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ON THE MARXIST PROGRAM

1) Dialectics of Revolution: Program and Party

(a) The Marxist Method and Program
(b) Vanguard Party and Democratic Centralism
(c) Petty bourgeois ‘Trotskyism’
2) Theory/Strategy of Permanent Revolution
(a) Marx on Permanent Revolution
(b) The Paris Commune tests permanent revolution
(c) Engels and Lenin
3) Epoch of imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism
(a) Permanent Revolution in the Age of Imperialism
(b) Imperialism Today
(c) The Rise of China and Russia as new imperialist powers
4) The Bolshevik Revolution and First Four Congresses of the International
(a) The Bolshevik Revolution
(b) The First Four Congresses: 1919-1922
(c) The programmatic gains of the First Four Congresses
5) Stalinism and the Left Opposition
(a) The counter-revolution in the revolution
(b) The Left Opposition for permanent revolution
(c) From the 3rd to the 4th International
6) The 1938 Transitional Program
(a) Transitional Method
(b) Trotsky’s Leadership
(c) A Transitional Program for Today
7) The Degeneration of the Fourth International
(a) The Crisis of Leadership in the FI
(b) “Reconstructing” the FI
(c) Rebuilding a new international on the 1938 Program
8) Restoration of capitalism
(a) Unconditional Defence of the Soviet Union
(b) Political Revolution Betrayed
(c) Cuba, Vietnam, DPRK
9) Terminal Crisis
(a) Marx, Lenin and Trotsky on crisis
(b) Debates on ‘Economic Crisis’
(c) Marx on Ecological Crisis

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ON THE MARXIST PROGRAM

1) Dialectics of Revolution: Program and Party

Objective laws of motion of capitalism necessitate the democratic centralist proletarian vanguard
party as the 'subjective' agent of revolutionary change.

(a) The Marxist Method and Program

Our program is based on Marx's scientific critique of capitalism and his program for socialist revolution.
First, we state what we understand by Marxism as method, theory and program. A very useful
introduction to Marx’s method is that of David Yaffe’s article “Crisis, Capital and the State”.
Marx broke with Hegel’s idealism and developed an historical materialist critique of capitalism.
Capitalism is an historically specific mode of production in which the contradiction between the social
relations and forces of production, expressed by class struggle, drives it to develop the forces of
production until it reaches the point where it must destroy the forces of production, in depressions and
wars that necessitates its overthrow by the proletariat. This made a scientific break from bourgeois
ideology that justified capitalism as natural and just, the evolutionary peak of civilisation in which the
three main ‘revenue’ classes shared the distribution of income as wages, rent and profits. While
political economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo recognised that labour produces value,
they attributed to landlords and capitalists a share of value as rent and profits as reward for their
role in the process of production.
Against Smith and Ricardo, Marx proved that the share of profits and rents were expropriated from
labour only because landlords and capitalists had dispossessed workers of the means of production.
This forced the proletariat to sell its labour power as a commodity and to produce more value than the
value of their labour power which was expropriated as surplus value, the basis of profits and rents. The
ideological appearance of profits, rents and wages as the rewards of the 'factors of production' (capital,
land, labour) misrepresented the exploitative relations of production as equal exchange relations. In his
analysis of ‘commodity fetishism’ Marx shows [Capital 1, Chapter 1 - section 4] how the inversion
of social relations as exchange relations was the material base of bourgeois ideology.
The exploitative social relation between labour and capital defined capitalism as an historic mode of
production driven by the contradiction between labour and capital. It set the objective conditions of
class struggle between workers struggling to increase the value of the wage, and capitalists who wanted
to increase their surplus-value, that is, the rate of exploitation, S/V. Class struggle over the rate of
exploitation was the motor of capitalist development, which was expressed by what Marx called
the capitalist “laws of motion”.
Specifically, labour resistance to increasing absolute exploitation forced capitalists to embark on
increasing the relative exploitation of labour. That is, to invest more capital in the means of production
'C', (constant capital) in order to increase labour productivity. This exacerbated the contradiction
between labour and capital, periodically driving it to the surface as the resistance of labour to further
increases of S/V caused the rate of profit to fall. For capital each crisis has to be resolved by destroying
enough C and V to restore the rate of profit S/C+V. For labour, crises can only be resolved by the
revolutionary consciousness of the proletariat acting as a subjective force sufficient to overthrow the
objective social relations of capitalism.

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Marx's critique of capitalism as a historically limited mode of production made it clear that the task of
the proletariat was to overthrow the bourgeois state and replace capitalism with a communist society.
This program was first drafted as the Communist Manifesto of 1848 when Marx defines the Communist
Party as an integral part of the working class representing its “international and historic” interests in the
“development of the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie”.

“The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the national
struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common
interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of
development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they
always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole”. Read ‘For Marx the
Program Comes First’ in Rebooting Lenin.

(b) Vanguard Party and Democratic Centralism

Unlike other forms of socialism, the party does not bring the program ‘from outside’ the class! It is the
vanguard of and for the class, i.e., “inside” the class, carrying the method of scientific socialism to the
wider working class so it can act subjectively as the revolutionary class. Lenin argues in What is to Be
Done that ‘scientific socialism’ is the work of the ‘intelligentsia’ that breaks from bourgeois ideology
to arrive at a communist consciousness. Yet under capitalism neither workers nor bourgeois intellectuals
spontaneously arrive at scientific socialism. For workers the fetishisation of social relations as exchange
relations reproduces economism, or ‘trade union’ consciousness. For intellectuals, fetishism reproduces
petty bourgeois socialism such as Fabianism or Menshevism. But once ‘scientific socialism’ was
‘worked out’ by Marx and Engels its discoveries became the common property of the proletariat and
the foundation for the program of the revolutionary vanguard party.

The Communist Party Marx describes then becomes the ‘collective scientist’ applying the scientific
method, not by aping bourgeois ‘science’, but of dialectical materialism. The party applies ‘Marxism’
by the method of testing theory in practice, drawing from Marx’s laws of motion conclusions that guide
the proletariat in its concrete class struggle. As for Marx, for Lenin the “truth is concrete”. The program
(and so the underlying theory) can only be tested in practice by the class struggle, drawing on the
experience of the vanguard united in action, a process which Lenin later referred to as “democratic
centralism”. Trotsky shared Lenin’s view of “democratic centralism”.

False socialist leaderships of the many petty bourgeois sects Marx identified failed to embrace the
Marxist method of dialectics and substituted a bourgeois version of socialism. We can trace this
phenomenon back to Marx’s critiques of Adam Smith and Ricardo. Marx refuted Ricardo who argued
exploitation was based on unequal exchange; he did battle with Proudhon who wanted to abolish money;
he did so in his critique of the petty bourgeois currents in the Paris Commune in Critique of the Gotha
Program. The essential criticism of Marx was that all of these currents were caught up in bourgeois
ideology, and hostile to the dialectic method, suppressing the contradiction between labour and capital
that drives the expropriation of surplus-value in production. By separating the objective and subjective
aspects of class struggle, they ‘objectify’ the role of the proletariat, and deny it any subjective historic
role in the revolutionary transformation of capitalism into socialism. They produce one-sided
distortions of Marxism that are either objectivist or subjectivist negating the dialectical subjective
intervention of the democratic centralist vanguard party in transforming the objective reality.

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Of course, the concept of democratic centralism has undergone many distortions in the history of
socialism. One is the anarchist doctrine that democracy is incompatible with centralism. This is a petty
bourgeois theory that democracy means individual freedom from party discipline or state authority. The
material base of the petty bourgeois is freedom from wage labour, to escape the working class into the
capitalist class. Anarchists are predisposed to hate the working class as the freed slave hates the slave.
Because their class is historically rootless (for example, having its roots torn up by capitalist agriculture
or being transplanted into the capitalist state bureaucracy) their fate lies with the victory of one or other
of the two contradictory social classes - proletariat or capitalist.

The central premise of anarchism is that the proletariat does not objectively need a state since all
states serve a ruling class. This is the petty bourgeois ideological belief that a subjectively ‘spontaneous’
workers revolution can defeat the bourgeois dictatorship and prevent the emergence of a workers’
dictatorship (workers’ state). Yet history has shown that when anarchists claimed to play a key role in
social revolutions, in Russia in 1917 and Spain in 1936-37, their leaders betrayed the workers and
working peasants by forming counter-revolutionary alliances with bourgeois parties against the
formation of a workers’ state. [Trotsky on Spain]

A second distortion of democratic centralism is that of Mensheviks and Stalinists (including Maoists)
who turn the party into a bureaucratic centralist organisation where workers’ democracy is subverted
by a bureaucratic caste based on the petty bourgeoisie. In this respect they are no different from social
democracy. The Mensheviks and Stalinists (as relapsed Mensheviks) suffer from the ‘objectivist’
disease. For them the transition to ‘socialism’ is ‘objective’ - that is, historically inevitable, and
therefore does not require a subjectively class-conscious revolutionary party to lead it. Rather the petty
bourgeois bureaucracy will inform the workers in triplicate when they can celebrate their victory. Such
treachery is the necessary expression of their class role in sucking up to capitalism by acting as
bourgeois agents in politics and the unions. The consequence is to disrupt and disorganise the potential
for a class-conscious workers movement led by a Marxist democratic-centralist party to overthrow
capitalism and open the road to workers’ governments capable of stopping capitalism’s destruction of
humanity and nature. But worse than anarchists, Mensheviks and Stalinists are the traitors to
Trotskyism who profess to follow Lenin and Trotsky but who actually sell out to the bourgeoisie.

(c) Petty bourgeois ‘Trotskyism’

The success of the democratic centralist party in Russia in 1917, and the aborted revolution in Germany
in 1919, saw the bourgeoisie panic and immediately declare the ‘Leninist’ Party the evil enemy of
humanity and the heavens. Trotsky’s The Lessons of October written after the death of Lenin in 1924
was his open attack on the rise of Stalin and his neo-Menshevik bureaucratic regime. The bourgeois
attack on the Leninist Party as a ‘dictatorship’ against the ‘democracy’ of the Provisional Government,
was disproved by the facts. First, the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionary peasant party walked out
of the soviets and gave the Bolsheviks a ‘bourgeois democratic’ majority rather than suffer inevitable
defeat. Second, workers, soldiers and peasants formed a clear majority in support of the insurrection.
Third, the imperialist countries invaded soviet Russia to smash a socialist revolution in the name of
‘democracy’ and against the majority will of workers in their own countries. It is clear that thereafter
we can talk only of workers’ dictatorship and workers’ democracy!

The result of the isolation and military invasion of soviet Russia was the rise of the state bureaucracy
substituting for workers’ democracy in the soviets. Trotsky and the Left Opposition resisted this

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degeneration of proletarian democratic centralism into petty bourgeois bureaucratic centralism. Trotsky
led the fight against Stalin until his death by a Stalinist wielded icepick. Unfortunately, long before his
death some within the ‘Trotskyist’ movement had begun to attack dialectics and the democratic
centralist party.

Since Trotsky’s death we have been subjected to ‘improvers’ who reject the method of Trotsky’s
Transitional Program. Some, like the ‘new left’, consciously reject the method of the Communist
Manifesto and the first four Congresses of the Communist International. Others (LIT, U Sec., CWI, LO,
ICL, IBT), who claim to adhere to the method, never apply or teach it. This abandonment of the Marxist
method reproduces the political confusion sown in the working class by the labour lieutenants of Capital
and their exclusive preoccupation with exchange relations, signifying their complete surrender to the
wage system.

The petty bourgeois politicians, the anarchists, Stalinists, pseudo-Trotskyists and labour bureaucrats all
serve Capital and understand the threat of the Leninist party as the vehicle for the delivery of the Marxist
program, and that it is a living thing only when it is taken up by the masses as their own. Their chosen
role is to suppress the program to serve the class enemy. They do this with such theatrics admonishing
militant workers that, “while we on the dais and in the organizing meetings are all in favour of the most
radical of the program’s demands, you workers are not ready for them, and cannot understand them at
your current level of development”. This is their alibi for organising workers around the broadest
abstractions and timid demands.

The program cannot live unless it advances the subjective will of the vanguard in the class struggle in
the form of the democratic centralist party. This cannot happen unless there is freedom of criticism to
challenge the program, combined with disciplined action to implement and test the program in practice.
For Marx the party embodies the program and acts as the ‘vanguard’ to advance the class struggle
towards class consciousness. The ‘permanent revolution’ is the theory/program based on the transitional
method. The revolution is permanent because it begins with immediate and democratic demands on
the bourgeoisie to meet the needs of workers, who struggle to win these demands proves that they
cannot be realised by capitalism, thereby raising the class consciousness of workers necessary to build
organs of workers power and to prepare for the seizure of power.

2) Theory/Program of Permanent Revolution

The Permanent Revolution from 1850 onward embodies the historical and internationalist class
interests of the proletariat and is not completed until the development of communist society.

(a) Marx on Permanent Revolution

Marx and Engel’s perspective in the Communist Manifesto was that the bourgeoisie would turn on the
proletariat after making its own revolution against the aristocracy. However, the failure of the 1848
revolutions showed that the European bourgeoisies had exhausted their role in the development of
capitalism and made an alliance with the feudal regimes against the proletariat. The bourgeoisie had
ceased to be the revolutionary class. It was now the task of the proletariat to take over from the
bourgeoisie the role of developing the forces of production by means of permanent revolution, finishing
the bourgeois revolution –in particular the national revolution, land reform and universal suffrage –as

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part of the socialist revolution. Marx and Engels summed up these results in March, 1850, with a
transitional program for “permanent revolution”! Read ‘For Marx the Program came first’ in Rebooting
Lenin.

The First International (International Workingmen’s Association) was formed (1864-1874) to

advance the transitional program for permanent revolution. Marx offered addresses on Capital and
current political questions. The International broke with the petty bourgeois socialists (Proudhon,
Lassalle etc.,) who compromised with the bourgeois state, and with the anarchists (Bakunin) who
rejected the need for a revolutionary workers’ state. It supported the right of national self-
determination in the case of Poland, the USA (civil war), Ireland and the Franco-Prussian war. Only
the proletariat could realise the bourgeois program for political independence by means of a political
alliance between the workers and peasants against the national bourgeoisie. The armed proletariat
would create a workers’ republic and defend it with a popular militia. The Paris Commune proved
that the bourgeois state would have to be smashed and replaced by the dictatorship of the proletariat.

