Markin comment:
The following is an article from an archival issue of Women and Revolution, Winter-Spring, 1996, that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Women and Revolution during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
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Class- Struggle Defense Work In The U.S. - Building on the Heritage of the International Labor Defense
We print below an edited speech by Deborah Mackson, executive director of the Partisan Defense Committee, prepared for April 7995 regional educationals in New York, Chicago and Oakland as part of a series of meetings and rallies sponsored by the PDC to mobilize support for Mum/a Abu-Jamal and the fight against the racist death penalty.
Mumia Abu-Jamal describes his current conditions of incarceration on death row at the State Correctional Institution at Greene County, Pennsylvania as "high-tech hell." When Governor Tom Ridge assaults all of the working people and minorities of this country by initiating the first execution of a political prisoner in America since the Rosenbergs, he must hear a resounding "No!" from coast to coast. Because Jamal is an articulate voice for the oppressed, this racist and rotting capitalist state wants to silence him forever. He is indeed dangerous. He is indeed a symbol. He is, indeed, innocent. Hear his powerful words, and you will begin to understand the hatred and fear which inspires the vendetta against this courageous fighter:
"Over many long years, over mountains of fears, through rivers of repression, from the depths of the valley of the shadow of death, I survive to greet you, in the continuing spirit of rebellion.... As America's ruling classes rush backwards into a new Dark Age, the weight of repression comes easier with each passing hour. But as repression increases, so too must resistance.... Like our forefathers, our fore-mothers, our kith and kin, we must fight for every inch of ground gained. The repressive wave sweeping this country will not stop by good wishes, but only by a counterwave of committed people firm in their focus."
We of the Partisan Defense Committee, the Spartacist League and the Labor Black Leagues are committed to a campaign to free this former Black Panther, award-winning journalist and supporter of the controversial MOVE organization who was framed for the 1981 killing of a Philadelphia policeman. Our aim is to effect an international campaign of protest and publicity like that which ultimately saved the nine Scottsboro Boys, framed for rape in Alabama in 1931, from the electric chair. We must mobilize the working class and all the oppressed in the fight to free this class-war prisoner framed by the government's murderous vendetta.
As Marxists, we are opposed to the death penalty on principle. We say that this state does not have the right to decide who lives and who dies. Capital punishment is part of the vast arsenal of terror at the hands of this state, which exists to defend the capitalist system of exploitation and oppression. America's courts are an instrument of the bourgeoisie's war on the working people and the poor; they are neither neutral nor by any stretch of the imagination "color blind."
To us, the defense of America's class-war prisoners— whatever their individual political views may be—is a responsibility of the revolutionary vanguard party which must champion all causes in the interest of the proletariat. The Partisan Defense Committee was initiated by the Spartacist League in 1974 in the tradition of the working-class defense policies of the International Labor Defense, under its founder and first secretary from 1925 to 1928, James P. Cannon. Today, I want to talk to you about how that tradition was built in this country by the best militants of the past 100 years—the leaders of class-struggle organizations like the pre-World War I Industrial Workers of the World, the early Socialist and Communist parties and the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party.
The Roots of Black Oppression
To forge a future, one has to understand the past. The modern American death penalty is the barbaric inheritance of a barbaric system of production: chattel slavery. Like the capitalists who hold state power today, the slavocracy used the instruments of their power, special bodies of armed men and the "justice" system— the laws, courts and prisons—to control people for profit. Directly descendant from the slavocracy's tradition of property in black people is the death penalty. A trail through history illustrates this truth. The "slave codes" codified a series of offenses for which slaves could be killed but for which whites would receive a lesser sentence. In Virginia, the death penalty was mandatory for both slaves and free blacks for any crime for which a white could be imprisoned for three years or more. In Georgia, a black man convicted of raping a white woman faced the death penalty; a white man got two years for the same crime, and punishment was "discretionary" if the victim was black. Slaves could not own property, bear arms, assemble or testify against whites in courts of law. Marriage between slaves was not recognized; families were sold apart; it was illegal to teach a slave to read and write. Slaves were not second- or third-class citizens—they were not human, but legally "personal, movable property," chattel.
William Styron in The Confessions of Nat Turner has the fictional character T.R. Gray explain the slaveowners' rationale to Turner:
"The point is that you are animate chattel and animate chattel is capable of craft and connivery and wily stealth. You ain't a wagon, Reverend, but chattel that possesses moral choice and spiritual volition. Remember that well. Because that's how come the law provides that animate chattel like you can be tried for a felony, and that's how come you're goin' to be tried next Sattidy. "He paused, then said softly without emotion: 'And hung by the neck until dead'."
While the slave codes were a Southern institution, legal and extralegal terror were never exclusive to the South. As early as 1793, fugitive slave laws were on the federal books. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Law was passed in response to the growing abolitionist influence which had inspired several Northern states to pass "personal liberty laws," giving some protection to slaves who had successfully negotiated the Underground Railroad. The 1850 law, seeking to protect the private property of slaveholders, put the burden of proof on captured blacks, but gave them no legal power to prove their freedom—no right to habeas corpus, no right to a jury trial, no right even to testify on their own behalf.
Many blacks were caught in the clutches of this infamous law, which had no bounds. For example, a man in southern Indiana was arrested and returned to an owner’ who claimed he had run away 79 years before. The law knew no pretense. A magistrate's fee doubled if he judged an unfortunate black before the bench a runaway slave instead of a tree man. And fugitives were pursued with vigor. In Battle Cry of Freedom, historian James McPherson recounts the story of Anthony Burns, a slave who stowed away from Virginia to Boston in 1854. The feds spent the equivalent of $2.3 million in current dollars to return him to his "owner." That is approximately equal to what an average death penalty case costs today.
Any hope that "blind justice" could be sought from the U.S. Supreme Court was dashed with the 1856 Dred Scott decision. Chief Justice Taney wrote that at the time the Constitution was adopted, Negroes "had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order...so far inferior, that they had no rights which a white man was bound to respect."
While slavery itself was overthrown in the Civil War and Reconstruction, the needs of the American capitalists for compulsory agricultural labor in the South remained. A new, semi-capitalistic mode of agriculture developed, in which the semi-slave condition of the freed blacks was made permanent by the re-establishment of the social relations of slavery: color discrimination buttressed by segregation and race prejudice.
After the Civil War the slave codes became the "black codes," a separate set of rules defining crime and punishment for blacks and limiting their civil rights. They were enforced by the extralegal terror of the Ku Klux Klan; in the last two decades of the 19th century, lynching vastly outnumbered legal executions. As W.E.B. Du Bois said of lynching:
"It is not simply the Klu Klux Klan; it is not simply weak officials; it is not simply inadequate, unenforced law. It is deeper, far deeper than all this: it is the in-grained spirit of mob and murder, the despising of women and the capitalization of children born of 400 years of Negro slavery and 4,000 years of government for private profit."
The promise of Radical Reconstruction, equality, could only be fulfilled by attacking the problem at its very root: private property in the means of production. Neither Northern capitalists nor Southern planters could abide that revolution, so they made a deal, the Compromise of 1877, in their common interest. That's why we call on American workers, black and white, to finish the Civil War—to complete, through socialist revolution, the unfinished tasks of the Second American Revolution!
In the wake of the Compromise of 1877, the U.S. Supreme Court began to dismantle the Civil Rights Acts of the Reconstruction period. One landmark decision was Plessey v. Ferguson in 1896, which permitted "separate but equal" treatment of black and white in public facilities. But separate is never equal. This was simply the legal cover for the transformation of the "black codes" into "Jim Crow"—the "grandfather clause," poll tax, literacy test, all designed to deny blacks the vote, and the institution of separate facilities from schools to cemeteries. This legal and practical segregation, instituted in the South and transported North, was a tool to divide and rule.
America's Racist Death Penalty
The death penalty was applied at will until 1972. From 1930 to 1967 the U.S. averaged 100 or more executions per year. In 1972, following a decade of civil rights protests, the Supreme Court ruled the death penalty was "cruel and unusual punishment" because of its arbitrary and capricious application. But the hiatus lasted only four years.
In 1976-the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty and has been expanding it ever since. In 1986 the court ruled it unconstitutional to execute the insane, but gave no criteria for defining insanity; in 1988 it approved the execution of 16-year-olds; in 1989 it ruled for the execution of retarded persons. Since 1976, 276 people have been executed in this country. Between January and April of 1995, 17 were killed. And innocence is no barrier, as the Supreme Court recently decreed in the case of Jesse Dewayne Jacobs, executed in Texas in January 1995 after the prosecution submitted that he had not committed the crime for which he had been sentenced. The Supreme Court said it didn't matter, he'd had a "fair trial." What an abomination!
Perhaps the most telling case in recent history was the 1987 McCleskey decision. The evidence submitted to the courts illustrated beyond the shadow of a doubt that racism ruled the application of the death penalty. Overall, a black person convicted of killing a white person is 22 times more likely to be sentenced to death than if the victim is black. When the McCleskey case went to court, liberals across the country hoped for a Brown v. Board of Education decision in regard to the death penalty. The evidence of racial bias was clear and overwhelming. But while the Supreme Court accepted the accuracy of the evidence, it said it doesn't matter. The court showed the real intention of the death penalty when it stated that McCleskey's claim "throws into serious question the principles that underlie our entire criminal justice system" and "the validity of capital punishment in our multi-racial society." Or as a Southern planter wrote in defense of the slave codes, "We have to rely more and more on the power of fear.... We are determined to continue masters" (quoted in Kenneth Stampp, The Peculiar Institution).
Let's take a look for a moment at "our multi-racial society." The U.S. has the highest rate of incarceration in the world: 344 per 100,000. It is one of the two "advanced" industrial countries left in the world which employs capital punishment. As of January 1995, 2,976 men, women and children occupied America's death rows; 48 are women, 37 are juveniles. According to the latest census, blacks make up 12 percent of the population, yet 51 percent of the people awaiting execution are minorities and 40 percent are black.
Eighty-four percent of all capital cases involve white victims even though 50 percent of murder victims in America are black. Of a total of 75 people executed for interracial murders, three involved a black victim and a white defendant, 72 involved a white victim and a black defendant. The death penalty is truly an impulse to genocide against the black population for whom the ruling class no longer sees any need in its profit-grabbing calculations.
Understanding this and understanding the broader importance of the black question in America, we take up Jamal's case as a concrete task in our struggle for black freedom and for proletarian revolution in the interests of the liberation of all of humanity.
Early History of Class-Struggle Defense
From the beginning of the communist movement, a commitment to those persecuted by the ruling classes, whether "on the inside" or out, has been recognized as an integral part of the class struggle. Marx and Engels spent years defending and supporting the refugees of-the Paris Commune.
As Trotskyists, we feel this responsibility keenly because we inherited some of the finest principles for class-struggle defense from James R Cannon, the founder of American Trotskyism. The traditions which inspired the International Labor Defense (ILD) were forged in hard class struggle, dating back to the rise of the labor movement after the Civil War. One of the first acts of the Republican government following the Compromise of 1877 was to pull its troops from the South and send them to quell the railway strikes that had broken out throughout the Northern states. The federal strikebreakers tipped the scales in the hard-fought battles of the time, many of which escalated into general strikes, and the workers were driven back in defeat. But united struggle against the bosses had been launched, and less than a decade later the workers movement had taken up the fight for an eight-hour day.
In the course of this struggle, workers in Chicago amassed at Haymarket Square in early May of 1886. The protest was just winding down when a bomb went off, likely planted by a provocateur. The cops opened fire on the workers, killing one and wounding many. The government’s response was to frame up eight workers, who were sympathetic to anarchist views, on charges of murder. They were tried and convicted, not for the bombing but for their agitation against the employers. Four were hanged, one committed suicide, three were finally pardoned in 1891.
The period from the turn of the century to America's entry into World War I was one of intense social struggle; militant strikes were more numerous than at any time since. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW—the Wobblies) led union organizing drives, anti-lynching campaigns and a free speech movement. The level of struggle meant more frequent arrests, which gave rise to the need for defense of the class and individuals. The left and most labor currents and organizations rallied to the defense of victims of the class war. Non-sectarian defense was the rule of the day. The Wobbly slogan, "an injury to one is an injury to all," was taken to heart by the vast majority of the workers.
This was Cannon's training ground. One of his heroes was Big Bill Haywood, who conceived the ILD with Cannon in Moscow in 1925. As Cannon said, the history of the ILD is "the story of the projection of Bill Haywood's influence—through me and my associates—into the movement from which he was exiled, an influence for simple honesty and good will and genuine non-partisan solidarity toward all the prisoners of the class war in America."
Big Bill Haywood came from the Western Federation of Miners, one of the most combative unions this country has ever produced. The preamble to their constitution was a series of six points, beginning, "We hold that there is a class struggle in society and that this struggle is caused by economic conditions." It goes on to note, "We hold that the class struggle will continue until the producer is recognized as the sole master of his product," and it asserts that the working class and it alone can and must achieve its own emancipation. It ends, "we, the wage slaves...have associated in the Western Federation of Miners."
Not all labor organizations of the time had this class-struggle perspective. Contrast the tract of Samuel Rompers' American Federation of Labor (AFL), "Labor's Bill of Grievances," which he sent to the president and Congress in 1908:
"We present these grievances to your attention because we have long, patiently and in vain waited for redress.
There is not any matter of which we have complained but for which we nave in an honorable and lawful manner submitted remedies. The remedies for these grievances proposed by labor are in line with fundamental law, and with progress and development made necessary by changed industrial conditions."
The IWW, whose constitution began, "The working class and the employing class have nothing in common," was founded in 1905. Haywood was an initiator and one of its most aggressive and influential organizers. As a result of that and his open socialist beliefs, in 1906 he, along with George Pettibone and Charles Moyer, were arrested for the bombing murder of ex-governor Frank Steunenberg of Idaho (the nemesis of the combative Coeur d'Alene miners). The three were kidnapped from Colorado, put on a military train and taken to Idaho.
The Western Federation of Miners and the IWW launched a tremendous defense movement for the three during the 18 months they were waiting to be tried for their lives. Everyone from the anarchists to the AFL participated. Demonstrations of 50,000 and more were organized all across the country. It was this case that brought James Cannon to political consciousness.
The case was important internationally, too. While they were in jail, Maxim Gorky came to New York and sent a telegram to the three with greetings from the Russian workers. Haywood wired back that their imprisonment was an expression of the class struggle which was the same in America as in Russia and in all other capitalist countries.
On a less friendly note, Teddy Roosevelt, then president of America, publicly declared the three "undesirable citizens." Haywood responded that the laws of the country held they were innocent until proven guilty and that a man in Roosevelt's position should be the last to judge them until the case was decided in court.
The Socialist Party (founded in 1901) also rallied to the defense. While in jail, Haywood was nominated as the party's candidate for governor of Colorado and got 16,000 votes. The leader of the SP, Eugene Debs, wrote his famous "Arouse, Ye Slaves" for the SP's Appeal to Reason:
"If they attempt to murder Moyer, Haywood and their brothers, a million revolutionists, at least, will meet them with guns.... Let them dare to execute their devilish plot and every state in this Union will resound with the tramp of revolution....
"Get ready, comrades, for action!... A special revolutionary convention of the proletariat...would be in order, and, if extreme measures are required, a general strike could be ordered and industry paralyzed as a preliminary to a general uprising."
Haywood's trial began in May of 1907. It was Clarence Darrow for the defense and the infamous Senator William E. Borah for the frame-up (prosecution). That this was a political trial was clear to everybody. The prosecution, for example, introduced into evidence issues of the anarchist journal Alarm from 1886, when Haymarket martyr Albert Parsons was its editor. Haywood thought that Dar-row's summary to the jury in his case was the best effort Darrow ever made in the courtroom. But Haywood also got a bit exasperated with his lawyer. In his autobiography, he tells the story of Darrow coming to jail depressed and worried. The defendants would always try to get him to lighten up. Finally Pettibone got tired of this and told Darrow they knew it would be really hard on him to lose this great case with all its national and international attention, but, hey! he said, "You know it's us fellows that have to be hanged!"
Every day of the trial the defense committee packed the courtroom with what Haywood called "a labor jury of Socialists and union men." This is a practice we proudly follow today. On the stand, Haywood told the story of the Western Federation of Miners and its battles against the bosses, putting them on trial. He refused to be intimidated by Senator Borah. When Borah asked whether Haywood had said that Governor Steunenberg should be exterminated, Haywood replied that to the best of his remembrance, he said he should be "eliminated."
On June 28 Haywood was acquitted. Soon thereafter, so were his comrades. At a Chicago rally organized to greet him upon his release, he told the crowd of 200,000, "We owe our lives to your solidarity." Haywood knew that innocence was not enough. It is that kind of solidarity we are seeking to mobilize today for Mumia Abu-Jamal.
The Labor Movement and World War I
Haywood was elected to the National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party in 1908, during its most left-wing period. In 1910, he was one of the party's delegates to the Socialist Congress of the Second International in Copenhagen. Shortly after, the SP moved to the right, and in 1912 (the year Debs polled nearly a million votes in his campaign for president) a number of leftists, including the young Jim Cannon, left the Socialist Party. A year later, when Haywood was purged from the executive board, there was another mass exodus.
The IWW, in which Haywood and Cannon remained active, expanded the scope of its activities. This was the period of the free speech movement and anti-lynching ' campaigns. One Wobbly pamphlet, "Justice for the Negro: How He Can Get It," discusses the question of integrated struggle and how to stop lynchings:
"The workers of every race and nationality must join in one common group against their one common enemy—the employers—so as to be "able to defend themselves and one another. Protection for the working class lies in complete solidarity of the workers, without regard to race, creed, sex or color. 'One Enemy—One Union!' must be their watchword."
They almost got it right: as syndicalists, they didn't understand the need for a vanguard party to fight for a revolutionary program.
With the beginning of World War I and preparations for U.S. involvement, the government declared political war on the IWW and the left. Thousands of Wobblies were imprisoned under "criminal syndicalism" laws—100 in San Quentin and Folsom alone. In response, the IWW adopted the slogan, "Fill the jails." It was a misguided tactic, but unlike many so-called socialists today, the Wobbliest had a principled position where it counted: they'd go to jail before they'd cross a picket line.
1917 was the year of the Russian Revolution. A month after that world-historic event, Haywood was back on trial in Chicago with some 18 other Wobblies. He was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in Leaven worth prison. In 1919 he was released on bail pending appeal and devoted his time to the IWW's General Defense Committee, launching a campaign to raise bail money for those in prison. When the Red Scare and the Palmer Raids began, Haywood learned that he was a primary target. So, as his appeal went to the Supreme Court, he sailed for the Soviet Union. A student of history, he had no illusions in "blind justice."
Cannon was also heavily influenced by the case of California labor leaders Tom Mooney and Warren Billings. In 1916, as America was preparing to go to war, Mooney and Billings were framed up for a bombing at a Preparedness Day Parade in San Francisco. The Preparedness Movement was a bourgeois movement of "open shop" chamber of commerce, right-wing vigilante groups, who were very serious about getting the U.S. into World War I. They went into Mexico to fight Pancho Villa as practice. The Preparedness Movement was opposed by labor, and in fact two days before the bombing there had been a 5,000-strong labor demonstration in San Francisco.
Mooney and Billings were convicted. Mooney was sentenced to hang, Billings got a life sentence. At first, their case was taken up only by the anarchists. The official AFL labor movement took a hands-off position. But when it became clear that they had been framed with perjured testimony, a "Mooney movement" swept the country.
The Mooney case had a big impact on Russian immigrant workers, among others. Thus the Mooney case was carried back to Russia, and in April of 1917 the Russian anarchists led a Mooney defense demonstration in Petrograd at the American consulate. Worried about Russia pulling out of World War I at that point, Woodrow Wilson personally interceded on behalf of Mooney and Billings. It didn't get them out of jail, but the effect of international pressure was not lost on Cannon.
In the U.S., the cops broke up Mooney defense meetings and arrested those present. The class-struggle nature of the defense movement, involving such actions as one-day strikes, was a felt threat to the ruling class, especially in the face of a war. In a conscious effort to dissipate this movement, the state commuted Mooney's death sentence to life in prison. In combination with the domestic repression following the war, this took the life out of the Mooney movement. Mooney and Billings stayed in prison for 22 years. They were released in 1939, and Mooney spent two and a half of the next three years in the hospital and then-died.
In his eulogy "Good-by Tom Mooney!" Cannon wrote:
"They imprisoned Mooney—as they imprisoned Debs and Haywood and hundreds of others—in order to clear the road of militant labor opposition to the First World War, and they kept him in prison for revenge and for a warning to others."
As World War II began, Cannon would find himself in the same position.
The Tradition of International Labor Defense
The parties of the Second International backed their own ruling classes in World War I, and the Bolsheviks fought for a new international party committed to the Marxist movement's call, "Workers of the World Unite!" In 1919, the leaders of the Russian Revolution founded the Third International, the Comintern, to build revolutionary parties which could take up the struggle against capitalist rule. 1919 was also a year of massive strike activity in the U.S. This wave of class struggle swelled the ranks of the Socialist Party, which then split in September. The most left-wing workers regrouped, giving birth to the American Communist movement, and Cannon was among them.
America in the 1920s was not a nice place to be. Warren Harding was elected in a landslide victory on the slogan of "Return to Normalcy." And "normal" was racist and repressive. His attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, launched a war on the left inspired by fear of the Russian Revolution, which resulted in massive deportations of leftists and jailing of American radicals. The young Communist Party went underground. 1920 saw more lynchings and anti-black pogroms than any time in recent memory. The Klan grew like wildfire, and the government passed anti-immigration legislation that would give Newt Gingrich and Pete Wilson wet dreams.
