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.

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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

*A December 16th Veterans-Led March In Washington To Stop The Wars In Afghanistan And Iraq -From The "Stop These Wars" Website-All Out To Support The Vets

Click on the headline to link to the End These Wars Website.

Markin comment:

On November 11, 2010, Veterans Day, I marched with a contingent of Veterans For Peace in the Boston Veterans Day parade and posted an entry in this space about my take on the event. (See, A Stroll In The Park On Veterans Day- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops From Iraq and Afghanistan!, dated November 11, 2010). As part of that commentary I noted the following:

“Listen, I have been to many marches and demonstrations for democratic, progressive, socialist and communist causes in my long political life. However, of all those events none, by far, has been more satisfying that to march alongside my fellow ex-soldiers who have “switched” over to the other side and are now part of the struggle against war, the hard, hard struggle against the permanent war machine that this imperial system has embarked upon. From as far back as in the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) days I have always felt that ex-soldiers (hell, active soldiers too, if you can get them) have had just a little bit more “street cred” on the war issue than the professors, pacifists and little old ladies in tennis sneakers who have traditionally led the anti-war movements. Maybe those brothers (and in my generation it was mainly only brothers) and now sisters may not quite pose the questions of war and peace the way I do, or the way that I would like them to do, but they are kindred spirits.”

Now comes word (see announcement below) that veterans are leading an action in Washington, D.C. on December 16, 2010 in front of the White House under the rubric of Peace On Earth. There is no question that I, the anti-imperialist committee that I am a member of in Boston, any self-respecting radical or, hell, any self-respecting little old lady in tennis sneakers for that matter, could endorse this thing. If for no other reason that it begs, literally begs, Warmonger-In-Chief Obama (of the double troop escalations in Afghanistan with nobody holding a gun to his head remember) to “do the right thing.”

That said, the sentiment expressed above in that Veterans Day commentary still holds true. So, I , and all I can gather to go with me, will be in Washington on December 16th. too. I will hold my nose in doing so although not my tongue trying to get my fellow vets to change course. In my hand I will hold this slogan-Obama-Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops From Iraq and Afghanistan! And I won’t be begging him about it, no way.
************

WELCOME TO STOP THESE WARS Join Us For Peace on Earth!

Posted on November 19, 2010 by admin

During the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King called our government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” True then—and even more so today.

A few years before that, in 1964 Mario Savio made his great speech at Berkeley; at the end he says, “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”

There are children being orphaned, maimed or killed every day, in our name, with our tax dollars; there are soldiers and civilians dying or being maimed for life, in order to generate profits for the most odious imperialistic corporate war machine ever, again in our name. How long are we going to let this go on? Until it is too late, until this destructive machine destroys all of us and the planet to boot?

Wikileaks has revealed the documented horror of U.S. war-making, beyond what any of us imagined. It’s time veterans and others express our resistance directly and powerfully by putting ourselves on the line, once again—honestly, courageously and without one drop of apology for doing so. It is not we who are the murderers, torturers or pillagers of the earth.

Profit and power-hungry warmongers are destroying everything we hold dear and sacred.

In the early thirties, WW1 vets descended on Washington, D.C., to demand their promised bonuses, it being the depths of the Depression. General Douglas MacArthur and his sidekick Dwight Eisenhower disregarded President Herbert Hoover’s order and burned their encampment down and drove the vets out of town at bayonet point.

We are today’s bonus marchers, and we’re coming to claim our bonus–PEACE.

Join activist veterans marching in solidarity to the White House, refusing to move, demanding the end of U.S. wars, which includes U.S. support—financial and tactical—for the Israeli war machine as well.

If we can gather enough courageous souls, nonviolently refusing to leave the White House, willing to be dragged away and arrested if necessary, we will send a message that will be seen worldwide. “End these wars – now!” We will carry forward a flame of resistance to the war machine that will not diminish as we effectively begin to place ourselves, as Mario Savio said, “upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus.” and we will make it stop.

We believe that the power of courageous, committed people is greater than that of corporate warmongers. But we will only see our power when we use it collectively, when we stand together.

