http://www.regroupment.org/main/page_for_trotskyism.html
For Trotskyism!
[The following document was adopted by the fusion conference of the
Bolshevik Tendency and the Left Trotskyist Tendency on November 1986 as
a codification of the programmatic agreement reached by the two
organizations. It was originally printed in 1917 #3, Spring 1987. This
version copied from http://www.bolshevik.org/1917/no3/no03btlt.html]
1. Party and Program
‘‘The interests of the [working] class cannot be formulated otherwise
than in the shape of a program; the program cannot be defended otherwise
than by creating the party. ‘‘The class, taken by itself, is only
material for exploitation. The proletariat assumes an independent role
only at that moment when from a social class in itself it becomes a
political class for itself. This cannot take place otherwise than
through the medium of a party. The party is that historical organ by
means of which the class becomes class conscious.’’
—L.D. Trotsky, ‘‘What Next?’’ 1932
The working class is the only thoroughly revolutionary class in modern
society, the only class with the capacity to end the insanity of
capitalist rule internationally. The fundamental task of the communist
vanguard is to instill in the class (particularly its most important
component, the industrial proletariat) the consciousness of its historic
role. We explicitly reject all stratagems put forward by centrists and
reformists, lifestylists and sectoralists which see in one or another
non-proletarian section of the population a more likely vehicle for
social progress.
The liberation of the proletariat, and with that the elimination of the
material basis of all forms of social oppression, hinges on the question
of leadership. The panoply of potential ‘‘socialist’’ leaderships are in
the final analysis reducible to two programs: reform or revolution.
While purporting to offer a ‘‘practical’’ strategy for the gradual
amelioration of the inequities of class society, reformism acts to
reconcile the working class to the requirements of capital.
Revolutionary Marxism, by contrast, is based on the fundamental
antagonism between capital and labor and the consequent necessity for
the expropriation of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat as the
precondition for any significant social progress.
The hegemony of bourgeois ideology in its various forms within the
proletariat represents the most powerful bulwark to capitalist rule. As
James P. Cannon, the historic leader of American Trotskyism, noted in
The First Ten Years of American Communism:
‘‘The strength of capitalism is not in itself and its own institutions;
it survives only because it has bases of support in the organizations of
the workers. As we see it now, in the light of what we have learned from
the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, nine-tenths of the struggle
for socialism is the struggle against bourgeois influence in the
workers’ organizations, including the party.’’
The key distinction between a revolutionary organization and a centrist
or reformist one is found not so much in abstract statements of ultimate
goals and objectives, but in the positions which each advances in the
concrete situations posed by the class struggle. Reformists and
centrists tailor their programmatic response to each new event in
accordance with the illusions and preconceptions of their audience. But
the role of a revolutionary is to tell the workers and the oppressed
what they do not already know.
‘‘The program must express the objective tasks of the working class
rather than the backwardness of the workers. It must reflect society as
it is and not the backwardness of the working class. It is an instrument
to overcome and vanquish the backwardness....We cannot postpone, modify
objective conditions which don’t depend upon us. We cannot guarantee
that the masses will solve the crisis, but we must express the situation
as it is, and that is the task of the program.’’
—Trotsky, ‘‘The Political Backwardness of the American Workers,’’ 1938
We seek to root the communist program in the working class through
building programmatically-based caucuses in the trade unions. Such
formations must actively participate in all struggles for partial reform
and improvements in the situation of the workers. They must also be the
best upholders of the militant traditions of class solidarity, e.g., the
proposition that ‘‘Picket Lines Mean Don’t Cross!’’ At the same time
they must seek to recruit the most politically conscious workers to a
world view that transcends parochial shopfloor militancy, and addresses
the burning political questions of the day in a fashion which points to
the necessity of eliminating the anarchy of production for profit and
replacing it with rational, planned production for human need.
Our intervention in the mass organizations of the proletariat is based
on the Transitional Program adopted by the founding convention of the
Fourth International in 1938. In a certain sense there can be no such
thing as a ‘‘finished program’’ for Marxists. It is necessary to take
account of historical developments in the past five decades and the need
to address problems posed by specific struggles of sectors of the class
and/or the oppressed which are not dealt with in the 1938 draft.
Nonetheless, in its essentials, the program upon which the Fourth
International was founded retains all its relevance because it poses
socialist solutions to the objective problems facing the working class
today in the context of the unchanging necessity of proletarian power.
