On The 80th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Fourth International-“Workers of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains”-The Struggle For Trotsky's Fourth (Communist) International -E.R. Frank-The Imperialist War and Revolutionary Perspectives (1944)

“Workers of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains”-The Struggle For Trotsky's Fourth (Communist) International -

Markin comment:

Below this general introduction is another addition to the work of creating a new international working class organization-a revolutionary one fit of the slogan in the headline.

Markin comment (repost from September 2010):

Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers' international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor ordered, by all means, be my guest, BUT only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward

The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.

With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
**************
E.R. Frank-The Imperialist War and Revolutionary Perspectives (1944)

Excerpts from International Report Delivered in the Name of the National Committee of the SWP
at the Eleventh Convention of the American Trotskyist Movement,
November 16, 1944

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From Fourth International, Vol.6 No.2, February 1945, Page 56-61.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The outbreak of the second world war did not catch us by surprise. We knew that without successful socialist revolutions, it was inevitable. We knew it was coming. We predicted it. And by our whole rounded political struggle, for our principles and our organization, we had steeled a cadre. We had prepared for the imperialist war. We were ready.

But right in our own party, the strongest, the best organized Trotskyist party, with the most tempered and experienced leadership, right in our own party, the Shachtmanite petty-bourgeois section of our leadership and membership buckled and folded up under the pressure of bourgeois public opinion the minute war broke out; unceremoniously abandoned the program to which they had promised to remain loyal and true and for which they had promised to fight come what may; abandoned the program of the Fourth International and attempted to engineer a split throughout our movement. We survived the fight with the petty-bourgeois opposition and emerged out of that fight stronger, healthier, more homogeneous, a more disciplined, a more effective party. Comrade Trotsky and we fought that fight as the steward of the whole International movement. We were able to assume this responsibility because we still enjoyed a measure of democracy, and could conduct the struggle in thorough-going fashion right to the end. We went into the war period with no illusions, with our eyes wide open. We knew that we, like the other Trotskyist parties, would be temporarily isolated. And we attuned our tactical orientation, we adjusted our tactics for the uphill pull in our political propaganda, our literary and organization activities, our trade union work. We didn’t change our program, we didn’t alter, much less abandon our principles. We merely adjusted our tactics, as realistic revolutionists, as Leninists always do. We knew that the fumes of war, the hypnotic spell of “national unity” would not long prevail. While at first, the war may halt the radicalization of the masses, may adversely affect the revolutionary process, it would soon impart to it a powerful impulse. Trotsky pointed out to us again and again that this war was not merely a continuation of the last one; that many factors were now more favorable from the point of view of the revolutionary vanguard; that the economic position of all the imperialist states, including the US was infinitely worse today; that the democratic and pacifist illusions of the last war were to a considerable extent absent; that the experience of the first world war did not pass without deeply affecting the masses.

We were able to proceed in our revolutionary work with patience, with tenacity, with confidence, because we kept our perspective, we kept our heads. We did not lose our nerve. We knew that life was working in our favor.

In this, our movement was unique. I am not referring here to the sell-outs of the Social Democrats and the Stalinists. In contrast to the last war, nobody was surprised or caught off-guard by the betrayal. We had anticipated this treason and had taken it into account in formulating our plans. I am now referring to the petty-bourgeois hangers-on, to the fellow travelers of the revolution. The retreat of the left-wing intellectuals from Marxism was converted into a precipitous flight. They madly rushed onto the bandwagon of the imperialist war. Darkest pessimism reigned supreme in all the left-wing intellectual circles, as well as the emigré groups. Some thought that Hitler’s victories were definitive; that Europe had slipped back to the dark ages; that the revolutionary movement had been irretrievably defeated; that Europe, that all suffering humanity would have to begin the long, painful climb over again. Others saw in Hitler’s victories proof that a new class of managers, of bureaucrats, had emerged; that the new form of society superseding dying capitalism would not be socialism, but bureaucratic collectivism, the managerial society, that the Marxist program had proved a Utopia.


A Feeling of Blackest Pessimism

In all these intellectualistic petty-bourgeois circles there reigned, as I said, a feeling of blackest pessimism. The picture was all dark and hopeless. And, of course, the petty-bourgeois quacks and fakes of the Shachtman group, veering like a weather vane in response to the pressure and mood of bourgeois intellectualdom, these fugitives from Bolshevism proclaimed in their turn that the clock of history had been set back so far that the political scene in Europe would be dominated by the fight for national liberation and bourgeois democracy. We were back in the nineteenth century! This pressure was so strong, this mood of defeatism was so pervading, that it found its way even inside the ranks of the Fourth International. A group of German refugee comrades published a document called the Three Theses, a thoroughly revisionist document, a thoroughly anti-Marxist thesis, which took for good coin Hitler’s boasts that his “New Order” would last centuries. They too thought that Europe was thrust back a hundred years, that the working class had lost its preeminent role and must dissolve itself in the middle class in the fight for “a national democratic revolution.” Stripped of its verbiage and theoretical “profundities,” what was implied here was the necessity of new Peoples’ Fronts to fight for “bourgeois democracy.” We decisively rejected this defeatist, this revisionist, this liquidationist “theory” at our last convention in 1942. We set our course on the perspective of the rise of the proletarian revolution.

The disorientation, the defeatism, the abandonment of the Fourth International program on the part of the German emigre comrades came about because they had lost all revolutionary perspective. They proclaimed the battle that had not yet started, already lost. We base ourselves on the rising working class revolution. They consider the European revolution already defeated.

We knew that out of the war would come a gigantic revolutionary explosion, above all in Europe, and we were confidently preparing for it. And less than a year after our 1942 convention, Italian fascism crashed to the ground. We saw in the downfall of Mussolini and the beginning of the Italian revolution the most striking confirmation of our analysis and program, and by the same token, an annihilating refutation of all the theories and speculations of our enemies. We immediately proceeded in our press to subject the Italian events to a thoroughgoing analysis and point to the road ahead.

We found no special difficulty in writing our plenum resolution on the European revolution, its perspectives and its tasks, any more than we found any special difficulty in analyzing the Italian events in our press. Do you know why? Because we were proceeding from a fundamental analysis. The Italian revolution represented for us merely the last link of a long chain that we had already wrought. We didn’t have to hunt for some new formulas. We didn’t have to devise new principles. We didn’t have to improvise, or proceed empirically from one step to another. We knew the answers ahead of time. I don’t mean the answer for every concrete problem that came up from day to day. There are no blueprints of that kind. But we had the general strategical answer and we understood the general trend and direction and meaning of the events.

Lenin, Trotsky and others established 30 years ago that capitalism on a world scale, and that European capitalism in particular, was no longer expanding but contracting. Its absolute decline had begun. In addition to the internal decline, the capitalist states of Europe were suffocating, because every one of them was hemmed in behind tariff walls and artificial state boundaries. The huge standing armies were eating up the substance of Europe’s wealth. The national state had become a reactionary fetter upon the economy of Europe. The first world war was itself testimony that European capitalism was in a blind alley. The war destroyed Europe’s hegemony, it impoverished the continent, and left it weak and debt-ridden, accelerating its decay. Economic hegemony had definitely passed into the hands of the richer and more powerful American imperialism. The war further disunited and dismembered Europe, further exacerbated its trade rivalries. The Versailles treaty created 17 new national states, raised up new gigantic tariff walls and further increased the standing armies.

The blind alley into which European capitalism was thrusting the peoples was answered by the October revolution of 1917, which wrenched one sixth of the earth’s surface out of the grip of capitalism and opened up the revolutionary era in Europe. The fierce, sanguinary, class struggles that swept Europe from one end to the other further weakened capitalism, further hastened its decline.

In contrast, American imperialism was still rising. Wall Street which had entered the war as a debtor emerged as a creditor. In addition to its tremendous material preponderance over Europe, American imperialism still enjoyed “national unity” at home. As against a Europe torn by revolutionary struggles, the US was the home of class collaboration par excellence.

Now all this is not some new revelation which our National Committee thought up just the other day. This analysis was made by Trotsky 20 years ago and was adopted at that time as the official position of the Communist International. Trotsky wrote:

“... the staggering material preponderance of the US automatically excludes the possibility of economic upswing and regeneration of Capitalist Europe. If in the past it was European Capitalism that revolutionized the backward sections of the world, then today it is American Capitalism that revolutionizes over-mature Europe. She has no avenue of escape from the economic blind alley other than the proletarian revolution, the destruction of the tariff and state barriers, the creation of the Socialist United States of Europe.”

And further:

“American Capitalism in driving Europe more and more into a blind alley, will automatically drive her onto the road of revolution. In this is the most important key to the world situation.”

It is this fundamental twin concept: Lenin’s concept that we live in the epoch of wars and revolutions and Trotsky’s analysis of the relationship between America and Europe that has guided our struggle all these past years.

By 1923, the revolutionary wave, evoked by the October revolution of 1917, receded. The defeat of the revolution in Germany in 1923 marked the turning point, and made possible the stabilization of Capitalism in Europe. The US came in with its Dawes plan, its loans and credits, and buttressed the shaken Capitalist system. But this very stabilization and the upturn in European economy that followed was on a far lower foundation than before 1914. This so-called stabilization proved of a not very enduring nature. This very stability was extremely unstable. Only six years later, a catastrophic economic crisis struck US imperialism, the largest, the strongest, the “healthiest” imperialist power of the whole world.

And it was not very long before all of Europe—all of the world — was again writhing in the grip of crisis. For ten years Europe was gasping and choking. The consuming economic crisis was only interrupted now and then by pitiful cyclical rises followed by new depressions. But the crisis itself was never overcome. The crisis again sharpened the class struggles, first of all in Germany, which was thrust into a new revolutionary situation. The question was sharply posed: either Fascism or Socialism. There was no third alternative. Through the base treachery of the Stalinist and Social Democratic leaders, the revolutionary situations were all dissipated and the potential revolutions aborted, one after another, first in Germany, then Austria, then France, then Spain. The Capitalists were permitted to regain the upper hand; the path was cleared for their plunging the masses of Europe and soon all humanity into the bloody maelstrom of the Second World slaughter.

And even super-powerful, super-rich, super-stable American Imperialism—the US—where they thought they had exorcized the class struggle, where they thought Marx had been refuted by Henry Ford, even this colossus writhed and twisted and shook for ten years in the toils of terrible economic chaos. For ten years Wall Street tried every device to overcome the crisis, but found that it could not extricate itself from the contradictions of decaying world capitalism. Finally it too plunged into the war with the aim of crushing its rivals and establishing its own world domination. It sought to solve the crisis by its exploitation of the peoples of Asia, of Africa and even of Europe; by making Wall Street the center of world tribute. American imperialism had reached its heydey and was already moving into its period of decline at a far faster tempo than any previous imperialism.

The crisis at home gave birth to the modern trade union movement, the largest, the best organized, the most volcanic trade union movement in the world. The class struggle, far from having been exorcized, emerged in America in full fury. Its young militant working class had not tasted defeat; it was vigorous, full of confidence and moving leftward.

In the last war, Europe lost its hegemony to America. But Europe is losing its very independence to America in this war. Europe’s decay was accelerated as a result of the first world war. But Europe is prostrate and ruined as a result of this one. America could stabilize Capitalism in Europe after the last war on a lower foundation and could permit its revival within sharply defined limits. American imperialism can enter and is entering Europe today with no other program but its dismemberment, its despoliation, to prevent Europe from reviving to a competitive level, to reduce Europe to a semi-colony, a vassal of the Wall Street banks ... (Here follows a discussion of Wall Street’s political program, bourgeois democracy, and the position of Morrow and Logan. See Frank’s Speech in December 1944 Fourth International.)