(b) The Paris Commune tests permanent revolution

The first real test of the International came with the Paris Commune of 1871 when the French
bourgeoisie allied with the Prussian state to suppress the French Republic. The defeat of the Commune
did not invalidate the Marxist program. It proved that the program tested in practice could be
strengthened by the lessons of the Commune. It proved that the bourgeois state could not be simply
taken over and used as the basis of the proletarian dictatorship, rather it would have to be smashed. It
highlighted the need to build a stronger international capable of overcoming both the reactionary
bourgeoisie, now embarking on imperialist expansion to colonise the world, and also of overcoming
the liberal bourgeois and petty bourgeois parties who compromised with the reactionaries, preventing
the proletarian vanguard from becoming a class-conscious force for revolution. The defeat of the
Commune brought a huge international reaction down on the proletarian movement.

Despite the lessons of the Commune, the International succumbed to opportunism in the 1870s. Marx’s
critique of the Commune in the Civil War in France was followed up by an internal struggle in the
International over the lessons of the Commune. It was time for the Marxists to settle accounts with their
great rivals Proudhon and Blanqui, Bakunin and Lassalle. Marx provides the ammunition. There was a
showdown with the anarchists in the International Conference at Hague in 1872, when their 4-year long
attempt to take over the International finally saw Bakunin expelled (24 for, 6 against and 7 abstaining).
The anarchist maximum program for smashing all states to “equalise the classes” to found a new society
on autonomous groups was revealed as utopian, precisely because the Commune compromised with
Thiers and did not use its embryonic state power to destroy the counter-revolutionary army and defend
Republican Paris from the Prussian army.

Marx blamed the ultra-left Blanquists who had been the majority in the Commune and also led the
Revolutionary Guard but failed to go beyond armed barricades to launch a serious attack on the Thiers
army. They walked out of the Hague Conference when it voted to shift the General Council from
London to New York, away from the barricades! The Proudhonists too (as the majority of members of
the International in the Commune) were shown to be petty bourgeois students in their opposition to
working class organisations. As Marx pointed out the Commune was a political association and passed
edicts to empower the unions and even build one big union! The Proudhonists were closer to the

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anarchists than Marxists, being critical of the need for a democratic and centralised party which in their
view would inevitably succumb to “authoritarianism”.

Against these ultra-lefts and reformists, Marx and Engels were convinced that with the leadership of
the International, the Commune could have led to an armed insurrection had the Marxist program for
‘permanent revolution’ been taken up by all members of the International and spread across France,
forcing a truce with Thiers for a Workers and Peasants Republic. For those who think this prospect
utopian, they should read Engels 1891 postscript to The Civil war in France on the ‘dystopia’ that
followed the defeat of the Commune. Its defeat was a defeat for France, then subjugated to Bismarck
for twenty years, creating the conditions for a new war, “…a race war which would subject the whole
of Europe to devastation by 15 or 20 millions of armed men.” The French state backed by the Prussians
may have defeated the insurrection, but it would have been fought on the terms of permanent revolution,
proving in the class war that compromises with the republican bourgeoisie are not possible, and that the
bourgeois revolution can only be completed by smashing the state and replacing it with a Workers’
State.

Held after the defeat of the Commune, the Hague Congress largely removed the ultraleft petty bourgeois
factions from the International. However, the ‘Marxists’ left in the International did not all draw Marx’s
conclusions that the working class had to defend the bourgeois program only by advancing the
proletarian program. While Marx knew that the Commune would be defeated unless the proletariat took
power, many ‘Marxists’, such as the followers of Lassalle, held the view that because the proletariat
was not ready for revolution in 1871, compromise with the bourgeoisie was necessary to prepare the
conditions for socialist revolution. So, while Marx had driven off the ultra-left petty bourgeois
‘subjectivists’ who fantasized workers could take power without organisation or a party, he had not
defeated the petty bourgeois ‘objectivists’ who said the proletariat were not ready for revolution. As a
consequence, in 1872 the General Council of the International was shifted from London to the New
York to relieve Marx of an administrative overload. It soon went into abeyance.

Three years later in 1875 the Gotha Congress of United German Workers Party would spark an angry
attack by Marx on the draft program. In his Critique of the Gotha Program he berated the German party
for compromising with Lassalle’s petty bourgeois socialism. He launched a bitter attack on the German
‘unity’ party for ignoring the Marxist method and program. “Vulgar socialism (and from it in turn a
section of the democrats) has taken over from the bourgeois economists the consideration and treatment
of distribution as independent of the mode of production and hence the presentation of socialism as
turning principally on distribution. After the real relation has long been made clear, why retrogress
again?

The defeat of the Commune was now expressed in a defeat for Marxism facing vulgar socialism,
signifying the ascendancy of the counter-revolution over the permanent revolution. The program
remained nationalist in the face of the rise of imperialism, and lacked an understanding of the historical
dialectic of the transition from capitalism to communism. Marx’s Critique had no impact for 15 years,
and it was not made public until Engels insisted in putting it on the agenda at the Erfurt Congress in
1891 when the faults of the Gotha program came up for debate. Read the ‘Gotha Program abandons
Marxist program’ in Rebooting Lenin.

(c) Engels and Lenin

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After the death of Marx in 1884, Engels continued to vigorously defend the Marxist program. First, it
fell to Engels as Marx’s lifelong collaborator to complete Marx’s unpublished drafts of Vols. 3 and 4
of Capital. This was important in revealing Marx’s scientific method, moving from the high level of
abstraction of Volume 1 to the many concrete determinations resulting from competition in the
marketplace in Volume 3. Here Marx’s law of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall (TRPF) and its
counter-tendencies provided the theoretical basis for understanding the expansion of capitalism beyond
the nation state into the global market, a perspective later developed by Lenin and Trotsky. Read
Rosdolsky’s Making of Marx’s Capital Chapters 1&2

Second, in the Second International founded in 1889, Engels stressed the necessity of including the
seizure of power, a workers’ republic and a united German federation. Yet he did not develop Marx’s
Critique of the Gotha Program to deal specifically with the rise of German imperialism or the impact
of colonial super-profits on the opportunist aspects of the Erfurt draft program. Advancing the
internationalist aspect of the Marxist program had to wait on further developments that led to the First
Inter-Imperialist world war and the historic betrayal of the Second International. Read ‘Engels and
Lenin critique the Centrist Erfurt Program of 1891’ in Rebooting Lenin.

It fell to Lenin to undertake the unfinished tasks that Marx had set himself in his planned final three
volumes of Capital: on the State, Foreign Trade, and World Market, and to specify how the laws of
motion of capital in Volume 3 would manifest concretely in the decline of competitive capitalism and
the rise of imperialism. The epoch of imperialism as state monopoly capitalism led to the
destruction of the forces of production, the parasitism of finance capital and worsening crises,
wars and revolutions that would hasten the completion of the permanent revolution with the end
of the capitalist mode of production and the beginning of the transition to communism.

3) Epoch of imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism

The ‘highest’ stage of capitalism divides the world between oppressor and oppressed states and
does not allow for new imperialist states to emerge with the exception of ex-workers’ states which
are able to resist re-colonisation.

It was Lenin who built on Marx’s Capital to develop the concept of imperialism as the epoch of capital’s
final stage of decline based on parasitic finance capital. The accumulation of capital would necessitate
bigger crises as the concentration of finance capital in the ‘great powers’ led to intensifying competition
to plunder the world market for sources of surplus value. This competition led to the First Imperialist
War which Lenin foresaw would either end in a redivision of the world market by the victorious great
powers and a defeat for the world’s workers, or in the revolutionary overthrow of global capitalism and
victory for socialist revolution.

Lenin’s theory of imperialism was critical in developing the Marxist program in the new epoch of state
monopoly capitalism. He incorporated the programmatic advances from 1848 onwards testing them
under the conditions of the revolution against the Tsar. The vanguard party was committed to the task
of permanent revolution – the proletarian party leading all the oppressed classes to overthrow the Tsar.
Russia was imperialist because the Tsar was modernising, with the aid of French and British finance
capital, as an oppressor state. The democratic revolution to overthrow the Tsar would rapidly morph

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into a full-blown socialist revolution to overthrow the Russian bourgeoisie who was now acting in the
direct interests of foreign imperialists.

(a) Permanent Revolution in the Age of Imperialism

The Russian bourgeoisie, like the European bourgeoisies of 1848, was incapable of leading, let alone
completing, the bourgeois revolution. A workers’ revolution in Russia, ‘the weakest link’ in
imperialism, would open the permanent revolution; but completing the transition to socialism would
not be possible without an international revolution. The international proletariat would have to
complete this task as part of the international permanent revolution. Lenin and Trotsky came to
agreement on Permanent Revolution as the completion of the bourgeois revolution with the victory of
the socialist revolution.

In 1905 Lenin and Trotsky spoke of an ‘epoch’ of permanent revolution. The permanent
revolution would extend for an indeterminate ‘epoch’ and would be completed only when the
revolution in Russia unified its three aspects, finishing the bourgeois revolution as socialist
revolution, incorporating that into the international socialist revolution, and making the
transition from socialism to communism.

Meanwhile, the Second International was in crisis having succumbed to imperialist economism in the
imperialist heartlands. The rivalry of the imperialist powers to partition the globe was complete by 1914
and the struggle for supremacy now had to be conducted by inter-imperialist war over the re-partition
colonies and semi-colonies to plunder raw materials and labour. Thirty years of gradual adaptation to
imperialist super-profits resulted in the betrayal of the majority of the Second International on August
4, 1914. Instead of opposing war the majority social-patriotic leadership of the International lined up
behind their imperialist ruling classes and went to war.

While soldiers and sailors mutinied towards the end of the war on both the Eastern and Western fronts
and formed armed soviets, only in Russia did civil war lead to the conquest of a workers’ state. In
Europe, armed insurrection was isolated and destroyed by the betrayal of the 2nd International. The
critical factor was the absence of the Marxist vanguard party capable of leading the proletariat-for-
itself to the armed insurrection to overthrow of the bourgeois state. The revolutionary continuity of
the Marxist program was kept alive by the Bolshevik Party in Russia, incorporating the lessons of
the permanent revolution since 1850, and representing the international and historic interests of the
world proletariat. However, it could not advance the permanent revolution further as the failure to
build vanguard parties in Europe let the revolutionary crisis pass with the defeat of the international
revolution. Read Reply to the RCIT on Permanent Revolution

(b) Imperialism Today

While the Bolsheviks thought that the First World War showed capitalism was overripe for overthrow
by the proletariat, this proved premature (see chapter 4 below). Workers and poor peasants were ready
and willing, but after the defeat of the imperialists’ counterrevolutionary intervention, the Stalinists and
petty bourgeois democrats dominated the majority of the oppressed, becoming the most treacherous
leadership of the permanent counter-revolution. The Stalinists’ policy of building ‘socialism in one
country’ (exported as ‘national roads to socialism’) rejected the Marxist permanent revolution and
substituted the ‘peoples’ front’ (popular front) - Stalin’s ‘bloc of four classes’ (workers, peasants,

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intellectuals and national bourgeoisie) in support of ‘progressive’ ‘democratic’ imperialist bourgeois

governments, against fascist regimes. Trotsky, writing in 1923 in The New Course, to defend himself
from a Stalinist attack on himself as an “anti-Leninist”, saw this as an attack on the theory/program of
permanent revolution which embodied the method of Marx and Lenin.

The Stalinist bureaucracy was playing the same role in the working class as the union tops and social
democrats in the imperialist countries. It trapped workers in popular fronts to prevent their armed
independent organisation in Bolshevik-type parties threatening imperialism and the whole bourgeois
social order. In China 1924-27, Germany 1933, Spain 1936-37 and Vietnam 1939-46, this was to have
tragic consequences as the Stalinist leadership of the Communist Parties trapped the anti-Stalinist
masses in counter-revolutionary popular fronts and eliminated them by military and fascist reaction.
After the betrayal of the “3rd Period” ultraleft policy which rejected working class unity against fascism,
the Stalinists moved to the right to bloc with the ‘democratic’ bourgeoisie to isolate and smash the
Bolshevik-Leninist, and Fourth Internationalist parties, and defeat the proletarian revolution.

Did the defeat of the proletariat in the First and Second imperialist wars and the reactionary civil
wars that followed invalidate the theory/program of permanent revolution against the bourgeois
program of permanent counter-revolution? We say no. On the contrary, that method/theory holds
all the more clearly today. The epoch of imperialism is still with us. Global capitalism has been
plagued by parasitism, wars, revolutions and counter-revolutions as each crisis gets deeper and
more catastrophic, necessitating a ruling class strategy of permanent counter-revolution of
depression, repression and war to defeat the world’s workers. Therefore, the theory/program for
permanent revolution remains the key task for the worlds’ workers and poor farmers organisations.
Only by uniting in anti-imperialist struggles to complete the bourgeois democratic tasks as part of the
socialist revolution, will imperialism’s permanent counter-revolution be defeated.

Stalinists were not alone in joining the counter-revolution. Self-proclaimed Trotskyists did so also. In
the anti-imperialist struggles after the Second War, the Pabloists objectified permanent revolution into
evolutionary stages during which the Stalinists and progressive capitalists would accompany, acquiesce
to, or go along with, the objective social laws of capitalism towards socialism without the need for a
Bolshevik-Leninist party. The rival anti-Stalinist current in the International Committee formed popular
fronts with anti-colonial ‘left nationalists’ like Paz Estenssoro, Nasser and Gaddafi. As a result, the anti-
colonial struggles were not led by Bolshevik parties but by social imperialist Mensheviks who put their
trust in the ‘socialist’ credentials of colonial dictators, today, for example, Bashar Assad. The common
factor here is the abandonment of the materialist ‘subjectivity’ of the working and oppressed people led
by a Bolshevik party, and the substitution of the petty bourgeois idealist ‘objective’ completion of the
bourgeois revolution preparatory to socialism in the never-never land.