When it was clear that the IWW was for all practical purposes broken, many of its jailed members, including Eugene Debs, were pardoned. The Communists, however, remained in jail. The union movement took it on the chops as well, and by the end of the 1920s only 13 percent of the workforce of this country was unionized.
The 1921 Third Congress of the Comintern was held under the watchword "To the Masses." In the U.S., the newly formed party had been underground and could hardly make a turn to the masses. At the Comintern's urging, the Workers (Communist) Party emerged in December of 1921 with Cannon as its first chairman and main public spokesman.
By the time of the Fourth Congress of the Comintern in 1922, the tactic of the united front had been defined; the Fourth Congress detailed its application. The need for the united front grew out of the post-World War I ebbing of the revolutionary tide following the Russian Revolution. The offensive by the capitalists against the proletariat and its parties was forcing even the reformist-led organizations into partial and defensive struggles to save their very lives.
The slogan "march separately, strike together" encapsulated the two aims of the united-front tactic: class unity and the political fight for a communist program. The Comintern sought both to achieve the maximum unity of the working masses in their defensive struggles and to expose in action the hesitancy of the leadership of the reformist organizations of the Second International to act in the interests of the proletariat and the inability of its program to win against the ruling class.
The united front is a tactic we use today. Our call for labor/black mobilizations to stop the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal and abolish the racist death penalty has brought together many different organizations and individuals to save Jamal's life. At these rallies and demonstrations, we
have insisted on the right to argue for our program to put an end to racist injustice and capitalist exploitation through socialist revolution.
In line with the policies hashed out at the Third and Fourth Congresses, the Communist International founded an international defense organization, the International Red Aid. These events had a substantial effect on the young American party, and one of the direct results was the foundation in 1925 of the International Labor Defense (ILD).
Cannon's goal was to make the ILD the defense arm of the labor movement. Cannon wrote to Debs on the occasion of his endorsement of the ILD:
"The main problem as I see it is to construct the ILD on the broadest possible basis. To conduct the work in a non-partisan and non-sectarian manner and finally establish the impression by our deeds that the ILD is the defender of every worker persecuted for his activities in the class struggle, without any exceptions and without regard to his affiliations."
From 1925 to 1928, the ILD was pretty successful in achieving that goal. It established principles to which we adhere today:
• United-front defense: The ILD campaigns were organized to allow for the broadest possible participation.
• Class-struggle defense: The ILD sought to mobilize the working class in protest on a national and international scale, relying on the class movement of the workers and
placing no faith in the justice of the capitalist courts, while using every legal avenue open to them.
• Non-sectarian defense: When it was founded, the ILD immediately adopted 106 prisoners, instituting the practice of financially assisting these prisoners and their
families. Many had been jailed as a result of the "criminal syndicalism" laws; some were Wobblies, some were anarchists, some were strike leaders. Not one was a member of the Communist Party. The ILD launched the first Holiday Appeal. Of course, the ILD also vigorously defended its own, understanding the vital importance of the legal rights of the Communist Party to exist and organize.
Social Defense and Union Struggle
The ILD's most well-known case was the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti. The frame-up for murder and robbery of these two immigrant anarchist workers, who were sent to their deaths by the state of Massachusetts in 1927, grew directly out of the "red scare" of the early '20s. The ILD applied with alacrity the main lines of its program: unity of all working-class forces and reliance on the class movement of the workers. Thousands of workers rallied to their cause, and unions around the country contributed to a defense fund set up by Italian workers in the Boston area. But the level of class struggle is key to the outcome of defense cases, and the ILD's exemplary campaign proved insufficient to save the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti.
As the case drew to a close, one of the feints used by the state was to start rumors that Sacco and Vanzetti's death penalty sentence would be commuted to life without parole. This was designed to dissipate the Sacco and Vanzetti movement and prepare their execution. Cannon rang the alarm bells from the pages of the Labor Defender, rallying ILD supporters to mass demonstrations and warning them of the devious and two-faced nature of the bourgeoisie. Cannon had not forgotten the demobilization of the Mooney movement after his sentence had been commuted nor the living death that Mooney and Billings were enduring in their 22 years of internment.
This has significance for us today as we fight against the threatened execution of Jamal. Life in prison is hell. Think about the "life" of Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt), another former Panther, jailed for a quarter of a century for a crime the state knows he did not commit. While some call upon Pennsylvania governor Ridge to convert Jamal's sentence to life without parole, we demand the freedom of both these innocent men.
The ILD also worked in defense of the class as a whole. In 1926, about 16,000 textile workers hit the bricks in Passaic, New Jersey. Their strike was eventually defeated, but it drew sharp lessons on the role of the state and demonstrated for Cannon the absolute necessity for a permanent, organized and always ready non-partisan labor defense organization. Cannon wrote in the Labor Defender:
"Our I.L.D. is on the job at Passaic. Not a single striker went into court without our lawyer to defend him. There was not a single conviction that was not appealed. Nobody had to remain in jail more than a few days for lack of bail.... A great wave of protest spread thru the labor movement and even the most conservative labor leaders were compelled to give expression to it."
In 1928, the Trotskyist Left Opposition (including Cannon) was expelled from the Communist Party. The ILD remained under the control of the Communist Party and thus became subject to the zigzags of Stalinist policies throughout the 1930s, including the perversion of the united front from a tactic for class unity into an instrument for class collaboration and counterrevolution.
In 1929, Stalin declared the "Third Period," an ultraleft shift, the main tactic of which was to smash the Social Democratic and other leftist parties by creating what the Stalinists called "united fronts from below." The Comintern charged the reformists with "social fascism"; the real fascists were to be dealt with secondarily. In Germany, this policy contributed to Adolph Hitler's seizure of power— there was no united fight against fascism by the workers in the mass Communist and Social Democratic parties. This policy had an effect on the U.S. party and its defense work.
Legal Lynching in the American South
One result of the stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing Depression was that 200,000people made the rails their home as they moved from place to place looking for work. On 25 March 1931, nine black youths, ranging in age from 13 to 20, were riding the Memphis to Chattanooga freight train. Two young white women, fearful of being jailed for hoboing when the train was stopped after reports that there had been a fight with some white boys, accused the blacks of rape. Among the nine were Olen Montgomery—blind in one eye and with 10 percent vision in the other—headed for Memphis hoping to earn enough money to buy a pair of glasses; Willie Roberson, debilitated by years-long untreated syphilis and gonorrhea—which is important if you're going to be talking about a rape case; and Eugene Williams and Roy Wright, both 13 years old.
The group were nearly lynched on the spot. The trial began in Scottsboro, Alabama on April 6. Four days later, despite medical evidence that no rape had occurred—not to mention gross violations of due process—eight were sentenced to death and one of the 13-year-olds to life in prison. The Communist Party issued a statement condemning the trial as a "legal" lynching. That night, the campaign to free the Scottsboro Boys began.
Freedom was a long time coming. A series of trials and appeals all went badly for the defendants. In 1933, one of the alleged victims, Ruby Bates, recanted her testimony, but it wasn't until 1937 that four of the defendants were freed. Three more were paroled in the 1940s, and in 1948 Haywood Patterson escaped from Angola prison to Michigan, where the governor refused to extradite him. The last, Andy Wright, who had had his 1944 parole revoked, was finally released in 1950. The nine had spent 104 years in jail for a "crime" that never happened.
The ILD made the word "Scottsboro" synonymous, nationally and internationally, with Southern racism, repression and injustice. Their campaign was responsible for saving the Scottsboro Boys from the electric chair. As Haywood Patterson's father wrote in a letter to his son, "You will burn sure if you don't let them preachers alone and trust in the International Labor Defense to handle the case."
The CP's publicity was massive and moving. They organized demonstrations in Harlem and across the country, appealing to the masses to put no confidence in the capitalist courts and to see the struggle for the freedom of these youths as part of the larger class struggle. Young Communists in Dresden, Germany marched on the American consulate, and, when officials refused to accept their petition, hurled bottles through windows. Inside each was the note: "Down with American murder and Imperialism. For the brotherhood of black and white young proletarians. An end to the bloody lynching of our Negro co-workers."
In the South, the defense effort faced not only the racist system but the homegrown fascists of the Ku Klux Klan as well, which launched a campaign under the slogan "The Klan Rides Again to Stamp Out Communism."
The ILD's success in rallying the masses to the defense of the Scottsboro Boys happened despite their sectarian "Third Period" tactics. The ILD denounced the NAACP, the ACLU and most of the trade-union movement as "social fascists" and threw the "Trotskyite" likes of Jim Cannon out of Scottsboro defense meetings. But fascism was on the rise in Europe, and, seeking now to make as many allies as he could, in 1935 Stalin' declared the "Third Period" at an end. A Comintern resolution urged the Communist parties to form "popular fronts" with any and all for progressive ends. In the U.S. this meant supporting Roosevelt and abandoning the struggle to link the defense of black people with the fight against the capitalist system. You can imagine the surprise of the NAACP, who were now greeted warmly by the ILD as "comrades"! This comradeship did not extend to the Trotskyists. The Scottsboro Defense Committee was formed, and a lot of the life went out of the movement as the case dragged on.
Cannon and his party, the Communist League of America, supported the efforts of the ILD to free the Scottsboro Boys. The Trotskyists insisted on the importance of an integrated movement to fight in their defense. Cannon pointed out that it was wrong to view the Scottsboro case solely as a "Negro issue" and agitated in the pages of the Militant for the organization of white workers around the case.
When Clarence Darrow refused to work on the case unless the ILD withdrew because he didn't like its agitation methods, Cannon wrote:
"The ILD was absolutely right in rejecting the presumptuous demands of Darrow and Hays, and the Scottsboro prisoners showed wisdom in supporting the stand of their defense organization. Any other course would have signified an end to the fight to organize the protest of the masses against the legal lynching; and with that would have ended any real hope to save the boys and restore their freedom."
Darrow's big argument was: "You can't mix politics with a law case." Cannon replied:
"That is a reactionary lie. It is father to the poisonous doctrine that a labor case is a purely legal relation between the lawyer and client and the court.... It was the influence of this idea over the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee which paralyzed the protest mass movement at every step and thereby contributed to the final tragic outcome. Not to the courts alone, and not primarily there, but to the masses must the appeal of the persecuted of class and race be taken. There is the power and there is the justice."
Communists on Trial
During the time that the Scottsboro Boys were languishing in their Southern jails, World War II began in Europe. The American workers had gone through the experience of one of the biggest union organizing drives in the history of the country, resulting in the formation of the CIO, and many of the new industrial unions had won significant victories. Communists, including the Trotskyists, Jim Cannon and the Socialist Workers Party, had participated in and led many of these struggles. War is great for capitalist economies—the destruction creates constant demand, and if you win, you get new markets to exploit. But to go to war, you have to regiment the population at home, and that begins with the suspension of civil liberties.
On the eve of America's entry into World War II, Congress passed the Smith Act, requiring the fingerprinting and registering of all aliens residing in the United States and making it a crime to advocate or teach the "violent overthrow of the United States government" or to belong to a group advocating or teaching it.
For public consumption, this act was billed as an antifascist measure, but the Socialist Workers Party (successor to the Communist League of America) and Minneapolis Teamsters were the first victims of the Smith Act prosecutions. Why did the head of the Teamsters Union, Daniel J. Tobin, the U.S. attorney general, Francis Biddle, and the president of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt, conspire to take away the First Amendment rights of a small Trotskyist party, a party with maybe a couple thousand members and influence in one local of one union?
Part of the answer is that the SWP was effective. The party had led some hard class struggle; it was their comrades who had provided the leadership for the Minneapolis strike of 1934 which led to the formation of Teamsters Local 544. Another part of the answer is politics: the SWP was forthright in its opposition to the coming war. This was a calculated government attack designed to cripple the SWP where it had the most influence in the proletariat as America girded for imperialist war.
In the courtroom, the SWP's goal was to put the capitalist system on trial, a tradition we carry forward in our own cases. On the stand, Cannon pedagogically explained the positions of the SWP on the questions of the day and Marxism in general. But the Minneapolis defendants went to jail for 16 months—sentenced on the same day that Congress voted to enter the war. The ruling class hoped that the party would be leaderless and pass from the stage. But at that time the SWP was still a revolutionary party with a revolutionary program and a collective leadership—so that hope was, in the main, dashed.
A number of CIO unions issued statements in defense of the Minneapolis defendants, as did numerous black organizations. The American Communist Party, however, issued the following statement: "The Communist Party has always exposed, fought against and today joins the fight to exterminate the Trotskyite fifth column from the life of our nation." In line with their support for Roosevelt and the war, the CP aided the government in the Smith Act prosecution of the SWP and aided the FBI in their persecution of the Trotskyists in the trade unions. The CP's disgusting collaboration did not prevent them from being prosecuted under the very same Smith Act, beginning in 1948. The Trotskyists, of course, defended the CP unequivocally against the government prosecution while criticizing the CP's Stalinist politics.
Years later the attorney general, Francis Biddle, apologized for prosecuting the Trotskyists. The bourgeoisie sometimes apologizes when its crisis is safely over. Fifty years after the end of World War II, the U.S. government "apologized" for the wartime roundup and internment of Japanese Americans, offering a token compensation to those whose homes were seized and livelihoods ruined. They say whatever outrageous trampling of civil liberties occurred was an "excess" or "wrong" and of course it will "never happen again." But the Reagan government drew up plans to intern Arab Americans in concentration camps in Louisiana after the bombing of Libya. Those camps are ready and waiting for the next time the bourgeoisie feels its rule is substantially threatened.
Class-Struggle Defense Work
The Partisan Defense Committee was initiated in 1974 by the Spartacist League with the goal of re-establishing in the workers movement united-front, non-sectarian defense principles in the tradition of Cannon's ILD.
This was not anticipated to be, nor has it been, an easy task. Unlike the ILD, which inherited the rich and principled defense traditions of the IWW and the personal authority of mass leaders like Cannon and Haywood, we were the immediate inheritors of a tradition of Stalinist perversion of defense work. In addition, the ILD was founded as a transitional organization, seeking to organize the masses for class-struggle defense work under the leadership of the party. By its second conference, the ILD had 20,000 individual members, a collective, affiliated membership of 75,000, and 156 branches across the country. The PDC attempts to conduct its work in a way that will make the transformation to such an organization possible.
The PDC program of raising money for monthly stipends for class-war prisoners is an example of an ILD practice to which we adhere. We currently send stipends to 17 prisoners, including Jamal, Geronimo ji Jaga and other former supporters of the Black Panther Party, victims of the FBI's murderous COINTELPRO frame-ups; Jerry Dale Lowe, a miner condemned to eleven years in prison for defending his picket line; and members of the MOVE organization locked up because they survived the racist cop assaults on their homes and murder of their family. We also follow the ILD's policy of strict accounting of finances and have modeled our journal, Class-Struggle Defense Notes, on the ILD's Labor Defender.
We take to heart Cannon's point:
"The problem of organization is a very significant one for labor defense as a school for the class struggle. We must not get the idea that we are merely 'defense workers' collecting money for lawyers. That is only a part of what we are doing. We are organizing workers on issues which are directly related to the class struggle. The workers who take part in the work of the ILD are drawn, step by step into the main stream of the class struggle. The workers participating begin to learn the ABC of the labor struggle."
Class-struggle defense is a broad category. We are a small organization and must pick and choose our cases carefully, with an eye to their exemplary nature. The case of Mario Munoz a Chilean miners' leader condemned to death in 1976 by the Argentine military junta, is a good example. This was the PDC's first major defense effort. Co-sponsored with the Committee to Defend Workers and Sailor Prisoners in Chile, the international campaign of protest by unions and civil libertarians won asylum for Munoz and his family in France.
Some of our work has been in defense of the revolutionary party. The Spartacist League takes its legality— the right to exist and organize—very seriously, and has been quick to challenge every libel and legal attack. The party successfully challenged the FBI's slanderous description of the SL as "terrorists" who covertly advocate the violent’ Overthrow of the government. A 1984 settlement forced them to describe the SL as a "Marxist political organization."
The PDC takes up not only the cases but the causes of the whole of the working people. We have initiated labor/black mobilizations against the Klan from San Francisco to Atlanta to Philadelphia to Springfield, Illinois, and mobilized sections of the integrated labor movement to join these efforts to stop the fascists from spewing their race hate.
In 1989, we broadened our thinking about how the PDC could champion causes of the international proletariat and offered to organize an international brigade to Afghanistan to fight alongside the forces of the left-nationalist Kabul regime against the imperialist-backed, anti-woman Islamic fundamentalists on the occasion of the withdrawal of Soviet troops. When our offer of a brigade was declined, we launched a successful campaign to raise money for the victims of the mullah-led assault on Jalalabad. To reflect this, we expanded the definition of the PDC to one of a legal and social defense organization. To carry out this campaign, it was necessary to expand the PDC internationally. Sections of the International Communist League initiated fraternal organizations in Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan.
Currently we focus our efforts on Mumia Abu-Jamal and the fight to abolish the racist death penalty. Our actions in the Jamal case embody many of the principles of our defense work and the integral relationship of that work to the Marxist program of the Spartacist League, in this case particularly in regard to the fight for black liberation, which is key to the American revolution. This is a political death penalty case which illustrates the racism endemic in this country in its crudest, most vicious form and lays bare the essence of the state.
Throughout the very difficult period ahead, we will put all our faith in the mobilization of the working class and none in the capitalist courts. We embark now on exhausting every legal avenue open to Jamal, but we know the result hinges on the class struggle.
We hope you will join us in the fight to free Mumia Abu-Jamal, to abolish the racist death penalty and finish the Civil War. Forward to the third American revolution! •
Wednesday, December 01, 2010
**From The Partisan Defense Committee- 25th Annual Holiday Appeal- Honor Class-War Prisoner Lynne Stewart
Click on title to link to the Partisan Defense Committee Web site.
The following is passed on from the PDC concerning the 24th Annual Holiday Appeal and applies this year as well
Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!
Free All Class-War Prisoners!
Build PDC Holiday Appeal
“The path to freedom leads through a prison. The door swings in and out and through that door passes a steady procession of ‘those fools too stubborn-willed to bend,’ who will not turn aside from the path because prisons obstruct it here and there.”
—James P. Cannon, “The Cause that Passes Through a Prison,” Labor Defender, September 1926
Twenty-four years ago, the Partisan Defense Committee—a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League—revived a key tradition of the International Labor Defense under James P. Cannon, its founder and first secretary: sending monthly stipends to those “stubborn-willed” class-war prisoners condemned to capitalism’s dungeons for standing up against racist capitalist repression. We are again holding Holiday Appeal benefits to raise funds for this unique program, calling particular attention to the fight to free America’s foremost class-war prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, who remains on death row in Pennsylvania.
Our forebear, Cannon, also affirmed a basic principle that should be no less applicable today: “The class-conscious worker accords to the class-war prisoners a place of singular honor and esteem…. The victory of the class-war prisoners is possible only when they are inseparably united with the living labor movement and when that movement claims them for its own, takes up their battle cry and carries on their work.”
The PDC calls on labor activists, fighters for black and immigrant rights and defenders of civil liberties to join us in donating to and building the annual Holiday Appeal. An injury to one is an injury to all! We print below brief descriptions of the 16 class-war prisoners who receive monthly stipends from the PDC, many of whom were denied parole over the last year for refusing to express “remorse” for acts they did not commit!
Mumia Abu-Jamal is a former Black Panther Party spokesman, a well-known supporter of the MOVE organization and an award-winning journalist known as “the voice of the voiceless.” This past April, the U.S. Supreme Court summarily threw out Mumia’s efforts to overturn his frame-up conviction based on the racist exclusion of black jurors from his 1982 trial. Ominously, this same court has yet to rule on the prosecution’s petition to reinstate the death penalty. The Philadelphia district attorney’s office states that, whatever the Supreme Court decides, it will continue to push for Mumia’s execution.
December 9 is the 28th anniversary of Mumia’s arrest for a killing that the cops know he did not commit. Mumia was framed up for the 1981 killing of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner and sentenced to death explicitly for his political views. Mountains of evidence proving Mumia’s innocence, including the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed Faulkner, have been submitted to the courts. But to the racists in black robes, a court of law is no place for evidence of the innocence of this fighter for the oppressed.
While others plead with the current U.S. president and his attorney general to “investigate” violations of Mumia’s “civil rights,” the PDC says that Mumia’s fate cannot be left in the hands of the government of the capitalists. The racist rulers hate Mumia because they see in him the spectre of black revolt. The stakes are high and the situation is grim, but any real fight for Mumia’s freedom must be based on a class-struggle opposition to the capitalist rulers, who have entombed this innocent black man for more than half his life.
Leonard Peltier is an internationally renowned class-war prisoner. Peltier’s incarceration for his activism in the American Indian Movement has come to symbolize this country’s racist repression of its native peoples, the survivors of centuries of genocidal oppression. Peltier’s frame-up trial, for the 1975 deaths of two marauding FBI agents in what had become a war zone on the South Dakota Pine Ridge Reservation, shows what capitalist “justice” is all about. Although the lead government attorney has admitted “We can’t prove who shot those agents” and the courts have acknowledged blatant prosecutorial misconduct, the 65-year-old Peltier is still locked away. Outrageously, in August, the U.S. Parole Commission again turned down Peltier’s parole request and coldbloodedly declared they would not reconsider his case for another 15 years.