Once we understand the trend of events correctly; once we have a correct analysis of the European situation, a correct understanding of the nature and role of American Imperialism, a correct appraisal of the European revolution, then our answers, our programmatic tasks, fall into their proper place. They are properly guided.

Our program for the European proletariat is the program of the October revolution, the program of Lenin and Trotsky in 1917, the program of the Socialist revolution, of the dictatorship of the proletariat, of the Soviet power.

Our central unifying slogan is the Socialist United States of Europe. This is the revolutionary answer, the only alternative to the imperialist scheme of Balkanizing Europe and enslaving its peoples. It corresponds to the experiences and needs of the European masses, who are learning that it is necessary to destroy the reactionary and outlived state boundaries, and that only through the economic unification and socialist collaboration of the free peoples of Europe can the menace of recurrent devastating wars be abolished and freedom and economic well-being assured.

Our instrumentality to lead the revolution is the Bolshevik party. Lenin taught us the kind of party the working class must have to make the revolution.

Our basic tactics to mobilize the masses and lead them forward to the revolution we have likewise learned from Lenin and the October Revolution. These tactics have been carefully studied by our movement over a great number of years. They have been enriched and refined through the study of their application, or more often, their lack of application, in the revolutions in Germany, Austria, Italy, France, Spain, China and elsewhere.

This work of careful preparation and training, of mobilizing the Trotskyist cadres for the revolutionary tasks ahead was crowned in 1938 with the holding of the Founding Conference of the Fourth International, right on the eve of the second world war. This conference adopted a world program for the present epoch. It is not merely a restatement of socialist doctrine and fundamentals, but the tactical program showing how the Fourth International must proceed to mobilize the masses for revolutionary purposes and win them to the banner of the Fourth international.

Trotsky, the author of this document, approached the whole question from this point of view: economically, he said, the world is ripe and over-ripe for the proletarian revolution, for Socialism. Capitalism in every sphere is disintegrating and sees no way out. The proletariat, in millions of masses, again and again moves onto the revolutionary road. But each time it finds itself blocked by its own conservative leadership. The crisis therefore is one of leadership. A new leadership, adequate to the revolutionary tasks at hand, must be created. This means the Fourth International, this small cadre, must find its way to the worker mass.

But how? By a program of transitional demands. The present epoch, said Trotsky, is distinguished not for the fact that it frees the revolutionary party from day-to-day work, but because it permits this work to be carried on indissolubly with the actual tasks of the revolution. We do not discard, said Trotsky, the old “minimum” demands; we defend the democratic rights and social conquests of the workers, but we carry on this work within the framework of our revolutionary perspective, and that is why the old minimum program is now superseded for us by the transitional program, the tasks of which lies in systematic mobilisation of the masses for the proletarian revolution.

Now the job today in Europe is to take this program and apply it. In our opinion it is not necessary to hunt around for some new program, or new tactical schemes. We need only apply the Transition Program of the Fourth International. Of course, a program is not a blue-print, it is not a cure-all. You cannot become a master strategist of the revolution merely by memorizing a lot of slogans and rules, any more than you can become a master surgeon by memorizing the best text book on surgery. Other things are necessary. You must have experience. You must have talent. You must have the ability to correctly gauge and appraise a situation, to know what it is necessary to do at the particular moment. You must have the courage and heart of a revolutionary fighter to withstand all pressure and attacks from the camp of the enemy. You must have all of these things. But many of these things are beyond the scope of resolutions and cannot be supplied or imparted by resolutions. A resolution has got to provide a line. If it does that, if it provides a correct line, it is a good resolution, it does the job.


The Transition Program

The revolutionary party will win the confidence of the masses by its struggle for the program of transitional demands. Our transitional program does not have a propagandistic character but is invested with burning importance in Europe today. That means that the bridge to the fundamental slogans can be more or less rapidly crossed and that all immediate, minimum, democratic demands are of necessity intertwined with the transitional ones, the essence of which is contained in the fact, explained Trotsky, that they are directed ever more openly and decisively against the very bases of the capitalist regime ...

The revolutionary party that today has the firmness and strength to fight for its principles; to resist the pressure of bourgeois public opinion, which inevitably bears down in merciless fashion on the revolutionary vanguard; the party which resists the “temptation” to win the masses “the easy way” by watering down its program, will on the morrow have the opportunity of becoming the revolutionary leader of the masses. Because the masses want a decisive change, because they thirst for a genuine revolutionary leadership, because the catastrophic crisis is driving the masses ever more fiercely onto the revolutionary road. And as they grow disillusioned with their present misleaders, they will turn to the parties of the Fourth International.

* * *

We don’t have to say anything new about our programmatic position on the Soviet Union. That question was so thoroughly discussed and so magnificently illumined by Comrade Trotsky during our debate with the Shachtmanite petty-bourgeois opposition, that it retains all of its validity to this day in its basic, in its fundamental features. The Trotskyist position on the Soviet Union, an integral part of our world program for the world revolution, is the only position that has been vindicated by the events, that has proved its correctness in the struggle that provided correct guidance to the revolutionary vanguard through all the mazes, twists and turns of capitalist diplomacy, of war, of changing alliances and the like. All the other programs on the Soviet Union have already been consigned by events themselves to the dust heap.

Take as an example the most pretentious of the theories on the Soviet Union—Burnham’s theory of the managerial society. Burnham’s book, The Managerial Revolution, you may recall, enjoyed a passing vogue among capitalist executives, government bureaucrats and renegades from Marxism, both in the United States and England. Burnham told us that the proletariat did not possess sufficient inner strength to reorganize society on socialist foundations and that a new class of “managers” was emerging which would supersede dying capitalism and take over the helm to form a new exploitative class. On the basis of this theory, Burnham had no difficulty in foretelling that Stalin and Hitler, the two main representatives of this new class of “managers” which was destined to emerge all over the world, were united by an “affinity of ideologies” and had joined together “to drive death wounds into capitalism” . Hardly had the Professor spoken his prophecy, than Hitler threw his armed might against the Soviet Union and staked everything on crushing it. Burnham’s “theory” proved no more enduring than the Stalin-Hitler Pact.

Two years later, Mussolini, the very pioneer of Burnham’s “New society” , was deposed, more correctly dismissed, just as an employer dismisses his plant superintendent, when his services are no longer required. The precursor of the “new society” proved to be no more than a common adventurer and cutthroat in the service of the Italian bankers, monopolists and landlords. The Fascist regime simply fell apart like a rotten apple.

Today, Hitler’s “new order” in Europe has already collapsed under the double blows of his military opponents and the struggles of the insurgent masses. And the downfall and total destruction of the Nazi regime is not far off.

That is how events themselves have dealt with this bit of pretentious humbug which for a few years “cut a big swathe” in capitalist “cultural circles” and in the editorial offices of petty bourgeois intellectualdom. And this “theory” , let it be remembered, was the only half-serious attempt to counter-pose some sort of unified logical conception to Trotsky’s Marxist analysis of Fascism as well as his analysis of the Soviet Union and the Stalinist bureaucracy.

So much for Burnham’s theory and its inglorious fate. Little need be said at this date of his shamefaced pupils and imitators of the Shachtmanite variety with their pathetic attempts to discover a new “managerial class” but limited solely to the Soviet Union. In a new form and in a different connection, this is a recreation of the anti-Marxist idea of national exceptionalism, with a vengeance.

It is an elementary tenet of Marxism that a class is not an accidental phenomenon, but emerges as an inevitable and necessary vehicle of a given stage of production. Every ruling class has in its own way represented a historically necessary and unavoidable stage of social development and could be overthrown only when it had exhausted its historical possibilities. Marxism knows of no historically unnecessary classes and certainly knows of no classes that are limited to “one country” . History has annihilated Burnham’s “theory” of the new bureaucratic class. It has disposed of his anemic Shachtmanian imitators in passing.

Now I said that our question on the Soviet Union is an integral part of our whole program of world revolution. It does not stand apart from it. From our political characterization of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers state, we drew the conclusion that we must defend the Soviet Union unconditionally against any and all imperialist attacks. Now that program retains its validity. We don’t have to change it. But we always defended the Soviet Union in our own way, by our own methods, which had nothing in common with the methods of Stalinism. Only those methods, we said, were permissible that were not in conflict with the world revolution. Stalinist defense was carried on under the slogans: For the Fatherland! For Stalin! Our defense was carried on under the slogans: For Socialism! For the World Revolution! Against Stalin!

While our basic position retains all of its validity, naturally, we do not give equal emphasis to all sections of our program at all times. We invariably push to the fore that section of our program, that tactic, that slogan, which has the greatest application, which is required by the general political situation. That is the art of politics: to apply to the conditions of the day that part of your policy which has the most immediate, the most burning urgency. When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, we began hollering at the top of our voices for the unconditional defense of the Soviet Union. That was the most important problem of world politics: save the Soviet Union from imperialist attack. That was a key position in protecting and advancing the revolution, which we knew would inevitably emerge out of the war.


A Different Situation

Today, however, we face a far different situation. The Soviet Union is no longer in immediate military danger. The Nazi attack has been successfully repulsed. Hitler’s “New Order” has already been destroyed. The Nazi regime faces imminent collapse. The continent is now in the process of military occupation by the armies of England, the United States and the Soviet Union. The European masses are in revolutionary ferment. The European revolution is rising and the Anglo-American imperialists have entered into a conspiracy with the Kremlin bureaucracy to strangle the revolution and to prop up decaying capitalism. That is the true picture of Europe today.

Under these conditions, it would be the height of unreal-ism, it would betray a complete lack of revolutionary generalship to keep on shouting the slogan of yesterday: Defend the Soviet Union. We do not alter our program; we do not discard this slogan which at a later date may possibly again acquire importance. But in the present situation this slogan recedes to the background and we push to the fore that section of our program which today has greatest importance; that section compressed in the slogan: “Defend the European Revolution against All Its Enemies,” against the imperialists, against the Kremlin bureaucracy, against all its agents and agencies. As I said, we do not change our program, but we very definitely are shifting our emphasis today, in conformity with the needs of the situation, in conformity with the changed relationship of forces, in conformity with the new requirements.

As a matter of fact, we haven’t made this shift in our emphasis, this tactical adjustment, just today. Some nine months ago our committee discussed this very problem and came to the conclusion that it was necessary to change the emphasis of our propaganda because of the new conditions in Europe. The discerning reader will have noticed that we conducted our propaganda in this spirit for a good many months. We propose now to incorporate this tactical prescription in our resolution, in order to make unambiguously clear to all, the nature of our tactical adjustment and the reasons for it.

The Stalinist bureaucracy, which emerged about 20 years ago, lost faith in the European revolution and proclaimed it realizable to build socialism in the Soviet Union alone. Today the process of degeneration has proceeded so far, this bureaucracy is so hated by the Soviet masses, it is in such conflict with the nationalized economy and its requirements, that it dreads, it mortally fears and opposes the European revolution which is now rising. That is why Stalin has rushed headlong into the arms of Roosevelt and Churchill, that is why he conspired with them at Teheran to crush the revolution and to uphold capitalism throughout Europe. That is why the Red Army, an instrument of the counter-revolutionary bureaucracy, is used to prop up capitalism in Rumania, Bulgaria, etc. Stalin is preparing to repeat his hangman’s work in Spain on a Europe-wide scale.

Internally, we know that the bureaucracy has practically effaced all the basic political conquests of the revolution; it has destroyed the Bolshevik Party, the Soviets, the trade unions; it has murdered the generation of leaders who led the Russian revolution; it has reintroduced a savage despotism; it uses the Red Army as a gendarme of capitalist property in Europe. Politically, the bureaucracy has virtually gone the limit in its headlong drive toward reaction. Economically, nationalized property and planned economy, these basic conquests of the October revolution, still remain.