With courage, persistence, boldness and numbers, we can eventually make this monstrous war machine grind to a halt, so that our children and all children everywhere can grow up in a peaceful world.

Join us at the White House on December 16th!

For a world in peace,


Nic Abramson, Veterans For Peace; Elliott Adams, Past President, Veterans For Peace; Laurie Arbeiter, Activist Response Team; Ken Ashe, Veterans For Peace; Ellen Barfield, Veterans For Peace; Brian Becker, National Coordinator, ANSWER Coalition; Medea Benjamin, Co-Founder, CODEPINK for Peace; Frida Berrigan, War Resisters League; Bruce Berry, Veterans For Peace; Leah Bolger, Veterans For Peace; Elaine Brower, Anti-war Military Mom and World Can’t Wait; Scott Camil, Veterans For Peace; Ross Caputi, Justice For Fallujah Project; Kim Carlyle, Veterans For Peace; Armen Chakerian, Coalition to Stop the $30 Billion to Israel; Matthis Chiroux, Iraq War Resister Veteran; Gerry Condon, Veterans For Peace; Will Covert, Veterans For Peace; Dave Culver, Veterans For Peace; Matt Daloisio, Witness Against Torture; Ellen Davidson, War Resisters League; Mike Ferner, President, Veterans For Peace; Nate Goldshlag, Veterans For Peace; Clare Hanrahan, War Crimes Times; Mike Hearington, Veterans For Peace; Mark Johnson, Executive Director. Fellowship of Reconciliation; Tarak Kauff begin_of_the_skype_highlighting end_of_the_skype_highlighting, Veterans For Peace; Kathy Kelly, Voices For Creative Nonviolence; Sandy Kelson, Veterans For Peace; Joel Kovel, Veterans For Peace; Erik Lobo, Veterans For Peace; Joe Lombardo, United National Antiwar Committee; Ken Mayers, Veterans For Peace; Nancy Munger, Co-President, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom; Fred Nagel, Veterans For Peace; Pat O’Brien, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom; Bill Perry, Vietnam Veterans Against the War; Vito Piccininno, Veterans For Peace; Mike Prysner, Co-Founder, March Forward; Ward Reilly, Veterans For Peace; Laura Roskos, Co-President, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom; Cindy Sheehan, Founder, Peace of the Action; David Swanson, author; Debra Sweet, National Director, World Can’t Wait; Mike Tork, Veterans For Peace; Hart Viges, Iraq Veterans Against the War; Father Louie Vitale, SOA Watch; Jay Wenk, Veterans For Peace; Linda Wiener, Veterans For Peace; Diane Wilson, Veterans For Peace; Col. Ann Wright, Veterans For Peace; Doug Zachary, Veterans For Peace



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Endorsers of the December 16 Veteran-Led Civil Resistance against War

Posted on November 19, 2010 by admin

■Veterans For Peace

■ANSWER

■CodePink

■Fellowship of Reconciliation

■March Forward

■Peace of the Action

■Peace Action Montgomery

■United National Anti-War Committee

■Voices for Creative Non-Violence

■Voters for Peace

■War Resisters League

■Washington Peace Center

■Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom

■World Can’t Wait

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Veterans Speak Out on December 16 Action

Posted on November 13, 2010 by admin

Fred Nagel

“Those who know the full extent of America’s imperial reach have a unique obligation to let their fellow citizens know what is being done in all of our names. But it is more than an obligation for veterans, since many of us have served in America’s invasions and occupations abroad. Perhaps it is also a privilege, another chance to express our love for this country, this time putting their bodies on the line to demand that America once again join the peace loving nations of this world.”—Fred Nagel, radio host and member, Veterans For Peace

Jay Wenk

“I listened today to Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech given at New York’s Riverside Church in 1967, “Why I Oppose the Vietnam War.” If any of us don’t know it, make it a point to hear it. His truth is timeless. When I hear it, I feel as deeply as possible, the necessity and the responsibility to be a Veteran For Peace. My conscience, my refusal to let the world change me are in the forefront of my existence. I will be with my brothers and sisters on Dec. 16.”—Jay Wenk, member, Veterans For Peace

