’, as the Stalinists claim, but a phase during which the elements of civil war are prepared. The institutions of this phase are not those of ‘advanced demo- cracy’, but of an advanced stage of capitalist decay which has totally rotted capitalist democracy from within. Behind the face of ‘advanced demo- cracy’ brutal suppression is planned. This con- tradiction is the dominant feature in the class struggle throughout Europe, and more and more in America. But the Stalinist bureaucracy and its Com- munist Parties, together with the trade union apparatuses and the social-democrats and cen- trists of all types in the labour movement, are not spent forces. They are active and deadly agents of counter-revolution. Their betrayals are an essential instrument of the preparations of the imperialists. They play this role all the more consistently because the revolutionary wave of working-class struggle threatens their own very existence, and they act in full consciousness of their solidarity with the imperialists. Whatever the incidental phases of. speech-making and demagogy by their leaderships, they will not in this period become the expression of leftward- moving forces, but on the contrary will be mobilized, together, or in rapid succession, or with a division of labour, to break up or head off the upsurge of the working class. The undefeated proletariat is rapidly testing out, working through and exhausting the forms of struggle familiar within its established organiza- tions. The role of the social democrats, centrists, Stalinists, and their revisionist apologists, is at all costs to restrict the working class to these forms, to perpetuate the fatal illusion that a quantitative build-up of pressure through these forms will achieve the workers’ aims. Such a political line leaves intact the bureaucratic leader- ship (with perhaps a few ‘left’ modifications or infusions from the Stalinists, the centrists, and the revisionists themselves, as in the Belgian General Strike, the administration of. Ben Bella, the British Pabloites’ services to the ‘left’ trade union bureaucrats, etc.). In fact, of course, the 25 years since 1945, in which the bourgeoisie—and particularly US imperialism—have used to the utmost these compromise forms of control, have covered over the accumulation of contradictions which require an entirely opposite solution. The role of revolutionary leadership is to give direction to the mounting workers’ struggles in such a way as to prepare for the real perspectives of capitalist International Perspectives development. The essence of this preparation has been to fight to give independent leadership in the struggle of the working class, to break the working class from reformist and Stalinist leader- ship of all kinds, to take advantage of the last period’s upsurge in the class struggle, to differ- entiate before millions of workers the revolutionary leadership of Trotskyism from the capitulation of the revisionists. There has been a new revolutionary wave in the struggle of the international working class, especially since 1968. This new wave, coming after a long period without major defeats, has provided the basic changed conditions in which the Fourth International, founded necessarily in the period of catastrophic defeats of the 1930s and growing up under the heavy blows of fascism and Stalinism, will be built as the international revolutionary leadership. But this success will come only out of a theoretical and practical over- coming of all the contradictions of the develop- ment of the class struggle, of the crisis of working- class leadership and of the struggle against revisionism within the Fourth International. In the situation of preparation of struggles of revolutionary magnitude, there is inevitably the threat of counter-revolution on a massive and bloody scale. This threat is concealed behind the screen of reformism, Stalinism and revisionism, defending the mechanism of class compromise. The workers’ own experience brings them into actual conflict with the mechanisms of reformism and Stalinism but it cannot by itself break through them. On the contrary, the last 25 years encourage the illusions in trade union militancy and reform measures by mass reformist and Stalinist parties. The working class is in danger, therefore, of being driven to the very brink of the struggle for power while still being reinforced in reformist illusions. To smash through this contradiction, to prepare the conscious vanguard within the working class for this struggle for power, this is the essence of — the fight against revisionism since the 1940s, of the construction of the parties of the Fourth International. These were the elements of a qualitative change in the international relationship of class forces accumulated by the end of the 1960s. The revo- lutionary struggles of the French and Czechoslovak workers in 1968 were the first major battles to express the breaking up of the post-war political class relations. These struggles had already been anticipated by the turn of the situation in Greece. There, even a return from the post-civil war repressions to limited ‘democracy’ with the direct collaboration of the Stalinists in.1966 had proved impossible, and had ended in the imposition of military rule. Since the 1968 struggles, the con- tinuous strike movements in Italy, paralleled by the resurgence of fascism, the 1970 martial-law measures in Canada, and the virtual civil war in Northern Iteland, together with the return of the right-wing Tory government in Britain, have all indicated very concretely the qualitatively new dimension of the class struggles inevitably prepared by the gathering economic crisis which has now struck. 113°

[p021] In every one of these countries—and in all others, for the capitalist economy is now more than ever before an inter-connected whole, in which the law of uneven development makes the situation more explosive, rather than providing sectors which will escape the main trends—this new dimension is the preparation of confrontations between the classes on the decisive question of state power. In industrial trade union struggles, workers will proceed as if the old forms of or- ganization and consciousness, the old mistrustful coexistence with opportunist leaders, remain as effective as during the boom. Great dangers con- front the workers’ movement because this con- servatism enters into the sharpest contradiction with the objective political developments at national and international level. The bourgeoisie, with its state power and its agents within the labour movement, prepares consciously to break the working class and to behead its revolutionary leadership. The ruling class senses, from the vantage-point of all its economic and _ political requirements, the need to impose entirely new forms of rule, and it proceeds very deliberately to act. The decisive role of the Trotskyist movement has been and must be to develop political con- sciousness, Marxist theory, in order that the con- scious preparation of the proletariat can defeat that of the class enemy. This can be done only on the basis of a correct appreciation of the