The world situation in the 1969-73 period was dominated by a number of interrelated factors: the aggravation of the crisis of the international imperialist system; the deepening of the crisis of bureaucratic manage ment of the economy and the state in the bureaucratized workers states; the precipitous new rise of workers struggles in many imperialist countries; the renewal of the revolutionary thrust of the masses in many colonial and semicolonial countries; the broadening, on an international scale, of a new mass vanguard composed of workers and youth acting independently of the traditional bureaucratic apparatuses of the Socialist and Communist parties, the unions, and the petty-bourgeois leaderships in the colonial countries. These factors will continue to dominate the world scene in the years immediately ahead of us.
For some twenty years following World War II, the colonial revolution stood almost alone in carrying forward the world revolution, while the workers movement in the advanced capitalist countries passed through a period of political stagnation, and the process of political revolution against the bureaucracy made only very slow progress. Beginning in 1967-68, the massive entry into action by the workers of the European capitalist countries opened a period characterized by a considerable revolutionary upsurge (see the theses on building revolutionary parties in capitalist Europe). While making adjustments for the various phases (including phases of stagnation or of temporary retreat) that develop in this period, depending upon the country, the International and its sections must maintain an overall view of the period. Its principal feature is a new rise of world revolution in which the proletariat and its specific forms of struggle and organization have a major weight within the world revolutionary process. It is a period that can, at given times, precipitate revolutionary crises that objectively place the question of power on the agenda. This is the fundamental tendency underlying the evolution of the world political situation since the Ninth World Congress.
All the changes that have occurred since then must be viewed in this general frame work. The reaction to this tendency - the agreements between Washington and Moscow and between Washington and Peking — demonstrate a desire to maintain the world-wide status quo but are characterized by the partners' lessened capacity to impose such a status quo by force. For this reason the accords have so far had a limited though not insignificant effect. Direct and concerted counterrevolutionary action has been put into effect only against the JVP [Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna— People's Liberation Front] in Ceylon. Through mutual neutrality, a counterrevolutionary operation is at present scoring successes in the Middle East. On the other hand, however, the counterrevolution has shown itself incapable of halting the Indochinese revolution, notably as a result of the political autonomy of its leaderships, an autonomy that is itself conferred by the strength of the revolutionary upsurge of the masses.
Such agreements are in general the consequence of a weakening rather than a strengthening of both imperialism and the bureaucracies of the bigger workers states. Although they try to use such agreements to slow down this process of weakening and to halt the upsurge of the world revolution, neither imperialism nor the ruling bureaucracies currently have at their disposal the means to achieve their goals effectively. Only serious defeats of the masses in key sectors of the world revolution today— notably in the large countries of capitalist Europe, in Japan, Vietnam, or Argentina— could decisively modify the world situation, enabling imperialism to return to an all-out offensive and impose its own solutions to the structural crisis shaking its system, i.e., establishing re actionary dictatorships, sharply lowering the masses' standard of living, and organizing and launching new, far-reaching counterrevolutionary wars.
For the next several years the fundamental tendency (which does not exclude temporary ebbs or partial setbacks) is neither such an ebb in the revolution nor such a reconsolidation of imperialism. On the contrary, the underlying tendency is toward a continuation of the revolutionary rise; an increase in capitalist crises of all sorts; and an increase in powerful thrusts by the mass movement, moving toward the creation of situations of dual power or passing straight over this threshold. The revolutionary Marxists, while warning the proletariat and the vanguard layers that this revolutionary rise cannot continue indefinitely, and that the absence of a radical proletarian solution to the crisis owing to the betrayal by the traditional leaderships would result in tiring out the masses and enabling a capitalist counterattack to assert itself, should stake everything on the present rising dynamic of proletarian struggles. They should seek to sharpen the struggles' objectively anticapitalist cutting edge, and, if possible, make them consciously anticapitalist. They must try to stimulate all organizational forms of struggle that enable the proletariat to begin creating soviet-type organs of independent organization. They must seek to advance along the path of building increasingly stronger revolutionary parties with more and more influence in the mass struggle, for this is the only way to insure the victory of the present rising wave of world revolution.
### I. Deepening Crisis of the World Imperialist System
1. The Worsening Situation of the International Capitalist Economy
The evolution of the world economic situation since 1969 has fully confirmed the political resolution adopted at the Ninth World Congress with respect to the end of the postwar period of relative stabilization and accelerated growth of the international imperialist economy.
The recession of 1969-71 hit the majority of imperialist countries— although in varying degrees and not, in any pronounced way, all at once. Since 1972 it has been followed by a new, accelerated expansion of production, except in Italy. But this is a typical inflationary boom marked by an acceleration of the inflationary process, which is worrisome for capital, and by a burst of speculative fever, especially in the flow of raw materials and in the price of gold and real estate. As was foreseen, this inflationary boom was only a short-term one, and the recession that will follow it, in 1974 or 1975, will be even more synchronized than the upswing of the business cycle in 1972-73, which itself caught up practically all the imperialist countries in its wake.
The crisis of the international monetary system, symbolized by the fall of the dollar and the elimination of its convertibility into gold for several years, is the result of the inevitable consequences of the use, for a quarter of a century, of inflationary techniques to stimulate the economy in the United States and the growth of world commerce. The repeated setbacks the imperialists have encountered in their attempts to create a new international monetary system reflect both the deepening of the interimperialist rivalry and American imperialism's inability to force the other imperialist powers to accept the solutions that best correspond to its own particular interests. The long-term repercussions of the crisis of the international monetary system can only exert pressure in the direction of deepening the instability and the crisis of the capitalist system as a whole, even if on a much shorter range they seem to artificially stimulate the economy by accelerating inflation.
At the base of the worsening of the economic situation of world capitalism is the reemergence of the fundamental contradictions of the capitalist mode of production, which were temporarily attenuated during the two decades that followed the second world war. The long-term decline in the rate of profit of the large trusts; their inability to finance their gigantic investment plans through self-financing alone; the decline in the portion of world commerce going to the colonial and semicolonial countries; the appearance of excess productive capacity in a number of "crucial" sectors of industry; the reappearance of massive unemployment in several imperialist countries — all these symptoms make it possible to predict recessions during the 1970s that will be much more serious than those of the 1960s.
The fact that in Western Europe and Japan these recessions will meet with an organized force, a rise in combativity, and an anticapitalist level of consciousness among the proletariat unequaled in the past will make the social and political situation exceptionally serious and explosive for capitalism. One can already predict that important layers of the proletariat in the advanced countries who have up until now refused to pay the costs of inflation will also refuse to pay the costs of unemployment that will be added on in the future. Extremely sharp struggles involving the occupation, takeover, and expropriation of factories will break out in the course of the recession that is brewing. The "oil crisis," as well as the increase in the prices of a number of other strategic raw materials like bauxite, cannot be viewed as simply a result of the incontestable greed of the big monopolies, nor as merely the product of a conspiracy against consumers. They reflect, in the realm of prices and profits, two long-term tendencies that began to appear several years ago and serve as an additional signal of a basic reversal of the long phase of postwar economic boom.
On one hand, the bourgeoisie in a number of semicolonial countries is seeking to take advantage of the rise of the colonial revolution in order to modify in its favor the division of the surplus value extorted from the world proletariat (especially from the proletariat of the colonial and semicolonial countries). This is carried out at the expense of the imperialist bourgeoisie, above all the bourgeoisies of Europe and Japan, which depend far more than the U.S. bourgeoisie on imported oil. The imperialist bourgeoisie counters by making the working masses bear a part of the cost of this operation. For the moment, it has little possibility of avoiding the redistribution of surplus value, since a decisive military intervention is politically and socially beyond its scope at the present conjuncture.
On the other hand, the long phase of decline in the prices of raw materials (1952-70) relative to the price behavior of manufactured goods has induced growing imbalances in the distribution of capital between various sectors, leading to bottlenecks and shortages that stem not from natural causes but basically from the anarchy of the international capitalist economy. In the framework of an economy of this kind, giddy rises in prices and profits like the one that is filling the coffers of the oil trusts today are the "normal" mechanism for redirecting capital toward these sectors and for stimulating investment and production in them, thereby eliminating these imbalances.
The fact that the working masses of the imperialist countries will have to pay the bill while the trusts appropriate new riches — and that the populations of numerous semicolonial countries (like those of the Indian peninsula!) will suffer both from the increased price of oil and from the rise in the price of manufactured goods that it will bring about-should stimulate revolutionary Marxists everywhere to indict capitalist wastefulness and to focus the indictment on the demand for expropriating all sources of energy and placing them under workers control, and on the need to pass over to socialist planning of the world economy.
However, the overall effect of the "energy crisis" and the rise in the costs of other strategic raw materials will be to reduce the rate of profit of manufacturing industry in the imperialist countries and thus to accentuate tendencies toward a marked slowdown of growth in the 1970s.
2. The Deepening of Interimperialist Contradictions
The years that followed the second world war were characterized by the nearly absolute dominance of American imperialism within the capitalist world. This hegemony was based on the technological and productive superiority of the American economy; on the American monopoly of nuclear arms; on the primacy of the dollar; and on the dependency of the other capitalist powers on the flow of American aid to rebuild and reconsolidate their economies and their states, which were seriously shaken by the war and the limited revolutionary rise of the years 1944-48. The establishment of a series of political and military alliances around the world — NATO, CENTO, SEATO, and OAS— all based on the hegemony of American imperialism, crowned the imperialist world system after 1945.
This situation has been profoundly modified in the course of the last few years. The spectacular reconstruction of the imperialist powers of Western Europe and Japan brought the law of uneven development into play at the expense of the American bourgeoisie for the first time in the history of capitalism. The U.S. economy experienced an erosion of its productivity advantage over its principal rivals. The effort to simultaneously assure the ex tension of its exports of capital, the underwriting of the costs of its role as world cop of the imperialist system, and the purchase of relative stability on its home front by accepting the maintenance of and even a modest growth in the standard of living of the organized industrial proletariat surpassed the resources of the American bourgeoisie. It resulted in a permanent deficit in the balance of payments and a rampant crisis of the dollar. The acceleration of inflation, caused especially by the war in Vietnam and by the need to pull out of the prolonged recession of 1969-70, ended up by producing the decline of the dollar and the international monetary system created at Bretton Woods. This was the symbolic expression of American imperialism's loss of its nearly absolute hegemony within the capitalist world.
Of course, American imperialism continues to occupy a position of relative superiority among the imperialist powers. While its rate of growth in material production and productivity are lower than those of, say, Japan and the German Federal Republic and its share of world trade is a great deal less than that of the European Common Market, its industry and revenues still greatly surpass those of capitalist Europe taken as a whole. It still has more capital invested abroad than all the other imperialist powers put together. Above all, the military superiority that it continues to exert within the imperialist alliance is out of proportion with its economic and financial weight. But the worsening of the interimperialist contradictions —which is a function not just of the change in the relationship of forces within the imperialist alliance, but also of the worsening of the structural crisis of world capitalism — has an inexorable tendency to pass from the commercial, industrial, and financial sphere to the political and even the military sphere. American leadership is seriously challenged and undermined within the world imperialist alliance, although no other power is in a position to present itself as a replacement. Some of the defensive countermeasures of American imperialism - such as the attempt to shift a portion of the total imperialist military costs to the countries of capitalist Europe and Japan, or the blackmail threat to withdraw American armed forces from Europe—contribute to fostering tendencies toward first a European, then a Japanese, nuclear force that might eventually express on the political and military level the change in the relationship of forces that has already occurred on the economic and financial plane.
The efforts of American diplomacy are aimed at replacing a bipolar strategy (i.e., the two "big powers" of the postwar period) by a strategy that corresponds to a more complex constellation: three "big powers" (United States, USSR, China- the latter not yet being quite so "big"), Japan, and a capitalist Europe without political unity. These efforts are aimed at defending America's position within the capitalist world and not at bringing about a fundamental reversal of alliances. The class interests of capital as a whole continue to take precedence in the long run over considerations of rivalry, and there are tangible material reasons for this. The loss of capitalist Europe or Japan would be a deathblow for the American bourgeoisie. It will therefore remain fundamentally tied to the international imperialist alliances— while striving to modify the relationship of forces within that alliance, as its European rivals and partners have done for years. Thus on the political plane, the deepening of the interimperialist rivalry is expressed, in the last analysis, by a crisis of leadership within the international bourgeoisie, which can reestablish a unity of views and responses only at the price of more and more laborious negotiations. The reservations of the European bourgeoisie with respect to the American policy in Vietnam and the Middle East; the difficulties in reconstructing any international system whatsoever; the blows and counterblows that the different imperialist powers are dealing each other in the chase after raw materials and the markets of the Eastern bloc countries, or in their relations with the bourgeoisies of Latin America— these are only some of the signs of this crisis of leadership, a crisis that is seriously weakening the capitalist system as a whole.
The EEC [European Economic Community— Common
Market] is going through a marked crisis as a result of the aggravation of the international economic situation of capitalism and the exacerbation of interimperialist rivalry. This crisis in no way expresses any increased power of American capital in Europe, paralyzing the formation of an integrated imperialist power. On the contrary, it expresses the still considerable strength of tendencies within each European bourgeoisie to withdraw into protectionism and nationalism as soon as its economic situation deteriorates— in other words, the still limited degree of interpenetration of capital on the European scale. However, just as in the past it was wrong to describe as "irreversible" the tendency toward economic and political unification of capitalist Europe, it is equally wrong to count today on the "inevitable" disintegration of the Common Market. The decision will no doubt be taken at a time of serious generalized recession which will necessitate in one way or another a still stronger intervention of the bourgeois state in the economy. If the interpenetration of capital on a European scale proves to be predominant, only a "European superstate" will be able to meet the needs of the European monopolies. If this state does not come into being, then a withdrawal intonational-state protectionism seems inevitable.
3. The New Counterrevolutionary Strategy of Imperialism
and the Fate of the Vietnamese Revolution Faced with the rise of all these economic, social, and political difficulties on a world scale, the fundamental strategy of imperialism was perceptibly modified in the course of the last few years. During the 1960s, it was centered above all on direct American intervention aimed at halting and smothering new revolutionary outbreaks. The counterrevolutionary war of intervention that American imperialism unleashed in Indochina was the most striking expression of this strategy. It ended in failure. U.S. military intervention not only failed to crush the Indochinese revolution, but the financial and political price paid for carrying out the operation proved to be higher and higher and threatened to shake the relative stability of bourgeois society in the United States itself. To repeat a war of the Vietnam type in the short run in another country seems impossible for the American bourgeoisie.
The global counterrevolutionary strategy of imperialism has evolved under these conditions toward combining the creation of regional counterrevolutionary stand-ins without direct intervention of U.S. troops (although with a more and more ample military aid from imperialism) with negotiations with the Moscow and Peking bureaucracies to get them to step up their role as a brake inside the mass movement - with a view to preventing the revolutionary uprisings that could no longer be tolerated within the framework of capitalism —in exchange for de facto recognition of their power over the countries they control.