We know that the Kremlin bureaucracy does not represent a new class, which has a historic function to perform, but is a parasitic caste, thrown up because of a purely exceptional conjuncture of events, a caste that is transitory in nature.

Now if we assume that the Kremlin bureaucracy allied with the imperialists, succeeds in definitively crushing the European revolution, then the fate of Europe is sealed. It can only become the helpless vassal, a semi-colony of the Anglo-American brigands, a doomed continent. And sealed also is the fate of the Soviet Union. Because the path will be immediately cleared for the reintroduction of capitalism in the Soviet Union, either by internal counter-revolution or by external military intervention or by a combination of both.

If, on the other hand, the workers’ revolution emerges triumphant in any country, we can assume that it will more or less rapidly penetrate and make its influence felt among the Soviet masses and the Red Army troops. Once the Soviet masses are lifted to their feet, the very first thing they will proceed to do is overthrow the dictatorship of Stalin and his bloody henchmen and restore the Soviet Union on the principles and teachings of its founders—Lenin and Trotsky. In either case the Kremlin bureaucracy is doomed. The Soviet Union is in a transition period and that transition cannot too long endure. It is either: forward to Socialism or backward to Capitalism. It cannot indefinitely remain in its present form. And it is clear that its whole life is bound up with the fate of the European revolution. That is why we came back again to the same proposition: the fight to protect, to defend, to extend, to deepen the European revolution is in essence, and coincides with, the true defense of the Soviet Union itself ...

* * *

American imperialism, by its unbridled expansionism, by its attempt to displace all rival imperialisms—not only Japan and Germany, but also the defeated allies, such as France, and even its partner-in-arms, British imperialism—is destroying every semblance of stability in the Orient as well as in Europe, is exacerbating all the inter-imperial conflicts and is becoming the irritant provoking new revolutionary explosions. American imperialism, the greatest counter-revolutionary force of the whole world, with its program of Pax Americana, before which the ambitions of all previous imperialisms pale, with its mad schemes of dominating all the continents and all the seas, will become the very instrument of destroying the old equilibrium and provoking new rebellions of the exploited masses ...

We are going to have to pay a lot of attention to our international obligations in the period ahead. The revolution is rising and we must be prepared to aid our co-fighters in every possible way. We have already done quite a bit. But that is only a good beginning. The next period will see the extension and growth of the Trotskyist movement, especially in Europe, and our assistance will have to keep pace with the opportunities and the needs of the struggle. We must stand ready to give all possible help to our comrades who are on the firing line.

But the greatest aid that we can give our co-thinkers, the greatest of all contributions that we can make is to perfect our movement, strengthen our forces and redouble our fight against this predatory beast of American Imperialism, this international marauder, who would rob and subjugate the whole world.

We know the power of this Wall Street crew. We know that this gang of Wall Street freebooters is prepared to wade through rivers of blood to save its infamous rule. We know its armed prowess and its counter-revolutionary designs. But we are also aware of its insoluble contradictions. We know that our enemy will grow weaker and that, we will grow stronger and will conquer in the end.

The power of a revolution is a mighty power. Before its hot breath armies have been known to melt away and thrones come crashing to the ground. The flames of the European revolution which, once started, will surely spread throughout the continent like a prairie fire, will make their effects felt even here across the Atlantic. They will give a strong impetus to the process of radicalization of the workers that is already beginning, and they will inspire the coming class struggles here at home ...

From The "Socialist Alternative (CWI) Press"- "The Permanent Revolution today"

From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future

Markin comment on this series:

One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.

There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.

The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.

Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:

"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."

This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
*******
18 February 2010
Theory

We publish below a new introduction by Peter Taaffe to Leon Trotsky’s ‘Permanent Revolution’, which the comrades of Socialist Movement Pakistan (CWI) are to translate into Urdu and publish.

The Permanent Revolution today
Introduction to new Urdu edition of ‘Permanent Revolution’ by Leon Trotsky

Peter Taaffe
What relevance does Trotsky’s Theory of the Permanent Revolution have to the problems of the workers’ cause or the peasants’ (small farmers) movement today? After all, it was formulated more than 100 years ago during the first Russian revolution of 1905-07. The same kind of question could be posed – and it is – regarding the ideas of Marx and Engels, Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg. But no matter how ‘old’ is an idea – a method of analysis upon which mass action is based – if it more accurately describes the situation today than ‘new’ theories, it retains all its relevance in the modern era. This is particularly the case for the masses in the neo-colonial world – and especially today in the vital country of Pakistan with more than 200 million inhabitants – confronted as they are with all the terrible problems flowing from the incomplete capitalist-democratic revolution.

A similar situation as exists in Pakistan today confronted Russia also in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Russia had not completed the capitalist-democratic revolution: thoroughgoing land reform, purging of the countryside of feudal and semi-feudal remnants, unification of the country, the solution of the national question, and freedom from the domination of foreign imperialism. At the same time there was no democracy – the right to vote for a democratic parliament, a free press, trade union rights, etc. This system was crowned by the brutal, autocratic, age-old tsarist state. How to solve the capitalist-democratic revolution? This was the question of questions posed before the young Russian workers’ movement. The different theories exploring this issue were tested out in practice in the three Russian revolutions of 1905-1907, the February revolution of 1917 and the October 1917 revolution itself. The latter, for the first time in history, brought the working class to power and it remains to this day the most important single event in human history.

The bourgeois revolution
Both Lenin and Trotsky differed fundamentally from the Mensheviks (the original minority in the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party) who believed the task of the working class in economically undeveloped countries such as Russia at that stage was to tail-end, give ‘critical support’, to the liberal capitalists in completing ‘their’ revolution. This was because they considered the liberal capitalists to be the main agents of the capitalist-democratic revolution. However, the belated development as a class of the capitalists – already revealed in 1848 by the German capitalists, who did not press through the German revolution at that stage – meant that they were incapable of completing this historic task.

Firstly, the capitalists invested in land and the landlords invested in industry and both were united, particularly in the modern era, to bank capital. Therefore any thoroughgoing bourgeois-democratic revolution would come up against the opposition not just of the landlords but also the capitalists themselves and their political representatives, the liberal capitalist parties. Above all, they were afraid that the masses, the main agency of change in all revolutions, including capitalist ones, inevitably pressed forward with their own demands, thereby challenging the position of the capitalists themselves. Even in the bourgeois French revolution of the eighteenth century, the plebeian sans-culottes (literally ‘without trousers’) were the main agency in clearing French society of all feudal rubbish. But they then went on to demand in 1793-94 measures in their own interests such as ‘maximum wages’ and ‘direct democracy’ which the newly empowered representatives of the bourgeoisie correctly understood as a threat. The sans-culottes were suppressed, first of all by the Directory and then by Bonaparte himself.

A similar, although even more pronounced, fear of the rising bourgeoisie in Germany occurred in the 1848 revolution. Then, the fear of the masses trumped the desire of the bourgeois to establish their own untrammelled political rule. Hence the compromise of the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties with feudalism and its representative, the monarchy. In the case of Germany, it took the intervention of Bismarck, basing himself on the Junkers – the former representatives of landlord-feudal reaction – to carry through belatedly the capitalist-democratic revolution ‘from above’ in the late nineteenth century. Even then, it was not fully completed and only the 1918 working-class revolution in passing following the First World War completed this process.

Lenin’s idea of the ‘Democratic Dictatorship’
Therefore, Lenin and Trotsky opposed the Menshevik idea that the liberal capitalists could carry though their own revolution in Russia. The capitalists had come onto the scene too late and were afraid of the masses. Arising from this, Lenin formulated his idea of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’. ‘Dictatorship’ for Lenin – as with Marx – meant the rule of a definite class. ‘Dictatorship of the working class’ meant the democratic rule of the working masses and not military rule or bonapartist ‘dictatorship’ over the masses, as opponents of Marxism argue. Because Stalinism – a one-party dictatorship of a bureaucratic elite resting on a planned economy – blighted the understanding of the masses, Marxism today does not use the term ‘dictatorship’. The phrase ‘workers’ democracy’ explains better Marx and Lenin’s idea today. Lenin’s idea was, in effect, a proposed democratic alliance of the working class and the peasantry as the main forces in a mass movement to complete the capitalist-democratic revolution. Trotsky agreed with Lenin that these were the only forces that could complete the process.

However, the weakness of Lenin’s formula was who would be the dominant force in such an alliance: the working class or the peasantry? Trotsky pointed out that history attests to the fact that the peasantry had never played an independent role. Scattered in the countryside with scarce access to the culture of the towns – with their literature, theatres, large collected populations – the peasants were always destined to seek for a leader in the urban areas. They could support the bourgeois, which would mean ultimately the betrayal of their own interests. This flowed from the foregoing fact that the capitalists could not complete thoroughgoing land reform benefiting the mass of the peasants. Or they could find a leader in the working class.

Lenin, in effect, left open which class would dominate in the alliance between the working class and the peasantry. His formula was an ‘algebraic formula’ and he left history to give it a concrete form. Trotsky went further than Lenin in his famous ‘Theory of the Permanent Revolution’. It was Karl Marx himself who first spoke about the ‘permanent’ character of the revolution drawing lessons from the 1848 revolutions. He wrote in 1850: “It is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions.” But Trotsky went further and concluded that once having drawn the mass of the peasantry behind its banner and taken power, the working class would be compelled to go over to the socialist tasks, both on a national and an international scale.

This brilliantly anticipated the October 1917 revolution. The working class took power in Petrograd, the seat of the revolutionary upheavals of the time, and Moscow. They then made an appeal to the rural masses, initiated ‘land to the tillers’, which won over the peasantry. But the dispossessed landlords joined hands with the capitalists, both the ‘liberal’ and reactionary wings, in an attempt to try to snuff out the Russian revolution. The peasantry through the travails of the three-year civil war rallied behind the workers and their party, the Bolsheviks, because they came to understand in action that they were the only ones who would give them the land. Even the intervention of 21 imperialist armies, which reduced the revolution at one stage to the old province of Muscovy, around Petrograd and Moscow, could not stop the revolution triumphing.

Another feature of the theory is the idea of ‘combined and uneven development’, particularly as applied to underdeveloped countries even today. Russia itself prior to 1917 illustrated this phenomenon very clearly. It combined extreme backwardness in relations on the land – feudal, semi-feudal, etc – with the latest word in technique in industry, achieved largely through massive imperialist intervention by French and British capital. The consequences in Russia were the development of a young and dynamic working class organised in big factories alongside archaic economic and cultural forms. A similar development has taken place in other countries in the neo-colonial world since.

Attacks on the theory of permanent revolution
Therefore, the permanent revolution has been borne out, not just in the theory formulated over 100 years ago, but also in the triumphant action itself of the Russian revolution. But this has not prevented continued attacks both on the author of this idea and the idea itself. The bureaucracy that arose in Russia, following the isolation of the Russian revolution and personified by the figure of Stalin, launched an attack on this theory. In effect, they borrowed the Menshevik idea of ‘stages’. First, so this theory argues, must come the capitalist stage, followed some time in the future by the ‘socialist’ stage. In the first stage, the workers’ parties are compelled to give ‘critical support’ to the capitalist parties, particularly the liberals, up to and including support for and even participation in bourgeois liberal governments. This idea, when put into practice by Stalinist parties, without exception has led to unmitigated disasters, particularly in the neo-colonial world.