Leah Bolger

“I am shamed by the actions of my government and I will do everything in my power to make it stop killing innocent people in my name.”—Leah Bolger, CDR, USN (Ret), 1980-2000; National Vice-President, Veterans For Peace

“‘….to protect and defend the Constitution…’ I took that oath as a sailor, and later as a police officer. I don’t consider that oath to have an expiration date because I believe in accountability, justice and peace. Where I come from, we say: ‘You don’t have to stand tall, but you’ve GOT to stand up.’ Stand up December 16, 2010, at the White House.”—Erik Lobo, member, Veterans For Peace

“War for empire, endless and cruel war, resulting in untold suffering, destruction and death for millions, a war economy here at home that steals from ordinary citizens and makes the few enormously wealthy, these are powerful reasons for us to put our bodies on the wheels, the levers, the apparatus of this vile war-making machine and demand that it stop. Enough is enough. There is no glory, no heroism, no good wars, no justification whatsoever, it is all, all of it, based on lies. I’ll be in Washington on December 16 with other veterans, resisting this war mentality, demanding its end.—Tarak Kauff, Veterans For Peace

* Out In The Be-Bop Night- Fragments On Working Class Culture- Scenes From The Search For The Blue-Pink Great American West Night-Sweet, Moonless Ohio Dreams-1969

Markin comment:

The scene below stands (or falls) as a moment in support of that eternal search mentioned in the headline.

Scene Four: Sweet, Moonless Ohio Dreams In The Search For The Blue-Pink Great American West Night

The 1960s asphalt-driven, white-lined, hitchhike road, the quest for the blue-pink great American West night, the eternal midnight creep of over-weight trucks with their company-seeking, benny-high, overwrought teamster drivers, and the steam-driven, onion-filled meatloaf-milk-heavy mashed potatoes-and limpid carrots daily special diner truck stop are all meshed together. You could say that there was no hitchhike road, and no blue-pink dreams, if the old-fashioned caboose (sometimes literally) diner was not part of the mix that glued things together out on that lonely highway.

No, I do not speak of the then creeping family-friendly one-size-fits-all but still steamed meats-milky starches-sogged vegetable franchise interstate restaurants that now dot the roads from here to ‘Frisco but back road, back hitchhike road if you were smart, back old time route one, or sixty-six or twenty road where you had a chance for pushing distance and for feeling America in the raw. Hey, I have a million diner stories, diners with and without truck stops, diners famous and obscene, diners of every shape and composition to tell about. Or rather I have about three basic diner stories with a million steamed meat loaf-mashed taters-carrots (okay, maybe string beans, steamed, for a change-up)-bread pudding for dessert variations. I want to tell you one, one involving a young woman, and involving the great American night that drives these scenes. The other variations can wait their turns for some other time.

Car-less, and with no hope for any car any time soon, but with enough pent-up energy and anger to built a skyscraper single-handedly, I set out for the early May open roads, thumb in good working order, bedroll on one shoulder, life’s worldly goods in a knapsack on the other. It was that simple in those days. Today, sadly, it would take my rental of a major U-Haul truck, for starters. As always in those days as well, and some of you may know the spot if you have ever been in Boston (or, better, Cambridge) there was (and is) an old abandoned railroad yard that was turned into a truck depot near the entrance to the Massachusetts Turnpike where most of the truckers, the big diesel-fuelled ones, the doubled-wheeled, eight and sixteen-wheeled ones, picked up or unloaded their goods for further transport. That was the place to check first if you were heading west on the off chance that some mad man trucker was looking for company on that white-lined, hard-scrabble road, and did not mind bedraggled, bearded, long-haired, hippie boy company, at that. As luck would have it I caught a guy who heading out to Chicago with a load of widgets (or whatever, even these guys didn’t know, or want to know, what was on the manifest half the time, especially if they were running “heavy”).

And why, by the way, although it is not germane to the story, was I heading out on that old California road. Why all that pent-up energy and skyscraper-building anger. Well, the cover story was so that I can get my head straight but you know the real reason, and this is for your eyes only, I had just broken up, for the umpteenth time, with a women who drove me to distraction, sometimes pleasantly but on that occasion fitfully, who I could not, and did not, so I thought, want to get out of my system, but had to put myself a little distance away from. You know that story, boys and girls, in your own lives so I do not have to spend much time on the details here. Besides, if you really want to read that kind of story the romance novel section of any library or the DVD film section, for that matter, can tell the story with more heart-throbbing panache that you could find here.