Eight MOVE members—Chuck Africa, Michael Africa, Debbie Africa, Janet Africa, Janine Africa, Delbert Africa, Eddie Africa and Phil Africa—are in their 32nd year of prison. They were sentenced to 30-100 years after the 8 August 1978 siege of their Philadelphia home by over 600 heavily armed cops, having been falsely convicted of killing a police officer who died in the cops’ own cross fire. In 1985, eleven of their MOVE family members, including five children, were massacred by Philly cops. This year, again, after more than three decades of unjust incarceration, nearly all of these innocent prisoners had parole hearings, but none were released.
Jaan Laaman and Thomas Manning are the two remaining anti-imperialist activists known as the Ohio 7 still in prison. They were convicted for their roles in a radical group that took credit for bank “expropriations” and bombings of symbols of U.S. imperialism, such as military and corporate offices, in the late 1970s and ’80s. Before their arrests in 1984 and 1985, the Ohio 7 were targets of massive manhunts. Their children were kidnapped at gunpoint by the Feds.
The Ohio 7’s politics were once shared by thousands of radicals during the Vietnam antiwar movement and by New Leftists who wrote off the possibility of winning the working class to a revolutionary program and saw themselves as an auxiliary of Third World liberation movements. But, like the Weathermen before them, the Ohio 7 were spurned by the “respectable” left. From a proletarian standpoint, the actions of these leftist activists against imperialism and racist injustice are not a crime. They should not have served a day in prison.
Ed Poindexter and Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa are former Black Panther supporters and leaders of the Omaha, Nebraska, National Committee to Combat Fascism. They were victims of the FBI’s deadly COINTELPRO operation under which 38 Black Panther Party members were killed and hundreds more imprisoned on frame-up charges. Poindexter and Mondo were railroaded to prison and sentenced to life for a 1970 explosion that killed a cop, and they have now served more than 37 years in jail. This year, the Nebraska Supreme Court denied Poindexter a new trial despite the fact that a crucial piece of evidence excluded from the original trial, a long-suppressed 911 audio tape, proved that testimony of the state’s key witness was perjured.
Hugo Pinell is the last of the San Quentin 6 still in prison. He was a militant anti-racist leader of prison rights organizing along with George Jackson, his comrade and mentor, who was gunned down by prison guards in 1971. Despite numerous letters of support and no disciplinary write-ups for over 28 years, Pinell was again denied parole this year. Now in his 60s, Pinell continues to serve a life sentence at the notorious Pelican Bay Security Housing Unit in California.
Jamal Hart, Mumia’s son, was sentenced in 1998 to 15 1/2 years without parole on bogus firearms possession charges. Hart was targeted for his prominent activism in the campaign to free his father. Although Hart was initially charged under Pennsylvania law, which would have meant a probationary sentence, Clinton’s Justice Department intervened to have Hart thrown into prison under federal law. The U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals has turned down Hart’s habeas corpus petition, and he has faced myriad bureaucratic obstacles and racist targeting throughout his incarceration.
Contribute now! All proceeds from the Holiday Appeal will go to the Class-War Prisoners Stipend Fund. Send your contributions to: PDC, P.O. Box 99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013; (212) 406-4252.
The following is passed on from the PDC concerning the 24th Annual Holiday Appeal and applies this year as well
Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!
Free All Class-War Prisoners!
Build PDC Holiday Appeal
“The path to freedom leads through a prison. The door swings in and out and through that door passes a steady procession of ‘those fools too stubborn-willed to bend,’ who will not turn aside from the path because prisons obstruct it here and there.”
—James P. Cannon, “The Cause that Passes Through a Prison,” Labor Defender, September 1926
Twenty-four years ago, the Partisan Defense Committee—a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League—revived a key tradition of the International Labor Defense under James P. Cannon, its founder and first secretary: sending monthly stipends to those “stubborn-willed” class-war prisoners condemned to capitalism’s dungeons for standing up against racist capitalist repression. We are again holding Holiday Appeal benefits to raise funds for this unique program, calling particular attention to the fight to free America’s foremost class-war prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, who remains on death row in Pennsylvania.
Our forebear, Cannon, also affirmed a basic principle that should be no less applicable today: “The class-conscious worker accords to the class-war prisoners a place of singular honor and esteem…. The victory of the class-war prisoners is possible only when they are inseparably united with the living labor movement and when that movement claims them for its own, takes up their battle cry and carries on their work.”
The PDC calls on labor activists, fighters for black and immigrant rights and defenders of civil liberties to join us in donating to and building the annual Holiday Appeal. An injury to one is an injury to all! We print below brief descriptions of the 16 class-war prisoners who receive monthly stipends from the PDC, many of whom were denied parole over the last year for refusing to express “remorse” for acts they did not commit!
Mumia Abu-Jamal is a former Black Panther Party spokesman, a well-known supporter of the MOVE organization and an award-winning journalist known as “the voice of the voiceless.” This past April, the U.S. Supreme Court summarily threw out Mumia’s efforts to overturn his frame-up conviction based on the racist exclusion of black jurors from his 1982 trial. Ominously, this same court has yet to rule on the prosecution’s petition to reinstate the death penalty. The Philadelphia district attorney’s office states that, whatever the Supreme Court decides, it will continue to push for Mumia’s execution.
December 9 is the 28th anniversary of Mumia’s arrest for a killing that the cops know he did not commit. Mumia was framed up for the 1981 killing of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner and sentenced to death explicitly for his political views. Mountains of evidence proving Mumia’s innocence, including the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed Faulkner, have been submitted to the courts. But to the racists in black robes, a court of law is no place for evidence of the innocence of this fighter for the oppressed.
While others plead with the current U.S. president and his attorney general to “investigate” violations of Mumia’s “civil rights,” the PDC says that Mumia’s fate cannot be left in the hands of the government of the capitalists. The racist rulers hate Mumia because they see in him the spectre of black revolt. The stakes are high and the situation is grim, but any real fight for Mumia’s freedom must be based on a class-struggle opposition to the capitalist rulers, who have entombed this innocent black man for more than half his life.
Leonard Peltier is an internationally renowned class-war prisoner. Peltier’s incarceration for his activism in the American Indian Movement has come to symbolize this country’s racist repression of its native peoples, the survivors of centuries of genocidal oppression. Peltier’s frame-up trial, for the 1975 deaths of two marauding FBI agents in what had become a war zone on the South Dakota Pine Ridge Reservation, shows what capitalist “justice” is all about. Although the lead government attorney has admitted “We can’t prove who shot those agents” and the courts have acknowledged blatant prosecutorial misconduct, the 65-year-old Peltier is still locked away. Outrageously, in August, the U.S. Parole Commission again turned down Peltier’s parole request and coldbloodedly declared they would not reconsider his case for another 15 years.
Eight MOVE members—Chuck Africa, Michael Africa, Debbie Africa, Janet Africa, Janine Africa, Delbert Africa, Eddie Africa and Phil Africa—are in their 32nd year of prison. They were sentenced to 30-100 years after the 8 August 1978 siege of their Philadelphia home by over 600 heavily armed cops, having been falsely convicted of killing a police officer who died in the cops’ own cross fire. In 1985, eleven of their MOVE family members, including five children, were massacred by Philly cops. This year, again, after more than three decades of unjust incarceration, nearly all of these innocent prisoners had parole hearings, but none were released.
Jaan Laaman and Thomas Manning are the two remaining anti-imperialist activists known as the Ohio 7 still in prison. They were convicted for their roles in a radical group that took credit for bank “expropriations” and bombings of symbols of U.S. imperialism, such as military and corporate offices, in the late 1970s and ’80s. Before their arrests in 1984 and 1985, the Ohio 7 were targets of massive manhunts. Their children were kidnapped at gunpoint by the Feds.
The Ohio 7’s politics were once shared by thousands of radicals during the Vietnam antiwar movement and by New Leftists who wrote off the possibility of winning the working class to a revolutionary program and saw themselves as an auxiliary of Third World liberation movements. But, like the Weathermen before them, the Ohio 7 were spurned by the “respectable” left. From a proletarian standpoint, the actions of these leftist activists against imperialism and racist injustice are not a crime. They should not have served a day in prison.
Ed Poindexter and Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa are former Black Panther supporters and leaders of the Omaha, Nebraska, National Committee to Combat Fascism. They were victims of the FBI’s deadly COINTELPRO operation under which 38 Black Panther Party members were killed and hundreds more imprisoned on frame-up charges. Poindexter and Mondo were railroaded to prison and sentenced to life for a 1970 explosion that killed a cop, and they have now served more than 37 years in jail. This year, the Nebraska Supreme Court denied Poindexter a new trial despite the fact that a crucial piece of evidence excluded from the original trial, a long-suppressed 911 audio tape, proved that testimony of the state’s key witness was perjured.
Hugo Pinell is the last of the San Quentin 6 still in prison. He was a militant anti-racist leader of prison rights organizing along with George Jackson, his comrade and mentor, who was gunned down by prison guards in 1971. Despite numerous letters of support and no disciplinary write-ups for over 28 years, Pinell was again denied parole this year. Now in his 60s, Pinell continues to serve a life sentence at the notorious Pelican Bay Security Housing Unit in California.
Jamal Hart, Mumia’s son, was sentenced in 1998 to 15 1/2 years without parole on bogus firearms possession charges. Hart was targeted for his prominent activism in the campaign to free his father. Although Hart was initially charged under Pennsylvania law, which would have meant a probationary sentence, Clinton’s Justice Department intervened to have Hart thrown into prison under federal law. The U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals has turned down Hart’s habeas corpus petition, and he has faced myriad bureaucratic obstacles and racist targeting throughout his incarceration.
Contribute now! All proceeds from the Holiday Appeal will go to the Class-War Prisoners Stipend Fund. Send your contributions to: PDC, P.O. Box 99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013; (212) 406-4252.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
From The Archives Of The Spartacist League (U.S.)-Declaration of Principles and Some Elements of Program-Sections One To Thirteen-International Communist League (1998)
Markin comment:
In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement that in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.
After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Deb’s Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.
I am continuing today what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.
However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
********
Declaration of Principles and Some Elements of Program
International Communist League
(Fourth Internationalist)
Adopted: 1998
Source: Prometheus Research Library, New York
Transription/Markup/Proofing: David Walters, Prometheus Research Library.
Public Domain: Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 2006/Prometheus Research Library. You can freely copy, display and othewise distribute this work. Please credit the Marxists Internet Archive & Prometheus Research Library the as your source, include the url to this work, and note the transcribers & editors above.
1. World Socialist Revolution and the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist)
The International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) is a proletarian, revolutionary and internationalist tendency which is committed to the task of building Leninist parties as national sections of a democratic-centralist international whose purpose is to lead the working class to victory through socialist revolutions throughout the world.
Only the proletariat, through the seizure of political power and the destruction of capitalism as a world system, can lay the basis for the elimination of exploitation and the resolution of the contradiction between the growth of the productive forces of the world economy and national-state barriers. Capitalism has long since outlived its progressive historical role of creating a modern industrial economy. In order to maintain their rule, the national capitalist classes must exploit national, ethnic and racial divisions, which have been intensified since the destruction of the Soviet Union. Increasingly mutually hostile imperialist powers and rival blocs must oppress the peoples of the former colonial world and those still under the yoke of colonial peonage, impoverish the world’s masses, engage in continual wars for the maintenance and redivision of the world markets in order to prop up the falling rate of profit, and attempt to smash the revolutionary struggle of the workers wherever it breaks out. In its final frenzied effort to maintain its class rule, the bourgeoisie will not hesitate to plunge humanity into nuclear holocaust or dictatorial oppression of unprecedented ferocity.
On the other hand, the victory of the proletariat on a world scale would place unimagined material abundance at the service of human needs, lay the basis for the elimination of classes and the eradication of social inequality based on sex and the very abolition of the social significance of race, nation and ethnicity. For the first time mankind will grasp the reins of history and control its own creation, society, resulting in an undreamed-of emancipation of human potential, and a monumental forward surge of civilization. Only then will it be possible to realize the free development of each individual as the condition for the free development of all. As Isaac Deutscher said in his speech, “On Socialist Man” (1966):
“We do not maintain that socialism is going to solve all predicaments of the human race. We are struggling in the first instance with the predicaments that are of man’s making and that man can resolve. May I remind you that Trotsky, for instance, speaks of three basic tragedies—hunger, sex and death—besetting man. Hunger is the enemy that Marxism and the modern labour movement have taken on.... Yes, socialist man will still be pursued by sex and death; but we are convinced that he will be better equipped than we are to cope even with these.”
2. The Crisis of Proletarian Leadership
The success or failure of the working class to achieve victory depends upon the organization and consciousness of the struggling masses, i.e., on revolutionary leadership. The revolutionary party is the indispensable weapon of the working people for their victory.
The ruling class has at its command a monopoly of the means of violence, its dominant political and bureaucratic apparatus, its enormous wealth and connections, and its control of education, the mass media and all other institutions of capitalist society. Against such a force a workers state can be brought into existence only by a proletariat fully conscious of its tasks, organized to carry them out, and determined to defend its conquests against the counterrevolutionary violence of the ruling class.
Through its acquisition of political consciousness the working class ceases to be merely a class in itself and becomes a class for itself, conscious of its historic task to seize state power and reorganize society. Such consciousness is not spontaneously generated in the course of the day-to-day class struggles of the workers; it must be brought to the workers by the revolutionary party. Thus it is the task of the revolutionary party to forge the proletariat into a sufficient political force by infusing it with a consciousness of its real situation, educating it in the historical lessons of the class struggle, tempering it in ever deepening struggles, destroying its illusions, steeling its revolutionary will and self-confidence, and organizing the overthrow of all forces standing in the way of the conquest of power. A conscious working class is the decisive force in history.
The indispensable nature of the task of forging a vanguard party and honing its revolutionary edge in preparation for the inevitable revolutionary crises is underscored in the imperialist epoch. As Trotsky pointed out in The Third International After Lenin (1928):
“The revolutionary character of the epoch does not lie in that it permits of the accomplishment of the revolution, that is, the seizure of power at every given moment. Its revolutionary character consists in profound and sharp fluctuations and abrupt and frequent transitions from an immediately revolutionary situation.... This is the sole source from which flows the full significance of revolutionary strategy in contradistinction to tactics. Thence also flows the new significance of the party and the party leadership.... [Today] every new sharp change in the political situation to the Left places the decision in the hands of the revolutionary party. Should it miss the critical situation, the latter veers around to its opposite. Under these circumstances the role of the party leadership acquires exceptional importance. The words of Lenin to the effect that two or three days can decide the fate of the international revolution would have been almost incomprehensible in the epoch of the Second International. In our epoch, on the contrary, these words have only too often been confirmed and, with the exception of the October, always from the negative side.”
3. We Are the Party of the Russian Revolution
The October 1917 Russian Revolution took the Marxist doctrine of proletarian revolution out of the realm of theory and gave it reality, creating a society where those who labored ruled through the dictatorship of the proletariat. This proletarian revolution led by the Bolshevik Party in Russia was not made solely for Russia. For revolutionary Marxists, the Russian Revolution was seen as the opening shot of a necessarily international struggle of labor against the rule of capital worldwide. Lenin’s Bolsheviks broke the capitalist chain at its weakest link, understanding that unless the proletarian revolution was extended to the major capitalist powers, most immediately Germany, an isolated dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia could not long survive.
The opportunities were manifold, but the new revolutionary parties outside Russia were too new, that is, too weak and politically immature, to pursue them. In Europe, especially Germany, the Social Democracy served its bourgeois masters, helping restabilize their order and joining with them in hostility to the October Revolution. Elsewhere, in less developed nations and regions, the main ideological obstacle and force against Bolshevism was nationalism.
The pressure of imperialist encirclement, the devastation of the Russian working class in the Civil War and the lengthy isolation of the Russian Revolution enabled a bureaucratic layer headed by Stalin to usurp political power in a political counterrevolution in 1923-24, what Trotsky called the “Soviet Thermidor.” While resting on and deriving its privileges from proletarian property forms of the Soviet degenerated workers state, the Stalinist bureaucracy was not irrevocably committed to their defense. Stalin’s “theory” of “socialism in one country,” expressing the nationally limited interests of the Kremlin bureaucracy, turned the Communist International from an instrument of the world revolution into a new obstacle.
Stalin’s “socialism in one country” was a rejection of the fundamental principles of Marxism. The Communist Manifesto (1848) concludes, “Workingmen of all countries, unite!” The Revolutions of 1848 signaled the opening of the modern era—the bourgeoisie made common cause with reaction in the face of a proletariat already perceived as threatening to capitalist rule. As Engels wrote in his “Principles of Communism” (1847):
“Question 19: Will it be possible for this revolution to take place in one country alone?
“Answer: No. Large-scale industry, already by creating the world market, has so linked up all the peoples of the earth, and especially the civilised peoples, that each people is dependent on what happens to another. Further, in all civilised countries large-scale industry has so levelled social development that in all these countries the bourgeoisie and the proletariat have become the two decisive classes of society and the struggle between them the main struggle of the day. The communist revolution will therefore be no merely national one.... It is a worldwide revolution and will therefore be worldwide in scope.”
In opposition to Stalin’s nationalist opportunism, Trotsky’s Left Opposition was founded on the program of authentic Marxism which animated the Bolshevik Revolution. The Left Opposition fought to preserve and extend the gains of the Russian Revolution which had been betrayed but not yet overthrown. In his searing analysis of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution, the dual nature of the Stalinist bureaucracy, and the explosive contradictions of Soviet society (The Revolution Betrayed, 1936) Trotsky posed the choice starkly: “Will the bureaucrat devour the workers’ state, or will the working class clean up the bureaucrat?” Trotsky’s prophetic warning was vindicated, bitterly, in the negative.
The anti-internationalist doctrine of “socialism in one country” resulted in a disastrous careening from ultraleft adventures to class collaboration. Trotsky characterized Stalin as the “gravedigger” of revolutionary struggles abroad, from the second Chinese Revolution in 1925-27 and the British General Strike of 1926 to Germany, where the CP, as well as the Social Democrats, allowed Hitler to come to power without firing a shot. In the context of the German betrayal, and the Comintern’s subsequent codification of the explicitly anti-revolutionary line of building popular fronts, which found its fullest expression in the Stalinists’ criminal strangulation of the Spanish Revolution, the Trotskyists organized the Fourth International, which was founded in 1938.
The planned economy in the Soviet Union (and the bureaucratically deformed workers states which elsewhere later arose on the Stalinist model) proved its superiority over capitalist anarchy in the period of rapid development. But the relentless pressure of continuing economic encirclement by the still world-dominant capitalist mode of production through the world market was inexorable without international extension of the revolution. Trotsky wrote in The Revolution Betrayed:
“The question formulated by Lenin—Who shall prevail?—is a question of the correlation of forces between the Soviet Union and the world revolutionary proletariat on the one hand, and on the other international capital and the hostile forces within the [Soviet] Union.... Military intervention is a danger. The intervention of cheap goods in the baggage trains of a capitalist army would be an incomparably greater one.”
The Fourth International’s organizational weakness, lack of deep roots in the proletariat, and theoretical incapacity and disorientation after WW II contributed heavily to the political break in continuity with the program of Trotsky’s Fourth International. The prior decimation of Trotskyist cadres throughout Europe at the hands of fascist and Stalinist repression—and the massacres of Trotskyists in Vietnam and jailing of Trotskyists in China, countries where the Left Opposition had found significant bases of support—gutted the movement of experienced cadres at a crucial moment.
The expansion of Stalinist rule in Eastern Europe after the war posed a new programmatic challenge to the Trotskyist movement against which formal “orthodoxy” was an insufficient defense. After an uninterrupted string of defeats and betrayals, from China (1927) and Germany (1933) to the Spanish Civil War, and Stalin’s murderous purges, the existence of the Soviet Union had been placed in grave danger. The Red Army defeated Hitler despite Stalin who—after beheading the Soviet military through his bloody purges on the eve of World War II—further sabotaged the military defense of the Soviet Union through his faith first in Hitler and then in the “democratic” allies.
Yet the Red Army’s victory over fascism greatly enhanced the authority of the bureaucratically degenerated Soviet Union, an eventuality not foreseen by Trotsky. The West European Stalinists emerged from WW II at the head of the mass organizations of militant workers of Italy, France and elsewhere. Meanwhile, in Soviet-occupied East Europe, capitalist property was expropriated and a collectivized economy established through a bureaucratically controlled social revolution, producing deformed workers states modeled on the Stalinist-ruled USSR.
Conditioned in part by the Vietnam War and internal turmoil racking the U.S., not least the black liberation struggle, the late 1960s/early 1970s saw a series of prerevolutionary and revolutionary situations in Europe—France 1968, Italy 1969, Portugal 1974-75. These represented the best opportunities for proletarian revolution in the advanced capitalist countries since the immediate post-World War II period. It was the pro-Moscow Communist Parties which again managed to preserve the shaken bourgeois order in this region. Here the counterrevolutionary role of the Western Stalinist parties contributed immeasurably to the subsequent destruction of the Soviet Union. The restabilization of the bourgeois order in the Western imperialist states in the mid-1970s was immediately followed by a new Cold War offensive against the Soviet bloc.
The Soviet Stalinist bureaucracy—in the absence of the proletariat as a contender for power—had sooner or later to turn to “market socialism,” which, along with appeasement of U.S. imperialism in Afghanistan and brokering capitalist restoration throughout East Europe, opened wide the floodgates to capitalist counterrevolution in the former Soviet Union in 1991-92. The proletariat, leaderless, did not resist, spelling the destruction of the workers state.