The Chinese revolution of 1925-27 had a greater possibility of victory under the banner of the working class and the young Chinese Communist Party than in Russia itself less than 10 years earlier. A working class super-exploited, kept at the level of pack animals, rose in one of the most magnificent movements in history, created a mass Communist Party and drew behind it the majority of the peasants in a war against landlordism and capitalism. Even though the masses had barely-formed trade unions, they also attempted to create soviets, workers and peasants’ councils, as the organ of the revolution in a movement which sought to emulate the Russian revolution. Unfortunately, the rising Stalinist bureaucracy in Russia itself determined that the rhythm of the Chinese revolution could continue only under the Menshevik baton, this time wielded by Stalin himself. The consequence of this led to support for the ‘radical’ Kuo Min-Tang of Chiang Kai-shek, including recognising it as a sympathising section of the Communist International. This ended in disaster. The revolution was drowned in blood and on its bones rose the monstrous dictatorship of Chiang Kai-shek.

This, by the way, gave a vision of what would have happened in Russia if the Mensheviks’ ideas had been followed in the revolution. It would have led, as in other situations, to an aborted revolution. General Kornilov, who was defeated in September 1917 (or a similar military figure) would have imposed a bloody dictatorship on the bones of the Russian revolution itself. This was prevented by the intervention of the Bolshevik party led by Lenin and Trotsky and their ideas. The disasters in the neo-colonial world, of Indonesia, of the setbacks in Vietnam following the Second World War and many others resulted from the Menshevik policy of ‘stages’ in the revolution, implemented by the Stalinists, in place of Trotsky’s clear ideas which were shared by Lenin in October 1917.

Yet despite this, there are some ‘Marxists’, who professed adherence in the past to the ideas of Trotsky, who now attack his theory of the permanent revolution. Others even support the idea of the ‘permanent revolution’ but in practice put forward a Menshevik position, supporting workers’ organisations participating in coalition governments with capitalist parties. In the first category of those who reject Trotsky are the two wings – which are separate organisations – of the now-disbanded Democratic Socialist Party (DSP) in Australia. They have gone to great lengths to attack Trotsky’s idea of the permanent revolution. In the process of attacking our pamphlet written in the 1970s, one of their leaders, Doug Lorimer, counterposed Lenin’s ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’ to Trotsky’s idea of the permanent revolution. To achieve this admittedly difficult task, he engaged in a policy of deception, consistent misquotation, half quotations of Trotsky’s ideas and innuendo which sought to counterpose to Trotsky Lenin’s ‘more correct’ idea of the ‘democratic dictatorship’.

He was not at all original in his endeavours as Karl Radek, once a leading member of the ‘Trotskyist’ Russian Left Opposition, after he capitulated and made his peace with Stalin, had also earlier attacked the theory of the permanent revolution. In answering him, Trotsky pointed out the Radek “did not pick up a single new argument against the theory of the permanent revolution”. He was, said Trotsky, an “epigone” (a slavish unthinking adherent) of the Stalinists. Lorimer acted in the same way. Speaking about the 1905 Russian revolution, Lorimer argued: “Lenin argued that the completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution by an alliance of the workers and peasants, led by the Marxist party, would then enable the working class, in alliance with the poor, semi-proletarian majority of the peasantry, to pass uninterruptedly to the socialist revolution.”

But Lenin only occasionally mentioned about moving “uninterruptedly” towards the socialist revolution when he adhered to his “democratic dictatorship” idea. This idea of “uninterrupted” or “permanent” revolution had first been put forward by Trotsky in the book ‘Results and Prospects’. Lenin’s main idea was that the bourgeois-democratic revolution could have led to, could “stimulate” the revolution in western Europe, which would then come to the aid of the workers and peasants in Russia, and only then place ‘socialism’ on the agenda. If Lenin had consistently advanced the idea, as some like Lorimer have suggested, there would have been no fundamental differences between him and Trotsky on the revolution. But clearly Lenin envisaged a period of time, a development of society and the working class between the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” and their coming to power and socialism. There is nothing “uninterrupted” in this.

Role of the peasantry
Another legend perpetuated by the Stalinists and by some like the former DSP is that Trotsky “underestimated the peasantry”, believing that the working class alone could carry through the revolution in Russia. He was therefore against a real alliance of the peasantry with the working class. On the attempts to find a fundamental difference with Lenin, Trotsky wrote: “The devil can quote scripture to his purpose.” He admitted there were “gaps” in his original theory of the permanent revolution, published, it must be understood, in 1906. History, particularly the great experience of the February and October revolutions of 1917, filled in these “gaps” but in no way did they falsify Trotsky’s general idea but rather reinforced and strengthened it.

Look at the honesty with which Trotsky deals with the evolution of his ideas against the shameful misrepresentation of them by Stalin, later by Radek and other latter-day critics. He wrote in answer to Radek: “I do not at all want to say that my conception of the revolution follows, in all my writings, one and the same unswerving line…There are articles [of Trotsky] in which the episodic circumstances and even the episodic polemical exaggerations inevitable in struggle protrude into the foreground in violation of the strategic line. Thus, for example, articles can be found in which I express doubts about the future revolutionary role of the peasantry as a whole… and in connection with this refused to designate, especially during the imperialist war, the future Russian Revolution as ‘national,’ for I felt this designation to be ambiguous.” He goes on: “Let me also remark that Lenin – who never for a moment lost historical sight of the peasant question in all its gigantic historical magnitude and from whom we all learnt this – considered it uncertain even after the February revolution whether we should succeed in tearing the peasantry away from the bourgeois and drawing it after the proletariat.”

Lorimer said much in the past about Trotsky, in his early writings, looking towards an alliance between the working class and the poor peasants rather than the “peasantry as a whole”. Lenin himself sometimes spoke in the manner that Trotsky did of the proletariat linking up with the poorer layers in the villages, etc. But in 1917 the working class in the revolution led the peasantry to complete the bourgeois-democratic revolution but did not stop there. It then passed in an “uninterrupted” fashion to begin the socialist tasks in Russia and to spreads the revolution internationally.

Fantastical schemas have been worked up by the opponents of this theory that the October revolution was not a socialist revolution but represented the victory of the bourgeois-democratic revolution through the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry”. This was separated as the “first stage” (in accordance with the ‘two-stage’ theory) from the socialist revolution which was only carried through in the summer and autumn of 1918. This is a false, mechanistic idea which seeks to artificially separate the completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution from socialist tasks. It is completely inaccurate when applied to October 1917. Moreover, it would be absolutely fatal if, as in the past, it was applied to the current situation existing in many of the countries in the neo-colonial world, including Pakistan.

China and Cuba
Some, like the former DSP, even argue that the Chinese and Cuban revolutions are a vindication of the original position of Lenin of the ‘democratic revolution’, of “first the democratic phase and then the socialist”. On the contrary, these revolutions were an affirmation of the correctness of Trotsky’s permanent revolution although in a caricatured form. A social revolution did indeed take place in China and Cuba (see ‘Cuba: Socialism and Democracy’ by Peter Taaffe) but not with the soviets and workers’ democracy of the 1917 Russian revolution. In China, a Maoist/Stalinist one-party regime was established from the outset, albeit with a planned economy. In Cuba, it is true that the revolution saw elements of workers’ control but not the full workers’ democracy of Russia. This limited the attraction of both revolutions – particularly to the working class internationally – which was not the same as the mesmeric effect of the Bolshevik revolution in the ‘Ten Days that Shook the World’.

Some even argue that there can be ‘independent’ peasant parties which can come together in a coalition government with the ‘workers’ parties’ to carry through the bourgeois revolution. Some even drag in isolated quotes from Lenin in which he suggests this: “A provisional revolutionary government is necessary… [The RSDLP] emphatically declares that it is permissible in principle for Social-Democrats to participate in a provisional revolutionary government (during the period of a democratic revolution, the period of struggle for a republic).” [V.I. Lenin, Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, Chapter 2.]

Commenting on this, Trotsky conceded that Lenin did indeed formulate an idea like this. But Trotsky described this as “incredible” and, moreover, contradicting everything that Lenin stood for subsequently, including in the period of the February revolution right up to the October revolution. Lenin in his ‘Letters from Afar” condemned even the slightest ‘critical’ support for the Provisional Government and demanded total class independence, both of the Bolshevik party and the working class. Moreover, the arguments of many such as Radek in his latter-day imitators like the DSP, the very history of Russia, attests to the fact that prior to 1917 there was no stable independent peasant party or parties.

It has been suggested that the Social Revolutionaries fell into this category of independent peasant parties. But all of these organisations claiming to represent the peasantry “as a whole” and existing in relatively stable periods then flew apart, divided along class lines – the upper layers looking towards the bourgeoisie, the lower layers merging and acting with the working class – in periods of social crisis. The Social Revolutionaries in 1917 reflected this. After February 1917 they were a prop of the bourgeois coalition together with the Mensheviks and opposed giving land to the peasants. In action, they were repudiated by the majority of the peasants. The Left Social Revolutionaries who split from the SRs, it is true, shared power for a short period with the Bolsheviks after the October revolution. They occupied a minority position compared to the Bolsheviks, which was not clearly envisaged in Lenin’s original idea of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry. Trotsky, from the beginning, in his theory argued that the working class would dominate and lead the peasantry. Subsequently, the Left SRs separated from the government, which itself was a reflection of the growing class conflict at their base amongst the peasantry as well as an indication of their inchoate, middle-class character.

Pakistan and the permanent revolution today
What is the relevance of this to Pakistan and the neo-colonial world today? Firstly, where the mistaken ideas of Menshevism – the two-stage theory of the revolution – have been put into practice, it has resulted in catastrophe for every mass movement fighting for power. Secondly, the bourgeois-democratic revolution remains to be completed in Pakistan. The fact that feudal and semi-feudal relations dominate the countryside and, in a sense, the whole of society is something that is almost taken for granted by the working masses of Pakistan. There is no other country – even in the neo-colonial world – which demonstrates more the intractability, the impossibility, of the bourgeois solving the accumulated problems of their regime. Very few other countries have such a concentration of wealth in the hands of a feudal/semi-feudal ruling class of landlords and capitalists as does Pakistan. Twenty families, as is commonly understood by the mass of the Pakistani population, dominate society. The main political parties, the Pakistan Peoples’ Party (PPP) led by Asif Zardari, the Pakistan Muslim League (PML) of Nawaz Sharif, the army and the state machine, the overwhelming majority of large industrial and commercial combines and companies: all are dominated by this very narrow super-rich ruling class.

However, an additional special feature of feudal and semi-feudal Pakistan is the domination of the army, which has held a controlling hand right from the state’s inception over 60 years ago. It is an extreme example of the corrupt ‘crony capitalism’ which blights the ruling classes in the neo-colonial world and increasingly in the ‘developed’ world too. In 2007, a book demonstrating the colossal private business interests of the Pakistani military, ‘Military Incorporated’, was written by Dr Ayesha Siddiqua. She claimed that this internal military ‘empire’ could be worth as much as £10 billion. Officers run secret industrial conglomerates, manufacturing everything from corn flakes to cement and actually own 12 million acres of public land. The generals have ruled Pakistan directly for more than 30 of the 62 years since independence in 1947. They still control the government, despite the existence of ‘civilian rule’ in the last three years. There has not been one day of ‘peace’ in the country since then, highlighted by the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the leader of the PPP, the catastrophe of Swat Valley – hard on the heels of the ‘Talibanisation’ of parts of Pakistan – and now the monstrous ‘suicide bombings’, which plague not just Afghanistan but Pakistan as well, even affecting the urban centres such as Lahore.