The principal local instruments that this strategy is based on are the Brazilian army in Latin America, the Israeli army in the Middle East, the Iranian army in the Arab-Persian Gulf, the South Vietnamese and Thai armies in Southeast Asia, and the South African army in Africa. But the effectiveness of the South Vietnamese army is more than doubtful; the course of the revolutionary process in Indochina could lead to its gradual disintegration. The rise of the student and workers movement is undermining the effectiveness of the Thai army. Since the effectiveness of the Israeli army has been called into question by the Yom Kippur war, it is likely that American imperialism will seek at least a supplement to it from the reactionary Arab regimes. And there are two other gaping holes in this system. On the one hand, Japanese imperialism is encountering great political difficulties in the effort to build up its military forces to the point of being able to substitute for American armed forces in Southeast Asia. On the other hand, in Western Europe the bourgeoisies' effort to create a full-scale counterrevolutionary striking force is encountering even greater difficulties, which has caused, among other things, the spectacular reversal of the Gaullist politicians in France, who today call loudly for the maintenance of the American military presence in Europe.
The effectiveness of some of these counterrevolutionary instruments should not be underestimated. The Brazilian army and the Israeli army have undoubtedly been a major factor in stopping the development of revolutionary situations in their respective regions. In the countries of Western Europe in which the tensions are manifested most sharply, the bourgeoisie's strengthening of its machinery for civil war involves preparing the national armies for the struggle against "internal subversion." This preparation, while not necessarily leading in the short run to the abolition of conscription, implies an increase in the weight of the professional sector of the army, a sector that is specially trained on both the material and ideological level to take charge of the struggle against the internal enemy. The training of the army for the tasks of civil war must be vigorously fought by the workers movement. Nevertheless, in its totality this counterstrategy depends on the outcome of the rise of the mass move ments now taking place. Without a very serious political and social defeat of the Japanese and European proletariats, one cannot see how imperialism would be able to create a stable and effective military force in these key regions of the world. In another connection, the ability of the Moscow and Peking bureaucracies to impede or effectively betray powerful revolutionary mass movements in exchange for a modus vivendi with imperialism does not depend solely on their intentions — which certainly run in that direction— but also on the strength of the revolutionary rise, on the relationship of forces be tween the treacherous old leaderships and the new vanguards within the mass movement, on the degree of control that Moscow and Peking and their respective agents exercise over this mass movement, on the repercussions of the changed relationship of forces in the mass movement inside the Communist parties themselves, etc. From this point of view, the situation today is fundamentally different from that of the 1944-47 period. The force, the cohesion, and the degree of control of the Stalinist apparatus-to say nothing of the Maoist apparatus —over the international workers movement are much smaller, while the power and the autonomy of the mass movement are much greater. That is why it is entirely out of place to speak of a new Yalta, in the sense of the ability of Washington, Moscow, and Peking to divide the world into spheres of influence and maintain the status quo.
The fate of the Indochinese revolution is in a way the synthesis of all these trends that dominate the development of the world situation today. The force of the revolutionary thrust of the Vietnamese masses is such that it defeated American imperialism's systematic, ten-year effort to crush it with the strongest concentration of firepower ever known in such a small area. The mass opposition to the pursuit of this counterrevolutionary war acquired such a scope within the United States that it forced American imperialism to withdraw the bulk of its infantry forces from Vietnam.
But the relative international isolation in which the Indochinese revolution found itself and the fact that the Moscow and Peking bureaucracies doled out their aid through an eyedropper while relentlessly stepping up their pressure for a compromise did not allow the revolution to pursue realistically the perspective of a military victory against U.S. imperialism's air war. Nixon's trips to Peking and Moscow contributed to demobilizing the antiwar move ment in the United States. In these conditions, the fact that the cease-fire put an end to direct imperialist military intervention in Vietnam and was followed by a similar cessation of intervention in Laos and Cambodia doesn't mean the immediate and automatic victory of the permanent revolution in Vietnam.
It means that the Indochinese revolution is continuing within an improved relationship of forces. Direct American intervention has been halted, and this halt has not been accompanied by a demobilization or disarming of the forces of the South Vietnamese NLF, or by a halt in North Vietnamese aid to the revolution in the South. And these forces as a whole are not letting up in their efforts to overthrow the puppet Thieu regime. But the cease-fire means that the course of the revolution will take time; that for a period it will avoid full-scale frontal battles with Thieu's army. The emphasis will move to expanding the agrarian revolution; to consolidating the new organs of power set up in the countryside; to attempting to bring about the political and social disintegration of the counterrevolutionary army; to breathing new life into the struggle in the cities, especially through the struggle for the liberation of political prisoners, for the reestablishment of civil liberties, against the high cost of living and speculators, and for the right of refugees to return to their village of origin.
The victories that the revolutionary forces have won in Laos and above all in Cambodia facilitate the unfolding of the permanent revolution in Vietnam toward victory. On the other hand, the march toward victory is being held back by the threat of renewed American bombing, the extensive aid Washington continues to provide the puppet Thieu, and the "moderating" and capitulatory pressures that Moscow and Peking continue to exert on the Indochinese revolutionaries. In the last analysis, everything depends on the entry into action of living class forces in the area, on their relationship of forces, on their willingness to fight, and on the orientation and resolve of their leaderships. For an entire period, the situation will remain one of dual power from top to bottom in a large part of South Vietnam. The outcome of the revolution will without doubt be decided by its ability to extend this dual power toward the cities and above all toward greater Saigon. There again, the autonomous intervention of the proletariat, with its own forms of organization and action, will probably mark the final phase of the Indochinese revolution.
4. The Resurgence of Workers Struggles in Western Europe
The resurgence of struggles of the Western European proletariat since the May 1968 bombshell in France is the most spectacular expression of the leading role the working class occupies within the present revolutionary upsurge, compared with the upswing of 1949-67, which was based above all on the colonial revolution. The breadth of these struggles, their increasingly anticapitalist objectives, and their growing political implications — which on several occasions have led to objectively posing the question of power — coincide to place several of the key countries of capitalist Europe once again on the threshold of a prerevolutionary crisis. Beginning in 1968 Italy passed through a very deep social and political crisis that, in the second half of 1969, culminated in a prerevolutionary crisis. The working class and other toiling layers were mobilized for years on end in struggles of a very broad scope, with a potentially anticapitalist dynamic. This thrust, which acquired a markedly united class nature, was characterized by egalitarian demands, by significant experiences tending to raise the question of workers control (control over the pace of work, the size of the work force, etc.), by a challenge to the whole concept of management rights, and by the emergence of new bodies of proletarian democracy (workers delegates and councils of delegates). The occupation of Fiat- Mirafiori, the largest factory in Europe, and of other factories in Turin five years after the beginning of the new phase and at the end of a hard-fought six-month battle for the new metalworkers contract is the most eloquent indication of the depth of the working-class radicalization in Italy, which has yet to run out of steam.
The French proletariat, which in May- June 1968 went through the inspiring experience of a general strike that included factory occupations involving about 10 million workers, has not witnessed any de cline in its struggle since then. Its upsurge took place in the context of the decomposition of the Gaullist regime. Seeking to channel this upsurge onto a reformist path, the Communist and the Socialist party leaderships have established a Union of the Left with a "Common Program." They claim that a parliamentary victory by this bloc would open up a "short phase leading to a transition to socialism." After a temporary lull before the March 1973 elections, the upsurge gained new strength immediately afterward despite the electoral defeat of the Union of the Left. This is shown not only in sharper struggles but also in demands that challenge the authority of the bosses and in the appearance of forms of independent organization of the masses in struggle, partially outside the monolithic control of the old leaderships and traditional organizations. The revolutionary upsurge is spreading to the most diverse realms of society (education, the family, the army, and the judicial system). The new vanguard, which is still mostly unorganized, has taken on mass dimensions since May 1968; it includes increasingly broader layers of young workers and already represents a significant factor on the political scene. In the period since the strikes against the death sentences the Burgos War Tribunal handed down against Basque militants in 1970, the Spanish working class has experienced an increasing politicization of its struggles. Even when they break out over questions of wages, these struggles tend to raise political demands (freedom for political prisoners, trade-union rights, etc.) and to be transformed into a direct confrontation with the forces of repression and the Franco regime. Thus the relevance of the slogan of the revolutionary general strike-which our Spanish comrades were the first to counterpose to the Spanish CP's orientation toward a peaceful general strike aimed at liberalizing the regime without affecting its capitalist structure—was revealed in a succession of experiences in Ferrol, Vigo, San Adrian, and Pamplona when such general strikes actually broke out on a local scale as a re action to the repression of strikes that had been purely economic at first. Under these conditions, propaganda for the preparation of a nationwide revolutionary general strike is finding a growing receptivity among the vanguard of the Spanish proletariat.
In Britain, millions of workers have put up fierce resistance to the attempts by the Wilson government, and later by the Heath government, to smash the workers' militancy by passing antiunion legislation and by increasing unemployment. The miners strikes, with their use of massive pickets around the electric power stations, and the political general strike of May 1, 1973, against the incomes policy, mark what are so far the high points of these battles, which have resulted in a pronounced radicalization within the unions and the left wing of the Labour party, as well as a notable growth of political currents to the left of the Labour party.
The resurgence of workers struggles has had an impact even in West Germany, where the proletariat entered the period opened up by the end of the long postwar boom with a very low level of class consciousness (the result of the victory of fascism, the war, the division of the country, the disastrous effects of the Soviet occupation, the triumphant anticommunism of the cold-war period, and the unexpected economic successes of capitalist reconstruction). From the wildcat strikes of 1969 to those of the summer and fall of 1973, the renewal of the West German proletariat's combativity is undeniable, even if it still lags behind that of the other large European capitalist countries in breadth and depth.
These phenomena have also occurred, even if at a slower pace and with a more reduced scope, in the smaller European countries like Belgium and Denmark. They mark a general tendency that will spread under different forms to most of the capitalist countries of Europe, especially if the breakthrough toward a revolutionary crisis is achieved in some important countries.
The appearance of a temporary situation of dual power in Northern Ireland in the course of struggles for civil rights and the situation of endemic civil war that continues there are equally revealing of the degree of instability in the situation facing big business in Western Europe.
Three features indicate particularly clearly the importance of the present resurgence of workers struggles in Europe: first, the fact that in Europe, workers demands and actions are taking an increasingly anticapitalist character, most clearly expressed by the different variants of the demand for workers control; second, the workers' instinctive thrust toward the independent organization of struggles (strike committees, elected strike committees, general assemblies of strikers controlling the strike committees), i.e., their more and more distinctly antibureaucratic character; finally, a synchronization of the rise of workers struggles in all the large countries of Europe, a synchronization that did not occur in 1919-20, 1923, 1936, or 1945-48, and that largely prevents one or another of the large bourgeois states from playing the role of cop on a European scale. Immigrant workers form the most exploited layer of the proletariat in a number of European countries and are the target of the first massive attacks of big capital on both the economic level and the political level (i.e., the rise of extreme right-wing racist demagogy). Their role in internationalizing the struggles, above all in their most radical forms, should be particularly noted.
All these indications point to a single conclusion. They enable us to foresee the occurrence in the near future of one of the most important revolutionary waves that the proletariat of capitalist Europe has ever known, prepared and stimulated by the prerevolutionary situations that have existed several times since 1968 in several countries and that the bourgeoisie did not succeed in crushing.
5. The Rise of Japanese Imperialism and Its Contradictions
The spectacular expansion of the capitalist economy of Japan is one of the most important of the phenomena that have modified the world situation in the course of the last twenty years. Rebuilt by American imperialism to be a counterweight to the strength of the USSR in Asia and to the victory of the Chinese revolution; nourished by the effects of the Korean war and the second Indochinese war; having the advantages of the most modern technology in such important industrial sectors as metallurgy, naval construction, the precision industries, and electronics, Japanese imperialism exploited to the hilt the industrial reserve army it still had in the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, to throw itself into a commercial and then a financial offensive on the world market. As a result of that offensive, it largely dominates the economies of South Korea and the Philippines; it is plunging toward the "peaceful" conquest of Indonesia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Thailand; it is the number one commercial partner of the People's Republic of China and Australia; and it is beginning to penetrate the Pacific coasts of the United States, Canada, and Mexico—while already achieving annual capital investments in Brazil greater than those of the United States. This commercial expansion corresponds not only to the need to find outlets for its giant industry and fields of investment for its excess capital but also to its haunting poverty in raw materials, which had already launched it on the road to expansion — at that time military -in the period before the second world war.
However, the rapid economic expansion of Japanese imperialism ran up against limitations resulting from the interaction of two factors. On the one hand, the decline of the hegemony of U.S. imperialism in the political and economic system of international imperialism robbed this expansion of the monetary basis (a stable dollar) and the political basis (U.S. hegemony in the Far East) on which it rested. On the other hand, a number of internal factors that fueled the rapid economic growth of the past decades have also been exhausted.
The decline of the fundamental stimulants of past growth has plunged the Japanese bourgeoisie into serious economic difficulties. This has already been expressed by the dramatic reversal of Japan's balance of payments and the consequent fall of the yen, which, following its spectacular rise after the Nixon declaration of August 1971, is now closer to its previous value.
In this situation, the decline of the political dominance of the LDP [Liberal Democratic party] has proceeded at an accelerated rate. Ever broader layers of the Japanese masses are parting ways with the LDP government and its policies. This tendency promotes the increasingly independent and militant mass struggles that are beginning to develop and also pushes the Japanese Communist party toward the center of the political stage. What is really happening is that the wave of radicalization can no longer be contained within the framework of a center-left bloc (Socialist party/Democratic Socialist party and Komeito [Clean Government party]). The deepening of the crisis in a context of growing combativity on the part of the working masses promotes the advancement of a popular-front type solution by the Socialist and Communist parties. It is therefore possible to anticipate a confrontation be tween the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in the period ahead; and the struggle against the tendency toward a popular front becomes an increasingly urgent task for revolutionary Marxists.
6. The Decline of American Hegemony and the Crisis of Bourgeois Society in the U.S.
Of all the important imperialist countries, the United States is the only one in which the proletariat has not yet participated in the spectacular resurgence of struggles in recent years. Revolutionary Marxists should assign particular importance to the theoretical and political analysis of the causes of this delay, which is linked to the great historical delay in the development of the political class consciousness of the American proletariat, without, however, being identical with it.
During the postwar period, North American capitalism has enjoyed a stability unparalleled by any other important imperialist power. This situation can to a large degree be explained by the international hegemony of American imperialism and by the advantages of its economy's edge in productivity, which allowed a constant rise in American workers' standard of living.
This prolonged period of political prosperity weighed heavily and negatively on the development of the combativity and class consciousness of the North American proletariat. The economic margin of maneuver of the North American bourgeoisies allowed them to grant real concessions to the working class while generally avoiding violent and direct confrontations with important sectors of the organized labor movement. This situation, particularly in the years after the second world war, was to allow the crystallization of an ultrareactionary trade-union bureaucracy that in many cases won its stripes through militant anticommunism and the role it played in the witch-hunt during the cold war, as well as the consolidation of a broad, ultraconservative labor aristocracy that was always willing to sacrifice the interests of the North American proletariat to the maintenance of its own privileges.
