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Workers Vanguard No. 922
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10 October 2008
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TROTSKY
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LENIN
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70th Anniversary of Founding of Trotsky’s Fourth
International
September 3 marked the 70th anniversary of the founding of the
Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution. The founding of the
Fourth International was a culmination of the fight led by Leon Trotsky to
defend the program of Bolshevism (i.e., genuine Marxism). We print below “A
Great Achievement,” by Trotsky, co-leader with V.I. Lenin of the 1917 Bolshevik
Revolution, announcing the Fourth International’s founding. The piece originally
appeared in the October 1938 issue of New International; it is reprinted
from the Writings of Leon Trotsky (1937-38).
Trotsky was instrumental, along with Lenin and other Bolshevik
leaders, in the founding of the Third (Communist) International in 1919. World
War I had exposed the complete bankruptcy of the Second International, whose
sections—with such notable exceptions as the Russian, Serbian and Bulgarian
parties—betrayed Marxism by supporting their own bourgeoisies in the war.
Meanwhile, the October Revolution was met with a bloody civil war, where the
forces of counterrevolution were allied with 14 invading capitalist powers.
Trotsky led the Red Army to victory in the Civil War. But the Soviet workers
state was bled white, many of its best proletarian fighters having fallen in the
struggle to defend the Revolution. By 1923, the Bolsheviks were also faced with
the failure of socialist revolutions in the West, especially in Germany. It was
under these dire conditions that a conservative, nationalist bureaucratic caste
emerged, effecting a political counterrevolution in 1923-24 and consolidating
power in the Soviet Union.
Against the Stalinist dogma put forward in late 1924 of “socialism
in one country,” which liquidated the program of the revolutionary struggle of
the proletariat, Trotsky and the Left Opposition fought for Leninist
internationalism. In retaliation, a series of Stalinist bureaucratic measures
would lead, by 1928, to Trotsky’s exile to Alma-Ata and his expulsion from the
Soviet Union in February 1929.
But at the 1928 Sixth World Congress of the Comintern held in
Moscow, American delegate James P. Cannon and Canadian delegate Maurice Spector
read copies of Trotsky’s Critique of the Congress’ draft program, published
later in The Third International After Lenin. It was a searing
indictment not only of the policies of the Stalinist bureaucracy within the
USSR, but also of its disastrous policies internationally. It dealt in
particular with the lessons of the Chinese Revolution of 1925-27, with Stalin
& Co.’s policy of liquidation of the Chinese Communist Party into the
bourgeois-nationalist Guomindang, which in turn resulted in the slaughter of
tens of thousands of Communists and trade unionists.
Trotsky’s Critique won Cannon and his allies to the Left
Opposition, for which they were expelled from the American Communist Party in
October 1928. The direct corollary to “socialism in one country” was the
transformation of the Comintern from an instrument of world revolution into an
instrument of the nationalist policies of the Kremlin Stalinist bureaucracy. In
1930, the International Left Opposition was founded in order to wage a factional
struggle to restore the Third International to its revolutionary purpose. But by
1933, Stalin’s Comintern could not be awakened by what Trotsky called “the
thunder of fascism”—the victory of Hitler’s Nazis without a shot being fired by
the powerful, pro-socialist German workers movement.
When this catastrophe did not give rise to outrage, or even
significant dissent, within the ranks of the Third International, Trotsky
concluded that that body had proved itself utterly dead as a force for
revolution. He called for the building of a new, Fourth International. In 1935,
the Third International at its Seventh Congress explicitly codified its program
of class collaboration with the policy of the “People’s Front.” The Stalinized
Comintern went on to play an aggressive counterrevolutionary role in the Spanish
Civil War, slaughtering revolutionary fighters in order to appease the
“democratic” imperialists and head off proletarian revolution in Spain.