The 1979 “Iranian Revolution” opened up a period of ascendant political Islam in the historically Muslim world, a development which contributed to and was powerfully reinforced by the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union. Khomeini’s seizure and consolidation of power in Iran was a defeat akin to Hitler’s crushing of the German proletariat in 1933, albeit on a narrower, regional scale. The international Spartacist tendency’s slogan “Down with the Shah! No support to the mullahs!” and our focus on the woman question (“No to the veil!”) stood in sharp opposition to the rest of the left’s capitulation to mullah-led reaction.
The preservation of proletarian power depends principally on the political consciousness and organization of the working class. After the physical liquidation of the revolutionary wing of the Bolsheviks by Stalin, all continuity with the traditions of the October Revolution was systematically expunged from the memory of the working class. In Soviet mass consciousness, suffused with the Russian-nationalist propaganda churned out by Stalin, World War II came to supplant the October Revolution as the epochal event in Soviet history. In the end, Stalin and his heirs succeeded in imprinting their nationalist outlook on the Soviet peoples; proletarian internationalism came to be sneered at as an obscure “Trotskyite heresy” of “export of revolution” or else cynically emptied of content.
Atomized and bereft of any anti-capitalist leadership, lacking any coherent and consistent socialist class consciousness, and skeptical about the possibility of class struggle in the capitalist countries, the Soviet working class did not rally in resistance against the encroaching capitalist counterrevolution. And, as Trotsky noted in The Third International After Lenin: “If an army capitulates to the enemy in a critical situation without a battle, then this capitulation completely takes the place of a ‘decisive battle,’ in politics as in war.”
An analysis of the terminal crisis of Stalinism is provided in Spartacist No. 45-46 (Winter 1990-91) in documents by Joseph Seymour, “On the Collapse of Stalinist Rule in East Europe,” and Albert St. John, “For Marxist Clarity and a Forward Perspective,” and the August 1993 Spartacist Pamphlet, How the Soviet Workers State Was Strangled. As was noted in Seymour’s document:
“During his long struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy Trotsky considered a number of different paths whereby capitalism might be restored in the Soviet Union.... Trotsky used the phrase ‘running backwards the film of reformism’ to polemicize against those professed leftists who maintained that the Stalin regime had already transformed the USSR into a bourgeois state through a gradual and organic process—Bernsteinism in reverse.... Trotsky’s view that a capitalist counterrevolution, as well as a proletarian political revolution, in Stalin’s Russia would entail civil war was a prognosis, not a dogma. It was predicated on resistance by the working class, not resistance by conservative elements of the bureaucratic apparatus. That is how the question is posed in The Revolution Betrayed.... The decisive element is the consciousness of the Soviet working class, which is not static but is affected by innumerable shifting factors domestically and internationally.”
As St. John noted:
“Unlike the anarchistic bourgeois economy the planned socialist economy is not built automatically but consciously. Therefore, [Trotsky] writes, ‘Progress towards socialism is inseparable from that state power which is desirous of socialism or which is constrained to desire it’ [“The Workers State, Thermidor and Bonapartism,” 1935]. Thus, he concluded, without the intervention of a conscious proletarian vanguard, the collapse of the Stalinist political regime would lead inevitably to the liquidation of the planned economy and to restoration of private property.”
The “Russian question” has been the defining political question of the 20th century and the touchstone for revolutionaries. We Trotskyists stayed at our posts and fought to preserve and extend the revolutionary gains of the working class while every other tendency on the planet capitulated to the ideological pressure of imperialist anti-communism. Above all our defense of the USSR was expressed in our fight for new October Revolutions around the world.
Responsibility for the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union lies also with all manner of reformists and centrists who lined up behind their own capitalist rulers against the USSR, including backing every reactionary movement from Polish Solidarnos’c’ to the Islamic fundamentalist butchers in Afghanistan. The devastating and worldwide consequences of the Soviet counterrevolution also destroy on the theoretical level the anti-Marxist theories that the Stalinist bureaucracy was “state capitalist,” according to which the Soviet counterrevolution would have been merely a shift from one form of capitalism to another.
The ascendancy of Boris Yeltsin and capitalist-restorationist forces in August 1991 was a pivotal event in determining the fate of the Soviet Union, but the final undoing of the October Revolution was not a foregone conclusion. Spartacists distributed throughout the Soviet Union over 100,000 copies in Russian of our August 1991 article, “Soviet Workers: Defeat Yeltsin-Bush Counterrevolution!” There we wrote that workers mobilizations should have cleaned out the counterrevolutionary rabble on Yeltsin’s barricades, thus opening the road to proletarian political revolution. We called for a political revolution to defeat capitalist restoration and return the Soviet proletariat to political power. Only those who were under the sway of capitalist ideology or its material perquisites were in a hurry to write off the Soviet Union at that time. The absence of resistance by a working class that had been betrayed and atomized by decades of Stalinist misrule and fierce repression was the decisive factor in the destruction of the Soviet workers state.
Our defense of the USSR was not limited to our program for the USSR: unconditional military defense against imperialism and internal counterrevolution; for proletarian political revolution to oust the bureaucracy and return the USSR to the road of Lenin and Trotsky. It was expressed also in our unconditional military defense of the Vietnamese Revolution; in our opposition to Solidarnos’c’’s drive sponsored by Wall Street and the Vatican to overturn the Polish deformed workers state; in our call to “Hail Red Army in Afghanistan—Extend social gains of the October Revolution to the Afghan peoples!”; in our active intervention for the revolutionary reunification of Germany.
History speaks its verdicts loudly. The ascendancy of counterrevolution in the former USSR is an unparalleled defeat for working people all over the world, decisively altering the political landscape on this planet. No longer challenged by Soviet military might, U.S. imperialism has proclaimed a “one-superpower world,” running roughshod over semicolonial peoples from the Persian Gulf to Haiti. No longer the unrivaled economic powerhouse of world imperialism, the United States still maintains the murderous advantage of its military might, while often preferring to camouflage its terror under the “humanitarian” fig leaf of the United Nations’ “den of thieves” (Lenin’s description of the UN’s predecessor, the League of Nations). But rival imperialisms, especially Germany and Japan, no longer constrained by anti-Soviet unity, are pursuing apace their own appetites for control of world markets and concomitantly projecting their military power. In the conflicts between rival regional trade blocs today, the outlines of future wars are sharpening. In the face of growing interimperialist rivalry, we reassert: “The main enemy is at home!”
Looking back retrospectively to the pre-World War I period, today’s “post-Cold War world” presents many parallels. And with the question posed of new interimperialist conflict, we can expect today’s reformists and centrists to act in the spirit of their social-democratic forebears of 4 August 1914 in backing their own rulers in wartime. Fully in this spirit was their support for counterrevolution in the USSR.
Alongside mass pauperization in the USSR, “ethnic cleansing” fratricide rages throughout the weak new capitalist states of East Europe and former Soviet republics where nationalist ideology substituted for nonexistent capital as the motor force of counterrevolution. Often a resurgence of the pre-World War II national antagonisms in the capitalist states of this region, in the aftermath of counterrevolution, nationalist ideology again becomes the chief roadblock which revolutionaries have to smash through.
In West Europe the safety net of social welfare measures is slashed as the bourgeoisies no longer see any need to stave off the “spectre of communism” by providing necessities. While the ideological climate of the “death of communism” affects the consciousness of the proletariat, in many countries of the world sharp class struggle provides the objective basis for the regeneration of Marxism as the theory of scientific socialism and proletarian revolution. It is not communism, but its parody, Stalinism, which has been shown to be a dead end.
Victorious counterrevolution has not only devastated the ex-Soviet and East European proletariats materially and ideologically; in a whole series of countries (e.g., Italy, France) where Communist parties commanded the allegiance of advanced layers of the working class, the proletariat has been sold the lie that “socialism has failed,” promoted by the ruling Stalinist bureaucracies who had headed these deformed workers states and presided over their destruction. The Kremlin abetted by the East German Stalinists led the counterrevolution in the DDR, rushing to hand the country over to the Fourth Reich. The Kremlin bureaucracy under Gorbachev carried out its ultimate, terminal betrayal, declaring that socialism had been a doomed utopian experiment and proclaiming the superiority of the capitalist market system. The disintegrating CPSU spawned openly counterrevolutionary gangs led by Boris Yeltsin who acted as the open agent of U.S. imperialism in the restoration of capitalism. Hence the Stalinist ruling castes and their cothinkers in the West bear direct responsibility for the destruction of the socialist aspirations of the advanced proletarian layers in Western Europe and elsewhere.
Trotsky’s assertion in the 1938 Transitional Program that “The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat” predates the present deep regression of proletarian consciousness. The reality of this post-Soviet period adds a new dimension to Trotsky’s observation. The only way in which this regression can be overcome and the working class can become a class for itself, i.e., fighting for socialist revolution, is to reforge an international Leninist-Trotskyist party as the leadership of the working class. Marxism must once again win the allegiance of the proletariat.
In China, the extreme nationalist ideology pushed by the ruling Stalinist bureaucracy is a direct bridge to capitalist restoration. The essence of “market reforms” counterrevolution in China is the bureaucracy seeking to become partners in exploitation with capitalist forces and especially the Chinese capitalists who were not destroyed as a class (as were their Russian counterparts after October 1917) but continued to function in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and elsewhere. China has carved out “special economic zones” as islands of imperialist exploitation and keeps the reverted Hong Kong’s capitalist economy untouched, while the army and bureaucracy generally are engaged in large-scale business ventures. Now the bureaucracy, sections of which seek to become the new capitalist exploiters, looks toward wholesale destruction of state industry, thereby posing the dismantling of what remains of the planned economy of the deformed workers state.
This course cannot be accomplished without breaking the resistance of the militant working class. The ruling Stalinist bureaucracy showed in Tiananmen Square in 1989—an incipient political revolution—both its fear of the proletariat and its intention to rely on brute force with no trappings of “glasnost” (Soviet leader Gorbachev’s political “openness”). The choices for China are proletarian political revolution or capitalist counterrevolution. The crucial factor is revolutionary leadership to reintroduce the internationalist class consciousness which animated the founding Chinese Communists of the early 1920s. The battle for workers political revolution in China has enormous stakes for the workers internationally. The outcome will have a huge impact in the remaining deformed workers states (Cuba, Vietnam and North Korea) and also in Asian countries like Indonesia, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines, where a militant young proletariat has emerged as a powerful factor.
4. The Theoretical and Historical Roots of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist)
As Trotsky described in his 1937 article, “Stalinism and Bolshevism”: “Reactionary epochs like ours not only disintegrate and weaken the working class and its vanguard but also lower the general ideological level of the movement and throw political thinking back to stages long since passed through. In these conditions, the task of the vanguard is above all not to let itself be carried along by the backward flow: it must swim against the current.” In this post-Soviet period, where Marxism is widely misidentified with Stalinism, there is a revival of everything from anarchist sympathies to anti-materialist idealism and mysticism. Karl Marx explained: “Religious suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of the soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions” (“Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” 1844).
The International Communist League bases itself on Marxist historical, dialectical materialism and continues the revolutionary traditions of the international working-class movement exemplified in the 1840s British Chartist movement and the Polish Party “Proletariat” (1882-86), the first workers party in the tsarist empire. We stand on the work of revolutionists such as Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg and Liebknecht. Above all we look to the experience of the Bolshevik Party which culminated in the Russian Revolution of 1917, the only revolution as yet made by the working class. This history illuminates where we come from, what we seek to defend and where we want to go.
We seek in particular to carry forward the international working-class perspectives of Marxism as developed in theory and practice by V.I. Lenin and L.D. Trotsky, as embodied in the decisions of the first four Congresses of the Communist International and by the 1938 Transitional Program and other key documents of the Fourth International, such as “War and the Fourth International” (1934). These materials are the indispensable documentary codification of the communist movement internationally, and are fundamental to the revolutionary tasks of our organization.
In this epoch of capitalism in advanced decay, we communists who have as our aim the proletarian conquest of state power and the reconstruction of society on a new egalitarian socialist basis are at the same time the most consistent defenders of the ideals of the Enlightenment and the gains of the bourgeois revolution: we are intransigent fighters for bourgeois-democratic liberties—for the right to bear arms; for the abolition of all monarchy and aristocratic privilege; for the separation of church and state; against the imposition of religious fundamentalism as a political program; for the defense of free speech and assembly against the encroachment of the bourgeois state; against barbaric “punishments” such as the death penalty; for juridical equality for women and minorities.
We are also intransigent defenders of proletarian rights as described in James Burnham’s pamphlet, The Peoples’ Front—The New Betrayal (1937): “There exists under capitalist democracy, to one or another extent, a third group of rights which are not, properly speaking, ‘democratic rights’ at all, but rather proletarian rights. These are such rights as the rights to picket and to strike and to organize. The historical origin of these rights is in all cases to be found in the independent struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois state.”
We also look for inspiration to James P. Cannon, a leader of the early American Communist Party who was won over to Trotskyism at the Sixth Congress of the Comintern and struggled to crystallize a Trotskyist formation, initially in the Communist Party, and to embed it in working-class struggle. Cannon was a principal founder of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). His struggle to build a proletarian party, forge a Leninist collective party leadership (rejecting the permanent factionalism of the early CP and opposing the cliquist intrigues which plagued, e.g., the French Trotskyists) and the 1939-40 fight against the petty-bourgeois opposition in the SWP (Shachtman and Burnham) which defected from Trotskyism over the Russian question—this is the revolutionary heritage which the ICL upholds.
However partially and mainly on his own national terrain, Cannon fought against the Pabloist revisionist current which arose in the post-World War II Trotskyist movement. In our basic documents (see especially “Genesis of Pabloism,” Spartacist No. 21, Fall 1972), while being sharply critical of the errors of the anti-Pabloites, we stand with them on this crucial fight for the survival of Trotskyism. Pabloism is characterized chiefly by a renunciation of the necessity for revolutionary leadership and an adaptation to existing Stalinist, social-democratic and petty-bourgeois nationalist leaderships. Following the creation of deformed workers states in East Europe, Pablo predicted “centuries of deformed workers states” and claimed that the Stalinist parties could “roughly outline a revolutionary orientation.”
Ill-equipped to explain the extension of Stalinism, Cannon and the orthodox Trotskyists first sought to ward off liquidationist conclusions by denying reality (e.g., refusing to recognize China as a deformed workers state until 1955). Cannon fought against Pablo’s rejection of the proletariat as the only class capable of transforming society and the denial of the need for a Trotskyist vanguard party. But this fight was never really fully carried through internationally. Denial of proletarian centrality lay behind every one of Pablo’s (and later Ernest Mandel’s) mainly vicarious experiments in revisionism (e.g., the “guerrilla road,” students as the “new mass vanguard”).
The origins of the International Communist League are in the Spartacist League/U.S. which began as the Revolutionary Tendency of the SWP and based itself primarily upon the British Socialist Labour League document, World Prospect for Socialism (1961), and two documents by the Revolutionary Tendency, In Defense of a Revolutionary Perspective (1962) and especially Toward Rebirth of the Fourth International (1963), the latter submitted to the SWP’s 1963 Convention. At its founding conference in 1966, the Spartacist League/U.S. adopted a Declaration of Principles (see SL/U.S. Marxist Bulletin No. 9) which served as the model for this International Declaration of Principles. The International Communist League, by contributing to the theoretical clarification of the Marxist movement and to the reforging of the workers’ necessary organizational weapons, upholds the revolutionary proletarian principles of Marxism and will carry them forward to the vanguard of the working class.
“By its very nature opportunism is nationalistic, since it rests on the local and temporary needs of the proletariat and not on its historic tasks.... International unity is not a decorative facade for us, but the very axis of our theoretical views and our policy” (Leon Trotsky, “The Defense of the Soviet Union and the Opposition,” 1929). From its inception as a small handful of young Trotskyists bureaucratically expelled from the SWP, the Spartacist League’s perspective and actions were directed toward the rebirth of the Fourth International and against American-centeredness.
In 1974 the Declaration for the Organization of an International Trotskyist Tendency was adopted, formally constituting the international Spartacist tendency. This document sharply attacked the federated, non-Bolshevik practices of our pseudo-Trotskyist competitors, the SWP, United Secretariat and Gerry Healy’s International Committee, all of whom hid behind the paper tiger of the blatantly undemocratic U.S. Voorhis Act to evade the practice of revolutionary Leninist internationalism. In contrast the iSt (forerunner to the ICL) forthrightly declared that it would be governed by the principle of international democratic-centralism.
The first delegated international conference held in 1979 elected an international executive committee. Since then the ICL has marked modest achievements in the international extension of our tendency to Latin America and South Africa and further extensions in Europe and Asia. This international growth has been a vital counterweight to the deforming pressures of our largest section existing in the protracted relatively reactionary political climate of the United States.
In 1989 the iSt became the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist).
Stalinism dragged the banner of communism through the mud while systematically perverting the understanding of every basic principle and term of Marxism, and the general level of identification of human progress with the idea of communism stands at a relative low point. But the workings of capitalist imperialism generate anew a raw subjective hatred of oppression among millions across the globe. The absence of genuinely communist leadership is acutely felt by many and the program of Leninist internationalism can be put forward with great impact.
Investment by imperialists in some low-wage “Third World” countries has created proletarian concentrations in hitherto unlikely areas for major conflicts between labor and capital. In our effort to further extend our party beyond the advanced Western countries, we seek to infuse our international with the courage of Bolsheviks like Kote Tsintsadze:
“It took altogether extraordinary conditions like czarism, illegality, prison, and deportation, many years of struggle against the Mensheviks, and especially the experience of three revolutions to produce fighters like Kote Tsintsadze.... The Communist parties in the West have not yet brought up fighters of Tsintsadze’s type. This is their besetting weakness, determined by historical reasons but nonetheless a weakness. The Left Opposition in the Western countries is not an exception in this respect and it must well take note of it.”
— Trotsky, “At the Fresh Grave of Kote Tsintsadze,” 7 January 1931
5. The International Character of the Socialist Revolution
Historic experience has shown that the road to socialism can be opened only through the creation of dual power culminating in the destruction of the capitalist state and the victory of the workers state and development of a new social order. The police, military, bureaucratic, juridical, and political apparatus of the old order cannot be reformed to serve the proletariat’s interests, but must be smashed and replaced by the dictatorship of the proletariat—a workers government based on councils of working people and supported by the workers’ armed strength. Such a state would defend itself against the counterrevolutionary efforts of the deposed ruling class to return to power and would reorganize the economy along rational lines. As the economic basis of social classes dwindles, the workers state would more and more assume a purely administrative function, finally withering away with the advent of classless communism. But to realize this aim requires the destruction of capitalist imperialism as a world system and the establishment of a world socialist division of labor.
The international character of the working class gives it a potentially enormous superiority over the bourgeoisie, as capitalism operates by anarchistic methods which set one national capitalist class against another and constantly create new unevenness and crises. In order to realize this superiority, the proletariat needs an international party to unify the class across national and other divisions and to coordinate the interdependent struggles of the workers of every country. While the revolution may begin in a single country, any partial victory will be secured only with the spread of revolution to other countries and the eventual world dominance of socialist economic organization. We fight to reforge the Fourth International, the world party of socialist revolution, whose program and purposes remain as valid today as at its founding in 1938.
A Leninist party is not simply built through linear recruitment, but through programmatically based splits with opportunists, as well as fusions with revolutionary elements breaking from centrism. Particularly when fusions are undertaken across national boundaries, there must be a thorough period of testing to establish solid underlying political agreement. We aim to bring together groups whose orientation is toward the achievement of new October Revolutions—nothing else, nothing other, nothing less.
6. The Vanguard Role of the Working Class in the Defense of All the Oppressed
Central to the Marxist perspective of world socialism is the vanguard role of the working class, and particularly the decisive weight of the proletariat of the industrialized countries. Only the working class has the social power and compulsion of clear objective interest to liberate mankind from oppression. Having no stake in maintaining the bourgeois order, its enormous power rests in its productive role, its numbers and organization.
The continued rule of a small handful of capitalists is maintained only through keeping the working class divided and confused as to its true situation. In the United States, the ruling class succeeded in exploiting deep divisions in the proletariat, first along religious and ethnic and later along racial lines. As part of an oppressed race-color caste, the black workers are doubly oppressed and require special modes of struggle (for example, transitional organizations such as labor/black struggle leagues). The working class transcends such divisions only through struggle and highly reversibly. Socialism in the United States will be achieved only by the common struggle of black and white workers under the leadership of a multiracial revolutionary vanguard.
The U.S. black question is defined by the particular history of the United States: slavery, the Civil War defeat of the Southern slavocracy by Northern industrial capitalism and the bourgeoisie’s betrayal of Radical Reconstruction’s promise of equality, leading to the racist segregation of black people despite the economic integration of black toilers into the proletariat at the bottom. The forcible segregation of blacks, integral to American capitalism, has been resisted by the black masses whenever a perceived possibility for such struggle has been felt. Hence our program for the U.S. is revolutionary integrationism—the full integration of blacks into an egalitarian, socialist America—and our program of “black liberation through socialist revolution.”