There is a false impression – particularly from abroad – that Pakistan, following Afghanistan, is in the unstoppable grip of the right-wing Islamic fundamentalists. Yet, as the Socialist Movement Pakistan (SMP) has pointed out, the fundamentalists have never had mass support up to now. Moreover, the mass, indiscriminate bombing campaign of the Taliban and other murderous terrorists is calculated to alienate the masses even further. At the same time, the indiscriminate counter-terrorism of sections of the Pakistani state and American imperialism armed with its ‘drones’ raining death from the sky can enrage the population and could drive them, at least temporarily, into the arms of the Taliban. However, the Taliban’s murderous rule in Swat, after the Pakistani state had negotiated a truce and withdrawn, was so vicious that the local population rose up against them. They had met with terrible repression from the Taliban. This led to the intervention of the army and a new pacification campaign against the Taliban, which in effect ripped up their previous agreement, signed only a matter of months before. This underlines the highly unstable, catastrophic position that is developing in Pakistan. In fact, so linked together is Afghanistan with Pakistan that they are now referred to as ‘AfPak’ by observers.

One thing is clear; the Pakistani army tops will never tamely adhere to imperialism’s plans in Afghanistan so long as there is no agreement between India and Pakistan, involving the issue of Kashmir. The Pakistani military considers Kashmir as part of its ‘hinterland’, a source of pressure on and a ‘buffer’ against India. Commenting on this, David Gardner wrote in the Financial Times: “Notwithstanding the offensive against the Pakistan Taliban in South Waziristan, the Pakistani military’s mindset has not fundamentally changed. They do not simply regard the jihadis as a greater security threat than India.” He goes on: “The army would need at least three times the troop strength it has deployed to take and hold South Waziristan. This operation looks more like an attempt to punish the Pakistan Taliban for straying off the reservation”! Compelled by its increased effectiveness, the army has recently been forced to go after the Pakistani Taliban, whereas it previously tolerated the Punjabi jihadis, Laskhar-i-Janghvi. Moreover it still supports and uses against India the original Kashmiri-orientated jihadi group, Laskhar-i-Taiba, thought to be behind November 2008’s bloody assault on Mumbai. Again, Gardner states: “The group’s mastermind, Hafiz Saeed, has a revolving door relationship with Pakistani jails.”

Pakistan, in effect, holds down half a million Indian troops in the valley of Kashmir with just a few thousand jihadis. Its support for the Afghan jihadis is based on the same reasoning, as a counter-weight – amongst other things – against India. India, for its part, is suspected of abetting insurgents in Pakistani Baluchistan. A top general commented: “Definitely we want Afghanistan to be the strategic depth of Pakistan.”

The national question in Pakistan
At the same time, the military has not given up hope of stepping in and once more openly seizing the reins of power in Pakistan. To this end, it has conducted a systematic unauthorised campaign of intervention in the political and judicial processes. Moreover, it has brutally repressed and ‘disappeared’ hundreds of its opponents in the rebellious state of Baluchistan. As Khalid Bhatti pointed out on the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI) website in November 2009, the uprising in Baluchistan is more serious than that in the tribal areas. Although in the latter the Pakistani state has lost control to the Taliban, there is not a national opposition as such to the Pakistani state. Things stand differently in Baluchistan, which only adhered to the Pakistani ‘federation’ in 1969. As Khalid pointed out: “The majority of the people do not have any positive feelings towards the state. More and more young Baluchi people are taking up the armed struggle. The nationalist insurgency not only continues, but is expanding into more areas of the province.”

There are now numerous Baluchi armed insurgent groups fighting the Pakistani army. Unfortunately, ‘targeted killings’ have also taken place against non-Baluchis with three thousand non-Baluchi people losing their lives with thousands fleeing the province for fear of meeting a similar fate. By one estimate, 50,000 non-Baluchi families have so far emigrated from Baluchistan and thousands more have applied for transfers out of the region. The university remained closed for more than three months, there is growing sentiment for separation from Pakistan, with Baluchi nationalists claiming: “We want an independent Baluchistan as it was before 1948, when it was annexed by Pakistan through military force.” These sentiments are particularly strong amongst youth, with university students in the lead, and, as a symptom of the depth of the movement, with women playing a prominent role.

The Pakistan regime, however, is prepared to wade through as much blood as is necessary to hold onto this strategically important province. It is important not just for Pakistan but for all the regional powers, with the jockeying for influence by the US, China, Iran and Afghanistan with even the ‘footprint’ of India present in the area. It is important for its rich natural resources of energy, natural gas and minerals, for its fishing and also for the strategic importance of Gawadar, the newly-built port overlooking the Straits of Hormuz, at the entrance to the Persian Gulf and, therefore, a vital stopping-off point for naval vessels in the area. China, in particular, sees this facility as vital for its interests and is the reason why it contributed the lion’s share of the capital and labour to build the port.

Yet Baluchistan is just the most extreme expression of the brewing national discontent in the non-Punjabi provinces which make up the ‘federation’. Even in Sind, resentment at ‘Punjabi domination’ – in effect, the control exercised by the landlord-capitalists of the Punjab, especially in the army – is fuelled by the grinding and growing poverty throughout Sind and Pakistan as a whole. The national question forms a crucial aspect of Trotsky’s theory of the permanent revolution. Without Lenin’s position on the national question – defended and added to by Trotsky’s analysis of this issue in many countries and many situations – the Russian revolution would have been impossible. That is a thousand times more the case today, especially in the neo-colonial world and particularly given the multinational character of Pakistan.

Yet, unbelievably, the basic demand for the right of self-determination of the oppressed nationalities of Pakistan is, in practice, rejected by the alleged ‘Trotskyists’ in the present crisis-riven ‘Class Struggle’ tendency in Pakistan. Only the SMP has pursued a consistent, principled and sensitive position on this issue. It stands, as Lenin and Trotsky did, for the rights of all oppressed peoples, for equality and against discrimination on racial, ethnic, religious or national lines. This does not mean advocating the right of self-determination, including the right to secede, without taking into account the mood of the masses. It is the right of peoples in the distinct national areas of Pakistan outside of Punjab, and even in Punjab itself, to choose their own path.

The ideal position from the standpoint of the workers’ movement in Pakistan would be a socialist confederation. This would provide full rights of autonomy, allow all legitimate national rights, down to the elimination of the slightest expression of nationalism or national superiority of one ethnic or national group over another. However, if oppressed nationalities wished to separate from even a democratic workers’ state, then the workers’ movement must accept that, as Lenin consistently argued and, in effect, carried out in the case of Finland in 1918. ‘Class Struggle’, led up to now internationally by the Alan Woods group, has consistently opposed such a policy in Pakistan. This has alienated them from some of the best fighters and leaders of the oppressed workers and peasants in the non-Punjabi parts of the country, many of whom have consequently gravitated in the direction of the SMP.

Crisis in the International Marxist Tendency
At the same time, they have a totally false position of sticking to the so-called ‘traditional organisations of the working class’ – without taking into account the concrete circumstances as to whether these organisations still represent the working masses. This policy now lies in ruins as a big split has developed in the Woods ‘International’, the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), on the consequences of this amongst other issues. It has had disastrous consequences for their organisation in Pakistan, as shown by the voluminous documentation detailing the bureaucratic methods of the Woods group, which split from the CWI in 1991.

Very few class-conscious workers now entertain any illusions that the PPP – led by ‘Mr Fifty Per Cent’ Asif Zardari – remotely represents in practice the working masses and the poor farmers of Pakistan. It is flooded out with the influence of the feudals, both in the towns and the rural areas. It is a party which has opposed strikes, called for and tried to organise strike-breaking, of the telecoms workers, for instance. The position of the PPP from what it was under its founder Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a ‘populist’ party capable of responding to the demands of the masses, has long gone. Therefore the same task is posed in Pakistan, as in other countries throughout the world, the development of a new mass party of the Pakistani workers and peasants, which the SMP has consistently argued for. The Woods group – which its leaders boasted was immune from the processes of ‘splits’ that allegedly condemned other organisations to ‘marginal’ influence in the workers’ movement – is seriously divided.

Ironically, it is on the very issues which formed the main ‘political’ reasons for their break from the CWI in 1992. Then it was the alleged existence of a ‘clique’ at the ‘top of the CWI’. This was rejected by 93% of the members of the British organisation and also by a majority of the CWI. Yet this is the same charge, in effect, now levelled against Alan Woods and his circle. There was absolutely no substance in this charge made by Woods and Co in 1992 about the CWI and its internal methods. The proof of this lies in the subsequent development of the national sections of the CWI with independent and thinking leaderships, capable of responding to the concrete circumstances in each country, which collaborates internationally but acts without waiting for ‘instructions’ from an international centre. The CWI operates on the basis of democratic centralism with full rights for all its members and sections with, in fact, a greater emphasis at this stage on the need for discussion and debate rather than the formal aspects of centralism.

The present split in the IMT has been kept under wraps – hidden from some of their members – up to the present time of writing. Yet all the political disputes in the CWI on a number of issues in the 1990s and the ‘noughties’ were public discussions, and documents were made public while the discussion was going on. Current debates are publically aired, for instance, in our journal ‘Socialism Today’ on such issues as China. This is done in order to allow all workers to see and, if needs be, to participate in the discussion of vital issues. Nothing like these democratic discussions takes place in the IMT.

An opposite picture is presented of the IMT, its internal life, its ideas and especially of its leadership in the incredible documents emanating from Pakistan, Spain and others who have fallen out with Woods and his closest circle. The Pakistani ‘dissidents’ around Manzoor Khan – the former PPP MP – paint a tragic picture of where Ted Grant and Alan Woods’s false position on the dogmatic insistence on undeviating work in the PPP and the ex-workers’ parties can lead. Manzoor justifies his opposition – on behalf of the PPP leadership – to strikes in Pakistan by wanting to remain in the PPP “at all costs”. Woods objected to this and promptly expelled Manzoor and his supporters. But a similar approach to that of Manzoor in Pakistan was adopted by Grant and Woods in Britain over our Militant MPs’ stand against the poll tax in 1991-92. We, the leadership and overwhelming majority of Militant (now the Socialist Party), stated that Terry Fields and Dave Nellist (our two MPs) could not pay the poll tax. This was because they and we had successfully urged millions of workers not to pay it and, faced with a similar situation, we declared they should take a similar principled stand. Grant and Woods argued that the MPs should pay as a means of staying inside the Labour Party!

Socialists were ‘dead’ outside of this ‘traditional organisation’, they argued, much as they had miseducated Manzoor and others in ‘Class Struggle’ in continued work in the PPP. We would have been ‘politically dead’ if the MPs and we had followed their advice. The Labour Party has since degenerated like the PPP into a bourgeois formation. Grant and Co were trapped in a false outmoded perception: that all political life of the working class was restricted to the Labour Party; to go outside meant ‘going over a cliff’. What is the result of this? They are insignificant in Britain while the Socialist Party has grown in numbers and influence. The same applies on an international scale with the IMT losing influence in many countries with Woods increasingly reduced to the role of a ‘benevolent advisor’ to Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. They reacted to the opportunist and indefensible actions of Manzoor – which was but the logical conclusion of their own ossified position on the ‘traditional organisations – by expelling him!

There are still sincere Marxists and Trotskyists within its ranks that we hope will cut through the thicket of lies and misrepresentations that have been particularly levelled by Alan Woods and his leading organising group against the CWI, its organisations, its leadership and its policies. A conscientious examination of the ideas of the CWI will, it is hoped, lead the best of these comrades to re-examine their past policies, and those of the CWI’s, and hopefully find a path back to a consistent Trotskyist position.