economic crisis, and of the inevitable break-up of the reformist compromise. If these were the rapidly maturing elements of the change in the world political situation, then the August 1971 measures of the US government, acting for the great monopolies and banks, made inevitable by the same basic economic develop- ments, had the role of crystallizing these elements into that changed situation: a situation char- acterized by struggle for state power. In the class battles leading up to the conquest of power the working class, because of its political backward- ness, will in some cases be able to march forward only after the shock produced by sectional or temporary defeats, in which reformist illusions must be shattered only by the actual new experi- ences in the class struggle. And only through the independent intervention by the revolutionary forces before, during and after such actions, can the necessary lessons be learned. The working class has demonstrated beyond any doubt that it is capable of fighting stubbornly and tenaciously, but there is no way of escaping the legacy of reformist and Stalinist leadership: it must be faced up to and combated through every experience of the working class in struggle. This is what places such a heavy responsibility on the Trotskyist forces. The sections of the International Com- mittee will have to consist of cadres trained in the basic theory and history of the Marxist move- ment, able at every stage, through upsurges of the class as well as through setbacks, to wage the struggle against Stalinism and reformism, at the same time boldly advancing the policy and pro- gramme on which the working class must fight to defeat the ruling class. a IV—Leadership and the fight against revisionism. Whilst the rapidly deepening recession and collapse of the world monetary system drive the capitalist class to the right, the Fourth Inter- national has the responsibility of answering the ruling class in a way which concentrates every- thing on the central issue of resolving the crisis of leadership, defeating the Stalinists and the reformists, taking advantage of the insoluble crisis in their ranks. Such a task can only be accom- plished by parties which start from the most profound analysis of the historic tendencies of the world capitalist crisis, and which have based themselves completely on the long struggle against revisionism in the Fourth International. The political essence of this revisionism was liquidationism. During the post-war period and the boom of the 1950s and 1960s, this liquid- ationism led to wholesale treachery, in which the Pabloites in one country after another collaborated with reformists and Stalinists, in many cases directly against the Trotskyists of the International Committee. In Ceylon and Algeria they collabor- ated openly with the bourgeois governments, even entering the coalition of Mrs Bandaranaike. In every case they worked with counter-revolutionary forces against the construction of independent revolutionary parties. The cadres who fell into this revisionist trap were told to adapt themselves to the supposedly inevitable appearance of left 414 centrist trends within the bureaucratic appara- tuses. In the period which has now opened up, such liquidationism and capitulation to oppor- tunism and centrism becomes even more deadly. The evolution of N. M. Perera and the LSSP in Ceylon is only a mild anticipation‘of this pro- cess. From ‘united left front’ they went to a bourgeois coalition government, and thence, via. the ‘peaceful road to socialism’, to the brutal suppression and incarceration of thousands of worker and peasant youth. In\the situation now entered into by the workers of the advanced capitalist countries, any capitulation to centrism, any compromise with theories that revolutionary parties can be developed naturally out of the radicalization of the working class, or through the regrouping of ‘leftward-moving’ forces, will be treachery, with fatal results. Everything now depends on the training, in practice and theory, of a cadre which understands that it is the in- dependent leadership of the Fourth International alone which can provide the pole of attraction for all the best elements of the working class and the youth, who are driven towards revolu- tionary consciousness by the crisis, because of the decisive breaks in the old relations, but who cannot attain that consciousness except in a struggle between our own forces and_ the Stalinists and reformists. This must predominate Fourth International Spring 1972

[p022] over all tactical considerations in our work in the labour movement. It is only the assembling and educating in struggle of such revolutionary parties which can provide the real possibility for the working class to win to its side the best forces from the intellectuals and the middle classes and peasantry. Centrist waiting and spon- taneism of any kind is a direct assistance to the ruling class and the Stalinist bureaucracy, facilitat- ing their conscious day-to-day work of breaking up every manifestation of the growth of revolutionary consciousness. In the United States, the inevitable concen- tration of the economic crisis on the dollar means that the American working class moves to the centre of the political stage. Insulated to a certain extent from the accumulating international con- tradictions in the recent period, so long as these were covered up by the incessant inflation of the dollar, the US working class is now exposed to the shock waves of all these contradictions at a new level. Yet this working class is equipped with only economic organizations and individual- istic trade union consciousness adequate to the boom and. the days of undisputed US world domination. Nowhere more sharply than _ here, therefore, is the question of revolutionary leader- ship posed. The revisionists of the Socialist Workers’ Party have played a treacherous role in obstructing the revolutionary preparation of a cadre in the United States. When the Socialist Workers’ Party in 1963 broke relations with the International Committee and openly returned to Pabloism in the so-called United Secretariat. they evaded all principled questions of the continuity of the Marxist move- ment. and proceeded from the appearance of agreement on the immediate ‘concrete’ issue of the Cuban revolution. Far from being. as was claimed. a turn towards revolutionary develop- ments. this was the very opposite. By accepting the theory of an epicentre of world revolution in the colonial countries. the SWP was writing off the American working class. By welcoming Castro's regime as a workers’ state and Castro as a ‘natural Marxist’. the SWP waged a frontal attack on the very fundamentals of Marxist theory and on the building of in- dependent revolutionary parties. The SWP’s Cuba campaign was actually a turn to the liberals and the middle class through the ‘Fair Play for Cuba Committee’. Their telegram of condolences to Mrs Kennedy was the crude but true expression of this reactionary course. Such an orientation could only produce a party and a youth movement. the Young Socialist Alliance. which was dominated