Modern capitalism, i.e., imperialism, reaching into all areas of the planet, in the course of the class struggle and as economic need demands, brings into the proletariat at its bottom new sources of cheaper labor, principally immigrants from poorer and less-developed regions of the world—workers with few rights who are deemed more disposable in times of economic contraction. Thus capitalism in ongoing fashion creates different strata among the workers, while simultaneously amalgamating the workers of many different lands. Everywhere, the capitalists, abetted by aristocracy-of-labor opportunists, try to poison class consciousness and solidarity among the workers by fomenting religious, national and ethnic divisions. The struggle for the unity and integrity of the working class against chauvinism and racism is thus a vital task for the proletarian vanguard.
Today anti-immigrant bigotry defines racist/rightist politics and is an acid test for the workers movement and left from West Europe to South Africa to East Asia. The ICL fights against deportations—for full citizenship rights for all immigrants! For labor/minority mobilizations to stop the fascists! For workers defense guards! For multiracial/ multiethnic workers militias against communalist violence!
Fascist demagogues feed off unemployment, immiseration and insecurity endemic to the capitalist system. Fascist terror and government attacks on immigrants and other oppressed minorities can be combatted effectively only from the perspective of overthrowing the capitalist system and replacing it with an internationally planned and collectivized economy. As Trotsky wrote in 1930 when under the impact of the Great Depression the Nazi Party emerged as a real threat to take power in Germany: “The Soviet United States of Europe—that is the only correct slogan which points the way out of the splintering of Europe, which threatens not only Germany but all of Europe with complete economic and cultural decline” (“The Turn in the Communist International and the Situation in Germany,” 26 September 1930).
The oppression of women, youth, minorities and all sectors of the oppressed must be analyzed and addressed in each country to find the most favorable point at which to apply the Marxist lever. As Lenin wrote in What Is To Be Done? (1902): “...the Social-Democrat’s ideal should not be the trade union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects; who is able to generalise all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation; who is able to take advantage of every event, however small, in order to set forth before all his socialist convictions and his democratic demands, in order to clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat.”
The ICL fights for women’s liberation through socialist revolution. In countries of belated capitalist development, the acute oppression and degradation of women is deeply rooted in pre-capitalist “tradition” and religious obscurantism. In these countries the fight against women’s oppression is therefore a motor force of revolutionary struggle. The condition of women in the most advanced capitalist countries, while far different, shows the limits of freedom and social progress under capitalism; revolutionists are the most consistent champions of women’s elementary democratic rights such as free legal abortion and “equal pay for equal work.” The reactionary social climate aggravated by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the concerted campaign to roll back “welfare state” protections of the masses has brought a sharp rise in anti-sex, anti-woman and anti-homosexual bigotry. We oppose all laws against crimes without victims, including those which criminalize homosexual or other consensual sexual activity, prostitution and drug use.
The oppression of women, the oldest social inequality in human history, goes back to the beginning of private property and will not be abolished short of the abolition of class-divided society. The fundamental social institution oppressing women is the family, whose function in the raising of the next generation must be superseded, with women’s household labor replaced by collective institutions in a socialist society. We stand on the Bolsheviks’ record of special organized work among women to win them to the socialist cause, described in early issues of the SL/U.S. journal Women and Revolution.
While fighting against every manifestation of bourgeois injustice, we oppose sectoralism, which denies the possibility of consciousness transcending an individual’s own experience of oppression, and fight to unite the vanguard of all oppressed social layers behind the proletariat in the fight for socialism.
Open the road to the youth! Key to building the international proletarian revolutionary party is the struggle to win a new generation of youth to the principles and program of Trotskyism. This includes not only the struggle to recruit young workers but also work among students. A particularly volatile layer of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia, students can play an active role in “radical” activities of either the left or the right. We seek to win students to the side of the working class, recognizing like Lenin that a revolutionary party is built through the fusion of declassed revolutionary intellectuals with the most advanced layers of the proletariat. Youth serve a particular role as the cannon fodder for the wars and other military adventures of the capitalist rulers. Our opposition to the bourgeois army and to conscription is antithetical to that of pacifists or those who seek a petty-bourgeois exemption from an obligation imposed on working-class youth in many countries. We go in with our class with the purpose of winning proletarian soldiers to the program and purpose of communist revolution. In a revolutionary situation we understand that key to proletarian victory is the splitting of the conscript army along class lines.
Through our youth work we seek to recruit and train the future cadres of the revolutionary party through establishing transitional youth organizations which are both organizationally independent of and politically subordinate to the revolutionary party.
7. The Bourgeois Basis of Revisionism
Insofar as revolutionary consciousness is not prevalent among the workers, their consciousness is determined by the ideology of the ruling class. Objectively capitalism rules through the power of capital, its monopoly of the means of violence, and its control of all existing social institutions. But it prefers, when possible, to rule with the “consent” of the masses through the dominance of bourgeois ideology among the oppressed, fostering illusions and concealing its bloody essence. Nationalism, patriotism, racism and religion penetrate into the organizations of the workers, centrally through the agency of the petty-bourgeois “labor lieutenants”—the parasitic trade-union, social-democratic and Stalinist-derived bureaucracies based on the privileged upper strata of the working class. If not replaced by revolutionary leaderships, these reformists will allow the organizations of the workers to become impotent in the fight for the economic needs of the workers under conditions of bourgeois democracy or even allow these organizations to be destroyed by victorious fascism.
In his 1916 work on Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin laid out the material basis of the opportunism of the labor bureaucracy:
“The receipt of high monopoly profits by the capitalists in one of the numerous branches of industry, in one of the numerous countries, etc., makes it economically possible for them to bribe certain sections of the workers, and for a time a fairly considerable minority of them, and win them to the side of the bourgeoisie of a given industry or given nation against all the others. The intensification of antagonisms between imperialist nations for the division of the world increases this urge. And so there is created that bond between imperialism and opportunism.... The most dangerous of all in this respect are those [like the Menshevik, Martov] who do not wish to understand that the fight against imperialism is a sham and humbug unless it is inseparably bound up with the fight against opportunism.”
The degeneration and capitulation of tendencies within the Marxist movement has been of especially critical value to the preservation of imperialist rule. Submission to the pressure of bourgeois society has repeatedly thrust nominally Marxist currents toward revisionism, the process of ruling out Marxism’s essential conclusion that the state is an instrument of class rule. Bernsteinian revisionism, Menshevism, Stalinism and its Maoist variant—all are illustrations of this process which constitutes a bridge to overtly reformist practices. Globally, besides the Stalinists and the Social Democrats, nationalists and the politically religious heavily work to derail working-class struggle.
Centrism is that programmatically heterogeneous and theoretically amorphous current in the workers movement that occupies numerous shadings in the political spectrum between Marxism and reformism, between revolutionary internationalism and opportunist social patriotism. As Trotsky noted in his 1934 article, “Centrism and the Fourth International”:
“For a revolutionary Marxist the struggle against reformism is now almost fully replaced by the struggle against centrism.... The struggle with hidden or masked opportunists must therefore be transferred chiefly to the sphere of practical conclusions from revolutionary requisites.”
In situations of sharp class struggle, the centrist pretenders who form part of the syphilitic chain maintaining bourgeois class rule become both more dangerous and more vulnerable to revolutionary exposure. The revolutionary Trotskyist vanguard will grow at the expense of our centrist opponents, or vice versa. The outcome of this confrontation between Marxism and centrism is a crucial factor in the success or failure of the revolution.
It is the unappealing reformist performance of social democracy and Stalinism that generated a revival of anarchism, an anti-Marxist ideology based on radical democratic idealism, which had been rendered moribund in the early years of this century by the revolutionary Marxism of the Bolsheviks. Similarly among unionists a revival of anti-political syndicalist moods is attributable to disgust with the behavior of all the old “socialist” parliamentarians; but this retreat to “pure” economic struggle only allows militant struggle to burn itself out without ever really challenging the reformist traitors.
8. The Struggle Against Imperialist War
Leon Trotsky codified the program of proletarian internationalist opposition to the wars inevitably engendered by decaying capitalism in his 1934 document “War and the Fourth International.” As Trotsky noted: “The transformation of imperialist war into civil war is that general strategic task to which the whole work of a proletarian party during war should be subordinated.” In interimperialist wars such as WW I and WW II, and in other wars between two relatively equally developed capitalist states, our basic principle is revolutionary defeatism: irreconcilable opposition to the capitalist slaughter and a recognition that defeat of one’s own bourgeoisie is a lesser evil. As Wilhelm Liebknecht said, “Not a man and not a penny” for bourgeois militarism.
In wars of imperialist depredation against colonial, semicolonial or dependent nations, the duty of the proletariat in every country is to aid the oppressed nations against the imperialists, while maintaining complete political independence from bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalist forces.
The proletariat must give unconditional military defense against imperialism to the deformed workers states in China, Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba. Our position flows from the proletarian class character of these states, embodied in the collectivized property relations—nationalized property, planned economy, monopoly of foreign trade and banking, etc.—established by social revolutions that destroyed capitalism. Despite the bureaucratic deformations of these states, our defense of them against the class enemy is unconditional, i.e., it does not depend on the prior overthrow of the Stalinist bureaucracies, nor does it depend upon the circumstances and immediate causes of the conflict.
The drive toward imperialist war is inherent in the capitalist system. Today’s ideologues of “globalization” are projecting a false vision that the rival interests of competing nation states have been transcended in this post-Soviet period. This is nothing other than a rehash of Karl Kautsky’s theory of “ultra-imperialism.” As Lenin wrote in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism:
“Compare this reality—the vast diversity of economic and political conditions, the extreme disparity in the rate of development of the various countries, etc., and the violent struggles among the imperialist states—with Kautsky’s silly little fable about ‘peaceful’ ultra-imperialism.... Is not American and other finance capital, which divided the whole world peacefully with Germany’s participation in, for example, the international rail syndicate, or in the international mercantile shipping trust, now engaged in redividing the world on the basis of a new relation of forces that is being changed by methods anything but peaceful?”
9. The National Question and the Right of All Nations to Self-Determination
As Trotsky wrote in “War and the Fourth International” (10 June 1934):
“Having used the nation for its development, capitalism has nowhere, in no single corner of the world, solved fully the national problem.”
The right of self-determination applies to all nations. The struggle by the proletarian leadership for self-determination of the oppressed nations is a powerful tool to break the grip of petty-bourgeois nationalist leaders on the masses. The ICL stands by Lenin’s polemic (The Right of Nations to Self-Determination, February-May 1914) wherein Lenin states: “The interests of the working class and of its struggle against capitalism demand complete solidarity and the closest unity of the workers of all nations; they demand resistance to the nationalist policy of the bourgeoisie of every nationality.”
We stand by Lenin’s argument that “Successful struggle against exploitation requires that the proletariat be free of nationalism, and be absolutely neutral, so to speak, in the fight for supremacy that is going on among the bourgeoisie of the various nations. If the proletariat of any one nation gives the slightest support to the privileges of its ‘own’ national bourgeoisie, that will inevitably rouse distrust among the proletariat of another nation; it will weaken the international class solidarity of the workers and divide them, to the delight of the bourgeoisie. Repudiation of the right to self-determination or to secession inevitably means, in practice, support for the privileges of the dominant nation.”
However, when the particular demand for national self-determination—a democratic demand—contradicts class questions or the general needs of the class struggle, we oppose its exercise. As Lenin noted in “The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up” (July 1916): “The several demands of democracy, including self-determination, are not an absolute, but only a small part of the general-democratic (now: general-socialist) world movement. In individual concrete cases, the part may contradict the whole; if so, it must be rejected.” Lenin strongly supported Poland’s right of self-determination, arguing this point against other revolutionary socialists like Rosa Luxemburg. But in the particular context of World War I, Lenin argued: “The Polish Social-Democrats cannot, at the moment, raise the slogan of Poland’s independence, for the Poles, as proletarian internationalists, can do nothing about it without stooping, like the ‘Fracy’ [social-chauvinists], to humble servitude to one of the imperialist monarchies.”
In our approach to the interpenetration of two or more peoples claiming the same territory, the ICL is guided by the practice and experience of the Bolsheviks, in particular the discussion on the Ukraine at the Second Congress of the Communist International. The ICL elaborated on this position with regard to the Near East, Cyprus, Northern Ireland and the former Yugoslavia. In such situations, under capitalism—in which the state power is necessarily dominated by a single nation—the democratic right of national self-determination cannot be achieved for one people without violating the national rights of the other. Hence these conflicts cannot be equitably resolved within a capitalist framework. The precondition for a democratic solution is to sweep away all the bourgeoisies of the region.
10. Colonial Revolution, Permanent Revolution and the “Guerrilla Road”
Experience since the Second World War has completely validated the Trotskyist theory of the permanent revolution which declares that in the imperialist epoch the bourgeois-democratic revolution can be completed only by a proletarian dictatorship supported by the peasantry. Only under the leadership of the revolutionary proletariat can the colonial and semicolonial countries obtain genuine national emancipation. To open the road to socialism requires the extension of the revolution to the advanced capitalist countries.
The October Revolution itself refuted the Menshevik idea of the revolution as stagist; the Mensheviks proposed a political bloc with the liberal Cadet party to place the bourgeoisie in power. “The Menshevik idea of union between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie actually meant submission of the workers as well as the peasants to the liberals.... In 1905 the Mensheviks merely lacked the courage to draw all the necessary inferences from their theory of ‘bourgeois’ revolution. In 1917, pursuing their ideas to the bitter end, they broke their neck” (Trotsky, Three Concepts of the Russian Revolution, first published 1942).
Lenin’s Bolsheviks were closer to Trotsky’s view in that they insisted that the Russian bourgeoisie was incapable of leading a democratic revolution. The Bolsheviks argued for an alliance between the working class and the peasantry, culminating in the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry,” a flawed slogan projecting a state defending the interests of two different classes. In 1917 following the February revolution, it took a sharp fight within the Bolshevik Party for Lenin’s “April Theses” line for the dictatorship of the proletariat to prevail. However the failure of the Bolshevik Party to explicitly recognize the vindication of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution by the October Revolution and the failure to explicitly repudiate the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” then became a conduit for the forces later posturing as the Bolshevik “old guard” (e.g. Stalin) to attack Trotsky, the theory of permanent revolution and the revolutionary internationalist premises and implications of the Bolshevik Revolution.
Trotsky wrote in his 29 March 1930 introduction to the German edition of The Permanent Revolution:
“Under the guise of providing an economic justification for internationalism, Stalin in reality presents a justification for national socialism. It is false that world economy is simply a sum of national parts of one and the same type. It is false that the specific features are ‘merely supplementary to the general features,’ like warts on a face. In reality, the national peculiarities represent an original combination of the basic features of the world process.”
In The Permanent Revolution (30 November 1929) Trotsky explained:
“Under the conditions of the imperialist epoch the national democratic revolution can be carried through to a victorious end only when the social and political relationships of the country are mature for putting the proletariat in power as the leader of the masses of the people. And if this is not yet the case? Then the struggle for national liberation will produce only very partial results, results directed entirely against the working masses.
class="quote"“A backward colonial or semi-colonial country, the proletariat of which is insufficiently prepared to unite the peasantry and take power, is thereby incapable of bringing the democratic revolution to its conclusion.”
The partial character of the anti-capitalist revolutions in the colonial world leads us to reaffirm the Marxist-Leninist concept of the proletariat as the only social force capable of making the socialist revolution. The ICL fundamentally opposes the Maoist doctrine, rooted in Menshevism and Stalinist reformism, which rejects the vanguard role of the working class and substitutes peasant-based guerrilla warfare as the road to socialism.
A further extension of Marxism contributed by the International Communist League in analyzing Stalinism was our understanding of the Cuban Revolution (see Marxist Bulletin No. 8, “Cuba and Marxist Theory”), which retrospectively illuminated the course of the Yugoslav and Chinese Revolutions. In Cuba, a petty-bourgeois movement under exceptional circumstances—the absence of the working class as a contender for social power in its own right, the flight of the national bourgeoisie and hostile imperialist encirclement, and a lifeline thrown by the Soviet Union—did overthrow the old Batista dictatorship and eventually smash capitalist property relations. But Castroism (or other peasant-based guerrilla movements) cannot bring the working class to political power.
Under the most favorable historic circumstances conceivable, the petty-bourgeois peasantry was only capable of creating a bureaucratically deformed workers state, that is, a state of the same order as that issuing out of the political counterrevolution of Stalin in the Soviet Union, an anti-working-class regime which blocked the possibilities to extend social revolution into Latin America and North America, and suppressed Cuba’s further development in the direction of socialism. To place the working class in political power and open the road to socialist development requires a supplemental political revolution led by a Trotskyist party. With the destruction of the Soviet degenerated workers state and consequently no readily available lifeline against imperialist encirclement, the narrow historical opening in which petty-bourgeois forces were able to overturn local capitalist rule has been closed, underscoring the Trotskyist perspective of permanent revolution.
11. The Popular Front: Not a Tactic But the Greatest Crime
From Spain in 1936 to Chile in 1973, ripe opportunities for proletarian revolution have been derailed through the mechanism of the popular front, which ties the exploited to their exploiters, and opens the road to fascist and bonapartist dictatorships. Leon Trotsky asserted: “By lulling the workers and peasants with parliamentary illusions, by paralyzing their will to struggle, the People’s Front creates favorable conditions for the victory of fascism. The policy of coalition with the bourgeoisie must be paid for by the proletariat with years of new torments and sacrifice, if not by decades of fascist terror” (“The New Revolutionary Upsurge and the Tasks of the Fourth International,” July 1936).
Like Lenin and Trotsky, the ICL opposes in principle any coalition with capitalist parties (“popular fronts”) whether in government or in opposition, and we oppose voting for workers parties in popular fronts. Parliamentary governments formed by reformist workers parties (“bourgeois workers parties” as defined by Lenin) are capitalist governments administering capitalist rule (for example, various governments of the Labour Party in Britain). In cases where a mass reformist workers party presents itself as representing the interests of the working class independently of and against the parties of the bourgeoisie, it may be appropriate for revolutionaries to apply the tactic of critical support (“as a rope supports a hanged man”). Such critical electoral support serves as a means for revolutionists to exacerbate the contradiction between the proletarian base and the pro-capitalist leadership. However, the inclusion of even small non-proletarian political formations (such as liberals or eco-faddist “Greens” in the West, or bourgeois nationalists) acts as a guarantor of the bourgeois program, suppressing this contradiction.
The “anti-imperialist united front” is the particular form that class collaboration most often assumes in the colonial and ex-colonial countries, from the liquidation of the Chinese Communist Party into Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang in the 1920s to decades of prostration of the South African “left” before the African National Congress (ANC), which has become the imperialist-sponsored front men for neo-apartheid capitalism. Today in Latin America, “anti-Yankee” nationalism is the main tool whereby militant workers and insurgent peasants are induced to place their hopes in bourgeois “radicals.” Trotsky’s program of permanent revolution is the alternative to placing confidence in fantasies resting upon the backward, imperialist-dependent bourgeoisie of one’s own oppressed country as the vehicle for liberation.
12. The Revolutionary Party: Its Program, Organization, and Discipline
“Without a party, apart from a party, over the head of a party, or with a substitute for a party, the proletarian revolution cannot conquer” (Leon Trotsky, The Lessons of October [1924]). We strive to build the revolutionary party, the instrument for bringing political consciousness to the proletariat, seeking to become the main offensive and guiding force through which the working class makes and consolidates the socialist revolution. Our aim is a revolutionary general staff whose leading cadre must be trained and tested in the class struggle. The party fights to gain the leadership of the class on the basis of its program and revolutionary determination; it seeks to understand the whole of the past in order to assess the present situation. The challenge is to recognize and boldly respond to the revolutionary moment when it comes, that moment when the forces of the proletariat are most confident and prepared and the forces of the old order most demoralized and disorganized. In such a revolutionary party is crystallized the aspiration of the masses to obtain their freedom; it symbolizes their revolutionary will and will be the instrument of their victory.
As Trotsky wrote in the Transitional Program:
“The strategic task of the next period—a prerevolutionary period of agitation, propaganda, and organization—consists in overcoming the contradiction between the maturity of the objective revolutionary conditions and the immaturity of the proletariat and its vanguard (the confusion and disappointment of the older generation, the inexperience of the younger generation). It is necessary to help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demands and the socialist program of the revolution. This bridge should include a system of transitional demands, stemming from today’s conditions and from today’s consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat.”
The vanguard party must devote the same conscious attention to the question of party leadership as the party devotes to fighting for the consciousness of the advanced workers. In “The Mistakes of Rightist Elements of the Communist League on the Trade Union Question” (4 January 1931), Trotsky wrote:
“Whatever may be the social sources and political causes of opportunistic mistakes and deviations, they are always reduced ideologically to an erroneous understanding of the revolutionary party, of its relation to other proletarian organizations and to the class as a whole.”
The united front is a primary tactic especially in unsettled periods to both mobilize a broad mass in struggle for a common demand and to strengthen the authority of the vanguard party within the class. The formula of “march separately, strike together” means action in unison in defense of the workers’ interests, while allowing for the clash of competing opinions in the context of a common political experience.
The communist tactic of the united front allows the vanguard to approach separate and otherwise hostile organizations for common action. It is counterposed to the “Third Period” Stalinists’ “united front from below” which demands unity with the “ranks” against their leaders, reinforcing organizational lines and precluding joint action. A united front requires full “freedom of criticism”—i.e., participants are able to present their own slogans and propaganda.