Socialist Movement Pakistan and the way forward for the masses
Genuine Trotskyism is destined to play a key role in the forthcoming battles of the Pakistani working class. And a vital aspect in the political armoury of the forces that will develop is the ideas and methods of Leon Trotsky, particularly his brilliant anticipation of the character of the revolution in the neo-colonial world, represented by the ideas of the permanent revolution, as outlined in this tremendous book. Despite the terrorism, the nationalism and ethnic divisions, the potential power of the Pakistani working class has also been visible in the number of strikes, mass demonstrations – including those in Baluchistan, of workers of all ethnic backgrounds and all religions – who march together in defence of workers’ organisations and their rights. The future of Pakistan is not in the hands of the mindless right-wing jihadis nor of American imperialism, nor of sectarian groupings but the mighty force of the Pakistani working class organised on socialist lines. The best hope for achieving this is in the ideas and methods of Leon Trotsky married to the contemporary analysis and programme of the Socialist Movement Pakistan.

The capitalist press speculates about another attempt of the military to seize power from the discredited ‘democratic’ politicians. But the alternative of Nawaz Sharif to that of the Zardari-dominated PPP is no real alternative at all. Nor is a coup – perhaps this time led by ‘colonels’ coming from a fundamentalist background – capable of offering a solution to the problems of Pakistan and the region. On the contrary, it conjures up a nightmare scenario of a fundamentalist or fundamentalist-backed regime, armed this time with nuclear weapons. This development, if it was to come about, would in no way represent the people of Pakistan because the fundamentalists have never received more than 10-15% of the vote in elections. Only a democratic and socialist road offers liberation from the nightmare of landlordism and capitalism for the long-suffering Pakistani masses. This book can help lay the basis for the emergence of a force that can lead them in this direction.

The Latest From The International Bolshevik Tendency- No Platform For Fascists In London (Or Any Place)

No platform for fascists!

Defend UAF leaders against state repression!

The following leaflet was distributed at a demonstration in London on 6 November 2010, organised by Unite Against Fascism.

Martin Smith, a leading figure in both Unite Against Fascism (UAF) and the Socialist Workers Party, has been found guilty of assaulting a cop outside the BBC in October last year when Nick Griffin of the fascist British National Party (BNP) appeared on Question Time. Fellow UAF leaders Weyman Bennett and Rhetta Moran are facing charges following the Bolton protests against the English Defence League (EDL) last March. Other UAF organisers are currently being investigated along with hundreds of anti-fascist activists who have been arrested over the past year. The entire workers’ movement must defend all these victims of state repression.

Drop all charges against anti-fascist protesters! Free Martin Smith now!

The growth of state repression parallels the increasing presence of the EDL. Disappointed by the election results for the BNP in May and fuelled by the economic meltdown, fascist thugs are a growing danger on the streets, staging provocations in cities all over the country, often targeting mosques or areas with a high concentration of racial minorities.

Fascism is a tool of the bourgeoisie in time of crisis to crush the workers’ movement. Although the bosses are not currently feeling any need to resort to this weapon, the growth of the BNP and EDL poses an ever more dangerous threat. They must be crushed by the multi-racial workers movement, and the sooner the better.

State repression against anti-fascists illustrates the self-defeating character of ‘demands’ on the capitalist government to ban EDL marches or prevent television appearances by BNP leaders. State regulation of political activity has always been applied much more vigorously against left-wingers than the right. The deadly fascist threat cannot be defeated by carnivals or musical festivals, nor by pacifist mobilisations where organisers lead anti-fascists into police kettles while the EDL is left to roam at will. As Leon Trotsky observed in 1934: ‘Nothing increases the insolence of the fascists so much as “flabby pacifism” on the part of the workers organisations’.

Fascism is the mortal enemy of the left, the organised workers’ movement and all the oppressed – the fascists must be driven off the streets and not allowed to march, speak in public or distribute propaganda. Meetings, demonstrations and television appearances of the BNP and EDL need to be vigorously ‘no platformed’ through massive united-front mobilisations centred on the trade unions and including organisations representing all the potential victims of fascist terror.

*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-The Marxist C.L.R.James On The Russian Question-1941

Markin comment:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
********
C.L.R. James on the Russian Question


Revolutionary History is grateful to Scott McLemee for permission to use his transcription of this and other C.L.R. James texts. Standard American spellings have been retained here, on the assumption they were used in the original publication. We have supplied a subheading (1. Introduction) where this was not present in Scott’s version, but where something was obviously required.

Resolution submitted by C.L.R. James (writing as “J.R. Johnson”) to the 1941 convention of the Workers Party of the United States.


Resolution on the Russian Question
1. Introduction

For many years the fact that in Russia the means of production were state property was sufficient for the Fourth International to characterize the working class as ruling class and the Russian state as a workers state.

Today, however, 1941, side by side with a tremendous but declining rate of industrial expansion in Russia, the working class has been reduced to a state of pauperization, slavery, and degradation unequaled in modern Europe. The real wages of the workers are approximately one-half of what they were in 1913. A bureaucrat holds all economic and political power. To continue to call the Russian workers the ruling class is to make a statement without meaning.

Yet Trotsky never wavered from this position. It led him, the direct successor of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, into calling upon the workers of Russia to be the best soldiers in an army that was, according to his own statement, acting as the tool of an imperialist power. The Workers Party, in refusing to accept this position, and in calling upon the Russian workers in this war to turn the guns in the opposite direction, made a profound break not with all that we have thought on the Russian question, but with something far more important, with how we have thought about it. So profound a difference must convince the party that what we face is not a rehash or manipulation of our previous ideas but a fundamental revaluation of the method and equipment with which we previously approached the question. Unless this is absolutely and thoroughly done, the party will live in a state of continual uncertainty, confusion, and recurrent conflict about our fundamental aims. This explains the scope and method of this resolution.

2. The Marxian Theory of Society

Marx rests his theory of society upon the technical level of the instruments of production under given historical circumstances.

“Assume a particular state of development in the productive forces of man and you will get a particular form of commerce and consumption. Assume particular stages of development in production, commerce, and consumption, and you will have a corresponding social order, a corresponding organization of the family and of the ranks and classes, in a word, the corresponding civil society.”

These are Marx’s own words. The purely historical, i.e., the chronological analysis of society, places property first. The logical method of Marx examines the actual historical relations always as an expression of the logical analysis, which begins with the technical level of the instruments of production. This determines the relation of the people to each other and the division into classes, which then determine the relation of the classes to the instruments of production and the results of labor. These last, usually expressed in laws, are the relations of property, which, from his earliest writings, Marx always defined as an expression of the mode of production. This is the strict Marxian terminology and the strict Marxian sequence, as can be seen from a casual reading of the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy and The Communist Manifesto.

Applying this method to Russia we find that in 1941 the technical level of production, unsupported by one or more powerful socialist states, compels a social relation of exploited wage-laborers and appropriating capitalists. In order to achieve the bourgeois- democratic revolution in 1917 the proletariat was compelled to seize power. But this seizure of political power was due chiefly to the incapacity of the ruling class and the conjunctural historical circumstances. The working class lacked the maturity in production of a proletariat which was a majority of the population and had been trained and disciplined by large-scale capitalism. All political power rests in the last analysis upon and is determined by production relations. This was the reason for the insistence of Lenin and Trotsky that without the proletarian revolution on a worldwide scale, the Russian proletariat was doomed to sink back to the position of wage-slaves, i.e. the restoration of Russia to capitalism. This is exactly what has happened. The whole society has turned itself slowly over and once more the working class has been pushed back into that submissive role in production which is determined by the low technical level of the productive forces judged on a national scale. The bureaucracy is completely master in the productive process that is the bases of its political power.

No more convincing exposition of Marx’s theory of a society resting on the technical level of production can be wished for.

3. The Theory of Capitalist Society

Contrary to expectation, the role of managers of production has not been seized by members of the old ruling class. The definition of the class which is today master of Russia must rest on an analysis of the mode of production which now prevails. The historical conditions of capitalist production are as follows:

(1) the existence of the world market,
(2) the existence of a class of “nominally free” wage-laborers,
(3) the ownership or monopoly of the means of production by a class which rules production and disposes of the property,
(4) production by private persons for a free and uncertain market.

Such a society produces a certain type of product, the capitalist commodity, which has its own special commodity characteristics. The labor contained in it has the double aspect of both use-value and exchange-value. To use Marx’s own words, “all understanding of the facts depends upon this,” and any analysis of Russia which describes it as a society “unforeseen” by Marxists but yet omits a consideration of this and other aspects of the law of value is so inadequate as to be not only misleading but valueless. The law of value can be rejected. It cannot be ignored or allowed to go by default in a Marxist party.

The Marxian law of value, however, is merely an expression of a certain type of society. This society, contrary to all other societies we have known and expect to know, makes the extraction of surplus labor (called in this instance surplus value) the main aim of production. For Marx “the capitalist mode of production (is) essentially the production of surplus value, the absorption of surplus labor.” This is crucial.

“It must never be forgotten, that the production of this surplus value – the reconversion of a portion of it into capital, or accumulation, forms an indispensable part of the this production of surplus value – is the immediate purpose and the compelling motive of capitalist production. It will not do to represent capitalist production as something which it is not, that is to say, as a production having for its immediate purpose the consumption of goods, or the production of means of enjoyment for capitalists. This would be overlooking the specific character of capitalist production, which reveals itself in its innermost essence.”

This is the main aim of production in Stalinist society, a capitalist society. All other societies produced for consumption and enjoyment.

All previous societies produced surplus labor, but except in isolated instances, wants or use-values were the main purpose of production. It is only in a society where labor is free of all contact with the means of production, within the environment of the world market, that the contradiction between production for use and for surplus value determines the whole society. Marx speaks of the difference between the use-value and the exchange-value of the commodity as the antithesis of the commodity. The contradictions and antagonisms of capitalistic society are merely embodiments of this antithesis, which is to be resolved in the synthesis of socialism, i.e., by the reuniting of the man of labor and the means of labor, and the abolition of the capitalist world market. International socialist society will produce surplus labor but it once more has as its sole aim the production of use-values.

Today this antithesis between production for use and production for surplus labor can be seen nowhere so clearly as in Stalinist Russia. And that stamps this society as being of the same inner essence as capitalism. Up to 1928, the use-value of the commodity predominated to the limited extent that this was possible in a backward society in the environment of the world market. The industrial proletariat in that year lived, at the very least, up to the standard of 1913. The first Five Year Plan predicted doubling of the subsistence of the working class by 1932.

But from 1929 a decisive change began. The lowering of agricultural prices in the world market threw the Russian plan into chaos. The competition on the world market, in its modern form of imperialist war, compelled the bureaucracy to reorganize the plan to meet the threat of Japan, at heavy cost; and with the coming to power of Hitler and his announcement that the main enemy was Russia, the change in Stalinist production and in Stalinist society became more uncontrollable. The bureaucracy was compelled to continue the process of industrialization at feverish speed. Under such circumstances, in a backward country, with an immature working class, the main aim of production inevitably must become the production of surplus labor, for the sake of more production, for the sake of still more production.

This economic necessity compelled an enormous increase in the repressive apparatus, the consolidation of the ruling bureaucracy by concrete privileges, honor, and authority, and the destruction of persons and ideology connected with the October Revolution. The necessity of autarchy, attempting to produce all that Russia needed within its own border, resulted in further disruption of production, and the mounting indices of production as a consequence represented large uneconomic investment, thus increasing the strain upon the workers. Stakhanovism was a perfect expression of the qualitative change in Russian society.

The climax came in 1936-1937 with the partial breakdown of the economy as exemplified by the charges of Trotskyite sabotage in every branch of production. In the historical circumstances of Russia, the antithesis between production of surplus value and use-value has reached a stage unknown in other capitalist economies. The state of world economy today precludes any thought of a cessation of this mode of production. The economic power of the bureaucracy precludes that this can be done otherwise than at the continued and growing expense of the working class. The system has developed in every essential of production into a capitalist system, and the parasitic bureaucracy has been transformed into an exploiting capitalist class. Henceforward its law of motion must be the same as that of other capitalist societies. An approximate date for the completion of the process is 1936, the year of the Stalinist constitution.