Lenin’s theory of imperialism explains the rise and fall of imperialist powers over this epoch. The
results of redivision of the world market in the two Imperialist wars has led to some imperialist states
rising and others falling. Yet since the First Imperialist War, no oppressed capitalist states have
emerged as an imperialist oppressor state. Among the British settler colonies, only Canada had a sizable
national capital sufficient to join the imperialist club before the war. We reject the view of some fake
Marxists that there are sub-imperialist states, for example India or Brazil, even China, that represent
progressive, countervailing, multipolar forces limiting US global hegemony. This is an admission that
the proletariat is not ready for revolution and must rely upon some ‘anti-imperialist’ bloc to resist US
imperialism. Nor as the RCIT claims are the Republic of Korea or Israel imperialist. We argue following

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Lenin that the litmus test for imperialism is the export of finance capital to super-exploit cheap labour
and extract raw materials as super-profits to counter the tendency for the rate of profit to fall (TRPF) in
the home countries. The conclusion is, that no colony or semi-colony can accumulate a sufficient share
of the surplus-value as national capital when virtually all surplus is appropriated by one or other
imperialist power. This has been borne out by events since 1918. The existing imperialist powers re-
divided the world, and yet failed to destroy the Soviet Union that had ‘partitioned’ itself from imperialist
world economy. After 1945, a new ‘redivision’ resulted, this time with the help of the Soviet Union,
which took territory in Eastern Europe and provided some aid for a number of national liberation wars
from China to Cuba which resulted in bureaucratically deformed-at-birth workers’ states. Read Russia
and China and the Unfinished Permanent Revolution.

(c) The Rise of China and Russia as new imperialist powers

The only exceptions to imperialist wars and redivisions that allowed new imperialist powers to emerge
was the success of permanent revolution in breaking from the imperialist world economy. Russia and
China as degenerate workers’ states escaped the fate of capitalist semi-colonies. Yet, as Trotsky long
argued, without a political revolution to defeat the bureaucratic castes in power, restoration would be
inevitable as the bureaucracy would have to revert to capitalism to save its own skin. The social
phenomenon described in The Revolution Betrayed and further in the Transitional Program of a
parasitic bureaucratic caste constituting a continuous threat of capitalist restoration in the absence of
global support for political revolution led to the complete triumph of Yeltsin in 1991. A petty
bourgeois/bureaucratic caste of “capitalist roaders” within China’s Communist Party likewise defeated
the Tien An Men uprising in 1989 and immediately moved to restore capitalism. As we have argued in
our documents, the rise of Russia and China as ex-workers’ states that restored capitalism and became
imperialist states can only be explained by developing Lenin’s theory of imperialism.

We develop Lenin’s theory of imperialism by going back to its essence: the export of finance capital as
a counter tendency to the TRPF. The domination of imperialism and its oppression of colonies and
semi-colonies is necessary to extract super-profits from its capital investment. This clearly explains why
new imperialist powers cannot arise once the world economy is divided by existing imperialist powers.
But it also explains how it is possible for former bureaucratic workers’ states to restore capitalism in
such a way as they escape being subordinated as semi-colonies and therefore can emerge as new
imperialist powers exporting finance capital and expropriating colonial super-profits.

In summary, former bureaucratic workers’ states resulted from national revolutions that overthrew their
bourgeoisies and escaped the imperialist division of the world economy. And even under bureaucratic
rule, state property allowed the rapid development of the forces of production well beyond that which
would have been possible had the national bourgeoisie remained in power. Yet in the absence of
workers’ democracy, bureaucratic planning is inefficient in matching production to social need and
leads to economic stagnation. It becomes a barrier to further development which puts pressure on the
bureaucracy to open up to the market and restore capitalism in the form of state capitalism. The
bureaucratic caste becomes a new ‘red’ bourgeoisie that takes advantage of the centralised state
apparatus to re-integrate into the global capitalist market without being subordinated to imperialist
domination. This means that Russia and China would inevitably emerge as new imperialist powers. In
2014 we summed up the impact of the rise of Russia and China. Read Why are Russia and China
imperialist powers and not capitalist semi-colonies?

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(4) The Bolshevik Revolution and First Four Congresses of the International

The most advanced point in the Permanent Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, faced the most
reactionary counter-revolutionary attacks, imperialist war, the popular front, fascism and
bureaucratic degeneration.

(a) The Bolshevik Revolution

The victory of the Bolshevik revolution was the most momentous event in the history of the modern
world. It vindicated the program of permanent revolution from the time of Marx to the epoch of
imperialism. The slogans for Peace, Land and Bread, summed up the Transitional Program. They were
immediate demands, but could be won only by a socialist revolution. Peace was the demand that the
workers in uniform refuse to fight, turn their guns on their officers and form rank and file soviets. It
ended the war, stopped the counter-revolution of Kornilov and built the Red Army. Land was the
democratic demand to win over the poor peasants by expropriating land and turning it over to the tillers.
This caused a split in the peasantry along class lines and opened the way for a class alliance with the
proletariat. Bread was the transitional demand to meet the basic needs of the workers and poor peasants
that could be won only by workers’ expropriation and control of industry. All led necessarily to the
seizure of power and construction of a workers’ state. Read Review of China Mieville’s October: The
Story of the Russian Revolution.

Marxism was vindicated in its fundamentals. First, only the proletariat, leading the poor peasantry and
other oppressed people, could rescue humanity from capitalist decline and reverse the destruction of
crises and wars by means of revolution. All class compromises in or outside parliament led to betrayal.
Second, only the vanguard party and program could inject the vital revolutionary subjective factor into
transforming the objective factor. All workers parties that attempted to appease the petty bourgeois or
labour aristocracy had to be split and the working-class majority won to the vanguard party. Third, the
workers’ state was a class state of the armed independence of the workers based on soviets and militias
and not mere bourgeois workers governments based on a majority of workers votes. This distinction is
manifest in the slogan of ‘The Dictatorship of the Proletariat’!

The victory of the Bolshevik revolution was met by a wave of enthusiasm from workers the world over,
and became the stimulus for the formation of vanguard parties in many countries. This wave became
the basis of the new 3rd International which was formed in February 1919. Its program debated in the
first Four Congresses to 1924 summed up the lessons of the permanent revolution in flesh and blood.
The new international was devoted to building world revolution not merely as an extension of the
Russian revolution but as the necessary condition for its survival. Read Trotsky, Lessons of October.

(b) The First Four Congresses: 1919-1922

Trotsky’s main writings during the period of the first four congresses are collected in the First Five
Years of the Communist International published in 1924. In his Introduction he states that the First and
Second Congresses of March 1919 and July 1920 were under the “aegis of imperialist war.” But “war
did not lead directly to the victory of the proletariat in Western Europe. It is all too obvious today just
what was lacking for victory in 1919 and 1920: a revolutionary party was lacking”.

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Writing in April 1919, Trotsky compares the German revolution to the Russian Revolution. There are
similarities, but the differences are key. Germany was an advanced imperialist country and both the
proletariat and the bourgeoisie were mature and powerful classes. When the armed workers opened the
German ‘February’ in November 1918, the bourgeoisie were forced to concede a ‘republic’ led by a
Social Democratic government which suppressed the revolution in the “July Days” of February 1919,
assassinating its main leaders Liebknecht and Luxemburg. The treacherous role of German Social
Democracy proved in Trotsky’s words – “to be the most counter-revolutionary factor in world history.”
This caused Social Democracy to split, but in the absence of a revolutionary party the proletariat was
without a “revolutionary combat organisation...It was compelled to not only fight for power but to
create its organization and train future leaders in the very course of this struggle.” Clearly, unlike the
Russian “July Days”, events were taking on their own momentum without the guidance of an
established vanguard party to avoid a showdown before the conditions for revolution had been prepared.
Nonetheless Trotsky regarded the “political and cultural level of the German workers” as capable of
rising to the task of winning workers from the treacherous SPD and the Kautskyite USPD, and to build
the Spartacist League into a Bolshevik-type party that could lead the revolution to victory.
Writing in May 1919 Trotsky in Thoughts on the Progress of the Revolution draws up a balance sheet
of the progress of the revolution so far. He critiques the Mensheviks’ evolutionary view that the
revolution would begin in the ‘West’ and move ‘East’.
But events clearly disproved the two-stage ‘mechanical Marxism’ by beginning in the East (Russia) and
moving West. Russia led first with the proletarian revolution in 1917 being neither an ‘accident’ or
‘adventure’. The betrayal of the Constituent Assembly in Germany (the Menshevik icon of
‘democracy’) in early 1918 led to the formation of a Communist Party with the slogan “All power to
the Soviets”. In Hungary and Bavaria, the workers had the impudence to emulate the Bolsheviks and
form workers governments with a “truly genuine democracy in the form of the rule of the victorious
proletariat.” “Thus, the proletarian revolution after starting in the most backward countries of Europe,
keeps mounting upwards, rung by rung, toward countries more highly developed economically”.
Thus, imperialist war not only disrupts the illusions in peaceful, evolutionary capitalist development, it
reveals the interconnectedness of all countries in the imperialist system. While bourgeois democracy
resists revolution in the West, its absence facilitates revolution in the East. Underneath the forms of
democracy are the relations of oppression between oppressor and oppressed states. The imperialist
ruling classes can ‘buy’ the ‘class peace’ with bourgeois democracy and delay civil war in the most
developed countries, but cannot delay it in the more backward, oppressed countries which the
imperialist bourgeoisies plunder for super-profits.

(c) The programmatic gains of the First Four Congresses

In his Report on the Fourth Congress (to the Communist Fraction of the 10th All-Union Congress of the
Soviets,) Trotsky summarises the international situation of the world labour movement. The three
prerequisites for socialist revolution are the level of productive technique, working class maturity and
a class-conscious vanguard.
First, capitalism is overdue for replacement by socialism. “...25 years ago and more, the
replacement of the capitalist mode of production by socialist methods would have already represented
objective gains, that is, mankind could have produced more under socialism than under capitalism.”

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Second, the working class “must become sufficiently powerful in the economic sense in order to
gain power and rebuild society”. “The working class in all countries plays a social and economic
role sufficiently great to be able to find a road to the peasant masses, to the oppressed nationalities,
and in this way assure itself of the majority. After the Russian revolution this is not a speculation, not
a hypothesis, not a deduction, but an incontestable fact”. (307).
Third, the ‘subjective factor’. “[T]he working class must be conscious of its power and must be able
to apply this power.” “During the post-war years, we have observed in the political life of Europe that
the working class is ready for the overturn, ready in the sense of striving subjectively toward it, ready
in terms of its will, moods, self-sacrifices, but still lacking the necessary organisational leadership”.
Trotsky presents this leadership as the role of the party. “In the most critical year for the
bourgeoisie, the year 1919, the proletariat of Europe could have undoubtedly conquered state power
with minimum sacrifices, had there been at its head a genuine revolutionary organization, setting forth
clear aims and capably pursuing them, i.e., a strong Communist Party. But there was none. On the
contrary, in seeking after the war to conquer new living conditions for itself and in assuming an
offensive against bourgeois society, the working class had to drag on its back the parties and trade
unions of the Second International, all of whose efforts, both conscious and instinctive, were essentially
directed toward the preservation of capitalist society.”
In his balance sheet of the Third Congress Trotsky calls the Congress the “highest school of
revolutionary strategy” because it seeks answers to the failure of revolution outside Russia. “Many
of us imagined the task of overthrowing the bourgeoisie much simpler than it actually is, and as reality
has now proved to us.” While the bourgeoisie is now parasitic on the forces of production it is
desperately fighting for survival, expending economic resources in propping up its state, the task of
overthrowing the bourgeoisie is not a “metaphysical” or “mechanical one” but one which, “…requires
for its fulfilment: revolutionary energy, political sagacity, experience, broadness of vision, resoluteness,
hot blood, but at the same time a sober head. It is a political, revolutionary, strategic task.”
In Trotsky’s Report on the Fourth Congress, he states that the Congress faced two big “intimately
interrelated tasks”, to defeat centrism (social democrats, Mensheviks, etc.) and to win the majority of
the working class. First, the CI demanded a “complete break with the bourgeoisie” programmatically.
Second, the CI argued that this could only happen by means of the tactic of the united front which can
win workers from bourgeois parties and centrist parties linked to the bourgeois program of class
collaboration. Trotsky addresses the centrists, ““You do not believe in our revolutionary methods and
in the dictatorship. Very well. But we Communists propose to you and your organization that we fight
side by side to gain those demands which you are advancing today.” This is an unassailable argument.
It educates the masses about the Communists and shows them that the Communist organization is the
best for partial struggles as well”. (Report, 323)
Communists raise their full program in every united front. The tactic is subordinated to the
strategy, not vice versa! Trotsky says: “From the united front flows the slogan of a workers’
government. The Fourth Congress submitted it to a thorough discussion and once again confirmed it
as the central political slogan for the next period. What does the struggle for a workers’ government
signify? We Communists of course know that a genuine workers’ government in Europe will be
established after the proletariat overthrows the bourgeoisie together with its democratic machinery and
installs the proletarian dictatorship under the leadership of the Communist Party.”
Trotsky then concludes that the Fourth Congress recognised a majority workers’ government in a
bourgeois state as a genuine transition to the dictatorship of the proletariat only if it was carried into
power by the majority of workers in a revolutionary situation capable of using it as a platform to

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seize power. In other words, a workers’ government must be actively transitional to soviet power. “That
is to say, a moment may arrive when the Communists together with the left elements of the Social
Democracy will set up a workers’ government in a way similar to ours in Russia when we created a
workers’ and peasant’ government together with the Left Social-Revolutionaries. Such a phase would
constitute a transition to the proletarian dictatorship, the full and completed one.” (ibid 324)
In summary, the first four Congresses mark the rapid development of a new Communist
International learning from the experience of the war, revolution and counterrevolution in
Europe between 1918 and 1922 to test its program and correct its errors. The result was the
affirmation of the vital role of a democratic centralist vanguard party armed with the tasks and
methods to break the masses from reformism and centrism by means of the tactic of the united
front on all immediate and democratic demands, and at the same time raising the transitional
program that posed the theory/program of permanent revolution. The demand which captured
the essence of this program was the Workers’ Government.