Now there were a million and one reasons that long-haul drivers back then would take hitchhikers on board, even hippies who represented most of what they hated about what was happening in, and to, their America in those days (in the days before the trucking companies, and the insurance companies, squashed that traveler pick-up idea and left the truckers to their own solitary devises). Some maybe were perverse but usually it was just for sheer, human companionship, another voice, or more usually someone to vent to at seventy or seventy-five miles an hour, especially at night when those straight white lines started to get raggedy looking.

This guy, this big-chested, brawny, beef-eating teamster guy, Denver Slim by name (really, I heard other truckers call him that at truck stops when they gave each other the nod, although as described he was neither slim nor, as he told me, from Denver), was no different except the reason, at least the reason that he gave me, was that I reminded him of his goddam son (I am being polite here) whom he loved/hated. Loved, because that is what a father was expected to feel toward kin, son kin especially and hated because he was showing signs or rebellion (read: becoming a hippie). I, needless to say, was a little queasy and sat close to the door handle for a while until I realized that it was more about love than hate. Old Denver Slim just didn’t get what was happening to his world, especially the part, the huge part, that he had no control over.

Hey, I had countless hitchhike rides in all kinds of vehicles, from the Denver Slim big wheels to Volkswagen bugs (look that up) but the common thread was that there were some interesting (if disturbing and hopeless) stories out there. Let me fill you in on Denver Slim’s story both because it helps explain what is coming up in my own quest and the hard, hard fact that there was a malaise, a palpable malaise, in the land and his story was prima facie evidence for that notion. Denver Slim had gone, like a million other members of my parent’s generation, through his childhood in the Great Depression (Chicago) and did his military in the throes of World War II (Corporal, U.S. Army, European Theater, and proud of it). After the war he started driving trucks, finally landing unionized teamster jobs as an over-the-road long haul driver based in Chicago. As was not unusual then, and maybe not now either, he married a local woman he knew from the old neighborhood, had several children, moved out of Chicago proper to a suburban plot house (“little boxes”, from the description he gave) and bought into the mortgaged, green-grassed lawn, weekly mowed (when he was not on the road), television-watching, neighbor-averting (except for the kids when young) routine that was a blueprint for America 1950s life in the lower-middle classes.

Here is where Slim’s story gets tricky though, and interesting. Of course being on the road, being mortgaged up to the neck on the road, he was never home enough to make the word family stick. He, as he admitted, when talking about his son Jamie, the rebellious son (read: becoming a hippie son), didn’t really know the kids (the other three were daughters whom he , as he said, wouldn’t have known anyway past the age of ten or so the way things work in girl world). But here is the kicker, the kicker for me back then although I get it better now, much better. The wife, Ruth, the ever-loving wife, had along the way taken a boyfriend and, off and on, lived with that boyfriend. Slim went crazy at first about it but somehow got through it and accepted that situation. Oh, you though that was the kicker. No, that was just the prelude to the kicker. Here it is. Denver Slim, old proud soldier-warrior, old mortgaged to the neck teamster, old work and slave on the road for the kids that he doesn’t know has a girlfriend, and had said girlfriend way before his wife took her lover. A beautiful family values story out of the age of Ozzie and Harriet, right?

But this is the real kicker for your harried hippie listener, old salt of the earth Denver Slim in relating his life story gets a little bit lovesick for his honey (no, not the wife, the girlfriend, silly) who lived in Steubenville, Ohio. And that, my friends, is where we are heading as we are making tracks to Youngstown on Interstate 70 and so instead of getting a ride through to Chicago (a place where I knew how to catch a ride west, no problem, almost like out of Boston) I am to be left off, and good luck, at the diner truck stop just off Route 7 outside of Steubenville, Ohio. Right near the Ohio River, at the eastern end that I was not familiar with. Christ, I never even heard of the place before, never mind trying to get a ride out of there, getting out of there at night as it looked like was going to happen by the time we got to the stop. Well, such is the road, the hitchhike road, and I hope old Slim had a good time with his honey, maybe, maybe I hope he did that is.