4. The Necessary Movement of Capital and Its Forms of Manifestation

That the laws inherent in capitalist production in Russia manifest themselves in unusual forms is obvious. But their unusualness in Russia is not unique. It is exceeded by the capitalism which Marx himself invented. To deduce the laws of capitalist production, Marx constructed a capitalism such as never existed and never could exist. In it labor, like every other commodity, was always sold at its value, the capitalist found on the market whatever he wished, consumption was always equated to production, fluctuations of prices there were none, no single capitalist enterprise advanced in front of the other in organic composition, unemployment and crisis were absent, all was in complete equilibrium; no capitalist could construct for himself a more ideal haven of peaceful accumulation. Yet this is the capitalism from which Marx drew his laws of motion, and even this capitalism Marx proved was bound to collapse. From this abstraction, which was the frame in which he worked in Volumes I and II, Marx then turned and in Volume III showed the devastating manifestation of the law of motion in capitalist society as it actually was. Thus the very method on which Capital was constructed is a warning to all hasty and ill-based attempts to baptize societies as never before seen, from a consideration of their external forms of manifestation, and not from an analysis of their laws of motion.

Marx dealt extensively with the crisis of over-production, but in 1886 Engels, in a preface to Capital, calmly stated that the decennial cycle of prosperity, overproduction, and crises, seemed to have come to an end, leaving a permanent depression. A few years later he wrote that perhaps this prolonged stagnation was only the prelude to a general world wide crisis, but he was not certain. That the continued absence of the cycle of prosperity, overproduction and crisis invalidated the law of motion of capitalist society was obviously far from his thought. For Marx crisis was an expression of the contradictions inherent in the movement of capitalist society. The crisis would express itself in different forms but the contradictions of the capital relations would continue.

The “free and uncertain” market of “pure” capitalism has been abolished before now in a national society. Lenin in 1917, before the revolution, stated that the immense majority of the capitalists in Russia were not producing for the market at all but for the state, which advanced them money. It was not commodity production for a free and uncertain market: it was not “pure” capitalism (the quotes are his own) but “a special kind of national economy.” In Germany today that process Lenin described is immensely more advanced than it was in Russia. It would be a perversion to assert that production in Germany is for a free and open market. It would be equally disastrous to see in the abolition of the traditionally free capitalist market, a basic change in the society. The law of motion is not thereby altered. To the contrary, it is the nature of the law of motion to abolish the free market. In Russia the commodity is no longer the product of private individuals. But it is, however, the law of capitalist production to abolish the private character of capital.

That Marx expected the revolution to occur before this was completed alters not one thing in his analysis of the movement of the society. The joint-stock company is “the abolition of capital as private property within the boundaries of capitalist production.” The concentration of all available capital in the hands of the Bank of England “does away with the private character of capital and implies in itself, to that extent, the abolition of capital.” The climax of this process is the ownership of all capital in the hands of the State. The bourgeoisie continues to draw dividends, but the drawing of dividends does not make a system capitalist. The dividends can be drawn from a Workers’ State. It is the fact that the state acts as the entrepreneur and exploits the workers that is decisive. “Interest-bearing capitals represents capital as ownership compared to capital a ‘function’.” And, still more clear, “The investing capitalist derives his claim to profits of enterprise and consequently the profit of enterprise itself not from his ownership of capital, but from its production function as distinguished from its form, in which it is only inert property.” Marx in scores of other places pointed out the distinction between production and property. It is one of his great contributions to economic theory.

But all this type of argument shows not only a complete incapacity to understand Russia, but a narrowness of view which will prevent any clear understanding of further developments in traditional capitalist society. Marx’s definitions are both precise and sweeping. In all previous societies, land was the main factor in production. In capitalist society the main factor is accumulated labor, within the environment of the world market. If the laborer controls the accumulated labor we have socialism. Wherever it controls him we have capitalism. “It is only the dominion of past, accumulated, materialized labor over immediate living labor that stamps the accumulated labor with the character of Capital.” Marx repeatedly wrote these definitions. The most famous of them, just as this last, applies literally to Stalinist society:

“Capital is a definite interrelation in social production belonging to a definite historical formation of society. This interrelation expresses itself through a certain thing and gives to this thing a specific social character. Capital is not the sum of the material and produced means of production converted into capital and means of production by themselves are no more capital than gold or silver are money in themselves. Capital signifies the means of production monopolized by a certain part of society, the products and material requirements of labor made independent of labor power in living human beings and antagonistic to them, and personified in capital by this antagonism.”

Such a society, whatever differences it may and must develop from classical capitalism, will move in a certain direction and in a certain way. That is the heart of the problem.

5. The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation

If the contradiction between use-value and exchange-value is the pivot of the Marxian political economy, its second distinctive character is, on Marx’s own evaluation, his method of analyzing surplus value, i. e. surplus labor in the modern historical condition. This he treats as an entity, and his deliberate refusal in theoretical analysis to take into consideration its subdivisions into industrial profit, commercial profit, interest, rent, taxes, etc. is a fundamental of his system. It would be presumptuous to attempt to state it in words other than his own.

“With the advance of accumulation, therefore, the proportion of constant to variable capital changes. If it was originally say 1:1, it now becomes successively 2:1, 3:1, 4:1, 5:1, 7:1, 8:1, so that, as the capital increases, instead of 1/2 of its total value, only 1/3, 1/4, 1/5, 1/6, 1/8 is transformed into labor-power, and, on the other hand, 2/3, 3/4, 4/5, 5/6, 7/8 into means of production . . . With the growth of the total capital, its variable constituent or the labor incorporated in it also does increase, but in a constantly diminishing proportion.”

The disproportion between constant and variable capital increases and, ultimately, such will be the strain on the worker to produce the necessary surplus that, as Marx says in one place, at a certain stage, if the laborer worked all 24 hours a day, and the capitalist took all the labor instead of merely the surplus over subsistence, it would still not be sufficient. Here in the process of production, and not in the process of circulation (the market) lies the fundamental contradiction of capitalist production. This is the basis of Marx’s law of the falling rate of profit.

“The fact that this analysis is made independently of the subdivisions of profit, which fall to the share of different categories of persons, shows in itself that this law, in its general workings, is independent of those subdivisions and of the mutual relations of the resulting categories of profit. The profit to which we are here referring is but another name for surplus value itself, which is merely observed in relation to the variable capital from which it arises. The fall in the rate of profit therefore expresses the falling relation of surplus value itself to the total capital, and is for this reason independent of any division of this profit among various participants.”

Here is the key to the understanding of the growing crisis in Russia. Part of the annual product goes for necessary wages. Part of it goes to replace the constant capital used up. If as has been estimated the means of production have to be renewed every ten years, then the workers have to produce, yearly, beside their wages, one-tenth of a constantly increasing capital. The rest is the surplus labor. As the mass of capital increases, the mass of surplus labor becomes proportionally less and less. The worker, with no control over the process of production, receives less and less of the product. At a certain stage, in order to make the decreasing mass of surplus value approximately adequate to its task, the capitalist has no alternative but to lower the wages and increase the exploitation of the worker. The worker resists. The capitalist class is then compelled to enslave him. Ultimately, says Engels, the worker will be driven to the level of a Chinese coolie. This is the inevitable enslavement of the worker which Marx prophesies so persistently.

If today when we see the enslavement we begin to see it in a worker no longer “free,” but attached to the factory as the slave or the serf was attached to the land, then the Party will have definitely left the road of Marxism for the most vicious and vulgar empiricism. It is on this movement in the direct process of production that is based the theoretical certainty of the collapse of capitalist production. The competition on the world market, the enormous expenses of an exploiting society, with its military apparatus, bureaucracy, clergy, police, etc., the decreasing productivity of the individual laborer, the millions who do work which can only be called work “under a miserable mode of production,” all this compels such a society to make surplus labor and surplus labor alone, the compelling force of production.

Thus at a certain stage, as in Germany in 1932, the magnificent productive apparatus stands crippled. Such is the size of the means of production and the organic composition of capital, that the enormous quantity of surplus labor necessary for the progressive functioning of a capitalist society cannot be produced. The “functioning capital” available to make this productive apparatus work is too little. It appears to be a plethora of capital, but Marx says this “so-called plethora of capital” is always a capital whose mass does not atone for the fall in the rate of profit. Capitalist production comes to a standstill, first and foremost because the system demands that surplus labor be produced, and sufficient surplus labor cannot be produced. The contradiction between use-value and exchange-value has reached its apotheosis. The troubles of the market are merely the reverse side, the result of the contradictions in production.

An identical process of production in Russia moves inevitably to a similar result. The laws of capitalist production, always immanent in an isolated Workers’ State and more so in a backward economy, have been forced into action, in the environment of the world market. The organic composition of capital in Russia mounts with the growth of industrialization. Year by year, however, the mass of surplus labor must grow proportionally less and less. Marx worked out his final theory of accumulation on the basis of the total social capital in the country and denied that this altered the economic and historical characteristics of the society. The expenses of an exploiting class within the environment of the world market, the privileges necessary to differentiate the classes, a vast military apparatus, increasing degradation and slavery of the worker, the lowering of his individual productivity at a stage when it needs to be increased, all these features of Russia are rooted in the capital-wage labor relation and the world-market environment. The advantages that Russia alone enjoyed in 1928, centralization of the means of production, capacity to plan, have today been swamped by the disadvantages of the quest for surplus value.

To its traditionally capitalist troubles the bureaucracy adds one of its own, an excessive waste due to the bureaucratic administration. But Stalin today, like Hitler, contends essentially with the falling relation of the mass of surplus value to the total social capital. That is the economic basis of the constantly growing persecution of the workers by the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy is no worse than any other ruling class. It behaves as it does because it must. This is the law of motion of Stalinist society. Ultimately the productive apparatus of Russia will stand as impotent as Germany’s in 1932, and for the same reason, its incapacity to produce the necessary surplus labor which is the compelling motive of production for any modern class society. The struggle in Russia is not over consumption, as Trotsky thought, but over production, and the Stalinist state is organized nine-tenths, not for stealing, but for production. The Party must make this clear in all its propaganda and agitation and correct this serious error.

This is the reply to all who see some new type of society superseding capitalism and solving its contradictions. All of these theories are distinguished by their absence of economic analysis, or by the flimsiness of their assumptions. If the Party should adopt the same empirical method in its own analysis, it will completely emasculate its own capacity to answer and destroy the arguments of those who herald the managerial society, the “new” Fascist order, the garrison State, etc. This theory is the heritage that Marx left for the proletarian movement. And it is here that we must be clear or always be in confusion.

6. The Theory of Imperialism

Modern imperialism is a quest for markets in an attempt to check the always declining relation of surplus value to the total social capital. So that Lenin, following Marx, bases his theory of imperialism on production and not on circulation. The circulation process of capital, however, is important for one’s understanding of a particular manifestation of imperialism. In Volume II, Marx repeats in almost every chapter that the capitalist has to set aside some capital year after year until it is large enough for the purpose of reorganizing this enterprise on the necessary scale. Individual capitals may accumulate quickly. What is important is the total accumulation in regard to the social capital as a whole. This mass of surplus labor, embodied in money capital and waiting until it is large enough, forms a substantial part of the capital in the hands of banks, and as capitalist production develops it becomes larger and larger. This money-capital also increases as capital is withdrawn from the production of commodities through its incapacity to produce profits. This is the money-capital of which Lenin writes.