(5) Stalinism and the Left Opposition

(a) The counter-revolution in the revolution

The tasks and methods formulated by the First Four Congresses were the basis for the organised Left
Opposition in the Soviet Union between 1924 and 1929, and after the 1933 Stalinist betrayal of the
German revolution (again!). The Bolshevik-Leninists (Trotsky’s preferred name) pursued these same
tasks and methods until the founding of the 4th International in 1938. As the Bolsheviks never
stopped saying, the workers revolution in Russia had everything going for it, a weak bourgeoisie and
a strong ‘Communist’ vanguard party. But without a revolution in Europe the Soviet Union would be
isolated from the advanced forces of production necessary to overcome Russia’s economic
backwardness. This would leave the new workers’ state reliant upon capitalist production methods in
industry and private peasant production in agriculture.
Thus, the Soviet Union was caught in the contradiction between workers state property in industry
and capitalist agriculture as the Trojan Horse of world capitalism. Lenin recognised that this made
the Soviet Union ‘state capitalist’ in the sense that the workers state oversaw an economy still
dependent on capitalist agricultural production and the expansion of the market in the
economy. It was these conditions that encouraged the rise of the petty capitalist peasants (Kulaks)
and capitalist traders (Nepmen) as an anti-working-class base for the bureaucratisation of the workers’
state. Was this inevitable?
Lenin and Trotsky proposed a way out of this ‘inevitability’ of bureaucratisation and restoration; the
‘party dictatorship’. “Inevitability” means that the historic conditions of isolation and backwardness
must overwhelm the soviet state and the leading role of the Communist Party proving that the
Bolshevik revolution was ‘premature’. But of course, the Mensheviks of the 2nd International and the
Kauskyites of the 2½ International, also believed that the failed German Revolution of 1919 was
premature, and betrayed it in the name of ‘Marxism’, isolating the Russian revolution. Since Lenin
and Trotsky were internationalists, they knew it was necessary for the Party to keep the permanent
revolution alive and guide the international revolution to victory. The key was to prevent the
bureaucratisation of the Party and of the Comintern. But for this to happen democratic centralism had
to be maintained so that the class interests of the proletariat and poor peasants could be advanced by
the planned socialist economy until the world revolution caught up with the Soviet Union.

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Lenin’s last fight against bureaucratism in the Party proves that he was no authoritarian, nor was the
dictatorship of the Party his personal dictatorship. The survival of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat
was now the responsibility of the Dictatorship of the Party. In his few final years Lenin was
committed to defending democratic centralism in the Party despite his declining health. He
understood the crisis facing the young workers’ state. In five years, it had survived the civil war but
the immense damage done to an already isolated and backward state was almost fatal and required
emergency surgery. The Party would have to step in to reform the state apparatuses to overcome the
Tsarist survivals and the encroachment of a petty bourgeois bureaucracy drawing its support from the
small peasant owners.
Lenin’s solution was typical of all his bold interventions - the Party had to be democratised in
order to mobilise the resources for economic planning capable of developing state industry,
overcoming the class contradiction and transforming petty capitalist peasant production into
collective agriculture.
His proposal was to reform the state Commissary of ‘Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection from a minor
body without respect or authority into a central body with equal rights to the Central Committee of the
Communist Party. It would recruit a fresh body of worker and peasant communists trained in planning
and organisation to inspect and oversee not only all economic matters but to keep the bureaucratized
central apparatus of the Party under check. [Better Fewer but Better]
Trotsky, like Lenin, saw the solution to the crisis in the economy as restoring inner-party democracy
in order to overcome the bureaucratic barriers to efficient state planning and production. Without
democratic centralism in the Party the bureaucracy would grasp at market-driven piecemeal policies
that created anarchy and ultimately brought the restoration of capitalism. Lenin’s final struggle and
appeal to the 12th Congress had been doomed. Stalin maneuvered to put his own appointees into the
Workers and Peasants’ Inspection neutralising its impact proving that centralism without democracy
becomes bureaucratic centralism. The bureaucracy under Stalin was using the crisis to strengthen its
bureaucratic dictatorship.
Trotsky argued that the emergency measures taken to mobilise the people in the civil war, called ‘war
communism’, could not be applied to overcome the worsening economic crisis, The ‘scissors’ crisis,
the widening gap between the rising prices of manufactured commodities and falling prices of
agricultural commodities, could not be solved “by attempts to command prices in the style of war
communism.” Given the failure of the German revolution in 1923 (in which Stalin played a nefarious
role) in coming to the rescue of the Soviet Union, the Bolsheviks would have to manage the soviet
state and plan the economy to resolve the contradiction between workers’ state industry and capitalist
agriculture as expressed in the New Economic Policy (NEP). Although already entrenched, the
bureaucrats’ victory was not yet assured.
Trotsky wrote a series of articles published in Pravda in December, reprinted as a pamphlet, The New
Course, just days before the 13th Party Conference in January 1924. He proved that the failure to act
on the Party and Plan questions had common roots in the rise of the bureaucracy as a result of the
isolation of the revolution by the failure of the German Revolution, the consequences of the Civil
War, and the collapse of the economy made worse by the NEP and the “scissors crisis”. All these
factors combined to strengthen the petty bourgeois peasantry - the Kulaks, and the NEPMEN, as well
as capitalist industry, and in turn, the adaptation of the bureaucracy to these pro-capitalist forces. The
reliance on capitalism would overwhelm the workers’ state and restore capitalism unless corrected by
workers’ democracy and comprehensive economic planning.

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(b) The Left Opposition for permanent revolution

The 13th Congress was a defeat for Trotsky and the Left Opposition. Stalin could use his faction to
ban the Opposition criticism of the bureaucracy as factional in a total break with Leninist norms.
Trotsky had to change tack. He now took on the task of explaining the failure of the German
Revolution and making the lessons of the October Revolution a guide to the international movement.
He was educating the international vanguard on the question of the bureaucracy indirectly to avoid the
charge of ‘factionalism’. His speeches on these subjects were testing the ground for his Lessons of
October which appeared in July, 1924.
The main lesson Trotsky drew in Lessons, was that the success of October, 1917 in Russia was
because there existed a Bolshevik Party, moreover led by Lenin. In Germany the failure of October,
1923, was because no battle-hardened Bolshevik party with a Lenin-type leadership existed. Stalin
was only mentioned in passing, but his two Troika partners, Zinoviev and Kamenev, were identified
as leading ‘conciliationists’ (those who conciliated with Menshevism). This particular ‘lesson’ was
not lost on Stalin. Trotsky was claiming that the ‘conciliationists’ in the party, who opposed the
insurrection and called for a ‘soviet government’ sharing power with ‘pre-parliament’, were
essentially Mensheviks repudiating permanent revolution for the halfway house of the Constituent
Assembly; i.e., the unfinished bourgeois revolution, now thwarted by bourgeois counter-revolution.
A new burst of bureaucratic repression of Trotsky followed, designed to discredit “Trotskyism” as
anti-Leninism. Trotsky responded with “Our Differences” to repudiate the charges against him as a
“Trotskyist”, but which remained unpublished because he was gagged. [note: the pressure on Trotsky
forced him to lie low in the service of the bureaucracy to avoid an “open struggle” (‘The Challenge of
the Left Opposition’. 23-25; 259-303 Pathfinder, not online).
Trotsky concluded that his bureaucratic critics were attempting to return to the politics of the
Mensheviks. Their criticism of his ‘underestimation of the peasantry’ and his ‘fetish of permanent
revolution’ reveals the class influence of the petty bourgeois peasantry to liquidate the dictatorship of
the proletariat by means of a “Menshevisation of the Bolshevik Party.” Moreover, he had no
“theological attitude toward the formula of permanent revolution.” Permanent revolution had become
the flesh and blood of the revolution of the proletariat leading the peasantry.
The LO of 1925-27 was an unstable bloc of right, left and centrist forces. The centre was the faction
led by Trotsky, faithful to Lenin’s dialectical method of restoring inner party democracy, grounded in
the militant and class-conscious workers, to resolve the class contradiction expressing itself as the
struggle for power in the Party. The right and left tendencies attempted to resolve this contradiction by
bureaucratic planning on the one side, and by direct workers democracy on the other, leaving the
battle for internal party democracy to the central Leninist/Trotskyist tendency. The right led by
Zinoviev was essentially an internal split in the bureaucracy over Stalin’s leadership. Zinoviev was a
bureaucrat, but broke with Stalin on his failure to overcome the ‘scissors’ crisis. The left was actually
‘ultra-left’ continuing the petty-bourgeois Communist Left idealist rejection of a workers’ state where
workers democracy had been usurped by the bureaucracy. This set the scene for the Ultra-lefts failure
to defend the gains of workers’ property, because of, rather than despite Stalinism, and a rightward
trajectory into the ‘third camp’ position of the USSR as a restored capitalist state ruled by a ‘new
class’.
To sum up, the struggle of the Left Opposition was the internal fight in the Party against Stalinism to
resolve the contradiction between workers property and the restoration of capitalism at the hands the
bureaucracy, by activating democratic centralism and elevating the role of the worker over the
apparatchik; it was the struggle to keep the permanent revolution alive! Here again were the ‘two

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tactics’ of a revolutionary wing and a reformist wing of the RSDLP that Lenin wrote of in 1905, as
the essence of Bolshevism and Menshevism. But now recast as the resistance of international
Bolshevism to the counter-revolutionary Stalinist ‘centrist’ degeneration of the Comintern into a
restored Menshevik International.
In response to the economic contradiction of the isolated Russian revolution, the Left Opposition’s
task was to resolve the scissors crisis without creating a dangerous kulak class; fight for restoration of
party democracy; increase the weight of factory workers to offset the ‘Lenin levy’ of careerists and
facitionalists; and to do so by transforming GOSPLAN from a bureaucratic, top-down and inefficient
leadership of the workers’ economy into a truly democratically planned socialist production plan.
Trotsky’s task was to overcome the maneuvers and propaganda of the Stalin bloc so as to bring about
further progress on the 12th Party Congress Resolution, which was Lenin’s legacy!

(c) From the 3rd to the 4th International

The Stalin factions’ series of mid-late 1920’s leadership combinations prolonged the NEP and then
abruptly abandoned it wholesale in a caricature of Trotsky’s earlier proposal for measured
collectivisation and industrialization. Stalin turned the army loose on the farmers to force
collectivization and eliminate the Kulaks (latterly enriched peasants) as a class. This was just one part
of Stalinism’s simultaneous assault on Marxism in party program and practice and state policy, both
on the international and national fields. Stalin abandoned the Bolshevik policies of the first 4
Comintern Congresses in his “Draft Program of the Communist International.” Stalin had just had to
fight the Left Opposition over his China policy in 1925-27. To avoid repeating (avoid an international
discussion and controversy) that disastrous experience, Stalin had Trotsky and Trotskyists expelled
from the party and the International (1928) with Trotsky exiled (1929) and ultimately assassinated
(1940).

The Stalin faction derived the “Socialism in one country” policy by reverting to the Menshevik policy
of ‘revolution by stages,’ accommodating the reaction of the Kuomintang under cover of a return to
the early Bolshevik slogan for the “Democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.” For
Stalinism, defeat was proof of success. Following Chiang Kai Shek’s massacre of the CCP leadership
and cadres in Shanghai, the class-collaborationist China policy zagged into the ultra-left Canton
uprising and the ultraleft ‘third period’ that led to the betrayal of the 3rd International and Hitler’s
consolidation of power in 1933-4, zigging back yet again to the peoples’ front period of collaboration
with democratic imperialism in defense of “socialism in one country”. The Comintern became the
public relations arm of the Stalin faction, where every struggle could be for sale to the bourgeoisie in
pursuit of Peoples Fronts and then “collective security” Stalin’s apologists say no other course was
possible for an isolated, surrounded USSR. But where did this “necessity” come from? From the
abandonment of the perspective of world socialist revolution for “socialism in one country”!

Thus when we look at the British General strike of 1926 we see a Stalinist-led Comintern influencing
the Trades Union Congress to call off support to the strike after only 9 days, even though it was
apparent that the position of the ruling class was weak and weakening and that New York capitalists
were already beginning to gobble up the business and proceeds of their world empire. Trotsky told
anyone who would listen. But Stalin’s entire emphasis was already moored to the conception that
internationally capitalism had stabilized, and hence it was time for purely legal and parliamentary
tactics. The British miners would have to go it alone. Here we see one side, the reformist side, of
Stalinism’s centrism.

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We saw the ultraleft side in China. After running behind the Wang Ching Wei left faction in the
Kuomintang (KMT) in a misapplication of the Comintern’s united front theory-- even to the point of
anointing the KMT the official Comintern party for China-- for purely factional, anti-Trotskyist
reasons Stalin had the Shanghai comrades launch an abortive uprising in April 1927, resulting in a
repression with mass executions as Chiang Kai Shek effectively applied the coup de grace of the
popular front policy of KMT-Comintern alliance. The lesson Stalinism took from this was that their
stageist theory worked!

It was the German debacle that led Trotsky to conclude that the Third International was no longer a
force for world revolution. The coming to power of Hitler and the Nazis witnessed the crushing of the
powerful German workers movement. In their ultra-left 3rd Period, the German Communist Party
(KPD) characterized the Social Democrats (SPD) as ‘social-fascists’, refusing to build anti-fascist
united fronts, instead stupidly proclaiming that “after Hitler, us.” Trotsky argued for a united front to
unite the rank and file of the working class in action and to undermine and expose the SPD leadership
in front of the mass of SPD workers. It was after this defeat that Trotsky started the building of a new
revolutionary Fourth International.

The Opposition’s defense of the workers’ state required a political revolution. i.e., the overthrow of
the bureaucracy and restore a healthy workers democracy. But after the German defeat in 1933,
Trotsky concluded the Comintern could not be reformed. This meant new, authentic Bolshevik-
Leninist parties had to be formed out of the previous External Factions of the CPs. This was done, by
fighting the great class battles of the Minneapolis strikes, the Dewey Commission condemnation of
the Moscow show trials of the old Bolsheviks, and the updating and elaboration of analyses and party
program. Everywhere Stalinism subordinated the workers’ struggle to the program of the bourgeoisie,
saving capitalism from its crisis by allowing fascism to defeat the proletariat and restore the
conditions for the return to capital accumulation.