A number of factors have begun to shake this relative social stability: the Black revolt; the Indochina war; and the economic weakening of American imperialism in relation to the other imperialist powers. The political readjustments under-taken by the Nixon administration are the expression of this shake-up in foreign and domestic policy (abandonment of most of the social programs of previous administrations, severe cutbacks in social expenditures, wage and price controls, a more or less generalized offensive against the standard of living of the working class, etc.). The decline in American hegemony in the world, along with the accelerated change in the conditions within which capital investments are carried out in the United States, has undermined the stability of U.S. bourgeois society. Among other things this society in the last ten years has experienced a massive revolt against its basically racist structure, the largest mass movement ever seen in any country against a counterrevolutionary war being carried out by its own bourgeoisie, and a massive shake-up of the classical value system of the bourgeoisie. Although the bourgeois two-party system was able to "co-opt" these successive waves electorally - basically because the bulk of the proletariat has not yet entered into action, and because the Moscow and Peking bureaucracies powerfully aided Nixon in demobilizing the antiwar movement— the traditional power structures have been as severely shaken objectively as they have been in the eyes of the masses. Far from being a passing accident, the Watergate scandal is the clearest expression of this shake-up. American big business is encountering growing difficulties in adapting its traditional methods of government to rapidly changing social and economic conditions, both nationally and internationally. By raising itself above the Republican and Democratic coalitions and electoral machines, the Nixon administration was beginning in earnest the destruction of the equilibrium of bourgeois political forces. Those sectors of the American bourgeoisie that feel this enterprise might be carried out at their expense have seized upon the Watergate scandal to try to bring Nixon back into line, without, however, calling into question the long-term trend toward the strong state. But this anti-Nixon offensive could seriously undermine the confidence of the American masses in the entire bourgeois political system.
Added to the effects of this crisis of political institutions on the working class are the effects of the economic difficulties of American capitalism. The objective factors that contributed to the social and political passivity of the proletariat for the last twenty-five years are playing less and less of a role. The American economy's advantages in the realm of productivity have been pared down or have disappeared. The real wages of the American proletariat taken as a whole have stopped rising since the beginning of the escalation of the war in Vietnam. The difference in the standard of living in comparison with Western Europe is gradually diminishing. The bourgeoisie's offensive against the working class's standard of living is being carried out in a diversified but systematic way: a combination of nominal wage increases with speedup and overtime, a direct attack on real wages through inflation, and cutbacks in social expenditures that affect the most exploited layers of the proletariat (notably the national minorities). The energy crisis offers an additional pretext for a whole range of rationalizations and layoffs in certain sectors of the economy. Up until now this offensive has not given rise to any massive response on the part of the American working class, in large part because of betrayal by the trade-union bureaucracies, who have given their de facto assent to the overall economic policy of the American bourgeoisie. However, the strikes in recent years by public employees and farm workers, the hard-fought strikes and occasional wildcat walkouts in heavy industry, and the appearance of trade-union caucuses in opposition to the old and traditional bureaucratic leaderships all indicate that discontent is far from nonexistent in the American working class, even if it has not yet reached the point of expressing itself in a massive and generalized way. This lack can be partially explained by the absence of a layer of advanced worker militants sufficiently numerous and organized to promote an effort to outflank the powerful bureaucratic apparatuses in actions that have more than a local or sectoral influence. There is, however, a molecular radicalization, particularly among young, Black, and Latino workers. It is fueled both by the change in the economic situation and the ideological residue of the social movements of the late 1960s. This is an undeniable reality and will have an impact on the emergence of a workers vanguard.
Consequently, the most probable variant for the immediate future in the United States is neither the continuation of the present momentary decline of the move ments of mass revolt, nor the rapid evolution of the country toward a military or police dictatorship, or a regime of the fascist type. On the contrary, the most probably variant is for a new surge of the mass movement, this time centered more on workers struggles launched in reaction to inflation, employment, and the deterioration of living standards, working conditions, and the environment— phenomena that will become aggravated in the course of the coming recession. The revolt by important sectors of the proletariat against the trade-union bureaucracy's policy of class collaboration, against its acceptance of successive clamp-downs on wages and of a policy of wage controls, will stimulate this renewal of workers struggles, give it a more pronounced anticapitalist and antibureaucratic character, and deal heavy blows to the bourgeois two-party system, placing workers independent political organization on the agenda once again.
Canada has enjoyed a period of economic prosperity as prolonged as that of the United States, thanks to its basic role under the North American division of labor as an exporter of raw materials, its privileged commercial ties with the United States, and the overall satellite character of its economy in relation to that of the United States. And it has experienced a much greater overall political stability. Canada's position as a subordinate (though largely autonomous) component of a continental economy dominated by U.S. capital worked to its advantage during almost the whole period between the end of the second world war and now. But because of this dependent relationship, Canada's political, economic, and social stability rest, to a degree unparalleled in any other imperialist country, on the good health of the U.S. economy. The difficulties the latter has encountered have had almost immediate repercussions on the Canadian economy. At the present time a whole range of factors linked directly or indirectly to this dependence on the United States is helping to undermine the stability of the Canadian state and is making increasingly obvious its artificial and unviable character as a distinct capitalist state. Its extreme dependence on foreign trade (especially with the United States and certain countries in the European Economic Community) makes its economy highly vulnerable to protectionist measures. The weakness and distortions of its manufacturing industry; the growing national consciousness of the Acadians, the French-speaking population of Ontario, and the native peoples; the extreme regional fragmentation that characterizes its economy, social structure, and political system— a fragmentation that is reflected in the absence of a solidly based political team capable of expressing the interests of the Canadian bourgeoisie as a whole— all these things tend, given the present conditions and above all the possibility of an international recession, toward a sharp domestic crisis that could well call into question the entire internal cohesion of the Canadian state.
Although the Canadian working class as a whole has not yet experienced massive mobilizations on a national scale, it has been possible to observe a notable increase in working-class militancy over the past few years, as well as an increase in sharp confrontations between important sectors of the workers movement and various levels of the Canadian state (federal or provincial). Examples of this are the rail strike, the massive mobilizations of the trade unions in British Columbia, the teachers in Ontario, the post office workers, and the hard-fought exemplary strikes in light industry that have given rise to broad mobilizations of worker militants on a local scale. For a small but growing number of trade-union militants, these confrontations are beginning to pose the problem of violent intervention by the state. Fundamental concepts about the urgent necessity of organizing workers self-defense are beginning to emerge. In all North America it is only in
Quebec that workers mobilizations have taken on a massive character almost in one leap. The general strike of the public employee unions' Common Front-along with the semispontaneous and more or less generalized walkouts in May 1972, the experiences of workers control, and the occupations of towns — constitutes the most significant mobilization of any sector of the North American proletariat in the last twenty-five years. Far from being decisively crushed by the defeat of the Common Front, working-class militancy was de monstrated all during 1973 by a wave of strikes in the private sector. The burden of national oppression, the extreme combativity of the proletariat, the economic crisis that has been endemic since 1964, the weakened economic and political state of the Quebecois bourgeoisie, the weakness and heterogeneity of the trade-union bureaucracy, and the intensity of the social contradictions make Quebec the weak link in the chain of North American imperialism.
The greatest subjective obstacle on the path toward the Quebecois revolution is the Parti Quebecois. Given the absence of independent working-class political organizations, this bourgeois-nationalist party has won the allegiance of the overwhelming majority of the organized workers movement. The intensification of the class struggle, however, is tending slowly but surely to detach a growing number of advanced workers from the influence of the Parti Quebecois, paving the way for violent actions outflanking the bureaucratic and nationalist movements. To date, the struggles of the Quebecois proletariat have had an influence only on a few isolated vanguard militants in the Canadian working class. But as social tensions increase in Canada and the United States, the example of the Quebecois working class will be followed by broader layers and will constitute an important radicalizing factor.
All the changes that have been described reflect a gradual transformation of the political and social situation in North America. This will provide historic new opportunities for a revolutionary intervention within the proletariat of this continent.
7. The Struggle of the Semicolonial Proletariat for Its Class Autonomy
One of the most striking features of the development of the colonial revolution over the last few years has been the growing weight of workers struggles tending toward independent action-including po-action- on the part of the proletariat in an increasing number of colonial and semicolonial countries. This phenomenon results from the interaction of a number of factors, among which the quickened pace of industrialization in these countries and the open bankruptcy of the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalist leaderships play a preponderant role.
The weight of the proletariat, and more especially of the industrial proletariat, is increasing in several semicolonial countries, even if the neocolonial or dependent industrialization — partial, skimpy, and dominated by the multinational trusts — has scarcely reduced the massive unemployment and the misery of the shantytowns. The conflicts between the proletariat and not only the foreign capitalists but also the "national" capitalists and governments, even those with an anti-imperialist veneer, are tending to increase. At the same time, the inability of the governments to resolve the fundamental problems of an underdeveloped society and economy, along with the ties they maintain with imperialism, compel them to make the masses bear the burden of the industrialization that is under way. Inflation, the high cost of living, unemployment, crises in housing and basic public services, illiteracy, stagnation if not decline in living standards, suppression of civil liberties, wage freezes, the prohibition of strikes —such are the problems the workers and poor peasants still find themselves faced with in these countries.
That is why the political credit that the traditional nationalist leaderships enjoy— thanks to some real, even though partial, gains from the anti-imperialist struggle — is gradually running out. The loss of prestige of the "reformist" military regime in Peru (which, among other things, has broken workers strikes with harsh repression); the decline in influence of the post- Nasserite leadership in Egypt, notto speak of the Baath in Syria and in Iraq; the exposure of the Bandaranaike regime in Sri Lanka; and the difficulties of the Ramanantsoa regime in Madagascar and the Ngouabi regime in the Congo (Brazzaville) are some illustrations of that general tendency. It is probable that Peronism's return to power in Argentina will provoke a crisis in the influence of this current among the broad proletarian masses and the radicalized student youth of Argentina
The case of India is particularly characteristic in this respect. After Nehru's death and the appearance of a massive famine in important sectors of the subcontinent, the hold of the Congress party on the Indian masses underwent a pronounced decline. The ultraopportunist policy of the CPI [Communist party of India] and the CPI(M)
[Communist party of India
(Marxist)] — a policy of governmental collaboration, alliance with the possessing classes and their parties, repression of popular movements, use of violence against other tendencies of the workers movement-fragmented the promising rise of the masses especially in West Bengal and Kerala, served as a brake on their mobilization, and eliminated the perspective of an alternative solution to the Congress party on a national scale. Thanks to several adroit maneuvers within the country (the break with the most corrupt politicians of the "syndicate") and abroad (support to the war of national liberation in Bangladesh and the victory over Pakistan), Indira Gandhi was able to restore the Congress party to the highest degree of political hegemony it had known in ten years.
But this restored semblance of stability was of only short duration. The new difficulties in grain supplies that broke out in 1972 revealed that none of the causes of the crisis of 1965-66 had been eliminated. New fissures have appeared within the Congress party. Social differentiation on the village level, and the poverty and the lack of perspectives for the agricultural workers, the untouchables, and the small farmers, are becoming increasingly worse. In these conditions, the initiative can again pass to the side of the proletariat.
The proletariat is instinctively seeking to overcome the effects of the divisions in the trade unions, a fact attested by the appearance, for the first time, of a system of factory delegates. The working class is even beginning to manifest an active solidarity with the village poor, as shown in the strike by the workers of Bombay in solidarity with the Maharashtra agricultural workers. The outcome of the Indian proletariat's movement to take the political initiative within the process of permanent revolution will depend on the building of a new revolutionary proletarian leadership, and on the capacity of this leadership to take a correct orientation toward the agrarian revolution. But the progress made along this route by the spontaneous surge of the masses will greatly facilitate the building of this leadership if the revolutionary Marxist nuclei follow a correct policy and intervene in the struggles of the masses with a spirit of initiative and a sense of re sponsibility.
In a more general way, the clearly proletarian forms taken by mass struggles in numerous semicolonial countries have become pronounced: strikes by metalworkers in Egypt and the Ovambo workers in Namibia, union agitation and strikes by the Black proletariat in South Africa, the general strike with factory occupations against the Bordaberry putsch in Uruguay, the Popular Assembly in Bolivia, etc. The setbacks suffered were the product of the inadequacy of a new revolutionary leadership, which above all implies inadequacies in the creation of organs of dual power of the soviet type, in the arming of the masses, and in allying with the working peasantry. But the progress achieved toward the proletariat's playing an autonomous role within the process of the colonial revolution underlines the fact that the solution of these shortcomings is today easier than it was before and permits a prediction of somber perspectives for imperialism in several colonial and semicolonial sectors. The entire evolution in Latin America confirms the absence of any objective basis for an even slightly prolonged period of bourgeois democracy once the mass movement enters an impetuous upswing. Of course, the vigor of this movement can force the "party-army" of the bourgeoisie to temporarily replace bloody dictatorships with so-called reformist regimes. But if these are not successful in channeling and turning back the combativity of the masses, armed and bloody repression is soon on the agenda once again. That is what happened in Bolivia in 1971, and in Uruguay and Chile in 1973. It will also occur in Argentina.
Furthermore, the effects of a serious de feat of the proletariat by the army can be more prolonged and have weightier consequences than foreseen, as is shown by the example of Brazil, where for nearly a decade imperialism and the forces of "national" reaction have been able to create a relatively stabilized sector of Latin America that serves as a counterrevolutionary pole for the entire continent and attracts important capital investments for that very reason. But this results in a considerable numerical and social strengthening of the industrial proletariat, which will ultimately undermine the conditions of this temporary stability.
Since the Zionist victory in June 1967, the Arab revolution has above all been marked by the armed struggle of the Palestinian people within the framework of the resistance movement. This represents an important and qualitative step forward, for the Palestinian resistance took part in the general development of an independent movement of the Arab masses — independent relative to the nationalist leaderships that have had hegemony since the mid- 1950s. But this actual independence has not been given conscious political expression within the resistance movement, since the leadership of this movement itself originates in the petty-bourgeois and bourgeois nationalist movement and continues that political tradition while leading the Palestinian struggle. As a result, the Palestinian resistance has generally been confined within the narrow limits of an anti- Zionist perspective, propagating the illusion that the Palestinian "people's war" will suffice to liberate Palestine from Zionist colonization. Citing the national character of its struggle, it refrains from putting forward a revolutionary social program, thus precluding any possibility of mobilizing the laboring masses of Palestinian workers and peasants— as well as the Arab working masses who support the Palestinian struggle— and likewise ruling out any possibility of developing an anti-Zionistworking-class movement in Israel itself. This policy of the Palestinian resistance movement's official leadership explains the defeat suffered by the Palestinian people's armed movement, beginning in 1970 in Jordan, and its gradual strangulation by the Lebanese regime. But at the same time, and independently of all existing leaderships, the rise of the Arab mass movement did not come to a halt but continued inexorably, attaining new heights in Egypt. This upswing is the result of a combination of deep economic and social crisis in the bourgeois Arab regimes and the growing political weight of the so-called neither-war-nor-peace situation resulting from the Arab defeat of 1967.
The Arab regimes launched the October 1973 war to check this upswing and destroy its effect as a political catalyst. They were trying to restore their nationalist facade, which has steadily eroded since 1967, and to provoke the intervention of the great powers, mainly American imperialism. The Arab bourgeoisies know that Washington is the only power capable of exerting effective pressure to obtain an Israeli retreat from the territories occupied since 1967. At the same time, the Arab regimes are closing their ranks under the patronage of Saudi Arabia, the direct tool of American imperialism.
Today the Washington-sponsored liquidation of the Arab peoples' struggle against Zionism - known as the "peaceful solution" —is well under way. The official leadership of the Palestinian resistance has taken a decisive step toward total degeneration by expressing its desire to participate in the diplomatic settlement. It is obvious to genuine revolutionists and anti-Zionists that all the proposed formulas for a settlement— the Hussein plan for a Hashemite federation as well as the plan for a Palestinian ministate—are nothing less than liquidationist proposals.