A hallmark of retreat from revolutionary purpose is the practice of propaganda blocs: the subordination of the proletarian program to opportunists in the name of “unity.” A similar purpose is served by the idea of a “strategic united front” which transforms the united front into a hoped-for standing “coalition” on a lowest-common-denominator program. As against all such schemes, the revolutionary party cannot be built without a fight for political clarity and relentless exposure of reformist and especially centrist forces.
The ICL stands on the principles and record of the International Labor Defense, the American arm of the early Comintern’s International Red Aid. We seek to carry forward the ILD’s heritage of non-sectarian, partisan class-struggle defense work, defending irrespective of their political views militant fighters for the working class and oppressed. While utilizing all democratic rights available from the bourgeois legal system, we seek to mobilize mass labor-centered protest, placing all our faith in the power of the masses and no faith whatever in the “justice” of the bourgeois courts. The greatest obstacle to reviving the traditions of labor solidarity is the infamous practices of Stalinist and social-democratic organizations: violence within the workers movement, slander of opponents, and manipulative “front group” maneuvering.
The organizational principle within the International Communist League is democratic-centralism, a balance between internal democracy and functional discipline. As a combat organization, the revolutionary vanguard must be capable of unified and decisive action at all times in the class struggle. All members must be mobilized to carry out the decisions of the majority; authority must be centralized in its elected leadership which interprets tactically the organization’s program. Internal democracy permits the collective determination of the party’s line in accord with the needs felt by the party’s ranks who are closest to the class as a whole. The right to factional democracy is vital to a living movement; the very existence of this right helps to channel differences into less absorbing means of resolution.
The discipline of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) flows from its program and purpose, the victory of the socialist revolution and the liberation of all mankind.
13. We Will Intervene to Change History!
“Marxism is not a dogma, but a guide to action.” The International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) is in the forefront of the struggle for a socialist future. The ICL is the only international organization which presently has a correct general conception of the world situation and of the tasks facing the world proletariat. The disparity between our small numbers and the power of our program is huge. Currently the sections of the ICL are or aim to be fighting propaganda groups. Our immediate task is the education and formation of cadres, recruiting the most advanced layers of workers and youth by winning them over to our full program through explanation of our views in sharp counterposition to those of our centrist opponents. Revolutionary regroupments on the program of Leninist internationalism are the means to resolve the disproportion between our small forces and our task.
Like Lenin’s Bolsheviks, our aim is to fuse together intellectual and proletarian elements, above all through the development and struggle of communist industrial fractions. By means of propagandistic literature one can educate the first cadres, but one cannot rally the proletarian vanguard which lives neither in a circle nor in a schoolroom but in a class society, in a factory, in the organizations of the masses, a vanguard to whom one must know how to speak in the language of its experiences. Even the best prepared propagandist cadres will inevitably disintegrate if they do not find contact with the daily struggle of the masses.
Communist work in the trade unions must be oriented to winning over the base, not unprincipled blocs and maneuvers at the top. Absolutely essential is the struggle for the complete and unconditional independence of the trade unions in relation to the capitalist state. Use of the bourgeois courts against political opponents in the trade unions or the workers movement is a breach of the principle of proletarian independence and an attack on the labor movement’s strength. Inviting the class enemy to intervene in the unions’ internal affairs promotes illusions in bourgeois democracy by portraying the state as “neutral” between classes. Police are not “workers in uniform” but the hired guns of the capitalist state; they have no place in the workers’ organizations. The ICL fights for “cops out of the unions.” Our fight for the principle of proletarian independence from the state is underscored by the tendency pointed out by Trotsky in his unfinished 1940 essay, “Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay,” for the reformist trade unions to grow ever more intertwined with the state.
Communists seek to build the strongest possible unity of the working class against the capitalist exploiters; therefore, we oppose craft divisions in the proletariat and stand for industrial unionism, and oppose the splitting of the working class into competing unions based on different political tendencies or ethnic groupings. In contradistinction, the task of the communist vanguard is to clarify and sharpen the differences between competing political tendencies in order to assemble the cadre for a Leninist party. In Lenin’s time these different political tasks were reflected in different organizational forms: the Comintern composed of the party organizations representing the unique Bolshevik political program and the Profintern representing the struggle for the unity of the working class in the unions.
We believe that the reforging of a communist Fourth International, built of authentic communist parties on every inhabited continent and tested in thoroughgoing intervention in the class struggle, will be arduous and often dangerous. The road forward for all of humanity is for the presently small forces adhering to the revolutionary program of Lenin and Trotsky to forge parties with the experience, willpower and authority among the masses to lead successful proletarian revolutions. Yet as we seek to bring this program to bear among the world’s workers and oppressed, we must recognize that the possession of the technology of nuclear holocaust by an irrational imperialist ruling class foreshortens the possibilities: we don’t have a lot of time.
We are guided by the precepts and practices of comrades such as Lenin and Trotsky:
“To face reality squarely; not to seek the line of least resistance; to call things by their right names; to speak the truth to the masses, no matter how bitter it may be; not to fear obstacles; to be true in little things as in big ones; to base one’s program on the logic of the class struggle; to be bold when the hour for action arrives—these are the rules of the Fourth International.”
The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (1938)
These are the rules of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) as we go forward in the historical task of leading the working class to the victory of world socialism!
—February 1998
In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement that in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.
After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Deb’s Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.
I am continuing today what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.
However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
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Declaration of Principles and Some Elements of Program
International Communist League
(Fourth Internationalist)
Adopted: 1998
Source: Prometheus Research Library, New York
Transription/Markup/Proofing: David Walters, Prometheus Research Library.
Public Domain: Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 2006/Prometheus Research Library. You can freely copy, display and othewise distribute this work. Please credit the Marxists Internet Archive & Prometheus Research Library the as your source, include the url to this work, and note the transcribers & editors above.
1. World Socialist Revolution and the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist)
The International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) is a proletarian, revolutionary and internationalist tendency which is committed to the task of building Leninist parties as national sections of a democratic-centralist international whose purpose is to lead the working class to victory through socialist revolutions throughout the world.
Only the proletariat, through the seizure of political power and the destruction of capitalism as a world system, can lay the basis for the elimination of exploitation and the resolution of the contradiction between the growth of the productive forces of the world economy and national-state barriers. Capitalism has long since outlived its progressive historical role of creating a modern industrial economy. In order to maintain their rule, the national capitalist classes must exploit national, ethnic and racial divisions, which have been intensified since the destruction of the Soviet Union. Increasingly mutually hostile imperialist powers and rival blocs must oppress the peoples of the former colonial world and those still under the yoke of colonial peonage, impoverish the world’s masses, engage in continual wars for the maintenance and redivision of the world markets in order to prop up the falling rate of profit, and attempt to smash the revolutionary struggle of the workers wherever it breaks out. In its final frenzied effort to maintain its class rule, the bourgeoisie will not hesitate to plunge humanity into nuclear holocaust or dictatorial oppression of unprecedented ferocity.
On the other hand, the victory of the proletariat on a world scale would place unimagined material abundance at the service of human needs, lay the basis for the elimination of classes and the eradication of social inequality based on sex and the very abolition of the social significance of race, nation and ethnicity. For the first time mankind will grasp the reins of history and control its own creation, society, resulting in an undreamed-of emancipation of human potential, and a monumental forward surge of civilization. Only then will it be possible to realize the free development of each individual as the condition for the free development of all. As Isaac Deutscher said in his speech, “On Socialist Man” (1966):
“We do not maintain that socialism is going to solve all predicaments of the human race. We are struggling in the first instance with the predicaments that are of man’s making and that man can resolve. May I remind you that Trotsky, for instance, speaks of three basic tragedies—hunger, sex and death—besetting man. Hunger is the enemy that Marxism and the modern labour movement have taken on.... Yes, socialist man will still be pursued by sex and death; but we are convinced that he will be better equipped than we are to cope even with these.”
2. The Crisis of Proletarian Leadership
The success or failure of the working class to achieve victory depends upon the organization and consciousness of the struggling masses, i.e., on revolutionary leadership. The revolutionary party is the indispensable weapon of the working people for their victory.
The ruling class has at its command a monopoly of the means of violence, its dominant political and bureaucratic apparatus, its enormous wealth and connections, and its control of education, the mass media and all other institutions of capitalist society. Against such a force a workers state can be brought into existence only by a proletariat fully conscious of its tasks, organized to carry them out, and determined to defend its conquests against the counterrevolutionary violence of the ruling class.
Through its acquisition of political consciousness the working class ceases to be merely a class in itself and becomes a class for itself, conscious of its historic task to seize state power and reorganize society. Such consciousness is not spontaneously generated in the course of the day-to-day class struggles of the workers; it must be brought to the workers by the revolutionary party. Thus it is the task of the revolutionary party to forge the proletariat into a sufficient political force by infusing it with a consciousness of its real situation, educating it in the historical lessons of the class struggle, tempering it in ever deepening struggles, destroying its illusions, steeling its revolutionary will and self-confidence, and organizing the overthrow of all forces standing in the way of the conquest of power. A conscious working class is the decisive force in history.
The indispensable nature of the task of forging a vanguard party and honing its revolutionary edge in preparation for the inevitable revolutionary crises is underscored in the imperialist epoch. As Trotsky pointed out in The Third International After Lenin (1928):
“The revolutionary character of the epoch does not lie in that it permits of the accomplishment of the revolution, that is, the seizure of power at every given moment. Its revolutionary character consists in profound and sharp fluctuations and abrupt and frequent transitions from an immediately revolutionary situation.... This is the sole source from which flows the full significance of revolutionary strategy in contradistinction to tactics. Thence also flows the new significance of the party and the party leadership.... [Today] every new sharp change in the political situation to the Left places the decision in the hands of the revolutionary party. Should it miss the critical situation, the latter veers around to its opposite. Under these circumstances the role of the party leadership acquires exceptional importance. The words of Lenin to the effect that two or three days can decide the fate of the international revolution would have been almost incomprehensible in the epoch of the Second International. In our epoch, on the contrary, these words have only too often been confirmed and, with the exception of the October, always from the negative side.”
3. We Are the Party of the Russian Revolution
The October 1917 Russian Revolution took the Marxist doctrine of proletarian revolution out of the realm of theory and gave it reality, creating a society where those who labored ruled through the dictatorship of the proletariat. This proletarian revolution led by the Bolshevik Party in Russia was not made solely for Russia. For revolutionary Marxists, the Russian Revolution was seen as the opening shot of a necessarily international struggle of labor against the rule of capital worldwide. Lenin’s Bolsheviks broke the capitalist chain at its weakest link, understanding that unless the proletarian revolution was extended to the major capitalist powers, most immediately Germany, an isolated dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia could not long survive.
The opportunities were manifold, but the new revolutionary parties outside Russia were too new, that is, too weak and politically immature, to pursue them. In Europe, especially Germany, the Social Democracy served its bourgeois masters, helping restabilize their order and joining with them in hostility to the October Revolution. Elsewhere, in less developed nations and regions, the main ideological obstacle and force against Bolshevism was nationalism.
The pressure of imperialist encirclement, the devastation of the Russian working class in the Civil War and the lengthy isolation of the Russian Revolution enabled a bureaucratic layer headed by Stalin to usurp political power in a political counterrevolution in 1923-24, what Trotsky called the “Soviet Thermidor.” While resting on and deriving its privileges from proletarian property forms of the Soviet degenerated workers state, the Stalinist bureaucracy was not irrevocably committed to their defense. Stalin’s “theory” of “socialism in one country,” expressing the nationally limited interests of the Kremlin bureaucracy, turned the Communist International from an instrument of the world revolution into a new obstacle.
Stalin’s “socialism in one country” was a rejection of the fundamental principles of Marxism. The Communist Manifesto (1848) concludes, “Workingmen of all countries, unite!” The Revolutions of 1848 signaled the opening of the modern era—the bourgeoisie made common cause with reaction in the face of a proletariat already perceived as threatening to capitalist rule. As Engels wrote in his “Principles of Communism” (1847):
“Question 19: Will it be possible for this revolution to take place in one country alone?
“Answer: No. Large-scale industry, already by creating the world market, has so linked up all the peoples of the earth, and especially the civilised peoples, that each people is dependent on what happens to another. Further, in all civilised countries large-scale industry has so levelled social development that in all these countries the bourgeoisie and the proletariat have become the two decisive classes of society and the struggle between them the main struggle of the day. The communist revolution will therefore be no merely national one.... It is a worldwide revolution and will therefore be worldwide in scope.”
In opposition to Stalin’s nationalist opportunism, Trotsky’s Left Opposition was founded on the program of authentic Marxism which animated the Bolshevik Revolution. The Left Opposition fought to preserve and extend the gains of the Russian Revolution which had been betrayed but not yet overthrown. In his searing analysis of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution, the dual nature of the Stalinist bureaucracy, and the explosive contradictions of Soviet society (The Revolution Betrayed, 1936) Trotsky posed the choice starkly: “Will the bureaucrat devour the workers’ state, or will the working class clean up the bureaucrat?” Trotsky’s prophetic warning was vindicated, bitterly, in the negative.
The anti-internationalist doctrine of “socialism in one country” resulted in a disastrous careening from ultraleft adventures to class collaboration. Trotsky characterized Stalin as the “gravedigger” of revolutionary struggles abroad, from the second Chinese Revolution in 1925-27 and the British General Strike of 1926 to Germany, where the CP, as well as the Social Democrats, allowed Hitler to come to power without firing a shot. In the context of the German betrayal, and the Comintern’s subsequent codification of the explicitly anti-revolutionary line of building popular fronts, which found its fullest expression in the Stalinists’ criminal strangulation of the Spanish Revolution, the Trotskyists organized the Fourth International, which was founded in 1938.
The planned economy in the Soviet Union (and the bureaucratically deformed workers states which elsewhere later arose on the Stalinist model) proved its superiority over capitalist anarchy in the period of rapid development. But the relentless pressure of continuing economic encirclement by the still world-dominant capitalist mode of production through the world market was inexorable without international extension of the revolution. Trotsky wrote in The Revolution Betrayed:
“The question formulated by Lenin—Who shall prevail?—is a question of the correlation of forces between the Soviet Union and the world revolutionary proletariat on the one hand, and on the other international capital and the hostile forces within the [Soviet] Union.... Military intervention is a danger. The intervention of cheap goods in the baggage trains of a capitalist army would be an incomparably greater one.”
The Fourth International’s organizational weakness, lack of deep roots in the proletariat, and theoretical incapacity and disorientation after WW II contributed heavily to the political break in continuity with the program of Trotsky’s Fourth International. The prior decimation of Trotskyist cadres throughout Europe at the hands of fascist and Stalinist repression—and the massacres of Trotskyists in Vietnam and jailing of Trotskyists in China, countries where the Left Opposition had found significant bases of support—gutted the movement of experienced cadres at a crucial moment.
The expansion of Stalinist rule in Eastern Europe after the war posed a new programmatic challenge to the Trotskyist movement against which formal “orthodoxy” was an insufficient defense. After an uninterrupted string of defeats and betrayals, from China (1927) and Germany (1933) to the Spanish Civil War, and Stalin’s murderous purges, the existence of the Soviet Union had been placed in grave danger. The Red Army defeated Hitler despite Stalin who—after beheading the Soviet military through his bloody purges on the eve of World War II—further sabotaged the military defense of the Soviet Union through his faith first in Hitler and then in the “democratic” allies.
Yet the Red Army’s victory over fascism greatly enhanced the authority of the bureaucratically degenerated Soviet Union, an eventuality not foreseen by Trotsky. The West European Stalinists emerged from WW II at the head of the mass organizations of militant workers of Italy, France and elsewhere. Meanwhile, in Soviet-occupied East Europe, capitalist property was expropriated and a collectivized economy established through a bureaucratically controlled social revolution, producing deformed workers states modeled on the Stalinist-ruled USSR.
Conditioned in part by the Vietnam War and internal turmoil racking the U.S., not least the black liberation struggle, the late 1960s/early 1970s saw a series of prerevolutionary and revolutionary situations in Europe—France 1968, Italy 1969, Portugal 1974-75. These represented the best opportunities for proletarian revolution in the advanced capitalist countries since the immediate post-World War II period. It was the pro-Moscow Communist Parties which again managed to preserve the shaken bourgeois order in this region. Here the counterrevolutionary role of the Western Stalinist parties contributed immeasurably to the subsequent destruction of the Soviet Union. The restabilization of the bourgeois order in the Western imperialist states in the mid-1970s was immediately followed by a new Cold War offensive against the Soviet bloc.
The Soviet Stalinist bureaucracy—in the absence of the proletariat as a contender for power—had sooner or later to turn to “market socialism,” which, along with appeasement of U.S. imperialism in Afghanistan and brokering capitalist restoration throughout East Europe, opened wide the floodgates to capitalist counterrevolution in the former Soviet Union in 1991-92. The proletariat, leaderless, did not resist, spelling the destruction of the workers state.
The 1979 “Iranian Revolution” opened up a period of ascendant political Islam in the historically Muslim world, a development which contributed to and was powerfully reinforced by the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union. Khomeini’s seizure and consolidation of power in Iran was a defeat akin to Hitler’s crushing of the German proletariat in 1933, albeit on a narrower, regional scale. The international Spartacist tendency’s slogan “Down with the Shah! No support to the mullahs!” and our focus on the woman question (“No to the veil!”) stood in sharp opposition to the rest of the left’s capitulation to mullah-led reaction.
The preservation of proletarian power depends principally on the political consciousness and organization of the working class. After the physical liquidation of the revolutionary wing of the Bolsheviks by Stalin, all continuity with the traditions of the October Revolution was systematically expunged from the memory of the working class. In Soviet mass consciousness, suffused with the Russian-nationalist propaganda churned out by Stalin, World War II came to supplant the October Revolution as the epochal event in Soviet history. In the end, Stalin and his heirs succeeded in imprinting their nationalist outlook on the Soviet peoples; proletarian internationalism came to be sneered at as an obscure “Trotskyite heresy” of “export of revolution” or else cynically emptied of content.
Atomized and bereft of any anti-capitalist leadership, lacking any coherent and consistent socialist class consciousness, and skeptical about the possibility of class struggle in the capitalist countries, the Soviet working class did not rally in resistance against the encroaching capitalist counterrevolution. And, as Trotsky noted in The Third International After Lenin: “If an army capitulates to the enemy in a critical situation without a battle, then this capitulation completely takes the place of a ‘decisive battle,’ in politics as in war.”
An analysis of the terminal crisis of Stalinism is provided in Spartacist No. 45-46 (Winter 1990-91) in documents by Joseph Seymour, “On the Collapse of Stalinist Rule in East Europe,” and Albert St. John, “For Marxist Clarity and a Forward Perspective,” and the August 1993 Spartacist Pamphlet, How the Soviet Workers State Was Strangled. As was noted in Seymour’s document:
“During his long struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy Trotsky considered a number of different paths whereby capitalism might be restored in the Soviet Union.... Trotsky used the phrase ‘running backwards the film of reformism’ to polemicize against those professed leftists who maintained that the Stalin regime had already transformed the USSR into a bourgeois state through a gradual and organic process—Bernsteinism in reverse.... Trotsky’s view that a capitalist counterrevolution, as well as a proletarian political revolution, in Stalin’s Russia would entail civil war was a prognosis, not a dogma. It was predicated on resistance by the working class, not resistance by conservative elements of the bureaucratic apparatus. That is how the question is posed in The Revolution Betrayed.... The decisive element is the consciousness of the Soviet working class, which is not static but is affected by innumerable shifting factors domestically and internationally.”
As St. John noted:
“Unlike the anarchistic bourgeois economy the planned socialist economy is not built automatically but consciously. Therefore, [Trotsky] writes, ‘Progress towards socialism is inseparable from that state power which is desirous of socialism or which is constrained to desire it’ [“The Workers State, Thermidor and Bonapartism,” 1935]. Thus, he concluded, without the intervention of a conscious proletarian vanguard, the collapse of the Stalinist political regime would lead inevitably to the liquidation of the planned economy and to restoration of private property.”
The “Russian question” has been the defining political question of the 20th century and the touchstone for revolutionaries. We Trotskyists stayed at our posts and fought to preserve and extend the revolutionary gains of the working class while every other tendency on the planet capitulated to the ideological pressure of imperialist anti-communism. Above all our defense of the USSR was expressed in our fight for new October Revolutions around the world.
Responsibility for the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union lies also with all manner of reformists and centrists who lined up behind their own capitalist rulers against the USSR, including backing every reactionary movement from Polish Solidarnos’c’ to the Islamic fundamentalist butchers in Afghanistan. The devastating and worldwide consequences of the Soviet counterrevolution also destroy on the theoretical level the anti-Marxist theories that the Stalinist bureaucracy was “state capitalist,” according to which the Soviet counterrevolution would have been merely a shift from one form of capitalism to another.
The ascendancy of Boris Yeltsin and capitalist-restorationist forces in August 1991 was a pivotal event in determining the fate of the Soviet Union, but the final undoing of the October Revolution was not a foregone conclusion. Spartacists distributed throughout the Soviet Union over 100,000 copies in Russian of our August 1991 article, “Soviet Workers: Defeat Yeltsin-Bush Counterrevolution!” There we wrote that workers mobilizations should have cleaned out the counterrevolutionary rabble on Yeltsin’s barricades, thus opening the road to proletarian political revolution. We called for a political revolution to defeat capitalist restoration and return the Soviet proletariat to political power. Only those who were under the sway of capitalist ideology or its material perquisites were in a hurry to write off the Soviet Union at that time. The absence of resistance by a working class that had been betrayed and atomized by decades of Stalinist misrule and fierce repression was the decisive factor in the destruction of the Soviet workers state.