2. Permanent Revolution
Over the past five hundred years, capitalism has cre ated a single world
economic order with an international division of labor. We live in the
epoch of imperialism—the epoch of capitalist decline. Experience this
century has demonstrated that the national bourgeoisies of the
neo-colonial world are incapable of completing the historic tasks of the
bourgeois-democratic revolution. There is, in general, no path of
independent capitalist development open for these countries.
In the neo-colonial countries the accomplishments of the classical
bourgeois revolutions can only be replicated by smashing capitalist
property relations, severing the tentacles of the imperialist world
market and establishing working class (i.e., collectivized) property.
Only a socialist revolution—a revolution carried out against the
national bourgeoisie and big landowners—can lead to a qualitative
expansion of the productive forces.
We reject the Stalinist/Menshevik ‘‘two-stage’’ strategy of proletarian
subordination to the supposed ‘‘progressive’’ sectors of the
bourgeoisie. We stand for the complete and unconditional political
independence of the proletariat in every country. Without exception, the
national bourgeoisies of the ‘‘Third World’’ act as the agents of
imperialist domination whose interests are, in a historic sense, far
more closely bound up with the bankers and industrialists of the
metropolis than with their own exploited peoples.
Trotskyists offer military, but not political, support to
petty-bourgeois nationalist movements (or even bourgeois regimes) which
enter into conflict with imperialism in defense of national sovereignty.
In 1935, for example, the Trotskyists stood for military victory of the
Ethiopians over the Italian invaders. However, Leninists cannot
automatically determine their position on a war between two bourgeois
regimes from their relative level of development (or underdevelopment).
In the squalid 1982 Malvinas/Falklands war, where the defense of
Argentine sovereignty was never at issue, Leninists called for both
British and Argentine workers to ‘‘turn the guns around’’—for
revolutionary defeatism on both sides.
3. Guerrillaism
Our strategy for revolution is mass proletarian insurrection. We reject
guerrillaism as a strategic orientation (while recognizing that it can
sometimes have supplementary tactical value) because it relegates the
organized, politically conscious working class to the role of passive
onlooker. A peasant-based guerrilla movement, led by radical
petty-bourgeois intellectuals, cannot establish working-class political
power regardless of the subjective intent of its leadership.
On several occasions since the end of the Second World War it has been
demonstrated that, given favorable objective circumstances, such
movements can successfully uproot capitalist property. Yet because they
are not based on the mobilization of the organized working class, the
best outcome of such struggles is the establishment of nationalist,
bureaucratic regimes qualitatively identical to the product of the
Stalinist degeneration of the Russian Revolution (i.e., Yugoslavia,
Albania, China, Vietnam and Cuba). Such ‘‘deformed worker states’’
require supplementary proletarian political revolutions to open the road
to socialist development.
4. Special Oppression: The Black Question, The Woman Question
The working class today is deeply fractured along racial, sexual,
national and other lines. Yet racism, national chauvinism and sexism are
not genetically but rather socially programmed forms of behavior.
Regardless of their present level of consciousness, the workers of the
world have one crucial thing in common: they cannot fundamentally
improve their situation, as a class, without destroying the social basis
of all oppression and exploitation once and for all. This is the
material basis for the Marxist assertion that the proletariat has as its
historic mission the elimination of class society and with that the
eradication of all forms of extra-class or ‘‘special’’ oppression.
In the United States, the struggle for workers power is inextricably
linked to the struggle for black liberation. The racial division between
black and white workers has historically been the primary obstacle to
class consciousness. American blacks are not a nation but a race-color
caste forcibly segregated at the bottom of society and concentrated
overwhelmingly in the working class, particularly in strategic sectors
of the industrial proletariat. Brutalized, abused and systematically
discriminated against in the ‘‘land of the free,’’ the black population
has historically been relatively immune to the racist imperial
patriotism which has poisoned much of the white proletariat. Black
workers have generally proved the most militant and combative section of
the class. The fight for black liberation—against the everyday racist
brutality of life in capitalist America—is central to the construction
of a revolutionary vanguard on the North American continent. The
struggle against the special oppression of the other national,
linguistic and racial minorities, particularly the growing Latino
population, is a question which will also be key to the American revolution.