by the politics of middle-class protest. suppression of the in- dependent programme of the working class. and open hostility to Marxist theory. It was from this standpoint that the SWP. along with the whole United Secretariat. developed the ‘analysis’ of sectors of radicalization: of the youth. of the Negroes. of women, ete. They worked in these spheres. and in the anti-war and student move- ments, as conscious opponents of any turn to the working class, and. they opposed all attempts to International Perspectives develop the independent line and organization of the working-class revolutionary leadership. In every case the independent demands of the work- ing class were subordinated to the preservation of alliances with the middle class, and this was excused by references to the dangers of sec- tarianism and the need for a truly mass movement. The fight for the American Labour Party, the building of revolutionary fractions in the trade unions, the training of a force of young Marxist revolutionaries to carry this struggle into every sector of the labour movement—this was left to the Workers’ League, in collaboration with the International Committee, which has been built through a consistent fight against the opportunism and anti-internationalism of the SWP. The verbal opposition of Hansen and Peng in the recent period to the line of Germain-Maitan- Frank is not a departure from these revisionist politics, but a further development of them. According to Hansen, it is now necessary to turn away from the Germain-Maitan thesis of guerrilla struggles, particularly concentrated in the colonial countries. Hansen draws attention to the dis- orientation of the Latin American revolutionary forces by Castroism and guerrilla-ism, and calls for a return to the ‘orthodox’ Marxist positions on the urban struggle, on the central role of the proletariat, and on the revolutionary youth. Not only was Hansen the chief agent imposing these disastrous theories on the revolutionary cadres in Latin America in 1961-1963, but his own party, the SWP, has also shown in its politics that Hansen’s ‘orthodoxy’ is but a cover for con- sistent disorientation of the youth into the camp of petty-bourgeois radicalism. Most important of all, Hansen himself proposes to ‘correct’ the course of the United Secretariat without any political and theoretical accounting. To do so would mean an objective analysis of Hansen's own role in 1963, the essence of which was to engineer an unprincipled unification with- out any theoretical or historical discussion. The SWP’s original 1953 break with Pablo had remained at a purely empirical and national level, without going to the class roots and the theoretical essence of Pablo’s tendency. Now the SWP has turned full circle after a tortuous 20-year-long empirical blundering. Hansen once again asserts ‘orthodox’ Trotskyism against the crudest Pabloism, having himself been the creator of the very situation in the world movement which he seeks to change. The development of the world Trot- skyist movement can in no circumstances take place along the road of compromise or fusion with this anti-theory tendency, but only by the most implacable theoretical and political struggle against it. A generation of Trotskyists will be trained in the United States only through a determined struggle to turn to the working class and consciously develop dialectical materialism against pragmatism and against this disastrous leadership of the SWP. The building of the Workers’ League, fighting on the programme of the International Committee, is therefore at the centre of the tasks of the IC. From this develop- ment will con.e the source, for the international 115

[p023] movement, of a qualitative leap in Marxist con- sciousness, precisely because in the tasks of the American proletariat are concentrated in highest form the international contradictions. Nixon’s measures of August 15, 1971, denote the beginning of an entirely new stage in the class relations in the United States, not only in the long term but immediately. Industrial struggles, through Nixon’s insistence on wage control, are brought into the centre of politics. The imperialists now restrict cheap imported goods, reduce the purchas- ing power of the dollar through devaluation, and step up an intensified exploitation for competition abroad. Inevitably this means direct attacks on the living standards of American workers. It means that the resistance to these attacks, beginning as trade union struggles, is immediately answered by the ruling class as sabotage of the national interest. The US imperialists are forced in the direction of political reaction, and must strike blows against the working class of a type not experienced by a whole generation. This will be a rude shock to millions of workers with reformist illusions bred by the boom. These struggles will be the framework within which Marxists must develop in the United States, as in all the advanced capitalist countries. The student, Negro, and anti-war movements of the late 1960s in the US, like the anti-Vietnam war protests and the ‘student power’ manifesta- tions in Europe and Japan, were not, as the revisionists claimed, the first wave of a new type of revolutionary anti-authority movement spring- ing out of the specific contradictions of ‘neo- capitalism’. On the contrary, they were but the heat-lightning flashes anticipating the entry on to the scene of the working class all over the world. The petty bourgeois and the student youth are moved by various separate expressions of the crisis, expressions in the ideological and political super-structure. But these elements can never produce the decisive class force for the socialist revolution. The proletariat will also from time to time reflect the developments in the super- structure, but great changes in the mass movement, the indispensable prerequisite for revolution, derive from the shocks produced by the con- tradictions in the very economic foundations of the capitalist order. The only correct orientation for the radicalized youth of the 1960s was a turn to prepare the resources and cadres for the great working-class struggles now placed on’ today’s agenda by the economic crisis. This was the mean- ing of the IC’s struggle for Marxist theory against impressionism, for the building of revo- lutionary parties against liquidation into middle- class protest movements, for the theory and programme of struggle against imperialism and bureaucracy, against the revisionist theories of a new stage of capitalism with new types of basic contradictions and new revolutionary elites. The training of cadres is not a formal task of educa- tion plus organizational experience, in preparation for deepening crises and intensified struggles. The revolutionary leadership must constantly struggle to integrate all the effects of the historical crisis, 116 not only as they appear in the experience of the working class but also in the objective relations between all classes, and in the reflection of these relations in the consciousness of all classes. Marxist theory must be developed through intervention in all these