Our defense of the USSR was not limited to our program for the USSR: unconditional military defense against imperialism and internal counterrevolution; for proletarian political revolution to oust the bureaucracy and return the USSR to the road of Lenin and Trotsky. It was expressed also in our unconditional military defense of the Vietnamese Revolution; in our opposition to Solidarnos’c’’s drive sponsored by Wall Street and the Vatican to overturn the Polish deformed workers state; in our call to “Hail Red Army in Afghanistan—Extend social gains of the October Revolution to the Afghan peoples!”; in our active intervention for the revolutionary reunification of Germany.
History speaks its verdicts loudly. The ascendancy of counterrevolution in the former USSR is an unparalleled defeat for working people all over the world, decisively altering the political landscape on this planet. No longer challenged by Soviet military might, U.S. imperialism has proclaimed a “one-superpower world,” running roughshod over semicolonial peoples from the Persian Gulf to Haiti. No longer the unrivaled economic powerhouse of world imperialism, the United States still maintains the murderous advantage of its military might, while often preferring to camouflage its terror under the “humanitarian” fig leaf of the United Nations’ “den of thieves” (Lenin’s description of the UN’s predecessor, the League of Nations). But rival imperialisms, especially Germany and Japan, no longer constrained by anti-Soviet unity, are pursuing apace their own appetites for control of world markets and concomitantly projecting their military power. In the conflicts between rival regional trade blocs today, the outlines of future wars are sharpening. In the face of growing interimperialist rivalry, we reassert: “The main enemy is at home!”
Looking back retrospectively to the pre-World War I period, today’s “post-Cold War world” presents many parallels. And with the question posed of new interimperialist conflict, we can expect today’s reformists and centrists to act in the spirit of their social-democratic forebears of 4 August 1914 in backing their own rulers in wartime. Fully in this spirit was their support for counterrevolution in the USSR.
Alongside mass pauperization in the USSR, “ethnic cleansing” fratricide rages throughout the weak new capitalist states of East Europe and former Soviet republics where nationalist ideology substituted for nonexistent capital as the motor force of counterrevolution. Often a resurgence of the pre-World War II national antagonisms in the capitalist states of this region, in the aftermath of counterrevolution, nationalist ideology again becomes the chief roadblock which revolutionaries have to smash through.
In West Europe the safety net of social welfare measures is slashed as the bourgeoisies no longer see any need to stave off the “spectre of communism” by providing necessities. While the ideological climate of the “death of communism” affects the consciousness of the proletariat, in many countries of the world sharp class struggle provides the objective basis for the regeneration of Marxism as the theory of scientific socialism and proletarian revolution. It is not communism, but its parody, Stalinism, which has been shown to be a dead end.
Victorious counterrevolution has not only devastated the ex-Soviet and East European proletariats materially and ideologically; in a whole series of countries (e.g., Italy, France) where Communist parties commanded the allegiance of advanced layers of the working class, the proletariat has been sold the lie that “socialism has failed,” promoted by the ruling Stalinist bureaucracies who had headed these deformed workers states and presided over their destruction. The Kremlin abetted by the East German Stalinists led the counterrevolution in the DDR, rushing to hand the country over to the Fourth Reich. The Kremlin bureaucracy under Gorbachev carried out its ultimate, terminal betrayal, declaring that socialism had been a doomed utopian experiment and proclaiming the superiority of the capitalist market system. The disintegrating CPSU spawned openly counterrevolutionary gangs led by Boris Yeltsin who acted as the open agent of U.S. imperialism in the restoration of capitalism. Hence the Stalinist ruling castes and their cothinkers in the West bear direct responsibility for the destruction of the socialist aspirations of the advanced proletarian layers in Western Europe and elsewhere.
Trotsky’s assertion in the 1938 Transitional Program that “The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat” predates the present deep regression of proletarian consciousness. The reality of this post-Soviet period adds a new dimension to Trotsky’s observation. The only way in which this regression can be overcome and the working class can become a class for itself, i.e., fighting for socialist revolution, is to reforge an international Leninist-Trotskyist party as the leadership of the working class. Marxism must once again win the allegiance of the proletariat.
In China, the extreme nationalist ideology pushed by the ruling Stalinist bureaucracy is a direct bridge to capitalist restoration. The essence of “market reforms” counterrevolution in China is the bureaucracy seeking to become partners in exploitation with capitalist forces and especially the Chinese capitalists who were not destroyed as a class (as were their Russian counterparts after October 1917) but continued to function in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and elsewhere. China has carved out “special economic zones” as islands of imperialist exploitation and keeps the reverted Hong Kong’s capitalist economy untouched, while the army and bureaucracy generally are engaged in large-scale business ventures. Now the bureaucracy, sections of which seek to become the new capitalist exploiters, looks toward wholesale destruction of state industry, thereby posing the dismantling of what remains of the planned economy of the deformed workers state.
This course cannot be accomplished without breaking the resistance of the militant working class. The ruling Stalinist bureaucracy showed in Tiananmen Square in 1989—an incipient political revolution—both its fear of the proletariat and its intention to rely on brute force with no trappings of “glasnost” (Soviet leader Gorbachev’s political “openness”). The choices for China are proletarian political revolution or capitalist counterrevolution. The crucial factor is revolutionary leadership to reintroduce the internationalist class consciousness which animated the founding Chinese Communists of the early 1920s. The battle for workers political revolution in China has enormous stakes for the workers internationally. The outcome will have a huge impact in the remaining deformed workers states (Cuba, Vietnam and North Korea) and also in Asian countries like Indonesia, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines, where a militant young proletariat has emerged as a powerful factor.
4. The Theoretical and Historical Roots of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist)
As Trotsky described in his 1937 article, “Stalinism and Bolshevism”: “Reactionary epochs like ours not only disintegrate and weaken the working class and its vanguard but also lower the general ideological level of the movement and throw political thinking back to stages long since passed through. In these conditions, the task of the vanguard is above all not to let itself be carried along by the backward flow: it must swim against the current.” In this post-Soviet period, where Marxism is widely misidentified with Stalinism, there is a revival of everything from anarchist sympathies to anti-materialist idealism and mysticism. Karl Marx explained: “Religious suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of the soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions” (“Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” 1844).
The International Communist League bases itself on Marxist historical, dialectical materialism and continues the revolutionary traditions of the international working-class movement exemplified in the 1840s British Chartist movement and the Polish Party “Proletariat” (1882-86), the first workers party in the tsarist empire. We stand on the work of revolutionists such as Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg and Liebknecht. Above all we look to the experience of the Bolshevik Party which culminated in the Russian Revolution of 1917, the only revolution as yet made by the working class. This history illuminates where we come from, what we seek to defend and where we want to go.
We seek in particular to carry forward the international working-class perspectives of Marxism as developed in theory and practice by V.I. Lenin and L.D. Trotsky, as embodied in the decisions of the first four Congresses of the Communist International and by the 1938 Transitional Program and other key documents of the Fourth International, such as “War and the Fourth International” (1934). These materials are the indispensable documentary codification of the communist movement internationally, and are fundamental to the revolutionary tasks of our organization.
In this epoch of capitalism in advanced decay, we communists who have as our aim the proletarian conquest of state power and the reconstruction of society on a new egalitarian socialist basis are at the same time the most consistent defenders of the ideals of the Enlightenment and the gains of the bourgeois revolution: we are intransigent fighters for bourgeois-democratic liberties—for the right to bear arms; for the abolition of all monarchy and aristocratic privilege; for the separation of church and state; against the imposition of religious fundamentalism as a political program; for the defense of free speech and assembly against the encroachment of the bourgeois state; against barbaric “punishments” such as the death penalty; for juridical equality for women and minorities.
We are also intransigent defenders of proletarian rights as described in James Burnham’s pamphlet, The Peoples’ Front—The New Betrayal (1937): “There exists under capitalist democracy, to one or another extent, a third group of rights which are not, properly speaking, ‘democratic rights’ at all, but rather proletarian rights. These are such rights as the rights to picket and to strike and to organize. The historical origin of these rights is in all cases to be found in the independent struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois state.”
We also look for inspiration to James P. Cannon, a leader of the early American Communist Party who was won over to Trotskyism at the Sixth Congress of the Comintern and struggled to crystallize a Trotskyist formation, initially in the Communist Party, and to embed it in working-class struggle. Cannon was a principal founder of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). His struggle to build a proletarian party, forge a Leninist collective party leadership (rejecting the permanent factionalism of the early CP and opposing the cliquist intrigues which plagued, e.g., the French Trotskyists) and the 1939-40 fight against the petty-bourgeois opposition in the SWP (Shachtman and Burnham) which defected from Trotskyism over the Russian question—this is the revolutionary heritage which the ICL upholds.
However partially and mainly on his own national terrain, Cannon fought against the Pabloist revisionist current which arose in the post-World War II Trotskyist movement. In our basic documents (see especially “Genesis of Pabloism,” Spartacist No. 21, Fall 1972), while being sharply critical of the errors of the anti-Pabloites, we stand with them on this crucial fight for the survival of Trotskyism. Pabloism is characterized chiefly by a renunciation of the necessity for revolutionary leadership and an adaptation to existing Stalinist, social-democratic and petty-bourgeois nationalist leaderships. Following the creation of deformed workers states in East Europe, Pablo predicted “centuries of deformed workers states” and claimed that the Stalinist parties could “roughly outline a revolutionary orientation.”
Ill-equipped to explain the extension of Stalinism, Cannon and the orthodox Trotskyists first sought to ward off liquidationist conclusions by denying reality (e.g., refusing to recognize China as a deformed workers state until 1955). Cannon fought against Pablo’s rejection of the proletariat as the only class capable of transforming society and the denial of the need for a Trotskyist vanguard party. But this fight was never really fully carried through internationally. Denial of proletarian centrality lay behind every one of Pablo’s (and later Ernest Mandel’s) mainly vicarious experiments in revisionism (e.g., the “guerrilla road,” students as the “new mass vanguard”).
The origins of the International Communist League are in the Spartacist League/U.S. which began as the Revolutionary Tendency of the SWP and based itself primarily upon the British Socialist Labour League document, World Prospect for Socialism (1961), and two documents by the Revolutionary Tendency, In Defense of a Revolutionary Perspective (1962) and especially Toward Rebirth of the Fourth International (1963), the latter submitted to the SWP’s 1963 Convention. At its founding conference in 1966, the Spartacist League/U.S. adopted a Declaration of Principles (see SL/U.S. Marxist Bulletin No. 9) which served as the model for this International Declaration of Principles. The International Communist League, by contributing to the theoretical clarification of the Marxist movement and to the reforging of the workers’ necessary organizational weapons, upholds the revolutionary proletarian principles of Marxism and will carry them forward to the vanguard of the working class.
“By its very nature opportunism is nationalistic, since it rests on the local and temporary needs of the proletariat and not on its historic tasks.... International unity is not a decorative facade for us, but the very axis of our theoretical views and our policy” (Leon Trotsky, “The Defense of the Soviet Union and the Opposition,” 1929). From its inception as a small handful of young Trotskyists bureaucratically expelled from the SWP, the Spartacist League’s perspective and actions were directed toward the rebirth of the Fourth International and against American-centeredness.
In 1974 the Declaration for the Organization of an International Trotskyist Tendency was adopted, formally constituting the international Spartacist tendency. This document sharply attacked the federated, non-Bolshevik practices of our pseudo-Trotskyist competitors, the SWP, United Secretariat and Gerry Healy’s International Committee, all of whom hid behind the paper tiger of the blatantly undemocratic U.S. Voorhis Act to evade the practice of revolutionary Leninist internationalism. In contrast the iSt (forerunner to the ICL) forthrightly declared that it would be governed by the principle of international democratic-centralism.
The first delegated international conference held in 1979 elected an international executive committee. Since then the ICL has marked modest achievements in the international extension of our tendency to Latin America and South Africa and further extensions in Europe and Asia. This international growth has been a vital counterweight to the deforming pressures of our largest section existing in the protracted relatively reactionary political climate of the United States.
In 1989 the iSt became the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist).
Stalinism dragged the banner of communism through the mud while systematically perverting the understanding of every basic principle and term of Marxism, and the general level of identification of human progress with the idea of communism stands at a relative low point. But the workings of capitalist imperialism generate anew a raw subjective hatred of oppression among millions across the globe. The absence of genuinely communist leadership is acutely felt by many and the program of Leninist internationalism can be put forward with great impact.
Investment by imperialists in some low-wage “Third World” countries has created proletarian concentrations in hitherto unlikely areas for major conflicts between labor and capital. In our effort to further extend our party beyond the advanced Western countries, we seek to infuse our international with the courage of Bolsheviks like Kote Tsintsadze:
“It took altogether extraordinary conditions like czarism, illegality, prison, and deportation, many years of struggle against the Mensheviks, and especially the experience of three revolutions to produce fighters like Kote Tsintsadze.... The Communist parties in the West have not yet brought up fighters of Tsintsadze’s type. This is their besetting weakness, determined by historical reasons but nonetheless a weakness. The Left Opposition in the Western countries is not an exception in this respect and it must well take note of it.”
— Trotsky, “At the Fresh Grave of Kote Tsintsadze,” 7 January 1931
5. The International Character of the Socialist Revolution
Historic experience has shown that the road to socialism can be opened only through the creation of dual power culminating in the destruction of the capitalist state and the victory of the workers state and development of a new social order. The police, military, bureaucratic, juridical, and political apparatus of the old order cannot be reformed to serve the proletariat’s interests, but must be smashed and replaced by the dictatorship of the proletariat—a workers government based on councils of working people and supported by the workers’ armed strength. Such a state would defend itself against the counterrevolutionary efforts of the deposed ruling class to return to power and would reorganize the economy along rational lines. As the economic basis of social classes dwindles, the workers state would more and more assume a purely administrative function, finally withering away with the advent of classless communism. But to realize this aim requires the destruction of capitalist imperialism as a world system and the establishment of a world socialist division of labor.
The international character of the working class gives it a potentially enormous superiority over the bourgeoisie, as capitalism operates by anarchistic methods which set one national capitalist class against another and constantly create new unevenness and crises. In order to realize this superiority, the proletariat needs an international party to unify the class across national and other divisions and to coordinate the interdependent struggles of the workers of every country. While the revolution may begin in a single country, any partial victory will be secured only with the spread of revolution to other countries and the eventual world dominance of socialist economic organization. We fight to reforge the Fourth International, the world party of socialist revolution, whose program and purposes remain as valid today as at its founding in 1938.
A Leninist party is not simply built through linear recruitment, but through programmatically based splits with opportunists, as well as fusions with revolutionary elements breaking from centrism. Particularly when fusions are undertaken across national boundaries, there must be a thorough period of testing to establish solid underlying political agreement. We aim to bring together groups whose orientation is toward the achievement of new October Revolutions—nothing else, nothing other, nothing less.
6. The Vanguard Role of the Working Class in the Defense of All the Oppressed
Central to the Marxist perspective of world socialism is the vanguard role of the working class, and particularly the decisive weight of the proletariat of the industrialized countries. Only the working class has the social power and compulsion of clear objective interest to liberate mankind from oppression. Having no stake in maintaining the bourgeois order, its enormous power rests in its productive role, its numbers and organization.
The continued rule of a small handful of capitalists is maintained only through keeping the working class divided and confused as to its true situation. In the United States, the ruling class succeeded in exploiting deep divisions in the proletariat, first along religious and ethnic and later along racial lines. As part of an oppressed race-color caste, the black workers are doubly oppressed and require special modes of struggle (for example, transitional organizations such as labor/black struggle leagues). The working class transcends such divisions only through struggle and highly reversibly. Socialism in the United States will be achieved only by the common struggle of black and white workers under the leadership of a multiracial revolutionary vanguard.
The U.S. black question is defined by the particular history of the United States: slavery, the Civil War defeat of the Southern slavocracy by Northern industrial capitalism and the bourgeoisie’s betrayal of Radical Reconstruction’s promise of equality, leading to the racist segregation of black people despite the economic integration of black toilers into the proletariat at the bottom. The forcible segregation of blacks, integral to American capitalism, has been resisted by the black masses whenever a perceived possibility for such struggle has been felt. Hence our program for the U.S. is revolutionary integrationism—the full integration of blacks into an egalitarian, socialist America—and our program of “black liberation through socialist revolution.”
Modern capitalism, i.e., imperialism, reaching into all areas of the planet, in the course of the class struggle and as economic need demands, brings into the proletariat at its bottom new sources of cheaper labor, principally immigrants from poorer and less-developed regions of the world—workers with few rights who are deemed more disposable in times of economic contraction. Thus capitalism in ongoing fashion creates different strata among the workers, while simultaneously amalgamating the workers of many different lands. Everywhere, the capitalists, abetted by aristocracy-of-labor opportunists, try to poison class consciousness and solidarity among the workers by fomenting religious, national and ethnic divisions. The struggle for the unity and integrity of the working class against chauvinism and racism is thus a vital task for the proletarian vanguard.
Today anti-immigrant bigotry defines racist/rightist politics and is an acid test for the workers movement and left from West Europe to South Africa to East Asia. The ICL fights against deportations—for full citizenship rights for all immigrants! For labor/minority mobilizations to stop the fascists! For workers defense guards! For multiracial/ multiethnic workers militias against communalist violence!
Fascist demagogues feed off unemployment, immiseration and insecurity endemic to the capitalist system. Fascist terror and government attacks on immigrants and other oppressed minorities can be combatted effectively only from the perspective of overthrowing the capitalist system and replacing it with an internationally planned and collectivized economy. As Trotsky wrote in 1930 when under the impact of the Great Depression the Nazi Party emerged as a real threat to take power in Germany: “The Soviet United States of Europe—that is the only correct slogan which points the way out of the splintering of Europe, which threatens not only Germany but all of Europe with complete economic and cultural decline” (“The Turn in the Communist International and the Situation in Germany,” 26 September 1930).
The oppression of women, youth, minorities and all sectors of the oppressed must be analyzed and addressed in each country to find the most favorable point at which to apply the Marxist lever. As Lenin wrote in What Is To Be Done? (1902): “...the Social-Democrat’s ideal should not be the trade union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects; who is able to generalise all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation; who is able to take advantage of every event, however small, in order to set forth before all his socialist convictions and his democratic demands, in order to clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat.”
The ICL fights for women’s liberation through socialist revolution. In countries of belated capitalist development, the acute oppression and degradation of women is deeply rooted in pre-capitalist “tradition” and religious obscurantism. In these countries the fight against women’s oppression is therefore a motor force of revolutionary struggle. The condition of women in the most advanced capitalist countries, while far different, shows the limits of freedom and social progress under capitalism; revolutionists are the most consistent champions of women’s elementary democratic rights such as free legal abortion and “equal pay for equal work.” The reactionary social climate aggravated by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the concerted campaign to roll back “welfare state” protections of the masses has brought a sharp rise in anti-sex, anti-woman and anti-homosexual bigotry. We oppose all laws against crimes without victims, including those which criminalize homosexual or other consensual sexual activity, prostitution and drug use.
The oppression of women, the oldest social inequality in human history, goes back to the beginning of private property and will not be abolished short of the abolition of class-divided society. The fundamental social institution oppressing women is the family, whose function in the raising of the next generation must be superseded, with women’s household labor replaced by collective institutions in a socialist society. We stand on the Bolsheviks’ record of special organized work among women to win them to the socialist cause, described in early issues of the SL/U.S. journal Women and Revolution.
While fighting against every manifestation of bourgeois injustice, we oppose sectoralism, which denies the possibility of consciousness transcending an individual’s own experience of oppression, and fight to unite the vanguard of all oppressed social layers behind the proletariat in the fight for socialism.
Open the road to the youth! Key to building the international proletarian revolutionary party is the struggle to win a new generation of youth to the principles and program of Trotskyism. This includes not only the struggle to recruit young workers but also work among students. A particularly volatile layer of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia, students can play an active role in “radical” activities of either the left or the right. We seek to win students to the side of the working class, recognizing like Lenin that a revolutionary party is built through the fusion of declassed revolutionary intellectuals with the most advanced layers of the proletariat. Youth serve a particular role as the cannon fodder for the wars and other military adventures of the capitalist rulers. Our opposition to the bourgeois army and to conscription is antithetical to that of pacifists or those who seek a petty-bourgeois exemption from an obligation imposed on working-class youth in many countries. We go in with our class with the purpose of winning proletarian soldiers to the program and purpose of communist revolution. In a revolutionary situation we understand that key to proletarian victory is the splitting of the conscript army along class lines.
Through our youth work we seek to recruit and train the future cadres of the revolutionary party through establishing transitional youth organizations which are both organizationally independent of and politically subordinate to the revolutionary party.
7. The Bourgeois Basis of Revisionism
Insofar as revolutionary consciousness is not prevalent among the workers, their consciousness is determined by the ideology of the ruling class. Objectively capitalism rules through the power of capital, its monopoly of the means of violence, and its control of all existing social institutions. But it prefers, when possible, to rule with the “consent” of the masses through the dominance of bourgeois ideology among the oppressed, fostering illusions and concealing its bloody essence. Nationalism, patriotism, racism and religion penetrate into the organizations of the workers, centrally through the agency of the petty-bourgeois “labor lieutenants”—the parasitic trade-union, social-democratic and Stalinist-derived bureaucracies based on the privileged upper strata of the working class. If not replaced by revolutionary leaderships, these reformists will allow the organizations of the workers to become impotent in the fight for the economic needs of the workers under conditions of bourgeois democracy or even allow these organizations to be destroyed by victorious fascism.