For Stalinism, the conclusion drawn from the German debacle was the desirability of cross-class
alliance, “united fronts” in the parlance of Georgy Dimitrov. known as “Peoples” or “Popular Fronts”
against fascism. From the popular front it was but a step to supporting Roosevelt, which they did
until, and then again after, their pact with Ribbentrop and Hitler. Dimitrov’s fake orthodoxy of 1934-5
was a cynical appeal to the Stalinist conception of the real Leninism as the pre-1917 “democratic
dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry”, where in reality the transitional program content of
the workers’ program dating to the Communist Manifesto 1850 edition was rejected along with the
permanent revolution. Gone was class-political independence as a principle. Gone was the world
revolution in all but convoluted explanations of fast-changing wobbles. Alliance with the liberal
bourgeoisie, only lately (1917) the goal of Menshevism (and Stalin himself before The April Theses!),
was the be-all in pursuit of the defense of the USSR (and everyone else) against fascism. However,
before Trotsky could consolidate the movement for a Fourth International events overtook the
Opposition cadres. First in France, and then in a major way in unmistakably revolutionary events in
Spain.

[6] The Transitional Program

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We have laid out the relationship between the vanguard party and program in testing and advancing
the program. The fundamental point here is that the Transitional Method is dialectics in action.
Transitional demands to meet workers’ needs are designed to raise revolutionary consciousness as
each advance by the workers is met by a bourgeois reaction, forcing in turn a new advance by workers
until the point of seizure of power is not only necessary but possible. The essence of dialectics then is
the active, conscious leadership of the vanguard to lead the working class “over the bridge,” as
Trotsky called it, from united fronts for immediate and democratic demands until a class-conscious
majority of workers calling for “all power to the soviets!” arises capable of fighting for and winning
socialist demands.

(a) Trotsky’s Transitional Method

The Transitional Program was Trotsky’s weapon to arm the proletariat at a time when once again the
bourgeoisie was forced to go to war to resolve its worsening crises. Its method was to close the gap
between the objective world situation, summarised as the coming showdown between the two main
classes over the future of humanity, and the subjective backwardness of the consciousness of the
masses. Either the war would bring a defeat of the revolution and a fall into barbarism, or the
proletariat would rise to the situation and make a socialist revolution. But for that to happen the
revolutionary party and program was needed to close the gap. It was a desperate last-minute attempt
to create a new international party in time to smash the Stalinist, social democratic and centrist mis-
leadership of the proletariat and release its potential as the only revolutionary class. For Trotsky this
crisis was summed up as the ‘crisis of Marxism’ which in its heart was “the crisis of revolutionary
leadership’ that could be resolved only by a new, 4th International.

The TP was the summation of the development of the Marxist program from the Communist
Manifesto through the first Four Congresses of the Third International. It built on the Left Opposition
that took up the work of defending Bolshevik Leninism after the degeneration of the Third
International and the rise of Stalin (from 1924). As we have seen after the final betrayal of the Third
International in Germany in 1933, the Left Opposition became the International Communist League
(ICL), the embryo of a new, Fourth International committed to the urgent task of founding a new
international to carry forward the task of the socialist revolution. Between 1933 and 1938 Trotsky
fought to bring together the various currents that had broken from the Stalinist Comintern, facing
resistance from some who thought a new international premature. Those who opposed its foundation,
like the Polish section, the Chinese Trotskyist Chen Tu-Hsiu and Isaac Deutscher, based their belief
on the period of defeats suffered by the world proletariat that would render the new international
impotent. Trotsky’s response was that no matter how weak, a new international had to be founded
urgently to raise the Marxist flag to rally the masses to revolution when the world faced war and
counter-revolution and humanity was in mortal danger.

“The new parties and the new International must be built upon a new foundation: that is the key with
which to solve all other tasks. The tempo and the time of the new revolutionary construction and its
consummation depend, obviously, upon the general course of the class struggle, the future victories
and defeats of the proletariat. Marxists, however, are not fatalists. They do not unload upon the
historical process those very tasks which the historical process has posed before them. The initiative
of a conscious minority, a scientific program, bold and ceaseless agitation in the name of clearly
formulated aims, merciless criticism of all ambiguity those are some of the most important factors for
the victory of the proletariat. Without a fused and steeled revolutionary party, a socialist revolution is
inconceivable. The conditions are difficult; the obstacles are great; the tasks are colossal; but there is

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no reason whatever to become pessimistic or to lose courage. Despite all the defeats of the
proletariat, the position of the class enemy remains a hopeless one. Capitalism is doomed. Only in the
socialist revolution is there salvation for mankind.”

The Transitional Program was drafted by Trotsky as the basis for the new international. It was
presented as a draft and far from complete. It lacked important aspects of a complete program – a
deeper theoretical introduction and a revolutionary conclusion.

“A complete program would should have a theoretical expression of the modern capitalist society in
its imperialist stage. The reasons of the crisis, the growth of unemployed, and so on, and in this draft
this analysis is briefly summarized only in the first chapter because we have written about these
things in articles, books, and so on…Also the end of the program is not complete because we don’t
speak here about the social revolution, about the seizure of power by insurrection, the transformation
of capitalist society into a dictatorship, the dictatorship of socialist society. This brings the reader
only to the doorstep. It is a program for action from today until the beginning of the socialist
revolution.”

Trotsky expected that the program would be competed in discussion with comrades in every country
so the general lines of the program would be balanced by particular local conditions. This was a clear
reference to the need for the new international party to be born both democratic and centralist.
Democratic discussion and critique would complete the program and agreement would be expressed
in its adoption by the founding congress and acted upon as a disciplined international. In response to
some criticisms from US comrades that “some parts of the program do not conform to the situation”
he took it upon himself to ‘elaborate’ on what was missing from the theoretical section and its
implications for the missing section on revolution. In discussions with leading US comrades, he said:

“We have repeated many times that the scientific character of our activity consists in the fact that we
adapt our program not to political conjunctures or the thought or mood of the masses as this mood is
today, but we adapt our program to the objective situation as it is represented by the economic class
structure of society. The mentality can be backward; then the political task of the party is to bring the
mentality into harmony with the objective facts, to make the workers understand the objective task.
But we cannot adapt the program to the backward mentality of the workers, the mentality, the mood is
a secondary factor – the prime factor is the objective situation…Everywhere I ask what should we do?
Make our program fit the objective situation or the mentality of the workers? And I believe that this
question must be put before every comrade who says that this program is not fit for the American
situation. This program is a scientific program. It is based on an objective analysis of the objective
situation. It cannot be understood by the workers as a whole. It would be very good if the vanguard
would understand it in the next period and that they would then turn and say to the workers, “You
must save yourselves from fascism.”

However, the criticisms of the incomplete program by US comrades demonstrated not its weakness so
much as that of the critics. Trotsky was forced to defend the 4th International against the US petty
bourgeois opposition which rejected dialectics for bourgeois empiricism, leading to a capitulation to
national chauvinism within the imperialist countries, and a refusal to defend the Soviet Union
‘unconditionally’. The draft program was adopted and it remains for today’s revolutionaries to debate
what changes were made in the time since 1938 are consistent with the theory and practice of
Marxism as held by Trotsky. Despite its limitations, as pointed out by Trotsky, the Transitional
Program became the revolutionary guide to the proletariat on how to advance its struggle across many

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class fronts to resolve the crisis of Marxism, to defeat imperialist war and defend unconditionally the
Soviet Union. For, while the workers have an instinct for dialectics as they become conscious of the
struggle of labour against capital, this is not enough without an international party and program
capable of transcending the divide between the objective situation and the subjective
consciousness and making the transition to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.

(b) Trotsky’s Leadership

Yet it is obvious that the crisis of Marxism put a huge load on Trotsky’s shoulders. Trotsky exiled in
Mexico had to contend with the Stalinist trials, the assassination of leading comrades including his
son Leon Sedov, the Dewey Commission, and those who opposed the founding of the new
international. He also faced the bourgeois slander that the international was a sort of ‘vanity project’
for the sole surviving leader of the Bolshevik revolution. [Deutscher] Trotsky refuted all this in his
explanation of the origins of the Transitional Program in common ideas, common understanding and
common discipline, the result of common experience:

“One can say that we didn’t have a program until this day. Yet we acted. But this program
was formulated under different articles, different motions, etc. In this sense the draft program
doesn’t presage a new invention, it is not the writing of one man. It is the summation of
collective work up until today. But such a summation is absolutely necessary in order to give
to the comrades an idea of the situation, a common understanding. Petty bourgeois anarchists
and intellectuals are afraid to subscribe to giving a party, common ideas, a common attitude.
In opposition they wish moral programs. But for us this program is the result of common
experience. It is not imposed upon anybody for whoever joins the party does so
voluntarily…The program for the class cannot fall from heaven. We can arrive only at an
understanding of the necessity…The program is the articulation of the necessity, that we
learned to understand, and since the necessity is the same for all members of the class, we can
reach a common understanding of the tasks and the understanding of this necessity is the
program. We can go further and say that the discipline of our party must be very severe
because we are a revolutionary party against a tremendous bloc of enemies, conscious of their
interests, and now we are attacked not only by the bourgeoisie but by the Stalinists, the most
venomous of the bourgeois agents. Absolute discipline is necessary but it must come from
common understanding. If it is imposed from without it is a yoke. If it comes from
understanding it is an expression of personality, but otherwise it is a yoke. Then discipline is
an expression of my free individuality. It is not opposition between personal will and the party
because I entered of my free will. The program too is on this basis and this program can be
upon a sure political and moral basis only if we understand it very well.”

The task is to take the program based on common experience, and common discipline as free activity
of the voluntary members, to the masses.

“The duty of the party is to seize every American worker and shake him ten times so he will understand
what the situation is in the United States. This is not a conjunctural crisis but a social crisis. Our party
can play a great role.” [Question: Isn’t the ideology of the workers a part of the objective factors?]
“For us as a small minority this whole thing is objective including the mood of the workers. But we
must analyze and classify those elements of the objective situation which can be changed by our paper
and those which cannot be changed. That is why we say that the program is adapted to the fundamental
stable elements of the objective situation and the task is to adapt the mentality of the masses to those

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objective factors. To adapt the mentality is a pedagogical task. We must be patient, etc. The crisis of
society is given as the base of our activity. The mentality is the political arena of our activity. We must
change it. We must give a scientific explanation of society, and clearly explain it to the masses. That is
the difference between Marxism and reformism.”

This was no clearer concrete demonstration of this than the question of an independent Labor Party. In
the discussions with the SWP leaders on the program Trotsky found that the SWP were divided over
whether there was sufficient ‘sentiment’ to call for an Independent Labor Party. Cannon thought that
where was strong sentiment in the CIO. Shachtman thought that sentiment was lacking and if the
SWP had to call for their formation they would end up as “appendages” of Roosevelt. Trotsky
responded by explaining that the objective of the formation of the CIO demanded an Independent
Labor Party to take the struggle forward.

On the question that “there is no evidence to indicate any widespread sentiment for such a party”
Trotsky answers:

“We have no machine to take a referendum. We can measure the mood only by action if the slogan is
put on the agenda. But what we can say is that the objective situation is absolutely decisive. The trade
unions as trade unions can have only a defensive activity, losing members and becoming more and
more weak as the crisis deepens, creating more and more unemployed…I say here what I said about
the whole program of transitional demands. The problem is not the mood of the masses buy the objective
situation, and our job is to confront the backward material of the masses with the tasks which are
determined by objective facts and not by psychology. The same is absolutely correct for this specific
question on the labor party. If the class struggle is not to be crushed, replaced by demoralization, then
the movement must find a new channel and this channel is political.

We claim to have Marxism or scientific socialism. What does “scientific socialism” signify in reality?
It signifies that the party which represents this social science, departs, as every science, not from
subjective wishes, tendencies, or moods but from objective facts, from the material situation of the
different classes and their relationships. Only by this method can we establish demands adequate to the
objective situation and only after this can we adapt these demands and slogans to the given mentality
of the masses. But to begin with this mentality as the fundamental fact would signify not a scientific but
a conjunctural, demagogic, or adventurist policy.”

To those who fear becoming a reformist party, Trotsky responds that the SWP would raise its
revolutionary program inside the Labor Party to get it adopted:

“…a concrete program of action and demands in the sense that this transitional program issues from
the conditions of capitalist society today, but immediately leads over the limits of capitalism. It is not
the reformist minimum program which never included workers’ militia, workers control of production.
These demands are transitory because they lead from the capitalist society to the proletarian
revolution…we can’t stop only with the day-to-day demands of the proletariat. We must give to the most
backward workers come concrete slogan that corresponds to their needs and that leads dialectically to
the conquest of power…We propagandize this program in the trade unions, propose it as the basic
program for the labor party. For us it is a transitional program; but for them, it is the program. Now
it’s a question of workers’ control of production, but you can realise this program only through a
workers’ and farmers’ government. We must make this slogan popular.”

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Trotsky’s assassination deprived the 4th International of his leadership and it succumbed to a failure
of dialectics as he feared. The international was weakened by a leadership too influenced by the
economism/opportunism of the petty bourgeois/labour aristocracy to operate as an effective
international vanguard. It that did not grasp the essentials of dialectics, rather succumbing to national
chauvinism in the interests of adapting to the mood of the ‘backward’ masses. Despite Trotsky’s
efforts to raise a program based on the objective situation to raise demands that would close the gap
between objective reality and subjective consciousness, the TP became reduced to a new mini-max
program. The leadership rejected dialectics as the contradictory unity of objective and subjective
reality, and resorted to the impressionism of the petty bourgeois intelligentsia which substitutes itself
for the agency of class-conscious workers.

(c) A Transitional Program for Today

To conclude this discussion of the Transitional Program we need to work out how to make a
Transitional Program for today based on the method of Trotsky’s program of 1938 ‘The Death
Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International.’ Trotsky referred to it as ‘unfinished’,
and that should adopt it together with all other programmatic documents of the new International such
as the Manifesto of the Fourth International on Imperialist War. In this way we use the method to
arrive at a program for today’s conditions that takes the objective situation as it presents itself and
raises the demands that are capable of developing workers’ class consciousness for the tasks of
socialist revolution.