The oppression of women is materially rooted in the existence of the
nuclear family: the basic and indispensable unit of bourgeois social
organization. The fight for complete social equality for women is of
strategic importance in every country on the globe. A closely related
form of special oppression is that experienced by homosexuals who are
persecuted for failing to conform to the sexual roles dictated by the
‘‘normalcy’’ of the nuclear family. The gay question is not strategic
like the woman question, but the communist vanguard must champion the
democratic rights of homosexuals and oppose any and all discriminatory
measures directed at them.
In the unions communists campaign for equal access to all jobs;
union-sponsored programs to recruit and upgrade women and minorities in
‘‘non-traditional’’ fields; equal pay for equivalent work and jobs for
all. At the same time we defend the seniority system as a historic
acquisition of the trade-union movement and oppose such divisive and
anti-union schemes as preferential layoffs. It is the historic
responsibility of the communist vanguard to struggle to unite the
working class for its common class interests across the artificial
divisions promoted in capitalist society. To do this means to advance
the interests of the most exploited and oppressed and to struggle
relentlessly against every manifestation of discrimination and injustice.
The oppressed sectors of the population cannot liberate themselves
independently of proletarian revolution, i.e., within the framework of
the social system which originated and perpetuates their oppression. As
Lenin noted in State and Revolution:
‘‘Only the proletariat—by virtue of the economic role it plays in
large-scale production—is capable of being the leader of all the toiling
and exploited masses, whom the bourgeoisie exploits, oppresses and
crushes often not less, but more, than it does the proletarians, but who
are incapable of waging an independent struggle for their emancipation.’’
We live in a class society and the program of every social movement
must, in the final analysis, represent the interests of one of the two
classes with the potential to rule society: the proletariat or the
bourgeoisie. In the trade unions, bourgeois ideology takes the form of
narrow economism; in the movements of the oppressed it manifests itself
as sectoralism. What black nationalism, feminism and other forms of
sectoralist ideology have in common is that they all locate the root of
oppression in something other than the system of capitalist private
property.
The strategic orientation of the Marxist vanguard toward ‘‘independent’’
(i.e., multi-class) sectoralist organizations of the oppressed must be
to assist in their internal differentiation into their class components.
This implies a struggle to win as many individuals as possible to the
perspective of proletarian revolution and the consequent necessity of an
integrated vanguard party.
5. The National Question and ‘Interpenetrated Peoples’
‘‘Marxism cannot be reconciled with nationalism, be it even of the ‘most
just’, ‘purest’, most refined and civilised brand. In place of all forms
of nationalism Marxism advances internationalism....’’
—V.I. Lenin, ‘‘Critical Remarks on the National Question’’
Marxism and nationalism are two fundamentally counterposed world views.
We uphold the principle of the equality of nations, and oppose any
privileges for any nation. At the same time Marxists reject all forms of
nationalist ideology and, in Lenin’s words, welcome ‘‘every kind of
assimilation of nations, except that founded on force and privilege.’’
The Leninist program on the national question is primarily a negative
one designed to take the national question off the agenda and undercut
the appeal of petty-bourgeois nationalists, in order to more starkly
pose the class question.
In ‘‘classic’’ cases of national oppression (e.g., Quebec), we champion
the right of self-determination, without necessarily advocating its
exercise. In the more complex cases of two peoples interspersed, or
‘‘interpenetrated,’’ throughout a single geographical territory (Cyprus,
Northern Ireland, Palestine/Israel), the abstract right of each to
self-determination cannot be realized equitably within the framework of
capitalist property relations. Yet in none of these cases can the
oppressor people be equated with the whites in South Africa or the
French colons in Algeria; i.e., a privileged settler-caste/labor
aristocracy dependent on the super-exploitation of indigenous labor to
maintain a standard of living qualitatively higher than the oppressed
population.
Both the Irish Protestants and the Hebrew-speaking population of Israel
are class-differentiated peoples. Each has a bourgeoisie, a petty
bourgeoisie and a working class. Unlike guilty middle-class moralists,
Leninists do not simply endorse the nationalism of the oppressed (or the
petty-bourgeois political formations which espouse it). To do so
simultaneously forecloses the possibility of exploiting the real class
contradictions in the ranks of the oppressor people and cements the hold
of the nationalists over the oppressed. The proletarians of the
ascendant people can never be won to a nationalist perspective of simply
inverting the current unequal relationship. A significant section of
them can be won to an anti-sectarian class-against-class perspective
because it is in their objective interests.