spheres, and in struggle against the existing level of consciousness in the working class. The spontaneous consciousness of the effects of the crisis in the working class is an inadequate and conservative consciousness. Not only is it restricted by the objective limits of the workers’ experience, but it is all the time subjected to the developments in bourgeois ideology and its agencies in the workers’ movement. Only a conscious fight for dialectical materialism against this ideology at every point can be the basis for the training of cadres. Revisionism in the Fourth International has always been directly opposed to this conception. Pabloism abandoned the revolutionary party and attributed a revolutionary role to sections of the Stalinist bureaucracy and the nationalist petty bourgeoisie. It is just as dangerous to proceed, as the OCI does, on the basis of elaborating a programme io ‘correspond’ to the aspirations of the working class. This mechanical and _ anti- Marxist approach to the question of consciousness actually leads to a capitulation to existing oppor- tunist trends in the labour movement. It assumes that the experience imposed on the workers by capitalism will bring about a growing rejection of the Stalinists and reformists, leaving scope for a ‘regroupment’ around the revolutionary party. The politics arising from this false theory are called, wrongly, the working class united front. The fruits of this revisionist approach have now been seen at the international level. The OCI’s ‘reconstruction’ of the International amounts to a series of organizational blocs with centrists and opportunists in opposition to the Trotskyists of the IC majority. Essen was the open manifestation of this, to be followed by the OCI’s declarations on the Bolivian revolution. The real, construction of the FI must proceed by the assembling and train- ing of the most advanced workers and youth into independent revolutionary parties, and not on such ‘regroupments’. Since 1944, the national-liberation struggles of the colonial peoples have occupied the front line of the direct struggle of the masses against imperialism. This colonial revolution, which the military oppression, of the imperialist powers has failed to stop, has -however remained isolated from the struggle of the proletariat in the metro- politan countries. In this, the counter-revolutionary role of Stalinism in all its treachery is most thoroughly exposed. Whether in its Soviet or Chinese forms Stalinism has claimed to give solidarity and support to the colonial peoples but has in fact played a decisive role in disciplining the workers .of the advanced countries while the capitalists pursued compromise Keynesian policies. Vietnam, Cuba, Indonesia, Korea, and the Latin American, African and Asian liberation struggles of the last 27 years—all have received verbal and even limited military support from Stalinism. But the essence has been that Stalinism has been the Fourth International Spring 1972

[p024] principal obstacle to the international mobiliza- tion of the only force, the working class, whose struggle can guarantee the completion of the process of permanent revolution and resolve the problems of the colonial masses. ‘Peaceful co- existence’ means in fact the maintenance of brutal military oppression and the eventual success in some cases of extreme right-wing acces- sions to state power which they use to suppress the masses. These are the tendencies expressed from Vietnam to Algeria, from Indonesia to Egypt, from West Africa to Cuba and Latin America. The role of the revisionists was to serve as an accessory of counter-revolutionary Stalinism in these great struggles. Not only did Pabloites join the Ceylon coalition in 1964, and Pablo serve as Ben Bella’s official adviser; they conducted the protests against the Vietnam war in such a way as to deliberately obscure the counter-revolutionary role of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Leninism was vulgarized and trampled on. The protest movement was justified, in the words of the Pabloites them- selves, by an appeal to quotations from Lenin to the effect that the first duty of a revolutionist in an imperialist country is to support the liberation struggles of the colonial peoples. Behind this vile deception, alliances with liberals and Stalinists were placed higher than the independent interests of the working class and the building of the Fourth International. In the name of Lenin and Trotsky, the essence of their work, the building of in- dependent proletarian parties, was rejected, and the colonial peoples were stabbed in the back yet again. Inside the colonial and semi-colonial countries, revisionism again directly assisted the Stalinist bureaucracy and the nationalist agents of im- perialism, by accepting petty bourgeois nationalist leaders as the revolutionary representatives of the masses. They completely rejected the essence of Lenin's position and the theory of Permanent Revolution: the construction of independent pro- letarian parties, leading the working class at the head of the oppressed peasantry, as the only force able to resolve the tasks of the democratic revolu- tion and go beyond them to the workers’ power, as part of the international proletarian revolution. The prospects for the proletariat in the colonial revolution now undergo a transformation, as the working class of Europe, America and Japan is inevitably drawn into the battle for state power by the precipitate development of the economic crisis. The struggles in the colonial. countries, ° having raged since 1944, now come together with the revival of the revolutionary struggle in the metropolitan countries at an entirely new level. But this coming together of the struggles poses the most acute contradictions and dangers. Im- perialism hastens to impose its crisis, so far as possible. on the colonial masses. It impels a brutal swing to the right in the Sudan, Egypt, and throughout the Middle East and it seeks the direct collaboration of the Chinese as well as the Moscow Stalinists to impose military dictatorship in India and Ceylon. The Stalinists’ support of the junta in Peru and the right-wing coup in Bolivia “International Perspectives _ are proof that the same class relationships have matured in Latin America. The end of the boom has meant a quick end to the middle-of-the-road role of sections of the nationalist bourgeoisie, and everything now depends on the independent role of the working class, which can be exercised only under the leadership of parties of the Fourth Inter- national. The sections of the Fourth International in the colonial countries will therefore be faced with mobilizing the working class to repel the attacks of reaction, to lead every new mass struggle produced by the convulsions of the economic crisis, and to participate consciously in the building of ‘the international revolutionary leadership. Above all it is necessary to orientate completely along the line of the independent revolutionary party against Stalinism and petty- bourgeois nationalism. These are the lessons of the whole post-war period and of the fight against Pablo