The application of a "peaceful solution," no matter what the variant, will create a political situation comparable to the national humiliation of the Arab regimes in 1948. As a result, it will favor the long-term development of a genuinely revolutionary movement of the Arab masses that can only be more fm-reaching than its predecessors because all the nationalist leaderships, even the most radical ones. Intercontinental Press have been discredited and because the deepened social crisis more and more injects class consciousness into the revolutionary national struggle. A new page of the Arab revolution is being turned, a page in which revolutionary Marxist militants will have to lay the foundation for the revolutionary communist party that will lead the Arab socialist revolution. That is a task that only the Fourth International is capable of carrying out.
In Black Africa, thirteen years of neocolonial independence have led to a deepening of the economic crisis that is exacerbating the social and political contradictions. Industrialization, though limited and weak, has given rise to a young and stable proletariat that is more and more asserting itself in struggles such as the one at the M'Bao refinery in Senegal, the Donala strikes in Cameroon, and the strikes in Mauritania or the demonstrations in the Congo. There is also a radicalization among the student youth (Senegal, Madagascar, Ghana, Niger, etc.). Finally, and to a similar extent, the peasant masses have been drawn into the radicalization (Madagascar in 1971, Chad, Nigeria, etc.). The petty bourgeoisie involved in managing the imperialists' holdings has under-gone an accelerated differentiation over the last thirteen years. A certain stratum has been able to establish an initial accumulation of capital through patronage from the state apparatus. Although the economic sectors in which this African capital is developing remain marginal and secondary, this differentiation within the ruling class produces political conflicts that aggravate the chronic political instability of these regimes. The African bourgeoisie remains economically and politically incapable of throttling the mass upsurge despite the growing use of repression. In this context, a new revolutionary generation is taking shape, a generation that is drawing lessons from the defeats of the nationalist move ments and taking up the task of building revolutionary Marxist cadres.
The liberation struggles in the countries dominated by a white minority—and especially those struggles unfolding in the Portuguese colonies — play an important role in the radicalization of all African youth.
Apart from the political lessons these struggles point to, there is also the strategic and economic importance Southern Africa and the Cape Verde Islands have for imperialism. Imperialism has extended diplomatic, economic, and military support to Portugal in exchange for Lisbon's growing concessions with respect to participation in the pillage of the colonies. Too weak economically to support a war effort of this scope, Portugal has to accept in particular the intervention of South Africa, the region's strong link in the chain of imperialism. The keystone of this alliance is to be found in such economic and military projects as the Cabora- Bassa dam or the Kunene project.
However, Guinea-Bissau's declaration of independence and the progress that has been made by the MPLA [Movimento Popular de Libertacao de Angola —Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola] and Frelimo [Frente de Libertacao de Mocambique —Mozambique
Liberation
Front] pose political and strategic problems whose solution will determine the future of these struggles. When push comes to shove, the centrifugal forces may become stronger or weaker, depending on the influence of various contradictory factors.
In the context of the imperialist powers' readjustment of their strategy in Southern Africa, the furtherance of the process of permanent revolution through internationalizing the conflict in the entire region can only be carried out on the basis of a clarification within the MPLA and Frelimo (revolutionary nationalist movements holding a multiclass concept) as regards the pace of development of the world revolution, and as regards the situation in central Africa. Victories in Angola and Mozambique will thus take place within the broader framework of a revolutionary crisis in all of Southern Africa, and of a sweeping new rise of the African revolution. In Guinea-Bissau, the most important evolution in the situation in the recent period concerns the changes the liberated zones underwent with the election of the People's National Assembly, which was the principal factor in the proclamation of an independent state. However, the absence of a clear formulation on the social nature of the Guinean state, the pressure from the neighboring states and the Soviet Union, and the multiclass perspective of the PAIGC [Partido Africano da Independencia da Guine-Bissau e Cabo Verde— African Party for the Independence of Guinea- Bissau and Cape Verde] constitute major obstacles to the possibilities of definitively overthrowing capitalism in that country unless an indispensable political clarification and differentiation takes place. The isolation of this struggle and the weakness of international support partially account for the danger of the PAIGC's falling back on the myth of the "national-democratic state on a noncapitalist path." Under these conditions, the revolutionary struggles in all the Portuguese colonies deserve consistent internationalist support from revolutionary Marxists.
The new relationship of forces created by the heroic struggle of the Indochinese people is gradually spreading across all South Asia. The political defeat experienced by American imperialism, a defeat symbolized by the forced withdrawal of its troops from Indochina, represents a harsh blow for the anticommunist regimes in Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, and South Korea, regimes that have founded and maintained their dictatorships on the basis of military, political, and economic backing from American imperialism. The state of emergency proclaimed in the fall of 1972 in South Korea and in the Philippines has been extended indefinitely and represents these dictatorial regimes' most recent effort to face up to the crisis. When Japanese imperialism stepped up its neocolonial exploitation of this region in an effort to fill the vacuum created by the weakening of U.S. imperialism, this in turn accelerated an explosion in the radicalization of the workers, poor peasants, and laboring masses.
The October 1973 revolt in Thailand, which overthrew the Thanom-Prapas military dictatorship; the struggle of the South Korean masses against Park and against Japanese imperialism, which was set off by the kidnapping of Kim Dae Jung by the South Korean CIA in Japan and lasted from October to December 1973; the anti- Japanese riots in Indonesia at the time of Tanaka's visit there-all of these events show that the crisis in East Asia has entered a new historic phase. The explosions of popular discontent will undoubtedly spread to the rest of these countries, above all to the Philippines.
These explosions are marked today by a nationalist political content. The task of revolutionary Marxists is to transform them into struggles that are both anti-imperialist and anticapitalist, that is, into a process of permanent revolution. The question posed is: Who is capable of organizing such a qualitative leap forward in these struggles, and with what orientation? The Maoist bureaucracy has already come out in open opposition to this new phase in the Asian peoples' struggles, as has the Soviet bureaucracy. It is thus essential that strong sections of the Fourth International be built in Asia and that the solidarity movement with the Indochinese revolution be strengthened in order to promote the struggle to overthrow the footholds of U.S. and Japanese imperialism and of the puppet regimes throughout this region.
8. Tragedy of Chilean Revolution
From 1970 to 1973, Chile witnessed a process of intensification of the class struggle and mass revolutionary initiatives that was in many ways the most advanced in Latin America since the victory of the Cuban revolution.
The origins of this revolutionary rise are to be found in the gradual rise in the strength of the working class and of workers organizations since 1938, owing to the fact that the Chilean bourgeoisie had to allow this movement to develop and to use it against the landowners in order to begin the process of industrialization. Despite the predominantly reformist character of the leadership of the workers movement and the resulting general acceptance of the "stages" theory of revolution, the Chilean proletariat nevertheless acquired an independent political organization that differed from similar experiences occurring during the same period in such countries as Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, etc. The process culminated in the 1950s. A final neoindustrial bourgeois layer — the product of a shift in imperialist investments — appeared on the scene. This sector found its political expression in Frei's Christian Democracy. A few reforms were carried out — especially in the countryside— which stimulated a radicalization of important layers of the peasantry. But the effects of these reforms on the whole of Chilean society were limited. That led to a social and political class polarization that was expressed in Allende's victory in the 1970 election campaign.
This victory occurred in the context of a stormy rise in the mass movement that left the bourgeoisie with no other immediate perspective than to permit the inauguration of the Allende government. This was made easier by the fact that the Popular Unity program did not go beyond the limits of a bourgeois-democratic program of nationalizing a few key sectors — mainly those dominated by imperialism — and carrying out an agrarian reform that was bolder than Frei's. At most, the Popular Unity program held out the perspective of nationalizing a few Chilean monopolies, thus enlarging the area of state capitalism. The bourgeoisie's real fear was not over these reforms, but over the combativity of the masses. That is why it made its acceptance of the Allende government conditional on Allende's acceptance of the Statute of Democratic Guarantees, which maintained intact the entire mechanism of the bourgeois state — especially its judicial and repressive apparatus. The leaders of the Popular Unity were quick to accept these conditions and to proclaim their determination to attain socialism by the "legal" and "constitutional" road without disturbing the bourgeois state apparatus.
The working masses, however, interpreted the installation of the Allende government as signifying a favorable change in the relationship of forces. They stepped up their militancy and activity, and their pressure accelerated the implementation of the Popular Unity program. Within a year the copper mines were nationalized, many landholders were expropriated, and state control was extended to a number of private industrial enterprises.
The interaction between the stepped-up combativity of the masses and the achievement of reforms promised by the Popular Unity —reflected in particular by a rise in the standard of living of the poorest layers of the population —led to a still greater political and social polarization in Chile. Part of the Christian Democratic electorate was won over by the Popular Unity, which received more than 50 percent of the votes in the April 1971 municipal elections. Another part went over to the extreme right. It was clear that the time for bourgeois-democratic reforms had passed, that a socialist revolution was on the agenda, and that in response to the revolutionary upsurge, feverish preparations for the counterrevolution were under way.
There was no agreement among the bourgeoisie on the methods to be used. The Christian Democracy launched a counteroffensive in the courts and parliament aimed at forcing the Allende government to repress the mass movement and to place strict limits on the part of the economy that had been wrested from private ownership. American imperialism organized a halt to international credit and a de facto blockade of the Chilean economy. The pressure of the working class, its encroachments on private property, and the government's hesitation to approve the revolutionary action of the masses — or rather its paralysis before the bourgeois threats — disrupted the productive apparatus and accentuated the economic crisis. Chilean employers encouraged runaway inflation, the sabotage of investments, and the organization of a black market. The right and the far right organized terrorist gangs and openly called for a military dictatorship.
Faced with this general offensive by the bourgeoisie, the Popular Unity government remained a prisoner of its concept of a "constitutional road toward socialism" and its criminal illusions about "the armed forces' respect for the constitution." It lost the initiative and began to retreat. It began to repress the masses, who were seizing the land and occupying the factories. The economic apparatus became paralyzed. Production, which had increased significantly in 1970, stagnated and declined.
The masses, however, refused to accept these retreats and continued to take action. They took the initiative of organizing numerous street demonstrations, notably in Concepcion, where the attempt to create a Popular Assembly led in the direction of forming an alternative leadership. When the bourgeoisie launched the truck owners strike in October 1972 and the government made new concessions, the proletariat took an enormous leap forward. It began to build its own organs of power— the cordones industriales [assemblies of rank-and-file workers in a local industrial concentration] and the commandos communales [community commands]. At that moment the situation in Chile ceased to be merely prerevolutionary. Elements of dual power appeared. The
Chilean revolution had begun.
The Popular Unity leaders' response to the increased polarization between re volution and counterrevolution was to ask representatives of the army to enter the government as arbitrators. The Stalinist and reformist leaders thus directly opened the road toward the September 1973 counterrevolution. By hailing the "neutrality" of the bourgeois army, by themselves connecting the army with the government, by permitting the vote on the arms-control law that allowed the army to carry out searches in the factories and working-class neighborhoods, the Popular Unity leaders created the ideal psychological, political, and technical conditions for preparing the military coup. The myth of the "legal road to socialism" led directly to the "legal road to counterrevolution." The upsurge in the mass movement, however, continued with increasing vigor. In the face of economic sabotage by the bourgeoisie, the government found itself compelled to "legalize" an increasing number of factory occupations and take-overs. At the same time, the JAPs [Juntas de Abastecimiento y Control de Precios — Supply and Price Control Boards] began to appear, and instances of workers control were extended and increased. Dual power took on a more precise form throughout the country.
In these conditions of extreme polarization and growing economic difficulties the Popular Unity still won 43 percent of the vote in the March 1973 parliamentary elections. This should not be interpreted as proof of mass support for Allende's reformist policy but rather as an expression of the will of the masses to defend their conquests, to eliminate the judicial and parliamentary obstacles with which the bourgeoisie continually blocked their initiatives, and to confront the counterrevolutionary threats of the bourgeoisie, including in the electoral arena. At the same time, the scope of the masses' extraparliamentary actions continued to increase, reflected in a growing differentiation within the Popular Unity itself. A right-wing pole formed around the Communist party, the right wing of the Socialist party, MAPU-Gazmuri [Movimiento de Accion Popular Unitaria — Movement for United Popular Action], and the Radical party; a confused and contradictory left took shape around certain currents of the SP, the MAPU-Gareton, and the Christian left. The Chilean SP played a peculiar role within this framework. A sui generis "mass centrist party," its leadership (Altamirano) made use of radical language without doing anything to back it up with action, while the rank and rile sought empirically for a revolutionary solution. Outside the Popular Unity, on the other hand, the MIR [Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria — Movement of the Revolutionary Left], despite its political limitations (centrism, ambiguity in regard to the Popular Unity, etc.), played a dynamic role alongside other political forces both inside and outside the Popular Unity through its "mass fronts," by occupying land and factories, and by criticizing reformist illusions about "the peaceful path toward socialism." The CP took a far-right position in the Popular Unity. Its attempt to return to private ownership the factories seized by the workers in October 1972 (the Milles project) provoked a violent reaction by the left wing of the SP and the MAPU. The initiative passed more and more from the hands of the Popular Unity parties to the cordones industriales, but the latter lacked centralization. The absence of a revolutionary party —a party capable of unifying the forces of the workers and the other laboring masses who instinctively wanted to carry through to completion the process of socialist revolution that was already under way — was cruelly felt. Without such a party even the most daring actions of the working class remained diffuse and insufficient for taking decisive initiatives at the level of state power. This was shown more clearly during the first, unsuccessful military coup of June 29, 1973, which revealed that thousands of workers in the main centers of the country were ready to fight, arms in hand, against the rising counterrevolution. But the enormous combativity of these forces was dispersed in frequent clashes with small gangs of reactionary shock troops during the numerous new occupations of factories and in the attempts to arm the rank and file. In the absence of centralized organizational structures, they were unable to assemble the necessary forces to stand up against the September coup, which was prepared in close cooperation with imperialism.
The bourgeoisie, far from dividing into disparate factions, sought to reunite its forces. Nevertheless, the extraordinary power of the workers movement undermined the bourgeoisie's base of power by developing its own organs of power, thus preventing the bourgeoisie from attaining its objective through the "normal" political channels. That is why the bourgeois army, the last bastion of bourgeois power left intact, had to enter the scene to carry through what the bourgeois parties were incapable of attaining.