The logic of capitulation to petty-bourgeois nationalism led much of the
left to support the Arab rulers (the embodiment of the so-called ‘‘Arab
Revolution’’) against the Israelis in the Mid-East wars of 1948, 1967
and 1973. In essence these were inter-capitalist wars in which the
workers and oppressed of the region had nothing to gain by the victory
of either. The Leninist position was therefore one of defeatism on both
sides. For both Arab and Hebrew workers the main enemy was at home. The
1956 war was a different matter; in that conflict the working class had
a side: with Nasser against the attempts of French and British
imperialism (aided by the Israelis) to reappropriate the recently
nationalized Suez Canal.
While opposing nationalism as a matter of principle, Leninists are not
neutral in conflicts between the oppressed people and the oppressor
state apparatus. In Northern Ireland we demand the immediate and
unconditional withdrawal of British troops and we defend the blows
struck by the Irish Republican Army at such imperialist targets as the
Royal Ulster Constabulary, the British Army or the hotel full of
Conservative cabinet ministers at Brighton. Similarly, we militarily
side with the Palestinian Liberation Organization against the forces of
the Israeli state. In no case do we defend terrorist acts directed at
civilian populations. This, despite the fact that the criminal terrorism
of the Zionist state against the Palestinians, like that of the British
army and their Protestant allies against the Catholics of Northern
Ireland, is many times greater than the acts of communal terror by the
oppressed.
6. Immigration/Emigration
Leninists support the basic democratic right of any individual to
emigrate to any country in the world. As in the case of other democratic
rights, this is not some sort of categorical imperative. We would not,
for example, favor the emigration of any individual who would pose a
threat to the military security of the degenerated or deformed worker
states. The right of individual immigration, if exercised on a
sufficiently wide scale, can come into conflict with the right of
self-determination for a small nation. Therefore Trotskyists do not
raise the call for ‘‘open borders’’ as a general programmatic demand. In
Palestine during the 1930’s and 1940’s, for example, the massive influx
of Zionist immigration laid the basis for the forcible expulsion of the
Palestinian people from their own land. We do not recognize the
‘‘right’’ of unlimited Han migration to Tibet, nor of French citizens to
move to New Caledonia.
The ‘‘open borders’’ demand is generally advocated by well-meaning
liberal/radical muddleheads motivated by a utopian desire to rectify the
hideous inequalities produced by the imperialist world order. But world
socialist revolution—not mass migration—is the Marxist solution to the
misery and destitution of the majority of mankind under capitalism.
In the U.S., we defend Mexican workers apprehended by La Migra. We
oppose all immigration quotas, all roundups and all deportations of
immigrant workers. In the unions we fight for the immediate and
unconditional granting of full citizenship rights to all foreign-born
workers.
7. Democratic Centralism
A revolutionary organization must be strictly central ized with the
leading bodies having full authority to direct the work of lower bodies
and members. The organization must have a political monopoly over the
public political activity of its members. The membership must be
guaranteed the right of full factional democracy (i.e., the right to
conduct internal political struggle to change the line and/or to replace
the existing leadership). Internal democracy is not a decorative
frill—nor merely a safety valve for the ranks to blow off steam—it is a
critical and indispensible necessity for the revolutionary vanguard if
it is to master the complex developments of the class struggle. It is
also the chief means by which revolutionary cadres are created. The
right to internal factional democracy, i.e., the right to struggle
against revisionism within the vanguard, is the only ‘‘guarantee’’
against the political degeneration of a revolutionary organization.
Attempts to gloss over important differences and blur lines of political
demarcation internally can only weaken and disorient a revolutionary
party. An organization cohered by diplomacy, lowest-common denominator
consensus and the concomitant programmatic ambiguity (instead of
principled programmatic agreement and the struggle for political
clarity) awaits only the first serious test posed by the class struggle
to break apart. Conversely, organizations in which the expression of
differences is proscribed—whether formally or informally—are destined to
ossify into rigid, hierarchical and lifeless sects increasingly divorced
from the living workers movement and unable to reproduce the cadres
necessary to carry out the tasks of a revolutionary vanguard.
8. Popular Fronts
‘‘The question of questions at present is the Popular Front. The left
centrists seek to present this question as a tactical or even as a
technical maneuver, so as to be able to peddle their wares in the shadow
of the Popular Front. In reality, the Popular Front is the main question
of proletarian class strategy for this epoch. It also offers the best
criterion for the difference between Bolshevism and Menshevism.’’