revisionism, confirming all the basic posi- tions of Lenin, Trotsky and the Third Inter- national. If these lessons are not learned now, then the new period we have entered holds the gravest dangers. Latin America, with the Cuban question at the centre, similarly manifested the decisive issues in the world class struggle and in the fight to build the Fourth International. In 1963, the ‘reunifica- tion’ of the Pabloite forces led by Frank, Mandel, Germain and Maitan with the Socialist Workers Party, was effected primarily on the supposed establishment of a Cuban workers’ state by a petty-bourgeois leadership under Castro, which had thereby become Marxist or Trotskyist through a process of natural evolution. Here was to be found the concrete historical expression of the long-advocated liquidation of the Fourth Inter- national in favour of spontaneous development from the ‘new world reality’. The ‘reunification’ also held out the prospect of Algeria following in the footsteps of Cuba and becoming the first workers’ state in Africa, with Ben Bella ‘another Castro’. The International Committee was con- demned as sectarian and blind to the ‘facts’ of Cuba’s supposed break with imperialism. Dynamics of World Revolution Today, published in June 1963 as the document of the ‘reunification’ said: ‘The emergence of mass revolutionary forces led by parties or tendencies which have developed outside the realm of Stalinist control (Cuba, Algeria) has introduced a most power- ful disintegrating element into international Stalinism, favouring the development of a revolutionary left wing.’ (Page 15.) From Cuba the conclusion was drawn that the revolution could succeed in colonial countries ‘even with a blunt instrument’ (page 5). Fidel Castro’s purging of the Escalante group in Cuba was welcomed as a critique of bureaucracy in the tradition of Lenin and Trotsky! (page 35.) In drawing up the balance sheet of these poli- tical positions, it is above all necessary to empha- size the method of constructing the Fourth International that is at stake, and to draw the lessons today. The International Committee pro- posed then, as it proposes in a different context and a different form today, a discussion of all 117

[p025] outstanding political questions which embraces all sections attached to both the International Com- mittee and the Pabloite Secretariat (now the ‘Unified Secretariat’). It is, of course, no accident that Ceylon, for example, is missing from the 1968 and 1969 documents of the Unified Secretariat’s World Conference. In 1963, the Ceylon section was mentioned in Dynamics of World Revolution Today as the only mass party in the Fourth Inter- national—only one year before this party entered a bourgeois coalition! ‘Unification’ was effected in 1963 only on the basis of suppressing discussion of differences and excluding the International Committee from the discussion. Ben Bella was imprisoned by the Boumedienne regime, which imposed a more right-wing nationalist regime in Algeria. Algerian militants under the influence of the revisionists, especially Pablo himself, were blinded by the theory of ‘blunted instruments’ and became the victims of the right-wing coup, as against any supposed ‘left’ development. The FLN produced no revolutionary development and drove no Stalinist party in a ‘revolutionary direction’. In Cuba the Castro movement, already merged with the Cuban Stalinists, moved completely into the policy orbit of world Stalinism. As foreseen by the analysis of the International Committee, the Castro government, through its control of the state offices and its alliance with counter- revolutionary Stalinism, entered upon the course which eventually will increase the dependence of Cuba on world imperialism and deprive the work- ing class of many of the conquests won in the last ten years. Castro began in 1966 his open assault on Trot- skyism in Latin America; the Guevara adventure in Bolivia collapsed; the ‘Castroite’ guerrilla strategy failed in one country after another. Loyal to the, Stalinist bureaucracy which guaranteed prices for the sugar crop, Castro kept silent on France May-June 1968 and then supported the Warsaw Pact intervention in Czechoslovakia. Under pressure from the Soviet bureaucracy to restore good relations in Latin America, the Castro regime did not support the persecuted students of Mexico. Now, as the Stalinists welcome the Peru- vian junta as a ‘revolutionary’ government, so does Castro abandon any pretence of fighting a Latin American revolution and seeks agreements with the so-called ‘left’? governments of these countries. Undoubtedly the US investments of the past decade in Latin America have encouraged an upsurge of the workers’ and peasants’ movements. This rise of the working class, which gives the real hope to the historic struggle of the rural poor, continuing throughout the _ continent, requires Trotskyist leadership; requires proletarian revolutionary parties able to oppose the Stalinists’ collaboration with imperialism. This upsurge of the working class, together with the inescapable prob- lems of trying to build up an autonomous Cuban economy on the basis of sugar-culture, is the forcing-house behind Castro’s inevitable accept- ance of the Stalinist bureaucracy’s pressure to move back to the American imperialist camp, via closer relations with Peru and then with the 118 Organization of American States. The Castro government, far from being the leadership of a revolutionary party at the head of a workers’ state, was on the contrary a Bonapartist caretaker for the Cuban bourgeoisie, holding the masses in check. Just as the militants, particularly youth, coming forward in struggle in the advanced capitalist countries can go rapidly through the experience of exhausting the traditional leaderships and test- ing out centrist tendencies, so in Latin America the ‘Castroite’ appearance of an alternative to Stalinism has had to show its true nature. In both cases it is the depth of the world crisis which has forced this development. Revisionism’s crisis naturally reflects directly this rapid exhaustion of the centrist and petty-bourgeois layers upon which it depends. Castro now follows the Kremlin bureaucracy in hailing the regime of the military junta in Peru as ‘revolutionary’. What the junta represents is a bonapartist dictatorship, directly subservient economically to US imperialism, but politically able temporarily to control sections of the masses through measures of so-called ‘nationalization’. This will more and more be the pattern in Latin America. Brutal suppression of the peasant masses in their struggle for land accompanied by ‘land reform’ benefiting a better-off minority; a period of relative expansion and ‘reform’ in industry through new relations negotiated with the US monopolists; integration of the trade unions into the state machine; preparations for repression of all independent working-class organization; ‘revo- lutionary’ nationalist demagogy of the bonapartist rulers, supported by the Stalinists. Castroism, aided by the revisionists, has become the apologist for this development, poisoning the development of