But all imperialism was not necessarily of the particular type Lenin analyzed. Japan and Russia were not, as he said, “modern, up-to-date finance-capitals,” but as he explained, their military power, their domination of colonial countries, their plunder of China, etc., made them imperialist. By 1914 imperialism was therefore a struggle for all or any kind of territory, for the sake of the territory and in order to prevent rivals from getting hold of it. This was done to control raw materials, to export capital, to expand the commodity-market, for strategic purposes, in fact for any purpose which would contribute to the increase of surplus value. That is the obvious economic basis of Stalinist imperialism. Like Hitlerism, it will seize fixed capital or agrarian territory, tin-mines or strategic ports and transport manpower. Within its own borders the bureaucracy mercilessly exploits the subject nationalities. Should it emerge victorious in the coming war, it will share in all the grabbings of its partners, and for the same reason. Trotsky’s idea that the bureaucracy seeks foreign territory merely to expand its power, prestige, and revenues lays the emphasis on the consumption of the bureaucracy. That is false. The “greed” of the capitalist class is a result of the process of production, and the greed of the bureaucracy has the same roots. With a productivity of labor as slow as it is in Russia, and the overhead expenses of an exploiting society within the environment of the world market as large as they are, equal to that of the most highly developed capitalist states, it is not possible for the bureaucracy to escape the same fundamental problems of production as an advanced capitalist state, and to move towards the same attempts at solution.

7. Fascism

If the relations of production in Russia are capitalist then the state is Fascist. Fascism is a mass petty-bourgeois movement, but the Fascist state is not a mass petty-bourgeois state. It is the political reflection of the drive towards complete centralization of production which distinguishes all national economies today.

Finance capital and interlocking directorates are a result of the growing concentration of capital and the increasing socialization of production. The contradiction between this socialization and the appropriation of the product for the benefit of a few, drives the few into a position where to survive they must act as one, against the workers and against the external bourgeoisie.

The Fascist state has deeper economic roots than we have hitherto acknowledged. In this respect the development of Russia is a sign-post as to the future of capitalist society. In 1878 Engels (and Marx approved) made a statement of the most profound social significance for the modern world: that the growing socialization of production would compel the capitalists to treat the productive forces as social forces, so far as that was possible within the framework of capitalist relations. How far is that possible? Today life and Marx’s Capital teach us the probable extent and limits of this process. Marx treated in Volume I the direct process of production, and all the essentials of his doctrine are contained in that volume. In the next volume he treated circulation, as part of the process of production, but as “secondary” and supplementary to production. The “one fundamental condition” of the capitalist mode of production, the sale and purchase of labor-power, he tells us himself that he abstracted from circulation and treated in Volume I.

Then in Volume III, his abstract analysis complete, he for the first time, and only late in the volume, subdivided surplus-value into profit, interest, rent, etc. Today the capitalist class, impelled to treat the productive forces as social forces, so far has left the property relations intact, but the group in control manipulates the surplus value more and more as a whole. Less and less capital is apportioned to production by competition. In Germany today capital is consciously directed to different branches of production. The process will continue. The capitalists abolish the free market and shape circulation as far as possible to their own purposes, rationing every commodity, including labor-power. But the one fundamental condition of capitalist production, the sale and purchase of labor-power, and the process of production (Volume I), that they cannot alter without destroying themselves. Lenin (in the last two pages of Imperialism) as early as 1916, saw that with the increasing socialization of production, “private economic relations and private property relations constitute a shell which is no longer suitable for its contents, a shell which must of necessity begin to decay if its destruction is postponed by artificial means.” The Communist Manifesto of the Third International was written around the same thesis in the most pronounced form.

If Russia today has differences with a capitalist economy where the private property relations have decayed and production is nationalized, these points are not to be detailed for their own sake as being different. Nobody denies their difference. What is to be proved is that these differences alter the law of motion of the society. And this cannot be done, because the contradictions of the whole society are rooted in the class relations of production, which are identical and determine all other relations. What was formerly private and uncontrolled by the very development of capitalist production becomes more and more state-controlled.

It is from there, where Marx placed his basic contradictions, that all capitalist troubles spring. More and more, capitalist society, in Engels’ phrase, will capitulate to the necessity for planning of the invading socialist society. We must be prepared for strange transformations. But as long as wage-labor exists, the capitalist class will have what Engels called not more than the “technical elements” of a solution. “Technically,” Hitler and Stalin have more control of the means of production and are able to do anything. In reality the social relations of production inside the country in the environment of the world market make them merely vain fighters against the general current of world economy. It is this economic necessity of organizing production as a whole (the invading socialist society) but yet the interests of a few (the old capitalist society) that finds political expression in Fascism. Whatever the method, capitalist economy forces the formation of the totalitarian state owing to the needs of production.

8. Socialism

The antithesis of Stalinist society and capitalistic society being the same, the solution of their contradictions is the same. It can be stated in a sentence. The workers must take control of the process of production on a national scale and international scale; this achieved, automatically, according to the technical development and the relations with the world market, use-values will begin to predominate. But with reasonable speed the same must take place on an international scale, or the quest for surplus labor in the world as a whole will drag down the socialist state, unless it commands an exceptionally well-developed and extensive area. “We live,” said Lenin, “not in a state but in a system of states.” The consequences of this transformation will be:

(1) The individual development of the laborer. It is in this that Marx depends with unwearying insistence for the higher productivity of labor which will be characteristic of the new society. “Variable Capital” will now, and only now, meet “Constant Capital” in coordination. In no sphere has our party been so guilty as in its utter neglect of this phase of production during the last ten years. The necessary expansion of production will take place and be maintained in socialist society through the fact that the material and intellectual advantages of society, now the prerogative of a few, will be the prerogative of all, and this, for Marx, means the certainty of an enormous development, not in the worker getting more to eat, but primarily as an agent in the process of production. The creative capacity of the worker, the joy in labor and service, hitherto seen only in the process of revolution, will be applied for the first time to production by the emancipated working class. That is the only way to solve the antithesis between use-value and exchange-value. To presume that Stalinist society has solved it is a monstrous absurdity. The degradation of the Russian worker is an economic fact. Man is the greatest of all productive forces, and once his potentialities are released, the era of human freedom will begin. “Its fundamental premise is the shortening of the working day.” Until then society will be increasingly like Russia and Germany, and plunging to destruction.

(2) This release of the workers for creative labor in production will be immensely encouraged by the entry into productive labor of the millions of idlers and unproductive laborer who infest modern society – the bourgeoisie, the lawyers, the publicity men, the distributors, domestic servants, agitators, storm-troopers, police, etc. All will be trained and placed in productive labor. They are the overwhelming overhead expenses of a class society, in Russia as well as in Germany.

(3) Production will be for social needs and not for millions of non-productive consumers in the army, navy, air-force, and their useless and criminal expenditure. The international division of labor will become a source not of enormous expenditure and autarchy, but a source of cooperation and continuous advance.

It is necessary to emphasize this today. For if it were understood some of the notions now prevalent in the Party could not exist. The idea that if the bourgeoisie should nationalize production and property, the hope for Socialism is utopia – that is a misunderstanding of the contradictions of capitalism which must be driven out of our movement. Such a transformation will solve nothing. The three points outlined above will be as far from realization as ever. A new society begins when the workers take power or when the world market is abolished by the domination of one capitalist state which would be an unspeakable barbarism. Marxism knows no other “new” society, far less any progressive new society. Either the emancipation of labor or increasing barbarism. Only in the most abstract sense can state-property be said the be a higher form, as monopoly capitalism was a higher form than pre- monopoly capitalism. Today we have reached a turning point. The pauperization of the worker, which was formerly relative, is now, on a world scale, absolute. Today in the most advanced capitalist societies, he is on his way to slavery. In its present state, capitalism, whatever its form, except in a few areas and for declining periods, can no longer maintain the worker even in the conditions of his previous slavery. Without the proletarian revolution the state-property form can be the vehicle of barbarism and the destruction of human society. Such terms as higher and lower forms have no meaning in the concrete circumstances. It is not the form of property but the social relations of production which are decisive. Today if the working class is master, the form is progressive. If it is not, the form is reactionary. “In bourgeois society living labor is but a means to increase accumulated labor. In communist society accumulated labor is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the laborer.” Any society today, in which the aim is not to promote the existence of the laborer is doomed to crisis and disorder and will go always closer to barbarism until the workers take power. That is all there is to Marx, and as he himself states, on an understanding of this, all comprehension of the facts depends.

9. Political Conclusions

On the basis of the above analysis certain political conclusions follow automatically.

They are:

(a) No defense of Russia under any circumstances.

The first condition for working out a long-term policy about Russia is to define the economic nature of the society and the historic character of the bureaucracy. It is bourgeois, and therefore has no rights over the struggles of the workers for their democratic rights. The struggle for socialism is the struggle for democracy, before, or after, the expropriation of the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy in Russia has to be expropriated, driven away from its stranglehold over the process and the means of production. To do this the proletariat mobilizes all the poor and all the oppressed of Russia. It is prepared without hesitation to restore private property to those peasants who wish it. It rejects a united front with Kerensky and all his scores of followers in Russia who ask the proletariat to fight with them so that they may each get a factory for themselves. With Mensheviks, and with any section of the working class movement, or any other section of society, it forms a united front for what it considers to be working class demands, and for nothing else; it forms these on its own conditions, and the revolutionary proletariat keeps its hands free and makes or breaks these attempts at united action as it sees fit in the interests of the struggle for power. Nothing in Marxism compels the proletariat to form a united front with any group at any time except it thinks to the advantage of the proletariat to do so in its struggle for power.

(b) Denunciation of the CP as the agent of a Fascist power.

It appears that in the minds of some this excludes a United Front with the CP on a specific issue. The contention is not only stupid but dangerous. A United Front is formed with a section of American workers mainly on their intentions against the American bourgeoisie, or the world bourgeoisie, not on account of its belief in Stalinism. If it is not to be formed with them because the CP is the agent of a reactionary bureaucracy which is the enemy of the workers and of socialism, that excludes the United Front with the CP for all those who do not believe that the working class is still the ruling class in Russia. In the case of Browder whom the American government attacked, for obvious reasons the Party will offer a United Front. If the CP, however had called for a mass protest against the War in 1939, then with our present policy the Party should have refused. But even that refusal is not definitive. For according to the temper of the American proletariat, the strength of the Party, the stage of development or disintegration of the CP, the strength of the bourgeoisie, the Party may even, under similar circumstances, decide even to support a specific anti-war action by the CP even though the call was dictated originally by the interests of the Russian bureaucracy. The sophistry which indulges in superficial arguments of the above type must be rigorously rejected. It would be most dangerous for the Party if it allowed itself to be driven into considering the United Front as a collection of fixed laws, instead of a tactical orientation within given circumstances toward a fixed goal.

(c) Propaganda for socialism.

The Party must make it a first task, in its press and all other propaganda and agitation, to preach the necessity of socialism, to explain that no modern society of any kind offers any solution to the problems of modern society, except a society in which the workers hold power. It must with special vigor denounce and expose the ideas that Fascism, managerial society, or bureaucratic state-socialism are in any concrete sense progressive societies or even could be, and it must do this by challenging their proponents on the fundamental economic categories and analysis of Marx.

(d) The Party must initiate a serious study of Marxian economics, and devote a section of The New International regularly to studies in Capital, The Critique of Political Economy, etc. Many of the important points in Capital are still controversial, but it is certain that the development of society offers this generation an opportunity to elucidate by an observation of life many of the problems which were objects merely of speculation by previous theoreticians. This must be the basis of our theoretical work in the future. It is as an example of what we have to do, and how we have to do it, that this resolution has been written. Whatever our conclusions, the uncertainly of the present and the crises of the future demand that we solidly establish our fundamentals. If even we shall decide to abandon the Marxian law of value in the analysis of any modern society, then we should now exactly and concretely why. For it is only from there that we could develop a new method, as will be necessary for any new society.

September 19, 1941