—Trotsky,‘‘The POUM and the Popular Front,’’ 1936
Popular frontism (i.e., a programmatic bloc, usually for governmental
power, between workers organizations and representatives of the
bourgeoisie) is class treason. Revolutionaries can give no support,
however ‘‘critical,’’ to participants in popular fronts.
The tactic of critical electoral support to reformist workers parties is
premised on the contradiction inherent in such parties between their
bourgeois (reformist) program and their working-class base. When a
social-democratic or Stalinist party enters into a coalition or
electoral bloc with bourgeois or petty-bourgeois formations, this
contradiction is effectively suppressed for the life of the coalition. A
member of a reformist workers party who stands for election on the
ticket of a class-collaborationist coalition (or popular front) is in
fact running as a representative of a bourgeois political formation.
Thus the possibility of the application of the tactic of critical
support is excluded, because the contradiction which it seeks to exploit
is suspended. Instead, revolutionists should make a condition of
electoral support the breaking of the coalition: ‘‘Down With the
Capitalist Ministers!’’
9. United Fronts and ‘‘Strategic United Fronts’’
The united front is a tactic with which revolutionaries seek to approach
reformist or centrist formations to ‘‘set the base against the top’’ in
situations where there is an urgent felt need for united action on the
part of the ranks. It is possible to enter into united-front agreements
with petty-bourgeois or bourgeois formations where there is an episodic
agreement on a particular issue and where it is in the interests of the
working class to do so (e.g., the Bolsheviks’ united front with Kerensky
against Kornilov). The united front is a tactic which is not only
designed to accomplish the common objective but also to demonstrate in
practice the superiority of the revolutionary program and thus gain new
influence and adherents for the vanguard organization.
Revolutionists never consign the responsibility of revolutionary
leadership to an ongoing alliance (or ‘‘strategic united front’’) with
centrist or reformist forces. Trotskyists never issue common
propaganda—joint statements of overall political perspective—with
revisionists. Such a practice is both dishonest (as it inevitably
involves papering over the political differences separating the
organizations) and liquidationist. The ‘‘strategic united front’’ is a
favorite gambit of opportunists who, despairing of their own small
influence, seek to compensate for it by dissolution into a broader bloc
on a lowest common-denominator program. In ‘‘Centrism and the Fourth
International,’’ Trotsky explained that a revolutionary organization is
distinguished from a centrist one by its ‘‘active concern for purity of
principles, clarity of position, political consistency and
organizational completeness.’’ It is just this which the strategic
united front is designed to obliterate.
10. Workers Democracy and the Class Line
Revolutionary Marxists, who are distinguished by the fact that they tell
the workers the truth, can only benefit from open political
confrontation between the various competing currents in the left. It is
otherwise with the reformists and centrists. The Stalinists, social
democrats, trade-union bureaucrats and other working-class misleaders
all shrink from revolutionary criticism and seek to pre-empt political
discussion and debate with gangsterism and exclusions.
We oppose violence and exclusionism within the left and workers movement
while upholding the right of everyone to self-defense. We also oppose
the use of ‘‘soft-core’’ violence—i.e., slander—which goes hand-in-hand
with (or prepares the way for) physical attacks. Slander and violence
within the workers movement are completely alien to the traditions of
revolutionary Marxism because they are deliberately designed to destroy
consciousness, the precondition for the liberation of the proletariat.
11. The State and Revolution
The question of the state occupies a central place in revolutionary
theory. Marxism teaches that the capitalist state (in the final analysis
the ‘‘special bodies of armed men’’ committed to the defense of
bourgeois property) cannot be taken over and made to serve the interests
of working people. Working-class rule can only be established through
the destruction of the existing bourgeois state machinery and its
replacement with institutions committed to the defense of proletarian
property.
We are adamantly opposed to bringing the bourgeois state, in any guise,
into the affairs of the labor movement. Marxists oppose all union
‘‘reformers’’ who seek redress from bureaucratic corruption in the
capitalist courts. Labor must clean its own house! We also call for the
expulsion of all cops and prison guards from the trade-union movement.