First, what is the objective situation? Trotsky in talking about the TP explained the objective and
subjective factors in history from 1848 up to 1940. We would sum up that history as ‘permanent
revolution’ in the sense of Marx when he first used the term in 1850; the bourgeoisie was no longer
the revolutionary class and had to be replaced by the new revolutionary class, the proletariat, to
make the permanent revolution.

“The expression “permanent revolution” is an expression of Marx which he applied to the

revolution of 1848. In Marxian, naturally not in revisionist but in revolutionary Marxian
literature, this term has always had citizenship rights. Franz Mehring employed it for the
revolution of 1905-1907. The permanent revolution, in an exact translation, is the continuous
revolution, the uninterrupted revolution. What is the political idea embraced in this
expression?

It is, for us communists, that the revolution does not come to an end after this or that political
conquest, after obtaining this or that social reform, but that it continues to develop further and
its only boundary is the socialist society. Thus, once begun, the revolution (insofar as we
participate in it and particularly when we lead it) is in no case interrupted by us at any formal
stage whatever. On the contrary, we continually and constantly advance it in conformity, of
course, with the situation, so long as the revolution has not exhausted all the possibilities and
all the resources of the movement. This applies to the conquests of the revolution inside of a
country as well as to its extension over the international arena.”

The objective situation is summarised as the balance of class forces between permanent revolution
and permanent counter-revolution. It is not an abstraction, but the practical theory/program for the
ongoing class struggle between the two antagonistic classes. We assess the objective situation today in
relation to the imperialist epoch as one of capitalist decay and the destruction of the forces of

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production. This poses the question of which class shall rule – the proletariat or the ruling class. Our
program is therefore one that makes the demands necessary to mobilise workers to fight for their
immediate needs all the way to the seizure of power and the subjective transformation of the existing
objective situation into the new objective situation of world socialist revolution. Read ‘Workers unite!
the historic task of workers is to overthrow rotten capitalism and fight for world socialism!’

7) The Degeneration of the Fourth International

a) The Crisis of Leadership in the Fourth International

From 1940 the International suffered major setbacks. The death of Trotsky was a decisive blow. War
weakened an already fragile international and left it facing the major task of seizing power against
massive hostile forces. We reject the argument that the Fourth was too weak at its foundation to
qualify as a serious international, or that its leadership was incapable of applying Trotsky’s war
program. Trotsky had spent the last 7 years of his life preparing for the Fourth International and
arming it with a Transitional Program that put the defense of the USSR in the coming world war at
the heart. He wrote many programmatic documents over this period arming the international for the
coming imperialist war, including War and the Fourth International (1934); A Manifesto Against
Imperialist War (1938); A Fresh Lesson: On the Character of the Coming War (1938); Imperialist
War and the Proletarian Revolution (1940) and Bonapartism, Fascism and War, the last article he
wrote that was interrupted by his assassination.
Despite the objective situation weighing heavily on the new International, following the example of
the Bolsheviks in war and revolution, Leninist-Trotskyists had the duty to raise the banner of the
Fourth in the war and fight for socialist revolution to defeat imperialism and to make the political
revolution against Stalinism. Broue in “How Trotsky and the Trotskyists confronted the Second Word
War” concludes:
“But we may suppose, on the contrary [against being victims of the objective situation] that
the Trotskyist organisations, their members and their leaders, were involved, and that they
have at least some responsibility for their own setbacks. In that case, we may think, that if we
start from the premises of Trotsky’s analysis of 1940, that the Second World War did see that
development of a mass movement based upon a national and social resistance, which the
Stalinists did their utmost to divert, and which in the case of Greece, they led to its destruction
- a resistance which the Trotskyists could neither support nor utilise, because they did not
know how to locate themselves in it, and even, perhaps, because they could not understand
the concrete character of the moment in history in which they were living. We believe this
question deserves to be asked.”
Yet Trotsky had already asked and answered this question, so who do we hold responsible? Trotsky
spelled out the concrete tactics of defeatism in his Proletarian Military Policy (PMP). He warned
constantly right up to his death of the danger of lapsing into social patriotism, notably in ‘A Step
Towards Patriotism’. “Should revolutionary defeatism be renounced in relation to non-fascist
countries? Herein lies the crux of the question: upon this issue, revolutionary internationalism stands
or falls.” The Communist Tendency in the SWP (US) wrote a 1972-73 critique of the degeneration of
the FI after the death of Trotsky. It argued that the FI succumbed to national chauvinism during the

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war and failed to correct that deviation from revolutionary Marxism after the war. It blamed the
increasingly petty bourgeois leadership and not the hostile conditions of the time, and called for the
founding of a new International based on the Program of the FI of 1938.
The case of Greece which Broue cites above proves that Trotsky’s perspectives and program were
correct. Not only with respect to the maturing conditions for civil war, but the internal debates within
Greek Trotskyism over defeatism and defensism in which the majority upheld defeatism. Therefore
we must make the leadership of the FI responsible for renouncing defeatism. As the Communist
Tendency states, “The crisis of leadership became the crisis of the Fourth International”. Why? The
problems Trotsky spoke of before his death were not overcome. The Crisis of Marxism was the
rejection of dialectics necessary to fight imperialist war and to defend the Soviet Union. The Second
imperialist war was a continuation of the First War, as workers were expended as cannon fodder to
settle a new pecking order of the great powers, in preparation for the class war against their mortal
enemy, the Soviet Union. Therefore, the defeat of imperialist powers by their own working classes
was the necessary condition for socialist revolution and the political revolution in the Soviet Union.
The national chauvinist defense against imperialist occupation, fascist or ‘democratic’, sucked
workers into the counter-revolutionary ‘patriotic front’ against the socialist revolution. Concretely,
this meant that in every imperialist power, occupied or not, defeatism was the order of the day. Armed
workers had to follow the famous call of Liebknecht and turn their guns on their own ruling classes.
National liberation had to wait for the defeat of the ruling class at home and the victorious wars in
defense of the new workers’ states.
In Learn to Think, Trotsky states:
“To carry the class struggle to its highest form – civil war – this is the task of defeatism. But
this task can be solved only through the revolutionary mobilization of the masses, that is, by
widening, deepening, and sharpening those revolutionary methods which constitute the
content of class struggle in “peace”-time. The proletarian party does not resort to artificial
methods, such as burning warehouses, setting off bombs, wrecking trains, etc., in order to
bring about the defeat of its own government. Even if it were successful on this road, the
military defeat would not at all lead to revolutionary success, a success which can be assured
only by the independent movement of the proletariat. Revolutionary defeatism signifies only
that in its class struggle the proletarian party does not stop at any “patriotic” considerations,
since defeat of its own imperialist government, brought about, or hastened by the
revolutionary movement of the masses is an incomparably lesser evil than victory gained at
the price of national unity, that is, the political prostration of the proletariat. Therein lies the
complete meaning of defeatism and this meaning is entirely sufficient.”
The FI leadership capitulated to national chauvinism, Stalinism, and the patriotic front against fascism
in the name of ‘democracy’ and the defense of the Soviet Union. Trotsky’s insistence that only
socialist revolution could win democracy and the political revolution in the SU was abandoned. In
France the conference of the European Secretariat in 1944 belatedly recognised this as a ‘deviation’ of
the leadership but claimed falsely it was corrected by the masses. The patriotic ‘deviation’ remained
unacknowledged by the Second Congress of the FI in 1948. In the US the SWP, also capitulated to
chauvinist pressure and turned the slogan ‘turn imperialist war into civil war’, into ‘turn imperialist
war into the war against fascism’. The SWP 1943 resolution failed to apply the PMP tactics to the
front in Europe where civil wars were breaking out in Italy and Greece. The German section
expressed the logic of the capitulation to national chauvinism with a theory that the Nazis had thrown
Europe back 100 years so that the bourgeois democratic demands including national self-
determination now replaced the transitional demand of civil war. Yet, in the weakest imperialist

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powers (Greece, Italy) and in the colonies and semi-colonies, (Vietnam, India) where the conditions
for civil war created spontaneous mutinies and rebellions, Trotskyists who were prepared to embark
on civil war against their own ruling class for socialist revolution, were diverted into fatal national
chauvinist blocs with the Stalinists by the leadership of the FI.
The failure of leadership of the FI in the war, was not inevitable. Its program was proven correct by
the war. Opportunities for revolution presented themselves, most tragically in Greece. As the weakest
imperialist link in Europe, Greece became the test of Trotsky’s program on the imperialist war. It
showed that national resistance was a trap leading to the mass slaughter of Trotskyists, while the
majority of the FI section that took defeatism seriously was able to fight to turn imperialist war into
civil war breaking workers from the Greek Communist Party (KKE). Broue comments:
“Trotsky’s remarks in 1940 about the war became concrete. The Greek soldiers in the Middle
East wanted to fight, arms in hand, against fascism. They therefore demanded officers whom
they could trust, allied themselves with the labour movement, and formed their own soviet-
style organisations. This was precisely along the lines which Trotsky had developed when he
wrote that the defense of their ‘democracy’ could not be delivered over to the likes of
Marshall Petain. The mass movement born out of the war expressed itself along these lines,
and did so, as Trotsky had forecast, in the army, that central section of militarised society, no
less important than in the factories.”
Such was the potential threat posed by the majority wing of Greek Trotskyism in giving direction to
the mutinies and insurrections, despite the reactionary bloc between the national bourgeoisie,
Stalinism and Anglo-American imperialism, that Churchill (the British butcher of the Middle East in
both world wars) took it upon himself to personally oversee the suppression of the civil war to “save
Greece from Communism”. But a more politically savvy Churchill claimed his intervention was to
stop “triumphant Trotskyism”, with a “grin of complicity in the direction of Stalin”, and so set the
course for the post-war imperialist alliance to end the Soviet Union. Churchill was correct, for while
the FI leadership failed to notice the significance of the Greek civil war, it proved that Trotsky’s war
program survived his own death, international isolation and the petty bourgeois composition of the FI.
The Second Congress in 1948 was the opportunity to correct this degeneration, but dominated by the
US and European sections and without genuine representation of the colonial and semi-colonial
sections where the ranks had been betrayed to the Stalinists, no Trotskyist balance sheet was made.
The majority in the Greek section (KDKE) that refused to defend bourgeois Greece and join the
partisans, and which opposed the patriotic deviation of the international leadership, was not
‘represented’ by Michael Raptis on the European IS, after the war. Raptis, who led the minority in the
KDKE that supported the resistance dominated by the Stalinists, nominated himself as a permanent
delegate following his expulsion from Greece in agreement with the Security police. The result was
an entrenched post-war bureaucratic imperio-centrist leadership that covered up the war-time
capitulation, was dogmatic in its understanding of the program, and before long, liquidated the FI
under the influence of Michel Pablo (Michael Raptis).
But now there was no Trotsky to defend dialectics against eclectics - the bourgeois method of
empiricism/pragmatism that led to the one-sided Stalinophile (Pabloite/Marcyite) and Stalinophobe
(Healyite/Wohlforthite) tendencies. The Stalinophiles came out of the war convinced that the
Stalinists played a progressive role in defeating fascism and that the Trotskyist party should act as its
cheerleader in the transition to socialism. The Stalinophobes reversed this position, making Stalinists
“counter-revolutionary through and through” while at the same time acting as cheerleaders for the
“progressive” national bourgeoisies. The SWP found their own socialist fatherland and ‘unconscious’

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Trotskyist, becoming the cheerleaders for the Cuban ‘healthy workers state’ and its leader Fidel
Castro. Meanwhile the Wohlforth/Healy camp saw Castro as just another bourgeois leader of national
liberation struggles, with Cuba becoming a degenerated workers state by the bureaucratic assimilation
of a bourgeois state into the Soviet Bloc.

Despite the struggles of many dedicated cadre, none of the various splits in the international resulted
in a healthy continuity with the program of 1938. It was not until the end of the post-war boom and
the onset of another structural crisis of capitalism in the 1960s that a re-examination of Marxism in
general and Trotskyism in particular by a new generation of revolutionaries began to arrive at a
scientific analysis of the collapse and betrayal of the Fourth during and after the war in preparation for
rebuilding the Fourth as a healthy international.

The return to Marx was needed to account for the political and economic retreats from Marxism
during the war and post-war period that, dispensing with Marx’s view that capitalism was inherently
crisis prone and had to be overthrown, held that state intervention could prevent further crises. David
Yaffe, among others argued that the depression and war, compounded by the betrayal of the Fourth
International, enabled the accumulation crisis of the 1930s to be temporarily resolved by destroying
value sufficient to restore the rate of profit. The result was the period of renewed capital accumulation
during the post-war boom, rather than a period of slump. However, far from state intervention
stabilising capital and preventing further crises, by the 1960s the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to
Fall (TRPF) was again driving capitalism to a new crisis of falling profits. Such a defense of classic
Marxism, and Trotskyism under Trotsky, was the starting point for building a new international on the
basis of the 1938 program.

b) ‘Reconstructing’ the Fourth International

Who was left to ‘refound’ or ‘reconstruct’ the Fourth International on the method and program of
1938? We acknowledge several important contributions on the causes of the degeneration of the
Fourth and attempts to regenerate it on a healthy basis. Typically, these attempts arose from militants
who broke with the SWP, or the Communist Party. In the US, Harry Turner joined the SWP after
breaking with Stalinism after 1956 and subsequently split with the Robertsonites when both factions
of the Left Tendency were expelled in 1966. He then broke with the Spartacists in 1969 and
documented this history in ‘Trotskyism Today” published in the Vanguard Newsletter in 1970/71.

Turner argued that both Robertson and Wohlforth factions that came out of the Left Tendency in the
SWP failed to explain the historical roots of the majority view that Cuba was a healthy workers state.
The SWP's fusion with the United Secretariat in 1963 was a capitulation to the political backwardness
of the US labor aristocracy and its national chauvinism. The Spartacists inherited this petty bourgeois
U.S. chauvinism uncritically. Robertson wanted to continue the post-war SWP national Trotskyist
‘federalism’ while Healy and Wohlforth counterposed a spurious ‘organisational’ internationalism.
None of these petty bourgeois currents oriented seriously to the working class, especially its black
section. All became centrist barriers to the building of a revolutionary vanguard party. We applaud
Turner’s fight to build an internationalist vanguard party based on democratic centralism to replace
the social-imperialist pseudo-Trotskyist currents.