all those militants it could influence among the workers, the youth and the poor peasantry. The election of Allende in Chile holds the same dangers. His ‘Marxism’ represents the immediate needs of US imperialism: to lull the masses to sleep while the best conditions are created for the expansion of US investment. The Stalinists and Castroites, behind the deception of a unity against the most reactionary forces, support such regimes and use them to strike out against the building of independent revolutionary parties based on the strategy of the permanent revolution and the programme of the Fourth International. The Pabloite revisionists inevitably enter an insoluble crisis in Latin America at this point. It is the very entry of the proletariat as the decisive force, now needing a leadership and strategy to lead the poor peasantry behind it and armed with the programme of Trotskyism, that makes necessary the changed political nature of those Latin American regimes. This, and not adaptation to the new regimes, provides the basis for the development in Marxism in Latin America, and already produces the determined elements who are fighting to build the Fourth International in Latin America around the International Committee. The lessons of Bolivia, following on Ceylon, Algeria and Cuba, bring home with the greatest urgency the necessity of parties of the Fourth Fourth International Spring 1972

[p026] International fighting on the basis of the Per- manent Revolution. Necessary above all else, after — the accession to power of Torres, was to build a party which was proletarian and revolutionary in programme and composition, able to lead the masses on the question of land reform. But the workers’ organizations were subordinated to the centrist policy of conditional support for Torres. The way was left open for the right-wing mili- tarists and fascists to win time and support in the countryside and effect a successful coup d’état, Support for Torres could only have this outcome. Caught in the illusion of a ‘dual power’ which could effect a gradual transition through struggle against reaction, the revolutionary vanguard was politically disarmed, and this meant the working class was disarmed. While the masses laboured under this illusion, the right wing prepared the counter-revolution. The resistance of the workers and students was soon overcome because there was no independent revolutionary preparation. The regroupment of Trotskyist forces in South and Central America will take place only if the lessons of the Bolivian events, and the lessons- of the Pabloite capitulation to Castroism, are learned. The only road is: the construction of independent proletarian parties as part of the building of the Fourth International. In Asia, the people of Vietnam are now directly joined in struggle by the masses in Ceylon and in Bengal. But this new upsurge of the colonial masses coincides with the deepest crisis in the advanced countries. For this reason the Stalinist bureaucracy, in Peking as well as Moscow, turns more resolutely to the imperialists. When the bureaucracy supports reaction in Pakistan against Bangla Desh, and supports the Bandaranaike government in Ceylon, it is betraying the future interests of the Vietnamese revolution as well as building up for massive repressions in India and Ceylon. But this is a natural consequence of the Stalinist bureaucracy’s policy since 1968. They betrayed the revolution in France and brutally suppressed the Czech workers, they helped break the Spanish miners’ strike, they shot down the Polish workers in 1970. The fact that Mao’s as well as Brezhnev’s counter-revolutionary role is more and more expressed in these first stages of the economic crisis of capitalism can constitute a great advantage to the Trotskyist movement, provided we fight everywhere to train the in- dependent leadership through the struggle against these betrayals. V—The tasks of building revolutionary parties. The Stalinist bureaucracy senses very well that the insoluble imperialist crisis means mass revo- lutionary struggles. These struggles, with power as their perspective, threaten every basic premise of the bureaucracy’s relations with imperialism, and open up to the workers of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union the prospect of a united international revolutionary struggle, for the social revolution against capitalism, and for their own political revolution against the bureaucracy. It is for this reason that the bureaucracy turns on the one hand to the imperialists and on the other to sharper repression at home. It was always true that the bureaucratic- military means to which the bureaucracy restricted the defence of the USSR actually defeated their object, because they operated as part of an overall Strategy which strangled the only real force able . to defend the gains of October, i.e. the inter- national working class. Thus today, the collabora- tion of world Stalinism with imperialism, far from making it more ‘peaceful’, actually opens the door to the growing right- -wing and militaristic tendencies which always arise at times of capitalist crisis. The capitalists are driven by necessity in the direction of re-conquest of the USSR, Eastern Europe and China, and the Stalinist be- trayals are calculated to divide and weaken the working class within each capitalist country which must fight for its own power if capitalist reaction is to be halted. As part of the international role of Stalinism, Stalinist parties will undoubtedly lead workers in some cases to defeats. There will be no short cuts around these experiences as the working class goes through its preparation for the decisive struggle for power. International perspectives The working class will test out its existing leaders and organizations, and the IC sections must find every way of breaking the masses in action from the Stalinists and reformists,; posing always the question to all those who still com- mand the allegiance of the working class: take the state power, break with the bourgeoisie. However, the new crisis after August 15 will very soon have effects in which the time taken to pass through some of these experiences _ is greatly reduced. Sections of workers will be placed in situations where they will learn more in a few weeks than in a lifetime. But this does not mean a pleasant educational exercise under ‘favourable’ conditions. Rather, it involves pro- found shocks in the whole way of life and thinking of the working class: Only Marxists who struggle to develop their understanding of dialectical materialism, of the real development of conscious- ness, will be able to break from routine, from formal expectations and propaganda methods, and instead find new ways of extracting new know- ledge from the objective changes, and from this developing theory and programme for the next Stage of the practical revolutionary Struggle. It is in this sense that only parties trained in a con- scious struggle to develop dialectical materialism against all enemies, all forms of idealism, will be equipped for the approaching struggles. The crisis is fundamentally one of revolutionary leadership. Our task is by no means just to find adequate expression for the developing moods and demands of the masses as they are spontaneously driven into action. It is to give leadership against the centrist traps into which these spontaneous movements will fall. The initial struggle will 119