The feeling that the decisive confrontation was imminent only led Allende and the leaders of the CP once again to make sorry attempts to reach a conciliation with the Christian Democracy. New and criminal concessions were made to the putschist officers. These included tolerating the officers' repression of the sailors at the Valparaiso arsenal who had begun to denounce the preparations for the putsch. The differentation within Popular Unity became sharper still, leading virtually to its disintegration on the eve of the putsch. Thus, with the disintegration of the old reformist leadership and the delay in the formation of a new revolutionary leadership, a vacuum was created in the leadership of the proletariat. This vacuum made it easier to carry out the coup by decreasing the possibility for an immediate, centralized response by the masses. The putsch confirms once more the rule formulated by Trotsky in Lessons of October. When there is a revolutionary situation in a country, when a decisive test of strength between the classes is in the offing, the side capable of taking the initiative in the struggle for power gains a decisive advantage. The relationship of forces can be transformed in twenty-four hours. That is what happened in Chile. The ferocity and cruelty of the Chilean counterrevolution, which call to mind the Versaillais [the counterrevolutionary forces that defeated the Commune in 1871], the Franco regime, and the Indonesian hangmen of 1965, can be explained by the depth of the preceding process and indicate the degree to which the bourgeoisie feared losing power. The counterrevolution goes further than anything Latin America has known since the time of the Mexican revolution, and, in its own way, is a tribute to the revolutionary ardor and combativity of the Chilean proletariat. At the same time, however, it constitutes a no less eloquent indictment of the criminal policy of the Chilean CP and SP leaders who wasted that enormous potential and led the Chilean masses into a tragic and bloody defeat. This indictment must have a clear central axis. It would be completely out of place to make the presence of bourgeois political groupings inside the Popular Unity or the presence of bourgeois ministers within the Allende government the axis of our criticism of the Popular Unity. Neither objectively, nor subjectively in the eyes of the masses, could the presence of these insignificant political forces be considered an excuse for the compromises and the successive capitulations of the Stalinist and reformist leaders. Such a criticism leads to slogans like "Out with the bourgeois ministers," or "For a CP-SP government," but in the eyes of the masses the Allende regime was already such a government. They in no way saw it as a coalition government with the bourgeoisie. They did not need a new experience to understand the bankruptcy of working-class reformism. This was al ready spread out before their eyes. Our indictment of the Popular Unity leaders should be focused precisely on this bankruptcy of reformism, the bankruptcy of the "peaceful and legal roads to socialism," the reactionary utopianism that says it wants to free the masses from capitalist exploitation by leaving intact the bourgeois state and its repressive apparatus.
The central slogans revolutionaries should have fought for among the masses in the crucial months before the putsch correspond to this analysis and critique. These slogans should have been: Build the organs of dual power everywhere— the cordones, the JAPs, the commandos comunales — with regional and local centralization; Call a national congress of these councils; Spread workers control throughout the entire economy; For the seizure of hoarded food and merchandise by the JAPs, to be distributed under workers control; For the completion of the agrarian reform; For the elaboration of an overall socialist plan to overcome the economic catastrophe organized by imperialism and the Chilean bourgeoisie; For the general arming of workers and poor peasants; For the formation of a central command of workers and peasants militias; For the disarming and dismantling of the reactionary officer caste. The central governmental slogan should have been "All power to a national congress of the cordones, the JAPs, and the commandos."
In this situation, the appropriate initiatives for a united front between the revolutionary Marxists, the MIR, and the left wings of the SP and the MAPU were those that would have speeded the achieve ment of such a program of action — a program on which the fate of the Chilean revolution depended.
The serious defeat experienced by the Chilean workers movement and working class has important ramifications. It is premature, however, to see it in the same light as the defeat of the German proletariat in 1933 or of the Indonesian masses in 1965. Everything still depends on the international context, on the possibility for new revolutionary upsurges in neighboring countries to win important victories, on the vanguard's capacity to regroup its forces, organize the resistance, and give confidence to the masses with a banner and a program unstained by the Popular Unity experience. The growing economic difficulties the junta is encountering and the renewal of economic struggles by the masses can favor this perspective. The CP's ultrareformist perspective of forming a bloc with the "left" Christian Democracy undoubtedly hinders it.
The right-wing orientation of the Stalinists, and the near disintegration of the SP, the MAPU-Gareton, and the Christian left, make the MIR today an important axis of the revolutionary resistance to the junta. While continuing to differentiate themselves politically and organizationally from the MIR, revolutionary Marxists in Chile should consider it to be one of their central tasks to carry out united-front activities with it, with the aim of forming a credible pole in opposition to the recalcitrant, capitulationist, and paralyzing re formists.
### II. Deepening Crisis of the Bureaucratic Regimes in the Bureaucratized Workers States
9. The Contradictions of Economic Reforms in the USSR and the People's Democracies
On the whole, the economic difficulties encountered in different degrees and at different rates in the "people's democracies" and the USSR stem from one central factor: the impossibility of running an increasingly complex planned economy in a highly industrialized country without a system of democratic and centralized management in which the major decisions are made by the workers themselves and applied and adjusted under their control.
The monopolization of management tasks by a privileged bureaucratic layer — a layer that subordinates the collective interest to the defense of its own privileges and to the power on which these privileges are based — causes immense waste and constant imbalances in the economic development of the bureaucratized workers states. Periodically, this wastefulness and these disproportions cause declines in the rate of growth that lead to difficulties in supply and threaten what has been the regime's main safety valve since Stalin's death: the nearly constant, even if modest, increase in the masses' standard of living.
The hybrid combination of different forms of planning, of bureaucratic centralization and decentralization through the vehicle of the market — without the mass of workers having any real possibility of democratic control and inspection over the establishment and execution of the plan, the level of supplies, and the flow of production-tends in general to substitute a number of new contradictions for those that each reform seeks to alleviate. In place of the Stalin era's "narrow self-centeredness of the factory" (i.e., of the bureaucrats on the factory level, whose privileges depended on the realization of the plan in physical quantities), the Khrushchev reforms substituted "regional self-centeredness" within the sovnarkhozi [state farms]. The Liberman reforms reintroduced "self-centeredness of the factory" without seriously increasing the effectiveness of the bureaucrats' management. The latters' revenues were tied to "profit" but they were unable to set prices or modify the total amount of wages.
The main contradictions of the various attempts at reforms have appeared at two levels: On the one hand, all decentralization based on strengthening the laws of the market, all attempts to make factories "profitable" in the context of the laws of the market, and all increases in the factory managers' decision-making power aimed at encouraging "profitability," have led - as their central consequence-to attacks on the working class's job security and standard of living. This is all the more true inasmuch as such reforms are generally accompanied by a certain "liberalization" of prices that in point of fact ends up in an immediate increase in the cost of social services, housing, transport, and consumer goods -costs formerly kept rather low by administrative decree. Here the application of these reforms has col lided with the reactions of the workers, who defend their working and living conditions against obvious attempts to worsen them.
The second contradiction of the reforms is bound up with the relative political liberalization they impose, at least at the level of the technical and scientific intelligentsia, whose support and initiatives the bureaucracy seeks in order to apply the reforms. The example of Czechoslo vakia testifies to the grave dangers that threaten the central political bureaucracy once "liberalization" begins to have re percussions in the society as a whole and stimulates not only the aspirations of the intelligentsia, but also demands for workers democracy at all levels.
In the face of these contradictions, there is no single response from the bureaucracies of the different Eastern European countries. It all depends, at any given time, on the degree of autonomy attained by the technocratic layers that develop as a by-product of the reform, on the previous traditions of the working class and how organized and conscious it may be, and on the scope of opposition from the intellectuals. In every case, the bureaucracy is essentially concerned with keeping the opposition by the intellectuals from affecting the working class, basically by preventing these movements from linking up with each other. To accomplish this, the bureaucracy plays on a number of factors, including attempts to corrupt the intelligentsia through economic privileges and certain political privileges (travel, a certain freedom of expression); propaganda oriented toward the working class aimed at provoking workers' hostility to ward privileged students; economic concessions to the workers, combined with the development of a "consumer society" ideology aimed at sidetracking workers from asking questions about the government; and fierce political repression against all attempts at organized opposition, using amalgams and other well-known police methods. The weight assigned to the use of this or that factor depends upon the situation.
Since the early 1960s, the economy of the Soviet Union has been in a continual crisis. Despite the good harvest of 1973 and massive investments in agriculture, the agricultural sector remains vulnerable and low in productivity. This permanent crisis is reflected in declining growth rates in heavy industry (especially noticeable in the sphere of consumer goods); by a crisis in investments (a great number of uncompleted industrial projects); and by an insufficient growth in productivity, which is related to a growing technological lag in comparison with the Western countries. The bureaucracy has thereby revealed its incapacity to ensure the transition from extensive to intensive development, and to reverse the traditional order of priority between means of production and consumer goods.
Given these characteristics, the crisis of the Soviet economy is essentially a crisis of underproduction— not overproduction, which is the type of crisis the capitalist economies suffer from periodically. The bureaucracy has made various efforts at reform without getting to the real roots of the crisis. The Liberman reform, which was launched with caution, was quickly halted when it became clear that these measures gave rise to phenomena that were getting out of the control of the central bureaucracy.
Confronted with the same problems that it faced ten years ago, the bureaucracy is today searching for a way out through collaboration with the most powerful capitalist country. Of course, the rapprochement with the United States is also explained by other factors, especially political ones: the Soviet bureaucracy's desire to slow down the dynamic of the Indochinese revolution and to prevent it from accelerating the revolutionary process in all of Southeast Asia; the desire to "neutralize" imperialism, indeed to obtain its tacit support, in the event of a possible military conflict with China.
But the rapprochement with the United States can be considered the equivalent of a new economic reform. The Soviet bureaucracy hopes to gain two advantages that will break through the bottle necks that are retarding economic growth in important areas: help in overcoming its technological backwardness with respect to the imperialist countries in certain sectors (the automotive, electronic, and chemical industries); and help in obtaining the investment capital necessary for accelerating the economic development of Siberia. Since agricultural production barely suffices for feeding the country, and since industrial consumer goods are not of the quality necessary to be sold on a sufficient scale in the West, the sole massive compensation that the Kremlin can offer for large-scale imports of machinery produced in the imperialist countries is the export of raw materials. This kind of export corresponds, moreover, with the present needs of the international capitalist economy and creates the objective basis for the present rapprochement in trade.
But the scope of these East-West exchanges should not be exaggerated. The Soviet raw-material resources available for export to the imperialist countries on the short or medium term are limited, and this restricts the export of commodities from the capitalist countries to the USSR. This trade will not account for more than a few percentage points of the total foreign trade of the imperialist countries, i.e., a negligible fraction of their national product.
Genuine penetration of the USSR by
American and international capital would confront objective difficulties no matter what the subjective intentions of the bureaucracy are. The reasons for this are inherent in the noncapitalist social structures of the Soviet Union. Unless there is a complete capitulation of the bureaucracy to the imperialists' demands —which is completely improbable given the social nature of the bureaucracy —the accords between the USSR and the United States will therefore remain on a very small scale. In any event, they will never resolve the structural contradictions of the Soviet economy.
From the political standpoint, Brezhnev's current line of presenting economic collaboration with the imperialist countries as a panacea for all the defects from which the economy is suffering, is at any rate quite hazardous. This policy has already provoked deep dissension in the top layers of the bureaucracy, where there is a faction that is more or less openly up in arms against the "sellout of national re sources." Moreover, the hopes for a rapid rise in the standard of living that this policy may give rise to among the masses are liable to be quickly shattered. This in turn may sooner or later give rise to serious discontent.
An "ideological clampdown" and systematic repression against oppositionists represent the bureaucratic response to present difficulties. At the same time, the leadership team is striving to reintroduce economic reforms. The most recent is the formation of large "industrial trusts" endowed with significant power while at the same time being more closely linked to the central bureaucracy than the previous economic units.
However, the bureaucracy will think twice before launching a frontal attack on such working-class gains as job se curity. Thus, for example, the Ochekino experiment, which anticipated setting the overall wage base without regard to the number of workers and was intended to encourage the factory managers to "rationalize" their use of labor power, has not been adopted as quickly as the bureaucracy wished because of pressure from the workers.
The logical consequences of economic reform have appeared most clearly in the "people's democracies." Aided by the defeat of the working class in 1956, the Hungarian bureaucracy was the first to take the plunge into reform. Nowhere else (with the exception of Yugoslavia) has the attempt at reform gone so far; nowhere else has it lasted so long. From this point of view, the Hungarian economic reforms can be considered a model whose lessons are being studied attentively in the neighboring countries. Applied fully during the 1960s, the economic re forms first benefited from the slack provided by an unbalanced economy - the essential characteristic of this lack of balance being a shortage in the most essential consumer goods, coupled with massive investment in heavy industry. If at first the reforms succeeded in satisfying the masses' needs for consumer goods, they very quickly led to contradictions that boded ill for maintaining the social and political status quo.
By favoring a widening of wage differentials, relaxing control over certain professional activities (the liberal profes sions and the crafts), permitting certain "real prices" (especially where they bene fited the peasantry), and relieving the state of responsibility for certain social investments (notably housing), the Hungarian reform unleashed a powerful process of social differentiation. The principal victim of this process was the working class, whose standard of living came nowhere near increasing at the same pace as that of other layers of the population (technicians, peasants, privately employed artisans, and doctors). While the resistance of the working class has not been expressed directly through an appreciable in crease in the number of strikes, it has taken form more specifically among the working-class youth, whose many forms of resistance and revolt testify to their profound distrust of the regime.
In the last analysis, the evolution of the situation will depend on the political choices made by the bureaucracy. In any case, there is no doubt that if the bureaucracy decides to continue the process of economic reform, it will at the same time be compelled to intensify repression against all the discontent aroused by these reforms. That is a very dangerous road to follow, however, because it can revive unfortunate memories in the consciousness of the masses in return for uncertain results. The Polish events of December 1970 showed clearly that the possibility of a working-class explosion with all its corresponding risks can never be completely dismissed. It is this fear of another Polish December that determines the bureaucracy's present policy and introduces deep cleavages within its ranks. Under the pressure of the "orthodox" elements most sensitive to the danger, an important step backward has already been made in the application of economic reforms. The economic reform today is at a crossroads. The future resistance of the working class is the factor that will determine either its second wind or its death. The economic reform the bureaucracy is beginning to apply today in Poland is the second attempt— this time much more cautious- in that direction since the serious failure of the first reform of 1956- To remedy the catastrophic situation that developed in the consumer goods market during the 1966-70 five-year plan, the Polish bureaucracy attempted to re establish "real prices" in December 1970. This approach consisted of a 30 percent increase in the price of basic provisions and a lowering of the price of luxury items, thus representing an attack on the living standards of working-class families. The workers revolt of December 1970 was a direct response to this attempt at economic reform. Faced with the upsurge of mass struggle on the Baltic coast and in the industrial center of Lodz, and with the continuing mobilization of the working class, the Gierek team had to consent to a number of important concessions to the main social layers. These concessions tended at the same time to introduce divisions between the intelligentsia and the other social layers. These measures were accompanied by propaganda for an individualistic, typically petty-bourgeois consumerist ideal that emphasized and justified the social inequalities. All these facts- which are linked to a real but limited increase in the standard of living of the working class, and to the hopes of the technocratic layers for an improvement in the economic situation through the application of the new reform — have contributed to an increase in the Polish bureaucracy's margin for maneuver, giving it breathing room without, however, resolving a single one of these fundamental contradictions.