The founding conference of the Fourth International was held in
Périgny, France, on the eve of the interimperialist Second World War, as the
Trotskyist movement faced murderous repression internationally at the hands of
capitalist regimes of all stripes, from fascist to bourgeois-democratic, and the
Stalinists. The conference adopted as its basic programmatic document Trotsky’s
“The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International,”
popularly known as the Transitional Program. Trotsky considered the founding of
the Fourth International the most important work of his political life. Writing
in 1935 (printed in Trotsky’s Diary in Exile—1935), he noted:
“Had I not been present in 1917 in Petersburg, the October
Revolution would still have taken place—on the condition that Lenin was
present and in command…. The same could by and large be said of the
Civil War….
“But now my work is ‘indispensable’ in the full sense of the word.
There is no arrogance in this claim at all. The collapse of the two
Internationals has posed a problem which none of the leaders of these
Internationals is at all equipped to solve.”
In 1940, the dirty work of a Stalinist assassin would finally
silence this great revolutionary. But it could not obliterate his massive volume
of revolutionary work, including the construction of the Fourth International.
Indeed, Trotsky’s final fight was against a petty-bourgeois minority in the
then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) that, as the Second World War got
under way, wanted to jettison the program of unconditional military defense of
the Soviet degenerated workers state.
Unlike the Second and Third Internationals, the Fourth
International never betrayed; it was destroyed in the early 1950s by the
liquidationist forces led by Michel Pablo. Faced with the onset of the
imperialist Cold War and the creation of Stalinist-ruled deformed workers states
in East and Central Europe, the Pabloites denied the need for a Trotskyist
vanguard. The Pabloites looked to the Stalinists, social democrats and,
eventually, Third World nationalists, arguing that they could be pressured to
outline a “roughly” revolutionary course. The struggle against Pabloism in the
Fourth International was led by Cannon, albeit partially, belatedly and on the
SWP’s own national terrain. The SWP would later take quite another tack, that of
seeking “convergence” with the Pabloites in the 1963 “reunification,” which
formed the “United Secretariat” (USec). It is beyond the scope of this
introduction to deal in a substantive or thorough fashion with the post-World
War II Pabloite degeneration of the Fourth International. We refer readers to
“Genesis of Pabloism” (Spartacist No. 21, Fall 1972), Prometheus
Research Series No. 4, “Yugoslavia, East Europe and the Fourth
International: The Evolution of Pabloist Liquidationism” (March 1993).
The forebears of the Spartacist League, the Revolutionary Tendency
(RT), waged a fight within the SWP against, among other things, its perversion
of revolutionary Trotskyism in order to unify with Pablo and his ilk. For this,
the RT was bureaucratically expelled from the SWP, which quickly degenerated
from centrism into outright reformism (see our 1984 pamphlet The Socialist
Workers Party: An Obituary).
Comrade Trotsky insisted that revolutionaries must swim against the
stream, as indeed he did and as we strive to do in order to reforge a
Fourth International that Trotsky would recognize as his own.
* * *
When these lines appear in the press, the conference of the Fourth
International will probably have concluded its labors. The calling of this
conference is a major achievement. The irreconcilable revolutionary tendency,
subjected to persecutions as no other political tendency in world history has in
all likelihood suffered, has again given proof of its power. Surmounting all
obstacles, it has under the blows of its mighty enemies convened its
International Conference. This fact constitutes unimpeachable evidence of the
profound viability and unwavering perseverance of the international
Bolshevik-Leninists. The very possibility of a successful conference was first
of all assured by the spirit of revolutionary internationalism which imbues all
our sections. As a matter of fact, it is necessary to place extremely great
value upon the international ties of the proletarian vanguard in order to gather
together the international revolutionary staff at the present time, when Europe
and the entire world live in the expectation of the approaching war. The fumes
of national hatreds and racial persecutions today compose the political
atmosphere of our planet. Fascism and racism are merely the most extreme
expressions of the bacchanalia of chauvinism which seeks to overcome or stifle
the intolerable class contradictions. The resurgence of social patriotism in
France and other countries, or, rather, its new open and shameless
manifestation, pertains to the same category as fascism, but with an adaptation
to democratic ideology or its vestiges.