[p027] shatter the existing relationships and conceptions, but left to itself the result will merely be a co- existence of militancy and ‘left’ thinking with the existing reformist and Stalinist leadership. The Trotskyists must conduct an all-round political and theoretical struggle against capitalist ideology in all its forms in order to break the ideological domination imposed by the bourgeoisie through reformism, Stalinism and revisionism. This means a conscious fight to start from the building of the independent revolutionary cadre in every country, at the same time studying with the greatest care the actual development of the work- ing class, but in no case confusing the latter with its pale reflection in sectors of the apparatus. In the course of development of the new phase of capitalist crisis centrism will appear at every major turn. In appearance it corresponds to the level reached by sections of the working class just breaking from reformism. Given the independent intervention by Trotskyism against centrism, then we can expect the enormous tension created by the economic crisis to provide conditions in which the centrists will be very rapidly exposed for the opportunists they are. But here lies great danger: the capitalist class needs every new upsurge of the working class to be broken in its early stages, and it relies on the centrist leaders to carry out the necessary betrayal. To combat and defeat this centrism is not therefore a propaganda task, but a life-and-death matter for the working class. It can be dealt with only by a party whose cadres are trained on the whole body of Marxist theory. What flows, therefore, from our theoretical analysis of the present economic and political situation, and from all the basic experience of our movement, is the paramount need to struggle on the basis of dialectical materialism for the in- dependent development of our own revolutionary party in every country. This, the creation of a decisive pole of attraction for the best elements driven forward by the crisis, and not some centrist adaptation to ‘new forces’, is the fundamental requirement of the working class and the youth. To go deeper and deeper into the masses, as the new stage of the crisis requires, is a task that cannot be undertaken except through the most decisive concentration on the development of Marxist theory. The Third Conference of the International Committee in 1966 adopted a resolution based on the report of the Conference Commission on ‘Rebuilding the Fourth International and the Tasks of the IC’. Asserting the continuity of the Fourth International since 1938 in struggle against Stalinism and against Pabloite liquidationism, this resolution emphasized above all else the building of independent revolutionary parties in every country. Such parties can only be built in opposi- tion to all tendencies to syndicalism and spon- taneity. In the epoch of wars and revolutions, and especially in the period since the early 1930s where the crisis of revolutionary leadership pre- dominates, all such tendencies quickly fall prey to centrist treachery. The very fact that the im- perialist crisis forces more and more millions of the masses into conflict demands precisely that 120 a leadership is forged which can establish the political independence of the working class. The proletariat will not abandon its traditional trade union and political organizations immediately to take the road of revolution. It will first act while still within the framework of these or- ganizations, producing a crisis within them. The resolution of this crisis is a conscious task which can be undertaken only by parties of the Fourth International. The cadres of the Fourth Inter- _national fight within the mass organizations of the working class to defend the trade unions from the capitalist state; they conduct a political struggle to remove the opportunist and Stalinist leaderships as the basis of the fight for proletarian democracy within the trade unions. All sectarianism, turning away from the mass organizations, must be resolutely opposed. It is essentially in this fight against the opportunist leadership, intervening on all the basic questions confronting the working class to win cadres and build the revolutionary party, that the struggle to unite the working class takes place. In this period of the crisis of revolu- tionary leadership, the struggle to build the in- dependent centralized revolutionary leadership is a fundamental, principled issue. To the building of the party all tactical questions are subordinated in the direct sense that every aspect of work—in the unions, in the youth movement, in propaganda, etc.—is planned and controlled from the party, with its perspectives worked out from the stand- point of building the party necessary to lead the working class to power. The role of a daily party newspaper in this fight is indispensable. It is the organizer of the party, constantly struggling to create a political homo- geneity of the work and consciousness of all members of the revolutionary party. It gives the party the necessary striking power in reacting to the sharp political turns characteristic of this revolutionary period. It takes to a new level the struggle of Trotskyism against Stalinism and all the agents of capitalism within the working class. It is the concrete realization of the perspective of resolving the crisis of leadership, enabling the fight for revolutionary consciousness to be con-- ducted on the political, the economic and the theoretical fronts in a way which‘is enriched and unified by the daily necessity of intervention in the class struggle. . ‘ The Third Conference of the International Com- mittee also decided to set up a youth commission working under its direction. This youth com- mission undertook the immediate tasks placed before it—organization of mass participation in the Ligge demonstration against NATO and the Vietnam war in October 1966, and convening an international conference of revolutionary youth organizations (begun as the International Youth Assembly, summer 1967). There is no doubt that the radicalization of youth in the 1960s was, as always, the anticipation of a renewed revolutionary upsurge of working-class struggle. For this reason, the orientation of the sections of the International Committee towards the youth was correct and of great importance. It has strengthened the cadre of the IC sections in preparation for the great class Fourth International Spring 1972