10. The Antibureaucratic Opposition Movements in the USSR and the People's Democracies
The interaction between the deepening of the objective contradictions, the growing differentiation within the apparatus, and the entry of the masses into action, has in each case been the mechanism de termining a loss of control by the bureaucracy over entire social groups (workers, students, intellectuals). It was not, in general, the working class that first went into action (except in the German Democratic Republic in 1953 and Poland in 1970). The movements of intellectuals are generally ambiguous and often serve as a vehicle not only for demands moving in the direction of socialist democracy but also for demands of economic "liberalization" and "rationalization" that may express the preoccupations and material interests of the technocratic wing of the bureaucracy, interests that are clearly hostile to the class interests of the proletariat and resented as such by it. Where the influence of Stalinism has been the greatest, Marxism has been the more discredited as a "state religion" in the eyes of the critical youth, ideological confusion has become deeper, and reactionary tendencies are more able to emerge within the intelligentsia and other oppositional layers alongside tendencies that are genuinely communist and close to revolutionary Marxism. As soon as broad working masses move into action, however, it is not confused ideological motivations but objective class interests that determine the social nature of their movement. Nowhere has the proletariat shown the slightest inclination to demand that the factories it built at the price of enormous sacrifices be ceded or sold to private owners, or to support demands tending in that direction on the part of other social groups. Nowhere has it called for broader rights for the factory directors or for the supervisory personnel. Nor does it call for a spread in the range of salaries or a growth in social inequality. Apart from improvements on the level of consumption, including housing, leisure time, holidays, and social benefits, the fundamental tendency of these demands focuses on the democratization of the structures of power and planning.
The events in Poland since 1970 mark a rebirth, still exceptional at this mass level, of proletarian activity.
After the revolt of 1970, the persistence of working-class combativity was the de termining factor in the Polish political situation. During the December 1970 strikes, the Polish working class formulated the elements of a political platform. Its de mands— e.g., for the cancellation of price increases, real autonomy for organs of workers control, elimination of wage inequalities between workers and bureaucrats in the factories, accurate news re porting— demonstrate its political maturity and its capacity to organize itself (consider, for example, the important role played by the strike committees).
The struggles of 1970 resulted in a partial victory; the freezing of food prices and the change in the ruling group in Poland were seen by the working class as a result of its mobilization. The strikes that occurred later (the Silesian-Rybnik miners, the Lodz textile workers) show that important sectors of the working class have become aware of their strength. It is in the wake of the preventive strikes of 1972 that the price freeze was maintained. The bureaucracy, however, has not made any concessions to the workers' political demands. By way of contrast, certain concessions to the intelligentsia (higher wages, but also possibilities for trips abroad) were aimed at defusing their demands.
The intelligentsia, which in March 1968 waged an isolated struggle for freedom of expression and was muzzled by repression, did not support the workers struggles of 1970. Nevertheless certain signs, such as the hostile reactions of the student milieu to the government's tightening of the reins on the youth organizations in 1973, are evidence of new possibilities for struggles in this milieu.
Some recent signs of a renewal- though still partial— of working-class activity in the Soviet Union should also be stressed. The discontent of the Soviet working class has primarily been centered on questions of low wages, poor living conditions, price increases, and the harsh regime in the factories. Still unable to organize itself in trade unions or other independent organizations, and still lacking a real possibility of expressing its class interests, the Soviet working class has seemingly remained passive.
Any form of organized opposition around generalized demands is obviously difficult in the context of a factory regime that maintains detailed files on each worker, where each worker must carry a "labor book" that records job changes and work-related incidents, where a broad system of informers on the shop floor keeps the secret police constantly informed of opinions expressed by each worker, and where every attempt at organized opposition is met with savage repression. Under these conditions, a large part of working-class opposition takes the form of an opposition of despair, expressed through individual actions such as widespread alcoholism, industrial sabotage, a high level of absenteeism, and shoddy industrial production. The dozens of strikes and other forms of open working-class protest that have occurred recently have remained localized actions, easily isolated and repressed, even though they indicate what can be expected in the future. In Hungary, where there is great distrust on the part of the workers, political manifestations of the young intelligentsia's radicalization have been the striking features of the recent period. Unmarked by the defeat of 1956, not neutralized by the state stipends that bought off their elders, and stirred by their awareness of the social inequalities stemming from the economic reforms, the young intelligentsia has been at the root of all the political movements challenging the regime over the past few years. It has had the support of high-school students (the illegal demonstration in front of the Greek Embassy in 1971, the spray-painting of the names of Che and Marx on the walls of Budapest in 1970) and of college students (the independent movement in support of the Vietnamese revolution in 1968-69). In particular, it was the force behind the March 15, 1972, demonstration that brought out 2,000 people to honor the memory of [Alexander] Petofi [a poet active in the 1848 revolution]. This young intelligentsia, certain currents of which define their opposition in the light of Marxism, is today the main target of bureaucratic repression. After having tried different methods of repression, the bureaucracy now seems to have decided to take more energetic action, including court prosecutions and police frame-ups.
In the Soviet Union, the antibureaucratic struggle has essentially been the work of the intelligentsia, through a left-wing Marxist current that stresses the role of the working class and through the movement for democratic rights. The former has been severely repressed (Grigorenko, etc.). The intelligentsia's isolation, both subjectively and objectively, from the working class is one of the main reasons for its current setbacks. Born of the hopes raised by the twentieth party congress, the civil-rights movement succeeded in mobilizing broad layers of the intelligentsia around such demands as freedom of speech, press, artistic creation, and assembly, as well as respect for the constitution. Through semilegal activities—open letters, petitions, and even demonstrations —it has emerged as the first antibureaucratic opposition movement in the USSR to go beyond the framework of small clandestine circles and, in 1967-69, to win a somewhat wider audience. The absence of a link with more important mass movements — the Soviet working class has displayed relative passivity since the Novocherkassk uprisings in 1962 — explains why the intellectual oppositionist current found itself disarmed after 1969, when the bureaucracy began to apply a policy of systematic repression. However, this isolation is also explained by other factors: on the one hand, by the bureaucracy's policy of attempting to isolate the intelligentsia by erecting a barrier of distrust between the intelligentsia and the working class; on the other hand, by the fact that the demands for civil rights were formulated in such a way that they fundamentally expressed the interests of the intelligentsia as a social layer while ignoring the economic and social rights of the working class and other layers of the population. This latter factor can be explained by the intelligentsia's rather acerbic assessment of the working class's passivity.
In the Soviet Union, where nearly half the population is non-Russian, the national question continues to represent a deep and explosive contradiction, as the riots in Lithuania in 1972 indicate. The national movements in the USSR involve nations that are in different stages of development, have radically different pasts, put forward quite different demands, and vary no less in strength than in their political character.
In Ukraine and the Baltic republics (the most developed non-Russian republics) the past decade has witnessed the rise of a powerful opposition that includes industrial and agricultural workers in its ranks. The various currents that make up this opposition have put forward demands for democratic self-government in the republics, for the restoration of their national languages as official languages of public administration, for an end to Great Russian chauvinism, and for independent socialist republics.
The struggle to reestablish Leninist norms in the national question is a central task of the political revolution. The demand for self-determination for the non- Russian nationalities, and in particular the demand for an independent socialist Ukraine, is a democratic demand that deserves the support of all revolutionary socialists.
11. The Political Crisis in the People's Republic of China
The political crisis that is shaking the Chinese bureaucracy has now lasted nearly fifteen years (since the Lushan Central Committee meeting of the Chinese CP). The ups and downs of this crisis— a crisis caused by the objective problems of be ginning to build socialism in a country as backward and as agricultural as China was, by the complication of these problems resulting from the dictatorship of the bureaucracy, by the different solutions to these problems that different factions of the bureaucracy have advanced, and by the entry of vast social forces into action, the relations among them, and their relations with different factions of the bureaucracy - have today led to a situation in which the bureaucratic degeneration of the Chinese revolution has reached a higher level than in the previous stage. Without giving unwarranted credit to the more "left" faction of Lin Piao and Chen Po-ta, it is necessary to stress that it has above all been since the fall of this faction (1970- 71) that the conservative features have become generalized in the foreign, domestic, and economic policy of the Chinese regime, features already visible in some respects since the phase of liquidation of the "Cultural Revolution": a spectacular right turn in Chinese foreign policy (Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Iran, Spain, etc.), culminating in Nixon's visit to Peking; reestablishment of a policy centered on "material incentives" in agriculture; reestablishment of the principle of "individual profitability of enterprises" in industry; new accentuation of inequality in wages, which had been reduced during the "Cultural Revolution"; and so on. This impression is confirmed by the re turn to their former positions in the CCP apparatus of many old bureaucrats who were detested by the masses for their abuse of power and for the privileges they had amassed during the period from 1949 to 1965, and who were removed during the "Cultural Revolution." Their return was symbolized by the reentry of Teng Hsiao-ping and his associates into the CCP Central Committee.
Of course, to use the term "bureaucratic degeneration" in regard to the Chinese revolution, by analogy with its application by Trotsky to the Russian revolution, requires numerous adjustments. In contrast to the October socialist revolution, the Chinese socialist revolution gave birth, from the beginning, to a workers state that was bureaucratically deformed to an incomparably greater extent than the USSR in the epoch of Lenin and
Trotsky. The proletariat in China never directly exercised power by means of Soviets. In contrast to the bureaucratic degeneration of the USSR, the bureaucratic degeneration of the People's Republic of China does not thus involve a political expropriation of the proletariat following a political counterrevolution, a Thermidor, but rather an accentuation, first quantitative then qualitative, of the phenomena of bureaucratization.
In another sense, the bureaucratic de generation of the USSR was the product of an uninterrupted process of ebbing in political activity by the proletariat and of strengthening of the privileged bureaucratic layer, stretching over a dozen years. In the People's Republic of China, on the other hand, the political activity of the proletariat, which had been extremely limited during and after the revolution of 1946-49, became a significant factor for the first time in 1956-57 during the Hundred Flowers movement. A second, much more pronounced rise in proletarian political activity took place in 1965-68, during the ascending phase of the "Cultural Revolution," which reduced the material privileges of the bureaucracy and, in general, the social inequalities in the country. It is all these specific features that give the term "bureaucratic degeneration," when applied to the Chinese revolution, a precise meaning: the breakthrough, if not the triumph, of socially conservative tendencies; the affirmation of the legitimacy of new material privileges; the justification of a policy of class collaboration with imperialism and with factions of the possessing classes in power in the semicolonial countries, under the cover of the need to "maneuver" among the various adversaries of the People's Republic of China. All this testifies to the existence of a bureaucratic layer whose common political interests are asserted particularly against the "anarchist and egalitarian excesses" of the left wing of the Red Guards.
The imperialists' change in attitude to ward the People's Republic of China, first shown by European and Japanese imperialism in the 1960s, then by American imperialism in the early 1970s, greatly contributed to putting the Chinese bureaucracy definitively on the road of "peaceful coexistence," in the same way that the changing attitude of the international bourgeoisie toward the USSR, beginning with the Laval-Stalin military declaration, definitively settled the adherence of the Kremlin to the international status quo. The radicalism of Maoism in the 1960swas not solely verbal, but real, as was the case of the ultraleft radicalism of the Kremlin in the Third Period. The passing over to a policy of international collaboration with imperialism corresponds in the two cases to both a new stage of international policies and to a new stage of conservatism of a consolidated bureaucracy. As for the relationship of forces with the masses, it remains more unfavorable for the Maoist bureaucracy than it was for the Soviet bureaucracy. There is neither apathy nor terror on a large scale in the People's Republic of China today, as was the case in the USSR in the epoch of Stalin. Since Mao, in an alliance with the Lin Piao/Chen Po-ta group, had already played the card of politicization, the present Mao/Chou En-lai leadership is now trying to widen its base by modest increases in the standard of living of the masses. The turn to the right runs up against, and will run up against, political reactions within the youth and the vanguard of the working class, which will be only partially neutralized by the recourse to nationalism and to the argument of the need to find a diplomatic counterbalance to the armed forces the Kremlin has massed on the Chinese frontier, and to accepting sacrifices for national defense. The Chinese proletariat, whose numbers have increased tenfold since 1949 and whose level of culture and class consciousness have risen significantly, will struggle against the right-wing course of the Mao/ Chou En-lai leadership. This may bring about new tactical maneuvers of "adjustment" by leaders of the bureaucracy.
12. The Yugoslav Crisis of 1971-72
The contradictions underlying the Titoist variant of bureaucratic power have be gun to ripen in an accelerated manner since the economic reforms of 1965. They reached an explosive degree in 1971-72. These contradictions are basically those between the limited self-management on the level of the enterprise, on the one hand, and the mechanisms of economic centralization that deny self-management (bureaucratic planning and "socialist market economy") on the other hand; and those between the economic self-management on the level of the enterprise, on the one hand, and the bureaucracy's monopoly of political power (absence of real workers power on the political plane) on the other hand.
Since the reforms of 1965, the rapid development of unemployment, the growing social inequality, the soaring of the primitive accumulation of private capital, and the increased ties between the Yugoslav economy and the international capitalist economy have provoked an accelerated sociopolitical differentiation in the country. The technocratic and managerial layers of the bureaucracy, in growing symbiosis with the private sector, undermined more and more openly the rights and powers of the workers within the frame work of the self-management system. They sought to reduce these rights and powers to a simple question of distribution of the annual net revenues, working to assert the total power of the directors under the pretexts of technocratic efficiency and the primordial imperative of competition. The workers, for their part, rose up more and more against the attacks on their rights and their standard of living, against the privileges of the nouveaux riches and the excesses of the "socialist market economy." The number of strikes multiplied. The working class's discontent found a centralized expression at the national congress of Yugoslav trade unions in 1971. A politicized youth vanguard set about formulating left-wing solutions following the university explosions of 1968. A Marxist opposition began to develop openly, rejecting more and more clearly both bureaucratic centralism and the "socialist-market economy" in favor of "self-management from top to bottom, responsible among other things for the tasks of democratic planning."
This process of sociopolitical differentiation is combined with a growing tension among the nationalities. The political cadres and technocratic and financial forces of the "developed" nationalities sought to gradually reduce "their" republics' contributions to the economic growth of the "underdeveloped" republics. The winds of nationalism, stirred by growing social inequality, began to sweep across the country, giving rise to tensions that were quite serious from the standpoint of the survival of the Yugoslav federation. The aspirations expressed by the Serbo- Croat conflict have been confused owing to the intermingling of several factors. On the one hand, regional and social inequalities have led to the reemergence of old national quarrels. These quarrels, however, have been reinforced by hostility toward the bureaucratic centralist policy of the Yugoslav government, whose administrative and military apparatus is for the most part Serbian. Thus, popular aspirations for greater Croatian autonomy represent, in part, the confused expression of an antibureaucratic struggle. But the main demands that have been put forward in this conflict have been advanced by privileged social layers whose separatist demands have in fact been accompanied by aspirations for a transformation of the present relations of production in the direction of total restoration of the laws of a market economy, along with the entry of Croatia into the world capitalist market. The participation of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois layers, and the support from reactionary clerical and Ustasha currents, testify to the antisocialist character of these movements. Furthermore, these two tendencies (popular nationalist sentiments of an antibureaucratic character and reactionary nationalist tendencies) have become combined with the objectives of local political cadres of the Yugoslav CP who are seeking in this confused nationalist movement a base of support for their own privileges of office by gaining more autonomy in relation to the bureaucracy of the federal state.