Slim must have had it bad, love bug-bitten bad, because he no sooner left me off at the diner than he then barrel-assed (nice term, right?) that big rig back, that big sixteen wheeler, onto the love-night road and to his own dream sleep. So here I am doing graduate-level diner study by my lonesome. Look, I am no stranger, by this time in my wanderings, to the diners, trucks stops, cafes, and hash houses of this continent. From the look of this one (and one judged these things by the number of big rigs idling near by) it was something of a Buckeye institution, maybe not like the football team or various legendary football coaches but busy (ya, see I know a little about Ohio, although not much outside the bigger cities and campus towns).

As I go inside through the glass-plated double doors I can practically inhale the steam from the vegetables, the dank, faded glory of the taters, and the inevitable onion smell than can only mean meat loaf. Hey, this is what passes for home-cooking on the road. And be glad of it, friend. As a single I would not be so uncool as to take a booth, although at this time of day there are some empties here, but rather hop right up on that old stool at the Formica-top red counter replete with individual paper mat and dinner setting, spoons, folks, knives, various condiments and plastic-entombed menu that every self-respecting diner has for those caught by their lonesome. Their sincere, if futile, attempt at home-away from homeyness. It’s not like this is a date-taking place (or at least I hope nobody thinks along those lines, but you never know, maybe people celebrate their anniversaries here) but it is okay out here abandoned in the neon-lighted wilderness of a back road truck stop.

Okay, at long last here is the part that you have been waiting for, the girl in the story part. Well, wait a minute, let me hold forth on waitresses because that is important to the girl part (and it was almost always waitresses in those days, or in a pinch, the owner/short order cook) who served them off the arm. In college towns and big cities, waitresses were (and are) just doing that job to mark time while going to college or some other thing but in the hash houses, the road side diners, the hole-in-the-wall faded restaurants of this continent it was (is) almost universally true that in this type of establishment this was an upwardly-mobile career move (or, maybe, just a lateral move). You have all seen and heard about the typical career waitress- surly, short-tempered, steam-pressed uniform, steamed by the proximity to the food trays that is, hardly has time to take your order because that party of six in the booths is waiting on dessert (and her big tip for this evening, she hopes, although if she thought about it the hard facts should have told her that old lonesome single male trucker was the best tipper). There is a smidgen of truth in those old hoary stories about waitresses but there is also some very hard-pressed, ill-fated bad luck thrown in as well. They all had stories to tell, at least the ones who didn’t scurry away like rats from “hippies.”

Okay, okay I can now tell you about angelic Angelica. That name, the smell of that name, the swirl around the tongue speaking that name, the touch of that name, still evokes strong memories even after all this time. But enough of nostalgia. Let’s get down to cases. First of all she was young, very young for a truck stop diner waitress so at first I thought that she was a career waitress-in-training or that there was a college nearby that I might not have heard of. I will describe her virtues in a second but let me tell you right off that the minute I sat down, and although there were several others at the counter who had come in before me, she came right over to my stool and asked if I wanted coffee. Well, kind of sleepy that I was at the time, I said yes and she went right off, got it, and came right back. And then, while the others at the counter were cooling their heels, she took my order, and as she moved away to put that order in (No, I do not remember what it was but, probably, since I was counting pennies, a burger and fries, meat loaf and other such high-end cuisine was saved for serious hungers) she slightly turned to give me another look and a sly smile.

In those days I was susceptible, very susceptible, to that winsome sly smile that some women know exactly how to throw (hell, I am still a sucker for that one, and don’t tell me you aren’t, or couldn’t be, too, male or female, it works both ways on this one). That sly smile and her, well, looks. Forget that endless physical description stuff about soft auburn hair, full ruby-red lips, bright, fresh, naïve blue eyes, nicely-shaped hips and well-formed legs. Very good legs. Okay, forget all that. I will describe her looks in “on the road” terms because when you were on the road and trying to get across the country the rules, the rules of the road, were a little different. Your take on life and your usually transient relationships with passing strangers, male or female, got a little twisted. Not necessarily in a bad way, but twisted.