[p028] battles which began in 1968. This new revolu- tionary stage of the class struggle provides qualitatively new conditions for a mass Trotskyist youth movement. The youth can now march forward no longer comparatively isolated from the adult workers, but on the contrary, given strength and confidence by the actions of large sections of the working class. The political development of the revolutionary youth is greatly facilitated by this relationship and the struggle against all forms of opportunism and adventurism in the youth can be carried through under very favourable conditions. Natur- ally the youth come into the struggle with no experience of the fundamental clash between imperialism and the proletariat. Their enthusiasm and energy, so essential to the building of the revolutionary party, have to be tempered and given greater force through the absorption of all the lessons of the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat. These lessons can only be learned in the school of Lenin and Trotsky, in the building of parties of the Fourth International. There is thus no separation whatsoever between the build- ing of the revolutionary party and the building of the mass revolutionary youth organization and youth International. The International Committee thus has a primary responsibility for the develop- ment of an international youth organization which places itself clearly and openly under the banner of Trotskyism, of the Fourth International. The history of the Fourth International, as of the Third International set up under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky, proves beyond any shadow of doubt that the laying down of a correct pro- gramme, even with the most impeccable historical forbears and preconditions, does not provide automatic sureties of the development of revolu- tionary leadership. Not complacency, but the most vigilant, combative and scrupulous attention to theoretical questions, checking on every perspec- tive and every development, constantly turning the cadres of every section towards fundamental theoretical questions, will build the revolutionary party. This is the most decisive lesson of the history of the Fourth International and the struggle against the revisionists. Development will not come from any combination of adherence to programme with the enthusiasm of the youth and the influx of fresh forces from the struggle of the working class. It will come from the battle to develop and deepen Marxist theory against every pressure from bourgeois ideology. The deeper the crisis of imperialism, and consequently of its bureaucratic agencies in the labour movement, the more press- ing the tasks posed before the revolutionary leadership, the sharper is the pressure of all forms of idealist thinking inside the revolutionary party. There is no road to the building of the revolu- tionary party, no road to workers’ power, except this one. It is precisely the possibility, under today’s conditions, of building the Fourth Inter- national into the world leadership at which Trotsky aimed, that poses the task of deepening dialectical materialism in the conflict against all forms of revisionism, of negating the whole period since 1938. The struggle against revisionism is_ the essence of preparation. It prepares the revolu- tionary party to fight for the leadership of the working class in overturning all the defeats and obstacles placed in its way by imperialism and the Stalinist bureaucracy. The essential task before the Fourth Conference of the International Committee is the theoretical and political preparation of all its sections, and of all those now coming towards the International Committee, to establish in the immediate future parties which will successfully challenge the Stalinist and reformist leaderships and lead the struggle for workers’ power. December 1971. This is a polemic against Radek in 1928. Trotsky examines the arguments against his pre-war theory of the permanent revolution (as expounded in Results and Prospects) and takes up the history of his differences with Lenin before 1917, of which Stalin and his henchmen made so much. Trotsky shows that it was Lenin's criticisms of his attitude to the centralised Marxist party, which he afterwards understood and accepted, that kept them apart. and not their differences on the permanent revolution. international perspectives 254 pages, _ Paperback 76 NEW PARK PUBLICATIONS LTD., 186A CLAPHAM HIGH ST., LONDON, 8.0.4 121

[p029] A ATO TS WALHOIW IN IVWIREATV INST 7 ATV TONG HST ~SAdOH

[p030] IN THE OPINION OF Marx and Engels, the philo- sophical materialism which existed before the mid- 19th century had severe limitations. It was mechanical, knowing only physics among the natural sciences, and therefore able to con- ceive of man himself only as a machine; and it could not conceive of the world in its develop- ment, as a continuous historical process; indeed even motion was considered as essentially static, constituting the re-establishment of equilibrium. These limitations had two sources: the under- developed character of the natural sciences, lack of knowledge of evolution, earth history etc.; and ‘the metaphysical, i.e., anti-dialectical, manner of philosophizing connected with it’. No scientific basis existed for a historical view of nature; there- fore all mobility, change, development seemed due to the work of ‘mind’. In the study of the history of mankind, the same metaphysical view predominated. From the fall of Rome to the Renaissance era was merely 1,000 years of darkness, giving way to a renewal of the creative human spirit. The actual inter- connections and changes were not seen. Engels says that the great theoretical task was to bring the science of society ‘...the sum total of the so-called historical and philosophical sciences, into harmony with the materialist foundations (natural history), and of reconstructing it there- upon’, This would give ‘the science of real men and of their historical development’, which began with Marx’s The Holy Family 1845 (see Engels: Ludwig Feuerbach). Early English philosophers and bourgeois consciousness The English philosophers of the 17th century had been especially important in pre-Marxist materialism. Although Bacon preceded them in the advocacy of materialism, it was Hobbes and Locke, at different stages of the bourgeois revolu- tion (Hobbes around the Civil War of 1640 and the Commonwealth, Locke working on the basis of the class compromise of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688) who presented the most systematically worked-out expression of the social outlook of the rising class, the bourgeoisie. These thinkers were part of the great historical process whereby the classes of modern society, capitalism, in Britain were assembled in their present basic rela- tions. These relations are essentially economic (wage-labouring workers and capitalists) but must also be understood in their ideological and political forms. It is precisely the bourgeois domination of those ideological and political forms which pro- vides the particular historical framework for the rule of the bourgeoisie in each country. These bonds must be broken for the proletariat to remove the bourgeoisie as a class when the crisis of capitalism demands revolutionary solutions, as now in the epoch of imperialism. We can put the question in another way. Lenin insists that socialist consciousness is brought to the working class ‘from the outside’, i.e. from the