Also pertaining to the same circle of events is the open fostering
of nationalism in the USSR at meetings, in the press, and in the schools. It is
not at all a question of the so-called “socialist patriotism,” i.e., defense of
the conquests of the October Revolution against imperialism. No, it is a
question of restoring preeminence to the patriotic traditions of old Russia. And
here the task is likewise one of creating suprasocial, supraclass values, so as
thereby more successfully to discipline the toilers and subject them to the
greedy bureaucratic vermin. The official ideology of the present Kremlin appeals
to the exploits of Prince Alexander Nevsky, to the heroism of the army of
Suvorov-Rymniksky or Kutuzov-Smolensky, while it shuts its eyes to the fact that
this “heroism” was based on the enslavement and benightedness of the popular
masses, and that for this very reason the old Russian army was victorious only
in struggles against the still more backward Asiatic peoples, or the weak and
disintegrating states on the Western border. On the other hand, in conflicts
with advanced countries of Europe the valiant czarist soldiery always proved
bankrupt. Obviously, the experience of the last imperialist war has already been
buried in the Kremlin, just as it has forgotten the not unimportant fact that
the October Revolution grew directly from defeatism. What do Thermidorians and
Bonapartists care about all this? They require nationalistic fetishes. Alexander
Nevsky must come to the aid of Nikolai Yezhov.
The theory of socialism in one country, which liquidated the
program of the international revolutionary struggle of the proletariat, could
not fail to terminate in a wave of nationalism in the USSR and could not but
engender a responsive wave of the same nature in the “Communist” parties of
other countries. Only two or three years ago it was maintained that the sections
of the Comintern were obliged to support their governments only in the so-called
“democratic” states that were prepared to support the USSR in the struggle
against fascism. The task of defending the workers’ state was intended to serve
as a justification for social patriotism. Today, Browder, who has been no more
and no less prostituted than other “leaders” of the Stalintern, declares before
a Congressional investigating committee that in the event of a war between the
U.S. and the USSR, he, Browder, and his party will be on the side of their own
democratic fatherland. In all probability this answer was prompted by Stalin.
But the case is not altered thereby. Betrayal has a logic of its own. Entering
the path of social patriotism, the Third International is now being clearly torn
from the hands of the Kremlin clique. “Communists” have become social
imperialists and they differ from their “Social Democratic” allies and
competitors only in that their cynicism is greater.
Betrayal has a logic of its own. The Third International following
the Second has completely perished as an International. It is no longer capable
of displaying any kind of initiative in the sphere of world proletarian
politics. It is, of course, no accident that after 15 years of progressive
demoralization, the Comintern revealed its complete internal rottenness at the
moment of the approaching world war, i.e., precisely at a time when the
proletariat is most urgently in need of its international revolutionary
unification.
History has piled up monstrous obstacles before the Fourth
International. Moribund tradition is being aimed against the living revolution.
For a century and a half, the radiations of the Great French Revolution have
served the bourgeoisie and its petty bourgeois agency—the Second
International—as a means of shattering and paralyzing the revolutionary will of
the proletariat. The Third International is now exploiting the incomparably more
fresh and more powerful traditions of the October Revolution to the same end.
The memory of the first victorious uprising of the proletariat against bourgeois
democracy serves the usurpers to save bourgeois democracy from the proletarian
uprising. Confronted with the approach of the new imperialist war, the social
patriotic organizations have joined forces with the left wing of the bourgeoisie
under the label of the People’s Front, which represents nothing else but an
attempt on the part of the bourgeoisie, in its death agony, once again to
subject the proletariat to its rule just as the revolutionary bourgeoisie had
subjected it at the dawn of capitalism. What was once a progressive historical
manifestation now appears before us as a revolting reactionary farce. But while
the “People’s Fronts” are impotent to cure a capitalism that is rotten to the
core, while they are incapable of even checking the military aggression of
fascism—the example of Spain is full of symbolic meaning!—they nevertheless
still prove sufficiently powerful to sow illusions among the ranks of the
toilers, to paralyze and shatter their will to fight, and thereby create the
greatest difficulties in the path of the Fourth International.