There were different protocols for different situations when you were hitchhiking. A lone male hitching was usually not a bad proposition, especially if you stayed close to the highways and knew the truck stops, and appeared to be drug free, or at least that you were not in the throes of a terminal drug experience while trying to hitch a ride. This Hunter Thompson Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas drug stuff is good road fiction, but fiction nevertheless, if you were trying to get from point A to point B before your old age set in. The same with goofy Dennis Hooper Easy Rider stuff. Good cinema, bad, real bad road stuff. The main problem then, and probably would be today as well, is single middle-age guys, maybe desperate for a little company, picking you up with the idea of making advances. I don’t know about anybody else, as least I never heard anybody talk much about it then, but a simple "no" usually was enough to stop that(and not infrequently got you dumped in some odd spot between exits to thumb down some flying-by traffic). It’s only later, in the early 1970s when I wasn’t on the road so much that things started to get hairy, and the talk turned to weirdness, serious weirdness, out on the white-lined lanes.

In the late 1960s a pair of males was not a bad combination either. Not so much for getting rides from truckers who usually did not have room for two (or, if so, it was uncomfortable as hell) but for the plethora of Volkswagen vans, converted school buses, campers, and pick-up trucks that were out there on the blue-pink seeking road. There were times on the Pacific Coast Highway out in California that you barely got your thumb out and some vehicle stopped, especially if you looked like you were part of “youth nation.” Two more guys in back, sure thing, no problem. Those were good days to travel the roads, and another time I will tell you about some of those experiences but right now I have to get back to describe Angelica, or her road-worthy attributes anyway.

The optimal road set-up though, the one that got you rides the fastest, usually was to be paired up with a woman, truth be told, preferable a good-looking young woman. Ya, it’s not good form today, it’s certainly not politically correct or socially useful today to work from this premise, but back then the idea was that a guy and girl were safe from the driver’s perspective. And it was almost always guys, truckers or loners, or an occasional man and woman, who picked you up. Not single women drivers, young or old. For my perspective, the hitcher’s perspective, a good-looking woman, with good legs, made the road easier. And other delights, of course.

And it did no harm to have the woman act as an upfront side-of-the-road decoy for that same reason. Maybe not in the desert tumbleweed badlands of Arizona or Nevada where the hot sun, or dust, got you a ride from people who knew that area and knew they had to stop as a matter of your survival, and who knows their own sense of survival as well, but between exits on Interstate 80, let’s say, it helped, hell it helped a lot. Maybe not old Denver Slim, high on benny and moaning and groaning for his honey (the girlfriend not the wife remember) in dark night, white-lined blur but a guy like me would have made those lonesome highway brakes squeal to high heaven, and gladly. Angelica, at first glance, would certainly make the road easier, although this little detour is strictly for descriptive purposes in this part of the story. Put a simpler way, she was fetching.

But all of that is music for the future. Needless to say making any kind of move toward continuing the conversation with Angelica required a certain diligence and patience in the middle of diner traffic. As it turned out the diligence was only partially necessary because she was more than willing to talk to me while taking orders all around us. Her story was that she had been enrolled in some local Podunk (her term) business school (Muncie Business College for Women,or something like that) in her hometown of Muncie, Indiana but now wanted to be a medical technician of some sort (radiologist is what it was, I think). But most of all she wanted to get away from home (be still my heart) and had wound up in Steubenville as some kind of way station between dreams. Yes, I can hear the snickers now about some small-town girl seeing the bright lights of Steubenville and going all a-flutter. Stop it. Stop it right now.

In the dark of that night I was obviously not in any particular rush to leave, and as the dinner crowd thinned out we talked some more, as she filled my coffee cup repeatedly so that I could look like I was a "real" paying customer. To say this gal was innocent in some ways would be an understatement, and on the face of it a Midwest naïve and an East Coast hippie just would not make sense, no sense at all. But so would the fact, the hard fact that I would be in Steubenville, Ohio as part of a search for the great American night. Let’s just call it the times, and leave it at that.