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David Fender leader of the Communist Tendency (CT) in the SWP wrote its platform and was
expelled in 1972. It’s platform, “Historical Roots of the Degeneration of the Fourth International, the
centrism of the SWP, and for a Return to the Proletarian Road of Trotskyism” deals with the
degeneration of the FI between the death of Trotsky and 1953. This degeneration led to the
abandonment of the Leninist position on imperialist war under pressure from national chauvinism in
every country. In Europe, the Trotskyists argued that the war had destroyed democracy, so that the
revolutionary task was to fight in a patriotic front for national liberation. This included the ‘liberation’
of occupied imperialist nations such as France and Italy! And in the U.S. where there was no threat of
occupation, the SWP backed the war against fascism as the first step in the struggle for socialism. No
attempt was made in the European Conference of 1944 and the Second Congress of the Fourth
International in 1948 to correct these betrayals of the Transitional Program.

c) Rebuilding the International on the basis of the 1938 Program

The only explanation for this degeneration was the failure of the leadership of the Fourth to defend
the Transitional Program. While the Fourth was weak, and under attack, losing many of its best
cadres, in the places where it had more influence than the Stalinists, as in Vietnam, it subordinated
itself to the Stalinists and the politics of the popular front with “democratic imperialism,” only to be
crushed by the Stalinists; or in Bolivia where the POR led a miners revolution in 1952 and then
formed a “popular front” Government with the bourgeois general Paz Estenssoro who staged a
counter-revolution! The “crisis of leadership was now the crisis of leadership of the Fourth
International.” By 1953 the Fourth had liquidated into the Stalinist or Menshevik program. Turner’s
article sums up. “... It is for this reason that we say a new Trotskyist International must be built basing
itself on the founding documents of the Fourth International in 1938 and on an objective assessment
of the historical period since…”

We acknowledge Turner’s commitment in trying to challenge US chauvinism in the labor aristocracy

by recruiting blacks and Latinos and pushing for national rank and file caucuses with the perspective
of a workers’ Labor Party based on the Transitional Program. We see this as the essence of Trotsky's
warnings to the SWP that unless the US labor movement fought for the inclusion of Blacks in the
proletariat, then the US was ripe for race wars and fascism. The orientation to the rank and file and
Labor Party based on the Transitional Program was something that the SWP and its splinters had
totally failed to do. An orientation towards the Latin American semi-colonies and specially oppressed
minorities such as Blacks was the only way to end the degeneration of US Trotskyism stuck in ‘white’
national chauvinism.

To summarise our position on the degeneration of the FI: The Fourth degenerated in the final analysis
because of a failure of revolutionary leadership. This resulted from a collapse of the democratic
centralism during the war and a lapse into social patriotism that could not be corrected unless the US
and European leadership had recognised their betrayals and turned to the semi-colonial sections for
leadership in the post-war congresses. The war and its aftermath proved to be the critical test, and the
Fourth failed the test. The urgent task today, then, is to build a new international based on the
founding documents of the Fourth International!

(8) Restoration of capitalism

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a) Unconditional Defence of the Soviet Union

The unconditional defence of the Soviet Union, and by extension the other bureaucratic workers
states, was the touchstone of Bolshevik Leninism and of Trotskyism. The defeat of the bureaucratic
workers states with the restoration of capitalism was a world-historic defeat for the proletariat, but not
for Stalinism and Menshevism. Stalinism (and its Maoist spinoff) found its parasitical existence under
threat as the bureaucratically planned economies fell into long-term stagnation. Without proletarian
democracy to apply socialist planning, the bureaucracy could not overcome the failure to match
production with social needs, and planning became even more inefficient than the law of value.
Nor could it overcome workers resistance to the bureaucratic plan. The result was
overproduction of inferior goods, and shortages in basic goods, resulting in the growth of a
black market. The bureaucracy recognised its privileges would be lost unless it restored the
LOV and converted itself into a new capitalist class. As Trotsky predicted, unless proletarian
political revolutions succeeded in these bureaucratic workers states, the bureaucracy would replace
workers’ property with capitalist property.

Trotsky’s position therefore was unconditional defence of workers property, despite the existence of
the counter-revolutionary bureaucratic caste. We refer here to the pages in the Transitional Program
titled “The USSR and the Problems of the Transitional Epoch.” This summarizes Trotsky’s view and
excludes all the possible outcomes it was possible to foresee at the time, exactly because it began its
investigation from an examination of the class interests within the USSR and internationally. The
ultimate fate of Stalinism in state power was predicted and described here. The entire dialectic was
laid out. Defence of the world revolution depended upon the successful political revolution against the
parasitic bureaucratic caste and a restoration of the political power of the soviets, freedom of all soviet
parties, publishing of all secret diplomacy and the replacement of the socialism in one country
program with a revolutionary foreign policy.

The greatest failure of the fragmented Fourth International was its inability to defend the workers’
property against capitalist restoration, i.e., to lead successful political revolutions in Russia, China and
other deformed workers states. Even when the International Committee, the International Secretariat
and the Latin American Secretariat of Orthodox Trotskyism made their occasional recitations of the
call for political revolution against Stalinism, this had the quality of holiday speechifying, as it had
little connection to putting the Transitional Program into practice. They displayed no intention to
raise its demands as a practical program for restoring or placing the workers into power in the
deformed and degenerated workers states. Each acquiesced in the monopoly of state power by
Stalinism in the present day, i.e., in their time, in the name of defense against imperialism. This failure
amounted to a de facto rejection of dialectics equivalent to the literal rejection by the petty-bourgeois
opposition of 1939-40 and later manifestations of this “3rd camp” sort. As Trotsky said. “A program
is formulated not for the editorial board or for the leaders of discussion clubs, but for the
revolutionary action of millions.”

Unconditional defence of the Soviet Union was rejected by the petty bourgeois opposition who
substituted empiricism for dialectics to arrive at the theory of state capitalism. In the post-war
situation, the FI was disoriented by its bad method. It split between objectivists and subjectivists
mentioned above, excluding the dialectics of the contradictory unity between objective and subjective
reality. The Stalinists and Mensheviks invoke evolutionary determinism (the subject is abstracted as
the Soviet state). The real subject, the democent party, is missing in action, as there is no contradiction
for the party to act on and make a political revolution. One current led by Pablo became Stalinophiles

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tailing the Stalinists in the DWSs. Stalinism was ‘progressive’ so long as it followed the evolutionary
‘national roads to socialism’.

The opposing 3rd camp became Stalinophobes and condemned Stalinism as worse than ‘democratic’
imperialism. They mucked up the analysis of the post-war situation by junking Trotsky’s writings on
Ukraine, Poland and Finland. No one grasped the necessary methodological unity between the
1939/40 events and the post-war transformations. A serious but ultimately scientifically insufficient
opposition was made by the Vern-Ryan tendency in the U.S. SWP. They mechanically posited the
transition to a workers’ state to coincide with the monopoly of state power in the hands of the USSR
army and applied this logic again to the monopoly of state power by the People’s Liberation Army in
China.

They were correct in so far as they recognized the contradiction of the necessity for economic
transformation with the Stalinist program of “Socialism in One Country”. But this was a mechanical
extrapolation. The necessity was not explained. Neither the Stalinophile International Secretariat nor
the Stalinophobic International Committee understood Cuba as a bureaucratized workers state. Thus,
both currents substituted for the workers international either critical support for the Stalinist/Maoist
bureaucratic caste or support for and hope of “Reiss factions” to emerge as a force for reform within
the bureaucracy. The political revolution as part of the Permanent Revolution disappeared into the
grand evolutionary schema of Menshevism.

b) Political Revolution Betrayed

This diseased tree bore the rotten fruit of capitalist restoration. The Stalinist bureaucracy was granted
a greater life expectancy than Trotsky had predicted with the defeat of Nazi Germany and the post-
war social revolutions, but by the late 1980’s, the pressures of world capitalism on the Soviet workers
state came to the fore. Brezhnev’s labor Liberman reforms of 1965 expressed the capitalist
restorationist wing of the Stalinist bureaucracy and reaffirmed the existence of it. Gorbachev
introduced Perestroika as a series of bureaucratic reforms (“market socialism”) that undermined
central planning and increased the strength of pro-capitalist counter revolutionary forces both within
and outside of the bureaucracy.

Perestroika was incapable of resolving the problems of the Soviet degenerated workers state and
validated the Trotskyist program of workers political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy,
restore workers democracy and reconstitute the Soviet workers state as an internationalist beacon for
world socialist revolution and the only way forward for the working class. In 1991, the Yanayev
coup, representing a wing of the Stalinist bureaucracy who wanted to slow down the drive toward
capitalist restoration, was met by the Yeltsin wing of the bureaucracy opposing the coup which made
its bid for accelerated capitalist restoration.

The Third Camp Stalinophobes such as the Cliffite International Socialists, in typical fashion, hailed
Yeltsin under the guise of “democracy”, even going so far as to state that “Communism is dead! Now
the fight for real socialism can begin” (quote). The centrists, such as Workers Power, capitulated to
social imperialism. Workers Power supported the pro-capitalist drive of the Baltic states to break
away from the Soviet Union, subordinating the class defense of the Soviet degenerated workers state
to the bourgeois democratic right of self-determination. This method was carried forward into open
support for Yeltsin. For Workers Power, and their later offshoot the RCIT/RKOB, the rise of Yeltsin
to power would increase democratic openings for the workers movement, a false momentary dialectic

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with a phony unity of opposites, something more usually put forward by Stalinists. Workers Power
abandoned the Trotskyist program of workers political revolution and sided with the forces of
capitalist counterrevolution. The RCIT came out of Workers Power and carries forward this
fetishization of bourgeois democracy today.

In contrast, at least to first appearance, the Robertson-associated currents, defended workers property
against capitalist restoration. But not really. In fact, some, like the International Bolshevik Tendency,
supported the Yanayev coup, the ‘slow roaders’ who sought to preserve more of their bureaucratic
privileges in the course of capitalist restoration. The ICL (Spartacists) withheld support for the
Yanayev gang, but only on account of their being “incompetents”! The political content of
competence was nowhere described and certainly not in terms of Trotsky’s call for Political
Revolution, and the ICL did not acknowledge the restoration until more than a year after the Yeltsin
coup, still holding out hope for a Reiss Faction equivalent to save the workers’ day.

The abandonment of political revolution in the bureaucratic workers states and the world historic defeat
of the workers’ states was a crime for Trotskyists. Trotsky stated in his battle with the ‘petty bourgeois
opposition’ that despite the Stalinist regime, the unconditional defence of the Soviet Union was, in the
event of a new imperialist war ultimately targeting the workers state, the supreme test of revolutionary
Marxism. Why? Because political revolution to remove the Stalinist bureaucracy and restore workers
control of workers property would mark a major advance in the permanent revolution globally.

On the other hand, restoration and defeat of the workers state would be a major defeat for the permanent
revolution. If revolutionaries couldn’t defend workers property as a major gain of the 1917 revolution,
they could not defend anything. Worse, those Trotskyist currents that did pay lip service to political
revolution with few exceptions capitulated to restoration without a fight (LRCI/LFI/RCIT) or still
denied that restoration has taken place (ICL, IBT on China/Cuba) and that what exists is a hybrid form
of ‘bureaucratic socialism’. Meanwhile other ostensible Trotskyists argue that restoration has created
capitalist semi-colonies, regional powers (SF) or “transitional” states where Russian or Chinese
imperialism is an impossibility (FLTI).

c) Cuba, Vietnam and DPRK

The ILTT [then the LCC] in 2013 concluded that capitalist restoration was now the guiding operating
principle of the Castroist Cuban Communist Party. We recognised that we were late in seeing the tell-
tale signs of this development and said so, although our tendency was the first to face the truth! “...The
6th Cuban Communist Party Congress held in April, 2011 resolved to make major changes for the
Cuban economy to overcome its stagnation. They represent a wholesale embrace of the capitalist
market. No longer limited to the ‘external sector’ where foreign corporates have made joint ventures
with state corporates for years, but for the whole economy. Cubans are now being encouraged to adopt
market practices such as buying state property as private property and employing wage workers. Thus,
the capitalist market will replace state allocation of resources as the main mechanism of the economy.
Marxists analyse this as a shift from state planning to the law of value, and hence a shift from a Workers
State, albeit deformed from its birth in 1959, to a Capitalist State.”

“...the parasite bureaucrats of the Cuban CP learned the lesson from its collapse that workers’ property
could no longer allow it to extract its privileges from workers labor. But to avoid the fate of the USSR
which opened itself up to capitalism by means of rapid ‘shock treatment’, Cuba looked towards China’s

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gradual restoration of capitalism. It began to open a sector of the economy to foreign private investment
and found that the new market relations with imperialism were much more lucrative for the bureaucracy
than trying to defend the planned economy. So, it now seeks to complete the process and turn itself into
a new bourgeois class. The 6th Cuban CP Congress in April marks a decisive break from the revolution
and the sealing of the capitalist counter-revolution as a world historic defeat of the international working
class.”

“Cuba’s ‘capitalist road’ converges with the much-vaunted Chavista ‘21st century socialism’. This is
the key to the defeat of Latin American workers which is necessary to allow Cuba to complete its
historic counter-revolution. Chavez’ Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela (and which leads the ALBA
countries including Bolivia and Ecuador) has trapped Latin American workers behind a popular front
with China. Chavez famously talks of walking hand in hand with China towards ‘21st century
socialism’. It is the counter-revolutionary role of the Chavista popular front in Latin America that allows
Cuba to complete a historic counter-revolution by the Chinese method of many defeats and repressions
of workers over the decades and then to complete that historic defeat. It follows that if the Cuban
counter-revolution is to be defeated before it is altogether victorious, it is necessary to smash the
Bolivarian popular front. We cannot stress this enough. Chavez and Castro are part of an 'anti-
imperialist' bloc with China and semi-colonial semi-fascists like Gaddafi and Assad to stop the new
wave of workers’ uprisings against the global crisis--uprisings which can play the critical role of
breaking up the popular fronts and the fake 'market socialism' that ultimately serves imperialism.” [Cuba
Sold Out]

With the Vietnamese-Cambodian war of 1979, the Vietnamese economy became a subsidiary of the
USSR. Politically, the Viet Nam Workers Party (VNWP) became even more vassalized to Moscow and
subsumed in its policy of confrontation with China, whose project the Pol Pot regime was. Thus, once
the Yeltsin coup succeeded, Viet Nam was subjected to great pressure to undo the revolutionary gains
of 1975-79 and reinstitute the rule of the law of value, and this occurred despite the continued political
monopoly of the VNWP.