The pressure and threats of the Soviet bureaucracy were another element complicating the sociopolitical differentiation. After the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the armies of the Warsaw Pact, reactions of self-defense appeared all over Yugo slavia, as in the People's Republic of China, since the governments of the two countries felt themselves targeted for a possible repetition of the Czechoslovak precedent. The active hostility that had existed between Belgrade and Peking for fifteen years faded away almost overnight. Preparations for a general arming of the people and a massive guerrilla war against possible aggression on the part of the Soviet bureaucracy were especially effective in Croatia and Slovenia. That provoked a strong reaction by the Kremlin, which took the form of stepped-up pressure on Tito to put an end to the decentralization of political power. The provisional solution of the crisis that was reached in 1972, resulting from the interaction of all these complex tendencies, is thus not without sociopolitical ambiguity. Tito, basing himself on the central military apparatus and reflecting the interests of the political wing of the bureaucracy, hit the technocratic and managerial wing hard. Without having radically modified the axes of the economic reform, the Titoist bureaucracy applied the brakes to it and initiated a turn. While stimulating real development in the country through a vast campaign of struggle against corruption and the billionaires, and while denouncing the existence of concealed technocratic and financial forces, the Titoist regime has not, for the moment, taken any specific measure calling into question the "socialist market economy" and, in particular, the decentralization of the banking system. For the moment what stands out is essentially the strengthening of the CP's role in all spheres of political and economic activity.
The preparatory documents for the
Tenth Congress of the Yugoslav CP show all the ambiguity of the policy still being followed: Like the new amendments to the constitution, they formally take into account a certain number of demands of the Yugoslav left, demands that tend toward democratic planning based on self-management and toward increased political support for self-management. Evidence that this is the case can be seen in the projected efforts toward "integrated self-management" by region or by industrial sector, and in the projected establishment of delegate assemblies representing "labor organizations" at the level of the municipalities and republics. Another indication is the explicit denunciation of the major illusions that have dominated the orientation toward a market economy since the 1965 reform, and of the socially damaging consequences of that orientation. Nonetheless, since the forms of this "integrated self-management" have not been specified, they (as well as the delegations to the assemblies) will undoubtedly be dominated by an increase in the political weight of the Yugoslav CP, either openly or through the trade unions and the factory managers.
Despite all their ambiguity, the denunciations of numerous individuals who have enriched themselves fraudulently, and the plans to increase the weight of self-management in the country's political life, have nonetheless had the immediate result of diminishing the wave of workers' discontent with the regime by giving them the feeling that their efforts have been crowned with success. However, none of the social problems affecting them (in equality, unemployment, the cost of living) have been resolved. The million Yugoslav workers working abroad- directly threatened by the economic situation in the European capitalist countries- re main an additional factor that promises future aggravation of an economic and social situation already marked by crises. In this context, political repression represents for the Titoist bureaucracy a se cond important means for preventing political opposition to its policies from merging with the discontent of the workers. However, the repression has struck not only the right but also the far left. Elements of socialist democracy that seemed to have been won many years before were reduced or suppressed. The relative freedom of public discussion and press were partially reduced. Methods of slander, lying accusations, use of the secret police-even within the Yugoslav CP- and violations of socialist legality were implemented. Centralization and stricter political control by the bureaucracy were assured.
In short, the events of 1968-72 have confirmed that the Federal Republic of Yu goslavia remains a bureaucratically deformed workers state. The theory that capitalism has already been restored has proven false in the light of experience. Political power is not in the hands of a bourgeoisie charged with the task of strengthening, stabilizing, and legalizing the sector of capitalist accumulation. Quite the contrary, this sector is only tolerated from time to time, developing for the most part through fraudulent operations; when it does assert itself, it is denounced and re pressed.
Thanks to the far-reaching decentralization that has taken place since 1965, the bureaucracy has without doubt gone through a profound internal differentiation. A sector has enriched itself by taking management positions in the key economic sectors and the banks. There can be no question but that this technocracy has identified its interests with the development of the market economy, and has joined the chorus of the bourgeois and aspiring bourgeois calling for the suppression of self-management (as being "economically inefficient"), for the extension of rights to private property (as a "stimulant"), and for the suppression of all economic centralization. This represents a process that is extremely revealing in regard not only to the key points around which the class struggle in Yugoslavia can determine whether or not there will be a return to capitalism, but also to the social forces favoring such a restoration, the working-class struggles that it has provoked, and the orientation the political wing of the bureaucracy has developed toward it.
Not only the trade-union bureaucracy and the rank-and-file militants of the CP, but also the sector of the bureaucracy that directly controls the state apparatus and derives its privileges from that apparatus have-in the light of the crisis — clearly shown their links with the working class, the social basis of their power in a regime born of an anticapitalist revolutionary struggle headed by the Titoist leadership. The recent crisis in Yugoslavia has confirmed, moreover, that self-management by itself constitutes neither a guarantee against bureaucratization, nor a guarantee of socialist democracy. Only the exercise of political and economic power on all levels, including the national level, by the working class through workers councils and their congresses can provide a radical solution to the weight and danger of the bureaucracy. The struggle against the dangers of the restoration of capitalism, as well as the struggle against the power and privileges of the bureaucracy, depend in the last analysis on the independent action of the proletariat. In Yugoslavia, these struggles pose as the central task the development of a revolutionary Marxist vanguard that will fight: a. For recognition of the workers' right to strike against the bureaucratic deformations of the state and the organs of self-management, against any reintroduction of relations of capitalist exploitation in the factories (the application and protection of the rights of self-management, including in jointly capitalized factories — that is, in factories backed by both Yugoslav social capital and capitalist investors); against any increase in unemployment; and against all attacks on their working conditions and standard of living. b. Against the financial and banking technocracies that have enriched themselves off the backs of the workers; for centralization of the entire credit and financial system; for the distribution of loans and investments by a federal congress of workers councils in which all the republics are fairly represented; for all credits to be managed by a central body of the various "labor associations" (self-management bodies representing the various branches of industry and services, and the associations dealing with culture and leisure time).
Against the obstacles to genuine self-management: down with bureaucratic planning; down with the competition among workers under the so-called socialist market economy; down with all-powerful decisions by the CP, through its monopoly of political power. Self-management from top to bottom! Workers democracy inside the CP and in all organs of political life. Organize democratic planning on the basis of an extension of self-management, coordinated on a federal level. c. Down with privileges; down with social inequalities; down with national inequalities; let the workers set wage norms without reference to regional inequalities and the laws of the market. d. For Yugoslav socialism to live and develop, the struggle against the reactionary separatist tendencies must involve a vast public debate and a strengthening of the central role of self-management— not police measures!
Down with all restrictions on freedom of expression for political tendencies — both inside and outside the CP— that accept the framework of socialism. Free all political prisoners. Halt all measures of re pression against the various Marxist currents in Yugoslavia. Down with all re strictions on the rights of supporters of these currents to work at their professions and to travel abroad. No restrictions on their financial and political possibilities of expressing their ideas.
13. The Interaction Between the Rise of the Working Class in Capitalist Europe and the Rise of Political Revolution in Eastern Europe
The rise of the socialist revolution in Western Europe and the rise of the antibureaucratic political revolution in Central and Eastern Europe will experience a growing interaction in the years to come. This will mark a break with the more isolated development of the political revolution in the 1950s, symbolized by the iso lation of the 1956 Hungarian revolution. On one hand, the development of a new mass vanguard breaking with Stalinism in the capitalist countries will stimulate massive movements in support of any important development of an antibureaucratic opposition in the bureaucratized workers states, helping to considerably diminish the bureaucracy's margin of maneuver in carying out police operations. The greater entry into the political life of their countries by the mass-based CPs of capitalist Europe, along with the loosening of their ties with the Soviet bureaucracy, will also help reduce the latter's margin of maneuver. It is hard to imagine how a repetition of the Czechoslovakia intervention could be carried out in another "Eastern bloc" country without producing a profound jolt to the political power of the Soviet bureaucracy and a deepening of the significant effects of the crisis that the Czechoslovakia intervention has already produced in the Western CPs. This is all the more true since massive protest movements would develop outside the CPs under the impetus of revolutionary Marxist organizations.
On the other hand, the fact that the military threats weighing against the
European borders of the "socialist camp" are being reduced (one of the by-products of the policy of detente being followed by the bureaucracy) and the fact that the borders are becoming more and more open to tourism, to trade, and, in some degree, to the possibility of workers moving about, at the same time that massive forces in struggle for socialism are appearing in Western Europe, will stimulate the development of a radicalization of the working class and the intelligentsia in Central and Eastern Europe.
The bureaucracy is perfectly conscious of this and in consequence is stepping up its efforts to accompany the "opening" to ward the West in commerce and tourism with more severe ideological and political control over the masses of the countries in which it is in power. The effective ness of this combination is doubtful. The movements of student revolt of the 1960sin West Germany, France, and Italy have already had a real impact among the students of Yugoslavia, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the German Democratic Republic, even if on a modest scale and with differing degrees of politicization from one country to another. And to the extent that they come to be known (in spite of the tight censorship of the press in the bureaucratic states), the forms and the content of workers struggles in the European capitalist countries- and the way they renew the most advanced and richest tradition of democratic, independent organization of the masses for the purpose of replacing bourgeois society with a society where the workers will be the real masters of their fate in all spheres of social life- will stimulate a renewal of Marxism and communism in the working-class and intellectual vanguard in the European bureaucratized workers states. One of the greatest obstacles in the path of this rebirth is the fact that Marxism has been degraded to the level of a state religion by the bureaucratic masters of these countries, and that it has been cynically manipulated to justify social inequality and the exclusion of the masses of workers from the direct exercise of power. This perversion of Marxism, the break in continuity resulting from the physical liquidation of the old revolutionary cadres of the working class, and the difficulties in reestablishing discussion and political life under the conditions of bureaucratic dictatorship create enormous obstacles for the young generation of workers and rebel intellectuals, making it extremely difficult for them to rediscover the genuine sources and the essence of Marxism-Leninism and to reacquaint themselves with its tradition. The appearance of a living example of revolutionary socialism and independent organization of the masses in Western Europe would give ten times more effectiveness to the effort to counterpose the true face of socialism to the hideous mask Stalinism has forced on it in Eastern Eu-rope and the Soviet Union.
The major political crises the bureaucratized workers states have gone through since their formation confirm the importance of a revolutionary Marxist vanguard for the coming political revolution in these countries. Unless there is a clear consciousness of the lessons of previous crises, the possibilities for partial reforms, and the governmental shufflings the bureaucracy is capable of setting into motion in order to retain the reins of power; unless there is clear understanding of the instruments of repression that the bureaucracy has at its disposal, the underlying tendencies toward the emergence of democratic soviet organs spontaneously pushed forward by the working class will in the end be taken over, channeled, and broken without the proletariat bringing the crisis to a victorious conclusion. The role of a revolutionary Marxist vanguard, even a small one, can be decisive in periods when such situations of "dual power" emerge— periods of overall social crisis. Its role will be to express the demands for workers power felt in a confused way by the masses, to struggle to preserve the genuine independence of organs of workers democracy against any element in the bureaucracy that tries to mislead and demobilize them, to fight for their centralization and self-defense, and to put forward clearly socialist and internationalist objectives leading to a clear understanding of the revolutionary tasks at hand: replacement of the bureaucratic apparatus with a genuine workers government based on workers self-management at all levels of society, for the advance of the socialist revolution.
### III. Crisis of the Traditional Workers Leaderships and the Building of the Fourth International
14. The Evolution of the Communist and Socialist Parties
In the course of the last few years, the crisis of the traditional workers organizations has intensified under the combined effect of the resurgence of workers struggles, the deepened structural crisis of the imperialist system, the crisis of the bureaucratic regime, and the appearance of a new vanguard of a mass character.
The closer collaboration of the Moscow and Peking bureaucracies with imperialism intensifies this crisis even further. For the detente has a contradictory effect on the relations among the traditional workers organizations, and on their relations with the masses. In dissipating the climate of "cold war" and militant anticommunism among the Social Democratic and trade-union leaders and cadres of several imperialist and semicolonial countries, the detente facilitates collaboration and lasting agreements between the CPs and SPs in several countries. Despite the strict re formist limits, indeed the class-collaborationist objectives, that the leaders of these organizations assign to agreements of this type, they unleash an objective dynamic of unity in action within the working class and increase workers' confidence in their own strength, thus contributing to the process of raising the combativity and radicalization of the proletariat. The results of this dynamic limit the freedom of maneuver of the traditional leaderships by raising considerably the price they would have to pay in order to carry out a right turn coinciding with a resurgence of struggle.
Thus, for the first time since 1935 a spectacular rapprochement between the Soviet bureaucracy and imperialism has not been accompanied either immediately or in the short run by an analogous right turn by a number of CPs. As was already the case at the time of the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact armies in August 1968, the present orientation of the French CP, the Italian CP, the Chilean CP, and most of the Stalinist parties in the capitalist countries, while re maining principally determined by the needs of the Kremlin, is put into practice, compared to the past, more as a function of the electoral needs of these parties and the need they feel to "stay close to" their mass base than as a function of the immediate needs of the Kremlin's diplomacy.
The same thing, moreover, applies to the Maoist groups. These groups generally justify— as a whole or with nuances — the right turn of Chinese diplomacy, pointing to the need for Peking to avoid the "encirclement" of the People's Republic of China. But one should not expect that they will mechanically apply, at least for the moment, the same right turn to their own activity in the advanced capitalist countries and to their relations with the bourgeoisie, even when that bourgeoisie is being courted by Peking.
The effects of the Sino-Soviet conflict and of the deepening crisis of the international Communist movement have the same result. The number of CPs that are keeping their distance from Moscow and Peking alike (the Japanese CP, the CP (Marxist) of India, and to a certain extent the Spanish CP) is increasing and will continue to increase. The criticisms with respect to specific aspects of the Soviet CP's policy, especially its repression against the national minorities and dissident intellectuals, will spread-even if in a prudent and dishonest manner.
What was said above in no way implies the existence of any "leftward movement" in the long-term strategy of the pro-Moscow CPs. To the contrary, the long-term strategy is more than ever neoreformist, revolving around the "electoral road to socialism." The process of "social democratization" of the CPs is continuing. The attempts to dissociate themselves from Moscow's actions generally accentuate this process. What is involved is only a tactical adaptation to the radicalization of the masses within the framework of this re formist orientation, aimed in part at checking the advance of the revolutionary Marxist organizations. Any attempt by the CPs to systematically hold back struggles and oppose themselves to all the workers' anticapitalist demands and forms of independent organization, even in the face of a tumultuous upsurge, could only accentuate a tendency to go beyond the CPs, and would clearly weaken the hold of the CP apparatus over the masses. Without excluding in advance the possibility that the above could occur in this or that country, the most probable variant is nevertheless one of more flexible maneuvers and adaptations on the part of CPs faced with the precipitous increase in mass struggles. This adaptation will reach its limits and change into an openly counterrevolutionary intervention at the moment the continued existence of the capitalist order is called into question. A similar remark applies, on the whole, to the mass Social Democratic parties. These remain fundamentally tied to class collaboration, bourgeois parliamentarianism, and defense of the capitalist order, even against workers on strike. The greater influence that members of the bourgeois state's administrative apparatus and the capitalist economy's nationalized sector now have in these parties, as compared to the past, further accentuates the tendency of the Social Democracy to espouse, at certain moments, the positions of the bourgeois state- even against the reformist unions.