And the times here included a very convenient fact. Angelica, as occurred more often than one would have thought out in those highway stops, as part of her job resided in one of the diner owner's motel cabins that dotted the outside ring of the truck stop. These single units provided cheap lodging for someone new, or transient, in town and were basically provided to the help so the newer help could be readily available on call when the inevitable call came in from the drunken cook, the moving-on dishwasher, or when one of the love-smitten senior career waitresses called in “sick”. Mainly though these cabins were for over-weary transcontinental truckers to grab a little sleep before pushing on. Thus they weren’t, at least these weren’t, your basic family-friendly digs that made you feel that you were in some room at home but rather that you were on that hell-bent, weary road, and this is the best you could do to rest those weary bones.

Well, yes we got around to leaving after her shift was over about 11:00 PM and did the ceremonial dancing around that generations, no, generations of generations, have pursued in the “courting ritual” on that initial question of whether, and when, a smitten pair get together for the night. If they do. But this time there is no story if they don’t, right?

Well, to spare any more suspense dear Angelica asked me into her digs. Just to talk, okay, and frankly I was so tired from my long day’s journey that just talk seemed about right then. I will describe that talk in a minute but let me describe this cabin homestead as we approached it on our one hundred, or one hundred and fifty, yard walk from the diner. Now that I think about it though I really shouldn’t have to describe it to you because you have all seen them, that is if you have been on the back roads of America a little, especially out on those one-lane country roads where working class people who don’t have much money go out to the country to get away from the city and this is what they can afford. There are about fifteen or twenty barely whitewashed cabins in a semi-circle, or maybe a few degrees over. If they were not numbered or if you came to them unknowingly on a dark, moonless night like tonight I guarantee that you would be hard-pressed to tell your new-found home away from home from any other in that arc.

The telltale old-fashioned, green oil-based painted screened door tells you immediately that you are not at the Ritz, or even its fifth cousin. As we enter amid the inevitable light-drawn flies, or moths, or whatever those insects are that you need to swat away to get in the door, or else you have to deal with them inside all night. Like I say these places are built for the moment and so the amenities are on the Spartan side.

As we walk inside, if I were to hazard a guess, and I was a professor in some upscale home interior design school, if someone presented this layout in a portfolio I would sent them, and sent them quickly, to remedial work. Or to a job at Sears Roebuck. But we are here and here the basic bed, bureau, kitchenette with a small table and a couple of wooden chairs, small sleeper sofa, and tiny shower ¾ bathroom fill the room. The only things personal about this place are Angelica’s alternate uniform that matches the one that she has on hanging to one side, drying out for her next bout with the ham-fisted crowd at the diner, and a small open suitcase that has her clothes neatly packed in it. On the bureau her “making my face” fixings and a few gee gads that everyone throws on the bureau when they want to unload their pockets. Hey, I have placed my head down to sleep on paper-strewn park benches and under paperless bridges and on up to downy-pillowed, vast, roomy, and leafy suburban estates so a highway motel cabin is hardly down at the low end of my sleeping quarters resume. This, my friends, will be just fine for the night.

So we start the "just talk" that Angelica promised. I don’t and, frankly, no one should expect me to, remember most of what we talked about but here is my lingering impression. Turnabout is fair play. I thought that I was going to get an in-depth view of what “square” small-town Midwest girls dreamed of, or what drove them from the Lynds’ Middletown (that’s Muncie, okay, the subject of a famous study in sociology), to the wilds of Ohio. Instead I was the interrogated. It seems that Angelica had been so “brain-washed” (her term) about “hippies” or what the old town folks thought was hippiedom (basically a variant of their mid-country fears of the “Bolsheviks” under every bed) that she was crazy to “capture” (my term) one. And, as it turned out, in the course of events, I was the one. And on top of that and here is a direct quote from her, “You seemed nice, right from the time you sat down.” (Well, of course, without question, without a doubt, it’s a given, and so on).