The ILTT considers North Korea to still be a deformed workers state, despite capitalist restorationist
forces, but that the CP leadership does not want to surrender to the US or China. Capitalist restoration
would present a particular problem for the North Korean Stalinist bureaucracy as they would end up a
semi-colony of either the US or China unless they had a German-style reunification under the bourgeois
South Korean regime. So, the question of how the North Korean Stalinist bureaucracy can maintain its
privileges is acute and we are watching this. There exist enterprise zones and joint enterprises that the
North Korean Kim bureaucracy turns on or off based on their current diplomatic position (with the US
in particular) and the level of military confrontation with the South. Hence the Trotskyist program of
defense of the deformed workers state and workers political revolution still holds for North Korea. The
ILTT stands against a capitalist re-unification and for a political revolution in the DPRK and socialist
revolution in the ROK.

(9) Terminal Crisis

Starting with Marx, crisis is a crisis of reproduction of the conditions of capitalist production.
Capitalism can survive so long as it has not exhausted its capacity to impose and restore those
conditions. It can do so unless the proletariat intervenes and takes power. Thus, the crucial factor in

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resolving capitalist crises is which class has power. The current crisis marks terminal decline of
capitalism, as the looming environmental catastrophe means capital can no longer reproduce its
conditions for existence.

As we have seen capitalism for the whole imperialist epoch has been over-ripe for its replacement by
socialism. Relative to socialism, capitalism destroys the forces of production in successive
depressions and wars. But capitalism even in its death throes will not just fall over and die. It has to be
overthrown and buried by its “gravediggers” the revolutionary proletariat. Lacking so far is the
revolutionary party to subjectively lead the working class to make the revolution. Ultimately the
critical factor for the ability of the proletariat to take power is the existence of an internationalist
revolutionary party. Without that party, capitalist crises become more and more destructive of the
conditions for capitalism’s reproduction, including the destruction of accumulated wealth (dead labor)
and the labor power or living labour. The future of humanity therefore is a race between living labor
(the proletariat) and dead labor (accumulated capital). Either capitalism dies or humanity dies.

(a) Marx, Lenin and Trotsky on Crises

The experience of the economic crises of the 20th and 21st centuries vindicate Marx, Lenin and
Trotsky. Lenin developed Marx’s theory of the anarchic self-expansion of capital to explain the rise
of imperialism and the inevitability of the First Inter-Imperialist War. That war failed to solve the
problems of restoring profits as the Bolshevik Revolution opened a new period in which the world’s
workers threatened to take power. Imperialism used social democracy and its state forces to suppress
the revolution, ultimately resorting to fascist movements to suppress the still-powerful proletariat.

Trotsky as the main surviving Bolshevik leader saw the rise of fascism as the mortal enemy of the
working class and its program of Permanent Revolution, and expected that if global revolution did not
result from the 2nd inter-Imperialist War, then Marxism itself as a revolutionary theory/program would
be found wanting. Had Trotsky survived the war he would have quickly drawn up a balance sheet. He
would have recognised that the 4th International in the Second inter-Imperialist war betrayed the
international working class by adapting to the Stalinist 3rd International with terrible consequences as
in Vietnam. The Stalinists succeeded in destroying the best Trotskyist cadres during and after the war,
sucking workers in the “democratic” imperialist countries into popular fronts with their own capitalist
ruling classes against the fascist powers. This divided the international working class and led, as we
have seen above, to the abandonment of the Bolsheviks’ program on imperialist war in the majority of
the Fourth International (FI).

Trotsky would have concluded that while imperialism survived the war, this was only a temporary
respite. The crisis of Marxism was not the same as its bankruptcy. The crisis of Marxism was now the
crisis of revolutionary leadership of the Fourth International. The Post-war boom was the result of
unprecedented destruction of the forces of production in the ‘30s and ‘40s. Yet it did not resolve
capitalism’s tendency to crises. Despite Stalinism’s betrayals, workers’ property survived the war in
Russia, and in the semi-colonies, imperialism was forced to go through a formal ‘de-colonisation’. In
some countries this struggle for independence would lead to the formation of bureaucratic workers
states. The FI, reneging on the most important part of the program on war, would have to be rebuilt to
prepare for the inevitable onset of a new, bigger crisis. The 1946 and 1948 international meetings

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would have drawn up honest balance sheets and repudiated the social imperialist deviation of the
European and US sections. This correction did not take place.

The first major test of a rebuilt international would have been drawing these lessons to vindicate the
Transitional Program for the post-war boom. Like the end of the First inter-imperialist war, workers,
despite their historic defeat, were after the Second inter-Imperialist war, able to organise and demand
some concessions in a period of new capital accumulation and prepare for the inevitable new, bigger
crisis. The new crisis came in the ‘60s with the end of the ‘post-war boom’. In the absence of Trotsky
and a healthy International, the response to the crisis revealed the bankruptcy of theory and program
of the official Fourth International. We can see this clearly in the debate between Ernest Mandel and
David Yaffe over the onset of a new crisis of falling profits.

(b) Debates over the post-war ‘structural’ crisis from 1970s to today

Mandel, the chief theoretician of the Pabloist USEC had an empiricist multi-cause theory of crisis,
(contingency was all the rage) which when boiled down was left with underconsumption, i.e., a
distributional theory of crisis not unlike David Harvey’s theory today. Yaffe accused Mandel of
capitulating to a state-centred Keynesian economics consistent with the FI’s capitulation to Stalinism.
In fact, the post-war boom had disoriented most Marxists, worsening the crisis of Marxism. The
defence of ‘democracy’ against fascism and the defence of the Soviet Union got conflated into the
defence of Stalinism as a petty bourgeois fraction of the working class embedded in the capitalist state
alongside classical Social Democracy (as for example ‘Eurocommunism’). The ‘boom’ was explained
as the result of ‘democratic’ capitalism managed by Social Democracy, and its end resulted from, not
from inflation as a symptom of the LTRPF, but the revival of neo-classical economics and neo-liberal
regimes. Hence Marxism was increasingly diluted, the left moved right across the world tailing
democratic imperialism. In the UK it tailed the retreat of the imperialist Labour Party from Harold
Wilson to the Blairite “third way”, and the US Democratic Party from the ‘Great Society’ to Bill
Clinton. The Pabloists or all colors who followed Mandel called Yaffe and Co ‘fundamentalists’ when
they claimed the ‘neoliberal’ upturns of the ‘80s and ‘90s were largely speculative. Neo-liberal
‘reforms’ destroyed constant and variable capital to raise the rate of profit but this was not sufficient
to restore pre-crisis levels of profitability in production. Over-accumulated capital was diverted from
production to speculating in existing values. Neither did capitalist restoration in Russia, China in the
early 1990s help solve capitalism’s crisis. Russia and China were not super-exploited neo-colonies of
the US bloc but became new imperialist powers to rival the declining US. Cuba and Vietnam restored
capitalism and became capitalist semi-colonies under the influence of the imperialist Russia/China
bloc.

Debates among Marxists about the nature and causes of crisis, continue to reflect the need to attack
Marxism to undermine its revolutionary theory and practice by refuting its ‘laws of motion’ – the laws
that explain the drive for capital accumulation. We can see this in the positions taken on the Law of
Value (LOV) and the Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (LTRPF). Those who defend
both laws (fundamentalists) see the current crisis as demanding a socialist revolution while those who
reject both laws (empiricists) explain the current crisis as resulting from wrong policies that can be
corrected with democratic socialist reforms. The debate between Michael Roberts and David Harvey
is instructive. Roberts argues that Harvey rejects the LOV and therefore the LTRPF. Capitalist crises
are therefore not necessary but contingent on powerful elites controlling the distribution of income.
This is shared with the radical neo-Ricardian school that says that exploitation occurs at the level of

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distribution. And therefore, we need a politics of re-distribution! Roberts explains that the capitalists’
power is to make profits, but when the laws of motion necessarily destroy the conditions for this, they
are powerless to stop their money losing value without a massive attack on workers to restore those
conditions. We argue that the structural crisis of the 1970’s to today demonstrates that capitalism can
no longer accumulate sufficient value as capital, so that the crisis is not contingent but necessary; and
further, we would argue, terminal.

The “Global Financial Crisis” of 2007/8 proves that the structural crisis that ended the post-war boom
is worsening. Since the 1960s the capitalist world economy has failed to destroy sufficient surplus
capital to restore the conditions for a new period of capitalist accumulation. Nor can Russia and China
as new imperialist powers evade the decline of the capitalist world economy as they are necessarily
subject to its laws of motion. This means that in the epoch of imperialism, spanning the period from
the turn of the 20th century until today, capitalism has been in inexorable decline. Despite its attempts
to restructure and re-divide the global economy and resolve depressions with world wars, each crisis
gets deeper and longer. Each world war merely postpones the day of reckoning. The build-up of the
explosive contradictions that are just beneath the surface of the neo-liberal veneer, will burst forth to
bring its life to an end. The owners of the big chunks of capital are desperately trying to suppress
those contradictions by state-backed financial speculation in existing values. But this is now expressed
as multi-trillions of ‘fictitious’ capitals resulting in impossibly high levels of debt that can never be
exchanged for actual new value expropriated from labor power as profit. We can see this explosion in
the making as capitalism's ability to restore profits now drives it towards the final destruction of the
forces of production and with it, nature.

(c) Marx on Ecological Crisis

Once we factor in the many negative feedbacks driving global warming it is obvious that we face the
prospect of human extinction. Once the ecosystem which capitalism takes for granted begins to
collapse, capitalism itself will collapse. Capitalism only exists as a mode of production by a constant
process of exploiting nature to the point of destruction. Marx recognised this early on. There was a
limit to the ability of capital to replenish or restore nature when it could deplete and destroy nature for
profit. Marx concept of metabolic rift is based on the best science of his day already revealing the
depredations of capitalist agriculture. It is a model for understanding the ecological rift between
capital and nature.

Contrary to popular wisdom, Marx was not a fan for environmental destruction. Rather he based his
whole theory on the contradiction between nature and society, expressed as between use-value and
exchange-value. Use-value being the natural process of producing for use (though this ‘nature’ is
conditioned by the requirements of capital); exchange value as being the requirement that use-values
were commodified as exchange value. Commodities would only be used if they were bought and sold
on the market. This contradiction is the seed of capitalist development which accumulates riches at
the top and accumulates impoverishment at the bottom. Inevitably capital would destroy nature and
itself unless labour as part of nature fought back and restored a harmonious relation between nature
and society. (Capital to Commune).

The only unanswered question is how soon this will happen and in what form. Global warming is
already destroying the conditions for production as the ‘external’ costs of pollution, degradation, and
exhaustion of raw materials impact back on declining profits. The costs of wars to control this

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declining resource base on human life as part of nature is producing a rise in resistance to this
inevitable social collapse. There is no prospect of the capitalist ruling class taking any responsibility
for preventing this collapse. It is necessary for the proletariat to take the lead in this task.

Marxism holds that under capitalism the class relation between capital and labor generates the motive
force for class struggle between the proletariat and capitalist class that, through workers strikes,
occupations and insurrections, will end in socialist revolution. As capital exhausts its historic capacity
to develop the forces of production, it inevitably destroys nature including the ecological conditions
for human existence. The proletariat in fighting to overthrow capital, must take the lead in drawing all
other oppressed people into the struggle for survival. These include all forms of labour, producing
value or not, unemployed, undocumented, self-employed, skilled or unskilled, white or blue collar
etc., plus all those who are outside the formal capital-labour relation but whose labour is appropriated
by capital. Its Transitional Program must address itself to bringing all oppressed peoples, and groups
behind the banner of socialist revolution, because without them there can be no revolution.

Women as the majority of workers, as members of an historic sex-class, still perform domestic labour
for no payment as domestic slaves, and continue to face ongoing gender oppression. As domestic
slaves, they do not directly create value but contribute their unpaid labour in reproducing the value of
labour power. Contrary to Marx and Engels, who expected the inclusion of women as wage workers
alongside men to make them more equal, they remain doubly exploited as domestic slaves and a
floating section of the reserve army of wage labour, where their working conditions lag well behind
those of men. Colonial and semi-colonial workers, (including self-employed, unemployed and
migrant workers) peasants and poor farmers are the big majority of the world’s workers and doubly
oppressed as unpaid slaves and wage workers. They are the largest section of the global reserve army,
super-exploited since their labour can earn no more than a poverty income. Indigenous peoples who
remain colonized in some form, partially embedded in their pre-capitalist social relations, are
oppressed by capital, and have their labour and land exploited by capital. There will be no socialist
revolution that does not include the representatives of working women, semi-colonial and indigenous
workers in the vanguard of the proletariat, and which does not make the liberation of all oppressed
from the threat of extinction, and the realization of communism, its goal.

Since Marx, Marxists have maintained that capitalism is a living contradiction between labor and
capital, which can be suppressed indefinitely unless transcended by socialist revolution. Today,
however, we do not see any prospect of capitalism ‘stabilising’ as it did briefly after the First
Imperialist and Second Imperialist wars. Today, the decomposition of capitalism is so advanced that
we are justified in using the term “terminal” crisis to mean that capitalism cannot restore profitability
because it is destroying its own conditions of existence. Whether this takes the form of fascist attacks
on workers and oppressed to resolve the crisis of falling profits, failure of production as the ecosystem
collapses, or expansion of many local and regional wars into a Third Imperialist World War, the
outcome is the same. The proletariat and other oppressed people facing death and destruction have
nothing to lose but their chains. Led by a revolutionary international communist party, they have
everything to win; the survival of the human, and other threatened species, in a global socialist, and
ultimately, communist world.

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