The duty of revolutionists is to teach the working class that the state
is not an impartial arbiter between competing social interests but a
weapon wielded against them by the capitalists. Accordingly, Marxists
oppose reformist/utopian calls for the bourgeois state to ‘‘ban’’ the
fascists. Such laws are invariably used much more aggressively against
the workers movement and the left than against the fascistic scum who
constitute the shock troops of capitalist reaction. The Trotskyist
strategy to fight fascism is not to make appeals to the bourgeois state,
but to mobilize the power of the working class and the oppressed for
direct action to crush fascistic movements in the egg before they are
able to grow. As Trotsky remarked in the Transitional Program, ‘‘The
struggle against fascism does not start in the liberal editorial office
but in the factory—and ends in the street.’’
Leninists reject all notions that imperialist troops can play a
progressive role anywhere: whether ‘‘protecting’’ black schoolchildren
in the Southern U.S., ‘‘protecting’’ the Catholic population in Northern
Ireland or ‘‘keeping the peace’’ in the Middle East. Neither do we seek
to pressure the imperialists to act ‘‘morally’’ by divesting nor by
imposing sanctions on South Africa. We argue instead that the ‘‘Free
World’’ powers are fundamentally united with the racist apartheid regime
in defense of the ‘‘right’’ to superexploit black labor. Our answer is
to mobilize the power of international labor in effective class-struggle
solidarity actions with South Africa’s black workers.
12. The Russian Question
‘‘What is Stalinophobia? Is it hatred of Stalinism; fear of this
‘syphilis of the labor movement’ and irreconcilable refusal to tolerate
any manifestation of it in the party? Not at all....
’’Is it the opinion that Stalinism is not the leader of the
international revolution but its mortal enemy? No, that is not
Stalinophobia; that is what Trotsky taught us, what we learned again
from our experience with Stalinism, and what we believe in our bones.
‘‘The sentiment of hatred and fear of Stalinism, with its police state
and its slave labor camps, its frame-ups and its murders of working
class opponents, is healthy, natural, normal, and progressive. This
sentiment goes wrong only when it leads to reconciliation with American
imperialism, and to the assignment of the fight against Stalinism to
that same imperialism. In the language of Trotskyism, that and nothing
else is Stalinophobia.’’
—JamesP. Cannon, ‘‘Stalinist Conciliationism and Stalinophobia,’’ 1953
We stand for the unconditional defense of the collectivized economies of
the degenerated Soviet worker state and the deformed worker states of
Eastern Europe, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, China, North Korea and Cuba
against capitalist restoration. Yet we do not lose sight for a moment of
the fact that only proletarian political revolutions, which overthrow
the treacherous anti-working class bureaucrats who rule these states,
can guarantee the gains won to date and open the road to socialism.
The victory of the Stalinist faction in the Soviet Union in the 1920’s
under the banner of ‘‘Socialism in One Country’’ was crowned with the
physical extermination of the leading cadres of Lenin’s party a decade
later. By counterposing the defense of the Soviet Union to the world
revolution, the Stalinist usurpers decisively undermine both. The
perspective of proletarian insurrection in order to reestablish the
direct political rule of the working class is therefore not counterposed
but inextricably linked to the defense of the collectivized economies.
The Russian question has been posed most sharply in recent years over
two events: the suppression of Polish Solidarnosc and the intervention
of the Soviet Army in Afghanistan. We side militarily with the
Stalinists against both the capitalist-restorationists of Solidarnosc
and the Islamic feudalists fighting to preserve female chattel slavery
in Afghanistan. This does not imply that the Stalinist bureaucrats have
any progressive historical role to play. On the contrary. Nonetheless,
we defend those actions (like the December 1981 suppression of
Solidarnosc) which they are forced to take in defense of the
working-class property forms.
13. For the Rebirth of the Fourth International!
‘‘Trotskyism is not a new movement, a new doctrine, but the restoration,
the revival, of genuine Marxism as it was expounded and practised in the
Russian revolution and in the early days of the Communist International.’’
—JamesP. Cannon, The History of American Trotskyism
Trotskyism is the revolutionary Marxism of our time—the political theory
derived from the distilled experience of over a century-and-a-half of
working-class communism. It was verified in a positive sense in the
October Revolution in 1917, the greatest event in modern history, and
generally negatively since. After the bureaucratic strangulation of the
Bolshevik Party and the Comintern by the Stalinists, the tradition of
Leninism—the practice and program of the Russian Revolution—was carried
forward by the Left Opposition and by it alone.