But experience has shown that a Social Democratic party that loses an important mass base within the proletariat also loses its electoral base and any chance to increase its patronage positions within the bourgeois parliamentary democracy. That is why even the mass Social Democratic parties are also susceptible to the effects of the mass radicalization and the tumultuous rise of workers struggles. This is expressed in the search for a new working-class base, especially by the French SP, the Spanish SP, the Dutch SP, the Labour party, the West German SDP, the Chilean SP, etc. The repelling effect that Stalinism and the ultraopportunism of the CP continue to exert on newly radicalized layers of the working class, above allworking-class youth, contributes to this process. It is likewise expressed by the development of new left-wing tendencies and their radicalization, which is already perceptible in the Labour party in Great Britain and in the Spanish SP.
15. The New Mass Vanguard
The appearance on a world scale of a new vanguard of a mass character for the first time since the creation of the Communist International constitutes one of the principal features of the new rise of the world revolution since 1968. It results from the fact that the resurgence in revolutionary struggles on an international scale since the victory of the Cuban revolution has coincided with the deepening crisis of imperialism and the traditional workers parties.
The new mass vanguard can be characterized most succinctly as the sum of forces acting independently and to the left of the traditional bureaucratic leaderships of the mass movement. It is both a social and a political phenomenon: The new vanguard includes the radicalized layers of the youth, the working class, and women—most of whom are unorganized. There is, however, an organized fraction that follows or is part of the far-left organizations: Trotskyist, centrist, Maoist, Maoist-spontaneist, etc.
In itself, the appearance of this new mass vanguard expresses a potential for building much stronger revolutionary organizations than in previous decades as well as the delay experienced in building these organizations. That delay means that revolutionary Marxism does not exercise hegemony over this layer from the outset, that it finds itself in competition with all sorts of centrist and ultraleft currents, and that the often considerable forces of this mass vanguard can be drawn into tragic explosions, isolated from the bulk of the working-class forces. The example of the JVP [Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna—People's Liberation Front] in Sri Lanka is the most typical illustration of this.
The relations between the revolutionary Marxists and the forces of this new vanguard are complex. On one hand, the revolutionary Marxists must carry out an uncompromising ideological and political struggle against the various centrist or ultraleft deviations from Marxism. On the other hand, they must strive toward unity in action around common objectives in the anti-imperialist, anticapitalist, and antibureaucratic struggles. It is through this combination of unity in action and political differentiation that the goal of transforming the bulk of the forces of the new vanguard into a lever capable of qualitatively modifying the relationship of forces with the bureaucratic apparatuses can be attained. It is through this combination that the ability to lead much broader mass struggles, and more advanced forms of mass, independent organization than in the past, can be won. It is also through this combination that pressure can be exerted on the mass trade-union and political organizations themselves to accelerate their process of internal differentiation. Our organization's ability to go beyond the stage of propagandism and to intervene in struggles with proposals for appropriate action will play a determining role in this struggle to win hegemony within the new vanguard and to strengthen our organization quantitatively and qualitatively.
The new mass vanguard was in large measure the product of the progress achieved by the world revolution through the Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions. At the same time it was stimulated, to a lesser degree, by the image of the Chinese "Cultural Revolution." The question is posed of whether the right turn of the Chinese leadership, the less-pronounced but nonetheless real right turn of the Cuban leadership, and the cease-fire in Vietnam will have the effect of causing an ebb if not the disintegration of this new vanguard. The policy of the Cuban leadership continues to be a very important factor in the development of the political situation in Latin America. Faced with the defeats suffered by the armed-struggle movements and believing there was no longer any short-term perspective of revolutionary victory in the other countries of the continent, and faced with the necessity of assuring the survival of Cuba in a region of the world entirely dominated by imperialism and of warding off the consequences of the economic blockade, the Cuban leadership has increasingly stressed its economic and political links with the Soviet bureaucracy and is seeking a margin of maneuver through alliances with and openings toward reformist, self-proclaimed anti-imperialist regimes. Proving that it is unable to distinguish between the foreign-policy requirements of a workers state and the fundamental requirements of the revolutionary struggle, the Cuban leadership has gone so far as to give uncritical support to the Velasco regime, including characterizing the Peruvian army as a revolutionary army. It has also given support to the Broad Front in Uruguay, a class-collaborationist front headed by a former general of the bourgeois army. In the case of Chile— at a stage where there were real possibilities for revolutionary development-the Cuban leadership gave practically unconditional support to the reformist Popular Unity leadership. The critical remarks Castro made on several occasions were not of a sort to help the maturing of the vanguard and clarification among the masses. At the same time, the Cuban leadership abandoned polemics against the CPs, even though these polemics had been a major feature of the stage of guerrilla warfare in Venezuela, Peru, and Bolivia, and also during the OLAS conference. In effect the Cuban leadership approved, in most cases, the re formist policy of these CPs in forming alliances with the so-called national bourgeoisie. Thus the Cuban leaders called into question their historic and theoretical gains of the 1965-67 period which, de spite all their limits, had permitted them to grasp the dynamic of permanent revolution in Latin America. Finally, the close alliance with the Soviet Union was accompanied by an unconditional glorification of the bureaucratized workers states and their leaderships. While it is true that in the meantime the Cuban leadership continued to aid revolutionary movements in certain countries on the Latin American continent, the fact remains that their political and ideological retreat has exercised and continues to exercise a negative influence on layers of the Latin American vanguard, both by stimulating their disintegration and evolution to the right— including their evolution toward the reformism of currents formed under Castroism - and by creating additional obstacles to the indispensable struggle against the centrist concepts and orientations that characterize broad sectors of the new vanguard in Latin America.
Furthermore, the situation of political impasse inside the country weighs on Cuba's foreign policy. The self-criticisms of 1970 have not been followed by real progress toward establishing socialist democracy, in which the workers can express themselves through their own democratic, revolutionary organs and effectively exercise their hegemony. This shortcoming can in no way be compensated by holding a strictly controlled trade-union convention to be concluded with the election of a former Stalinist bureaucrat as top leader (moreover, the congress is not scheduled until 1975).
This new vanguard is basically susceptible to two contradictory pressures. The fact that the resurgence of workers struggles is continuing and even broadening in numerous imperialist and semicolonial countries, and the fact that the crisis of bourgeois society as well as the crisis of the system of bureaucratic power in the bureaucratized workers states is still deepening, unquestionably favor a parallel broadening of the new mass vanguard. The temporary ebb of the student radicalization in certain countries (United States, Japan) is, or will be, compensated by the growth of the working-class radicalization, above all of the working-class youth.
But the right turn of the Chinese and Cuban leaderships and the setbacks to the centrist or ultraleft mass organizations based on the new vanguard (for example, the Naxalites in India!) can cause disarray in its midst and give rise to reabsorption into the traditional organizations at a time when the revolutionary Marxist organizations prove too weak or incapable of filling the void created by these setbacks. The political and organizational initiatives of our own organizations are thus an important factor for the fate of the new mass vanguard. The conditions are favorable for carrying out a successful offensive against Maoism, which was dealt a very grave blow by the right turn of Peking's diplomacy. But this offensive will not profit our own movement on a large scale, i.e., will not end up in a considerable strengthening of our own organizations, unless it breaks out of the ideological arena and is accompanied by initiatives in action that make it possible to galvanize the vanguard as a whole against the reformist and Stalinist apparatuses in the mass struggle. Otherwise, it will be the reformist and neoreformist organizations that will end up profiting from the crisis of the Maoist currents through the decomposition of a part of the new vanguard.
16. The Fourth International
Since the Ninth World Congress (third since reunification), the Fourth International has made significant progress, the greatest since its foundation. It now has sections or sympathizing groups in some fifty countries. A dozen of them have increased the number of their adherents fivefold or tenfold between 1969 and 1973. Trotskyist cadres and militants have played an important role in strikes and trade-union struggles of national scope, notably in France, Italy, Spain, Sri Lanka, Argentina, Bolivia, and Switzerland. As in the preceding period, they have played a leading role in the struggles of student youth involving tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of university and high-school students, notably in France, Belgium, Mexico, Japan, Colombia, and the United States. Revolutionary forces already hardened in combat have joined the Fourth International, notably the ETA-VI [Euzkadi ta Azkatasuna — Basque Nation and Freedom] in the Basque country.
Nonetheless, the numerical forces and the organizational influence of the Fourth International remain quite modest, out of proportion to the confirmation of its program and general orientation by events, and to the far larger influence that revolutionary Marxist ideas today exert in the world. This lag is basically explained by the following factors: a. A very marked uneven development between the breadth of the radicalization—especially the working-class radicalization in numerous imperialist and semicolonial countries — and the scope of the general politicization. Despite the very pronounced resurgence of mass workers struggles in numerous countries, the political consciousness of the working class is rising at a much slower pace. The formulation Trotsky used to characterize the crisis of consciousness of the proletariat —the skepticism of the old generation and the inexperience of the new — continues to remain largely valid, although to a lesser degree than in 1938, 1948, or 1958. b. The appearance of the new mass vanguard since the second half of the 1960s, which favored the more rapid building of the Fourth International, was not in any way accompanied by a process of political homogenization. Given the complexity of the present world situation, the organizational weakness of the Fourth International at the beginning of this new revolutionary rise, the attractive force exerted on student youth by the ideologies identified with victorious revolutions like Castroism and Maoism, the politically organized portion of the new vanguard was found everywhere divided between the Trotskyist, Maoist, and centrist currents and is very often fragmented into a swarm of grouplets. In several important countries, different organizations claiming adherence to Trotskyism sought to win new cadres and militants, in competition and sometimes in violent public polemics against each other, which could not help but increase the confusion of the vanguard during the initial phase of its formation, promoting extreme fractionalization into small grouplets and a prolifera- Intercontinental Press tion of variants of sectarianism and opportunism. c. The rapid growth of Trotskyist organizations, and their being confronted with struggles and responsibilities often out of proportion with their past history and their degree of maturity, have created difficulties for the correct resolution of the many delicate tactical problems that generally appear in mass struggles, not to speak of revolutionary struggles. The process of educating new cadres and mature national leaderships inevitably slows the growth of the organizations, in the same way that the political and organizational strengthening of the international center retarded the growth of the world movement. d. Many of the organizations of the Fourth International continue to manifest a sectarian attitude on the question of recruitment in not exploiting all the opportunities offered for substantially strengthening their ranks. They underestimate a basic aspect of the Leninist theory of organization, namely the concept that it is only within the revolutionary organization that one can really become a revolutionary militant. e. Finally, the international bourgeoisie, which considers the Fourth International a real menace to the reign of capital, has for that reason intensified its repression against our movement and has thus erected additional obstacles on the road of our growth.
The effort to come to grips with the obstacles mentioned above is by no means intended to de-emphasize the social obstacles that slow the building of a mass revolutionary international: the weight of capital and the continued domination of its ideology over bourgeois society; the weight of the Stalinist, Maoist, and reformist apparatuses, based on their enormous material resources. The enumeration of the above-mentioned factors restraining a more rapid growth of the Fourth International is above all done with the aim of underlining the factors the revolutionary Marxist forces can take directly in hand, the obstacles they themselves can help eliminate.
17. The Specific Tasks of the International Organization
The Ninth World Congress (third since reunification) marked an important stage in the development of the Fourth International. The International became conscious of the fact that changes in the objective conditions (a new rise of world revolution whose center of gravity is shifting toward the industrial proletariat) and the subjective conditions (the appearance of a new mass vanguard and modifications in the relationship of forces between this vanguard and the bureaucracies of the traditional workers organizations) in which it is being built both permit and make extremely necessary its growing over from a propaganda group into an organization on the road toward implantation in the proletariat, an organization capable right now of taking political initiatives that will have repercussions on the class struggle on a national scale. The construction of the Fourth International is being carried out through the building in different countries of sections and sympathizing organizations that educate cadres, intervene in mass struggles, engage in combat for workers' immediate demands, democratic de mands, and transitional demands, as well as for the Transitional Program as a whole, and take the necessary initiatives in action that gradually lead to their being viewed as the nucleus of a new revolutionary leadership that will replace the bureaucratized traditional leaderships in the workers movement. The construction of the Fourth International is thus inseparably linked to the struggle to raise the level of consciousness of advanced layers of the proletariat and poor peasantry, and to the struggle for the independent organization of the masses under the most varied forms — that is, to the struggles that correspond to the concrete stage the class struggle has attained in each country in the present circumstances. Beyond these normal tasks of the national organizations of the Fourth International, there are tasks that are specific to the World Party as such, that correspond to the ever more precise demands posed by the internationalization of the economy, of politics, of the class struggle-in the imperialist epoch in general and in the present phase of this epoch in particular. Whatever the shortcomings our movement shows in this regard as a result of its obvious material weaknesses, it is the only one that is conscious of these needs, that readily formulates them, that educates its cadres, militants, sympathizers, and the sectors of the vanguard of the broader masses it can influence. It is the only one that is beginning to accomplish these tasks in a deliberate way within the limits of its possibilities.
However, as the process of the Trotskyist organizations' growing over from propaganda groups to organizations on the road to implantation in the proletariat and already prepared to take con crete initiatives in the class struggle becomes more pronounced, the pressure of the specific national features that will give such initiatives their precise forms will of necessity differ from country to country and especially from one group of countries to another. This sharpens the necessity of strengthening the International center all the more so as to maintain the Fourth International's cohesion and programmatic integrity. The task of the center cannot consist of making authoritative decisions about the tactics of national sections; that is forbidden by the International's statutes. It does consist of the effort to coordinate action and to promote political and theoretical homogenization. In the period ahead this effort will be focused on carrying out specific international tasks such as the following: a. To continue the campaign of international support to the Indochinese revolution and to other revolutionary struggles under way in the world: the Palestinian resistance, the revolutionary move ments in the Portuguese colonies, the Irish freedom struggle, the Chilean resistance, etc. b. To develop movements of solidarity on a European scale, and if possible on a larger scale, with the strikes and workers struggles that either confront the multinational trusts or have an exemplary thrust that can accelerate the growth of proletarian class consciousness on an international scale (such as the struggle at Lip). c. To develop a movement of international solidarity, involving the entire workers movement, with the victims of the repression aimed at the revolutionaries of the imperialist and semicolonial countries, such as the campaigns that we have organized for the defense of Argentine political prisoners under the military dictatorship, and against the decree banning the Ligue Communiste. d. To develop an international move ment of solidarity with the victims of the repression that is directed against political dissidents and oppressed nationalities in the bureaucratized workers states. e. To develop an international campaign against the increasing attacks on the right to strike, on the absolute right of trade unions to negotiate wage settlements, against wage controls, state arbitration of wage conflicts, the growing integration of the unions into the bourgeois state, etc. f. To expose on an international basis the new betrayals of revolutionary struggles by the Moscow bureaucracy (Cambodia, Iran, Sudan, Sri Lanka, India, Palestine, Vietnam, etc.) and by the Peking bureaucracy (Bangladesh, Sri Lan-ka, Sudan, Iran, Spain, Vietnam, etc.). g. To initiate an international discussion of a complete draft program of the Fourth International; the Transitional Program, as Trotsky said, is only a part of this. h. To develop more fully our theoretical analysis of a number of phenomena that have been insufficiently examined during the last few years, including the precise stage the Cuban state and society have reached; the reasons why the proletariat in the huge factories of the United States has yet to move into massive action; the agrarian question in India and the response in terms of demands and program that has to be brought to bear on it; the development of a more specific transitional program for the bureaucratized workers states; and our programmatic response to the general crisis of bourgeois society. i. To develop the press and publications of the leadership of the International in order to make possible a more rapid flow of information and elaboration for the benefit of the sections and the sectors of the vanguard they already influence.