But here is the unexpected part, or at least the somewhat unexpected part. Off the top of my head I would not then, in the 1960s, bet my last dollar that a young woman from Muncie (town used here for convenience only) would be coy (nice word, right?) on her first “date.” Coyness here signifying her willingness to gather me to her bed at about 3:00 AM as we both were trying to fight off the sleep that was descending on us. But get this, and I will sign any notarized document necessary in support of this, she asked, yes, asked me into her bed. Well, as I mentioned above, she said I seemed nice, and there you have it. Of course, being “nice” I couldn’t say no. Yes, the gentleman “hippie”, that’s me.

You know the boy meets girl plot lines of most movies have it all messed up. Either they meet, give each other lecherous stares (hell, not even winsome smiles) and proceed to tear each other clothes off in an act of sexual frenzy then spent the rest of the movie justifying their eternal love by that first edenic act. Or, and this is truer of older films (and prudish modern comic book-based superhero flicks), the “foreplay” lasts so long that by the time that they hit the downy billows you go ho-hum and are more interested in the unfolding plot. Novels follow a lot of the same paths except, mostly the sexual scenes are about a paragraph or so and reflect the wisdom of the parties involved more than raw sexual energy. Romance novels, a category that would seem to be made for sexual exploits, using don’t get around to hitting the pillows until about page 323 and by then all you care about is whether the sheets are pastel or designer prints.

Real life, real life first encounter romances (read: sexual encounters) are more halting and, frankly, timid. Except, of course, those phantom Herculean and nubile sex-crazed teeny-boppers of urban legend that we have heard about. Ya, I have heard about them too. But that’s about it, heard about them. Think about the awkwardness of that first touch reflecting those ancient memories of being kissed back in about sixth grade, or about those gone wrong affairs that have piled up in your life’s memory bank, or that intense moment when both parties look downward in trepidation at what may come ahead. Or, and here is where memory plays no trick, that woman back home, that woman of one thousand frustrations that you needed to get some distance from, and that set you on this blue-pink road, but whose 999 delights have now surfaced and clouded all thinking. I nevertheless plunge recklessly onward.

For those pruriently-inclined readers who now expect a touch by touch, feel by feel, clothes taking-off by clothes taking-off, flesh against flesh description of our precious, sweet, private, very private love-making look elsewhere. Wait a minute. Look elsewhere, unless you have a written book (and/or movie rights) contract in hand. In that case I will be more than happy to fill in the sweaty, steamy, lurid, blood-pressure-rising details. I will make the earth under that old cabin shake, and the rafters too. I will give details that would make the Marquis de Sade blush, blush profusely. If you have no contract then let’s leave it at this; something deep in that moonless Ohio night, that times out of joint, moonless Ohio night, created a passion, or better, a moment of passion that we both could have bet our last dollars on. Something that it seemed we had both been waiting all our lives for, although we didn’t use those words. Just a couple of sly, knowing smiles, and then sleep.

Suddenly, we are awaken with a start. A still dark of night start and a hard rapping on the door, that damn, fly-flecked, oil-based painted green door. And a voice, a female voice. “Angelica, one of Penny’s kids is sick you’ll have to take her shift.” Even a night of passion, a moonless Ohio sly-smiled night of passion, cannot fend off the day’s realities, Angelica’s day realities. She says: “Yes, I’ll be there in a little while,” almost automatically. But just as automatically she says to me: “Don’t go out on the highway yet.”

Humble, barely whitewashed cabin or exotic, leafy country estate if a woman jumps out of bed and orders me to stay put who am I to disobey, at least until I see what my next move is. I agree and turn over. A few hours later she returns and we mess up her bed sheets again, and again. Then, after some Angelica sleep, and some kitchenette supper she says to me, just as boldly as when she invited me to her bed, that she wanted to go “on the road” with me.

My heart is racing for a thousand reasons, one of them included the thought that our little romance would lead to this although I didn't put it that way in my answer. More like: “Ya, I guess I was kinda thinking, maybe, a little about that idea.” A couple of days later, after she had worked some double-shifts and I did my bit doing some off-hand dish washing for meals and wages we gathered up her stuff off the bureau, place it in that orderly small suitcase, shut that damn, moth-crusted oil-based painted green door and head for the trucks a couple of hundred yards away and our ride out. Our ride out in search of the blue-pink great American West night that I have not told her about, at least not in those exact words, but that that she will find out about in her own good time and in her own way.