The working class, especially in Europe, is still in retreat, or at
best, in a state of hesitation. Defeats are still too fresh, and their number
far from exhausted. They have assumed their sharpest form in Spain. Such are the
conditions in which the Fourth International is developing. Is it any wonder
that its growth proceeds more slowly than we should like? Dilettantes,
charlatans, or blockheads, incapable of probing into the dialectic of historic
ebbs and flows, have more than once brought in their verdict: “The ideas of the
Bolshevik-Leninists may perhaps be correct but they are incapable of building a
mass organization.” As if a mass organization can be built under any and all
conditions! As if a revolutionary program does not render it obligatory for us
to remain in the minority and swim against the stream in an epoch of reaction!
The revolutionist who uses his own impatience as a measuring stick for the tempo
of an epoch is worthless. Never before has the path of the world revolutionary
movement been blocked with such monstrous obstacles as today, on the eve of a
new epoch of greatest revolutionary convulsions. A correct Marxist appraisal of
the situation prompts the conclusion that we have achieved inestimable successes
in recent years, despite everything.
The Russian “Left Opposition” originated 15 years ago. Correct work
on the international arena does not add up as yet even to a complete decade. The
prehistory of the Fourth International properly falls into three stages. In the
course of the first period, the “Left Opposition” still placed hopes on the
possibility of regenerating the Comintern, and viewed itself as its Marxist
faction. The revolting capitulation of the Comintern in Germany, tacitly
accepted by all its sections, posed openly the question of the necessity of
building the Fourth International. However, our small organizations, which grew
through individual selection in the process of theoretical criticism practically
outside of the labor movement itself, proved as yet unprepared for independent
activity. The second period is characterized by the efforts to find a real
political milieu for these isolated propagandist groups, even if at the price of
a temporary renunciation of formal independence. Entry into the Socialist
parties immediately increased our ranks, although in respect to quantity the
gains were not as great as they could have been. But this entry signified an
extremely important stage in the political education of our sections, which
tested themselves and their ideas for the first time face to face with the
realities of the political struggle and its living requirements. As a result of
the experience acquired our cadres grew a head taller. A not unimportant
conquest was also the fact that we parted company with incorrigible sectarians,
muddlers, and tricksters who are wont to join every new movement in the
beginning only to do everything in their power to compromise and paralyze
it.
The stages of development of our sections in various countries
cannot of course coincide chronologically. Nevertheless, the creation of the
American Socialist Workers Party can be recognized as the termination of the
second period. Henceforth the Fourth International stands face to face with the
tasks of the mass movement. The transitional program is a reflection of this
important turn. Its significance lies in this, that instead of providing an a
priori theoretical plan, it draws the balance of the already accumulated
experience of our national sections and on the basis of this experience opens up
broader international perspectives.
The acceptance of this program, prepared and assured by a lengthy
previous discussion—or rather, a whole series of discussions—represents our most
important conquest. The Fourth International is now the only international
organization which not only takes clearly into account the driving forces of the
imperialist epoch, but is armed with a system of transitional demands capable of
uniting the masses for a revolutionary struggle for power. We do not need any
self-deceptions. The discrepancy between our forces today and the tasks on the
morrow is much more clearly perceived by us than by our critics. But the harsh
and tragic dialectic of our epoch is working in our favor. Brought to the
extreme pitch of exasperation and indignation, the masses will find no other
leadership than that offered them by the Fourth International.
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