The Trotskyist movement was born in a struggle for revolutionary
internationalism against the reactionary/utopian conception of
‘‘Socialism in One Country.’’ The necessity of revolutionary
organization on an international basis derives from the organization of
capitalist production itself. Revolutionists on each national terrain
must be guided by a strategy which is international in dimension—and
that can only be elaborated by the construction of an international
working-class leadership. To the patriotism of the bourgeoisie and its
social-democratic and Stalinist lackeys, the Trotskyists counterpose
Karl Liebknecht’s immortal slogan: ‘‘The Main Enemy is At Home!’’ We
stand on the basic programmatic positions adopted by the 1938 founding
conference of the Fourth International, as well as the first four
congresses of the Communist International and the revolutionary
tradition of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky.
The cadres of the Fourth International outside of North America were
largely annihilated or dispersed in the course of the Second World War.
The International was definitively politically destroyed by Pabloite
revisionism in the early 1950’s. We are not neutral in the 1951-53
split—we side with the International Committee (IC) against the Pabloite
International Secretariat (IS). The IC’s fight was profoundly flawed
both in terms of political framework and execution. Nonetheless, in the
final analysis, the impulse of the IC to resist the dissolution of the
Trotskyist cadre into the Stalinist and social-democratic parties (as
proposed by Pablo) and its defense of the necessity of the conscious
factor in history, made it qualitatively superior to the liquidationist IS.
Within the IC the most important section was the American Socialist
Workers Party (SWP). It had also been the strongest section at the time
of the founding of the International. It had benefited by the most
direct collaboration with Trotsky and had a leading cadre which went
back to the early years of the Comintern. The political collapse of the
SWP as a revolutionary organization, signalled by its uncritical
enthusing over Castroism in the early 1960’s, and culminating in its
defection to the Pabloites in 1963, was therefore an enormous blow to
world Trotskyism.
We solidarize with the struggle of the Revolutionary Tendency of the SWP
(forerunner of the Spartacist League/US) to defend the revolutionary
program against the centrist objectivism of the majority. We stand on
the Trotskyist positions defended and elaborated by the revolutionary
Spartacist League in the years that followed. However, under the
pressure of two decades of isolation and frustration, the SL itself has
qualitatively degenerated into a grotesquely bureaucratic and overtly
cultist group of political bandits which, despite a residual capacity
for cynical ‘‘orthodox’’ literary posturing, has shown a consistent
impulse to flinch under pressure. The ‘‘international Spartacist
tendency’’ today is in no important sense politically superior to any of
the dozen or more fake-Trotskyist ‘‘internationals’’ which lay claim to
the mantle of the Fourth International.
The splintering of several of the historic pretenders to Trotskyist
continuity and the difficulties and generally rightward motion of the
rest opens a potentially fertile period for political reassessment and
realignment among those who do not believe that the road to socialism
lies through the British Labour Party, Lech Walesa’s
capitalist-restorationist Solidarnosc or the Chilean popular front. We
urgently seek to participate in a process of international regroupment
of revolutionary cadres on the basis of the program of authentic
Trotskyism, as a step toward the long overdue rebirth of the Fourth
International, World Party of Socialist Revolution.
‘‘On the basis of a long historical experience, it can be written down
as a law that revolutionary cadres, who revolt against their social
environment and organize parties to lead a revolution, can—if the
revolution is too long delayed—themselves degenerate under the
continuing influences and pressures of this same environment....
’’But the same historical experience also shows that there are
exceptions to this law too. The exceptions are the Marxists who remain
Marxists, the revolutionists who remain faithful to the banner. The
basic ideas of Marxism, upon which alone a revolutionary party can be
constructed, are continuous in their application and have been for a
hundred years. The ideas of Marxism, which create revolutionary parties,
are stronger than the parties they create and never fail to survive
their downfall. They never fail to find representatives in the old
organizations to lead the work of reconstruction.
‘‘These are the continuators of the tradition, the defenders of the
orthodox doctrine. The task of the uncorrupted revolutionists, obliged
by circumstances to start the work of organizational reconstruction, has
never been to proclaim a new revelation—there has been no lack of such
Messiahs, and they have all been lost in the shuffle—but to reinstate
the old program and bring it up to date.’’
—James P. Cannon, The First Ten Years of American Communis