In his 1916 work on Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin laid out the material basis of the opportunism of the labor bureaucracy:
“The receipt of high monopoly profits by the capitalists in one of the numerous branches of industry, in one of the numerous countries, etc., makes it economically possible for them to bribe certain sections of the workers, and for a time a fairly considerable minority of them, and win them to the side of the bourgeoisie of a given industry or given nation against all the others. The intensification of antagonisms between imperialist nations for the division of the world increases this urge. And so there is created that bond between imperialism and opportunism.... The most dangerous of all in this respect are those [like the Menshevik, Martov] who do not wish to understand that the fight against imperialism is a sham and humbug unless it is inseparably bound up with the fight against opportunism.”
The degeneration and capitulation of tendencies within the Marxist movement has been of especially critical value to the preservation of imperialist rule. Submission to the pressure of bourgeois society has repeatedly thrust nominally Marxist currents toward revisionism, the process of ruling out Marxism’s essential conclusion that the state is an instrument of class rule. Bernsteinian revisionism, Menshevism, Stalinism and its Maoist variant—all are illustrations of this process which constitutes a bridge to overtly reformist practices. Globally, besides the Stalinists and the Social Democrats, nationalists and the politically religious heavily work to derail working-class struggle.
Centrism is that programmatically heterogeneous and theoretically amorphous current in the workers movement that occupies numerous shadings in the political spectrum between Marxism and reformism, between revolutionary internationalism and opportunist social patriotism. As Trotsky noted in his 1934 article, “Centrism and the Fourth International”:
“For a revolutionary Marxist the struggle against reformism is now almost fully replaced by the struggle against centrism.... The struggle with hidden or masked opportunists must therefore be transferred chiefly to the sphere of practical conclusions from revolutionary requisites.”
In situations of sharp class struggle, the centrist pretenders who form part of the syphilitic chain maintaining bourgeois class rule become both more dangerous and more vulnerable to revolutionary exposure. The revolutionary Trotskyist vanguard will grow at the expense of our centrist opponents, or vice versa. The outcome of this confrontation between Marxism and centrism is a crucial factor in the success or failure of the revolution.
It is the unappealing reformist performance of social democracy and Stalinism that generated a revival of anarchism, an anti-Marxist ideology based on radical democratic idealism, which had been rendered moribund in the early years of this century by the revolutionary Marxism of the Bolsheviks. Similarly among unionists a revival of anti-political syndicalist moods is attributable to disgust with the behavior of all the old “socialist” parliamentarians; but this retreat to “pure” economic struggle only allows militant struggle to burn itself out without ever really challenging the reformist traitors.
8. The Struggle Against Imperialist War
Leon Trotsky codified the program of proletarian internationalist opposition to the wars inevitably engendered by decaying capitalism in his 1934 document “War and the Fourth International.” As Trotsky noted: “The transformation of imperialist war into civil war is that general strategic task to which the whole work of a proletarian party during war should be subordinated.” In interimperialist wars such as WW I and WW II, and in other wars between two relatively equally developed capitalist states, our basic principle is revolutionary defeatism: irreconcilable opposition to the capitalist slaughter and a recognition that defeat of one’s own bourgeoisie is a lesser evil. As Wilhelm Liebknecht said, “Not a man and not a penny” for bourgeois militarism.
In wars of imperialist depredation against colonial, semicolonial or dependent nations, the duty of the proletariat in every country is to aid the oppressed nations against the imperialists, while maintaining complete political independence from bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalist forces.
The proletariat must give unconditional military defense against imperialism to the deformed workers states in China, Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba. Our position flows from the proletarian class character of these states, embodied in the collectivized property relations—nationalized property, planned economy, monopoly of foreign trade and banking, etc.—established by social revolutions that destroyed capitalism. Despite the bureaucratic deformations of these states, our defense of them against the class enemy is unconditional, i.e., it does not depend on the prior overthrow of the Stalinist bureaucracies, nor does it depend upon the circumstances and immediate causes of the conflict.
The drive toward imperialist war is inherent in the capitalist system. Today’s ideologues of “globalization” are projecting a false vision that the rival interests of competing nation states have been transcended in this post-Soviet period. This is nothing other than a rehash of Karl Kautsky’s theory of “ultra-imperialism.” As Lenin wrote in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism:
“Compare this reality—the vast diversity of economic and political conditions, the extreme disparity in the rate of development of the various countries, etc., and the violent struggles among the imperialist states—with Kautsky’s silly little fable about ‘peaceful’ ultra-imperialism.... Is not American and other finance capital, which divided the whole world peacefully with Germany’s participation in, for example, the international rail syndicate, or in the international mercantile shipping trust, now engaged in redividing the world on the basis of a new relation of forces that is being changed by methods anything but peaceful?”
9. The National Question and the Right of All Nations to Self-Determination
As Trotsky wrote in “War and the Fourth International” (10 June 1934):
“Having used the nation for its development, capitalism has nowhere, in no single corner of the world, solved fully the national problem.”
The right of self-determination applies to all nations. The struggle by the proletarian leadership for self-determination of the oppressed nations is a powerful tool to break the grip of petty-bourgeois nationalist leaders on the masses. The ICL stands by Lenin’s polemic (The Right of Nations to Self-Determination, February-May 1914) wherein Lenin states: “The interests of the working class and of its struggle against capitalism demand complete solidarity and the closest unity of the workers of all nations; they demand resistance to the nationalist policy of the bourgeoisie of every nationality.”
We stand by Lenin’s argument that “Successful struggle against exploitation requires that the proletariat be free of nationalism, and be absolutely neutral, so to speak, in the fight for supremacy that is going on among the bourgeoisie of the various nations. If the proletariat of any one nation gives the slightest support to the privileges of its ‘own’ national bourgeoisie, that will inevitably rouse distrust among the proletariat of another nation; it will weaken the international class solidarity of the workers and divide them, to the delight of the bourgeoisie. Repudiation of the right to self-determination or to secession inevitably means, in practice, support for the privileges of the dominant nation.”
However, when the particular demand for national self-determination—a democratic demand—contradicts class questions or the general needs of the class struggle, we oppose its exercise. As Lenin noted in “The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up” (July 1916): “The several demands of democracy, including self-determination, are not an absolute, but only a small part of the general-democratic (now: general-socialist) world movement. In individual concrete cases, the part may contradict the whole; if so, it must be rejected.” Lenin strongly supported Poland’s right of self-determination, arguing this point against other revolutionary socialists like Rosa Luxemburg. But in the particular context of World War I, Lenin argued: “The Polish Social-Democrats cannot, at the moment, raise the slogan of Poland’s independence, for the Poles, as proletarian internationalists, can do nothing about it without stooping, like the ‘Fracy’ [social-chauvinists], to humble servitude to one of the imperialist monarchies.”
In our approach to the interpenetration of two or more peoples claiming the same territory, the ICL is guided by the practice and experience of the Bolsheviks, in particular the discussion on the Ukraine at the Second Congress of the Communist International. The ICL elaborated on this position with regard to the Near East, Cyprus, Northern Ireland and the former Yugoslavia. In such situations, under capitalism—in which the state power is necessarily dominated by a single nation—the democratic right of national self-determination cannot be achieved for one people without violating the national rights of the other. Hence these conflicts cannot be equitably resolved within a capitalist framework. The precondition for a democratic solution is to sweep away all the bourgeoisies of the region.
10. Colonial Revolution, Permanent Revolution and the “Guerrilla Road”
Experience since the Second World War has completely validated the Trotskyist theory of the permanent revolution which declares that in the imperialist epoch the bourgeois-democratic revolution can be completed only by a proletarian dictatorship supported by the peasantry. Only under the leadership of the revolutionary proletariat can the colonial and semicolonial countries obtain genuine national emancipation. To open the road to socialism requires the extension of the revolution to the advanced capitalist countries.
The October Revolution itself refuted the Menshevik idea of the revolution as stagist; the Mensheviks proposed a political bloc with the liberal Cadet party to place the bourgeoisie in power. “The Menshevik idea of union between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie actually meant submission of the workers as well as the peasants to the liberals.... In 1905 the Mensheviks merely lacked the courage to draw all the necessary inferences from their theory of ‘bourgeois’ revolution. In 1917, pursuing their ideas to the bitter end, they broke their neck” (Trotsky, Three Concepts of the Russian Revolution, first published 1942).
Lenin’s Bolsheviks were closer to Trotsky’s view in that they insisted that the Russian bourgeoisie was incapable of leading a democratic revolution. The Bolsheviks argued for an alliance between the working class and the peasantry, culminating in the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry,” a flawed slogan projecting a state defending the interests of two different classes. In 1917 following the February revolution, it took a sharp fight within the Bolshevik Party for Lenin’s “April Theses” line for the dictatorship of the proletariat to prevail. However the failure of the Bolshevik Party to explicitly recognize the vindication of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution by the October Revolution and the failure to explicitly repudiate the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” then became a conduit for the forces later posturing as the Bolshevik “old guard” (e.g. Stalin) to attack Trotsky, the theory of permanent revolution and the revolutionary internationalist premises and implications of the Bolshevik Revolution.
Trotsky wrote in his 29 March 1930 introduction to the German edition of The Permanent Revolution:
“Under the guise of providing an economic justification for internationalism, Stalin in reality presents a justification for national socialism. It is false that world economy is simply a sum of national parts of one and the same type. It is false that the specific features are ‘merely supplementary to the general features,’ like warts on a face. In reality, the national peculiarities represent an original combination of the basic features of the world process.”
In The Permanent Revolution (30 November 1929) Trotsky explained:
“Under the conditions of the imperialist epoch the national democratic revolution can be carried through to a victorious end only when the social and political relationships of the country are mature for putting the proletariat in power as the leader of the masses of the people. And if this is not yet the case? Then the struggle for national liberation will produce only very partial results, results directed entirely against the working masses.
class="quote"“A backward colonial or semi-colonial country, the proletariat of which is insufficiently prepared to unite the peasantry and take power, is thereby incapable of bringing the democratic revolution to its conclusion.”
The partial character of the anti-capitalist revolutions in the colonial world leads us to reaffirm the Marxist-Leninist concept of the proletariat as the only social force capable of making the socialist revolution. The ICL fundamentally opposes the Maoist doctrine, rooted in Menshevism and Stalinist reformism, which rejects the vanguard role of the working class and substitutes peasant-based guerrilla warfare as the road to socialism.
A further extension of Marxism contributed by the International Communist League in analyzing Stalinism was our understanding of the Cuban Revolution (see Marxist Bulletin No. 8, “Cuba and Marxist Theory”), which retrospectively illuminated the course of the Yugoslav and Chinese Revolutions. In Cuba, a petty-bourgeois movement under exceptional circumstances—the absence of the working class as a contender for social power in its own right, the flight of the national bourgeoisie and hostile imperialist encirclement, and a lifeline thrown by the Soviet Union—did overthrow the old Batista dictatorship and eventually smash capitalist property relations. But Castroism (or other peasant-based guerrilla movements) cannot bring the working class to political power.
Under the most favorable historic circumstances conceivable, the petty-bourgeois peasantry was only capable of creating a bureaucratically deformed workers state, that is, a state of the same order as that issuing out of the political counterrevolution of Stalin in the Soviet Union, an anti-working-class regime which blocked the possibilities to extend social revolution into Latin America and North America, and suppressed Cuba’s further development in the direction of socialism. To place the working class in political power and open the road to socialist development requires a supplemental political revolution led by a Trotskyist party. With the destruction of the Soviet degenerated workers state and consequently no readily available lifeline against imperialist encirclement, the narrow historical opening in which petty-bourgeois forces were able to overturn local capitalist rule has been closed, underscoring the Trotskyist perspective of permanent revolution.
11. The Popular Front: Not a Tactic But the Greatest Crime
From Spain in 1936 to Chile in 1973, ripe opportunities for proletarian revolution have been derailed through the mechanism of the popular front, which ties the exploited to their exploiters, and opens the road to fascist and bonapartist dictatorships. Leon Trotsky asserted: “By lulling the workers and peasants with parliamentary illusions, by paralyzing their will to struggle, the People’s Front creates favorable conditions for the victory of fascism. The policy of coalition with the bourgeoisie must be paid for by the proletariat with years of new torments and sacrifice, if not by decades of fascist terror” (“The New Revolutionary Upsurge and the Tasks of the Fourth International,” July 1936).
Like Lenin and Trotsky, the ICL opposes in principle any coalition with capitalist parties (“popular fronts”) whether in government or in opposition, and we oppose voting for workers parties in popular fronts. Parliamentary governments formed by reformist workers parties (“bourgeois workers parties” as defined by Lenin) are capitalist governments administering capitalist rule (for example, various governments of the Labour Party in Britain). In cases where a mass reformist workers party presents itself as representing the interests of the working class independently of and against the parties of the bourgeoisie, it may be appropriate for revolutionaries to apply the tactic of critical support (“as a rope supports a hanged man”). Such critical electoral support serves as a means for revolutionists to exacerbate the contradiction between the proletarian base and the pro-capitalist leadership. However, the inclusion of even small non-proletarian political formations (such as liberals or eco-faddist “Greens” in the West, or bourgeois nationalists) acts as a guarantor of the bourgeois program, suppressing this contradiction.
The “anti-imperialist united front” is the particular form that class collaboration most often assumes in the colonial and ex-colonial countries, from the liquidation of the Chinese Communist Party into Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang in the 1920s to decades of prostration of the South African “left” before the African National Congress (ANC), which has become the imperialist-sponsored front men for neo-apartheid capitalism. Today in Latin America, “anti-Yankee” nationalism is the main tool whereby militant workers and insurgent peasants are induced to place their hopes in bourgeois “radicals.” Trotsky’s program of permanent revolution is the alternative to placing confidence in fantasies resting upon the backward, imperialist-dependent bourgeoisie of one’s own oppressed country as the vehicle for liberation.
12. The Revolutionary Party: Its Program, Organization, and Discipline
“Without a party, apart from a party, over the head of a party, or with a substitute for a party, the proletarian revolution cannot conquer” (Leon Trotsky, The Lessons of October [1924]). We strive to build the revolutionary party, the instrument for bringing political consciousness to the proletariat, seeking to become the main offensive and guiding force through which the working class makes and consolidates the socialist revolution. Our aim is a revolutionary general staff whose leading cadre must be trained and tested in the class struggle. The party fights to gain the leadership of the class on the basis of its program and revolutionary determination; it seeks to understand the whole of the past in order to assess the present situation. The challenge is to recognize and boldly respond to the revolutionary moment when it comes, that moment when the forces of the proletariat are most confident and prepared and the forces of the old order most demoralized and disorganized. In such a revolutionary party is crystallized the aspiration of the masses to obtain their freedom; it symbolizes their revolutionary will and will be the instrument of their victory.
As Trotsky wrote in the Transitional Program:
“The strategic task of the next period—a prerevolutionary period of agitation, propaganda, and organization—consists in overcoming the contradiction between the maturity of the objective revolutionary conditions and the immaturity of the proletariat and its vanguard (the confusion and disappointment of the older generation, the inexperience of the younger generation). It is necessary to help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demands and the socialist program of the revolution. This bridge should include a system of transitional demands, stemming from today’s conditions and from today’s consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat.”
The vanguard party must devote the same conscious attention to the question of party leadership as the party devotes to fighting for the consciousness of the advanced workers. In “The Mistakes of Rightist Elements of the Communist League on the Trade Union Question” (4 January 1931), Trotsky wrote:
“Whatever may be the social sources and political causes of opportunistic mistakes and deviations, they are always reduced ideologically to an erroneous understanding of the revolutionary party, of its relation to other proletarian organizations and to the class as a whole.”
The united front is a primary tactic especially in unsettled periods to both mobilize a broad mass in struggle for a common demand and to strengthen the authority of the vanguard party within the class. The formula of “march separately, strike together” means action in unison in defense of the workers’ interests, while allowing for the clash of competing opinions in the context of a common political experience.
The communist tactic of the united front allows the vanguard to approach separate and otherwise hostile organizations for common action. It is counterposed to the “Third Period” Stalinists’ “united front from below” which demands unity with the “ranks” against their leaders, reinforcing organizational lines and precluding joint action. A united front requires full “freedom of criticism”—i.e., participants are able to present their own slogans and propaganda.
A hallmark of retreat from revolutionary purpose is the practice of propaganda blocs: the subordination of the proletarian program to opportunists in the name of “unity.” A similar purpose is served by the idea of a “strategic united front” which transforms the united front into a hoped-for standing “coalition” on a lowest-common-denominator program. As against all such schemes, the revolutionary party cannot be built without a fight for political clarity and relentless exposure of reformist and especially centrist forces.
The ICL stands on the principles and record of the International Labor Defense, the American arm of the early Comintern’s International Red Aid. We seek to carry forward the ILD’s heritage of non-sectarian, partisan class-struggle defense work, defending irrespective of their political views militant fighters for the working class and oppressed. While utilizing all democratic rights available from the bourgeois legal system, we seek to mobilize mass labor-centered protest, placing all our faith in the power of the masses and no faith whatever in the “justice” of the bourgeois courts. The greatest obstacle to reviving the traditions of labor solidarity is the infamous practices of Stalinist and social-democratic organizations: violence within the workers movement, slander of opponents, and manipulative “front group” maneuvering.
The organizational principle within the International Communist League is democratic-centralism, a balance between internal democracy and functional discipline. As a combat organization, the revolutionary vanguard must be capable of unified and decisive action at all times in the class struggle. All members must be mobilized to carry out the decisions of the majority; authority must be centralized in its elected leadership which interprets tactically the organization’s program. Internal democracy permits the collective determination of the party’s line in accord with the needs felt by the party’s ranks who are closest to the class as a whole. The right to factional democracy is vital to a living movement; the very existence of this right helps to channel differences into less absorbing means of resolution.
The discipline of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) flows from its program and purpose, the victory of the socialist revolution and the liberation of all mankind.
13. We Will Intervene to Change History!
“Marxism is not a dogma, but a guide to action.” The International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) is in the forefront of the struggle for a socialist future. The ICL is the only international organization which presently has a correct general conception of the world situation and of the tasks facing the world proletariat. The disparity between our small numbers and the power of our program is huge. Currently the sections of the ICL are or aim to be fighting propaganda groups. Our immediate task is the education and formation of cadres, recruiting the most advanced layers of workers and youth by winning them over to our full program through explanation of our views in sharp counterposition to those of our centrist opponents. Revolutionary regroupments on the program of Leninist internationalism are the means to resolve the disproportion between our small forces and our task.
Like Lenin’s Bolsheviks, our aim is to fuse together intellectual and proletarian elements, above all through the development and struggle of communist industrial fractions. By means of propagandistic literature one can educate the first cadres, but one cannot rally the proletarian vanguard which lives neither in a circle nor in a schoolroom but in a class society, in a factory, in the organizations of the masses, a vanguard to whom one must know how to speak in the language of its experiences. Even the best prepared propagandist cadres will inevitably disintegrate if they do not find contact with the daily struggle of the masses.
Communist work in the trade unions must be oriented to winning over the base, not unprincipled blocs and maneuvers at the top. Absolutely essential is the struggle for the complete and unconditional independence of the trade unions in relation to the capitalist state. Use of the bourgeois courts against political opponents in the trade unions or the workers movement is a breach of the principle of proletarian independence and an attack on the labor movement’s strength. Inviting the class enemy to intervene in the unions’ internal affairs promotes illusions in bourgeois democracy by portraying the state as “neutral” between classes. Police are not “workers in uniform” but the hired guns of the capitalist state; they have no place in the workers’ organizations. The ICL fights for “cops out of the unions.” Our fight for the principle of proletarian independence from the state is underscored by the tendency pointed out by Trotsky in his unfinished 1940 essay, “Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay,” for the reformist trade unions to grow ever more intertwined with the state.
Communists seek to build the strongest possible unity of the working class against the capitalist exploiters; therefore, we oppose craft divisions in the proletariat and stand for industrial unionism, and oppose the splitting of the working class into competing unions based on different political tendencies or ethnic groupings. In contradistinction, the task of the communist vanguard is to clarify and sharpen the differences between competing political tendencies in order to assemble the cadre for a Leninist party. In Lenin’s time these different political tasks were reflected in different organizational forms: the Comintern composed of the party organizations representing the unique Bolshevik political program and the Profintern representing the struggle for the unity of the working class in the unions.
We believe that the reforging of a communist Fourth International, built of authentic communist parties on every inhabited continent and tested in thoroughgoing intervention in the class struggle, will be arduous and often dangerous. The road forward for all of humanity is for the presently small forces adhering to the revolutionary program of Lenin and Trotsky to forge parties with the experience, willpower and authority among the masses to lead successful proletarian revolutions. Yet as we seek to bring this program to bear among the world’s workers and oppressed, we must recognize that the possession of the technology of nuclear holocaust by an irrational imperialist ruling class foreshortens the possibilities: we don’t have a lot of time.
We are guided by the precepts and practices of comrades such as Lenin and Trotsky:
“To face reality squarely; not to seek the line of least resistance; to call things by their right names; to speak the truth to the masses, no matter how bitter it may be; not to fear obstacles; to be true in little things as in big ones; to base one’s program on the logic of the class struggle; to be bold when the hour for action arrives—these are the rules of the Fourth International.”
The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (1938)
These are the rules of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) as we go forward in the historical task of leading the working class to the victory of world socialism!
—February 1998
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